TV
josh.spero
The battleground: beauty. What’s at stake: our souls. At least on these two things philosophy don Roger Scruton (presenter of Why Beauty Matters) and art critic Waldemar Januszczak (presenter of Ugly Beauty) were agreed in the Modern Beauty season. For despite very different ideas of beauty, they both reached the same conclusion: it is there to nourish the soul.Which is why it may seem odd that their programmes consider the same examples and yet reach very different conclusions. Jeff Koons to one is shallow and materialistic, to the other a source of self-knowledge. Scruton finds Damien Hirst Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
That queen of solipsism, Katie Price, hasn’t been the only person on TV this week seeking “closure” (loved the short but savage Graham Norton spoof of Price on Monday night's show, by the way), and a new documentary series, We Are Family, is offering four collections of relatives the chance to settle their differences on camera. And no need to dine on wichetty grubs either. In fact the opening clan, the Minchews, was put up in a country-house hotel as its members patched up their feuds and prepared to embrace the sentiment of the eponymous Sister Sledge ditty.The eight Minchew siblings, or Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Anne-Marie Duff doesn't really resemble Margot Fonteyn. Blonde, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, she has nothing of the exotic, olive, Latin complexion that Fonteyn inherited from her Brazilian grandfather. And she never learned ballet, even if, with her long, lean frame and elegant swan neck, she looks more like a dancer than the rather more compact Peggy Hookham of Reigate (as Fonteyn started out in life). But Duff is a tremendously versatile actress, "one of the best around," according to the director Otto Bathurst, who chose her to play the prima ballerina assoluta, in Margot, his biopic which 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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to the shenanigans of Brit-art superstars like Messrs Emin and Hirst, Art has become a lucrative appendage of pop culture, so it’s only logical that it should be given its own version of X Factor, with a bit of Apprentice-style authoritarianism bolted on for good measure. In School of Saatchi, a panel of judges sifts through a long list of hopefuls who are whittled down to 12, then six, then finally to the chosen one who will be installed in a London studio for three years under Charles Saatchi’s patronage.Saatchi (“one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in the world of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Channel 4 put six disabled people on a desert island for three months to see if they can fend for themselves. That’s the startling premise of Cast Offs - a new drama co-written by Alex Bulmer, Tony Roche and Jack Thorne. Does team writing really work? And can you get laughs out of such sensitive material. theartsdesk invited the three writers to interview one another.TONY ROCHE: OK, I’ll ask the questions because I’m lazy and that seems like it will be the least amount of work. Any objections?
ALEX BULMER: Yes.
JACK THORNE: Obviously.
TONY: Great. We’re agreed. So, first question. Jack, can Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Who’d be a traffic warden, eh? The answer, it would seem, is any number of immigrants willing to be paid £7 an hour to be verbally abused, physically attacked and generally despised by the great British public. And Olly Lambert, writer-director of Channel 4’s well-made and informative Cutting Edge documentary, Confessions of a Traffic Warden, says that although his original intention was to find out about the people beneath the uniforms, what he actually discovered was the hair-trigger vileness of Londoners beneath a badly scuffed veneer of civilised behaviour. None of this will have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This odyssey of party-goer and interior designer Nicky Haslam frequently resembled a Private Eye diary by Craig Brown, who’s always at his best when lacerating narcissistic name-dropping diarists from earlier generations. We watched Haslam swapping anecdotes about Picasso with the painter’s biographer John Richardson, reminiscing about how Mae West used to sleep with two monkeys on her bed, and pointing out where Marilyn Monroe and Tallulah Bankhead used to live in New York.He’d give us their exact house numbers, he said, but he’d left his compendious address book behind. The sense of parody Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Has somebody got it in for poor Matthew Macfadyen? In the recent series of Criminal Justice he didn’t even make it to the end of episode one before he was fatally stabbed by Maxine Peake. Now here he was as Enid Blyton’s adoring and supportive first husband Hugh Pollock, books editor at the George Newnes publishing house, only to find himself on the wrong end of Ms Blyton’s brutally self-centred drive for success at any price. For heaven’s sake, was this any way to treat a man who’d given you your big break in publishing and even bought you a new typewriter?Eventually he was driven to drink Read more ...
josh.spero
As questions go, "What is beauty?" is quite possibly only second to "What do women want?" in the frequency of its asking and in the difficulty of its answer. As the first programme in BBC Two and BBC Four’s Modern Beauty season, What Is Beauty? features Matthew Collings skirting around the edges of an answer and in doing so inadvertently hitting upon one.Collings tries to identify ten different components of beauty with reference to some of his favourite artworks. Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto from Monterchi is beautiful because of its simplicity, Robert Rauschenberg’s Charlene Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Filmed in the same Thamesmead locations in south-east London as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Misfits also features a gang of young trouble-makers in boiler suits. Unlike Alex and his Droogs, who face the fearsome "Ludovico" aversion therapy (after which thinking about violence, or hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, triggers nausea), this bunch are on a fairly slack community service gig. They paint benches between spliffs and indulging in the sort of banter you’d find on any Facebook page not being monitored by the grown-ups.That all changes when a massive electrical storm gives Read more ...