The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
My grandfather served in the trenches, but he declined to talk about it. I suppose the horrors had been insupportable. If he had lived day and night with those memories, it might have destroyed the life he built up at home, as a headmaster in a mill town near Manchester. Recently one of his pupils,
How in God’s name did Jonathan Meades ever get a job presenting TV programmes? I ask in the spirit of surprised delight rather than disgust, for Meades is that rare almost to the point of nonexistent phenomenon: the presenter who doesn’t treat you like a subnormal child or so irritate you with his incredibly infuriating
Nobody is going to be excused Dickens in his bicentennial year. This is good news for television people, since Dickens wrote his novels in the form of screenplays. He worked closely with his illustrators, making sure the scene they drew was exactly what he had in mind. He even acted out the roles as he
One of my resolutions this year is to make a lot more money. But how? In fact, I’ve noticed recently, it’s very simple: all you have to do is take a popular character with enormous worldwide brand recognition (e.g., King Arthur, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes) and shamelessly reinvent him for the youth demographic. So, for
The most watched programme on television this past year was the royal wedding, which is hardly surprising, since we had the day off to watch it. Bagehot said that royalty was the institution that ‘riveted’ the nation, by which he meant bound together rather than fascinated. However, strange as it may seem, most people in
My prize for the best thing on TV this year goes to the comedy Rev (BBC2, Thursdays). I know Simon Hoggart disagrees with me on this — he finds it all a bit predictable. But in the spirit of Christmas I should like to point out that Simon is a wine-soaked pinko Guardianista who hasn’t
‘I don’t like him looking daft,’ growls Alastair Campbell to the camera as Bafta-winning documentary film-maker Molly Dineen shadows Tony Blair for the 1997 party election broadcast. The warning is clear. Forty hours of footage became a mere ten minutes of spin, but it’s testament to Dineen’s rapport with the member for Sedgefield that despite
To the Manor Reborn (BBC1, Thursday) is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant programmes in the history of television. But then I’m biased for the Rat is in it, and what a splendid, handsome and talented young fellow he has turned out to be. If you looked very carefully about halfway through episode one, you’ll
Can a critic simply be wrong, in the way that a mathematician who said that 3×3=10 would be wrong? I’m beginning to wonder, since I am the only person I’ve read who thought Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short was not vile but terrific and The Killing II (BBC4, Saturday) all right, though far from the
Fact: in 1963, air travel was so new and exciting that the awed gasps of the passengers as the plane took flight frequently drowned out the noise of the jet engines. Fact: in 1963, air travel was so comfortable that passengers emerged from long-haul flights even more refreshed, relaxed and cheerful than when they boarded
Ricky Gervais’s latest sitcom, Life’s Too Short (BBC2, Thursday), is really a series of sketches on his favourite themes — failure, rejection, self-delusion and humiliation. I gather from friends of friends that at UCL he was often teased, not always pleasantly, for not fitting in with the right gang. Exclusion of one kind or another
One of the useful things about having teen and near-teenage kids is discovering what the vulgar masses watch. Last week, for example, during half-term, I got to see two hugely popular programmes which I would probably never have bothered watching on my own: Undercover Boss USA (Channel 4, Wednesday) and The X Factor (ITV, Saturday,
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall thinks it’s time we all went veggie (River Cottage Veg; Channel 4, Sunday). Coming from a man whose favourite dish is human placenta marinaded in fruit-bat extract, who slaughters his own pigs with a pocket knife and dances naked in their gore as he turns them into 2,058 varieties of artisanal black pudding,
‘We all need to rendezvous every week. It keeps us all as a community,’ said Jane Copsey on the In Touch anniversary programme (produced by Cheryl Gabriel). The Radio 4 magazine for the blind and partially sighted has been around for 50 years dispensing advice and encouragement, hope and cheer. Nowadays it’s been cut to
