The St James's Evening Post

Notes from Missing Believed Wiped 2011: 2 - The Mumford Puppets

2011-12-18T23:09:00.000Z

One of the many attractions of an event such as Missing Believed Wiped is the likelihood that it will draw the viewers' attention to a career and a genre or sub-genre of which they were previously unaware. The first such case this year was that of Frank Mumford. Now 94, he and his late wife Maisie were in great demand as marionette designers and performers during the 1950s and 1960s. Documentary-maker Richard Butchins is currently raising funding for a film about the Mumfords, their puppets, and Frank Mumford's collection of archive film, often from the puppets' television appearances: more details of the project and the archive can be found at An Attic Full of Puppets.

The BFI screening included four short pieces, the first two being advertisements and the second two sequences shot to accompany Burl Ives songs. The two adverts were the most striking: the first, a reminder of a time not so long ago when the British were most likely to consume the exotic alcohol that was wine if its foreignness was mediated through the importer's brand, so a glamorous puppet (Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward's aspirational middle-class first cousin, three or four times removed) extols the virtues of 'VP wines'. Much of the film can be seen in the video embedded in this post; I make a brief appearance at the front of the BFI audience, a minute and a second in. The second advert showed an elderly male pianist marionette being revived during a performance by the placing of an Empire brand cigarette in his mouth. So near in time to the audience, and (as with Emergency - Ward 9) so far from what is currently socially acceptable.

The remaining two pieces were devised to accompany the playing of Burl Ives records on television. The Doughnut Song, in which the 'old man' puppet becomes a doughnut seller, is the one which lingered longest in the mind, and in the absence of a video of the Mumford Doughnut Song sequence to embed, it is best to leave it to the imagination.

Notes from Missing Believed Wiped 2011: 1 - Emergency - Ward 9

2011-12-18T03:09:00.001Z

Written by Dennis Potter
Directed by Gareth Davies
BBC 1, tx 11 April 1966
BFI Southbank, NFT 1, 11 December 2011

It was difficult not to approach Thirty-Minute Theatre: Emergency - Ward 9 without crossing off the Dennis Potter checklist. Hospitals? Nostalgia for and revulsion from a lost social order? Old popular music? Fascinated disgust with physical frailty? All present and correct; and the Potter experts will no doubt be able to both qualify and extend that list.

Dennis Potter's script was placed in the directorial hands of Gareth Davies, who had brought the two Nigel Barton plays to screen; but Emergency - Ward 9 lacked their claustrophobic sense of personal apocalypse. For a play broadcast 'Live from Studio 7', as the narration over the Thirty-Minute Theatre title sequence said, it managed several changes of tone which were reminders that the path to great work doesn't necessarily lie through the editing suite. The path of the Free Church lay preacher Padstow takes him from professedly openhearted Christian to a man hiding behind closed eyes and folded hands, frantically praying as his ears are assailed by profanities issuing from Hell. The audience is left unsettled - having been introduced to them as a figure of reassurance, Padstow ends up unanchored and adrift amidst bored medical personnel of varying levels of enthusiasm, devotion to duty, competence and humanity, his belief in his own skills at navigating the oceans of sociability and society undermined. The title tilts at the romantic heroism of ATV's soap opera Emergency - Ward Ten; in Potter's world the best we can do is to fall a whole number short of our ideals.

Kenith Trodd, story editor of Thirty-Minute Theatre at the time and producer of much of Potter's later television work, introduced the BFI screening with the warning that the audience might experience 'psychic shock', and recalled that at the time the play was broadcast The Black and White Minstrel Show was considered unexceptionable family entertainment for viewers of BBC1, the same channel which broadcast Thirty-Minute Theatre. There were gasps and nervous laughter at the racist opinions, assumptions and language of the overtalkative and undereducated Flanders, performed with appallingly compelling pathos by Terence de Marnay, and at the use of recordings of old popular songs supposedly representing the lives of African-Americans - 'nigger music'. These emphasised the way the presence of prosperous black businessman Adzola (Dan Jackson) disturbed the ward; this is interpreted primarily through the colour prejudice which the play depicts as endemic among the majority population.

Potter is interested in a broad spectrum of postwar social anxiety. The elements of Padstow could probably be found among the preachers of Potter's Forest of Dean childhood, as could Flanders; but in that context Adzola would only be understood as the beneficiary of missionary charity and evangelism. Flanders's belief that Adzola, an immigrant, is stealing the National Health Service which he fought for is depressingly familiar to the viewers of forty-five years later. The aftermath of the scalding of Flanders by Adzola, in response to Flanders addressing him as Sambo ("I thought all niggers was called Sambo..." Flanders weeps, recalling the reassuring picture books about children of the world he was shown at school), sees Padstow attempt to apologise on behalf of Flanders, but this expression of compassion is itself based upon social assumptions which are outdated - Adzola is a successful businessman, proud of his achievements, and utterly contemptuous of the ignorant 'working man' epitomised for him by Flanders. Padstow's faith has survived a death on the ward - the nearest the 'Old Man' gets to last rites are impertinent comments from Flanders, and routine bodywash from a disinterested nurse - but it is visibly rocked here. Tenniel Evans's Padstow was lost and confused in the face of this rejection of his compassion; in the end Padstow and Flanders might not be reconciled, but they recognise each other as familiar types in a changed world.

Thanks to The Television Plays and Serials of Dennis Potter.

Another Jimmy Savile post

2011-10-30T12:21:00.002Z

Though only to draw attention to someone else's reminiscences of Jimmy Savile's role in the Manchester club scene of the early 1960s.

Sir James Savile OBE KCSG 1926-2011

2011-10-29T22:12:00.000+01:00

Born into a television-watching household of the 1970s, I was aware of Jimmy Savile from a very early age, presenting (I think) Clunk-Click, but have clearer memories of Jim'll Fix It. I never particularly warmed to Jimmy Savile as a presenter - there was something too obviously artificial about his persona, an aggressively flamboyant projection of celebrity, self-confident almost to the point of indifference to how he was received, but also gripped by a dangerous nervous excitement. There was something oddly Victorian about Jim'll Fix It. Its treatment of children having their wishes granted had a sentimental edge reminiscent of those nineteenth-century novels about childhood innocence and hardship, which might have presented themseles as addressed to children, but which found their real audience in adults. There was something Victorian about Jimmy Savile's life story too, though it took turns which could only have happened in the mid-twentieth century, in the twin explosions of music-led youth culture and broadcasting.

Beneath what one of his former Radio 1 colleagues called his 'carapace' were glimpses of someone who had overcome early vulnerabilities by finding that the right mode of attack was the best form of defence. Poverty and disability were eliminated through the deployment of apparently unselfconscious self-caricature, from the palm-kissing with which women who caught his eye at dance halls were greeted, to the display of malnourished legs seen recently on a repeat of a 1976 Top of the Pops. Savile draped himself langourously across the set, his orange T-shirt, unnaturally brown hair and white shorts dressing him as the incarnation of that memorably hot summer through which Abba's 'Dancing Queen' celebrated the bittersweet vigour of teenage disco, but Savile dared the audience to think that he had been shrivelled in the heat. He conveyed this through the wild stare of a man who had overcome the would-be toughs in northern ballrooms and tied them up where they could cause no harm, while the music played on from his double turntable and the night's booked bands, of no interest to the hit parade-focused teenagers, no doubt spent the cash Savile had placed in their pockets in some corner far away where they couldn't spoil the party.

Rolling news outlets, focused on the immediate, seemed to have trouble placing Savile. Early reports of his death described him as an 'actor' - but the only part he played was Jimmy Savile. Savile's enjoyment of his wealth and the ostentation of his charity work attracted the mockery of the succeeding generation in particular, but there was no great insight offered into Savile by the sneers of the Smashy and Nicey era. Just over a decade after he had broken out of the dance halls (though being senior presenter across the Mecca chain was hardly obscurity), Savile's persona had already become bound up with public service. His Clunk-Click entertainment series took its title from the campaign Savile fronted to promote seatbelt use in cars, in the days before it was compulsory. His next major advertising campaign was for British Rail, impressing upon ITV viewers that this was the age... 'of the train!' In the 1980s scarcely a month seemed to go by without Jimmy Savile running another marathon, speaking about the work of Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire or St James's in Leeds. A self-promoter's charity involves annexing the objects of his concern to his own public image, but there seems to have been much that Savile did for his hospitals which passed below the media radar, and his leadership of the taskforce which reformed Broadmoor was praised this evening by a former chief executive of the secure mental hospital.

Venerable as a disc jockey he was. In being invited back to Top of the Pops to close the programme down in 2006, the BBC acknowledged that in 1964 they had been nowhere near the heart of what was hip and trend, and needed a star of Radio Luxembourg, with added northern authenticity, to present their new television chart show and lend the corporation some credibility. Radio 1, three years later, relied heavily on newer talent from the silenced pirate ships, but Savile was still there, well into the 1980s; in some undefined, unexplorable way he had shaped the course of the British pop music scene.

Venerable in another way he may become. Jimmy Savile's devout Catholicism has been commented upon. Despite wild speculation, his celibacy may well have been more consistent and pursued more wholeheartedly than that of many ordained priests. It would not be at all surprising if at some stage there were reports of miracles attributed to him. It would be somehow appropriate if a gold track suit, a gimmick-laden chair, and the remains of cigars were to become holy relics.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - seven years on

2011-09-30T17:02:00.000+01:00

Last week saw the seventh anniversary of the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and also the publication of a further online update featuring entries on 106 individuals new to the dictionary and three new reference groups which help readers navigate between subjects who were members of groups or involved in particular historical junctures. Lawrence Goldman, editor of the ODNB, has as usual added a new preface highlighting some of the new entries. Despite my credit as associate research editor I've not been involved with this release beyond a few minor corrections to older articles. Early favourites among the new entries (and currently available free online) include the architect Warren Chalk (1927-1987) whose proposals included a plan for an underwater city in 1964 and who with his colleagues published one issue of their magazine Archigram in comic strip form; James Maxwell (1838-1893) and Charles Tuke (1843-1893), whose firm designed the Blackpool Tower; actors Sabu (1924-1963) and Nina McKinney (1912-1967); Joseph Barnes (1549/50-1618), printer to the University of Oxford (and thus a leading subject of another research project with which I'm connected, The History of Oxford University Press); and two mediaeval women of high status and dynastic influence, though five centuries apart: Eadgyth (c.911-946), daughter of Edward the Elder and queen of the East Franks; and Jacquetta de Luxembourg (c.1416-1472), a French noblewoman who became aunt by marriage to Henry VI of England, and then mother-in-law to Edward IV.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has participated in and influenced the growing interest in using the personalities of individuals or groups to illuminate the history of locations or pivotal incidents and through those individual lives place them in wider social contexts. Friends who recently visited Belsay Hall and Castle in Northumberland spoke enthusiastically of the personality of Sir Charles Monck (1779-1867) [ODNB article available to subscribers only, including most public libraries in the UK and Ireland], who designed and built the present hall, which pleased me given that Monck was one of my own additions to the dictionary, and his profile has increased at Belsay in recent years. Likewise archaeological investigations at Wallington Hall, a National Trust property a short distance from Belsay, established the connection between the present house and the home of the Fenwick family, the last of whom to live there was the Restoration courtier Sir John Fenwick (c.1644-1697) [ODNB article available to subscribers only, as above], beheaded for his role in the Assassination plot against William III. Fenwick's career in the service of the House of Stuart and the ultimately overwhelming encroachments made on his inherited property by the mercantile Blackett dynasty illustrate the dynamics of national politics and regional economics in seventeenth-century north-east England.

Living still

2011-07-05T17:50:00.000+01:00

It's been a very long time since I posted here. I am still busy writing two chapters for the History of Oxford University Press, as well as having other assignments, but intend to return with book reviews shortly.

