Points: an application

Conceived to be released daily throughout the life of The Space, Points is a rigorously curated collection of 184 individual archival moments drawn from the BBC and ACE film archives. Lasting between 2 and 5 minutes, each Point is a fragment of imaginatively presented cultural experience – a poem, a movement of dance, s short section of music, a soliloquy, an engagement with a single painting. Each one is chosen both because of the beauty or surprise or challenge or delight of the art being presented and because this has been creatively interpreted and re-imagined for the screen.

Certain Points are released to coincide with related artistic events planned for 2012; others appear unconnected to the summer’s schedule. As a whole, Points offers an unparalleled sampling of the astonishing story of the arts in post-war Britain and reveals the immensely rich but all-too-often buried traditions of imagination and creativity from six decades of media made for the BBC and the Arts Council.

Examples of the thousands of possible Points include:

• the beautiful concluding sequence of John Read’s Barbara Hepworth (BBC, 1961), in which her sculptures are displayed on the St Ives beach accompanied only by music;

• Linton Kwesi Johnson performing a poem from Dread Beat’n’Blood (ACE, 1979), directed by Franco Rosso;

• a scene of The Fall (ACE, 1990), Darshan Singh Bhuller’s extraordinary film with Celeste Dandeker, a dancer with disabilities;

• part of James Scott’s experimental Richard Hamilton(ACE, 1969), which juxtaposes the artist’s work with its sources in American popular culture;

• the breathless, crazed montage that opens Ken Russell’s Isadora (BBC, 1966) with Vivian Pickles (above);

• Christopher Plummer performing ‘To be or not to be’ from Hamlet at Elsinore (BBC, 1964);

• a short scene from the BBC studio production of Michael Tippett’s controversial opera New Year (1991).

Each Point, which on screen carries only an introductory caption and a closing copyright line, is accompanied online by three essential complements:

• extensive metadata that facilitates searching as well as connections to be made across the collection;

• a detailed ‘catalogue’ description of the material and its creators, the context in which it was made and suggestions for why it might be seen as interesting;

• full details of all the rights associated with the clip, and what clearances have been necessary (including the itemisation of all specific costs and permissions) to allow each Point to be released into The Space – and ideally beyond to YouTube, blog embeds and more.

Although each individual Point is a complete experience, we hope that the distribution platform will support the emergence of numerous innovative forms – pathways, journeys, channels, user-curated selections, user commentaries – to associate, connect and enhance any number of Points.

Points offers a daily release that contributes to the overall narrative of The Space and helps structure its framework. The creative curatorial vision, the 184 individual elements and the associated online information, together comprise a new artistic work that engages with, interrogates and reinvigorates the archives of the BBC and ACE. Points offers immediate and engaging experience of a wonderful array of artistic achievement coupled with contextual knowledge that enhance these encounters and assists others to explore and re-imagine archival sources.

In terms of the other key objectives of The Space, Points contributes to wider digital development by (a) revealing the richness of archival sources, and (b) sharing extensive knowledge and experience about rights, including specific costs – which remains a ‘hidden’ aspects of all rights discussions.

Points also supports digital innovation in it use of archival elements, making a selection widely available as resources for mobile and other platforms. The use and take-up of the many disparate elements will also generate extensive data to inform evaluation of The Space and possible future archive-based applications and access strategies.

Update:

Arts Council England and the BBC have announced the successful applicants – details here. Clicking on the link below will take you to a .pdf of the full list.

Full list of successful applicants to The Space (.pdf)

This Don Carlos transferred to the West End from the Crucible in Sheffield for just twelve weeks. It was one of those shows that I really wanted to see, but failed to get to: a legendary but almost never performed play by Schiller, a much-praised new adaptation by Mike Poulton, Derek Jacobi in the central role, and a by-all-accounts finely textured production by Michael Grandage, 5-star reviews. All of which comes through in the NVAP’s three-camera recording that was made of a matinee performance at the Gielgud Theatre.

The screening offered a vivid sense of the production from seven years back – the strengths (and occasional weaknesses) of the performances, the brilliant setting and costumes (Christopher Oram), lightng (Paule Constable) and sound design and score (the ubiquitous but invariably brilliant Adam Cork). Yet I was also aware that 150 minutes (plus comfort break) was a long time to spend in an airless lecture theatre with an archival theatre recording.

