f PREVIEW
Tx.: The Museum Of Memory
BBCZ, Thu 24 Jun, 11.15pm.
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This is hardcore: Tx.
7 Last year, John Maybury made a film
about Francis Bacon called Love /5 The Devil Comparatively leftfield as biopics go - it focused on Bacon’s destructive
love affair with George Dyer rather
than his art — the film was, nevertheless, a conventional outing for
. Maybury, who had previously worked with Derek Jarman. With The Museum
Of Memory, Maybury makes a return to his first love, experimental films.
’I saw it as an opportunity to do something in my more arty territory,’ says Maybury With a hint of self-
mockery. ’After the experience of Love Is The Devil, it was really nice to go back into that chaotic nonsense land.’
Tx. enabled Maybury to ’get his hands on some really hardcore gadgetry.’ Using digital imagery, Maybury has created a virtual museum around which the audience is guided by avant-garde artists Antonin Artaud and Edie Sedgwick, played by Love Is The Devil’s Daniel Craig and ex-MTV Germany presenter, Heike Makatsch.
Leigh Bowery, another figure of the modernist avant-garde, chairs a debate between the pair, masked by computer graphics and an artificial voice. Finally, Derek Jacobi (who played Bacon for Maybury) provides a voiceover, reading from Shakespeare’s sonnets. It makes for pretty confusing viewing.
Maybury has variously described The Museum Of Memory as ’a PlayStation narrative’, ’a virtual travelogue’ and ’an avant-garde comedy’. None of this is much help in understanding what it means, but then Maybury doesn’t necessarily expect his audience to 'get It'.
’There is a fear of this kind of work because of the intellectual baggage,’ he says, 'but it’s completely open to interpretation. It’s meant to be serious. It’s also a bit annoying. It’s pretentious, but the pretentiousness of it is quite funny. Above and beyond anything else, there are some really beautiful images there. For me, that’s enough.’ (Miles Fielder)
PREVIEW Lucid
Channel 4, Wed 30 Jun, 12.35am.
Acetate
; BBCZ, Mon 28 Jun & 5Jul, 11.15pm.
You may have noticed that last year
saw the much heralded ten year
anniversary of dance music in Britain. What started as a Balaeric holiday for a couple of lads spawned the chemical generation and a new club culture.
While it took a while for the media to portray club culture as anything other than regular ’Drugs! Shock! Horror!’ scandals, they seem to have finally recognised the enormous popularity of dance music. Now, there is a plethora of radio shows and magazines dedicated to club culture, as well as a hit movie - Human Traffic - Currently in the cinemas. Trundling behind, as ever, comes terrestrial TV.
Two programmes dedicated to dance music are helping to rectify the imbalance. The slick Acetate, hosted by Carl Cox, is a series of MTV style interviews and video clips with the
Clear living: Lucid
inevitable cuts and loops and an accessible soundtrack. Remaining tongue-in-cheek and informative is a hard balance, but they more or less pull it off.
In contrast, Lucid is a example of ’ambient television’ which focuses on Glasgow’s club culture in a more abstract and multimedia format than Acetate. The programme opens with the divine anthem of ’97, DJ Q’s ’We Are One’, and showcases some of the favoured venues of choice for the clubbing generation on the west coast. This is not a run-of-the-mill documentary; it is well suited to its time slot and won't sit as comfortably with a wider audience, which won’t bother the producers one jot.
Glory be, you don’t have to suffer any over-styled y0ung hosts who are given over to bouncing about and being more in yer face than you thought was humanly possible. Acetate looks to the gentle words of wisdom of Carl Cox and interviewer-less interviews while Lucid relies solely on clubbers’ voice- overs and subtitles to create a multi- media show. (Simone Baird)
TV &. RADIO
i to TV host, fronting a 25-week guide
PREVIEW Comedy Cafe
Scottish, starts Mon 28 Jun, 12.20am.
’He’s a has-been that never really was,’ is Mackenzie Crook’s cutting analysis of his alter ego Charlie Cheese, before more kindly describing him as ’an affectionate mickey-take of those Blackpool end-of-pier comedians.’ Still, Mr Cheese has finally graduated
to all things comedic.
Other employees of Comedy Cafe who may be familiar are sketch performers Stay Alive Pepi, having appeared on The Fast Show and Reeves & Mortimer. The Cafe will positively buzz with stand-up and sketch comedy, while Charlie will be interviewing celebs in his own inimitable way.
Among those lined up to chat over a game of table football are Jeremy Beadle and Les Dennis. ’I don't quite know where comedy comes in there,’ comments Crook tactfully. Plus, there’s news of films, books and gigs and anything else
Comedy of manners: Charlie Cheese
considered funny. If it makes you laugh, it’s in the caff. (Kirsty Knaggs)
- Timewatch: Letting The
PREVIEW
Genie Out Of The Bottle BBCZ, Sat 26 Jun, 9.40pm.
Nobody quite does pornography with the notoriety of those saucy Scandinavians. ’Much More Sex Please, We’re Danish,’ may not be their national motto, but as Timewatch discovers, the Danes are as liberal with their attitudes to sex as the British are carnally conservative.
Thirty years on from the legalisation of porn in Denmark, there have been few taboos to stand in the way of the Danes’ view of civil liberties. While it won’t raise eyebrows to discover that premarital sex has never been sniffed at
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Porn again: Timewatch
the way it was here, it may turn stomachs when hearing what Scandinavians
mean when they talk of themselves as animal lovers.
Dissenting voices, naturally, are to be heard in the form of campaigners against all things considered obscene and upstanding members of the church. As Swedish anti-porn stalwart Stina Fridofsson puts it: ’I believe in the family and pornography means to defile. It destroys part of the finest gift that God has given us.’ (Brian Donaldson)
REVIEW Haywire BBCZ, Sun 20 Jun **
Channel bore: Haywire
Billed by its makers as the TV equivalent of fast food, this is almost too accurate a description: Haywire has no nutritional value, is highly derivative, unimaginative and might possibly give you diarrhoea.
It’s not all that bad a premise, satirising the world of satellite and cable TV, but unfortunately it’s hard to parody something essentially parodic. The lone highlight in this first show is the Innuendo Channel where a female presenter and a gentleman sporting an unwieldy moustache repeatedly exchange double entendres in the guise of cookery (think stuffing the turkey and you’ll be on the right track). This Viz-style humour is amusing at first, but quickly becomes as tiresome as the rest of the show.
Instead of viewing this, switch over to cable TV and see how the ’so unfunny it's funny’ balance should be struck. (Mark Robertson)
24 Jun—8 Jul 1999 THE U8T111