Now we've become so steeped in digital devices that we can’t count to four without the aid of a calculator, it’s the perfect moment to take a voyage back to an era when British Leyland manufactured cars in diarrhoea-beige and there wasn't any daytime TV.Electric Dreams (part of the BBC’s Electric Revolution season surveying 40 years of galloping technology) rests on a simple premise. I can imagine it being described by mad Californian professor Denzil Dexter from The Fast Show - "we took this middle class suburban family and subjected it to intense technology deprivation." The clock in the Read more ...

You might imagine a cultural artefact on the topic of make overs, albeit primarily of the self, to be handled with particular care and attention when it is itself made over, as the Truman Capote novella Breakfast at Tiffany's has now been on the West End. Alas, Sean Mathias's second successive Haymarket production is an object lesson in how not to tamper with the pre-existing goods. Joseph Cross's leading man, William Parsons, sends us into the interval, his jaw dropped open in disbelief. He's not the only one.The misfire is all the more surprising given the abilities of those involved, Read more ...

Blame it on J.J. Abrams. With the success of the unfathomable Lost, Abrams altered the consciousness of American TV drama, and made it obligatory to think in at least four dimensions. Hence we had Heroes, in which people could fly, were indestructible, or could alter the course of history. Abrams himself is back on the paranormal beat with Fringe (due back imminently on Sky 1), a kind of X-Files-through-the-Looking Glass.Now here’s FlashForward, Five’s big new buy-in for the autumn, and a series which many reckon looks uncannily like ABC's potential replacement for Lost. The brainchild of Read more ...

Take four superb actors - Lucy Cohu, Kerry Fox, Ian Hart and John Simm - cast them in a revival of a play that inspired a haunting film, and what do you get? On the evidence of last night’s opening performance of Speaking in Tongues, a right mess, that’s what.Australian writer Andrew Bovell (who worked with Baz Luhrmann on Strictly Ballroom) and whose latest play, When the Rain Stops Falling, was staged at the Almeida in London earlier this year) adapted his 1996 play five years later as the film Lantana, starring Barbara Hershey, Anthony LaPaglia and Geoffrey Rush. With its interlocking Read more ...

History is written in blood, however elegant the cover. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the collapse in 1521 of the Aztec Empire, a culture that presented Europe with a vision of such otherness that it could only be destroyed. In 2002, the Royal Academy of Arts tried to persuade us to look beyond the grisly tales of human sacrifice to a more nuanced portrait of a people steeped in gory rituals that we, soaked in the serial-killer television porn of the 21st century, might strangely understand.It didn’t work – how many vessels designed to receive still-beating human hearts do you need to Read more ...

The great and the good came to Imogen Cooper’s 60th birthday concert. In fact, so thick with friends and fellow pianists was the Wigmore Hall, that at the end there seemed to be as many people going backstage to congratulate her as were leaving through the front doors. In that quietly embarrassing, I-hope-no-one-saw way, after some light-hearted Schumann, I thought for a moment she flashed a smile at me and – charmed – smiled back, but it turned out that I was sitting behind Brendel. It was that sort of audience.Perhaps it wasn’t such a difficult mistake to make. This was a genteel tea- Read more ...

4 am. Eternal. I'm at an all-night temple festival somewhere in north Kerala in southern India - not so much in the middle of nowhere as on the outskirts of nowhere. There's wild chenda drumming and a terrifying apparition of a man who has gone into a trance – the goddess Babrakali, they tell me, has possessed him. He's wearing an outrageous red costume 12ft high, and he is charging right at me. The fact that his outfit is on fire, that he's just bitten the head off a live cockerel and the remains of the unlucky fowl dangle from his mouth, doesn't reassure me.In fact, he stops just in front Read more ...

They played their first concert in 1969, and 40 years later the TP Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou, to give them their full name, had their UK debut last night at the Barbican as part of their first European tour. They are the latest expression of a growing cult of classic bands who hit their peak in 1970s Africa. The music of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti has never been more popular, strange jazz from 1970s Addis Ababa has been selling impressively on the Ethiopiques series of records, while Senegal’s Orchestre Baobab have reformed to great acclaim.Three cult albums, culled from a repertory of over Read more ...

Werther is based on the young Goethe’s semi-autobiographical epistolary novel which tells of a young artist’s thwarted love for a simple country girl who is already engaged. First performed in Vienna in 1892, it is audibly a product of that time. You can hear the predominant influence of Wagner in piquant unresolved dissonances, suggestive of a fleeter-footed, gallic Tristan with added harps. The sheer depth and splendour of the music is what makes a potentially risible narrative work so gloriously: it is superbly paced and always entertaining. And Opera North’s first stab at it since 1982 Read more ...

For my money, Andy Parsons is by some distance the best panellist on BBC2’s Mock the Week - not that you would know it from the editing, which appears to be in thrall to that shouty Scottish bloke. Parsons is quick, witty, clever and has a command of current affairs that only MTW host Dara O Briain can match. What a pleasure, then, to see him live, commanding the audience’s rapt and thoroughly entertained attention in a show that lasted more than two hours, but which just flew by.Parsons, with his shaven head and Estuary vowels, could be mistaken for a London cabbie but is in fact a Read more ...

The trailer for Farewell - released in Paris this week - was so dull I nearly didn't bother to go and see the film. The problem with selling Cold War thrillers to the masses is that realistic spy movies have little truck with trailer-friendly stunts, explosions and one-liners. But as any reader of Le Carré knows, the world of espionage is a world of smoke and mirrors, where no-one is who they appear to be, and where cynicism and expediency rub shoulders with slow-burning paranoia. In the right hands, these ingredients can have you on the edge of your seat, and fortunately for us, the hands of Read more ...

“He’s a naughty lad, isn’t he?” said an elderly lady to her husband as they left Julian Clary’s show, Lord of the Mince, which had numerous references to gay sexual practices. The remark wasn’t made in anger, mind, but with a smile on both their faces - and that’s a clue as to why Clary gets away with some unbelievably smutty material. As with many a camp gay comic, from Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson to, more recently, Graham Norton and Paul O’Grady, the British public just love him.Clary’s fans fall, I imagine, into two distinct categories; those who know him as a comic, and those who Read more ...