Television

From bombs to Benidorm

Mass Tourism: The Architecture of Franco’s Spain (2019) Meades completes his quartet on the architecture of European dictators of the 20th century. Franco's architectural legacy was more enduring and surprising than any of the others.

'This was 90 minutes of barely concealed anger at this “religion-infected country”, a Spain that is struggling to exhume and dispose of Francisco Franco, physically or mentally. He remains underneath his magnificent monument, the Valley of the Fallen, “hypocrisy made stone. An insult. A tomb to shit on. He deserves the sort of grave that Hitler and Himmler got — no grave at all. No headstone, no name, no provocation to remember.” Meades is peerless.'
Chris Bennion, The Times

Flexing of the lingo muscle

Jonathan Meades on Jargon (2017) Meades dissects the way in which jargon is used to confuse, cover up and lie in the modern world, from law and politics to sport and art.

'It’s meant to provoke, and does. It’s also blisteringly brutal, clever and hilarious. Meades is a rare thing on television: properly different. Sporadically he pops up to deliver a polemic in his inimitable style: deadpan, still, no walking towards you or waving his arms about, no TV cliches. The sunglasses have gone, sadly, perhaps the subject of jargon is so serious it requires eye contact.'

Sam Wolllaston, The Guardian

'Meades’ film should be taught in schools, and screened on a weekly basis in all other institutions. It could change everything.'

Rachel Cooke, The New Statesman  

M for murder and modernism

Benbuilding - Mussolini, Monuments, Modernism and Marble (2016) First Hitler, then Stalin, now Mussolini. Here Meades discovers a dictator who couldn't dictate, caught between the contending forces of modernism and a revivalism that harked back to ancient Rome.

'What makes Meades such a consummate TV author is a delight in language and a repertoire of expertise

In Praise of ..., The Guardian

'Never has television been used so intelligently, so imaginatively, as by Jonathan Meades.'

Roger Lewis, The Oldie

Incredible hulks

Bunkers, Brutalism, Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry (2014) Brutalist architecture did not seek to represent geological formations. It sought to create buildings that matched such formations, even challenged them. Mankind could take on nature and win, could make its own yardangs and hoodoos. Meades celebrates brutal beauty.

'Provocative, opinionated, allusive, variously heretical and revisionist, Jonathan Meades is the antithesis of the apologetic orthodoxy of BBC cultural output.'
Martin Hoyle, Financial Times
'A beautiful paean to concrete and scale and ambition, to architecture as art.'
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian