Trooping the Colour.

Trooping the Colour, a photo by The British Monarchy on Flickr.

ambush Corrie Corfield

Radio Sometimes I wonder who listens to Radio 4's Feedback. Like television's Points of View and Newswatch, it's usually fuelled by the kind of bizarre humans who complain if a programme's been broadcast thirty seconds too late or Justin Webb's accidentally crashed the eight o'clock picks on the Today programme.

 Various channel controllers are generally hauled in to be asked presenter Roger Bolton (a veteran of these kinds of programmes having previously front Channel 4's Right to Reply back when it was still somewhat a public service channel) about exactly why Chris Moyles exists or if they're ever going to bring back Pied Piper.

But sometimes, just sometimes, Feedback offers a real insight into radio production as was the case yesterday when Bolton ventured out of the steaming mass of vitriolic energy which his usual nest and visited Radio 4's continuity department to ambush Corrie Corfield as she goes about her day filling the gaps between programmes and reading the news.

Corrie's one of my favourite voices on twitter and on the radio and we can now marvel at her ability to fit four pieces of information into a minute and a half, whilst being shouted towards by people in other studios.  You can listen to the whole thing here (eps dated 15 June), along with an excellent anecdote about John Snagge commentating the Queen's coronation.

Kenneth Branagh knighted.

The Queen's birthday honours were released at midnight and Hamlet interest includes a knighthood for Ken now Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh.  Also from the cast of his film version of Hamlet, Kate Winslet receives a CBE.

Other Shakespearean actors include Jean Marsh who's now an OBE and Amanda Redman, MBE.

At the Royal Shakespeare Company, outgoing artistic director Michael Boyd is knighted and Victoria Heywood, executive director is granted a CBE.

That's about all I can spot.  The full lists are posted on The Guardian's website.

the kind of natural weeding

Libraries Lately there's been an immense discussion about a mass disposal of materials from Manchester Central Library as part of a three year refurbishment project. The source of concern was a letter purporting to be from inside the process which suggested the people in charge of removing three hundred thousand items weren't trained librarians and that they weren't sure what was being thrown out. Cue much excitement on Twitter and elsewhere, especially from me.

Now The Guardian's finally written a piece about it, Martin Wainwright describing the various issues, relating the details of the outrage and as happened the other day with that Charlotte Church piece, someone involved in this case Smyth Harper the Head of News at Manchester City Council has popped in to offer some perspective. Now, obviously she too isn't inside the library -- she's a council press officer, but she seem pretty clued in on the topic.

Elsewhere in the comments this lengthy piece from the Manchester Evening News is linked to, finally offering some perspective on what's happening with detail as to what's being disposed of and why, "reference and non-fiction works, with some fiction.  [...] outdated scientific, medical or trade references books, or books in poor condition, have also been dug out."  They're also consulting borrower records to see what's actually being used lately.

So now we have two sides to the story.  On the one hand the suggestion of cultural vandalism on a massive scale.  On the other the catching up on seventy years of the kind of natural weeding every library that isn't a national deposit (like the British or Bodlean Libraries) which has to keep everything usually goes through.  Regular book sales in local branch libraries are an example of this.

My guess is that it's somewhere in between depending on your point of view.  The breaking up a library's collection is to some extent the destruction of a historical legacy, a mass of knowledge brought to together by successive hands across the years.  But in truth that's probably only of interest to those studying collections policies and there's an argument that a record of what was in the collection is just as valuable as keeping the physical items.

Plus if something is rarely used if ever and is available from elsewhere through inter-library loan, it isn't some great loss, if an inconvenience to someone turning up at the library hoping to look at it on a given day.  But that would also be the case if it was simply on loan.  At least from the MEN piece there's no suggestion that they're getting rid of anything unique (though obviously if there are only 2 copies left in the world you should probably keep both of those).

Also at certain point non-fiction books stop being filled with knowledge and become cultural curiosities as to what the state of knowledge was at a certain point.  Out of date scientific papers are sometimes a special case because they can be a treasure trove of historical data, but again, if they're not unique and they're not used that often and you don't have the room, there's little point keeping them, especially if they've been digitised.

At home I have a certain weeding policy especially in regards to my VHS tapes.  Rather than simply dumping the lot, I carefully went through and checked on availability.  There are some treasured films in there which have never went to dvd or were deleted within seconds of release (Nina Takes a Lover and astonishing amount of Shakespeare) so I've kept those.  I'd expect the Manchester Library's doing much the same.

