Episode 18 The Culture Show

This week, the good ship Culture Show sets sail

from the maritime museum here in Greenwich,

One of my favourite places,

and quite simply the world's greatest museum

devoted to seafaring.

All that, and they are about to open a new exhibition of photographs

by the pioneering American photographer, Ansel Adams,

all on the theme of water.

More of that later.

'Also on tonight's show,

'Miranda Sawyer delves into the dark arts of trashy mags.'

'Michael Smith stares death in the face...

'..and I review three of the shortlisted books

'in the running for the Samuel Johnson Prize.'

First, it's smash hits cinema,

and America's latest blockbuster movie is Argo.

Ben Affleck joins the ranks of Hollywood's multi-taskers

by both directing and performing in this action thriller.

We sent our man Mark Kermode on a mission to find out more.

In the West, the late '70s was a time of socially progressive values,

of the economic independence of women,

of environmentalism and of disco.

But further afield,

this era of self-determination was expressed rather differently.

In Iran, after the Islamic Revolution,

rising tensions with the US

triggered the storming of the American Embassy,

putting the CIA and the American Government on high alert

as 52 Americans were taken hostage.

Although those events are well rehearsed,

Ben Affleck's new film Argo centres on a less well-known element

of the story that sounds so absurd it just has to be true.

-What happened?

-Six of the hostages went out a back exit.

Where are they?

The Canadian Ambassador's house.

I got an idea. They are a Canadian film crew for a science-fiction movie.

I fly into Tehran. We all fly out together as a film crew.

I need you to help me make a fake movie.

So you want to come to Hollywood and act like a big shot

-without actually doing anything?

-Yeah.

You'll fit right in.

-Ben, welcome to the Culture Show.

-Thanks so much for having me.

I'm old enough to remember the hostage crisis,

but I didn't know the story of Argo,

and the story was classified until about 10 years ago.

'97, yeah.

The CIA had some sort of 50th anniversary celebration thing,

and they declassified reams of material,

and the stuff sat on the shelf until somebody researched it.

Eventually the script ended up in my hand,

so it was a serpentine kind of journey,

but one that I'm really glad ended up the way it did.

What about the balancing of the thread?

On one hand, you have a comedic strand, on the other hand

there is a political story and there's a thriller.

Did you ever find it hard to balance how many laughs can we get

in a scene which is being played off against a hostage situation?

I thought, when I read the script,

that that was going to be most challenging thing,

to synthesise these three tones which were quite different,

and, you know, as you point out, the laughter can really upend

the rest of the material, because people are having fun

and not taking it seriously all of a sudden because, hey, it's a comedy.

Ultimately, what really rescued me was that the acting,

particularly in the comic part with John and Alan,

was so real that it didn't seem to be different

from the rest of the movie, oddly.

How about The Horses Of Achilles?

No good. Nobody does Westerns any more.

It's ancient Troy.

If it's got horses in it, it's a Western.

Kenny, please.

Yeah, it's John Chambers about the office space.

It doesn't matter, it's a fake movie.

If I'm doing a fake movie, it's going to be a fake hit.

My assumption is that a good proportion of the audience

won't know how it ended before they go in.

Was that your feeling as well?

My hope was that I would benefit from two things.

One from the fact that it was a true story,

so you tell the audience this is true and they invest a little more deeply

because they think, "Well, if I see someone die,

"I'll think that they really died."

Two, it is not so true, and so well-known

that you can't still surprise the audience.

Almost!

Every time.

'Argo is a departure from Affleck's directorial home turf.

'His first two films, Gone Baby Gone and The Town,

'were both crime thrillers based in Boston.'

'But for this film, with George Clooney producing,

'he has broken those geographical and topical boundaries.'

Look, they are going to try and break you, OK?

By trying to get you agitated.

You have to know your resume back to front.

You really believe your story is going to make a difference

when there's a gun to our heads?

I think my story's the only thing between you and a gun to your head.

George Clooney, when he was over here in the UK some years ago,

was talking about wanting to make movies that had political threads,

but worked as dramas, and watching this, it seemed very much to me

that I can see that vision of his.

How was your relationship with him as a producer?

You know, George is the smartest guy I've ever met about Hollywood.

Obviously understands politics. Extremely winning, charming guy.

And handsome!

Very handsome, not that I noticed! But he is very handsome.

