Dear Jim

Diary entry: Saturday, 1 January, 1977
Made a Lego house in the morning. Watched Swap Shop. Watched Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory in the afternoon, after playing Monopoly. New series of Jim’ll Fix It and Dr Who. Watched Starsky And Hutch.

Jimmy Savile, or Sir Jimmy Savile as he officially remains for now, died less than a year ago, on October 29, 2011, two days before his 85th birthday. His body lay in state, in a gold coffin, at the Queens Hotel in Leeds, and 4,000 people lined up to pay their respects. When he died, his secrets died with him. Or at least, they did in theory. Unfortunately, since his death, a number of people have come forward to say that they were abused by him when they were children. Since ITV’s Exposure documentary aired on Wednesday, more have lined up to join them and add to the cacophony of complaint against his good name. I’m not a detective, but when such a broad catalogue of independent testimony corroborates itself in this way, it’s hard not to find the evidence compelling.

The disturbing picture emerging is of a depraved sexual predator with a penchant for girls of around 15 who used his power as a national treasure, a figure on the pop scene, and the host of television shows aimed at children to get what he wanted. By all accounts, he pulled the egregious trick of frightening his victims into keeping quiet, and filling them with shame for something he had perpetrated. By preying on troubled girls from an approved school in Surrey, he exploited a bond of trust between himself and the institution, in much the same way that paedophile Catholic priests use the sanctity of the church to have their way with altar boys.

I only ever sent one letter to Jim’ll Fix It. It was in 1976. I asked Jim – or “Jim’ll” as we jokily called him – to fix it for me to meet my hero, the Daily Express cartoonist Giles, so I could show him my own cartoons. (As related in my book, I even drew some Giles characters on my letter and used coloured pens on the envelope – as if no Jim wannabe had ever thought of that before.) It was all for nothing; I never got a sniff. But then neither did my brother Simon and he’d asked “Jim’ll” to fix it for him to visit the Action Man factory, which ought to have been right up the programme’s street with their appetite for subliminal advertising.

In later, more self-conscious years, I identified Jim as an establishment figure of whom I did not approve, when, after the video of the late Sid Vicious performing Something Else on Top of the Pops, Savile warned the nation not to ride a motorbike without proper protection.

It turns out that he was the one who we should have been warned about. The BBC is under fire, from the usual anti-BBC quarters, for its part in “turning a blind eye” to what Savile seems to have been doing on their premises, in dressing rooms at Television Centre when Jim’ll was the king of early evening BBC. No chatter about how different our attitudes to paedophilia were then, in the 60s and 70s, can lessen the gruesome impact of what we’re now learning. This does not mean anybody covered it up. Savile was a superstar in the 60s and 70s, his creepiness all part of the eccentric nature of his persona – which, if later documentaries about him, particularly Louis Theroux’s, present a realistic picture, were extensions of his actual character. He did an awful lot of work for charity, and this seems to have been his cloak of protection. It’s entirely possible that people he worked with simply couldn’t believe he’d put his hands where they weren’t wanted.

I never met him. But when I first worked at the BBC, in the early 90s, I heard “rumours” about him that were pretty ugly. Funnily enough – or not very funnily enough – the rumours I heard were different from the ones that are now coalescing into testimony and possibly fact. I wouldn’t say they’re worse, but they are equally repellent on an entirely different level. They don’t involve under-age girls. When people say it was “an open secret” that he was a bit of a pervert, this incriminates anyone who heard the whispers. The entertainment industry has its own folklore of dirty stories about well-loved celebrities; with the way the tabloids have worked for the last few decades, you do sort of think: well, if they’re true, they’d have come out by now, surely? I never heard the stories about Savile’s penchant for under-age girls.

If you can assassinate a dead man, that’s what happening right now. Savile’s legend has been rewritten. Those who always found him creepy – which is most of us – can now congratulate ourselves for having spotted that he was a wrong’un, and yet, how brilliant are we for doing that after hearing first-hand accounts of his wrongdoing? It’s interesting that Kenny Everett, another much-loved and wacky Radio 1 and Top Of The Pops DJ, has been celebrated this week, and depicted as a man haunted by the “shame” of his own homosexuality, although I assume that in liberal corners of entertainment, this was not condemned, but accepted. Concerning this “open secret”, we posthumously sympathise with and applaud Ken for battling on, because it was he who was damaged by Victorian attitudes to a legal lifestyle choice. (I say “we” applaud him; I’m sure a lot of purple-faced, Mail-reading colonels in the home counties still think being gay is an affront to nature, but who cares about them.)

If Savile was a serial molester of children, then he deserves to have his plaque and his statue taken down, for he died without ever being found out or punished for ruining so many lives. We didn’t even use the term paedophilia back in the crazy 60s and 70s, although I vividly remember Public Information Films about not talking to “strangers” who promised to show you puppies. Pop star Alvin Stardust and footballer Kevin Keegan, however, approached kids and showed them how to cross the road correctly in similar films. The moral being: if someone famous comes up to you, it’s fine. If Jimmy Savile had come up to them, it would have been fine.

It’s awkward having to readjust your view of the world. I have been thoroughly enjoying BBC4’s repeats of Top Of The Pops from 1977 and, currently, 1978. They are fascinating social documents, when shown in full. Will they still show the editions hosted by Savile, with his mating yodel and his hands all over the 15-year-olds? I suspect not. Although they did show one with Gary Glitter on earlier this year.

A final thought: when I was about 12, the same age as the diary entry above when Jim’ll Fix It was a fixture and Willy Wonka considered a benevolent bachelor proffering sweets, I made a papier maché Jimmy Savile puppet in art at school. Oddly, I made a “horror” version of Jim, with blood coming out of his mouth and eyes, and an evil face. That’s what childhood is about: innocent fun. I’m glad he never answered my letter.

Mighty real

In 2011, Senna broke documentary history in the UK with a £375,000 opening weekend in June (it went on to take $11 million globally, having done brisk business in Brazil and Japan). It was a vintage year for long-form, theatrically released documentaries. I wrote about the subject for Word magazine at the time, but since the feature’s not online, I’ll repeat some of the salient points. Why? Mainly because yesterday, I saw three long-form, theatrically released documentaries, two brand new, one from last year. (The other one I’m going to mention is not yet out, but due in August.)

