Article on the BBC TV series 'Handmade in Britain', with a mention that one episode is going to be on stained glass.
The stained glass bit -
Britain's Most Fragile Treasure, presented by historian Dr Janina Ramirez, unlocks the secrets of the famous East Window at York Minster, the largest medieval stained-glass window in the country.
Britain has a different approach to TV documentary on the arts & sciences, compared to America. They appear, at least recently, to actually cultivate academics for television presentation. More in science programs, with bona fide scientists like Brian Cox (physics), Jim Al-Khalili (physics), and Marcus Du Sautoy (mathematics) given pretty decent budgets to create documentaries. For their arts presenters, I suppose the trend is to try and get away from presenters who are just art critics and toward ones who at least have art history educations, like Tim Marlow or Matthew Collings. In any case, Britian does seem to produce many more arts or science television presenters/communicators in general than America does. After all, how many American art historians are signed up with a talent agency?
You can get a sense of Janina Ramirez's presentation style in this portion of a documentary about an Icelandic Saga on YouTube - The Laxdœla Saga part 1 of 4
[update: October 10, 2011 - the first episode airs today. I have not heard of it airing at all in the US, but I will pass along any info I get. There is a Handmade in Britain webpage for the series on the V&A website. Lots of interesting links, though I still don's see how it works that stained glass is a tiny subcategory of ceramics.]
Posted by Tom at September 30, 2011 11:22 AM