1960s
Sam Marlowe
If you weren’t sick when you arrived at Les Cerisiers, the private psychiatric hospital in this satiric early Sixties drama by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, you probably would be by the time the institution had finished with you. Its all-female staff are either grotesque or pulchritudinous; and the latter category have a worrying tendency to wind up murdered.The former comprise the sanitorium’s head, hunchbacked, hollow-eyed Dr Mathilde von Zahnd (Sophie Thompson), and her butch, helmet-haired right-hand nurse, Marta Boll (Joanna Brookes). Together with their ill-fated subordinates, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, what strange and wondrous treasures await the record producer given exclusive access to the private vaults of a Beatle. He will, for instance, find entire radio programmes preserved on multi-track tape, and recordings of F1 cars roaring past at some unspecified race track. He will stumble upon a humbled Fab being given his very first sitar lesson by Ravi Shankar, and be privy to a brief musical moment beamed in across the decades from a room at the Jaipur Palace Hotel. There will be a few decent songs, too.One day every last 1/4 inch of this eccentric audio trove may well be exposed to Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
The most shocking moment in this feature-length episode of Mad Men – for which the phrase “long-awaited” seems an understatement after a 17-month hiatus – is a quiet one. It’s not a moment on the level of a man getting his foot severed by a lawnmower, or Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) out-of-nowhere proposal to doe-eyed secretary Megan (Jessica Paré) in last season’s finale. The moment comes when Don, a man who has built a house-of-cards false identity around his passion and creative ingenuity as an ad man, casually admits to his new wife, “I don’t really care about work.”It’s just one of many Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Everything that’s best about the opening episode of Paula Milne’s White Heat, a decade-straddling saga of seven friends who begin as flatmates in 1960s London, is encapsulated in its Hartley-quoting title, The Past Is a Foreign Country. For estranged friends Charlotte (Juliet Stevenson) and Lily (Lindsay Duncan) it’s also a country fraught with unresolved tensions and deeply painful secrets, and one that they’re forced to revisit after a death brings the old group back together in the present day. So far, so The Big Chill. But the more commonly drawn comparison has been to the Beeb’s Read more ...
Andrew Perry
Five minutes before stage time at the Lexington, the latest retro-soul diva from the mighty Universal conglomerate hovered outside the ladies’ toilet downstairs, holding a crutch and looking decidedly nervous. Ren Harvieu was one of the nominees in the BBC’s Sound of 2012, and has been groomed for the past two years in the same Kid Gloves stable, which churned out Duffy and Amy Winehouse. Thus the nation will doubtless soon become readily conversant with her exotic French-Canadian surname, and know that the first one is short for Lauren. Unlike many such major-label racing certainties, Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag from the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn set in London’s so-called Swinging Sixties is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their husbands. “Keep them all happy,” he says in cavalier style, “Happiness is transitory, of the moment.” He takes no responsibility other than helping to arrange the odd back-street abortion. Never get attached and never get dependent - these are his watchwords. Life’s a giggle. His attitude to women is expressed by his dated vocabulary – “bint”, “bird” or just “it”. And he’s always on the fiddle.Half a century Read more ...
graeme.thomson
As this rampant return to our screens repeatedly underlined, one of the great joys of watching The Comic Strip throughout its 30-year frenzy of frantic - if intermittent - silliness has been never knowing what precise manifestation of oddness lurks around each corner. Where else, after all, would you find "Babs" Windsor popping up – utterly gratuitously – to give Tony Blair a meaty snog? Or Ross Noble ambling into frame as a socialist tramp, shortly to be throttled and thrown from a moving train? Or Margaret Thatcher giving full vent to her inner Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson, smeared over Read more ...
sheila.johnston
London, 1961. Duffle coats are the ne plus ultra in hipster cool, everybody smokes like fury and black people are known as negroes in enlightened society (and even enlightened society wouldn't want them moving in next door). In the congenial, shiny-surfaced world of this coming-of-age comedy, the Beatles' first LP is still two years away, and so is sexual intercourse, but not for Jenny. For Jenny, 1961 is an annus mirabilis, the year in which this skittish 16-year-old schoolgirl acquires a wealthy, worldly older admirer. And, being a deal more beautiful than Philip Larkin, she doesn't have to Read more ...