ultimately comes

TV The rather good Canon and Sheep Shit: Why We Fight attempts to come to terms with canonicity in Doctor Who and ultimately comes to the same conclusion that I do. That there is no canon, or as I tend to put it, everything is canon. He quotes from a fair few writers, and the most telling and predictably clever is Steven Moffat:
"It is impossible for a show about a dimension-hopping time traveller to have a canon."
This might well be the second Doctor Who related post in a day, but it is a Saturday and I'm probably pining [via].

any old rubbish onto the screen

TV The headline on this post-broadcast interview with Russell T Davies on the death of Torchwood's Ianto is a bit misleading (he says it in jest), but nonetheless this is a typically entertaining interview in which Russell basically tells those fans who are still riled up about the whole thing to, well, grow up:
"People often say, 'Fans have got their knives out!' They haven't got any knives. I haven't been stabbed. Nothing's happened. It's simply a few people typing. I'm glad they're typing because they’re that involved. But if you can’t handle drama you shouldn’t watch it. Find something else. Go look at poetry. Poetry’s wonderful."
The reaction in the comments is as you'd expect:
"I already watch Supernatural thank you very much. I will gladly never watch anything you ever make again. You are a poor excuse for a writer and a nasty human being at that RTD. You have no respect for your fans or your characters. I wish you nothing but bad luck."
Even though, if he was a poor excuse for a writer you wouldn't care about any of this in the first place J.B. and if Russell didn't have any respect for his fans he'd just do what many other producers on tv do and push any old rubbish onto the screen, because, y'know, it is only sci-fi. Get some perspective (!).

The Collaborative Spotify Playlist


Blue sky 2, originally uploaded by Fabio Marini.


Surprise!

I love the unexpected, especially in music, and how sometimes the juxtaposition of two elements that shouldn't be within a country mile (or at the very least the length of the Liverpool Arena) away from one another, somehow when merged, create a bit of magic. Dean Stockwell raps. A school choir sings the theme from Transformers (in Japanese). Lily Allen covers ELO. And whatever it is Samuel L Jackson is doing here. This collaborative playlist is an attempt to gather such things together, in other words, weird cover versions and the like. Please add your own.

Where did all the cheese go?

Food I've sent an email ...
To: Customer Relations, Northern Foods:

Find attached some photographs of your San Marco Familia Hawaii frozen pizza and the illustrative photograph from the box. I have but one question:

Where did all the cheese go?

There didn't seem to be much when I took the pizza out of the plastic wrapper but I hoped that it would spread out a bit during the cooking process. Unfortunately, and disappointingly (as you can see), that didn't happen. So instead of the juicy looking pizza on the box which had enticed me to select that instead of the others in Asda's freezer whilst shopping the other day, I ended up with the offering I've just had to crunch through for dinner this evening.

I know that when I cook a pizza it's not going to look exactly the same -- you have better ovens than we do, but surely suggesting that we would be getting a topping that looked one way and offering something else in the box is a bit unfair. In case you're wondering that isn't cooked cheese in the middle it's where some bare pasty has burned to a crisp. I could talk also about the dry bits of ham and the rather limp pineapple but I think I've already made my point.

I was disappointed, my dinner was ruined, and that is a shame.

Take care,

Stuart.
Those photographs in full ...



[Of course frozen pizza rarely looks like the box or something from a restaurant and I should have known better but this was a treat and I mean look at it ... ]

UPDATED! 27/07/09 I've already received a reply:
Dear Mr. Burns,

Thank you for contacting us regarding your recent complaint with San Marco Hawaiian pizza. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused as a result of this incident.

All the toppings are placed on the pizzas mechanically and then between the final topping stage and the spiral freezer, all products must pass our Visual Inspectors. I must apologise for the momentary lapse by our Visual Inspectors, which gave rise to this problem and allowed this defective product to pass undetected into the distribution chain.

All relevant Production, Quality Control and Marketing staff for this product have been informed of your complaint. Please be assured that we at Green Isle Foods go to great lengths to ensure that all our products meet the usual high standards.

I appreciate that you took the time to notify us of this problem and I trust you will have enough confidence in our product to try it again.

Please forward your home address as I would like to send a gesture of goodwill.

Many Thanks & Kind Regards

[name redacted]
Customer Services
Green Isle Foods.
Thanks very much to them for the swift reply and as I said I will be trying their pizza again. I wonder what they'll send me...

geocities rescue

And so for one final time ...



