Jonathan Meades c/d?

Hey: http://thequietus.com/articles/10502-jonathan-meades-interview

wow cool. I've been meaning to read his new book, and also to get this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Jonathan-Meades-Collection-DVD/dp/B001110H14

enjoyed the interview a lot.

me too, it was great; stuff on his acid-pioneer civil servant science friend totally fascinating, would read more about that scene.

yeah really good. He seems much warmer in the context of an interview- not playing the character "Jonathan Meades" I suppose.

right exactly - his latest lrb bit is fine, very Meades, but it's nice to read him looser.

funny that that guy was 30 years his senior, when he was 12 or whatever?

wow cool. I've been meaning to read his new book, and also to get this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Jonathan-Meades-Collection-DVD/dp/B001110H14

― Arvo Pärt Chimp (Neil S), Monday, October 29, 2012 10:11 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

Brothers got me that DVD for Christmas last year. It's kind of patchy, and everything's p much available on the extraordinarily extensive youtube collection.

But it is worth it for North alone, which I think is a fantastic double parter.

Looking forward to reading the interview.

I think they're the only ones I've seen on that DVD. His recent series on France, as discussed upthread, is also excellent IMO.

Excellent interview. Mostly doesn't comment on the music, not sure what its doing there? And the bit about Medway Towns *shudder*

lol@

Did you know Peter Christopherson?

JM: Yes, I did. What did he call himself? Scrawny or something…

the medway towns are miserable miserable places

yeah the music thing was weird... they weren't particularly interesting choices, and he didn't comment on them anyway. there wasn't a mention of what its purpose was nor what reaction he did or didn't give. it actually felt like a good interview despite slightly bad questions, without slating the interviewer.

Exchanged a few emails with the great man a few years back; we were having trouble researching some of his more obscure references for the subtitles on the DVD boxset. Turns out they were in-jokes... an area of Aberdeen actually being a corruption of a production assistant's name, etc.

obviously the music was supposed to be a structuring device but maybe doran had the music along as some sort of morale booster or psychic shield or something too. besides, it did spark off a couple of interesting tangents. reads like he didn't really need it though and he semi-abandoned it when he realised he wasn't going to get put through the mincer

I received the Jonathan Meades Collection for Christmas. Currently watching the rather excellent episode on Belgium.

1. jelous
2. The Belgium episode is one of my favourites.

I very much enjoyed it, the penguin dude and thrush counting were both particularly bizarre.

the bits of his book I read were very good and exactly what you'd expect. the scripts for his shows seem like an odd inclusion though

New show about Essex on BBC4 next week!
http://rationalist.org.uk/4020/the-joy-of-essex

Sounds thematically similar to the one he did on the Fenlands some time ago. He's still on typical form, by the sounds of it!

dis ting is on now

enjoyed that, esp as an ex frinton resident

I've been looking for this for ages. From 2001, the best ever Jonathan Meades documentary:
"Queen Victoria Died in 1901.. And Is Still Alive Today"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM76cIGJ0uQ

full documentary on Youtube, nice!

Owen Hatherley wrote a generally positive review of Meades' book in the LRB recently:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n05/owen-hatherley/joe-jerry-and-bomber-blair

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTyP43_8Ssk

"what you observe isn't good enough" sounds like a sentiment that could sit in the middle of the nakh-sinclair-meades venn diagram

Full episode!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTCC-DGbhCg

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/03/series-clark-television

I have never seen Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, but this argument is appealing to me in theory

yeah neither have I, but I've wanted to, though Meades' essay gives me pause for thought.

Its not a controversial an argument. Clark was a conservative art critic - worth a watch as it actually reminds of a time when the BBC spent money on documentaries and made an effort on presenting an argument and giving the space and time (12+ hours) for it.

Besides all that it is more than worthwhile if you don't know that much about art and want to see lots of it quickly. It did what it set out to do.

Yet, for all its lavish grandiloquence, television of this sort is humble: it knows its place and pays due deference to acknowledged masterpieces in media to which it believes itself to be a subservient upstart. It is essentially reportorial and does not attempt to create its own reality. It soothes with the balm of the familiar and the canonical.

This rings true of the series

There are three Ian Nairn documentaries, the first with a hagiographic 80s-era introduction from Meades, on iPlayer at the moment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01rwh55/Nairn_Across_Britain_From_Leeds_into_Scotland/

interesting! loved the bits on the ribblehead viaduct & its brutal construction. wikipedia tells me the workers had various shanty towns & ironically named some of them after posh bits of london. something very tender about nairn & he captures the overwhelming quiet & emptiness of the place. I was in carlisle this week but didn't see too much outside the great second-hand bookshop. it's all pedestrianized now which is something of an improvement, seems a little strange he didn't mention the odd red castle which has seen continuous use for 900 years. nairn cuts an almost sullen but likeable figure, sat on the platform swinging his legs griping about pine trees or getting agitated about a derelict signal box insisting you cld convert the points levers into beer pumps. i'm probably going to watch all of these.

I like the dreamy quality of hearing one person's ruminations but I do wonder what all these faceless people nairn cares about think

just catching up on the brutalism progs. funny he should mention the whole Swinburne Poems and Ballads as object of cultural rebellion thing. P&B stood in relation to the fin de siècle as jazz did to the Angry Young Men. A symbol of a oppositional and willed break with the previous generation.

was thinking maybe I should watch ian nairn progs before they expire but it says

Available until
12:00AM Thu, 1 Jan 2099

they're all really great, i've totally fallen for nairn now. he's really into stockport town centre, hates piccadilly gardens, & deems northampton the most belgian town in england. he is v otm about the desolation up the a6, which is largely the same way 30 yrs later. there's loads of little details, little points he stops at. there's lots of places i want to visit. he plays the whole of harry ogden's schoolyard song unbroken while he's pootles up the canal to wigan, it's gorgeous tv.

deems northampton the most belgian town in england

That doesn't sound so bad?

it's p dardenne bros it's true

also great:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m29kxayGYb1qz4sryo1_500.jpg

yeah he is clearly a belguim fan

just catching up on the brutalism progs. funny he should mention the whole Swinburne Poems and Ballads as object of cultural rebellion thing. P&B stood in relation to the fin de siècle as jazz did to the Angry Young Men. A symbol of a oppositional and willed break with the previous generation.

