Ollie Johnston, who died yesterday, was the last of nine animators who sprinkled stardust over some of the world's best-loved cartoon characters. Andrew Gumbel reports on the men who drew Disney...
For some sense of the size of the footprint that Ollie Johnston, one of Walt Disney's oldest and longest-serving collaborators, has left on the world of film animation, one could do worse than turn to Brad Bird, the writer-director of some of this decade's most acclaimed animated films, including The Incredibles and this year's Oscar-winner, Ratatouille.
Back in 1978, Bird was a young animator at Disney who looked up with an appropriate sense of wonder at both Johnston and his best friend, Frank Thomas. Both had been with the company since 1934 and formed part of a core group known affectionately as the "Nine Old Men", a group who developed the look, feel, and emotions of every one of Disney's fairy-tale titles and – whatever one thinks of the cuter-than-cute Disney aesthetic with its chirping little birds and garlands of flowers – essentially pioneered the art of putting moving drawings on to celluloid.
In 1978, Johnston and Thomas retired. They left the building on a Friday; Bird inherited Johnston's desk the following Monday. As he later recounted: "I was properly awed as I sat down in Ollie's chair, at his desk. As I was checking it out and getting the feel of it I noticed the pencil sharpener was full of shavings. Instead of throwing them out I poured them into a glass jar, labelled it and set it atop the desk. Good luck shavings ... a simple reminder of the hard work required to create magic. My own jar of real Disney dust. The last jar."
This was indeed an elegiac moment. Johnston and Thomas were the last of the nine to walk out the door of Disney's animation studios, which had started up in Hollywood in the 1920s and then moved, as the company grew in size and stature, to a nondescript facility in the unlovely suburb of Burbank. A similar sense of an era passing fell over the animation world yesterday as news spread that Ollie Johnston had died at the age of 95. Just as he was the last one of the original nine to retire, he was the last one to die, too.
Brad Bird revered him enough to offer him small speaking parts by way of homage in two of his films, The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Two years ago, wheelchair-bound but still exuberant in spirit, Johnston travelled to Washington to accept a National Medal for the Arts from President George Bush. Thomas might easily have been there with him, had he not died the year before.
Johnston was feted for his specific contributions to the Disney canon – the character of Mr Smee, Captain Hook's feckless sidekick, in Peter Pan; the evil stepsisters in Cinderella; Bad King John (eventually voiced by Peter Ustinov) in Robin Hood; and, perhaps most memorably of all, the taboo-breaking early scene in Bambi when Bambi's mother is shot dead by hunters. The Bambi aesthetic tends to be ridiculed as much as it is cherished these days – all those big, blinking, tear-moistened doe eyes designed to tug at our emotions seem more than a touch mawkish and manipulative.
At the time, though – the film came out in 1942 – the very achievement of bringing animal drawings to life and triggering an emotional response in a mass audience was little short of ground-breaking. Blame the cheesy aesthetics on Disney himself; the technical accomplishment was all Johnston's, along with the rest of the nine. That achievement later laid the groundwork for the other big legacy that Johnston and Thomas have left to their successor animators – a book now generally regarded as the animation bible.
Called The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, and first published in the early 1980s, it is a 600-page examination of the theory and practice of animated film, together with hundreds of stills from the Disney canon and other illustrations. Johnston and Thomas consider the long history of drawing and the attempt by artists, going back all the way to the cave painters of the Cro-Magnon era, to create the illusion of movement and life. They draw on every sort of theory of emotional expression, including Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees (useful for animal films such as The Jungle Book).
In their view, the advent of film was an unparalleled breakthrough in the history of drawing, in the never-ending search for what they term "that elusive spark of life". "By making sequential drawings of a continuous action," they write, "and projecting their photographs on to a screen at a constant rate, an artist now could create all of the movement and inner life he was capable of. An artist could represent the actual figure, if he chose, methodically capturing its movements and actions. Or he could caricature it, satirise it, ridicule it ... what an amazing art form!"
The trick, the indefinable magic, was not to make the audience feel it ought to be responding to a cleverly crafted drawing, but rather to make the audience forget it was watching moving drawings at all and make the emotional connection easily, spontaneously, like a puppet-master making his audience forget his puppet has strings. This is what Walt Disney had dreamt of from the very beginning. "I want characters to be somebody. I don't want them just to be a drawing," he had said as early as 1927.
The "Nine Old Men" were hired more haphazardly than methodically – these were the very early days of film animation, with no certainty about the future. Johnston was a native Californian and a graduate of Stanford University and a prestigious art institute in Los Angeles when he joined in 1935. He was given just one week of training before starting on the job as an "in-betweener", a low-level artist who fills in the blanks between the most important action moments.
Others had even more happy-go-lucky entries into the business. Les Clark was an ice-cream shop owner across the street from Disney's original premises in Hollywood who caught Disney's attention because of the elegant lettering around the mirrors of his shop. Clark asked Disney if he could show him some drawings, and the tentative offer of a short-term job turned into a lifetime's work.
The nine solidified as a group in the 1930s and 1940s, the period when Disney produced such pioneering titles as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Bambi. None of them were really old men – they were in their twenties and thirties. The nickname derived, rather, from President Franklin Roosevelt's dismissive term for the nine mostly conservative justices on the Supreme Court who had a habit of blocking his New Deal reforms.
As a group they worked out 12 basic principles for bringing characters and scenes to life, which centred around timing, how much action to put into any frame sequence, and the degree to which they should exaggerate physical features or movements. Everything, from Johnston's point of view, started with an understanding of the character's state of mind. It's a lesson his successors have taken to heart. "He taught me to always be aware of what a character is thinking," said John Lasseter, the head of the Pixar Animation Studio who directed Toy Story and a whole production line of wildly successful computer-animated successor titles, in a statement to mark Johnston's death. "We continue to make sure that every character we create at Pixar and Disney has a thought process and emotion that makes them come alive."
For Johnston, animation wasn't just about replicating the emotions and thrills of live-action film. It was also an opportunity to create characters more wholly than any actor ever could with his or her physical limitations. Naturally, that challenge had its daunting side. "The worst thing about starting a new scene," he once said, "is have to start with blank piece of paper. It's not like live action where a director knows he has Robert Redford or Meryl Streep – a known quantity. We start with nothing."
Thursday, 17 April 2008
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
Underbelly sparks new probe
A 'hit' has been ordered on the Nine Network, with a watchdog to investigate whether controversial drama Underbelly has breached classification guidelines. However it's possible the broadcaster will beat the rap, with the investigation not likely to be completed until after the gritty gangland series has finished screening.
Christian group Festival of Light Australia says the screening of Underbelly, which traces the 1995-2004 gangland war between some of Melbourne's most notorious criminals, has breached industry code of practice classification guidelines on five separate occasions.
The group wants the show reclassified, saying there have been numerous occasions when scenes involving strong coarse language, drug use and nudity have been aired at an inappropriate time.
"I'm concerned that Channel Nine is really pushing the envelope, pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable at what time on TV," Festival of Light national research officer Roslyn Phillips said. "It seems to me as if they wanted the 8.30pm time because a lot more people are watching then ... but, of course, those numbers are swelled by young teenage children."
She said parents were lulled into a false sense of security because of Underbelly's M rating, and she wanted it reclassified. "It's quite clear if you read the guidelines that the sorts of things included in some of the scenes should be MA or AV. And if there are any scenes that are AV, and quite a few of the episodes do contain AV scenes, then ... it should be shown after 9.30pm."
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has confirmed the broadcaster is being investigated, but warns this may take several months. The 13-part mini-series began screening on February 13 in all states and territories except Victoria, meaning the show is likely to be off the air before ACMA has completed its investigation.
"It's not only a case of the horse has bolted, but really nothing happens," Ms Phillips said. "It means the guidelines don't mean anything anymore ... we've got to have a much better complaints system."
Meanwhile, Underbelly has been axed in New Zealand after it rated poorly. The Dominion Post newspaper reported the series, portraying Melbourne’s grisly underworld murders, had been taken off air from the TV3 station after screening only three episodes. “I can’t confirm at this stage when the show will return, only that it will be slightly later in the year in a different slot,” TV3 spokeswoman Jacqui Loates said. When the show first screened at 9.30pm on March 30, almost 225,000 watched the show according to AGB Nielsen Media Research, but by last week 188,600 tuned in.
Christian group Festival of Light Australia says the screening of Underbelly, which traces the 1995-2004 gangland war between some of Melbourne's most notorious criminals, has breached industry code of practice classification guidelines on five separate occasions.
The group wants the show reclassified, saying there have been numerous occasions when scenes involving strong coarse language, drug use and nudity have been aired at an inappropriate time.
"I'm concerned that Channel Nine is really pushing the envelope, pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable at what time on TV," Festival of Light national research officer Roslyn Phillips said. "It seems to me as if they wanted the 8.30pm time because a lot more people are watching then ... but, of course, those numbers are swelled by young teenage children."
She said parents were lulled into a false sense of security because of Underbelly's M rating, and she wanted it reclassified. "It's quite clear if you read the guidelines that the sorts of things included in some of the scenes should be MA or AV. And if there are any scenes that are AV, and quite a few of the episodes do contain AV scenes, then ... it should be shown after 9.30pm."
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has confirmed the broadcaster is being investigated, but warns this may take several months. The 13-part mini-series began screening on February 13 in all states and territories except Victoria, meaning the show is likely to be off the air before ACMA has completed its investigation.
"It's not only a case of the horse has bolted, but really nothing happens," Ms Phillips said. "It means the guidelines don't mean anything anymore ... we've got to have a much better complaints system."
Meanwhile, Underbelly has been axed in New Zealand after it rated poorly. The Dominion Post newspaper reported the series, portraying Melbourne’s grisly underworld murders, had been taken off air from the TV3 station after screening only three episodes. “I can’t confirm at this stage when the show will return, only that it will be slightly later in the year in a different slot,” TV3 spokeswoman Jacqui Loates said. When the show first screened at 9.30pm on March 30, almost 225,000 watched the show according to AGB Nielsen Media Research, but by last week 188,600 tuned in.
Dirty old town
There's not a Melbourne tram or palm-lined esplanade in sight in Nine's new drama, Canal Road. Instead, aerial shots sweep ominously over the city's night skyline. The Yarra River is murky and swirling and sinister figures lurk in graffiti-covered laneways. The impression is of a dark and brooding city, where pale and beautiful people struggle every day against an undercurrent of danger and despair.
With its dramatic, filmic production quality and interwoven plotlines of sorrow and manipulation, Canal Road is in keeping with a trend away from the sunny series that have long been the hallmark of Australian television drama. Recent shows such as Nine's gangland drama Underbelly and Showcase's brothel drama Satisfaction paint a very different Australia to the one that sparkled by the sea in The Secret Life Of Us or that glowed by rural twilight in McLeod's Daughters. And Melbourne, it seems, is the setting of choice for producers of such television noir.
Filmed in the middle of winter near Flinders Street Station, Canal Road shines a flashlight on the machinations of a busy medical-legal drop-in centre, where heroin addicts, homeless people and cash-strapped city workers collide. "We're showing Melbourne like it's never been shown," says co-producer Susan Bower. "The Secret Life Of Us made Melbourne groovy and we haven't gone for that look. We've gone for inner-city apartment living, not suburban or beach living."
Bower, who took over as executive producer of Ten's Neighbours this year and whose credits include Nine's Sea Patrol and McLeod's Daughters, says Canal Road was 10 years in the making, at least in her mind.
A former nurse who got her scriptwriting break providing medical information for A Country Practice, Bower was inspired by her experiences and those of her colleagues working in medical-legal centres around the country. "We're exploring the top and the bottom end of town," she says. "Because of the physical area that it's in, you'll have homeless and disadvantaged people coming in but you'll also have lawyers who are pethidine addicts or heroin addicts. These centres exist; they're all over the place."
Bower admits the premise is a little confusing. Is it a medical drama, a legal drama, a psycho-thriller or a romantic mini-soap? "The medico-legal thing throws you," she says. "It's not a medical show. We don't do immunisations, we don't do stories about people with headaches or a stroke victim or anything like that. It's a bit like The Practice in as much as it is a law story but it's also about the people and it isn't your normal open-and-shut cases. It's not at all like MDA ... The idea is that nothing is what it seems, that there is always intrigue, that there is mystery to everything."
The plot centres around psychiatrist Spence McKay, played by Australian actor Paul Leyden, a household name in the US thanks to five years on the soap As The World Turns. Grieving the loss of his wife and son in what he mistakenly thought was an accident, McKay is angry and alone. He can find no comfort in the arms of his female colleagues, despite their fawning affection. Instead he employs the services of a glamorous prostitute (Klara Lisy) who, it seems, is also enamoured.
When not gazing dreamily at McKay, the women at Canal Road are dealing with their own tormented personal lives. Workaholic GP Olivia Bates (Diana Glennon) could "run a small country" but can't find love. Corrections officer Holly Chong (Peta Sergeant) is being stalked by a criminally insane client. The hard-partying ways of community nurse Bridget Keenan (Brooke Satchwell) find her in embarrassing situations, such as being handcuffed naked to a hotel bed by a Siberian backpacker. And the cyber-infused world of dizzy receptionist Skye Brady (Alyssa McClelland) is about to unravel horribly.
Meanwhile, over at McKay's private practice, patient and high-flying lawyer Daina Connelly (Sibylla Budd) is playing a dangerous game with her shrink - one that, given she is a sociopath, will no doubt end in somebody's tears. Thrown into the mix are disgraced lawyer and current legal aid worker Steve Yunnane (Patrick Brammall), flirty physiotherapist Tom Squires (Charlie Clausen), personal care assistant and petty criminal Henry Walter (Sam Anderson) and brash ladies' man Detective Ray Driscoll (Grant Bowler).
As Wolfgang West on the New Zealand show Outrageous Fortune, Bowler experienced the twisted side of TV drama, something he wishes was more prominent in the Australian industry. "Outrageous Fortune is a far more politically incorrect show than anything I've ever done but Kiwis have a different sensibility," he says. "They're far less conservative than we are [and] what they make tends to have a far greater cultural identity to them. I think Aussie television can get a bit earnest, a bit 'Dudley Do-Right'. Everybody wears their seatbelt and salutes and does all the right things at the right time and, though that's lovely and laudable, I don't think it's necessarily reflective. Complex characters and difficult situations are really nice to see on screen. In commercial television, especially, there's an enormous temptation not to offend anyone and what we tend to do is damp things down. You look at the stuff we import, like Boston Legal, Prison Break, 24 - they're all about people behaving badly. They're horribly flawed, almost completely non-functional, but we can't help but fall in love with them."
The challenge with making Canal Road, Bower says, is that the concept evolved as filming progressed. "Our brief from Nine was that there was to be no serial content as such. It wasn't like, 'You must watch next week to find out what happens.' What ended up happening was that there is serial content but if you were to tune in to episode nine, you wouldn't be confused. But there is a 13-part murder mystery that unfolds, with loose ends being tied up by the end of the series. The reward, if you watch it every week, is that it will build on things."
For a producer who has built her career on the lighter side of Australian drama, Bower is enthusiastic about the darker series on our screens. "There's been a resurgence of drama and it's because I think the general public got the idea that we weren't going to see any of our actors or hear our own voices telling our own stories on television. I think it's terribly important that we keep hold of our culture. The French have a minister who just looks after television and film because it's their culture, they recognise that. Australia is very, 'Oh, she'll be right mate,' about our culture, until it's gone. [Even though] there's a generation that loves video clips, they'll still sit and watch television. They might download it but they'll watch it. And we have to give them things that they want to watch."
Canal Road begins on Nine on Wednesday at 9.30pm.
Further reading: Canal Roads dark side; New road for Brooke
With its dramatic, filmic production quality and interwoven plotlines of sorrow and manipulation, Canal Road is in keeping with a trend away from the sunny series that have long been the hallmark of Australian television drama. Recent shows such as Nine's gangland drama Underbelly and Showcase's brothel drama Satisfaction paint a very different Australia to the one that sparkled by the sea in The Secret Life Of Us or that glowed by rural twilight in McLeod's Daughters. And Melbourne, it seems, is the setting of choice for producers of such television noir.
Filmed in the middle of winter near Flinders Street Station, Canal Road shines a flashlight on the machinations of a busy medical-legal drop-in centre, where heroin addicts, homeless people and cash-strapped city workers collide. "We're showing Melbourne like it's never been shown," says co-producer Susan Bower. "The Secret Life Of Us made Melbourne groovy and we haven't gone for that look. We've gone for inner-city apartment living, not suburban or beach living."
Bower, who took over as executive producer of Ten's Neighbours this year and whose credits include Nine's Sea Patrol and McLeod's Daughters, says Canal Road was 10 years in the making, at least in her mind.
