Scan and pan: The Mark Steel Lectures
The Arts Channel on Monday night at 18:00 or on Tuesday lunchtime at 12:10. Where else on New Zealand television could you find Lord Byron in the guise of Paul Simonon from the cover art of London Calling by The Clash; or Isaac Newton as Carol Vorderman; or Charles Darwin as the nutter from Close Encounters of the Third Kind? But, let’s be honest, there can’t be more than a handful of people in New Zealand watching the Mark Steel Lectures, can there?
It’s nothing short of a cultural calamity that this BBC Four and Open University co-production — which won Mark a Royal Television Society award for Best Entertainment Performance and went on to be shown on BBC Two and the UK’s History Channel — is tucked away on pay TV. But that’s not the Arts Channel’s fault. Good on them for discovering (or, at least, stumbling upon) Mark Steel and buying both series of ‘Great Thinkers’, but it’s still a pity most people may never see them.
Steel is a British comedian, newspaper columnist and author. He presented a BBC Radio Four series of lectures on famous people, but there are rumours Steel subsequently fell out with the radio station and that his web page was therefore removed from the BBC site.
He says he started his working life as a TV repairman, and won several competitions in the industry magazine for the best joke anyone had told when they couldn’t fix some poor bugger’s telly. He graduated from the comedy club circuit and toured Britain with his one-man show. Steel hosts his own Radio 4 series, The Mark Steel Solution, is regularly a guest on Radio 4’s Loose Ends and various other TV and radio programmes. He’s also written regular columns for the Guardian, the UK Independent (on topics such as global poverty, the free market and Mariah Carey) and the Socialist Worker.
There’s a potted history of Steel’s pre-‘Great Thinkers’ work on the web, and a number of short biographies, including this one. Wikipedia’s entry says he was sacked by the Guardian newspaper because, according to Steel they wanted to “realign towards Tony Blair”. The Guardian denies this. His agent has a site that incorporates some of Steel’s writings.
Conceptually, ‘Great Thinkers’ doesn’t seem all that revolutionary, but it really does make for a TV experience unlike any other. The parts of the thinkers are played by extraordinarily low-key actors, recreating scenes from their lives in a present day environment, with only their occasionally outlandish costumes, modern props and passers-by to help them suspend our disbelief. Lord Byron, for example, wore a wonderfully camp suit that looked as though it’s been cut from a Turkish rug, and devices such as laptops, fax machines and mobile phones furnished the vignettes, intercut with Steel’s digressionary ‘stand-up’ narration in his laddish, London style. And so we have Mary Shelley at a PC in a gothic Siouxsie of the Banshees get-up, and a Ludwig van Beethoven who’s woefully dependent on TV’s teletext subtitle service.
[My original post referred erroneously to ‘Alfred’ Lord Byron. Do-oh! There has never in fact been an industry stipulation that peer poets must be called Alfred, although 1st Baron Tennyson was one. Byron, of course, was George. George Gordon Noel Byron.]
The full line-up of subjects for Steel’s first series was Lord Byron, Sir Isaac Newton, Sigmund Freud, Aristotle, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. The second series featured Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Thomas Paine (did you know Paine wrote two of the world’s best-selling books of his day?), Sylvia Pankhurst and Mary Shelley.
The Pankhurst episode explained how she ended up living in Ethiopia as a Rastafarian sympathiser and became Haile Selassie’s “advisor on policies for women”. One of the funniest moments came towards the end of the Shelley episode, when the irate teenage author bellowed at the camera, “Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not the fucking monster!”
These lectures are part of the Open University’s course material, but Steel doesn’t expect watching his shows to earn you a degree, or to hasten your studies in philosophy. In an interview at the Mark Steel Lectures site he concedes, “If you want to know a lot about these people you're going to have to do more than to watch my programmes.” Nevertheless, there’s a serious intent behind ‘Great Thinkers’ and, having seen all the episodes, I can say that every one contains a number of surprising facts about the subject, bolstered by plenty of fake tabloid headlines, street and shop signs and in-jokes — some fly by so fast that you find yourself reaching for the non-existent freeze-frame button on your remote to savour the moment.
