In TV-speak we have the TX date (transmission date to you and me)-of The Hotel Sunday April 17th at 8pm. Previously we had been told that the first episode would go out on Tuesday April 26th, and I expect that the date has been brought forward to get in ahead of the mighty brouhaha of the Royal Wedding. Wayne, the General Manager at the Damson Dene, and Paul and Lavinia, who are now his assisstant managers, joined executives from Channel 4 and the staff of Dragonfly, the production company and several dozen representatives of the press (”hacks” in TV-speak) for a preview of the first episode. We were at the plush cinema room in the Channel 4 headquarters in central London. The episode has three main themes- a proposal of marriage (the young couple were also there for the screening), the induction of Amos, a young Romanian recruit, and the story of an elderly couple who were having a short break before getting the results of a test which would show whether or not the husband had terminal cancer. This was the second time I had seen this episode and I found it to be just as funny and moving as the first. Most importantly, the hard, cynical hacks also loved it- in fact the Channel 4 guys said they had never seen such a warm reaction to a preview.
Afterwards, there was a question and answer session in which Wayne was brilliantly funny. I don’t think he realises what a star he is going to be.
Archive for the ‘Press’ Category
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
“The Hotel”- The Official Launch
Sunday, March 27th, 2011
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The passing spring,
Birds mourn,
Fishes weep
With tearful eyes
Matsuo Basho- The Narrow Road to the Deep North
A fortnight ago Sendai, Fukushima and Matsushima meant nothing to us. Now, they are all too familiar as places hit by the Japanese tsunami. We’ve seen the images of the wreckage but the pictures on TV give us no idea of the beauty of the landscape which was destroyed. It was a beauty as renowned in Japan as the Lake District is here.
On 27th March 1689, exactly 322 years ago, the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho set off from Edo on a journey north, which he described in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, one of the best travel books of all time (now published by Penguin Classics). He stayed in Fukushima and Sendai (where he threw fresh leaves of iris on the roof of his inn and prayed for good health) and took a boat to the islands of Matsushima. This is how he described them:
“I would like to say that here is the most beautiful spot in the whole country of Japan and the beauty of these islands is not in the least inferior to the beauty of Lake Dotei or Lake Seito in China. Indeed the whole beauty of the entire scene can only be compared to the most divinely endowed of female countenances, for who else could have created such beauty but the great god of nature himself?”
Not much later our Romantic poets would be describing described the beauty of the Lake District in similarly ecstatic terms. Basho’s words give us a deeper understanding of why the Japanese love our Lake District so much, and make it even more poignant that their own favourite place of beauty has been destroyed.
Thursday, March 24th, 2011
The meaning of loss
Of all the terrible stories to come out of Japan there is one which I can’t get out of my mind. On the day of the earthquake a woman from Miyagi prefecture went to work. While she was at work the tsunami swept away her house, killing her husband and her three children. Her parents were also killed. Everything she woke up with that morning had gone- not simply her family and her home, but every last possession- her photos, her letters and her mementos. Although she has survived, the tsunami has washed away her life.
Carla Carlisle referred to the dignity of the Japanese people as “their gaman, more concept than word, which means a sense of endurance, a kind of grace in the face of disaster”. Her article, entitled “The Meaning of Loss’ in this week’s Country Life, will make any grown man cry.
Friday, March 18th, 2011
Is this Art?
The headline in the Telegraph asked “Is this the best restaurant in the world?” That question, asked by Jasper Conran, has been bugging me and tonight I had the chance to find out for myself. The restaurant is L’Enclume in Cartmel, the chef, Simon Rogan, the occasion a charity event hosted by Lakes Alive (http://www.lakesalive.org/). Simon Rogan introduced the meal himself, so we had no doubt that he was at the stove.
I wonder if Simon Rogan’s creations are more art than gastronomy? Simon uses craftsmanship to create something beautiful, which is as good a definition of art as you will find.
I’m not so sure that his creations succeed as gastronomy as well as they do as art. The problem is that most of the portions are so tiny that they are gone in one or two bites What the menu described as the MAINS was a piece of pork belly no larger than my little finger. You aren’t given the chance to appreciate what’s there. If this was poetry it would be a haiku; if it was music it would be a jingle.
But art it certainly is, and, to judge by the menu, Simon is something of a poet as well. Here is the menu in full:
Lakes Alive Dinner
HARMONIC FIELDS of vintage potatoes in onion ashes, whey sauce and sorrel
Reg’s non VAGABONDING chicken wings and oyster, rocket and pickled kohlrabi
Sole with radishes and cockles in view of MAUDIT SONNANTS, parsley and cider butter
Rare bread (sic) pork and cracklings, main of the BANQUET, salsify, onions and hedge garlic
No mint in MINTFEST but there is iced beets and sweet cheese, chervil and hazelnut
Friday, March 11th, 2011
The earthquake in Japan
Because my daughter is in Japan I’ve been inundated with enquiries today about her safety and found myself giving interviews for our local ITV news and our local papers. Jo, fortunately, is hundreds of miles from the earthquake and only got to hear about it when she started getting texts asking if she was all right.
I think this disaster, terrifying though it seems on our television screens, will show the Japanese at their best. Earthquakes are part of daily Japanese life; all buildings are constructed to withstand them; there are monthly “earthquake drills” in sensitive areas and a national reserve army whose sole role is to deal with natural disasters. The Japanese skill at dealing with earthquakes can be seen from the declining death rates over the years. In the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 140,000 people died; the Kobe earthquake of 1995 killed 6,400 people and today’s earthquake, which was 180 times stronger than Kobe’s, will probably see a smaller number of deaths, most of them caused by the tsunami, against which there is no defence.
