May I recommend the film Fatherland to my readers. It is simply superb. If there is a better actress on God’s earth than Sandra Hueller – whom you may recall being outstanding in The Zone of Interest – I want to take lessons from her. Set during the Cold War it tells the story of Thomas Mann returning to West and East Germany to receive an award. It is stark and restrained but all the better for that. It is written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, in black and white with subtitles. Don’t let that deter you from seeing it. It’s a masterpiece.
Then, if you have the koyach, check out Memoriam, by Noga Flaishon, at the elusive Southwark Playhouse. I use the word because there are two Southwark Playhouses, one in Borough and one in Elephant and Castle. Why one of them doesn’t give in and say ok, the broiges is over, we’ll change the headed paper to The Bourista Playhouse, I don’t know.
(We’d had a disaster already, in the same week, setting out, in good time, to see Julia Pascal’s play about Hannah Arendt, but turning up at the Almeida, Islington instead of the Arcola, Dalston. We’d have been more successful on pushbikes. There is no entrance to latecomers and no interval. Abject, we went home for beans on toast.
The play, Memoriam – we made it to, and I can report it is a good play, with impeccable direction and acting, about family and hi-tech. A girl from a Jewish family, working for a firm which harvests people’s memories for public consumption, falls out with her family because she wants to use her grandmother’s memory of her time in Auschwitz. It splits the family. It feels very prescient and important at this period of our lives.
Again, there was no interval and since many of the audience were our age, the last ten minutes was a lesson in mind over body and the mixed toilet was like Saturday in Camden market. I have to say that I’m uneasy still in mixed toilets… I can’t help it. I just keep apologising, when I’ve done nothing but pee in the prescribed place.
The occasion was a Gala night for Jewish Blind and Disabled so I had to say a few words before the show. I told the audience that in my day, AI meant Artificial Insemination and it threatened nobody except cows. My daughter once had a biology exam at school and one of the questions was, “Why is Artificial Insemination in cows, preferable to normal methods?” Amy’s answer was succinct if ingenuous, “Because it’s nicer for the cow.” There’s a lot of my late mother Zelma in that girl.
The rest of my week has been nostalgia and then some. There was a podcast about the beginning of ITV with Michael Grade, who in my day was head of London Weekend Television (LWT) where I made three series of the sit-com, Agony. He later became head of the BBC and we had fertile territory to turn over. He is as concerned as am I about the rise of antisemitism and how best to counter it. We were not there to discuss such weighty subjects but somehow it imbued every issue we touched on.
Agony was about a Jewish agony aunt – they all were of course. There was Clare Raynor, Irma Kurtz and Marjorie Proops (Rebecca Israel). It is largely a female job although the first ever agony “uncle” was, unexpectedly, Daniel Defoe. Another such Jewish radio therapist was Agony’s co-creator Anna Raeburn. She wrote the pilot with a gay Jewish Californian, Len Freeman, whose mother ran a sex shop in Hollywood and LWT had the guts to commission a series.
It ran from 1979 to 1981 on a Sunday night, quite late because of its racy content. We had transvestites, sex toys, and perhaps the first openly gay, normal homosexual relationship. I can tell you that 40 years since it aired, not a week goes by that a gay man doesn’t shake my hand and tell me that the programme saved their lives.
We also talked about the stunning effect on we, Northerners, when Granada TV opened with the words:
“From the North, this is Granada.”
Suddenly we existed. We were part of the world of Television. It was not only for us it was by us. My late husband Jack Rosenthal was there on that first thrilling night. He was in the promotions department, earning eight pounds a week and deliriously happy (even though Vantona Textiles had offered him nine pounds a week.)
I found this passage in his autobiography and read it out with glistening eyes:
INTERIOR OFFICES AND CORRIDORS GRANADA TV STUDIOS – DAY-1956
Arguably, the most exciting place on Earth.
Bright young things bustle in and out of offices, clipboards clutched in hands and stop watches bouncing on bosom.
The air clangs in a babel of colliding accents – Cambridge, Cockney, Canadian, with the odd bit of Ardwick thrown in.
The corridors shimmer with legendary, yellow corduroyed whizz-kids of West End stage and Silver Screen discussing Life and Art.
Phones ring everywhere. Typewriters clatter. And the excitement went on well after home time. Like an excited Mancunian nightclub. With clothes on.
And he quotes, CEO Sidney Bernstein’s rallying cry – and threat – to the troops before Agincourt – on the day Granada TV went out for the first time;
“And together, starting from tonight, we’ll make Granada the best TV station in Britain – the best programme-makers. That means every one of you.
If any of you are unhappy with that, you can leave right now.’’
Next day everyone had a handwritten note on the door of their office. It read:
“Thanks, it was a wow.”
What I find so thrilling is the sense of a new world being explored... and the vividness and imagination of Jack’s literary re-creation of a 70-year-old moment in time.
The week ended with a superb celebration of the life of producer/ presenter Alan Yentob at the BBC in Portland place. It was filled with what his friend Mel Brooks once described as “the great and the near great,” and my life flashed before me. Alan was remembered with affection as a great name dropper, so in respect to his memory I will do the same. Joanna Lumley and Armando Iannucci were our engaging hosts and Jules Holland, Labbi Siffre, Lemn Sissay, James Graham, and Dave Gilmour gave us music and memories. Guests included former CEOs John Birt and Greg Dyke, alongside Mick Jagger, Tim Rice, Richard Eyre, Stephen Frears … I could go on.. and I do…
There was, to my surprise no mention of his early life, his childhood in Manchester or his Jewish heritage. It was as if he’d emerged, chrysalis like, at the age of 20, to rise to fame over his four decades at the BBC. Had Yentob himself made the programme, I mused, it would have started in Stepney, via Iraq.
Jeremy Clarkson and Clive Anderson were surprisingly sweet company afterwards and Janet Street Porter dished some dirt over canapes. David was so happy to be able to tell Stephen Fry how much he adored his Odyssey reading. I suddenly recalled Jack’s speech at my 60th birthday party. He said:
‘’Maureen was born in 1946, the same year as the invention of the ball point pen. A pen that can write over 2,000 letters, and still not get a reply from Alan Yentob.’’
We came home in time to watch on BBC four, a 1985 play, The Fools on the Hill, about the beginning of television from Alexandra Palace, written by Jack Rosenthal as he looked at Ally Pally from his study window in Muswell Hill.
How fortunate have I been in my life to have been loved by men of the word.
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