Will 'ganderflanking' take off?

The BBC reports that a campaign has been launched to try to get the old English word ganderflanking into the Oxford English Dictionary. It's not a new word, having its origins in Wiltshire, in the UK, apparently. It means "aimless messing around." 

My wrist watch has started ganderflanking since I got it a new battery about a week ago. There was no cleaning done, although the watchmaker claimed that it really needed it - but I'd bought the thing for £15 in Norwich in 2007, and the last thing it needs is any more money spent on it. If it goes, it goes.

But the ganderflanking aspect is that in spite of having nothing more done to it than the replacement of  a battery, it's now decided that every twenty-five minutes to the hour it should beep at me. And at twenty-five to three in the afternoon it should pretend it's reminding me of something by playing its alarm. In order to stop it giving me its alarm warning, I have to push in the button that officially is supposed to be only for setting the time on the watch. It's a sad day when a wristwatch decides it should join a campaign to revive something in the English language.

Back to the actual ganderflanking campaign.  Mervin Grist, Conservator at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre - he's also an artist, writer and performer - originally mentioned the word on the radio in December, and the presenter, Sim Courtie, was much taken with it, so much so that he immediately began campaigning to get the word into the Oxford English Dictionary. A week later it was used in the House of Commons by the South Swindon MP, Robert Buckland.

Whether it gets its rightful place in the OED is a moot point, but in the meantime, it seems a shame that such a delightful word should be lost, and I for one am already doing my bit to give it a new life. 

Northanger Abbey

There have been times when the BBC has made something of a hash of televising the classics (King Lear was one example), but rarely have they made such as hash as their version of Northanger Abbey, made in 1987 with Peter Firth and Katharine Schlesinger.  Robert Hardy and Googie Withers also appear; Withers is fine in a truncated role as Mrs Allen, but Hardy seems totally ill-at-ease, as though he's either not sure what the role is all about (he plays General Tilney) or he's found that the production wasn't living up to his expectations and he is trying in part to sink it.   That's probably unkind; most actors do their best not to assist productions to sink, and anyway this one is sinking from the opening scenes without any further help from the actors.

The script adds and subtracts, seldom adding to any advantage and often subtracting to great disadvantage.  It loses the point that Catherine Morland (Schlesinger, all googly-eyed as though her eyelids were permanently stuck wide-open) is so enamoured of the Gothic romance novels of the period that she views everything about her as though it was coloured in the same way.  Instead, we have crazy inserts of the Gothic stuff she sees as though it was some kind of reality, and these are never really explained.  She never actually grows from being obsessed with the romances to seeing real life.

Firth isn't too bad as Henry Tilney, one of Jane Austen's regular older and wiser men whose role it is to bring a young woman into a place where she's not so self-obsessed and flighty.  He's charming, though not particularly handsome.  Why Catherine would fall in love with him at first sight is a bit difficult to understand (or he with her, if it comes to that).  His worst moment however is when he's required to sing some Italian duet with a woman who's role in the film is never clarified.  Firth isn't dubbed by someone who can sing; instead we have to endure a couple of minutes of him singing with a voice that has little vocal quality whatsoever.  Its main blessing is that it's in tune.

The Thorpe brother and sister are presented as plain awful: Jonathan Coy plays John Thorpe as one of those brusque characters out to win a bride to fund his ongoing living.  He at least knows the style of the thing.  Cassie Stuart, however, has no idea of the style or period.  Her speech has no quality to it, she's forever giggling and gushing, and her only moment of truth is when she's dumped by Catherine's brother because she's been giggling and gushing at Henry's brother.  On top of this she's dressed like someone who has no sense about her clothing at all.  Not that she's alone in this; this TV play must be one of the worst dressed on record for both men and women.

And then there's the music: for a start there's too much of it, blowing its way into scenes where it isn't needed, and at other times so anachronistic that it breaks any mood it's trying to convey.  The user reviews on IMDb.com, which seldom agree with each other, here universally decry the music, especially the use of a saxophone and some wailing woman that occurs on more than one occasion.  The reviewers in this instance dislike the play almost entirely, in fact, which again must be unusual both for IMDb and for the BBC.

For some reason this particular film doesn't show up in IMDb's search engine.  You can find it via Google, where the additional tag, 'Screen Two' is added; this appears to have been some series that the BBC produced around that time that were intended both for TV broadcast and theatrical release.

Downton Abbey in the revised versions

If you're a fan of Downton Abbey you'll appreciate these two parodies far more.



They were produced for the BBC Red Nose Day in 2011.

Here's the second 'episode' in which the butler explains how far apart the real upstairs and downstairs are, and Joanna Lumley decides that being cast as the housekeeper (below stairs) she's definitely in the wrong part of the building.

Bleak House

With The West Wing now having been viewed in its entirety, I looked around for something to replace it, and found Bleak House, the BBC serial version, on display at the library. 15 episodes, but much shorter episodes than The West Wing ones.

I kept saying to my wife: I don’t remember that from the book, but in fact they stuck pretty closely to it. In spite of the fact that I’ve read Bleak House twice, the details obviously haven’t stuck with me as well as I’d thought.

It’s pretty well done, considering it’s produced in that BBC fashion of not stinting on costume and casting, but on lighting and scenery. Somehow the BBC, for all its expertise, still plays the niggard on certain aspects of its major productions. And there’s quite a bit of hand-held camera, which sometimes gets annoying, particularly when the camera’s prowling around one of the enormous gardens and we have to spy on the characters through leaves, plants and bushes.

There’s more story than I remembered, but for all that, some of the characters, such as Harold Skimpole, seem excess to requirements. My strongest feelings about the whole thing relates to the casting: some of it is top-notch, some of it is odd.

