Coronation Day across the Globe was first broadcast in 1953, by the Home Service, and until last Sunday, it wasn’t broadcast again. In order to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the cororation, the BBC decided to delve into their archives and re-broadcast it. It might have been the first televised coronation, but the BBC’s radio team were ‘determined to show off what they alone could do’, writes Kate Chisholm in her radio review this week. This determination resulted in messages of goodwill to the Queen sent from places ranging from the Australian outback to the top of Ben Nevis. In 2012, however, the programme seems ‘weirdly outdated’. Nevertheless, says Kate:
‘There was something deeply affecting listening to something that came straight out of another time, as remote to us now as the dinosaurs, yet still within the living memory of people we know.’
This week, if you weren’t watching or listening to a programme about the coronation, it seemed that the only option was The Tudors. They have, as Clarissa Tan points out in her television review this week, ‘invaded television’, with Henry VIII and his wives every way you turn. From their love lives to their food, nothing has been left uncovered, but Clarissa’s pick of the bunch has been the historical documentary, The Last Days of Anne Boleyn. Featuring more ‘Tudorologists’ than you can shake a stick at – including of course the likes of Starkey, Mantel and Philippa Gregory – it analysed her ‘crimes against the Crown’, with the finger of blame for her death pointing at Cromwell, Henry VIII (of course), and even Boleyn herself. Here’s the trailer for the programme:
From ermine wearers to ermine lovers; Deborah Ross’s film review is of Behind the Candelabra a film about Liberace which Hollywood allegedly declared ‘too gay’, but which Deborah thinks is ‘fabulous. No other word for it’. Featuring Michael Douglas as Liberace (a role in which Michael Douglas in ‘weirdly…vaguely sexy’, it focuses on ‘the five years he spend with one of his sexy younger boyfriends’. From gold-tapped Jacuzzis to plastic surgery, it is ‘as moving a human story as any’ and, says Deborah, ‘a terrific film’. If that’s not praise indeed, then I don’t know what is.
In last week’s magazine, Julian Flanagan interviewed Christopher Purves, the one-time pop star who has made the transition into opera, and is now playing the role of Walt Disney in Philip Glass’s The Perfect American. Purves may be a ‘fluid, eloquent baritone’ with ‘considered acting’, but in this opera, Glass ‘seems to go to great lengths to bore his way into immortality’, according to Michael Tanner, who reviews its first night this week. It’s not just the music; the text is at ‘a level of prolix banality’, as well. For Tanner, ‘the saddest thing about the evening was the wasted talent of Christopher Purves’, while ‘the rest of the cast do what they can with what they are given’.
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