A former nurse who got her scriptwriting break providing medical information for A Country Practice, Bower was inspired by her experiences and those of her colleagues working in medical-legal centres around the country. "We're exploring the top and the bottom end of town," she says. "Because of the physical area that it's in, you'll have homeless and disadvantaged people coming in but you'll also have lawyers who are pethidine addicts or heroin addicts. These centres exist; they're all over the place."
Bower admits the premise is a little confusing. Is it a medical drama, a legal drama, a psycho-thriller or a romantic mini-soap? "The medico-legal thing throws you," she says. "It's not a medical show. We don't do immunisations, we don't do stories about people with headaches or a stroke victim or anything like that. It's a bit like The Practice in as much as it is a law story but it's also about the people and it isn't your normal open-and-shut cases. It's not at all like MDA ... The idea is that nothing is what it seems, that there is always intrigue, that there is mystery to everything."
The plot centres around psychiatrist Spence McKay, played by Australian actor Paul Leyden, a household name in the US thanks to five years on the soap As The World Turns. Grieving the loss of his wife and son in what he mistakenly thought was an accident, McKay is angry and alone. He can find no comfort in the arms of his female colleagues, despite their fawning affection. Instead he employs the services of a glamorous prostitute (Klara Lisy) who, it seems, is also enamoured.
When not gazing dreamily at McKay, the women at Canal Road are dealing with their own tormented personal lives. Workaholic GP Olivia Bates (Diana Glennon) could "run a small country" but can't find love. Corrections officer Holly Chong (Peta Sergeant) is being stalked by a criminally insane client. The hard-partying ways of community nurse Bridget Keenan (Brooke Satchwell) find her in embarrassing situations, such as being handcuffed naked to a hotel bed by a Siberian backpacker. And the cyber-infused world of dizzy receptionist Skye Brady (Alyssa McClelland) is about to unravel horribly.
Meanwhile, over at McKay's private practice, patient and high-flying lawyer Daina Connelly (Sibylla Budd) is playing a dangerous game with her shrink - one that, given she is a sociopath, will no doubt end in somebody's tears. Thrown into the mix are disgraced lawyer and current legal aid worker Steve Yunnane (Patrick Brammall), flirty physiotherapist Tom Squires (Charlie Clausen), personal care assistant and petty criminal Henry Walter (Sam Anderson) and brash ladies' man Detective Ray Driscoll (Grant Bowler).
As Wolfgang West on the New Zealand show Outrageous Fortune, Bowler experienced the twisted side of TV drama, something he wishes was more prominent in the Australian industry. "Outrageous Fortune is a far more politically incorrect show than anything I've ever done but Kiwis have a different sensibility," he says. "They're far less conservative than we are [and] what they make tends to have a far greater cultural identity to them. I think Aussie television can get a bit earnest, a bit 'Dudley Do-Right'. Everybody wears their seatbelt and salutes and does all the right things at the right time and, though that's lovely and laudable, I don't think it's necessarily reflective. Complex characters and difficult situations are really nice to see on screen. In commercial television, especially, there's an enormous temptation not to offend anyone and what we tend to do is damp things down. You look at the stuff we import, like Boston Legal, Prison Break, 24 - they're all about people behaving badly. They're horribly flawed, almost completely non-functional, but we can't help but fall in love with them."
The challenge with making Canal Road, Bower says, is that the concept evolved as filming progressed. "Our brief from Nine was that there was to be no serial content as such. It wasn't like, 'You must watch next week to find out what happens.' What ended up happening was that there is serial content but if you were to tune in to episode nine, you wouldn't be confused. But there is a 13-part murder mystery that unfolds, with loose ends being tied up by the end of the series. The reward, if you watch it every week, is that it will build on things."
For a producer who has built her career on the lighter side of Australian drama, Bower is enthusiastic about the darker series on our screens. "There's been a resurgence of drama and it's because I think the general public got the idea that we weren't going to see any of our actors or hear our own voices telling our own stories on television. I think it's terribly important that we keep hold of our culture. The French have a minister who just looks after television and film because it's their culture, they recognise that. Australia is very, 'Oh, she'll be right mate,' about our culture, until it's gone. [Even though] there's a generation that loves video clips, they'll still sit and watch television. They might download it but they'll watch it. And we have to give them things that they want to watch."
Canal Road begins on Nine on Wednesday at 9.30pm.
Further reading: Canal Roads dark side; New road for Brooke
Can a feminist really love Sex and the City
For some, Sex and the City was a refreshing story of friendship and sexual freedom. For others, it was an orgy of consumerism and triviality. With the film version set to open, Alice Wignall asks if the series was good or bad for women...
If you are even remotely au fait with the motifs of Sex and the City, the scene will be instantly familiar. A female journalist, at work in her city apartment, ponders the blank screen of her laptop. Her fingers hover, the cursor winks invitingly and this week's pressing question is tapped out. But the person at the computer is me rather than Carrie Bradshaw, there is not a strappy shoe in sight and my question would never have appeared on the show, namely: is it really possible to call yourself a feminist and still like Sex and the City?
I only ask because, next month, the series that launched a thousand "Which SATC character are you?" quizzes is back, this time on our cinema screens. And yet I'm still no closer to working out if the SATC gals could do with a few remedial consciousness raising classes, or if they are, in fact, le dernier cri in empowered womanhood.
The original show, which ran for 94 half-hour episodes between 1998 and 2004, is unashamedly - and, yes, unusually - a show about women, for women (though, significantly, not completely by women. It was adapted from a newspaper column and book of the same name by Candace Bushnell, but the producer and a good chunk of the writers and directors were men). The four main characters even represent a slightly self-conscious stab at representing four different archetypes of womanhood. Charlotte, the conservative, romantic, naive upper-east-side princess with sights firmly set (at least at the start of the show's run) on the right marriage to the right man. Samantha, the successful, hardworking, inviolably independent PR executive who is a believer in sex rather than love and just as tirelessly devoted to that last cause as Charlotte is to hers. Miranda, the smart, corporate, high-flying lawyer. And, at the centre of it all, attempting to navigate a path between the options offered by her unlikely group of girlfriends, is Carrie: in her own way just as idealistic as Charlotte, as glamorous as Samantha and as dry as Miranda. The themes and plot of each episode are framed by the questions Carrie asks in her weekly columns for the fictional New York Star newspaper (a reflection of Bushnell's own writing for the real life New York Observer) and include everything from experimental lesbianism to breast cancer and the challenges of combining career and motherhood.
And yet, despite the awards and enviable viewing figures, and despite the fact that SATC really did bring something new to mainstream television when it started, it was not immediately embraced by the sisterhood as must-see feminist TV. That is partly because, for a show about women, it displays a singular obsession with men. As Miranda, the character most likely to consider herself a feminist, points out in one episode: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?"
Since the primary purpose of SATC is to explore what it was like for thirty-something heterosexual single women negotiating sex and love in a late 20th-century urban setting, it would be hard to do that without mentioning men. But that makes it, at its heart, a protracted romantic comedy, and SATC suffers from being bound by the still-pretty-conventional constraints of the genre.
Janet McCabe, research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-editor, with her colleague Kim Akass, of Reading Sex and the City, a collection of essays about the programme, says, "The women are still caught in fairytale narratives. The 'right' couple were signalled in the first episode [in which Carrie first meets her on-off lover known only as Mr Big] and in some ways the entire show has just been about them getting together - which, of course, has to be endlessly delayed or you don't have the driving force behind the story." But this central relationship is clearly problematic. Mr Big is arrogant, egocentric and apparently unable to see a good thing when she is standing in front of him in four-inch heels. Carrie's own inability to wake up and realise what a terrible cliche she is dating renders her, at best, pretty dumb and, at worst, passive and weak. (At the conclusion of the TV series, she is rescued from Paris - and another unsatisfactory relationship with another alpha male - by Mr Big, her knight on a Boeing 777.)
"It does make for quite uncomfortable viewing," says Professor Imelda Whelehan of De Montfort University, author of The Feminist Bestseller: 'From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City'. "How do we respect her? And Mr Big is such an interesting element. Even his name is masculine. He is like this phallus at the centre of it all."
The most significant story arcs are about the characters' search for relationships. And at the conclusion of the television show, all four characters - even Samantha, whose avowed aim for most of the series was emotion-free sex - are happily paired up. "It does seem that, in the end, it had to come back to a traditional view," says Whelehan. "That the future for most women means marriage and children."
And despite the shared understanding between the show's creators and its fans and analysts that every woman is one of the SATC ladies, it has always been crushingly obvious that hardly any of us actually is. The characters are, to a woman, white, rich, straight and apparently unencumbered by any strong emotional or practical ties to anyone or anything beyond their friendship group and, of course, the men they engage with. On one level, this is simply a piece of scene setting - it is a show about wealthy New Yorkers, not about all women everywhere. Akass points out that because there are so few television programmes purely about women, "Sex and the City bears the burden of representation. No one expects The Sopranos to encompass the experience of all middle-aged Italian-American men." The lack of drama in any other aspect of the women's lives except their relationships - the fact that they don't generally have to deal with issues arising from, for example, financial burdens or family ties - clears the field for their sex lives to become their first priority. "They do exist in this kind of vacuum," says Whelehan. "The chaotic element in their lives is their partners. Everything else is ultimately fine, mainly because they have the money to fix most problems." Which also explains why SATC is often dismissed as being simply a show about shoes. With no real battles to fight, excessive screen time can be devoted to tales of trivial consumption.
But that can also be easily rebutted. You may not applaud the way that the show tackles more serious issues, sandwiched, as they are, between dates and dinners, sex and shopping, but SATC is never just froth and froth alone. Illness, infertility, bereavement, ageing, single motherhood, sexual discrimination and divorce all play their part in the show's storylines. Glossily packaged and swiftly dispatched they may be, but you can confidently say that there is more to the programme than footwear.
And is the endless head-scratching over men really a betrayal of women? Or could it actually be an acknowledgement of the problems that plenty of women still experience in reconciling the protection and preservation of their own identities while engaging with men at work, at play, and in bed? As Akass asks, "Is it the case that a strong women can't desire a husband?" The success of SATC showed that, at the very least, there's still plenty of mileage in the tension between independence and the desire for sex, love and partnership; and especially for all those things with men.
These questions are not dealt with in an unintelligent way; the chorus of different female voices is a useful device for discussing them; that it fails to offer any novel answers is a function of the fact that it is, after all, just a TV fairy story. It also seems churlish to be bitter about the fact that Carrie et al do not offer a fail-safe model for emancipated womanhood when nor, frankly, has real-life feminism.
And to dismiss the programme entirely on the basis of its shortcomings as a feminist text would also be to lose out on what it does deliver. Just to take the most headline-grabbing example, that includes some pretty frank discussion of sex, in which female sexual pleasure and agency is obviously considered a fundamental right, rather than a privilege. McCabe says, "The way they spoke, and the things they talked about, were revolutionary. And it was also a great study of female friendship.
Ultimately, you just feel that it started with the four of them and they will always be together." Not only is it a programme about women, but one about women who like each other. They identify as each other's soul mates and provide emotional, practical and moral support. They don't compete with each other for male attention. They make each other laugh. It is probably the best depiction of the genuine nature and importance of female friendship ever to win an Emmy.
And so while it is probably about as much use as the Beano as a manual for life, you can be a feminist and like Sex and the City. Not least because if you're about to start letting political doctrine arbitrarily dictate which bits of the culture you respond to you may as well give up now and submit to the patriarchy. But mainly because the programme is funny and clever and it thinks women are important
If you are even remotely au fait with the motifs of Sex and the City, the scene will be instantly familiar. A female journalist, at work in her city apartment, ponders the blank screen of her laptop. Her fingers hover, the cursor winks invitingly and this week's pressing question is tapped out. But the person at the computer is me rather than Carrie Bradshaw, there is not a strappy shoe in sight and my question would never have appeared on the show, namely: is it really possible to call yourself a feminist and still like Sex and the City?
I only ask because, next month, the series that launched a thousand "Which SATC character are you?" quizzes is back, this time on our cinema screens. And yet I'm still no closer to working out if the SATC gals could do with a few remedial consciousness raising classes, or if they are, in fact, le dernier cri in empowered womanhood.
The original show, which ran for 94 half-hour episodes between 1998 and 2004, is unashamedly - and, yes, unusually - a show about women, for women (though, significantly, not completely by women. It was adapted from a newspaper column and book of the same name by Candace Bushnell, but the producer and a good chunk of the writers and directors were men). The four main characters even represent a slightly self-conscious stab at representing four different archetypes of womanhood. Charlotte, the conservative, romantic, naive upper-east-side princess with sights firmly set (at least at the start of the show's run) on the right marriage to the right man. Samantha, the successful, hardworking, inviolably independent PR executive who is a believer in sex rather than love and just as tirelessly devoted to that last cause as Charlotte is to hers. Miranda, the smart, corporate, high-flying lawyer. And, at the centre of it all, attempting to navigate a path between the options offered by her unlikely group of girlfriends, is Carrie: in her own way just as idealistic as Charlotte, as glamorous as Samantha and as dry as Miranda. The themes and plot of each episode are framed by the questions Carrie asks in her weekly columns for the fictional New York Star newspaper (a reflection of Bushnell's own writing for the real life New York Observer) and include everything from experimental lesbianism to breast cancer and the challenges of combining career and motherhood.
And yet, despite the awards and enviable viewing figures, and despite the fact that SATC really did bring something new to mainstream television when it started, it was not immediately embraced by the sisterhood as must-see feminist TV. That is partly because, for a show about women, it displays a singular obsession with men. As Miranda, the character most likely to consider herself a feminist, points out in one episode: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?"
Since the primary purpose of SATC is to explore what it was like for thirty-something heterosexual single women negotiating sex and love in a late 20th-century urban setting, it would be hard to do that without mentioning men. But that makes it, at its heart, a protracted romantic comedy, and SATC suffers from being bound by the still-pretty-conventional constraints of the genre.
Janet McCabe, research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-editor, with her colleague Kim Akass, of Reading Sex and the City, a collection of essays about the programme, says, "The women are still caught in fairytale narratives. The 'right' couple were signalled in the first episode [in which Carrie first meets her on-off lover known only as Mr Big] and in some ways the entire show has just been about them getting together - which, of course, has to be endlessly delayed or you don't have the driving force behind the story." But this central relationship is clearly problematic. Mr Big is arrogant, egocentric and apparently unable to see a good thing when she is standing in front of him in four-inch heels. Carrie's own inability to wake up and realise what a terrible cliche she is dating renders her, at best, pretty dumb and, at worst, passive and weak. (At the conclusion of the TV series, she is rescued from Paris - and another unsatisfactory relationship with another alpha male - by Mr Big, her knight on a Boeing 777.)
"It does make for quite uncomfortable viewing," says Professor Imelda Whelehan of De Montfort University, author of The Feminist Bestseller: 'From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City'. "How do we respect her? And Mr Big is such an interesting element. Even his name is masculine. He is like this phallus at the centre of it all."
The most significant story arcs are about the characters' search for relationships. And at the conclusion of the television show, all four characters - even Samantha, whose avowed aim for most of the series was emotion-free sex - are happily paired up. "It does seem that, in the end, it had to come back to a traditional view," says Whelehan. "That the future for most women means marriage and children."
And despite the shared understanding between the show's creators and its fans and analysts that every woman is one of the SATC ladies, it has always been crushingly obvious that hardly any of us actually is. The characters are, to a woman, white, rich, straight and apparently unencumbered by any strong emotional or practical ties to anyone or anything beyond their friendship group and, of course, the men they engage with. On one level, this is simply a piece of scene setting - it is a show about wealthy New Yorkers, not about all women everywhere. Akass points out that because there are so few television programmes purely about women, "Sex and the City bears the burden of representation. No one expects The Sopranos to encompass the experience of all middle-aged Italian-American men." The lack of drama in any other aspect of the women's lives except their relationships - the fact that they don't generally have to deal with issues arising from, for example, financial burdens or family ties - clears the field for their sex lives to become their first priority. "They do exist in this kind of vacuum," says Whelehan. "The chaotic element in their lives is their partners. Everything else is ultimately fine, mainly because they have the money to fix most problems." Which also explains why SATC is often dismissed as being simply a show about shoes. With no real battles to fight, excessive screen time can be devoted to tales of trivial consumption.
But that can also be easily rebutted. You may not applaud the way that the show tackles more serious issues, sandwiched, as they are, between dates and dinners, sex and shopping, but SATC is never just froth and froth alone. Illness, infertility, bereavement, ageing, single motherhood, sexual discrimination and divorce all play their part in the show's storylines. Glossily packaged and swiftly dispatched they may be, but you can confidently say that there is more to the programme than footwear.
And is the endless head-scratching over men really a betrayal of women? Or could it actually be an acknowledgement of the problems that plenty of women still experience in reconciling the protection and preservation of their own identities while engaging with men at work, at play, and in bed? As Akass asks, "Is it the case that a strong women can't desire a husband?" The success of SATC showed that, at the very least, there's still plenty of mileage in the tension between independence and the desire for sex, love and partnership; and especially for all those things with men.