Anna Maxwell Martin plays Esther Summerson as a determined kind of character who dives in boots and all and seems to have few qualms about herself. Not quite how I remember Esther from the book: there she was much more backward about coming forward. Still, Martin has some very moving and affecting scenes. 7 out of 10.

The Wards in Chancery are excellently cast, and actually manage to give life to two of the duller characters in the story. Carey Mulligan and Patrick Kennedy therefore get 9 out of 10.

Miss Flight is played by Pauline Collins. She’s the right height, but the wrong shape. This Miss Flight is well-fed and fairly capable – and there are few flights of fancy about her. She seems to have her head well screwed on, whereas as Miss Flight ought to be tiny, like a little bird, barely fluttering her way through life. 5 out of 10, but mostly the producers’ fault for wrong casting.

Equally Jo, the sweeper boy, has plainly been getting his vittles from somewhere off stage. A skinny, small boy is how he’s cast by Dickens, and his illustrator, and this well-fed lad, though he does the part adequately, shouldn’t have been cast in this wizened role. Again 5 out of 10 because of the casting department.

Nathaniel Parker, of all people, plays Harold Skimpole. What is it about skinny people in this production? Parker was quite beefy in a recent TV series, but has lost some of that here. Nevertheless, he’s far too comfortably-built, and never convinces us of the truth of his idea that he’s too much of a child to understand the adult world. Regrettably, because I like Parker as an actor, 4 out of 10.

The one skinny actor who gets everything right is the oddly-named Burn Gorman as Mr Guppy. Not only is this beanpole exactly as Phiz shows him, he’s gauche and irritating, socially inept, has a face like something that’s been pushed sideways and all in all could have sprung from the pages of an early edition of the book. 10 out of 10.

Lady Dedlock is played by Gillian Anderson, who, I only realised part way through watching, is the former X-files leading lady. Some reviewers haven’t liked her much in the part, but I couldn’t fault her. 10 out of 10.

Likewise Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn is the epitome of malevolence, manipulation and heartlessness. Superbly done. I had an impression in my head that Tulkinghorn was a stouter person, but Dance overcame all other impressions within the first episode. 10 out of 10.

Timothy West does Sir Leicester Dedlock wonderfully; Tom Georgeson is a typical Dickens clerk (Clamb); Hugo Speer is Victorian to the sideburns as General George; and Alun Armstrong, while not being how I’d pictured Bucket, makes the role his own. High points all round for these people.

Being a Dickens story, there are a host of other minor characters, from the doctor, Alan Woodcourt to Caddy Jellyby, from young Turveydrop to Snagsby. The list goes on and on.

Two other larger parts are played by Philip Davis, as Smallweed, and Johnny Vegas as Krook. Davis throws himself utterly into his role (though we could perhaps have had one or two less of the shake-ups from his granddaughter) and Vegas is suitably slimy until his explosive demise. Again I would have expected ‘lesser’ men, in the sense of skinnier people. Not too many people managed to carry weight around in Dickens’ time, and the pictures of Smallweed that I seem to recall were of someone virtually at death’s door at all times – but managing to avoid it.

Casting obviously makes a huge difference to any piece, and my carping about skinniness aside, I enjoyed the production overall. And there’s a wonderful moment at the end, which in a way echoes Dickens’ usual tidying-up chapter of what happened to all his characters. Esther finally marries Alan Woodcourt, and as they begin to dance outside, the bright summery field is full of people from the story (those that haven’t died off during the course of it!). It’s reminiscent of the end of Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, with its great dance of life.

Which reminds me that I haven’t mentioned the character I enjoyed most of all. For once, a character that I’d remembered as having a bit of weight turns up in the production as someone of ordinary size: John Jarndyce, the warm and loving man of integrity, wisdom and honesty, the man who struggles with his love for Esther (because he knows he’s too old for her), the man who's unable to help Richard Carstone avoid an untimely death from his addiction to the Jarndyce v Jarndyce case, and the man who helps many others in the course of the story. In this role, Denis Lawson never put a foot wrong. He’s been in television for ever, his first listing being way back in 1969, in Dr Finlay’s Casebook. And he appeared in the first Star Wars and two of the subsequent prequels. If I could give 11 or 12 out of 10, I’d do it.

Jephtha by Handel

I think I may have spelt the name of this oratorio wrongly in a recent post on my other blog. One of the difficulties of travelling and typing: you don’t always get a chance to check the details.
Anyway, as I mentioned elsewhere it was being rehearsed when we came across it. The group performing it were the Orlando Choir, a group which specialises in baroque music. The only soloist we heard rehearse was a youngish man called Alexander Ashworth, a bass-baritone. He has a fine and fluid voice, and sang in a remarkably relaxed style.
The choir was also dealing with Handel’s constant runs and scales with ease, and also with the fugues that permeate his works. This is another amateur choir - amateur here in London doesn’t mean that the work will be done in a slapdash fashion, or done without professionalism and skill. The Orlando, the BBC, the Philharmonia, the Crouch End and the Trinity boys’ choirs were all remarkable in their professionalism, even though, as far as I can tell, these people don’t actually sing for a living. (Though the boys’ choir has done so many concerts and tours that they might as well - can’t imagine when they get their schoolwork done.)
The conductor - a very relaxed fellow, too - was James Weeks. I don’t know how old he is, but he didn’t seem to be more than in his early thirties. Hang on, he was born in 1978, so that makes only 29. Apparently he has at least thirty hours in the day, because apart from conducting the Orlando, he conducts another choir - the Exaudi Vocal Ensemble; he freelances with other choirs, he plays the organ, he writes on organists and contemporary music - and he composes. Crikey.