Peter Morgan has made his name, despite his explicit republicanism, from dramatising the House of Windsor. First on stage, then in cinema, and more recently in Netflix’s blockbuster monolith, The Crown. The latter’s production values are spectacular, and certainly in the first two seasons (I confess I gave up in season 3 as it seemed to become more tabloidy), the synergy between script, actors and direction was impressive.

Season 1’s penultimate episode (Assassins) was written by Peter Morgan, directed by Benjamin Caron, and was first aired on 4th November 2016. The reason for choosing this one was because of its stellar acting and the dramatic poignancy of the storyline: Winston Churchill (a brilliant John Lithgow) is at last stepping down as Prime Minister to hand over to the desperately impatient Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam). A portrait has been commissioned from Graham Sutherland (Stephen Dillane) by Parliament and there is going to be a great unveiling. It is the conversations between artist and subject especially that stand out.

It has to be one of the finest hours of television I’ve ever watched, I think.

A complete change of tone now. This is a classic satirical novel from the 1930s and on which has brought universal joy and guffaws to all who have spent any time on the farm.

Stella Gibbons (1902-1989) was an English journalist with a remarkable eye for the ridiculous. Cold Comfort Farm was a runaway success that’s never gone out of print; sadly it seems to have been the only one of her many books to have stood the test of time.

Her crosshairs were set on the rural sagas that had apparently been popular in the 1920s, many of which had been inspired by the doom-laden tomes of Thomas Hardy (such as the (IMHO) unbearably bleak Jude the Obscure). By common consensus her targets include the so-called ‘loam and lovechild’ novels (!) like Mary Webb’s Precious Bane (set in Shropshire) and Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Joanna Godden (in Kent).

But you certainly don’t need to have read those books to love this one (none of us had, in fact). Her turn of phrase is sparklingly witty and the pen-portraits of the various characters laugh-out-loud funny. And the greatest joy of all is that we never do discover the precise nature of the “something nasty in the woodshed” that so perplexed the matriarch and protagonist Flora Poste’s Aunt Ada Doom.

It sets imaginations running wild and so that’s perhaps why the phrase has become enshrined in the English language. It even appears in a song by Neil Hannon’s wonderfully arch and rakish band, The Divine Comedy

Rebel, Sweetheart was The Wallflowers fifth studio album. Lead singer, and songwriter of all the tracks, is Jakob Dylan (who is, as you might expect, son of Bob) and while it didn’t make huge chart waves, it’s a gorgeous and provocative album.

The sixth track is our focus: God Says Nothing Back. It’s a haunting song, full of questions and doubts, and fittingly, is hard to pin down.

Opening question: what album saved your life?

All of us slip into judging books by covers and people by appearances. It’s unfair and unhelpful, but it happens nevertheless, sometimes instinctively. So an encounter with Mats Steen, a Norwegian suffering from advanced Duchenne muscular dystrophy, would have left most people struggling to know where to begin in relating to him. How quickly we equate physical restriction or disability with mental. Yet that also is an unfair presumption. Mats retained all his mental faculties. Yet as he gradually lost control over his own body, it’s perhaps inevitable that he appeared to withdraw completely into himself. His parents were deeply concerned as he seemed to lose contact with everybody around. But through technological miracles, he was writing blogposts and became fully immersed into life online.

But the disease would inevitably defeat him and he died at only 25. It was only then that his grieving parents discovered that he was part of a huge global community of people who communicated with and cared for one another through the game. Mats played the character Ibelin Redmoore in the guild Starlight. Nobody knew anything about his real life circumstances; he kept them completely secret. But he was someone countless people trusted and grew to love, someone who could lend a shoulder or timely advice or just a listening ear. All online.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (on Netflix) is unique, an extraordinary Norwegian documentary telling his story – and because so much of Mats’ life was in the game, it can be recreated very easily from his digital footprint.

Several WoW friends came to his funeral – and he was clearly somebody who, for all his troubles and agonies, was a genuine source of kindness and care for so many people around the world. This is therefore a documentary to win over cyber-sceptics; it is hard to contend that this community was fake, superficial or a distraction. For some, it was the only forum in which they could express something of their full humanity.

So we all found this a really moving and profound watch and recommend it wholeheartedly.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was a prolific writer of novels and short stories, especially in science fiction. Fahrenheit 451 dystopian novel went through various iterations before being published in 1953.

