PRECIOUS

I’ve written before of my liking for the new drama serial Smash, the first run of which is being shown in Britain on Sky Atlantic. The penultimate episode, broadcast at the weekend, contained a moment so magical that the small hairs on the back of my neck stood out. But to have the full experience of its magical quality, you need to have some background in musical history.

Smash tells the story of the creation of a new Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, entitled 'Bombshell!'. Already, you feel, you‘re in good hands: this is a wholly credible notion for a contemporary musical play with just the right title. As the story unfolds, the details also feel right. The songs have a contemporary flavour but also evoke Broadway tradition. The ingénue has the wrong kind of singing voice – the actress playing her is a graduate of a telly talent show – but that now is where Broadway is finding its new musical leads so the wrongness is right. And the clichés are secure too. Everything works. Evidently the general critical and public response is less than favourable. Beats me. At least it’s been renewed for a second season.

The immaculate Anjelica Huston

Here’s the magical thing. The producer of 'Bombshell!' is Eileen Rand, recently divorced from her co-producer, so it’s important for her amour propre that she succeeds on her own. During the course of things, she starts an affair with a sympathetic bar owner. He’s a mature man but a piece younger than her. As a viewer, you fear where this might be going, but so far so encouraging,

Eileen is played by the very great Anjelica Huston. Lucky television that it can get so distinguished a movie star and so authoritative a presence. In the most recent episode, Eileen and her beau fetch up in an old-style supper club and Eileen is drawn to the pianist who is tinkering with 'September Song'. Eileen says it’s a number she loves and the pianist invites her to sing it. She does.

Anjelica Huston is no singer but she delivers it beautifully as sprechgesang. It is perfectly apt for her character because of her own situation. The song expresses tenderly and wryly feelings for a rather younger lover, thus:

“Oh, it’s a long, long while
From May to December.
But the days grow short
When you reach September.
When the autumn weather
Turns the leaves to flame,
One hasn’t got time
For the waiting game”.

Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson

‘September Song’ was written for the musical play Knickerbocker Holiday that had a short Broadway run in 1938. The show was a sharp political allegory tricked out as a piece of period fluff. The score was written by the playwright Maxwell Anderson, who had a brief early career as a lyricist, and the towering genius Kurt Weill, probably most widely known for his musicals with Bertolt Brecht. Weill and Maxwell also furnished the score for Lost in the Stars, perhaps a more enduring piece.

Though Knickerbocker Holiday has faded from view, ‘September Song’ remains in the standard repertory. But, like Sondheim’s ‘Send in the Clowns’, it was written for an actor rather than a singer and many singers really do not know quite how to deliver it and so fail with it. The song came about because the chief character actor in the original musical felt that he needed something solo to do and the writers felt a number was called for. In such scrambling, genius comes alive.

Knickerbocker Holiday – Walter Huston and Jeanne Madden

The actor for whom the song was written – and here’s why the moment in Smash is such a sweet thing to do – was Walter Huston, Anjelica’s grandfather. It may well have been the only occasion on which he sang in public but his is still the gold standard for the song. Anjelica’s may be seen as a beautiful salute.

Huston's biography

Walter Huston’s name won’t mean much to any but old movie buffs under 80. But if you ever get the chance to catch the Humphrey Bogart vehicle The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, you can enjoy as prime a piece of movie-stealing as you might hope to see by Huston, then two years from death.

Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

As for British television, nothing this summer has come within a country mile of Kathy Burke’s Walking and Talking, another Sky Atlantic treat. Set against a perfectly recalled and recreated London in the mid-1970s, it is so much more than a mere character-talk piece. Indeed, it feels to me like nothing so much as the schoolgirl version of Waiting for Godot with Burke herself turning up as Pozzo. Four episodes – that’s all! – was twenty too few. Exquisite.

Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Ami Metcalf as Vladimir and Estragon

Back in the supposed real world, BBC Television News has already moved its entire operation to the Olympic park. Given that the whole of BBC1 (and indeed BBC3) is to be given over to broadcasting the games for the duration, how can anything to do with runners, sailors and cyclists possibly be dressed up as in any way news. Surely those tuning in for the news want some news, not a rehash of everything that’s already been on BBC1. I wish on the BBC a major news story that cannot have an Olympic angle shoe-horned into it. Let them all be in the wrong place at the wrong time and learn a good lesson about what a news service is expected to be.

Kathy Burke and Sean Gallagher as Pozzo and Lucky