18  The reviewer

The critics – you shouldn’t even ignore them. (Sam Goldwyn, film mogul)

Critics are like horse-flies. They prevent the horse from ploughing. (Anton Chekhov)

The best judge of a feast is the guest, not the cook. (Aristotle)

What you need is honesty, the bravery to say what you really feel … you have to forget about being liked. (Aleks Sierz, in an email to the author)

Let’s call them reviewers if they work in journalism and critics if they are academics. Chekhov the creator was mainly thinking of bad theatre reviewers, who didn’t appreciate his new approach to playwriting. Goldwyn, the tycoon producer, could afford to rubbish film reviewers, in imitable style. The two of them remind us that the creator is essential – the reviewer isn’t, however powerful a few of them can be in closing down very expensively produced plays in London’s West End and New York’s Broadway. In the critics’ camp Aristotle reminds us that nevertheless reviewers perform a most useful task, that they can help the artist’s audience to appreciate the art fully and thus promote the art.

Promoting the art that deserves to be promoted means identifying the art that, in the reviewer’s opinion, does not. Artists often complain that reviewers don’t know what they’re talking about because they haven’t done it (‘those who can do, those who can’t teach’). They even complain about favourable reviews on the grounds that they don’t address the right issues. It’s true that reviewers can gain from having a go themselves at what they review. Some successful novelists are also successful reviewers of novels.

Theatre reviewers can gain from some acting or directing experience, even at an amateur level. But greater involvement in and direct experience of the creative process by reviewers takes time, and artists’ demands for these often ignore the pressures of the deadline. More seriously, those demands can fail to take into account that reviewers’ main obligation is to the readers written for.

The creators work from one premise; the producers, including directors and actors, work from another; the reviewers and the critics from another. That is, of course, considerable oversimplification. The point is: because of the differences in perspective it’s often difficult to pin down what is fair and what is unfair comment. On the whole each side is aware of this and refrains from joining battle, but occasionally war breaks out in letter columns and TV studios. Libel considerations mean in effect that the reviewer’s comments should not directly threaten the ability of practitioners to earn their living, and must be written without malice. (An actress won damages when a reviewer said her bottom was too big.)

The reviewer needs some essential attributes, which will demand attention in this chapter:

•  knowledge of the field being written about

•  a passion to know and experience more

•  a desire to share your passion and knowledge with readers

•  the ability to judge perceptively

•  the courage to stand by convictions against pressures to please those with other premises

•  the writing skill to communicate vividly and entertainingly

•  the writing skill to make the assessment clear to the readers.

This chapter charts the particular demands made on the reviewer of books, music, art, theatre, films and television. But first: How do you become a reviewer? What are the tasks? Which are the specific writing skills?

HOW TO BECOME A REVIEWER

As with other byline columns, general or specialist, reviewing is unlikely to be the first task a new writer will expect to be doing. Yet it’s an obvious specialism for staff and freelance writers interested in the arts, and there are opportunities for beginners on local papers and small magazines. At all levels in the media, reviewing is dominated by outside contributors.

Popular and quality markets are strikingly different in the way they cover the arts. Prospective reviewers must therefore study markets with particular care, collect cuttings and analyse them, and decide what sort of publication to pitch to. Even within the same category of publication, arts or features editors can have varied demands. Some examples are given below of the way reviews of the same work have varied between publications.

The tabloids put the emphasis on lively, entertaining reading. In several (The Sun, News of the World and The People for instance) arts coverage blurs into showbiz gossip. Many provincial papers (again, a good place to start) cover much amateur work, which requires a different approach, as will be described. Another good place to start is in low-circulation little magazines: arts editors watch them, along with students’ magazines, for new reviewing talent.

There are several magazines devoted to the arts that should be studied (see the subject indexes of Macmillan’s Writer’s Handbook and Willing’s Press Guide). Many consumer magazines, weeklies and monthlies, give space to reviews and there are the freesheets and free magazines to consider.

Aleks Sierz is a freelance with extensive experience in theatre reviewing and related activities. His first job as a theatre reviewer came in 1990 when a friend became arts editor of Tribune and asked him to review a show. ‘Soon I was hooked,’ he tells me. ‘Later I did an MA in arts criticism at City University, London following a BA in History] but I learnt the craft of writing by working as a freelance sub.’ He has worked for numerous publications, including The Stage, Time Out and What’s On. He has been a broadcaster for the BBC, is the author of In-Yer-Face Theatre (Faber), a best-selling account of cutting-edge drama, and since 2002 he has been elected Honorary Secretary of the Critics’ Circle. He also writes features for The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times and The Independent.

He has taught journalism for 10 years ‘and it’s always helped my own work, kept me on my toes. I’ve been involved in translating plays, doing drama workshops and, of course, interviewing countless practitioners. But although these experiences have been interesting they have not helped my reviewing.’

His advice to the budding reviewer? ‘It’s best to develop a career as a general journalist, perhaps as a freelance sub, perhaps as a freelance arts feature writer. In addition, try to get your work published anywhere you can, and build up a portfolio of short reviews. Then network like mad and keep hassling.’

THE REVIEWER’S TASKS

Some of the tasks to be mentioned assume that the reviewer has done some research. Full-time reviewers have probably done a fair amount of reading up on the subject and have the time to prepare well for what’s coming up. Part-time reviewers should at least have the key up-to-date reference books to hand, and find the time to make acquaintance with previous works of the artist. Previous experience and reviews of the artist’s (director’s/actor’s) work will help. Don’t neglect the press releases available from the publicity agents.

First reviewers have to decide on the level of knowledge the readers of their publications are likely to have, and whether or not they may have read, seen or heard the work. Play and film reviews are normally the result of attending previews in studios so generally assume readers haven’t seen the works. Last night’s TV reviews (or last week’s) must take into account that some readers have seen the programmes and some haven’t. The following tasks need to be modified accordingly. They need to be selected and adapted, of course, to the kind of art being discussed.

Reporting

Reporting is the basis of reviewing. The disciplines of reporting are reflected in the kinds of questions to answer. For example:

•  What is it called?

•  What’s the genre? (Literary novel or thriller, tragedy or comedy, art-house film or blockbuster?)

•  What is it about? What does it mean? What does it represent?

•  What is it like?

•  Who created it?

•  Who produced/directed it?

•  Where is it showing? Where can you buy it?

•  When and where does the action take place?

•  Why was it written/painted/composed?

•  How much is it?

Assessing

Your opinion must be informed and you must show it to be informed, by indicating the evidence for your statements and arguments. The evidence will be in the form of facts, examples, quotes. It’s good to have strong opinions but readers must feel they are being helped to make up their own minds and that they can disagree while still valuing your piece. Some important questions are:

•  What are the work’s merits/defects?

