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 ...

Stop press: our rampant celebrity culture might not be wholly positive! If you’ve already been apprised of that fact some time in the past century, go ahead and skip actor Daniel Dingsdale’s debut play, which – along with Steve Thompson’s similarly outmoded Roaring Trade in the main house – stifles the often creatively programmed Park Theatre’s claim to relevance.Cast your minds back to 2008, when Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross left messages on Andrew Sachs’s phone claiming Brand had slept with his granddaughter. Here we have another pair of obnoxious, bantering shock jocks – Rob (Tom Maller Read more ...

After the most TV-based election build-up ever seen with big debates, small debates and, for the two main party leaders at least, a traditional Paxo stuffing, the battle buses were parked up as the electorate settled down to watch the big night on the small screen.Channel 4 was up first in a bizarre decision to bolt out of the traps a clear hour before polls closed. This left Jeremy Paxman and David Mitchell with very little to do other than complain about the Ofcom rules that wouldn’t let them discuss politics until 10pm and the Channel 4 schedulers who were, presumably, busy keeping their Read more ...

The voice no longer soars with easeful power, nor does it possess that tingling, honey-coated purity that gave hits such as “Bridge Over Troubled Water” such emotional force. This should hardly come as a surprise, since Art Garfunkel is now 72. Away from Paul Simon, from whom he split in 1970, Garfunkel has had a long, stop-and-start solo career, occasionally writing and recording his own songs but mainly singing other people’s, including those unforgettable Simon hits.But it’s not just age that has affected his vocal cords. The last three and a half years saw Garfunkel suffering vocal cord Read more ...

The Bennet family had an issue. Time to get the Austenesque quips out of the way. For the Bennets in Gems TV the truth universally acknowledged was, roughly: “That a £100 million family-run jewellery television channel risking running out of its best-selling African gem, not to mention suffering from a shortage of screen presenters who can flog the stuff, must be in want of a friendly television documentary format to get them out of their fix.” (For the record, no one seemed sure if it was a single “t” or a double one in Bennet: ITV gave them one – closet Janeites there, eh? – the Read more ...

Jazz FM’s Ian Shaw will host the inaugural Jazz FM Music Awards on Thursday 31 January. Sponsored by audio pioneers Klipsch, piano legends Ramsey Lewis and Ahmad Jamal will both be honoured during the evening. Lewis will receive the Gold Award for Outstanding Contribution to Jazz, while Jamal will collect the Lifetime Achievement award. Both artists are due to perform on the night, with Jamal's closing set featuring a "surprise collaboration".The London Youth Gospel Choir will kick off the evening, and singer Cerys Matthews will join the Jazz FM Awards House Band for a number. The winner of Read more ...

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 ...

Some of the bravest people in theatre operate in the dance world. Lloyd Newson’s new DV8 production, Can We Talk About This?, tackles just as contentious and satirically explosive a subject as Javier de Frutos did in Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez, the luridly anti-Papist work that got him death threats and a BBC ban in 2009. Newson takes on Islamic fundamentalism, confronts head-on the Salman Rushdie fatwa and the multiculturalism chimera, and in doing so may have forced himself to prepare for possible reprisals - not least when he shows this at the National Theatre next spring.The Read more ...

 Rachel McAdams brings her appealing arsenal of kooky, Kewpie-doll twitches to bear on the story of an apparent ditz called Becky, who actually has steely claws to spare when it comes to turning round the fortunes of an ailing Manhattan-based breakfast television program. True to form, the show's bluntly spoken, fitness-obsessed boss (Jeff Goldblum) is ready to give Daybreak the chop if ratings don't improve. (At one point, Becky launches yet a further desperate appeal to her employer during a jog round the Central Park reservoir, as you do.)So what if Becky's job interview is a bluff- Read more ...

And so Mad Men 4 rode into the sunset, Don perched on yet another horse (sorry, love interest), a fifth series in production, and it’s all become a soap opera rather than a drama series. It should be called Madly Men. Fast diminishing returns, one of them me, diminishing possibly to zero next time. I’d held hopes that series 4 would see Don come to the picturesque fall promised in the credit sequence, probably off a cliff far away in the wilderness where his body would lie unnoticed like an empty Lucky Strike packet. His hidden identity would tear through his careful carapace and his Read more ...

That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be deliberately pretentious, because the secret of Mad Men’s addictive draw is the human profundity you try to read into this fascinatingly surfaced drama about an empty man who doesn’t know who he is. This is the ultimate advert for TV, a series so slick and so moreish you don’t even know it’s an advert.If you are already hooked on Mad Men, you don’t Read more ...

theartsdesk received a New Year's gift last night when we were given a significant accolade from BBC Radio 5 Live. In Web 2009 with Helen and Olly, the station's podcasters and self-styled "internet obsessives" Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann recognised theartsdesk as one of the five "essential sites of 2009" in a series of awards to the "cream of weblebrity". The shortlist included such big names as Google Streetview and Spotify, the winner.Our category consisted of sites which "this year seemed to become entirely essential" and the presenters (pictured right) praised theartsdesk's " Read more ...