The first was Searching For Sugar Man. You’ll have heard plenty about this. Directed by Swedish newcomer Malik Bendjelloul, it is not strictly the story of “new Bob Dylan” Sixto Rodriguez, a seemingly gifted late-60s troubadour whose two albums, in 1970 and 1971, were flops in America, after which he moved from semi-obscurity to total obscurity; rather, it is the story of two wily South Africans, a record shop owner and a journalist, who set about finding Rodriguez after his songs took on a new life within the anti-Apartheid movement and he became “bigger than Elvis” in South Africa.

As with so many of the great feature documentaries of the 21st century – during which time the genre has boomed – Sugar Man has a story to tell that many people will not have heard before. Rodriguez remains obscure (or at least, he would have done if not for this documentary) outside of South Africa. He’s also big in Australia and New Zealand, although this inconvenient fact is left out of Searching For Sugar Man. Some have criticised it for editing the truth in this cavalier fashion, but it doesn’t worry me too much, as the fact remains: Rodriguez was a flop in America and was fascinatingly picked up in South Africa without anything to do with hype or marketing (and certainly unbeknown to his US record label, Sussex, which packed up in 1975 anyway). This is the essence of the story.

I won’t give any more detail about how that story unfolds, as the conclusion is all the more effective and dramatic if you remain in the dark. (Most reviews give it away.) I found myself with a smile on my face often during its modest 86-minute running time. It’s a good yarn, stranger than fiction, and says a lot about the way the record industry used to work in the pre-digital age. It also speaks of the Lottery-like nature of fame and fortune – Rodrigeuz’s songs take centre stage, always captioned, and they’re pretty good, not least Sugar Man, which was revived by David Holmes a few years back. Bendjelloul creates some very cinematic establishing footage of Cape Town, Detroit and other key locations – at one point morphing to photo-realist animation. Such bold filmmaking tricks are often used in documentary now, where the stakes have been raised, but they add to the experience of seeing it in a darkened cinema, as I did. Ultimately, though, it’s the story that will make or break.

Sometimes, as with Senna, say, or Touching The Void, or One Day In September, it’s not the outcome that matters, but the getting there. Docs built around news events, or a life story whose ending is on the statute books, are all about the organisation, or dramatisation, of information. I know next to nothing about Formula One motor racing, but I know that Ayrton Senna is dead; and such was the deft, economical skill of storytelling in Senna, I was as gripped and moved as if I had been watching fiction.

The non-fiction take is as old as film itself; indeed, the first moving pictures presented trains, factory workers and Arctic explorers: documents of real life. But though landmarks such as Triumph Of The Will in 1935 and Night Mail in 1936 enjoyed cinema exhibition in parallel with dramatic fiction, they were quickly ghettoised to the living room once television had established itself; they seemed more at home beside the news and weather.

In the 70s and 80s, theatrically released concert films like The Last Waltz and The Song Remains The Same – forefathers of J***** B*****: N**** S** N**** (not mentioning the tiny pop singer’s name online ever again!) – found a ready-cooked audience. But the true renaissance of documentary as a commercially viable cinematic form happened this century.

The epic high school basketball saga Hoop Dreams made $11 million in 1995, but in the same year only around ten documentaries even made the theatres. By 2003 – the year Michael Moore hit the polemical big time with Bowling For Columbine and James Cameron took us round the wreck of the Titanic in 3D with Ghosts Of The Abyss – the total was up to 45. A year later, try 85. Last year, 122 documentaries were released in the United States, around half of which found their way to UK cinemas.

The Imposter is out on August 24, so I will not add to the already-building hype and give too much away. I saw it last week, and interviewed its director Bart Layton for Radio Times, so I’m dying to talk about it, but can’t. Another true story that was documented at the time but is surely little known to most people, I actually remember reading a long (really?) New Yorker piece about the subject a few years ago, which turns out to have been among the triggers that turned Layton onto the idea of a possible documentary.

Like Sugar Man, the less you know the better. All I will say at this early stage is that it starts with a missing 13-year-old boy in a small town in Texas, who turns up a few years later in Spain and is reunited with his family. This all happened in the 90s – coincidentally when much of the pivotal action in Sugar Man takes place – but in gathering together all the principal players, Layton and his producers (about one of whom, more later) have created something very special. We’ll discuss it when it comes out, right?

Once again, it’s stranger than fiction. And, in many ways, not as neat. But its use of dramatic reconstruction is interesting, as my own deep aversion to the techniques of Crimewatch has completely dissipated over the past decade. I used to be a purist about this: if the archive doesn’t exist, tough. But the clever work by Kevin MacDonald in Touching The Void changed my mind. (Similarly, the reconstruction in Man On Wire, by James Marsh, was unobtrusive and subtle. This was an event, after all, that was not filmed. That said, I found the still, black-and-white photographs of Philippe Petit tightrope-walking between the Twin Towers as awe-inspiring as any newsreel.)

Perhaps the most interesting connection to make here is John Battsek. He worked as a producer or exec producer on Sugar Man, The Imposter, One Day In September and Project Nim, some of the milestone feature-length documentaries of the age, linking to key men Marsh and MacDonald (not to mention other notable docs, Restrepo, In The Shadow Of The Moon and The Age Of Stupid). Directors build the story and illustrate it using whatever techniques they feel do the best job, but producers are always the driving force, and in documentary seem to play a more hands-on role. If I’m wrong about that, tell me, but when I met him, Bart Layton put a lot of emphasis on his, including Battsek, MD of Passion Pictures, a company that’s proven itself a vital force for getting it done in the doc world.

I’ll be totally honest with you: I skipped Project Nim when it came out at the cinema last year in a blaze of publicity and marketing. The life story of Nim, a chimpanzee taken from its mother at a primate research institute and brought up “as a human” by a hippyish family in New York and paraded in the media as being able to “talk” (in fact, sign), I could see that this was a fascinating story. But it was clearly going to be rooted in cruelty to animals, and no amount of bucolic footage of long-haired Americans playing with a cute chimp in kids’ clothes was going to compensate for that. I’m afraid I gave it a wide berth. (I don’t even find animals in human clothes cute. Not even tiny hats.)

I’ve had it on DVD for months, and yesterday, because I don’t really care about the Olympics, I decided to get my act together. Directed by Man On Wire’s Marsh, it uses very little reconstruction, and then only flashes, as plenty of photos and footage were taken at the time, due to the scientific nature of the experiment. Like The Imposter, it relies heavily on talking heads, and it seems that everybody involved was happy to provide testimony. This testimony lights up the story. (If you’ve seen Errol Morris’s mesmerising The Fog Of War, based pretty much exclusively on interviews with one man, Robert McNamara, you’ll know how powerful the right talking head can be.)

