Why Real Lives on Screen?

"The unexamined life is not worth living." If Socrates is right about this (and far be it for me to disagree with him), he has provided the greatest possible justification for the art of biography. Biography, of course, is all about the examination of lives.  It is the art of stitching together the facts of …

Book beginnings

I have finally broken ground on the first draft of Broadcasting Biography. Those who write will know the horror of the blank page, so I am delighted and relieved to have made a start. I have decided to do as Maria suggests in The Sound of Music, and start at the very beginning. Well - with chapter …

Ethics Part 2

Previously, I've briefly considered ethics in terms of the imperative to be accurate versus the question of dramatic truth.  This post will consider a different aspect of ethics, the question of privacy. I realised when I was going to look into questions of ethics that I should actually read up on some media ethics texts. …

Ethics part 1

Today started with reading a fascinating Q&A with the dramatist and screenwriter Peter Morgan, probably the best known contemporary moving image biographer. There is a lot of rich material in this interview, but I was particularly engaged by Morgan's provocative distinction between accuracy and truth. Morgan persistently argues that there is an inherent and essential …

More melodrama and storytelling for TV

I had one piece of melodrama reading hanging over from last week, which I finished off today: Ben Singer's Melodrama and Modernity (2001). I've read this book before, a long time ago, I think for an undergraduate essay about melodrama and Italian cinema.  Needless to say, I had forgotten most of its insights in the intervening years, …

Heritage film & melodrama

I've had another genre-filled day today, because I'm trying to mop up the last bits of reading for the book's first chapter. This will offer a theoretical and definitional overview of the televisual biographical drama.  One of the things I'm trying to do is locate it in relation to familial genres - and today's were …

Biopics, history, memory

Over the next few weeks, I will largely be finishing off some final bits of reading before I start writing. I love reading and find writing tough, so I am relishing this moment of pure assimilation before I actually have to create something. Today I have been returning to work by Márta Minier and Maddelina …

“Real” horror – Serial Killers in American Horror Story: Hotel: Devil’s Night

I'm a fan of American Horror Story, and so far forgiven both a lot of its excesses, particularly its repetitive use of archetypes and mise-en-scene with Baz Luhrmann levels of subtlety.  I've also been generally on board with its promiscuous use of pop culture referencing, even in places where it is simply meretricious (Elsa 'Life on' Mars, …

Iris (2001)

Synopsis:  Iris Murdoch (Judi Dench), internationally renowned author and philosopher, is eking out a quiet semi-retirement with her academic husband John Bayley (Jim Broadbent).  Prompted by atypical lapses in memory,  Iris reluctantly agrees to visit a doctor, who diagnoses Alzheimer's disease.  Iris must contend with a gradual erasure of her memory and personality, and John is …

Cilla (ITV, 2014)

I was, of course, inspired to write about Cilla after the sad news that its subject, the singer and TV presenter Cilla Black, had died.  Like most British people my age, Cilla Black played a defining role in Saturday nights as I was growing up.  If I remember it correctly, 'Miss Cilla Blaaack' and her show Blin-duh …

Sylvia (2003)

Synopsis: After meeting at Cambridge, Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) and Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) form an unequal literary marriage: his star is on the rise, while she finds herself suffering perpetual writers' block.  Her chronic mental illness, coupled with his infidelity conspire to consign her to abject misery, but, although left alone with two children, she is …