Episode 17 The Culture Show


Episode 17

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WOLF HOWLS

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Turn off the lights, disconnect the doorbell

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and leave the trick or treaters to the neighbours

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because you won't want to miss a minute of tonight's show.

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We've got freakish films, witch trials,

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the best of non-fiction and a snapshot of fine art

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and photography from the National Gallery, here in London.

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Coming up, Mark Kermode

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and John Sweeney investigate new film The Master.

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I'll be comparing Old Masters with modern photographers.

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Miranda Sawyer reviews three of the short-listed books

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for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize.

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And we'll be summoning up a piece of Halloween gold from the TV archives.

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But first, from Shameless, Silk and Strindberg

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to a haunting Myra Hindley, via a role in Dinnerladies

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with Victoria Wood, it may come as a surprise that actress Maxine Peake

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has turned her talents to electronica, with music collective

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the Eccentronic Research Council.

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Their latest concept album tells the tale of the Pendle Witches,

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a subject close to Maxine's heart.

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WOLF HOWLS

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BELL TOLLS

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Elizabeth Southerns, Elizabeth Device, James Device, Alison Device,

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Anne Whittle, Anne Redferne, Jane Bulcock, John Bulcock,

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Katherine Hewitt, Isabel Robey, Margaret Pearson and Alice Nutter.

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The Pendle Witches are a group of people from Pendle, Lancashire,

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who were accused of witchcraft.

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And they were just local people who were mainly very poor,

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uneducated, and who'd dealt a little bit in the selling of herbs

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and potions for illnesses.

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They were just women and men just trying to get by.

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I'm from Lancashire, from Bolton.

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So we always knew they were the witches from over the hill.

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I grew up in the shadow of the West Pennines.

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It was probably only when I got to about 17, 18, that

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I started investigating further, but I just thought this can't be true.

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So I went into a local bookshop in Bolton

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and got a couple of books and that's when I started to realise really that it was sort of a smokescreen

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that was based on conspiracy and paranoia,

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and the seriousness of it.

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I got in touch with Adrian rather embarrassingly through Facebook actually.

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I just got a message from this guy saying,

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"I think you'd like my music," and I though, "Will I?"

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And he sent me a track over and I loved it.

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And then the subject of the Pendle Witches came up

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and we both had this passion to tell the true story.

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So we said, "Let's do something."

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# The A666, some call the devil's highway

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# And some call the road to hell

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# But I can't believe the devil came from Bolton

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# And gorged on black peas astride a small stone elephant

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# And I don't believe he was ever a fan of Chris Rea. #

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The album is a travelogue. It is based on a day

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me and Adrian came up to Pendle and had a good old mooch around.

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Adrian sort of went away

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and wrote from the experiences that we had that day.

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I never thought of being in a band, and when I recorded this

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I still didn't think I was going to be in a band.

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And then we got a call saying they want to release it as an album

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and could we do a few gigs to promote the album?

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And that's when I panicked.

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# My pal and I hit this particular road

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# Like Terry and June in a battered old Hillman Minx

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# Masquerading as an Eddie Stobart truck

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# To give thanks

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# And praise the Lord to those ladies known as the Pendle Witches

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# Those uneducated, mostly very poor, sometimes a little bit daft

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# But then, aren't we all?

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# Women who were by and large unjustly hung by cretinous agenda

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# Filled judges and their potty Reformation obsessed word editors

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# On the orders of the bully kings

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# Proof, if ever needed, that man can be a black dog. #

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Pendle Witches' sort of tragic story started with...

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Alison Device was...out on the moor one day and there was a peddler who'd come over

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from Halifax who was selling pins.

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She'd asked him for some pins and he'd said no.

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So she'd probably said, "On yer bike, mate," which was taken as a curse.

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He then supposedly fell down on the floor in extreme pain.

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Now, if you read the description, the gentleman had obviously had a stroke.

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But it was taken that Alison had cursed him.

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So then she was hauled in with her mother and the family

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and the families who had been sort of connected with them,

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all of them were accused of witchcraft.

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So that's how it started.

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At the time of the Pendle Witches, James I was in power

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and he completely believed that witchcraft was a threat

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and that anybody seen to be, God forbid, fiddling with twigs

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or anything like that, he would have them condemned as a witch.

