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Parental warning

Louis Theroux is renowned for giving folk enough rope to hang themselves, so it makes you wonder why anyone agrees to be the subject of one of his investigations in the first place. The Phelps family have an answer. It gets them, their messages and their hateful placards on television. See, they think we’re all going to Hell, that the deaths of American soldiers is God’s way of punishing America for legalising homosexual relationships and that Barack Obama is The Beast, as spoken of in The Book Of Revelations. Thank you for tuning in. Read the rest of this article »

Debauched Dickens

The mark of a fantastic adaptation is if you want to buy the book as soon the credits start to run on the first episode. To be honest, I only waited that long as I couldn’t bear to drag my eyes away from every sumptuous detail on the screen to visit my online bookseller. The Crimson Petal And The White is opulent, brutal, seductive, aggressive, sinister, corrupt, beautiful and so much more. It’s like finding a strumpet’s dressing-up box and guessing the history of every piece inside it. Read the rest of this article »

Life is a cabaret

Christopher Isherwood wrote the book behind the film called Cabaret. His book was called I Am A Camera, but he wrote a series of them inspired by his experiences in Berlin in the ’30s. He was living in decadent times that were souring as the Nazis rose to power, taking advantage of the economic depression and xenophobic paranoia of a people still recovering from World War I. Sound familiar? Hmm.

Christopher And His Kind tells the story through selected experiences of Isherwood’s reluctant but altogether unavoidable politicisation. Based on his book of the same name, this 90-minute one-off drama stars Doctor Who’s Matt Smith as the adventuring young gay man who kicks off the whole endeavour by admitting that what actually attracted him to Berlin was ‘the boys’. As he enters a den of iniquity, guided by W.H. Auden, his eyes round in wonder at the treats on offer. The boys are here, but even they expose their own mask of deception once the surface is scratched. As an outsider – both as a foreigner and a homosexual – Isherwood stares in awe and wonder at the changing face of the Berlin (and the Berliners) that he has come to love. Read the rest of this article »

Whodunit?

T is the season to get poorly – fa, la, la la, cough, splutter, sneeze, sigh. Indeed, it feels like everybody is going down with something, recovering from the other or feeling a tingle in their unmentionables. Traditionally, in telly terms, this means a diet of Neighbours, Doctors, finding Genevieve on some distant cable channel and settling in for an afternoon of John Nettles solving a crime on a not so distant isle. Safe and familiar as the blanket that comes out to cover you on the sofa for just such occassions. Which was why I was rather put out to discover the dearth of detective shows on weekday afternoons. When did this happen?!! Read the rest of this article »