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I've been into London a couple of times this week to see event screenings at the National Film Theatre, all television rather than cinema, and all arranged by the good offices of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gervase_fen. The estimable Mr Fen has written his review of Wednesday night's screening of the BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke here; I generally concur with his review but found it much more difficult to believe in the drama straight away; found Billie Piper's Sally a little flat, probably because I've been used to her more expressive Rose Tyler; and was irritated by no-one remarking that so many of the characters are played by black actors. A black clergyman would have been remarkable in the Oxford of 1874. The adaptation was remarkably faithful to the novel, considering how short a time ninety minutes is, despite the loss of a few ancillary characters and the simplification of some of Sally's backstory. The new date of 1874 (the novel was set in 1872) reflected that Sally is at least a couple of years older in the adaptation than she is in the book; Billie Piper is youthful but too worldly-looking to pass for the novel's sixteen. Jim, too, is now about nineteen - Philip Pullman said in the talk afterwards that he thought of him as about twelve - though the Garlands seem about the age they are in the book.
On Saturday we attended Missing Believed Wiped 2006, one of the highlights of the year. The NFT presented perhaps the strongest line-up so far, beginning with two plays from the 1960s, Level Seven, by J.B. Priestley from the novel by Mordecai Roshwald, and The Crush by Nigel Kneale. Level Seven was broadcast in 1966 as part of the BBC's science-fiction play strand 'Out of the Unknown', and concerns the deepest level of an underground bunker containing representatives of each class of one of two military and political power blocs, charged with co-ordinating any missile strike on the enemy based on a strict sequence of escalated responses, and also with continuing humanity after mutually assured destruction. The interpretation moves from psychologically-conscious realism, as X.117 (played by David Collings) resists the discipline of the bunker and is eventually taken away and lobotomized, to metaphor as radiation sickness penetrates to Level Seven itself, leaving its inhabitants first blind, then immobile, frozen like Pompeiians in the wake of Vesuvius. The Crush, shown on ITV (ATV) in 1964, could still be relevant now; it is the story of the siege of the London embassy of a former British colony, who are planning to detonate a thermonuclear device in London if they are not paid compensation for the minerals extracted from the territory during British rule. Nigel Kneale's usual preoccupations - the credulity of the wider population, and the responsibility of the educated technocracy - are apparent, but I enjoyed his anti-Quatermass figure, the former ex-pat called in as the civilian expert, but who is more interested in searching evacuated houses for gin.
The second half of Missing Believed Wiped this year was entitled 'Comedy Plus', and was led by Out of the Trees, the pilot for a comedy sketch series written by Graham Chapman, Bernard McKenna and Douglas Adams, which was transmitted once in January 1976 and soon after wiped, to the consternation of fans of Chapman and Adams; Chapman recorded it off-air and it's this tape which was played through sympathetic equipment and copied to provide the basis of the version shown at the NFT, with only a little distortion. Part of the problem with the concept is that after Monty Python's Flying Circus anything involving Chapman and other performers (none of whom were involved in the writing, though Adams makes an appearance in the background as a thug in one scene) would seem like he was working with a B-team. While it was refreshing to see women playing parts which in Python would have been undertaken by one or two of the team in drag, some of the cast - notably a young Mark Wing-Davey - did not seem to be up to the material, which spoke with the voice of the beleaguered 1970s middle class male, besieged by women competing over frivolities, pedantic socially-retarded scoutmasters, and various kinds of jobsworth. Simon Jones delivered his solid permanently bemused persona on several occasions, Chapman's Genghis Khan is somehow automatically funny, and watching Roger Brierly one realises how much Angus Deayton owes him.
The revelation of the night for me was that Hattie Jacques once starred in a detective series, the perhaps unfortunately titled Miss Adventure from ITV (ABC) in 1964, about an enthusiastic employee at a 'private enquiry agency' whose Raymond Chandler-influenced attitude to the work is at odds with the cautious attitude of her boss, but which (I suspect) proves more in keeping with the times; and a sketch from an Eleanor Bron series, After That, This, from BBC 2 in 1975, where she and Derek Fowlds perform an operatic duet as masseuse and client who are determined that their lust should overcome the mounting evidence that they are, in fact, long-separated mother and son. Some recently rediscovered (but actually never lost) footage from a BBC television news bulletin of 22 November 1963 covering the assassination of President Kennedy, and the arrest of 'Oswald Lee Oswald' as the killer, is bound to turn up as an archive feature on the BBC website shortly.
