Fleapit revisited:North By Northwest.

When Madison Avenue advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) goes for Martinis with his friends after work he ends up getting a bit more excitement than he'd hoped for. Thornhill is kidnapped by a couple of thugs, put in a back of a car, and driven to the estate of UN diplomat Lester Townsend (Philip Ober) where he's interrogated by Phillip Vandamm (James Mason almost purrs his lines) who is, for some reason, pretending to be Townsend.

When Vandamm's creepy stooge Leonard (a menacing looking Martin Landau makes good use of his piercing blue eyes, as they dart around they light up the screen) forces a bottle of Bourbon on Thornhill and then tries to bump him off, a now drunken Thornhill fails to convince his cynical mother, Clara (Jessie Royce Landis), or, perhaps, more importantly, the police of what has happened.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film North By Northwest (shown recently on BBC2, I caught up on the iPlayer) tells the story of what happens to Thornhill as he tries to prove he's not the man he's been mistaken for, the elusive George Kaplan. 

When one of Vandamm's goons kills Townsend, Thornhill, who has met with him to try to clear his name, becomes the chief suspect and soon he has both the police and Vandamm's mysterious organisation (which appears to be based in Washington DC (a view of the Capitol Building from a window confirms this) and has, at its head, a suspicious figure known only as The Professor (Leo G. Carroll)) after him.

He goes on the run and on the search for Kaplan. On a train to Chicago he meets with Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). Eve's a thoroughly modern woman, surprisingly so for the era. She's none too shabby either so when she comes on to Thornhill and offers to hide him from the police, it's everything he could have asked for. 

But what's in it for Eve? Why is she so desperate to shack up with America's most notorious fugitive? Thornhill's grand tour takes him from New York (we're treated to sights like the UN Secretariat Building, the Queensboro Bridge, and Grand Central Station) to Chicago (where NYC's yellow cabs are swapped for green ones), on to the plains of the midwest (for the infamous cropduster scene) and, eventually, to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota for the final denouement.

The film looks fantastic. Both Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are, of course, impeccably dressed and coiffeured throughout, the Art Deco cocktail bars and trains with fancy dining cars, the finned automobiles, even the less dynamic station wagons, and the oak dominated hotel foyers paint an enviable picture of 1950s New York and some of the buildings later on in the film, when we've headed out west, look as if they could have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

One scene even reminded me of Tracy Island from Thunderbirds. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that Gerry and Sylvia Andeson would have been Hitchcock fans. Even the stylised titles (c/o Saul Bass, naturally) look amazing and the Bernard Hermann score is a delight. There are some great lines too. Eve tells Thornhill "I had nothing to do that weekend so I decided to fall in love" and when she asks of him why he took so long shaving, Thornhill replies "big face, small razor".

It's one of the occasions where Grant can't resist a bit of screwball. I'm not sure that, or a bizarre laughing scene in an elevator, fit brilliantly with the overall mood of the film but that is more than made up for all the things that do fit together. A fantastic vertigo inducing scene shot from the top of a skyscraper sets us up for a journey fuelled not just by Cold War paranoia but also by plain old fashioned everyday paranoia.

Thornhill's not the easiest character to care about. He seems more upset when Eve tries to dump him than when he's kidnapped or someone tries to kill him. But that doesn't really matter. What the film lacks in emotional depth it more than compensates for in surface detail. It really is quite a journey. Such an extraordinary one that even the stone face of Teddy Roosevelt looks bemused by it.

From a Whisper to a Screen:The Undeclared War.

"The point is to get people used to the idea that everything is a lie. That there is no truth. Once they accept that .... the biggest liar wins" - Angie McMurray

Peter Kosminsky's recent The Undeclared War (Channel 4) could hardly be more topical. It's set in the UK, in 2024, during a run up to a general election. The ruling Tory party are hugely unpopular and are getting a lot of shit, quite correctly, for being corrupt and incompetent. Prime Minister Andrew Makinde (Adrian Lester), the first PM of colour in the UK, has replaced Boris Johnson, in something that was widely seen as a bloodless coup, fifteen months earlier and the country is in deep recession and its hospital corridors are full of sick and distressed patients.

Protests surround Whitehall and the far right are on the rise. On top of all this the country suddenly falls victim to a series of increasingly dangerous cyber attacks. At GCHQ in Cheltenham, a team of analysts is tasked with trying to prevent these attacks and, possibly - if some in government get their way, launching revenge attacks on those believed responsible. Vladimir Putin's Russia and the FSB.

