Here’s an intriguing mystery. I have been writing in another context about the ITV company Granada and the benevolent despot who ran it in the 1950s and 1960s, Sidney Bernstein. Bernstein owned a chain of cinemas as well as heading an entertainment conglomerate that, by the mid-’60s, encompassed a television rental business and motorway service stations. Often described as a ‘Socialist millionaire’, Bernstein was a major art collector who eventually gave a significant collection of mostly modern masterpieces to Manchester Art Gallery (above). On 14 February 1959, the New Statesman ran a largely admiring profile of Bernstein (without a byline, as was the custom then) which included the information that, thanks to Granada,
visitors to art galleries, in Manchester and elsewhere, will shortly be able to hire for half-a-crown a gadget with earphones, through which they will hear interpretative commentaries on the pictures they are looking at.
Which I find extraordinary. This is early 1959, remember, and Granada is involved in the development of audioguides for museums. I had previously assumed such guides were only introduced, at the earliest, in the 1980s. In fact, it’s tricky trying to research the history of audioguides – I can find next-to-nothing online and one of the most scholarly papers concerned with the topic – ‘Four steps in the history of museum technologies and visitors’ digital participation’ by Jorgen Riber Christensen in MedieKulter, 2011; available as a free download) – contains nothing about their history.
All of which leads me to ask, does anyone know anything about this Granada-backed audioguide? Was it actually prototyped and tested? Does anyone remember using one? And, inevitably, is there a collector of historical media artefacts who actually owns one? All information, including about the early history of audioguides, gratefully received.
These past few months I have spent a good deal of time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where I have been exploring further collaborations with the Royal Shakespeare Company. That’s how I know that many of the company’s leading lights, including artistic director Gregory Doran, have this week decamped to New York. The RSC opens its mega- successful musical Matilda on Broadway on Thursday, and the night before Greg’s production of Julius Caesarstarts its run at BAM. (For background, see this Wall Street Journal piece.) I have also been reading Sally Beauman’s truly terrific The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades, first published in 1982 (and which I can’t quite believe I haven’t encountered before). And that is how I came to realise that this year marks the centenary of the first visit to the USA by the company that much later became the RSC. read more »
So even if you’ve already seen this, it is worth another watch – it’s a brilliant marketing coup for Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum which re-opens this week after a decade of closure. A detail of the painting which it recreates – Rembrandt’s celebrated The Night Watch – is above. The image is courtesy of the museum’s new website with its wonderful Rijks Studio facility which has a generous framework for downloading and re-use.
I am currently watching more television series drama than I have for a long time. Each new episode of Broadchurch on ITV and of both The Good Wife and Nashville on More4 demands a viewing, and Mad Men S6 is just about to return. (I am, however, clearly the only person in the world who is not totally up to speed with GoT S3 E1.) But this post is about another episodic drama that I have just discovered on DVD: The Spiral. The first series of this French cops’n’lawyers chronicle (Egrenages in the original) ran – thanks to the need for a follow-up to The Killing – on BBC Four in 2009. But it was made in 2005, since when there have been three further runs, each of which has also made it to Four, and series five and six are underway. Perhaps it’s a bit eccentric to write about an eight-year-old programme (and apologies for coming so late to this particular petite réception), but it really is terrific television – and DVDs have in any case made the medium more perpetually present than ever before. read more »
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. read more »
The past week has been particularly rewarding for those of us who follow the writings on film of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. To start with, The Criterion Collection released the opening (embedded below) of a video essay about Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), newly available from them on DVD and Blu-ray. The essay features extracts from Bordwell and Thompson’s ‘Functions of film sound’ juxtaposed with clips of the Bresson masterpiece. (You should also read Tony Pipolo’s exemplary short essay on the film.) Then there have been two new Bordwell blog posts, Side Effects and Safe Haven: Out of the past and The 1940s, mon amour, both of which are related to a major new web essay, Murder culture: adventures in 1940s suspense (from which the above image, taken on the set of Hitchcock’s Suspicion Rebecca, comes). This is a wonderfully supple piece of writing about mid-century mystery narratives in novels and films.
Just after I had taken the photos above and below of these aged newspaper clippings I tossed them into a recycling sack. They followed hundreds – thousands – of others that had lain in piles in my bedsits and studies across the past forty years. Some of them anchored significant memories – one recalled my visit as a sixteen year old to the Tate Gallery’s William Blake show. But now they’ve gone, and I’m pleased that they have. Indulge me, however, as I explain about how I came to have these clippings and why I felt able finally to throw them away.
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. read more »
Links… is perhaps a little light this weekend, at least in this iteration. I have returned to my college for a gaudy, to which all those who started there between 1974 and 1977 are invited. Such a reunion is held only once every six or seven years, so it’s almost essential. But it is not necessarily conducive to completing a weekly column of reading and viewing recommendations. Let’s start with two great posts this week from Paleofuture, the Smithsonian’s blog that looks back to visions of the future in the past. Matt Novak wrote both The newspaper of tomorrow: 11 predictions from yesteryear (where you can find the above 1962 image of George Jetson reading his televiewer) and Postwar dreams of flying in style, and there is much to enjoy in both. Across the jump, there’s more from the past and the future, and perhaps even a little of the future, with thanks due this week to @lukemckernan, @OWC_Oxford, @Chi_Humanities, @Tate, @manovich, @emilynussbaum and @brainpicker. read more »