The trailer hints that the experiment did not go to plan, and now I’ve seen the film, I realise how very badly wrong it went. This is a heartbreaking film, in which witnesses who seem to be the good guys turn out to be bad, and at least one bad guy turns out to be good. In this sense, over 93 minutes, you will experience a rollercoaster ride of emotion. People who are fascinated by animals also seem able to do unspeakably unnatural things to them. People who detect the chimpanzee’s closeness to humans also seem fine with putting the same primates in cages. A lawyer appalled by the abuse he felt was meted out upon Nim was also willing him to have him “perform” in a courtroom. It’s a truly unpredictable tale. I must admit, I found it well made and admirable throughout, despite my squeamishness. If anything, it’s an anti-vivisection polemic, but never feels hectoring or finger-wagging.

Nim, for all its advance publicity and “from the director of the Oscar-winning Man On Wire” tagline, seems to have made around $400,000 in the US (I can’t find figures for it elsewhere), so I’m not sure if it was a hit or not. Certainly, anyone buying a ticket to see a cute chimp in kids’ clothing and “talking” was going to be in for a shock. In general, docs are far cheaper to make than fiction for self-evident reasons. No actors to pay. Relatively easy shoots. Available archive. As such, more are being made in the hope of striking gold. It’s not tricky to explain why Michael Jackson’s This Is It took £9.7 million in the UK in 2009, knocking Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 off the all-time top spot, nor why gallery-playing ringmasters like Moore, Nick Broomfield and Morgan Spurlock help sell to popcorn-munchers what are essentially elongated editions of Panorama. In addition, Moore’s tub-thumping Democrat polemics chime with a broader disaffection for neocon hegemony and rampant capitalism among the chattering classes.

But with a biography told as simply as Senna, or as traditionally as Living In The Material World, it is surely the truth itself that attracts us. The turn of the Millennium played tricks on the human psyche. Although it was just the date that changed, the end of one epoch and the regeneration into another seemed to grant us pause to reflect on mankind’s achievements and failures – and to arrange them into Top 20 lists. Cheap archive took on a new potency. The 1990s became absorbed into a broader, catalogued past quicker than any decade in post-industrial history. Everything was up for grabs.

As our shrinking world has simultaneously grown more complex and prone to biblical melodrama – wars raging, floods rising, banks failing, news rolling, despots deposed, cities aflame, old certainties rendered uncertain on a near-weekly basis – it seems that we are increasingly drawn to a cauterised, edited version of reality, packaged up for us by painstaking documentarians. Never mind TV’s “structured reality,” this is structured reality.

And so, finally, to Swandown, which I saw as an appetiser to Sugar Man yesterday in my Olympics-denying double bill at the Curzon (and your local arthouse, if you’re lucky enough to have one, is a godsend for doc-lovers). This is less a documentary, more a document. It present events that actually happened – filmmaker Andrew Kötting and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair traversing sections of waterway between Hastings and Stratford in a swan-shaped pedalo – but in an entirely subjective manner. It is a messy, fragmented film, made on the hoof, and yet its trajectory was clearly planned, and its through-line is so precise we are actually shown maps with lines drawn on them. The result, shot through with recitations from Beckett and Lear, and – although I didn’t recognise it – a recording of Werner Herzog (who now seems exclusively to make documentaries) talking about Fitzcarraldo, whose epic quest Swandown self-mockingly mimics, is eccentric and surprising and at times wholly chucklesome.

You get to see Stewart Lee and Alan Moore in the pedalo at one stage, too, and if that isn’t a pair of filmmakers knowing their audience, I don’t know what is. (The actor Dudley Sutton also makes an irascible appearance, which is a delight.) In fact, Swandown is a delight generally, especially if you’re a fan of Lee’s self-conscious postmodernism and Moore’s twangy, good-humoured cosmic philosophy. Due to shaky captioning, I thought Sinclair was Kötting, and Kötting Sinclair to begin with, but once I’d worked it out, it actually rebalanced the experience. So, if you’re thinking of catching Swandown, and you should if you feel you’re in the right mental demographic, Sinclair is the quiet one in a fleece, Kötting the noisy, Kentish one in an unsuitable suit. The latter is, of course, the driving force, the chief pedaller and peddler.

Documentary comes in many forms. I think I have seen all of them in the past 24 hours. As with my tastes in books, I now demand reality. Fiction just will not cut it.

Admit one

Having expressed my lack of excitement about the discovery of the Higgs Boson on Twitter on Wednesday – a semi-principled, partly caricatured indifference predicated upon my own dimwit’s grasp of physics, a year-round allergy to hype and a more specific aversion to the sneering nature of the nickname “the God Particle” – I was informed by a couple of defenders of science that if so, I was therefore unqualified to get excited about anything else that I get excited about, including films, music, TV and, specifically, the Mitford Sisters. (I was also called an “intellectual pygmy” by someone who I will never hear from again, which I’m pretty sure is sizeist.)

I was on that day particularly excited by the Mitford Sisters, the world’s most interesting aristocratic sibling sextet, as I had tickets to see two – that’s two – great lost TV documentaries about them at the BFI on London’s South Bank. As part of what looked like a generally if typically excellent season, The Aristocracy on TV, they’d forged a Mitfords double-bill out of Nancy Mitford 1904-1973: A Portrait By Her Sisters (1980) and Jessica Mitford: The Honorable Rebel (1977), both made for the BBC, the latter under the umbrella The Lively Arts.

Having been officially and continually besotted by Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Debo Mitford since 2008, when Letters Between Six Sisters came out in paperback, my thirst for new material to ingest waxes and wanes. I went on an early rampage after Letters and Martin Bright’s C4 documentary alleging that Unity had been pregnant with Hitler’s child when she shot herself in 1939, shown around the same time. And from this first flush of enthusiasm for six literate women who were not only the subject of many books, they wrote plenty too (as well as seemingly endless correspondence), I created my own small library of new and secondhand volumes. (I am particularly fond of the yellowing paperback copy of Unity Mitford: A Quest, which erroneously displays a picture of Diana on the cover.) I have added to this intermittently when new reprints come round, or when Debo, the surviving Mitford, publishes another, but by and large, it’s kind of done. Which is why I jumped at the chance of viewing these two documentaries, which are unlikely to be shown on TV now.

I was delighted that the screening sold out, early on. It was a thrill to be among fellow Mitford groupies in NFT2, with not a spare seat in the house. Mitford fans do tend to be female, and not generally young, but this is by no means a rule. After all, five out of six of the Mitfords are dead – indeed, long dead; only Diana and Debo saw the Millennium in – and as such, loving them is not about remembering them, necessarily. I wasn’t aware of them, growing up, and I’m sure I heard about Nancy, the novelist, first. I don’t yearn to live in the tumultuous and deadly 1920s and 1930s that were their heyday, although I do find that era endlessly fascinating, with the aristocracy experiencing their first taste of decline, and losing their men in both world wars. (A life lost in action is a life lost regardless of breeding or money.)