As you say, this project lines up very neatly with that description

of wanting to make a certain kind of movie,

and George is smart enough to understand

that you can't do something that's didactic, that's preachy,

that says "We want you to believe this."

You're an air traffic controller with the audience.

But, you know, you can have some of this provocative,

thought-provoking content in a movie.

You're getting a visitor.

-Have you gotten people out this way before?

-No.

You are asking us to trust you with our lives.

This is what I do, and I've never left anyone behind.

In terms of the casting, you seem to have made a specific decision that,

as far as hostages are concerned,

it's not names that everyone would be familiar with.

Was that a deliberate decision?

Yeah. I felt that the movie doesn't work at all

if you don't identify emotionally with these house guests.

If people over the world watch the movie

and don't feel like "That could be me."

In order to identify that closely and empathise that much with somebody,

I think it helps if they're not stars.

With this movie, having anonymity really helps,

because they just seem ordinary.

How much, for you, is the hair and the clothes and the beard

arrangement key to getting into the character?

Or do you just look at those things and go, "I know where we are"?

One thing I like about it, it is not me.

I feel I can just sink into this other guy.

It is all your hair.

It is all my hair, although Philip Baker Hall,

who played Admiral Turner, you know,

the two guys who we have to pitch the idea to...

You're telling me that there is a movie company in Hollywood right now

that is funded by the CIA?

Yes, sir.

He didn't say anything to me when we were doing the movie,

and we played the scene,

and he was there for his couple of days and he left,

and he ran into another actor three months later and was like,

"I saw Ben. He still has the wig!"

Ben, I really enjoyed the movie. Thanks very much.

It's a pleasure. Nice interview, thank you.

Next, Miranda Sawyer ventures into the murky depths

of contemporary magazine culture.

A provocative new play by Lucy Kirkwood, who has been described

as Britain's brightest stage writer

takes a wry look at the ethically-challenged world

of men's and women's magazines.

'In 1994, a magazine barged its way on to our newsstands

'transforming not only the culture of men's magazines,

'but popular culture itself.'

'Loaded was the original lads' mag.'

'Its motto, "For men who should know better."'

Loaded, to give it its due,

was a pretty good magazine in the early days,

but it spawned a new generation of men's mags,

whose attitude - more birds, less words - made their agenda explicit.

'Glossy shots of semi-clad celebs were replaced by snaps

'of ordinary girls posing semi-naked in their bedrooms.'

'Pictures that wouldn't look out of place in a porn mag.'

As bikini and bra tops were lowered, so too were the industry's ethics,

and it's this thorny issue that lies at the heart of

a new black comedy by Lucy Kirkwood called NSFW, here at the Royal Court.

'The play takes its title from a social media term, Not Safe For Work,

'meaning images that you wouldn't want your boss catching you browsing online.'

'It's a play of two halves,

'with the second act set in a glossy women's magazine, Electra,

'and the first in the offices of lads' mag, Doghouse,

'where they're chasing the ratings in a desperate bid not to go under.'

Two of the publications in our demographic

have gone under in the last three months,

and this is an opportunity.

I don't think that's what we've fully grasped here yet.

You don't look excited.

This is exciting.

ALL: Yay!

I'm giving you licence to be bold, guys, be brave, yeah?

There's always room for jokes and boobs. That's a given.

What else is there room for?

Rupert?

Bums.

Bums don't sell. What I am saying is,

let's really live in the spaces between the boobs, yeah?

'I asked two seasoned journalists,

'Deborah Orr, who writes for the Guardian,

'and James Brown, the creator of Loaded,

'to tell me how well they thought the play had nailed the industry.'

Doghouse is obviously based on a lads' mag.

Did you recognise it from your years at Loaded?

Some of it. I thought the name of the magazine was good,

and the office decor looked right,

but the bloke struggling with his sales

and young girls sending pictures of breasts in,

that's not what my world was like, editing those magazines.

There is a couple of issues that they do raise that are quite interesting.

One is the idea that, to a certain extent,

young women want to exploit themselves,

so they want to send pictures in of themselves with their tits out.

This idea that the you're only going to become famous

by getting your tits out is really short-sighted.

I take those points, but that's not quite what they were saying.

It isn't all about chicken and egg.

Are women portrayed in the media, in the way they are

because that's how women want to be portrayed, or are women lining up

to be portrayed because that's the way the media want to portray women?

