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In Our Time: Marco Polo

Melvyn Bragg 14:27, Friday, 25 May 2012

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Marco Polo. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep - PMcD

Hello

Ingrid told me that I was writing too much again. She must be obeyed. She works both for Start The Week and In Our Time and works with ultimate efficiency and patience. (I bet that was hard for you to type out, Ingrid.)

After the programme there was a lot of talk about Kublai Khan. He was thought of as being the greatest Khan. He was compared with Alexander the Great who, of course, had gone into the East but not with goods, with an army, and dropped only when he had no more worlds to conquer. We're told that there is a Muslim Alexander, a Persian Alexander, an Alexander for all seasons, just as there was a Great Khan for all seasons.

Frances Wood is beguiled by Matthew Paris, who seems to have lived in St Albans all his life and yet reached out right across to the edge of Asia with his information. He knew all the stuff about the Khan and he marvels at how knowledge travelled in those early, so-called rather primitive, medieval days.

The most sensational discovery for me was that the reason why the Mongols stopped at the gates of Vienna was not to do with any superior force, but was because the Great Khan died, and they all turned to go back across the plains and the steppes to be there at his funeral and to help choose his successor. So, we are not Mongol because of the death of the Great Khan.

The Bodleian text of Marco Polo is highly recommended by everyone, especially the illustrations.

London has hit a heat wave and, Murphy's Law, I was so hedged in by work on the imminent renaissance of The South Bank Show and a serious argument with - well, let's leave it at that. Not an individual but ...

So it's been pounding pavements, hitting phones, texting, emailing, and trying to get numbers and addresses and so on. But no bad life at all. Cathy Haslam, with whom I set up a small company to continue to make the television programmes I wanted to make, and I celebrated an anniversary with a quick lunch. But now an evening of relief: off to Michael Frayn's publication party in a garden.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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The Film Programme at Cannes

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Francine Stock 11:00, Thursday, 24 May 2012

Editor's note: The Film Programme is broadcast at 4pm this Thursday 24th May. The programme this week comes from the Cannes Film Festival. -CM

For all its rarified reputation, the Cannes festival is for the large part a trade fair with some top-notch entertainment attached. For the serious filmgoer (aching knees and back from so much sitting, dusty shadows beneath the eyes) there's the opportunity to catch a wide range of international films and talk to filmmakers. Those in town to do deals are wild-eyed with caffeine, riding a carousel of micro-meetings and viewings, muttering into mobile headsets. Then there's the celebrity press pack who lurch and roar at the first hint of the imminent transit across a corridor of say, Brad Pitt. And the cohorts of impossibly glamorous young women stalking the public spaces just to catch someone's eye. They do, inevitably, but not usually the right someone.

The Red Carpet itself is a bit of theatre left over from an age when arc-lights swept the sky as diamond clad deities unfurled slowly from Lagonda or Rolls-Royce. The Red Carpet needs that contrast with the dark sky and the sight of people in off-the-shoulder gowns at two-thirty on a rainy afternoon whilst the audience is in sensible showerproofs seems a disjuncture too far.

So that business apart - it was hard not to be charmed by the opening film (and I didn't put up much of a fight) Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is a colour-coded elegy for the kind of 1965 family holiday where boredom became a form of transcendental meditation. Or Ken Loach's engaging The Angel's Share - part realist tragedy, part 1950s heist caper - which was greeted here with the wondering admiration that the French have felt for Loach since he first came here in the 1960s. They marvel at the way his films are accessible, whilst conveying a distinct social commentary. In Britain we take this for granted; it's what he does.

The film that in the first week knocked the festival in the solar plexus was Austrian director Michael Haneke's Amour, a study of a devoted couple in their eighties facing the separation of death. The couple are played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, actors much loved as stars from the height of French cinema of the late 1950s and 60s. Trintignant was the lead in Un Homme et Une Femme (1966), for example, whilst Riva was The Woman in what for me is one of the greatest films of all time, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Cinema audiences have over the years watched these two grow old - something which must contribute to the intimacy and tenderness of Haneke's drama. At 89, Resnais himself was in Cannes with a new film.

Walter Salles' adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road divided critics, some believing it a decent stab at what might be an impossible adaptation of the zeitgeist road movie, while others finding the famous trio onscreen rather dull. Andrew Dominik's big bruising American gangster picture, Killing Them Softly, with Brad Pitt as a hitman, was heavy on Scorsese homage, using crime as metaphor for the pathology of the American economic system, but it gave Pitt one hell of a closing speech.

For all Cannes is considered highbrow, many of the films on show are remarkably accessible. And 'not-in-the-English-language' does not always indicate profundity - In Another Country, a South Korean film in competition for the top prize, the Palme d'Or, with Isabelle Huppert playing three characters, was delightfully daft but little more. You certainly don't need a doctorate in film studies to appreciate the films of two of our guests this week (although you wouldn't be disappointed if you did). Wes Anderson and Ken Loach's films will both be in cinemas within the next ten days.

Francine Stock presents The Film Programme at 4.00pm on Thursday 24th May.

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The New Elizabethans

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Paula McDonnell 09:00, Monday, 21 May 2012

Editor's note: Nominations for The New Elizabethans were sent in by Radio 4 listeners and then a panel of historians decided on the final list. Radio 4 will broadcast profiles of the New Elizabethans daily (Mon-Fri) starting on Monday 11 June at 12.45pm. Here, the Editor of the series, Andrew Smith talks about the process behind the selection. PMcD.

It sounds like the opening line to a joke. What do you get if you put six historians and the chief executive of the Royal Opera House in the same room, for eight hours? The answer turned out to be a lot of passionate and extremely well informed argument; and, eventually, a list of men and women who in the view of the panel have shaped and given character to the period during which our present Monarch has reigned. The New Elizabethans.

Thanks to everyone who suggested their own New Elizabethans during the public consultation - our panel had your list with them throughout their deliberations. 3,600 nominations produced 950 separate names and the great majority of the people on the list have been nominated by at least one of you - and a lot more than that in many cases - though it was always our intention to allow the panel to make additional nominations based on their own knowledge and expertise.

Our panel's list has now been published and with presenter James Naughtie, we are starting to make a short radio programme about each of the selections. They will be broadcast from June 11.

For now, we're certain to have the arguments. Who has been left out? Why is someone else in? What about this writer, that footballer, a different scientist or business leader? Has the balance been struck correctly between the earlier part of the reign and more recent times? What about the balance between men and women, or people from different parts of the country?

Our panel, locked away with only BBC coffee for sustenance, considered all of these difficulties, and many more, with rigour and with fortitude. The problems inherent in drawing up such a list were thoroughly discussed on Start the Week before our deliberations began, so they came as no surprise and the panel returned to them often during three long meetings.

We asked them to choose men and women whose actions during the reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands (though they don't necessarily have to be British) and/ or who have given the age its character for better or worse - but that still leaves plenty of room for argument and interpretation.

Some of the choices and omissions seem likely to cause comment. There's no religious leader, for example - although religion and faith are certainly themes in some of the lives that have been chosen. There isn't a military general - although there is a soldier, one who will be a new name to many of you. And what about the two pairings? John Lennon and Paul McCartney are put together for a single programme as are John Hume and David Trimble, the latter sharing New Elizabethan status as they did their Nobel Peace Prize.

Those of us working on The New Elizabethans project already know that any list of this sort is guaranteed to spark arguments. Its mere mention in any social gathering fires off a series of sharp discussions and questions. How are you deciding? Who's deciding? On what basis? Let the debate begin.

Andrew Smith is Editor of The New Elizabethans

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