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Friday 19/07/19 Bare Burn, baby, necessities burn The best Disney The night bigots songs – ranked! destroyed disco page 2 pgpage 6 • The Guardian 2 Friday 19 July 2019

1 When You Wish Upon a Star 2 Playlist Pinocchio, 1940 Ranked! Disney’s theme tune is the Circle of Life studio’s equivalent of Over The Lion the Rainbow: a song from King, 1994 a children’s fi lm that went No Disney fi lm beyond its intended audience has a more Disney and ended up part of the great spectacular American songbook. You opening than The 3 couldn’t accuse the lyrics – Lion King, which songs by Ned Washington, also Elton John and I Wanna Be responsible for The Nearness Tim Rice’s song Like You Kano of You and Wild Is the Wind – matches: the The Jungle 1 Trouble By Alexis Petridis of talking down to their hint of melodic Book, 1967 The east London MC’s audience: “Fate is kind – she and lyrical Perhaps Robert fi rst track since 2016’s brings to those that love the melancholy and Richard career-best Made In sweet fulfi lment of your secret that undercuts Sherman should the Manor is great: 10 longing.” A song about yearning its epic soar – be mentioned in he ponders postcode and hope, When You Wish Upon “There’s more the same breath wars to inspired The Bare a Star set the gold standard for to do than can as Lennon and Chance/Kanye-style Necessities Disney songs . ever be done” – McCartney. I gospel-rap production. The Jungle Book, gives it a real Wanna Be Like 1967 emotional pull. You is prime Charli XCX & Christine Originally 9 evidence: 2 and the Queens soundtracked a beautiful burst Gone by a set of folky The Age of Not of age-defying A muscular track full country songs – Believing joy, it was also of the malevolently and a parody of Bedknobs and subversive in mechanical funk that the Beatles – The Broomsticks, 1971 its depiction Janet Jackson channelled Jungle Book A moving song of evolution at her peak, as the pop ended up with about the fading at a time when power couple interrogate what may be the of childhood teaching it was love in a world of hate. greatest Disney and the loss still illegal in soundtrack of of innocence, some US states. Sam Smith all. The Bare The Age of How Do You Sleep? Necessities pulls Not Believing 3 The nocturnal off the task of is almost psychodrama that is promoting a unbearably sad. 4 Sam Smith’s musical don’t-worry-be- It sounds less like love life moves to its happy approach something aimed Let It Go latest chapter: the tale to life without at kids than an Frozen, 2013 of a – what else? – toxic making you want existential crisis There’s a reason Let It Go relationship full of to punch whoever set to music: became so huge. It is, by some cheating and jealousy, set wrote it. “Your dreams distance, the best-written power to throbbing electropop. are lost up on ballad in years. The lyrics twist a shelf / And the usual self-help platitudes NCT 127 worst of all, you into something darker, a perfect 4 Highway to Heaven doubt yourself”. fi xing of adolescent angst, with This English-language all its accompanying screw-you track from the BTS- impetuousness intact: “No right, rivalling K-pop 8 no wrong, no rules for me.” phenomenon has a big chance of crossing over: Remember Me all 1975-style soft-rock Coco, 2017 5 guitars, cheesy raps and Coco is a fi lm a glorious chorus. that tackles Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat tough themes, The Aristocats, 1970 Miya Folick including death Still not yet hip to pop music, 5 Malibu Barbie and dementia. Disney was on a fi rmer footing The Californian indie- Its central song with jazz. Punning on the slang slacker cosplays life as could be about use of the word “cat”, Scatman a pretty blonde, and the either. Written Crothers’ star turn – complete fi nal verse suggests it’s all by Roberto Lopez with a vaguely Eartha Kitt-esque rosy. But she comes back and Kristen interlude from Eva Gabor – to Earth: “Oh no, I’m still Anderson-Lopez , remains irresistible. a human being.” the team behind Let It Go, it is Lil Baby & DaBaby 7 far more subtle: 6 Baby its melody is Over a steady, inexorable Someday My Prince Will Come strong enough to beat reminiscent of Snow White, 1937 withstand being 6ix9ine’s Fefe, the One of the fi rst Disney songs heard umpteen most similarly named to cross over into “adult” times in the fi lm. 6 MCs in the US rap game music, this gorgeous, join forces for a pair swooning melody became A Dream Is a Wish Your of typically focused, a jazz standard, apparently Heart Makes disparaging verses. fi rst performed as such by Cinderella, 1950 the Ghetto Swingers, the jazz Less schlocky than you Julien Chang band formed in Theresienstadt might have imagined a song 7 Of the Past ghetto/concentration camp, and sung to a crowd of helpful, Debut single from subsequently by Miles Davis and anthropomorphic birds and this 19-year-old from Dave Brubeck . mice to be, A Dream Is a Wish Baltimore, who lays his Your Heart Makes may be When Toro y Moi-ish voiceover You Wish Upon a Star’s closest cosmic Balearic boogie, competitor for the title of See the full list at cruising smoothly early Disney’s greatest ballad, theguardian.com/music into a long-form jazz

covered by everyone from Brian PHOTOGRAPH: ALAMY piano solo. Wilson to Jessie Ware . • The Guardian Friday 19 July 2019 3

reception in early January, intended to bring warring Tory MPs together. For reasons that may for ever remain opaque, Mr Rosindell seems to have Lost in Showbiz bought along Ms Pollard. We will let the Mail on Sunday report take over for a bit: “The 69-year-old comedy actress left No 10 aides speechless after putting two fi ngers in her mouth for her signature comedy Marina Hyde whistle to get the prime minister’s attention at a reception held for Tory MPs and their spouses on Wednesday evening.” Go on. “Ms Hi-de-Hi! Pollard, who shot to fame as holiday camp cleaner Peggy Ollerenshaw in the BBC series Hi-de-Hi!, was a repeats: the guest of maverick Essex MP Andrew Rosindell.” Ah yes. There it is. bad boys of Anyway, how did the prime minister react to this, one of the many indignities visited upon her Brexit get per week in 2019, only 90% of which were of her own making? “Breaking off a conversation with energy the star minister Claire Perry,” we learn, “Mrs May said: ‘Hello there, Su.’ The backer they actress and singer shouted back: ‘Hi-de-hi!, Theresa!’” Yup, well, that’s why you’re on deserve the guestlist, Su. And at one level, fair play to her. There is a nice line in the fi rst Bridget Jones movie where Bridget is describing her friend Tom. “Tom, 80s pop icon who only wrote one hit record then retired because he found that one record was quite enough to get him laid for the whole of the 90s.” And so with Su, who played Peggy in Hi-de-Hi! in the 80s, and found that was quite enough to get her invited to several envelope would make a popular skit for Arron and Uzbekistan. Andrew, of course, concluded: “Great evening with openings a week for the 90s, the 00s, to get up for his sort-of friend Donald insisted he could justify every trip, people from all of the world.” the 2010s, and will doubtless see her Trump’s next birthday party at the and, anyway, part of that £25,000 Regarding the evening’s major right for most of the 2020s, too. president’s Floridian resort, Mar-a- was a fi ve-grand Virgin Atlantic star – Su, obviously – this episode is As for how the May-Pollard Lago. Or Racist Xanadu, as I prefer to upgrade. These days, he believes chiefl y welcomed for drawing my bilateral proceeded from there, a think of it. maroon EU passports have been “a attention to a frankly majestic Mail fellow guest tells the paper: “The Where were we? Ah yes. To national humiliation”. So don’t ruin on Sunday report, which I somehow prime minister is not great at the B further clarify, the gentleman on what’s coming next with any spoilers seem to have missed back in January small talk at the best of times, so ehold, a Banks’s left is not Ted’s comedy for him. of this year. The headline alone it looked pretty painful. Su just wonderful and warming snap from sidekick Spike Dixon, described Mr Rosindell’s other credits is an indication of the veritable kept saying: ‘We want Brexit’ and, this week’s 31-year Hi-de-Hi! cast by Holiday Rock as “an incredibly include always being described as treasure trove therein. So here we go: ‘What’s happening with Brexit, reunion. As someone who has honest and law-abiding man, a “maverick” entirely by people “Hi-de-Hi!, Theresa! Sitcom star Su why is it taking so long?’ and, ‘We watched every episode of the seminal and the only member of the who have never met one. He Pollard causes havoc at Number 10 as want Brexit now.’” Yet worse was to 1980s holiday camp sitcom, it is a entertainment staff who didn’t memorably once canvassed with his she wolf-whistles and berates PM and come. Not only was Downing Street pleasure to see old castmates back run his own scheme to scam the Staff ordshire bull terrier, with the demands that she speeds up Brexit.” approached by the Mail on Sunday together like this. Dear Su Pollard, campers for money”. It is, in fact, dog wearing a union jack waistcoat. Well now. We lay our scene for a quote on the prime minister’s who played hapless chambermaid Conservative MP for Romford, As I say, this is eccentricity only for at some Downing Street drinks lively discussion with Su, but it Peggy Ollerenshaw, hasn’t changed Andrew Rosindell, a longtime people who have never met anyone actually obliged, describing May as a bit. Indeed, to caption this photo, friend of Su. What can I tell you remotely intriguing or unusual, and “a huge fan” of Ms Pollard’s work. we may as well use a line from her about Andrew? The MPs’ expenses who – if they did – would hang them I’m sure we’re all fans of a amusingly exhaustive character investigation revealed he had for being probably foreign or gay. highfalutin reference to someone’s biography on Holiday Rock , the claimed £125,000 in second home As for the nature of the soiree “work”, calling to mind as it does Hi-de-Hi! fansite: “Peggy had a expenses for a fl at in London, with featuring Andrew, Su and Arron, the literary oeuvre of a Jane Austen rather vivid imagination and was his primary residence apparently it seems to have been a Tory The PM is not or the canvas stylings of a Jackson often easily taken in by others’ lies, being his childhood home , 17 miles fundraiser/Caribbean event, at Pollock, as opposed to someone particularly Ted’s ridiculous tales away, where his mother still lived. which Su featured alongside great at small whose Wikipedia entry for the past when he needed a cover story.” There have been various other erstwhile ’Allo ’Allo! waitress Vicki couple of decades is best summarised Oh my, dear me … I’m so sorry. disappointments, including the Michelle. Forgotten Celebrity talk at the best in the line: “In pantomime, Su You must forgive me. Having looked Independent’s revelation that he had Conservative Patti Boulaye was appears mainly as the Wicked a little closer, I can see that the roly- accepted £25,000-worth of trips to also in attendance, and there was of times. Su just Queen in Snow White and the Seven poly funnyman in the centre of the the Cayman Islands, the Turks and a speech by Jeremy Hunt. Yup, I Dwarfs, appearing in recent years at shot is not actually check-suited Caicos Islands, Switzerland, Taiwan know what you’re thinking: there kept saying: ‘We Sunderland, Blackpool, Tunbridge Maplins comedian Ted Bovis (played literally isn’t enough heroin in Wells, Aylesbury and Malvern.” by Paul Shane). I had wondered, London to get me through that. want Brexit’ Still, if one version of Brexit given that he died in 2013. Instead, it Or, as Banks judged: “It was a great is about restoring Britain to the seems to be self-styled Brexit bad boy evening. Andrew Rosindell is a comforting and largely imagined Arron Banks, who started out in an patriotic Tory MP and a model one certainties of yesteryear, could panto act called Mississippi Minstrels. Hang at that.” Slightly selective swamp- or even sitcom bookers do much on: that was Ted. My apologies again: draining there, given the expenses better than the glittering lineup the character biographies section unpleasantness, but at featured in this picture? Then again, of Holiday Rock is rather diffi cult to Hello campers: this stage in our descent perhaps the production to harness tear yourself away from, once you Su, with Banks down the rabbit hole, we Su, Arron and Andrew’s collective become fully enmeshed in its bygone and Rosindell hardly expect coherence gifts has already been found, and charms. Still, whatever Mississippi or consistency from we shall spend the next few years ILLUSTRATION: NICK OLIVER ILLUSTRATION: COVER PHOTOGRPAH: ZUMA PRESS/EYEVINE PHOTOGRPAH: COVER Minstrels may have been, I’m sure it our bad boys. Arron watching the show play out. • 4

Cut! Are directors being edited out of the picture?

