mostly david ephgrave

Tonight's performance of Letters Live hammered home my deficiencies as a writer.  This may sound negative, but it isn't. Watching the show was a beautifully enriching experience. It served to remind me how powerful, emotive and evocative a letter can be. It can act like a direct channel to the thoughts and feelings of people of the past; more than a list of dates or statistics in a history book will ever do.  It made me mourn the near loss of the medium as a form of communication. You could argue that the email has replaced it - but there's something sterile and emotionless about an existenceless collection of characters on a computer screen, when compared to sheet after sheet of hand-or-typewritten correspondence. It's less tangible, and somehow less valuable for it. It helped that the letters were beautifully read. A whole of host of familiar faces stepped up to the lectern (their bodies were there too), including Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliet Stevenson, T...

God only knows how the BBC managed to make one of the most beautiful songs ever written sound so bland. It starts promisingly, with a Sgt-Pepper-style orchestral tune-up making way for a pretty, understated celeste. Then standards start to slip. Singers line up one after the other to see who can mess with the phrasing of their allocated line the most; stretching them beyond recognition, in a desperate attempt to take up more than eight beats. Only Brian Wilson, Chris Martin and Kylie Minogue sing it straight. Just as things are looking up, Brian May strolls in with his scratchy pubic hairstyle and overly compressed guitar sound and you want to run for the hills. One of the world’s most searingly honest and sincere love songs has its heart and soul ripped out; a ballad that's reduced me to tears many times, does it again, but for all the wrong reasons. These line-at-a-time celebrity sing-alongs seldom work. Everyone tries too hard. Each performer spends too l...