Arts

When he admits, ‘I’m in intense pain,’ he immediately smiles, to avoid appearing gloomy or self-pitying.

Interspersed with the unremitting progress of his disease is his life story. A happy childhood in Canada was unusual only in the detail of his diminutive height. The shortest in his class, he grew to five foot three and then stopped. Acting – in ‘cute elf’ roles, as he charmingly puts it – was his salvation.

The slightly clunky re-enactions of his youth show his desperate bids for stardom: first appearing on screen at 15, and moving to LA aged 18. He finally got his big break in 1982, on the NBC show Family Ties. And then came the megabreak in 1985 – as Marty McFly in Back to the Future.

Fox became one of the great stars of the ’80s – the sex thimble every American Mom wanted their daughter to marry.

Everything went right – he married his Family Ties co-star, Tracy Pollan, in 1988. Family Ties ran from 1982 to 1989; the Back to the Future trilogy from 1985 to 1990.

You remain painfully aware of what awaits Fox, even as you see the pictures of the Ferraris of his youth and the shots of chat shows when he was the Boy Prince of Hollywood.

It began to go wrong in 1991, with the Parkinson’s diagnosis. Fox concealed it until 1998, even as he embarked on another hit show, Spin City

He continued to act for over 20 years, not least in a funny cameo in Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he cheerfully mocks his Parkinson’s.

But he knew all these years he was acting on borrowed time. In 2021, he retired, defeated by the struggle to smile and the blank countenance of the Parkinson’s-sufferer.

This could have been a schmaltzy feelgood film. But in fact it’s so honestly done that it’s genuinely moving. Yes, Fox has a lovely supportive wife – ‘In sickness and in health,’ she whispered on hearing the Parkinson’s diagnosis – and four adorable children.

But it remains a feelbad film. There is no cure for Parkinson’s, however rich or famous you are. As Fox says, ‘You lose this game. You don’t win this.’

Theatre William Cook

THE MOTIVE AND THE CUE National Theatre, London, until 15th July

In 1964, Richard Burton played Hamlet on Broadway, directed by John Gielgud – the finest Shakespearean actor of the century directing the most exciting actor of his generation. Burton’s recent marriage to Elizabeth Taylor was front-page news. Commercially, this new Hamlet couldn’t fail.

Artistically, though, the pairing was a thorny proposition. Gielgud’s approach to Shakespeare was cerebral and intellectual. Burton was passionate and instinctive. Gielgud played him from the neck up. Burton played him from the gut.

Their Hamlet was a clash of styles and generations – the gentleman actor of the old school versus the angry young man of the jet age.

This Kulturkampf is the essence of Jack Thorne’s thoughtful new play, crisply directed by Sam Mendes. Unlike in a lot of backstage dramas, its main focus is the rehearsal process. Thorne’s play concludes as the curtain rises on the first night.

Two of Burton’s supporting actors (William Redfield and Richard L Sterne) wrote whole books about these rehearsals – so Thorne has a lot of historical detail to draw on. There’s bound to be a fair amount of artistic licence, too. However, it’s not very important how much of this is fact and how much fiction. The only thing that really matters is: does it work as drama?

The show is graced by two superb performances: Mark Gatiss as a delicate and graceful Gielgud, and Johnny Flynn as a brooding, virile Burton.

It’s perfectly possible to sit back and just enjoy these uncannily accurate portrayals, yet I found myself watching them with a mounting sense of frustration. Although each individual scene is an elegant, eloquent set piece, Thorne is too kind to his characters and his play suffers as a result.

At 38, Burton was too old to play Hamlet. A lifetime of hard living (which was to finish him off at the age of 58) was already starting to catch up with him.

Johnny Flynn, who plays him here, is 40, but while Flynn looks ten years younger, Burton looked at least ten years older. There’s a scene where he turns up to rehearsals drunk and is rude to everyone (especially Gielgud), but – like the awkward issue of his age – the conundrum of why a man who had it all should choose to drown it in a sea of drink is never adequately addressed.

