Tag: britain

In Our Time: The Bluestockings

I’d always thought that “bluestocking” was just a Victorian pejorative for a woman who preferred learning to socialising, and that the term derived from the perceived frumpiness of said women. But the In Our Time episode that we listened to this Sunday disabused me of that notion. The Bluestockings were an influential intellectual “club” in late 18th Century England, which bore some resemblance to the French salons of the same era, involving both men and women. Only later did the term become gendered and pejorative. The three experts who discussed it were Karen O’Brien (King’s College London), Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London) and Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University).

The Bluestockings were not originally conceived of as a movement, instead it grew organically out of informal gatherings hosted primarily by three London society hostesses for the purpose of rational conversation. In the 18th Century the term “rational conversation” meant something along the lines of “improving conversation” – it was about learning and educating each other. And this is in some sense in opposition to the normal etiquette of the time which frowned upon talking about anything you knew more about than the person you were talking to – particularly if you were a woman. The meetings happened about once a month, and members also corresponded by letter and published essays. Very unusually for the time women were not just permitted to attended, they were also heavily involved in organising these meetings and over time came to dominate them. The name Bluestocking, however, was derived from the male attendees – as the gatherings were informal some of the men would wear their everyday blue stockings rather than their court silk stockings.

One of the important hostesses at the beginning of the movement was Elizabeth Montagu. She was born a member of the gentry, and married into the aristocracy. She was a very intelligent woman, who took over running her husband’s coal business when she married and made her family incredibly wealthy. The experts explained that she opted out of the court social circle of the time – as it was stultifyingly boring, particularly for ladies in waiting. Instead she hosted her own gathers – which became meetings of the Bluestockings. She wrote many many letters and also published essays, including an influential one about Shakespeare. This was in reply to an essay by Voltaire, and Montagu was writing to restore Shakespeare’s reputation as an important playwright. The experts pointed out that this is period when Shakespeare isn’t all that well regarded – classical authors and classical styles are still held up as being inherently better than anyone writing in English could be. Montagu’s essay is an important part of overturning this consensus.

Montagu’s gatherings might’ve been informal, but they were still organised – she arranged the chairs in her room in a semi-circle and so everyone was talking to everyone (I think). Another of the society hostesses involved in these was even more informal – she dotted the chairs around the room in little groups before the guests arrived, this meant there would be many clusters of conversations going on. The informality of the English Bluestockings was a contrast to the French salons of this same era – they had topics decided in advance and were more formalised with some degree of rules about who could speak. Another contrast between the French & English models was that the French salons were politically and religiously radical – the Bluestockings as they began were not.

As the first generation of Bluestockings gave way to the next the movement began to become more restricted to women, and to become tarred with the association of the French salons with radicalisation. This is during a period where the establishment was particularly concerned about any hints of political radicalisation, because the French Revolution was an example of where that sort of thing could lead. On the other side of the coin the Bluestockings were seen as too conservative by the new generation of female thinkers – women like Mary Wollstonecraft. So the movement began to fade away, however it had the legacy of having promoted the concept of women as the intellectual equals of men at a time when that was practically unthinkable.

An interesting programme about something I knew nothing about before. I’d quite like to read a biography of Elizabeth Montagu, but a quick google suggests there’s no such thing. A shame, but the further reading list for the In Our Time episode lists several books about the Bluestockings so perhaps I’ll pick up one of them at some point 🙂

A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley

A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley was a three part series about the peculiar relationship of Victorian & Edwardian Britain with murder. It was half about the real life crimes that shocked (and enthralled) the nation during the era – including such notable villains as Jack the Ripper and Dr Crippen as well as others I’d not heard of before. This strand of the programme also looked at the changing face of crime detection and reporting during this era – the very idea of police detectives was come up with in Victorian times. The British fascination with murders also got a boost from cheapening newspapers and rising literacy.

Worsley was also talking about fictional murders – and the blurry line between dramatised stories of real life crimes and purely fictional crimes. Particularly in Victorian times an especially juicy story might get turned into the plot of a melodrama or for a travelling puppet theatre show. People would also write in to New Scotland Yard with their own ideas for how to solve high profile unsolved murders – and Worsley tied this to the beginning of the detective novel.

Purely fictional murder sensational novels and detective stories rose in popularity through Victorian and Edwardian times, reaching their highpoint with the Golden Age of detective fiction between the two world wars. This is the time of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers etc and in their fiction murder has become very sanitised, and detection a parlour game. Figuring out “whodunnit” before you got to the reveal at the end of the book had much the same appeal as doing a crossword, and those were also rising in popularity at the time.

This was a TV series with a sense of fun – Worsley dressed up in period costume, and acted out snippets of melodramas and so on as they fitted into the story she was telling us. Including a bit of the transformation scene from the stage production of Jekyll & Hyde!

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Mud, Sweat and Tractors – series about the history of farming in 20th Century Britain.

