- Friday 25 September - Marek and I will be at the Radio Times Festival at Hampton Court. The bill for that day also includes Peter Capaldi, Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin, and Russell T Davies. No pressure.
Showing posts with label museum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label museum. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
More days and evenings out
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Science Museum late, 26 August
Me, m'colleague Dr Marek Kukula and our chum Samira Ahmed will be at the Science Museum late event on 26 August, which is free and rather good. As the blurb says:
Attention, big kids - join us at the Science Museum this Wednesday 26 August and step back into the wondrous world of childhood. Explore the scientific secrets of Doctor Who, uncover the meaning behind types of play and learn how the food your mum eats affects your tastes.
Come and enjoy our famous bubble show or make your very own mutant teddy at one of our interactive workshops. Plus, don't miss regular attractions including live music, the Punk Science comedy show and the best silent disco in town.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Sherlock Holmes and immortality
You can read my piece for the Lancet Psychiatry on the Museum of London's Sherlock Holmes exhibition (running until 12 April), which really explores the nature of Holmes fandom more generally.
I'm also thrilled to see that the BBC website has a clip from the newly discovered 1916 film of Sherlock Holmes starring William Gillette. The clip includes the moment that Holmes meets his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, with them saying "Bonjour" to one another - this version of the film was discovered in France.
Especially thrillingly, while the intertitles narrating the film refer to "Sherlock Holmes" (see, for example, at 01:09 in the clip), Moriarty either speaks with an accent - or a typo:
I'm also thrilled to see that the BBC website has a clip from the newly discovered 1916 film of Sherlock Holmes starring William Gillette. The clip includes the moment that Holmes meets his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, with them saying "Bonjour" to one another - this version of the film was discovered in France.
Especially thrillingly, while the intertitles narrating the film refer to "Sherlock Holmes" (see, for example, at 01:09 in the clip), Moriarty either speaks with an accent - or a typo:
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Three milk churns in Berkhamsted
These are the old milk churns in which were found rolls and rolls of film of ordinary people larking about, shot by Mitchell and Kenyon a century ago. The churns stand to one side in the reception of the BFI archive at Berkhamsted, which opened its doors to a select clutch of visitors yesterday, including yours truly.
It's a treasure-trove of fascinating things. Next to the milk-churns was the blood-red costume worn by Ingrid Bergman as Paula in Gaslight (1944) - looking in good nick for its 70 years. Facing that was a costume worn by Greta Garbo. As we made our way round the building, we saw continuity photos from Star Wars, the Academy Award won by Cecil Beaton for Gigi, an invitation to Peter Sellers' first birthday and Derek Jarman's scrapbook from filming Jubilee.
Having nosed round and worked in a number of archives, and nattered to curators and experts in a variety of fields in a variety of pubs, what struck me more than the splendid artefacts was how well organised the tour was, with a good range of material covered and engaging people to talk to us. They answered our questions and kept to time, while sharing their expertise in a way I could understand. That is no mean feat.
As well as the special collections of props and paperwork, the tour covered the BFI's efforts to preserve old film and TV. We saw a two-inch tape machine, like the ones on which programmes such as Doctor Who were once recorded. The tapes, at £400 in the early 60s, cost more than the cast were paid for a week, so the tapes were reused and episodes were wiped... We saw the wet-gate process and how it vanishes the cracks and damage on old film. We even got to handle film strips and poke our noses round the vast stacks of film cans with alluring titles...
Most fascinating to me (chiefly because I already knew a fair bit about telly preservation) was the discussion of silver nitrate film stock. It's not just highly flammable; as it burns it creates oxygen so can't be put out. Our guide told us of a safety demonstration where burning film had been placed in a bucket of water and then, when it was removed, had reignited. The burning film also releases noxious gases such as cyanide.
So there's a reason there are so few Art Deco cinemas survive - they burned down. Now you need a specific licence to run silver nitrate film in a projector. The BFI have the two licences, and also the largest collection of nitrate films as most other archives have transferred their stock to safety film (which has its own problems with mould and vinegar syndrome) and destroyed the dangerous stuff. We got to nose round the chilly, concrete bunker where rooms of the dangerous nitrate are stored.
There are those who argue that silver nitrate is better than subsequent formats, though one of our guides suggested this was because it tended to be struck from the original negative, rather than being a later-generation copy. Nitrate also used to be cheap: its use was as much about cost as its quality.
It was a grand day out, and thanks to my chum K for letting me tag along after her.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
The man who invented the bank holiday kept a pet wasp
 |
| Caricature of John Lubbock from Punch, 1882, via Wikipedia. |
Among the heroes was John Lubbock MP (1834-1913), who I'd not heard of before. A pupil of Darwin's (having grown up near Down House), Lubbock later named an insect after him. Lubbock also introduced the first bank holiday, kept a pet wasp, got insects drunk to see if they recognised each other and claimed to have taught his dog to read.
He coined the terms "neolithic" and "paleolithic" and bought the site of Avebury to save the ancient stone circle there from destruction. Many of his prehistoric finds are on show in Bromley Museum, which I shall now be making a trip to.
He coined the terms "neolithic" and "paleolithic" and bought the site of Avebury to save the ancient stone circle there from destruction. Many of his prehistoric finds are on show in Bromley Museum, which I shall now be making a trip to.
Later, Lubbock became the first Lord Avebury - and his grandson sits on the Liberal Democrat benches in the House of Lords.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Digging the Past: Archaeology on TV - BFI 19 January
The Dr has been helping the splendid fellows at the British Film Institute with an event on 19 January where you can watch a load of old telly about archaeology. There now follows a short public service announcement:
Incidentally, Wheeler also makes a brief appearance in the bit I wrote for Many Happy Returns, a special 20th anniversary adventure for space archaeologist Bernice Summerfield, all the proceeds of which go to charity. Producer / Evil Genius Scott Handcock has also tumblred credits as to who wrote what.
DIGGING THE PAST: ARCHAEOLOGY ON TVOf particular excitement to me is the stuff with Mortimer Wheeler - "Archaeologist and Man of Action" as I blogged last year.
Date: 19 January 2013 | Time: 4pm | Location: BFI Southbank, NFT2, Belverdere Road, London SE1 8XT | Price: Non BFI members £10 (£6.75- concessions) | Age group: ANY |
In association with the Institute of Archaeology and the British Film Institute, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology presents three sessions looking at the way television has portrayed archaeology. Starting with early televised newsreels of excavations and discoveries including footage from 1949 taken in Cairo to more recent programmes including the controversial Romer's Egypt. The presentations cover the often eccentric characters including the legendary Mortimer Wheeler and an interview with Dorothy Eady otherwise known as Omm Seti. The end session focuses on ancient Egypt as seen by TV fiction writers with something to please everybody from the BBC's Cleopatras to Doctor Who.
020 7679 4138 | Booking through BFI box office www.bfi.org.uk or tel 0330 333 7878
Incidentally, Wheeler also makes a brief appearance in the bit I wrote for Many Happy Returns, a special 20th anniversary adventure for space archaeologist Bernice Summerfield, all the proceeds of which go to charity. Producer / Evil Genius Scott Handcock has also tumblred credits as to who wrote what.
Tuesday, October 02, 2012
Sarkastic
An afternoon in Greenwich seeing chums. Greenwich Park was busy with workmen and tractors dismantling the Olympic arena, which meant the pathways were all hemmed in and there are great gouges in the ground. Difficult to not feel a pang at what's been done, despite the success of the Games.
Also had a chance to nose round the newly restored Cutty Sark. I'd last been there in 2004 for a wedding, with a disco on the low-ceiled upper deck. I had to dance between the steel girders that came down to my shoulders. How strange to return to it in its new glory - and be so disappointed.
First, it's £12 for an adult ticket, which is pretty steep and made me glad I was visiting on my own. You'd expect some pretty good interpretation for that money, but no. You pass through the expensive gift shop, up a ramp into the lowest part of the ship. There, a few of the beams are labelled - which would be quite useful if you knew your nautical structural terminology.
There are then what look like stacked crates of tea, with brief captions explaining the history of tea in the UK (introduced in the 1650s, made fashionable a decade later by Catherine of Braganza and then the essential British drink when, to counter Dutch traders smuggling the stuff, the tax on it was significantly reduced). There's also a short film about the Cutty Sark itself, and more about its owners and the races its raced in.
You then move upstairs to the level I once danced in... and it seemed a little bare. I read everything to be read and it took less than 10 minutes. I guess that might have been different if the place had been crowded, but there was nothing to hold the interest for more than a moment: a display about the type of sheep that were traded, a reference to the opium wars (rather glossing over what the British inflicted on China to protect its own trade).
The deck affords amazing views of London - with the Shard and the London Eye clear even on a nasty day:
I nosed around the small, cramped rooms and there was a fun projected film of a sailor explaining his work. But again, it was all a bit sparse, with little to excite the imagination or encourage further investigation. I love an obscure top fact, and there was nothing for me.
I took the lift down to the lower floor (the lift building is built on the spot where the TARDIS lands in Dimensions in Time - the philistines) and emerged into what I thought was an expensive cafe. There's something odd about the way the coffee bar dominates one end of this otherwise eye-popping space, the gleaming, copper bottom of the ship hanging in the air above you. It gives the space a cold and corporate feeling, like the ship is merely an expensive bit of art in the lobby of some faceless multinational.
Moving away from the coffee bar made for a better effect, and as I stood underneath the huge vessel, it reminded me of the Saturn V rocket on its side at Cape Canaveral - the same scale, the same sense of travel as adventure and art.
You climb the steps at the end to a viewing gallery, but then have to double back and return to the coffee bar to make your way out - through the expensive shop. I was there less than half an hour, and read all the captions. The worst thing is that I love the Cutty Sark - it played a part in my first date with the Dr all those years ago, and was a landmark when I lived down the road. I even had the Slitheen sail it round the Mediterranean in a Doctor Who book. I already adored the ship; it took a lot to be left so cold. A costly disappointment.
Also had a chance to nose round the newly restored Cutty Sark. I'd last been there in 2004 for a wedding, with a disco on the low-ceiled upper deck. I had to dance between the steel girders that came down to my shoulders. How strange to return to it in its new glory - and be so disappointed.
First, it's £12 for an adult ticket, which is pretty steep and made me glad I was visiting on my own. You'd expect some pretty good interpretation for that money, but no. You pass through the expensive gift shop, up a ramp into the lowest part of the ship. There, a few of the beams are labelled - which would be quite useful if you knew your nautical structural terminology.
There are then what look like stacked crates of tea, with brief captions explaining the history of tea in the UK (introduced in the 1650s, made fashionable a decade later by Catherine of Braganza and then the essential British drink when, to counter Dutch traders smuggling the stuff, the tax on it was significantly reduced). There's also a short film about the Cutty Sark itself, and more about its owners and the races its raced in.
You then move upstairs to the level I once danced in... and it seemed a little bare. I read everything to be read and it took less than 10 minutes. I guess that might have been different if the place had been crowded, but there was nothing to hold the interest for more than a moment: a display about the type of sheep that were traded, a reference to the opium wars (rather glossing over what the British inflicted on China to protect its own trade).
The deck affords amazing views of London - with the Shard and the London Eye clear even on a nasty day:
 |
| View from the deck of the Cutty Sark, looking west up the Thames |
I took the lift down to the lower floor (the lift building is built on the spot where the TARDIS lands in Dimensions in Time - the philistines) and emerged into what I thought was an expensive cafe. There's something odd about the way the coffee bar dominates one end of this otherwise eye-popping space, the gleaming, copper bottom of the ship hanging in the air above you. It gives the space a cold and corporate feeling, like the ship is merely an expensive bit of art in the lobby of some faceless multinational.
Moving away from the coffee bar made for a better effect, and as I stood underneath the huge vessel, it reminded me of the Saturn V rocket on its side at Cape Canaveral - the same scale, the same sense of travel as adventure and art.
At the end of the room was a strange display of figureheads, which might have been more appealing if there'd been more about what each represented, or how their role changed over time. It's nice to look at but tells you nothing of note.