All of which means I'm rather more philosophical about this than before I began writing this post (not least because Harper indicates that no local items, the bread and butter of this kind of collection are being lost).  So now I'm looking forward to seeing the new library with great interest.  But of course, Liverpool's own Central Library opens in the meantime and we've no idea what's being going on in there.

Sturton's splutter.

Radio For fans of unexpected scoops (see also Diane Abbot announcing her Labour leadership candidacy on Today), here's the moment on the BBC's World at One when Edward Sturton found out he'd have to throw out the interview he was about to have with Argyle and Bute Council leader Roddy McCuish over the censorship of the Never Seconds blog:

listen to ‘Argyll and Bute council reverse #neverseconds camera ban live on The World at One’ on Audioboo

I love Sturton's splutter. He's clearly assumed he's going to be speaking to a drone and takes the usual tactic of going in all words blazing, and McCuish has to interrupt him in order to announce the reversal.  But yes, this is all sorted out now.  The original donkey statement has been replaced with another explaining the reversal ("There is no place for censorship in this Council and never will be whilst I am leader").

RSC Julius Caesar's BBC Four broadcast date confirmed.

John Wyver at Illuminations has just confirmed it, but the film version of the RSC's new production of Julius Caesar broadcasts on BBC Four on Sunday 24 June 2012 at 8pm. Here's the synopsis on the relevant programme page:

"Film version of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2012 production of Shakespeare's fast-moving thriller. A vivid story about a struggle for democracy, Julius Caesar is also a love story between two men united by an explosive act of political violence. The setting is a modern African state in which the tyrant Caesar is about to seize power. Cassius persuades Brutus to join the conspirators plotting an assassination. Featuring a distinguished cast of black actors, the film is shot on location and in the RSC's theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon."

Really excited and I suppose we can consider it something of an experiment because this is a rare occasion of a version of a theatre production being broadcast during the run initial run of that same theatre production.

One of the reasons often given for theatre not appearing on television or radio is the impact that would have on box office receipts, so it'll be interesting to hear if this does have an impact on the RSC's box office receipts. 

My guess is that it won't.  These are separate entities and the experience of watching each is different, a viewer choosing between the close-ups of television or the electricity of live theatre and people will still flock to the RSC because it's the RSC.  We'll see.

"Julius Caesar is also a love story"

Shakespeare John Wyver at Illuminations has just confirmed it, but the film version of the RSC's new production of Julius Caesar broadcasts on BBC Four on Sunday 24 June 2012 at 8pm. Here's the synopsis on the relevant programme page:

"Film version of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2012 production of Shakespeare's fast-moving thriller. A vivid story about a struggle for democracy, Julius Caesar is also a love story between two men united by an explosive act of political violence. The setting is a modern African state in which the tyrant Caesar is about to seize power. Cassius persuades Brutus to join the conspirators plotting an assassination. Featuring a distinguished cast of black actors, the film is shot on location and in the RSC's theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon."

Really excited and I suppose we can consider it something of an experiment because this is a rare occasion of a version of a theatre production being broadcast during the run initial run of that same theatre production.

One of the reasons often given for theatre not appearing on television or radio is the impact that would have on box office receipts, so it'll be interesting to hear if this does have an impact on the RSC's box office receipts.

My guess is that it won't.  These are separate entities and the experience of watching each is different, a viewer choosing between the close-ups of television or the electricity of live theatre and people will still flock to the RSC because it's the RSC.  We'll see.

"you can tell me to my face"

Music The Short Cuts section of tomorrow's Guardian includes a typically sarcastic missive from PopJustice's (the usually good) Peter Robinson regarding one of Charlotte Church's new tracks, Mr The News, a thinly veiled attack on Mr Murdoch.

It's the sort of thing which unless it's written by Marina Hyde or Hadley Freeman tends to end badly and sure enough some immensity materialises in the comments underneath when a new commenter claiming to be Charlotte Church arrives to correct instrument inaccuracies and lay waste to the sarcasm:

"I'd like to invite you to one of my gigs and then, if you still believe it to be true, you can tell me to my face that I sound like Matt fucking Cardle. By the way, It's a yukele that you can see in the background"

She returns later to correct the spelling of ukulele.  If I was The Guardian I'd ask Charlotte to write a longer rebuke or have full length pictures of her and Peter pointing at each other and scowling in the Saturday edition with a lengthy debate about what the point was.

