The Politics of Dancing

I suppose that 44 years represents a substantial enough period between television adaptations of Tolstoy’s literary masterpiece. These adaptations, which it has now become critically de-rigueur to giggle at, is what the BBC does best. [1]   However, Jack Pullman’s 1972 adaptation set the bar extremely high, and even after 44 years, it is still available on DVD, casts a very long shadow. Given its length War & Peace lends itself far better to TV adaptation than to film, with the action comfortably moulded into six to nine episodes. Attempts to bring it to the big screen have been abysmal. At this point, as parliamentarians are obliged to point out, I must declare an interest. I read War and Peace when I was sixteen, and read it whilst watching The Pullman adaptation, thus for me Alan Dobie will always be Andrey Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, Morag Hood, Natasha Rostova and Anthony Hopkins Pierre Bezhuhov. Reading the book was one of the great literary moments of my life. So...

A series of programmes about the Cold war is an enticing prospect and is a subject long overdue for thoughtful analysis. If this programme is anything like the rest of the series that moment has not arrived yet. It is not in itself a bad programme, just monotone and one dimensional. It offers up a very traditional perspective on the events of the late 1940’s, you will find the same narrative in any school textbook. It was surely a mistake to rest the whole programme on the voice of one man, the narrator Dominic Sandbrook. No other voices, aside from clips from the archive, are heard and he appears to speak in sentences all concluding in exclamation marks, his voice rising and falling like some pantomime villain to make each point. One feels that if watching this programme with a child they would ask, “Why is he talking funny?” There are however some priceless moments in the programme, not least archive footage of ‘The Red Dean,’ Hewlett Johnson, receiving the Stalin Peace Priz...

There is something in American TV drama that its British equivalent lacks, which is not to say that British TV drama at its best is not amongst the best in the world. This lacking element feels difficult to pin down, the closest I can get to describing it is sex appeal, a va va voom factor. This is particularly true of The Good Wife http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-good-wife/4od. It is a cracking series, not afraid to tackle big issues, like the American use of torture, huge inequalities in the US legal system and the abuse of immigrant labour; it even found time to tackle British super injunctions, admittedly in one of its weaker episodes. This week’s episode tackled the draconian and Kafkaesque US anti terror laws. Alicia Florick, played by Julianna Margulies packs enough sex appeal to light up the most mundane drama, when combined with a script that crackles with sexual tension against a background of complex marital and personal relationships and even more complex ...

I have a particular interest in the 1950’s since it was the decade in which I was born, at the very tip end of 1955, ten years and seven months after the end of World War 2. It is a cliché now that the past is another country moreover as Alan Bennett observed no era is quite as remote as the recent past, the stereotype view of the fifties being a grey interregnum between the vivid black and white newsreel violence of the forties and the Technicolor explosion of the 1960’s, long ago and far away. Here however it is presented as a period with a strong electric undercurrent, a strangely dark, though somehow exotically glamorous place, caught in a time warp, unable to escape from the oppressive weight of a hierarchical past where everyone knows their place. Enter the angry young man, all cigarettes and the intense typewriter clacking, if not literally, then in his head, determined to wrench the oppressively dull and reverential world of the BBC into a reality of a world that contains the b...