Danny (Simon Pegg) heads up a team at GCHQ where he is joined in his work by Phil (Joss Porter), Max (Tom McKay), and a young American lady called Kathy (Maisie Richardson-Sellers). Reporting into Danny's boss David (Alex Jennings), the team are joined by a young student on work experience. Saara (Hannah Khalique-Brown) is, quite clearly, the owner of a brilliant mind but will her older, and mostly male, colleagues take her seriously? A teenager on work experience?

Saara's also got a fair bit of personal stuff going on. Her dad, Ahmed (Nitin Ganatra), is very unwell and her relationship with her mum, Yasmin (Bharti Patel), is so bad she's not even told her, or either of her siblings, about her new job. She's also in a relationship with a former tutor of hers. James (Edward Holcroft). 

Sleeping with one of his students is not the only thing John does that he perhaps should not. He takes a group of students with him to a climate change protest in Bristol and is rewarded by having his head kicked in by a load of fascist thugs.

In Whitehall, PM Makinde has, to use what now feels like antiquated parlance, a hawk on one shoulder in the form of Richard Marston (Ed Stoppard) and a dove, at least in comparison, on the other in the form of Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Kahn (Hattie Morahan). Marston's unpleasant, and pugnacious, personality seems a good fit for the current Tory administration but it also has to be said that Makinde, though often malicious and self-serving in intent, is articulate whereas Teresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss could barely string a coherent sentence together between the three of them. 

Makinde also cites the US, Germany, and France as allies which, as we've recently discovered, is better than Truss has managed so far. Away from the world of COBRA meetings, Saara has befriended the eccentric John Yeabsley (a deliciously hammy Mark Rylance). Yeabsley's an old hand at GCHQ and something of a grammar pedant. Modern developments appear to have left him behind but, over games of chess and triangular sandwiches, he becomes something of a second father figure to Saara and shares his memories, his experience, his homespun wisdom, and even his salt'n'vinegar Discos (great crisp choice) with her.

Saara can also call on the grudging help of the young maths genius Gabriel (Alfie Friedman) and a former Russian classmate of hers, Vadim (German Segal). Nearly a whole episode is given over to Vadim's return to St Petersburg where he's tasked by Glasvet (a sort of high level Russian trolling organisation) with creating online disinformation destabilising the UK. But who does he really work for?

The episode set in Russia is not the most gripping but is highly instructive and provides much exposition. Of course the war in Ukraine is mentioned but of more importance to The Undeclared War is the introduction of Marina (Tinatin Dalakishvili), a journalist who Vadim is clearly in love with. 

Marina is sent to London from Russia to work for Russia Global News. An organisation, as her boss Angie (Kerry Godliman) wryly notes, who have earned the nickname 'Putin's poodles'. Angie McMurray is an interesting, and quietly terrifying, character. She believes that both Britain and Russia are so broken they need to be torn apart, violently if need be, so that they can be rebuilt.

There is a lot in the way of Aleksandr Dugin's dubious philosophy in Angie's worldview and, like Dugin, she is more than happy to incite people to riot to achieve her aims. In a disUnited Kingdom, at a time when we already seem to have created the perfect storm and things look like they can't get any worse they, of course, do get worse (sound familiar?) and The Undeclared War starts off telling this story a bit slowly but once it gets going it becomes a pretty addictive watch.

There's lots of tense background music (c/o Debbie Wiseman), lots of doors, lots of brick walls, and lots of empty rooms and there are absolutely loads of shots of scrolling data on computer screens. To try and avoid too much repetition of this, the makers of The Undeclared War have chosen to depict some codebreaking scenes metaphorically and this means we end up, rather confusingly at first, watching Saara Parvin looking through phone books with a magnifying glass, abseiling, breaking into gyms, and bouncing a ball against a wall for bloody ages.

It's hard to care too much when a bank of computers crash and people chatting about BT Openreach and online banking is not particularly thrilling either. Some of the dialogue, "most of our tools have been rendered nugatory", is a bit clunky and some of the post-pandemic touches (no handshaking at GCHQ and more masks in 2024 than in 2022?) seem a bit overdone. 

A Kandinsky on the wall at the offices of the FSB seems like a rather obvious signifier that the action has switched to Russia and when Saara and Kathy's friendship looks as if it may move over to something less platonic that seems an unnecessary distraction to the main story. An avenue perhaps the makes of The Undeclared War might have better not gone down.

