England
Marina Vaizey
The country is groaning under the weight of commemorations, exhibitions, publications and programmes all marking significant anniversaries of World War One, but the underlying message – lest we forget – remains as potent as ever, perhaps even more so in these tumultuous times.Narrating this documentary chiefly concerned with the art of the First World War, Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne told us that the art described the indescribable, conveying what is beyond description. If that sounds unbearably fey it isn’t at all, for the surprise and interest of this programme was in fact two-fold: Read more ...
Sheila Rock
I had never really photographed landscape. But I spent many wonderful weekends in Suffolk and Norfolk along the coast. This project began when I just decided to photograph the sea in a very abstract way. The sky and the light and the flatness were quite inspiring for me.And then commercial jobs were taking me to places like Staithes near Whitby in North Yorkshire, and Cornwall, and I just thought it was so beautiful that I’d say to my assistant, “If I book you for a day or two, let’s travel along the coast and do some more atmospheric pictures.” As I began to explore other parts of the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
"I sometimes wish we were more normal," sighs one of the adult Bliss children in Noel Coward’s country-house comedy. But it’s her family’s self-dramatising abnormality that provides both the froth and the substance of this early play, written in a blaze of youthful elan over three days in 1924. What has kept it a theatrical staple for 90 years and counting is not just its writer’s talent to amuse, nor its near-perfect structure: it is also the stain of truth that seeps through its merry mayhem, drawing on Coward’s own experience as a hapless weekend houseguest, and his sharp-eyed observations Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ken Russell remained British cinema’s enfant terrible till his death in 2011, aged 84. Rather than fade into respectability, he retreated to amateur provocations filmed in his back garden, and returned to the dramatised documentaries on classical musicians which made his name for the BBC in the Sixties. His notoriety peaked with Women In Love’s nude male wrestling in 1969, the nude nuns and corrupt bigotry of 1971’s The Devils and his chat show assault on its critic Alexander Walker, and The Who’s Tommy (1975).Russell’s decision not to direct Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday as his cinema debut Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Look at me, and think of England. This marvellous array of quirky, idiosyncratic watercolours by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) from the 1930s until his premature death during wartime when his plane, on an air sea rescue mission for which he had volunteered, crashed in Iceland. It is full of memorable and haunting pictures. Drawing on a profound understanding of the history of the English watercolour and its concentration both on domesticity and majesty, Ravilious utilised the conventional response – in part the English distrust of grandeur and ambition – to produce a subtle assault on such Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Philippa Perry, 20 years a psychotherapist, was the dashing narrator of this history of 300 years of agony aunts (or uncles). Wearing a bright orange coat, she cycled between libraries, universities, newspaper and magazine offices, looking at centuries-old publications and interviewing contemporary writers. It was a fact-studded visual essay, but in spite of the raciness of its subject, oddly bland.It all started in the 1690s with The Athenian Mercury, published for one of the new coffee houses which had sprung up in London. Its editor-in-chief John Dunton is given the accolade of inventing Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is everything of the quiet achiever about Dobrinka Tabakova. The softly-spoken Bulgarian-British composer was born in 1980 into a music-loving family of doctors, scientists and academics in the town of Plovdiv in Bulgaria and moved to England in 1991. She has garnered composition prizes from Amsterdam, London, New York, Neuchâtel, Vienna and Warsaw. She has been featured composer or composer-in-residence in Utrecht, Sigulda (Latvia), Lockenhaus (Austria), Dubrovnik, Berlin, Hong Kong and Oxford, and will have a major focus on her work this year at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival and at Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It’s a hostage to fortune really to create a play on one of the funniest books ever written, and a Victorian one at that. Still, Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat is regularly mined for stage and small screen entertainment, and this version by Craig Gilbert turns out to be a diverting and enjoyable touring show for Britain’s small town theatres, for which hurray, and particularly so for towns on the Thames, where the boat hired by J, George and Harris is being ever so uncertainly steered.The striped blazers, overgrown schoolboy indolence, and the constant practical joking on each other, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's the story they tried to ban! Reinventing the Royals was supposed to have been broadcast in January, but was yanked from the schedules when Prince Charles's staff at Clarence House withheld archive footage, apparently because of a behind-the-scenes battle between royal advisers.Anyway here it is now, and you can understand why Charles might have taken exception to how he's portrayed. For a start it's presented by Steve Hewlett, who was the editor of Panorama when it broadcast Princess Diana's confession of adultery in 1995. The smarmy-looking Hewlett (pictured below) now plies his trade Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The broomsticks are back in the cupboard, wands are no longer at the ready, and no one is casting spells in cod Latin. JK Rowling’s first novel for adults has made its inevitable journey from page to screen. The first view of a picturesque Cotswolds village – a mannikin in erotic underwear provocatively on all fours in a shop window – says it succinctly: we’re not in Hogwarts any more.The setting of The Casual Vacancy is Pagford, a village in rural southern England where the haves and have-nots, the plummy toffs and the loamy yokels, co-exist cheek by jowl. That’s the way it always has been Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Last autumn Rumer reappeared with her third album, Into Colour, surprising everyone with a lead single that was disco-flavoured. The rest of the album was closer in scope to the opulent LA easy listening and classic West Coast singer-songwriter fare that the singer has made her own since her first major label single, “Slow”, blew up in 2010.Born Sarah Joyce in Islamabad in 1979 to a large British family, she found she was the result of an affair between her mother and their Pakistani cook. The death of her mother in 2003 affected her profoundly and, when she attempted to track her blood Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mercifully not preceded by a Broadchurch-style hype-tsunami, the new series of Mr Selfridge has slipped neatly back into the Sunday 9pm slot as if it's the rightful owner just back from a year of travelling round the world. It's not revolutionary, ground-breaking or "subversive", but equipped with some new characters and promising plotlines, this opening episode ushered us into the post-World War One era with a spring in its step and the wind in its hair.However, first we had to dispatch poor Rose Selfridge, Harry's much-loved wife (who was played by Frances O'Connor, latterly of The Missing Read more ...