politics
Jasper Rees
Coalitions make for drama, and for comedy. We know that from, respectively, Borgen and the final series of The Thick of It. It is little wonder therefore that soon after the 2010 election delivered a hung Parliament, the National Theatre commissioned a play. And yet the drama that emerged was not about deals struck in back rooms by the Cameron-Clegg government. Instead, This House spirits its audience back to 1974, the year Labour embarked on five years’ of horse-trading as it sought to govern the country with an overall majority of three.James Graham was born in 1982, the year of the Read more ...
Justin Adams
In this cut and paste world, we have become used to a multiplicity of images: screens, words and pictures from across the globe and across history flicker through our field of vision, competing for our attention with the natural world, the urban environment and our own memories, thoughts and dreams. The artist who most successfully began to express this new vision of the world was Robert Rauschenberg.In my teens in the Seventies, I was drawn to the bright colours of Pop Art in opposition to the murky palettes of the Old Masters. But Lichtenstein and Warhol's cool attractiveness seemed in the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
TV can be a powerful tool of redemption. Take Strictly Come Dancing – anything that can shift perception of Ann Widdecombe from poisonous homophobe to innocuous have-a-go hero is dark, dark magic indeed. Just this week, the Strictly dancefloor has finally bid goodbye to Ed Balls after housing him for almost as long as the role of Shadow Home Secretary, and society is opening its arms to him – a politician with a reputation as a ruthless bully. It's another example of TV-led Munchausen syndrome by proxy.In Channel 5’s fly-on-the-wall documentary, MPs Behind Closed Doors, redemption also seemed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's remarkable that the story of Seretse Khama, the king of Bechuanaland, isn't more popularly known, though Amma Asante's film may change all that. The movie opens in a smoggy, gloomy London in 1947, where Seretse (David Oyelowo) is completing his studies in law prior to returning to rule his homeland. Momentous change is in the air in the post-war world, as Europe struggles to rebuild and Indian independence signals sundown on the British Empire. Seretse encounters filing clerk Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) at a London Missionary Society dance, where their eyes meet across a crowded Read more ...
graham.rickson
What to do if you’re a despotic leader with an underperforming film industry? Hiring better directors and actors wasn’t an option for Kim Jong-il in the late 1970s, so he took drastic action: luring South Korea’s biggest female star Choi Eun-hee to Hong Kong on false pretences and having her abducted. Her ex-husband, the South’s leading filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, did the honourable thing and went in search of her, only to suffer the same fate. What happened next is the subject of Rob Cannan and Ross Adam’s engrossing documentary.Shin was a financially inept directorial maverick, whose production Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If you thought that a contemporary drama about forcible repatriation, set in an Immigration removal centre, would be about the plight of those confined in places like the infamous Yarl’s Wood, in Removal Men writers MJ Harding and Jay Miller give us something unexpected.Instead of the place's inmates, their play concentrates on what it might be like to work in such an environment. Its origins came when Harding – a founder of the band Fat White Family, sharing composer credits with Jonah Brody – became involved with an intervention to prevent the deportation of a detainee at Yarl’s Wood. He Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New York-born actor Robert Vaughn, who has died at the age of 83, achieved massive popular success when he starred as the sleek secret agent Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and exploited the then-new James Bond mania to ratings-busting effect. Prior to that, Vaughn, both of whose parents were actors, had racked up a long string of minor credits in American TV and movies, the most prestigious of which was an appearance in John Sturges's 1960 cowboy classic, The Magnificent Seven. The latter also starred Steve McQueen, with whom Vaughn Read more ...
Barney Harsent
So we’re less than a week away from America’s choice. Many in the States have presented it as a kind of Sophie’s Choice – an unbearable outcome no matter who they choose. On the one hand they have a racist, sexist, braggart bully who has been named in at least 169 federal lawsuits and is due to appear in court over allegations of child rape, while on the other, they have a professional politician who can’t use email properly. It must be agonising for them.In The Conspiracy Files: The Trump Dossier, programme makers attempted to highlight how "The Donald" has managed to make a choice as stark Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having survived what you might call his boy-band years, Jude Law has emerged as a truly substantial actor, and his role here as Lenny Belardo, the newly-elected Pope Pius XIII, may prove to be a defining moment. Created by a multinational consortium including HBO, Sky Italia and Canal+, The Young Pope confronts the viewer with something of a learning curve, with its mysterious Vatican setting and arcane multi-lingual clerical hierarchy, but by the end of this opening double episode you could sense that this is going to be a weird and wild ride.Director Paolo Sorrentino didn't make it easy on Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Could Jeremy Paxman explain the inexplicable, so that viewers could begin to understand the meaning of the astonishing theatre that is the 2016 American presidential election? We can hardly even grasp the plot, let alone the coming denouement and its repercussions.To those of us on this side of the pond, one candidate is a misogynist lying bullying businessman with a red face and badly dyed hair, who seems to have garnered enormous support among the white working class. Here was Republican Donald Trump, aged 70, aka The Donald, known in Scotland for controversial golf courses, in New York for Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Katori Hall (b. 1981) the embodiment of Martin Luther King’s dream? She was born in Memphis, the city where King died. The Mountaintop, her play about his last night alive, had its world premiere at Theatre 503, a tiny pub stage in south London. But the unanimity of the reviews, combined with the timely arrival of a black man in the White House, propelled the two-hander into the West End where it played to standing ovations from notably multiracial audiences. In a year which saw the premiere of Enron by Lucy Prebble and Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, it won the coveted Best New Play award Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Oh BBC Four, we do love you, but this was an uncomfortable proposition from the start. We watch your pop music documentaries, because – let's face it – nobody else is making any, but so often they are pretty thin gruel. There are gems, of course, generally the ones focusing on an individual artist or label, or super-specific genre or time period. But the broad-sweep ones are more often than not a hodge-podge, seemingly governed in their narrative by what library footage was available, but also by a cripplingly old, white, rock establishment view of history.Even when soul and reggae are the Read more ...