To what extent was it an aesthetic experience watching this artless recording (which was also anonymous; there are no video credits on the tape or in the programme notes)? There were times when I was most definitely involved in the drama, drawn in to the sixteenth century world of the characters, caught up – as with the best of theatre (and television) – in a tale of love and intrigue and betrayal and power. But for much, perhaps all, of the time I was (also) aware that I was watching a trace of something else. Before me were strands of an exchange between performers and audience that I was over-hearing or watching at one remove, perhaps as if through a large and mobile keyhole.

Inevitably, especially with the recording thrown onto a big screen, there were moments when the performances, pitched for the Circle and not for the cameras, came across as ‘shout-y’, but this was less of a problem than one might have imagined. The theatre lighting, used without any changes for the recording, at times appeared exceptionally dark (and it was a very dark production) and at times has burned out highlights. But, again, even projected very large, this was not disruptive.

The camerawork and vision mixing were achieved and intelligent, and the pictures often looked exceptionally good. But the sound had a somewhat distant quality, lacking in the intimacy and immediacy we expect of film and television (and occasionally blighted by what I guess were tube trains running beneath the Gielgud). We were close when we needed to be, but refreshingly often on a wide shot to see the whole stage. Only very occasionally was there a mis-cue, a scrambled search for the camera shot, a moment when the focus was off. The pace of the cutting between shots was also most definitely slower than contemporary television – except, of course, that these days two and a half hours of Schiller, no matter how stupendous, would never get within spitting distance of the small screen. Television today cannot bear very much (or indeed any) theatricality.

A time there was when we just might have seen Don Carlos on our domestic sets, or at least when comparable plays from the classical repertoire were part of the mission of public service broadcasting. There was a time too when plays were broadcast live from the theatre – and indeed for many years taking three cameras into a house was an absolutely standard production technique. (Over on the blog for the Screen Plays research project, I have just been writing about three camera OBs from The Intimate Theatre in Palmers Green in the immediate post-war years, here and here.)

Watching a theatre relay thirty or forty years ago must have had something of the quality of what I felt in the V&A lecture theatre: a sense of privilege to be witnessing something rich and strange that would otherwise have been denied me, mixed with a frustration that this was not perhaps as thrilling as it might otherwise been, had I been in the theatre, or had the play been re-imagined more for the screen, or even had pigs taken flight.

None of which should be taken as suggesting that I have anything but the greatest admiration for the work of the NVAP – and for the nearly 300 recordings of theatre productions that the collection now preserves. There is a full list here of what the NVAP has recorded since 1992, when the deal was done with the Federation of Entertainment Unions to permit these tapings without payment of artists’ fees. E-mail tmenquiries@vam.ac.uk to find out how to arrange for research viewings of any of the titles (and also take a look at Annette Brausch’s September 2009 blog about going to the V&A’s outpost at Blythe House to watch one of the recordings.)

Future NVAP Sunday afternoon screenings at the V&A include:

26 February: Three Hours After Marriage (1717), written by John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot and directed by Richard Cottrell; recorded at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, September 1996.

4 March: The Alchemist (1610), written by Ben Jonson and directed by Nicholas Hytner, recorded in the Olivier auditorium at the National Theatre, November 2006.

11 March: A Christmas Carol (1843), written by Charles Dickens, adapted and directed by Mark Dornford-May, recorded at the Young Vic, January 2008.

18 March: Hedda Gabler (1890), written by Henrik Ibsen and directed by Richard Eyre, recorded at the Duke of York’s Theatre, July 2005. (This stars Eve Best and Benedict Cumberbatch – I’ll definitely be there for this one.)

25 March: Waiting for Godot (1948), written by Samuel Beckett and directed by Sean Mathias, recorded at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, June 2009.

Further details are available here. There will be another series of screenings in April and May.