These questions are not dealt with in an unintelligent way; the chorus of different female voices is a useful device for discussing them; that it fails to offer any novel answers is a function of the fact that it is, after all, just a TV fairy story. It also seems churlish to be bitter about the fact that Carrie et al do not offer a fail-safe model for emancipated womanhood when nor, frankly, has real-life feminism.
And to dismiss the programme entirely on the basis of its shortcomings as a feminist text would also be to lose out on what it does deliver. Just to take the most headline-grabbing example, that includes some pretty frank discussion of sex, in which female sexual pleasure and agency is obviously considered a fundamental right, rather than a privilege. McCabe says, "The way they spoke, and the things they talked about, were revolutionary. And it was also a great study of female friendship.
Ultimately, you just feel that it started with the four of them and they will always be together." Not only is it a programme about women, but one about women who like each other. They identify as each other's soul mates and provide emotional, practical and moral support. They don't compete with each other for male attention. They make each other laugh. It is probably the best depiction of the genuine nature and importance of female friendship ever to win an Emmy.
And so while it is probably about as much use as the Beano as a manual for life, you can be a feminist and like Sex and the City. Not least because if you're about to start letting political doctrine arbitrarily dictate which bits of the culture you respond to you may as well give up now and submit to the patriarchy. But mainly because the programme is funny and clever and it thinks women are important
How Jane lost her Darcy
It is an irony universally acknowledged that the writer of 'Pride and Prejudice' died a spinster. But a TV drama shows why we should not pity her, says James Rampton...
Playing Jane Austen can seriously damage your health. That, at least, is the worry of Olivia Williams. The actress is portraying the author in Miss Austen Regrets, a one-off BBC1 drama that explains why the novelist died a 41-year-old spinster, having failed to meet her own Mr Darcy. In a break between scenes on set at Hall Barn, an appropriately stately manor house near Beaconsfield, the 39-year-old actress confides that she's fearful of the consequences if Austen's legions of passionate fans – the "Janeites" – take against her portrayal of their heroine. "It's a terrifying prospect," Williams shudders. "These diehard Janeites will pelt me with rock cakes if I make a mistake. Already, they're complaining online – 'She's too tall, she doesn't look right!'"
But Miss Austen Regrets, to be broadcast on 27 April, won't lack for authenticity; it is the fruit of months of meticulous research by Gwyneth Hughes. The writer, who penned last year's acclaimed BBC1/HBO thriller Five Days, says the screenplay is so closely tied to Austen's own words that she almost feels she should split the writing credit.
"The script is based on Austen's surviving letters to her sister and to her young niece Fanny. So I must share the credit for quite a lot of the dialogue with Miss Austen herself," Hughes says. "And I must say, it's been a strange and humbling experience to feel this genius of English literature peering critically over my shoulder as I write. But I have loved every minute in her company."
Hughes's script – the latest contribution to the burgeoning industry of Austen-related films (Becoming Jane, The Jane Austen Book Club) – dances a gavotte around the subject of marriage. Apparently happily unmarried as her 40th birthday looms, Jane lives in straitened circumstances with her mother (Phyllida Law) and sister Cassandra (Greta Scacchi) in Hampshire.
Her beloved young niece, Fanny (Imogen Poots), asks the author to run the rule over her potential husbands, prompting Jane to look back in melancholy on her own suitors. Her memory alights on the ones that got away; in a flashback, we see that when the author was 27, a rich neighbouring landowner, Harris Bigg-Wither (Samuel Roukin), proposed to her. She initially accepted, but after a long dark night of the soul, the next day she turned him down. The rejection condemned her family to live in genteel poverty, and her mother never let her forget it.
Jane reflects wistfully on the fact that this episode put her off the very idea of marriage. Consequently, she never settled down with her soulmate, the Reverend Brook Bridges (Hugh Bonneville), a clergyman who could wait no longer and ended up marrying someone else. It is a poignant tale of missed opportunities.
The makers of Miss Austen Regrets say this story was just crying out to be made into a drama. "If people only know one thing about Jane Austen, it's that she never married," says Anne Pivcevic, the producer, who was also responsible for BBC1's recent Sense and Sensibility. "It's fascinating that this woman who wrote so extensively about marriage and love with such perception and humanity never married. So when we discovered that at the age of 27 she actually had a proposal, which she rejected, we thought that was very fertile ground for drama.
"Harris had a marvellous house and a lot of acres, so for Jane to turn him down was a scandal at the time. But in the drama we explore the idea that it was a definite choice to rebuff Harris. She refused him because she did not truly love him – that's a theme that resonates throughout her novels. She remained unmarried as a choice, not out of bitter disappointment. The word 'spinster' denotes a victim – it's never used in a positive sense. But in Jane's letters, we found an incredibly affirmative voice, someone who knew her own mind.
"Yes, Harris was very rich and would have ensured her family's security, but Jane simply wasn't willing to compromise. She was an independent woman who was determined to live by her own lights. Jane remains an iconic figure to us because she made 21st-century choices in the 19th century," Pivcevic says.
Olivia Williams, the mother of two young daughters, three-year-old Esme and Roxanna, one, is sitting on the exquisitely manicured lawn of Hall Barn, a country house that would not look out of place on the cover of a Penguin Classic. Set dressers fuss round us hanging lanterns from the topiary for the next scene – the inevitable country ball sequence.
The actress was first spotted on an audition tape by Kevin Costner and invited to co-star with him in The Postman, her Hollywood breakthrough. She has gone on to feature in The Sixth Sense, Rushmore and Friends, and can currently be seen in the film Flashbacks of a Fool.
Williams ponders why Jane rejected Harris. "People's lives aren't planned," she muses. "They're just a random series of more or less faltering cock-ups. Jane was not some Virginia Woolf-style, proto-feminist heroine asserting, 'I want to be on my own.' She was not a bluestocking. She loved order and wanted very much to be within the parameters of acceptable society. The problem was that she didn't fit into it. She fully intended to, but she was so sharp and bright, she didn't slot in."
The actress, who played Jane Fairfax opposite Kate Beckinsale in the 1996 version of Emma, adds: "Clearly, the novelist had very strong views about female behaviour, but she wasn't a rebel. She just kept being too clever and overstepping the mark. She kept telling it like it is – she couldn't help herself.
"She didn't settle for Harris because she didn't love him enough. She wasn't some sloppy romantic – she was practical. She understood what my mum always used to say to me: that being married and having kids is really tough. It's bearable if you love the other person, but if you don't, it's unbearable. Jane knew that, but I still think she was gutted not to have found a husband."
Even if these events saddened Austen as a woman, they enriched her as a writer. Her life bled into her work. In 'Persuasion', for instance, she writes wryly that "a woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again".
Pivcevic agrees that "Austen's life informed her work. She wrote about the very difficult practice of getting to the altar. Her own love affairs had a very rocky road, and that is reflected in the novels. Look at poor Marianne in 'Sense and Sensibility'. She plumbs the depths. Heartache and misunderstandings abound, and she nearly dies on the way to the altar. But, in contrast to her own life, Austen's heroines always get there in the end – ultimately, she always gives them both love and money."
Austen's bittersweet experiences endowed her novels with a rare astringency. "One's impressions from screen adaptations of Austen is that it's all lovely girls running down hills in flowery dresses," Williams says. "But Austen could be a real bitch as well. She could nail the weaknesses in someone's appearance or accent. She could deconstruct people accurately and uncharitably, and would rail against their faults and foibles. That's why I – and the vigilante Janeites – love her."
Some 200 years after her death, Austen continues to inspire devotion not only from the Janeites but from the public at large. 'Pride and Prejudice', for instance, topped a poll of "The Books that Changed Your Life" on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. So why does Austenmania rage on?
Williams, who studied English at Cambridge University, says: "I'm in awe of Austen. She is the reason I've never written anything. I remember trying to write like her once and coming up with these clearly risible attempts to plot or describe things as brilliantly as she does."
The actress, who says she never goes anywhere without Austen's letters, pinpoints what makes her such a cherished novelist. "She writes with the perspicacity of someone who can see people for what they really are. She knows how to keep you on your toes. And out of that come these perfectly structured love stories. I also love the fact that her heroines have imperfections. Everyone reading her books thinks, 'There's hope for me. Even though my best friend is the most beautiful woman in the room, I could still get the gorgeous man in the end!'"
Greta Scacchi takes up the theme. "Austen is eternally popular because she writes wish-fulfilment stories. In the end, her characters get what they want. On the surface, her novels seem archaic – the whole elaborate story leads up to the moment of the first kiss and there is no exploration of what happens afterwards. And yet Austen's work throws up universal questions that are as relevant today as they were in her time: is this the right man? Is there such a thing as true love?"
Austen will always strike a chord because the ideas she addresses will always preoccupy us – love and marriage. Williams, who has been married to the actor Rhashan Stone since 2003, laughs: "It was looking pretty ropey for me at one point. I was 35 when I got together with my husband – that's another reason why I thought I understood Jane's predicament.
"We all know women who – dreadful phrase – have left it too late. It's common in our generation. So I didn't waste my time. I'd known my husband for ages, but once we hooked up, it was less than a year before we got married – 'Quick, find me a priest.' Marriage was a state of being I wanted to be in. Again, I think I comprehended how Jane must have felt."
It is an irony Austen herself might have appreciated that, while the writer may have suffered for her principles, we benefited immeasurably from them. Williams thinks that spinsterhood actually enhanced Austen's authorial skills. "I've recently had my second child, and I know that anything that can be cut out of your life is cut out of your life when you get married and have children. If Jane had got married, her writing would have been the first thing to go. It's selfish of us to be grateful if she was unhappy being a spinster, but our consolation is that she was able to write these wonderful books."
With a mischievous smile, Williams adds: "I'm not saying that Jane would have preferred to be on her own, but thank God she was!"
Miss Austen Regrets is on BBC1 at 8pm on Sunday 27 April
Playing Jane Austen can seriously damage your health. That, at least, is the worry of Olivia Williams. The actress is portraying the author in Miss Austen Regrets, a one-off BBC1 drama that explains why the novelist died a 41-year-old spinster, having failed to meet her own Mr Darcy. In a break between scenes on set at Hall Barn, an appropriately stately manor house near Beaconsfield, the 39-year-old actress confides that she's fearful of the consequences if Austen's legions of passionate fans – the "Janeites" – take against her portrayal of their heroine. "It's a terrifying prospect," Williams shudders. "These diehard Janeites will pelt me with rock cakes if I make a mistake. Already, they're complaining online – 'She's too tall, she doesn't look right!'"
But Miss Austen Regrets, to be broadcast on 27 April, won't lack for authenticity; it is the fruit of months of meticulous research by Gwyneth Hughes. The writer, who penned last year's acclaimed BBC1/HBO thriller Five Days, says the screenplay is so closely tied to Austen's own words that she almost feels she should split the writing credit.
"The script is based on Austen's surviving letters to her sister and to her young niece Fanny. So I must share the credit for quite a lot of the dialogue with Miss Austen herself," Hughes says. "And I must say, it's been a strange and humbling experience to feel this genius of English literature peering critically over my shoulder as I write. But I have loved every minute in her company."
Hughes's script – the latest contribution to the burgeoning industry of Austen-related films (Becoming Jane, The Jane Austen Book Club) – dances a gavotte around the subject of marriage. Apparently happily unmarried as her 40th birthday looms, Jane lives in straitened circumstances with her mother (Phyllida Law) and sister Cassandra (Greta Scacchi) in Hampshire.
Her beloved young niece, Fanny (Imogen Poots), asks the author to run the rule over her potential husbands, prompting Jane to look back in melancholy on her own suitors. Her memory alights on the ones that got away; in a flashback, we see that when the author was 27, a rich neighbouring landowner, Harris Bigg-Wither (Samuel Roukin), proposed to her. She initially accepted, but after a long dark night of the soul, the next day she turned him down. The rejection condemned her family to live in genteel poverty, and her mother never let her forget it.
Jane reflects wistfully on the fact that this episode put her off the very idea of marriage. Consequently, she never settled down with her soulmate, the Reverend Brook Bridges (Hugh Bonneville), a clergyman who could wait no longer and ended up marrying someone else. It is a poignant tale of missed opportunities.
The makers of Miss Austen Regrets say this story was just crying out to be made into a drama. "If people only know one thing about Jane Austen, it's that she never married," says Anne Pivcevic, the producer, who was also responsible for BBC1's recent Sense and Sensibility. "It's fascinating that this woman who wrote so extensively about marriage and love with such perception and humanity never married. So when we discovered that at the age of 27 she actually had a proposal, which she rejected, we thought that was very fertile ground for drama.
"Harris had a marvellous house and a lot of acres, so for Jane to turn him down was a scandal at the time. But in the drama we explore the idea that it was a definite choice to rebuff Harris. She refused him because she did not truly love him – that's a theme that resonates throughout her novels. She remained unmarried as a choice, not out of bitter disappointment. The word 'spinster' denotes a victim – it's never used in a positive sense. But in Jane's letters, we found an incredibly affirmative voice, someone who knew her own mind.
"Yes, Harris was very rich and would have ensured her family's security, but Jane simply wasn't willing to compromise. She was an independent woman who was determined to live by her own lights. Jane remains an iconic figure to us because she made 21st-century choices in the 19th century," Pivcevic says.
Olivia Williams, the mother of two young daughters, three-year-old Esme and Roxanna, one, is sitting on the exquisitely manicured lawn of Hall Barn, a country house that would not look out of place on the cover of a Penguin Classic. Set dressers fuss round us hanging lanterns from the topiary for the next scene – the inevitable country ball sequence.
The actress was first spotted on an audition tape by Kevin Costner and invited to co-star with him in The Postman, her Hollywood breakthrough. She has gone on to feature in The Sixth Sense, Rushmore and Friends, and can currently be seen in the film Flashbacks of a Fool.
Williams ponders why Jane rejected Harris. "People's lives aren't planned," she muses. "They're just a random series of more or less faltering cock-ups. Jane was not some Virginia Woolf-style, proto-feminist heroine asserting, 'I want to be on my own.' She was not a bluestocking. She loved order and wanted very much to be within the parameters of acceptable society. The problem was that she didn't fit into it. She fully intended to, but she was so sharp and bright, she didn't slot in."
The actress, who played Jane Fairfax opposite Kate Beckinsale in the 1996 version of Emma, adds: "Clearly, the novelist had very strong views about female behaviour, but she wasn't a rebel. She just kept being too clever and overstepping the mark. She kept telling it like it is – she couldn't help herself.
"She didn't settle for Harris because she didn't love him enough. She wasn't some sloppy romantic – she was practical. She understood what my mum always used to say to me: that being married and having kids is really tough. It's bearable if you love the other person, but if you don't, it's unbearable. Jane knew that, but I still think she was gutted not to have found a husband."
Even if these events saddened Austen as a woman, they enriched her as a writer. Her life bled into her work. In 'Persuasion', for instance, she writes wryly that "a woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again".
Pivcevic agrees that "Austen's life informed her work. She wrote about the very difficult practice of getting to the altar. Her own love affairs had a very rocky road, and that is reflected in the novels. Look at poor Marianne in 'Sense and Sensibility'. She plumbs the depths. Heartache and misunderstandings abound, and she nearly dies on the way to the altar. But, in contrast to her own life, Austen's heroines always get there in the end – ultimately, she always gives them both love and money."
Austen's bittersweet experiences endowed her novels with a rare astringency. "One's impressions from screen adaptations of Austen is that it's all lovely girls running down hills in flowery dresses," Williams says. "But Austen could be a real bitch as well. She could nail the weaknesses in someone's appearance or accent. She could deconstruct people accurately and uncharitably, and would rail against their faults and foibles. That's why I – and the vigilante Janeites – love her."
Some 200 years after her death, Austen continues to inspire devotion not only from the Janeites but from the public at large. 'Pride and Prejudice', for instance, topped a poll of "The Books that Changed Your Life" on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. So why does Austenmania rage on?
Williams, who studied English at Cambridge University, says: "I'm in awe of Austen. She is the reason I've never written anything. I remember trying to write like her once and coming up with these clearly risible attempts to plot or describe things as brilliantly as she does."
The actress, who says she never goes anywhere without Austen's letters, pinpoints what makes her such a cherished novelist. "She writes with the perspicacity of someone who can see people for what they really are. She knows how to keep you on your toes. And out of that come these perfectly structured love stories. I also love the fact that her heroines have imperfections. Everyone reading her books thinks, 'There's hope for me. Even though my best friend is the most beautiful woman in the room, I could still get the gorgeous man in the end!'"
Greta Scacchi takes up the theme. "Austen is eternally popular because she writes wish-fulfilment stories. In the end, her characters get what they want. On the surface, her novels seem archaic – the whole elaborate story leads up to the moment of the first kiss and there is no exploration of what happens afterwards. And yet Austen's work throws up universal questions that are as relevant today as they were in her time: is this the right man? Is there such a thing as true love?"
