One of my other preoccupations is the nature of Government, democratic or dictatorship and the impact of capitalism on both forms of government. I therefore decided not to look again at those participating in Actor's Studio programmes this afternoon and experience another showing of The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1964 three hour epic whose cast include Sophia Loren, Alec Guiness, James Mason, Christopher Plummer, Mel Ferrer, Omar Sharif and Finlay Currie. It is such a long time since viewing this feature that a hour passed before I began to remember some of its other aspects and perspectives. Apparently the twenty million dollar epic was a box office failure, which is surprising because of the scale of film, the spectacular sets of Roman, the crowd scenes and the battles. I suspect because the film is dark and bleak which long stretches set in Winter and triumph of evil and suffering over good most of the time.
By the early 1960's there were already several important academic analysis of why the Roman Empire declined and fell, ending perhaps with the spectacle of the rulership being auctioned to the highest bidder, similar to what the UK is doing now with its land, properties and football clubs. The film telescopes many of the important components of the decline and fall around a decade after the death of Caesar, Marcus Aurelius.
I begin by joining those who point out that the decline and ending of Rome was an entirely good thing notwithstanding the achievements emanating from individual Romans, because of centuries of savage killing of people in their hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands, the slavery, the corruption and all aspects of immorality. I would like to believe those who argue that one contribution towards its end was the peaceful and socialistic nature of Christianity, and no doubt many individual Christians lived up to their beliefs, but as subsequent history has shown nations espousing Christianity have proven to be just as bloody and corrupt as those who do not. The films does contain a tiny number of advocates of the Christian way of life who perish, while the majority succumb to the bribes and the immoral pleasures of the corrupt.
I like the comprehensive review of issues provided at Killewnroos.com/1/RomanFall, which covers the decline in morals and values, environmental and public health problems, political corruption, unemployment, inflation, urban decay, Inferior technology, and military spending and if all these sound facility to the West and to the United States in particular, the analysis was presented in the form of a contemporary examination question about the position of the US.
As for the film, it fixes on a period of thirteen years at the end of the second century and has a story very very very loosely based on some factual people and events. The Caesar , played by Alex Guiness was rumoured to have been poisoned and "his son", Commodus was also rumoured to have been the offspring of a relationship between his wife and a gladiator and factually Commodus fought like a gladiator and liked and used gladiators. As the film ends an attempt is made to bribe the military to into choosing the next Caesar and in fact three months after the assassination of Commodus, Didius Julianus bribed the Praetorian guard to make him Emperor outbidding Claudius Pompeianus. He was not shown in the film but he actually married the daughter of Marcus Aurelius who in the film first married the King of Persia against her wishes as a consequence of an alliance negotiated by her father. The film closes as she runs off with "Able" after he has slain "Cain" in a fight to the death, and who then when offered the crown decides to go off with his love of life to try and live happy ever after, but you know the relationship with not last beyond the next frame, given all that has gone before. To its credit it is not the kind of film which fills you with optimism or faith, given the reality of the next 1800 years.
Earlier I had written that I envisaged a quiet day of writing,100.75 working, a roast pork Sunday lunch, and lots of TV, including the first series of Yes Minster on a DVD. There was lots of good TV to watch, some at competing times with Fred Dibnah taking precedence over the second part of the Politics Show. I am never up and focused for the early morning Sunday current affairs programme which was a must when conducted by Sir David Frost. Over lunch in addition to the showing of the Fall, there was a remake of the Father of the Bride II where the original film with Spencer Tracey, was part of my childhood visits to the Odeon cinema, although I believe it first came our when I was a teenager, such does time become condensed.
I expected that The Happy Birthday Brucie would take precedence over this weeks Ice Dancing competition. How Harriet would have loved the Brucie programme and the Ice Dancing. Then Lark Rise to Candleford was a must and I decided to watch the new two Oxford based episode Lewis who has carried on the Morse police detective programmes, where I am looking forward to spending a few days this summer. I assumed there would be a multiplay showing of Lost and planned to book the 11pm slot only to find this was not so as everything was being geared up for you know what, which means I then have to keep the TV and Radio off from all news and chat programmes until the evening for the special, and thus also miss the second showing of Lost,. There was back to back repeats of American Idol throughout the day, Queen, the group seems to be permanently appearing in Rio and there is a return of the South Coast yacht series Howard's Way on BBC 4. There was also a whole afternoon devoted to the Actors Studio, from Barbara Streisand, Jane Fonda and Al Pacino, previously seen and Forrest Whitaker who played Ida Amin, and where I managed to catch glimpses while I gave my attention to the Fall and other activities. I quick flick through the flicks did reveal a showing of Noel Coward's Private Lives this afternoon, which I regret I missed.
