| A Look-back and Guide |
Television Arts Feature |
| Television , Arts and History of Wales , December 17, 2020 |
2020 was the year with no precedent, where reviews of live performance ended abruptly in winter. It was a year of television. And a year of looking-back. 16 October 2020 Documentary from 1942 on CEMA with Dylan Thomas contribution “Its subject is the Committee for the Encouragement of the Arts and Music. The state made itself a participant in cultural life...Dylan Thomas' work on 17 Strand films in the 1940s appears in “A Poet at War”...bringing the best to as many of our people to cheer them on to better times.” * * * * 04 November 2019 El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie “The Vince Gilligan style is unique. In particular the action is unhurried. The Jesse-Ed encounter has a slow deliberation to it. If this were a European production it would be edited to a third shorter in duration. In Gilligan expectation the action loops back and forth over present and past.” * * * * 03 September 2019: Wales at the Edinburgh Festival Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Gethin Alderman, Jordan Brookes, Elis James, Morgan Rees, Eleri Morgan, Essylt Sears, : Hannah Daniel, Jonny Cotsen, Laura Dalgleish. Dave Reubens aka Danger Dave with bright red hair. Razor blades and staple guns feature. When he is to be seen hammering a nail into his nose a large “DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS YOURSELF” is superimposed on the screen.” * * * * 14 January 2019: “The Sopranos” at Twenty Years “Television's modern age began 20 years in January 1999. The New York Times view was that “it just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century”. Whether Tony goes in his fifties or a decade on makes no difference. He is never going to rest easy or know tranquillity. The world of smallness, contained and constrained with clan and crime, gives no comfort. We watch, and we watch again, because “the Sopranos” is ultimately rich in an affirming morality.” * * * * 11 November 2018: Armistice documentary in Barry, Cadoxton, Blackwood, Brecon “At Ynyslas a representation of a combatant's face was washed away by the incoming water. Danny Boyle's event-artwork, one of 24 around Britain from Orkney to Cornwall, worked. At Stratford Park, another artwork “Shrouds of the Somme” made the great numbers material. Its effect was deep. Small individually crafted doll-like corpses, the exact number of casualties, were laid in rows.” * * * * 15 October 2018: Documentary on Lady Rhondda: Rhondda Rebel” “Rhondda Rebel” is a good documentary for reasons that are not complex. There is expert commentary delivered economically but fully from Lady Rhondda's biographer Angela V John. Margaret, then Mackworth, attracted her Welsh audience who brought sulphuric acid, live mice, dead mice, rotten tomatoes, jeers and smashed windows to the political discussion.” * * * * 30 April 2018: Mary Beard “Civilisations” “So if you ask me what is civilisation,” run her words, “I say it's little more than an act of faith.” Beard, a classicist, sets civilisation in dichotomy with barbarianism, but it is better set against tribalism. Civilisation is manifest where tribe merges into something more encompassing.” * * * * April 28th 2018: Civilisations Human consciousness uniquely commingles past, present and future in a way that other species do not. Simon Schama says in his very last words “art collapses space and time.” * * * * 18 April 2018: “David Hurn: A Life in Pictures” “David Hurn is aged 83 and a good interviewee. His sentences are both eloquent and to the point. The heart of his own aesthetic has not changed in 60 years. “My photography”, he says, “relies on warmth and liking people and trying to understand what they are doing.” A photograph is “capturing the essence of what you feel about something.” * * * * 03 April 2018: The Torch Theatre Milford to New York “Grav yn Efrog Newydd” “From Milford to Manhattan: A Remarkable Journey Told. Gareth John Bale is in Times Square. “Grav” is a work of theatre biography, the makers swiftly cut back to of Kidwelly, the view to the Gower and Mynyddygarreg. Television does not often visit theatre; this is a full film of the life and the play.” * * * * 06 November 2017: Marc Rees & National Dance Company Wales- P.A.R.A.D.E. “A brief introduction sketches the incendiary meeting in 1917 Paris of Satie, Cocteau, Diaghilev and Picasso. Marc Rees describes the original performance of outdoor acts and circus and explains the adaptation to include the rhetoric of a modern day politician (Eiry Thomas) in full voice. Caroline Finn describes the development in her choreography, individual creativity and spark emerging from the mundanity of repetitive tasks.” * * * * 04 October 