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

One of the truly great coming togethers of theatre and television is the 1982 Primetime/Channel 4 adaptation of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dickens dramatisation. The day-long immersion in its world at the Aldwych thirty years ago remains one of defining theatrical experiences of my life (see here) – and a week on Saturday, 25 February, BFI Southbank offering a chance to re-live that in a way, with an all-day screening of the television version. There’s also a Q&A with co-directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, writer David Edgar and actor David Threlfall (and me as moderator). The event has been sold out for weeks (it’s in the modestly proportioned NFT3) but a few tickets are back on sale – and if you are quick you might snap one up here. If not, watch out for the blog that will follow.

Julius Caesar

We are making excellent progress towards our next television film with the BBC and the Royal Shakespeare Company. We have identified an amazing location and taken on our Director of Photography, and you can expect to see more blog posts about the production as we get closer to the start of filming on 23 April.

Five Truths

Back in August last year I wrote about Katie Mitchell’s fascinating installation (produced with the V&A and the National Theatre) about the ways in which key twentieth century theatre directors might stage (and film) the idea of Ophelia’s madness in Hamlet. Wonderfully, the films from the installation are now available as free downloads for the iPad; go here for details.

Screen Plays: the project, the blog and the conference

The academic research project Screen Plays which I am leading at the University of Westminster is going from strength to strength. Our blog has hosted some excellent posts in the past few weeks, including a fascinating discussion by Billy Smart of the 1959 BBC production of Ibsen’s Brand, with Patrick McGoohan in the title role, and an exploration of the National Theatre/Channel 4 adaptation in 1983 of The Oresteia by Amanda Wright. I have also just posted a couple of pieces about the BBC’s outside broadcasts from the Palmers Green rep house known as The Intimate Theatre in the immediate post-war years (here and here). The project also currently has an open call for proposals for a one-day conference in October, the details of which are here.

Don Carlos at the V&A

I blogged with enthusiasm early in January about the series of screenings organised at the V&A to mark the twentieth anniversary of the National Video Archive of Performance. On Sunday, 19 February, at 2.00 there is a free screening of the NVAP’s three-camera recording of Michael Grandage’s production of Schiller’s Don Carlos – to which I’m really looking forward; details here.

Leonardo’s London Blockbuster: The Movie

Before Christmas I blogged about the Sky Arts/Seventh Arts live-to-cinemas programme linked to the National Gallery’s exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter in the Court of Milan. Intriguingly and remarkably, Leonardo Live has now been screened in nearly 500 cinemas across the United States, as The New York Times details in this report. If it felt, as I wrote, ‘half-live’ when we were watching it ‘live’, goodness only knows how the programme came across three months after it was recorded.

Postcard from the battlefields

Prompted by my filming trip to some of the Great War cemeteries in Belgium and France, and by the visit to Thiepval (see here), I have been reading the terrific collection The Penguin Book of First World War Stories. Edited by Barbara Korte and Ann-Marie Einhaus, this is a richly varied read with surprising tales by, among others, Katherine Mansfield (a writer I need to know better), Rudyard Kipling, Hugh Walpole and Muriel Spark.

The volume concludes with a wonderful story by Julian Barnes, ‘Evermore’, originally published in The New Yorker in 1995. This tells of Miss Moss, a lexicographer who lost her brother in the war. and of her annual visits to the cemeteries and memorials of the Somme. It is a brilliant dissection of language, of loss and of memory. Miss Moss (the name is perfect) hates Sir Edwin Lutyens’ monument at Thiepval, but she recognises its importance:

Such an edifice assured the newest eye of the pre-existence of the profoundest emotions. Grief and awe lived here; they could be breathed, absorbed. And if so, then this child might in turn bring its child, and so on, from generation to generation, EVERMORE. Not just to count the missing, but to understand what those from whom they had gobe missing knew, and to feel her loss afresh.

… and finally, The Boss

Bruce Springsteen in a terrific piece for the Guardian by Fiachra Gibbons: ‘I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.’ Wrecking Ball is released on 5 March.

On the Menin Gate

At 8 o’clock under Ypres’ Menin Gate buglers play the Last Post, ‘the traditional final salute to the fallen’. The ceremony started in 1928 and, with only a break enforced by the German occupation of the town during the Second World War, it has been performed each evening ever since. On Thursday there were several hundred British schoolchildren there who were visiting the area and learning about the war. The simplicity and clarity of the occasion makes for a moving tribute.