There was not much physical activity apart from getting up, washing my hair after its cut and putting in the Sunday roast, without spuds. The roast was a chunk of pork with crackling. I kept an ear open so as to watch a programme feature about the introduction of the UK the England, and I presume Wales, free bus travel pass in April, (Scotland already has). The problem is that some local authorities, and the Brighton area was featured, are claiming that they are not likely to receive adequate compensation from the government. I was delighted to hear that I am not the only one contemplating longer trips, and one couple interviewed planned to travel around the coasts. As the programme pointed out the attitude of local authorities is myopic because it fails to allow for the reality that this will mean the over sixties making more trips, spending more money, keeping fitter and healthier and therefore making less demand on the national health service and local authority provided social welfare provision. I was also right to watch Fred Dibnah because he started his programme with a look at the forts of Hadrian Wall, moving on to the Canals. This two for £6 offer of the Pork roast was covered with crackling rather than filled with stuffing. I forgot to mention that the previous day I tried the deep frozen Lobster for the evening meal and discovered why it must be years since I first tried one before and found that the quantity of flesh which can be eaten is small and no more tasty than white meat crab claws where the value is significantly better and more enjoyable. I suspect it is similar to caviar and other posh nosh where preparation and presentation is the what you pay for.
I had mixed reactions to the celebration of the eighty years of age celebration of Bruce Forsythe, given that he was performing during World War II and still managed to hold his own in a tap dancing routine at the start of the programmes and participated in a vigorous Come Dancing finale. He has been part of my childhood with Sunday night at the Palladium, and then series after series of game shows, coming to his own again with the Celebrity Come Dancing series. As the programme revealed he has not been elevated into a national icon in the same way as Lord Dickie Attenborough and Sir Paul McCartney. The feel good factor departed from Lark Rise to Candleford as this week the subject was the impact on a marriage when an otherwise good man drinks to excess and strikes his wife, and then is unwilling to agree to total abstinence as the terms of withdrawing her legal complaint towards him and which sends him to prison. The programme always contains several ongoing stories in addition to the focus of the week, and the level of writing and acting is such to add to accumulating admiration.
It is a notable achievement to be able to enjoy Lewis without giving a moment's consideration to Morse other than to remember the death of a great actor whose work continues to delight as episodes are repeated on one Sat channel after another. Given the recent involvement of a Ruskin College School of art student in the Big Brother Celebrity programme, there was added interest that this episode featured a household of students from the college, one of whom was skilled at drawing and painting the reproduction of scenes with a photographic memory living in his own world, and one, his only friend in life, is one of two murder victims whose definition contemporary art, like my own, is all of life, but whose ideas are outside the box, bringing her into conflicts with society, and to her premature death. It is always a joy to see scenes of the city and the Oxfordshire villages. Those whose everyday working environment is one of the colleges and who are able to enjoy a detached home in a village and who also contribute to the wider society.