Austen will always strike a chord because the ideas she addresses will always preoccupy us – love and marriage. Williams, who has been married to the actor Rhashan Stone since 2003, laughs: "It was looking pretty ropey for me at one point. I was 35 when I got together with my husband – that's another reason why I thought I understood Jane's predicament.
"We all know women who – dreadful phrase – have left it too late. It's common in our generation. So I didn't waste my time. I'd known my husband for ages, but once we hooked up, it was less than a year before we got married – 'Quick, find me a priest.' Marriage was a state of being I wanted to be in. Again, I think I comprehended how Jane must have felt."
It is an irony Austen herself might have appreciated that, while the writer may have suffered for her principles, we benefited immeasurably from them. Williams thinks that spinsterhood actually enhanced Austen's authorial skills. "I've recently had my second child, and I know that anything that can be cut out of your life is cut out of your life when you get married and have children. If Jane had got married, her writing would have been the first thing to go. It's selfish of us to be grateful if she was unhappy being a spinster, but our consolation is that she was able to write these wonderful books."
With a mischievous smile, Williams adds: "I'm not saying that Jane would have preferred to be on her own, but thank God she was!"
Miss Austen Regrets is on BBC1 at 8pm on Sunday 27 April
Mission almost accomplished
Last night's TV reviewed: Age of Terror
Frankie Howerd used to talk about Robin Day and his cruel glasses. The glint of Peter Taylor's specs have lately become of interest to his directors, who tend to zoom in on them and his furrowed forehead as he ponders his past. Although he has worn them for as far back as I can remember, they are there, I would guess, to suggest age and wisdom. As a “green young reporter” in the 1960s, he told us last night on Age of Terror (BBC Two), he had hardly heard the word terrorism. Yet terrorism, particularly Irish terrorism, would become his specialist subject.
So when Taylor started the first episode of Age of Terror with a promise to tell us the history of terrorism over the past 40 years, it was hard to imagine anybody better-placed to fulfil it. After all, his previous work includes several magisterial documentaries on Northern Ireland, and 2005’s The New al-Qa’eda, which gave a calm but thorough kicking to Adam Curtis’s theory in The Power of Nightmares that al-Qa’eda doesn’t exist. Oddly, though, Taylor’s 40-year history then began in 1976.
On June 27, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv was hijacked by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two West Germans members of something called Revolutionary Cells, all four collectively belonging to a revolutionary network called Terror International. It was never made clear exactly who or what comprised that shadowy organization. Taylor insisted that the hijacking “seemed to be the work of a network of revolutionary groups called Terror International” or that “the bloody imprint of Terror International in its various guises seemed to be everywhere.” Although the intervention of left-wing German terrorists into the Palestinian dispute undoubtedly shocked Jews and looked like a recrudescence of German anti-Semitism, there were a lot of “seems” when Taylor discussed this mysterious network. I would have liked to hear one of his interviewees actually mention the outfit but the best he came up with was old film of his meeting with the big-haired Blank Panther Angela Davies, “someone who shared the revolutionary fervour of Terror International”.
Anyway, the next day, the plane landed in Uganda – where President Amin had recently declared himself a champion of Palestinian freedom. As ever, Taylor provided a beautifully clear account of what happened next. How the terrorists separated out the Jewish passengers and sent the rest home. How they threatened to kill the hostages unless dozens of their imprisoned comrades were released. How, after some government-level vacillation, the Israeli Defence Forces launched a night raid that saved 100 lives. Partly the success was due to their hitting upon an inspired solution to the problem of transporting soldiers quietly from the airport to the terminal. They ordered a black Mercedes of the type Amin himself travelled in, to which the typical Ugandan response was a salute. When Mossad instead delivered a white one, they thought laterally, and painted it.
Most of us know the story roughly, if only through movies such as Raid on Entebbe, but many details have faded. That made for suspense as the story unfolded mainly in the words of the hostages but aided by news footage and some discreet re-enactments. I did not remember that the one Israel soldier killed was the leader of the assault, Yoni Netanyahu, a man with such iron nerves that he slept all through the flight over even as his comrades puked out of nerves and air turbulence. His older brother, Binyamin, went on to become Israeli Prime Minister in the 1990s. Nor did I recall the disgusting detail that after the operation, Amin ordered the murder of Nora Bloch, a 75-year-old taken from the plane with a choking fit in order to recover in hospital.
In many ways, then, you could understand why this story took over the whole programme. Not only is it a famously riveting tale in itself, but Taylor also had gripping interviews with several of the people involved. (One Israeli sergeant, for example, wasn’t sure which of the hijackers he shot – but prefers to think it was a German.) Nevertheless, it still felt something between a pity and a slight swizz that an event initially put forward as an illustration of wider trends should end up squeezing out any proper discussion of the trends in question.
Now, in common with television executives, terrorists like to get good ratings. Capturing public attention is part of the plan, and though their actions generally have a narrowly defined goal – the release of imprisoned comrades, say – they're always advertising for the cause as well, pushing what they regard as a criminally neglected injustice into the headlines. Which means that the relationship between terrorists and journalists is always potentially compromised, the interests of both parties overlapping in a slightly queasy way. The problem is conspicuous in Age of Terror, which purports to be about cardinal moments in the recent history of applied terror but that can't help but look like what old print journalists used to call "marmalade droppers", stories so captivating that the toast halts in mid-air as it travels to the mouth of the newspaper reader.
"What happened during those six days in Entebbe transformed the age of terror," Taylor claimed about the 1976 hijacking of an Air France aircraft. But he never persuasively explained how. It seemed just as likely that this incident had been singled out from the many assaults and atrocities of the Seventies for the same reasons that it had dominated the headlines at the time: the story might have been crafted for Hollywood in its combination of historical irony and bold endeavour.
The historical irony, a cruel one, came from the fact that Israeli passengers found themselves undergoing a selection as menacing as anything that had occurred on an Auschwitz platform: the German- accented voice of Brigitte Kuhlmann, one of the four hijackers, calling out the names of Jewish passengers as she sifted through their passports. Since part of the fuel for the German revolutionary underground had been rage at the country's Nazi period, there was something grotesque about this echo from the past, and there was some evidence that it contributed to the Israelis' determination to go the extra mile in avoiding any kind of deal with the hijackers.
Or rather the extra 2,500 miles, the jet having been flown from Athens to Uganda, where the hijackers felt confident of a friendly welcome from Idi Amin, who had recently transferred his dubious loyalties from the Israeli government to Colonel Gaddafi. This is where the bold endeavour came in, the plan to take direct action and snatch the hostages out of captivity being so difficult and so unlikely to succeed that the hijackers almost certainly believed that it wouldn't be attempted. The very improbability of the deed may have contributed to its success, as did that canny decision to drive the kilometre from the Israeli transport planes to the terminal building in a black Mercedes limousine, thus staying the trigger finger of the Ugandan guards at the airport. As you would expect, Taylor's account of this operation was gripping, underlined by interviews with several of the original hostages. But the very cursory thumbnail sketches of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the curiously unprobing interview with a former colleague of Brigitte Kuhlmann and Wilfred Bose, the two German members of the hijack team, left you feeling that you knew more about the incident without learning a lot more about why it had occurred, or what relation it might bear to our own status as terrorist targets now.
Taylor did give us some background to the terrorists’ actions – but so briefly as to prove ultimately tantalising. Most viewers will have understood what the Palestinians were up to. Yet, why some supposedly intellectual left-wing Germans decided to ape the Nazis in the cause of overthrowing capitalism remained more of a mystery. Admittedly, an exposition of revolutionary theory might have made for less sexy television than the raid at Entebbe. Without it, though, the history we’d been promised seemed distinctly incomplete – and a few silent reconstructions featuring some student-types smoking fags and looking earnest didn’t really fill the gap.
Frankie Howerd used to talk about Robin Day and his cruel glasses. The glint of Peter Taylor's specs have lately become of interest to his directors, who tend to zoom in on them and his furrowed forehead as he ponders his past. Although he has worn them for as far back as I can remember, they are there, I would guess, to suggest age and wisdom. As a “green young reporter” in the 1960s, he told us last night on Age of Terror (BBC Two), he had hardly heard the word terrorism. Yet terrorism, particularly Irish terrorism, would become his specialist subject.
So when Taylor started the first episode of Age of Terror with a promise to tell us the history of terrorism over the past 40 years, it was hard to imagine anybody better-placed to fulfil it. After all, his previous work includes several magisterial documentaries on Northern Ireland, and 2005’s The New al-Qa’eda, which gave a calm but thorough kicking to Adam Curtis’s theory in The Power of Nightmares that al-Qa’eda doesn’t exist. Oddly, though, Taylor’s 40-year history then began in 1976.
On June 27, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv was hijacked by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two West Germans members of something called Revolutionary Cells, all four collectively belonging to a revolutionary network called Terror International. It was never made clear exactly who or what comprised that shadowy organization. Taylor insisted that the hijacking “seemed to be the work of a network of revolutionary groups called Terror International” or that “the bloody imprint of Terror International in its various guises seemed to be everywhere.” Although the intervention of left-wing German terrorists into the Palestinian dispute undoubtedly shocked Jews and looked like a recrudescence of German anti-Semitism, there were a lot of “seems” when Taylor discussed this mysterious network. I would have liked to hear one of his interviewees actually mention the outfit but the best he came up with was old film of his meeting with the big-haired Blank Panther Angela Davies, “someone who shared the revolutionary fervour of Terror International”.
Anyway, the next day, the plane landed in Uganda – where President Amin had recently declared himself a champion of Palestinian freedom. As ever, Taylor provided a beautifully clear account of what happened next. How the terrorists separated out the Jewish passengers and sent the rest home. How they threatened to kill the hostages unless dozens of their imprisoned comrades were released. How, after some government-level vacillation, the Israeli Defence Forces launched a night raid that saved 100 lives. Partly the success was due to their hitting upon an inspired solution to the problem of transporting soldiers quietly from the airport to the terminal. They ordered a black Mercedes of the type Amin himself travelled in, to which the typical Ugandan response was a salute. When Mossad instead delivered a white one, they thought laterally, and painted it.
Most of us know the story roughly, if only through movies such as Raid on Entebbe, but many details have faded. That made for suspense as the story unfolded mainly in the words of the hostages but aided by news footage and some discreet re-enactments. I did not remember that the one Israel soldier killed was the leader of the assault, Yoni Netanyahu, a man with such iron nerves that he slept all through the flight over even as his comrades puked out of nerves and air turbulence. His older brother, Binyamin, went on to become Israeli Prime Minister in the 1990s. Nor did I recall the disgusting detail that after the operation, Amin ordered the murder of Nora Bloch, a 75-year-old taken from the plane with a choking fit in order to recover in hospital.
In many ways, then, you could understand why this story took over the whole programme. Not only is it a famously riveting tale in itself, but Taylor also had gripping interviews with several of the people involved. (One Israeli sergeant, for example, wasn’t sure which of the hijackers he shot – but prefers to think it was a German.) Nevertheless, it still felt something between a pity and a slight swizz that an event initially put forward as an illustration of wider trends should end up squeezing out any proper discussion of the trends in question.
Now, in common with television executives, terrorists like to get good ratings. Capturing public attention is part of the plan, and though their actions generally have a narrowly defined goal – the release of imprisoned comrades, say – they're always advertising for the cause as well, pushing what they regard as a criminally neglected injustice into the headlines. Which means that the relationship between terrorists and journalists is always potentially compromised, the interests of both parties overlapping in a slightly queasy way. The problem is conspicuous in Age of Terror, which purports to be about cardinal moments in the recent history of applied terror but that can't help but look like what old print journalists used to call "marmalade droppers", stories so captivating that the toast halts in mid-air as it travels to the mouth of the newspaper reader.
"What happened during those six days in Entebbe transformed the age of terror," Taylor claimed about the 1976 hijacking of an Air France aircraft. But he never persuasively explained how. It seemed just as likely that this incident had been singled out from the many assaults and atrocities of the Seventies for the same reasons that it had dominated the headlines at the time: the story might have been crafted for Hollywood in its combination of historical irony and bold endeavour.
The historical irony, a cruel one, came from the fact that Israeli passengers found themselves undergoing a selection as menacing as anything that had occurred on an Auschwitz platform: the German- accented voice of Brigitte Kuhlmann, one of the four hijackers, calling out the names of Jewish passengers as she sifted through their passports. Since part of the fuel for the German revolutionary underground had been rage at the country's Nazi period, there was something grotesque about this echo from the past, and there was some evidence that it contributed to the Israelis' determination to go the extra mile in avoiding any kind of deal with the hijackers.
Or rather the extra 2,500 miles, the jet having been flown from Athens to Uganda, where the hijackers felt confident of a friendly welcome from Idi Amin, who had recently transferred his dubious loyalties from the Israeli government to Colonel Gaddafi. This is where the bold endeavour came in, the plan to take direct action and snatch the hostages out of captivity being so difficult and so unlikely to succeed that the hijackers almost certainly believed that it wouldn't be attempted. The very improbability of the deed may have contributed to its success, as did that canny decision to drive the kilometre from the Israeli transport planes to the terminal building in a black Mercedes limousine, thus staying the trigger finger of the Ugandan guards at the airport. As you would expect, Taylor's account of this operation was gripping, underlined by interviews with several of the original hostages. But the very cursory thumbnail sketches of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the curiously unprobing interview with a former colleague of Brigitte Kuhlmann and Wilfred Bose, the two German members of the hijack team, left you feeling that you knew more about the incident without learning a lot more about why it had occurred, or what relation it might bear to our own status as terrorist targets now.
Taylor did give us some background to the terrorists’ actions – but so briefly as to prove ultimately tantalising. Most viewers will have understood what the Palestinians were up to. Yet, why some supposedly intellectual left-wing Germans decided to ape the Nazis in the cause of overthrowing capitalism remained more of a mystery. Admittedly, an exposition of revolutionary theory might have made for less sexy television than the raid at Entebbe. Without it, though, the history we’d been promised seemed distinctly incomplete – and a few silent reconstructions featuring some student-types smoking fags and looking earnest didn’t really fill the gap.
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
What else is there for Deion Sanders to do?
What Else Is There for Deion Sanders to Do? Reality TV, of course. The former football and baseball player Deion Sanders is blessed with a charm that leaks through the armour of his arrogance, observes Ginia Bellafante. Back in the early 1990s, when he was proving himself one of the greatest athletes in living memory, playing cornerback for the Atlanta Falcons and outfield for the Braves, Mr. Sanders responded to the critical comments of the baseball announcer Tim McCarver by dousing him with ice water. Still, the athlete’s status as a dazzler, a fun lover, a guy with whom you’d love to share a Coors Light or six, suffered no lasting fracture.
When the cameras show up, Mr. Sanders knows how to beguile. Seeing him on his new reality series, Deion & Pilar: Prime Time Love, (which begins Tuesday on the Oxygen channel), travelling through his mansion on a motorized scooter, like an 82-year-old navigating O’Hare, seems only to confirm his particularly entitled brand of genius.
Prime Time Love is the latest in a long list of reality shows that tries to tap into the wifely grievances of women across the class spectrum who can’t stop shaking their heads in disbelief at their husbands’ domestic inadequacies. It is a short distance from an Erma Bombeck column to something like Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood, which showcases the rapper’s suburban lollygagging and spousal disobedience.
Living on a hundred plus acres in the suitably named Prosper, Tex., Mr. Sanders and his wife, Pilar, a former model-actress, argue about chores and child rearing. In him you are meant to see your own lovable lug, but the conceit is a total canard. While your husband may not be able to tell the difference between a box of Cascade and a box of cake flour, he also hasn’t put you up in a 40,000-square-foot house with a video arcade and a marital bed that looks like a large pie.
What makes Prime Time Love such a hoot isn’t merely the image of a grown man too lazy to walk to the kitchen, but also the even more preposterous idea that someone married to the one person ever to play in both the Super Bowl and the World Series would expect an equitable division of household labour.
Mr. Sanders has five children — Deion Jr., Deiondra, Shilo, Shedeur and Shelomi — and the series puts his parental ineptitude on full display. When the younger ones require a primer on reproduction, for instance, Mr. Sanders plops them in front of the TV to watch geezer sex educator Sue Johanson (who has her own show on Oxygen) on the grounds that if he were teaching them about basketball he’d call Michael Jordan, and if he’s going to talk about sex he is going to go to the best. This turns out to be not half as funny as watching Mr. Sanders read to his children from “Getting Smart About Your Private Parts” or hearing him explain that Jack and Jill did not go up a hill to fetch a pail of water. You almost forget that he is leveraging his sons’ future sexual sanity in order to forge his persona as a hero whose intuitive gifts should excuse his buffoonery.