Earlier we filmed the architecture of the imposing gate, which was completed in 1927 to designs by Reginald Blomfield. (Blomfield was also responsible for Lambeth Bridge and much of the bottom end of Regent Street by Piccadilly Circus.) The walls of the memorial carry the names of 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the fierce battles around Ypres and who had no known burial place. Yet even the many, many panels here were not enough for all of the missing, and another 34,984 are commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial.

Inevitably, as you look at the endless lists, arranged by regiment and rank, you wonder if there are family members recorded here. You search for your surname, but if you have one as eccentric as mine you really don’t expect to find it. Except that’s exactly what happened, just as I was thinking about such an unlikely event. There, beneath the heading of The Rifle Brigade, between “Wright J.” and Young F. J.”, is “Wyver B. W.”. Seeing this was entirely unexpected, and the moment was oddly unsettling.

My brother-in-law David has a deep interest in the First World War, and from him and my sister Sheila I learned the next day that Bertrand William Wyver was killed either on Messin Ridge or at Passchendaele in 1917. He was the son of William and Ellen Wyver from Rochester in Kent. Our family lived in Kent for many years (Sheila and I were born in Whitstable), and my Aunt Jean knew of the Rochester Wyvers. What none of us is sure about is how – or indeed whether – Bertrand William was related to us.

David’s research has discovered that only two Wyvers were killed in the Army in World War One. The other was George Wyver who we believe was related to our branch of the family. He was killed in the Battle of the Somme and is remembered on the war memorial outside the library in Whitstable. Apparently the brother of my grandmother on my mother’s side, Leonard Solomon, was also in the Rifle Brigade and was also killed. He is listed on Thiepval Memorial, of which more below.

Only since the visit to Ypres have I read Siegfried Sassoon’s bitter poem written in 1927-28, On passing the new Menin Gate. This concludes

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever,’ the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

Outside Ypres

Piet Chielens is the director of the In Flanders Fields museum in Ypres. Partly because the museum is undergoing a major revamp, we were able to spend the whole day filming with him – and learning from him. Should he ever need a day job he would make a wonderful tour guide. For me, the most fascinating place he took us to was Croonaert Chapel Cemetery, a corner of a foreign field that houses seventy-five Commonwealth graves.

The walled cemetery sits incongruously in the middle of a large expanse of ploughed land. But as you drive around Ypres – and this is also the case on the Somme – you quickly realise that the incongruous is the norm. For as Piet explained, the cemeteries are where the dead were buried beneath wooden crosses during the war. Only in the 1920s were these resting places (or those of them with forty or more bodies) transformed, with as little disturbance as possible, by the energies of the CWGC into the permanent sites of today. As a consequence they mark where troops fell or where there was a field station or temporary hospital. Once you start to look for them, you realise that they are everywhere around Ypres, constant reminders of the history of the land which in many important ways is largely unchanged nearly a century on.

The cemeteries of the Somme

The next day, after the snowstorm, we filmed in a number of cemeteries on the Somme battlefields. Again, once you begin to look for them, you realise that the cemeteries are everywhere, small and large, sometimes hidden away and sometimes strikingly prominent within a sweep of land.

Those under the care of the CWGC have standard size headstones for all and officers and men are buried alongside each other. They all seem immaculately cared for and while each one is permanently open to all visitors with no wardens keeping guard, there appear to be no problems with litter or with vandalism.

We went first to Faubourg-d’Amiens Cemetery in the suburbs of Arras, where there is also another major memorial commemorating close to 35,000 Commonwealth servicemen, as well as many Commonwealth burials and a small number of German soldiers. In one corner my colleague Louise found a short row of headstones for Hindu Indians soldiers, then some Muslims, and – on his own – a Sikh cavalryman. The morning was nippily cold (we were working in -8 degrees C at one point) but after the previous night’s snow the sky was a clear and brilliant blue, which made for perfect filming conditions.

On we drove to several other small Commonwealth sites, including Longueval Road where we found a single German grave surrounded by many British. Then we visited the German cemetery at Fricourt where the graves are marked not with a white headstone but with a metal cross, on each of which up to four soldiers may be remembered. Only, oddly, the Jewish German soldiers have individual stones. Despite the fine low sun raking the grass with shadows, this resting place felt less approachable and somehow a touch disturbing.