The Cultural Tastes of the First Big Brother Eleven

The Big Brother house was a necessarily sterile place where cultural pursuits were kept to a minimum. But whether on purpose or through subtle manipulation the Big Brother Eleven became a microcosm of the current state of Popular and High culture in the UK. Don’t believe me? Lets take this one step at a time . .

A few weeks in, on the completion of a mini-task the group are given the chance of seeing any film. Any film at all, the entirety of film history available. The lads, predictably start suggesting horror films. Someone offers ‘that new film by Jim Carrey’ (which would have tested the resources of Brother Big, not exactly being out then) – until someone chimes in with ‘Happy Gilmore’, the Adam Sandler golf classic. A few votes and the suggestion is carried. Popular cinema selected over high brow – hmm – has anyone seen this week’s box office list? Later, we found an example of how the public tends to view television. Clamouring as they were for ‘East is East’, Big Brother decided that perhaps they would be more invigorated by the works of Bobby Davro, paralleling the attitude of the two main TV channels on a Saturday night. In other words, ‘We know you want to see something half decent, but we’ll put this on because you’ll probably watch it anyway . . .’ Born out by the fact that all of the housemates stay for the first episode on the tape, and after the girls went to bed, the boys viewed the other three, taking the attitude that watching anything is better than watching nothing at all.

The choice of house literature, although only glimpsed at, was also pretty significant, taking in many of the big sellers of the past few years – Thomas Harris, ‘Hannibal’ and the Chinese family epic ‘Wild Swans’ snubbing Seamus Heaney and the rest of his Whitbread colleagues.

Perhaps most interesting are the musical choices. Music is of course not usually allowed in the Big Brother house, the only comfort being Anna’s guitar, or what appears to be the soundtrack album, pumped into the house on Friday nights (loved on the first Friday ignored by the last). Understandably, music does not otherwise get mentioned. We’d find out that Craig loves the middle of the road delights of Rod Stewart and Phil Collins, which is probably the musical taste of ten percent of the viewing audience. Then, in the final few days, the remaining three housemates chose the record they would most like to hear after ten weeks without contact from the outside world. Craig decides his thing is ‘I was only joking’ by Rod Stewart, because it reminds him of being at school. Darren chooses the new version of ‘Good Life’ by Inner City, which reminds him of his kids dancing.. Now Anna. Anna, the lesbian ex-nun with a folksy guitar talent who one might expect to chime in with something acoustic chooses – ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ by Georgio Morodor with Phil Oakey. Oddly enough it kind of sticks out. A track which was created for a film that no one has seen since 1984. The least expected song from nowhere. Some personal resonance here. It’s in my top ten songs as well. And more often than not it has the same reaction for me as for her. She cried, her face awash with memories of club visits of the past and friends she’s missed, her housemates reaction underlining just how alone she feels. Probably the most touching moment of the entire series. Just a pity Craig spoilt the thing by laughing through it. If you can dig out the film, it’s worth it. A touching love triangle between a guy, his girl and a computer. It’s years ahead of its time. Think ‘Being John Malkovitch’ with Eighties production values.

UPDATE! In the aftermath of Big Brother, the Eleven have quietly been making a name for themselves in various corners of the media, but in ways no one would have predicted. Nicola releases a single, which reaches the heady heights of the low seventies in the charts. Anna appears in a catwalk show, and the promised folk singing career is nowhere to be seen (although she was good on TFI ). Craig doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself, although award shows, Ready Steady Cook, A Question Of Sport, and book signings is a start. Also signing is Clare who is also introducing a review programme about Clubs in the middle of the night. Darren is spending time with his kids. Andy co-‘presents’ an entertainment review show on Channel 5 with Lisa Rogers who he seems to have taken a real shine to him having already appeared on ‘The Big Breakfast’ and the inexplicably awful ‘Frontal’ with him. Mel is looking at her options, but the cover of Marie Clare was probably a cool place to start. Nick is doing what I suppose we all expected and is appearing in as many interviews as possible to improve his profile Caggy has recorded a single and turned up to as many award shows as she can. Tom is almost modelling. Sada seems has already written a book about being a ‘woman’. Didn’t really doubt you were anything else there girl . . . eeeeeerrrrrrr . .