You climb the steps at the end to a viewing gallery, but then have to double back and return to the coffee bar to make your way out - through the expensive shop. I was there less than half an hour, and read all the captions. The worst thing is that I love the Cutty Sark - it played a part in my first date with the Dr all those years ago, and was a landmark when I lived down the road. I even had the Slitheen sail it round the Mediterranean in a Doctor Who book. I already adored the ship; it took a lot to be left so cold. A costly disappointment.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Ancient Egypt Smash - comic-writing workshop
This week, I helped Kel Winser with a comic-writing workshop for 17 year-olds, run at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. I've done events like this before, and am generally asked in to talk about being a jobbing writer and the sorts of things that come up when I'm writing comics. I also have original artwork from a strip I wrote (drawn by the amazing John Ross from Doctor Who Adventures), and it helps the kids to see the stages the work goes through before it goes to print.
This time we tried something different and I was more involved. Kel asked me to write a script for the attendees to draw. The idea was that each attendee would draw one or two panels each, telling the story between them. They'd have to work together to agree character designs, setting and so on.
The museum was also keen for me to include aspects of Egyptology (and the workshop included an exercise in drawing objects from life), something about modern Egypt, the practice of archaeology itself and the ancient culture of Egypt - which isn't exactly easy in three pages of six panels each. So here's what I wrote:
ANCIENT EGYPT SMASH!
Script © Simon Guerrier 2012
PAGE ONE (OF THREE) – SIX PANELS
PANEL ONE
Establishing shot: Egypt in the future. A mix of the ancient and the futuristic. Pyramids (not the ones at Giza – something more unusual), but with skyscrapers nearby, and flying cars. Small detail in this: an archaeological dig, with the entrance to an excavation.
CAPTION:
Egypt. 2212 AD.
PANEL TWO
A dark tomb being excavated. Closed doors with hieroglyphics (or your own strange writing) on them. In front of them kneels a figure, a silhouette, holding a torch as she reads. Though we don't know it yet, she's a woman – but we'll meet MAGGIE in the next panel. There are other archaeologists working nearby.
CAPTION:
Where incredible finds are still being made...
MAGGIE:
So it says... Oh.
MAGGIE 2:
“Death to men who enter here...”
PANEL THREE
MAGGIE lifts a torch to investigate what she's found. She's an accomplished archaeologist, but she's NOT River Song or Lara Croft or any other hero you already know. Her clothes are practical but futuristic. She wears glasses.
MAGGIE:
Good job I'm not a man.
MAGGIE 2:
But you lot best stay back...
PANEL FOUR
Same as PANEL TWO, but MAGGIE pushes the doors with her hand and the doors creak open. We can just see inside parts of the two giant ROBOTS inside.
CAPTION:
Creeeeeeeek!
PANEL FIVE
MAGGIE holds the torch up to examine two huge robots, their designs based on Egyptian gods (you pick which ones). ROBOT 1 and ROBOT 2 look brand new. We need to see their faces, and their blank, staring eyes (to make the next panel work).
MAGGIE:
They're amazing. So perfectly preserved!
PANEL SIX
Close on the robots' faces as their eyes light up. MAGGIE falls back in horror. The ROBOTS speech bubbles are in a different, more mechanical typeface and the bubbles are more square.
ROBOT 1:
That's real nice of you, puny human.
MAGGIE:
Oh!
PAGE TWO – SIX PANELS
PANEL ONE
ROBOT 1 and ROBOT 2 smash their way through the doors and out of the tomb. The archaeologists run away, but MAGGIE tries to keep up with the robots.
CAPTION:
Crash! Thunk!
ARCHAEOLOGIST:
Eeek!
MAGGIE:
But you're... You're alive.
ROBOT 2:
Well, d'uh. God's don't die.
PANEL TWO
The ROBOTS stand outside the dig, gazing off at the skyscrapers, the flying cars (as PAGE ONE, PANEL ONE). MAGGIE running after them, struggling to keep up.
ROBOT 1:
How long did we sleep?
ROBOT 2:
I'll check the position of stars...
PANEL THREE
ROBOT 1 leaning over to look, in amazement, at the reading on ROBOT 2's wrist. MAGGIE tries to intercede.
ROBOT 1:
Woah! What?!?
ROBOT 2:
Must be a glitch.
MAGGIE:
The doors of your tomb were sealed more than 4,000 years ago.
PANEL FOUR
The robots, shocked, turn on MAGGIE.
ROBOT 2:
The humans tricked us!
MAGGIE:
What? We didn't do anything!
PANEL FIVE
ROBOT 2 gestures at the skyscrapers, the flying cars.
ROBOT 2:
They locked us away – and built a world of their own!
ROBOT 2 2:
So we'll smash it!
PANEL SIX
The ROBOTS take to their air, leaving MAGGIE behind.
MAGGIE:
Wait! Come back!
MAGGIE 2:
What have I done?
PAGE THREE – SIX PANELS
PANEL ONE
The two ROBOTS smash a famous landmark from somewhere round the world. The bigger, the madder, the more recognisable, the better.
CAPTION:
Smash!
ROBOT 2:
Ha ha!
PANEL TWO
The two ROBOTS destroy ANOTHER famous landmark somewhere round the world. It has to be from a different country than the one in PANEL ONE.
ROBOT 1:
Good to stretch after all that time asleep.
CAPTION:
Crunch!
PANEL THREE
The two ROBOTS in the air, one holding on to a warplane, the other smashing into one. Behind them, lots of warplanes attacking.
CAPTION:
The humans try to fight back, but...
ROBOT 1:
Is this the best they can do?
CAPTION:
Clunk! Crunk!
PANEL FOUR
The ROBOTS in the air, the ground below them littered with broken planes and tanks.
ROBOT 1:
Okay. What do we smash next?
PANEL FIVE
From behind the robots as they look down – at a children's playground, with swings and slides, kids playing.
ROBOT 1:
Oh wow!
ROBOT 2:
Perfect.
PANEL SIX
The giant ROBOTS... on the swings. Small children stare and point and laugh.
ROBOT 1:
This is amazing! Wheee!
ROBOT 2:
Yeah, okay, humans. You can keep your world.
END
This time we tried something different and I was more involved. Kel asked me to write a script for the attendees to draw. The idea was that each attendee would draw one or two panels each, telling the story between them. They'd have to work together to agree character designs, setting and so on.
The museum was also keen for me to include aspects of Egyptology (and the workshop included an exercise in drawing objects from life), something about modern Egypt, the practice of archaeology itself and the ancient culture of Egypt - which isn't exactly easy in three pages of six panels each. So here's what I wrote:
ANCIENT EGYPT SMASH!
Script © Simon Guerrier 2012
PAGE ONE (OF THREE) – SIX PANELS
PANEL ONE
Establishing shot: Egypt in the future. A mix of the ancient and the futuristic. Pyramids (not the ones at Giza – something more unusual), but with skyscrapers nearby, and flying cars. Small detail in this: an archaeological dig, with the entrance to an excavation.
CAPTION:
Egypt. 2212 AD.
PANEL TWO
A dark tomb being excavated. Closed doors with hieroglyphics (or your own strange writing) on them. In front of them kneels a figure, a silhouette, holding a torch as she reads. Though we don't know it yet, she's a woman – but we'll meet MAGGIE in the next panel. There are other archaeologists working nearby.
CAPTION:
Where incredible finds are still being made...
MAGGIE:
So it says... Oh.
MAGGIE 2:
“Death to men who enter here...”
PANEL THREE
MAGGIE lifts a torch to investigate what she's found. She's an accomplished archaeologist, but she's NOT River Song or Lara Croft or any other hero you already know. Her clothes are practical but futuristic. She wears glasses.
MAGGIE:
Good job I'm not a man.
MAGGIE 2:
But you lot best stay back...
PANEL FOUR
Same as PANEL TWO, but MAGGIE pushes the doors with her hand and the doors creak open. We can just see inside parts of the two giant ROBOTS inside.
CAPTION:
Creeeeeeeek!
PANEL FIVE
MAGGIE holds the torch up to examine two huge robots, their designs based on Egyptian gods (you pick which ones). ROBOT 1 and ROBOT 2 look brand new. We need to see their faces, and their blank, staring eyes (to make the next panel work).
MAGGIE:
They're amazing. So perfectly preserved!
 |
| Page one, panel six by Ryan |
Close on the robots' faces as their eyes light up. MAGGIE falls back in horror. The ROBOTS speech bubbles are in a different, more mechanical typeface and the bubbles are more square.
ROBOT 1:
That's real nice of you, puny human.
MAGGIE:
Oh!
PAGE TWO – SIX PANELS
PANEL ONE
ROBOT 1 and ROBOT 2 smash their way through the doors and out of the tomb. The archaeologists run away, but MAGGIE tries to keep up with the robots.
CAPTION:
Crash! Thunk!
ARCHAEOLOGIST:
Eeek!
MAGGIE:
But you're... You're alive.
ROBOT 2:
Well, d'uh. God's don't die.
PANEL TWO
The ROBOTS stand outside the dig, gazing off at the skyscrapers, the flying cars (as PAGE ONE, PANEL ONE). MAGGIE running after them, struggling to keep up.
ROBOT 1:
How long did we sleep?
ROBOT 2:
I'll check the position of stars...
 |
| Page two, panel three by Chantelle |
ROBOT 1 leaning over to look, in amazement, at the reading on ROBOT 2's wrist. MAGGIE tries to intercede.
ROBOT 1:
Woah! What?!?
ROBOT 2:
Must be a glitch.
MAGGIE:
The doors of your tomb were sealed more than 4,000 years ago.
PANEL FOUR
The robots, shocked, turn on MAGGIE.
ROBOT 2:
The humans tricked us!
MAGGIE:
What? We didn't do anything!
PANEL FIVE
ROBOT 2 gestures at the skyscrapers, the flying cars.
ROBOT 2:
They locked us away – and built a world of their own!
ROBOT 2 2:
So we'll smash it!
PANEL SIX
The ROBOTS take to their air, leaving MAGGIE behind.
MAGGIE:
Wait! Come back!
MAGGIE 2:
What have I done?
PAGE THREE – SIX PANELS
PANEL ONE
The two ROBOTS smash a famous landmark from somewhere round the world. The bigger, the madder, the more recognisable, the better.
CAPTION:
Smash!
ROBOT 2:
Ha ha!
PANEL TWO
The two ROBOTS destroy ANOTHER famous landmark somewhere round the world. It has to be from a different country than the one in PANEL ONE.
ROBOT 1:
Good to stretch after all that time asleep.
CAPTION:
Crunch!
PANEL THREE
The two ROBOTS in the air, one holding on to a warplane, the other smashing into one. Behind them, lots of warplanes attacking.
CAPTION:
The humans try to fight back, but...
ROBOT 1:
Is this the best they can do?
CAPTION:
Clunk! Crunk!
PANEL FOUR
The ROBOTS in the air, the ground below them littered with broken planes and tanks.
ROBOT 1:
Okay. What do we smash next?
PANEL FIVE
From behind the robots as they look down – at a children's playground, with swings and slides, kids playing.
ROBOT 1:
Oh wow!
ROBOT 2:
Perfect.
 |
| Page three, panel six by Kel |
The giant ROBOTS... on the swings. Small children stare and point and laugh.
ROBOT 1:
This is amazing! Wheee!
ROBOT 2:
Yeah, okay, humans. You can keep your world.
END
Monday, August 20, 2012
Make your own comic drawn by Lee Sullivan
In 2007, I devised a task for a comic-writing workshop aimed at teenagers being run by the V&A's Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. The following four images by amazing comics artist Lee Sullivan were printed out on postcards.
Use the images to tell a story. You decide which order they go in, and add captions and speech bubbles. You can add to the images or create new panels of your own. You don't have to use all (or any) of the panels. Enjoy.
(Please note: you're welcome to try the task yourself or share it with your friends so long as you don't make money from it. The task and scripts are (c) Simon Guerrier 2007, and the artwork (c) Lee Sullivan 2007.)