Those caveats aside, and admittedly there's quite a few, I really enjoyed The Undeclared War. A couple of good supporting performances from Gavi Singh Chera as Saara's brother Saj and Oliver Powell as a black hat hacker called Jolly Roger who GCHQ make use of and some interesting thoughts on deepfakes, Wikileaks, and Edward Snowden set the scene for a thriller that got more tense as it went on.

Not for everyone in it. Some, in the style of Don't Look Up, seemed oblivious to the obvious danger the country was in but others, especially Saara and Vadim, realise how much trouble is coming down the line and just how dystopian the future is beginning to look. Eventually, you find yourself caring about them and even this frustrating country. In the end, in what could have so easily been a dry and didactic drama, Peter Kosminsky managed to pull off human emotion. Something Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are proving themselves incapable of. 

 

Fleapit revisited:Moonage Daydream

David Bowie would have received his fair share of compliments in his life. He was called a genius, an icon for sexual liberation, Sky Arts called him Britain's most influential artist of the last fifty years and Rolling Stone named him the greatest rock star ever. To some he was nothing short of a god but in Brett Morgen's new Bowie film, Moonage Daydream, one of Bowie's fans, when asked about him at the height of Bowie's imperial phase, simply replies "he's smashing".

He was too. You almost forget just how many great songs Bowie had but Moonage Daydream does a pretty good job of reminding you of quite a lot of them. Heroes, Time, Quicksand, All The Young Dudes, Aladdin Sane, Sound And Vision, Warszawa,  Life On Mars, Space Oddity, Word On A Wing, Hallo Spaceboy. There's so many of them that sometimes Morgen cuts them off half way through or overdubs them with the sound of helicopters in flight, screams, and even other songs. I think at one point I caught a scene from The Wizard Of Oz.

It can be quite jarring at first but you soon grow into it. Morgen's style of documentary making is not dissimilar to that of an Adam Curtis or Asif Kapadia. There's no narration, no talking heads, and very little chronology. Instead it's a headfuck whirr of skulls, random graphics, overhead shots of cities, scenes of Bowie drinking milk in the back of a car driving through a desert, and, of course, lots of stars, rockets, and other space age signifiers.

There's also a surprisingly large amount of Russell Harty and even a little bit of Klaus Nomi. What there isn't is any mention of Bowie's first wife Angie, his kids - Duncan and Lexi, or any of the music that perhaps didn't quite make the grade. There's no Tin Machine, there's no Dancing In The Streets with Mick Jagger, and there's (disappointingly for me) none of that Anthony Newley influenced Decca Years stuff.

No Love You Til Tuesday, no Rubber Band, and no I Dig Everything. There's a clue as to why Bowie came to almost disavow this part of his career when he's interviewed about his childhood in the film. He never says as much but it seems it was not a happy one. When asked about his parents he responds by saying that his father is dead and that him and his mother did not have a close relationship. When asked about Brixton, where he was born, he claims to feel no ties to the place.

He even mentions that, as a child, he had no time for either Winnie the Pooh or Rupert Bear! The one person from his childhood he did speak fondly of was his maternal half-brother Terry who introduced the young Bowie to free jazz, beat poetry, and the occult before succumbing to schizophrenia and spending the rest of his life, he died in 1985, institutionalised. Bowie didn't necessarily understand free jazz or beat poetry but it was that which fascinated him about those things and he soon became a collector.

Not so much of things but of experiences, of people, of places. We zoom through images of those that inspired Bowie (Aleister Crowley, Fats Domino, WS Burroughs, Nietzsche, Little Richard) and those blur and melt into footage of Bowie films (The Man Who Fell To Earth, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Labyrinth) and rehearsals for a Broadway production of The Elephant Man in which Bowie played John Merrick.

We see Bowie's art (itself, to my eyes, influenced from the likes of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner) and we follow the man himself as he moves from London to Los Angeles and then on to Berlin. The film is most interesting when Bowie talks about the methods and motivations behind his work, what he hopes to achieve and why he thinks he wants to achieve it.

At all times, Bowie remains an enthusiastic supporter of art, a passionate advocate of experimentation, and, more than anything, a lover of life. Even as he rolls his eyes at one of Harty's inane provocations, there is a playfulness and a glee behind the facade of distance.

