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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?
- Joel: Rich Mullins’ Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth
- Sophie: Mahler’s 5th Symphony
- Mark: Peter Gabriel’s So