Elements appeared in short stories and then a friend

urged him to develop his 1951 novella The Fireman into something fuller.

A clear inspiration was the book burnings that started almost as soon as the Nazis got into power in 1933. As a lifelong reader Bradbury was horrified by the sense that the same might be happening in the USA as the House Unamerican Activities Committee got into its stride (not least because of Sen. McCarthy).

The key idea is that the state controls thought by banning all books and making TV watching compulsory. Fire brigades exist to burn rather than extinguish. Guy Montag is a fireman who begins to have qualms. A brilliant and compelling read that, far from feeling dated, has become more relevant than ever.

Mark Gertler (1891-1939) was part of a remarkable generation of artists based in London. He was part of the (in)famous Bloomsbury set (of whom was quipped ‘they lived in squares and loved in triangles‘, or variations to that effect). His parents were Polish Jews who immigrated when Mark was only 5, and his talent was obvious from very early. As a young man, he became infatuated with the artist Dora Carrington and socialised with several Bloomsburyites.

As a conscientious objector in the First World War, he came into conflict with many, including a significant patron. And this outlook is on vivid display in this painting from the middle of the war, simple called Merry-go-round. It is perhaps the painting for which he is best known and it packs a punch.

Few images convey the sense of futility and entrapment that people felt in the middle of that infernal war. Their uniforms (male and female) suggest a society conformed to military discipline, their facial expressions show the chill of enforced ‘fun’. There is no escape. It is no accident that I found myself thinking about this picture when writing about Sam Mendes’ 1917 a while back.

Most loved immersive worlds:

Frederick Buechner (1926-2022; pronounced ‘Beakner‘) was an American Presbyterian minister, theologian and, most notably for our purposes, writer. He was prolific in both fiction (15 novels), poetry and non-fiction. He was heralded in his lifetime for his brilliance and creativity, though inevitably, his books have perhaps not maintained their deserved popularity.

The novel for which he is best known is surprising! A relatively short work, Godric tells the semi-fictional story of an obscure figure from 12th century Northumberland. Godric of Finchale (apparently pronounced ‘finkle’ acc. to English Heritage!) was a hermit with a heavy conscience, a former Crusader who essentially withdrew from society to a cave on the River Wear, north of Durham. He longs to be left alone to seek God and avoid his past. But the Bishop of Durham was having none of it, and so the Abbot of Rievaulx Abbey sent a young monk, Reginald, to live with Godric in his very old age, to write up this holy man’s life. The result is a hagiography (literally writing about a saint). The word has since come to mean a biography primarily concerned to present the subject in the best light with all warts removed (with probably a few miracles thrown in). But Godric is infuriated by this, not least because he knows his past.

The result is an extraordinary, moving and compelling book, wrestling with the nature of good and evil, sin and righteousness, guilt and forgiveness; essentially it’s about how messed up we all are. It’s no surprise that it was a finalist for the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

Buechner wrote:

I picked up a small book of saints and opened it, by accident, to the page that had Godric on it. I had never so much as heard of him before, but as I read about him, I knew he was for me, my saint.

Chris McCandless was utterly disenchanted with the hypocrisies and platitudes of modern, especially suburban, American life, as exemplified by his parents. So in May 1990, freshly graduated from university, he leaves home without telling anyone to escape to the wilderness. He travels all over in his clapped out car until it’s wrecked in a flood. He hitchhikes, meeting various people with extraordinary stories of their own. He is aiming for Alaska, and he eventually finds an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness in April 1992. He sets up his base there, naming it ‘The Magic Bus’, and all seems ideal. However, things start to go wrong, especially as the weather turns. He also comes to realise how much he desperately craves human company. But when he tries to retrace his steps, the stream he crossed before has become a lethal torrent, forcing him back.

He has to resort to foraging for food, and then becomes fatally ill after eating a poisonous plant. He keeps a journal as he slowly declines. Some weeks later, hunters find his body and the family are contacted.

Sean Penn’s film is a heart-breaking story adapted from the research of mountaineer and writer Jon Krakauer, whose book Into the Wild stayed at the top of bestseller lists for 2 years. It is beautifully shot and well-paced, with a superb performance by Emile Hirsch in particular. (Sadly, he seems not to have landed the productions or parts that enabled him to reach such heights since). To top it all, the soundtrack is simply stunning: Eddie Vedder (of Pearl Jam) wrote and sang the songs. I’ve had seasons over the years of keeping the album on repeat.

