War, slavery, and sunshine as winter officially ends

'Pink Mist' sounds like a lipstick shade or a girly cocktail but for the troops in Afghanistan, it meant the fine spray of blood in the air when a soldier is blown to bits. It's the title of Owen Sheers' extraordinary drama of three young men who, inspired only by paucity of alternatives, go to war and are all terminally damaged. This was first staged at Bristol Old Vic in 2015, returning 2017 and is now available online here until 22 April. 

The play is a kind of surrealist mix of poetry and dance, with high-energy performance and dream-like intensity from a small cast and the interpreter always visible beside the action like a lamenting Cassandra - it's all powerfully effective. The script was inspired by interviews from returned servicemen and their families, which makes it all the more harrowing that none of the soldiers was inspired to enlist for any reason other than frustration with their life options in Bristol, and none gave any consideration at any time to the larger issues of national conflict.  This casebook study of three urban boys who deserved a better life - Arthur, Hads and Taff - shows the ripple effect on families and questions the values of the society we live in. You can read more about the cast and production here:  recommended viewing, if only to appreciate the emotional impact & scope of staged theatre. 

Bristol Old Vic has been providing drama in a variety of ways throughout lockdown, with this week's diversity including an audio play on Radio 3: The Meaning of Zong, directed by Tom Morris and written by Giles Terera, recreates with emotional intensity the true story of the slave ship which in 1781 dumped hundreds of black men and women overboard and successfully claimed insurance for their lost 'cargo'.  Moving between the historical court case with real-life figures of abolitionist Granville Sharp & Olaudah Equiano (Samuel West & and Giles Terera) and imagined mystical scenes from 1781,  it's sometimes difficult to follow, but the facts of the case are dreadful enough to grip the listener throughout.

Southampton's Art House on Saturday featured a zoom-adapted performance of Kevin King of Egypt, a bizarre tale created by poetry performer & psychiatric nurse Rob Gee - who Frome audiences will remember from his popular visits to Merlin Theatre for Poetry Platter events. Kevin has bipolar disorder and we meet him in a mood of strange elation as he decides to break out of the psychiatric ward and head for Egypt. All he needs is his passport and a run of luck, and it seems at times that he may achieve both, as he somehow acquires a policeman's wallet, a malleable taxi-driver, and a small girl called Millie. Kevin is an immensely sympathetic character, despite his extraordinary behaviour: the points he makes about social controls are insightful, and there's a lot that's really funny in this deceptively simple, very skilful, monologue.

A contrast in zoom mood now:  At the Coalface is the title and theme of Frome poet Rebecca Brewin's collection of poems published by Blurb Books: her online launch on Thursday was hosted by Mike Grenville with an introduction from Helen Moore and harp interludes from Vicki Burke. This evocation of mining and miners' lives merges with a mining of the poet's own history, and Rebecca uses the power of lists to summarise, define, and deepen the experiences she evokes. An impressive launch for a complex collection. 

And my tale of The Invisible Granny was Thursday's featured Storyopathy event from Kilter Theatre in collaboration with Clare Reddaway's A Word in Your Ear fiction sessions. Sadly I missed the link to Olly Langdon's reading but my pestering messages got me through the waiting room in time to hear Dr Olly's suggestion of retrouvaille as a key theme which, although his therapist persona is spoofy, I felt gratifyingly insightful.  After the audience dispersed, the page stayed open long enough for a big old catchup chat with friends who'd booked to hear my story of Izzy Quirk who had never been on holiday and what happened when she did. 

Time for another look at a couple of Frome's Podcasters: what's brilliant about these audial sessions is that they aren't time-sensitive so if you miss one you can catch up any time later, or binge on them box-set style. Eleanor Talbot, seen here with Jessie and some of her jewellery designs, hosts Variations on a Theme which this week covers the topic of cover songs. Is the original always the best - or even the best-known? Case in point is the 1982 hit written by Tears for Fears' co-founder Roland Orzabal for the band, but Gary Jules' more powerful cover of Mad World was a massive Christmas hit in 2003.

Andy Wrintmore's podcast guest couldn't be more appropriate in the week we heard Easthill Field has been saved from development by the support team's efforts to research the wildlife and prove its value as ancient meadow, as the Giant Pod with Julian Hight focuses on Frome's punk-rocking self-taught tree specialist. This informative & entertaining session covers a wide range of topics including tree communication, 'forest bathing' in benign pheromones, and protection activism as well as his travels and those great tree books. Andy has now also given the podcast treatment to musician Nick Wilton, another fascinating Frome personality - who I'm proud to say, like Julian - and Andy himself - featured in my book Frome Unzipped - from prehistory to post-punk. So it's good to know 4000 year-old trees and neo-punk are both still thriving in Frome.

