Worse b4 Better

61st Birthday One Week Later Than Planned.....

Birthday Redux

And so, dear reader, my previous blog explained that I contracted 

SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2)

aka Covid-19

and that I hijacked a Craig David song to explain the Week 1 journey which largely involved coughing and a sore throat. Well, Week 2 has not been the same and involved silent hypoxia (ie low oxygen levels without realising) and a feverish temperature. Floppy boneless limbs applied to both weeks. Covid is a peculiar disease:

• Some, like me, have an “OK” first week, a shocking second week and then recover
• Some people are asymptomatic and hardly know they’ve had it
• Some people deteriorate rapidly and die
• Some people become very ill for a long time
• Some people, like me, develop silent hypoxia from which you can recover (as I did) but which can alternatively lead to a sudden plummeting of health, becoming desperately breathless and hospitalisation 
• And there are many variations and gradations between.

I’m in the recovery stage now, building up stamina, breathing consciously and deeply, increasing the walking distance each day, resting between exertions….

Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif

It is written…. Nothing is written….

A highlight of sofa-flopping has been indulging in long movies – like the widescreen version of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a still astonishing feat of cinematography, editing and design with pitch-perfect performances, overwhelming music, and iconographic moments like the above entrance of Omar Sharif in the far distance, like a shimmering mirage; and the jump cut below between a burning match and the rising sun. Lawrence’s epic journey(s) through the burning deserts were a good match for how I felt dredging through my body’s responses to Covid-19. When William Potter burns himself extinguishing a match between his thumb and forefinger, he challenges Lawrence to explain “What’s the trick, then?” Lawrence answers: “The trick….is not minding that it hurts.”

Silenzio, Bruno

An altogether jolliier experience was the film that capped my delayed birthday – the Disney-Pixar film Luca, ravishingly animated and charmingly told. The themes were clear as an Italian blue sky: helicopter-parenting, family – both blood and constructed, unconventional-friendships, deceit, bullying, outsiders, prejudice, escape/freedom….

Miss Jean Louise, stand up....

Golden Anniversary

During Lockdown Three Point Zero, you take your celebrations where you can. So, if The Harry Potter Film Club has to meet on Zoom, then so be it. The group started as a prelude to watching The Cursed Child at the the theatre (in the olden days of theatre-going) because one person had limited knowledge of the Wizarding World. But then it continued, fuelled by a love of wine and cake and sociable bonhomie. And we decided to mark the 50th film with dressing up as characters from films we’d already watched, thus, above:

• No-Face from Spirited Away
• Sadness from Inside Out
• Idgie Threadgoode from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café 
• Mr Perks from The Railway Children and
• Lina Lamont from Singin’ in the Rain

Hey, Boo, fifty films and counting

There have been

• 10 Fantasies
• 7 Comedies
• 5 Animations
• 5 Documentaries
• 4 Dramas
• 3 Historical Films
• 3 Crime Thrillers
• 3 Musicals
• 2 Biopics
• 2 Family Films
• 2 Literary Adaptations
• 2 SciFi Movies
• 1 Disaster Movie and
• 1 Satire.

Over half were made since the Millennium and the earliest so far was 1940's Pinocchio. The 50th anniversary film choice was Robert Mulligan’s 1962 movie of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird with landmark performances by Gregory Peck (as Atticus Finch), Estelle Evans (as Calpurnia), Mary Badham, Phillip Alford and John Megna (as Scout, Jem and Dill), Brock Peters (as Tom Robinson), and Robert Duvall (as Arthur (Boo) Radley.) With mood-perfect rhythms and music by Elmer Bernstein and a miraculously faithful adaptation by Horton Foote, the movie captures the spirit of the novel without simplifying any of the moral and legal complexities. The film remains light touch in the way a modern version, I think, would be far more heavy-handed.

Won't You Be My Neighbour?

The significance of the feet washing is explained in the documentary....

