IT’S A RUSSELL PETERS CHRISTMAS

It’s… a Rus-sell Pe-ters Christ-mas / Tell all your friends, or they’ll be mad,
Once a year, you cannot miss this / If you do you’ll get a hurt real bad,
We are wea-ring, gay ap-parell / Yes we all have is-sues with our dad,
Hol-iday is time for pure bliss / We can guarantee that you’ll be glad,
It’s…. a Rus-sell Pe-ters Christ-mas / It’s the most fun, that you can get,
If you dis-agree, then you can kiss this / When the song is over,
we’re not done yet,
Now, it’s time to get down to busi-ness / Russell’s flying in on his
private jet, Watch it now in high def-ini-tion / Before the nerds post
it on the in-ter-net, Welcome to my Christmas special / Set your PVR
for Christmas glee, It’s kinda corny and sentimental / And it’s
starring meeeeeeeeeeee! (with apologies to “Deck the Halls”)
What happens when you combine up a comedy heavyweight, his brethren of
Canadian and international showbiz friends, and a requisite frozen
pond surrounded by glittering, sparkling Christmas trees?
One heck of a Christmas special, that’s what!
Anchoring its holiday lineup, CTV presents the world premiere of the
original Canadian production “A Russell Peters Christmas” Thursday,
Dec. 1 at 9pm on CTV and CTV Mobile. The special is also the
centrepiece of the holiday schedule on The Comedy Network, premiering
there on Saturday, Dec. 10 at 10pm. Helping Peters make merriment are
Michael Bublé, Pamela Anderson, Ted Lange, Faizon Love, Jon Lovitz,
Goapele, Scott Thompson and his own mother and baby daughter.
Inspired by the variety shows of yesteryear, Peters puts his own
irreverent twist on the Christmas special, making it unlike anything
viewers have seen before. Along with the obligatory carolers, winter
wonderland setting, and cheesy glad tidings, RPC features legendary
comedians, lingerie models, Pamela Anderson as the Virgin Mary, and
the bartender from “The Love Boat.” With a mix of Russell Peters
stand-up; hilarious sketch featuring guest stars and Peters’ own
mother, Maureen and baby daughter, Crystianna; stop-motion animation
reminiscent of a Rankin/Bass classic (set in Bramalea, no less); and
show-stopping musical performances including the incomparable Michael
Bublé, it’s a holiday special like no other.
Following the CTV debut and leading up to the Comedy premiere of the
holiday special, the Peters antics continue with the Canadian
television debut of Russell  Peters: The Green Card Tour Live from The
O2 Arena Dec. 3 at 10pm exclusively on Comedy.

ARIEL TWETO FLYING HIGH OVER HER SUCCESS

Ariel Tweto isn’t just the 24-year-old dynamo who gives “Flying Wild
Alaska” so much of its irresistible energy. She’s also an associate
producer responsible for beating the bushes (sometimes literally) in
search of story ideas for the show’s second season, now airing
Tuesdays on Discovery Canada.
“I would do research of what was happening around Alaska, and if there
was an interesting story, I would call around and ask if we could
follow them on their journey,” explains Tweto, who works in the
offices of Era Alaska, the state’s largest regional airline, with her
parents, Jim and Ferno, and her sister Ayla. “It would be boring to
just have the camera rolling all the time in our offices. I know
everyone in and around our community, so it’s easier for them to talk
to me than it was to have a random stranger come up to them.”
That paid off this season with what may be Tweto’s favorite episode,
an upcoming one built around the Iditarod, the famous sled-dog race,
and the accompanying “running with the reindeer” for Tweto and her
friends. She also finds time for a mild flirtation with a handsome
young musher, Cain Carter.
“(The Iditarod) is always like a big festival where I get to see all
my friends, and I love animals, and I get to play with the dogs and be
outside in nature and follow the mushers and hear their stories, and
they have some really amazing ones,” Tweto says. “Beyond that, this
season I just really grew an appreciation for flying. I love it so
much more than I used to when I was younger, just from actually
learning more about the airplane and having more respect for my
parents and what they do. I just love being in the air.”
That’s a good thing, because apart from the danger that is pretty much
a daily element in the routine of a bush pilot, “Flying Wild Alaska”
focuses extensively on Tweto’s determined struggles to master the
skills she needs to become a fully licensed pilot with the family-run
business. Still, that process is stressful enough without having a
camera stuck in your face, and sometimes, she admits, a little more
privacy would be nice.
“But I understand that’s kind of what the show is about,” she adds
quickly. “So many people are interested in learning how to fly, so I
know early on that it was going to be a big part of it. But there are
times when I just get so frustrated that I want to yell at the people
to just shut off the cameras so I could have my space. It’s especially
frustrating when your dad is repeating something over and over, and
you still don’t get it, or you’re bickering and you just want to be by
yourself or just vent. Unfortunately, since we’re doing a reality
show, the people watching want to see that drama, so I couldn’t do
that.
“Of course, other times it’s really cool, and you think, ‘Ooh, I hope
they got that for the camera!’ ”
Although she loves her home state and knows that on some level, she’ll
always be a part of Era Alaska, Tweto makes no secret of the fact that
she’s itching to see more of the world, and not just from trips like
her recent one to the “lower 48” to promote the series.
“I love traveling and meeting people — which I guess goes hand in hand
with the airline business — but I love going to places outside Alaska,
and I’ve always wanted to see different parts of the world. In the
back of my mind, though, I know I’ll always go back and help out.”

