“Remember, remember, the fifth of November.” That’s when fireworks and bonfires mark Guy Fawkes Day in England — the very day newly-weds Robert Fripp and Carol Burtin Fripp were each rubber-stamped LANDED IMMIGRANT at St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Quebec, and admitted to Canada. The next thirty-some years passed while they both produced television, independent of each other, for three networks: CBC, TVOntario, and Japanese-language productions re-worked in English for export markets, for NHK-Japan .
CBC-TV’s This Land series sent Robert to remote places to film interesting tales; to the prairies and Nova Scotia for Country Canada; for fishing tales to Newfoundland; and a six-part Cities on the Sea series explored settlements in or on water. Finally, Robert pulled together 360 episodes of CBC’s weekly, The Fifth Estate — investigative television, variety often beyond belief — for 11 years.
At TVOntario, Carol produced a live, 90-minute current affairs weekly, Speaking Out. Her guests were often luminaries, such as Linus Pauling (Vitamin C); James E. Lovelock (the Gaia hypothesis); Betty Friedan (‘The Feminine Mystique’); Dr. Benjamin Spock (Baby and Child Care); Dr.Nathan Pritikin (the Pritikin Eating Plan); David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, (the Immaculate Conception: “You can’t keep a Good God down.”) and theologian Hans Küng. Speaking Out ran 15 seasons.
A book list began. In the sciences: Spirit in Health: on shamanic cultures, healing and therapy deep in prehistory, long before modern medicine. Then came The Becoming (UK) and its later edition, Let There Be Life (US/CDA): which included sixty-plus essays on the Cosmos, and life’s evolution. Next, a commercial venture, IBM Visions, a marketing magazine series on computers for science and engineering research. A book list needs fiction! Wessex Tales splits 40 stories evenly into two volumes, set in Dorset, England. In Power of a Woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine dictates her memoirs from a long, turbulent life. Then there’s Design and Science: this coffee-table book covers work by designer Will Burtin. Its major themes are 1/ communicating knowledge and data visually, and 2/ Burtin’s scientific approach to information design. All these books are shown and described in my book list.
Salisbury Cathedral’s choir recruited me at nine to chant, sing and read Elizabethan English for five years. I remembered the language well enough to learn it better decades later, when I wrote Dark Sovereign, a script for film or play. It’s in my same book list, ready to compete against Shakespeare — fluently, in his Tudor/Elizabethan English.
Regarding Dark Sovereign, a post appears on LinkedIn. It reads: “For the first time in over four centuries a living author challenges Wm. Shakespeare directly by writing a competing play in the Bard’s English. Yes, fluent Tudor English. Robert Fripp’s counter-attack, Dark Sovereign, restores factual accuracy and a touch of common decency to the reputation of King Richard III, four hundred years after the Bard destroyed it.” In life, Richard was a mostly-decent man cut down for ever by Tudor defamation waved aloft by William Shakespeare.
Plunge in. Explore strange caves. robertfripp.ca awaits. Reader, may your Fates and Fortunes treat you kindly.
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Photo: Marilyn Peddle, North Dorset, England, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