Interview to Article to Documentary to Movie

It’s hard to spell neighbour without a letter u but as this post is about an American documentary and movie, I will do so (apart from in the post’s title!) Daughter Emily introduced me first to the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. The documentary was partly prompted by a November 1998 article in Esquire magazine entitled Can You Say...'Hero'? by Tom Junod. Two screenwriters (Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster) then fictionalised the encounters between Tom Junod and his subject and recruited Tom Hanks to play the interviewee and Matthew Rhys to play the interviewer (renamed Lloyd Vogel for the movie.) It’s a bit complicated to explain but both the documentary and the movie are bigger than the sum of their parts, in my opinion, and have profound things to say about both society and education. The subject in question is Mr Rogers. I’d not heard of him or his seminal children’s TV programmes before watching the documentary.

UK equivalents - including some I didn't mention in the text - can you identify them?

UK equivalents?

I think the nearest in the UK we have to Mr Rogers might be people like Floella Benjamin, Carol Chell, Chloe Ashcroft, Johnny Ball or Brian Cant on Play School or Play Away and maybe, for Mr Rodgers’ Neigborhood, The Magic Roundabout for a weird alternative world – or Hector’s House or Mr Benn or…. If you are of a certain age, you’ll get the references…. But if you don’t know the world of Mr Rogers and his Neighborhood, or Daniel Tiger, Lady Aberlin, Mr McFeely, Officer Clemmons, King Friday the Thirteenth and more, then I can recommend you watch the documentary (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) or the movie directed by Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.)

Characters from Mr Rogers' Neighborhood

I like you just the way you are

I can imagine spoofs of Mr Rogers (indeed some feature in the documentary), but somehow the genuine article seems to mean every word when he addresses a vulnerable child with the words:

I hope you know that you made today a very special day by just your being you. There's no one in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.

And when he speaks to a graduation class and

From the time you were very little,

You’ve had people who have smiled you into smiling,

People who have talked you into talking,

Sung you into singing,

Loved you into loving.

So, on this extra special day,

Let’s take some time to

Think of those extra special people.

Some of them might be right here,

Some may be far away,

Some may even be in Heaven.

No matter where they are,

Deep down you know they’ve

Always wanted what was best for you.

They’ve always cared about you beyond measure

And have encouraged you

To be true to the best within you.

Let’s just take a minute of silence to

Think about those people now.

I'm glad I’ve learned about Mr Rogers.

Cat on a hot tin roof

Newman & Taylor, Charleson & Duncan, Boyle & Parker (photo credit: Keith Pattison/PR), O'Connell & Miller (photo credit: Johan Persson)

“I’ve got the guts to die…. have you got the guts to live?”
The first time I saw Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a hot tin roof was a TV showing during my teenage years of the 1958 film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives. I have memories of the power of the character of “Maggie the cat” and remember the row between father and son where the climax was a declaration that love is what matters, but I was definitely too young to fully understand the adult bitchiness, secrets, tensions and manipulations that Williams had poured into the relationships. Of course, back in the 1970s, what I didn’t know is that the screenplay was effectively a censored version of the play, removing much of the play’s subversive (for the times) text.

Newman/Taylor (SNAP/Rex Features), Cast of Young Vic production (photo credit: Johan Persson), Charleson and Duncan (photo credit: Mike Hollist/Daily Mail/Rex Features)

“We’re through with lies and liars in this house.”
In March 1988 at Bradford Alhambra I saw the touring production of Howard Davies’s National Theatre production designed by William Dudley and starring Lindsay Duncan as Maggie, Ian Charleson as Brick, Alison Steadman as Mae, Barbara Leigh-Hunt as Big Mama and Eric Porter as Big Daddy. I hadn’t cottoned on to the reputations of any of these actors so I just took the play at face value and remember being awestruck by the lyrical beauty and viciousness of Williams’s dialogue and felt gobsmacked/heartsmacked/soulsmacked by the actors’ ability to present flayed ugly reality in full view of an audience, but in characters that were yearning for connections and love and truth.

