I saw this the first time around (in the mid- 80s ?) and loved it then. Even better this evening. What vintage writing, directing and acting. Superb.
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Alas, not available on iPlayer (understandably so perhaps) and neither are the Talking Heads. Ah well, credit card at the ready! :-)My life, each morning when I dress, is four and twenty hours less. (J Richardson) -
did you watch the Hytner/Bennett interview ? - I can't get over Bennett not having a single grey hair on his 80-year old head
I tried the first five minutes of Englishman Abroad but thought the film quality was so bad I couldn't stick it.Comment
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Yes, I think it's Bennett's best work. What an amazing performance from Coral Browne who was suffering at the time from the cancer that eventually killed her! She was actually playing her younger self, since the story was based on a real-life incident when Browne was touring Moscow in the late 1950s. Alan Bates was also superb as Burgess, who seems to have inspired some quality drama in English playwrights - Julian Mitchell's Another Country was also about Burgess.Originally posted by ardcarp View PostComment
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I remembered it fondly and have put it on the hard drive. Picture quality is not great but perfectly Ok. (A few weeks ago BBC4 starting going out in HD on our local transmitter.) Another good one set in E Europe from this period is Stoppard's Professional Foul with Peter Barkworth. I'd like to see that again.Comment
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I found the interview fascinating, but didn't watch all of the play. I think I may have it on DVD somewhere. As for his hair - yes, I wondered about that too, but I can't think he'd dye it or anything, though one never knows. That fair sort of hair doesn't show grey for ages. It blends in. My mother's was the same.
I was, of course, glad to see the excerpt from Habit of Art about Auden and Britten, even though I don't think it was a very good play. I wish it was on DVD, but it doesn't seem to be.
A Chip in the Sugar was painfully moving - the only one of his Talking Heads series with Bennett himself.Comment
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The Bennett birthday tributes continue, tomorrow, (Tues, 13 May) with Talking Heads - A Lady of Letters, Patricia Routledge in a further masterly Bennett portrayal; followed by 102 Boulevard Haussmann - Alan Bates also on fine form as Marcel Proust; BBC 4, 21.00 and 21.30- 22.45 hrs, respectively.
I did an overnight transfer of An Englishman Abroad, together with the delicious Dinner at Noon. Both titles now look splendid on DVD, certainly an improvement of my transfer of The Battleship Potemkin!
John Schlesinger restricted by a tight BBC budget astutely substituted Dundee for his Moscow locations and even the simulated snow effects have a mastery in themselves.Comment
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I treasure a rather scruffy postcard from Alan Bennett, written when he was appearing in Single Spies at the Globe Theatre ( Now the Gielgud ) A friend of mine was a local light in a rather good amateur dramatic society, and he wanted to do a workshop performance of the TV play Green Forms. This featured two ladies gossiping in an office, and they were played superbly by Patricia Routledge and Prunella Scales.
In the proposed amateur production, my friend would have liked to have played one of the characters himself, but the gender was a problem. The Patricia Routledge character had an ailing mother who needed constant attention, and there were lines like - " She was on the commode all night after the vicar came, you know one chocolate biscuit and she's over the edge!" I suggested that we could change her into a rather camp man, a sort of watered down Charles Hawtrey, not necessarily gay, but very buttoned up. This would not have needed many changes to the text.
We decided to write to Alan Bennett, asking his permission, and the postcard was his reply. You can almost hear his voice as he opens with "I'm sure you're right"
He didn't object to our suggestion, as long as it was a club production, commenting that he had almost forgotten it ! I suppose a very productive author can sometimes forget the details of earlier works, especially in the rather ephemeral medium of TV
Unfortunately our plan for the modified Green Forms wasn't carried out due to the serious illness of the other player. I would love to see the original TV play, if it hasn't joined so many other good things in the bulk eraser.Comment
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In "Women in Love", and playing another Burgess in "The Go Between" Bates represented a sort of ideal male role model for the young me at the time. I was much struck by his presumably pretty spot-on portrayal of the spy Burgess as someone who with his nostalgia for an illusory past England would ironically (or maybe not) have been an ideal UKIP fan today.Originally posted by aeolium View PostComment
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Come on, S_A - GB was a gay communist, not your average UKIP fan surely! He was more a sort of aristocratic Bohemian, despising the establishment but enjoying its perks like clubs and cricket.Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
Yes, Alan Bates was very good in most of what he did. I also liked him in the Hardy adaptations, Far from the Madding Crowd (film) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (BBC serial).Comment
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... and yet agonisingly funny too, brilliantly done by AB ("They go mad round the war memorial" or "He was caught exposing himself in the doorway of Sainsburys. I mean, as mam says, if it had been Tescos, you could understand it ...!"Originally posted by Mary Chambers View Post
). That humour was signally lacking, oddly, from the Maggie Smith monologue which followed it - just too unmodulated and melancholy, oddly for that performer (whom AB singled out in the interview as being able to switch emotional modes in an instant)
The observational film in the Harrogate hotel I watched too (for the 4th or 5th time over the years, probably), also painfully moving and funny in a lighter vein... My Yorkshire grandparents and their turns of phrase and respectable friends seem all to be found in that film, wearing other faces...."...the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."
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After first noting that the film quality looked 'old', it just didn't bother me one bit. We still have a c**p old telly with a cathode ray tube (but vg sound) and I sometimes envy the modern 'walls' that some folk have. But I really think that once you get into something the picture quality and size are just forgotten.I tried the first five minutes of Englishman Abroad but thought the film quality was so bad I couldn't stick it.Comment
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Do you have the same feeling about reproduced music, or a painting on a gallery wall almost invisible with dirt? Obviously we can still enjoy old films and recordings that have deteriorated through the passing of time, but surely good quality should still be aimed for, otherwise technical restoration is a waste of time.Originally posted by ardcarp View PostComment
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Hang on....I'm not campaigning for poor quality! And no I don't prefer Haydn string quartets on the phonograph. I was just pointing out that I was absorbed in the play to the extent that the film quality was quickly forgotten. Had it been a travelog about the Andes (or snooker in black and white) I'm sure it would have bothered me a lot.
BTW, just saw A Chip in the Sugar and agree with above comments. Very poignant.Comment
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