"A sequel. That's it. We'll bring it out on March 25, and we'll call it... Christmas 2! " -- BZ, 'Santa Claus: The Movie'

Film I'm going to miss Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops posts. It's the end of the year and he's not flagging. Here's the opening paragraph of his Santa Claus: The Movie review and I think it's his best yet:

"There’s nothing lonelier than being a Jew on Christmas. When someone says “Merry Christmas” all I hear is “Fuck you, Jew.” When someone says “Happy Holidays” what they really mean is “Fuck you, Jew.” When they say “Happy Chanakoonah” that’s ultimately just another way of saying “Fuck you, Jew.” When someone at work says “Hey, Nathan, can I borrow your Juno screener?” All I hear is “Fuck you, Jew”. Man, I really need to go back on my meds. Fucking seasonal depression."

Now if you'll excuse me, my record is stuck.

"Love, love is a verb, love is a doing word, fearless on my breath." -- Massive Attack, 'Teardrops'

That Day If anyone is reading this today, 'Appy Chrismass. This year I was greeted by a turntable under the tree which means I can revisit my old record collection, which isn't exactly Championship Vinyl size but still has a few 'oohs and aah's and I didn't know I had thats. Look, it's ELO!

The strangest moment of the morning was watching my expectant mother waiting for my approval as I unrapped the Newton Faulkner album.
'Right. Yes. Thanks.' I said.
'Well I saw it advertised.' Mum said, clearly wondering why I wasn't more excited.
'Um. Yes.'
'What's wrong?'
'Well, I've never heard of him.'
And I haven't. The name hasn't passed through either of my ears or rested on either of my braincells. Is Newton Faulkner someone who everyone has heard of? Have I totally missed a very large ship, perhaps three of them? I suspect it's another knock on effect from The Proms, when I totally, like, missed, like, everything, like, like. It's quite a good album actually although I'm not sure about his version of Teardrops, probably because I'm so used to the masterful Massive Attack version. Please put me out of my misery.

Anyway, have a great rest of the day and I'll speak to you soon.

"Not even a mouse..." -- Anonymous, 'A Visit from St. Nicholas'

Life I love that even in the mid-end of the noughties, BBC Two can still think its plausable to have have a Ken Dodd inspired theme night with an ITV manufactured 'Evening With ...' whose main pleasure is still to see how celebrity culture has changed. Not much apparently. Hello, it's late Christmas Eve and I'm hiding away because there are people asleep in the lounge and since anything I do would include talking I've decided to let them nap. Long day tomorrow.

I actually went shopping in town earlier, proper shopping including the purchase of a turkey and everything. Actually it was just a crown but I still feel like I've done the christmas thing. The longest queue was in our currently tiny HMV (Hot Fuzz & extended King Kong by the way) not Tesco though which shows that people's priorities are not at all out of joint - though to be fair, the food store has more tills. I only managed to stress out once this year -- over carrot and swede and finding thereof. Again, priorities.

Is that the time? Hour and ten minutes to go ...

Review 2007: The Year The Turner Came To Town

Ian Jackson on Liverpool

Of course, Liverpool is a fantastically cultural city all the time, we don't need Governments or EU commissions to tell us we are allowed to be a Capital of Culture for one year then revert to normal. But having this award has meant that we have even more organisations and people wanting to be a part of the action even before 2008 starts. So the Liverpool Biennial have had more money to spend on great public artworks such as Antony Gormley's Another Place and Richard Wilson's Turning the Place Over.

We even had the Royal Variety Performance held at the Liverpool Empire, so the poor Queen and Mr Queen had to travel up to Lime St. to endure, I mean enjoy, the best of variety entertainment. The really big thing though was the first non-London Turner Prize for art which this year was held at Tate Liverpool. This was seen as a major coup for the city but in hindsight maybe the hype was a bit overdone. The Tate couldn't quite bring itself to totally deny Londoners their annual ration of Turner artists so they had a massive retrospective of past winners at Tate Britain.