I haven't actually told anybody this,

but I am actually part of a group, a women's group,

and I sort of lie to them about what I do,

but the way things are right now,

all my mates are on benefits and I don't want that, so if it means

I'm working for money then, I can deal with a few tits here and there.

-What about the idea that women somehow collude?

-Yes, they do.

They say it is empowering if I do pole dancing to keep fit?

Yeah. Load of crap. It's just women's own self-delusion.

Women collude in topless pictures

in the same way as dairy farmers collude in milk.

That's a pretty awful metaphor, given the breasty-ness...

Milk.

So, you know, it is a supply and demand thing.

If you offer people money

for something that it is easy for them to do,

especially if it's a lot of it, people will come along and say,

"Yeah, I can do that."

This one. Show me on this one.

Show you what?

Show me how you put a circle round the flaws on this woman's body and caption them.

There's a moral centre to the play,

which is a naive little fellow who comes along and works for Doghouse

and then he tries to get a job at Electra.

When Sam is asked to circle the imperfections in women,

did you buy the editor Miranda's argument that if you are doing that,

you're actually improving a lot of women?

Oh, definitely. I recognise that philosophy that she's espousing.

"That woman's too fat, that woman's too thin, that woman's too hairy."

It's really destructive and nasty and awful,

and any woman who stands around doing that job and saying

she's empowering women by it is a total bitch and enemy of humanity.

So have a little look at the screen and tell me where her flaws are.

But she's perfect.

No, I don't mean for normal women.

For normal women, she's an unhealthy role model.

Projecting, well, damaging standards of unnatural physical,

you know, perfection.

Sorry, luvvie, does this look like The Guardian?

Sorry?

She's not perfect.

No, but, I mean, she's an actress.

She's a film star. It's her job to be perfect.

No, she's not perfect.

Nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect. Our readers aren't perfect.

I need you to point out the ways in which this woman is not perfect.

Would you say the play, although it's not very accurate about the industry,

does throw up issues that need to be talked about?

The thing about the play is that the people who never buy

Zoo or Nuts or Heat...

Which there are none of in the audience.

..will go along to see this and have their prejudices confirmed

in a witty way that they will enjoy,

and it's a great night out in that respect,

but it's entertainment.

The idea that it has something deeper to say

about the real problems that society is grappling with

is, for me, not at all true.

Before I went in to watch it, I was reading the actual play.

I was almost embarrassed by how much I was laughing.

The first couple of pages, the way the editor was behaving.

That was spot on.

If it had carried on like that, just sending the whole thing up,

it would have worked for me,

and if they just kept layering it on, it would have made them look more and more stupid,

they would have made a much stronger case

and got the points across a little more subtlely.

And NSFW is on at the Royal Court Theatre until 24th November.

Next, the Wellcome Collection which is known for exploring the links

between art, medicine and life, often with rather macabre results.

This winter, they've gone downright morbid

with an exhibition about death.

Quaking in his boots, our very own Michael Smith went along

to find out just what happens

when you make that final appointment with the Grim Reaper.

'How do we begin to talk about death?'

'Death doesn't answer back.'

'The Grim Reaper's not big on conversation.'

Death, after all, is a guess, the great unknown.

The one blank canvas that awaits us all.

How do we imagine the unimaginable?

'I've never seen a dead body before,

'and maybe that's one reason I feel quite removed

'from death's blunt realities.'

'But John Harris's family has been putting London's East End

'six feet under for five generations.'

'It turns out that commemorating death

'can be more expensive than living.'

I can see that around the office,

you've got quite a collection on the subject.

Well, it comes back, really,

to this study of various cultures and religions.

I find it fascinating, and if you went back in time,

especially if you were a wealthy person,

a lot would be expected of you.

For example, you know, there was some beautiful mourning jewellery.

Now, you imagine rings like these.

If you were a person of some status and you had your funeral,

not only would you entertain people with food and drink,

but important people, you would give them a present.

So a family might strike about 30 of these rings, say, for example.

So on top of your normal funeral costs, by today's standards

you would have another £25,000 in jewellery you're giving out.

-So, it'd be more expensive than a wedding?

-Oh, yes.

So, probably the biggest expense in anyone's life was their actual death.

Death's a subject I've always tried to avoid, really.

French philosopher Blaise Pascal

said it was easier to die without thinking about it,

and to contemplate death as some far-off event.