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You had to be so careful about how you conducted yourself.

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You could be, as unfortunately these women were, murdered.

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# Hang the witch, oh, shut them up

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# It's a middle-class vendetta on women who were better

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# Sorry to murmur, praise heart

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# If you don't believe in Jesus, don't think there'll be a Christmas

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# Another day has gone, another witch is dead

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# Another day is gone... #

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I can see very clear parallels with today, how people are sort of

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swept under the carpet if they don't fit in, if they're on

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the margins, very poor, uneducated, we're not dealing with these people

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face on, we're just pushing them in cupboards and closing the door

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and hoping that they're out of sight, instead of dealing with it.

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The album is about smokescreens and I think what happens in this country today

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and throughout the world, governments are very good at pinpointing people

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who are accused of being the root cause of things when it's not really, it's just to deflect.

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We should never forget our history

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and maybe we'll get out of the mess we're in at the moment if we do that.

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# One last spell I offer up

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# Contains grains and worms and carrots

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# 16th-century Holland and Barrett, dear you

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# Snap my neck and wave goodbye

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# Every eye that sees is guilty

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# Of a subtle kind of cruelty. #

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Just in case 1612 Underture should have crept under your radar,

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it's out and available now.

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Now, there's a real buzz about Paul Thomas Anderson's new film,

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not least because it's loosely based on the story of L Ron Hubbard,

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founder of Scientology.

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Mark Kermode went to see the film with Panorama's John Sweeney,

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a man who's come face-to-face with the organisation

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and knows it better than most.

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The Church of Scientology has long had strong ties with Hollywood

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and many of its stars.

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Now, Paul Thomas Anderson,

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the wunderkind behind movies like Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood

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and Magnolia, has released a film inspired in part by the life

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of L Ron Hubbard and the early days of the movement he founded.

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The Master tells the story of a Navy veteran,

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drifter and down-and-out who falls under the spell

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of the charismatic leader of a new quasi-religion, the Cause.

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I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher.

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But above all, I am a man, just like you.

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In the States, it broke opening weekend records for an arthouse release

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and has been hotly tipped for Academy Awards.

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While, over here, the film's allusions to Scientology

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have already caused a bit of a media stir.

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So I wanted to ask someone who's been up close and personal

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with the controversial church what he made of the film.

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BBC Panorama reporter John Sweeney has fronted two investigations

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into Scientology and its members, not the easiest of assignments.

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-You don't understand the nature of journalism, with respect.

-No, no.

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-I don't understand the nature of you as a person.

-Very good, thank you.

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-John?

-Hi, Mark.

-Welcome to the Culture Show.

-Thank you.

-Take a seat.

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So, John, we've just watched The Master together. I loved it.

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-What did you make of it?

-I thought the film was extraordinary.

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I thought it was bold and good.

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I'm still troubled by my experience with the Church of Scientology.

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I found this film almost healing, in some sense.

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What's wonderful for me

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about The Master is it explains the birth of a cult.

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Because the thing that really gets me

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and confuses all of my friends and people who think about it,

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ex-Scientologists, is how on earth do they fall for this?

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How do they fall for this man and this thing, this entity,

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this "church", and the answer is...he had charisma.

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And what's so brilliant about this film is you see how a man

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with immense charisma can mould people around him

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to believe he is someone special.

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He's been writing all night. You seem to inspire something in him.

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What we will do now will urge you toward existence within a group.

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Paul Thomas Anderson has said that The Master is not meant to be

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a biopic of L Ron Hubbard

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but he accepts that there are very pronounced parallels.

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Tell us, from your knowledge, what those parallels would be.

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Let's start with, they call it processing,

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Scientology calls it auditing.

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What happens is you go into a trance-like hypnotic state

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and you talk through your past lives on tape.

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Are you thoughtless in your remarks? Do your past failures bother you?

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Is your life troubled? Is your behaviour erratic?

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The biggest thing of all is that Hubbard,

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the founder of Scientology, was massively charismatic and a conman.

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And in the film, the Master is massively charismatic and a conman.

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-You might learn something.

-He's making all this up as he goes along.

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You don't see that?

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There's Jason Beghe, who's left the Church

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and he's said about Scientology that there has never been

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a mousetrap without some really good cheese in it.