The monument to the missing

Our last location was the towering memorial at Thiepval which commemorates soldiers from Britain and South Africa who lost their lives on the Somme but who do not have a burial place. Here there is an almost inconceivable total of 72,191 names, many many of whom were killed on the single day of 1 July 1916. Nearly 60,000 British soldiers died on the front on that day alone.

Thiepval is a strange monster sitting alone as if somehow stranded in the Picardy countryside. The intimacy of small cemeteries contrasts oddly with the grandiosity of Lutyens’ overblown design – and on this trip it is the former that felt most appropriate to remembrance. But there is also something immensely intriguing about Thiepval, and in the visitor centre I bought Gavin Stamp’s 2006 book about its construction, The Memorial to the Missing on the Somme. So there may well be another post on all this to come.

The title link is to Geoff Dyer’s review for the Guardian, from which this comes:

The planning and construction of Lutyens’s masterpiece is placed in the context of fiercely contested debate, not only about how but about what was to be commemorated… Those who lobbied for Christian memorials considered his designs offensively pagan but the result might better be termed elemental. Taking the triumphal arch as his starting point, Lutyens turned this into a three-dimensional pyramid of arches. A fusion of classical and modern, the memorial seems both dense – there are enough walls for the names of the dead to be individually inscribed – and airy. What is not there – the tunnels formed by the arches, each framing a view of sky and English-looking foreign fields – plays as important a part as what is.

The cast [of A Bigger Splash], who are billed as such in the film’s opening credits, include – in addition to Hockney, Schlesinger and Clark – designer, model and Mrs Clark, Celia Birtwell; art dealer John Kasmin, whose legendary New Bond Street gallery closes at the conclusion of the film; curator and critic Henry Geldzahler; Hockney’s loyal and lonely assistant Mo McDermott; and a number of beautiful boys known to the title sequence only by their Christian names. Jack Hazan, working as both director and director of photography, filmed these and others on and off across three years from 1971 to 1973.

To hear Hockney tell it, he drifted into the film with no sense of what it would eventually become. At first, he rebuffed Hazan’s approaches, but the director was persistent and he turned up for the first shoot with a small camera, modest lights and only two assistants. ‘Well, this will be slightly out of focus,’ Hockney thought, as he later recalled to Christopher Simon Sykes, ‘and it will play one or two nights at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street with the Polish version of Hamlet, and then it’ll be gone.’ The words speak of an age of pre-celebrity culture innocence.

Hazan and his partner David Mingay, who is credited as film editor and co-writer, began with little sense of what they might eventually achieve, although Mingay early on saw that the emotional centre of the film should be Hockney working through the aftermath of his break-up with Peter Schlesinger. Filming sessions with Hockney were haphazard, but Hazan discovered an ally in Mo McDermott, who was happier to expose his life and longings. Schlesinger, too, was reluctant to appear, although he participated more fully once Hazan had agreed to pay him. And indeed, the ostensible subject of A Bigger Splash, David Hockney, is less prominent in the film than either McDermott or Schlesinger.

Nor is A Bigger Splash much concerned with the process of painting, although there are insights – often almost tangential – into Hockney’s working methods, such as the way in which he lays out a grid of photographic studies for the second version of Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972). The collaged photo-works of the later 1970s are in embryo here. At the centre of the film is the creation of this painting, which features Schlesinger, wearing a pink jacket, standing by the side of a poll staring into the water at a boy swimming under the surface. A mood of distance and dis-connection dominates, as it does in much of the film. Yet both Hazan and Hockney have acknowledged that the scene in which the artist takes a knife to the first version of the canvas is an embellished reconstruction of actual events. Hockney has also been clear that he didn’t employ for this painting (although he has for others) the projector known as an epidiascope that we see McDermott using…

What, then, is ‘true’ in the film? ‘Each scene was devised,’ Jack Hazan said in the 2006 video interview included on the BFI’s DVD and Blu-ray release of A Bigger Splash. ‘There’s very little there that’s observation.’ ‘It was never going to be a documentary,’ Hazan has acknowledged elsewhere, ‘There was always an intention to be a fictional feature film based on the scene that surrounded David. Some of it was invented, but the scenes that were invented mirrored what actually happened.’ Some thirty-five years on, the film appears as a precursor to the structured reality television series like The Hills and Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County from the United States, and the home-grown The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea.