It was not until this afternoon that an entertainment film came closer to the reality of my experience Deep in my Heart is an extraordinary film because of the acting, its subject and my experience. It is the story of three women who loved a child born as a result of a rape by a black man of a white woman. The woman, played by Ann Bancroft, is a married catholic with two children in a white neighbourhood just before the assassination of Martin Luther King and her first reaction is that she does not want the child, despite the immediate acceptance and faith of her husband and she remains uncertain until the birth when she decides to place the baby for adoption in the hope that she will find a home and a life of love and acceptance which she knows is not possible in the segregated community in which she lives. They are the kind of couple who marched behind Martin Luther King. The child is brought up by a divorced black foster parent for the next seven years and both she and the child make the assumption that the placement has become a permanent one. Then a new social worker is appointed who arranges and insists on making an adoption placement given the foster mother and child a few days notice. It is the kind of thing that still happened in the USA in the sixties and in other parts of the world but through the creation of a care service created in 1948 and the gradual development of social casework practice, had been largely eliminated by the mid sixties in England and the rest of the UK. By that I mean the quality of decision taking by child care social worker and the courts. The seven year old child would never have been removed from the foster home in such circumstances and all my former colleagues would have fought to have ensured that the situation remained so, for our problem was the difficulty of finding foster homes, let alone adoptive home for black or mixed race children. The child who had been raised in segregated black community is placed with a liberal white woman who is married to a white man who goes along with her enthusiasms, the decision not to bring an additional child of their own in the world and to adopt a child, a half white child into a white middle class background. The couple have no idea about the loving home she had and the brutal way she was removed from it. The adopting woman is also portrayed as a loving woman who tries to reach out to a child where there will always be a barrier, and her efforts to create a mother and child relationship leads her to moving two a black and white mixed neighbourhood, where the child finds she is rejected by both communities, called nigger by the whites and by a name which I cannot remember by the blacks. Between the age of eight years and sixteen she has not friend. The woman's husband refuses to move and she is forced to go to work and to evening school in order to support the two of them. All this could have led to tragic life and the story would never have been told. Then good fortune came the way of the young woman in that she met a Christian young man with an extended family and they married and four boys a girl, then she developed asthma a doctor asked about her background and this led first to finding the foster mother and then her birth mother , and returning to confront her adopted mother. The brilliance fo this film above the previous two of last week, The Lost Child and Antwone Fisher, is degree of truth about those meetings and the disclosure of the fears as well as the hopes, the creation of separate lives and the failure to ever bridge the void that was left when mother, in this instance three, were separated. While the reasons for the separations was due to the colour of skin and the way society thought and acted about colour and race, the film also revealed more fundamental truths, This was the reaction of the brother of the birth mother, who had been told along with to other relatives that the child had died without disclosing she had been raped and the father was black. Everyone will know you were raped he said, not how dreadful for you, what a burden you have carried. The film ends with a gathering of all three families in which the innocent victim of what could have been such a tragedy has a sense of being whole, and of being fully part of a world of black and white, and brown and grey, of yellow and red. At the age of thirty four, it was not possible to wipe out the void there had been, but she was unusual in not experiencing the sequence of damage events which the majority of those who were part of my working life had experienced and would haunt them for the rest of their lives unless they too, found exceptional humans to provide them with love and support and enable them to cope even if they are never able to fill the void
By the early 1960's there were already several important academic analysis of why the Roman Empire declined and fell, ending perhaps with the spectacle of the rulership being auctioned to the highest bidder, similar to what the UK is doing now with its land, properties and football clubs. The film telescopes many of the important components of the decline and fall around a decade after the death of Caesar, Marcus Aurelius.
I begin by joining those who point out that the decline and ending of Rome was an entirely good thing notwithstanding the achievements emanating from individual Romans, because of centuries of savage killing of people in their hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands, the slavery, the corruption and all aspects of immorality. I would like to believe those who argue that one contribution towards its end was the peaceful and socialistic nature of Christianity, and no doubt many individual Christians lived up to their beliefs, but as subsequent history has shown nations espousing Christianity have proven to be just as bloody and corrupt as those who do not. The films does contain a tiny number of advocates of the Christian way of life who perish, while the majority succumb to the bribes and the immoral pleasures of the corrupt.
I like the comprehensive review of issues provided at Killewnroos.com/1/RomanFall, which covers the decline in morals and values, environmental and public health problems, political corruption, unemployment, inflation, urban decay, Inferior technology, and military spending and if all these sound facility to the West and to the United States in particular, the analysis was presented in the form of a contemporary examination question about the position of the US.
