celebrity
The King is Dead, BBC ThreeFriday, 03 September 2010It's not that I feel like a middle-aged fuddy duddy exactly - although I was even almost too old for The Word and I'm clearly not the target audience for BBC Three. But if I were still in the 16-34 age group - even at its most juvenile end - frankly... Read more... |
Big Brother, Channel 4Tuesday, 24 August 2010There is a lot of talk about the contestants' experience of Big Brother but little about the viewer’s experience. During its decade on air there was a drop-off of both the red tops' shock-horror coverage and the intellectualised justifications put... Read more... |
Grandma's House, BBC TwoTuesday, 10 August 2010There are many for whom Simon Amstell can do no wrong. He is clever, he is funny, and he fronted Never Mind the Buzzcocks. What’s more, although his appearance suggests a cute, geeky vulnerability, his exquisite sarcasm can skewer the most inflated... Read more... |
Prince, Super Rock Festival, LisbonFriday, 23 July 2010Travelling along at 140kph in a Mercedes in a police convoy on the wrong side of the road with Prince, and Portuguese fado singer and his new protégé Ana Moura in the front, plus the artist’s agent and Rolling Stones sax player Tim Ries, is pretty... Read more... |
Living with Brucie, Channel 4Wednesday, 14 July 2010So was it nice to see him (to see him nice)? Actually nice is probably the wrong word for Bruce Forsyth on the evidence of the opening documentary in a new series of Cutting Edge – tetchy, obsessive in his habits and (as we shall see) sometimes... Read more... |
Death Becomes... What?Thursday, 17 June 2010A couple of very different publications have lately had me thinking about those 21st-century inescapables: death and celebrity. A new magazine called Eulogy hits the news stands for the first time today. It is an attempt – one that is on first sight... Read more... |
True Stories: We Live in Public, More4Tuesday, 15 June 2010With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art... Read more... |
KicksFriday, 04 June 2010This is a modest film – only 80 minutes long – with big things to say about the way celebrity warps the lives of all who come into contact with it: not only of the elect few whose faces adorn teenage walls, but also those lonely girls in their... Read more... |
Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, Tate ModernSaturday, 29 May 2010In the week that Sarah Ferguson was caught on a secret camera receiving a stash of $40,000 from News of the World journalists, Tate Modern launched this ambitious and excitingly diverse photography exhibition. Had the meeting been earlier, the... Read more... |
Grumpy Guide to the Eighties, BBC TwoMonday, 10 May 2010“The Eighties – where do you bloody well start?” Geoffrey Palmer’s lugubrious voiceover seemed even more world-weary than usual as this hour-long special on the decade everyone loves to hate began. And I felt for him, I really did. Because I am,... Read more... |
Stuart Semple, Morton MetropolisSunday, 09 May 2010Sincerity is not a quality the contemporary art world seems to value: the masking of emotions under layers of irony is where we stand. But while Damien Hirst paints from a cynical palette, British Pop Artist Stuart Semple's Nineties-inflected... Read more... |
Marc Quinn, White CubeFriday, 07 May 2010Marc Quinn is used to making a spectacle of himself. In Self (1991 and ongoing), a life-sized cast of his head was filled with his own blood. It was a stark and sobering reflection on what we all share, the universality of the most basic of human... Read more... |