Arts Archives

Highlighting the goodies

Radio

Since the Home Service was relaunched as Radio 4 in September 1967, the station has established itself almost as the ‘heartbeat’ of the BBC. The chance to direct, shape and enhance such a treasure-house of programmes — ranging from Farming Today to ElvenQuest via Something Understood, Classic Serial and The World Tonight — must be endlessly fascinating. But therein lies the challenge. Radio 4 does sparkle with its intellectual brilliance, its flashes of humour, its ability to make sense of the moment through its reporters, interviewers and the editorial wizards who pull the news together in seconds.

Simon Hoggart

Watching brief

Television

The most watched programme on television this past year was the royal wedding, which is hardly surprising, since we had the day off to watch it. Bagehot said that royalty was the institution that ‘riveted’ the nation, by which he meant bound together rather than fascinated. However, strange as it may seem, most people in the UK weren’t sufficiently fascinated, or bound together, to see the ceremony — they were republicans, too young, having a day out, were on the street in London, or just didn’t care. Some 26 million were in front of their sets, only 3 million more than watched in the US, where the coverage started at 6 a.m. East Coast on a normal weekday.

Scott Jordan-Harris

A laughing matter

Theatre

Barry Cryer, defiantly old-fashioned in a dinner suit and red-velvet waistcoat, sits in a director’s chair and addresses his audience as if they are devoted friends. Most of them are: every joke he tells is met with affectionate laughter of a kind given only to national treasures. Butterfly Brain, which is currently touring, is structured around the alphabet, but each letter is simply a starting point for masterly flurries of unconnected comedy. Some of these, such as ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ sung to the tune of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, come directly from I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, on which Cryer has appeared ‘since before sound’. Others are anecdotes collected across a lifetime of listening to backstage stories.

24 December 2011

Adrian Hilton

Spotify Christmas: Joy to the World

We normally run these Spotify playlists on Sundays, but, as it's Christmas tomorrow, we thought we'd make an exception for Adrian's selection of festive music. Don't forget Pete Hoskin's selection of more recent Christmas songs, from a couple of weeks ago, too. Distilling your Christmas favourites into a succinct playlist is like trying to cram the creator of the universe into a manger – not entirely impossible, but it needs a bit of thought and planning. Just as the Christ-child had to surrender aspects of divinity, a playlist must compromise somewhere. But kenosis is traumatic. What goes? The Pogues? That’s easy enough. Mariah Carey? That’ll upset Fraser. Cliff? Oh, steady on.

18 December 2011

Ian Birrell

Another top ten albums of 2011 list

Picking my favourite albums this year reminded me of three things about the current state of music. First, the obvious point of how everything is driven by single tracks rather than albums, making the task harder each year. Second, how so much of the most interesting and innovative art is being made by women right now. And third, how the future of music is increasingly found in places such as Kinshasa and Johannesburg as much as in the traditional stomping grounds of London and Los Angeles. Anyway, here’s my list. And since any of these lists are an exercise in self-indulgence, can I cheat and give mentions in dispatches to Little Dragon, Metronomy, Nneka, Owiny Sigoma Band, SBTRKT & Toddla T?

17 December 2011

Andrew Lambirth

An ideal Christmas

Arts feature

Andrew Lambirth on John Leech, artist friend and travelling companion of Dickens, whose pictures help illuminate the novelist’s work Christmas approaches, and my thoughts turn, with reassuring inevitability, to Dickens. As the nights draw in and the winter winds blast across the fields of East Anglia, the counter-urge is for the comfort of a good book, to be read preferably by the fireside in a snug armchair. Dickens is the high priest of cosiness, forever creating situations in which the fire and wine within are contrasted with the cold and storm without. In his novels, hearth and home are crucial images of goodness, comfort and continuance, and nowhere more so than in his first and greatest festive story, that indisputable classic, A Christmas Carol.

Sinclair McKay

Silent night

Features

There is one carol that has particular resonance for Londoners: ‘Silent night, holy night’. Just the idea of it can bring on an involuntary shiver of pleasure. In the 36 or so hours between Christmas Day and Boxing Day, after a solid month of the eldritch screeches of office parties and Westfield shopping, we city slickers are suddenly granted something more valuable than gold. The profound quiet — both in the darkness and the daylight — gives us a glimpse of the unsuspected soul of the city. The silence also tells us something about our everyday lives that, even subconsciously, some of us might want to change.

