Film, TV, and Theatre

Phil Cornwell and John Sessions in Stella Street (1997)

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A British TV comedy series that perhaps fell under the radar a little bit (you can actually find people who never saw or heard of it), Stella Street was nonetheless a great find when it began airing in 1997 and continued over four series to 2001. Its somewhat bizarre premise is that an ordinary street in suburban Surbiton is peopled by a group of bigtime celebrities going about their lives in ordinary, suburban fashion, but adhering to some well-known and exaggerated stereotypes pertaining to said celebs.

The show was conceived and written by John Sessions, Phil Cornwell and Peter Richardson, with the main characters played by Sessions and Cornwell (and Ronni Ancona for some episodes). The celebrities chosen to live in Stella Street were presumably influenced by the performers’ ability to do great impressions of them and whose personas lent themselves to some great send-up comedy. The programme takes the form of a mockumentary with filming done on a handheld camera and Cornwell as Michael Caine talking directly to the camera to introduce characters and situations (just as he does in the 1966 film Alfie).

Jack Nicholson is portrayed as the inveterate womanising bad-ass of his stereotype (or his real personality?) complete with bad taste Hawaiian shirts not exactly suited to the British climate. Michael Caine is full-on Sixties’ Michael Caine with the trademark laconic vocal delivery, shock of ginger hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Roger Moore is the quintessential English gentleman with impeccable manners, and with a loneliness theme ruthlessly exploited by Sessions. David Bowie is the self-effacing and slightly awkward superstar staying true to his Bromley roots. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards run the local grocery store, Mick with massive enthusiasm, Keith with time-worn, devil-may-care cynicism and a gleam in his eye.

Let’s enjoy a montage of Cornwell and Sessions bringing these characters to life: the mayhem of Mick and Keef’s corner shop, and then a glorious vignette of David Bowie and Roger Moore exchanging spectacularly mundane Christmas presents (with Roger Moore taking politeness to the next level when gifted an underwhelming £10 book token).

Mick and Keef
Film, TV, and Theatre

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

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A few months ago I went to a screening of the 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari at local venue the Old Woollen in Farsley. The film is a quintessential piece of German Expressionist cinema from over a century ago and a fascinating insight into celluloid creativity during the era of the Weimar Republic. As fun as it is, with its story of a mad hypnotist inducing a brainwashed somnambulist to commit murders, I wanted to look at an even more quintessential movie from the era, one that most people have come across at some point, the great 1927 science-fiction masterpiece, Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976).

Lang has been cited as one of the most influential of filmmakers of all time, and he is credited with pioneering both the sci-fi genre (Metropolis, Woman in the Moon) and film noir (M). He didn’t shy away from producing epically long films, either, like the 4.5 hour Dr Mabuse the Gambler or the two-part Die Nibelungen based on the epic poem Nibelungenlied, but the one film that captures the zeitgeist of the auteur’s work is undoubtedly Metropolis.

It was written in collaboration with Lang’s wife Thea von Harbou and based on her 1925 novel of the same name. Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia prefiguring Blade Runner and bringing to mind themes from Orwell and indeed Mary Shelley with its own Frankenstein’s monster in the form of the scientist Rotwang’s iconic robot the Maschinenmensch.

Meanwhile, the film’s aesthetics, with Gothic touches, draw heavily from the Bauhaus, Cubist and Futurist design movements of the time. We see a world of colossal skyscrapers from which a wealthy elite lords it over the down-trodden masses of the underground who toil in abject conditions to keep the machines of the society running.

One day a member of this elite, one Freder Fredersen (Gustav Fröhlich), has an epiphany when presented with what life is like for the poor, by the saintly Maria (Brigitte Helm, who also plays the Maschinenmensch), and the two conspire to change the society and bring about social justice. As such, it can be construed as a rather simplistic morality tale, but there’s no simplicity in the stylisation and brilliant technical effects, which serve to create a remarkable world, both visually beautiful and powerful. Enjoy the theatrical trailer, below, with an excellent soundtrack by Gottfried Huppertz.

