Channel Four TV's Bremner, Bird and Fortune's new series is now more biting satyr rather than playful satire given the fact that England's daily newspapers are these days inescapably satirical and comedy has an inability to make what is already bellyaching into bon mots. The Chancellor's new budget did offer help to small businesses in the economic blight. Bit late for those upon whom the locusts dined.
Lead Balloon: Series 3 is deadpan comedian Jack Dee's take on upwardly deflating middle-class London. And it's still very funny and woefully accurate. Think The Office meets a Royal National Theatre play about it's audience. Meowwwwww...
Amélie antidote shocks cat lovers
Steppenwolf heads for the National Theatre
What's Art Doc? Festival(18 November - 8 December 2008)
And the German Film Festival.
Andrew Neil interviews journalist, academic and former Labour MP David Marquand, who was a senior adviser to Roy Jenkins as President of the European Commission, and has recently published a widely acclaimed history, Britain Since 1918.
Keynes and the Financial Meltdown from an Oz radio station
John Carlin returns to Reykjavik to find the broken Viking nation banking on its women to bail it out
Björk writing in The Times: After financial meltdown, now it's smeltdown
The Fallen a an amazing three-hour BBC doco about all the British recent war dead. The film may have read like 'duty' to watch but it became totally compelling and almost unwatchably voyeuristic as we hear of how differently parents cope with the losses of their children. One mother had never even opened the returned crates trying both to contain the grief and memorialise it. One sibling frequently went to her brother's grave and talked to him. Another daughter almost hated her father for committing suicide on his return. One journalist's contribution, who'd been posted to cover the helicopter ambulance crews, spoke of the boy soldier that he saw rescued and dying. "People don't care unless related to them, [the names we see in the papers every week mean very little]..that's a shame, what's for breakfast...but I saw this boy and knew his name."
Officer spoke of kit shortage before death
The latest of London's local councils' disgraces: Ministers told to come clean about Haringey
A three-star report - and a tortured child
Apologies for the wrong link in the last posting for Paul O'Grady's autobiography At My Mother's Knee. Far more than just a tea-time talk show host, he's crawled through the grime and sewers of show-business himself over the years so knows what he's talking about and a huge genuine love and compassion for his guests.
BBC Radio 4's The Archive Hour: Here's Kenny: Kenny Everett one of the not so sung heroes of Britain in the 60s and 70s. Fair Play Chaps assesses whether or not modern sport has lost its way and if the era of sporting fair play has gone for ever.
Interview about the children's/adult novel now opera Skellig on
BBC Radio 4's Front Row (Fri 21 Nov) - the composer Tod Machover is better known for doing weird and wonderful experiments in new music technology at MIT (Massachusetts Institute for Technology).
Requiem for a Beast: Matt Ottley's picture book(Lothian Press) won this year's Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year prize, and the Young Adult Book Award at the Queensland (Australia) Premier's Literary Awards dealing with shameful aspects of Australian history and culture.
ITV's The South Bank Show aired a doco on Brit artist and art world 'IT girl' Sam Taylor-Wood. Downstairs at the White Cube's central London space is a compelling multi-screen video installation Sigh by Wood. Musicians are seen playing a score by Academy award winning composer Anne Dudley with invisible instruments using only their musle memory.
BBC Radio's Front Row also a spot on Carsten Höller's new work The Double Club - a working nightclub, bar and restaurant opening in North London. And on Tues 18 Nov
Jools Holland and his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra (he of the BBC TV show who's a fantastic musician in his own right).
The campaign to save Titian's two masterpieces Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon (Front Row 19 Nov) - the latter on display at the National Gallery in London until Sunday 14 December.
Hana Makhmalbaf's timely and compelling Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame is now out on DVD (though not on the Contender distributor site!)
The really intriguing recent installation work of Maya Hewitt's seen recently at East End gallery Bischoff/Weiss
The London Jazz Festival ended on the weekend but for those who missed some or all try BBC Radio 3 jazz links.
'Tis Autumn - The Search For Jackie Paris is a well-worth seeing documentary about a jazz singer who in his time was on the same top 5 list as Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Mel Torme and even toured with Charlie Parker for six months. The film's denouement though intending to show that he mightn't have been as nice as one would liked to have remembered him does rather seem to smack of biographic balance rather than 'art'.
For a taste of Left Bank memories, Martin Ritt's 1961 Paris Blues is out on DVD in a great print and with a great cast including Mr. Louis Armstrong himself, though I don't think that's Paul Newman actually blowing his own 'horns'. Every one of these 'kids' just oozes sex appeal - Mr. Armstrong having his own flavour apart of course. The film's racial issues may seem dated i.e. Sidney Poitier not wanting to return to the States because in Paris he's just a jazz musician not a black jazz musician. But when you see a film such as Barry Jenkins' Medicine for Melancholy (one of the unsung highlights of this year's London Film Festival), you realise that the soul searching never just goes away. And though colour is of course is the issue, it goes far deeper than just pigmentation. Can you love two people at the same time? Can you love both sides of yourself equally? Both colours within yourself? Sublime sepia-esque cinematography from James Laxton.
Other Ritt films just out on DVD:
Criterion's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold-1965 (US-Reg.1). Kino Films have Sounder(1972)
and one of the few books available on the director: The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man.
UK conductor Hickox dies, aged 60
One of West London's great retail therapy hopes (from an Oz firm):
Westfield: big projects, big jitters
This is your first big test, Boris - so don't blow it
Centre 'will bring traffic chaos'
Crunch bites into Olympic stars' living space
Rule change 'abolishes' overcrowding on trains
Rail users launch a sardine protest
Or just out to cheer us all up and prove that the world wasn't any better back when, there's The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus Collector's Set (R1)
Monty Python's Personal Best
Monty Python Complete
And Global Sex: A conversation about the effect of globalisation on sexual desire. This conversation was first broadcast on 2/8/2001.
Some timewarped post-prandial video from this year's Times BFI London Film Festival. (My pensées are coming. Trust me, I'm a film geek.)
London Film Festival -Day 1: Frost/Nixon premieres in Leicester Sq at the Opening Night Gala.
Day 5: Paul Morgan and Steve McQueen''s Hunger is screened.
Secret Life of Bees: Sophie Okonedo shows her excitement at premiering the film at the LFF.
Day 9 W. premiere, Secret Life of Bees with Thandie Newton and Paul Bettany.
Day 7: Penelope Cruz, Il Divo, Anvil and Keanu
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