Sky Arts
Kieron Tyler
What if John Lennon had left The Beatles in 1962? What if they had continued without him? And what if he had still become the acid-tongued, ready-with-a-quip character the real world became familiar with? Snodgrass took those what-ifs and ran with them to depict a parallel world that was less the “hilarious comedy drama” trailed by Sky and more a gloomy, slightly creepy oddity made even more so by Ian Hart’s deft, second-nature portrayal of a Lennon floundering on life’s scrapheap.Hart has played Lennon twice before and this third outing took him into an imaginary scenario originally created Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Bulgakov gets about more than you’d think. As a character in the play Collaborators, the Russian novelist was most recently seen helping Stalin with his memoirs. Within the last couple of years his novels The Master and Margarita and The White Guard have both been adapted for the stage, while A Dog’s Heart was turned into an opera. All of these works were imbued with the Bulgakovian scent for phantasmal satire. So what's next for an author hooked on shape-shifting and the surreal?Don’t run a mile quite yet, but his memoir of serving as a young doctor in rural Ukraine has been turned into a Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
For those who saw David Tennant’s outstanding Hamlet either during the production’s 2008 run at the RSC or in its later television incarnation, there’s likely to be some built-in intrigue to his role in the debut instalment of new Sky Arts series Playhouse Presents, not least because his cut-glass vocals and pervasive melancholy are more than a tad reminiscent of his take on the Dane.But his character in the Will Self-penned short play, the first of 10, is sullenly self-absorbed to an extent that makes Hamlet look positively ebullient by comparison. A bored, bitter artist living in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The final section of The Joy of Disco illustrated how disco music grew into a vast global phenomenon. It had been brought to the popular mainstream by the success of Saturday Night Fever, was enjoyed by grannies at Pontins, and even prompted 70-something showbiz veteran Ethel Merman to make a disco album.But the central theme of the film was the way that disco represented the triumph of social groups who had been deemed to fall outside the prevailing social norms. Blacks, gays and Hispanics flocked to join the scintillating Church of Disco as it blossomed through the Seventies, and it became Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve been this way before. A few years ago the BBC screened a series called Play It Again, in which celebrities had a crack at performing on musical instruments which they had not visited in decades. Sky Arts have revisited the concept with a series called First Love, whose first six programmes went out last year and featured a usual array of celebrity suspects starring in a game of friends reunited, the musical version. The new series includes among others Stephen Mangan on acoustic guitar, Shaun Ryder on saxophone, the inevitable Alastair Campbell on bagpipes, but it begins in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Three years after it was, as they say, "let go" by ITV, The South Bank Show, with Melvyn Bragg at the helm, is set to return on Sky Arts in 2012. The idea has been in the wind since Sky Arts revived The South Bank Show Awards in January this year, but the news was formally announced yesterday (30 November). Reflecting on a television career that began in 1963 when he landed a job as "Ken Russell's gofer", Bragg said that making arts television was what he'd always wanted to do and remains his passion."I'm really, really chuffed to bits that The South Bank Show is back in town," he declared. " Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Unless one has been misreading the policy stylings of the oddly named "Nigel Farage" and his merry band of isolationists, the general idea behind UKIP is that Nothing Good ever came out of Europe. Party members may therefore wish to pursue a blanket avoidance of decent crime drama, almost all of which comes from our continental neighbours. First there was The Killing which went on more or less forever and was more addictive than crack. Spiral was barely less cultish. And after the entries from Denmark and France, now a succulent Italian crime drama takes its turn to stick around for an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last March’s Japanese earthquakes and tsunami, as we know, brought devastation to hundreds of thousands of Japanese. But it also caused a crisis in the 3D film industry, just as it is attempting to be born. The most important 3D tape stock finishing factory in the world was swept away by the waters.In the burgeoning 3D film world this caused consternation, and for no one more than the producers of the 3D version of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake that was just about to be shot at Sadler’s Wells by Leopard Films. It caused a terrifying lurch in price for the making of what has to be seen as a Read more ...
fisun.guner
When a celebrity lets their public mask slip, something wonderful and also disconcerting can happen: they can noticeably become someone else. If they’re lucky, that change can be so marked that they become just another face in a crowd. Of course, if he were in a police line-up, I’m sure I’d have no problem picking out Stephen Fry, but something of that discernable physical shift happened in last night’s In Confidence, when Fry appeared in the interview hot seat with Laurie Taylor.Fry’s fame is such that he does, in fact, get stopped wherever he goes. And he talked - naturally, very eloquently Read more ...