•  Is it worth your time and money?

•  Did I like it?

•  Will you like it?

•  What sort of people will like it?

•  Is it informative/inspiring/interesting/entertaining?

•  What are the significant elements and how do they compare generally with other works in the genre (plot or characters, well-made play or postmodern experiment, message or slice of life, melody or in the raw?)

•  How does it compare with other works by this creator, producer, director, etc.?

•  With contemporaries’work?

•  With work of a similar kind in the past?

•  How far does the creator (or creators) succeed in achieving what they set out to do?

•  How well has the work been served by the interpreters involved – actors, directors, set designers, musicians, etc.?

•  If known (e.g. last night’s theatre), how did the audience react to the work?

Setting standards

We’re not talking about pontificating, but of giving your opinion about whether a work is good or bad and guiding your readers to the former. You’re angry when you feel that bad work is chasing out the good. Your readers, to repeat, get to know where you stand on various aspects and can be guided by and interested in your piece even when they disagree on various points.

It’s a question of integrity. You react to the work, you analyse your reaction, make your assessment and communicate it honestly, taking your readers’ likely reaction into account, and you refuse to let your judgement be swayed by outside pressures. Your readers feel they can trust you to tell the truth as you see it.

What outside pressures? Both the subsidized and commercial theatres, for example, depend heavily on PR and pre-production selling (interviews with the stars, lavish praise of the previews, and so on). This hype has recently been compounded by the practice of casting American film stars in London’s West End plays less effective than the very successful films they are based on (see below).

‘The water is purer’, as the late Hugo Young said about political columns (see page 296), if you don’t become too friendly with the denizens of the world you’re reacting to and assessing. Matthew Parris made a similar comment in his Times column (page 276). The dangers are prevalent in reviewing. Andrew Billen interviews for The Times subjects whom he may also critically assess for theatre reviews in New Statesman. There’s certainly a need for circumspection, he says, at the same time recognizing the profit that comes from this broadening of interests.

THE WRITING-UP PROCESS

An advantage of book reviewing is that you can note passages that impress you together with page numbers and refer back to them as many times as you like. You can put your comments in square brackets after passages you mark to be quoted. You can make notes while watching a play or film with a pen-torch but you can’t roll the production back (unless you can get the film video). You can be more generous with your notes if you’re reviewing TV programmes for reviewing purposes at home, and you can record TV programmes on video to go back on them. But you may prefer to keep your experience fresh, and write up your film or TV review immediately after the viewing. Furthermore, taking notes in any quantity while reviewing the performing arts can prevent you from being open to the experience.

If your review of a performance can wait until the following day, you may be able to produce a more thoughtful and more polished piece. But some reviewers perform better when they have a deadline an hour or two after the performance. Practise doing reviews with both kinds of deadlines.

Language and style

Strong, well-informed opinions go better with a distinctive style, and a distinctive style is especially required by a reviewer. Firstly, because many readers want to be persuaded memorably to buy it or not to buy it. They are better able to assess how they would react, knowing their reviewer, if that reviewer’s words have staying power. Secondly, because many more readers won’t have the time or the money to buy it, but want to keep up with what books are being published, what plays, films, art exhibitions and concerts are on at the moment.

Such readers want to read something that gives them a fair idea of the reviewer’s experience, and they won’t get it from a reviewer who’s merely competent. A good reviewer can be memorably excited (in the angry sense of the word) by a bad work of art and have interesting things to say about it. That’s one important test of the quality of a reviewer. Bernard Levin once wrote a review of a play in London’s West End by describing the set in detail from one end to the other. Bur even he, the doyen of theatre reviewers at the time, could only get away with that once. TV reviewers can and do make a living out of rubbishing mediocre TV (see below).

Conciseness and precision

When writing reviews, especially with a pressing deadline, it’s hard to avoid clichés, the clichés of approval and disapproval, that don’t give a clear idea of how you arrived at your assessment and don’t therefore help readers to decide on their likely assessment. Have a look at these, and if they rise up in front of you, strike them out:

never less than competent/appealing/engaging

never more than adequate/amusing, likeable

these are mere quibbles

Avoid unnecessary modifiers:

a grave emergency

an acute crisis

in-depth research

under active consideration

consummate skill

Recognizing the value of precise modifiers when aiming at the necessary conciseness, the tendency is to trot out those adjective or adverb pairs that familiarity has drained of their original force, especially when they are alliterative. For example:

bouncy and bedraggled

cruel and conniving

fast and furious

Avoid also vague words, especially those recently overused to the point of exhaustion, used on their own, without explanation. Such words must be added to, exploited in some way, to indicate why they are being used:

fascinating, interesting, amazing, beautiful, cool (in the newer sense), wonderful, marvellous, glorious, gorgeous, nice, feisty, funny, amusing boring, uninteresting, ugly, awful, unfunny

Words that say why

You can say why an assessment has been arrived at in various ways. Consider the following attempts, which employ tone of voice, irony, implication, as well as precise modifiers:

Adebimpe’s switch from swooning falsetto to rapid-fire lyrical delivery in King Eternal was mesmerizing to watch. [A concert given by the TV on the Radio band]

The show yanks Modigliani out of the clutches of the makers of pretty postcards and turns him, instead, into an unsettling Jewish mystic, whose cultural anxieties nourished his work continuously, productively and superbly.

This is the aspect [the qualities of distinguished women writers] that Le Fanu highlights in this pretty-as-pink biography of Rose Macaulay], its twirling calligraphy, gracious picture gallery and carmine endpapers, as much as its message, an embodiment of 21st century, soft-focus, optimistic new feminism.

This is a very dense and detailed book. It is a study of decision-making, painstakingly traced through the chaos of competing Nazi institutions.
[The Origins of the Final Solution]

Thriller novelist Patricia Highsmith’s anti-hero Tom Ripley – your friendly neighbourhood serial murderer – is played with epicene wit by John Malkovich.

Shakespeare’s problem comedy of love discovered and recovered [Much Ado About Nothing] came to us served light and bright, without so much as a provocative thought in its pretty little bewigged head.

Finding a good order

It’s helpful to report the main facts or the story of a book or play or film early in the review, so that there’s a clear context for the judgements made. Note how this principle guides the authors in many of the extracts discussed.

BOOKS

So many books are published that it’s essential that you, or your literary editor, choose wisely. That means books that are well above average and that will lend themselves to informative, entertaining and readable columns for those who don’t read much and who are highly unlikely to read the ones you’re reviewing, as well as for those who do read a lot and are regularly persuaded by you to acquire them.

