Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Television

  • So That’s How He Did It – Maybe…

    Sherlock returned to the TV screen last night with an episode containing the solution as to how he faked his own death at the end of the last series. Well, to be more accurate, the episode contained at least three possible solutions. However, two of them were explanations provided by secondary characters, which I think can be discounted – particularly the one involving a gay romance between Moriarty and Holmes.

    No, the one that is most probably true was the one recounted by Holmes himself. Of course, part of the reason why I want that to be the real story was because it was the theory that I came up with when I first saw The Reichenbach Fall a year ago. When Holmes confirmed all the points I had listed I punched the air with a loud shout of Yes!

    I thoroughly enjoyed the whole episode, which was a real cracker.

  • TW3 and RIP

    It’s been something of a week for drawing breath, what with the announcements of the deaths of first Seamus Heaney, and now David Frost. Both were 74, and both, in very different ways, contributed to the cultural lives of many.

    Much as it pains me to say it; if I’m honest, then Frost’s influence on my life has been much greater than that of Heaney’s. I was transfixed, at an impressionable age, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, by That Was The Week That Was on BBC TV.

    Devised by Ned Sherrin, fronted by Frost, but with sterling support from many others, TW3 was a satirical landmark in British Television. We shall not see its like again.

    It only ran in 1962 and 1963, when I was just 13 and 14. It was a late-night show, live, and ran each week for as long as it took to get through the material, often into the small hours. Looking back, I am slightly surprised that my parents allowed me to watch it at all.

    As is quoted on TW3’s Wikipedia page:

    “TW3…did its research, thought its arguments through and seemed unafraid of anything or anyone… Every hypocrisy was highlighted and each contradiction was held up for sardonic inspection. No target was deemed out of bounds: royalty was reviewed by republicans; rival religions were subjected to no-nonsense ‘consumer reports’; pompous priests were symbolically defrocked; corrupt businessmen, closet bigots and chronic plagiarists were exposed; and topical ideologies were treated to swingeing critiques.”

    So thank you, David Frost (not forgetting Ned Sherrin, Timothy Birdsall, Bernard Levin, Lance Percival, Kenneth Cope, Roy Kinnear, Willie Rushton, Al Mancini, Robert Lang, Frankie Howerd, David Kernan, Millicent Martin, John Albery, John Antrobus, John Betjeman, John Bird, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Peter Cook, Roald Dahl, Richard Ingrams, Lyndon Irving, Gerald Kaufman, Frank Muir, David Nobbs, Denis Norden, Bill Oddie, Dennis Potter, Eric Sykes, Kenneth Tynan, and Keith Waterhouse). You helped form me into the person I am today.

  • You Say Tomayto…

    …and I say tomahto…

    The Beeb has a new series of historical programmes being broadcast under the portmanteau title of Life and Death in the Tudor Court.

    Last Thursday saw the broadcast of The Last Days of Anne Boleyn, and what a rich plum pudding of a programme it was. It had a collection of historians and novelists – big guns, such as David Starkey and Hilary Mantel – battling it out over whose interpretation of the facts – as far as they are known – were the real McCoy. I thought it was absolutely riveting. The programme makers interviewed the experts individually, and then cut between them so that it was very apparent that history is fluid, and the truth is never as clear-cut as some would like to profess. The cut-and-thrust between the experts was excellently done, and pointed up the fact that history is never cut-and-dried.

    The following night, we had professor Diarmaid MacCulloch covering much the same ground with his examination of the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell.

    Unfortunately for the good professor, having seen how interpretations of the players in the Tudor Court were presented and interpreted by a gallery of experts on the previous night, I was far less ready to go along with his thesis. I kept wondering how his fellow historians might have wanted to present a somewhat different picture.

    And then there was his pronunciation of the name of Anne Boleyn. The previous night, all the assembled experts had said Anne Bowlin, just as I’ve always thought of it. And now here was the good professor calling her Anne Bollin. I’m sorry, but something is not right in the state of Denmark…

    You say potahto, and he says potayto – let’s call the whole thing orff.

  • Best Laid Down – And Avoided

    In recent years, there’s been a fashion for “historical drama documentaries” on TV. You know the sort of thing – get a historian to front a programme on say, the Wars of the Roses, and fill most of the airtime with badly-paid and badly-acting extras re-enacting the battles. What could have been an opportunity for a knowledgeable expert to analyse a historical event gets pushed aside in favour of amateur dramatics and, shudder, “spectacle”.

