Culture

Pacific Rim is a giant monsters v. giant robots film and although written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, who made Pan’s Labyrinth, which was sublime, it’s still just a giant monsters v. giant robots film, and now we have dealt with that, we can move on to The Moo Man. The Moo Man is not like Pacific Rim. There are no giant monsters seeking to destroy the world, and no giant robots seeking to protect it. There is no CGI, no 3D, no battle scenes, no violently thumping soundtrack, no action — bar a day trip to Eastbourne — and no token woman who is feisty, as is the way with token women when the alternative might mean having to actually give them a fair crack of the whip.

I’m not the first person to remark that Verdi is getting oddly little attention in this his bicentenary year, especially when compared with his contemporary Wagner who, despite the usually much greater demands his works make in almost all respects, is not only receiving plenty of performances, but is also the subject of even more books than usual, not all of them about his alleged faults of character. Yet Verdi shouldn’t be less controversial a figure than Wagner; it’s just that Wagner stimulates people to react in such intense ways, while they placidly accept Verdi as an energising tunesmith and a decent patriot, ardent for the unification of Italy in contrast to Wagner’s shameful nationalism.

Alan Turing, the man who developed the Enigma code that saved the Allied war effort, was not merely disregarded by his country. A homosexual, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 and chemically castrated via forced oestrogen injections. Under unimaginable duress, he committed suicide. That it took until 2009 for the British government to apologise only compounds the scandal. Turing’s story is told in Codebreaker, a docudrama that combines reenactments of conversations between Turing, played by Ed Stoppard (above), and his psychiatrist (the German Jewish refugee Franz Greenbaum), and interviews with experts on his life and work. One after another, they attest to Turing’s brilliance as the man who created modern computing.

Luther is back, in Luther, and so is Donny Osmond, of Donny & Marie fame. Could there be two more differing cultural symbols of manhood? My feeling is no. Luther (Tuesdays, BBC1) fills our screens with sick foreboding. We are as victims pinned to the sofa, eyeballing the characters’ every action with terror as they move about menacingly in our living-rooms. It’s a cop show where the cops are not so much bent as twisted, their souls writhing to unarticulated inner torments, chief among them that of its anti-hero DCI John Luther (Idris Elba).

Siegfried is, everyone agrees, the hardest of the Ring dramas to bring off. The first and almost insurmountable problem is that the title role is one that almost no one can sing, and one of which even on recordings there are very few wholly satisfactory accounts. Lauritz Melchior, the only tenor with the adequate size and beauty of voice, and the sensitivity, when he could be bothered, to employ them to the full, never recorded the role complete, his only ‘live’ preserved performance being heavily cut. The most one can hope for is a more-or-less decent account, and they are rare.