Boxing Day sees the continuation of our lists of 2012 top ten cultural experiences. Today’s contribution is from our colleague Todd MacDonald.
Todd: I started trying to rank these in order but it started to strike me as being a bit unnecessary. These are my top ten things in no particular order, just ten equally great things at ten different times during my 2012.
1. Bugsy Malone by Secret Cinema, The Troxy, London E1
An interactive cinema experience that involved dressing up in ’20s gear and travelling to a ‘secret’ location. In this case Fat Sam’s speakeasy was located at the Troxy in Limehouse. Outside the rear door, the queue was sceptically watched over by a policeman in period costume walking up and down the line and casually swinging his baton. The librarian gave us a book each and we all walked through an actual pivoted bookcase. We finally came out into the Grand Slam with Fat Sam himself on stage. We took our table and enjoyed Leroy Smith boxing for the first time, playing Blackjack with a corrupt dealer and Tallulah chatting up one of my mates. The film itself was then screened and we ate and drank until the finale. The answer is yes. Yes, we did have a foam pie fight and, yes, it was total carnage. read more »
After the pleasingly popular post yesterday, our end-of-year cultural top tens continue with Linda’s choice. Happy Christmas, everyone.
Linda: These are in no particular order, though my list is somewhat skewed by a three week trip to Uganda this summer to visit my daughter who was living there for six months. If I had to pick a favourite amongst the ten, it would have to be the gorillas (no. 3 below) – and above is a holiday snap. Yes, this legendary little guy (a male of approx. eight years we were told) was no more than a few feet away from me, deep in the jungle. read more »
Each year each of us at Illuminations and at our sister company Illuminations Films contributes a top ten of cultural highlights of the year (although we missed this in 2011), We are running these daily through this holiday week, with first up our colleague at Illuminations Films and producer of Berberian Sound Studio, Keith Griffiths. Keith: I didn’t get out much this year and perhaps my list reflects somewhat the life of a reclusive hobbit. My top ten is not in any particular order – except for No 1.
1. Tour de France
Each year I seem to congratulate ITV more than any other television network and so it is again this year. The daily coverage and repeats of Le Tour were brilliantly commentated and succeeded in the almost impossible – making cycling enthralling and more exciting than most Hollywood blockbusters. With a TV set up on the bookcase next to my desk I managed to view nearly every Stage, and if I missed one due to a trip to the Smoke, the High Speed Rail link got me back in time for the edited version. Fantastic sport, fantastic TV. read more »
Over the past couple of days there has been a lot of buzz about Snow fall – the avalanche at Tunnel Creek, written by John Branch for The New York Times. But ‘written by’ is only part of this true story of a group of trapped skiers, which across a multi-part feature is a dazzling web narrative combining text, images, video, audio, slide-shows and truly remarkable integrated graphics. This is state-of-the-art multi-media, and something you can spend hours with over the holidays. And for background on how it was put together, see Jeff Sonderman’s feature for Poynter. For further productive ways to pass the next few days, see the links across the jump (h/ts this week to, among others, @manovich, @lukemckernan, @KeyframeDaily, @holland_tom and @juliaLupton) – and then on Christmas Eve we start our Illuminations ‘top tens’ of the year. read more »
This seasonal post is an edited version of one that I wrote last year for the blog of the research project about theatre plays on British television, Screen Plays. I hope it is sufficiently entertaining to bear repeating here.