Episode 1 of The Crusades – series presented by Thomas Asbridge about the Crusades.

Episode 1 of Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures – Richard Fortey looking at three fossil sites that changed our idea of the past.

Martin Amis’ England – a one-off programme featuring Martin Amis talking about what he thinks it is to be English and about modern society. The BBC blurb for it sounds a lot more negative than I thought it actually was.

Hidden Histories: WW1’s Forgotten Photographs – one-off programme about the photographs taken by ordinary soldiers during WWI. Particularly featuring two photographers, one German and one British, whose descendants met up as part of the programme.

The Necessary War; The Pity of War; David Attenborough’s First Life

The Necessary War and The Pity of War were a pair of programmes from the BBC about the First World War that aired a couple of months ago. In The Necessary War Max Hastings put the case for WW1 being, ultimately, necessary despite the loss of life etc. And in The Pity of War Niall Ferguson argued that it was all a terrible and costly (in terms of lives) mistake – this programme finished with a debate. I found myself not entirely agreeing with either position, although I preferred Hastings’s presentation as Ferguson was more than a touch smug and flippant. Both were looking at this from a very British perspective, the question wasn’t so much “was the War worth it?” as “should Britain have gone to war in 1914?”.

Hastings’s main point was that at the time the decision to go to war was made it seemed the least of all possible evils. He argued that if Britain had stayed out of the war in 1914 then there was a reasonable chance that Germany would’ve overrun France, and then Britain would later have faced war with a much bigger Germany which would be more capable of disrupting British shipping (and thus the British economy and empire). So he suggested that at the time, and with hindsight, war seemed inevitable the only question was “now or later?”. He also discussed how the atrocities perpetrated by the German army as they rolled over Belgium meant that this was the moral choice as well as the politically sensible one and that a Europe dominated by the Kaiser’s Germany would not be a pleasant place to live. I was somewhat less convinced by his attempt to present the Versailles Treaty as a good thing just because it was better than what the German’s would’ve imposed if they’d won (there’s a lot of room between that and “good” after all).

Ferguson on the other hand thought that if Britain had stayed out of the war in 1914 then the world would’ve been a better place both in the short term and in the long run. But I’m afraid he didn’t convince me at all, except that I do agree that with the benefit of hindsight the First World War was an appalling waste of lives and didn’t even produce a lasting peace. His arguments were mostly appeals to emotion and he also used counterfactuals to illustrate what he thought would’ve happened if Britain had stayed out of the war. His key idea was that he thought the conflict would’ve remained European without Britain’s intervention, and that a Germany that had conquered or otherwise overrun France and Belgium wouldn’t have expanded further. There was a strong air of “who cares about the French and Belgians” although he didn’t go as far as to say that – but having recently watched both The Necessary War and the series based on Hew Strachan’s book about WW1 I was struck by his complete lack of mention of the way the Belgian and French civilians were treated by the advancing German army at the beginning of the war. It wouldn’t’ve fit very well with his “playful” suggestion that a Europe “dominated” by the Kaiser’s Germany would’ve been “just like our modern EU” (although he conceded that Angela Merkel is rather nicer than the Kaiser). He didn’t come across as having much more than wishful thinking to back up his idea that peace and harmony would’ve reigned as soon as Germany finished conquering Belgium, breaking the back of France and defanging Russia.

The debate at the end of The Pity of War was both with experts, and with the audience for Ferguson’s lecture (he lectured, Hastings did more of a standard documentary programme). No-one seemed to agree much with Ferguson and he got taken to task for his flippancy about the EU by a rather formidable woman in the audience too 🙂

In the end I think I agree with Hastings that the choice to go to war was the best one that the British leadership could see at the time. And I think without the examples of WW1 and WW2 we wouldn’t all be as wary of global modern warfare – which doesn’t make them good things at all, just sadly inevitable.

David Attenborough’s First Life was a two part series about the origins of animal life on our planet. It goes before his series about the evolution of the vertebrates (which we watched last year), and so only mentioned vertebrates right at the very end. Although it was called “First Life” he really wasn’t interested in anything except animals, and so we didn’t get to see much about the prokaryotes (who were the first life) or even eukaryotes prior to the development of multicellular organisms. And plants were only ever mentioned in passing.

So in episode 1 he covered the evolution of organisms like sponges, and looked at the fossil record of a group of now long extinct animals which had a different body plan to our own. These were all sedentary and had grew by branching with each branch being a smaller version of the whole organism. These died out (Attenborough said “inevitably” but I’m not quite sure why), and the last part of that programme looked at the Cambrian Explosion which is the name given to the sudden rise of diversity of animals with a more familiar body plan. These were generally capable of movement and have head ends and tail ends to their bodies. And even teeth! Episode 2 focussed on arthropods, and in particular the insects and the colonisation of the land. In particular he looked at the way that the development of hard shells to fend off predators lead to being able to leave the water (because their bodies didn’t collapse or dehydrate). And we were shown lots of awesome trilobite fossils from a particularly well preserved fossil bed in Morocco.