provided by HBO. “There wouldn’t be a season two of Big Little Lies without Andrea Arnold,” it read. There was no TV’s ‘golden denial of the basic story. It at least solved a mystery. Many age’ is attracting fans had found the second season oddly edited and padded with big-name fi lm- fl ashbacks. Even so, most episodes ran 10 minutes shorter than those makers. But a of the fi rst series. More generally, it was questioned how a director as scandal at Big singular as Arnold – the creator of such raw, lyrical fi lms as Fish Tank Little Lies shows and American Honey – could end up making something that felt so often how little power like the beigely polite work of Vallée? The answer was she had not. they’re given, says The proof, we assume, remains on whatever hard drive holds Danny Leigh the show she made before Vallée began his edit. (There is already a social media campaign to #ReleaseTheArnoldCut .) Amid the many troubling details, it emerged that Arnold had both been encouraged to shoot as she saw fi t and allowed to start her own edit in London before, predictably, her most distinctive sequences took the brunt of Vallée’s cuts. T Arnold is a sharply intelligent he fi rst episode woman with a gleeful sense of in the second season of Big Little mischief; accepting the Oscar for Lies was more tellingly titled than her short fi lm Wasp in 2005, she most of us could know: What Have declared the feeling to be “the dog’s They Done? Still, there was high bollocks” . She does not like talking excitement around the show’s to the press at the best of times, and return. The previous series – in these are not those. (She did not which a murder elegantly bled into respond to a request for a comment a group portrait of fi ve complicated for this piece.) She is also no one’s women in Monterey, California – idea of a cautionary tale. While her such fl utterings with actual power. familiar shape by Vallée, Gareth to economy, and like every dodgy had been an award-winning slice of fi lms are rough, boundary-pushing What followed played like, were his David Brent. economic model, women get the golden age TV, a show with the cast beasts set in Tilbury (Fish Tank), careers not involved, a slapstick It also tells a grim story about worst of it. The revelations feel of a movie, led by Nicole Kidman working-class Glasgow (Red Road), workplace comedy: writer-producer the continued trials of women doubly shocking because we think of and Reese Witherspoon. Giddily, for the wild midwest (American Honey) David E Kelley drifting on set for directors. According to IndieWire, directors as gods with megaphones, season two, they would be joined by and 1840s Yorkshire ( Wuthering the occasional hour, convinced that Kelley had both planned to bring the top of the food chain, when most Meryl Streep. And there was another Heights ), she has also successfully whatever weirdness Arnold was Vallée back and failed to tell Arnold. are just more anxious freelancers. intriguing coup. The whole series done time in the mainstream. Before up to could be later squashed into If true, the male power axis is an ugly Which is why it would be a mistake was to be directed by the Oscar- Big Little Lies, she had been in the look for a show adapted from a novel to assume that the whistleblower winning British fi lm-maker Andrea US directing episodes of the shows by a woman, Liane Moriarty, and came from Arnold’s camp. Arnold . Kidman spoke on behalf of I Love Dick and Transparent. The much praised as a home for robust Next month will see the director the production. They were, she said, atmosphere she created on set in female narratives. Pedro Almodóvar release Pain and in the hands of a “visionary”. Monterey was, by all accounts, happy The picture is complicated by Glory , an autobiographical drama That was then. Now, the season and productive. She is, put simply, a the roles as executive producers about an ageing grand auteur. A fi nale will air this weekend only vastly experienced working director. This era calls for of Kidman and Witherspoon, each certain melancholy comes from after an industry scandal: an exposé And also one with a credibility unlikely to have known anything knowing that this kind of near- in IndieWire revealing that once that Big Little Lies quickly laid claim someone more of Arnold’s crisis. Neither has extinct fi gure was a product of the the series had been shot, creative to. In modern, high-end TV – even commented. (On the day the story cinema, a space that many directors control was taken from Arnold with fi lm directors fl ooding the anonymous: broke, Witherspoon tweeted a sun- have now left for TV. What they have by the producers and all seven market – to have a series overseen bright snapshot of herself, Kidman learned is that golden age television episodes recut by Jean-Marc Vallée, by someone with Arnold’s history a custodian to and their co-stars on a Pacifi c beach is still television, a medium in which the director of the fi rst season. of Cannes prizes and art-cinema with their children. “Feeling extra the role of creative fi nal boss falls Reportedly, Arnold was informed excellence was a status symbol. chauff eur the grateful for this incredible cast and not to them but the showrunner, Vallée had always been due to The same publicity push in which amazing crew,” it was captioned.) typically a writer-producer whose resume his involvement; it was just Kidman called Arnold a visionary story from one Still, the gender dynamics at play own relationship with directing that nobody had told her. When saw HBO carefully namecheck her feel clearer if you simply tweak the may be as an occasional sideline or the re-edit was done, she had to fi lms, suggesting at least someone instalment to question asked in that fi rst episode something that one of the staff does. spend 17 days reshooting under his involved had actually seen them and from What Have They Done? to New eras can look like anything “extremely hands-on” supervision. wanted their style in the show. the next Would They Have Done It to a Man? but up close. While both Arnold and The experience is said to have left Evidently, not really. In the Broader still, the drama reminds Vallée came to Big Little Lies from her devastated. A statement was future, no director will confuse us that directing is the original gig fi lm, the showrunner was Kelley, GUARDIAN PHOTOGRAPH: ANTONIO OLMOST/THE • The Guardian Friday 19 July 2019 5

