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12 items from 2012
TV review: Queen Victoria's Last Love; Beautiful Minds
25 April 2012 4:05 PM, PDT | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »
This film about Queen Victoria and the lowly Indian she loved was all terribly British
They were a rum lot, the Victorians, weren't they? What a crazy, throbbing mass of crinolined contradictions and conflicts they were – endless charitable good works on the one hand, endemic poverty and unshakeable belief in the undeserving poor on the other. It was social suicide if you fiddled suggestively with a glove button in mixed company, but you could shag your way round every brothel in Covent Garden without anyone batting an eyelid. Probably because said eyelids were drooping in the opium dens between brothels, but that's another story.
It is only appropriate, then, that Queen Victoria, leader and symbol of the age, was the rummest of the lot. Deprived of her passionate marriage to Prince Albert by his untimely and very inconsiderate death, she sublimated her energies into overcomplicating mourning practices for the nation ("What a load of crepe! »
- Lucy Mangan
TV highlights 25/04/2012
24 April 2012 4:05 PM, PDT | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »
Our Food | Queen Victoria's Last Love | Beautiful Minds | Justified | Mountains Of Ice | Turtle Boy: A Bodyshock Special
Our Food
8pm, BBC2
Even Giles Coren, who tends to treat "hands on" presenting with a look of deep suspicion, can't suppress his delight when he gets to stoke the fire aboard a steam locomotive. "That's basically the most exciting thing I've ever done in my life," he gushes. Coren's aboard the train to explain how the coming of the railways to Scotland meant hitherto local delicacies could get to market further south. This foodie version of Coast concludes with tales of venison, salmon and the humble spud. Jonathan Wright
Queen Victoria's Last Love
9pm, Channel 4
Victoria's lengthy widowhood was relieved by relationships with charismatic males in her service, most famously John Brown. However, in her old age Victoria became smitten by a young Indian servant, Abdul Karim, whose tales of the »
- Jonathan Wright, David Stubbs, Martin Skegg, Phelim O'Neill, John Robinson
TV review: Divine Women: When God Was a Girl; Beautiful Minds; The Sinking of the Concordia: Caught on Camera
11 April 2012 4:05 PM, PDT | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »
Bettany Hughes whisked us back to the time when the gods were goddesses
It's pretty much a given that God is a bloke, God the father, in all the main monotheistic religions these days. Men have pretty much also sewn up the rights to be his gatekeeper: a female catholic priest is a complete no no; Anglicans won't have women as bishops; and only reform Jews and some Islamic sects countenance women rabbis and imams. But as Bettany Hughes's fascinating documentary, Divine Women: When God was a Girl (BBC2), made clear, it wasn't always so.
The earliest known religious site, Gobekli Tepe in south-east Turkey, which predates Stonehenge by 7,000 years, had an arresting figurine of a woman – either giving birth or being penetrated – at the heart of the temple, suggesting that the first gods were, in fact, goddesses. It was a similar story elsewhere, with goddesses either taking centre stage or, »
- John Crace
Have you been watching … Bang Goes the Theory?
9 April 2012 3:48 AM, PDT | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »
Its hosts may be young, but Bang Goes the Theory is one of the BBC's best populist science programmes for adults ever
Just as it's still slightly fashionable for adults to admit to watching Newsround because its simplicity gives them them a better grounding in current affairs, I have my own confession to make: I have recently become a Bang Goes the Theory devotee.
This is for much the same reason as the Newsround viewers – it's easy for me to get lost with more advanced science shows. I can usually manage about 10 minutes of an average Horizon episode before my brain starts to cry, and only about two minutes of a Brian Cox show before I lose track and start wondering if they really had to fly him all the way to Nairobi just so that he could draw a triangle in the sand with a stick. But I don't have that problem with Bang. »
- Stuart Heritage
Possible future films for Sean Bean
23 March 2012 3:36 AM, PDT | Den of Geek | See recent Den of Geek news »
If Sean Bean has a hole in his schedule, Andrew has a few film pitches that might interest him...
What can you say about Sean Bean that hasn't been said before? He's like a Moomin Shaman. His love is deeper than the sun and he's as gentle as a mother's kiss.
Apologies if your mother sometimes gets a bit carried away. No one needs those flashbacks.
While Robert Carlyle selfishly took the lead role in Sawney Bean, there are still movies out there, potentially, with a Sean Bean shaped hole in them. The Hobbit is set about 78 years before The Fellowship Of The Ring, but maybe Ecthelion II looks quite like his grandson. And maybe, what with it being a Fantasy film, Ecthelion II can somehow have an even more spectacular death than his son. Who can have a baby with Sean Bean's face. I'm fairly sure Weta could »
10 Socially Relevant South Park Episodes
18 March 2012 1:46 AM, PDT | Obsessed with Film | See recent Obsessed with Film news »
It should never have worked and it didn’t for many. The traditional South Park animation was so cheap, so basic and crude and even the writing back then was almost entirely puerile. But that was why I loved it so much. It was a cartoon, but it was so filthy. It was childish, my parents hated it, and that only seemed to spur me on to love it more. At first, it was the fart jokes that hooked me. As a thirteen year old, farts were funny (and as a twenty-five year old, I can honestly say they still are), but something happened to both South Park and myself as the years went by. We grew up.
