The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was both a heartfelt defence and a convincing example of what popular entertainment can achieve. Telling the story of Barbara Parker, a fictional 1960s TV star, it took a stern line on highbrows who prize the punishing over the pleasurable, while delivering a lot of pleasure itself. My only
‘Donatello is the real hero of Florentine sculpture’, so Antony Gormley has proclaimed (hugely though he admires Michelangelo). It’s hard to disagree. But the full range of his work is hard to see, spread out as it is on altars and tombs through Florence and elsewhere in Italy. This makes Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance at
You may think that roses have always symbolised courteous romance, but art history describes their smuttier private life. Consider the pouting red blooms in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Venus Verticordia’, which the art critic John Ruskin considered so obscene that he refused to continue his friendship with the painter. Ruskin admired the execution when he first
The Last of Us is widely being hailed as the best video game adaptation ever. Maybe. But it’s still a video game adaptation. On one of the early levels, for example, you have to escape from a zombie apocalypse that has broken out in Houston, with your truck and your guns, being careful also to
Sound of the Underground is a drag show involving a handful of cross-dressers who spend the opening 15 minutes telling us who they are. Then, rather ominously, they announce: ‘We’ve written a play.’ But they haven’t really. The scene shifts to a kitchen where the drag queens meet to discuss their pay and conditions, and
Grade: D Yes, it’s porky Sam from Essex, with his body issues and his complex gender pronouns and his endless narcissistic banalities, his depthless self-importance. This is Smith’s fourth studio album in a career that seems to be nosing a little downhill, mercifully – although it will still sell by the million worldwide. He has
A classical concert programme is like a set menu, and for this palate the most tempting orchestral offering in the UK this January came from the Slaithwaite Philharmonic under its conductor Benjamin Ellin. They opened with a suite from Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, and the inclusion of Hollywood film music in a ‘straight’ classical programme was
I can’t work out if Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, which stars Brendan Fraser as a man weighing 600lb – that’s 42 stone in real money – is ‘abhorrently cruel’, as some have said, or a film of ‘rare compassion’, as others have said. Either way, it is compelling, although whether that’s for the right reasons
Folk is the Schiphol of Scottish music. Eventually, every curious traveller passes through. From arena rockers to rappers, traditional music remains an undeniable source. Which is why the second word in ‘Celtic Connections’ is at least as significant as the first. Now in its 30th year, lighting up the otherwise unpromising prospect of a Glasgow
In a national vote on which county’s landscape best embodies Englishness, every county would presumably vote for itself. But when the War Office commissioned Frank Newbould in 1942 to design a poster with the patriotic slogan ‘Your BRITAIN – fight for it now’, it featured Sussex, with a shepherd herding sheep in the foreground and
Most former punks end up touring the nostalgia circuit or cropping up at conventions. Not Christopher John Millar, aka Rat Scabies. When Scabies hit middle age, the legendary drummer with the Damned began to hunt for the Holy Grail. ‘We all started off criticising government and I’ve ended up looking for pixies,’ explains Scabies. In
Two podcast MOTs this week. I am a long-term listener of sex and relationships podcast Savage Love, hosted by Seattle-based Dan Savage. And tuning in to his most recent instalment, I can confirm it is still fabulous. A quick primer for those not familiar: Savage is famous for giving the world such gems as ‘monogamish’ (mostly
When I first saw ‘The Triumph of Death’ (1562-63), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the painting throbbed: this land was sick, smothered in smoke; the fires on the horizon had been burning for ever, turning earth into dirt, air into haze. All was dull, lethargic, ill. When I saw the painting again some years later,
The Unfriend is a smart new family comedy which opens on the sunlit deck of a cruise ship. Peter and Debbie, a boring middle-class couple, are introduced to a clingy American tourist, Elsa, who worms her way into their affections. Before they know it, they’ve agreed to let her visit them at home after the
