Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Alex James

Addicted to dopamine

How do you stop people taking cocaine? Illegality keeps it at bay a bit. It stops it being quite so freely available, but it makes it sexy, too. I wonder how much its illegal status really affects people’s decision whether to take it or not. If the perils inherent aren’t a deterrent, the risk of punishment is hardly likely to sway the balance. People might be encouraged to start smoking, drinking, snorting and ultimately injecting their eyeballs by others, but other people’s efforts and assertions don’t enter the picture when it comes to stopping. In our vices, we hear no other voices. Obviously cocaine is a con, a bad long-term

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Beguiled by a master

Hidden Burne-Jones Leighton House Museum, 12 Holland Park Road, London W14, until 27 January It’s always a pleasure to visit Lord Leighton’s house and imagine oneself in a more spacious era, venturing into the artists’ quarter of Kensington and paying a call on one of the most popular artists of the Victorian period. The remarkable architecture of the house with its famous Arab Hall always deserves another look, though the exhibitions mounted in the upstairs gallery are becoming an increasing draw for the art public. Last year it was Leighton’s drawings, now brilliantly followed up by a show of little-known Burne-Jones drawings from Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Edward Burne-Jones

Deborah Ross

Bombs and butts

Charlie Wilson’s War 15, Nationwide Mike Nichols’s latest film is a mixed bag and a stuffed bag and, incredibly, none the worse for either. In its rat-a-tat, rapid-fire 95 minutes you get bombings, mines, refugee camps, casualties, hot tubs, Playboy cover girls, arms dealers, cocaine, scandal, Tom Hanks’s naked butt (surprisingly delicious; peachy), CIA agents, world presidents — and all in a movie that is partly serious political satire and partly just a hoot. A film about America’s covert funding of the mujahedin in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan a hoot? Listen, I know a hoot when I see one, and this is a hoot. OK, so who is this Charlie Wilson and

Kate Chisholm

Mercantile madness

How crazy is this! A huge great whopping oil tanker, 250,000 tons of rust-red steel, sails through one of the narrowest, most beautiful and most populated sea straits on the planet. And it’s not the only one. There are 50,000 of them every year. Not quinqueremes these, or even stately galleons. But eyeless giants, lumbering their way through the sea channel that links the silvery Black Sea with the dazzling blue Mediterranean. Bosphorus Battles on Sunday night (Radio Three) took us through these straits (which curve and wind their way through the Turkish capital, Istanbul) as if we were standing on the bridge of one of these maritime monsters, looking

Robin Oakley

Place your bets

I was given a new take on diplomacy the other day in what you might call the reflective postcoital stage of an interview with a foreign minister from eastern Europe. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘diplomats are really like ladies of easy virtue. Most of our best work is done late at night or at weekends, and we don’t get to choose our partners.’ In racing, too, information does not always come down the conventional route. One of the best tips I ever had came by way of an apology from an owner’s girlfriend who had accidentally poured most of a glass of red wine down my shirt front at Uttoxeter.

Alan Judd

Regrets, I’ve had a few…

Most of my regrets are of sins of omission rather than commission; what I didn’t do rather than what I did. (I’m thinking here of acquisitive opportunities rather than moral actions, where the balance of regret should probably be more even and the total certainly greater.) Recently, I’ve been thinking particularly of an XK150 Jaguar. It was a Norfolk car, a fixed-head coupé, in the days when you could pick them up for £2,500. It went faster than I could drive, seemed solid, had reasonable chrome, looked good in British Racing Green and had been well maintained by a retired gentleman whose son was selling it for him. Others were

Richard Sennett

Fatty but fashionable

January meant marrow-bones in my youth. For most of the year on my housing estate in Chicago, beef featured at best twice a week; after the expense of the holidays it became temporarily an impossible luxury. Beef soup appeared instead, and marrow-bones were the one redeeming treat, the marrow inside the bones creamy-rich; we dug it out with a flat-bladed screwdriver and spread the cooked marrow on salted toast. As my fortunes improved in adult life, I never lost the taste for this treat. I was glad to learn at some point that Queen Victoria also loved this plebeian food, having marrow on toast for tea; no doubt she used

Tuesday

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Take another look at Millais

Andrew Lambirth urges those who think they don’t like this artist to go and see this show Last chance to see this large and lavish retrospective of the most famous of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais (Tate Britain, until 13 January). The Tate confidently asserts that John Everett Millais (1829–96) was the ‘greatest’ of the association which initially consisted of Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and himself, with a handful of fellow-travellers. Later Burne-Jones and William Morris formed a second-generation PRB, and there were other useful associates like Ford Madox Brown, William Dyce, Arthur Hughes and John Brett. To call Millais the ‘greatest’ is to oversimplify matters. Although Rossetti wasn’t a

Clemency Burtonhill

Is a TV drama about the royal family sacrilege?