When the shortlist was announced in May the cameras were there but only so all the journalists and art critics could watch the announcement live without bothering to travel up north. It was a bit embarrassing to be honest as the judges had to wait for a member of staff to write down the questions being phoned in from London and then read them out. Then the shortlist itself and the works the artists were nominated for sounded all a bit serious, political and safe. Yes, all good artists and good works but nothing that was likely to make people all over the nation think 'Oh yes, must travel to Liverpool to catch that show'

Then the exhibition opened in October and again many people were underwhelmed and unexcited. It was almost as if even the artists thought 'Well, its only Liverpool and Wallinger is going to win anyway so I'll just do something quick' Mark Wallinger's own entry for this exhibition was his Sleeper video. So I imagined him sitting at home thinking 'Well its only Liverpool and I'm bound to win anyway for my State Britain piece, so, lets see, I could just post off this video I shot in 2004 for the 05 Venice Biennale. Yep. Job done.’ I'm joking of course, I know the artists wouldn't think that way but the show did have that sort of feel about it.

The national press did post the required reportage but with little enthusiasm and national TV, even programs such as Newsnight review and the Culture Show who are often scraping the bottom of the barrel to find a cultural event of interest to talk about, steadfastly ignored Liverpool. The evening of the awards came in December and as expected Wallinger won. Channel 4 reported the event live. In some years past the Turner merited an hour or half hour long program. This year it was going to be the 5 minutes following the end of Channel 4 News, then it was to be the last 5 minutes of the news then it was going to be in the middle.

So, of course, we all had to watch the whole news program just to see the very brief announcement (at 19.45). There was also a report about the prize at 19.30 which included a brief shot of me and my wife, Minako. We were not invited to the awards as we are not celeb enough but this shot was taken at the press viewing in October. Ok, having said all that, it was actually a good exhibition. I'm glad it was here and I'm glad I saw it (several times). Maybe its more of a problem with the Turner Prize itself, many think its had its day, time to come up with something new.

Fortunately the good people at Tate Liverpool have been here long enough to realise that you have to add a bit of fun and flair if its happening in this city and so they planted a big black Taxi cab alongside the show with a video screen in the back showing filmed interviews of recent passengers talking about art. Many people thought this was the best thing, it should have won the prize.

Ian Jackson runs Art In Liverpool.

Click here to find out more about this review of 2007, read previous posts and learn about contributing yourself.

"peace among those whom he favours" -- the new angel of the lord

Literature These years, I always make a point watching the Candlelit carols edition of Songs of Praise. The changing of words in the hymns (which I've heard someone horridly call 'contemporising' on occasion) is a given these days. But between the carols, there were Bible readings telling the story of the nativity, which this year were read by Julia McKenzie and the late Anton Rogers in the gorgeous Hereford Cathedral. For years, my impression is that the words have been from the King James edition Bible, so beautiful and poetic and infused with awe. Here's perhaps the most famous section, it's from Luke 2:8-16 ...

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

In fact, even at a young age if I didn't remember anything directly from the Bible other than the Lord's Prayer, I remembered those words: "on earth peace, good will toward men" If nothing else, it inspired one of my favourite ever cartoons, MGM's Peace On Earth as brilliant a demonstration of why war is stupid as you're likely to see.

Not on Songs of Praise tonight though. Tonight instead I was introduced to the Holy Bible, New Standard Revised Version. Here's that same passage as it appears in the version read out in Hereford Cathedral:

"In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.
Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.
But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people:
to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.
This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours!'

So region instead of country. News instead of tidings. You can't say Christ -- it's the Messiah. Swaddling clothes become 'bands of cloth'.

The project was no doubt to make the Bible accessible to new generations (more of that contemporising). Arguably there shouldn't be anything wrong with that since the King James itself was translated from Greek and used so that the masses -- at least those who could read -- would have access to the word of God (I'm simplifying -- the Wikipedia inevitably has greater detail). Except in this case were not talking about going from one language to another -- it's the same language. It's just that some of the words are more archaic. It reminds me of the modernisations of Shakespeare in which the verse is translated into prose, absolutely losing the poetry. That's what's happening here -- you're going from one piece of writing which is inspiring and uplifting even to a questioner like me to something which, yes, does the job, tells the story, but lacks a sense of history.

