"I'm the ugliest man that's ever presented a programme"

TV The Guardian has a fabulous interview with Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley on the subject of the ITV morning show Daybreak and its disasterous launch. They're bullish, self-depricating yet defensive and their chemistry underscores that most of the show's problems have nothing to do with them and everything to do with the content. Chiles on the bad press:

"I get up at quarter to four," he says. "I get in the car at five past four, I say hello to the driver, he says hello to me. We both say how knackered we are, and then I read the papers. And I read that I'm the ugliest man that's ever presented a programme, I read that my close friend and co-presenter Christine is a social-climbing slag, and that the programme is the worst thing anyone's seen, and it's tanking, and it's a complete failure. I've read all that by the time I've gone round the Hogarth roundabout, so my day bottoms out at 4.15am. And then people say the problem is I'm grumpy. Well, a) I'm grumpy for a reason; and b) if you have got your arse in your hands, is there anything worse than somebody telling you to cheer up?"

This might yet be seen as the closest they'll get to infamous Bruce outburst on Big Night Out -- unless Chiles goes through with his promise herein to get out of his contract by saying the one word you can't ever get away with saying on television at that time of the morning.

"Judy Garland refused to sing it"

Christmas The Story Behind 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas':

"The original version was so lugubrious that Judy Garland refused to sing it. She said, 'If I sing that, little Margaret will cry and they'll think I'm a monster.' So I was young then and kind of arrogant, and I said, 'Well, I'm sorry you don't like it, Judy, but that's the way it is, and I don't really want to write a new lyric.' But Tom Drake, who played the boy next door, took me aside and said, 'Hugh, you've got to finish it. It's really a great song potentially, and I think you'll be sorry if you don't do it.' So I went home and I wrote the version that's in the movie."

From now on our troubles will be miles awaaaaeeey ...

"stuffed into cereal boxes and left in her attic..."

TV This week, the BBC's Inside Out programme featured a short biography of Delia Derbyshire the arranger of the original and still best version of the Doctor Who theme tune. It's thoughtful and manages, in its eight or nine minutes to speak to all the right experts on the subject:



Experts including Dr. David Butler who was my dissertation tutor at university. I'm not sure, in fact I know, I wouldn't have graduated from my MA Screen Studies degree without his help.

Review 2010: The Opinion Engine: Update: 7/31

About So far seven people have sent ideas for some things for me to give my opinion on during December which is excellent, but that'll only get me to the seventh. I'd like to be posting right through to until the 31st.

If this is all news to you, here is the call for entries.

To repeat I'd like be writing about anything. Something cultural, a film, a book, a tv programme or some music. A current affairs story. A person. A concept. Even just a word.

You can contact me through the usual virtual channels:

EMAIL

TWITTER

FACEBOOK

Thanks again.

"the Tim Vine route"

Liverpool Life Last night I attended one of the periodic Ignite talks. I decided to simply watch the events unfold rather than write lots of notes this time so I'm pleased to see that Alistair's filed a report so you can read about what you missed:

"Next Robin Brown, of Seven Streets (among other websites), discussed the importance of choosing the right name for your website.
There are, he mused, three types of route you can go down to name a site - the SEO (search engine optimisation) route, the Tim Vine route (puns) or the Ronseal route (does what it says on the tin).
A site such as Medical Device Technology, for example, is a Ronseal and SEO name.
When it came to naming Seven Streets, Robin and David Lloyd chose a name reflecting Liverpool's history. They almost, he said, chose to name the site Corkhill after the legendary Brookside family- but decided, in the end, that "it was a terrible name".
His advice was that people naming sites should "consider audience, content, tone and "Ronseal or Tim Vine or SEO".

As I realised afterwards, Liverpool Blogs inadvertently manages to be Ronseal, Tim Vine and SEO.

"Killing me won't bring back your goddam honey!"

Film Never mind #iamsparticus. I am Nic Cage:



Having not seen it, I hadn't realised the remake of The Wicker Man was essentially the film version of "I'm a Celebrity..." [via]

"the famous amateur film footage"

History The Atlantic rounds up what's actually known about the Kennedy Assassination, 47 years on:

"In a 2005 book, Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, Gerald McKnight of Hood College suggested that a high-level plot involving senior U.S. intelligence officials was probably responsible for the president's death. In his 2003 book about photographic evidence, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination, David Wrone of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point argued that the famous amateur film footage of the assassination proves that Kennedy was hit by gunfire from two different directions. Wrone did not advocate a theory of who was responsible."