    Tonight, for example, on BBC One, there will be a programme on Pompeii, fronted by Dr. Margaret Mountford. Now, Dr. Mountford recently completed her studies with her thesis on Papyrology, so she may well have the chops to be able to talk knowledgeably about the lives of Pompeiians in 79 AD, but I fear the worst. The programme is called Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time, and is billed as “a one-off landmark drama documentary”. The programme web site contains plenty of stills of costumed extras pretending to be citizens of Pompeii.

    Oh dear, this does not look promising. Particularly when I recall a documentary on the same subject that the BBC first broadcast in 2010: Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town. No pointless dramatical reconstructions there – just an acknowledged expert on Roman life, Professor Mary Beard, talking about her beloved subject. And because of her knowledge and enthusiasm, she was able to bring the citizens of Pompeii to life for me far better than hordes of the toga-clad extras that I suspect will be paraded before us this evening.

    Just last year, the BBC broadcast a series of programmes made by Professor Beard on the Romans, and once again she brought them all to life without any need for “dramatical reconstructions”. Give me that sort of approach to history, and I’m happy. I think I’ll be giving Dr. Mountford’s drama documentary a miss this evening. I see that on BBC Two at the same time we have Sir Terry Pratchett contemplating the role of mankind in the eradication of the planet’s species, and considering his own inevitable extinction, hastened as it is likely to be by his Alzheimer’s disease. That sounds much more interesting and thought-provoking to me.

  • I Am The Doctor – And I Am Afraid…

    It’s coming – the next series of Doctor Who. My place on (or behind) the sofa is booked. This will be the 50th year since Doctor Who has been showing in the haunted fish tank, and each year I seem to be getting more excited than ever.

    Ooh – I can hardly wait!

  • You Might Think That…

    …but I couldn’t possibly comment.

    Ah, that immortal line, uttered by Francis Urquhart MP in the BBC’s masterful adaptation of House of Cards.

    Fast Forward twenty years or so, and we have House of Cards – American style. Actually, I think it could be pretty good. Kevin Spacey could give the late, lamented, Ian Richardson a run for his money. However, not having Netflix, or any of these new-fangled internet channel thingies, it may take me a while before I can compare the two.

  • “It’s Smaller On The Outside”

    I loved the Doctor Who Christmas Special.

    Just typical of Steven Moffat’s writing that he inverts the time-worn trope of “It’s bigger on the inside” by having Clara Oswin Oswald exclaim the mirror opposite – which elicits a glance from the Doctor as if to say: buckle your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy ride…

    I’ll be there, for every minute of the journey.

  • RIP Patrick

    So Sir Patrick Moore has died – at the age of 89. I can’t say I’m surprised, he has not looked at all well in his recent Sky at Night programmes, but it is still sad news.

    I grew up watching the Sky at Night – it introduced me to Astronomy – and I still have my dog-eared copy of The Observer’s Book of Astronomy, authored by Patrick Moore F.R.A.S., F. R. S. A. He inspired generations of children to look up, wonder at, and, above all, observe the heavens. He was an amateur in the true sense of the word, and one whose meticulous work advanced our understanding of the moon in particular.

    The next time I look up and see the moon in a clear night sky I shall remember him with affection and respect.

  • “The Angels Take Manhattan”

    So, the Ponds departed from Doctor Who last night. Unlike some, I thought that the episode was an excellent one. That can be ascertained from the fact that, at one point (when Rory and Amy jump to their deaths off the apartment block),  Martin threw me a kitchen roll to dowse my blubbing in.

    The sequence of Rory trying to keep his matches alight, whilst Weeping Angel cherubs were blowing them out was up there with the iconic moment in Pitch Black. The Weeping Angels are almost nudging the Daleks off the pedestal of the premier Doctor Who foes at this point for me.

    And I can’t help thinking that the name of the New York apartment block (“Winter Quay”) was significant in some fashion. Was it an anagram, perhaps?

    “We quit! A(my), R(ory), NY”

    Who knows? I’ll be there waiting, in anticipation, for the Christmas episode…

    Update: There was a coda to this episode that was written, but never actually filmed. I don’t understand why. It is simply perfect.

