I blogged on Friday about the dismal electronic images of Trevor Nunn's Macbeth, first seen on ITV in early 1979. Nunn's chamber production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, originally seen three years earlier at The Other Place, was produced in the studio by Thames Television. Thirty years on, the colour video images are distressingly poor, but almost everything else about the recording remains vividly strong. Ian McKellen and Judi Dench contribute definitive readings of the central couple, the supporting cast (Bob Peck, John Woodvine, Roger Rees) is vintage RSC, and the whole piece is visually distinctive and dramatically compelling. I have some quibbles, but overall this lives up to its exalted place in the pantheon of small screen Shakespeare.

Over on the Art of Faith II blog, we've posted the latest delightful despatch from John McCarthy, including the team's visit to the rock-carved temple at Kailasanthra (above). Here, as on other Sundays, I'm posting links to pieces that caught my eye this week, including the news of the death, at the age of 87, of Margaret Dale. She was a notable director and producer of dance programming at the BBC from 1954 to 1976 and one of the true pioneers of arts television (a 1963 interview with her is here). A former dancer, she brought the Bolshoi Ballet to television in 1956 and worked with Frederick Ashton, Kenneth Macmillan and many other choreographers. In the New York Times, Alastair Macaulay praises her 1960 screen version of Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardée, writing that it 'remains exemplary as ballet on camera. The takes are long and unobtrusive...'

In my odyssey through previous screen Macbeths (here, here and here) I have reached what many regard as the best version of the Scottish play produced for television, and perhaps even the best such Shakespeare. This is the Ian McKellen-Judi Dench staging, directed by Trevor Nunn for the RSC in 1976, which was recorded by Thames Television and first shown on ITV on 4 January 1979. I intend to blog a fuller review of it tomorrow [well, in fact, it was Monday], but here I want only to remark on how distressing is the technical quality of the recording -- and to pose the question of whether there are techniques for restoring it.