To review books you need to read widely. You should know something about other books by the author being reviewed: read one or two of their earlier books. Read or find out about similar books by contemporaries for the sake of comparison.

As always, publicity material will guide you into preliminary research: the blurbs on the covers, publishers’ catalogues and handouts, literary agents. The author may be listed in Who’s Who. Look for references in books of literary criticism. Read published reviews of earlier works and interviews with the author.

Non-fiction

When reviewing a non-fiction book it often helps to measure how far the author has succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls of the genre and gaining its prizes. Adam Mars-Jones considers that Peter Parker’s literary biography of Christopher Isherwood, novelist, friend of W. H. Auden, succeeds admirably. The intro to Isherwood: A Life (The Observer, 23 May 2004) contains a clear context for a 1500-word review:

Authorized lives have one set of disadvantages (self-censorship, mealiness of mouth), unauthorized ones another: restriction of sources, sensationalism. Parker’s book is virtually free of blemishes in either category and comes close to combining the corresponding advantages – fullness, fearlessness.

It was a longish (1904–86), interesting life (England, pre-war Berlin where he wrote acclaimed short stories, California from the start of the Second World War – where he wrote A Single Man, ‘a novel changed his exile into art’ and some film scripts, and took to Hindu mysticism). Mars-Jones shows how Parker skilfully interweaves the facts of the life with the character of the subject. He paraphrases Parker at key moments rather than quotes him. Here, where he does both, we get a sharp flavour of Parker’s method:

As Parker points out with endearing dryness, there could be likelier converts to ascetic religion than ‘a sceptical, sybaritic, chain-smoking, egotistical and morally confused homosexual atheist’. It seems particularly drastic for a writer who was only able to approach ideas by an understanding of the people who held them, to take on the belief that personality is an illusion. Nevertheless it brought him peace as well as frustration.

Towards the end Mars-Jones returns to questions of genre, commenting that modern biography tends to ‘enlargement of the spleen’. Parker apparently doesn’t suffer it:

His wit at Isherwood’s expense never becomes destructive. He may feel mildly disillusioned by his subject at times, but not betrayed. He passes on a great deal of discreditable material – Isherwood was prickly, misogynistic, a hypochondriac and uncontrolled drinker – yet his own enthusiasm doesn’t suffer. Isherwood’s charm works even posthumously.

A crucial factor

Before reviewing a non-fiction book be sure you have access to up-to-date reference sources (try online) to enable you to check figures and facts.

A reader finding an error or two in a non-fiction work will lack confidence in anything the author says. Similarly the reviewer’s authority is damaged if errors go unspotted.

Here’s an example of a reviewer (Peter Kellner in The New Statesman) who has done the necessary research and is doing the necessary hatchet work on a book about amateurism in some of Britain’s elite groups:

Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister in 1957, not 1956. David Steel entered Parliament in 1965, not 1964. When George Woodcock stepped down as TUC general secretary in 1969 he was succeeded by Vic Feather, not Len Murray. In the 1979 general elections the Scottish Nationalists did not fall ‘from fourteen seats to four’ – they fell from eleven seats to two. ‘The two-year premiership of James Callaghan’ in fact lasted for three years and one month. Today Labour constituencies do not ‘insist on reselecting their members every two years’ – they do so once in each Parliament.

The error detector should distinguish between author’s and printer’s errors and may need to fault the publisher’s proofreading.

Fiction

It’s worth spelling out a little first the main elements that fiction reviewers may have to deal with:

•  The story is what happens; the plot is the structure of what happens with the causality indicated.

•  The setting – the place, the ambience, the atmosphere – needs special attention when it’s unusual: for example, if it’s a little known or exotic place, such as an imaginary planet in a science fiction work.

•  The period or periods. Is it about today, or 20 years ago, or a century ago? In reviewing a historical novel you would pick up any anachronisms that damage the illusion.

•  The theme, or message behind the story, may have to be carefully distinguished from the story itself. The immorality of characters has to be distinguished from the morality of the work.

•  Narrative technique may need comment. How does the author use time? Is the sequence clear or confusing? Are flashbacks used and are they effective?

•  Characters may be caricatures as in Dickens; or true-to-life as in George Eliot or Jane Austen; or symbolic, representing ideas, as to some extent in Henry James and D. H. Lawrence. Or what?, as in Martin Amis.

•  Style. It may be so straightforward as to be hardly noticeable: this may be a case of art concealing art, or it may simply be that an unobtrusive style is more effective for what the author wants to do. The style might, on the other hand, be nearly the whole point, as in James Joyce: his universe is in his language.

A straightforward, clearly constructed review is required when the narrative is the thing, especially when it’s a historical novel. David Grylls gets across the gripping story of Paul Watkins’s Thunder God and manages to pack in the kind of decryption Watkins needed to bring the Age of the Vikings to life (The Sunday Times, 23 May 2004).

The following is an attempt to indicate the structure of the review and the way the reviewer’s assessment is implied in the details he relays (no space for quoting except once but the flavour of the book comes out in the details). Note also how Grylls deals with the question of accuracy and period atmosphere.

Intro:

Paul Watkins’s latest novel – a tortuous but increasingly tense adventure yarn set in the 10th century AD – follows the turbulent fortunes of a young Norseman, Hakon. Having eerily survived being struck by lightning, he is selected to be a priest, then captured by Danish raiders and transported as a slave to Byzantium. Here he fights for the Varangians, Viking mercenaries in the imperial guard. After serving in Baghdad, Cordoba and on the Nile, he saves the emperor in battle. Released from the army, he returns to his homeland, only to find it besieged by bellicose Christians. At this point the book is less than one third through: the real action is yet to come.

Par 2:

Watkins’s surging, fantastic saga is almost too much to take in: for once the standard hyperbolic blurb (‘a riveting tale of epic proportions’) is a modest understatement …

There’s much religious mysticism, ritual and sacrifice. Pledged to the thunder god Thor, Hakon ‘hopes to pierce the barrier between men and gods’.

Par 3:

Besides swirling with visions and legends, the narrative is packed with physical detail: vivid descriptions of implements and foodstuffs, cloths and coins, ships and swords …

It ends with that quote:

Recalling his time with the Varangians, he remembers the ‘scent of cloves and cardamon and the pollen-yellow mustiness of turmeric’.

Par 4:

Not only the diversity of religion is stressed (Norse, Christian and other more exotic creeds), but also its divisiveness …

Hakon is disillusioned by the benefits of religion. There are fraudulent miracles and slaughtering.

