CaptainWaggett

He's a Doctor Who fan too

His book on the Victorians is great - it's not really about anything, just a ragbag of anecdotes and ramblings (who knew why you sometimes find flat shells in the gardens of Victorian hourses?) but it's very readable and very, very funny.

dremble wedge

That looks a good read. I shall try to track it down...

CaptainWaggett

Inventing the Victorians. It's great - just as interesting as Shepperton Babylon. More than you could ever want to know about Victorian tightrope walkers (I got vertigo just reading the account of Blondin's manager who was carried over Niagara Falls but didn't find out until halfway across that he'd had to get off so his beast of burden could have a rest!)

penfold

And you will learn more than you wanted to about Sweet Fanny Adams....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

charliekane

I'm afraid I find his style too gossipy and a bit self-aggrandising - and I believe the general concensus over the series he wrote for the BBC last year on British Cinema was that it was shockingly badly done. Worth watching for the clips and a few interviews though.

CaptainWaggett

I saw the BBC4 documentary he did on 1930s British films - the one narrated by Charlie Higson (missed the series - what was that and what was wrong with it?) and I thought it was great. Gossipy but so what? People don't like gossip? Who else is going to do a prime-time documentary with 10 minutes on Donald Calthrop? The one about 18th century London nightlife was fun too and I liked his conversational style of presenting. Is he involved with the forthcoming BBC4 season on B-films?

charliekane

A seven part series British Film Forever ran last summer, and was largely panned as a missed opportunity to do a decent history of British movies.

Alex Cox, in the Guardian, 15th August 2007:
.... the current BBC2 series, British Film Forever, resonates with early New-Labourspeak. We are told, in the Thrillers episode, that The Italian Job was "the ultimate in Cool Britannia-dom". If anyone really needs reminding, Cool Britannia is now a discredited and despised invention of New Labour. These late-1990s fantasies soon segue into something more sinister: an apparent loathing of the history, or the culture, of the country the series is supposed to celebrate.
We are told 10 Rillington Place "brilliantly embodies the seedy degradation of the real little Britain of the time". Get Carter depicts "a Britain paralysed by strikes and a failing economy ... in short, a nation on the skids". Get Carter was made in 1971. I was a teenager then, and can assure the promoters of this depressing vision that, despite strikes and IRA atrocities, Albion was a long way from skid row. When I went to college, the government paid for it. I incurred no debt. The state owned the water pipes, the reservoirs, the airline, the lecky, the telephone system and the railways, which ran on time and were reasonably cheap. We weren't engaged in two wars of colonial aggression. Muslims weren't our enemies. And the weather was great!
Get Carter is an excellent gangster film. But there is no way that Mike Hodges' fine script can be extrapolated into a condemnation of the unions, or of the economic policies of the time. Hodges would, I suspect, be offended at the suggestion. Both the choice of British films, and the condescending tone of the documentaries, push a very specific view of recent British history. To wit: the second world war, grit, duty and pluck, triumph over adversity. Good. The establishment of the welfare state and the development of trade unions. Bad. Thatcherite greed-years. Also bad. Blair and Brown greed-and-war-years. Excellent!

There is also a well reasoned piece by Clive James in the Times Literary Supplement, 26th September 2007, which can be found here:
The Great British Film - Times Literary Supplement

Although he makes the mistake of placing Olivia de Havilland in Wuthering Heights, Clive nevertheless presents a good review of the faults with the series:
But on the scale of international box office, which effectively meant Hollywood, Olivier never became established as a film star. He could say it didn’t matter to him, but it still matters to everyone who writes about him. It certainly mattered to Matthew Sweet, who wrote the commentary for British Film Forever, and might have done better to subtitle it “Despite the Yanks”.....
... the true wording of British Film Forever should have been “British Film Sporadically”. This was the biggest theme demanding to be treated by a documentary survey of the history of British film. Its almost complete absence guaranteed that the commentary could not be serious; so we got sprightliness instead.

It pains me to say that the results were seldom tolerable and all too often deadly. But Jessica Hynes, the actress who was given the task of speaking the words of Mr Sweet, is yet young, and it wasn’t her fault that she had to say, when evoking the directorial rigour of David Lean, “And if it meant getting the shot he wanted, Lean could lean”. It probably wasn’t even Sweet’s fault that he had to write such stuff. It is a tone, the tone of documentary television in its last inches of terminal decline, and the tone was almost certainly imposed on him by producers who no longer know any better. Leaden verve used to be the occasional mistake made by documentary production teams who, when the task dictated, thought that they could achieve humour just by fiddling with their diction. (Cue archive close-up of Kenneth Williams with mouth forming a small circle.) They had seriousness to depart from, and could always get back to it. But the British Film Forever bunch think that an unswerving facetiousness is the only way to talk.



Clive also, quite rightly, questions the value of a production which - presumably given access to many experienced and knowledgeable giants of British cinema - chose to give more screen time to Simon Pegg than to Jack Cardiff or Bryan Forbes. I know whose opinion I would prefer.

penfold

He wrote the original script, but I believe he was as disappointed as anyone over how it was buggered about to get it within budget. For example, it wasn't written for Hynes, IIRC, but for Jonathan Ross, hence the written-in flippancy.
Of course, Alex Cox, once the go-to man for intelligent comments on film in TV docs, had no axe to grind at all.......

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

charliekane

Intrigued by the mention of a season of B-films. Does anyone have any details ?

CaptainWaggett

Hasn't been fully announced yet. Sweet wrote an article for the Guardian about it a few months ago - there's a thread about it somewhere - so I assume he will do another documentary. Supposedly it's in June so I guess it will be when BBC4 finish whatever their current season is. Hopefully it will be a long one like their 1960s tv season.

charliekane

Thanks for that - look forward to it

CaptainWaggett

It starts next Saturday - and on the first evening they are showing Lazybones, followed by a documentary presented by Matthew Sweet. Should be an excellent season.

999picklepuss

Also over next weekend they are showing The Last Journey (1936) and Cover Girl Killer (1959)
Can't wait

Wee Sonny MacGregor

Excellent news - particularly about Cover Girl Killer. Those glasses!

charliekane

Quite agree about Cover Girl Killer - a cracking little film, and delightfully naughty for its time. Wonder why there wasn't such an outcry over this as there was for Peeping Tom, though ?

The season looks good, what there is of it, but sadly it's all over by Monday I think