Tag: Television (Non-fiction)

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

Around the World in 60 Minutes; Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters

Around the World in 60 Minutes was a hybrid of a programme – part “what’s it like to be an astronaut?” and part travelogue. The two strands of the programme were woven together by looking at what you see during one orbit of the International Space Station – which takes 90 minutes to go round the Earth. The travelogue side of it went to about a dozen different places round the world, in the direction of the orbit, and told us something about the place and an interesting stat or two. For instance at Greenwich they talked about the meridian, and how in some sense the charts produced by the British after longitude was formalised were the GPS of their day. There was also a distinct environmental message to the whole programme – for instance they visited Brazil where they talked about the Amazon rainforest and how it’s the lungs of the planet. Brazil has had laws against deforestation for decades, but it’s only since they’ve put up a couple of satellites to keep watch over the forest that they’ve been able to enforce the rules. Now any deforestation can be seen by comparing images and the landowner can be fined. But the rainforest still loses something like 450 acres of forest every orbit of the ISS (I think that number’s right, it was something close to that anyway).

This travelogue stuff was interspersed with footage from the ISS (both inside and out) and interviews with an astronaut who’s been to the ISS. The emphasis here was strongly on how cool it is to go to space although they did mention things like nausea in microgravity being a problem initially, and talked a bit about the difficulties of getting in and out for space walks. But overall it felt a little like a recruiting film in these bits 😉 There were also sections about the sorts of scientific experiments that are done in space, like taking viruses up because once they’re returned to earth you can make better vaccines (tho I don’t think I followed why that happened).

It wasn’t quite what I’d expected from the description – I think I was expecting more travelogue and less recruiting for astronauts. It was cool tho, in its own hippy sort of way 🙂

Another quirky one-off programme that we watched last week was Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters. This was presented by Tom Holland, who opened the programme with a description of how much he was fascinated by dinosaurs when he was a small child. It went on from there to look at how a variety of different cultures have interpreted the fossilised bones they discover – what they made of dinosaur bones.

His main theme was that even though we now know most of the stories are wrong, they’re still attempts to explain these bones and most have some element of truth (or at least you can see where they came from). For instance there are myths from Native American societies that live on the Great Plains that talk of huge birds with teeth and sea snakes with feet that lived a long time ago in a different age of the world when there was water over the land. And if you look at the fossils you find in the area then you can see that once it was a shallow sea (lots of sea creatures), with pterodactyls and aquatic dinosaurs.

He didn’t just stick to dinosaur bones – several Greek myths might have come from discoveries of large mammal fossils. He suggested that elephant skulls look a bit like one-eyed monsters, because of the gap in the skull for the trunk which might look like an eye socket. Back before the Greeks knew what an elephant was perhaps they told stories of the cyclops to explain these bones. But the most striking Greek one was his suggestion for where griffins originate. There aren’t any dinosaur fossils in Greek territory, but if you go out along the silk routes towards China, then there are fossils in the Gobi desert of dinosaurs – they are beaked, and have four legs (with claws) and even nests of fossilised eggs. Stories about these bones could easily have been the original travellers’ tales about griffins.

As well as these older myths Holland also talked about the first more scientific attempts to figure out what dinosaur bones were. He visited Crystal Palace and looked at the dinosaur reconstructions there – which to modern eyes look ludicrously wrong, with their heavyset clumsy looking frames. And he did note that there are still many things we don’t actually know and are still just extrapolating according to our own prejudices.

This was a fun programme, it covered quite a lot of ground and all with a sense of humour. Although it did at times get a bit too carried away with itself (lots of “surely it must’ve been based on this!!”) but mostly it stayed the right side of the line, and anyway it wasn’t taking itself too seriously.

Other programmes watched this week:

Episode 2 and episode 3 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episode 2 of Unnatural Histories – series about human influence on areas of the world that we traditionally think of as “untamed nature”.

Viking Art: A Culture Show Special – programme about the current British Museum exhibition, tho the programme concentrated more on Britain than the exhibition does.

Inside the Animal Mind; Edward VII: Prince of Pleasure; Royal Cousins at War; The Great British Year

Inside the Animal Mind is a three part series presented by Chris Packham that looks at what we know about how animals think and what that tells us about our own thinking. The first episode covered animal senses, the second looked at how intelligent animals are and the third investigated the effects of being social on animal intelligence. In each episode Packham showed us the sorts of experiments currently being done to extend our knowledge of animal minds. For instance one of the questions he looked at in the first episode is how do dogs seem to know when their owners are due home from work? It’s not like they can tell the time after all. It turns out that this may have something to do with scent levels in the house – if you bring into the house something smelling of the owner earlier in the day, which increases the scent levels, then the dog doesn’t react at the normal time.

The first episode was mostly setting the scene for the meat of the series – making sure we knew a bit about how information gets into the animal brain. The next two episodes were mostly concerned with the overall question of how unique are humans. What, if anything, sets us apart from the other animals. So the second episode concentrated on some of the most intelligent animals – primarily a variety of crow species. These birds solve can solve complex puzzles, use tools and even plan for the future. That last was illustrated by an experiment where a couple of crows were kept in a large cage that could be partitioned into three – overnight they were kept in one end or the other, during the day they had free range of the whole cage (and were given plenty of food). They weren’t given a choice about which end of the cage they spent the night. If it was one end they would get breakfast in the morning before the partitions were removed, if it was the other they wouldn’t. So after that pattern had been established they were given places to hide food (little sandtrays) in each end of the cage. During the day they’d hide some of the food they were given, and they’d hide a significantly higher proportion in the “no breakfast” end – knowing that if that was where they ended up then they’d want more food in the morning than if they ended up in the breakfast room.

