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On The Review Show tonight, conniving queens, | 0:07:15 | 0:07:17 | |
the allusion of fiction and elusive truths, Philip Glass sets | 0:07:17 | 0:07:21 | |
an American icon to music, challenging art, | 0:07:21 | 0:07:25 | |
and searching for Paradise. | 0:07:25 | 0:07:27 | |
All that, | 0:07:27 | 0:07:28 | |
and we've got music from Tim Burgess of The Charlatans in the studio. | 0:07:28 | 0:07:32 | |
Welcome to The Review Show. | 0:07:34 | 0:07:36 | |
Tonight my cultural jury is the crime writer Denise Mina, novelist | 0:07:36 | 0:07:40 | |
and broadcaster Marcel Theroux and journalist Sarfraz Manzoor. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:43 | |
Coming up, we'll be looking at new novels from Neil Gaiman | 0:07:43 | 0:07:46 | |
and James Robertson, | 0:07:46 | 0:07:48 | |
imagination and endeavour in two big summer exhibitions, Austrian | 0:07:48 | 0:07:52 | |
director Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy and Walt Disney: The Opera. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:56 | |
But first, it seems you can't swing a sword these days without | 0:07:56 | 0:07:59 | |
hitting another medieval drama series. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
With the success of big budget titles | 0:08:02 | 0:08:04 | |
such as The Tudors, The Borgias and HBO's Game Of Thrones, | 0:08:04 | 0:08:07 | |
bodices, battles and beheadings are big business. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
Well, now the BBC has joined the fight with home-grown ten-part | 0:08:10 | 0:08:14 | |
summer blockbuster The White Queen. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:16 | |
Based on Philippa Gregory's best-selling | 0:08:16 | 0:08:18 | |
series of historical novels, The Cousins' War, it reinterprets | 0:08:18 | 0:08:22 | |
the Wars of the Roses from the elusive female perspective. | 0:08:22 | 0:08:25 | |
Welcome to Planet Plantagenet. | 0:08:25 | 0:08:28 | |
The White Queen refers to Elizabeth Woodville, | 0:08:32 | 0:08:35 | |
one of three women at the centre of a clandestine medieval matriarchy. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:40 | |
Her translucent beauty is one of a host of weapons in her armoury, | 0:08:40 | 0:08:44 | |
and it is not long before she captures the attention of a young King Edward IV. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:50 | |
Your Grace, I cannot be your mistress. | 0:08:50 | 0:08:52 | |
I may die in battle and this could be my last request. | 0:08:54 | 0:08:57 | |
You would deny your king that? | 0:08:57 | 0:08:59 | |
You will not die. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:01 | |
You are quick and brave and lucky. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:07 | |
This new drama imagines the battle lines drawn not by the men, | 0:09:07 | 0:09:12 | |
but by the women at the heart of the royal court. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:14 | |
Even now when I'm reading modern histories about the medieval period, | 0:09:14 | 0:09:19 | |
I find I have to read through them to find these women | 0:09:19 | 0:09:22 | |
and to find out what they're doing and what they're thinking, | 0:09:22 | 0:09:25 | |
and in a sense, to read through that prejudice | 0:09:25 | 0:09:28 | |
which even today we've inherited. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:30 | |
This was the Middle Ages, | 0:09:30 | 0:09:32 | |
when might and majesty were just a rebellion away. | 0:09:32 | 0:09:35 | |
Family was fickle, and marriage merely a means to an end. | 0:09:35 | 0:09:39 | |
We should find a purse of gold from the treasure room for His Grace. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:42 | |
A purse of gold to wage war against King Henry? | 0:09:42 | 0:09:45 | |
Woman, have you lost your wits?! Are we Yorkists now? | 0:09:45 | 0:09:49 | |
Yes. If he wins. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:53 | |
And he is likely to, for then he will control all our fortunes. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:57 | |
And all the marriages. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:00 | |
And there are many girls in the family, Richard. | 0:10:00 | 0:10:03 | |
Sometimes, woman, you even scare me. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:11 | |
They live in a world where women have no formal political | 0:10:11 | 0:10:14 | |
opportunity at all. | 0:10:14 | 0:10:16 | |
A woman cannot fight her own corner in any | 0:10:16 | 0:10:19 | |
way except by manipulation, by sexual allure, by politicking, | 0:10:19 | 0:10:25 | |
by rebelling in secrecy, | 0:10:25 | 0:10:27 | |
and also by using witchcraft that these women have to deploy | 0:10:27 | 0:10:31 | |
and secret art they can land their hands on in order to | 0:10:31 | 0:10:35 | |
get their own way, because their is no open way to | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
power for a woman - indeed, not just then but for a long time after. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:43 | |
Sarfraz, do you think it's a credible perspective in history? | 0:10:48 | 0:10:51 | |
I mean, there's so little documented about it. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:54 | |
It's hard to say, but in a way it doesn't really matter. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:56 | |
I think, in terms of the woman who wrote... Emma Frost, I think, | 0:10:56 | 0:11:00 | |
she said, "Well, we're using history but this is actually drama," | 0:11:00 | 0:11:05 | |
so I don't think it necessarily matters. | 0:11:05 | 0:11:07 | |
I thought this was royal history rewritten as rom-com, | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
in the sense that, essentially, it's about a man who's kind of out | 0:11:10 | 0:11:13 | |
there, he finds someone he wants to love, | 0:11:13 | 0:11:15 | |
they've got to be coming from different camps, | 0:11:15 | 0:11:18 | |
and the fact that it has got these female leads does make it more | 0:11:18 | 0:11:21 | |
interesting, but also, the fact that most of these women who are | 0:11:21 | 0:11:24 | |
watching drama and reading fiction, it makes sense as well. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:27 | |
As you're saying, you're watching it, | 0:11:27 | 0:11:29 | |
it's very obvious that the primary thing is drama, it's a drama, | 0:11:29 | 0:11:33 | |
and it's kind of like The Tudors but much more accessible. | 0:11:33 | 0:11:36 | |
The dialogue is very contemporary. You know... | 0:11:36 | 0:11:40 | |
-"I'm mad for you." -"I'm mad for you." | 0:11:40 | 0:11:42 | |
So jarring when he says to her, "I'm mad for you." | 0:11:42 | 0:11:45 | |
You know, the analysis of female power, | 0:11:45 | 0:11:49 | |
it didn't really feel particularly like a feminist | 0:11:49 | 0:11:51 | |
re-writing of history because it was really about them being pretty | 0:11:51 | 0:11:54 | |
and getting married. It wasn't about who they controlled. | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
It was about how they exercise power, isn't it? | 0:11:57 | 0:12:00 | |
Also, the idea that Jacquetta, who is Elizabeth's mother, | 0:12:00 | 0:12:05 | |
is also practicing witchcraft. | 0:12:05 | 0:12:08 | |
Right. We know that women did exercise power in some way. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
You know, in the medieval period of Aquitaine, Henry II's wife made | 0:12:11 | 0:12:16 | |
a lot of trouble for him. | 0:12:16 | 0:12:18 | |
And I was longing to see how these women were going to | 0:12:18 | 0:12:21 | |
exercise power. How is it? | 0:12:21 | 0:12:23 | |
You don't have your hand on the gear stick as a woman | 0:12:23 | 0:12:26 | |
in medieval England, so what are they going to do? | 0:12:26 | 0:12:29 | |
Well, judging by this, you kind of, you look pretty | 0:12:29 | 0:12:32 | |
and you hope the king takes a shine to you. I didn't see that. | 0:12:32 | 0:12:35 | |
Lady Macbeth is a more interesting feminist icon | 0:12:35 | 0:12:39 | |
than the women we met. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:40 | |
It's because we don't know. | 0:12:40 | 0:12:43 | |
The character Margaret Beaufort is kept apart from her son. | 0:12:43 | 0:12:45 | |
She believes Henry VII, as it happens, is going to be king, | 0:12:45 | 0:12:51 | |
and I thought her character was really strongly | 0:12:51 | 0:12:53 | |
portrayed as a really intellectual, slightly unhinged, driven woman. | 0:12:53 | 0:12:57 | |
I thought Edward's mother was a really interesting character as well. | 0:12:57 | 0:13:00 | |
And in a way, I think, you know, for a dramatist, for a writer, | 0:13:00 | 0:13:04 | |
it's actually quite nice that this is stuff that there isn't that | 0:13:04 | 0:13:07 | |
much documentation of, cos it allows you to fill the gaps. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:10 | |
The danger is just whether you believe any of it's true or not. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:13 | |
It just wasn't medieval enough for me. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:15 | |
I wanted something which had more of the stink | 0:13:15 | 0:13:17 | |
and the regionalism of the Wars of the Roses. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:20 | |
I mean, OK, we don't know much about them. | 0:13:20 | 0:13:22 | |
We know quite a lot about some of it. There's a past in letters. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:25 | |
There's that book She-Wolves by Helen Castor, which is | 0:13:25 | 0:13:28 | |
about the women powerbrokers before Elizabeth. | 0:13:28 | 0:13:33 | |
So we know something about them. | 0:13:33 | 0:13:34 | |
We know they didn't sleep on beds exactly like that. | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
We knew they don't have hair crimpers | 0:13:37 | 0:13:39 | |
and we knew their personal hygiene wasn't exactly like what | 0:13:39 | 0:13:41 | |
we saw in that thing, | 0:13:41 | 0:13:43 | |
and I think they succumb to a tendency to Mills and Boon-ify it. | 0:13:43 | 0:13:46 | |
Don't you think this is just at the service of drama, though? | 0:13:46 | 0:13:49 | |
They're not trying to be literalists in that sense. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:51 | |
If you think about the television of The Other Boleyn Girl, | 0:13:51 | 0:13:53 | |
which was done with an absolutely tiny budget. | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