School production of Streetcar with Lois Taylor, Joe Layton and Clare Kelly (photo credit: Dale Wain) and the three main women in the Young Vic production: Hayley Squires, Sienna Miller and Lisa Palfrey (photo credit: Johan Persson)   

“I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage.”
Fast forward to October 2012 and Sarah Esdaile’s production in the Quarry theatre with Zoe Boyle as Maggie, Jamie Parker as Brick and Richard Cordery as Big Daddy. The design by Francis O’Connor suggested the text’s “twentyeight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile….. Victorian with a touch of the Far East.” Paul Pyant’s Lighting and Mic Pool’s Sound dripped with the heat of summer. By now I’d taught Streetcar Named Desire and seen both that play and Suddenly Last Summer, Camino Real, The Glass Menagerie, Orpheus Descending and taught and directed a student production of Streetcar. I’d also read Tennesse Williams’s kaleidoscopic memoir and read enough biographical detail to understand his own self and his own family were the main “copy” in his work. His alcoholic father, his volatile mother, his lobotomised sister, his repressed sexuality, his health problems, anxieties and dreams - all feverishly emerged in his stage characters and situations. But from where was the poetry and the vision? His innate genius, I suppose.

Top two photos of West Yorkshire Playhouse production; photo credits: Keith Pattison/PR. Other photos by John Persson of the Young Vic production

“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? – I wish I knew…. Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can….”
And so to last night to see the NTLive broadcast of the Young Vic production by Benedict Andrews designed by Magda Willi. Sienna Miller was a feline Maggie, Jack O’Connell was a crumbling Brick, Colm Meaney a domineering Big Daddy, Hayley Squires a desperate Mae and Lisa Palfrey a heartbreaking Big Mama. The rest of the cast and production values were equally evocative in my opinion – evocative of Williams’s study of “Mendacity” – the lies we tell to remain a part of civilised society when all the time we are festering with shameful desires…. a perfect play to watch in this time of fake news and bare-faced political lying. Something about the two central performances in this version suggested to me there was hope at the end. “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” says Brick to Maggie as she embarks on a determined baby-making campaign…. the way Sienna Miller played it I thought “it is true, there is hope, life will find a way.”

Jack O'Connell and Sienna Miller in photos by Johan Persson

Anne Lister and Shibden Hall

Shibden Hall, home for a time to Anne Lister (bottom centre), "wife" of Ann Walker (top right), subject of Sally Wainwright's forthcoming series, Gentleman Jack, as played by Maxine Peake (in 2010) and Suranne Jones in the new series

Gentleman Jack
Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax, Scott and Bailey, To Walk Invisible, Unforgiven amongst many others) is currently preparing an 8-part mini-series about a Yorkshire heroine/anti-heroine/larger-than-life personality, Anne Lister. Anne is going to be played by Suranne Jones, having been played in a one-off film by Maxine Peake in the 2010 Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister. The production should be broadcast on the BBC and on HBO during 2019. A family outing to Shibden Hall perched on a south-facing slope in Halfax’s happy valley revealed plenty and to spare about the remarkable Anne Lister.

Images of Anne Lister, Maxine Peake (top right) playing her in 2010, and Helena Whitbread (bottom left) whose careful work has helped decode the millions of words of Anne's secret diaries

A woman ahead of her (and our) time
Determined to become an independent, commercially successful woman, the free-thinking Anne took on the testosterone-heavy might of Industrial England and, in many ways, triumphed. In surprising ways. Having had a passionate affair with a doctor’s daughter, Mariana Belcombe, (an affair that continued after Mariana’s marriage to a wealthy man, an affair that combusted during a weekend in Scarborough), Anne inherited Shibden Hall without the means for its upkeep or to fulfil her plans to enter the coal industry as a mine-owning entrepeneur. She was also lonely. So began a campaign to woo wealthy heiress Ann Walker. Unbelievably (but truthfully) they had their union blessed in a church and wore wedding rings. Despite the sneering of the gentry who nicknamed Anne Lister Gentleman Jack (the title of Sally Wainwright’s script), Anne and Ann were notorious celebrities and were invited to the unlikeliest of soirées.

