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Saturday

Charles Spencer

The next big thing

You’re probably sick of reading about John Peel, the Radio One disc jockey who died of a heart attack last week and whose passing was marked with the solemn, exhaustive media coverage usually reserved for great statesmen. This was, after all, only a man who played records for a living. Andy Kershaw, one of Peel’s protégés and a fellow DJ, went spectacularly over the top in the Independent. Peel, he said, was the ‘most important person in British music since the birth of rock’n’roll’. Come on, Andy, take a grip. More important than Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, David Bowie?

Simon Hoggart

Trick or cheat?

Old formulae are desperately re-worked in order to fill the endless hours of television time. (Did you know that the BBC broadcasts five hours of TV every hour, in this country alone?) The mathematician and code expert Simon Singh, whom I bumped into the other day, suggested I watch Beg, Borrow or Steal (BBC2, Tuesdays) because he felt it illustrated some interesting intellectual problems. It comes straight after The Weakest Link and is in many ways a knock-off, since participants not only need to know the answers, but are also encouraged to swindle each other. There are five contestants. They are asked clutches of four questions, some moderately tough (‘Which is the fastest animal on two legs?’). Only people who get all four right win any money.

Peter Phillips

Beyond words

Sitting in the Globe Theatre towards the end of last season, I began to have one of those out-of-mind experiences which only music is supposed to be able to give. The play in question was Measure for Measure, always known to be a difficult one to interpret satisfactorily, a difficulty which presumably increases if one is not in possession of all that might be of help. Full of untried concentration we welcome the players and lend them our ears. Off goes the Duke: ‘Of government the properties to unfold/ Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse,/ Since I am put to know that your own science/ Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice/ My strength can give you...’ What? Could you possibly say that again more slowly?

John McEwen

Force for good

This is the first in a series of short sharp shows devoted to leading British artists which Tate Britain proposes to stage over the coming years. According to Stephen Deuchar, Tate Britain’s director, Rego was easily the most popular choice, and little wonder. It is a sign of true quality that in a 50-year career she has gone from strength to strength.

Saturday

William Packer

Bride and prejudice

Leighton House, Lord Leighton’s home and studio in Kensington, has a growing reputation for small and scholarly yet undaunting exhibitions. And with the house itself and its collection to be relished into the bargain, size hardly matters. That said, the current special offer, occupying only one room, is centred upon a single work that, at 10 feet by more than five, is itself pretty big. Indeed ‘The Babylonian Marriage Market’ is one of the great machines of high Victorian narrative art. Its painter Edwin Long, born in 1829, was already in his mid-40s and at the time not even an Associate RA. And this one work, two years in the painting and the sensation of the Royal Academy Summer Show of 1875, was to make his name and fortune.

Mark Glazebrook

Intimate insight

And did those feet in ancient timesWalk upon London’s suburbs green?And was a canvas full of sunOn England’s pleasant pastures seen?And did Pissarro’s light divineShine forth upon our clouded hills?And was IMPRESSIONISM builded hereAmong these dark Satanic mills? Well, up to a point, yes, if Camille and his son Lucien may be merged and those Satanic north of England mills, later to be turned a smoggy white by L.S. Lowry, kept in the distance. Although retaining Danish nationality, having been born in the Danish West Indies, Camille Pissarro’s feet, or rather one of them, in a genetic manner of speaking, may have hailed from the same vicinity as William Blake’s ‘Holy Lamb of God’. Pissarro’s mother was Creole but his father was Jewish.

Andrew Lambirth

Sweetness and Light

People love to sniff the scandal of forgery. Didn’t that old rogue Tom Keating practically become a folk idol? The disputes of scholars are mostly dry stuff, but the notion that the National Gallery’s recently and expensively purchased ‘Madonna of the Pinks’ by Raphael could be a fake has been resurrected by arts reporters and newshounds hungry for headlines on the occasion of this eagerly awaited Raphael exhibition. I have heard artists and critics voicing their doubts about the authenticity of this painting — one of the former opining that the faces do not look sufficiently Italian to be by Raphael, but are instead ‘neurotic and unmistakably Low Countries’ — and indeed it is easy to have misgivings about such a controversial picture.

Michael Vestey

Digital watch

Did the BBC’s creation of its Radio Four-type digital radio network BBC 7 force the commercial digital station Oneword to close? The report last week investigating the corporation’s move into digital radio seemed to think so. Tim Gardam, a former BBC and Channel 4 executive, whose report it was, said that the BBC ‘was basically unconcerned about the potential effect of BBC7 on Oneword’. The Oneword ‘assumption that it would be allowed to pursue this market alone was scuppered’ once BBC7 was launched. He thought the station’s collapse might have been avoided if the BBC had been willing to share its renowned archive with it. It is a pity that Oneword, the digital radio station that resembled Radio Four, closed.