To research each thinker, Steel explains, he’d start by reading a beginner’s book to get to know the parameters of the subject’s life and then follow-up with whatever biographies he could find — not really the sort of material you imagine would detain many stand-up comics. “The thing with reading is just that most people don’t have the time, and you can read a 400-page book in a day, if you have to. The reason why 400-page books usually take months to read is that you’re trying to do it in and out of going to work, looking after kids, and so on. But if you sit down in the morning and take it bit by bit, over a period of about eight days you can read quite a lot of stuff.”
So, do the Mark Steel Lectures justify an Arts Channel subscription? Well, not quite. There’s still far too much ballet and opera between the good bits for my liking, and not enough literature and the visual arts. Only about ten per cent of the programming is honestly watchable, and much of the music coverage is hideously outdated. There was a Bill Frisell documentary recently that was so good that it had me hunting downloads of his music on the web, but it was sadly a rare exception. And the Steel lectures make up only 30 minutes a week, unless you watch the repeats — which you may feel like doing. Still, the “price of a cup of coffee a week” campaign the Arts Channel ran prior to its paid launch really doesn’t stand up as a justification to subscribe.
So you may have to wait for the DVDs; but don’t hold your breath. As with so much of the kind of TV and film output that doesn’t cater to the mass market and which isn’t likely to sell in the hundreds of thousands, there’s a groundswell of opinion asking for the Mark Steel Lectures to be released on DVD, but it doesn’t appear that the rights owners are listening. There was much more widespread support for the release of the entire second season of Twin Peaks on DVD, which still isn’t out because the rights owners say a release isn’t economically viable. That debate has been raging since 2001, so one is forced to wonder how much (if any) notice is taken of forums and internet chatter.
There’s no word yet on whether Steel is planning a third series, but he seems to have enjoyed the experience of studying the first 12 thinkers so much that I don’t feel the need to keep my fingers crossed until he’s compiled a further list of nutcases. “Most of these people are so nutty they come at you fairly easily,” he says.
It’s nothing short of a cultural calamity that this BBC Four and Open University co-production — which won Mark a Royal Television Society award for Best Entertainment Performance and went on to be shown on BBC Two and the UK’s History Channel — is tucked away on pay TV. But that’s not the Arts Channel’s fault. Good on them for discovering (or, at least, stumbling upon) Mark Steel and buying both series of ‘Great Thinkers’, but it’s still a pity most people may never see them.
Steel is a British comedian, newspaper columnist and author. He presented a BBC Radio Four series of lectures on famous people, but there are rumours Steel subsequently fell out with the radio station and that his web page was therefore removed from the BBC site.
He says he started his working life as a TV repairman, and won several competitions in the industry magazine for the best joke anyone had told when they couldn’t fix some poor bugger’s telly. He graduated from the comedy club circuit and toured Britain with his one-man show. Steel hosts his own Radio 4 series, The Mark Steel Solution, is regularly a guest on Radio 4’s Loose Ends and various other TV and radio programmes. He’s also written regular columns for the Guardian, the UK Independent (on topics such as global poverty, the free market and Mariah Carey) and the Socialist Worker.
There’s a potted history of Steel’s pre-‘Great Thinkers’ work on the web, and a number of short biographies, including this one. Wikipedia’s entry says he was sacked by the Guardian newspaper because, according to Steel they wanted to “realign towards Tony Blair”. The Guardian denies this. His agent has a site that incorporates some of Steel’s writings.
Conceptually, ‘Great Thinkers’ doesn’t seem all that revolutionary, but it really does make for a TV experience unlike any other. The parts of the thinkers are played by extraordinarily low-key actors, recreating scenes from their lives in a present day environment, with only their occasionally outlandish costumes, modern props and passers-by to help them suspend our disbelief. Lord Byron, for example, wore a wonderfully camp suit that looked as though it’s been cut from a Turkish rug, and devices such as laptops, fax machines and mobile phones furnished the vignettes, intercut with Steel’s digressionary ‘stand-up’ narration in his laddish, London style. And so we have Mary Shelley at a PC in a gothic Siouxsie of the Banshees get-up, and a Ludwig van Beethoven who’s woefully dependent on TV’s teletext subtitle service.
