Essential media about the arts

The terra incognita of television archives

8.05.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: Television

Recently I sat in a viewing theatre with half a dozen other researchers and watched a truly remarkable 1965 television documentary called Walk Down Any Street. Directed for Associated-Rediffusion by Charlie Squires, the film is a clear-eyed and sympathetic verité portrait of a working-class family in Bermondsey. There are just four extended sequences – a funeral, a 21st birthday party, a hospital birth and a christening – and each is dispassionately observed at considerable length with minimal music that is not from the world of the film and with no voice-over after an opening introduction. I had never heard of the film before, I can find nothing about it online, and I don’t believe there is any critical writing about it in any book or article (I should be delighted to be disabused of this). The film is astonishing, both as film-making and as social history, but just as astonishing is its almost total obscurity. Welcome to the terra incognita of television archives.
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Jacobean jottings

25.04.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: Performance, Television

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.

A lost masterpiece

22.04.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: Performance, Television

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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Out of the past

25.03.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: Performance, Television

The Screen Plays season of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedies begins tonight at BFI Southbank. We open with a remarkable 1965 production of Thomas Middleton’s play from 1621 Women Beware Women, which I have written about in detail here. The screening will be followed a discussion with Dame Diana Rigg (who plays Bianca) and Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Gregory Doran. The show is sold out but if I get news of any returns I’ll announce them on the @Illuminations Twitter feed. And you can still purchase tickets for future screenings, including the wonderful 1964 Hamlet at Elsinore (above) with Christopher Plummer on the afternoon of Easter Monday. (Yes, I know the play was written around 1599-1600 and so is not strictly Jacobean.) Meanwhile, below is my Introduction to the season which argues that these great plays remain relevant and resonant today.
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Steel on screen

6.02.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: Film

I have said this here before but it definitely bears repeating: over the past seven years or so a series of BFI screenings, publications and DVD releases has rewritten the history of the British documentary. This is an achievement that has, as yet, been insufficiently celebrated – and of course the task is far from complete. Much of what we’ve learned and seen anew has been to do with cinema and industrial documentaries and we still have the glories of television documentary to discover. But already we can understand more fully and engage more deeply with and simply and straighhforwardly see an enormously rich filmmaking heritage from the early 1930s to the late 1970s (and occasionally beyond). And the latest instalment of the project is this month’s initiative This Working Life: Steel which was launched on Tuesday evening at BFI Southbank. Here’s the trailer…

On finding your second-hand self

7.11.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: Film, People

Wednesday morning, and to kill time I’m wandering around Stratford-upon-Avon. Oxfam Books is – as ever – alluring, and I make for the modest Film and Television section. Not that my shelves at home (or indeed the floors) have any more space, but I am always hopeful of finding an early volume of Briggs or “K’s” signature in a copy of Civilisation. Today, however, slotted between Paris Hilton’s – until now, unknown to me - Confessions of an Heiress and an equally resistible volume titled Mime in Class and Theatre is, yes, a book that I wrote back in 1988, The Moving Image: An International History of Film, Television and Video. The black spine, white retro font and end-frame of Chaplin’s Modern Times jolts me with the recognition that this is perhaps the first time I’ve found myself in a second-hand bookshop. Quite how do I feel about that?
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All Greek at BFI Southbank

5.06.2012 posted by Amanda Wrigley Category: Performance, Television

Thursday sees the start of a season of BFI Southbank screenings of rarely seen television productions of theatre plays from ancient Greece. The season is curated by Amanda Wrigley and has been organised with the research project Screen Plays, in which Illuminations is a partner. The nine Greek tragedies plus one quasi-satyr play offer a fascinating range of approaches to the foundational plays of Western drama and the screen presentation of ancient Greece (including an Electra, above, shown unsubtitled on ITV in 1962). Together they illuminate the richly interesting variety of ways that British television has experimented with capturing the force of these ancient tales from the late 1950s to 1990. One of the events is already sold out, and tickets for the others are going fast: to book go to the website for BFI Southbank or call 020 7928 3232.
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On first looking into The Space

1.05.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: Digital media, Performance

Day 8 of the Julius Caesar shoot, and we continue to film the assassination scene. On set it’s still really cold and outside it’s raining hard once again. What more do you need to know (apart from what’s for lunch)? So I am taking a May Day break from blogging the shoot, and turning instead to today’s launch of The Space. This is the ‘pop up’ online arts offering from Arts Council England and the BBC that went live this morning and that will run across the summer. Go here and here for background, and (in the interests of full disclosure) here and here for the story of our rejection; for the latest follow @thespacearts. Plus, Tony Ageh marks the launch on the About the BBC Blog. There is no question that this is a hugely significant and exciting initiative for arts media, and my aim is to write about it extensively as it unfolds. I would also be delighted if this blog becomes one of the key places where a critical dialogue about its successes and failures is played out. What follows are preliminary thoughts on first looking into The Space.
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A Dickens of a day

26.02.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: Performance, Television

We cried, we cheered and we clapped (a bit), and then we cried some more. At 11.30 in the morning we set out with Nicholas, Kate and friends, plus a few enemies, on the wonderful journey that was (and, in one way, still is) the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. At my side (in the next seat but one) was co-director Sir Trevor Nunn, and he was still there nearly twelve hours and one panel discussion later. NFT3 at BFI Southbank is perhaps slightly less comfortable than I think the Aldwych Theatre was more than thirty one years ago, but did I care? June 1980 was when, on another magical Saturday, I first entered the world that Sir Trevor, co-director John Caird, adapter David Edgar and of course Charles Dickens had conjured up for me (and around a thousand others). That day was one of the great theatre experiences of my life, which I re-lived when Channel 4 showed its screen translation in late 1982 – and which I was engrossed by and felt angry with and thrilled and laughed and wept at once again yesterday.
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Nickleby & co

25.02.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: Literature, Television

To BFI Southbank later for all eight hours of the Channel 4/Primetime version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. I’ve said before that the stage production, seen over a Saturday in the Aldwych Theatre in the late summer of 1980, remains one of the defining theatrical experiences of my life. And the television adaptation that followed two years later, after the theatre show had enjoyed an extraordinary success, is also pretty good. But it’s a long time since I watched the whole thing, which is what I’m to do today – in addition to chairing a panel with co-directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, writer David Edgar and David Threlfall, who was such a moving Smike. As the show was coming together, The South Bank Show secured good access to the rehearsals – and much (although frustratingly not all) of Andrew Snell’s documentary is on YouTube, in what appears to be an off-air recording. For this post I have gathered up the four sections and written a few notes on each.
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