the indisputable lure of the idiot lantern

Tuesday was a great night for music TV with the one-and-a-half-hour live final of "Maestro" followed by the unveiling of this year's Mercury Music Prize winner.

I'm quite happy for Elbow to carry off this year's Mercury. Although I've only heard radio plays of tracks from "Seldom Seen Kid", general opinions I've heard this week, notably from Messrs Radcliffe and Maconie, claim that over the course of seven years and four albums Elbow have paid their musical dues and are now a band "whose time has come". I also agree with them that it's been a very open field this year, although I don't think there was a realistic chance that the Portico Quartet, as token jazz nomination, would win. No doubt they will benefit from a massive sales boost though as a result of being shortlisted, so it's all good...

It all does mean (sigh) that my Amazon shopping list grows ever longer with the addition of Elbow, Burial, British Sea Power, Laura Marling and possibly Estelle. I'd already bought the Radiohead, Last Shadow Puppets and Rachel Unthank and the Winterset (particularly pleased for them), so hoorah for me...

As for Maestro, well I don't know, is it more than a kind of "X-Factor" for the (cringe) "chattering classes"? It's been compulsive viewing anyway--who wasn't rooting for Goldie, who didn't find Jane Asher really annoying...

Genial chief judge Sir Roger Norrington hopes that the series will rekindle interest in classical music. It seems to be working on me. Recordings in the paltry "classical" category are consigned to the almost-completely-inaccesible bottom shelf of my CD rack and it's been years since I went to a classical concert. Blow me though if this afternoon I didn't get myself down to Balham Library, borrow Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" and Vaughan Williams's Sea Symphony, spend half an hour scanning South Bank Centre leaflets for the next two months and pencil in a couple of concerts by the Philharmonia Orchestra.

We'll see if it lasts...