New BBC One Boss Unveils Judi Dench, Dustin Hoffman Film

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
3:34 PM PDT 8/22/2013 by Georg Szalai

EDINBURGH – New BBC One controller Charlotte Moore outlined her vision for the U.K. public broadcaster's flagship channel here on Thursday and announced first programming commissions, including an adaptation of a Roald Dahl book starring Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman.

I intend to look under the bonnet of every genre to make sure we are bringing audiences distinctive, innovative and pioneering television," Moore said.

That means that BBC One should be "part of the national conversation" and that viewers should feel that the annual license fee they pay to help fund the BBC "is being well spent on quality programs." Concluded Moore: "BBC One needs to offer something for everyone, every week of the year, and that is what I’m committed to.”

While she has been in her post for only a few weeks, Moore on Thursday also unveiled first program orders designed to set the tone for what to expect from her tenure.

Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot will star Dench and Hoffman in an adaptation by Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer. Said Moore: "It's absolutely stellar casting for one of the nation's favorite children's classics."


READ MORE HERE: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bbc-one-orders-judi-dench-612726

Dan Stevens: The word "coffee" is music to my ears In his monthly column, Dan Stevens berates Britain's lack of stamina. (TELEGRAPH)

By Dan Stevens12:15PM BST 02 Jul 2013

There are a lot of things that excite me about an orchestra but one that always gets me is the collective sense of time, held together by that crazed individual, the conductor; the manic bundle of musical quartz at the heart of the mechanism. I went along to the Festival Hall on the South Bank in London recently to see Benjamin Wallfisch (the composer of the wonderful score for Summer in February) as he was conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra playing a series of four pieces he had composed based on Roald Dahl’s Dirty Beasts; poems among my favourites (now being read to another generation of Stevens). Ben harnessed the orchestra’s facility for storytelling and showed it off to a spellbound audience of schoolchildren. When he toyed with the time signature to great oohs and ahhs (most of them mine) I realised how connected emotional narrative is with pace. Children seem immediately more attuned, but if we give ourselves up to the signature of a piece it can be wildly transportive, taking us to the saddest, happiest and most frenzied places.

The oldest complaint about London is “closing time”. Everywhere else in the world seems to have more stamina than Britain. The rage that can be seen in the serious London drinker’s eye at last orders can be quite terrifying. But who in God’s name turns their coffee machines off at 5pm? “Sorry, sir, there’s not much demand for it over here after 5, so we turn it off,” I was told recently. Well that’s precisely why you’re closing early. I’m demanding coffee, now, because I need it. Yes, I know it’s 6pm, which is normally when you might be halfway through a chilled sauvignon blanc, but I am a coffee drinker and I want coffee. Tonight.

READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/10144038/Dan-Stevens-The-word-coffee-is-music-to-my-ears.html

the "Alternative Honors List," or, for me, the I'll take it if they don't want it list (New York Times)

The writer Doris Lessing and David Bowie both turned down honors from the British government.



In what the BBC is calling the “alternative honors list,” the British government on Friday released the names of 277 people — actors, writers, musicians, politicians, scientists and others — who for reasons known mostly to themselves rejected the rarefied opportunity to become knights, dames and the like between 1951 and 1999.       

Included are Roald Dahl, who did not want to receive the Order of the British Empire, or O.B.E., in 1986; Graham Greene, who did not want to be a Commander of the British Empire, or C.B.E., in 1956; and Aldous Huxley, who turned down a knighthood in 1959.

The list, released only after repeated Freedom of Information requests by the BBC, includes only dead nonrecipients and leaves it anyone’s guess as to why they declined their awards. But people who turned down awards in the past have given their reasons as, variously, not believing in the monarchy; not liking the system’s links to the British Empire, when there is no British Empire anymore; being miffed that the honor they are being offered is one of the lower-level ones; and feeling generally opposed to the elitism of the whole thing.       


To read more:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/world/europe/britain-releases-partial-list-of-those-declining-knighthood.html?_r=1