[My original post referred erroneously to ‘Alfred’ Lord Byron. Do-oh! There has never in fact been an industry stipulation that peer poets must be called Alfred, although 1st Baron Tennyson was one. Byron, of course, was George. George Gordon Noel Byron.]
The full line-up of subjects for Steel’s first series was Lord Byron, Sir Isaac Newton, Sigmund Freud, Aristotle, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. The second series featured Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Thomas Paine (did you know Paine wrote two of the world’s best-selling books of his day?), Sylvia Pankhurst and Mary Shelley.
The Pankhurst episode explained how she ended up living in Ethiopia as a Rastafarian sympathiser and became Haile Selassie’s “advisor on policies for women”. One of the funniest moments came towards the end of the Shelley episode, when the irate teenage author bellowed at the camera, “Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not the fucking monster!”
These lectures are part of the Open University’s course material, but Steel doesn’t expect watching his shows to earn you a degree, or to hasten your studies in philosophy. In an interview at the Mark Steel Lectures site he concedes, “If you want to know a lot about these people you're going to have to do more than to watch my programmes.” Nevertheless, there’s a serious intent behind ‘Great Thinkers’ and, having seen all the episodes, I can say that every one contains a number of surprising facts about the subject, bolstered by plenty of fake tabloid headlines, street and shop signs and in-jokes — some fly by so fast that you find yourself reaching for the non-existent freeze-frame button on your remote to savour the moment.
To research each thinker, Steel explains, he’d start by reading a beginner’s book to get to know the parameters of the subject’s life and then follow-up with whatever biographies he could find — not really the sort of material you imagine would detain many stand-up comics. “The thing with reading is just that most people don’t have the time, and you can read a 400-page book in a day, if you have to. The reason why 400-page books usually take months to read is that you’re trying to do it in and out of going to work, looking after kids, and so on. But if you sit down in the morning and take it bit by bit, over a period of about eight days you can read quite a lot of stuff.”
So, do the Mark Steel Lectures justify an Arts Channel subscription? Well, not quite. There’s still far too much ballet and opera between the good bits for my liking, and not enough literature and the visual arts. Only about ten per cent of the programming is honestly watchable, and much of the music coverage is hideously outdated. There was a Bill Frisell documentary recently that was so good that it had me hunting downloads of his music on the web, but it was sadly a rare exception. And the Steel lectures make up only 30 minutes a week, unless you watch the repeats — which you may feel like doing. Still, the “price of a cup of coffee a week” campaign the Arts Channel ran prior to its paid launch really doesn’t stand up as a justification to subscribe.
So you may have to wait for the DVDs; but don’t hold your breath. As with so much of the kind of TV and film output that doesn’t cater to the mass market and which isn’t likely to sell in the hundreds of thousands, there’s a groundswell of opinion asking for the Mark Steel Lectures to be released on DVD, but it doesn’t appear that the rights owners are listening. There was much more widespread support for the release of the entire second season of Twin Peaks on DVD, which still isn’t out because the rights owners say a release isn’t economically viable. That debate has been raging since 2001, so one is forced to wonder how much (if any) notice is taken of forums and internet chatter.
There’s no word yet on whether Steel is planning a third series, but he seems to have enjoyed the experience of studying the first 12 thinkers so much that I don’t feel the need to keep my fingers crossed until he’s compiled a further list of nutcases. “Most of these people are so nutty they come at you fairly easily,” he says.
1 Comments:
They did play the radio series on National Radio. I heard at least one - I can remember Karl Marx sending a cringworthy combination condolence/begging letter to Engel's widow.
Post a Comment
<< Home