Film

Malcolm Tucker delivered the best description of Star Wars, in The Thick of It: ‘The one about the fucking hairdresser, the space hairdresser, and the cowboy. The guy, he’s got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin. His father’s a robot and he’s fucking fucked his sister. Lego, they’re all made of fucking Lego.’ He didn’t mention that Star Wars is really about Henry Kissinger. It was written by George Lucas, grossed $33 billion over six films, with merchandise, founded a new and stupid religion called Jedi, which, in the 2001 census 0.8 per cent of the population of England and Wales said they identified with, and invented the Star

‘Tis the season for end-of-year lists. Here is mine. It’s for the ten best home video releases of 2015; which is to say, the ten best DVDs or Blu-rays released in Britain this year. I’m leaving out releases from abroad, even though that means leaving out some of my favourites, so as to spare your wallets. All of these can be bought without import fees or much delay. There are other caveats and restrictions. The biggest is that, despite trying my best, I cannot watch everything. There are some major releases that I haven’t got around to yet (including this Yoshida set, which I’m saving for the Christmas break). There

Does the Queen only send telegrams to British subjects? If so, I guess the rest of us will have to celebrate Technicolor’s centenary without Her Maj’s involvement. I’ve already written about the occasion for last week’s issue of The Spectator; but I thought I’d return to it having spent most of yesterday gorging on films and cake. For yesterday was the anniversary day itself. The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation filed its start-up papers on 18 November 1915. One thing that I tried to communicate with my article is the great variousness of Technicolor. The word tends to conjure up a particular era and mood: the colourful Hollywood musicals and romances

They’ve already found a cure for the common cold. It’s called Technicolor. My first dose of it came during the Christmas holidays when I was about 12. There I was, ailing and miserable, when The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) came on the television at the end of my bed. Nothing had prepared me for this. A Sherwood Forest that was aflame with green. Clothes that shimmered purple and blue. Olivia de Havilland’s oh-so-cherry lips. Under two hours later I cast off the duvet and leapt from the fug. The sickness had gone. I now know that this medicine, Three-strip Technicolor, was a revolutionary process, the first to properly mix

Peter Mandelson, in his moment of pomp, had his portrait taken by Lord Snowdon. He is sitting on a fine modern chair. Mandy would no doubt have been aware of the ancient historic associations, through bishoprics and universities, that chairs have with power. Since it is a chair much admired by architects, Mandy also looks quite cool, although these things are relative. The chair and its footstool are known as Eames Lounge 670 and Eames Ottoman 671, and they were first manufactured in 1956 by Herman Miller of Zeeland, Michigan. Curved plywood shells are veneered with Brazilian rosewood, upholstered with shallow black leather-studded cushions and supported, at a meaningful tilt

Even the most down-to-earth people get emotional about Bill Viola’s videos. Clare Lilley of Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) seems close to tears as she takes me round his new show. Lilley is the show’s curator. She’s usually so matter-of-fact, but when she talks about Viola her eyes light up. When she took her two teenage daughters to his studio in Los Angeles, she tells me, they both cried when they saw his films. I like to think I’m made of sterner stuff, but when she leaves me in the Sculpture Park’s Underground Gallery, where Viola is on show, after a few minutes in there on my own I’m blubbing like

Next week Frank Auerbach will be honoured by the British art establishment with a one-man show at Tate Britain. It’s a fitting tribute for an artist who’s widely (and quite rightly) regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter. Yet although Auerbach has spent almost all his life in Britain, what’s striking about his paintings is how Germanic they seem. Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was only seven when he came to England (his parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust). By rights, he should stand alongside British artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, yet his work feels far closer to German painters like Georg Baselitz or Anselm Kiefer. Auerbach