Watchification

How Simon Schama must curse the producers of The Tudors, so beautiful, so colourful, so…..Hollyoaks. Which means that it’s a must for anyone who favours style over substance. (Me). And despite knowing what happens in the end, I still hoped that Anne Boleyn, played by the superbly curvy mouthed and impossibly regal Natalie Dormer, would get a last minute reprieve, kick Henry into touch and rule supreme. In fact, coward that I am, I couldn’t watch her beheading, instead hid behind a cushion and muttered to myself about how much I hate the choice of a Playboy bunny to play wife number 3, Jane Seymour. Anyway series two sees Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) still managing to keep those pounds off and striding about court in a very handsome strop. Off with his head.

It’s easy to tell how old the people running British TV are these days: they’re all my age. I know this because they keep commissioning programmes about the music and culture of their formative years, which are my formative years. Here’s a great big (seriously: it’s an hour-and-a-half long) piece of Manchester mythography: a documentary feature about Manchester’s maddening but unassailably brilliant Factory Records, a record label that dreamed of being a cultural force, a remaker of its home city, something we’d never forget. I was trying to think of other super-influential record labels and innevitably settled on Motown but then I remembered that Motown actually left Detroit. Factory would never have left Manchester (the show first went out last year).

I heard about the BFI’s YouTube channel on the radio this evening and rushed over to have a look. There are dozens of short films and clips from a hundred years or so of British film, including some funky stuff from Germaine Greer and lots of themed material like these London films. I’ve chosen a strange and evocative propaganda film made towards the end of World War 2, in which school children somewhere in the English countryside celebrate May Day. The BFI archivists have provided lots of interesting notes for each video so be prepared to lose an hour or two…

Part one of a very promising-looking history of surgery that seems to share only its name with Roy Porter’s excellent short history of medicine, published in 2002. Lots of excellent close-up brain surgery…

I can’t believe we haven’t linked to this before. A lovely big documentary series: a fascinating 1992 BBC/WGBH co-production about the history and significance of computers. It’s a five-part series: the kind of thing they call a ‘landmark’ these days. It’s fascinating at least in part because it captures the period up to but not including the arrival of the Internet. Since anyone born after about 1980 has no idea what computers were for before they were all connected together (I can hardly remember myself), this kind of serious consideration of the period must have real historical value. The series was rescued from VHS obscurity and carefully cut up into useful chapters (using Viddler) by blogger and creator of upcoming.org Andy Baio. A public service if ever I’ve heard of one. You can watch the rest of the series here.