Afghanistan
Adam Sweeting
If you don't fancy any more masters-and-servants dramas on a Sunday evening, you can thank Channel 4 for bringing the excellent Homeland to its Sunday roster. Kicking off tonight, it arrives in the UK basking in Golden Globe glory, having picked up accolades for Best Drama Series and Best Actress in a Drama Series in last month's ceremony. The latter went to Claire Danes for her performance as CIA counter-terrorist officer Carrie Mathison.The premise of Homeland is that US Marine Sergeant Nick Brody (Damian Lewis, also Globe-nominated) has been freed from eight years in Al Qaeda captivity in Read more ...
ash.smyth
As if by way of riposte to Birdsong’s ever-so-pensive treatment of late, last night’s Royal Marines: Mission Afghanistan brought warfare back to the 21st century with an uncompromising thump. In Episode 1: Deadly Underfoot, Chris Terrill joined Lima Company, 42 Commando, as they took over from their Marine colleagues at Toki base, in the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand. This was in the tenth year of the war – as the greatest of narratives would have it – and the Taliban, so Terrill assured us, were “on the back foot”. There was, presumably, no pun intended.For 50-odd minutes we Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's quite a bit to admire in DR Hood's debut feature. There's the cast for a start, headed by nascent superstar Benedict Cumberbatch alongside Brit-dram It-girl Claire Foy. Beguiling, too, is the piece's setting in the fenlands of East Anglia (quite near Mildenhall airbase, one would guess, judging by the eerie shots of American aircraft drifting overhead). It's countryside which never quite makes its mind up whether it's starkly beautiful or menacingly primitive.The same fault line of doubt runs down the middle of the marriage of Dawn and David (Foy and Cumberbatch). The opening Read more ...
hilary.whitney
William Dalrymple wrote his highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu, an account of his journey to the ruins of Kubla Khan's stately pleasure dome, when he was 22. In 1989 he moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching and writing his second book, City of Djinns (1993), which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award. Since then he has published five further books, all of which have won major prizes. White Mughals (2003), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, is to be made into a film directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes.Dalrymple also has an illustrious Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Does anyone else ever feel a mite sorry for the North Pole? It always takes second billing to its more famous namesake, and you can see why. The South Pole belongs to a continental land mass. Antarctica has penguins, historic huts, and chaps going outside, maybe for some time. The North Pole, stuck up there on basically a huge floating icicle, is hedged about with ifs and buts. Who got there first? No one knows. And when you stand precisely at 90.00.00 degrees north, the drift of the ice soon shifts you off it. If the Poles were siblings, the South would inherit the land and the title. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Continuing BBC Four's trend of creating surprisingly watchable programmes out of dowdy and unpromising ideas, this survey of the plants gardeners love to hate was a mine of information and offered plenty of food for thought. And for that matter, plenty of food, since it appears that wheat has only survived to become one of our top crops because, several thousand years ago, it was genetically beefed up by getting spliced to a weed.What is a weed, anyway? Presenter Chris Collins, a seasoned horticulturist despite his protection-racketish demeanour, came up with several plausible definitions. He Read more ...
fisun.guner
How easy is it to stage a dialogue between two artists when they are, in fact, separated by over a century? And is it really an artistic conversation that takes place or merely an imposition of values by the living over the dead? This pertinent question confronts the viewer in an exhibition of two photographers of war-torn Afghanistan. The first, John Burke, took sepia-toned documentary photographs of the second Anglo-Afghan war, from 1878 to 1880 (the first having taken place in 1839-1842), while the second, Simon Norfolk, takes artfully constructed contemporary photographs that blur the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
In the ravages of the recent arts cuts, and debates over the winners and losers, one estimable organisation tended to be overlooked in the coverage – the Asian Music Circuit, who have done more for Asian arts in the UK than probably any other entity. They have had their entire grant cut. The director of AMC, Viram Jasani, told me he was stunned by this unexpected savagery and took a week or two to gather his thoughts and mount a campaign. Sections of the media have started to swing behind it – in the last week an editorial in The Guardian simply said: “This is madness.”As The Guardian put it Read more ...
juliette.seibold
One Friday afternoon this spring, a friend led me to a low, dusty room in an education institute in the Afghan capital, Kabul. A few dozen men sat in neat rows. Most were young and wearing leather jackets, a few were older and in tweed jackets or suits. One wore a turban and chapan, a warm winter padded coat. All were keen writers who together are thriving members of a literary circle, a solace of imagination, creativity and wonder far from the fighting and the headlines of Afghanistan's bitter war.First, a young man opened the meeting with a Quranic chant. Then the first author Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Omid Djalili is a funny man with a funny provenance. There are not many stand-ups about who speak the languages of Presidents Havel and Ahmedinejad, who have played both Muslims and Jews without being either one or the other, whose CV includes stints performing Berkoff in Slovak and playing Whoopi Goldberg’s sidekick on NBC. In fact none. Djalili is by his own admission an accidental comedian. Though born (in 1965) in the United Kingdom, his Iranian roots made him an intriguing curiosity when he ditched acting for telling jokes. Then the War on Terror turned his comedy into a timely window on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If war is such hell, why do we keep doing it? This may be one of the questions you'll be asking yourself after sitting through the taut and gruelling 100 minutes of Armadillo, Janus Metz's remarkable account of a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan with soldiers of Denmark's Guard Hussars.Metz and his cinematographer, Lars Skree, wrote their wills before setting off to Helmand Province in 2009, where they joined the Danish troops at Forward Operating Base Armadillo. It's tempting to make a lazy assumption that the Danish soldiers are something of a political fig leaf helping to make the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are certain film-makers who like to give themselves a headache. Buried confined its only character to a coffin. Phone Booth stuck Colin Farrell in – what else? – a phone booth. Essential Killing imposes another kind of confinement on its main character: it maroons him in silence. It could be argued that cinema has long experience of keeping its mouth shut. They did without dialogue until 1927. But give or take the odd bravura exception – say, the eloquent first 15 minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West - film has lost the habit of making do without words.The actor tasked with carrying Read more ...