Women Prefer Jane Russell

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Samira Ahmed


Ain't There Anyone Here For Love by avinot

In my early 20s I started working my way through a lot of old movies I hadn’t yet seen. When I sat down to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes this eye popping clip of Jane Russell’s confounded my expectations. In a film where both stars played parodies of femininity, Russell seemed to be the most self-aware. Cynical and hard nosed, she wise-cracks her way through the film, mentally almost detached from her remarkable tall, broadshouldered physique.

Surely earning gay icon status in this 4 minute number alone, Russell, on a transatlantic liner to France, sings mournfully “Ain’t  there anyone here for love?” surrounded by the nearly naked US men’s Olympic team performing a variety of bending exercises. Later in the film she dresses up in a blonde wig, pretending to be Marilyn Monroe, wiggling her way through her own rendition of “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”.
With hindsight I would compare it to that Robert Preston number from Victor/Victoria, when he does “The Shady Dame from Seville”.

Having written a BBC News obituary of Russell while a correspondent there in the 90s, I’ve come to the conclusion that she detached herself from the male fantasies constructed around her.  Clearly exploited as a very young woman in The Outlaw (which incidentally, is very raunchy, and not just because of her bust) she went on to be a grown up star; a worthy match for her equally laconic costar Robert Mitchum, particularly in the wonderful His Kind of Woman. (Watch out for Vincent Price nearly stealing the show as a ham actor).

Whatever is written about her religious views and her love life. Russell’s films reveal a woman with a sense of self-deprecating humour, and too much intelligence to whine about the restrictions on her career by powerful men or social convention. She also did a huge service to her fellow country women by becoming the “face” of a famous brand of bras; advocating comfort for 18 hours.  Though apparently in the early days she had to wear the bra over a poloneck jumper in the ads. Bridget Fonda, contemplating a breast enlargement for her dunderhead boyfriend in Singles watches Russell and Monroe singing “We’re Two little Girls from Little Rock” in Gentleman Prefer Blondes, fuelling her insecurity. But she of course misunderstood what Jane Russell was all about. (And changes her mind about the op) . An American female colleague told me today, that her famous and lighthearted Playtex bra ads from the 70s were hugely important to women.

A woman’s woman, you might say.

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If Homer Simpson were Muslim…

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

Have been re-reading Jeremiah in the  Old Testament  and watching Peter Kosminsky’s bold The Promise drama, I thought it worth revisiting something a little more light hearted — my exclusive feature on the making of The Infidel. As writer David Baddiel put it: Imagine if Homer Simpson were a Muslim, who finds out he’s actually Jewish. The piece reveals Baddiel’s love of “swap’ movies, such as Trading Places and Big, goes into rehearsal with Omid Djalili playing Fagin in Oliver! in the West End, and features  Richard Schiff’s views of Islamophobia in the last US presidential campaign.

The piece originally aired in July 2009. You can see it on the C4 News website here.

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Why I love Westerns

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Samira Ahmed



A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and
little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born,” the Wild West was still – just about – in living memory. And a little British Asian girl growing up in 70s suburbia could read the opening lines to Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House on the Prairie, or turn on the TV and enter the frontier lands of the movie Western. One day the little girl grew up to be a journalist and a campaigner on feminist issues, and still loved Westerns so much that she sat through Heaven’s Gate dubbed in German; for the chance to see it on a massive East Berlin cinema screen. This is the story of my journey.

I am 8 years old and find myself at home walking in on the end of a Saturday TV movie matinee. John Wayne is on horseback trying to shoot his beautiful, apparently Indian niece, Natalie Wood. The niece that he’d come to rescue. I am deeply confused. She’s saved by handsome Jeffrey Hunter but it doesn’t feel like a happy ending. I am deeply unsettled.

Now, it was about 15 years later when I actually got around to watching The Searchers from start to finish (when it was screened at the National Film Theatre) , so don’t think I had a highbrow, film critic-style relationship with Westerns from the start. I remember sitting at an uncle’s house in Hillingdon, possibly celebrating Eid, with lots of Hyderabadi relatives, and we were all – kids and adults alike – gathered round the TV watching the end of the original True Grit (more on this later). But the point is these films were shared moments of mythic story telling. I saw scores over the years of my childhood and they were formative.

I fell in love with their stars; (Anthony Perkins in Friendly Persuasion, long before I’d heard of Psycho) the landscapes (notably John Ford’s lovingly filmed Monument Valley); and the weird and wonderful women and their ranches full of outlaws (Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious). I especially loved the strong Indian and Mexican women (Katy Jurado in High Noon, as opposed to anaemic Grace Kelly). And there were always strong women in Westerns; holding their own in a deeply macho world.