a 63-year-old network veteran Eve and, below, whose career in television began in with her husband, the 1980s and whose signature hit ‘I thought Maximillion was the legal comedy-drama Ally Cooper McBeal. In the IndieWire report, Kelley was said to believe in “unifi ed of rap style” as a fi rst rule of TV. The phrase translates as a measure of what pulls in viewers and who holds which as a cards as a result. Plot is king and no one watches for the director; indeed, too much directing gets in the way. sisterhood … It wasn’t’ Cue the altogether less obtrusive Jean-Marc Vallée. The irony is that as directors have poured into television, Kelley’s worldview has spread the other empowered – nenew track Scuses is a way. Mega-budget fi lm-making now She was a titanitan ofof gutsy reprove ooff bad ex-boyfriends. follows the same logic: all-powerful “Whether it’sit’s mem talking to my past rights-holders hiring malleable 00s hip-hopp – and self, or to futurefuturre girls, it’s saying: ‘You directors to work within a strict house don’t need toto ddeale with the bullshit. style for minimal spotlight. How now Eve is back,bacck,k Keep it moving!’moviov ng You have that a-ha many viewers of Game of Thrones momentmomentnt wherewhere you go: ‘You know would be able to name the show’s with a Britishish what?whahat? Fuck thisthi shit!’” directors? Increasingly, the same billionaire iinn tow Paranoia dodoese still creep in. is true of movies. Where multiplex “Sometimes, I’mI’ apprehensive crowds would have once sought out and a renewedwed becausebecause the inindustry has changed so the latest Spielberg on the basis of much.” In 2013, 2013 she brought out Lip name recognition, $2.8 bn worth of hunger forr rap. Lock, her fi rst album in 11 years, and tickets to Avengers: Endgame were it sank withoutwithou trace. “I had to really not sold to fans on the basis of the Shannon Mahanty pick myself baback up.” Now, she says: Russo brothers’ unique style. “ It’s the rightright time. I’m trying to give For directors in 2019, their meets her people a feefeeling.lin Because the music professional life is less bound I listen to whwhene I’m getting ready to up with the screen their work go out, when I’m getting dressed or ends up on than with the global when I’m drivingdriv – it lifts my mood. shift towards the franchised and I want peoplepeople to feel good.” episodic – whether that is Big Little n a balmy night stripping and focused on music. She Eve’s life nnow is strikingly Lies or Spider-Man. If a vanished inn Paris recently, was fl own to LA to sign with Dr Dre’s diff erent f fromrom her 00s heyday. In fi lm culture created the auteur, Eve foundd hherselfelf AftAftermathermath lalabel,bel, bbutut was dropped 2010, she metme British billionaire the new era calls for something hiding in the corner after eight months. MaximillionMaximillion Cooper at Gumball more anonymous: a custodian of O of a nightclub. The A month later, she signed to 3000, the charity car rally he intellectual property, there to safely opening bars of her Bronx-based label Ruff Ryders, founded . It is attended by a slew of chauff eur the story from one season 200 1 hit Let Me Blow Ya Mind were whose main export was the rapper rich-list petrolheads, and the idea or instalment to the next. Visionaries ringing out from the sound system: DMX. She describes it as her “hip- is to drive supercars 3,000 miles, are not what matters. The brand is. “Drop your glasses, shake your hop bootcamp”, which taught her shipping the m from country to Again, much of this mirrors the asses.” This happens quite a lot, how to evolve as an artist. Her debut country via private jet, and partying wider economy; a world with the and Eve has her response down pat. album, Let There Be Eve, reached each night in a new city. “I remember middle fallen out. Now, for the “I walk away,” she says, “and I get No 1 in the US, making her only the thinking: he must be a player, director driven to follow an idea really watch-y. I want to see if people third female rapper to land the top because you can’t throw something rather than get in line at Marvel, the are still into it. Thankfully, they spot after Lauryn Hill and Foxy like that and not be a player, right?” only answer is to do it cheap, then were, otherwise I’d feel like shit.” Brown. “There defi nitely weren’t Cooper proved her wrong. After cheaper still. There are, of course, It has been 17 years since the a lot of females out there, and the three years of long-distance dating, the old-school dudes able to call US rapper ’s biggest hits . Coming labels were basically trying to make Eve moved to London, marrying him on corporate patronage for their up in the late 90s with a platinum you get naked,” she says. But with and becoming stepmother to his four fancies: Christopher Nolan, Wes buzz cut and paw-print tattoos Ruff Ryders, it was always: ‘We like children. “I moved countries, got Anderson, Quentin Tarantino. For across her chest, Eve was one of who you are, we’re not going to try married and became a stepmom . everyone else, the task is to survive a handful of female rappers whose and change you.’” That took a lot of fi guring out my outside the unifi ed styles. The fi nale success matched that of their male She was unaware of how the music identity.” Cooper had never dated of Big Little Lies airs this Sunday. counterparts. Millennials came of industry would pit female rappers a black woman before, so Eve spent Many directors may feel that if you age listening to Let Me Blow Ya Mind against one another. “ I thought we