callmemadam | Entries tagged with television

This morning, Amazon offered me AJP Taylor’s How Wars Begin for 99p. The two books in the set are transcripts of lectures he gave on television from 1977. You can watch some of these on YouTube, I found. A talking head, lecturing on history for half an hour with no autocue, props or film clips. Can you imagine this now? Of course not; far too élitist. This is depressing.

I was very disappointed yesterday evening to find that the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest which I’d recorded, had been mysteriously swapped for a modern version which I didn’t like, in spite of Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Judi Dench et al and deleted. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. First, I watched the annual Schönbrunn Palace summer evening concert from Vienna. Beautiful setting, stunning lighting, The Vienna Philharmonic and a programme of popular classical music. It was very enjoyable. That was followed by The Composer behind the Moustache, about the composer Sir Karl Jenkins.

If you think you don’t know Sir Karl, just listen to Adiemus and you’ll find that you do. Like me, you probably didn’t know what he looks like. He claims that when the cameras picked out his hirsute phizzog at the King’s coronation, a wild rumour began that he was Meghan Markle in disguise. The programme traced his career from early days singing in a Welsh chapel to acclaimed composer. He studied for a B.Mus. while at the same time playing in a jazz band, which raised some eyebrows. He continued with jazz, then joined the avant garde jazz/rock group Soft Machine, one of my husband’s favourite bands when he was a student. What? I had absolutely no idea of this. He wrote music for advertisements and film scores. His great success came with The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (2000), which has been performed all over the world. According to one commentator, the work died until the issue of the CD coincided with 9/11 and chimed with the way people were feeling. The Americans invited him over to conduct a performance for the tenth anniversary.

Rather wild and woolly-looking, modest, softly-spoken, he is still busy writing at eighty. This year, for the first time, music by him will be played at a Prom: Stravaganza, a saxophone concerto first performed by Jess Gillam last year. It was all rather humbling.

It’s taken me a while, because I resisted the temptation to binge but I’ve now watched all eleven episodes of Brideshead and ended it in tears, which is why I chose a picture (on LJ) of an older, grimmer Charles Ryder with Julia as an illustration, rather than one of the happier Oxford scenes. When this series was first shown, I looked forward to each episode (can you imagine that today?) and I still found there’s not a second’s boredom in it. It was made by Granada and I suppose that now only Netflix can afford such lavish productions.

The book is subtitled ‘The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder’ and hearing Jeremy Irons’ narration as Charles is one of the great pleasures of the series. All the characters are perfectly cast; I particularly like Simon Jones as Bridey. John Gielgud is perfect as Charles’ eccentric father (‘Johnny got the best part’ complained Olivier, who played Lord Marchmain). Nikcolas Grace is unforgettably OTT as rather tiresome Anthony Blanche and there as a delightful little cameo from Ronald Fraser. The production follows the story and dialogue of the book so closely that watching is almost as good as reading it.

There’s no point trying to summarise the book (it would take too long) and even less in trying to explain what I think Evelyn Waugh meant by it. In a later preface, he says that it should be seen as a memoir of the Second World War rather than of the twenties and thirties. Really, of course, it’s all about religion, which may be a problem for some readers, although the beauty of the prose should carry anyone along with it. I was young when I first read it (many reads since) and I thought then that Charles and Julia were mad to throw away their happiness because of Julia’s Catholic scruples. Now, I understand it better. What I will never understand, though, is the portrayal of Sebastian. Why a gilded youth should descend into hopeless alcoholism and then be regarded as a kind of saint, is beyond me. ‘You have to suffer to be holy’ says his loving sister Cordelia. If it were that simple, the world would be full of saints.

In spite of the apparent bleakness of the ending, the book and TV series have some very funny scenes.

