EastEnders News...

EastEnders is a source of continual frustration at From Beer to Paternity Towers. Too often, it's Albert Square characters bashed into round plot holes, creating a mish-mash of stories and scripts where constant exposition is used to explain poor plotting and unlikely character development. 

But tonight's episode is excellent. I say excellent. It's actually pretty heartbreaking. It deals with Shabnam Masood's stillborn baby storyline and the whole episode focuses on this one story. 

The Pete Lawson script is simple and strong, Rakhee Thakrar and Davood Ghadami give excellent performances as the heartbroken parents, the always solid Nitin Ganatra is superb as Masood, and Bonnie Langford, yes, Bonnie Langford, is a revelation as Kush's grieving mum, Carmel. 

When Enders can do stuff that is genuinely this good, it only adds to the frustration that it can stuff that's so poor. You get the impression that there is still the kernel of excellence in EastEnders. But it takes a precision where the storyliners and the writers have to pay attention and respect to a particular storyline to create it, rather than indulge the creative whims of people who seem to have little respect for the characters and their histories.

If the same amount of attention had been paid to the ongoing bore-fest and plotting nightmare of the Lucy Beale murder storyline, then you get the impression it would have been much better... and not need to have every unlikely twist and turn explained to death and over-justified.

But Monday's Enders is excellent. It's EastEnders at its best. And, as a long-term fan, that's a huge relief.

The Sights of London: Part I...

Today, I was coming back from training BJJ at London Fight Factory and I cycled around Old Street roundabout.

Waiting at the traffic lights, a milk float pulled up alongside me and, sat on the very back of the float, with his legs dangling over the edge, was a fat lad in a high-visibility jacket. In one hand, he had a kebab, on his lap was the polystyrene kebab container and, in the other hand, was a fag.

I never expected to see such a sight in the trendy, cutting-edge streets of the capital’s East End. He was also smiling incessantly. 

The man is either a halfwit or a happy genius. I couldn’t tell which...

Newcastle: Part III: Home Gathering...

The Unthanks have been the darlings of the English folk scene for some time now... and rightly so. 

They've produced several amazingly good studio albums, notably the Mercury Prize nominated, The Bairns, and Here's the Tender Coming. They've also gone off and done leftfield projects such as a live album with Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, plus an album of traditional folk songs from the Tyne shipyards. 

Meanwhile, singing sisters Becky and Rachel Unthank have both taken part in outside projects; Becky contributing vocals on Martin Green's haunting Crow's Bones deserves a worthy mention here. And they host regular singing weekends and there's clog dancing in there, too. What's not to like? No… Really? What's not to like?

Home Gathering on 22 August was the culmination of their ambition to host their own boutique festival and it was an intimate and engaging affair. The venue was the Stephenson Boiler Workshop in Central Newcastle, a link with the city's industrial past now reshaped as an atmospheric arts space. 

Twelfth Day, Rob Heron's Tea Pad Orchestra, Alasdair Roberts and The Baghdaddies all provided excellent support, while a side stage featured guest singers as the bands were clearing the main stage and setting up. But it was The Unthanks who were the stars of the show.

Fronted by Becky and Rachel, The Unthanks delivered a cracking and intoxicating performance, with highlights including crowd favourite The King of Rome, the haunting Magpie, and the title track from their latest album, Mount the Air. The whole collective are wonderful and inspiring performers and, if there’s a finer sound than the group in full flight as they perform the insistent and heartbreaking Testimony of Patience Kershaw, then I’ve yet to hear it in 30-plus-years of gig-going.

The Unthanks kick all sorts of arse. In an age where commodification and making a fast buck at the expense of quality and sustainability is almost a government dictat, they continue to do their own thing on their own terms. And they do it with an authenticity and love that is all too rare. They remain an act to treasure.

Picture: The Unthanks Website

Newcastle: Part II: Baltic Arts Centre...

Me and the Missus are in Newcastle for a mini music festival and we're out and about exploring and, first up, is the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts. 

The venue itself is amazing: an art gallery over the six floors of a converted dockside warehouse alongside the Tyne. It has a high deck that offers fantastic views of the city and amazing glass lifts. The venue itself would be worth a visit without the great stuff it houses.

