fri 29/03/2024

celebrity

The King is Dead, BBC Three

It'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...

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Big Brother, Channel 4

The eye had it, and will be sadly missed by our unapologetic critic

There 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...

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Grandma's House, BBC Two

There 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...

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Prince, Super Rock Festival, Lisbon

Travelling 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...

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Living with Brucie, Channel 4

Bruce Forsyth and wife Wilnelia Merced-Forsyth act naturally for the cameras

So 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...

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Death Becomes... What?

A 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...

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True Stories: We Live in Public, More4

The fears of a clown: Dot-com pioneer Josh Harris learnt that the future isn't always bright

With 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...

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Kicks

This 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...

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Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, Tate Modern

From Nan Goldin's series 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency': definitions start dissolving because of her presence as voyeur and participant

In 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...

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Grumpy Guide to the Eighties, BBC Two

“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,...

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Stuart Semple, Morton Metropolis

Sincerity 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...

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Marc Quinn, White Cube

Marc 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...

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