Worth staying in for.

I think I've largely given up on television recently. C-List celebs, tat from the attic, long evenings of snooker and darts, steely cops and lawyers, weird wired world oddballs.......and that's before we get to the fantastic and resistible über world of drama and soap. Same old, same old. Yawn.

So tonight's channel 4 documentary 'Making Space' - which followed sculptor Antony Gormley preparing work for a major exhibition- 'Blind Light' - at The Hayward Gallery was a great treat. We saw not only the making of the sculptures but also heard Gormley's reflections on the creative journey. It centres, as his work has done since the 1980s, on the human form and its relationship to the space around it, and in these new pieces, to appearance and disappearance - the 'fog' filled room where bodies drift in an out of view, the shape within preceived or glimpsed from without, the unexpected. Good stuff.

As Gormley prepared these works - casts of his own body to be encased in webs of steel - Sefton Council on Merseyside were preparing to remove his 'Another Place' installation from Crosby beach. Fortunately the planners granted permission for them to stay and they will remain locked 'twixt land and sea looking silently out towards the horizon. 100 identical cast iron figures provoking a multitude of questions, explanations and emotions. Powerful perhaps. Mysterious certainly.

I could have found them a home here had Sefton Council evicted them - our rolling field, sweeping down to the stream and the whispering conifers of Badnage Wood would be an excellent place for them to stand in enigmatic silence. But this is a landscape that answers back - ask 'Why?' or 'What does it mean' too loudly and the hills and trees will throw your question back to you. So we'll never know.........Echooooooooo.