Likewise, Thorne’s Gielgud is far too saintly for my liking. Just as great footballers rarely make great managers, great actors rarely make great directors.

Gielgud infuriates Burton with his micromanagement, but the rest of the cast adore him, even though his reluctance to countenance a Hamlet different from the one he played is terribly self-obsessed.

Ditto Elizabeth Taylor. Tuppence Middleton’s Taylor is charismatic and alluring, but I found it hard to believe the most famous (and gorgeous) actress in the world would be quite so content to hang around mixing cocktails for her husband’s workmates. Maybe she really was that polite in real life, but it hardly makes great theatre. I was hoping for a few more fireworks.

The biggest problem, however, is that the whole thing is so self-referential.

What if you’ve never heard of Gielgud or Burton? What if you’ve never seen Hamlet? Would this play within a play make any sense, or would you be utterly befuddled? The rehearsal scenes feel novel to begin with, but I ended up wishing I was watching these actors playing Hamlet for real.

Things become a lot more interesting when Thorne’s characters escape from the rehearsal room: Burton boozing in his hotel suite; Gielgud with a male escort. I would have loved to see more of this, and a lot less ‘What’s my motivation?’ I’m in a minority. This audience adored it. There are already rumours of a West End transfer.

This is an accomplished production of an accomplished play, but it’s a sign that theatre is retreating into introspection.

1964 was the year of John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence and Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. Osborne and Orton were writing about the modern world. They weren’t writing about Edwardian interpretations of Shakespeare.

Gatiss and Flynn are terrific as Gielgud and Burton, but I’d rather see them as Polonius and Hamlet or, even better, in a new play about the world today.

Radio Valerie Grove

‘So, what was your best takeaway, from the whole shebang?’ as a BBC podcaster put it.

Was it the sweet chorister’s opening welcome to the king, the ‘gobsmacking’ Zadok, or Penny Mordaunt’s biceps? A nostalgia-fest ensued, until fatuity and banality set in.

All vox pops invite clichés. Those who got coronation mugs and silver lockets in 1953 recalled monochrome first sightings of a flickering 12-inch screen, the launch of the television age. Seventy years on, earphones in, I started out loyally tuned to Radio 4’s commentary, stayed to hear Jim Naughtie pick up the baton – but then gave in. The box won again.

I was glued to the optics: Charles’s worryingly gaping tunic, Camilla’s instinctive desire to guide the Archbishop’s hand so he didn’t mess up her hair. It was totally involving, intrusive and televisual.

At this point, enter my daughter Lucy, an English teacher. Her school is already dealing with baccalaureate students using ChatGPT to write their essays. Even Lucy finds it useful (if fallible) to create simple tests. ‘Try it,’ she said.

‘Two hundred words,’ I ordered, ‘comparing the BBC Coronation coverage on radio and TV.’

Zip! In a nanosecond, the required wordage appeared on-screen, relating how radio dominated households in 1953, ‘when TV sets were still rare’.

‘But what about the 2023 Coronation?’ I asked.

Zip! Another nanosecond and the bot retorted, ‘I’m sorry, but I cannot compare coverage of the 2023 Coronation. Queen Elizabeth II is the current monarch of the UK and there have been no announcements about a future hypothetical ceremony.’ Ha! This bot, created in 2021, is stuck there. We laughed. But I was also astonished.

After Jeremy Bowen’s Frontlines of Journalism series, we were left wondering whether we really wanted the BBC’s impartiality guidelines upheld after all. Bowen’s father, Gareth, was not impartial, reporting the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Nor was Richard Dimbleby, entering Belsen in 1945. Jeremy Bowen: ‘The truth does not lie “somewhere in between” opposing viewpoints. The truth lies right there, in a box.’

The historian Peter Hennessy, b 1947, rose from a family on benefits to the House of Lords, blessed by grammar school and a history master named Eric Pankhurst. On Desert Island Discs, he admitted a journalistic blunder (naming the wrong Fourth Man in 1977). He also declared, ‘I wish my generation had been able to do better for our country.’ With all our post-1945 advantages, we should have made a better world, he said. He is hopeful. ‘I’m Pollyanna to a fault, and the country’s brimming with good people. We are better than this.’

