Monitor
Monitor was a BBC arts programme that was launched on 2 February 1958 and ran until 1965. Huw Wheldon was the first editor from 1958 to 1965. He was also the principal interviewer and anchor. Wheldon set about moulding a team of talents, including John Schlesinger, Ken Russell, Patrick Garland, David Jones, Humphrey Burton, John Berger, Peter Newington, Melvyn Bragg, Nancy Thomas and Alan Tyrer. Monitor ranged in subject over all the arts. Wheldon's Monitor lasted until he had "interviewed everyone I am interested in interviewing", and he was succeeded by Jonathan Miller for the series' last season.
Episodes
The opening programme in the new series. Introduced by Jonathan Miller.
With Jonathan Miller including Peter Brook with actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company talking about the portrayal of madness. Monitor meets artist Joe Tilson, who gains inspiration from the modern world.
With Jonathan Miller including: Philip Larkin, who talks to John Betjeman about himself and his poetry and the city of Hull where he lives. "From a purely practical point of view it's nice being remote, because people on the whole don't drop in on you". and Philip Johnson, New York architect filmed in and around New York. "If you don't have an art collection you don't easily come to me for a house".
With Jonathan Miller. Including: Dwight MacDonald, the American critic talking to Robert Kee… Sandy Claus, by Barry Humphries… Father Christmas, as seen by the French anthropologist Claud Levi-Strauss.
with Jonathan Miller; including: Robert Lowell. The Pulitzer prize-winning American poet filmed in New York and Boston. Second of a series on living poets… Michael Podro. Art as detective story-a display of the methods of Erwin Panofsky.
with Jonathan Miller including Empson Apart William Empson holds a curious and special place among modern English poets. He started life as a mathematician and wrote much of his poetry, as well as Seven Types of Ambiguity, while still studying at Cambridge in the 1920s. Since then he has taught widely in China and Japan. In tonight's film he talks about some of his poems and their meaning to him. and Michael Podro Art as detective story-a display of the methods of Erwin Panofsky.
with Jonathan Miller. including David Sylvester: What the Pundits Say David Sylvester, the art critic, takes a sidelong look at the critics as they discuss the paintings of the American artist Jasper Johns. Richard Brooks A film portrait of the director Richard Brooks as he makes his film of Conrad's Lord Jim. A New Place Designed by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, the new Economist building in St. James's Street is an exciting addition to the London scene. It is discussed by the architects, the client, and John Donat.
with Jonathan Miller A television exploration of the world of Samuel Beckett. [Starring] Jack MacGowran Since Waiting for Godot burst on a startled and sometimes outraged English audience nearly ten years ago, Samuel Beckett has become a well-established figure in the English theatre. The latest production of Waiting for Godot at the Royal Court Theatre, London, has been received as a classic. This evening's programme is an experiment in expressing on television some of Mr. Beckett's central themes and ideas as they occur not only in his plays but in his novels.
with Jonathan Miller Robert Lowell Widely regarded as the greatest living American poet, Lowell talks in this film about the challenges of his craft and reads poems in which he grapples with the problems of time and tradition. Time Is A film made by Don Levy for the Nuffield Unit of the History of Ideas on the subject of time-the abstract idea which man created and still only partly understands. Narration adapted and spoken by John Wain.
With Lady Barbirolli, The Halle Orchestra (Leader, Martin Milner), The Orchestra of the Royal Manchester College of Music, The King's Lynn Quartet and members of the Halle Concert Society. Commentary by Huw Wheldon. A Monitor presentation.
with Jonathan Miller Dobcross Henry Livings, the young English playwright, left London to live in Dobcross, a small workaday village near Oldham. His friends there work in the local mills and dyeworks and it is out of this background of northern industrialism that he has written plays like Big Soft Nellie and Eh? Leicester Tower James Stirling and James Gowan, two British architects, built the new Department of Engineering at Leicester University. They discuss with Professor Parkes, Head of the Department, and John Donat how the building and Leicester's first tower came into being. Western Native Township Julian Beinart, a South African expert in town planning, shows the startling decorations on the walls of the houses in the township and talks about what this 'writing on the wall' means to the Africans who live there.
with Jonathan Miller Including: People in Rather Odd Circumstances The poems, drawings, and conversation of Stevie Smith. and Poet As Art Critic Michael Podro on the art criticism of the French poet Baudelaire.
A film on James Joyce Written by Anthony Burgess
No overview is available.
Wives, mistresses, and the sinister Pierre Louys, artist, photographer, pornographer, make up the strange circle surrounding the life and music of the French composer. A new feature produced and directed by Ken Russell, author of the prize-winning Monitor film on Elgar.
A programme on the illustration of the instantaneous. Including The Camera and the Canvas Aaron Scharf describes the impact of photography on painters during the last hundred years, and in particular early experiments in capturing movement. Naum Gabo, the famous Russian pioneer of Constructivist sculpture, filmed at his home in Connecticut, and Kenneth Snelson, a young American living on Long Island and working in a similar field.
Donald McCullin A film portrait of the prize-winning news photographer which brings us face to face with the courage and energy of one of the most exciting figures in modern photo-journalism. The Royal College of Physicians Continuing the Monitor series on modern architecture in Britain. John Donat talks with the architect Denys Lasdun whose firm built the dramatic new Royal College of Physicians premises in Regent's Park. Sir Robert Platt, a past president of the Royal College, discusses ways in which Lasdun's new building has affected the whole feeling of an ancient professional institution.
A new film produced and directed by Ken Russell about Henri 'Douanier' Rousseau artist-painter. The excise clerk who became the great primitive painter-his friendship with Alfred Jarry, the two-gun midget from Laval; his struggles, imprisonment for fraud, tragic love affair, and mysterious death. With the Yorkshire primitive painter James Lloyd in the role of Rousseau.
Three ways of looking at the world. Why so thin? The art critic, John Berger looks at the work of the great sculptor, Giacometti whose strange spindly figures have been one of the great mysteries of modern European sculpture. Berger solves the mystery in terms of Giacometti's theories of vision. The Middle-class Magician The art critic, George Melly went to Brussels and made a film about the Belgian surrealist. Rene Magritte whose pictures are conundrums about the way the world looks. Cheese! Or what really did happen in Andy Warhol's Studio Monitor comes to an end with a surprise of its own making.
