La Rhumba
10-08-2002, 09:58 PM
Hi, I wasn't sure which forum to post this - it's a report of a radio programme I did originally for the T&D list, which was broadcast last weekend in the UK. It's a slice of ice skating history of the greatest icedancers of all time. Hope you enjoy it. :D
__________________________________________________ __
Radio 4 Broadcast - v.v. long!
Back To Front – Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 28th September 02
A Programme by Simon Barnes, sports writer for The Times, looking at
sporting events which knocked the news headlines off the front pages.
The first in the series looked back to 1984 and Torvill and Dean at
Sarajevo.
The programme began with the opening of Bolero, with Jayne Torvill
and Betty Callaway's comments over the music.
Jayne: "We didn't realise how many other lives we'd touched with it,
you know, this amazing fairy story."
Betty: "It was better than I've ever seen them skate before, it had
something very special. They skated for each other and to each other,
and the public were just very lucky to have looked on."
An unknown voice comes on…….
"Very proud, very proud to have been part of that time, to actually
witness the birth and development of a great star".
Simon Barnes: "February 1984, and a nuclear winter………but it was also
a winter lit up by the improbable Torvill and Dean, children of an
almost bizarrely ordinary Nottingham suburb who had within them a
violent, highly disciplined athletic ambition, and a curious
incontinent [?] striving for art.
They were already successful in that odd corner of sport known as Ice
Dance, traditionally a mixture of skill, technique and kitsch
presentation. They were known and admired across Britain, but that
was to escalate with astonishing force. As the pressure built up
before the Winter Olympic Games, Torvill and Dean set in motion a
winter of love. John Lowe and his wife Pat took a 24 hour trip from
Nottingham to Sarajevo. They went there to watch their friends Jayne
Torvill and Christopher Dean skate their stuff for real."
[Now the unknown voice is identified.]
Pat:"As soon as we arrived they gave us all flags, bowler hats with
Union Jack flags on. We were all excited, but also apprehensive
because we wanted them to win so much."
BBC TV Commentator, Alan Weeks' voice comes on,
"They are four minutes away from Olympic Gold."
John Lowe: "Just before they went on, the stadium of course by that
time was totally full. It's hard to describe, but it was electric,
and the feeling of our own friends having every chance of winning the
Olympic Gold was unbelievable."
Alan Weeks: " My goodness, what a moment to come on the ice!"
Betty Callaway: "I had the feeling that they were going to win, I was
always so sure of them because they were superb skaters, but on the
other hand, something can go wrong which you don't know about."
(laughing)
[Note:The last two comments were obviously a reference to the little
flower girl who was delayed on the ice picking up a few stray petals
from the previous skaters, while the whole world, including C&J
looked on waiting and smiling. But no mention of this incident from
Simon Barnes.]
Alan Weeks:"And they await the announcement to start their Freedance."
Simon Barnes:"Betty Callaway, Torvill and Dean's Coach looked on,
radiating false calm. In a city soon to be destroyed by war,her deep
anxieties were in truth a haven of frivolitiy in a world racked by
anxieties about the future of humankind."
Then a series of interviews and comments about the meaning of sport
in the context of World Events. [The campaign against nuclear
wepaons, Andropov's funeral in Moscow – still the Soviet Union in
1984.]
The BBC's Moscow Correspondent, Peter Rough,
"They were acutely aware that their sporting prowess was one of the
few things on the world stage that they really had to offer. The
Soviets had a tradition of some of the greatest icedancers in the
world. ………We would be watching the incoming Soviet feeds reporting
that Torvill and Dean were major contenders, and that things were
gonna be difficult. I don't think the Russians indicated to their own
people that they may have, pretty well what I think in iceskating
terms, was a whitewash."
Simon Barnes comments about Soviet sport being funded by the
Politburo, and T&D's "modest Grant from Nottingham Council."
Betty:" It wasn't easy for them. They had to keep their jobs going.
At the beginning, the first 2 years that I had them, they had to
skate either very early in the morning or very late at night. They
could go on about half past ten at night."
Pat Lowe, who worked in the Norwich Union [insurers] with Jayne.
"We're talking about two young people, and they were very young
people in the early days, who came from very ordinary backgrounds,
who, through their own sheer will and determination and hard work,
came to the pinnacle of their career in the sport that they loved."