As Bowie ages, and his success becomes at first even bigger before receding a little, he becomes more confident in himself and feels less desire to hide behind characters like Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and The Thin White Duke. 

His undying, and total, love for Iman cures him of the cynicism he once held for love, for settling down, and for building a life and if his music is rarely as stellar or as innovative from the early eighties onwards (there are, of course, glorious exceptions like his final album, 2016's Blackstar was released just two days before he died) he seems comfortable with that.

He seemed to be, as much as anything else, a man very happy with his lot and copious footage of Bowie dancing (check those legs move) seems good evidence of this. I mean, he's got the tunes to dance to. He wrote most of them. Modern Love, Ashes To Ashes, DJ, Let's Dance, Starman, Changes. I could go on.

You'd probably need to already love Bowie to love this film, it's not an 'in' for anyone not already on board, but if you do love Bowie you will love a great deal about it. The film is good. It's really good. But can it do justice to Bowie's vast influence and his enormous talent? Of course not. One hundred and forty minutes is a good length for a feature film but it's not enough to do Bowie justice and I'm sure Brett Morgen knows that. 

What Moonage Daydream can do is give us a sense of how incredible it all was. Bowie's writing, his dancing, his view on the world, his art, his acting, his cheeky interviews, his mind, and, more than anything, the wonderful music that seems to just get better with time. The further away we get from Bowie's era it seems, the more we understand his music. The film was great but Bowie? He was smashing.

Thanks to Darren for joining me and for a quick debrief in The Clapham North pub afterwards.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery:Picasso and Ingres at the National Gallery.

Just two paintings! That was it. The National Gallery started trailing their Picasso Ingres:Face to Face exhibition some time ago and on first reading of it I imagined a fairly extensive affair telling the story of how Picasso, long acclaimed as the greatest artist of the 20th century, took influence from the French neoclassical painter Jean-August-Dominique Ingres and adapted it for a modern sensibility.

When it became apparent that it was to be a free exhibition I knew then it would likely be smaller. I thought perhaps The National would host it in their Sunley Room (they have some pretty good exhibitions there) but on booking a (free) ticket I was quickly disabused of that notion.

Picasso Ingres:Face to Face was in one small room in the east of the gallery and there were, as I've already mentioned, just TWO paintings in it. They're both very good paintings. Of that there is no doubt. But it's pretty thin gruel even when wadded out with a few explanatory signs and a quote from each artist written directly on the wall.

"Who is there, among the greats, who has not imitated? Nothing is made with nothing..." - Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - Madame Moitessier (1856)

The quote ascribed to Ingres is clearly designed to show that he wouldn't be bothered by Picasso riffing on his style - and that Ingres himself borrowed from past masters. Raphael being the most cited example. His 1856 portrait of Madame Moitessier was made to celebrate the then 23 year old's marriage to the (44 year old) businessman Paul-Sigisbert Moitessier.

Ingres actually began the painting in 1844 (the year of the marriage) but it took him an astonishing twelve years to finish. Initially, the plan was to have Moitessier's young daughter sat on her lap but as time passed said daughter grew too large and was replaced with a fan. Rich people loved their fans back in those days.

Ingres combines contemporary Parisian clothing with classical references and turns the painting into a double portrait by showing Moitessier's reflection in a mirror behind her. When Picasso first encountered the Ingres portrait in Paris in 1921 it was at a time when he was looking to move away from Cubism and experiment with new ideas but it wasn't until over a decade later, 1932, that he created what you may call a cover version of it.

Whereas the Ingres work was a commission - and one he nearly didn't take, Picasso's Woman With A Book (which you'd normally need to travel to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California to see) is a portrait of the randy old goat's lover Marie-Therese Walter.

Picasso met her on the streets of Paris in 1927 (she was 17, he was 46) and was struck by her 'interesting face'. She began modelling for the older man and, inevitably, she became his lover. Even though he was still married to the ballet dancer Olga Khoklova. Olga was 36 so perhaps Picasso considered her to be getting on a bit.

Walter's in a similar pose to Moitessier - note the position of her right hand, there's the double portrait thing going on (although some believe that may be Picasso's profile rather than Walter's), and instead of a fan she has a book on her lap. Elsewhere, Picasso has done his own thing. Patches of jarring colour on Walter's dress contrast with a darker background (believed to reflect the fact they were having an affair at the time) and whereas Moitissier looks directly out to the viewer, Walter is, in true Picasso style, painted both in profile and head on.

