Tag Archives: BBC

The birthplace of ‘Civilisation’

15.05.2013 posted by Category: Television
The birthplace of ‘Civilisation’

By making available in perpetuity programmes without too many rights issues, the online BBC archive collections are proving to be invaluable resources for researching television history. A parallel archive release from BBC Four (oddly unlisted on the main archive index page) is a treasure trove of early programmes about archaeology, most of them from the 1950s and ’60s. Many of the films in this new group star the avuncular and mustachioed Sir Mortimer Wheeler who in the 1920s and ’30s, long before he became a television pundit, was a key figure in establishing a scientific basis for archaeology. Wheeler’s post-war television tourism in the classical world appears disarmingly primitive when compared with the CGI-heavy pilgrimages of today. But it allows us to trace with striking clarity the emergence of the television form of the presenter-led journey. This would flower at the end of the 1960s in Kenneth Clark’s landmark Civilisation (1969) and more than forty years on from that series remains dominant in factual television today.
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Jacobean jottings

25.04.2013 posted by Category: Performance, Television
Jacobean jottings

We are coming to the end of the Screen Plays season at BFI Southbank of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedy. In the final two screenings, tomorrow night (it’s sold-out but there may be tickets on the door) and on Monday, you have the chance to see two full adaptations of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s play The Changeling together with substantial extracts from the other two surviving versions. Monday night’s showing is Compulsion (2009, with Parminder Nagra above), a modern updating of the play set in London’s Asian community – from which I have embedded an extract below. More details of this and the other adaptations in a moment, but I want also to use this round-up to mention that we have organised a very informal discussion group about the season from 3-5pm on Friday afternoon at BFI Southbank; if you think you might like to attend, do please e-mail me via john[at]illuminationsmedia.co.uk. Below, I am compiling through Thursday and Friday a number of links and a handful of reflections about the season so far.


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A lost masterpiece

22.04.2013 posted by Category: Performance, Television
A lost masterpiece

On Thursday night BFI Southbank screened Roland Joffé’s 1980 BBC television adaptation of John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. This was shown as part of ‘Classics on TV: Jacobean tragedy on the small screen’, a season of television productions of early seventeenth century dramas curated by Screen Plays, the academic research project on which I am working with Dr Amanda Wrigley.

On the basis of my memories of seeing ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore on transmission more than three decades ago and of viewing more recently a poor VHS copy of – for some reason – only the first half, I wrote a Screen Plays blog post about the film. I knew this was a significant television production but I was unprepared for the impact of Thursday’s viewing. For me, as for many others in the sold-out auditorium, seeing the drama on a big screen was quite simply overwhelming. This is a major work of British film – I am not embarrassed by the word ‘masterpiece’ – that is all but unknown. And it is is crazy, crazy, crazy that it is hidden away in the archives and has hardly been seen for the past thirty-three years.
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Links for the weekend

14.04.2013 posted by Category: Links
Links for the weekend

There’s one straight-up, stand-out recommendation this week, Eric Naiman’s lengthy essay for The Times Literary Supplement, When Dickens met Dostoevsky. It’s the tale of a notable literary hoax about an alleged meeting encounter between the two authors in 1862, but of course it’s also about what we fervently want to be true and why. Some of the same ideas run through The Fort Bragg murders – is Jeffery MacDonald innocent?. This is another of this week’s good long reads, in this case from Andrew Anthony in theGuardian about truth, relativism and the 1970 murders about which Joe McGinniss, Janet Malcolm and now Errol Morris have written notable books. Below, there are further links to interesting stuff, with thanks this week for recommendations from @audiovisualcy, @manovich and @poniewozick.
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Television today: illogical, crazy, dumb

11.04.2013 posted by Category: Television
Television today: illogical, crazy, dumb

Let’s suppose that Arts Council England employed the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon and a team of researchers and production staff to put together a substantial 3-volume history of the art of the Netherlands. ACE committed, let’s say, £300K of public funds to the project and this was felt to be money well-spent. The result was generally agreed to be engaging, authoritative and a valuable contribution to extending awareness and understanding its subject.

Now imagine that it was announced that the book was going to be available for just one month. We could all read it together during that month, but after thirty days the book was going to be hidden away. We couldn’t even consult it in public libraries, although it might come out for another month at some point in the future, and it might be the case, although no-one could promise, that we could buy our own copies in the future.