To be on board with Prime Time Love, you’ve got to excuse a lot, as the show rests on the highly implausible premise that the Sanderses don’t employ help. If true, this would be more impressive than Mr. Sanders’s N.F.L. record for touchdown returns. Some years ago, when he was sued by a car repair shop for failing to pay a bill in full, housekeepers who blocked his car from being towed were cited in the news coverage. Presumably these loyal housekeepers haven’t been expunged.
Absent in the Sanders house, though, is a certain kind of common sense. No one has ever seemed to let Mrs. Sanders know that the price of marriage to a rich and successful man is a recalibration of the hope that the person you’re living with will ever make his own sandwich. Every time she is on her husband about something, you think Mr. Sanders is going to respond by lining up his pay stubs. That he can turn his princely indifference to the mundane into something like an endearing eccentricity proves that he is in possession of certain talents no sports statistician could quantify.
Prime Time Love is on Oxygen, Tuesday night at 10:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 9:30, Central time.
When the cameras show up, Mr. Sanders knows how to beguile. Seeing him on his new reality series, Deion & Pilar: Prime Time Love, (which begins Tuesday on the Oxygen channel), travelling through his mansion on a motorized scooter, like an 82-year-old navigating O’Hare, seems only to confirm his particularly entitled brand of genius.
Prime Time Love is the latest in a long list of reality shows that tries to tap into the wifely grievances of women across the class spectrum who can’t stop shaking their heads in disbelief at their husbands’ domestic inadequacies. It is a short distance from an Erma Bombeck column to something like Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood, which showcases the rapper’s suburban lollygagging and spousal disobedience.
Living on a hundred plus acres in the suitably named Prosper, Tex., Mr. Sanders and his wife, Pilar, a former model-actress, argue about chores and child rearing. In him you are meant to see your own lovable lug, but the conceit is a total canard. While your husband may not be able to tell the difference between a box of Cascade and a box of cake flour, he also hasn’t put you up in a 40,000-square-foot house with a video arcade and a marital bed that looks like a large pie.
What makes Prime Time Love such a hoot isn’t merely the image of a grown man too lazy to walk to the kitchen, but also the even more preposterous idea that someone married to the one person ever to play in both the Super Bowl and the World Series would expect an equitable division of household labour.
Mr. Sanders has five children — Deion Jr., Deiondra, Shilo, Shedeur and Shelomi — and the series puts his parental ineptitude on full display. When the younger ones require a primer on reproduction, for instance, Mr. Sanders plops them in front of the TV to watch geezer sex educator Sue Johanson (who has her own show on Oxygen) on the grounds that if he were teaching them about basketball he’d call Michael Jordan, and if he’s going to talk about sex he is going to go to the best. This turns out to be not half as funny as watching Mr. Sanders read to his children from “Getting Smart About Your Private Parts” or hearing him explain that Jack and Jill did not go up a hill to fetch a pail of water. You almost forget that he is leveraging his sons’ future sexual sanity in order to forge his persona as a hero whose intuitive gifts should excuse his buffoonery.
To be on board with Prime Time Love, you’ve got to excuse a lot, as the show rests on the highly implausible premise that the Sanderses don’t employ help. If true, this would be more impressive than Mr. Sanders’s N.F.L. record for touchdown returns. Some years ago, when he was sued by a car repair shop for failing to pay a bill in full, housekeepers who blocked his car from being towed were cited in the news coverage. Presumably these loyal housekeepers haven’t been expunged.
Absent in the Sanders house, though, is a certain kind of common sense. No one has ever seemed to let Mrs. Sanders know that the price of marriage to a rich and successful man is a recalibration of the hope that the person you’re living with will ever make his own sandwich. Every time she is on her husband about something, you think Mr. Sanders is going to respond by lining up his pay stubs. That he can turn his princely indifference to the mundane into something like an endearing eccentricity proves that he is in possession of certain talents no sports statistician could quantify.
Prime Time Love is on Oxygen, Tuesday night at 10:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 9:30, Central time.
Second episode of Pushing Daisies dropped by ITV
The second episode of new hit drama Pushing Daisies is to be dropped by ITV, and viewers will jump straight forward to watching episode three, it has emerged.
ITV launched the quirky drama, about a pie maker who can bring the dead back to life, on Saturday night and enjoyed the highest consolidated premiere of a US series since Friends. But the broadcaster was unhappy that the series, starring Britain's Anna Friel alongside American Lee Pace, was delivered as nine episodes when it wanted to allocate it an eight-week slot, so made the decision to lose the second instalment.
ITV spokesperson Ian Johnson said: “Episode two was the only self-contained episode that did not affect the storyline so the decision was taken not to screen it.” He said the US writers’ strike had disrupted filming of the series, leading it to be delivered as an unusual nine-episode package, when the channel usually receives dramas in parts of six or eight. “Because of the US writers’ strike, shows were delivered in random episodes,” he explained. Johnson said the missing episode might be screened at a later date as a stand-alone show.
The ITV1 debut of Pushing Daisies at 9pm on Saturday night attracted an average of 5.7 million viewers, and a total of 7.3 million once Sunday’s repeat was accounted for. The figures mean the show, which has made Anna Friel a star in America, can claim a more successful premiere than the high-rating launches of Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives and Heroes.
Although the show is yet to be completely embraced by the British critics, in the US, Pushing Daisies has been both a ratings and critical success, and has already won a clutch of awards. The second 22-episode series is currently being filmed in the US.
David Finkelstein thinks he knows where ITV could've made room on their schedule. "Carefully reviewing the packed ITV schedule we've done something that you might have thought impossible," he suggests. "We have identified ten top class shows that could, just could, be dropped to make way for the extra episode, without, we hazard, damaging this nation's cultural life unduly"...
1) The Jeremy Kyle Show: You Cheated on Me With My Friend, So Prove I'm the Dad!
2) Katie & Peter: The Next Chapter
3) Sally Jessy Raphael: Gotcha! Spying on Dangerous Teens
4) Police Stop! Real-life footage of criminals and ordinary people behaving badly
5) Used Car Roadshow
6) Judge Judy
7) Daily Cooks Challenge
8) All Star Mr & Mrs. Celebrity couples reveal how much they know about each other
9) Loose Women
10) Teleshopping
Glad to be of service.
ITV launched the quirky drama, about a pie maker who can bring the dead back to life, on Saturday night and enjoyed the highest consolidated premiere of a US series since Friends. But the broadcaster was unhappy that the series, starring Britain's Anna Friel alongside American Lee Pace, was delivered as nine episodes when it wanted to allocate it an eight-week slot, so made the decision to lose the second instalment.
ITV spokesperson Ian Johnson said: “Episode two was the only self-contained episode that did not affect the storyline so the decision was taken not to screen it.” He said the US writers’ strike had disrupted filming of the series, leading it to be delivered as an unusual nine-episode package, when the channel usually receives dramas in parts of six or eight. “Because of the US writers’ strike, shows were delivered in random episodes,” he explained. Johnson said the missing episode might be screened at a later date as a stand-alone show.
The ITV1 debut of Pushing Daisies at 9pm on Saturday night attracted an average of 5.7 million viewers, and a total of 7.3 million once Sunday’s repeat was accounted for. The figures mean the show, which has made Anna Friel a star in America, can claim a more successful premiere than the high-rating launches of Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives and Heroes.
Although the show is yet to be completely embraced by the British critics, in the US, Pushing Daisies has been both a ratings and critical success, and has already won a clutch of awards. The second 22-episode series is currently being filmed in the US.
David Finkelstein thinks he knows where ITV could've made room on their schedule. "Carefully reviewing the packed ITV schedule we've done something that you might have thought impossible," he suggests. "We have identified ten top class shows that could, just could, be dropped to make way for the extra episode, without, we hazard, damaging this nation's cultural life unduly"...
1) The Jeremy Kyle Show: You Cheated on Me With My Friend, So Prove I'm the Dad!
2) Katie & Peter: The Next Chapter
3) Sally Jessy Raphael: Gotcha! Spying on Dangerous Teens
4) Police Stop! Real-life footage of criminals and ordinary people behaving badly
5) Used Car Roadshow
6) Judge Judy
7) Daily Cooks Challenge
8) All Star Mr & Mrs. Celebrity couples reveal how much they know about each other
9) Loose Women
10) Teleshopping
Glad to be of service.
Obama could snub Couric
Katie Couric's reported status as a lame duck may torpedo what was supposed to be her biggest night - a starring role as the host of a presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.CBS is still waiting to hear from the Sen. Obama campaign about whether he will agree to a proposed debate before the North Carolina Democratic primary.
The network - which has not hosted any of the previous 24 debates or forums - is offering Obama a plum timeslot, right after 60 Minutes on April 27. Sen. Clinton has already signed off on the debate.
But reports that Couric is getting ready to leave the newscast after the election - or even sooner - are not helping her chances of landing a debate for CBS. She even visited the Obama campaign offices in Chicago last week where she reportedly tried to sway the candidate - so far, without luck.
"Certainly there is now the impression that she is not someone to worry about after inauguration day," says a former White House official with experience in these matters. "The feeling is that you're dealing with the No. 3-ranked news division and a potentially lame-duck news anchor".
The thought that the current gossip would affect a decision of such national importance is absurd," a CBS News spokeswoman said.
Obama and Clinton are set to debate tomorrow - on ABC - before the Pennsylvania primary next Tuesday. North Carolina holds its primary May 6. But because Obama is leading in that state's polls, his campaign apparently believes he may not need to do another debate.
Elsewhere, Barack Obama proves he's a better baller than bowler, that's for sure. The front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination reveals his skills on the basketball court - but little else - on HBO's Real Sports Tuesday night at 10. "I watch a good basketball game, or I play in a good basketball game, it makes me feel good," Obama cordially tells host Bryant Gumbel. The one-on-one is soft as a Nerf, with Gumbel avoiding a full-court press in favour of a lay-up line.
But interrogation clearly wasn't the game plan for the 13-minute segment. To the network's credit, it again finds rare video to score points, like highlights from the 1979 Hawaii state championship game, featuring Obama and his Punahou High School team that won the title, and clips from a pick-up game the candidate played last month in North Carolina, soon to hold its primary.
Obama, now sporting a YMCA-caliber game, admits he was no more than the seventh or eighth man in his only varsity season, but there is some hyperbole from his former coach, Chris McLachlin. "He would play basketball before school, he would play at lunchtime, he'd be first one at practice, last one to leave," says McLachlin, who at least doesn't claim Barry walked to practice pinned down under sniper fire.
Obama's brother-in-law, Chris Robinson, is the only one who says anything remotely useful to opportunistic race-baiters - or age-baiters, for that matter. He says the 46-year-old Senator used to be "a black player who plays black," but now he's "a black player who plays white" to keep from getting hurt. "I think if you're using that verbiage," Robinson says, "y'know, after 35, we all play white."
Those who do want to read between the sidelines can latch onto an Obama observation how the basketball court - or chasing super-delegates? - reveals one's character. "For example, people who keep on shooting even though they have no jump shot, you can tell that there's a certain self-delusional aspect to their game, right?" he says. "That says something about who they are."
The interview took place before Obama's now legendary 37 bowling score in Pennsylvania, yet still managed to reveal some foresight about that. "I was thinking I was going to have to tear down the (White House) bowling alley and build a basketball court," he says.
After seeing Obama try both, it's hard for any party to argue with that policy.
HBO and the challenge ahead
Prior to last week, when she was tapped as the new chief of HBO Entertainment, Sue Naegle had spent her entire career as an agent representing television writers. So this is a person who knows how the network process works, understands the ways in which proposed shows are too frequently popped into the broiler as raw filet mignon and somehow, many kitchen arguments later, slide out as blackened ground chuck.
"My biggest heartbreak as an agent was, I'd work with my clients and hear what they wanted to do and really get excited and really love it, take it into the network [or] wherever it was going, and then watch it slowly die, by a thousand people with different opinions," Naegle announced with a rueful chuckle last week. "By the end of it, people couldn't remember what they'd started with."
HBO was, for much of the last decade, the great counter-example proving that TV series could be created differently, using methods more favourable to passionate writer-producers, the people who dreamed up what became The Sopranos or Six Feet Under or Sex and the City. And Naegle left no doubt she'd like to make the pay-cable outlet every writer's dream destination once more.
"Development by committee or by patching together multiple people's ideas isn't the way to get great television," she said. "I think it starts with the writer. Somebody who's very passionate and has a clear idea about what they'd like to do and the kind of show they'd like to produce. When I hear that and see that in somebody's eyes, I always feel like I've got something." Whether HBO can maintain its commitment to great television in a rapidly changing media environment is, of course, the big question surrounding Naegle's hire, which was announced last week. She replaces Carolyn Strauss, a career-long HBO programmer nudged from the post last month.
The last few seasons have seen lots of high-profile disappointments for HBO. Not many fans lined up for quixotic campaigns to save the willfully perverse drama John From Cincinnati, for example, or Louis C.K.'s misbegotten sitcom Lucky Louie. In fact, subscribers and critics alike have seemed puzzled by much of what HBO's done recently.
"Interesting, smart, entertaining series" are what Michael Lombardo, Naegle's new boss and the channel's West Coast chief, said HBO now must find. "I use the last term specifically," Lombardo added, "because I do think if we can be faulted for anything, it was that some of our series did not deliver on that note." In other words, HBO execs seem to agree with critics that too many of their recent shows just weren't all that much fun to watch. That's a big admission for a place that's still regarded by many in the business as the cool kids' table. HBO retains a business model that stirs envy among rivals. Executives say that subscriber tallies, revenue and profits are at record highs (HBO has about 30 million customers, although that metric has never been accompanied by razor-sharp clarity).
But let's face it, it's not 1998 anymore. After years of watching HBO dominate the Emmys and critics' top 10 lists -- and nab sizzling ratings for Sopranos and Sex -- basic cable outlets got the message and started producing their own richly drawn, provocative series. HBO, meanwhile, tended to retreat into its silo. When producers came to pitch unusual shows about New York ad men in the 1960s and a crime-scene tech who moonlights as a vigilante serial killer, HBO slammed the door, decisions that many at the network came to regret. Mad Men and Dexter went on to become acclaimed hits for AMC and Showtime, respectively.
Naegle realizes the ground has shifted. "Now, unfortunately, there's lots of places that are doing things in the HBO model, in terms of structure and content and even language and nudity," she said. But "this really for us is an opportunity to do things that are unique."
Is Naegle the right person to seize that opportunity? Ordinary viewers may have greeted her ascent with a shrugging, "Who she?" But Hollywood history is studded with examples of agents who made the jump to executive ranks, with results ranging from the legendary (Lew Wasserman) to the bathetic (Michael Ovitz). Indeed, Chris Albrecht, the architect of HBO's original-series renaissance in the late 1990s who left the network last year amid a domestic-abuse scandal, once worked as an ICM agent.
For her part, Naegle comes to the job with several important advantages. For starters, she's the first outsider brought into a major post at HBO in a long while. Given where the network is now, a fresh pair of eyes couldn't hurt. At UTA, the big Hollywood agency where she had spent her career, most recently running the TV department with colleague Jay Sures, she worked with writers such as Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City, Men in Trees) and Jhoni Marchinko (Will & Grace). She once described herself to Variety as a "script pimp."
Those relationships will likely prove beneficial. Indeed, Ball is already shooting his next HBO series, True Blood, an adaptation of Louisiana-based vampire novels by Charlaine Harris (although the show was announced last year, long before Naegle took the new job). "We respond to the same stuff," Ball said of Naegle. "What's great about her is that she really loves television and how excited she gets about it."
That seems true. Naegle said she's crazy about Lost, Mad Men, House, Dexter, Weeds and Battlestar Galactica, along with "some reality shows." (Eagle-eyed observers will note the lack of half-hour comedies on this list other than Weeds.) Most shows she watches off her TiVo, although she made sure to tune in live for HBO's five-night-a-week shrink drama In Treatment. "That's been my latest sort of obsession," she said.
But maybe the most important quality Naegle will bring to the HBO gig is her openness, her sense that TV's next great hit will spring from some place entirely unexpected. "As an agent, I'm always careful not to discount someone because they'd worked on some show that I didn't like or had written a movie that I didn't care for," she said. "Television should be a medium that people can really jump in on. It should be wide open enough that if you can find a great filmmaker from Sundance, or you can find somebody who's sitting in Milwaukee and has just written a script that they love, then that could end up being a hit show . . . There's talent everywhere you look."
So can HBO's new entertainment chief realistically pull it out of its slump? Naegle is now charged with reviving a still-important network that is in serious disarray; a network that does not have an original series on the air at present -- and that will remain the case for the next five months. The miniseries John Adams wraps up in a couple of weeks. Generation Kill, a 7-part miniseries from Wire creator David Simon, will debut on HBO July 13. Both are one-offs that won't return. HBO won't have an original series on the air until September -- that's when Alan Ball's new vampire series, True Blood, debuts. Until then, aside from the usual array of original films, Hollywood movies, documentaries and specials … nada.
