A lament for LoveFilm

Dear Amazon,

Thank you for your recent e-mail announcing the closure of your LoveFilm DVD postal service at the end of October. However, you have made me rather sad. And a bit cross. Your excuse for the demise of LoveFilm is that you've apparently seen decreasing demand for DVD and Blu-ray rental "as customers increasingly move to streaming". Streaming? Streaming what? Colds?

Some of us, you see, have no idea what you are talking about. Some of us are technically inept and technologically decrepit. Some of us just don't always have the money to upgrade to the latest thing. Some of us are still barely coming to terms with the demise of VHS. And the closure of our local Blockbuster.

I have a DVD player. In fact, only last year I upgraded it to a Blu-ray player. It's been a long haul into the 2010s in this household. So what? As far as I'm concerned, I've got it and I still want to use it. Why should I chuck it out and waste all that plastic and circuitry just because a lot of your customers have got streaming colds?

Oh, wait, you mean Internet streaming. There, I'm not such a luddite after all. Yeah, online streaming. We do that with Netflix. I signed us up in desperation for a free month's trial when our daughter got chicken pox at the end of reception, which housebound us for the best part of a week. And it's shit. It buffers a lot, crashes regularly, and has very little on it that we want to watch. Some good TV box sets, yes, but we're probably only interested in about one film in a hundred, none of which were released in cinemas in the past three years. Besides, our daughter has completely hijacked our account by watching My Little Pony and Paw Patrol on a loop.

You see, I used to go to the cinema at least twice a week. I saw pretty much every film going. Living in London, I could see anything that a review made sound interesting, no matter how obscure. This backfired sometimes. Uzak, for example. But anyway, I didn't get to miss out on movies. Relocating to York, with only one art-house cinema, our choice was more limited, which is how our LoveFilm subscription started. I still read the reviews, and slowly worked up a list of films that weren't heading our way that I wanted to see. And then we had our daughter, which (aside from a crazy year of taking her once a week as a baby to City Screen's Big Scream, where she sat through Black Swan, 127 Hours, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Another Year and many other inappropriate titles in complete milk-overloaded oblivion) meant we didn't get to go to the cinema at all for ages. Now when we go it's to see things like Captain Underpants, Minions, The Boss Baby and Moana. Which are all fine, but meanwhile our LoveFilm list of all the titles I really want to watch has been growing and growing.

It's not often that we get an uninterrupted evening with enough time and energy to actually sit through a whole film, but when we do, it's a proper treat, and we want therefore to treat it properly. Do the cinema thing. Turn the lights off, and the sound up. Have a glass of wine. Maybe even make popcorn. We bought a bigger telly to enhance our experience. We wanted to replicate the Picturehouse in our house. We're not bothered about being able to watch things on our phones. But I'm certainly regretting how few uninterrupted evenings we have, which meant we sat on The Hateful Eight for three whole months, now that we only have two months left to get through the rest of my LoveFilm list. I'm trying to up our game now, with the nights drawing in at the close of summer, but it won't be easy. I just had to quarantine my husband in the spare room for two days because he threw up everywhere on Monday night and I selfishly didn't want our daughter (or me, because I have a piece of plastic fork stuck in my intestine) catch it.

The DVD still has something that Internet streaming doesn't. What you get on DVDs or Blu-Rays are (1) extras and (2) subtitles. Extras that tell you something about the background to the movie you just watched - how it evolved from concept to completion, how special effects were achieved. Deleted scenes sometimes show you how thought directions were abandoned, for better or worse. You may catch some silly bloopers or other funny incidents that occurred during filming. You will undoubtedly see actors, writers, producers and directors gushing about how brilliant they all are. You may even capture some handheld footage of the wardrobe department. Many extras are total dross, but I always watch them. Because I spent years of my life subtitling them, or getting other people to translate subtitles for them. So a lot of effort has gone into the behind the scenes of your behind the scenes and I for one want an opportunity to appreciate it. And of course the main feature will have subtitles too - for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and in up to 38 different languages, depending on which regions the disc will play in. The subtitles will have been put together by poorly paid professionals, mostly doing it for love, because translating a movie is more interesting than translating a washing machine manual, even if it's paying you less than minimum wage and has a turnaround so fast you almost have to translate in real time.

How will the deaf community access movies now, with so little online being subtitled properly, if at all? And, more importantly, how will I watch the latest releases in Norwegian or Brazilian Portuguese?