Emily Maitlis

One false move

Features

It’s never been easier for a single mistake to define a whole life Occasionally, as a television presenter, you come across stories that make your blood run cold. The last time it happened, I was live on air and I virtually stopped speaking. I wish I could say the story was about some appalling human rights abuse or a new threat of global recession. But no. It was about a Russian newsreader, Tatyana Limanova, who committed a spectacular act of career self-sabotage by apparently flipping her finger at the camera live on air, immediately after a reference to President Obama. She seemed to have survived, at first, but within days her moment was on YouTube and the world was watching.

Neil Tennant

Out of tune

Features

Going to see the new smash hit show Matilda the other night, I was once again reminded that, as a creative musical force, the contemporary West End musical is dead. It contains the sort of music you only find in musicals; it has no relevance to contemporary music; it exists in a creative ghetto. The musical has become divorced from popular musical culture. Theatre critics seem to have no value system for judging the music in musical theatre.

Joan Collins

A star at Christmas | 17 December 2011

Indefatigably British

Theatre

My German grandmother never understood the point of pantomime. She’d lived in England for more than half her life, spoke English like a native (actually, a good deal better) and had a sound appreciation of English humour, from Lewis Carroll to The Good Life. However, she was happy to admit that the panto bug had completely passed her by. She knew that pantomime was the one art form that was indefatigably British, and that no foreigner could ever hope to decipher it. Of course she was absolutely right. No other entertainment sums up our innate Euroscepticism quite like panto. And no British Christmas is complete without a chorus of ‘Oh, no you’re not!’ or ‘He’s behind you!’ That’s not to say, though, that we actually enjoy it.

Michael Henderson

Those I have loved

Theatre

It is one of Kenneth Tynan’s most-quoted observations. After seeing the first night of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in May 1956, the mustard-keen young critic could not contain his enthusiasm for John Osborne’s play. ‘I could never love anybody,’ he wrote, ‘who did not want to see Look Back in Anger.’ On reflection it says rather more about Tynan’s eagerness to be recognised than about the play’s merits, but the phrase has entered the language. From this distance Look Back in Anger does not look particularly lovable. It was important, certainly, in the sense that there were English plays before, and after, and they were not the same. Tynan was the first man to spot Osborne’s talent, and wanted others to know it.

Michael Tanner

On top form

Opera

Having seen and been most impressed by two New York Met relays of Wagner operas on the big screen, I was interested to see how the largely close-up medium would cope with a Handel opera, where the challenges are quite different. Both composers have single characters singing for large stretches of time, but, while Wagner’s are always involved in a process of feeling, so that there is a sense of exploration at every moment, Handel’s are immersed in states of feeling.

Lloyd Evans

Dollop of woe

Theatre

Juno and the Paycock is a slice of documentary realism from the earliest years of the Irish Free State. The skint Boyle family are living like a gang of hobbits in the leprotic ruins of a grand Dublin townhouse. The paint blisters and peels. Diseased mortar crumbles into scabby flakes. The plaster-work centrepiece on the ceiling is like a charred meringue the size of a cartwheel. It’s grim. Money’s tight, food is scarce. Everyone’s depressed. There’s no work. The pride of the family, young John Boyle, would probably give his right arm to get a job if it hadn’t been blown off during the civil war. Then a glimmer of hope. Cap’n Jack Boyle inherits a small fortune from a forgotten cousin. Hooray! The happy times are here. The Boyles go bananas.

Deborah Ross

Plucky woman

Cinema

The Iron Lady is a better performance than it is film, although I suspect the performance will carry the day. My good friend Meryl Streep, whom I have personally witnessed making pie with her very own Meryl hands, is awesome, flawless and magnificent, etc. but the film itself is peculiarly glib and superficial and somehow brushes over her actual politics. It is Thatcher without Thatcherism. It is Thatcher as a kind of Boadicea or Queen Elizabeth I. It is Gloriana of the kind that will please the Right and pleases Bruce Anderson (see feature pages) although, let’s be honest, anything that pleases Bruce Anderson does have to be a bit wrong somewhere. I hope Bruce will forgive me saying this, or what? Not sit on me, I hope. No one could be expected to survive that. (No, Bruce, no!