I wanted to agree, but then I heard Helen Lewis’s dismaying series The New Gurus, with its bleak vision of young men in thrall to ‘life coaches’ – not just Andrew Tate, but ‘a Love Island candidate and former nightclub promoter’, preaching a toxic lifestyle to 200 million downloaders.

And David Aaronovitch’s The Briefing Room – on the Online Safety Bill – did not reassure. These morning slots – Woman’s Hour included – seem designed to instil pity and terror. It’s a relief to find Ed Reardon (now an ‘ambassador to the planet’, while Jez has ‘taken the HS2 shilling’) still satirising contemporary life. Or The Oldie’s A N Wilson, wonderfully non-impartial on Times Radio, declaring that over-70s should be denied the vote, as they are ‘too set in their ways, and will be dead soon anyway’.

For his 80th birthday, Michael Palin’s Desert Island Discs was revived from 1979. ‘I’m sorry to say you only got a second at Oxford,’ Roy Plomley said. ‘You seem to have frittered a lot of time with Terry Jones. What was he supposed to be reading?’ ‘He was reading Frittering,’ deadpanned Palin. All right, Terry read English. ‘And did he get a second, too?’

‘Yes, he only got a second,’ said Palin. ‘Poor Terry.’

Quite lost on Plomley, who had NSOH.

Television Frances Wilson

The BBC is currently going Down Under, and what an education it is.

Ten Pound Poms (BBC1), Danny Brocklehurst’s new Sunday-night drama, begins in snowy Stockport in 1956, where Annie Roberts (Faye Marsay) spots the ad for £10 tickets to Australia on the newspaper she is using to soak up her drunken husband’s vomit. Things haven’t been right with Terry (Warren Brown) since he was captured in the war.

The next time we see them, they are heading for the harbour. ‘We can have our tea in the garden,’ says Annie to the kids, Pattie and Peter (Hattie Hook and Finn Treacy). ‘Coconuts for breakfast,’ adds Terry, who has promised to give up beer. It is Empire Windrush in reverse.

Six weeks, three days and 14 hours later, the Roberts family disembark in Sydney where a Chinese couple are being turned away by the port authorities. ‘Whites only,’ explains the customs officer. ‘Rules.’

Pattie looks stunned, as though racism were an entirely new concept. Annie will be similarly astounded when, the following week, an Aboriginal woman is sent to the back of the queue in a shop.

One and half million people from Britain and Ireland were seduced by the Australian government’s Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, including Mr and Mrs Gibb and their sons Barry, Robin and Maurice, who left on the same boat as the parents of Kylie and Dannii Minogue.

Given that Ten Pound Poms is primarily a social history of the migrant experience, it’s a pity that postwar England is presented as more colourcoordinated than a Benetton advert. Pattie and Annie Roberts will presumably have heard plenty of references to ‘Pakis’ back in Stockport, and seen the signs saying, ‘NO BLACKS, NO IRISH’. What’s new is that they are now themselves at the bottom of the pecking order.

Instead of being handed the keys to a spanking new bungalow with a beach view, the family are deposited at a temporary housing complex, which looks, says Terry, ‘like a prisoner-of-war camp’. Watchtowers loom over vermininfested shanty huts; inmates scrub their backs beneath outdoor showers.

‘This place is a dump,’ Pattie says to J J, the sadistic hostel manager (played by comedian Stephen Curry).

‘And you wonder why,’ replies J J, ‘we call you whingeing poms. You come over here, soak up our sunshine, take our jobs, and all you do is complain.’

Other whingeing poms in Camp Cockroach include the sultry Kate (Michelle Keegan), who left her fiancé behind in Liverpool, and Bob, a dodgy English businessman whose wife, Sheila (I know!), is miserable enough to be shagging J J.

