Television
Roger Lewis
A friend of mine once went on a coach trip to the camps, where there was an elderly couple squabbling in the gift shop. ‘Look,’ said the husband eventually. ‘Will you shut up? You’re spoiling Auschwitz for me.’
I thought of this exchange when preparing to watch The Last Survivors, a documentary about those handful left who’d experienced the Nazi atrocities. What possible new angle could any producer come up with? Inadvertent black comedy, like the Mel Brooks of
Springtime for Hitler? We’ve had the horror rubbed in so many times. The
Holocaust is not news. I needn’t have worried, because the horror can’t be rubbed in too many times. There is no such thing as ‘the banality of evil’. Evil always comes across freshly, agonisingly.
Here we met dignified, sombre, good people, who as children had been rounded up and who were witnesses to the unspeakable. Manfred Goldberg still clutched a picture of his vanished little brother. Maurice Blik makes sculptures – twisted figures that haunt his imagination. Anita Lasker-wallfisch, magnificently angry, said, ‘People always want to see emotions. Forget it. This is a private matter. We are talking facts here. I’m not giving people the pleasure of seeing my emotions.’ If that belief caught on, modern TV would come to a stop – as everyone is always meant to blub.
In Don Mccullin: Looking for
England, the great photographer, now 83, cried with laughter when he saw a brass band playing in the cold rain in Eastbourne. There was something so stoical, British and daft about the scene – pensioners in pixie hoods chewing sandwiches with plastic teeth. I also felt that being in the rain in an out-of-season seaside resort was about as bad as being under fire in one of Don’s war zones.
I met Sir Don at one of The Oldie’s lunches. He seemed keen to talk about his poverty-stricken childhood, and I felt there was a lot of anger still bottled up. To divert him, and seeing Peter Bowles across the room, I said something about how Bowles was in Blow-up, and how surely it was Antonioni’s film that had made photographers trendy in the Sixties. ‘I took the photographs for that film,’ said Don. He did, too. For some reason I then mentioned the journalist Nick Tomalin. ‘I was standing next to him when he was blown up,’ said Don. ‘Blood and guts everywhere.’
If I’d been a bit braver, I’d have asked him what he made of Henri Cartier-
Bresson’s statement that, at the finish, ‘photography is instant drawing, really. Like instant coffee.’ But then sometimes drawing can be pretty speedy – as shown by the way Sidney Nolan, in Australia’s Maverick Artist, smeared his paint about, as if using windscreen wipers.
No one in Australia liked modern art. So Nolan’s pictures of the orange outback, flat and dry, with drought-flayed animals and solitary barns, weren’t in demand until Kenneth Clark invited him to exhibit in England. Nolan moved from Melbourne to London in 1954, and quickly became an establishment figure – Sir Sidney Nolan OM. He developed a liking for first-class travel, posh hotel suites, bought a mansion in Herefordshire, and is buried in Highgate.
About 30 years ago, I bought a Robert Lowell book in Zwemmer’s, and out fell an original oil-on-board picture (of a mermaid) by Nolan, who’d illustrated it, personally inscribed on the verso to ‘K’ – Kenneth Clark, no less. When egregious Alan Clark sold off his father’s library, I’m glad he missed that one.
On the Sarah Bernhardt-as-hamlet principle, I’ve always thought that qualified psychiatric nurse Jo Brand should play me in the adaptation of Seasonal Suicide Notes. The excellent Imagine episode Jo Brand: No Holds Barred simply reinforced this opinion. We could be sisters. Known, earlier on in her career, as a ‘scruffbag’, ‘sea monster’ and ‘revolting obese leper’, Brand now prattles about cakes and is immensely likeable. I hope she’ll never stop enjoying swearing.