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They love-bomb you to death.

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And at the beginning of the film, certainly, Phoenix is a wreck

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and the Cause does help him.

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They listen to him. There is some kind of weird family.

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And they look after him.

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If we are not helping him, then it is we who have failed him.

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Perhaps he's past help.

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Or insane.

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The Cause feels like a good thing for really quite a while

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and then it's suddenly when the sceptic arrives

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and questions the Master

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that it turns nasty and gets progressively darker and darker.

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Good science by definition allows for more than one opinion,

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otherwise you have the will of one man, which is the basis of cult.

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And this is where we're at, to have to explain ourselves. For what?

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The only way to defend ourselves is to attack.

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From your personal experience,

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it's obviously struck a very deep chord in relation to Scientology.

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Do you think it's possible to read the film in any other way?

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It's not absolutely about Scientology, even for me.

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You don't have to be in the least bit interested

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in the Church of Scientology or have ever heard of it

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to find this film an amazing piece of art.

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It's a love affair between two men.

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It's a film about a charismatic domineering personality.

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It could also be about other cults.

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Do you think there's any particular reason why this film exists now?

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I think Scientology used to have an octopus-like grip on Hollywood.

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And that is weakening. It should have been made 20 years ago.

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But it's great that they've done it now.

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-John, thank you very much.

-Thank you.

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And The Master is out on Friday,

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going on general release in two weeks' time.

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Next, a groundbreaking new exhibition at the National Gallery,

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which for the first time in its 150 years of history

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is devoting a major show to the subject of photography,

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specifically the links between photography and painting.

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I went along to find out

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what we might learn from this double exposure.

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In 1839, a new technology revolutionised the image.

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Photography. Almost immediately,

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it sparked a heated debate that's still going on today.

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So, can a photograph be a work of art?

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It's an old chestnut

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and personally I think the answer's straightforward - of course it can.

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Every time the photographer depresses the shutter,

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all kinds of artistic decisions are being made,

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about focus, about light, about composition.

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And yet in many people's minds, questions still hover.

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Isn't photography too easy, too mechanical, too much of a shortcut?

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Can a photograph ever be really as truly

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and deeply expressive as a great painting?

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To explore, I've come to the National Gallery's

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first major photography exhibition, which has Old Masters of painting

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rubbing shoulders with groundbreaking photographers,

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past and present.

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Pioneers like Julia Margaret Cameron were convinced that

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photography could be art, and used smudged paint effects to prove it.

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But, 150 years later, photography was still painting's poor relation.

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In the '70s, Craigie Horsfield was one of the first contemporary artists to make a breakthrough.

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I remember, 20 years ago,

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you were well known for bridling if anybody called you a photographer.

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You said, "No, no, I'm an artist,

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"and I happen to use a camera some of the time."

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If you were showing Gilbert & George, it's photography, or is it?

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Warhol - is that photography?

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It's such a nebulous description,

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and it doesn't actually apply to most of what we see and experience.

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Horsfield's work challenges some perceived limitations of the photograph -

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that they're small, slight, quick to reproduce,

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lacking the weight of painting.

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He produces only one image,

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emphasising the uniqueness of the object itself.

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I notice that you are one of the few in the exhibition

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who doesn't have a sheet of glass

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interposed between image and audience.

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To me, that has the effect of drawing me

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into the photographic paper, almost beginning to see

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the photographic paper itself is another form of skin on which these pigments,

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these shapes, these forms have been imprinted.

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Is that part of your intention?

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Yes, it is an aquarelle paper, where you have this tactile surface.

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If you look very closely,

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you can see the stippling almost as if it was the pores of the skin,

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but, of course, it is an illusion.

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There's a strong sense of enigma about it.

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I have this sense that he's really thinking about something that's been said to him.

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There's almost like a sense of clenching in his cheek muscles.

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There is.

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But this is surely one of the fascinating aspects of making art,

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and especially making pictures,

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that this is a story.

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We know that it's not real.

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It's not this person in this place.

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It's an account of somebody who we've never met,

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who we will only know this about.

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-Yeah.

-And...

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-It's almost like the Mona Lisa quality.

-Well...

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-Except he's not smiling!

-It's something that art can do, isn't it?

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Horsfield's work has been described as painterly

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in both its process and its nature.

