I Demand these Fifity-Four Seconds of Grange Hill be Watched, then Universally Celebrated.

 My strongest memory by far of the time Grange Hill went to Chessington Zoo is of Annette Firman negging a posh, ginger kid from between the plates of a fiberglass stegosaurus in the picnic area. Posh, ginger kids don't forget things like that. This is how I remembered that Series Five: Episode Twelve provides such a valuable record of what is now the "World of Adventures". But I had not remembered just how many other extraordinary moments the episode boasts. After finding it online, I posted the following single take to instagram, uncaptioned. Clickbait superlatives crowded my brain, but I didn't want to give any spoilers, and I still don't, so I must simply insist you watch it unprepared. This is from 1982:

 

 Did Grange Hill – and specifically director Diamuid Lawrence – invent the steadicam chase? Apparently, newer technologies were gifted to the cheaper shows first to play around, so maybe. And what play... Jonah Jones's satchel lands in the sea lion enclosure, and within minutes we're watching young actor and not stuntman Lee Sparke falling bodily from actual rocks and swimming with actual forty-stone pinnipeds. Was anyone working at the zoo that day? I think this episode might also be the first time we hear Janet St. Clair say "I'm only trying to help you, Ro Land", an instant playground banger. I apologise to any demographic reading who has no idea what I'm talking about, but I also immediately rescind that apology because here is the episode in full, and irrefutable evidence that Grange Hill could be – I hesitate before typing this but, yeah, no – as good as anything that's ever been made.

 

 

"Pfff. I want to be an airdresser when I grow up. You know. With proper training."

"Yeah."

"What's the matter with that?"

"I want to do something exciting. Be a trapeze artist in the circus. Something like that."

"You can't be a trapeze artist."

"Why not?"

"Tt."

As a Trusted News Source...

"WORK FOR A KING NOT A CLOWN"

 

 Iranian artist Soheila Sohjkanvari's "Leave to Remain" features a number of old passports stamped with incongruous advertising slogans. The one above is from Burger King (which now I think about it, I should have been able to guess). I saw it today at Tate Britain while catching up with my friend Viv with whom I enjoyed rooms one through eight. I was a little late meeting her though, because I'd stopped to take some video...

 

 

 

 Halfway through Hyde Park I'd heard cheers and car horns to the south, and realised something potentially cheerful might be up outside The Iranian Embassy, so I made a small detour and arrived just in time to see someone climb out onto the balcony (I'm pretty sure it was out, not up, is that possible? UPDATE: No) take down the flag of the Iranian Republic, and fly in its place the pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun. (At this point my camerawork gets a bit shaky because I had to take my gloves off to zoom in.)

 

 The police sirens were clearly for somewhere else, and I guess the van driving up and down was showing Fox Newson its flank, but cropped, so your only clue is Sean Hannity – does Hannity still work at Fox? Of course, a lot of rotten kings and clowns with no history of supporting #women, #life or #freedom will want to take responsibility for this if it ends happily, but let's not let them. Picking up speed as I headed on to Pimlico, I sent what I'd shot to a friend at BBC Persian whom I hadn't seen since 2022, with love and hope that her family in Iran was safe. But how would she know? And walking home I learnt a little of it had been published online, which is how I can identify the flags.

 Azadi.

 

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Ken Russell's Crabs on the Teasmade

"This is the record of our second expedition to the site of Britain. It was a grim undertaking. But we had to go, otherwise all the members of the first expedition would have died for nothing..." We never find out what killed that first party in the end. Maybe they swooned themselves to death at the site of a porcelain cockapoo.

 

 

  Because, despite its intriguing opening, what must be one of television's first ever post-apocalyptic visions settles almost immediately into a sneering fantasy upon the ruination of ghastly ghastliness. Ken Russell is directing, however, so nothing's done by halves, everything's shot with a warring mixture of love and hate rather than just disdain. Maybe the voiceover was scripted afterwards because Monitor thought it looked too beautiful. I have no idea why it was made, but that might be what's most enjoyable about it. Anyway this is your occasional reminder to check in on the BBC Archive's youtube channel, and I hope you're all recovering this new year's day, and continue to recover.

 

Charlie Brown Is A Mood

 "Recently my secretary came to work one morning, and she said that her little boy had come home from school the previous afternoon, had removed his jacket, had thrown it down on the living room couch, and had said - Mom, I feel like Charlie Brown... And all of a sudden it occurred to me, after all these years: this is the purpose of Charlie Brown."

