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On this month's Review Show... | 0:00:01 | 0:00:03 | |
Drugs and depravity on the big screen, | 0:00:03 | 0:00:05 | |
gangland violence on TV, | 0:00:05 | 0:00:07 | |
greed and deceit on the stage | 0:00:07 | 0:00:10 | |
and espionage on the page. | 0:00:10 | 0:00:12 | |
Plus the art of Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and Bob Dylan, | 0:00:12 | 0:00:16 | |
and music from James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:20 | |
Tonight, razor blades in cloth caps in the new TV drama Peaky Blinders, | 0:00:25 | 0:00:30 | |
an exhibition links two titans | 0:00:30 | 0:00:32 | |
of 20th-century art, | 0:00:32 | 0:00:34 | |
comedy in the Cold War from bestselling novelist Jonathan Coe | 0:00:34 | 0:00:38 | |
and a modern morality play from the writer of Matilda The Musical. | 0:00:38 | 0:00:43 | |
Joining me with their verdicts on all of that, | 0:00:43 | 0:00:46 | |
the novelist AL Kennedy, author and columnist James Delingpole | 0:00:46 | 0:00:49 | |
and the writer and critic Paul Morley. | 0:00:49 | 0:00:53 | |
But first, it's been 20 years | 0:00:53 | 0:00:55 | |
since Irvine Welsh shot to literary stardom with Trainspotting, | 0:00:55 | 0:00:58 | |
his shocking and witty depiction of drug culture | 0:00:58 | 0:01:00 | |
in Edinburgh's underbelly. | 0:01:00 | 0:01:03 | |
Danny Boyle's screen adaptation | 0:01:03 | 0:01:05 | |
was one of the most successful British films of the 1990s. | 0:01:05 | 0:01:08 | |
Now imagine, if you dare, | 0:01:08 | 0:01:11 | |
a world which is even more dark and depraved, | 0:01:11 | 0:01:14 | |
in an adaptation of Welsh's third novel, Filth, | 0:01:14 | 0:01:16 | |
about a corrupt copper's descent into chaos. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:20 | |
James McAvoy plays Welsh's anti-hero, | 0:01:23 | 0:01:26 | |
the racist, sexist and homophobic Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson. | 0:01:26 | 0:01:30 | |
Desperate to win a promotion | 0:01:32 | 0:01:34 | |
which he hopes will reunite him with his estranged wife and daughter, | 0:01:34 | 0:01:37 | |
Robertson's increasingly erratic behaviour | 0:01:37 | 0:01:40 | |
wreaks havoc on those around him. | 0:01:40 | 0:01:43 | |
What does that make me, then? You're a policeman. | 0:01:43 | 0:01:45 | |
The film, directed by Jon S Baird, | 0:01:46 | 0:01:49 | |
features a Who's Who of British acting talent, | 0:01:49 | 0:01:52 | |
with John Sessions as Robertson's Chief Inspector, | 0:01:52 | 0:01:55 | |
Jamie Bell and Imogen Poots as his colleagues in the force | 0:01:55 | 0:01:59 | |
and Eddie Marsan as his unlikely best friend. | 0:01:59 | 0:02:02 | |
What made you join the force? | 0:02:02 | 0:02:04 | |
Police oppression, brother. You wanted to stamp it out from the inside? | 0:02:04 | 0:02:07 | |
No, I wanted to be a part of it. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:09 | |
In Welsh's book, Robertson develops a tapeworm | 0:02:12 | 0:02:15 | |
which eats away at his intestines, | 0:02:15 | 0:02:17 | |
the device Welsh used to explain his unscrupulous policeman's back story. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:22 | |
In Baird's film, he suffers hallucinations, | 0:02:23 | 0:02:26 | |
in which he's tormented by his psychiatrist, | 0:02:26 | 0:02:29 | |
a role Jim Broadbent clearly relished. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:31 | |
How have you been since our last consultation, Bruce? | 0:02:31 | 0:02:34 | |
No problems, I presume, eh? | 0:02:34 | 0:02:36 | |
No! | 0:02:37 | 0:02:39 | |
No more cocaine and chip suppers for Bruce, eh? | 0:02:41 | 0:02:44 | |
McAvoy is the latest in a long line | 0:02:44 | 0:02:46 | |
of corrupt coppers on the big screen, | 0:02:46 | 0:02:49 | |
from Dirty Harry to The Departed. | 0:02:49 | 0:02:51 | |
But has there ever been one quite as minging as this? | 0:02:51 | 0:02:54 | |
What we would do is all the men would go to the photocopying room. | 0:02:54 | 0:02:58 | |
One by one, of course. No offence if that's your thing. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:01 | |
And what we'd do | 0:03:01 | 0:03:02 | |
is we would photocopy an image of our wedding tackle. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:06 | |
BAWDY LAUGHTER | 0:03:06 | 0:03:07 | |
MUSIC: "Mr Vain" by Culture Beat | 0:03:10 | 0:03:13 | |
Quite a Christmas party there! | 0:03:26 | 0:03:28 | |
Now, listen, the shadow of Trainspotting | 0:03:28 | 0:03:31 | |
obviously looms large over this, | 0:03:31 | 0:03:33 | |
Danny Boyle's huge hit. | 0:03:33 | 0:03:35 | |
How would you make the comparison? | 0:03:35 | 0:03:37 | |
I think it compares very well. Although it's quite an old book, | 0:03:37 | 0:03:40 | |
obviously it's about corruption at all levels. | 0:03:40 | 0:03:43 | |
It's got a kind of Jacobean feel | 0:03:43 | 0:03:45 | |
and I think we live in that kind of world of ultimate cynicism | 0:03:45 | 0:03:48 | |
and we have this kind of Machiavellian character | 0:03:48 | 0:03:51 | |
just being completely and successfully - up to a point - | 0:03:51 | 0:03:55 | |
immoral. | 0:03:55 | 0:03:56 | |
But with a sense that it is immorality, it's not amorality. | 0:03:56 | 0:04:00 | |
That he is going wrong. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:02 | |
And I think that works very well, | 0:04:02 | 0:04:04 | |
perhaps even better now. And it's very confident, | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
it's very slick. The editing is kind of Edgar Wright style - | 0:04:07 | 0:04:11 | |
bouncy, pacy editing. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:13 | |
And you've got this beautiful central performance, | 0:04:13 | 0:04:15 | |
as there was from Ewan McGregor. | 0:04:15 | 0:04:17 | |
Again, I think that James McAvoy, | 0:04:17 | 0:04:19 | |
this will be... I mean, he's very... | 0:04:19 | 0:04:22 | |
renowned now, | 0:04:22 | 0:04:23 | |
but I think it could be the making of him, | 0:04:23 | 0:04:26 | |
because he holds it together. He's in every scene and he paces it, | 0:04:26 | 0:04:29 | |
and because it's coloured by his psychology, | 0:04:29 | 0:04:31 | |
he really is making the film work, | 0:04:31 | 0:04:33 | |
and in real harmony with the director. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
And interestingly, in the scene I saw, | 0:04:36 | 0:04:38 | |
he introduced it, James McAvoy, and he said, | 0:04:38 | 0:04:40 | |
"This is the riskiest thing I've ever done." | 0:04:40 | 0:04:42 | |
Yeah, I liked it as a kind of grand grotesque antidote | 0:04:42 | 0:04:45 | |
to Britain's Got Baking | 0:04:45 | 0:04:47 | |
and that kind of nonsense. | 0:04:47 | 0:04:48 | |
Strictly Come Cavorting. | 0:04:48 | 0:04:49 | |
Just as another side of Britain. | 0:04:49 | 0:04:51 | |
And I also liked it because of the... | 0:04:51 | 0:04:53 | |
apart from anything else, | 0:04:53 | 0:04:54 | |
just the revelation and revealing of great actors, acting. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
And it struck me as a kind of a 21st-century version | 0:04:57 | 0:05:00 | |
of a Carry On series or a Confessions Of series. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:02 | |
You know, Jim Broadbent turning up | 0:05:02 | 0:05:04 | |
and Eddie Marsan, Jamie Bell. | 0:05:04 | 0:05:07 | |
It just constantly kept coming, these surprises. | 0:05:07 | 0:05:09 | |
So, on any level, it was just a wonderfully bawdy entertainment. | 0:05:09 | 0:05:13 | |
It was fantastically bawdy. | 0:05:13 | 0:05:15 | |
Yeah. Choose life, choose Filth. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:16 | |
It had that same in-your-face quality that Trainspotting had | 0:05:16 | 0:05:20 | |
and it also has the most brilliantly chosen soundtrack. | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
I love it when they go to Hamburg and you get 99 Luftballons, | 0:05:23 | 0:05:28 | |
and the one where...Silver Lady | 0:05:28 | 0:05:31 | |
is played, and... | 0:05:31 | 0:05:33 | |
a cameo appearance by... | 0:05:33 | 0:05:35 | |
Can I tell the viewers? Am I spoiling it? | 0:05:35 | 0:05:37 | |
I think you might have given a very big hint there! | 0:05:37 | 0:05:40 | |
Well, David Soul... | 0:05:40 | 0:05:41 | |
This is rather sort of, um... | 0:05:41 | 0:05:43 | |
because most people won't even be aware of when it's David Soul, | 0:05:43 | 0:05:46 | |
because he's looking a bit puffy nowadays, | 0:05:46 | 0:05:48 | |
but everything is perfect in its place. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
Right from the beginning, where there's a kid with the balloon, | 0:05:51 | 0:05:54 | |
and the kid gives Bruce the middle finger. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:58 | |
It's wonderful. | 0:05:58 | 0:06:01 | |
I love the idea of...you know those Scottish Tourist Board adverts, where it says "Surprise yourself"? | 0:06:01 | 0:06:05 | |
This is a great advert for Scotland. Seriously. | 0:06:05 | 0:06:08 | |
In a sincere way. This is a great advert for Scotland. | 0:06:08 | 0:06:11 | |
Because it's confident. It's people making fun of themselves. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:15 | |
And you don't want a film where the cast is having fun, but you can't really join in. | 0:06:15 | 0:06:20 | |
Because people are having so much fun. | 0:06:20 | 0:06:22 | |
Eddie Marsan is picking up his partner, shaking him with his teeth. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:25 | |
And Eddie Marsan vomiting in his hands is fabulous. | 0:06:25 | 0:06:29 | |
But the thing is, like you've just given away... | 0:06:29 | 0:06:31 | |
Sorry! You worry on every level about giving it away, | 0:06:31 | 0:06:34 | |
because one of the things that's wonderful is people keep popping up, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
whether it's Jim Broadbent or the one you've given away! | 0:06:37 | 0:06:39 | |
That is the great surprise. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:41 | |
Because in many ways, it's an old-fashioned film, oddly. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
Because of the British ensemble cast... | 0:06:44 | 0:06:46 | |
Yes, it could be the '60s, '70s, in many ways. | 0:06:46 | 0:06:49 | |
What brings it up to date is the vomiting and the swearing and the sexing. | 0:06:49 | 0:06:52 | |
That gives it a hint of the 21st century. | 0:06:52 | 0:06:54 | |
I was interested in what you had to say, the idea of it not being immoral but amoral. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:59 | |
Well, I know that Irvine likes the script very much | 0:06:59 | 0:07:02 | |
and I think it has the quality that he has. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:05 | |
