BBC Four
Saskia Baron
Slipped out in the Storyville slot without much fanfare, Life, Animated is the Oscar-nominated documentary which won a theatrical release and rave reviews in the US and UK last year. It’s a horribly clichéd word, but heart-warming is the best way to describe this tale of a young autistic man, Owen Suskind, who learnt to speak via his passion for Disney animations.We first see Owen in home movie footage, a chatty toddler play-acting Peter Pan with his dad. But soon after that footage was shot, he lost all his speech and began to display other worrying signs – problems with motor control, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Two years ago BBC Four had a film about a year in the life of Scafell Pike. Arriving at glacial pace is the sequel: Life of a Mountain: A Year on Blencathra. The star this time round is more of a best supporting character actor than a headline performer. It’s only the 18th highest of England’s peaks. As one photographer explained, you can’t get a decent shot of all of its five-felled south-facing expanse. For a long time it even had the wrong name imposed on it: Saddleback, on account of the dipping ridge between its peaks. Alfred Wainwright, who still has the final word on these things in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pigeons were described in this riveting programme as man’s best feathered friends, as well as an urban pest: the 35,000 of them that used to flock round Trafalgar Square deposited some 390 tons of unharvested guano – bird poo, in simpler words – annually that had to be cleaned up, until bird feeding was banned. Mess and noise made the same bird, so loved by pigeon fanciers, into dreaded flying rats, a leading public menace.But pigeons, like rats, are infinitely adaptable, hence their remarkable survival, underlined by an amazing capacity to breed. And until the 1840s, when the telegraph was Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
"Oh what a beautiful morning! Oh what a beautiful day!" Curly the cowboy sang in the opening scene of Oklahoma!, the first musical from Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943). In the midst of war here was sheer optimism and celebration set – with some nods at reality ("there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, an’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up the sky") – in the American West. It was also a fully integrated show – music, book, lyrics, choreography (Agnes de Mille, Cecil B DeMille’s niece) and set design with everything pushing the narrative, another Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Ebullient, prolific, loquacious and a charmingly enthusiastic historian both in print and for television, Simon Sebag Montefiore has turned his attention to the pivotal city of Vienna, nourished equally by the Danube and its central geographical position in Europe.Images, both interior and exterior, were punctuated by our intrepid explorer-historian, characteristically garbed in bright blue shirt, giving scale to street and landscape, and easily picked out by his trademark jaunty straw hat as he walked through imperial Vienna. It was history experienced on foot, matching intellectual and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This is a documentary about a minority in a minority, a riff on young, gifted and black. And how better to attract both practitioners and audiences to classical music than by encouraging diversity? The totally startling statistic was that in the UK, only five per cent of classical musicians are black or from ethnic minorities.The programme focussed on the Kanneh-Mason family, the parents Stuart and Kadiatu and their seven children (two boys, five girls), from the 20-year-old pianist Isata, now the holder of the Elton John scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, on down. Their Nottingham Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The indefatigable Victorian spinster Marianne North (1830-1890) is the most interesting artist you've never heard of. The upper-middle-class Ms North thought marriage a terrible experiment, and with her single state allowing her control of her fortune, she took to cultural and physical independence. Her rich landowner father, Frederick, MP for Hastings, knew everyone who was everyone, including Sir William Hooker, director of Kew. It was a visit to the gardens that turned his daughter’s eyes to the world of plants. She was 25 and had found her vocation. Marianne deserted the drawing room Read more ...
Florence Hallett
If you’ve had half an eye on BBC Four’s conceptual art week, you’ll have noticed that the old stuff is where it’s at, with Duchamp’s urinal making not one but two appearances, equalled only by Martin Creed, that other well-known, conceptual stalwart (who actually isn’t as old as he looks). The BBC would say that this is because 2016 marks the centenary of Dada, the anarchic, absurdist art movement (if a movement is what it was) that saw artists begin routinely to challenge and ridicule accepted ideas about art – what it is, why it is and what it’s for.The other reason, as demonstrated in Tate Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The wilder shores of contemporary visual art are now ephemeral or time-based: performance, installation, general carry-on and hubbub. But once upon a time – say, the 1960s – it was the nature of objects, pared down to essentials, and often made from real materials sourced from the streets, builders’ yards and shops, that startled: the idea made manifest without old-fashioned notions of the hand-made, craft or manual skill.The making could even be outsourced, and one critic called minimalism “ABC art”, reduced almost literally to building-block art: form or colour representing nothing but Read more ...
james.woodall
Some years ago broadcaster Andy Kershaw introduced on BBC World Service radio a piece of Brazilian music with this blunt dismissal: “When I hear a track by, say, Gilberto Gil, I tell myself: ‘Right, time to take the lift and go to bed’.” It wasn’t a terribly joined-up complaint, but (in Kershaw-speak at least) it made sense.He’d arguably chosen the wrong musician for his swipe – Gil remains relentlessly inventive and, at 74, fantastically dynamic – but it was clear what he was getting at. A lot of Brazilian (or Brazilian-inspired) pop music has, at half-cock, made it into hotel lobbies and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The American northwest is gorgeous: endless lakes, limitless ocean, mountains, forests, overwhelming blue skies in deepest summer, mists and of course rain, in one of the wettest places on earth – 4 metres of rain annually. Here were hundreds of islands too, archipelagos in a land almost infinitely rich in resources, from the Alaskan Panhandle and British Columbia south to Washington State.We were on an extended visit, on foot, canoe, kayak, speedboat and car, guided by the enthusiastically knowledgable Dr Jago Cooper from the British Museum. The landscape was punctuated by visiting Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Recently the television historian Bettany Hughes, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, energetic, enthusiastic and rather astonished, has tramped across the continents on our behalf, making a clutch of hour-long documentary introductions to the individuals with the most profound influence on human society. For this third and final film (made in association with the Religion and Ethics department of the Open University), she had as her quarry the medical man whose insights, however intuitive rather than scientific in the modern sense, formed and still form our view of ourselves.Yes, it was he: Sigmund Read more ...