And finally... another 'Best Place to Live' list in the Sunday Times, another win for Frome as top place in the south west. Illustrating their accolade with a photo of the rapidly-depleting shops of Catherine Hill, the Sunday Times summary may not delight all residents by its enthusiasm for "tasteful Farrow & Ball tones" as a primary reasons for selection. At £84-119.00 for a 5 litre pot, F&B elegance represents everything that many long-standing residents resent about the 'gentrification' of Frome. Luckily there's a lot more to love about our town, including the passionate interest in its past & present history, reflected by online groups like Frome History & Mystery,  Frome Local, Frome Wildlife Watch, and more. Where else, I wonder, would my photos of a bit of ruined aqueduct, from an aborted idea at the end of the 18th Century, attract 6,824 views on facebook in 3 days? Here's the entries, now blocked: my book Frome Unzipped (p92-93) recounts the sad story of the failed project to create a canal link to Frome, despite the extraordinary inventiveness of James Fussell, and I'm learning more from comments now - including the inevitable financial scandal... (thanks Patrick Moss). 

Nearing the end of Twin-Terrors' year

The annual preoccupation with creating a sparkling feel-good factor in the darkest days has had more than usual to contend with this year - in fact, more the average horror movie. My autumn walking routes having turned to sludge, the alternative of wet streets became a chance to enjoy all the illuminated displays: an expression of community hope and a visual delight - if you ignore the planetary damage, of course, but that's true of simply existing these days.  

Also in the real world, the big news for the week before Christmas was the sensational return of live music in Frome: Back of the Bus filling 23 Bath Street to legally-permitted capacity for an afternoon session last Sunday, with all the glitz, pizazz, and passionate punky hi-energy performance that we expect from this wonderful septet.  From their funky upbeat opening with You Gotta Have Faith to their awesome version of Hazel O'Connor's anthem Eighth Day - never more spine-chilling than this year - this performance was memorable. Huge appreciation to Lark Porter and all the team at 23 for making this happen.

No carol concerts or street singers this year, sadly, but with amazing ingenuity here's a seasonal song from Frome coordinated by Patrick Dunn: 'Carol for the Cabinet from a 'Bleak Choir' of musicians and singers. And do click on this offering from Nick Van Tinteren's Tiny Desk Concerts.

Indoors there was the winter balm of telly, and this season's big feel-good epic Strictly Come Dancing, pulling out all the stops with generous marking and a small but noisy studio audience. This series has had a massive following and deservedly-approving critiques from commentators across the spectrum ... and no-one could have looked as shocked as Bill Bailey and his partner Oti Mabuse when he was revealed as the series winner - great series, great result.  

Also on the box, a double treat from Sky Arts (triple, if you count Stephen Mangan presenting) as Portrait Artist of the Year final night not only gave us Eddie Izzard looking splendid in a frock, but also followed the progress of the contest's overall winner,  Curtis Holder, as he created his commissioned portrait of Carlos Acosta, director of Birmingham Royal Ballet. This is now hanging in the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, but just as exquisite is this portrait of the artist's partner, which confirmed the judges' final choice.  

A homebound Christmas left most of us tuning to the tele, rummaging among the repeats & reruns for personal gems: among mine were Grease, now 42 years old but still appealing despite its 'teenage' cast all clearly in their 20s & 30s, and a feisty version of Pride & Prejudice with some emotional scenes shot in Stourhead.

Ending this final post from a year of twin terrors with a poem, which was going to be TS Eliot's soliloquy from one of the Magi, but though beautiful it is very melancholy, so instead here's Kahlil Gibran reflecting on love in The Prophet: 

    Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.

     But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:

     To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.

     To know the pain of too much tenderness.

