I was so very sad to hear about Jonathan Miller passing away. This man seemed such a creative force, possessed of a powerful academic mind, yet resourseful and witty. i have had a fondness for his adaption of Alice In Wonderland since it was gifted to me by the artist mark Mc Keown and was awed by the stellar cast he assembled to pull it off. But it was his adaption, and to an extent reinvention, of MR James Whistle And I'll Come To You way back in 1969 for which he will always make me feel grateful. I cannot exaggerate the impact that adaption had on me the first time I saw it, or rather "witnessed" it at such an impressionable age. I was totally frozen with terror as I watched it quietly unfold, with its air of "cranky scholarship".Suddenly it was as though I were stuck halfway up an unfamiliar set of stairs , with darkness before me and a terrifying fall behind me. No complex special effects, no vapid jump scares, no leading or overbearing soundtrack. Just a slow burn of mounting terror and a sense of places in the world we ought not to look too closely at.
I have since heard he encouraged an air of improvisation among his cast, which probably contributed to the aura of unaffected naturalism. It felt almost documentary like, with an atmosphere of a world now passed. As has the man himself now.
Jonathan Miller was eighty five when he died. He had been suffering with Alzheimers disease for the last few years. It is a bastard of a disease that robs us of our loved ones while they are still with us, robbing them, and us, of hard won and treasured memories.stealing the very foundations upon which our personalities are built.
But someone like Jonathan Miller leaves a rich legacy of treasured creative moments. He was by all accounts a powerful and challenging academic who recognised there was no such thing as a benign willful ignorance. I fear we have entered an era where such intellects are demonised, treated with suspicion.
Yet the rites of exorcism exist, their chief component; Enlightenment.
