Jane Campion’s TV Series “Top Of The Lake” Monumentally Tedious.

August 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Jane Campion's Top Of The Lake.

Jane Cam­pi­on’s Top Of The Lake.

You’d be for­giv­en for think­ing that Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake, cur­rent­ly on BBC2,  was the lat­est daz­zling­ly orig­i­nal and unashamed­ly intel­li­gent series to grace our TV screens. It’s not.

There’s plen­ty of plot. In so far as there are numer­ous inci­dents. There are char­ac­ters, some fine act­ing, and it’s all beau­ti­ful­ly shot. New Zealand has rarely been ren­dered as atavis­tic or as alien. But there’s absolute­ly no dra­ma what­so­ev­er. Things hap­pen. Some­times they’re explained, often they’re not. Because Cam­pi­on clear­ly has no inter­est in what you or I would call a “sto­ry”.

Or to put to anoth­er way, by reject­ing the tra­di­tions of a hope­less­ly out­mod­ed patri­ar­chal con­struct, Aris­to­tle’s absurd insis­tence that every sto­ry should have a begin­ning, mid­dle and end, she can free the female form from its reduc­tive reifi­ca­tion and reach instead for tran­scen­den­tal revelation.

What you get in oth­er words are a bunch of male and females stereo­types who just hap­pen to occa­sion­al­ly meet.

If she wants to explore gen­der pol­i­tics – and she clear­ly does – she should do a phd.

Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw in Jane Campion's "Bright Star".

Abbie Cor­nish and Ben Whishaw in Jane Cam­pi­on’s “Bright Star”.

The rea­son it’s been get­ting all these inex­plic­a­bly pos­i­tive reviews is that female crit­ics are so hun­gry to cham­pi­on any­thing that’s made by and for women, they’re ren­dered com­plete­ly pur­blind on the rare occa­sions that they get to see any.

Whilst their male coun­ter­parts are so keen to sport their lib­er­al cre­den­tials they feel com­pelled to play along. Mike Hale, who reviewed it for The New York Times here, was an hon­ourable exception.

Cam­pi­on should stick to male pro­tag­o­nists, as she did in the won­der­ful Bright Star. Because when­ev­er she deals with women, she has an uncon­trol­lable urge to lec­ture. Poorly.

You can see the trail­er for Bright Star here.

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Alice Roberts’ Lovely Programme on Childbirth Slightly Spoilt by bits of Science.

July 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Alice Roberts, scientist, and mother!

Alice Roberts, sci­en­tist, and mother!

There was a love­ly lit­tle pro­gramme there on BBC2 the oth­er day, pre­sent­ed by Alice Roberts. Who, by the way, is not just a moth­er, she’s a sci­en­tist too. A doc­tor if you don’t mind!

She’d pre­vi­ous­ly pro­duced pro­grammes on human evo­lu­tion and the Human Jour­ney, so she prob­a­bly felt pres­sur­ized to keep throw­ing lit­tle snip­pets of sci­ence in to what was oth­er­wise a delight­ful med­i­ta­tion on motherhood.

What a joy to be able to watch and lis­ten as the nurse talked her through her scan. There are the lit­tle feet! And are they the hands?!

How beautiful is that?

How beau­ti­ful is that?

Unfor­tu­nate­ly though, just as we were set­tling down to hear (and see!), in minute detail, just what was going on there in her tum­my, we were whisked off into the jun­gle to hear a bunch of men (sur­prise sur­prise) dron­ing on and on about chimpanzees.

Instead of all that guff on chimps, what they should have done instead is show us a few shots of women actu­al­ly giv­ing birth. So we could see the mir­a­cle in action for ourselves.

We were privy to a few of the joy­ous shrieks as they echoed tan­ta­liz­ing­ly down the cor­ri­dor in a mater­ni­ty ward. What a tease! And then it was off again for more bits of quite unnec­es­sary science.

Hard­ly the sort of thing you’d expect from a strand like the oth­er­wise reli­able Hori­zon. Must try harder.

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Bill Bailey Celebrates the Other Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace.

April 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

TX-card-crop-pro1-1.5+(1)I was qui­et­ly dread­ing Bil­ly Bailey’s Jun­gle Hero, his pro­gramme on the for­got­ten co-dis­cov­er­er of Evo­lu­tion by Nat­ur­al Selec­tion, Alfred Rus­sel Wallace.

Few things are as tired or as tedious as watch­ing yet anoth­er so say com­ic being hilar­i­ous­ly mis­matched with an incon­gru­ous top­ic, and sent off in search of an exot­ic loca­tion to use as a point­less backdrop.