Fritz Lang
Music

Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition (1874)

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The Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) wins my ‘coolest composer’s name’ award, with honourable mention to German composer Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921) who of course is not to be confused with mellow British pop singer Arnold Dorsey who used Engelbert Humperdinck as a stage name. Mussorgsky was one of the “The Mighty Five” alongside Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, and (another contender for the cool name award) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Together, these five fashioned a distinct national style of Russian classical music in the second half of the 19ᵗʰ century.

Mussorgsky’s works were inspired by Russian history and folklore, such as his opera Boris Godunov (about the Tsar who ruled Russia between 1598 and 1605), Night on Bald Mountain (a series of compositions inspired by Russian literary works and legends), and Pictures at an Exhibition. This latter piece is a piano suite in ten movements, written in 1874, and inspired by an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Hartmann was as devoted as Mussorgsky to making intrinsically Russian art and the two had become firm friends. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual artwork.

Art critic Vladimir Stasov described the piece as Mussorgsky “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.”

The composition has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists, but has also became widely known from orchestrations and arrangements produced by other composers, such as Maurice Ravel’s 1922 adaptation for orchestra. The excerpt below is the opening promenade from the Ravel version, as played by the National Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York. This is another tune where I say “I bet you know it…”.

Incidentally, prog rock trio Emerson Lake and Palmer did a version of Pictures at an Exhibition, just as they did a version of another blog topic here, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

Modest Mussorgsky
Art

John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851)

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If you were to choose any British art gallery to walk into today, you would be sure to find one or more paintings by one or more artists belonging to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others, who sought to reform art and return it to the glory days, as they saw it, of Italian fifteenth century art. That period of art, so-called Quattrocento art, was characterised by abundant detail, colour and complexity; in the following century, however, artists – such as Raphael – were seen by the group as having a corrupting influence on art, ushering in the unnatural and stylised art of Mannerism. Parmigianino’s Madonna With The Long Neck (1540) is often used as an example of Mannerism playing fast and loose with proper perspective, as I’m sure you can see.

Parmigianino’s Madonna With The Long Neck (1540)

Today, we’re looking at a classic of the Pre-Raphaelites, namely Ophelia, the 1852 painting by British artist Sir John Everett Millais (and held in Tate Britain). Ophelia is of course a character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a Danish noblewoman driven mad by her love for Prince Hamlet and who ultimately drowns in despair. Her drowning is not usually seen onstage in the play, but merely reported by Queen Gertrude who tells the audience that Ophelia, out of her mind with grief, has fallen from a willow tree overhanging a brook. She lies in the water singing songs, as if unaware of her danger (“incapable of her own distress“), her clothes, trapping air and allowing her to stay afloat for a while (“Her clothes spread wide, / And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up.”). But eventually, “her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay” down “to muddy death“.

Millais paints Ophelia in a pose with open arms and upward gaze in the manner of saints or martyrs (they did love a tragic woman, the Pre-Raphs). In keeping with the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has used bright colours, with lots of detailed flora and fidelity to nature. Despite its nominal Danish setting, the landscape has actually come to be seen as quintessentially English (Ophelia was painted along the banks of the Hogsmill River near Tolworth in Surrey). The flowers shown floating on the river were chosen to correspond with Shakespeare’s description of Ophelia’s garland.

Fun fact: at one point, Millais had painted a water vole paddling away near Ophelia, but changed his mind (probably correctly) after an acquaintance mistook it for a hare or rabbit. Although fully painted over, a rough sketch of it still exists in a corner of the canvas hidden by the frame, apparently.

Millais’ Ophelia (1851)
Music

The Jackson Five’s I Want You Back (1969)

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It was Gladys Knight who first made a call to legendary Motown founder Berry Gordy to tell him about an exciting new act she had overheard from her dressing room on the second floor of the Regal Theater, Chicago. Gordy never returned that call but a short time late Motown was approached again, this time by Bobby Taylor of Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers who told A&R Vice President Ralph Seltzer about this sensational act that had opened for them at the High Chaparral club. So it came to pass that the Jackson Five – for it was they – went to Detroit to audition for Motown, and Gordy signed them up right away.