Other TV watched last week:

Episode 3 of Churches: How to Read Them – series looking at symbolism and so on in British churches.

Episode 1 of A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley – series about the popular fascination with murder in late Victorian & Edwardian times.

Episode 1 of Mud, Sweat and Tractors – series about the history of farming in 20th Century Britain.

Ian Hislop’s Olden Days;

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting from Ian Hislop’s Olden Days but it wasn’t what we actually got! What we got was an interesting (and entertaining) look at how the British think about their history. The first episode of the series looked at two different Kingship myths – Arthur and Alfred. Obviously Alfred has the advantage of being real, but the best known story about him (burning the cakes) is about as truthful as the Arthur mythos. Ian Hislop spent that programme looking at the stories (and history where possible) of both Kings, and tracing their popularity over the centuries. Arthur is more popular during more romantically inclined eras – for instance in late Medieval times when chivalry was an important part of society. Alfred on the other hand is popular in more practically minded eras – particularly the Victorians. He brought laws and valued wisdom and learning, and this fits in well with the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian sense of bringing order and civilisation to The Whole World. Of course this isn’t ever an exclusive “one or the other” situation, and even in the eras I just mentioned both are an important part of the national idea of the perfect monarch.

The second episode concentrated on the paradoxes of the Victorian attitudes to the past. On the one hand this is an era of progress and practicality, bringing new technologies and ways of life to the world. on the other hand, and perhaps because of all the change, this is an era constantly looking back to a better and more perfect past. Not just for nostalgia, although there is plenty of that (like Sir Walter Scott’s Arthur and/or Scottish history themed novels). It’s also rather paradoxically being used to help drive the change. Hislop phrased it like this: The best way to get the British to do something new is to tell them it’s rooted in the old traditions of the country.

And the third and final episode looked at the place The Countryside has in the collective imagination of Britain. He started off by explaining that 1851 was a tipping point in Britain’s history – the census of that year recorded more people living in towns & cities than living in the rural areas, for the first time ever. And ever since the countryside has been idealised and mythologised into a timeless and unchanging rural idyll. So Hislop showed us sentimental Victorian watercolours of rose covered cottages and talked about Cecil Sharp’s great project to track down the True Folk Music of the People. This sort of theme also shows up in places like Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings – it’s The Shire (an idealised version of the village Tolkein spent some of his childhood in) vs. Mordor (which Hislop noted must be Birmingham in that context 😉 ). And even though the Archers started out at a radio show designed to bring new ideas to farmers, it’s turned into another example of mostly urban people idealising the country life.

An interesting look at the British national mythos over history. And unsurprisingly given the presenter rather funny at times.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 9 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episode 2 of How to Get Ahead – series about court life during a three different historical periods.

Episode 2 of Precision: The Measure of All Things – series about measurement and the history of measurement.

Don’t Panic – The Truth About Population – part of the This World series this is a lecture presented by statistician Hans Rosling. It’s a very entertaining yet informative look at population growth and poverty throughout the world. It’s the answer to fears about the booming population (we’ve actually reached peak child so growth is already slowing and will top out in the next few decades). And also a look at whether or not we can really pull the third world out of extreme poverty (it’s already happening). He also talked a bit about climate change but was less convincingly reassuring about that!

Episode 1 of Churches: How to Read Them – series looking at symbolism and so on in British churches.

Monkey Planet; Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places

Monkey Planet was a three part series presented by George McGavin about primates – monkeys, apes and lemurs. The first episode in was primarily a survey of just how wide-ranging and varied a group the primates are. The other two looked at aspects of primate behaviour that we tend to think of as particularly human, and showed both how it’s actually primate-wide and more varied than our narrow perspective suggests. The second episode concentrated on social interactions – like social hierarchies, family arrangements, maintaining friendships. And the third episode was focussed on intelligence and learning. That had the most startling piece of footage – a chimpanzee who lives in Iowa in a research institute who was shown going on a picnic with one of the scientists and making a campfire and toasting marshmallows on it. It shouldn’t be startling – I know chimpanzees are intelligent and very closely related to humans (we could be considered a third chimpanzee species). But somehow making a fire to toast marshmallows on was more human-ish than I was expecting.

This was a fun series to watch, even if I haven’t written much – its strength was in the footage of all the different primates being primates (which is hard to write about but good to watch).

Another series we finished watching this week was Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places. This covered a lot of the same sort of territory as the recent Neil Oliver series, Sacred Wonders of Britain (post) but where the Oliver series organised things chronologically this one organised them thematically. The six half-hour episodes covered things like “Water” or “Caves” and so on. It was based on someone’s book, but not presented by the author. I’m not sure I was all that keen on the actual presenter – Ifor ap Glyn – whose schtick seemed to be that at the start of the episode he tried to come across as completely without knowledge on the subject, then by the end of the half hour he’d “learnt why these places are so important”. And it wasn’t quite believable either at the start or the end. One thing he was very good at, however, was telling the associated stories for places with the right sense of awareness of the ridiculous nature of them!