What do you think? Appropriate use of public money? Viable model for subsidised cultural production? Well, um, probably not. But this is EXACTLY the way in which television about the arts (and much more) works now. It’s illogical, crazy, dumb – and we are all the poorer because of it.  Yet no-one seems to notice just how weird it is.
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No R&D, please, we’re TV

2.04.2013 posted by Category: Television
No R&D, please, we’re TV

First day at work for new BBC Director General Lord Hall. His morning e-mail to all staff is here. Advice? Well, nurture the arts, please, and perhaps especially performance on television, but other than that I will leave it to others – including the mostly sensible contributors to The Observer, and Melvyn Bragg as well. Instead, I want to muse a little on the inability for television to work with independents on true research and development. I’m not thinking about technology R&D here, which the broadcasters, and especially the BBC, have shown themselves to be rather good at, but what we might think of as programming R&D. And I don’t mean the development of individual programmes, like commissioning scripts or securing access. Rather, I am concerned with deep R&D, thinking about the ways in which particular programme forms or genres might develop and trying to come up with radically different ideas. This kind of R&D is pretty much structurally impossible for broadcasters and independents to collaborate on.

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Orson’s sketches for early television

19.03.2013 posted by Category: Film, Television
Orson’s sketches for early television

Early television programmes do not get anything like the attention they deserve. In part this is because very few such programmes – and I am thinking here of television before the mid-1950s – have been preserved. But even those that are still with us are little-studied and attract nowhere near the attention that is now lavished (appropriately) on early films. A case in point is the six 15-minute episodes of Orson Welles’ Sketch Book, produced in the 1955 by the BBC, with the great man as host. These were re-broadcast in 2009 by BBC Four and ‘Citizen Welles’ has kindly uploaded them to YouTube (complete with the new channel’s branding). Watching them is a bit like sitting next to the 40-year-old Orson at dinner and having this charming, dazzling man pour his anecdotes and reflections into your eager ear. What’s not to like?
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On theatre, television and theatre on television

12.03.2013 posted by Category: Performance, Television
On theatre, television and theatre on television

Today’s lesson (which I reflect upon across the jump) comes in the shape of a substantial quote from a Times interview by Libby Purves (£) last week with the director of the National Theatre Nick Hytner.

Talking of the BBC, I wonder what he feels about its arts coverage: does it do all it should? ‘Plainly it doesn’t. I’ll be surprised if that doesn’t change under Tony [Hall, incoming Director-General]. To the extent that a DG can involve himself in nuts and bolts, he’ll surely look at it.’ I was referring to the sidelining of the Review Show from BBC Two to BBC Four, but he brushes that aside. ‘That’s just journalism! I’m interested in performance.’

‘I don’t see why there couldn’t be a close relationship between the BBC and this vast performance network — us, the Crucible, the Royal Exchange, Opera North, Broadsides, Live Theatre, the Royal Ballet, everyone! Fifty-two weeks, more than 52 companies offering something. It’s low-hanging fruit, there for the taking. NT Live is for the big screen, but there are ways to bring terrific performances to television. Look what marvellous work Greg Doran did with Julius Caesar. The conventional wisdom is that the two worlds are separate, and that needs challenging… Look, they’ve really got to detach themselves from this Downton ratings mentality.’
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Links for the weekend

24.02.2013 posted by Category: Links
Links for the weekend

Even if I neglect the blog on other days (and apologies for that, it’s just a very busy time right now), the list of links needs to be offered each Sunday. I rarely embed audio clips here (mostly because I find doing so trickier than video) but this is a lovely long piece from Radio New Zealand with the editor of the London Review of Books, Mary Kay-Wilmers, speaking about the magazine and especially about the late Peter Campbell who was a wonderful illustrator and a great graphic designer and the loveliest of men. Peter was originally from New Zealand and his work is currently on show in an exhibition at the City Gallery in Wellington, a detail from which is reproduced above.

Also, Boyd Tonkin wrote an interesting profile of Mary Kay Wilmers and the LRB for the Independent this week. Across the jump, more links from the past week, with h/ts for recommendation to @pacificraft and @emilynussbaum.
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Links for the weekend

17.02.2013 posted by Category: Links
Links for the weekend

It’s got to be Girls for the lead. The most recent episode of Lena Dunham’s HBO series, titled ‘One man’s trash’, lit up my Twitter like nothing else last week (except maybe that meteor, on which you need to read Elif Batuman in The New Yorker), and while it will be some time before we see it here, at least we can read about it. In That sex scene on last night’s Girls, Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker followed up her recent article about the series. Part – but only part – of why she liked the show so much was its tender display of sex:

… the Hannah/Josh scene was so intimate that it felt invasive: raw and odd and tender. That’s a nearly unheard-of quality in sex on cable television …

For other thoughtful and sympathetic responses, see Maureen Ryan at The Huffington Post, Hanna Rosin at Slate, Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture, and ‘Emily’ at xojane (who quotes some responses that are less sympathetic), and also – although not quite so sympathetic – Brian McGreevy in Don’t call Lena Dunham ‘brave’ for Vulture. There are many more links below, as I endeavour to offer every Sunday, with h/t thanks this week to @KeyframeDaily, @glennhroe, @annehelen and @MethuenDrama.
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