In October 1969, the Jackson Five’s first national single, I Want You Back, was released, and became their first number one hit on 30ᵗʰ January 1970. It was performed on the band’s first television appearances on Diana Ross’s The Hollywood Palace and on their milestone performance of 14ᵗʰ December 1969, on The Ed Sullivan Show.

The song was written and produced by the production team known as The Corporation, comprising Motown chief Berry Gordy himself, Freddie Perren, Alphonso Mizell, and Deke Richards. Originally considered for Gladys Knight & the Pips and later for Diana Ross, the song was re-worked to suit its main lead vocal being performed by a tween, the then-11-year-old Michael Jackson. Here’s Jackie Jackson’s memory of the event:

“I remember going into the Motown studio and hearing the track coming through the big studio monitors right in our face,” says Jackie Jackson. “It was slamming. The intro was so strong. Berry always taught us to have a strong intro to get people’s attention right away. And I remember the Corporation teaching us the song. Michael picked it up so fast; it was easy to learn for all of us. They kept changing it here and there for the better. We told them it was great, but the next day Freddie and Fonce added more things to it. They wanted to make it perfect. Michael did these ad-libs at the end of the song. They didn’t teach him that; he just made up his own stuff.”

And “slamming”, it certainly was: an exuberant pop masterpiece that remains one of my favourite all-time songs. It’s joyful – even if it is about a lover who is ruing his hastiness in dropping his girl! Enjoy the whole package here: the glorious costumes, the boys’ voluminous Afros, the well-rehearsed dance moves, and of course the genius of Michael Jackson manifested at a precociously young age. Recorded in the Goin’ Back To Indiana TV special in 1971.

The Jackson Five

 

Literature

Mark Twain’s Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910) was of course the great American writer and humourist better known by the pseudonym Mark Twain, and lauded as the father of American literature. His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) as well as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). The latter novel I had on my bookshelf as a boy although I must admit I don’t remember reading it; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, on the other hand, was a staple of my generation that everyone read.

Clemens used a litany of pen names: before “Mark Twain” he had written as “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass”, “Sieur Louis de Conte”, “John Snook” and even just “Josh”. There are a number of competing theories about the pseudonym he conclusively decided to adopt, my favourite being the riverboat call from his days working on steamboats: “by the mark, twain” (referring to sounding a depth of two fathoms, which was just safe enough for a steamboat travelling down the Mississippi). However, another theory talks about his keeping a regular tab open at his local saloon and calling the bartender to “mark twain” on the blackboard, and I get the impression that he enjoyed the speculation and never conclusively confirmed one or the other.

He was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In his early years he worked as a printer and typesetter, and then, as mentioned, a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join his brother Orion in Nevada to speculate unsuccessfully in various mining enterprises. Finally, he turned to journalism and writing which soon won him success and praise from his critics and peers, and led him to his true vocation.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written throughout in vernacular English and told in the first person by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn. The book comes across as an authentic portrayal of boyhood and it is awash with colourful descriptions of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society marked by the prevalent practice of slavery and its associated societal norms, it often makes for uncomfortable reading, but at the same time it is a scathing satire against the entrenched attitudes of those days. The novel explores themes of race and identity long before that was a phrase, but also what it means to be free and civilised in the changing landscape of America.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1st edition
Mark Twain
Film, TV, and Theatre

Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966)

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In the last blog, I wrote about Thomas More’s Utopia and the more general area of utopian fiction and it occurs to me that this week’s topic, Gene Roddenberry’s seminal TV series Star Trek, itself falls squarely into the genre of utopian fiction, albeit a far future one in which humanity, having conquered the stars, has also conquered those quaint old divisions that characterised 1960s America. The Enterprise’s crew of star sailors includes a Russian, a Japanese and a black woman and no-one bats an eyelid because it’s the 23rd century and the Cold War, Hiroshima, and racial segregation are all markers of a distant past.