THE GREY CUP

If there has been a closer or more interesting season in CFL history,
it was too long ago for most of us to remember it. As the league roars
into its 99th Grey Cup, it looks as if three-down football is as
healthy as it’s ever been. The game will be carried live on TSN from
BC Place stadium Sunday, Nov. 27.
“This is a state-of-the-art facility, says TSN analyst Glen Suitor,
“as good as any in the NFL.”
That’s nothing compared to what’s been going on down on the field. As
this season drew to a close, BC, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and
Montreal all headed into the final week in a 20-point tie, and
bringing up the rear was Hamilton, with 16 points and a record of
occasionally demolishing teams that were supposed to be stronger.
For any football fan fed up with the annual certainty that is the
Montreal Alouettes, this new competitiveness was like a drug. “In this
decade, because of Montreal’s dominance, there’s always been a heavy
favorite with Montreal, and then the challenger out of the West,”
Suitor says. “And that challenger has changed. It has been BC, and it
has been Calgary at times.”
But this season is a lot different. Both Hamilton and Winnipeg beat
Montreal in the regular season quite handily.“That’s what makes it
unique this year. Going into the playoffs, there was no favorite.”
What’s most astounding about this was the fact that last year,
Winnipeg and Edmonton both finished out of the playoffs and then spent
all this season jockeying for first place in their divisions. For
Edmontonians, this has been like waking from some horrible dream. Last
season’s Eskimos were a disgusting aberration to a city used to
competitive football teams. “Edmonton surprised me,” Suitor says. “But
when you see the playmakers on the offensive side of the ball, and the
fact that they have two dominant rush ends, who are new to the league,
on defense, you can figure out why.”
As for Winnipeg, between the revival of the Blue Bombers and the
return of NHL hockey, that city has become home to some of the
happiest sports fans on the continent. “One of the great stories this
year has been Winnipeg’s turnaround, not just on the field but how it
has translated into sellouts,” Suitor says. “They will break records
this year as far as attendance goes and souvenir sales.
“I don’t know why it is, but there’s great enthusiasm in Manitoba,
with the return of the Jets and how the popularity of the Bombers has
shot through the roof.” Lest anyone think that all this pan-Canadian
euphoria signals the end of the Alouettes, we should remember that one
of those 20-point seasons belongs to the perennial favorites, and in
Anthony Calvillo, the Als possess a quarterback whose arm is a
certified lethal weapon. This season, Calvillo knocked off three
records: In July, he threw his 395th career touchdown pass, the most
in league history. Then in August, he knocked off Damon Allen’s CFL
career-passing record. And finally, in October, Calvillo became the
leading passer in professional football.
“This guy isn’t just a great football player and a great man, but he’s
an inspiration,” Suitor says. “After that game, when he broke the
record, he didn’t go and party. He didn’t go to a restaurant with his
teammates. He didn’t even take his family out. They went to a homeless
shelter and handed out hot meals, right after the game.”
This brings us, finally, to what may have been the season’s biggest
surprise: the amazing BC Lions. This was a team that started the
season with six losses in its first seven games, then went on an
eight-game winning streak, leaping from the toilet to the head of the
league.
“Something I think will be talked about for years and years and years
is the turnaround for the BC Lions, how they can go zero and five out
of the gate and then go on an eightgame win streak,” Suitor says. “Any
team from now on that starts slowly in a season will use the BC Lions
of 2011 as their case study, to say, ‘We can turn this around.’ They
made it to the playoffs with an eight-game win streak. “So anything is
possible.

