Simon Heffer wrote in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday:
Should you want to watch the three best new factual programmes that will be broadcast on BBC television this year – and I feel I am performing a rare public service by alerting you all to them – then be sure to watch Off Kilter, the three-part series written and presented by Jonathan Meades, which starts on BBC 4 at 9pm on Wednesday. Meades is probably Britain's foremost cultural critic.
There is almost no corner of that culture that remains alien to him, or unscrutinised in his original, penetrating way. This series is about Scotland, but don't let that put you off. Meades gives us Scotland as probably even most of the Scots do not understand it; whether in Aberdeen, the Western Isles or Gordon Brown's Kingdom of Fife, Meades both observes and recollects.
He recollects long beyond the normal scope of such activity, back into Scottish atavism. With the help of sometimes breathtaking photography by Luke Cardiff, and peppered with the auteur's own brand of visual and verbal quirks, this series is a masterpiece.
5 comments:
A limited compilation of Jonathan Meades's programmes was released on DVD last year. Amazon's current price of £14.18 for a 3-disc set is quite a bargain:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jonathan-Meades-Collection-DVD/dp/B001110H14/
However, you can see most - if not all - of his programmes on YouTube, cut into ten-minute segments (which means each programme is in three parts):
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22jonathan+meades%22&search_type=&aq=f
Was I alone in finding last night's programme on Aberdeen's architecture a bit disappointing - an unstructured and slightly repetitive ramble? Not up to his usual standards: I would say perhaps he is better in shorter programmes, but I found "Magnetic North" engrossing. Oh, well, try again next week.
No, I thought it was excellent. It bore little resemblance to the programme described in Heffer's article, however that's probably a good thing.
The second episode of Meades new series was a considerable improvement on the first and represented a definite 'return to form'.
Looking forward to the next two episodes.
The Heffer review mentioned previously was typically idiotic.
I don't have much time for Heffer, and while his review goes off in odd directions and tends purple in its prose, Meades remains one of the most distinctive and vital documentary-makers in Britain. With so many docs being made to an increasingly tedious template, even on BBC4, his work stands out even more starkly.
A certain bittorrent site that provides samizdat British programming to expats like myself has made pretty much everything from Meades available, including the stuff that's not on DVD.
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