2017: Dylan Iorwerth Documentary on Benjamin Piercy “The Dyfi Estuary was filmed in the most glorious of seasons. Iorwerth himself spoke from a carriage on the line that arcs first to Aberdyfi and then up the Cambrian coast to Pwllheli. His subject was the maker of the line, Benjamin Piercy from Trefeglwys in Montgomeryshire. The business inspiration behind the bringing of the railways was top sawyer David Davies of Llandinam, but the man who made it happen was Piercy.” * * * * 26 September 2017: Thomas Picton in the Caribbean “The location filming took presenter Dylan Iorwerth in the footsteps of Picton from the Carmarthen monument to Gibraltar and Trinidad. The essence of his rule was personal dictatorship. Wellington had no doubts about his senior officer, the highest-ranking casualty at Waterloo. “I found him a rough foul-mouthed devil as ever lived.” * * * * 01 March 2017: BBC Wales' Arts Review of the Year- a Travesty of the Arts “The editors' criteria for screen time were news items and celebrity recognition. Thus the tribute to Bryn Terfel had him singing “Roxanne” in duet with Sting. If the 2015 programme was inadequate then that for 2016 is worse. Its representation of the vitality and diversity of artistic activity in Wales is a travesty. In this telling Wales has no dance at all, Jo Fong, Caroline Finn, Darius James, Gwyn Emberton are all non-people in the BBC gradation of things.” 03 January 2016: BBC Wales' Arts Review of the Year “Lacking coherence and integrity. The producers give every appearance of sharing with their commissioning masters a laddish embarrassment about the arts. This uneven review of the year gives too the impression that is has been compiled to meet some programming check-list.” * * * * 29 December 2015: Documentaries on Theatre "The programme was dull stuff and I tried Soho. New writing, after all, is theatre’s lifeblood. Dull too and I switched to Kendal and even there I did not last the half-hour. As documentaries they looked economically budgeted. No arts journalists were on camera to give any bite and flavour. The editing looked to action to fill the time. A contributor to the Guardian’s discussion was succinct: “The series spoke volumes about the cultural disconnect of commissioning at the BBC”. * * * * 15 September 2015 Documentary on 40 years of Theatr Felinfach “Euros Lewis provides the historical background of the extraordinary fecundity of home-created theatre. Ceredigion between the world wars had one hundred and fifty amateur companies. Little Llandewi Brefi alone had three companies. Aeron Davies and Gret Jenkins recall audiences of four to five hundred, some members walking for miles, cramming into the spaces, even pressing against windows to see in.” * * * * 22 July 2015: A Renoir at Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire “Renoir – Pierre-Auguste rather than Jean or Claude – occupies a special place in Wales. His fellow Impressionist, and his senior by two years, Sisley may have been the one to have married in Cardiff Town Hall and the one to have painted nineteen pictures of Penarth and Langland Bay. But Renoir’s “Blue Lady” in the National Museum, at its time one of the most expensive purchases made by the Davies Sisters, has become, a century on, the most popularly loved in the Bequest.” * * * * 30 June 2015: Marc Edwards “Patagonia” “Patagonia” has three virtues; all play to the strengths of its medium. The most obvious is that it captures the visual appearance of the geography. The camera cuts to signs of streets named Juan C Evans and Michael D Jones. The engineering prowess and achievement of the first settlers are shown in a sequence where Huw Edwards stands by a canal. The Welsh creation has indeed been, after the multiple early trials and difficulties, to make bloom the Patagonian steppe of scrub and thorn.” * * * * 12 May 2015: James Graham & Donmar Theatre Donmar Theatre “the Vote” “It is a conception of boldness, not great television drama, because it does not have the medium’s tools of cut and edit, but fascinating, and cheering, on several levels. At a time when indigenous television drama itself has given up the ghost, and sagged into cops and spies, bio-drama and candle-lit Heritage, it is evidence that there is a vitalism to a plain old analogue art form, feet tramping on wood.” * * * * 15 October 2014: Owen Sheers “Dylan Thomas: A Poet's Guide” & “Under Milk Wood in Pictures. Peter Blake Does Dylan” “The Dylan Thomas centenary has launched a thousand events. ‘Dylan Thomas A Poet's Guide’ is one with a difference. It is about the poetry. It is presented by an authoritative voice who knows the subject. A film about a poet gets to be actually presented by a poet, who meets a range of speakers who are also poets. Qualified people