HOW WOMEN ROCK OUR WORLD

Bessie Smith to Lady Gaga is a wide swath in modern music, and “Women Who Rock” includes them and many in between Friday, Nov. 18, on KCTS.
Mixing interviews with key women musicians and live performance footage, Women Who Rock features the stories of trailblazers like Bessie Smith, Ma Raney, Mother Maybelle and Mahalia Jackson as well as contemporary stars Darlene Love, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Bonnie Raitt, Cyndi Lauper, Wanda Jackson, Mavis Staples, Deborah Harry and Kathleen Hanna of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.  Also featured are songwriter Cynthia Weill and journalists/critics Ann Powers, Nelson George and Holly George Warren.
Cyndi Lauper, with nearly 30 years as a music icon and worldwide record sales of 30 million, will host the program. The program breaks the female influence on rock and roll into distinct eras, starting with the music’s blues roots in the 1920s and 30s. It travels forward through time, telling stories of key musicians from each succeeding era, including rock and roll’s emergence in the 1950s, the girl group and counterculture era of the 60s, disco and punk in the 70s, celebrations of empowerment and fun throughout the 80s, into today’s predominance of women in pop, and much more. The film reveals the ever-morphing role of female performers and shows how today’s singers were influenced and inspired by their forebears.
“Rock and roll is a very wide river,” says filmmaker Carol Stein. She and Susan Wittenberg “wanted people who represented various eras,” she says, “We were trying to figure it out by categories. It’s a big tent.”
Though there’s a chasm between the likes of Mahalia Jackson and Madonna, the common denominator is music with attitude.
The documentary opens with James Brown singing, “This is a man’s world.” It soon cuts to Christina Aguilera belting the same song, and the irony is lost on no one.
Women are the top grossers in music in the 21st century, the documentary notes. But women’s rock roots go back to the very beginnings of the genre.
The catalyst for the film was an exhibit at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which helped the filmmakers decide who should be in the documentary. Darlene Love was finally inducted in 2011, and though her legions of fans had been asking about her inclusion for years, Love was sanguine.
She, of the voice that never stops and who has been hitting the charts since 1961, is completely at peace with how long it took for her to be recognized in the museum.
“It bothered me at first, and then I didn’t think about it anymore,”
she says. “You know what? I will be in there, in time.”
Stunning in a form-fitting satin dress — she kickboxes five days a week — Love talks with no regrets. Love sang backup for Elvis, Sinatra, Sam Cooke and many others. She’s been on Broadway and sees herself as a rock singer.
Love is probably best known for singing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” which she’s done annually since 1986 and always brings the house down. Love has that effect on people.
She started singing in a girl group, the Blossoms, when she was 18.
Years of doing backup for everyone from Tom Jones to Dionne Warwick followed.
While deciding whether she could go solo, she had a day job — cleaning houses. She was scrubbing a toilet in a woman’s house when her hit “Christmas” came on the radio. She knew then that she had to pursue a solo career.
She was 40 and dating Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, and he nudged her to launch her solo career. “He said, ‘Are you going to sing backup your whole life or go solo?’ So he put together a band for me,”
Love says.
She did a show at The Roxy. She recalls singing “Hungry Heart,” and some skinny guy in the back of the room was whooping it up. She asked someone, “Who was that in the back cutting up so bad?” Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt told her.
They were early boosters.
“We are still really good friends,” Love says.
And she credits her friends, including Springsteen, Elton John and Phil Spector, for helping her career. “It is tougher for women,” she says. “It was easier for me.”
Many of the female rockers in the documentary don’t seem to care how hard it was. They were going to do it, and it’s that attitude that fuels their music.
“Women who are adventurous, who step out of the norm, who don’t take no for an answer” is how filmmaker Stein describes them.
Many of the clips are extremely familiar, but the surprises come in the beginning for those who don’t know Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She looked like an unassuming church lady until she strapped on that electric guitar and became a rocker of pure audacity.
Relying, perhaps too heavily, on music journalists for commentary and taking a chronological approach, the documentary features popular clips, snippets of music videos and a few fresher interviews.
“Nancy Wilson played a ballad especially for us,” Wittenberg says. “If we spent time with the artists, they are very giving and very sweet.”
Ultimately the filmmakers want to convey “that rock and roll is thought of as a male art form,” Stein says. “From the start, women have made a profound contribution to the art form. This was a film honoring that these women were incredible artists. This is basically a tribute. To me it is a joyous celebration, a thank you to those who have given us so much joy.”
Even if rock remains dominated by the guys, Love says she knows the truth. “We are as powerful as men are in rock because men want to see us,” she says, “The men know we are there; they are just trying to act like we are not there.”

