ALL OUR YESTERDAYS.

mr sg and I were talking about Dr Tubby Ramirez, the telly historian, 

of how, like most of them,  she is so very much in the way and I recalled her first shows, in which  she managed  to thrust  her tits at us, repeatedly show us her spike heels and even introduce us to her kid,  Little Baby Tubby, all while she was lecturing us about Anglo-Saxon art. 

 

 I had visions of her cameraman, lying on a floor-level trolley, pulled along, following her up and down the aisle of Durham Cathedral, filming her shoes click-clacking, muttering, Swing that arse for me, tubby bitch; you know, like  they do in the pornography community. I half-expected talented angry gastronome, Jeremy Fuckhead, to burst  into the cathedral, like Becket's assassins, growling, Gimme somea that, I want somea that, Do you know who I am? I'm talent on legs, me. The prime minister's a mateamine, I'm a gourmet, gimme steak'n'chips, well done, with plenty of tomato ketchup. Otherwise I'll punch your fag face in.  Jeremy Fuckhead, drooling over Dr Tubby's legs'n'feet'n'heels'n'baby, Christ, there's a porno nightmare and no mistake, a star on a reasonably-priced historian.

 We don't see so much of her footwear - or her family -  and she is less SteamPunk, now that she's established and to be fair to her she is nowhere near as annoying as is Dr David Hiss, 

the man who insists that all the English Kings and Queens were gay. 

 

Of course they were, you know they were, 

 

just admit it, all you viewers,
 you're all gay, everybody's gay, 

 

You want to admit it. You know you do.
  Take me, look, I'm just a grammar school boy but look what I've achieved by being gay, 

I'm rich 

 

and I'm the prettiest historian on the telly. 

She falls way short, though, Dr Tubby, in her programmes,  of standards set by earlier, less showy presenters,.

We were also talkmg, recently, about that Clark chap, and the Civilisation series.  I didn't see that but I gather that his presentation was much less intrusive that that of Dr Tubby Ramirez and her gang of  tits-out, cock-waving celebrity historians. 

It is a shame that these shows all must be presenter-led, that they all have a version of Bruce Forsyth, gibbering all over them, shoving their vanity in our faces; so trashy, so unscholarly. The broadcasters, of course, would say that this is what we want, showbiz, that we cannot sustain an interest for an hour, unless some plump little doxy is flirting with us.

 Look, here's me, with  a really, really old book.

 And here's me, on the telly, with some other really, really old things. It's just so fascinating. That really, really long ago, people made these things. Because, you know, there wasn't any Tesco, where they could go and buy things.

And do you know what, if he was alive today, which, obviously he couldn't be, that old monk, the Veritable Bede, is it Veritable? Venomous, the Venomous Bede? Verifiable? The Verifiable Bede? Anyway, if he was alive, the Virtual Bede, see, I knew it all along, on the tip of my tongue , it was, the Virtual Bede, course it was; if the Virtual Bede was alive today, he'd be on the telly. I'd probly have him on one of my shows, achelly.

Jeremy Isaacs' The World At War is on again,

 

it is always on, somewhere, and rightly so, it is brilliantly good television history, expertly written, scored by Carl Davies, narrated, almost neutrally,  by Laurence Olivier, every one of twenty-six episodes freeze-framing at the end on some dire image of War's horror -  a stricken face, a shattered city, a captured column; rage, agony and humiliation - and not a presenter in sight, ever. How dare there be?

Discussing education, yesterday, there seemed to be a consensus that many teachers were simply not up to the job but if you were a pupil, studying history, who would you prefer, your teacher, droning-on, or Neil Oliver 

being helicoptered from one dramatic ruin  to another? How can a history graduate with a PGCE compete with the falsity and excitement of the wonderful world of history, created by television and presented by gobby hacks?

 

Anyway, tellyhistory is not all trash and I remembered this, below, from years ago. It might make a rainy afternoon read and if either of the shows are portalised, platformised or by any other means available to watch, well, there are worse things to do, If you like that sort of thing. The comments are good, too.

Friday, 29 May 2009

FROM THE MOUTHS OF THE BARDS TO THE PEN OF THE SCRIBE.

 

WOTSONTELLY. TREASURES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, MICHAEL WOOD ON BEOWULF.BBC FOUR.

