Television
The perfect measure
Ian Hislop
If you were a medieval pilgrim to Chartres cathedral you could get a 'clerke' to explain the stain glass windows to you. We now have Professor Christopher Frayling to do the job for us. A Strange Landscape (BBC2, Saturday, 8 p.m.) gave us an armchair pilgrimage and Frayling's exegesis of just one of the 176 widows was a classic example of the power of television in the right hands.
While the camera provided the images the presenter talked us through the three biblical stories that were being told and drew out the parallels between them. He then pointed out 'the message from the sponsors' in a panel depicting the shoe- makers whose guild had funded the win- dow in question and who might be considered to have a vested interest in the whole business of pilgrimage. Close-ups revealed details that the eye would normal- ly miss. Adam clutches his throat after he has eaten the apple in the garden of Eden — hence the Adam's apple. The passers-by in the parable of the Good Samaritan are not looking away from the scene as one usually imagines. They are having a good gawp.
The professor concluded by bringing up the popular analogy of stain-glass being a sort of medieval comic book for the illiter- ate. But he then undermined it by asking how many comic books could tell three interwoven metaphysical stories at the same time as employing a unique symbol- ism of geometry, colour and light. He is all for making the subject accessible but he does not make the mistake of oversimplify- ing it. His preferred analogy was not a comic-book but 'an encyclopaedia in lime- stone and glass'.
Frayling is one of that rare breed — a convincing media don. Without being tricksy or patronising he manages to make the idea of the medieval landscape interest- ing. Yes, he flies around in a helicopter above Chartres and later walks around in a giant treadwheel but because he talks so well the effect is not distracting but engrossing. The intellectual content is not lost underneath the visuals.
The photography in this programme is superb which is just as well when the pre- senter's thesis is that the medieval cathe- drals were designed as facsimiles of the Holy City and represented a new architec- ture of light. They have to look pretty spectacular Rkjustify this. But they do and Frayling's commentaries are themselves enlightening. Explaining the construction of the ribbed roof of Chartres he said that it was like putting up a stone umbrella, set- ting it firm and then taking the handle away. He compared the huge outbreak of building in France that followed Chartres to the space race. Eighty cathedrals were put up in the 12th and 13th century out of this desire to build higher and higher and to reach the heavens in stone. The vaults look remarkably like rockets and Frayling even got away with saying the builders were `boldly going where no man had gone before'.
He also put the cathedrals in the context not of our architectural sense but that of the time. The medieval landscape was one of single storey low buildings and the effect of these gigantic white stone structures soaring up to the sky must have been extraordinary.
The insight, the learning lightly worn but still worn, made this programme a real pleasure. On Saturday night one could learn that the four feasts of the Virgin at Chartres actually coincided with four big textile fairs. Abbot Suger, whose theories of light and brilliance set off the whole gothic style thought he was inspired by St Denis but had actually mixed up three dif- ferent Denis's from Christian history. Pil- grims at the time complained about being given rotten food and short measures of drink wherever they stayed on the way. At Chartres the townspeople quarried the stone themselves and as an act of faith a small community of 10,000 built the great- est structure in western Christendom. They believed it would help win them eternal life.
On BBC1 at the same time 15 million people were watching The National Lottery in the belief that they might win a lot of money.
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