April 9th - April 15th 2007
Sunday Fed up
Saturday Kew Gardens
Friday For the Norties
Thursday Kew Gardens
Wednesday Julian Budden
Tuesday Kew Gardens
Monday Nicole Stéphane
Sunday 15th April
Overheard in the carnivorous plant zone in the Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew
A: No dear, I don't think they do Feeding Time...
Saturday 14th April
Kew Gardens, Spring 2007
Friday 13th April
I started writing a long piece consisting of an imaginary interview in which Graham Norton lays down for senior BBC management the stringent terms and conditions under which he is prepared to work, once again, to put money into the capacious pockets of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
But frankly you could probably do better yourself just by tuning into Any Dream Will Do and giggling as Norton refers, yet again, to Webber's pseudo-aristocratic status ("He's just a Lord!"), marvelling at the advances in plastic surgery that appear to have given said Lord a matching set of eye-bag implants, and shouting "Megan's Law!" every time Norton gets to cuddle another suddenly-disempowered twenty-year-old.
No sign, as yet, of the guest appearance by Alan Sugar as I imagined it ("You've got an arse the size of Russia and that thing you do with the dewey-eyes is making me nauseous frankly. So, Nik: You're Fired") and the changing-room scenes that were surely stipulated in the original contract have yet to make the final cut.
But stay tuned: anything, or so they would have you believe, can happen.
(Update; No, scrub that - the show has now moved to the studio-based finals, bleeding what little 'reality' there ever was from the format, and reducing it to just another Satiddynite variety show (make that "variety" show); still plenty of youths crying though, if that's what floats your boat...)
Thursday 12th April
Kew Gardens, Spring 2007
Wednesday 11th April
Obituary Watch: Julian Budden
For many years the pleasing speaking voice of Julian Budden, who has died aged 82, with its easy, friendly manner, was to be heard in the intervals of BBC radio broadcasts of Verdi operas...
After his first year, second world war service in the Friends Ambulance Unit took him to Italy and Austria (1943-46); he returned to graduate in classics in 1948.
Meeting Julian in his later days, one could be forgiven for thinking him a sort of Professor Brainstorm. Absent-minded and impractical in minor matters he certainly was, but his brain was needle-sharp when it mattered.
It was a surprise, even to some of us who thought we knew Julian well, when he went to live with Luigi Innocenti, a potter, in Florence...
Tuesday 10th April
Kew Gardens, Spring 2007
Monday 9th April
Obituary Watch: Nicole Stéphane
Despite having appeared in several films, and subsequently becoming an enterprising producer, Nicole Stéphane, who has died aged 83, will always be associated with the role of Elisabeth, the semi-incestuous sister, in Jean-Pierre Melville's adaptation of the Jean Cocteau novel, Les Enfants Terribles.
Stéphane is hypnotic as the manipulative elder sister of Paul...her masculinity and his femininity making an androgynous whole. She has a certain butch glamour as she elegantly walks around the apartment in a Dior negligee with a clothes peg on her nose..
Born Nicole de Rothschild, part of the banking family, she was imprisoned in Spain in 1942 after crossing the Pyrenees while she was trying to join the Free French. After liberation, she decided to take up acting as a career, assuming the name of Nicole Stéphane.
A friend, and sometime lover, was Susan Sontag, with whom Stéphane made Promised Lands (1974), a film essay shot during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when the two women set off into the Sinai desert with a small crew while burned-out tanks were still smouldering and corpses lay by the side of the road.
But what occupied Stéphane most over the last decades was her attempt to get Proust's novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, made into a film. The closest it came to fruition was with Luchino Visconti.After an initial meeting with the most Proustian of directors, Stéphane cried, "You said everything I wanted to hear! I must kiss you!" before giving him permission to direct it with her producing.
In all the film was to last four hours and cost an astronomical 5bn lire, but when Stéphane baulked at the price and asked to be given more time to raise the money, Visconti, haughtily and discourteously abandoned the film.
Sadly, Stéphane, who was a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur et Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, never lived to see her dream realised.
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