With frustrating, if commendable, purity, the singers are not miked, and it takes a strong voice to reach the highest of the al fresco tiers.
The medical profession was reluctant for many years to acknowledge a condition oncologists now call, with inelegant if commendable candour, "chemo brain" – and like every other side-effect, it does not afflict everyone.
But what price Mr George if his commendable anti-inflationary zeal should tip the economy into recession?
But his professed desire for further information is commendable, if he means it.
For a man who recently turned 43, such athletic commitment is commendable, if nothing else.
The fractured chronology would have been more commendable if he'd mastered basic pacing, plotting, lighting and editing first.
The lack of historical perspective is disappointing, but the program does make a commendable, if brief, effort to look beyond the well-publicized scandals it revisits.
On one hand, first lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign, which targets the burgeoning phenomenon of childhood obesity in the US, is commendable, if ineffectual.
So far, much to Downing Street's relief, there has been a commendable (if surprising) reluctance to make a causal connection between Mr Blair's Iraq policy and the bombings.
Mr Justice Vos concluded: "It would be commendable if the outcome of this judgment were that the parties, even at this late stage, started to work collaboratively together to achieve the best possible planning permission, as they had envisaged they would under the terms of the SPA".
We do our best with all the commendable, if tricky, stuff of politics and economics, but what about style and culture even culture at its most popular?Who predicted (we did not) that "Mamma Mia!", with Hollywood stars badly singing Abba hits, would be a smash success this year at the box-office?