Produced by Michael Barnes in 1977, when Jessica, or Decca, was a sprightly 60, the Melvyn Bragg-narrated portrait An Honorable Rebel was a real insight into Communist Spice’s life in Oakland, California. (She eloped to fight with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War with her sweetheart Esmond Romilly – who was, sadly, killed in the Second World War, when he joined the Canadian Air Force – and ended up in the United States, where she married Civil Rights lawyer Bob Treuhaft.) By this time, she was in demand as a lecturer and speaker, and the documentary is topped and tailed by a talk given to students at a university. She had not developed an American accent, and retained the much-derided “Mitford accent”, which must have been impenetrable to outside influence. What a curiosity she must have seemed when she threw herself into protecting the rights of black people on the frontline of unrest in the 40s and 50s.

She and Bob – a lovely soul whose eyes almost disappear into slits when he smiles or laughs, which is often – are seen with compatriots from the Civil Rights years, when Decca was stamped a “subversive” by the authorities and the FBI started a long file that she reads from, having obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act. (It is, unsurprisingly, redacted; it also states that she and Bob were both earmarked for possible internment in camps that were always previously denied by the US government.) What a fiercely dedicated freedom fighter she appears. From a privileged upbringing, she confounded all by coming out and then going away, and none of it was a “gap year” pose. She and Romilly lived in an East End slum when they first returned from Spain, and the pair of them tended bar in Florida when they first arrived there. During the McCarthy years in America, she was not exactly blacklisted, but she refused to incriminate herself or fellow members of the Civil Rights Congress at the HUAC hearings – an episode she illuminates beautifully in the re-telling, with a comic twist about mishearing a question about her alleged membership of a “tenants’ association” which turned out to be a “tennis association.”

Here’s a thing: I have hardly ever seen the Mitford sisters moving about, or talking. There’s a marvellous late interview with Decca by Christopher Hitchens on iTunes, but very little footage exists of the sisters in their debutante days. Photos, yes, and portraits, and newspaper cuttings (such as when Decca eloped and her father, Lord Redesdale, sent out a search party), but moving pictures? Very scarce. Which is why both of these docs were such delights. Honorable Rebel – named after her first memoir, Hons and Rebels, one of my faves – is packed with Decca and her lovely, plummy voice, her sentences peppered with “you know”. But Nancy Mitford, made seven years after the eldest sister’s death by Julian Jebb, was arguably all the more valuable, as it featured brand new interviews with Pamela, Jessica, Debo and Diana, an icily elegant lady who was only 70 at the time, but could have been 90, with her white hair in a bun. Still beautiful, of course. Oh, and still defiantly claiming that the British Union of Fascists, led by her second hubby Oswald Mosley, were not anti-semitic. (Diana and Mosley were interned during the war, and did not live the life of luxury in there, other than being brought Stilton and Port by visitors, so it must have etched a few years into her, although she lived to the ripe old age of 93.)

There’s also some plum footage of Nancy from 1966, filmed for ABC. She is, if anything, the most Mitfordy of all the Mitfords, fluting, “I enjoyed the war very much … it was very lively in London.” Pamela, whose lack of strident political affiliations left her without a handy nickname, and who might have been a lesbian, is a smashing old stick, feeding her hens and letting her pony off for a run, cheerily reading from Nancy’s novels and chuckling away at her favourite bits, the very image of a Countryside Alliance stalwart. She is least known of the sisters, but comes alive in this film. Debo we are used to seeing in her active dotage, such a fixture has she become at Chatsworth and on the book-signing circuit, but it’s sweet to catch her, aged 60, when she was still the Duchess of Devonshire. I love the way she admits to her older siblings’ stereotype as a bit of a dunce (“I can hardly read – I hate it, books”), and it’s amazing to think that 32 years later, she’d still be going strong.

There’s a bit of Diana’s son Jonathan Guinness in the Nancy film (he co-authored 1984′s solid House Of Mitford with daughter Catherine), but it’s all about the sisters. These films have reignited my passion for them. I could literally recite their shared biography to you, with accompanying amazing facts and trivia, and part of me wishes I really had worked up a one-man show about them for Edinburgh, as I had once fantasised about doing. I’m happy enough spreading the word. Quite clearly, you don’t have to agree with hereditary peerage and the old class system like David Cameron and George Osborne do, in order to find these people fascinating. From a feminist perspective, the sisters weren’t schooled as their father feared they would develop “fat calves” from all the hockey and as such, effectively educated and motivated themselves. Only Pamela and Unity did not write books (and Unity may have, had she lived). Nancy wrote eight highly-regarded novels and, later, a clutch of tolerated historical biographies. Decca wrote a dozen books including memoirs and, more importantly, investigative journalism; she changed the way Americans saw their own funeral industry with The American Way Of Death. (She is seen testifying against the sharp practices of the funeral industry at a hearing in Honorable Rebel.) Diana wrote three memoirs and was a book reviewer for Books & Bookmen and the Standard.

That two of them turned out to be fascists, and one of them a card-carrying Communist is what makes them so unique. I love them. Anyway, my tried-and-tested guide to the best of Mitfords literature – Mit Lit – is here, although I may have to add Jessica’s memoir of her time in the Communist Party, A Fine Old Conflict, to this, having now seen An Honorable Rebel, which has re-piqued my interest.

I know it’s in London, but the BFI is such an amazing place to go to, even if it’s just for a pricey drink in the bar. Have a look what’s on there now and in the near future.

Altogether now, for Decca:

‘Tis the final conflict
Let each stand in his place
The Internationale
Shall be the human race

Look! A Mitford!

This week’s Telly Addict - in which you will see that I have eschewed the now-traditional jacket to reflect this glorious weather – contains no adult language whatsoever and no scenes that viewers may find disturbing unless a man fishing some soiled underpants out of a public toilet cistern at Chatsworth House falls under that heading. Despite the kind comment under last week’s complaining that the Guardian clearly doesn’t “train” its “journos” how to present TV properly (idiot: I’m not a Guardian “journo”!), I soldier on and amateurishly review Chatsworth on BBC1; Starlings on Sky1; and Silk on BBC1. Ideally, interested parties will discuss the shows under review. Alternatively, they can criticise my technique and question my professionalism, in the mistaken belief that watching Telly Addict is compulsory and not voluntary.