A bit shallow, but actually did rather well as a contrasting sort of programme to watch after something more weighty (like The First World War).

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 8 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episodes 1 and 2 of Ian Hislop’s Olden Days – a series about the British fascination with an idealised past.

Episode 1 of How to Get Ahead – series about court life during a three different historical periods.

Episode 1 of Precision: The Measure of All Things – series about measurement and the history of measurement.

Vikings Live

Last Thursday we went out to the cinema to see a live broadcast from the current British Museum exhibition about the Vikings (which I’ve already written about here). Cineworld Ipswich sadly managed not to switch the screen on in time for the start of the broadcast, but we only missed the first few minutes. The format of the live part of the show was Bettany Hughes and Michael Wood looking at various of the items on display in the exhibition and talking to experts about them (including Gareth Williams, the curator of the exhibition). There were also a couple of segments of chat with the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, about the exhibition and the objects. These live sections were interspersed with pre-recorded stuff – presumably partly to allow presenters and camera crews time to reorganise themselves for the next bit!

It was an interesting counterpoint to the exhibition itself. I felt the exhibition emphasised the non-raiding, non-marauding parts of the Viking story, and was trying to position them more as traders and colonisers. Whereas the broadcast wholeheartedly embraced the raiding and warlike side of the Vikings, while also pointing out their softer, more civilised side (sometimes). It also had more of a sense of fun to it than the exhibition itself – perhaps just because it’s easier to convey that enthusiasm in person than in a museum label.

Each segment of the broadcast was introduced with a dramatic declamation of (translated) Viking poetry, by a man dressed up as a Viking, followed by a burst of fire revealing the title (like “War” or “Raiding” or “Women”). Obviously these were part of the pre-recorded stuff, I thought they were rather well done. We also got to see the exhibition curator dressed up as a Viking warrior – apparently he does re-enactment as well as museum curation! He was particularly enthusiastic at showing Michael Wood how you could use a long knife from below a shield wall to gut your enemies … And the show piece at the end of the broadcast was some footage of a (re-enacted) Viking ship burial, which I think for me suffered from the amount they’d been hyping that in advance – sadly not quite as spectacular a I was expecting.

As well as all that sort of thing we also got treated to a much closer look at some of the artifacts than was possible in the exhibition itself. In the case of many of the smaller pieces (like the little ship brooch that opens the exhibition) this meant we got to see them at many many times life size and so could really see the detail. One thing that struck me in all the explanations of the objects was that a lot of them have been relatively recently discovered. The ship burial that they had from Scotland, for instance, hadn’t been completely conserved yet (making it incredibly fragile and difficult to display). And there was a tiny silver figurine of a female warrior(? valkyrie?) with a sword that had only been dug up last year!

It’s cool that the British Museum are doing this sort of thing. I think as a broadcast it would work whether or not you had a chance to see the exhibition in person. I’m glad we went to see it, and I think it’s a shame we somehow didn’t go to the Pompeii Live one last year – I’ll definitely keep an eye out for these sorts of tie-in broadcasts in future.

Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest; Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice

Mind the Gap was a two part series presented by Evan Davis about the growing gap between the economy of London (booming) and the economy of the rest of Britain (somewhat stagnant). I’m not sure he really had 2 hours worth of material, but I guess he wanted to divide it into two themed chunks. The first programme mostly covered what the situation is and how it has arisen. Davis talked to a variety of people – CEOs, workers, people involved in transport, Boris Johnson etc. The take home message was that the gap exists because a gap already existed and it’s just got more pronounced. Basically businesses want to be near other businesses – either of the same type for collaboration (or people poaching) or of different types (again for collaboration). So once London started to be the place to be, it became more the place to be. Davis did spend a bit of time talking about the downsides of this as well – in particular the way people get priced out of the city. And the effects on transport and other infrastructure requirements. Like the fact that Crossrail isn’t even built yet and they’re already planning Crossrail 2 because the projected growth of the city means it’ll be needed that soon.

The second programme was more concerned with what, if anything, can be done to reduce the gap – bringing up the rest of the country rather than bringing down London, obviously. This felt particularly padded, to be honest. Davis’s message here was the he thinks (and this was clearly couched as a personal opinion) that trying to bring the whole of the rest of the country closer to London in economic terms is a non-starter. By spreading the economic growth so thin you don’t ever get momentum going anywhere. Also Davis didn’t seem to think many places had enough there to start off with. His idea was that the best hope for economic growth outside London is to encourage formation of a supercity in the north of England. Statistically speaking if you compare city population sizes between many European countries including Britain then we don’t actually have a “second city” – there’s a far bigger gap between London and the next tier of cities than you’d expect. So Davis thinks that the way forward is for the Liverpool to Leeds corridor to turn into Britain’s second city. I guess Glasgow/Edinburgh wasn’t chosen because it has the issue that it might turn out not to be British shortly.