Although he's showing you terrible things, | 0:07:05 | 0:07:07 | |
there's not an awareness that they're not terrible, | 0:07:07 | 0:07:09 | |
and up to a point, without giving the game away, | 0:07:09 | 0:07:12 | |
it's got a very redemptive and extremely moral ending. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:14 | |
And it's making decisions that are a way to combat evil, in a way. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:19 | |
While being very gleeful. And that redemptive ending... | 0:07:19 | 0:07:22 | |
It does mean that some of the shocking things, | 0:07:22 | 0:07:26 | |
and upsetting... It is a very graphic film. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
But you get a completely different view by the time you get to the end. And it's a knife edge. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:33 | |
It could go either way, without giving it away, James! | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
And the whole film would be thrown into doubt. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:38 | |
So without giving anything away, JAMES...! | 0:07:38 | 0:07:41 | |
Without giving anything away, | 0:07:41 | 0:07:42 | |
can I just say that I thought that the ending was exactly the ending that needed to be | 0:07:42 | 0:07:47 | |
and was most satisfying and true to the film. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:50 | |
That's all I will say. | 0:07:50 | 0:07:51 | |
It's that moment when David Soul catches a fish. | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
It's OK! | 0:07:54 | 0:07:55 | |
It's amazing. | 0:07:55 | 0:07:56 | |
Rewinding a bit to the middle of the film... | 0:07:56 | 0:07:59 | |
Interestingly, you said this shows a very confident view of Scotland. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
That is different from Trainspotting. | 0:08:02 | 0:08:05 | |
One of the most famous speeches in Trainspotting was about the cultural cringe, | 0:08:05 | 0:08:08 | |
about Scotland kowtowing to England. | 0:08:08 | 0:08:10 | |
So it's a very different mood. Yes, there's a great line...I'm going to paraphrase it. | 0:08:10 | 0:08:14 | |
John Sessions is saying, "This isn't anywhere. This is Scotland, for Christ's sake!" | 0:08:14 | 0:08:18 | |
There is a real sense that this is coming from a culture that exists | 0:08:18 | 0:08:21 | |
and if you don't quite understand the words, there's context, and you'll get it. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:25 | |
And it's just coming from a place. | 0:08:25 | 0:08:28 | |
In the way that it's enjoyable to be with those people, | 0:08:28 | 0:08:30 | |
it's enjoyable to be with a place, | 0:08:30 | 0:08:32 | |
and although it's very dark, it's just full of kind of life and energy. | 0:08:32 | 0:08:35 | |
I know that Baird was influenced by things like Clockwork Orange. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:40 | |
A kind of different, very imaginative, energetic sort of British cinema | 0:08:40 | 0:08:45 | |
that's been blanded as we've tried to go for Hollywood. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:49 | |
Absolutely. That's why it would be wonderful to see as the beginning of a series. | 0:08:49 | 0:08:52 | |
It IS the equivalent of a Carry On. | 0:08:52 | 0:08:55 | |
The same kind of... Shirley Henderson, we haven't mentioned her. It's an amazing ensemble cast. | 0:08:55 | 0:08:59 | |
But it's giving... You're talking about Carry On. Yes, there are funny moments. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:04 | |
But it's very dark as well. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:06 | |
Carry On was quite dark. Bruce Robertson, he's disintegrating | 0:09:06 | 0:09:10 | |
before our eyes, isn't he? | 0:09:10 | 0:09:12 | |
The sex scenes... I'm not going to mention because I don't want to give away any of the plot! | 0:09:12 | 0:09:16 | |
But the...the sex phone calls involving Frank Sidebottom | 0:09:16 | 0:09:19 | |
with Shirley Henderson... | 0:09:19 | 0:09:21 | |
That scene is both grotesque | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
and funny | 0:09:24 | 0:09:26 | |
and weirdly erotic. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:28 | |
And it's the same, as you said, about his treatment of drugs. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:31 | |
It's amoral. | 0:09:31 | 0:09:32 | |
He shows the good side of drugs, the fun side, | 0:09:32 | 0:09:34 | |
and the bad side. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:36 | |
So it's all mashed up. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:38 | |
And it's not prurient. They've worked out - not to give anything away - lots of ways to do things | 0:09:38 | 0:09:42 | |
that it would conceivably be quite upsetting to do from other angles. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:47 | |
They've worked out a curiously polite way to do a lot of really terrible things. | 0:09:47 | 0:09:51 | |
And it's rooted in a great piece of writing. | 0:09:51 | 0:09:53 | |
And even though there's certain things they cannot do | 0:09:53 | 0:09:56 | |
because it could only be done in writing, they've managed to find a cinematic way of doing it. | 0:09:56 | 0:10:00 | |
Like the hallucinations, which could have been, you know, he starts, and we see it very early on in the film, | 0:10:00 | 0:10:05 | |
he envisages the characters as different animals. | 0:10:05 | 0:10:08 | |
It could have been comical, but actually it's rather frightening, I think. | 0:10:08 | 0:10:11 | |
Very. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:12 | |
You're wondering for quite a lot of the film why it is that this handsome man who's always... | 0:10:12 | 0:10:17 | |
I mean, he is quite handsome underneath the revoltingness, | 0:10:17 | 0:10:19 | |
and he's supposed to be quite sexually attractive to women. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:22 | |
..why he can never quite get it up. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:24 | |
Then when the hallucinations start kicking in, | 0:10:24 | 0:10:27 | |
you realise exactly why, because it's rather horrible. | 0:10:27 | 0:10:30 | |
It's incredibly hard to get hallucinations or heightened reality right as a director | 0:10:30 | 0:10:34 | |
or as an actor. | 0:10:34 | 0:10:36 | |
Again, I would emphasise just how good that performance is. | 0:10:36 | 0:10:39 | |
That's why it's a revelation for McAvoy. I think it is his breakthrough role. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:43 | |
When you can see everything he can do. I think we're agreed. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:46 | |
From now on, even his next five roles, as weak as they could be, he's OK now. | 0:10:46 | 0:10:49 | |
It was a risk worth taking. | 0:10:49 | 0:10:51 | |
I think it'll be a Yuletide classic, to rank with It's A Wonderful Life and The Muppet Christmas Movie. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:56 | |
I doubt that very much, | 0:10:56 | 0:10:58 | |
but this Yuletide classic, Filth, opens in cinemas in Scotland on the 27th of this month | 0:10:58 | 0:11:03 | |
and it's being released right round the country on the 4th of October. | 0:11:03 | 0:11:07 | |
There's plenty more violence and moral collapse | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
in a new BBC2 series, Peaky Blinders, | 0:11:10 | 0:11:12 | |
referring to gangsters' cloth caps laced with razor blades. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:17 | |
This time, though, the mean streets are in Birmingham | 0:11:17 | 0:11:19 | |
and the setting is the aftermath of the First World War. | 0:11:19 | 0:11:23 | |
The Peaky Blinders were a notorious gang in Birmingham's slums. | 0:11:26 | 0:11:30 | |
Dealing in bookmaking and protection rackets, | 0:11:30 | 0:11:33 | |
their distinctive brand of violence | 0:11:33 | 0:11:35 | |
made them widely feared. | 0:11:35 | 0:11:37 | |
Cillian Murphy plays Thomas Shelby. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:40 | |
Fresh from the front lines of the Great War, | 0:11:40 | 0:11:42 | |
he's the ruthless head of the clan. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:45 | |
Sir, this is her. | 0:11:45 | 0:11:47 | |
The girl who tells fortunes. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:49 | |
WHISPERED INCANTATIONS | 0:12:04 | 0:12:07 | |
It's important to do the research and know the historical context. | 0:12:22 | 0:12:27 | |
These men were just sent back from the trenches, sent back from France | 0:12:27 | 0:12:30 | |
and just spat out into society. | 0:12:30 | 0:12:32 | |
I read a lot of books about the First World War and the trenches, | 0:12:33 | 0:12:37 | |
and he's come back and he's been decorated, | 0:12:37 | 0:12:39 | |
and he's seen something, but he's a changed man. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:41 | |
Are you Lee boys laughing at my brother? | 0:12:41 | 0:12:44 | |
Are you? | 0:12:47 | 0:12:48 | |
Eh? | 0:12:48 | 0:12:49 | |
Tommy! Tommy! Tommy! I asked you a question. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:52 | |
Tommy, come on, it's just the craic! | 0:12:52 | 0:12:54 | |
Get your family out of here and go to the fair before you start a war. | 0:12:54 | 0:12:59 | |
These were stories that were told to me in snapshots - | 0:12:59 | 0:13:02 | |
really, really limited amounts, | 0:13:02 | 0:13:04 | |
but just little glimpses of a world | 0:13:04 | 0:13:07 | |
where my dad used to take messages to his uncles | 0:13:07 | 0:13:10 | |
who were all immaculately dressed gangsters, | 0:13:10 | 0:13:12 | |
sitting round a table covered in money. | 0:13:12 | 0:13:14 | |
Birmingham was pounding out stuff made of metal | 0:13:14 | 0:13:18 | |
24 hours a day, and so add to that this great influx | 0:13:18 | 0:13:23 | |
of damaged war veterans with their guns, | 0:13:23 | 0:13:25 | |
add to that the political situation with communists | 0:13:25 | 0:13:28 | |
who wanted to change the world, | 0:13:28 | 0:13:30 | |
add to that the new policemen... | 0:13:30 | 0:13:31 | |
You know, all of these layers come in | 0:13:31 | 0:13:33 | |
and all I'm doing is looking at what really was there. | 0:13:33 | 0:13:37 | |
They're approaching Protestant Irishmen | 0:13:37 | 0:13:39 | |
to come over here as specials. | 0:13:39 | 0:13:41 | |
To do what? | 0:13:41 | 0:13:42 | |
To clean up the city, Ada. | 0:13:42 | 0:13:44 | |
He's the chief inspector. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:46 | |
The last four years, he's been clearing the IRA out of Belfast. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:50 | |