In the meantime, I have written something about the actress Elisabeth Sladen (1946-2011) for the Doctor Who fanzine Panic Moon, which can be ordered from its site.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: September 2010 update

2010-09-23T12:48:00.003+01:00

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is six years old, and has today published its eighteenth online update. Over a hundred new subjects include a special focus on 'black Britons, 1700-2000' such as prominent London gang-member Ann Duck (bap. 1717 d. 1744), slavery abolitionist and magician Henry Brown (b.c.1815 d. in or after 1878) and nightclub proprietor Ola Dosunmu (1914-1991?) . There are also eight new reference group articles, part of an online series designed to help readers find their way around the dictionary. These include my own contribution on the Foxite whigs, the political followers of Charles James Fox (1749-1806) who were generally more glamorous and notorious than those of Fox's great rival William Pitt the Younger. Other new subjects include Yvonne Fletcher, killed during the protest at the Libyan people's bureau in London in 1984; Jewish scholar Israel Abrahams (1858-1925); eighteenth-century grocer and neglected London policing pioneer Saunders Welch (1711-1784); and Nica de Koenigswarter (1913-1988), patron of the jazz musician Thelonious Monk. There's also a king, Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho (d. 1996). Robert Fabian (1901-1978), Scotland Yard's real life 'ace detective' of the 1930s and 1940s turned television personality in the 1950s series Fabian of the Yard is also added.

Editor Lawrence Goldman's online preface can be read here. Some of the new content is available to read for free, but most of it is behind a paywall; however, most of those in the UK reading this should be able to access the online dictionary through their public library's subscription and remote access service.

The Learned Press

2010-09-08T12:31:00.000+01:00

I spent the last two days amidst fellow-contributors to The History of Oxford University Press at Keble College, Oxford. This event was described most determinedly by general editor Simon Eliot as 'not a conference', although the intention - and effect - was that we should confer with each other in formal and informal ways. As a relatively recent recruit, compared to most, I lacked the benefits of long-term exposure to the various channels of communication the project has set up, but left able to put more faces to names and with more of the pathways within and between volumes explored. Multi-authored scholarly work in the humanities faces the challenge of overcoming the often necessary solitude of research and composition, but this meeting reminded us that bridges had been put in place which we contributors could cross. The attendees who thronged Keble's JCR and Pusey Room came from overlapping theatres of academic expertise and varieties of personal and professional histories with OUP. There is still some distance to travel before the four volumes are available on shelves (we had the opportunity to consider what the books might actually look like) but (to extend yet another metaphor) maps have been compared and features common to adjoining territories of printing, bookselling, publishing and educational history surveyed, and (to cross further into contrivance) we know better the contents of each other's backpacks.

Life presses on

2010-08-06T01:17:00.001+01:00

Over three months since I last posted, which wasn't part of the plan. I've been extremely busy, and this blog has been neglected chiefly in favour of research and writing. I'm privileged to be writing two chapters of The History of Oxford University Press, volume one. This is a multi-authored volume edited by Ian Gadd, who is an old colleague from Oxford Dictionary of National Biography days. Simon Eliot is the project's general editor. I'm currently working on the chapter on OUP (not that the modern acronym is quite appropriate) between 1690 and 1780. This requires a certain amount of dogged persistence through several distinct twists and turns of Oxonian academic history, but I'm within sight (albeit distant) of the end of the first draft now.

Your diarist, podcast

2010-05-01T15:04:00.004+01:00

My Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Sweeney Todd, the legendary Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is now available as a podcast from the dictionary website. To celebrate, I've fed the article text through Wordle. The results are predictable, but might amuse.

Saturday morning vote-seeking

2010-05-01T12:15:00.002+01:00

This morning I woke up to find PoliticsHome and BBC News reporting that David Cameron was in Woodstock. By the time I had reached the town centre the Conservative leader had disappeared, though television equipment and police were still in evidence. Some other parliamentary candidates were there, including a banner-bearing Stuart Macdonald, and a cheery Dawn Barnes, whom I have now informed of the existence of this blog.

Meet the Candidates: electioneering in Witney constituency

2010-04-28T00:42:00.004+01:00

'Meet the Candidates', the poster in the newsagents' window urged, as I left the shop this morning clutching my new Radio Times (which I was disappointed to see doesn't have an election cover, though there is no reason why it should). Woodstock Town Hall, 7pm, it said; so this evening I ventured into the Sir William Chambers building, from which the smallest borough in England was once ruled, to partake of democracy. The foundation stone, laid 'by order' of George, fourth duke of Marlborough, rather than by the duke in person, was oddly appropriate.

Four candidates were present: Dawn Barnes of the Liberal Democrats, independent Paul Wesson, Colin Bex of the Wessex Regionalists, and Stuart Macdonald of the Greens. David Cameron's absence had been trailed in advance, but the Labour candidate Joe Goldberg had an unavoidable emergency and so was also missing. Cameron and Goldberg were replaced by county councillors from their respective parties, Ian Hudspeth and Duncan Enright. No mention was made of UKIP's Nikolai Tolstoy.

The audience was about forty strong, including several who had travelled to Woodstock from elsewhere in the constituency; I sat next to a leading figure in the local Labour Party, who had travelled down from the distant town of Chipping Norton, eleven miles to the north. Of those on the platform, the substitutes represented their parties as best they could, though it was to be regretted that David Cameron's message reproduced much of what we had already read on his campaign leaflet, and spent too much time addressing Churches Together in Woodstock who had (to their credit) organised the event. Dawn Barnes, effectively the front runner of those present, the previous Liberal Democrat candidate having achieved a narrow second place over Labour in Witney constituency in 2005, was enthusiastic and chatty if cautious, characterizing the more mainstream persona adopted by the Liberal Democrats in recent years. Likewise distancing himself from old stereotypes was Stuart Macdonald, who stressed his party's commitment to ending inequality, using his opening statement to target the present government's poor record in eliminating income disparity, and telling of how he had seen a tooth-pulling in his local pub, as a near neighbour could not afford a dentist.

Paul Wesson and Colin Bex in their ways represented different strands of an old parliamentary ideal, seeking to be spokespeople for local interests holding the executive to account. Wesson, a Carterton councillor of long and varied experience, emphasised the need for negotiation between individual members of parliament to break up the block votes in the Commons. Bex, in contrast, demonstrated an enduring disenchantment with the upper tiers of government which led him to co-found the Wessex Regionalists in 1980 (the party's other co-founder, Alexander Thynn, the present marquess of Bath, was not mentioned). Bex seeks a wholesale restructuring of administration in England which would devolve much power and finance to parish councils and the remainder, to regional assemblies inspired by the archaic notion of an Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, though with a distinct parliament for Cornwall.

After a first question on abortion from a local activist recognised by the chair, questions concentrated on the constitution, the economy, education and the environment. A local Liberal Democrat spoke out against David Cameron's rejection of coalition politics as inherently unstable, citing the success of Germany and New Zealand; Ian Hudspeth made an unconvincing case against coalitions and proportional representation by which he seemed to liken British conditions to those of Greece and Italy as models of chaos. Populist assumptions about the British general election being principally a plebiscite to choose a prime minister were quashed with constitutional correctness by Duncan Enright, and other scenarios explored, with Macdonald and Wesson most creative in their vision for the minor parties and independents, Macdonald seeking to bring 'fresh air' into politics, and Wesson envisaging an independent Witney MP working with counterparts in Wyre Forest and Blaenau Gwent and perhaps also the Northern Irish and Scottish and Welsh nationalist MPs. A question about education brought forward powerfully-expressed criticism of the destructive effects on morale and results in schools from the targets culture championed by the present government from Macdonald, while Barnes stuck to the 'pupil premium' promised in her party's manifesto. Barnes's most effective moment came during Colin Bex's response to a question on the three main parties' honesty concerning the economy: Bex's call for (if I remember correctly) a one-year income tax of 101% on the top 10% of earners was immediately slapped down by Barnes, who pointed out that this would penalize those earning £40000 a year, a sum which she said was modest in much of the south-east of England. Bex immediately moderated his policy to a tax on the top 5%.

After two hours this correspondent decided to seek a Chinese takeaway and not repair with the candidates and substitutes to The Star across the road, where it was pointed out that it would be illegal for them to buy any voters drinks. The Labour and Conservative substitutes sometimes played into the hands of those who would portray them as cosy duopolists; of the two candidates who most impressed, Dawn Barnes could have done with more passion and less recourse to party jargon, Stuart Macdonald with more detail on constructive change. Those who want to allow room for Macdonald would probably be best advised this time to vote for Dawn Barnes. It's a remote possibility, but in the unlikely event that elections are won or lost in bookshops, and if the Liberal Democrat manifesto really is the bestselling book this week at Waterstone's in Witney, David Cameron could do worse than return from Lancashire and cultivate his constituency.

Son of Man, by Dennis Potter

2010-04-03T02:17:00.002+01:00

Son of Man was first broadcast on 16 April 1969, in the wake of Easter, in BBC 1's one-off drama strand The Wednesday Play. I first saw it nineteen years afterward, in a religious studies lesson; Good Friday twenty-two years later seemed to be an appropriate time to watch it again.

I can't pretend to an encyclopedic knowledge of Potter's work, but torment and ecstasy enjoyed an intimate relationship for his protagonists. Humdrum human existence has a tendency to the brutal; compassion in its purest form in short supply. Potter's Jesus is introduced in agony in the desert, physically contorted into a hollow in a rock, begging for a clear word from an inner voice. Throughout it will remain open to question whether Jesus is who he claims to be, a man sent 'from God', or instead a man possessed of a particularly infectious form of delusional paranoia. The audience is at first invited to dismiss him, and is then disarmed by his ability to persuade Peter and Andrew (Brian Blessed and Gawn Grainger) to give up their nets and follow him. Even as Jesus builds his reputation and challenges crowds to change their understanding of what the natural order of human affairs is - and telling a conquered people in revolt against Roman rule to love their enemies is presented by Potter as Jesus's most potent heresy - Colin Blakely can gently elide his portrayal from one of an inventive, creative persuader whose faith in the imminent kingdom of God animates his appeal both to the imagination and reason, to a shivering wreck crushed by the weight of his apprehensions of his own nature. There is only one miracle, the driving out of a demon from a woman, and as a play of the 1960s this is presented without question as a psychological disorder; Jesus's therapy of physical contact and conversation, assuring the woman that she is loved by God, is that of a man who has negotiated his own path away from schizophrenia.

Opposed to Jesus in the structure of the play is Pontius Pilate, played by Robert Hardy as a normally assured but hot-blooded member of the imperial officer class. Potter depicts the governor of Judaea and his wife Procla as a formally devoted couple struggling to maintain a comfortable middle age in what they regard as a primitive subject territory. Pilate is not a man of faith; for him Jewish monotheism is a sign of a lack of imagination. Procla, a languid Patricia Lawrence, displays sympathy for the locals but it is at best the condescension of a tourist , urging her husband to show some appreciation for local culture. Their behaviour deliberately echoes those of the prosperous upper middle class of the fictional Home Counties. While Jesus is brought to intellectual clarity and personal charisma by psychological pain, Pilate's energies are enhanced by seeing people hurt each other; he enjoys violence, which he remarks makes a man. His own deployment of pain is casual; when a woman servant asks Pilate to hit her again, having heard Jesus urge her to offer her other cheek, Pilate is so intrigued that (we learn from later dialogue) he flogs her to death. The flogging is unremarkable; the servant's stubbornness is not.