Marley & I and I

In an effort to be the most clichéd white person in the country, I am listening to Bob Marley on Spotify as I type, inspired to do so by having seen Kevin Macdonald’s splendid two-and-half hour documentary Marley. I’m glad I saw it at the cinema on a Saturday afternoon, not just because it put a massive smile on my face, but because there’s still something thrilling about watching footage you expect to see on TV on the big screen, such as the all-too-scant concert footage of Marley that snakes vitally through the film, a film that is otherwise dominated by interviews and actuality from modern-day Jamaica, where most of his compatriots and offspring still reside.

I’ve been seeing the trailer for Marley for weeks at the Curzon – again, I can almost recite it – but unlike similarly overplayed ads for The Kid With A Bike, Blackthorn and Le Havre, there’s not much you can ruin about a hagiographical lifestory. After all, we know Bob dies at the end. (Having glibly said that, the details of his final months were incredibly moving and sad, especially when, at a snowbound Bavarian holistic clinic, his dreadlocks fell out and we heard from his daughter Cedella the shock she felt when she saw him, looking small for the first time in his life: the lion without his health-giving mane. Incidentally, the cancer had riddled his body by the time he went to Germany for a treatment based on nutrition, but I couldn’t help thinking: this is not a man who should be somewhere cold and snowy in his last days. He eventually died in Miami.)

When a figure from music is so big, so widely hailed, so iconic, and his music has been so comprehensively absorbed not just into the mainstream but into the fabric of our lives, it’s easy to take him for granted, but Marley re-establishes Bob Marley as the true one-off he surely was, raised as a “half-caste” in dirt-poor Jamaica, driven by music from an early age, immersed not just in the local music – Mento, ska, then reggae – but in the particular religion of his island community, and yet, accepted and loved by every creed and colour around the globe.

Although this is very much sanctioned by his estate, and co-produced, seemingly, by most of the people interviewed for it, Bob is not entirely sanctified. He was, to use Mark Ellen’s phrase, a “tremendous crumpeteer”, and left behind 11 kids and no will. That said, he did seem to genuinely believe in a higher power than money, something that laid him open to all sorts of opportunism. I felt that Chris Blackwell – another co-producer – was given short shrift, with barely a mention for the important part Island Records played in bringing Marley, and thus reggae, to a wider (for which read: whiter) audience. At one stage, the voice of Peter Tosh is heard, referring to Blackwell as “Whitewell.”

My knowledge and appreciation of reggae used to be fairly vanilla, but when my first 6 Music show was produced by the MOBO-lovin’ Frank Wilson, my understanding of reggae’s roots in ska and rocksteady, and before that imported American R&B, was deepened. I also interviewed the writer David Katz, whose 2004 oral history Solid Foundation is a great, well, foundation, and photographer David Corio, another white man captivated by Jamaican culture. I was also lucky enough to meet Rita Marley, whose book No Woman No Cry gives an honest, up-close account of Bob’s antics. All of this matured my view, and I took away a love for early reggae in preference to the big stuff Marley was shaking the world with in the 70s. (I prefer to hear The Wailing Wailers – Judge Not, Simmer down – featured in the film, and have a soft spot for tinny late-60s stuff like The Paragons, The Pioneers, The Upsetters, Desmond Dekker.)

So, go and see the film. Witnesses like Bunny Wailer, Neville Garrick, Junior Marvin, Ziggy, Carlton Fraser, Aston Barrett, Allan Skill Cole are so charismatic, you just love being in their company as the story unfolds. It’s astonishing how little moving footage there seems to be of Bob, in concert or otherwise, and many of the big moments are captured only in stills. But whole episodes of his life were unknown to me, particularly the concert in Zimbabwe with the tear gas; and the massive shows in America where very few black people turned out, leading to the support slot with the Commodores – something Marley was honest and humble enough to do – where at last he and the Wailers see black faces in the crowd. Segregation may have been officially banished in the US, and in the former Rhodesia, but still dividing lines were drawn.

I’m not sure to what extent Marley is Macdonald’s film, as he seems to have taken up the reins after previous director Jonathan Demme fell out with one of the producers, but it sounds like a soft Scottish accent asking many of the questions off-camera, so I’m hoping it’s him. The skill in putting one of these things together is partly to “animate” stories where only testimony and still photographs exist, but partly to link the present with the past. With a subject whose legacy seems set to loom in perpetuity, at least there’s no danger you’ll end up on a nostalgia cruise.

Just as watching French and Italian films always makes me want to drink wine, watching Marley might have you reaching for the cigarette papers. Not in the cinema, though, please.

 

 

 

 

For the record and full disclosure (I am nothing if not scrupulous in these matters), this blog post, hardly an inflammatory or controversial one, originally contained a  joke which I removed last night once it had come to intention via Twitter that it had been taken at face value. Mea culpa: it was obviously a bad joke, badly made, and I immediately edited it, as it had no bearing whatsoever on the sentiment of the review. It was a daft reference in the bit about Bob’s failed holistic treatment to Ben Goldacre and Robin Ince that was certainly never intended to offend. If anything it was a joke about our famous differences of opinion, as much a joke on me as them. After all, Robin is my friend, and I have met and worked with Ben on a number of occasions, thanks to Robin, and it has always been civil and even jokey. Anyway, I think some of the latter’s followers on Twitter must have linked to the site, as for a fairly unremarkable review of a film, it’s had an unusual amount of visits. If you posted a comment questioning the joke and your comment hasn’t appeared, it’s because I removed the joke. Apologies for any confusion, although not to anyone who tried to turn it into a fight. (I do not have a smart phone, and am “off Twitter” and “off blog” for hours at a time, especially at weekends, so I am sometimes slower to respond to these things than other people.)

On your bike

A kid, a woman, and an old man, on bikes. Two very different films at the Curzon, which I failed to get round to reviewing last weekend. (I seem to recall a time when I would review every film I saw within a day of seeing it. What happened to that halcyon age? All work and no play etc.) So, The Kid With A Bike is a lovely Belgian film from the Dardennes brothers, whose work is constantly carried aloft at shoulder height by Sight & Sound but with which I admit I am not familiar. They seem to be interested in small-scale human stories, of which this is one, and it comes in at a lean 87 minutes: a boy, Cyril (Thomas Doret) abandoned by his selfish father is fostered by a Samaritan-like hairdresser (Cécile De France) on a nondescript but not unpretty suburban estate (it was filmed in Liège). The story follows the difficult and painful adjustment from a utopian parental model to a trickier surrogate, and yet it avoids all the obvious narrative traps.