How do you know so bloody much? | 0:13:50 | 0:13:52 | |
Cos I asked the coppers on our payroll. | 0:13:52 | 0:13:55 | |
Why didn't you tell me? | 0:13:55 | 0:13:57 | |
I'm telling you. | 0:13:59 | 0:14:00 | |
James, Filth, which we were discussing - set in Edinburgh, got a very strong sense of this. | 0:14:06 | 0:14:11 | |
Peaky Blinders in Birmingham - does it have the same sense of place, do you think? | 0:14:11 | 0:14:17 | |
It's got a very strong sense of place, | 0:14:17 | 0:14:19 | |
but not anything to do with Birmingham, I don't think, | 0:14:19 | 0:14:22 | |
starting with the accents. | 0:14:22 | 0:14:23 | |
The accents seem to belong to | 0:14:23 | 0:14:25 | |
a sort of melange of generic northern, | 0:14:25 | 0:14:29 | |
Liverpudlian and Irish. | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
Birmingham barely gets a look-in. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:34 | |
And as a Brummie myself - as you can probably tell by my accent(!) | 0:14:34 | 0:14:38 | |
Talking of dodgy accents(!) BRUMMIE: I feel slightly cheated, I do. | 0:14:38 | 0:14:41 | |
You would. I do, because Birmingham doesn't normally get a look-in, our kid. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:47 | |
Normally it's places like Manchester or London. | 0:14:47 | 0:14:49 | |
Because unfortunately, Birmingham hasn't had its own screenwriter - | 0:14:49 | 0:14:53 | |
the north had Alan Bleasdale and Paul Abbott, and London's had loads of people. | 0:14:53 | 0:14:58 | |
So Birmingham gets its first shot of being on TV... | 0:14:58 | 0:15:02 | |
It ain't there. And...it ain't there! No. | 0:15:02 | 0:15:06 | |
Our kid, it's rubbish! | 0:15:06 | 0:15:08 | |
I'm not going to attempt the accent, but did you think it was rubbish as well? | 0:15:08 | 0:15:12 | |
My parents were from there and, yes, I don't know where these people are from! | 0:15:12 | 0:15:15 | |
It's really quite painful, and it's difficult to act if you're not actually placed. | 0:15:15 | 0:15:19 | |
And I know that Stephen Knight, his parents are from there and he was born in Birmingham, | 0:15:19 | 0:15:24 | |
but it doesn't have either the accent of the kind of music of place. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:29 | |
If you think of James Mitchell writing When The Boat Comes In... | 0:15:29 | 0:15:32 | |
In a way, quite similar period. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:34 | |
Really rooted, and there was this upswelling of interest in the Northeast. | 0:15:34 | 0:15:38 | |
Or you think of Dennis Potter not always writing about the Forest of Dean, | 0:15:38 | 0:15:41 | |
but definitely being from there, having that music. | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
And, yeah, Birmingham never gets a look-in, not since Second City First, | 0:15:44 | 0:15:48 | |
which was, what, the '60s, '70s? And it's such an interesting place. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:51 | |
Does that lack of authenticity matter, Paul? Doesn't bother me in the slightest. | 0:15:51 | 0:15:55 | |
I was thinking Jim Baines, late 1970s, Crossroads, | 0:15:55 | 0:15:57 | |
for the Birmingham accent, maybe early Ozzy Osbourne. | 0:15:57 | 0:16:00 | |
Didn't bother me in the slightest. It's a fabled place, and as such, | 0:16:00 | 0:16:03 | |
in many ways, that was what I loved about it. | 0:16:03 | 0:16:05 | |
It was the closest I've seen British TV get to the HBO, cable TV classics | 0:16:05 | 0:16:09 | |
that we're all in thrall to at the moment. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:12 | |
And I loved the music too - the use of the Dirty Three | 0:16:12 | 0:16:15 | |
or the White Stripes or the Black Keys or Nick Cave. | 0:16:15 | 0:16:18 | |
Because it wasn't important to me that necessarily it was geographically saying Birmingham. | 0:16:18 | 0:16:23 | |
It was giving me an idea of a historical moment, | 0:16:23 | 0:16:27 | |
and in that sense, it was terrifically, absolutely brilliant. | 0:16:27 | 0:16:30 | |
The accents... You've been giving me a worse accent than a Birmingham accent I've ever heard! | 0:16:30 | 0:16:35 | |
You're from Manchester, so you don't care about Birmingham. | 0:16:35 | 0:16:39 | |
One of the things I loved about this was that it was giving me an idea of a history and a place. | 0:16:39 | 0:16:45 | |
I don't care about the accents in Game Of Thrones. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
I don't really give a shit about the accents in this. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:50 | |
It's not important. | 0:16:50 | 0:16:51 | |
Did you not feel...? There was an awful lot of exposition, and you did get a lot of facts, | 0:16:51 | 0:16:55 | |
because people were kind of explaining things to each other a hell of a lot. | 0:16:55 | 0:16:59 | |
There was one line where she said, "So-and-so, he's your best friend from school". | 0:16:59 | 0:17:04 | |
And we also learn that during the First World War, | 0:17:04 | 0:17:09 | |
women have taken on a more important role back at home. | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
Who would have thought that, eh(?) Can you imagine?! | 0:17:12 | 0:17:15 | |
Well, this, I suppose, was the social history that you enjoyed. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:18 | |
It didn't bother me. | 0:17:18 | 0:17:20 | |
And I thought it was the best use of Churchill I've seen as well. | 0:17:20 | 0:17:22 | |
I LOVE the use of Churchill! | 0:17:22 | 0:17:24 | |
Fantastic. And the accretion of subtlety that I think is important | 0:17:24 | 0:17:28 | |
and Cillian Murphy, the way he's developing. | 0:17:28 | 0:17:30 | |
And Helen McCrory. | 0:17:30 | 0:17:32 | |
And some of the things we adore at the moment have been going six, seven, eight series. | 0:17:32 | 0:17:36 | |
And if you go back to the first or the second, | 0:17:36 | 0:17:38 | |
then maybe we would have already jumped upon them. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:41 | |
I could see this going through the whole of the 20th century, | 0:17:41 | 0:17:44 | |
and I would be quite enjoying the fifth and sixth series. | 0:17:44 | 0:17:47 | |
Did you use the word "subtlety" in the context of this programme? | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
You bet, James! When Cillian Murphy walks into a bar, | 0:17:50 | 0:17:54 | |
they seem to superimpose a halo on his head | 0:17:54 | 0:17:56 | |
and he seems to have been bathing his cheeks in asses' milk beforehand... | 0:17:56 | 0:18:00 | |
I think that's what he looks like. He is very attractive. | 0:18:00 | 0:18:03 | |
He is very pretty, but... Jealousy! | 0:18:03 | 0:18:05 | |
OK, he's slightly better-looking than me, | 0:18:05 | 0:18:07 | |
but it is so stylised. The other thing I really object to - I'm sorry - as a Brummie... | 0:18:07 | 0:18:12 | |
Birmingham people are the funniest people in the world. | 0:18:14 | 0:18:16 | |
Not me, but Brummies in general. | 0:18:16 | 0:18:19 | |
And there was no sense of that humour, that banter that you get in the Midlands. | 0:18:19 | 0:18:23 | |
There was none of it. It was very, very serious. Very up itself, I thought. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:26 | |
You'd got the right name for the chemist, but you hadn't got that sort of city... | 0:18:26 | 0:18:31 | |
I wanted to love it. I wanted to see... | 0:18:31 | 0:18:33 | |
It is great to see Sam Neill up against Cillian Murphy | 0:18:33 | 0:18:35 | |
and see them acting at each other - OK, in bizarre voices. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:39 | |
I want to love it. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:40 | |
And I hope it does turn into Boardwalk Empire. | 0:18:40 | 0:18:42 | |
I'm very suspicious about the attempts British television has made | 0:18:42 | 0:18:45 | |
to try and join in with this wonderful television | 0:18:45 | 0:18:48 | |
that's coming from different Golden Ages from other worlds. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:51 | |
This was the closest... There's a kind of intelligence about it that I really adored. | 0:18:51 | 0:18:54 | |
Not least in the way they used the music, | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
and the way they were using that combination of cinema and novel-writing, | 0:18:57 | 0:19:01 | |
but creating a third thing, which is a new kind of television. | 0:19:01 | 0:19:04 | |
This for me was the moment when I saw it growing. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:06 | |
And the production values are very high. | 0:19:06 | 0:19:08 | |
Yes, and it's very cinematic, | 0:19:08 | 0:19:10 | |
maybe in a way that isn't all that suitable necessarily to television. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:13 | |
But there are these kind of staid moments. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:16 | |
There's an Irish mole | 0:19:16 | 0:19:18 | |
who has to sing, who isn't a terribly good singer. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
I don't know if that's kind of a joke or what goes on with that. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:24 | |
Then you've got the pub singing, but it's all very... | 0:19:24 | 0:19:26 | |
Maybe that soap element that is the heart of this | 0:19:26 | 0:19:29 | |
is because, you know, you didn't watch Crossroads, did you? | 0:19:29 | 0:19:33 | |
You didn't watch Prisoner: Cell Block H. I watched it at my grandmother's knee. | 0:19:33 | 0:19:36 | |
I like the combination. There's a soap element, but there's this other resonant, glorious element | 0:19:36 | 0:19:40 | |
that I'm really liking as television. | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
It's got so much money in it, though, and I just wanted it to REALLY work, | 0:19:43 | 0:19:47 | |
because some of the shots, and the horse coming in... | 0:19:47 | 0:19:49 | |
They go to the gypsy fair. Yes. | 0:19:49 | 0:19:52 | |
The cart. With the golden light, it looks beautiful. Great. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:54 | |
But it is proof that you can polish a turd. That's the problem. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
Well, I don't know if it's quite...cloacal. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:00 | |
It's not The Sopranos, is it? | 0:20:00 | 0:20:02 | |
What about the view of gangsters which we've seen certainly in Sopranos and so many other dramas? | 0:20:02 | 0:20:06 | |
I mean, the glamorisation of the gangster world? | 0:20:06 | 0:20:09 | |
There's somebody in a an office somewhere, thinking, | 0:20:09 | 0:20:12 | |
"Oh, God, let there not be hat-related crime | 0:20:12 | 0:20:15 | |