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He paved the way for some of the artists here,

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many of whom explore the relationship

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between photography and art history.

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Richard Learoyd uses a 19th-century process,

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a camera obscura,

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a gigantic photographic device the size of a room.

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The image is projected directly onto the paper itself,

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making each image unique.

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Sittings can last for days.

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All of this effort,

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all of this labour into the camera obscura effect.

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What is it, the effect you're trying to get? What's the sensation?

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The sensation is the power of the photograph.

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I think that making photographs in that way

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creates image of a scale

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without a printmaking process intervening.

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This process is incredibly good at giving people

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a centre of gravity, giving a sense of weight

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and three-dimensionality that defies the photographic surface.

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Learoyd's work is often directly inspired by existing works of art.

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The National Gallery reveals the connection

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between his aesthetic and that of the painter Ingres.

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My references and the things that I sort of am drawn to

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are actually painterly.

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It's a funny relationship that I have with photography.

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I think I am slightly unusual in that I take...

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Sometimes I take a very literal interpretation of an image that I like.

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But when I was looking at this photograph for the first time,

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-I did actually think of Ingres...

-Yeah.

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..with that lost profile of the face

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and this tremendous sensual focus on flesh itself.

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That flesh is something that people are invited to scrutinise.

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It's only your children or your lover that you ever get to look at

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so closely, to see, well, actually he's got hair here,

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and the pores of the skin are quite smooth, so you can evaluate his age.

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Maybe he's not in a manual profession

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because his fingernails are quite, you know, they're pretty good.

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There's a softness of the skin.

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You make a lot of decisions about somebody

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when you can look at them incredibly closely.

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Can a photograph

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be expressive in the same way, as deeply, as profoundly

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of somebody's sensibility, as a painting or a sculpture?

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I think yes, but it isn't a casual yes.

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I think that photography has enormous problems.

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The medium has enormous problems.

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The equalisation of technology,

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the fact that everybody carries a phone,

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everybody makes photographs all the time.

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It's almost as if everybody was wandering the streets

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with a canvas, painting constantly!

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Yeah, yeah.

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How much more difficult would it be to produce a Titian?

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Well, yes, that's a good point.

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It can be, at its best, incredibly moving, photography.

0:20:020:20:07

But it moves in different ways. It's a very complicated area.

0:20:070:20:09

You can get pictures that are emotional

0:20:090:20:11

because of what they're showing you rather than what they are.

0:20:110:20:14

I think that what I'm interested in is photographs that are moving

0:20:140:20:19

or emotional because of what they actually are.

0:20:190:20:21

Next up, the Samuel Johnson Prize,

0:20:250:20:27

shining a light on the very best non-fiction writing.

0:20:270:20:31

Miranda Sawyer picked three books on the shortlist to see

0:20:310:20:34

who scaled the heights this year.

0:20:340:20:36

'The Samuel Johnson Prize is Britain's most prestigious

0:20:400:20:43

'award for non-fiction,

0:20:430:20:45

'and has previously been won by books on subjects

0:20:450:20:48

'as diverse as China's great famine under Mao,

0:20:480:20:51

'an account of our fascination with whales,

0:20:510:20:53

'and the story of a real-life Georgian murder mystery.'

0:20:530:20:56

The six books on this year's shortlist are equally broad-ranging,

0:20:590:21:03

but my selected three have a few themes in common.

0:21:030:21:06

They're all weighty, scholarly tomes that analyse war and human conflict.

0:21:060:21:10

They shine a light onto our more brutal and vicious traits,

0:21:100:21:14

but also offer a glimpse of redemption.

0:21:140:21:17

Mount Everest is the looming presence at the centre of

0:21:220:21:25

Into The Silence by Wade Davis,

0:21:250:21:27

a gripping account of man's first attempts to conquer

0:21:270:21:30

the roof of the world

0:21:300:21:32

in a series of expeditions between 1921 and 1924.

0:21:320:21:36

Wade Davis, who is an award-winning anthropologist

0:21:390:21:42

and explorer in his own right, is brilliant at plotting

0:21:420:21:45

the history behind the British desire to conquer Everest.

0:21:450:21:49

By 1912, we'd lost the race to both poles,

0:21:490:21:51

so scaling the largest mountain in the world

0:21:510:21:54

became absorbed into the colonial effort,

0:21:540:21:57

in Davis' words, "A grand imperial gesture."