Shibden Hall

Go to Shibden Hall
Anne’s ambitions to climb mountains and travel to Persia proved her undoing and she contracted a fever aged 49 in what is now modern day Georgia. The grieving Ann had Anne embalmed and took six months to transport the body back to Halfax – you can only imagine the trauma of that journey in the winter of 1840 to 1841. Ann Walker’s own story is just as astonishing as Anne Lister’s. What happened to both women and how we know as much as we do owes a great deal of thanks to a woman called Helena Whitbread who narrates some of the features of Anne’s life in a display at Shibden Hall. The hyperlinks in the first paragraph of this blog will reveal more. I’m looking forward to Gentleman Jack being broadcast but, in the meantime, a visit to Shibden Hall is to be recommended. And, to recover from your awestruck wonder at Anne’s life, call in to nearby Dove Cottage nurseries and hidden garden (open March to September.) Smell nature. Anne Lister, you are remembered. You were a marvel. A force of nature.

The hidden garden at Dove Cottage Nursery near Shibden Hall

To Walk Invisible

Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside

One of my favourite programmes over the 2016/17 New Year period was the Sally Wainwright-penned snippet of “Brontëana” To Walk Invisible. It was a treat to see the location-shooting (some sets were built on Penistone Hill, not far from Haworth, and the costumes and set dressing were impeccable.) The actors were uniformly strong:

• Charlotte, determined, industrious and judgmental: Finn Atkins 
• Emily, fierce, private and funny: Chloe Pirrie 
• Anne, generous, peace-loving and wise: Charlie Murphy 
• Branwell, disappointed, frustrated and self-sabotaging: Adam Nagaitis 
• Reverend Patrick Brontë, stoical, dignified and proud of his daughters: Jonathan Pryce

Moors above Haworth

Blazing imagination
What I found most impressive about the production was the selection of detail, given the amount that could have been included. I think Sally Wainwright’s script had a distinctive “take” which captured less mythologised aspects of Haworth’s famous inhabitants:

• the blazing childhood imaginations run riot
• the importance on Anne and Branwell of the Robinson household at Thorp Green Hall
• the focus on the three years of reunion (1845 – 1848) which brought the remaining family together after various working excusions
• the shocking impact on the whole family of Branwell’s complicated demons, petulant behaviour and fatal illness
• the believable relationships between father and offspring, between Emily and Branwell, between the sisters 
• the distinctive qualities of each member of the family
• the palpable presence of the Brontë neighbours, servants and friends
• the comic thrill and awe of Currer and Acton turning up at George Smith’s office in London

New Year's Eve 2016 with Michael, Janet and Alex walking to Top Withins

Emily Brontë’s undated untitled poetry

I’ve quoted from the following stanzas before (here, in July 2016) but I thought I’d put the whole sequence down in celebration of To Walk Invisible, in tribute to the glories of the Yorkshire moors and in memory of what I did in the hours before the Murder Mystery Game Death by Chocolate. Wherever I go, whatever I do and whatever happens after I am long gone, the moors above Haworth will remain. I’ve already recorded that it’s one of the best places I know to blow away cobwebs and get perspective. In her stanzas about walking, Emily Brontë makes the point that walking is the place to leave behind “busy chase of wealth and learning” and she goes where her instincts take her, to a place where you can see Heaven and Hell clearly, a place where the contrary sides of human experience can be “centred.” Since the stanzas are undated and untitled, I’ve taken the liberty of giving them a title, snatched from a repeated phrase inside the sequence.

I’ll walk…. by Emily Brontë

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

To every thing there is a season

The author choosing between champagne and water and dreaming of the new and the old in his imaginary landscape.

