Culture

The first episode of A Very English Scandal (BBC1), the story of the Jeremy Thorpe affair, was brilliant. So often, dramas about the past suffer from the disbenefit of hindsight. They use the dead as mannequins to wear their contemporary thoughts and attitudes. History, in their hands, is a form of what is now called ‘cultural appropriation’, paying no respect to the reality of the lives depicted. There is a brief moment in A Very English Scandal which teeters on the edge of this, when dear Lord Arran, sitting in his own house and in the presence only of his wife and Leo Abse MP, makes a rather pious speech about how wicked it is that homosexual acts are illegal.

A most excellent fellow, Roger Allam. On the stage he brings dignity to all he does, in the noblest traditions of the British theatre. Off it he is a fully paid-up member of the human race, admired by his comrades as a man no less than as an actor. Some mummers, eager to let off steam, occasionally let the side down. Allam is the sort of chap — star and team player — who brings the profession into repute. Three times a winner of an Olivier award, twice for best actor, he is currently to be found on the West End stage in The Moderate Soprano, David Hare’s touching portrait of John Christie, Etonian, commissioned officer, eccentric and founder of Glyndebourne Festival Opera on the family estate in Sussex. ‘I’ve grown to love the man,’ says Allam.

The Italian film director Alice Rohrwacher’s rise to the top has never been more obvious than this week at the Cannes Film Festival. Her third feature film, Happy as Lazzaro, which she wrote and directed, stunned the critics gathered in Cannes for what has been a very strong 71st edition. A distinctive and yet quiet talent since her first film Corpo Celeste was selected at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight in 2011, followed three years later by her second film The Wonders, Alice Rohwacher has reached, at just 36, a maturity and force that echoes both Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ermanno Olmi. Conceived as a diptych, Happy as Lazzaro is a poetic fable which starts in an enchanted and timeless Roman countryside and finishes in the asphalt jungle of industrial Turin.

Fire up YouTube on the iPad, tap in ‘tap’, then wave goodbye to the rest of your day: clip after clippety-clip of the best and brightest stars rattling out impossible rhythms: Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling; Fayard and Harold Nicholas taking the stairs one split jump at a time; Gene Kelly singing (and dancing) in the rain. The American actor, writer and entertainer Clarke Peters (anything from The Wire to Five Guys Named Moe) was never dragged to tap-dancing classes as a boy in the late 1950s — ‘it was more ballet and jazz by then’ — but he remembers ‘trying to pick up moves from the films. I think I do what I do because of Gene Kelly. He wasn’t a great tap dancer but I loved his athleticism, his style.