Par 5:

Recognizing the deep similarity of myths, campaigning ultimately for secular values, the book is informed by a modern sensibility that can seem anachronistic In a world in which boys have their fingers chopped off for trivial offences such as spilling food … we are asked to believe that the ultimate trauma is to suffer from clerical child abuse … Watkins is obviously influenced b y westerns, epics and buddy movies …

Conclusion:

None of this matters once the narrative grips you … Like his Victorian predecessor Rider Haggard he offers adventure plus ideas, but (unlike Haggard) his commitment to ideas never inhibits the excitement Finally] Thought-provoking about cultural loyalty and the cosmopolitan world of the Vikings, Thunder God appeals primarily as a thundering good read.

When dealing with ‘literary novels’, those that aim to do what the novelist D. H. Lawrence said the novel can do, reviewers may have higher aims and raised sights: in the upmarket prints they may be called critics. Lawrence said the novel ‘can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead’. Other critics and commentators have identified similar achievements of the novel: setting standards above the materialistic, questioning the common assumptions about success and status and about what makes life worth living.

MUSIC

Reviewing music and art has to rise to the challenge of how to interpret in words what is non-verbal. The verbal content of opera doesn’t help much, nor does the fact that in representational art the subject is obvious.

A review of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta by the local amateur operatic society won’t cause too many problems. In fact you might get away with giving something of the plot, referring to the performances of the leading singers and to the fun to be had by all. The inadequate phrasing of the baker’s wife’s coloraturas in the leading female role is unlikely to be dwelt upon.

But reviewing concerts or discs of rock, jazz or classical music needs knowledge and appreciation of what the sounds mean, and skill in translating that appreciation into informative and entertaining words (even when you can be sure that your audience knows the jargon). Here’s an extract from a rock concert review by James Smart in The Guardian:

Eighties Matchbox … still put on an impressively professional stage show. Their thrashing hillbilly rock is played at a speed that necessitates a certain amount of precision, and the Brighton five-piece does not disappoint, stringing a tight mesh of riffing over pounding rhythms. Any tunes are well hidden.

The monthly Mojo, devoted to rock, pop, soul and everything in between, covers all the news, and has lengthy features and profiles as well as reviews of gigs and albums. Readers clearly know all the jargon and the names dropped. A review by Manish Agarwal of The Hold Steady’s album (‘hard rockin’ smarts from Brooklyn newcomers who don’t dig punk, funk or irony’) goes:

Their publicity photos suggest tidy Mod revivalists, with their bank clerk hair and matching suits, but The Hold Steady shred with the giddy zeal of rock gods in waiting. This unvarnished debut tempers Thin Lizzy flair with Pixies bounce, dripping melodies that slipped down like six-packs and guitars that aren’t afraid to solo if the song calls for it. What makes them stand out, though, is frontman Craig Finn’s stream-of-consciousness slalom through contemporary culture. Employing a throaty, sing-speak vocal, he skewers club fashionistas with Most People are DJs, rails against indie scene snobs on the sax-boosted Hostile, Mass., and ruminates on rock’n’roll’s transformative power with the piano-laden Springsteen-like beauty of Certain Songs. (July 2004)

Reviewing discs of classical music often need comparisons with other artists’ efforts, whether benchmark or just different, as in this extract from a Gramophone review of Imogen Cooper’s playing of Schubert:

Again, in the A minor Sonata she takes her time. Certainly her spacious conception of the opening movement allows her to orchestrate it to the full, with a splendidly wide and rich dynamic range. But here I sometimes wondered if there was sufficient underlying tension to sustain a tempo rather slower than we often hear – as, for instance, on the old Decca LP recordings by Lupa and Ashtenazy, both of whom also offer a more urgent finale.

Reviewing opera requires attention to all the usual elements of theatrical production, including set design, costumes and machinery as well as matters of acoustics, and acting as well as the singing and the music playing and conducting. The overall assessment is difficult to get balanced. Reviews in The Week of theatre, films and opera are worth studying for the comparisons made between extracts from the quality papers. The following piece in the issue of 19 June 2004 does this for the production of Gounod’s Faust at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London and holds lessons for the way reviews of the same production can differ:

… Charles Edwards’s wonderful designs [says Rupert Christansen in The Daily Telegraph], ‘with a set that is a combination of a Gothic Re vival church with the interior of Garnier’s opera house’ reflect the world that Gounod’s music inhabits. And, under McVicar’s direction, the characters convey ‘a vivid sense of the hypocritical values’ that underpin the melodrama.

The singing is wonderful as well, said Richard Fairman in The Financial Times. Angela Gheorghiu was ‘in gleaming voice’ and sang the role of Marguerite ‘with thrilling abandon’. While Bryn Terfel made ‘a predictably prodigious Mephistopheles with voice and character to spare’. But the real revelation was Roberta Alagna, said Tim Ashley in The Guardian. He ‘gives the performance of a lifetime’. He is ‘physically daring – celebrating Faust’s new-found youth by cartwheeling round the stage – and vocally responsive to every psychological shift’.

On the contrary, said Robert Thicknesse in The Times. There is no psychological depth to this production. These ‘rarefied stars’ were easy to listen to, but the leading pair has taken ‘glossy blandness to its lucrative apogee’. Not for a moment do these two stray from the path of convention, ‘whether it’s in the way in which Marguerite unwraps her jewels, just like another parcel from Cartier, to their colour-by-numbers love duet’. Antonio Pappano conducts prettily, but the rest of the evening is ‘mediocre, empty and whorish’.

ART

Reviewing art exhibitions requires assured descriptive powers. Here are a few sentences selected at random from various publications over the past few years:

The figure is demonic, squatting, eyes like black saucers, teeth bared in a hideous rictus, breasts slung like sacks of flour.

Painted with a freedom strangely prophetic of Francis Bacon, the sightless singer opens his mouth in a grotesque, gap-toothed smile, caught in the spotlight of Goya’s scrutiny.

The fourth century BC olive wreath found on a skull in the Ukraine is so fragile that:

you notice immediately that the paper-thin leaves of beaten gold tremble slightly at your footsteps.

Brash, misleading and garish, orange features in more than half the paintings in this show …

… de Kooning starts to evolve from bogus Cubism into a flowing, equivocal, Moro-esque style: floating amorphous blobs, variously derived from dislocated body parts (Fire Island) or jagged, deconstructed, heavily worked Cityscapes (Excavation).

Brian Sewell first wrote of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in London 20 years ago and his coverage of the 2004 exhibition, organized by David Hockney and Allen Jones, deplores the decline he has seen over the years. He’s in favour of the traditional skills, like drawing, and is scathing about a small monoprint of Tracey Emin of 1997 with ‘not a line of drawing, nor a hint of colour, the printed legend WELL ITS ALRIGHT AND ID LOVE TO BE THE ONE LOVE IS WHAT YOU WONT’, priced at 2938.