I’ll be honest, as a regular at the Curzon, I think I have seen the trailer for The Kid With A Bike more than any other in my life. (The chain has a reasonably limited, niche-aimed bill across a handful of cinemas, and understandably likes to trail early.) By the time I finally came to see it, last weekend, I could almost literally recite the trailer. As such, the basic set-up of the story was well known to me. But although Cyril gets into a few scrapes, and bad company, the film sidesteps complete predictability. As intuitively, almost miraculously played by first-timer Doret, Cyril is neither angel nor devil; he has an adult head on 12-year-old shoulders, but he’s not precocious. This is as much a tribute to the writing and directing as the acting. De France is naturalistically captivating, too, and the sparing use of music – just one cue from a Beethoven concerto – is startling. I need to get some more Dardennes into my life. Our education never ends.

To the second film with heart in this ad hoc double bill, then. The other kid with a bike is 83. Bill Cunningham New York is a genuinely life-affirming documentary that forms a piece with last year’s timely Page One: Inside The New York Times, featuring, as it does, the paper’s long-standing fashion photographer Cunningham, who has been cycling and walking around New York since the late 70s, snapping street style as modelled by ordinary citizens, and enjoying every single minute of it.

The seniors who have been delighted by The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel should seek this out, too. It is a celebration of age and experience. Cunningham, a camp, infectiously upbeat loner and workaholic (not that he sees what he does as work), lives in a tiny studio above Carnegie Hall – a bolt-hole rammed full of filing cabinets from which our man is cruelly evicted during the filming of the documentary – and seems entirely undimmed by old age. He welcomes director Richard Press into his life, and proves anything but a fossil from a previous age. He calls everyone “child” or “kid” and that includes people in their 60s and 70s, and spreads sunlight as readily and tirelessly as he spreads flashlight.

There is a sequence towards the end of the film – another short one, at 84 minutes – during which he opens up about his private life, or lack of one, and about God, and we see tears very briefly, but he hoovers these up and the smile is soon back upon his face. It’s the kind of film where you expect its subject’s dates to come up in a caption at the end, but Cunningham lives on. Surely he must be immortal. (He seems to have achieved this by not allowing others into his life, and yet he’s been a social butterfly all along. That’s his secret: be nice to everybody and retire to a fold-out bed, alone, each night. Oh, and take the filling out of sandwiches, apparently, and don’t accept a free drink.)

My guess is that Bill Cunningham New York will turn up on TV sometime soon. Keep an eye out for it.

The Third Beatle

Five years in the making, Martin Scorsese’s feature-length documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World enjoyed a one-performance-only premiere at selected arthouse cinemas last night. It’s released on DVD on October 10, with an airing on BBC2 pencilled in for late November. I imagine the DVD will be the full-length version, at a glorious 208 minutes, and I know HBO are showing it in two parts over two nights, so we must hope that the same will be true on the BBC, as it demands to be seen in full. I’m so glad the Curzon were showing it (with “sold out” notices posted all the way up the stairs and in the lift), as it’s not often that I sit in a cinema for three and a half hours and barely move a muscle or stifle a  single it’s-my-age yawn. It’s a phenomenal piece of work. And though I congratulate myself as someone who pretty much knows the story of the Beatles – and Harrison’s solo career – off by heart, it was full of lovely surprises.

Three and a half hours is no more than George deserves. Lennon and McCartney are eulogised, dissected, appraised, reappraised and hagiographied on a near-yearly basis, and Paul and Ringo are never off our screens or out of our magazines, promoting themselves and their latest wheezes and in doing so demystifying the last vestiges of mystique that may once have surrounded them. (I interviewed McCartney, at length, for a Q cover story in 1997, and although it was a personal milestone for me, I sensed that he was already becoming ubiquitous, and I seem to remember it was not a big-selling issue of the magazine.) But George remains the Third Beatle. The one McCartney told off during the Let It Be sessions. The one Eric nicked the wife off. The one who had a job getting his songs on Beatles albums. The quiet one. The Travelling Wilbury. Even the one who got stabbed in his own home and died of cancer. For me, he is the architect of the best solo Beatle album of all: All Things Must Pass, which is one of my all-time go-to records, and the one who was a mate of Monty Python, two aspects which push him right up my charts.

So, in researching and telling his life story, from bombsite birth in 1943 to sad, accelerated death in 2001, in this much detail, and with this much attention, Martin Scorsese is simply realigning the stars. McCartney is interviewed, and the subject of his old schoolmate brings the best out in him. So is Ringo, who is much less preening and annoying than his default setting (he almost gets the last word). We hear, too, from Olivia Harrison, Dhani Harrison (who also reads out some letters from his dad), Eric Clapton (again, on charming, self-deprecating form, and frank about the Patti affair), Neil Aspinall, Klaus Voormann, Astrid Kirchherr, Patti Boyd and George Martin (who, I fear, may have already said all that he can usefully remember about the Beatles). But it’s the less obvious participants who add the real texture: Jackie Stewart (yes, that one), a drawling Eric Idle, a giggling Terry Gilliam, drummer Jim Keltner, a truly hilarious Tom Petty and Derek Taylor’s widow Joan, who tells a lovely story about their first LSD trip as if recounting a particularly jolly picnic. And Phil Spector may be a bit nutty, but his memories of producing George and his involvement with the Concerts for Bangladesh are valuable.

It was a predictably “older” crowd in the Curzon. I mean, who but those of a certain vintage are going to spend a night out watching old footage and fond reminiscences of a dead Beatle? It was great to commune with these people. I was too young for the Beatles, although as anyone will tell you, growing up in the 70s, their back catalogue was just in the public domain, constantly played on the radio, alongside the solo stuff. (The Beatles singles were, pretty uniquely at the time, reissued in 1976 and they flooded the charts.) My mum and dad had John Lennon’s Shaved Fish compilation in the house, which I enjoyed, but I didn’t really become a student of the Beatles until the late 80s, when a friend really sold me Lennon’s albums, particularly The Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. By the time I got to Q, ready to deepen my knowledge, I had started to expand my CD collection with “classics”, and in what I still consider to be a particularly fallow period for new music in the years 1998-2000, I spent more on old music than at any other time in my life, and became a solo Beatle completist. It was then, belatedly, that I fell in love with All Things Must Pass. Its creation is given ample airtime in Living In The Material World. But then again, so is every stage in Harrison’s life. That’s what you get with a 208-minute running time.

