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Lädt ... Trains and Buttered Toast: Selected Radio Talksvon John Betjeman
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Eccentric, sentimental and homespun, John Betjeman's passions were mostly self-taught. He saw his country being devastated by war and progress and he waged a private war to save it. His only weapons were words--the poetry for which he is best known and, even more influential, the radio talks that first made him a phenomenon. From fervent pleas for provincial preservation to humoresques on eccentric vicars and his own personal demons, Betjeman's talks combined wit, nostalgia and criticism in a way that touched the soul of his listeners from the 1930s to the 1950s. Now, collected in book form for the first time, his broadcasts represent one of the most compelling archives of 20th-century broadcasting. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)791.4472The arts Recreational and performing arts Public performances Film, Radio, and Television RadioKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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His popularity was established by these hundreds of radio talks and his participating in ”The Brains Trust” a quiz show in the common knowledge format, where this self-proclaimed “semi-intellectual” was able to show off a flexible extemporizing intelligence which appealed to those broad ‘masses’ of the BBC listeners. One of his producers, the later infamous spy Guy Burgess asked him to give a series of interviews and talks on the ‘British Eccentric’, explaining that he thought to himself ‘…. who more suitable to than you to talk about one of the others?’
John was not a handsome man, Wilhelmine Cresswell, once briefly his fiancé, recalled in an interview later “ …his hair was like last year’s birds nest and his teeth were covered in slime’! Despite this, he made an equally successful migration to the medium of television and became one of the most popular British Poet Laureates.
Betjeman published over a hundred books of Victorian architectural comment, hymns, country guides and – of course – dozens of his poetry. His keystone work ”Summoned by Bells” was autobiographical and was made into a film. It is from that work that the title of this book was taken;
Safe in a world of trains and buttered toast
Where things inanimate could feel and think.
The pieces in the book are from his radio talks and cover a broad spectrum of his thoughts and interests – I would have liked more of his train-travel narratives or period pieces like those I enjoy from J.B. Priestley or Eeh Bah Goom Priestley as Betjeman described him with that wicked sense of humour he sometimes flashed.
However; Betjeman’s poetry, as distinct from the marvelously evocative town and country descriptive pieces in this book does not engage me very much, but, with that humour again, he writes “I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think. It jingles for the slaves of their own passions”.