I think they had, like, three walls and a bed, | 0:13:56 | 0:13:58 | |
and it blew this out of the water. | 0:13:58 | 0:14:00 | |
It was absolutely amazing in dramatical terms, | 0:14:00 | 0:14:02 | |
in terms of the integrity, in terms of the sense that you | 0:14:02 | 0:14:05 | |
had of the power play between all the different characters. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:08 | |
And this is very superficial. | 0:14:08 | 0:14:11 | |
But do you think it's because it's just started | 0:14:11 | 0:14:13 | |
and the idea is that almost... Not exposition, | 0:14:13 | 0:14:15 | |
but the first two episodes are setting up these | 0:14:15 | 0:14:17 | |
series of women who then actually, | 0:14:17 | 0:14:19 | |
-particularly Henry VII's mother, will come into play much more? -No. | 0:14:19 | 0:14:23 | |
I think it's kind of Tudors-lite, and it's War of the Roses, | 0:14:23 | 0:14:26 | |
-which is quite baffling. It's going to be massive. -Do you think so? | 0:14:26 | 0:14:29 | |
I thought it was slow. It thought it built slowly, | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
and I think we're now used to multi-part dramas which have a | 0:14:32 | 0:14:34 | |
number of plot strands set up in the early episodes, | 0:14:34 | 0:14:37 | |
and this really only had one going on in the first episode. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:40 | |
I agree, Margaret Beaufort, right, | 0:14:40 | 0:14:42 | |
she's the future mum of the future Henry VII. | 0:14:42 | 0:14:45 | |
Really interesting character, really promising. | 0:14:45 | 0:14:47 | |
She was unusual, she had a strange fanaticism, | 0:14:47 | 0:14:51 | |
and I kind of wanted more of that. You know, these were strange times. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
There were religious wars going on. | 0:14:54 | 0:14:56 | |
These people were like warlords, they were like gangsters, | 0:14:56 | 0:14:59 | |
-they weren't like... -But I think you get a bit of that from Janet McTeer. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:02 | |
She absolutely dominates cos she is so brilliant. | 0:15:02 | 0:15:05 | |
When she is in a scene, she kind of takes it over. | 0:15:05 | 0:15:08 | |
We talked a bit about the magic, | 0:15:08 | 0:15:10 | |
I think the magic thing could possibly be something which is going | 0:15:10 | 0:15:13 | |
to grow as well, and I thought that was an added element | 0:15:13 | 0:15:16 | |
and it struck me as, you know, | 0:15:16 | 0:15:17 | |
you were saying I was sounding like an accountant, | 0:15:17 | 0:15:19 | |
maybe I'm going to sound a bit like a commissioning editor here, | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
but there is a sense that if you can get a bit of sci-fi | 0:15:22 | 0:15:24 | |
in addition to the royal light... | 0:15:24 | 0:15:26 | |
But what about this whole Downton effect? | 0:15:26 | 0:15:28 | |
This is the next kind of Downton and, actually, it doesn't matter | 0:15:28 | 0:15:33 | |
too much, as you say, what the literal niche of the story is. | 0:15:33 | 0:15:36 | |
It's getting the personal drama. | 0:15:36 | 0:15:38 | |
Being shallow, all these actors are very appealing to look at, | 0:15:38 | 0:15:42 | |
they have a story that's quite interesting in there. | 0:15:42 | 0:15:44 | |
This is also territory that most people are not as familiar with | 0:15:44 | 0:15:48 | |
as they are with the Tudors, | 0:15:48 | 0:15:49 | |
and I think the BBC are on to a good thing with this. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:51 | |
Give me Horrible Histories. | 0:15:51 | 0:15:53 | |
I found it quite hard to work out who they were, | 0:15:53 | 0:15:55 | |
because they're all so good-looking and they've all got the same hairdo, | 0:15:55 | 0:15:58 | |
and they all just blur into one. | 0:15:58 | 0:16:00 | |
In fact, one person actually comments on how alike all the women are. | 0:16:00 | 0:16:04 | |
The men are sort of identi-kit looking in the same way, I think. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:07 | |
I wanted more. They've only had a bath once a year! | 0:16:07 | 0:16:10 | |
The jackets they're all wearing, | 0:16:10 | 0:16:12 | |
talking about the contemporary language, | 0:16:12 | 0:16:14 | |
even the fashion is contemporary with those quilted jackets that the men | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
-are wearing. It's something you could see out on the streets. -Puffers. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:20 | |
Puffers, puffer jackets in The White Queen. | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
Well, The White Queen begins tonight on BBC One right after this show. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:25 | |
This month, two new books also take real life events as a starting | 0:16:25 | 0:16:30 | |
point to explore very different worlds. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:32 | |
One the 21st of December, 1988, an aeroplane exploded over | 0:16:35 | 0:16:40 | |
the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:43 | |
James Robertson's latest book, The Professor Of Truth, | 0:16:46 | 0:16:50 | |
is the tale of Dr Alan Tealing, who loses his wife and daughter | 0:16:50 | 0:16:53 | |
when their aeroplane is brought down in a suspected terrorist | 0:16:53 | 0:16:56 | |
attack, also killing 270 people. | 0:16:56 | 0:16:59 | |
The story bears many similarities to that of Lockerbie, | 0:17:03 | 0:17:06 | |
but The Professor Of Truth is very much a work of fiction. | 0:17:06 | 0:17:10 | |
Fiction, I think can sometimes get at the truth in a way that | 0:17:10 | 0:17:15 | |
the hard facts of journalism sometimes can't. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:19 | |
With a novel you can boil some of that detail down to | 0:17:19 | 0:17:23 | |
some of the more abstract essentials. You know, what is truth? | 0:17:23 | 0:17:26 | |
What is justice? | 0:17:26 | 0:17:27 | |
What happens to somebody who suffers that kind of loss, | 0:17:27 | 0:17:31 | |
and then has to got through this long, emotional, psychological, | 0:17:31 | 0:17:35 | |
philosophical journey in order to try to find some kind of answer at the end of it? | 0:17:35 | 0:17:41 | |
"'Tell me, were you even alive before the bomb went off?' He said. | 0:17:41 | 0:17:46 | |
"'I mean, really alive?' The anger surged again inside me. | 0:17:46 | 0:17:51 | |
"'Yes, I was,' I said. 'You can keep death and pain. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:55 | |
"'I was alive every day and I knew it. | 0:17:55 | 0:17:57 | |
"'I was in love with my wife and I adored my beautiful daughter.'" | 0:17:57 | 0:18:02 | |
Neil Gaiman has reached super stardom as a writer of graphic novels, | 0:18:05 | 0:18:09 | |
children's books, adult fiction and, more recently, TV and film. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:15 | |
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane is his first adult book in | 0:18:15 | 0:18:18 | |
eight years, although it's told from the perspective of a young boy. | 0:18:18 | 0:18:22 | |
The fantasy began when I was about eight or nine years old. | 0:18:22 | 0:18:26 | |
And it was when I learned that the lane that I lived on, there was a | 0:18:26 | 0:18:31 | |
farm at the end of the lane that had been mentioned in the Domesday Book. | 0:18:31 | 0:18:35 | |
And I remember thinking at the time, "Wouldn't it be interesting | 0:18:35 | 0:18:38 | |
"if the same people had lived there for a thousand years?" | 0:18:38 | 0:18:43 | |
Gaiman's book blurs his real childhood memories of landscapes | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
and events with his unique style of other world fantasy. | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
His young protagonist's battle with dark magic is fought under | 0:18:50 | 0:18:54 | |
the aegis of three protective women, | 0:18:54 | 0:18:56 | |
one of whom is his centuries old 11-year-old neighbour, | 0:18:56 | 0:18:59 | |
Lettie Hempstock. | 0:18:59 | 0:19:01 | |
"Something shifted and the ragged thing looked down at us. | 0:19:01 | 0:19:06 | |
"Lettie Hempstock said, 'Name yourself.' | 0:19:06 | 0:19:10 | |
"There was a pause. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:12 | |
"Empty eyes stared down. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
"Then a voice as featureless as the wind said, | 0:19:15 | 0:19:18 | |
"'I am the lady of this place. I have been here for such a long time. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:23 | |
"'Since before the little people sacrificed each other on the rocks. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:27 | |
"'My name is my own, child, not yours.'" | 0:19:27 | 0:19:30 | |
Denise, as Neil Gaiman said, it's his first adult book in eight years, | 0:19:32 | 0:19:36 | |
does it read like an adult book? | 0:19:36 | 0:19:37 | |
It does actually read like an adult book | 0:19:37 | 0:19:40 | |
and I think one of the things I love about him | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
and I think it's a very strong book from him, is that he writes... | 0:19:43 | 0:19:49 | |
His fantasy is almost like a metaphor you can't quite grasp | 0:19:49 | 0:19:54 | |
hold of. You can't quite see what he's drawing towards. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
It doesn't feel like abstract fantasy, it's not strange | 0:19:57 | 0:20:01 | |
and otherworldly for no reason. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:04 | |
It feels like a sort of dreamed metaphor, you know? | 0:20:04 | 0:20:07 | |
Which I think is really enchanting. | 0:20:07 | 0:20:08 | |
And he has this sort of Edwardian construction of childhood, | 0:20:08 | 0:20:12 | |
which, you know, is really quite beautiful. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:16 | |
Sarfaz, he said that what he wanted to do was write as an adult | 0:20:16 | 0:20:19 | |
remembering what childhood really was. | 0:20:19 | 0:20:22 | |
And he gives this great example where he says, actually, | 0:20:22 | 0:20:25 | |
it's about adults move to places in straight lines. | 0:20:25 | 0:20:27 | |
Children meander, wait behind bushes and find their own way. | 0:20:27 | 0:20:31 | |
And that he is bringing that sensibility to the book. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:33 | |
Yeah. I mean, I think, to be honest, the bits | 0:20:33 | 0:20:35 | |