You're into the territory of turning "on earth peace, good will toward men" into " and on earth peace among those whom he favours!" The intention here seems to be strangely PC (considering this work was done in the mid-20th century) and changing 'men' which is too gender specific for some probably into 'those he favours' which is supposed to mean everyone but in context actually sounds like God is only offering peace to those he likes, offering a whole raft of loose interpretations I'll leave in your capable hands. Why is the use of the word 'man' to encompass everyone still a polariser? Aren't actresses called actors these days?

Unsurprisingly, the Revised Standard Version also has a wiki which supplies this great quote:

"The intention was not only to create a clearer version of the Bible for the English-speaking church, but also to "preserve all that is best in the English Bible as it has been known and used through the centuries" and "to put the message of the Bible in simple, enduring words that are worthy to stand in the great Tyndale-King James tradition."

Which must have looked really good on the sales brochure.

The fact that I was and am annoyed by this continues to underline that I haven't completely let go of my connection to religion just yet. And it could of course just be that I'm a stuck in the mud traditionalist who likes to hear the expected words in the right order and if I'd been brought up on the RSV, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. It's just very disappointing that a text which has served us so well on the BBC for all of these years is being phased out in favour of something which seems to have been written to sound similar yet simpler because collectively, even the middle of the last century, we'd become less clever in our use and understanding of language than we used to be.

"I’d also love to do a DEEP SPACE NINE novel..."

TV Pantechnicon has a really rather fabulous and revealing two-part interview with script editor Gary Russell which begins with his acting career (bless) and continues almost right up to date at Cardiff (if he's got the IDW gig yet, it only shows in that he says that he wants to write a graphic novel). Great stuff about Big Finish and particularly his feelings about Tom Baker's treatment thereof. I didn't know those three scripts were originally written for him.

[Part One, Part Two]

The first part can be read in the .pdf version of the fanzine at around page 21. The rest is in html.

"I missed the train." -- Matthew Rudd

Travel Matt has a few problems using our shambolic transport system: "A car journey from my home to the railway station takes approximately 15 minutes, depending on the regulation factors like weather, time of day etc. So, the Natural Blonde agreed to drive me from the village (we haven't had localised services to the vast terrain of small towns and villages east of Hull since Dr Beeching decided in 1964 that they were no longer necessary) to the station. [...] We set off on a 15 minute journey with half an hour to spare. [...] We got stuck behind a succession of 25mph transporters carrying those mobile offices, which take up two lanes by just enough of a margin to prevent you from overtaking. [...] I missed the train."

"It gave me palpitations and my palms were actually sweating..." -- Keris Stainton

TV Well of course I've secretly been watching Strictly -- it's been difficult to get away from wedged into the schedules at weekend teatimes. Part-dance contest, part soap opera, part panto, the contest has largely been worth watching to see pop-culture 'icons' in entirely unlikely situations (well one situation -- Willie Thorne dancing, Stephanie Beacham dancing, don't get done get Dom dancing, everyone basically dancing) their emotions laid bare -- it's unsurprising how false or arrogant someone can come across as being when being interviewed about the foxtrot and talking about their 'journey' (Taxi or train? Or did they send a car?). I was more impressed with the celebs who took the judge's comments on board and promised to do better than the miscreants who argued and told them they didn't know what they were talking about. Yeah, and whose the expert?

Quite rightly Alesha won which made a liar out of those who reduced the viewership to a bunch of mindless cretins who'd simply vote for Matt because they fancy him (some of whom were judges apparently). She's been consistently good from the first show, always displaying an ability a cut above the likes of Di Angelo whose frequently forgotten his steps in the middle of a routine (actually to an extent, by her own admission, she'd get flummoxed herself now and then, but because she seemed relaxed and gave off the vibe of being in control, this didn't seem as apparent -- the more nervous contestants were laid bare on the dance floor because their problems were magnified). Either way it underlines just what Charlie Brooker says in the Christmas Screen Wipe -- that people who vote in uk reality tv shows are a far more liberal bunch than most people give them credit for, in this case voting as winner someone whose black and a woman and clearly has talent.

