Banned 50 years ago after one screening, Ken Russell’s controversial TV documentary about the German composer Richard Strauss will finally be seen again on 29 February. In 1970, Russell was at the top of his game – by far the best arts documentary maker with garlanded films on Elgar, Delius and Isadora Duncan. He had also just shot Women in Love, his award-winning movie. But his BBC TV doc, Dance of the Seven Veils, shocked with its portrayal of the German composer as a vulgar, pompous man with Nazi sympathies. Mary Whitehouse, the self-appointed guardian of our morals, got hot under her collar about its sex scenes, while questions were asked in the House of Commons. Then the Strauss family complained about the use of the composer’s music, before applying a ban, through copyright, which only expired a week ago. “And yet,” says Russell’s widow, Lisi, “Ken loved Strauss’s music, but not his politics or personality.”
Russell, who died in 2011, used to live in the Lake District, where he filmed his Strauss doc. Luckily, Lisi has long kept one surviving, if slightly discoloured, copy. It will be shown, appropriately, at the Keswick film festival, which will also feature another Russell cause célèbre, A Kitten for Hitler. This short was prompted by Russell’s great chum Melvyn Bragg, who wondered if the film-maker could conjure up something purely to offend. Made in 2007, the eight-minute film is the story of a Jewish kid who, feeling sorry for the unloved Führer, goes to Germany to give him a kitten. How sweet and yet how obnoxious.
How can Stig Abell remain a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row when he is also a “recruiting officer” for Times Radio, the planned rival to Radio 4? Abell, a regular on the arts programme since 2017, was appointed launch editor of Times Radio in January. And yet Radio 4 seems surprisingly relaxed since Abell will present through March and maybe beyond following discussions with senior BBC Radio executives.
Decidedly rum since, when it was announced a week ago, that John Pienaar, the BBC’s deputy political editor, was to join Times Radio, he left the corporation immediately. But Abell, despite being very much a News UK loyalist (he was previously the Sun’s managing editor and is still editor of the Times Literary Supplement), is allowed to stay at the Beeb while setting up a serious competitor.
Fifty years old this month, Flowers Gallery has expanded from London to the US and Hong Kong. It’s Hackney outlet, Flowers East, is holding a celebratory exhibition with 50 works of its artists, including Tom Phillips, war artists Peter Howson and John Keane (who has a solo show at the gallery next month), and BP portrait prize winners, Tai-Shan Schierenberg and Stuart Pearson Wright.
Wright tells me he is working on a portrait of the members of the “secret” society, the Dilettanti. Established more than 250 years ago, its members then and now are male and from the aristocracy and top echelons of the arts. Current dilettanti include the dukes of Wellington and Devonshire, and Lord Jacob Rothschild. The vast portrait will hang in their meeting place, Brooks’s club in Mayfair – another male bastion.