I liked most were the bits which felt like they were written for adults, | 0:20:35 | 0:20:38 | |
which were his meditations and reflections on what's | 0:20:38 | 0:20:41 | |
different about childhood as opposed to adulthood. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:43 | |
And there's a lovely bit where I think Lettie says something like, | 0:20:43 | 0:20:46 | |
grown-ups aren't really grown-ups on the inside. | 0:20:46 | 0:20:49 | |
Actually they're all children and they're just pretending | 0:20:49 | 0:20:51 | |
and I thought that really felt, that felt very true. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:54 | |
But to be honest, I didn't find the fantasy stuff, | 0:20:54 | 0:20:56 | |
whether it's a metaphor or not, that appealing. | 0:20:56 | 0:20:58 | |
And I think it's only an adult book for people who have grown up | 0:20:58 | 0:21:01 | |
loving sci-fi or fantasy or those kind of things. | 0:21:01 | 0:21:04 | |
It doesn't really speak to me. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:05 | |
And I know he's got 1.8 million followers on Twitter | 0:21:05 | 0:21:08 | |
-or everything, but... -You're so jealous. -I would love that. | 0:21:08 | 0:21:11 | |
But I just think that actually, it's only a book | 0:21:11 | 0:21:13 | |
if you grew up loving that kind of writing for adults. | 0:21:13 | 0:21:16 | |
But what about the way that he creates this wonderful | 0:21:16 | 0:21:19 | |
family of women? Now they're strong women, the Hempstock women. | 0:21:19 | 0:21:22 | |
Lettie, Mrs Hempstock and old Mrs Hempstock. All witches. | 0:21:22 | 0:21:25 | |
Yes, they're all witches. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:27 | |
For me, the pleasures of the book are the pleasures of magic, | 0:21:27 | 0:21:31 | |
of goodies and badies and a kind of simplistic moral universe. | 0:21:31 | 0:21:36 | |
And those are the pleasures of children's fiction to me. | 0:21:36 | 0:21:39 | |
What it doesn't have is rounded characters, | 0:21:39 | 0:21:43 | |
kind of strong writing, a really interesting character | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
and a kind of moral sophistication. So, to me, | 0:21:46 | 0:21:48 | |
I'm kind of puzzled that the book is billed as an adult novel. | 0:21:48 | 0:21:51 | |
I know the framing action, the beginning and the end, | 0:21:51 | 0:21:54 | |
is kind of where he makes the argument this is an adult novel. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:57 | |
But for me the pleasure of the central section, | 0:21:57 | 0:21:59 | |
the pleasures I got, they remind me of Susan Cooper, | 0:21:59 | 0:22:02 | |
The Dark Is Rising or Wrinkle In Time, or Roald Dahl books. | 0:22:02 | 0:22:06 | |
Well, to me it was Lolly Willowes, the Sylvia Townsend Warner book, | 0:22:06 | 0:22:09 | |
because it just came alive in exactly the same way. | 0:22:09 | 0:22:12 | |
You had this incredibly sympathetic portrayal of, these are white witches of course. | 0:22:12 | 0:22:15 | |
But they were, you know, that isn't, that's not myth. | 0:22:15 | 0:22:18 | |
He makes a picture in the book that it's a myth. To me that's fairy tale. | 0:22:18 | 0:22:21 | |
Fairy tale is where there is an evil witch and there's a good witch. | 0:22:21 | 0:22:24 | |
In a myth there's a witch and they're ambiguous | 0:22:24 | 0:22:27 | |
and the struggle is what, are they good? | 0:22:27 | 0:22:30 | |
But this is not a book where there's that kind of ambiguity. | 0:22:30 | 0:22:33 | |
Isn't it adult in the sense that this is actually a child who's | 0:22:33 | 0:22:36 | |
trying to process things that were going on which were real, | 0:22:36 | 0:22:39 | |
but using the kind of imaginative world. | 0:22:39 | 0:22:41 | |
Or did they even exist, or were they his imagination? | 0:22:41 | 0:22:44 | |
Because really it centres around a suicide and his dad having an affair with the au pair, | 0:22:44 | 0:22:49 | |
and this kid trying to make sense of it, | 0:22:49 | 0:22:50 | |
and trying to understand from that perspective. | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
But that's your interpretation of it. That's an interpretation. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:56 | |
That's like me saying that Jack The Giant Killer is about | 0:22:56 | 0:22:59 | |
some oedipal fantasy, but that's not on the page. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:02 | |
But what about, I mean, you talk about the language, | 0:23:02 | 0:23:05 | |
the way that he creates this perfectly, it seems, sensible idea | 0:23:05 | 0:23:09 | |
that there's a hole in the boy's foot, | 0:23:09 | 0:23:11 | |
which then comes in to the heart. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:12 | |
That's a very difficult trick to pull off. | 0:23:12 | 0:23:15 | |
I mean, he's so accomplished | 0:23:15 | 0:23:17 | |
but if you don't get fantasy and it doesn't speak to you | 0:23:17 | 0:23:20 | |
and you can't go there, it's not going to make any sense to you, | 0:23:20 | 0:23:23 | |
but if you love that kind of thing, then... | 0:23:23 | 0:23:25 | |
You have to be in the club beforehand. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:27 | |
Well, is it a club? I don't know. | 0:23:27 | 0:23:29 | |
I just think you have to kind of open a door in your mind... | 0:23:29 | 0:23:32 | |
I do think his evocation of being a boy who sought solace | 0:23:32 | 0:23:36 | |
in words and in books and sort of the interior world, I think | 0:23:36 | 0:23:40 | |
that was really beautifully done, | 0:23:40 | 0:23:42 | |
and that must have been quite autobiographical, | 0:23:42 | 0:23:44 | |
but that felt quite true, didn't it? That the world outside | 0:23:44 | 0:23:47 | |
is really kind of complicated, I'm going to go back in. | 0:23:47 | 0:23:49 | |
Also, I don't find that Edwardian, slightly saccharine, | 0:23:49 | 0:23:53 | |
-childhoody stuff all that appealing. -Secret Garden. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:56 | |
Yeah, I don't really find that terribly appealing, | 0:23:56 | 0:23:59 | |
but I do love the idea of a child | 0:23:59 | 0:24:00 | |
faced with quite traumatic events in the adult world, | 0:24:00 | 0:24:03 | |
trying to make sense of it with the wrong information | 0:24:03 | 0:24:05 | |
-and coming up with these... -Because that happens all the time | 0:24:05 | 0:24:08 | |
in reality and fantasy, the wrong information, the wrong order. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:11 | |
But in the book, the problem is that | 0:24:11 | 0:24:13 | |
some evil force has broken in and they are a bit like a canvas sheet | 0:24:13 | 0:24:17 | |
and then with the help of these good witches, he has to solve the evil. | 0:24:17 | 0:24:21 | |
There's no sense in which | 0:24:21 | 0:24:22 | |
this is really about someone who is having trouble processing grief | 0:24:22 | 0:24:25 | |
or their dad having the affair with the au pair. | 0:24:25 | 0:24:28 | |
You have some anxiety, some ambivalence about his father. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
I mean, to me, that territory for adult fiction would be, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
"I have ambivalent feelings about my dad, is he a goodie or a baddie?" | 0:24:34 | 0:24:38 | |
I think if you buy into it, | 0:24:38 | 0:24:39 | |
I can totally see why it would be an absolutely delicious read. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
I just feel like if you're not part of that, it can leave you cold. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
If you're not 14, it's not a delicious read, I think. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:48 | |
Interesting, the next book we're going to talk about, | 0:24:48 | 0:24:50 | |
The Professor Of Truth. | 0:24:50 | 0:24:52 | |
James Robertson also writes children's fiction | 0:24:52 | 0:24:54 | |
and his starting point is the dreadful events of December 1988. | 0:24:54 | 0:24:59 | |
Can you turn fiction into a different kind of truth | 0:24:59 | 0:25:03 | |
-than the one that exists? -That's what he's trying to do. | 0:25:03 | 0:25:06 | |
I'm a bit mystified by this, because in his interviews, | 0:25:06 | 0:25:08 | |
he basically says the argument that if you write something fictional, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:11 | |
you can reach a different truth than journalism can, etc. | 0:25:11 | 0:25:14 | |
But I think that's slightly demeaning journalism, | 0:25:14 | 0:25:16 | |
because in the book, he doesn't mention Lockerbie | 0:25:16 | 0:25:19 | |
and he doesn't mention Libya, he doesn't mention Megrahi, | 0:25:19 | 0:25:22 | |
-but the inference is there that that's what it is. -Yeah. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:25 | |
But in the details, when he's talking about the loss of somebody | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
through a plane crash or about any of those things, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:32 | |
those are all things you could glean from very good non-fiction, | 0:25:32 | 0:25:35 | |
and also, when he talks about how in the book, what he wants to do | 0:25:35 | 0:25:38 | |
as part of the book is to reopen the case and look at it again, | 0:25:38 | 0:25:41 | |
it feels like he's kind of having his cake and eating it | 0:25:41 | 0:25:44 | |
as he's basically saying, "This is not anything to do with Lockerbie, | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
"but by the way, I'd like you to start looking at Lockerbie again." | 0:25:47 | 0:25:50 | |
And interestingly, he followed Lockerbie, as all of us here did, | 0:25:50 | 0:25:53 | |
very, very carefully. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:55 | |
Dr Jim Swire was, of course, the main campaigner who believes, | 0:25:55 | 0:25:59 | |
particularly after the trial, that Megrahi was innocent. | 0:25:59 | 0:26:01 | |
There was a great conversation between Robertson and Jim Swire | 0:26:01 | 0:26:06 | |
at Hay because James Robertson purposely never met Jim Swire | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
before he wrote the book, and the character of Alan Tealing, | 0:26:09 | 0:26:12 | |
Jim Swire says, gets as close as you will ever get | 0:26:12 | 0:26:16 | |
to writing fictionally about the emotions he felt. | 0:26:16 | 0:26:19 | |
I think the emotional hook is very interesting, | 0:26:19 | 0:26:21 | |
but I'm really fascinated by that tension between writing | 0:26:21 | 0:26:25 | |