a lot of time educating him and his Big little chose to watch Fish Tank instead, on iPod Minis or setting Who’s That were all gonna be friends. It was not children about her experiences as controversy … that would be the dog’s bollocks. Girl? as their polyphonic ringtone. like that. I’d see [Lil] Kim and say hi, a woman of colour. “ We had a long Arnold; and She is now preparing to release and she’d be like: ‘ Get the fuck away conversation the other day about (below) the show her fi rst album in six years, one from me.” Not verbally – you could when I go to diff erent countries: if she directed that hops between rap, reggae and just tell what she was thinking. But it people don’t know who I am, then pop balladry and refl ects her new never felt like a competition. I loved I get questioned a little longer than married life in the UK (hoped-for Missy [Elliott] and Kim but I never him. That’s something he never saw guests include Jessie Ware and wanted to be them.” before. It’s not that he’s oblivious, he Giggs). Dressed in black leggings Now, on the verge of releasing just lives in a diff erent body to me. It’s and an Adidas jumper, Eve is eating album number fi ve, she is 40. “I’m been nice to be able to open his eyes.” chips in a pub in Notting Hill , west not as stressed about what people A few years ago, she was taking London, and exud es confi dence . It is think any more – that’s a great her stepdaughter, Jagger, to a school hard to imagine her feeling like shit. feeling.” She wants to make music disco. “I just wanted to drop her Before she was a rapper, Eve Jihan that makes other women feel as off and get the hell out of there,” Jeff ers was a choirgirl from west she says . Her plan backfi red. “This Philadelphia. Her plan was to be a woman, she comes over and says: singer, but when she joined an all- ‘Hi, are you Jagger’s stepmom? We’ve female covers group called Dope Girl heard so much about you!’” Eve Posse, she switched to rapping at the raises her eyebrows. “Then she goes: suggestion of her manager. At 18, ‘My husband loves hip-hop. He loves while working in a strip club to pay Tupac. Honey, come over! Don’t you the bills (“I’m from the hood,” she just love Tupac?’” She grins. “My shrugs), she had a chance meeting life’s a sitcom, but sometimes you with the rapper Ma$e, who told her : just have to laugh.” “If you really want to rap, you need Eve’s single Reload (feat Konshens) to rap.” Eve took his advice, stopped is out now • The GGuardian 6 FriFridayday 19 July 2019

mademade by black artists, dominated byb femalefem stars and with a core audienceaudie that was, at least initially, largelylarge gay. “White males, 18 to 34, are ththe most likely to see disco as the productthe p of homosexuals, blacks Disco and Latins,L and … to respond to appealsappe to wipe out such threats to theirto the security.” DaDahl remains defi ant. He didn’t resrespondpo to a request for an interview for ththis feature, but made his pospositionit clear in the 2016 book Disco inferno DemDemolition:o The Night Disco Died. ““I’mI’m wworn out from defending myself as a racistr homophobe,” he wrote. “Th“Thee event was not anti-racist, not antanti-gayi-g … we were just kids pissing on a musicalm genre.” Moreover, he was defedefendingn “the Chicago rock’n’roll Disco liflifestyle”est from an unwanted musical Demolition invinvasion.as The rise of disco to Night (left) maimainstreamn success on the back of was hosted SaSaturdaytur Night Fever’s unexpected by Steve sucsuccessce was “a repudiation of all Dahl (right) thinthingsg rough – like rock’n’roll and bbarar nnights” and “demean[ed] the ordordinaryin life that kids inhabited”. To understand Disco Demolition NigNight,ht you have to understand how comcommerciallym dominant disco had bbecbecomeom in the US at the time. Of ththe 16 singles that made the top of the US chart in the fi rst half of 1979, only three were not disco tracks. The previous year, disco singles had been No 1 for 37 weeks out of 52. “In to deal with what was degenerating any big city in America, you could into a riot. “Someone walked up to turn the radio dial and catch disco me said: ‘Hey you – disco sucks!’ and on as many as fi ve or more stations,” Forty years after snapped a 12in in half in my face,” says Alice Echols, cultural historian, Lawrence says. “That’s when academic and author of Hot Stuff : a DJ called on I started feeling like: ‘OK, they’re Disco and the Remaking of American just targeting me because I’m black.’ Culture. “It had pushed AOR not to Americans to I’ve got a Loop T-shirt on – what’s the the margins precisely, but classic diff erence between me and the next rock didn’t have the dominance on destroy disco usher trying to get back to his locker? radio that it once had. Live music I was one of the few African American venues were increasingly switching records, the ugly people in the stadium. Steve Dahl over to disco.” attitudes of the said it wasn’t discriminatory, he This didn’t please everyone. Dahl with was an equal opportunities “Even though record labels were event ring out the skip full off ender or whatever, but Steve making a lot of money off disco, of records didn’t invite no brothers to they were holding their nose,” she loud and clear. By Comiskey Park.” says. “They were worried about Forty years on, Disco it crashing, but they wanted it to Alexis Petridis Demolition Night remains one of crash so they could go back to classic the most controversial events in pop rock. There was also a grassroots history. Last month, when the White anti-disco movement, a national Still, Lawrence’s job had perks. get in for 98¢. Dahl planned to fi ll a Sox commemorated its anniversary, eff ort on the part of people involved Punters rich enough to sit in the dumpster with the records and blow it attracted widespread criticism with AOR. There were people stadium’s boxes would tip well, them up as a publicity stunt. from Billboard to Vice and the who thought it threatened their you could get a good view