Vanity compels me to say that both the books which I bought yesterday list my name in the acknowledgements. I feel happier about this than I probably should.
gervase_fen. The estimable Mr Fen has written his review of Wednesday night's screening of the BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke here; I generally concur with his review but found it much more difficult to believe in the drama straight away; found Billie Piper's Sally a little flat, probably because I've been used to her more expressive Rose Tyler; and was irritated by no-one remarking that so many of the characters are played by black actors. A black clergyman would have been remarkable in the Oxford of 1874. The adaptation was remarkably faithful to the novel, considering how short a time ninety minutes is, despite the loss of a few ancillary characters and the simplification of some of Sally's backstory. The new date of 1874 (the novel was set in 1872) reflected that Sally is at least a couple of years older in the adaptation than she is in the book; Billie Piper is youthful but too worldly-looking to pass for the novel's sixteen. Jim, too, is now about nineteen - Philip Pullman said in the talk afterwards that he thought of him as about twelve - though the Garlands seem about the age they are in the book.On Saturday we attended Missing Believed Wiped 2006, one of the highlights of the year. The NFT presented perhaps the strongest line-up so far, beginning with two plays from the 1960s, Level Seven, by J.B. Priestley from the novel by Mordecai Roshwald, and The Crush by Nigel Kneale. Level Seven was broadcast in 1966 as part of the BBC's science-fiction play strand 'Out of the Unknown', and concerns the deepest level of an underground bunker containing representatives of each class of one of two military and political power blocs, charged with co-ordinating any missile strike on the enemy based on a strict sequence of escalated responses, and also with continuing humanity after mutually assured destruction. The interpretation moves from psychologically-conscious realism, as X.117 (played by David Collings) resists the discipline of the bunker and is eventually taken away and lobotomized, to metaphor as radiation sickness penetrates to Level Seven itself, leaving its inhabitants first blind, then immobile, frozen like Pompeiians in the wake of Vesuvius. The Crush, shown on ITV (ATV) in 1964, could still be relevant now; it is the story of the siege of the London embassy of a former British colony, who are planning to detonate a thermonuclear device in London if they are not paid compensation for the minerals extracted from the territory during British rule. Nigel Kneale's usual preoccupations - the credulity of the wider population, and the responsibility of the educated technocracy - are apparent, but I enjoyed his anti-Quatermass figure, the former ex-pat called in as the civilian expert, but who is more interested in searching evacuated houses for gin.
The second half of Missing Believed Wiped this year was entitled 'Comedy Plus', and was led by Out of the Trees, the pilot for a comedy sketch series written by Graham Chapman, Bernard McKenna and Douglas Adams, which was transmitted once in January 1976 and soon after wiped, to the consternation of fans of Chapman and Adams; Chapman recorded it off-air and it's this tape which was played through sympathetic equipment and copied to provide the basis of the version shown at the NFT, with only a little distortion. Part of the problem with the concept is that after Monty Python's Flying Circus anything involving Chapman and other performers (none of whom were involved in the writing, though Adams makes an appearance in the background as a thug in one scene) would seem like he was working with a B-team. While it was refreshing to see women playing parts which in Python would have been undertaken by one or two of the team in drag, some of the cast - notably a young Mark Wing-Davey - did not seem to be up to the material, which spoke with the voice of the beleaguered 1970s middle class male, besieged by women competing over frivolities, pedantic socially-retarded scoutmasters, and various kinds of jobsworth. Simon Jones delivered his solid permanently bemused persona on several occasions, Chapman's Genghis Khan is somehow automatically funny, and watching Roger Brierly one realises how much Angus Deayton owes him.
The revelation of the night for me was that Hattie Jacques once starred in a detective series, the perhaps unfortunately titled Miss Adventure from ITV (ABC) in 1964, about an enthusiastic employee at a 'private enquiry agency' whose Raymond Chandler-influenced attitude to the work is at odds with the cautious attitude of her boss, but which (I suspect) proves more in keeping with the times; and a sketch from an Eleanor Bron series, After That, This, from BBC 2 in 1975, where she and Derek Fowlds perform an operatic duet as masseuse and client who are determined that their lust should overcome the mounting evidence that they are, in fact, long-separated mother and son. Some recently rediscovered (but actually never lost) footage from a BBC television news bulletin of 22 November 1963 covering the assassination of President Kennedy, and the arrest of 'Oswald Lee Oswald' as the killer, is bound to turn up as an archive feature on the BBC website shortly.
Vanity compels me to say that both the books which I bought yesterday list my name in the acknowledgements. I feel happier about this than I probably should.
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