Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "bbc-television"

Just as divisive as the Presidential Campaign or the referendum on the European Union is a BBC television series that has just finished, ‘Dickensian’, a delightful confection of twenty soap style half hour episodes that started at Christmas. This drama entwined many Dickens characters together in the same pocket of London Streets, filling in back stories. It started with the murder of Jacob Marley, we followed the domestic life of the Cratchet family and events in the life of young Miss Haversham leading to her tragic jilting; equally tragic, her friend who will become the widow Lady Dedlock with a secret. In the last episode The Artful Dodger takes Oliver to meet Fagin.
In the unlikely event you have never heard of any Dickens characters you would have enjoyed a rattling good tale. Keen readers and watchers of BBC dramatisations could enjoy picking out the characters and novels. Opinions were divided, some thought Dickens should not be tampered with, or didn’t like the attempts to give his simpering female characters some zest. I don’t usually like the idea of prequels and sequels written on behalf of dead authors, when they have no say in the matter, but this series was fun and delightfully dark for pre watershed viewing.
Dickens wrote short stories, plays and of course his novels, which started as weekly installments and ended as public readings on both sides of the Atlantic in the last years of his life. He was a great publicist, so no doubt he would have been delighted to see so many film and television portrayals of his tales. As for ‘Dickensian’; famously he changed the ending of Great Expectations, would he mind others constructing the beginnings of his stories?
Whether you like it or not Dickens is surely part of many people’s lives. One of my earliest memories is having nightmares after watching black and white Miss Haversham on television. The first Dickens books I actually read were my mother’s library books ‘One Pair of Hands’ by his great granddaughter Monica; disillusioned with her upper class origins she went ‘into service’ and then into nursing –‘One Pair of Feet’. I recall them being hilarious, I don’t know if they have stood the test of time like her ancestor. In high school in Australia we had to ‘do’ Great Expectations. Picture a gnarled old bloke with nicotine stained hands and a hacking cough. This was our literature teacher. ‘Personally I can’t stand Dickens’ were his first words to us. Most lessons we were left to do ‘free reading’. I was determined on principal to read and enjoy the work of a fellow Englishman.
Since then I have read some, but not all of his novels, usually prompted by enjoying a BBC television series. We have a house full of Dickens paperbacks as a teenage member of the family discovered one could buy paperback classics for a pound and hit upon these as cheap birthday presents. The novels of Charles Dickens are bound to feel heavy and the print small in paperbacks, not to be read on the bus or tube, but savoured at a leisurely pace. Every sentence is packed full of description of people and places, but if you lose your way and don’t finish you can always catch up on DVD.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06vbmfq

What do Winnie the Pooh, J S Bach and John Le Carre have in common? Stories told, over and over.
I was recently reading Winnie the Pooh to the youngest member of the family, he is only four months old, but his parents have already started a bed time story routine. It was a chance to be reunited with A.A. Milne’s stories, which appeal to adults and children alike. The first chapter was more of a mouthful than I recalled, I wanted to edit, too many ‘he saids and you saids’. But there is a good reason. Forget all the Disneyfication and commercial toys that have come since. There is only one Winnie the Pooh and he is the real teddy bear that belonged to the real child Christopher Robin. His father told him tales about his own toys, something any parent can do with their child. The original books with their drawings by E H Shepard are all a child needs.
http://www.poohcorner.com/A-Short-His...
On Good Friday and Saturday, Streetwise Opera presented their edited version of Bach’s St. Mathew’s Passion in Manchester’s Campfield Market, the audience were required to promenade and follow the performers; true street theatre. It was broadcast on BBC4 on Easter Sunday. Bach set words from Saint Mathew’s Gospel to music to be played and sung at a church service, the congregation were being told the story of the last few days of Christ’s life.
At The Lighthouse, Poole, on Good Friday, Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and Southern Sinfonia Baroque presented Bach’s St. John Passion sung in English. The audience was there for the wonderful music, but this was not just a concert; with a small orchestra the soloists held centre stage and James Oxley as the Evanglelist told the story. Whatever your faith or none, this is a cracking story, always relevant. Most of us presume we would never be like Judas, but are we so sure we would not deny our best friend as Peter did? Politics are nothing new, in Pilate’s place what would we have done?
Equally morally ambivalent was ‘The Night Manager’, a BBC 1 drama that has kept many of us gripped, with the final episode on Easter Day. Based on the novel by John Le Carre, according to executive producer Simon Cornwell, who also happens to be the author’s son, they decided to ‘recontextualise’ the novel in the present day. Le Carre, who cameos in the series, approved of all the changes. It worked; a modern tale of arms dealing in the Middle East. Roper, played brilliantly by Hugh Laurie, we know is evil beneath the smooth exterior. Jonathon Pine is on the side of the good and the innocent, but has to do bad things if Roper is to be stopped and lives saved. Most of us don’t trust governments, nor do we know how to stop those who have money and ruthlessness on their side. We just hope that as in all good stories, secret heroes are fighting on the side of the innocents.