The last episode concentrated mostly on dolphins (tho also other intelligent social animals, like chimps). The idea is that being social helps to drive the development of intelligence and in particular intelligence to do with communication and recognition of others (and oneself) as individuals. Things we think of as human traits, and some of these traits take a while to develop in young children too – a child won’t recognise his or herself in the mirror until the age of 2, and the ability to realise that other people have other perspectives takes longer than that. Dolphins are one of the few animals to recognise themselves in a mirror – they had footage of a dolphin very clearly admiring himself in a mirror in the water. They also had some footage of how this was first observed – the biologists were observing dolphin mating via a one-way mirror, and when the dolphins realised there was a mirror there they oriented themselves so they could watch themselves while they were mating.

The series didn’t try to provide an answer to what sets us apart from animals – just pointing out that many of the things we think make us special have been found in at least one other species. And yet, there must still be something that means we are the ones with civilisation and advanced technology not the others, but we don’t yet know what that is.

I’d been expecting something a lot more shallow, so this series was a rather nice surprise. Worth watching.

We’ve started watching some of the World War I related programmes that the BBC are broadcasting at the moment. The first three that we’ve watched were sort of prequels to the war. The first was a biography of Edward VII (Edward VII: Prince of Pleasure), and the others were a two part series about the descendants of Queen Victoria who were ruling England, Germany and Russia by the outbreak of the war (Royal Cousins at War). I’m lumping these together to talk about because they had clearly been made by the same team, and had the same format and aesthetic. Each one had a (faceless) narrator, as well as a selection of experts on the subject, and they were very focussed on the biography of the individuals and how that intersected with the politics. At times that did make us feel they overstated the importance of (for instance) the English King in the politics of the day but mostly it stayed on the right side of the line.

The mission of all three programmes seemed to be to humanise the people they were talking about, and one of the tricks they used to do this was by colourising black and white photographs of them which suddenly makes them seem more real. In the two Royal Cousins at War programmes they also had video footage taken by the royals on their holidays – so all messing about a bit and hamming it up for the camera. And of course there’s a soap opera quality to the dysfunctionalness of Queen Victoria’s family. The Edward VII programme spent a lot of time looking at the way the relationship between Victoria and Edward was a vicious circle – she felt he was useless and shouldn’t be trusted with responsibility. So he frittered away his time on women and parties, and whenever he did get given something to do he’d end up doing daft stuff like showing official documents round to his friends to get opinions. Which then meant Victoria had proof he was useless. So that meant by the time he came to the throne no-one, not even himself, thought he was going to be any good at being King. As it turned out, he was good at the job – he was charismatic and much better than his mother at the public performance side of royal duties.

This is also the last hurrah of powerful monarchs in Europe. While Edward VII and his son George V didn’t have much overt power, as constitutional monarchs, they had even less after WWI was over. Their role was still important in terms of diplomacy, however. Edward’s ability to get on with people helped to sweeten relationships with countries such as France – a visit from Edward helped get public opinion onside before the “real diplomats” sat down at the negotiating table to discuss what became the Entente Cordiale. And George’s lifelong friendship with his cousin Tsar Nicholas helped shape the alliance between Russia and England.

At the other end of the spectrum Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas were still autocratic rulers and so their personal qualities and opinions did have a large part to play in politics and foreign policy. They weren’t entirely free to do what they wished – public opinion and the opinions of their politicians did matter, but they had more genuine power than the British monarchy. And sadly neither were particularly competent. Tsar Nicholas seems to’ve epitomised “nice but dim” and combined this with a strong sense of his duty to preserve the authority of his throne. Which doesn’t end well.

The story of Wilhelm is the sort of thing that if you wrote it as fiction people wouldn’t believe it. He was the son of Victoria’s eldest daughter and she had been married off to the Kaiser Wilhelm I’s eldest son with a mission to liberalise Germany. Her husband (heir to the throne) is more liberal than his father and than Wilhelm II would turn out to be – so if only he’d lived to rule longer than a few months then history might’ve gone very differently. Wilhelm II had a very troubled relationship with his mother – he had had a difficult birth, and his left arm was damaged in the process. His mother couldn’t bear the fact that she had a crippled child, and Wilhelm himself felt inadequate – which only got worse as he got older and bought into the militaristic culture of Germany at the time. As future Kaiser he should be the epitome of perfection, and yet he was physically crippled. This sense of humiliation isn’t helped along by relations with his extended family. Edward VII was married to a Danish princess, whose sister was married to Tsar Alexander. Prussia had invaded Denmark, and defeated the Danes, in the 1860s and the Danish royal family had never forgiven them. So the two sisters would organise jolly family holidays … to which Wilhelm was not invited. He seemed to go through most of his life overcompensating for his disability and for his perceived lack of friends. He also seems to’ve been a rather nasty piece of work, too – so even tho some of it was out of his control, he did make his own problems worse.

These programmes were an interestingly different perspective on the run-up to World War I, and I realised how little I know about Germany of that era & Kaiser Wilhelm in particular.

We also finished off watching The Great British Year. This was a nature series, about the wildlife of Britain across the year. I don’t really have much to say about it – the point was very much the visuals, and they did have some spectacular footage 🙂 And there were red squirrels, but not enough of them for J’s tastes 😉

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Unnatural Histories – series about human influence on areas of the world that we traditionally think of as “untamed nature”.

Episode 1 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Henry & Anne: The Lovers that Changed History; Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England

Henry & Anne: The Lovers that Changed History was a two part series on Channel 5 – I found out about it because it’s presented by Suzannah Lipscomb who was one of the talking heads on the programme about The Last Days of Anne Boleyn that I liked so much last year (post). The first part covered the successful part of Henry VIII & Anne’s relationship and the second part looked at the unravelling of that relationship. It had been billed as “part re-enacted” but actually there wasn’t much more than you often see in documentaries. They had a couple of actors to do Henry and Anne, and some extras, and several snippets of action (like a court scene, Henry fencing, Anne being dressed or praying). They also had the actors repeat lines that one or the other had written – quotes from letters, or other such things. But all too often that felt like filler, because Lipscomb herself would also read out the quote.

