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Adam Sweeting
In time-honoured fashion, hope sprang eternal for the British contenders in the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards, held last night in Los Angeles. Downton Abbey had picked up seven major nominations (and 16 in all, including various behind-the-scenes categories), while there were also high hopes for the multi-nominated Sherlock and gongtastic possibilities for the BBC detective series Luther and its star Idris Elba. Clive Owen was in the running for his portrayal of Ernest Hemingway in the HBO mini-series Hemingway & Gellhorn, while Jared Harris had a shout for Best Supporting Actor in Mad Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So the chairman of Big Brother TV becomes chairman of the Arts Council. Is it good or bad that Sir Peter Bazalgette will now hold the purse-strings for our publicly supported arts, the most debated, the most fragile, the most ephemeral elements of our national cultural consciousness, the most opposite of the time-wasting that is reality TV?Bazalgette is descended from the Victorian Bazalgette who built London's sewers, and he has attracted verbal ordure for years for his development at Endemol TV of the reality shows about the petty minutiae of life (cooking, gardening, eating - heavens - Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s a place where human beings don’t belong,” says Efterklang’s Rasmus Stolberg. “It’s a very inspiring place, but a very sad place”. The Danish band’s new album, Piramida, is built around sounds they recorded in Pyramiden, a former Russian mining settlement on the island of Spitsbergen, north of Norway, close to the North Pole. It was abandoned in 1998. The climate means nothing decays.“Hollow Mountain” opens Piramida, and Efterlkang have chosen to premier the film for the track on theartsdesk. “We don’t consider this a video, more a visual piece that follows the song,” explains Stolberg Read more ...
Ismene Brown
True originals are those who keep contemporary arts bright, and one of the handful of dance performers who set the 1980s and 90s on fire was a bony, white-skinned, bleakly witty and garrulous physical clown with a taste for the extreme called Nigel Charnock. The news of his death last night from cancer at the age of only 52 feels painful to anyone who suffered and laughed so much at some of his merciless works.Charnock was a scary performer, quite often naked and doing unmentionable things with crucifixes, dresses and pink plastic babies, and he'd thrash himself bruisingly over the floor (or Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even in this year of years, it has to be accepted that not everyone has a soft spot for sport. Anyone answering to that description may well attempt to sprint, jump or pedal away from the coming onslaught, but if you are anywhere near a television, radio or computer, the five-ring circus is going to be hard to avoid for the next few weeks. Though an arts site devoted to noting, admiring and every so often deploring fresh developments on the cultural map, we felt we couldn’t entirely allow the biggest sporting event ever to visit the shores to pass entirely unnoted. So as of tomorrow, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Producers did warn it was going to be a bad summer for West End theatre, but the announcement of the closure of Chicago is still a curveball. For 15 years the musical - those credits one more time: music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, a book adapted by Ebb and Bob Fosse from the play by journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins and choreography by Ann Reinking “in the style of Fosse” - has been keeping audiences entertained at the Adelphi, then the Cambridge and, as of last November, the Garrick. In that time it has grossed over £120 million. But as of 1 September one of the pillars of the West Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“One never consciously observes. The only people who consciously observe are policemen and undercover agents.” Eric Sykes, who has died at the age of 89, was the last of the great vaudevilleans. When I met him in the late 1990s, he was already totally deaf and largely blind, and somehow continued to work and remain remarkably chipper with it. He had his first ear operation in 1952, another a decade later, whereafter he wore a hearing aid camouflaged as a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. He would sometimes rub his eyes through the plane where the lenses ought to be: a sight gag if ever there was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Shooting is underway on Diana the movie and, as the producers did with Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, a snap of the star in full fig and wig has been launched upon the world. Naomi Watts, whose previous love interests have included Laura Harring in Mulholland Drive and a sizeable ape in King Kong, plays the spurned wife of the heir to the throne and lover of the son of the owner of Harrod's in a film to be directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.That name may ring a bell: he’s the genius who gave us Downfall. From Hitler’s bunker to Buckingham Palace may be thought to be possibly more than a step, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
With Euro 2012 about to end and the Olympics looming, we'll be hearing an awful lot of national anthems over the next couple of months. Don't we all agree that the majority of them are inadequate - often being turgid tunes with no reference to the culture of the countries involved? Isn't it about time we had some alternatives? Here are a few suggestions.United KingdomAnthem: God Save the QueenThe obvious alternative for Team GB would be "Jerusalem". Athletes could also sing along to the stirring strains of "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols. Another possibility was suggested by Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This Friday afternoon at five o’clock, the National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke will recite a new poem and initiate a seismic week of Welsh cultural exploration. The inaugural Dinefwr Literary Festival will bring writers and musicians from Wales and beyond to a National Trust house and park in Carmarthenshire. Unlike other literary festivals in Wales – notably Hay and Laugharne – this one will straddle the border between English and Welsh. Joining Clarke on the list of performers is not only the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion but his Welsh-language equivalent, the current Archdruid of Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk has been voted Specialist Journalism Site of 2012 at the Online Media Awards. In a celebratory dinner at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium recognising "the best and boldest of online news-based creativity and also the most original", The Guardian were the major winners with five awards, but even their new Data Store section was outgunned in the Specialist Journalism category by The Arts Desk.In a category contested by 11 nominees, The Arts Desk's prize was the first of two given by the judges acclaiming two specialist sites "for very different reasons" - the other went to The Economist Read more ...
Ismene Brown
John Percival, one of the heavyweight group of dance critics of the past 60 years, died last Wednesday, aged 85. He had watched and reported on ballet and dance from their infancy in the Forties right up to recent years, offering a powerful perspective on one of the most vivid and energetic movements in British culture in the 20th century.The first biographer of Rudolf Nureyev and choreographer John Cranko, Percival was for 30 years the dance critic of The Times and also the editor of Dance and Dancers, the now defunct but eminent monthly magazine that charted the growing maturity of the Read more ...