BBC One
Adam Sweeting
Brilliant though it was to be shooting an Imagine film for BBC One, we did experience the occasional tremor of foreboding about making a programme with Nigel Kennedy. We (that's me and director Frank Hanly) had a bit of previous with Nigel - I'd done several print interviews with him, and we'd shot a couple of short films with him for EMI.The last one was at Rockfield studios in Monmouth for his recent jazz album, Shhh! We'd bowled up out of the pouring rain on a black November night to be greeted like long-lost family members, as Nige plied us with wine and insisted that we join him, his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Doctor Who crew are fond of their encounters with historical characters. In his time, and let's face it he has infinite supplies of it, the Doc has rubbed shoulders with Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie, and recently weathered the Blitz with Winston Churchill. For this one, "Vincent and the Doctor", le Docteur voyaged back to 19th-century Provence to straighten out a puzzling temporal kink.While visiting the Van Gogh exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where art historian Dr Black (Bill Nighy) was holding forth about the marvels of the tormented Dutch genius, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Aptly, this new documentary about how the Rolling Stones fled from England to the South of France to record Exile on Main Street was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with a supernaturally healthy-looking Mick Jagger on hand to give it a promotional shove. Jagger (along with Keith Richards and Charlie Watts) produced the film, working closely alongside director Stephen Kijak to knit together an evocative and emotional portrait of "the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world", at what many would argue was their peak.The fact that the project is an authorised job from the heart of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Idris Elba’s screen career is going so swimmingly that you wonder what can have tempted him back to Blighty. Probably not the weather, since the former denizen of Canning Town now lives in Florida, and is in perpetual demand Stateside thanks to the extreme hotness engendered by his portrayal of Russell “Stringer” Bell in The Wire. He was in the American version of The Office, co-starred with Beyoncé in Obsessed, has several movies in production and will executive-produce a new legal drama series for NBC.So, Idris Elba, where did it all go wrong? I jest, of course. Slightly. Luther is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mamma mia! The last Leaders' Debate has come and gone, so what on earth are we going to do on Thursday evenings now? I was half expecting an announcement at the end of the show telling us that the Debates will be coming back for a new series in the autumn. Next Thursday of course is the election itself, which will be a straggly, bleary-eyed, long-drawn-out affair. How much nicer if it could be compressed into a crisp 90 minutes and then decided on a viewers' poll.But I'm just wallowing in the Neverland aura which has shrouded this entire election campaign. It has been a phony war waged in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite his "interesting" haircut and fondness for the undeleted expletive, violinist Nigel Kennedy is a man of exceptional taste and discernment. While recording his new jazz album Shhh! at Rockfield studios, he took time out to hail theartsdesk and greet the 'desk's Adam Sweeting.This is a hectic year for Kennedy. He's currently playing a programme of J.S. Bach and Duke Ellington on a German tour with his newly-formed Orchestra of Life, comprising young musicians from Kennedy's adoptive home, Poland, and at the end of May he hosts a weekend of Polish music (and other activities) on London's Read more ...
howard.male
Of course I’ve not been anticipating the appearance of the new Doctor with quite the counting-the-days excitement of many children, teenagers and anoraked adults across the land. But to invert the Jesuit motto, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," my seven-year-old self has recently resurfaced, resulting in at least a frisson of excitement. After all, there’s also a new Tardis, a new assistant, some new bug-eyed monsters, and hopefully one or two scripts as scary as "Blink" or as inexplicably moving as "Human Nature/The Family of Blood". So what’s not to get Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Having already unearthed a Joseph, a Maria, an Oliver and a Nancy for three of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s many West End productions, at the same time generating several dozen hours' worth of free primetime publicity, the BBC are now aiding the “merciful Lord” in his search for a Dorothy (and a Toto, although we’ll have to wait until future episodes before we get into the Alan Partridge-esque circus of dog auditions) to tread the boards in his forthcoming stage adaptation of The Wizard of Oz.Over the Rainbow is basically The X Factor for girls raised on Boden and Birkenstocks. One candidate's Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Seven Ages of Britain began in the same week as A History of the World in 100 Objects on Radio 4. You wait a prodigiously long time for a massive cultural overview and then two come along at once. Do they think in a joined-up way about these things at the BBC? Or has this double helping been a sign of a wider moral and structural chaos that characterises the new world disorder? Last night David Dimbleby concluded his tour of two millennia of British art. It has, inevitably, been a bit of a sprint. In this final episode, the horror of the trenches was wrapped up in less screen time than Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Benjamin Franklin once said that fish and guests start to smell after three days – and something similar happened to BBC One’s latest “event drama”, Five Days. The odour was that of decaying promise, and, if duty hadn’t called, I probably wouldn’t have hung around until the final episode of Gwyneth Hughes’s week-long saga. Not that it was boring exactly – in an unhurried, linear kind of way, Hughes’s storytelling pulled you in and kept you there. But the longer it went on, the more it felt like being held under false pretences.It was all to do with some sort of seedy drugs mess in the end - Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve been here before. In the first week of theartsdesk’s existence, the BBC began screening a daily drama by the name of The Cut. Daily drama has never been the BBC’s thing, unless you happen to speak Welsh and follow Pobol y Cwm, and so it proved with this online soap dished out in bite-size five-minute pieces. It was my solemn duty to issue daily reports for the first five days of The Cut's life. And now here comes Five Days, which will run eponymously till the end of the week: five episodes, one a night, till we find out whodunwhat. Will it keep you hanging on? For this second outing of 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 ...