The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Been a whole lotta time since Waylon was seen around here. Time to rectify that so here's the great man singing A Good Hearted Woman which is what every outlaw needs though since all mommas also know they really shouldn't let their babies grow up to be cowboys you'd think that means they'd be doubly hesitant to let their daughters hitch themselves to the outlaw bandwagon...
A driven George Clooney tells Marianne Gray how important it is not to get typecast George Clooney arrived on British screens more or less a fully formed star. He had spent years trapped in American sitcom hell and by the time we got him he was in his mid-thirties playing the debonair Dr Doug Ross in the hit series ER. We never saw him as a young hopeful in embarrassments like The Return of the Killer Tomatoes or Murder, She Wrote, a TV show he describes as a junkyard for actors who become skeletons of themselves. He was delivered to us as Gorgeous George, the actor who could do no wrong. ‘Listen,’ Clooney comments amiably, when I meet him just before Christmas, ‘I was unfamous for a very long time and I’m enjoying being where I am now.
Drawing Attention Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 17 January Last chance to see a really excellent selection of works on paper from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. It’s a relatively new collection, begun in 1969, but despite that it includes many of the great names of Western art. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century France via England and the Netherlands, from German Expressionism to international abstraction, not forgetting a group of works by some of Canada’s finest, the collection maintains a hearteningly high standard. In the first room are the Italians, so good it’s difficult to know where to start. Stroll round the room a couple of times and see what particularly catches your eye.
I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. Blame middle age, or lack of time, or the grim, brutal feeling that you’ve seen it all before and can’t be bothered to see it again, or in my particular case the eight years I spent working as a TV critic for newspapers. (In the eyes of one or two people I worked for, no longer enjoying telly would make me better qualified than ever to write about it.) But what with one thing and another, until Christmas Day I hadn’t sat down and watched anything on television (other than cricket) for about five months.
La Bohème Cock Tavern The Enchanted Pig Linbury Studio Puccini’s La Bohème has oddly become the Christmas opera of choice, broadcast on BBC TV on Christmas afternoon (an especially ludicrous affair), and major opera houses dusting down their elderly versions. I doubt whether any of them will be as involving, indeed thrilling and upsetting, as OperaUpClose’s production at the Cock Tavern Kilburn, originally scheduled to run from early December to 20 January, but now extended by two full months, it is proving so popular. The Cock has seating for only 40, so that is not quite as amazing as it sounds, but given the comparative obscurity of the venue it is still impressive.
The Misanthrope Comedy Molière is a genius but only in France. Play-goers here need some convincing that he belongs in the first rank. This new production of The Misanthrope shifts the action from 17th- century Paris to present-day London and turns the bickering upper-class lightweights into film-makers and their hangers-on. Gosh. What a breakthrough. Translator Martin Crimp has single-handedly discovered that the movie world is a sort of aristocracy. Call the Nobel committee. They need to hear about this guy. The most striking aspect of his translation is its incessant jangling lexical peculiarities. He’s decided to preserve one minor facet of Molière’s language, the rhyming couplets.
New Year, New Radio. And not just any old wireless. It’s one of the latest digital wonders, which has inside its chic black casing a mini-computer that can whisk me round the world in a matter of seconds to visit tens of thousands of radio stations. For reasons that are as yet beyond me, though, I’ve only succeeded so far in travelling straight to Z, with no idea how to get back through the alphabet, not having a tame teenager on site to show me the way. (The instruction manual can of course only be accessed on computer and is written in a language some way between Urdu and Mandarin.
I think I might be about the second-last person on earth finally to have replaced his squat, bulbous, stone-age TV set with one of those new angled, wide-screen, narrow, HD-ready jobs. My worry is it’s not big enough. ‘No, you can’t have a 50-inch. No way are you having a 50-inch. Not in MY house,’ said the wife, as the kids and I all begged and begged to no avail. Of course, I understand where the wife is coming from. There was indeed an era when to have a large TV screen dominating your sitting room would have been considered vulgar or nouveau-riche or what we now call chavvy. But that was 20 years ago. Times have changed. Plus, I’m a TV critic — sort of — so I jolly well should.
Awoken the other night by cold and concern for global warming, I searched my conscience for ways to reduce my carbon footprint. The trouble is, a large part of it is simply my existence. During the now-forgotten demographic panic of the 1970s, I knew a man who killed himself in the interests of population reduction, though it would have made greater demographic sense to kill lots of us. Deciding against either option — for the present — I got up and gazed at the silent snowscape outside. My own tyre tracks were already obliterated and that set me thinking: are there any particular tyre-track sins that might damn me for ever to eternal roasting? Something recent came uneasily to mind.
Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? With Sandown’s jumping card frosted off last Saturday, I wasn’t the only one who scuttled across Surrey to Lingfield’s polytrack, where Betdaq had sponsored an extra day to keep the cash tills rolling and the internet wires humming with the bets that help to sustain our sport. All-weather racing began here only 20 years ago, just before the Berlin Wall fell. But with an ear-nipping chill and snow still visible on the grandstand roof we still enjoyed a seven-race card.