Filming on The Palace was only a few weeks in when the rumours started flying. ‘A tawdry and offensive affair’ trumpeted the Sunday Telegraph; ‘dreadful and offensive and very near to the bone’, added Lord St John of Fawsley; ‘a real danger [it will] undermine support for the [royal] family’, weighed in a media watchdog. To the cast and crew, such reports were flabbergasting, not least because those talking so authoritatively about the television series in question were yet to see an episode. We wondered if this hatchet job might be some sort of publicity stunt (it bore similarities to some of our storylines, after all) — before it became

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Beyond redemption

Absurd Person Singular, Garrick Women of Troy, Lyttelton Cinderella, Old Vic   Five years as a critic and I’ve never seen anything by Alan Ayckbourn. With a flicker of apprehension in my heart I took my seat at the Garrick. Absurd Person Singular (nice title, nothing to do with the play) begins at a bourgeois drinks party. Calamity unfolds. Wife forgets to buy tonic, dons mackintosh, exits into rain via back door, returns from off-licence, finds back door locked so must re-enter house via front door without being spotted by guests because rained-on mac looks silly. See her problem? Nor did I, but the comedy of the first act rests

Ariane Bankes

Caught napping

Sleeping & Dreaming Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1, until 9 March 2008 ‘To sleep, perchance to dream…’. If only. We are supposed to spend one third of our lives asleep, but many find getting their regulation quota a losing battle, and others don’t even want to. Sleep is beleaguered in our busy world, fighting a slow battle of attrition against the massed pressures of modern life. And why do we sleep, and dream? It is still a mystery, although the scientific community is awash with different theories. For those of us who toss and turn nightly, armed with a fistful of heavily rationed sleeping pills (or a slug

Marcus Berkmann

Reasons to be cheerful | 5 January 2008

I am an idiot. Last month, in this space, I proffered the usual random selection of favourite albums of the year, not a single one of which had actually been released in 2007, for, like many people (I’d like to think), I can be a little slow on the musical uptake. A day or two after the column had been filed, I was listening to Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch) for maybe the 78th time when I suddenly thought, ‘Hang on, this came out this year. And it’s as good as anything I’ve heard this year as well.’ Thus proving that I am appreciably slower on a far wider range

Kate Chisholm

Amid the mudflats

If you’ve been waking up at 3 a.m. after yet another nightmare about climate change, there’s been a well-timed antidote on Radio Four this week. On The Estuary (made by the wildlife team, Chris Watson as sound recordist, Mike Dilger as naturalist and Stephen Head as the landscape historian), we heard how The Wash on the east coast of England has ebbed and flowed through the centuries. Maybe we are entering a new meteorological phase where sea levels will rise and what were once silty fields and verdant pastures will disappear under water. But what’s new? The estuary of the fenland rivers has changed radically over the last 12,000 years

Simon Hoggart

Lies and humiliation

Extras (BBC 1), Parkison: The Final Conversation (ITV), Sense and Sensibility (BBC 1), David Cameron’s Incredible Journey (BBC 2), The Hidden Story of Jesus (Channel 4)  We said goodbye to Michael Parkinson and Andy Millman over Christmas. Andy Millman was the hero of Extras, whose finale went out on BBC1 on 27 December. This was what I think of as a sit-traj, a comedy with more misery than laughs. It was mainly about humiliation: Andy’s doll, based on his character in his grisly sitcom, is outsold by a Jade Goody doll that screeches racist abuse. A harridan from the Guardian (I genuinely have no idea which of my colleagues was meant)

Friday

The Skimmer

Bovver for the BBC over the foul Catherine Tate Christmas Special

On Boxing Day, The Skimmer noted how the Catherine Tate Christmas Special with its orgy of swearing was hardly suitable for BBC1 on Christmas Day. Now, The Times reports that OFCOM is to investigate the show following a flurry of complaints from viewers about the “most offensive programme ever broadcast by the BBC on a Christmas Day”. Even Catherine Tate seems to have realised that things went too far, telling The Radio Times:  “I don’t know how this Christmas special got so depraved because it isn’t what I set out to do”.  The BBC is standing by its decision, arguing that one of the character’s foul language “was fundamental to

Wednesday

The Skimmer

A foul Christmas special

The Catherine Tate Show’s Christmas Day Special managed over 20 uses of the F-word in the first five minutes, which must be something of a record, even by today’s debased standards of modern entertainment.   True, the show was broadcast at 10.30pm, safely after the 9pm watershed when more adult material is shown, but this was on BBC1 on Christmas Day at a time when millions of families were likely to be watching together after the rigours of the day. We suspect many parents with youngish families must have grabbed the zapper and embarrassingly switched to something more appropriate.   Is the constant repetition of the F-word in the first

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Boy From the County Hell

Shane McGowan celebrates his 50th birthday today. Who would have thought it? Comfort and joy all round. This must rank as one of the most unlikely anniversaries imaginable. As the great man says himself: “Smoking, drinking, partying – that’s why I’ve stayed alive as long as I have.” That’s the spirit lads. Give it a lash. Happy birthday Shane… And a merry Christmas to all of you out there, wherever you may be.

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Wearisome Unbearableness of Manohla Dargis

Oh dear. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis (who apparently find the idea of being asked to name and write about her favourite movies of the year an intolerable imposition that reminds her of the Judeo-Christian patriarchy that has made her existence so frightfully ghastly) then further indulges herself with this hackneyed spot of hand-wringing: Enthusiastic reviews, intelligent filmmaking, even hot sex are no longer automatically enough to persuade a distributor to jump. The problem is that the art-house audience that supported the French New Wave filmmakers to whom “Reprise” owes an obvious debt can no longer be counted on to fill theater seats. Or maybe it’s overwhelmed. For a