The three exhibitions when we visited included an installation by a Norwegian artist called Ida Ekblad. Her installation was a sort of carnival of junk that provided the set for a stage play. It was interesting because her process involves rummaging through scrapyards and creating found works from what she recovers. From these scrapyard trips, she creates mini monuments of meaning from discarded junk. They're playful, poignant and a little bit sad. 

The second artist was a painter and a sort of collage creator called Tony Swain. He creates canvases of old newspapers then paints over them. I wasn't massively keen on his stuff. I just didn't connect with it.

My favourite of the three artists on display, though, was an Indonesian artist called Fiona Tan. She now lives in Amsterdam and two of the three works we saw by her were film installations. The first, Disorient, involved two different films playing simultaneously on separate screens at the opposite ends of one room. 

One screen (see picture above) showed a sort of storehouse of Asian artefacts, both ancient and modern, while the other screen showed modern city scapes that have been economically impacted by globalisation. The vocal soundtrack that played over both was an actor reading from an account by Marco Polo about the different countries he visited and his impression of their cultures and riches. As a meditation on identity and cultural heritage, it was an amazing piece of work. 

The second work by Tan was called Inventory, which was filmed at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and offers a reflection on collecting and the sort of process of acquisition and cataloguing that takes place when museums take from one culture and bring them back and translate them for another.

The third work was Depot, which re-imagined and recreated a 76ft truck that used to take the preserved carcass of a huge whale across Europe so people could see it. Inside the truck was no whale but a cabinet of curiosities and a small cinema. The film again discusses cataloguing and collecting items, but this time natural history. 

Tan's work is ambitious in scale and idea and incredibly thought-provoking. It's wonderful stuff.

Newcastle: Part I: Beer...

Me and the Missus are in a pub in Newcastle called The Bodega. It's an old Victorian pub that still has some old fixtures and fittings and it's bloody lovely. 

In it, they are also serving a beer called Chew Chew by a brewery called Fallen Brewing Company. The beer (pictured above) is a salted caramel milk stout. And it's fabulous! 

Newcastle also has a Brewdog bar that serves all manner of craft beers. Newcastle is pretty darn good!

Competition Time: Part IV...

Today, I was supposed to be competing in the Surrey Open, which was supposed to be my third BJJ tournament of the year. But I'm still recovering from injury, so, like the last one, it was a non-starter, making it a disappointing one out of three for the year so far.

A couple of my pals were fighting, though, so I went along to see what was what.

The first thing to note was that it a very well run event, with mat times and fight schedules running pretty much exactly as advertised. One of my friends picked up a deserved bronze after winning one fight, then losing the next. The guy he lost to looked much bigger and my mate had a damaged hand, so he did well not to get submitted. My other friend fought a guy who quite simply looked like an ogre, and he was eventually submitted, despite battling on very bravely against what looked like a brutal leg triangle attempt.

It was good to watch them in action, though. I then went to watch the people in the category I would have been fighting in. If fully fit, I think I'd have done OK.

But I'm slowly coming back to training and competing in the London Open in October is now the goal.

The Modern World Disgusts Me: Part VI…

The hit Britcom film, Love Actually, starring Hugh Grant, was on telly last night. 

I didn't watch it. I just noticed it was on, but I did some basic maths and worked out that it went on for two hours and 40 minutes.

That seems an awfully long time time. I am assuming extra time was added for adverts, and extra pauses were added so fans of the flop-haired prostitute hirer and affable upper-class twit actor would know where to chuckle, but that's still nearly three hours. 

I haven't seen the film but I reckon two hours would be my limit. The idea of nearly three hours seems like torture...

Emmerdale: The Best Thing on British TV...

Once upon a time, Emmerdale was a 30-minute soap that went out on Tuesday and Thursday dinner times in the YTV region on ITV. Its main concerns surrounded a farming family called the Sugdens and what happened on their farm. It was a Yorkshire-based version of The Archers, but with better visual content and a wonky set. 

