Wales
Jasper Rees
Where were you? For those of us too young to experience Kennedy’s assassination, which realistically is anyone under the age of 55, the Royal Wedding is the next event along the chain of history that simultaneously impinged on much of the globe’s consciousness. In July 1981, I was on a French course in Clermont Ferrand and the whole group watched Lady Di get Prince Charles’s names in the wrong order on a TV in class. There must have been French commentary. Were you anywhere in particular?For the inhabitants of a Welsh pit village in Abi Morgan’s drama Royal Wedding, the nuptials up in London Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Welsh landscape promoted by the tourist board is a known entity. Postcard photographers patrol its contours waiting for the rains to desist and the sun to peer out so that they can snap splendid estuaries, meadowed shores patrolled by a lone diesel train, elegant county towns hibernating in the fold of a loafy hill, aqueducts and crumbling abbeys, beetling peaks and labyrinthine ravines. These photographs by James Morris, from a new exhibition and book, find another, sterner Wales imposed on the old familiar template.The post-industrial Wales depicted here doesn’t always win admirers. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Justin Kerrigan was only 25 when he made Human Traffic. A bristling portrait of rave culture at the dawn of New Labour, it did well enough commercially and enjoyed a cultish afterlife on DVD. That was 11 years ago. Kerrigan hasn’t made another film since. Or hadn’t. With I Know You Know he returns with a script from his own pen. Whenever a promising debut is followed by a long silence, the question is always the same: was the wait worth it?It’s hard to say, and that’s partly to do with the character at the heart of a perplexing portrait of psychiatric breakdown. Robert Carlyle plays a Read more ...
david.cheal
It was Brian Wilson who started it. Eight years ago he toured Britain with a show that had at its heart a triumphant performance of his classic Beach Boys album, Pet Sounds, played – in a phrase that has become de rigueur when describing such events – in its entirety. Many more followed suit: David Bowie with Low, Sparks with Kimono My House, Lou Reed with Berlin (which in turn became a terrific Julian Schnabel film), while later this year Primal Scream will perform their epic Screamadelica album at the Olympia in London. And now John Cale is at it.Last year in Cardiff Cale mounted a show Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rhod GIlbert is, I suppose, what one would call a contrarian. Much that he comes up against in life appears to confound him and, perhaps as a consequence, a lot of things seem to go wrong (often at the same time), which causes him yet more rilement. Even the title of this show, Rhod Gilbert & The Cat That Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurst, which I saw at the Leicester Comedy Festival, is in response to an annoying fan who brings the comic gifts of things that have been mentioned in previous show titles, such as grapes and mince pies. “I thought, I’ll show him,” says Gilbert. “There’s no way Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12 or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was six.” Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, broadcast on the radio in 1955, offered young listeners a flavour of his aromatic observations of small-town Welsh life better known to adults in Under Milk Wood.The old roué might very well have wondered how a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When is enough? The template usually cited as the perfectly proportioned lifetime for sitcom is Fawlty Towers. It ran for two series, 12 episodes - in and out, no mucking about. The Office deliberately kept the same hours, give or take the odd Christmas special and an entire American remake. Disappearing off the other end of the scale was Only Fools and Horses, which adopted the opposite tack of keeping faith with its characters as the contours of their lives changed. Gavin and Stacey, whose creators Ruth Jones and James Corden are knowledgeable students of the genre, has always had the look Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The mechanism for securing a publicity still from the BBC is as follows. Go to the relevant website, log in, look for the photographs that illustrate the programme, then take your pick. For Dame Shirley Bassey: The Girl from Tiger Bay there wasn’t much of a selection. Only one image, in fact, at least that I could see. It finds Alan Yentob perching like a prize-winning schoolboy on the edge of the sofa, while the prize leans intimately on his shoulder. We need Imagine, especially now that the guillotine is slowly and insubordinately lopping Lord Bragg’s coiffeured head off over on the other Read more ...
David Nice
Bryn Terfel is a good guy. I know; he never forgets a face, and I’ve seen him making the tea for the entire team at a recording session – no one-off, they assured me. Yet the nature of the bass-baritone beast is given over to more villains than noble souls. The "bad boys" of opera and musical theatre are grist to Terfel’s satanic mill in his latest CD-linked tour. Although inevitably given the demands of live performance there’s less than meets the ear on the disc, Bryn as dark god in concert gives far more than those recent short-shrifting divas Fleming and Gheorghiu.What a relief, too, that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From seat 17 of Row 8, Block M35, Stair 14, Level 4, in a gathering of 75,000 spectators, almost all of them Welsh, it’s difficult to argue with the idea that Wales already has a national theatre. It’s called the Millennium Stadium (picture below). Just before kick-off yesterday afternoon, from my high-altitude perch, I looked across to the distant tunnel opposite. Its jaws belched fire and smoke and, in due course, a pumped-up team in red shirts. Their entry was greeted by a dozen gas-powered jet flames dotted around the touchline, spurting up towards the stadium roof. And then all those Read more ...
sue.steward
Wales doesn’t figure high on the UK charts of art awareness, but one of its leading contemporary artists, 43-year-old Tim Davies, represents a generation who are producing significant, original work without approbation from the Hoxton or Shoreditch taste-makers, and often, attention comes from abroad. In Wales, of course, it’s a different story: he was Gold Medal winner in the 2003 National Eisteddfod, and on the other hand the only British artist shortlisted for the prestigious international Artes Mundi prize in 2004. Davies’ major solo show at the Glynn Vivian Gallery in his hometown, Read more ...
robert.sandall
It’s pretty well understood that talent, good looks and hard work are not enough to guarantee you safe passage through the celebrity jungle nowadays. But for five years it looked as though they might be enough for Katherine Jenkins. Until recently the general view of Jenkins held that she was a nice, polite, touchingly naive, and unaffected young woman from Neath in South Wales, who just happened to be the most popular classically trained singer to emerge here in this century.Her reticence appeared almost saintly. Jenkins never talked in public about her boyfriends, never dissed less Read more ...