DOCUMENTARY DAY

“Sunday is documentary day,” or rather, there’s no better day for settling down and watching a good documentary. The day just feels right for it and, you never know, we might just learn something from the experience as we try and clear the 1001 things that looked like they might be interesting but never got around to watching, and clear some space off the DVR.

To be honest, this phenomenon started on Saturday night, but as Sunday has become the day upon which we do the “documentary watching” thing, it tends to sound better to declare it to be documentary day than to holler “It’s a documentary 24 hour time segment that is starting on Saturday bit which will mostly occur on Sunday and will probably stretch to slightly more than 24 hours anyway…”

Mind you, if I have learned one thing from watching all those documentaries, the value of using the correct terminology ought to be more important to me. Accuracy in all things should be a prerequisite.

Saturday evening had started with us finally getting around to “Trevor Nunn on The Tempest” which was a quite fascinating look at Shakespeare’s last completed play which was part of the BBCs “Shakespeare” strand earlier on this year. We recorded a heck of a lot of it, but this was the first time that we’d sat down to watch any of it. And what fascinating stuff it was, such stuff, in fact, as dreams are made of, and now I really would like to see the play again, although the thing that I most learned was that you really, really, ought never to let actor’s speak about what they do, their motivation and justification and so forth. Time and again I found myself thinking, as they gushed on and on about nothing in particular, “Oh just stand over there and say your lines, luvvie…”

After this we leapt into Horizon’s “Are we good or evil?” which wasn’t all that much of a leap after all that “actorly wisdom” but it was fascinating to see an analysis of the genetics of psychopathy and to learn that some people are predisposed to wickedness, and most of those, if they aren’t drawn to the “universe changing” notion of ending other people’s lives, do seem to thrive in a big business environment.

I always suspected as much.

A jolly Saturday evening finished with a film about the murder of a policeman in Dallas in 1976 called “The Thin Blue Line” which was fascinating as it started with the viewer having little idea of who was who as they spoke direct to camera and, time and again, allowed their own words to condemn their actions. This was a massive condemnation of the justice system in the America of the 1970s, and had quite a lot to say about the death penalty, too. In the end, you were left with a very bitter feeling about the whole situation which, of course, also managed to remain ambiguous enough for you to remain as uncertain as to what really happened that night as any number of law enforcement officials must have done at the time. When the caption came up announcing that one of the contributors had indeed been executed in 2004, it was hard not to end the day heading to bed in a particularly sombre mood.

Sunday brought “The Two-Thousand Year Old Computer” onto our screen, although at first I wasn’t all that fussed about it and did the washing up instead, which was a mistake because it was all about one of those things that does actually fascinate me, the lost technologies of the ancient world. After all, just because we don’t think that they could possibly have had such devices doesn’t mean that they didn’t, because there were still brilliant minds at work back then, even if they didn’t have some of the advantages of modern science. If you chucked an iPhone into a tar pit tomorrow, what would future archaeologists make of it? Anyway, if you’ve never heard anything about the “Antikythera Mechanism” it’s well worth looking it up, because it might just change your opinion on a few things as we stand here on the precipice looking into a new dark age…

After that we had a triple bill of “Space” related programmes. “Do We Need the Moon?” - Well, unsurprisingly it turns out that we do, and we ought to be investing tin that bloke’s “solar panels” plan right now, by the way…; “Destination Titan” - The sacrifices made during a team of scientists 17 year quest to land their shoebox full of testing equipment onto a moon of Saturn one billion miles away; “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” – the history of the Soviet space programme which turned out to be a bit of an investigation into some religious claptrap being spouted by some cosmonaut cult or other, but was quite interesting nevertheless.

After tea, we returned to Shakespeare and watched Ethan Hawke, an American actor with whom I was unfamiliar, basically pitching to be allowed to have a go at playing Macbeth, in “Ethan Hawke on Macbeth” (See my note above about letting actors talk…). Of course, Macbeth is one of my favourite plays and there’s nothing I like better than to discuss it at length and out loud with an actor just before they go onstage, and then stroll back to the dressing rooms whistling all the way…

Really, the most interesting things that I found out about Ethan Hawke during the programme is that he’s friends with Richard Easton (who used to be in “The Brothers”), and the odd fact that they allowed him to manhandle a first folio without wearing gloves, but despite him, the Macbeth stuff was actually very interesting and a lot of the psychology linked straight back to that “Horizon” film from the day before.

Finally we sat through a double bill of “Simon Schama’s Shakespeare” which was much more my cup of tea; Proper history, proper theatre, proper kings and queens being up to no good, and all being reflected in the art of the times, and Simon even took a moment to send himself up by acting opposite Harriet Walter, which almost made me forgive him for letting the actors gush on a bit about finding their characters and the obvious smugness of the “smart set” as they went about their theatre-going.

Almost.