England
Adam Sweeting
Tucked away in a warren of residential streets in the older part of Guildford, The Old Glassworks looks like a lock-up garage, and seems to have been designed to repel unwanted attention with a private force-field of anonymity. Once you've been welcomed inside, however, you find yourself in an improbable wonderland of mysterious musical instruments, from lutes and rare 17th century guitars to members of the violin family in various states of deconstruction.Above all, you'll find the newly-built guitars of the owner of the establishment, Brian Cohen. Born in South Africa but resident in Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Barbican has built a steady reputation for almost unclassifiable large-scale art exhibitions, particularly in architecture, design and photography: they have been underestimated pioneers, often working in areas themselves under-scrutinised. Thus they often manage to surprise, and so it is here.This vast anthology is subtitled “Britain as Revealed by International Photographers”, and has been assembled under the aegis of Martin Parr, the highly successful photographer of the banalities of British life. It looks through the eyes of 23 foreigners, including five women, at the last eight Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the camera lingered lovingly over landscaped gardens and ravishing English countryside with a stately home parked squarely in the back of the frame, one could hardly avoid slipping into a Downtonesque reverie. Even more so when the assembled posh personages arrayed prettily on the greensward began to discuss marriage and inheritance, triggering echoes of the fabled Downton "entail".Clearly, screenwriter Julian Fellowes is not minded to relinquish his grip on ITV's plum 9pm Sunday slot, and his motto may be "if it ain't broke, don't fix it any more than you have to". If he couldn't bring us Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The weekly magazine Country Life was founded in 1897, and is now perhaps improbably owned by Time Inc UK. Its popular image among people who do not necessarily ever look at it is defined by the famous (or infamous) girls in pearls: those portraits of well-groomed fiancées, a kind of weekly visual equivalent of – say – Desert Island Discs for prosperous young aristos, which introduce the articles of each issue. There have been 6,000 such young belles since 1897, interspersed with an occasional Prince Harry or William – not wearing pearls.This time round it was a Yorkshire lass, Ella Charlotte Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When it comes to losing power, and powers failing, Michael Gambon has once again proved himself the ruler of choice. The actor who gave us his Lear when he was only just hitting his forties has had three decades of gurning and grouching to ready himself for Churchill’s Secret, and those earlier royal storm rantings even got a wry mention in Charles Sturridge’s nicely autumnal, rather more sotto voce drama. The nuances of ceding control and attendant family upset were gentler, more manicured lawn than blasted heath, but the sense that death’s door was creaking open gave Gambon a chance to riff Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This slightly ludicrous programme is really a chance to see a charming range of dogs and cats, based on an assumption that by comparing cats and dogs we humans can decide which species is best. But best for what? As pets, domestic companions, survivors in the human jungle?Both species have survived indeed by attaching themselves in one way and another to various human societies, and even managing in certain societies to be worshipped as divine beings, Egypt being a prime example, while now some Asian countries see dogs as a food source. Well, they eat guinea pigs in South America; one country Read more ...
Mary Finnigan
This extract from Mary Finnigan’s book Psychedelic Suburbia describes events leading up to the creation of the Beckenham Arts Lab, during the early period after David moved into her flat in Foxgrove Road, Beckenham in April 1969. The book was published by Jorvik Press on 8 January 2016 – three days before David died in New York. In early May, Hutch comes to stay for a few days and adds the dimension of his refined guitar skill to David’s compositions. David can strum to useful effect, but he has not learned to finger pick.I never get to know Hutch well, but on first impression he seems to be Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's hard to disagree with Matthew Wright, in his brisk analysis of the shortcomings of British crime drama (see below). He notes how flashes of inspiration are smothered by skimpy budgets and the timidity of commissioning editors. The disastrous anti-climax of London Spy was a classic example. A British Sopranos seems further away than ever.But all is not lost, and as our picks of the year show, there has still been plenty of great stuff to watch, from the finely-woven historical drama of Wolf Hall to the dark and daring Jessica Jones or the comic touch of Mackenzie Crook and Peter Kay. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Earlier this year, Sky Living showed The Enfield Haunting, a tale of eerie events in a 1970s council house. One of its stars was Timothy Spall, playing a paranormal researcher. Maybe he had a premonition that his son Rafe would carry on the family's supernatural tradition in the leading role of Harry Price: Ghost Hunter (★★★★★).Anyhow, Spall Jr was shrewd, witty and skilful in the role of a 1920s spookbuster called in to investigate the mysterious case of a politician's wife, Grace Goodwin, who had been found wandering naked in a London market. Part of the problem was that she and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On Monday ITV showed BAFTA Celebrates Downton Abbey, in which a massed gathering of cast and crew plus a few celebrity guests toasted Downton's five-year stampede to global acclaim. Its creator Julian Fellowes waddled onstage and told an anecdote about how he'd been accosted by a Downton fan while browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookshop in New York. "Just let Edith be happy!" she wailed at him.As it turned out in this double-length finale, he did, exercising the God-like authority the Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA-scooping show has bestowed on him. In fact it all went a bit Richard Curtis as Read more ...
Mark Kidel
There was a time when the BBC provided a creative context – free of the anxiety-fuelled micro-management that characterises commissioning today – that gave a great deal of space to original and experimental film-making. While the pioneering work of French documentarians in the 1950s and 1960s was subsidized by an enlightened state, British documentary made advances thanks to public (and later commercial) television.Subtitled "The Evolution of the British Documentary", this well-curated BFI compilation of BBC films from 1951-1967 pays homage to a variety of films and TV programmes that provide Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though Alfred the Great was renowned for educational and social reforms as much as for whupping the Danes on the battlefield, I'd never pictured him the way David Dawson has been playing him in The Last Kingdom. Pallid and sickly-looking, and plagued by all-too-human frailties, this Alfred looked more like a weedy consumptive poet than the midfield dynamo of embattled Ninth Century England.Yet it paid off in the end, as Alfred summoned all the strength he could find to drag himself and his entourage out of the soggy Somerset marshes (where, last week, he burnt the cakes in finest 1066 and All Read more ...