HOWARD GOODALL'S GREAT DATES

Broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK September-October 2002, re-broadcast in May-June 2003. The four 50-minute programmes examine the years 1564, 1791, 1874 and 1937.

Information about the DVD availability of this series may be found by emailing here

To go to the Channel 4 Learning Great Dates site click here.

The Sunday Times (London) ‘Culture Section’ 22.9.02 Television review:

[AA Gill]

“On the factual side, Howard Goodall’s Great Dates (Sunday, C4) has it [...that ineffable, can't-take-your-eyes-off-it, believable, empathetic thing..] as well - a wholly likeable, winning screen presence. He is the music teacher none of us ever had......the first episode, on Wagner, was a brilliant bluffer’s guide, and relieved us of the guilty obligation of every having to listen to the stuff. If they could manufacture Howard Goodall CD players, they’d sell a million. Every home should have one."

The Daily Telegraph (London): 4.9.02

[Rupert Christiansen - The Arts Column (preview)]:

Over the past week, we’ve lapsed into one of our periodic flaps about the future of classical music. Surveys published by the Arts Council and Policy Studies Institute reveal that the proportion of concert-goers under 50 has plummeted, while Classic FM’s magazine informs us that 65% of 611 children between the ages of 6 and 14 could not name a classical composer, and 77% did not know a French horn from their elbow. Cue the doom-sayers and their jeremiads.

Now they’ve had their wail, let’s calm down and consider. I wouldn’t deny that there are genuine causes for concern, most of them connected to the Tories’ disgraceful cuts in state school music-teaching, but let’s not jump to hysterical conclusions. To misquote Disraeli, there are statistics, damned statistics and lies, so I prefer to trust the evidence of my own eyes. Late-night concerts at the Edinburgh Festival filled the Usher Hall with a palpably younger, different crowd. At the Proms last Sunday, I was amazed at the percentage of people in their teens and twenties queuing for Mendelssohn’s Elijah, of all things. The number of Friends of Covent Garden under 26 has increased from 524 to 802 over the past 12 months. These are observations and facts, not statistics, and they speak for themselves.

One can also turn the Classic FM figures around and end up being rather impressed: 40% of those questioned played an instrument, and 78% of them took music lessons at school; 77% identified a violin, 79% a trumpet. Those figures seem quite high. But sampling from an age group that stretches from a pre-literate 6 to bordering-on-GCSE 14 surely renders the whole exercise meaningless in any case. Another element that sends the doom-sayers apoplectic when such surveys are debated is the baneful influence of television and declining quality of its art coverage. Give us more classical concerts, opera and ballet they say, without pausing to reflect on the way that the flat, square proportions of the box drain so much of the excitement, atmosphere and spontaneity out of live performance.

There is, of course, some merit in broadcasting a great occasion such as the Last Night of the Proms, but it’s not enough just to plonk a camera in front of high culture and expect millions to kowtow. The problem is how to make better television out of the arts, not just to pump them into the schedule as a means of raising the tone.

At which point I want to recommend a tremendously good series starting on Channel 4 on September 15. Howard Goodall’s Great Dates presents a truly fresh, lively and intelligent use of the medium that combines the informative with the imaginative and stands as a subtle retort to the doom-sayers. Focusing on crucial years in four composers’ lives - 1564 for Palestrina, 1791 Mozart, 1894 Wagner and 1937 Shostakovich - Goodall vividly sketches social and historical contexts as well as making brilliant use of visual imagery to illustrate his lucid explanations of the technicalities of fugue, sonata form, chromaticism and letimotiv.

Despite an occasional lapse into Schama-esqure slickness (some landscaped gardens are meaninglessly described as “more Britney Spears and Bjork”), he is neither prompous, patronising nor faux-populist. He communicates easily with the camera and pitches his discourse at an amicable but stimulating level. “I imagine I’m at a dinner party, being questioned by friends who have curiosity but no expertise,” he told me. “There’s no point aiming at those who aren’t interested. If you don’t like gardens, nothing is going to make you enjoy Gardener’s World”.