As well as the start of Henry & Anne’s relationship the first programme also talked a bit about the earlier lives of the two. In particular Lipscomb visited the house Anne grew up in (Hever Castle) and one of the palaces of the French court where Anne spent several years as a lady in waiting to the Queen of France. One of the main themes of this early part of the programme is how the legend that has grown up around Henry and Anne is both accurate and not. Although later it’s true that Henry was something of a cruel tyrant, at the beginning of his reign (and even by the time Anne and he begin to interact) he’s a charming, charismatic athlete and playboy. Anne’s sometimes talked of as “a commoner” but that’s like Kate Middleton being “a normal middle class girl” … true, but not particularly accurate (both come from significantly wealthier or higher status families than the phrase conjures up). Also Anne’s time at the French court is later held up as where she learnt “the arts of love” but actually the Queen’s court was known for being virtuous and chaste.

What her time at the French court does do for Anne is make her appear sophisticated and a bit exotic. Combined with her wit & intelligence, that’s what eventually catches the King’s eye. But Lipscomb was keen to point out that this wasn’t at once – actually the King takes Mary Boleyn as a mistress when the Boleyns come to court, not Anne. Once Henry & Anne’s relationship begins Lipscomb paints it as a passionate love affair, and says that she believes that the reason they wait and start to look for a way out of his marriage for Henry is that they want to “do things properly”. Obviously Henry must’ve already begun to worry about a lack of heir, and to think about how to change that as his first wife grew older. But Lipscomb doesn’t believe Anne played hard to get in order to hold out for marriage, instead she thinks the two fell head over heels in love and wanted to marry from the beginning – this was not just another mistress for Henry. I’m not entirely sure I agree (although obviously Lipscomb knows far more about the subject than I do!). One notable absence from Lipscomb’s narrative was any of the other men Anne may’ve had relationships with. In particular Anne had been bethrothed to Henry Percy, and that had to be formally declared as a celibate relationship (it was broken off because his father did not approve). If it hadn’t been a celibate relationship then they would’ve counted as married before Henry and Anne became a couple – so this was important, but Lipscomb didn’t mention any of this is the programme.

The second programme looked at Anne’s fall from grace, which really began shortly after the highpoint of their marriage. Through no fault of her own she failed at the primary duty of Henry’s Queen. Elizabeth was born, and was not a son. Another pregnancy came to nothing (Lipscomb noted there’s no record of a miscarriage either, so perhaps this was a phantom pregnancy). And then not long after Katherine’s death Anne miscarried a child that was far enough along development to be obviously a boy. Things were beginning to unravel. Around this time Henry also suffered a fall during a tournament that knocked him out for a couple of hours, and re-opened an old leg wound that would never completely heal again. Lipscomb speculated that this fall might actually have caused a personality change in Henry – and certainly afterwards he was the tyrant we later remember him as. However personally I’m not sure we need to speculate about frontal lobe damage from the fall, and subsequent personality changes, to explain this. Henry’s behavioural changes could also be explained by an increased sense of mortality, and the effects of chronic pain. He almost died without an heir, his nightmare scenario. And the ulcer in his old leg wound was now being treated with hot pokers on a regular basis, not something to settle anyone’s temperament.

Then we’re up to the final fall of Anne – accused of adultery, imprisoned and tried then executed. Lipscomb is firmly on the side of Anne being innocent of the charges, swayed in part by Anne’s swearing of oaths to God that she hadn’t done these things even once she was condemned to die. Anne was, after all, a pious woman. So Lipscomb’s theory (and I’m inclined to agree here) is that Anne’s “fault” was to not be submissive enough to the King – she didn’t make adultery unbelievable – and to flirt and be witty in the company of the court. The very things that had drawn her and Henry together in the first place were her downfall in the end.

A good series, even if I didn’t entirely agree with Lipscomb’s theories at all times.

As well as that recent series about the Tudors we’ve also been watching a series we recorded last year – The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England. The conceit here is Ian Mortimer presenting a sort of handbook to what you’d need to know to blend into Elizabethan England if you were able to go and visit. The emphasis was on the differences to the modern day, and the potential hazards you might run into. I really liked the visual style of this series. Parts of it had Mortimer talking to us in a room that looked like an alchemist’s den – lots of bottles and curiosities and old books. In parts he was walking through a computer generated space with old pictures illustrating what he was talking about hanging in boxes in the space. And about half was filmed in real life locations which were then enhanced with white line drawings of the people and objects you’d expect to see there in Elizabethan times.

The three programmes of the series covered different levels of Elizabethan society. We started with the poor – I think because that’s what in general one knows least about, and because it would have the most shocking changes. Life really was nasty, brutish & short if you were a peasant – he covered things like the poor living conditions, the diseases, the food, the sorts of work you could do and how much (little) you’d be paid. And also the problems with travelling while poor – people could get in trouble for sheltering the homeless, so unless you could find work you wouldn’t find much shelter. The second programme looked at high society. They had many more comforts in life (and probably live a lot longer too), but disease was still an issue. And watching what you said and who you said it to would still be very important if you were visiting – informants and paranoia were not just for the lower classes. The last programme looked at the rising middle classes, and at the growing amount of innovation, exploration and culture coming from this class. Shakespeare is an obvious example, Francis Drake is another. Throughout all three programmes Mortimer also noted how social mores have changed – what we’d find particularly noticeable would be the difference in how women were treated. He talked about how wives were obliged to do what they were told, and could be beaten without that reflecting poorly on the husband. And about the way that it was almost assumed that a female servant would be coerced into sleeping with her master. Of course, if she became pregnant that was then her problem.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this series, but I really liked it. Might pick up the book it was based on at some point.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 3 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.

Episode 1 of Inside the Animal Mind – Chris Packham looks at how animals think and perceive the world around them.

Mad Dog: Gaddafi’s Secret World – a 90 minute documentary about the rise and fall of Gaddafi, using interviews with people who were a part of his regime in one way or another. Very much had a message, and sometimes you could see just how they were using spin to make him seem as bad as possible (even tho I agreed with the premise it felt heavy handed). Part of the Storyville series.