 

 Back to the dawing board: here's more treasure from the BBC Archive, to honour what would have been Charles Monroe Schulz's hundredth birthday today. Buying old Peanuts paperbacks as a child, I felt let into an unusally adult kind of comedy, at least as funny as, but more emotionally astute than the anarchic, boggle-eyed output of British kid's comics, and the fact that this comedy's protagonists were people my age was, in hindsight, incredibly important. It meant you didn't have to be adult to be human. Your feelings were valid regardless, and not just something to be marked right or wrong.

 

  I actually miss the tone of these pre-junket-era interviews: "I think the one overwhelming reason why your work is so popular here in England, where very largely we think of ourselves as being a Post-Christian Society, is that here's a man who really knows how terrible life is. Are you happy to be looked at in that way?" asks Peter France of the author of Happiness Is A Warm Puppy. 

 To which the answer turns out to be: "Yes." 

 

A Sketchy Account of The Martian Broadcast

 The problem with trying to write a post a day while simultaneously performing in Love Goddess is not that there's a risk I'll run short of material, but that I'll never write about anything else. Here's yet more Orson Welles. 

 

 Welles by Welles

 In 1955 the BBC invited Welles to record six fifteen-minute-long, occassionally illustrated, improvised monologues on the subject of his life thus far. These he used to – as he himself put it in episode two – weave theatrical legends, meaning a lot of "Orson Welles' Sketchbook" consists of anecdotes, and a lot of those anecdotes are pretty apocryphal, if not completely made up on the spot, and that's a tremendous shame really because the work discussed is so interesting in its own right. I'd love, for example, to hear Welles' account of the work that went into making his directorial debut in Harlem, but I've next to no interest in a tacky anecdote about a supposedly imported coven of witch doctors making cursed, goat-skin drums. 

 

 

 Or, as in episode above, I'd love to hear him discuss the influence his hoax-news radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds" might have had on both the entire broadcast medium and his own later work ("Citizen Kane" famously opens with a fake news reel) but I'm less interested in the influence it might have had on John Barrymore's dogs... Welles would be so much more interesting if he didn't try so hard to be interesting, and the genuine achievement of "The Martian Broadcast" has been completely overshadowed by the legend of a country sent mad spun around it. Am I being a snob? He probably understood his audience better than I do. 

 And yet, even as he makes this shit up, Welles relates how "fed up" his company had been with the credulity of listeners to "this new magic box... So in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of the machine... We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came from the tap."

 

The Delia Derbyshire of the Electronic Stomach

 

 

 Allow me to present these edited highlights of a tribute to the – apparently – thousands of sound effects artists required to bring a single episode of radio to life, according to this startlingly untrustworthy and increasingly Lynchian "Jam Handy Picture" from 1938 called, for some reason, Back of the Mike. Here are four men recreating the sound of a telephone:

 

 And here, over a decade before The Archers was first broadcast, is someone testily soothing a cow: 

 

 I was inspired to do some research into this subject by Margaret Cabourn-Smith's shining turn as The Goon Show's solo foley artist "Janet" in Spike, which I saw at the Richmond Theatre on Thursday with her husband Dan Tetsell who had just finished his own run on EastEnders, completing the BleakEnders trifecta...

 

 To save the kerfuffle of taking down bank details, I had given Dan two sleek tenners for the ticket – tenners aren't "crisp" any more, but is "sleek" the word? – which he then passed on to Mervyn Millar whom we met in the pub afterwards for tickets to My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican. Mervyn in turn handed these on to Barry Cryer's son Bob who was the fourth at our table – I don't know for what, but it didn't matter, I'd really enjoyed the show and some pints and was now in the mood to find transactions like these immensely pleasing.* Here's the sound of a horse chase:

 

 I talked to Mervyn about how much I'd been considering recently the increasing popularity of puppets in theatre, because I figured he must have played a part in that, and I asked how he got started: Apparently his first puppet had been a judge, built because there simply hadn't been enough time for the actor he was directing to do the full quick change. Here's a rain storm:

 

Bob Cryer was lovely too, and talked about the passing of his father, and the slight oddness of grieving alongside a parasocial fan community (Ray Galton's son had suggested they team up with Rory Kinnear and Lucy Briers to form the "Sons Or Daughters Of Famous Fathers", or SODOFF.) I had a great time.