Some observations. George looked the best a lot of the time during the Beatles’ reign. He ended up looking the worst of the surviving three in middle age. Whatever natural fashion sense he’d possessed in the 60s and early 70s departed him. Perhaps it was when he got religion? His haircuts were increasingly misshapen in the 80s and 90s. It’s a shame, too, to find out that he moved to Switzerland to end his days so that he wouldn’t have to pay tax (if that is indeed the reason – Gilliam certainly believes so, giggling at the thought). There’s a priceless moment when George is getting together with Paul and Ringo in the mid-90s for what would be the valedictory Anthology interviews, and he says to Paul, “Vegetarian leather jacket is it?” He was, we were told, a “closet Krishna”, in that he did not shave his head or wear orange, but in other respects, he walked it like he talked it.

A witty, talented and spiritual man who clearly liked his drugs, perhaps a bit too much, and loved the ladies, perhaps a bit too much, his legacy is a whole circle of friends who have nothing but warm things to say about him. For an apparent recluse, he was a real socialite. And the footage of him pottering in the vast grounds of Sir Frankie Crisp’s neo-Gothic Friar Park, tending to the garden without the help of “staff” is heartwarming indeed. Nice, too, to hear Dhani say that to rebel in his household was to go to school.

I often drift off while in the cinema, just for a couple of minutes, and then drift back. I am of that vintage. But I didn’t lose my concentration – or stop smiling, actually – for the whole of this film. It is unique in that regard. And so was George, who is my favourite Beatle. And my second favourite Travelling Wilbury after Tom Petty, at least since last night.

Hang on a minute, lads, I’ve got a great idea

For three weeks, we have been All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, thanks to the empowering genius of BBC2, and to the empowered genius of Adam Curtis. It is easy to call a man a genius, but I think Curtis’s track record is now simply too compelling to ignore. I feel fairly sure, looking at his long CV, that the first of his documentary series I saw was Pandora’s Box in 1992. I’m going to guess that his “trademark style” was by then in place. If I am wrong, do forgive me. I also feel sure I saw The Mayfair Set in 1999. But it was The Century Of The Self in 2002 (very much a defining commission for the newborn BBC4), about the birth of public relations on the couch of Freud, that really nailed Curtis to the mast and I remember vividly that it had me hooked in from the start. Why was nobody else joining the dots for me this way, I thought. He followed Self with the equally compelling The Power Of Nightmares just a couple of years later. He was spoiling us. He was on a roll. This century, I think, suits him. It gave him 9/11 for a start.

It’s rare that a documentary filmmaker carves such a uniquely stylised niche. Plenty of stunning and memorable films have been made that document a certain time or place, or portray a certain group of people in a particularly entertaining or uncomfortable way, but these are usually either fly-on-the-wall or “authored” documentaries, and it’s within these parameters that most of our greatest documentarians work their magic; in other words, you either hear the filmmaker’s voice or see his/her face, or you don’t. Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield are very much part of the narrative of their films; Molly Dineen is sometimes heard, but not seen; as far as I know, Paul Watson keeps out of his films, and Michael Apted was never on camera in Seven Up and subsequent installments.

Adam Curtis is not seen in his astonishing films, but they are his. He narrates them, he authors them, and he originates them, from his brain, and from history, usually 20th Century history. You sometimes hear him off-camera, but these muffled intrusions are not statements, they usually just stand to remind us that Curtis is in the room, and that he likes to edit things together in a rough and ready  manner, jump-cutting as if to avoid the artifice of the form. All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace was, to my mind, among his finest and, yes, most graceful works. Perhaps his most audacious? In just three, hour-long films, he managed to link so many disparate and obscure threads your head was spinning throughout. (For the record, he does not deal in gristle: though the tone-setting Pandora’s Box ran to six films, Century Of The Self comprised four, and he polished off Nightmares and The Trap in three each.) I really enjoy documentaries on TV, but too often they simply tell a story that’s already been told in a slightly different voice, or pick at a scab and hope that bears results. An hour – and I mean a full, BBC hour, not a truncated commercial-TV “hour” with its throw-aheads and recaps – can be a long time when a subject isn’t enough to fill it. With Machines Of Loving Grace, you got the feeling that Curtis had timed his stories to the second, so that they built and built, and took in tangents without losing the central thesis, and arrived at their punchline at precisely the right moment. You didn’t need to look at the clock while they played out: you could feel the halfway mark, and the ten-minutes-to-go mark. And anyway, who’s got time to look at the clock?

If you didn’t see them, my best shot at conveying the sheer breadth of material would be to list a few, random markers: Ayn Rand, Joseph Stiglitz, the Federal Reserve, Arthur Tansley, Buckminster Fuller, the Club of Rome, computer utopians, Bill Hamilton, Diane Fossey, Rwandan genocide and copper wire. If some of these names are foreign to you, some of them were to me, too. It’s not Curtis’s style to run through names that everybody knows, and the final of the three films, my favourite, The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey, was simply mind-blowing in its clear-minded audacity and originality. (I’d heard of almost none of the key players except for Diane Fossey and Richard Dawkins! How thrilling to learn so much.)

Let us simply applaud the BBC for celebrating ideas. Ideas are not always required on the voyage from pitch to programme. A hook is often enough. Or a headline. Or a title. But Adam Curtis trades only in ideas, in connections, in tangents, in profound leaps of intellectual and cultural faith.

I think I love him.

The bomb that will bring us together

Wooooo-ooooo-ooooooh! We’re all going to die! Oh, not again! I lived the first 25 years of my life in the shadow of the neutron bomb. I was quite glad when the Cold War ended. And now, according to this dramatic but seemingly sensible new feature-length documentary Countdown To Zero, I’m living in the shadow of either a dirty bomb set off by terrorists, or a neutron bomb that was fired off by accident. It’s a compelling film, directed by Lucy Walker and produced by Laurence Bender, which gets a limited cinematic release on June 21 but will presumably turn up on TV or DVD pretty sharpish afterwards. All the details are on the film’s official website, but June 21 has been chosen as it’s Demand Zero Day, which is basically about reducing the world’s nuclear weapons to zero (you can sign a petition, get involved, that sort of thing).

The world certainly looks like a dangerous place in the film. Even though bin Laden’s death and the Arab Spring have happened since it was made and altered the landscape for good or ill, the fact remains, there are nuclear weapons everywhere, and nuclear material is sitting around waiting to be turned into weapons: the technology is simple, the will is certainly there among the world’s most dispossessed and pissed off, and, as the film shows, detection of this stuff is woefully inadequate. (Bury a piece of uranium inside some cat litter and you can just post it to America, pretty much, and no red lights will go off at any port.)

