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Triptych Conversations

Triptych Conversations

By: Mark Meynell Joel Bain Sophie Killingley
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3 friends (@quaerentia @perishandfade @joel.a.bain) + 3 unrelated artistic masterpieces = insights for modern life (hopefully!)All content © Mark Meynell.
Episodes
  • Triptych Ep 2:3 | The Crown’s Assassins, Cold Comfort Farm, Jakob Dylan & The Wallflowers

    Triptych Ep 2:3 | The Crown’s Assassins, Cold Comfort Farm, Jakob Dylan & The Wallflowers
    Jun 18 2026
    The Masterpieces 1. "Assassins", The Crown ep 1:9 (2016) Peter Morgan has made his name, despite his explicit republicanism, from dramatising the House of Windsor. First on stage, then in cinema, and more recently in Netflix’s blockbuster monolith, The Crown. The latter’s production values are spectacular, and certainly in the first two seasons (I confess I gave up in season 3 as it seemed to become more tabloidy), the synergy between script, actors and direction was impressive.Season 1’s penultimate episode (Assassins) was written by Peter Morgan, directed by Benjamin Caron, and was first aired on 4th November 2016. The reason for choosing this one was because of its stellar acting and the dramatic poignancy of the storyline: Winston Churchill (a brilliant John Lithgow) is at last stepping down as Prime Minister to hand over to the desperately impatient Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam). A portrait has been commissioned from Graham Sutherland (Stephen Dillane) by Parliament and there is going to be a great unveiling. It is the conversations between artist and subject especially that stand out.It has to be one of the finest hours of television I’ve ever watched, I think. 2. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932) A complete change of tone now. This is a classic satirical novel from the 1930s and on which has brought universal joy and guffaws to all who have spent any time on the farm. Stella Gibbons (1902-1989) was an English journalist with a remarkable eye for the ridiculous. Cold Comfort Farm was a runaway success that’s never gone out of print; sadly it seems to have been the only one of her many books to have stood the test of time. Her crosshairs were set on the rural sagas that had apparently been popular in the 1920s, many of which had been inspired by the doom-laden tomes of Thomas Hardy (such as the (IMHO) unbearably bleak Jude the Obscure). By common consensus her targets include the so-called ‘loam and lovechild’ novels (!) like Mary Webb’s Precious Bane (set in Shropshire) and Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Joanna Godden (in Kent). But you certainly don’t need to have read those books to love this one (none of us had, in fact). Her turn of phrase is sparklingly witty and the pen-portraits of the various characters laugh-out-loud funny. And the greatest joy of all is that we never do discover the precise nature of the “something nasty in the woodshed” that so perplexed the matriarch and protagonist Flora Poste’s Aunt Ada Doom. It sets imaginations running wild and so that’s perhaps why the phrase has become enshrined in the English language. It even appears in a song by Neil Hannon’s wonderfully arch and rakish band, The Divine Comedy 3. God Says Nothing Back by the Wallflowers (2005) Rebel, Sweetheart was The Wallflowers fifth studio album. Lead singer, and songwriter of all the tracks, is Jakob Dylan (who is, as you might expect, son of Bob) and while it didn’t make huge chart waves, it’s a gorgeous and provocative album. The sixth track is our focus: God Says Nothing Back. It’s a haunting song, full of questions and doubts, and fittingly, is hard to pin down. Other Mentions Opening question: what album saved your life? Joel: Rich Mullins’ Winds of Heaven, Stuff of EarthSophie: Mahler’s 5th SymphonyMark: Peter Gabriel’s So
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    59 mins
  • Triptych Ep 2:2 | Remarkable Ibelin, Fahrenheit 451, a Merry-go-round

    Triptych Ep 2:2 | Remarkable Ibelin, Fahrenheit 451, a Merry-go-round
    May 20 2026
    What happens when a young man battling Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (Matts Steen aka Ibelin) meets Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 and the joy riders of Gertler's 1916 painting Merry-Go-Round...
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Triptych Ep 2:1 | Buechner’s Godric, Jenkins’ Armed Man, Penn’s McCandless