… and here’s a rather wonderful (and bonkers) period trailer recently posted to YouTube by BFI:

I am going to experiment a little with my regular links page over the coming weeks – it will not always appear on the same day in the week, and I intend to add it regularly as I come across stuff. each of the following is well worth your time:

• Tinker, Tailor – a guide for the perplexed: a richly nuanced reading by David Bordwell of a richly nuanced film.

• Pandora’s digital box: art house, smart house: … and while we’re with David Bordwell’s posts, this is the fifth in his essential series on the transition to digital projection – anyone with the slightest interest in making or watching movies should be reading these.

• Girls on film – softening and sexualising Lisbeth Salander: a terrific piece by Monika Bartyzel on movies.com about the central role in the book and the film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (via @brainpicker).

• Accessing the cinematic cloud: Chuck Tryon on the future of digital delivery of movies – and why comparisons with early ATMs are relevant to the debate.

• How to search for the golden age of television: even if you argue with both his method and conclusion, this is an interesting quantitive analysis by Samuel Arbesman for Wired to identify when US television was at its best – which turns out to be the years 1950-1970.

• A different kind of delirium: I’m reading The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo, and Charles Baxter’s response for The New York Review of Books is a good companion.

• Be better at Twitter – the definitive, data-driven guide: Megan Garber for The Atlantic on a study of 43,000 responses to Tweets (thanks to @annehelen).

• Fragmentary – writing in a digital age: Guy Patrick Cunningham for The Millions on ‘the defining feature of the contemporary reading [and writing] experience’.

• The dilemma of being a cyborg: Carina Chocano in The New York Times on some of the  implications of being ‘collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.’

• The new French hacker-artist underground: a compelling essay by Jon Lackman for Wired about the UX group in Paris who undertake covert cultural restorations.

• Peter de Francia obituary: Michael McNay for the Guardian on a dazzlingly good and under-appreciated painter who was also an influential figure at the Royal College of Art.

• Francis Fukuyama on the financial crisis: one of The Browser‘s Five Books interviews – and a really good one too.

• The story of a suicide: the extraordinary tale of the life and death of Tyler Clementi, and of technology and modern manners, written by Ian Parker (at length) for The New Yorker – this is a monumental piece of modern journalism, and you need to read it.

• In the final panel the legendary script editor and producer Betty Willingale, who herself started at the BBC in the mid-1950s, spoke with great affection and admiration of the director Joan Craft. I pride myself in knowing a bit about the history of television drama – and there are few enough studio drama directors who were women – yet hers was a name that was entirely unfamiliar. Her credits, however, are truly impressive, from the thirteen episodes of The Old Curiosity Shop in 1963 through to Lorna Doone in 1976. Here is the first part of her 1974 six-hour David Copperfield (she had previously directed a thirteen-episode version with Ian McKellen in 1966):

• Another name that was new to me was the writer Constance Cox, who was the main writer of scripts for classic serials after Dickens and others in the early years. From a 1998 obituary in The Independent I discover that she adapted classic novels for the stage in the immediate post-war years and then transferring her skills to television. She wrote versions of Jane Eyre in 1956 and 1968, and her Dickens serials include Martin Chuzzlewit (1964) and A Tale of Two Cities (1965), both of which were directed by Joan Craft. Among her other credits were episodes of The Forsyte Saga (1967-68).

• Among the remarkable extracts that we saw was a fragment from Arthur Benjamin’s opera A Tale of Two Cities which the great director Rudolph Cartier staged for television in 1958. The work had had a radio broadcast in 1953 and then a full staging at Sadler’s Wells in 1957. Cartier clearly choreographed a full-on studio spectacle that appeared sufficiently intriguing to warrant further investigation (and a screening of the full-length work). Time and again through the event I was struck by how little we know of the history of television programmes, as opposed to the institution, its political context and its technologies, all of which have been better served by researchers.