Unlike a lot of the liberal scare-docs we’ve seen about ecological armageddon and social ills, Countdown To Zero is not gimmicky. Gary Oldman provides the voice of Robert Oppenheimer at the beginning, but other than that, we are not sold the facts by an august Hollywood star to help the medicine go down. (Much of the narration comes from an interview with Valerie Plame, in fact.) The graphics and animation are minimal and low-key. When a bomb “the size of a tennis ball” is mentioned during the Manhattan Project section, we see a tennis ball in mid-air; likewise when grapefruit are used to demonstrate relative size, we see grapefruits. I’m fine with this. Google Maps are used to show various ripples from imagined nuclear devices dropped in the centres of various big cities. A world map is used to show how many nuclear states there are in the world.

I wasn’t sure how useful the endless vox pops were. Asking people in assorted cities how many nukes they think are in the world merely demonstrates that guesses range from low to high. But that’s how the “real people” are employed in Countdown To Zero: as guessers. I suppose it shows how ill-informed we all are, but not after seeing this. Take your pick where the nuclear holocaust will come from: Iran, North Korea, Pakistan … apparently Boris Yeltsin averted a Russian-American showdown as recently as 1995 when a non-nuclear rocket was misidentified by the Soviets’ radar and he chose to ignore it in that brief window of indecision a world leader gets.

I like a horror film occasionally, and this is one, but Bender and Walker must be applauded for their calm tone (the same production company made An Inconvenient Truth), and for the sheer weight of their interviewees: Gorbachev, McNamara, Musharraf, Carter, de Clerk and even Tony Blair. (How unpleasant to see his face, but hey, well done for stirring up global jihad when you were in office and making the world a less safe place in light of all this, eh?) It’s an American film, and has an American bias, but it does not shirk American responsibility – they really did start all this, technologically and politically, and it was their Communist paranoia that fanned the flames of escalation for 40 years. (It’s enlightening to remember that de Klerk put a stop to South Africa’s nuclear programme in 1990 and opted out of the nuclear club with full disclosure and the handing over of all their working to the AEC. Difficult to swallow down that bile and credit him with anything, but there it is. Mind you, Apartheid South Africa had only developed the weapons programme in the first place due to its increasing isolation in the world.)

I hate nuclear weapons. They ruined what might have been an idyllic childhood, scaring the constant shit out of all of us who saw things like Threads, The Day After, On The Beach, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Dr Strangelove, Fail-Safe, Protect and Survive, or even clips of The War Game. The truth is, no nuke has been fired or dropped in anger since the US killed around 200,000 citizens of Japan in 1945, but during the 1980s, particularly, the hand on the Doomsday Clock ticked ever closer to midnight, and it informed so much of how we thought, what we did, and what the music sounded like. Two Tribes was a number one pop record about America and Russia going to war. A pop record! What are number one pop records about now? Oh yeah, nothing.

Anyway, the good thing about living in London, which I didn’t for the early part of my teenage years, is that it would all be over very quickly. Don’t have nightmares, but do watch this film if you get the chance on June 21.

 

Too much perspective

On Thursday evening, I found myself in the National Gallery, in London, after the National Gallery had closed at 6pm. Not only was I being led through the bowels of the gallery, and through doors that could only be opened with an electronic dongle-style pass, I was there to be given a private, one-on-one, guided tour of some the most significant works in the Sainsbury Wing’s Renaissance collection by my own academic – Professor David Ekserdjian, Professor of History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester (and also a Trustee of the National Gallery) – accompanied at all times by our own security guard. This is not how I normally spend a Thursday evening. But I am in the midst of making a documentary for Radio 4, and when you are doing that, you find yourself in unusual places at unusual times doing unusual things. (Actually, a lot of the time when making Radio 4 documentaries you find youself in tiny studios, but it’s nice to get out.)

The documentary, which I won’t go into too much detail about for fear of undermining its impact when it’s broadcast in December, is about 3D. But not just about modern 3D – Avatar, Sky Sports etc. – it goes back to the very roots of man’s obsession with creating the illusion of 3D. And guess what, a good place to start is the Renaissance, where artists and architects like Lorenzo Monaco, Piero della Francesca and Filippo Brunelleschi were changing the face of art by introducing perspective to what were still essentially religious works that came with their own rules. The Coronation Of The Virgin, a 1414 altarpiece which Professor Ekserdjian talked me though on our private view, is a clear early example of a sort of primitive attempt at “realism” (check out the sloping floor tiles) after centuries of “flat” depictions. You can view the picture on the National Gallery website, which I know they’re very proud of. Anyway,  it was a privilege to be talked through such beautiful and important pieces by a man who knows more about the subject than anyone I’ve ever met, and the posh fun wasn’t over yet.

Yesterday, I found myself on the train to Exeter, there to visit the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, housed at the University of Exter. It is also open to the public, and full of lovely artifacts relating to the earliest days of what became cinema, but, thanks to the magic of Doing A Radio 4 Documentary, we were allowed to go backstage, where a treasure trove of Victoriana – optical toys, mainly – was laid out on a table for us to play with, while Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter, Dr John Plunkett, guided us through them. Once again, a privilege. I got to play with an actual Victorian stereoscope circa 1850! It really was amazing, and one of the earliest forms of what we know today as 3D – the illusion of 3D, naturally, but so is Avatar, of course.

After spending much of this year talking bollocks with Richard, or being locked away behind my laptop trying to form sentences, or failing auditions for TV, it’s so bracing to be out and about, doing things I might not ordinarily get to do for people who might appreciate them, and above all, to be talking intelligently to intelligent people who know loads more than me about the subjects they know the most about. There’s less money in making radio programmes than there is in playing at telly, but it’s all so immediate and intimate, and I love trying to describe what in this case is a totally visual subject for the radio. (By the way, I realise Richard Herring is a super intelligent man, but we don’t get to be intelligent together in public, we only get to be idiots, which is fun in its own way, and we’ll be doing it in Bristol on Wednesday, which I am looking forward to immeasurably.)

Anyway, visit the National Gallery duing its opening hours; it’s free. And if you’re in Exeter, drop in at the Bill Douglas Centre – which is indeed named after the great British filmmaker, upon whose own collection it was founded. It’s also free. We should make the most of such places. The Tories may be cutting Arts funding with their big, indiscriminate axe, but museums and galleries can avoid the bigger cuts by remaining free. Do not let these places go. Use them.

And I’ll keep you posted on when this documentary goes out.