The Killing

Why is "The Killing", the Danish thriller on TV, better than any of our British TV products? It's a work that analyses in depth the murder itself and also the effect it has on a whole community - well, those in the community who are affected in various ways by the murder, from the girl's immediate family to a councillor who is trying to oust the mayor and take over the job himself. The police investigating the case also become humanely affected by the murder, especially the young woman detective (who wears cardigans that have, due to the series, soared in price) who becomes almost insanely obsessed with the case. Yet don't British TV crime plays do something of the same kind? "Waking the Dead" has investigations of murdered people whose cases are history. Each murder affects certain people within the community and outside it; the innvestigating team use pathology to find this and that out about the victim.... and so on. But there's something special about "The Killing". Its tone is not frivolous or superficial or slightly humorous (Poirot) but deadly serious. You feel, with British crime plays and series that the victim is there to make a good story; he or she is dead so now we'll concentrate on the whys, hows amd wherefores. The victiim is a sort of cypher on which the story hangs (if it does!). In British TV crime works, often, depth of character attempts use idiosyncrasies to make them interesting; there is little depth of character in fact. In "The Killing" the characters were portrayed with depth and understanding: you have the dead girl's immediate family suffering with an agony you could almost feel yourself; then as the investigation spread out to others - a teacher, a boy-friend, a councillor etc - and, not least, the investigating team and slowly the pressure grows on everyone concerned. There was nothing of the "let's make this as exciting as possible" but something of the long, serious , well written novel which delves deep into its characters as well as tell a good story. It was not of the English school well described by Orwell in his essay "Decline of the English Murder": respectable middle class chap who decides to bump off his wife (less disgracefull than leaving her for his secretary apparently - then!) and start out in life anew. It was, it seems, a characteristically Nordic murder mystery for, it seems, the Danish and Swedish writers of crime fiction have become far superior to our home-grown breed.

Elizabeth Taylor

A college friend of mine used to say "I'd like to just sit on the bed beside Elizabeth Taylor, just sit there, you understand? (I didn't nod), just sit there and look at her. I wouldn't do anything, just sit there looking at her." Yeah, I know the feeling and I didn't believe a word of it, knowing him. Probably he didn't believe it either; maybe it was a fantasy of his that made him feel pure since he wasn't pure. He was a ram. A Welsh ram.
But never mind him, let's think of her.
Was she a good actress? Well, she won two oscars didn't she? I never thought her a great actress, good but not great. I always found her a bit lifeless; she posed a lot. She did give a powerful performance in "Who's Afraid of Virgina Wolf?" but I found it forced and ugly - ok, she was supposed to be ugly. The trouble was that she simply wasn't ugly; she tried to be but didn't succeed. Burton was great in it; he relished his lines like only an experienced stage actor can. She blurted her lines, shouting them agressively when she should have been more subtly cruel.
I liked her best when she was young: "National Velvet" and "Lassie Come Home"; she was charming and innocent and loveable. I don't think she was ever as loveable in adult movie life except perhaps when she acted with gay friends like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson - then she seemed casually content.
I read a story about her and Burton in a book written by a script-writer. He went to their house on a visit to discuss a script and noticed that in their bedroom they had a trolley full of drinks by the side of their bed. So they were normal after all!
(Another tale he told was of a movie mogul who phoned him up late one night and said: "I want a one page synopsis of "War and Peace" on my desk first thing tomorow morning.")
Back to Elizabeth Taylor. She visited Cardiff with Richard Burton, went to a rugby match and, afterwards, she and Burton went to the bar of the Cardiff Athletics Club. It was packed to the door. "How are we going to get to the bar to get a drink?" she asked Burton. He said: "Just walk." She did and the crowd parted like the Red Sea did for Moses giving her a passage straight to the bar.
An actor told of a visit she made to Port Talbort to visit Burton's sister after he had died. She stayed the night in a bedroom with no toilet facilities except a pot under the bed. The following morning she came down the stairs carrying the pot, stopped halfway down and asked: "what am I supposed to do with this?" Burton's sister said: "we'll bottle it and sell it."

Midsomer

There is no place on this earth like Midsomer where inumerable murders take place - on TV, that is. I am informed that it's not only very popular in this country but the world over; maybe the same as Dickens was popular in Russia some time back because the Russians thought that was how England was then in the 1900's, not, when Dickens was writing, in the 1800's.
Well, the series producer of Midsomer Murders has been naughty and said that he doesn't want black or Asian faces on the show because it would take it away from it its Englishness. He's quite right, it would. That is not to say that its Englishness is like what Englishness is like in reality. The Englishness of Midsomer Murders is the Englishness of a fictional idea of Enghland with its rolling green fields and its Constable skies and its Elgarian tone and its Miss Marpole-like daintiness.
But while the producer was right to point this out he worded the remark in such a way that it seemed racialist: he said that his series was the last bastion of Englishness by which he inferred, if not actually meant, that the England of his programmes was a fine place until the foreiners with black or dark faces came here.
He is, of course, on dangerous grounds because you can't, these days, make any remark that might, just might, hurt the feelings of a "new Englishman".
One is now almost frightened of speaking one's mind lest the politically correct come down on you like a ton of bricks for making a racialist remark when all you've said is something like "I saw a black man peeiing in the street". "Why did you say he was black?" "Because he was." "Would you have said it about a white man doing the same thing? "No, probably not." "Why not? Are white men superior to black men?" "No, I ... er I... didn't mean.... er to say... Please forgive me. Don't take me away to prison. Please." And so on.
Dyke who left the BBC a couple of years ago said that the BBC was too white. Now that is a racialist remark. He is saying that anyone who is black is better than a white person. Isn't he? Would you put a black violinist in a symphony orchestra to have a black face there if he wasn't much good on the violin? Dyke was saying you should.
Sorry to see John Nettles leaving the show since he's the only man I know who can speak without opening his mouth. Could get a new job as a ventriloquist I suppoe.

