Peter Viney's Blog

Politics for weeks. Extended news every evening. The run up to elections is dull.  And the BBC keeps shooting itself in the foot with news coverage. They were reporting on plans to cut expenditure in public services and debating whether it was possible. For the next piece of news, reporting on how politicians appealed to the electorate, they started with a reporter standing live outside the House of Commons at night (to illustrate “parliament”). They moved to the home book-lined study of a writer on communication skills to interview him for a few lines (the books illustrated “writer”), then the cameras went to a dancing academy to mention that body language was important for politicians (dancing illustrates body language), and finally to a reporter standing in a boxing ring to explain that a contest was about to start. The reporter wore boxing gloves. (It illustrates “contest”).

That involved four location set-ups for film units, and like so much on TV news, insults the audience’s intelligence by banal over-illustration. The few minutes of script could easily have been done by one talking head in a studio. Add three researched still photos at most, if you really have to.  It also undermined the argument that cuts can’t be made in the BBC as a public service when resources are ludicrously wasted on dumb location set-ups and the results patronize the viewing audience.

I believe the BBC is one of our greatest resources and that its independence and licence fee should be protected, but when producers show this sort of nonsense on a nightly basis, they seriously damage the case.

Accents in movies …

Kids give you an excuse to see this sort of 3D computer animated stuff. The story of How To Train Your Dragon is about a Viking village plagued by a variety of colourful dragons. Our hero, Hiccup, manages to befriend and tame a Night Fury dragon and then befriends all the dragons and people stop killing them and everyone learns to respect their differences and lives happily ever after. Love interest is provided by the teen queen Astrid, herself a dab hand with a chopper (or should I say “battleaxe”).

The first ten minutes is Hollywood scripting at its worst. You’re launched right into a noisy and confusing night attack by the dragons on the Vikings and you’re expected to pick up plot lines amidst the bangs and crashes and bolts of lightning and dragonian flame-throwing.  Basically, everyone thinks the wispy Hiccup is a wimp. Our 6 year old and 4 year old companions looked bemused. From then it rapidly gets better.

It made me think about the old question of accents in films. The Vikings find themselves with Scottish accents, perhaps a legacy of Shrek for Dreamworks Animation meant that big, gruff, beefy blokes sound Scottish. Also, the Vikings are kilted and bearded, if lacking in sporran, dirk and bagpipes.  However, the Vikings’ spotty teen offspring have eschewed the rich parental burr for high school movie teen American.

I never had any sympathy with those snooty 1950s film critics who complained about the characters in biblical epics having American accents.  There is no such thing as English without an accent. Either you have a variety of accents in English, or you go the Mel Gibson route as in Passion of The Christ, and have the cast speaking Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin; or in Apocolypto where they speak Maya.

Assigning an accent that feels right for the audience is crucial. In some 1950s epics, they had the Romans speaking in British accents and everyone else speaking in American. This suited the British listener who identified with the patrician empire-builders. In the BBC TV adaptations of Emile Zola, the folk of the North-East French coalfields had Yorkshire accents … Eeh, bah, gum, monsieur, there’s trouble at mill. It makes sense, as it’s a regional accent from a mining area. What would they speak otherwise? French-accented English? The issue was sent up in ‘Allo ‘Allo, the World War II sit-com about the French resistance where everyone spoke comically French-accented English (or comically German-accented English), that is except the English pilots (trying to escape) who spoke either Advanced RP or schoolboy French. When the English-speaking resistance leader had to speak to them, she moved from French accented English to public school Advanced RP. Listen, chaps … To complicate matters, there’s an English secret agent who is disguised as a gendarme. He speaks French-accented English but can’t pronounce words correctly, so his daily greeting is Good Moaning. In the last series, David Jansen who played Kevin in our videos A Weekend Away and A Week By The Sea, joined the cast as the German officer Herr Flick.

Oliver Stone was widely criticized for having the Macedonians in Alexander speak with Irish accents, while the Athenians don’t. He argued that the Macedonians moved in from the periphery and took over so needed a Celtic fringe accent. At the time, the naysayers believed that Colin Farrell, as Alexander, couldn’t do any other accent, so the others had to adopt Irish accents to fit. For audiences outside Ireland itself the effect was slightly comical: Get your swords and shields … the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem are at the walls with a mighty army.

