Hollow Birthday Presentation

Yesterday's Concert for Diana may have been a rockin' day 'o music, but you'd never have known that if you watched the condensed version of it last night on NBC. The hour culled from the concert was really poorly put together, I thought. It was a model of how NOT to present live music on TV. The hour was whatever the opposite of intimate is -- distant, cold, strange.

The camerawork made Wembley Stadium feel hollow and only emphasized the fact that the show was not sold out. The cameras kept cutting away from the stage to sweep across the audience, which looked sort of underwhelmed. The seats seemed oddly far apart from one another, which was particularly clear when the camera panned the princes, who seemed stiff even when they were swaying to songs. And then the stage came off as far too big, as if none of the performers could really fill it with their presence or their music. Elton John, Rod Stewart, Nelly Furtado, and Joss Stone and Tom Jones together -- none of them quite registered.

Grumble, grumble.

P.S. The worst sin? Denying us a clip of Tom Jones singing a cover of the Arctic Monkeys' "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor."