Television’s big day
17:00 So that was great, and truly interesting in so many ways, some of which I'll try to note down in a further post. A thousand thanks to the BBC for the restoration and to BBC Parliament for the re-run, although more
17:00 So that was great, and truly interesting in so many ways, some of which I'll try to note down in a further post. A thousand thanks to the BBC for the restoration and to BBC Parliament for the re-run, although more
By making available in perpetuity programmes without too many rights issues, the online BBC archive collections are proving to be invaluable resources for researching television history. A parallel archive release from BBC Four (oddly unlisted on the more
We are coming to the end of the Screen Plays season at BFI Southbank of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedy. In the final two screenings, tomorrow night (it's sold-out but there may be tickets on the more
On Thursday night BFI Southbank screened Roland Joffé's 1980 BBC television adaptation of John Ford's play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. This was shown as part of 'Classics on TV: Jacobean tragedy on the small screen', a season of television more
There's one straight-up, stand-out recommendation this week, Eric Naiman's lengthy essay for The Times Literary Supplement, When Dickens met Dostoevsky. It's the tale of a notable literary hoax about an alleged meeting encounter between the two authors in more
Let's suppose that Arts Council England employed the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon and a team of researchers and production staff to put together a substantial 3-volume history of the art of the Netherlands. ACE committed, let's say, £300K of public funds 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 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 more
Today's lesson (which I reflect upon across the jump) comes in the shape of a substantial quote from a Times interview by Libby Purves (£) last week with the director of the National Theatre Nick Hytner. Talking of more
Even if I neglect the blog on other days (and apologies for that, it's just a very busy time right now), the list of links needs to be offered each Sunday. I rarely embed audio clips here (mostly because I more