To prove the idea worked, I wrote two short scripts using the images in different combinations. In discussion with the organisers, I avoided super heroes, violence and explosions, and also tried to tie the images and stories to the age and experience of the kids attending. But the kids were (and you are) not limited by those restrictions.
VERSION ONE
PANEL 1
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BOY IN CAP are on their phones, BLOND BOY is whistling and MONSTER looks at us.
CAPTION:
Just another day waiting for the 57.
CAPTION 2:
With an invisible monster.
MONSTER:
(THINKS): Cor, I’m bored. I’ll use my powers to make that pretty girl see me and fall in love.
PANEL 2
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY looked shocked. BOY IN CAP gazes at MONSTER.
MONSTER:
(THINKS) Drat, missed!
PANEL 3
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY hold hands. BOY IN CAP struggles in the arms of MONSTER.
MONSTER:
(THINKS) She's fallen for the wrong person!
MONSTER 2:
Hmf! I’ll just have to eat this one.
PANEL 4
Bus drives away with RED HAIR LADY and BLOND BOY.
RED-HAIRED GIRL:
Is that guy in the hat… flying?
BLOND BOY:
Help!
[END]
VERSION TWO
PANEL 1
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY hold hands. BOY IN CAP struggles in the arms of MONSTER.
CAPTION:
Waiting for the last bus on Sunday night.
RED-HAIRED GIRL:
It’s been such a great weekend!
MONSTER:
I just want a little kiss goodbye.
PANEL 2
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BOY IN CAP are on their phones, BLOND BOY is whistling and MONSTER looks at us.
RED-HAIRED GIRL:
Yeah, I’m just seeing him off. Be home soon.
MONSTER:
Heh heh. I don’t just want a little kiss.
PANEL 3
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY looked shocked. BOY IN CAP gazes at MONSTER.
BOY IN CAP:
Well how about I stay with you and she takes Blondie home?
PANEL 4
Bus drives away with RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY.
BLOND BOY:
A swap!
BOY IN CAP:
I bet Mum doesn’t even notice.
[END]
Use the images to tell a story. You decide which order they go in, and add captions and speech bubbles. You can add to the images or create new panels of your own. You don't have to use all (or any) of the panels. Enjoy.
(Please note: you're welcome to try the task yourself or share it with your friends so long as you don't make money from it. The task and scripts are (c) Simon Guerrier 2007, and the artwork (c) Lee Sullivan 2007.)
VERSION ONE
PANEL 1
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BOY IN CAP are on their phones, BLOND BOY is whistling and MONSTER looks at us.
CAPTION:
Just another day waiting for the 57.
CAPTION 2:
With an invisible monster.
MONSTER:
(THINKS): Cor, I’m bored. I’ll use my powers to make that pretty girl see me and fall in love.
PANEL 2
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY looked shocked. BOY IN CAP gazes at MONSTER.
MONSTER:
(THINKS) Drat, missed!
PANEL 3
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY hold hands. BOY IN CAP struggles in the arms of MONSTER.
MONSTER:
(THINKS) She's fallen for the wrong person!
MONSTER 2:
Hmf! I’ll just have to eat this one.
PANEL 4
Bus drives away with RED HAIR LADY and BLOND BOY.
RED-HAIRED GIRL:
Is that guy in the hat… flying?
BLOND BOY:
Help!
[END]
VERSION TWO
PANEL 1
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY hold hands. BOY IN CAP struggles in the arms of MONSTER.
CAPTION:
Waiting for the last bus on Sunday night.
RED-HAIRED GIRL:
It’s been such a great weekend!
MONSTER:
I just want a little kiss goodbye.
PANEL 2
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BOY IN CAP are on their phones, BLOND BOY is whistling and MONSTER looks at us.
RED-HAIRED GIRL:
Yeah, I’m just seeing him off. Be home soon.
MONSTER:
Heh heh. I don’t just want a little kiss.
PANEL 3
RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY looked shocked. BOY IN CAP gazes at MONSTER.
BOY IN CAP:
Well how about I stay with you and she takes Blondie home?
PANEL 4
Bus drives away with RED-HAIRED GIRL and BLOND BOY.
BLOND BOY:
A swap!
BOY IN CAP:
I bet Mum doesn’t even notice.
[END]
Saturday, January 21, 2012
The sign of 'the penguins'
A fun afternoon in Greenwich, first to be grilled for a forthcoming podcast about some things what I have writ, and then to a special preview of the newly reopened Caird library at the Maritime Museum.
Whereas once the museum's vast wealth of records on the history of ships, pirates, migration and cool space stuff was housed down the road in Kidbrooke, it's now neatly packed into 9 kilometres of shelves at the museum, which I got to poke my nose round. The chief appeal will be to maritime researchers and those tracking family history (and there's a digitisation project going on at the moment).
But for the casual, nerdy passerby there was plenty to excite, if you have the sense and sophistication to be excited by weird old books. There's volume after velum-wrapped volume of old maps, complete with dragons and monsters, and a sailcloth bound edition (1779) of William Buchan's Domestic medicine: or, a treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases by regimen and simple medicines with an appendix containing a dispensatory for the use of private practitioners - this copy as used on the Bounty under Bligh.
Of the greatest excitement to me was a copy of Aurora Australis, the book written and published by the British Antarctic Expedition of 1907 over the winter (April to July) of 1908. It's full of drawings, poems and short accounts of the trip by members of the crew such as "Interview with an emperor" (i.e. an emperor penguin). Dork that I am, I thrilled to see ice-berg hyphenated. But the book, the physical object, is a thing of wonder.
The front matter explains that it was "Printed at the sign of 'the penguins'" - beside a neat, square logo - "by Joyce and Wild. Latitude 77°..32' South, Longitude 166°..12' East Antarctica". One of the librarians helpfully told me that this was one of maybe 100 copies produced (the museum holds two copies). That's the print run of some of the small-press stuff I've worked on or reviewed. And they don't compare.
The cover is hard wood - made from a packing case, as the stamp on the inside clearly shows. But it's the quality of the book that's really impressive: good quality lay-out and editing, printed beautifully on a good stock of paper.
So we get an impression of the kind of man that expedition leader Ernest Shackleton might have been in his need to add a second, "Additional preface" with the following caveat:
Whereas once the museum's vast wealth of records on the history of ships, pirates, migration and cool space stuff was housed down the road in Kidbrooke, it's now neatly packed into 9 kilometres of shelves at the museum, which I got to poke my nose round. The chief appeal will be to maritime researchers and those tracking family history (and there's a digitisation project going on at the moment).
But for the casual, nerdy passerby there was plenty to excite, if you have the sense and sophistication to be excited by weird old books. There's volume after velum-wrapped volume of old maps, complete with dragons and monsters, and a sailcloth bound edition (1779) of William Buchan's Domestic medicine: or, a treatise on the prevention and cure of diseases by regimen and simple medicines with an appendix containing a dispensatory for the use of private practitioners - this copy as used on the Bounty under Bligh.
Of the greatest excitement to me was a copy of Aurora Australis, the book written and published by the British Antarctic Expedition of 1907 over the winter (April to July) of 1908. It's full of drawings, poems and short accounts of the trip by members of the crew such as "Interview with an emperor" (i.e. an emperor penguin). Dork that I am, I thrilled to see ice-berg hyphenated. But the book, the physical object, is a thing of wonder.
The front matter explains that it was "Printed at the sign of 'the penguins'" - beside a neat, square logo - "by Joyce and Wild. Latitude 77°..32' South, Longitude 166°..12' East Antarctica". One of the librarians helpfully told me that this was one of maybe 100 copies produced (the museum holds two copies). That's the print run of some of the small-press stuff I've worked on or reviewed. And they don't compare.
The cover is hard wood - made from a packing case, as the stamp on the inside clearly shows. But it's the quality of the book that's really impressive: good quality lay-out and editing, printed beautifully on a good stock of paper.
So we get an impression of the kind of man that expedition leader Ernest Shackleton might have been in his need to add a second, "Additional preface" with the following caveat:
"But the reader will understand better the difficulty of producing such a book quite up to the mark when he is told that, owing to the low temperature in the hut, the only way to keep the printing ink in a fit state to use was to have a candle burning under the inking plate; so if some pages are printed more lightly than others it is due to the difficulty of regulating the heat, and consequently the thinning or thickening of the ink. Again the printing office was only six feet by seven and had to accommodate a large sewing machine and bunks for two men, so the lack of room was a disadvantage; but I feel that those who see this book will not be captious critics".Shackleton would later be a member of Captain Scott's ill-fated expedition, while his amazing, old-skool heroism in getting his crew - every one of them - safely back from the Antarctic is featured in this week's Corpse Talk comic strip by Adam Murphy in issue 3 of the Phoenix comic. The books I've mentioned - and a whole bunch more cool stuff - is available on request at the Caird library - subject to the terms and conditions on the website.
Monday, December 19, 2011
One man and his dog
Been a little busy, but on Friday I got two trips out. First, Scott Andrews took me to see Sherlock Holmes 2, which was whizzy and silly and fun. Then I made the epic trek to Chiswick to review Hogarth's house for something out next year (which I shall post about when it happens). What follows is stuff I didn't say in that.
Hogarth lived in Chiswick between 1749 and his death in 1764. Chiswick seems quite proud of the connection. His house was opened to the public in 1904, but re-opened in November after a fire in 2009. In 2001, a statue by Jim Mathieson of Hogarth and his pug-dog Trump was unveiled on Chiswick High Street. It was unveiled by Ian Hislop and David Hockney - I assume symbolic of his status as satirist and artist.
A picture by Hogarth shows the house surrounded by fields, but now it's right next to a busy road and roundabout (both named after Hogarth). You can see and hear the traffic grumping past as you poke round the displays. (I did not put in my review that Donna Noble realises her taxi driver is a robot on this very road.)
The house was built in what was once an orchard, and the mulberry tree that apparently still blossoms each year is thought to be older than the building. You can just about make out the tree in this picture.
Hogarth lived in Chiswick between 1749 and his death in 1764. Chiswick seems quite proud of the connection. His house was opened to the public in 1904, but re-opened in November after a fire in 2009. In 2001, a statue by Jim Mathieson of Hogarth and his pug-dog Trump was unveiled on Chiswick High Street. It was unveiled by Ian Hislop and David Hockney - I assume symbolic of his status as satirist and artist.
A picture by Hogarth shows the house surrounded by fields, but now it's right next to a busy road and roundabout (both named after Hogarth). You can see and hear the traffic grumping past as you poke round the displays. (I did not put in my review that Donna Noble realises her taxi driver is a robot on this very road.)
The house was built in what was once an orchard, and the mulberry tree that apparently still blossoms each year is thought to be older than the building. You can just about make out the tree in this picture.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Wheeler
“Archaeologist and Man of Action” says the back cover of Still Digging, the 1955 autobiography by archaeologist, soldier and “acclaimed Television Personality of the Year”, Mortimer Wheeler. Wheeler's something of a hero – Indiana Jones as played by Terry-Thomas, with moustache and twinkling mischief. This illustrated 2'6 paperback has been a joy to read.
Wheeler himself calls the book,
Wheeler delights in archaeology as a proper, bona fide science, describing particularly fine discoveries or developments in method, and reporting with special glee when some new piece of evidence torpedoes a long-standing theory. He's surprisingly modest about his own contributions to the field – such as dividing digs into grids. Acutely aware that so many of his peers had been killed in the First World War, he concludes that his eminence in the profession,
He's quick to credit Tessa's contributions to several of his digs. But there's just a single, brief mention (on page 183) of Margaret, his wife at the time of writing, and no mention at all of the wife in between.
As I posted a few weeks back, Mavis was drawn and bedded by Augustus John – before and perhaps after her marriage to Wheeler. Wheeler divorced her in 1942 having caught her with another lover and excised her completely from his memoirs. John, though, gets a mention several times – and even gave the book it's title. (There's no mention of the duel.)
