Cheddar Gorge

09. September 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Travel

I went to Cheddar Gorge at the weekend on the way back from deepest, cideriest Somerset. Saw the brown signage away from the M5 and thought, hey why not! I didn’t have any major expectations, having not been there before, but I was hopeful of finding a huge fissure, carved into cheesy yellow crags with rivulets of Worcestershire sauce running down the walls.

Cheddargorge

So it turns out the gorge is made of rocks and mud and plants and goats and suchlike. Even more distressingly it’s filled with a road and the endless car parks at that road’s edge. Still, seeing as I needed somewhere to park, I can hardly complain. Having done so myself and the missus wandered on foot up the gorge, to find the touristy spectacles that did await. But after seeing nothing but more car parking we turned round and headed down instead. We found the old and more than slightly cheesy village of Cheddar, with its grotty mix of olde worlde cheese shoppes and nasty 60s concrete cave / museum entrances. We paid £15 for an Explorer ticket that enables us to do everything there is to do in Cheddar and its gorge at any time over the next ten years! We only managed Gough’s Cave and the tour bus since we were pushed for time, but they represented acceptable value for money.

Gough’s cave is the bigger of the two cavey attractions, and it slags off Cox’s Cave as being relatively unimpressive so we didn’t bother with that one. It took us an hour or so to go through the quite extensive network of passages and chambers, with large orange audio-guide handsets clamped to our ears for the well pitched talky tour. Staff were helpful too and even turned all the lights off in one of the chambers for our amusement and edification. You’ll have to go in there yourself to find what wonders await, but here’s just a single picture to whet your appetite.

Goughcave

The tour bus took some finding as the map on the leaflet is near useless and simply says “by the lake”. Turns out that means the bottom-most of at least three lakes strung through the village. Once aboard and up to the top deck it’s a quick 15 minute ride back up the gorge (past our parked car) with a decent guide on board explaining everything and pointing out all the stuff I’d missed in my earlier foray.

It’s not exactly the Grand Canyon but overall it’s a nice day out. We went on a Monday so it wasn’t very busy. It’s probably hellish when it’s swarming.

Common Sense Consultancy

09. September 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Design

Every day I notice examples of infuriatingly bad design, often in places where it simply boggles the mind. Cash machines for example. Around for decades now and used by millions of people every day you’d think they would have evolved into the ultimate example of efficient usability. Yet many of them seem to have been created and installed without even the slightest common sense being brought into the equation.

As a person of about average height, when I stand in front of a cash machine I am convinced of man’s inhumanity to man as all I can see is the brickwork in front of my face. I contort myself into an undignified squat with my arse sticking out, in order to be able to see the machine. This makes it that much harder to conceal my actions with my body. Even in this position, the angle and deep inset of the screen is such that the buttons along the edge are visually misaligned so that they appear to match up with the option below the one I intend. Some banks solve this parallax error with lines running from the buttons to the plane of the screen. Hooray for them! They’ve probably got a patent on this bit of common sense to prevent the rest of the world from benefiting. Boo to them!

I appreciate that short and disabled people must be accommodated, but I struggle to believe that there’s no decent solution that doesn’t wreck the experience for the other 90%. Do those responsible possess enough awareness of the world around them to realise their folly once they have committed it? Presumably not otherwise they’d fix it the next time and we’d have had decent cash machines since about 1975. So, I offer my services as a “common sense consultant”, ready to look on any problem with eyes wide open and a big dollop of common sense and competency. And thus will the world become a nicer place and I will become rich. But alas, I may have to consider that Plan B.

Theatre Review: Fat Pig

08. September 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Culture

I went to see Fat Pig at The Trafalgar Studios a week ago. Fat Pig is a comedy play by Neil LaBute, starring (when I saw it) Kris Marshall, Robert Webb, Joanna Page and Ella Smith. In fact that’s the entire cast, so they must each be doing OK out of the rather exorbitant ticket price! I understand the run’s been extended but a couple of new cast members will be in place soonish, including Kelly Brook.

The venue’s quite neat, though if you’re at the front you may feel uncomfortably close to the action: being a ‘studio’ there’s no raised stage. If you’re at the back you may struggle with vertigo: the seating comprises a single very steeply raked tier. The cast do their thing, generally two at a time, on the two sided revolving set, which is neatly employed though not nearly as clever as I’ve become used to on the London stage. Maybe a bit more effort could have been put into creative use of lighting to jazz up the set and establish mood more effectively.

It took me a minute to confirm it to myself, but it soon became apparent that the entire cast were putting on American accents. Indeed the whole thing is apparently set in some US metropolis or other – presumably New York or LA. But it could quite easily have been UKified with no loss of plot or character cohesion, and that would have removed the nagging distraction that bugged me throughout. It’s a shame that this is what I remember most about the play!

The other things that stick most boldly in the mind are a mix of good and bad. The cast are very good, though I’d stop short of saying excellent. Kris Marshall gets the most comicly promising character and fills it out flamboyantly, as does Joanna Page in the other ‘support’ role. There are a fair few laughs to be had, but not as many or as deep as the flyers would have you believe. The two main protagonists are lumbered with carrying the plot however, and seem to spend most of their time delivering endless small talk and lovers’ ramblings – which would be fine if it was full of sparkling comedy dialogue. But it wasn’t. The end was particularly disappointing, as the play simply runs out of steam after another tortuously long heart to heart devoid of laughs. The audience weren’t even sure whether it had ended or not.

It’s easy to pick fault, and I’ll freely admit I’ve not seen much non-musical theatre recently. Maybe I’ve been spoiled with the cavalcade of hilarity and slick production that was Spamalot and Avenue Q. Maybe I’m a philistine. Maybe Fat Pig was just so so and only managing to elevate itself by virtue of a good cast and some decent marketing. I’ll give it one thing – it tickled my brain buds and left me thinking about it even a week later.

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