Start the Week

14/02/2011

Andrew Marr talks to David Attenborough as he goes on the trail of the elephant bird. Fifty years ago he was given pieces of its egg on a visit to Madagascar, now he returns to find out what this giant ostrich-like creature can tell us about the balance between survival and extinction. A journey of a different kind for Sheila Hancock who goes in search of the often over-looked artist of the watercolour. The writer David Shields heralds the death of the realist novel, as he advocates blending fiction and non-fiction in a kind of 'lyric essay', but he does it by plagiarising other authors in a form of 'creative sampling'. And poet Andrew Motion meditates on crossing the borders between fact and fiction.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 14 Feb 2011
Audio Format:: other

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There's parallels with what's happening in poetry according to Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate, his poems about war and laurels and donkeys show what he means. And later the actress Sheila Hancock will be championing the sometimes slighted art of the English watercolour and suggesting we're too snobby about amateurs. First though, an artist of storytelling on television, our very own Maestro David Attenborough, whose latest film is about his obsession with a giant egg. And indeed with the giant island of Madagascar, which he first filmed 60 years ago, David, Madagascar has a most unusual flora and fauna. Yes, in several hundred million years ago the continents, the earth were all joined in one huge continent and then they all started splitting away from one another. And at one time Madagascar was sandwiched between what was going to become Africa on one side and India on the other. And they parted at a very interesting stage in Earth's history and the history of life. And Madagascar got stuck with primates, the group which me and monkeys belong, at a very early stage in their history. And there were no monkeys at that time. And it split away and then in Africa and indeed in India monkeys evolved, displaced most of the little lemurs as the primitive things were called, but not in Madagascar. So they've got these extraordinary primitive monkeys that might put it that way that are very little known and live nowhere else as Madagascar's pieces are concerned. And they arranged tiny little ones, relatively huge ones. The smallest of all primates, which is about the size of a mouse, smaller than a mouse really, is one of them. And then there's another which is the size of a ten-year-old child. They're marvelous to watch. And it's also obviously got a very interesting prehistory in terms of what was there before, which is where you come in on this show with the tiny little fragments or small fragments, what turns out to be a huge egg which was discovered, where you discovered the first time you went to film there in 1960. Yes, I found it for myself, is it? Well, I mean it was well known that they were there. Indeed Marco Polo knew that there were huge eggs, the size of rugby football somewhere, and deduced that they must have come from an immense bird, which it was right, and that it must have been so big that it could lift an elephant. Which is wrong. Which is wrong, because it was a flightless bird. But they flourished, probably the biggest bird that ever lived or never walked. And I was interested to find out when they disappeared and what stage they disappeared. And that's what this programme is about. And one of the interesting, many interesting things about the programme is that because you were there in 1960, you were able to cut back and forward from then and now. And of course one of the things that's happened, like so much the rest of the world, is massive deforestation and a shooting growth in the human population. Which as a naturalist produces a sort of underlying note of melancholy, I would have thought. Well bound to because all those human beings, three times as many as the were when I was there only 50 years ago, millions and millions and millions. They like the rest of us, they all want a house to live in and they all want a place to go through and so on. And so there's only one place they can take it from and that's the natural world. So inevitably, if you've got that extra number of people and they survive, then they've taken that much from the natural world. And there were places where it was dismal going back, I have to say. I went back to a place where I had perhaps the most paradisial experience when I was 50 years ago of a rainforest when I saw the biggest one that he was called the injury. And it was a magical place 50 years ago. And now it's just a wasteland. There was a sawmill in the middle of it. And to make matters worse, I mean surrounded by devastated land, just rubbish as it were, a wasteland. And what made it even more poignant was that even the sawmill was a wasteland because it had eaten up the forest, got nothing else to do. So they just walked away and left it and there was rusting in