Captain Cook: The Man Behind the Legend – Timewatch episode from 2008/09 about Captain Cook & his voyages of exploration. I knew surprisingly little about the man in advance (beyond that he existed).

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.

Baroque! – From St Peter’s to St Paul’s; Guilty Pleasures

Baroque! – From St Peter’s to St Paul’s was a three part series presented by Waldemar Januszczak about Baroque art and architecture. The three programmes moved in geography (covering Italy, Spain & the Netherlands, and Britain respectively) and forwards in time. He started off with the story of how baroque art has its roots in the Counter Reformation – basically intended to propagate the “right” Christian message via eye-catching art. In particular as a response to the more austere Protestant sensibility, a sort of “you say we have too much art? we’ll show you too much art!”. As the movement took off in Spain (via Naples – a Spanish colony) the religious subject matter became darker and more visceral. Baroque artists also became the court painters of the era. Januszczak was entertainingly dismissive of the Hapsburg rulers of Spain & the Spanish Netherlands (and to be fair, there’s a lot there to to be dismissive of) while extolling the virtues of their taste in art. The Spanish court paintings were one of the vectors that introduced baroque art & architecture to England – Charles I’s visit to Spain when he was hoping to marry a Spanish princess brought him into contact with the court culture and painting. This wasn’t to be the baroque movement’s first jump to a Protestant nation – that was the Netherlands. Once the baroque took a hold in England it was given extra space to grow because of the Great Fire of London – about half of the last episode of this series was about the various churches (including St Paul’s) which were rebuilt in a baroque style after that disaster.

I’ve found it hard to write about what was in the programmes, because a lot of the point was (unsurprisingly) the visuals – Januszczak showed us a lot of paintings and buildings both well known and not. The style of the programme was gloriously over the top, as befits the subject matter. Well worth watching 🙂

This week we also watched both parts of a series that we’ve had on the PVR for ages – Guilty Pleasures. This series was about how modern attitudes to luxury have been shaped by our cultural roots. It was presented by Michael Scott, who’s a classicist, so it’s no surprise that the first episode was about the influence of the Ancient Greeks; the second episode was about the influence of medieval Christianity. In Ancient Greece he followed three strands of Greek attitudes to luxury – the first of these was the Athenian democracy that spent time and legislation on trying to prevent ostentatious private luxuries by channeling the urge to consume into public luxuries. And tried to tie society together by having ritual communal luxuries – like sacrificing large numbers of cows which would then give every citizen some meat. The Spartans in some ways had their downfall through unsuccessfully navigating this tension between public & private luxury. As prominent Spartan citizens began to gather wealth to themselves rather than live in the spartan communal fashion their society began to decline. And the last society he touched on in that episode was the Macedonians who embrace luxury (for the ruler) much more than the Athenians or Spartans – they use their wealth as a propaganda tool and to enhance the division between the ruler and the ruled (unlike the more egalitarian principles of Athens or Sparta).

By the middle ages luxury has become a sin. Having contact with luxurious things is supposed to lead you into ever worse sin – fine foods, fine clothing is just a precursor to other indulgences. Scott also talked about how the Black Death actually led to increased luxury for the people who survived. People at the lower reaches of society in particular gained land and better pay because there was a lack of labour available. Which increased the feelings of guilt around luxury. Another factor was that the plague was seen as God’s punishment on people, and so at higher levels of society people took a second look at their lives and came to the conclusion that God was not pleased about their sinfulness (including their luxuries).

And Scott tied it together at the end by thinking a little about modern attitudes to luxury, in particular in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis. The Greek influences can been seen in how we generally react to conspicuous consumption as divisive, and the medieval influences are most obvious in the very idea of a “guilty pleasure”.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of The Stuarts – a series about the Stuart Kings of England & Scotland, presented by Clare Jackson, and about how they shaped the United Kingdom and how they were shaped by it. Broadcast on the Scottish version of BBC2 only.

Episode 1 of Bible Hunters – series about the search for early texts of the Bible in Egypt.

Episode 1 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.

New Secrets of the Terracotta Warriors – Channel 4 one-off programme about the terracotta army found buried near the Emperor Qin’s grave in China. Partly about the history of Qin era China (the first unification of the country in c.200BC, and partly about the techniques currently being used to learn more about the terracotta soldiers. A little shallow.

Episode 1 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.

Britain’s Most Fragile Treasure – Janina Ramirez programme about the East Window in York Cathedral. How it was made, who made it, how it’s being conserved, and what the various scenes and stories are.

Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve; Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures

Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve was a three part series that was partly a travelogue and partly about the history of Christian pilgrimage across Europe and the Holy Land from medieval times through to the modern day. Reeve made it pretty clear several times that he’s not a Christian himself, so this was an outsider’s view on the subject. He did, however, talk to several people who do pilgrimages for religious purposes today, so we got both sides of the subject represented. The first episode started in Lindisfarne and made its way down to Canterbury and mostly talked about medieval experience of pilgrimage. Then the second episode went through France and Northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, and then across the alps to Rome. The third episode went from Istanbul to Jerusalem (via Bethlehem).

Reeve seemed focussed primarily on the question of what people get out of pilgrimage. His conclusions were that as well as the visiting of spiritually significant sites the journey itself has spiritual benefits for the people who do pilgrimages. They have a time to step outside of their daily lives and reflect on how they’re living and what they’re doing with their lives. Be that in a religious sense or a purely spiritual sense, various of the modern pilgrims he talked to weren’t people who called themselves Christian.

It wouldn’t be a Simon Reeve programme if it didn’t also look at the less uplifting parts of the subject! In the last episode there he was travelling through the West Bank (as one has to, if one’s visiting Bethlehem), and took the opportunity to contrast the modern political situation with the spiritual significance of the region to so many people. Another example was his visit to a very modern cult centre – the town where Padre Pio lived, who died in 1968. This has a massive new cathedral, a TV station of it’s own (run by monks), lots of fancy hotels in the town for all the touristspilgrims. And various rumours of how he kept his stigmata open during life by the judicious application of carbolic acid … He was canonised, but Reeve implied that was more an attempt by the Vatican to keep it in house so’s to speak. The cult was growing up anyway, so he was officially made a saint.