But the film is more than the sum of all these extraordinary parts and is one of those that stays with you long after viewing.

Sir Karl Jenkins (1944- ) is a Welsh Composer who started out as a jazz-fusion multi-instrumentalist. He trained at Cardiff university and the Royal Academy of Music in London. You may think that his music is unfamiliar, but especially through its use in advertising, his compositions seem to get everywhere. They’re the sorts of familiar tunes that you can never place but instantly associate with banks or insurance or whatever! Composing such music is no mean feat, and requires a certain kind of genius

But he is the writer of far more than atmospheric mood music. He’s best known for Adiemus, and more recently the Armed Man mass for peace. There is a long mediaeval tradition of composing settings of the Catholic mass liturgy around popular melodies and one of the most used was from a folk song called ‘L’Homme Armé’ (or the Armed Man). Jenkins updates the concept at the Millennium,  describing the previous century as

the most war-torn and destructive century in human history

Commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum to mark its move from London to Leeds at the Millennium, Jenkins combines the original form with texts from the Bible, the Islamic call to prayer, and the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. But just as Benjamin Britten did with his War Requiem after the Second World War, Jenkins throws in more contemporary poetry for good measure.

Artistic discoveries during the break:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (as she became after her second marriage) suffered intolerable hardships in the lead-up and aftermath of giving birth in 1885 to her only child, Katherine. Today, she would be swiftly diagnosed with severe postpartum depression, but of course in the 1880s and 90s, the concept was light years from a medic’s vocabulary. She was given a ‘rest cure’, a strictly policed form enforced solitude and passivity: confined to bed, barred from social interactions, limited diet, minimal mental stimulation (so little or no reading or writing). If anything was guaranteed to aggravate mental illness, this was it.

Highly unusual for the time, she finally divorced her husband Charles Stetson in 1894, although both had recognised that would be necessary as early as 1888.

She wrote what would become her most famous  short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, in 1890, about a young mother’s ghastly plummet into madness in circumstances that clearly echoed her own. It is brilliantly paced but utterly chilling in its artful, unreliable narrative that manages to speak with piercing clarity. It’s easy to see why it became a staple of feminist literature, but it shouldn’t be confined to such labels. 

It is astonishingly good writing, pure and simple. Here are some relevant links:

Paul Simon is one of the true greats of American popular music. I mean, who else living has both his creative range and longevity? A brief ChatGPT query offers only Willie Nelson and Dick van Dyke (!?, though he is 100 this year). Both great folks – but IMHO not a patch on Paul Simon. You mention Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock, or Johnny Mathis? But their careers are marginally shorter, believe it or not.

He first came to global fame (as well as Sophie’s obsession) through his 10-year partnership with fellow New Yorker, Art Garfunkel.  It was hugely successful, but towards the end, became highly fraught; they formally split in 1970. This song, I am a Rock, was first released in 1965 but only in the UK. It would gain a global hearing when included in their 1966 album Sounds of Silence.

In Passing:

In an earlier episode, we shared our artistic proselytising failures: those things we loved that failed to impress anyone else. Mine was Local Hero. So we put it under the Triptych microscope, with interesting results!

Bill Forsyth wrote and directed (on the back of his success with Gregory’s Girl), David Puttnam produced (fresh from Chariots of Fire Oscar glory). The film’s scale is simultaneously tiny and global. Its tone is light and quirky, almost absurd at times, but manages also to prompt serious questions. It’s nostalgic certainly, and perhaps trades in caricatures of a long-past Scotland. But it is a film with heart that really grows on you (though only perhaps, as Joel says in the discussion, once you have an idea of what to expect!). 

The premise is simple. US megacorp oil company wants to buy remote fishing village on Western Highlands coast to turn it into a massive refinery. Agent sent from Houston to soften the inhabitants up for the deal. That’s it. But nothing goes smoothly. And that’s the joy of the whole. A wonderful cast (including Burt Lancaster in one of his last big roles; the great Fulton Mackay, Denis Lawson, not to mention Peter Capaldi in his very first etc), brilliant script, and dollops of wonder and natural beauty. Oh and Mark Knopfler’s gorgeous soundtrack.

As several critics have pointed out, it is effectively a modern fairy tale.