After my understandably bad-tempered day yesterday, I was able to relax for a couple of hours in the evening touring Italy in the agreeable company of actor David Harewood. While revering Shakespeare, Harewood had always thought of Dickens as ‘an author I wouldn’t like’, until a copy of Pictures of Italy ‘landed on my desk’. (How did that happen? one wonders rather cynically.) People think of Dickens as forever tramping the mean streets of London at night or playing the country gentleman at Gad’s Hill but he spent a surprising amount of time abroad. His visit to Italy took place in 1844, between the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son. This was before the Risorgimento, when Italy was still divided into separate states and kingdoms. Dickens had met Mazzini, in exile in London, and was all in favour of unification and modernisation.
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Yesterday evening, I watched the start of a new series, Julius Caesar: the Making of a Dictator. Like most documentaries of this type, it took an hour to tell you what you could read in ten minutes. And oh dear, it was done in the same style as the Shakespeare series I disparaged recently. The three main protagonists, Julius Caesar, Cato and Pompey were speechless and spent a lot of time looking enigmatic or glaring at nothing (the baleful influence of Mark Rylance again?) These scenes, plus many shots of menacing-looking flocks of birds, were intercut with a lot of chat from talking heads including St Rory Stewart, who is to my mind behaving oddly these days. All praise then to Mary Beard, who can carry an hour’s programme entirely alone and tell you a lot about Julius Caesar without a crowd of people looking ridiculous in togas. It takes a lot of skill to wear a toga, a wig or indeed a top hat as if you’ve been wearing one all your life and few actors possess it.

I always watch Between the Covers in the hope of hearing about a book I might like to read and sometimes, I do. Yesterday’s episode must have been the worst of the series so far. What on earth is the point of having on a book programme a man who confesses to never reading a book? The star was absolutely Ahir Shah. I enjoyed his intelligent comments but I doubt if he persuaded anyone to read his BYOB, which was Hobbes’ Leviathan. It doesn’t do to be too clever on television.

Weekends are a TV desert for me. I’m watching Magpie Murders because I’d read the book and wondered how Anthony Horowitz would translate such a complicated plot to the screen. I read it again and now watch it playing ‘spot the differences’. I also like to watch Antiques Roadshow but yesterday it was cancelled at short notice. The only reason I can think of for it is that the BBC really hates older viewers and cares nothing for their disappointment. All was not lost, as I found two absolute gems on BBC 4.

The Queen’s Realm: England is a little film first shown for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. We take a tour of England from the air: the green countryside, the coast, industry, holiday camps, cars on new (then) roads, canals and steam trains. It must have looked nostalgic then; even more so now. There’s music but no commentary, just a lot of poetry, chosen by John Betjeman. This turned into a great quiz for me: spot the poet! I actually started making a list, which I won’t bore you with except to say that it was a masterstroke to have the Flying Scotsman whizzing along to Faster than fairies, faster than witches …. I Think Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses is underrated and all children should read it because they will never forget the poems. RLS, Auden and T S Eliot in the same programme and all perfectly appropriate? Brilliant. Research afterwards failed to find a list of the poems used but I did discover that the film is on YouTube, fast becoming my favourite channel.

Later, I watched an absolute cracker: Norwegian violinist Bjarte Elke and his band Barroksoliniste playing seventeenth century British music in various candlelit venues. Traditional folk songs, drinking songs, sad laments, sea shanties and some lovely Purcell sung by a guest soprano. Brilliant musicians (several nationalities), subtle choreography and a lot of fun, including duelling fiddles. Do you ever wonder how you know The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies-O, Haul Away Joe and Leave Her Johnny, Leave Her?
I think I learned some at junior school, and slightly different versions; only to be expected with songs which have lasted centuries. They ended with Leave Her Johnny, singing it softly as they left the stage then, later, with their instruments all packed up and apparently bidding each other fond farewells, they played it again. This scene was intercut with atmospheric shots of a foggy old Thames, reminding you that it must have looked much the same in the past. I found I went to bed still singing, ‘what care I for a goose-feather bed’ to myself. Highly recommended, especially if you like folk music.

Has anyone else been watching this series of literary rambles on Sky Arts? Intelligent conversation about books with added pretty scenery: what’s not to like?

