20th November 2012
I’m coming very late to this but I have been engaged by – and have learned from – a film made by BBC Research and Development and posted in six parts on their blog across the summer. Opening up the Archives looks at the issues facing the BBC in dealing with its huge television, radio and other collections (such as written materials and photographs) and at some of the solutions being contributed by BBC R&D. The sections are indexed here but since they make it easy to embed I have also brought them across to the blog. The six parts are across the jump, with a few comments from me on each. I should say that I think this is a terrific resource and I’m grateful for BBC R&D for making and posting it. read more »
19th November 2012
I was sorry to read last week of the death at the age of 90 of artist William Turnbull (above). You can read fine obituaries of him by Michael McNay for the Guardian and Mark Hudson for The Arts Desk, and there is a fine website devoted to his art here. I first encountered his work when at the impressionable age of 16 I saw the 1971 exhibition of ‘the Alistair McAlpine Gift’. The peer who has been so much in the news lately was then a noted a collector of contemporary art and he had donated to the Tate Gallery sixty works by seven sculptors, including Turnbull. For a long time many of these colourful modern pieces were a bit of an embarassment to Tate and they sat undisturbed in the stores, but more recently their particular qualities have begun to be recognised more. Turnbull too remains comparatively little-known, even if his work has been widely admired and quietly influential. So I was pleased to see last week’s acknowledgement of his achievements, even as his death led me to reflect on our DVD series theEYE – for which we filmed William Turnbull in 2005 – and on its afterlife. read more »
17th November 2012
My ‘Links for the weekend’ is our blog’s most popular offering. But given the length of this week’s post as it first appeared, it is clear that the idea is in danger of getting out of hand. So I am considering posting ‘Links…’ in two parts on some weekends – one with film, broadcasting and other media links and one with all the rest – including visual arts, literature, politics and other stuff (and I do recognise that some stuff will fall into both strands). To try this out, I’m now splitting this weekend’s grouping – and adding a few more links – to see how it might work. See the original post for the film and media links and this new one for everything else. Also, for no reason other than that the first two episodes were terrific, the picture is of Sofie Gråbøl as Sarah Lund in The Killing III. read more »
17th November 2012
After the BFI’s extensive tribute to Alfred Hitchcock over the summer and the immaculate restorations of his silent films, you might have thought the great director had nothing else to give. But now, and for the next two months, the first film on which Hitchcock received a screen credit, The White Shadow (1924, above), is available as an online premiere (go to the National Film Preservation Foundation here). The director was Graham Cutts, and in fact only some 42 minutes of the film have been recovered, but these make a rich and remarkable offering, on which Hitch was assistant director, screenwriter, art director and editor. For discussions of the film and its discovery in the New Zealand Film Archive together with background as to why it is online, see David Steritt’s excellent programme notes accompanying the stream (on the right of the page) and a valuable post from ferdyonfilms.
Across the jump, more Hitchcock, lots more film links and other good stuff. Note, too, that I have now divided what was becoming a ridiculously long list into two parts – the second is here, along with an explanation. Hat-tips this week to, among others, @jonahweiner, @emmafgreen, @KeyframeDaily, @jayrosen_nyu, @matlock and @jmittell. read more »
15th November 2012
The BBC yesterday brought together all of its radio channels for a charming Damon Albarn composition to celebrate ninety years since it first went on air. Other offerings to mark the occasion include a neat online interactive timeline. I am frustrated, however, that the enthusiasm of the timeline’s creators seems to have led to a clutch of errors that while perhaps minor are nonetheless unforgiveable in a history of the corporation by the corporation. Take a look at May 1937, where the section about coverage of George VI’s coronation claims this as ‘the BBC’s first television outside broadcast’. Except that it wasn’t… read more »
13th November 2012
I am researching early television in the 1930s and have come across a rather engaging discussion in the Letters column of The Times. This took place at a time when the very idea of ‘television’ was being formed – as indeed, as we can see, was the word itself. On 26 March 1934 Revd. G E Nicholls of Clevedon kicked things off with this thought:
May I suggest the unsuitability of the word “television” that it is half Greek and half Latin? May I suggest telorama?
(This classical allusion is often ascribed to legendary Guardian editor C P Scott, in the quote, ‘Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it.’)
Readers of The Times, and especially those with a classical education – of which there were rather more then than now – loved such a challenge… read more »
12th November 2012
I thought it might be time to bring this blog up to date with the news from my ‘other’ project, Screen Plays. This is a three-year research initiative based at the University of Westminster and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. With my colleague Dr Amanda Wrigley, I am exploring the history of theatre plays on television and working towards a book, a collection of papers and a freely accessible online database with details of all 3,000-plus British television productions since 1930 of plays originally written for the theatre. The project is almost at its halfway point, we have just had our first conference and we continue to develop an active blog, to which today I contributed a discussion of John Arden’s play Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (above) which was produced by Granada in 1961 and is available as a Network DVD. For more on all of this, read on… read more »
10th November 2012
The big background story of the week has to be how big data helped Obama win big. Start with Michael Scherer’s fascinating piece for Time, Inside the secret world of the data crunchers who helped Obama win. What Scherer describes is ‘a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters.’ It’s also worth comparing with the Romney campaign’s inept data work – see Inside Orca – how the Romney campaign suppressed its own vote by Joel B Pollak for Breitback. And as for the prediction stuff, How did Nate Silver predict the US election by Bob O’Hara for the Guardian is very good. The image, incidentally, is the website that the Romney campaign had ready for when their guy won.
There is more good stuff below – with thanks for tips this week to @BiblioOdyssey, @MediaIndustries, @emmafgreen, @silent_london, and @TheBrowser (as so often). read more »
8th November 2012
As I hope we’ll have occasion to reveal at the appropriate point, I have a particular interest at present in Uncle Vanya. So the opportunity to see two – very different – productions on the same day seemed too good to pass up. In any case how often do you get to see any play twice in twenty-four hours, to compare two casts and two interpretations? Which is the reason I took myself off to a matinee of Lindsay Posner’s new staging at the Vaudeville Theatre and then hot-footed it down the road to the Noel Coward Theatre to see the production by Russian theatre company Vakhtangov. The former, which stars Ken Stott and Anna Friel, is scheduled to run until 16 February (and there were plenty of empty seats); the latter has just two more totally sold-out shows to go.
read more »
7th November 2012
Wednesday morning, and to kill time I’m wandering around Stratford-upon-Avon. Oxfam Books is – as ever – alluring, and I make for the modest Film and Television section. Not that my shelves at home (or indeed the floors) have any more space, but I am always hopeful of finding an early volume of Briggs or “K’s” signature in a copy of Civilisation. Today, however, slotted between Paris Hilton’s – until now, unknown to me – Confessions of an Heiress and an equally resistible volume titled Mime in Class and Theatre is, yes, a book that I wrote back in 1988, The Moving Image: An International History of Film, Television and Video. The black spine, white retro font and end-frame of Chaplin’s Modern Times jolts me with the recognition that this is perhaps the first time I’ve found myself in a second-hand bookshop. Quite how do I feel about that? read more »
