Tim Smit on Humphrey Jennings
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2018
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tim Smit has admired Humphrey Jennings since seeing Danny Boyle’s Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2012.
Jennings was a film maker, artist, and co-founder of the Mass Observation Movement. Many of the scenes in that memorable Olympic ceremony were inspired by his work.
His films about ordinary British life during the Second World War are a poetic testament to the people of the British Isles.
Tim Smit wants to know why Jennings isn’t better known?
Tim Smit is founder of the Eden Project and talks to Matthew Parris.
They're joined by curator Ros Cranston from the British Film Institute, with contributions from Jennings' biographer Kevin Jackson
Producer: Maggie Ayre
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2018.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service. |
| 0:04.7 | Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests. |
| 0:08.8 | Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook. |
| 0:11.2 | Technology doesn't want to be good or bad. |
| 0:15.0 | It's in the hands of the creator. |
| 0:16.7 | It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room. |
| 0:20.7 | If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing. |
| 0:26.0 | Julie, at your service, listen to all episodes on BBC Sales. BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:37.0 | A Paris Hotel Room, it's 1937, and the artist and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings is jumping up and down on the bed saying |
| 0:46.1 | look at me don't you think I'm beautiful with what the poet and writer Stephen |
| 0:51.6 | Spender described as his pinhead face and flapping ears, Jennings |
| 0:56.2 | could hardly have been described as beautiful, yet modesty was never his forte. |
| 1:01.7 | With him in that Paris hotel room was his lover Peggy Guggenheim, who was |
| 1:06.4 | said to have likened him to Donald Duck. Self-belief and confidence were, apparently apparently his strengths. |
| 1:13.0 | He went on to become one of the most important documentary filmmakers |
| 1:17.0 | of the mid 20th century with his films about ordinary British life. |
| 1:21.0 | The man who listened to Britain. |
| 1:23.2 | Calling all workers. Music, well you welcome, played here this morning on rhythmic records. |
| 1:46.6 | He's hardly famous today but his work keeps popping up for instance and the opening ceremony |
| 1:52.2 | of the London Olympics as we shall see. |
| 1:54.9 | His life is the choice of my guest, Tim Smith, the Anglo-Dutch former archaeologist turned |
| 2:01.3 | music producer, turned botanist who went on to found the Eden Project in |
... |
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