In the first series, the pair followed Boswell and Dr Johnson on their journey north and in the second, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The third series (just finished) is about the unlikely friendship between Alexander Pope, the disabled, Catholic poet and Jonathan Swift, the Irish Protestant. Both were radicals in their way, Tories at a time of Whig dominance of British politics. Pope first made his name with his satires, like The Rape of the Lock but what brought him wealth was his translation of the Iliad, which took him several years. Swift said he would have preferred it if Pope had spent the time on his own poetry and that someone else had then translated that. Pope spent his money on building his dream house at Twickenham, laying out a garden and making a grotto. Frank and Denise seemed to spend a lot of time on the Thames, gazing at the spot where Pope’s villa once stood. All that remains of it is the grotto, which they visited. I love grottos and have often been to the one at Stourhead, which includes an inscription by Pope. Our travellers had little to say about the garden, which became famous. Here’s Pope’s advice to gardeners:
Let not each beauty ev’rywhere be spied,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,
Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds.
Still sound advice today.

When Swift realised that there was no hope of a good job for him in England, he returned unwillingly to Ireland, describing it as ‘the land I hate’. He was Dean of St Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin from 1713 to 1745. We saw the cathedral, of course and the monument to him which I have also paid homage to. Strange that the man who ‘hated’ Ireland became such a fierce defender of Irish liberties against English encroachments. He and Pope met only once more but maintained a witty and affectionate correspondence.

I like these programmes for the chat, the readings and the obvious enthusiasm - love, even, which the presenters have for their subjects.

Congratulations if you managed to sit through the whole of the first episode of BBC 1’s total rewriting of Great Expectations without falling asleep or switching off. Apparently filmed entirely in the dark and featuring what felt like hours of close-ups of Pip’s face it was, surprisingly, boring. I waited until Miss Havisham appeared and switched off. I felt really depressed afterwards; just the Sunday evening’s entertainment you need after a gloomy wet day made even worse by the clocks changing. I’ve since read what is going to happen in future episodes. If you want to write a series about how terrible everything was in Victorian Britain with a subtext of how, even though the events took place nearly two hundred years ago, they’re all somehow our fault, by all means to do so. But don’t expect me to watch it and don’t call it Great Expectations.

I watched Wild Isles.

I’ve been watching Wonderland on Sky Arts (available on Freeview in the UK). There are four episodes, dealing with children’s literature before the Second World War. It seems to be repeated quite often, so if you missed it this time, you may catch it later.

It’s a pleasure to see children’s literature taken seriously and discussed intelligently. The main theme is that the ‘wonderlands’ which have become so well-loved often developed as a result of an unhappy childhood or tragedy which affected the authors. You may be as surprised as I was to hear ‘Streatfeild’ pronounced ‘Streetfeild’:-)

There’s a good review here and here’s a brief trailer.

Watch on YouTube

Yesterday evening I watched the very last of the BBC’s early sixties dramatisations of some of Simenon’s Maigret stories. At the end of the episode, Talking Pictures hoped I’d enjoyed the series. I certainly did! Obviously, production techniques have improved dramatically since those days but I found I didn’t miss fancy camera angles or the kind of zooming about which makes me feel giddy. One of the pleasures of watching was how obviously French it all was. For instance, a cop is running down a street and passes a parked row of half a dozen ancient 2CVs. Quite irrelevant to the story, just part of the background. Then there’s the social attitudes. Knock, knock, a visitor arrives. ‘Ah, Bonjour Monsieur. Drink?’ And at any time of day. I also enjoyed spotting actors playing small roles then but who later became famous: Paul Eddington, Arthur Lowe, Joan Sanderson just three of many.

The previous episode had been shocking because one of Maigret’s team was murdered on duty. You could see Maigret’s struggle: rage and distress making him long to catch the culprit and kill him with his bare hands, while he fought for the self-control to behave in a civilised way. He himself was shot in that episode, so in Maigret’s Little Joke he’s off work sick with his arm in a sling and poor Madame Maigret battling as usual to get him away on holiday with *no work*. Hah! As if being wounded is going to stop him.