The great country singer George Jones was famed not just for his voice, but also for his drinking. Once, deprived of the car keys, he drove his lawnmower to the nearest bar. In the very good Paramount+ drama about Jones and Tammy Wynette – entitled George and Tammy, so there’s no excuse for forgetting –
For around a decade now, Grayson Perry has been making reliably thoughtful and entertaining documentary series about such things as class, contemporary masculinity and modern secular rituals. (All a lot more fun than they sound, I promise.) Equipped with an infectious Sid James laugh and an impressive commitment to affability, he’s demonstrated a willingness to
‘We hope you enjoy the performance,’ announced the Tannoy before the lights went down for How did we get here? – the accent being put on ‘hope’, as though enjoyment was unlikely. I took a deep breath in anticipation of modern dance at its most portentous and pretentious, my expectations already depressed after imbibing some
‘Spain must be much more interesting than Liverpool,’ decided the 12-year-old Archer M. Huntington after buying a book on Spanish gypsies in the port city. The family of American railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington had just docked at the start of an 1882 European tour that would introduce Archer to the National Gallery and the
There can’t be anyone anywhere who hasn’t somehow been touched by a Steven Spielberg film. Some of us, for example, haven’t dipped their toe into the sea for going on 40 years now. (Thanks for that, Jaws.) He has thus surely earned the right to finally turn the camera on himself, as he does with
Daniel Barenboim was supposed to perform with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra earlier this month. His recent health concerns made that impossible, but it was a reminder that for the first time since the appointment of the late Libor Pesek in 1987, the RLPO is under the direction of a conductor soaked in the German
‘The rays of the sun conquer the night’ sings Sarastro, at the end of Mozart and Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte. It was the Royal Opera’s first performance of January 2023 and there’s something profoundly consoling about seeing this of all operas at the midnight of the year. The lights dim; five chords ring out and that
Watch on the Rhine is the curiously misleading title chosen by Lillian Hellman for a wartime family drama that became a film starring Bette Davis. The location is not Europe but America and the show opens with Fanny Farrelly, a member of the New England gentry, arriving in her sumptuous drawing room for breakfast. The
There’s a case to be made for John Cale being the most daring ex-member of the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed redefined the transgressive possibilities of literate three-chord rock’n’roll. Cale, arguably, has travelled even further. A Welsh miner’s son who won a scholarship to Goldsmiths, Cale engaged with the early flowerings of Fluxus before mixing with
Whenever I listen to Great Lives on Radio 4, which is often, I am reminded of the gulf between fame and achievement. How is it that some people do so much, yet remain obscure, while others seem to be carried forward with perpetual momentum after doing just one thing? A good many of the lives
Kaleidoscope is a fairly routine eight-part heist drama with a supposed novelty spin: apart from the beginning and the end, you can view the episodes in any order, meaning that each viewer has a slightly different experience. If I sound mildly sceptical, it’s because the novelty isn’t actually that novel. B.S. Johnson got there 54
Bank of Dave is the ‘true(ish)’ story, as this puts it, of Dave Fishwick, the Burnley businessman who wanted to set up a high street bank to help the local community. He was, Fishwick said in a recent interview, at home when the call came from Piers Ashworth in LA. ‘He’s the writer of Mission
‘Graphic’ scenes of violence are now associated with film, but the word betrays an older ancestry. The first mass media images to shock the public were engravings documenting contemporary social ills pioneered by the Victorian magazine The Graphic, though the association goes a long way further back, to Jacques Callot’s etching series ‘Miseries of War’
I loved music before I could walk. It seemed I could harmonise anything my sisters were singing. I had perfect pitch, a mixed blessing since wrong notes made me cry. I hated music when I first heard Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. I was nine years old. My mother had died when I was two and my
Todd Field’s Tár stars an insanely glorious Cate Blanchett – if she doesn’t win an Oscar I’ll eat my hat – as a world-famous orchestral conductor about to record Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. There is also Elgar’s Cello Concerto in this film, and a bit of Bach, but it’s not about music. To say it’s about
