university
Matt Wolf
Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio should see an uptick in admissions on the back of Liberal Arts. The wan cross-generational love story was shot on the invitingly leafy grounds of a campus whose alumni over time have included E L Doctorow, Paul Newman and this very film's own co-star, Alison Janney. But if the place looks lovely, the people decidedly don't. One's best advice for Elizabeth Olsen, who walks off with the film playing a lovestruck undergrad, is to get out - and fast. Instead, this vibrant actress spends most of the film mooning over Jesse (Josh Radnor, who also functioned as Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In the debating chambers and committee rooms of the Conservative Associations of Oxford and Cambridge lurk the Children of Cameron. The current cabinet is to a large extent an Oxbridge Old Boys club and succeeding generations are already being fattened up for the fray. Young, Bright and on the Right - and what an aimless title that was - picked two candidates and sharpened the knives.The film followed them as they negotiated the sharp end of student politics. Twenty-one-year-old Joe Cooke looked like a cross between Chris Evans and John Selwyn-Gummer and possessed a kind of dry charm and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So Fresh Meat approaches the conclusion of season one and, against my expectations, I’ve become a devoted fan. When it was announced that Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain were launching a new sitcom, based around a Manchester student household, it sounded promising; perhaps a postmodern update on The Young Ones was in the offing. Peep Show fans were expecting a riot of sordid humour and cruel jokes of embarrassment. We had those in spades. What we weren’t expecting were such wonderfully written and acted character studies.You grew to really care about perky try-too-hard Welsh Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“Are there any freshers in the audience?" asked Emma-Lee Moss halfway through last night’s set. Two voices raised a muted cheer. Whatever else your average 18-year-old might have been doing, cut loose from the apron strings for the first time in the capital city on a Friday night, they were unlikely to be listening to music this polite and well behaved. Or so you’d hope.She may be less widely heralded than Laura Marling, but both women have recently been doing their utmost to transcend the creative straitjacket of middle-class nu-folk girls-with-guitars. This, oddly, has left Moss's music Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Ben Butley is poisonous, spiteful, a bully, a sadist and a snob. So how does Simon Gray, who created his titular anti-hero in 1971, ensure that an audience can endure his company? He equips him with the kind of lacerating verbal dexterity that makes you catch your breath, appalled and a little awed all at once. And in Lindsay Posner’s fine revival, this nasty, sad, desperate piece of work who, as a lecturer in a London university English department, gets plenty of opportunity to inflict his wit on the soft young sensibilities of eager undergraduates, is played with bilious aplomb by Dominic Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Even taking into account Britain's currently insatiable appetite for the literary, cinematic and televisual output of our Nordic friends, the notion of an “award-winning Icelandic comedy” still sounds a little like one of those lame gags designed to play upon a nation's reputation for batting above average in the international suicide stakes. The pedigree of The Night Shift , however, is no joke. Sadly, it transpired last night that its contents were also no laughing matter.A 12-part comedy show which earned numerous plaudits in Iceland when first shown in 2007, The Night Shift (Næturvaktin) Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Let us begin with the nots. Fashionably weird is not enough. Edgy, whatever that means, is not enough. The repeated use of the word “vagina” is not enough and semi-improvised ensemble acting is not, in itself, quite enough. These were just some of the many not-thoughts which ran through my mind during the opening episode of the much-touted Campus. So what did picky me want? I wanted funny.Created by Green Wing supremo Vicky Pile and written by six of the same team behind that fondly recalled surreal-com, it was difficult not to make comparisons between Green Wing and Campus simply because it Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The story revolves around the character played by Stevenson, Dr Diane Cassell, an academic who specialises in sea-level rises, and works at an Earth Sciences university department. Although she is seen by some as a climate change sceptic, a heretic who deserves the death threats she is beginning to receive, she has a more attractive view of her role. For her, scientists are meant to be sceptical: knowledge only advances when people ask questions. People who “believe” in climate change are merely the newly religious.Such attitudes put Diane on a collision course with Kevin, her head of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No one understands escapism like Willy Russell. Either side of 1980, he wrote two plays about working-class Liverpool women in flight from a humdrum existence. In one a young hairdresser seeks fulfilment through a literary education with the Open University. In the other, a middle-aged housewife has an island-holiday romance. As films, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine earned Oscar nominations for, respectively, Julie Walters and Pauline Collins. As plays, they have barely been off the stage in productions all over the world. The Menier Chocolate Factory shrewdly revived the pair of them Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When artistic director Dominic Cooke took up his new post at this venue in 2007, he said that he wanted “to look at what it means to be middle class, what it means to have power, what it means to have wealth”. Although this comment caused a lot of fuss, with die-hard Royal Court fans imagining that he was about to betray the theatre’s tradition of staging plays about low-lifes, Cooke’s programming has managed to balance gritty underclass dramas with plays about the rich and privileged. Laura Wade’s Posh follows Polly Stenham’s That Face (a hit in 2008) in its exploration of class and social Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
“Green Wing, but set in a university” is one of those useful handles that reviewers were always going to grasp when discussing Victoria Pile’s new improvised ensemble comedy, Campus, the opening try-out in Channel 4’s new Comedy Showcase season of sitcom pilots. For once, the handy nut-shell description is spot on. Campus is precisely that: Green Wing, but set in a university – and as a fan of Green Wing I should feel that that is good thing. However I’m not sure the formula has survived the relocation from hospital to campus.For one thing, they are such different – almost opposite - Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Secondary school teachers accused of not pointing their brighter students towards Oxbridge might feel vindicated by ITV2’s Trinity - although the messages were a little mixed. On the one hand the fictional elitist university college in this new teen dramedy-thriller is dominated by sadistic, floppy-fringed toffs and their debauched secret societies. On the other hand some state-educated freshers might quite like the idea of being asked by lithe, blue-blooded blondes, “Have you ever come on a member of the royal family?”This unsubtle entreaty – addressed to Reggie Yates’s Lewisham lad Theo - Read more ...