Hap­pi­ly, this was very much the excep­tion to that rule. Which was prin­ci­pal­ly down to Bailey’s unmis­tak­able and gen­uine enthu­si­asm for his sub­ject, and their joint area of interest.

Alfred Rus­sel Wal­lace was an ama­teur sci­en­tist in the clas­si­cal­ly Vic­to­ri­an mould. He spent his life try­ing to make sense of the ani­mal king­dom and our place in it. And he fund­ed his quest by trav­el­ling to the far­thest cor­ners of the globe, col­lect­ing exot­ic spec­i­mens that he was able to send back home and sell in London.

located-in-southeast-asia-in-the-malay-archipelago-indonesia-indonesia+1152_12987332687-tpfil02aw-18651These twin pur­suits, of knowl­edge, and of col­lect­ing insects – and dis­cov­er­ing new ones —  are clear­ly shared by Bai­ley. And there real­ly was only way for him to tell us about Wal­lace and his dis­cov­er­ies. Which was to take us with him on the jour­ney that the lat­ter made in the 1850s.

Bai­ley and his fel­low film mak­ers got every­thing just about right in this pro­gramme. The expla­na­tions of how Rus­sel arrived at the idea of nat­ur­al selec­tion, and of why it was that it hap­pened there, in the Malay Arch­i­pel­ago were clear and sim­ple with­out ever being over sim­pli­fied. And they were inter­spersed with just about the right amount of local colour and per­son­al anecdote.

There was a polit­i­cal slant to the pro­gramme too. Wal­lace is the for­got­ten fig­ure in the sto­ry of evo­lu­tion by nat­ur­al selec­tion. We only ever remem­ber the first per­son to dis­cov­er any­thing, and soci­ety and the sci­en­tif­ic estab­lish­ment chose to cel­e­brate the well-bred Dar­win and not the low­ly Wal­lace, despite the fact that their papers were pre­sent­ed together.

Indeed, Dar­win was only moved to pub­lish at all because of what Wal­lace had sent him. When to his hor­ror, he dis­cov­ered that his life’s work was in dan­ger of being eclipsed by this ama­teur enthu­si­ast on the oth­er side of the world.

BillBaileyAll of which is true. But Dar­win had been work­ing on his the­o­ries for near­ly 20 years before Wal­lace had his eure­ka moment. But he under­stood how explo­sive an idea nat­ur­al selec­tion would prove to be, and he want­ed to gath­er as much evi­dence as he could before pub­lish­ing anything.

And there were oth­er rea­sons why the sci­en­tif­ic world for­got Wal­lace. Like his pros­e­lytis­ing of Spir­i­tu­al­ism, and his cred­u­lous cham­pi­oning of séances, both of which he insist­ed on see­ing in a “sci­en­tif­ic” light.

Nonethe­less, he deserves to be more ful­ly cel­e­brat­ed, and Bai­ley is demon­stra­bly the per­fect man for the job. The con­clud­ing episode is on this week­end on BBC2.

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BBC2’s Superb Programme “The Other Pompeii: Life and Death in Herculaneum”.

April 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

herculaneum-panoramaSur­pris­ing­ly, the first time that any­one ever prac­ticed archae­ol­o­gy was in 1738. It was then, on Octo­ber 22nd to be pre­cise, that Rocque Alcu­bierre sat down to care­ful­ly write down a descrip­tion of all the things they were dig­ging up at the recent­ly dis­cov­ered Roman town of Her­cu­la­neum, just out­side of Naples.

Soon after that, a sec­ond town cap­tured in time was unearthed at near­by Pom­peii. And the sci­ence of archae­ol­o­gy was born, as Rocque and his fel­low work­ers began to ask them­selves the sorts of ques­tions that archae­ol­o­gy poses.

Should they put what they found back where they found it? Or should they take it away to be stored some­where else, where it could be looked after more safe­ly? And if so, where?

cyclades-mapThe word archae­ol­o­gy had first been coined by the Greek his­to­ri­an Thucy­dides in the 5th cen­tu­ry B.C., when he described what had acci­den­tal­ly been dug up on the island of Delos.

Delos had always been sacred to the Greeks. The group of island that it is part of, the Cyclades, gets its name from the fact that it is around Delos that the larg­er islands of Nax­os, Paros and Mykonos are cir­cled.

So the Greeks had always assumed that they’d always lived there. But when they dug up arte­facts that had clear­ly come from near­by Turkey, Thucy­dides cor­rect­ly argued that there must have been oth­ers who had lived there before the Greeks.

