TV guide: 28 of the best shows to watch this week, beginning tonight
Toby Stephens as Oscar Wilde in Prisoner C33, Sunday on BBC Four
Prisoner C33
Sunday, BBC Four, 9pm
It is the year 1895 and Reading Gaol has a famous inmate, known simply as Prisoner C33. Starved, placed into solitary confinement and denied even basic sanitation, this wretched creature is unrecognisable as his former self: renowned playwright, wit and dandy socialite Oscar Wilde. Jailed for the crime of conducting a homosexual relationship, Wilde is in the depths of despair and, in a bid to stave off insanity, begins to converse with his younger self, in this hard-hitting drama written by Stuart Patterson and directed by Trevor Nunn. Toby Stephens plays both versions of Wilde, one in his flamboyant pomp, the other looking back at his lost life and love.
A new one-man play starring Toby Stephens, directed by Trevor Nunn and written by Stuart Patterson, which finds Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol in 1896, condemned to solitary confinement because of his sexual identity.
He begins a conversation with himself, sometime as torturer, sometimes as comforter. Together the pair wrestle with the humiliation of his fall from celebrity to convict, because he loved another man.
Prisoner C33 was commissioned by Emma Cahusac for BBC Arts and BBC Four. It was directed by Trevor Nunn and written by Stuart Paterson. The executive producer is Sally Angel and the producer is Andrew Fettis.
A new one-man play starring Toby Stephens, directed by Trevor Nunn and written by Stuart Patterson, which finds Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol in 1896, condemned to solitary confinement because of his sexual identity.
He begins a conversation with himself, sometime as torturer, sometimes as comforter. Together the pair wrestle with the humiliation of his fall from celebrity to convict, because he loved another man.
Prisoner C33 was commissioned by Emma Cahusac for BBC Arts and BBC Four. It was directed by Trevor Nunn and written by Stuart Paterson. The executive producer is Sally Angel and the producer is Andrew Fettis.
A clip from the BBC Four documentary, “Brighton Pavilion’s secrets - Art, Passion and Power: The Story of the Royal Collection,” in which presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon explores the secrets of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton.
Some of the very first archaeological photographs held in Les Archives Nationales-French National Archives. The pictures were taken in ancient Mesopotamia,Iraq, during a French expedition in the early 1850s.
Some of those photographs are very important because what we see on the photograph actually got lost on the way to France (in a river). All we have now is the photograph of some of these objects. Thanks to these images archaeologists still can work with this lost material.
TheRosetta Stone was found on July 19, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign by French soldiers near the town of Rosetta (el-Rashid, about 65 km north of Alexandria). It contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek,Egyptian hieroglyphicsandEgyptian demotic.
On Napoleon’s defeat, the Rosetta Stone became the property of the British under the terms of the Capitulation of Alexandria (1801) along with other antiquities that the French had found. Before being put on public display, the stone was sent to the Society of AntiquariesinLondon to be copied. Four plaster-cast copies were made and distributed to four universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Dublin. Hundreds of prints were produced and spread across Britain, sent to both individuals and to institutions. Direct copies were also made from the stone itself; ink was smeared over its surface before paper was laid down on it and the inscriptions were coloured in white chalk to make them more legible. Several scholars made progress with the initial hieroglyphics analysis but it was 20 years, however, before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was announced by Jean-François Champollion in Paris in 1822.
The decoding of the Rosetta Stone was a massive advance. It provided the key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the chronology of Egyptian history.
Today the Rosetta Stone is an archaeological icon and one of the treasures of the British Museum.
Pictures 1-2: A copy of an engraving of the Rosetta Stone, done in the Society of Antiquaries in 1801
The Group of the Cross is a complex of temples at the Maya ruins of Palenque, Mexico.
Palenque was a Maya city state that flourished between 500 and 700 AD, when the city rose to be a powerful capital within a regional political unit. K'inich Janaab’ Pakal-Pakal the Great-, was the most famous ruler of Palenque. Once the ancient city was abandoned around the 9th century, the thick jungle surrounding it covered its temples and palaces.
The temples known as the Cross Group are among the most elegant of all Maya architecture. The three main structures are the Temple of the Cross (picture n 1), the Temple of the Sun (picture n 2, left) and the Temple of the Foliated Cross (picture n 3).
The temples were built from limestone, covered in stucco and decorated with blue and red paint. All three temples (built between 684 - 702 AD) have a large central opening flanked on each side by two stucco decorated piers and a narrow portal. The interiors are divided into front and back rooms. In the back room is a sanctuary that houses a three part panel. In each temple the panel has a similar theme, how Chan Bahlum II (K'inich Kan B'ahlam), the son and successor of Pakal the Great, was the rightful heir and ruler of Palenque. The Cross Group is one of the most important sources of glyphic text of the Maya culture.
The Cross Group was named by early explorers because of the cruciform iconography found on some of its tablets but in reality the cross-like element is a representation of the tree of creation at the center of the world in Maya mythology.
The beginnings of archaeology; “imperialist plunder”
The Younger Memnon -in the British museum- is a colossal granite statue from the ancient Egyptian mortuary temple, the RamesseumatThebes. It depicts the pharaoh Ramesses II, “the Great” (ruled 1279-1213 BC). The statue lost its body and lower legs and it is one of a pair which originally flanked the doorway of the Ramesseum. The head of its pair is still at the Ramesseum (picture n. 3) -its body is restored. The statue was cut from a single block of two-coloured granite.
The Younger Memnon was retrieved from the Ramesseum by the italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni in 1816. He removed the bust and then shipped it to England. It took him 17 days and 130 men to tow it to the river. He used levers to lift it onto rollers. Then he had his men distributed equally with 4 ropes drag it on the rollers.
The hole on the right of the torso is said to have been made by members of Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt at the end of the 18th century, in an unsuccessful attempt to remove the statue. The 18th century would see Britain rise to be the world’s dominant colonial power, and France becoming its main rival. Both countries wanted to outdo each other, from empire to archaeology. They strived to build the very best collections in the entire world. This was about national pride.
When the Younger Memnon arrived to England they had nowhere to put it. It sat out in the rain and in the pollution of London. It was later acquired in 1821 by the British Museum and was at first displayed in the old Townley Galleries (now demolished) for several years, then installed in 1834 in the new Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. It was the first public collection of Egyptian antiquities and it had a massive impact on the public. People looked at these objects not as antiquities, but as symbols of British victory. One of the obelisks indeed had engraved down the side “Captured by the British Army”.
Pictures n. 4, 5: Belzoni’s drawings: The Younger Memnon being hauled from Thebes
