ARTISTS IN LOVE, SKY ARTS, 8pm
I’D been disgruntled by this series. Featuring famous partnerships, it had chosen pairings where the man was the genius and the woman merely his muse. Why not tell us about Leigh/Olivier or Plath/Hughes, marriages where the woman does a bit more than wash the dishes and spark up her man’s imagination?
The series corrects that tonight by focusing on the short marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. When Miller first met the blonde bombshell he immediately saw past her sexual image, saying to her: “You’re the saddest girl I’ve ever met.”
And yet, despite seeming a sad “girl” to this intellectual man, he was in awe of her, recalling of this first meeting: “I had to flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing. "With all her radiance she was surrounded by a darkness which perplexed me.” And this impressed Marilyn: he walked away rather than swooning, pawing and patronising her.
HANDMADE: BY ROYAL APPOINTMENT, BBC4, 8.30pm
I TOYED with the idea of putting the Andrew Neil interview series in this slot, but I preferred pretty porcelain to petty politicians.
Wedgwood are famous for “prestige porcelain” and in their Victorian heyday, when one displayed one’s wealth via a lavish dinner table, Wedgwood was essential. But these days we eat from our laps, from tin foil dishes and pizza boxes – so what of Wedgwood?
There are still some masters at work in the old Staffordshire factory, though they mainly sell to rich foreigners who want a bit of old British heritage – even though they’re probably buying something made in the company’s new Indonesian factory.
The show combines the sad story of deindustrialisation – “14 years I’ve been at the Wedgwood. In them days everybody who left school had a job” – with the need to be fast, cheap and modern.
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