TV
sheila.johnston
At last something good on the telly at Christmas, you think. Eleven new short films premiere nightly on Sky over the holiday period starting this evening. All are dialogue-free (though with music and sound effects), all have a seasonal flavour and, cumulatively, assemble a terrific line-up, including the actors Timothy Spall, Natasha McElhone, Bill Nighy, Peter Capaldi, Mackenzie Crook and Ross Kemp and the writers and directors Neil Gaiman, Richard Eyre, William Boyd, Tony Grisoni and Jeremy Brock. You can't really go wrong with all that. Can you?It would be curmudgeonly to carp that the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It's sometimes referred to, just a bit dismissively, as bonnet drama. Whenever television visits the 19th century, the headwear of the female characters does indeed play its part. Of no adaptation of Victorian fiction is that truer than Cranford. The actresses wearing the bonnets are fairly resplendent too. This Christmas they are queueing up to appear in Heidi Thomas's new dramatisation set in Mrs Gaskell's quiet Cheshire town. Our gallery celebrates the bonneted British actresses of Cranford, to amplify director Simon Curtis's description elsewhere in theartsdesk of working on the new Read more ...
simon.curtis
When Cranford was first shown in 2007 on a Sunday night and then repeated the following weekend, those first two showings got over 10 million people watching each week. You obviously pay attention to that. And because the first series wasn’t a straight adaptation of a finished book but based on a set of short stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, there was always the potential for more.When people first came to Cranford they found it surprising in a very obvious way. Unlike a Jane Austen adaptation, when you know how it’s going to end, or David Copperfield which I have directed for the BBC, the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12 or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was six.” Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, broadcast on the radio in 1955, offered young listeners a flavour of his aromatic observations of small-town Welsh life better known to adults in Under Milk Wood.The old roué might very well have wondered how a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The recent low-budget hit Paranormal Activity has been laughably hailed by delusional critics as “the most frightening movie ever made”, but it barely scrapes the foothills of the hair-raising ghastliness depicted in The Exorcist. William Friedkin’s demonic-possession shocker was released in 1973, but even today you wouldn’t want to watch it without keeping a large brandy and the off switch within easy reach. This documentary in 5's series The True Story, which tries to find rational explanations for movies, sought to explore the real-life story that the movie, and prior to that William Peter Read more ...
David Nice
How old Placido Domingo? Old Placido Domingo in not bad vocal health, to paraphrase Cary Grant's celebrated telegram reply. The other answer depends on your source of reference. Domingo is 68 in the eyes of last night's rather lazy, over-reverent Imagine, but 75 according to my not so New Everyman Dictionary of Music. Where did that come from? It would make him an octogenarian by the time of the date he proudly announced at the programme's end as the furthest-forward in his singer's diary. Perhaps this isn't that much of an issue. There are plenty of others that Alan Yentob Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s what any woman dreams of. You’re in the throes of childbirth, contorted by spasms of medieval-style agony, when in bounces chirpy Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden to assist with the delivery. It remains to be seen how accurate this show’s title is (this was the pilot episode), since the list of celebs willing to expose their inadequacies when confronted with the kind of jobs normal people do is likely to be short.Judging by this saga of Amanda’s five-week crash course in midwifery, the aim was to produce something more along the lines of "I hadn't a clue what I was doing at first Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A penny for the author’s thoughts. An opening montage makes it quite clear that Vladimir Nabokov had no truck with witless modernity. Yet here nonetheless is a documentary on his infamous bestseller, and they've gone and named after a TV talent show about the hunt for an actress to play a singing nun in a West End musical. Why? Was the idea to interest Sound of Music fans in Lolita? If they were going for a song, that dodgy one from Gigi would have been rather more apposite: “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”.Perhaps Nabokov would have chuckled. After a lifetime of wandering, he did spend his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"They all laughed at Rockefeller Centre, now they’re fighting to get in,” as the Gershwins put it. Much the same applies to Susan Boyle, the implausible contestant from Britain’s Got Talent who has soared fantastically from a closeted life of caring for her widowed 91-year-old mother in West Lothian to the top of the American album charts. In the inimitable stat-speak of music trade mag Billboard, Boyle’s debut album I Dreamed A Dream “marks the best opening week for a female artist's debut album since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.”ITV1 hailed Boyle’s astounding Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can just picture the meeting. Someone stands up and pitches. “We’ve got this girl, see. And she’s good at numbers, OK? You know, maths and stuff. But here’s the thing: she knows that statistically her best chance of a successful marriage is if she gets hitched to her 11th sexual partner when she’s 28. With me so far, guys? Trouble is, she discovers on her wedding day that Mister Eleven is really Mister Ten. Yeah? And then all hell breaks loose. What you reckon? Eh? Think it’s a goer?” Silence reigns in the room until the head honcho - you somehow assume it is a man - slowly raises his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week the BBC News online magazine is running a Portrait of the Decade. Each day has brought a consideration of the words, the events, the people, the objects and, today, the cultural highlights of the decade. I was invited to consider those highlights.In years to come, when they look back on the culture of the Noughties, no one will struggle to identify the overarching theme. This has been the decade in which the professional, the trained talent, has had to budge up and make room. A decade ago, who’d have imagined that the biggest stars in pop would be sourced from a Saturday-night Read more ...
josh.spero
If Andrew Graham-Dixon's arts career ever goes belly-up, there is surely a microphone with his name on it at Radio 4, so warm and confident and trustworthy is his voice. Judging, however, by his new three-part programme on BBC Four, The Art of Russia, there is no chance of this happening soon.The first episode is entitled "Out of the Forest", describing how the Russian people under Ivan the Terrible emerged from their wooded subjugation by the Mongols, but the story Graham-Dixon starts with - how they got there in the first place and how they survived - is at least as interesting.It was - as Read more ...