     To be wounded by your own understanding of love;

     And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

     To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;

     To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;

     To return home at eventide with gratitude;

     And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

When living costs the earth... (creativity is still free)

Who owns the land we live on? It's a question that begs another: how land can be 'owned' anyway? ~ aboriginal cultures believed the land owns its people ~ and Salisbury is a good place to raise it.  The developments on Solsbury Hill are still a raw memory (in 2000 I workshopped a community drama about the hill's history and the road protest was vividly recalled), objections to plans for nearby Stonehenge rumble on, and now of course there's fracking...
This Land is a powerful and thought-provoking drama from Pentabus with Salisbury Playhouse which has arrived near the end of its two-month tour at the theatre of its coproducers, and will play in their Salberg Studio till the end of the month.
To avoid preaching, playwright Siân Owen has created a central story around a rural couple whose relationship is struggling for ordinary reasons so the arrival of the drilling rigs becomes a metaphor of their fracturing relationship, but though this mundane strand becomes slightly laboured, the time-shifts which span over a thousand years are strongly imagined and often very funny. Rosie Armstrong and Harry Long, taking on every role from 800BC to 2216AD,  are particularly good in these cameos, superbly switching personalities with minimal costume change. Set, sound, & lighting also support the concept brilliantly - literally, as drilling begins. The show's tour continues until 6 May ~ check it out, it's well worth seeing even if you don't need reminding that the earth does not belong to us, we borrow it from our children. Image Richard Stanton.

Back in Frome, the Art Society Spring Exhibition has opened in Black Swan Arts gallery, presenting a wide variety of subjects & styles & with postcards for sale. Artist & trustee Paul Newman awarded the Vera Skinner prize to this small wetland landscape called Two in a boat because he found it so intriguing... congratulations Carol Symon.
And as well as the Archangel Sunday afternoon session ~ a terrific set from Nicky, Vikki, & Griff ~ we had live music on Saturday too, al fresco, courtesy of our two Vinyl & CD record stores: Rivers of England (two of the nonet anyway) pitched in Cheap Street for Raves from the Grave, and outside Covers on Catherine Hill, the White City Shakers Old Time String Band entertained passers-by, including a strikingly good harmonica player who whipped out his instrument, grabbed the mic, and joined in. So here they are ~ which one's which is, I hope, self-evident...

Fringe-ing Frome's festival

While half of Frome disappears to Pilton to either work or perform, the rest of us are warming up for our town festival starting next week. As anyone in, or interested in, Frome will know there's so much creative stuff happening all the time that festival fringe activities aren't exactly oases in a cultural desert but this week the buzz is even more bombinatory than usual.  Or bombinatious, not sure which is the right adjective from this great verb. Where to begin?

Muffin Man 1 & 2 had two nights at The Cornerhouse, and my marvellous actors & co-writers, Ross Scott and Fleur Hanby-Holmes spent a full day in rehearsal with the relevant pastries before our opening on Thursday.  The show comprises a replay of my 'Bard of Frome' title-winning short from last year, followed by our devised sequel to the cliffhanging ending of this unlikely rom-com, The Morning After. The opener is a stand-up routine and there's a song between the two plays, both 'bonus tracks'  created by the characters to add depth to their roles. Lots of audience laughter and brilliant feedback forms, especially after the awesome Saturday night performance summed up Great entertainment - well told story - good fun! and even more succinctly Funny as f##k. (You can see them all here)
Midsummer Dusk is developing sensationally well and tickets for the extra Saturday performance selling briskly at the Festival box office. Sunday's evening rehearsal gave us a shivery sense of how atmospheric the Dissenters Cemetery will be...  our superb cast is already virtually word perfect.


And it's bang goes the neighbourhood affordability-wise, as once again Frome is in the national press:  our Share Shop is commended in Positive News, and we're now a 'Great Town' officially, as a winner in this category at the Urbanism Awards ceremony this month.

Moving briefly out of the cultural hub for two visits to Bath: on Tuesday to talk my poems, as they now say, at the Rose & Crown where lovely Speakeasy organizer Jo Butts entertained us with thoughts from Mark Thomas's People's Manifesto (Goats are to be released on to the floor of the House of Commons - no more than four) and local regular John Christopher Wood aired his views on Cheese (it is an urban myth / that Palestinians make cheeses of Nazareth)  so my chirpy appeal for provision of therapeutic gigolos in Homes for the Elderly fitted in nicely.

