Documenting our Times in Film

I am a fan of "Spooks" so please excuse, that I speak of this series here more than of any other.
But in my opinion "Spooks" also does a great job in documenting our time.
Not that the events shown in the parts of this series are real events. But they show, what people fear most today. What they see as a likely event and crisis and how such a crisis could be stopped.
So "Spooks" in a way does much more than being a show of fictional events.
It even does mcuh more than any series centered around personal relationships of their protagonists. Those series mostly show scenereies, relationship topics which are well apart from real life and anything the viewer can really acquire.
Though in general sceptic about future historical documents about our time, I even give "Spooks" to some extent authority to document our attitude towards crises and political situations.

What impresses me about the "Spooks" series is, how closely they reach to portrait real events and still be fictional. The line in between documentary and fictional is a very slim one in this case.
Due to this fact, the "Spooks" series allows a multitude of conclusions. For example it opened my mind to see more clearly how our time would act and react in cases of emergency, what we see as likely crises to occur and how we nowadays would try to cope with them.
The series also reveals a very deep ingrained distrust in politicians, which I never saw as clearly manifested as in this series, though it is common ground for people on the street.
The series achieves to really portrait our times, which is an exceptionally well done work by the writers and the whole film crew of "Spooks"!
As a result, "Spooks" is able to reveal a great deal of attitude, common opinion and ways of living of our time.
Though not a real historical document, it is able to tell a great deal about our generation.

Spooks is both "History and Fiction".

London Celebrating Wellington's Victory

To the birthday (22nd of August) of the actor mentioned in the previous blog post, a very nice video with lots of London material was published on YouTube.
It is created out of little snippets from the "Spooks" series 7 (Kudos / BBC production) and includes an excerpt of one of my favourite music pieces, "Wellington's Victory" composed by Ludwig van Beethoven.
I hope you enjoy this little video advertisment for London spies:



The history behind the music is quite interesting, as Beethoven originally did not compose the music with the intention to celebrate the English victors. He, for quite some time, was a fan of Napoleon. In Vienna, with French troups enclosing the town (where Beethoven had first hand experience for his music of how canons in different distances sounded), this surely was not an easy point of view.

An Interesting Interview ...

An interview, which alerted me to the modern reception or more correctly scepticism in today's society about politics was the interview on the BBC Breakfast Show about "Spooks" (10/2008).



The interview is in no way criticising politics - on the contrary. The polite way of answering the interviewers questions on a personal experience basis is cleverly done and in my opinion a great way of founded criticism. Here the abilities of the actor (which I knew from "North & South") as well as the topic of the series "Spooks" caught my attention.



P.S.: I do not mention the actors name here in this blog post, as I once read on a fan-blog about him, that mentioning his name alone brings a mega uprise in click rates. As I do not want to use his popularity for my sake, I refrain from mentioning him here directly.

At first I wanted to shorten his name as a replacement for 'special someone' to the initials. You easily will find out, why, as a German historian, I refrained from doing so, when even my university had problems shortening the summer semester that way.