Arts Reviews

It’s amazing what can be squeezed into an hour of The Hour (Wednesday, BBC2): smutty photos, gang violence, bent coppers, illegal gambling, fascism, racism, a political cover-up, a media exposé, leaked documents, seduction, abuse, neglect, the corrupting temptations of celebrity, the corrupting temptations of complicated dessert recipes, a dog in space, the threat to the nation of nuclear war, the threat to the BBC of commercial television and the threat to an English bluestocking of a sexy, bare-legged French girl with a carving knife, a wedding ring and a gamine haircut. The poor old kitchen sink, left out like Cinderella, must have had a dull time sitting at home by

Go back 90 years to the first radio broadcast by the newly formed BBC and you might think you’ve entered a time warp. The company (it became a corporation later) was obsessed about a government inquiry and accusations that it was elitist and biased towards London. How could it survive without the licence fee? How do you keep those troublesome regional stations happy? How do you stop your unruly artistes (as they were then so politely called) from landing you in the muck? Not much has changed in 2012. The BBC has always been at the mercy of the licence fee, set initially by the government at ten shillings (equivalent

‘Passion for freedom‘ is now holding its fourth exhibition at the Unit 24 Gallery just behind Tate Modern. The show is a visible and occasionally dazzling manifestation of an often submerged movement in western liberalism that regards the liberal-left mainstream with something close to disgust. They – we – find the indulgence of radical Islam as a betrayal of the best of the liberal tradition. We are equally repelled by multi-cultural orthodoxy, which puts the interest of a ‘community’ before the interests of the individual, particularly when the individual is a woman. The magnificent Maryam Namazie, One Law for All’s Spokesperson, and a woman you will rarely hear on the

If you didn’t watch Derren Brown’s Apocalypse, then the following will be meaningless… I suppose all television is a kind of charlatanism, a usually agreeable deception to which the rest of us more or less willingly sign up. We know, at the back of our minds, that TV is fake. Which is why Derren Brown’s Apocalypse was salutary viewing: clearly, demonstrably, faked – and even beyond that obnoxious in its presumptions. Sort of TV incarnate, in exaggerated microcosm. The audience are mugs, the supposed representative from the audience – the protagonist of Brown’s fifth form horror show – a mug who can be lifted from his humdrum torpor and selfishness

What London can give jazz music — beyond an audience in its concert halls — is a setting to match the music’s diversity. The city offers access, culturally, to what is European, American, African and more. And so it is with the London Jazz Festival (9–18 November), whose extensive programme is significant both for its cultural mix and for its line-up of jazz’s greatest living musicians. 2012 marks the festival’s 17th outing, with over 250 concerts, 40 hours of which are to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Performers will include the legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins (16 November, Barbican), who recorded with Miles Davis before he was 20. Now aged