Today I followed a link and found this story on the BBC website. It’s entitled “Shakespeare’s first theatre found”, and refers to the discovery of the remains of the confusingly-named Theatre, the first theatre in which Shakespeare acted and his plays were performed.
That seemed vaguely familiar to me. Scanning the article, I spotted another headline in the ‘See Also’ section of the sidebar:
That article, from last August, is called “The Bard’s ‘first theatre’ found”. That’s actually when the discovery was announced by a team from the Museum of London. You can read the original Museum of London press release, and today’s subsequent one that spawned the confusing headline. Maybe the BBC needs some kind of “check for duplicate heading” functionality in their content management system?
To make matters worse, the Daily Mail used the headline “Remains of Shakespeare’s first Globe Theatre unearthed in East London”. This is technically accurate, but deeply misleading. In 1599, the Globe Theatre was built with timber from the aforementioned Theatre. The Mail used that headline despite the discovery having been made six months ago, and the Theatre only being tangentially related to the Globe.
And, since I’m being all nitpicky, why does London Museum’s Taryn Nixon refer to The Theatre as “probably the second theatre ever built”? in the video associated with today’s article? What about all those Greek and Roman theatres? Maybe she means “the second theatre ever built in London”?
From a theatre history perspective, this is a really important find. It is, for example, almost certainly where “Romeo and Juliet” was first performed. Appropriately, the Tower Theatre Company plans to build a new theatre on the site.
Via Neatorama, I recently learned about QI (which stands for ‘quite interesting’). It’s a quiz show that combines all the best things about British television: the BBC, bracing intellectualism and Stephen Fry. Here’s the first ten minutes of the very first episode, from way back in 2003:
Recurring guest Alan Davies, in particular, is enormously funny. We don’t really have the ‘comedy quiz show’ in North America, but it seemed to be a staple of British TV when I lived in Ireland. The basic formula involves getting four or five smart, funny men together on a goofy sound stage and letting them make jokes at each other.
After the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, there was a sense of unfinished business in the region.
On the eve of war, Arab civilians believed propaganda broadcasts from Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s Egypt promising an easy victory over Israel; for Israeli citizens there was the feeling of anticipation of terrible defeat.
But the Israeli capability was underestimated - and Arab generals thought so too.
I’ve only listened to the first two parts, but it does a fantastic job of blending historical recordings with new interviews with those decision-makers and innocent bystanders who are still around. I’ve only ever had the vaguest grasp of Middle Eastern politics and history, and it’s a longterm project improve. This series has certainly helped in that regard.
The BBC produces so many odd, original shows. Many North American shows beg, borrow and steal from the Beeb. Here’s a new series that, judging from the ad I just saw, looks fairly amusing:
The villagers of Harby in Nottinghamshire are about to experience an altogether different way of life when their village takes part in an ambitious observational documentary series by the BBC looking at how an English village community copes when the women are taken away for one week.
The Week The Women Went is a week long experiment, commissioned by BBC THREE, to enable the men of Harby to take a fresh look at the roles they play at home and in the community and for viewers to see how a community of men rise to the challenge of filling all the roles in village life.
Heh. I wrote that first paragraph without knowing that, as it turns out, the CBC is producing its own version. The town they’re using even sounds similar–Hardisty, Alberta. They’ve got a blog about the project on Blogspot.
