Essential media about the arts

… and one delicious delight. I wanted to like last week’s Imagine: Alan Ayckbourn – Greetings from Scarborough. I really did. Contemporary theatre gets few enough full-length documentaries devoted to it, and Sir Alan Ayckbourn (the link is to his excellent website) is one of our greatest writers. But as I watched Jenny Macleod’s film for BBC Scotland (which remains available on BBC iPlayer until 27 December) I could feel myself becoming more and more frustrated – to the extent that I decided that rather than writing a conventional review, I would simply itemise my irritations. Nor would I neglect to celebrate the programme’s moment of wonder – but for that, along with the irritations, see below.

1. First off, there is the loose and slightly lazy filmmaking – endless shots of the seaside at Scarborough, where until recently Ayckbourn ran the Stephen Joseph Theatre, and not too much else apart from a charming but well-rehearsed interview with the man himself in which oft-told anecdotes are set up with the softest questions.

2. There’s also the largely redundant chorus of thesps – Penelope Keith, Michael Gambon, Richard Briers, Tom Courtenay even – who have little to contribute beyond how absolutely marvellous it was to appear in an Ayckbourn play decades ago. Yet there’s not a single interview with a critic (not even with the estimable Michael Billington, who knows the playwright’s work better than most), or with a historian or a theatre scholar who might be able to provide some slightly more rigorous sense of the context for Ayckbourn’s singular achievement, or to explore the themes of his plays, or to analyse how his writing works, or…

3. Speaking of which, in the film both Catherine Tate and Alain Resnais (of whom more below) compare Ayckbourn to Chekhov – and yet there is no attempt to interrogate this claim, to ask what it might mean and to try to understand its implications. I know this is a primetime programme on BBC One, so I’m not looking for the critical subtleties of a Stanislavsky, but even so… Why do the ideas of the film not progress past the rebuttal of the straw man idea that because Ayckbourn is popular he can’t really be any good? Oh, and his characters and themes are universal and they can even make sense of him – fancy that – in Brazil. More generally, why is it that film and the visual arts consistently receive more informed and thoughtful treatment on television than the theatre?

4. The extracts from the plays are a particularly raggedy bunch: brief extracts from television studio productions of the 1980s, rehearsal footage, audio recordings played over stills. I hardly felt that I saw or heard any extended chunks of Ayckbourn’s language, and while the paucity of available archive is hardly the fault of the filmmakers, it does seem to indicate that British television has been distressingly parsimonious in its dealings with one of the major writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

5. This one may seem absurd, but nearly halfway into the film I was really bugged by the caption ‘From the Archive 1976′. What on earth is the point of such an opaque acknowledgement? What archive? From which programme do these evocative clips come? What was their original context? How might we situate ourselves in relation to them? A series title and source would have helped immensely, and would have saved me having to to scour the BBC archive programme index at BBC Motion Gallery (you need to register, but it’s free) to discover that the evocative sequence is from Arena Theatre: Just Between Ourselves, broadcast by BBC2 on 4 February 1976. (For those who care about these things, the original film was directed by David Buckton.)

6. We have been here before, but let’s also note the lack of respect for the original programmes’ frame ratios. Much of the archive material was filmed or recorded as 4:3 images, but here they are cropped top and bottom to fill a 16:9 frame. Such thoughtlessness demonstrates a profound disrespect for historical source material.

7. The mis-use of television archive is then compounded by part of a French feature film trailer which is presented in its correct widescreen ratio. (The film is the glorious Coeurs, or Private Fears in Public Places (2006) – not that Imagine tells you – directed by Alain Resnais from a 2002 Ayckbourn play.) The trailer is shown appropriately letter-boxed with black above and below the image. Is this because the lawyer who licenced the clip insisted that it be shown like this, demonstrating her understanding of the cultural as well as the economic value of the footage in her care? Or is it because the filmmakers believe, consciously or not, that film has a greater cultural value than television – and therefore deserves to be treated with more respect?

8. Why did presenter Alan Yentob have to resort to the cheap shot of reading out a substantial chunk of Ayckbourn’s eulogy to his mother that the playwright spoke at her funeral? As far as I could see, this was included primarily to prompt Ayckbourn to tears, as indeed it (almost) did, but the trick felt unnecessary and inappropriate.

9. Finally, let’s give voice to the frustration that no Ayckbourn play makes it anywhere near the small screen these days. The last one to appear was The Revengers’ Comedies in 1999, but since then the playwright’s work has been treated with the disdain that television consistently demonstrates towards theatre plays. I wonder how future generations will judge television drama today for the neglect of a writer who, as we’ve seen, many speak of as comparable to Chekhov.

And the delicious delight? The eccentric ‘interview’ with veteran film director Alain Resnais, of course, who is a devoted admirer – as is his wife Sabine Azéma – of Ayckbourn. Alan Yentob goes to Paris to speak to them both, but Resnais refuses to appear on camera, and so Yentob sits in front of the camera (above) and listens to the director who is off-screen. Such was their love of Ayckbourn’s writing that Resnais and Azema went to Scarborough every year for a decade before even speaking with the writer. When they did so, they asked him and his wife to be witnesses at their 1998 wedding – in Scarborough. The unconventional interview, coupled with the couple’s joy as they speak about the writer, is rather wondrous – and worth all the irritations of the programme several times over.