Looking at stuff

[shark_hat]

The British Library's permanent exhibition can always give me chills; this time it was Jane Austen's History of England and Jane Gray's mini prayer book, with the polite note to her jailer. The Hebrew bibles illuminated in mediaeval Europe are cool- well, everything on display there is cool, obviously.
Also cool, sigmonster, who made me bread. Yay! The security guards may be jaded by seeing lots of eccentric intellectual types using the reading rooms, they didn't seem to bat an eyelid at a warm sourdough loaf being handed over outside the King's Library.
We then went for some trolley-service dim sum at New World (yum, prawns) and headed over to Shepherd's Bush, getting there ridiculously early because I never trust the Central Line, so we got to queue for half an hour outside a bar converted from an underground loo. (Honest.) We had free tickets for previews for Mitchell and Webb's new BBC sketch series, which seems like it will be funny. My three niggles were: we ended up sitting behind people who were standing, so had to alternate leaning over sideways in a comical manner and standing up for a bit; the drinks were expensive; I can't work out what I've seen one of the cast members in before. Only the third will apply when the show's on TV, and none of them stopped the evening being fun, anyway. Two nifty things: the bar has black lights, so I was casting an unearthly glow from the white stripes in my top; the stage directions being read out (I bet the green clarinet man won't look as funny on screen as he does in my mind.)

I was lent some eps of Snuff Box by a very kind person with a functioning Freeview box. A lot of people seem to have been disappointed by this. It's certainly very weird and dark. I guess the gross elements are there because Berry and Fulcher find them funny and not because they want to shock- I think the 11.30 BBC3 audience are moderately offense-proof- but they don't match up with my sense of humour exactly. (The song using swearwords as the beat was funny, mind you.) I certainly like this more than Nathan Barley (not that the two are very alike except in being recent comedy that may be intended as sort of pushing boundaries.) That came over as quite depressing to me, whereas this is sort of more bizarre and twisted but not as cynical. Which is an odd thing to say about a show centred around two hangmen, but there we go. I'm finding Matt Berry and his singing voice irritating- I don't *think* you're meant to be saying "hit him again!" in the scenes where he gets beaten up while trying to collect some boots. Will watch this again at some point and try to work out if I have an actual opinion or just a shrug.

Comments

[sigmonster.livejournal.com]

How was the bread? My loaf was a little fatter and a little half-baked cos I was in such a hurry to get it out of the oven, but good anyway.

Next batch will be better. Oh yes. It will be slashed properly, for a start.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

Delicious. A little underbaked (not badly). Wonderful toasted.