Wednesday 6 November 2013

Tolkien in Oxford

As, perhaps, an example of the strange, visible, inter-connected world that is developing...

I was contacted last week by Merton College, Oxford.  Next year is the 750th anniversary of the founding of the college, and as part of that they want to do something about their (current) greatest son, J. R. R. Tolkien.  And they wanted to speak to me about a project I was involved in in 1968.  Yes, I said 1968.

That was a short BBC film called 'Tolkien in Oxford'.  Leslie Megahey - later to be Head of Music and Arts BBC TV - was the director.  I have been told that somewhere I have been listed as 'writer' on the project.  Nothing so grand.  I think I was 'researcher' - in other words, the gofer.  Because I knew Tolkien's work and I knew Oxford I pulled things together as the director wanted them.  Most of the things you see on the screen I set up, the interviews, the locations, the room that stood in for 'Tolkien's study'.  You can see me in the extended Merton College sequence, as I choreograph the gaggle of 'tourists' weaving in and out of shot.

The film was made at a very specific time in the development of Tolkien's reputation.  The crew, for the most part, knew little about him.  I remember saying to the sound man, 'Look, this is exactly like interviewing Lewis Carroll.  In the future people will want to know everything he said, however trivial.  Save everything...'  But television shoots do not work like that...

Talking to Leslie Megahey and to Merton College over the weekend...  Comparing notes and memories, looking at surviving paperwork...

There is work to be done.  The film has appeared on the BBC web site - but the information given on the web site is wrong.  The actual film as displayed on the BBC web site is incomplete - notably at some points it has Tolkien talking gibberish, because explanatory captions have been lost.  For technical reasons the captions were floated in at the time of broadcast. 

We need to restore the captions and restore the end credits.  Clearly - because the film is on the BBC web site - the film has already been digitised.  So, maybe, that should not be too hard...


At the same time the film has become a sort of ur-document for Tolkien scholars and enthusiasts, but comment is a bit confused - partly because the research record is incomplete, and because very few people will have seen the film as intended, and as broadcast. 

Examples...


I have never seen a cineaste study of 'Tolkien in Oxford'.  Does it exist?  I mean something about how the approach of the young auteur seen here is further developed in later Leslie Megahey works - a narrative that is visual and filmic, quite elaborate camera sequences, Leslie himself taking over the interviewing, and so on.  Also, it is an Oxford man's film about Tolkien in OXFORD - the student body (in its myriad daftness) becomes a character, Merton College itself becomes a character, and in the final helicopter sequence the whole city becomes a character.  Tolkien in Oxford.

Leslie Megahey is increasingly recognised as a very significant figure in the development of BBC documentary - see, for example, the recent British Film Institute re-release of his Schalcken the Painter...

...or his study of Orson Welles...

So, Tolkien in Oxford...  Find ways to restore the film, find ways to rescue the research record.  For a start, does anyone have the original Radio Times to hand?


Patrick O'Sullivan

1 comment:

  1. Not the original Radio Times, but the recent BBC genome project search on Tolkien in Oxford results in this: http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?adv=0&q=Tolkien+in+Oxford&media=all&yf=1923&yt=2009&mf=1&mt=12&tf=00%3A00&tt=00%3A00

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