Imagine if all BBC arts programmes were this good
It is easy to mock Alan Yentob – not least because he is a BBC executive who wears pyjamas as daywear – but he does make some good films. Imagine… Tom Stoppard: A Charmed Life (BBC One) was one of his very best. Stoppard has given plenty of television interviews over the years, having become a darling of the arts world in the 1960s thanks to his breakthrough play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. But this
Imagine… film was a comprehensive – definitive? – film, surveying Stoppard’s career and recounting a family history that led to his most recent and personal work, Leopoldstadt.
Among the talking heads was David Hare, who spoke admiringly of Stoppard but identified the aspect of his plays that some critics dislike: that he is “clever-clever”. Stoppard, now 84, did not come across that way. He was witty and self-deprecating, and happy to throw in showbiz anecdotes
– as when the film adaptation of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead beat Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas to the Golden Lion at Venice. “I was laughing because I just knew how ridiculous that was,” he said. But at the afterparty, Scorsese and his family were not laughing. “I didn’t realise how furious they all were. Oh, come on, it’s just nonsense! I mean, I’d vote for
Goodfellas…”
In amongst the interview and the tributes from contemporaries, we were treated to snippets from Stoppard’s plays with all of their quick-fire wit. Every play he has written, Stoppard explained, mixed comedy with tragedy. The tragedy of
Leopoldstadt is intensely personal: the story of a European Jewish family, like Stoppard’s own, from the late 19thcentury to the 1950s. His mother rarely spoke of the past, and the playwright only recently discovered that his relatives had perished in the camps. But his biographer, Professor Dame Hermione Lee, said a theme ran through much of Stoppard’s work: of “trying to rescue the lost past”.
Amid the weighty stuff, there was the opportunity to follow Yentob as he poked around the home which Stoppard shares with his third wife, Sabrina Guinness. “We’re not, surely, reduced to showing my wedding photographs?” Stoppard sighed, as Yentob noticed a picture from the family album. The film rather skimmed over Stoppard’s private life (splitting with wife number two, Miriam, after an affair with Felicity Kendal), but that is the Yentob way: he succeeds in these profiles because he is less interrogator, more relaxed house guest.
The case of the “Cardiff Five” involved the longest murder trial in British legal history, but I’m afraid to say that I had never heard of it before watching A Killing in Tiger Bay (BBC Two). In 1988, 20-year-old Lynette White was found murdered – a particularly brutal murder, as recounted in grisly detail here. Four separate witnesses reported seeing a man acting suspiciously near the scene, and trying to hide his bloodsoaked hand in his coat. The man was white. The five men charged with Lynette’s murder were black.
This three-part series catalogues how a miscarriage of justice unfolded. Some of those who were wrongly accused of the crime told their stories. A junior officer with South Wales Police at that time described the force as “a law unto themselves” with a policy of arresting people then trying to build a case against them.
The programme’s most valuable evidence was the recordings of police interviews with the accused. White’s boyfriend, Stephen Miller, was questioned 19 times over five days, and repeatedly denied that he had killed her. But the officers were intimidating, telling him that he had been present at the murder. “I’m still going to keep going and I’m going to pump things into you every time,” one said. After five days, Miller made a confession and implicated the other four.
This was one of the better type of true-crime documentaries in that it afforded respect to the victim, rounding out the picture through the recollections of friends. She was bright-eyed and quirky, with a Minnie Mouse laugh. She loved dancing. She had also endured a tough childhood and was working as a prostitute. “She had ideas, ambitions, dreams, just like you and me,” said one friend.
Tiger Bay locals defended their community, known for its multiculturalism but regarded by outsiders as a place of “prostitutes, drunks, pimps and fights”. Perhaps memories of being able to leave their doors open were rose-tinted, along with the descriptions of the arrested men as “characters”. But this was a worthwhile look at a deeply rotten investigation.
Imagine… Tom Stoppard ★★★★★ A Killing in Tiger Bay ★★★★