It was kind of annoying that you didn't have much control over what you were sent next with LoveFilm, but the mystery envelope winging its way from Peterborough was part of the thrill. Now you are offering me Amazon Prime instead of my LoveFilm subscription. I try so hard not to accidentally click on that big yellow Prime icon every time I order a book or CD (yes, yes, I'm so prehistoric, but it is surely clear to you by now that I prefer objects to computer screens), but now you have really upped your ante. Will you actually have any of my LoveFilm list on your Prime selection, cos you certainly didn't the last time I checked? Or will I have to do a pay-per-view for my more obscure choices that will cost way more than my LoveFilm subscription ever did? Are you even going to e-mail me my LoveFilm list before you delete it, because I'm not going to be able to remember ten years of film choices by myself? Actually, since you are about to have a warehouse full of unwatched DVDs that you can't sell, why not use me as your charity shop and send all the ones on the list my way? I'll sit in my ark, gradually working my way through them.

And I don't want your discounted Firestick, thanks, because you let Jeremy Clarkson advertise them.

I think that ditching LoveFilm and making us all take Prime was always your plan. You said otherwise, but who ever believes a word that large tax-avoiding corporations say?

Yours, except I'm not,

A disgruntled LoveFilm by Post viewer.

Deutschland '83

"In touch with the ground

I'm on the hunt, I'm after you

Smell like I sound, I'm lost in a crowd

And I'm hungry like the wolf ..."

    (Duran Duran)

A rollicking ride with subtitles. Has to be a good thing, right? Sunday night television has turned into a battle of the drama Titans - War And Peace versus Endeavour versus Deutschland '83. Deutschland '83 is a German spy thriller from Walter Presents, Channel 4's new foreign-telly box-set-on-demand service. I'm sticking with Endeavour, then treating myself to Deutschland '83 during rare solitary moments of leisure. I'm using our new Chromecast, so that I can watch our tablet on the big(gish) screen of our television. It's been quite the revelation, even if our daughter now spends most of the time watching clips of cats being scared by cucumbers on You Tube rather than CBeebies. Gosh, we are almost in the digital age in our house at last.

Which is more than we can say for the East Germans. Seeing them fail to keep up with Western technology is one of the greater sources of amusement in Deutschland '83. They are stumped when a break-in to a safe gives them a list of nuclear targets stored on an encrypted floppy disk. It's not the encryption that's the problem, it's the actual disk. Their computers can't play it. They need an IBM, illegally procured and imported. And then there is the hero's dumbfounded attempt to master the phone switchboard in his office. And his naive response to a black marketeer offering to sell him a Walkman: "What's a Walkman?". The look of sheer astonishment and adulation on his face when he hears Duran Duran playing through headphones for the first time is glorious.

The music is wonderful, of course, if you are of a certain age that is mine. Yes, even 99 Luftballons. The theme song is Major Tom, but sung by Peter Schilling, not David Bowie. Though the name still feels poignant in the week of Bowie's death. Bowie's music features elsewhere - China Girl, Modern Love - alongside New Order, The Eurythmics, The Cure, The Police, Blondie and 10cc. And we're only on episode three. Further delights await. But there will be Phil Collins at some point. Even in the early '90s, German radio was almost continuous Phil Collins.

"Earth below us, drifting, falling, floating weightless, coming home..."

Our hero is Martin Rauch, former East Berlin border guard and now, thanks to an agent aunt who indulges in nepotism, Moritz Stamm, East Germany's newest spy recruit. But - oh dear - turns out he's pretty rubbish at it. Every week he messes up, but somehow gets away with it. It probably helps that he is posted to a West German general who is so distracted by the antics of his own children (one a soul singer on a Bhagwan commune in Cologne, the other a newly recruited pacifist) that he totally fails to notice suspicious goings on around him. Like his sister-in-law getting drugged at a party after she stumbles across Moritz making an illicit phonecall. Like Moritz clumsily dropping crucial bits of paper during information exchanges. Like Moritz splattered in blood after nearly being killed by a Ninja waitress. Like Moritz failing to recognise an old friend from his hometown in Braunschweig and the old friend failing to recognise Moritz - because the real Moritz Stamm has been shot dead on a train. Like Moritz sneaking off to his chain-smoking aunt's car at a petrol station to have blood taken to see if he can be his mother's kidney donor. (And what everyone in Germany - not just the General - failed to notice in that scene was that Moritz got back into their car and managed to drive off despite a) having left a petrol nozzle attached to it in the previous scene and b) not having paid.)

Lamps get bugged, offices get broken into. Sometimes it isn't Moritz's incompetence but twists of fate that intervene. American generals decide to switch hotel rooms because one fancies a view. A bugged Art Deco desk meant for a Nato official is gifted on to his secretary. An antiques dealer works late into the night, letting his friendly dog sniff around his shop while Moritz attempts to bug said desk. The girl Moritz has to seduce to procure secrets loves cats, but Moritz is allergic.

