The winner's version of history. That's original
I read during the week that Ridley Scott has suspended filming on his Robin Hood epic, Nottingham, because he has realised that the onset of autumn threatens the greenness of his Sherwood Forest.
Not that the man's horticultural naivety alarmed me especially. I do not expect Sir Ridley to know the exact timings of the carotenoid and anthocyanin pigmentation advance as late-summer chlorophylls dwindle in English leaves, any more than I would expect Hollywood to plough millions of dollars into an action movie concept from Alan Titchmarsh.
(Although I did briefly wonder if Sir Ridley had deliberately set his breakthrough 1982 movie, Blade Runner, in a dimly lit futuristic cityscape only because he was worried about getting the trees wrong.)
No, what worried me was Sir Ridley's dismal, unimaginative, high-Tory, blatantly sociopathic interpretation of English history and literature.
Robin Hood “seen through the eyes of the Sheriff of Nottingham?” Ooh, how original. Finally the medieval history of England gets to be seen through the eyes of the all-conquering Norman upper classes.
You twonk, Ridley. From the Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book through Magna Carta to the Breton lays, it was the Norman nobility who wrote all the history in the first place. It's always the upper classes, the exploiters and administrators, who get to tell the story.
There's nothing new at all about seeing things through their eyes.
That's the whole point of Robin Hood - that the down-trodden underclass, the exploited and the weak get to have their version told too.
For the past few years, history teaching in schools has endeavoured to press home this point, to give a voice back to the odd woman, prole or black person who has featured in British history - largely in an attempt to make history more interesting to women, black people and proles. And now Sir Ridley wants to take it all away from them again. Is 21st-century Britain so conformist, right-wing and hidebound by convention and regulation that we really want to hear the sheriff's side of it? The policeman's version?..
Read entire article at Times
Not that the man's horticultural naivety alarmed me especially. I do not expect Sir Ridley to know the exact timings of the carotenoid and anthocyanin pigmentation advance as late-summer chlorophylls dwindle in English leaves, any more than I would expect Hollywood to plough millions of dollars into an action movie concept from Alan Titchmarsh.
(Although I did briefly wonder if Sir Ridley had deliberately set his breakthrough 1982 movie, Blade Runner, in a dimly lit futuristic cityscape only because he was worried about getting the trees wrong.)
No, what worried me was Sir Ridley's dismal, unimaginative, high-Tory, blatantly sociopathic interpretation of English history and literature.
Robin Hood “seen through the eyes of the Sheriff of Nottingham?” Ooh, how original. Finally the medieval history of England gets to be seen through the eyes of the all-conquering Norman upper classes.
You twonk, Ridley. From the Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book through Magna Carta to the Breton lays, it was the Norman nobility who wrote all the history in the first place. It's always the upper classes, the exploiters and administrators, who get to tell the story.
There's nothing new at all about seeing things through their eyes.
That's the whole point of Robin Hood - that the down-trodden underclass, the exploited and the weak get to have their version told too.
For the past few years, history teaching in schools has endeavoured to press home this point, to give a voice back to the odd woman, prole or black person who has featured in British history - largely in an attempt to make history more interesting to women, black people and proles. And now Sir Ridley wants to take it all away from them again. Is 21st-century Britain so conformist, right-wing and hidebound by convention and regulation that we really want to hear the sheriff's side of it? The policeman's version?..