Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Liz Anderson

The man who transformed houses

More from Arts

Alec Cobbe is a designer, painter, musician, picture restorer and collector, and has recently donated drawings, photographs and other archives to the V&A, where some of this collection is now on display. Cobbe was born in Dublin and aged four moved to the family house Newbridge, an 18th-century, 50-room country villa designed by James Gibbs, which, he says, was the ‘single greatest influence on my life’. He had an ‘idyllic lamp-lit childhood’ — there was no electricity — where the ‘running water was rainwater, which had to be pumped daily to a tank at the top of the house’.

Kate Chisholm

How radio — and the digital age — help us to remember the first world war

Radio

Perhaps the most moving programme of all amid the huge range that will mark the coming centenary of the Great War will be on 28 June, the day when in 1914 Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie while they were on a state visit to Sarajevo. On that night, Radio 3, along with other members of the European Broadcasting Union, will transmit live from Sarajevo a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, marking that first step on the road to war. But the evening will also inevitably reflect on how the aftermath of 1914–18 led ultimately to another war, this time in Bosnia, and to the three-year siege of Sarajevo (the longest siege of a capital city in modern times).

Clarissa Tan

Is Sherlock starting to suffer from ADD?

Television

Sherlock’s not dead. A good thing, since on New Year’s Day BBC1 launched its third series of Sherlock, and it’d be inconvenient if the three episodes didn’t have Sherlock. Last season, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes stood on a building rooftop, dramatic coat flapping, a tweedy caped crusader. Then he jumped to his death. Only he didn’t. He’s still alive. The Cumberbatch comeback! Hooray. Of course, the detective had some explaining to do. Not only to sidekick John Watson (Martin Freeman) — who grew a moustache as part of the grieving process — but also to the many Sherlock fans who’d taken to the internet in the past two years to post their survival theories.

Will Gore

Interview Naomie Harris: It was hard playing the dark side of Winnie Mandela

Cinema

How do you solve a problem like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela? Perhaps it wouldn’t have legs as a format for a BBC Saturday-night talent show, but it’s a question that Naomie Harris has been trying to answer ever since she agreed to play her in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. I meet Harris at the Soho Hotel in London on the day before the UK première of the film, which tells the story of Nelson Mandela’s struggles against apartheid. It’s also, it transpires, the day before the death of the former South African president is announced to the world. Since his passing so much has been said about Mandela, but during the half-hour I spend with Harris it is his ex-wife who is uppermost in our minds.

Deborah Ross

‘Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’ is a very, very long walk indeed

Cinema

The biopic Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom is a timely tribute, and an earnest and respectful and well-meaning one, but it does seem like a very, very long walk indeed. It’s a slog, a plod, a trudge uphill, and of all the things you may have wished to say to Nelson Mandela, given the opportunity, what you will find yourself saying here is: ‘Put your bloody skates on, man. We have homes to go to, and other fish to fry!’ This is not, I’m assuming, what you thought you’d ever most wish to say to Mandela, given the opportunity, but the fact is: you will never have wanted anyone to put their skates on quite so much in your entire life.

Lloyd Evans

Get tickets for Emil and the Detectives, and opera glasses — some of the child actors are tiny

Theatre

It starts with a brilliant joke. We’re in the Weimar Republic in 1929. Little Emil Tischbein is listening to his mother and a moaning neighbour, Mrs Wirth, lamenting Germany’s loss of moral fibre. Mrs Wirth cites a recent gangster film whose depravity shocked her to the core. ‘We saw it three times,’ she adds.  Forewarned about thieves and hoodlums, Emil travels to Berlin carrying a precious cargo of 140 marks. A sinister stranger robs him on the train and he befriends a gang of Berlin school-kids who set off to retrieve his cash. Erich Kästner’s classic is directed with great style by Bijan Sheibani, who captures much of the book’s verve and atmosphere.

Michael Tanner

The state of opera today (it’s not good)

Opera

I’ve been hoping that in this, the last of my weekly columns on opera, I would be able to strike a positive, even cheerful note on the present and future of the art form, but honesty compels me to say that I don’t think it is in very good shape. Not, probably, that it has ever been, or at least only for brief periods. Owing to its mongrel nature, there has usually been a tendency for one or other of its ingredients to lord it over the others, so that the ideal balance of music and drama, spectacle and action, personalised in the collaboration of singers and conductors, stage directors and musicians, has only been rarely achieved.

Peter Phillips

Could this be the year of C.P.E. Bach?