― Fizzles, Thursday, 27 February 2014 21:18 (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post

the second program is a bit of a nadir of that raging against complasiant bien pensant pietist sentimental cretinous oafish morons thing he does, just screaming VANBRUGH over and again into the void

they are still better than anything else likely to be on the bbc this year but that's beside the point

I agree on both points. I also think his "bring back the big beasts of architecture, dictating to the masses and creating artistic statements" was all a bit weirdly Ayn Rand. The gratuitous bashing of "bureaucrats" and the like wasn't particularly edifying either.

re Brutalism, part 2, yes:

- it's "better television" than other people make, and one wants this good TV to exist
but
- I disagreed with almost all the substantive views he put forward.

nairn's london and paris books £50+ for a used paperback

Hello pinefox!!

Hello Tracer Hand, I've missed you.

I love Nairn striding out to his Morris Minor to "Wade in the Water".
The episode at the Munich Beer Festival is bizarre - not quite sure what is going on there, apart from the fact that he's clearly steaming drunk.
By the end of the Orient Express trip he look's as if he's been drinking for days with no sleep.

The documentary about him made it clear that his shows tended to be filmed around pub opening hours.

"Nairn's Paris", which I've never read, gets short shrift from every Nairn commentary I've ever read, but I'd love to find a copy at a reasonable price. I would also love a copy of "Modern Buildings In London", which everyone seems to like more.

Someone's recently re-published "Britain's Changing Towns" as "Nairn's Towns", I note. I bet you'd agree with Ian Nairn more than you do with J. Meades, Pinefox.

Sorry. Agree (to what extent he’s knowingly Nairning it up also, I couldn’t say, could be both, couldn’t be Nairn only I think). Glad you’re enjoying them.

he obv doesn't like Wessies or at least he seems to have a preference for the more picturesque parts of Yorkshire. Mind you I think Nairn was driven to despair in Hudds and probably had an extra ten pints at dinnertime to fortify himself against the ugliness of such a heathen shithole, until Halifax cheered him up!

i am going on such a crawl if there's anywhere left after lockdown ends

no apologies necessary, these lads are a real find

The new Jonathan Meades book is out today from @unbounders. An incredible 900+ pages of his collected essays. I haven't even got past the dedication and I'm already laughing. #pedroandrickycomesagain #jonathanmeades pic.twitter.com/SH7uSD2FG1

— Alex Boyd (@AlexBoyd) March 8, 2021

Nice interview of a book I'd like to get hold of.

https://thequietus.com/articles/29856-jonathan-meades-pedro-and-ricky-come-again-owen-hatherley-interview

Meades v much the right-winger it's ok to like amongst leftist types, eh?

Pretty funny to see Unbound retweet enthusiastic reviews of this book that are all "this man warned us about the woke!"

How are you defining right-wing here? There are a lot of edgelordy comments in this, true.

Actually he comes across as leftier in this interview than I'd previously known him to be - there's a strong love of individualism in his thinking on architecture, thus the love of Belgium, and the complete contempt for any urban planners who thought people's needs and preferences should be taken into account.

Biggest challop in this interview so far is that France takes anti-semitism more seriously than the UK, a totally baffling statement to me both from my experience with the UK and with France.

He's great tho don't get me wrong!

His last couple of documentaries have displayed some pretty clear right-wing sympathies at points, iirc, but he's generally hard to pin down ideologically.

When he did the Yorkshire section of Nairn's Journeys, he, in his own words, "bumped into" the great bluesman Champion Jack Dupree whilst doing a section of the programme in Halifax. The two got on rather well and maintained a close correspondence almost right up to his own death.

very interesting detail from the Ian Nairn wiki!

I think being a restaurant critic at some point almost guarantees you are going to have picked up some tedious edgelord tendencies.

Further to the question of his being right wing: remembered the other day that his programme on France is some truly shameful stuff. Lots of sympathy for the soldiers of the Algerian conflict who went into far right terrorism, entirely unhinged portrait of France (France!) as a self-hating country where political correctness has gone mad.

that... doesn't sound great. Was this a recent show?

No, just popped into my mind the other day for some reason. It was already archived on youtube when I started watching it, probably close to a decade ago. Lemme check, it's from 2012.

Fragments of an Arbitrary Encyclopaedia ?

I watched this recently too and some of his stuff about Algeria struck me as a bit ripe, albeit that if his claims of a massacre of French loyalists are even half-true then sympathy is more understandable

I forget the politically-correct riffing but every time I do watch one of his (generally excellent) programmes there's always a Provocative Bit

(or if it's the Essex one (which I still enjoy), Several Provocative Bits lol)

I think that's the one yeah calz. Made me angry enough to not check out the other eps.

Seem to remember one quip was abt a dude who'd been responsible for a pro-independence terrorist attack in Algeria that killed several women ending up as a women's studies professor, YoU CoUlDn'T mAke It uP!

The other episodes are good tbf. One of them is all about how weirdly American-aspiring France is

I would lay money on him being a covidiot