I have finally got around to watching the first part of the BBC’s Worlds of Fantasy series (first mentioned here). I have to admit that the first few minutes of the program were one of the most patronizing things I have ever seen on TV, and I can’t blame anyone who turned it off very quickly. However, the rest of the program was more interesting, if very confused.
To call it a program about fantasy literature is, I think, rather misleading. It would be far more accurate to describe it as a history of British attitudes to childhood over the past 100 years as seen through the lens of fantasy books with child protagonists. Had it been presented in that way it would have been a lot more coherent, but it does insist on being a program about fantasy literature instead, with the inevitable confusing result.
China is very good, and Alasdair Gray is hilarious, but some of the other people interviewed say some very odd things. The next time I see Francis Spufford I am going to take issue with him about his assertion that fantasy fiction cannot have existed before there was an industrial society for it to react against. That seems far too much of a surrender to Tolkien’s agenda for me. And the oddest thing in the program is when Will Self comes out with, “you need certainty for fantasy”. I have no idea what he meant by that. Maybe it was some daft idea about how only cosy, middle class people read fantasy, but it could equally have been a single sentence being taken out of context.
There are apparently more programs to come, and I should be able to catch at least one of them before I go back to California. In the meantime I shall leave you with a marvelous comment from John Simpson (not someone I had previously thought of as a literary critic) who described the Harry Potter books as, “everything that literature shouldn’t be”. (He was talking about them being safe and unchallenging, not about fantasy having no place in literature.)
I took a quick look on the Beeb’s site but aside from some press releases, there wasn’t much information available about this program. Is there any other information online for this programme?
I can’t find much about it online. I gather that part 2 will be about epic fantasy and focus on Tolkien and Peake. I also understand that the BBC shot some footage with Susanna Clarke. That may be for the third and final part, which I guess should be on the current state of the field. I don’t recall Neil mentioning the series. It is absurd to do such a program and not include him, but he may not have been in the UK at the time they were making it.