Our childhood artistic joys:

I can’t quite believe it. What started as a minute little thought-seed, during one insomniac night back in mid-2024, then evolved into an actual thing with a real-live team. Joel and Sophie were in pretty quickly after the thought was shared, and then Owen came up trumps as our techie.

Now look! We have reached the 8th, and  final, episode of Triptych Season 1!  What a ride it’s been. But before delving into this week’s  show-notes, we would LOVE to hear from YOU.

So here’s a link to a brief TRIPTYCH Listener Survey (it should only take 5-10 minutes, max) to help us develop and grow Triptych for Season 2 and even beyond!

But for now, back to the show… We decided to take the masterpieces in chronological order this time.

Black Mirror is both a phenomenon and an outlier, one that has gained cult status in some quarters (though perhaps there’s a generational divide there? You’ll need to ask our producer Owen for more on that. He has views…). It started life on the UK’s once quite edgy and adventurous Channel 4, the brainchild of journalist, arch-satirist and presenter, Charlie Brooker. He has either written, or prompted creative discussions for each episode, working with his producer Annabel Jones.

But what makes it incredibly unusual is that it is an anthology show; in other words, one made up of a series of unrelated, stand-alone episodes. This is obviously much more expensive than a regular show because new sets, casts, designs etc are needed every time. The common thread is the impact of technology, socially, relationally, economically, and politically. Some gripe that it often piggy-backs on ideas that are developed at greater length elsewhere, but that does seem nit-picky when the production values are so high and the provocations so thoughtful. If that was not the case, it’s unlikely Netflix would have thrown huge budgets at it or so many A-list stars given their right arms to be in it. 

That said, it is rarely comfortable viewing and sometimes incredibly dark. As this episode is… the discussion we had was very ‘interesting’!

The premise of Men against Fire: soldiers are given neural implants that affects their perceptions, especially of enemies, so that they appear as lethal grotesques, or ‘roaches’. However nothing is as it seems. But what is interesting is that none of the ethical issues are as straightforward as they first seem. In this clip, psychiatrist Arquette (played by the brilliant Michael Kelly) explains the ethos behind the implants to protagonist Stripe (Malachi Kirby).

The total population of the 16 Caribbean nations comes to only around 44 million (so 0.54% of the world’s population). But just stop for a moment to think of its cultural impact: this is a region punching well above its weight:

So it’s to Derek Walcott that we turn now (1930-2017). He won the Nobel in 1992 for his varied writing (plays, short poems, epic poetry, criticism), work that bridged all kinds of different influences making him one of the leading post-colonial writers of his generation.

In this episode we discuss his beautiful, Love after Love, which was his publisher’s Poem of the Week only the other day.

Some other connections

Lake Street Dive is a highly talented and versatile band made up originally of friends who met at music college over 20 years ago (the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston). Since then, they have successfully experimented with different genres while the line-up has changed slightly. There is so much to love about their music, with its invention, virtuosity, flexibility and joie-de-vivre. This song, Making Do, is deceptively straightforward at first listen, though – and prompted a very interesting discussion.

The core line-up on this 2021 album, Obviously, was:

The Guilty Pleasures (we were prepared to admit to…)

Wystan Auden (1908-1973) was British-American and one of the most celebrated poets of his generation. He would emigrate from the UK to the USA in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War (something for which many in the British establishment never forgave him). But before he crossed the Atlantic, he saw his role as a form of literary journalist. After witnessing something of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, he travelled around Europe as many increasingly felt the inevitability of renewed conflict, a mere twenty years or so after the Armistice ending the previous war.

In Brussels, he visited Belgium’s fine art museum, and found himself gripped by several works in the gallery’s Brueghel room.  Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c1525-1569) was a Dutch Old Master who specialised in complex group scenes and landscapes, often setting biblical or mythological narratives in the world of his contemporaries. In the course of his poem, Auden alludes to three such paintings, although it is the 3rd (Landscape with the Fall of Icarus) which held his primary focus.

For follow up:

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a pioneering Russian-born artist and theorist who emigrated to France in the 1930s after living in Germany (including a decade teaching at the famous Bauhaus). He was committed to finding ways to create ‘pure’ art through use of abstraction and colour especially.

His first career was in academic law, and he was very successful, being offered a professorship in Estonia before he was 30. But he turned his back on it to concentrate on painting, beginning his studies in Munich in 1896. He moved back and forth between Central Europe and Russia even after the 1917 Russian Revolution, but he soon realised that his outlook was worlds apart from that of the new regime.

