Another day of sunshine, clouds and gusts of wind. With no sermon to prepare for Sunday, I had time to prepare texts for next Sunday's Eucharist after breakfast. Thanks to a tip off from Kath, I bought a tee shirt for Clare at the online Abba Voyage merchandise site. No idea how long it will take to turn up in the post. The only one she fancied had the logo 'Dancing Queen' emblazoned on the front according to Kath. I hope I picked the right size!
Then a long walk in the park before a late snack lunch, and got supper ready for cooking. While I waited for Clare's return, I watched another episode of Manayek. She enjoyed the concert, although she needed to wear ear-plugs and wear sunglasses to cope with the loudness of the music and intensity of the light show. A good reason why I wouldn't bother to attend that sort of spectacle. I often find cinema surround sound so uncomfortably loud that it detracts from my enjoyment of the movie. My hearing is still fairly good but I don't want it to worsen. I still have tinnitus in my right ear since we watched the 2001 Monaco Grand Prix motor race from a millionaire's high rooftop garden near the Casino. We were given ear plugs but one just wouldn't fit in my right ear, and it's never been the same since.
We ate supper while listening to the Archers. In a recent plot development a soirée has been arranged by a young character for a group reading of the book 'Lark Rise to Candleford' involving several villagers and this prompts the idea of repeating this at the up-coming Harvest supper. Over the past few weeks the BBC drama department has been promoting this performance as a stand alone Sunday afternoon play, just as it did with a village play based on the Canterbury Tales three years ago. It's an interesting project for the cast of the world's longest standing soap opera to take on.
After we'd eaten I finished the final two episodes of Manayek, a series of ten episodes, and was pretty impressed that considering six or eight episodes per series is the norm, it held my attention throughout. It was a police procedural of a very complex kind, featuring corruption at every level of the police force, judiciary and politicians. It involved investigations involving several separate departments - Local Policing, CID, International Crime, Anti-terrorism, State Security and the Prosecutor's Office, each with their own hierarchy, ambitions and betrayals, secrets to keep, and no mutual accountability. Corruption and serious crime exposed, and then covered up for fear that the whole system would lose credibility and collapse. Too big to fail, as the saying goes.
As in UK anti-corruption drama series 'Call of Duty' much was made of interviews and conversations with colleagues, but with relatively little violence or exciting chase sequences, and almost nothing to do with sex, which makes quite a change, or religion for that matter, and may reflect the Israeli market for which it was made. Interesting to see the diverse range of characters portraying police officers representing the plurality of the Israeli secular state.
It seems there's a second series, but as this has only recently popped up on Walter Presents, it may be some time before there's a second series follow-up. The only other Israeli series I've watched was 'Shtisel' some years back, about the life and loves of a Jerusalem Haredi extended family with inter-generational tension and social ambition in play, all very bourgeois in its way. Manayek portrays the dark underside of revered public institutions.
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