Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
The joy of watching black-and-white films on my black-and-white TV
I’m dreaming of a black-and-white Christmas.
Thanks to Talking Pictures, the TV channel that specialises in reruns of old British movies and TV series – from Ealing Comedies to Armchair Theatre – I have discovered that life looks better in black and white. I can’t cope with watching the box in full colour any more and I am doing something about it. This Christmas, I am treating myself to a vintage TV set: it’s 50 years old, and so it can transmit only in black and white.
I am excited. Getting all my smallscreen entertainment in monochrome, I am going to be happier – and richer, too. These days, if you are under 75, it costs £154.50 for a colour-tv licence, but only £52 for a black-and-white one. Regular colour broadcasts began on BBC2 in July 1967 (with the Wimbledon tennis tournament) and the number of blackand-white licences issued has been in steady decline ever since. In 2000, there were 212,000. By 2015, the number had dipped below 10,000. Now, they reckon, it’s closer to 5,000.
My friend Jeffrey Borinsky is a TV and radio technology historian and he is helping me find the right set. As he says, ‘Who wants all this newfangled 4k Ultra HD, satellite dishes or a screen that’s bigger than your room when you can have glorious black-and-white TV?’
It’s that time of year when we hacks get called by assorted features and literary editors asking us to nominate our Books of the Year.
Normally, I simply recommend a book by a chum (whatever it’s like) in the hope that next year they’ll return the compliment. This year, I have a proper favourite, a book I picked up by chance and couldn’t put down until I had finished it.
Finding Nemon (Peter Owen, £25) is Aurelia Young’s engrossing, gripping biography of her extraordinary father:
Oscar Nemon (1906-85), Jewish refugee, flamboyant charmer and celebrated sculptor of all the greats of the 20th century, from Sigmund Freud to Elizabeth II. When I was an MP, for good luck before making a speech I would always touch the toe of Nemon’s celebrated, larger-than-lifesize statue of Winston Churchill which stands in the Members’ Lobby in the House of Commons.
As a sculptor, Nemon was a genius who usually began working on the monumental heads of his subjects with a wodge of Plasticine no bigger than a tennis ball. As a breadwinner, he was unreliable. As a husband, he left something to be desired. As his daughter puts it lightly, ‘Monogamy was not Nemon’s strong suit; indeed, shortly after I was born he planned to leave his family and go to the USA to join one of his lovers.’ Lust, love, art, anecdotes… Finding Nemon’s got the lot.
My Film of the Year was going to be either White Crow, Ralph Fiennes’s compelling telling of the story of Russian ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev’s escape to the West in 1961, or Tolkien, a romantic account of the student years of the creator of The Lord of the Rings, starring Nicholas Hoult as the young
JRR. (The author’s estate declared that it did not ‘approve of, authorise or participate in the making of the film’, but I loved it.)
And then I went to Paris and saw A Rainy Day in New York, Woody Allen’s latest romcom. It’s charming, very funny and (dare I say it?) my Film of the Year.
I had to go to Paris to see it, because they don’t appear to be showing it in London. The film was actually completed in 2017, but its distributor, Amazon Studios, halted its release because of the Me Too hoo-ha surrounding Woody Allen. The film was eventually released in Poland in July this year and is gradually getting screenings across Europe, South America and Asia. It may not be Allen at his peak (he’s 83 now), but the cast is ace (led by Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning and Jude Law) and several of the lines had me laughing out loud.
My wife is encouraging me to tidy up my study for Christmas. I am not sure it is a good idea. I used to enjoy putting my shelves in order, arranging all my books alphabetically (by author when novels; by subject when biographies), ensuring that the spines were all upright and neatly aligned, until a Freudian psychoanalyst friend told me, ‘Tidying bookshelves is what people do in a vain attempt to keep death at bay. You think, by enforcing order on your bookshelves, you can impose order on your life. You can’t. Life is chaotic and death is inevitable.’
I think A A Milne put a more positive gloss on it. ‘One of the advantages of being disorderly,’ he observed, ‘is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.’
For their Book of the Year, Gyles’s friends are recommending his anthology of poetry to learn by heart, Dancing by the Light of the Moon (Penguin Michael Joseph, £14.99)