London
David Nice
If Eric Coates’s Knightsbridge March is good enough for Gergiev, who conducted it as a saving-grace encore of a very messy World Orchestra for Peace Prom in 2005 (17 orchestral leaders in the first violins, not a happy gambit), then it’s certainly worth the time of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and one of its biggest sound-shapers. Bright spark John Wilson unhesitatingly claims Coates as his favourite light-music composer. But this concert served up more than just bubbles in the champagne of the Southbank’s Festival of Britain 60th anniversary celebrations; there was some decent semi-serious Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Tickets were like gold dust for this one and the stage was lit as if some of that dust had been sprinkled on the Festival Hall in a midsummer dream of a concert. The massed ranks of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra and a backing rock band magicked up on the Southbank to pay handsome tribute to the presiding Puck and genius loci Raymond Douglas Davies, alumnus of the William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School, in the manor of Muswell Hill. As the last night of the Meltdown series, curated by Davies, was it all hopelessly OTT? Short answer: yes. But it was also Read more ...
graham.rickson
The first part of Patrick Keiller’s trilogy, an attempt to address the "problem of London", begins just before the 1992 re-election of John Major. It’s a pseudo documentary ostensibly narrated by an acquaintance of one Robinson, a part-time art lecturer at the University of Barking. Nearly 20 years on, not much has changed – we’re in a place of bombings and bomb threats, with chaotic, privatised public transport. It’s a once civil society stretched to breaking point.
Paul Scofield’s arch commentary is so mellifluous that you’re willing to believe everything he says. Is there really a tunnel Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The identity of British independent film, and its future directions, has always been a matter of some contention – and with the ongoing transfer of authority on funding issues from the now-defunct UK Film Council to the British Film Institute, it’s a question that isn’t going to go away. For Ron Peck, whose most recent film Cross-Channel has been released on DVD, coinciding with the re-release of his Empire State, it's a question close to the heart, as director of what has been called Britain’s first openly gay film, Nighthawks, and the much-acclaimed boxing documentary Fighters.Peck is most Read more ...
joe.muggs
This month sees an audacious attempt to showcase British dancehall music, when the Cargo venue in Shoreditch hosts the multi-artist revue Showtime!. The Heatwave collective have brought together vocalists from various UK underground scenes, linked by a strong influence from the high-energy Jamaican sounds of the past 30 or so years. While many of the artists involved have found success in crossover scenes like rave, jungle, grime and garage, the appeal of dancehall itself (also known by the overlapping terms bashment and ragga) has traditionally been restricted to predominantly black Read more ...
josh.spero
Hot on the vulgar, vertiginous heels of The Only Way is Essex came E4's Made in Chelsea last night, where the stars were better shod but about as interesting as shoe leather. The first ill omen was the use of the angsty, vengeful riff from Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" - it wanted the passion and style of the music but could only grasp it on a fast-food level. Things got no better.This show was self-defeating, as is any reality show where "interesting" people have to put themselves forward. Truly interesting people would never want to parade their lives in a flash of fur, so we were left Read more ...
theartsdesk
Comedy writer John Sullivan has died aged 64, writes Adam Sweeting, after spending six weeks in intensive care battling viral pneumonia. The creator of several hit comedy series for the BBC, Sullivan is guaranteed immortality for his masterpiece, Only Fools and Horses, which ran from 1981 to 2002. Featuring the escapades of the wide-boy south-London brothers, Rodney and Del Boy Trotter (Nicholas Lyndhurst and David Jason), it became one of the best-loved British comedies ever screened, and also gained a substantial international following. A 2004 poll named Only Fools... as the best Read more ...
alice.vincent
In a play about drugs for a secondary-school audience there is always the potential for cringing. My own experience of theatre for a young audience involved PSHE lessons, overtly moral drama from hammy actors and dated street names for drugs. It was The Magic Roundabout, only more awkward and less entertaining. The Almeida Theatre and its solid Young Friends scheme is working hard to give youth theatre a better image through Crawling in the Dark, a new play which deals with young people and, yes, drugs, but without an embarrassing reference in sight.Natalie Mitchell has managed the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
According to her website, Martina Cole is "the person who tells it like it really is". If it's really like this dramatisation of her 1997 novel The Runaway, it's unrelentingly brutal, squalid and frightening, a televisual blow to the head from a blunt instrument. Perhaps the fact that the series was shot on a giant set in South Africa helps to account for its strange atmosphere of reality assembled from an Ikea-style flatpack.The Runaway of the title is, or is going to be in episode two, Cathy Connor (Joanna Vanderham). It's the early Sixties, and Cathy has been brought up in London's East Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having amasssed bankable screenwriting kudos for Edge of Darkness and The Departed, William Monahan made his writer/director debut with London Boulevard, a reworking of Ken Bruen's novel burnished with useful marquee glitz from headliners Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley. However, some reviewers remained unconvinced by the flick's aura of "Guy Ritchie does Get Carter", and Monahan would have done himself a favour by dialling down the guns and geezerdom. Much as we love Ray Winstone, it was a little too predictable that he should turn up as the merciless über-villain, Gant.Nonetheless, the Read more ...
peter.quinn
It's not every night that an artist proposes locking the doors and having “one giant orgy of love”, but then Dee Dee Bridgewater has always had a singular take on things. This sold-out gig at Ronnie Scott's was one of those rare, did-that-really-happen-or-am-I-dreaming evenings where performer and audience reciprocally move into some kind of magical, harmonious alignment.The singer was performing material from Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959): To Billie With Love From Dee Dee Bridgewater, chosen as one of my Albums of the Year in theartsdesk's 2010 New Music Round-up and a worthy Grammy winner Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As he did with his Spanish idyll Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen supplies his fourth London film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, with an anonymous male American narrator whose air of irritatingly breezy omniscience distances us from the proceedings, limiting the empathy we may feel for the four protagonists. This is a shame, because two of them - tetchy, unhappily married Sally (Naomi Watts) and her divorced, needy mother Helena (Gemma Jones) - are, for all their faults, characters we hope to see prosper.As he did with his Spanish idyll Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen Read more ...