Read and Appreciated in 2003
A Year’s Best List
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6. Play: Toby Swift’s 2003 radio production of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance by John Arden, (First performed in 1959; new production for BBC Radio 3 broadcast December 2003)
Another timely return to a long admired piece of work. This was a compelling new production (with stunning sound design) of Arden’s examination in prose, ballad and verse of the psychologically consuming nature of retributive violence. The action takes place in a North of England mining town in the late nineteenth century town, where a group of army deserters are planning to exact revenge for the death of a fellow soldier. As one of the characters observes at the end of the play, ‘You can’t cure the pox by further whoring’.
7. Album: The Wind, Warren Zevon
(Artemis, 2003)
An elegiac, bleakly humorous, sad and inspiring departure by the maestro of ‘rock noir’ who died in September. For those of us who’ve laughed, shuddered and raged with Zevon over the years it’s hard to hear the lyrics of the final track ‘Keep Me in Your Heart,’ without a lump in the throat. “There’s a train leaving nightly called ‘when all is said and done’, keep me in your heart for a while…”
8. Film (DVD re-release): The Wicker Man: The Director’s Cut, Directed by Robin Hardy, screenplay by Anthony Shaffer
(Studio Canal, 2002)
This year I finally caught up with the restored version of Hardy and Shaffer’s strange and brilliant film about a deeply unsettling collision of Christianity with paganism. It’s a flawed masterpiece. Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward give their finest performances and I can’t argue with the critics who have described it as the best British horror movie. The accompanying documentary, in which it is asserted that the original print was dumped in a hole that now lies below a motorway, is every bit as disturbing as the movie itself.
9. Non fiction book: The Age of Consent, George Monbiot
(Flamingo, 2003)
Quite simply the finest essays on how we live and how we could live for a very long time. Monbiot outlines globalisation and its discontents and mounts a passionate defence of democracy.
10. Exhibition: End of residency show, Chad McCail
(Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead UK, April 2003)
A comic strip narrative of zombies, robots and parasites presented at the Baltic gallery and on hoardings around Newcastle and Gateshead. Sex, repression and power. Have a gander:
Andrew Hedgecock is a freelance writer and researcher based in Nottinghamshire, England. His interviews, reviews and essays have appeared in The Third Alternative, The Spectator, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Time Out City Guides, The Edge, The Zone, the French magazine Yellow Submarine and the Fantastic Metropolis sampler, Breaking Windows. His work can also be found online at The Alien Online, The Zone and here at Fantastic Metropolis. Andrew lives and works on the edge of what’s left of Sherwood Forest, halfway between two imposing synthetic hills–one an iron age barrow, the other a re-landscaped colliery tip.
Copyright © 2003 by Andrew Hedgecock.
