St James’s Palace. 1953. A dynamic Duke of Edinburgh is relishing a ding-dong with the antediluvian fossils of the Coronation Committee. He wants to embrace modernity by allowing the BBC to televise the ceremony. The ‘grey old men’ want to continue doing things in exactly the same way that they have been done since 1066.
Who could resist School of Rock? For me it was a chance to see a heavy-metal musical written by the best-known headbanger in the House of Lords, Julian Fellowes. The movie features Jack Black as a failed rock guitarist who bluffs his way into a private school and turns a class of robotic snoots into
The last ten minutes of any Don Giovanni tell you more about a director than the previous two hours. Mozart’s elastic ‘dramma giocoso’ can take a lot of pulling about, can be stretched taut into tragedy or squeezed into the tight confines of a farce, but whatever option (or combination of options) you choose, those
Apart from the next Game of Thrones, there’s nothing I’ve been looking forward to quite as much as The Grand Tour (Amazon Prime). I like Clarkson, Hammond and May, I like banter, I like political incorrectness, I like exotic scenery, I like cars, I like puerile jokes and I liked Top Gear. Take the same
Ernest Hemingway loved going to the zoo, but not on Sundays. The reason, he explained, was that, ‘I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.’ He would probably have enjoyed Animality, an entertaining exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, Lower John St, W1. It
A United Kingdom is based on the greatest love story you probably didn’t have a clue about. I know I didn’t. It’s based on the true story of Seretse Khama, heir to the African kingdom of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and Ruth Williams, a typist, who fell in love in 1940s London and married despite everyone
When did you last experience a boring Sunday afternoon? If you’re over 16, probably not since you were last 16 and stuck at home, raindrops sliding down the window pane, nothing on TV until five o’clock, nowhere to go because everywhere is shut. But boredom, says Phill Jupitus, has become an endangered emotion. Now that