Also in Bath, Stepping Out have been performing The Square Wheel of Time at the Rondo. The 'big show' productions from this Bristol community theatre company are always zestful romps with dancing, song and magic tricks as well as wild comedy, bizarre characters, and a thought-provoking bite that lingers. Mark Breckon's script and an exuberant cast combine to tick all these boxes once again. Directed by Cheryl Douglas with lavish costumes and clever stage techniques to create filmic fights and atmospheric flashbacks, this show took and tweaked the company's usual play-within-a-play convention: among many highlights I'd have to pick out 'Tamas' dirty-dancing to Time of My Life (Black-Eyed Peas version of course), the urbane and unscrupulous Dr Charles Lavelle, and Cecilia the stolen daughter dancing secretly with the gipsies, but this was an ensemble piece and everyone deserves praise.  The plot, involving eco-warriors returning to the 19th Century to change history, is sublimely incredible but the intention, to prevent the dominance of chemical intervention in mental health treatment, raises a serious issue. Behind every character, laughable & lovable or outright pathetic, we begin to see a third dimension: the real person damaged by trauma, loss, emotional abuse, or even unresolved family history. More than mere diverting entertainment, these plays from Stepping Out invite audiences to take a realistic & critical look at the current 'medical model' of treatments. As the Square-Wheelers have learnt, chemical pills are not the only, or the best, way to return to health.

15th Century grief & 20th Century grooming

In 1401 a Bohemian clerk called Johannes von Saz lost his wife in childbirth and next day wrote a dialogue with Death as full of vivid grief and rage as you'd expect from such an outpouring. Death and the Ploughman has been translated by Irish writer Michael West into a dramatic diatribe for voices, an argument by turns lyrical and chilling, with unexpected shifts and even dark comedy, and The Mechanical Animal Corporation with Tobacco Factory Theatres has taken this into Bristol's Arnos Vale Cemetery for an extraordinary piece of site-specific promenade theatre.
 'Promenade' always makes me think of strolling with parasols, but here we trooped by torch-light up muddy forest paths between tombs where dim-lit figures could be glimpsed tending their graves and decorated figures mourned on their own headstones, as we followed the ploughman in his contentious pursuit of Death deeper and deeper into her dark realm. Death disdains his protests. "Man lives in this world a stranger in a strange land: from the moment you enter this world you are old enough to leave it." The language is often biblical but the debate about love and suffering is timeless, and Death's speech of scorn at mankind's use of life is, though short of fracking and bankers's bonuses, as fresh as this week's facebook. Director Tom Bailey and his cast have created a gripping & unforgettable theatrical event, with a satisfying final verdict from the strange chorus: "The honour is to the ploughman, but the victory is to Death." It's on till Sunday ~ if it's not sold out dig out your warmest clothes & go.

I haven't seen Pygmalion since the movie of My Fair Lady in 1964 and I'd forgotten how seriously political a statement about the unpalatable nature of class distinction the play is intended to be, so it was interesting to see this unsaccharine production at Theatre Royal Bath. The allusion in the title seems deliberately ironic: Professor Higgins did not fall in love with Eliza as an artwork and make her real, he remained obsessively infatuated with his own skill and made a real girl miserably artificial, which makes a truly satisfying outcome difficult. Shaw had problems with his directors over this from the 1914 opening night on, but director David Grindley finds an ending the writer might have accepted while emphasising the situation comedy and verbal wit throughout. Effectively simple sets and beautifully muted costumes evoke the era superbly and there's a strong cast, with Rula Lenska as Higgin's mother and Jamie Foreman as Eliza's father excellent and Alistair McGowan as the high-functioning sociopath professor outstanding.

This week's Frome-fact: Hot on the heels of the Sunday Times accolade, The Times has published a list of the 30 most glamourous places to live in the UK with Frome at number 7 ~ just ahead of Primrose Hill. Their rational is based on occasional celeb-spotting rather than town life but it's nice to be popular, even with journos who praise house prices and the fact 'commuters from Bristol and Bath live here.'

And I can't post without a farewell to Tony Benn whose funeral is today. His image is featured in the window of the Health Food shop in Cheap Street, with a quote of wonderful simplicity and wisdom.  "If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people."

Back in the southwest: viewings, writings, and readings

Encounters Short Film & Animation festival took over Bristol dockland screens last week. I went along to the South West Showcase and enjoyed a fantastic programme of 15 bite-size movies ranging from 90 seconds to 13 minutes, some dramatic, many comic. One of the more intriguing shorts used verbatim speech to tell a behind-the-scenes story of train journeys from the cleaners' perspective, but overall my favourite was The Best Medicine, for reasons summed-up by another viewer on their FB page: Seriously the best film I've seen all year... can't believe I went from crying to laughing to crying to laughing so quickly... It touched me... I want everyone to see it! its so life affirming... I want more awesome people like Jon in my life... THANK YOU.
I couldn't put it better.

