class system
Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture, BBC TwoSaturday, 25 February 2012
The Lord count was perhaps surprisingly high in the first instalment of Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture. Among the talking heads I counted there was only one who wasn’t a life peer or a “proper” hereditary one, and there was only one who was... Read more... |
Big Society!, Leeds City VarietiesMonday, 23 January 2012
You approach the theatre via a cobbled side street and you’re harangued by a Salvation Army officer, pleading with you not to go inside this house of ill-repute. The City Varieties is an under-appreciated jewel of a venue, a Victorian music hall... Read more... |
Alfie, Octagon Theatre, BoltonSaturday, 21 January 2012
Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag from the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn set in London’s so-called Swinging Sixties is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their husbands. “Keep them all happy,” he says in cavalier style, “... Read more... |
Swallows and Amazons, Vaudeville TheatreThursday, 22 December 2011
Four children allowed to go off in a boat on the Lake District by their mother without a responsible adult or lifejackets? If this happened today Social Services would be down on mum like a ton of bricks. But this is 1929, long before the tyranny of... Read more... |
LS Lowry, Richard Green GalleryTuesday, 29 November 2011
How can you review LS Lowry? The Salford rent-collector-cum-painter simply did what he did: sending his bendy, pipe-cleaner people through white-floored industrial streets, in scenes that seemed hardly to change in decades. While Lowry fully... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Cosmo JarvisSunday, 13 November 2011
Cosmo Jarvis (b 1989) was born in New Jersey but grew up in Devon. He has produced two albums, Humasyouhitch/Sonofabitch (2009) and Is The World Strange or Am I Strange? (2011), that combine incisive lyricism, goofy humour, rap, rock, terrace-chant... Read more... |
Downton Abbey, Series 2 Finale, ITV1Monday, 07 November 2011
And so the eventful second series surged to a close with a bumper 90-minute edition - or at least it was in a 90-minute slot, generously padded with the commercials battling to scramble aboard the great ship Downton - and we were still left dangling... Read more... |
The Pitmen Painters, Duchess TheatreWednesday, 12 October 2011
Is there something remarkable about a group of working-class men learning to paint? You may think there is, or you may think there isn’t. You may think that anyone with very little formal education learning to do any of the things associated with... Read more... |
CD: Ed Sheeran - +Saturday, 10 September 2011
When I lived in Brighton in the mid-Nineties, a certain type was 10 a penny. Young, stoned, middle-class buskers, acoustic guitar strummers who were au fait with hip hop and able to improvise endless streams of witty wordplay and often to make human... Read more... |
Geordie Finishing School for Girls, BBC ThreeTuesday, 02 August 2011
If you're reading this review, you'll probably be expecting a sarky analysis. It invites that - wow, posh girls with unpronounceable names have to work in a Newcastle chippy! - but the programme, which sent four Home Counties fillies up North to... Read more... |
The Rattigan Enigma, BBC FourFriday, 29 July 2011
In a recent article, David Hare complained about “a national festival of reaction” in the arts, exemplified by such supposedly Establishment-leaning works as The King’s Speech and Downton Abbey. His real target was Terence Rattigan, currently being... Read more... |
theartsdesk MOT: Yes, Prime Minister, Apollo TheatreMonday, 18 July 2011
Situation comedy relies on strong brands, and some ideas just run and run. Yes, Prime Minister is the stage version of the long-running 1980s BBC television shows Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, which memorably starred Nigel Hawthorne and Paul... Read more... |