the middle of it. It's a tragic sign. If there's any room for hope, it's sometimes, and the same is true in the Galapagos, where local people turn conservationist because tourism and conservation are the last jobs left. And there was an example of that when you were. Yes, and the people are becoming more and more conscious of conservation and its value in tourism. There's not to be despised that motive. I mean, it's all very well for us as visitors saying how lovely it is to go back and see these places. But people there have gone to earn a living. They've got to be able to get food. And if they can get it from tourism, and that involves preserving the natural world, I'm all for it. And tell us about one of the other interesting things which does preserve, in some respects, at least some of the trees, is the fardier beliefs. Yes, it's a whole complex system of beliefs, taboos, you might say, about why you mustn't touch certain creatures because the spirits of the ancestors are involved in, or they're very, very dangerous, or whatever. And it's very complex in Madagascar. And the interesting enough, the people in Madagascar are not Indian and they're not African. They actually come from South East Asia about 2000 years ago. And they're with them. They bought their own music and their own, so it's extraordinary. And their own culture, including these beliefs in taboos and so on. We're going to be talking a little bit later about sort of breaking up narratives in poetry and prose. Interesting what's happening to documentary filmmaking because people are much more knowing these days. And you're cutting back and forward from earlier documentaries. But you're also able to talk about the effect of lenses and cameras and how that changes the stories you tell. Yes, it's an interesting problem that you have, because how far do you go to, as it were, destroying your own construction that you've already put out? I mean, for example, there was a short program the other day in which it was about eagles being hunting in I think of Mongolia. And I was absolutely gripped. But then you saw a shot from the eagles from the back. And you saw what the eagle was looking at, which is okay, except that you have now moved from documentary into a construction. Yes. And it's an interesting question as to how much you gain and how much you lose if you take that particular shot and think about it and put it there. But people do you now want to know how how films are made almost while they're watching the films. And you know, in your great world series, very often there's a film afterwards about how a shot would be done. Yeah, I would like to think that the narrative that you provide is sufficiently involving for you not to be sitting back and saying how did they get back. But they much what you're doing is saying, my goodness, that's absolutely extraordinary, isn't it? You know, rather than I wonder how they got that shot. What did the rest of us make of this, this film? I thought it was enchanting to see you going back to 50 years ago, so 50 or 60 years ago when you were there. And I was fascinated. I mean, you had to look long and hard when you were there before. You didn't have a zoom on your camera. How do you feel about the fact now that it is easier? You can shoot at night, you can zoom in, you can do what you like, whereas you spent, I think you said, about five days getting a shot of those little tiny things. Well, no, I'm all fired. I'm not spending 20 minutes and instead of five days. That suits me perfectly well. It's interesting that we're also taking a step backwards. I've also been making a film in 3D recently. And that's going back to about the 1960s in a big way because it takes four people to carry the damn thing. And you can't change your lens. It takes the course of an hour. So it was like old times as far as I was concerned and remote. I thought the program was completely wonderful and tremendously enriched by your going back, as you obviously did sheet of as well. But beside that, I was also very touched by how you seem to be resisting quite a lot of time and actually use this word at some point to sort of anthropomorphizing instinct in yourself. You wanted to say how sweet, how charming you wanted to be sort of rather old school about it, but wouldn't quite let yourself, because you wanted to retain it properly, sort of scholarly, scientific. Hold on things. Yes, you don't need to go on too much about that, do you? I mean, those animals are so beguiling and so enchanted, but you don't need me to say, isn't it interesting? Quite, quite. David Shields. Yeah, so to the moment that fascinated me the most was the moment when you briefly convicted yourself as being perhaps slightly part of the problem that you shipped dozens of examples of specimens back to zoos in England. And I was hoping you could talk about that slightly more. It was really an extraordinarily riveting moment in the documentary. Well, that was how it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago zoos who were responsible people and interested