What I like best about Goodall’s approach is that, without resorting to the embarrassed jokiness that infected Harry Enfield’s well-meaning television introduction to opera a few years back, he doesn’t let his subject send him po-faced. Instead, he sells Palestrina and Shostakovich to the viewer without apology or special pleading and happily suggests, for instance, that “at one level, The Magic Flute is ‘Harry Potter, The Musical’” (Note the important qualification.) That sort of remark makes the doom-sayers uncomfortable. For them, all “classical music” must be fetishised as good art, on a par with cod-liver oil, while “popular music” is bad art and as corrupting as cheap milk chocolate. Mozart and Harry Potter can’t mix. This leads to the idea that classical music is something to be preserved as a separate canon, rather than music composed in the past which lives on in the present, and that’s where the barriers come up. Whatever those surveys suggest, the real problem isn’t that kids don’t like Beethoven and Wagner any more - it’s that dreary and snobbish phrase “classical music”.

The Australian October 13th 2002:

Music series strikes the right note

Howard Goodall's Great Dates 9.30pm, ABC

I'll have to admit that when it comes to culture, I take mine with a large glass of pop, especially if you're talking music. Not that I have an anti-classical music agenda, mind you. It's something I've always meant to get into and I have no doubt that if I put in the time and effort, I could appreciate the hell out of it, it's just that gee, there's this Get Smart marathon on right now and I have to see if they screen that one with Harry Hu in it.

My knowledge of classical music tends to come from what I've managed to pick up by attrition, especially in the case of Wagner. Play me The Ride of the Valkyries and I start talking about napalm, Mormons and Vietnam. Move on to Siegfried's Horn Call, again from the Ring Cycle, and I can recite all six minutes of Chuck Jones's classic 1957 Merrie Melodies cartoon, What's Opera Doc?, in which Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd perform an opera set to Wagner's work.

Given this, the fact that I think composer and presenter Howard Goodall absolutely rules is high praise indeed. For a start, he's got the right pop culture cred – he wrote the theme songs to two of the greatest British comedies of the past two decades, Blackadder and Red Dwarf.

But, more importantly, he knows how to give viewers a lively introduction to a topic that is intriguing even to the most attention-span-challenged fan of the three-minute pop video (ie, me). He's not at all highfalutin', but at the same time he doesn't simplify a topic to the point where in the end you are just as uninformed as you were at the start . Viewers familiar with Goodall will probably remember his previous series, Howard Goodall's Big Bangs, a five-part production in which he chronicled the five most significant events in the history of European music, starting from the development of writing notes down.

But those with longer memories may recall Howard Goodall's Organ Works and Choir Works, the former delving into the mechanics of the organ and the latter looking at the relevance of the choir in the contemporary environment.

Which brings us to Great Dates. We're not talking about people who take you to a fabulous little restaurant, have great conversation and are very attentive, but rather the years in which significant pieces of music were composed. This first episode deals with 1874, the year that Richard Wagner completed Gotterdammerung, the final work in his Ring Cycle.

In 50 minutes and quite a few location changes (the man likes to travel) Goodall takes us through Wagner's influences and political beliefs and how a change in outlook that he underwent between writing the words and composing the music affected the end result. Goodall examines Wagner in terms that even someone like me – who learned two chords on the guitar in grade 3 and promptly forgot them – can appreciate why his work was so unique and therefore so influential.

Great Dates also looks at the composer in the context of his own time, and how Wagner was largely struggling until he found a dedicated fan in the form of "mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria who in the days before musicians had posters in Smash Hits magazine, painted the interior of his castle with scenes from the mythology that Wagner used as the basis of the Ring Cycle.

Then there's the fact that Wagner was also that Nazi guy. Goodall is at pains to point out that Wagner's music was not simply appropriated by the Nazi Party – he had a pretty good handle on the whole anti-Semitic thing himself.

This raises the question of whether we can separate the man from the music which, strangely enough, was a question I asked myself when trying to decide whether to buy an Eminem CD. Although after watching this, I'm fairly confident Wagner never wrote a song containing the lyrics "Bitch, I'm a kill you". – Kerrie Murphy

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Filming 'Great Dates'

On September 11th 2001, Howard was in New York, about to begin some shooting for his new Channel 4 series Howard Goodall's Great Dates. Walking to a rendez-vous in Gramercy Park, he stood and watched the entire WTC terrorist atrocity with his own eyes from the street. Filming was (naturally) abandoned, though his camera crew and director Mandy Chang were on Brooklyn Bridge filming a panorama of Lower Manhattan at the time and caught the whole event on film. Final filming for the series was completed in February 2002.

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