The verdict

How the fuck can Oscar Pestorious not be guilty?
In cases like this, when you think 'He did it, he's fucking going down' and so on, when the verdict, normally of a jury, is given, you think to yourself, well, that's a surprise, but I guess they were there throughout the whole trial, whereas I just saw what got reported, and was trying to judge the body language of guilt based on some, frankly appalling, pastel sketches of the accused.
Not so here.  The South Africans may be recovering racists but when it comes to courtroom drama they are very progressive, meaning they allow the cameras in the courtroom.  Presumably the next move is to have live action commentary.
What it means is that a combination of available footage, celebrity and morbid curiosity led to large swathes of the trial being broadcast on the BBC news channel, because apparently it's news to broadcast hours of some weepy bloke bleating about how he didn't mean to shoot his girlfriend and ruin his en suite.
Any bloke listening realised that these were the honest emotions of a man who really, really, did not want to go to jail.  Any woman listening recognised the sort of sincerity normally associated with the phrase 'It's not you, it's me' prior to a rapid alteration in relationship status.
So normally, we're not in a position to fairly judge others.  Thanks to telly, we were.

Review: The Mousetrap

The good people of Malvern love a murder, by which I mean they love an artfully produced whodunit, which is why on this rainy November night the Malvern Theatre was full, not a spare seat to be had.  Knowing what lay in store, folk were ready for a treat and obviously, those who had enjoyed previous productions and who are intimate with Agatha, were expecting something worth tempting them out on a night like this, something special.  And something special is what they got, because although the place was packed, as it was observed to me afterwards: 'there was not a sniff, cough or fidget the whole way through'.  True enough and no further accolade is required to underline the quality of this performance of 'The Moustrap'.

What I will say is that the individual performances were excellent.  As usual, the stage contained a number of well known actors, by which I mean well known from the telly, and the play gave them the chance to step out of familiar roles into vintage dress, an opportunity they seized with obvious relish.  It's wrong to single out any sole performance for praise but it's fair to say that the spirit of impending panto season had obviously gripped some of the cast, with Steven France and Karl Howman in particular in fine form, giving a masterclass in how to perform at the very edge of restraint, and when to knowingly push things just that bit further.

Indeed, for a whodunit featuring ghastly grisly murder, the entire play was not short of laughs, there were genuine comedic characters and some finely judged comic moments, all of which gave the darker moments of the play that much more chilling impact.

The play is celebrating its sixtieth year, yet still seems fresh.  Partly this is because the set up, strangers thrown together in a country house hotel that is then cut off from the rest of the world by snow, is timeless, or at least has been timeless for the last sixty years.  But also because, unfortunately, some of those darker themes in the play are still with us and, at the time of this performance, still sadly topical.  The audience were watching a play cherished in part because of its longevity that dealt with contemporary themes.

In 'The Mousetrap' four expected and one unexpected guest arrive at a newly opened hotel and, as the snow thickens outside, the plot thickens inside with the discovery that one may be a murderer.  The first half of the play, with the introduction of the characters and the building of suspicion into paranoia, ensures that the audience has a busy time pointing the finger of suspicion first one way and then the other.  'The Mousetrap' is a glorious mechanism, the plots and sub-plots weaving and ticking along but there is more to it than an admirable structure, as the characters come to life, the audience are drawn in.

And what a pleasant place to be drawn in to.  Once they have cleared out the murderer, I'd quite fancy a week at the hotel.  The set was excellent, an unchanging single room that somehow managed to convey that yes, behind this door is a writing room, behind that one a dining room, behind that one a music room and so on.  As important as the scenery was the lighting, which managed to suggest that particular winter dusk you get when it's been snowing and, for one pivotal scene, transforms the stage and the theatre as day becomes dusk.

That 'The Mousetrap' is celebrating its sixtieth year is testament to its quality as a play and this was an exceptional performance, with cast and crew obviously conscious that they were performing something beloved, with national treasure status.  There was an air of celebration to the performance that might not have been there last year and may not be there next year but that does not matter because, at the conclusion of the play and after the curtain call, one is asked not to reveal the plot.  In that one delicious moment there is complete complicity between audience and performer and with a huge collective wink, everyone goes home happy.

Hashtag trouble

Panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham, I wonder to myself, could life ever be the same again?

Well it sure as hell wasn’t the same as it was before. In a week where civil unrest came to the shittier boroughs of our cities, the media and other commentators were left flummoxed by an apparent paradigm shift in civil disorder away from people being violent in order to make a point towards people being violent in order to make off with a new 42 inch plasma telly.

The one thing that stayed the same was that people chose to riot on their own doorsteps. Bloody hell, where do these people think they are going to be able to hang about if they torch the Tennessee Fried Chicken shop?

While the media took a few days to start using the term ‘underclass’, in a concerned tone, others were ready to tag the looters as ‘chav scum’ and move on. Were it not for the fact that they started looting in the daylight hours, I’d have just tagged them as ‘Morlocks’.

The politicians took a surprisingly long time to realise that it does not look great to be on holiday at your luxury villa in Tuscany while people are rioting every night. So they came home and everyone told them they were a complete waste of space and largely responsible for all this. You could see certain politicians standing there thinking ‘yesterday I was lolling by the pool, drinking wine that cost three euros a bottle and tasted great and working on my tan. Today I am in a neighbourhood with a post code I can’t pronounce and some woman is shouting at me while a bloody news team film the whole thing.’

While everyone was looking for The Cause Of All This Unrest (probably a complicated mix of a material society, people being told they should have certain things, unreasonable aspirations driven by television talent shows, a lack of realistic aspirations, a lack of education and a lack of enough coppers to administer a bloody good beating on the first night), it was interesting to monitor the social networks, Twitter in particular.

I’ve never really looked at it before, but Twitter is a microcosm of the internet, it informs and disinforms, because tweets appear as print they have the appearance of authority but can be unsupported by any evidence, there’s a lot of good stuff on there, there’s a lot of bad stuff on there and there is a hell of a lot of dull stuff on there, but there’s also the irreverent humour that the internet does so well. How long is the appropriate delay between an event and the first jokes about that event? With Twitter, that no longer applies because the jokes are being made while the event is still happening. Best example – ‘Greggs torched, hot pies in ten minutes’.

It was also the case that rolling news couldn’t really keep up with events, they were moving so quickly. Not as quickly as the police though, who by by Thursday were moving very quickly indeed to kick chav arse.

In the end, as with so much civil unrest, it was the rain, and a few thousand extra police, that sorted the problem. Good job the chavs were too busy looting trainers to bother with the umbrella shops.