0:21:570:22:01

But the backdrop to this epic quest was the battlefields of World War One,

0:22:030:22:07

where men were subjected to an onslaught of death and destruction.

0:22:070:22:11

EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE

0:22:110:22:16

'In the noise and chaos and horror of the battle,

0:22:160:22:19

'all communication collapsed.

0:22:190:22:21

'Those few who advanced slowed

0:22:210:22:23

'and faltered, burdened by their loads,

0:22:230:22:26

'leaning and bowing into the storm

0:22:260:22:28

'as if to limit exposure to the land.'

0:22:280:22:30

Out of the 23 climbers who took part in the world's first

0:22:310:22:35

Everest expeditions,

0:22:350:22:36

17 had experienced the horrors of the trenches.

0:22:360:22:40

This is the final attempt here,

0:22:400:22:43

1924, and we see Mallory and Sandy Irvine,

0:22:430:22:46

who accompanied him.

0:22:460:22:48

Mallory was the most illustrious climber of his generation,

0:22:480:22:52

so therefore the most famous.

0:22:520:22:53

And this one here is the very last photograph taken of Mallory

0:22:530:22:57

and Irvine as they set off from camp four

0:22:570:22:59

to make their assault on Everest,

0:22:590:23:02

and neither of them came back.

0:23:020:23:04

Whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit is still disputed.

0:23:070:23:12

The three expeditions to conquer Everest had failed.

0:23:120:23:14

But man's obsession with defeating it never ceased.

0:23:140:23:19

I'm not normally into stories of exploration

0:23:210:23:23

and British derring-do, but this book is much more than that.

0:23:230:23:27

For a start, it's beautifully written,

0:23:270:23:29

and the way that Wade Davis explores human suffering

0:23:290:23:33

and the effect of World War One

0:23:330:23:35

on the individual and national psyche

0:23:350:23:38

makes this book genuinely moving.

0:23:380:23:40

But less than 20 years after the First World War,

0:23:420:23:46

violence and fighting had returned to Europe,

0:23:460:23:48

this time to a country at war with itself.

0:23:480:23:52

The Spanish Holocaust, written by Paul Preston,

0:23:540:23:57

an academic and a leading authority on modern Spanish history,

0:23:570:24:01

is a chilling yet powerful account of the mass slaughter

0:24:010:24:04

committed by Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War.

0:24:040:24:07

In Spain, there is what has often been called the pact of silence.

0:24:090:24:12

That was an important part of the transition to democracy.

0:24:120:24:15

When Franco died,

0:24:150:24:17

people were terrified that there wouldn't be a democratic transition,

0:24:170:24:22

and therefore there was this kind of tacit agreement,

0:24:220:24:25

"Let's not rake over the past."

0:24:250:24:28

So in a way, I wanted to, if you like,

0:24:280:24:31

to break the pact of silence.

0:24:310:24:34

I felt someone had to do it.

0:24:340:24:36

On 18th July, 1936,

0:24:410:24:42

on hearing of the military uprising in Morocco,

0:24:420:24:46

an aristocratic landowner lined up the labourers on his estate

0:24:460:24:50

to the south-west of Salamanca

0:24:500:24:52

and shot six of them as a lesson to the others.

0:24:520:24:55

Aguilera's cold and calculated violence

0:24:550:24:59

reflected the belief common among the rural upper classes

0:24:590:25:02

that the landed labourers were subhuman.

0:25:020:25:05

You use the word holocaust, it's a Spanish holocaust.

0:25:060:25:08

-Why did you choose that word in particular? It's quite loaded.

-What I wanted to do was to shock.

0:25:080:25:13

I wanted a word that would capture my sense of indignation,

0:25:130:25:18

my sense of horror at what had happened.

0:25:180:25:21

Franco had such an amazingly good press in the Anglo-Saxon world.

0:25:210:25:25

He's still thought of as this gallant Christian gentleman,

0:25:250:25:28

when in fact the piles of dead bodies over which Franco clambered

0:25:280:25:32

to get to power were something I felt needed attention being drawn to.

0:25:320:25:36

There were evenings when my wife would come home from work

0:25:360:25:40

and she would find me literally weeping over the keyboard.

