Arts Reviews

I’ve got this brilliant idea for a major new cop series. It’s called Chalk and Cheese and, though you won’t have guessed this from the title, it’s about these detective partners who couldn’t be more different. Why, they’re like two incredibly dissimilar things, one, maybe an edible, milk-based product, the other some manner of mineral that you use to write with. Chocolate and Graphite: that’s another possible title, then. So, anyway, what I thought is that one of the characters would be a normal, sensible family-man type. And the other, by way of humorous and dramatic contrast, would be completely out there. He could be addicted to drugs and alcohol,

Two words tell you everything you need to know about today’s announcement that BBC3 is to become an online-only channel: ‘spoiler alert’. The phrase is now part of the cultural language, an everyday reality for consumers of all types of media. And that’s because broadcasting – the notion that we all watch the same thing at the same time – is, for huge numbers of people, dead. Not dying – dead. That’s why it doesn’t matter that you’ll now only be able to watch BBC3 on the iPlayer. Of all Auntie’s channels it’s surely the best one to be pushed off the terrestrial cliff first — it’s aimed at the

There’s a campaign running at the moment to rebrand History of Art and clear up some of the myths surrounding the subject. It’s seen as a posh subject, studied by posh girls, and with good reason too: A-level History of Art is offered at only 17 state secondary schools out of more than 3,000, plus a further 15 sixth–form colleges. By contrast, over 90 fee-paying schools offer the subject. I not only studied it at school, but went on to read it at university. And yes, the majority of the people I met while studying it were posh girls from privileged backgrounds. At university, the course was read by a

The Today programme’s early morning audience were roused by a very excited reporter chasing Bono at the Oscars this morning. ‘Bono! BONO!’ he shouted, before the Great Man himself strolled over to offer Radio 4 listeners some, er, unique wisdom. listen to ‘BONO! BONO! on the Today programme’ on Audioboo

One of the greats of French cinema, Alain Resnais (1922 – 2014), has died. His early films, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year in Marienbad (1961), which experimented boldly with visuals and narrative, were the key inspiration for the French New Wave, dictating the direction Godard and Truffaut headed in. But where some saw innovation, others only saw pretentiousness. Of Last Year in Marienbad, the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote: ‘The term ‘sleeping beauty’ provides, I think, a fairly good transition to Last Year at Marienbad — or Sleeping Beauty of the International Set, the high-fashion experimental film, the snow job in the ice palace. Here we are, back at the no-fun party

Boy, the crap that opera’s allowed to get away with. The mime, the mugging, the movement, the ideas. Richard Jones’s new production of Rodelinda at the English National Opera seemed to be channelling that heady mix of bullshit and banality that that signer had nailed so well at the Mandela funeral. Theatre wouldn’t have got away with it. Daytime telly wouldn’t have got away with it. Even the Chuckle Brothers, I reckon, might have thought twice about some of these routines. But apparently it’s absolutely fine to stuff Handel’s Rodelinda with tripe. Especially as the music’s just about to hit the heights. Thus were several sung glories ruined by mindless, barely acted

A friend and I joke that there are two types of jobs: fun ones, and school fees ones. We (penurious journalists) say this to our friends (pecunious lawyers, bankers, consultants), and find immense comfort in it. Perhaps I should have sacked off my History of Art degree, and done something vocational – ergo ‘worthwhile’ as Katie Hopkins will no doubt argue at the Spectator’s debate on Tuesday, ‘An arts degree is a waste of time and money’. I’d be raking it in by now. But then I apply the intellectual faculties developed while studying my degree, and realise that this is, of course, poppycock. After all, most of my friends

Artists make good critics, but do critics make good artists? It’s hard to tell, when most are too chicken to try. For over 20 years, Spectator critic Andrew Lambirth has been making collages. He caught the habit from the British Surrealist Eileen Agar in the late 1980s and kept it private, until forced to go public last year when Eileen Hogan selected six of his works for The Discerning Eye. Now 20 are going on show at the Minories in Colchester in a joint exhibition with his friend and fellow Suffolk resident Maggi Hambling (8–14 March, closed Sundays). Hambling’s contribution to the show is a new five-day series of paintings