about true events in a narrative way. I think it's fascinating | 0:26:25 | 0:26:29 | |
that the central character is a professor of English Literature | 0:26:29 | 0:26:33 | |
and the whole book for me is about narrative | 0:26:33 | 0:26:36 | |
and the power of narrative to alter and to rewrite, | 0:26:36 | 0:26:40 | |
and that history is a narrative, it is a constructed narrative. | 0:26:40 | 0:26:43 | |
And he posits that, basically, | 0:26:43 | 0:26:45 | |
the CIA and indeed the investigators here were creating a narrative that | 0:26:45 | 0:26:50 | |
-they needed to have. -Yeah. -Which essentially wasn't the right one. | 0:26:50 | 0:26:54 | |
To me, I wanted to see someone, I want to see that in non-fiction. | 0:26:54 | 0:26:59 | |
If someone has new evidence about Lockerbie, | 0:26:59 | 0:27:01 | |
I don't think a novel is the right place to address it. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:03 | |
What's interesting also is, in terms of imaginative leaps | 0:27:03 | 0:27:06 | |
and the idea of what fiction can do, | 0:27:06 | 0:27:08 | |
I was thinking about Martin Amis' The Second Plane, | 0:27:08 | 0:27:10 | |
the collection of writings about 9/11. | 0:27:10 | 0:27:12 | |
In one of them, I think he writes from the position of one | 0:27:12 | 0:27:15 | |
of the suicide bombers | 0:27:15 | 0:27:16 | |
and it struck me that if Robertson had written | 0:27:16 | 0:27:19 | |
a book from the position of a fictionalised Megrahi, | 0:27:19 | 0:27:22 | |
that could perhaps take you to a place where | 0:27:22 | 0:27:24 | |
non-fiction hasn't so far done. | 0:27:24 | 0:27:26 | |
But to take a position from someone like Jim Swire, | 0:27:26 | 0:27:29 | |
who is around and well-known, | 0:27:29 | 0:27:30 | |
didn't feel that much of a jump. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:33 | |
I thought it was a brilliant way to bring it up again, | 0:27:33 | 0:27:35 | |
talk about it and unpack it. | 0:27:35 | 0:27:37 | |
Lots of people don't want to talk about it, which is very interesting. | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
-A lot of Americans don't want to talk about it. -Which you can fully understand. | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
People find the story that they need | 0:27:43 | 0:27:45 | |
but what I really loved about this book, | 0:27:45 | 0:27:47 | |
and the fact it was a fiction book, | 0:27:47 | 0:27:49 | |
was it looked at the purpose of law. | 0:27:49 | 0:27:50 | |
Justice is different from truth. | 0:27:50 | 0:27:53 | |
Justice is different and the law is not about achieving justice, | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
it's about resolving disputes | 0:27:56 | 0:27:58 | |
between two sides. | 0:27:58 | 0:28:00 | |
I really liked all that. | 0:28:00 | 0:28:01 | |
You're a crime writer. That wasn't news to you. | 0:28:01 | 0:28:04 | |
No, I knew that anyway, but it's nice to see it affirmed by somebody else. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:08 | |
I think the fact it takes you on an emotional journey in a way | 0:28:08 | 0:28:11 | |
that non-fiction will not and people who read non-fiction | 0:28:11 | 0:28:14 | |
are different than people who read fiction, so because it's fiction and is from a first-person account... | 0:28:14 | 0:28:20 | |
If it's oblique, do you think that what James Robertson is saying is, | 0:28:20 | 0:28:25 | |
"I want fiction to be a campaigning tool to reopen Lockerbie." | 0:28:25 | 0:28:31 | |
I think this is a strange tension. Everybody bases | 0:28:31 | 0:28:34 | |
fiction on true events but people are very | 0:28:34 | 0:28:38 | |
churlish about admitting it if there's a ghost of being sued. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:40 | |
I don't really understand what it's about. | 0:28:40 | 0:28:43 | |
I think if it has anything made up, it's fiction. | 0:28:43 | 0:28:45 | |
One drop of made-up stuff makes it fiction. | 0:28:45 | 0:28:49 | |
There might be people who read this that might not | 0:28:49 | 0:28:51 | |
read a non-fiction book about Lockerbie and that might ignite them to want to know more. | 0:28:51 | 0:28:55 | |
It will certainly send them to Wikipedia to say, | 0:28:55 | 0:28:57 | |
"What's he driving at?" It certainly sparked an interest in me | 0:28:57 | 0:29:01 | |
in reading more about what actually happened. | 0:29:01 | 0:29:04 | |
Neil Gaiman's novel is released this week | 0:29:04 | 0:29:06 | |
and James Robertson's The Professor Of Truth is available now. | 0:29:06 | 0:29:10 | |
Sadly, another of Scotland's finest writers, Iain Banks, died last weekend. | 0:29:10 | 0:29:14 | |
Humorous, thoughtful and witty to the last, you can see his final | 0:29:14 | 0:29:17 | |
interview in a Review Show special on BBC Two on Tuesday at ten o'clock. | 0:29:17 | 0:29:22 | |
Now to a filmmaker who has sent seismic shocks through | 0:29:22 | 0:29:26 | |
festival circuits and lists Werner Herzog and John Waters amongst his fans. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:31 | |
Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's provocative, uncompromising new | 0:29:31 | 0:29:34 | |
trilogy, Paradise: Love, Faith and Hope, provides a stark window into | 0:29:34 | 0:29:39 | |
the worlds of three women and their search for the personal paradise. | 0:29:39 | 0:29:43 | |
In the Paradise trilogy, Seidl underscores his ability to | 0:29:54 | 0:29:57 | |
create uncomfortable viewing through excruciatingly intimate | 0:29:57 | 0:30:01 | |
examination of his characters. | 0:30:01 | 0:30:02 | |
The first film, Love, takes us to the | 0:30:15 | 0:30:17 | |
heart of sexual tourism with middle-aged divorcee Teresa. | 0:30:17 | 0:30:21 | |
Teresa is faced with tensions between her desire | 0:30:30 | 0:30:33 | |
and the financial transactions demanded by her would-be young lovers. | 0:30:33 | 0:30:36 | |
Complex relationships with men | 0:30:49 | 0:30:51 | |
and religion run through the second instalment, Faith, | 0:30:51 | 0:30:54 | |
as a devout Catholic woman struggles with the return of her | 0:30:54 | 0:30:58 | |
estranged Muslim husband. | 0:30:58 | 0:31:01 | |
Hope, the final and more redemptive of the films, is set in a teenage diet camp. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:06 | |
It examines 13-year-old Melanie's crush on her doctor | 0:31:08 | 0:31:11 | |
and the sexualisation of romance at that confusing age. | 0:31:11 | 0:31:14 | |
Seidl's tableau imagery, mixed with long single-shot scenes, | 0:31:18 | 0:31:21 | |
create a window through which to reflect on his subject matter. | 0:31:21 | 0:31:24 | |
Although it often makes for awkward viewing. | 0:31:26 | 0:31:28 | |
Marcel, three very stark films, but let's look at Love first. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:40 | |
Were you uncomfortable watching this? | 0:31:40 | 0:31:43 | |
I was very uncomfortable watching it. | 0:31:43 | 0:31:45 | |
This is not a date movie. | 0:31:45 | 0:31:47 | |
I made the mistake of watching it with my dad | 0:31:47 | 0:31:49 | |
and I didn't know where to put myself. | 0:31:49 | 0:31:51 | |
There are longueurs, | 0:31:51 | 0:31:53 | |
it's challenging, | 0:31:53 | 0:31:55 | |
it's very sexually frank, | 0:31:55 | 0:31:57 | |
but I thought it was an amazing film. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:00 | |
I've never seen anything like it | 0:32:00 | 0:32:02 | |
and it will haunt me for a long time. | 0:32:02 | 0:32:05 | |
There's a naturalism, a nakedness about the characters | 0:32:07 | 0:32:10 | |
that you just don't see at the cinema. | 0:32:10 | 0:32:12 | |
Yes, it's a difficult European film | 0:32:12 | 0:32:14 | |
but I think we should salute it for that reason. | 0:32:14 | 0:32:17 | |
To echo Marcel, | 0:32:17 | 0:32:18 | |
it's uncomfortable viewing. | 0:32:18 | 0:32:20 | |
The director has a photography background | 0:32:20 | 0:32:23 | |
and you can see that in the way those shots are composed, in wide shots. | 0:32:23 | 0:32:26 | |
There's shots where you have the white Austrian women | 0:32:26 | 0:32:29 | |
in a row of sun-loungers | 0:32:29 | 0:32:31 | |
and on the other side you have a long line of African men waiting | 0:32:31 | 0:32:34 | |
and it's deeply uncomfortable. | 0:32:34 | 0:32:37 | |
The other thing that makes it uncomfortable | 0:32:37 | 0:32:39 | |
is these are amateurs and professionals working together... | 0:32:39 | 0:32:43 | |
The Kenyans are the amateurs. | 0:32:43 | 0:32:45 | |
Some of these are actually beach boys | 0:32:45 | 0:32:48 | |
and you don't quite know | 0:32:48 | 0:32:51 | |
how much they knew before the scenes began, | 0:32:51 | 0:32:53 | |
what level of improvisation there was. | 0:32:53 | 0:32:55 | |
I watched it on my own. | 0:32:55 | 0:32:58 | |
I was quite glad I did | 0:32:58 | 0:32:59 | |
because this felt like it was verging on quite uncomfortable, | 0:32:59 | 0:33:03 | |
ethically dubious territory. | 0:33:03 | 0:33:06 | |
I felt really implicated in the sex tours | 0:33:06 | 0:33:08 | |
and when I realised a lot of these guys are not professional actors. | 0:33:08 | 0:33:11 | |
It's incredibly explicit. | 0:33:11 | 0:33:13 | |
Is it exploitative, do you think? | 0:33:13 | 0:33:15 | |
I think it WAS exploitative and really quite soiling. | 0:33:15 | 0:33:19 | |
It's a long time since I watched a film | 0:33:19 | 0:33:22 | |
that made me feel that powerfully. | 0:33:22 | 0:33:23 | |
I feel it does implicate the audience | 0:33:23 | 0:33:26 | |
in the sexual exploitation of these men. | 0:33:26 | 0:33:28 | |
At the same time, it is quite beautiful | 0:33:28 | 0:33:31 | |
and a world you've never seen before. | 0:33:31 | 0:33:33 | |
I thought the inversion of the genders for sex tourism | 0:33:33 | 0:33:36 | |
really highlighted... | 0:33:36 | 0:33:37 | |
If they had been | 0:33:37 | 0:33:39 | |
fat, unattractive old men | 0:33:39 | 0:33:41 | |
and very beautiful young women, I wouldn't have been as uncomfortable | 0:33:41 | 0:33:44 | |
because it's so familiar. | 0:33:44 | 0:33:46 | |
What about the idea that it's kind of Rubenesque, | 0:33:46 | 0:33:48 | |
that there's a beauty their bodies as well? | 0:33:48 | 0:33:51 | |
I think if you point the camera | 0:33:51 | 0:33:53 | |
at anything for long enough, it becomes beautiful to your eye | 0:33:53 | 0:33:56 | |
and I think it's just so unfamiliar | 0:33:56 | 0:33:58 | |
and you realise | 0:33:58 | 0:34:00 | |
after ten minutes, | 0:34:00 | 0:34:01 | |