But it was only after Her­cu­la­neum and Pom­peii were dis­cov­ered some two thou­sand years lat­er that we began to prac­tice, sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, archae­ol­o­gy itself. They’d been caked in vol­canic ash after Mount Vesu­vius had erupt­ed in 79 A.D. And they’ve giv­en us an extra­or­di­nary win­dow into life in first cen­tu­ry Ancient Rome.

Our guide for this pro­gramme was Andrew Wal­lace-Hadrill, Direc­tor of the Her­cu­la­neum Con­ser­va­tion Project in Rome. And what he gave us over the course of the hour were a series of fas­ci­nat­ing insights that were as calm­ly infor­ma­tive as they were qui­et­ly moving.

He walked us through the dif­fer­ences between Her­cu­la­neum and the more famous Pom­peii, explain­ing the dif­fer­ent dis­cov­er­ies that we’ve been able to make there, and how it was that they were revealed.

CIMG2004-1Painstak­ing analy­sis of human waste, bones and skele­tons, togeth­er with an array of arte­facts has pro­duced an arrest­ing set of images frozen in time. Women and chil­dren hud­dling in shel­ter, as the men­folk stood des­per­ate­ly out in the open on the beach. A young boy cling­ing on to his pet dog. A two-year-old girl with her sil­ver ear­rings, being clung to by her mother.

Wal­lace-Hadrill was the per­fect guide on a fas­ci­nat­ing tour. And what a pleas­ant sur­prise to see a pro­gramme on Rome where the focus of atten­tion was on the Clas­si­cal world and not on the pre­sen­ter. Eru­di­tion and a cer­tain sense of mod­esty are not, it seems, a thing of the past.

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BBC2’s Superb “Afghanistan: The Great Game, A Personal View by Rory Stewart”.

June 15, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Rory Stew­art is the per­fect guide to walk us through the last few hun­dred years that the peo­ple of Afghanistan have been forced to suf­fer through.

Not yet 40 and cur­rent­ly serv­ing as a Tory MP, he was a star pupil at Eton where he active­ly sup­port­ed the Labour Par­ty, and then at Oxford and Har­vard, before work­ing as a diplo­mat in the Balka­ns, and as a senior coali­tion offi­cial in Iraq between 2004–5. But he is prob­a­bly best known for his award win­ning book The Places in Between, which charts his 32 day trek across Afghanistan in 2002.

So he is nat­u­ral­ly reluc­tant to draw any obvi­ous par­al­lels between the dis­as­trous cam­paigns con­duct­ed in Afghanistan in the past, and those that the peo­ple there have been sub­ject­ed to more recent­ly. Which only serves to make those com­par­isons all the more conspicuous.

The first part of his BBC2 pro­gramme focused on the British and Rus­sians as they fought for influ­ence in the region dur­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry, in what came to be known as the Great Game. Whilst the sec­ond looked at the Rus­sians and the Amer­i­cans as they fought for exact­ly the same rea­sons, in exact­ly the same region, and with exact­ly the same results, in the 1970s and through­out the 1980s.

One of the more inter­est­ing ele­ments in Stew­art’s mea­sured yet impas­sioned pro­gramme was that, far from stum­bling blind­ly into the region both the British and espe­cial­ly the Rus­sians knew per­fect­ly well how fraught with dan­ger, polit­i­cal­ly and mil­i­tar­i­ly, med­dling in Afghanistan was. But they felt oblig­ed to do so any­way, for fear of appear­ing weak to the com­pet­ing super­pow­er on the oth­er side of the fence.

The results were, almost need­less to say, dis­as­trous. You can prac­ti­cal­ly trace the dot­ted line link­ing the CIA’s clum­sy and stag­ger­ing­ly mis­cal­cu­lat­ed attempt to make up for the shame of Viet­nam by arm­ing the muja­hedeen to the teeth in the 80s, and the destruc­tion of the Twin Tow­ers 20 years later.

Amer­i­ca’s response of then stam­ped­ing blind­ly back into, where else, but Afghanistan was as pre­dictable as it was, from Amer­i­ca’s own per­spec­tive, trag­ic. That, of all things, a British prime min­is­ter should have been so imper­vi­ous to his­to­ry to have so will­ing­ly fol­lowed them in there is, again, almost beyond belief. God save us all from con­vic­tion politicians.

One of the things that this pro­gramme was par­tic­u­lar­ly good at was remind­ing us all that, as bad as it was for the pow­ers engaged there in their vain pur­suit of influ­ence, it was of course immea­sur­ably worse for all the actu­al Afghans there caught in the result­ing crossfire.

This is the sort of thing that the BBC still does so well. And Stew­art is, demon­stra­bly, some­thing of a star.

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