John Wyver writes: Tonight the Liszt Institute – the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London is screening Robert Vas’ film essay My Homeland. Made for BBC’s Omnibus strand in 1976, this draws on a century and more of Hungarian poetry, film, photography, music and graphics to weave a powerful, poetic and deeply personal response to the Soviet repression of the 1956 Revolution. (Above is framegrab illustrating also the film’s self-reflexivity.)
My Homeland is a film about memory and history and exile and landscape and resilience and friendship and hope and belonging and identity and the power of art — and apart from this showingit is almost impossible to see.
(The event is sold out, but there is a wait list; I been involved in organising the showing, and will be contributing to the post-screening discussion, as a last-minute replacement for Professor James Jordan.)
That My Homeland is not widely available to be celebrated and written about and taught is, simply and straightforwardly, a cultural scandal. Students of twentieth-century history and of film especially, but more generally all of us, are impoverished by the film’s inaccessibility.
But of course this is not just about Vas’ masterwork, or about the restrictions preventing exploration of this filmmaker’s extensive and immensely creative filmography. This is about all of us not being able to enjoy and to be enriched by so much of the drama and the documentary output and the features and the comedy and the performances and far more that has been produced for television since the early 1950s (which was when television recording began).
This situation makes me sad and it makes me angry, and I am desperately disappointed that, despite arguing and proselytising and campaigning for some fifty years for far more extensive access to the television archive, we can still see freely and without fuss so little of what has been produced with our licence fees and our exposure to advertising by the most consequential medium of our lives.
John Wyver writes: Ninety years ago today, the BBC’s high definition television service officially went on air from Alexandra Palace. There are celebrations there this afternoon and evening, and a number of articles and posts are marking the occasion, including the BBC Canvas presentation TV90 – From Trial to Transmission by Jamie Medhurst
John Wyver writes: Disconcertingly, Robert Vas’ powerful, poetic documentary essay My Homeland (1976) begins in silence. The silence of the censored and oppressed. The silence of the early morning before the tanks rolled into Budapest nearly 70 years ago. The silence of the grave.
Made for BBC Television’s Omnibus strand to mark the 20th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution and its brutal suppression by the Soviets, My Homeland is receiving an exceptionally rare screening for the 70th anniversary at London’s Liszt Institute , the Hungarian Cultural Centre on Trafalgar Square, next Tuesday, 3 November.
The film will be introduced by Dr Eleni Liarou (Birkbeck, University of London), and will be followed by a discussion with Eleni, Professor James Jordan (University of Southampton), Hungarian-born poet, writer and academic, György Gömöri and moderated by the Director of Liszt Institute London, Botond Zákonyi. Tickets are free and can be reserved here.
We are delighted to showcase as a guest post this richly interesting and and remarkably useful guide to the BBC drama series Centre Play by our friend and television scholar Billy Smart (who himself blogs here). Our thanks to him for permitting us to share more widely his reflections that were originally compiled for a group of friends and colleagues. We very much hope he will contribute other posts that draw on his extraordinarily extensive viewing and deep understanding of the history of television drama.
Billy Smart writes: In 1973 the long-running BBC2 Thirty-Minute Theatre (1965-73) strand bifurcated into two separate series. Second City Firsts (1973-78) plays were produced from BBC Birmingham at Pebble Mill, with a specific remit to create new writing and filmmaking from the regions. If you have a keen interest in old British television drama you will probably recognize the name and have seen one or two.
But the complementary Centre Play strand, which ran until 1977, has never achieved the same name recognition, despite its very distinctive opening credits design that looks like a rainbow going down a plughole. Amazingly, almost all of the surviving corpus can now be found online.
John Wyver writes: As yesterday’s post indicates I was very taken with the Towner Eastbourne’s exhibition Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism, which closes tomorrow, Sunday. Here are another ten images from the show which especially struck me, including, above, Cliff Rowe’s ‘Three women talking’, c 1950, from the collections (as are so many of the great loans) from the People’s History Museum, Manchester. Captions follow each of the selections below. Apologies for the reflections in some of my photos, and for the slightly wonky framing.
John Wyver writes: I was today ridiculously late in visiting the Towner Eastbourne’s revelatory Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism exhibition — it has been open since May and now you have only until Sunday to catch it. Which, needless to say, you should, in part because it features a host of fascinating and little-known artworks, as well as a wealth of associated contextual photos, diaries, catalogues, posters and the like, but also because it lays out an alternative history of mid-century British art to that accepted as the mainstream. And then there’s its telling of a hopeful and inspiring tale of engaged artists standing against fascism. So perhaps there is a lesson or two there for us.
Developed from Andy Friend’s exceptional book Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933-1943, published by Thames & Hudson last autumn in a gloriously illustrated edition, the show relates the story of the Artists’ International; Association (AIA), and highlights the work of eleven of its key members: Peggy Angus, Pearl Binder, James Boswell, James Fitton, Margaret Fitton, James Holland, Percy Horton, Peter Laszlo Peri, Betty Rea, Cliff Rowe and Nan Youngman.
John Wyver writes: My schedule is all over the place, disrupted by family issues and other commitments. But here is a collection of interesting articles and more that I might have contributed last Sunday, and which I hope will get me back to posting more regularly. My somewhat seasonal and socialist realist image is ‘Grain for the State’, 1953, by Viktor Karrus, seen recently in the collection of KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn.
• The moment of Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians: when jokes became lead pellets: marking the fiftieth anniversary of Griffiths’ great drama, Stephen Wagg contributes a short post on ‘ the decline of a shared national comedy culture, and the growing influence of comedians in shaping political and social conversations’.
• Nonpredictive texts: for LA Review of Books, Elizabeth Alsop is just terrific on perhaps my favourite TV show of the year so far, DTF St Louis, and other works by writer, director and showrunner Steven Conrad.
John Wyver writes: I have been away, on an excellent trip to Warsaw, Tallinn and Helsinki, and so have neglected the links for the past two Sundays. Here is a catch-up selection of stuff that has recently caught my eye, with the intention that I will return to a proper Sunday column next weekend; I may also add a handful of extra links here. The image above is from the fascinating Neon Museum in Warsaw, which I will discuss more in a future post.
• The 100 best TV shows of the 21st century: The New York Times [gift link] begins another of its mega-listing stunts, which will doubtless prove infuriating and invaluable in about equal measures.
• Not a civilisation, an organ: there’s so much to engage with and reflect on about AI at present, and this blog post about agentic swarms by the ever-excellent Bill Thompson should be near the top of your reading list.
John Wyver writes: To Coventry, to the city’s great and glorious cathedral, and most particularly to the exhibition 75: Towards a New Cathedral (until 21 September), mounted there in the Chapel of Christ the Servant (above). I visited with my friend and colleague Helen Wheatley, who was the consultant on my BBC Four documentary Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain (the link is to the film on Youtube, as here):
When Helen and I, along with our collaborators Todd MacDonald, who filmed and edited, and Ian Cross, who created the very special graphic design, were working on the film in 2021 , I was frustrated by how few traces I could find of the 200-plus entries to the 1950-51 competition to design a rebuilt cathedral after wartime bombing. Basil Spence, of course, won that competition, and now this compact and rich exhibition surfaces a number of those other plans. Helen and I found it fascinating.
