The young Katherine Mansfield searches for Bliss and Blue Smoke drifts by again.
TV
Bliss
What Now? (TV2, 8.00am). Six years is a long time in tele-vision, so it will be a sad goodbye to What Now? stalwart Charlie, who is farewelled in typical celebratory style, including messages from viewers. But nothing is ever sad on What Now? for long, and the show will be welcoming Charlie’s replacement in, ah, typical celebratory style.
Sunday Theatre: Bliss (TV1, 8.30pm). Another gorgeous dramatisation in New Zealand Season, and it’s the most literary so far. Sunday Theatre: Blisstells the story of Katherine Mansfield’s early life until just before publication of her successful book of short stories, In a German Pension. Kate Elliott plays Mansfield or, when we first encounter her, Kathleen Beauchamp, a fiery 19-year-old baulking at her designated role of a proper young lady in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s “a jumble of tin-roofed shacks 12,000 miles from anywhere”, she tells her piano teacher. She has had some education in the UK with her two sisters, but in New Zealand she is expected to marry and settle down – an option she likens to enforced slavery, “turning out a baby a year until you have a boy and you can stop”. It’s an excellent script by writer and director Fiona Samuel, who allows her Mansfield to be witty, passionate and outspoken without belabouring the status of women in 1908. Too passionate, however, for her mother and father (Sarah Peirse and Peter Elliott), who are exasperated by her behaviour – Elliott does an excellent outraged father, especially when she has some racy stories accepted for publication by Australian magazine The Native Companion. Finally, for the sake of her mother’s nerves if nothing else, Katherine is allowed to go to London for a year, but dark days are to come. Her love affair with the son of family friends is discovered and she is cut off from the family. She hastily marries, but runs away on her wedding night and reunites with her former lover. Having got wind of the goings-on, her mother arrives in London and quickly dispatches her, pregnant, to a spa in Bavaria. Perhaps not such a bad thing – it is, of course, where her serious writing career begins.
FILM
Mamma Mia! (TV3, 8.30pm). Never has so much terrible singing been so popular: Mamma Mia! became the highest-grossing musical film of all time, kicking reigning champion Grease to the curb. Talk about Money, Money, Money. Meryl Streep nearly gets away with caterwauling Abba songs in dungarees, but Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth totally meet their Waterloo. Amanda Seyfried plays Streep’s daughter who, before she says I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do to Dominic Cooper, wants to know which of her mum’s three ex-boyfriends is her dad. High jinks ensue, but with this much awful wailing, we’re sending out an SOS. (2008) 4
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (TV2, 9.00pm). And that, in a nutshell, is what this movie is all about: two friends (Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) are so hard up they decide to make an x-rated spoof on Star Wars. Impossible to review without using double entendres but pretty entertaining, on the whole. Whoops. (2008) 7 – Diana Balham
RADIO
Composer of the week (Radio New Zealand Concert, 9.00am today and weekdays, and 7.00pm Monday). London-born Gerald Finzi (1901-56) is best known as a composer of vocal works, but he did write large-scale compositions, including his concertos for cello and clarinet. He is considered one of the most quintessentially English composers, although his parents were of Italian-Jewish and German-Jewish descent. One of the strongest themes in his music is the loss of childhood innocence, which he experienced during World War I when Ernest Farrar, his music tutor at Christ Church, High Harrogate, was killed on the Western Front. This was followed by the death of three of Finzi’s brothers. He turned to poetry for solace, and set to music poems by Thomas Traherne, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti and, later, William Wordsworth and Shakespeare. Finzi married the artist Joyce Black in 1933 (she then went by the name Joy Finzi) and they settled in Wiltshire, where he found peace and happiness composing music and growing apples, saving several rare English apple varieties from extinction. In 1939 the Finzis moved to Newbury in Berkshire, where he founded the Newbury String Players, an amateur chamber orchestra that specialised in 18th-century string works and new music by contemporary composers such as Julian Bream and Kenneth Leighton. Finzi died prematurely from complications caused by Hodgkin’s lymphoma the day after his cello concerto premiered and was broadcast on the radio. – Diana Balham
Spectrum (Radio New Zealand National, 12.15pm). It was known as The Friendly Invasion – so friendly, in fact, that quite a lot of Kiwis have American blood in their veins, thanks to the stationing of US Marines on these shores during World War II. About 20,000 young Americans came to Paekakariki on the Kapiti Coast to train for assaults against the Japanese in the Pacific, and despite our menfolk echoing the British grumble that they were “oversexed, overpaid and over here”, the Marines brought a bit of glamour to dingy wartime New Zealand. Today, Jack Perkins joins locals at the Paekakariki Railway Museum to remember the days when the Marines came to stay. – Diana Balham
The Sunday Feature (Radio New Zealand Concert, 2.00pm). Episode two of the 10th-anniversary repeat of Douglas: The Landscape of a New Zealand Composer is called Practicalities. It looks at different aspects of Lilburn’s working life – writing music for film, theatre and radio; creative partnerships with Dame Ngaio Marsh, Richard Campion, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and the National Film Unit; and his early excursions into electronic music, which resulted in the foundation of the Electronic Music Studio at Victoria University. – Diana Balham
Blue Smoke (Radio New Zealand Concert, 7.00pm). Blue smoke comes drifting by for a second series, in four parts, starting tonight. It’s written and presented by music historian and former Listener arts and book editor Chris Bourke and based on Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964, which won the 2011 New Zealand Post Book of the Year award last month. Tonight’s episode, After Hours, looks at early recordings of musical comedians, cabaret acts and such solo artists as Kahu Pineaha, Lou and Simon, Noel McKay, Bas Tubert and Ash Burton. – Diana Balham