Write Around the World with Richard E Grant
Sign in to watch this content please.
- Episode
- Episode Two - France
- Broadcast Info
- 2021 (59 mins)
- Description
- Book and travel lover Richard E Grant journeys to southern France, in the footsteps of great authors whose work was inspired by the country, its culture and history. Reading key pas-sages from the books as he goes along, Richard learns about the lives and experiences of the writers, and through their eyes gains fresh insights into the diversity of the region and its distinctive and captivating landscapes. Richard’s journey starts in the Cévennes mountains, one of France’s most sparsely populated regions, as he recreates part of the walk described by Robert Louis Stevenson in his famous travelogue ‘Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes’. Stevenson was just 28 when he undertook his journey in 1878. He was recovering from tuberculosis and suffering from a broken heart following an affair with Fanny Osbourne, a married American woman. He hadn’t yet written the books that were to make him famous and was still financially de-pendent on his parents. The Cévennes was cheap and offered him the chance to reflect and to write. It was also a landscape similar to Scotland and one of the only areas in France where Protestantism still prevailed following an uprising by a group of insurgents called the Camisards in the early 18th century. Struggling with his reluctant donkey as Stevenson did, Richard visits the Catholic monastery Our Lady of the Snows where Stevenson spent a night and nestles down for a night under the stars just as Stevenson did. In the town of St Jean du Gard he meets British author and Stevenson expert Adam Thorpe who has lived in the Cévennes for over 30 years . Travelling south Richard heads for the bustling port of Marseille. Inspired by Alexander Dumas’s ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ and accompanied by a local guide, he takes a boat to the Chateau d’If, which lies on the Ile d’If just 1.5 kilometres from the mainland. This was the journey undertaken by Dumas’ hero Edmond Dantes before being imprisoned in the Chateau which used to be one of France’s most notorious and escape proof prisons. Here Richard learns that prisoners were treated differently according to their class and wealth. The poorest were placed at the bottom, being confined perhaps twenty or more to a cell in windowless dungeons under the castle whereas wealthier inmates could pay for private cells with windows. Moving further south Richard heads to the heart of the French Riviera where writers across the ages have been inspired by the dazzling coastline and stunning light including the great American novelist F Scott Fitgerald who lived in Antibes’ sister town Juan Les Pins for two years in 1925. Richard visits the Belles-Rives hotel, formerly the seaside house rented by Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda, and their daughter Scottie. It was here that Fitzgerald was in-spired to write ‘Tender is the Night’. For Fitzgerald, the Cote d’Azur was the perfect place to explore the themes of money, decadence and young love that so fascinated him. He modelled his characters Dick and Nicole Diver on real-life friends, the wealthy Americans Gerald and Sara Murphy, who were at the forefront of a group of wealthy Americans who invented the summer season on the Riviera. Richard visits the Hotel Du Cap Eden Roc, the model for Gausse’s Hotel Des Etrangers in ‘Tender is the Night’. Driving up into the hills above Cannes Richard visits actor turned writer and olive farmer Carol Drinkwater whose books about renovating a crumbling old olive farm have become international bestsellers. Carol shows Richard around the property and talks about the trials and tribulations she experienced starting a new life here. She cooks Richard lunch from Elizabeth David’s ‘Book of Mediterranean Food’ and explains David’s huge influence on British cooking. It was visiting Antibes in 1939 that David learned about Mediterranean food from the writer Norman Douglas. When she returned to London in the 1950s, she set about introducing ingredients like olive oil, garlic, courgettes, aubergines to postwar Britain. Richard’s final stop is Grasse, perfume capital of the world and the setting for one of his favourite books, Patrick Süskinds ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’. Some years ago, Richard realised his childhood dream of creating his own perfume, doing much of his re-search in Grasse which has a microclimate perfect for flower farming. It was here that Süskind’s main character arrived in the 18th century to learn the ancient art of enfleurage, a technique for extracting the aromatic oils from flowers. At Galimard, one of Grasse’s oldest perfumeries, Richard creates his own perfume before joining a local guide to visit some of the places associated with Süskind’s book.
- Genre
- Literature; Architecture; Culture
How to cite this record
The Open University, "Write Around the World with Richard E Grant". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/239761 (Accessed 10 Jan 2025)