There was a lovely juxtaposition on BBC Four last night; it should, so very English was it, have been broadcast on St George's Day, on every Saint George's Day for in a two-programme combination of the British Museum, on the Sutton Hoo helmet and the historian Michael Wood, on the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, the evening, almost inadvertently, nonchalantly celebrated the art and the craft of England, neither of them native here to the manor  born but now weathered-in, intrinsically English, celebrated wherever she is spoken, read or acted-out; there was no Elgar, no Henry the Eighth and praise God, neither the ghastly Simon Schama nor the obnoxious David Starkey, queened and preened throughout, their every line arch and rehearsed, comic book history. Michael Wood is of much greater refinement.

Most of them annihilate culture, the telly twitterati, the grammar school totalitarianistes nouveau, reducing it to just an ingredient in the endless sausagemeat of broadcasting – cogito ergo disseminare, I think, therefore I must be on the telly, arseholes,  all of human history and culture merely a vehicle for their smug, emphatic, talking heads.

The tale from the Museum recounted the disovery of the helmet, now gloriously reconstructed, taken from an East Anglian burial mound, part of an enormous treasure trove and donated, quite properly and in an understated, English fashion, to the nation by it's finder, Mrs Pretty. It revealed how, until the find, Anglo-Saxon man was assumed a mead-swigging brutish dullard scratching around in the pigshit and how the dicovery of such exquisite craft stood that assumption on its head. It was told with effortless scolarship by employees of the Museum and by film and stills from the 'thirties, when the treasure-laden burial ship of, it is presumed, King Raedwald, was discovered in its burial mound. The excavation took place against the commencement of the Nazi War and all, fabulously wrought gold and silver and gems, was, like much of our treasure, consigned to an Underground station for future restoration, once Mr Hitler had been sent packing by our trusty warriors.

Judged against scholars, restorers, custodians of Antiquity, Wark, the snarling harridan and Mark Potato on the BBC are irrelevant mouthy show-offs, trashy; Schama and Starkey crush enthusiasm and curiosity beneath a cavalcade of wordy, name-dropping, punning and put-downs; contrived, over-written, moribund, an hour watching either of these jumped-up irritants produces TV’s desired effect of making the viewer feel lesser, patronised, nobody-ised. The grinning, hairy, Jock hobgoblin, Neil Oliver, whining his way around the Coast or through mediaeval Scotland, like a Kosher Billy Connolly, makes one yearn for an Open University Closed.

Wood, though, blessed with boyish good looks, easy charm, a wondering enthusiasm and an unfaltering, seemingly spontaneous delivery had me up and running, or Googling anyway, reading poetry, planning a trip to Jarrow Monastery to walk in the steps of the Venerable Bede; to Malmesbury, where, Wood surmised, the pagan Anglo-Saxon oral tradition was enscribed and preserved - but, paradoxically, by latin, Christian clerks.

In a few magic moments filmed with a man expert in ancient swordsmithing, Wood teased out the craft, almost alchemy, the ritual, the myth behind the Warrior’s magical, dragon-slaying sword, created originally by extracting ore from meteorites sent by the Gods, the fabulously sophisticated artisan twisting and beating and twisting together again rods of red-hot iron to produce the killing strength required, the enchanted ripples of it's melding unique to each blade.

Wood’s programme was interspersed with a telling of the epic Beowulf in a repilicated Saxon Hall. Performed by Julian Glover to an audience of period-dressed, wassailing Saxonophiles this demonstration harked back to an information technology predating even writing. In the beginning was the word. 

In a few simple phrases Wood linked the whole of English literature, story-telling, from Chaucer to High Noon to the oral tradition of the Danes, the Angles, the Saxons; our every literary nuance, the astonishing global impact of English deeply rooted in the myths, not of John Bull but of the Germanic immigrant tribes; it was deftly, lovingly done, it’s purpose to educate, inform and enthral.

Glover's raucous and dramatic performance to an enthusiastic, participating crowd was intercut also by an elegant, spare photography, landscapes almost Oriental in their singularity conjured, somehow, the rush of Time itself in a single, static frame; quietly, seditiously demonstrated the endurance of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, against which we are all, Warrior or empty, discredited politicians, Jock Tribesman, Eton Bully or fearful National Fronter, but performing fleas.

The poem itself, compassionate in its way to both hero and monster, is taught to English undergrads after the Epic of Gilgamesh and before Gawain and the Green Knight and many an Ishmaelite pays it scant, barely requisite attention, yet in Wood's homage it seems pivotal to the Pagan-Christian duality which forged our national culture during what we call the Dark Ages but which, for an hour, Michael Wood made Bright.

See both programmes, if you can, on one of the BBC's many portals to distraction.

There, mr verge, as you were saying, no man is an island, no monster either.