Culture

Currently lurking in the Scottish Borders; blogging hiatus likely to continue for a few more days. Trust y'all are flourishing and making the most of the New Year.

Andrew Lambirth urges those who think they don’t like this artist to go and see this show Last chance to see this large and lavish retrospective of the most famous of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais (Tate Britain, until 13 January). The Tate confidently asserts that John Everett Millais (1829–96) was the ‘greatest’ of the association which initially consisted of Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and himself, with a handful of fellow-travellers. Later Burne-Jones and William Morris formed a second-generation PRB, and there were other useful associates like Ford Madox Brown, William Dyce, Arthur Hughes and John Brett. To call Millais the ‘greatest’ is to oversimplify matters.

On Boxing Day, The Skimmer noted how the Catherine Tate Christmas Special with its orgy of swearing was hardly suitable for BBC1 on Christmas Day. Now, The Times reports that OFCOM is to investigate the show following a flurry of complaints from viewers about the "most offensive programme ever broadcast by the BBC on a Christmas Day”. Even Catherine Tate seems to have realised that things went too far, telling The Radio Times:  “I don’t know how this Christmas special got so depraved because it isn’t what I set out to do”.  The BBC is standing by its decision, arguing that one of the character’s foul language “was fundamental to what makes her funny.” That may be.

The Catherine Tate Show's Christmas Day Special managed over 20 uses of the F-word in the first five minutes, which must be something of a record, even by today's debased standards of modern entertainment.   True, the show was broadcast at 10.30pm, safely after the 9pm watershed when more adult material is shown, but this was on BBC1 on Christmas Day at a time when millions of families were likely to be watching together after the rigours of the day. We suspect many parents with youngish families must have grabbed the zapper and embarrassingly switched to something more appropriate.   Is the constant repetition of the F-word in the first sketch of a popular comedy show on Christmas Day really the BBC's idea of family programming? What editorial vetting procedures did it undergo?

Watched "Atonement", starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, the film version of Ian McEwan's novel and the latest British costume drama which American critics affect to love (hence talk of Oscars) but to which American audiences are indifferent (in two weeks in the US it's taken only a paltry $3.5m at the box office).   Atonement is fine as these things go, yet another depiction of class-ridden Britain in the 1930s, which encourages global audiences to think we're still the same out-dated stratified museum in 2007.   In general the film depends on high-quality dialogue and lovingly-depicted country-house scenes, which are cheap to shoot. Most of the budget, however, seems to have been blown on recreating the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940.

Now that Hollywood has decreed that smoking in movies is as bad - and in fact perhaps worse - than gratuitous sex and violence, it's not a great surprise that folk are reminiscing about the role smoking has played in the movies. This Slate sideshow doesn't break much new ground - and, lamentably, declares smoking "deplorable - but it's worth watching for the super video clips from the Golden Age of Gold Leaf. It's worth mentioning, however, in rather more detail than the slideshow does just why smoking and the cinema became inextricably linked.

The BBC's version of the Nativity this Christmas will depict Mary and Joseph as asylum seekers rejected by brutal Britain. Yes, once again the Beeb plays fast and loose with history so that we can all think the worst of our country. So let's remember some facts. First, this country's record in giving genuine asylum seekers refuge is second to none, a matter for pride rather than disparagement. Second, Mary and Joseph were not in any sense asylum seekers, nor were they dirt poor. They were a Middle Judean family who had gone to Bethlehem to participate in a census (primarily for tax purposes) but arrived so late all the inns were full (hence the resort to the stable). None of this matters, of course, to the cultural secularists who dominate BBC drama.