A desk switch in Brussels

Martin/Moritz is doing it all for love. For his girlfriend back home, who is pregnant, but not necessarily with Martin's child. For his mother, in desperate need of that kidney transplant. Getting her treated in a West German hospital is the bribe meant to lure him. That and the recruiter breaking Martin's fingers - the real Moritz Stamm was an accomplished pianist, and Martin can't play a note. So it fills a gap in the story and tortures Martin into submission in one fell swoop. Clever, but not nice. They drug his coffee to finish the job.

Despite occasional violence and everyone trying to prevent nuclear armageddon, the mood is light. Both sides seem equally clueless, which is not what you expect from German officialdom. It's a bit too Austin Powers at times. I don't think life under the Stasi at the height of the Cold War can have been that funny. Although East Germans always struck me as having a better sense of humour than West Germans. However, I am not looking forward to what pregnant Annett, a loyal teacher of Young Pioneers, might do with her discovery of Martin's mother's hidden Western book collection, many titles of which Martin procured for her during confiscations at the border. But we shall see. Having baby brain, she might just wander off and forget all about it.

There is clearly good money in being a double agent. Tischbier, the pacifist leader and Moritz's spy boss lives in some sort of palace. Moritz needs to brush up on the high life if he is a success - his lack of knowledge of steak ("Just bring me some meat from a cow") is what leads to the later Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon assault by the waitress. Moritz's previous exposure to haute cuisine has been his aunt smuggling in Nescafe. He finds the choice in a Bonn supermarket overwhelming. It's infinitely more impressive than any German supermarket I've ever been to.

It's hard to believe that it all takes place only five years before my first ever trip to Germany. And only six years before the fall of the Wall. The system in 1983 seems utterly entrenched and impenetrable. There is genuine threat, and no sign of change. In 1988 I probably knew little about the East, and had only got as far as 1924 in my school history lessons on Germany.** But 1988 is the year I went to Cologne and Bonn, where Moritz is stationed. I was 15, and on a school exchange. It was a whirlwind day trip from Mainz, and while we devoted a reasonable amount of time to Germany's highest motorway bridge, Cologne cathedral and a lunch of chicken and chips at Cologne station, we only managed to see the main squares of both cities. Oh, and the outside of Beethoven's house. Bonn seemed far too small and - dare I say? - parochial to be a capital city. It is so right that the accolade was subsequently restored to Berlin. I wouldn't mind a piece of one of those now abandoned embassy buildings though - then I could live like Tischbier.

Genuine 1988 Cologne beer mat, which must have supported lemonade

Beethovenhaus, Bonn, dingy '80s photography

** Interestingly, my first German teacher, whom we all suspected of Communist tendencies because she wore black trousers, rode a motorbike and we were stupid teenagers, taught us that the word for "orange" was Apfelsine. Whereas two years earlier in 1983, Apfelsine is one of the East German words that Moritz is told he must forget, and use Orange instead. So now I'm wondering if we were right all along...

Wimbledon 2day

I wrote about Wimbledon last year. In fact most of what I have been watching recently has felt a bit Groundhog Day - Episodes, Child Genius, W1A... They've already been covered by this blog. Nothing more to add.

Anyway, in last year's blog post I complained about the inanity of John Inverdale's highlights programme Today At Wimbledon. But now it has been replaced (nothing to do with me, I hasten to add) and I have seen Wimbledon 2day, I retract my criticism wholeheartedly. Because I hadn't seen nothing yet, it turns out.

Clare Balding is always bright and enthusiastic and keen to sound the expert, even if she does tend to shove her hands in people's faces. But she has been placed in an oversized Pimms tent covered with fake grass from a market stall and given a malfunctioning iPad that constantly distracts her with tweets. And she has been surrounded by a Top Gear meets Antiques Roadshow style audience on their feet. An audience who contribute NOTHING other than a bland, nervous "I am on camera, don't sneeze, it's hot, don't faint" smile and the odd stagestruck murmur of agreement. There are still the former player commentators (McEnroe, Navratilova, Bartoli, Henman etc) invited in for a chat, but even they seem diminished by this dumbing down and the distracting people in the background. The spotlight is no longer shining upon them as it would have done in a purpose built TV studio. And they have to sit clutching giant microphones. They are also being asked ridiculous questions about jokes and beards.

What there isn't a whole lot of is tennis, unless a British player happens to have won a match that day. Instead there is YouTube footage of toddlers having a meltdown by their paddling pool while being forced to wield a racquet in their back garden to fend off flying objects. I am not making this up. Now, Wimbledon has always made children play tennis in our back garden, and this is to be heartily encouraged, but we don't need to upload a video of it on to the Internet. Our kids might not be as cute as we think, for one thing.

