Much celebration here in Castle Von Naggle this week with the appearance of a new three-part Jonathan Meades series on BBC4. If you've seen his work before, hell, you'll already know whether you love him or hate him - he appears to be gloriously polarising - but if you've never had the pleasure, read on, read on.
Who is this Meades? The introduction given to him on Clive James' website, a veritable treasure trove of intellectual goodies where a number of his writings are included, describes him thus:
"[A]n educated upstart who not only doesn’t know his place, but knows far more than his allotted share about all the other places. [...] The tradition that started with Betjeman and Piper’s Shell guides can now be said to have reached a culmination in the personality of Meades. [...] The latest and most subversive exemplar of a useful broadcasting tradition, he still startles me most in his journalism, which is best approached through his collection Peter Knows What Dick Likes (Paladin, 1989). The pieces selected here prove his gift for reaching sideways out of aesthetics and bringing in the sociology and the politics as well, with no care for who gets offended."
(The aforementioned collection being out of print, with tatty paperbacks of it being sold for over fifty bleedin' quid)
According to Wikipedia, Meades was born in 1947, trained at RADA and wrote restaurant reviews for the Times between 1986 and 2001, putting on a pound a year in weight in the process, then losing a third of his body weight in the year that followed. He's also been writing for decades on architecture and culture and written a number of novels, most of which are annoyingly hard to find. But he's best known (in this house anyway) for his work on BBC television since 1990. It's not easy to put his programmes into any particular genre pigeon hole, and so much the better for it - ostensibly the starting point for much of them would be architecture, but they're as much performances as documentaries, lecture and cabaret in one, shot through with black, sometimes vicious humour. They're also thoroughly opinionated, refreshingly so in days when damn near every programme broadcast seems determined to please everyone and offend no-one, and unashamedly intelligent, as linguistically extensive as Will Self yet without the sense of showing off.
Meades could never be accused of talking down to his televisual audience; his shows demand your attention from start to end. This could be a recipe for boredom in an age of short attention spans and pandering to the stupid, yet his shows use the medium of television with an invention that escapes the rest of the industry. The character of Meades who presents these programmes is a fictional construct of his own, perpetually seeing the world through red-tinted sunglasses, forever clad in a suit no matter the location, an incongruous glitch in the system, often played on for ridiculous effect (see the suit-free Terminator intro to Remember The Future). This is not a man who takes himself as seriously as initial appearances would suggest, a man who understands the importance of entertainment (on his first interview for Little Atoms he speaks of his admiration for Marty Feldman) ensuring that an hour long broadcast never becomes dull, never turns into another generic opinion-free documentary. His atheism is strident, unapologetic, undiluted no matter the religion, as befits an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
So what does he talk about? He's covered subjects from the unsung architectural highs and lows of Britain (the extensive Abroad Again series), Stalinist and Nazi architecture, surrealism, food (the excellent Meades Eats series), Belgium, vegetarians (I dare not show that one to the Missus) and Northern Europe (the brilliant two-parter Magnetic North that first won us over last year). But these are just the starting points, spinning off into parts historical, cultural, sociological, autobiographical, satirical. He never takes the oft-trodden route of other documentaries, and his latest - Off Kilter - is no exception.
A three-part documentary (of sorts) on architecture in Scotland, prior experience of television would lead you to expect a focus on Edinburgh, C R Mackintosh in Glasgow and maybe a croft house or two. Instead, the first part of Off Kilter focuses exclusively on Aberdeen, a city that's barely touched television screens except for oil documentaries. I've only been there once, a stop-through on the way home from Orkney, and my first impressions were pretty weak. Turns out I've seriously underestimated it, architecturally at least. After a rather bizarre opening revolving around corned beef and typhoid, it hits solid Aberdonian ground - well, stone. He points out how the use of Aberdeen granite gives 300 year old buildings a surprisingly new appearance, even CG-like, and highlights the local obsession with dormer windows and the fascinating churches. As he puts it: "devil gets the best tunes, god gets the best buildings." I'd wondered if he'd touch on Donald Trump's Big Adventure and he doesn't disappoint in the slightest, tearing into the whole unsightly business with passionate contempt. Wonderful.
So, where to start? Firstly - watch the just-shown first episode of Off-Kilter on the iPlayer, available until the end of the month, then catch the next episode on the Isles of Lewis and Harris, (says here: "Meades discovers serenity, Calvinism and peat bog bodies") which should be a real treat.
Secondly - buy yourself The Jonathan Meades Collection on DVD, a steal at under £14, which contains a selection of his telly work (Abroad In Britain, Further Abroad, Abroad Again) and both parts of the brilliant Magnetic North.
Thirdly - for the many programmes not included on said DVD, settle down at the YouTube Meades Shrine ("if you are going to get caught up in any kind of cult of personality, then you better make sure it's a good 'un.") which has pretty much every thing I think he's done in front of a camera, broken down into 10 minutes chunks and held together in handy playlists, up to & including Off-Kilter for those who can't access the iPlayer. There's so much going on in his programmes that second- and third-viewings are even more rewarding than the first. Intelligent, wry, genuinely enlightening television seems to be harder and harder to find, so thank the BBC for keeping these brilliant shows going. Though the man himself may well shudder at the thought of such acceptance, Jonathan Meades is a national treasure.
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