Peter Phillips

Heavenly voices

Music

It seems that Christ was born with the sound of choral music in his ears. That, at any rate, is what is to be deduced from many of the works of art that the manger scene has subsequently inspired. There is the holy family gathered round the crib, gold and lapis lazuli everywhere, beneficent animals kind of smiling at the smiling Christ child and, raised rather above all this, angels singing. Perhaps officially they are sexless — Wikipedia isn’t very discursive on the gender of the cherubim and seraphim — but as far as I can see they look like girls and are meant to be men. This makes for all sorts of interesting speculation, not least in the matter of what they sounded like.

Charles Spencer

Sounds for a cool Yule

Music

One of the unwritten rules in our house is that Christmas should never be mentioned until a few days before the big day. Mrs Spencer gets into a state in the run-up to the festive season, not least because, as a teacher at the Royal Ballet School, she has rehearsals of The Nutcracker to attend at Covent Garden, in which the school’s pupils always appear, as well as end-of-term reports to write. When she is in the thick of all this, the idea of writing Christmas cards, buying presents and planning the catering brings on acute anxiety attacks, and if I so much as mention how much I am looking forward to the festivities all hell can break out. But secretly I am looking forward to it, tremendously.

Kate Chisholm

Twelve crackers

Radio

It might cheer the spirits of our over-stressed EU leaders this weekend if they were allowed time out from their delicate financial machinations to listen to the Day of Christmas Music broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday and in the other 55 countries of the European Broadcasting Union (set up in 1950 as a cultural balance to the economic community). This annual flit round the countries of the union is always a refreshing antidote to the festive frazzle; an upmarket Eurovision with snatches of announcements in exotic languages as a reminder of the spirit of co-operation.

James Delingpole

Victory to the vicar

Television

My prize for the best thing on TV this year goes to the comedy Rev (BBC2, Thursdays). I know Simon Hoggart disagrees with me on this — he finds it all a bit predictable. But in the spirit of Christmas I should like to point out that Simon is a wine-soaked pinko Guardianista who hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about, whereas I am world-famous for being right about everything, so there. Why is Rev so good? Let us count the ways. Its alpha and omega — as with all the best sitcoms — is character. Apart from Perry and Croft’s various masterpieces and The Simpsons, I’m hard pushed to think of any other TV comedy with quite so extensive a cast of well-drawn, plausible, compelling major and minor characters.

Andrew Petrie

Disappearing lords

Television

‘I don’t like him looking daft,’ growls Alastair Campbell to the camera as Bafta-winning documentary film-maker Molly Dineen shadows Tony Blair for the 1997 party election broadcast. The warning is clear. Forty hours of footage became a mere ten minutes of spin, but it’s testament to Dineen’s rapport with the member for Sedgefield that despite its brevity the film was described by the late New Labour strategist Philip Gould as ‘probably our most effective broadcast’. Twenty-five years after her acclaimed debut Home from the Hill, Dineen’s collected works now fill three double DVDs.

16 December 2011

Kate Maltby

The top ten plays of 2011

66 Books - The Bush Theatre The Bush opened its new theatre with an extraordinarily energetic celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. The 66 playlets, one inspired by each of the books of the Bible, included the occasional dud - but the overwhelming majority were sparklers. Stand-outs included Ony Uhiara as Esther, no longer an unwilling biblical wife but instead a courageous innocent fighting to survive the horror of human trafficking; Obi Abili in Tom Well's tragicomic reworking of the Samson story; and the gentle mystery of the Archbishop of Canterbury's own offering, a newly penned version of the resurrection of Lazarus.

14 December 2011

Kate Maltby

A compelling but unheroic Richard

Thanks to some mistake of history, Shakespeare’s Richard II has never quite been recognised as one of those roles against which the great actors are measured. But it takes a virtuoso to bring Richard to life: like all the toughest roles, he’s a heap of contradictions out of which only the most talented actors can construct a consistent man. We despise him in the first half and then weep with him in the second. He’s a decadent and incompetent king but, once deposed, he becomes an introspective tragic hero, a cousin of Hamlet. Against this challenge, newly minted film star Eddie Redmayne never quite finds the dignity needed to make Richard truly heroic.

