‘Blurring the lines between fact and fiction’:Ken Russell, the BBC and ‘Television Biography’

Working for the BBC arts programmes Monitor and Omnibus during the 1960s, the director Ken Russell was responsible for a series of biographical films based on the lives of painters and composers. Tracing the development of Russell’s work from Prokofiev (1961) and Elgar (1962) through to Bartok (1964) and The Debussy Film (1965), the article examines how Russell’s incorporation of elements of drama into the arts documentary generated arguments, both within the BBC and beyond, about the legitimacy of mixing ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in such works. These debates focused, in particular, on the use of ‘dramatic reconstruction’ and subjective ‘interpretation’ and the ‘fairness’ of the films’ treatment of the artists and composers with which they dealt. As a result of its unusually explicit representations of sex and violence, Russell’s film about the composer Richard Strauss, Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), took these arguments to a new level. Through an examination of the responses that the film generated, the article concludes that, due to the degree to which the programme departed from BBC norms of documentary practice, and the related values of ‘impartiality’ and ‘good taste’, it became a work that tested the very limits of what the BBC then considered it possible to transmit

Facile formation of highly mobile supported lipid bilayers on surface-quaternized pH-responsive polymer brushes

Poly(2-dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate) (PDMA) brushes are grown from planar substrates via surface atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP). Quaternization of these brushes is conducted using 1-iodooctadecane in n-hexane, which is a non-solvent for PDMA. Ellipsometry, AFM, and water contact angle measurements show that surface-confined quaternization occurs under these conditions, producing pH-responsive brushes that have a hydrophobic upper surface. Systematic variation of the 1-iodooctadecane concentration and reaction time enables the mean degree of surface quaternization to be optimized. Relatively low degrees of surface quaternization (ca. 10 mol % as judged by XPS) produce brushes that enable the formation of supported lipid bilayers, with the hydrophobic pendent octadecyl groups promoting in situ rupture of lipid vesicles. Control experiments confirm that quaternized PDMA brushes prepared in a good brush solvent (THF) produce non-pH-responsive brushes, presumably because the pendent octadecyl groups form micelle-like physical cross-links throughout the brush layer. Supported lipid bilayers (SLBs) can also be formed on the non-quaternized PDMA precursor brushes, but such structures proved to be unstable to small changes in pH. Thus, surface quaternization of PDMA brushes using 1-iodooctadecane in n-hexane provides the best protocol for the formation of robust SLBs. Fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) studies of such SLBs indicate diffusion coefficients (2.8 ± 0.3 μm s–1) and mobile fractions (98 ± 2%) that are comparable to the literature data reported for SLBs prepared directly on planar glass substrates

Creating testable questions in practical conservation:a process and 100 questions

It is now clear that the routine embedding of experiments into conservation practice is essential for creating reasonably comprehensive evidence of the effectiveness of actions. However, an important barrier is the stage of identifying testable questions that are both useful but also realistic to carry out without a major research project. We identified approaches for generating such suitable questions. A team of 24 participants crowdsourced suggestions, resulting in a list of a hundred possible tests of actions.</p