The Radio 4 Blog Feed

Artangel and Radio 4: Open Project Artists

2013-07-11T08:44:27+00:00

Katrina Palmer and Ben Rivers

You may remember that earlier in the year we announced a major new collaboration with Artangel, the organisation responsible for commissioning and producing some of the most memorable and acclaimed works of contemporary art in recent times. They have worked with artists like Clio Barnard, Jeremy Deller, Brian Eno, and Michael Landy, who famously destroyed all his possessions in Break Down, a 2001 performance piece installation.

Radio 4 has teamed up with Artangel in a quest to bring to life new ground-breaking arts projects. In January we launched Open, a call-out to artists working in any medium and anywhere in the UK to submit their proposals, and I’m really pleased to say that we have chosen the first two artists to be commissioned.

Katrina Palmer’s new project will excavate an undisclosed place in England through writing and installation. She is a young artist of exceptional promise – she wrote The Dark Object, a series of connected stories about power relations in a fictional art school – but her Open project for Artangel and Radio 4 will be her most ambitious to date.

The other successful artist is Ben Rivers. His films and installations dwell on subjects at the margins of society and build poetic narratives which ebb and flow between documentary and fiction. His first feature length film, Two Years at Sea, was presented at the 68th Venice International Film Festival in 2011 and at the London Film Festival.

Katrina and Ben will now continue to develop their proposals. I’m hugely excited by their ideas so far, and I look forward later in the year to being able to share more details of what we can expect from them, and the part Radio 4 will play in the projects.

Radio 4’s collaboration with Artangel has already borne fruit in the form of Open Air – a series of five playful and surprising audio interventions broadcast earlier this year.

Look out for more news later in the year.

Listen to Open Air

Artangel

Radio 4

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites

How The West Was Fun: When Britain loved cowboys

2013-04-03T15:59:43+00:00

Listen to Archive on 4: Riding into Town from Saturday 6 April at 8.00pm.

John Wayne

I was probably of the last generation to grow up with the Western (Quentin Tarantino is another) and I was aided by a brother a few years older. He once spent an entire week on holiday in Italy in the mid 70s, walking around with his eyes screwed up trying to look like Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. But where he loved the spaghetti Western spawned in the 60s, I preferred the old Hollywood westerns of the 50s. Only people who've never watched proper Westerns really think they're all about celebrating macho men brutalizing native Americans. Many are doing the opposite; tackling racism, injustice and lynch mobs, sometimes covertly, but often openly.

Above: Samira Ahmed's brother Salim (left) and a neighbour in their back garden in Wimbledon in 1968.

For my Archive on Four: Riding Into Town I explore the decades from the 30s to the 70s when Westerns ruled in Britain and why they were such a loved form of escapism. Look carefully at pop culture of the 60s and you'll notice The Shadows playing Apache and The Beatles dressing up in stetsons and cowboy boots. I talked to fans of all kinds. Christopher Frayling, a world authority on the spaghetti western, outlined the history of the British gentleman in westerns – The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, A Man Called Horse, Shalako and also Savage Guns, a Hammer Film, which he thinks was the first spaghetti western. He explained how the violent nihilism of the European spaghetti Western grew out of the counterculture of the 60s.

Samira Ahmed's brother Salim, photographed at Bush House, peeping round a door, dressed in his Native American outfit, at a recording for the Hindi Service circa 1968.

I found myself singing the Marilyn Monroe theme tune to River of No Return with Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, who grew up obsessed with the cowboy films and serials, which he watched in the Saturday morning cinema clubs of the 1940s. His favourite, Shane (1953) features a Messianic hero, and inspired Holloway to become a priest. In the original Jack Schaefer novella, Shane is described as a "good man with a good tool", embodying the modern difficulty we have in watching the Western, especially as we see the ongoing battle for gun control in the US.

I found that it was often women, like Holloway's mother, who chose the family's cinema outings and they chose westerns. Women often had leading roles in the 40s and early fifties – Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich feature in some of the greatest.

The Unforgiven, featuring Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn

In the documentary you can also hear film historian Stephen McVeigh at Swansea University and me deconstructing the delights of gender and sexuality in some cult Westerns that feature in the list below. He told me his students usually claim to hate the genre, but often change their mind after watching one of his recommendations. He also thinks the Western successfully endures in different forms, such as Star Wars and the cartoon film Rango. In many ways science fiction and fantasy have replaced the Western landscape as the dreamworld where anything is possible.

