Sharpe

Sharpe. Sharpe is fucking class. I could give you a bunch of reasons why, culturally speaking, Sharpe is a thousand times greater than Swan Lake.... and I'm going to.

1) Harris, the singularly-monikered intellectual of the riflemen. Be sure, if there's ever a moment whereby Sharpe needs to tell someone to bugger off, be sure that Harris will piss him off by generally being a multi-lingual supergenius. Also, he looks like Ray Parlour's dad.
2) Dan Hagman, the Yorkshire-bred poacher with an eagle-eye and a good ear for a tune. In fact, he's so on the spot with the knees up I often wonder if he's been sent the advance copy of Bert Weedon's Play In A Day. Never plays Freebird though. Fucker.
3) And let's not go near Lieutenant Leprechaun.
4) The plot in every episode is exactly the same. Sharpe gets assigned to some stiff-nosed prick hot out of officer's school, always in a damn hurry to give the frogs a rodgering, thrashing, whatever. Inevitably they never take his advice, and he has to Jack Bauer it off to save the fucking day, again.
5) Brilliant revisionism; e.g. when "invent" hand grenades to defend some fort. In a later scene Harris beats Darwin to the punch with his improvised after-dinner speech on the origin of species.
6) Every fight scene ends with someone being kicked square in the balls.

Best programme with Ray Parlour's dad ever.

Portus Verdict: PPPPP

Swan Lake

I feel that it is first necessary to note that the nature of this review may be slightly affected by the previous night's events. It's a subtle alteration in tone, but worth mentioning.

Act 1 begins five minutes prior to the start of the performance and your narrator is in the Lyceum toilets trying and failing to make himself throw up. Someone decided that dry retching in the Lyceum toilets is a new cultural low, which is why Melvyn Bragg arrived to award me with a golden plaque and give me a three-part featurette on ITV4. After giving him a wedgie I left the Lyceum until the first interval, as they have some rule, guideline, whatever, whereby I can't stumble in half cut and holler stuff at the ushers. Political correctness GONE MAD.

Act 2 - I reckon that I can handle sitting in the Gods now, though this requires me to endure ULTIMATE VERTIGO, which would have been stomach turning enough were it not for the fact that all of the male cast wore extremely thin tights and nothing else. The limited denier of said garments meant in reality that my theatre experience involved looking at bare arse. For two hours. There wasn't even equal opportunity going on as NONE of the women wore peep-hole brassieres.

Act 3 - Look, the plot made no sense, the dancing was boring and the only enjoyment was to be had by watching the orchestra, who were, pretty good. Kudos to the cymbal bloke, he bashed those motherfuckers with the simple joy of a small child compressing two halves of a banana sandwich. Yes I was that child. Oh and the swan didn't die at the end, they changed it. They fucking Disneyfied the fuck out of it.

Portus verdict: PPPPP