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 »
For yesterday’s post I scribbled some notes about our filming this week for the research project Shakespearean London Theatres. With a company of nine actors we have been staging scenes from four early modern plays and filming both the rehearsals and the scenes themselves. It’s been fairly stressful and at the same time a lot of fun, and it has been particularly interesting to see (and hear) how words that may seem to a degree impenetrable on the page make perfect sense when spoken. All of this is one strand of six short films, to be completed next March, that will also feature contributions from academics and elements of archive material. Read on for further notes from Thursday, Friday and today. read more »
So, you know, what does a producer actually do? Well, judging by the paucity of posts this week, when he’s filming he certainly doesn’t have time for his blog. Since Monday we have been shooting short drama scenes for the research project Shakespearean London Theatres (ShaLT), and for this producer the past four days have included hanging an actor (intentionally and safely; see above), making a lot of coffee, finding locations, finding crew, recasting a major part with less than twenty-four hours notice, acting as a first AD, composing and sending out call sheets, explaining the project (over and over), disbursing petty cash (and collecting receipts), sourcing swords and worrying – a lot. Worrying about money, worrying about whether everyone is warm enough (they haven’t been), worrying about noise, and most of all worrying about time. Oh, and directing the films. We have one further day of rehearsals today, and then our last drama shoot tomorrow morning. So maybe now I have time to tell you a bit about what we’re doing. read more »
Time was in our house when the Advent calendar was the centre of the world right through December. But now our eldest, Nicholas, is studying at Ningbo in China (and blogging his time there), his brother Ben is reading geography at Nottingham, and even their sister Kate is in the process of putting away childish things. So forgive me if transfer my Advent attentions here with recommendations (albeit three days late) for three daily online offerings: A Bach Christmas calendar from BBC Radio 3, Sonnets for Advent from Blogging Shakespeare, and the 2012 Hubble Space Telescope Advent calendar from The Atlantic. read more »
At London’s The Photographers’ Gallery there is a compelling exhibition called Shoot! Existential Photography (until 6 January). Trouble is, the idea behind what’s not in any case a great title is a bit tricky to explain. Here’s the gallery’s set-up:
In the period following World War I, a curious attraction appeared at fairgrounds: the photographic shooting gallery. If the punter’s bullet hit the centre of the target, this triggered a camera. Instead of winning a balloon or toy, the participant would win a snapshot of him or herself in the act of shooting. Shoot! Existential Photography traces the history of this fascinating side-show – from its popular use at fairgrounds to how it fascinated many artists and intellectuals in its heyday, including Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre [that’s the two of them above], Man Ray and Lee Miller. read more »