Potter's response to the problem of Judas is to make him an agent provocateur, a member of Caiaphas's temple police, who nevertheless nurses a great love for Jesus and his message. Edward Hardwicke suggests Judas's fragility; he is a reed caught between strong winds, and while Peter condemns him at Gethsemane - 'You bastard' - Jesus only smiles with weary expectation. In the end Judas is a prisoner of the institutional structure which Jesus has no time for: part of the peace against which Jesus raises a sword.

The immediate triumph which Potter allows Jesus is his effect on Pilate, who is disturbed by Jesus in a way which he finds incomprehensible. Facing Caiaphas, the leader of his own religion (interpreted by Bernard Hepton as a cold and embittered head of an administrative machine, nursing a hatred for his position as a collaborator with the system, but dependent on both rank and hate) Jesus had been inarticulate: Blakely's performance is ambiguous as to whether he is paralysed by fear, suffering a catatonic episode, expressing his despair at Caiaphas's questions or else a determination to be carried off to death. Pilate he first meets blindfolded; when the blindfold is removed Jesus's remark is 'Good afternoon'. Pilate throughout the trial is uncertain whether to treat Jesus as a political threat, a potential court jester, someone potentially useful in other ways, or just an irrelevance. (Christianity, as Potter knew, has been all these things to the civil power.) He strikes Jesus for insolence, and then apologises. His reaction to Jesus's 'Don't be afraid, Pontius,' is to move away, repulsed at the insight into himself, and to confirm the sentence of crucifixion. Jesus changes people by example. Pilate is last seen with an expression of contempt on his face as Jesus is flogged by his soldiery; it could be contempt for a Jesus whom Pilate says has condemned himself, but equally the discovery of self-hatred, and also the discovery that violence either no longer thrills or that the pleasure it brings him disgusts him.

For Potter, the crucifixion is the greatest example of all; loving your enemies means at its most extreme letting them do their worst to you without resistance. The final juxtaposition of the replayed desert scene from the beginning, as Jesus asked 'Is it me?', with the crucifixion and Jesus's final 'Oh God... why have you forsaken me?' is oddly underwhelming. This was one of the scenes rewritten for the subsequent stage version, with Jesus being allowed to add 'It is finished' before expiring on the cross.

Back in 1988, my religious studies teacher introduced the play to his class arguing that it posed the question 'Was Jesus mistaken?' The only concession to the supernatural, possibly, is that as Jesus dies, darkness falls. The effect of Potter's change for the stage was to confirm Jesus's career as worthwhile even if he was deluded about his special relationship with God - whatever he thought that relationship was. My memories of the 1995 stage revival - directed by Bill Bryden for the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Joseph Fiennes as Jesus - suggest that the crucifixion was much more powerfully-executed. More widely, Bryden expressed first-century Judaea through comparison with the mid-twentieth century Forest of Dean into which Potter was born, combined with frequent singing from Moody and Sankey to represent Potter's family's evangelicalism. Despite Caiaphas's sneers (before he encounters Jesus) at 'the manners of a carpenter' and Blakely's displays both of Jesus's erudition and his appreciative delivery of the evaluation of the cross as a piece of timber which Potter gives Jesus, the Jesus and disciples of Gareth Davies's television production are never quite the working men which Bryden's staging presented or which Potter's dialogue seeks. Rumours of a film version of Bryden's interpretation failed to come to fruition.

While Son of Man has problems - there are several moments, particularly Jesus's meeting with Peter and Andrew, where weak performances would make the scene incredible. Pilate, Procla and their entourage draw on a cultural impression of the colonial governor more current for a 1969 audience than for one in the early twenty-first century, though it should not take long to think of workable equivalents. Son of Man may not seek to make converts, but it might change minds, even through the slow process of laying down thin new layers amidst the soft strata of opinion.

Travelling by rail around London, 1851

2010-03-21T13:43:00.004Z

While following links around the internet instead of doing the thousand and one things which I have to do, I came across this account of a train journey from Fenchurch Street to Camden Town in 1851, first published in the Illustrated London News. It's fascinating for all sorts of reasons. There is the language - 'railroad' is not yet established as an Americanism, and is freely used here - the punctuation of 'the Regent's-park' and street names, all hyphenated in the fashion familiar in the eighteenth century but which endured well into the nineteenth, as if English couldn't decide if it wanted to be like its German cousin and enthusiastically embrace compounds. The train made it possible to appreciate the scale of the metropolis - not only could Poplar go to Primrose Hill, they could both see Pentonville grow in front of them. The remark that the Roman camp near Canonbury has been completely covered by new streets and houses conveys something of the nineteenth-century British sense of moment, the overturning of ancient precedents; London was a new Rome, and a greater one. Look also for the architecture of Homerton parsonage - this is a time when having ones own parish church and parsonage were a sign of civic identity, and both by their construction and design claim deep roots. The covered way at Minories is remarkable too - a reminder that in the City in 1851, the railway engine was still the nervously polite guest of the horse.

Sir Terry moves on

2009-12-20T19:41:00.001Z

I listened to Terry Wogan's last Radio 2 breakfast show on Friday. More accurately, I listened to it on Friday and Saturday, thanks of course to the BBC's iPlayer. I've been around long enough to remember the first time Terry Wogan left Radio 2, twenty-five years ago. In those days Terry was a youngster of 46, moving on from the radio to take up a thrice-weekly chat show on BBC 1 television. I think that there was a lengthy handover to Jimmy Young. I suspect that those more familiar with that phase of Wogan's career would tell me that there was always a lengthy handover to Jimmy Young, or at least would say that they remembered that having been the case, as Wogan-Young badinage seemed to be part of the programme. There was some kind of presentation, and I am fairly sure that Wogan's recording of 'The Floral Dance' was faded up (as seen on a 1978 David 'Kid' Jensen-fronted Top of the Pops); but it is the kind of move I'd have made had I been editing the programme. Appropriate, because the sub-Rex Harrison sung-spoken, self-conscious overextension of a DJ's irony was exactly the sort of painful thing Wogan did in the late 1970s and early 1980s when he went from being ubiquitous on TV panel games, to a successful game show host himself, and rising chat show presenter. His early Saturday evening show of summer 1980, What's on Wogan?, looked even to my nine-year-old self as if it had a budget of tuppence and its guest record was patchy, but the fact it only ran for that summer etches it in my mind as a bridge between two epochs of my life, between first and middle schools. The appearance of K-9 and Lalla Ward on one programme probably helped. More importantly for Terry Wogan, the programme showed someone that he could interview guests on television in a live setting (though he'd been the anchor of interview formats before, including an ATV daytime series in 1972, and a Radio 4 series in 1974). It may even have established him as heir presumptive to Michael Parkinson in the late Saturday evening slot, a succession which duly operated in 1982 when Parkinson left for TV-am. Wogan seemed an unlikely successor to the argumentative, incisive, journalistic Parkinson, but the move was probably in keeping with the times; Parkinson had interrogated the twentieth century, a march of golden age Hollywood stars, political figures and latterday television celebrities hauled up to prove that they had substance. Wogan - particularly after it became an early evening weekday show in 1985 - was a pageant, celebrating its guests who were more gently molested than Parkinson had managed as they plugged their books, though this method was itself able to produce unexpected revelations.

Part of the reason for the resentment at Wogan's rise was probably that Radio 2 wasn't expected to be the launching ground for stars - at least, not disc jockeys. After the Light Programme was rearranged into Radio 1 and Radio 2 in 1967, almost all the new format, music and presenter-led programmes shared between both channels were badged as Radio 1 shows; music sequence programmes which were Radio 2 only, or Radio 2 after 7am such as Breakfast Special, tended to be presented by people with a traditional BBC announcer training, such as John Dunn. Terry Wogan had not been a 'pirate' like the leading younger Radio 1 DJs, but he had come from Ireland. Even staid RTE could be considered outside the BBC tradition. Moving Wogan from his old mid-afternoon slot on Radio 1 (Radio Rewind has clips from his Radio 1 days), to become a 'personality' presenter on Radio 2 in a slot where Radio 2 had previously deferred to Tony Blackburn on Radio 1, was doubtless part of the move to give Radio 2 more definition as a contemporary service in its own right. This ambition, presaged by the BBC's 1969 strategic plan Broadcasting in the Seventies, took Radio 2 beyond being a pool in which antiquated Light Programme formats were sent to await scuttling. It also allowed Wogan to gradually shed his comedic Irishman persona ('Banjaxed!') and become a wry commentator on the concerns of the broadest possible audience.

The media most remember him pointing out the absurdities of Dallas, but a trawl through 1970s press cuttings reveals him being alternately rubbished as the most banal of the banal while other critics recognize, at least, that such a character took some effort. For every Clive James in The Observer ridiculing him as a cyborg par excellence among cyborg television presenters, there is a Val Arnold-Forster praising him in The Guardian in 1976 as the ideal anchor for Radio 2's morning coverage of the Montreal Olympics. Wogan was not afraid to admit that he didn't understand many of the sports or what they were doing in the Olympics, a point of view shared by many listeners who in some cases must have felt they were listening to the Olympics under duress. As between 1970 and 1990 Radio 2 was the main radio channel for sport coverage in Britain, it's not surprising that sport is well-represented in Wogan's press coverage. "Back to Terry Wogan at Broadcasting House" is a phrase that crops up for years after he had left the Radio 1/Radio 2 afternoon show from which Radio 2 would opt out with racing coverage. 'Wogan's Wager' saw Wogan play the role of racing tipster. There was even a Terry Wogan handicap chase, and Wogan owned at least one racehorse.

When Terry Wogan returned to Radio 2 from television in 1993, he was joining a changed network. In the early 1980s Radio 2 was not only where I heard lots of mid-century Broadway show tunes, 1960s pop and much older material, but where I first heard new singles by Queen and, indeed, French and Saunders. Realignment in the late 1980s and early 1990s under Frances Line, first as controller of music and then as controller herself, had deliberately sought an older audience and deleted almost all references to popular culture after 1960. By 1992, when she replaced Derek Jameson as breakfast host with Brian Hayes, she was admitting this strategy had misjudged her target audience's taste: the average age of the audience was in its mid-sixties, ten years older than her calculations. Circulating Hayes into evening programmes and restoring Wogan helped Line retrench without compromising her earlier dictate that Radio 2 should not be a star-making station - only people already established in the public eye should present on Radio 2. By 1993, Wogan had been a prominent media personality for so long that it could be forgotten that Radio 2 had been where he found much of his fame in the first place.

Perhaps ironically for someone brought in to add a touch of Radio 1 personality broadcasting to Radio 2 back in 1972, the emergence of the defiantly and gleefully ageing TOGs as his listeners helped form continuity with the Line era audience as Radio 2 (including Wogan's show) renewed its engagement with younger strands of popular culture under controllers Jim Moir (1996-2003) and Lesley Douglas (2003-2008). The adoption of elements of a zoo format further distanced Wake Up to Wogan from the old Terry Wogan show, but perhaps most important was that Wogan returned to Radio 2 ready to become an elder statesman. One of his early irreverences as a television commentator on a beauty pageant was to say that he was doing it for the same reason as the bikini-clad contestants: "for the exposure". He didn't need exposure in the same way any more. While television work was not as easily come by as in the 1970s and 1980s there was Children in Need every year, Points of View and experiments such as The Terry and Gaby Show which provided income, coverage and helped Wogan remain a contemporary figure rather than the subject of nostalgic profiles. The innuendos and double entendres of the 'Janet and John' stories and others were likewise signs of modernity.