  • Lest We Forget

    The BBC showed a one hour documentary last night: Death Camp Treblinka: Survivor Stories. The survivors in question were Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman. They were among 600 prisoners who escaped during a revolt at the camp on August 2nd, 1943. Only 40 of them were known to have survived to the end of the war, and now, only Samuel Willenberg remains to bear witness – Kalman Taigman died in July this year.

    The programme was profoundly shocking – Treblinka II was a death camp that existed for no other purpose than for the killing of human beings. Over 800,000 Jews and Gypsies were gassed, shot and cremated during the 13 months of the camp’s operation.

    What struck me was how small Treblinka II was – only 600 metres by 400 metres. The Nazis kept between 700 and 800 prisoners to operate the camp, while 90% of the inmates sent to Treblinka were killed within the first 2 hours of arriving.

    Willenberg and Taigman told their stories to camera, and they were harrowing. For example, Willenberg found the coats of his two younger sisters among the personal effects of the dead he had been made to sort through by the Nazis. Or the fact that during his escape from the camp, a fellow escapee, who was wounded, begged Willenberg to shoot him, rather than be recaptured. Willenberg gave him his wished-for coup de grâce.

    The light at the end of the tunnel was the closing section of the programme that showed that the two men had survived the horrors of Treblinka and rebuilt their lives. Taigman had gone on to fight in the Warsaw Uprising, while Willenberg was a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The closing moments of the programme managed to bring a profound sense of peace and regeneration of the human spirit at its best – something that I never thought would be possible given what I had just seen and heard earlier in the hour

  • The Amish – Lovely People…

    So, the BBC had yet another documentary about the Amish last night. Following on from the programmes about the Stoltzfus families, the BBC gave us a programme about David and Miriam Lapp and their adorable children.

    And, just as with the Stoltzfus families, I found myself simultaneously liking the Lapps, but also cringing at their complete obliviousness of what humanity has achieved, for better or for worse.

    David and Miriam came across as genuinely likeable, but there was that awful frisson when Miriam started talking about the rod (as the Bible states), as an effective method of chastisement of her children, while smiling all the while. At this point, her youngest son pipes up to implore her not to use the rod (in her case a wooden spoon – with a smiley face drawn upon it!) on him. She grinned. I found that shocking and not at all cute or lovely.

    In the end, I once more found myself thanking my lucky stars that I was not born into an Amish community. The chains around the human spirit would have proved too much for me.

  • “So, How Much Trouble Are We In?”

    The opening quote, from the lovely Rory, in the trailer for the BBC’s next season of…

    Doctor Who!

    Ooh! I can’t wait! And was that a baby weeping angel doing a riff on the definitive moment from Pitch Black? Damn, this looks to be worth waiting for…

  • The Secret History of our Streets

    Last night, BBC Two broadcast the first in a series of documentaries about streets in London. It was The Secret History of our Streets: Deptford High Street.

    It was truly excellent – up there with what the BBC does best. Starting with the sociological maps of Charles Booth, it moved to the present day with vox pop interviews of residents and those connected with the history of Deptford High Street.

    The centre of the programme was John Price, whose family have lived in and around Deptford High Street for 250 years. His was the arresting voice of a community that was forced into a diaspora by the well-meaning, but ultimately ruinous, city planners of the 1960s.

    It was riveting television, that, as Lucy Mangan writes, prodded your brain awake as it broke your heart. Do read the comments on her article, and the comments on the producer’s blog of the programme, they are worth it.

    I was close to tears at several points, and moved to white-hot fury as the programme revealed that one street in Deptford had been saved from the city planners’ bulldozers. In a final irony, it turned out that the street that survived was of housing stock that was at the absolute bottom of the pile. Better streets, one of which contained John Price’s family, were flattened. And now, this street, consisting of tiny terraced houses built for the poorest of the poor in the 19th century, has properties that are on the market for £750,000.

    We were treated to the spectacle of an oleaginous estate agent showing a well-to-do couple around one such tiny property. I have never come closer to wanting to hurl something through the television as at that moment. It made me sick to the bottom of my heart.

