Cameo appearances

Me

VIDEO: of extract of  the acceptance speech from BBC coverage

McNulty

Bubbles

Jesus (pink velvet)

The 2009 British Academy Television Awards at the Royal Festival Hall, London.

UPDATE 28.iv.09:

Just arrived from BAFTA (official pic) – red lining courtesy of my old pal John (Granny Takes A Trip) Pearse, maker of the Gee wedding garb

Much smileage

Update 12.v.09:

VIDEO of the full monty – the opening of the golden envelope and the acceptance speech, with Graham Norton and the fellas from Masterchef

A wed wose, how womantic

Kathleen 'The Lips' Byron in Black Narcissus

I’m a Romantic at heart. I love the paintings of Johns Minton, Craxton and Piper (as gorgeously gathered at the Barbican in 1987 in A Paradise Lost). And I love Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor red. I was saddened to hear of his passing yesterday – he was one of British cinema’s greatest. I met him once a couple of years ago at a tribute in his honour at BAFTA – and the honour was mine .

When I first saw it in my 20s, I was really taken by Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) with James Mason and Ava Gardner, for its 50s surrealism and its Romantic colour. Cardiff shot it for the literary maverick Albert Lewin (who also made the off-beat The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)). It reminds me of the graphic style of Abram Games, my mum’s teacher and mentor, designer of the quintessentially 50s Festival of Britain logo.

Much though I admire A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948), it is the third great film he shot for Powell & Pressburger that I reckon marks the highpoint of his career – Black Narcissus, for which he won an Oscar in 1947. How can you forget Kathleen Byron’s bright red lips?

I was fortunate to encounter Michael Powell – it was in Cambridge in 1985 at the Arts Cinema (then in Market Passage)  when I was at college. I had set up the University Film Society and he visited with his Mrs, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, for a screening of Colonel Blimp. I have his autograph on the Arts Cinema programme on my Wall of Honour – alongside my signed picture of Neil Armstrong (swopped for a signed Damned single with editor Mark Reynolds), and photos of Chaplin, Muhammad Ali and Gandhi. Powell and Cardiff were perfectly attuned in their neo-Romantic outlook.

On the plane back from Dublin this evening I read he spent two years developing a script for my beloved Ulysses in the early 60s but it never came to anything. I reckon it is filmable but you’d need to stray a long way from Joyce (but not in spirit) to pull it off. I organised a 16mm screening of Joseph Strick’s 1967 effort with Milo O’Shea in my 20s for some reason that entirely escapes me now.

Cardiff was born on 18th September (1914) a date which has a special meaning for me – but I’m not telling you why. The point is we’re connected – 18th September, Elstree, The Archers, Lewin. (Powell was born 30th September, Lewin on the 23rd and Madeline Kahn on the 29th, significant clustering vibe here.) Cardiff was a real craftsman of my grandfather Ian Harris’ generation and had that special English Romanticism. I was struggling all day yesterday as I left England for Ireland to pick anything out of St George’s Day. Those red crosses of St George all over the pubs were just an unsettling embarrassment. But Cardiff’s red shoes, red rose (in Life & Death), red lips have the quintessence of what is great about England. In the words of Lili von Shtupp, with her distanced Teutonic view across the water: A wed wose, how womantic!

Kim 'The Lips' Hunter in A Matter of Life and Death

Where’s that kid gone?!

WATCH THE VIDEO: Jesus, where’s that kid gone?!

Britain’s Forgotten Children on Channel 4 from 11th May

UPDATE 23.iv.09:

Hi Def embeddable version now available:

One and Other

Antony Gormley is one of the two most popular artists on Big Art Mob (Banksy is the other)

[clearspring_widget title=”One and Other” wid=”49edeaf153efcc08″ pid=”49ee289b0cf75ef3″ width=”250″ height=”200″ domain=”widgets.clearspring.com”]

The Way of the World

Signs of the times?…

Following nothing

Over 3,000 people follow …nothing (but a promise)

Containing nothing

linked to a site containing …nothing (but a promise and an advertisement). Get the ads right and the content can take care of itself. I believe in ‘launch early and often’ as much as the next guy, but there’s early – and there’s Early.

Meanwhile – over at Tumblr…

the Team is a bit light on the fairer sex.

Stumbled across these in the course of a couple of minutes via Twitter a few days ago and (no offence intended to Big Blue Baby or Tumblr, another few minutes and I dare say some other examples would have crossed the radar) they struck a cautionary chord.

Journalism ain’t what it used to be

Tony Wells

A colleague sent me over a link to the last Media Guardian podcast in which I made an unwitting appearance. Maggie Brown saw a speaking gig I did last week and said it made her realise that “there are some people there [at Channel 4] with real knowledge driving the 4iP fund which I hadn’t expected” – I was talking about my Landshare project which goes live tonight as soon as the DNS switches over from the old Registration site .

So that much was spot on 😉

What The Guardian unfortunately failed to do with their careful fact checking and old school journalistic attention to detail was:

• get my name right – I was Tony Gee (an amalgamation with the next speaker who was Tony Ageh of the BBC)
• ascribe the project to the right source – not 4iP which is not behind Landshare but Channel 4 Cross-platform (since it is related to a primetime TV show, River Cottage)
• grasp the purpose of the site – not getting allotments but sharing land (the clue’s in the name)
• link it to the right partners – Royal Horticultural Society was singled out from a wide coalition including the National Trust, Garden Organic, Capital Growth et al, with no sense that Channel 4/Keo Films was the prime-mover

The thing that stands out for me about event where Maggie saw me speak (at the Voice of the Listener and Viewer, chaired by Roger Bolton) was a rather odd question I got at the end from a lady in the audience:

– Why did you use all that jargon?

– Sorry, hadn’t meant to, was really trying to avoid it, what did I say?

– Well what did you mean by “pipes”?

– Those things water flows through

– Well what about “ether”?

– Sort of airy

Still, it was lovely to appear in the Media Talk podcast, not least in that it squeezed out a begrudging recognition that we do some good stuff at Channel 4 in the networked media world. Now I love The Guardian as much as the next white, male, Oxbridge-educated, middle class person – my own flesh&blood works there on the Sports desk, the luverly Jemima Kiss writes great stuff in it, a nice gardening man in G2 wrote a double-page spread about Landshare and Veg Doctors in it today – but it does bug me that the highly respected organ spends a lot of time having a go at C4 without declaring its vested interest (including vested interests in terms of the Guardian/Scott Trust’s media ownership such as radio stations etc.) in the Channel’s future not being secured by the Powers That Be as we travel over the crossroads of digital switch-over – how it would love to be the counter-balance to the BBC in the public service media landscape. But when we ask ourselves whether Skins viewers read The Guardian over breakfast every morning? whether the Sex Education Show viewers turn to The Guardian for a chance to talk openly about sex education issues? whether The Guardian can do a Jamie’s Scool Dinners? we understand why Channel 4 has its place in the landscape and why people of all sorts dig it.