Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
“Jolly nice meeting you but I’m sorry, you won’t ever make a film because your face is wrongly arranged.”
Director giving Judi Dench advice after an audition in 1960, as recalled in conversation with Richard Eyre on the BBC.
Glad that she didn’t listen to the advice. In Lindsay Shapero’s Red Joan, a spy drama based on actual events, she plays Joan Stanley, accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Russians. So a complete contrast to ‘M’.
I enjoyed John Malkovich’s older Hercule Poirot solving The ABC Murders a few years ago, introducing a rather darker version of the detective and convincingly evoking what I imagine a 1930s atmosphere should be. I loved that he had an apartment in the mansions near the Royal Albert Hall, as that was such a familiar spot in my student days as I walked to and from the Kensington Gore building of the Royal College of Art.
I’m studying Quentin Blake’s approach to illustration at the moment which is why I’ve tried to free up my drawing here. Blake’s hands are rarely observed with anatomical precision but they’re so confidently drawn and so expressive of the individual character that they look completely convincing.
But I feel uncomfortable deliberately drawing hands so rapidly, without attempting to observe every individual joint. Folds in material I’m happier with, as they’re fluid and semi-abstract anyway.
Yes, he has turned out looking rather like Ralph Vaughan Williams in my drawing but this is rumpled Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby, Neil Dudgeon’s lead character in ITV’s Midsomer Murders.
Hopefully the good inspector won’t have any trouble from these characters, Riz Ahmed’s Omar and Kayvan Novak’s Waj, the hapless northerners in Four Lions who attempt to train crows as bombers. I love the expression on the crow’s face.
And I’m sure that no crows were harmed during location filming in the hills around Sheffield.
These were all drawn from photographs in last week’s Radio Times, as was Sunny, played by Sajeev Bhaskar, another character from Unforgotten. Professor John Wright is a clinician and epidemiologist at the Bradford Royal Infirmary.
I had probably held more birds than stringed instruments, and the feeling reminded me of scooping a hen from its perch, its body always lighter than I expect, and pulsing with life.
Helena Attlee, Lev’s Violin, 2021
Helena Attlee, author of An Italian Adventure and The Land Where Lemons Grow, The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit, appears on the Books Page of this week’s Radio Times, on the trail of the “mongrel history” of a worn and weathered violin in her new book Lev’s Violin.
In a photograph in this week’s Radio Times, Maria Schrader’s character Lenora has the detached, intense look of one of a woman in a Stanley Spencer painting. Deutschland 89, a German-American spy drama, is currently showing on More4.
Emil Hostina is a Securitate agent, hunkered down with her in a safe house in Timisoara, Romania, at the time of the fall of the Ceausescu regime.
I love the theatricality of the production. I wouldn’t want to stay with these two if they opened and bed & breakfast in Scarborough, but they’re wonderful characters to draw. Perhaps Deutschland will be looking for an artist in residence for their next series?
Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
That makes it sound as if his work could be a bit tough, but he’s just as likely to get audiences laughing and applauding as he is to get them fired up with indignation or empathic and thoughtful.
Linton Kwesi Johnson, poet and best-selling reggae artist, is only the second living poet and the only black British poet to have his work published as a Penguin Classic.
Mary Creagh was Wakefield’s first woman MP, elected in 2005, so she’s one of my local Women in History. She’s invariably more upbeat than in my drawing but this is from a still from a Channel 4 interview, live from the Palace of Westminster, in December 2019, a week after she lost her seat to Imran Nasir Ahmad Khan, our current MP, who was literally parachuted in – yes, really, landing on a school playing field – to stand for the Conservative Party.
In the interview she reflected that the then Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn had been guilty of ‘preening narcissism’, so here she reminds me of a distraught character in a Samuel Beckett play or as Cordelia, banished by the folly of her father, in King Lear.
Mary Creagh has always taken a keen interest in environmental issues and during her time at Westminster she was chair of the Environmental Audit Select Committee. She’s now chief executive of the national walking charity Living Streets.
Living Streets the UK charity for everyday walking
Hard to believe that it’s now six years since I last saw Kate Taylor, Wakefield historian. On Saturday mornings, she and archivist John Goodchild used to treat themselves to breakfast at the Cottage Tearooms in Horbury then call in at the Rickaro Bookshop on the High Street. Barbara worked there at the time.
In the 1970s Kate wrote articles on history and architectural heritage for the Wakefield Express, so it was a big thing for me when she called to interview me when my first book A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield was published. It meant a lot to me that she took my work seriously.
I liked Kate’s uncompromising support for architectural conservation and always felt that she had an air of quizzical scepticism about her and a twinkle of mischief. She was force to be reckoned with and I couldn’t finish my Wakefield Women in History month without including her.
In the last of this series of live sessions on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week, current Portrait Artist of the Year Curtis Holder drew dancer Oti Mabuse.
Also briefly appearing, Curtis’s sleepy whippet and Oti’s little terrier.
Jill Nalder, actress and activist, was this week’s sitter, painted by Gregory Mason on Portrait Artist of the Week.
Jill has been taking part in hedgehog surveys in Regents Park. In the area between Primrose Hill and Regents Park she says there should be about 300 hedgehogs but the surveys have revealed that they’re down to just 27 individuals. Rather than doing a hedgehog rescue, the group are looking at ways to ensure the population is sustainable.