PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Funeral Music
Windsor 19/9/22
A Sideways Glance at The Funeral
Monday morning. Impossible to escape the demise of the old lady who resided in the castle up the road from where I live. The Long Walk, which the cortège will pass along in a few hours, is just two minutes away, it’s where I take my daily constitutional. I haven’t been out there for the last few days – they’ve put up barriers to control the crowds they expect to come and watch, and the grass is pockmarked with outside broadcast vans. The press began to descend on the town the very first day, along with the throngs laying flowers, who they duly interviewed – the first tv crews were already there the first evening when I returned from London after seeing a friend off on the Eurostar. I couldn’t avoid going into town a couple of times over the next few days. There are always groups of tourists in the town centre, but the people now swarming around the castle weren’t your usual culprits, and they were a little subdued as they made their way to the castle gates.
Ambrosio Fornet RIP
Ambrosio Fornet, who has died in Havana at the age of 90, was one of Cuba’s leading revolutionary intellectuals, a literary scholar, essayist and scriptwriter (his best known screenplay was Retrato de Teresa from 1979) who became a dear friend whom I never failed to visit every time I went to Havana, sometimes passing hours in conversation with him. We talked about film, of course, and about Cuba – he explained to me many a puzzle I had about the culture, especially cultural politics – and because he was extremely curious about England, he had me explaining things to him in such a way that I found myself reflecting on my own country in new ways. I got him in front of the camera twice, once in 1985 in Havana Report about the film festival, which I made with Holly Aylett, and once a couple of years earlier in the first of the documentaries on New Latin American Cinema I made for Channel Four. Here he is.
Kiss Channel 4 Goodbye?
The prospective privatisation of Channel Four induces in me a state of cognitive dissonance. Part of me is appalled at this wanton repetition of what the patrician Harold Macmillan way back called ‘selling off the family silver’, and another part of me answers back, but what is there worth saving? I remember, you see, what Channel Four was really like when it started, before it adopted a populist agenda in the 1990s, and I’m speaking not just as a viewer but as one of the numerous independent filmmakers who was commissioned by them. Over its first decade, C4 was truly novel, adopting unconventional and groundbreaking programme formats and bringing a whole new generation into production, in fulfilment of its public service remit, to be innovative, to inspire change, to nurture talent and to offer a platform for alternative views. Read more