An interesting series 🙂 And in a piece of serendipity the first episode overlapped in subject matter with the end of Neil Oliver’s recent series about Sacred Wonders of Britain that we’d just finished watching (post). The second episode had some overlap with the second episode of Waldemar Januszczak’s series about Baroque art which we’re also watching at the moment. The three presenters have very different styles so it was interesting to get the various perspectives all so quickly together!

The other series we finished watching this week was Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – a three part series about species that didn’t die out in mass extinction events presented by Richard Fortey. Each episode covered a different extinction event, and Fortey tracked down 10 species that survived it through to modern times. The first one was about the Great Dying (which occurred 252 million years ago) which is the most significant extinction even with the greatest die-off of species. For this one he looked at things like horseshoe crabs, sea cucumbers and lampreys. The second covered the KT boundary – i.e. death of the dinosaurs, so had an emphasis on birds, mammals and crocodiles. And the third one looked at the Ice Age and at the cold adapted species that made it through to our own times.

This was definitely more my sort of thing than J’s. I thought it managed to combine a bit of geology, a bit of evolutionary biology and a bit of modern day travelogue into an interesting whole (even tho I think I knew of most of it before, it’s nice to actually see things sometimes). Fortey was an engaging presenter, who was also pretty entertaining as he tried to handle live specimens with varying degrees of success and comfort. I had a great deal of sympathy with that as someone who’s significantly worse at handling live animals than he was yet is still a biologist 🙂 Oh, and it also had a running theme of Fortey eating some of these survivors & telling us how they taste, which was a slightly odd (but fun) addition.

Other TV watched this week:

The Coffee Trail with Simon Reeve – one-off programme about coffee growing in Vietnam. Vietnam is the main supplier of coffee for the instant coffee trade, and it’s as exploitative a trade as you’d expect. The regime in Vietnam isn’t particularly nice either.

Episode 2 of Baroque! From St Peter’s to St Paul’s – gloriously over the top series about Baroque art and architecture, presented by Waldemar Januszczak.

Episode 1 of The Stuarts – a series about the Stuart Kings of England & Scotland, presented by Clare Jackson, and about how they shaped the United Kingdom and how they were shaped by it. Broadcast on the Scottish version of BBC2 only.

Nigel Slater’s Great British Biscuit – a similar programme to Slater’s previous one on sweets (post), part nostalgia, part history of biscuits. Lots of “oh I remember those” moments 🙂

Greek Myths: Tales of Travelling Heroes – programme presented by Robin Lane Fox about the early Greek myths about the origins of their gods. Also looking at the links between the mythological stories and the landscape the Greeks knew, and also the links to Hittite mythology. We both had quite a lot of deja vu watching it, and figured out eventually that we’d watched it before about 3 years ago and had just forgotten (brief post on my livejournal). Interesting & worth watching, even for a second time 🙂

Easter Island: Mysteries of a Lost World; The Search for Alfred the Great

Easter Island: Mysteries of a Lost World was a one-off 90 minute documentary about the history of Easter Island presented by Jago Cooper. The canonical story about the Easter Island culture is that they became so obsessed with building the Moai statues that they cut down all the trees to move them around, at which point the soil promptly eroded away and the culture collapsed due to being unable to grow food. Violence, destruction of statues and cannibalism followed. There’s then a moral lesson drawn about what we, the modern global society, should learn about using up all your resources.

The thesis of Cooper’s programme is that when you actually examine the evidence it’s clear that the traditional story is wrong. Over the course of the programme Cooper talked to several experts in the history and archaeology of Rapa Nui (the proper name for Easter Island and it’s people) both from Rapa Nui and from other countries. The experts didn’t always agree on the details (most notably about the date of arrival of people on Rapa Nui) but the overall picture was clear. Easter Island is the last inhabited place on Earth to become inhabited, somewhere between 100AD and 1200AD. As the Polynesians spread out into the Pacific Ocean they had a standard method of colonising new islands. A group would go out in boats looking for new lands, and when they found something suitable they’d take note of where they were then plant some yams and return home. A larger colonisation group would then set out with all the amenities they’d need to set up a self-sustaining society, and by the time they got there they would have yams to eat. Rapa Nui was the last island found in this eastward migration, and because it’s so far from any other land it became isolated after it was settled. From whenever that was till the arrival of the first Dutch ship in 1722 AD the Rapa Nui people believed themselves to be the only people in the world, and the island was the only land in the world surrounded by an endless sea.

Rapa Nui was forested when the islanders arrived, and did become deforested over the next several centuries. However, this wasn’t anything to do with moving statues and wasn’t even a catastrophe. Cooper told us that the statues are more likely to’ve been moved by “walking” them using ropes, rather than pulled on wooden runners. And even if they were using wood to move their statues, it wouldn’t’ve needed that many trees. One of the experts interviewed had done the calculations – he knew how many trees could’ve grown on the land, how many trees you’d need to cut down to move a single statue a particular distance, how many statues had moved how far. And it was an insignificant number of trees to move all the statues using wood, as compared with the starting number.

Instead of being the results of foolish disaster it’s much more likely that the trees were cleared to create space to grow crops just as is the case in other places around the world. The Rapa Nui people used several methods to keep the soil thus exposed both there and fertile. One things they did was to use rocks to cover the fields in a technique called “stone mulching” (I didn’t quite understand how this worked beyond the obvious idea that the rocks stopped the soil from blowing away – wouldn’t it also stop plants from germinating?). There is also evidence that they landscaped areas so as to collect and channel water – the only fresh water on the island comes from rain – and they planted trees in the damper areas generated by this. And they planted some crops (like banana trees) in caverns where the roofs had fallen in – shaded and out of the wind.

