Yesterday, I thoroughly enjoyed the full seven hours of the BBC’s 1953 Coronation coverage which BBC Parliament re-ran in (almost) its entirety. You can read the blog that I wrote here as well as see the numerous screengrabs that I took along the way, and the coverage is on iPlayer (until Sunday 9 June) here, here, here and here. And if you only watch one fragment of it, do take a look at the delightful introduction with Sylvia Peters – who hosted the broadcast in 1953 and who, astonishingly, did the same for BBC Parliament yesterday.
Taken together, this material is a historical and televisual document of the highest order, and I very much hope that the fine new digitally restored print is soon made available on DVD. I was engaged by numerous aspects – by the brief ‘intimate’ images of Price Charles, for example, in the Abbey and framed in a window at Buckingham Palace; by the centrality of the endless military parade in the afternoon; by the realisation that the BBC did not have sufficient facilities to cover the whole of the Queen’s route either to or from the Palace; and by the fact that the engineers in 1953 seem to have saved a roll of 35mm film (on which the recording was being made) by missing out a section of the ‘break’ at 2pm when television was showing simply the front of Westminster Abbey and listening to the bells.
Most of all, the full broadcast showed how ‘light’ was television’s touch on this event. Throughout there was a strong sense that the BBC was ‘simply’ relaying all of this to the nation and the world (albeit in an operation of huge technical complexity). Apart from Sylvia Peters, there were no in-vision announcers, there were no interviews, no studio couches from which experts could pontificate, and only the most modest of graphics. Even Richard Dimbleby and the other commentators allowed lengthy sequences of images simply to unfold in front of us with few words. Television appeared to shrink back from making its own mark, withdrawing from any apparent mediation, even as it was constructing a media event with profound consequences for its own form and for the nation.
Thanks to the BFI, there is a fascinating comparison to line up against the BBC’s coverage in extracts from Long to Reign Over Us, 1953 (embedded below, and from which I have taken a framegrab above). The production is an amateur film of very high quality made by John de Vere Loder, 2nd Baron Wakehurst (he also provides the narration), and it is in sparkling colour. The picture of London in June sixty years ago is both familiar and deeply strange, just as the world appears in all the very best documentary footage.
17:00 So that was great, and truly interesting in so many ways, some of which I’ll try to note down in a further post. A thousand thanks to the BBC for the restoration and to BBC Parliament for the re-run, although I think with just a little more care lavished on the presentation it could have been marvellous. The opening with Sylvia Peters was wonderful, but I wish they had stuck to the original timings and I would really have liked some on-screen credits to round things off. Were there no credits on the original? Could even a basic roll not have been assembled especially for today?
Here is a last quote from Kynaston:
The coverage…, in no small part due to Dimbleby, gave the medium an irreproachable respectability. a sense of it moving for the first time to the centre of national life. “The BBC has magnificently vindicated the noble idea of a public service,” declared the Sunday Times‘s television and radio critic, Maurice Wiggin. “It has behaved with impeccable tact and dignity and has undoubtedly made innumerable new friends… After last Tuesday there can be no looking back.”‘
And here are a couple of thoughts from Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) who has watched the re-run as well:
@illuminations There is an interesting comparison with modern television which would have cut back to the studio for most of this.
@illuminations Or run a film interviewing members of one of these regiments.Or interviewed Kate Williams.
— Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) June 2, 2013
16:58 Chester Wilmott signs off, over a shot of the royal standard flying over Buckingham Palace, with a reminder of the speech that the Queen made on her 21st birthday in which she dedicated her life to the service of the nation. Then,
We pray for her to enjoy a long, glorious amd happy reign.
God save the Queen.
The past is a different country. They do things differently there.