These subplots distract from – rather than blend in with – the central story,

‘Oh no – the gerbils have escaped again’ which is how the Roberts family will make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear. The Aussies, swivel-eyed psychos, see the Poms as top-hatted pansies nibbling on cucumber sandwiches. Things really are upside-down here!

The two nations are also divided by a common language: ‘How do you get an elephant into a refrigerator?’ J J asks a terrified Peter. ‘Open the door and push him in.’

Terry, a skilled builder, finds himself digging trenches alongside Dean (David Field), the most lethal man since Freddy Krueger. ‘You have Blacks in Britain, don’t you?’ says Dean, having tried to squash Terry beneath an avalanche of rolling steel pipes. ‘Well, over here, you’re the Black. Go and piss in the bushes.’

A later rant from Dean about the ‘Abos’ being subhuman leaves Annie and Terry agreeing to find nicer friends. This is after Dean has run over an Aboriginal boy, leaving him for dead.

For light relief, turn to BBC2 iPlayer where Colin from Accounts, written by and starring Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall, is pure heaven. Strangely, the plot also hinges on a car accident in Sydney. This time, it’s a stray dog (Colin) who is hit, and Gordon (played by Brammall) covers his medical expenses and takes him in. Now with wheels instead of back legs, Colin looks like a children’s toy. Why did Gordon run over Colin? Because he was distracted when Ashley (Harriet Dyer) flashed her tit at him as she crossed the road.

‘Was it your party tit?’ asks her friend, Megan. ‘No’, says Ashley, ‘it was the small one.’

Now that’s a joke poor Peter could laugh at.

Music

Richard Osborne

Benjamin Grosvenor At Wigmore Hall

There was a handful of empty seats for pianist Benjamin Grosvenor’s Coronation weekend Wigmore Hall recital.

It may not have been entirely wise to schedule so high-profile an event on the same evening as the royal concert, televised live from nearby Windsor. Still, though the size of the audience was a fraction of that of the Windsor throng, there could be no denying the pedigree of the artist, or the range and durability of the music he’d chosen to play.

Grosvenor is the finest English pianist of his generation, and his programme was a thing of epic proportions. In the first half, a famously challenging transcription by composer and piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni of Bach’s mighty chaconne from his D minor Partita was followed by what many believe to be Robert Schumann’s greatest work for solo piano, his C major Fantasia

After that, we were transported back to the 20th century’s two world wars and works by Ravel and Prokofiev which Grosvenor had tellingly juxtaposed.

Walls have ears. I remember the late Robert Tear recalling his time as a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, where he sensed ‘instant echoes of old, long-gone notes, deposited in the stone crannies’.

It must be the same in Wigmore Hall. This matchless venue for chamber music and song was designed and built by the Bechstein piano company. It was confiscated from Bechstein in 1916 under a somewhat dubious amendment to the Trading with the Enemy Act. Ravel and Prokofiev both appeared there, as did Busoni, who played at the hall’s inaugural recital on 31st May 1901.

Grosvenor’s decision to launch the recital with a lapidary account of the Bach brought with it more than a hint of the idea of Moses bringing the tablets down from the mountain. All the evening’s music owed a debt to the keyboard works of Bach, not least the Schumann.

There’s no greater love letter in all music than the three-movement Fantasia which the 26-year-old Schumann composed during an enforced separation from his wife-to-be, the 16-year-old Clara Wieck. Yet the work’s origin goes back to a fundraising commission from Franz Liszt to help raise money for a Beethoven memorial in Bonn. Beethoven revered Bach.

More to the point, there’s that haunting nine-note motif, a direct quotation from Beethoven’s song cycle To the Distant Beloved, that’s embedded deep within the fabric of the Schumann.

Following in the footsteps of Sviatoslav Richter, whose 1961 HMV recording of the Fantasia redefined our sense of the work’s expressive reach and impact, Grosvenor pulled on seven-league boots of his own. He unleashed great cataracts of tone, yet taking silence itself captive in moments of sudden quiet and contemplation.