Star Trek first debuted in the US on 8th September 1966 but here in the UK it wasn’t until 12th July 1969 (just eight days before the Apollo 11 mission to the moon) that this soon-to-be-huge pop-culture phenomenon began airing on BBC One. It must have been a few years later when it came upon my radar because I have no memory of a black-and-white version and it wasn’t until about 1974 that we got a colour telly. But boy, how they capitalised on that new colour medium: bright gold, blue and red tunics abounded aboard the USS Enterprise, whilst the numerous planets they beamed down to, and aliens they encountered, were also captured in glorious technicolour.

The concepts were mind-blowingly imaginative, the sound effects reassuringly futuristic (the background computer chatter on the bridge, the sound of a communicator flipping open, the swoosh of the automatic doors, the firing pf phasers, the mechanisms of the transporter in full beam), and the sets were…well, limited by the period shall we say, but full marks for imagination.

The Enterprise, as everyone knows, was a space exploration starship on a mission to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations; to boldly go where no man has gone before”. Led by the Captain James T Kirk, First Officer Spock and Chief Medical Officer Leonard “Bones” McCoy, the crew also included lieutenants Sulu and Uhura, ensign Chekov and of course, on the engineering deck and responsible for all things engineering (including beaming, shields, di-lithium crystals, and giving her as much as he dare), was Montgomery “Scotty” Scott.

It spawned an immensely successful franchise, of course, with something like eleven spin-off TV series and numerous feature films, but it’s the original series that will always be the true Star Trek to me. Their weekly missions had me rapt from the moment Kirk kicked off each episode with an excerpt from his Captain’s Log, and below, for the sake of nostalgia, are the opening and closing credits of this iconic TV series.

Kirk and Spock
Literature

Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)

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People are apt, these days, to consider modern life rubbish and that we’re living in a quasi-dystopian society run by fools and cowards and spiralling towards disaster. Fair enough; it would be pollyannish of me to disabuse them of that notion, given the realities of the world, but let me quickly provide a crumb of comfort by pointing out that at least we’re still able to enjoy life’s little pleasures like this blog. And we can at least dream of how it might have been, how we might have been led by philosopher-kings in a just and ideal society enjoying a golden age. A utopia, if you will…

I don’t know if there ever has been a real-life utopia, but it’s perhaps unlikely, given that there have been so many imaginings of one, dating back to 370BC when Plato described the attributes of a perfect state in The Republic (and from where we get the term and idea of the “philosopher-king”). I suppose bright sparks have been lecturing their comrades on how things should be done for as long as humans have lived together, but the written form – utopian literature – gets properly kicked off with Sir Thomas More’s word-coining book Utopia published in 1516.

Thomas More (1478-1535) was the noted Renaissance humanist who was at various times lawyer, judge, statesman, philosopher, author, and Lord High Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. Quite the achiever, and he is even a saint now, since being canonised in 1935 as a martyr (having been executed as a result of failing to acknowledge Henry as supreme head of the Church of England).

“Utopia” is derived from the Greek prefix ou-, meaning “not”, and topos, “place” – so, “no place” or “nowhere”. Interestingly, More had initially toyed with naming his fictional state by the Latin equivalent of “no place” – Nusquama – so we might today have been talking about Orwell’s 1984, for example, as a dysnusquamian novel!

In any event, More’s vision inspired many others to describe their own versions of an ideal utopian society, including Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) (see what he did there?), H G Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), and Aldous Huxley’s utopian counterpart to his decidedly dystopian Brave New World, namely Island (1962). Well, we can keep imagining…

Sir Thomas More
Music

Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales Of Hoffman (1880)

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German author E T A Hoffmann (1776–1822) was one of the major writers of the Romantic movement and his stories of fantasy and Gothic horror highly influenced 19th-century literature. For example, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is based on Hoffman’s novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, while Delibes’ 1870 ballet Coppélia is based on the short story, The Sandman. Incidentally, this excerpt from the latter story, describing that folkloric character the Sandman, amply illustrates that the term ‘Gothic horror’ is no exaggeration (in bygone ages we didn’t half spin some horrific tales for our young, eh?):

“Most curious to know more of this Sandman and his particular connection with children, I at last asked the old woman who looked after my youngest sister what sort of man he was. “Eh, Natty,” said she, “don’t you know that yet? He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.”