Quite what his beliefs were is hard to pin down, but at the very least he was influenced by a unique cocktail of Russian Orthodoxy, Theosophy, Wagnerian theories of total art, and much besides. He was famously synaesthesic (as Sophie explains in the episode) which features in his extraordinary 1910, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 

I (Mark) absolutely loved Amor Towles’ wonderful 2016 book, A Gentleman in Moscow, not least because of a rather ghoulish fascination with the early years of the Russian Revolution.

When I heard about its TV adaptation with Ewan McGregor, I was nervous, to say the least. Thankfully, I thought they did a really good job of it in the end. But I became totally obsessed with the Opening Titles, which clearly owe no little inspiration from Kandinsky! Simply beautiful…

Snarky Puppy is a jazz fusion collective started by the legend that is bassist Michael League (right) in 2004. Since then over 40 musicians have played with them at various points, though they usually feature 10-15 players at a time in the studio or live.

Their 2014 album We Like It Here was made while the band was doing a huge European tour, and was recorded before a live audience in Utrecht, Netherlands on four consecutive nights.

The final track, Lingus, apparently got its title from the fact that League was jotting down parts for the different musicians while on an Aer Lingus flight!

League explained the group’s membership ethos to All About Jazz. If a player could earn more for a gig outside the band

… we’d get a substitute and if the substitute played well, then it felt like, ‘Well, they learned the music and played great, what a waste for them to learn all that for one gig…’ so we would kind of just keep them in the Rolodex, so to speak, and rotate them in and out. Then it became a thing where we started touring so much that guys couldn’t do all the dates, or didn’t want to, or whatever.

That would change the way that they played the music. And then even when that new person left, that memory of that new relationship with the music would remain. So really we just kept building on the personalities of the new people that would come in, brick by brick. …in general, the guys understand what the band is – a rotating cast…

But I don’t really think of Snarky Puppy as a collective. It’s just a large band and sometimes people aren’t there. It doesn’t feel like a revolving door, it doesn’t feel anonymous at all. The guys who have played gigs with us the least have still played several hundred gigs. That’s more than most people play with their own bands. So it’s very much a tight, familial unit. Everyone feels very, very close and very essential, also.

Photos (r) ©Andrea Rotili (at the Fano Jazz Network)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was first released in 2004 by French director Michel Gondry, having been written by Charlie Kaufman and Pierre Bismuth as well as Gondry (right, with  Carrey).

The cast is uniformly good, led by Jim Carrey (in a significant departure from his previous zany roles) and Kate Winslet (7 years after Titanic) with a number of others who were well on their way to  much greater recognition: Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, and Kirsten Dunst.

The film is a quirky and charming story about love, relationships, and memory. What sets it apart from standard predictable romcoms is the Sci-Fi premise at its heart: a neurological technique that enables a “psychiatrist” to probe inside a person’s brain to identify and then delete undesired memories. But as often, the technique is a mere plot device and so fairly marginal to the film’s heart. It is visually stunning but psychologically profound and thought-provoking.

The film won Best Screenplay Oscar in 2005 as well as several other screenplay gongs, and Kate Winslet was nominated for an Oscar too.

Other links:

Ghosteen is a double-album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, produced by Cave and long-standing bandmember Warren Ellis. It followed their 2016 studio album Skeleton Key, a work that was near completion when Cave’s son Arthur was killed in a fall while aged only 15. Despite that, that album as a whole felt strangely prescient of the coming tragedy with its themes of loss and grief.

But by the time Ghosteen came out, Cave and his wife Susie, had processed much, though by no means all, of their pain. This perhaps inevitably was kneaded into this album, which unusually these days works best when considered as a united whole. The Caves’ very private tragedy had been exposed all too publicly. But the remarkable aspect of this music is how powerful it has subsequently proved for countless others experiencing their own grief. While never as concrete or explicit (not least because it is a musical and poetic work rather than a book), it is not surprising that some have responded to it as they have to C. S. Lewis’s poignant final book, A Grief Observed.

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was a Nigerian novelist and academic who pioneered, and thus helped to create interest in, African fiction in particular, and post-colonial fiction more generally. Things Fall Apart, coming out in 1958, was the game-changer, the first of what would become The African Trilogy.