Keris has the full story at TV Scoop. Where there really that many dances? Is it really only another nine months to the next one?

"The implications of this rumour are clear." -- Suw Charman

Journalism Suw writes about a quite bizarre controversy in which a reviewer on a games website appeared to have been fired for giving a bad review for something which for which a company had bought loads of ad space for. I love the poetry of this sentence which is the best digital substitute I've seen yet for 'not worth the paper its printed on':

"The implications of this rumour are clear: If CNET is bowing to pressure from advertisers to ensure that their own games are favourable reviewed, then CNET's games coverage becomes not worth the electricity that lights its pixels."

One of the great pleasures in some print magazines is seeing a one-star review of a film accompanied on the opposite page by an advert for that same movie almost as though the distributor are saying 'Yeah -- but look -- it's Martin Lawrence in drag --- again! It's gonna be - hi-lar-eus!' But really -- can anything which takes massive amounts advertising from the industry its writing about be truly independent?

"He took a photo of the two ‘rubbish’ trees and asked which one I preferred." -- Gia

Christmas Luckily, since A Charlie Brown Christmas isn't on in the UK this year, Gia's found a copy and explains neatly about how it's effected those of us who saw it as a child.

Since we are now in the time of the Christmas Radio Times, here again are my tv recommendations for the festive season.

"I wanna live again!" -- George Bailey, 'It's A Wondeful Life'

Life This is not how I expected to spend the week before Christmas. Monday I felt perfectly perfectly, but Tuesday was somewhat boss eyed. Dragged my bones to a sort of work appraisal which I hopefully managed to get through without being too weird. Walked into town and bought a new printer (Canon PIXMA ip2500 dontcha know) and odd bits (as late Christmas presents are usually described) but by the time I’d been through Odd Bins I was really bleary, and not for that reason. Sigh. Home then. Bed then.

Spent Wednesday under the duvet, sweating visibly and on the edge of consciousness I think. Managed to watch four films which isn’t something I’ve done in ages. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, a rubbish tv movie from ITV called Lie With Me, Bobby (Emilio Estevez’s underrated fictionalisation of RFK’s assassination) and Barefoot in the Park (which is just lovely – I don’t think I’ve seen Jane Fonda as funny).

Thursday actually felt a bit better. Said some of the interesting things that men to tend to say about these things like ‘I think my fever broke last night’. Went out at lunch time and bought food. Spent the afternoon reading and reviewing this (which, um, led to this). But truthfully I was rotten and not entirely coherent. Drifted through Seven in the evening. Some people are drawn to comedies when they’re ill to try and cheer themselves up. They have opposite effect on me. I just look at all the happy faces, and jolly music, and wiz bang and it just makes me feel worse – because they’re doing all the things I’m not right now. I’m such a misanthrope at times.

Friday I was supposed to go on a work’s afternoon drink thing but decided I’d be dreadful company (hell, I was finding my own company disappointing what with all the self pity) so decided to go instead on my semi-annual pilgrimage to Bedford Falls and a lovely digital print of It’s A Wonderful Life at FACT in Liverpool. Jimmy Stewart was a great actor - he makes Brando look like a shameless mugger. Sobbed my way through the ending as per usual.

This morning did the final pre-Christmas shop at Tesco, where we managed to meet our immediate neighbours, someone I hardly worked with ten years ago and the girlfriend of a friend of a friend who I met at s housewarming last weekend. I had the kind of avant-guard hair which only develops through days of having a cold so I’m sure I must have come across as very odd and eccentric soul as I searched for strawberry jam. When you’re ill and you’re walking around in public nothing is indeed real.

Now I’m feeling really tired and wondering whether I should really post this wallow in wallowing. But blogging can be like filling in an application for welfare. You must show the gaps in your work history and so here we are. Normal service will hopefully resume shortly. Review 2007 submissions still welcome etc.

Night.

The Pirate Loop.