• Another fascinating extract was a clip from the start of the BBC’s 1959 Great Expectations which starred Dinsdale Landen and Colin Jeavons as Pip and Herbert Pocket. But what we saw was the encounter between young Pip and Magwitch, which – especially after David Lean’s 1946 feature film – remains the defining scene for any version of this book. And while this one was most definitely shot in the studio (overseen by producer Dorothea Brooking) it stood up very creditably, not least because it had the time to roll out much of Dickens’ own dialogue.

• For me, Betty Willingale was the star of the day, and session chair Dick Fiddy skilfully drew out her anecdotes and recollections. I hadn’t realised that her role as a script editor was one that was introduced when executive Sydney Newman came across from ABC to head up the BBC’s drama department in 1962 (the link is to Tise Vahimagi’s exemplary short profile at BFI ScreenOnline). Newman is such a central figure in the development of British television drama, but again his career has not (yet) been subject to the detailed research that it demands.

• Newman apparently hated the classic serial in its Sunday teatime slot, and Betty Willingale recalled that at his BBC retirement party in 1967 he said, ‘I’ve got one big regret – I couldn’t kill off the “f”-g classic serial.’ ‘Only he didn’t say “f”-g,’ Betty Willingale added with a smile.

• One last cherishable image from Betty Willingale’s recollections, even if it has only the most tenuous connection with Dickens. She worked for a short time on the soap about a trendy magazine called (both soap and magazine) Compact. This ran from 1962 to 1965 and, like almost all drama through to the mid-1960s actors, it was broadcast live. Such was the tension of this process for the cast especially, that Betty Willingale recalled often seeing actors just before the show lying at the edge of studio and vomiting

• Among the other Dickensian gems from the archive is The Signal-man, taken from one of the short stories in the Mugby Junction collection. Filmed with Denholm Elliott and screened in 1976 as the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas, this was Andrew Davies’ first adaptation for television – he would of course later write Middlemarch (1994), Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Bleak House (2005). This was once available on DVD from the BFI but was one of the titles that fell victim to BBC Worldwide’s rapacious demands for high licence fees when it came time to renew the contract. So I have little compunction about including an unauthorised YouTube version:

• The biggest surprise of the day was learning of a 1994 adaptation by playwright Peter Barnes of Hard Times for BBC Schools (illustrated above). From the clips we saw, this show in four half-hours looks terrific – imaginative, expressionistic and effortlessly rising above its miniscule budget. Thrillingly it’s available on DVD (albeit as a Dutch import), and so a copy is now on its way to me.

• Like many others, I think my second-favourite television Dickens is the tremendous 2005 Bleak House, directed by Justin Chadwick and Susanna White. But there were a goodly number on Saturday who spoke up for the BBC’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1994), adapted by David Lodge and starring Paul Scofield and Keith Allen. This was directed by Pedr James, who came for the BFI event and who was a delight to meet and talk to. This too is now on order from Amazon.

And, yes, I did write ‘second-favourite’… I doubt that any Dickens adaptation will ever dislodge from its place in my affections the 1982 Primetime/Channel 4 adaptation of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. BFI Southbank is showing all eight hours on 28 February, but I’m not even going to link to it because the day is completely sold out. I’ll there (and I’m chairing a post-show discussion too) so at least you’re guaranteed a future blog.

Meanwhile, here’s a section with Roger Rees as Nicholas and Suzanne Bertish as Fanny, courtesy of YouTube:

Is it because the couple behind me to the right feel that they’ve paid enough to disturb everyone around them? Do they believe that their obvious wealth – and equally obvious lack of taste – permits the woman of a certain age to respond to my ‘Shhh’ with an indelicate raspberry? And what about the pair in the same row to the left? Can they really think that everyone else wants to hear their inane exchanges? And then there are two more people in the row in front who chatter and persist in what my grandmother would have described as canoodling.

Shut up, people. Shut the f*** up.

And while I’m in grumpy old man mode, can I also moan about the young-ish woman sitting two seats to my right who continues to check her e-mail right through the play’s three acts? The large screen of her mobile burns brightly despite being held in her lap – and, yes, it is insistently distracting to me, and surely to others too. In any case, why come to the theatre if you can’t at least wait to the intervals to log on?