Surviving Hitler: A Love Story

Sunday, Nov. 20 at 10pm on CBC News Networks’ Passionate Eye. It’s a story straight out of a Hollywood movie: A German soldier falls in love with a Jewish teenager in Nazi-ruled Berlin. When war breaks out, he sends love letters from the Russian front, while her family hides resistance fighters in their home. The young sweethearts become co-conspirators in a plot to assassinate Hitler. When the plot fails, they face almost certain death. Unbelievably, both survive the Gestapo’s wrath, and become the first couple to marry in the ruins of post-war Berlin. Directed and produced by John-Keith Watson for the BBC, “Surviving Hitler” is the true story of Helmuth and Jutta, now in her 80s and the film’s riveting narrator. Jutta describes her life during the war in searing detail—her parents are taken away by the Nazis, her beloved Helmuth is arrested, and she herself winds up in prison, escaping only when Russian soldiers reach Berlin. As she tells her story, the film unfolds through never-before-seen 8 mm footage shot by Helmuth, his voice recordings and the letters he wrote from the front lines.
Surviving Hitler is a love story for the ages—and a harrowing tale of wartime courage, resistance and survival..

GREATEST DISASTER STORY EVER TOLD

“Titanic: The Final Moments” — airing Sunday, Nov. 20, on the Discovery series “Curiosity” — tells the story one more time and comes up with enough interesting details that it seems almost new again. The producers have blended the latest scientific evidence with the earliest eyewitness testimony to recreate what exactly happened.
“My approach to the subject was to take a step back and ask why, 100 years on, are we still fascinated by it,” says Richard Dale, who directed and produced the doc. “It’s because it was such a human
drama: 1,500 people dying on the maiden voyage of the biggest machine ever to move on the planet.”
With all the scientific data available to us today about the ship, what makes “Titanic” fascinating are the human details dredged up from the official testimony and the newspapers of the day. The idea of the doc was to “find out what new things can we bring to the story.”
Combined with all the material evidence that has become available since the discovery of the wreck in 1985, the personal details make for a surprisingly complex story. For example, each deck of the ship was laid out differently from every other deck — making the Titanic a nightmare maze for passengers trying to find their way around in calm times, let alone an emergency.
And voyagers in third class were treated so badly that there were only two baths for 700 passengers. No wonder the people taking official testimony hardly bothered with them, and it was left to the penny press to tell the stories of the common people caught up in the tragedy.
As for the rich and famous, they were the celebrities of their day, a selection of the most powerful and glamorous people on two continents.
“This is a bit like having Richard Branson make a spaceship and everyone goes on it, and it blows up on its first voyage, with the great and the good of the planet on it,” Dale says. At the same time, the story of how the ocean “consumed the ship,” as one passenger put it, plays like a horror movie, with a monster that is as relentless and hideous as anything put on film.
The film follows in greater detail than ever before, the horrifying way the minus-2-degree water took over the ship, and how it killed.
And one of the things that’s constantly intriguing, no matter how many times the story is told, is the element of hope. We know the ship and most of the passengers come to a bad end, but the way the tragedy plays out in slow motion on a still sea, there always seems to be hope for survival. “It’s a situation that was unthinkable and continued to be unthinkable even while it was happening,” Dale says. “I really don’t think anyone believed, with the possible exception of a few crew members, that the ship was going to sink. “But when you think of the physics of it, it’s inevitable that it’s going to sink: 46,000 tons of metal and glass and wood. Of course it’s going to sink.”
Of the events that have occurred in recent memory that might have the capacity to generate a Titanicsize legend, the first one that comes to mind is the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Dale, who has made films on both, sees the events as being remarkably similar in one key way: Until the moment the ship, or the towers, go down, the idea of the construction failing is almost beyond belief. Then the minute it begins to fail, there’s an inevitability about it that is chilling and humbling. “It’s that kind of tipping point that changes something from being impossible to happen to impossible that it didn’t happen.”