Two years into Retirement
It’s coming up to two years since I retired from teaching and since April I’ve been increasingly getting into writing as my prime retirement hobby. I’ve written dialogue and many shorter prose exercises, some for competitions and some for my eyes only, and I’ve also kept this public blog going for two years as a way of disciplining myself to meet deadlines (I now try to publish blog entries five times a month!) Since August 1st 2016, though, one particular writing project has been dominant such that my “domestic Tuesdays” (see Wasted time….) are becoming writing Tuesdays, as are all other working days. Sally is becoming Domestic Goddess to give me the luxury of trying to commit an idea I’ve had to paper. The germs of the idea were planted a long long time ago. But it’ll be a long journey before any of it is seen outside the immediate family….

Skipton Castle: inspiration for one of the locations in my magnum opus

Cul de sacs, red herrings and acres of detritus
I think it was Thomas Edison who first coined the notion that worthwhile inventions come from 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I’m beginning to understand that at first hand now. The experience of writing is a turbulent glide over a meadow where you suddenly slip in mud, feel like you’ve twisted your brain’s sense-muscles but set off again, determined and eager before getting knocked over by cannonballs of embarrassment, picking yourself up and immediately becoming the Gold-Medal-Winning Olympic Champion of the Sport of Writing before falling down a pothole made of marshmallow and liquid treacle toffee. Wings on your heels and a stink bomb up your nose. And woe betide you stop and read what you’ve written with anything like objectivity. Painful. But then the main idea, the spark – the flash – the concept that got you started niggles at you, pleads with you, begs you and you return to the whole mystifying shebang with cockeyed optimism. Fun. Weird fun. Keeps me from causing mischief in the streets.

Life Advice

From The Bible’s Ecclesiastes Chapter Three

To every thing there is a season
and a time for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build up,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to lose,
a time to keep and a time to cast away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

Time to get on
with telling the story of Raydan’s Rhenium Tales which has plot(s), characters, themes, settings (maps), and needs a coherent style. Question: where will that come from I wonder? Answer: more perspiration…. 

Oscar Wannabes

My film of the year: Brooklyn

Odeon Screen Unseen

This time last year I started going with the family to the Odeon Screen Unseen showings – usually Monday nights, usually critically acclaimed, usually £5 a ticket.  All good. The risk is you sit down not knowing what is going to come up on the screen! That way we got to see Nightcrawler, Whiplash, Selma, and It Follows last year – all fascinating in one or more ways. This week it was Room and when the title came up I was happy (and worried) because it was a book I had raced through earlier in the year, astonished at the tension built up by the narrative voice in Emma Donoghue’s novel. It could have gone either way.

Emma Donoghue, Jacob Tremblay, Brie Larson - Room

Room
Room was excellent, I thought. The lean screenplay, the photography and editing, the final shot of the suburban garden in the snow…. All worthy of prizes but equally wonderful were the performances from the sublime Joan Allen as Nancy to the heroic Tom McCamus as Leo, from an intense William H Macy as Robert to Wendy Crewson as a devastatingly smooth TV interviewer – all cameos of great power. But could an Oscar nomination go to a 7-year old? Jacob Tremblay as Jack certainly goes through a convincing gamut of emotions in the film, spending half of the running time looking horribly ill. But I will be very surprised if Brie Larson isn’t nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She, I think, plays unpredictably, sometimes unsympathetically, maternal but highly-strung, dead-eyed but full of life force, strong and vulnerable – and at all times, in my opinion, playing truthfully to the dramatic situation.

In the Heart of the Sea, Murphy, Gleeson, Fairley, Whishaw, Hemsworth

In the Heart of the Sea

Ron Howard’s film about the loss of the whaling ship Essex and how it inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is less obviously award-winning except possibly in the special effects categories. I wasn’t bored but my daughter spoke the truth when she said it had elements of the cartoon version of Thumbelina – ie one disaster after another. Chris Hemsworth scrubs down well (and looks truly wasted at times) and Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson and Michelle Fairley can do no wrong in my eyes; as for Cillian Murphy, I would watch him read the phone directory. But there was something about the structure of the movie (the script, maybe?) that meant I cared very little about the outcome, though absolutely cheered for the whales (and excellent dolphin performances, too.) Oscars for the special effects, I think, and thank you to Cineworld who presented this in an early Secret Screening, Cineworld's equivalent of Odeon Screen Unseen.

