Manet’s Mona Lisa: Radio 4’s Moving Pictures reviewed

Elizabeth the First is a ten-part American podcast series that isn’t about Elizabeth I at all. The assumption of its producers seems to be that the Tudor monarch was all right – a bit of a trailblazer, one might say – but not really worthy of her title.

The real ‘Elizabeth the First’ was actually Elizabeth Taylor. The series aims to present the actress as the first ‘influencer’ the world has ever known, even though poor old Taylor didn’t even know what Instagram was. Taylor did, however, court the media before the word ‘social’ was attached to it. And she didn’t need to take selfies because people were always shoving cameras in

her face.

The podcast is narrated by Katy Perry, the Californian singer who kissed a girl and liked it and then married Russell Brand. She speaks in a breathy way and is as partial as Meghan Markle to celebrating another woman’s ‘fortitude’ and ‘authentic self’. Elizabeth Taylor’s CV did not stop at plain ‘actress’. She was, as Perry put it, an ‘actress, artist, activist, advocate, mogul, daughter, mother, grandmother, friend, lover, wife, influencer’. You get the idea.

The point this podcast is trying to make is that today’s influencers are far less influential than they think they are. More than 40 million accounts on Instagram have more than a million followers each and similar statistics could probably be produced for TikTok and Twitter. What do these numbers really add up to? It’s all very vacuous. Elizabeth Taylor, by contrast, possessed ‘real power and longevity’. Fine. But describing her as ‘an influencer who went the distance’ feels slightly daft.

The episodes improve as they move away from this formula to explore the actress-mogul-mother’s biography. They proceed roughly chronologically from Taylor’s life as a child star to her establishment of an Aids foundation in the 1980s, and feature some brilliant clips and anecdotes from childhood friends and family members. I particularly liked hearing Taylor describe the lightbulb moment she learned from fellow actor Montgomery Clift that she didn’t need to cry real tears or shake real shakes, as she had done as a child actress. This would only lead to more shaking long after a scene was over ‘because your body doesn’t know the difference’ between acting and reality.

It’s just a pity that so many of the interviews descend into hagiography. It is hard to keep a straight face when hearing Elizabeth Taylor described as ‘such a generous gift receiver’. You can just imagine her reaction at being presented with a social-media freebie.

The barmaid of Manet’s ‘Folies-Bergère’ is about as unTaylorish as they come. She’s been described as the Mona Lisa of the 19th century owing to the enigma of her look and the dislocation between her full-frontal portrait and her reflection from behind. For the first episode of Moving Pictures, a new series starting on Radio 4 this week, we’re encouraged to find the painting on Google Art and zoom in on her expression and surroundings while we listen.

The programme is beautifully produced, with vivid passages of narrative reimagining Manet at the time of painting the picture intersected by interviews with art historians, who pause over the work’s most intriguing passages. Have you ever noticed the red logo on the beer bottle on the bar? It was the first logo ever to appear in western art and the first to be trademarked in the UK. How about the mandarins in a bowl? They are probably glacé.

This feels like slow radio but with a satisfying intellectual dimension. There’s no obvious agenda and no outlandish theory to push. The once popular idea that the barmaid looks depressed because she’s a prostitute – a contemporary caricature described her as a ‘seller of consolation’ – is rejected as too tidy. ‘Manet,’ says narrator Cathy FitzGerald, ‘doesn’t like tidy.’ There were complaints when the Courtauld added a new label to the painting late last year presenting the woman as an item on offer to the gentleman in the mirror. The programme does a comparatively good job of speaking to you rather than at you while you immerse yourself fully in the art on screen. It’s blissful listening.