Friday, May 11, 2007

Jonathan Meades: Abroad Again

I caught the first programme in this new series and thoroughly enjoyed it. As the website devoted to it says:

We make places. And places make us. We respond to what we have created. But how does this compact between mankind and its greatest artifices work?

In Jonathan Meades: Abroad Again this question is addressed in a multitude of ways: visually, comically, rhetorically, obliquely, argumentatively and whilst swimming fully clothed.

And also passionately. For these programmes are the expression of an obsessional preoccupation with places and with the properties they reflect: fantasy and necessity, escape and expectation, individual assertion and collective fear.
Maybe he is an acquired taste, but no one else makes programmes like Meades. I was once at the same party as him and was pleased to discover that he looks even more like Jonathan Meades in real life.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Meades is a legend.

David said...

Meades introduced the British public to the popular Belgian sports of finch-watching and vertical archery.

Joe Taylor said...

My favourite Meades moment is a simple visual gag from his documentary on the waterways of East Anglia (apparently, it all comes out in the Wash...)

He delivers a lengthy monologue in front of what appears to be a large black sailboat - and only at the end do we discover it's a rather smaller sail attached to his hat.

No idea why that's stuck with me - but I thought it was marvellous at the time.

Anonymous said...

But was he wearing his sunglasses at the party?