Wheeler is otherwise cagey on the subject of girls. Apart from Tessa, the only romantic entanglement is a newly liberated Italian contessa, who calls him “the General” before he escapes her advances. He's such an old rascal otherwise I suspect his private life might not have been nearly so tame as the book implies.
There are plenty of vignettes about the celebrities he encountered – such as eminent archaeologists Pitt-Rivers and Petrie. But Wheeler was also clearly interested in everyone, no matter their origin or status. The appeal here is as much his perspective as what he did or who he met. As an archaeologist and war-veteran, he takes the long view and sees his own insignificance in history.
Wheeler himself calls the book,
“an average life in one of the great formative periods of history”.He deftly brings to life service in two World Wars and the violence of the partitioning of India up close – there's a thrilling account of him rescuing a Muslim colleague's family from a siege only for them to tick him off for not bringing their luggage, too. All in all, it's a rather chappish rollick through his life, with excerpts from diaries and correspondence to add vivid contemporary detail. It's generally fun and good-humoured, with an eye for the absurd character or moment. At the same time, he's forthright in his opinions.Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Still Digging – Adventures in Archaeology (1958 [55]), p 9.
“The British Museum I abjured [as a young man] as I abjure it today, a place that suffers from a sort of spiritual cataract and out-stares the visitor with unseeing eyes.”My 1958 edition adds a footnote to this view:
“I regret this remark. It was written before I became a Trustee of the British Museum and, had truth permitted, I should have deleted it.”That forthrightness is matched by an unapologetic vocabulary when speaking of other nations. There's plenty, for example, on the habits of “the Hun”. Yet for all the racial terminology, he's also strikingly tolerant for his time. The following passage is a typical mix:Ibid., p. 24.
“I have in mind the sixty-one students who flocked to me from the universities of India and from the archaeological departments of the Indian states: swarthy Muslims from the North-West Frontier and the Punjab, little round-faced talkative Bengalis, quick-witted Madrasis, dark southerners from Cochin and Travancore. Also, today – only a few years later – such an assemblage of races, tongues and creeds would no longer be feasible. Religious and political barriers have split asunder those who in 1944 worked together with single purpose and common understanding.”It's not just that he wished other races would bally well get along with one another. He's an enthusiastic participant in World War Two, but when the Eighth Army pushes the Germans out of Libya, he's happy to work with Italian – that is, enemy – and Libyan archaeologists, freely acknowledging their superior skill and expertise. He also readily credits the many women archaeologists he's worked with over the years, and is carefully to cite both their unmarried and married names. Foreigners, natives and ladies are treated as equals – all that matters is that they're up to the job.Ibid., p. 174.
Wheeler delights in archaeology as a proper, bona fide science, describing particularly fine discoveries or developments in method, and reporting with special glee when some new piece of evidence torpedoes a long-standing theory. He's surprisingly modest about his own contributions to the field – such as dividing digs into grids. Acutely aware that so many of his peers had been killed in the First World War, he concludes that his eminence in the profession,
“was the outcome of circumstance, not merit”.There's a shadow over much of his otherwise jolly outlook. As well as the wars, there's the death of Wheeler's first wife, Tessa, in 1936. Wheeler was away on a dig at the time. His account of learning the news while heading back to England and seeing it in the paper is told with exemplary restraint, which makes it all the more haunting.Ibid., p. 206.
He's quick to credit Tessa's contributions to several of his digs. But there's just a single, brief mention (on page 183) of Margaret, his wife at the time of writing, and no mention at all of the wife in between.
As I posted a few weeks back, Mavis was drawn and bedded by Augustus John – before and perhaps after her marriage to Wheeler. Wheeler divorced her in 1942 having caught her with another lover and excised her completely from his memoirs. John, though, gets a mention several times – and even gave the book it's title. (There's no mention of the duel.)
Wheeler is otherwise cagey on the subject of girls. Apart from Tessa, the only romantic entanglement is a newly liberated Italian contessa, who calls him “the General” before he escapes her advances. He's such an old rascal otherwise I suspect his private life might not have been nearly so tame as the book implies.
There are plenty of vignettes about the celebrities he encountered – such as eminent archaeologists Pitt-Rivers and Petrie. But Wheeler was also clearly interested in everyone, no matter their origin or status. The appeal here is as much his perspective as what he did or who he met. As an archaeologist and war-veteran, he takes the long view and sees his own insignificance in history.
“At its best, this book will be little more than a scrapbook: probably few lives are otherwise, save those of the very successful or the very humdrum.”But there's also a compelling philosophy behind these rag-tag adventures. On the same page, he says,
“I do not believe in much except hard work, which serves as an antidote to disillusion and a substitute for faith.”He says, but for John and his publishers, he'd have called his book “Twenty Years Asleep” - based on the line in Don Juan that we miss a whole third of our lives. Wheeler is a fidget, too eager to get out and explore all the fascinating stuff. His enthusiasm engaged generations of young archaeologists all around the world, and then the TV-viewing public. That delight in rigorous investigation, and the wry, self-mocking twinkle in his eye, is just as arresting today.
Ibid., p. 9.
“Whilst adoring luxury I abhor waste, and am firmly of the view that most of us are unconscionably wasteful in this matter of sleep. It must at the same time be added that I have been made aware of other opinions.”Ibid., p. 205.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Jaunt
Had a nice couple of days' escape from London before our building work starts in earnest. Went to Ely for the afternoon, mooched round the cathedral and Cromwell's House (I was there in 2007, too), then fell into a pub.
Spent the evening in Cambridge eating pizza at Torchwood, and next morning did the Sedgwick -
- and Fitzwilliam museums.
The Dr loved the newly redesigned Greek and Roman bits, and I found some beautiful Augustus John landscapes and even a sculpture by Eric Gill. So that was nice.
Thence lunch with A. and A. and a trip to the Polar Museum, with its ceiling maps of the poles by Gill's brother MacDonald. The museum is mostly now about the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, but there's plenty of material on polar exploration by Europeans, and the story of Scott's ill-fated mission still packs one hell of a punch.
Spent the afternoon punting and pottering (I found the alleyway from Shada / The Five Doctors). The Fort St George pub has carved ladies behind the bar that seem to be slightly naughtier versions of the caryatids.
Then went to dinner at Cotto which was, frankly, amazing.
Next day we schlepped back to London and mooched round the Out of this World exhibition at the British Library, which is packed with detail. Rather pleased I'd read the majority of the key texts, though think it misses a trick by not addressing issues of race and class that are often so implicit in ideas of the "alien". And it still seems strange to see a sci-fi exhibition feature lots of Doctor Who but no Star Trek (though my teenage self would have cheered).
Looked through the windows of the Gilbert Scott restaurant which the Dr would like a trip to for her birthday. Instead we had a drink in the bar at St Pancras, where the service was immaculate. Went for a pee, though, to find this lady staring down at me.
Home to feed the cats and then out to dinner with @classicdw to tweet all about Robot - Tom Baker's first story as Doctor Who. Lovely tea afterwards and then home. Done some rewrites this morning and now off to a birthday party, with a long week of typing and building work to come.
Spent the evening in Cambridge eating pizza at Torchwood, and next morning did the Sedgwick -
- and Fitzwilliam museums.
The Dr loved the newly redesigned Greek and Roman bits, and I found some beautiful Augustus John landscapes and even a sculpture by Eric Gill. So that was nice.
Thence lunch with A. and A. and a trip to the Polar Museum, with its ceiling maps of the poles by Gill's brother MacDonald. The museum is mostly now about the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, but there's plenty of material on polar exploration by Europeans, and the story of Scott's ill-fated mission still packs one hell of a punch.
Spent the afternoon punting and pottering (I found the alleyway from Shada / The Five Doctors). The Fort St George pub has carved ladies behind the bar that seem to be slightly naughtier versions of the caryatids.
Then went to dinner at Cotto which was, frankly, amazing.
Next day we schlepped back to London and mooched round the Out of this World exhibition at the British Library, which is packed with detail. Rather pleased I'd read the majority of the key texts, though think it misses a trick by not addressing issues of race and class that are often so implicit in ideas of the "alien". And it still seems strange to see a sci-fi exhibition feature lots of Doctor Who but no Star Trek (though my teenage self would have cheered).
Looked through the windows of the Gilbert Scott restaurant which the Dr would like a trip to for her birthday. Instead we had a drink in the bar at St Pancras, where the service was immaculate. Went for a pee, though, to find this lady staring down at me.
Home to feed the cats and then out to dinner with @classicdw to tweet all about Robot - Tom Baker's first story as Doctor Who. Lovely tea afterwards and then home. Done some rewrites this morning and now off to a birthday party, with a long week of typing and building work to come.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
The awkward age
I was in Copenhagen at the weekend. The Dr had been there for a week shadowing a new Egyptology exhibition and I joined her for the last couple of nights.
On Saturday, with my birthday hoving into view, we trained out to the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, with five different kinds of longship on display and lots of other cool stuff.
I liked how much they used the Bayeaux tapestry to show how these people once lived: gleaning from the comic-strip history vital clues about colours, tools and shapes, even the haircuts of different groups of people.
A panel on the history of the Vikings describes them getting over their 'awkward age' (i.e. marauding round other countries, raping and pillaging) in time to lead the Europeans on their crusades (i.e. marauding round other countries, rapings and pillaging).
But it also gave the lie to the Vikings as burly savages, showing the sophistication of their work. The ships were made from flexible, bendy planks, and then expanded over the fire to make them longer and lighter. That made strong, flexible and nippy crafty, ideal for stealth operations. But larger ships could carry plenty of cargo, and (as in Jonathan Clements' Brief History of the Vikings) there was a lot of emphasis on the friendly trade that was much more the norm than the pillaging.
Having read the Sagas of the Icelanders last year, it was good to see lots on the multicultural mixing of the time. As I explained to the Dr, the history of the Vikings is inextricably mixed up with the history of the UK.
As well as the original ships, expertly preserved, there was also a lot on the experimental archaeological project to rebuild a longship and sail it across the North Sea and circumnavigate the UK. This meant lots of footage and panels about sea-sickness, which at best disrupted watches and basic ship duties and at worst took out a third of the crew. Watching the crowded boat sitting so low in stormy and dark water, I got a sense of why the Vikings might not have been in the best moods when they arrived anywhere.
In the drizzle outside the museum there were tourists in horned helmets (though the Vikings didn't wear horns) rowing for themselves, and various beardie people at stalls selling hand-crafted Vikingish tat. I settled for a chicken sandwich - and was delighted to discover that the Danish word for chicken is 'kylling'. And just by the museum is a small fast-food place: Viking Pizza.
The Dr also took me round the prehistoric bits of the National Museum, and had clearly had a lovely week exploring other museums in the week. Copenhagen's a friendly, bustling city crammed full of people on bikes. I had a lovely time and only saw a small fraction, so am hoping to go back again.
On Saturday, with my birthday hoving into view, we trained out to the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, with five different kinds of longship on display and lots of other cool stuff.
I liked how much they used the Bayeaux tapestry to show how these people once lived: gleaning from the comic-strip history vital clues about colours, tools and shapes, even the haircuts of different groups of people.
A panel on the history of the Vikings describes them getting over their 'awkward age' (i.e. marauding round other countries, raping and pillaging) in time to lead the Europeans on their crusades (i.e. marauding round other countries, rapings and pillaging).
But it also gave the lie to the Vikings as burly savages, showing the sophistication of their work. The ships were made from flexible, bendy planks, and then expanded over the fire to make them longer and lighter. That made strong, flexible and nippy crafty, ideal for stealth operations. But larger ships could carry plenty of cargo, and (as in Jonathan Clements' Brief History of the Vikings) there was a lot of emphasis on the friendly trade that was much more the norm than the pillaging.
Having read the Sagas of the Icelanders last year, it was good to see lots on the multicultural mixing of the time. As I explained to the Dr, the history of the Vikings is inextricably mixed up with the history of the UK.
As well as the original ships, expertly preserved, there was also a lot on the experimental archaeological project to rebuild a longship and sail it across the North Sea and circumnavigate the UK. This meant lots of footage and panels about sea-sickness, which at best disrupted watches and basic ship duties and at worst took out a third of the crew. Watching the crowded boat sitting so low in stormy and dark water, I got a sense of why the Vikings might not have been in the best moods when they arrived anywhere.