Sadly, they seem to have missed off the strongest possibility. At this point I don't know what to believe and I don't think anyone alive today will really find out the truth.

Liverpool Biennial 2010: Feedback: The Good Stuff

Art Yesterday's list of qualifications aren't necessary here.

Quality of the work

The standard of work on display in 2010 has in the main been very high, across all facets of the festival, from the official to independents, some of which, especially in the public realm has been truly unforgettable. Do Ho Suh’s Bridging Home was probably, for me, the best of the festival (see above). The most engaging work has had the capacity to pull us momentarily from our own humdrum reality in that way that is only usually possible in the best fiction, transforming utterly how we look at the world. Time and again I gasped, I gaped, I was giddy. If you want to know what my other favourite work has been, I’d point you in the direction of my reviews; with one or two notable exception I’ve generally followed the policy of only talking about the work I’ve thought was worth talking about.

Iconography

The festival’s iconography was another triumph. The wolf silhouette appeared on posters and street signs, outside venues and across the front of the Biennial catalogue and created buzz simply through their inexplicable existence. Search Google and there are dozens of people asking “Why wolves?” and cleverly an explanation was only forthcoming for those who looked for it, either by engaging with Biennial personal or looking carefully at the merchandising. They were designed by Carlos Amorales who was engaged by the story of Edward I who exterminated the original wolf population of the country in the fifteenth century. Amorales was inspired to give the lupines a revenge of sorts by having the animals spread across the city for the duration of the festival “to create a contemporary folk tale as an image campaign for the Liverpool Biennial and bring back an antique image into our contemporary world.”

52 Renshaw Street

There was perhaps no greater symbol of the ambition of this festival than the placing the Biennial’s visitor centre in as iconic a local landmark as the old Rapid Hardware store. A giant street long advert on the main bus route, it was impossible for the residents of Liverpool this year not to at least have some awareness of the festival even if it was to wonder why some half naked person was lying enigmatically in one of the windows. But more importantly it was literally a shop window for the festival, one of its largest venues containing some of its most confrontational work, festival curator Lorenzo Fusi ably demonstrating the various facets of the Touched theme. Plus there was the sheer novelty of stepping through the automatic doors only to encounter picnic tables and some garden sheds. If only all cafes (which is what this turned out to be) could be this original.

Social Networking

As I mentioned when writing about the Biennial’s representation at the last Social Media Café, unlike previous festivals there’s been a genuine sense of this being an event spread across three months rather than an initial burst of excitement with the Biennial then falling beneath the radar, only really approachable by those in the know, who care to seek it out. One of the reasons for that has been the social networking strategy, of advertising and getting news of the festival out across Twitter and Facebook and blogs and interacting with visitors, making them feel like participants as well as customers. Being invited to the press day was especially instrumental in leading me to offer this much coverage across the festival period rather than the simple top ten which has often constituted my contribution. More than any other year I’m genuinely sorry to see the festival coming to an end.

Happy Birthday, Doctor.

TV Oh dear, it's an attack by the deadly Sigur Ros. Hankies at the ready, and ...



Happy Birthday, Doctor. You don't look a day over a thousand and forty-nine, oh err, six-hundred and three, um, nine hundred and seven? [via]

Liverpool Biennial 2010: Feedback: The Bad Stuff.

Art Heavy sigh. Having spent the best part of three months being upbeat about the festival and trying desperately to be its ambassador as best I can, I think it’s only fair, now that it’s nearly over to offer a slight post-mortem on what didn’t work, the frustrations, the annoyances. Note before reading this that I accept this won’t be everyone’s experience and also that people have different standards, are potentially more patient about some of these things than me. I know. I know. And so, in order of annoyance from top to bottom. Let's get this over with quickly shall we?

