Media Matters

TV

Last week the televisual feast I reported in my previous post came to an end as we finally caught up with the concluding episodes of The Killing on iPlayer and 24 on Sky FX. The only decent thing left is Madmen and that’s only on once a week. So great was our desperation that we watched an episode of Midsomer Murders with John Nettles’ replacement in the lead. It was dreadful. In Nettles’ day - although definitely Saga viewing - its picture-postcard alternative universe had a certain internal consistency. No longer so: the episode centering on a girls’ boarding school had all the gritty realism of Ealing Studio’s St Trinian’s minus the humour.

Only marginally more successful was the vintage production of Lakmé we watched on Sunday. I always have a problem with opera on TV: you see the leads in close-up. Listening to a CD your imagination paints the picture; in the opera house the cast are sufficiently far away from the cheap seats we can afford for their figures and faces to be blurred. The romantic leads are usually written for a tenor and a soprano, and tenors and sopranos tend to be hefty. And although in the real world fat people fall in love - America’s birth-rate provides evidence enough - watching them do it has all the allure of a fifteen stone lap-dancer. In this production the problem was compounded by Dame Joan Sutherland’s chin inescapably reminding me of Desperate Dan.

Radio.

Ambridge has started a book club. Shula’s father-in-law , Jim, with apparent predicability chose a classical text: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Except this turned out to be an April Fool’s joke: his real choice was a book by Richard Harris. I think the scriptwriters, encouraged by the batty Whitburn, have completely lost the plot. They slipped up earlier, compromising Jim’s self-consistency as a character with his improbable reaction to the lugubrious Kathy Perks. Now they’ve done it again. Jim may be a pompous ass with limited self-awareness but he is an educated and cultured man. I’ve found Metamorphoses to be thoroughly readable, though - unlike my namesake - being no classical scholar, I’ve only used it as an adjunct to English texts which refer to it - Chaucer makes particularly subtle use of the story of Midas and the ass’s ears. I’ve also read a Richard Harris novel, Fatherland. The writing was wooden, the plot ‘s great revelation - the Nazis were murdering Jewish people on an industrial scale - was something I seemed to have heard somewhere before. I’d like to study Metamorphoses in the company of a Classics professor. I’m sure Joe Grundy’s life would be enriched by the experience. To pick a piece of crap because Joe ‘would be able to understand it’ is patronising. And as a teacher of literature Jim would knows that great fiction can speak to anyone no matter his level of education or his social class.

Incidentally, I’m not belittling readers of crap fiction. I read it myself: if a book gives you pleasure that’s all that matters. But enjoying reading books and enjoying discussing them are two different animals: most people are only interested in the first. But a book club presupposes an interest in the second and for that you need a text that will repay discussion. Analysing popular fiction is the province of the sociologist or the cultural theorist not the literary critic.

Newspapers.

Prompted by me, Pat acquired an iPad2 on Lady Day, the first day they were released outside the US. Providentially we noticed a store selling Apple products had opened in the Battente shopping mall in Ascoli. One reason I’d encouraged Pat to buy the iPad was her subscription to the digital edition of the Guardian. I find that the paper’s website is easier to navigate on the iPhone than the digital edition which retains the print edition’s format. This holds true for the desk or laptop. But on the iPad the digital edition really comes into its own: easy to navigate, and just like reading the print edition minus the crumpled sheets when you turn the pages in a confined space.

And today she could have had the thrill of reading hubby’s letter about Wuthering Heights and foul language. Money well spent, I’d say!


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