Growing up in British-ruled Nigeria as a proud member of the Igbo people group, Achebe was acutely conscious of how perceptions of Africa and Africans were shaped almost exclusively by white writers and reporters. And like that best morsel of writerly advice, if you don’t see the books you want to read on the shelves, then you’ll have to write them yourself.

Here is another title taken from verse. In this case, its title is taken from W. B. Yeats’ highly influential poem (one we had to learn by heart at school, although I was always rubbish at that): The Second Coming, a poem that feels as relevant these days as it ever did.

The book is full of wonderful character descriptions and gives a vivid sense of the complex social interactions of a whole host of different people. So to help navigate, we came up with a cast list of the key players:

For follow up:

Masterpieces we’re jealous of:

Baltimore was the first big international hit for The Tamlins, a Jamaican reggae group founded in 1970 and renowned for their remarkable vocal skills. The original lineup was Carlton Smith, Junior Moore and Winston Morgan. From small beginnings in nightclubs, they became highly sought after by producers and singers alike for their rich harmonies and superb musicality, working with the likes of Peter Tosh in particular, as well as with Delroy Wilson, Pat Kelly, John Holt, and Jimmy Cliff.

The original song was written in by the highly influential composer Randy Newman for his 1977 album Little Criminals. But it took the legendary Nina Simone to nudge it into a form closer to The Tamlins’ version for her eponymous 1978 album Baltimore.

The Tamlins’ line-up was originally made up of Carlton Smith, Junior Moore and Derrick Lara, each a remarkably strong singer in his own right. But a wonderful synergy occurs when they work together, such that the sum is greater even than its great parts. They have been described as “a cross between Bob Marley and Earth Wind & Fire, a combination that makes them definitely worth experiencing live.” However, it’s no longer possible to hear the original group as Derrick Lara sadly died of cancer in Feb 2020.

For more information, check out the bio and recordings list here at Reggaeville.

Oh an while we’re talking about Baltimore, here’s some info about the phenomenon that was The Wire that Mark mentioned.

Marina Abramović was born in Belgrade, in the Serbian part of what was then Yugoslavia, a year after the end of the Second World War. Her parents had been very involved in Tito’s Partisans and so had a privileged place in post-war Yugoslav society. Their activities meant that she was largely brought up by her religious grandparents for the first few years of life.

She has been a pioneer of performance art, presenting works with hair-raising levels of threat and vulnerability. Most celebrated / notorious / infamous (take your pick!) was her Rhythm 0 which entailed her standing for six hours in a Naples Art Gallery next to 72 objects (which included food and drink, scissors, a gun and a bullet). Visitors were invited to do whatever they wanted to her, using one of the objects. It started off gently, but by the end one visitor even held a loaded gun at her head.

After her 20 year relationship and working partnership with Ulay (the West German Uwe Laysiepen), they devised a formal end by walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and meeting in the middle. When they did, they greeted one another, spoke briefly, and then each continued their journeys. The next time they would meet was in 2010 at ‘The Artist is Present’.

She made ‘The Artist is Present’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York in 2010. A documentary about the process and experience was then released in 2012.

This involved sitting at an empty table for around 730 hours in total, and visitors were allowed to sit with her for a minute. There was to be no speaking or physical contact, just being in one another’s presence. Many spoke of the extraordinary experience of sitting like this with a stranger.

This German-language film won Best Foreign Language Oscar and made a far greater impact on Anglophone cinema audiences than German films often get. It is set in East Berlin in 1984 (of course, it’s no accident that this was the year selected), under communist rule. The GDR (German Democratic Republic: ie East Germany) was constantly scrutinised and patrolled by the country’s security services, (the Stasi). And this fictitious account posits the possibility of one senior officer who finds himself swept up in the lives of those he is charged with surveilling.

In some quarters the film was highly controversial, because of the sheer implausibility of a single individual having both  the means and the opportunity to do what Gerd Wiesler (played by the astonishing Ulrich Mühe) did in the film. There were just too many internal checks and ‘safeguards’ to prevent such unilateral action. This is debated, of course, but the wonder of the film is that it does find humanity in the bleakest of contexts. And that is what makes this such an inspiring work of art (perhaps naively, perhaps not).

For here, see that art and humanity can pierce through the rigid constructs of a totalitarian state and make a difference. The film’s 92% score on Rotten Tomatoes is well-deserved.

