Penny-plain People

22nd March 2013

I have written before about NT Live - the National Theatre's immensely successful live to cinema broadcasts - including about their showings of HamletFrankenstein and Phedre, as well as general pieces here and more

Yes to No (from Curzon on Demand)

15th March 2013

Film fans, happiness is coming (this to be sung to a jaunty tune with optional hand-clapping). If you've seen Pablo Larraín's remarkable film No, about the rival media campaigns in the 1988 referendum in Chile, you might perhaps pick up the more

On reading Poliakoff

28th February 2013

I have just finished reading Stephen Poliakoff's Dancing on the Edge. Or at least that's what it feels like. In fact I have been viewing on my iPad downloads of the five-part six-hour BBC Two film. I have more

On reading a good book

13th February 2013

My blog schedule for the week has been disrupted by a slow recovery from a modest bout of 'flu, so apologies for the absence of new posts in the past few days. Spending more time in bed than usual did more

#ROLive: our ‘House’

9th January 2013

Hard though it is to believe, it is nearly seventeen years since we went backstage at the Royal Opera House in the BBC fly-on-the-wall series The House. Michael Kaiser, who later became general director of Covent Garden, summed more

Royal Opera LIVE, with added live blog

7th January 2013

20:16 I'm won over - not by the switching at The Space but by the view of the performance that the 'mix' channel offers. (Suzy Klein, incidentally, doing a great job.) And with that, I think I'm going to sign more

Opening up the archives

20th November 2012

I'm coming very late to this but I have been engaged by - and have learned from - a film made by BBC Research and Development and posted in six parts on their blog across the summer. Opening up the more