Like many people, an evening highlights programme is the only tennis I get to see during Wimbledon. I may not be in an office all day, but I have my daughter with me all afternoon. (Last year her three hours of pre-school were in the afternoon so that gave me a bit of tennis time. Now they are in the morning.) As the weather is lovely (it's SUMMER, people  - stop moaning about the heatwave), I am not going to sit indoors and even begin to attempt to persuade her to watch a match on Centre Court. So I don't care what people are tweeting about the day to Clare Balding (especially if they aren't tennis experts). Lucky them, they've seen it already. Now it's my turn. Show me what I've missed. That's all I want.

The whole style of the programme just feels so wrong, so misjudged. Wimbledon is meant to be slightly stuffy, I think. Stuffiness is at the soul of the All England Club, like the be-blazered stewards and the strawberries and cream. There shouldn't be high fives or bad spelling. I don't care if the 2 is for BBC2, it doesn't belong in the word TODAY. Next they'll be shoving Sue Barker in a gin joint and changing the theme tune to a Kayne West** rap.

(** I only know who Kayne West is thanks to the subtitlers currently going viral for attempting to cover his Glastonbury set for a hard-of-hearing audience not allowed to see bad words. Please always feel free to tweet good things about subtitlers! But not inane nonsense about a tennis player's beard.)

The EE British Academy Film Awards Ceremony 2015

We stayed up far too late on Sunday night watching the Baftas and I am not quite sure why. The whole proceedings seemed as stilted as saying the sponsors' new name. Orange is now EE. And that's "E...E" rather than "Eeeeee". "Welcome to the 2015 E...E... Bafta Awards Ceremony." It just doesn't work. Which is presumably why EE are also ditching the Orange Wednesdays deal later this month. ("E-E Wednesdays" as a name makes you long for Mr Dresden's stupid suggestions of old: "So it's every Wednesday, like clockwork. And we're Orange. Clockwork... Orange... I got it! Let's call them Orange Wednesdays!" ) And it's possibly also why EE have just been bought out by BT. BT Baftas. There you go. There's alliteration and everything.

Anyway, back to the E...E awards, operating in treacle. Stultified by the sponsor name, everyone took an age to walk on to the stage. The men were trying to remember who they needed to take up with them and which woman to kiss (girlfriend or co-star?). The ladies were debating whether or not it was safe to leave their handbags on their seat and struggling to climb the stairs in their tight dresses and high heels. There were no E...E or Royal Opera House ushers to assist or hurry. Someone had had the foresight to keep Stephen Hawking's wheelchair stage right and step-free, but the Polish production crew of Ida, which won Best Film Not In The English Language, had been shoved at the back of the auditorium. (Although they didn't necessarily take the longest to get on stage.) It was so snail-like that the teenage stars of Boyhood were probably wondering if this was really what they had sacrificed their entire childhood for. Maybe everyone was just surprised that for once it wasn't raining outside.

Stephen Fry also seemed awkward. Probably because he has been too busy honeymooning with his young husband to practise his lines. His recent marriage was all he wanted to talk about. Personally I'd much rather have heard more of his excellent thoughts on God, but this possibly wasn't the setting for that. However, his links were still more lucid than the introductions of any of the award presenters. All these actors being feted for their supposedly excellent performances, yet none of them can read an autocue. The presenters only had two (fairly predictable) lines to say - could they not have learned them by heart so that their gushing could sound at least faintly authentic? David Beckham presented the award for Outstanding British Film like a five year old does phonics. But he is a footballer - he is allowed not to be able to read. But not an actor. It's a job requirement.

Unless you are in a Mike Leigh film, as he doesn't bother with scripts. Leigh received the Academy Fellowship this year, and actually bothered to turn up to receive it. I love his films, although haven't yet managed to see Mr Turner, which received four nominations but no awards this year. His improvised method of story-telling is so unique in cinema and, as Imelda Staunton (presenting the award) said, "organic". This reminded me of a play of Mike Leigh's I saw at the National Theatre many years ago, which was so "organic" that a live mouse appeared on set, thoroughly distracting the audience but not the cast discussing anti-Semitism on stage. I wish that the actors had noticed so they could have shown us their true ad-libbing skills. Mike Leigh was in the bar during the interval, but I didn't have the courage to ask him about it, fearing he might bite my head off. Or ask me something about Zionism.

I did see Mike Leigh's last film, Another Year, at the cinema. It was the second film I took my baby daughter to see at City Screen's Big Scream. This crazy notion of taking a babe-in-arms to a current film release in the cinema was a lifesaver for me during the first year of parenthood. It made me feel human again. Even if I missed half of every plot by crouching down on the floor changing nappies, or in later months chasing after my daughter determinedly crawling towards another baby's food. And even if the material being presented to her was utterly inappropriate - Lord Voldemort avada-kedavring, King George VI using the F-word, Aron Ralston cutting his own arm off. If my daughter had actually been conscious during Black Swan, she might not be so enthusiastic about her ballet lessons now. But at least I was familiar with most of that year's award nominees.

