Green and Pleasant Land

Something that AA Gill wrote in the Sunday Times today made me smile (Gill is always good value, even when you disagree with him). Here are his thoughts on the way England is portrayed in television documentaries like Nicholas Crane’s Britannia:

‘There is something rather distasteful about the lens’s lyrical licking of our country; the unquestioning, unremitting, unrequited lust for the twee, twinky, touristy bits of Blighty. All those series of elegiac rambles, with their moaning, breathless clichés, groping mountains and valleys, come one after the other like charabancs in the Lake District. There’s a sort of sentimental fascism about them, an overromanticised geological jingoism. While the presenters ramble, the cameras go by helicopter, soaring over National Trust properties, being chased by a sobbing orchestra. Their England doesn’t contain any suburbs or tower blocks; no motorways, airports, no industry, no trading estates, no you and me. It’s inhabited by an occasional dotty rustic, an endangered craftsman and simple lock-keepers. Why do they continue to try to sell us this ridiculous, bogus, thatched lie of a nation? I already live here, I want to shout.’

Just about every British television documentary using the countryside as a subject is guilty in some way of this: Countryfile, Coast, A Picture of Britain with David Dimbleby, Britain’s Favourite View. Of course there is nothing new in any of it; the British Transport Films unit, set up sixty years ago in May, made travelogues showing destinations like Cornwall, Norfolk, and the Highlands as places which people might go to on holiday, preferably by train. Many of them had a ‘lyrical’ quality; there was the use of poetic language, quotations from the likes of Shakespeare and the Romantics and classical music in the style of Benjamin Britten and Edward Elgar.

Ironically the man said to have founded the British documentary movement had very different aims in mind. John Grierson believed that the intentions behind film making should be ‘social and not aesthetic’. The idea of, say, Drifters and the later films of the 1930s by directors and producers like Harry Watts, Edgar Anstey, Basil Wright, Paul Rotha and Robert Flaherty was to have as realistic as possible a portrait of the way life was lived. Even so Grierson was not against the use of non professional actors or of constructing scenes and suggesting they were real. Arguably the blame behind the pictorialisation that lingers in modern British documentaries lies in Night Mail (1936). This famous film shows the post being delivered by a train going from London to Scotland and the workers who did it. But for all its attempt at realism, the part that everyone remembers is the sequence at the end of the journey with WH Auden’s poem narrated over music. The rhythm of the beat and the editing create a sense of excitement and anticipation which is, whatever Grierson wanted, due to the aesthetic of the piece. It is stirring, beautiful; Auden’s poem talks of thousands ‘still asleep, dreaming of monsters’ as the train arrives in Edinburgh and Aberdeen with the sun rising. The effect is unforgettable, both for the audience and, I think, the filmakers who have come after, wanting to create something similar. Sometimes this is beauty, often it is as Gill suggests ‘overromanticised geological jingoism’.