Then there were those secretly gay, camp, polysexual or just plain wacko Westerns (Johnny Guitar – the French critics’ favourite. And Calamity Jane. And my personal calamitous favourite – The Singer Not the Song, featuring Dirk Bogarde’s highly unlikely Mexican bandido in black leather jeans and gloves, and Johnny Mills as the Catholic priest he lusts after.)

As I grew older I was intrigued by how they re-told simple, gripping medieval tales of greed (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) and dark tales of Shakespearean complexity about racial hatred – especially the fear of miscegenation (The Searchers, Flaming Star, The Unforgiven); lust (The Outlaw, Desire Under The Elms, Duel In the Sun); sexual violence (The Bravados, Man of the West); and the deep seated twin culture of gang violence and the legal or illegal lynchmob (The Missouri Breaks, The Unforgiven, Warlock and countless others). I still regularly find myself watching extreme violence in the middle of the afternoon on the network TV matinees – Richard Widmark having his hand stabbed to a table in Warlock, or Jimmy Stewart being shot through the hand in The Man From Laramie.

Wonderful actors known best for different work, proved their magnificence to me if they could carry off a Western; especially if they played Indians. (Audrey Hepburn in The Unforgiven; Elvis in Don Siegel’s Flaming Star). I formed double bills in my head. A King Lear like relationship between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River nearly end in Shakespearean tragedy, but pulled back at the last minute by Howard Hawks. And then in a poignant companion piece, a few years later, there was Monty again, his beauty scarred by the car accident, now struggling against a different kind of old American, to rescue Lee Remick from the Depression era Tennessee Valley in Wild River.

I grew up to study English Literature at A-level and then at Oxford University; and I started to see more clearly the “rules” and “form” that liberated, rather than restricted, the Western to critically explore the politics and moral dilemmas of its time; just as much as the “rules” and “form” of the Elizabethan sonnet or court play. Within the “rules” of the settings (ghost town or boom town or graveyard or homestead) and the rules of engagement (white man versus Injun; Easterners versus the frontier; farmers  versus cattlemen; outlaw versus sheriff), it was all there: McCarthy era witch hunts (High Noon); Vietnam and a belated recognition of American Indian genocide (Little Big Man). There was the end of the West (The Wild Bunch, Lonely Are the Brave, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and, as in so many of Clint Eastwood’s films, a darkly satirical Gothic take on machismo in the age of Women’s Lib (The Beguiled).

You may notice the lack of post-1960 Westerns in my listings. Perhaps it’s being forced to watch spaghetti Westerns so often as my big brother and his teenage friends monopolised our Betamax VCR, but they seemed too mean and coldly macho. Michael Crichton’s thriller Westworld is the exception, and that’s because it is a model of the great 70s genre – sci fi. For me, the Golden Age ended before the 1960s. The Westerns of the 30s, 40s and 50s are liberated by the repression. The coiffed hair and neat gingham outfits a decoy from the dark and twisted content.

I’ve watched many Westerns through the 80s and 90s to the present day, and those that work best are those that embrace or parody the baroque structuring of the formal Western and its strong repressed sexuality; not those that wallow in realism. Hence I prefer Sam Raimi’s sexy sharpshooting tribute to the spirit of Dietrich/Crawford/Stanwyck, The Quick and The Dead (Sharon Stone shagging Russell Crowe in a priest’s habit – in chains!) to Clint’s decent, but depressing and masochistic, Unforgiven.


Recently I’ve had many discussions with 40-something contemporaries about whether we were the last generation to grow up with a full appreciation of the genre. But we can choose to change that. I’ve got my own children keenly watching Westerns. There’s one on TV nearly everyday. She Wore A Yellow Ribbon was the first. Then The Shootist – a film so sad it ought to be the last Western one ever watches. But perhaps it is as well to mourn the last gunfighter early on, and then spend a lifetime celebrating the glory days. Back To the Future III is a nice way in, for kids, by the way.

And then the Coen Brothers’ True Grit gets nominated for every major award going and it gives you hope. The co-editor of the Spectator Arts Blog suggested Bridges’ acting revealed just how hammy John Wayne’s was. But I believe that’s missing the point of John Wayne. A man who was Westerns.  And I’d suggest he watches The Shootist.

No Country For Old Men and O Brother Where Art Thou? were of course Westerns, anyway. And what is a Western but the Odyssey, as in O Brother Where Art Thou?, or the Aeneid or the Mahabarata or Monkey’s journey to the West – a mythic journey through symbolic landscapes where we all know instinctively that we are exploring the human condition.

So where does my journey end? Well. I had my own encounter with an old man in the West. Sitting in San Francisco’s magnificent Mexican cathedral-style Castro Theatre in 1995, he came up to me:

“Where you from, Stranger? And what brings you to this screening of Once Upon A Time in the West?”

“Well,” replied this Stranger from the East (Europe). I’ve never seen it before and found it was on here in 70 mm.”

