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Pedro Gonçalves

Dennis Potter's brutal children | Television & radio | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...tvblogbypeterbradshaw

Teatro Blue Remembered Hills Azul Longe Nas Colinas

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 03 May 11 - No Cached
  • It is set in the Forest Of Dean in 1943; a place of idyllic summer beauty, marvellously photographed and shot entirely on location, on film, with no studio scenes shot on video
  • A bunch of children are romping around endlessly, aimlessly, with children's inexhaustible fund of energy and ingenuity - playing and fantasising about what their absent dads are doing in the war. They are nasty and bullying, ganging up on the weakest, with constantly shifting allegiances and protocols of sycophancy. They are, in their way, entirely innocent. But it is this which means that they are capable of horrifying acts of cruelty, which seem even more cruel in an age when we are obsessed with children as victims of adult predators.
  • Blue Remembered Hills is of course a little like Golding's Lord Of The Flies, but without the "rescue" ending and without that novel's satirical premise that children would behave like this if the restraint of authority were removed: Potter removes the conditional tense; he says that they do behave like this every day, and that the distinction between childhood and adulthood - that supposed harness of morality and rationality - is far less clear than you think.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Helen Mirren plays Angela
  • The greatest performance is from Colin Jeavons as the horribly put-upon Donald, brutally called "Donald Duck"
  • I don't think I have ever seen in any television drama something as shockingly, explicitly real as Donald's distress after being bullied.
  • He is all alone, hiding in a barn, rocking back and forth, desperately lonely and sobbing to himself "Come back dad... come back dad... ". It is deeply upsetting to watch because we know that in some angry, masochistic way he is saying this to upset himself still further. This scene - one of the most purely violent I've ever seen in any television programme - shows how important it was to cast adults. Seeing an adult cry like a child is shocking, and adult actors can make children's pain brutally and tactlessly real to an audience which wants to forget what being a child was actually like.
  • famous lines from AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad, which Potter himself reads over the final sequence:Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
  • Could it be that in remembering this past you are not debarred from the blue remembered hills, but rather, you are inhabiting them for the very first time - inhabiting them in a fuller, realer way than when you were there as a child? Memory, though conflicted and anguished, affords you a vivid new presence (and it may also be that Potter wants us to superimpose an ironic meaning on "land of lost content" with its "air that kills"). Now you are there, really there, intensely aware as you never were at the time of the ironies, the injustices and the exquisite luxuries of having nothing to do all day.When an adult truly remembers what it was like to be a child, with an adult's perspective, there is something forbidden and almost transgressive about it. That is what, I think, Potter is getting at when he cast adults as children. It wasn't a stunt: it was a representation of the act of memory.
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