Welcome to the grown-up rock mothership. I've seen bands play in TV studios plenty of times over the years, but walking into the Later... With Jools Holland recording at BBC Television Centre for the first time, as I did last night, is something else. Studios generally have a disappointing feeling of smallness, or of looking behind the curtain to reveal artifice, but this genuinely was like stepping into the TV screen: the circle of bands and punters exactly as you see it when the camera spins around in the show's intro.
Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking artists in their own right, in fact. As such, the school is considered to be something of a star in itself. So what’s its secret? This BBC Four two-parter aimed to find out - and, you’ve guessed it, in keeping with a certain jaunty documentary-making tradition, it gave the participants just enough rope to hang themselves.
For The Pacific, the 10-part saga of a group of US Marines involved in the campaign to drive back the rampant Japanese army in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Spielberg has resumed the executive producer role he adopted to make Band of Brothers nearly a decade ago, once again in partnership with Tom Hanks.
Of course I’ve not been anticipating the appearance of the new Doctor with quite the counting-the-days excitement of many children, teenagers and anoraked adults across the land. But to invert the Jesuit motto, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," my seven-year-old self has recently resurfaced, resulting in at least a frisson of excitement. After all, there’s also a new Tardis, a new assistant, some new bug-eyed monsters, and hopefully one or two scripts as scary as "Blink" or as inexplicably moving as "Human Nature/The Family of Blood".
Take two sets of separated parents and observe their opposing response to sharing the children. Colin and Alison haven’t involved lawyers, and divide childcare equally and amicably. Sandy, on the other hand, has spent tens of thousands of pounds on legal fees in order secure access to his four children with Rose, a woman who was so inured to being dragged through the family courts by her ex-husband that not until fairly late on in the quietly excellent Who Needs Fathers? did she notice that she had now been pulled into the court of public opinion - and a trial by television. It gave a whole meaning to the term “in camera”.
The first cinema was two-thirds empty. A hundred seats had been laid out by the Lumière brothers in a Parisian salon, but only 33 of them were occupied. The small audience saw a film in which a crowd, mostly women in long dresses but also a large bounding dog, pour through a tall gate. None of them looks at the camera, as we would now. In 1895, stardom was not yet associated with film. The dog, as dogs will, gave much the most attention-seeking performance.