Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Fred Johnston

Circular

We went about in circles one hand on the next man’s shoulders something out of Gogol or Great War blind: we ate chicken soup, which gave one old man stomach cramps: he was taken away, snotting. A trustee, if such a thing is imaginable in a lunatic asylum, clicked around as part of a service-trolley, selling cigarettes and bars of chocolate but never newspapers; no telling what bad news could do to the mind. My wife arrived to say she had custody of our children; we wept dutifully and she left, a slim woman keying expertly the buttons on the door’s security pad — some, receiving similar news, screamed. Others

James Delingpole

After watching Bad Education, Big School is as embarrassing as watching your dad trying to DJ

You know you’re getting old when TV starts getting nostalgic about eras during which you were already feeling old and nostalgic. Take Pogs, the subject of one of those ‘Whatever happened to them, eh?’ moments in Badults (BBC3, Tuesday), an amiable sitcom about twentysomething flatmates. Pogs were these collectable discs originally made from fruit-juice bottle caps (passion fruit, orange and guava) that were a massive fad in the mid-Nineties. Tragically, though, the reason I know this is not that I played with them myself but that my stepson Jim the Rat did. How depressing is that? What it means is that even the generation below me, Jim’s, is already beginning

Kate Chisholm

Farewell to a natural born broadcaster

‘He was a natural broadcaster,’ said Nick Higham, after the death last week of the rugby player and sports broadcaster Cliff Morgan. I wondered what he meant. ‘Natural’ as in born to the task? Or ‘natural’ as in his ability to communicate as if chatting directly to you, and only you, with no pretension or affectation, just a desire to tell a good story, to convey his enthusiasm? I still miss Morgan on Saturday mornings. He had such a warm voice, and something more: a real and genuine interest in the stories behind the athletes, tennis stars, rugby players, basketball champions, wrestlers, rowers, cyclists, swimmers, gymnasts, equestrians he chatted to

Andrew Petrie

At home with President Nixon

The most paranoid of presidents, Richard Nixon must have been feeling unwell when he allowed three of his closest aides to shoot personal Super 8 footage of their time in the White House. Bob Haldeman, John Erlichman and Dwight Chapin — all of whom later went to prison for their involvement in the Watergate affair — together shot more than 200 rolls of film between 1969 and 1973, the highlights of which form the backbone of a new documentary Our Nixon, and show us a team of go-getting young Republicans you wouldn’t recognise from Oliver Stone’s murky biopic. As the director Penny Lane says: ‘There aren’t any bad guys in

Deborah Ross

About Time review: If Richard Curtis is brilliant at anything, it’s Upper Middle Class Lifestyle Porn

The easiest thing would be to sneer at Richard Curtis’s new film About Time, and so I will a little, or maybe significantly. It’s hard to know at this point, as I’m up here, at the beginning, and the end is down there, at the bottom, and who knows what will happen in between. It’s as much a mystery to me as to you. However, pre-sneering, in whatever amount, I should make clear that if you have enjoyed Curtis’s previous films— Four Weddings, Love, Actually, Notting Hill, but not The Boat That Rocked, which we’ll pretend never happened, as that’s best all round — you will enjoy this. It’s more

Michael Tanner

Do I wish I’d gone to see Peter Grimes on the beach at Aldeburgh? No

With a tidal wave of Peter Grimeses about to engulf us — performances in London, Birmingham and Leeds in September alone — there is also, from 5 September, the film of the celebrated Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh Beach at more than 80 cinemas in the UK.  The film was made in June during the three live performances that occasioned ecstatic reviews from all who saw and wrote about them. I didn’t go to any of them, for rather cowardly reasons. But now, having seen the film of the occasion, do I wish I had? Clearly the atmosphere must have been tremendous: the sound and smell of the sea, the threat