0:25:400:25:44

It was appalling.

0:25:440:25:46

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels Of Our Nature

0:25:500:25:54

offers a more optimistic outlook for mankind.

0:25:540:25:57

Pinker is a polymath and author of several popular

0:25:570:25:59

science books about language and the human mind.

0:25:590:26:02

In this, his latest work, he argues that over the course of human history,

0:26:040:26:08

violence has declined

0:26:080:26:10

and we are now living in the most peaceful era of our species' existence.

0:26:100:26:15

It sounds a bit too good to be true.

0:26:150:26:18

But Pinker's argument is convincing as well as thought-provoking,

0:26:180:26:22

and it's backed up with an incredible amount of research,

0:26:220:26:26

masses of data and graphs that chart violent incidents over time

0:26:260:26:29

and adjust them according to the world's population.

0:26:290:26:32

'Critics have been raving about this book.

0:26:330:26:36

'It's been called "brilliant" and "mind-altering".

0:26:360:26:38

'Pinker believes that the pacification of the world

0:26:380:26:41

'is a steady and ongoing trend.'

0:26:410:26:44

The women's liberation and civil rights movements

0:26:440:26:47

illustrate how far we've come from fighting each other

0:26:470:26:51

to fighting for each other's rights.

0:26:510:26:53

So, Steven, I've read two other books on the shortlist

0:26:540:26:58

that are essentially full of mankind's brutality.

0:26:580:27:01

And yet your book is trying to give us a reason for optimism.

0:27:010:27:06

I kept coming across these statistics that no-one else seemed to know about,

0:27:060:27:10

that violence seems to be in decline

0:27:100:27:13

in multiple ways.

0:27:130:27:15

So many people think that things are getting worse,

0:27:150:27:17

and being privy to these studies showing that it is the other way around,

0:27:170:27:21

I thought that the news had to get out.

0:27:210:27:24

What would you like people to take away from your book?

0:27:240:27:27

One is a sense of gratitude for the institutions that have made life pleasant

0:27:270:27:31

in ways that we sometimes don't appreciate,

0:27:310:27:34

and also the knowledge that it's not hopeless,

0:27:340:27:37

the world is not a hellhole, we've been doing something right.

0:27:370:27:40

Thinking that we can reduce war still further is not romantic,

0:27:400:27:44

it's not idealistic, it's completely practical.

0:27:440:27:47

Thank you, Steven, and I'd like to say that I spent ages reading thousands and thousands of words

0:27:470:27:51

of how terrible people have been to each other,

0:27:510:27:53

and you have given me a glint of hope, so I'd like to say thank you very much.

0:27:530:27:57

My pleasure, thank you!

0:27:570:27:59

And next week I will be looking at the other three nominees on the shortlist.

0:28:010:28:05

But finally tonight, a piece of unexpectedly terrifying telly

0:28:050:28:09

first broadcast 20 years ago today.

0:28:090:28:11

Following a public outcry and a slew of complaints,

0:28:110:28:14

it was deemed too disturbing ever to be repeated in full -

0:28:140:28:17

quite an achievement for an entirely fictitious spoof documentary.

0:28:170:28:22

But here, for one night only, resurrected from the BBC crypt,

0:28:220:28:25

Ghostwatch will play us out.

0:28:250:28:27

And remember, it's not real. Good night.

0:28:270:28:30

Sarah, Sarah, are you all right?

0:28:320:28:35

Suzanne's a lot quieter now.

0:28:350:28:38

But they won't move. They won't listen to me.

0:28:380:28:43

I think Suzanne's in some kind of a state of shock.

0:28:440:28:48

MIC FEEDBACK

0:28:480:28:51

What do I do? I can't leave them.

0:28:510:28:53

Sorry, I've got to take this out. It's making a terrible noise.

0:28:530:28:56

BANGING

0:28:560:28:58

I don't know what's going on.

0:28:580:29:00

Can you hear this?

0:29:000:29:01

Smithy? Michael? Dr Pascoe?

0:29:010:29:04

There are credible noises

0:29:040:29:06

coming from the walls and from the ceiling.

0:29:060:29:09

SCREAMING

0:29:090:29:11

# Tonight on Halloween. #

0:29:110:29:13

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