Stephen Fry
aleks.sierz
Star casting has, since the pandemic, done much to restore the fortunes of commercial theatre. And, when they can pull off a similar deal, the same applies to subsidised venues. If the downside is that many smaller institutions get left behind, the upside is clearly visible all over the West End.The latest stars to join Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln in The Lady from the Sea or Brendan Gleeson in The Weir, are national treasures Stephen Fry and Olly Alexander in this West End transfer of the hit National Theatre revival of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 masterpiece, The Importance of Being Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A thirtysomething American woman with wavering self-confidence, a tendency to talk too much and a longing for married bliss with Mr Darcy at his gorgeous country pile tries to reset her life post-breakup with a grown-up new job in London. Welcome to Bridget Jones country as seen through the lens of New Yorker Lena Dunham. The 10-part Netflix series that Dunham and her English musician husband Luis Felber have created, Too Much, is just that: a welter of verbiage, weird characters and relentless squelchy sex – though the sex scenes are virtually the only occasions our heroine stops Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Second performances are even more valuable than premieres, composers say, when it comes to launching a piece into the world. Spare a thought, then, for Jan Ladislav Dussek, who has had to wait over two centuries for this prize to be awarded to his Mass in G – really, a Missa solemnis – of a scale to rival Beethoven’s example. It was revived last night for the first time since its premiere in 1811 with exemplary spirit and dedication by Academy of Ancient Music forces under Richard Egarr.Like Beethoven, Dussek was a composer primarily for and at the piano. He flourished as a touring virtuoso Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The main attraction of this new US sitcom for a UK audience is that two British actors - Stephen Fry and Susannah Fielding – appear in it. The basic premise is that Jack Gordon, a famed reporter, has led a thrilling outdoorsman life, writing about his adventures for the magazine Outdoor Limits. But then his editor, Roland (Fry), recalls him to the office in downtown Chicago and tells him the publication is going web-only, and that he will now be writing about the great outdoors from, well, the not-so-great indoors.Jack (Joel McHale, pictured below with Fry) is, in best sitcom fashion, a fish Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Is it possible for a mobile phone app to combine functionality with the highest standards of design and craftsmanship? Chris Chapman, the creator of the Headcaster app, says it is. He brings a sculptor’s eye and puppeteer’s sense of movement to the creation of a fun platform for people to communicate with friends and the wider world through animated characters.Chapman (pictured below) explains how the app works for the user. “You arrive in the app and you’re presented with a host of characters – you can choose to be anything from a talking set of teeth and eyebrows, to pumpkin-head, to a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It wasn't a bad idea to change the scenery by locating the belated ninth season of 24 in London, even if they probably nicked the idea from The Bourne Ultimatum, and episode one opened with a passing shot of an East End mosque just to set the paranoia clock ticking. Nonetheless, despite scenes of grimy railway viaducts, derelict warehouses and traffic-choked streets, large stretches of this curtain-raising pair of episodes still took place inside the kind of dimly-lit operations rooms which have become the show's trademarks. The CIA's London HQ is full of tight-lipped operatives wearing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When television goes off exploring classical civilisation, you can hear those lines from The Life of Brian chiming in your head. “Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?” Such has been the glut of Roman TV in recent times that no couch potato is in any further doubt. The Romans have kept the plebs royally entertained. But what of the Greeks?The ancient ones, that is. (Of their modern descendants we know quite enough from the financial pages.) What Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Something new is happening in the West End. Just up the road from Thriller and down a bit from Les Misérables a billboard the colour of weak tea (positively consumptive compared to the full-colour, neon assaults on either side) proclaims the arrival of Richard III and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is back on Shaftesbury Avenue, and this time he means business – big, commercial business. How has this sleight of hand been achieved? Five words: Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry.With national fervour still fresh and raw in this Olympic year, and audiences still coming down from the high of Branagh’s Read more ...
ash.smyth
I spent a fair chunk of last Sunday evening at Douglas Adams' 60th birthday party. This was a bit of a curve ball, not only because I'd never met the author of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - but also because he's been dead for nearly 11 years. But there he was, all the same, selling out the Hammersmith Apollo with a little help from Stephen Fry, Clive James, Jon Culshaw, a couple of thousand nerds in dressing gowns, and a posse of dancing rhinoceroses.The Supreme Hitch-Hiker, author of a five-part trilogy (now six-) and creator of Dirk Gently, was by all acounts a classic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He would not hesitate to wake up employees at all hours to yak about ideas. He could fire an underling in the seconds it took for the elevator to ferry him to or from his fourth-floor office. He shouted, like, a lot, even at Bill Gates. Especially at Bill Gates. And yet the great and the good last night all queued to waft smoke up the posthumous iHole: Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet, Norman Foster, who invented the glass airport, Stephen Bayley, who invented designer waffle. No one in this hagiographical walk-through of a life in gizmos seemed inclined to suggest that Steve Jobs Read more ...
ash.smyth
Language is, the sages tell us, intrinsic to being human. Or to what humans call “being human”, anyway. And yet, notwithstanding the 70-odd muscles and half a billion brain cells deployed every time we open our mouths, we hardly give the matter a second thought. I confess I was in two minds about committing to five hours of Stephen Fry telling me this; but as the opening credits rolled last night on Fry's Planet Word, before I'd even got my feet up and my tea on, while he was still saying "the story of language is surely one of the greatest stories we have” – I knew we were Read more ...
ash.smyth
A couple of summers back, I spent an entire term with an idling history teacher who watched, in his many, many free periods, the entire back catalogue of QI on his laptop. And gave us running updates. Much as we mocked him for his pseudo-intellectual thumb-twiddling, in a staff room full of chat about timetables, syllabuses and the iniquities of the tuck shop, the regular injection of dorky trivia – and the entrenched and bitter arguments it provoked – was very welcome.That said, I cannot now tell you for certain whether the word “hello” was really invented along with the telephone, or if Read more ...