Faking documentaries

I am not a great TV fan. Much of my viewing is after the 9pm watershed and some of it with the aid of a drink or two. That is not to deny that there is some great TV, just that it mostly is not for me. I mainly watch documentaries or films and am becoming very tetchy about the former. However, one that I particularly enjoyed recently is called: The Railway: Keeping Britain on Track. It’s great. Commentary is light and we never see the commentator, and why indeed should we. What we see is real people doing real things, travelling, selling tickets, driving trains, paying and avoiding paying. Oh and there was a Sisyphean cycle of a drunk repeatedly walking up the escalator the wrong way. It’s fascinating, there are scenes of drama, anger, kindness, selfishness, loyalty and comedy. And it is all real.

The railway documentary has none of those awful fake entries when the presenter, often a ‘personality’ with little connection to the documentary’s topic, knocks on a door and real people open it feigning surprise at this obviously prepared and often much rehearsed scene. Do they think we are idiots? In my recent appearance with the Hairy Bikers I was made to do one of these. No door this time, just a slipway to the punting station on Oxford’s River Cherwell. After chatting for an hour or so whilst the director and general dogsbody set everything up, we had to pretend to meet ‘for the camera’. Our ‘first’ meeting took four takes. On the third one the Hairy Biker slipped on the wet decking and fell over – now that was the entrance that should have been screened (no Hairy Bikers were hurt in the making of this sequence).

The Hunt is currently being screened by the BBC and it is excellent, though I am torn between supporting the hunter and sympathy for the hunted. Commentary is heavier, but we never see the commentator. He is a media personality, chosen I suppose to give authority to the script, but it could have been done by anyone with good diction. It is secondary to the action which could be enjoyed without commentary at all. And to see how it is all made described by the crew who actually filmed it – magic.

Please someone stop these ‘personalities’ walking towards the camera as they talk, and stop screening close ups of their thoughtful faces, presumably to provide drama where this should come from the documentary itself. Please stop inserting irrelevant clips of fires when the word fire is mentioned in the commentary. We all know what fire looks like. Similarly for storms, or crowds, or stars, or the sea. Please stop showing matey scenes between the ‘personalities’ and the complete strangers that they meet. These strangers are the real stars, we know that the personality does not know them, will never see them again, will not even recall their name after the next documentary. These things should not be called documentaries, they are simply chat shows on the road where the presenter is the focus and the subject, the experts and the real people are simply a backcloth for the show.

Ah well, that’s got that off my chest. Now where did I leave that bloody remote? And where’s the ‘off’ button.

Syria Remembered

I visited Syria about ten years ago, alone and with a backpack. I entered the country from Turkey and visited a number of towns and cities that have recently made the headlines. I had no agenda, just a Lonely Planet Guide and a will to explore. I recall the kindness of Kurds, Arabs, Armenians and Alawites.  Also the many pictures of Assad, the desert wastes, the heat, the incredibly low prices, the decrepit trains, the ancient remains and women shrouded in black.

Sadly, I have mislaid my notes of the month or so that I spent there, so these recollections are from a distance. My only experiences of aggression and violence occurred in the first place I visited: Deir ez-Zur, a small city in the east. Endeavouring to get cash in the bank the cashier held me entirely responsible for our involvement in the war in neighbouring Iraq. On the main street two cyclists resorted to fisticuffs following a collision. In a park a group of young men approached me with seeming angry intent. They demanded to know where I came from and I replied, with some trepidation, “England”. They looked at each other as if making a decision, then together shouted, “Bush bad, Blaire good,” and insisted upon my accepting a bottle of orangeade from them. That was a near thing.

Later my wandering took me near to the entrance to a large school. Teenagers were pouring out at the end of their day and I was soon surrounded by a vast crowd of them demanding answers to questions such as “Where you from? Are you married? How old are you? Why are you here? Do you have children? What is your name?” Finally a fully uniformed gateman pushed his way through the crowd and told me to go away: the crowd that I had unwittingly attracted was blocking the road.

Next I went to Palmyra and had the fortune to see the Temple of Bel, since tragically and pointlessly destroyed by ISIS, and then onto the capital, Damascus, one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in the world where the main danger was crossing the wide central road. Further west I met the Mediterranean coast at Tartus. Such a relief, such a pleasure. Here the women actually exposed their hair! On my first day there, sitting eating my lunch in a park, two uncovered young ladies joined me, talked to me and shared their food with me. It was a relief to leave behind the black-draped uncommunicative ladies of the east.

