Cumbrian Blues

[shewhomust]

Must remember to set the recorder tomorrow evening for the second programme in the BBC's English Ceramics series. Last week's was rather good. You'd think it would be pretty much foolproof, making a television programme about the history of interesting and beautiful objects, all you have to do is show plenty of pictures and maybe just occasionally tell us what we're looking at (and who made it, and how, and why). But television doesn't work like that, and all too often they seem to start from the premise that the subject they are dealing with is intrinsically boring, and that they need to add lots of extraneous material to keep us entertained - a soap opera star, say, explaining their deep love of ceramics...

Well, the first episode was exemplary. Lots of pretty pictures, and although these were interspersed with people talking, they were at least relevant people. I was particularly taken with Paul Scott, a Cumbrian artist working in blue and white transfer-printing, talking about the plates he had made inspired by the foot and mouth epidemic. I can't find those in the gallery on his website, but there are many other fine things: a tea set commemmorating the cockle pickers drowned in Morecambe Bay (which I might have seen in the V&A, if I hadn't been so overwhelmed in their ceramics gallery; Gateshead in a box, commissioned by the Shipley Art Gallery - must get to the Shipley...