The old man’s eyes moistened. “I’m jealous, girl. I’m so jealous that you’re going to see it for the first time like that.”

And he smiled. And the lights went down. And suddenly I found myself at a dusty train track in the middle of a wide open plain; amidst a group of steely eyed gunslingers. Waiting.

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How a mother’s instinct silenced newsroom cynics

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Samira Ahmed
Yesterday footage came into the ITN newsrooms of an armed raid on a jewellery shop in central Northampton, carried out apparently by a gang who’d arrived on scooters with sledgehammers. Many of us were deeply cynical at how a woman ran from some distance away straight into the group and started walloping them with her handbag. I found two ITN lawyers and the Deputy Editor of Channel 4 News standing over my shoulder watching the remarkable footage several times, deeply concerned that we should not be fooled by a hoax.  The reasons for our doubts? The perfect framing of the scene. (Apparently caught by a freelance cameraman in town for an assignment) . And why would a senior citizen, who reminded hacks old enough to remember the show, of Supergran, head straight into a group of men armed with sledgehammers?

The woman had told police she wanted to remain anonymous. Officers confirmed to me last night that the incident seemed genuine and there were four suspects in custody. And then today, presumably under pressure from the volume of media interest, she released the following statement through police. It turns out she thought a young man was being attacked by the others and said “my mother’s instinct kicked in”.  It’s a rare moment when someone’s motive proves even more selfless than imagined. Dare I suggest that any parent  — any mother even — knows exactly why she could do it? And it’s shut the journos up.

Statement issued on behalf of Anne Timson  in respect of the attempted armed robbery in Northampton town centre yesterday morning (Monday 7th February 2011)
“I’d been shopping in the town and was on my way down Gold Street when I met a friend and stopped to have a chat.

“I became aware of a loud revving noise at the top of the street. I ooked over and saw a kid run up to the doorway  of the jeweller which is on the corner of Bridge Street. Three lads followed him and when I saw their arms going I thought the kid was being beaten up. My mother’s instinct kicked in and I ran across the road shouting at the lads to stop it. Only then did I realise that they were smashing glass and that it was a raid.

“There was a scooter in my path revving up but by now I was in full flight and I started whacking the lads over the head with my shopping bag. Passers by didn’t come to my assistance to begin with. I was amazed at that, but they all seemed mesmerised.  A lot were standing there filming or taking photos and I wonder whether more people didn’t intervene because they thought the raid was being mocked up. In the cold light of day, I know I put myself in danger. But I probably would do the same again.

My red coat has now been packed away for the winter and my red hair is being dyed green. And my black shopping bag is having a rest today, to give it time to recover from its bruises!”
 

Statement from Deputy Chief Constable Suzette Davenport:

“I have today met with Ann and , on behalf of the Force, thanked her for what she did. She demonstrated true community spirit in wanting to help others but we should acknowledge that this did involve a clear element of risk.”

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The Girl From The Black Country: An interview with Julie Walters

Posted on February 5, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

UPDATE May 19th 2014: Julie Walters was awarded the 2014 BAFTA fellowship last night for her lifetime achievement in acting. In the interview I did with her in 2011 she spoke with real passion about her fear for whether a working class girl like herself could possibly make it as an actor today because of tuition fees and the resurgent power of those from wealthier, more privileged backgrounds. At the award ceremony she joked about her mother warning she would end up “in the gutter”. The same story told in my film, has the added context of class and university fees.

It could be the plot of a film. The working class girl from the small town who became a big star, goes home. One of Britain’s most renowned actors, 7-time BAFTA winning, 2-time Oscar nominated  Julie Walters, has  just done that. She returned to Smethwick, in a deprived part of the West Midlands, this week to talk to school children. It was with the Film Club charity, which uses cinema to inspire and engage young minds. But could a young Julie today make it big like she did? Julie Walters is not so sure. For my exclusive report, I got to go along with  her. I particularly enjoyed using clips from the film that made her, Educating Rita and a film that inspired her, Billy Liar.

As a child Julie Walters spent a lot of Saturday afternoons on the sofa with the curtains drawn watching old movies, putting herself into the parts. The films on TV in her day were 30s and 40s ones. Bette Davis was a favourite. But Billy Liar, which is featured in my C4 News report, and other new wave social realist films starring working class talents such as Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney and her future co-star Michael Caine made it seem like you could really do it. What comes across most strongly in her discussion with the children is how much she always wanted to perform, and how talented and dedicated she was; putting on drama skits in her lunch hour with her friends.  But unconventional too. Recalling how she used to  muck about during rehearsals for a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she admits to her audience how the drama  teacher she had a secret crush on, declared in frustration, “Do you know why you’re playing Moth? Because you’re such a bloody nuisance!”