"after we've shown the episodes of this". | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
I mean, yeah... Hat rage! | 0:20:18 | 0:20:20 | |
I think, you know, it is tapping into... | 0:20:20 | 0:20:24 | |
You mention your disappointment that it doesn't give you Birmingham | 0:20:24 | 0:20:27 | |
and it doesn't give you The Sopranos either. | 0:20:27 | 0:20:29 | |
I'm surprised by that, | 0:20:29 | 0:20:31 | |
because in a way, the insight and the beginning of many sophisticated responses to a moment in history... | 0:20:31 | 0:20:38 | |
I mean, you're being cynical about the idea of the women being in control during the war... | 0:20:38 | 0:20:44 | |
No, I'm cynical about the way it's presented. | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
It's a historical fact. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:49 | |
Personally, I think it's a really good insight into something that we lack. | 0:20:49 | 0:20:53 | |
It's the beginning of... There's much to plunder in British culture | 0:20:53 | 0:20:58 | |
that hasn't been plundered. | 0:20:58 | 0:20:59 | |
That's the frustrating thing. It's all there. Birmingham is fascinating. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:02 | |
The history's there, the women are there... Opium, sex... | 0:21:02 | 0:21:05 | |
Italians, Chinese... | 0:21:05 | 0:21:07 | |
But it should all work, and maybe it's just got slightly too much. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:11 | |
Well, you can make your own minds up | 0:21:11 | 0:21:13 | |
and decide if you like hat-related crime in Peaky Blinders, | 0:21:13 | 0:21:16 | |
which continues on BBC2 on Thursday night. | 0:21:16 | 0:21:19 | |
Now, it's quite a move, isn't it, | 0:21:19 | 0:21:21 | |
from the family entertainment of Matilda The Musical | 0:21:21 | 0:21:23 | |
to a Faustian pact, | 0:21:23 | 0:21:25 | |
but the playwright Dennis Kelly has always been eclectic, | 0:21:25 | 0:21:29 | |
enjoying recent success on Channel 4 with Utopia. | 0:21:29 | 0:21:31 | |
His modern morality play at the Royal Court Theatre in London, | 0:21:31 | 0:21:35 | |
The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas, | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
traces one man's journey from childhood innocence | 0:21:38 | 0:21:41 | |
to a downfall caused by naked ambition and greed. | 0:21:41 | 0:21:45 | |
Gorge Mastromas was conceived on the 15th of July 1973. | 0:21:49 | 0:21:53 | |
It was a warm and balmy night, not too hot, | 0:21:53 | 0:21:56 | |
with a gentle breeze coming in through open summer windows. | 0:21:56 | 0:21:58 | |
It had rained earlier that day, | 0:21:58 | 0:22:00 | |
but the air was now clear, | 0:22:00 | 0:22:02 | |
and the night had a softness to it that felt like... | 0:22:02 | 0:22:06 | |
..a pause. | 0:22:07 | 0:22:08 | |
The lovemaking was not particularly enjoyable. | 0:22:08 | 0:22:10 | |
But neither was it particularly unpleasant. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:13 | |
George's father had not been in the mood. | 0:22:13 | 0:22:15 | |
George's mother had not been in the mood. | 0:22:15 | 0:22:17 | |
In keeping with his unremarkable start in life, | 0:22:17 | 0:22:20 | |
Gorge, played by Tom Brooke, | 0:22:20 | 0:22:22 | |
grows up to be an ordinary guy who always tries to do the right thing. | 0:22:22 | 0:22:26 | |
However, one day at work, Gorge is faced with a moral dilemma | 0:22:26 | 0:22:30 | |
which forces him to choose between his own code of honour | 0:22:30 | 0:22:34 | |
and self-advancement, which could propel him into a life | 0:22:34 | 0:22:37 | |
that's anything but ordinary. | 0:22:37 | 0:22:39 | |
Now, I'm going to make this quite quick, because I've only got two minutes and 23 seconds left. | 0:22:39 | 0:22:44 | |
Existence is not what you have, up until this moment, thought it is. | 0:22:44 | 0:22:49 | |
It is not fair. | 0:22:49 | 0:22:51 | |
It is not kind. It is not just. | 0:22:51 | 0:22:53 | |
The majority of the universe is, in fact, | 0:22:53 | 0:22:56 | |
so cold it would freeze the water in your eyes in an instant. | 0:22:56 | 0:22:59 | |
The rest - great big balls of fire surrounded by clumps of matter. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:05 | |
Matter | 0:23:05 | 0:23:07 | |
doesn't care. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:08 | |
Most of the world are ignorant of this. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:11 | |
The believe in God or Marx | 0:23:11 | 0:23:14 | |
or the unseen hand of the market | 0:23:14 | 0:23:16 | |
or honesty...or goodness. | 0:23:16 | 0:23:19 | |
It's a bold start for Vicky Featherstone's directorial debut | 0:23:21 | 0:23:25 | |
since taking the helm of the Royal Court earlier this year. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:28 | |
The play reflects contemporary themes like financial collapse | 0:23:28 | 0:23:32 | |
and child abuse, | 0:23:32 | 0:23:34 | |
with Kelly taking the implosion of the property boom | 0:23:34 | 0:23:37 | |
as the starting point for his take on late-20th-century capitalism | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
and what he sees as a climate of greed. | 0:23:40 | 0:23:43 | |
Gorge was remade in those few tiny, eternal seconds. | 0:23:46 | 0:23:50 | |
His rules were born, his mantra, | 0:23:50 | 0:23:53 | |
his new way of life, his three golden rules. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:57 | |
1 - Whenever you want something, | 0:23:57 | 0:23:59 | |
take it. | 0:23:59 | 0:24:00 | |
2 - All that is required to take everything you want | 0:24:00 | 0:24:03 | |
is absolute will and an ability to lie to the depths of your heart. | 0:24:03 | 0:24:07 | |
3 - The effectiveness of a lie | 0:24:07 | 0:24:08 | |
is compromised only by your attachment to the outcome of the lie. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:12 | |
Therefore, never think of the outcome. | 0:24:12 | 0:24:15 | |
Always assume discovery. Embrace each second as if it were your last. | 0:24:15 | 0:24:19 | |
Never, ever regret. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:21 | |
Three simple rules. Three golden rules for life. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:24 | |
And when Gorge looked at that old man, | 0:24:24 | 0:24:27 | |
he looked at him with fresh and energetic new eyes. | 0:24:27 | 0:24:31 | |
New and beautiful eyes, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:33 | |
and he opened his mouth and he said... | 0:24:33 | 0:24:36 | |
Yes. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:37 | |
You must sell. | 0:24:37 | 0:24:39 | |
Paul, we got a very strong sense in that short extract | 0:24:43 | 0:24:46 | |
of the chorus, the way the chorus is used. | 0:24:46 | 0:24:48 | |
And the first 30 minutes just has the actors in chairs on the stage, | 0:24:48 | 0:24:53 | |
giving what I thought was... It was about Gorge's early life. | 0:24:53 | 0:24:56 | |
But a really interesting insight into the politics of the playground. | 0:24:56 | 0:25:00 | |
Well, yes, but then the whole play | 0:25:00 | 0:25:03 | |
becomes five or six versions of something. | 0:25:03 | 0:25:07 | |
It doesn't stay there - it goes somewhere else. | 0:25:07 | 0:25:09 | |
It was strange for me, | 0:25:09 | 0:25:11 | |
because it was very, very weird. | 0:25:11 | 0:25:13 | |
I don't know if it was deliberately weird or unintentionally weird. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
I couldn't quite work it out at all. | 0:25:16 | 0:25:18 | |
It had a kind of strange quality, where I loved everything about it except the play. | 0:25:18 | 0:25:23 | |
I love the setting, I love the acting, I love the timing, the comic timing, | 0:25:23 | 0:25:27 | |
I love the lighting, I love the music, | 0:25:27 | 0:25:28 | |
but the words themselves struck me as being | 0:25:28 | 0:25:31 | |
a writer who's desperately looking for something to say | 0:25:31 | 0:25:34 | |
and had absolutely nothing to say in the end. | 0:25:34 | 0:25:36 | |
And so, absolutely, that first part is wonderful | 0:25:36 | 0:25:39 | |
because of the comic timing that elevates some of the language | 0:25:39 | 0:25:42 | |
to be somewhat wittier than it might otherwise be. | 0:25:42 | 0:25:45 | |
Then we have another thing. We have five or six pieces that don't fit together, | 0:25:45 | 0:25:49 | |
where ultimately the cast seem trapped by something that doesn't lead anywhere. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:52 | |
I found it utterly underwhelming. | 0:25:52 | 0:25:55 | |
James, did the content strike you in the same way? | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
Yeah, I thought it was... I agree with Paul, actually. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:01 | |
Happily! | 0:26:01 | 0:26:02 | |
Less than the sum of its parts, I thought. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:05 | |
Whereas with the Irvine Welsh movie, | 0:26:05 | 0:26:08 | |
the more I thought about it afterwards, the better it got in my imagination. | 0:26:08 | 0:26:12 | |
I think it's a really good piece of work. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
This one, the more I analysed it afterwards, | 0:26:14 | 0:26:17 | |
the less impressive it became. | 0:26:17 | 0:26:19 | |
I enjoyed it at the time. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:21 | |
I thought the cast were really enthusiastic. | 0:26:21 | 0:26:23 | |
That scene where they're sitting there, they really draw you in. | 0:26:23 | 0:26:27 | |
And then it just goes a bit floppy. | 0:26:27 | 0:26:30 | |
But what about the quality of the writing? | 0:26:30 | 0:26:32 | |
Here and there, I would maybe have snipped it a bit. | 0:26:32 | 0:26:35 | |
And unless they were forgetting things... It may be they had snipped it a bit. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:40 | |
I liked it much more than these guys. I like everything! | 0:26:40 | 0:26:43 | |
I'm just in a good mood. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:45 | |
You're the right generation for this then! I think it's quite a delicate thing. | 0:26:45 | 0:26:50 | |
Filth is on a knife edge and it's the right side of the knife edge | 0:26:50 | 0:26:54 | |
and either they'll find a way of performing a text | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
that's quite light and it's funny, but you have to handle the humour | 0:26:57 | 0:27:01 | |
or...particularly at the end... | 0:27:01 | 0:27:04 | |
I don't think the end is quite firing. There seems to be a time gap. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:09 | |
But you have to say, Tom Brooke playing Gorge - he's remarkable. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:12 | |