 

  Naturally Margaret ended the show doing the splits. More surprisingly, she opened it accidently knocking her enormous gramophone off a trolley. I was very happy to be sitting next to Dan for that – that's the joy of live theatre – and I was also very happy the show ended with a performance of 1985. The tour ends soon, and the final Richmond show is going up within an hour of me posting this so sorry for that, but go if you can. 

 What else did I enjoy about that night? The pub was giving out free dog biscuits. Eating those took me back. 

 Here's more research:

 

 

* UPDATE: Margaret has just informed me it was for a ticket to Spike. Perfect.

My Webcamming Profile Placeholder

 I finally managed to catch my friend Maude's show The Webcamming Chronicles tonight at the Cockpit – tickets for the second showing on the 13th here! – and thoroughly recommend it, but haven't time if I want to get any sleep now to explain why. So here as a placeholder is Carl Sagan's first attempt, as far as I know, to send a drawing of a naked man to aliens. I drop us straight into the explanation below, but the whole video, being a video of Carl Sagan talking, is typically superb.

Zan Zendegi Azadi continued...

 Yesterday I met Faren (not pictured) and her friends and colleagues in Trafalgar Square to join a human chain across Wesminster Bridge in support of the protests in Iran. October the 29th was also Cyrus the Great day, so I thought about researching him before writing this, then realised it probably wasn't that necessary, but I'll still research him after I've written this. I've got Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe open next to me right now.

 

 

  

 Whitehall had been busy. The March of the Mums had made front pages earlier that day, and there was also a Ukrainian protest outside Downing Street, with which we ocassionally intermingled. "Down with tyrants." A lot of the chants were in English, but we were also taught "Azadi! Azadi! A-zad-i!" the Farsi word for freedom. And I finally learnt how to say Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, meaning Women, Life, Freedom – as taught to the people of Hastings by Omid Djalili here, and written across the Jason hockey masks of some protestors. Others hid their face behind David Lloyd's Guy Fawkes mask, now associated with Anonymous, possibly unaware of the seasonal appropriateness. Others still were dressed as zombie nuns, but I'm pretty sure they were just cutting through.

 Our numbers grew as we walked down Whitehall, sometimes side by side and filling the road, sometimes holding hands in single file to form the human chain, (which I couldn't photograph without breaking of course). There hadn't seemed to be as many in Trafalgar Square as a month ago, but now we were on the move we were closing roads. This was my first march. Faren said she hadn't felt as safe as she'd have liked at the last one, because people had started shouting "Down with the BBC", believing the corporation hadn't been doing enough to support the protestors, or that reporting the deaths of students was bad for morale – meanwhile the very fact of Faren's employment by BBC Persian has seen her upgraded by the Iranian Government from spy to terrorist – but on this demonstration however, I only saw the one sign with the letters "BBC" dripping in blood, and Faren had her friends around her now. She seemed happy. She was loud. "I'm letting out a lot of anger." I realised I'd only been throwing my voice. Pretend shouting. Shy.

 

  Posting some photographs of the protest on Instagram that evening, I wondered for the first time what my phone is actually up to when it says it's "finishing up" after the loading bar's filled, and I had flashbacks to Arthur Pewtey at the Marriage Guidance Counsellor. I don't really know how well I've fulfilled protestors' requests to "Be the Voice of Iran". But I know what I can do if it's okay with you, and that is to sign, and ask you to sign, THIS PETITION to whoever's Home Secretary when you read this: to drop an already twice rejected Public Order Bill that would make criminal offences of everything that happened yesterday – "interfering with key national infrastructure" for example – in other words, closing roads – and "locking on" – in other words, holding hands. If not for me, do it for Cyrus the Great.

 

Guise? Guise!

 Using this blog simply to regurgitate videos from the BBC Archive does feel a little lazy, but it keeps putting out such treasure, and I wanted something properly unsettling to post for Hallowe'en weekend. Unfortunately this package delivers so fully that I now want the whole heathen atrocity of a "holiday" banished from the memory of the Earth. What are these poor innocents doing? What have they been taught? What is this programme?