A year ago, The Sopranos went off the air, but it’s clear that things were already going wrong at HBO. The excellent historical drama Rome had died a too-early death and millions of Deadwood fans were dealt an cruel blow when a planned fourth season failed to materialize. It then emerged that HBO had passed on Mad Men, an AMC series from a former “Sopranos” writer that became the most acclaimed drama of the year. Speaking of AMC, director Darren Aronofsky is working on Riverview Towers, a new horror-thriller series, for that network. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the project had been in development at HBO for two years.
As Canadian TV critic Rick McGinnis put it, “AMC is this year’s Showtime, while Showtime has become the new HBO, and HBO is, well, the company that somehow lost Aronofsky’s project … while the Sopranos, Deadwood and Rome were all going off the air. Just what, precisely, is HBO actually doing these days?”
Well, last year the network spent a reported $25 million making six episodes of the Linda Bloodworth-Thomason series 12 Miles of Bad Road, which the channel found wanting and won’t air. Now HBO executives must endure the embarrassing spectacle of Bloodworth-Thomason sending DVDs of 12 Miles to critics and airing her grievances in the press in a quixotic attempt to make a sale at another network. “HBO … apparently didn't like the broad tone of the series. And they are right, it's ridiculously broad. But someone should have figured that out, oh, about $20 million ago at least,” San Francisco Chronicle critic Tim Goodman recently wrote. “You don't hire Bloodworth for dramedy and not expect to get broad sass. It's what she does. Waiting for six completed episodes is just bad management rooted in either fear or [incompetence].”
Over the next few months, things won’t get any easier for HBO. Other cable networks will spend the summer doing what they’ve done since The Sopranos exited -- stealing HBO’s thunder. As Mediaweek noted, "the sharks are circling." USA, TNT, FX, Showtime and AMC all have ambitious slates of new and returning originals planned for 2008, and the summer season, on cable anyway, will be especially crowded. Mad Men, USA’s Burn Notice, TNT’s The Closer, and Showtime’s Weeds, as well as a host of new shows from various cable networks will be soaking up media attention and grabbing viewers' eyeballs while HBO sits on the sidelines.
In the last year or so, we’ve enjoyed HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, Tell Me You Love Me, and In Treatment, all of which drew some of that elusive media buzz that HBO so depends on. But those programmes lacked the broad appeal that Sex and the City and The Sopranos had – and HBO needs those kinds of big-tent shows to keep a large chunk of those 30 million subscribers happy.
We look forward to True Blood, but that's the network's only big premiere this year, although it's hoped that Entourage, which also returns that month, will be as sharp as it was in its early days, not the bloated parody of itself it has become. As for new seasons of Tell Me You Love Me, Big Love, Flight of the Conchords and the new series based on the The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels, we’ll have to wait until 2009 for those programmes, according to HBO. (There’s a hopeful sign for those who want another season of In Treatment -- Naegle made positive comments about it in a New York Times piece.)
And according to Variety, "in the pilot pipeline are the David Milch-Bill Clark cop entry Last of the Ninth, the biker drama 1 Percent, the laffer Driving Around with Joni, the Barry Sonnenfeld-helmed Suburban Shootout, Darren Star's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and the Bob Odenkirk/David Cross comedy David's Situation."
HBO executives probably just want to forget the year that’s passed since Tony Soprano exited the scene, and get through 2008 as best they can. In fairness to Naegle, we should give her until this time next year to assemble a full slate of programmes that reflects her creative vision. Then we can decide whether HBO’s top executives -- none of whom come from the creative side of the business, as a recent Business Week piece points out -- made the right decision in hiring her.
Actually, it may not be fair to ask whether one person can return HBO to its former status as TV’s creative leader. At this point, just pulling the channel out of this slump will be enough of a challenge.
"My biggest heartbreak as an agent was, I'd work with my clients and hear what they wanted to do and really get excited and really love it, take it into the network [or] wherever it was going, and then watch it slowly die, by a thousand people with different opinions," Naegle announced with a rueful chuckle last week. "By the end of it, people couldn't remember what they'd started with."
HBO was, for much of the last decade, the great counter-example proving that TV series could be created differently, using methods more favourable to passionate writer-producers, the people who dreamed up what became The Sopranos or Six Feet Under or Sex and the City. And Naegle left no doubt she'd like to make the pay-cable outlet every writer's dream destination once more.
"Development by committee or by patching together multiple people's ideas isn't the way to get great television," she said. "I think it starts with the writer. Somebody who's very passionate and has a clear idea about what they'd like to do and the kind of show they'd like to produce. When I hear that and see that in somebody's eyes, I always feel like I've got something." Whether HBO can maintain its commitment to great television in a rapidly changing media environment is, of course, the big question surrounding Naegle's hire, which was announced last week. She replaces Carolyn Strauss, a career-long HBO programmer nudged from the post last month.
The last few seasons have seen lots of high-profile disappointments for HBO. Not many fans lined up for quixotic campaigns to save the willfully perverse drama John From Cincinnati, for example, or Louis C.K.'s misbegotten sitcom Lucky Louie. In fact, subscribers and critics alike have seemed puzzled by much of what HBO's done recently.
"Interesting, smart, entertaining series" are what Michael Lombardo, Naegle's new boss and the channel's West Coast chief, said HBO now must find. "I use the last term specifically," Lombardo added, "because I do think if we can be faulted for anything, it was that some of our series did not deliver on that note." In other words, HBO execs seem to agree with critics that too many of their recent shows just weren't all that much fun to watch. That's a big admission for a place that's still regarded by many in the business as the cool kids' table. HBO retains a business model that stirs envy among rivals. Executives say that subscriber tallies, revenue and profits are at record highs (HBO has about 30 million customers, although that metric has never been accompanied by razor-sharp clarity).
But let's face it, it's not 1998 anymore. After years of watching HBO dominate the Emmys and critics' top 10 lists -- and nab sizzling ratings for Sopranos and Sex -- basic cable outlets got the message and started producing their own richly drawn, provocative series. HBO, meanwhile, tended to retreat into its silo. When producers came to pitch unusual shows about New York ad men in the 1960s and a crime-scene tech who moonlights as a vigilante serial killer, HBO slammed the door, decisions that many at the network came to regret. Mad Men and Dexter went on to become acclaimed hits for AMC and Showtime, respectively.
Naegle realizes the ground has shifted. "Now, unfortunately, there's lots of places that are doing things in the HBO model, in terms of structure and content and even language and nudity," she said. But "this really for us is an opportunity to do things that are unique."
Is Naegle the right person to seize that opportunity? Ordinary viewers may have greeted her ascent with a shrugging, "Who she?" But Hollywood history is studded with examples of agents who made the jump to executive ranks, with results ranging from the legendary (Lew Wasserman) to the bathetic (Michael Ovitz). Indeed, Chris Albrecht, the architect of HBO's original-series renaissance in the late 1990s who left the network last year amid a domestic-abuse scandal, once worked as an ICM agent.
For her part, Naegle comes to the job with several important advantages. For starters, she's the first outsider brought into a major post at HBO in a long while. Given where the network is now, a fresh pair of eyes couldn't hurt. At UTA, the big Hollywood agency where she had spent her career, most recently running the TV department with colleague Jay Sures, she worked with writers such as Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), Jenny Bicks (Sex and the City, Men in Trees) and Jhoni Marchinko (Will & Grace). She once described herself to Variety as a "script pimp."
Those relationships will likely prove beneficial. Indeed, Ball is already shooting his next HBO series, True Blood, an adaptation of Louisiana-based vampire novels by Charlaine Harris (although the show was announced last year, long before Naegle took the new job). "We respond to the same stuff," Ball said of Naegle. "What's great about her is that she really loves television and how excited she gets about it."
That seems true. Naegle said she's crazy about Lost, Mad Men, House, Dexter, Weeds and Battlestar Galactica, along with "some reality shows." (Eagle-eyed observers will note the lack of half-hour comedies on this list other than Weeds.) Most shows she watches off her TiVo, although she made sure to tune in live for HBO's five-night-a-week shrink drama In Treatment. "That's been my latest sort of obsession," she said.
But maybe the most important quality Naegle will bring to the HBO gig is her openness, her sense that TV's next great hit will spring from some place entirely unexpected. "As an agent, I'm always careful not to discount someone because they'd worked on some show that I didn't like or had written a movie that I didn't care for," she said. "Television should be a medium that people can really jump in on. It should be wide open enough that if you can find a great filmmaker from Sundance, or you can find somebody who's sitting in Milwaukee and has just written a script that they love, then that could end up being a hit show . . . There's talent everywhere you look."
So can HBO's new entertainment chief realistically pull it out of its slump? Naegle is now charged with reviving a still-important network that is in serious disarray; a network that does not have an original series on the air at present -- and that will remain the case for the next five months. The miniseries John Adams wraps up in a couple of weeks. Generation Kill, a 7-part miniseries from Wire creator David Simon, will debut on HBO July 13. Both are one-offs that won't return. HBO won't have an original series on the air until September -- that's when Alan Ball's new vampire series, True Blood, debuts. Until then, aside from the usual array of original films, Hollywood movies, documentaries and specials … nada.
A year ago, The Sopranos went off the air, but it’s clear that things were already going wrong at HBO. The excellent historical drama Rome had died a too-early death and millions of Deadwood fans were dealt an cruel blow when a planned fourth season failed to materialize. It then emerged that HBO had passed on Mad Men, an AMC series from a former “Sopranos” writer that became the most acclaimed drama of the year. Speaking of AMC, director Darren Aronofsky is working on Riverview Towers, a new horror-thriller series, for that network. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the project had been in development at HBO for two years.
As Canadian TV critic Rick McGinnis put it, “AMC is this year’s Showtime, while Showtime has become the new HBO, and HBO is, well, the company that somehow lost Aronofsky’s project … while the Sopranos, Deadwood and Rome were all going off the air. Just what, precisely, is HBO actually doing these days?”
Well, last year the network spent a reported $25 million making six episodes of the Linda Bloodworth-Thomason series 12 Miles of Bad Road, which the channel found wanting and won’t air. Now HBO executives must endure the embarrassing spectacle of Bloodworth-Thomason sending DVDs of 12 Miles to critics and airing her grievances in the press in a quixotic attempt to make a sale at another network. “HBO … apparently didn't like the broad tone of the series. And they are right, it's ridiculously broad. But someone should have figured that out, oh, about $20 million ago at least,” San Francisco Chronicle critic Tim Goodman recently wrote. “You don't hire Bloodworth for dramedy and not expect to get broad sass. It's what she does. Waiting for six completed episodes is just bad management rooted in either fear or [incompetence].”
Over the next few months, things won’t get any easier for HBO. Other cable networks will spend the summer doing what they’ve done since The Sopranos exited -- stealing HBO’s thunder. As Mediaweek noted, "the sharks are circling." USA, TNT, FX, Showtime and AMC all have ambitious slates of new and returning originals planned for 2008, and the summer season, on cable anyway, will be especially crowded. Mad Men, USA’s Burn Notice, TNT’s The Closer, and Showtime’s Weeds, as well as a host of new shows from various cable networks will be soaking up media attention and grabbing viewers' eyeballs while HBO sits on the sidelines.
In the last year or so, we’ve enjoyed HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, Tell Me You Love Me, and In Treatment, all of which drew some of that elusive media buzz that HBO so depends on. But those programmes lacked the broad appeal that Sex and the City and The Sopranos had – and HBO needs those kinds of big-tent shows to keep a large chunk of those 30 million subscribers happy.
We look forward to True Blood, but that's the network's only big premiere this year, although it's hoped that Entourage, which also returns that month, will be as sharp as it was in its early days, not the bloated parody of itself it has become. As for new seasons of Tell Me You Love Me, Big Love, Flight of the Conchords and the new series based on the The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels, we’ll have to wait until 2009 for those programmes, according to HBO. (There’s a hopeful sign for those who want another season of In Treatment -- Naegle made positive comments about it in a New York Times piece.)
And according to Variety, "in the pilot pipeline are the David Milch-Bill Clark cop entry Last of the Ninth, the biker drama 1 Percent, the laffer Driving Around with Joni, the Barry Sonnenfeld-helmed Suburban Shootout, Darren Star's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and the Bob Odenkirk/David Cross comedy David's Situation."
HBO executives probably just want to forget the year that’s passed since Tony Soprano exited the scene, and get through 2008 as best they can. In fairness to Naegle, we should give her until this time next year to assemble a full slate of programmes that reflects her creative vision. Then we can decide whether HBO’s top executives -- none of whom come from the creative side of the business, as a recent Business Week piece points out -- made the right decision in hiring her.
Actually, it may not be fair to ask whether one person can return HBO to its former status as TV’s creative leader. At this point, just pulling the channel out of this slump will be enough of a challenge.
Documentary investigates the rule of 'King Corn'
King Corn (10 p.m. Tuesday, WTTW-Ch. 11) uses a shambling, shaggy style to answer a serious question: Why is our food system so out of whack?
The substance of this documentary will be familiar to readers of Michael Pollan’s 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which examined how industrial agriculture has transformed not just the lives of farmers and animals, but the basic building blocks of our diet. Corn has indeed conquered the American diet, but the mountains of corn that farmers produce (which are subsidized by the government) are a mixed blessing. Food is cheaper, but we are fatter, and when it comes to animals, according to this non-shrill film, 70 percent of the antibiotics consumed in America are fed to cattle.
Yet filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are seen eating juicy burgers in the film. They don’t disdain our fast-food culture — they just want to understand what’s behind it, and they do a good job of explaining that in this hour-long documentary. King Corn may be a little slack and self-conscious in places, but it’s also fair, thorough and quite literally down to earth.
In essence, Cheney and Ellis set out to do what Pollan did: tell the story of how our diet has changed since the ’70s by meeting the people who grow our food. They talked to farmers and cattle ranchers in Iowa and Colorado, and the duo also interviewed cogent and concise food experts, including Pollan. But the King Corn duo went the extra mile, or the extra acre — they went to Iowa to farm corn.
In college, they discovered that they both had relatives who came from the tiny town of Greene, Iowa. After college, they spent almost a year there, where they leased one acre from a local farmer and grew corn. They follow the progress of their crop closely (and when they get their subsidy checks, they regret not planting more corn). But the filmmakers also use homemade charts and lighthearted animated sequences to talk about how government policies altered farming in the ’70s, and how corn harvests have shot up and prices have fallen since then. In their tiny kitchen, they even attempt to make high-fructose corn syrup, the sweetener that has become ubiquitous.
King Corn isn’t just a cogent, low-key examination of where our food comes from and how that has changed in the past 30 years. The film is, in part, a tribute to life in towns such as Greene. Cheney and Ellis note that the cost of food has dropped sharply since their relatives lived there, but they also appear to mourn the passing of a rural way of life that has been disappearing with the advent of ever-larger farms.
Farming itself doesn’t turn out to be a transformative experience – as they note in the narration, “Planting 31,000 seeds was not exactly a hands-on experience. Then again, [thanks to machinery] it took only 18 minutes.”
But a website for King Corn shows that the filmmakers were deeply affected by their experiences. According to the Independent Lens site for the film, the director of the documentary, Aaron Woolf, now runs a “know-where-your-food-comes-from” grocery store in Brooklyn.
The substance of this documentary will be familiar to readers of Michael Pollan’s 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which examined how industrial agriculture has transformed not just the lives of farmers and animals, but the basic building blocks of our diet. Corn has indeed conquered the American diet, but the mountains of corn that farmers produce (which are subsidized by the government) are a mixed blessing. Food is cheaper, but we are fatter, and when it comes to animals, according to this non-shrill film, 70 percent of the antibiotics consumed in America are fed to cattle.
Yet filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are seen eating juicy burgers in the film. They don’t disdain our fast-food culture — they just want to understand what’s behind it, and they do a good job of explaining that in this hour-long documentary. King Corn may be a little slack and self-conscious in places, but it’s also fair, thorough and quite literally down to earth.
In essence, Cheney and Ellis set out to do what Pollan did: tell the story of how our diet has changed since the ’70s by meeting the people who grow our food. They talked to farmers and cattle ranchers in Iowa and Colorado, and the duo also interviewed cogent and concise food experts, including Pollan. But the King Corn duo went the extra mile, or the extra acre — they went to Iowa to farm corn.
In college, they discovered that they both had relatives who came from the tiny town of Greene, Iowa. After college, they spent almost a year there, where they leased one acre from a local farmer and grew corn. They follow the progress of their crop closely (and when they get their subsidy checks, they regret not planting more corn). But the filmmakers also use homemade charts and lighthearted animated sequences to talk about how government policies altered farming in the ’70s, and how corn harvests have shot up and prices have fallen since then. In their tiny kitchen, they even attempt to make high-fructose corn syrup, the sweetener that has become ubiquitous.
King Corn isn’t just a cogent, low-key examination of where our food comes from and how that has changed in the past 30 years. The film is, in part, a tribute to life in towns such as Greene. Cheney and Ellis note that the cost of food has dropped sharply since their relatives lived there, but they also appear to mourn the passing of a rural way of life that has been disappearing with the advent of ever-larger farms.
