Arts Archives

Word perfect

Radio and podcasts

‘Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight…’ It all began on Friday night with the Shipping Forecast, made world-famous by Radio 4’s team of continuity announcers. Radio reigns supreme in these Olympics. It’s so much part of why Britain is different from the rest of the world, and Danny Boyle sparked off his extravaganza by recognising this. Hurrah! We’ve stuck with the old wireless technology, adapting, renewing, ensuring that the power of radio as life-saver, fact-checker, storyteller not only survives but also grows in stature. TV gives us the brave new world of moving pictures, and brought Boyle’s creative vision to life, but the commentators never seem to have done enough preparation.

Peter Phillips

Choral cull

Music

The Myerscough report about the future funding of the BBC, entitled Delivering Quality First, is another classic in the long-running serial about how everything will be much better once the Corporation has made further cuts to its staff and programming. This one, which follows on from another published what seems like just the other day, is the direct result of the BBC having acquiesced in freezing the licence fee until 2017 while taking on new costs, such as the World Service and the switchover to digital services. Two thousand jobs must go and this time the funding of the Performing Groups — the five full-time orchestras and the BBC Singers — is not protected.

Victoria Lane

Brown study

In health and hypocrisy

Theatre

George Bernard Shaw argued passionately that Britain should create a public health service. And he lived long enough (1856–1950) to become one of its earliest victims. This play from 1906 shows the very best and the very worst of his creative abilities. He had a plan: to strip bare the iniquities of private medicine and stick the knife in deep. We open in Harley Street where a gang of slick and prosperous doctors are bantering away, like tipsy clubmen, about their patients. I cured this one. I killed that one. Each quack has his preferred treatment. One thinks all disease is caused by blood poisoning. Another that surgery cures every ailment. A third that cheerful nurses and a decorative sick-bay are an infallible panacea.

Michael Tanner

Striking gold

Opera

If I said what I really thought about Götterdämmerung at the Longborough Festival, of which I saw the last of four performances, anyone who wasn’t there would think I was madly exaggerating; but anyone who was there would agree — I have run into several people who were at one or another of the performances, and they were all breathless with excitement and admiration for this astounding achievement. Raving doesn’t make for enjoyable reading, I realise, so I’ll try to be a bit more specific. In the first place it was a tremendous team effort with, at its centre, the fanatical dedication and experience of the conductor, Anthony Negus, colleague of Reginald Goodall but very much his own man in particular points of interpretation.

Deborah Ross

Druggy bear

Cinema

The greatest compliment I can pay Seth MacFarlane’s Ted is that although this is essentially one of those slacker, stoner comedies, and such comedies aren’t really my thing — too old, too tired, only once had a joint and it made me feel sick then my knees went all funny — this did make me laugh quite a bit. It’s about a teddy bear that comes alive to fulfil the dream and friendship needs of a lonely little boy. Years later, the two are still living together, in a state of extended adolescence, although it is Ted who is the bad influence. Ted has a potty-mouth. Ted has a dirty mind. Ted smokes weed. Ted likes a drink. Ted is fond of hookers, even though he has no penis.

James Delingpole

Danny’s super sop

Television

Almost the best thing about Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony was the running Twitter commentary. From Marcus Stead: ‘Ah, here we go, NHS worship. One of the most overrated things about Britain. Expensive, unreliable, regularly lets patients down.’ From Miss Annesley: ‘I think “Voldemort runs the NHS” is the moral of this story.’ And from Mr Ranty: ‘Stafford Hospital is second from the left, the one with 450 dead patients.’ Not getting into the spirit of things is something we British do well. It’s instilled in us from an early age — usually during our first visit to the pantomime where the nasty, scary bully man on stage insists we join in with cries of ‘Behind you!’ and ‘Oh, no you didn’t!

1 August 2012

Steerpike

Sam Taylor Wood’s toy-boy takes her name

After tying the knot with her toyboy lover Aaron Johnson, 22, in June, it seems the artist-turned-movie director Sam Taylor Wood, 45, is doing little to dispel the dominant old woman image. The cast list for the upcoming adaptation Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley has a new name on it: ‘Aaron Taylor Johnson’. It seems that 23-year age gap has got Taylor Johnson firmly under the thumb...

