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Telly addicts

Mary Beard is marvellous

392 replies

TheYuleLogLady · 14/12/2010 21:57

i love her. i want to go to pompeii and sare a botle of wine with hr.

OP posts:
catsinthejinglebelfry · 19/12/2010 00:02

Oh BoF - don't go.

Mary - this is v lazy of me, but how many more episodes are there? I'm v keen to tell DH (who is the culture vulture in our house,for some unknown reason) that MB has tipped me off about the next episode....

catsinthejinglebelfry · 19/12/2010 00:04

good post aitch.

The Clare Balding thing really really rankled, especially the way she seemed to get flak for her very reasonable comments about his nasty attitude. I know it's what he's paid for but........

AitchTwoOh · 19/12/2010 00:05
GrendelsMum · 19/12/2010 10:07

Actually, according to Amanda Vickery's book, the relationship between servant and employer could be both much closer and more fraught than we tend to think of them today. (More along the lines of that post in AIBU a couple of months ago about 'my cleaner is stealing from me but I don't want to sack her').

Why on earth shouldn't someone aged 60 or so look aged 60? Was A. A. Gill really complaining about that?

Hassledge · 19/12/2010 10:18

Dammit - now I want to actually go and pay money for a copy of the ST so I can read the Gill piece.

The upshot of this will be a) an additional £1.75 (I'm guessing wildly) in the Murdoch pocket and b) me ranting furiously for the rest of the day.

senua · 19/12/2010 11:30

Why has this descended into a discussion about appearances? SEA started a thread the other day about a Horizon programme on Maths. There were some decidedly dodgy (male, academic) haircuts and jumpers but no-one saw fit to comment on them, so why are we commenting on an academic woman's appearance? (and when I say 'we' I don't just mean society at large, I mean us women on MN)

AitchTwoOh · 19/12/2010 11:35

why not read the thread before getting torn into the telling-off, senua? Hmm

senua · 19/12/2010 11:45

Eh? I have read it. I've even contributed a couple of times, you may have noticed.Hmm
Why are we discussing it? Full stop.
Not whether AAG or anyone else is right or not. But why is it even a topic for conversation?
We have stopped talking about Pompeii and are discussing the presenter's dress sense instead: this is Not Good.

AitchTwoOh · 19/12/2010 11:54

MB hasn't been back on in ages, senua. she was the one who brought up appearance. what he says appears to have been hurtful, so perhaps people are commenting on her appearance as one woman to another, in case she was hurt.

anyway, what fascinating insights/questions do you have on the matter of Ancient Rome? why don't you kick that off, rather that tutting at people who are trying to be kind.

marybeard · 19/12/2010 12:07

Yes, hi... I havent been sulking, just working and writing a blog. It's about something else, but at the end I refer to AA. My line is that if you go on tv you have to take what comes.. and I feel pretty OK as I have had huge amounts of positive feedback. But imaging what it would be like to read that .. just ad feminam appearance stuff -- if you were feeling a bit down!
Phew .. I'm lucky, but as someone said.. how is a middleaged woman supposed to look. Isnt middleaged OK?!

AitchTwoOh · 19/12/2010 12:15

lol at not sulking.

your line is a good one, but as you say thank god you were feeling pretty chipper otherwise. these things do sting, regardless of how amazing one's personal image.

it is crazy, the way women look compared to men on TV. look at american television, where it is more usual and indeed acceptable to see older women terribly disfigured by plastic surgery than it is altered by the aging process.

SantasSackura · 19/12/2010 12:19

HI, I didn't manage to watch the programme, but am very interested in StethstarofBethlehem's question...

senua · 19/12/2010 12:21

double eh? @ aitch

You had the earlier discussion with Mary where the politics of all this was laid out. It seems to me that she is entirely aware of the cynical 'logic' of what AAG is doing and has not taken it to heart. She has been around long enough not to be taken in and hurt by games like that. And whilst the words of anonymous nobodies may be nice, I doubt that she will take that much comfort from them.

(Drafted this and then spotted that MB has posted again. I think, if I may be so bold, that she has sort concurred with what I said)

Whippoorwhill · 19/12/2010 12:21

Finally caught up with Mary's programme on the iplayer. As a regular reader of her blog I was very much looking forward to it.

We thoroughly enjoyed it and both teenagers watched avidly and asked questions and didn't once try to slope off and play video games. High praise indeed.