Updated 14/06/2012  It is Charlotte.  She and PopJustice had a conversation about this on Twitter last night.  Difficult to link to it all, but PopJustice has agreed to go a gig.

an exhibition of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's work

Art One of my favourite paintings, certainly in my top ten is The Forerunner, painted in 1920 by the artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (see above). It’s the Italian Renaissance and in an imagined moment, Leonardo da Vinci demonstrates a small prototype of one of his flying machines to his patrons Ludovico Sforza and Beatrice d' Este, the Duke and Duchess of Milan. The surrounding multitude with their mix of scepticism and indifference are beautifully realised as are the fashions with their elaborate patterns especially one female figure in a bright aquamarine dress.

There’s much more about the struggles between Leonardo and his patrons at the website of the Lady Lever Art Gallery where the painting is held and is also the venue for an exhibition of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale's work. She was one of the number of artists in the later waves of pre-Raphaelites, along with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, painting mythical, biblical and classical scenes in a relatively realistic form, the look which defines for many people Victorian painting (even if as is so often the case there was much more variety than that).

Fortescue-Brickdale has unfortunately remained relatively unknown, at least in comparison to John William Waterhouse (one of her influences), largely because she was working at a time when the pre-Raphaelite style was already falling out of fashion and it's a mark of the way that such things change that this the first show since a display at the Ashmolean in Oxford in 1972.  Also much of her work was in stained glass windows, book illustrations and small sculptures and is arguably often part of collections in which the star names receive the limited available wall space.

The exhibition is guest curated by Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Associate Professor in Art History at the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand and co-author of  Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists.  She spoke to Laura Davis of The Liverpool Post recently about the exhibition and says "when we look at Fortescue-Brickdale’s work, we can see it as one woman’s attempt to engage with the issues of the time, to make her own decisions about contributing to the making of contemporary culture.”

Some of her best work is in books, especially a portrait of Shakespeare’s heroine Sylvia (from The Two Gentlemen of Verona) in a collection of old English songs and ballads, rendered in a contemporary, almost photo-realistic style, the colour popping out of the pages (despite the necessary low light levels in the gallery space). There’s also a rare chance to see a number of paintings long since hidden in private collections like Vivien and Merlin showing the moment the elderly wizard is beguiled by this beautiful young thing, her serpent-like figure accentuated by an emerald green cloak.

Fortescue-Brickdale’s trick is to express some rather profound ideas through startling images. In Time the Physician, the artist overturns the idea of “father time” as one of death’s heralds with an illustration of him binding the head of a knight, suggesting instead time as a great healer.  Another jaw-dropping watercolour (which is worth visiting the exhibition for alone) is The Guardian Angel in which a celestial interventionist stretches her cupped hands around a World War I bomber, shielding the pilot on what might be his final journey, in what could as well be an alternative poster for Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's film A Matter of Life and Death.

She’s often described as the last of the pre-Raphaelites and the appearance of one the twentieth century’s first technological achievements rendered in the style and imaginary structure of a movement begun seventy years before also demonstrates that even as Fortescue-Brickdale ploughed on with her work, even she was recognising that it was part of a bygone era. By the 1920s she’d apparently abandoned the style but by then she’d created a valuable body of work which deserves greater attention, something this exhibition will hopefully provide.

[Image: © National Museums Liverpool.]

"icky little feelings like petty jealousy"

Music Finally, after seven long years, Fiona Apple has a new album coming. NPR has a preview:

"This has never been truer than on Apple's first album in seven years, whose typically hard-to-digest title is partly The Idler Wheel — the part in a system of gears (on phonographs and cassette players, among other extraordinary machines) that, seemingly passively, helps other parts move. The feelings Apple takes on in her deliberately maddening, eventually addictive new songs are those that inch us along, filling up most of our lives: icky little feelings like petty jealousy, self-doubt, bored loneliness and shamed regret. This is the stuff we'd rather tamp down. Apple wraps her fingers around it and makes it unavoidable."

Note, I haven't listened yet. I'll wait for the release so I can listen "properly". But it has been too long. To celebrate, here's one of my favourite Apple moments, metaphorically filling in for the film Magnolia during the editing stage for then boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson:



Anderson would also direct this promo for Apple's cover of Across The Universe.

"now Pizza Express"

History Oxford Street in Southampton was the shopping area that passengers joining the Titanic may have visited. John Welshman, author of Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town has attempted to reconstruct what the shops might have been:

"No 29: A bakery owned by James Wildman, a pastry chef and confectioner (now the Olivetree Restaurant).

