John Wyver writes: for your enjoyment and edification, herewith this week’s selection of articles and audio that have engaged and challenged and enriched me over the past week.
• The fatal flaw in Mr Bates vs The Post Office: I don’t agree with David Aaronovitch’s conclusions but this essay from his Notes from the Underground Substack is among the best things written on the ITV drama series (above) and its fallout.
The most immediate risk from the machine age is not that they go rogue – that’s for Hollywood. It is that we stay in charge of our machines but blindly follow their outputs, no matter how idiotic or immoral, because it’s easier.
John Wyver writes: Here’s a remarkable trace of my, and of Illuminations’ and Channel 4’s pasts – a programme break from 14 January 1984 with a continuity announcement and slide trailing the first documentary I produced,Six Into One: The Prisoner File. The 50-minute film, shown two days later on 16 January after a re-run of the final episode of The Prisoner itself (above), was conceived and written by Chris Rodley and directed by Laurens C. Postma, and features an exclusive interview with Patrick McGoohan. Of course, it feels like yesterday — and a very long time ago.
John Wyver writes: the regular (if this week, a little late) numerically specific number of recommendations of articles and other stuff that have engaged and amused and challenged me over the past week. For some reason there are a lot of film links this time.
The idea is to make our journalists working on climate the cool kids of the newsroom: If you work at Le Monde, and if you want to be associated with interesting projects—if you want to work with colleagues from different sections and learn to do cool stuff with social and video and podcasts—covering climate change is how you do it.
John Wyver writes: Extraordinarily, this afternoon as a little tribute to Wider Television Access, a group I co-founded in 1980, BFI Southbank is screening a 1963 episode of ITC’s series The Saint, Teresa with Roger Moore and The Avengers: A Touch of Brimstone from 1965 with, of course, Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg. I’ll be there to intro the screenings along with another co-founder, Archive TV programmer Dick Fiddy, who has organised the show as part of the BFI’s Scala: Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll cinema season.
As the BFI listing notes, WTVA was ‘a group of enthusiasts keen on providing access to vintage TV in an era before home video and nostalgia TV channels.’ Others involved included the Scala’s Steve Woolley, Chris Wicking, Tise Vahimagi, Tony Mechele, Paul Kerr and my Illuminations colleague Linda Zuck, and we organised screenings — of Danger Man, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and music shows, amongst much else, mostly borrowed from collectors or surreptiously liberated for a brief period from company vaults. We lobbied for archive television as best we could, and published an occasional magazine, Primetime (above).
John Wyver writes: something like normal service is resumed this week with a numerically specific number of recommendations of articles and other stuff that I have been engaged and amused and challenged by over the past week.
• The secret fuel that makes Ferrari such a triumph: finally, Michael Mann’s ‘sublime’ movie (above) receives the respect it so richly deserves, and from no less a critical giant than The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody [£, but limited free access]; do catch it in a cinema if you can.
[I]t’s the kind of purified, rarefied film that major filmmakers make late in their careers, in which they get to the heart of the matter plainly and present their subjects unadorned and unamplified.
John Wyver writes: Two years ago I compiled a list of stuff – books, films, journalism, television, exhibitions, online elements – that I had enjoyed, appreciated, learned from and generally been cheered by over the previous twelve months. Herewith, this year’s selection (and instead of a Sunday Dozen, which will be back next week) — and yes, I missed 2022. The order is (largely) random.
What compiling this year’s list made me realise is (a) that while I listen to a lot of music, it’s mostly via certain radio strands (on BBC Sounds), a couple of which are listed below, and that I acquire only a very few CDs (and yes, I do still listen like that); and (b) I’ve read a lot of books, but more research-related non-fiction than fiction, and only a few have made it to the list.
The image is a detail from Édouard Manet’s ‘Portrait de Zacharie Astruc’, 1866, oil on canvas, seen (and photographed, poorly) in the Musée d’Orsay’s Manet/Degas exhibition.
John Wyver writes: a tiny present in the form of a short selection of readings and listenings, some seasonal and some not, that caught my attention over the past week. The image is ‘The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel‘, 1308-1311, by the Sienese painter Duccio di Buoninsegna, tempera on poplar panel, courtesy of the truly enlightened open access policy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Happy Christmas!
• Pluralistic: 2024’s public domain is a banger: this, my friends, is how a links post should be done, from the maestro Cory Doctorow — about copyright, the public domain and sex, basically. There is also a very good edition of Free Thinking from this past week about the same subject (although mostly without the sex), with guests David Bellos, author of Who Owns This Sentence? – A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, Katie McGettigan, lecturer in C19th American literature and Hayleigh Bosher, Reader in Intellectual Property Law at Brunel University London. Pleasingly, it’s only minutes into the discussion of copyright before one of the guests comes out with the all-too-familiar mantra, ‘There are a lot of grey areas really’.
John Wyver writes: taking this one week at a time, but nonetheless I’m pleased to offer a second selection of articles, podcasts and broadcasts that engaged or informed or challenged me during the past week. There is some hard-edged politics below, but there are lighter, seasonal recommendations too. For the image above, see the penultimate entry.
• Seeing genocide: the curator, filmmaker and theoriest Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s overwhelmingly powerful essay for Boston Review about photography, history and the Israel-Hamas conflict.
• Deeper into Ozu: to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the great Japanese filmmaker’s birth, Criterion commissioned six writers each to discuss one of his lesser-known works; it’s a delightful miscellany whether you know anything about his cinema or not, and will hopefully convince you to watch more.
John Wyver writes: It’s a long time since I compiled the weekly ‘Sunday links’ – indeed it’s a long time since I wrote anything substantial here. But with the changing circumstances for the company (see News, below), I’m minded, if I can find the time and energy, to start again. So for this weekend anyway, under a new title, here is a selection, supplemented by what I hope are useful additional links, of just twelve articles, downloads, broadcasts and podcasts that in the past week I found surprising and engaging and challenging. The order is entirely random.
I aim to make a similar selection each Sunday from now on, concentrating not so much on the mainstream, but rather on the cracks and crevices of our media world. And as far as possible I’ll choose things that are freely accessible, although some may require a free sign-up. See what you think, and if you find the selection useful, do please share on social – or just tell a friend. (For details of the glorious image above, see the second item.)
In the new year a season at BFI Southbank is showcasing the weird and wonderful history of the Scala Cinema, and as part of this programmer (and our friend) Dick Fiddy has organised an afternoon on Saturday 13 January dedicated to the memory of the screenings organised there by Wider Television Access (WTVA). The programme features two classic ITC episodes, The Saint: Teresa (1963), with Roger Moore and Lana Morris, directed by Roy Ward Baker, and The Avengers: A Touch of Brimstone (1965, above), with Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, Peter Wyngarde and Carole Cleveland, directed by James Hill.
A group of those who felt that television history at the time was ill-served, WTVA is a key part of the pre-history of Illuminations, since it was in this context that the two current partners, John Wyver and Linda Zuck, first met. The success of the WTVA screenings that we, along with colleagues and other cultists, programmed led directly to our early Channel 4 commission, Six into One: The Prisoner File, and then later to The A-Z of TV, 1,001 Nights of TV and of course the series of TV Heaven. As we aim to breathe a little life back into this blog, we will try to fill in something of this history and our memories of the Scala showings. Be seeing you!