This is where I admit that I have never really grasped how Terry Wogan maintains such a rapport with his audience. Unlike several of the 1970s newspaper critics, brought up in the stratified days of Light, Home and Third, his reign over the airwaves seems less inexplicable than those of more recent personalities. In a 1979 Guardian review of an edition of Parkinson, Peter Fiddick expressed his surprise that he felt outraged by the use of Terry Wogan as "mute butt" of a "love-in" between Michael Parkinson and Carol Channing. "He is actually too interesting a figure to most of the British public, and too good a professional broadcaster, and maybe even too bright a bloke, to be handed out that treatment." Fiddick managed to acknowledge how a man he'd previously seen as only a representative of the unadventurous and unexciting was revealed as a sophisticated practitioner when taken for granted. Despite his septugenarian age and the premature obituaries of this week, Wogan and his capacity to surprise are still with us. Expect occasional ripples but above all an astutely composed dialogue with audience and with guests on Sunday lunchtimes from February.

The Hemingses of Monticello

2009-12-10T18:36:00.002Z

I've submitted another reader review to History Today's books blog, on The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed. My text as submitted was overlength, but it has been carefully edited by History Today's web editor, Kathryn Hadley.

I write in the review that in referring to his household of free relations and slaves as his 'family' Thomas Jefferson was employing the same terminology an eighteenth-century Englishman would have used of his spouse and their offspring and free servants and others living under his roof. Likewise Jefferson preferred to refer to his slaves as his 'servants', obscuring the fact that the control which he exercised over them as his property was different from his authority over free employees.

The fact that Sally Hemings, her siblings and her mother were enslaved is unavoidable to the early twenty-first century reader and is the foremost consideration when assessing their careers. While legally and socially degraded from the status of free people in Virginia, this was not a status which late eighteenth-century Virginians took entirely for granted; Jefferson's use of the term 'servant' echoes the classification of African plantation workers in early seventeenth-century Virginia as indentured labourers; only in mid-century were moves successfully made in the courts to deny them their freedom and convert them into human property, a controlled population both guaranteeing a source of cheap labour and protecting what was probably thought of as the English character of the colony from apprehensions of Africanization.

Jefferson was not alone in playing the ideal white landed Virginian patriarch, with Sally Hemings as lower-status mother of his 'private' family; but he may have been aware of parallels in England too, where high-status males, whether unmarried, married or widowed, enjoyed second families of lower social status than enjoyed by their official property-inheriting children. Jefferson's setting up his male Hemings in-laws and children as artisans not only suggests that Jefferson was flattering his political ideals, experimenting with the Hemingses as the foundations of a new free Virginian society, but also echoes a greater English male of the earlier century. Charles II is said to have been reluctant to ennoble either his children with Nell Gwyn or Nell Gwyn herself, and I have long wondered whether the king was entertained by the idea of having recognised descendants somehow placed among the 'middling sort'.

Situations emerging from these second families could be found among the eighteenth-century English nobility, which might suggest to a white ascendancy in Virginia, holding tightly to race privilege, just how a Sally Hemings who had simply been Jefferson's 'servant' might have threatened it. On the death of Edmund Sheffield, second duke of Buckingham and Normanby, in 1735, he left the Sheffield estates to his mother. Katherine, duchess of Buckingham and Normanby, had been the third wife of John Sheffield, first duke of Buckingham and Normanby, who was himself her second husband. On her death in 1743 she bequeathed the estates to her grandson Constantine Phipps, the son of her daughter from her first marriage, Lady Catherine Annesley. The estates were alienated from the Sheffield line of descent, but kept within a legitimate kinship network which included several peers of the realm. Phipps's inheritance of the entire estate was challenged by one Charles Herbert, who turned out to be an illegitimate son of the first duke of Buckingham and Normanby by a woman described in The Complete Peerage as 'Frances, "Mrs. Lambert"'. After lengthy judicial proceedings the Sheffield inheritance was divided between Charles Herbert and Constantine Phipps. Herbert, brought up outside the property-owning elite, became a landed gentleman, took the surname of Sheffield and was in due course admitted to the foothills of the hereditary titled nobility with a baronetcy, though neither he nor his male-line descendants (unlike those of Phipps) reached the House of Lords. (The most famous member of the family in 2009 is Samantha Cameron, nee Sheffield, wife of the leader of the Conservative Party.) While the Phippses did better in terms of status the core of the Sheffield estate in Lincolnshire was lost to them. There was a slight irony that Duchess Katherine, who had attempted to engineer the painless succession of the Phipps family to the Sheffield estate, was herself an illegitimate daughter of King James II, but had she seen Charles Herbert's case she could with some force have replied that she had not made any attempt to become queen.

The landowning class and titled nobility of Great Britain were sufficiently complex and enduring groups to withstand such challenges to caste; but the planter society of Virginia was newer and its pretensions to gentle status more fragile. A caste which clung to whiteness of skin and unambiguous European pedigree as the marks of the right to liberty and the right to own other people allowed itself to ignore a very small number of members of the elite who were possibly African descent - Gordon-Reed notes one possible case, that of Frances Bland Randolph Tucker, on page 537 of The Hemingses of Monticello - but anything more would have raised too many questions destructive to the Virginian status quo. Virginia had no peerage but property, and Jefferson supported and promoted efforts to dilute the concentration of Virginian land ownership in a few white hands; but self-preservation prevented the emergence of an African-American Charles Herbert, or (to give two examples among near-contemporaries of Jefferson where the sons of servant mothers inherited the estates of British peers) a George Finch of Burley-on-the-Hill, Rutland, or a John Bowes of Streatlam, Co. Durham. The Hemingses, freed, either forsook their heritage, left Virginia, or both, before white-dominated slave society collapsed under economic realities, war and the brutal consequences of its own self-deception.

The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia

2009-11-23T23:30:00.001Z

Returning from Oxford this evening, I found The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia waiting for me. Edited by Annette Landgraf and David Vickers, it aims to be a comprehensive guide to Handel's life, works and historical context. I have no claims to be a musicologist but was able to contribute the entries on Queen Anne; on Baron Johann Adolf von Kielmansegg (master of the horse to George I, who commissioned the waterborne concert at which Water Music was first performed); on George I's mistress Melusine von der Schulenberg, duchess of Kendal, and her daughter Petronilla, countess of Walsingham, best-known simply as the wife of the politician and literatus Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield, but a doughty defender of Handel during a period when he courted unfashionability with his music for the English language Semele. This is a useful volume for anyone interested in the musical and cultural history of early eighteenth-century Britain, to which I'm glad to have contributed.

I've been a bit less visible since I left the staff of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, so have been less obviously available to contribute to projects like this in the last couple of years; a pity, as I enjoy doing them.

On styling life peers

2009-10-22T16:02:00.000+01:00

I know that this is a matter of limited interest, but as long as the House of Lords is around, I'd like to see its members styled properly. So, Seumas Milne in The Guardian, 'Lord Mandelson', not 'Lord Mandelson of Foy'. Peter Mandelson's peerage was gazetted as 'Baron Mandelson, of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham'. That first comma tells you what the everyday substantive part of the title is.

And yes, there are too many lords for a media staffed by those bred up in egalitarian times to cope, hence the confusion over when to use a territorial designation. 'The Rt Hon Peter Mandelson, LP' [Life Peer] or (hence it be inferred that such a peer revolves at 33.3 per minute on a turntable) 'The Rt Hon Peter Mandelson, MHL' [Member of the House of Lords] would be welcome options.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - October 2009 update

2009-10-09T11:25:00.004+01:00

It was not my intention in establishing this blog simply to point to my publications elsewhere, but this is the second of two posts doing just that. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography yesterday published its fifteenth online update since the new dictionary first appeared in September 2004. As usual, a comprehensive introduction to the new material has been provided by the dictionary's editorial team at Oxford University Press. Among the new entries, and curently on the 'public shelves' allowing non-subscribers to read them, is my entry on William and Blanche Gibbs, nineteenth-century philanthropists and master and mistress of the Victorian Gothic house of Tyntesfield in Somerset, their lifestyle funded by an export monopoly for Peruvian guano.

The fifth anniversary of publication has been celebrated by taking a selection of articles published online since then and allowing them to be accessed free of charge, presumably for a limited period. These entries include the writer Douglas Adams as well as the judge Dame Rose Heilbron, Sarah Moulton (Sir Thomas Lawrence's 'Pinkie'), sanitary engineer Jesse Cooper Dawes and first woman American presidential candidate Victoria Claflin Woodhull.

The Book of English Magic

2009-09-29T13:46:00.000+01:00

I have contributed a reader review of The Book of English Magic to History Today's books blog.

The Pitmen Painters

2009-09-19T23:49:00.001+01:00

Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters is revived for the second time at the National Theatre, still with its original principal cast - led by Ian Kelly (himself something of a Renaissance man, being an award-winning biographer as well as an actor and director) as art lecturer Robert Lyon, and Christopher Connel (also recently seen in Newcastle as Alan Shearer in You Really Couldn't Make It Up, alongside Mark Benton as Newcastle United chairman Mike Ashley) as the 'star' of the Ashington Group of painters, Oliver Kilbourn. My placing of the tutor before the student may be unintentionally revelatory, but inadequately represents how far the painters led their own development. Ideology is a theme - principally the inadequacy of any of the dogmas current in the 1930s to explain what the pitmen painters did, and the packaging of the mining painters as a 'group' by the art establishment of professionals and patrons, obscuring their varied talent as individuals. The first half is practically a play in itself; the second, a coda set during the Second World War and after on the eve of nationalization, dwells on the aspirations of the Attlee era, building up to the unfurling of Kilbourn's Ellington Colliery banner and its promise of mock Tudor houses and gardens for the workers, symbolizing in the play the storming of the bastions of cultural privilege by the working class. As a surtitle notes as the end, as Hetton Silver Band's recording of the mining composer Robert Saint's hymn tune Gresford, the miners' University of Ashington never arose, and there are today no working collieries in the area. Perhaps the most powerful scene for our times, though, shortly before the end, comes when Oliver Kilbourn visits Robert Lyon in his studio, relocated from Newcastle to Edinburgh after Lyon was appointed professor at Edinburgh College of Art largely (the play suggests) on the back of his self-promotion as tutor of the Ashington Group, and is rendered in chalk and charcoal by Lyon as a sentimentalized rustic labourer. The exchange on privilege, where it lies, who has it and what it means to use it is certainly one for today's cultural commentators to chew upon.

British comic reprints in The Guardian and The Observer

2009-09-12T13:49:00.001+01:00

The Guardian this week launched a week of 1970s and 1980s comic reprints with a 1975 edition of Jackie. I was never in its target audience, though a long time ago I met a housing journalist who claimed to have worked at D C Thomson writing the letters page. Pages of small text (minuscule by today's standards - though I seem to recall that Jackie in the mid-70s was published in a larger format than the A4 size used by The Guardian reprint) reflect the readers' interest in David Essex and Donny Osmond, likewise text-heavy adverts for the WRNS and Barclays Clearing Department aim to lure the mid-teenage girls who would soon be leaving school, while adverts for Anadin and Feminax help the reader cope with the state of being "well on the way to being a woman." Though generally promoting positive images of womanhood, the advert for the Woman's Royal Army Corps still shows an uncertain looking girl being instructed in cooking by a moustachioed male chef. Tomorrow, the 2000th issue of The Beano - the copy which I bought on publication is in a box at my parents' somewhere - and then on Monday over from D C Thomson to IPC (now Egmont) for the football-led Roy of the Rovers, which was as little my territory as Jackie.

The decline of British comics is as much the result of underinvestment and the freezing out within the businesses concerned of many of those with the mental agility and sense of the market which could have found avenues to perpetuate them, as it is the result of the growth of alternative forms of entertainment for the target audience. Memorabilia magazine published an article in 2002 examining the place of girls' comics in the magazine world in what we might call the age of Bunty - the longest running of a generation of girls' titles, and published by D C Thomson between 1958 and 1991 - written by John Freeman (himself a comics editor, writer and designer of note) and which was reprinted on the very informative official fan site for IPC's gothic girls' title Misty here.