Hockney’s contribution doesn’t please: ‘six of his absurdly large, wishy-washy and wholly unconvincing watercolours dominate the end wall of the Academy’s largest gallery and can be seen the length of the building’. He does, however, find ‘quiet pleasure’ to see some of the ‘old warhorses’ of the academy producing some of their best work, and celebrates the work of the late Terry Frost. His ‘final flourish is astonishing – a vast and vigorous lexicon of familiar motifs aggressively stated in red and black on white, all subtleties of tone abandoned – a man not, in his late eighties, going gently into that good night’.

Art reviewers need the courage of their convictions more than other reviewers, such is the volatility of the visual arts. For William Packer in The Financial Times this was a classic summer exhibition in which Hockney gets across ‘the radiant clarity of the fountains in the Alhambra courtyard’ and turns watercolour into ‘the most up-to-date form in the world’.

As for the minefield of contemporary conceptual art – of which Damien Hurst’s pickled sheep in a glass case is a well-known example – reviewers know they are walking through it on a tightrope. They have to say interesting things about a butterfly sitting on top of a pile of turds called ‘True Love’; about an empty gallery with its lights going on and off; a bit of a wall in white and pale blush-pink shades with a tiny smudge on it (a squished mosquito) shipped from Mexico, with the sound of another mosquito transcribed into musical notation displayed on a musical stand – a violinist occasionally playing the piece; a video of a naked man jumping up and down on a trampoline; and so on. The butterfly and the turds are made of paper and we are told that this suggests that the artist ‘considers beauty and squalor to be inextricably linked’. The mosquito-inspired work is called ‘endemically chancy’.

Sally O’Reilly in Time Out of 23–30 June 2004 makes a stalwart attempt when covering an exhibition in the Bloomberg gallery in London’s East End to relate the two very different artists: Chantal Joffe with her ‘visceral, 10-foot portraits of women from the fashion pages’ and Kenny McLeod with a 42-minute video:

‘Blue Grey’ is an oddly impersonal portrait of a city boy falling apart, his behaviour dissolving into the fringes of insanity. A series of set pieces serve both as formal devices and as poignant analogies; the man cuts up his suit, then sews it back together; from a bus he reads out loud every word that he sees in his surroundings. Rather than anything personal, there’s a whiff of Wittgenstein about McLeod’s word/image loops, which makes them appear diametrically opposed to Joffe’s paintings. While the expressiveness of the paintings accentuates the formal qualities of the videos, McLeod’s analytical approach makes every dribble of paint seem utterly precise.

You can sympathize with the difficulty of the reviewer’s task but that ‘whiff of Wittgenstein’ and the comparisons make you suspect a desperate attempt at justification. Did her readers catch the allusion?

You don’t see any criteria by which much conceptual art is being judged: practitioners don’t or can’t explain; reviewers of it can frequently be found in Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner. But reviewers must be open to new kinds of art and must try to find ways of promoting what they find promising.

THEATRE

Plays and films, like operas, need reviewers skilled at juggling. They share many of the concerns of the fiction reviewer (see page 319). Genres are many, with different terms (or different connotations) from those used for novels: tragedy, comedy, straight play, farce, and more. The various contributions to the staging and to the production, as with opera, have to be noted. The play reviewer is concerned almost entirely with how well the production is served in a particular performance, so allowances may be made if reporting an early performance and there are signs that it might get better. ‘Almost entirely’ because the reviewer might want to discuss whether or not justice was done to the text, and will often read the text as preliminary research.

Skill at compression is especially required in reviews of plays and films since you have to juggle assessments of various aspects of the work. Here’s a one-paragraph review by John Peter in The Sunday Times Magazine (23 May 2004) that does this juggling skilfully:

Self-improvement used to be a moral issue: you got up, and ahead, by learning and working. Neil LaBute’s play [The Shape of Things] is about the Botox age – you improve not your mind but your appearance to show that you are where it’s at. You feel you’ve had a nice little moral nip and tuck when you are with the gang you want to be with. Even nerds have their IDs. Adam (Enzo Cilenti) has the slouched bearing, the clumsy little paunch, the boyish fidgeting, the indecisive grin. Enter Evelyn (Alicia Witt), student and artist. Evelyn is smart, sexy, imperious: a rule-breaker, a free spirit. The catch is that free spirits are ruthless. They are best admired from a distance, which is why they have a special loneliness. Evelyn has a project, and Adam is her victim. So are his best friends, Jenny and Philip (Sienna Guillory, James Murray). LaBute’s take is that artists are, or can be, such free spirits: destroyers, cannibals, emotional imperialists. So, is art a moral experience or a makeover?’ Julian Webber’s direction crackles with aggression, irony and pain, and the actors give elegantly crafted performances, laid-back and cool. Their impact is anything but.

Meaningful modifiers are most often used in reviews to let you see the characters (inside as well as outside). Nouns have to be meaningful too. Note the combinations in the description above of Adam and ‘emotional imperialism’.

The language of reviews must get across the atmosphere of the product and the reviewer’s place in the world described, but with a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer: ‘you feel you’ve had a nice little nip and tuck …’ neatly tells us what the playwright is doing with the characters and that the reviewer approves: a good example of how you can exploit such clichés as ‘nice little’. Note also how another of the listed cliches, ‘cool’, gains meaning from the context.

The structure of a review normally needs careful planning so that the evidence is clear that backs up the opinions. A brief analysis of Peter’s piece will illustrate:

Intro:	Today appearance is all: the theme is broached.
Body:	From ‘You feel you’ve had …’: the characters and how their relationships make the story. The artist as possible free spirit and destroyer.
Conclusion:	From ‘So, is art a moral experience or a makeover?’ we are left with the question. The director’s and actors’ contributions are followed by a summing up of the effect of the whole.

It’s a short review, so peripheral matters are excluded. There’s no mention of the set, which means there was nothing remarkable about it. Plays these days often have minimal settings. If films and TV can do the realism so much more convincingly there’s little sense in trying to compete with them. Of course minimal settings can be a creative contribution.

It’s a favourable review and the negatives are not serious, so there’s no space for them. Minor negatives could have been disposed of at the start or at the finish. What has to be avoided is a back-and-forthing between the two, which makes for confusion.

Even in a short review, notice how different aspects – characterization and conflict – are juggled to effect in the body, as evidence for the author’s ‘take’ or message.

In these play-safe times for the commercial theatre it’s musicals or it’s star American names in London’s West End and new plays there are few. When Harry Met Sally at the Theatre Royal was adapted from Nora Ephron’s Oscar-nominated film script of a highly successful film starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. Playing even safer, the production attracted a succession of paired, known (if not well) names. Just as adapted mediocre novels can make great films, so can the adapted scripts of very good films make disappointing plays. Fiona Mountford in The Evening Standard of 16 June 2004 covers the pairing of Michael Landis and Molly Ringwald.