Meanwhile in Bath, a rather different celebration with the annual Jane Austen Festival, bringing all things sprigged and genteel to the Georgian streets and tea-rooms. From a cosy talk on Rummaging through the Reticule to a city walk termed The Unsavoury Tour!, Janeites can gavotte, nibble, trim turbans, learn etiquette, and generally immerse themselves in Jacobean fashion from sun-up till candlelit evening ~ including a daily dose of Pride and Prejudice at the Podium library. Reading the entire novel takes four hours a day throughout the week using relays of readers: Rosie and I were recruited for a stint in Thursday's installments, the ones when Lizzie has seen the house of which she would have been mistress and begun to regret her strident rejection of its owner, and deciding his renewed addresses stirred an impression of a sort to be encouraged as by no means unpleasing.... Great fun, and a reminder of the author's mastery of irony and clever eye for social mores.

Frome's riverside gallery Black Swan Arts has a new exhibition for autumn: a collection of very diverse images by Rachel Anne Grigor with the intriguing title where the earth meets the sky. Words at the Black Swan writing group met as usual on the first Sunday after the opening to consider this visual art from a verbal perspective. Rachel uses a process involving etching ~ and an element of random outcome ~ for most of these pieces, while achieving apparent precision and touching detail.  This was the day after I got back from Spain and probably my head was still full of Picasso's injunctions so I may have plunged depths unintended, but I was reminded of Auden's wonderful poem about Brueghel's Fall of Icarus, how "everything turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster... " My responses, and those of the other workshop participants, will be posted in the FB archive of Words at the Black Swan.

Final note: another local overview from  Martin Dimery blogs Frome, a recognisable summary in my experience. Like Martin I'm an ancient incomer: I arrived in 1987 from an area of London where litter didn't flutter only because it was solid with the debris of glue-sniffers, so I found the town quaintly respectable at first. I grew quickly to realise it was stubbornly egalitarian and anarchicly quirky, had the wildness of Glastonbury without the dreadlock self-theming and the otherworldliness of Totnes without the cliquey snobbery. I suppose I'll always be an incomer, but unlike those more western counties with their scorn of 'grockles' and 'emmets', locals in Frome always seemed to me to welcome new energy pragmatically. As Martin says, Ever since Frome weavers resisted the lure of industrialisation... Frome has engendered a sense of anti- establishment independence, attracting the like- minded to move in. Frome likes its artizans, writers and artists. Which is why Frome, with arts funding hardly worth bending to pick up if it fell in the Cheap Street leat, nevertheless thrives.

Home again... for a bit

There's always a lot going on in Frome, as a recent online travel site found ~ though focusing rather on the charmingly quaint angle rather than the determinedly egalitarian nature of many community activities. Don't get the idea the 'Frome revival' is led only by incomers: the calendar is full of local traditions like Carnival and fairs and sporting events. New initiatives thrive here because it's a fertile ground, not because of need to irrigate arid land.

Which is why innovative international apprenticeship Edventure has its UK base in Frome, with the second year of intake celebrating the start of their year-long self-shaped work scheme last night at the Works Canteen with a pizza party. The new recruits not only made the pizzas themselves, but found time for Q&A about ideas for community projects to raise funds to advance their own plans. It's a brave & brilliant venture, and if anywhere can nourish a work ethic that's not about fitting pegs in rigid social holes, I'm sure Frome can. (And btw 3 parties within 24 hours of arriving home is another local speciality...)

Just down the road from us, crow-flying style, Devizes celebrated the August bank holiday with a Street Festival, including international circus acts and theatre. Brilliant Aritista di Strada e di Circo Ian Deadly entertained on the green with a clever and very funny juggling act, controlling the crowd with as much skill as he manipulated his props. I'd gone along with Annabelle, who's planning to use street theatre as a daytime addition to our autumn Carnival, and she ended up performing as Ian's glamorous assistant.

Theatre Royal Bath is ending its summer season with a classic french froth: the Parisian hanky-panky of Feydeau's farce A Little Hotel on the Side, adapted by John Mortimer and superbly directed by Lindsay Posner. Naturally, for a show heading to the West End, the cast were all excellent ~ Richard Wilson's seedy hotel proprietor and Richard McCabe's portly philandering Pinglet have rightly garnered critical acclaim but it was Natalie Walter as the dithering object of his affections who illuminated every scene she entered. And the star of the show was probably Michael Taylor for his set design, especially the swivelling hotel interior alternating sleazy bedchambers and shadowed haunted room. Farce is an endlessly popular form, perhaps because it's rooted in human dread of personal embarrassment, and added elements of Benny Hill and St Trinians worked in nicely but for me the spasms and gagging of stuttering Mathieu were an uncomfortable reminder that once people bought tickets for Bedlam. Overall though it was easy to see why this happy-ending story met with noisy audience approval at the final curtain.
 