I sometimes felt it had the logic of a dream, and I was trying to give it the benefit of the doubt. | 0:27:12 | 0:27:16 | |
Is this meant to be this strange and weird? | 0:27:16 | 0:27:18 | |
And I decided in the end, thinking about it more, that it was just clumsy. | 0:27:18 | 0:27:22 | |
I just think it's a very, very bad piece of writing. | 0:27:22 | 0:27:25 | |
At the centre of this production, there's a guy who's got very little to say, doesn't know how to say it, | 0:27:25 | 0:27:30 | |
and he's very good on technique, on craft - he can do a lot of different things - | 0:27:30 | 0:27:33 | |
but what comes home in the end is he didn't really have any idea what he wanted to write about. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:37 | |
Well, I suppose what he's writing about... | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
It's a modern morality play. | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
It's an attack on capitalism, isn't it? | 0:27:43 | 0:27:45 | |
Well, it decides that at the end. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:48 | |
If you're going to do an updated Marlowe... | 0:27:48 | 0:27:50 | |
At the end of Dr Faustus, | 0:27:50 | 0:27:51 | |
Dr Faustus gets dragged down to hell by the demons. | 0:27:51 | 0:27:54 | |
This one, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying | 0:27:54 | 0:27:57 | |
that the actors just stumble off apologetically, | 0:27:57 | 0:28:00 | |
rather embarrassed about the conclusion that's been written for it. | 0:28:00 | 0:28:03 | |
It feels like a workshop production | 0:28:03 | 0:28:05 | |
that could really do with a bit of shape. Five or six, because of the sections. | 0:28:05 | 0:28:10 | |
There's different ways of approaching something, | 0:28:10 | 0:28:13 | |
looking for something, so you do get the seven characters looking for something. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:17 | |
You get six or seven scenes looking for something. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:19 | |
And it's all done, and we're all hyped up for this thing to happen. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:23 | |
But nothing seems to be happening, because at the centre of it, it's about nothing. | 0:28:23 | 0:28:26 | |
One of the sections touches on another contemporary theme - | 0:28:26 | 0:28:30 | |
child abuse and misery memoirs, which I thought was very effective. | 0:28:30 | 0:28:36 | |
It is. It's not really about that - it's about somebody doing something incredibly despicable, | 0:28:36 | 0:28:41 | |
which was to appropriate all the architecture to advance themselves, | 0:28:41 | 0:28:44 | |
so it's not really looking at abuse per se. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:47 | |
Not at all. No, no. It's not the play being cheap and nasty, it's Gorge being cheap and nasty. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:51 | |
But on behalf of writers, it's very difficult to write about what he's writing about, | 0:28:51 | 0:28:55 | |
particularly at the end, because what are you going to do? | 0:28:55 | 0:28:58 | |
There's a world revolution that hasn't happened yet and wouldn't? | 0:28:58 | 0:29:01 | |
Is there a literal slaughter? | 0:29:01 | 0:29:03 | |
Is there, what you've been getting an awful lot lately, | 0:29:03 | 0:29:06 | |
everybody has a love-in and we all dream together and somehow it works out? | 0:29:06 | 0:29:10 | |
It's like you seem to be ticking off things... | 0:29:10 | 0:29:12 | |
Because at the centre of this, | 0:29:12 | 0:29:14 | |
he has to write something for these people to speak and for there to be a stage setting, | 0:29:14 | 0:29:17 | |
but suddenly it becomes the memoirs, the misery memoirs. | 0:29:17 | 0:29:21 | |
Suddenly it becomes this. Suddenly it becomes the Howard Hughes recluse who's made too much money. | 0:29:21 | 0:29:26 | |
It just seemed to be ticking off things, rather than tackling them. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
Hasn't it got a unified idea of one man's moral decline, | 0:29:29 | 0:29:33 | |
in the way we were talking about, in the other items earlier? | 0:29:33 | 0:29:35 | |
The initial premise is really, really interesting. | 0:29:35 | 0:29:38 | |
This idea that, in the first part of his life, | 0:29:38 | 0:29:42 | |
he has done the right thing. He's done the right thing by his friends, by his girlfriends and stuff. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:49 | |
He's taken the path of goodness. | 0:29:49 | 0:29:52 | |
But is it really goodness, or is it cowardice? | 0:29:52 | 0:29:54 | |
Is it just because he's not seizing life by the horns, as it were? | 0:29:54 | 0:29:58 | |
Is he not embracing the world and taking the bold move? | 0:29:58 | 0:30:01 | |
I think a lot of us have thought about this. | 0:30:01 | 0:30:03 | |
We've sleepwalked through our lives, | 0:30:03 | 0:30:05 | |
sort of done what seems to be right, | 0:30:05 | 0:30:08 | |
but maybe we should take the bolder, aggressive course. | 0:30:08 | 0:30:10 | |
But then he gives... | 0:30:10 | 0:30:13 | |
We didn't meet Mrs Faust, did we? | 0:30:13 | 0:30:14 | |
He doesn't show us an alternative. | 0:30:14 | 0:30:17 | |
If we did lead a good life, what would happen? | 0:30:17 | 0:30:19 | |
We only learn that, if you become very rich, | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
you become rather selfish and...well, that's it. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:26 | |
There's also this thing with this generation of the moment... | 0:30:26 | 0:30:29 | |
Because this is very much born in the early '70s, | 0:30:29 | 0:30:31 | |
so the generation becomes, "I'm going to talk about what it was like at school, | 0:30:31 | 0:30:34 | |
"then about the moment I started raving, | 0:30:34 | 0:30:36 | |
"then about that moment that I'm not sure what happened, because everybody started to become..." | 0:30:36 | 0:30:40 | |
It seemed to hit really banal beats, without really amplifying | 0:30:40 | 0:30:44 | |
some of those moments of the latter part of the 20th century. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:47 | |
It just seemed to be ticking off subjects, rather than actually getting stuck in. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:51 | |
OK. Well, The Ritual Slaughter Of Gorge Mastromas | 0:30:51 | 0:30:53 | |
is running at the Royal Court in London until the 19th of October. | 0:30:53 | 0:30:57 | |
Still to come tonight, | 0:30:57 | 0:30:59 | |
the art of Bob Dylan at the National Portrait Gallery | 0:30:59 | 0:31:02 | |
and the new comic novel from Jonathan Coe. | 0:31:02 | 0:31:04 | |
Now, though, the first of two tracks from the Manic Street Preachers, | 0:31:04 | 0:31:08 | |
whose new album is out tomorrow. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:10 | |
Here's James Dean Bradfield and Gavin Fitzjohn | 0:31:10 | 0:31:13 | |
with Show Me The Wonder. | 0:31:13 | 0:31:15 | |
# This is no threat | 0:31:22 | 0:31:24 | |
# Just an invitation | 0:31:25 | 0:31:27 | |
# A sense of belonging | 0:31:28 | 0:31:31 | |
# A sense of inspiration | 0:31:32 | 0:31:35 | |
# Is heaven a place | 0:31:36 | 0:31:38 | |
# Where nothing ever happens | 0:31:40 | 0:31:42 | |
# Is it too much to ask | 0:31:42 | 0:31:46 | |
# To disbelieve in everything | 0:31:47 | 0:31:49 | |
# Show me the wonder | 0:31:52 | 0:31:54 | |
# I have seen the birthplace of the universe | 0:31:54 | 0:31:59 | |
# Show me the wonder | 0:31:59 | 0:32:01 | |
# I have seen miracles move in reverse | 0:32:01 | 0:32:06 | |
# If you're exiled | 0:32:11 | 0:32:13 | |
# By all the cruel tongues | 0:32:13 | 0:32:17 | |
# Then show me the wonder | 0:32:17 | 0:32:20 | |
# The wonder of your love | 0:32:22 | 0:32:24 | |
# A tapping pain of madness | 0:32:26 | 0:32:28 | |
# Running through the veins | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
# We may write in English | 0:32:32 | 0:32:35 | |
# But our truth remains in Wales | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
# Show me the wonder | 0:32:42 | 0:32:44 | |
# I have seen the birthplace of the universe | 0:32:44 | 0:32:48 | |
# Show me the wonder | 0:32:50 | 0:32:51 | |
# I have seen miracles move in reverse | 0:32:51 | 0:32:56 | |
# Praying for the silence | 0:33:09 | 0:33:11 | |
# When we look into the mirror | 0:33:11 | 0:33:14 | |
# Staying so patient | 0:33:15 | 0:33:18 | |
# We measure the nostalgia | 0:33:19 | 0:33:22 | |
# Is heaven a place | 0:33:24 | 0:33:25 | |
# Where nothing ever happens | 0:33:27 | 0:33:29 | |
# Is it too much to ask | 0:33:30 | 0:33:33 | |
# To disbelieve in everything | 0:33:34 | 0:33:37 | |
# Show me the wonder | 0:33:40 | 0:33:41 | |
# I have seen the birthplace of the universe | 0:33:41 | 0:33:46 | |
# Show me the wonder | 0:33:47 | 0:33:48 | |
# I have seen miracles move in reverse | 0:33:48 | 0:33:54 | |
# Show me the wonder | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
# I have seen miracles move in reverse. # | 0:34:03 | 0:34:08 | |
James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers with Show Me The Wonder. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:33 | |
And there'll be another track from James at the end of tonight's how. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:36 | |
Now, did you know that Francis Bacon once asked Henry Moore | 0:34:36 | 0:34:39 | |
for sculpture lessons? | 0:34:39 | 0:34:41 | |
Just one of the revelations at a new exhibition in Oxford | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
which highlights the shared influences and passions | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
of two of the 20th century's best-known artists, | 0:34:47 | 0:34:50 | |
who are traditionally seen as being poles apart. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:53 | |
At first glance, these two giants of 20th-century art | 0:34:53 | 0:34:58 | |
may seem to have little in common. | 0:34:58 | 0:35:00 | |
One worked in paint, the other, in stone and bronze. | 0:35:02 | 0:35:06 | |
While Moore gained renown for serene sculptures of the human form, | 0:35:09 | 0:35:13 | |
Bacon's figures are often distorted and tormented. | 0:35:13 | 0:35:16 | |
But a new exhibition finds fresh comparisons | 0:35:19 | 0:35:21 | |
between the two great men, bringing their work together | 0:35:21 | 0:35:24 | |
for the first time in 50 years. | 0:35:24 | 0:35:26 | |
Both men's work was shaped | 0:35:28 | 0:35:30 | |
by living through two world wars. | 0:35:30 | 0:35:31 | |
Moore celebrated human stoicism | 0:35:31 | 0:35:35 | |
through sketches in the mines... | 0:35:35 | 0:35:36 | |
..while Bacon's art is twisted in torment. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:40 | |
