Oliver Sacks can't name Elvis Presley. But then, he doesn't recognise himself
My biggest cock-ups, as a journalist? Well, I used to be an editor, and once managed to defame an entire country (Iceland) and was sent to apologise. That's got to be the best. Then there was a time I ran an article about Morrissey with a full-page accompanying photograph of . . . Edwyn Collins! But for that one I'm going to say, in my defence, that I suffer from mild prosopagnosia. I didn't know about it at the time ? it's only just been diagnosed, by myself admittedly ? but having watched Imagine: The Man Who Forgot How to Read and Other Stories (BBC1) and heard Oliver Sacks talk about it, I'm convinced. I'd be hopeless as the picker-outer at a police identity parade: mmmm, it could be him, but then again he may be my mother. Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognise faces.
No I don't get it that badly. I recognise my mum, and the woman who appears to live with me (unless of course it's not one woman, and it's all part of an elaborate hoax). I just have problems with people I don't know so well. Sacks doesn't know who Alan Yentob is, but then a lot of people wonder that. More significantly he doesn't recognise the pictures Yentob shows him ? of Oprah Winfrey and Elvis Presley, and he only gets Barack Obama and the Queen ("well, she's grey-haired, she has an imperious look") through deduction.
Sacks sometimes doesn't even recognise himself ? he finds himself apologising to apologetic grey-bearded men who turn out to be Oliver Sacks (his reflection), or preening himself in front of puzzled grey-bearded men who turn out not to be (not his reflection). He speaks very entertainingly about it ? with the understanding of a neurologist, but also with a very human fascination of someone who isn't just concerned with the central nervous system and the brain but also with the person behind them. That ? his interest in humanity ? is what makes Sacks so appealing. And he has a lovely twinkle about him ? he's not just interested in everything and everyone (including himself), he's amused by them as well.
I could have done with more of Sacks in Yentob's look at how we perceive the world and what happens when the way we see it goes wrong. The programme is loosely based on Sack's most recent book, The Mind's Eye, and on characters Sacks has studied. Yentob visits the artist Chuck Close, who also has prosopagnosia and intriguingly sees faces as bags of cats, so it's perhaps perverse (though he says inevitable) that he should have become a portrait painter. And Yentob meets the Canadian crime writer Howard Engel, who had a stroke and lost the ability to read overnight, but not the ability to write because the two are controlled by different parts of the brain. Beethoven composed when he was deaf, so I suppose there's no reason why someone who can't read continues to write.
There's a deaf man here too ? Danny, who's now going blind as well. Imagine that, living in silent darkness. Touch, smell and taste are going to become very important. It's all going to be about sex, isn't it? Yentob doesn't ask Danny about sex.
They're fascinating, these people, and their conditions. But the film is a slightly odd one. It's as if Yentob has stolen the characters from Sacks' book and tried to do something with them himself. But because he doesn't have Sacks's expertise he has to keep running back to check in with him. And that's when it becomes interesting and comes alive ? because Sacks has more to say about it all. And also he's dead watchable ? and funny.
A little unfocused then, you might say. But then, you might also say that given that the film is about what happens when vision goes wrong, a little unfocused is perhaps appropriate.
I was a bit down (also appropriately) on Lead Balloon (BBC2) when this final series started, and there hasn't been much since to make me change my mind. It's felt tired. Until this one, in which Rick is taken hostage by a dangerous criminal at Belford jail. It's just the two of them in the prison library for the whole half-hour. Well, one really: Jack Dee does a lot of his squirmy, crumpled-forehead thing but the episode belongs to Robbie Coltrane, who is excellent as Rick's volatile but sensitive captor. A cracker then, again appropriately.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/28/imagine-oliver-sacks
No comments:
Post a Comment