Jonathan Meades c/d?

yeah but pomposity - meades’ cookery book p self-satisfied.

shit recipes as well! I'll start boiling bones and Parmesan rinds as an alternative to eating bark ftr!

but still love him.

This is so dated and banal. It could have been made twenty years ago.

forgot it was on, shit is it really that bad?

It’s on iPlayer.

I love Meades but this is pretty much a hodgepodge of Dad opinions (footballers have stupid hair, modern art is rubbish, things were better when people on tv enunciated properly, etc) that makes no real attempt to engage with the 21st century.

idk, plenty of people seem to have liked it so maybe I am a grouch but it was enormously disappointing.

business jargon is bad is also like a 90s bad comedian level type of thing

I've enjoyed bits of this tbh, but when he said Duchamp was a bad joke then, that get's worse with the re-telling - that's tired old great great granddad opinions ffs!

It's easy to show a load of wank modern-art to back up a shit opinion.

Dressing himself up as a Benny, too.

The further he gets from architecture, the more he becomes a "rugged individualist" has often been a feature of his work. But not in a good way at all on this one - in places.

The idea he seemed most interested in is the one he outlined in the Radio Times - that RP is a tool of self-improvement and homogenisation is a positive thing - which has echoes of his challop about how good it was for Algerian children under occupation to be rote taught obscure facts about the amount of rainfall in different parts of France with a view to making them more French and therefore more likely to succeed, etc. That could have made a provocative hour of television but the material obviously didn’t stretch that far.

His mid 20th century modern art challops might have been intended to wind up certain types of pseud arseholes, but that doesn't stop it being really played out and wrong willful philistinism.

when I say mid 20th c, I sort of meant they probably would have passed as mainstream opinions back then.

In music terms what he did would be like trash-talking John Cage and then showing footage of britpop arseholes to back up his prejudices.

was looking forward to iplayering this, maybe I'll pass :(

I bet he could be very witty + funny on footballing dimwits with tribal tattoos, but he wasn't in this and also perhaps it is a bit of a shooting fish exercise for a heavyweight like him.

which has echoes of his challop about how good it was for Algerian children under occupation to be rote taught obscure facts about the amount of rainfall in different parts of France with a view to making them more French and therefore more likely to succeed, etc.

I couldn't get through his show on France. He diagnoses it as suffering from self-hatred (FRANCE, of all countries!) and talks about a dude who started off as a terrorist and ended up a professor in women's studies "ironically, since most of the victims of the bomb he planted were women". There aren't enough eyerolls in the world.

If you're hunting something architectural to watch from lockdown, an anonymous hero uploaded almost every Jonathan Meades documentary here: https://t.co/SqtJxAfMQ6 - I wrote about Meades during my MA, so I might share some choice transcribed quotes and screenshots below pic.twitter.com/Vxi6gs7jgR

— MatthewLloydRoberts (@MatthewLloydR) March 31, 2020

Somebody linked it on another thread. Great stuff.

Scratching a similar Nairn-Meades itch but happening right now, there's this fellow, Dan Cummings, a similar mix of knowing, irritating, funny and interesting: http://www.youtube.com/user/CummingsYourWay/videos

He and his mate appear to be making these films and lobbing them on youtube. I hadn't come across him before this morning but it looks like he's been doing this a while.

Content warning: Black Country.

That's not a warning that's a recommendation

Quite so. But mostly I was trying to get your attention NV. The Hull episode's pretty good also.

three quick observations:

a) shame on you for making me want to go down to the pier when i can't
b) i think he's very knowingly riffing on Meades especially
c) these look brilliant!

pub montage at the end of the Hull ep is particularly cruel

good shout Tim, never seen a Youtube address so many of my interests in one go :D

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