who know, and care about, the subject; it is quite a good idea for a documentary.” * * * * 13 October 2014 “Dylan Thomas: A Poet at War” "Director Dafydd O'Connor has secured the service of Matthew Rhys for narration. The range of interviewees marries archive material, Caitlin Thomas and John Ormond, with present day commentators. Jeff Towns, Hannah Ellis, Gwen Watkins, biographers Paul Ferris and Andrew Lycett all contribute. Julia Cleverdon tells that ‘Under Milk Wood’ probably only exists by virtue of her father’s strong-mindedness. Producer Douglas Cleverdon locked the author up for the night and forced it out of him.” * * * * 05 February 2014 Brith Gof Documentary on “Y Gododdin” “Producer-directors Mike Parker and Martin McCarthy followed Brith Gof and the path-breaking “Y Gododdin” with a single camera. They were there on a freezing 1988 December’s night in Cardiff’s abandoned Rover factory and then at subsequent performances in an Italian sand quarry, a former crane factory in Hamburg and finally in Glasgow. The last venue has symbolic overtones, comments a scholar in the film, as the original tribesmen in defeat fled Dunedin to the neighbouring kingdom of Strathclyde.” * * * * 25 November 2013: “Y Gwyll/ Hinterland” “It would have been easy to shoot the Ystwyth and Rheidol valleys in their spring colours and make it into a heritage event. “Shot with real intelligence; simple, subtle and with both eyes focussed on the feeding of the atmospheric cloud over the piece.” The treatment of Ceredigion is true. It is not the only version, but it is a true one. Upland buildings can have a tatterdemalion quality. The windfarm plot and the background conifers are reminders that National Park status was snatched away from the Cambrians in a last-minute manoeuvre.” * * * * 05 August 2013: Bio-drama on Richard Burton “Burton and Taylor” “Original British drama’ run the advertisements that clog television and radio. Words have their meanings. ‘Original’ indicates that a writer or a director has had an idea that has been gradually brought to fruition. An acted-out documentary, or quasi-documentary, on celebrities stretches the adjective ‘original’ into areas where it begins to blur. Structure, rising rhythm, human truth, ambiguity, moral tension, narrative excitement and denouement. All are lacking in the bio-drama. They burble along until they end and then require captions at the credits to complete their narrative.” * * * * 31 January 2012: “Baker Boys” “Baker Boys 2” is television. It does what only television drama can do. It fires off a series of rapid, inter-cut sub-plots within one over-arching dramatic situation. Structurally, it pivots between private and public action. It does parents and teenagers very well. It captures the brittle nature of the bonds between men. The director handles ensemble scenes with aplomb. A double celebratory night out in the city gives a nice kick to the watery stuff put out by Cardiff’s official promoters.” * * * * 23 January 2012: Bio-drama on Richard Burton "S4C’s film for Christmas covers a single day in June 1968 in Switzerland. On that day Richard Burton’s elder brother Ifor fell and broke his neck. The devisers of this piece wander in that no-man's land of dramatised documentary. The facts of that day may never be known. That is enough; they need not be known. So the film is neither documentary, since it is not tethered to those facts that the biographers record. But nor is it drama with that genre’s complexity and wider resonance.” * * * * 27 June 2011: Documentary on “the Passion in Port Talbot” “Ghost-like figures, they talk of the dead who have gone before them. Cor Serenata sings “Ain't No Grave”. The Solar Dance Group and West Glamorgan Youth Theatre perform. A group of bell-ringers plays a lovely melody. There is the roofer who is to be the inspiration for the character of God.” * * * * 17 June 2011 Documentary on “the Passion in Port Talbot” “The Passion” was more than a success. It was an event. According to Siriol Jenkins, in her measured voice-over, by the time Sunday arrived “Newspapers around the world are printing pictures of this unique event. People have travelled here from all over the UK and abroad to witness the last day.” It will never be known for sure quite how many thousands were there.” * * * * 14 February 2011: “Baker Boys” “There is no reason why drama from Wales should not stand alongside that of Paul Abbott and Jimmy McGovern. For a revisit some drama, villainy, fire, ambition, and plain old craftsmanship, please. If the intention is that the project be a low-aiming piece of parochialism that cowers this side of the Severn then that is not enough.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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