28 July 2012

Patrick Carnegy

This troubled throne of kings

Arts feature

The jewel in the crown of Sir Michael Boyd’s decade as director of the Royal Shakespeare Company was his 2007–8 staging of the major Shakespeare Histories from Richard II, through Henry IV, V and VI, to Richard III. For a short, alas too short, period, the entire sequence of eight plays could be seen over a few days at Stratford. Fortunate indeed were those who were there, and I count it one of my greatest theatrical experiences. Boyd’s Histories would have enthralled only the tiniest fraction of the population. But with television it’s a different story. BBC2’s four Histories films, packaged as The Hollow Crown and broadcast on consecutive Saturday evenings, stand to have a far greater impact.

Andrew Lambirth

Beyond the expected

Exhibitions

Thomas Heatherwick (born 1970) is one of our most exciting and inventive designers, so it is somewhat unfortunate that he is much associated in the public mind with a project that failed, the memorably named ‘B of the Bang’. This was a sculpture commissioned to commemorate the 2002 Commonwealth Games held in Manchester, and the idea was to create a sunburst of tubes and poles to symbolise an explosion of energy. It was a good idea and a formidable undertaking. Erected in 2005, it was plagued with technical problems and bits even fell off. It was taken down in 2009, and only the documentation remains.

Andrew Petrie

Critical meltdown

Olympian challenge

Radio and podcasts

Who would have thought 15 years ago that not only would the BBC still be spending money on radio coverage of the London Olympics but that there’d also be a dedicated digital station? High definition TV, with its crystal-clear images of every pimple, tattoo and six-pack, should by rights have seen off its poor sound-only relation, with only words, words, words on offer, no pictures, no flashbacks, no sweaty post-triumph interviews. But on Wednesday, Radio 5 Live Olympics Extra came on air (and online), broadcasting to the world nothing but coverage of the Games, throughout the day but also on catch-up all night long. Radio 5 Live’s controller, Adrian Van Klaveren promises that we’ll hear ‘radio as you’ve never heard it before’.

Sinclair McKay

Trouble ahead

Television

Must we? All of us? This is the perfect storm, the tempest, the ultimate crisis for non-sport fans. But TV, with all its kaleidoscopic variety, was invented for just such an eventuality, surely? And together with some assistance from our faithful old friends, the tinnies in the fridge, the next few weeks might pass quite pleasantly, no? Fssssst. Sip. Hmmm. See? Happily, in terms of drinking and smoking, Patsy and Edina in Absolutely Fabulous (BBC1, Monday) seemed to be in agreement about what we in the East End refer to as ‘The Limpics’.

Lloyd Evans

Death in Damascus

Theatre

A timely show at the Finborough takes us into the heart of Bashar al-Assad’s terror state. Zoe Lafferty’s verbatim piece gathers evidence from activists and torture victims and flings it straight at us. The result is utterly gruesome and utterly compelling. A fractured, blood-stained snapshot of an ancient monstrosity blundering towards its own funeral. Syria, a Russian sidekick state, still pursues the traditions of Marxist totalitarianism. Every morning, ranks of schoolkids salute their leader. ‘Unity, Freedom, Socialism’ they chant in honour of a regime which traduces all three ideals. The Alawi minority, making up 12 per cent of the population, controls everything. Western music and literature are ruthlessly censored.

Michael Tanner

Talent show | 28 July 2012

Opera

The Royal Opera season concluded, as is now customary, with an evening in which the participants in what used to be the Vilar Young Artists programme, in the light of events renamed the Jette Parker Young Artists, are paraded to show their progress. They make a truly international team, as the slip inside the programme indicated: ‘Ji-Min Park has withdrawn...the role of Il Conte di Libenskof will be sung by Ji Hyun Kim...the role of Zefirino...will now be sung by ZhengZhong Zhou.’ For the first time the programme consisted of a single work; previously it has been made up of excerpts from several.