Whereas this year, things were pretty hopeless. Britain is usually so behind on film releases that Baftas are often to awarded to films not yet in our cinemas, but this year most of the nominees were already circulating. But I had only managed to see two of them, Wild and The Theory Of Everything. And that was only because our daughter was ill last weekend and my husband was kind enough to give me a pass out while he stayed at home to look after her. My husband and I used to go to the cinema at least twice a week, and had the time to read film reviews in the Sunday papers and London's Time Out magazine. But now seeing a film in the cinema is a rarity, especially together. Although the one film we saw together last year, '71, about a British soldier lost behind enemy lines in Belfast, did receive a mention, as its lead actor won the Rising Star Award.

Hit or miss on the red carpet?

There was lots of kissing. There were lots of poisonous looks from the ladies who didn't win, particularly from Wild's Reese Witherspoon. I bet I know whose toenail she'd like to pull off now. There were absent winners, most of whom were at a rival awards ceremony in LA. There were also people missing off the annual "death row" - Bob Hoskins being one, Geraldine McEwan another. There were lovely dresses and dodgy dresses, which is all anyone ever seems to care about. Personally I have no real idea what makes a dress a "hit" or "miss" in the fashion stakes, but I can tell you that the only dress I wanted to own was Imelda Staunton's. It was made of proper princess stuff. There was a pop band who had dressed up in beards and T shirts and whom I was supposed to have heard of. No one appeared to enjoy their performance. But Professor Hawking (another atheist called Stephen with a love life being much talked about at the moment) stole the show. It's incredible that he has survived against so many odds, including my dad nearly running him over in Cambridge when Hawking's wheelchair shot into the road in front of my dad's car.

I have never been to the Baftas of course, but that doesn't mean I am not under the illusion that I could get to go one day, when my screenplay for - well, that needs work - gets nominated. We used to think they ought to have subtitling awards ceremonies. "And the Bafta for best fast subtitle edit in a medical drama goes to Rebecca Dodgson for ER season five, episode four." "I must just thank the company's medical dictionary, which gave me the opportunity to use such fine spelling during the emergency thyroidectomy."

I have been to the Royal Opera House, the Baftas' venue of choice. My dad occasionally took me, not only to the very cheapest seats up in the gods, but at the very back of those gods too. But I can't really blame him, given the ticket prices. A better deal was to go to the Sunday afternoon recitals in the Floral Hall, where you were nearer the G&Ts in the bar and in spitting distance of the stage. There was no spitting of course, just lovely performances of the Trout Quartet or from Ian Bostridge.

And I did once stand behind Outstanding Debut By A British Actor, Writer Or Presenter award presenter Tom Hiddleston at an airport check-in. He wasn't so famous then. He was still flying Ryanair for one thing.

Slow and awkward the whole proceedings might have been, but away from the Baftas and the silly sponsor name, the two minds at the helm of the evening, Stephen Fry's and Stephen Hawking's, remain utterly brilliant. May intelligence always win the day.

Tannbach

Say what? Never heard of this one? Can't find it in your Radio Times?

That's because it's on German telly. I'm never going to sit in front of Jeremy Kyle while my daughter is at nursery, but I do like to indulge in a bit of ZDF, Germany's (very loosely defined) equivalent to BBC2, which I can watch online for free on my sofa in York. Mostly I watch the news, and sometimes try and transcribe it, sad geek that I am, pretending that I still have a subtitling career. Occasionally I watch a thriller, since there seems to be a weekly murder mystery set in every different Bundesland, but my God, German police dramas are bad. Yes, Die Rosenheim Cops, I'm particularly talking about you.

Mainz

I have even been to ZDF. I did a German school exchange to Mainz (where ZDF is based) when I was 15, and the father of my exchange partner was a lawyer for the television station. He was good at getting free tickets to be in the audience of various chat shows and magazine programmes. Not the greatest quality broadcasts you'll ever see, but it's always fun and interesting to see television be made.

But at the start of January, ZDF showed Tannbach, which had me gripped almost as much as Edgar Reitz's absorbing epic Heimat. Although thankfully Tannbach only had 3 episodes and a total running time of 310 minutes (as opposed to Heimat's 3100). And OK, truth be told, it wasn't really a patch on Heimat. But it did leave you with a big sense of "What happened next?" as there was a lot left more to tell.

Not Tannbach - the house high on a hill overlooking the Rhine
used as the home of the main characters in Heimat 3

Tannbach is a small fictional village on the border between Thuringia and Bavaria (but it is evidently based on Mödlareuth). That border is to prove hugely significant, since we are in 1945 in the final days of the war, and Germany is about to be divided by the Allies into zones. Tannbach is initially liberated by the Americans, but after the meeting at Yalta it is taken over by the Russians. But a subsequent re-examination of the state border on an old map reveals that it runs directly through the heart of the village. Which means that unless the Russians and Americans can come to a sensible agreement, the iron curtain is about to run right along the village stream, separating the village into two like a mini Berlin. Needless to say, they don't come to a sensible agreement. Families are divided, hearts are torn, and there are unnecessary and tragic deaths.