11 December 2011

Peter Hoskin

Spotify Sunday: The new Christmas classics

There are, as they say, only thirteen more shopping days until Christmas. And that, unless you don't much care for seasonality, means only thirteen more days of Christmas music. But what to listen to? There are the old standards, of course: the carols, the hymns, that Slade song. But I thought I'd delve into my collection for a few more recent numbers that you might enjoy. So here's a selection of ten Christmas tracks recorded in the past decade. As always, you can listen to the playlist by following the Spotify link at the bottom of this post. On a Christmas Day — C.W. Stoneking I'm amazed that C.W. Stoneking's music works so well.

10 December 2011

Robert Gorelangton

Consumed by Dickens

Arts feature

If you don’t like Simon Callow, you probably don’t like the theatre either. He is as theatrical as a box of wigs. Who else would bark ‘come!’ when someone knocks on his dressing-room door? There he is with a glass of wine, a boom of good cheer, having peeled off his side whiskers after his lushly enjoyable one-man show based on two rediscovered Dickens stories, Dr Marigold and Mr Chops. But that tour is now over and Callow (probably still best known for his part in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral — the funeral was his) is going straight into another Dickens, his new version of A Christmas Carol. The actor-writer who has cornered the market in Dickens works likes Dickens. He has a book coming out next year, his 13th.

Andrew Lambirth

Pushing the boundaries | 10 December 2011

Exhibitions

When I was at school, I remember the art teacher returning incensed from a trip to London during which he’d taken a group of seniors to the Tate Gallery. The particular object of his ire was what he described as ‘a pile of blankets’ by Barry Flanagan. He could not accept that this was a legitimate work of art, and, in a state of raging mischief, he’d grouped his school party around the thing in question and surreptitiously changed the order of the blankets. This subversive act was intended not only to relieve his feelings but also to prove the falseness of the work. If it could be fundamentally changed without anyone noticing, it was — to his mind at least — undeniably bogus.

Ed Rex

Singing siblings

Music

The Unthanks couldn’t have chosen a more fitting venue for the first night of their current tour than St James’s Church, Piccadilly; just as it’s all too easy for passers-by, eyes glued to the bright lights, to overlook this relic of the 17th century, one could be forgiven for missing The Unthanks’ distinctive breed of folk music amid the barrage of predictable tales of nightclub romance filling the airwaves. But sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank still managed to pack the pews. Where does our nationwide fascination with singing siblings come from? The Gallaghers had us on tenterhooks every time they bickered; Jedward seem to be building a career on nothing more than shared DNA; and now groups of sisters everywhere are transforming solo songs into family singalongs.

Simon Hoggart

Knock-off news

Theatre

The Onion is a comic giveaway American newspaper that satirises the awfulness of most American newspapers. ‘Doofus Chilean miner stuck down there again’ is one of their recent headlines, along with ‘Parents honor dead son by keeping up his awful blog’. Now we in Britain can watch the television version, Onion News Network (Sky Arts 1, Saturday). It is the latest spoof of 24-hour news. The first, and probably the best, was Armando Ianucci and Chris Morris’s much-too-brief The Day Today back in 1994. You may remember the hopeless Peter Hanrahanrahanrahan. Morris used to duplicate those cosy chats between reporter and presenter except that in this case he would tear Hanra’s reports to shreds.

Kate Chisholm

Wild wastes of forgetfulness

Radio

Too much dark, not enough light, often leads us inwards, into those dark regions of the mind where memory resides. Between the Ears (Radio 3, Saturday evening) echoed the mood of the month by taking us on a journey back into that hinterland of darkness where names begin to disappear, places can no longer be recognised, the fridge becomes the oven, and words become jumbled so that the Radio 3 announcer no longer makes sense. What happens to us when the memory begins to go? Is it just a loss of self, of personality? After all, most of us have no memory at all of those first three years of life, when everything is astoundingly new and fresh and challenging? Should we instead embrace amnesia as a way of extending the boundaries of self, as a way of becoming?

Patrick Carnegy

Conjuring with morality

Theatre

You can see why Harold Bloom, in his marvellous book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, should have called Measure for Measure one of Shakespeare’s most ‘rancid’ plays. But it’s also one that he greatly admired, though it takes a good production like Roxana Silbert’s new one at Stratford to show you just why. Bloom’s rancidity resides in the unpleasantness of the characters, and in the way in which even the seemingly virtuous go about their morality. Wisely eschewing any overly specific setting, Silbert lets the costumes do the work.