Culture

Changeling 15, Nationwide Changeling, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, is a most melodramatic melodrama starring Angelina Jolie and her totally amazing, bee-stung lips. (I was stung by a bee once, but on the eyelid; it didn’t look so great.) Anyway, based on a true story, it’s set in Los Angeles in 1928 and is about a single mother, Christine Collins (Jolie) whose nine-year-old son, Walter, goes missing and when returned by the police five months later, turns out not to be him at all. The police insist the boy is Walter, and insist Christine accepts him as Walter, but Christine knows he is not, just as any mother knows who is and who isn’t her son — not that the son will always want to know her.

The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks. You never fully understood them at the time and you understand them even less now that you’ve forgotten most of the context and detail. But by golly, don’t they half haunt the imagination ever after? Terry Nation’s late Seventies series Survivors had just this effect on me. It was about the aftermath of a killer virus which wipes out virtually the entire human species leaving just a handful of survivors to roam the earth, scrape by without TV or electric lights or hot showers, and generally rediscover the old agrarian ways before we became so dependent on technology. The ultimate fantasy of the modern green movement, in other words.

Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod. Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod. How does he do it? we both exclaimed. Each and every week he comes up with five hours of elegant, informative, entertaining script, interspersed with carefully chosen nuggets of music from major and minor figures in the classical world. It’s like listening to an audio encyclopaedia.

Byzantium 330-1454 Royal Academy, until 22 March 2009 In his excellent book Portrait Painters, written more than half-a-century ago but still full of wisdom and stimulating observations, Allan Gwynne-Jones includes a note on the character of English art. He has been discussing the great glories of the medieval school of manuscript illumination in Britain, often forgotten when an assessment is made of our contribution to the visual arts. Yet between 1000 and 1300 the English school was the finest in Europe without a doubt. Gwynne-Jones writes: ‘In order to understand English art one must study its source. English art is Byzantine in root, the Byzantine tradition having found its way to Durham and thence to Winchester by way of Ireland. It is a very austere tradition.

This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday. This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday. At a time when far too many composers — more anxious about audience numbers than they are about the quality of the music they produce — have often compromised themselves in the cause of immediacy and accessibility, Carter has remained true to himself and to the tough, multilayered, multitextured, multicoloured language in which he writes, investing his always highly organised music with an overriding feeling of lyricism.

Boris Godunov English National Opera La rencontre imprévue Guildhall School of Music and Drama The new production of Musorgsky’s most important work Boris Godunov, at English National Opera, raises more questions than it answers. It is an impressive achievement, showing a seriousness of commitment to the work on the part of everyone involved, and yet there can have been few people in the audience on the first night who didn’t feel that it was teetering on the verge of tedium, if never quite lapsing into it. Given that ENO had decided to do the so-called ‘original’ version of 1869, that is without the Polish Act and thus without any major female role, it was wise to perform it without an interval.

Body of Lies 15, Nationwide Body of Lies is the latest film from producer/director Ridley Scott and it is an espionage thriller set mostly in the Middle East — Iraq, Jordan and Syria — featuring espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage and, if you can keep up, which I didn’t, there is probably a considerable amount of counter-counter-counter-espionage in there too. In short, it is unlikely that you’ll come out of the cinema saying, ‘Well, that was a little light on the espionage, wasn’t it, dear?’ It’s one of those films where, part of the way through, you even start to think, do I actually care enough to follow all this? Is it even possible to follow this? (It is vexingly complex.

Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. But I genuinely found his sitcom, Outnumbered (BBC 1, Saturday), co-written with his long-time collaborator Guy Jenkin, terrifically funny. It is set in a well-worn situation — the family — and the first episode was a cliché plot, the wedding where everything goes wrong, but that didn’t matter. I watched it on my portable DVD player during a crowded train journey. People miserably standing, propped upright only by each other as we bounced over the points, watched in resentment as I sat curled up and cramped, laughing my head off.