TV How’s this for timing? You wait years for an intergalactic luxury liner in peril and two come along at once. Luckily, it looks as though in each case the source of that peril is completely different. Well clearly. Whatever’s happening on the Titanic on Christmas Day can’t be as random as the journey the Starship Brilliant is on in here, what with being stuck in a time loop and being menaced by pirate badgers, the only way of travelling about the ship being to dive into something which feels almost but not exactly like scrambled egg. Welcome to the bizarre fantasy that is Simon Guerrier’s The Pirate Loop. Leave your preconceptions at the front cover.

The Doctor and Martha travel to the aforementioned ship to solve the mystery of why it disappeared. The timelord uncovers the truth disappointingly easily but then, as with some of the best Doctor Who stories, has to wrestle with his conscience as to whether he has the right to disrupt recorded history and save the lives of those onboard. It’s in the process of trying to warn the captain that they greet the aforesaid impediments as well as an aristocratic alien race, the Balumin, which Guerrier describes as looking like Mr. Tickle, which isn’t an easy image to ignore really. All of which makes it sound terribly exciting and surprising which it certainly is – but ultimately, despite some discrete moments of charm it doesn’t quite hang together.

The first problem is one which afflicts many of these novels – an over familiarity of ideas. Time loops and paradoxes have become the show’s stock in trades of late, particularly in this past series and certainly you shouldn’t knock anyone whose following in the footsteps of Steven Moffat. Indeed one of the best bits of the novel is right in the middle when the story cuts between the Doctor and Martha in two time periods, the actions of one echoing through to the other. Sadly the big surprise at the centre of that really doesn’t work if you look at it too closely and particularly in relation to Moffat’s work and the alternative might have been a bit more interesting.

The characters too, with the exception of a well interpreted Doctor and Martha, are all fairly irritating. Most of our time is spent in the company of the badgers, bred with the intellect of Forrest Gump to make them malleable and blessed with Home Counties accents which the author takes great pleasure in reproducing – the dialogue is apostrophe central. There is a sweet scene in which Martha explains to them how to eat canapés (no really) but in the end they’re about as appealing as the cavemen in The Tribe of Gum (or whatever it’s being called this decade) and will only work for those with a high tolerance for cutsiness

The Bulamin’s speaking representative is Mrs Wingsworth, essentially an ovoid Margot from The Good Life with extra arms. Again, there’s neat bit of dialogue between her and the Doctor about her low self-esteem (no really again) but other than that like the badgers she’s pretty two dimensional as are some human characters who eventually appear to do some shouting. It’s almost as though Guerrier has deliberately written them as cartoons with the intended audience in mind, but some of the characters in The Infinite Quest had more depth than this. Only the Ood-like mouthless engineers are effective and it’s a shame we don’t spend more time with them.

Despite all of that it’s not an unenjoyable read and sometimes quite ingenious. Guerrier has clearly structured his story in advance and details in the opening chapters pay off well in the end. The reader is always orientated within the ship and the use of analogies keep the readers totally aware of the environment mostly drawn from Martha’s Earthly experience. It’s Martha who probably comes off best in all of this, absolutely in-keeping with the television version with a range of contemporary references to everything from myspace to Facebook in her jacket pocket – something which the Doctor indulges in himself to good effect. But you know what in the end makes this worth reading? A single paragraph of introspection in which our hero ruminates on what would need to be done were he really to lose his companion. It’s perhaps the most powerful bits of writing about the lonely god since the bottom end of The Family of Blood.

The Pirate Loop, by Simon Guerrier, is released by BBC Books on 26 December. ISBN 9781846073472.

"Lots of fun, not the most cerebral slice of Who ever..."

TV OTT's Graham was at the screening. Potential spoilers (from a certain point of view) but worth reading for the stuff about the Q&A: "Lots of fun, not the most cerebral slice of Who ever, but terribly exciting, and with one real groaner they could only get away with on Christmas Day. That's what I reckoned, anyway." New theme music too.

Elsewhere I'm feeling a bit under the weather today, so here's a review I've written of The Liverpool Nativity published at Off The Telly to tide you over.