    And while the programme showed some of the new life that has come to Deptford High Street, including the (to me) rather questionable evangelical preacher, I couldn’t help feeling that the programme makers had made the right choice by using the song and words of the evangelical choir to close what was a brilliant example of a documentary. The  choir sang ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken’ – a bitter comment on how a community was shattered for ever by the Council’s bulldozers. The chorus, ‘There’s a better home a-waitin’ – in the Sky, Lord, in the Sky’ was perhaps a cruel, but knowing, joke about the highrise apartment blocks the Council built. The new slums to be marked as such on the map of a 21st Century Charles Booth, whilst the original community has been scattered to the four winds…

  • Facets of Delius

    I was first introduced to the music of Frederick Delius back in 1968 via Ken Russell’s brilliant biographical film portrait: Song of Summer. The film dealt with Delius’s last six years of life, when he was a cantankerous old man; blind, paralysed, and dealing with tertiary syphilis. It is a superb film. Apparently, Eric Fenby, who was Delius’s amanuensis at the time, found the film so true to life that he suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of seeing it.

    We’ve had to wait nearly 45 years for another film portrait of Delius. Last night, we got it, in the shape of John Bridcut’s glorious film documentary: Delius: Lover, Composer, Enigma shown on BBC Four. This took a view of the whole of Delius’s life, from growing up as Fritz Delius in a German family in Bradford, through his time in Florida, and the flesh-pots of Paris, to his old age in Grez-sur-Loing, when he was married to the long-suffering Jelka Rosen.

    It was simply stunning. And it has made me want to explore more of Delius’s music – particularly his early work. His opera Koanga pre-dates Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess by thirty years, and his A Mass of Life celebrates the joy of life, without religious overtones.

    John Bridcut does good work – his biography of Benjamin Britten: Britten’s Children, which I read before I saw his documentary film on which the book was based, alerted me to his talent. Delius: Lover, Composer, Enigma is equally good. It contains many interviews, both current and archival material (e.g. Sir Thomas Beecham – a champion of Delius’s music), that elucidate Delius’s genius. I’ve just ordered more CDs of Delius’s music as a result. Thank you, Mr. Bridcut. And thank you, Frederick Delius.

  • Meet The Romans With Mary Beard

    May I just say, what an absolute pleasure it was to be in the company of Professor Mary Beard last night when she introduced us to a variety of long-dead Romans.

    This was TV in the very best tradition of the BBC: to educate, inform and entertain.

    I’m pleased to see that I was not the only one so impressed.

    Roll on next week when we get to see Professor Beard enthusiastically declaiming about the social impact of the Roman latrines…

  • How Did He Do It?

    If you saw last night’s Sherlock episode (The Reichenbach Fall – note the singular, by the way, a nice joke), you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you didn’t, and don’t want spoilers, then stop reading now.

    …

    I suppose, in a way, with a title echoing the climax of the original Conan Doyle story The Final Problem, which features the Reichenbach Falls, it was obvious what was going to happen; but the question is: how did he do it? There are lots of theories floating around, and while I’m unsure of the precise mechanics, I’m fairly sure of the following:

    • Molly was in on it (and what a wonderful character she has proved to be throughout the two series)
    • John Watson was not.
    • Mycroft may have been.
    • We did see a live human being jump (he was moving his arms to control his balance), and I am sure it was Holmes.
    • Watson was knocked over by a bicyclist in the period between seeing the jump and running to Holmes’ body. That is certainly significant.
    • Watson feels for Holmes’ pulse, and presumably doesn’t find one. Holmes was shown earlier playing with a squash ball. Could this be the old “squash ball in the armpit to stop the pulse trick”?

    Some viewers have complained that we shouldn’t have got obvious confirmation that Holmes faked his own death by seeing Holmes alive in the closing seconds, but I thought it was a good plot device:

    • It confirms to the viewer that Holmes is alive and sets the ball rolling on “how did he do it?” Great for the next series…
    • It gives extra poignancy to the fact that we now know that Holmes has heard Watson’s eulogy to a friend that he supposes is dead.

    The writing and the acting of this series has been outstanding. Hats off to all concerned.

  • Slice of Life

    I was writing a reply today to an email from old friends who had recently emigrated to Canada. In it I wrote that, having arrived here in the Netherlands 27 years ago, and in spite of having dual Dutch and British nationalities, that I nevertheless expected to die here, and not return to the UK.

    One of the reasons is that, despite my disappointment in the rise of Geert Wilders and his Christian xenophobia, there remains in Dutch society a residue of the tolerance and openness that attracted me here in the first place.