 Pablo Picasso - Woman With A Book (1932)

"One's work is a way of keeping a diary", Picasso is reported to have once said and I'm with him on that. My blog is, in ways, my diary. It's not as interesting as Picasso's, few are, but it does at least have more than two pages. An interesting exhibition but one that need not detain you for very long. Something more comprehensive next time please!

Mathematically Safe:Man Vs Robot.

A mathematician walks one mile south. She then walks one mile east. After that, she walks one mile north. She finds herself back in the exact same place she started. She sees a bear. What colour is that bear?

The observant amongst you will have noted that her three mile walk does not include a westerly stretch and wondered how, without that, she could possibly have ended up in the exact same place. Some of you will have deduced that the only place on the globe that would be possible is the North Pole. So our mathematician (and I'm not sure why this Arctic wanderer needs to be a mathematician) must have been at the North Pole and the only bear you'd be likely to see there is a polar bear. So the bear was white.

This was one of the many fun challenges set to the audience by Junaid Mubeen during last night's Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk, 'Mathematical Intelligence:What we have that machines don't'. Junaid is a mathematician turned educator (and a former Countdown champion) who has worked with the celebrated author Simon Singh and has written a book with the same title as his Skeptics talk.

The book was written because Junaid wanted to counteract some of the hype that surrounds AI and he began by telling us how, in June of this year, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made claims that one of his company's chatbots, LaMDA, had become a sentient being.

Not many took his claims seriously, and Google placed him on administrative leave, but these claims are becoming more and more common. This idea is that AI has become so intelligent that it is sentient but Junaid, and I'd agree with him, would argue that intelligence, especially of the artificial kind, does not equate with consciousness and that consciousness is of more importance when deciding what/who is, or isn't, sentient.

The idea that software can be sentient goes back at least as far as 1966 when the mock Rogerian psychotherapist Eliza was believed to be giving answers that were too complex for a mere computer to come up with. You have a look at the exchange with Eliza below and make your own mind up.

As humans, we have a tendency to anthopomorphise our own creations and in doing so, Junaid contends, this means we place too much trust in them. Ultimately, letting computers and systems make decisions in our life. From something as minor as choosing what car insurance to go for to something as important as deciding when to bomb a factory in Iraq.

Computers are, of course, very good at performing calculations quickly. That's what they're for. But Junaid Mubeen wanted to show us the side of maths that computers are less good at. The side of maths that we humans (for now at least) are better at. He talked occasionally of beautiful maths and ugly maths and he was as passionate about his subject as he was knowledgeable.

It made for a really interesting talk. Junaid believes that mathematics is actually (again, for now - the show included several caveats as our speaker was reluctant to indulge in speculation) resilient to the threat of automation and to make his case he gave us some examples of where computer reasoning can go wrong. Reasoning not being something that can be reduced to algorithms.

Humans look for patterns everywhere. To try to make sense of an often senseless world. Apophenia is a word that relates to finding patterns and connections in the unrelated and when it comes to maths one example is the equation n + n(squared) + 41 = a prime number. See below:-

2 + 4 + 41 = 47

3 + 9 + 41 = 53

4 + 16 + 41 = 61

47, 53, and 61 are all prime numbers and this continues so it appears we have ourselves a pattern. In fact you need to get to the number 40 (40 + 1600 + 41 = 1681) before the pattern is broken. 1681 is divisible by 41 as well as by 1 and itself. We've been led down the path by something that looks very much like a pattern but isn't one.

A series of odd numbers, in sequence, added up always seems to result in a square number. See below:-

1 + 3 = 4

1 + 3 + 5 = 9

1 + 3 + 5 = 7 = 16

1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 = 25

Four is the square of two, nine is the square of three, sixteen is the square of four - and so on and so on. It looks as if we have identified a pattern here and, in this case, we have. There were far more complex examples of this last night but you probably get the point. It sometimes takes a long time, and a lot of computation, to work out if something is a true pattern or not.

So why do we not, quite simply, hand over these calculations to cold, hard, and rational computers? It's because many computers are not as rational as we like to think they are. They have been programmed by us humans and because of this they incorporate many of our biases.

Machine learning, like us, looks for patterns. A good example is a CV scoring algorithm that was created for Amazon. Based on their previous recruitment agenda, it picked up that there was a strong anti-female bias in Amazon's past recruitment policy and replicated it into its algorithms. If any CV contained female pronouns or any other clear indicators that the applicant was a woman they would be marked down.

