Vision On

Could it be, could it be?

Sky Arts, for which we've just completed Art of Faith, is very savvy about securing press attention. And one of its smartest strategies is the Friday night "Hijack" slot. A personality chooses a run of programmes for the evening from the channel's catalogue. Marry this idea with a figure in whom the press is interested and it's a smart way of securing free column inches.

Announced today is the programmer for Friday August 22: Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, still somewhat of a mystery to those in the arts and broadcasting. So today the Guardian Culture blog and the Times ran pieces about what might be divined from his selection. And nestled in his quartet of announced choices is a half-hour documentary about Antony Gormley, an artist who according to Burnham achieves "the remarkable trick of being both utterly accessible and deeply mysterious at the same time".

Now could this be, could this possibly be, our film from theEYE series with Gormley? The Times describes the programme as an "interview" with the artist, which is a pretty fair description of our documentary, although it also features a really good and rather beautifully filmed selection of his works. And this EYE is under licence to Sky Arts. If it is, I have to say I'm rather childishly pleased with the idea -- and tomorrow I'll try to confirm whether this is the case. The picture incidentally is of one of Gormley's accessible-but-mysterious figures snapped at Roche Court earlier in the summer.

Update: Sky Arts have confirmed that Andy Burnham's choice is indeed our EYE film. Neat that, isn't it?

Watching the Qur'an on television

Last night I watched two hours of television straight through -- and it was just a single programme. Well, alright, I did make one phone call and I got up to get a drink at least twice. But devoting this amount of time to an off-air showing one film, and a documentary at that, is much rarer today than it once was.

Technology (from the VCR to the iPlayer) has combined with social change (too many other media demands) to reinforce forms of television directed primarily to the short attention span. So in both fact and fiction we have faster editing, busier shots with constant movement and frenetic graphics, plus ever-stronger verbal sign-posting. All of which --  one could argue (I would) -- drains meaning and the potential of complexity from individual images and their juxtapositions. And all of which is familiar, perhaps overly so. But it can take something that resists these pressures to expose their workings -- and that's certainly what Antony Thomas' film The Qur'an did on Channel 4 last night.

All you need is love

Congratulations to my friend Ian Macmillan (on the right) who entered into his Civil Partnership with Andy Hitchman today. It was a lovely, touching ceremony.

 

 

 

Ian made the film The Scholte Affair with me for the Tx. series, but this is the opening from his truly exceptional Channel 4 series with Matt Collings, This is Modern Art.

One small idea (1.)

Walking around the Twombly exhibition I was struck by an idea for a series of television documentaries. There's a terrific group of canvases, Untitled (Bolsena), that was apparently painted in the summer of 1969 at a time when the artist was fascinated by television coverage of the first moon landing. And once you know that, you can see in the details suggestions of the craft and its path through to the moon and back.

I suddenly thought of making a film that brought together a range of artwork -- and not just painting but poetry, music and more -- that was directly prompted or influenced by Apollo 11. The catalogue references Robert Rauschenberg's Stoned Moon series of lithographs, and now I'm on the hunt for more. It seemed to me at that moment an excellent idea -- and one with a natural tie-in time next summer, when we have the 40th anniversary of the landing.

A hour or so later, I decided on a preliminary title, Inspired, and on the sense that it probably needed two companions to make into a short series (which is always more commissionable than a one-off). So why not apply the approach to two other key post-war post-war events, the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the 9/11 attacks?

I'm going to post occasionally as I develop the notion and see if I can find some funding and bring it to reality.

Cy and Marc

Tate Modern's exhibition of the work of Cy Twombly is, simply, glorious. After a clutch of early works, it concentrates on presenting groups of works made by Twombly at a specific moment -- and the galleries have rarely looked better. Indeed, perhaps the last time there was a show as simply visually as this was the Donald Judd exhibition back in 2004, also curated personally by Tate Director Nicholas Serota. These are cycles of great beauty and richness and poetry and wonder.

(My one caveat is, for the moment, about the sculpture. For me, the objects do far less than the paintings and drawings. I think I'd have preferred a show that featured fewer of these. The image Quattro Stagioni: Inverno, 1993-4 is © Cy Twombly, courtesy Tate Modern.)

I'll unquestionably return, and I hope on several occasions, before the show closes in mid-September. One of my interests is that more than a decade ago I produced a film about Twombly's work with the radical (and wonderful) director Marc Karlin.

Benny, Bjorn and Benjamin Britten

The movie version of Mamma Mia! opens wide next week, with one or two cinemas already offering special previews. Go see it.

The film, just like the theatre show, is irresistible: a joyful, delightful and occasionally poignant confection with reflections on age and youth, dreams and realities that remain just the right side of trite. Phyllida Lloyd directs brilliantly, drawing out a marvellous comic performance from Meryl Streep and finding a screen language that's direct but inventive, and that bounces satisfyingly between reality (well, sort of) and all-out fantasy.

I was particularly interested to see it because, just about a decade ago, Illuminations was working with Phyllida on the television film of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana.

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.)

Michael Gill 1923-2005

Last week Georgina Denison, the widow of filmmaker Michael Gill, put together a private screening of a compilation of her late husband's work. She brought together some two hundred colleagues and admirers, many of whom had worked together at the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s. Gill's son, the critic AA Gill, spoke briefly beforehand, there were drinks, and an appropriate atmosphere of admiration and sadness. I felt privileged to be there.

I knew Michael slightly; in the later 1980s Georgina and he had an office next to the room in which Illuminations was based in Newman Passage, close to Channel 4's first building.

Lost in Tokyo

The Guardian asked me to do an overnight blog post about Imagine: The Wild Sheep Chase (BBC1), about Haruki Murakami.

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.