There is so much going on in the immediate aftermath of the war it's hard to know where to begin. There are refugees. There are Nazis running underground and Nazis redefining themselves as Communist bureaucrats. There are Jews coming out of hiding and trying to locate their families. There are motherless babies and childless mothers. There is survivors' guilt and the shock of discovering what has happened behind the gates of the concentration camps. There are soldiers with their minds shattered by what they have seen. There is the indignity of foreign invasion and foreign ideology. There is the need to keep secrets, denounce enemies and to preserve standing and escape punishment for past crimes. Persilscheine, Entnazifizierung: there is the need to be officially declared clean in order to move on. For those that aren't, there is the threat of internment camps. There is much betrayal. No one trusts anybody any more, not even within their own family.

Village life seems to have carried on as normal during the war, but suddenly there is a starving population to feed and Germany's farmland is all in the East. The aristocrats lose their land, their large houses are torn down, and people in the Russian zone are resettled over hundreds of miles to farm smallholdings run by communes.

Later, there is the black market and smuggling, which only worsens as the border is fortified. There are people on the make, and people taking sides that they don't believe in simply for self-preservation. There is very much a chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the uncertain future and the pangs for home (Heimat) make decisions impossible, yet split-second choices to stay or go can be the difference between life and death, imprisonment and freedom. Collaboration is all, but collaboration has consequences. One half of the village moves from the control of one secret police to another at the opposite end of the political spectrum. And the leaders of both sides try to brainwash their citizens to convince them that their way is the right way.

Above all, it seems to ask the question, is love for your family enough to make you happy and make you want to stay, whatever happens in the world around you? Needless to say, opinions on this are as divided as the village, as some characters flee at a glancing opportunity, and others remain bound to the land, come what may.

Berlin Wall fragments, sent to me by a penfriend in early 1990

I never went to East Germany while it still existed. My first forays east were post-reunification in 1994. Living in Heidelberg at the time, everyone there actively discouraged travel to the former GDR with a dismissive, "It's just a building site. Go in 20 years when it's all finished." Which meant I instantly set off to have a look. The building site aspect was certainly true, but it was still such an important place to visit. I remember sitting on the ICE train to Berlin, travelling at ridiculous western speed, and suddenly seeing abandoned watchtowers overlooking acres and acres of muddy soil, the forests gone, and the fields ploughed to ruin. This was my first sight of the East. The next was climbing out of the U-Bahn onto a deserted Potsdamer Platz. The Wall had been torn down but at that time nothing had been built in the space left behind, and I found myself standing alone on what felt like an ocean of blank concrete with a bitter March wind tearing through me. The square was once one of the most important and bustling meeting points in Berlin before the Wall turned it into a minefield and no-man's land. It since been entirely redeveloped and regained its commercial importance, but I shall never forget that wilderness in the heart of a troubled, emerging yet jubilant city. I walked a little further past Checkpoint Charlie and then directly through the Brandenburg Gate, something which would have been impossible just five years before. Unter den Linden was a boulevard of fine facades, but behind it were decaying bullet-pocked buildings. Artist colonies and developers were battling (often with each other) to bring them back to life.

Berliner Dom looking towards Alexanderplatz

I travelled on to Halle, Leipzig and Dresden. Halle was depressed and horribly polluted from the nearby brown coal mines. Leipzig was rapidly springing back to be something magnificent. Dresden was simply shocking. Very few of its finer buildings had been restored after the city was blown to bits by the Allies in 1945, and those that were had since been blackened by soot and neglect. An unspeakably ugly avenue of concrete high rises had replaced whatever road had once led from the station to the city centre. (Not that we don't have similarly hideous post-war rebuilds in the UK.) The Frauenkirche, since reconstructed as a beautiful symbol of peace and hope after the reunification, was just a heap of numbered rubble laid out across the grass.

Frauenkirche, Dresden in 1994

Leipzig

And yet great things were being lost, such as free child care, which in turn ended the universal employment of women. Publicly owned assets and companies were rapidly privatised and millions of jobs lost. The farmland of Tannbach was sold off. Subsidised rents were stopped. The economy went bust and exports of East German products became impossible after a low fixing of the East German Ostmark's exchange rate, as they could not compete with the Western market. A lot of teachers and academics were blacklisted as having worked for the Party when they were merely government employees trying to do a decent and enjoyable job. West Germans came back to reclaim their houses in the East forcibly taken from them after the war, but there was no reciprocal arrangement for any East Germans who had lost property in the West. There was a mass exodus from the East, making it difficult to sustain infrastructures and the less desirable properties.

