More from Arts

Saturday

Ursula Buchan

Go west

The gardening press in England is often criticised for being parochial. The Scots I meet never miss an opportunity to remind me of this but you could argue that Irish gardens and gardeners are more at the margins of our consciousness. Geographical distance is a major factor, of course, but against that must be set a common pre-20th-century gardening heritage — among the moneyed classes, at least — as well as a common language, temperate maritime climate and, in the case of Northern Ireland, citizenship. Indeed, if it were not for the impact made by an irrepressible trio of contemporary horticulturists, I suspect that Irish gardening would be largely ignored by English gardeners.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Talk show

The Conversation Piece The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 14 February A visit to the Queen’s Gallery is always a civilised, enjoyable experience. Apart, that is, from the airport-style security to which the visitor is subjected — a saddening sign of the retrograde times we live in. The treasures of the Royal Collection are worth any number of visits (I always want to see Gainsborough’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’ or Annibale Carracci’s ‘Head of a Man in Profile’, but there are plenty of other fine things), while the temporary exhibitions mounted in the side galleries are very often of the highest quality. One such is the current display devoted to The Conversation Piece, and subtitled Scenes of Fashionable Life.

Lloyd Evans

Living dangerously

Rope Almeida Generous Finborough Oh dear, not this again. I’ve seen Hitchcock’s wonderfully creepy film Rope several times and I had little appetite for the Patrick Hamilton play on which it’s based. Big surprise. The film script was radically customised to accommodate the timid tastes of 1940s film-goers. The original, from 1929, is more daring, subtle, profound and psychologically interesting in every way. In fact, this isn’t just a masterpiece. This is one of those rare occasions in art when a mind of extraordinary power takes a stale genre — the repertory thriller in this case — tosses aside all the conventions and raises the format to a previously unimaginable plane of sophistication. Right from the first line Hamilton rewrites the rule book.

Patrick Carnegy

Magicking away misogyny

Arabian Nights Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon The RSC’s Christmas show is a welcome revival by Dominic Cooke of his adaptation of Arabian Nights, first staged with great success at the Young Vic in 1998. This is also the first ‘family show’ in the Courtyard, and it was good there were so many children there to enjoy it on the opening night. The stories told by the beautiful Shahrazad to the King in hope of postponing her post-wedding-night execution are obscure in origin. But even the unexpurgated versions by Sir Richard (‘dirty dick’) Burton (16 volumes, 1885–88) run to no more than about 260 tales and not the thousand-and-one that legend would have us believe.

Charles Spencer

Walking on air

Minicab drivers have a bad reputation for being dishonest incompetents and worse — a current poster campaign suggests that if a woman gets into an unlicensed cab she has only herself to blame if she gets raped — but down here in suburban Surrey they couldn’t be more helpful or reliable as I have had recent cause to find out. Just before Christmas, I skidded on ice in Dorset and my beloved VW Passat slid slowly and graciously into the iron railings of the picturesque bridge that runs over the River Brit in Netherbury. Having just driven off from a standing start, I was only travelling at a few miles an hour and time seemed suspended during my helpless slide across the ice.

Michael Tanner

Golden olden

La bohème Royal Opera House Thanks to the cautiousness of the major opera companies over the festive season, I saw Puccini’s La bohème twice in five days, with another couple of productions to go. The most fascinating aspect, for me, of seeing the Royal Opera’s 577th performance of this masterpiece, in John Copley’s production from 1974, was to compare it with the shoestring production which I saw at The Cock Tavern in Kilburn on New Year’s Eve. Many dimensions of comparison suggest themselves, the most obvious being that of cost. Tickets for The Cock are £15, those for much of the Royal Opera House about £205, with even the centre amphitheatre at £89.

Deborah Ross

Fired up

Up in the Air 15, Nationwide 44 Inch Chest 18, Nationwide Up in the Air is gorgeous and wondrous and intelligent and elegant and freshly funny and moving and exquisitely constructed and I beseech you to get off your sofa and go see it. I am so serious about this I will not only say it all over, I will say it all over in capitals followed by nine exclamation marks: GO SEE IT!!!!!!!!! Now, what more do you want me to do? Carry you to the cinema? Don’t be silly. But I will give you four more exclamation marks, a chevron and two pound signs: !!!!^££. More than this I cannot do.

Simon Hoggart

Family values

What’s your favourite Simpsons joke? This is mine: Lisa and Bart are having a row and Homer tries to stop them. ‘Oh, dad,’ one of them says, ‘we were arguing about which one of us loves you more.’ What’s your favourite Simpsons joke? This is mine: Lisa and Bart are having a row and Homer tries to stop them. ‘Oh, dad,’ one of them says, ‘we were arguing about which one of us loves you more.’ ‘Gee, that’s sweet,’ says Homer, or words to that effect. ‘She says I do, and I say she does...’ Mind you, working on the show does sound fun. When they have guest stars they try to get them to come to Los Angeles in person, though some, such as Tony Blair, are allowed to do it long-distance.

Kate Chisholm

Telling our story

Back in the Sixties or Seventies it was TV that made the cultural running, showing off its photogenic qualities to make series that were supposed to change the way we thought about ourselves. Huge amounts of dosh were pumped into Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man as Clark swanned around the Western world displaying gems of creativity, while Bronowski did the same for our intellectual development travelling from Easter Island to Auschwitz and back. Now, though, TV is looking more and more like a blowsy old music-hall star, decked out with cheap glitter but unable to disguise its creaking lack of creativity.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Fine line

Drawing Attention Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 17 January Last chance to see a really excellent selection of works on paper from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. It’s a relatively new collection, begun in 1969, but despite that it includes many of the great names of Western art. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century France via England and the Netherlands, from German Expressionism to international abstraction, not forgetting a group of works by some of Canada’s finest, the collection maintains a hearteningly high standard. In the first room are the Italians, so good it’s difficult to know where to start. Stroll round the room a couple of times and see what particularly catches your eye.