in spreading information about the natural world, the way they did it was to go and get animals and exhibit them. There wasn't any television at that sort of time. I mean, when the zoos have found it. And there was a belief that if they die, body went out and brought more. And my first experience again for the topics was with an expedition from the London Zoo, went out precisely to do that. But it changed. I mean, in my lifetime, it has now completely changed. You can't do that on quite right, too. And even then you didn't take the Bergen stricter in case it was somebody's grandmother. That's quite right. Well, you do reveal in the film how you believe this bird became extinct, but we're not going to reveal that. You're going to have to watch the film if you want to know. And we're now going to move from an extinct bird to a dying art form, according to David Shields. David, your book, Reality Hunger, has a real go at the overly sort of closed or self-contained world of the traditional novel. And you argue that it needs to be broken open. It is being broken open. And in a sense, the sort of bastard forms which are memoir, journalism, rapportage, inserting themselves more and more into narratives. And the question of is it a novel? Is it not a novel is becoming interestingly irrelevant? True enough. I mean, there's a wonderful line I quote from Walter Benjamin in the book in which he says, "All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or they invent one." And it seems to me that the novel in its current form is no longer in any way doing justice to contemporary life. Think about plot that has a certain coherence that life tends to lack. Setting seems to me an awful lot of novels dwell upon setting in a way that doesn't seem to me congruent with contemporary life. A sort of Freudian psychology that doesn't take advantage of what we know about life through cognitive science and also general understanding about language. So to me, the most exciting works of contemporary literature are sort of like the elevators trapped between floors on a very difficult to define department store, that we can't quite find the walls. And it seems to me that in that groping, we find a much more powerful metaphor for life than the extremely pristine forms that still dominate literary culture. And we should say that when you argue that the novel is a dying art form, you mean the novel at its most ambitious and highest level of ambition. Because as something that people consume, then it's certainly not dying. I mean, it's huge numbers of novels are big stories as a kind of consolation, sucky suite or something to do. We're not talking about that, we're talking about the novel that its highest form. And you argue that, and it's very interesting to go back right to the origins of the novel, the first novelists or many of the first novelists disguised the fact that this was a made up story and wanted people to believe it was closer to journal or journalism or reportage. Sure, I mean, to Faux, Cervantes, Stern, a lot of what the book I'm trying to do in the book is not so much bury the novel so much as make, I hope, a fairly exciting case for the excitement of sort of poeticized nonfiction. I'm trying to do what I call define nonfiction in an upward manner. And produce some of the excitement there must have been when this the first novels which appear to be bundles of letters and you weren't quite sure what you were getting and small it and all of them were at it. Try and recreate some of the genuine excitement as against you pick up a novel and most of the time he says, you know, exactly what you're going to get. It's a genre, you know, precisely what you're going to get and in what order? Precisely. I think, you know, that we live in this extraordinarily mediated culture. Kafka said a book should be an axe to break the frozen sea within us and it's my contention and the book's contention that the huge majority of novels function essentially as nostalgia for when the verities still held. Samuel Johnson said, you can tell that I like to quote, but Samuel Johnson said a book should either allow us to escape existence or teaches how to endure existence. It seems to me the overwhelming majority of contemporary, highly praised novels allow us to escape existence, but don't teach us how to endure existence. The books I want to go to the mat for are books like Jam, Cozia's, Elizabeth, Costello, David Marksons. This is not a novel. The S-Nipals away in the world. David Marksons, this is not a novel. So these are all people that would be described as novelists by most people but who are pushing against the sides of the genre. They're not doing what Jeff Dyer calls writing "novel-y" novels. The writing works that push back extraordinarily hard against the received form. So many novels that get praised, it seems to me, are essentially writing barely disguised 19th century novels as if somehow life hadn't changed since Gustav Flibera. And crucial therefore to your contention or your argument is that theft is a good thing. I'm