Music

Looking through the list of composers who celebrate some sort of anniversary in 2014 is a depressing business. I don’t think I have ever seen such an anonymous collection of small-time nobodies, and yet for them to appear on a list at all suggests that they did something of note, and that someone has heard of it. The only really big name to qualify is that of Richard Strauss, who was born 150 years ago. Often half-centenaries seem a little forced, not worth the fuss; nonetheless I anticipate there being some fuss about this one, since the cupboard is so bare.

Andrew Lambirth

There are too few masterpieces in Masterpieces: Art and East Anglia

Arts feature

The mood is celebratory in East Anglia: the University (UEA) marks 50 years since it opened its doors in Norwich, and the Sainsbury Centre, its visual arts flagship, is back in business after refurbishment by Foster & Partners. The first public building designed by Norman Foster, it opened originally in 1978, a huge glass and steel hangar to house the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, given to the University five years earlier. This impressive collection is wide-ranging, including a substantial group of early Francis Bacon paintings, an important collection of Hans Coper ceramics, and excellent things by Moore, Giacometti, Picasso and Epstein, as well as quantities of other artefacts, ancient and modern.

31 December 2013

James Mumford

The best albums of 2013

As the new year beckons, James Mumford counts down the best albums of 2013. Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, and David Cameron's favourite - Haim, all make the list. But Coffee House readers - what would be on your top ten? 10: Phoenix, Bankrupt! The revival of the 1980s is the clear theme of my top-ten. The success of Phoenix is a fascinating story, they being in some ways the band that should-never-have-been. Not only are they French, they are also in their thirties. For many years they were an obscure act before their 2006 album It’s Never Been Like That went stratospheric. Bankrupt! is unadulterated high-octane synth-heavy pop. ‘Entertainment’ is awesome, particularly when it drops to half-time.

25 December 2013

Fraser Nelson

WATCH: Christmas under fire – Britain, 25 December 1940

This has become a Christmas tradition for me: watching this extraordinary four-minute film about 25 December 1940. Its narrated by an American - at the behest of the British government, who wished to persuade Americans that our fight against Hitler was worth joining. The script is beautiful, almost poetic. "For the first time in history, no bells ring in England to celebrate the birth of the Saviour. No church bells are allowed to be rung in England. If they are, it will mean that the invader has come… At Christmas, England does what England has done for a thousand years - she worships the Prince of Peace." Do watch the film. It's more moving than anything you'll see on television today.

15 December 2013

Christopher Edwards

From the Spectator’s archive: Peter O’Toole stars in ‘Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell’

Peter O'Toole has passed away today, aged 81. Amongst the many characters he played was the lead role in Keith Waterhouse's  Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, based on the Spectator's Low Life column. O'Toole was easily Jeffrey's favourite of the actors to play him - Tom Conti, he thought, seemed to disapprove of all the drinking but O'Toole 'made it his play'. Below is our review of his performance, by Christopher Edwards dated 20 October 1989. Readers of The Spectator will need no explanation about the contents of this production, based as it is upon the weekly column of our own Low Life correspondent.

12 December 2013

Andrew Lambirth

God in a stained glass window

Arts feature

Writing about Graham Sutherland in 1950, the critic Robert Melville observed: ‘When one looks at a picture one finds oneself over the frontier or one doesn’t. Criticism has no power of making converts to an experience which occurs without the intervention of reason ... Criticism considers the sensitive flesh of the image and discovers its spiritual stature: indeed, unless we pursue the meaning of the image as language, painting may well fall silent and rest content in the pride of its flesh.

Roderick Conway-Morris

Turner’s seafaring ways — and his blazingly competitive art

Exhibitions

Turner’s contemporaries regarded him primarily as a marine painter. This perception extended to his persona, with many who met him commenting on his nautical gait, manner of speaking and other salty characteristics. He frequented ports and coastal parts, relished sailing in storms, was immune to seasickness and famously had himself lashed to the mast to experience the full force of the gale before painting one of his most controversially ‘indistinct’ canvases ‘Snow Storm’.

Pd James

Bleeding-under-Wychwood

Poems

Oh take a break at Bleeding-under-Wychwood Away from all the city noise and grime; Where the harvest moon shines bright and the knocking in the night Is the undertaker working overtime. You can dine quite cheaply at the Pig and Whistle On the roast beef of Olde England, rare and lean, But I don’t advise the soup, you’ll be rolling like a hoop For it’s liberally sprinkled with strychnine. You’ll need this little map of Bleeding Manor Where the villainous pursue their dread affairs; See, all the rooms have labels from the attics to the stables With a little matchstick body on the stairs. The squire, Sir Murgatroyd, is old and wealthy And recently has wed a teenage wife.