Maps

Across the years, the Biennial maps have been of variable quality. In 2004 they were so broken I actually had to create a key for myself so that I could find out which other venues where even open in a given area. In terms of the International venues, this year’s was the best yet with big red numbered dots and a clear key as to the locations of the Touched venues and public realm works (even if I spent over half an hour on the first day trying to find the gable end of 24 Fleet Street).

Hidden in amongst those however were the green spots of the SQUAT venues, unnumbered and entirely confusing. Although generally bunched together on the likes of Seel Street some of these green spots didn’t seem to correspond to a venue at all, and although a ferret through the Biennial catalogue usual brought some indication of what I might be looking for I’d argue that finding an exhibition space shouldn’t be an act of detective work. On one occasion I was so exhausted by the time I got there I wasn't much in the mood to look at the work.

Information

Or more specifically a lack of consistent signage. Whilst I had a magical day on Seel Street visiting the SQUAT and Independent venues, I missed a couple more because I hadn’t realised the otherwise normal looking house or whatever was an art venue to and not happening by when it was actually open. Part of the problem with the map could have been solved if some kind of logo had been placed on the front of a given building indicating that this was part of the Biennial too and which strand. The official Biennial wasn't entirely immune to this as my odyssey around the Black-E demonstrates.

And in this new world, when people have less time to themselves, the more information they have about what to expect at these ad-hoc venues the better. There’s nothing more dispiriting than walking miles only to be confronted with a video work you don’t have time to watch all of the way through or a tiny exhibition containing a few paintings. I know this isn’t just true of the Biennial, but a festival that prides itself on being dipped in and out of should at least be able to say if something can be seen in a lunchtime.

Noise

Too often my experience of an exhibition was spoilt by the ambient noise. Sometimes this was due to the poor placement of a work, complex video art in an essentially public place were the noise of life outside meant that it was sometimes impossible to give my full attention to a work. Sometimes it was other visitors, quiet moments with paintings ruined by someone standing nearby with a mobile phone. None of which can be helped.

But sometimes, in fact often if I’m being honest, it was the staff.  When I worked as an invigilator one of the things I was very conscious of was making sure that the visitor wasn’t disturbed from the reason they were visiting, the art. But over and over again I’d be unable to hear a video piece or I’d have my concentration blown because of gossip or some meeting or other about the internal workings of the venue and in one case the invigilator conducting a long, loud mobile phone conversation that reverberated around the building.

Am I being intolerant? Probably. Just unlucky? Maybe and I should add that my experience of the invigilators in some venues was exemplary, especially when they were obviously passionate about the work and keen to make me passionate too. When you're travelling about the Biennial alone, this can often be the only human interaction you have all day and in most cases it was very welcome. On a couple of occasions I even questioned my own customer service abilities because they didn't match up.

But there at two venues in particular the staff were especially insensitive and I had to leave a section of an exhibition in the case of one and the venue in total in the other because I was just wasting my time.  How do you broach a subject like this?  Can you stop screeching about so that I can listen properly to how this woman lost her baby, please?  The presentation of an artist’s work isn’t just about bricks and mortar but the whole experience and I just don't think a visitor shouldn’t be expected to make these kinds of allowances.

Conclusion

Again, please take this criticism in the spirit within which it was meant and with the proviso that I'm not the best navigator, have a habit of overlooking things and can be pretty cantankerous for my age. I just thought it important for the purposes of this blog to give an overall picture of the experience but to do so outside all of the opinionating about the art. None of this was enough to spoil my experience of the Biennial as a whole.  This has been a magical, magical time, as I'll explain when I write about the good stuff.

"emotional data"

History The Royal Society's lost women scientists. Richard Holmes reveals how humanity's advancement has effectively been slowed by academia's patronising attitude to women. Here's how astonomer William Herschel annotated his sister's historic paper on discovering new comets:

"Since my sister's observations were made by moonlight, twilight, hazy weather, and very near the horizon, it would not be surprising if a mistake had been made." But it had not. Caroline also kept an observational journal for more than 30 years. This gives not only astronomical data, but emotional data too: it's an invaluable early view of a brother-sister scientific team at work, including their many trials and heartaches. It is one of the earliest records of how science actually gets done, its secret tribulations as well as its public triumphs."

Some subjects demand to be turned into a series for BBC Four.

"subtle, yet perhaps very revealing"

Film Louise Hamway investigates the two versions of Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. Yes, that's two.

