TV
Jasper Rees
In traditional drama, actors are vessels for the written word. They do the looks, the sex, the tears - the dynamics: they perform. But the words are supplied by the writer. True Love gives the mummers the opportunity to go the extra mile. A series of five half-hour films going out across the week and set in a seaside town, it is the latest work from the defiantly lo-fi director Dominic Savage.At a time when drama departments were mostly commissioning cop shows, Savage made his reputation with a loose trilogy of films that descended circle by circle into an inferno of social deprivation. Nice Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Male dancers are a puzzle to British audiences, where they are an uncomplicated, taken-for-granted treasure in Latin or Slav countries. I point this out gratuitously, as it's a point that wasn't touched upon by Melvyn Bragg's film about three iconic men of ballet, Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Carlos Acosta.But this was not a historical survey of attitudes to male dancers and how Oliver Cromwell messed with British heads - that interesting possibility remains unrealised on TV. This was about the act of fleeing slavery to find freedom, from constricted motherland to liberated Western Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a mismatch of ambitions was unearthed in this Culture Show special on the ArcelorMittal Orbit. Boris Johnson admitted that he’d wanted slides on it, joking heartily that “there’s nothing too vulgar for me”, whilst Anish Kapoor wished for it to be “up there with the gods”, and mused that it had moments that were meditative and contemplative. Meanwhile, the artist expressed sheer horror that the Olympic Authorities where keen to call it “an attraction”, despite the public’s insistence on calling it a helter-skelter. Then there was some lofty talk of it representing the nature of flux in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Sex Pistols played their final live show on 14 January 1978 in San Francisco. According to the third and final programme in the Punk Britannia series, “for many, it would be the end of punk”. It certainly was for ex-Pistol John Lydon, who'd form Public Image Ltd. Taking on the task of tracing what happened next was a challenge. Nothing was neat. Loose ends, new strands and evolution of the existing meant it couldn’t be. If this programme succeeded, it was in portraying the turmoil that came in punk’s wake.Bringing order where there is chaos is always difficult. As an overview of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Amid the splurge of programmes about London saturating the airwaves, apparently designed as a crude propaganda offensive to divert us from the impending Olympics clampdown, Matthew Collings's examination of the mystical relationship between the Thames and JMW Turner was thoughtful and rather touching. It's true that Collings sometimes ties himself in knots while trying to express some inexpressible truth about art, but he successfully conveys the idea that he's making an honest effort to tell you about something he genuinely believes in.Though a shrewd businessman who marketed himself Read more ...
Veronica Lee
And so Desperate Housewives has ended after eight funny and entertaining seasons. Marc Cherry's creation, which first went on air in October 2004, deservedly won numerous Emmys and Golden Globes along the way. It was set in the small town of Fairview in the fictional Eagle State and followed the lives of four neighbours on the same street - Susan (Teri Hatcher), Bree (Marcia Cross), Lynette (Felicity Huffman) and Gaby (Eva Longoria).The series started with the suicide of their Wisteria Lane neighbour, Mary Alice (Brenda Strong), and the roles in it played by her husband and son. The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Has Louis Theroux got a bit of a porn addiction? This is the second time he has visited the fleshpots of suburban California to find out what (and indeed who) is going down. Actually, as the first film was 15 years ago when Theroux was an all-but-pimply spindleshanks with outsize Blair-era specs, he is probably in the clear. But you do have to wonder whether Theroux is running out of American weirdos to spend the weekend with. There was a distinct sense of an older, wiser but less twinkly filmmaker coming round the block again.The premise of Twilight of the Porn Stars was that an industry in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To each their own Hay. The Roman encampment that is the modern-day literary festival, circled by pantechnicons and trending in the Twittersphere, looks very much like a monomaniacal content provider for all comers. Astroturf walkways deliver the cagouled hundreds and thousands to events in tents with clockwork regularity. But the reality is, of course, that no two experiences of Hay are alike. A bit like snowflakes.Talking of which, the one common denominator to every event in my two and half a days on site alluded in some shape or form to the weather. As the winds crack its cheeks outside, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Athol Fugard's 80th birthday is being marked by four major productions in New York this year, two of which have come and gone. How has the London stage honoured this 11 June milestone in the life of the South African playwright for whom the personal and the political have become inextricably linked across the years? With nary a word, which is just one reason why Tony Palmer's hefty documentary about this man of letters and more (Fugard has worked as a novelist, poet and actor/director, not just as a dramatist) is especially welcome. And why it also feels frustratingly incomplete. That Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
All good things must come to an end, but at least if it's a fully tooled-up American drama series it comes to an end a lot more slowly. Where the BBC serves up six episodes of Silk or a ridiculous three of Sherlock, the third season of The Good Wife finally drew to a close with its 22nd instalment.It's hard going for writers, actors and crew, but the benefits of such an extended run are plastered all over the screen, week in and week out. In Britain, at least, The Good Wife hasn't earned itself those "greatest TV show ever made!" accolades lobbed at The Sopranos or The Wire by the more Read more ...
fisun.guner
Taste and class – there’s really no separating them. So when Grayson Perry decided to go "on safari through the taste tribes of Britain” he did so through the lens of class, and he started from the “bottom up”: he went to Sunderland, where big hair, big heels, short skirts and fake tans rule among the women, and the local footie team, the gym, tattoos and pimping your car does it for the men.Inspired by Hogarth’s great eight-part painting A Rake’s Progress, in which young Tom Rakewell sets out in life as the heir to the fortune of a wealthy merchant, quickly acquires the habits and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Just when it seemed that thrillers on British television were supplied solely by Scandinavia's finest, along comes a new US series to remind us that when it comes to densely plotted ensemble pieces the Americans have form too. Revenge, the pilot episode of which aired last week and which started a 21-week run last night, has some promising names attached. It was created by Mike Kelley, a writer on One Tree Hill and The O.C., and it stars Madeleine Stowe.She plays Victoria Grayson, who spends her summers in the Hamptons, the East Coast summer playground of the über-rich and Read more ...