Some of the most serious Western enthusiasts now are re-enactors too, such as The Lawmen who I met in Bristol. Priding themselves on authenticity, they research and "inhabit" real Western characters such as Annie Oakley and Doc Holliday and love the more recent Westerns such as Tombstone and Unforgiven, which get the details of clothing and equipment right.

Caroline Lawrence, the bestselling children's author of the Roman Mysteries grew up obsessed with Westerns. I talked to her about the challenge of writing Westerns for children – the first of her PK Pinkerton Western Mysteries begins quite uncompromisingly with a scalping. It is strange to think that modern children know more about ancient Egypt or Rome than the Wild West. Of course it's in our hands to change that.

Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, discusses watching Westerns in the 1940s

Here's my personal top ten of subversive or cult Westerns to try out for yourself:

Rancho Notorious (1952) Fritz Lang (best known for Metropolis) creates the Expressionist western. The hero seeks out the man who murdered his fiancée and finds his way to Marlene Dietrich's strange ranch where she is Queen of a motley brood of outlaws. Hate, murder, revenge are all the more powerful in the artifice of its sets.

Johnny Guitar (1954) Weird wonderful, and very camp. Two powerful women, often dressed in male garb, battle it out over land and love. Joan Crawford's showdowns with Mercedes McCambridge leaves the men as mere onlookers. Don't be fooled by the title. The eponymous Johnny knows better than to interfere. Director Nicolas Ray lights it with the dreamlike intensity of Rebel Without A Cause.

The Searchers (1958) Often rated the greatest Western ever but it's far more than it seems. John Wayne's Ethan is on a quest to find his niece kidnapped by Comanches, but he is no loveable hero. There is darkness at his core and an unsettling racism in his motivation. The moral heart of the film is his companion, the part-Indian Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), who pulls Ethan back from the final kill. Susan Faludi's excellent book about 9/11 "The Terror Dream" takes its title from a line in the original Alan LeMay novel and explains how the Western still powers a delusional American male identity today.

Saddle The Wind (1958) written by Rod "The Twilight Zone" Serling this tale of rival brothers is a fascinating clash of acting eras and cultures. Robert Taylor is the old, Romantic Hollywood confronted by the Method acting frenzy of his trigger-happy younger brother John Cassavetes. Singer Julie London (a great Western actress) is always mesmerizing.

Flaming Star (1960) Originally written for Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley is the brooding half-Kiowa son enraged by the cruel racism inflicted on his mixed race family. Dolores Del Rio is his mother, in a fine and inspiring female role. This was directed by Don Siegel (future collaborator with Clint Eastwood) who focuses on the inescapable momentum of violence.

The Unforgiven (1960) This is like a mirror image of The Searchers and based on a novel by the same writer, Alan LeMay. In this case Audrey Hepburn is the allegedly kidnapped Indian girl the Kiowa want back. While one brother stays loyal (Burt Lancaster) another Audie Murphy (in true life America's most famous and decorated WWII soldier) turns against her in an act of horrifying racism. Silent age star Lillian Gish is a noble and brave matriarch. A wonderful film.

The Singer Not The Song (1961) British and unintentionally gay, but then what did you expect with Dirk Bogarde as a Mexican bandit wearing his own custom-made black leather trousers, gloves and hat? There is, in theory, a female love interest, but it's all about Bogarde's obsession with John Mills's Catholic priest. The orgasmic end in which they fall into eachother's arms in a hail of bullets has to be seen to be believed.

The Beguiled (1971) Don Siegel again with a truly Gothic Western. Clint Eastwood – a wounded Union soldier finds himself the cockerel in the henhouse when he takes refuge in a Southern finishing school for young ladies, but things take a sinister turn. A Stephen King-like macho nightmare in the age of women's lib, apparently this is one of Eastwood's favourite films.

Back To the Future III (1990) A perfect introduction to the Western for children. Full of affection for the genre, with a genuine villain, jokes about the prissy tassled cowboy costumes of the 50s, a strong female (Mary Steenburgen's schoolteacher) and an early burst of steampunk in Doc's re-booted time machine.