"In 1979, Werner Herzog adapted Murnau’s film into “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” a.k.a. “Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht,” a beautiful interpretation of the landmark film that works as homage while bringing its own touch of New German Cinema to it. Unlike the original, Herzog made two versions of the film: one in English and one in German. Not merely dubbed over voices as one would expect; Herzog shot the two simultaneously, shooting a scene in German then the same scene over in English. The differences are subtle, yet perhaps very revealing about the differences in German and American cinema."

[obvious]The extra car chases were probably a bit unnecessary, though.[/obvious]

“Producing a Modern Newspaper”

History This article at The Bolton News mainly advertises a screening of films from the North West Film Archive at Bolton Library on Tuesday which will include plenty of documentary shorts not seen in decades (the reels have to be defrosted and processed before they can be seen). The evening starts at 7.30pm and tickets cost £4 from the library or by calling 01204 332211, if you're in the area.

But the article also includes a fascinating embedded video from 1930, “Producing a Modern Newspaper”, showing the journey of news stories from the telegraph machine through the journalistic eye to the printing press to distribution and finally to the hands of the paper boy.  It would be interesting to know how different a contemporary remake would be.  Has the distribution process of local papers changed that much?

"busting through stereotypes"

Radio This job advert seeking a female DJ to work at Radio One, that's Radio One in Beirut, cleverly spends much of its duration busting through stereotypes:

"Q – Is it safe?
A – In a word, yes. Petty crime is virtually unheard of and the rare occasions of political unrest are mostly limited to particular areas that you’re unlikely to find yourself in. Most residential areas around Beirut are very quiet indeed."

Sounds idyllic. Ferne?  Interested?

"so battered"

Film Another film archive discovery story, which though not as tenuous or impossible as the Metropolis restoration, shows that the difference between an important film existing or not existing is a simple and strange as the number of prints in existence:

"Almost as quickly as it built a cult reputation, the film [Sara Driver's adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story] fell from view, the victim of a leak in a New Jersey warehouse that destroyed Ms. Driver’s negative. That left her with only one film-festival print so battered that it would barely run through a projector. When museums and art house theaters called over the years asking to show it, she would turn them down, not wanting the film to be seen in such bad shape."

Yet more hope that Marco Polo is still out there. Somewhere.

"an audio diary of his life"

History Art From Analog: 20 Years Of Voice Mail Makes A Movie:

"If there's one thing Mark Craig never did, it was hit "erase" on his answering machine. "When Craig got an answering machine in 1985, he wouldn't erase. He'd just replace the tape and throw the old one into a shoebox. Twenty years later, he had amassed hours and hours of what was, effectively, an audio diary of his life."

The resulting film is just twenty-three minutes but this has the potential to be a valuable social history archive.

"the local village car park in Devon"

Food Potato launched into space:

"The "spacechip" – named Spudnik2 – was then tied to a helium weather balloon with a camera attached and launched from the local village car park in Devon."

Then the Taterians, sensing one of their own was being tortured, sent a rescue mission/invasion force to earth and wiped out the human race.

Elsewhere I review this week's The Sarah Jane Adventures. That is all.

"Whimsical Short Films Unit"

TV The Apprentice production team's early experimentation with Dr Who soundtracks:

"Following on from last week’s shock melange ‘twixt The Apprentice and some incidental music from Dr Who story ‘Daleks in Manhattan’, TV Cream’s Whimsical Short Films Unit has been toiling hard on the predictable flight of fancy that is: Hey! What would have happened if the production team had used some music from old Dr Who on the show?!"

This is a work of genius, especially the second one. TV Cream has offered some utterly vintage work lately.

Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith.

TV Back in the distant past, in mid-October when I was still exactly in my mid-thirties, it seemed as though the production team were taking the brave step of writing out Luke and K9 in an effort to move away from the too easy deus ex machina style story conclusions which have tin-dogged the series from the start. Luke may have stuck around as a dismodied head and shoulders on a flatscreen, making fleeting appearances to justify his continued presence in the introduction ("Boy GEEENIUUUS"), but the stories since have arguably been more thrilling because, with one obvious exception, the remaining attic allies have needed to rely somewhat on their wits, putting the clues together without too many easy answers (even to the point of taking Mr Smith out of the equation for this or that reason) and a fair bit of trial and error.