of the Lawrence realised something Economist, of a kind that was absent livelihoods, because of its gobbling game and there were regular special wasn’t right: people weren’t just in 1979. Then, only Dave Marsh of up of live venues; there were people promotional events, often with turning up with disco records, but Rolling Stone suggested that there who just thought it sounded plastic music: country nights, Elvis nights. anything made by a black artist. “I was something distinctly ugly about and synthetic and commercial; there I Tonight, he was looking forward said to my boss: ‘Hey, a lot of these the vast crowd of white men publicly were people who were just nakedly n the summer of 1979, to seeing a band called Teenage records they’re bringing in aren’t destroying music predominantly racist and homophobic.” Vince Lawrence had got himself Radiation, fronted by loudmouth disco – they’re R&B, they’re funk. Nichols says that disco’s a part-time job as an usher at local radio DJ Steve Dahl: they had Should I make them go home and dominance was, for some of the Comiskey Park baseball stadium, recorded a parody single called Do get a real disco record?’ He said no: haters, inseparable from issues such home to the Chicago White Sox. Ya Think I’m Disco , part of Dahl’s if they brought a record, take it, as busing and affi rmative action, It wasn’t an ideal job for a black ongoing campaign against the they get a ticket.” He laughs. “I want initiatives designed to reduce racial teenager. Comiskey Park was next commercially dominant genre to say maybe the person bringing segregation in US schools and door to Bridgeport, a neighbourhood in late 70s America. Embittered the record just made a mistake. For some, disco colleges. Fear of disco, she says, of the city where, as Lawrence puts by the fact that he had been fi red But given the amount of mistakes I was partly “the fear that American it, “it was common knowledge that by a station called WDAI when it witnessed, why weren’t there any represented identity was no longer synonymous you might not want to be hanging switched formats from AOR to disco, Air Supply or Cheap Trick records emasculation – with whiteness. DJs in Detroit around after dark, because there Dahl had been endlessly mouthing in the bins? No Carpenters records – formed a disco vigilante group called were people there who for sure don’t off on air at his new station, WLUP, they weren’t rock’n’roll, right? It was your girlfriend the Disco Dux Klan. Originally, their like you based on your colour”. The also known as The Loop: snapping just disco records and black records eff orts were going to involve wearing area was so notorious for racism disco records or dragging the needle in the dumpster.” expected you white sheets and robes – they got that even one of the White Sox’s star across them, encouraging people to Things turned uglier after Dahl’s rid of that part of it. And then there players, Thad Bosley, had found his join his anti-disco organisation, the demolition took place and the crowd to dance were people like Steve Dahl, for car surrounded by a mob after taking Insane Coho Lips. He had worked – estimated at 50,000 – rushed the whom disco represented a sort of a wrong turning driving home after out a promotion with the White Sox: fi eld. Unable to cope with the surge emasculation: you couldn’t wear a game, the situation only diff used turn up at Comiskey Park on 12 July of people the ushers were told to go a scruff y T-shirt and jeans, you had

when one of them recognised him. with a disco record and you would home and that the police would have to get dressed up and, worst of all, PARAMOUNT AP; GETTY; WIREIMAGE; PHOTOGRAPHS: • The Guardian Friday 19 July 2019 7

your girlfriend or wife expected more adventurous and creative level was thrown into deep despair,” you to humiliate yourself by than ever: the immediate post- says Aletti. “They had to adjust to fucking dancing. Some of the push Disco Demolition years were the era how the record companies now back against disco also had to do of Arthur Russell’s extraordinary worked, but it just meant that there with feminism.” avant-disco (Loose Joints’ Is It was a lot of really interesting music Whatever the reasons behind All Over My Face? and Dinosaur still coming out that was danceable, it, Disco Demolition Night had a L’s Go Bang); of the electronic which is kind of where disco startling and immediate impact. experimentation and eclecticism of started – a lot of oddball danceable Radio stations that had switched the sound pioneers by DJ Larry records that didn’t need to be called to disco switched back to rock. The John Travolta Levan at the Paradise Garage anything.” Still, the 40th anniversary Grammy awards cancelled their in Saturday in New York; of the ferocious, commemoration of Disco best-disco-recording category after Night Fever explicitly queer hi-NRG sound Demolition left a peculiar taste. “It only one year. Chic, who as Echols pioneered in San Francisco baffl es me,” says Lawrence. “We live points out, “had made millions of by Patrick Cowley . in a diff erent world – Dahl’s either dollars for Atlantic Records since Ironically, the most revolutionary incredibly naive or dishonest.” 