"We're livin' la vida loca!"

TV Freema Agyeman.com (a fansite) notices that IDW have published a five page preview of their new comic: cover, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This first page is squeetastic and the rest does somehow have a different to the strips in Battle in Time, DWA and DWM. Even though both of the characters only look somewhat like the real thing it works. I'd rather have this than an attempt at photorealism that doesn't look quote right.

[website is gone.]

"Oh, my..." -- Kirk, 'Star Trek: Generations'

Film Speaking of canons, according to the producers of the new Star Trek film the reason that they can't fit William Shatner and Kirk into the new movie is because he died in Generations so to include him would be non-canonical. In other words:

(1) This new film is canon, fits within the chronology and is not a massive reimaging/remake of the mythology as previously reported
(2) The future Spock scenes happen in the post-Generations Trekiverse
(3) But if they retcon anything it'll look like they really didn't want Shatner in there in the first place because ...
(4) If they really wanted him there, they could have set the future scenes pre-Generations (with some heavy foreshadowing) oh and ...
(5) It buggers the canonicity of all of William Shatner(ish)'s Trek novels because in those he resurrected Kirk.

I mean what the point? It's not like Trek itself has been too protective of this stuff in the past. Enterprise was a minefield and just where was the Eugenics War when the Starship Voyager went back in time in Future's End?

My reaction to all this as a Doctor Who fan ...

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Because in the Whoniverse they just make stuff up as we go along and everything is canon. Except Dimensions in Time. And Scream of the Shalka. And Death Comes To Time.

Oh, my ...

"When James Bond gets an assignment, he probably ends up on the Riviera, up to his 007's in bikinis. Me? I end up 80 miles past nowhere." -- MacGyver

Books The Penguin Blog unveils the cover for Sebastian Faulks's new James Bond novel, Devil May Care and describe the genesis of the design: "The Partners presented us initial designs based around the concept a blood-red flower with the silhouette of a naked woman as its stem set against a jet black background."

According to an interview I heard some time ago, Faulks is deliberately going to be aping Ian Fleming's writing style although he's not the first. According to the Wikipedia, when Fleming died, a range of authors including Kingsley Amis wrote stories under a single pseudonym although as the way of these things, there canonicity is in doubt etc.

The Liverpool Nativity.

TV The Liverpool Nativity was rather better than anyone expected. In the run up, cynical writing and comment abounded with some questioning the casting – any scouser with an equity card – and the setting, which could potentially have led to another airing of the usual stereotypes (gosh we’re so chipper and funny and welcoming and not all like you southerners portray us etc). But in the end it was a rather winning bit of television because of the obvious passion which had gone into the organisation and the performances.

This televised modernisation of the story of the birth of Christ kicks off Liverpool Capital of Culture year and was brought to us by the people behind Easter’s Manchester Passion. However, it was logistically an even more complex prospect than the crucifixion; narrated in front of a crowd by joyous MC Geoffrey Hughes as the Angel Gabriel from a stage at the bottom of William Brown Street, his commentary and shouting intercut with scenes set in other parts of Liverpool city centre and beyond. This was everything that might appear in the average school nativity but on a massive scale and with a BBC outside broadcast unit instead of a nervous parent with a camcorder.

In St George’s Hall, Cathy Tyson, aided by some winning Busby Berkley-style dance routines, gave a panto rendition of Herod – in this version a Minister for the Interior bent on chucking out asylum seekers such as the good Joseph. She was visited by the three wise men – who included ex-Chinese Detective David Yip and Joe McGann sporting a rather natty velvet jacket. Up by St Nicholas’s Church, we met the shepherds – Andrew Schofield knocking out a decent rendition of Imagine before being visited by Jennifer Ellison doled up in a silver tracksuit as an angel. Sadly we cut away before seeing the star that would lead them to St John’s Gardens.

The most impressive journey was for Mary and Joseph, who began in the café of the Seacombe Ferry Terminal before travelling across the Mersey by boat (instead of the usual donkey), through the streets of Liverpool and up to the stage. This central couple were rather actually rather convincing – with West End veteran Jodie McNee in particular generating real sympathy for Mary’s plight and clearly in tears at one point. This was some mean achievement when you take into account much of the show was happening across town, the duo had to wait for cues before performing and they had to ensure they reached their goal before the finale.