going to read out something from Montaigne, which you quote just because it's a completely irresistible Montaigne. The great French essayist wrote, "The bees pillage the flowers here and there, but they make honey of them which is all their own. It is no longer time or margarine, so the pieces borrowed from others. He, that the writer, will transform and mix up into work all his own." Well, it's one of the key arguments of the book is that creativity and plagiarism have been synonymous virtually since the beginning of recorded civilization. Shakespeare's stall of the 6,000 words in "Henry VI" parts one through three. Shakespeare's stall 4,000 of those words directly from Holland's head's chronicles. James Joyce said, "I'm quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paceman." Picasso said, "All art is theft." And so I put it to you, Mr. David Shields, that you didn't write this book at all. You stolen it. Well, that's what I want to argue. Half of the work, I'm happy to be chained to the mast as a primary stealer. You know, I think I want to argue that a lot of art, a lot of writing, is in fact remixing, mashing up. I mean, to what degree did Joyce write "Finnigan's Wake"? It's nothing but a tissue of other people's quotations, same with Eliot's "The Wasteland." He's just hit the, he's just hit the look at a very, very fast button on the mixer rather than the slow button on the mixer by "Finnigan's Wake," so the words themselves would become. Exactly. And that, you know, I want to argue that nonfiction should have precisely the same sort of thrilling freedoms that fiction has, that somehow that we grant, that a work like, say, Ulysses is a tissue of quotations. But somehow when it comes to a work of poetic nonfiction, we seem to want to domesticate and to neuter the work with an elaborate citation apparatus. And it's one of the contestions of the book is that I'd like to push nonfiction toward a more exciting poetic realm in which here, too, the reader cannot be sure what shields, what's Sonny Rollins, what's Schopenhauer, what's Robert Fisk. That, to me, is a really, kind of exciting, a dubiety. Andrew Motion, I'm going to come on to found poetry in a little while, but what did you make of the argument itself? I love this book. It's very much my kind of thing. And actually, one of the things that David has just mentioned, a very interesting novel, if that's quite the word for it, called "This Is Not A Novel" by David Marksen, which came out here last year, was a book that I happened to read, which is a collection of sort of fragmentary observations about life, but very much not interested in telling a consecutive narrative and not interested in the development of character and all the things that novels are traditionally expected to do, which is a book that I happened to read that came out, and came out almost immediately after I'd read 150 odd novels when I was chair of the book, acted as a tremendous sort of palette cleanser for me. And I think that's part of the value of what David himself has done with this book, is to cleanse our palettes, which are jaded or easily do get jaded by reading orthodox joined out novels of a familiar kind. But to be a bit more precise about it, I think that there are two things going on which were implicit in really what you were saying there. One is about challenging orthodoxy, allowing us to think that narrative might come rather lower down the pecking order of the things that we turn to our entertainment to provide, which is an idea that I'm very sympathetic with, a lyric poet could hardly not be sympathetic with that idea, because narrative is not necessarily something that we hold closest to our hearts. But also as part of that, an idea about collage, which has always been very interesting to me, in which you speak about very interesting in the book as a matter of fact, but also manifest in the way that the book is organized. Alongside the many quotations which you use, and we can hear the effect of collage in the way that you talk about this thing. I mean, sometimes you're talking as David, and sometimes you're talking about all these other people that you credit is a remark of Eliot's, I think, that's always been very dear to me, in which he says, immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. She doesn't have to be in your book, I think, isn't it? It has meant a lot to me over the years. Right, I'm planning on what to say. Well-known burglar Andrew Motion speaks out. I'm sorry, Sheila, go ahead. Oh, God, you're talking over my head, all of you. I really find it difficult to grip onto this. I'm actually trying to write a novel myself at the moment, and I'm an uneducated person. I live school at 15. And I'm trying to understand the narrative form and all those sort of things. So I think I find your book quite liberating. But when you start using words like collage and all that, I don't know what you're talking about. And it seems to me they're all novels. You are bringing the truth of your life, even if it's something like Wuthering Heights. They