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 »
I have written before about NT Live – the National Theatre’s immensely successful live to cinema broadcasts – including about their showings of Hamlet, Frankensteinand Phedre, as well as general pieces here and here. By and large I am a big fan, and out of the recent screenings I loved One Man, Two Guv’nors, admired Timon and was thrilled by The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. But last night’s live showing of Alan Bennett’s People came across as a rare mis-fire, and I left the Ritzy in Brixton (my regular haunt of the Clapham Picturehouse having sold out) feeling a little short-changed (my members ticket had cost £13, full price £17.50). What I have been trying to work out since is the extent to which this was due to Alan Bennett’s squib of a play and how much of my mood was down to the penny-plain presentation from the Southbank. read more »
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? read more »
