Jane Eyre on Ice?

The words of former chat show host Michael Parkinson are quoted on many news outlets, such as RTÉ Entertainment. He criticises the dumbing down of television in general and ITV in particular.

"Peter Fincham (ITV's director of television), who in another life might have been horrified at the thought of being known as the man who took the South Bank Show off air, said ITV was looking at arts programming, but that the return of arts to the schedule would depend on the ideas put forward."
He continued: "If you balance that proposition against the current output on ITV, we might expect the likes of Kerry Katona, Jordan and Cheryl Cole to create the necessary link between the ITV audience and, let's say, Jane Eyre on Ice, or Simon Cowell's opera, Robson and Jerome: My Part in Their Downfall, or Al Murray investigating the wonder of chromosomes in a talent show called The Y Factor."

Booh, Jane Eyre on Ice does sound like fun! ;)

Simon Schama's book The American Future is reviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer. He's apparently a Britton by birth but an American in spirit.

Schama says: "It's America's fault. Thank God, it's America's fault." He recounts discovering Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and other American writers as a schoolboy, "and they sounded nothing like Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, or Dickens, an entirely different kind of English, with its own life and its own muscle." That discovery, he says, stoked his own inventiveness as a writer. (John Timpane)

Oh well.

And now for a twenty-year-old weather 'forecast', courtesy of The Times.

May 1989 was actually very warm and mostly dry, but on the 19th air streaming in from different directions collided over the Pennines and triggered a huge thunderstorm on the bleak moors above Halifax. The scene could not have been more dramatic, set near the ruined farmhouse of Top Withins, where Wuthering Heights was reckoned to be set. (Paul Simons)

Must have been really quite a stunning sight indeed.

On the blogosphere: Dovegreyreader reviews and gives away copies of Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow, What are you reading? posts about Jane Eyre and Caroline at Coastcard, inspired by the recent episode of A Poet's Guide to Britain on Sylvia Plath and Wuthering Heights, shares a few related pictures. Finally, the Brussels Brontë Group posts a poem by Catherine Koeckx in French and two watercolours inspired by the moors around Haworth, which she has visited. On the same blog, Eric Ruijssenaars posts

At the recent Brontë weekend on 24-26 April, last year’s cemetery excursion was repeated on the afternoon of Friday 24 April. We set off in glorious weather to search once more for the gravestones of Martha Taylor and Julia Wheelwright, friends of the Brontës during their time in Brussels, who were originally buried in the Protestant cemetery which was closed down at the end of the 19th century. (Read more)

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Poetry, Wuthering Heights