Alan Brownjohn

Bar Mirror

Poems

He had not recognised me or I him. The place was crammed and rackety, and our eyes Took each other in, and we didn’t realise... We stared, and we ruled each other out until After several glassy seconds I found the will And the nerve to speak. Well — it must be! — He knows my name. In the warmth that dropped on me after the ice-cold air, I’d been looking for someone I knew, to launch a greeting Eagerly after long decades of never meeting. In a crowd of loud unknowns I would still have said I might tell this man from the back of his schoolboy head, And a sureness that the same face would still be there.

Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz’s notebook: Have our schools lost all faith in culture?

Notebook

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the Master of the Queen’s Music, recently wrote about the almost total ignorance of young people when it comes to classical music, but I think he was wrong when he worried that Mozart and Beethoven were becoming ‘the preserve of the better off’. The truth is that if there’s a lack of interest in the classics, it crosses all classes and income brackets. Not so long ago, I had dinner with the sixth form of one of our leading public schools. I asked them if they could name one opera by Verdi. This was met by total silence. All right, I said, who can name any opera at all? Another long silence — until, at last, the head boy put up his hand. ‘How about Phantom of the Opera?

Barry Humphries

The Price of Fame

More from Books

Try not to meet us in the flesh We’ll disappoint you if you do, Our dandruff and our garlic breath Are better tucked away from view. Try not to catch us off the cuff We’ll topple your romantic dreams Not concentrate or smile enough, You’ll see us parting at the seams. You hang our pictures, read our books Or watch us on the telly nightly, You’ve clocked our more despondent looks, Know if we’re straight, or gay, or slightly. Better to love us from afar Let distance tint your overview, Up close you’ll see how crass we are; How disappointingly like you. I learnt this lesson three years back, I sat in Hatchards signing books, A lady who had bought a stack Had flashed me several meaning looks.

Vernon Scannell

A Yorkshire Christmas Eve | 12 December 2013

More from Books

His nearby town wore annual evening-dress, cheap jewellery of lights, white fur and bright drapes of Santa red which might impress late shoppers on this final trading-night, persuading them to spend their all before indifferent time slammed shut the last shop door. He heard hyena voices and he saw splashed vomit on the pavement as he left, saddened by this evidence of more contempt of what was once the numinous. He headed for the moors and his small house. Later on, as he prepared for bed, he could not rid himself of melancholy: the world had changed, Christmas seemed stone-dead or turned into a tasteless parody of what was thrilling once, yet innocent.

Michael Henderson

Music in Vienna

Notes on...

There is no finer city in which to hear music than Vienna. Or, to put it more felicitously, there is no finer city in which to listen to music for, as music-lovers know, there is a world of difference between hearing and listening. In the Imperial City, where most of the great composers in the Austro-German tradition lived and worked, you are on your mettle. As the Italian guide said to the American tourist who had popped into the Uffizi gallery in Florence to find out if there was anything worth seeing: ‘Here, signore, it is not the paintings that are on trial.’ In Vienna there is no greater musical pleasure than sitting in the golden hall of the Musikverein, particularly when the Vienna Philharmonic is playing.

Lucy Vickery

Walk on the wild side with the Gruffalo

More from Arts

If, like me, you are allergic to pantomime (‘Oh, no you’re not!’; ‘Oh, yes I am!’) then help is at hand: the Gruffalo is in town and strutting his stuff, to the delight of legions of tiny fans, at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue until 12 January. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s much-loved verse fable tells of a feisty, wily mouse who goes for a stroll in a ‘deep dark wood’ where he confronts his demons. Having encountered and outsmarted a series of peckish predators by inventing the Gruffalo, a black-tongued, orange-eyed monster, he comes face to face with (and outwits) his own terrifying fantasy creation.

Kate Chisholm

Just imagine what BBC schedules might look like in Christmas Future

Radio

Is it time to scrap the licence fee? That’s a question we’re going to hear more and more about in the next couple of years. Why should the BBC retain its archaic monopoly over the airwaves? Why not abolish the royal charter that grants the BBC the right to collect the fee (worth £3.6 billion a year) when it comes up for renewal in 2017? A change is long overdue, throwing open the broadcasting market, giving the independent production companies more opportunities to succeed and enabling the new digital online stations to expand, build audiences, create more original audio experiences. Or is it? Just imagine what would happen to radio in the UK if the BBC could no longer guarantee its funding.