Sunday

Toby Young

From our archive: Toby Young interviews Sir David Frost

Sir David Frost, one of Britain’s greatest broadcasters, has passed away today at the age of 74. From our archive, here is Toby Young interviewing Frost in 2007 following the release of Frost/Nixon, the film chronicling his series of interviews with Richard Nixon. As Toby reveals, Frost was revelling in the new found interest of his broadcasting legacy. Sitting in one of the green rooms at Yorkshire Television on a Saturday afternoon in Leeds, it’s difficult to reconcile the man I’m watching on the monitor with the David Frost of legend. He’s recording four back-to-back episodes of Through the Keyhole to be broadcast on BBC2 later this year and he’s finding it

Thursday

Francesca Steele

The Venice Film Festival from your desk

Venice may be the oldest film festival in the world but it is still breaking new ground. This week film-lovers across the globe will sit down in the comfort of their own homes to watch films that are being streamed live from the Lido. It is the second year of Venice’s Web Theatre; this offers members of the public the chance to buy tickets to stream films  — picked largely from the festival’s Horizons section — at the same time as festival attendees see them on the big screen (www.labiennale.org for details). Horizons, though not the main category in the festival, still has some worthwhile films to watch. Wadjda, the

Clarissa Tan

The sight of a rose-and-pistachio cake with lychee flavouring, strewn with petals, makes Clarissa Tan’s heart lift

I’m not crazy about cookery shows. I suspect they indicate how little we are cooking, rather than how much. We’re fascinated with celebrity chefs because we think they’ve mastered something exotic and foreign to us — no surprise their shows are often slotted next to travel programmes. Looking at Jamie Oliver potter about his kitchen, we smugly feel we’ve given some time to cooking, though in reality we’ve done no such thing. On the whole, I think you are better off making yourself some buttered toast than spending an hour watching Anthony Bourdain experiment with spring rolls in Hanoi. The Great British Bake Off (BBC2, Tuesdays) is different. Like Masterchef,

Lloyd Evans

Chimerica is a triumph

Chimerica. The weird title of Lucy Kirkwood’s hit play conjoins the names of the eastern and western superpowers and promises to offer a snapshot of both nations just as the baton of economic primacy passes from America’s wizened youth to China’s reborn antiquity. The script has an unusually complex set of creative ambitions. It takes the formula of the romantic comedy, gives it a bittersweet twist, and plants it in the arid terrain of international politics. And it starts as a whodunnit. Joe Schofield, a fêted American photo-journalist, was in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when he shot a few frames of the unknown citizen who halted a Chinese tank in

Andrew Lambirth

At last Alfred Munnings is being taken seriously again

Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959) did himself a grave and lasting disservice when he publicly attacked modern art in a bibulous after-dinner speech at the Royal Academy in 1949. He had been president of the RA for five years, pipping Augustus John to the post, but the controversy he stirred up (he called Picasso and Matisse ‘foolish daubers’) led to his resignation. The echoes of his rant linger on more than half-a-century later, constituting for many the most memorable thing about him. Like Canute, Munnings could not stem the tide, and Modernism for a time swamped and eroded his reputation. Now, as people begin to look at his work again, his

Lloyd Evans

Henry Goodman interview: How to make Brecht fun

The face is unlined. The tan is as deep as Brazilian hardwood. The thatch of grey hair looks like a gift from God rather than the achievement of surgical intervention. At 63, the actor Henry Goodman keeps himself in excellent trim. He exudes energy and concentration, and in the hour we spend together, he relates every aspect of our talk straight back to the show he’s promoting, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Brecht’s political allegory uses imaginary figures from Chicago’s underworld to satirise Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany during the 1930s. The script was written in just three weeks, in 1941, while Brecht was in exile in Helsinki

William Cook

Second city blues

Why are clever-clever people so rude about Birmingham? Bruce Chatwin dismissed his hometown as absolutely hideous, Kenneth Tynan called his birthplace a cemetery without walls. Britain’s second city has always been belittled, not least by those who’ve left it, and now the old slights have been revived in the current debate about HS2. Never mind the pros and cons of that controversial high-speed railway — it’s the destination which really gets London’s goat. If HS2 went to Liverpool we’d be sure to mind our p’s and q’s, but Brum has always been an easy target. As Londoners never tire of telling one another, ‘Fancy forking out all that cash, just