 

 

 Full marks to whoever decided to overlay the subtle howling of wind over footage of children limping through a wood singing about their own ugliness. Until now I had entirely bought into the idea that trick or treating was something we picked up from the States – I blame Fry and Laurie – but I was ten in 1984 and yet I don't remember "guising". Or sticking my head under water to make contact with another world. Or eating apples to learn the future. I knew a little about carving faces into turnips, but only because we had to wear one at the London Dungeon as "Stingy Jack". That was a scary costume. It had nothing on this kid's Licorice Allsorts mascot Bertie Bassett though. Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ.

 

A Third Startling Themblance, or When Dad Was Big Brother...

 

 

 Okay, I don't necesssarily expect you to know what my Dad looks like, so you're probably just thinking "Oh, that's a photograph of William Churchill's trusted adviser and possibly illegitimate son, former MP for Paddington, pioneering financial journalist, pretend Australian back in the days when pretending to be Australian was socially advantageous, and George Orwell's boss at the Ministry of Information, Brendan "BB" Bracken, born in County Tipperary 1901, etc..." without a double-take, and you'd be right. It's him. I think it definitely looks like my Dad too though. And so does this.

 

 Happy Birthday, Daddy! It's Dad's birthday today... I screengrabbed this picture of Bracken leaving Downing Street with Churchill from the very informative but, if I'm honest, not necessarily reliable documentary below – and I'm not just saying that because one of the interviewees is Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad.

 

 

 

 Bracken had all his papers burnt after his death apparently, so everything seems pretty apocryphal. Also the presenter bangs on lovingly about how big a liar Bracken was, so we're probably not on the same page politically. But it's interesting to see someone else have a go at making a history documentary, let's put it like that. The whole thing looks like it might have been shot on a phone, the music's fascinatingly awful, and there are some great, cheap choices of location to spice up the narrative, like a branch of Wimpy's when America gets involved. I'm not recommending it necessarily – again, William Rees-Mogg is in it – but I learnt a lot about BB from it, including the fact there's actually no evidence he was Churchill's son, and I feel I also learnt quite a bit about Conservative mythos too.

 

 

 Speaking of which, what I really do recommend is The Gathering Storm, this 1974 BBC play I found yesterday on youtube, starring Richard Burton as Churchill, in which Dad pops up playing Bracken. Sorry yes, that was what got me looking him up in the first place and discovering the resemblance. Patrick Stewart also pops up as Clement Attlee. It's an extraordinary cast. Dad died his hair red for the role, which caused a lot of amusement when I was born, and they shot scenes at Chartwell itself, from which Dad "rescued" a photo of Churchill with Somerset Maugham and H. G Wells that he found in a cleaning cupboard. I love the absence of twinkliness in Burton's pre-Thatcher portrayal of Churchill here, not least because it makes the jokes play better, but also because, while he might have been a figure of fun, Churchill was not a clown: he was a walking, breathing ideology – terrifying, but I've also not seen portrayed more vividly someone you'd definitely want as the enemy of your enemy.

 (Okay, I'm not saying Bracken definitely wasn't Churchill's son...)

The Woman King is Awesome. Fights are Cool. History is Horrible.

 Here are Thuso Mbedu and Viola Davis playing a scene we've watched many times before, in Disney cartoons, in Tom Cruise vehicles, in Young Adult fantasies – I mean, it was dumb of me to even begin this list because it's absolutely endless. When I saw it in The Woman King yesterday however, it felt fresh. Watching Viola Davis act always feels like the best way of spending one's time, but Thuso Mbedu...

 

 

 I don't think I've ever seen played as well as I have here the story of a strong-willed young outlier trying to find both the respect of their elders and their place in history, which isn't bad considering it's pretty much half of all stories told (and not my favourite usually; I like stories about monsters and slackers). Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Woman King might be the best Historical Romance I've seen since... I don't know... Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves? No it has so much over that film, even that film, but I wanted to give a hint of how – in the best way – basic an entertainment it is too. Basic, not dumb.

 

Procession of the wealth of King Ghezo, painted in 1851 by Forbes (source) 

 

 The all-female army of the Agodjié are its heroes, and they're introduced to us the way many Romances might introduce a villain: with a ruthless raid on a village under cover of darkness, all survivors pressed into captivity, but I'll come back to that. Here is another introduction, as campaigning Benin lawyer and four-time presidential candidate Marie Elise Gbedo learns of the Agodjié's extraordinary origins for BBC Africa. Happy hundredth birthday, BBC!

 

 

 

"They told me about Joan of Arc at school, without telling me about my queen. Why is that?"