James Delingpole

Jeremy Clarkson brings Yuletide joy to the Delingpole household

Television

So I’m looking at the seasonal TV schedules trying to find something — anything — to watch. Britain and the Sea? Probably very well done, but David Dimbleby is such a dangerously feline, OE-manqué, Flashmanesque, living-embodiment-of-the-BBC closet pinko that reviewing it would feel wrong, somehow, like chipping into a fund to buy Chris Huhne an eighth home. The Doctor Who Christmas Special? But it always makes me want to kill myself. I hate the idea that a Dalek garlanded in tinsel might burst into the Cratchit household with a fat goose dangling from its exterminator gun while the White Witch’s frozen heart melts and all the crippled children are released from the snowy mountain — or whatever mawkish crap they’ve got planned for us this year.

Damian Thompson

Music to listen to when you’ve broken up with a precious friend

Music

Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata is thrilling and brain-twisting. Its nickname derives from the fact that it was published as a sonata ‘for the hammer-action keyboard’, which just means a piano. But the notion of hammering suits this work. It’s his longest sonata — a late one, No. 29 in B flat, Op. 106 — and a mighty piece of machinery. I’ve been listening to it for 40 years and I’m not even close to grasping its details. It’s far more of a mental puzzle than the sublime last trio of sonatas, Opp. 109–111, whose construction is less tortuous. The Hammerklavier has been in and out of my CD player a lot recently, for two reasons. I’ll explain later.

Lloyd Evans

Jude Law’s Henry V is a buccaneer leading a stag-night raid across the continent — but he’d be a great Macbeth

Theatre

Henry V is the final show in Michael Grandage’s first West End season. The theatre was full to bursting on press night. Jude Law, in the title role, had attracted a crowd of autograph hunters, who shivered outside the stage door. One was a tall, chubby young man in loose grey clothes wearing a bobble hat and a very kindly grin. His flies were undone. The play itself is a disjointed, rambling affair. Poorly shaped, and even a little artless, it’s crowded with fights, bloodshed and laddish humour. The scenes of brutality are offset by soaring passages of patriotic verse that have been quoted into overfamiliarity. There was much coughing and guttural distraction throughout the performance. Grandage aims for handsome, elegant informality and here he scores full marks.

Michael Tanner

Parsifal has anxiety, rage, near-madness — unfortunately the Royal Opera’s version doesn’t

Opera

Debussy’s description of the music of Parsifal as being ‘lit up from behind’ is famous; less so is Wagner’s own remark to Cosima that in his last music drama he was trying to get ‘the effect of clouds merging and separating’. The scoring of the music, especially in the outer acts, is so extraordinary that even people who are repelled by the subject matter of Parsifal, such as Nietzsche, are still overwhelmed by its beauty, which uniquely combines sensuousness and spirituality. It’s a beauty that has to cope with and contain a very great deal of pain, more even than Act III of Tristan.

Marcus Berkmann

Albums of the year? Some years we can answer it, some years we can’t 

Music

Albums of the year? What a good question. Some years we can answer it, some years we can’t. The essence of pop music is its newness, its absolute determination to upgrade itself and keep on upgrading itself, often beyond anyone’s interest in its upgrading itself. Accordingly, there are some years when the paid-up music obsessive has to retrench and consolidate and — quite simply — stop buying new records until he can find somewhere to put them. I only bought about 25 new CDs this year, of which only five or so were new-new-new. As yet, none of them has really come through. But there’s time. There’s tomorrow, there’s next week, and there’s the rest of my life to get the most out of the David Bowie album.

Lloyd Evans

Is this the real First Lady of ‘Borgen’?

Television

I meet Birgitte Hjort Sorensen in a plain office near the Donmar Warehouse in the West End. She’s warm, sharp and engaging, and her fast-flowing English is adorned with the odd Eurotrash platitude. Her American twang owes itself to the global language school of television. ‘I watched a lot of American and English TV growing up. We have it subtitled, not dubbed. Denmark is such a small country and nobody’s going to speak Danish outside of Denmark.We kind of have to learn.’ She’s about to appear as Virgilia in Coriolanus at the Donmar. How does she find playing the wife of a tyrannical anti-hero? ‘Interesting in that she doesn’t talk a lot compared to some of the other characters, who talk quite a lot.

Stephen Bayley

The most inspiring gift for your child this Christmas

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One of the big differences between Frank Lloyd Wright and me is that, when he was nine, his mother gave him a set of wooden building bricks. When I was the same age, I wanted Lego for Christmas, but my own mother thought it a mere toy, a puerile gift. So she put away childish things and I was given something more high-minded. Perhaps a boring encyclopaedia or a hated chemistry set, useful only for making obnoxious smells. It was 1876 when Anna Wright presented her boy Frank with Froebelgaben, or ‘Froebel Gifts’, an educational tool devised by ur-pedagogue Friedrich Froebel, who also gifted us the Kindergarten idea: the belief that children’s intellects can be cultivated like flowers.