Which makes me wonder whether Clay and Gareth, in crafting the conclusion to Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith and this season are being entirely serious when offering a solution that requires the combined effort of Luke, K9, Mr Smith and newbie electronic soap tray Mr White and a return to the worst excesses of previous stories: the kind of easy research leaps Lisbeth Salander would be proud of, action sequences lasting what seems like mere seconds piled one on top of another in which characters shift geographical area in moments and not always through teleportation and a villain that requires the emotional fallout from a fake global terror to be destroy. Epic concepts like Clyde trapped in the orbital golfball which would have been explored over whole episodes in the old Doctor Who (and did in the case of The Space Pirates) are ushered in and out all too soon.

As ever I was simultaneously elated and appalled, especially since the first episode is actually a quite sensitive (well sensitive for this panto) portrayal of Alzheimer’s or at least the stresses of watching a trusted friend or family member getting old. Who of us hasn’t forgotten something or witnessed someone else forgetting something really rather major like the current residency of their son and wondered – are we or they alright? Lis wonderfully demonstrated first the denial to friends, denial to oneself before acceptance and the decision on whether to fight or relent and let nature take its course.

Of course, in the real world none of this is brought about by a milfian temptress in a red sports car with matching couture. Like Samantha Bond and Suranne Jones before her, Julie Graham senses rightly or wrongly (it oscilates) that this isn’t the place for subtlety though she manages in the first episode to just about convince us that Ruby could be a potential replacement for Sarah Jane, cleverly approximating some of Lis’s business (the walk, the stance, the flick of the hair). By the cliffhanger, the needs of the show kick in of course and it's as though Kate O’Mara is in the room (not least because Ruby’s plan, to steal people’s life essences wasn’t a million miles away from the real Rani’s in her first adventure, if you squint).

Ultimately ranking about a seven on the Zaroff scale you still have to applaud the determination with which Graham sells the Katesh’s gastroschisis state and the boggle eyed notion of a stomach which exists outside an alien’s body, the writers sadly failing to have Clyde suggest it as useful alternative to a gastric band. What I would have liked to have seen would have been a proper battle of wills between Ruby and Sarah Jane the latter having already lost her wits before the former reached ascendancy. Would I be wrong in suggesting that the title character has been even less present this series, mostly falling into her old form of having to be rescued? In nearly ever story this year she seems to have been zapped or put through some sort of mental torture.

Which brings us back to doe in which I also expected the Doctor to arrive for good measure. Whilst its true that both Rani and Clyde also have a hand in the solution, there’s always something slightly unedifying about a character who’s previously had little input on a story charging and saving the day. Perhaps Luke’s still ill-advised scarf is meant to hide the chord which is being used to dangle him in like the original gods that would be brought in at the close of a Euripidian Greek tragedy. Aristotle hated this approach to drama and said so in Poetics where he proposed (radically for 335 BCE) that the resolution of the plot must always spring from the internal actions of the play, a model which has worked for much of the rest of the series.

Or as Hitchcock says, if you show a gun in the opening reel it has to have gone off by the end. What just about makes it saleable (other than the fact that Luke did at least put in an appearance in the first episode) is Tommy Knight’s burst of adolescent vitriol, his character bawling out Rani like a refugee from a John Osbourne play, as though what we’re actually seeing is the result of some whole other unseen narrative which is happening at Oxford, with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as the main villain (a tricky bugger once you’ve reached the middle section). When he later clumsily tells Rani that he loves her, it begins to seem almost exactly like my university experience.

But predictably amid all the shouting and running, the best scene is the quiet moment between Rani and her mum, in which Gita describes quite logically the jealousy of seeing her daughter palling about over the road with this second mother figure and the secret they clearly have between them, Mina Anwar perhaps suggesting, just as she did with the alternative version of the character in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith that the feckles, flowery, “HELLO SARAH!” version of her character is an act or defence mechanism and that, eep, Gita might have hidden depths which is quite a contrast to Graham’s gurning from across the road. It’s this contrast which has, on the whole, made this series such a joy.

Next Time: I don't know. Time's caught up with us.