Boys from the Black Stuff (and a bit of Michelangelo)

 

I am old enough to remember the much loved tv series and I was interested to see how it had been condensed to fit into just over two and a half hours with interval.  

The set grabbed attention straight away, with cranes and industrial building and the Mersey rolling away on the backdrop.  I liked the unemployment office which introduced most of the key characters and showed the performative rote nature of the weekly visits.  I have to say though that it felt like there was  a lot of plot and scene setting to get through in the first half which came at the expense of character .  All necessary  but I came out at the interval feeling a bit detached from it all.   The second half though starts to hone in on the people that this stuff is happening to, and for me it found its heart then, these men, not knowing how to be men when they can’t work any more, and families struggling to adapt, although still with a warm but sharp undercurrent of humour.  Yosser Hughes is still a blackly comic but also tragic figure, while George becomes more clearly the representative for the older working class culture and socialist values all being lost.   What I didn’t feel here was the sense of boiling rage I got from the tv series, which is strange given that a lot of things haven’t actually got any better and maybe a bit worse when you consider that the poverty now is in work as well as out of it.  Still a worthwhile and moving production, with a great ensemble cast though.  And I loved the communal singing and the early eighties soundtrack too.

Earlier in the day we went to see the Michelangelo exhibition at the British Museum.  This is a really worthwhile, if quite expensive* event. Some lovely pieces on display and arranged chronologically, including some of his partnerships too, although it was pretty obvious that the people who painted his drawn designs fell well short of the master himself. What a busy guy he was, right up to his death in his eighties, still drawing  and painting, working as an architect and still finding time for writing poetry and keeping up lots of correspondence…. and as one notable drawing shows, spending a bit of time designing a salt cellar for some reason!  I liked this much reworked design though of the Porta Pia.

*Art Pass was definitely worthwhile for this one, even if they tried to hide that option away on the website!