Cowards
This is the first episode of another brilliant comedy to make its merry way from Radio 4 to TV. It’s one I loved on the radio, and it makes the transition to telly incredibly well. Plenty of awkward, embarrassed silences and random but plausible strangeness.
You might recognise Tim Key and Tom Basden (or rather, their voices) from Mark Watson Makes the World Substantially Better on Radio 4 last year. Together with Lloyd Woolf and Stefan Golaszewsk, they are the Cowards.
The City Uncovered with Evan Davis: Tricks with Risk
I’ll be honest: pretty much any programme with helicopter shots of big cities will get my vote – especially if it’s also got Nassim “Black Swan” Taleb in it. Do they download the aerial shots off the Internet or something? It’s also got lovely Evan Davis riding a motorbike (quite slowly) and explaining derivatives and all those other exotic ways of managing risk that led us to this financial mess. Or did they? Solid explanatory TV with knobs on.
Snow Cake
A proper film with Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver and Carrie-Anne Moss. You may want to give up after 10 minutes. Don’t. It’s worth it.
Original score by the lovely Candian indie band, Broken Social Scene.
Men and Money – A Question of Confidence
Emma’s fashion post yesterday mentioned that there’s some good content in the BBC Archive. If you haven’t spotted it yet, the archive is gradually opening up some fascinating collections, into which I think we’ll be dipping from time to time.
The Men and Money series was a glimpse into banking in Britain first aired in 1964. This, the second episode, deals with confidence in banks and bankers.
There’s something mildly alarming about a financial system and large and highly developed as the one in Britain. The structure looks solid enough but the foundations are mysterious.
Money doesn’t mean gold. It doesn’t even mean pound notes, since these are pumped out by the Bank of England whenever there’s a shortage. Money, in the modern sense, means credit and the one thing that sustains the system is confidence in this credit. People trust banks and the banks trust the government.
One particular highlight is the sequence, starting at 10m40s, about ingenious (and frankly terrifying) experimental methods of preventing bank robberies. Even more interesting, in a world into which Nick Leeson had not yet been born, is the story (at 35 minutes in) of the banking crisis of 1890 in which Barings Bank was saved “and still flourishes”.
If you enjoyed that as much as I did, the archive contains all six episodes of the Men and Money series.
Men, Women and Clothes
The programmes made for the BBC’s new Style season seem to confirm that for some reason it’s impossible to have interesting TV about fashion. Style on Trial with a sweaty Stuart Maconie and guests like Laurence Llewelyn Bowen looking bewildered in a gloomy studio somehow lacks glamour. And does Lauren Laverne have to present everything? But this colour series from 1957 shows it can be done.
The wobbly titles – “by kind permission of the Marquess of Abergavenny” – might make it seem impossibly quaint at first, and some elements are truly bizarre, like the bloomers hung up like a ghost on a black background and Benny Hill being dressed up in a toga. But it’s “Devised, Written and Spoken by” the fantastically elegant Doris Langley Moore, who actually packs the whole thing full of facts and intelligent opinions, so you have to concentrate to keep up with her points about male facial hair, female back decolletage and other aspects of body shape and dress through the ages. Brilliantly, the BBC have put the whole series in their archive. They’ve also got some great accompanying documents, including a grumbling audience report showing that people in the Fifties didn’t know how lucky they were.
Now please can someone make a decent new programme about fashion: give us a rest from Twiggy and get someone like Diane Pernet in, to tell us something we don’t know.
