Arts Reviews

Small Island, based on Andrea Levy’s novel about Jamaican migrants in Britain, feels like the world’s longest book review. We meet Hortense, a priggish school teacher, and her cool, handsome boyfriend who survive on a pittance in the Caribbean. Then we skip back to Hortense’s childhood in a house dominated by a bullying preacher who forbids conversations at mealtime. Then we cross the Atlantic to Lincolnshire and meet a chirpy blonde, Queenie, whose auntie runs a sweetie shop. Does Queenie want a job selling sweeties? Yes, says Queenie to her auntie. All this takes ages, and it feels like a deadly earnest sociology lecture. Then a stiff young bank clerk

Most of Hollywood’s Arabian Nights fantasies are, of course, unadulterated tosh. The Middle East, wrote the American film critic William Zinssner, is transformed into ‘a place where lovely young slave girls lie about on soft couches, stretching their slender legs… Amid all this décolletage sits the jolly old Caliph, miraculously cool to the wondrous sights around him, puffing his water pipe.’ It is box-office commercialisation at its worst. As a cinematic franchise, however, Arabian Nights is the gift that keeps on giving, which goes a long way to explaining why Wikipedia has a list of 72 films (nowhere near complete) based on One Thousand and One Nights, starring everyone from

It starts on a beautiful summer’s morning in the suburbs of America. A prosperous middle-aged dad is chatting with his neighbours in the garden of his comfortable home, but by nightfall his family has been destroyed. This is one of the most momentous convulsions in all drama. Arthur Miller’s masterful plotting, which he never again surpassed, is a match for the best. By the best I mean Oedipus. Jeremy Herrin’s production emphasises the lush fertility of America in the late 1940s. Trees in full leaf overlook the timber house that is perhaps a little too small for its millionaire owner. Joe Keller is a pioneering industrialist who served a brief

Channel 4’s When I Grow Up had an important lesson for middle-class white males everywhere: you’re never too young to be held up as a git. The series, billed as ‘a radical experiment in social mobility’, gets a group of seven- and eight-year-old children from different backgrounds to work together in a real-life office setting — which in Thursday’s first episode was, rather unexpectedly, Hello! magazine. The editor-in-chief Rosie Nixon began by announcing, in the tones of one making a brave stance against prevailing social attitudes: ‘I do feel passionately about diversity.’ And this, of course, was also the brave stance taken by the programme itself and its on-hand experts,

‘Can you fly down this evening?’ she was asked by her boss in the Delhi office of the BBC. ‘Yes, of course. I have to,’ replied Ayeshea Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist. She was talking from Colombo to David Amanor of the World Service’s The Fifth Floor, which looks at current news stories from the perspective of those intimately involved with them and is always worth catching for its alternative, less formal approach and Amanor’s gentle probing to find the real story. Perera described the chaos on arriving at the airport in the Sri Lankan capital on the evening of Easter Day and the weirdness of going to see the