sun 08/12/2024

TV arts

Imagine... Anselm Kiefer, BBC One

Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results,...

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South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2014

Poor David Bowie. He didn't win a Grammy for his album The Next Day, and he didn't win a South Bank Sky Arts Award today either. That honour went to Arctic Monkeys and their fifth album AM, as Melvyn Bragg hosted the ceremony at London's Dorchester...

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Television: 10 Top Performances from 2013

No definitive answers to what was "the best" of 2013 of course, and I daresay opinions will differ wildly. For instance, despite the plaudits showered on it elsewhere, I felt that Broadchurch stretched itself too thin after showing initial promise....

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Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies, BBC Four

BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily...

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The Space makes room for all the arts online

Now live and online is The Space, the new "freely available digital arts space" developed by Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC. Over the next 6 months, The Space will showcase high-profile arts events from across the UK, adding new...

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South Bank Show returns to TV with awards

The South Bank Show is returning to TV on 27 May on Sky Arts, announces the broadcaster, to be preceded by the ceremony for the 16th South Bank Sky Arts Awards. The awards event on 1 May at the Dorchester Hotel, London, highlights the year's top...

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2011: Ladies With Ukuleles and Blockbusters With Bite

2011 was an excellent year for highly original music from female musicians, two of whom brandished ukuleles yet found quite different ways of using them.New England’s Merrel Garbus (otherwise known as Tune-Yards) put her foot down on the effects...

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South Bank Show comes to Sky Arts

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,...

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DVD: Dramarama - Spooky

'Dramarama - Spooky': it's been parodied by everyone from Victoria Wood to The League of Gentlemen

This series of supernatural dramas from the early 1980s is the sort of thing that could very easily be parodied – has been parodied, in fact, by everyone from Victoria Wood and French and Saunders to The League of Gentlemen and Garth Merenghi's...

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DVD: Macbeth

Your Macbeth opens in the round, tailored to a small studio theatre. In entrusting it to television, do you engage someone experienced in the medium to render faithfully the spaces and the talking heads, as Trevor Nunn did for the deservedly...

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theartsdesk in Hay: Books Etcetera

Hollywood-on-Wye: Rob Lowe talks to Mariella Frostrup at Hay

Watching bookaholic punters tramping down windswept country lanes in hiking boots, anoraks and rucksacks instantly alerts you to the singular quality of the Hay Festival, though it's surprising that nobody has grasped the glaring opportunity to...

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Treme, Sky Atlantic

When Treme debuted on HBO in the States, some excitable critics watched the pilot episode and instantly proclaimed it a masterpiece superior even to The Wire. David Simon, who created both shows, may have been delighted. Or on the other hand, he...

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