40-YEAR WAR IN WHICH THE WEAPONS WERE WORDS

There were two earthshaking weapons threatening the world during the Cold War, but only one was used. And that would be propaganda.
That was the weapon of choice for both the East and West blocs in the four decades after the Second World War, when both sides had gigantic arsenals of nuclear weapons that they dared not use.
“Love, Hate & Propaganda: The Cold War,” hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos and airing on consecutive Thursdays, Nov. 17 and 24 and Dec. 1 and 8, on CBUT, is a sometimes amazingly detailed look back at those years.
The series could as easily be called “Language, Power and Persuasion.”
“I think what may have heightened the use of propaganda as a tool was that nobody really wanted an armed conflict,” says Peter Ingles, who produced the documentary series.
“Even though we were building weapons of mass destruction, deeper down we were fighting a war of words and ideas, trying to convince people that their ideology was better than the other’s. And that was done through propaganda.”
This series follows one that aired around a year ago under the same “Love, Hate & Propaganda” title.
That one dealt with the Second World War, and its main aim was to present to a younger audience what was, for older viewers, a familiar story.
“At first, it wasn’t even about propaganda,” Ingles says. “It was about bridging the gap between generations. But it worked so well that schools picked it up.
“And we got feedback, not just from teachers but from kids as well.
The teachers just ate it up.”
This time around, the series has a sharper focus and benefits from the availability of a wide range of pop culture artifacts from the era — many of which haven’t been seen in years.
As a result, this will probably have as strong an appeal to viewers who lived through the Cold War as for people who only know it as a historical label.
“Our main concern is to make this accessible to a younger audience,”
Ingles says. “But what’s interesting about it is that it’s something that stays very current. We’re still using propaganda today to get ideas across and to sell products.”
The series doesn’t follow a chronology from the fall of Germany and the drawing of the Iron Curtain across Europe (in Churchill’s well-chosen words) to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Rather, it proceeds thematically, from the fear and darkness of Stalin in Russia and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts in the United States, to the competing ideologies and each side’s styles of salesmanship, to popular culture and the final thaw.
Archival material ranges from grim footage of Korea, the Hungarian Revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam and Afghanistan to the lighter side of the propaganda war, fought with scientific breakthroughs, popular culture and consumer products.
“In the postwar period, North America was thriving, because we were on this economic push from the war,” Ingles says. “I remember seeing pictures of Europe, and the devastation, which went on for a long time.
“And this misery in which people were living was a perfect battleground for the war of ideologies.”
Some of the most interesting material is what might, on the surface, be taken as the most trivial: the 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow; the pop culture reaction to the first Earth satellite, Sputnik, launched by the Russians; a Russian trade fair in New York; and an American one in Moscow.
As Episode 3 shows, there was a real struggle in the communist world to come up with an antidote to the seductive powers of Western culture, usually with little success.
Archival footage shows the Rolling Stones ripping up a stage in West Berlin — presumably within earshot of the East.
This is followed by fascinating and often hilarious footage of East Bloc pop stars, clean-cut and smiling and obviously manufactured for the purpose.
“Propaganda is manipulation of the masses,” Ingles says. “I think it’s actually more a part of the capitalist society: selling a product, selling a message.
“I think in the East Bloc countries, propaganda was propaganda. We were slicker at it because there was a lot more money behind it.”
In the end, we can be grateful that the nuclear weapons were never used and that it was the war of words that decided which ideology would emerge triumphant.
And one of the most potent symbols of communism, the Berlin Wall, became the symbol of the end of it.
“To me the surprise was the irony of the fall of communism,” Ingles says. “With all the missiles that were being piled up on both sides, it was finally words that brought down the wall. “It was the pope and his speeches. It was Reagan saying, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ ”