The Quick and The Dead (1995) Sam Raimi's film has virtually the same plot as the sombre Unforgiven (1992) and even the same villain – Gene Hackman - but is a lot more fun and self-aware. Sharon Stone is the mysterious stranger who comes to town to take part in a gunfighting contest. Leonardo Di Caprio and a very young Russell Crowe provide the sex appeal. Film historian Stephen McVeigh pointed out that Stone is only ever vulnerable and makes mistakes when dressed as a woman.

Listen to Archive on 4: Riding into Town from Saturday 6 April at 8.00pm.

Visit Samira Ahmed's site or follow her on Twitter

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.

The Film Programme in Toronto with Terence Stamp

2012-09-13T08:14:57+00:00

Editor's note: This week Francine Stock presents The Film Programme from The Toronto International Film Festival; she catches up with Terence Stamp, soon to be seen in a new film alongside Vanessa Redgrave, Song for Marion. You can hear The Film Programme on Thursdays at 4pm and repeated on Sundays at 11pm.

Francine Stock and Terence Stamp at The Toronto Film Festival

Eavesdropping at festivals is always intriguing - people talking up their projects, chewing over the commercial records ('The Expendables' was really cute for us in Germany') and sucking their gums at the prospects, ('Cloud Atlas - at 2 hours 43 minutes, you've sliced the box-office in half, just one showing a day!'). These snippets can be more bizarre and snappy than anything you hear onscreen.

It may not have the pouting starlets (or, this year, the torrential rain) of Cannes or the architecture and gravitas of Berlin but the Toronto Film Festival (known locally as TIFF) is big and approachable. It's a bear-hug of a festival. And it probably shows more films that may actually be found in cinemas in Britain sometime soon. Most of the screenings here are within walking distance of the elegant new TIFF building, the Lightbox, which hosts smaller festivals and regular screenings round the year. The volunteers in their orange t-shirts sporting slogans for the festival (where epic meets indie, where OMG meets WTF etc ) are cheery even late at night as you stagger out, grey and puffy-eyed.

Grey is this year's colour, though. After decades of believing that cinema was just for the under-25s, the industry has realised that a combination of the demographic bulge and changing technology means that the people most likely to go out and spend in the evenings may not be kids. And older people demand a different kind of film, one perhaps with more talking, fewer explosions and the odd face that hasn't been immobilized or pumped up by cosmetic toxins.

As luck (or talent) would have it, some of those films are British - The King's Speech, which premiered here two years ago is the recent exemplar. This year at Toronto, there are several - among them Hyde Park on Hudson (FDR meets George VIth) Quartet, a tale of retired opera singers directed by Dustin Hoffman but with a cast including Dame Maggie Smith and Sir Tom Courtenay, Sally Potter's intimate, atmospheric Ginger and Rosa about friends growing up under the threat of the Bomb in the early sixties and the film that will show as the Closing Gala on Sunday, Song for Marion.

This casts Terence Stamp opposite Vanessa Redgrave - a juxtaposition of some of the finest bone structure onscreen in the past half century - as a couple coping with ageing and the inevitable separation that follows. They've never made a film together before, although they might have done had Stamp played the lead in Blow-Up (1966) as Antonioni originally intended. Or indeed sung along as Lancelot with Redgrave as Guinevere in Camelot (1967). There's no glamour in the setting for Song for Marion - a modest bungalow - and neither of them shrinks from looking their age. But then again, they are both, in their seventies, strikingly handsome.

Francine Stock presents The Film Programme on BBC Radio 4

Kirsty Lang meets Meryl Streep

2011-12-12T15:00:08+00:00

Ed's note: You can hear Kirsty Lang's interview with Meryl Streep on Front Row tonight, Monday 12 December at 7.15pm on BBC Radio 4. It'll also be available as part of the Front Row podcast. Details at the end of the post - PM.

Meryl Streep's foot and hand prints at Grauman's Chinese Theater by Loren Javier.

The venue was a small, trendy Soho hotel tucked away in a side street away from the madding crowd.

I go up the stairs past the candy pink sofas and expensive looking contemporary art. A PR person tells me Meryl is running late. She's jet-lagged and hungry so do I mind waiting while she has a sandwich. I'm shown into a comfy suite where I meet Meryl's personal make-up artist who is clearly a regular companion.

He's on the phone ordering the sandwiches. "She forgets to eat on these trips" he clucks in a maternal way. He's late 50s, grey haired, dressed in black, slightly camp but not in an over the top way. He asks us if we've seen the musical Priscilla. Apparently the make-up is stupendous. My producer, who is about to get married, gets some tips on applying false eyelashes.