Or as Woody Allen put it, "I am not afraid of death."

"I just don't want to be there when it happens."

'But a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection

'tries to look death square in the face.'

'It's a uniquely morbid cabinet of curiosities,

'charting humanity's eternal attempt to make peace with death.'

'And I'm getting a sneak preview of some of the objects.'

So this is just one of the treasures

that you will find in our exhibition.

It's a portrait of a rather robust looking, well-fed gentleman.

But if you flip him around, you'll see that there is a radical device

-on the other side.

-Before and after?

-Exactly.

So do you think the fact that there is a skull in it,

does that it give it a moral dimension,

this picture, do you think?

I certainly think that it would have encouraged the person

who'd commissioned this portrait to reflect upon whether or not

they were living a good life.

So this is a really interesting sculpture.

It's Death, carrying a bow and arrow in triumph,

and you get a lot of images of the triumphant skeleton in the genre

known as the dance of death which is an illustration that emerges

in the Middle Ages around the time of the Black Death.

There's something incredibly gory and full-on

about this little sculpture,

but I guess, you know, at that time, when everyone around you

would be dropping like flies, you know,

you'd be a lot more familiar with death.

I guess that culture had a different relationship with death than we do.

'What has persisted, though,

'is our need to ritualise death, to window-dress it.'

'To give it some kind of shape.'

Sometimes it seems like the easiest way to deal with a subject

as uncomfortable and difficult as death is to make fun of it,

and in this picture, it's almost like Death's the punchline

of some cruel joke.

It's a piece by George Grosz,

and he made it in the last year of his life, which was the late '50s,

and the rise of advertising and mass consumerism.

Now, in that world, we're insulated from the stark reality of death,

but here, death pokes through that veneer.

You see these skulls coming through in adverts for shoes

or adverts for products, and it's just a reminder

that we're going to die in the most cynical and sarcastic way.

'In many of these images,

'the opposite of death isn't life, but sex.'

'The urge to procreate is the only counterweight

'to Death's inevitable blackhole gravity.'

We've got a series of postcards here from the early 1900s

that explore the theme of sex and death.

It's as if sex and death are locked in a strange kind of tango,

two sides of the same coin.

This one, particularly, is a kind of lover's embrace

that you can also read as a skull.

I just find the postcards really bizarre and I can't imagine

sending loved one a reminder of their own death in the post.

'However you try and understand death,

'there is no way to prevent the inevitable.'

'As the Roman poet Horace said,

"You flourish in wealth and the honour which men pay you,

"consider yourself that you are mortal, that you are earth,

"and into the earth you shall go."'

'Death's the great leveller.'

'Whether you are buried in silk sheets or a cardboard box,

'it is the one great democratic experience that comes to us all.'

For my part, I don't really want a fancy headstone or a memorial,

I'd like to have my ashes scattered into the Thames.

It's this vast, eternal thing that runs through the city I love

and belong to, and when I die, I'd like to become part of that.

And you can see that collection for yourself from 15th November.

Now we turn to the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize

for non-fiction.

Last week, Miranda Sawyer took her pick of three books

from the shortlist.

This week, I've got to grips with the rest.

'Last week's books touched on the horrors of war,

'but also on human redemption. My books are quite different.'

The three books I'll be looking at all deal with journeying,

travelling the world beyond our shores.

Pushing boundaries, whether real or imagined.

'The great American playwright Arthur Miller described

'August Strindberg as the mad father of modern theatre.'

'In this first major English biography for 30 years,

'writer Sue Prideaux shines a dazzling light

'on the mercurial writer straddling the old world and the new.'

The second half of the 19th century was a crucible of innovation,

a period of tumult and revolution.

The new pushing out the old at every turn.

Think of Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, Cezanne.

Well, August Strindberg was as incendiary as any of them.

'His most famous play is Miss Julie,

'still hugely popular in theatres today.'

'In its time, though,

'its powerful sexual and class politics shocked audiences.'

'It was banned for 18 years in his own country.'

'But Strindberg wasn't the only Scandinavian

'ruffling a few feathers.'

I was fascinated to read about Munch the painter's relationship

with Strindberg.

Am I right in thinking that that's actually wear your book began?

Absolutely.

Strindberg had just written Miss Julie and he arrived in Berlin.

Munch was having a show, and there they were.