Deborah Ross

Where is he now

Cinema

In the late 1960s, a Mexican-American singer-songwriter is signed to a record label after two Motown producers see him performing in a seedy Detroit dive called The Sewer. He delivers two albums, which receive rave reviews (he is compared to Bob Dylan; some say he is better than Bob Dylan), but nobody buys them, so he drops from sight, and would have stayed dropped from sight, but for one remarkable twist: unbeknownst to him, particularly as he never saw any royalties, he had become a massive hit in apartheid-era South Africa, outselling both Elvis and the Rolling Stones. The artist is Sixto Rodriguez and this film, his story, is the best, most touching, most humbling documentary I’ve ever seen about a musician I’ve never heard of.

21 July 2012

Cosmo Landesman

Gloom and doom

Arts feature

A young American documentary film-maker recently said to me, ‘Do you want to know why no British documentary film-maker would ever make a film about something like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations? There was no blood! No violence! No crack babies! No tears! People were happy, and one thing British documentary film-makers hate is happy people and happy endings. If you want to get a doc made and shown in Britain, you gotta go for gloom and doom.’ Of course my American friend was exaggerating — but by how much? Think British documentary and what comes to mind? For me it’s Pete Postlethwaite wagging a finger and making apocalyptic warnings of ecological disaster in The Age of Stupid.

Andrew Lambirth

Diana on show

Exhibitions

Metamorphosis (sponsored by Credit Suisse) is more than an exhibition, it is wider in its manifestations and implications. The Sainsbury Wing galleries are full of interesting works of art, but the Metamorphosis festival — for that is what it surely is — extends to the Royal Opera House and beyond, through dance and poetry. Unfortunately, there are only limited performances by the Royal Ballet, but these will be filmed and thus available for viewing, and the poetry is published in a handy illustrated paperback (price £8.99), with a learned but accessible introduction by the director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny.

Kate Chisholm

In from the cold

Radio and podcasts

When it was announced earlier this week that Aung San Suu Kyi will soon be cast away for Desert Island Discs, it was suggested her choices of music will be ‘really interesting’, because, under house arrest in Burma, she had been forced to live in ‘a time warp, a capsule away from the world’. But will she really be so out of touch with the musical tastes of Radio 4 listeners? Suu Kyi has often mentioned her gratitude to the BBC, and the World Service in particular, for leading her to places, ideas, music and poetry that were located and inspired thousands of miles away from the house where she was confined just outside Rangoon.

James Delingpole

Back to the future

Television

I wonder how the 2012 Olympics will look, when re-imagined by a BBC docu-drama 64 years hence. If it’s anything like next week’s charming but not exactly unclichéd account of the 1948 Men’s Double Scull — Bert & Dickie (BBC1, Wednesday 25 July) — something like this, I expect, with all sorts of imaginary obstacles thrown in the way to make our hero’s struggle more movie-friendly. Int. London Olympic Velodrome. 2012 Men’s Keirin final. An elderly man in brightly coloured skintight gear shuffles with the help of a Zimmer frame towards his shiny, high-tech bicycle. Jaunty Cockney: Bleedin’ ’eck. That old geezer looks like he’d be more comfortable on a penny farving. Cockney’s mate: You may larf.

Deborah Ross

Old and bold

Cinema

Two films this week, one about oldies who play table tennis at an international level and another that is a love story funded by an Oxfordshire village, whose inhabitants feature as bit-part characters and extras. And I’ll be upfront about it: one is rather good whereas, although I’d have liked to like the other, and said it was sweet and charming, it wasn’t, so I can’t. Either way, at least there isn’t a reboot of a rebooted comic book movie that ‘redefines the genre’ — until everyone realises it does not — in sight. You get what I’m saying? Good. Let’s move on. Ping Pong is a documentary about the over-80s table tennis world championships. Who knew? I didn’t.

Peter Phillips

Culture notes: Chart topper

Exploiting agony

Opera

Verdi’s art reaches its summit in Otello, and in doing so reveals both his greatness and a paradox that seems inseparable from it. The plot is harrowing, more so than any of his other operas, and Verdi exploits its agonising capacities to the full. The glorious love duet which concludes Act I is something to make the most of, for that is the end of happiness, as the act’s final bars suggest. From then on it is a series of dreadful scenes in which the chief characters, deliberately or not, create as much suffering as possible — suffering which, at least at crucial points, the audience is bound to share in a satisfactory performance.