Andrew Lambirth on artistic delights and pleasures we can look forward to in 2010 The juggernaut of blockbusters at last shows signs of slowing down. In recent years, museums have deluged us with loan exhibitions of often very mixed quality in order to generate the increasingly large amounts of revenue necessary to fund their extended bureaucracies. Too many shows really, particularly when concocted by curators of boundless self-esteem with scant regard for the public. I long for fewer exhibitions chosen with greater discernment, and it seems that the crisis in international finance is finally helping to achieve this. World tours are being cancelled, ambitions checked, sponsorship withdrawn. Initially, this means that there are marginally fewer exhibitions running for longer.
One intriguing statistic from last year’s television went almost unnoticed. One intriguing statistic from last year’s television went almost unnoticed. In October, an edition of Jonathan Ross’s 9 p.m. chat show on BBC1 had fewer viewers than Autumnwatch. Even though Barbra Streisand was his main guest, the six-million-pound man was defeated by barnacle geese and rutting stags on the Isle of Rum. Autumnwatch took 2.9 million viewers, which is pretty good for a wildlife programme on BBC2, whereas Ross got 2.8, which is pitiful for prime time on BBC1. These days everything that can go wrong seems to go wrong for the poor old Beeb.
Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you. Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you. With perfect timing, on New Year’s Day, Joe Acheson’s programme for the BBC World Service began the year with a startling, pin-drop-sharp lesson on how to listen. Sound of Snow and Ice took us to Finland in midwinter, to the Jyväskylä School for the Visually Impaired. The temperature in my study seemed to plummet as an extraordinary rasping noise echoed through the room, the sound of boots crunching on deep, deep snow.
Morecambe Duchess Red Donmar Peter Kay: ‘I’ve never met a person who didn’t at the very least love Eric Morecambe.’ Hello? Peter? Over here. I remember Eric and Ernie during the 1970s and they were as entertaining as a power cut. Perfunctory, passionless mother-in-law jokes. Semi-funny puns pouring out like weak tea. Nursery-rhyme repetition everywhere. The catchphrases. The trick with the paper bag. Eric slapping Ernie’s cheeks. Endless jibes about Ernie’s hairy legs and his playwriting ambitions, even though both gags were non sequiturs: we couldn’t see Ernie’s legs and we knew for sure he wasn’t a playwright because he was too busy being the country’s richest unfunny stand-up.
Well, Sunday afternoon high-class, great-pickin' gospel really.
Henrietta Bredin on boats, trains, planes that transport singers around the stage Opera, so they say, has the power to transport the listener on wings of sound to places beyond the imagination — on a good night, at any rate. But just to keep singers, and directors, on their toes, a number of composers have, over the years, been tickled by the notion of writing specific modes of transport into the opera’s storyline. Puccini was car-mad, so you’d think he might have put one of his favourites into an opera. His first purchase was a De Dion-Bouton 5 CV in 1901, and some years later he commissioned a special off-road number from Lancia, for hunting trips.
December 2009 — the final month in the bicentennial of the great composer (obit. 1809) once dubbed by Tovey ‘Haydn the Inacccessible’. December 2009 — the final month in the bicentennial of the great composer (obit. 1809) once dubbed by Tovey ‘Haydn the Inacccessible’. No longer! His vast protean output has never been more widely available nor more highly esteemed. Father technically and spiritually to Mozart and Beethoven, revered by Brahms and (unexpectedly) by Wagner, beloved of Stravinsky, Britten and Ligeti, Haydn was something of a well-kept secret, but is now a universal possession, treasured as equal with the highest.
Ever since I gave up watching TV over Christmas and New Year I have become much, much happier. The reason Yuletide TV is so depressing is that — as with those tantalising presents under the tree — it’s fraught with a level of expectation it can never possibly fulfil. You think, ‘At last: I’m free. Free to slob; free to watch without having to worry about going to bed and getting a good night’s sleep so I can be fresh for work tomorrow. So, go on, TV: entertain me!’ I’m not even sure that it’s TV’s fault. I think it’s the problem with Christmas generally. The whole season reminds me of a slightly dodgy Ecstasy pill. ‘Am I up yet?’ you keep asking yourself. ‘When’s it going to happen? When do I peak?
‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all. ‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all. They’ve already got the radio habit (having had, of course, absolutely no pressure from their interfering aunt). They’ve discovered for themselves that listening to Sherlock Holmes’s ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ is far more scary than watching Doctor Who. Radio, pipes up Tom, lets you paint the pictures in your head. Television just tells you ‘that’s how it’s got to be’. To get any pleasure from radio, though, you have to make an effort, focus attention, follow the plot. You have to learn how to listen.