Farming itself doesn’t turn out to be a transformative experience – as they note in the narration, “Planting 31,000 seeds was not exactly a hands-on experience. Then again, [thanks to machinery] it took only 18 minutes.”
But a website for King Corn shows that the filmmakers were deeply affected by their experiences. According to the Independent Lens site for the film, the director of the documentary, Aaron Woolf, now runs a “know-where-your-food-comes-from” grocery store in Brooklyn.
Badass Wombles
The Wombles have moved across the pond and adopted a New York drawl in support of a campaign to save British children's TV...
This is, of course, not the first time the Wombles have flirted with the harder edges of social commentary... The Wombles Do Punk and Wombles on The Word;
This is, of course, not the first time the Wombles have flirted with the harder edges of social commentary... The Wombles Do Punk and Wombles on The Word;
Top TV writer is victim of 'dog rage'
Andrew Davies, the screen-writer behind some of Britain’s best-loved costume dramas, has become a victim of “dog rage”.
Davies, 71, was punched and headbutted while walking his puppy Daisy in a park close to his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. The Bafta and Emmy-award winning writer, best known for his BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, was assaulted by the owner of two Staffordshire bull terriers that were involved in a scuffle with Davies’s “timid” Alsation rescue dog.
“It was dog rage,” said Davies this weekend. Describing how the terriers had “terrified” Daisy, the writer said: “I drove one of them off. I shouted ‘Go on! Get out of it!’ and sort of aimed a kick at it, which was never really meant to connect, and didn’t. The dog got the message and went off. But his owner shouted, ‘Don’t you fucking touch my dog!’ and ran up and headbutted me and punched me in the eye. It knocked me clean off my feet. He was a big guy and I am quite little.”
Police said the 6ft attacker, in his early twenties, put up the hood of his black tracksuit before fleeing. Davies, who suffered a black eye, said: “I thought I was doing this guy a favour because he couldn’t control his dogs. It all happened so quickly I didn’t have time to be terrified. It was just such a surprise.”
Davies’s television credits include House of Cards, Sense and Sensibility and Tipping the Velvet, an adaptation of Sarah Waters's novel about lesbian love in Victorian times.
Davies is working on the screenplay for a Hollywood version of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, directed by Sam Mendes. His film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s sexually charged novel Brideshead Revisited will be released later this year.
Growing up in Cardiff, Davies had a natural instinct to be “a bad boy” and modelled himself on Dylan Thomas, the heavy-drinking Welsh poet. “I wanted to go to London, get drunk a lot and have loose women - there didn’t seem to be very many of them in Rhiwbina,” he has said. The writer has lived in Warwickshire with his wife, Diana, a retired teacher, since the 1960s.
A former English lecturer at Warwick University, Davies achieved fame late in life after struggling as a part-time writer. It was the success of his campus satire, A Very Peculiar Practice, that convinced him to take up writing full-time in 1986.
Davies has won five Bafta awards, the last of which was in 2006 for Bleak House, an adaptation of the Dickens novel for the BBC. The dog rage incident took place on March 31. Davies decided not to go to hospital after the attack.
The writer was in a reflective mood this weekend. “Oddly enough, it seemed to perk me up a bit - all the adrenaline flooding in,” he said. “You know what they say - a narrow escape from an accident, that sort of thing, can make you more alive. But also it’s not something I would go out seeking because I have got a bloody sore eye.”
Three children have been killed by dogs in the past two years, leading to calls in some areas, such as Wandsworth, south London, for the return of dog licences. This would require owners to register the details of their animals. Ministers, however, are lukewarm about the idea.
Davies, 71, was punched and headbutted while walking his puppy Daisy in a park close to his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. The Bafta and Emmy-award winning writer, best known for his BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, was assaulted by the owner of two Staffordshire bull terriers that were involved in a scuffle with Davies’s “timid” Alsation rescue dog.
“It was dog rage,” said Davies this weekend. Describing how the terriers had “terrified” Daisy, the writer said: “I drove one of them off. I shouted ‘Go on! Get out of it!’ and sort of aimed a kick at it, which was never really meant to connect, and didn’t. The dog got the message and went off. But his owner shouted, ‘Don’t you fucking touch my dog!’ and ran up and headbutted me and punched me in the eye. It knocked me clean off my feet. He was a big guy and I am quite little.”
Police said the 6ft attacker, in his early twenties, put up the hood of his black tracksuit before fleeing. Davies, who suffered a black eye, said: “I thought I was doing this guy a favour because he couldn’t control his dogs. It all happened so quickly I didn’t have time to be terrified. It was just such a surprise.”
Davies’s television credits include House of Cards, Sense and Sensibility and Tipping the Velvet, an adaptation of Sarah Waters's novel about lesbian love in Victorian times.
Davies is working on the screenplay for a Hollywood version of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, directed by Sam Mendes. His film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s sexually charged novel Brideshead Revisited will be released later this year.
Growing up in Cardiff, Davies had a natural instinct to be “a bad boy” and modelled himself on Dylan Thomas, the heavy-drinking Welsh poet. “I wanted to go to London, get drunk a lot and have loose women - there didn’t seem to be very many of them in Rhiwbina,” he has said. The writer has lived in Warwickshire with his wife, Diana, a retired teacher, since the 1960s.
A former English lecturer at Warwick University, Davies achieved fame late in life after struggling as a part-time writer. It was the success of his campus satire, A Very Peculiar Practice, that convinced him to take up writing full-time in 1986.
Davies has won five Bafta awards, the last of which was in 2006 for Bleak House, an adaptation of the Dickens novel for the BBC. The dog rage incident took place on March 31. Davies decided not to go to hospital after the attack.
The writer was in a reflective mood this weekend. “Oddly enough, it seemed to perk me up a bit - all the adrenaline flooding in,” he said. “You know what they say - a narrow escape from an accident, that sort of thing, can make you more alive. But also it’s not something I would go out seeking because I have got a bloody sore eye.”
Three children have been killed by dogs in the past two years, leading to calls in some areas, such as Wandsworth, south London, for the return of dog licences. This would require owners to register the details of their animals. Ministers, however, are lukewarm about the idea.
Television is a pretty decent invention
Last night's TV reviewed: Waking the Dead; Am I Normal?; The Complainers; Stephen Fry and the Machine That Made Us
Even in normal circumstances, Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve) from BBC1’s Waking the Dead must be one of the most intense detectives on television. Last night, though, he definitely had plenty to be intense about. They're up against the Irish National Liberation Army, the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, and Basque separatists Eta. I wouldn't be surprised if, in part two tonight, Boyd finds out that Farc, the Tamil Tigers and al-Qaida are involved as well. Still, he's got his see-through wall to write on, and his fearsome temper to call upon when things get tough. He should be all right. And Trevor Eve has a new haircut which makes him look slightly less like Noel Edmonds and even less like Hughie Green. That has to be a good thing.
The latest two-parter began with him bidding farewell to the American girlfriend who’d clearly captured his heart prior to flying back home. “I wish I’d never met you,” said Boyd in his trademark mutter (which alternates neatly with his trademark shout). That was never going to improve the mood of an already erasable bugger (trust me, I know, from experience). Not long afterwards, he heard that his teenage son had just gone from homelessness to a mental hospital via an unfortunate encounter with the former ETA agent Lore Carson (Beatriz Batarda) and an electric train line. And as if that wasn’t enough, it also seems as if Boyd might also have Mother Issues, either about his own mum, his son’s or both. Interrogating a young mugger, he threw in the not-strictly-relevant question, “When did you last talk to your mother?” – adding darkly that “If you have a mother who gives a damn, then you’re one lucky boy.”
As ever in Waking the Dead, the upshot is a strange mixture of an intriguing, even classy thriller and dollops of the purest corn. No matter how complicated the plot became, for example, almost every aspect of it managed to remind Boyd of his own troubles. At one stage, Lore was required to prove her French origins by uttering a hearty “Zut alors!” And of course, there’s always the classic scientific dialogue from Boyd’s omniscient colleague Dr Eve Lockhart (Tara Fitzgerald). Faced with a 15-year-old charred corpse, most forensic experts might be content merely to “run single nuclear-type polymorphisms and carry out some stable- isotope profiling on the bone marrow”. Eve, however, also opted for a “microscopy to compare fibres and a microspectrophotometry and chromatography test to compare dyes”. It's all mad, loop-the-loop, bonkers conkers. But, somehow, Waking the Dead manages to be good fun. Actually, not just somehow; Trevor Eve's the one to thank. His understated irritability is totally convincing and manages to ground the whole thing in some kind of reality. Just. There are few television sleuths more interesting than Det Supt Peter Boyd.
Now, if you judge an illness by its cures, addiction emerged from the first edition of Dr Tanya Byron's new series Am I Normal? (BBC Two) somewhat lacking in credibility. Byron had the undeniably good idea of taking apart all the received wisdom on the subject of addiction and subjecting it to careful examination. The trouble for the programme was that, rather anti-climactically, all the received wisdom turned out to be true. Addiction, Byron duly concluded, is caused by a combination of biological, psychological and social factors. The line between compulsive (or even habitual) behaviour and true addiction is often blurred. People can become addicted to activities as well as to chemicals.
Here was Nikki in Harley Street looking for help with her chocolate habit from Kevin Laye, a thought field therapist who modestly described himself as not a healer but a “technician”. Laye told her to think of herself as a computer and him as the IT guy come to “delete” her virus. He began tapping her “energy points” beneath her neck, on her cheek, and forehead. And he went on tapping, for 40 minutes, and still Nikki liked her Yorkie bars. “There could be toxins,” Laye said, in the way the IT guys say “it could be your hard drive”. The funny thing was, the next day Nikki did give up on chocolate and she kept away from the demon confectionery for all of three months. Then she started guzzling again.
Ben was a smoker. Sorry, I should say, is a smoker, despite a heavy session of EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing and has been approved by NICE (the government body that denies drugs to breast cancer sufferers). This required Ben to look at a pen as it was waved across his face by a man with a very deep voice and then track a blob of light across a screen that was showing images of smoking-related disease. “Congratulations. Enjoy your life as a smoker,” said the man in his deep voice. But when Byron's team followed up this miracle of brainwashing, it discovered that Ben was once again puffing away.
And then there was Teresa, a lifelong heroin addict who had turned to prostitution to finance it. Her cure was Equine Assisted Therapy, which was why Byron was talking to her in a paddock where five horses - one for every child of hers who had been taken into care - were showing her some “unconditional love”. “I never thought I would stand in a field of horses talking to a woman who had taken drugs from the age of 9 to the age of 40, wanting to cry my eyes out,” Byron said. But then who would? Yet Byron was also careful to say that, although Teresa had been off drugs for a year, the treatment was still being evaluated.
Byron's strength, as readers who solicit her advice know, is that she is fair and open-minded. There were points in the programme when I wished she were a bit less so and took a point of view on this addiction business, which now recruits not only sex addicts but computer game fans. The problem was that Dr Jeffrey A.Schaler, the author of Addiction is a Choice, a book that holds that addicts are simply flawed people who make poor choices, was not particularly persuasive. If you want to stop, stop he said. After all, people do. He reminded me of Gore Vidal responding to an interviewer who asked how he had cured his anorexia: “I ate something.” He was sort of missing the point.
Byron showed us brain scans that revealed that for addicts some stimulants not only released dopamine in one part of their brain but closed down the impulse control response elsewhere. But most of us have lived long enough to know that some people have addictive personalities and for the worst of them, their best bet is to become addicted to Alcoholics Anonymous or one of its sisters. Schaler's pull-yourself-together response is attractive because it places individual responsibility at its core but it is a bit like what Bill Bryson was saying in The Times about taking away litter bins from beauty spots. The theory is that people will take ownership of their mess and take it home. The practice is, they don't.
Unfortunately, every time Schaler said “It’s as simple as that”, you knew it wasn’t really. And so, needless to say, did Byron – who, whatever she claimed, never seemed entirely in the business here of rethinking everything she felt she knew. The result still worked quite well as a means of giving some familiar debates a thorough airing. Yet, coincidentally enough, her own supposed scepticism about mainstream ideas ended up looking like a choice she’d made (in this case for the purposes of television) rather than something hard-wired into her brain.
In The Complainers (Ch.5) Dom Joly sent a couple of stooges into a restaurant, their brief to behave with increasing obnoxiousness while a hidden camera filmed the response of the people on the neighbouring table. In two cases, the folk on the next table simply got up and moved elsewhere, issuing not a word of complaint despite a litany of offences to complain about. In the third instance, a man finally voiced his annoyance, but it had taken a smashed glass, full of wine that splattered his trouser leg, to propel him to the end of his tether. Joly's point was that the British do not readily complain, perhaps because we are still innately good-mannered. He thinks we should rail against petty modern irritations, and those who would curb our liberties. To this end, one of his colleagues started fixing a wheel clamp to an illegally-parked van while its driver, an official wheel-clamper, was clamping an illegally-parked car. Unfortunately, the clamper's response to being clamped was bemusement rather than righteous anger, which slightly diminished the effect.
There was much in this programme that was socially relevant. Joly addressed the Orwellian nightmare of five million CCTV cameras keeping tabs on us, for example. But he seemed a little over-protective of his reputation as a prankster. In sleepy Dawlish in Devon, where the CCTV cameras are disguised as lampposts, he asked a man who appeared to be partially blind whether he had seen any street crime. This encounter was shown over and over, rather as if the editing had been thrown to a couple of sniggering third-formers, vastly entertained by the spectacle of an elderly man wearing protective dark glasses being asked whether he had, wait for it, seen something. It was a curious, jarring misjudgement.
Still, for all its occasional ham-fistedness, and some confusion over its identity as it lurched between comment and comedy, The Complainers might just be worth following. A preview of next week's programme showed a man with a loud-hailer asking a loud-hailing, street-corner evangelist why he had to be so loud. "Jesus didn't have a loud-hailer," he bellowed. Quite so.
At any rate, a nation that can boast Stephen Fry as one of its own can never be entirely dismissed as beyond the pale, gentility-wise. In Stephen Fry and the Machine That Made Us, he was at his most engaging, presenting with intelligent wit the story of the man who invented the printing press almost 600 years ago – Johannes Gutenberg from Mainz on the banks of the Rhine , "the silicon valley of medieval Europe".
Cursed with a beard that looked like a fish stuck to his face, treacherous investors, and terrible business sense, Johannes's addiction was to perfection, which is why, when Fry opened up his vellum Bible, it did not fall apart in his hands and its pages of justified type looked as beautiful as ever. It gave him gooseflesh just thinking about it said Fry, clever cleverly.
This was a fine documentary, yet as notable for what it did not contain as for what it did. There was, television gods be praised, no dramatic reconstruction of Gutenberg and other Germans with medieval beards discussing font sizes, just Fry talking to other intelligent people and assembling a vivid picture of Gutenberg's life and work, helped by a talented carpenter, Alan May, who knocked up a convincing copy of Gutenberg's original press.
Fry thinks that the printing press dwarfs all other inventions. He could imagine a world without cars, telephones or computers, he said, but not without the printed word. I feel duty-bound, perhaps even vellum-bound, to agree. But here was a reminder that television, too, sometimes counts as a pretty decent invention.
Even in normal circumstances, Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve) from BBC1’s Waking the Dead must be one of the most intense detectives on television. Last night, though, he definitely had plenty to be intense about. They're up against the Irish National Liberation Army, the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, and Basque separatists Eta. I wouldn't be surprised if, in part two tonight, Boyd finds out that Farc, the Tamil Tigers and al-Qaida are involved as well. Still, he's got his see-through wall to write on, and his fearsome temper to call upon when things get tough. He should be all right. And Trevor Eve has a new haircut which makes him look slightly less like Noel Edmonds and even less like Hughie Green. That has to be a good thing.
The latest two-parter began with him bidding farewell to the American girlfriend who’d clearly captured his heart prior to flying back home. “I wish I’d never met you,” said Boyd in his trademark mutter (which alternates neatly with his trademark shout). That was never going to improve the mood of an already erasable bugger (trust me, I know, from experience). Not long afterwards, he heard that his teenage son had just gone from homelessness to a mental hospital via an unfortunate encounter with the former ETA agent Lore Carson (Beatriz Batarda) and an electric train line. And as if that wasn’t enough, it also seems as if Boyd might also have Mother Issues, either about his own mum, his son’s or both. Interrogating a young mugger, he threw in the not-strictly-relevant question, “When did you last talk to your mother?” – adding darkly that “If you have a mother who gives a damn, then you’re one lucky boy.”