That The Guardian and The Observer are running this promotion at all shows how long ago the age of these comics is. The target audience is presumably those thirty- and fortysomethings who juggle mortgages with employment instability which defies the security promised by those adverts in Jackie, while battling to comprehend, let alone meet, the demands made by their children, inspired by today's globalized youth consumer culture. A dose of escapism into a remote comfort zone, when five pence a week bought you another thirty-six, thirty-two or twenty-four pages of turf in a shared world (though only sixteen if you were one of the hapless loyal readers of Polystyle's TV Comic after spring 1979) perhaps less universally accessible, and perhaps less immediate, than today's piped forms of information and entertainment, might be a tempting proposition. Jackie in 1975 looks like a product of a transitional age, fascinated by visual culture but in its heart wanting to converse with its readers through densely-composited text stories and the stark monochrome Helvetica and Roman of its problem pages. The rest of the week is dominated by boys' and humour titles, both more self-consciously visual forms.

Apologies for my absence

2009-08-26T15:26:00.000+01:00

It strikes me that I have been neglecting this blog, continuing to make frequent posts pseudonymously elsewhere and not under my own name under this proud eighteenth-century masthead. I will remedy this soon.

From Russia with Love

2009-06-14T23:15:00.002+01:00

I dipped into the James Bond season currently running at the Phoenix in Oxford today, and joined a thronged screen 2 for the remastered From Russia with Love. I'd not actually seen this one, though discussion a few nights ago had revealed the secret of the opening tag scene, which asserts and promotes Sean Connery's Bond as a cinematic icon as well as demonstrating how well Connery can act.

The Bondian world of From Russia with Love is less self-consciously fantastical than it would become in later films, but there's already a joy in the expression of dialogue such as the assessment of Grant as a "homicidal paranoid" and thus perfect agent material for SPECTRE. The regular cast are at ease with one another, and Desmond Llewelyn delivers his reactions to Connery's blithely cocksure Bond with such imperceptible effort that it's no surprise that his brief walk-on and off here as the officer from 'Q division' becomes a regular role.

The film is also a lesson in 1960s attitudes to sexuality. It's implied that the training establishment at SPECTRE Island caters to all of Grant's physical needs, underlining the argument that compared to Bond (himself deeply flawed as a role model in the eyes of his deskbound colleagues in London and his girlfriend in what is presumably Cambridge, but in Istanbul able to negotiate peace between the two fighting Gypsy women by charming them into states of submission) he's emotionally stunted, dependent as he is on institutions for sex. Rosa Klebb is presented as dually deviant, both as an older woman with a sexual appetite, and also demonstrating attraction both to Grant and to Tatiana (Tania) Romanova; but this again is presented as guaranteeing her position in SPECTRE, at least making her less expendable than the coldly boastful chess grand master Kronsteen. Tania's seemingly relaxed attitude to the impermanence of her liaison with Bond at the end of the film is an obvious male fantasy; when we first encounter him Bond, in a punt with his girlfriend Eunice who makes her disapproval of his lifestyle plain, is as close to the henpecked husband stereotype as we see him. There is perhaps not that great a distance between Connery's Bond and Sidney James's Carry On characters as might first be assumed.

From Russia with Love is at times an exuberant travelogue and recalls the days of credit controls and limited foreign travel well; Hagia Sophia is rarely out of shot in Istanbul, and when the camera actually enters its walls it lingers over its architecture as much as it does on other occasions on the contours of leading lady Daniela Bianchi. The scenes in the Byzantine underwater reservoir (not Pinewood as I'd told myself and readers when I first published this review, but a location in Istanbul) are just as exotic; the audience in Britain or America is taken from one layer of an unfamiliar but familiar world, to another, stranger one. We are offered juxtapositions of confinement with open spaces throughout, whether on location in Turkey, Switzerland or Argyll (the latter doubling as the Istrian peninsula), within railway carriages or sheltering within rock chambers or the back of a florist's wagon. This language is starkly derived from Buchan via Hitchcock and eloquent in itself about the multiple worlds inhabited by the many personae of the Bondian secret agent.

An enjoyable game was spotting the Doctor Who actors in the cast. The porter on the Orient Express whose wages are regularly subsidized by Bond's Turkish ally Ali Kerim Bey is played by George Pastell, The Tomb of the Cybermen's master logician Klieg; it was only when watching the credits, after struggling to place him, that I learned that Kerim Bey's chauffeur son was Neville Jason, much later Prince Reynart and his android double in The Androids of Tara. Francis de Wolff from The Myth Makers is the Gypsy leader.

The soundtrack is memorable too, and I'd heard much of it in other contexts. One piece which has been a favourite at the National Film Theatre before screenings is, I now know thanks to the presence of the soundtrack on Spotify, '007 Takes the Lektor', by John Barry.

Reggie Perrin

2009-04-24T23:25:00.002+01:00

Reggie Perrin, BBC 1's reinvention of the fondly-remembered 1970s sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, seems sadly on the basis of tonight's premiere largely a misfire. It needn't have been, because the seeds of something sufficiently distinct from the original were present. 'Kisses to the past' grated because they were unnecessary and invited comparison with the old series when the new Reggie Perrin needed to stand on its own two feet - being Reggie passing Sunshine Desserts on his way to Groomtech, and the nostalgic applause-seeking, and winning, "I didn't get where I am today..." from Chris.

I found it difficult to believe that Reggie's workplace adequately represents the modern office. The boss who ignores his underlings' carefully planned schedule is probably universal, but I suspect that the practices of different sectors of the economy have diverged more since the 1970s, making it more difficult for Groomtech to be representative of the middle-managerial workplace. There was indeed something oddly retro about the whole thing, when utter contemporaneity - agitational, even, in the best Sydney Newman tradition - was needed. I'd have put the Perrins in a more modern house; and I'd not have mentioned Carshalton Beeches in the script when Reggie clearly rides a Chiltern train... A Radio 4 preview in the last few days pointed to the Women's Social Action Committee as thirty years out of date, and I'd agree.

This is a second signature project commissoned by Jay Hunt which has not quite captured the spirit she was presumably seeking, as the revival of Minder was initiated by her at Five, and Reggie Perrin was her first public commission at BBC 1 (though it may have been on the books before). Martin Clunes is good enough to be about watchable, but too often comes across merely as a needlessly cruel manager rather than someone suffering in despair at the world in the manner of Leonard Rossiter. If Jay Hunt hoped to use Reggie Perrin to revive the British sitcom in the way that Doctor Who has revived family drama, I fear that she has instead only pointed to its weaknesses, revering a golden age of the 1970s without understanding why the hits of that era worked.

The Complete Richard Hannay

2009-03-29T23:46:00.002+01:00

The first thing to say about John Buchan's Richard Hannay is that he is probably not the man you think you know; at least, if you are anything like me. My impression, formed from fragments of film adaptations and a deep suspicion of the traditional boys' adventure story (whatever that was) inculcated (probably) in earliest childhood, was of an English gentleman, an adventurer in the service of the British Empire, an insider. Richard Hannay is perhaps all these things; but he is not simply the sum of these qualities, and none of them are automatic.

Hannay is an outsider several times over. When introduced in The Thirty-Nine Steps he is in London because that's what men who have made their 'pile' out in the Empire do. He's a successful mining engineer spending his fortune gained in the mines of southern Africa. Although born in Scotland, Hannay has lived in Africa since boyhood, but feels that he has exhausted its possibilities. A life of renting rooms in London and drifting through clubland without introductions leaves him frustrated. His career as an engineer has made his fortune and it is the part of his past which he introduces to us first; but he has also been a soldier and emerges from the first book as someone who takes for granted that the Second Matabele War, in the post-imperial era more easily understood as a war of colonial subjugation and expropriation, was a conflict of moral improvement both for the victors and the defeated. After the success of The Thirty-Nine Steps (initially serialized in Blackwood's under a pseudonym) Buchan extended Hannay's world into one he was already developing in his other contemporary novels and short stories, and added a circle of characters including Sandy Arbuthnot, later Lord Clanroyden, a Scottish aristocrat, traveller in the east and master of disguise; John S. Blenkiron, an American engineer and millionaire investor who acts in the British interest during the Great War; Peter Pienaar, mentioned in The Thirty-Nine Steps as "the best scout I ever knew"; Mary Lamington, nineteen-year-old intelligence operative who takes Hannay by surprise in such a way that he marries her; Geordie Hamilton, patriotic brawling Scots soldier who becomes first Hannay's batman then a loyal retainer of Sandy's; and Scots laird and baronet, enthusiastic and skilled pilot, Sir Archie Roylance. All are the stronger for being relayed through Hannay; when in The Courts of the Morning (not included in the combined volume) Hannay chooses not to join Sandy and Blenkiron in their South American adventure, the bulk of the novel feels emptier for its third person narration.

Hannay's opinions and prejudices are continually foregrounded by Buchan; Hannay emerges as a character through the gap between the limited outlook expected by those seeking to manipulate him, and Hannay's own broader view. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Scudder intrigues Hannay with his tale of Jewish conspiracy, but never entirely convinces him. His African experience is crucial. Later, in The Three Hostages, Dominick Medina entirely misreads Hannay's character, fatally for Medina's ambitions. Medina's roots in England are deeper than Hannay's, and though he is descended from Iberian exiles and is influenced by an Irish mother who holds England in disgust, it is his Englishness which is emphasised and which may lead him to consider Hannay dull and an ideal pawn. Much or most of the overseas experience with which Medina is widely credited turns out to be fraudulent, and what he has learned, he lacks the understanding to interpret beyond narrow self-interest. Frequently throughout the Hannay books, the reader is implicitly asked to contemplate how little those know of England who only England know.

The great charm of The Thirty-Nine Steps arises from its combination of travelogue and adventure story. For a substantial section of the book it appears that the events which leave Hannay a wanted man are a red herring to allow Buchan to present a series of vignettes depicting Scottish types. For Hannay Lowland Scotland is an ancestral home which he has never really known; though he returns to it in a series of crises, in The Thirty-Nine Steps, in Mr Standfast, in the second climax to The Three Hostages, and the Laverlaw section of The Island of Sheep. In The Thirty-Nine Steps Hannay finds an innocence in Scotland with which he is sometimes impatient - the audience for the radical candidate he finds deluded - but those who are happy with their traditional social roles are largely trustworthy and in some cases models of charity. Characters of this type appear in some form or other throughout the books. They are appropriate for a land which in Buchan's scheme for Hannay's world is a kind of Elysium, often disturbed from the outside, but which when properly maintained - as on Sandy Clanroyden's estate where Hannay and Haraldsen retreat in The Island of Sheep - can strengthen one against those who wish harm. However, to do the work one is called to do one has to leave the sanctuary of the Lowlands. England is the principal theatre of industry and the head office for the rest of the world. Disorder comes when that head office is subverted (as in The Thirty-Nine Steps) or loses sight of a clear aim (as in The Three Hostages).

The Hannay books aren't straightforwardly simplistic adventure stories either. The Thirty-Nine Steps was famously written while Buchan was confined to bed as an experiment in writing a 'shocker' - a "romance where the incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible" (quoted Lownie, John Buchan, 119). There's something self-consciously genre-challenging about it - Scudder presents the plot to assassinate the Greek prime minister, Karolides, in terms of a conspiracy of cliches: anarchists, capitalists and especially Jews - but Hannay finds the truth more prosaic and more dangerous, a foreign power determined to provoke a European war at its own convenience and whose agents in Britain are long-established and skilled at hiding in plain sight within the Imperial establishment. This scenario is presented as a more realistic depiction of European power politics, helped by the anonymity of the German agents who if having something of the diabolical masterminds of pulp fiction about them seem less prone to caricature, and more threatening, because we never learn their names - at least, not in this book.

