Image from 1969 documentary about the Royal Vauxhall Tavern
A quick heads up to say tickets are now on sale for a couple of events next month at BFI Southbank at which I’ll be speaking. Both have already sold well to BFI members so get in quick to avoid disappointment.
On Wednesday August 12, as part of the BFI’s London on Film programme, they’ve curated an event on London’s Vanishing Queer Spaces.
The most exciting element of the programme is material from a 1969 TV documentary about drag, mostly filmed at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. It’s amazing. We get to see drag queens performing some terrific numbers on the venue’s old bar, almost sending punters’ drinks flying as they charge along it, and also preparing for their acts and talking about what drag means to them. It’s another era – just two years after gay sex was decriminalised – and the pub’s interior was so different in those days you struggle to get your head around the layout. Yet in many ways it’s easily recognisable as the Tavern we know and love, from the wild performances to the eclectic mix of punters.
Curated by BFI National Archive curator Simon McCallum, the event will also include footage of legendary 80s club Benjy’s, shot on video by the brilliant queer filmmaker Derek Jarman. And there will be a panel on LGBTQ venues – how they evolve, endure and disappear – to which I’m contributing alongside Dr Justin Bengry, one of the coordinators of Historic England’s new project about LGBTQ spaces, Pride of Place. I dare say the RVT Future campaign’s attempts to make the Tavern a listed building will crop up in the conversation – we might even know the result of the application by then.
Orson Welles in Orson Welles’ Sketch Book, BBC TV, 1955
And the week before that, on Thursday August 6, I’m giving a talk about Orson Welles and Television – a long-standing passion of mine – as part of the centennial BFI Welles season I co-programmed (read more about that here). It’s about how Welles tried to revolutionise television, and why television wouldn’t let him.
Welles was no less fascinated or inspired by TV than by theatre, radio or cinema, and he created several radical, wonderful programmes in the 1950s. The industry, however, found little use for him beyond talk shows, adverts and voiceovers. Using rare archive material, I’ll be exploring Welles’s bold – yet largely unknown – vision of TV as the ultimate storyteller’s medium. Find out how he anticipated YouTube and Skype by half a century, how his small-screen experiments influenced the likes of F for Fake, and just what all those adverts and talk shows were about. (Money? Sure, but money for what? And not only money…)
After my talk we’re screening the first episode of the 1955 travelogue series, Around the World with Orson Welles. He revisits Vienna – the city with which he was closely associated thanks to the success of The Third Man – and indulges his fascination with pastry at some length. We also learn about the pernicious impact of an innovative newcomer to the city’s coffee-house culture: the ‘espresso’.