That potty humour is still there in force. South Park never changed exactly, it’s still the same filthy, offensive, tasteless show it always was (in fact it’s arguably worse today »
- Stuart Bedford
Great Scott! Fitzgerald is enjoying a third act
4 February 2012 4:08 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
New stage and film adaptations of The Great Gatsby attest to Scott Fitzgerald's enduring brilliance and his relevance to our boom and bust age
In one of his most famous and personal obiter dicta, F Scott Fitzgerald once bitterly observed: "There are no second acts in American lives." The author of The Great Gatsby, arguably the supreme American novel of the 20th century, knew what he was talking about.
Few writers have ever enjoyed a more brilliant first act. Fitzgerald's 1925 debut was sensational in a way that's only possible in a feverish, self-inventing society such as the Us. This Side of Paradise was a first novel whose language, characters and attitude haunted the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald's phrase) like a hit song. A five-year creative spree followed, culminating in the book originally titled "Trimalchio in West Egg". As The Great Gatsby, it was a novel that had awestruck critics, led by the young Ts Eliot, »
- Robert McCrum
Books: Book Review: Lawrence M. Krauss: A Universe From Nothing
25 January 2012 10:02 AM, PST | avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news »
In 2009, the Richard Dawkins Foundation posted a video of a Lawrence M. Krauss lecture on YouTube. His discussion of how science says God wasn’t necessary for the creation of the universe racked up more than a million hits and inspired Krauss to expand it into a book. Unfortunately, the concepts he explores are so complex, and filled with so many factors that top physicists and cosmologists don’t understand, expanding on them in print actually makes them more confusing. With an afterward by Richard Dawkins, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing is solidly »
Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate by Terry Eagleton
16 January 2012 11:48 AM, PST | Pastemagazine.com | See recent PasteMagazine news »
In Reason, Faith, and Revolution, Terry Eagleton calls God Is Not Great “stylish, entertaining, splendidly impassioned, [and] compulsively readable.” But he also shows how shallow Hitchens’s conception of religion is, and how feeble a straw man he set up for himself. (Eagleton includes Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell in his indictment; he refers to the whole crowd as Ditchkins for rhetorical purposes.) »
Catch up TV Guide: From Skins to The Infinite Monkey Cage
6 January 2012 4:06 PM, PST | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »
TV: Skins
Skins series six has finished filming and starts on 23 January on E4. The third generation may have taken a little more time to bed in, but with this run being extended to 10 episodes and the addition of new cast members, there should be plenty of room for breathing space and, hopefully, fewer daft storylines. Will Franky and Matty make a go of it? Will Liv put the bottle down and let them? How will Chris Addison's demonic David Blood feel about Grace and Rich's thwarted nuptials? Remind yourself of what it all means with a run through of series five, all of which is currently up on 4Od.
4Od
Audio: Apm - The Dinner Party Download
Although we're well into the new year, The Dinner Party's special end-of-2011 podcast is worth a retrospective download, thanks to an excellent interview with Randy Newman, Nile Rodgers discussing the »
- Rebecca Nicholson
Literary events in 2012
6 January 2012 2:51 PM, PST | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »
More Dickens and even more Shakespeare, but also new novels from Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, plus exciting new voices – 2012's literary highlights
January
10 Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, starring Matthew Rhys and Tamzin Merchant, begins – and, unlike the book, ends – on BBC2.
13 Michael Morpurgo's much-loved children's novel War Horse, a long-running favourite at the National and on Broadway, gets the Hollywood treatment. A tearjerking saga about a young soldier and his horse – it was only a matter of time before it was Spielberged.
16 Ts Eliot prize. Despite withdrawals from the shortlist over objections to a hedge fund's sponsorship of the prize, the Eliot remains the UK's premier poetry award, and its eve-of-event reading is always a treat. This year's shortlist includes Daljit Nagra, Carol Ann Duffy and John Burnside.
20 Release of film of Coriolanus, an Orson Wellesian effort directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, »
Literary events in 2012
6 January 2012 2:51 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
More Dickens and even more Shakespeare, but also new novels from Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, plus exciting new voices – 2012's literary highlights
January
10 Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, starring Matthew Rhys and Tamzin Merchant, begins – and, unlike the book, ends – on BBC2.
13 Michael Morpurgo's much-loved children's novel War Horse, a long-running favourite at the National and on Broadway, gets the Hollywood treatment. A tearjerking saga about a young soldier and his horse – it was only a matter of time before it was Spielberged.
16 Ts Eliot prize. Despite withdrawals from the shortlist over objections to a hedge fund's sponsorship of the prize, the Eliot remains the UK's premier poetry award, and its eve-of-event reading is always a treat. This year's shortlist includes Daljit Nagra, Carol Ann Duffy and John Burnside.
20 Release of film of Coriolanus, an Orson Wellesian effort directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, »
2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2004
12 items from 2012
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