Rock

Vinyl (Sky Atlantic) — the much-anticipated series, co-produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, about the 1970s New York record industry — began on Monday with a two-hour episode directed by Scorsese himself. The result was, as you’d expect, an exhilarating watch. So why did it also create an undeniable feeling of slight disappointment? One reason, I suppose, could just be that modern TV viewers are spoiled rotten. So many American dramas since The Sopranos have shown such a miraculous mixture of breadth and depth that the problem is no longer believing how ambitious television can be, but simply keeping up with them all. (More bloody golden eggs? Why can’t

The opening bars of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony (1914) are scooped out from the gloopy bedrock of the city. Vaughan Williams was dredging through the same mud, silt, slime and ooze as those scene-setting paragraphs of Our Mutual Friend (1865), where Charles Dickens shows that the real glue binding his book together will be the River Thames. Dickens’s famed ‘boat of dirty and disreputable appearance’ berths Our Mutual Friend in the earth and experience of London. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’s cellos and double basses, which launch his symphony, plod out from the sludge of the river. But, by the time his bucolic Scherzo waddles into view, you could be

‘He was the most influential Beatle,’ Yoko Ono recently claimed. When Paul and John first spotted him out in Hamburg, in his suit and beard, sitting ‘drinking bourbon and seven’, they were amazed. ‘This was, like, a grown-up musician,’ thought Paul. One night Ringo sat in for their drummer Pete Best. ‘I remember the moment,’ said Paul, ‘standing there and looking at John and then looking at George, and the look on our faces was like …what is this? And that was the moment, that was the beginning, really, of the Beatles.’ I think Ringo Starr was a genius. The world seems to be coming around to the idea. Two

The oeuvre of Chris Rock may not be fully known in this parish. He was the African-American stand-up who made a packet out of saying the unsayable about race. Richard Pryor kicked down the door, but it was Rock who stamped a registered trademark on the N-word. He also had a rapper’s sensibility in the area of gender politics: his breakthrough set had much to say about — and I merely quote — dick and pussy. And what about the movies? For children, Rock voiced a jive-talking zebra in the Madagascar mega-franchise, perhaps a quadrupedal hommage to Eddie Murphy’s donkey in Shrek. Alas Rock’s own pet projects have a tendency

As I was flipping through some television garbage trying to induce sleep, I came upon an old western starring Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Malone and Rock Hudson. Once upon a time the above names would have been common points of reference — a collective vocabulary signifying the Fifties: chrome tailfins, standard-issue grey flannel suits, hats and stifled alternative views. No longer. Common points of reference today are unrecognisable, at least for yours truly, still stuck on black-and-white movies, good manners and correct dress. At one point in the film, a young, beautiful girl tells a middle-aged Kirk Douglas that she loves him. He dismisses it, telling her she’s just a girl

In the giftshop at the new Elvis exhibition at the Dome, you can buy your own version of his flared white jumpsuits. I can’t think of anyone who could wear one and not look ridiculous — particularly if they had a bit of a weight problem. But Elvis, who would have turned 80 this year, managed to pull it off. This selection of the best Elvisiana from Graceland is full of the sort of kitschy excess that would sit so awkwardly on anyone else: his outsized solitaire diamond ring, the gold phone by his bedside table, the Harley-Davidson golf carts he used to rocket through Graceland’s grounds. It’s easy to

Stars, playwrights and even set designers are constantly being lionised in the papers. But why not producers? They, after all, are the ones who choose the plays, the stars, and then make it all happen. Duncan Weldon and Paul Elliott are two veteran cigar chompers who’ve been in the business for 45 years. They’ve made and lost a packet, over and over again. They never seem to learn. Like all producers, they love their wives almost as much as they love a hit. Over lunch in the West End, I discussed the knack of being and staying a producer. Great exponents such as Cameron Mackintosh and Bill Kenwright have always