To their credit, and I'd rarely be nice about Amazon, the company did delete the algorithm before it went live and one presumes they've come up with something fairer and more even handed now.

Another illustrative puzzle was set for the audience:-

"There are 125 sheep and 5 dogs in a flock. How old is the shepherd?"

It's clear to most us that there is no information whatsoever in that statement from which we can deduce the age of the shepherd. But if you were to ask that question to a group of school children, many of them would at least try to give an answer. Most, apparently, would say the shepherd is 25. 

Possibly because the only sum that results in a reasonably sensible age for a shepherd is to divide the 125 sheep by the 5 dogs. School kids are eager to please - and they're still learning - so that's understandable. But it's interesting to note that when this poser was fed to a very mathematically advanced piece of software it too attempted an answer and came out with a right load of old nonsense!

Suggesting the shepherd was 125 years old because that would be the only age at which there would be the same number of sheep as dogs. Whatever that means. It sounds unhelpful but it's actually helpful in telling us that, in these ways, AI's not there yet. If you write a piece of software in code every single letter, digit, mathematical symbol, and forward slash are vital. They have to be in the right place for things to work.

Anybody who's read a WhatsApp message will know that human communication is rarely so elegant. There are typos, people miss out crucial punctuation, spell words wrong, and make all manner of orthographical howlers. As humans we can normally, except in extreme cases (I remember once waiting for my friend Simon in a pub, he was running late as usual, I got a text informing me he was sorry he was late but would be there by Christmas), work out what the intended message was. But computer software, like Mr Logic from Viz, takes everything as read. Literally.

And that's why, for now, we have the edge over the robots who will probably one day take over. This fascinating talk, in which I've only covered a small part, took in Alan Turing, the Deep Blue chess computer, Euclid, slide rules, DALL-E 2 image generation software, G.H.Hardy, and how the game of Monopoly was once also known as the Landlord's Game and the Q&A took in Fermat's Last Theorem, Terminator 2, Facebook, the Riemann conjecture (or hypothesis), calculus, the singularity, and a robot that is determined to turn the entire planet into a giant paperclip factory.

It was fascinating but then I like maths (maths can be fun, as long as you choose the right sum) and I love it when Skeptics do a mathematical talk so I thank them, and compere Michael Marshall, for that. But I also like it when they do nature and in a fortnight's time, Seirian Sumner will be talking about wasps. I wonder if wasps do maths.

Venice:From Canaletto to a New Atlantis?

I've only visited Venice once. In 2014, on my way from Verona to Treviso to catch a flight back to London I spent about an hour at Venice bus station. I didn't see a single canal, gondola, or even any water. It felt like a wasted opportunity but I thought I could always come back. Having attended Canaletto's Venice Revisited at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich yesterday I now realise time may be against me.

Canaletto - A Regatta on the Grand Canal (1740)

While also, at the same time, wondering if it's even advisable to go there as a tourist. Since Canaletto's time (1697-1768) the sea level in Venice has risen by sixty centimetres and flooding has become both more frequent and more severe. The permanent population of the city has plummeted as people escape both the floods and the exorbitant property prices. Many places bought up to be used as hotels, AirBnBs, and other tourist infrastructure making the city ever more unaffordable to most Venetians.

In many ways, it's two of the things that have, in the past, made the city so prosperous that could now be its undoing:- its water and its tourists. For many years Venice was a gateway for trade between east and west (carpets and spices arrived into the city from Egypt, Turkey, and Syria) and that allowed many of its great palaces and churches to be built. Come the time of the Grand Tour in the 18th century, Venice was one of the most important destinations and if you were rich enough (and you had to be pretty rich to do the Grand Tour) you'd mark your visit to Venice by buying one of Canaletto's masterful paintings of his home city as a souvenir.

If you were really rich - as Lord John Russell, the 4th Duke of Bedford, was - you'd not just buy a Canaletto. You'd commission him to paint an entire series of Venetian views for you. It's these paintings that make up the first half of the National Maritime Museum's show and you'd have to be something of a curmudgeon to not admit they are very beautiful. You can normally only see them by visiting Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire (as the TADS did, back in 2016, taking in an elephant while we were there).

The idea behind The Grand Tour was to teach British upper class men, future statesmen and generals, about art, architecture, and classical history. Most major European cities would be included but Lord John Russell's tour, or at least the plan for his tour - we're not sure how many locations he managed to visit in the end, was unusually extensive.

