Review Archives - Robin Catling

Review: BBC Reith Lectures 2013 – Grayson Perry

Review / November 14, 2013 May 24, 2021

The award-winning artist Grayson Perry presents the 2013 BBC Reith Lectures, titled Playing to the Gallery. Across four programmes he discusses what makes him an artist, the limits of contemporary art, how to gauge the quality of new artworks and the future of the avant-garde.

The long-running and incredibly worthy annual lecture series on the media, broadcasting and the arts gets a hugely entertaining shot in the arm from the still subversive and playful Grayson Perry.

Turner-winning ceramicist and noted cross-dresser Perry scrutinises the art world with candour and good humour, and still manages to inspire from beneath a cloak of cynicism… …

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Review: Recommended Reads from a Century of Children’s Literature Pt II

Culture, Review / August 14, 2013 May 24, 2021

Originally from Speaking Well In Public’s Page on Facebook.

Continuing my recommended reads from a century of children’s literature.

CS Lewis
From The Magician’s Nephew to The Last Battle, the Chronicles of Narnia tells the story of another world from its dawn to its end. In the first written and best known, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, four brothers and sisters find themselves drawn into Narnia and help in its heroic struggle to free itself. …

Review: Recommended Reads from a Century of Children’s Literature Pt I

Culture, Review / August 12, 2013 May 24, 2021

Originally from Speaking Well In Public’s Page on Facebook.

My recommended reads from a century of children’s literature, featuring tales of mystery, adventure and the great outdoors, of magic, fantasy and other worlds, of theatre, ballet and life on the stage… Most will be enjoyed by girls and boys, and a great start to a bookshelf to keep for life. …

Review: Danny Boyle – Man of Wonder (BBC Culture Show Special)

Culture, Review / May 12, 2013 May 24, 2021

“In a Culture Show special, Oscar winning director Danny Boyle talks to Mark Kermode about his new film Trance, London 2012’s afterglow and the highs and lows of an extraordinary film-making career.”

Danny Boyle began his career in subversive agit-prop theatre at the Royal Court and went on to be equally subversive in TV.

Breaking into feature films, his back catalogue includes the violent, kinetic, anarchic as well as touching, satirical, philosophical and romantic. From iconic counter-culture Trainspotting, frenetic horror 28 Days Later, to eight-Oscar triumph, the brutal romance Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle is at his best when he refuses to compromise. It was something he acknowledged in less successful projects – Hollywood excesses A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach. …

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The Golden Record – Voyager’s Message in a Bottle

Culture, Review / March 27, 2013 May 24, 2021

The Voyager spacecraft has recently left the orbital limits of our solar system. It is now the furthest any made-made object has travelled from Earth.

If you’re not old enough to remember the launch, Voyager left carrying a golden record containing a sample of sounds and images from Earth. So should any extraterrestrial life encounter Voyager in deep space, those beings should be able to listen and view the sounds of our civilisation.

If you go to the Golden Record web-site http://goldenrecord.org/, you can see exactly what NASA placed on the golden record, “a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.” …

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Review: The History of the Future BBC Radio4

Culture, Radio, Review / October 13, 2012 May 24, 2021

Juliet Gardiner looks at how cultures of the past viewed the possibilities of the future, and what these visions say about the pre-occupations of the time.

Or as I like to call it – Where’s My Jetpack?

Here’s a curious thing; a BBC Radio 4 documentary series that doesn’t appear to exist on iPlayer, Listen Again or as a podcast. I caught the tail end of this series which finished in September, just the last couple of episodes. I’d like to hear the rest, but I can’t find them. Even though the show’s homepage is still up on the BBC website. …

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Review: Shakespeare Uncovered – David Tennant on Hamlet

Culture, Review / July 23, 2012 May 24, 2021

“In Hamlet, David Tennant whose own RSC performance was a huge hit, meets other actors who have played the role – from the legendary David Warner in the 1960s to the recent Jude Law. He also tries, alongside Simon Russell Beale and Ben Whishaw, to unravel the meaning of the play and the reason why it is considered the greatest play Shakespeare ever wrote.”

With this being some anniversary or other of the great Will Shakey, there’s an awful lot of actoreyness on the BBC at the moment. In this final episode of Shakespeare Uncovered, David Tennant’s take on Hamlet was one of the better dissections of a classic in under an hour. Hats off to BBC2 for attempting to explain and impress just how great it is. You know there’s a ‘but’ coming, though, don’t you… …

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Review: The Man Who Saves Life Stories BBC Radio4

Culture, Radio, Review / June 27, 2012 May 23, 2021

“Irving Finkel collects ordinary people’s lives. He hoards their life stories in diary form and has amassed a collection of hundreds of handwritten volumes. But Irving has a problem. What should he do with them? The diaries are crammed onto shelves and piled up in corners of his small office. Irving’s day job is Assistant Keeper in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum.”

The Man Who Saves Life Stories was one of those little gems that Radio 4 produces; the story of a museum curator and British eccentric who fell into collecting diaries and is now trying to house that collection as a ‘people’s history’ thing. …

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Review: Horizon – Out of Control? BBC2

Culture, Review / May 9, 2012 May 23, 2021

“We all like to think we are in control of our lives – of what we feel and what we think. But scientists are now discovering this is often simply an illusion.

Surprising experiments are revealing that what you think you do and what you actually do can be very different. Your unconscious mind is often calling the shots, influencing the decisions you make, from what you eat to who you fall in love with. If you think you are really in control of your life, you may have to think again.”

“At every moment of our lives an unseen presence is guiding us,” announced narrator Hugo Speer. No, not God, the unseen presence is our own unconscious mind, which decades of psycho analysis since Freud has us believing is the Edward Hyde or Caliban in all of us, out to destroy civilisation. It turns out our unconscious is the foreman, brakeman, steersman and navigator of almost everything we do. …

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Review: Perspectives – Lenny Henry Finding Shakespeare

Culture, Review / May 6, 2012 May 23, 2021

“As a working-class kid growing up in Dudley in the West Midlands, Lenny found William Shakespeare’s plays boring, irrelevant and inaccessible. But by the age of 50 and with a burning ambition to try his hand at serious acting, Lenny decided it was time he faced his fears and finally tried to get to grips with the Bard.”

To many, Lenny Henry is that big bloke who advertises the hotels. To those with a long memory, he is still the sixteen-year-old kid with the big grin and bags of energy, who barn-stormed the New Faces TV talent show and, via Tiswas, Three of A Kind and several seasons of his own sketch show, grew up to be a dramatic actor (Chef, Hope and Glory) of mixed successes. Some of us still expect jokes from Delbert Wilkins and Deakus every time he walks on; that or a bowl of Alpen muesli. It all rather undercuts his recent successes as a classical Shakespearean actor, notably Othello, the stage production later adapted for Radio 4. …

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