the actress is a very beautiful woman. | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
What did you think of her journey, though? | 0:34:03 | 0:34:06 | |
The idea was that this was her first | 0:34:06 | 0:34:09 | |
episode of sex tourism | 0:34:09 | 0:34:11 | |
but she became coarsened... | 0:34:11 | 0:34:13 | |
It's a great descent, great storytelling. | 0:34:13 | 0:34:16 | |
..towards these men. | 0:34:16 | 0:34:17 | |
She starts off wanting love, a man to look into her eyes | 0:34:17 | 0:34:19 | |
and then gets progressively disillusioned | 0:34:19 | 0:34:21 | |
as she has one bad experience after another. | 0:34:21 | 0:34:23 | |
We don't know how the movie | 0:34:23 | 0:34:25 | |
was made, but in terms of the film, | 0:34:25 | 0:34:27 | |
the exploitation is mutual - | 0:34:27 | 0:34:29 | |
the men get money, the women get sex. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:31 | |
It's hard to say who's benefiting but by the end, | 0:34:31 | 0:34:35 | |
she's become so coarsened by the experience that she takes... | 0:34:35 | 0:34:38 | |
You feel she really degrades someone who | 0:34:38 | 0:34:42 | |
is not part of this, without wanting to give the whole plot away, | 0:34:42 | 0:34:46 | |
she degrades someone who's not part of this whole system | 0:34:46 | 0:34:49 | |
and it's deeply troubling. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:51 | |
Then you have, in one other of the trilogy | 0:34:51 | 0:34:54 | |
the woman who's gone to Kenya's sister. | 0:34:54 | 0:34:56 | |
She has either the zeal of a convert | 0:34:56 | 0:34:58 | |
or is a very ardent Roman Catholic | 0:34:58 | 0:35:00 | |
who is evangelising. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:03 | |
What did you think about that? | 0:35:03 | 0:35:04 | |
This is a very Austrian form of Roman Catholicism. | 0:35:04 | 0:35:07 | |
It's not Irish Catholicism, | 0:35:07 | 0:35:09 | |
that's for sure. | 0:35:09 | 0:35:11 | |
It's very, very rigid | 0:35:11 | 0:35:13 | |
and I felt I really wanted to like the film | 0:35:13 | 0:35:15 | |
because it's very beautiful | 0:35:15 | 0:35:17 | |
and there's a lovely central relationship | 0:35:17 | 0:35:19 | |
and I really liked that character. | 0:35:19 | 0:35:21 | |
I think although they're very stark, | 0:35:21 | 0:35:22 | |
the characters are quite sympathetic | 0:35:22 | 0:35:24 | |
but at the same time I didn't feel it was anything to do with spirituality... | 0:35:24 | 0:35:28 | |
It's all to do with sex, isn't it? | 0:35:28 | 0:35:31 | |
It's all about repressed sexuality. | 0:35:31 | 0:35:33 | |
But she scourges herself... | 0:35:33 | 0:35:35 | |
in a very strange and sexual way, | 0:35:35 | 0:35:37 | |
trying to atone for the sins of others. | 0:35:37 | 0:35:40 | |
I felt that was a misunderstanding of a search for spirituality | 0:35:40 | 0:35:43 | |
through very rigid religion, which I think... | 0:35:43 | 0:35:47 | |
That ambiguous thing she does with the crucifix... | 0:35:48 | 0:35:50 | |
I felt that was a bit silly, to be honest. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:52 | |
I think there were some really interesting things in this film | 0:35:52 | 0:35:55 | |
in the sense that they had | 0:35:55 | 0:35:57 | |
this ardent Catholic | 0:35:57 | 0:35:59 | |
who is in a relationship with a Muslim guy | 0:35:59 | 0:36:02 | |
who comes back halfway through the film - her husband. | 0:36:02 | 0:36:05 | |
What I find quite interesting | 0:36:05 | 0:36:07 | |
and quite counter-intuitive | 0:36:07 | 0:36:08 | |
was that he is basically saying to her, | 0:36:08 | 0:36:10 | |
"You've gone a bit too far. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:12 | |
"What's up with your religion?" | 0:36:12 | 0:36:14 | |
That was quite clever, but I think in this film, | 0:36:14 | 0:36:16 | |
as in some of the other ones in the trilogy, | 0:36:16 | 0:36:19 | |
he creates interesting characters | 0:36:19 | 0:36:21 | |
and puts them in interesting scenes | 0:36:21 | 0:36:22 | |
but he sort of runs out of plot. | 0:36:22 | 0:36:24 | |
Yes, but just going back | 0:36:24 | 0:36:26 | |
to the nature of the Roman Catholicism, | 0:36:26 | 0:36:28 | |
this was shown | 0:36:28 | 0:36:30 | |
in Venice and there was an outcry | 0:36:30 | 0:36:32 | |
in the Roman Catholic Church | 0:36:32 | 0:36:33 | |
about the way this was being portrayed. | 0:36:33 | 0:36:36 | |
It's actual quite comical as well. | 0:36:36 | 0:36:38 | |
There's the scene where she goes into this elderly couple | 0:36:38 | 0:36:40 | |
and starts hectoring them because they're living in sin | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
and it felt a bit improvised. | 0:36:43 | 0:36:46 | |
It's actually quite funny. | 0:36:46 | 0:36:47 | |
It was done in a documentary style. | 0:36:47 | 0:36:49 | |
It looked like they had just sent her in to some non-actors. | 0:36:49 | 0:36:52 | |
The director does come from a documentary background... | 0:36:52 | 0:36:54 | |
Is that problematic in terms of creating drama? | 0:36:54 | 0:36:56 | |
Watching it and knowing about the beach boys, | 0:36:56 | 0:36:59 | |
then there's this really fantastic scene | 0:36:59 | 0:37:01 | |
of this really out-of-control, angry, alcoholic Russian woman. | 0:37:01 | 0:37:05 | |
And knowing about the beach boys, I was thinking, "This is very well improvised," | 0:37:05 | 0:37:08 | |
then realising afterwards and thinking, | 0:37:08 | 0:37:11 | |
"She probably was a really angry, alcoholic Russian woman!" | 0:37:11 | 0:37:14 | |
We don't know. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:16 | |
We have to assume the filmmaker's working in good faith. | 0:37:16 | 0:37:18 | |
The third film is the daughter of the woman who's the sex tourist. | 0:37:18 | 0:37:21 | |
While she is off in Kenya, | 0:37:23 | 0:37:24 | |
her daughter has been sent to a diet camp. | 0:37:24 | 0:37:26 | |
I kept thinking of Stand By Me or something. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:31 | |
This seemed to be much more dramatic with a lovely narrative. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:34 | |
Until the paedophile plot kicked in... | 0:37:34 | 0:37:38 | |
You recognise the filmmaker's DNA after a while | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
and are kind of bracing yourself for the horrible | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
revelation that will take the plot in a weird direction, but of | 0:37:45 | 0:37:49 | |
all the stories, that is the one that has some redemption in it, I think. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:53 | |
It does say something about the trilogy that | 0:37:53 | 0:37:55 | |
a film about a 13-year-old and a much older doctor is the most | 0:37:55 | 0:37:58 | |
heart-warming film of the group. | 0:37:58 | 0:38:00 | |
What he does, incredibly, is capture teenage girls talking to each other. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:06 | |
He is absolutely brilliant. | 0:38:06 | 0:38:07 | |
There's a bit with the three girls lying on the bunk beds, | 0:38:07 | 0:38:10 | |
seen from their knees, playing with their DSs. | 0:38:10 | 0:38:13 | |
It's just really sweet and the relationship... | 0:38:13 | 0:38:16 | |
What he really captured, which I have never seen on film before, | 0:38:16 | 0:38:19 | |
is the girls' relationships are with one another. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:22 | |
And the love interest is just a prop. The doctor is a notional man. | 0:38:22 | 0:38:27 | |
There's a scene of when the women in love are on the lounger | 0:38:28 | 0:38:32 | |
and they are talking about their men... | 0:38:32 | 0:38:34 | |
I never thought of that. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:35 | |
It's basically the same thing and you wonder | 0:38:35 | 0:38:37 | |
whether that will happen to them in a couple of decades. | 0:38:37 | 0:38:40 | |
It's interesting that this is the younger kids, | 0:38:40 | 0:38:42 | |
the unsullied version, that kind of wide-eyed innocence, asking each | 0:38:42 | 0:38:45 | |
other questions cos they're really scared they don't know the answers. | 0:38:45 | 0:38:49 | |
Both of those scenes involve "what do you do with hair?" and things like that. | 0:38:49 | 0:38:54 | |
One of them is talking about it, their mother's talking about it | 0:38:54 | 0:38:57 | |
and the daughter's talking about it. | 0:38:57 | 0:38:59 | |
What do you think is the experience of having these three films together? | 0:38:59 | 0:39:02 | |
To watch them back-to-back is a pretty tough watch. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
But he's saying something about paradise, I suppose. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:10 | |
To me, the strongest film is the first one | 0:39:10 | 0:39:11 | |
and the other two are less successful. | 0:39:11 | 0:39:14 | |
Love has the strongest narrative | 0:39:14 | 0:39:15 | |
and the biggest sense of the character of the journey. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:18 | |
The other two, I would find fault with. | 0:39:18 | 0:39:21 | |
Could you watch them together? | 0:39:21 | 0:39:22 | |
God, I wouldn't ask anybody to watch them back-to-back. | 0:39:22 | 0:39:25 | |
He wants people to watch them as a five-and-a-half-hour film. | 0:39:25 | 0:39:29 | |
I would watch them a month apart. I think you would just recover in time to watch the next one. | 0:39:29 | 0:39:33 | |
Werner Herzog said, "Never have I stared so directly into Hell," | 0:39:33 | 0:39:36 | |
which I think could go on the poster. KIRSTY LAUGHS | 0:39:36 | 0:39:38 | |
Paradise: Love is in cinemas now, | 0:39:38 | 0:39:40 | |
with Hope and Faith following in July and August, | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
a month apart, as Denise says. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:45 | |
Next tonight, Tim Burgess is perhaps best known as lead singer | 0:39:45 | 0:39:48 | |
with The Charlatans. | 0:39:48 | 0:39:50 | |
But he's recently paired up with Kurt Wagner of Lambchop | 0:39:50 | 0:39:52 | |
for his latest solo album, Oh No, I Love You. | 0:39:52 | 0:39:55 | |
Here's Tim with The Economy. | 0:39:55 | 0:39:58 | |