Overall I wasn’t sure if I agreed with Davis, but I’m aware I don’t really know much about economics and haven’t thought about these issues much before – so my sense of disagreement might be just the result of ignorance.

If you were after a serious programme about polar bear life and biology, then Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice is not the programme you’re looking for. However it was very entertaining 🙂 The best claim to seriousness that it has is that it uses disguised remote control cameras to get closer to polar bears and to film them acting in a much more natural fashion than you can do when there’s a whole film crew around. And as the programme blurb says, this does demonstrate their intelligence and curiosity. But what made it worth watching was the narration (voiced by David Tennant, in his natural accent so not quite like Doctor Who providing commentary). In the narrative the polar bears were fairly anthropomorphised and the cameras were definitely anthropomorphised, and it was great fun to watch!

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of The Plantagenets – Robert Bartlett covers the history of the Plantagenet dynasty, who ruled England for nearly 300 years.

Episode 4 of Pagans & Pilgrims – series about the sacred places of Britain, presented by Ifor ap Glyn.

Episode 6 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episode 1 of Monkey Planet – series about the biology and behaviour of primates.

Border Country: The Story of Britain’s Lost Middleland; Rococo: Travel Pleasure Madness

Border Country can be fairly characterised as unashamed propaganda for the No-to-Independence side of the upcoming referendum in Scotland. To be fair that fits my own bias* so I was predisposed to like the series. The narrative structure for the two programmes was a history of the border regions of England and Scotland from the time of the Romans through to James VI & I as ruler of both countries. It was presented by Rory Stewart, and his thesis is that the border between Scotland and England is not a natural cultural breakpoint, but more of an arbitrary line drawn across the region. And he believes that these sorts of line-on-the-map borders lead to more problems than they solve.

*One selfish reason: if Scotland isn’t part of Britain then as the English born child of Scottish parents I lose my sense of national identity (I’m British rather than Scottish or English). One more political reason: As someone who can’t vote in the referendum I’m not looking into it closely, but the rhetoric in favour of independence that I do see is heavy on the “of course the bad stuff stays with the UK but we’ll get to keep the good bits of the Union even once we’ve left”. And that feels naive and foolish to me – maybe everything will work out the way they want, but unless there are some signed agreements then making contingency plans on worst case scenarios and reassuring your public about them would seem sensible.

The intros from the BBC continuity announcer for both programmes were very pointed about this being Stewart’s personal opinions, and he says that himself several times through the series. Part of this is distancing it from his job – he’s the Conservative MP for the Penrith and the Border consituency in Cumbria. So important for him to point out repeatedly this is him speaking for himself and not the Tories in general. But this also came up several times when he was talking about the history of the region – he’d fairly often say something along the lines of “many historians believe X but I believe Y because …”.

The facts and stories that he told us were mostly the same as in many other programmes about British history. But there were two major differences in the way the narrative was framed that made this a series worth watching. The first of these was that it was strongly focused on the stretch of land between the river Humber and the river Forth, which he referred to throughout as the Middleland. He emphasised the continuity of culture across that region, both before and after the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall. The first programme covered the tribal culture of the people who lived in the region before the Romans, then the effect the Wall had on them. This was followed by the aftermath of the demilitarisation of that border when the Roman Empire shrank back away from Britain. And that programme ended on a high note with the golden age of Northumbria – the era of the Venerable Bede and St Cuthbert. A time when this region was a centre for religious thought and art across Europe – note that Northumbria at the time covered areas on both sides of the border. The second programme was full of death and destruction. He concentrated on the Vikings, then the Harrowing of the North by William the Conqueror and finally the Anglo-Scottish wars of the late medieval period and the clans of Reivers who terrorised the area during this period. The power of these clans, in Stewart’s narrative, was broken only when the border ceased to divide the countries. He said that the unification of Scotland and England into the United Kingdom meant that the Reivers weren’t useful to the military of one side or the other so it was easier to enforce the law in the region.

The other way in which the framing of this series was different to many other British history programmes is that Stewart frequently drew parallels between our history and areas of the world today. He was a deputy governor in Iraq for a while, he’s got a lot of involvement in charity work in Afghanistan and has walked through that country and written a book about it. As well as other places. So, for instance, he was comparing the tribal Celtic culture that existed before the Romans arrived to rural Afghanistan. He compared the golden age of Northumbria to modern day Tibet – because of the monkish religious cast to the culture. Never in a “it’s exactly the same” sort of way, but in a way that drew out the parallels and made you think about both the history of Britain and the current state of the world in a new way.

