I hiked these last few days, which inevitably means a lot of postings and mail to catch up with. However, I also watched a few things. The audio commentary of
Thor: The Dark World told me that while I can hold out against Tom Hiddleston's characters no matter how popular - with my urgent need to see them slapped thankfully fulfilled in canon -, holding out against Tom Hiddleston himself is somewhat more difficult because he's just that charming. On the audio commentary, anyway. Completely into the MCU without any embarassment or need to emphasize he's a serious actor, etc. Full of praise for his fellow actors, not just the famous ones like Anthony Hopkins but also for the guy who plays a guard (whom he knows by name), and this fellow actor complimenting was how I found out that Josh Dallas, currently David/Prince Charming in
Once Upon A Time, played Fandal in
Thor (but not in
The Dark World where his OuaT commitment meant he was replaced by Zach Levy). And he - Hiddleston, not Dallas - sounds distinctly smitten with Chris Hemsworth, so the internet did not lie about that one.
I also finished a miniseries from 1981 which the BBCiplayer is currently showing because of the WWI anniversary,
The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, starring Philip Madoc, whom I had previously mainly associated with villainous Time Lords (I first saw him as the War Lord in the Second Doctor adventure
The War Games) and Brother Cadfael (he played him in the radio dramatisations), in the title role. The series was written by Elaine Morgan, whom I must check out as a scriptwriter.
Now, here's what I knew about David Llyod George before watching: he was the British Prime Minister in the later part of WWI and thus also one of the Big Three at Versailles, and he was the most famous Welshman not an actor or writer since Wales got conquered. (I have since found out Winston Churchill put it a bit differently in his valediction after Lloyd George's death:
"The greatest Welshman which that unconquerable race has produced since the age of the Tudors". This makes me wonder whether or not I count old Henry VII as a great Welshman. He certainly was a very successful one!) I didn't know anything else, which turns out to have been a big hole in my knowledge of British history. Most importantly, I did not know just how many key reforms Lloyd George was responsible for pre WWI, mostly as Chancellor of the Exchequer, laying the foundations of the British welfare system.
( Some facts in case you are like me and lack D Ll G knowledge )I also hadn't known he was both the last Liberal PM and regarded as one of the reasons for the party's decline into insignificance for many decades to come, and nothing whatsoever about his private life.
The Life and Times of David Lloyd George for the most part manages a good mixture of politics and personal life, perhaps only cheating in favour of the later in the last episode, covering the years in decline until death, where the biggest gaffe/embarrassment/sin/however you want to call it which a 20th century politician could make, old Lloyd George visiting Hitler in 1936 and concluding this was the German Washington, is covered (or rather, only alluded to) briefly in dialogue while the big relationship crisis with one of the two women in his life and the death of the other gets main emphasis and key scenes. In earlier episodes, however, many of the previous dramatic events which made me wonder re: their reality did turn out, as some research has shown me, to have been real, for example David Lloyd George resolutely protesting the Boer War in 1901, holding speeches against it everywhere in the country and getting almost lynched by a patriotic mob (32 people in the crowd did die that day) in Birmingham, only surviving because the politice smuggled him out in disguise as another policeman.
Crucially, the (obscured) Hitler interlude aside, I didn't have the impression the series was trying to sell me its main character as prettified. (Mind you, it is careful in the first episode not to mention that David Lloyd George is supposed to be in his early twenties when first making a splash as a young Welsh lawyer taking on the Anglican Church, because Philip Madoc, while made up to look younger, must have been in his 50s at best. But he's so good in the part I
don't wish the show had picked a younger actor for the younger Lloyd George of the first two or three episodes.) It shows the two sides of his character traits - that drive and ability to talk most people into anything is great when employed to champion the poor, but he's also shown as a terrible, terrible husband when using them. By which I mean: not only did he apparantly believe fidelity was for other people while jealous himself, but he was great at pulling just about every "you know, this is really your fault" excuse of cheating husbands ever, and it takes his wife Maggie a while to become immune to this type of mindmessing.
Most importantly, the series narrative doesn't play Maggie and the other key woman in Lloyd George's life, Frances Stevenson, against each other. As so many biopics do, going for the "she just was too narrow minded/couldn't understand his genius whereas X was his soulmate" route (
Walk the Line, much as I liked the film, did this, and so did the two John Lennon biopics focusing on his relationship with Yoko re: his first wife Cynthia.) Instead, the series presents both Maggie and Frances - who started out as the governess of the youngest Lloyd George daughter in 1911, then became his secretary and his lover in 1913 and remained with him for thirty years while he remained married to Maggie until Maggie's death, basically living in two households until then, whereupon after two years of fierce arguments with his children he married Frances - as sympathetic and three dimensional, and gives narrative weight to both relationships, instead of declaring one as True Love and the other as Lesser. Frances - who was one of the first female secretaries (or as we'd describe her job today, P.A. to a key cabinet member and then the first female secretary to a British Prime Minister - tends to talk more politics with him, but that doesn't mean Maggie is presented as apolitical (we see her succesfully campaign in Wales for Lloyd George when he's busy campaigning in the rest of the country) or without her own opinions (she's completely against him continuing the coalition with the Tories post WWI).
Other than Maggie and Frances, the female characters who get deeper characterisation than a few lines are two of Lloyd George's daughters, Mair (who dies young at age 17) and Megan (after finding out the truth about her father's relationship with her former governess the big Frances hater of the family, and following her father into politics). The important male supporting characters are his uncle Lloyd (Welsh shoemaker and preacher who raised him), brother William (type supportive Faithful Lieutenant) and young Winston Churchill (type Ambitious Lieutenant). It was interesting to me that a show made in 1981 chose to not only use the occasional Welsh but also doesn't subtitle it. (You can usually guess the meaning from the context.) Which is historically accurate - David Lloyd George being to date the only British PM whose first language wasn't English, and a little googling tells me Philip Madoc also had Welsh as his first language -, but that usually doesn't stop fictional depictions to avoid other languages.
Lastly: two quotes about Lloyd George not in the series but which, hungry for more after watching, I found and which struck me as capturing the personality as given by the series:
What Lloyd George failed to understand was no man, however gifted, is a major political power in himself. He can teach, he can preach, he can make a significant contribution, but power politics is a struggle between social forces, not a duel between individuals. Once the war was over the Tories had no more use for him. He was an outsider, an upstart Welsh lawyer who had got above himself. (Jennie Lee, Baroness Lee of Asheridge in My Life With Nye (1980))
David Lloyd George was the best-hated statesman of his time, as well as the best loved. The former I have good reason to know; every time I made a pointed cartoon against him, it brought batches of approving letters from all the haters. Looking at Lloyd George's pink and hilarious, head thrown back, generous mouth open to its fullest extent, shouting with laughter at one of his own jokes, I thought I could see how it was that his haters hated him. He must have been poison to the old school tie brigade, coming to the House an outsider, bright, energetic, irrepressible, ruthless, mastering with ease the House of Commons procedure, applying all the Celtic tricks in the bag, with a talent for intrigue that only occasionally got away from him.
I always had the greatest difficulty in making Lloyd George sinister in a cartoon. Every time I drew him, however critical the comment, I had to be careful or he would spring off the drawing-board a lovable cherubic little chap. I found the only effective way of putting him definitely in the wrong in a cartoon was by misplacing this quality in sardonic incongruity — by surrounding the comedian with tragedy. (Cartoonist David Low)
Also: as it turned out I knew the theme of the series already, because it was composed by Ennio Morricone and became a breakout hit:
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