There’s a positive note:

Smooth surfaces and slick packaging are what Loveday Ingram’s serviceable production is all about, with its Jamie Cullum soundtrack and minimalist white box of a set.

But it doesn’t quite come off:

Marcy Kahan’s adaptation … nominally anchors the dithering duo in some kind of reality by providing them with a best friend each, but apart from this they remain absurdly context-free.

The years roll by, Sally’s hair remains slightly out of control and still all they talk about are their romantic entanglements, or lack thereof.

On the whole, the National Theatre production of the rarely revived eighteenth century French classic, Marivaux’s The False Servant, updated to the 1930s and directed by Jonathan Kent, was enthusiastically welcomed by reviewers. The plot is thick. Lelio (Anthony Calf), the fiancé of a Countess (Charlotte Rampling), plans to dump her in favour of an heiress (Nancy Carroll). The latter disguises herself as a man, Chevalier, who callously wins the Countess’s love and exposes Lelio’s treachery. The servant of the title betrays anybody for money. The set is striking: candles, chandeliers, mirrors and Louis XIV decorations.

Let’s compare a few extracts from June 2004 reviews – (1) Benedict Nightingale in The Times (440 words), (2) Sheridan Morley in the Daily Express (350 words), and (3) Aleks Sierz in What’s On (300 words). Note how you think the lengths affect the styles. First, on the translation, the set and updating effects:

1  … Kent and his enjoyably colloquial translator, Martin Crimp, have given us a brilliant, cynical, scary play that justifies every British prejudice about French sophistication and avarice. Paul Brown’s marvellous set … sums up much about the glitter, narcissism and shallow awfulness on show. If I described her Nancy Carroll’s] Chevalier as a gorgeously sexy Radclyffe Hall I would not, I think, be wholly misrepresenting an evening that, since it is set in our knowing era, is bound to take on lesbian overtones.

2  Marivaux … whom nobody bothers to revive over here, largely because he is reckoned too precious, too tricky, too wordy and perhaps just too French.

    Which is precisely why this production is such a joy and such a revelation. Kent and his new translator … have cut through all the high heels, wigs and the verbiage to give us the ice-cold modern miracle, Marivaux on speed as it were … In an infinitely glamorous setting … a cast … seem perfectly to understand the world they inhabit is also that of Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn in trousers, those Hollywood 1930s in which nobody was quite what they seemed, personally or sexually.

3  Martin Crimp’s superb translation, which bristles with pointed thrusts and sharp asides, captures Marivaux’s seductive scepticism and elegant irony … The Chevalier comes across as a modern woman, enjoying the freedom that dressing as a man gives her, and happily demonstrating her superior intelligence and wit: the poor Countess has no choice but to melt into the arms of androgyny.

Sierz, however, finds the set ‘cumbersome’. Acting honours are varied:

This is a play in which Arlequin (David Collings) has become an oafish old drunk, the servant of the title (excellent Adrian Scarborough) is a depraved Jeeves eager to betray anyone for cash, and the male lead, [Anthony] Calf’s Lelio, exudes a mix of fastidious, brutishness and slimy misogyny.

The evening’s performance comes from Carroll as a sharp, ruthless, dangerously charismatic transvestite … lesbian overtones. An opportunity, perhaps, for Rampling to explore her character’s emotional intricacies in more depth? If so, it’s not one that she seizes.

Morley, apart from the favourable mention of the ensemble above, singles out Charlotte Rampling as the Countess:

At the centre of this web of deception and despair, looking more like the ice princess than ever, we get Charlotte Rampling who, although she trained over here at the Royal Court, has seldom, if ever, been back in 30 years.

Sierz finds much of the acting ‘muddled’but is in agreement with Nightingale about Scarborough and with Morley about Rampling:

Only the star … knows how to move with elegance, and the most memorable moment of the show is when Adrian Scarborough as Trivelin gives a spirited mime of his eavesdropping.

Sierz is something of a champion, naturally enough, of in-yer-face theatre and gets around the fringe to review it. He laments the lack of attention given it by British theatre makers to Sarah Kane, who committed suicide aged 28 in February 1999, although she is acclaimed by our universities and abroad. Also in What’s On (11 February 2004) he reviewed the first revival here (at Battersea Arts Centre, London) of Crave, first produced in 1998.

It’s a difficult play, he tells us, but worth the challenge. There are no stage directions; in the text, no plot, no ordinary dialogue and characters called A, B, C and M. It’s symbolic, fragmentary, Matt Peover’s ‘daring direction … focusing on C, a young woman haunted by memories and fantasies’.

… Four voices echo round her mind. At the same time, the cast talk to each other, which suggests two relationships: one between C and an older abusive man, A, and the other between the needy woman M and the more slippery male B. Direct and explicit language clash with ambiguity and elusiveness.

It’s a haunting 40 minutes, with lines of poetry following snatches of conversation: at one moment, we’re in a psychiatric clinic, at another, in a wine bar. And while C is clearly suffering as she tries to grapple with her depression, there are passages of unexpected elation and wicked humour. Typically, it is the abusive A who gets to speak Kane’s long paean to love.

On a dark, abstract set, which suggests a splintered cityscape, the young cast tackles the play with intelligence and commitment. Not every section works equally well, and some of Kane’s choral rhythms are missing, but in general this is a memorable version of a rare contemporary classic. Who could crave for anything more?

FILMS

If reviewing regularly, obtain publicity material from film distributors. This normally gives full cast details, potted biographies of actors, details of the production, etc. It is given out at previews. Reviewers of films and TV plays should have some knowledge of the medium, of the technology and of the production techniques used inside and outside the studio, of the difference between the montage of numerous short scenes and the slow build-up in the scenes of a play.

It’s not so easy in film to get inside a character’s head in any subtle way, as you can in a novel or a play. Against this there’s the power of images. Ingenuity is called for, in the use of flashbacks and voice-overs, and so on.

Films have the great advantage in realism. In a flash we are in Rome or London or outside and then inside a castle (even if actually we’re not). A Rolls Royce immediately establishes a character’s wealth, poverty is represented by a torn and dirty shirt. The images tend to take precedence over the words. Film is a director’s medium: scripts can be mediocre and actors can be unconvincing if the images are overpowering or if the disjointed way of working (scenes not done in the order of showing, for example) makes for some confused acting.