It was 30 years after Darwin,

Nietzsche had just said God was dead,

and everyone was interested in what is it to be human?

What's going on in the human mind?

In a sense, aren't they rebelling against Darwin?

-Yes.

-The idea that this man can explain everything about humanity,

that The Origin Of The Species has told us where we fit.

They're looking to put that mystery back.

Yeah, because the mystery, obviously, is there,

and so they're looking to find it.

That year, that summer, Munch painted The Scream.

He was interested in portraying extreme psychological states

like despair and anxiety,

and Strindberg was interested in doing the same, and so he was

turning inside himself to express this metaphysical, if you like.

Generally speaking, I think biographers fall into two camps.

There are those who, once they've finished their book,

never, ever, ever want to think about the subject ever again,

and there are those who fall in love with the subject.

Where would you put yourself?

Neither category, actually, but I could think about Strindberg,

I will think about Strindberg until the day I die.

'From the wintry world of 19th-century Sweden to modern-day Mumbai.'

'My next book's journey couldn't be more different.'

'In 2009, Slumdog Millionaire burst onto the screen,

'perhaps misleadingly called "The feel-good film of the year."'

'After the glitzy Mumbai premiere,

'the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo

'wrote a piece in the New Yorker reflecting the real city she knew.'

'The slums of Mumbai, that she'd been researching for four years.'

Katherine Boo's Behind The Beautiful Forevers is a remarkable debut.

With an absorbing cast of characters,

it's written in the manner of a novel,

though everything in it is based on real interviews with real people.

There's no neat beginning, no middle, and certainly no Bollywood ending.

At the heart of it all

lies the author's passion to make us, the readers, truly feel

what it is really like to be one of the poorest people on earth.

'In the early years, Abdul had sat in a classroom

'where nothing much happened. Then there had been only work.'

'Work that churned so much filth into the air it turned his snot black.'

'Work more boring than dirty.'

'Work he expected to be doing for the rest of his life.'

'Most days, that prospect weighed on Abdul like a sentence.'

'Tonight, hiding from the police, it felt like a hope.'

The book is based in Annawadi,

described as "a sumpy plug of slum bordering a sewage lake."

"3,000 people packed into, or on top of, 335 huts."

The book's strength lies in its relentless focus

on the grim human realities of poverty,

the almost insurmountable obstacles faced by the people of Annawadi

as they struggle day-to-day through life.

All this isn't laid on thick, it's simply laid bare.

'The hectic, restless world of the slum seems like a million miles away

'from the next book.'

Robert MacFarlane's book is the third volume

in a kind of psycho-geographical trilogy.

A heartfelt exploration not just of how we shape the landscape,

but of how it shapes us.

The old ways or walks that he travels are human constructions,

charting both our history and our humanity.

It is anything but pedestrian.

'Robert MacFarlane was made a Cambridge don

'at the grand old age of 25.

'His first book won three prestigious awards

'and set the tone that would make him

'the golden boy of travel writing.'

-Why do you walk?

-It's a very good question. I always have walked.

I walk to commemorate, to remember, but also to discover, as well,

and walking is a very powerful way of giving shape to our thoughts,

but also to our memories.

'MacFarlane said he wanted to be a poet then a novelist

'before he settled on his own unique style of writing, and it shows.'

'There's an undeniable mystical, spiritual side to his work.'

It's bright line curved away from us.

An OG whose origin we could not explain,

and whose invitation to follow we could not disobey.

So we walked it northwards, along that glowing track

made neither of water nor of land

which led us further and still further out to sea.

'In fact, one of the most memorable paths he takes is not on land,

'but out at sea.'

I remember, it was such a luminous night.

There was Jupiter, there was a wonderful moon.

We left a phosphorescent wake behind us,

and I suddenly realised we were leaving our own trail briefly visible

as this kind of sea road in the green and gold phosphorescence

beneath our boat.

It was unforgettable.

Well, it's been a great pleasure.

-We should take a walk!

-Yes, absolutely. Let's leave.

And the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize

will be announced on 12th November.

That's pretty much it for tonight's show,

but we leave you with a visual treat.

The legendary photographer Ansel Adams documented the raw beauty

of the wild American landscape,

and now a new exhibition here at the National Maritime Museum

contains some of his most stunning images,

including three monumental photographic murals

never previously exhibited.

The show opens on the 9th November. Good night.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media