RosieBell

South Riding

Sunday evening, you’ve gloomily ironed your shirts for the week and now it’s time to settle on the sofa with a dram and see what the BBC has to offer you.  A train appearing through steam, a man on a horse galloping along the beach, cars with running boards and a woman in a bright red calf-length dress and round hat, who shines out among the grey of a town and the faces of the unemployed. You are warned that there will be scenes of a sexual nature.  Of course, it’s an adaptation by Andrew Davies , the man who loves a good corset-undoing scene for the Victorians, wet breeches for the Regency period and this one, South Riding, being modern, we can expect stocking tops and suspenders. 

Andrew Davies’s adaptations vary  in quality.  Vanity Fair was excellent, while the last Emma was a downer, as was Daniel Deronda, partly because the actress in them, Romola Garai, is a lightweight and spent most of her time smiling like crazy, as if advertising toothpaste. 

You can expect in a BBC period drama that the researchers will get the cut of the clothes and the shape of the vehicles right, but Davies is responsible for the dialogue.  I haven’t got a copy of South Riding to hand, but I’m pretty sure this was not 1930s speak:-

“it sends a message that the girls are valued”

A school is “affordable”

About a Council decision “What is needed is transparency”

Those phrases are from more recent times, that of the Today programme interviewing a politician post about 1980.  Are we going to have “robust” by-laws next?

Despite those niggles the story has got going nicely.  Sarah Burton, a progressive and socialist, has been appointed headmistress to the girls’ high school in a Yorkshire town.  Her appointment is opposed by the Conservative councillor and landowner, Robert Carne, who is struggling financially and has a neurotic daughter and a wife in an asylum.  Sarah Burton is played by Anna Maxwell Martin, and looks and feels right, not celebrity pretty but attractive, a red-haired powerhouse full of reforming zeal, a Jennie Lee of her time and place. David Morrissey as Robert Carne is heavy and brooding, which is all you need for the part.  Robert Carne has a grand house, a  tragic life and a masculine presence, which is enough for romantic appeal.  After the initial antagonism the two have been thrown into each other’s company in a calf birthing scene in a barn, and that was mellow and warm with the colours of the Jersey cows and the hay.  The scenery of wide skies and flat countryside, the shabby school, the grey town and the general period feel are well done.

South Riding was made into a series  in 1974 with Dorothy Tutin playing Sarah Burton.  It was thirteen episodes long, while this series is three only.  The earlier series was panoramic like Winifred Holtby’s novel, the structure of which was held together by the decisions of the town councillors, and how they affected the different characters, from high to low.  That big cast of characters are mostly going to have to be dropped or reduced and we’ll lose the wide view for a more focused drama but that has plenty going for it. Lydia Holly, for instance, (Charlie-May Clark), a clever, talented girl with uncontrollable hair has a short scene with her impoverished family, when her ebullient labourer father and she quote How Horatio Kept the Bridge at each other.  The family’s life is very poor - they live in a railway carriage - but not loveless and miserable and that gives Lydia a real spark.  Andrew Davies has kept Councillor Huggins (John Henshaw) the lay preacher and adulterer, who I would guess has been left in as he’ll grope around a few stocking tops and he has a great good-time girl (Janine Mellor) to fondle. 

So plenty of dramatic interest, competent acting, a fine appearance, an okay script.  Not up there with Cranford but of a reasonable standard, and like the Shipping Forecast, shows that the BBC is ticking along and all is right with the world.

Macbeth

I was really enthralled by the production of Macbeth on BBC4 on Sunday night.  It was set approximately in the Soviet Union in the 1940s - that is, not making exact parallels of events and characters but using images of that time and place to create an atmosphere from Europe‘s recent dark age.  There was footage of bombardments and armies marching. Macbeth, played by Patrick Stewart, appeared first in a forage cap, looking Slavic and as if he had just come from battling heroically at Stalingrad. 