In the drizzle outside the museum there were tourists in horned helmets (though the Vikings didn't wear horns) rowing for themselves, and various beardie people at stalls selling hand-crafted Vikingish tat. I settled for a chicken sandwich - and was delighted to discover that the Danish word for chicken is 'kylling'. And just by the museum is a small fast-food place: Viking Pizza.
The Dr also took me round the prehistoric bits of the National Museum, and had clearly had a lovely week exploring other museums in the week. Copenhagen's a friendly, bustling city crammed full of people on bikes. I had a lovely time and only saw a small fraction, so am hoping to go back again.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Two plays
I have two new plays out this month. Sorry.
First there's Dark Shadows - The Creeping Fog, Click the link for trailer, more details and to buy the damnable thing. The story, set in a London museum during the Second World War, stars David Selby (he's in The Social Network, you know) and Matthew Waterhouse. Thrillingly, it's Matthew's Big Finish debut (but he's not playing Adric. Or is he? Is he?!? No he isn't.)
Producers James Goss and Joseph Lidster commissioned me because I didn't know too much about Dark Shadows. They wanted a standalone, spooky story that would appeal to old-skool fans of Dark Shadows but also to a broader audience. So this is, clearly, the perfect thing to buy now so that you're all set for the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie next year. Yes it is. Quiet at the back.
Lots more about Dark Shadows at the Collinwood site, run by clever Stuart Manning who also did the cover for my story.
Then there's Doctor Who and the Cold Equations, starring Peter Purves and Tom Allen. Click the link for a trailer, more details and to buy yourself six copies. It's an exciting space adventure which has already earned 10/10 from the nice Doc Oho. Following on from The Adventure of the Perpetual Bond, the first Doctor Who and his friends Steven and Oliver find themselves on a spaceship... and things then go a bit wonky with aliens and stuff.
The lovely cover is by Simon Holub. Tom is interviewed in the new, free issue of Vortex magazine (issue 28). We recorded a third Steven and Oliver story last week.
First there's Dark Shadows - The Creeping Fog, Click the link for trailer, more details and to buy the damnable thing. The story, set in a London museum during the Second World War, stars David Selby (he's in The Social Network, you know) and Matthew Waterhouse. Thrillingly, it's Matthew's Big Finish debut (but he's not playing Adric. Or is he? Is he?!? No he isn't.)Producers James Goss and Joseph Lidster commissioned me because I didn't know too much about Dark Shadows. They wanted a standalone, spooky story that would appeal to old-skool fans of Dark Shadows but also to a broader audience. So this is, clearly, the perfect thing to buy now so that you're all set for the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie next year. Yes it is. Quiet at the back.
Lots more about Dark Shadows at the Collinwood site, run by clever Stuart Manning who also did the cover for my story.
Then there's Doctor Who and the Cold Equations, starring Peter Purves and Tom Allen. Click the link for a trailer, more details and to buy yourself six copies. It's an exciting space adventure which has already earned 10/10 from the nice Doc Oho. Following on from The Adventure of the Perpetual Bond, the first Doctor Who and his friends Steven and Oliver find themselves on a spaceship... and things then go a bit wonky with aliens and stuff.The lovely cover is by Simon Holub. Tom is interviewed in the new, free issue of Vortex magazine (issue 28). We recorded a third Steven and Oliver story last week.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Mrs King
Very busy with new house and work stuff, but here's the talk I gave on 10 February at the National Portrait Gallery...
Next month, a 29 year-old former accessories buyer for the clothing chain Jigsaw will marry a flight lieutenant from the RAF. But this won't be any ordinary wedding: Kate Middleton is marrying Prince William, second in line to the British throne.
The couple have always attracted attention from the press but the announcement last November of their wedding was something else. Every British paper ran the story on their front page – and all of them had an angle.
"Kate's very special," said the Daily Telegraph, playing up the romance. As with many papers, it highlighted the fact that the engagement ring is the one worn by William's late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales – and skirted over how her marriage had turned out. This is the royal wedding as fairy-tale.
The Daily Mail didn't seem quite so delighted. Yes, the engagement is a cause for celebration, but it's headline chides, "We got there in the end, darling," as if annoyed at having been kept waiting – or as if the happy couple owed it to the paper and the country to get engaged sooner. The Mail was also quick off the mark to use the announcement to flog some commemorative merchandise. It's the royal wedding as product, meeting the demands of its market.
"A royal wedding in the age of austerity," mused the Guardian, taking a step back to place the announcement in its socio-economic context, asking what it said about the state of the nation as a whole. Yes, okay, it's a royal wedding, but what's in it for us?
One paper didn't overtly lead with the happy couple.
There's cheery. At first sight – and in the news-stand next to other papers – this seems completely different: no smiling, happy couple, not even any colour. But what's that down in the corner? "I wish her well," says columnist Julie Burchill, "but Kate Middleton is marrying beneath her."
For all it's doing it's own thing, the Independent is still taking a position on the story. Burchill's column is a reversal of earlier press criticism of Middleton – that she wasn't posh enough for the prince. There were reports in 2007 that she used inappropriate words like “toilet” and “pardon”. Several papers have discussed whether it's appropriate for our future queen to have a job, or that her parents run a small mail-order business.
The key word is appropriate. The papers – and perhaps the rest of us – seem to believe that anyone marrying a king or queen must have an appropriate pedigree, curriculum vitae and vocabulary. But the role of consort has no formal definition, and it's a role that Kate's various predecessors have all struggled with.
I'm going to look briefly at five other people who married kings and queens of England. I'm going to look at how much power and influence they had, and what they might tell us about the role Queen Catherine will play in future.
This dashing chap is the current consort, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The photo is from 1947, the year he married the then Princess Elizabeth.
Unlike Kate Middleton, Philip was already royal. Both he and the queen are great, great grandchildren of Queen Victoria. He was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, nephew of the then king of Greece. A year after Philip was born, King Constantine was deposed and the royal family had to flee the country. Philip was, famously, carried away in a cot made from an old fruit box.
So he grew up as a prince in exile. He was taught at the Schule Sloss Salem school in Germany, which has been set up by Kurt Hahn after the First World War with the explicit intention of producing leaders for the future. When Philip was 12, Hahn was arrested for criticising the Nazis. After his release he moved to Britain and set up a new Salem school in Scotland – Gordonstoun. The young Prince Philip was one of his first students, and his sons and grandsons also went there.
I wonder how much the prince's exile and education under the Nazi-hating Hahn influenced the consort he became. As I said before, there's no formal definition of a consort's role.
Jeremy Paxman interviewed Prince Philip for his book, On Royalty, published in 2006, and asked him about his role when his wife took the throne. “I did ask various people what I was expected to do,” said the prince. “And?” asked Paxman. “They sort of looked down and shuffled their feet,” (p. 234).
Instead, the prince has been able to make the role his own. I think his education and his family's exile have taught him to be useful, to make a contribution to the advancement of the country and its people. Paxman likens him to his predecessor as Queen's Consort, Prince Albert, and remarks on a similar “Teutonic approach to work”. Paxman speaks of a “more than nominal” involvement in the 800 organisations of which the prince is patron.
We can see the influence of his old school in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, set up in the late 1950s to encourage the personal development of young people through volunteering, self-reliance, the learning of skills and sport. Since then, some 4 million young people – from all backgrounds – have taken part.
Prince Philip was a thoroughly modern consort, too, championing science and industry. He was the first royal to be interviewed on television, and was also a TV presenter. Watch Prince Philip host a live programme for the BBC's The Restless Sphere series on 30 June 1957.
It's an extraordinary programme. For more than 70 minutes, the young prince single-handedly explains the experiments to be carried out during the International Geophysical Year, including early satellite technology, solar observation and oceanography. It's fascinating to watch him deftly explain complex technical ideas, work the different props, link to and fill time around pre-recorded segments from all across the world, and generally keep the show running smoothly. In another life, he might have presented Tomorrow's World. He cuts a rather dashing figure, a Renaissance man from a far off time when we still just about had an Empire.
But the prince also discusses evidence from different sources around the world that the oceans are rising and glaciers melting – as if the climate were changing. He tells us that more evidence – much more evidence, gathered over many decades – will be needed to know for sure. And over the next decades, he championed that research and concerns about the environment. Watch Prince Philip on breakfast show TV-am in November 1987.
In many ways, the prince was ahead of the game on the environment. Perhaps his position as a statesman without portfolio, constantly meeting experts and representatives in every walk of life, gives him a unique position. He's continually briefed on the latest scientific findings, and he uses his position to share them with the rest of us.
He's still speaking on the subject today, but two things have changed. First, there has been increasing evidence for climate change and increasing numbers of people speaking about it – and against it. It has become more fashionable and political – and the royal family as a whole are expected to avoid political statements.
And secondly, something has changed about the way the royal family is represented.
“A huffy note enters his voice when he talks about how his family have been treated by the mass media,” says Paxman, who then quotes the prince: “'It is absolutely extraordinary what has happened in the last thirty years. I mean, before that we were accepted as quite normal sorts of people. But now, I mean now I reckon I have done something right if I don't appear in the media. Because I know that any appearance in it will be one of criticism.'”
That's from a chapter in the book called “Gilded but gelded”, all about the royal family's relationship with the press. That's a big subject – too big to get into here, so I'll just recommend Paxman's book. Instead I want to stay on the consort's role and responsibilities – and the fact that Prince Philip says that no one else told him what he was required to do. He has clearly set out to be useful, to help people fulfil their potential and to help the world. But his response to the way the press now responds suggests another motivation.
“I will be criticized for doing something,” he told Paxman. “So I've retreated – quite consciously – so as not to be an embarrassment. I don't want to be embarrassing.”
I mentioned appropriateness before, and I think the other side of that is embarrassment. But embarrassing who? Himself? The queen? The royal family? The nation? And what is the response when you do cause embarrassment?
Even if she had lived, Princess Diana would not have been a consort – she and Prince Charles divorced in 1996. But, like Prince Philip before her, Diana created her own role and responsibilities as Princess of Wales – and recreated that role on several occasions. She seemed both to embody and challenge our ideas of what a consort should be.
This is a portrait of Princess Diana (currently on view in the NPG's 32). It's quite a surprising choice for the gallery – very unlike the way we might think of Diana from the time, in ballgowns and finery, the fairy-tale princess in that wedding dress. This is a simple portrait, Diana dressed informally in open-necked blouse and trousers. That simplicity contrasts with the setting, the smart, gold-lined door that frames her, the antique chair she's sitting on.
Other portraits of Diana from the time have her looking coyly away whereas here she holds our eye. That chimes with a description in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography of Diana meeting Charles at a polo match in 1980:
“Her directness and sympathy over the death the previous year of his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, caught his attention: she was not afflicted by the usual constraints on people dealing with royalty, and was neither tongue-tied nor overly deferential. Her credentials as a potential royal bride were obvious.”
What were those credentials? Princess Diana was not born a princess, but her father and both grandmothers moved in court circles and she first met Prince Charles when she was 16 – when he briefly dated her sister. She was well off, having inherited a sum from her great-grandmother. She was not academic, having failed her O-levels twice.
She was, says the ODNB, “A popular, essentially jolly girl with a talent for making friends,” and her O-levels didn't matter because, “arguably, none [were] required for girls of her class, who had no need to earn a living; indeed, displays of intellect could be frowned upon by the largely philistine county set”.
She was beautiful, and could play the part of the fairy-tale princess. And she had an ability to talk unaffectedly to anyone, enchanting people who met her. Both things made her very popular with the press and public, and it seemed she might be just the jolt in the arm that the royal family needed.