Lloyd Evans

Extreme actions

Theatre

OK, I was wrong. I’ve said it a million times but I now realise it’s perfectly feasible. Antique dramas can make sense in a modern location. Nicholas Hytner sets Timon of Athens slap bang in the middle of present-day London. The action begins in a mock-up of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing, complete with that dull, forbidding grey hue that some miserable nutcase chose for the walls. Ominously, hanging centre-stage, is El Greco’s swirly pink vision of Christ ejecting the moneylenders from the temple. A launch party is in full swing. Champagne flows. A gang of yuppies, toadies, spivs and freeloaders has gathered to toast the opening of the ‘Timon Wing’. Glamorous sycophants hover around the millionaire philanthropist crying, ‘Timon, Timon!

16 July 2012

Steerpike

Ferry and Marr dream team

Bryan Ferry CBE was on form last night, for his only UK appearance this year, at Guildford’s terribly middle-class Guilfest — the only festival I have ever seen that had a Pizza Express on site. The sixty six year old rocker still has it, even if he did have to ruin the look with a cashmere scarf after the sun went down. Mr Steerpike was not alone in wondering why the set had an edgier feel to it than the greying Roxy Music fans might have been used to. All was revealed toward the end when Ferry announced the extra guitarist with the badly dyed black hair, and the worst outfit on the stage, was none other than Smiths strummer Johnny Marr. I hear that Marr has collaborated on Ferry’s new album, due out next year.

14 July 2012

Will Gore

A life less ordinary

Arts feature

‘I know it sounds arrogant but I think it’s undeniable that it has become fixed in the culture like a stately home,’ says Mark Haddon of his book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Arrogant or not, he is probably right. Haddon’s novel about an autistic boy’s attempt to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbour’s dog has sold more than two and a half million copies since its publication in 2003 and seems to have been read by everyone. As we chat in the basement of the Ashmolean Museum in his hometown of Oxford, Haddon doesn’t come across as an egomaniac. When he discusses Curious Incident he’s more like a proud parent marvelling at his child’s success.

Kate Chisholm

The power of words

Radio and podcasts

‘Oddly enough,’ declared the actor John Hurt on the Today programme last Friday, ‘radio is closely linked with film.’ This grabbed my attention over tea and porridge. Radio like film? It’s not at first an obvious comparison. Radio deals in images, but surely only those we create in our minds. Hurt went on to explain: ‘Film deals with visual images. Radio deals with linguistic images.’ He was talking to Justin Webb about the plays Tom Stoppard wrote for radio when he set out to establish himself as a dramatist in the early 1960s. Four of them are now available as a five-CD set from the British Library as part of the celebrations for Stoppard’s 75th birthday.

Olivia Glazebrook

Relaxing with the ignoble

Television

Unless I have slept through another of the year’s once-in-a-lifetime experiences — which is rather more likely than possible — the days since the Wimbledon final have passed without call for bunting, cheering, spangling or any other kind of cross-gartered preparedness. We seem to occupy a lacuna; to have swum into the eye of the 2012 Events’ Cyclone. Here we are invited, until the Games begin, to rest our flag-waving arms, uncross our patriotic fingers and reacquaint our senses with something other than Pride-and-Glory. With immaculate timing — while Centre Court was still being put to bed — Wallander returned to BBC1 (Sunday).

Lloyd Evans

Double vision

Theatre

Michael Frayn is a schizophrenic. His creative personality bestrides the English Channel. When he’s at home he writes traditional West End farces with amusing titles and plenty of jokes. When he sits at his European desk he comes up with dour, static, talk-heavy historical dramas with boring titles and no jokes at all. Democracy, written in 2003, is a classic Euro-bureau production. Frayn invites us to examine Willy Brandt’s stewardship of West Germany in the early 1970s. Willy is referred to throughout as ‘Villy’ which, for some reason, sounds even more silly than just Willy. Chancellor Villy has a couple of problems. He’s an idealist and he wants the free world to embrace the eastern bloc and to give the misunderstood Soviets a big, warm, sloppy hug.