But by placing their work shoulder to shoulder, | 0:35:42 | 0:35:45 | |
the exhibition shows a more monumental, | 0:35:45 | 0:35:47 | |
sculptural side to his paintings | 0:35:47 | 0:35:49 | |
and all the influences shared by the two men, | 0:35:49 | 0:35:53 | |
from the classical world to Picasso. | 0:35:53 | 0:35:56 | |
At the National Portrait Gallery, | 0:36:00 | 0:36:02 | |
the work of another 20th-century colossus is on show | 0:36:02 | 0:36:05 | |
in a major British museum for the first time. | 0:36:05 | 0:36:08 | |
Bob Dylan has always pursued an interest in art | 0:36:08 | 0:36:11 | |
alongside his music. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:13 | |
Face Value is a set of 12 portraits | 0:36:13 | 0:36:15 | |
of semi-fictional people. | 0:36:15 | 0:36:17 | |
They have invented names | 0:36:29 | 0:36:31 | |
and deliberately elusive titles. | 0:36:31 | 0:36:33 | |
Abstract, sketchy portraits of people | 0:36:35 | 0:36:37 | |
have long been at the heart of Dylan's songs, | 0:36:37 | 0:36:39 | |
but he wouldn't thank you for comparing his music to his art, | 0:36:39 | 0:36:42 | |
which he sees as entirely separate. | 0:36:42 | 0:36:44 | |
Nevertheless, these works developed the idea | 0:36:44 | 0:36:47 | |
that behind the many faces he encounters | 0:36:47 | 0:36:49 | |
on his long musical journey, | 0:36:49 | 0:36:51 | |
there lies a story. | 0:36:51 | 0:36:53 | |
Well, let's begin with the Henry Moore and Francis Bacon exhibition. | 0:36:58 | 0:37:01 | |
There's a great quote I found in the catalogue from Myfanwy Piper. | 0:37:01 | 0:37:05 | |
She says, "Henry Moore never forgets the solidity of flesh upon the bone, | 0:37:05 | 0:37:08 | |
"the strength of the bare bones beneath the flesh. | 0:37:08 | 0:37:12 | |
"Bacon never forgets that flesh is meat." | 0:37:12 | 0:37:15 | |
So there you have a summary of the differences between the men. | 0:37:15 | 0:37:19 | |
But this exhibition was about their similarities. Yeah. | 0:37:19 | 0:37:21 | |
And I was unconvinced other than they were chronologically... | 0:37:21 | 0:37:24 | |
Obviously Moore's a little bit older. ..similar. | 0:37:24 | 0:37:26 | |
But looking at Moore's drawings and the sense of motion | 0:37:26 | 0:37:30 | |
and the three-dimensionality in Bacon | 0:37:30 | 0:37:33 | |
and looking at Moore's drawings of the people sleeping in the shelter | 0:37:33 | 0:37:38 | |
and the miners and bodies being acted upon, | 0:37:38 | 0:37:40 | |
you are beginning to see great similarities. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:44 | |
And they both have this difficulty with presenting the human face, | 0:37:44 | 0:37:49 | |
because it became difficult in an age of war | 0:37:49 | 0:37:52 | |
to bring that human-ness | 0:37:52 | 0:37:56 | |
fully and protectedly there. | 0:37:56 | 0:37:59 | |
And I think...there's this idea that Moore is terribly calming, | 0:37:59 | 0:38:02 | |
and you sit next to the King and Queen, and it's all very nice. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:05 | |
He's very disturbing too. | 0:38:05 | 0:38:07 | |
The helmet with the figure inside, which was described as being maternal... | 0:38:07 | 0:38:11 | |
A very scary mum if you think that. | 0:38:11 | 0:38:14 | |
There's darkness in him too. | 0:38:14 | 0:38:17 | |
It's coming from a place where, | 0:38:17 | 0:38:19 | |
apart from anything else, literally coming back from World War I. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:22 | |
Suddenly you could survive a traumatic facial injury. | 0:38:22 | 0:38:24 | |
There were thousands of men wandering around who literally didn't have faces | 0:38:24 | 0:38:29 | |
or didn't have the faces that they had. | 0:38:29 | 0:38:31 | |
Moore was in the trenches, | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
Bacon was an ARP during World War II. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:37 | |
They were surrounded by these different pressures and forces | 0:38:37 | 0:38:41 | |
working on the physicality of bodies. | 0:38:41 | 0:38:43 | |
And they're both kind of expressing this... | 0:38:43 | 0:38:46 | |
torment. | 0:38:46 | 0:38:47 | |
And also, there's this kind of... There's an eroticism and a beauty. | 0:38:47 | 0:38:51 | |
It's very complex, lovely, lovely stuff. | 0:38:51 | 0:38:53 | |
It made me look at these two artists who we think we know | 0:38:53 | 0:38:56 | |
in a very fresh way, | 0:38:56 | 0:38:58 | |
particularly the sculptural nature of a lot of Francis Bacon's paintings. | 0:38:58 | 0:39:02 | |
Absolutely. It is interesting, that idea that he supposedly asked | 0:39:02 | 0:39:05 | |
Henry Moore, indirectly. | 0:39:05 | 0:39:09 | |
But then what's funny, | 0:39:09 | 0:39:10 | |
when you think of a 3D version of Francis Bacon, | 0:39:10 | 0:39:13 | |
you do get basically the monsters from Alien, | 0:39:13 | 0:39:15 | |
so it's possibly better that he didn't go there, that he stayed where he was. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:19 | |
I like the exhibition as a sort of element of the politics of artistic reputation as well. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:24 | |
In the end, let's face it, they've put one against the other. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:27 | |
Going in, you'd think, "Is it the Beatles versus the Velvet Underground?" | 0:39:27 | 0:39:31 | |
Henry Moore, the familiar, friendly face of Modernism, | 0:39:31 | 0:39:34 | |
versus Bacon, which has got this more distorted sort of cerebral, aggressive... | 0:39:34 | 0:39:39 | |
He's got the intellectual mystique that Moore doesn't have, | 0:39:39 | 0:39:42 | |
and so it was interesting for me to see the parallels that come. | 0:39:42 | 0:39:45 | |
And for me, Moore starts to elevate slightly. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:48 | |
You suddenly start to see a weird rigidity about Francis Bacon that surprises you. | 0:39:48 | 0:39:52 | |
After a while, it becomes more... | 0:39:52 | 0:39:54 | |
You think, "Oh, my God, it's a little bit of gimmickry", | 0:39:54 | 0:39:57 | |
and suddenly you're becoming...for me, | 0:39:57 | 0:39:58 | |
there's some things about Henry Moore you've not noticed before, | 0:39:58 | 0:40:01 | |
because you've dismissed him slightly as being a bit more Elton John to... | 0:40:01 | 0:40:05 | |
I've changed it now. Elton John to Bacon's Ornette Coleman. | 0:40:05 | 0:40:08 | |
But I like that side of it as well. | 0:40:08 | 0:40:10 | |
It's always a controversial thing to do, to pit one against the other. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:15 | |
But for me it was something I really enjoyed exploring. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:17 | |
And the shared influences, from the classical world | 0:40:17 | 0:40:21 | |
in Bacon's Eumenides that we saw in the little film there, | 0:40:21 | 0:40:26 | |
Christianity, even though both men were atheists, | 0:40:26 | 0:40:30 | |
Michelangelo, and so on. | 0:40:30 | 0:40:32 | |
Yes, well, one learned that Francis Bacon | 0:40:32 | 0:40:35 | |
spent most of his life living within walking distance | 0:40:35 | 0:40:38 | |
of the British Museum | 0:40:38 | 0:40:39 | |
and would regularly go and admire the sculptures. | 0:40:39 | 0:40:41 | |
What's fascinating is that he was familiar with all these beautiful works of art | 0:40:41 | 0:40:46 | |
and his response to them all was really to mash them up and deconstruct them | 0:40:46 | 0:40:51 | |
and make them all ugly. | 0:40:51 | 0:40:53 | |
You think of the work he's most famous for - | 0:40:53 | 0:40:54 | |
the screaming Popes. | 0:40:54 | 0:40:57 | |
So Velazquez was a pretty good artist. | 0:40:57 | 0:40:58 | |
And what is Bacon's contribution to art? | 0:40:58 | 0:41:02 | |
He sort of makes it a bit ugly and messy. | 0:41:02 | 0:41:04 | |
Like Paul, I came away from the show | 0:41:04 | 0:41:07 | |
feeling much warmer towards Henry Moore than I had hitherto | 0:41:07 | 0:41:11 | |
and really kind of unimpressed with Francis Bacon. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:15 | |
It was interesting to see that even at his peak in the '60s, | 0:41:15 | 0:41:20 | |
Brian Robertson, who was a great critic, | 0:41:20 | 0:41:23 | |
was pointing out that actually he's pretty... | 0:41:23 | 0:41:26 | |
It's as much about his life as his art. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:29 | |
It's as much about Bacon pissing his life away in the Colony Rooms | 0:41:29 | 0:41:33 | |
and being this kind of angry man | 0:41:33 | 0:41:35 | |
as he is a painter. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:36 | |
And I'm not sure he amounts to much more than that. | 0:41:36 | 0:41:39 | |
I think he's more of a sort of a rock star figure than a really great artist. Alison? | 0:41:39 | 0:41:42 | |
Well, that's a bit harsh! I think he was quite good, in his way. | 0:41:42 | 0:41:45 | |
Better than me. And that triptych, those enormous... | 0:41:45 | 0:41:49 | |
That amazing, blazing, kind of boiling dark, complicated triptych | 0:41:49 | 0:41:53 | |
of the three figures at the base of the cross. | 0:41:53 | 0:41:56 | |
That is extraordinary. | 0:41:56 | 0:41:58 | |
I love his paintings. I don't think they're just ugly. | 0:41:58 | 0:42:01 | |
They have all kinds of emotions going through them. | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
I know people were... Not joy. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:05 | |
Not necessarily joy. Not beauty either. | 0:42:05 | 0:42:07 | |
But they had the beauty of some kind of passion. | 0:42:07 | 0:42:10 | |
I would not, as some people did, volunteer to have my portrait painted by him necessarily, | 0:42:10 | 0:42:15 | |
but I think they both came across as very thoughtful, skilled... | 0:42:15 | 0:42:20 | |
I think it's also interesting seeing the source material. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:24 | |
They begin... It's Picasso, it's Surrealism, it's non-Western tribal art, | 0:42:24 | 0:42:29 | |
and what they both did with it. | 0:42:29 | 0:42:31 | |
And I also enjoyed that element of putting the two together - | 0:42:31 | 0:42:34 | |
how two different frames of thinking | 0:42:34 | 0:42:37 | |
came up with a different approach. | 0:42:37 | 0:42:38 | |
You've got the country squire, Henry Moore, | 0:42:38 | 0:42:40 | |
and you've got the slightly sleazy, sordid myth of Francis Bacon. | 0:42:40 | 0:42:44 | |
And putting the two together and seeing how they arrived at different ways of expressing that, | 0:42:44 | 0:42:50 | |
their influences and also their environment. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:52 | |
