Easter Eggs

Not quite the Easter Karen and I were hoping for (though it started off well on Good Friday with an impromptu visit to Legoland Windsor - it was for the kids, honestly)...

Tom is ill. He came down with a horrible stomach virus yesterday morning and spent the entire day either asleep or crying with painful gut cramps. It's heartbreaking not being able to do anything for him except administer Calpol and cuddles as and when necessary. Karen managed to get an emergency appointment with a doctor at the local hospital yesterday evening and he confirmed it was just a virus - a particularly nasty one - but nothing to worry about. That's something at least.

We got Tom into bed as soon as we got home and he had a fitful night - hence Karen and I didn't get as much sleep as we would have liked either. He's better today but still very pale, tired and fractious but at least he's taking more of an interest in the world around him again - yesterday he didn't want to know anyone or anything. It was really very upsetting.

So the Easter eggs have been broken out belatedly this morning - Ben is happy at least as he's had a visit from not only the Easter bunny but also the tooth fairy as his first tooth fell out in the night. I'm tempted to tell him that the chocolate is making his teeth fall out and he'd be better off giving it to me but I don't think he'll fall for it somehow...

Hope the rest of you are having a lovely, stomach cramp free Easter with a full set of gnashers!

Passionate

I’m greatly impressed with the BBC’s new rendition of The Passion. It looks good – sumptuous, I guess, would be the right word – and the dialogue and acting is really superb. They’ve got the feel of it just right. No surprise to learn then that the production team involved are the same highly skilled souls who brought Rome to our TV screens last year.

The Passion is both a difficult and an easy story for a director to interpret. Easy because the story is so well known and emotive of itself that it already connects with a huge audience (even the irreligious among us must surely appreciate the beauty of the story’s message) and difficult exactly because of the same. The story is so well known it’s almost been done to death. It’s too familiar.

And yet to quote an old saying, the BBC and HBO have managed to inject new wine into an old wine skin and, as a consequence, have come up with a deeply satisfying beverage.

A top class cast, beautiful locations, fantastic costumes (the costume department of the BBC’s Robin Hood please take note) and a skilled writer have all produced what is one of the best adaptations of the Easter story that I’ve seen for a long time.

All the old traditional motifs are there. I’m happily ticking off each event as it occurs – the Easter story is so ingrained since my school days it’s like re-visiting an old friend – but the writers have bulked out these Biblical checkpoints with elements of easily understandable human frailty and manoeuvrings. There is an inevitability about it all – but it is the inevitability of real human weakness rather than the work of two-dimensional cartoon automatons lifted straight out of the sparse text of the Bible.

There’s talk of controversy afoot too – apparently the director has filmed Jesus being crucified in the foetal position stating that there is strong evidence that this is how the Roman’s did it. Personally I think such details are irrelevant but it’ll be interesting to see how it is handled.

It’s a shame that the director didn’t take a few more risks elsewhere though. As good as Joseph Mawle is in the role of Jesus he does nevertheless conform to that deeply trad and probably deeply inaccurate view of Christ as being white with western features and blue eyes. Even I can see that such a notion is (a) unlikely (b) possibly imperialistic and (c) offensive. But then maybe the same argument should be applied here as to the arrangement of the crucifixion? Nobody really knows what Christ looked like so does it matter? Doesn’t the significance of the message outweigh the minutiae of its details?

My only gripe is a small one. James Nesbitt. He’s a brilliant actor and I really like him... but I just can’t cope with his Irish accent coming out of the mouth of Pontius Pilate. It really jars. I’m just waiting for him to splutter, “Bejasus are you Jesus? Would yer be after coming down to the pub fer a pint?”

Not so much Pontius Pilate as Padraig Pilate... and as we all know, Guinness does not travel well.