politics
Nanci Griffith, Royal Concert Hall, GlasgowSunday, 11 March 2012
“I know what I was angry about when I wrote this,” Nanci Griffith told the crowd as she introduced “Hell No (I’m Not Alright)”, “but you can get your anger out about whatever you want.”It seemed a little odd that Griffith left the big hook (if the... Read more... |
White Heat, BBC TwoFriday, 09 March 2012
Everything that’s best about the opening episode of Paula Milne’s White Heat, a decade-straddling saga of seven friends who begin as flatmates in 1960s London, is encapsulated in its Hartley-quoting title, The Past Is a Foreign Country. For... Read more... |
CleanskinThursday, 08 March 2012
Hats off to independent British writer/producer/director Hadi Hajaig, who has doggedly piloted his thriller Cleanskin to the screen and picked up distribution support from Warner Bros in the process. Hajaig was never going to be splashing around in... Read more... |
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... |
Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, Hayward GalleryThursday, 23 February 2012
As he readily acknowledges himself, Jeremy Deller can’t paint and he can’t draw, so he never went to art school. For many artists of his generation (he’s 46), this lack of traditionally based skills seems not to have presented a problem. But Deller... Read more... |
The World Against Apartheid, BBC FourWednesday, 25 January 2012
When I opened my e-nvitation to write up last night’s The World Against Apartheid, I was not expecting it to come bedecked with GoogleAds for hen parties, roller discos, and custom-made birthday invitations (keyword: "part/y", one assumes). Only 20... 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... |
J. EdgarFriday, 20 January 2012
People tend to know three things about J.Edgar Hoover: that he was in charge of America’s internal security for four decades; that he kept secret files on the political elite; and that the most powerful unelected man in the nation's history liked to... Read more... |
Putin, Russia and the West, BBC TwoFriday, 20 January 2012
“Who is Mr Putin?” That was the question being bandied about by journalists and Kremlin watchers in the months after Boris Yeltsin’s out-of-the-blue New Year’s Eve 1999 resignation. Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB operative in East Germany, was prominent in... Read more... |
A Secret History: The Grammar School, BBC FourFriday, 13 January 2012
This two-part documentary, which ended last night with teary recollections from a handful of well-known faces, wasn’t really a “secret history”. The history of grammar schools and their wholesale demolition by a Labour government is pretty widely... Read more... |
The Good Wife, More4Friday, 13 January 2012
Much has been made of the quality of drama currently or recently on British television - Downton Abbey, Sherlock, Cranford, any number of Dickens adaptations we are about to see during 2012 - and rightly so. But as The Good Wife starts its third... Read more... |
Borgen, BBC FourSunday, 08 January 2012
Knitwear fetishists won’t be as thrilled with Borgen as they were with The Killing, but based on the first two episodes of the Danish political drama, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is a match for Sarah Lund. She’s as likely to stray from what she... Read more... |
