The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
My 12-year-old sister shouted, ‘Come and watch this TV programme, you’ll love it. It is all about naked men trying to prove how tough they are.’ She was right, I did like it, so much so that at the end, when applicants were invited to apply for the second series, I filled in the online
Henrietta Bredin has put together a series of events to celebrate the Royal Opera House’s Ring cycle It is with considerable trepidation that I venture to write about Richard Wagner in these pages, considering that in doing so I am following a trail well blazed by Bernard Levin — a passionate and lushly articulate devotee
Exhibitions: Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s ‘Adam and Eve’; Work, Rest & Play Amazingly, the Courtauld can claim to have mounted the first exhibition in England devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1472–1553). He’s not an artist we know at all well here, though one or two images will be familiar from reproduction, probably elegant,
Where does Sibelius stand today? Twenty years ago, the answer would have been not very high. Today, 50 years after his death, I think it would be ‘on the up’ again, especially as we now know not just the symphonies and tone-poems but also the wonderful songs in performances by Karita Mattila, Soile Isokoski, Anne
I see Squeeze have reformed and are touring again. In fact, there don’t seem to be many bands who haven’t reformed and aren’t touring again. Out there on the road: that’s where the cash is. There seems to be a particular process here. 1. Band splits up in a spirit of mutual enmity and recrimination.
For its final operatic offering, this year’s Edinburgh Festival presented what it billed as ‘World première of a new production’ of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. I suppose every new production is a ‘world première’ but they don’t need to say so. Anyway, this turned out to be a dismal affair, part infuriating and part
Eternal though they may seem, the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival are susceptible to change. Roger Wright will take over the former next year and Jonathan Mills has just assumed responsibility for the latter. New appointments do not necessarily mean that anything more up-to-date will happen, nor that the change will be for the better
There has been such a lot of fuss and hype around this adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel — as if this is all anybody has ever been waiting for — that I did wonder if I had anything new or useful to say. But then I realised: 1) it’s never stopped me before and
Sorry, I’m in Sardinia at the moment and I couldn’t find any preview tapes that really grabbed me before I went away so if you don’t mind I thought I’d just have a general grumble about the state of TV. First, Weekend Nazis (BBC1, Monday), whose undercover team made the truly cataclysmic discovery that one
Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you. I suspect that this has always been true.
Cinema goers will all be planning to go to see Atonement this weekend: I know I am. But if you are defeated by the queues, which threaten to be of English Patient/Shakespeare in Love proportions, do go and see Knocked Up instead. If ever a film was let down by its title it is this
Opera Chic has all you need to know about Luciano Pavarotti’s death, including a collection of terrific YouTube clips. If only the Washington National Opera’s forthcoming Boheme could feature a voice such as this… But, of course, the point is that it can’t.
Last night’s GQ Men of the Year Awards were, as ever, a glittering occasion and a tribute to the talents of the magazine’s editor, Dylan Jones (whose most recent Spectator Diary you can read here). Plenty of excellent choices for the 10th annual ceremony, including the editor of the year, Will Lewis, editor in chief
Researchers confirm that rock’n’roll stars lead unhealthy lives and die young. Shockerooni!
I’m just back from Edinburgh, my 20th successive year at the festival for the Daily Telegraph, which makes me feel very old indeed. How times have changed. When I started going, the paper put us up in the luxurious Sheraton Grand and no questions were asked about the size of your bar bill, which in
Dublin. Terrific to write about, terrible to experience. This was the verdict of Patrick Kavanagh, poet, alcoholic and failure, born in 1904 and now brought back to life in Russell Kennedy’s enjoyable show at the Old Red Lion. Kavanagh’s assessment of Dublin would be better applied to himself. He cuts a shambolic, repellent figure in
Next time you’re bemoaning the TV licence fee, check out the BBC’s World Service. Next time you’re bemoaning the TV licence fee, check out the BBC’s World Service. A different quality appears to prevail in their making of radio documentaries — more time spent on research, less on presentation. No tricks, no smoochy music. Just
I have a piece in today’s Independent on the downfall of Amy Winehouse, an extended version of my post earlier this week. Which just goes to show that where Coffee House leads, the press follows.
There is something more than usually grotesque about the slow-motion downfall of Amy Winehouse being played out daily in the media. As the singer and her appalling husband holiday in St Lucia, their respective parents are fighting a shameful proxy battle at home, with her father-in-law, Giles, calling on Amy’s fans to boycott her records
In the theatre programme notes for the new play based on Pedro Almodóvar’s film, All About My Mother, the playwright Samuel Adamson observes that the play’s protagonist, Manuela, is drawn towards the world of theatre by an unexpected event. Back in 1999, although I didn’t know it at the time, my own life was about
Exhibition; Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour How diminished our lives would be if suddenly we could only see in black and white. ‘Colour is the first revelation of the world,’ exclaimed Hélio Oiticica (1937–80), a Brazilian artist with a mission to liberate colour and help it to embody itself in other guises. He thought
The most egregious example of cheating in wildlife photography was the 1958 Disney film Wild Wilderness. They wanted footage of lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs into the sea — heaven knows why, since lemmings do no such thing. Since the crew were in Alberta, where neither sea nor lemmings can be found, they bought the
If you want to know what’s coming up in the arts this autumn a good place to look is today’s G2, where critics have chosen the ‘50 hottest acts’. The film Atonement, based on Ian McEwan’s novel, with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, opens on 7 September (I’ve seen a preview and loved it). Other
V.S. Naipaul’s essay on Derek Walcott, the great St. Lucian poet, in today’s Guardian review is as eloquent and insightful as one would expect. What caught my eye is a point that Naipaul makes about the whole idea of the Caribbean as an island paradise. As he writes, that idea of the beauty of the islands
Forty years after his first drug bust in 1967, Keith Richards is still testing the limits of the law. But, as one would expect of a 63-year-old, the substances in question have changed over the years. So it was that, before an enraptured audience at the O2 Centre on Tuesday night, the pirate-captain of the
Perhaps unwisely, the museum at Gloucester prominently displays a large aerial photograph of the city, revealing in one what the shocked pedestrian discovers slowly on foot: the huge proportion of the centre flattened for ghastly car parks, more devastating in their seeming permanence than the recent flooding, of which little trace remained on my four-day
A few years ago, the director of a London-based ballet company publicly challenged the way ballet is taught in Britain. More recently, additional havoc was caused by an article by an equally prominent journalist who lamented our schools’ apparent inability to produce first-rate stars. In each instance, British ballet teachers and directors of prestigious ballet
Shakespeare, as we all know, served up English history as entertainment and instruction for the Elizabethans. Factual accuracy was subservient to a view of the jungle truths of sovereignty and political ambition that was as uncomfortable and relevant then as it remains today. The eight major Histories from Richard II to Richard III have been
TV or not TV, that is the question pondered by Edinburgh every year. An unseen faultline divides the audiences from the performers. Audiences want to get away from TV while performers — especially comedians — want to embrace it. Les Dennis, who has done telly already, transcends the rift in his new hybrid show which