# High noons and summers | 0:40:17 | 0:40:20 | |
# The twelfth of five | 0:40:25 | 0:40:28 | |
# We are no smoking | 0:40:34 | 0:40:37 | |
# Beyond the still and viewless package | 0:40:40 | 0:40:44 | |
# Ooh... | 0:40:49 | 0:40:52 | |
# Our economy | 0:40:54 | 0:40:56 | |
# We're so sorry, so sorry | 0:41:03 | 0:41:07 | |
# It takes more than that for us to disappear | 0:41:07 | 0:41:13 | |
# You can go there | 0:41:19 | 0:41:21 | |
# We can do this | 0:41:21 | 0:41:24 | |
# We'll pretend that we don't even need it | 0:41:24 | 0:41:29 | |
# We can tune a piano | 0:41:36 | 0:41:39 | |
# It's like everything we thought | 0:41:39 | 0:41:43 | |
# That sax would be | 0:41:43 | 0:41:45 | |
# Ooh... | 0:41:54 | 0:41:58 | |
# Our economy | 0:41:59 | 0:42:02 | |
# Ooh... | 0:42:09 | 0:42:11 | |
# Our economy | 0:42:15 | 0:42:18 | |
# Ooh | 0:42:25 | 0:42:30 | |
# Our economy | 0:42:31 | 0:42:35 | |
# It won't be wasted | 0:42:44 | 0:42:47 | |
# It won't be lost | 0:42:52 | 0:42:55 | |
# Always a poke | 0:43:01 | 0:43:04 | |
# And you | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
# Wore my clothes | 0:43:10 | 0:43:12 | |
# Ooh... | 0:43:14 | 0:43:18 | |
# Our economy | 0:43:21 | 0:43:23 | |
# Ooh... | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
# Our economy | 0:43:37 | 0:43:40 | |
# We're so sorry | 0:43:40 | 0:43:42 | |
# It takes more than that | 0:43:42 | 0:43:44 | |
# For us to disappear | 0:43:44 | 0:43:48 | |
# We're so sorry | 0:43:48 | 0:43:50 | |
# So sorry | 0:43:50 | 0:43:52 | |
# Our economy | 0:43:52 | 0:43:56 | |
# We're so sorry | 0:43:56 | 0:43:57 | |
# So...ooh... # | 0:43:57 | 0:44:00 | |
There'll be more from Tim later in the show | 0:44:07 | 0:44:09 | |
and his new remix album, Oh No, I Love You More, | 0:44:09 | 0:44:11 | |
is out now. | 0:44:11 | 0:44:12 | |
He'll also be performing a special one-off gig | 0:44:12 | 0:44:15 | |
with Lambchop at the Barbican on the 23rd of June. | 0:44:15 | 0:44:19 | |
Now, it's as much a symbol of the English summer | 0:44:19 | 0:44:21 | |
season as Wimbledon and the Henley Regatta. | 0:44:21 | 0:44:23 | |
The Royal Academy's annual summer exhibition | 0:44:23 | 0:44:26 | |
is a huge melee of art | 0:44:26 | 0:44:27 | |
which draws vast crowds | 0:44:27 | 0:44:29 | |
and both fulfils the dreams and dashes the hopes | 0:44:29 | 0:44:31 | |
of many amateur artists. | 0:44:31 | 0:44:33 | |
It's far from easy to get your canvases onto those hallowed walls | 0:44:33 | 0:44:37 | |
so elsewhere in the capital, | 0:44:37 | 0:44:39 | |
one gallery is showing art by those | 0:44:39 | 0:44:40 | |
who haven't been quite so lucky. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:42 | |
Meanwhile, the Hayward is displaying work | 0:44:42 | 0:44:44 | |
by individuals who create fantastical art | 0:44:44 | 0:44:46 | |
which is outside the mainstream. | 0:44:46 | 0:44:49 | |
The world's largest open-submission art competition | 0:44:49 | 0:44:52 | |
has been running since 1769. | 0:44:52 | 0:44:56 | |
This year, there were more than 12,000 entries | 0:44:56 | 0:44:59 | |
and rivalry is fierce, | 0:44:59 | 0:45:01 | |
with little more than 10% of the works | 0:45:01 | 0:45:03 | |
being approved by the hanging committee. | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
Once regarded as stuffy and staid, | 0:45:06 | 0:45:08 | |
in recent years, the summer exhibition | 0:45:08 | 0:45:11 | |
has tried to keep up with the times. | 0:45:11 | 0:45:13 | |
Amateurs deemed worthy of wall space | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
can see their portraits, abstracts or landscapes | 0:45:16 | 0:45:19 | |
alongside work by distinguished names. | 0:45:19 | 0:45:22 | |
The like of Frank Auerbach, | 0:45:22 | 0:45:24 | |
Michael Craig-Martin and Grayson Perry. | 0:45:24 | 0:45:28 | |
Everything is contemporary. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:30 | |
Everything has been produced in the last couple of years. | 0:45:30 | 0:45:32 | |
We have paintings people would describe as being traditional | 0:45:32 | 0:45:35 | |
because they're straightforward landscapes | 0:45:35 | 0:45:37 | |
or portraits or something like that, | 0:45:37 | 0:45:40 | |
alongside much more difficult, challenging contemporary work. | 0:45:40 | 0:45:44 | |
I think our sense is we need to make all of that work together. | 0:45:44 | 0:45:48 | |
In a mischievous retort to this august institution, | 0:45:50 | 0:45:53 | |
for the past 23 years, | 0:45:53 | 0:45:55 | |
a gallery in Waterloo | 0:45:55 | 0:45:56 | |
has been showing work rejected by the Royal Academy. | 0:45:56 | 0:46:01 | |
Not The Royal Academy | 0:46:01 | 0:46:02 | |
is inspired by the Salon De Refuses, | 0:46:02 | 0:46:05 | |
a Paris exhibition in 1863 | 0:46:05 | 0:46:07 | |
which showed the work of artists such as Manet and Whistler | 0:46:07 | 0:46:10 | |
which had been rejected by the influential Salon committee. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:14 | |
Though this gallery, too, has selection criteria. | 0:46:14 | 0:46:18 | |
We don't like really ugly things. | 0:46:18 | 0:46:21 | |
Never have. We're totally escapist. | 0:46:21 | 0:46:23 | |
We live in a world that's full of ugly things | 0:46:23 | 0:46:26 | |
and when I go home and I look at my own paintings, | 0:46:26 | 0:46:29 | |
that have been painted by artists, | 0:46:29 | 0:46:32 | |
I would like to feel I'm looking at something beautiful and uplifting. | 0:46:32 | 0:46:37 | |
Nearby, the Hayward Gallery's | 0:46:37 | 0:46:39 | |
Alternative Guide To The Universe | 0:46:39 | 0:46:41 | |
celebrates work by people whose imaginations | 0:46:41 | 0:46:43 | |
have not been contaminated by traditional teaching. | 0:46:43 | 0:46:47 | |
Almost all of them are self-taught. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:51 | |
They didn't go to art school. | 0:46:51 | 0:46:53 | |
If they're physicists, they didn't study physics at university. | 0:46:53 | 0:46:57 | |
They learned things out of their own passion | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
and they've also imagined things that most of us take for granted | 0:47:00 | 0:47:04 | |
and decide we'll leave to the experts. | 0:47:04 | 0:47:07 | |
I think what you see in this work, | 0:47:07 | 0:47:09 | |
no matter how far-fetched or whimsical it may seem sometimes, | 0:47:09 | 0:47:13 | |
is the strength of this utter conviction. | 0:47:13 | 0:47:16 | |
These are people who believe in what they're doing, | 0:47:16 | 0:47:18 | |
and most of them are trying to make the world a better place. | 0:47:18 | 0:47:21 | |
So, Denise, beginning with the Hayward, | 0:47:23 | 0:47:26 | |
the kind of Outsider Art, so it's called, | 0:47:26 | 0:47:28 | |
often it's people on the edge of society who want to create a world that doesn't exist. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:33 | |
Did you find it beautiful? | 0:47:33 | 0:47:35 | |
I found it extraordinary and really, really stimulating. | 0:47:35 | 0:47:38 | |
You know, it's so interesting to go to something like this after | 0:47:38 | 0:47:42 | |
the Royal Academy because what it really highlights for me | 0:47:42 | 0:47:45 | |
is all those filters that stop art being shown or appreciated, | 0:47:45 | 0:47:49 | |
a lot of these people haven't been to art school, | 0:47:49 | 0:47:52 | |
they haven't been accepted. A lot of these people were not known until they died. | 0:47:52 | 0:47:56 | |
The work was not known until they died. | 0:47:56 | 0:47:58 | |
There's one particular woman who did self portraits | 0:47:58 | 0:48:02 | |
in kiosks in bus stations and it's Cindy Sherman. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:05 | |
Cindy Sherman bought her collection and then repeated it. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:08 | |
And then repeated it. | 0:48:08 | 0:48:10 | |
Sherman is a name who's presentable so she gets through the filters. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:13 | |
I find this so stimulating and I did think, you know, | 0:48:13 | 0:48:16 | |
we should look for art everywhere, not just in galleries. | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
But of course, often the kind of worlds they're creating, | 0:48:19 | 0:48:22 | |
of course, have theories, which are absolutely fantasy. | 0:48:22 | 0:48:26 | |
One of them was based on the idea that gravity doesn't exist | 0:48:26 | 0:48:30 | |
and the planet's going upwards. The other thing to pick up on, | 0:48:30 | 0:48:34 | |
I don't think a lot of these people think of themselves as artists. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:37 | |
They think of themselves as scientists or mathematicians | 0:48:37 | 0:48:40 | |
or philosophers and actually, | 0:48:40 | 0:48:42 | |
what I found quite interesting was that some of the ideas | 0:48:42 | 0:48:45 | |
behind the art was often more interesting | 0:48:45 | 0:48:47 | |
and more vivid than the art itself. | 0:48:47 | 0:48:49 | |
In a sense, this whole thing, it's not just the Academy is set up to keep these people out. | 0:48:49 | 0:48:53 | |
There's a kind of euphemism going on here. | 0:48:53 | 0:48:55 | |
A lot of these people have mental health problems. | 0:48:55 | 0:48:58 | |
This is art by people, some of whom have spent their whole life in institutions. | 0:48:58 | 0:49:01 | |
And I found the work very moving indeed. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:05 | |
I'd seen the Japanese outsider art the week before, | 0:49:05 | 0:49:08 | |
but one of the things that is moving about it is the sense | 0:49:08 | 0:49:11 | |
that these are not artists who are in control of what they're doing. | 0:49:11 | 0:49:14 | |
They're driven by obsessions, crazy theories that are palpably wrong... | 0:49:14 | 0:49:18 | |
Do you need the biography, do you think? | 0:49:18 | 0:49:20 | |
Well, I think that's part of the USP. I think it's implied. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:25 | |
I don't know. I mean, what you're saying there about an artist, | 0:49:25 | 0:49:28 | |
it's obsessive people, many of whom have mental illnesses, | 0:49:28 | 0:49:32 | |
people working on the basis of completely wrong ideas, | 0:49:32 | 0:49:35 | |
-that's most of us, isn't it? -Well, no, no... | 0:49:35 | 0:49:38 | |
You know, monomaniacs, that's a definition of a human being. | 0:49:38 | 0:49:42 | |
I think the other thing is that often art is about | 0:49:42 | 0:49:44 | |
trying to create a vision and sharing that vision. | 0:49:44 | 0:49:47 | |
I think they do stand up. You don't necessarily need to know the biography. | 0:49:47 | 0:49:50 | |
What about the idea of "calendar savant", one is, | 0:49:50 | 0:49:53 | |
