June TV shows

This post is a couple of days late, due to the incredibly busy weekend I've been having (of which more in a later post). We finished watching five TV shows this month. All were excellent, although I'd have to say that some of them ruined things somewhat by very disatisfying endings. The shows in question were:

Blue Lights, a contemporary crime drama set in Belfast, following a number of new police recruits as they undergo their training and become caught up in trying to solve a high-profile case involving organised crime. It's a good social portrait of Northern Ireland in general, and Belfast in particular.

Interview with the Vampire, an adaptation (part of) the first book in Anne Rice's series. I came to the books at exactly the right age and demeaner — eighteen years old, and very melodramatic — and loved them a lot during the time I read them. The changes the showrunners made from the books in terms of Louis's backstory and ethnicity work really well, and serve to even better emphasise the unequal, messed up, codependent relationship between Lestat and Louis, and later Lestat, Louis and Claudia. I'm less convinced that the changes made to the timeframe — pushing everything forward in time from the mid-1800s to the early twentieth century — works well, although I assume it was necessary if the show wanted Louis to be Black, but to have been born free rather than enslaved. In any case, the show hit exactly the right tone — the same purple prose, the same self-absorbed melodrama, the same lurid excess, and is to my mind a fantastic adaptation.

Daisy Jones and the Six, another adaptation from a book, and another story about self-destructive codependent relationships. This is the story about the titular band, and Daisy Jones, a singer who joins them later, and their journey as they make it big as rock stars in the 1970s. The cast in this is fabulous, the songs are great (and are sung and performed by the actors), and it's thoughtfully done portrait of a very specific time and place, and of the beauty that can be created by incredibly damaged people, and the damage that they can do to themselves and each other. The one sour note is the show's ending, which pulls the rug out from under the viewer in terms of the frame narrative (of a retrospective series of interviews for a documentary about the band) in a way that I found sentimental and unsatisfying.

Infiniti, a French drama about astronauts travelling to the International Space Station, and a strange series of murders taking place in Baikonur (the city in Kazakhstan that is home to the Cosmodrome spaceport from which Russian- and international-crewed human space flights were launched until very recently). I really liked the portrayal of space flight (although I had to switch off the part of my brain that knew no country's space program would send such psychologically unstable people as the show's characters into space), life in Kazakhstan, and the weird social and political tensions that come from the region's Soviet legacy, and the Cosmodrome's weird political status as an entity on Kazakh territory, but leased to Russia until 2050. However, I wished that the show had stayed in the realms of crime drama and geopolitical thriller, whereas instead ( spoilers )

Other than that, a very good show, and I enjoyed its multilingualism.

Count Abdullah, another comedy from the same writers who brought us We Are Lady Parts. In this show, a young NHS doctor of British Pakistani descent ends up transformed into a vampire, making his already complicated and stressful life even more complicated and stressful. As with We Are Lady Parts, this is a comedy about British Muslim life made by people from that community, and I found it laugh-out-loud hilarious.

June was definitely a high point in terms of TV shows, that's for sure!

Summery Sunday summary

I've had a very busy (by my standards) few days, to the extent that in some ways it feels as if the weekend was four days long, even though I had to work two of them. Due to a strange set of circumstances, I've ended up working in the library in Cambridge for three consecutive days (Wednesday-Thursday-Friday), and will be working another three consecutive days next week (Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday), whereas I normally only work in person on Wednesdays. I have no idea how I used to manage to work in person five days a week, week in, week out, because just three days in a row now feels incredibly draining.

On Thursday evening, Matthias and I walked the 8km or so out to Littleport, a village to the north of us along the river, and had dinner at an Italian restaurant that had been recommended to me by a colleague. It was still pretty warm and humid, so the walking felt effortful, even at 6pm. The food at the restaurant was great, and incredibly cheap (less than £10 for a main course), and the waiter was what you might describe as 'a character,' discouraging people from ordering certain dishes on the menu, and chatting endlessly with the Irish family at the next table over. It's definitely the best place to eat in Littleport, so I'll certainly be back the next time we walk out there.

On Friday evening I met Matthias in the centre of town, where there was the monthly food truck event happening. We had dinner, and then ended up at a '90s silent disco in the cathedral. The place was full of people mainly our age and older (and, as usual when events involving nostalgic '90s music take place, seemed to have attracted every Polish person in the region), although with pockets of zoomers whose presence baffled me given they weren't even alive when most of this music was a thing. There were three different DJs playing the three different channels on the headsets — '90s pop, '90s alternative, '90s hip hop — I flicked between the channels according to the song and my whim, danced my heart out, and generally had a wonderful time.

On Saturday, we did another walk — this time around 8km through various villages into Haddenham, which was hosting a beer festival/community fair on the village park. The walk took us through the usual kinds of fenland landscapes — lots of flat fields of wheat, paddocks full of horses, hedgerows and brambles under skies filled with low-hanging fluffy clouds. I'm not a beer drinker, so beer festivals in general aren't hugely interesting to me, but I love these kinds of village community events from a sociological perspective, and had a great time sitting out in the open air, listening to some rather dreadful local music acts, and people-watching.

Finally, we spent the middle of the day out at 'Aquafest,' a local fair thingy that involves various food and drink and tat stalls, fairground rides, and a race of homemade boats/rafts on the river. As we were walking home, I could see a group of four people struggling to stay afloat on their sinking craft, with one oar drifting away down the river, which probably gives you an accurate idea of the vibe of the whole thing. We ate soft tacos, wandered around for a bit, and then headed home.

I've been so busy this week that I don't have any new books to log here, which is strange for me, but I suppose if you take all the above into account it's not all that surprising.