sex
Nick Hasted
This story drops down the rabbit-hole so fast, you doubt it’ll ever hit bottom. Kiwi TV presenter David Farrier’s human interest items of the That’s Life/One Show sort led him to feature “competitive tickling” videos. His interest drew disproportionate, homophobic legal wrath from their mysterious maker, and this crowd-funded documentary is Farrier and co-director Dylan Reeve’s stubborn response. If revelations aren’t quite on the level of Searching for Sugar Man or The Imposter, the layers of deceit it reveals are grippingly unexpected.The tickling leagues, like their maker’s loopy Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The chances are, you’ve only ever seen Flaming June in reproduction: since 1963 it has resided in the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, an out-of-the-way location that reflects the universal disdain for Victorian art in the post-war period. When the painting disappeared and then resurfaced in a house on Battersea Rise it was rejected by every British museum imaginable, eventually being bought by the enterprising curator Luis A Ferré, to form part of what is now recognised as a world-class collection of Victorian art.Returned to the studio at Leighton’s fabulous "House Beautiful" for the Read more ...
David Nice
After a day of sheer pain, would it be endless night or cathartic relief at ENO? Both, must be the answer, and much more, all at once. Iconoclastic Frank Wedekind's "earth-spirit" Lulu, exploited as a street-child but now able to turn the tables for a while on male bourgeois weakness, lives through one horrible situation after another before dying at the hands of Jack the Ripper, but Alban Berg's never merely atonal score gives such transcendent warmth to the spell she casts just by being.Has it ever sounded more grounded in its beauty, or more closely connected with the stage shenanigans, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Following no less than three smash-hit, sell-out runs in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe, the King’s Head Theatre production of Joe DiPietro’s Fucking Men, or F*cking Men (as the publicity calls it), now transfers to The Vaults Theatre in Waterloo for a five-week run. It’s clearly been around long enough to attract attention. But, apart from the shocking name, what’s it all about? Well, the title speaks volumes actually, because the play is based on the daisy-chain sexual encounters of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 classic, La Ronde, except that here the action is transposed onto the gay Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The procedure of introductions in Louis Theroux: Savile seemed somehow more elaborate than usual. Knocking on the door of those he was about to talk to for what might have been dubbed “Savile Revisited”, Louis Theroux was unusually careful about his greeting ritual: “I’m Louis”, “Can I come in?”, “Should I take off my shoes?” That last one was perhaps the fairest question here, because he was bringing all sorts of past horrors and dirty deceits into these clean and tidy homes.This was Theroux confronting Jimmy Savile – on his own behalf, for the BBC, and, by implication, all the rest of us, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (****) hit cinemas in summer 1970, it is a pivotal Sixties film as it depicts the era in terminal crash-and-burn mode. Cashing in on but not a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, it caught the female pop-group trio the Kelly Affair’s assimilation into and corruption by Hollywood. Renamed the Carrie Nations, they consume drugs, have ill-advised sexual liaisons and sell records by the bucketful. Good-natured singer Kelly MacNamara (Dolly Read) side-lines her boyfriend – their manager – to purse an affair with a money grubbing beefcake.Characters vampirically Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Have you seen Fleabag yet? If not, here’s the one-word review: brilliant. You need three hours to watch the lot on the iPlayer, which is BBC Three’s main address these days. Do come back afterwards and read this longer appreciation, which contains spoilers.So, Fleabag. Brilliant. It was written by and stars Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the eponymous singleton, and began life as a fringe play at Edinburgh before moving south. Like Miranda it features a dark-haired single woman making confiding asides to camera. It’s as if she’s her own Greek chorus supplying a running commentary from the wings. ( Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So much has happened since the first of June when Versailles flounced on to our screens with its flowing locks and flashing cocks. The British people have voted to widen the Channel, the Conservatives have a new leader, Labour doesn’t have one and Christopher Biggins has been expelled from the Big Brother house. As Louis XIV might have said: plus ça change…The title song (Now and Forever by M83) became increasingly haunting as the weeks and wigs (often with heads still attached) rolled by. The series lost interest in sex as more and more bricks were laid, the palace took shape and glory shone Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Remember Sex Box? Perhaps you were wisely watching paint dry that night instead. Sex Box was part of Channel 4’s ongoing commitment to making the nation’s toes curl in horror. It involved couples getting it eponymously on in the titular container, after which they emerged blinking into the studio lights to give a blow by blow account to Mariella Frostrup. As if that wasn’t barrel-scrapingly unBritish enough, here for your viewing pleasure is Naked Attraction.The premise is that physical attraction is a sine qua non of a romantic relationship, so why not begin at the beginning and create a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sex sells. That's the well-upholstered thinking behind Brief Encounters. A disparate group of northern women beat off (sorry) the recession by flogging marital aids at saucy Tupperware parties. Shtupperware, if you will. One of them's dear old Penelope Wilton. Goodness. Cousin Violet's eyebrows would perform a pole vault. You know where you are in this drama-by-numbers. Even the title is below the belt, shamelessly flashing its naughty smalls at David Lean's classic buttoned-up Forties romance. The plot is loosely based on Jacqueline Gold’s memoir about the birth of Ann Summers. That was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was an exhumation waiting to happen. As the UK ponders trashing Europe, Eurotrash was summoned from the grave to remind voters what they’ll be missing if enough Brits put an X in the exit box. The Europe of Eurotrash is not grey suits and fisheries legislation. It’s a place where a ruling on the straightness of cucumbers is a gag waiting to happen, where pooches and porn stars stand for political office, where the then future Madame Sarkozy could be distinctly heard to ask, “Do you like my titties?”.It’s not easy or appropriate to write about Eurotrash the day after the referendum Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
In the middle of the last century the worst thing that could be said about a working-class housewife was that she had “run off with a black man”. Well, the Queen of France, no better than she ought to be, has had it off with a black man (in fact her pet dwarf). Last week’s opening episode of Versailles ended with Louis XIV (George Blagden) setting eyes on the resulting black baby for the first time.The second episode immediately picks up the baby and runs with it – all the way to a blind wet nurse from whose breast the sinister henchman Marchal (Tygh Runyan) plucks it before attempting Read more ...