From places you'd expect like Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Florence, and Athens to more unlikely destinations such as Zaragoza, Mantua, Hamburg, and Gdansk and even as far away as Agra, Cairo, Kandahar, Baghdad, and Samarkand. Even Inverness was included.

Giovanni Antonio Canal was born in Venice on 18th October 1697. He died in the same city seventy years later but by then he was better known as Canaletto. Meaning 'little canal'. He began his career painting backdrops for plays and operas but it was his city views that brought him his fame. He was particularly popular with British visitors and even lived for a time in London (there's a blue plaque on Beak Street in Soho marking his former dwelling).

Canaletto - View of the Doge's Palace at the Piazzetta seen from the Bacino (1731-36)

The Woburn Series, as the paintings commissioned by Lord John Russell are now known, take in many of the city's most celebrated landmarks and most famous festivals but they also show everyday Venetian life, people hanging their laundry out of their windows or going about their daily business. Canaletto treats his portrayal of the water of Venice's canals with equal importance as he does the imposing and beautiful architecture of the city though the people, when inspected close up, are rarely clearly defined.

Mere blobs against the majestic background. Making Canaletto a highly unlikely pioneer of Impressionism. Grand Tour visitors would often reach Venice from the Italian mainland via gondola and the view (above) of the Piazzetta di San Marco would be the one that would great them. In recent years, visitors would most likely have arrived in Venice on enormous cruise ships and you can't help thinking that experience wouldn't be nearly so rewarding.

Until 1854, the Rialto Bridge was the only bridge spanning the Grand Canal, the city's main waterway, and it, too, became a tourist attraction. In Canaletto's time, mirrors and lamps were sold from shops on the bridge. Now those shops primarily sell souvenirs and other tourist tat.

Canaletto - View on the Grand Canal, with the Bridge of the Rialto and the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi on the left (1731-36)

Canaletto - View of the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Bembo to Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Piazzetta di San Marco, with the Libreria Vecchi on the left, and Palazzo Ducale on the right (1731-36)

I'm not completely dismissing tourism (I hate it when people claim they're a traveller rather than a tourist - as if there's any real difference). I love being a tourist either abroad, elsewhere in the UK, or even in my home city of London. But, even though nobody needs that many mirrors and lamps, it must be a problem when you can't buy everyday goods because the shops are full of snow globes and fudge.

While Canaletto's paintings celebrated the city, they also did a fair bit to attract yet more visitors to Venice and soon enough people who'd never been there would be able to recognise its campaniles, its piazzas, its churches, and its bridges from his paintings.

Canaletto - The Camp Santa Maria Formosa with the church and campanile, to the left beyond the two narrow bridges spanning the Rio di Santa Maria Formosa, the Palazzo Grimani (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Scuola di San Rocco (1731-36)

Canaletto wasn't always completely honest with his audience though. In The Scuola di San Rocco, above, the artist has created a spacious square where none existed. To be able to take in this view you'd actually need to be able to see through the stone wall of a nearby church but Canaletto wished to sell paintings and to sell paintings you needed idealised compositions.

On the other hand he painted local people (and their dogs) in then less celebrated squares like Campo Francesco Morosini. In that, he appears to be trying to capture at least a version of genuine Venetian life. The curators of the exhibition are keen for us to know that, in modern times, Venetians have taken to walking their dogs either very early in the morning or late at night so as not to lose them in the crowds. Have they never heard of leads?

Canaletto - The Campo Francesco Morosini from San Stefano, with the Church of San Vitale on the right (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Piazza San Marco looking from the Basilica di Marco to the Church of San Geminiano (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Entrance to the Grand Canal with the Dogiana and the Church of Santa Maria della Salute (1731-36)

There are times when the exhibition rams home its point about the deleterious effects of mass tourism a bit too heavily. Not least because in showing us all these spectacular images of Venice it will be making many of us want to visit. They are giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

Venice has had its share of problems in the past. As a busy port it was particularly vulnerable to plagues and illnesses. Cargo ships can carry diseases as easily as they can goods. Between the years 1575 and 1577, 30% of the city's population were killed by the bubonic plague and the Church of the Redentore was built on Giudecca island, by the hugely influential architect Andrea Palladio, to commemorate those that passed. In an interesting piece of circularity, Woburn Abbey itself is built in a Palladian style.

