Culture

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.

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 World tours are being cancelled, ambitions checked, sponsorship withdrawn.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Edward Bawden Bedford Gallery, Castle Lane, Bedford, until 31 January 2010 In these days when museums seem to think it acceptable to sell off the charitable gifts of past ages to feed contemporary vanities, I wonder who will be tempted to donate works of art without binding them securely in protective red tape? In the last eight years before his death, the artist and illustrator Edward Bawden (1903–89) gave a vast archive of his work to the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery in Bedford. It was, effectively, the contents of his studio, representing nearly every period of his career, and it numbers more than 3,000 items.