Robin Holloway

Update on Three

It’s several years since I’ve attempted in these columns an overview of the state of Radio Three. Perceptions are sharpened by an actual absence from these islands of some three months, followed by a season in the country, where its beams do not penetrate. So I come to it refreshed, with a wider perspective from which to measure benefits and disabilities than if, glued to the tacky Radio Times, I’d never been away. Positives first: plenty of the network’s manifold and manifest excellences remain intact. A passionate addict of ‘serious classical music’ (ugh) and the idea, and actuality, of a service wholly devoted to its dissemination, I find this ideal still holds, if precariously, despite the depradations of current ideology.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Grave and glittering

While it’s clear, from the ending-times of most of their performances, that neither of London’s major opera houses feels it is worth considering seriously their patrons who don’t live in the capital and have to use public transport, it often seems even clearer that most Londoners wouldn’t dream of going further afield for an opera than Bow Street or St Martin’s Lane. At least I can’t see any other explanation of why each visit I have paid to Sadler’s Wells this year has been to a theatre half-full, if that. And several of those visits have been far more enjoyable than almost anything to be found in the West End in recent months.

Giannandrea Poesio

Stamping feat

Foot stamping is a common feature of many forms of dance. This is not surprising because it provides immediate rhythmical accompaniment to the dance, while being integral to the dance action. Inspired by what many consider as the most natural and first man-made rhythm-making in the world, illustrious choreographers have often drawn upon this primeval idea for their artistic creations. Footfalls, therefore, have often been extrapolated from their traditionally non-theatrical contexts and imported into ballets such as those by Maurice Béjart and Jiri Kylian, or into more radical theatre-dance works, such as Maguy Marin’s memorable May B (1981).

Andrew Lambirth

Private passions | 23 October 2004

If travel indeed broadens the mind, much of its benign influence and inspiration must come from contact with foreign culture, very often in the form of museum collections in the country visited. (The British, perhaps surprisingly, are valued museum-goers.) The remarkable assembly of masterpieces and lesser Salon items that fills the Louvre actually says a great deal about French history, if correctly interpreted. Likewise the contents of the National Gallery reflect upon our national character and patterns of taste with no less piquancy and point.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Puzzlingly unmoving

Hard to credit, but at the Royal Opera the new production of Massenet’s Werther begins with the prelude being played while the curtain is still lowered, no one messing around in front; and when it rises, at the point indicated in the score, we see a honeysuckle-covered wall, with a water spout spouting water, and part of a quaint old house. Old-style realism, or semi-realism, which many of us have been pleading for, if not in all cases, at least in such classic period pieces as this. When characters appear, they are dressed in period, too. Fairly soon, however, I began to wonder whether the director Benoit Jacquot, collaborating with the designer Charles Edwards, and in collusion with Antonio Pappano, had their tongues in their cheeks.

Toby Young

Who needs friends?

Cloaca, Kevin Spacey’s debut as the artistic director of the Old Vic, must rank as one of the biggest disappointments of the year. It isn’t bad, exactly, but I was expecting so much more from the man who electrified British theatergoers with his star turn in The Iceman Cometh six years ago. I sat there in the audience thinking, ‘He put his career in Hollywood on hold for this?’ A new play by a Dutch author called Maria Goos, Cloaca is reminiscent of Art, the long-running hit about three middle-aged male friends who argue about the value of a blank canvas.

Giannandrea Poesio

Californian class

I wish ballet companies due to visit London in the next few months could bring programmes that are as richly varied and neatly constructed as those presented by San Francisco Ballet last week. Artistic eclecticism as well as the ability to respond to a diversity of stylistic and technical demands are two of its most noticeable qualities. This 69-strong company, under the 20-year directorship of Helgi Thomasson, has matured into one of the best companies today. I do not recall the last time I saw such an impeccable rendition of George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, the crowning glory of the second programme.

Andrew Lambirth

Flower power

Constance Spry (1886–1960) was a remarkable figure who exerted a powerful influence over the taste of generations of home-makers, particularly from the 1930s to the 1950s. Born in Derby, she was brought up in Ireland where she studied hygiene and physiology, with a view to a career in nursing. A natural communicator, she soon found herself lecturing on first aid and home nursing for the Women’s National Health Association in Ireland. From the start there was a noticeable emphasis on self-help and what can be done in the home. But Spry was always capable of working equally well with larger institutions, and at the beginning of the first world war she became secretary of Dublin Red Cross.

Saturday

Toby Young

Preserving our heritage

What will happen to British culture when the United Kingdom disintegrates into half a dozen warring republics? Who will protect our museums from marauding bands of looters when the rule of law breaks down? What will become of the crown jewels when the royal family is banished to Monaco? If our cultural heritage survives at all, it’ll be thanks largely to India, judging by the loving care with which three classic works of English literature have been adapted recently. Later this year, cinema-goers have two treats in store: Bride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennett is transformed into a Bollywood heroine, and Vanity Fair, Mira Nair’s distinctly Indian take on Thackeray’s masterpiece.