were talking about what they long to be, Emily long to have that sort of life. She talked about the environment that she knew, she described them. So hasn't it always been happening that? It's an interesting question and it's a good challenge to my argument. And obviously, as Andrew pointed out earlier, that obviously millions, if not billions of people, are still reading novels. When I flew over from Seattle to London, I can promise you they weren't reading reality hunger on the plane if they were reading good, big baggy novels. But I guess what I'm trying to argue is that we can short circuit that process. We can do what Andrew calls hot wire, the reader directly to feelings. And I guess for me as an inventor, reader of novels and as a citizen of the 21st century, I just feel that that gesture feels to me extraordinarily played out. It's functioning as a kind of nostalgia that David Foster Wallace said before his suicide. Two years ago, he said, they were existentially alone on the planet. You can't know what I'm thinking and feeling. And I can't know what you're thinking and feeling. The best books construct a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness. And I want to say the best books make the question of how the writer solved being, being alive, the absolute center of the work, rather than the sort of patient, plotting 19th century telling of story. But aren't they then going to turn out to be rather preachy self help books? That would be the danger. Every form has its weaknesses. But as Montaigne said, every person has within themselves the entire human condition. That at its worst, that kind of work is precisely that sort of bloodletting sort of bleeding on the page. But at its best, the writer shows his or her life as the very trope for human existence. Well, let's try to apply some of that to the world of poetry that Andrew Motion has been so eminent in for so long. But he's also going to be talking about the festival shortly, the space for Thought Literary Festival, it's called. Andrew, you've said you're sympathetic to this argument. And you also, you're sympathetic to the notion of found poetry. And in laurels and donkeys, which is a collection of poems about the experience of warfare. You give examples of that. Can you just talk us through a found poem as opposed to a piece of reportage? Sure. Well, the book is a mixture of the two things. Found poetry is nothing to be frightened of. That's the first thing to say. Though it can have a slightly sort of scary reputation. What it means to me and what it meant, if I may put my own name in the same sentence, it says what it meant to Shakespeare and actually dozens of other people before, as David has been reminding us hundreds of people before. Perhaps everybody even before is coming across something that somebody else has written and thinking, well, either I want a bit of that or I want the whole of that and I either want it as it stands or I want to tweak it a bit. Perhaps I want to include some of my own words around it. Perhaps I want to take it out of its original context and put it in a new context, rearrange it, cut it into short lines of its poetry that you're writing, all kinds of interferences, interventions you can make in order to refresh it and to make it part of whatever conversation you're trying to have yourself. And this has always produced sort of problems about plagiarism and so on. I'm thinking of Hugh McDermott from his great Scottish poet who would take a sentence out of a scientific book quite often and then just chop it up and put it down as a poem. He would say, well, it's different but you read it differently and I've created something. I've got a lot of sympathy with that. Actually, I do want to say something that David might not agree with and I'd be very interested to hear what you feel about this, which is that I always want to acknowledge where I find my my bits. Partly out of respect for people's copyright, I have to say, I mean, in other words, there is a purely pragmatic dimension to all this and partly because I think it's interesting for the reader to find what overlappings, what flow there is between thoughts, being similar thoughts, being had at different times by different people. It's not directly related to poetry but it does seem to me that one of the effects of the internet has been to mash things up much more and people are constantly cutting and pasting and forgetting where they came from. I mean, I think there's so much of that happening on the internet. There's so much happening on people's iPods. It's so absolutely part of the sort of cultural flow that we live in that it would frankly be weird to find an art form standing rather hortily, it would seem a part alone and naked. So mashing, if you like, is a very important part of this. Actually, can I just add one thing about in this particular context, which was very important to me, which is that these are, as you say, war poems and I'm very aware, when I'm reading war poems written by people who haven't had direct experience of