After watching her charm and engage 50 or so children in the hall of George Betts Primary school, we speak in a quiet classroom.  They know her best for her role as Ron Weasley’s mother in the Harry Potter films, and Mamma Mia! but Julie Walters is the product of a lifetime of watching films as well as making them. And that film education is something she believes can inspire, not just future actors or directors.

“Kitchen sink really did it for me,” she enthuses. “Not that my parents were rowing and beating eachother all the time or anything, but they were about my class… Suddenly actors weren’t frightully posh people putting on an act. That was an inspiration.”

Researching Smethwick ahead of the interview I found it had been a microcosm for the national battles for equality and social mobility over the past century. In 1918 Christabel Pankhurst narrowly lost her fight to be Britain’s first woman MP. In the 20s the future fascist leader Oswald Mosley was the local Labour MP, and in the 1960s Malcolm X famously came to Marshall Street, Smethwick after a racist generation election campaign against “coloured” people buying houses there made headlines around the world. Conservative campaigners allegedly used the slogan “If you want a n****** for a neighbour, vote Labour. It worked.

15 then, Walters remembers the excitement of Malcolm X coming. Her girls’ grammar school, Holly Lodge, backed onto Marshall Street. She didn’t understand the significance of the racial politics of his visit till later, at university. And it’s that issue of social mobility through education that was clearly her passion.

Despite opposition from her Irish Catholic mother to going On The Stage, Walters felt able to abandon nursing for a degree in drama and teaching at Manchester Polytechnic because she had a full grant. She got a job at Liverpool’s renowned repertory Everyman Theatre, where other working class talents were being nurtured — Willy Russell, who wrote Educating Rita which made her name — and Alan Bleasdale, whose Boys from the Black Stuff gave her one of her first TV roles.

Walters smiles when she thinks how “you actually felt sorry for middle class kids” at drama school. “In 1970 it was very fashionable to be working class.” More reflectively she admits, “I was lucky to get into the business at at that time.”

Walters says she’s not political, but is cynical about what she terms the “Sam Cam”  and Cameron “set” of old Etonians. As someone who was at Oxford University in the mid 80s, at the same time as Cameron and much of his cabinet, Walters’ remark sets me thinking. The 80s was the last time I remember it being socially desirable to have inherited money and be aristocratic.  The 80s (Educating Rita aside) was dominated by posh heritage dramas on TV and film: the Jewel In The Crown, Brideshead Revisited, the Merchant Ivory films. Does Walters see a parallel in the current vogue for Downton Abbey and  The King’s Speech?

“Kitchen sink drama was in the 60s which was a real boom time, wasn’t it? And [Educating] Rita was in the 80s which was also a boom time, so I think that’s interesting. I think there is a certain retreat.. to more escapist stuff. We don’t want to know about people struggling, because they are struggling.”

Cinema is cyclical, she argues. Certainly the vogue for escapism is not new. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance extravaganzas and Cagney gangster films of the 30s were the escapist fantasies of the Great Depression.

But Walters feels angry because she believes a girl like her, could not make it as she did: “I had a full grant to do what I did. And subsidised theatre is getting smaller and closing.. which has nurtured young writers and actors and directors… I’m frightened. I’m frightened for young working class kids coming up. Not just because it’s difficult to be an actor, but because it’s so difficult to go to University in the first place. No matter how much they say, “We’re going to look after the poorest”, you know, who IS that, exactly?”

Looking back at the interview tape, I notice  how concerned Walters looks. The jauntiness, the self-deprecating jokes, the mimicry, has stopped.

Having discussed Alfie and all those other  60s heros, in my edited report I found a young lad with charm and a hint of that cockiness. During the Q and A, 13 year old Holly Lodge boy, Josh Wilkins turned out to be the only pupil to know who Bette Davis was, and struck up quite a rapport with Julie Walters. She told him she recognised a fellow “subversive” like her.

I ask him afterwards for his view of the old girl who’d made it big. “She was very funny and entertaining. I look up to her a lot,” he smiles. And does he have any ambition to be an actor? “Not an actor. I want to be a goal keeper. I am a goal keeper ” And then, after some thought. “But if that doesn’t happen, Im doing DT GCSE and I will try my best to be an engineer and” (he gives me a beautiful grin  and gestures with his fingers rubbing together) “to earn a little money, if you know what I mean.”

Not just Julie Walters, I think Michael Caine would be proud.

Note: The Film Club charity has now become part of Film Nation under the BFI’s Education arm. 

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My secret playground in the Bush House Hindi section

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

News that the BBC is closing the shortwave service of the Hindi section to India has a special relevance for me. This is not a post about the decision.  The service will continue to be available on FM and via other digital means.

Bush House, Aldwych: The centre of the universe

My mother, Lalita Ahmed, used to freelance for the Hindi Section. She read news sometimes but, being a professional performer rather than a journalist, took part mostly in dramas and discussions. And without childcare, throughout the 70s she used to take me, and often my siblings and even friends, along when she had recordings.