My favourite character (after Maigret himself), Lucas, has been promoted to Inspector and is in charge of a murder case. Maigret wanders around, not apparently doing much but the ‘little joke’ is that he keeps sending Lucas anonymous cards with pertinent questions on, such as, ‘Why is Madame X lying?’ As usual, the plot is somewhat complicated but Lucas and his patron solve the mystery. I find it surprising that Ewen Solon, the actor playing Lucas, is not a familiar face outside this series. I looked him up and found that he was born in New Zealand and had a whole string of acting credits yet he’s hardly a household name.

Here, on YouTube, Barry Forshaw gives an excellent introduction to both Simenon and the Rupert Davies series, before the episode The White Hat is shown. I have only just watched this, after writing my little piece and find that I agree with everything Forshaw says and he says it better than I have.

Watch on YouTube

No Quiz Night because of rugby. I look forward to this all week. How they must hate their viewers.

The Waste Land was first published in 1922, so to mark the centenary, there’s a flurry of programmes about Eliot. Last week, BBC 2 showed a programme devoted entirely to The Waste Land. It wasn’t bad. The most surprising thing about it for me was to find how much of the poem I knew, although I haven’t read it that often.

Yesterday evening, on BBC 4, there was a repeat of a programme I’ve seen before: A N Wilson talking about Eliot’s life and work. He was trying to square the great poet (he considers The Waste Land the greatest poem of the twentieth century) with Eliot’s ‘abhorrent’ views. He failed in this attempt and confessed himself ‘baffled’. It’s good. Both these programmes used Eliot’s own recordings of his poems; an eerie voice from the past.

This was followed by possibly the most challenging and exhausting one-hour film I’ve ever seen. Apparently, when lockdown began, Ralph Fiennes set himself the task of learning The Four Quartets. Phew! He turned his recitation into a one-man stage performance and then this film (directed by his sister). To hold an audience with poetry for an hour non-stop and never a dull moment is an amazing achievement. (Weakly, I did get the occasional mental flash of Fiennes with no nose.) It must surely become compulsory viewing for anyone unlucky enough to be studying the poems. I say unlucky not because the poetry is bad (far from it) but because you could spend a lifetime studying the Quartets and still not get to the bottom of them. Luckily for me, I can accept mysteries. I felt tired afterwards so Fiennes must have been prostrated. When does he get a knighthood?

I’ve just heard that Robbie Coltrane has died; I always thought he was much younger than I am. I’m annoyed that on the BBC news website, he’s described as ‘Harry Potter actor Robbie Coltrane’, as if he’d never done anything else. Tutti Frutti, for instance. It was the same when Alec Guinness died; it was all about Star Wars and not all the wonderful films he’d made when he was younger. Or André Previn; musical genius and all the British press had to say was that he was once on the Morecambe and Wise show.
I hope Coltrane gets the obituaries he deserves tomorrow.

Yesterday evening, I watched the first ever (1960) episode of Maigret on Talking Pictures. When I was young I went to tea at a friend’s house. Watching Maigret was a family ritual for them and I watched the only episode I had ever seen until yesterday. It must have made a huge impression because when it was remade with Rowan Atkinson I thought, ‘not Rupert Davies, not black and white, not Maigret.’

I loved everything about it: the music, the cars, Rupert Davies, sex and drugs in Montmartre, the pipe, the hat and the classy titles at the end. And Rupert Davies. The film quality was very good for such an old TV programme and if Talking Pictures shows some more, I’ll probably be watching.

I found this excellent little programme on Sky Arts TV yesterday evening. It dealt mainly with the period after the death of Hardy’s first wife, Emma when, overcome with grief and remorse (he had treated her badly), he wrote some of his greatest poetry. The talk was serious, more like a radio programme with pictures than the usual TV talking heads and pointless visuals. There was a commentary over the rolling credits at the end which had me wondering who the writer was. It was Virginia Woolf. All the contributors had something interesting to say and I enjoyed it very much. I just wish I could convince more people that Hardy was not just a doom-monger and also that he was one of our greatest poets.

