[ Originally posted on Facebook 27 March 2020 ]
The city of Toulouse in the south of France is certifiably rugby-mad. And while the French national rugby side exasperates by blowing hot and cold, the Stade Toulousain (ST) rugby club is consistently one of the most successful in Europe.
I’d got to talking rugby pretty often with the Toulousain husband of a work colleague in Geneva, and one day he astonished me by inviting me to fly down to his city and watch his revered team play (ST match tickets basically unobtainable seasons in advance).
It was during this visit that I discovered another of Toulouse’s glories—its huge covered market, a magnificent, proper French one, with running the entire length of the floor above a warren of equally magnificent Occitanian restaurants.
So there we were at the table of one such, chatting away with the chef-owner, also (natch) a rugby-fanatic. And when he found out I was a ‘rosbif’ (English), he started waxing lyrical about a compatriot of mine, a youngster he’d recently discovered who’d completely changed his attitude to food and its preparation.
And the name of this English wunderkind? (this an experienced French chef, mind)—Jamie Oliver.
I tell the story because one of the contributors to my next ‘Riches of YouTube’ channel does for his specialist area what Jamie Oliver does for cooking.
Talking about art on screen is no easy task. You need simultaneously to master a bewildering variety of genres and techniques, breathe the sometimes rarefied air of the artistic imagination, yet be able to put it all across in terms we ordinary mortals can understand.
Well, Andrew Graham-Dixon does just that—like our Jamie he really knows his stuff, but he wears his learning lightly and communicates his vast knowledge enthusiastically and without pretension.
All of which is by way of introduction to #2 in my ‘Riches of YouTube’ series, a channel entitled simply Art Documentaries, in which Graham-Dixon is just one among a myriad presenters.
It’s all here, from bamboo to bauhaus, carpentry to ceramics, dada to dance. A ‘Mastercrafts’ series covers thatching, blacksmithing, stained glass, weaving, stonemasonry; there’s profiles of noted artists, explorations of the art of countries around the world, tours of the world’s great museums.
And so on. And on . . .
And because these are all programmes made for TV, the production is uniformly top-class.
Here, as John Dryden wrote of Geoffrey Chaucer, “here is God’s plenty” . . .