I must confess, there were long stretches, especially when I was only 5, when I was bored.  But there were those fabulously exotic English meals to look forward to in the Bush House canteen when it was all over. Fish and chips and spongy things with custard. But over time it came to mean much more. I grew up completely at home with reel-t0-reel tape machines; sitting with the Studio Managers, watching them rock the reels and edit with a flick of the china graph pencil and razor blade. Scripts were painstakingly typed and carbon copied. Words in beautifully written Hindi were amplified round the booth. I even got my first broadcast experience there being interviewed for a children’s programme about second generation Indian immigrants growing up in Britain. (And learned that it was never a good idea to drum one’s fingers on the table during a recording). I saw the professionalism of take after take till they got it right, broadcasters and non-Hindi speaking technical staff alike. Compared to the racism one often came across outside in 70s Britain, Bush House seemed a beacon of mutual respect and tolerance, whatever the reality of office politics. It made a big impact on a young girl.

Most of all I remember with affection sitting in the Hindi section offices. The Eastern Service was all on one one floor — Urdu, Bengali and the other Oriental languages linked through the labyrinthine corridors of the building. A wrong turning on the way back from the Ladies might see me wander into a room full of Burmese or Nepalese journalists and writers, sharing a joke. The place was always full of intelligence and affection for distant homelands. Many staffers in some Eastern European sections were political exiles. The Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov was famously murdered around this time (1978); his killing not solved till 1995.

I would sit in the window bay as night fell, looking out on the lit up theatre marquees of the Aldwych and the taxis dropping off outside the Waldorf, and  listen to my mum and her journalist friends discussing the latest politics in London and Delhi.  I can actually still remember that specific moment, sitting there, when I thought, one day when I’m grown up I’ll live in London like this and go out at night. Bush House was then, and somehow remains to me now, the centre of the universe.

My mum’s friends mostly continued to serve the Hindi section till retirement. They were delighted when I became  a BBC graduate News Trainee. Kailash Budhwar, who was from 1979 till 1992  head of the Hindi section, and a regular commentator on South Asian politics for  programmes such as Newsnight, remains a close family friend and mentor. I took a special delight in 1990, in going back into Bush House for the first time since I was a child, to interview him for a trainee radio report. It was about the 6th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster. He has remained a passionate advocate of the World Service. I found this letter he wrote to The Times about the power of English as a global language in 2005.

Looking back now from the vantage point of 20 years in news journalism, mostly at the BBC and ITN, I realise how privileged I was to be, in a small way, part of the Hindi section.

For an opinion piece about the closure of shortwave by a former BBC-staffer you can read this in The Guardian.

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John Barry: Sentimental Music Man in an E-type Jaguar

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

There was a select number of 60s Guys who had that Jag. Barry and his friends made up a significant proportion of them. With  a romantic track record as complex as James Bond’s, John Barry was a composer who lived the lifestyle his music  soundtracked.

But it all began here. Beat Girl is a delightfully Bad British exploitation flick about beatniks in the fleshpots of Soho’s coffeebars. It had an X-certificate and delighted in the lewdness it claimed to be exposing. His first soundtrack, featuring his own John Barry 7 — it has all the stylistic devices that would solidify on the Bond themes — serious twanging guitar melodies and a memorable refrain. Watch out for a very young Oliver Reed camping it up as a wild one in a checked shirt. If you watch the whole film, refined, sinister pre-Scaramanga Christopher Lee is acting in another class.

Beat Girl.

The Knack and How To Get It is another typical jazzy Barry score, and the best thing about a film whose 60s sensibilities have dated very badly. (Jokes about rape were very common in 60s sex comedies.) How many people would even remember this if you asked for the best films of the mid 60s? You can see from the trailer why the French loved it though. Enough to award it the 1965 Cannes Best film prize.


What intrigues me about Barry’s super tough image is how much sentimentality  there is in his later soundtracks. All the Bond ones feature very sweet love themes. See the Japanese wedding theme of You Only Live Twice, and the underrated soundtrack to The Living Daylights. But in Out of Africa  he produced something sweeping and deeply deeply sentimental. The soundtrack equivalent of what is sometimes patronisingly dismissed as “chicklit”. It was funny then to hear Knack-star Michael Crawford on The World At One today cite “masculinity” in Barry’s  musical style. It’s sad but appropriate that I remember a couple of years ago watching BAFTA’s roll call of the great talents who’d died in the past year , being run to this soundtrack.  I suspect the Oscars and the Baftas will pay John Barry just tribute.

Out of Africa

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From Citizen Kane to Morning Glory: Journalists on Film

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

In the light of Morning Glory — the new film about breakfast TV anchors with Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton, this is my assessment of journalists on film for The Spectator Arts blog; the good, the bad and the ugly.