Will Self’s review of The Reckoning in London’s Evening Standard (3 June 2004), for example, though pointing out some anachronistic elements in this film about medieval England, welcomes director Paul McGuigan’s ‘fresh, lively cinematic vision’:

His Middle Ages is dirty, smelly and colourful; as plague-ridden corpses are disinterred by the thespian detectives a troupe of travelling actors], fingernails are properly chipped and bloodied. He and his cinematographer Peter Sova (who also shot the beautifully stylized Gangster No. 1), are a little too addicted to the slomo pan accompanied by an amplified ‘swoosh’ but, mostly, their interpolations of dreamlike fugues – actors performing gymnastics, water flowing down faces like quicksilver – are apposite as well as atmospheric.

The nameless town looks great, especially in long shot, with its half-timbered houses wattling their way up the flanks of the baronial castle, but too much use is made of the crane shot, which, paradoxically, far from opening out the action, make the purpose-built set feel like just that.

Self takes the opportunity to chart the career of the star, Paul Bettany, who plays an unfrocked priest who falls in with the actors: not so convincing in this one, after impressive performances in Gangster No. 1, Master and Commander and Dogville, which are summarized.

Whereas bad plays come across as pretentious or boring and cannot normally be saved from disaster, even by the most skilful acting, bad or run-of-the-mill films can be enjoyable. There’s so much to look at and often you don’t have to take it seriously.

Rose Lloyd enjoyed The Lost Boys and shared her enjoyment with us in the South London Press:

What’s got long hair, an ear-ring, a ghetto-blaster, and fangs?

Well, it’s something out of The Lost Boys, which … creates a whole new breed of monster – Teenychoppers.

The vampire tradition, now a bit long in the tooth, gets some much needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, when moved to pretty seaside town Santa Carla, populated almost entirely, it seems, by creatures of the night.

Despite the chattiness the opening firmly places the film in its genre and tells us what it’s about.

There are a ‘bunch of motorbike-riding, cave-dwelling, bloodsucking, heavy metal bats, who hang around the fairground savaging anyone who dares stick their neck out’. A vampire killer, who hangs out in a shop selling Batman comics, says, ‘We have been aware of some very serious vampire activity here in the town. We are almost certain that ghouls and werewolves occupy top positions at the town hall’. Ms Lloyd’s comment: ‘Well, could you resist a film with lines like that?’ and sums the film up as ‘a likeable and entertaining variant on I was a Teenage Werewolf’.

A couple of comparisons will conclude this section, of Monster, directed by Patty Jenkins, starring Oscar winner Charlize Theron, who had a notable uglied-up makeover. This is based on the true story of America’s serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was abused as a child, became a prostitute and ended up, after killing her clients, on Death Row. Here are extracts from the reviews of (1) Nigel Andrews in The Financial Times (4 stars verdict) and (2) James Christopher in The Times (2 stars verdict) on 1 April 2004:

1  Cheap, brisk, vividly written, the film begins like a shoestring shockudrama, a ‘now it can be told’ descendant of the old Warners crime biopics, or Sam Fuller reality thrillers. But the performances of Theron and Christina]Ricci, as the girlfriend increasingly aghast as Wuornos keeps returning from a hard day’s hooking with bloody clothes or smouldering gun, raise it to superior psychodrama. (© The Financial Times. All rights reserved)

2  The romance is as runny and lurid as egg yolk. It inspires Wuornos to pipe dreams of a job and a home, without having a clue what either entails. She is forced back to the streets and, less inevitably, the gun by the petulant girlfriend] Selby’s demand to be kept in the manner to which she is accustomed. Any compelling dramatic point is lost.

    The film [is]a vaguely well-intentioned homily about a damaged woman who loses her grasp on reality, and a spoilt girl who never had her hand on it in the first place. How disappointing that Theron’s biggest splash should end in such a shallow puddle.

The monthly magazine Empire is for film buffs. It covers all aspects, in general features, dissection of works in progress and news on the technology, as well as numerous reviews of current releases and videos. Although averaging 200 to 300 words, reviews manage to pack a lot in. In the August 2004 issue Patrick Peters reviews The Flower of Evil in a hundred or so:

Although Claude Chabrol has sustained his career with thrillers in the Hitchcock mode he’s at his best dissecting the foibles and failings of the French bourgeoisie. His real targets here are those seemingly respectable bastions who harbour the neo-fascist prejudices that have scarred Gallic society since the Nazi occupation. What’s most notable about this compelling study of class arrogance is the restraint and precision of Chabrol’s satire, whether he’s commenting on the careless affluence of womanizing pharmacist Bernard Le Coq’s semi-incestuous family, or the complacent naivety of Nathalie Baye’s campaign for mayor of their Bordeaux neighbourhood. But stealing the show is Suzanne Flon’s immaculate display as the matriarch whose good-natured indulgence of her ghastly relations belies a guilty secret. Mercilessly acute and quietly devastating.

TELEVISION

My comments on feature films apply to a large extent to TV plays. The distinction between the two in fact is being blurred: many films are now made with finance invested on condition that they will have plenty of TV as well as cinema outlets. Nevertheless there can be important differences in the way film-makers approach work for cinema and TV. As sweeping generalizations, TV works better for domestic kinds of drama (it is watched in domestic surroundings), cinema better for epic westerns or similar works. One-off TV plays are increasingly rare at present and it’s series and soaps that need attention. Appropriately enough, they are treated, on the whole, with less seriousness than theatre, but given credit if they are good entertainment.

Series

The series Murphy’s Law (BBC1) was carried by James Nesbitt in the title role as an unorthodox CID man. Virginia Blackburn in the Daily Express (1 June 2004) recognizes that a good detective story/thriller can sail along on a good deal of preposterousness. A chemical leak from a mysterious biotech company, it is suspected, caused the death of a child, reported as drowned. But it was pulled out of the river alive by Alice and died in hospital. Murphy goes undercover:

On arrival at the factory, an overall-clad Murphy and his troupe of cleaners are told very conveniently by their boss exactly where they shouldn’t go. The first and second levels are fine, she says, but avoid the third level. Got that at the back? The third! It’s where the bad guys are! Murphy certainly clocks it, as does Alice who’s now also working undercover, posing as – guess what? – a cleaner. She attracts the attentions not only of our hero but also the baddest bad guy, John Simpson (one of those scriptwriters must have a sense of humour), the head of corporate affairs, who soon discovers she’s the dead boy’s mother.

It becomes clear that Simpson’s job description covered murdering anyone who might have been on to the company’s nasty secret, which, to cut a long story short, involved manufacturing a drug that made it psychologically easier for soldiers to kill people. It appears that Simpson had become addicted to it …

Earlier in the year Mark Lawson in The Guardian admitted to enjoying No Angels, full of randy nurses and doctors, condemned by the Royal College of Nursing, just as the randy teachers of Teachers (also Channel 4) were condemned by the National Union of Teachers:

The only obstacle to enjoyment is that armchair psychologists may feel that Channel 4 will soon be diagnosed with erotomania.