UPDATE! It’s now six months since our friends left the house and about time we assessed their real cultural impact now that the ultimate manufactured pop band has finally made the chart implode upon itself. Sada’s book on flirting was published. Andy is apparently bicycle touring Oz. Dear Caggy was last seen on daytime talk show ‘Esther’ and probably still trying to get that darn single released. Nicola’s singing career . . .well calling the Big Breakfast won’t do you any good luv. Nick appeared in his own late night game show ‘Trust Me’ which had the distinction of actually being quite good. Clare appeared in panto. Thomas is learning to be club DJ. Mel has her own Big Brother style show on E4. Darren became a UN rep for about three minutes. Anna is presumably fishing for projects (and with any look succeeding after her too professional showing on TFI Friday with a nervous Mel), appearing as a nun in Comic Relief, and slagging the whole Big Brother concept on Channel 4 shows about reality TV. Craig (errr) got a 5 album deal and has since released a charity record. Now seen most mornings tooling about a house in the ‘burbs with other strapping young men and Lowrie Turner . . .

UPDATE! It’s now almost a year since Big Brother One began, new series coming up, and all is quiet on the front of the ex-big brotherites. Most have disappeared back into relative obscurity, popping only now and then when reality tv is being question. Or introducing reality TV in the case of Mel’s ‘Chained’. Anna’s going to be presenting a new show soon with Davina McCall for the BBC Saturday night line-up. She inevitably seems to be the most visible, for as well as appearing on a Channel 4 documentary giving her representation on the show a pasting, she’s done stand-in nun work on the Comic Relief ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’ special. Ah the CRBB – to be honest we thought of creating a page, but decided that it pretty much deconstructed itself, what with everyone’s endless TV reviews . . .

UPDATE! Tom and Clare. TOM AND CLARE?!?

UPDATE! Actually more of a greetings to anyone who’s visited the page from the Google Directory or one of the other Open Directory source. Hello. We know that if you’ve read this far down, our English is at least intelligible, especially considering that you’ve just read a bunch of things you already know.

UPDATE! This strangely popular page gets its first mention at an internet newsgroup, the UK BIG BROTHER Anna Nolan Club. Believe me the new version of this site has given us a better appreciation of how hard it is to create a website. But it’s always good to be a bit enigmatic sometimes . . .

UPDATE! Still no Big Brother Two page? We suspect writers elsewhere are doing a better job. There is a feeling with BB2 however that we are looking in on damaged good. The magic isn’t the same. There have been some fun moments, but overall the players seem to care that little bit too much about there public image. And how can Paul still be there?

UPDATE! “Nick stands in the corner looking at the floor.” Jon Ronson writes amazing article in The Guardian magazine.

stifled by the restrictive legal process



Film One of the problems with the recent London Law & Order series was that although it was filmed in the UK, with British actors and was about the UK justice system with its wigs, the pacing of the material, shooting style and general structure constantly reminded the viewer that they were watching adaptations of older material, almost to the point that you could hear a hammer thumping away trying to flatten the script to work in a different context. The underrated Basic Instinct 2 similarly brought the Hollywood aesthetic to the streets of London, director Michael Caton-Jones offering his best Verhoven-alike.

I had much the same impression of The Paradine Case; that the story might have been served better by being set in the US; I appreciated that some of the point is about watching Gregory Peck’s lawyer slowly becoming stifled by the restrictive legal process, unable to right for wrong, unable to confirm when he needs to what evidence or witness statements he’ll have to deal when in court. And we might have been denied Charles Laughton’s delicious performance as the Judge, whose permanent expression of disgust ranging against anyone who doesn’t share his world view is, I’m sure, the image of what many people now expect some MPs to be like now that we know how they’ve been spending our money.

But compare Peck’s performance here with his tour-de-force as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Granted the material in the later film is more electric and relevant and the overall approach is towards creating a work of prestige, whereas Hitch as ever is more interested in entertainment, yet his actor looks uncomfortable; Hitch himself says to Trauffaut in no uncertain terms: “I don’t think that Gregory Peck can properly represent an English lawyer” he wanted Lawrence Olivier or Ronald Coleman. But the production had been rewritten by his then producer David O. Selznick and he had his own ideas about who should cast to say his words and so, like many of his earlier British silents, he was working with elements that were not of his choosing.