Simon Barnes:"It seemed over the top appropriate that T&D should
skate for gold on St Valentine's Day. Furthermore, they were to skate
a love story, that had lashings of anguish, a fair old sprinkling of
eroticism, and melodramatic doom and disaster at the close. Pleasure
in their skill and artistry was enhanced by excited speculation about
their intriguing and ambiguous relationship."
Jayne: "During the summer leading up to the Olympics, suddenly it was
an interesting story that we might possibly be the gold medallists,
and then we would get various magazines that would turn up and want
to do a feature, and they would say "will you be getting married?"
and we always used to say not yet."
Betty:"I heard that so many times, and they were perfect friends,
absolutely perfect friends, and that was one of the things that I was
so fortunate about, there were the three of us together, all the time
during the championships, and we got along so well."
Simon Barnes:" The fairy story ……… was a pleasing distraction from
the………." [more political discussion about nuclear leakage at
Sellafield and the Miner's Strike].
The programme returns to the start of T&D's campaign to win Olympic
Gold with a "flawless skate" in the Compulsory Dances [music from the
Westminster Waltz and "a perfect mark making Olympic history" brief
news report].
Barnes:"Traditional skating slush, but T&D - artists aswell as
athletes were always innovators. Their daring and unexpected choice
of music for the Freedance was to revolutionize their sport.
Jayne:"We thought, well, perhaps it would be different to start with
a slow piece of music that actually builds. We had been listening to
the Bolero during the summer, we just played it as background music
to warm up to. When we were talking about this, the Bolero
immediately came to mind because it starts very quietly, very slowly,
and gradually builds to a crescendo, and we both said, "yes, that's
it, that would be the piece".
[Bolero playing in the background]
Betty:"It was completely different to what anyone else had even
attempted, and when I first heard it I thought, oh, are they going to
really feel this? It had got to be a programme where it was truly a
matter of personal feelings between the two of them. It had to be
interpreted very strongly."
Jayne: "Having had it reorchestrated, we learned how complicated it
was. But it also made us very intimate with the score, and with the
instruments that were used. That was really helpful in
choreographing, and actually feeling the music. We always had a
storyline because it helped us to focus on the character that we
wanted to portray within each piece. In this particular case we
decided it was more like a "Romeo & Juliet" type character where we
were in love with each other and we wanted to be together but, for
some reason we couldn't be, and so in the end we decided to, um, kill
ourselves by jumping into a volcano, into hot lava [laughing] which
is completely mad, but that drove us, that gave us the passion."
Part Two in next post :)
__________________________________________________ __
Radio 4 Broadcast - v.v. long!
Back To Front – Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 28th September 02
A Programme by Simon Barnes, sports writer for The Times, looking at
sporting events which knocked the news headlines off the front pages.
The first in the series looked back to 1984 and Torvill and Dean at
Sarajevo.
The programme began with the opening of Bolero, with Jayne Torvill
and Betty Callaway's comments over the music.
Jayne: "We didn't realise how many other lives we'd touched with it,
you know, this amazing fairy story."
Betty: "It was better than I've ever seen them skate before, it had
something very special. They skated for each other and to each other,
and the public were just very lucky to have looked on."
An unknown voice comes on…….
"Very proud, very proud to have been part of that time, to actually
witness the birth and development of a great star".
Simon Barnes: "February 1984, and a nuclear winter………but it was also
a winter lit up by the improbable Torvill and Dean, children of an
almost bizarrely ordinary Nottingham suburb who had within them a
violent, highly disciplined athletic ambition, and a curious
incontinent [?] striving for art.
They were already successful in that odd corner of sport known as Ice
Dance, traditionally a mixture of skill, technique and kitsch
presentation. They were known and admired across Britain, but that
was to escalate with astonishing force. As the pressure built up
before the Winter Olympic Games, Torvill and Dean set in motion a
winter of love. John Lowe and his wife Pat took a 24 hour trip from
Nottingham to Sarajevo. They went there to watch their friends Jayne
Torvill and Christopher Dean skate their stuff for real."
[Now the unknown voice is identified.]
Pat:"As soon as we arrived they gave us all flags, bowler hats with
Union Jack flags on. We were all excited, but also apprehensive
because we wanted them to win so much."
BBC TV Commentator, Alan Weeks' voice comes on,
"They are four minutes away from Olympic Gold."
John Lowe: "Just before they went on, the stadium of course by that
time was totally full. It's hard to describe, but it was electric,
and the feeling of our own friends having every chance of winning the
Olympic Gold was unbelievable."
Alan Weeks: " My goodness, what a moment to come on the ice!"
