politics
Adam Sweeting
David Cameron has been a recluse since the fateful days of June 2016 when the referendum on EU membership didn’t go quite the way he’d hoped. He’s probably been living through a private purgatory. “I think I will think about this forever,” he murmured to the camera in this first instalment of BBC One’s two-part doc.Finally, though, his inevitable (though surely not “long-awaited”) autobiography is hitting the shops. Dave, who now looks like a slightly melancholy hedge fund manager or the kind of chap who skippers a 40-foot gin palace down the Solent on the weekend, has dragged himself out of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Alexander Zeldin continues his devastating analysis of modern Britain in this culminating play of a (very loose) trilogy that started with 2014’s Beyond Caring, followed by LOVE two years after that. These are bleak dramas that show human beings washed up on the edges of a society in which levels of social support have been brutally pared down, even as they contend with change that has drastically disbalanced established ways of life, from zero-hours contracts (Beyond Caring) to homelessness (LOVE). The Dorfman has become a signature setting for the anonymous, dilapidated institutional Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“The Troubles” is a polite euphemism for the ferocious storm of sectarian violence and political chaos which convulsed Northern Ireland for 30 years, before being brought to a close by 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. Irish journalist Darragh MacIntyre fronts this seven-part history of those fearful days, and the first instalment of Spotlight on The Troubles: A Secret History (BBC Four) took us from the first stirrings of Catholic versus Protestant conflict in the mid-Sixties to the full-blown horrors of murders, bombings, mass internment and the British Army’s increasingly bloody involvement.It Read more ...
Stephanie Sy-Quia
You will doubtless have seen the protestors who dress as Gilean handmaids to protest anti-abortion legislation from Texas to Missouri. They model their costumes on those of the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale: tight white bonnets and red smocks. They appear at courthouses and state capitols as a warning from the near-future or a fiction which feels ever more like the present – and the truth. Thirty-five years and much hype later, Atwood has given us a sequel, The Testaments. “Dear Readers,” she wrote recently on social media, “Everything you’ve ever asked me Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the current feverish atmosphere at Westminster, with arguments about Brexit becoming increasingly shrill, the time is right once more for political theatre: serious plays about serious issues. Oddly enough, however, while television has effectively dramatized the current crisis, in films such as Channel 4's Brexit: The Uncivil War, theatre seems to take a more oblique approach by setting its stories in the past. So James Graham's perennially interesting This House was set in the late 1970s, while Hansard, actor Simon Woods's smartly-written debut play, which gets an astonishingly generous Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of all grime's original generation, Kano has a strong claim to being the greatest rhyme-constructor in the old school hip hop sense of dense rhymes packed with multiple meanings. Add movie star looks and a penchant for fur coats in photoshoots and he was most young grime fans' tip for following Dizzee Rascal into the big league. But though he got the major label deal, MOBO awards, Mercury nominations and Damon Albarn collaborations, and though his 2016 Made in the Manor album hit the top ten, he's never quite parlayed that into becoming a breakout superstar, a household name in that Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
As Penny Lane’s documentary shows, America and Satanism have a long history. From the Salem Witch trials to the moral panic triggered by the Manson murders and films like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in the 1970s, mass panic in America of the occult is nothing new. But, as Hail Satan? demonstrates, today’s worshippers of Lucifer are closer to being humanist activists involved in performance art and fighting for religious pluralism than they are the black robed, goat sacrificing clichés that are populated in the media. At the not-so-black heart of the documentary is Lucien Greeves, who Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
”Cunts Are Still”. Well, that got your attention, didn’t it? Not my words, merely the title of one of JARV IS’s new tracks. In case you didn’t get it, JARV IS is a play on words and the name of given to Pulp frontman and founder Jarvis Cocker’s latest outfit. Cocker still is releasing new material. He still is an exuberant and energetic performer. He still is wearing those glasses. And still is very good.The title of the aforementioned track refers not, however, to Britpop heroes playing major international arts festivals, but to those in political power who are “still ruling the world”. A Read more ...
David Kettle
Darren McGarvey AKA Loki: Scotland Today The Stand's New Town Theatre ★★★★★ Darren McGarvey (aka Loki the Scottish Rapper) won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2018 for his book Poverty Safari, a startling, sometimes shocking examination of his own roots in deprivation and addiction in Pollok on the south side of Glasgow. The win shot him to stardom overnight, not least for the book’s unflinching dissection of poverty and privilege, and also for McGarvey’s equally uncompromising analysis of his own sometimes ill-considered opinions and perspectives. He Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Donald Trump’s former strategist, alt-right propagandist and all-round provocateur Steve Bannon comes under the spotlight of a smart, dynamic, behind-closed-doors documentary, as he attempts to turn his brand of far-right populism into a global movement. Adroitly mixing fly-on-the-wall material with news archive, director Alison Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) follows Bannon as he campaigns behind the scenes of the 2018 US mid-terms and casts his beady eye on the EU elections. In so doing, she offers a chilling glimpse into the reactionary forces that are seeking to exploit Read more ...
Thatcher: A Very British Revolution, Finale, BBC Two review - a heartbreaking account of her decline
Marina Vaizey
The surprisingly touching conclusion to BBC Two’s five-part chronicle of the Thatcher years was a masterpiece of contemporary history. Congratulations to producer Alice Fraser, director Pamela Gordon, and composer Alexandra Harwood for very fitting and emotive music (for once). Perhaps it has taken a female team to produce this portrait, warts and all, without a hint of the condescension still evidenced even now by a significant number of Margaret Thatcher’s male contemporaries.Some of the best known survivors of her government delivered their highly personal views with astonishing frankness Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Five years ago, when the world was still reeling from 2008 and Britain from the swinging axe of George Osborne, Thomas Piketty’s Capital was an unlikely bestseller. It was a book probably more bought than read, but it contained an important and highly topical message: that wealth was once again concentrated in the hands of few people, just as had been the case before World War One.That book, now poised to become a documentary, was hailed as “one of the watershed books in economic thinking,” and its publisher, Harvard University Press, published a sort-of companion volume. Inequality by Read more ...