The action mostly took place in a while tiled basement reached by a cage life in what seemed to be an army hospital.  The three witches were sadistic and crazy nurses.  When Macbeth became king, on the walls were banners of his gigantic face above the collar of a field marshall in the socialist realist style .  The dinner scene when Banquo’s ghost appears was reminiscent of the hideous dinners that Stalin used to hold, where they guests were terrified into appearing jolly.

Setting Shakespeare’s plays in specific periods of history can be gimmicky.  I remember seeing Coriolanus goose-stepping as a Fascist leader, which was a cheap effect, and simplifies the complex nature of the play.  But it really worked for Macbeth, a play about a fine soldier turned politician murdering his way to the top and then instituting a reign of terror to keep himself in power and then to keep himself alive. 

            For mine own good
    All causes shall give way, I am in blood
    Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,
    Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

So there were the interrogations, the informers, the government in exile in England and the murder of opponents’ families.  Macbeth and his wife, once allies and confidants, become estranged, and Macbeth ends holed up in a bunker while the avenging army closes in. 

There was one wrong note.  When the execution of the treacherous Macdonwald was reported to King Duncan “That very frankly he confessed his treasons/Implored your highness’ pardon and set forth/A deep repentance” you had just seen him hooded in a cell being shot and were reminded of the confessions of old Bolsheviks at the Moscow trials - which goes against the meaning of the lines, and hinted that Duncan’s rule was as bad as Macbeth’s.  That wasn’t right, but the rest of it was brilliant.

And the acting?  Well, I barely noticed that these soldiers and officials were actors acting, so it must have been good.

Through the Screen, Darkly or Fear and Self-Loathing in Croydon

So Peep Show is back with us, the nastiest and funniest of comedies.

For those who don’t watch it, the show follows the grubby lives of two loser friends and flatmates.  One is a  wimp, a corporate drone and a geek (David Mitchell as Mark) and the other a chancer, a fantasist and wannabe rock star (Robert Webb as Jeremy).  You follow their internal monologues and then when one of them speaks to another character, you see the face of that character - smiling, snogging, furious - from their point of view.  So as you watch you are moved from voice over soliloquy to dialogue or action seen through one pair of eyes, which gives the show a slightly jerky feel.  We observe what they observe.  The characters exist in their own skulls and make guesses about what’s going on in other people‘s.

In my time I have missed chunks of Peep Show but that’s like missing a few Sherlock Holmes stories.   Mark and Jeremy are like Holmes and Watson (with Mark as Holmes, i.e. getting the better lines) in that you can pick them up at any time and enjoy their personalities and turns of phrase.   So as I welcome Holmes saying, “I see by your tweed socks, sheep hide patch on the left elbow of your jacket and the cracked fingernail on your third finger you must have served on the Indian frontier with the Royal Fuzz Cuffs, “ so in the first episode of this series I was glad to hear again the resigned and dismayed tones of Mark at the hospital while his ex girlfriend Sophie gave birth to their child.

Mark, full of fear and self-loathing, as usual, was at his ineffectual best trying to escape from being Sophie’s birthing partner, because he‘s “stuck on the medical channel and there’s no remote control” .  He flees to a video games room to be “in the safe zone with gangsters and deserted subways” but he returns to find Sophie getting a Caesarean, and when he looks at her south end, thinks “the screen is there for a reason, there’s a reason they put Guantanamo on Cuba”.

Meanwhile Jeremy has fallen for a young lovely whose boyfriend is in intensive care.  Feigning supportive kindness, he comforts her and muses, “right now I’m a supporting character in a weepie when I want to be the lead man in a porno”.

I have seen three episodes of the seventh series and things have been more upbeat for Mark than usual.  On seeing his new born baby he has a happy fatherhood twinge:-   “My son can figure out cold fusion, not as one of the main guys, that would be unrealistic, but in an administrative capacity.”  

Mark is a less obnoxious character than Jeremy, and has a worse time, so you can enjoy his occasional wins.  Mark’s super-ego crushes his id, and stresses out his ego, while Jeremy dispels the vague rumours he has heard of a super-ego with drugs.  As you are in their heads and so pretty much on their side you can root for both Mark and Jeremy getting the better of people who are more repulsive than they are . 