When I got my first job in journalism —as a BBC graduate News Trainee fresh out of university – my father bought me the video of Citizen Kane (1941) and my brother got me Broadcast News (1987). Both turned out to be important to my career in different ways and explain why I feel so passionately about how journalism is portrayed in the movies.

The best film ever about TV journalism?

I used the Citizen Kane video to make a report about its 50th anniversary on our
trainee Newsnight programme. Egged on by my fellow trainees who said it was
really good, I channelled young Mr Orson Welles himself, walked up to the 7th
floor corridor of TV Centre and took it to the editor of Newsnight the same day,
boldly suggested they might like to run it. They didn’t, but I was soon a trainee
there and within 2 years, a Newsnight reporter. Thank you Mr Kane.

But it was Broadcast News – made only 5 years before I joined the profession myself, that set the benchmark for journalism on film. James L Brooks, who cut his teeth in 60s TV said he wasn’t interested in the world of TV news, but the relationships. And yet it remains, for me, the most accurate portrayal of my profession ever made. The film celebrates with humour and charm the intellectual ambition of talented journos and the excitement of the work (Holly Hunter’s Norman Rockwell edit that barely makes it to air); the egos (Jack Nicholson’s cameo network Anchor) the office politics and TV attitudes to talent (Albert Brooks is talented but not anchor material; William Hurt looks the part
but is struggling to “get” the stuff he’s reporting on) and the way long running
stories are viewed from HQ: Hunter and Brooks head off to Nicaragua to prove
they are heavy weights; Hunter sends her love rival, Lois Chiles, off to cover an
Alaskan serial killer’s’ trial. The film is framed by the characters contemplating,
sometimes helplessly and regretfully, the decline of journalistic standards.

Broadcast News was a combination of intelligent soap and a throwback to the Hollywood of “grownup” sparring reporters – Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn in Woman of the Year (1942) and Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940)

But more than, that it turned out to be accurate. Most of the things that have
happened in that film, right down to the periodic mass sackings, have become a
reality across my profession. The film managed to humanise the hacks and their wretched love lives, but did not sentimentalise us or our world. It even threw in an ethical dilemma – (SPOILER ALERT) and after all the fakery scandals I’ve seen over the past 2 decades, I find it interesting how my attitude has changed significantly to the crucial scene in which it’s revealed that William Hurt faked a tear for his cutaway, interviewing a rape survivor.

But I blame another blond Hollywood leading man for the trash that has come to dominate the Big Screen’s portrayal of my profession. Yes, I know Robert Redford was in All The President’s Men (1976) and Three Days of the Condor (1975) –a conspiracy thriller fantasy which climaxes in a Wikileaks style victory as his envelopes of secret documents land safely in the offices of the New York Times.

But this man is responsible for the truly execrable Up Close and Personal (1996) with Michelle Pfeiffer. Remarkably, this film started out as an intelligent biopic script about one of America’s first female news anchors, Jessica Savitch, scripted by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. You will have to dig out the TV movie Almost Golden to find out about the sex discrimination and personal tragedy of her life. For all its faults, there’s a chilling scene in which hostile producers refuse to brief her over her earpiece as she’s live commentating on a breaking event. You can also read the scathing account of the metamorphosis of Up Close and Personal in Didion and Gregory Dunne’s book, Monster.

Up Close and Personal is the Showgirls of TV journalism. It’s tawdry, exploitative and hideously sentimental in a way that real hacks could only dream of. I’ve lost count of the number of times it’s come up in conversation with fellow journos, ending with howls of derision.

Pfeiffer, a poor Southern weather girl, on the make, complete with fake TV
name Tally Atwater, finds her pre-shoot in a jail turned into a live nationwide
broadcast when a riots breaks out, despite a lack of any cables out of the camera.
Some black and Latino men die hideously, and it’s all for us to feel how special
Ms Atwater is. It makes her career and she never has to do a piece of original
journalism again. Just read autocue with different coloured hair. Any time a
sense of irony might be creeping in, Robert Redford looms up for the romance,
his ageing face barely visible in the blur of the soft focus as the once great
producer, who’s on the way down. . I think it was supposed to be a remake of A
Star is Born. But no one laughed when James Mason died at the end of that.
Although James Mason wasn’t blown up at the end by generic evil non-blond
militants. With the live camera running…

What Up Close and Personal did mark out was a sub genre of Cinderella films ,
in which childlike girls found their princes while negotiating a Barbie-glamorous
grown up career in, like, journalism. The Devil Wears Prada, Superman Returns,
and, judging by the trailer, Morning Glory.