I don’t think I always agreed with him – I could see places where I thought he’d had to be careful to pick his facts to fit his story (like the Edward I trying to conquer Scotland bit didn’t quite sit right with me, for instance). And I think the implied “don’t vote for independence because it’ll all go up in smoke” is a bit too far-fetched. But equally, I do agree that the boundary between Scotland and England is a historical artifact – drawn by the Romans for their own imperial reasons. And it was thought provoking, and good to look at the history I know through a different lens.

Rococo: Travel Pleasure Madness was a three part series about the Rococo art movement presented by Waldemar Januszczak. It’s a sequel of sorts to the series he did last year about Baroque art that we watched in February (post). In the Baroque one he moved across the continent following the movement, this Rococo series was done in three themes instead. And his themes were picked to support his thesis that a lot of the modern world has its roots in the Rococo. First he looked at the period and the art in terms of travel – particular emphasis on Venice as a tourist destination, as well as the fondness for paintings of exotic animals and Chinoiserie. Next was pleasure, and there were two strands to this. One was the sort of decadent pleasure epitomised in Boucher’s Blonde Odalisque (a painting I’ll never look at in quite the same way after seeing Januszczak sprawl across a sofa in the same pose (with his clothes on, thankfully!)) and in Marie Antoinette pretending to be a milkmaid. The other strand talked about things like how “the pursuit of happiness” as a human right is a Rococo idea. The last of the themes was madness – a lot of the Rococo style is rather otherworldly and unreal, and this programme focussed on where that could lead and the darker side of the Rococo.

As with the Baroque series it’s hard to find things to say, because it’s all about the visuals. One thing that does strike me is that Januszczak’s programmes have a distinctive style to them. I’m not sure I can articulate it, it’s more of a feeling than something I’ve got figured out – but I’m hard pushed to think of another presenter who spends so much time walking away from the camera with his back to the audience. Another quirk is that often he has people looking at the paintings he’s talking to – and they’re not just people around in the art gallery by chance, it’s always the same handful of people so it’s for deliberate effect. This series also had people dressed up and acting out silent vignettes completely ignoring him while he stood and explained what was going on.

I still think Rococo art is overall a bit too frilly and a bit too pink, but I do now know more about what’s there behind the pink frilliness!

When Albums Ruled the World – nostalgia for the heyday of the vinyl LP, the 60s & 70s.

Episode 3 of Pagans & Pilgrims – series about the sacred places of Britain, presented by Ifor ap Glyn.

Animals Overnight: Sleepover at the Zoo – programme about sleep and animal sleep patterns. They set up cameras around Bristol Zoo to record what various of the animals did overnight when no-one was around, and also visited various sleep scientists to talk about what we know and don’t know about sleep. Most surprising fact for me is that REM sleep appears to be the result of convergent evolution, even if we still don’t know what its purpose is.

Episode 1 of The Plantagenets – Robert Bartlett covers the history of the Plantagenet dynasty, who ruled England for nearly 300 years.

Episode 5 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Unnatural Histories; Tales from the Royal Bedchamber

Unnatural Histories was a series with a message, and in the case of one of the episodes it even seemed to have some subliminal messaging going on (and perhaps the other two and we just didn’t spot it). The basic premise was that the series was looking at three great “wildernesses” which have been made national parks and investigating whether or not it’s really true that these are the last great spaces untouched by the hand of man. Each episode concentrated on the history of a particular national park – firstly the Serengeti, secondly Yellowstone and thirdly the Amazon rainforest (bits of which are national park but they were thinking about the whole region). The message was the same in each case – that the concept of untouched wilderness is really just a nasty little racist hangover from the days of white imperialism. In all three cases people have been living in and shaping the land and ecosystem for thousands of years. So the narrative of the “pristine, untouched wilderness” erases the native peoples from the picture – like the way we talk about the “discovery” of the Americas in the 15th Century despite there having been people living there for 12,000 years who thus discovered it some time ago. It’s a narrative that only works if you consider Europeans as the only “real people” in the situation.

It definitely succeeded in being a thought provoking series – we kept pausing it to talk about it while watching. I think there’s something to be said for keeping some parts of the world as a viable habitat for wildlife rather than just building cities over everything (in particular the Amazon which has a significant affect on global climate too). But the way in which these parks were created and the way the people who lived there were treated was appalling. In both the Serengeti and Yellowstone native people were moved out involuntarily and prevented from using the land the way they used to – but tourists could still go onto the land and often cause more damage than the locals would’ve. In the Serengeti big game hunters were positively encouraged at the same time as local people were prevented from hunting for food. Removal of people is also altering the ecosystems of the parks – for instance elk in Yellowstone grew in numbers to an extent where wolves had to be reintroduced to prey on them. The Amazon was even more complex – in that there was a significant reduction in population by diseases brought by the first Europeans, possibly up to 90%. So the human part of the ecosystem had collapsed prior to the attempt to preserve the “wilderness”, but the effects of that human population hadn’t entirely unravelled.