The recital’s second half landed us in very different territory: Gallic not German, more emotionally detached –beyond personality, you might say – and driven by a distinctively 20th-century brand of keyboard virtuosity.

Ravel began his suite Le Tombeau de Couperin with ‘Forlane’, haughty and witty after the manner of Couperin, albeit decked out with outlandish harmonies which caused some of Ravel’s contemporaries to cover their ears in disbelief.

That was in 1914. Then the war came and the work was set aside until 1917, by which time many of Ravel’s friends were dead.

Again, there were those who were shocked by the surface brilliance of the work Ravel finally completed. ‘The dead are sad enough in their eternal silence’ was Ravel’s reply.

Grosvenor was less disingenuous. There was a touch of anger in his rip-roaring account of ‘Rigaudon’. The movement was dedicated to the memory of two brothers, Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, who’d been blown up by the same shell on the day they arrived at the front in November 1914. And there was a deep undertow of melancholy in his playing of ‘Menuet’, dedicated to Jean Dreyfus to whose family Ravel had long been close.

This, and the sardonically dazzling toccata with which Le Tombeau ends, might seem impossible acts to follow, but Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, written in 1942, takes expressions of outrage and disbelief to new heights.

It, too, concludes with a rocketing toccata. Vladimir Horowitz, in his 1945 world-première recording, treats this with a certain consideration; elegance even. Not so Grosvenor, whose performance, not inappropriately, suggested a ‘to Hell with it all’ mood.

There was menace too in his playing of the slow movement, with its parody blues tune and passages that sound like the chiming of distant bells.

Do those same bells continue to chime over Prokofiev’s newly shattered homeland? It was a question this beautifully calibrated reading made it impossible not to ask.

It had been some recital – rounded off with a lovely performance of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, the river god smiling as the waters played about him.

Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson Clash Of The Tinas

If you have been on the Tube recently, you can’t have missed those posters proclaiming ‘TINA’ and picturing the hoofer from Tennessee in full cry.

They’re promoting the five-year anniversary relaunch of the recordbreaking eponymous musical at the Aldwych in the West End, impeccably directed by Phyllida Lloyd.

‘Set to the pulse-pounding soundtrack of her most beloved hits, experience Tina Turner’s triumphant story live on stage as this exhilarating celebration reveals the woman that dared to dream fiercely, shatter barriers and conquer the world – against all odds,’ the programme says.

The production is a collab with Mrs Turner herself and it’s an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza interrupted only by brief intervals of hitting (Ike on Tina). The greatest hits – River Deep, Mountain High, What’s Love Got to Do with It?, Nutbush City Limits, Let’s Stay Together and Private Dancer – are all given proper size-12 welly.

Whenever I see the poster, the journalist in me, as opposed to the Oldie rock critic, can’t help wishing that the life of another Tina was being celebrated too, despite the ads boasting ‘There is only one Tina’.

That is Tina Brown. We met when I was at Oxford and she blew in – she was editing Vanity Fair and Olivia Channon had just died of a drugs overdose in the Christ Church rooms of Count Gottfried von Bismarck – and took a bunch of undergraduates, including me, out to lunch to get the goss for a mag piece.

‘I liked the editor of Isis, a sparky blonde,’ she said in a diary afterwards, which remains the only nice thing anyone has ever written about me.

I have been her devoted slave ever since.

This May, she was in town to host a summit for her Sir Harry Evans Memorial Fund. At a reception for it at the US Ambassador’s residence (where drinks started at the record early time of 5.30pm, and at 7pm I couldn’t even get a glass of water as they had ‘closed the bar’), Tina said a few words. The crowd included Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. All I can say is her gift for nifty phrasemaking has if anything advanced with age (she hailed the couple as ‘the Mick and Keith of journalism’).

So, please, Phyllida Lloyd, how about doing a rock opera about the girl from Maidenhead who bewitched men of letters, edited magazines, founded magazines and so on?

Tina Brown is the Tina Turner of journalism. She too is ‘simply unstoppable’ (as the posters put it). She is ‘simply the best’ – and a rock star in her own right.