Given that we are all going to be spending a lot of time at home over the next few weeks, we thought we would give you some options for entertaining yourselves and your children.

Let’s face it, we are in a terrible, unprecedented situation that is going to test us all. But we are more fortunate than most, having the wonderful garden to wander in and neighbours we know who we can talk to, while keeping a safe distance. And for the long hours we will all be spending inside, we have access to the internet, which seems to be holding up to the strain. It gives us an extraordinary amount of options, not least because many cultural institutions are giving free access to material that previously existed behind a paywall. We’ve listed below some ideas for content to entertain you and your family over the next few weeks. If people have other suggestions they would like us to let people know about, e-mail them to admin@crescentgarden.co.uk and we can add them to the list.

FILM AND TV

First, a really useful website, JustWatch, which can tell you, for any given film or TV series, which video-on-demand service has it.

Now, what to watch? For some suggestions try:

theatre/opera/classical

While the theatres and concert halls are closed, there are still options to see great performances on your connected TV or computer.

A subscription service called Digital Theatre offers recordings of recent theatre, opera and classical performances for a subscription fee of £9.99 per month.

The Guardian has a listing of stage performances that are being made available free online, some very fringe but also some from more mainstream theatres.

Many of the world’s great orchestras and opera companies are making available recordings of classic performances for free. These include the Royal Opera House, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna State Opera and the Berlin Philharmonic. This Guardian article lists them all.

Music

Obviously there are lots of streaming music services that you will almost all be using already. But what to listen to?

  • If you want to find great albums you might have missed from last year, this page has links to the ‘End of Year’ best of lists from pretty much all the music magazines and websites

  • For a wider view, a number of websites do lists by decade or of all time, including Pitchfork, the NME and Rolling Stone

    magazine

 A number of artists are live streaming intimate acoustic concerts for their fans. The Guardian and Rolling Stone give you their pick of the best of them.

Podcasts

There are a lot of good podcasts out there. Here are links to some suggestions from the Guardian and 13 true crime podcasts selected by Oprah Magazine. And below some other podcasts well worth your time, all available where you normally access your podcasts:

  • Revisionist History - Malcolm Gladwell's unique take on small and large events he believes have been misunderstood by history.

  • Serial - the one that started the whole podcast boom. The first series is the classic, but the other two are also well worth a listen.

  • Desert Island Discs - 50 years worth of Radio 4 interviews with fascinating people.

  • Slow Burn - in depth looks at the Watergate and Monica Lewinsky scandals.

  • Catch and Kill - Ronan Farrow tells the story of his Harvey Weinstein investigation.

  • Against the Rules - first podcast from brilliant business writer Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and the Big Short.

  • Stephen Fry's Great Leap Years - a gallop through the great inventions of man, in Fry's erudite and witty style.

  • Broken Record - Malcolm Gladwell and celebrated music producer Rick Rubin get fascinating interviews with music legends.

  •  Out to Lunch with Jay Rayner - the Observer's larger-than-life food critic takes celebs out to lunch and gets them to open up over the table.

We’ll be happy to add other suggestions residents would like to send to admin@crescentgarden.co.uk

Books and Audiobooks

There are lots of websites suggesting books to read while social distancing. Here are links to lists from The Guardian, The Telegraph and Cosmopolitan magazine.

Audible, the subscription audio-book platform, just made hundreds of titles available free for non-subscribers to listen to while social distancing. You can find out here what’s available and how you access them.

If anybody wants to start a book club to help neighbours interact during the social isolation period, let us know at admin@crescentgarden.co.uk and we’ll post contact details on this page.

art

  • The galleries are closed, but some of the world's greatest museums are doing free guided online tours of their collection. They include the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Prado, the Metropolitan in New York, the Hermitage, the National Gallery in Washington, the British Museum and the Vatican Museum.

  • Google Arts and Culture has a wealth of online tours, catalogues and videos made in collaboration with museums from around the globe. It also includes virtual tours of famous sites like Easter Island and Machu Pichu, which, while not exactly a substitute for your planned Easter holidays, will help ease the blow a little.

  • Culture Whisper also has links from which you can explore online the collections of the Tate, National Gallery and many other British galleries.

kids

Perhaps the biggest challenge of all - how to keep the kids entertained. Here are some suggestions:

cooking

You have to cook while socially distancing (unless your favourite restaurant has turned to delivering takeaways) so why not make an activity out of it. You could start by getting to know your cookbooks better through a great website called Eat Your Books that has indexed most of the world’s cookbooks. You subscribe (it costs $3.00 per month or $30 per year), search for and tick all the cookbooks you have, and then they are added to your 'Bookshelf'. It's worth adding some blog and newspaper supplements as well (e.g Guardian Cook) as that also gives you access to the thousands of recipes available online. Then enter a few ingredients you have available and it gives you a listing of recipes from your cookbooks and online that feature those ingredients. Genius

For those that can’t get out to the shops for fresh food the Guardian has posted 10 great recipes you can make using store-cupboard ingredients.

Jamie Oliver has done a fast turnaround TV show for Channel 4 called ‘Keep Cooking and Carry On’. It’s quick and easy recipes that are not only delicious but use easy to get ingredients, and are flexible enough to swap ingredients in and out depending on what’s available. You can find videos of all the recipes here.