Sunday, November 24, 2013

Ian Nairn in Northampton



The site of this lost arcade in Northampton is occupied by the Grosvenor Centre, which is the shopping centre you find yourself in (if you are lucky) when you exit the town's doomed Greyfriars bus station.

I found it via a Daily Telegraph blog post by Andrew M. Brown. He quotes Jonathan Meades on Nairn's broadcasting style:
He was a person, not a personality… You never get the feeling that he'd pined all his life to stand in front of a camera. He was doubting and melancholic and vulnerable…. It's a voice full of quiet despair. The repetitively falling cadence suggests an acute awareness of human impermanence and death's proximity.
By contrast, Meades programmes are tightly written and, as Brown puts it, tightly choreographed. Even the scripts can make you laugh out loud.

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