Write Around the World with Richard E Grant
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- Episode
- Episode Three - Spain
- Broadcast Info
- 2021 (59 mins)
- Description
- Book and travel lover Richard E Grant journeys to Andalucia in southern Spain, in the footsteps of great authors whose work was inspired by the country, its culture and history. Reading key passages from the books as he goes along, Richard learns about the lives and experiences of the authors. His journey gives him fresh insights into the traditions and history of the region, its distinctive and captivating landscapes, and its most popular tourist destinations. Richard’s journey starts in the ancient city of Granada. Inspired by the writing of one of Spain’s most celebrated figures, the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, he finds out about the city’s rich Moorish heritage, its rich Romani culture and tragic part in Spain’s civil war. He finds out about the Spanish concept of ‘duende’, a form of heightened emotion, and hears Lorca’s poetry sung by one of Spain’s most celebrated flamenco singers. He also explores the house where Lorca’s family lived during the poet’s final years and learns about the poet’s eventful life, cut tragically short when he was killed by a fascist firing squad in August 1936. Novelist Victoria Hislop was inspired by Lorca’s life and writing and also by a love of flamenco when she wrote her novel ‘The Return’ . Reading it, Richard learns about Spain’s policy of ‘forgetting’, which meant that there was little or no conversation about the brutalities of the war within Spain until 2007 when the law of historical memory was passed, enabling Spain finally to come to terms with its fascist past. In the western Alpujarras, one of Spain’s wildest areas at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Richard travels down bumpy rural roads to the spot where former Genesis drummer Chris Stewart bought a dilapidated farm called El Valero 30 years ago. Chris shows him around the study where he wrote Driving Over Lemons, the first in the bestselling series of books chronicling his experiences relocating to rural Spain and, over lunch, they discuss the attractions of living in such a remote place. Like Chris Stewart, the great American writer Ernest Hemingway was attracted to the ro-mance of Spain when he first visited it as a young man in 1923. He returned to Spain regu-larly, lending his voice to the fight against fascism during the Civil War when he worked as a reporter for an American newspaper. Accompanied by two of Hemingway’s most ac-claimed books, ‘Death in the Afternoon’, his exploration of bullfighting, and ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, Richard heads to the spectacular mountain town of Ronda. Hemingway wrote that ‘this is where you should go if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon’. He also wrote that this is where you should come to see your first bullfight. Richard visits Ronda’s bull-ring, one of the oldest in Spain and explores Hemingway’s fascination with the sport which was controversial even at the time he was writing. He also visits the Taja Gorge, which was the location for a brutal incident during the civil war, said to have inspired a famous description in ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’. In the Eastern Alpujarras, Richard goes foraging for seasonal produce with Emma Illsley, co-author of ‘Las Chimeneas: Recipes and Stories from an Alpujarran Village’. He discovers that the Alpujarras is home to some of Spain’s finest food, largely thanks to the availability of ingredients like almonds and figs established in Spain by the Moors. He also finds out about the unique Moorish watering systems still employed by villagers in the area. He samples a traditional local dish, prepared by two local cooks from recipes handed down through the ages. Driving south to the Costa Tropical, known for a micro-climate that once made it a prosper-ous sugar growing area, Richard heads to the seaside resort of Almunecar. This was the final stop in Laurie Lee’s epic walk across Spain, described in his much-loved travelogue ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’. Here Richard tries his hand at busking on a mouth organ in an attempt to emulate Lee, who made his living by playing the violin to earn mon-ey. He also learns about Lee’s time here in the days leading up to the civil war and discov-ers the enduring importance of his account of the town’s fortunes. West of Almunecar, on the Costa Sol, Richard visits the resort of Marbella, accompanied by J G Ballard’s ‘Cocaine Nights’. Ballard loved the Costa del Sol but watched it grow from a series of fishing villages to ‘a linear beach city entirely devoted to leisure’. In his provoca-tive thriller ‘Cocaine Nights’ he examines the potential dangers of the kind of gated com-munities , cut off from reality, that he saw in abundance here. Playing tennis himself, Rich-ard will learn about the radical solution to ‘boredom’ offered by Ballard’s fictional creation tennis coach Bobby Crawford.
- 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/239762 (Accessed 10 Jan 2025)