Ashley Cross

Just finished watching a documentary about Stonehenge, featuring a recent excavation whose team leaders think the stones were ‘a prehistoric Lourdes’. I disliked it on two points. First, BBC documentaries are in a dire state. Secondly, Stonehenge has not been well-served by the grand claims made for it on the scantiest evidence.

BBC documentaries have been flailing for years, popularising various topics in exactly the wrong way. They have an uncanny ability to dumb-down and talk-up. The venerable Horizon strand, which started a new series today with a documentary about those silent Wiltshire stones, has long since lost its authority.

The voice-of-god narrator announces some upcoming revelation only to disappoint: the announcement that the results of a chemical analysis are ‘unexpected and startling’ makes you sit up, until you quickly find that it only confirms the site is a few hundred years older than previously thought. Given that, as the documentary said, we have had to make educated guesses about the age of the circle, putting the supposed age back 300 years seems fairly underwhelming, as much as we may appreciate the new accuracy.

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I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on the UK iPhone since Steve Jobs’s keynote back in January. The announcement today couldn’t have come soon enough. Now the day is almost over, I have reflected a little on this ace new gadget.

Despite being a huge fan, I think Apple has made some fundamental mistakes with the iPhone and its entry in the UK. In fact, the whole thing has left a very nasty taste. The iPhone is almost perfect. Pity its positioning wasn’t so successful.

Here are the iPhone flaws and what Apple need to do for the next generation of the product.

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I’m amazed at the energy people put in to questioning the authorship of the plays we refer to as Shakespeare’s. Today, in an article on the front page of BBC news, a group called the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (which includes Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance) has whipped up some publicity for their concerns over whether the Stratford-born country boy Will Shakespeare could really have been responsible for the most prominent works of English literature.

Does anyone have the heart to tell them that the question of who authored the Shakespeare canon has been studied in great detail for many years? Or that, despite the healthy need for questioning everything to do with a document-deprived life story, the doubters always seem to be eccentric and willfully contrarian despite the facts and reasonable assumptions we have to hand?

It is one of the most hotly-contested arenas for the juxtaposing views of vocal firebrands and quiet scholars alike, at least since Francis Bacon (1561-1626), philosopher and viscount, was suggested as the real author in the 18th century.

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Watching the re-runs of ITV’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I have become mesmerised by Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s misanthropic detective. Originally made between 1984-1994, the Granada Television productions have impressive scripts, sets and casts. The attention to period detail and the specially-built Baker Street at Granada Studios, made this a classy and unprecedented production that seems faultless even in the age of digital retouching. It set a benchmark for all adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories as well as for television drama generally. The pinnacle of the production was the choice of actor to play Holmes. Jeremy Brett became definitive.

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