fighting on the front line, that however good their intentions, or whoever sympathetic their intentions might be, there is a danger that they might aggrandize themselves by associating with the subject. If they leave it purely and simply in their own words, as it were, if they pretend that they were there, that they have had those experiences themselves. And I thought that by interviewing soldiers, reading books in which soldiers give their witness, and accommodating, in my own poems, some of their thoughts and words that I might get around that difficulty. In the book, you don't say who the source is on. Oh, it's on the back, but I mean, they know each poem I sometimes wanted with the poems, which I think are lovely. I wanted to know who you talk to exactly. Well, it's on page 30. With the poem, I would have liked it. Do you know what I mean? It puzzled me sometimes. Whose voice I was listening to? Well, I'm slightly puzzled by that puzzlement, I must say, because in the same way that when you were reading David's book, you were able to look at the back to see what the origin of some of these things were, and what weren't. Then, as it happens without having previously read your book, we came to a very similar solution about that. There's a danger, of course, of just talking about poetry, and I'm wondering if I could persuade you to read something from the book, and actually, as it happens, this is one that I wrote all by myself. All by yourself, but but it's about Harry Patch, the great survivor of the Great War, who you met and you talk to. I met Harry Patch just before the end of my laureate's time as a result of a commission by the BBC, actually, which turned out to be really the most interesting and moving commission through that time, and although I wasn't laureate anymore when he died, I wanted to say goodbye to him, and we'd stayed in touch by letter and so on, so I had a, if I may say, sort of affection for him really by that point. Anyway, the death of Harry Patch, when the next morning eventually breaks, a young captain climbs onto the fire step, knocks ash from his pipe, then drops it still warm into his pocket, checks his watch, and places the whistle back between his lips. At six o'clock precisely, he gives the signal, but today, nothing that happens next happens according to plan. A very long and gentle note wanders away from him over the ruined ground, and hundreds of thousands of dead who lie there, immediately rise up, straightening their tunics before falling in as they used to do, shoulder to shoulder, eyes front. They have left a space for the last recruit of all to join them, Harry Patch, 111 years old, but this is him now, running quick-sharp along the duckboards, when he has taken his place and the whole company has settled at last, their Padre appears out of nowhere, causing a moment in front of each and every one to slip away for a dry mud onto their tongues. It's very, very beautiful. Well, thank you. And it strikes me that like quite a lot of the poems here, it's a poem that would have been recognized by a Siegfried Sassoon or a Wilfred Owen, and I wonder how self-consciously you feel that tradition can't be escaped from, and shouldn't be escaped from? Well, that's a very nice thing for you to say in all sorts of ways, and I hope that where they here to read it, they would recognize it. Having said that, and the first poem in the book indeed is about Siegfried Sassoon, and sort of travels with him through the years and up to now, and then back and up to now again. But having said that, I think it's very important to feel that there's more than one way to write a war poem, and the First World War is not the only way, and it would be rather inappropriate to write about modern warfare in those terms. The way that modern war, perhaps modern warfare, and certainly modern poetry about war is rather neglected, it has indeed to something to do, I think, with the way that war poetry is taught in schools, which is almost entirely concentrated on the First World War, so poor old Second World War poets, and poets writing about Vietnam, and now do get rather neglected. Yeah, I was interested to hear you read it, because on the page, you didn't read as that was on the page, you didn't break the lines as you did on the page, you broke them quite quickly. That's an interesting question. Well, I think I've always tried to write poems, and I think one of the ways in which poems stay alive when you're reading them on the page is by having some contest between the unit that a line is, and the unit that a chunk of sense is, and the unit that a verse is, and the unit that a whole poem is, and it's the play between those ideas of shape, of unit, that animates the thing overall, and when you're reading the poem, I do simply have to take a decision about where you're going to breathe, pause. But what about when I'm reading it to myself? Should I stop at the end of the line, as it were? I think that's up to you. But in Shakespeare, that's terribly important, where he stopped a line, and surely it is with