The Bird Bard has just been watching Armando Iannucci's documentary on Charles Dickens on BBC2, and it's got him well worked up. "What is it with TV producers and literature?" he rages. "Why can they not allow anybody to read a poem, or from the page of a book, without screening wacky images that seem deliberately designed to distract the viewer's concentration away from the words being read?"
I'm forced to admit that The Bird Bard does have a point, although otherwise the programme was a fairly intelligent, watchable and enjoyable review of the great writer's life and works. A shame that the producer seemed unaware that nobody would be watching it who did not have love and respect for the actual words that Dickens wrote. While he was quite happy to use standard camera work when celebrity talking heads were having their say, as soon as anybody read directly from Dickens' writings we were suddenly getting fuzzy focus shots, weird angles, and that most distracting thing of all: brief snapshots of the printed page that don't even fit within the whole of the screen. You can't help trying to read along as the voice speaks, but you're not even able to get to the end of a line. This approach seems to be used whenever TV does poetry or literature, and I must say it drives me bonkers. It makes it impossible to concentrate on the beauty of the language or to make sense of the content. I can only assume that the cameraman on this programme was drunk part of the time. At one point he was filming Armando Iannucci's reading out of focus through the leaves of a tree, as if he thought he was doing a voyeuristic porn movie.
I can only surmise that deep down all TV producers despise literature. Let's face it: literature by definition has no visual aspect. Reading is a solitary pursuit and requires a fair amount of effort and concentration on the part of the reader. It is everything that TV is not. Do these TV people, consciously or unconsciously, ruin their own programmes deliberately, hoping for low ratings and therefore no need to make any more such programmes?
I'm forced to admit that The Bird Bard does have a point, although otherwise the programme was a fairly intelligent, watchable and enjoyable review of the great writer's life and works. A shame that the producer seemed unaware that nobody would be watching it who did not have love and respect for the actual words that Dickens wrote. While he was quite happy to use standard camera work when celebrity talking heads were having their say, as soon as anybody read directly from Dickens' writings we were suddenly getting fuzzy focus shots, weird angles, and that most distracting thing of all: brief snapshots of the printed page that don't even fit within the whole of the screen. You can't help trying to read along as the voice speaks, but you're not even able to get to the end of a line. This approach seems to be used whenever TV does poetry or literature, and I must say it drives me bonkers. It makes it impossible to concentrate on the beauty of the language or to make sense of the content. I can only assume that the cameraman on this programme was drunk part of the time. At one point he was filming Armando Iannucci's reading out of focus through the leaves of a tree, as if he thought he was doing a voyeuristic porn movie.
I can only surmise that deep down all TV producers despise literature. Let's face it: literature by definition has no visual aspect. Reading is a solitary pursuit and requires a fair amount of effort and concentration on the part of the reader. It is everything that TV is not. Do these TV people, consciously or unconsciously, ruin their own programmes deliberately, hoping for low ratings and therefore no need to make any more such programmes?
Perhaps it's my own fault for expecting anything else. The ideal medium for programmes about literature is probably radio. The best way to present literature visually that I can imagine would be a plain shot of a proficient actor or presenter sitting in a chair reading from a book, possibly cutting to an illustration now and then. Didn't that used to be called Jack-a-nory when I was young? Ah...I fear The Bird Bard is showing his age!