But when things started to go wrong in the fairy-tale wedding, it all became very different. It's easy to forget the outrage that met the 1992 book Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton – which finally blew the lid on the fairy-tale, after all the years of rumour. Diana had rarely been out of the news before, but now the tone of the coverage had changed. There were stories about her various alleged lovers, or the state of her mental health, or just endless photos of her. The ODNB speaks of the constant harassment, where “photographs of Diana angry, or Diana in tears, Diana at the gym or the corner shop, commanded a far higher price than photographs of Diana carrying out public engagements.”
There's an argument that the press wanted to get at the “real” Diana. Perhaps it was payback for the fairy-tale wedding that we'd all been sold turning out not to be true. Perhaps the institution had got caught up in the story and believed their own press but the royal family – as an institution – effectively lied to the nation and, even worse, to the papers.
But it also didn't help that in some ways Diana brought this press harassment on herself. She was interviewed several times by Morton for his book and got her friends to contribute, too. She'd done so on the basis that she could always deny doing so – and that lie, when exposed, damaged her reputation with the Press Complaints Commission, which had tried to defend her from the media scrum over the book. It was also her choice to dispense with her round-the-clock police protection – so she could pursue her private life without constant surveillance. And that left her exposed to the paparazzi.
Perhaps she was not the canniest player, but at the same time, Diana also used the attention of the press to great effect for important causes. The ODNB says that this was part of a conscious effort to refashion her role and responsibilities.
“From June 1987,” it says, “when she visited the first ward for AIDS sufferers in Britain, she associated herself closely with a huge number of causes and organizations devoted to different kinds of sufferers ... Her patronage was widely sought and widely bestowed: whatever disadvantages might accrue from having a notoriously temperamental and, as time passed, increasingly unpredictable royal patron, Diana's name—and more especially her presence—were guaranteed to raise the profile of issues and organizations, and to increase revenue significantly. There was nothing novel about the association of a royal woman with good causes of these kinds: charity was the traditional outlet for women of the upper classes. But Diana brought glamour to the work and a degree of publicity which was never available to her less photogenic but no less hard-working sister-in-law, the princess royal, among others.”
Though Diana charmed those she met, press coverage was as often cynical as it was supportive, questioning her motives, or using the occasion to put questions about her private life. When she told Martin Bashir in a television interview in 1995 that she wanted to be remembered as the “princess of hearts”, many newspapers showed open contempt.
A year later she was granted her divorce and again set about refashioning her role. Diana stepped down from all but six of her charities and asked Prime Minister John Major to make her a “roving ambassador” on humanitarian issues for Britain. When no official role was created for her, she did it anyway: leading a Red Cross mission to draw attention to the devastation caused by landmines. This was a major political issue. The royal family are meant to keep well clear of making political statements – but Diana was no longer part of the family, and had nothing to lose. As the ODNB says,
“Powerful vested interests opposed the landmine ban, and Conservative MPs went on record accusing the princess of being a ‘loose cannon’, interfering in politics beyond her remit, but her championing of the cause was a significant factor in the promotion of the treaty banning the mines.”
And when Diana died suddenly in 1997, the press – and the nation – were quick to forget all their criticism. “Princess of hearts” was how they remembered her. The empathy, the charity, the tragic fate of the beautiful, fairy-tale princess – that's the image of her that endures. And that's why, in the grand narrative spun by the press, it's not odd that Kate Middleton wears Diana's engagement ring.
We've not discussed love. “It's important to understand,” says Jeremy Paxman, “that, in making arrangements for royal marriages, love is not necessarily the prime consideration. If the couple enjoy each other's company, that is a bonus not a prerequisite,” (p. 87).
But I don't think that's true. We want to believe in the fairy-tale. When Diana's engagement to Charles was announced in 1981, the press asked if they were in love. “Of course,” said Diana immediately. Charles' response has been much picked over since. “Whatever love means,” he said.
Was he in love with Diana? Was he in love with someone else? Charles later admitted to infidelity, and there's been speculation that at the time he'd wanted to marry Diana's older sister Sarah, or his current wife, Camilla. The speculation continues that these women were not deemed appropriate consort material – they weren't suitably innocent or pretty or whatever it might have been.
The pervading story seems to be that Charles chose duty over love – and that that was a mistake. So it's interesting to compare Diana with someone else who wasn't quite a consort.
When Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, it was largely sold as romance. He chose love over the crown. Like Diana, Edward was a popular figure, photogenic and beloved of the press. Like Diana, his empathy with his people could lead to controversy. “Something must be done,” he said on seeing the collapse of industry and mass unemployment in Wales – and that innocuous, humane statement caused a scandal.
But the British press were discrete about his love life. We know now he had a number of affairs in the late 1920s and early 30s, but the press at the time paid no heed. Even when his relationship with Wallis became more serious – and their yacht trip round the Mediterranean was followed with keen interest by the world press – the British newspapers said nothing.
When Edward chose to give up the throne, the “abdication crisis” proved little of the sort. “Reading the official papers and the private diaries,” says Paxman, “what is striking is how, in the end, the king's determination to marry his divorced American mistress came to turn simply on the question of how it might be managed,” (p. 209).
That says a lot about how the royal family's relationship with the press has changed. But why was Wallis not a suitable consort for the king?
The official reason is that she was a divorcee. At the time, divorced people could not remarry in the Church of England – which made it tricky for the head of the church to marry a divorcee. The irony being that the Church of England was created to grant Henry VIII a divorce from his first wife so he could marry someone else.
But there were other issues with Wallis. The ODNB says that she “impinged on the performance of [Edward's] duties” as Prince of Wales. She was bossy, and had an abrasive irreverence towards Edward's position and the royal family generally. She came from a poor background and she was American.
And she didn't want to be queen. “All the indications,” says the ODNB, “are that she enjoyed her role of maîtresse en titre [chief mistress] and would have been satisfied to retain it ... Once Mrs Simpson realized that marriage to her would cost the king his throne, she tried to change his resolve. Anticipating much hostile publicity when the story broke in the United Kingdom, she retreated first to Fort Belvedere, and then to the south of France. From there, in a series of distraught telephone calls, she tried to persuade Edward not to abdicate, even if this meant giving her up. She accomplished nothing; this was the only subject on which she was unable to dominate her future husband.”
But if Wallis was thought unsuitable then, it's nothing to how she's thought of now. In the last six months, she's been depicted in three period dramas.
In Any Human Heart on Channel 4, she and Edward swan round a golf course, pushing in front of other golfers and pinching their cigarettes. In Upstairs, Downstairs on BBC One, she nearly causes a diplomatic incident in 1936 by turning up at a party with the Nazi Ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop. It's heavily implied that she and Ribbentrop are lovers, even that Wallis is a fascist sympathiser. She's briefly in the film The King's Speech, where Edward accuses his brother of heading a plot to usurp him. I gather, too, that Madonna is working on a film in which Wallis is seen cheating on Edward.
These are not flattering portrayals, and the received wisdom seems to be that Wallis was a bad influence on Edward, promiscuous, greedy, silly, even dangerous. Edward was naïve, or stupid, for marrying for love – or at least for loving this particular woman. The story goes that it is a good thing Wallis wasn't queen. And that instead we got this lady:
As with Wallis, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon didn't choose to be queen. She was already married when her brother-in-law abdicated, and her husband became George VI. But even when he'd just been Duke of York, she had “had her doubts and reservations about her suitability for public life and perhaps about her feelings for” him and “apparently turned down his first two proposals of marriage” - so the ODNB says.
She was the first non-royal to legally marry a royal prince since James II in the seventeenth century. But her in-laws, George V and Queen Mary, “thought that this pretty, natural, level-headed, and unassuming young woman would be a good partner for their unconfident son.” And that's exactly the role she played as consort.
Taking the oath of accession, the new king said he took on his responsibilities “with my wife and helpmate at my side”. Perhaps tellingly, at his coronation, “Elizabeth's throne ... was placed level with the king's. Later, in 1943, she was appointed a councillor of state, allowing her to deputize for the king in official matters—the first queen consort to fulfill the role—and she also held investitures on her own.”
The ODNB discusses at length the treatment of the abdicated King Edward, and the decision to deny his wife the title of “her royal highness”. The same title was, of course, stripped from Princess Diana when she divorced Charles. Though, “there is no reason to believe that [Edward's sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth] was directly responsible for the decision,” says the ODNB, “her opinion on the matter may be imagined. She saw Mrs Simpson as an interloper who had disrupted both the public position of royalty and private relations within the royal family. In the queen's view Mrs Simpson's actions had forced an unexpected and unwelcome change to her settled family life and had imposed ultimate burdens on her husband [which may have contributed to his early death]. To a woman who placed the highest value on responsibility, whether to family or nation, Mrs Simpson's irresponsibility, as she saw it, could not be tolerated, nor should it be rewarded.”
She was also fiercely protective of her husband. According to Walter Monckton, Edward's representative in the negotiations about what his role might be as Duke of Windsor, George VI was not against Edward taking on some minor royal functions – effectively swapping roles with his younger brother. “But in Monckton's opinion ‘the Queen felt quite plainly it was undesirable to give the Duke any effective sphere of work’. She thought the duke ‘was an attractive, vital creature who might be the rallying point for any who might be critical of the new King who was less superficially endowed with the arts and graces that please,” (cited in Lord Birkenhead, Walter Monckton, p. 169).
If Elizabeth had little choice about becoming queen, she also had little choice in her responsibilities during her husband's reign, which was so dominated by the Second World War – the lead up to it, the war itself and the immediate aftermath. In Paris in 1938 to help reinforce the Anglo-French alliance, it was Elizabeth's stylish white outfits – designed by Norman Hartnell – that won the admiration of the press. She was similarly praised for her style the next year in the US, and the king and queen's stay at President Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park has been cited as “a significant moment in the developing ‘special relationship’ between the two nations and one of the most important royal visits in the history of the modern monarchy”.
When the war began, Elizabeth and her husband famously refused to leave London, and she would not countenance her daughters being sent away to Canada. When Buckingham Palace was bombed, she said she was glad: “Now I can look the East End in the face”. As the ODNB says, “she reached out to the British people, sharing their experiences in a way that royalty had never done before. Interestingly, she chose not to appear in uniform during the war and came to symbolize the virtues of normality and peace.” The royal family also apparently conformed to wartime rationing.
Perhaps Elizabeth only chose her role and responsibilities after her husband's death. There's evidence that Winston Churchill advised her in her bereavement, “but it seems equally likely,” says the ODNB, “that the strength of character and the imagination required to play this new role came also, and quite naturally, from Elizabeth herself. She had no wish or aptitude for the role of retiring dowager. Comfortable with her people, adaptable, and with an unaltered ethic of service, she returned to public duties in May 1952.”
As Queen Mother for the next fifty years, she was patron of more than 300 organisations and charities. She was chancellor of the University of London for 25 years and colonel-in-chief of 13 regiments. She also lived lavishly, employing a large staff and entertaining on a grand scale. She apparently ran up debts of £4 million at Coutts Bank.
But while for any other royal that might have earned the displeasure of the nation – or the press – the Queen Mother never seemed to lose favour. Perhaps it was her cheery, ever-smiling attitude to her public duties. She clearly worked hard as the grandmother of the nation. And she was also discreet – giving one interview when first engaged. Woodrow Wyatt would later reveal that she had “conservative opinions” but she never voiced them openly. Whatever her opinions of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor she never spoke about the abdication – and she attended both of their funerals.
The Queen Mother's own funeral in 2002 was a major event. A quarter of a million people filed past her coffin as it lay in state. She lived a remarkably long life and her popularity never wavered, even as it did for the rest of her family. Why? What did the Queen Mother do that the others didn't? Why do we remember her so fondly? What could Kate Middleton learn from her?
There's duty, hard work and the charitable causes. There's the empathy with the people. But other consorts had that. There's a loving relationship with the king. A bit of style doesn't go amiss either. A twinkle in the eye will more than make up for a slightly naughty gambling habit.
But I think the Queen Mother's chief asset was her discretion. She never spoiled the mystique of royalty, she never told tales and she never got caught up in politics. More than that, by keeping her mouth shut she never said anything embarrassing.
