The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
There were times during last Friday’s First Night of the Proms when it felt as if we’d been transported back to Ohio during the Eisenhower administration. We could have been in Severance Hall, Cleveland, listening to its orchestra under George Szell – and there’s no higher compliment I can pay the BBC Symphony Orchestra, because
In the 1990s, the BBC had a popular flat-share comedy, Men Behaving Badly, about a pair of giggling bachelors who were scolded and dominated by their mummy-substitute girl-friends. The author, Simon Nye, has written a historical crime caper about the theft of the crown jewels in 1671, as Charles II prepared to celebrate his tenth
If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was the subtle message of Eldorado, a documentary that pretended to inform us about the real-life background sexual milieu to Cabaret and Babylon Berlin, but was really much more interested in promoting its political view that
It is the stuff of nightmares, or a queasily dystopian film plot. A woman is undergoing a surgical procedure in a top-rated US clinic. The aim is ‘egg retrieval’, a process which collects eggs from the ovaries for use in IVF. It involves nerves and hope, long needles and pain – except the patient has
Bands that have hung around, or gone away and come back again, occupy an increasingly sizeable percentage of pop’s bandwidth. When it comes to making new music, many are happy not to rock the boat, scraping by on the goodwill accumulated from past endeavours. Others strive to present a moving target, enjoying a more evolved,
Through several phases of the culture wars, ballet has served as a canary in the coal mine, its intense and exposed physicality highlighting all the issues surrounding sexuality, gender and power that have currently become our unhealthily narcissistic preoccupation. Perhaps the warnings started with the phenomenon of Vaslav Nijinsky. Against the defined masculinity and femininity
In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. The programme managed to shed new light on a familiar but still irresistible story by concentrating on Philby’s relationship with his old chum – and fellow Cambridge man – Nicholas Elliott. Elliott was
Seven years ago, I asked Bruce Springsteen what he meant when he talked of the covenant between himself and his audience. It was a long, thoughtful and thorough answer, and when I transcribed it, I realised he would have won Just a Minute, so clear was his reply. Part of what he said was this:
Blockbuster action movies are designed to stun the audience into submissive acceptance. Complexity, humanity, emotion and beauty are reduced to a few flickering lights in the swirling darkness of death and destruction. This is not a criticism. Great art has sometimes been like that and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is certainly art,
Beneatha’s Place, set in the 1950s, follows a black couple who encounter racial prejudice when they move to a predominately white suburb. The location is Nigeria but it might as well be the USA because most of the characters, both black and white, are American. (The Young Vic has strong links with America, and a
In 1998 curators at the Courtauld Institute received an anonymous phone call informing them that 11 drawings in their collection were fakes. The caller intimated that he was an associate of the notorious forger Eric Hebborn, who had claimed in his 1991 memoir, Drawn to Trouble, to have sold the institute a fake Rowlandson. The
‘Ring out your bells for me, ivory keys! Weave out your spell for me, orchestra please!’ It’s lush stuff, the music of Ivor Novello, and when the Buxton International Festival announced a new musical ‘built around’ his songs, the heart took flight. Novello is one of those fringe passions that are, one suspects, a lot
A few months ago, a clip from a podcast went mildly viral online. A lightly dressed woman sits in front of a microphone, explaining her sex life in pedantic detail to an offscreen interviewer. It was strange and unpleasant, which was why people couldn’t stop looking at it. What kind of podcast is this, exactly?
Idris Elba would have made a perfect James Bond. Not the James Bond that we knew and loved when he was played by wry, capable Sean Connery or playful, tongue-in-cheek Roger Moore. But he definitely ought to have been a shoo-in for the horror show that the Bond franchise has become: dour, humourless, pumped up,
Nothing demonstrates the inanity of profanity like an undercooked comedy. The famous Spitting Image puppets have returned in a political musical that’s more cuddly than cutting. Writers Matt Forde and Al Murray add a lot of swearing to their punchlines without understanding why. The temptation to use the F-bomb is a warning sign from the
Most artists begin an arena show with a bang: emerging from the floor, the gods, on a hoist, everything short of being sprung headfirst from a cannon. Touring for the first time in seven years, Peter Gabriel shrugged off such rote conventions. At 8 p.m. on the dot, he shuffled on alone in a flat
I’m listening to John Cleese talking to Justin Welby in the new series of The Archbishop Interviews when the thought occurs to me that he might unwittingly be comparing himself to Christ. The comedian has just been discussing the failure of the literal-minded to comprehend sarcasm and irony, and the inanity of tabloid headlines, when
You’d have to have a heart of stone to not be moved by Name Me Lawand. It’s a documentary about a Kurdish boy, deaf since birth, who has lived a lonely, isolated and shut-in life until he learns British Sign Language and slowly starts to blossom and reveal who he is. (Who are we without
‘Goodness Triumphant’ is the subtitle of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and you’d better believe he delivers. It’s the sweetest thing imaginable; true, the stepsisters are awful, but their spite bubbles over in streams of such sunny major-key effervescence that it’s hard to hold it against them. As for their father Don Magnifico, you can’t seriously hiss
One of the annoying things about too many contemporary museums is that, having ditched old-fashioned closely typed descriptive labels and display cases, they often seem to be pitched at the level of a 12-year-old. So it’s refreshing to go to a museum that really is for 12-year-olds – or, at least, babies to 14-year-olds. Three
It’s a long climb up the 1,368 steps to the Shinto shrine at Kotohira. Many of the pilgrims are making comfort stops at the countless teahouses that line the route, but other worshippers break their journey at Kanamaru-za, the oldest surviving kabuki theatre in Japan. A middle-aged man in Barbara Cartland war paint, heavy black
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth and final film in the franchise so it’s Harrison Ford’s last go at cracking the bullwhip as either the world’s greatest archaeologist or the world’s greatest plunderer, depending on where you are coming from. Ford is now 80 but they still make him appear to
Here’s a mystery for you. Why were Spoon, one of the most dynamic, sharpest rock bands in the world, playing a single night in a north London town hall (capacity 890) while Arctic Monkeys were playing three nights at Arsenal’s ground (capacity 59,000) as part of a UK tour that encompassed eight other stadiums in
James Graham’s entertaining new play looks at the England manager’s job. Everyone knows that coaching the national side is just a hobby. The boss picks the squad for a handful of fixtures each year and gives a pep talk at half-time followed by a post-match press conference. He’s spared the bother of speculating in the
In opera, as in so much high-budget entertainment, expectation management is half the battle. With its massive Greek Revival mansion, approached through miles of rolling parkland, The Grange Festival has the grandest setting of any of the summer festivals; and that might have something to do with why the opera served up there has so
As I sat down at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, I overheard a curious exchange. ‘You mustn’t create art within art,’ said an invigilator frostily. He was telling off Fred Pilbrow, an architect, who had been taking in the Pavilion’s sociable atmosphere with friends and painting a watercolour of the scene. They proceeded to enter a
No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone off on an earnest quest to investigate a touchy subject and reached his conclusions only after the most extravagant of brow-furrowing. There is, however, a perhaps unexpected twist: the resulting programmes are rather good, creating
In front of the banner advertising the RA Summer Exhibition, the swagger statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) by Alfred Drury stands garlanded with flowers. But the Academy he founded won’t be marking his tercentenary with a retrospective, just a small display and a series of artists’ lectures. For an anniversary show, you have to
Hang around for long enough at Chester Cross, and theatre is pretty much guaranteed. It’s a Saturday morning in May: a human statue holds his pose, a remote-control buggy zips about advertising the spring sale at MenKind and three connoisseurs of discount cider are making their views known from the bench outside St Peter’s Church.