And you've actually got the Rodins there, so you can see... | 0:42:52 | 0:42:55 | |
And the Michelangelos. | 0:42:55 | 0:42:56 | |
And the Moore crucifixion... | 0:42:56 | 0:42:59 | |
That amazing drawing with this kind of strange figure | 0:42:59 | 0:43:02 | |
drooping and sloping. | 0:43:02 | 0:43:04 | |
What I love sometimes is if you look through a Henry Moore hole, | 0:43:04 | 0:43:07 | |
as often one is going to do... Steady! | 0:43:07 | 0:43:10 | |
..and you suddenly see a Francis Bacon William Blake death mask, | 0:43:10 | 0:43:13 | |
then, oddly, out of these differences, | 0:43:13 | 0:43:16 | |
you saw the similarity. | 0:43:16 | 0:43:18 | |
Well, we've obviously been talking about two men who have an incredible international reputation | 0:43:18 | 0:43:23 | |
for their art. We'll move on now to a man whose reputation across the world is for his music, | 0:43:23 | 0:43:28 | |
but has just started to have an exhibition in London for his art, | 0:43:28 | 0:43:33 | |
and that's Bob Dylan. | 0:43:33 | 0:43:34 | |
Lots of musicians have an art school background, don't they? | 0:43:34 | 0:43:37 | |
David Bowie, Bryan Ferry. You could probably name a lot more. | 0:43:37 | 0:43:41 | |
What do you think about Dylan's work? | 0:43:41 | 0:43:44 | |
Some of those musicians, certainly in Britain in the '60s and '70s, | 0:43:44 | 0:43:48 | |
basically instead of using paint and bronze and clay, | 0:43:48 | 0:43:52 | |
used music to represent their art. | 0:43:52 | 0:43:54 | |
And they were artists. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:55 | |
And sometimes used the fact they can paint | 0:43:55 | 0:43:58 | |
to suggest they had more artistic quality than maybe they might otherwise have. | 0:43:58 | 0:44:02 | |
But Dylan just is an artist. | 0:44:02 | 0:44:04 | |
What I love about this particular exhibition - it's very modest, | 0:44:04 | 0:44:07 | |
it's very small, it's just 12 paintings on three walls, | 0:44:07 | 0:44:10 | |
is that it gives you a little insight into the way his mind works. | 0:44:10 | 0:44:14 | |
And therefore gives you a little insight into how his songs work, | 0:44:14 | 0:44:17 | |
and what an extraordinary artist he is. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:20 | |
An artist whether he uses what he's using here | 0:44:20 | 0:44:25 | |
or music. | 0:44:25 | 0:44:26 | |
What I love about this as well is that it's 12. | 0:44:26 | 0:44:29 | |
So it's like an album - there's 12 pieces. | 0:44:29 | 0:44:31 | |
And it's also very interesting to look at the cover of the self-portrait... | 0:44:31 | 0:44:35 | |
Another self-portrait that's just been released - the tenth in the series of his bootleg records. | 0:44:35 | 0:44:41 | |
And there's a picture on that that's supposedly of him, | 0:44:41 | 0:44:44 | |
that also suggests that all of these are actually him. | 0:44:44 | 0:44:48 | |
I was going round trying to work out who was who | 0:44:48 | 0:44:52 | |
in their disguised identities. | 0:44:52 | 0:44:53 | |
Yeah, you sort of look at the angry woman and you think, | 0:44:53 | 0:44:56 | |
I wonder whether he came on to her and she turned him down? | 0:44:56 | 0:44:59 | |
And is that person a gangster, perhaps? | 0:44:59 | 0:45:02 | |
But that's as far as it goes. | 0:45:02 | 0:45:04 | |
I think Paul was characteristically generous towards the show. | 0:45:04 | 0:45:08 | |
When I went to see it, people were sort of | 0:45:08 | 0:45:11 | |
half-heartedly wandering around, | 0:45:11 | 0:45:13 | |
going, "Oh, Bob Dylan? Yeah, right, off we go." | 0:45:13 | 0:45:15 | |
It's...don't give up the day job time, I think. | 0:45:15 | 0:45:18 | |
Alison, do you think he should be at the National Portrait Gallery? | 0:45:18 | 0:45:21 | |
Er...it gets people through the door. | 0:45:21 | 0:45:23 | |
The woman on the desk... I said, "Where's the Bob Dylan...?" | 0:45:23 | 0:45:26 | |
and she gave me that look of, "Right, you've just come for the Bob Dylan, | 0:45:26 | 0:45:30 | |
"but you might see some other things you might like." | 0:45:30 | 0:45:33 | |
"Down there and round the corner." | 0:45:33 | 0:45:34 | |
And I kind of get it from the gallery's point of view. | 0:45:34 | 0:45:37 | |
He's got so many dense layers of skill and characterisation | 0:45:37 | 0:45:40 | |
which he can express in music, and he can't do the same in art. | 0:45:40 | 0:45:44 | |
Also, you must remember it's not necessarily Bob Dylan | 0:45:44 | 0:45:47 | |
that's demanded on his bended knees that the National Portrait Gallery put this on. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:50 | |
It's been put on for various reasons to do with the National Portrait Gallery. | 0:45:50 | 0:45:54 | |
Having arrived, rather weirdly, | 0:45:54 | 0:45:55 | |
past the picture of Anna Wintour in the foyer, which I thought was strange... | 0:45:55 | 0:45:59 | |
and past a picture of the Queen, | 0:45:59 | 0:46:01 | |
and you get to these... I think they are fabulous... | 0:46:01 | 0:46:05 | |
We're not going to wander round all the corridors! I could do that for you if you want! | 0:46:05 | 0:46:09 | |
Another night. | 0:46:09 | 0:46:11 | |
Both of the exhibitions we've been talking about - | 0:46:11 | 0:46:13 | |
Flesh and Bone and Face Value - are running until January. | 0:46:13 | 0:46:17 | |
Jonathan Coe has won critical acclaim | 0:46:17 | 0:46:20 | |
and bestseller success for his satires on British life in the recent past. | 0:46:20 | 0:46:24 | |
Think of The Rotters' Club and What A Carve Up! | 0:46:24 | 0:46:27 | |
For his latest book, Coe's gone back to the buttoned-up Britain of the late 1950s | 0:46:27 | 0:46:32 | |
for a tale of espionage and intrigue at the heart of Europe. | 0:46:32 | 0:46:36 | |
A wife, a baby, a house in Tooting and a steady job | 0:46:38 | 0:46:42 | |
at the Central Office of Information. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:44 | |
It's 1958, | 0:46:44 | 0:46:45 | |
and Thomas Foley is plodding through a humdrum middle-class life. | 0:46:45 | 0:46:48 | |
But out of the blue, an unexpected assignment | 0:46:48 | 0:46:52 | |
thrusts him into a brave new world. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:54 | |
Hosted by Belgium, Expo '58 | 0:46:57 | 0:46:59 | |
was the first international world fair after the Second World War | 0:46:59 | 0:47:03 | |
and was an extravagant exercise in shiny, futuristic design | 0:47:03 | 0:47:07 | |
and international one-upmanship. | 0:47:07 | 0:47:10 | |
Thomas is sent there to look after British interests. | 0:47:10 | 0:47:12 | |
"Here, for the next six months, would be thrown together all the nations | 0:47:12 | 0:47:17 | |
"whose complex relationships, whose conflicts and alliances, | 0:47:17 | 0:47:20 | |
"whose fraught, tangled histories had shaped, and would continue to shape, the destiny of mankind." | 0:47:20 | 0:47:27 | |
Thomas is a quiet, diligent civil servant. | 0:47:29 | 0:47:33 | |
There are two things which attract the attention of his superiors - | 0:47:33 | 0:47:36 | |
his mother is Belgian and his father used to run a pub. | 0:47:36 | 0:47:40 | |
As soon as they realise that they have to organise a fake British pub in Belgium, | 0:47:40 | 0:47:44 | |
they call upon him. | 0:47:44 | 0:47:46 | |
So he gets catapulted into a completely unreal and unfamiliar, | 0:47:46 | 0:47:51 | |
multinational, multilingual world. | 0:47:51 | 0:47:54 | |
If you really want to observe the British acting as they truly do, | 0:47:55 | 0:48:01 | |
then you take them out of their element. You plop them in a foreign locale | 0:48:01 | 0:48:05 | |
and suddenly, all their Britishness is kind of magnified tenfold. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:08 | |
Defining Britishness | 0:48:16 | 0:48:18 | |
is a perennially challenging, if not impossible, task. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:22 | |
I thought it might be, among other things, | 0:48:22 | 0:48:26 | |
a kind of interesting contribution to that debate to rewind 50 years. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:29 | |
"What did it mean to be British in 1958? | 0:48:32 | 0:48:34 | |
"Nobody seemed to know. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:36 | |
"Britain was steeped in tradition. | 0:48:37 | 0:48:39 | |
"Everybody agreed upon that. | 0:48:39 | 0:48:41 | |
"Its traditions, its pageantry, its ceremony | 0:48:41 | 0:48:44 | |
"were admired and envied all over the world. | 0:48:44 | 0:48:46 | |
"At the same time, it was mired in the past, | 0:48:46 | 0:48:50 | |
"scared of innovation, | 0:48:50 | 0:48:51 | |
"riddled with archaic class distinctions, | 0:48:51 | 0:48:54 | |
"in thrall to a secretive and untouchable establishment. | 0:48:54 | 0:48:58 | |
"Which way were you supposed to look when defining Britishness - | 0:48:58 | 0:49:01 | |
"forwards or backwards?" | 0:49:01 | 0:49:04 | |
Well, Jonathan Coe, a Birmingham writer, so let's turn to our resident Brummie first here! | 0:49:07 | 0:49:12 | |
Now this idea of Expo '58, it is an extraordinary microcosm of the geo-political tensions | 0:49:12 | 0:49:18 | |
at that time in the aftermath of the Second World War. | 0:49:18 | 0:49:21 | |
Does he make the most of this? | 0:49:21 | 0:49:23 | |
Well, it's a good setting, I agree. | 0:49:23 | 0:49:25 | |
You get an excuse to wheel on Russian spies | 0:49:25 | 0:49:28 | |
and American spies and all sorts of... | 0:49:28 | 0:49:31 | |
Yeah. | 0:49:31 | 0:49:33 | |
You get the chance to see a Brit abroad in a weird context, | 0:49:33 | 0:49:37 | |
but I found it a disappointingly slight book in the end. | 0:49:37 | 0:49:41 | |
My problem with Jonathan Coe... | 0:49:41 | 0:49:42 | |
and I had the same problem with What A Carve Up! | 0:49:42 | 0:49:45 | |
I know a lot of people really rate it. | 0:49:45 | 0:49:47 | |
It's the uncertainty of tone. | 0:49:47 | 0:49:50 | |
One's never sure whether he's caricaturing his subject | 0:49:50 | 0:49:54 | |
or whether he's giving you a sort of lovingly realised portrait | 0:49:54 | 0:49:58 | |
of a particular era. | 0:49:58 | 0:50:00 | |
There's an excruciating scene quite early on | 0:50:00 | 0:50:03 | |
where the husband and wife... | 0:50:03 | 0:50:06 | |
The husband is about to go off to Belgium. | 0:50:06 | 0:50:09 | |
And the next-door neighbour comes into the kitchen | 0:50:09 | 0:50:12 | |
and starts making the most leering innuendo to the wife. | 0:50:12 | 0:50:16 | |
Now, it might just about work in a Carry On movie, | 0:50:16 | 0:50:19 | |
but it doesn't work in a portrait of that period. | 0:50:19 | 0:50:22 | |
People were quite subtle in the 1950s. | 0:50:22 | 0:50:24 | |
They weren't these vulgar caricatures. | 0:50:24 | 0:50:26 | |