The Three Hostages also draws attention to the artifices of the thriller. The character of Dr Greenslade recalls Scudder, and prompts in Hannay a discussion of the way a thriller is constructed; it seems a neat joke when we learn that following the Great War Hannay's secret service contact Sir Walter Bullivant is now Lord Artinswell, and thus in terms of his signature has moved from 'B' to 'A'. The confrontation across the wild landscape of Machray, while awkward in the context of the main narrative, is called for because Buchan, through the revulsion of Hannay, has built Dominick Medina into such a fiend (if one brought down by his own arrogance) that the convention of the exercise demands that Medina seek swift personal vengeance.

Both The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep are disappointments after Mr Standfast, presented as the centrepiece of the Hannay novels in the five-book Penguin combined edition, and with some justification. Both it and the second instalment, Greenmantle, read like the work of a government propagandist, which they were; but there has been a decided shift in tone and content. Greenmantle, like The Thirty-Nine Steps, takes place in a world where women are distant and mysterious - Hilda von Einem is a threat to Hannay because he has little experience of women, and she almost destroys the world-travelled but ascetic Sandy Arbuthnot. The German commander, Von Stumm, plays up to the stereotype of the physically heavy, privately effeminate officer. The book fulfils the role of reminding its readers of the importance of the Ottoman Empire as a theatre of war, and the contribution of the Russians, whose commander at Erzerum turns out to be a Russian grand duke who had once hunted with Peter Pienaar in South Africa in 1898; the Russians are thus marked as familiar and knowable.

Mr Standfast was written at the close of the war, and while Greenmantle was set in a war where combat was still thought of in terms of cavalry charges, Mr Standfast was completed once the war was over, and shows how Hannay, who is largely having a good war, deals with the deleterious effects it has on the home and western fronts. For John Buchan, successful people are adaptable ones who find something to do in changed circumstances and excel through that adaptability; Peter Pienaar is such, having trained as a pilot at an advanced age and emerged as one of the best fighters in the air, only to be shot down over Germany and one leg ruined. He is later allowed to move to Switzerland which further marks him as a non-combatant; his turn of phrase has become more elliptical and philosophical. He is one of two Fisher King figures, the other being Lancelot Wake, the conscientious objector whom Hannay first meets among the pacifist colony in "the garden city of Biggleswick" (itself a mocking of over-idealistic town planning) and whom he again encounters on Skye, and who gradually earns from Hannay a slightly uncomprehending respect. Wake eventually joins Hannay and his party on the western front as a messenger, and is killed from a shrapnel wound to his groin. Hannay's self-satisfied consignment of Wake to perpetual virginity, after Hannay has won the hand of the teenage spy Mary Lamington, comes to signify his silent recognition of Wake's status as a Grail prince, though he does not know it. There is a contrast between the honest conflict of the men on the front line, and the corrupting nature of the world of espionage; Graf von Schwabing, the chameleon-like survivor of the Black Stone defeated by Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, once captured, is not handed over to the authorities but instead offered the chance of redemption by taking his place on the front line alongside British and French troops, where the extreme circumstances would not allow him to reinvent himself one more and disappear. Redemption as a theme emerges through the books; Medina turns away from the possibility in The Three Hostages, but hard work and a morally uplifting goal transform Haraldsen and to some extent restore both Hannay and Lombard in The Island of Sheep.

Much as The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep fail to live up to the promise of Mr Standfast, they do express an aimlessness felt in Britain and Europe after 1918 which affects certainties Hannay felt in the first two books. While Greenmantle treats the Turks and Arabs with cultural condescension, the Britain of the later novels has similar vulnerabilities to Buchan's portrayal of the Ottoman Empire; the Imperialist assumptions have been swept away; even the metropolitan territory is fragmented, with the independence of the Irish Free State, and new leisure activities have sprung up, incomprehensible to Hannay, as barriers of rank and race are eroded. While an adventurer who respects risk-takers - the 'sportsmen' of the earlier novels - Hannay also takes for granted heredity, that peoples and classes have distinct characters shaped across generations. The Island of Sheep sees Haraldsen's thirteen-year-old daughter Anna assuming a natural and unchallenged leadership over the people of the Norlands, over whom her maternal ancestors had exercised lordship for centuries. She is also female and in the later novels the married Hannay is obviously less familiar with women, though he does not know his wife well enough to realise that she will have her own plans independent of his instructions and look for the eponymous three hostages herself.

The Island of Sheep concerns a grudge from Hannay's youth in South Africa coming back to haunt him and his old comrade Lombard; it is perhaps the difficulty of finding things for Hannay plausibly to do in South America that excludes him from The Courts of the Morning. The Island of Sheep is concerned only tangentially with the politics of the 1930s, as Haraldsen's father's dream of a society invigorated by a return to Nordic values could be a comment upon Nazi Germany. It's a regret that Buchan didn't live to write a Hannay novel set in the Second World War - the transformations which that conflict would have wrought on Hannay (who, like his creator, might have moved from an Imperial to an internationalist perspective, and would probably be more sensitive about the casual use of derogatory nicknames for ethnic groups) and his friends would have been entertaining.

Press Gang - first thoughts

2009-03-25T15:30:00.003Z

I've recently started watching Press Gang, the first television series written by Steven Moffat, which ran on ITV between 1989 and 1993. As I've written elsewhere, when the first series began the location was too close to home, as I'd just spent a year as one of the editors of a school newspaper initially affiliated with a local weekly. I would have loved the staffing levels and the collective enthusiasm displayed by Lynda Day's team.

Press Gang has a format built on shifting sands at the frontiers of the plausible, but which is kept alive by the cutting wit of Steven Moffat's writing and the energetic belief of the cast in what they are doing. Matt Kerr, an important character seen only occasionally, is a well-known journalist who has made the unexpected career move of moving to a local paper, where he spins off a weekly Junior Gazette produced by students from the local secondary school. The Junior Gazette's staff are initially extracted from the school's cleverest and most motivated pupils, but by the time the first edition approaches Matt Kerr is complaining that all the problem kids have been thrust in his direction too, such as Spike, American and therefore uninhibited by British reserve and also the perpetrator of an unmentionable act at the school disco. Dexter Fletcher's Spike becomes the romantic interest for Julia Sawalha's Lynda, however much she refuses to acknowledge it. The large workspace used by the Junior Gazette looked, plausibly, like an abandoned compositor's room; while early episodes of the first series look back to classic early twentieth-century depictions of the newsroom, where even the telephone is exotic (the Junior Gazette shouldn't have one, by agreement with Matt Kerr - an odd prohibition but the absence of the phone helps an episode or two along) later ones acknowledge the arrival of networked computers, as used by tetraplegic contributor Billy Homer.

Discovering Press Gang now is to look into as vanished a world as my long-ago late-1980s sixth form. ITV original children's production has long disappeared, and it's difficult to imagine the demographic-strangled CBBC commissioning this now. Too quirky for a Five commission, its entrenchment in the heightened reality of children's television makes Press Gang unlikely Channel Four material, post-Hollyoaks. The large cast alone dates it. There is an absence of toilet humour, but a sprinkling of cheery sexual innuendo every so often which marks Press Gang's attitude to growing up as an experience where enjoyment can be found amidst the anguish; unlike the by-the-numbers earnestness in what I've seen of Tracy Beaker or the hand-holding of The Sarah Jane Adventures, there is little need to heavily signpost the lessons learned by the characters.

As well as providing invaluable support for a young writer and a young cast to show how good they were, Press Gang is about teenagers coming to grips with adult responsibilities, and how the road to self-knowledge is a dangerous one, sometimes fatal. At eighteen or nineteen, I saw Lynda as repellently self-assured; two decades on, she seems very vulnerable. The self-assurance is a veneer, used for comic effect - as in her repeated insistence that she has no particular interest, romantic or otherwise, in Spike - and for tragic, such as her failure to realise how serious David Jefford's alienation actually is, prompting the harangue which leads to David's suicide in Monday-Tuesday. Lynda sustains it by her capacity for self-protecting tunnel vision, which propels the narrative of Breakfast at Czar's as she ignores the evidence which would confirm that the Junior Gazette has been misled by head of the council planning committee. How far her decision to shut the team in the office all night, so they can produce a new edition in a few hours, is consciously motivated by the fact it prevents Spike going on a date with the 'obvious' Charlotte is something Lynda could not and would not answer.

Lynda stands for integrity; opposite her is Colin, the Junior Gazette's head of sales and briefly (in Shouldn't I Be Taller?) her successor as editor. Colin's principal role is comedic - he is the class clown, his outfits get louder, and his schemes more grandiose across the season and a half. Where Lynda stresses the Junior Gazette as a responsible, campaigning 'Voice of Today's Youth', Colin learns the lessons of the red-tops and for one horrible issue has the team produce the sensationalist Gaz. A later episode has Colin build up his stooge Fraz into a chess prodigy so he can stage a chess match against local chess phenomenon Suzi Newton, played by Abigail Docherty whose general physical resemblance to teenage mathematician Ruth Lawrence, a semi-regular fixture in the media in the mid- to late-1980s, is exploited by her performance and her costuming.

The regular cast of Press Gang were all on cusps of careers at this point. Some had become established television faces as children, but would move away from regular exposure after Press Gang, like Mmoloki Christie or Kelda Holmes. Lee Ross and Charlie Creed-Miles are among those who have established solid working careers; Lucy Benjamin was in EastEnders for a while, Dexter Fletcher is rarely without period costume these days, and Gabrielle Anwar has emerged from Hollywood startletdom into leading roles on American television. Julia Sawalha is rarely off British television screens.

I'm currently a few episodes in to season two, and so have yet to see the Junior Gazette cut its ties with school and become a fully commercial enterprise in the later seasons. More when I have done so.

Tony Hart 1925-2009

2009-01-18T13:53:00.000Z

It's been a week where people who influenced the popular culture of the world in which I was born and grew up have been dying - 'head Dalek' John Scott Martin, Patrick McGoohan, Angela Morley (composer of the ATV logo music, and much, much else), John Mortimer, David Vine, Ricardo Montalban. Now, Tony Hart has gone. I first remember him as a largely silent presence on Vision On, where only presenter Pat Keysell spoke for any length of time and with her microphone turned on, and where Tony Hart was the most respectable-looking of the anarchic forces of communication which Pat kept under the barest level of control. Later on, there were Take Hart and Hartbeat - Smart Hart was after my time and I hadn't realised that it had existed, though I knew that Smart continued the BBC children's television art tradition, including the Gallery. His contribution to Blue Peter as designer of the ship logo is well-known, but he was a guest presenter in that programme's early years as well.

Tony Hart visited the Oxford Union in early 1991, and kept a packed debating chamber of students absolutely rapt. We were the end of the Vision On generation, the first to know Morph, and listened to tales of his move from the army into television graphics - "Every few mornings I wake up thinking 'You're an officer, man! Is this any way to spend your life?' " (Yes! his listeners cried telepathically) - with recollections of how nice a person Colin Bennett was to work with, and carefully making sure that Peter Lord and David Sproxton received credit and praise as creators of Morph, often misattributed to Hart, including by the BBC today until Hart's former producer Christopher Pilkington corrected them on air. At one point, before telling an anecdote with post-watershed content, he asked "Are there any children in the audience?" and of course we all laughed self-consciously, because when he was there we were children again. A great communicator, who will be missed.

Quantum of Solace

2008-12-07T00:22:00.000Z

I've never been to see a James Bond film in the cinema before, but grew up with them flickering in and out of my awareness on television. I think the first one I saw might have been You Only Live Twice, or perhaps Live and Let Die. I haven't seen Casino Royale either, so this was my introduction to Daniel Craig's Bond.