you as well. Yes, it is. It defines one kind of tension, because you've got another kind of tension that we're against each other. Well, if we were trying to sort of imagine the world that Harry Patch lived and fought through, one of the ways that we might close our eyes and imagine, I guess, is through the painting of Paul Nash, because Paul Nash's landscapes of the First World War are some of the most memorable images. Very interesting, we talked about cameras earlier on, that this is the war still described mostly by painters, because for censorship reasons, the First World War, and Paul Nash is one of the many characters who appears in your film, Shida Hancock, the art of watercolours, which there's a watercolour exhibition that's written coming on, and this is linked to it. But your argument starts off with the Englishness of watercolours, that this is an art which began in its most enthusiastic flowering on his islands. Why do you think that was? Well, I think in the Victorian times, particularly, it was the camera of the period, and everybody had a paint box, and everybody went out and painted, and some did it as professionals, and some did it as amateurs. And talking of the war things, I mean, the last person that we cover in the show is Doug Farthing, who is a Gulf War and Afghan war, and he is painting on the spot, sometimes on a shell case, anything to capture the moment. And I think that's the wonderful thing about watercolours, that you catch the moment absolutely. You don't have to go back into the studio and mix up the oils and fiddle around with it. You actually, the emotion of the moment is thrown onto the page. You start relatively early in the story with Turner. Well, cousins and then Turner. Yeah. Two great travellers, and again, they're bringing their bringing back glimpses of a more interesting, brighter, more colourful world to the English, trapped on their rainy island by the Napoleonic Wars. Well, look as Turner did cover England as well, but then the Napoleonic War happened, and they couldn't go abroad, and then suddenly, when they were released from that, I mean, when Turner was in Venice, it was in ruins after the war, which is why his poems are so fragile and so ephemeral, I think, because he feels that it's disappearing. It's a ruin. It's interesting. You said poems by mistake. Oh, I'm sorry. Absolutely right. No, absolutely right. Well, they are poems. They are poems. I suppose the other thing about the interesting about the watercolour is compared to the oil. It has to be done fast, and it's just got a vigour. It's the lyric poetry rather than the narrative art as well. Yes, it's very much thrown on the page, but I mean, Turner is the greatest, I think, although cousins whom he copied, I mean, cousins end up in a lunatic asylum, and his doctor had bought up his paintings and used to have young people like Turner to come and copy his paintings, and interestingly, you'll see in the exhibition at the date, at the moment, that there's a painting that Turner did 50 years after, which is almost identical to the one that he must have copied of cousins. Probably didn't realise he was doing it, talking of plagiarism. Probably did, I would say. But also, the point about Turner is that he was kind of, but by that stage, watercolour had begun to be established. Thanks to Turner Cousins is an artistic innovator who brings back this fantastic stuff, and it's just not recognised. Oh, absolutely. And Turner wasn't to begin with, of course. He was considered to be an absolute madman. Did you suggest that Cousins' breakdown is probably connected to the total lack of appreciation or understanding when he first came back to work? Well, it's presumptuous to say that, but I think it probably was. In fact, nearly all of them, and it had a really bitter end. I mean, Lady Canning, who's the amateur painting that we cover, who painted in India, she died incredibly young in pursuit of subjects. She went into the jungle in India and got malaria and died, so a lot of them had tragic ends. And we must just talk a little bit about Lady Charlotte Canning herself, because that's an extraordinary story that you're telling. Yeah, she's a wonderful woman. I wish we could do a whole programme on her. I didn't know anything about her. I'm ashamed to say it, but she was a wife of the first viceroy of India. She was there during the Indian mutiny as well. She had to carry out all her social duties, which she did terribly well, but she had a very unhappy marriage. He'd been sent there by Queen Victoria because he was having an affair in England, and he had to be got away. She was a great friend of Queen Victoria, so there are a lot of wonderful letters between them. And I believe she even sent paintings to Queen Victoria, who though she was Empress, never visited India. But did do a lot of painting. She was a painting Empress. Yes, everybody did. I'm hoping that as a result of this programme, everybody's going to start doing watercolours. There's a wonderful David Hockney quote we've got here. He said, "With