I caught an intriguing session at the Cheltenham literary festival, titled ‘Secrets of the TV Critics’. As it happened, the main secret seemed to be that some of them liked a drink while they watched the box. In the distant days before advance DVDs and internet previews, one critic of the Daily Express used to
Whenever I find myself dreaming about how awful things would be under a red/green dictatorship — increasingly often, these days — the one person who gives me a glimmer of hope that I might get out of the hell alive is Stephen Fry. He’s a leftie, of course — but, like Frank Field and Kate
I imagine there is software that helps you write biopics for television. First you pick the childhood from a drop-down menu, selecting [poor but respectable] [very poor] [so poor that all your belongings will fit into a single wheelbarrow which your mother pushes from a grim slum to the nearby hell-hole]. Father deserts family [yes]
‘I don’t suppose the war will leave any of us alone by the time it’s done,’ prophesied one of the characters in the new series of Downton Abbey. Oh, dear, I’m sure she’s right. So I wonder which will be the character who comes back with shellshock, which one with no legs, and which one
The Promenaders have excelled themselves this year. I thought initially they were slightly more docile and slightly less dotty than usual, but no. Not only at the Last Night, but also at the Israel Philharmonic Prom on 1 September, they found their voice — so strongly that the BBC actually suspended the broadcast of the
There are some things television can do which no other medium can manage. Take one of those little-noticed programmes, Hidden Paintings on BBC4. It’s presented by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, the chap with the King Charles spaniel hair, who used to do Changing Rooms, in which people found parts of their house redecorated while they were away,
When future historians sift through the wreckage of Western Civilisation to try to find out where it all went wrong, I do hope they chance upon at least one episode of The World’s Strictest Parents (BBC3) and one of Deal or No Deal (Channel 4). The World’s Strictest Parents is another TV variant on the
Years ago I did some charity gig with Will Self, a sort of Desert Island Books. He had chosen a Raymond Chandler, and I remarked on the similarities between Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse. Both were educated at Dulwich College, both were wonderfully stylish and stylised writers, both were masters of the dazzlingly witty, totally unexpected
I’ve got this idea for a book, when I get the time, called Everything You Know Is Wrong. Its job will be to attack all the idiot received ideas of our age — what my father-in-law calls ‘notions’. High on the list of candidates, most definitely, is the commonly held belief (especially among stand-up comics)
Prince Charles turned up on TV again this week, in Britain’s Hidden Heritage (BBC1, Sunday), wandering round a country house in Scotland that he had helped to restore. Prince Charles turned up on TV again this week, in Britain’s Hidden Heritage (BBC1, Sunday), wandering round a country house in Scotland that he had helped to
Angus Macqueen is a film-maker whose CV includes The Death of Yugoslavia, Gulag, Cocaine and a slightly odd period commissioning the likes of The Secret Millionaire as Channel 4’s head of documentaries. These days, happily, he’s back making his own stuff — and BBC2’s Chilean Miners: 17 Days Buried Alive was another gem. Commentary was
After rootling in the BBC archives on the internet recently I started thinking, wouldn’t it be good if more programmes from the past were shown in full? The online archive contains less than a tenth of the total footage stored by the BBC (which would amount to nearly 70 years of TV if you watched
Hold on to your seats, everyone, and grab yourselves a stiff drink. I’ve got a story gleaned from this week’s Dispatches: How Murdoch Ran Britain (Channel 4, Monday) so shocking that it will completely change your views on government, the media, everything. OK, here goes: in 2004 Tony Blair wanted Britain to sign up to
The latest series of The Apprentice (BBC1, Sunday) had, I gather, its best ratings ever. God knows why. All those ghastly people! Lord Sugar! His sidekicks! The stupid, infuriating, boring contestants! The last episode in the current series consisted of interviews with the four finalists, all of whom, in their own different ways, were barking.
Evan Davis clearly has a great sense of humour. You can tell because on his Twitter profile it states: ‘These are only my views — the BBC has no views.’ Yeah, nice one, Evan. Very pert. Very dry. In fact, of course, the BBC has a view on everything. Israelis? The Nazis taught them everything