FAMILY’S PHOTO’S HELPS HEAL WAR-TORN NATION

 To know where you’re going, you have to know where you’re from… When two Canadian brothers return to the war-torn African country of their childhood, they didn’t expect their father’s old photographs to rekindle the memory of a nation. Chronicling how some family snapshots unexpectedly filled a void in a country without a photographic legacy, the beautifully-filmed feature documentary Liberia ’77 has its television broadcast premiere Tuesday, November 15 at 9pm on Knowledge Network.
Jeff and Andrew Topham’s remarkable journey begins with an envelope of family photographs taken when they were growing up in Liberia in the 1970s – a place they remember as a paradise with endless beaches, thick jungle, and even a pet chimp. Their father had taken thousands of images capturing the ex-pat family’s African experiences, unknowingly documenting a country and people on the edge of destruction. Directed by Jeff Topham and produced by Melanie Wood, Liberia ’77 reveals how the brothers, now photographers themselves, follow the trail of their father’s pictures to West Africa. After 30 years and two civil wars, they search for the places and people in the snapshots and re-shoot the images in modern times. Along the way, they discover that decades of violence and war had forced Liberians to destroy their personal photo collections. With nearly its entire photographic history erased, Liberia is a country without images of its culture and people, especially from pre-war times.  Suddenly, the tattered envelope of Topham family pictures takes on an unimagined significance.
When Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, sees one of their photos, she is so moved that she urges them, and others, to return any pre-war photos to the country so that the children of Liberia can know their history. This sparked the Liberia Photo Repatriation Project, which has become an important extension of the film. Critically-acclaimed at festivals around the world, Liberia ’77 is the winner of a Platinum Award for Feature Documentary at the 2011 WorldFest-Houston, a 2011 Houston Critics’
Choice Award for Best Feature Documentary, an Audience Award at the 2011 Possible Worlds Sydney Film Festival, and two Golden Sheaf awards at the 2011 Yorkton Film Festival for Best POV Documentary and Best Director (Non-Fiction).
 Since the completion of the documentary, Liberia ’77 has taken on a life of its own. The filmmakers will mount a photo exhibition in Monrovia, Liberia at the National Museum in 2012, showcasing the precious images of a once peaceful and prosperous country, and offering hope for a brighter future. The exhibition will raise awareness in Liberia of the importance of cultural heritage, and culminate with a gift to the country of all the exhibition photos, along with many photos gathered from others through the repatriation project.
Liberia ’77 is a film that shows how despite time, war, distance and culture, photography connects us all.
For more info on the doc and the repatriation project, please visit:
www.liberia77.com

GUILT, AND REVENGE ARE ALL ON THE MENU…

What could possibly go wrong when two ex-lovers meet for lunch at their favorite haunt from years before? Lots. Emma Thompson (Sense and
Sensibility) and Alan Rickman (Harry Potter) take that risk in this funny, bittersweet drama, adapted from Christopher Reid’s captivating narrative poem, on “The Song of Lunch,” airing Sunday, November 13 at 9pm on KCTS.
During its recent UK broadcast, The Song of Lunch delighted critics, with The Guardian calling it “quietly moving, clever, beautiful, sad, and true. Just wonderful.” The Times was also charmed: “It is as accomplished as anything you are ever likely to watch—rich and dense and minutely observed, accurate and unusual and superbly performed.”
Recalling their role as a beleaguered married couple in the 2003 romantic comedy “Love Actually,” Thompson and Rickman return as star-crossed lovers, this time with a backstory of heartbreak and recriminations—at least for one of them.
Rickman’s character (neither is named) instigates the mid-day rendezvous. He is a morose, middle-aged copyeditor with a book publisher in London. Fifteen years earlier, Thompson’s outgoing character left him for a wildly successful author, and she now lives a happily married family life in Paris. Over glasses of Chianti and grappa (mostly imbibed by him), the complexities of their relationship emerge. An aspiring poet, he wrote a single disastrous book that is an epic retelling of their romance. In it, he plays the role of the legendry Greek poet Orpheus, while she is Orpheus’s doomed lover, Eurydice. It’s an allegory that can be easily misunderstood, especially with the poem’s theme of failed rescue of the heroine from the underworld.
However, she knows him too well to be offended. And besides, it’s all water under the bridge. Plus there is so much to talk about! And talk they do, for a surprising, provocative, and sometimes agitating lunch-hour, amid the food and bustle of a trendy Soho restaurant called Zanzotti’s, which is less rollicking than they remember from the old days. Fittingly, their date ends on a mythic note.
Poet Christopher Reid says that The Song of Lunch was inspired by the famous pub scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses (chapter 12), which captures a slice of life in Dublin from the early 1900s—just as Reid’s poem summons a now-vanished Soho, remembered boozily through a grappa glass of nostalgia.
Below is a delectable excerpt from the poem, evoking Zanzotti’s and its proprietor in the heyday of the now-faded romance:
“Zanzotti’s: unreformed Soho Italian.
Chianti-in-a-basket.
Breadsticks you snap
with a sneeze of dust.
Red gingham cloths overlaid on the diagonal with plain green paper ones.
Finger smears at the neck
of the water carafe.
And Massimo himself
touring the tables with his fake bonhomie.”