When the press speak to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, it’s as if they only want to catch her out. What does she think of Kate? What does she think of the student protesters? Why was her window open? If she says something innocuous it’s reported that she doesn’t care. If she says something more fun it’s reported that she’s not funny. The woman cannot win.
She does the charities and good causes. She supports her husband. And she keeps a relatively low profile. I discovered while preparing this talk that the Portrait Gallery holds no photographs of her, let alone a portrait.
We still don’t know what role Camilla will play when her husband becomes king. The couple have said that she won’t be a queen – but is that up to them? According to the law, as soon as the present queen dies, Prince Charles automatically becomes king and his wife queen. At the moment, Camilla is also the Princess of Wales because she's the wife of the prince – but she or those around her choose not to use that title. So maybe she'll choose not to be called queen, and maybe she won't be crowned when Charles is. But, technically, she'll still be queen.
And why shouldn’t she be queen? There are strong feelings on the subject. Some feel it wouldn’t be appropriate because she’s a divorcee – though so is her husband. Some feel it’s not appropriate given that she and Charles had an affair while he was still married to Diana. So Camilla not being queen is a sort of punishment for how Diana was treated. Or maybe its punishment for the embarrassment caused by the whole “Squidgy” business.
Would it have been different had Charles married her in the early 1970s? Would Camilla have been made a fairy-tale princess and received the same adulation as Diana? Would she have suffered the same problems, too? Or is there something about their different personalities and ambitions that means things would always have been different?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. But it makes me wonder again how much a consort – or almost-consort – gets to define their own role and responsibilities, and how much they just react to us, as a nation, as perhaps voiced through the press. There’s no formal definition of a consort’s role, but we seem to know instinctively what is appropriate, what is embarrassing, and what makes our blood boil.
So we don’t know what kind of consort Kate Middleton will be. We don’t know how much say she’ll have in her role and responsibilities. But we will know when she gets it wrong.
Next month, a 29 year-old former accessories buyer for the clothing chain Jigsaw will marry a flight lieutenant from the RAF. But this won't be any ordinary wedding: Kate Middleton is marrying Prince William, second in line to the British throne.
The couple have always attracted attention from the press but the announcement last November of their wedding was something else. Every British paper ran the story on their front page – and all of them had an angle.
"Kate's very special," said the Daily Telegraph, playing up the romance. As with many papers, it highlighted the fact that the engagement ring is the one worn by William's late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales – and skirted over how her marriage had turned out. This is the royal wedding as fairy-tale.
The Daily Mail didn't seem quite so delighted. Yes, the engagement is a cause for celebration, but it's headline chides, "We got there in the end, darling," as if annoyed at having been kept waiting – or as if the happy couple owed it to the paper and the country to get engaged sooner. The Mail was also quick off the mark to use the announcement to flog some commemorative merchandise. It's the royal wedding as product, meeting the demands of its market."A royal wedding in the age of austerity," mused the Guardian, taking a step back to place the announcement in its socio-economic context, asking what it said about the state of the nation as a whole. Yes, okay, it's a royal wedding, but what's in it for us?One paper didn't overtly lead with the happy couple.
There's cheery. At first sight – and in the news-stand next to other papers – this seems completely different: no smiling, happy couple, not even any colour. But what's that down in the corner? "I wish her well," says columnist Julie Burchill, "but Kate Middleton is marrying beneath her."For all it's doing it's own thing, the Independent is still taking a position on the story. Burchill's column is a reversal of earlier press criticism of Middleton – that she wasn't posh enough for the prince. There were reports in 2007 that she used inappropriate words like “toilet” and “pardon”. Several papers have discussed whether it's appropriate for our future queen to have a job, or that her parents run a small mail-order business.
The key word is appropriate. The papers – and perhaps the rest of us – seem to believe that anyone marrying a king or queen must have an appropriate pedigree, curriculum vitae and vocabulary. But the role of consort has no formal definition, and it's a role that Kate's various predecessors have all struggled with.
I'm going to look briefly at five other people who married kings and queens of England. I'm going to look at how much power and influence they had, and what they might tell us about the role Queen Catherine will play in future.
This dashing chap is the current consort, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The photo is from 1947, the year he married the then Princess Elizabeth.
Unlike Kate Middleton, Philip was already royal. Both he and the queen are great, great grandchildren of Queen Victoria. He was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, nephew of the then king of Greece. A year after Philip was born, King Constantine was deposed and the royal family had to flee the country. Philip was, famously, carried away in a cot made from an old fruit box.
So he grew up as a prince in exile. He was taught at the Schule Sloss Salem school in Germany, which has been set up by Kurt Hahn after the First World War with the explicit intention of producing leaders for the future. When Philip was 12, Hahn was arrested for criticising the Nazis. After his release he moved to Britain and set up a new Salem school in Scotland – Gordonstoun. The young Prince Philip was one of his first students, and his sons and grandsons also went there.
I wonder how much the prince's exile and education under the Nazi-hating Hahn influenced the consort he became. As I said before, there's no formal definition of a consort's role.
Jeremy Paxman interviewed Prince Philip for his book, On Royalty, published in 2006, and asked him about his role when his wife took the throne. “I did ask various people what I was expected to do,” said the prince. “And?” asked Paxman. “They sort of looked down and shuffled their feet,” (p. 234).
Instead, the prince has been able to make the role his own. I think his education and his family's exile have taught him to be useful, to make a contribution to the advancement of the country and its people. Paxman likens him to his predecessor as Queen's Consort, Prince Albert, and remarks on a similar “Teutonic approach to work”. Paxman speaks of a “more than nominal” involvement in the 800 organisations of which the prince is patron.
We can see the influence of his old school in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, set up in the late 1950s to encourage the personal development of young people through volunteering, self-reliance, the learning of skills and sport. Since then, some 4 million young people – from all backgrounds – have taken part.
Prince Philip was a thoroughly modern consort, too, championing science and industry. He was the first royal to be interviewed on television, and was also a TV presenter. Watch Prince Philip host a live programme for the BBC's The Restless Sphere series on 30 June 1957.
It's an extraordinary programme. For more than 70 minutes, the young prince single-handedly explains the experiments to be carried out during the International Geophysical Year, including early satellite technology, solar observation and oceanography. It's fascinating to watch him deftly explain complex technical ideas, work the different props, link to and fill time around pre-recorded segments from all across the world, and generally keep the show running smoothly. In another life, he might have presented Tomorrow's World. He cuts a rather dashing figure, a Renaissance man from a far off time when we still just about had an Empire.
But the prince also discusses evidence from different sources around the world that the oceans are rising and glaciers melting – as if the climate were changing. He tells us that more evidence – much more evidence, gathered over many decades – will be needed to know for sure. And over the next decades, he championed that research and concerns about the environment. Watch Prince Philip on breakfast show TV-am in November 1987.
In many ways, the prince was ahead of the game on the environment. Perhaps his position as a statesman without portfolio, constantly meeting experts and representatives in every walk of life, gives him a unique position. He's continually briefed on the latest scientific findings, and he uses his position to share them with the rest of us.
He's still speaking on the subject today, but two things have changed. First, there has been increasing evidence for climate change and increasing numbers of people speaking about it – and against it. It has become more fashionable and political – and the royal family as a whole are expected to avoid political statements.
And secondly, something has changed about the way the royal family is represented.
“A huffy note enters his voice when he talks about how his family have been treated by the mass media,” says Paxman, who then quotes the prince: “'It is absolutely extraordinary what has happened in the last thirty years. I mean, before that we were accepted as quite normal sorts of people. But now, I mean now I reckon I have done something right if I don't appear in the media. Because I know that any appearance in it will be one of criticism.'”
That's from a chapter in the book called “Gilded but gelded”, all about the royal family's relationship with the press. That's a big subject – too big to get into here, so I'll just recommend Paxman's book. Instead I want to stay on the consort's role and responsibilities – and the fact that Prince Philip says that no one else told him what he was required to do. He has clearly set out to be useful, to help people fulfil their potential and to help the world. But his response to the way the press now responds suggests another motivation.
“I will be criticized for doing something,” he told Paxman. “So I've retreated – quite consciously – so as not to be an embarrassment. I don't want to be embarrassing.”
I mentioned appropriateness before, and I think the other side of that is embarrassment. But embarrassing who? Himself? The queen? The royal family? The nation? And what is the response when you do cause embarrassment?
Even if she had lived, Princess Diana would not have been a consort – she and Prince Charles divorced in 1996. But, like Prince Philip before her, Diana created her own role and responsibilities as Princess of Wales – and recreated that role on several occasions. She seemed both to embody and challenge our ideas of what a consort should be.
This is a portrait of Princess Diana (currently on view in the NPG's 32). It's quite a surprising choice for the gallery – very unlike the way we might think of Diana from the time, in ballgowns and finery, the fairy-tale princess in that wedding dress. This is a simple portrait, Diana dressed informally in open-necked blouse and trousers. That simplicity contrasts with the setting, the smart, gold-lined door that frames her, the antique chair she's sitting on.
Other portraits of Diana from the time have her looking coyly away whereas here she holds our eye. That chimes with a description in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography of Diana meeting Charles at a polo match in 1980:
“Her directness and sympathy over the death the previous year of his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, caught his attention: she was not afflicted by the usual constraints on people dealing with royalty, and was neither tongue-tied nor overly deferential. Her credentials as a potential royal bride were obvious.”
What were those credentials? Princess Diana was not born a princess, but her father and both grandmothers moved in court circles and she first met Prince Charles when she was 16 – when he briefly dated her sister. She was well off, having inherited a sum from her great-grandmother. She was not academic, having failed her O-levels twice.
She was, says the ODNB, “A popular, essentially jolly girl with a talent for making friends,” and her O-levels didn't matter because, “arguably, none [were] required for girls of her class, who had no need to earn a living; indeed, displays of intellect could be frowned upon by the largely philistine county set”.
She was beautiful, and could play the part of the fairy-tale princess. And she had an ability to talk unaffectedly to anyone, enchanting people who met her. Both things made her very popular with the press and public, and it seemed she might be just the jolt in the arm that the royal family needed.
But when things started to go wrong in the fairy-tale wedding, it all became very different. It's easy to forget the outrage that met the 1992 book Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton – which finally blew the lid on the fairy-tale, after all the years of rumour. Diana had rarely been out of the news before, but now the tone of the coverage had changed. There were stories about her various alleged lovers, or the state of her mental health, or just endless photos of her. The ODNB speaks of the constant harassment, where “photographs of Diana angry, or Diana in tears, Diana at the gym or the corner shop, commanded a far higher price than photographs of Diana carrying out public engagements.”
There's an argument that the press wanted to get at the “real” Diana. Perhaps it was payback for the fairy-tale wedding that we'd all been sold turning out not to be true. Perhaps the institution had got caught up in the story and believed their own press but the royal family – as an institution – effectively lied to the nation and, even worse, to the papers.
But it also didn't help that in some ways Diana brought this press harassment on herself. She was interviewed several times by Morton for his book and got her friends to contribute, too. She'd done so on the basis that she could always deny doing so – and that lie, when exposed, damaged her reputation with the Press Complaints Commission, which had tried to defend her from the media scrum over the book. It was also her choice to dispense with her round-the-clock police protection – so she could pursue her private life without constant surveillance. And that left her exposed to the paparazzi.
Perhaps she was not the canniest player, but at the same time, Diana also used the attention of the press to great effect for important causes. The ODNB says that this was part of a conscious effort to refashion her role and responsibilities.
“From June 1987,” it says, “when she visited the first ward for AIDS sufferers in Britain, she associated herself closely with a huge number of causes and organizations devoted to different kinds of sufferers ... Her patronage was widely sought and widely bestowed: whatever disadvantages might accrue from having a notoriously temperamental and, as time passed, increasingly unpredictable royal patron, Diana's name—and more especially her presence—were guaranteed to raise the profile of issues and organizations, and to increase revenue significantly. There was nothing novel about the association of a royal woman with good causes of these kinds: charity was the traditional outlet for women of the upper classes. But Diana brought glamour to the work and a degree of publicity which was never available to her less photogenic but no less hard-working sister-in-law, the princess royal, among others.”