    Triptych Ep 2:1 | Buechner’s Godric, Jenkins’ Armed Man, Penn’s McCandless
    Apr 18 2026
    The Masterpieces 1. GODRIC by Frederick Buechner (1981) Frederick Buechner (1926-2022; pronounced ‘Beakner‘) was an American Presbyterian minister, theologian and, most notably for our purposes, writer. He was prolific in both fiction (15 novels), poetry and non-fiction. He was heralded in his lifetime for his brilliance and creativity, though inevitably, his books have perhaps not maintained their deserved popularity.The novel for which he is best known is surprising! A relatively short work, Godric tells the semi-fictional story of an obscure figure from 12th century Northumberland. Godric of Finchale (apparently pronounced ‘finkle’ acc. to English Heritage!) was a hermit with a heavy conscience, a former Crusader who essentially withdrew from society to a cave on the River Wear, north of Durham. He longs to be left alone to seek God and avoid his past. But the Bishop of Durham was having none of it, and so the Abbot of Rievaulx Abbey sent a young monk, Reginald, to live with Godric in his very old age, to write up this holy man’s life. The result is a hagiography (literally writing about a saint). The word has since come to mean a biography primarily concerned to present the subject in the best light with all warts removed (with probably a few miracles thrown in). But Godric is infuriated by this, not least because he knows his past.The result is an extraordinary, moving and compelling book, wrestling with the nature of good and evil, sin and righteousness, guilt and forgiveness; essentially it’s about how messed up we all are. It’s no surprise that it was a finalist for the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.Buechner wrote:I picked up a small book of saints and opened it, by accident, to the page that had Godric on it. I had never so much as heard of him before, but as I read about him, I knew he was for me, my saint. 2. INTO THE WILD (dir. by Sean Penn, 2007) Chris McCandless was utterly disenchanted with the hypocrisies and platitudes of modern, especially suburban, American life, as exemplified by his parents. So in May 1990, freshly graduated from university, he leaves home without telling anyone to escape to the wilderness. He travels all over in his clapped out car until it’s wrecked in a flood. He hitchhikes, meeting various people with extraordinary stories of their own. He is aiming for Alaska, and he eventually finds an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness in April 1992. He sets up his base there, naming it ‘The Magic Bus’, and all seems ideal. However, things start to go wrong, especially as the weather turns. He also comes to realise how much he desperately craves human company. But when he tries to retrace his steps, the stream he crossed before has become a lethal torrent, forcing him back. He has to resort to foraging for food, and then becomes fatally ill after eating a poisonous plant. He keeps a journal as he slowly declines. Some weeks later, hunters find his body and the family are contacted. Sean Penn’s film is a heart-breaking story adapted from the research of mountaineer and writer Jon Krakauer, whose book Into the Wild stayed at the top of bestseller lists for 2 years. It is beautifully shot and well-paced, with a superb performance by Emile Hirsch in particular. (Sadly, he seems not to have landed the productions or parts that enabled him to reach such heights since). To top it all, the soundtrack is simply stunning: Eddie Vedder (of Pearl Jam) wrote and sang the songs. I’ve had seasons over the years of keeping the album on repeat. But the film is more than the sum of all these extraordinary parts and is one of those that stays with you long after viewing. 3. Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man Peace Mass (2000) Sir Karl Jenkins (1944- ) is a Welsh Composer who started out as a jazz-fusion multi-instrumentalist. He trained at Cardiff university and the Royal Academy of Music in London. You may think that his music is unfamiliar, but especially through its use in advertising, his compositions seem to get everywhere. They’re the sorts of familiar tunes that you can never place but instantly associate with banks or insurance or whatever! Composing such music is no mean feat, and requires a certain kind of geniusBut he is the writer of far more than atmospheric mood music. He’s best known for Adiemus, and more recently the Armed Man mass for peace. There is a long mediaeval tradition of composing settings of the Catholic mass liturgy around popular melodies and one of the most used was from a folk song called ‘L’Homme Armé’ (or the Armed Man). Jenkins updates the concept at the Millennium, describing the previous century asthe most war-torn and destructive century in human history Our very own Doodler, Sophie Killingley, with the great man himself (some time ago it should be said!) Commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum to mark its move from London to Leeds at the Millennium, ...
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    1 hr
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