Vision On

The two cultures

One strand of my reading this week has been taken up with Tim Boon's new book Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television. Wallflower Press has published this in the same series as my Vision On; there's also a tie-in exhibition at the Science Museum, plus this New Scientist video of very early science films, with an interview from Tim.

There's much that's really interesting in the book, but one of the things that particularly fascinated me was his exploration of the relationship between scientists and the BBC in the 1950s.

Learning to watch

One of my projects that's at a very early stage of development involves trying to understand how people watched television in 1930s and 1940s. How did they learn what television was and what it could do? What meanings did they take from the medium and from its programmes? I'm fascinated by the challenge of reconstructing this, since of course there are only a few people around who might remember anything -- and it was a very long time ago.

Then I picked up a copy of Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the paperback of which has sat unread on a shelf at home since it was published in 2002. And rather wonderfully, he addresses more or less exactly the question I'm faced with, except that he is concerned with reading in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first words of his Preface are as follows:

This book addresses a question which, until recently, was considered unanswerable. It proposes to enter the minds of ordinary readers in history, to discover what they read and how they read it.

A little further on, referring specifically to the work of the historian Robert Darnton and more generally to those in the emerging discipline of "book history", Rose suggests some of the sources on which he and others can draw:

...memoirs and diaries, school records, social surveys, oral interviews, library registers, letters to newspaper editors (published or, more revealingly, unpublished), fan mail, and even in the proceedings of the Inquisition.

I don't expect to rely on the Inquisition but his other ideas chime with the ways I'd been thinking about developing my research. And the remainder of his Preface details other methodological problems and solutions which are equally as stimulating.

Opening his book this morning felt like a particularly pleasing occurrence of serendipity.

(Image of a 1931 Charles Jenkins Co. television from the Early Television Foundation.)

No, no, nostalgia

One of the reasons why I've been posting infrequently is that I've also been maintaining a blog for the Illuminations production Art Race, which is being filming in the States. Frustratingly, however, we have to keep the project and the blog under wraps at the moment. Meanwhile, here is a very nice review by Tiffany Jenkins on the recently re-vamped Culture Wars website of my book Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain.

"Vision On is no lament for days gone by," she writes, "but makes a strong case for reclaiming the commitment to high quality arts programming of the past. Dismissing people like Wyver for being nostalgic, as the defenders of the status quo try to, evades the lessons that could be learned from the past and applied to the future, a trap Wyver thankfully won’t fall into." Thank you, Tiffany.

The power of language

I'm reading Adam Nicolson's very good book Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. (Earlier in the year I really enjoyed and appreciated Nicolson's Earls of Paradise about a related aspect of English culture from a few decades before.) It's a vivid snapshot of the first decade of the reign of James I, and it's very good on the complex relationships between the established church of the time and the "puritans". There are also exceptional moments when he writes about the power and the ambiguity of language. Including the following (which for me, odd as it may sound, has real resonance with my sense of contemporary television).

I'm lovin' it

It's rare (at least for me) to start a novel without knowing anything about it -- and then to fall in love with the writing. But that's what's happened with Andrea Cannobio's existentialist mystery about a garden designer, The Natural Disorder of Things. My wife Clare give it to me as a birthday present, and I'm totally hooked. There's an interesting article about Cannobio here.

Sunday links

In the Observer Will Hutton reflects on public service broadcasting and Channel 4's future; shame the blog comments are by and large banal.

On the New York Times site Terrence Rafferty hymns Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963):

In this picture everything, ancient or modern, “real” or “unreal,” has its own stunned dignity, and the movie wants us to see it all as beautiful — as its people, tragically, cannot... “Contempt” is about men and women rendered graceless by their times, but the movie, substituting rigorous aesthetics for the novel’s psychology, shows us where they (and we) went wrong and achieves an extraordinary grace.

I've just finished Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel Hangover Square and Bookforum's Eric Banks offers an elegant tribute to the writer.

Philip French once again demonstrates his mastery, reviewing Vantage Point, which I saw last night. He picks up references I'd noticed (The Conversation, Dealey Plaza) but adds much that I didn't know (Robert Browning, editor Stuart Baird's connection with Ken Russell). Watching the movie (which isn't as good as it ought to be), I was also struck by how the explicit manipulation of time is an increasingly important factor in American thrillers; think of Michael Clayton and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

I was in Arcadia

On my flight to Toronto I read the wonderful new book by Adam Nicolson about the Earls of Pembroke, the great country house Wilton and the idea of Arcadia during the English Renaissance. Its short opening chapter is exemplary: an accessible, rich analysis of the roots of Arcadia in the confluence of the rural and feudal way of life in medieval England and the sixteenth century rediscovery of the classical world. These are the forces that shaped the dream the author characterises as "a lost world, an ideal and unapproachable realm of bliss and beauty".