Marcus Berkmann

Blast from the past

I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. Blame middle age, or lack of time, or the grim, brutal feeling that you’ve seen it all before and can’t be bothered to see it again, or in my particular case the eight years I spent working as a TV critic for newspapers. (In the eyes of one or two people I worked for, no longer enjoying telly would make me better qualified than ever to write about it.) But what with one thing and another, until Christmas Day I hadn’t sat down and watched anything on television (other than cricket) for about five months.

Michael Tanner

Cut-price treat

La Bohème Cock Tavern The Enchanted Pig Linbury Studio Puccini’s La Bohème has oddly become the Christmas opera of choice, broadcast on BBC TV on Christmas afternoon (an especially ludicrous affair), and major opera houses dusting down their elderly versions. I doubt whether any of them will be as involving, indeed thrilling and upsetting, as OperaUpClose’s production at the Cock Tavern Kilburn, originally scheduled to run from early December to 20 January, but now extended by two full months, it is proving so popular. The Cock has seating for only 40, so that is not quite as amazing as it sounds, but given the comparative obscurity of the venue it is still impressive.

Deborah Ross

Going nowhere

The Road 15, nationwide The Road is based on Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel and, as far as roads go, this one is long, hard, brutal, pitiless and profoundly horrible, plus there doesn’t seem to be much reward for sticking with it. It is very much like the North Circular in all these respects, unless you count finally getting to Ikea as a reward, which no one in their right mind would. ‘The horror, the horror,’ as Joseph Conrad would surely have said, if he’d found himself in Ikea on a Saturday afternoon. He might also have added: ‘And the meatballs are rubbish,’ but we’ll just never really know. But here? With this road?

Lloyd Evans

Meddling with Molière

The Misanthrope Comedy Molière is a genius but only in France. Play-goers here need some convincing that he belongs in the first rank. This new production of The Misanthrope shifts the action from 17th- century Paris to present-day London and turns the bickering upper-class lightweights into film-makers and their hangers-on. Gosh. What a breakthrough. Translator Martin Crimp has single-handedly discovered that the movie world is a sort of aristocracy. Call the Nobel committee. They need to hear about this guy. The most striking aspect of his translation is its incessant jangling lexical peculiarities. He’s decided to preserve one minor facet of Molière’s language, the rhyming couplets.

Kate Chisholm

Digital maze

New Year, New Radio. And not just any old wireless. It’s one of the latest digital wonders, which has inside its chic black casing a mini-computer that can whisk me round the world in a matter of seconds to visit tens of thousands of radio stations. For reasons that are as yet beyond me, though, I’ve only succeeded so far in travelling straight to Z, with no idea how to get back through the alphabet, not having a tame teenager on site to show me the way. (The instruction manual can of course only be accessed on computer and is written in a language some way between Urdu and Mandarin.

James Delingpole

Childhood hero

I think I might be about the second-last person on earth finally to have replaced his squat, bulbous, stone-age TV set with one of those new angled, wide-screen, narrow, HD-ready jobs. My worry is it’s not big enough. ‘No, you can’t have a 50-inch. No way are you having a 50-inch. Not in MY house,’ said the wife, as the kids and I all begged and begged to no avail. Of course, I understand where the wife is coming from. There was indeed an era when to have a large TV screen dominating your sitting room would have been considered vulgar or nouveau-riche or what we now call chavvy. But that was 20 years ago. Times have changed. Plus, I’m a TV critic — sort of — so I jolly well should.

Alan Judd

Carbon sins

Awoken the other night by cold and concern for global warming, I searched my conscience for ways to reduce my carbon footprint. The trouble is, a large part of it is simply my existence. During the now-forgotten demographic panic of the 1970s, I knew a man who killed himself in the interests of population reduction, though it would have made greater demographic sense to kill lots of us. Deciding against either option — for the present — I got up and gazed at the silent snowscape outside. My own tyre tracks were already obliterated and that set me thinking: are there any particular tyre-track sins that might damn me for ever to eternal roasting? Something recent came uneasily to mind.

Robin Oakley

All-weather winner

Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? With Sandown’s jumping card frosted off last Saturday, I wasn’t the only one who scuttled across Surrey to Lingfield’s polytrack, where Betdaq had sponsored an extra day to keep the cash tills rolling and the internet wires humming with the bets that help to sustain our sport. All-weather racing began here only 20 years ago, just before the Berlin Wall fell. But with an ear-nipping chill and snow still visible on the grandstand roof we still enjoyed a seven-race card.

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

Call of the wild

One intriguing statistic from last year’s television went almost unnoticed. One intriguing statistic from last year’s television went almost unnoticed. In October, an edition of Jonathan Ross’s 9 p.m. chat show on BBC1 had fewer viewers than Autumnwatch. Even though Barbra Streisand was his main guest, the six-million-pound man was defeated by barnacle geese and rutting stags on the Isle of Rum. Autumnwatch took 2.9 million viewers, which is pretty good for a wildlife programme on BBC2, whereas Ross got 2.8, which is pitiful for prime time on BBC1. These days everything that can go wrong seems to go wrong for the poor old Beeb.

Kate Chisholm

Sight and sound

Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you. Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you. With perfect timing, on New Year’s Day, Joe Acheson’s programme for the BBC World Service began the year with a startling, pin-drop-sharp lesson on how to listen. Sound of Snow and Ice took us to Finland in midwinter, to the Jyväskylä School for the Visually Impaired. The temperature in my study seemed to plummet as an extraordinary rasping noise echoed through the room, the sound of boots crunching on deep, deep snow.