Serendipitous TV

We were out yesterday having lunch with some friends and talk turned to the TV with the usual grumble about how there s 'nothing to watch, despite a gazillion channels', and they said that basically what they were reduced to was periodically checking BBC4, Quest and Sky Arts 'just in case'. 

It was a cold day, and as we were without the car, because she was in the car hospital, we did a lot of walking about in town, and to-ing and fro-ing to bus stops and so on and when we got home I was cold to the bone. I spent much of the evening lying under six layers of blankets/throws ( ie three of them doubled) and muttering every so often that I 'wasn't really all that warm'. What I needed was some not very taxing and not very noisy tv to watch, and mindful of what K and R had said I checked to see what Sky Arts had on offer. I struck gold.

Currently showing, as I checked, was the second program in a series of four about authors from the so-called Golden Age of Children's Literature. It was 28 minutes in, but Sky offered me the option to restart it which I did. At the end of the episode it asked if I wanted the next one and I lay there happily watching episodes 3 and 4, then searched out episode 1 on catch up. 

Son No 2 watched some of it, but thought it was 'horribly sad', and it's true a lot of it leaned towards the melancholy. Several of these writers lost a child, some more than one, and really if it had taught me nothing else it would have reminded me to be grateful for how far medical sciences have come since the 1870s.  I thought I knew a lot about some of these authors, while being aware I was fairly ignorant about some others. I learned a lot, including the fact that some of the stuff I 'knew' was wrong, and was left with a desire to look out some biographies and find out more. I was also seized with a sudden impulse to find and buy a Beatrix Potter  Cross Stitch Alphabet Sampler but, perhaps happily, a perfunctory glance at the internet didn't throw up anything suitable. It's not as though I am short of cross stitch projects as it is. 

Biographies of the writers, with particular emphasis on those aspects of their lives that made it into their work, were interspersed with commentary from some leading lights; including Brain Sibley, who amongst other things wrote the BBC dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings, Peter Hunt, the 'godfather' of the  field of Children's Literature Studies, and Professor Dinah Birch. What they said was thoughtful enough to be interesting without being so academic it was off putting. Accessible but thought provoking. 

The series is called Wonderland, and if you have any interest at all in fiction for children from its beginnings to just before the Second World War then it is definitely worth seeking out and enjoying, if you have access to Sky and haven't already seen it. 

I note with some surprise that we are not yet half way through January and I have already waxed enthusiastic about a book and a tv program. I know I decided to take 'positivity' as my aspirational word for the year, but I hardly expected it to manifest so dramatically and so soon!