which is the repetition of numbers? Which in itself is utterly beautiful | 0:49:53 | 0:49:56 | |
and weirdly had echoes of Gilbert and George for some reason. | 0:49:56 | 0:50:00 | |
That order, creating, some kind of desperate need to create order. | 0:50:00 | 0:50:04 | |
There was another one, a woman who does things, I think she calls them painted prescriptions, | 0:50:04 | 0:50:08 | |
this idea of trying to create something from inside. | 0:50:08 | 0:50:10 | |
A lot of what was shown there is now actually quite old | 0:50:10 | 0:50:13 | |
and is now fetching money. | 0:50:13 | 0:50:16 | |
How quickly are the dealers going to move in | 0:50:16 | 0:50:19 | |
and already have moved in on some outsider art as commercial? | 0:50:19 | 0:50:22 | |
I think that's really worrying. One of the things about the way... | 0:50:22 | 0:50:25 | |
I think as, you know, people making things, | 0:50:25 | 0:50:28 | |
trying to make sense of the world by making things | 0:50:28 | 0:50:31 | |
and reconstructing reality by making things, that's an activity. | 0:50:31 | 0:50:35 | |
Selling things as a commodity is another activity | 0:50:35 | 0:50:39 | |
and I think it's important in some ways to try and keep them separate. | 0:50:39 | 0:50:42 | |
If you go to the Royal Academy | 0:50:42 | 0:50:43 | |
and you see, and I went there on Buyers' Day, | 0:50:43 | 0:50:46 | |
which was a really quite bizarre experience, | 0:50:46 | 0:50:48 | |
because you're there and everything is about what the price is, | 0:50:48 | 0:50:51 | |
who's got a future, what's going to be worth more in the future. | 0:50:51 | 0:50:55 | |
And you look at outsider art and you think, you know, a market, | 0:50:55 | 0:50:59 | |
-well, markets always build up. -And an outsider artist should be able | 0:50:59 | 0:51:02 | |
to benefit from the market as much as anyone else. | 0:51:02 | 0:51:04 | |
It's not about value. The market is not value. | 0:51:04 | 0:51:07 | |
Outsider art has something special, because we get so bored. Money seems to have infiltrated the art world. | 0:51:07 | 0:51:12 | |
With outsider art, these people were compelled to create and that's what comes through. | 0:51:12 | 0:51:16 | |
It's unsullied by any mercenary motive. It's from the heart. | 0:51:16 | 0:51:20 | |
That's what Samuel Beckett called it, "the itch to make," | 0:51:20 | 0:51:23 | |
you know, which is delicious, it's gorgeous. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:26 | |
So you go from the relative quiet of the Hayward Gallery | 0:51:26 | 0:51:30 | |
into the Royal Academy, 1,300 paintings, everywhere. | 0:51:30 | 0:51:35 | |
-Was it thrilling? -It was more than thrilling. | 0:51:35 | 0:51:38 | |
The novelist Stendhal had a series of panic attacks | 0:51:38 | 0:51:41 | |
when he went to Florence because he was overwhelmed | 0:51:41 | 0:51:43 | |
by the amount of art and I had something of the same thing when I went into the Royal Academy. | 0:51:43 | 0:51:47 | |
It's so different, there are sculptures, light boxes, drawings | 0:51:47 | 0:51:52 | |
engravings, installations, and I had to go back, actually. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:56 | |
I went twice because the first time I was completely overwhelmed | 0:51:56 | 0:51:59 | |
by the amount of art on display. But after a while it becomes demystified | 0:51:59 | 0:52:02 | |
because it actually tells you the price of everything | 0:52:02 | 0:52:05 | |
and that somehow brings it back down to earth immediately, | 0:52:05 | 0:52:09 | |
when you go, "That's 1,500 quid. Not on your Nelly." | 0:52:09 | 0:52:11 | |
And you can see people going around doing concisely that. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:14 | |
There is not a space on the walls. | 0:52:14 | 0:52:17 | |
And of course it looks crazy but apparently it's curated. | 0:52:17 | 0:52:21 | |
-Did it feel curated? -It didn't feel curated. | 0:52:21 | 0:52:23 | |
It is like TK Maxx on a Saturday for art lovers! | 0:52:23 | 0:52:27 | |
But it didn't really feel curated | 0:52:27 | 0:52:29 | |
and I was very interested in the curatorial statements | 0:52:29 | 0:52:33 | |
at the start of every room, because you did think, "This is a jumble sale!" | 0:52:33 | 0:52:38 | |
But what was really weird, you would look around | 0:52:38 | 0:52:40 | |
and you would see there's a big Sean Scully, | 0:52:40 | 0:52:42 | |
which bizarrely isn't for sale. | 0:52:42 | 0:52:44 | |
And of all the artists, Sean Scully I wouldn't have thought | 0:52:44 | 0:52:46 | |
would have wanted to have all these amateur artists around him, | 0:52:46 | 0:52:49 | |
with varying degrees of ability, I would say. | 0:52:49 | 0:52:52 | |
I think the only way it was curated was there were rooms | 0:52:52 | 0:52:55 | |
devoted to photography and to portraiture | 0:52:55 | 0:52:58 | |
and to sculpture, so in that way... You're looking unpersuaded, | 0:52:58 | 0:53:01 | |
but there is a little bit of that. | 0:53:01 | 0:53:03 | |
I found it absolutely overwhelming | 0:53:03 | 0:53:05 | |
and I think that in a way what you have to do is just literally... | 0:53:05 | 0:53:08 | |
In a way it's quite pure, though, because you walk around and say, | 0:53:08 | 0:53:10 | |
"What affects me? What's actually touching me?" | 0:53:10 | 0:53:12 | |
And because there is so much, you just look for the things that do. | 0:53:12 | 0:53:15 | |
I found I was looking at things and thinking, "Oh, I like that one. | 0:53:15 | 0:53:18 | |
"Oh, no, that's just the biggest one." | 0:53:18 | 0:53:20 | |
And also, "That one's a way up there," | 0:53:20 | 0:53:22 | |
and you want to be able to just peacefully look at it | 0:53:22 | 0:53:25 | |
but you couldn't because people were banging into you. | 0:53:25 | 0:53:27 | |
Did you not find that the things that really struck | 0:53:27 | 0:53:29 | |
were the things which were a bit different? I found I got exhausted by the paintings | 0:53:29 | 0:53:34 | |
and it was actually things like... There's a car made of steel bars | 0:53:34 | 0:53:38 | |
by Ron Arad, and did you see the girl posting a letter | 0:53:38 | 0:53:41 | |
though the letterbox? It was a little sculpture. | 0:53:41 | 0:53:44 | |
-I just thought it was absolutely beautiful. -It was nice to go around | 0:53:44 | 0:53:47 | |
and think, "I could actually... There's a picture there for 100 quid." | 0:53:47 | 0:53:50 | |
I know this is a tough economic time so you don't want to seem callous, | 0:53:50 | 0:53:53 | |
but 100 quid for a piece of art that you might treasure for the rest of your life, you think, "OK." | 0:53:53 | 0:53:57 | |
You start thinking, "This is not beyond... | 0:53:57 | 0:53:59 | |
"If I didn't need a new boiler, maybe I would be able to!" | 0:53:59 | 0:54:02 | |
And then you have the Tracey Emin limited editions | 0:54:02 | 0:54:04 | |
with all the different stickers all the way along. | 0:54:04 | 0:54:06 | |
Tracey Emin was certainly not going to get rejected. | 0:54:06 | 0:54:08 | |
Apart from anything else she's a Royal Academician so, therefore, she gets her place. | 0:54:08 | 0:54:12 | |
But if you were rejected, you can hightail it to Waterloo. | 0:54:12 | 0:54:15 | |
-That's right. -And you can go into Not The Royal Academy. | 0:54:15 | 0:54:18 | |
-Was that any less crazy? -It was not all the paintings. | 0:54:18 | 0:54:22 | |
They've rejected pictures too. And I found it really interesting. | 0:54:22 | 0:54:27 | |
One of the things I noticed, | 0:54:27 | 0:54:29 | |
one of the consistent themes of things that had been rejected | 0:54:29 | 0:54:33 | |
were views of places you can get to on Ryanair or easyJet. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:37 | |
It just made me think, there was like Sorrento, | 0:54:37 | 0:54:39 | |
"You're not getting in the Royal Academy." | 0:54:39 | 0:54:41 | |
It made me think that's so class-ridden. | 0:54:41 | 0:54:43 | |
It has to be a difficult place to get to, it can't be accessible. | 0:54:43 | 0:54:46 | |
Picking up on your thing about TK Maxx, | 0:54:46 | 0:54:49 | |
I thought there was an admiral purity to the exhibition | 0:54:49 | 0:54:53 | |
in that you had pictures that were stacked | 0:54:53 | 0:54:56 | |
according to the size of the canvas. | 0:54:56 | 0:54:58 | |
And I think also there was a sense that you could tell what they actually wanted. | 0:54:58 | 0:55:02 | |
You got it in the clip there, things that were pretty to look at. | 0:55:02 | 0:55:05 | |
I have to say, what I thought I was looking at was paintings, | 0:55:05 | 0:55:08 | |
-rather than art. -Not at the Royal Academy. | 0:55:08 | 0:55:10 | |
It does say that the Royal Academy is representative of art now. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:14 | |
It's not art now, it's pictures you can buy now, pretty much, | 0:55:14 | 0:55:16 | |
-and some models. -But the stuff that wasn't at the Royal Academy, | 0:55:16 | 0:55:19 | |
it's just pretty pictures. There's no engagement with the world. | 0:55:19 | 0:55:22 | |
-And what does that say about British taste? -It says that people want something cosy | 0:55:22 | 0:55:26 | |
to put on their walls. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:27 | |
Well, you can enter the Hayward's alternative universe | 0:55:27 | 0:55:30 | |
or check out the art for sale at the Royal Academy | 0:55:30 | 0:55:32 | |
and Not The Royal Academy throughout the summer. | 0:55:32 | 0:55:35 | |
20th century American legends have provided much inspiration | 0:55:35 | 0:55:38 | |
for contemporary composers. Einstein, Nixon, Jackie Kennedy, | 0:55:38 | 0:55:42 | |
even Anna Nicole Smith have all been given the operatic treatment. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:46 | |
Now one of the greatest icons of popular culture, | 0:55:46 | 0:55:49 | |
the man behind an empire which has entertained most of us | 0:55:49 | 0:55:52 | |
at some time or another, is the subject of a new work | 0:55:52 | 0:55:54 | |
by one of the world's leading composers, Philip Glass. | 0:55:54 | 0:55:58 | |
Glass' 25th opera deconstructs Walt Disney, | 0:56:00 | 0:56:03 | |
the creator of some of the most familiar fairytales | 0:56:03 | 0:56:06 | |
and cartoon characters of all time. | 0:56:06 | 0:56:09 | |
The opera is based on a novel by Peter Stephan Jungk, | 0:56:09 | 0:56:12 | |
which reimagines Disney through the eyes | 0:56:12 | 0:56:14 | |
of a disgruntled former employee. | 0:56:14 | 0:56:17 | |
As Disney lies dying in a hospital bed, | 0:56:18 | 0:56:21 | |