That was in the 1970s. Fast Forward to 2015 and it's the best-acted, best-written and best-plotted show on TV in the UK, and it has been for about the past two years. 

The soap produces six 30-minute episodes every week and affairs, blackmail, more affairs, violence, crime, yet more affairs and bitter family feuds are what it does on a regular basis. It does still, however, throw in the occasional farming storyline and relatives of its original family, the Sugdens, are still involved, too. 

But alongside the dramatic blockbuster moments is a bedrock of believable and largely likeable characters that long-term fans have a vested interest in. Most Emmerdale characters are people you'd probably want to spend time with in a pub. EastEnders should take note.

The centrepiece of its latest storyline is the wedding of hunky farmer Pete Barton to Debbie Dingle, the daughter of the machiavellian pairing of canoodling cousins Cain and Charity Dingle. Debbie, however, had been bonking Pete's dodgy brother Ross Barton, a muscled id with nearly fashionable facial hair and a good line in self-confidence, and the secret affair threatening to come out was one of the key stories brewing in the build-up to the wedding. 

The truth about the affair did, obviously, come out just before the first dance kicked off… then events elsewhere saw a helicopter plummet into the reception and leave the wedding party with slightly bigger problems that a betrayed groom and  a damaged wedding cake. 

The build-up to the wedding and the disaster has been a masterclass in both long-term storylining and character development. The actual wedding and disaster is simply superior TV drama. It's well-written, it's well-acted, it's well-produced… and, most importantly, the various plot strands that come together this week are all utterly believable. The aftermath also gives the show for lots of material for future story development.

Kate Oates, the series producer, recently went on record as saying that she thought she had the best ensemble cast of any soap. And, watching Emmerdale this week, it's hard to disagree. There are some beautiful moments, with comedy characters like Dan Spencer and Kerry Wyatt doing genuinely moving dramatic scenes as Ruby Haswell breathes her last. And Val Pollard returning from the grave to say goodbye to hubby Eric is a touching, funny and surprisingly poignant moment.

The big dramatic hitters, such as Michael Parr and Anthony Quinlan as Ross and Pete Barton, and Jeff Hordley as Cain Dingle, are also fabulous. As are Charlie Hardwick and Elizabeth Estensen as warring sisters Val Pollard and Diane Sugden.

But it really is an ensemble piece and it's an excellent one. Enders has been in terminal decline for some years now, and Corrie is still excellent, but Emmerdale has consistently raised its game and, this week in particular, it's hit new heights. 

Emmerdale kicks all sorts of arse. Fact.

Cilla Black...

National treasure Cilla Black has died. The headlines on the 24-hour rolling news channels all read Cilla Black Death. It made it sound like bubonic plague had made a comeback. 

I also have a Cilla Black joke. For any Cilla Black fans reading this, don't worry, it's a bit saucy and it doesn't ridicule or demean her in any way. And it's very funny.

I'll write it up in the next few days and you can judge for yourselves...

Sticking Point: Part IV...

As has been previously documented on this blog, I am learning my first martial arts weapon at Hapkido, the Korean martial art I've studied for more than a decade. 

The weapon is a short stick called a tahn bong and it's used for striking, blocking, stabbing, choking and manipulating joints. It's a little like the billy club my favourite superhero, Daredevil, uses, so I was hoping I'd be a natural with it. Sadly, I'm not. 

To improve, I've built training for 15 minutes every day into my work schedule and I've now been doing this for about six months, and, recently, I thought I was getting somewhere with it. My strikes were fluid and my striking accuracy was definitely improving. 

Then, at a couple of recent classes, I've had a few major corrections to my striking. The first was to do with excessive shoulder rotation and the second was to do with thumb placement. I was also told that I'm gripping my stick too hard. Make your own jokes… 

So I've had to re-adjust my striking technique and pretty much restructure most of my delivery. It's a bit annoying I'm not as good as I want to be, but it's all part of the process. 

At least, I'm slowly working my way through more of the second dan syllabus now. These things take time, and I'm in no rush. I also need to sometimes remember that most 46-year-olds don't even study one martial art, let alone two.

Perseverance is all.