Sandscript on Shakespeare

Today is William Shakespeare’s birthday and it is also four hundred years since his death. The centenary is being celebrated in many places and in many ways. His words have been absorbed into most people’s lives, often without them realising. My many moments with Shakespeare on both sides of the world do not alas consist of watching our great actors live in classic stage performances, or hours spent reading and memorising sonnets. My mother never forgot her teacher who ‘brought The Bard to life’ by having the girls get up and act all the parts; my experience was more prosaic.
At my high school in Perth, Western Australia, dryly reading through Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice in a hot classroom, The Bard was reduced to total tedium; hardly William’s fault, he wrote his plays to be acted in front of lively audiences, words of wisdom interspersed with sword fights or humour to keep their attention. As a cynical teenager who spent most of my time giggling with my best friend Marjorie, the school’s attempts to bring us culture were doomed to fail.
One day a company, or more likely a group of amateurs, arrived to present scenes from Julius Caesar. We had no hall, just a quadrangle with a concrete stage, but at least Perth’s Mediterranean climate was appropriate for a Roman story. My only memory is of helpless giggling as Caesar carried on breathing after his violent death, his white robes unstained. I guess we would only have been satisfied with real blood.
Another time, the school was bussed to a suburban hall where some real English actors were presenting scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. My only recollection from that day is the interval, when one of the actors came to the front of the stage to tell us we were the rudest, most badly behaved audience they had ever played before. I cannot take full credit for this, I am sure I was loyally listening and watching. You will not be surprised to learn that our school had a bad reputation.
Later on in top year, our new and enthusiastic literature teacher arranged for his classes to attend a production of Othello and endured an evening of chronic embarrassment. We were reduced to tears of helpless laughter from the moment a puny chap covered in black boot polish walked on as Othello, until Desdemona breathed her last, curling her legs up and clinging onto a bed much too small for a death scene.
But before we left school the world of Shakespeare was brought to life with the arrival at the cinema of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, played by real teenagers like us; though obviously Olivia Hussey’s Juliet was more beautiful than my pimply, gauche fifteen year old self.
Before my return to This Sceptred Isle I acted in my first and only Shakespeare role. In a wheat belt country town there were only three things to do in your leisure time, drink, play football or netball, join the local dramatic society. The Old Time Music Hall production was an eclectic mix and included the witches' scene from Macbeth. I played a witch. ‘Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble…’ is all I remember.
Films over many decades and now television productions, give everyone a chance to enjoy Shakespeare’s stories and words. Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ burst onto the screen full of colour, comedy and life, a film all the family could enjoy.
In recent years entertainment has come full circle; live theatre is broadcast live to cinemas. Kenneth Branagh’s 2013 Macbeth was produced in a small church for Manchester International Festival, tickets sold out within minutes. We went to see it at the Regent Centre, Christchurch, a lovely rescued Art Deco cinema; but however good the live relay, I’m sure the smell from the mud and straw strewn aisle of the church and the chance of having your ear chopped off as swords swung perilously close during the battle scenes, made the experience more real for the audience in the church.
Shakespeare is always open to interpretation and time travel; we loved a live production in London of Two Gentlemen of Verona set in the 1930’s, with a grand piano and songs from that era.
Finally we made it to Stratford Upon Avon and saw ‘As You Like It’ in the intimate wooden galleried Swan Theatre. As we sat down we were asked to keep bags, coats and feet out of the narrow aisles so as not to trip the actors.
2016 will be filled with Shakespeare of all sorts and I shall be looking forward to the second trilogy in the BBC Hollow Crown series starring some of our favourite actors.

International Women’s Day has come round again and I wonder are we celebrating or commiserating with over half of the world’s population? We are not one homogeneous group of virtuous creatures united in a lifelong battle against beastly men, we are as different from each other as we are from men; pampered or poor, straight or gay, living in domestic chaos or alone. There is no set women’s opinion on important issues such as abortion or prostitution. Some women use men while others are abused by them. We are not one big sisterhood, though there are many wonderful sisterhoods throughout the world.
Women are perceived to be good at friendship and on an average day will probably have had more rewarding conversation with the girls at work or the ladies at their club than with their husbands. But women are also capable of spiteful animosity towards each other, whether it’s bullying at school, bitchiness at work or Yummy Mummies competing ruthlessly to have the most natural child birth or be best at breastfeeding. If you are following BBC One’s psychological thriller ‘The Replacement’, set in a high powered working environment, you will have an insight into the chilling atmosphere and mind games that women can create and men do not even perceive.
Of course it is not just other women who are despised; it is often the nicest men, the good ones who are doing everything by the feminist book, who are treated abominably, ousted from their homes and have their children taken. While women’s lives can be destroyed or even taken by domestic violence, it is ironic that some women chuck their husbands because they are too nice and they got bored.
And on International Women’s Day what about men? Modern man is perceived to be confused as to his role; being the sole breadwinner or the provider of the home is often not feasible and when things go wrong, relationships break down, homelessness and even suicide can follow.
On the positive side modern young men have proved they are just as capable as their wives and girlfriends at looking after babies and running a home. You don’t need to be a psychologist to work out that the key to human happiness could be cooperation.
Rainbow flags flutter in liberal countries to celebrate diversity; gay people comfortable in their own bodies may appear to have little in common with transgender folk, but they all want to be accepted for themselves. It makes no difference to Planet Earth or World Peace how people want to dress or who they want to share their lives with. We’re all human beings who need food, shelter and safety and as a bonus, happiness.
People in good relationships of all sorts can face the world better and human beings do not need to be divided men against women; heterosexuals against others; we have enough to do saving the planet and stopping wars, so perhaps we should have International Individuals Together Day.