It’s difficult to know what can be done, tho. These ecosystems were sustainable with populations of about the size that they had, who lived in traditional ways. And the modern world inevitably changes that, and I don’t think any of it is in ways that should be prevented. Modern medical care keeps people alive for longer, so the population grows and consumes more. Once you’re aware of conveniences like clean running water and electricity you’re going to want them – and that requires space and resources. And these aren’t things you should deny people to keep them “traditional” enough to live somewhere. But how do you police the land use effectively? And without that turning into its own nastiness? And if the people were moved out a couple of generations ago like in the case of Yellowstone then do they still have the knowledge and so on to live the way their ancestors did?

So yes, a very thought provoking series with more questions than answers.

(The possible subliminal messaging was in the Serengeti one, btw – every time they switched from black & white footage to colour or vice versa there was a frame or two of a still image of two Masai standing against a sunrise (or sunset).)

Tales from the Royal Bedchamber was aired to coincide with the birth of William & Kate’s son. It was presented by Lucy Worsley (who did Fit to Rule that we watched last year), and was a chronological look at the bedchambers of the English & British royalty over the last 700 or so years. It wasn’t quite what I expected in that I was expecting more about the birth or not of heirs to the throne, but really it was about the beds and the rooms. So we were shown several rather nice looking beds from various points over the centuries. And she explained how pre-Victorian times the royal bedchamber was actually a state room – and the people who had access to it were some of the most important people in the country because they had the most access to the king.

I don’t think there was anything in this programme I didn’t already know, but it was nice to see the examples of beds etc.

Other TV watched last week:

Episode 1 and 2 of Rococo: Travel, Pleasure, Madness – three part series presented by Waldemar Januszczak about the Rococo art movement, as a sequel to his series on Baroque art.

Episode 1 of Border Country – programme about the history of the area of Britain around the England/Scotland border, presented by Rory Stewart.

Episode 1 of Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest – two-part series about the increasing gap between the economy of London and the economy of the rest of Britain.

Episode 4 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episode 1 & 2 of Pagans and Pilgrims – series about the sacred places of Britain, presented by Ifor ap Glyn

The Stuarts; Bible Hunters

For some odd reason the BBC had a new documentary series about The Stuarts and then only aired it in Scotland. I can see that it was intended to tie in with the upcoming vote on independence but it was straightforwardly a documentary rather than a piece of propaganda. So I’m not really sure why it was kept north of the border. We only spotted it because I’d recorded something else off BBC2 Scotland to avoid a clash, and there was a trailer for The Stuarts.

The presenter was Clare Jackson, who I don’t think I’ve seen anything by before, and her thesis was that the Stuarts were the defining royal dynasty of Great Britain – despite the actual creation of the United Kingdom only happening almost by accident at the end of the Stuart era. She took us through the whole 17th Century (and a smidge beyond) in chronological order. The first episode covered James VI & I, and the early years of Charles I. The accession of James to the English throne in 1603 after Elizabeth I’s death had been a time of optimism – for James and for his new country. James’s dream was to unite the two countries in the same way that the crowns were now united, however he wasn’t able (even with his high degree of political skill) to persuade the English in particular to do this. Jackson also covered the seeds of Charles I’s autocratic leanings – in particular she pointed at his visit to Spain, whilst he was trying (and failing) to negotiate a Spanish marriage for himself. At the court of the Hapsburgs he got a taste of how royalty “should” be treated.

The second episode covered the civil wars and the Restoration. In this episode Jackson was keen to stress how the way we’re taught British history today (particularly in England) simplifies and prettifies this collection of conflicts. We’re often presented with it as “democracy vs. autocracy”, and the parts of the war outside England are often ignored. She said it is better compared to modern conflicts like the violence & genocide in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And she emphasised the Irish parts of the Civil Wars, which were not pretty in the slightest and still have repercussions today. Cromwell is a divisive figure – either a hero (from a Protestant point of view) or a villain (from the Catholic point of view). She also pointed out how Cromwell was by the end King in all but name (hardly the champion of democracy that English school history would like to portray him as) and after he died his power and title passed on to his son. Who was sufficiently bad at the job that Charles II was invited back to England.

The last episode could be thought of as the long decline of the Stuarts … we started with the disaster that was about to be James VII & II. Charles II had been fairly astutely focused on remaining King – he might’ve had Catholic leanings and a Catholic wife but he’d stayed a Protestant (until his deathbed, perhaps). His brother James, however, did convert to Catholicism and was fervent about it – he resigned public office rather than give up his Catholicism. Charles never managed to sire a legitimate heir, so James was next in line to the throne. Charles did his best to mitigate the problems with his having a Catholic heir – he had James’s daughters brought up Protestant and married them to good Protestants (like William of Orange, a diplomatic necessity as well as an internal political one). So when James did come to the throne it was seen as a brief blip before Mary & William took over – dealable with. When James’s new wife had a son this changed and it was time for more direct action, William was invited to invade (this is the Glorious Revolution) which he did and by chance he won bloodlessly. William and Mary, and then Mary’s sister Anne after them were childless so after Anne the next possible Stuart heirs were the Catholic descendants of James. And this is what finally brought about the creation of the United Kingdom that had been James VI & I’s dream. England wanted the Protestant Hanoverans to inherit after Anne died, Scotland would’ve preferred the Stuart heir – and so the crowns and thus the countries would part unless Parliament succeeded in passing the Act of Union.