Betty Callaway: "I had the feeling that they were going to win, I was
always so sure of them because they were superb skaters, but on the
other hand, something can go wrong which you don't know about."
(laughing)
[Note:The last two comments were obviously a reference to the little
flower girl who was delayed on the ice picking up a few stray petals
from the previous skaters, while the whole world, including C&J
looked on waiting and smiling. But no mention of this incident from
Simon Barnes.]
Alan Weeks:"And they await the announcement to start their Freedance."
Simon Barnes:"Betty Callaway, Torvill and Dean's Coach looked on,
radiating false calm. In a city soon to be destroyed by war,her deep
anxieties were in truth a haven of frivolitiy in a world racked by
anxieties about the future of humankind."
Then a series of interviews and comments about the meaning of sport
in the context of World Events. [The campaign against nuclear
wepaons, Andropov's funeral in Moscow – still the Soviet Union in
1984.]
The BBC's Moscow Correspondent, Peter Rough,
"They were acutely aware that their sporting prowess was one of the
few things on the world stage that they really had to offer. The
Soviets had a tradition of some of the greatest icedancers in the
world. ………We would be watching the incoming Soviet feeds reporting
that Torvill and Dean were major contenders, and that things were
gonna be difficult. I don't think the Russians indicated to their own
people that they may have, pretty well what I think in iceskating
terms, was a whitewash."
Simon Barnes comments about Soviet sport being funded by the
Politburo, and T&D's "modest Grant from Nottingham Council."
Betty:" It wasn't easy for them. They had to keep their jobs going.
At the beginning, the first 2 years that I had them, they had to
skate either very early in the morning or very late at night. They
could go on about half past ten at night."
Pat Lowe, who worked in the Norwich Union [insurers] with Jayne.
"We're talking about two young people, and they were very young
people in the early days, who came from very ordinary backgrounds,
who, through their own sheer will and determination and hard work,
came to the pinnacle of their career in the sport that they loved."
Simon Barnes:"It seemed over the top appropriate that T&D should
skate for gold on St Valentine's Day. Furthermore, they were to skate
a love story, that had lashings of anguish, a fair old sprinkling of
eroticism, and melodramatic doom and disaster at the close. Pleasure
in their skill and artistry was enhanced by excited speculation about
their intriguing and ambiguous relationship."
Jayne: "During the summer leading up to the Olympics, suddenly it was
an interesting story that we might possibly be the gold medallists,
and then we would get various magazines that would turn up and want
to do a feature, and they would say "will you be getting married?"
and we always used to say not yet."
Betty:"I heard that so many times, and they were perfect friends,
absolutely perfect friends, and that was one of the things that I was
so fortunate about, there were the three of us together, all the time
during the championships, and we got along so well."
Simon Barnes:" The fairy story ……… was a pleasing distraction from
the………." [more political discussion about nuclear leakage at
Sellafield and the Miner's Strike].
The programme returns to the start of T&D's campaign to win Olympic
Gold with a "flawless skate" in the Compulsory Dances [music from the
Westminster Waltz and "a perfect mark making Olympic history" brief
news report].
Barnes:"Traditional skating slush, but T&D - artists aswell as
athletes were always innovators. Their daring and unexpected choice
of music for the Freedance was to revolutionize their sport.
Jayne:"We thought, well, perhaps it would be different to start with
a slow piece of music that actually builds. We had been listening to
the Bolero during the summer, we just played it as background music
to warm up to. When we were talking about this, the Bolero
immediately came to mind because it starts very quietly, very slowly,
and gradually builds to a crescendo, and we both said, "yes, that's
it, that would be the piece".
[Bolero playing in the background]
Betty:"It was completely different to what anyone else had even
attempted, and when I first heard it I thought, oh, are they going to
really feel this? It had got to be a programme where it was truly a
matter of personal feelings between the two of them. It had to be
interpreted very strongly."
Jayne: "Having had it reorchestrated, we learned how complicated it
was. But it also made us very intimate with the score, and with the
instruments that were used. That was really helpful in
choreographing, and actually feeling the music. We always had a
storyline because it helped us to focus on the character that we
wanted to portray within each piece. In this particular case we
decided it was more like a "Romeo & Juliet" type character where we
were in love with each other and we wanted to be together but, for
some reason we couldn't be, and so in the end we decided to, um, kill
ourselves by jumping into a volcano, into hot lava [laughing] which
is completely mad, but that drove us, that gave us the passion."
Part Two in next post :)