Perhaps the curious sense of dislocation also from the film actually having been shot in the US with Selznick rewriting the script in the UK and sending the pages to Hitchcock who was meant to try his best with them. I had assumed it was the other way around. The directors says he lost track of the shape of the piece. He’s talked about how he was never entirely sure how the original murder was committed, the geography of the house, and that is confusing, though I did think whilst watching that this was a deliberate choice to show how our memory can play tricks and reshape events to fit our point of view. Now and then, I wonder if Hitch was adding layers to his work that even he wasn’t aware of.

links for 2009-07-22

  • Liverpool to Manchester in thirty minutes. Blimey.

  • The US has its @stephenfry & @wossy moment.

  • How the other hemisphere lives.

  • "I had quite a difficult slot – it was 0200 to 0300 on Sunday 19th. So there was a sizable crowd in Trafalgar Square who were not terribly sober… they wanted to be entertained (is everything Britain's Got Talent?). I knew that the weekend night slots were likely to be more difficult but when you are allocated a slot your only option is to accept it or refuse it – there is no chance of swapping it. So I had decided to do it. A family member had said that the evening weekend slots were "skittles for drunks", and so it partly proved."

  • Very sorry to hear this. Good luck everyone.

  • I was waiting for this. Hadley Freeman (who I love) on the new look. She's wrong sadly. She's condemning the man rather than his suit, because he's not David Tennant (who she loves). Best comment underneath? "That's in fashion this season? Really? Everyone round here's wearing jeans and t-shirt."

  • .. and without the beard and hair (and I hope he dioesn't mind me saying this) looks exactly (almost) like he did at school.

  • Frankie, do you remember me?

  • Is that before or after he died? #torchwood

  • It's Doctor Who Blog and Message-Board BINGO! (I may have written myself into all four corners)

  • "Enhanced her voice may be, but on the one song she actually begins singing, "Tonight I Celebrate My Love," she has trouble pronouncing the word celebrate which was strange, considering her background."

  • Whilst I cast about trying to decide what to put in the regular weekend Spotify spot here's a fantastic set of links which demonstrates that no matter how deep you think you've reached into the catalogue there's always something you've missed. Is it wrong that I like the album of Britney covers so much? (Yes.)

  • The late king of pop recreated in potatoes and tomatoes. See also a cauliflower sheep and a penguin made from aubergine.

  • Good article, though it fails to mention that the whole Blair Witch project was killed stone dead by Blair Witch 2 which committed the sin of not taking its own premise seriously.

  • I still have the promo DVD this appeared on — it was given away with the first issue of DVD Review. I wish I was still this excited about them and less suspicious of Blu-Ray. It can't be that much better can it?

  • The final line in this article is probably why I send myself on these quests.
  • links for 2009-07-21

  • My God! It's full of stars!

  • Not a spoof trailer. Actual film. Actually eighty odd minutes long. Looks like it was shot for thripence.
  • paying money to enter a Hieronymus Bosch painting



    Life One of my least favourite pastimes is grumbling about local transport in Liverpool. There’s never enough buses on the routes I need and the experience of riding on them is like paying money to enter a Hieronymus Bosch painting on wheels with the screams of hell replaced by the sounds of 50 Cent being pumped from a mobile phone speaker (though that’s much the same thing).

    No such problems in Stratford. Because there are (basically) no buses. On the one hand I should be very pleased that the town isn't jammed up with Stagecoaches oddly competing with one another for business, but I was still cursing when I looked at the timetables and noticed that the irregular timings of some of the services, many of which visited just three times in an hour, and all in the last half of that hour and even then not at times when you'd actually want them, like after six o’clock in the evening.

    The trains are equally improbable: on the Wednesday, visiting Mary Arden’s Farm, I took the train to Wilmcote, one stop out of Stratford, about a ten minute ride. In that ad-hoc way you when you're on holiday, I checked the timetable when I got there to see when the next train back would be. 5 o’clock. It was 10 o’clock.

    Stepping out of the station wondering whether there would be enough to do that afternoon, a friendly lady with a very nice car (who for image purposes looked like Emmerdale’s Patsy Kensit) asked if I was alright. Registering my surprise about the train service, I asked her if there was a quicker way back, a bus perhaps. She looked stunned by the suggestion, and wondered if I’d considered walking. I looked at my poor feet and they seemed to look back at me, throbbing with rage.

    I'm such a city dweller. And I'll try not to complain about Merseytravel again.