A good series, I really don’t know why it was confined to the Scottish bit of BBC2.

Bible Hunters wasn’t a promising name for a series, but actually it turned out to be pretty good (with some flaws). Jeff Rose took us through the 19th and early 20th Century attempts to find or confirm the truth of the Bible. The first episode focussed on the New Testament, and the efforts of 19th Century scholars and explorers to find early copies of the Gospels. The idea was to show that the Gospels were indeed the inerrant word of God, and that the narrative of Jesus life and ministry was correct. Egypt was the target of these expeditions because of the early monastic tradition in the country dating back to much nearer the time of Jesus life than anything in Europe could do. Some monasteries (like that at Sinai) have been inhabited continuously since at least the 3rd Century AD. What was found shook the certainty that nothing had changed as the Bible was copied and translated over the centuries. In particular the ending of the Gospel of Mark (the oldest of the four Gospels, thought to’ve been written first) was different, and different in an important fashion. The modern end of that Gospel has Jesus seen after his resurrection, and the women who went to his tomb are instructed to go forth and tell people the good news. The 2nd Century version of the text ends with the women finding the empty tomb, being told by an angel that Jesus has risen, and being afraid and telling no-one. The programme built this up as being a cataclysmic blow to the faithful, and certainly it causes a lot of problems if your faith requires the words in the Bible to be literally the whole truth and literally unchanging.

The second episode looked more generally at what expeditions to Egypt showed about both the general truth of the biblical world view and the construction of the canonical texts of the Bible. As the history of Pharaonic Egypt began to be examined it cast doubt on the accuracy of the Biblical stories about the history & age of the Earth. For instance when the Dendera zodiac was found it was thought to be 12,000 years old (now known to be false, it’s Ptolemaic) and how did that square with Usher’s careful calculations about the Earth having been created in 4,004 BC? And other Gospels were found buried near old monasteries – which had been hidden after the official choice of the four we now know as being the canonical books. These included a Gospel according to Mary Magdalene, which gave a bigger role for women in the early church than in later times. And also Gnostic Gospels.

The format of the programme was Rose going to various places in Egypt, and also talking to various academics from a variety of institutions about the history of the people who found these things and the history of the ideas. And it was interesting to watch, but I kept running into things that made me stop and think “wait, is that really true?”. Which then casts doubt on the accuracy of other things that I didn’t already know something about. For example Bishop Usher’s calculation of the age of the Earth was mentioned, and Rose told us that “everyone believed that the Earth was only 6,000 years old” at that time. But as far as I was aware by the time Usher was doing his calculations there were a lot of people (if not most people) who thought the Earth was much older than that – Usher was more of a last-gasp of outdated thought rather than mainstream. I could be wrong, it’s not an area I know much about but things like that let the doubt in. Another example was that the EEF (forerunner of the modern EES) was presented as being solely about proving the truth of the Bible when it started – but when we visited the EES last September (post) we were told that although the biblical links were used to get more funding preservation of the ancient monuments as things in themselves not as “it’s in the bible” was also an important goal. The discrepancy could well be down to spin, but again this lets doubts creep in about the accuracy or spin on the rest of the programme.

I am glad I watched it, but I don’t know if I’d trust it on the details without cross-checking the facts.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Henry & Anne: The Lovers that Changed History – two part series about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, part dramatised documentary presented by Suzanne Lipscomb.

Episode 2 of Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England – this was part of the BBC’s Tudor Season in 2013. It’s a series about life in Elizabethan times from the perspective of the differences between now and then, what you’d need to know if you could travel back there.

Robins of Eden and The Rabbits of Skomer – two rather retro-feeling mini nature documentaries, lasting just 10 minutes each.

The Joy of the Single – programme about singles, talking to various music industry people. Covered things like the history of the single as a phenomenon, the physical object of a 7″ vinyl single and the sort of emotional impact that various singles had on these people.

Episode 2 of The Great British Year – series about British wildlife and countryside over the whole year. Lots of gorgeous shots of animals, and timelapse sequences of landscapes.

Blink: A Horizon Guide to the Senses – programme presented by Kevin Fong about the senses. Not much new footage, instead it made use of the last 40 years of Horizon to pull out illustrative bits and pieces from the archives. Some neat things to see, but in other ways it felt a bit shallow.