Carol, Mad Max: Fury Road, Mr Holmes, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Ex Machina

My Oscar hopes

My film (and book) of the year has been Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn and I will be delighted if it wins every award going; if it wins nothing, I won’t care because it’s permanently lodged in my psyche. I also enjoyed Bridge of Spies, Carol, The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road, Mr Holmes, Inside Out, Ex Machina, Diary of a Teenage Girl and Steve Jobs. I’ve yet to see (but am looking forward to) Spotlight, The Revenant, The Danish Girl, The Big Short, The Hateful Eight and Trumbo.  I would definitely add Room to my list of great films of the year now, if only for Brie Larson’s performance. I’m already booked in (twice) to see a galaxy far, far away but will be going with phantom trepidation as much as new hope….

Man's Dominion

Graffiti in Dunedin

What is “cultural cringe”?

New Zealand tourist guides write about the “cultural cringe,” a self-deprecating Kiwi inferiority complex – the idea that everywhere else must be better!!?? Yet my reading about North Island and South Island suggests to me that New Zealand punches way above its weight. Three activist facts alone suggest a country with robust politics where tradition is not hidebound:

New Zealand suffragettes and the sinking of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior

• New Zealand was the first country to offer universal female and male suffrage (in 1893)
• Between March 2005 and August 2006 New Zealand became the only country in the world in which all the highest offices in the land were simultaneously occupied by women (Head of State, Governor-General, Prime Minister, Speaker and Chief Justice)
• In the wake of the French bombing of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in 1985, a flotilla of private New Zealand yachts occupied the Pacific Ocean where France were intending to carry out nuclear tests – radical and brave!

Prince William participates in a Maori greeting

An idealised alternative England?

In shorthand media mythology, New Zealand promotes Commonwealth values of democracy, fairness, tolerance, equal opportunities, sustainable development and environmental guardianship. Commonwealth values are indeed inherent, but so is weird comedy in the form of the Flight of the Conchords (Bret McKenzie and Jermaine Clement.) Tolkien might be English but it took a New Zealander, Peter Jackson, to realise successful movie versions of his works. Director Jane Campion and actors Russell Crowe and Sam Neill are three more examples of why “cultural cringe” is unecessary.

Sam Neill, Jane Campion, Peter Jackson, Flight of the Conchords, Russell Crowe

Other notable cultural figures and history makers include: Manu Bennett (actor), Eleanor Catton (novelist), Richard Curtis (writer), Alan Dale (actor), Kerry Fox (actor), Janet Frame (writer), Sir Edmund Hillary (mountaineer), Lucy Lawless (actor), Jonah Lomu (rugby player), Katherine Mansfield (writer), Temuera Morrison (actor), Anna Paquin (actor), Ernest Rutherford (scientist), Kate Sheppard (suffragette), Kiri Te Kanawa (soprano) and Karl Urban (actor).

Successful Kiwis

Add these to Lorde and Aaron Smith and you see what I mean – “cultural cringe” is unnecessary.

Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider

Asserting Identity and Sacred Nature

One of my favourite films is Niki Caro’s film of Witi Ihimaera’s book Whale Rider starring Keisha Castle-Hughes. I think the film shows that you can assert your own identity against the odds. New Zealand, in such a remote location, has certainly asserted its identity. The tension between tradition and modernity is at the heart of Whale Rider, as the Maori people in the film/book negotiate modern times. The beginning of the story introduces the interdependence of mankind and nature; humans as stewards of the natural world. I get the sense that New Zealanders take the governance of the planet seriously - and in a humanitarian way. The following poem (found on David Hardy’s website and reproduced with his permission) captures the message:

Man’s Dominion by David Hardy 

When settlers came from overseas 

Overwhelmed, they were, by trees 

Like nothing else they’d ever seen 

For most of them were evergreen 

It wasn’t long before they tried 

To make the landscape countryfied 

They burned the bush and planted grass 

The scar might show - but time would pass 

Besides the cattle, sheep and horse 

The predators were brought in force 

They introduced for sake of sport 

The animals that could be caught 

To hunt and shoot and fish and snare 

They brought the rabbit, deer and hare 

And very soon the people found 

Erosion, rocks and barren ground 

The deer ringbarked the forest trees 

That died as though they had disease 

The goat came later on the scene 

And ringbarked where the deer’d not been 

The rare and tender little plants 

Most succulent inhabitants 

No one, then, assessed their worth 

They disappeared right off the earth 

With ignorance and greed they came 

And mankind now is just the same 

We’re losing species year by year 

So at that rate they’ll disappear 

AND SO WILL WE

The horrors of Isengard and the beauty of Fangorn

David’s poem chimes with the environmental messages built into Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with the destructive forces of Sauron and the military violence of the Orcs pitted against the homely values of the Hobbits in the Shire and the world-weary Ents, the ancient shepherds of Middle Earth forests.

Isengard being destroyed by orcs; Merry and Pippin enjoying an Ent ride in Fangorn.

It strikes me that New Zealand was the perfect place to film Tolkien’s works since it has had its share of environmental struggles. The history of the country is riddled with battles, massacres, treaties and land negotiations between the European colonizers (from 1642 onwards) and the Polynesian migrants who developed the Maori culture and who began settling first around the year 1200.

Journey to the other ends of the earth

New Zealand is only one possible destination among many. Will I go there one day? Time will tell.





In the meantime, I’ll enjoy a glass of crisp and cold Marlborough wine and hum the theme tune to Fellowship of the Ring.

Tatau and Terrific TV

Tatau

I just finished watching Tatau with the family. Tatau was/is the BBC3 series filmed on the Cook islands with plenty of directorial verve. (Directors Wayne Yip, Josh Frizzell and Michael Hurst.) On my blog profile I say how loyal I feel towards the BBC and it is this kind of series that makes me want to support them wholeheartedly. It felt like an independent production and had plenty of dazzle in the performances, the direction, the design features and the overall idea. It wasn’t a homogenous committee-drama, that’s for sure, and all the better for that.

BBC3

I hope the decision to put BBC3 online does not backfire. Several of their shows have been big successes: Being Human, In the Flesh, Gavin and Stacey, Torchwood – and there have been excellent documentaries too – one I remember vividly, My Brother the Islamist, could do with monthly repeats. I don’t know how expensive it was to send the crew and cast to the Cook islands for Tatau but it was FANTASTIC to see uncommon locations and less-familiar actors (including a good number from Commonwealth countries) in a weird and wild drama.

Brave commissioning

Some shows are victims of the commissioning channel’s lack of support, for example, the sudden cancelling of Atlantis which grew into a greater show with each episode. I imagine Tatau will not get a second series so we will never know whether it would have matured over another set of episodes. But I for one would tune in if the series was re-commissioned. Bravo to the BBC for giving viewers something out of the ordinary.

Tatau’s strengths

It made an eye-pleasing change to see sun-kissed locations different from drab urban offices and bucolic green villages favoured by typical home-grown TV series. The actors were uniformly good with the double act of Joe Layton as Kyle and Theo Barklem-Biggs as Budgie managing to convey the reality of buddies who had been travelling and who had a shared history. Joe’s intensity and Theo’s buoyancy motored the plot. Theo’s story contained an imaginative twist (no spoilers) and the hints at Maori culture were intriguing.

New faces to British TV

Shushila Takau, Alex Tarrant and Rawiri Jobe as Aumea, Maui and Koringo were convincing and unsettling in their portrayals of ambiguous characters – should Kyle and Budgie trust them or not? Cian Elyse White as Lara Morgan, I thought, was an attractive and charismatic performer and character; she probably had the best-written part in terms of variety of tone and emotion.

