Every once in a while, a film will present you with an unexpected bonus — a brief shock of recognition. You’ll suddenly realize that you recognize the location in which a scene was shot and that, in fact, you were once standing in the same spot where you now see Brad Pitt or whomever on the screen.
I experienced a unique version of that shock of recognition a few years ago when watching “The Illusionist,” a 2010 animated feature by Sylvain Chomet about an aging French magician in 1959 whose career is being eroded by more popular forms of entertainment and a general audience weariness with magic shows.
(Not to be confused with the 2006 period drama with the same title starring Edward Norton, Jessica Biel and Paul Giamatti.)
Following ever-diminishing job offers, the magician moves from Paris to London and eventually to Edinburgh. In one scene, standing in an Edinburgh street, he glances up at the historic castle atop Castle Rock overlooking the city.
Chomet’s drawing was precise enough that I could tell it was set right in front of the hotel I’d stayed in (coincidentally) during a Society for Animation Studies conference a couple of years earlier.
Last month, I was back in Scotland, Glasgow this time, just tagging along with my wife, May Berenbaum, who was to deliver the Wigglesworth Memorial Lecture for the Royal Entomological Society, having won the Wigglesworth Memorial Award for outstanding service to the science of entomology.
May is formally a fellow of the society — so I guess I can honestly say that I’m married to a fellow but am not gay.
On our ride from the Glasgow airport to our hotel, our cab driver took us on a trip through the history of Scottish contributors to science, medicine and literature.
Fittingly, he looked and sounded as though he could be a close cousin or even brother of Peter Capaldi (the Glaswegian actor who portrayed the 12th doctor in the “Doctor Who” television series).
The roster of Scottish inventors and scientists specifically involved in some way with images on screens is long and notable. Alexander Bain introduced the facsimile machine in the 1840s.
Polymath James Clerk Maxwell took time out from his work in thermodynamics and electromagnetics to produce the first durable color photograph in 1861 and later demonstrated that any color could be produced using three primary colors, which would eventually become the basis for color television.
Electrical engineer John Logie Baird demonstrated the world’s first mechanical television in January 1926 and went on to invent the first publicly demonstrated color TV system and the first purely electronic color picture tube.
And, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was Scottish, and his creation, Sherlock Holmes, has appeared in more screened depictions, including even animated cartoons, than probably any other fictional character.
In any case, once at the hotel, I was so jet-lagged and exhausted that I just collapsed and watched Scottish television.
There was an all-Hitchcock channel, but I eventually just turned to Scottish quiz shows and found they reminded me of the quiz-show skits that dotted the video landscape of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
Several aspects in general stood out. The hosts were often more casually attired than in either Monty Python’s skits or American television. Often, they looked as though they had just come back from shopping at a big-box store, but they still more or less followed the rule of being better dressed than their contestants.
Cash prizes seemed to be generally smaller than in the U.S. I think the largest amount I saw won was 5,000 pounds (about $7,000). Certainly nothing to sneer at, but five-figure prizes and more on U.S. shows such as “Jeopardy” are fairly common. Then there were the non-cash prizes. I saw a team of four female contestants go into raptures over a 24-piece tea set.
- “Pointless,” airing on the BBC since 2009, turns the goal of “Family Feud” on its head. One hundred people are polled on various general-information questions or challenged with tasks such as making as many words as possible or the longest word from a select set of letters. Then four two-player teams attempt to come up with correct answers that were given by the smallest number of respondents rather than agreeing with the largest number.
- “Tipping Point,” airing on ITV1 since 2012, has contestants trying to buzz in first with a correct answer. That earns them discs to be used in a giant coin-pusher like those you might find in a gaming arcade. Tokens drop down on an upper level with others, and some might then be pushed off the moving platform onto a lower moving platform. Any tokens that fall off that second platform into a collection trough are worth 50 pounds each (only the single winner of the game gets to keep the cash, though). If you’ve played an arcade coin-pusher or watched someone else, you know it can be quite frustrating when coins hang on the edges. Then it gets boring. The structure of the device insures that it’s unlikely to pay off much and takes some time achieving any payout. But “Tipping Point” has been on for more than a decade, so it must still hold its appeal for audiences in the U.K.
- Finally and unquestionably, the oddest quiz show I discovered was “Bullseye” — now in its third incarnation on ITV1, airing since 1981. It combines answering questions with dart-throwing. Three teams of two players each compete, with one team member throwing darts at a special board and the other answering questions. The dart-throwing determines cash rewards and question topics. Occasionally, the competition is interrupted by Bully, the show’s anthropomorphic animated bull mascot, rushing in and hugging the emcees (a Highland bull, as I recall, with the breed’s long hair and long horns, as well as a red-and-white-striped shirt and blue pants). Coming upon “Bullseye” randomly for the first time makes you realize that you never really knew the true meaning of the word “befuddled” before. At its peak, “Bullseye” was drawing 20 million viewers, or about a third of the total U.K. population.
So even something as familiar as a quiz show can be revelatory and disorienting when recast in another country — just like my breakfasts in Scotland with slices of haggis and blood pudding.