Broadband is back - and without any outside interference, just a replacement router as something had gone 'phut' inside mine.  Mutter, mutter.

Anyway, last night went with someone from church to her daughter's school perfomance of 'We Will Rock You.'  She then told me she wasn't sure it was suitable for a minister's ears, which was mildly amusing.  There was a fair deal of inuendo which was lapped up by the 16-18 year olds in the audience, went straight over the heads of the few little children there and seemed a tad puerile (which I cannot spell) to this forty-something minister.

I was struck by the story line, with its messiah figure and some not very veiled biblical parallels - 'the living rock' and the search by the killer queen (Herod meets Cruella Deville) for the star that heralded him.  I enjoyed the mis-pronunciation of 'video tape' as "vi-day-o tap" and the crackly version of the Bohemian Rhapsody video that merged into the "Big Brother" title sequence.  There was some clever stuff going on here that made me think.  Perhaps the most significant thing was when one of the characters said 'our hope lies in the past' - resonating with some of what I've been looking at and thinking about from a history perspective.

At one point the cast called upon the audience to raise their hands and 'wave' along with the music - my neighbour turned to me and said 'just like Hillsong'... at which point I switched to 'lightbulb changing' and said 'not quite' but she did have a point... what is the real difference?

It was a good perfomance - even if it made me feel old because I was younger than any of the performers when 'Bohenmian Rhpasody' was released - and would have made a really good starting point for talking about some real topics around freedom, the meaning of life, globalisation and so on, if only a few church folk were a little less wary of taint.