One of the marvels of the Olympic Games of 2012 was the ubiquity of the video coverage. No more was there the experience of Olympic games of years past, when a single television channel covered as much as it could. The BBC delivered 2,400 hours of video over the seventeen days of the Games acrossRead More
Month: December 2012
The national gallery
I have, tucked away in a cardboard box somewhere, a large collection of postcards of paintings from small galleries up and down the UK. Years ago, when somehow there was more time to do such things, I would go out on regular trips to towns to pursue the kinds of paintings that seldom made intoRead More
Going to the cinema
I am out in London, and it has been a long day. I am walking towards the train station for the journey home, when I pass close by a shopping centre with an art house cinema in the middle of it. It is still early evening, and I think to myself why not see ifRead More
Watching people think
Can there be a stranger human activity than watching people play chess? To sit in an audience looking up at two people seated and staring at a table, thinking? And sometimes thinking for a very long time. I remember one glorious Channel 4 TV transmission at the time of the Gary Kasparaov-Nigel Short world chessRead More