    The only way to get around then, if you don't drive, is either taxi of the City Sightseer red bus tour which is how I got back to the town centre after finishing at the farm. These are usually very good indeed, especially if there’s a live commentary. The best I've heard was in Belfast, were, once the guide had pointed out were all of the secret British listening posts were, went on to say some not very nice things about some of the not very nice people who lived in the province especially in relation to a recent bank robbery and I genuinely became fearful not just for his life but our own. History tour and thrill ride rolled into one.

    Not this day. Instead, we were given earphones and asked to plug into the pre-recorded service and far from being a ‘tour’ this amounted to random facts about Shakespeare’s life interspersed with incongruous burst of musak, of the kind which you’d find on those cassettes that were given away with new hi-fi’s to show off what they could do. Said facts, read with bored indifference by an actor were generally interesting, if sometimes rather oblique. Passing through countryside, wind blasting me in the face (open top), after a burst of synthesiser, the actor piped up: “To your right are the Cotsworlds.” Pictured. And that was, I think that.

    Doctor Who Discovers Pond Life

    TV Quick round up of the day's news. Firstly, Ben Cook and Lizo Mzimba on BBC Breakfast offering a first reaction to Matt Smith's new costume:

    [video removed from YouTube]

    The official BBC site has coverage but is admittedly trumped by the Daily Fail who have the more iconic shots you might have expected, including one of the Doctor and Amy and the TARDIS which looks brandlipsmakingspanking new and blue and seems to have regained some of its 60s iconography. Pity the windows are still the wrong size. The Guardian also has some rather good commentary, spotting a Press Gang connection. The Times has quotes.

    As we've seen in the past, choosing the Doctor's image is a sonic screwdriver dodging minefield. Get it right and you have something fans will be beating down the door of the local Slaters or Greenwoods trying to recreate; get it wrong and your lead actor will spend his term on the show wearing what amounts to Test Card H or the kind of cricket jacket which still manages to look out of place on a cricket field.

    I think this is a very well considered choice. With Matt, the temptation might have been to go with a far more casual appearance, something akin to what he was wearing in his first publicity shots, the jacket and t-shirt. This is braver, a kind of old school teacher or 40s newspaperman or indeed scientist, slightly incongruous, underscoring the idea of an ancient mind in a younger body and a nice contrast to Karen's rather more contemporary look.

    The other news today was of course the reveal of companion Amy's surname. Pond. Amy Pond. Let that roll about in your mouth for a bit. It's the kind of name the 10th Doctor would relish saying, stressing the surname to its full stressablity. It doesn't tell us an awful lot about the character other than, contrary to what the conspiracy theorists had in mind that she's not Donna regenerated or Romana (their way of explaining why the name hadn't been sent out yet).

    It's simply that The Grand Moff and the gang want to keep something back at such an early point in their new era. Like this (if you reeeally want to be spoiled). Exciting isn't it?

    academic yet accessible

    Theatre My current book is History of the Theatre by Oscar G. Brockett (fifth edition), which I'm reading in an attempt to fill in the gaps in my knowledge about drama and the stage -- in other words anything before and after the Elizabethan and Jacobian periods. The writing style is fairly academic yet accessible and though the section I'm reading at present, an exploration of Ancient Greek drama, is mostly pages and pages of conjecture, there are a few bright points of interest, which usually spring out of nowhere like a gazelle with the sudden inkling that they're going to be the shape with whisker's next meal.

    Example: at the bottom of a paragraph listing Sophocles's canon we're presented with the following sentence: "(Sophocles) is credited with the introduction of the third actor, with fixing the size of the chorus at fifteen members, and with the first use of scene painting." I love this. It's exactly how I'd hoped theatre had unfolded; that at some point after decades of there being only one actor on stage plus chorus, a writer thought of the extra complexity possible in having two of them and then Sophocles looked at that and thought "You know - imagine what we could do with another one."

    Another example, and I should say that though this extract is long, it's well worth reading right through to the end. There are certain phrases I've used often and despite knowing their meaning, I've never been completely sure of their origin. See if you too have an 'aaah haa haa' moment, especially if you're an avid viewer of a certain type of science fiction or fantasy television programme whose storyline has to be wrapped up within approximately forty-five minutes:




    See what I mean? Of course, the wikipedia has also covered this, but there's nothing quite like discovering these things quite by chance. Now that I think about it, every Doctor Who story is about a deus ex machina, since the Doctor is effectively a god and the situation has already been set up before he gets there. Which presumably means the TARDIS is Euripedes's crane ...