I’ve been asked,  “what’s a woman's view of the programme. Don't you find it rather horrifying to actually hear what it is that men are thinking?! For, sadly and shamefully, these two are but extreme versions of the male of our species.”  Well,  I’m with the two men, as I’m with Hamlet or David Copperfield.  I‘m seeing it all through their eyes and thinking through their thoughts, not those of the various women who they would like to shag but don’t want to be inconvenienced by.   Solipsism and liking to get what we want isn’t a gender-related attribute.

Deadpan for ever

Leslie Neilsen has died.  The master of deadpan, who always managed to look patrician and gentlemanly, no matter what pratfalls he was taking, or what slapstick scenes he was engaged in. 

I always liked the closing credits of Police Squad.  Incredibly silly, but they broke me up every time.

 

 

 

The Song of Lunch

The Song of Lunch, BBC2’s filmed version of Christopher Reid’s long poem, was excellent.   I had some misgivings because a poem’s own words should be able to take care of themselves without the help of images and it’s an abomination to put music behind a poem, but I found it effective and poignant.  I didn’t know the poem and so did spend the first viewing trying to work out the form.  I could hear rhymes in couplets but the line lengths seemed to be irregular. 

The poem is narrated by Alan Rickman, who plays the fifty something man who meets his former lover for lunch after fifteen years separation.  I love Alan Rickman and he is absolutely right as the embittered copy editor and minor poet with his face of an affronted falcon and the voice that delivers words with precision but can go gravelly and sneer ironically.   Emma Thompson is the ex-lover and she has much less to say.  She looks exactly as an ageing failure would hate to see his ex-lover looking - contented and elegant, with news of her marriage to a successful novelist, the boys she has by him and their life together in Paris.  Her face and eyes get across her pity, her familiar exasperation and her sense that when she had dumped Alan Rickman and gone off with her present husband she had made exactly the right choice.

A poem dramatised like that can fall into an awkward literalism.  Alan Rickman’s internal monologue deals with  his ex-lover’s shapely wrist, and so the camera rests on the wrist.  (Fortunately when the narrator of the poem describes what his pee looks like the camera just showed his back view in front of the porcelain.)  However, this was well judged and conveyed what happens when we go through such events. Our senses are heightened and we remember the smallest detail, as when travelling in a foreign country, the foreign country being for the Rickman character the present, a hostile place, and at this lunch through his behaviour he banishes himself from the lovelier past.

It is a poem about ageing and disappointment and how we inflict wounds on ourselves as Alan Rickman  pours more wine and screws up yet another important happening in his life. The final word which clinches how time has moved on with death coming into sight, is a shock, like coming across your own tombstone.

I don’t know how many poems would lend themselves to a filmed treatment of this kind.  Tony Harrison’s “V.” which Channel 4 filmed amidst a lot of controversy because of its four letter words was pretty good, though more of a montage of images against the words than a dramatisation.  I have heard long dramatic poems like Tennyson‘s Maud done on radio successfully but you couldn‘t do The Wasteland for instance.   There has to be some dramatic situation to give the scenes tension and suspense, and characters you can be interested in.  I thought The Song of Lunch was inspired and hope the Beeb does something similar again.

Update:- I'm pretty sure the rhymes "waste" and "taste" appeared twice.

Yabba Dabba Doo

The Flintstones are 50 years old.  Hat tip, Impossible Songs.

In memory of Tony Curtis, here’s the episode The Return of Stoney Curtis

 

Tony Curtis was as long-lashed and beautiful in cartoon as well as in the flesh.

What I loved about The Flintstones was the gadgetry that these cavemen of suburban USA employed.

Self-renewing stylus

Better than a Dyson

Lunch of Blood

Mice hide when hawks are high;
Hawks shy from airplanes;
Planes dread the ack-ack-ack;
Each one fears somebody.
Only the heedless lions
Under the Booloo tree
Snooze in each other's arms
After their lunch of blood -
I call that living good!