Canaletto - The Piazza San Marco looking towards the Basilica di San Marco and the Campanile (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Church of the Redentore on the Giudecca (1731-36)

Canaletto - View on the Grand Canal looking north from the Palazzo Contarini dagli Scrigni to the Palazzo Rezzonico (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Entrance to the Arsenal with the Oratory of the Madonna dell'Arsenale (1731-36)

Elsewhere, the curators show us that Canaletto has painted the Arsenale (Venice's main shipyard), the Pontei del Tre Archi (translation probably not required there), and numerous gondola ferries and fine buildings. While at the same time letting us know that shipbuilding is dying out in Venice, that the three arched bridge has been fitted with a wheelchair ramp (surely not a bad thing?), that only eight gondola ferries remain in the whole of Venice (including one, apparently, in the below View of the Grand Canal), and that many of the buildings in these paintings were knocked down to build a railway bridge.

Canaletto's Venice Revisited is nothing if not schematic - and that's before we even get to the last couple of, more politicised, rooms. The rooms containing the Canaletto paintings are fleshed out with models of gondolas, French guidebooks, watercolours, etchings, maps, and even an invoice. Yes, an invoice! While I was there two elderly, and somewhat posh, gentlemen were surveying the exhibits and commenting in the fruitiest of accents I've heard for some time.

Canaletto - View on the Cannaregio looking towards the Ponte di San Giobbe, with the Palazzo Testa on the left (1731-36)

Canaletto - View of the Grand Canal looking up from the Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto, with the Palazzo Contarini delle Figure to the right, and on the left the Palazzo Balbi (1731-36)

Canaletto - View of the Grand Canal, from the Sacca di Santa Chiara, with, on the left, the wall of the Convent of Corpus Domini (1731-36)

Already softened up for the message, the show ends with a couple of rooms dedicated to VENICE TODAY. Whilst acknowledging it remains one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, it has also gained a reputation as a 'dying city'. A city of floods, of dwindling population, and of protests against the unfeasibly large cruise ships. Venice, it seems, is a poster city for the damage that climate change is doing to the world. There are even fears that ultimately it will disappear under water, a new Atlantis.

It's long been a city of posters, if not a poster city for wanton environmental destruction, as a series of rather fetching advertisments for both the city and the cruise ships that once docked in its lagoon (the larger ones were banned but only last year) demonstrate.

'Venise et le Lido' travel poster (1920s)

'Venise' rail travel poster (1921)

Royal Mail line Mediterranean Cruises poster (1929)

Venice travel poster (1970s)

A city with a population of approximately 50,000 people that attracts more than two and a half thousand times that number every year is bound to have problems balancing things and while most people accept that mass tourism helps with economic development there is also a widespread belief that, in Venice, the situation has become unsustainable.

The air pollution caused by the cruise ships, and the damage they do to the city's waterways, has made those ships the focus of mass protests by the No Grandi Navi ("no big ships") movement. Cruise ship visitors are described as "hit-and-run" tourists because their time in the city is so brief. Many of them will have been fed and watered on board the giant floating tower blocks so will probably only make very minor contributions to the Venetian economy.

A port bow view of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company cruise ship Stratheden in Venice, Italy (1937)

Cruise ship Sea Princess arriving at Canale di San Marco in Venice (1980s)

MSC Fantasia cruise ship in Venice (2014)

Flood defences have been built around the lagoon in recent years but these were beset with delays and corruption scandals and many are still sceptical about what effects (either positive or negative) these defences will have. Some believe it may already be impossible to save both the city AND the lagoon and that a choice will soon need to be made.

Many Venetians have already left the city to seek employment elsewhere. Work in the tourist industry is often low paid and unreliable. But many others have stayed in Venice. They refute the idea that their city is dying and point to centuries of resilience, ingenuity, and evolution. They believe that Venice can not only survive but prosper. That Venice can become a new kind of poster city. 

A poster city for the kind of sustainable regeneration that everywhere in the world will need to undertake soon enough. Perhaps the days of Canaletto's grand regattas and Ascension Day celebrations are no more but I hope Venice can survive. Not just as a museum piece but as a vibrant city that provides as good a home to its citizens as it does an awesome destination for its tourists. Bona fortuna!

Matthias Scholz - Protest against big cruise ships, Venice (2019)

Canaletto - The Grand Canal, Ascension Day:The embarkation of the Doge of Venice for the Ceremony of the Marriage of the Adriatic (1731-36)