As for the film, it fixes on a period of thirteen years at the end of the second century and has a story very very very loosely based on some factual people and events. The Caesar , played by Alex Guiness was rumoured to have been poisoned and "his son", Commodus was also rumoured to have been the offspring of a relationship between his wife and a gladiator and factually Commodus fought like a gladiator and liked and used gladiators. As the film ends an attempt is made to bribe the military to into choosing the next Caesar and in fact three months after the assassination of Commodus, Didius Julianus bribed the Praetorian guard to make him Emperor outbidding Claudius Pompeianus. He was not shown in the film but he actually married the daughter of Marcus Aurelius who in the film first married the King of Persia against her wishes as a consequence of an alliance negotiated by her father. The film closes as she runs off with "Able" after he has slain "Cain" in a fight to the death, and who then when offered the crown decides to go off with his love of life to try and live happy ever after, but you know the relationship with not last beyond the next frame, given all that has gone before. To its credit it is not the kind of film which fills you with optimism or faith, given the reality of the next 1800 years.
Earlier I had written that I envisaged a quiet day of writing,100.75 working, a roast pork Sunday lunch, and lots of TV, including the first series of Yes Minster on a DVD. There was lots of good TV to watch, some at competing times with Fred Dibnah taking precedence over the second part of the Politics Show. I am never up and focused for the early morning Sunday current affairs programme which was a must when conducted by Sir David Frost. Over lunch in addition to the showing of the Fall, there was a remake of the Father of the Bride II where the original film with Spencer Tracey, was part of my childhood visits to the Odeon cinema, although I believe it first came our when I was a teenager, such does time become condensed.
I expected that The Happy Birthday Brucie would take precedence over this weeks Ice Dancing competition. How Harriet would have loved the Brucie programme and the Ice Dancing. Then Lark Rise to Candleford was a must and I decided to watch the new two Oxford based episode Lewis who has carried on the Morse police detective programmes, where I am looking forward to spending a few days this summer. I assumed there would be a multiplay showing of Lost and planned to book the 11pm slot only to find this was not so as everything was being geared up for you know what, which means I then have to keep the TV and Radio off from all news and chat programmes until the evening for the special, and thus also miss the second showing of Lost,. There was back to back repeats of American Idol throughout the day, Queen, the group seems to be permanently appearing in Rio and there is a return of the South Coast yacht series Howard's Way on BBC 4. There was also a whole afternoon devoted to the Actors Studio, from Barbara Streisand, Jane Fonda and Al Pacino, previously seen and Forrest Whitaker who played Ida Amin, and where I managed to catch glimpses while I gave my attention to the Fall and other activities. I quick flick through the flicks did reveal a showing of Noel Coward's Private Lives this afternoon, which I regret I missed.
There was not much physical activity apart from getting up, washing my hair after its cut and putting in the Sunday roast, without spuds. The roast was a chunk of pork with crackling. I kept an ear open so as to watch a programme feature about the introduction of the UK the England, and I presume Wales, free bus travel pass in April, (Scotland already has). The problem is that some local authorities, and the Brighton area was featured, are claiming that they are not likely to receive adequate compensation from the government. I was delighted to hear that I am not the only one contemplating longer trips, and one couple interviewed planned to travel around the coasts. As the programme pointed out the attitude of local authorities is myopic because it fails to allow for the reality that this will mean the over sixties making more trips, spending more money, keeping fitter and healthier and therefore making less demand on the national health service and local authority provided social welfare provision. I was also right to watch Fred Dibnah because he started his programme with a look at the forts of Hadrian Wall, moving on to the Canals. This two for £6 offer of the Pork roast was covered with crackling rather than filled with stuffing. I forgot to mention that the previous day I tried the deep frozen Lobster for the evening meal and discovered why it must be years since I first tried one before and found that the quantity of flesh which can be eaten is small and no more tasty than white meat crab claws where the value is significantly better and more enjoyable. I suspect it is similar to caviar and other posh nosh where preparation and presentation is the what you pay for.
I had mixed reactions to the celebration of the eighty years of age celebration of Bruce Forsythe, given that he was performing during World War II and still managed to hold his own in a tap dancing routine at the start of the programmes and participated in a vigorous Come Dancing finale. He has been part of my childhood with Sunday night at the Palladium, and then series after series of game shows, coming to his own again with the Celebrity Come Dancing series. As the programme revealed he has not been elevated into a national icon in the same way as Lord Dickie Attenborough and Sir Paul McCartney. The feel good factor departed from Lark Rise to Candleford as this week the subject was the impact on a marriage when an otherwise good man drinks to excess and strikes his wife, and then is unwilling to agree to total abstinence as the terms of withdrawing her legal complaint towards him and which sends him to prison. The programme always contains several ongoing stories in addition to the focus of the week, and the level of writing and acting is such to add to accumulating admiration.
