sat 22/02/2025

celebrity

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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Modern Masters: Warhol, BBC One

Alastair Sooke ponders the inescapable coolness of Andy Warhol

I wondered how long it would be before Andy Warhol’s "15 minute" quote came up. From the whizzy, flash-bang opening credits  I knew it wouldn’t be long. I was right: but less than seven minutes? Less than five?  I didn’t time it, since I was still...

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Katy Brand, touring

Katy Brand: her sketch comedy baits celebrities and spoofs pop music

The first time I saw Katy Brand was at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2005, where she was performing Celebrities Are Gods in a tiny, windowless basement late at night. Hers was the last show in the room, which by now was a fetid sweatbox, and only a few...

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Powder Her Face, RO, Linbury Studio Theatre

Sexy but not scandalous: the 'vocally terrific' Joan Rodgers as the Duchess

Let's get straight to the fellatio, shall we. The blow job - and its Polaroid rendition - that led to the 1960s divorce trial of the dissolute Duchess of Argyll forms the centrepiece aria (an aria that "begins with words and ends with humming") in...

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Starsuckers, More4

That fame, and the pursuit thereof, is hurtful to the soul is the unexceptional if, I suppose, ever invaluable message of Starsuckers, the Chris Atkins documentary given genuine ballast by the details it selects with which to argue its case....

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