After 20 minutes we are ushered along the corridor to meet Meryl.

It's dark outside and the light in the room is dim but I note that there is something luminous about her skin. The make-up is minimal, she looks almost bare faced, not a false eyelash in sight. Dressed in black trousers and a green silk top, I observe that she's smaller and thinner than I imagined, but then movies stars always seem diminished in real life, stripped on the lights, the large screen and the celluloid.

Meryl is clearly nervous, arms crossed over her chest. "I don't like radio interviews" she confesses. I wonder if she needs a camera to feel comfortable but keep that thought to myself. This is a performance for her but not one she relishes. As the interview progresses I conclude that Meryl Streep prefers to inhabit the skin of others, not her own, certainly not in front of a stranger and a journalist to boot.

We're discussing her role as Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady which I've seen the day before. She is nervous about the way we Brits will perceive her portrayal. It's flawless of course. The accent is pitch perfect and so is the body language; the purposeful stride made staccato by high heels, the large handbag gripped with just the right amount of force and the smile stretched rigidly across the Iron Lady's face.

Hard work goes into a performance like that. She says she locked herself in a hotel room for over a week and watched tapes of Maggie over and over again going right back to her very first TV interviews in the 1950s when she was first elected as an MP to Finchley. Her voice was very different then - higher - says Meryl who then launches into an imitation of the sort of "elocution posh" we're used to hearing in post war British films.

I point out that the film will probably upset a lot of people. The Left won't like it because it's too sympathetic and the Right won't like it because it shows Thatcher as she is now, diminished by dementia. Meryl points out it's not her job to judge. She's just trying to empathise, to slip into Thatcher's skin.

After a while I try to change the subject from the Iron Lady to Meryl Streep.

But she's not having any of it. I begin to understand why we know so little about this Hollywood star. She won't let us in. I ask how she feels about three of her four children going into showbiz. She smiles fondly "Are you asking whether I would have preferred them to become bio-chemists or doctors instead of actors?"

A big sigh follows, "I worry for my two daughters with a mother like me but they seem happy" she tails off. There's a knock on the door. My time is up. I've met Meryl Streep but then again I'm not sure...

Kirsty Lang presents Front Row on BBC Radio 4

Tonight's Front Row with Kirsty Lang, includes an interview with Meryl Streep, who plays Margaret Thatcher in the film The Iron Lady.
Front Row is on BBC Radio 4 at 7.15pm and shortly afterwards online.
Sign up for the Front Row daily podcast.
Kirsty Lang has her own blog here and is also on Twitter as @bbckirstylang.

Joe Cornish, Attack the Block director, on The Film Programme

2011-05-13T17:15:24+00:00

Jo Cornish came into BH to talk to Francine Stock about his new film Attack the Block on this afternoon's Film Programme. Listen again on the Radio 4 web site and download the programme to your computer by signing up for the free podcast. Mark Kermode reviewed the film a couple of weeks ago and Joe's long-time partner Adam Buxton has mixed feelings on the Adam & Joe blog. Listen to Adam & Joe's 6 Music show tomorrow morning at 1000.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of About the BBC

Elizabeth Taylor, 27 February 1932 - 23 March 2011

2011-03-23T11:46:14+00:00

Elizabeth Taylor, perhaps the last of the movie icons of the golden era, has died, aged 79. She was a troubled person but an undisputed star. Philip French, The Guardian's film critic, said in a profile:

...she was exploited by every gossip columnist and patronised by virtually every film reviewer, dismissed as a substandard actress, condemned as a predatory home-breaker - but elevated to superstar status.

Front Row, this evening at 1915, has interviews with director Nicolas Roeg, who first worked with Elizabeth Taylor in 1952; Paul Gambaccini, who was the DJ at her 50th birthday party; Barry Norman, who gives an overview of her career; and director Michael Winner. Listen live at 1915..

Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Neil Coghill filming an interview at Merton College, Oxford in 1967.

Elizabeth Taylor in front of the River Thames in 1963.

Elizabeth Taylor in front of the River Thames and Houses Of Parliament

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

The pictures come from the BBC's picture archive.
Time has a selection of Taylor's appearances in the magazine, BBC News has a compilation of important moments from her films, Variety has an obituary.

