#AcWriMo and Screening Britannia

It's November. For many people, that means #NaNoWriMo, writing the first draft of a novel in thirty days. I sometimes think of that, but whenever I get started, I always end up after a few days declaring everything I have attempted to be utter shit. However, there's an equivalent for academic writing, #AcWriMo. I did a bit of that last year, and made some progress on a book project that I probably still can't reveal. This year, I'm going all out, but aiming at completing much of the first draft of my book on Roman Britain on screen. I hope to write about 1,000 words a day.

However, I have built up a backlog of Screening Britannia blogposts recently, as a result of teaching my online Screening Britannia course (which you can still book onto and receive all the past recordings of the class up to this point). I'm really enjoying teaching this material, and it's opening up new perspectives that I might not otherwise have fallen upon. In particular, I am starting to realise the importance of the English folk horror tradition to the portrayal of Druids, and to why Roman Britain narratives so often use the Druids. Fortunately, there's a new Routledge Companion to Folk Horror just come out, which is even affordable as an ebook. Anyway, since those posts and my planned book are intimately interrelated, I am going to write them, and count them against my daily word count target. This is the first. 

A couple of months ago I finally put up the 2015 version of a paper entitled 'A Wild West hero: Motifs of the Hollywood Western in four movies about Hadrian’s Wall', which considers four movies, King Arthur (2004), The Last Legion (2007), Centurion (2010), and The Eagle (2011). The paper is incomplete, especially in the references, which will be fixed when I rework the material for the book. But for now, at least it's out there.

As part of preparation for my course, I rewatched Boadicea (1927), which I wrote about in 2020. At the time I thought it was the earliest screen version of Roman Britain, though I have since discovered that there is an earlier version of Cymbeline, from 1913. But I also discovered something about Boadicea. The version I watched on YouTube is not in fact the full movie. This version is less than half an hour, but it is obvious from this description on the BFI website that the full movie was about ninety minutes. All sorts of extra details are lost. Two people seen at the beginning starting a fight with the Romans about paying taxes actually have names in the full version. There's also a love subplot between one of Boadicea's daughters, here named Emmelyn, and a good Roman by the name of Marcus. (One of the ways Boudica narratives reconcile an audience that wants to be heirs to the Iceni queen's British heroism and at the same time the 'virtues' and values of Roman civilization is by including good Romans, who essentially want to live in happy co-operation with the Britons, and bad Romans, who provoke the revolt.) This love plot idea is later picked up in fake-Boudica movie The Viking Queen (1967), and I wonder if John Temple Smith, who devised the story for the latter movie, was familiar with Sinclair Hill's silent epic.

Unfortunately, while the BFI does possess the archive materials for this movie, so it is not, technically, 'lost', they do not have a viewing copy, so it has so far proved impossible for me to see the full-length Boadicea.

I was able to watch Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991). This is, of course, a pretty silly movie; one can quite see why Mel Brooks thought it ripe for parody in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). My reason for mentioning it here is the notorious scene in which, it is commonly stated, Robin (Kevin Costner) goes from Dover to Nottingham via Hadrian's Wall. And actually, this isn't a fair criticism. By all means, have a go at the movie for suggesting that one can get from Dover to Nottingham in a day on horseback. But, whilst scenes with Costner and Morgan Freeman playing Robin's Moorish ally Azeem were filmed up at Sycamore Gap, by the famous tree (sadly recently chopped down, for reasons that are currently obscure), at no point does anyone say they are at Hadrian's Wall. Indeed, diegetically, the movie is quite clear that the scene is taking place on Robin's own lands, not far from Nottingham. The Wall happens to be a convenient location to suggest a degree of antiquity. We should no more read it literally as Hadrian's Wall than we are meant to believe that the medieval city of Nottingham is actually at Carcassonne, or that Nottingham Castle is actually at Bodiam. Both of these were locations used in the movie, but these pass without comment.

I was delighted when the four missing episodes of The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969) turned up unexpectedly. Unfortunately, this has little effect on my work, as the only Roman Britain sketch was in the first episode (and then cut for broadcast), which has long been available on DVD. Still, at least we can now watch Michael Palin playing Elizabeth I as a bawdy music-hall drag act, which justifies the whole series on its own.

Finally, there are a couple of books coming out that are going to be relevant to my work. Jen Williams new fantasy, Talonsister, is set in a fantasy version of immediately pre-Roman Britain; sadly, there's not going to be time for me to read it before Novacon next week, where she's the guest of honour. And in December, my friend and former Open University colleague Katy Soar has edited a collection called Circles of Stone, an anthology of weird tales of Britain's pagan past. I feel sure there will be Druids.