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?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.
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.
Meades is a legend.
ReplyDeleteMeades introduced the British public to the popular Belgian sports of finch-watching and vertical archery.
ReplyDeleteMy 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...)
ReplyDeleteHe 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.
But was he wearing his sunglasses at the party?
ReplyDelete