PAGE EIGHT

An all-star cast and a taut teleplay by one of England’s greatest living writers launch a new season of PBS’ “Masterpiece Contemporary”
with the spy drama “Page Eight” on Sunday, Nov. 6 (check local listings). Written and directed by David Hare, whose screenplay adaptations of “The Hours” and “The Reader” both earned him Oscar nominations, the splendidly acted thriller follows the fortunes of aging MI-5 intelligence analyst Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy), who finds himself drawn into the personal drama of a mysterious beauty next door (Oscar winner Rachel Weisz) even as an explosive revelation comes to light at work, where his boss, mentor and best friend Ben Baron (Michael Gambon) leads him to a single sentence at the bottom of page eight in a top-secret document — a sentence that clearly hints at a conspiracy of silence between top government officials in Washington and London involving information that may have jeopardized the lives of several spies on both sides of the Atlantic.
“It’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had,” Nighy says happily of his role in the film, on which he also serves as an executive producer.
“I’ve waited a long time to play a spy, actually, so I was very grateful when I fi nally got to play one, not least because it was written by David, whom I have worked with all my life and who I admire beyond measure.  He is one of the greatest writers currently working, in my opinion, and it’s just a very cool thing to play.”
Hare got the idea for the story after talking with some people inside the real MI-5 (the British equivalent of the CIA) about the agency’s problems dealing with overt pressure from politicians asking them to manipulate intelligence data to support a political case, rather than to analyze the facts objectively, a dilemma that, Hare says, has split
MI-5 down the middle.
He didn’t start out to write another role for Nighy, his friend and colleague of more than three decades, but he quickly realized the actor was perfect for this role.  “If the man is meant to be sort of secretive and funny and loves jazz and women and is clever and is sort of one step ahead of everyone else, who am I going to get to play that except my old friend Bill Nighy? After about 20 pages, it became clear that it was him,” Hare says.
Both men speak with unguarded affection for each other, although when Hare, who was the fi rst director to cast Nighy as a romantic leading man many years ago, refers to his friend’s current status as “certainly in Britain, the erotic favorite of a certain middle-aged generation,” a bemused Nighy advises an interviewer, “If David had said that in front of me, as Englishmen we would have had to kill ourselves shortly afterwards.”
All joking aside, however, both Hare and Nighy talk of “Page Eight” as being something of a dream project, one that also attracted such A-list actors as Ralph Fiennes, playing a charming yet cunning prime minister, and Judy Davis as one of Johnny Worricker’s tart-tongued
MI-5 colleagues, despite the fact that the fi lm was produced on a $3 million budget over only five weeks.  It certainly doesn’t show.
Working with one of Hare’s best, most compelling scripts, these exceptional actors produce a gallery of such finely realized characters caught up in such vividly realized relationships that viewers are apt to feel as if they are watching a sequel to an earlier fi lm.
“When you come across something which is great art, you sometimes experience it as something familiar to you, as if it was something that already was in your mind but had not yet been revealed to you,”
Nighy says. “From the moment I read this script, it was as if I were remembering it. That’s obviously a trick of the mind, but there is a familiarity to it, as if the words are what I would have gotten around to saying myself given the time.” An executive at NBC/Universal, which co-produced “Page Eight,” likewise commented to Hare after screening the fi lm that “‘I feel I could take any of these characters and do a spinoff series with them, because I feel as if they exist and they are interesting people. You could take even a quite minor character and run another series off them.”
Even more happily, the BBC was so pleased with the film that it immediately asked Hare to write more Johnny Worricker films.
“We are planning to do two more, to follow the story through,” Hare says. “I think this is just the beginning.  When I first wrote it, the BBC’s first response was, ‘Can you do six?’ but I’m far too slow to do that.  I have faced that fact that I have to do three, because there is more to say on the subject.”
And that couldn’t please Nighy more. “I am jazzed in the extreme,” the actor says. “I am super-jazzed. It’s my absolutely ideal situation. If you had asked me, as some journalists do, ‘What do you dream of? What would be your ideal project?’ well, this is it. This is my perfect engagement. And the fact that there are going to be two more makes it super-perfect. I love being directed by David.  In the theater as well, he always has had a very highly developed visual sense. His aesthetic has always been very, very expressive and satisfying and mirrors mine to a certain degree. I love how he sees it and how he has been able to make it look. I am just very, very happy.”

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