Beeny Cliff
I

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free –
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

II

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

III

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

IV

- Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

V

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is - elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.

Crossposts: https://callmemadam.livejournal.com/695717.html

Chatting to a friend on the phone last week and having our usual rant about the state of the world, she raved about the above film, one of two. I watched the first one yesterday on
the iPlayer and she was right. This is the most lucid account I have ever read or watched about the history of Afghanistan and its wars with great powers. The next one is about the doomed Russian invasion. The films were made in 2012. One point of interest is that public opinion in the nineteenth century was against the Afghan invasion (the Duke of Wellington opposed it) but the hawks, as Stewart calls them, had their way, with disastrous results. Five stars and I want to read Kim again.

When you look at Rory Stewart’s CV, you wonder how one man can have done so much before he’s fifty. Then you try to think of a single useful thing Boris Johnson has ever achieved.

Crossposts: https://callmemadam.livejournal.com/695393.html

Yesterday’s Trains that Changed the World was about underground trains and much better than the first programme. A lot of my irritation with the first effort was that I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know and kept thinking of interesting points they could have made but didn’t. Yesterday, I was charmed to learn that the patron saint of tunnellers (a very superstitious lot, apparently), is St Barbara. Unlike the Victorian navvies, the men building Crossrail use state of the art equipment, yet they have statues of St Barbara about. I’m all for saints and find this quite delightful.

Crossposts: https://callmemadam.livejournal.com/693571.html

I’m a great admirer of Ian Hislop and his unremitting moral outrage about wrong-doing in high places. I also enjoy his television programmes, which are quirky and original. That’s why I watched yesterday evening’s programme. I should have known better because it was not his usual BBC 4 slot but one of Channel 5’s many documentaries cobbled together from old film. ‘Presented by’ Ian Hislop is very different from ‘written by’. So, we saw the aforementioned and oft-seen before film clips, plus interviews with people you see all the time on programmes about railways or Britain’s industrial archaeology. We also saw Professor Kate Williams. Do they wheel her out to pretend that their programmes are in any way historical? She’s a remarkable woman. She must have a specialism (I believe it’s the Tudors?), yet there is no period of British history for which she cannot bring out some trite observation for television. Yesterday we had, ‘I wonder what the Victorians, travelling by train at thirty or forty miles an hour would have thought of the Japanese and Chinese travelling at 200 m.p.h. 100 years later?’ (Or words to that effect). Wow, that’s some historical insight! You really have to be a professor of history to think of something like that. Not.

Current Mood: disappointed
Crossposts: https://callmemadam.livejournal.com/693173.html

The entire England ODI squad has to self-isolate after some positive testing. A team put together in two days has two good WINS over Pakistan and it merits not a mention on the news. The England football team LOSE and it’s the only story.

My explanation is that cricket is not free-to-air on television.

Crossposts: https://callmemadam.livejournal.com/690827.html

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Life must be filled up

Entries tagged with television

Proof that we have dumbed down

TV watch: The Composer behind the Moustache

TV (DVD) Watch: Brideshead Revisited (1981)

TV Watch: Dickens in Italy, Sky Arts

TV watch: Julius Caesar and Between the Covers

TV watch: The Queen’s Realm and The Alehouse Sessions

TV watch: Skinner and Mina’s Literary Road Trip

TV watch: Great Expectations

TV watch: terror, murder, blood, horror

TV watch: Wonderland

TV Watch: the last Maigret

The BBC interferes with my biorhythm

T S Eliot on television

RIP Robbie Coltrane

TV watch: Maigret

TV Watch: Thomas Hardy: Fate, Exclusion and Tragedy

TV Watch: Afghanistan: The Great Game - A Personal View by Rory Stewart

TV watch: Sorry, Ian …

TV Watch: Ian Hislop’s Trains that changed the World

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