As ever in Waking the Dead, the upshot is a strange mixture of an intriguing, even classy thriller and dollops of the purest corn. No matter how complicated the plot became, for example, almost every aspect of it managed to remind Boyd of his own troubles. At one stage, Lore was required to prove her French origins by uttering a hearty “Zut alors!” And of course, there’s always the classic scientific dialogue from Boyd’s omniscient colleague Dr Eve Lockhart (Tara Fitzgerald). Faced with a 15-year-old charred corpse, most forensic experts might be content merely to “run single nuclear-type polymorphisms and carry out some stable- isotope profiling on the bone marrow”. Eve, however, also opted for a “microscopy to compare fibres and a microspectrophotometry and chromatography test to compare dyes”. It's all mad, loop-the-loop, bonkers conkers. But, somehow, Waking the Dead manages to be good fun. Actually, not just somehow; Trevor Eve's the one to thank. His understated irritability is totally convincing and manages to ground the whole thing in some kind of reality. Just. There are few television sleuths more interesting than Det Supt Peter Boyd.
Now, if you judge an illness by its cures, addiction emerged from the first edition of Dr Tanya Byron's new series Am I Normal? (BBC Two) somewhat lacking in credibility. Byron had the undeniably good idea of taking apart all the received wisdom on the subject of addiction and subjecting it to careful examination. The trouble for the programme was that, rather anti-climactically, all the received wisdom turned out to be true. Addiction, Byron duly concluded, is caused by a combination of biological, psychological and social factors. The line between compulsive (or even habitual) behaviour and true addiction is often blurred. People can become addicted to activities as well as to chemicals.
Here was Nikki in Harley Street looking for help with her chocolate habit from Kevin Laye, a thought field therapist who modestly described himself as not a healer but a “technician”. Laye told her to think of herself as a computer and him as the IT guy come to “delete” her virus. He began tapping her “energy points” beneath her neck, on her cheek, and forehead. And he went on tapping, for 40 minutes, and still Nikki liked her Yorkie bars. “There could be toxins,” Laye said, in the way the IT guys say “it could be your hard drive”. The funny thing was, the next day Nikki did give up on chocolate and she kept away from the demon confectionery for all of three months. Then she started guzzling again.
Ben was a smoker. Sorry, I should say, is a smoker, despite a heavy session of EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing and has been approved by NICE (the government body that denies drugs to breast cancer sufferers). This required Ben to look at a pen as it was waved across his face by a man with a very deep voice and then track a blob of light across a screen that was showing images of smoking-related disease. “Congratulations. Enjoy your life as a smoker,” said the man in his deep voice. But when Byron's team followed up this miracle of brainwashing, it discovered that Ben was once again puffing away.
And then there was Teresa, a lifelong heroin addict who had turned to prostitution to finance it. Her cure was Equine Assisted Therapy, which was why Byron was talking to her in a paddock where five horses - one for every child of hers who had been taken into care - were showing her some “unconditional love”. “I never thought I would stand in a field of horses talking to a woman who had taken drugs from the age of 9 to the age of 40, wanting to cry my eyes out,” Byron said. But then who would? Yet Byron was also careful to say that, although Teresa had been off drugs for a year, the treatment was still being evaluated.
Byron's strength, as readers who solicit her advice know, is that she is fair and open-minded. There were points in the programme when I wished she were a bit less so and took a point of view on this addiction business, which now recruits not only sex addicts but computer game fans. The problem was that Dr Jeffrey A.Schaler, the author of Addiction is a Choice, a book that holds that addicts are simply flawed people who make poor choices, was not particularly persuasive. If you want to stop, stop he said. After all, people do. He reminded me of Gore Vidal responding to an interviewer who asked how he had cured his anorexia: “I ate something.” He was sort of missing the point.
Byron showed us brain scans that revealed that for addicts some stimulants not only released dopamine in one part of their brain but closed down the impulse control response elsewhere. But most of us have lived long enough to know that some people have addictive personalities and for the worst of them, their best bet is to become addicted to Alcoholics Anonymous or one of its sisters. Schaler's pull-yourself-together response is attractive because it places individual responsibility at its core but it is a bit like what Bill Bryson was saying in The Times about taking away litter bins from beauty spots. The theory is that people will take ownership of their mess and take it home. The practice is, they don't.
Unfortunately, every time Schaler said “It’s as simple as that”, you knew it wasn’t really. And so, needless to say, did Byron – who, whatever she claimed, never seemed entirely in the business here of rethinking everything she felt she knew. The result still worked quite well as a means of giving some familiar debates a thorough airing. Yet, coincidentally enough, her own supposed scepticism about mainstream ideas ended up looking like a choice she’d made (in this case for the purposes of television) rather than something hard-wired into her brain.
In The Complainers (Ch.5) Dom Joly sent a couple of stooges into a restaurant, their brief to behave with increasing obnoxiousness while a hidden camera filmed the response of the people on the neighbouring table. In two cases, the folk on the next table simply got up and moved elsewhere, issuing not a word of complaint despite a litany of offences to complain about. In the third instance, a man finally voiced his annoyance, but it had taken a smashed glass, full of wine that splattered his trouser leg, to propel him to the end of his tether. Joly's point was that the British do not readily complain, perhaps because we are still innately good-mannered. He thinks we should rail against petty modern irritations, and those who would curb our liberties. To this end, one of his colleagues started fixing a wheel clamp to an illegally-parked van while its driver, an official wheel-clamper, was clamping an illegally-parked car. Unfortunately, the clamper's response to being clamped was bemusement rather than righteous anger, which slightly diminished the effect.
There was much in this programme that was socially relevant. Joly addressed the Orwellian nightmare of five million CCTV cameras keeping tabs on us, for example. But he seemed a little over-protective of his reputation as a prankster. In sleepy Dawlish in Devon, where the CCTV cameras are disguised as lampposts, he asked a man who appeared to be partially blind whether he had seen any street crime. This encounter was shown over and over, rather as if the editing had been thrown to a couple of sniggering third-formers, vastly entertained by the spectacle of an elderly man wearing protective dark glasses being asked whether he had, wait for it, seen something. It was a curious, jarring misjudgement.
Still, for all its occasional ham-fistedness, and some confusion over its identity as it lurched between comment and comedy, The Complainers might just be worth following. A preview of next week's programme showed a man with a loud-hailer asking a loud-hailing, street-corner evangelist why he had to be so loud. "Jesus didn't have a loud-hailer," he bellowed. Quite so.
At any rate, a nation that can boast Stephen Fry as one of its own can never be entirely dismissed as beyond the pale, gentility-wise. In Stephen Fry and the Machine That Made Us, he was at his most engaging, presenting with intelligent wit the story of the man who invented the printing press almost 600 years ago – Johannes Gutenberg from Mainz on the banks of the Rhine , "the silicon valley of medieval Europe".
Cursed with a beard that looked like a fish stuck to his face, treacherous investors, and terrible business sense, Johannes's addiction was to perfection, which is why, when Fry opened up his vellum Bible, it did not fall apart in his hands and its pages of justified type looked as beautiful as ever. It gave him gooseflesh just thinking about it said Fry, clever cleverly.
This was a fine documentary, yet as notable for what it did not contain as for what it did. There was, television gods be praised, no dramatic reconstruction of Gutenberg and other Germans with medieval beards discussing font sizes, just Fry talking to other intelligent people and assembling a vivid picture of Gutenberg's life and work, helped by a talented carpenter, Alan May, who knocked up a convincing copy of Gutenberg's original press.
Fry thinks that the printing press dwarfs all other inventions. He could imagine a world without cars, telephones or computers, he said, but not without the printed word. I feel duty-bound, perhaps even vellum-bound, to agree. But here was a reminder that television, too, sometimes counts as a pretty decent invention.
Monday, 14 April 2008
Reality show maker arrested
Police charged an aspiring reality show director with blocking four women — half of a cast billed as ordinary girls hoping to become "princesses" — from leaving the central Florida house where the show was being shot. Marc Brilleman, 33, identified as the chief operating officer, director and writer of Pauper to Princess, was arrested Saturday on a charge of false imprisonment.
According to the show's website, its concept was to build the eight women's self-esteem and help them grow physically, mentally and spiritually. As with many reality shows, the women lived in a house while the program was taped. Producers were trying to sell the show to a TV network.
Four of the women told investigators Brilleman blocked and locked a door when they tried to leave the house, where they had been since February and had been able to leave on weekends, said Jerome Miller, a commander for Apopka police northwest of Orlando.
Brilleman initially denied stopping the women when questioned by police, then said "they could not leave because they were being disciplined," Miller said. Brilleman also told them they could not leave because they were under contract, the police report said.
According to the report, the women were also upset that they had not been paid for the past five weeks of filming. Miller said the case would be forwarded to state prosecutors. Brilleman posted a $3,000 bond and was released several hours after his arrest. Police do not believe he has a criminal record. Miller said Brilleman is from South Africa, but his immigration status is unclear.
Calls to the telephone number listed on the show's website rang unanswered and e-mails sent to company executives were not answered. Brilleman does not have a listed telephone number and it was not known if he had a lawyer.
Jim Johnson, the show's executive producer, told the Orlando Sentinel the women who asked to leave were allowed to do so. "Nobody was being held against their will at any time," Johnson said. "This show was an honourable show. We took them to the opera, we took them to fashion shows, we took them to modelling training and we took them to etiquette training."
Johnson did say the producers took the women's cellphones away, but he said that was done according to the contract the women signed. Even though the contract said the women had to remain in the house for 13 weeks, the producers had been letting the women leave on recent weekends, he told the newspaper.
Diane Waizmann, whose 23-year-old daughter Alisha was among the contestants, told The Associated Press on Monday that her daughter was not available. Only five women were left in the house when Brilleman was arrested, Johnson told the newspaper. Two were given permission to leave and one was eliminated as part of the show's competition.
The company producing the show, Dream House Productions Inc., was registered with the Florida Secretary of State's Office on Jan. 17.
According to the show's website, its concept was to build the eight women's self-esteem and help them grow physically, mentally and spiritually. As with many reality shows, the women lived in a house while the program was taped. Producers were trying to sell the show to a TV network.
Four of the women told investigators Brilleman blocked and locked a door when they tried to leave the house, where they had been since February and had been able to leave on weekends, said Jerome Miller, a commander for Apopka police northwest of Orlando.
Brilleman initially denied stopping the women when questioned by police, then said "they could not leave because they were being disciplined," Miller said. Brilleman also told them they could not leave because they were under contract, the police report said.
According to the report, the women were also upset that they had not been paid for the past five weeks of filming. Miller said the case would be forwarded to state prosecutors. Brilleman posted a $3,000 bond and was released several hours after his arrest. Police do not believe he has a criminal record. Miller said Brilleman is from South Africa, but his immigration status is unclear.
Calls to the telephone number listed on the show's website rang unanswered and e-mails sent to company executives were not answered. Brilleman does not have a listed telephone number and it was not known if he had a lawyer.
Jim Johnson, the show's executive producer, told the Orlando Sentinel the women who asked to leave were allowed to do so. "Nobody was being held against their will at any time," Johnson said. "This show was an honourable show. We took them to the opera, we took them to fashion shows, we took them to modelling training and we took them to etiquette training."
Johnson did say the producers took the women's cellphones away, but he said that was done according to the contract the women signed. Even though the contract said the women had to remain in the house for 13 weeks, the producers had been letting the women leave on recent weekends, he told the newspaper.
Diane Waizmann, whose 23-year-old daughter Alisha was among the contestants, told The Associated Press on Monday that her daughter was not available. Only five women were left in the house when Brilleman was arrested, Johnson told the newspaper. Two were given permission to leave and one was eliminated as part of the show's competition.
The company producing the show, Dream House Productions Inc., was registered with the Florida Secretary of State's Office on Jan. 17.
Preparing for a presidential debate
ABC's Charles Gibson spent days behind closed doors preparing to moderate two presidential debates in January, but says he feels "way too laid-back" in advance of Wednesday's session between Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and rival Sen. Barack Obama.
It's probably because George Stephanopoulos will be with him onstage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for the 90-minute debate, airing at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
"I've got George to hide behind," Gibson told The Associated Press. "This time, whenever I get in trouble I'll say, 'George?"'
The timing of this debate, as the relative campaign lull leading up to next Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary is ending, made it particularly attractive to ABC. The network is soliciting questions from viewers but Gibson isn't sure whether they will be used. ABC has also talked to a number of superdelegates and gotten good suggestions about issues to raise that have received little attention so far, he said Friday.
The most interesting suggestion Gibson received for a debate format didn't make the cut. He asked Obama what ABC could do to make this debate different. "He kind of smiled and said, 'We've done it so often that I could do Hillary's lines and she could do my lines and we could each debate as the other person,"' Gibson said. "I said, "Ooh, I think that may be it."'
Gibson finds moderating these debates satisfying but not satisfying enough. "I'm always one of these people who walks away and thinks he could have done better," he said. "The last one went far better than my fears and not nearly as good as my fantasies."
Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert's bid for the presidency may have fallen short, but he's still determined to influence the race. On Monday, The Colbert Report begins a week of broadcasts in Philadelphia, where the all-important Democratic Pennsylvania primary is looming. Colbert hopes the relocation will return him to centre stage in the election.
"I don't need to be president. I don't need to be president," repeated the comedian in a recent interview, as if trying to convince himself. "If somebody else needs that, if Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama need that title to make themselves feel good, that's fine. I just want the power to decide who will be president and I'm going to Philly to help exercise that."
It's the first time the Comedy Central show (11:30 p.m. ET, Monday-Thursday) has broadcast anywhere but its snug Manhattan studio. Taping at the University of Pennsylvania's 900-seat Zellerbach Theater will be a drastic change for the programme. "It's like doing the show all over again," said Colbert. "It's like October 2005 because it's a new set, new graphics, coming up with a new opening every night, trying to give everything special touches."
Among those touches will be a filmed tour of Philadelphia and hometown guests including John Legend (who will sing the Star Spangled Banner), Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Governor Ed Rendell and rap group the Roots. This is Colbert's most notable foray into the thick of presidential politics since his failed bid to be added to the South Carolina Democratic primary ballot last fall. Though at the time Colbert was polling ahead of several candidates, party officials voted 13-3 to keep him off the ballot, claiming he "serves to detract from the serious candidates."
Advertisements for the upcoming shows have come with typical Colbert bravado. In one, he announces: "Philadelphia, you're about to get a new brother to love. No tongue."
The Colbert Report recently won a Peabody for broadcasting excellence. To Colbert, the award is further proof of his sway. "I'm a king maker," he said. "It's not a dirty word."
It's probably because George Stephanopoulos will be with him onstage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for the 90-minute debate, airing at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
"I've got George to hide behind," Gibson told The Associated Press. "This time, whenever I get in trouble I'll say, 'George?"'
The timing of this debate, as the relative campaign lull leading up to next Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary is ending, made it particularly attractive to ABC. The network is soliciting questions from viewers but Gibson isn't sure whether they will be used. ABC has also talked to a number of superdelegates and gotten good suggestions about issues to raise that have received little attention so far, he said Friday.
The most interesting suggestion Gibson received for a debate format didn't make the cut. He asked Obama what ABC could do to make this debate different. "He kind of smiled and said, 'We've done it so often that I could do Hillary's lines and she could do my lines and we could each debate as the other person,"' Gibson said. "I said, "Ooh, I think that may be it."'
Gibson finds moderating these debates satisfying but not satisfying enough. "I'm always one of these people who walks away and thinks he could have done better," he said. "The last one went far better than my fears and not nearly as good as my fantasies."
Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert's bid for the presidency may have fallen short, but he's still determined to influence the race. On Monday, The Colbert Report begins a week of broadcasts in Philadelphia, where the all-important Democratic Pennsylvania primary is looming. Colbert hopes the relocation will return him to centre stage in the election.
"I don't need to be president. I don't need to be president," repeated the comedian in a recent interview, as if trying to convince himself. "If somebody else needs that, if Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama need that title to make themselves feel good, that's fine. I just want the power to decide who will be president and I'm going to Philly to help exercise that."
It's the first time the Comedy Central show (11:30 p.m. ET, Monday-Thursday) has broadcast anywhere but its snug Manhattan studio. Taping at the University of Pennsylvania's 900-seat Zellerbach Theater will be a drastic change for the programme. "It's like doing the show all over again," said Colbert. "It's like October 2005 because it's a new set, new graphics, coming up with a new opening every night, trying to give everything special touches."
Among those touches will be a filmed tour of Philadelphia and hometown guests including John Legend (who will sing the Star Spangled Banner), Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Governor Ed Rendell and rap group the Roots. This is Colbert's most notable foray into the thick of presidential politics since his failed bid to be added to the South Carolina Democratic primary ballot last fall. Though at the time Colbert was polling ahead of several candidates, party officials voted 13-3 to keep him off the ballot, claiming he "serves to detract from the serious candidates."
Advertisements for the upcoming shows have come with typical Colbert bravado. In one, he announces: "Philadelphia, you're about to get a new brother to love. No tongue."
The Colbert Report recently won a Peabody for broadcasting excellence. To Colbert, the award is further proof of his sway. "I'm a king maker," he said. "It's not a dirty word."
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