Baustelle Reichstag, Berlin 1999

I made a daytrip to Erfurt in the former GDR from Goettingen in 1998. By then the pace of restoration had accelerated, and the central buildings were mostly bright and vibrant. It no longer seemed any different from towns in the West, My last trip East was when I went back to Berlin in 1999 and stayed for a weekend on my way home from Poznan in Poland.

And now - incredibly - those 20 years I was told to wait are up. By anyone's account, it is time to head back.

I hope that BBC4 buys Tannbach so that everyone in the UK can see it too, in the Saturday night foreign drama slot. But at the same time I hope that they wait long enough for me to have resurrected that subtitling career so that I can translate it for you, Bavarian and all.

The Battle For Britain's Breakfast

I watched this on a bit of a whim, but it turned out to be surprisingly interesting. It’s hard to believe that there was once no such thing as breakfast television. Once upon a time, the only TV before lunchtime was Open University lectures or that test card of a girl playing noughts and crosses with a scary clown. She was a big part of my youth, that girl. My mum couldn’t shove us in front of CBeebies all day long, but she could let us loose on the test card. I am sure that clown had a lot to do with a childhood phobia of the circus.

This documentary detailed the ratings war between ITV and the BBC after the government gave permission for channels to start broadcasting in the early morning. The ITV franchise was awarded to TV-am, and the cheeky BBC decided to launch a rival show two weeks before it went on the air. The first Breakfast Time on BBC1 in 1983 was a big event in our house. (We plainly had no life.) We were always very much a BBC rather than an ITV family, though me and my brother were allowed to watch Rainbow at lunchtime so that my mum could then tune into The Sullivans. So Frank “combover” Bough and Selina “Clothes Show” Scott were regulars in our house, and we only saw Good Morning Britain when we went to visit my nanna in the Lake District. So I was quite surprised to learn that people that I had remembered being on ITV, like Russell Grant and the Green Goddess, were actually on BBC Breakfast Time. Or I guess these were assumptions rather than memories. But that is what the whole ratings war was about – the BBC's breakfast show, with its jumpers and sofas, was trying to be like ITV, whereas the TV-am broadcasts, with David Frost, Parky, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford and a serious news content, were trying to be like the BBC. It didn’t work out for anybody, although the BBC was winning the ratings war. Behind the scenes at TV-am there was a lot of treachery. Famous people got sacked. Jonathan Aitken was a baddie even then (he got wine thrown over him by Anna Ford - you go, girl!). TV-am went virtually bankrupt and could barely pay for enough electricity to keep broadcasting. Greg Dyke, now chancellor of my alma mater, The University of York, brought in a rat puppet called Roland to save the day. 

Eventually things came full circle. The BBC relaunched Breakfast with people in suits behind desks (to make people want to go out to work), and ITV became increasingly tabloid-influenced and sofa-based (to encourage stay-at-home couch potatoes). And since then everything has more or less remained as you might expect.

My grandfather was once on Breakfast Time, when he became the first person to climb all the mountains in England, Scotland and Wales over 2,000 feet high. However, he was filmed on location, asleep in the back of his Volvo, and hiking up his final hill, rather than being allowed on a sofa. Those who knew him would probably agree that my grandfather didn’t look comfortable on a sofa.

It’s sadly ironic that The Battle For Britain’s Breakfast was broadcast the day after the death of Peaches Geldof. Her parents were, of course, very involved with Channel 4’s own early morning programme, The Big Breakfast, which (since it didn't air until nearly a decade later) played no part in this documentary. I once walked past the house where The Big Breakfast was filmed. It was next to a grotty canal towpath that was on the Capital Ring, a 78 mile walk around the edge of London which my husband and I completed one summer. The walk is split into several easy sections, the beginning and end of which are all accessible by public transport, usually from stations in zone 4. I wrote of the Capital Ring in 2006:

“Like all of London, the Capital Ring embraces contrasts. You see some of the most opulent (Richmond) and some of the most squalid (Hackney Wick) parts of the city suburbs. There are palaces (Syon House, Eltham) and sewers (the Greenway). There are streams, canals and rivers, forests, woods, parks and open meadows. There is the world’s ugliest hospital (Ealing). There is a windmill (Wimbledon). There are cranes, swans, ducks, coots, squirrels, rats, voles, mice, woodpeckers, jays and rutting deer. There is dog shit (Crouch End’s Parkland Walk). Some areas are undergoing rapid change and construction, such as the Docklands and 2012 Olympic Park to be. Some are undergoing painfully slow change and construction (Wembley stadium and, if I think about it, the 2012 Olympic Park to be).”