When the first ships arrived, on Easter Day 1722, they found a vibrant and healthy society – which was rather surprised to find it wasn’t alone in the world. That visit was brief, and amicable. When the next ships arrived, about 50 years later, they found a much reduced population and notably that the Moai statues were toppled over. What had changed? The traditional story involves civil war and cannibalism, but there’s no archaeological evidence for that at all. Instead Cooper said the most plausible explanation is that European diseases caused a severe drop in population in this previously isolated society. I think he said that 90% of the population is thought to’ve died – and so of course you have societal changes, that’s a very traumatic event. The statues show signs of being deliberately lowered to hide their faces. One possible explanation is that the honoured ancestors who were supposed to protect them had failed so were toppled. Another is that the Rapa Nui wanted to hide what had happened to their people from the ancestors, so this was a way of covering their eyes. Society was still basically healthy, however, as shown by the evolution of new rituals (like the birdman cult).

And then the European powers did what they did so often – many of the natives were taken off as slaves to work in South America. Those who remained were forced to live in only one small part of the island and poorly treated, while the rest was given over to intensive sheep farming. This use of the land is what caused the soil and the ecosystem to become as poor as it is today. At one point in the 19th Century there were only 36 families on Rapa Nui who had children – and all the native Rapa Nui people today are descended from these people. The culture has only survived in fragments from oral histories written down in the early 1900s – these same fragments are what started the modern fascination with Easter Island. The modern Rapa Nui are fiercely proud of their island, and its history, and are trying to get independence from Chile (their current political rulers).

This was a fascinating programme, well worth watching. Cooper does get a little carried away with how perfect life was before the Europeans arrived, but I think that’s partly to highlight the contrast between the traditional story about the island and what the evidence tells us.

Another one-off programme that we watched this week was The Search for Alfred the Great. This was presented by Neil Oliver and followed the recent attempts to find the bones of King Alfred. The structure of the programme was three intertwined strands – a biography of Alfred, the history of his bones after his death and the scientific examination of the bones we have.

The biography of Alfred didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know – we’ve recently watched Michael Wood’s series about Alfred and his heirs (post) which covered the subject in more depth. The history of Alfred’s bones was new to me, however. His body has been moved at least twice since his original burial. These initial two moves are well documented – he was buried first in the Old Minister at Winchester. Then after completion of the New Minister (that he himself set in motion) he was reburied there. After the Norman Conquest there was another rebuilding of the church (to its current form) and the monks associated with the first New Minister were moved to somewhere else – Alfred was reburied in their new abbey. After the dissolution of the monasteries during the Reformation the story of Alfred’s bones gets more murky – they stayed buried as the abbey was demolished around the graves and were forgotten to some extent. When the area was redeveloped into a prison in the 18th Century the convicts doing the ground breaking for foundations discovered sepulchres and bones – the valuable bits were sold, the bones were scattered. But an antiquarian did write about it, and about how these might’ve been Alfred & his family’s tombs. Later a Victorian claimed to have re-found and re-dug up these bones – eventually those were bought by a local church which re-interred the bones in the churchyard with a note that they were probably Alfred. This Victorian is the dodgy link in the evidence chain.

And this is where the modern analysis comes in. The bones from the churchyard were exhumed and analysed using modern techniques. I was a little surprised when near the end of the programme the carbon dating all came back as “too recent” – the 5 skeletons in the grave dated between 1100 AD and 1500 AD. Surprised because I thought I’d read that they’d found something plausible. All became clear shortly afterwards when Oliver moved on to talk about a modern partial excavation of the disturbed abbey site. This had turned up a few bits of human bone but funding had run out before proper analysis was done. Carbon dating on a fragment of a man’s pelvis indicated a date of ~900 AD, so the right era. There is nothing to say if it’s Alfred or not, but it’s possible. The main take home message is that it is likely worth excavating the rest of the site properly so see what else might be found (if anything).

An interesting programme. And well done to Oliver and the other people involved in making it for making a programme that was still worth watching even tho the central question wasn’t answered!

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – series presented by Richard Fortey looking at three mass extinction events and showing us modern examples of the species that survived them.

Episode 2 of Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve – a programme about the history of (Christian) pilgrimage, pilgrimage sites and the modern incarnation of it.

Episode 1 of Baroque! From St Peter’s to St Paul’s – gloriously over the top series about Baroque art and architecture, presented by Waldemar Januszczak.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 3); Sacred Wonders of Britain; Tudor Monastery Farm; The Brain: A Secret History

The third and final episode of Treasures of Ancient Egypt covered the period from Ramesses II through to Cleopatra. In terms of the history of the period this can be seen as a long slow decline from the height of New Kingdom power through several foreign dynasties to the annexing of Egypt by the Roman Empire. Alastair Sooke’s thesis was that in terms of the art this was a new dawn – fuelled in part by foreign Pharaohs’ desires to be more Egyptian than the Egyptians, and during times of self-rule by a renewed sense of national pride and connection with their history.

This pieces he looked at were again a mix of iconic objects we all know about, and other less well known objects. This time there were several temples – starting with the temple at Abu Simbel, and later showing us the temple of Horus at Edfu and the temple at Dendera. One of the threads he used to hold the programme together was the gradual introduction of more realism to the art – for instance he looked at the art under the Nubian Pharaohs, and pointed out how the faces were much more lifelike. And this is taken further under the Ptolemies when there is some merging between the naturalistic Greek style and the more stylised Egyptian art. One of the places he took us to illustrate this was a tomb chapel that had the traditional layout and scene types that one would expect, but the figures were drawn in a much more lifelike fashion and looked almost Greek.