In Tartus my visa was due to expire so I had to visit a photographic studio to obtain a snap for the visa application. The photographer was outspoken in English. After the usual interchanges I pointed to the large portrait of Assad and asked, “Why do you put that there?”

“We love him,” he replied with a genuine smile. “He asks us not to put his likeness on our walls, but we want to. He was educated in your country you know.” I knew.

Leaving Tartus and the dirtiest beach I have ever seen behind, I made my way through Latakia to Kasab and was quickly embraced by Armenians who complained bitterly about the government. Not the Syrian, but the Turkish government. The Ottomans had marched their ancestors out of their country to Syria during the First World War and many had died in transit.

There is more, much more, in those mislaid, maybe lost, notes, those memories of a peaceful country with people going about their business, their lives. Okay, maybe I was naive, blinkered, deliberately misled, but I do not think so. Would that we could wind back the clock to the time of my visit and start again, but that is foolish talk. Like everyone I feel so sorry for those killed, maimed, deprived of their homes, their livelihood, their lives by this awful conflict.

Do I have a solution to this crisis? Of course not. There is just one thing I am sure of: things have certainly been worsened by other countries taking sides, arming one side against the other, castigating one side or another – yet that still continues. So what can we do? There is something - help those that are helping the refugees in the area: Save the Children for example.

Nature strikes back.

Most years I would be heading for Spain just now for the autumnal visit, but wife support has changed that. So I am in England and the season has just started in Oxford with a talk arranged by Skeptics in the Pub on the theme of philosophers and science. Though I enjoyed the beer and a chat with a friend I was not impressed by the talk. A youngish self-styled called philosopher tried to convince a packed audience that scientists have no ethics and philosophers (whatever they are) have a monopoly on both ethics and logical thought. Fresh from The Edinburgh Fringe, I think he found Oxford sceptics extremely sceptical and a hard bunch as they repeatedly attacked his Venn diagram. This had a big circle labelled philosophy embracing a smaller one labelled science and everything outside the big circle was labelled stupid! The speaker probably scores quite high on entertainment value (with some) but low on rational content (with many).

The day before that I lost my wallet on the Chipping Norton to Oxford bus. The moment after I stepped off the thing I patted my back pocket – wallet gone. And with it all the usual stuff from credit cards to bus pass and drivers licence plus an irreplaceable poem on Turkey. The bus went on to the railway station and I intercepted it on its way back – wallet gone and a different driver. Sod it.

The day after I received some photos from Dolors, a good friend in our village in Spain. I could see from the thumbnails that the pictures were of my caseta - my stone hut at the huerto - and left the message for later. I opened it at around one o’clock this morning and could not quite believe what I saw – my two roofs, only completed last year, wrecked; my solar panel pocked and undoubtedly ruined! Sod it.

Many pictures of Spain feature the sun, the sea and the beach, and I guess that is the picture that jumps into most people’s heads when the country is mentioned. Our area is not like that. It does get hot in the summer, but it also gets cold in the winter. And though there is much more sunshine than in Britain we are rocked by storms. The Spanish word for storm is tormenta and sounds to me stronger, wilder, more tremendous and the storms around La Fresneda are certainly all of that: ripping lightening, deafening thunder, flash flooding and sometimes, just occasionally billiard ball hail. The latter is rare, usually localised, and bloody frightening. If you are caught in one you run for your life for shelter, the balls of ice usually start small, but rapidly grow in size and intensity. They damage cars, crops and of course, roofs.

The hail storm that damaged my little creation over there broke on Monday. When I heard about it early this morning my reaction was subdued, sad more than angry. When all of my tools were stolen from the caseta a few years ago I was furious and vented my fury in a blog (7^th September 2012) in which I poured anger and blame on the thieves. Who or what can I blame for the damage to my roof? Nature I suppose. Global warming perhaps – and thus all of the car drivers and coal consumers of the world – not really, I’m pretty sure that hailing predates the discovery of global warming.

So what’s next? Go over there sometime to reroof the caseta and install a new solar panel, I suppose. Sadly I carefully mortared the latter into the roof so that thieves could not take it! I wasn’t expecting an ice ball attack so soon.

PS a friend in Spain sent me a newsclip which contains a video showing the ferocity of the hail storm shot at the swimming pool of a nearby village. Reports now say that the hail stones were as large as eggs!