Saul Bellow

There have been back to back programmes about Joy Adamson to celebrate 50 years since the publication of Born Free.  I can’t remember much about the film Born Free but I would guess the Joy Adamson in real life and documentary was far more talented, far more single-minded and far more difficult than she was as portrayed by Virginia McKenna.  Like a lot of women, and men, who can relate well with animals she couldn’t be bothered much in conciliating human beings.  Not a warm, caring person at all - in fact, a bit of a monster - but highly admirable, using the profits from her books for various conservation projects.

There are thousands of photos of her and Elsa embracing.  The lioness was as photographed as often as a first-born child.  In one of the documentaries Desmond Morris said that Joy Adamson regarded Elsa as a “lover” , not sexually, but certainly with physical closeness and unconditional love.  There are a couple of things to be observed about absorbing love of an animal:- 1) unless it’s an elephant or tortoise you are almost certain to outlive it; 2) a jealous, possessive person can demand total attention from the object of their love when human - throwing scenes when the object wants to watch football with his mates - but the lover of an animal accepts the fact that the animal has its own life of animalhood - of hunting, mating, scents and night time prowling.  The lover would not accept a human rival in affection, but the animal life is not a threat as it is so alien.  Also, a lioness out hunting shows her power - the grand strong beast that runs down the gazelle and then nuzzles up to the human that she could kill with one swipe of her paw.  

I had a pet goat when I was a child, that I’d played with from a kid.  The goats multiplied and increased to a herd and were sent to the back of the farm where they were supposed to keep down the blackberry and other scrub.  Whenever we came across the herd all the goats would stop, watch us warily and be ready to run but Ellie-Mae would come forward, greet me and let me scratch her head.

Neo Puritans

Last night I watched Dispatches: Britain’s Islamic Republic, on Channel 4.  It was about the Islamic Federation Europe’s entryism into the Labour party, and their domination of the Tower Hamlets council, which gives them access to large sums of money that they can divert from generally cultural projects to the more purely religious.  The IFE members came across as intolerant puritans, reminding me of the Christian evangelicals who in Victorian times dominated the country, with their Mrs Grundy censorship, their suspicion of pleasure, their miserable joyless dreary Sundays, which continentals used to regard with horror.  Along with the puritanism is a desire to control the morals of others. These guys were leaning heavily on a young woman who was starting a dating site, or taking away the funding from groups that were celebrating song and dance in bright costumes.  They were like Mrs Proudie the bishop's wife in Trollope’s Barchester series, who locked her servants’ doors and whose petty tyranny was justified because it was for the souls of the people.  Save us from those who would save our souls!

Warm and human and dead loveable

When you heard that Julie Walters was playing Mo, in the eponymous bio telly pic about the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland you knew Maureen Mowlam was going to be warm, and human and dead loveable and out-spoken and Northern, with an adoring husband.  Similarly in Wide-eyed and Legless, where Julie Walters was playing Diana, with the strange illness and adoring husband, she was warm, and human and dead loveable and outspoken and Northern.  And in Calendar Girls, Julie Walters was bereaved of her sweet adoring husband, and she was so warm and human and dead loveable (and outspoken and Northern).   She even made Mary Whitehouse warm and human and outspoken with a nice husband.  Can someone please give her the role of Margaret Thatcher? Or Elizabeth the First?  Or Boadicea?  Or even Ilse Koch and see if she will make them warm; human; dead loveable; outspoken; Northern?  Right from her days in Educating Rita she has been played such women and she must be sick of it.

Actually her brilliant friend Victoria Walters did feature her as a silly, egocentric actress in Victoria Wood’s Midlife Christmas where she played someone who was bloody annoying and a total pain in the neck, so she’s got it in her to get away from those warm etc parts which haunt her like the Furies. 

Oneupmanship

I haven’t listened to either X Factor’s Joe McElderry’s runner up for the Christmas number one spot or Rage Against the Machine’s winning song, but if Simon Cowell is pissed off, all right minded people should rejoice.

His teeth and hair can make you howl
I mean that tin-eared Simon Cowell
The telly talent contest’s über führer.
Some Yankee lefties had their fun,
In beating him to number one,
And all of us can shout out Hallelujah!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.