he confides to a nurse he calls Snow White | 0:56:21 | 0:56:24 | |
that he hopes to have his body cryogenically frozen. | 0:56:24 | 0:56:28 | |
At one point he is saying, | 0:56:28 | 0:56:30 | |
"You know, I'm going to die, | 0:56:30 | 0:56:32 | |
"but Mickey and Donald will live forever." | 0:56:32 | 0:56:35 | |
And he seems almost jealous that his creation shall outlive him. | 0:56:35 | 0:56:39 | |
# I'll become a Messiah | 0:56:42 | 0:56:44 | |
# So that everyone who's afraid of death | 0:56:44 | 0:56:49 | |
# Will never say die. # | 0:56:49 | 0:56:53 | |
Disney is portrayed as a tyrant, a megalomaniac. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:57 | |
His views on communism and race are revealed | 0:56:57 | 0:56:59 | |
through a disagreement with an animatronic Abraham Lincoln. | 0:56:59 | 0:57:03 | |
# ..I ask you to come back to | 0:57:03 | 0:57:06 | |
# The truth in the Declaration of Independence | 0:57:06 | 0:57:11 | |
# I beg you Do not destroy | 0:57:11 | 0:57:14 | |
# An important emblem of humanity... | 0:57:14 | 0:57:19 | |
# Be freedom | 0:57:23 | 0:57:26 | |
# Become the political religion of our mission... # | 0:57:26 | 0:57:34 | |
'This is not a documentary.' | 0:57:34 | 0:57:37 | |
An opera is a form of poetry, so this is a... Oh, you can say... | 0:57:37 | 0:57:43 | |
an impression... an interpretation of a life. | 0:57:43 | 0:57:47 | |
OPERA SINGING | 0:57:47 | 0:57:52 | |
Marcel, we expect Philip Glass, | 0:57:54 | 0:57:56 | |
we have high hopes always of Philip Glass to come up with | 0:57:56 | 0:57:59 | |
an extraordinary take on a subject or a personality, | 0:57:59 | 0:58:02 | |
was this it on Walt Disney? | 0:58:02 | 0:58:04 | |
You know, I really love the music of Philip Glass | 0:58:04 | 0:58:07 | |
and one of the things I like about it is that it is open. | 0:58:07 | 0:58:09 | |
Those arpeggios are like someone restating a question over and over again | 0:58:09 | 0:58:13 | |
and expecting you to supply the answer. | 0:58:13 | 0:58:15 | |
The trouble with this was that it was telling us | 0:58:15 | 0:58:17 | |
what to think about Walt Disney, that he was a reactionary, | 0:58:17 | 0:58:20 | |
that he was a bigot, and that he was an unpleasant individual. | 0:58:20 | 0:58:23 | |
It didn't have the nuance that I think Philip Glass's music has. | 0:58:23 | 0:58:26 | |
Do you think it was problematic that they were not allowed to use | 0:58:26 | 0:58:29 | |
any of the Disney imagery? That they then created their own imagery? | 0:58:29 | 0:58:32 | |
-I thought they did that brilliantly. -I don't think that was problematic at all. | 0:58:32 | 0:58:36 | |
As an opera, not just a biography, | 0:58:36 | 0:58:38 | |
I felt that the libretto did not work at all | 0:58:38 | 0:58:40 | |
and I kept wishing they would stop singing | 0:58:40 | 0:58:42 | |
so I could hear the music. I don't know if anyone else felt that way? | 0:58:42 | 0:58:45 | |
But it is just, you know, everyone is declaiming all the time. | 0:58:45 | 0:58:48 | |
It is organised in these vignettes - now we are here, now we are there, | 0:58:48 | 0:58:51 | |
and so they all have to tell you where they are and how they feel about that, | 0:58:51 | 0:58:54 | |
"I really like it here, and now I have got cancer." There is no interaction, there are no... | 0:58:54 | 0:58:59 | |
There was no poetry. | 0:58:59 | 0:59:01 | |
At one point they literally read out the train timetable, don't they? | 0:59:01 | 0:59:04 | |
-Yeah. -Why do you think the libretto was so problematic? | 0:59:04 | 0:59:07 | |
I think... | 0:59:07 | 0:59:09 | |
To me it seemed like a very, very big star who may or may not | 0:59:09 | 0:59:13 | |
be a little bit moody and everybody trying not to do anything wrong. | 0:59:13 | 0:59:17 | |
It felt very, very staid | 0:59:17 | 0:59:19 | |
and it felt like a collaborative project with one person | 0:59:19 | 0:59:23 | |
with an awful lot of power | 0:59:23 | 0:59:24 | |
and everybody else tiptoeing around them. | 0:59:24 | 0:59:26 | |
The dialogue is absolutely awful | 0:59:26 | 0:59:29 | |
and this thing of having subtitles above the stage of an incredibly | 0:59:29 | 0:59:32 | |
beautifully staged thing, is so distracting and it is in English. | 0:59:32 | 0:59:37 | |
I went with my wife and she said, "Actually, stop listening to the words and just try and focus | 0:59:37 | 0:59:41 | |
"on the music instead and actually it will tell you the story better." | 0:59:41 | 0:59:44 | |
I think the subtitles actually did not help that | 0:59:44 | 0:59:47 | |
because you were reminded of how flat the libretto was. | 0:59:47 | 0:59:49 | |
But the question that it asks was also quite an interesting one, | 0:59:49 | 0:59:52 | |
about this idea of what is an artist? | 0:59:52 | 0:59:54 | |
At one point the disgruntled animator says, | 0:59:54 | 0:59:57 | |
"You are just an effective CEO rather than a real artist," | 0:59:57 | 1:00:00 | |
and that is quite an interesting question to be asking. | 1:00:00 | 1:00:03 | |
But actually, Philip Glass said he wasn't doing a hatchet job. | 1:00:03 | 1:00:06 | |
What he was trying to do was show a man of his time from a small town | 1:00:06 | 1:00:09 | |
that then turned into Disneyland with all those racist, yes, | 1:00:09 | 1:00:13 | |
tones of the time. | 1:00:13 | 1:00:15 | |
You could make that argument, but I did not feel that I had left | 1:00:15 | 1:00:18 | |
and I had seen a nuanced portrait of a genius, I felt I'd been... | 1:00:18 | 1:00:22 | |
-And everything... -Maybe he wasn't a genius, though. | 1:00:22 | 1:00:24 | |
-Walt Disney wasn't a genius? -Maybe he wasn't, I don't know. | 1:00:24 | 1:00:27 | |
You could say that somebody could be a product of their time | 1:00:27 | 1:00:29 | |
and still be a genius. I think we got the bit that he was a product of his time. | 1:00:29 | 1:00:33 | |
I don't think we would have been persuaded on the basis | 1:00:33 | 1:00:35 | |
of the opera that he was a genius. | 1:00:35 | 1:00:36 | |
One of the central themes is the dispute with the employees, | 1:00:36 | 1:00:39 | |
which is actually a much more interesting dispute. | 1:00:39 | 1:00:41 | |
It is not just, "I worked for you..." | 1:00:41 | 1:00:43 | |
-Intellectual property and all sorts. -It's about ownership of the characters, | 1:00:43 | 1:00:47 | |
which would have been a fantastic thing to get into | 1:00:47 | 1:00:49 | |
and it is a dispute that is still going on in comics now. | 1:00:49 | 1:00:52 | |
It is that idea about whether you draw something or not matters, I guess, isn't it? | 1:00:52 | 1:00:55 | |
-Or it is character design. -But Stan Lee is the same... | 1:00:55 | 1:00:57 | |
-But that would be the same for Damien Hirst, wouldn't it? -It would be the same for Hirst | 1:00:57 | 1:01:01 | |
and the same for Stan Lee, who didn't actually draw Spiderman, | 1:01:01 | 1:01:03 | |
but it is still his character, and I think that actually, in a sense that, | 1:01:03 | 1:01:07 | |
you can't be lucky for as long as Walt Disney was lucky. | 1:01:07 | 1:01:09 | |
There has got to be some talent there underneath it as well. | 1:01:09 | 1:01:12 | |
But what he had was the talent to pick the right people... | 1:01:12 | 1:01:14 | |
-To pick the people around you. -And that goes for lots of big businesses. | 1:01:14 | 1:01:17 | |
Which is what he explains as a little kid at the end of the opera. | 1:01:17 | 1:01:20 | |
It is the same with Steve Jobs, isn't it? | 1:01:20 | 1:01:22 | |
The idea that Steve Jobs didn't come up with the iPad or whatever, | 1:01:22 | 1:01:25 | |
but eventually, that is what you get identified with. | 1:01:25 | 1:01:27 | |
That is why I thought it was a hatchet job, | 1:01:27 | 1:01:29 | |
I didn't think they were fair to what he has given to the world. | 1:01:29 | 1:01:32 | |
Well, The Perfect American continues at the ENO until Friday, 28th June. | 1:01:32 | 1:01:36 | |
Also that night, if you would like to see more modern opera, | 1:01:36 | 1:01:39 | |
George Benjamin's Written On Skin is on BBC Four at 7:30pm. | 1:01:39 | 1:01:43 | |
You can also hear it on Radio 3 on Saturday 22nd June at six o'clock. | 1:01:43 | 1:01:47 | |
Well, that is just about it for tonight. | 1:01:47 | 1:01:50 | |
If you want to find out more about everything we have discussed, do go | 1:01:50 | 1:01:53 | |
to our website and, of course, | 1:01:53 | 1:01:54 | |
don't forget to follow us on Twitter. | 1:01:54 | 1:01:56 | |
Thanks to my guests, | 1:01:56 | 1:01:57 | |
Denise Mina, Sarfraz Manzoor and Marcel Theroux. | 1:01:57 | 1:02:00 | |
Next month, Martha will be here | 1:02:00 | 1:02:02 | |
discussing some of the exciting events on offer at the Manchester Festival, | 1:02:02 | 1:02:06 | |
including Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth. | 1:02:06 | 1:02:08 | |
To get us in the mood we will leave you with a Manchester classic. | 1:02:08 | 1:02:11 | |
Here is Tim Burgess again with his acoustic version of | 1:02:11 | 1:02:14 | |
The Only One I Know. Good night. | 1:02:14 | 1:02:17 | |
# The only one I know | 1:02:28 | 1:02:32 | |
# Has come to take me away | 1:02:32 | 1:02:38 | |
# The only one I know | 1:02:38 | 1:02:42 | |
# Is mine when she stitches me | 1:02:42 | 1:02:49 | |
# The only one I see | 1:02:57 | 1:03:02 | |
# Is mine when she walks down the street | 1:03:02 | 1:03:07 | |
# The only one I see | 1:03:07 | 1:03:12 | |
# Has carved her name into me | 1:03:12 | 1:03:19 | |
# Everyone's been burned before | 1:03:27 | 1:03:34 | |
# Everybody knows the pain | 1:03:38 | 1:03:43 | |
# Everyone's been burned before | 1:03:48 | 1:03:54 | |
# Everybody knows the pain | 1:03:58 | 1:04:04 | |
# The only one I know | 1:04:17 | 1:04:22 | |
# Never cries Never opens her eyes | 1:04:22 | 1:04:28 | |
# The only one I know | 1:04:28 | 1:04:33 | |
# Wide awake and then she's away | 1:04:33 | 1:04:39 | |
# The only one I see | 1:04:43 | 1:04:48 | |
# Is mine when she walks down the street | 1:04:48 | 1:04:54 | |
# The only one I see | 1:04:54 | 1:04:58 | |
# Has turned her tongue into me | 1:04:58 | 1:05:04 | |
# Everyone's been burned before | 1:05:12 | 1:05:20 | |
# Everybody knows the pain | 1:05:24 | 1:05:29 | |
# Everyone's been burned before | 1:05:33 | 1:05:41 | |
# Everybody knows the pain | 1:05:44 | 1:05:49 | |
# Everyone's been burned before | 1:05:54 | 1:06:00 | |
# Everybody knows the pain. # | 1:06:04 | 1:06:10 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:06:10 | 1:06:13 |