It is a notable achievement to be able to enjoy Lewis without giving a moment's consideration to Morse other than to remember the death of a great actor whose work continues to delight as episodes are repeated on one Sat channel after another. Given the recent involvement of a Ruskin College School of art student in the Big Brother Celebrity programme, there was added interest that this episode featured a household of students from the college, one of whom was skilled at drawing and painting the reproduction of scenes with a photographic memory living in his own world, and one, his only friend in life, is one of two murder victims whose definition contemporary art, like my own, is all of life, but whose ideas are outside the box, bringing her into conflicts with society, and to her premature death. It is always a joy to see scenes of the city and the Oxfordshire villages. Those whose everyday working environment is one of the colleges and who are able to enjoy a detached home in a village and who also contribute to the wider society.
It was not until this afternoon that an entertainment film came closer to the reality of my experience Deep in my Heart is an extraordinary film because of the acting, its subject and my experience. It is the story of three women who loved a child born as a result of a rape by a black man of a white woman. The woman, played by Ann Bancroft, is a married catholic with two children in a white neighbourhood just before the assassination of Martin Luther King and her first reaction is that she does not want the child, despite the immediate acceptance and faith of her husband and she remains uncertain until the birth when she decides to place the baby for adoption in the hope that she will find a home and a life of love and acceptance which she knows is not possible in the segregated community in which she lives. They are the kind of couple who marched behind Martin Luther King. The child is brought up by a divorced black foster parent for the next seven years and both she and the child make the assumption that the placement has become a permanent one. Then a new social worker is appointed who arranges and insists on making an adoption placement given the foster mother and child a few days notice. It is the kind of thing that still happened in the USA in the sixties and in other parts of the world but through the creation of a care service created in 1948 and the gradual development of social casework practice, had been largely eliminated by the mid sixties in England and the rest of the UK. By that I mean the quality of decision taking by child care social worker and the courts. The seven year old child would never have been removed from the foster home in such circumstances and all my former colleagues would have fought to have ensured that the situation remained so, for our problem was the difficulty of finding foster homes, let alone adoptive home for black or mixed race children. The child who had been raised in segregated black community is placed with a liberal white woman who is married to a white man who goes along with her enthusiasms, the decision not to bring an additional child of their own in the world and to adopt a child, a half white child into a white middle class background. The couple have no idea about the loving home she had and the brutal way she was removed from it. The adopting woman is also portrayed as a loving woman who tries to reach out to a child where there will always be a barrier, and her efforts to create a mother and child relationship leads her to moving two a black and white mixed neighbourhood, where the child finds she is rejected by both communities, called nigger by the whites and by a name which I cannot remember by the blacks. Between the age of eight years and sixteen she has not friend. The woman's husband refuses to move and she is forced to go to work and to evening school in order to support the two of them. All this could have led to tragic life and the story would never have been told. Then good fortune came the way of the young woman in that she met a Christian young man with an extended family and they married and four boys a girl, then she developed asthma a doctor asked about her background and this led first to finding the foster mother and then her birth mother , and returning to confront her adopted mother. The brilliance fo this film above the previous two of last week, The Lost Child and Antwone Fisher, is degree of truth about those meetings and the disclosure of the fears as well as the hopes, the creation of separate lives and the failure to ever bridge the void that was left when mother, in this instance three, were separated. While the reasons for the separations was due to the colour of skin and the way society thought and acted about colour and race, the film also revealed more fundamental truths, This was the reaction of the brother of the birth mother, who had been told along with to other relatives that the child had died without disclosing she had been raped and the father was black. Everyone will know you were raped he said, not how dreadful for you, what a burden you have carried. The film ends with a gathering of all three families in which the innocent victim of what could have been such a tragedy has a sense of being whole, and of being fully part of a world of black and white, and brown and grey, of yellow and red. At the age of thirty four, it was not possible to wipe out the void there had been, but she was unusual in not experiencing the sequence of damage events which the majority of those who were part of my working life had experienced and would haunt them for the rest of their lives unless they too, found exceptional humans to provide them with love and support and enable them to cope even if they are never able to fill the void
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