2nd June 2013
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:
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.
16:57 The final scene.
16:56 The crowds.
read more »
1st June 2013
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 »
30th May 2013
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 »
28th May 2013
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 »
27th May 2013
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 »
26th May 2013
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.
Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo. read more »
25th May 2013
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.
read more »
20th May 2013
… 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 »
19th May 2013
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 »
18th May 2013
Another of our colleague Todd MacDonald’s weekly selections of interesting and intriguing videos…
Todd MacDonald: It’s all about in-camera techniques and masking tape this week, starting with some beautiful footage of London in 1927 – IN COLOUR!
London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo. read more »