Hunting Raven, Frome's popular independent bookshop took an enterprising leaf out of Bath's bookshops on Sunday, with a reading by art historian, poet & novelist Sue Hubbard from her latest book The Girl in White. This fictionalised biography tells the fascinating story of Paula Modersohn-Becker, late 19th Century German expressionist painter and intimate of Rilke who wrote Requiem for a Friend after her early death after childbirth.
 Don’t be afraid if I understand now, ah, 
it climbs in me: I can do no other,
 I must understand, even if I die of it.
Part of the fascination around Paula's life is the nonconformist spirit she showed in both her painting and her lifestyle ~ she joined a bohemian artists' colony and after her death was officially labelled a degenerate. Sue researched so exhaustively she claims she "sometimes felt like the puppy in the Andrex ad, all this stuff unwinding, how do you get to the end and find a form?"  Her answer was to write from the later perspective of her daughter Mathilde who, since she never knew her mother, is also researching Paula's story.
Hunting Raven will be open every Sunday till Christmas ~ an ideal opportunity to browse and buy without supporting grand-scale tax evasion. And while I'm beating the drum for local independents, Raves from the Grave is rated "music heaven" and Ellenbray Press has toys to make you giddy ~ you could restructure the town centre in Lego.

Moving randomly on, today's date is my chance to share a wonderful Erich Fromm quote I found posted on facebook (thanks Charty): “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence”.  The Ancient Mayan calendar apparently regards 12-12-12 as the beginning of a new cycle of evolution for humanity and the cosmos, heralding a momentous shift in the collective consciousness of the planet. I look forward to it wistfully.  Eric Fromm's words reminded me of that sensational Auden line "We must love one another or die" which I've now discovered (thanks Steve) the poet himself later rued as shamefully sentimental. He withdrew the poem from his collections and refused further permission to use it, but I'm far from alone in feeling huge resonance in the elegant magnificence of this laconic line: E M Forster in his political essays wrote of Auden "Because he once wrote 'We must love one another or die' he can command me to follow him", and the injunction remains in popular culture as an aspiration even if not a truth universally acknowledged. Auden is possibly my favourite poet so I'm baffled he recoiled so violently, and wonder if it was precisely that ~ recoil, like the kickback from a powerful gun connecting with irrevocable impact. So that's my message at 12am on 12/12/12: numbers come & go, but never underestimate the power of words. Happy New Cosmic Shift!

I feel a bit bad admitting I wasn't bowled over by After the Accident at the Brewery. It was well acted, and the situation - joyrider kills best friend and random small child, parents unable to recover - is certainly harrowing. The notion of putting culprit and suffering parents together for Restorative Justice, with us the voyeuristic audience as onlooking coordinator, is simple and strong, and the mix of eloquent soliloquy and intense argument should have worked really well. But I never felt able to inhabit the emotional heart of this story - it remained a case-study, violent and tragic but oddly two-dimensional. I think the static and cerebral directing was one factor, and another was that the script simply failed to convince at key places when cathartic shifts were necessary but not really credible. And, for such a deluge of raw pain, it went on a bit too long .

Being frequently bang off-trend when it comes to movies I've only just seen Social Network - what an amazing movie, deservedly taking Oscars for best script and best editing and should have won best film too if we weren't all sentimentally besotted with royalty. Zuckerberg in the movie registers quite high on the autistic scale of emotional illiteracy - presumably to add a more complex dimension, since the real Zuckerberg comes across in interview as a total hero. His concept was radical: facebook as an agent of worldwide democracy, users as communicating individuals rather than consumerist prey. No wonder he was sued.

And finally... banging the drum for Frome again: Matthew Graham (think Life of Mars and Ashes to Ashes, not Bonekickers, please, we all have off-days) revels in living just outside the town.
In a recent interview he said he'd pick Frome over Bath any day "- of course! Always go for the underdog. It's a treasure trove of unusual shops and its arts festival draws the likes of Eddie Izzard... Unstoppable Frome!"
Deadly is the Female, which along with our independent record shop and cinema were among Matthew's list of unmissables, is currently commended in Vogue for 'a shopping experience designed to make you feel like a Hollywood starlet from the golden era.' As Muriel Lavender, starring the Poetry Cafe tomorrow night, will agree.
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