 After watching the The Woman King I realised I did actually already know about the Agodjié, from a superb and quite heartbreaking documentary Lupita Nyong'o had made for Channel 4 after the release of Black Panther. I learnt today that Nyong'o was originally going to be in The Woman King herself, but dropped out shortly after filming this documentary, and Mbedu took over, although correlation isn't causation...

 

   Like Marie Elise Gbedo, Nyong'o visited the Agodjié's original compound in Dahomey and marveled at the reliefs of them absolutely segmenting their male enemies. Unlike Gbedo, she not only talked to the UNESCO world heritage site's curator, but to its current King, who claims descent from a man able turn into a panther. "So dope," to quote Nyong'o.

 

 It was the documentary's last scenes that stuck in my mind most however, when a heartbroken Nyong'o visited the "Door of No Return" – Benin's monument to those shipped off from its shores as slaves – having learnt that the Agodjié warriors she had so grown to admire had also pressed into slavery her own guide's great-grandmother. One has to take care when presenting warriors as heroes - Well no, actually one doesn't, that's the problem. There's nothing stopping you turning History into a messiah fantasy like Braveheart, or a revenge fantasy like Gladiator, but the best historical narratives present someone we root for navigating this horror – kicking arse, sure, but also bound by a little bit of politics. The Woman King does this wonderfully, beginning its story where Nyong'o left it. It also has a really nice bath in it. It is outstanding.

A survey of television production during the first six months of operation. For manufacturers and viewing rooms only.

 Arts, Science, Light Ents, the lot! Don't make me choose a screenshot!

 I've said it before and I'll say it again, the BBC Archive is really worth following. 

 (And here's Lord Reith being "sut"-shamed by Malcolm Muggeridge.)

 

 

"Opera and Revue have been attempted."

. برای زن، زندگی، آزادی

  My friend Faren is almost finished packing. Moving tomorrow. As I mentioned before she's had a testing  fortnight, and I offered to help with her boxes, but she asked me to go to Trafalgar Square instead. So I went and I took these videos and photographs and far more.

 

 A demonstration was being held to honour Mahsa Amini, the woman murdered by Iranian police for her inappropriate headwear. People were calling for revolution, and saying her name, and angry and smiling. It was glorious. It had the quality of glory. The Square was in full bloom.

 

 I saw a new statue on the fourth plinth, which I thought had been reserved for the Queen. But this was of Malawian preacher and freedom fighter John Chilembwe. It had gone up three days ago.

 

 The work of sculptor Samson Kambalu, it recreates a photograph taken in 1914 of Chilembwe refusing to take his hat off in front of the white colonialist over whom he now towers. Now he was looking on. Chilembwe would later stage his own uprising in Malawi.

  I remember when Boris Johnson was mayor, he tried to turn this plinth into a war memorial. Without meaning a shred of disrespect to the late Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park, I'm happy that didn't happen. Particularly today. As I say, full bloom.

Of Course, the Very First British TV Drama Was Filmed in Total Darkness.

 Almost as surprisingly, it was filmed in portrait mode. 

 A single camera/projector shot a pinwheel of light at the subject, and changes of angle were achieved by raising a chequered card behind which actors had to feel their way around with the lights off, using only the panel below for guidance.

 

 "These used to light up as required."

 

 Accompanying music and sound effects were, as far as I can work out, provided by a mixture of pre-recorded 77's and, if you count a second's worth of chimes played out on the guts of a musical top by producer Lance Sieveking, live performance.

 

"This is my signature tune."

 

 And here's Lance with the rest of the original team extant behind that 1930 drama, The Man With the Flower in His Mouth – an adaptation of a short play by Pirandello about oral herpes – recreating their original publicity shot for a recreation broadcast forty years later.

 

 That's "special effects man" George Inns on the far left with his checquered card, and on the far right Mary Eversley the prompter, holding a script, so I guess there must have been some light to see by after all, although probably not as much as in the 1970 reconstruction below from which these images are all taken.

 

 

 I did not know neon was pink.

 I really recommend subscribing to that BBC Archive channnel. I couldn't find a recording of the 1930 original, but given that the means of both recording and broadcasting it were entirely analogue that's not surprising. I did however find another very convincing, fuller restaging made by Granada Television in 1968 made by Radio Rentals for the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1967, so here's that too. It's horrible. What were they thinking?