The interludes with modern artists were particularly good this week. I liked the chance to see how faience and faience shabtis were made. Faience shabtis as a group were one of his treasures, the first mass produced art in the world. The expert from UCL that he talked to about this first showed him some of the shabtis in the Petrie Museum, and then showed him how he made his own shabti inspired art. The other modern artist was a graffiti artist in Cairo who has taken inspiration from both the official iconography of ancient Egypt (like the Pharaoh smiting his enemies scenes) and from the ostraca found at Deir el Medina. Inspired by the latter he paints topsy-turvy scenes with the cat & mouse instead of people. His art also had a political twist – and he talked about how the same was true for the ancient Egyptians.

This has been a very good series. Although there were a few over simplified pieces of history Sooke generally did a good job of providing enough historical info for context without turning it into a history lesson. As I’m often approaching the objects from a perspective of learning about the history that produced them it was interesting to have someone talk about them as art in their own right. I thought the mix of objects chosen was good too. The “obvious” iconic pieces were there (but looked at from a fresh perspective) and there were several less obvious pieces so the whole thing didn’t feel like we’d seen it all before. At first I was dubious about the bits where Sooke talked to modern artists, but some of the later segments of that sort were really cool.

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We finished three other serieses this week, so I shall try & keep my commentary brief! The first of these was Sacred Wonders of Britain – a Neil Oliver series that looked at sacred places in Britain from earliest prehistory through to the Reformation. This is quite a large sweep of time, and I thought the last episode was the weakest of the three. In part because it didn’t feel like it was quite Oliver’s thing, being history not archaeology, and in part because they were having to take account of the fact that Christianity is a current faith. As always with a programme presented by Oliver I thought he went too far off into flights of fancy at times – taking the expert opinion of “maybe” and turning it into a long imagined story of how it “was”.

However, criticisms aside I do like his programmes overall and this series was no exception. There were a lot of places shown that I’d not heard of or seen before which was cool to see. I was particularly struck by the prehistoric flint mine which at first didn’t seem like it was a particularly good candidate for sacred. But as the archaeologists pointed out there was plenty of flint available on the surface in the very same location of the same quality as that from the mines. There were several tools left behind in the mines which didn’t seem in poor condition, and the few skeletons that have been found (in cave ins) were of young people on the cusp of adulthood. Taking all of that together they think it might’ve been some sort of rite of passage.

Another series we finished was Tudor Monastery Farm. This was part re-enactment and part documentary, presented by Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold. It’s part of a collection of serieses called SOMETHING Farm, each taking a different period of history and telling us about farming during that time, we’ve previously watched Wartime Farm (post). This was the first of these serieses that Tom Pinfold had been in – in the previous ones the third presenter was Alex Langlands – and sadly I didn’t think he had much on screen chemistry with anyone. From a quick look around the BBC website it seems he’s pretty new to being a presenter, so perhaps he’ll improve as he relaxes into the job.

There were 6 episodes in the regular series covering the whole year of farming and life as it would have been in the year 1500, and one special afterwards which looked at Christmas festivities. They’d picked this year as it was pre-Reformation and post-Wars of the Roses. So it was a peaceful, settled era and the people still observed all the Catholic rites. The farm type they were recreating was a farm owned by a monastery, but worked by prosperous lay people. One of the key themes of the series was that farming in this period was beginning to change – more and more the tenant farmers were growing grain and raising animals to sell as well as to feed themselves and give to the monastery. One of the things I like about these serieses is that the re-enactment portion of it really shows how things worked – like how you build a fence if you’re a Tudor farmer – and the documentary side of it fills in the little details you wouldn’t get just by looking at it (which woods you choose and how you get them, in the case of the fence).

Because this was about such a long ago period of time they didn’t just cover farming. There were, of course, a lot of details about everyday life (like clothes, or how they cooked). And they also covered more specialist things like how to make a stained glass window, how you mined and purified lead, how salt was produced, how they made fireworks and so on. All in all a rather good series 🙂

And we also finished up what we had recorded of The Brain: A Secret History – we were missing the first of the three episodes. It was a series about how the brain works and how we found out about it, presented by Michael Mosley. Of the two episodes we watched one dealt with emotions, and the other with mapping bits of the brain to functions. The emotions one was at times hard to watch as the sorts of experiments done to figure out how emotions work were generally not very nice – like frightening a young child to see if phobias could be induced (they can), or shutting up baby monkeys in too-small isolation cages to see what effect that has on their adult psyches (a bad effect). The other episode had more “wow, that’s weird” moments and less trauma – however it had a lot of footage from somebody’s brain surgery which I was too squeamish to look at (yeah, I’m a wimp).

So at times difficult to watch for a variety of reasons (and I think from the clips in the intro segment we missed the most disturbing episode) – but it was an interesting couple of programmes. There were a lot of “neat facts” about how our brains work, and the ethical quagmires of how one does experiments to find these out were well explained.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – series presented by Richard Fortey looking at three mass extinction events and showing us modern examples of the species that survived them.

Episode 1 of Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve – a programme about the history of (Christian) pilgrimage, pilgrimage sites and the modern incarnation of it.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 2); Strange Days: Cold War Britain; Rise of the Continents

The second episode of Alastair Sooke’s series about the art of Ancient Egypt covered the Middle Kingdom (briefly) and most of the New Kingdom. He only picked a couple of objects from the Middle Kingdom – both from Senusret III’s reign. He gave the impression that this is because the New Kingdom was the Golden Age, which is true in some ways, but the Egyptians themselves looked back at the Middle Kingdom as their “classical age” where art and culture first achieved great heights. I think it’s a shame he didn’t make it more clear the reason it gets short-shrift in programmes like these is because not as much survives for one reason or another. Often because sites were re-used or updated by New Kingdom Egyptians wanting the association with past glories.

The other eight treasures on the programme were from the New Kingdom between the reigns of Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun. As well as looking at some of the iconic art from her reign he spent some time talking about the iconography of Hatshepsut as Pharaoh. Pharaohs are male, so Hatshepsut was represented with all the male accoutrements and a masculine body in her official art works. One thing I hadn’t realised before (or had forgotten) is that it was during Hatshepsut’s time that the term Pharaoh actually started to be used – it translates to “the palace” so it’s the equivalent of talking about the White House doing X or Y in the USA (and surprisingly the example Sooke used was Brits talking about the Crown which I don’t even think is the best of the possible UK equivalents – No. 10 would be better).