Anyway, if you live in London, I wholeheartedly recommend that you give the Capital Ring a go. We loved it and were very proud of ourselves when we got all the way round. We embarked on the walk's bigger brother, the London Loop, but sadly didn't get to complete this before we had to move away.

I was surprised to read that the Big Breakfast house is still standing now, since it was right in the area where the Olympic Park was going to be built. Apparently it fell under a compulsory purchase order but didn’t in the end need to be demolished.

The first subtitling company I worked for had two contracts to subtitle the news segments on breakfast television, one for Channel 4's Big Breakfast, and one for GMTV, TV-am's successor. Being fresh out of university, I hadn’t had any experience of serious early rising, so never volunteered to cover these shifts myself. Now, with a young child and never getting to sleep beyond six in the morning, I’d be signing up for them like a shot, as you got a taxi ride into work (the Tube not being properly up and running at that time of day), paid extra, and could slope off home after lunch. (Though to be honest, given the cuts to subtitling budgets over the years, I doubt these terms and conditions would still apply.) Subtitling for GMTV was done at their studios on the South Bank and there was also a rumour that if you popped out to make yourself a coffee at the right time, you could also get yourself on television, as some interviews were filmed outside the subtitle transmission room. Our involvement in these breakfast shows' production was hardly as cut-throat as the world portrayed in the Battle For Britain's Breakfast, but the subsequent loss of the GMTV contract was definitely the start of our own company's demise.

W1A

“So that’s all good.”

Even though it finished way past our bedtime, having so loved Twenty Twelve, we eagerly tuned in to its follow-up, W1A.  Former head of the Olympics Deliverance Commission Ian Fletcher has got himself a new job as Head of Values at the BBC. He’s a bit of a hero now that the London Olympics were actually a success after all.  W1A is all part of the BBC’s attempt to show us that it can, despite its stuffy traditionalist reputation and recent news headlines, laugh at itself. Nonetheless, thankfully Ian Fletcher's role of Head of Values doesn’t mean “Showing the world we’re no longer a bunch of paedophiles” but rather “Show Cornwall we’re not prejudiced against it.” I say thankfully because the former is hardly a sound basis for a comedy show.

I love Hugh Bonneville’s bewildered buffoon character, wandering round trendy officeless office space with his badly folded bike sticking out under his arm, with no idea where to sit or how to get a coffee. It’s so different from his “nice but imperious” role in Downton Abbey. The ocean of hotdesks with rude “Don’t even think about it” messages stuck on every unmanned monitor reminded me of my freelance days competing for a computer, coming into work stupidly early (for a media employee) to make sure I could get one. And I loved the background joke of the terrible live subtitles being transmitted in the presentation Ian Fletcher had to attend. A little nod to my former profession going rapidly down the shitter.

I have done subtitling work for the BBC, but contracted out to another company and not directly employed by them. After accidentally sending us every episode of Fawlty Towers, from then on the Beeb only sent us their absolute dross to subtitle: Bargain Hunt, Ready Steady Cook, Wipeout, Esther. They originally palmed off The Weakest Link to us too, but then it became a hit and we hardly ever saw it again.

I did get offered a job at the BBC once, in their Pronunciation Unit, based at Bush House on The Strand. The Pronunciation Unit (if it still exists) spend their lives making phrase book style databases of how to say the names of everyone in the world ever, so that newsreaders and other presenters don't look stupid when talking on the television or radio.  It was rather a shock to be offered the job, since the interview was really hard (with numerous interruptions from a persistently ringing telephone in the office).  I also had to do a test that involved identifying foreign languages from transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet and I think I got nearly all of them wrong.

But the Pronunciation Unit was situated in a virtually windowless basement surrounded by dusty cramped book stacks, about as far removed from the trendy, light and open plan world of W1A as you could get, and it all just felt a little too dark and airless to me, since I am prone to claustrophobia. So I turned the job down and I’ve never been entirely sure it was the right decision. It’s always been one of those “What if...” moments. Ultimately, I thought I would miss subtitling just a bit too much. I think they were surprised at my rejection, given the kudos attached to working at the BBC back then and the job offered a rare gem to a BBC employee, namely a permanent rather than temporary contract. Perhaps W1A will finally show me just how right I was to send my career path, for what it’s worth, elsewhere.

I don’t think that W1A will be as funny as Twenty Twelve, if only because the events portrayed at the BBC are unlikely to then happen on the news the following week. (Though Lord knows the BBC could use some news that makes us laugh for a change.) Plus the wonderful Olivia Colman is no longer in it. But the PR bullshit, pointless meetings, random voiceovers by David Tennant and surprise cameos (Alan Yentob and Salman Rushdie arm wrestling?) will no doubt prove very entertaining indeed.