Most of the songs also worked well, even if the resonance of some of the lyrics was lost, despite the best efforts of the performers – a problem with the microphones led to many of the words not being quite audible. Good job everyone knows the plot. Some thought had clearly gone into the context of the selections – such as the appearance of Mary and child heralded by Lady Madonna – and why not celebrate Liverpool’s musical heritage at an event like this? It’s all a matter of taste, probably, but original composition just would not have worked in this context. It’s far more impressive to have a standing audience that looks like half the population of the city, singing en masse, All You Need is Love.

It was also dead funny – the look on Mary’s face was priceless when Gabriel apparently appeared to her and explained her physical predicament. Ditto her husband, who clearly got the wrong idea. Often the script attempted to burst the expectations of the viewer – when Hughes had to indicate Christ’s parents were taking the ferry across the Mersey he joked, “You might think that’s a cue for a song … well it isn’t.” Schofield, meanwhile, perked up on hearing free food might be available at some point, at which point a fellow shepherd suggested he should stop fulfilling the stereotype. Only some of the material Cathy Tyson had to deal with fell rather flat and listless, but after booing from the crowd, proceedings went right back on track.

I imagine there will still be some viewers who were offended by all this, either because of the appropriation of the key biblical story or a reminder that for some Liverpool is the centre of the universe. But hopefully even they couldn’t deny that, for the most part, this was done with the best of intentions. Everyone involved got into the spirit of the thing, and as the crowd parted to give Mary and Joseph a clear run away from their pursuers, you really could believe that all you need is love.

"Everybody in the whole cellblock, was dancing to the jailhouse rock". -- Elvis Presley, 'Jailhouse Rock'

TV When the producers of tonight's Strictly Come Dancing decided that those kids should jive to Elvis's Jailhouse Rock I'm not sure that they were totally aware of what some of the lyrics were about: "As noted by Rolling Stone magazine [...] there are parts of the lyrics that may represent talk about homosexual relationships between inmates:"Number forty-seven said to number three / You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see / I sure would be delighted with your company / Come on and do the jailhouse rock with me."

“You cannot open a book without learning something.” -- Confucius

Commerce I've done my fair share of internet shopping this Christmas. I've had many real world shopping days, but almost all of the books and cds have been sent from Amazon or Play.com's warehouses wherever they are. It's cheaper, true and the free delivery over a certain price helps, but also the selection is larger -- you're able to shop based on search terms rather than whatever happens to be on the shelves and although as Barbara Ellen notices today in The Observer there's always the possibility that whatever you order doesn't quite fit with your expectations (which is very true -- one of the books is smaller than I expected -- insert well worn cliche here) it is gratifying to be able to give a present that fits the person exactly rather than some hazier version thought up by the central purchaser for a bricks and coffee-shop shop.

A new ruling in France suggests I should feel guilty about this. Their courts have order Amazon to stop free delivery on their books from the end of the year, as a way of combating their 'illegal' practices and to support the work of small retailers. That's certainly laudable, but I do wonder how it effects consumers throughout the country. In Liverpool, we don't really have any small retailers. In terms of proper book shops, we have Tescos, Waterstones, WH Smith, Blackwells, The Works, Country Book Sale and Borders out in Speke, all chains. There are a couple of second hand bookshops, but our only small book retailer is News From Nowhere and they seem to have found a perfect niche for themselves covering non-mainstream topics.

I don't have a problem with going internet because it's simply an example of shopping around and finding the best price. There must be some places in France like us, where the real-world chains have already mostly swamped the independents and so in those areas this ruling is essentially favouring one type of retailer to the detriment of another with the consumer in the middle paying more for their books. I don't believe this is too similar to the big supermarket ruining the high street because in this case I'm buying exactly the same product online. Fingers crossed then that someone political in the UK doesn't get wind of this and try to score some points by proposing something similar.