To Pallant House Gallery in Chichester for Barbara Hepworth: The Hospital Drawings. Having started at The Hepworth Wakefield, this wonderful exhibition closes at Pallant House on Sunday; it then shows from 14 June-24 August at Mascalls Gallery in Kent. On display are forty or so of the roughly seventy drawings and paintings that the artist made as studies of surgeons and nurses in and around operating theatres between 1947 and 1949. Little-known and comparatively uncelebrated, at least in comparison to the artist’s sculptures, these are beautiful and powerful works – personal, gloriously human yet with strong elements of the impetus to abstraction. For all their modesty, they can also be seen (although this is not how they are presented in Chichester) as one of the few truly great cultural celebrations of the achievements of post-war Labour government. read more »
To Richmond Theatre for Headlong’s smart and stimulating adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull(until Saturday, then Bath and Derby). As directed by Blanche McIntyre, a fine cast including Abigail Cruttenden, Alexander Cobb and Pearl Chanda deliver John Donnelly’s remodelled text with passion and panache. This is a Seagull that, in part by developing a dialogue with Hamlet, foregrounds the play’s strong sense of the stage and of story-telling. (There’s a very good set of resources from Headlong’s website here.) It is the second modern staging of the play that I have seen in the past year and the fifth exceptionally fine Chekhov production. Which has prompted me to muse on the playwright, on television, on language and on onanism. read more »
After a good few months of preparation the Royal Shakespeare Company reveals today that it is to begin live cinema broadcasts of selected productions from Stratford-upon-Avon. The first screening will be of Gregory Doran’s production of Richard II with David Tennant on Wednesday 13 November; at least two further productions will follow in 2014. You can register for further information here and also find out which cinemas are currently confirmed, although many more will be added over the coming months. And did I mention I’m producing the broadcast? For this I’m working not directly with Illuminations (although my relationship with the company remains as strong as ever) but for the RSC where I am also newly installed as the company’s Media Associate. I am very very excited about all this. Across the jump is an edited version of today’s press release – and you can confidently expect to follow the production’s progress in future posts. read more »
I have spent the evening in the front row of Screen 4 at Clapham Picturehouse watching the Royal Opera House live broadcast of Rossini’s La donna del lago. I thought it truly splendid, and the best ROH broadcast that I have seen to date. By way of instant reactions, across the jump are 10 immediate observations and thoughts. read more »
Another great selection from our colleague Todd MacDonald, who also features this weekly choice on his personal blog.
First up we have a video that I first watched once it won the Vimeo Awards Grand Prize in 2012. It really is one that delivers on repeat viewing and exemplifies the age-old mantra that the simplest ideas are often the best. The Everynone team have a broad collection of similarly enticing videos on their website including Moments which I cannnot even begin to understand the approach to its execution. Once you start to get a feel for Everynone’s work, all of the films maintain the idea of simplicity but you begin to wonder how they all came together when the range of material required to achieve them is so vast. Truly great work.
The question is, Is this the end of television as we know it? Henry Jenkins at Confessions of an aca-fan asks it with more acuity than most, highlighting a video (that I have embedded below) of an hour-long panel discussion at the recent research summit organised by the Annenberg Innovation Lab. If you want to understand something of this year’s seismic changes in television (or at least in the current American mode of the medium) then the contributions are well worth a watch. Jenkins also helpfully provides a host of links explicating some of the key shifts. On this topic, see also Google has a Trojan horse to disrupt TV – really, really big data by John Paul Titlow for read write. After the video, stay tuned for the usual mix of top clix (including a wonderful Hamlet mash up), with thanks this week to @JackofKent and @Chi_Humanities.
… and one that I just don’t understand – but we’ll get to that. The re-hang of Tate Britain is complete and unquestionably and unreservedly is a cause for celebration. The main circuit of the galleries is now a walk through 500 years of British art, arranged in a rigorous chronology, and then there are break-out spaces with smaller shows. The main perambulation will remain largely in place for a good while, but the ‘In focus’ exhibitions will change regularly. On the basis of a first visit last Saturday, when the galleries were pleasantly busy but a long way off the crammed conditions at Tate Modern, my sense is that the place and its art has never looked better, more enriching and more stimulating. Brava, director Penelope Curtis, and bravo head of displays Chris Stephens, and their many collaborators. There is much I want to post about, but I thought as an opener I would simply celebrate some things I admired and appreciated in just a small number of spaces – the galleries devoted to the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s as well as the two new Henry Moore rooms. read more »
No doubt about the key cultural event of the week: the opening of the completed re-hang of 500 years of British art at Tate Britain. Tomorrow’s post will be 10 things I already love there – like the revelatory juxtapositions that puts a Lowry from 1948 alongside a Freud from a year earlier – and today’s first clutch of links is dedicated to the reactions of others. In the ‘pro’ camp is the Telegraph’s Richard Dorment (‘gloriously, satisfyingly, reactionary’) and Jackie Wullschlager for the Financial Times (‘a vibrant intellectual reappraisal’), but the response of Laura Cumming for the Observer is more mixed, while former Tate education officer Bridget Mackenzie is damning in Wordless at Tate Britain. You can get a sense for yourself from this Guardian picture gallery. Other links from the week are below, with thanks for recommendations due to @KeyframeDaily, @melissaterras, @emilynussbaum and @TylerGreenDC. read more »