I was left with the impression that the Bond franchise is suffering an identity crisis, though there were signs that it is working on resolving it. I watched most of the Pierce Brosnan films on television, and while there is the superficial connection of M still being played by Judi Dench, otherwise this doesn't seem to be the universe that Brosnan's Bond inhabited. Where Brosnan's Bond fought larger-than-life megalomaniacs, Craig fights less tangible threats. The high technology now belongs to MI6 with their giant touch-sensitive display screens; the enemy in the field deals in the material world, water, oil, guns, bullets, blood and bone, and these need to be Bond's weapons too.

The audience is played with, of course. Gemma Arterton's Fields appears to be the unexpected introduction of a more traditional Bond girl, but she is a play-acting minor foreign office staffer, seduced by Bond almost before they meet, and she provides another layer for Bond's guilt. I don't know the books at all, but Olga Kurylenko's Camille, with her scarred back, echoed what I think of as a Fleming trope, the beautiful woman with the physical imperfection caused by a man when she was very young, though I don't know whether it occurs outside Dr No.

Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The state of opinion in 2001.

2008-11-08T21:50:00.002Z

Time to bring out one of my old Doctor Who fanzine articles, lately rediscovered. This was published in Faze issue 23, in 2001.

Nearly five years since the last new Doctor Who production for television was broadcast, and eleven years since the last series, it's becoming more and more difficult to say anything new about the programme. Stories that through the 1990s, especially, were closely scrutinised, deconstructed, reconstructed and pastiched in Virgin or BBC novels are receding into the past. There's a danger that a critical consensus could emerge by default, as fandom's intellectual wing finds it has nothing more to chew and moves on, leaving newcomers with sets of statements that become final and definitive by neglect.

This situation affects 'classics' as much as it does the less-regarded adventures of the Doctor, and one of these is 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang', one of those stories that almost everyone still rates highly. It came second in the DWM awards in 1998, at 89.21%. In this article I intend to question some of the recently-printed statements about Talons, and try to reanimate the spirit of debate!

"It's pulp adventure, and not profound - there's no message, no clunking allegory to be found at its core..." Alan Barnes, DWM 295, 3 June 1998

It's certainly pulp adventure, and I wouldn't claim that it sets out to moralise, but like all good drama, 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' is concerned with the relationships between people and how individuals live with the compromises that they make in everyday life. In doing so it delves a little further than most Doctor Who stories do. 'Talons' concentrates on physical appearance and how this affects how people see each other as human beings. The viewer is alerted to this by the Doctor's failure to recognise what marks out the features of Li H'sen Chang from those of the police sergeant in episode one, ethnicity being all-important to the Doctor's Victorian British hosts. The first exchange between Jago and Litefoot is also remarkable as Jago comments that he should have recognised Litefoot's intellectual ability from his physiognomy - a fashionable notion throughout the nineteenth century, allied to the skull-exploring science of phrenology, with deeply obstructive effects for those deemed, 'scientifically', to be physically second-rate.

The story plays with Victorian theory - and modern prejudice - by presenting the central villain as a man in a mask, who has become deformed through his own experiments and is failing to restore his physical form. His speeches often are self-congratulatory, but Magnus Greel cannot bear to look at his own face, nor does he wish anyone else to see it. It is almost as if Greel's experiment has revealed his own inner nature. The Zygma experiment is another picture of Dorian Gray, but Greel has become his own canvas.

"Goofs: Why does Greel need girls rather than young people in general?" Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, Doctor Who: The Discontinuity Guide, 1995

The most obvious explanation for Greel's obsession with young women is a sexual one; his draining of their life essence analogous to the way that Dracula (indirectly alluded to both in the script's dialogue and its execution - Greel seems most active during the hours of darkness) principally sought young women as his prey, or to the sexual assaults of 'Jolly Jack', mentioned by Casey as part of the scene-setting in the first episode. Alternatively, as the script suggests that his DNA is breaking down following his failure to enter the correct levels before making his journey through the zygma beam; perhaps all the damage was to his X chromosome, and he can only be guaranteed repair by taking genetic information from young women, unravelling their bodies as he does so. This is probably bad pseudo-science, but it should not obscure the fact that Greel is as foul a rapist as the Ripper from whom he is drawn.

The difference between Greel and the Ripper is that he needs a procurer, someone who will drag his victims from the streets, and his participation in this business shows how far Li H'sen Chang is prepared to go in the service of his benefactor. Chang shows occasional signs of wanting independence from Greel. John Bennett rolls his eyes in exasperation as Greel outlines his demands during their scenes together in the carriage, and we learn just before Chang's death that he was anticipating a performance before Queen Victoria. The logic of Chang's ongoing season at Jago's establishment is that he remains there to protect Greel; how many times, one wonders, has he had to hypnotise Jago to keep him from becoming suspicious? Yet in other scenes Chang appears to be genuinely subservient to his master; it's difficult to be certain whether the production had a clear line on how far Chang is independent of Greel. The focus of the story, after all, is first on the disappearances, and then on the who and what of Weng-Chiang, not on the detail of the criminal network that Chang runs to service Greel's needs. As a beaten Chang escapes the Doctor to offer himself as a dinner guest of the giant rats, with himself as the entrée, the Doctor muses that 'it was a good act'. This simple, but multi-layered sentence, refers not only to Chang's stage performance, but to his benevolence in taking in the failing Greel in the first place, and perhaps also pays tribute to his ability to convince Greel that he was his devoted servant for so long, well after his experiences had taught him that Greel was not the god he had once appeared. Terrance Dicks, perhaps feeling that he would be unable to explain this ambiguity to the Target audience, omitted this line from the novelisation and portrayed Chang as a religious fanatic at the (almost) last; a pity, as the part is written and portrayed with more sensitivity, and Dicks's novelisations had a great influence on the way that fans remembered the broadcast serials.

"Even as late as 1977's 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang', a white actor was employed to play a Chinese villain under heavy eye make-up. Strangely, many fans of this popular serial are surprised that it hasn't had a recent terrestrial repeat." Gary Gillatt, Doctor Who From A to Z, 1998

Having cited Terrance Dicks's approach to the novelisations as one reason why the sophistication of Chang's characterisation has been overlooked, I'll now quote Dicks again to explain the racist casting puzzle which has dogged 'Talons' ever since it was broadcast. I remember reading in the article 'Overseas Overview' in DWM late in 1982 of how the Canadian broadcaster TV Ontario ended up not showing 'Talons' in their province at all following concern from representatives of the Chinese community. David Howe and Stephen James Walker write in Doctor Who: The Television Companion that Bennett's "performance and make-up are so convincing that it is difficult to believe that he is not actually Chinese". Bennett's performance is strong, yes, but his features can't be disguised by prosthetic eyelids, and the result could even be seen as grotesque.

It's possible, though, that this effect was sought by the production team. To quote Terrance's interpretation of the story again:

"...the magician had appeared from nowhere. Perhaps he really was from China as he claimed. After all he really was Chinese, unlike most Oriental magicians who were usually English enough once the make-up was off." Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, 1977

Most commentators have agreed that the success of 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' stems from its sense of fictional period; the Doctor and Leela do not step out of the TARDIS into Victorian London as such, but in a particular Victorian London that was already well-established in the popular imagination. I don't know about the contributions of Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake or Fu Manchu to Talons, but those who do agree that their influence is all there. It's appropriate therefore that instead of facing a villain who appears to be a native of China, the Doctor has as his foe someone whose image evokes a late-nineteenth-century idea of how a hostile, "inscrutable" Chinaman might look - a European in exaggerated eye make-up and elaborate moustache. This argument does not refute the charge of racism but shows how the casting of John Bennett was a calculated manoeuvre rather than an act of laziness on the part of a production team reluctant to give a leading role to a non-white actor.

I've dealt with the main criticisms that I can remember, and my remaining observations are somewhat random. London's geography in 'Talons' owes little to reality; there is no doubt that the Fleet runs near Limehouse in the televised story, whereas in reality it enters the Thames under Blackfriars Bridge, having followed the course of New Bridge Street, Farringdon Street and Farringdon Road. A friend of mine once insisted that I had assured him the Venerable Bede really did like fish, although I have no recollection of anything of the sort. Does anyone know if Bede mentions a taste for seafood in his writings? Counterfactualists might like to speculate on the companion we might have had, if Leela had not been carried over from 'The Face of Evil', as the Victorian setting would have been the obvious point to introduce Philip Hinchcliffe's Eliza Doolittle character, although this story shows very well how Leela ended up fulfilling that role. I'm an admirer of Jago and Litefoot as characters in the context of this story, but have difficulty seeing how their partnership would have continued in any proposed series. Their characters would have needed to be fleshed out considerably, and at the very least Litefoot would have needed to find a laboratory without masking tape on the walls! I mean to get round to digging out the magazine he is seen reading at one point, issue 917 of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; considering the care taken with the Doctor Who of this period the choice of periodical could well have been deliberate. Finally, after a couple of viewings of the story with frenzied note-taking, I'm realising how much easier DVDs will make the reviewing process!

Life on Air, by David Hendy

2008-10-16T12:24:00.005+01:00

I first posted a version of this review elsewhere earlier this year, but the recent paperback publication of David Hendy’s Life on Air seems a good opportunity to revisit it. Life on Air was a deserved winner of the Longman-History Today prize as 2008 Book of the Year.

Life on Air is perhaps best described as an institutional history; but the limits and nature of the institution the reader might be presupposing are immediately called into question. The title and the subject court the reader's experience as listener to a Radio Four whose identity which is validated by continuity in the content and personality of the service. As David Hendy reminds his readers, while Radio Four has always had a controller and its own staff, the character of the station, like other BBC services in what was once called sound, then radio, and now audio (the recent rechristening of BBC Radio 7 notwithstanding), has concurrently been dependent not only on the general direction of BBC radio as set by successive directors or managing directors, but also in part on the ambitions of other departments within BBC radio. Each of these (particularly before the move to corporate centralism in BBC management under John Birt) existed to a large (if variable) extent on its own terms and championed its own interpretation of what public service broadcasting ought to be in Britain, how the BBC should fulfil its role, and fought for its own share of the carefully rationed wavelengths. The evolution of Radio Four took place within this context.

The emergence of Radio Four's present character is almost a story of how people in lower, middle and lower senior management in BBC radio championed 'the rich mix' - a term which Hendy associates with one particular fight in defence of Radio Four, between 1978 and 1982 - against various committees and several managing directors of radio, directors-general, or governors, against expectations that in the near future 'the rich mix' would be redundant and that Radio Four's purpose would be 'informational'. Not only was the cause of rolling immediacy particularly demanded by journalists, it seems also to have been an expectation of Ian Trethowan, managing director of BBC Radio from 1970 to 1976, that Radio Four was to become a news and current affairs network; and many other figures in the BBC took this for granted at various points between 1967 and the early 1990s.

Hendy starts the book with a chapter '30 September 1967', and David Dunhill's elegy for the Home Service as he closed it down for the last time (though missing my favourite part of that announcement, the punning "What is radio for?"). While Dunhill assured listeners that the Home Service was like a bride on the eve of her wedding, which would go on being the same person - "we hope" - the change of name to Radio Four came as part of an ongoing process of rethinking the purpose of the Home Service which had been going on since the arrival of Frank Gillard as director of BBC Radio in 1963. At this point the Home Service was in the middle of a conscious transformation, having over the previous three years been gradually exchanging music programmes with the Light or Third programmes for speech. These included taking over The Archers from the Light, and sending programmes like Record Review to the 'Music Programme' that shared the Third's frequency, though it was the sharpening of the music-led networks that was BBC radio's priority, and thinking about the future of speech was an afterthought. This reshaping did not end in 1967; Woman's Hour, for example, didn't come to Radio Four from Radio Two until 1973. Its most successful controllers seem to have been those who tenaciously defended the character of the network while stressing evolutionary change.