Even though this is the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan I expect them to recover from it quickly and efficiently. The Japanese are showing admirable courage and resilience. The fact is that in spite of the ever-present risk of earthquakes Japan will remain one of the safest places to visit in the world and I hope that no-one will be deterred from visiting Japan by what they have seen on TV today.
Friday, March 11th, 2011
The Big Society in a Big Tent
I’ve no more idea than the next person what the Big Society is but there may be a hint of it in this Big Tent. The tent has been the home for the last few days of the Best of Lakeland Show, put on by the Lakes Hospitality Association. It’s a trade show for hoteliers, restaurateurs and the like and has attracted hundreds of visitors. It’s in a new venue, right in the heart of Bowness. I went round all the trade stands this morning, speaking to the exhibitors and they all spoke enthusiastically about the success of the show. Last night there was a highly successful dinner for 100.
The reason that I mention the Big Society is that this event has been organised by just one part-timer, Gail Bartolf and her part-time assistant Rebecca. They have sourced the new venue, got the council’s consent, obtained planning permission from the National Park Authority, organised power, catering, toilets, stewards, car parking, signage, the dinner, advertising, sold the stands, etc., etc.,. They are the only employees of the LHA and have carried out all their other duties for its 550 members at the same time as organising the show.
If this had been a public body, relying on public funds, I’ve no doubt at all that the same work would have required at least a dozen full timers on vast salaries. Those salaries would have been paid for by you and me. If this is the Big Society, let’s have more of it.
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011
Keeping Out the Chinese
“Currently we only have 0.5% of the market share of Chinese tourists. If we could increase that to just 2.5% this could add over half a billion pounds of spending to our economy and this could mean as many as 10,000 new jobs.”
David Cameron
I had lunch the other day with a Chinaman who was incongruously named Boris. He lives in Shanghai but spends a lot of his time in Europe. Boris makes his living supplying luxury goods to wealthy Chinese and business is very brisk. Although we met in London he explained that very few Chinese bother to come to the UK because it’s a tremendous faff trying to get here. The problem is the difficulty in getting a British visa. To get a British visa the Chinese have to fill in a ten page form and personally attend an application centre. When Boris visits Europe he usually travels to Paris from which he can go to Turin and Barcelona on the same visa. France, Italy, Spain and 22 other European countries have all signed up to the Schengen agreement under which one visa covers all 25 countries.
David Cameron has refused to sign the Schengen agreement. The consequence of this block-headed policy is that last year we had only 110,000 Chinese visitors compared to 2m to the Schengen countries. Hotels, restaurants and shops in Paris, Barcelona and Turin are laughing heartily at our misfortune and if David Cameron was really sincere in creating the 10,000 jobs and earning the half a billion pounds of which he speaks, the solution couldn’t be simpler.
Saturday, January 15th, 2011
The World’s Largest Garden Feature
The rain has been relentless and the north of the county is under water again. Nothing new there. But the most dramatic pictures come from the other side of the world, from Queensland, where entire suburbs have been drowned. These suburbs must have been built by supreme optimists because the lowlands of Queensland are forever being submerged.
Queensland’s most dramatic flooding took place in 1893 when the waters rose a full ten feet higher than they have this week. In fact the deluge was so great that a ship, the Paluma, which was berthed in the harbour, was lifted from her moorings and deposited in the botanical gardens, as this picture shows. It made quite an attractive ornamental feature amongst the palm trees for a while, but the dilemma of how to dispose of it was solved when a second deluge lifted it up and carried it out to sea. I think that’s a shame. If it had remained, the city fathers would have had a permanent reminder of the fact that Queensland is prone to flooding and they might have confined any future building to the higher ground.
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011
Wild Asian Ass
Doing the crossword, even if you’re not particularly good at them is one of the greatest pleasures of the Slow Life. There was a time, in days when I seemed to have more leisure, when I always did the cryptic crosswords in the Times and the Telegraph but nowadays it’s the Times 2 crossword, always preceded by the Polygon and the Codeword.
It’s not really the done thing to use a dictionary, and definitely taboo to fall back on the internet. There was a letter in the Times recently from a man who was stumped by the clue “Wild asian ass” (6) and when he googled it, instead of the answer, which is “onager” got a site headed “hot asian chicks shaking love booty”, which put him off the crossword for the rest of the day.
Sometimes a crossword clue is so good you don’t forget it. Here are some of my favourites:
Pain (7,5)
g g e (9,3)
Bar of soap (6,6)
To which the answers are, respectively: French bread; scrambled egg and Rover’s Return
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
Government by Petition
The Government has invited ordinary citizens to present Bills to parliament
This would be a great idea if it turned out to to be more than a stunt. As it happens, a Bill has already been prepared which would be perfect. It was drafted, in verse, by A P Herbert, who was the last Member of Parliament to represent the University of Oxford (before the university seats were abolished).
The Bill was entitled the Spring (Arrangements) Bill, and here’s an extract:
Subsection (1) of Section Four
Of any Act that seems a bore
And all the Acts concerning beer
And every Act that is not clear
(Always excepting Schedule A)
Shall be repealed and thrown away
This would be a good start. It would at least get rid of everything that’s been passed in the last thirteen years.