A bit of colour for a change

Another day of enforced inactivity...or weak willed surrender - take your pick. I thought some colour might make a change from the recent diet of monochrome hot and sleepy animals.

Catie's out at the weekend long celebrations of the eighteenth birthday of her best friend (and my goddaughter....although I'm a decidedly ungodly Godfather). In her absence I am seeking mental escape from my mind screaming imprisonment in my crowded and neglected home via the first season of the recent drama series on The Borgias. I missed all three series, partly because of the poor reviews it got over here and partly because The Borgias and Rennaissance Italy have a bad track record when it comes to TV drama: it all tends to degenerate into ridiculous false accents and comic book Borgia villains! I've got to say though I'm enjoying it - it looks gorgeous with colours worthy of Titian and lighting worthy of Caravaggio, both artists decidedly out of period but hey! they use Elizabethan and eighteenth century English music in the soundtrack so Titian and Caravaggio aren't much of a stretch! Jeremy Irons is for once not wasted as he has so often been on lack lustre projects and plays Alexander VI with a lot more nuance than the bloated, slavering, incestuous, gluttonous lecher that he's usually written off as and Cesare - I've always liked Cesare - is similarly more three dimensional than he's usually drawn. Dramatic distortions of history aplenty but fair enough - it's drama not documentary. Grated a bit when Machiavelli turned up as Lorenzo the Magnificent's right hand man (face palm!) but I magnanimously forgive them. A slight personal conflict of sympathies over them casting an actor I really like (Stephen Berkoff) as a man I really despise - Savonarola....but I just thought very hard about him convincing Botticelli to feed all those wonderful paintings into the Bonfire of the Vanities and I found I was still perfectly capable of being very annoyed by him. The critics rated the later series as better so every chance of a few more days spent in my beloved fifteenth century.....I do hope we see much more of the Medici's, I've been a fan since I was a teenager, particularly of Lorenzo, my kind of despot.