For someone for whom BBC radio has been a recurrent soundtrack to his life, there are smiles of familiarity as various landmarks are passed. In October 1970 new controller Tony Whitby - husband of children's television's Joy Whitby, creator of Play School - merged four consumer programmes into You and Yours, listened to in my lunchtimes at home in the early 1980s, and still thriving in the twenty-first century. Brian Redhead arrived at Today in 1975 as one of many attempts to harden its news content. This drive was frustrated briefly during the 'counter revolution' of 1977 led by controller Ian McIntyre, which saw Today being sliced in two to allow for Up to the Hour, a medley including paper reviews, Thought for the Day, and clips from comedy records, the intention being to make the news more focused; the experiment was ultimately as good as denounced on air by announcer Peter Donaldson when he urged listeners to retune to other BBC networks rather than listen to it.

Many of Radio Four's crises seem to have arisen from anxiety that its plural personality couldn't be maintained, or from the certainty of factions such as the aforementioned news lobby that it could not and should not be sustained. Hendy does not stray too far into the debate on modern Britain's uneasy and uncertain grasp on what 'class' is, which continues to shape current discussion about Radio Four. (I wasn't sure if the recent utterances by Jane Garvey about the ‘middle class’ nature of the station, following her translation from Radio Five Live to Radio Four and Woman's Hour, were self-conscious PR, or an unthinking condemnation of the debate about what constitutes intelligent discussion and what constitutes elitism to another round of dubious class-based rhetoric.)

Even as Radio Four 'Basic' took over 1500m/200kHz long wave and became Radio Four UK, complete with Fritz Spiegl's famous theme, on 23 November 1978, it was being undermined from within. The “new national service from the BBC”, as it was hailed by announcer David Symonds, was rapidly being presented at a succession of meetings as an anachronism. The election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979 encouraged those in the BBC who thought a period of retrenchment, even retreat, from the goals established at the start of the 1970s was inevitable. For a while it seems to have been assumed that the numbered stations of 1967 would be phased out and that most of Radio Four's output would be merged with local radio under the heading 'BBC Town and Country Radio' or possibly 'BBC Radio England', acknowledging that for many the requirement to carry parliamentary coverage on long wave, and the absence of VHF frequencies for Radio Four outside England (not fixed until the 1990s) meant that 'Radio Four UK' had failed at its inception. Later, John Birt, an outsider from ITV parachuted into the BBC as its first director of news and current affairs, for reasons which had a lot to do with politics, was incensed in 1987 when Radio Four allowed Today to end at 9am on the day of the Great Storm; controller Michael Green reasonably said that there was no point keeping news on air as local radio was best placed to provide information to those affected and the storm hadn't made much impact anywhere north of Watford. The incident helped fuel Birt's desire that Radio Four should become news-led or evolve into or spin off a serious news network, something that never happened in the way Birt imagined, except during the 1991 Gulf War and the attempted coup in the USSR later that year.

Hendy celebrates but also criticises the atmosphere described by some as 'creative inactivity' which allowed producers to spend time thinking; against the neo-managerialism of 'Producer Choice', introduced by Birt as director-general, and which was in full flight in 1997 when Hendy ends the main body of his account, he places the introduction of time management, a fuller appreciation of costing and editorial monitoring in the 1960s which decisively ended a culture where many programme-makers spent long lunchbreaks in the pub. Birt's BBC awaits its historian, though Hendy briefly introduces business sociologist Richard Sennett and his conclusions about the conditions which ensure quality of output without ruling whether or not Birt's reforms decisively affected this at Radio Four for better or worse.

By good fortune as much as by design, it seems, Radio Four has moved from its roots in the 'middlebrow' Home Service, born out of the need to comfort and sustain Britain at the dawn of the Second World War, through the incorporation of some of the high cultural aspirations following the dissolution of the old Third Programme during the 1960s (which magnified in importance following the arrival of Melvyn Bragg as presenter of Start the Week in 1987), into an age when we can no longer be certain what low and high culture are. Its role now, Hendy thinks, is "to widen out horizons a little as the world of fragmenting tastes and ideologies pulls us apart". This is a development unforeseen by the "public affairs" lobby who wanted drama and comedy excised from Radio Four in the 1970s, and perhaps also by John Birt, who apparently expressed bafflement at Michael Green's determination to hold on to Today, The World at One and PM, which (in the discussions which eventually led to the creation of Radio Five Live) Birt wanted as the core of his desired 'upmarket' rolling news network. Didn't he want to lose Today, he was asked, so he could run comedy in the mornings? The 'rich mix' is surely richer for being mixed together on one network. The arguments used by European listeners during the 'Save Radio Four Long Wave' campaign of the early 1990s included that Radio Four was a good ambassador for British cultural values. The continued existence of Radio Four argues well for the health of British pluralism, whatever one's opinions of the state.

Brideshead Revisited

2008-10-13T23:06:00.002+01:00

If the youth of a large proportion of the audience at Brideshead Revisited at the Odeon Magdalen Street, Oxford, last Thursday night was anything to go by, Brideshead Revisited retains its hold on the imaginations of new Oxford undergraduates. In fact, most of the people on the streets that evening seemed to be freshers, crowding around the entrance to Po Na Na, striding down St Giles with varying levels of conviction and purpose. This, perhaps, was their night; but if they sought the Oxford of today in Brideshead Revisited, they would have been hard pushed to find it.

I mainly know Brideshead Revisited from Granada Television's interpretation nearly thirty years ago. When I went to an open day at the college I eventually attended, I was told by one of the JCR that Brideshead had been a cult in 1980s Oxford, to the extent that 'to Brideshead' was allegedly a verb, referring to people who carried teddy bears around with them and aped the supposed manners of the 1920s. The reality of this exaggeration by the turn of the 1990s, as far as I saw, was a short-lived student society called the Romantics, active about the time of my finals. Nevertheless, there was a moment of personal recognition in this film; there's a moment in the book where Charles Ryder recognises the arrival of Sebastian in his life as the opening of a door in a wall into an enchanted garden, and Sebastian's room in Christ Church seems to have been translated from Meadow Buildings to a familiar staircase in Tom Quad, though I make no claim for that particular student society whose then-president reigned from a set there to have brought me within reach of grace.

The film, from a screenplay by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, inevitably comes across as a précis of the book or (if you are like me) the longer television adaptation. Despite the protests of director Julian Jefford that he has never seen the Granada version, members of his crew probably have. The new film is haunted by the television series, with various performances echoing their television predecessors. Castle Howard is used again for Brideshead (abandoning a plan to use Chatsworth), and some of the scenes seem almost like alternate angle shots, as the same staircases and corridors used by Charles Sturridge are chosen again.

A lot of effort is put into incorporating details from the book here and there. Sebastian greets Charles on his first visit to Brideshead wearing pillar-box red pyjamas. There's some dialogue reconstruction in the early Oxford scenes, though Lunt the porter is only introduced to make the point that Oxford undergraduates did not 'do for themselves'; and there is nothing of the complaints about the women attending the ball. Cousin Jasper's denunication of Anglo-Catholics as "Sodomites" is however transferred to our first glimpse of Anthony Blanche's set on the river, one of many translations to celluloid (though there were several artefacts on the 'print' I saw which were distinctly electronic) which observes the letter but not the spirit of the book.

Advance publicity drew attention to the replacement of Charles Ryder's fascination with the Flyte family with a more conventional love triangle between Sebastian, Charles and Julia. Ben Whishaw's Sebastian is more fragile than Anthony Andrews's, though one of the failings of this increasingly staccato interpretation is that his decline seems all too rapid, and is sparked by the acceleration of Charles's love affair with Julia. In the book this begins on ship, in mid-Atlantic, a decade after Charles's friendship with Sebastian has ended; here, Julia comes to Venice with Sebastian and Charles, leading to a precipitate first kiss in a contrived carnival scene. The film has a less sophisticated understanding of sexuality than either the book or the Granada adaptation, and Sebastian seems far more motivated by the thwarting of his homosexual desires (here dealt with more explicitly than in the novel, though still tamely) than one feels he should. His final appearance in the narrative sees him in Morocco, a hybrid of ascetic holy man and AIDS patient, attended to by (and, we hear, later attending) bearded monks straight out of Renaissance painting.

Charles Ryder is played competently and often with subtlety by Matthew Goode, though he is working with debased material compared to Jeremy Irons. (Television folklore holds that although the Granada Brideshead was credited to John Mortimer, m'learned scriptwriter's work was abandoned at an early stage and largely used as a guide to scouting locations, with directors and cast improvising dialogue scene by scene based on the text of Waugh's book.) Problematically, Charles's longings here are far more material than they seem in the book; it's much easier to think at an early stage that he consciously longs to possess Brideshead with Julia, as Rex Mottram believes, particularly as here his involvement with Brideshead and the Flyte family is broken into three concentrated periods.

Davies and Brock, director Julian Jarrold, and their colleagues, impose a simplified and misunderstood version of the British class system on the film - and don't seem to realise that mentioning the word 'Catholic' at every opportunity, and as good as crash-zooming on rosary beads as Nanny Hawkins drops them, is no substitute for theology. Lord Brideshead, Sebastian's older brother, is turned into a hunting-shooting-fishing cliché rather than the unworldly and often ineffectual figure he seemed on television, and who apparently once aspired to the priesthood. Charles is a scion of a landed gentry family in the book, but there is no room for subtle gradations of social distinction here. The poor fellow is on an allowance less than a fifth of what he enjoys in the book; the aesthetic and spiritual wholeness he craves from Brideshead and the Flytes is trivialised. The character of Hooper in the book is a fellow-officer of Charles, though from an educational background that (in Charles's view) disregards the heroic and aspiration for something greater than the human world, in favour of a narrative of revolution-from-below. In the film he becomes a corporal, losing Waugh's points that the aristocratic culture of the Flytes had as good as been swept away before the start of the Second World War, and that without the heroic there was no hope of understanding the 'fairy-tale' of religion which revealed the spiritual universe hidden behind the curtain of the material world.

I tend to have a negative reading of the family dynamics within the Flyte family, and had seen their Catholicism as a symbol of their decline, acknowledging that this sat oddly with Waugh's own Catholicism; but it was explained to me after watching the film that I had probably missed Waugh's message that the Flytes can't reconcile being English aristocrats with being Catholic, both being different kinds of 'other' in early twentieth-century Britain. Having since finished the book I see that this is probably the case, but one wouldn't know it from the film. The story goes that Andrew Davies left the project because he wanted to make God the villain of the film, but if so it's still possible to discern his influence. The mania on the faces of the Flytes as the dying Lord Marchmain very determinedly crosses himself could be read by a sceptic as a possession by falsehood, while the conclusion of film doesn't seem very bothered with the state of Charles's faith, instead letting him snuff out his obsession with the Flytes in the chapel as if he was reconciling himself to the impending reign of the working men symbolised by Corporal Hooper.

So, this isn't Waugh, more off-the-shelf modernism; but it looks well enough and there are some striking images. Hayley Attwell as Julia photographs well, is well-draped, and goes nicely mad towards the end; Emma Thompson generally conveys the seriousness of Lady Marchmain's faith and her leadership of her family with attention, though I did wonder whether there were any better takes of her collapse at the Ryders' house, as this seemed overdone. Michael Gambon's Lord Marchmain is a more dangerous and effervescent performance than Laurence Olivier provided for Granada, and captured in more concentrated form the impression of Marchmain that Charles Ryder gradually builds up in the book. Nonetheless, this is a Brideshead made easy. While the new plot elements and the more conventional historical theme work, they flatten the story. Perhaps the affirmation of modernity I see in the final scene is more fitting for the clubbing, street-partying students of last Thursday night; but I'd still direct people to the DVD of the Granada series if they want a screen adaptation which does more justice to the novel.