Going back to How To Train Your Dragon, the Scottish was a fair call. Mel Gibson would have had them speaking historically accurate Old Norse, but this is a kid’s film. The foreign accent route would have left them sounding like the Swedish chef in The Muppets. A mild Scottish accent works as it’s one of the most northerly native-English accents. Given the jealousies and bickering among the class of trainee dragon killers, the choice had to be a teen accent. High school USA or Grange Hill? You go with what the largest audience finds easiest on the ear, which means American.

Shrek humour influenced the names too. I failed to pick up on much more than Hiccup, Astrid and Hiccup’s dad, Stoick, but other characters are named Gobber, Snotlout, Fishlegs, Hoark the Haggard and Phlegma the Fierce.

I was listening to the radio news about the Oxford and Cambridge annual boat race today. This is an event which has completely slipped beneath my radar, but it was brought into the news today by the presence of two burly identical twins in the Oxford team. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are Americans who as well as rowing at this high level, won a legal case over their role in the origins of Facebook.

It started me thinking about my childhood, when everyone in the country took sides in the boat race and everyone watched it on TV live. For no apparent reason, we all adopted sides and fervently supported one team or the other. The only reason for my choice of Cambridge all those years ago was a liking for light blue over dark blue, as we had no connections to either town and certainly not to either university. I liked light blue shirts and didn’t like dark blue pullovers.

Many years later, as an OUP author, I remember expressing a mild preference for an Oxford victory to one of my OUP editors, but as he’d attended Cambridge himself, he was rooting for the other side, as it turned out were most of his colleagues.

The boat race on TV has proven a minefield for sports reporters. The person who steers the boat is usually chosen because they’re small and light, and is called the cox. Private Eye regularly lists unfortunate sports commentaries, and with the boat race they’re along predictable lines (The race is over! They’ve won! Everyone in the crew is hugging their little cox …)

I haven’t watched it in years, except for re-runs on the main evening news, though after thirty years connection with Oxford, I’d extremely vaguely hope they’d win. That’s more to do with having filmed various videos in so many obscure parts of the university, especially English Channel III: Double Identity.

See a cut and pasted article  Barcodes under “Rants” on a disturbing new piece of legislation.

Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese have been producing soundtracks together since Raging Bull and The Last Waltz. Robbie Robertson has been quoted as saying of Shutter Island that This may be the most outrageous and beautiful soundtrack I’ve ever heard. The choice of modern classical tracks is highly unusual, ranging from Penderecki and John Cage to Brian Eno, and I got the soundtrack CD a couple of weeks ago. In 1973, between recording Stage Fright and Moondog Matinee, Robertson was allegedly working on a version of Penderecki material, which never emerged.

The trouble is, that after seeing the film, the images they bring up are so chilling that I’m not sure I’ll listen that much. The film is gripping from start to finish, the locations are stunning as is the sense of period (1956). I’m not going to drop any plot spoilers, but the almighty twists left the audience somewhat irritated, I thought. definitely one to see, even if you come out wishing fervently that there’d been a more conventional ending.

Copyright and trademarks

I just read a New York Times articles about the Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans, who are trying to copyright their elaborate costumes, so as to prevent photographers profiting from selling posters and photos of them.

The legal issue is interesting. We’ve had this for years  with publishers worried that a MacDonalds sign was visible in a street scene and might lead to problems. The general feeling is that if an image is the central subject of a picture, permission may be needed.

The legal trepidation reached a peak in the mid-90s when American editors started putting ™ or © signs after half the proper nouns in New American Streamline. I had a text about a car crash in Departures unit 55 and the first edit was  `The Ford™ crashed into the Chevrolet™.

I sent the editors  a couple of pages from the Grapes of Wrath where the name Ford appeared and said I don’t believe Ford could ever win a case against a publisher who failed to put “TM” after the word Ford, as anyone could find hundreds of examples without. They saw reason and the offending signs were removed, though one at least © was missed, so superstar Courtney Dallas still boasts in Unit 16 that I have a new Mercedes © and a lot of money …

This impacts on readability.

I also said I couldn’t believe Ford or Chevrolet would be dumb enough to sue, as they maintained their names were trademarked and a court might decide that their loss was nil in a work of literature, thus undermining the trademark. Anyone with any sense knows FORD is trademarked to stop the Central Asian Motor Corporation producing a range of “Fords” and more so, to stop spare parts manufacturers putting “FORD” on their goods. It’s not about describing a car in a book.  When we borrowed  a Ford for filming a video from the manufacturer I told the marketing guy about the TM issue and he fell about laughing at the very idea of sueing a writer for infringing their copyright. After all, his job was product placement, getting the Ford name into as many places as possible.

The moral of the story, as ever, is “Keep the lawyers in check.”