Television Roger Lewis
For weeks there’s been little to watch, save the dreary boredom of games. (In my circle, ‘sport’ refers exclusively to recreations involving rods, tweeds and guns.) The World Cup, Wimbledon, Test matches, the Open... Hate ’em all. The darts, grand prix, snooker, cricket... Hate ’em all.
While I can of course see the comic
potential of the World Indoor Bowls Championships, as beamed from the Potters Resort, Great Yarmouth (‘Bryant is drawing well to the head this afternoon… Hughie Duff’s forehand is looking weak, especially in the long jacks’), for me it’s too dangerously like Tony Hancock in his bedsitter, killing time before finally deciding to kill himself.
I have been thrown back on having to watch ancient broadcasts – and let no one imagine things were superior in the past. Barnaby Rudge, shown in 1960, in a lavish 13-part adaptation, was pretty ropey. The studio scenery wobbles, doors stick, the staging is awkward and half a dozen shabby extras, rhubarbing like mad, represent the London mobs. Under terrible wigs, Timothy Bateson and Esmond Knight grimaced in fuzzy close-up. Newton Blick, as Gabriel Varden, the locksmith, managed to get out some of his lines without stumbling hardly at all. Grace Brothers’ Arthur Brough turns up, expostulating in exactly the same fashion as he did as Mr Grainger in Are You Being Served? The Gordon Rioters set the city on fire – we see none of it.
Yet amid the miasma, John Wood is affecting as Barnaby, the simpleton, and Raymond Huntley, as Sir John Chester, takes exquisite pleasure in being malicious. Indeed, that’s why I sat through the drama – to marvel at Huntley, best known for playing civil servants and supercilious bank managers and judges in Norman Wisdom comedies. His enunciation is exquisite, as is his poise.
The other miracle is Joan Hickson as Mrs Varden. Though her character is always contriving to be harassed and anxious, exhausting and demanding, Hickson yet also managed to be paradoxically serene. Every would-be actor and actress must watch the DVD boxed set and study Huntley and Hickson.
Another of my favourites was Rachel Roberts, who killed herself when she stopped being married to Rex Harrison, though, being Welsh, she was anyway automatically a handful. She always hit the right note of hysteria and was brilliant as Mrs Appleyard, the tense and mad headmistress in the 1975 film of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The new television adaptation is highly indebted to Peter Weir’s original – particularly the general sensation of painful, clammy summer heat, and a soundtrack crammed with echoing insect noises and parrot shrieks, with discordant clankings and rumblings.
It is ominous – and it is also erotic; the presentation of green, tropical forests and quivering, black soil, the dark petals and screaming wildlife. The beautiful and solemn schoolgirls in white muslin are like virgins heading towards the slaughter, as they set out, on St Valentine’s Day 1900, to picnic in a seemingly subaqueous place of threat and enticement.
The whole drama, really, is about awakening (and suppressed) sexuality, as the girls are drawn into new depths – the soldiers, horses, male servants. The school is itself a peculiar and immaculate Gothic folly – and an additional theme is how uneasily Australia, at the turn of the 20th century, retained its links to what the locals call ‘home’, ie England, with its garden parties, social codes and protocols, the belief in titles and
submit a 20-minute cantata or operatic scène lyrique.
How fascinating it is, then, to have first-time recordings of all three Gounod entries: Marie Stuart et Rizzio (1837, third prize), La Vendetta (1838, second prize) and Fernand (1839, first prize).
What makes the book doubly fascinating is its array of short essays. These include the young Gounod’s own colourful impressions of Rome, Naples and Capri; the tale of his relationship with his gifted and attentive mother, traced through the letters she wrote to him in Rome in 1839-42; and a wonderful account of Gounod’s friendship with the painter Ingres who, denied preferment in artistic circles in Paris, ran the Villa Medici in Rome where music was as much a part of his world as painting.
In the end, Rome, for Gounod, came to mean the Sistine Chapel and the music of Palestrina, a huge influence which shows in the marvellous a cappella Messe Vocale, included in the set, which he wrote for Vienna’s Karlskirche in March 1843.
One thing the bicentenary might have reminded us of is Gounod’s Sullivan-like gift for writing lighter music. I think of his delectable late Petite Symphonie for winds, of which Barbirolli made an enchanting recording, and two operatic divertissements, La Colombe, of which Diaghilev and Poulenc were so fond, and the Molière-derived Le Médecin malgré lui. Both gold dust for smaller companies Another year, perhaps.