The Importance of Motion

It was just one of those days when Oxford felt very far away from London. Almost everyone is resigned to using the services of The Oxford Tube, a coach service that runs 'every 10 minutes' ('at peak times'; sub-caption in microscopic font). The train service is for gamblers: you might get there in half an hour if you're lucky; if you aren't, you might find yourself being shunted to and fro endlessly in a Sartrean hell somewhere between Reading and Didcot Parkway. The Oxford Tube takes longer, but at least even if it's slow, it's predictably slow. Besides, it's less than half the price.

This was one of the days when slow was excruciating: at every stop before leaving Oxford there were fifteen people waiting to get on, all of them with luggage and wanting to pay with fifty pound notes. At a certain point, or, to be more precise, when the clock hit seven o' clock and we had just reached Hillingdon, I gave up on the idea that I would catch the play at all. We pulled in at the Marble Arch stop at twenty past, and I hopped into a taxi. As we passed Big Ben its hands read exactly 7.30. London taxi drivers know where everything is, or are supposed to, so you know they're lost when they say something like 'Um, er, the National is the theatre that's, er...' 'Directly in front of you with a sign projected onto its facade.'

The play that I was impossibly trying to catch was The Life of Galileo, a play about which I knew nothing and had no expectations whatsoever. It was also part of the £10 sponsored season at the National, which was why I was fairly sanguine. If I missed the play completely, a stroll on the South Bank was an acceptable substitute; and I have, after all, lost more than £10 on poorly-judged purchases at a music store. But oh, what a waste it would have been if I had turned around and not walked the few extra steps to where an unexpectedly nice usher took pity on me and said he would sneak me in during a scene change in about three or four minutes. In all I missed about twelve minutes of a play that ran for three hours and ten minutes. And I'm actually considering going back to see all 190 minutes of it all over again, because every second of it was absolutely brilliant.

The costumes and sets were a melange of anachronisms, but the effect of this was to draw attention away from them, rather than toward: a kind of anti-operatic effect, to remove all sense of pageantry and period and focus attention on the text. Galileo's daughter, in flats and capris, could have strolled in off Oxford Street; on the revolve (the play is on the vast, well-equipped Olivier stage) she literally runs up against the cardinals in their medieval red and black. And in the middle of all this is Galileo himself, in a rumpled white linen shirt; he is not straddling these two worlds: he is what at the same time holds them together and yet, because he cannot help but do so, divides them by his words, ideas, and, not incidentally, his character. There are wonderful reviews of the play out there that I will not try to outdo, but I have to say that the two things the average educated person knows about Galileo were delivered brilliantly: the recantation, delivered offstage, with a time-shifted Simon Russell Beale sitting facing the audience, the map of the world on his face; and the coda 'e pur si muove' delivered in the final moments of the play visually, the very familiarity of the image delivering unto us, the audience, the universe as we know it.

It's a phrase that I have come to mutter, more in desperate hope than anything else, when the Oxford Tube is jammed on the ring road heading westward out of London.

Nice hair and no neuroses

Two of my favourite shows are wrapping up their final seasons (also known as being cancelled, an inhumanely casual sort of euphemism for ending the life of a series): Alias and The West Wing. Neither of them has appeared in DVD box set form yet, at least in the UK, but they are of course widely available on the Bitorrent underground network, and those of my friends who traffic in this sort of activity have given me mixed reviews of how each is brought to a close. I'll decide when the time comes whether I really want to see a pregnant Jennifer Garner (whose outfits have become less and less wearable since Season 3, incidentally) knot up JJ Abrams's promised 'ending with a bang'. The West Wing has been barely watchable for some time, despite a brief resurgence of intelligence in Season 5, but this will be more a valedictory parting of ways than anything else; I'd like to hang out with everyone for a final few hours, no matter how inane the script: one feels as though we have been through much together. But perhaps my lack of initiative to watch the final episodes are part of my inherent dislike of finishing anything: even with books I love, I have a tendency to stop just a few chapters shy of the end. The psychoanalysis involved isn't difficult: I have a natural fear of finishing anything, especially anything of my own; for after completion comes evaluation and, inevitably, judgement.

What I have been doing is starting on new series, and tonight I brought myself up to speed with the latest episodes of Doctor Who that aired while I was out of the country, and then found myself strangely absorbed with a workplace drama (never been my cup of tea) called Grey's Anatomy. It had all the elements of something I'd hate: for starters, an annoyingly pretty main character with great clothes, a tepidly good-looking love interest devoid of personality, with each episode built around a 'theme' about which Meredith Grey, the blonde surgeon whose makeup remains impeccable after a forty-eight hour shift, spouts predictable aphorisms. But it was recommended to me by someone whose taste has never led me wrong thus far, and indeed, I found myself shelving my past traumas of the genre from the likes of Ally McBeal and enjoying a sexy, well put together workplace drama. It's been almost a year since I left the workplace to get my second degree, and I suddenly remembered what a good day at work felt like: the feeling of doing something important and the satisfaction of a day's accomplishment; the pride of knowing that you're good at what you do; the subtle undercurrents of romance that spice up a day at the office.

The other rave I have about the series is the excellent music selection. I've always felt it was cheating, somehow, to get one's musical clues from television, rather than hanging out in smoky clubs to catch the newest band on the block; but life is short, I'm getting old, and I no longer read Vogue from cover to cover, nor do I grab the latest Guide Rouge and Gault-Millau hot off the press the way I used to. It caught my attention because I had been listening to Laura Michelle Kelly's 'Somewhere Only We Know' from her excellent The Storm Inside. It was another artist's version that was used, with excellent emotional timing, in the show, and I began to pay attention to the music; the highlight of Season One has to be Butterfly Boucher's 'Never Leave Your Heart Alone'.

But the final episode and predictable cliffhanger of Season One reminded me of the worst of the genre: an impassioned speech of pushbutton emotionalism, poorly written and badly delivered: it was like something out of Friends. Thank god that magnetic tape is not dead and that I have a friend who knows how to use his VCR (well, it's actually DVCPRO and it's his job), but thanks to him I can get up to date with the latest season of Spooks. I'm looking forward to some suitably depressing BBC fare until the next season of Grey's Anatomy comes out, with, no doubt, echoes of the spring collections in the copies of Marie Claire that I never actually had time to go through.