I must confess to having a soft spot for one such film though. And there is a sort of relevance, in the light of the undercover police/environmentalist campaigners story, to Straight Talk (1992).  This guilty pleasure of mine features the flawless James Woods as the hardnosed Chicago newspaper hack romancing talk radio agony aunt Doctor Shirlee (Dolly Parton) to find out if she’s a fake doctor.

She is. A graduate only of the southern University of Life. There is a scene
involving her bra and the phrase “holy moly” that Katie Price would be proud of.
The film also features Spalding Gray, and the then unknown Michael Madsen and
Teri Hatcher. But beyond the fairytale an ethical dilemma presents itself, too,
as Woods pulls his story rather than destroy the woman he loves and she comes
clean about who she really is. Sniff. The original poster even shows her sitting on a pumpkin.

I finish with a list of films about journalists– worth checking out for what they
say about the times they were made, as much as whether they are accurate or
not:

Defence of the Realm (1985) – the last film to capture old Fleet Street at work.
Gabriel Byrne negotiates a rather imitative London conspiracy thriller, complete
with envelope handovers on Hungerford Bridge and a doomed Denholm Elliott
as ageing alcoholic hack, but is strong on the atmosphere of smoky copy rooms,
rattling hot metal presses, and the ritual “banging out” of retiring print workers.
Greta Scaachi looks great in a trenchcoat.

Anchorman(2004)  Under the cover of being set in the 70s, this combines fantasy streetfighting between rival network gangs with anti-diversity arguments that stretch only a little beyond reality:

Brick Tamland: [opposing women in the newsroom] I read somewhere their
periods attract bears. Bears can smell the menstruation.
Brian Fantana: Well, that’s just great. You hear that, Ed? Bears. Now
you’re putting the whole station in jeopardy.

The Ghost (2010) The plot unravels into a lame 70s conspiracy thriller, but Ewan
MacGregor and Pierce Brosnan turn in fascinating performances in this
atmospheric exploration of the instincts of a good reporter who sold out,
uncovering the secrets of an ex-prime minister.

Superman (1978) Superman II (1980) Unlike the wretched “reboot” of Superman Returns with teenage mum Lois Lane – the originals feature growups. The scenes in the newsroom of the Daily Planet are highly atmospheric. Chain smoking hardnosed Margot Kidder’s
greatest moment is when she climbs the Eiffel Tower to get her scoop, spelling
out “P-U-L-I-T-Z-E-R “ to calm her nerves.

Network (1976) In our world of “infotainment”, how much of this Oscar winning film about pushing TV news ratings with aggression and violence is really fantasy anymore?
Faye Dunaway is a role model for today’s TV execs.

True Crime (1999) Reporter Clint Eastwood and his editor James Woods battle it out in the newsroom as the clock ticks to save an innocent man from the electric chair. Eastwood plays a kind of ageing Dirty Hack rather than Harry who could redeem himself with this one story. It is very, very silly.

Ace In the Hole (1951) Kirk Douglas and Billy Wilder concocted this nasty little tale about the heartless reporter trying to make his fortune when a miner is trapped underground. Sound familiar? Spike Lee paid homage to the famous end shot near the start of Malcolm X.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (2009) This intelligent Fast Food Nation-style allegory about modern Western consumption features a fascinating subplot about the exploited female intern turned investigative weather reporter who is mocked by the sexist news anchor for not looking glamorous enough; and pressured to play down her intelligence on camera. Delicious.

You can read the original post on The Spectator Arts Blog here.

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Michael Gove on educational elitism — a flashback to Oxford 1988

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

 

Hearing the attacks for alleged “elitism” made on Education Secretary Michael Gove’s  plans to make the National Curriculum of English state schools more academically rigorous, I remembered something he wrote about that very subject 23 years ago, in January 1988 when we were both undergraduates at Oxford University. (The year, coincidentally, that the Education Reform Act first set up the National Curriculum). This article originally appeared on the Channel 4 News website.

Oxford Union Magazine January 1988

The future Conservative Education Secretary was then President of the Oxford Union – the university’s famous debating society that term. I edited the Union’s magazine, “Debate” together with fellow English Literature and Language student, Toby Litt. The content reflected the issues being debated that term and the pressing issues of the day as we saw them. The coverlines were – Money  about how most students seemed to be going into the City to become bankers, contrasted with mass unemployment, and poverty in many inner cities. Fear was about Aids, and Sin was about homophobia. But Michael Gove’s address at the front, was about the motion “This House believes that Oxford and Cambridge are too elitist.” It turned out to be a bold mission statement about his desire to stop Oxbridge being a finishing school for the children of the rich; by raising educational standards in state schools:

gove debate article

“Elitism is not a bad thing. Unjustified or corrupt elites are wrong, but the concept of striving after excellence which underpins elitism is entirely worthy. If our state schools were a little more elitist, if they tested their pupils with greater rigour and frequency and brought home the difference between failure and success more forcibly they would have more pupils at Oxford.” Explaining why true elitism in his opinion would”not mean more Sloanes and fewer scholarships but rather the reverse,” Michael Gove added: “In a sense elitism is like roughage. The system works better and more cleanly and blockages are eliminated by the introduction of a little fibre.”

