journalism
RIP dance critic John PercivalMonday, 25 June 2012John 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... Read more... |
Lowdown, BBC FourThursday, 16 February 2012
The most finely judged thing about Lowdown on BBC Four is how it takes the tradition of broad Australian humour and makes it broad enough to cover the Outback without causing a breach in laughter or taste. The taste in this comedy of hacks is, of... Read more... |
Charles Dickens, Theatre and Dance Critic-at-LargeThursday, 09 February 2012
When a young Charles Dickens visited New York in 1842 with his wife, he strolled down Broadway, happened upon an unusual dance and naturally checked out theatreland. As his bicentenary is celebrated, here, from his journal, American Notes For... Read more... |
America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine, BBC FourFriday, 02 December 2011
Before the internet and the Kindle were invented, generations of Americans saw their lives refracted through the pages of Life magazine. In particular, through its photography, since writers at Life were largely relegated to supplying glorified... Read more... |
Interview: Errol Morris on making TabloidFriday, 11 November 2011
When the former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, walked towards UK Customs in 1977, she had a perfect tabloid story in her bag: handcuffs, a Smith and Wesson pistol, and a burning desire to rescue the love of her life from the Epsom Mormons. One of her... Read more... |
The Rum DiaryThursday, 10 November 2011
In later years, when callow reporters would be sent to interview the wrecked legend Hunter S Thompson in his Colorado compound, at some point in the weekend, in between the drugs, booze and random gunfire that punctuated his days, the Gonzo... Read more... |
A British Subject, Arts TheatreSaturday, 05 November 2011
Journalism is often used to create compelling true-life plays. This drama, written by award-winning actor Nichola McAuliffe, has both a journalistic writing style and a journalist - actually the playwright’s husband - as a central character in a... Read more... |
Page One: Inside the New York TimesMonday, 19 September 2011
As an elegiac score plays, bails of early editions of the New York Times are bundled and tossed into a fleet of vans, which roll out into the dawn city streets, to distribute the news. The conviction shared by many in this documentary about the... Read more... |
About The Arts DeskFriday, 09 September 2011The Arts Desk, or theartsdesk.com, is a website created in 2009 by leading British professional arts journalists and critics to offset the decline in supply of arts coverage in the print media where most of them worked. Launched on 9 September 2009... Read more... |
The Field of Blood, BBC OneMonday, 29 August 2011
The overwhelming impression given in television of urban Scotland in the Eighties is of a land where people had discovered neither vegetables nor lightbulbs. The Field of Blood on BBC One last night went no way towards correcting this: as tenebrous... Read more... |
Loyalty, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 21 July 2011
Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the... Read more... |
DVD: Sweet Smell of SuccessTuesday, 22 February 2011
It’s difficult now to imagine Hollywood conceiving a one-two punch as ferocious as Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, which were released a month apart in the summer of 1957. Their target was the... Read more... |