What then to do? Ask people to shut up or to turn off their mobile? If it results in the kind of exchange that I have with well-heeled stick woman, then it is definitely going to blight my evening, even if only minimally. Or should one have a word with an usher? Will they take any action? And is there any point in combining a few sharp ‘Shhhs’ with a short ill-tempered blog?

• The television moment: a stimulating post at Critical Studies in Television online from Steven Peacock reflecting on ‘the moment’ in contemporary television and distinguishing what this might mean from ‘the moment’ in film.

• How Twitter saved event TV: a good piece by Lucy Mangan for the Guardian.

• Birdsong – an epic in the making: did you watch the BBC adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ novel? Still awake? This is an interesting 2009 Independent article by Geoffrey Mcnab about the earlier attempts to make the book into a movie. You might also want to compare BBC head of drama Ben Stephenson’s claims for the project back in May 2011: ‘It’s about fighting back against any perception that we don’t make the best drama in the world.’

• A newly restored Wings: how much are we looking forward to this? Smithsonian.com reports on the restoration and DVD release of William Wellman’s 1927 classic of the First World War.

• Sidney Lumet – experimental filmmaker?: a very good essay by Fergus Daly for Experimental Conversations.

• George Lucas is ready to roll the credits: a richly interesting profile of George Lucas facing retirement by Bryan Curtis for The New York Times.

• Hand jive: yet one more absolutely unmissable David Bordwell post, this time about hand gestures in All the King’s Men, The Magnificent Seven and more.

• Hammer restoration blog: just getting up and running, but definitely one to watch, as the team behind the restoration of many of Hammer’s horror classics promise a close-up chronicle.

• Space exploration: filmmaker Patrick Keiller is interviewed by Leo Goldsmith for the blog of New York’s Museum of the Moving Image.

• Elsevier – my part in its downfall: smart title for an important post by renowned mathematician Tim Gowers on why he is no longer prepared to publish in an Elsevier journal – and on academic publishing more generally.

• The wrong Leonardo?: Charles Hope in the New York Review of Books is very good on the Leonardo show, and especially on the two versions of the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’.

• The new American Wing: the Metropolitan Museum of Art has just opened what looks like a glorious and spectacular suite of galleries for their American collections; Holland Cotter’ review for The New York Times, The Met reimagines the American story, is an intelligent take, and in Berth of a nation the Financial Times (is there a byline on this piece?) is similarly enthusiastic.

• Walkerart.org: The Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis has produced a potential game-changer among museum websites (and really impressive it is too), as as Nina Simon explores in her Museum 2.0 post Digital museums reconsidered (which also has some other very useful links).

• Bill T. Jones discusses Story/Time: also from the Walker, the exceptional choreographer talks about John Cage with the museum’s performing arts curator Philip Bither McGuire…

• Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum: I liked this vlog with educators Andrew Fisher and Christine S. Kim taking a look at Breuer’s iconic architecture.

• Museum of Contemporary Art to create original programming for YouTube: watch out Tate and the V&A, The New York Times says that the LA institution is promising ‘a documentary-style show about street artists; a weekly news roundup to be called the Art News Network; an “MTV Cribs”-style show that visits artists’ studios; an educational series called MOCA University; an art comedy series; and a show hosted by the antic video artist Ryan Trecartin, described as a “post-reality and talk show.” ‘ Hmmm.

• The longest photographic exposures in history: thanks to @toddmacd for pointing me to this fascinating piece (with great images) by Stefan Klenke about shots taken with months-long exposures.

• Theatre talkback – the stage, the screen and the screen on stage: interesting reflections from Ben Brantley for The New York Times.

• Blowing up the book: Alexandra Alter offers a useful round-up in the Wall Street Journal of some recent enhanced e-books and apps.

• Václav Havel (1936-2011): a terrific tribute from Paul Wilson for The New York Review of Books.

• Mrs Winterson’s daughter: Adam Mars-Jones submits Jeanette Winterson’s recent memoir to a fascinating raw and revealingly personal close reading.

• Music Matters: … and finally, a lovely video in which Tom Service discusses a recently discovered Brahms piece with pianist András Schiff and conductor Christopher Hogwood…