Peter Reavy’s blog

Newsnight’s deputy editor has been defending a package on Gordon Brown made by Jamie Campbell, which showed a pair of events out of chronological order.

Having watched the film, it seems to me that the meaning is at least somewhat affected by the order.

More to the point, Jamie Campbell’s packages to date have not been a great fit for Newsnight. They feel like a different sort of documentary-making. They are akin to the work of Louis Theroux or, before that, Nick Broomfield. In this type of film, the film-maker is part of the story. The interviewer becomes a character. We begin to doubt the interviewer’s own motives and sincerity.

I can see the editorial need for a roving reporter taking the maverick approach that Michael Crick once did. Crick has had to tone his approach down now that he is the programme’s political editor.

However unless Jamie Campbell can work in a different style, his approach feels wrong for Newsnight.

Will Self advises Salman Rushdie about accepting knighthoods, quoted in the Guardian:

Given the furore that The Satanic Verses occasioned, it does strike me that any responsible writer might ask himself whether the fallout from accepting such an honour was really worth the bauble … it is surely better that writers decline any form of honour.

Clever words, eh? Rushdie should scorn baubles, like Will Self would.

But when bullies gather, clever Will Self won’t stick up for a fellow writer.

I went to see my first Shane Meadows film, This Is England. After ten or fifteen minutes, I was starting to write the film off, since it seemed rough and ready in terms of editing or the way the scenes were staged. But despite this amateurishness, the story grabbed me.

You would think that this film would stand or fall on its realism, but it doesn’t. In some ways it is a mis-remembered 80s. It remembers every single teenager as dressing in perfect 80s fashion, whether New Romantic or Mod. It also hits the wrong note in places. It can seem far too 2007. But it captures how it felt to be a teenaged boy in the 80s.

This is England is a strange, awkward and nostalgic film, but it expresses the distance between then and now, and is worth seeing.

One of the Guardian’s critics, for some reason, watched every single Ingmar Bergman film. I felt like I had too before I’d finished reading his conclusions. Once you start thinking of a film-maker like Bergman as formulaic, then it seems pointless to watch more than a handful of his films and since I already have, he’s not on my rental list at the moment.

I watched Robert Bresson’s take on the Joan of Arc story. It was such a disappointment that I wondered why I’d liked his other films. Googling it, I see comparisons between his film and Carl Dreyer’s on the same subject. It seems a bit unfair to lump them in together just because they’re old foreign films in black and white, but there you go.

Anyway, Dreyer’s film moved me, Bresson’s film didn’t. I prefer A Man Escaped and L’Argent followed by Balthazar and Mouchette. Those would make you think that Bresson is one of the greatest directors. But Procès de Jeanne d’Arc is a dud to throw in with Lancelot du Lac.

How to make Russian tea. Apparently it’s all about the tea concentrate or zavarka.

The book Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 by David Kynaston has been receiving a lot of attention. Not sure whether I’m ready to tackle it just at the moment, so I pulled together a few reviews of it.

Here they are: Independent, Observer, Guardian, Times, Literary Review, Telegraph, Telegraph, Spectator, Daily Mail.

Andrew Roberts:

Then came 9/11. Suddenly, everything changed.

No fewer than 67 Britons died on that day, and Blair showed a side of his personality that had been impossible to discern before: Churchillian leadership.

I don’t feel like adding to the unending post-Blair analysis, but I clearly remember not just the confidence but also the speed with which Blair backed the United States on that day of chaos.

It’s unfashionable to praise Tony Blair these days, but I was glad to read what Andrew Roberts had written, since it reflects my own strongest memory from his ten years in power. I don’t think he proved himself a Churchill simply because he was never put to as harsh a test. But he did display true leadership then and in the War on Terror years which followed.

Good on him.

Tyler Cowan shares tips on how he reads fast. I’m fascinated by this topic. I worked through most of Breakthrough Rapid Reading, with mixed results. Mainly what I took from it was that you should know in advance what you need from a book and read at a pace that suits.

I used to read fast as a child, but I read fiction and naturally skipped. I stopped reading for a while as a teenager and may have slowed down as a result of that, but I can skim Google Reader feeds as fast as I want, so it may only be that I treat books with undue seriousness.

I came across this top 10 list of fantasy fiction.

I didn’t realise that Max Ernst’s book Une Semaine de Bonte could be bought quite as a cheap-ish paperback. I may have to treat myself, but in the meantime, some of it can be seen on the web.

Investigating another book on the list, I thought the cover looked interesting, and a bit more digging led me to the German painter Franz Stuck. Though classed as a symbolist, he reminds me a little bit of the New Objectivists I posted about recently.