Language

I used to know a man (in his early eightees then) who set out to obtain an Open University degree (he did get it). One day he showed me some of a lecturer's notes in History, commenting that that lecturer was immensely knowledgeable and a brilliant explicator of his subject. I read a page but could not understand any of it. To my mind it was nonsensical. I could, of course, read the words - they were quite familiar to me - and I could even read some of the sentences; but they meant nothing to me. I had the feeling that I was reading, or trying to read, something that was showing how deep the man was intellectually without his actually presenting any understandable arguments.
It took me back to a physics book that was reccommended to students starting the degree course in physics: the book was unreadable. It is almost as if the authorities wanted to appear wiser than they were and therefore had given the students stuff that they knew would be unfathomable, pretending they themselves were able to fathom it.
In last week's Spectator an art critic (usually a very good one) wrote this about the artist Alan Reynolds: "The new work consists of white reliefs and pencil drawings, which contine Reynolds's exploration of the dynamic relationships between the horizontal and the vertical." I'm pretty sure that Andrew Lambirth undrestands what this means but I certainly don't. However, I'll not go further into this and give him the benefit of the doubt since he knows a lot more about art than I do. But what does it mean?
In The Times today Daniel Finkelstein quotes a professor at the London School of Economics thus: "A political community is properly bounded when congruence and symmetry prevail between the 'governors' and the 'governed and when an imagined community of fate connects its envoys directly to a common political project." Finkelstein says "I haven't got the first clue what the professor is going on about."
Neither have I.

Avante Garde

"Schoernberg envied Berg his success while Berg envied Schoernberg his failures." So wrote a friend of Berg's. He said he had to console Berg over his success - possibly his quite popular violin concerto (which I have not yet fathomed and feel I probably never will).
A lot of composers of the early part of the 20th century seemed to have worried themselves sick over whether they were avant garde enough. "Am I modern enough?" Bartock cried.
Then there was poor Rachmaninoff, concerned that his music was not going along with the trend towards atonality with his success weighing him down: "I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today but it will not come to me."
Thank God it didn't, I say. I have just heard, for the umpteenth time his 2nd symphony and although it gushes with sentimentality and with a style of orchestration that borders on confusion with its overlapping ornamentation, it still strikes me as an emotionally powerful work.
A couple of days ago I heard a song by Korngold. At first, not knowing who the composer was, I thought it might have been Franz Lehar (yes, it was that good). I was most impressed. Yet Korngold, after early triumphs in Germany and Austria, couldn't get his works played, probably his semitic origins had something to do with it. So he shot off to the USA where he became one of the most popular composer of backgound music to films. He was immensely successful with films like Robin Hood and Captain Blood. Yet he yearned for success of a different kind; he yearned to be taken seriously by his avante garde peers. He never was. Yet his violin concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz is rather good.
Well, we can't all be Franz Lehars I suppose, happy to go along doing what you do best and to hell with the rest of the modernisers. But some were like Ligeti: "One simply cannot go back to tonality, it's not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avante garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avante garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape."
His scrap metal thrown into a tin bucket is, I suppose, some kind of escape!

Jane Russell

I recall the film coming to the South Wales valley town where I lived: Blackwood. There was a queue about half a mile long. Blokes. I don't think there was a single woman in the queue. Only blokes. Young blokes, most of them. The film? "The Outlaw" with Jane Russell. Who else was in it? Couldn't remember so I looked up David Thomson's book "Did You See"? Well there was Thomas Mitchell as Pat Garrett, Walter Huston as Doc Holiday and a newcomer, Jack Beutel, as Billy the Kid (I haven't heard of him since that film - perhaps he never recovered being seduced by Jane Russell - well, as a kid I knew something had gone on!).
David Thomson sums up the film in a few words: "You see, 'The Outlaw' isn't just Howard Hughes, or even Pat Garrett meets Doc Holiday and Billy the Kid. It's Jane Russell.
She took the film by storm. She never was, later, as hot as she was in this film. At the time it was sensational, she was sensatuional.
Of course, what made her name was her casting by Howard Hughes who took over from Howard Hawkes after two weeks of filming. He took a few years to make it and, before releasing it, sent out to the world very sexy pictues of the new star, all legs and breasts (two to be exact) a gun-toting lass lying in the hay and looking like she desires "it", if you know what I mean by "it" - you know, "that". Yes, now you've got it.
Two other films of her's that I liked were "Paleface" with Bob Hope and Trigger.... O yes, Roy Rogers too. She did a song with Hope which showed she could sing a bit: "Buttons and Bows". It won an oscar. Then there was Howard Hawks' "Gentlemen prefer Blondes". Most eyes at that time (blokes eyes I mean) were on Marilyn Monroe but it was as if Jane Russell was gallantly allowing Monroe to be the centre of attraction; it was as if they enjoyed being together and Jane enjoyed being second in line in the sexy stakes. Or was she? Though the hunks in the film threw themselves at Monroe, all she was interested in were diamonds, which, we all know by now, are a girl's best friend.
Now Jane Russell has died at 89. But I can still see the queue at the cinema in Blackwood; and it was probably the same at every similar flea-ridden cinema the world over.