Tatau’s weakness

Sadly I think the show’s weakness was in some aspects of the writing, where, although the set-ups and the complications all had massive potential, there were underwritten characters and scenes that seemed either missing or rushed. I want to applaud Richard Zajdlic on the one hand for creating a complex show with some fine scenes and character moments but I wonder whether the pressures of budget and/or time and/or location meant he would have produced a more satisfying total narrative if circumstances had allowed. I noticed he was producing too. I know he is an experienced writer and one of the (many) past shows to which he contributed, This Life, is a major classic, in my opinion.

I wanted to see more depth to particular characters

Aumea’s father and her brother both had much more potential than the script allowed.  Temuera Morrison as the father had a powerful screen presence and his role in the climax could have been much more developed. Budgie’s mum (and Budgie’s whole back story prior to arriving on the island) proved functional rather than integrated and thematic. It struck me that Tyler and Dries (Tai Berdinner-Blades and Barry Atsma) had a lot more mileage and were fascinating in their vignettes but it struck me they were potentially more complex than the screen time given; the relationship between Kyle and Tyler seemed to have resonance but we weren’t shown how or why. Ditto Maui and Dries.

Future Stars

All the actors were engaging and I hope to see them again in the future. The series was ambitious and I hope the BBC does not shy away from promoting material like this again. Overall my family and I enjoyed this series a great deal – and relished shouting at the characters’ decisions – always a good sign of an engaging drama.

Daring to be different – are we in a Golden Age of TV?

Tatau didn’t fall into the category of total predictability. Many TV drama shows follow a formula these days so you can anticipate how each character will behave and even what the director is wanting you to think with predictable camera moves and angles.  Notable exceptions in recent times have been, in my opinion, (in alphabetical order): Arrested Development, Breaking Bad, The Bridge, Deadwood, Fargo, Game of Thrones, Happy Valley, House of Cards, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Last Tango in Halifax, Orange is the New Black, Peaky Blinders.

Past Glories

From the past I would cite as Great and Golden TV: Band of Brothers, Battlestar Galactica, The Beiderbecke Tapes, Bleak House, Boys from the Blackstuff, Brideshead Revisited, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cracker, The Crow Road, Damages, Edge of Darkness, Firefly, I Claudius, The Jewel in the Crown, The Killing, Life on Mars, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Our Friends in the North, Martin Chuzzlewit, Middlemarch, Pennies from Heaven, Prime Suspect, The Prisoner, Shameless, The Singing Detective, The Sopranos, Takin’ Over the Asylum, This Life, Tutti Frutti, The West Wing, Twin Peaks.

Not yet seen….

(I’ve had reliably recommended, but not yet seen, Boardwalk Empire, Dexter, Freaks and Geeks, The Game, Generation War (Our Fathers, Our Mothers), The Hour, Line of Duty, Lonesome Dove, Pushing Daisies, Ripper Street, Six Feet Under, Spiral, Veronica Mars, The Wire.)  I’m happy to receive further recommendations or to be reminded of anything I’ve missed from my list.

Tatau is one of those “Guilty-Pleasure” shows

The following list are TV series that I have watched with huge pleasure, but even at the time knew they were not for all tastes : 24, The 100, American Horror Story, Atlantis, The Avengers, Being Human, Call the Midwife, The Champions,

Doctor Who, Dynasty, The Flash, Glue, Heroes, The House of Eliott, In the Flesh, Land of the Giants, Merlin, Misfits, My Mad Fat Diary, North and South, The Returned, The Tripods, Spartacus, Star Trek, The Three Musketeers, Timeslip, The X Files – all entertaining and, for different reasons, shows that absorbed my imagination. But I wouldn’t put them in the “Past Glories” paragraph above. Tatau fits into this category, I think.

Perfect entertainment but something amiss

In all these guilty-pleasure shows, the concept is bigger than the final execution. The actors are usually brilliant, scenes are regularly stunning, all the design elements could not be bettered. But somehow the totality of the script misses a satisfying arc; often the conclusion is contrived, rushed or flawed; sometimes a formula kicks in and writers start repeating successful tropes. Alan Garner once wrote that “originality is the colouring of existing themes” and, in my book, Tatau’s colours were vibrant.