A penny for the author’s thoughts. An opening montage makes it quite clear that Vladimir Nabokov had no truck with witless modernity. Yet here nonetheless is a documentary on his infamous bestseller, and they've gone and named after a TV talent show about the hunt for an actress to play a singing nun in a West End musical. Why? Was the idea to interest Sound of Music fans in Lolita? If they were going for a song, that dodgy one from Gigi would have been rather more apposite: “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”.
tv reviews
Adam Sweeting
"They all laughed at Rockefeller Centre, now they’re fighting to get in,” as the Gershwins put it.
Jasper Rees
You can just picture the meeting. Someone stands up and pitches. “We’ve got this girl, see. And she’s good at numbers, OK? You know, maths and stuff. But here’s the thing: she knows that statistically her best chance of a successful marriage is if she gets hitched to her 11th sexual partner when she’s 28. With me so far, guys? Trouble is, she discovers on her wedding day that Mister Eleven is really Mister Ten. Yeah? And then all hell breaks loose. What you reckon? Eh? Think it’s a goer?” Silence reigns in the room until the head honcho - you somehow assume it is a man - slowly raises his honcho head and delivers his solemn verdict. “I love it!!”
josh.spero
If Andrew Graham-Dixon's arts career ever goes belly-up, there is surely a microphone with his name on it at Radio 4, so warm and confident and trustworthy is his voice. Judging, however, by his new three-part programme on BBC Four, The Art of Russia, there is no chance of this happening soon.
Jasper Rees
A bit like the British constitution, it’s never been written down. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist: the edict, issued from a leather-bound desk somewhere within the innermost enclave of the citadel that is Television Centre, that an audience’s intelligence must never in any circumstances ever be taken as a given. No horses were frightened in the making of this programme.
Adam Sweeting
Luckily, the budget for this two-part adaptation of Andrea Levy's prizewinning novel stretched to some location shooting in Jamaica. The contrast between the Caribbean's luminous skies and brilliant colours and crushed, monochrome, half-dead 1940s London is almost too painful to watch. It's the perfect visual metaphor for a story about Technicolor dreams crashing to earth
Jasper Rees
It always used to be said that boarding school prepares you for every hardship. Whether that includes prison in one of the most impenitent dictatorships in Africa is not a question that was put to Simon Mann in last night’s edition of Storyville. Mann, still incarcerated when the BBC caught up with him, was awaiting a pardon from President Teodoro Obiang, the very potentate he had attempted to topple five years earlier. Never mind that they like to keep a battery and electrodes handy for interrogations, Mann wasn’t about to slag off the great man’s excellent hospitality.
Adam Sweeting
The best thing in Paradox so far has been the enormous explosion that provided the climax to episode one, as a train stranded on a railway bridge was incinerated by an erupting chemical tanker. A dramatic aerial shot captured an angry pillar of smoke and flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air, against a backdrop of lush Lancashire countryside.
Ismene Brown
If Margot Fonteyn and Rudy Nureyev were the most massively important people who ever existed in ballet, then the most massively important question that ever existed in ballet was, did they sleep together? Last night Margot got this over pleasingly quickly. There was the quivery BBC anno at the start that there would be scenes “of a sexual nature”, and hop-skip-jump the couple were at it like rabbits straight after their first performance together.
josh.spero
The battleground: beauty. What’s at stake: our souls. At least on these two things philosophy don Roger Scruton (presenter of Why Beauty Matters) and art critic Waldemar Januszczak (presenter of Ugly Beauty) were agreed in the Modern Beauty season. For despite very different ideas of beauty, they both reached the same conclusion: it is there to nourish the soul.