Is this a form of pastiche? | 0:50:26 | 0:50:28 | |
One of the blubs talked about the book being "Hitchcock meets Ealing comedy". | 0:50:28 | 0:50:32 | |
I gave it huge benefit... No, I gave it the benefit of the doubt, | 0:50:32 | 0:50:36 | |
as a kind of found object, the kind of book you might find in the late 1950s - a minor novel. | 0:50:36 | 0:50:42 | |
A slight novel. | 0:50:42 | 0:50:44 | |
So therefore, everything about it, I truly enjoyed. | 0:50:44 | 0:50:47 | |
There were certain things you couldn't do, | 0:50:47 | 0:50:49 | |
because you couldn't apply now-knowingness to that period, | 0:50:49 | 0:50:53 | |
because it would have burst that bubble. | 0:50:53 | 0:50:55 | |
So in the end, I kind of enjoyed the idea that what he'd done, | 0:50:55 | 0:50:59 | |
the great craft, was really to write a...modest late-1950s novel | 0:50:59 | 0:51:06 | |
about the late-1950s, | 0:51:06 | 0:51:08 | |
with a sense that it's written now, but it's not actually, so he doesn't burst any bubbles. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:12 | |
And it gives us a sense of something that's on the precipice of happening. | 0:51:12 | 0:51:16 | |
And I enjoyed all that - that rock n roll is about to happen, | 0:51:16 | 0:51:18 | |
that pop culture's about to happen, that a different thing is about to happen. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:22 | |
So I ended up enjoying it, because I viewed it as a rather wonderful found object. | 0:51:22 | 0:51:26 | |
The last ebbing of a kind of innocence, I suppose. | 0:51:26 | 0:51:29 | |
Yeah, um... | 0:51:29 | 0:51:30 | |
No, I just... He's a lovely guy. | 0:51:30 | 0:51:34 | |
He's a nice person. I wanted to like it! | 0:51:34 | 0:51:36 | |
It's a great setting, | 0:51:36 | 0:51:38 | |
lots of good ideas. It is a very interesting time. | 0:51:38 | 0:51:41 | |
The trouble is, if you're setting it in that period, | 0:51:41 | 0:51:44 | |
you're always going to be up against Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis | 0:51:44 | 0:51:47 | |
and Graham Greene, in some of the territory. | 0:51:47 | 0:51:49 | |
And it's not any of those things. | 0:51:49 | 0:51:52 | |
It's not Hitchcockian. That's what's on the back of the book. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
It's not Carry On. | 0:51:55 | 0:51:57 | |
The funny... | 0:51:57 | 0:51:59 | |
You know, doesn't really work for me. | 0:51:59 | 0:52:00 | |
You seem quite engaged by the espionage idea and the two spies. | 0:52:00 | 0:52:04 | |
The spies are versions of Thomson and Thompson from Tintin. | 0:52:04 | 0:52:09 | |
There's one extraordinary scene where he's about to get off with this rather attractive Belgian bird | 0:52:09 | 0:52:14 | |
and it's raining, | 0:52:14 | 0:52:16 | |
and they need an umbrella. Suddenly, from behind...from nowhere, | 0:52:16 | 0:52:20 | |
appears this umbrella, which is being held by the Thomson and Thompson detectives. | 0:52:20 | 0:52:24 | |
It's... I'm not saying it was a horrible read, because it wasn't. | 0:52:24 | 0:52:27 | |
I'm with Paul on that one. | 0:52:27 | 0:52:29 | |
It was enjoyable, but... | 0:52:29 | 0:52:31 | |
it does unsettle you, this changing of tone. | 0:52:31 | 0:52:34 | |
Where are you? | 0:52:34 | 0:52:35 | |
The fact that Delingpole can use the word "bird" | 0:52:35 | 0:52:38 | |
suggests that actually Jonathan has achieved everything he needed to do! | 0:52:38 | 0:52:42 | |
Because he's created a weird period piece. | 0:52:42 | 0:52:44 | |
Without somehow it being infected by... | 0:52:44 | 0:52:47 | |
the knowingness he obviously has. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:51 | |
I'm giving him the huge benefit of the doubt. | 0:52:51 | 0:52:53 | |
I think he knows enough to know everything within it that people are criticising | 0:52:53 | 0:52:57 | |
for being a laziness or a weakness is in fact part of the point of the book. | 0:52:57 | 0:53:02 | |
You described it as a slight book, but his ambition, as we heard, for the novel, | 0:53:02 | 0:53:06 | |
is much more than that, because it's about British identity, isn't it? | 0:53:06 | 0:53:11 | |
Through the ludicrous... | 0:53:11 | 0:53:13 | |
Nothing's changed, really. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
And he does make that point, and then that's the only point that he makes. | 0:53:16 | 0:53:20 | |
And lots of people were much better at Brits being abroad | 0:53:20 | 0:53:23 | |
and Britishness really being about a particular area of England, | 0:53:23 | 0:53:27 | |
and a particular set of values. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:29 | |
Yeah, that's there, but he's not really running with it. | 0:53:29 | 0:53:32 | |
I began to wonder - he's got a lot of support from Belgium - | 0:53:32 | 0:53:35 | |
if he's actually, like many of us, | 0:53:35 | 0:53:37 | |
mainly our income now is coming from Europe, | 0:53:37 | 0:53:40 | |
if he's almost speaking to Europe, because that is sort of a European idea of us. | 0:53:40 | 0:53:44 | |
I like that idea that in many ways - for what he is setting up is about to happen, | 0:53:44 | 0:53:49 | |
like the Beatles, like rock n roll - | 0:53:49 | 0:53:50 | |
that idea of what it is to be English or British, | 0:53:50 | 0:53:53 | |
not a lot has changed since the late 1950s. | 0:53:53 | 0:53:57 | |
With everything that has happened and happened since, | 0:53:57 | 0:53:59 | |
many things that were about the way we represented ourselves in the late 1950s in Belgium | 0:53:59 | 0:54:05 | |
would pretty much be the same now. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:06 | |
Which would be great if he talked.... | 0:54:06 | 0:54:09 | |
We're examining our own national identity when the Russians | 0:54:09 | 0:54:12 | |
are apparently calling us a small island that nobody cares about! | 0:54:12 | 0:54:15 | |
They must have read this book! | 0:54:15 | 0:54:17 | |
There's one line where one of the characters says, | 0:54:17 | 0:54:20 | |
"We like our imperial past, we Brits." | 0:54:20 | 0:54:22 | |
That's not very good...that's a bit obvious, isn't it? | 0:54:22 | 0:54:24 | |
And a lot of the dramatic reveal is at the end, | 0:54:24 | 0:54:27 | |
when it doesn't matter and everybody's dead and you won't... | 0:54:27 | 0:54:30 | |
You know what? I really like the last four pages as well, | 0:54:30 | 0:54:33 | |
when he sped through. I thought that was really great. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:35 | |
I liked that a lot, when he brought everything up to date. Fantastic! | 0:54:35 | 0:54:38 | |
They should all do that, shouldn't they? | 0:54:38 | 0:54:40 | |
The Russians can talk about us being a small nation. | 0:54:40 | 0:54:43 | |
You had a lovely thread about melancholy and the past and the future and how you relate to it, | 0:54:43 | 0:54:47 | |
but again, it wasn't quite... | 0:54:47 | 0:54:49 | |
It's a better book than you think. I just wanted it all to hang together and fire, | 0:54:49 | 0:54:52 | |
and it seemed to be about four different books. | 0:54:52 | 0:54:55 | |
What I did applaud - and this is SO superficial - | 0:54:55 | 0:54:57 | |
but that it was attempting to be funny, in a world where the novel... | 0:54:57 | 0:55:02 | |
I know it's a chilling phrase "the comic novel", | 0:55:02 | 0:55:07 | |
but he is ploughing kind of a lonely furrow here. | 0:55:07 | 0:55:10 | |
It's things like the gay Belgium joke. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:12 | |
You can have the gay Belgium joke, It's a bit of a weird push of a translation of "Belgique joyeuse", | 0:55:12 | 0:55:17 | |
but OK, it's not happy Belgium, it's not joyous Belgium or merry Belgium - | 0:55:17 | 0:55:20 | |
we'll make it gay. | 0:55:20 | 0:55:22 | |
You don't do that joke three times. | 0:55:22 | 0:55:23 | |
There's one place where it works and then you move on. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:26 | |
I think he's a good writer, but he tries too hard. OK. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:29 | |
Well, gay Belgium and the Thompson twins from Tintin | 0:55:29 | 0:55:33 | |
are both in Expo '58, which is out now. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:35 | |
That's almost it for this month's show. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:37 | |
There's more on all the items | 0:55:37 | 0:55:39 | |
we've been discussing on our website. | 0:55:39 | 0:55:40 | |
Thanks very much to my guests, AL Kennedy, | 0:55:40 | 0:55:42 | |
James Delingpole and Paul Morley. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:45 | |
Kirsty will be back next month | 0:55:45 | 0:55:47 | |
with a special show looking at the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize, | 0:55:47 | 0:55:50 | |
which was announced earlier this week. | 0:55:50 | 0:55:52 | |
I have to say, all brilliant choices, | 0:55:52 | 0:55:54 | |
but then I was one of the judges. | 0:55:54 | 0:55:56 | |
To play us out tonight, | 0:55:56 | 0:55:57 | |
another track from the brand-new Manic Street Preachers album. | 0:55:57 | 0:56:00 | |
This is James Dean Bradfield and guest vocalist Cate Le Bon with Four Lonely Roads. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:05 | |
Good night. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:07 | |
# Four lonely roads | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
# The terror it had flown | 0:56:11 | 0:56:13 | |
# Never led you home | 0:56:13 | 0:56:16 | |
# Four lonely roads | 0:56:19 | 0:56:21 | |
# Got sunk into my heart | 0:56:21 | 0:56:24 | |
# Then it fell apart | 0:56:24 | 0:56:27 | |
# Staring with an idle eye | 0:56:29 | 0:56:34 | |
# Measuring the pain inside | 0:56:34 | 0:56:40 | |
# Darker hell stood up on high | 0:56:40 | 0:56:45 | |
# Then disappeared without reply | 0:56:47 | 0:56:51 | |
# Four lonely roads | 0:56:58 | 0:57:02 | |
# I'm trapped inside this skin | 0:57:02 | 0:57:04 | |
# Can't let love back in | 0:57:04 | 0:57:06 | |
# Four lonely roads | 0:57:09 | 0:57:12 | |
# The cities drunk and mute | 0:57:12 | 0:57:14 | |
# Lost in your pursuit | 0:57:14 | 0:57:17 | |
# Staring with an idle eye | 0:57:19 | 0:57:25 | |
# Measuring the pain inside | 0:57:25 | 0:57:30 | |
# Darker hell stood up on high | 0:57:31 | 0:57:35 | |
# Then disappeared without reply | 0:57:37 | 0:57:41 | |
# I don't know why | 0:57:41 | 0:57:44 | |
# And if we can, then we must | 0:58:09 | 0:58:14 | |
# Hold our heads up, learn to trust | 0:58:14 | 0:58:19 | |
# It's up to you, it's up to us | 0:58:19 | 0:58:25 | |
# Some dignity, a little love | 0:58:25 | 0:58:30 | |
# A little love. # | 0:58:30 | 0:58:34 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:34 | 0:58:37 |