London to Brighton in four minutes
A TV classic, these little films pop up on BBC4 from time to time, in far better quality than the youtube versions. Good to see iplayer access for them.
Shopping for England
What a lovely, fascinating, useful programme. Proper scholarship (from Mica Nava, a clever historian who was once, in the distant past, my boss for a short while), great stories and really interesting and relevant insights into the translation of Britain from 19th Century manufacturing powerhouse into 20th Century shopaholic paradise. The two big names featured [...]
Picture Book: Now We Are Growing Up
Bit of a misleading title. This looks at the relationship between pictures and words, but also is just interesting about the brilliance of some of the best books of all time (Children’s or not): Stig of the Dump, Tom’s Midnight Garden, Swallows and Amazons. With some particularly excellent interview material with Philip Pullman (on daemons) [...]
Vladimir Ashkenazy: The Vital Juices are Russian
No question about it: the best programme classified ‘music’ on iPlayer at the moment: a lovely 1968 documentary about pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy. The young Ashkenazy’s evidently not your stereotypical classical soloist: not wild-eyed, tempestuous or mercurial and not an egomaniac, despite his international fame. He’s modest, curious, humane, passionate. The kind of person you’d like [...]
London to Brighton Side by Side
If there was a channel that showed only speeded-up movies filmed from the cab of a train I would watch it. Here are two films from thirty years apart (1953 and 1983), screened side-by-side, and both shot from the cab of a London-Brighton train. Mesmerising.
bookmarks by: delicious.com