The days are short, there is no light for gardening after work, and local horticultural societies are halfway through their winter programme of illustrated talks. All over the country, gardeners are gathering, in spartan village halls and echoing church rooms, on every first Tuesday in the month to listen to a ‘speaker’. These talks are designed to entertain, enlighten and generally see gardeners through until the spring, when allotments beckon, and garden visits and flower shows can once more be organised. All towns and most large villages have a horticultural society, which is impressive in an age when people increasingly refuse to join things.
For me little that is memorable, and even less that is sheer fun, has been penned about football, apart from Gary Lineker’s definition of the game as ‘Twenty-two men chasing a ball — and in the end the Germans win’. For me little that is memorable, and even less that is sheer fun, has been penned about football, apart from Gary Lineker’s definition of the game as ‘Twenty-two men chasing a ball — and in the end the Germans win’. Horseracing, though, has always attracted both purple prose and anecdotage. Sea The Stars’ winning of the 2000 Guineas, the Derby, the Coral Eclipse, the Juddmonte International, the Irish Champion and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe has made it a special year for racing books.
James Cameron's mega-blockbuster Avatar seems destined to win the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director (as well as the technical awards). Peter Suderman explains why: So despite its genuinely impressive technical innovations, Avatar isn't much a movie: Instead, Cameron's cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense.
This is what the internets were invented for: Uncle Monty as Darth Vader. Superb.
Andrew Lambirth reflects on Stanley Spencer’s ‘Study for Joachim Among the Shepherds’ Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) is a rare figure of international standing among British 20th-century artists. As the painter and critic Timothy Hyman has observed, Spencer can be ranked alongside Munch, Bonnard, Kirchner, Beckmann and Guston for his extraordinary work exploring the relationship between the self and the world. He was a wonderfully original and inventive artist whose work has paradoxically suffered because of his unconventional private life.
There is one day in the year when it is acceptable for anyone, of any age, to lie on the sofa all day and for much of the night. The blinds remain legitimately lowered; the telly can stay switched on. One hand will grasp the remote control; the other might leaf through a jumbo box of After Eights. It will probably be raining; you may be feeling more than a little sick; the trousers you were given yesterday feel a size too small today, and Granny has just announced she will be staying another night. It’s Boxing Day. Traditional feelings — disappointment, torpor, lassitude — can be kept at bay as long as one remains glued to the sofa, deaf to all interruptions and with one’s gaze fixed firmly on the flickering screen.
Seven hundred miles now in the borrowed Bristol 410 and I’ve loved every yard of it. Seven hundred miles now in the borrowed Bristol 410 and I’ve loved every yard of it. It’s poised, tolerant, powerful and very comfortable, now that I’ve removed the sunroof windshield that was threatening to scalp me. The elegantly understated lines make you feel you’re driving your club, appreciated by those who know, unrecognised by those who don’t (fortunately it handles rather better than the club would). In fact, the handling continues to surprise, partly because the wide, old-fashioned wheel makes you more conscious of steering, while the naturally aspirated 5.2 Chrysler V8 burbles and hums with unstressed power.
Henrietta Bredin on how Music for Life can help overcome the isolation of dementia sufferers I am looking at an elderly woman, tiny in a huge armchair. She has not spoken for months, she has not maintained eye contact with anyone for even longer and she has developed a nervous compulsion to keep one hand always up to her chin, covering her mouth. A woman in a pink overall is sitting next to her, gently stroking her hand, and a young man with a violin is kneeling at her feet. With infinite patience, the violinist starts to play a simple tune, making it even quieter, more exploratory, when she appears to flinch at the sound of the first notes. Very, very slowly, almost indiscernibly, the woman’s tight, clenched muscles relax slightly. The little tune trickles on.
Otello Barbican Die Zauberflöte Royal College of Music Verdi’s Otello has almost become a rarity since Domingo gave up singing the title role, so its inclusion in the LSO series of concert performances under Sir Colin Davis was most welcome, and all the more so when it was announced that, at extremely short notice, the young New Zealand tenor Simon O’Neill had taken over from the ailing Torsten Kerl. My first exposure to O’Neill was as Florestan at the Proms this year, where he electrified the proceedings with his intense and accurate singing and vocal acting. Otello demands even more than Fidelio, and he rose to all the challenges, from a quite magnificently authoritative ‘Esultate!’ onwards.
Carlos Acosta Sadler’s Wells Theatre Jerome Robbins, the undisputed, though often unsung, father of modern American ballet, was one of the few dance-makers who could successfully choreograph to Bach’s music. Undaunted by the morass of cultural, historical and artistic biases that still surrounds the compositions of the baroque master, Robbins approached Bach with an intriguing mix of respect, in-depth musical understanding and modern-day wit. In his ‘Bach’ creations, the dance idiom is never a mere translation/adaptation of the music, but an ideal complement to the same, which highlights the scores’ linear complexities by responding to the music’s incessant inventiveness with a seamless outpouring of ideas.