Though Diana charmed those she met, press coverage was as often cynical as it was supportive, questioning her motives, or using the occasion to put questions about her private life. When she told Martin Bashir in a television interview in 1995 that she wanted to be remembered as the “princess of hearts”, many newspapers showed open contempt.
A year later she was granted her divorce and again set about refashioning her role. Diana stepped down from all but six of her charities and asked Prime Minister John Major to make her a “roving ambassador” on humanitarian issues for Britain. When no official role was created for her, she did it anyway: leading a Red Cross mission to draw attention to the devastation caused by landmines. This was a major political issue. The royal family are meant to keep well clear of making political statements – but Diana was no longer part of the family, and had nothing to lose. As the ODNB says,
“Powerful vested interests opposed the landmine ban, and Conservative MPs went on record accusing the princess of being a ‘loose cannon’, interfering in politics beyond her remit, but her championing of the cause was a significant factor in the promotion of the treaty banning the mines.”
And when Diana died suddenly in 1997, the press – and the nation – were quick to forget all their criticism. “Princess of hearts” was how they remembered her. The empathy, the charity, the tragic fate of the beautiful, fairy-tale princess – that's the image of her that endures. And that's why, in the grand narrative spun by the press, it's not odd that Kate Middleton wears Diana's engagement ring.
We've not discussed love. “It's important to understand,” says Jeremy Paxman, “that, in making arrangements for royal marriages, love is not necessarily the prime consideration. If the couple enjoy each other's company, that is a bonus not a prerequisite,” (p. 87).
But I don't think that's true. We want to believe in the fairy-tale. When Diana's engagement to Charles was announced in 1981, the press asked if they were in love. “Of course,” said Diana immediately. Charles' response has been much picked over since. “Whatever love means,” he said.
Was he in love with Diana? Was he in love with someone else? Charles later admitted to infidelity, and there's been speculation that at the time he'd wanted to marry Diana's older sister Sarah, or his current wife, Camilla. The speculation continues that these women were not deemed appropriate consort material – they weren't suitably innocent or pretty or whatever it might have been.
The pervading story seems to be that Charles chose duty over love – and that that was a mistake. So it's interesting to compare Diana with someone else who wasn't quite a consort.
When Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, it was largely sold as romance. He chose love over the crown. Like Diana, Edward was a popular figure, photogenic and beloved of the press. Like Diana, his empathy with his people could lead to controversy. “Something must be done,” he said on seeing the collapse of industry and mass unemployment in Wales – and that innocuous, humane statement caused a scandal.
But the British press were discrete about his love life. We know now he had a number of affairs in the late 1920s and early 30s, but the press at the time paid no heed. Even when his relationship with Wallis became more serious – and their yacht trip round the Mediterranean was followed with keen interest by the world press – the British newspapers said nothing.
When Edward chose to give up the throne, the “abdication crisis” proved little of the sort. “Reading the official papers and the private diaries,” says Paxman, “what is striking is how, in the end, the king's determination to marry his divorced American mistress came to turn simply on the question of how it might be managed,” (p. 209).
That says a lot about how the royal family's relationship with the press has changed. But why was Wallis not a suitable consort for the king?
The official reason is that she was a divorcee. At the time, divorced people could not remarry in the Church of England – which made it tricky for the head of the church to marry a divorcee. The irony being that the Church of England was created to grant Henry VIII a divorce from his first wife so he could marry someone else.
But there were other issues with Wallis. The ODNB says that she “impinged on the performance of [Edward's] duties” as Prince of Wales. She was bossy, and had an abrasive irreverence towards Edward's position and the royal family generally. She came from a poor background and she was American.
And she didn't want to be queen. “All the indications,” says the ODNB, “are that she enjoyed her role of maîtresse en titre [chief mistress] and would have been satisfied to retain it ... Once Mrs Simpson realized that marriage to her would cost the king his throne, she tried to change his resolve. Anticipating much hostile publicity when the story broke in the United Kingdom, she retreated first to Fort Belvedere, and then to the south of France. From there, in a series of distraught telephone calls, she tried to persuade Edward not to abdicate, even if this meant giving her up. She accomplished nothing; this was the only subject on which she was unable to dominate her future husband.”
But if Wallis was thought unsuitable then, it's nothing to how she's thought of now. In the last six months, she's been depicted in three period dramas.
In Any Human Heart on Channel 4, she and Edward swan round a golf course, pushing in front of other golfers and pinching their cigarettes. In Upstairs, Downstairs on BBC One, she nearly causes a diplomatic incident in 1936 by turning up at a party with the Nazi Ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop. It's heavily implied that she and Ribbentrop are lovers, even that Wallis is a fascist sympathiser. She's briefly in the film The King's Speech, where Edward accuses his brother of heading a plot to usurp him. I gather, too, that Madonna is working on a film in which Wallis is seen cheating on Edward.
These are not flattering portrayals, and the received wisdom seems to be that Wallis was a bad influence on Edward, promiscuous, greedy, silly, even dangerous. Edward was naïve, or stupid, for marrying for love – or at least for loving this particular woman. The story goes that it is a good thing Wallis wasn't queen. And that instead we got this lady:
As with Wallis, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon didn't choose to be queen. She was already married when her brother-in-law abdicated, and her husband became George VI. But even when he'd just been Duke of York, she had “had her doubts and reservations about her suitability for public life and perhaps about her feelings for” him and “apparently turned down his first two proposals of marriage” - so the ODNB says.
She was the first non-royal to legally marry a royal prince since James II in the seventeenth century. But her in-laws, George V and Queen Mary, “thought that this pretty, natural, level-headed, and unassuming young woman would be a good partner for their unconfident son.” And that's exactly the role she played as consort.
Taking the oath of accession, the new king said he took on his responsibilities “with my wife and helpmate at my side”. Perhaps tellingly, at his coronation, “Elizabeth's throne ... was placed level with the king's. Later, in 1943, she was appointed a councillor of state, allowing her to deputize for the king in official matters—the first queen consort to fulfill the role—and she also held investitures on her own.”
The ODNB discusses at length the treatment of the abdicated King Edward, and the decision to deny his wife the title of “her royal highness”. The same title was, of course, stripped from Princess Diana when she divorced Charles. Though, “there is no reason to believe that [Edward's sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth] was directly responsible for the decision,” says the ODNB, “her opinion on the matter may be imagined. She saw Mrs Simpson as an interloper who had disrupted both the public position of royalty and private relations within the royal family. In the queen's view Mrs Simpson's actions had forced an unexpected and unwelcome change to her settled family life and had imposed ultimate burdens on her husband [which may have contributed to his early death]. To a woman who placed the highest value on responsibility, whether to family or nation, Mrs Simpson's irresponsibility, as she saw it, could not be tolerated, nor should it be rewarded.”
She was also fiercely protective of her husband. According to Walter Monckton, Edward's representative in the negotiations about what his role might be as Duke of Windsor, George VI was not against Edward taking on some minor royal functions – effectively swapping roles with his younger brother. “But in Monckton's opinion ‘the Queen felt quite plainly it was undesirable to give the Duke any effective sphere of work’. She thought the duke ‘was an attractive, vital creature who might be the rallying point for any who might be critical of the new King who was less superficially endowed with the arts and graces that please,” (cited in Lord Birkenhead, Walter Monckton, p. 169).
If Elizabeth had little choice about becoming queen, she also had little choice in her responsibilities during her husband's reign, which was so dominated by the Second World War – the lead up to it, the war itself and the immediate aftermath. In Paris in 1938 to help reinforce the Anglo-French alliance, it was Elizabeth's stylish white outfits – designed by Norman Hartnell – that won the admiration of the press. She was similarly praised for her style the next year in the US, and the king and queen's stay at President Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park has been cited as “a significant moment in the developing ‘special relationship’ between the two nations and one of the most important royal visits in the history of the modern monarchy”.
When the war began, Elizabeth and her husband famously refused to leave London, and she would not countenance her daughters being sent away to Canada. When Buckingham Palace was bombed, she said she was glad: “Now I can look the East End in the face”. As the ODNB says, “she reached out to the British people, sharing their experiences in a way that royalty had never done before. Interestingly, she chose not to appear in uniform during the war and came to symbolize the virtues of normality and peace.” The royal family also apparently conformed to wartime rationing.
Perhaps Elizabeth only chose her role and responsibilities after her husband's death. There's evidence that Winston Churchill advised her in her bereavement, “but it seems equally likely,” says the ODNB, “that the strength of character and the imagination required to play this new role came also, and quite naturally, from Elizabeth herself. She had no wish or aptitude for the role of retiring dowager. Comfortable with her people, adaptable, and with an unaltered ethic of service, she returned to public duties in May 1952.”
As Queen Mother for the next fifty years, she was patron of more than 300 organisations and charities. She was chancellor of the University of London for 25 years and colonel-in-chief of 13 regiments. She also lived lavishly, employing a large staff and entertaining on a grand scale. She apparently ran up debts of £4 million at Coutts Bank.
But while for any other royal that might have earned the displeasure of the nation – or the press – the Queen Mother never seemed to lose favour. Perhaps it was her cheery, ever-smiling attitude to her public duties. She clearly worked hard as the grandmother of the nation. And she was also discreet – giving one interview when first engaged. Woodrow Wyatt would later reveal that she had “conservative opinions” but she never voiced them openly. Whatever her opinions of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor she never spoke about the abdication – and she attended both of their funerals.
The Queen Mother's own funeral in 2002 was a major event. A quarter of a million people filed past her coffin as it lay in state. She lived a remarkably long life and her popularity never wavered, even as it did for the rest of her family. Why? What did the Queen Mother do that the others didn't? Why do we remember her so fondly? What could Kate Middleton learn from her?
There's duty, hard work and the charitable causes. There's the empathy with the people. But other consorts had that. There's a loving relationship with the king. A bit of style doesn't go amiss either. A twinkle in the eye will more than make up for a slightly naughty gambling habit.
But I think the Queen Mother's chief asset was her discretion. She never spoiled the mystique of royalty, she never told tales and she never got caught up in politics. More than that, by keeping her mouth shut she never said anything embarrassing.
When the press speak to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, it’s as if they only want to catch her out. What does she think of Kate? What does she think of the student protesters? Why was her window open? If she says something innocuous it’s reported that she doesn’t care. If she says something more fun it’s reported that she’s not funny. The woman cannot win.
She does the charities and good causes. She supports her husband. And she keeps a relatively low profile. I discovered while preparing this talk that the Portrait Gallery holds no photographs of her, let alone a portrait.
We still don’t know what role Camilla will play when her husband becomes king. The couple have said that she won’t be a queen – but is that up to them? According to the law, as soon as the present queen dies, Prince Charles automatically becomes king and his wife queen. At the moment, Camilla is also the Princess of Wales because she's the wife of the prince – but she or those around her choose not to use that title. So maybe she'll choose not to be called queen, and maybe she won't be crowned when Charles is. But, technically, she'll still be queen.
And why shouldn’t she be queen? There are strong feelings on the subject. Some feel it wouldn’t be appropriate because she’s a divorcee – though so is her husband. Some feel it’s not appropriate given that she and Charles had an affair while he was still married to Diana. So Camilla not being queen is a sort of punishment for how Diana was treated. Or maybe its punishment for the embarrassment caused by the whole “Squidgy” business.
Would it have been different had Charles married her in the early 1970s? Would Camilla have been made a fairy-tale princess and received the same adulation as Diana? Would she have suffered the same problems, too? Or is there something about their different personalities and ambitions that means things would always have been different?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. But it makes me wonder again how much a consort – or almost-consort – gets to define their own role and responsibilities, and how much they just react to us, as a nation, as perhaps voiced through the press. There’s no formal definition of a consort’s role, but we seem to know instinctively what is appropriate, what is embarrassing, and what makes our blood boil.
So we don’t know what kind of consort Kate Middleton will be. We don’t know how much say she’ll have in her role and responsibilities. But we will know when she gets it wrong.
- See also: my talk on 10 people in the National Portrait Gallery's collection that Doctor Who has met
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