    On this New Year’s Eve, for example, the main entertainment programme on TV was presented by Paul de Leeuw, an out, and married, gay man (and who always strikes me as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”). His guests were the Dutch equivalent of the Speaker of the British House of Commons, a cocaine-using Dutch Olympic gymnast (wearing a very tight T-shirt that displayed his body and arms to their best) and twins who are the oldest working prostitutes in the Netherlands. Somehow, I can’t imagine the equivalent happening in dear old Blighty…

  • The Lady With An Ermine

    The UK’s National Gallery has just opened a major exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci’s works. It’s a blockbuster, completely sold out, and the buzz has also reached the Netherlands, with articles in the Dutch press and items in the media. I happened to watch one on Dutch TV this evening – a segment on De Wereld Draait Door. In it, the Art Editor of the Volkskrant newspaper, Wieteke van Zeil, and Emilie Gordenker of the Mauritshuis museum gave their views on why the exhibition was a “must see” event.

    I must say, I felt frustrated by what they had to say. Van Zeil opened up the discussion by saying that “The Lady With an Ermine” was a better painting than the Mona Lisa. Her evidence appeared to be simply that she thought it was a better painting… Er, sorry, but that’s not really sufficient. Had she mentioned some of the pertinent facts about the painting, then I would have been nodding in agreement, but a bald “it’s a better painting” is simply not good enough, and she’s supposed to be the Art Editor of the Volkskrant, for heaven’s sake.

    Well, OK, I thought, she’s only the Art Editor of the Volkskrant, she may have just a broad but shallow knowledge of Art. Let’s hear the real background from Ms. Gordenker. As Director of the Mauritshuis, she will obviously give us the facts on why this painting is so important.

    But, blow me down, she didn’t. She also wittered on about the beauty of the painting and the brushstrokes…

    Dammit, it’s not just about technique! It’s also about the fact that this painting is the first modern portrait in the history of art.

    The woman in the painting, Cecilia Gallerani was the 16 year-old mistress of Da Vinci’s patron, Ludovico il Moro. She looks not at us, but away to someone else with a faint smile, which immediately raises the question of whom she was looking at. Da Vinci gives us a hint. She is holding an ermine, which symbolises purity. Da Vinci states this in his notebooks. Not only that, but the Greek name for ermine, γαλή, recalls the name Gallerani. Furthermore, the animal could also be a hint to Ludovico il Moro himself. Ludovico was called “Italico Morel” (white ermine), because he had become a member of the Order of the Ermine in 1488, when the King of Naples had conferred the title upon him.

    There is more to this painting than simply brushstrokes and all of this was not mentioned in the interview. What a wasted opportunity!

  • The Girl Who Waited

    So I was otherwise engaged last weekend when the latest episode of Doctor Who aired. I had travelled to Northern Ireland to say a final goodbye to my dearest friend. That’s another story, and I don’t feel ready to tell it, so instead I’ll turn to the artifice of The Girl Who Waited. I caught up with it today.

    There’s something about a good story, well told. It can seize the heart and provoke a deep emotional reaction. The Girl Who Waited had that effect on me. Simply superb, developing from the basic setting up of the story, to the working out of the morality of how it affects the three protagonists, in particular the relationship of Rory and Amy, both balanced and unbalanced through time. As before, others can tell the story better than I.

    “This is a kindness”. But, of course, it isn’t, and like the older Amy, one wants to rage against it. Arthur Darvill, and above all, Karen Gillan, as both the old and the young Amy, made this one of the best episodes of Doctor Who I’ve ever seen.

    Bravo!

  • “Put Hitler in the Cupboard”

    So the final half of the sixth series of the regenerated Doctor Who kicked off last night with “Let’s Kill Hitler”. Oh, but I did enjoy every single moment of it. Steven Moffat is such a brilliant and audacious writer, and the excellent actors have a field day with his lines.

    Look, I don’t care that there were some probable plot holes – the Doctor should have known about River’s lipstick trick by now – I was still loving every single moment: the introduction of Mel, the growing-up sequences, the use of Hitler as a MacGuffin, the antibodies in the tesselrator channelling the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation of Douglas Adams, the redemption of Mel/River… It was a blast. Knocked the current sorry mess of Torchwood into a cocked hat.