Our Most South-Westerly Tip of England Correspondent finds a wholly different and original perspective on the world outside his front door (Different Ways of Seeing is on at Penlee House Gallery & Museum in Penzance until 12 November). I recently visited a gallery (www.penleehouse.org.uk) around the corner from my home which ... Read More...
Dabbler Review
Current TV and film
Brit watches "an exercise in petty catharsis by an embarrassed left-liberal media establishment" and asks why satire isn't funny any more... The recent 50th birthday of Private Eye, Britain's leading satirical magazine, was marked by an avalanche of glowing media tributes. But for Christopher Booker, its first editor and still an ... Read More...
Brit praises Thomas Alfredson's new adaptation of the Le Carre classic... A Saturday night visit to the ring-road multiplex is not, in the normal course of things, an activity of particular cultural sophistication. Grown-ups in JD sportsgear (i.e.oversized romper suits) toddle open-mouthed from the shouty, flashy blast of the foyer into ... Read More...
The Poster King, the marvellous Edward McKnight Kauffer exhibition at The Estorick Collection, provokes some thoughts on the advertising of today. The idea that advertising can be art became entirely uncontroversial, or at least it seemed to me, around about the time of the Guinness Surfer ad. But one wonders whether you could make ... Read More...
Brit watches the first episode of series 2 of Downton Abbey (Sunday ITV1 9pm), the smash-hit pile of country house tosh... “What shall we call each other?” asks the visitor. “Well, whay don’t we start with Deem Meggie Smeeeeeeuth?” drawls Jennifer Saunders in the Comic Relief spoof of Downton Abbey – the only funny ... Read More...
I don't know how he did it, but a few weeks ago Evan Davis managed to smuggle a quite shocking heresy past the the BBC editors. In an episode of Made in Britain he argued, gently but persuasively, that the primary cause of the collapse of heavy British industry in late ... Read More...
Bryan Appleyard responds to Mahlerman's review of Tree of Life... Much as I esteem Mahlerman, on the subject of Terrence Malick's film Tree of Life he has made a familiar film reviewer's mistake - criticising a film for not being another film. Malick, more than any other director, has earned the ... Read More...
If it is true that the execration of American cinema is its need to package, to sell something, so that the true aesthetic judgement becomes a valuation of whether the packaging has enough heft, then Tree of Life, only the fifth film by director Terrence Malick in forty years, must ... Read More...
Is Evan Davis the most modest man in Britain? In a recent Sunday newspaper Q&A he was asked whether he was too 'lightweight' to present the Today programme. His answer: I'm keen not to lose the things that made people say I was lightweight, but I'm also keen not to be seen ... Read More...
It’s been 15 years since Jamie Oliver slid down a spiral banister and into our lives, and whilst he remains the same old scooter riding Peter Pan, decked out in his Kevin the Teenager garb, Jamie PLC has been busy carving out a serious business empire - what with the ... Read More...