tue 19/03/2024

Sky Arts

theartsdesk Q&A: poet laureate Simon Armitage on landscapes, libraries, home and edgelands

Simon Armitage is a poet at the top of his game: in his second year as poet laureate, he has given voice to the experiences of lockdown. In March, he released his collection Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems, a return to the childhood village in...

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Offended by Irvine Welsh, Sky Arts review - are we seeing the end of free speech?

Do we have a right not be offended? It's a question that’s growing bigger and uglier, thanks to the censorious “cancel culture” which has become such a disfiguring aspect of social media.Leith’s notoriously profane and scabrous novelist Irvine...

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David Crosby: Remember My Name, Sky Arts review - a rock icon looks in the mirror

Rock documentaries are so often disappointing, the result less a portrait than a whitewash. A J Eaton’s 90-minute rock doc David Crosby: Remember My Name, which premiered on Sky Arts, was an unflinching close-up, utterly absorbing and all the more...

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Hip Hop Evolution, Sky Arts review - foundations of a revolution

Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix,...

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Madama Butterfly, Glyndebourne review - perverse staging, outstanding cast

Puccini’s heroines and the rough treatment he hands out to them have come in for plenty of opprobrium over the years. But just occasionally they fight back on his behalf in the person of an outstanding singing actress; and this is exactly the case...

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Helaine Blumenfeld: Britain’s most successful sculptor you’ve never heard of

Sexy is an overused word in the arts but it’s an adjective you can’t help applying to some of Helaine Blumenfeld’s voluptuous marble sculptures as you run your fingers over their surfaces. These abstract bodily forms, often in the purest icing-white...

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The South Bank Show: Joyce DiDonato, Sky Arts

Take Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and add Handel and Mozart and the Frenchman Massenet, and you have the composers whose operas the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato has made her own. She's one of the few who has become a classic opera...

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The Good Wife, Series 7, More4 / The Nightmare Worlds of HG Wells, Sky Arts

Seventh series (★★★★) of the superior legal drama (still perversely tucked away on the obscurantist More4), and Alicia Florrick is having to get back to legal basics. Having been blown up by a political landmine in series six, as she made an ill-...

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Occupied, Sky Arts

Even the most glazed-eyed Europhile must have begun to notice that the EU's righteous halo is dimming a tiny bit. Against a backdrop of currency chaos and uncontrolled immigration, issues of sovereignty and national self-determination are...

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The South Bank Show: Abi Morgan, Sky Arts 1

It’s been a decade since the television drama Sex Traffic brought writer Abi Morgan into the mainstream. It won an impressive collection of awards, and its tale of international prostitution networks, and their brutality, was as harsh and under-the-...

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South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2014

Poor David Bowie. He didn't win a Grammy for his album The Next Day, and he didn't win a South Bank Sky Arts Award today either. That honour went to Arctic Monkeys and their fifth album AM, as Melvyn Bragg hosted the ceremony at London's Dorchester...

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Lindsey Buckingham Talks Music, Sky Arts One

Sometimes TV doesn’t need to be “challenging” or “groundbreaking” to be thoroughly worthwhile. The first episode of Sky Arts' new “…talks music” series saw the familar format of a live, seated interview applied to one of pop music’s highest...

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