A driven George Clooney tells Marianne Gray how important it is not to get typecast George Clooney arrived on British screens more or less a fully formed star. He had spent years trapped in American sitcom hell and by the time we got him he was in his mid-thirties playing the debonair Dr Doug Ross
Drawing Attention Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 17 January Last chance to see a really excellent selection of works on paper from the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. It’s a relatively new collection, begun in 1969, but despite that it includes many of the great names of Western art. From the Italian Renaissance to 18th-century
I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. I’m sure I’m not the only Spectator writer (or reader) who doesn’t watch television any more. Blame middle age, or lack of time, or the grim, brutal feeling that you’ve seen it all before and can’t be bothered to
La Bohème Cock Tavern The Enchanted Pig Linbury Studio Puccini’s La Bohème has oddly become the Christmas opera of choice, broadcast on BBC TV on Christmas afternoon (an especially ludicrous affair), and major opera houses dusting down their elderly versions. I doubt whether any of them will be as involving, indeed thrilling and upsetting, as
The Road 15, nationwide The Road is based on Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel and, as far as roads go, this one is long, hard, brutal, pitiless and profoundly horrible, plus there doesn’t seem to be much reward for sticking with it. It is very much like the North Circular in all these respects, unless you
The Misanthrope Comedy Molière is a genius but only in France. Play-goers here need some convincing that he belongs in the first rank. This new production of The Misanthrope shifts the action from 17th- century Paris to present-day London and turns the bickering upper-class lightweights into film-makers and their hangers-on. Gosh. What a breakthrough. Translator
New Year, New Radio. And not just any old wireless. It’s one of the latest digital wonders, which has inside its chic black casing a mini-computer that can whisk me round the world in a matter of seconds to visit tens of thousands of radio stations. For reasons that are as yet beyond me, though,
I think I might be about the second-last person on earth finally to have replaced his squat, bulbous, stone-age TV set with one of those new angled, wide-screen, narrow, HD-ready jobs. My worry is it’s not big enough. ‘No, you can’t have a 50-inch. No way are you having a 50-inch. Not in MY house,’
Awoken the other night by cold and concern for global warming, I searched my conscience for ways to reduce my carbon footprint. The trouble is, a large part of it is simply my existence. During the now-forgotten demographic panic of the 1970s, I knew a man who killed himself in the interests of population reduction,
Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? Where would we be without ‘all-weather’ racing on artificial surfaces? With Sandown’s jumping card frosted off last Saturday, I wasn’t the only one who scuttled across Surrey to Lingfield’s polytrack, where Betdaq had sponsored an extra day to keep the cash tills rolling and the