"No 31: A tobacconists owned by Arthur Edwin Bannister and his wife Matilda (now Pizza Express).

"Nos 33-34: The Oxford Hotel owned by Walter Percy Brandon (now the Oxford Brasserie)."

This is excellent work.  Hotels then, restaurants now.  Incidentally, the Oxford University Press's blog is really, really excellent, offering a stream of short, clever intelligent posts on a range of random subjects, like an academic-style BoingBoing.

Simon Schama on Shakespeare.

This especially informative article from Simon Schama manages to explain the development of the commercial theatre in Britain in a single paragraph:

"The first owner-manager to convert a tavern yard site into a true theatre was the grocer John Brayne who established one at the Red Lion in the rustic suburb of Whitechapel. Ultimately, the Red Lion was just too far from the punters to make a go of it, but Brayne’s brother-in-law, James Burbage, was a carpenter-joiner as well as an actor, and when they moved the enterprise to the more populous and buzzingly seedy area of Shoreditch, they took over the ruins of a Catholic convent for the new theatre. The symbolism of one kind of spectacle succeeding the other could not have been more eloquent."

Amazing. In all the books I've read on the topic, never have I seen the transition so cleanly and clearly explained.  Schama's Shakespeare series begins on BBC Two on 22nd June.

"Brayne’s brother-in-law"

Theatre This especially informative article from Simon Schama manages to explain the development of the commercial theatre in Britain in a single paragraph:

"The first owner-manager to convert a tavern yard site into a true theatre was the grocer John Brayne who established one at the Red Lion in the rustic suburb of Whitechapel. Ultimately, the Red Lion was just too far from the punters to make a go of it, but Brayne’s brother-in-law, James Burbage, was a carpenter-joiner as well as an actor, and when they moved the enterprise to the more populous and buzzingly seedy area of Shoreditch, they took over the ruins of a Catholic convent for the new theatre. The symbolism of one kind of spectacle succeeding the other could not have been more eloquent."

Amazing. In all the books I've read on the topic, never have I seen the transition so cleanly and clearly explained.  Schama's Shakespeare series begins on BBC Two on 22nd June.

The Sunday Seven. Trevor Gilks. Woody Allen Fan.

Trevor Gilks is nearing the end of a project to watch all of Woody Allen's films in order.  He edits the website Every Woody Allen Movie.

How did you become a Woody Allen fan?

My parents were fans growing up, and I remember watching movies like Annie Hall and The Purple Rose of Cairo with them as a young man. Following that, I grew up into the sort of person - neurotic, over-educated, whiny, spectacled, white - for whom Woody Allen fandom is just sort of assumed.

What was your inspiration for starting the project?

Boredom, a burning need to tell people what I think about stuff, and a long-held desire to be considered an expert in something.

What was the trickiest element to achieve?

The trickiest part is avoiding repetition - repeating myself, and repeating others. The Internet is over-populated with opinions and if I can't offer anything new, there's essentially no real justification for my existence. I don't always succeed, but I'm always trying.

Of everything you've done what have you been most pleased with?

I think grabbing the domain 'everywoodyallenmovie.com' was a stroke of genius. It makes me seem more official.

When I did my own similar project, I found it easier to watch a chunk of them together and then go back and write reviews because it meant I could see the commonalities between them more clearly. What was your method, and did you have any particular aspects that you wanted concentrate on?

My approach was more one-at-a-time - watch one, write about it, then repeat. Unlike you, I don't have any other material I can put out in between Allen movies, but I still wanted to be able to publish content on a regular, non-sporadic basis.

I didn't go into it with anything in particular I was looking for. I figured I'd just head out and see what happened. I suppose my one hope was that the unique position I was putting myself in - watching them all in order - would give me a special perspective that would allow me to notice things others might miss.

What's your favourite Woody Allen film and why?

Annie Hall and/or Manhattan are my default choices, for all the usual reasons - emotion, characters, insight. However, I've seen those movies so many times, I feel ready to retire them. If I was going to watch a Woody Allen movie right now, I'd pick Take the Money and Run, Stardust Memories or Zelig. All three of them have a wild, unpredictable energy that's very exciting and lends itself to repeat enjoyment.

What stops you from feeling listless?

Continuous distraction.

Trevor continues to watch every Woody Allen movie here.