When Harry met Sally at 20

2009-08-28T17:02:42+00:00

Editor's note - Sarah Churchwell is writer and presenter of yesterday's When Harry met Sally at 20. I asked her to tell us more about her subject - SB.

The only difficult thing about writing a script - or indeed a blog post - about When Harry Met Sally and its place in the genealogy of American romantic comedy was having to stop. Even harder was knowing it would have to be edited for time: my original script would have run over an hour, and we were only given 30 minutes, including clips. The response so far to the final programme has been what I hoped: people on email and twitter saying, "I didn't think romantic comedy would hold up to analysis, but it does." And several people have asked for more discussion of Harry and Sally's relation to the older romantic comedies of Hollywood's golden age. So I thought I'd use this opportunity to expand on a few of the ideas that didn't make the final cut.

Harry and Sally harkened back to the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s and early 1940s, the years before the Second World War changed the game, the films that invented the battle of the sexes as we know it. We mentioned the influence of Woody Allen, and the way that Harry and Sally fuse Woody Allen's late 1970s romantic comedies with an earlier classical Hollywood vision, but there wasn't time to say more. Unlike Allen's specifically Jewish-American comic take on romance, which focuses on Allen's psychodramas, the classical Hollywood comedies of the 1930s to the 1960s were generally WASPy in their characters and culture; in the 30s they were concerned with issues of class and social status; after the Second World War they started playing variations on the Difficult Woman theme: taming shrews, melting the frigid, educating the innocent, cutting career women down to size, and very occasionally teaching a straying man the error of his ways. Woody Allen, by contrast, made romantic comedies about Woody Allen.

Director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron consciously and constantly make references to classic cinema and musical standards of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, visual and aural quotations that remind us of where we've come from and suggest where we're going. For example, the film ironically reproduces the famous split screen of the Day-Hudson comedy Pillow Talk, from 1959, thirty years earlier, in which the film wittily suggested that the lead couple, who could not be shown in bed together because of the Hays Code, were actually taking a bath together by juxtaposing pictures of them in their separate apartments while in the bath.

Reiner shows Harry and Sally in bed 'together' using the same split-screen technique, when they are in separate beds and separate apartments, watching the same film, Casablanca, a film they mention and argue about more than once - and by no coincidence it is the great American treatise on romantic loneliness and the consolations friends can offer: Casablanca finishes, after all, with the end of love and the beginning of a beautiful friendship. When Harry Met Sally finishes with the end of a beautiful friendship and the beginning of love.

As Harry and Sally watch Casablanca together late at night, the split-screen suggests not sublimated or displaced sexual tension, as the 1959 Pillow Talk did, but rather the easy companionship of post-coital 1989 'pillow talk,' of a couple in bed together watching a movie, rather than having passionate sex. Compatibility is key, and one of the things that defines Harry and Sally is their refusal to ever take grief from each other. They become friends at the precise moment when Sally finally hits back: "I just didn't like you," she says, "and you had to write it off as a character flaw, instead of accepting the fact that it might have had something to do with you." Suddenly, Sally is smarter, tougher, less of a straight man and comic butt of the joke than we might have thought. This is not a film that thinks women are stupid or passive - or mysterious, frigid, or threatening.

We noted that When Harry Met Sally marks the last time - to date - that Hollywood made a romantic comedy that was pitched equally at both sexes. Today, we dismiss romantic comedy, derisively as 'chick flicks.' Among other things, this reinforces the idea that only women are interested in relationships, as if only they want to see films about them, when of course love, sex, and comedy are, in real life, abiding interests of both sexes. But in films we assign romantic comedy to women: if it's a chick flick then only women care about love. The chick flicks we're getting today reinforce the stereotype that women are the custodians of relationships, and men are commitment-phobic.

But Harry isn't commitment-phobic: he's coming out of a marriage to a woman he loves. He just doesn't know that he loves Sally for a while. That's hardly a high-concept view of relationships. Harry is confused - but in contrast to the men in the so-called Bromance, he's also not a man-child refusing to grow up. He's a functioning, successful professional: both Harry and Sally are grown-ups. Ironically enough, this makes When Harry Met Sally a throwback - and one of the many reasons we still love it.

Sarah Churchwell is senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia

Sarah's programme, When Harry met Sally at 20, was broadcast yesterday so you've got six days to listen again.