Andrew Lambirth

The whizz stirrer-up

‘Professor’ Bruce Lacey (born 1927) is one of those figures who has existed effectively on the periphery of the art world for more than half a century. Part licensed jester, part society’s conscience, Lacey operates best on the fringes, stirring things up, provoking thought and challenging preconceptions, a lightning conductor for comment and criticism. Before this exhibition, I associated him principally with the Kitchen Sink painters (John Bratby used to describe him as ‘a whizz’) and the type of idiosyncratic humour best exemplified by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. In fact, the ‘Prof’ appeared with The Alberts, a subversive neo-Edwardian jazz band and forerunners of the Bonzos, in a cabaret

Daniel Hardisty

End

We learn how every item is its own army the day we split the house down parting lines; the bookcases ready to be divided: the little troops that stand with their stiff spines.

Kate Chisholm

Tom Stoppard’s Pink Floyd play gives Radio 2 a dark side

How many listeners, I wonder, actually tuned in to Darkside as it went out on air on Radio 2, after dark, curtains closed against the pale moon waning? One listener for sure at 10 o’clock on Monday night was David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s guitar man and co-creator of the band’s mega-successful ‘concept album’ The Dark Side of the Moon, which inspired the play. Gilmour told the playwright Tom Stoppard that he wouldn’t listen ‘until it was actually going out on radio’. He wanted to catch ‘the extra vibe’. He may be a rock superstar but he’s still in thrall to radio: ‘There it is being listened to at that moment

Roy Kelly

Heaven

Perhaps Heaven is like being foreign abroad where even the groceries appear exotic. All is before you exactly as it seems. Everything is as false and true as dreams. The language excludes you, familiar and strange, though all is apparently recognisable, all absent and correct in the world as it is. You are learning to call things by another name. The money looks like works of art, pastel coloured, value grown abstract and meaningless with beauty. Relax on these caféd squares, inspect the view, experience a larger meaning escape you. Look, the lake is furrowed with the long white wakes of steamers and ferries, clear despite the haze. A silent,

Radhika Kapila

London life

Whoever coined the phrase ‘nothing is ever black and white’ had quite obviously never stepped over the threshold of Tate Britain this summer. Another London (until 16 September), a selection of photographs taken by some of the 20th century’s most celebrated photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn, is a two-tone world; a black and white sea of parks and landmarks, crowds and individuals; London’s many faces in the last century (Wolfgang Suschitzky’s ‘Lyons Corner House, Tottenham Court Road’, 1934, above). There’s something unnerving about seeing London, a city recognised for its vibrancy and multicoloured diversity, depicted in stark monochrome. But, at the same time, black and white photography has

Kate Chisholm

Against the odds

Just in time for the Paralympics the veteran broadcaster and campaigner for disability rights, Peter White, has launched a special Paralympian series of his No Triumph, No Tragedy programme (Radio 4), the title of which should probably be reversed. On Sunday he talked to Margaret Maughan, the first Briton to win a gold medal at the Paralympics. She broke her back in a road accident in Malawi, where she was teaching, but only a year later she triumphed at Rome in the first international games for the disabled to be held alongside the Olympics. Maughan had discovered that although she had always been hopeless at sport she was rather good

Michael Tanner

Six hours with Stockhausen

Arriving for the world première of Stockhausen’s opera Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light), we were greeted by the sight of two Bactrian camels, delightful and patient creatures, standing almost immobile for at least an hour while many visitors inspected them, before leaving in Joseph’s Amazing Camels coach. The one we saw later on stage was a pantomime camel, out of which, unzipped, a man stepped, after the animal had done an elaborate dance and been offered champagne. Zany and utopian, this is characteristic Stockhausen as I remember his works from the 1970s, before his long semi-eclipse, as people lost patience with his pretensions, his extreme prolixity, the tiresomeness of