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Television / Radio

Weekend media coverage of sport

Michael Henderson, in The Times yesterday, thundered against the new look TMS. He observed that it tries too hard to be funny. He rued the absence of Christopher Martin Jenkins, I agree with Henderson the ultimate flag bearer of traditional cricket, to a certain extent. Brian Johnston laid down the [...]

August 16, 2020 // 0 Comments

Edvard Munch

Sky Arts have been running a weekly series on exhibitions by great artists and last Monday it featured the Norwegian colossus Edvard Munch. Tim Marlow interviews curators of the museum and there’s a visual treat of the pictures to view. Previous painters have been Heironymus Bosch, Edourd Manet [...]

August 12, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Riviera/A History in Pictures (Part Two)

Whilst I enjoyed the second part of this programme broadcast yesterday it was with certain  reservations. The main problem was that, by being a travel history of the Riviera from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day and a review of the artists that painted there, the scope was too [...]

July 31, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Plot Against America

I promise you this is the last review you will have to read of HBO’s Plot Against America but the editor asked me to put it in a historical context. I have to start with the observation that this was not a documentary but a drama based on the fiction of Philip Roth. This said, a number of [...]

July 30, 2020 // 0 Comments

Book review: Utopia Avenue (Part 2)

This is the second part (of two) of my review of Utopia Avenue, the latest novel by David Mitchell just released in the UK. To build upon the themes I touched upon in Part One, I must register that normally I avoid fiction like the plague and hitherto had neither been aware of Mitchell’s [...]

July 29, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Riviera/A History In Pictures/BBC4

Since lockdown it’s been meltdown for the travel industry and not the most upbeat of times for me. I was heartened therefore to watch a programme on the history of the art of the Riviera last week  which brought many memories of Rust trips there. The first part, narrated by Richard E Grant, [...]

July 28, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Plot Against America (in a film context)

The editor also asked me to post a review of The Plot Against America putting it in a film context. The two memorable films on this subject of creeping fascism are It Happened Here (1966) and Vittorio de Sica’s last film The Garden of the Finzi- Continis (1970).  It Happened Here was a black and [...]

July 25, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Plot Against America/Sky Atlantic

I have the advantage over some reviewers as I have read Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America twice. I am now three programmes into the HBO adaptation and enjoying it hugely. I do not find knowing the novel well a hindrance – more a blessing as you wonder how the actor has [...]

July 24, 2020 // 0 Comments

Life lessons

One of the things that irritates me about the modern younger generations in the 21st Century is their now almost-universal sense of entitlement. Much of the blame in my view can be laid at the door of the human race’s ever-advancing science and technology and specifically the all-pervasive social [...]

July 16, 2020 // 0 Comments

Will the real Poirot stand up?

I have now seen all the re-runs of Series one of Poirot. Hugh Fraser plays the dim, bespoke Captain Hastings, Philip Jackman Inspector Japp with trademark flapping raincoat as brilliantly caricatured by Stephen Fry in Gosforth Park and Pauline Moran the bossy secretary Miss Lemon. The second [...]

July 14, 2020 // 0 Comments

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