    Lisa Hannigan's missing

    Music The Mercury Music Prize nominations have been announced. I can conclusively say I've haven't heard most of this music -- which is different to saying I haven't heard *of* it, I suppose. I'm still trotting through that music history book -- I've reached the early romantics -- Berlioz and Schubert -- and haven't had time to visit Glasvegas.

    It's probably time to catch up. To help myself along, I've listed the nominees below with links to Spotify, well at least links to what I can find. Florence And + Machine's album isn't on yet and Lisa Hannigan's missing too. Spotify's been a bit slow with updates lately. Perhaps some record companies have instituted an artificial gap between when an album is released and when it appears on the service ...

    Kasabian - West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum

    The Horrors - Primary Colours

    Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires

    Glasvegas - Glasvegas

    La Roux - La Roux

    Florence + The Machine - Lungs

    Bat For Lashes - Two Suns

    Lisa Hannigan - Sea Sew

    The Invisible - the Invisible

    Led Bib - Sensible Shoes

    Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Twice Born Men

    Speech Debelle - Speech Therapy

    'The BBC Shakespeare Plays' by Susan Willis.



    In 1975 when BBC producer Cedric Messina was working on a drama at Glamis Castle, he decided that it would be the perfect location for a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Thinking about it some more, he wondered why he should stop there? Why not film all of the plays in the canon (thirty-seven at that point, Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III not having been admitted yet), some jolly good Shakespeare, for broadcast on television? The BBC liked that idea. And eventually so did the American co-producers, oilmen and bankers (the likes of Exxon and Morgan Bank who wanted to be seen to be very interested in culture). A big event, an epic undertaking, televising the canon was a chance for the BBC to thump it’s chest and shout “This is what we do!” (with a little help from some friends).

    As Susan Willis explains in The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making The Televised Canon, a celebration of Messina's undertaking, the Americans having stipulated that it shouldn’t be too radical, so none of that modern dress malarkey, the producer would see his original vision be revised and revised, and ultimately completed six years later, having gone through three producers with three different visions, a panoply of directors (some television veterans new to Shakespeare, some Shakespeare veterans new to Shakespeare) though Messina got his wish to film As You Like It at the castle and surrounds and later taking Henry VIII on location to the actual historical palaces, everything else was shot in the studio, engaging some of the greatest theatre actors of all time and whoever was popular on television.

    As anyone lucky enough to own the dvd boxset will know, the results are something of a mixed bag. In her investigation, Willis (associate professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery) notes (and I agree with her) that those plays which are less well know, Measure for Measure or Pericles or All’s Well That Ends Well are the best served out of the lot because the directors didn’t feel constrained by what has gone before, whereas Romeo and Juliet, huddled then in the shadow of the recent Zeffrelli movie doesn’t do anything new. The crowning achievement is probably Henry VI – Richard III in which director Jane Howell through an ensemble cast doubling roles, on a single set resembling an adventure playground, portrays this history as the games of school boys play-acting; in isolation it’s as entertaining as I, Claudius, with just as many wild performances and narrative meanders.

    Writing just a few years after the final broadcast, Willis clearly has a great admiration for the series. Beyond the history, she offers a forensic analysis of some of the series’s auteurs, Jonathan Miller, Elijah Moshinsky and Howell demonstrating how they turned the constraints into benefits by taking full advantage of the televisual medium to emphasise the meaning of a scene through the mis-en-scene or stylising the sets to thematically underscore the motivations of a character. She carefully manages to keep such analysis with the production, only ever broadly venturing into the text when its absolutely necessary usually when describing cuts made or scene changes.

    The book closes with some gossipy production diaries for Troilus and Cressida, Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors, contrasting different directing styles and showing how the BBC’s production methods of the time constrained their artistic decisions (familiar to anyone who’s watched the documentaries on Doctor Who dvds – the 10pm shutdown effected high art too). It's the kind of thing which would be of use to anyone with an interest in this period of television or theatre history and has some wonderful moments were the diva gene in some actors takes full bloom, their competitive streak, but unfortunately more often than not, Willis refuses to name names, though a close analysis of the cast list would probably offer a few ideas.