watercolour, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture." And then the picture might tell another story as well, which relates very much to what we've been talking about in the other media, doesn't it? That's indeed. Yeah. And watercolour today, I mean, some of us say the iPad is beginning to replace it, but nonetheless, the great thing about it is you can put a small box of watercolours in one pocket and the painter. I love it. What dawned on me while we were making the programme, because I was surrounded by people with cameras. I mean at the Taj, we filmed there and then in London as well. Everybody's flashing away the cameras looking through a lens the whole time, which is the point I was saying to you, David, was it not better when you had to look long and hard to capture an image? And it worries me that these people, they take hundreds and thousands of pictures, shove them in their computer. They haven't actually seen, smelt and felt the people they're looking. That is the great thing about drawing and painting. You have to keep looking, you have to look and look and look. Absolutely, and the cast. As long as it stinks there. In the case of Alima. I mean, the trouble with watercolours is that they fade, isn't it? I mean, that is. There is a reason why you don't see it all over every gallery in the world, because they fade and so you're not allowed to show them for more than a few months. But you are allowed to go in the back room at the Tate, I might point out, you just phone them up and you can go and see thousands of times. I mean, isn't that something that's so powerful about them too, the idea of their impermanence? I mean, it's very difficult not to look at watercolours without feeling that there is something inherently elegiac about them. However well observed they are, however beautifully done, they are, we feel not there forever. That's why I think Venice was so perfect for Turner, because that as well is disappearing. Though I noticed that the Venice of Turner, which was just about to go underneath the water, is exactly like the Venice of today, which is still not going on underneath the water. I guess Sheila, one thing which I argue in my book is that I argue for art in which there's the thinnest possible membrane between life and art, and don't you think that you're saying something relatively similar about watercolour, that it's trying to get, obviously there's always a difference between life and art, but there's a sense in which watercolour is trying to make that membrane as thin as possible. Yeah, but then I would argue that there's room in the world, not just for watercolours, there's room in the world also for oils that are much more culled, much more thought through. That's a different form of art, but I happen to prefer a watercolours now on taking the programme. No, I don't because I'm so bad at it. Though the programme makes an eloquent case for breaking down, smashing down the barrier between the amateur and the professional and not taking it too seriously. Well, one of the artists I interviewed says the difference between a professional and an amateur is the professional is paid for it, an amateur, as I said, for love, and I think that's rather a good definition. One of the interesting things is that so many explorers and so many naval officers, for example, actually had, they were trained to do watercolours in order to do profiles of coasts and so on. Well, Darwin. Well, Darwin wasn't much of a watercolourist, but he did some, but he wasn't one of the great naturalists, watercolourists, of whom there are many, who did simply breathtaking watercolours. I mean, Hodges, who was with Cook, for example, the watercolours of Hodges are just breathtaking. You could never see them because they fade so that you have to go out, as you say, knock on the door and say, "Please now see Hodges watercolours." I think it's maybe some why. Maybe some scientists nowadays can come up with something that we we paint over them and makes it more permanent. Well, we've had lots of quotes today. A final one from Dr Johnson, "Only a blockhead writes, except for money." So I hope you will make lots of money. Thank you to all my guests. David Attenborough and The Giant Egg is on BBC2 in March, but if you can't wait until then, David Attenborough's Madagascar is currently on Wednesday nights on the same channel. And Remotion will be in conversation at The Space for Thought, literary festival in London on the 19th. David Shields' reality hunger is out now, and you can see Sheila Hancock's The Art of Watercolours on BBC1 on the 20th of February, and The Watercolour at Tate Britain Show opens this week. Next week, Simon Wesley on modern soldiers and mental health, John Stubbs on the gallant Cavalier Army, and Dame Athene Donald on Science and Creativity. But for now, thank you and goodbye. When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping king supers for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. 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Producer: Katy Hickman.