Hello,
I'm sorry this is late. I only came back from America yesterday. I went soon after the last programme and thought I could do Sturm und Drang in the longueurs while filming. When you have written a programme and your next job is to present it there are many longueurs, while the cameramen and the director and the sound man decide on the precise place on which you should be shot and then go away into the far distance to do poetic cutaways which will enhance the finished film. These longueurs can last for hours. On a film set people specialise in crossword puzzles or tarot cards. Some of them write hit plays. I thought that I could assemble what I wanted to say about Sturm und Drang.
But, dear reader, I'd lost the notes. I searched high and low - or more accurately horizontally in my bag - and found plenty of notes on Sturm und Drang but none of my notes on my notes on Sturm und Drang. So I apologise to the three contributors who had a great deal to say after the programme and I made a great number of notes. They are still somewhere in Broadcasting House, probably in a wastepaper basket which may be, you may think, where they belong.
We were filming sequences for a BBC 2 documentary on the impact of the King James Bible, 1611-2011. This is based on the book that I've written and we stormed America - standard class all the way - five different cities in seven days from Washington deep into South Carolina. We finally ended up in swamp country surrounded by the shacks in which slaves had lived and doing a piece to camera from the church they had built in the middle of this settlement.
It was an incredible tour. The 1682 Quaker church which was plain beautiful; the Lincoln Memorial for the Martin Luther King sequence as well as the speech of Lincoln himself; down in South Carolina for the slaves and the spirituals and the Bible stories which saw them through - but that's all to come.
When you get back to the hotel - or, to be more accurate, motel - after an average of five or six hours a day, crushed with the equipment in a small van, the only sane option is to have a shower, get a sandwich and watch television. The Chilean miners were the big story. In fact, CNN became 24-hour Chilean miners for as long as I was there. It was an amazing story. Quite soon, however, the attention to the drama which had - in terms of live television rather undramatically - a happy ending - the spin-offs began. The President of Chile decided that he would make an umpteen-hour speech to the world which he knew was watching. The commentators back in the USA worked out very quickly how much each miner would get from newspapers and sponsorship deals and local millionaires and wine merchants and so on. The jokesters came out with the jokes ...
The next big story on television was the bullying story. There is now a great deal of bullying on Facebook, it seems, and adolescents are being driven to suicide by this internet bullying as well as direct bullying at school. In a robust and exemplary American fashion, this has been taken up with fury by the commentators who are trying to flush it out and hunt it down.
And, of course, there were the new words, or new to me. Perhaps not to you. The word 'unfriended' was used again and again. Young people who are on Facebook were desolate when they were 'unfriended', i.e., someone they'd thought of as a friend had pulled out of the relationship and decided not to communicate with them again. It's a neat word and I expect it to stick. There was also a lot about the mortgage business with the phrase 'deficit hangover' occurring several times. We were told that many people in America still had a deficit hangover from what they'd spent last Christmas. Good again. One Republican lady told a Democrat gentleman who was talking what she clearly thought of as soft socialism to 'man up'. This was later interpreted as an attack on his virility. Shops which were going into sales told us that they were 'overstocked'. And finally people who made ludicrous remarks on the electioneering circuit were called 'loose-lipped'.
I would guess that at least two of those will get into the OED in time - if they're not already there.
Very sorry about the Sturm und Drang.
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg
(trouvé cet article sur le site de la BBC)
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