Reviews
Veronica Lee
It was all done in the worst possible taste, as the late, great Kenny Everett didn’t say: 2009 started with the fallout of the mother of a ruckus over a radio broadcast that probably three people actually heard when it went out, but more than 30,000 individuals felt they should complain about in the ensuing row. I refer, of course, to the Russell Brand-Jonathan Ross telephone-message jape concerning elderly actor Andrew Sachs. Ross returned to his BBC One chatshow and Radio 2 programme at the end of January 2009, and the ripples still run as we enter 2010. Much has been said or written on the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Time was when British families planned Christmas Day around The Queen in the afternoon and (depending which generation you fall into) Morecambe and Wise, Victoria Wood, French and Saunders or The Vicar of Dibley in the evening. But now it seems television bosses have all but given up on offering family entertainment, as BBC One's comedy fare was transmitted entirely after the watershed and ITV1’s sole offering, Ant & Dec’s Christmas Show, was broadcast on Boxing Day.My appetite for Victoria Wood’s Midlife Christmas had been whetted by a wonderful night devoted to the Lancashire comic on Read more ...
theartsdesk
No great new movements or radically transformational figures emerged to dominate classical music in the Noughties (not even him up there). Just one small nagging question bedevilled us: will the art form survive? Well, it has. What appeared to be a late 20th-century decline in audience interest in the classical tradition was in fact a consumer weariness with the choices on offer. And who could blame them? At the start of this decade, the London orchestral scene, in the hands of aging, mediocre conductors, was as appealing as a boil-in-the-bag fish dinner; administratively and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC's reinvention of Doctor Who under the auspices of Russell T Davies has proved to be an inspired upgrade of a legendary 1960s marque fit to rank alongside BMW's resuscitation of the Mini, though it would hardly be sensible to argue that the new-look Doctor is distinguished by Germanic precision engineering or a coolly mathematical design philosophy. Quite the opposite. Although the cardboard scenery and risible special effects that used to lend Doctor Who much of its jerry-built charm have been digitally upgraded, the series is still a hard-to-define mix of soft sci-fi and a kind of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There were some odd sights in Christmas Day viewing but none more discomfiting, I’d bet, than seeing a ballerina lying on a physio’s couch having a leg dragged quickly up to touch the side of her head while the other leg lay perfectly still pointing downwards. Can the body really do that? Another weird sight - dozens of people in full 18th-century French costume and wigs dancing in 40-degree heat on a Cuban stage. Meanwhile coachloads of dancers were going down with swine flu and a 45-year-old retired dancer was flown in from Germany to take the part of a 20-year-old. Surely nothing is as Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Family been bickering over games again this Christmas? Take the blighters to this fabulous supernatural melodrama and they'll learn soon enough what happens to a dirty card cheat. Long unavailable, Thorold Dickinson's 1949 adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's eerie short story, wherein a penniless Russian officer and crusty beldame sell their souls for the secret of winning at a simple game of chance, will be released on DVD, not before time, on 18 January. Meanwhile, it opens today for a short run in cinemas where its baroque imagery and outsize performances, from Anton Walbrook and Dame Edith Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s possible Endemol didn’t give the book too close a reading. George Orwell conceived Big Brother as an all-seeing eye whose function was to enforce social and political conformity. Let us not revisit here the gallery of desperadoes, sextroverts and day-release wannabes who formed a disorderly queue to parade themselves for days, weeks, months and indeed years on end in the Big Brother house. They did conform in a sense: every single one of them wanted to stand out from the crowd. In the decade now ending, the desire to seek attention was the new rock’n’roll. Fuchsia with vermilion polka Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If reality TV became a mass-audience opium for a world turning bleaker and nastier, what we might as well call unreality TV has been fulfilling a related role while following a different trajectory. In a world that has never been quite the same since 9/11 opened up a big crack in it, some of TV's most compelling creations have been the ones which have dared to tamper with perceived reality in subtle, disturbing ways. We all felt that the earth had moved in some indefinable fashion, and we've been struggling ever since to understand exactly how. Jim Morrison's line, "the future's Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s been a very good year for Beatlemania, with all the albums re-repackaged and the group going virtual in Rock Band. The BBC lobbed in their own Beatles season-ette, and one of the more striking images from their riot of documentary footage was of John Lennon escorting his Aunt Mimi up the steps onto the plane taking them to America, with her handbag and Sunday-best hat.That surely settles any debate about his real feelings for Mimi. She is depicted in Sam Taylor-Wood's absorbing film about Lennon’s teenage years as a stern exemplar of moral discipline, but driven by honourable motives and Read more ...
paul.bradshaw
As we gathered in St John’s Church in Waterloo last Thursday to hear The London Lucumi Choir perform, on the same day people in their thousands were making the pilgrimage to the Church of San Lazaro in Cuba. In that church, just outside Havana, pilgrims walk or sometime crawl the few miles to the Church, often bearing gifts of rum and cigars as penitence. It is a sign of the times that songs to the orishas – the deities that populate the Yoruba religious pantheon, who all have their own distinctive, trance-inducing rhythms – can also be heard in a Christian church in London. Our presence Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The term “accompanist” is no longer acceptable, no longer “politically correct” in musical circles, not least Lieder. It’s hard to imagine now that the relationship between a singer and his or her pianist was ever regarded as anything other than an equal partnership. But 26 years ago, when Julius Drake first stepped out on to the Wigmore Hall platform to play Poulenc with “friends”, the rarefied world of chamber music and song was a very different place. Even Gerald Moore, the most venerated of Lieder pianists, called his autobiography Am I Too Loud? – a title more than a little suggestive of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When I saw Gregory Doran’s production of Twelfth Night for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in October, I thought it unsubtle and underpowered, but that it would settle in during its run. Apparently not, as, in its transfer to London’s West End, it has gathered neither pace nor depth. That’s a real shame as there are some terrific performances at its heart.Doran’s handling of the play’s complicated romances has wonderful clarity and in this he is helped by great performances by the four lovers. Jo Stone-Fewings playfully brings out the fevered Read more ...