1977” – Le Freak was the biggest- development took place in Chicago, Commemorating Disco selling single in the label’s history – the city where disco had supposedly Demolition Night in the US political found “suddenly no one at the label been killed: inspired in equal climate of 2019 makes a strange would take their calls”. Even disco part by the raw disco edits of DJ kind of sense, though. There’s labels were changing the designs Frankie Knuckles and European a weird correlation between the of 12in-single sleeves to make their electronic music by Fad Gadget way Dahl has defended Disco products look less like disco records. at the label did. There were a lot of of Disco Demolition went on for and Kraftwerk, former Comiskey Demolition – standing up for the In the second half of 1979, only one rock’n’roll stalwarts in the music years. As Echols notes, the Rolling Park usher Vince Lawrence and “rock’n’roll lifestyle” of straight disco single – Michael Jackson’s industry who were not just unhappy Stones had frequently toured with Jesse Saunders co-wrote the fi rst white men in the face of disco’s Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough – but angry and felt that rock’n’roll black artists, including Stevie house single, On and On , in 1984. dominance – and the language made US No 1, for a solitary week. was being ignored because black pop Wonder and Ike and Tina Turner, Lawrence went on to co-write Farley of the alt-right, where Milo “I didn’t take it seriously at all, was dominating the charts. Within who were warmly received by “Jackmaster” Funk’s Love Can’t Yiannopoulos claims that those which obviously was a mistake in a short period of time, Warner Bros their audience, but when Prince Turn Around, the fi rst house single taking part in a “straight pride” retrospect,” says Vince Aletti, who decided there was no longer a disco supported them in 1981, he was to achieve mainstream success parade represent “America’s most in 1979 had just quit his column department . We became the dance booed off stage. in the UK. Meanwhile, the two brutally repressed identity”. “It’s in Record World – which had music department – disco was a dirty In others, it proved an entirely biggest stars of the 1980s – Michael fascinating that this has happened assiduously documented disco’s rise word. Virtually every record label pyrrhic victory. Retreating Jackson and Madonna – were disco now,” agrees Echols. “It does sound – in order to work at Warner Bros’ did the same thing.” underground to its original acts in all but name. very much in line with politics over disco label, RFC. “The higher-ups In some senses, the after-eff ects audience, disco became arguably “I don’t think anybody at the disco here. It’s very … Trumpist.” • The Guardian 8 Friday 19 July 2019

Will the real Alec Baldwin please stand up?

treatment unfavourably with that of a more successful actor. “I wish we could have gone further,” he sighs. Playing John “The hair and make up people DeLorean, said they could do a detailed With Morena version that would take three skewering Donald Baccarin in hours to apply. The director said: Framing John ‘Give us the best you can in two Trump, Woody DeLorean hours.’ I was looking at stills of Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Allen, #MeToo … Vice – I admire Bale so much – and when you have as much skill as Bale, Why is it so hard and they get it just-so …” He trails off , then picks up the thought with a note to pin the actor of faintly smouldering resentment. down on anything? “Well, I’m sure they didn’t rush him out of the make up chair.” By Ryan Gilbey DeLorean once said that no man without a strong sex drive ever accomplished anything, so I ask Baldwin whether he agrees. “What an English question,” he says, with a reconstructions peppered among and DeLorean is someone who made booming laugh. “What a naughty, interviews with the subject’s family a lot of poor choices. His family, naughty English question that is. and colleagues, Baldwin plays the late reputation, his own health, all fell You could fold the sex into anything, automobile executive and inventor, victim to that soaring ambition.” couldn’t you? You could fold the sex whose gull-winged car was turned Baldwin himself had one into dentistry. Listen, I’m not an into a time machine in Back to the interaction with the real DeLorean: What a naughty, authority on that subject, but there Future but whose life was destroyed a late-night phone call in 2004 in are men and women who want what A by ambition, stupidity and greed. It’s which the fallen automobile giant naughty they want, and that is a shotgun for conversation a compelling story that starts with suggested that the actor might like them: they want art, they want with Alec Baldwin feels rather like DeLorean relinquishing his position to play him in a movie. “No one was English question palaces, they want people, they being in a holding pattern above as group executive at General Motors approaching me from a network or collect people, they collect children New York. Not that it’s boring: on to start his own company and ends a studio. It was all hypothetical. that is. You and wives . They have a reality that the contrary, talking with this old- with his na ive involvement in a John’s hand was in this because he burns out and then they dust fashioned fi lm star and modern-day cocaine-smuggling operation was an uber control freak. I never could fold themselves off and start all over again. sitcom god, this part-time Trump exposed in an FBI sting. heard from him again, and then he And then there are people who are antagonist and full-time schmoozy Baldwin has said he feels diff erently died the following year.” the sex into laser-like. There’s one thing they showbiz personality, is an entirely about DeLorean every day, so I ask For the fi lm’s reconstructions, want and that’s all they want, pleasant experience. You are in where his head is at right now. “With Baldwin wears facial prosthetics, dentistry whether it’s money or sex or power. business class, perhaps even fi rst, John – I don’t think I’ve ever said this a silver wig and a pair of thick black And that was John.” and you are happy and sated and before – and I’m not just saying this slabs for eyebrows. I bring up the There is no mystery about which stimulated. Spread out invitingly to, um, delight you and freshen up subject of make up but all this does is category Baldwin falls into. After below you are the twinkling lights of this material for this interview – but prompt one of those ruminations, Winning an the wreckage of his divorce from the Manhattan, where the 61-year-old lately when I think about him – and which ends, with Baldwinian Emmy in 2017 actor Kim Basinger in the early 2000s, actor and