politics
Adam Sweeting
Remarkably, the most provocative moments in Sir David Frost's survey of TV satire were supplied by his own early-Sixties show, That Was The Week That Was, when he was still an oily young upstart on the make. The BBC's Director General himself had declared that the aim of the show was to "prick the pomposity of public figures", but he must have felt the shockwaves rattling the door of his office. We revisited Millicent Martin's scathing lullaby for single mothers to sing to their children ("the world is full of bastards just like you"), a member of the studio audience jumped onstage and tried Read more ...
fisun.guner
We know the format: take a bunch of posh, privileged types - held up as examples of cluelessness when it comes to how “ordinary” people live by privileged, overpaid TV executives - and plonk them down in the middle of some dodgy council estate. Remove their credit cards and give them £6.50 to last a week. Watch as they baulk at the amount of cash their new, jobless neighbour manages to spend on fags, kebabs and the occasional drug habit. Watch as they wonder how to react to the plight of a harassed single mother in a mouldy one-bed flat who’s railing against immigrant families being given“ Read more ...
william.ward
One of the downsides of the international media’s obsession with the crimes and misdemeanours of Silvio Berlusconi and his make-it-up-as-you-go-along style of government is that anything that doesn’t fit in with the overall narrative of the crazed, corrupt media mogul destroying an otherwise magnificent, well-organised country, tends not to make the headlines.The UK media is currently full of the Italian premier’s latest assault on the Freedom of Expression. This is a singularly cack-handed bill which aims to prevent one ill - police wire-taps being relayed in the media before trial Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Shirin Neshat's often compelling Women Without Men spirits us back to Tehran 1953, and the political atmosphere surrounding the British- and American-supported coup that deposed Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. But the director counterpoints unrest on the streets with the fate of four women who end up in their own private haven, an apparently mystical orchard that provides them with a temporary escape, not only from the politics of the outside world but from the roles in Persian society that they are expected to occupy. Add in strong elements of magical Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s a rich vein of comic and satirical humour that runs through British art. Hogarth set the trend in the mid-1700s and heralded a golden age of graphic satirists. These included the three masters of the form: Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruickshank. There’s a direct line that links their work to the political cartoonists of our own day, and Tate Britain’s sweeping survey Rude Britannia: British Comic Art features both the historical and the contemporary: Gerald Scarfe, with his excoriating visions of Thatcher; Steve Bell, who most notably put John Major in a pair of Superman underpants; and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Satire, like roast beef, is what Brits are famous for and this exhibition takes us right back to its earliest days in graphic print. In the 1600s, Dutch allegorical prints were adapted by British printmakers to comment on contemporary issues and one of the first examples in this exhibition is a print that illustrates the purportedly cruel and barbarous treatment meted out by the Dutch to the English at the outset of the Anglo-Dutch war - so it’s hardly rib-tickling stuff.This is before we get to Hogarth’s moral outrage and thence to the birth of political satire’s golden age with the big Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dystopia is a genre that works like a rhetorical device. Take a government policy — let’s say the war in Afghanistan — then list the bad effects that this has had on the British people, exaggerate by a factor of ten, or more, add some obscure but sinister language, extrapolate by throwing in some nightmarish horrors, and then wrap it all up for a small cast. If you’re lucky, as Beth Steel has been with her debut play which opened last night at the Old Vic Tunnels, you’ll get a really atmospheric venue, and, in her case, Kevin Spacey sitting in the first-night audience.The Old Vic Tunnels are Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people’s experience of the 120 or so Victorian asylums that littered the UK landscape for more than a century is, thankfully, oohing and aahing over the “sophisticated and sensitive” conversions they have become, providing “astonishing, unusual and stylish” apartments, as estate-agent-speak has it. Those fortunate enough to move into these beautiful new homes are doing so of their own accord, of course, but many of those held in their previous incarnations would have preferred to be anywhere else at all.This documentary, made by Chris Boulding for the BBC’s Open University strand, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people know Andy Hamilton from his frequent (and very droll) appearances on panel shows such as Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz on television and radio, but he is also a prolific writer. His writing credits could take up the whole of this review, but a brief CV includes Not the Nine O’Clock News, Drop the Dead Donkey, Old Harry’s Game and, most recently, the equally excellent Outnumbered on BBC One, which he co-writes with Guy Jenkin. But now, with Hat of Doom, he is going back to where he started in comedy and doing a stand-up tour.He gets the measure of his audience straight Read more ...
william.ward
Applauded by the audiences at Cannes last year, where it was the only Italian film in the competition, and nominated for a Palme d’Or, awarded four prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival, and favourably received at home, Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere is now being released in the UK, increasingly a rare event for films of Italian origin.And not without good reason: the flair of originality combined with an attention to the quality of the dialogue, the acting and the entire editing process is a skill set not often encountered these last 30 years in Italian cinema. It is often said Read more ...
Veronica Lee
I had a slightly surreal experience last night, when an actor playing the butler of a future Cabinet minister in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband announced during the interval that David Cameron had just departed Buckingham Place en route to 10 Downing Street to form the next UK government. It was just one of a few pleasing convergences of art and life of the evening, not least of which was that we were gathered in something called the Churchill Room at the time.The play, which has several political references that could have been written just before curtain-up, was performed by a group of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s an accepted truth that Chris Morris is a comedy genius. Now the word "genius" is so overused in some quarters as to be rendered meaningless, but in Morris’s case it's a richly deserved description; he created or co-created some of the funniest, cleverest and most original comedy on British television, including The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam. Not a bad CV, even if it also contains the rather less amusing Nathan Barley. So what of his feature-film debut, Four Lions, which he directed and co-wrote with Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (of Peep Show fame)?Well it has the Morris trademark of a Read more ...