Adam B

Maybe Keir should demand the heads of major US news networks any time they imply Britain is on the brink of civil war or that we live under sharia law. Or does it not work both ways?

Yes, I’m smack in the middle of that cohort, and it’s not so much that I think FM are bad, more that I have the received impression that they’re a bit naff (or perhaps, rather, that they should be filed alongside other naff music from my youth).

A jig?!

A colour still from a film: a young man wearing a white singlet with black straps, his arms bare, is being carried on the shoulders of soldiers with bare heads, wearing grey greatcoats. HIs arms are outstretched and his head is hanging down. There are similarly dressed soldiers forming a guard of honour, with rifles in their hands.

A still from a film. A young man with blond hair and a moustache is lying with his eyes closed in a pale satin-lined coffin, set on snowy ground. He is wearing elaborate black military-style uniform and has a sword held in his hands.

A colour publicity image for a play. A young man with dark hair, wearing a black top with a colourful image of flowers on the front, is lying in what looks like a white-satin-lined coffin. His eyes are open and he is staring up. There are white gladioli lying on his torso and white gypsophila on the coffin. It's lit in blue and looks slightly surreal.

Fortinbras: no words... EXEUNT. FINIS. THE END.
www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/slo...
And so it ends... Branagh carried off, and in his coffin in the 1996 film; Andrew Scott in a publicity image for the Almeida production in 2017.

Congratulations & thank you!
👏👏👏

I’m old, so I had to retrospectively reconfigure all my memories of university in order to align with the plot of the book.

Louis Jourdan in ‘Count Dracula’ (BBC 1977)
- available to stream in the UK on @talkingpicturestv.bsky.social until 8th November
⬆️🔉🔊⬆️

Thanks. “Engineer” is a pretty old word, with perhaps more range of meanings back then than now. Eg. in Hamlet: “to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard.”
“Architect” would actually be a very good alternative here, but the whole play rests on the main character being an architect!

1.1. Cunning scratch Great Venice welcomes you, our honoured guests, The lions of st marks do roar their x. [praise] [your xx roar] a golden jewel in an azure sea, This xx city now so [filled/runs/flows] with gold That [xxx] we cannot choose but build A [massive] treasury beyond the xx dreams [scrambling] Of Babel's ancient tow'ring engineers To store and safeguard all our xx wealth.

Our #Playmakers project has reached the stage where I can sit in a café, drumming out pentameters on the table with my fingers & searching the OED for the non-anachronistic mot juste.
#AmWriting
#CunningFlorentines
#VeryFirstDraft

Here’s another Baim page that has a script that does include the Shakespeare scenes, so I’m not sure why they don’t feature among the stills

bw.baimfilms.com/the-collecti...

Oh, yes, I like that!

Juliet leaning her cheek upon her hand

It’s odd there’s no stills from the Hamlet on that page (or from a later sequence of a soliloquy of Juliet’s); both do seem somewhat shoehorned in.

I came across John Byron, as playing Hamlet in Stratford in 44, but found this (which doesn’t look like our Hamlet, but maybe uncertain if it’s the same person)

hi-in.facebook.com/BBCRadio4/ph...

and this

moviedude.co.uk/1Actors%20Pa...

What We Lost When Condé Nast Unceremoniously Shuttered Teen Vogue This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news...

if you want to know what happened to Teen Vogue yesterday, my work wife @allegrak.bsky.social — who ran our politics section for 6 years until this past June — said it all in this.

can't even pull out a favorite part til I sign my separation letter lol, just read the whole thing.

Yes, looking at his records on Theatricala he must be too early. But the clip may predate 1944 somewhat, as it feels rather different in film quality etc, to the rest of the travelogue in the film.

From the documentary Our Mister Shakespeare (1944) - a travelogue of Stratford Upon Avon & the surrounding area, including this and one other scene from #Shakespeare
- unclear who the actors are playing Hamlet & Ophelia. Does anyone recognise them?

“Who you gonna call?” A large wooden box with a wide flexible pipe leading into the inner workings of a large church organ.

The Magisterium’s Musical Exorcism Unit attempting the capture & removal of an irregular rodent daemon from the pipes of what has come to be known as the Cathedral’s Marvelous Mechanical Mouse Organ.

From the title page of The Memorable Maske 1613 For more information see readingearlyplays.com

Stars and Statues Made Human, Olympian Knights, Princes of Virginia!

This Wednesday in REP we read three masques for the Lady Elizabeth’s Wedding in 1613.
- written by Chapman & Beaumont, designs by Inigo Jones, music by Johnson, Coprario & Confesse

No Farthingales May Be Worn

Peregrine falcon chicks 'poisoned' as post-mortem results revealed The peregrine falcon chicks were a popular sight at Worcester Cathedral, followed by many on the YouTube livestream

[unclear how they came to ingest the poison; perhaps via pigeons that the parents caught & fed to them.]
www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/2559223...

And extra innings … ⚾️

Bottom of the ninth it is then ….

DVD cover of TOWER OF LONDON, with a bald Boris Karloff staring out at us.

- arrived in the post today, Tower of London (1938) with Basil Rathbone as Richard III; having recently streamed the 1962 remake where Vincent Price was the King (in the earlier version he’d played the Duke of Clarence); Olivier’s Shakespearean Richard III was filmed in 1955.

Well, “Forget that I’m fifty / Cause you just got paid” feels a whole lot different now than it did when I first listened as a teenager in the eighties!

A large empty room; a shop stripped bare; white neon lights in the ceiling

Along the Bridge of Lights trail, Worcester Poundland avoids the warm & wintry colours of other festival installations, and embraces a stark white neon modernism.
… either that, or it’s just closed down.

The bridge in Worcester, illuminated in yellow

A circle, a portal, glowing in cathedral stone; surrounded by a pale green luminosity

A projection, somewhat transparent; a bird, a pigeon with splashes of blue and yellow on its wings

- from Worcester’s Bridge of Lights festival last night

🏏 - brilliant run chase by India! 🇮🇳 #CWC2025

A scene from “The Tempest”. From “The Library Shakspeare, Volume One - Comedies”, illustrated by Sir John Gilbert, George Cruikshank and R. Dudley. Published in London by William Mackenzie, c1882.

“Had I plantation of this isle, my lord … And were the king on’t, what would I do?”
- Tonight in REP we will have an AGM at 7pm, followed by a reading of The Tempest to mark its 1612/13 revival by The Kings’ Men.

Well, I didn’t know that. That’s brilliant! Thank you.

Spoilers! 🤣