I've finally got around to watching this on the Red Button. I'd been looking forward to it, but it was so brutally edited that I'll now have to go and listen to the radio version, if it's still on. The camerawork even managed to miss the leapfrog at the climax of the morris dance. I thought Mark Radcliffe was truly rubbish as MC, he should leave the jokes to Mike Harding. With the exception of The Full English, and Martin Simpson & Richard Hawley, I was fairly underwhelmed by most of the live performances - even Bellowhead seemed a bit subdued. In particular I found Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer's version of "Willie of Winsbury" simply tedious. And what are Jarvis Cocker's credentials for presenting the lifetime achievement award to Martin Carthy? Nice to see Ciaran Algar and Greg Russell win the Horizon Award - when he was even younger than he is now Ciaran would sometimes come along to our local session with his dad, and it was obvious even then that he is prodigiously talented. I don't subscribe to the view that these awards are irrelevant. I went to the show in Salford and thoroughly enjoyed it (despite the notorious Don Mclean peformance), so perhaps the televised version didn't get across the atmosphere or quality of the performances. If so, it suggests the BBC isn't really interested enough to do a proper job of it.
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