The objection to Teachers and now No Angels is that these visions of sex-crazed educators and loose-skirted nurses resulted not from deep research into what colleges and hospitals are like, but from close examination of the effect on TV ratings of heavy sexual content.

Documentaries

The TV documentary may be compared to the well-researched feature article and a series of documentaries to a non-fiction book. It’s distortion of emphasis that the reviewer will find to criticize, however, rather than errors of fact. As mentioned above, the film-maker can manipulate viewers’ feelings and thoughts by careful selection of images.

TV documentary makers use a wide range of research material, and the reviewer’s job is to indicate how well or badly this is used, and how it all contributes to the total effect. Interviews inside and outside the studio, photographs, drawings, paintings, maps, charts, old newsreels, current newsreels, reconstructions by actors of real-life incidents – these are among the devices used. Documentary producers may overdo the general ‘make-it-visual’ principle; too many coloured figures may be moved about on to many coloured maps to express the simplest of facts or processes.

Reviewing a documentary generally means asking these general questions:

•  Is it part of a series? If so, what contribution is it making to the series, and what is to follow?

•  What knowledge did the viewer need to bring to the documentary? How clear was the background to a viewer who did not know much about the subject?

•  Was the programme’s judgement fair, was the argument convincing? As balanced as it should have been?

•  How did the programme compare with similar earlier documentaries that may have been seen? (Keeping in mind of course that readers may not have seen either.)

For preliminary research before reviewing, try the station’s Press Office or the office of the programme’s producer. Put yourself on the necessary mailing lists if a regular reviewer.

The variety of TV output is matched by the variety of approaches to the reviewing task. There’s such a vast variety of programmes that the approach of reviewers vastly varies to match, but whatever the publication, assessment tends to be between the lines, with humour and irony to the fore and a consciousness of those huge telly audiences that are being wooed in a spirit of fierce competition. Here’s Jill Foster on ‘Today’s Telly’ in the Daily Mirror of 28 June 2004 on a documentary, Little Lady Fauntleroy (Channel 4). Ten-year-old James Harries appeared on TV as an antiques expert (we learn that he was primed by his father) and later turned into a woman.

James is now Lauren who is a marriage counsellor cum karaoke singer cum doctor of metaphysics and dramaturgy – don’t worry, I had to look it up too. Trouble is, all her qualifications are from the Cardiff College of Humanistic Studies – located at the Harries’ home.

The self-deluded and snobbish parents are making money from the gullible and are attracting venom from the neighbours. The presenter ends up screaming at them what he thinks of their fake qualifications.

Last Night’s or The Weekend’s TV can group together several items and can find intriguing or funny ways of making connections between them. In The Independent Review Thomas Sutcliffe moves from a Panorama (BBC1) programme Can Condoms Kill? (the Aids virus can pass through the holes) to a BBC2 documentary on The Elgin Marbles:

Like condoms, the subject of the Elgin Marbles is an impermeable membrane: on one side you have those who believe they should be returned to Greece, and on the other those who think they shouldn’t, and the two rarely make any kind of meaningful contact.

When a genre can be covered (or attacked) by lumping together several programmes, the resulting review can say worthwhile things even if the products aren’t worth much. In June 2004 the schedules were crammed with ‘reality’ shows. Sam Wollaston responded with Reality Bites in The Guardian, starting with Hell’s Kitchen (ITV1), wherein three-Michelin-starred Gordon Ramsay is the devil:

So what you essentially have here is a man who used to be a real chef before he turned into a publicity monster pretending to be cross with some people who are pretending we’ve heard of them in a restaurant that doesn’t really exist. And they call it reality.

Some of the so-called celebrities eating – or not eating – in the makey-uppy restaurant are only ‘famous’ because they’ve been on reality shows themselves. Look, there’s Jade off Big Brother. And over there is the coughing major who was on Celebrity Wife Swap. With Jade off Big Brother. The whole reality thing seems to have turned into a terrifying self-fertilizing organism that breeds and evolves, creating offspring that get uglier with each new generation.

Wollaston refers to Big Brother’s ‘bunch of losers who should be cross that they’ve been locked up in an old formula’. They get on or don’t get on and are voted out one by one. It’s not enough. For TV these days, he says:

You have to properly mess with them – swap their wives, fake their jobs, put them in the past, alter their faces, exchange their internal organs …

He finds the new kind of Pop Idol, Bollywood Star, in which hopeful Brits audition for a major part in a Bollywood film, more promising. And Simon Edge in the Daily Express found in it things to smile at and things to be moved at. Like some bad films, some bad TV can be enjoyed for various reasons, and the reviewer can sometimes remind you of the fact.

You can make a living out of sending up TV that’s not up to scratch because there’s so much of it, if you’re Victor Lewis-Smith with a regular whole-page column in London’s Evening Standard. Early June of 2004 saw several programmes commemorating the anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944. Nothing and nobody is safe, as Lewis parodies jingoistic attitudes. He has refused to have anything French in the house since France ‘refused to participate in our glorious mission to destroy Saddam’s non-existent weapons and liberate the long-suffering and downtrodden oil of Iraq’. He’s also returned to the kennels a German shepherd dog and smashed up a Spanish Yamaha guitar …

Come on England! We don’t need Europe. Let’s stick two British fingers up at untrustworthy Johnny Wog, revive the Empire, reintroduce the groat, and enjoy once again our inalienable ancestral right to quaff a flagon of malmsey or a butt of sack (or even a sackbut). We’re still a great nation! We’ve still got the Falkland Isles and Rockall! Honestly, sometimes I wonder who won the sodding war, really I do.

He’s rude about the No to Europe Party, fronted by Robert Kilroy-Silk and Joan Collins, and finally in the second column gets round to reviewing D-Day Dispatches (ITV1), which he found, among other things, inconsistent in style:

‘It’s the second of June, 1944,’ said John Suchet, dressed in unambiguously 2004 clothing and standing in a contemporary ITN-style studio clutching a plastic clipboard, so why was Sian Lloyd dressed in a Second World War military uniform, and pointing at a map with Forties’ graphics?

Lewis has generally got a serious point (whether you agree with it or not). People who ‘lived and fought through that period seldom mention the war at all’. He concludes:

They know that, in truth, there’s nothing glorious about war, and as we all hurtle towards WWIII, television should remember that the truth that makes us free is not the comforting celebration of our victories. For the most part, it’s the truth we’d prefer not to hear.