There was obviously some considerable discussion of the new art style that Akhenaten brought with him when he changed the state religion. Both in terms of the slightly bizarre body shapes of the earliest stuff, and the new informal poses and domestic scenes on official art works. Which does give a very different impression of the royal family of that time, even as I remind myself it’s propaganda first & foremost. Obviously the bust of Nefertiti featured in this section, you can’t really miss it out. But the item from around that era (just before it) that struck me most was the little glass fish, that’s now in Berlin. I’ve seen it before & it’s a lovely piece, but what made it the highlight of this programme for me was that they showed us how it was made. I’ve read about how these glass objects were made before but it’s different actually watching it happen. And as always I’m somewhat in awe of what people were able to do before the advent of modern technology.

Obviously the programme ended with Tutankhamun’s mask – another iconic piece you can’t miss out, which also illustrates how what we have to admire depends so much on chance. The next episode covers the rest of Egyptian culture up to Cleopatra, quite a wide range. There’ve been a few clips of the temple at Abu Simbel, so presumably that’ll feature 🙂

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This week we finished watching Dominic Sandbrook’s series about the Cold War – Strange Days: Cold War Britain. This three part series looked at British history from 1946 through to 1989 through the lens of how the Cold War affected politics and culture. So part of the series was Sandbrook telling us about the major events of the Cold War, and giving some indication what life was like on the other side, to give us context for the effects on Britain. And the other part was looking at events in Britain from a perspective we don’t always think of. Some stuff was obvious when you thought about it – like the popularity of James Bond films tying in to revelations about Russian spies in the UK. And the John le Carré novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as the much less glamorous and more cynical take on the same thing. Other things less so – consumerism being a part of how we differentiated “us” from “them” makes sense when I think about it, but I’d never’ve thought of how capitalism was in some ways kept in check by a desire to prove it was better than the alternatives. Which made more sense when Sandbrook talked about it than I have quite managed to articulate here!

The threat of nuclear war and how that shaped our culture was one of the strands running through the programmes, and the various attempts government made to prepare people for this. Sandbrook highlighted several times the contrast between the almost optimistic government handbooks which aimed not to panic people (even if this backfired at times) and the bleak films and TV serieses which were closer to what the reality might be. He showed us clips from The War Game (a 60s film that wasn’t shown on TV for about 20 years) which was a meticulously researched documentary, and Threads (an 80s film) which was more overtly fictional. Both grim enough even in excerpt that I know I don’t want to watch them in full. In the third programme Sandbrook also mentioned a book he’d read for class when he was 10 (I looked him up on wikipedia, he’s a couple of months younger than me) – as he started to talk about it I knew exactly which book he meant before the reveal. It was “Brother in the Land” by Robert Swindells, which I’ve read. Once. I’ve dipped into it occasionally since, and it’s still on my shelves, because I remember it as a good, well written book. But I’ve never re-read it cover to cover, despite my love of post-apocalypic novels. It’s just an extremely grim and depressing and unrelentingly bleak tale of the first months after a nuclear war. I read it at about 13 or 14, a few years after it was published, and it’s stuck with me since then – it must’ve been pretty traumatising to read at the age of 10 particularly when you had to think about it for school rather than stick your head in the sand (I’ve always adopted the ostrich approach to the idea of The End of the World As We Know It catastrophes).

Anyway, that was a bit of a digression. I liked this series, in particular I thought they did a good job of mixing archival footage with new stuff seamlessly switching between the two in a way that made the old stuff seem more immediately relevant. I even liked the somewhat overblown style, but I think J found the sweeping generalised claims made at times a little irritating.

We also finished another series this week – Rise of the Continents – which I really enjoyed so I wanted to say a few words about it even though this post is already quite long! This was a series about plate tectonics and the geological history of the earth, presented by Iain Stewart. Each week Stewart looked at a different continent (Africa, Australia, the Americas and Eurasia) and followed the geological story of the continent after it split from Pangea (the supercontinent that existed when the dinosaurs roamed the earth). He showed us the evidence that tells us about this geological story, and he also showed the impact that geology has had on both evolution and on human history. He’s a geologist so was strongest on that subject, pretty good on palaeontology but said a couple of dubious historical things we noticed (but otherwise was OK on that). Basically what you’d expect as he got further from his actual area of expertise. He was also a charmingly enthusiastic presenter.

One reason I enjoyed it so much is because I think the idea of plate tectonics is inherently cool. The earth not being static but consisting of vast sheets of crust all moving around and crashing into each other is awesome. It’s also an area I don’t know much about – I think the last time I read a book on it was in the 80s, when the science was still fairly new. So there were all sorts of things I didn’t know, and most of them were in the “neat facts” category. Like did you know that as India travelled on its way to crashing into Eurasia it moved over a magma plume, which turned a big chunk of it into a zone of volcanoes. This thinned the land so India started to move quicker. But also while it sat over this region for a few hundred thousand years the amount of volcanic eruption dumped toxins in the oceans and changed the climate – so this is thought to have contributed to the decline of the dinosaurs (before an asteroid finished them off). Or did you know the silver mines in South America exist because of subduction of the Pacific Ocean floor carries water down under the land. I can’t quite remember how Stewart said this then lead to the silver deposits, but the very idea of water being carried down under the crust is one I’d not thought of before (and it’s kinda cool as a concept).

I think J didn’t like the visual effects on the programme much – there were quite a few transitions where they used a jumble of still shots and mixed up audio before Stewart explained something. It didn’t bother me as much though.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Sacred Wonders of Britain – Neil Oliver visits several sacred sites in Britain dating from prehistoric times through to the Reformation.

Episode 2 of The Brain: A Secret History – Michael Mosley series about brains, minds and experimental psychology. We never managed to record episode 1 but we decided to watch the other two anyway.

Episode 6 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.