The Sandman (and two other of Hoffman’s tales, Councillor Krespel and The Lost Reflection) also inspired the subject of today’s blog, the opéra fantastique by French composer Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffman. Offenbach (1819-1880) was already a famous composer of around 100 operettas, such as Orpheus in the Underworld (1858) and La Belle Hélène (1864), when he collaborated with Jules Barbier to bring The Tales of Hoffman to the stage. It proved to be his final work: knowing he was dying, he wrote to impresario Léon Carvalho:

“Hâtez-vous de monter mon opéra. Il ne me reste plus longtemps à vivre et mon seul désir est d’assister à la première” (“Hurry up and stage my opera. I have not much time left, and my only wish is to attend the opening night“)

But it wasn’t to be: Offenbach died in October 1880, four months before the opera’s premiere…nevertheless, his work entered the standard repertory and is a popular piece to this day. Here, listen to Anna Netrebko and Elīna Garanča sing the soprano and mezzo-soprano duet, the Barcarolle (Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour) from Act III. You either know it or you think you don’t know it…but you’ll know it!

Jacques Offenbach
Music

Franz Gruber’s Silent Night (1818)

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It’s Christmas time and once again, like many of you, my family and I enjoyed a candlelit carol service at our local church. I do like this event each year; it marks the arrival of Christmas-proper and is the time when you can pause from the merry-go-round that is Christmas-in-practice and just enjoy the moment. Carols such as O Come All Ye Faithful and Hark, The Herald Angels Sing are ideal for a packed church with a rousing organ (who doesn’t enjoy blasting out those barnstorming Victorian lines such as “Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb” and “Hail th’incarnate Deity”?). The carol that I want to write about today, on the other hand, is better suited to a far more reserved affair: Silent Night is made for hushed tones and a gentle accompaniment, and for me is the very epitome of the reflective element of the season.

The story goes that the carol was first performed on the evening of Christmas Eve in 1818, in St Nicholas Church, Oberndorf, in present-day Austria. The young Catholic priest at the church, Joseph Mohr, found himself in a bit of a pickle when the church organ became incapacitated just before that evening’s Christmas Mass service (in the manner of boilers breaking down at just this wrong time of year, I suppose). Thinking on his feet, he remembered that he had written a nice poem a few years before called Stille Nacht, and wondered if local schoolmaster and organist Franz Gruber might set its six stanzas to music for guitar.

Gruber readily agreed to step into the breach and wrote a melody there and then – and that night, the two men sang Stille Nacht for the first time at the church’s Christmas Mass, with Mohr playing guitar and the choir repeating the last two lines of each verse. According to Gruber, the organ builder who serviced the instrument at the Oberndorf church, was so enamoured of the song that he took the composition home with him to the Zillertal valley in the Tyrol where he shared it with musical friends. From there, two travelling families of folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers, included the tune in their shows, and its popularity spread all over Europe.

Rainer family

It’s a very moving and humbling song; as a testament to its global popularity, it was sung by troops during the famous Christmas truce of World War I, perhaps because it was the one tune that was familiar to all of them. How poignant the words must have seemed at that particular moment!

German lyrics English lyrics
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute hochheilige Paar.
Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Hirten erst kundgemacht
Durch der Engel Halleluja,
Tönt es laut von fern und nah:
Christ, der Retter ist da!
Christ, der Retter ist da!Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Gottes Sohn, o wie lacht
Lieb’ aus deinem göttlichen Mund,
Da uns schlägt die rettende Stund’.
Christ, in deiner Geburt!
Christ, in deiner Geburt!		 Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin mother and child!
Holy infant, so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace!
Sleep in heavenly peace!Silent night! Holy night!
Shepherds quake at the sight!
Glories stream from heaven afar,
Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia!
Christ the Saviour is born!
Christ the Saviour is born!Silent night! Holy night!
Son of God, love’s pure light
Radiant beams from thy holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth!
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth!

Here is a rendition by the Spanish sopranos Montserrat Caballé and her daughter Montserrat Martí. Merry Christmas!

Franz Gruber

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