BRIAN SEWELL .COM
Brian Sewell The Road to Santiago
THE
NAKED PILGRIM
Brian Sewell makes the historic pilgrimage to Santiago.
In one
of the most highly acclaimed Tv series of recent times, the inimitable
Brian Sewell, Britain’s most
famous and best-loved
art critic and historian, makes the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
His remarkable journey is atturn moving and hilarious. It is a deeply
personal exploration of art and religious
belief, which takes Sewell by boat, car and horse through France and North
West Spain
via Paris, Chartres Orleans, Bordeaux, Lourdes, Bilbao, Burgos and Leon.
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EPISODE THREE |
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EPISODE FIVE |
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EPISODE SIX |
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A rough search
for forgiveness:
Andrew Billen
on Brian Sewell's sexually charged series about God and art - Television
New Statesman, July 14, 2003
by Andrew Billen
On your behalf, for last week's issue, I watched Michael Wood search for
Shakespeare on BBC2. It was epic television
scholarship, the sort of thing, as they used to say of the monarchy, the
BBC overdoes so well. But there is no reason
art programmes have to be epics. A cat may look at a king and an Old Master
may fit on a postcard.
You don't have to be BBC2 to make art documentaries. It merely helps.
For a year or so now in the early evenings, Five has been cheekily showing
cheap arts documentaries
opposite the other channels' cheap soaps and makeover shows. It will send
Tim Marlow into Tate Modern and, erm, that
will be the programme. With The Naked Pilgrim: the road to Santiago (Tuesdays,
7.30pm), however, Five has
come up with an epic-sounding idea. It has sent the venerable art critic
Brian Sewell, famous for his
denunciations of Britart, on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago de
Compostela in Spain.
This being Five, the camera-work reveals anything but an epic budget.
Unlike Wood, who was shown in his
prologue marching through four distinct seasons, Sewell explains how he
couldn't afford to let his pilgrimage
take up more than four weeks of last June. We see him board a cross-Channel
ferry in a 20-year-old Mercede
-- his "Rosinante" -- and listen to him grumbling about the
hotels he has been booked into.
Yet, in its own way, Brian Sewell's series is as rich as Wood's.
"I think the idea was to look at beautiful cathedrals, drink too
much wine and say something insightful about belief and art,"
says Brian Sewell. But he also wants to investigate the medieval mind,
and the history lessons he delivers along
the way are not negligible. Cathedrals, Sewell explains, needed customers
as much as any otherbusiness.
To attract visitors, you had to have a relic you could hype. If you didn't,
you'd better hope that a miracle
had happened close by. Failing that, you'd just have to promote the celebrities
who
had visited. Thus the poor cathedral at Orleans not only records that
Louis XI andhis queenpassed through, but alsopreserved
their heads for show in a crypt.
These insights are simple enough. Brian Sewell, however, is not a simple
man. His bizarre persona raises many more
personal questions. Is that upper-class voice genuine or a put-on? His
campness: is it arty or homosexual? Brian Sewell
obligingly teases us with references to his sex life. Pilgrimages are
searches for forgiveness, he tells us twice. In his case,
the sin that needs the most attention is lust. Driving to Paris, he reveals
how he lost his virginity there at the age
of 20 to a 60-year-old grandmother. (His pubic hair, he recalls, became
caught in her butterfly-wing glasses.)
"I thought when I grew older," he informs us, "that lust
would disappear, that what went on between my
loins would not worry me. Not true. You just go on. Every six seconds."
He counted to six and
reached the number sex. "An old man's life," he sighed.
For a programme about God and art, this is a remarkably sexually charged
series. He complains that Sacre-Coeur in Paris
does not contain the sacred heart of Jesus, nor even his "foreskin".
Visiting a farm shop on his way south, Brian Sewell
insists on seeing the goats' sleeping accommodation on the pretext that
pilgrims in previous ages would have happily
lodged there. "Sleep with a goat--just imagine that," he whimpers.
Flirting with two female tourists, he praises
one's blue eyes and writes off the other's as being, like his, "the
colour of dark urine".
If still flirty and loin-tormented at 72, it quickly becomes apparent
that Brian Sewell's spirit is in an even more twitchy state.
In the first programme, Brian Sewell admits that the cathedrals are making
him "uncomfortable and troubled" and that
he is in danger of becoming a "lapsed sceptic". The finale will
surely have Brian on his knees begging for God's
mercy while taking a cold shower. If it does, the series will have demonstrated
that Catholic
cathedrals can still work as gigantic, walk-in advertisements for belief.
But the London Evening Standard art critic's awe is never as interesting
as his scorn. Spying the French shore, he declares
French modern architecture the ugliest in civilised Europe. Sacre-Coeur
is a "hideous, hideous, vile church": "I think they
should knock it down. I think God should intervene." Even Notre-Dame,
subjected to 19th-century restorations, is not
ruined enough for his tastes. On the other hand, he likes unjustly neglected
Orleans.
No doubt part of Five's hope was that Brian Sewell's temper would let
rip against inferior art. Given the amount
of gush usually talked about our heritage on TV, this is not a necessarily
ignoble wish. But more importantly, Sewell's
independence of mind spurs him to ask fellow tourists what they really
think about the buildings they are visiting.
For all his snobbishness, Sewell believes that we each have the ability
to criticise with perception, whether
we see through eyes that are cobalt or the colour of pee. The rough democracy
of a pilgrimage is a good
metaphor for that, as, indeed, are Five's dilapidated production values