    If there’s a problem, having concentrated on her favourites, Willis rather dumps everyone else into a single chapter, though the writer does somewhat justify that choice by explaining what she thought went wrong with, for example, As You Like It. It’s the nature of these things that I’m bound to disagree with her on a great many things but her observations are correct more often than not, especially in relation to Richard Griffith’s Falstaff dozing his way through a The Merry Wives of Windsor (working against a wonderful Judy Davis and Ben Kinglsey), and particularly about the fiery chemistry between Tim Pigott-Smith as Angelo and Kate Nelligan as Isabella in Measure for Measure, an early triumph and one of the reasons I became interested in Shakespeare, which was the aim the project, to get the disaffected interested so it succeeded in that.

    Thinking about it some more



    Books In 1975 when BBC producer Cedric Messina was working on a drama at Glamis Castle, he decided that it would be the perfect location for a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Thinking about it some more, he wondered why he should stop there? Why not film all of the plays in the canon (thirty-seven at that point, Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III not having been admitted yet), some jolly good Shakespeare, for broadcast on television? The BBC liked that idea. And eventually so did the American co-producers, oilmen and bankers (the likes of Exxon and Morgan Bank who wanted to be seen to be very interested in culture). A big event, an epic undertaking, televising the canon was a chance for the BBC to thump it’s chest and shout “This is what we do!” (with a little help from some friends).

    As Susan Willis explains in The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making The Televised Canon, a celebration of Messina's undertaking, the Americans having stipulated that it shouldn’t be too radical, so none of that modern dress malarkey, the producer would see his original vision be revised and revised, and ultimately completed six years later, having gone through three producers with three different visions, a panoply of directors (some television veterans new to Shakespeare, some Shakespeare veterans new to Shakespeare) though Messina got his wish to film As You Like It at the castle and surrounds and later taking Henry VIII on location to the actual historical palaces, everything else was shot in the studio, engaging some of the greatest theatre actors of all time and whoever was popular on television.

    As anyone lucky enough to own the dvd boxset will know, the results are something of a mixed bag. In her investigation, Willis (now Associate Professor of Literature and English at Duke University) notes (and I agree with her) that those plays which are less well know, Measure for Measure or Pericles or All’s Well That Ends Well are the best served out of the lot because the directors didn’t feel constrained by what has gone before, whereas Romeo and Juliet, huddled then in the shadow of the recent Zeffrelli movie doesn’t do anything new. The crowning achievement is probably Henry VI – Richard III in which director Jane Howell through an ensemble cast doubling roles, on a single set resembling an adventure playground, portrays this history as the games of school boys play-acting; in isolation it’s as entertaining as I, Claudius, with just as many wild performances and narrative meanders.

    Writing just a few years after the final broadcast, Willis clearly has a great admiration for the series. Beyond the history, she offers a forensic analysis of some of the series’s auteurs, Jonathan Miller, Elijah Moshinsky and Howell demonstrating how they turned the constraints into benefits by taking full advantage of the televisual medium to emphasise the meaning of a scene through the mis-en-scene or stylising the sets to thematically underscore the motivations of a character. She carefully manages to keep such analysis with the production, only ever broadly venturing into the text when its absolutely necessary usually when describing cuts made or scene changes.

    The book closes with some gossipy production diaries for Troilus and Cressida, Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors, contrasting different directing styles and showing how the BBC’s production methods of the time constrained their artistic decisions (familiar to anyone who’s watched the documentaries on Doctor Who dvds – the 10pm shutdown effected high art too). It's the kind of thing which would be of use to anyone with an interest in this period of television or theatre history and has some wonderful moments were the diva gene in some actors takes full bloom, their competitive streak, but unfortunately more often than not, Willis refuses to name names, though a close analysis of the cast list would probably offer a few ideas.

    If there’s a problem, having concentrated on her favourites, Willis rather dumps everyone else into a single chapter, though the writer does somewhat justify that choice by explaining what she thought went wrong with, for example, As You Like It. It’s the nature of these things that I’m bound to disagree with her on a great many things but her observations are correct more often than not, especially in relation to Richard Griffith’s Falstaff dozing his way through a The Merry Wives of Windsor (working against a wonderful Judy Davis and Ben Kinglsey), and particularly about the fiery chemistry between Tim Pigott-Smith as Angelo and Kate Nelligan as Isabella in Measure for Measure, an early triumph and one of the reasons I became interested in Shakespeare, which was the aim the project, to get the disaffected interested so it succeeded in that.

    links for 2009-07-18