One of the film’s great sadnesses is that Ulrich Mühe (right) died post-production but before general release. So he never got to see the impact it made around the world.

Most will be (blissfully) unaware that Mark has been working on a novel about life in East Germany for almost a decade (!!) now. Here are some of his happy snaps from a research trip way back in 2018 (incl. visits to the former Stasi HQ and the Hohenshönhausen remand prison.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was a Russian composer during the Romantic era, one who seemed to straddle the musical worlds of east and west. He wrote music on a grand scale for operas, ballets and symphonies. His turbulent emotional life is born out in the clear turbulence of his music.

The 4th Symphony was written in 1877/78 after the excruciating breakup of his marriage that had lasted only one month. As Sophie explains in the episode, one thing that makes this work so special is that we have a record of the composer’s correspondence with his patroness Nadezdha von Meck in which he articulates precisely what he is doing in ‘our symphony’.

Despite the whole symphony sometimes being nicknamed ‘Fate’, Tchaikovsky wrote that fate is primarily represented by the insistent and invincible brass fanfare at the very start.

It has been relatively tricky to find out much about the photographer, Robin Farquharson. So far, I’ve discovered that he was born in Jamaica in 1944, went to boarding school in England and studied photography at Rhode Island School of Design (1965-68). If you know more about him, or especially if Robin can get in touch with us, we’d love to hear more!

The Crooner and I saw his photograph Stony Ground on display at the National Gallery of Jamaica back in July 2023 when I was in the country for a work trip. (Incidentally, it’s a super gallery and deserves a far higher profile.)

Some other related links:

Born in 1961 to Canadian parents on a NATO base in West Germany, Douglas Coupland is a successful novelist, artist and designer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture was his breakout novel, first published in 1991, narrated by ‘Andy’ about his life with his two friends Dag and Clare, in Coachella Valley, Southern California.

This is a great introduction to Coupland’s writing by a friend, Andrew Tate (no, NOT that Andrew Tate).

For more information about Coupland’s extraordinarily diverse work, check out his official website.

Written for the soundtrack of Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023), What Was I Made For? stormed up the charts around the world, including reaching No. 1 in Australia, UK and Ireland. It won both a Grammy and an Oscar the following year.

Billie Eilish shares writing credits for the song with her brother and frequent collaborator, Finneas O’Connell. She described the process like this:

I did not think about myself once in the writing process. I was purely inspired by this movie and this character and the way I thought she would feel, and wrote about that. And then, over the next couple days, I was listening and I was like, girl, how did this … honestly, and I really don’t mean this to come off a conceited way at all, but I do this thing where I make stuff that I don’t even know is … like I’m writing for myself and I don’t even know it. (from Billboard archive)

This is the performance at the Oscars mentioned in the discussion.

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) was a Spanish painter working at the height of the counter-Reformation. He was sometimes nicknamed the “Spanish Caravaggio” because of their shared love of the chiaroscuro (light/dark) style, although it is unfair to see him solely in terms of the Italian painter’s legacy from the generation before.

There is debate about the details, but it is likely that the character of St Luke (who was known not as an artist but as one of the New Testament evangelists) is in fact a self-portrait.

Another of his most beloved works is Agnus Dei (The Lamb of God) painted at roughly the same time. Both can be seen in Madrid’s Prado Museum.

The Star Wars universe has ‘inspired’ the creation of a number of duds. But the 3 of us are in total agreement that Andor is not one of them.

For all the hokum of creating entire cultures and religious backstories for different planets (invariably with healthy dollops of allusions and resonance from Classical Greece and Rome), Andor feels much more serious and edgy. It is political and personal, capturing a genuine sense of jeopardy. What’s more it has quite the case, including the array of British actors as imperial commanders (due largely since it’s filmed at Pinewood Studios west of London).

Plus as veteran actor Ian Ogilvy apparently once said when asked why baddies are always Brits, “we’re the only ones who don’t mind.” Probably no longer true, but it clearly is in the Star Wars universe.

The Andor series (2nd is coming in April) is the backstory to the movie Rogue One, which itself is a prequel to Star Wars I/IV A New Hope), narrating the means and cost of capturing the plans for the Death Star.

• The music of Aqualung (Matthew Nicholas Hales)

• Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees (from The Bends, 1995)

• The work of the French old master Claude Lorrain.

Also mentioned in passing:

• Mitchell & Webb’s classic sketch Are we the baddies?
• Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010)