The odd subbing/typesetting error apart (in the garbled sentence about societies choosing their elites) it certainly makes interesting reading in the light of his announcement, not least the reference to Old Etonians: “If I had not been tested, cajoled, frightened by failure and stimulated by success I would not be at University… I cannot over-emphasise what elitism is NOT. It is not about back-slapping cliques, reactionary chic or Old Etonian egos. It is a spirit of unashamed glamour, excitement and competition.”

Read the original 1988 article here.

Original post on Channel 4 News website.

Further reading: Department of Education website

Michael Gove MP website

They work for you website

The Truth about the Jam generation: Spectator arts blog post about Oxford and 80s culture (2011)

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From Ealing to Four Lions: How to fund a great British film.

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

BAFTA Nominations were out today. When I remarked on Twitter yesterday that the Golden Globe winning, now much BAFTA nominated, Oscar hopeful The King’s Speech had been funded via the scrapped UK Film Council I was flagging up the difficulty in assessing success and failure, rather than attacking the government per se for abolishing one quango to move its functions to another body. As it did attract a lot of attention and questions, here’s my fuller exploration from the Channel 4 News website.

In making its decision the Culture Secretary cited how much money was spent on overheads. The government says more net funding will be available when film funding responsibilities pass to the British Film Institute. What is consistent is how just about every government, for the past 50 years has tinkered with the structures of state film funding; always in pursuit of that elusive grail – great (commercially? critically?) successful films and tax or lottery-payer “value for money”. You can view
all the projects the UKFC has awarded and the amounts on their website:

Back in the 50s, big studios paid an “Eady” levy from their then massive UK box office returns; a tax to fund British films. Like today some of the projects were worthy but dull, or frivolous, and rarely made money. It’s just we don’t remember them, and they don’t get discussed on vintage film programmes any more than we play the dross that cluttered up much of the pop charts in the 60s.

Then starting in the 1990s the National Lottery opened up a goldmine. You couldn’t walk to a train station or past a busstop without seeing a poster for some new “hilarious” or worthy British movie. Up and Under http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120422/, Sex Lives of the Potato Men; there were the Trainspotting clones, the Lock Stock and 2 Smoking
Barrels gangster clones.

Somewhere in there were critically acclaimed films with small returns – such as Lyn Ramsay’s Ratcatcher.

Exactly 10 years ago it emerged that only 1 out of 11 films released and funded through national lottery money in 3 year had made a profit (An Ideal Husband)

It reminded me of Alexander Walker’s assessment of the great British films of the 60s: A Hard Day’s Night, If… Blow Up and Performance.  All but the first were not main stream hits.” What is most interesting, that all, except If… were funded by major Hollywood studios. Performance – with hindsight a remarkably daring film – was
funded by Warner Brothers. The studio was so horrified, it delayed release till 1970 and an executive was supposed to have remarked on a viewing, “Even the bathwater is dirty.”

So what sort of films should a government-backed UK Film body be funding? Do you need UK tax revenues to fund a movie like “The King’s Speech”? Isn’t that exactly the kind of film which should raise all its money privately? Or does that mean funding only worthy films that no one wants to pay to see? In addition, is it too easy to judge with hindsight what was always going to make it big?

Like 1981’s Oscarwinning triumph, Chariots of Fire, The King’s Speech deals with difficult and engaging themes with strong actors. One tackles the trauma of stammering in a powerful man at a crucial junction in history. The other dealt with the ugly anti-semitism of upper middle class England and the challenge to a devout Christian’s faith. But one can’t help wondering if it’s the comfy “heritage” setting that has been the real winner.
And whether the temptation in these austere times is for British film funding to do, what appeared to happen in the 80s; to invest in “safe” material. The 80s was dominated by the tone set by Merchant and Ivory’s period adaptations. France, by contrast, continues to make a broader range of contemporary-set movies.

Chris Morris’ truly original and daring “Four Lions”, which makes disturbing but genuine comedy out of homegrown Islamist terrorism, seems to mine the same dark subversive terrain as the finest Ealing comedies. While nominated in other categories, it’s a notable omission from today’s BAFTA original screenplay shortlist. In 20 years I wonder what its status will be Perhaps the BFI could do worse than take inspiration from the golden age of the Ealing studios in planning their funding policy. Ealing had a steady output of British material that celebrated contemporary life in all its complexity; kind hearts, NOT just coronets.

Further reading:

A useful account of the postwar history of British film from britishfilm.org.uk

This is the strategy the UKFC had itself outlined, only 8 months ago.

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