Arts Reviews

On Tuesday night on Channel 4, a stern male figure peered over his glasses (as equipped with one of those cords favoured by themiddle-aged specs-wearer) and offered us his robust views on how government benefits encourage laziness. Which might not sound that unusual — except that the male figure in question was 12. His name, no less improbably, was Mog and he was a contestant in the new series of Child Genius, now hosted by Richard Osman — these days almost as ubiquitous on television as Susan Calman is onRadio 4. As ever, the first few minutes were spent assuring us how fiendish the quiz would be; but, as ever

From the moment this all-female reboot of Ghostbusters was announced, the fan-boy panic set in: where will it end? An all-female Top Gun? Will it make me pregnant? Who are these ‘women’? Where do they come from? Are they a recent thing? Do we know any? If it’s proved they can carry big Hollywood comedies, how will they ever be stopped? Such vitriol had to be coming from a sexist place as films are rebooted all the time and superheroes are endlessly — Batman can’t bend down to pull up his socks without being rebooted — yet they don’t provoke hate. Plus, it’s not as if remaking a film erases

Leonore is the first version of Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Stephen Medcalf thinks it’s better. ‘What Leonore gives us is more discursive but more dramatic,’ he declares in the programme of this Buxton Festival production. Well he would, wouldn’t he? He’s the director. You’d hope he’d have some faith in the piece. And what’s undeniable is that with Leonore you get more Beethoven for your buck than in Fidelio. True, there’s no ‘Abscheulicher!’ and no glowing declaration of universal brotherhood from the Minister. But if you’ve ever wished that Beethoven had given us a bit less of all that freedom and humanity stuff and a bit more romantic comedy, Leonore is

It’s sadly possible to imagine that The Living and the Dead was sold to BBC1’s commissioning editors as ‘Poldark meets The Exorcist’. Yet, while that wouldn’t be a completely inaccurate summary, the overall result is a lot more coherent, clever and ambitious than that. At heart, in fact, Tuesday’s first episode was a nifty twist on another genre: the one where a retired detective/gunslinger/master criminal comes out of retirement for one last job. The programme began in Somerset in 1894, where we met Harriet Denning, an unusually bright 16-year-old, whose intellectual curiosity alarmed her mother but who was encouraged in her reading of Ibsen, Zola and Darwin by her proud

A brief encounter with Radio 4’s Any Questions to gauge the measure of opinion in the shires after the referendum result was enough to convince me we are entering even more torrid times than during the campaign. For some mysterious reason both Harriet Harman and Alex Salmond, billed in Radio Times to appear on the panel alongside Ken Clarke and Chris Grayling, had reneged on their promise and been replaced by Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP who got into trouble in 2014 for her white van man tweet, and Steven Woolfe, an oxymoronic Ukip MEP. The audience, judging from the applause, were pretty much balanced between the Leavers and Remainers

Mike Bartlett’s curious blank-verse drama Charles III became an international hit. His new effort examines the cut-throat world of dark-web espionage. An American traitor named Andrew (Edward Snowden presumably) is hiding out in a Moscow hotel. Enter a flirty, giggling Irishwoman played by Caoilfhionn Dunne, who claims to be British and who teases Andrew over his betrayal of his homeland’s secrets. She evinces an interest in Oscar Wilde and the pair lock horns over footling minutiae. Andrew points out that Barbie dolls are called Sindy in the UK and this seems to demonstrate his familiarity with Britain. But he fails to spot the false cadences of her accent and he