AitchTwoOh · 19/12/2010 12:25

sorry senua, would respond but am too busy chuckling at the fact that you wrote 'love your shoes!' and then came on here to tick people off about talking about such trivialities as personal appearance. lol. Grin

AitchTwoOh · 19/12/2010 12:25

and still nothing from you on Ancient Rome, i see... Grin

sethstarofbethlehemsmum · 19/12/2010 12:32

Mary looked bloody brilliant in the coat/shoes combo - every inch the attractive, interesting, lively, intelligent older woman. The fact that Gill finds it distressing in such a terribly personal way (it really seems to have upset him) speaks volumes about his attitude to women. It is no surprise to find him slagging off your mention of masculinity, further down the review.
The problem is, Mary, that this style of dress is not deferent enough: as Sheila Jeffreys argues in Beauty and Misogyny, the reason why women are meant to trip around in high heels, dye their hair to youthful colours, wear clothes that show off their figure etc, is as a compliment to men. Allowing yourself to go on telly without undergoing the necessary preparation is experienced by men like Gill as very rude.

How much of an arse could this man be.... 'Just turning up as a [insulting phrase censored because it, and he, are revolting] and demanding to be taken seriously is an enormous vanity' - as if her career as a Cambridge Classics professor, authorship of a hugely popular book on the subject, being acknowledged by generations of students as a brilliant lecturer, were not adequate reasons to think we might be possibly interested in what she has to say about Pompeii! Confused

OK, and the bit in the review that really makes him look pathetic: he tries to place himself on the moral and intellectual high ground by finding an aspect of Beard's argument to attack. Obviously he personally gets all antsy when she makes points about Roman masculinity, so he assumes there must be something wrong with the argument, and finds it in the fact that she is supposedly using 'the present' to explain 'the past'. He even gives it a posh sounding name, 'the great archaic fallacy'. (He's a bit woolly here.... does he mean 'a modern concept'? in what sense can you not use the present to explain the past? How do we normally do history then?) Because Gill, with the extraordinary arrogance that you see in his type of man, doesn't seem to twig that Mary Beard as a historian who has thought endlessly about the complicated relationship between the present and the past, will have a far more sophisticated understanding of this relationship than him. No, he thinks the very fact she has used a modern word, 'paternalistic' (I thought she said patriarchal, but hey ho) to refer to the Romans represents some terrible theoretical errors and he, the mighty Gill, has found her out in it!
wanker.

senua · 19/12/2010 12:37

What is your problem Aitch?

OK. I'll repeat what I said earlier; "Excellent programme. A nice introduction, I hope it gets a bit more science-y later on. There must be so many tests that you can do on those bones. Ditto the poo in the sewers - we had a teaser about what might be discovered by analysis, but no detail yet." Will we get more science, Mary? For example, the skull was said to be African just by looking at the shape of it. Are you going to show any tests which give more detail of the location of where it came from?

Happy now Aitch?

sethstarofbethlehemsmum · 19/12/2010 12:38

Senua Grin

You did say 'loved your shoes':

"senua Sat 18-Dec-10 23:04:40
That naughty twinkle in the eye was definitely from a 16 year old.
Loved your shoes!"

SantasSackura · 19/12/2010 12:39

LOL LOL SSM!

SantasSackura · 19/12/2010 12:40

@ your rebuff to Gill

AitchTwoOh · 19/12/2010 12:44

good lord, senua, give it up. Grin look, the conversation is likely to be about the gill review now, there is nothing you can do about it... it's Sunday, the paper's out and no amount of tellings-off will change the fact that people might wish to discuss it. and in any case you're right, her shoes were lovely.

i don't really see what your problem is, tbh, the conversation had already advanced past just talking about appearance by the time you showed up this morning. Confused asking why we were talking about appearance when a. we weren't and b. it was completely apparent from the thread seems a little obtuse to me.

senua · 19/12/2010 12:47

Yup. I said I loved her shoes because I have a thing for shoes and I was trying to be 'nice' (to use Aitch's word) without making personal comments.

AitchTwoOh · 19/12/2010 12:48

excellent post sethsmum, btw.

SantasSackura · 19/12/2010 12:50

I think Senua means that it's ironic that appearances are being discussed at all, rather than the content of the programme?
Although you did say "love your shoes" Senua so you're just as guilty!