Simon Egerton is a talented man. One of the most talented men I think I have met. He plays the piano/keyboards with a degree of technical skill matched with artistry and musicianship which is hard to find. He also sings beautifully and, a rare combination, is a more than competent actor. Just for good measure, much of the material he performs he has also written himself. Although I haven’t seen evidence of it myself he probably dances like Fred Astaire and bakes like Mary Berry too.

FAG ENDS and FAMILIES is a touching, but never sentimental, occasionally dark, but never overbearingly so, story of an ordinary life told through speech and song. It is nostalgic both in form and content, truly elegiac at times, and a lovely way to spend ninety minutes. At every turn you are nodding in recognition of shared human truths whilst revelling in the performer’s dexterity. It really is quite a feat. Think of the work of Noel Coward performed with the virtuosic skill that the Master himself didn’t quite possess and you are in the right territory.

Probably best to skip over this one. I thought the cast did a fine job trying to make a silk purse out of this one. The play had been cut down to a mere 70 minutes traffic of the stage. The result was something of a litany of names and activities about which we were told but the reality of which we never witnessed. It had a peculiar distancing effect. Good to go to the Brockley Jack Theatre for the first time though.

The difficulty in finding a reasonable image to accompany this review is illuminating. Many of the pictures are ridiculously romantic and technicoloured. Massive, silver, blue, purple and gold monsters leap impossibly high out of the sea and an impossibly old man looks on awed by the fish's magnificence.

I hadn't read the novel since my teenage years and my adolescent memory of the story was one of a deeply rich relationship between man and fish. I was chary of re-reading in case I found it to be the romantic hogwash and fakery that it is sometimes accused of being.

My early opinion survived the experience. Whilst not being as profound as I once thought it was I still enjoyed it very much and love its treatment of scale and its epic quality.

Whilst not the best of her plays, this one has plenty to recommend it. There is some beautifully astute stuff about the late 18th century society for whom and about whom she is writing. Some of the characterisations are glorious and the dialogue, as I have come to expect from Mrs Inchbald, is accurate, witty and very fast paced. She doesn't mince or waste her words at all.

What lets it down slightly is the play's plotting and dramatic structure. It promises much and then delivers slightly less than it promised. Almost inevitably the Establishment on whom she was dependent for patronage and success was not to be upset and so the play has a happy ending where one would really want it to press home its critical points. This is disappointing but I have found that in production there are ways to mitigate this deficiency and get to what was really concerning the writer. For anyone with enough money to do the play justice, it could be a valuable addition to the 18th century restored dramatic canon.

I thought I'd never manage to sit through another series without Troels. How wrong I've been. I thought that Karina, Plough and Buch [Danish solicitors firm maybe?] carried the political torch admirably whilst Lund, Strange and Brix beavered around the corpses and their hopelessly intricate and doomed-to-failure relationships with wonderfully understated angst. Copenhagen, in fact most of Denmark, looked suitably sombre. Afghanistan [I hope they actually went there] was suitably brown. Each episode's denouement was sufficiently cliff-hanging for us to keep watching ... so that was New Year's Day accounted for really! I worry for Lund - partners are a real problem. And now even her Mum's gone and got married. And what the significance was of her husband's nut allergy I'll never know. And why did Bilal ...? Perhaps someone might explain Bilal to me?