What follows is a tale of woe about a pantomime broadcast from a Christmas past, with the catalogue of problems that afflicted the planned presentation in early January 1947 from the Grand Theatre of ‘Croydon’s biggest pantomime’, Jack and the Beanstalk. This extraordinary litany of problems and faults is drawn from documents in the file titled WAC T14/312 ‘TV OB Grand Theatre Croydon 1946’ at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre at Caversham. Happy Christmas! read more »
I was in a kingdom of dreams today – and for the very last time. It was a relatively prosaic – but I must stress most enjoyable – meeting of the Southern Broadcasting History Group that took me once more to Shepherd’s Bush and to BBC Television Centre. I first visited this iconic, astonishing and beautiful building on 17 March 1973 – that’s almost forty years ago, gentle reader – and it has been central to my professional life ever since, and to my dream life and fantasies for even longer. The BBC has sold the freehold and by the end of this month will have decamped to the glass and glitter of Broadcasting House and to other pastures new. So I’ll never have another meeting here, nor another viewing, and I’ll never see another programme recorded in the studios. Cue therefore a memory or two – and, no, sorry, that must be just a speck of dust in my eye. read more »
My strangest (and most welcome) discovery of the week was the 1929 avant-garde film La perle (above). Thanks to The Forgotten: Never Explain a Mystery, Never Wake a Sleepwalker by David Cairns at the ever-excellent Mubi.com’s Notebook, I read about the background to this ‘alluring, at times beautiful and eerie objet d’art… [which] simmers with sex and kink’. And then I got to see it, since thrillingly the author has posted it on Vimeo, from where I embed it here. Across the jump are numerous other links from the week, although whether any of the others offer further ‘sex and kink’ only you can judge. Thanks for pointers to @Chi_Humanities, @filmstudiesff, @TheBrowser, @weinmanj, and Michael Jackson.
Yesterday we learned that a performance project on which we had been working seriously since August will not get broadcast funding. This was to have been a television version of a thrilling production that I admired immensely in the theatre earlier in the year. Although we saw this as a continuation of our work with Hamlet (2009), Macbeth (2010) and Julius Caesar (2012), this time it was not a Shakespeare play.
When we proposed the idea the broadcaster responded with initial enthusiasm and asked the director and I to budget and schedule a screen version. We brought the cast and creatives on side, found a date that could work in everyone’s diaries and started to plan the details of the filming. But now we’ve been told that there’s not the money to make it – despite its two and a half hours bring budgeted at less than half the cost of an hour of standard television drama. Such things, of course, happen all the time, but I am struck by how rarely they are discussed, either in journalism or in academic writing – and I have been wondering quite why that should be the case. read more »
Congratulations to our colleague Keith Griffiths, producer for our sister company Illuminations Films (along with Mark Burke for Warp X) of the Peter Strickland-directed feature Berberian Sound Studio. This is Screen Daily on the film’s success last night:
Berberian Sound Studio scooped the biggest haul of trophies at the 15th British Independent Film Awards but was beaten to the Best Film prize by Rufus Norris’ drama Broken. Berberian Sound Studio won four awards including Best Director for Peter Strickland and Best Actor for Toby Jones. It also won Best Achievement in Production and Best Technical Achievement for the work of Joakim Sundstom and Stevie Haywood on the film’s sound design.
Empire has the full list of winners and nominees, and Steve Rose for the Guardian has a new interview with Toby Jones. Illuminations Films is our sister company, run by Keith and Simon Field, that specialises in producing distinctive and imaginative feature and short films, installations and multi-platform projects, both fiction and documentary; more will be revealed when the company’s parallel website goes live next month. The pressbook for Berberian Sound Studio can be found here courtesy of distributors Artificial Eye and the DVD and Blu-ray are released in the UK on 31 December. Finally, here’s the 90-second trailer:
I am indebted to Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) and his estimable Hamlet Weblog for pointing out that – remarkably – BBC Worldwide has made available in full on YouTube seven plays from The BBC Television Shakespeare. Made between 1978 and 1985, the 37 plays in this series are often dismissed as under-cast and under-rehearsed studio-bound turkeys. A number of them, however, are far richer than that – and almost all have points of interest. I am going to write further about the plays and this initiative from Worldwide, but these are links to the productions online now (and you have to put up with four or five adverts in each stream): As You Like It, The Tempest, Hamlet (above), Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Across the jump are many more links from the past week, one about Shakespeare, some concerning television and many to do with neither (with H/Ts to @UCLAFTVArchive, @TylerGreenDC, @KeyframeDaily and @emmafgreen). read more »
