Meades on France

[amateur51]

Either way, I am finding it refreshing to be given information, ideas, connections which are more complex and stimulating than the normal oversimplified, patronising pap that is delivered too often on TV these days.

I enjoyed Clive James's take on the subject in the Daily Telegraph:

"I mustn’t bang on too often about Jonathan Meades on France (BBC Four), although it became evident that this would be a landmark series from the moment that Meades began to speak. Far from discussing French history with any experts on French history, Meades discusses the whole vast, intricately ramified subject with himself.

This self-sufficiency leaves him plenty of room to employ language at a high level: quite the most attractively written commentary I have heard on television in years. As Meades dominates the shot like a close-up of an eloquent gargoyle that has broken loose from its cathedral, his dizzy powers of articulation remind you that the baroque, at its best, always had the Renaissance inside it: a discovery, not just a refinement.

“Concupiscent popes with chancels full of nephews.” Meades’s use of words is as kinky and eclectic as one of those French rooflines he is always warning us against, but underneath the floridity there are firmly held moral principles. Treating the subject of the French female professor of gender studies who started her career as a terrorist (score: killed four, maimed 40) he evoked her and those like her in a single sentence “There are countless instances of the scum rising to the top.”

Praise indeed!

I think it's a wonderful programme, in nice bite-sized pieces - there are plenty of frights on modern telly programmes, goodness knows, but rarely enough danger - wor Jonathan provides just that

Why wasn't he cast as Moriarty?

[aeolium]

I don't know about firmly held moral principles - I think Meades is mainly a contrarian who delights in being unpredictable and atttacking fashionable views and assumptions. For instance, his claim in the last episode that decolonialism was a fashionable but preposterous idea could just as readily have been challenged by asking him whether he thought colonialism (which had been just as fashionable) was equally preposterous, or whether this was one of his 'firmly held moral principles' And I thought his quip about roots being what vegetables have came up three times, twice in the second programme and once in the third.

Entertaining, but not imo as good as his series on Northern Europe and Scotland.

[Serial_Apologist]

I don't know about firmly held moral principles - I think Meades is mainly a contrarian who delights in being unpredictable and atttacking fashionable views and assumptions. For instance, his claim in the last episode that decolonialism was a fashionable but preposterous idea could just as readily have been challenged by asking him whether he thought colonialism (which had been just as fashionable) was equally preposterous, or whether this was one of his 'firmly held moral principles' And I thought his quip about roots being what vegetables have came up three times, twice in the second programme and once in the third.

Entertaining, but not imo as good as his series on Northern Europe and Scotland.

I "read" his comment about decolonialism in the same spirit as GBS's view that the only sin in divorce lay in the prior sin of marriage.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

... pride ... gee ma look at us we are being " ,,,,, " etc