his 35-year-old wife, I’ve been talking about him a lot – inevitability, in him comparing his for Saturday and the catastrophic fallout when an Hilaria, own a penthouse apartment. I have friends and acquaintances Night Live; (They also have an 18th-century who’ve seen the fi lm, and we go out with Tina Fey in farmhouse in the Hamptons.) And to dinner and discuss it – I fi nd that 30 Rock (right) yet a question presents itself, not beyond anyone who’s – oh, I don’t unreasonably, as the plane circles the know – committed murder or they’re city and each new circumnavigation a sex traffi cker – I kind of look at John seems to bring it no closer to terra as a victim.” fi rma: are we ever going to land? I am trying to fathom the “sex It is something to do with the traffi cker” comment but he has circuitous nature of Baldwin’s already moved on. “Now, granted, sentences, the way he riff s and this sounds like I’m being overly waffl es and meanders at will. Nothing colourful. But he’s a victim of his can interrupt him, apart from his own ambition. He’s an American pets. (“Hold on a second,” he says businessman and that comes with a down the line from New York, and whole menu of options. American then I hear the words “Girls! Come!” businesses have changed the world – before he returns to the phone to tell they’ve fostered innovation on a me he was “just summoning my level that’s unseen – and they’re also dogs”.) It is his appearance in the new responsible for a lot of the horrifi c docudrama Framing John DeLorean pollution and climate change and that has occasioned our conversation plastics pollution – I mean, I don’t today. In bite-sized dramatic want to go on and on with that list – • The Guardian Friday 19 July 2019 9

enraged voicemail he had left for Emmy-winning performance as their then-11-year-old daughter found Donald Trump, whom he plays on its way online (in the recording, he Saturday Night Live with one branded her a “rude, thoughtless eyebrow permanently raised and little pig”), he went through a period both lips protruding as though of what he has called “staring off a trying to suck a lemon through a cliff ”. And then he did indeed start letterbox. What purpose does he feel all over again with Hilaria, with his portrayal serves? “Among the whom he now has four children American people, there is a level of under the age of 10. disgust and even nausea about His career has always seemed so Trump. Just as his presidency is a diff use. Who knows what he ever chronic condition and it’s not going wanted? He has been a theatre actor, away any time soon, so the humour – a fi lm and TV star, hosted a quiz not just me, but all humour about show and presided over his own Trump – is the medicine people are chatshows, as well as Alec Baldwin’s taking to quiet the nausea. It’s a see- Love Ride , in which he dispenses saw. I do SNL and then by Monday or relationship advice to couples from Tuesday night, they wanna throw up the back of a limousine (“It’s the all over again.” silliest thing you’ve ever seen”). There is also a podcast, Here’s the Thing , with a slate of guests including everyone from Itzhak Perlman to Sarah Jessica Parker, Bernie Sanders to Ben and Jerry. If he never gives another great performance again it won’t matter: he is having a blast playing Alec B Baldwin, a role that, as a younger aldwin recalls man, he appeared often to despise. once meeting E Jean Carroll, the Following a stint in soap opera in columnist who alleges that she was the early 1980s, he briefl y became an raped by Trump in the mid-90s. “I actor to be reckoned with, performing was introduced to her a few years David Mamet, Joe Orton and Caryl ago when a friend of mine brought Churchill on stage, and working with her to dinner at a small restaurant in Tim Burton, Jonathan Demme and New York, and nothing about that Mike Nichols in the early years of woman led me to believe she was his fi lm career. But the Basinger a liar or a sociopath. She’s making era, and his own consuming anger, a charge of rape – especially at this came to defi ne him in the public time – when she knows how the consciousness far more than any of other accusers have been dealt his performances, with the exception with – she knows what she’s getting perhaps of the shark-like sales herself into. I mean, just look at all executive who dominates the opening the other accusers who’ve been scene of the 1992 fi lm of Mamet’s dismissed and have watched the Glengarry Glen Ross. Then again, accused having rose petals spread that movie wasn’t playing on a loop by his supporters for him on a path on the front pages of every tabloid at toward his goal. Carroll knows this America’s supermarket checkouts, going in – she knows that’s where the way his divorce later did. it’s headed.” Likewise, Baldwin’s on screen The other defi ning performance achievements – his Oscar Baldwin worries in Baldwin’s career came with Tina nomination for playing an that the #MeToo Fey’s wickedly inventive sitcom unscrupulous casino boss in The moment ‘seems to 30 Rock . As the calculating and Cooler or his collaborations with be slipping away’ charismatic network boss Jack Martin Scorsese ( The Aviator , The Donaghy, vice -president of East Departed) and Woody Allen (three Coast Television and Microwave fi lms including Blue Jasmine ) – Oven Programming, he lent the have usually been eclipsed by his show his gravitas and style, and it, intemperate comments and displays in turn, reinvented him as a lovable of aggression. Most actors of his wag with a killer line in comic stature and experience make the disdain. What did it teach him about headlines for winning awards; himself? “30 Rock taught me how losing his temper is more Baldwin’s unfunny I am. My mind was blown thing. Only this year he pleaded by how quick the people on that guilty to harassment and agreed to show were, how sharp Tina was. take an anger management course know for sure, but you have testimony McGowan, to name two of the most The fi rst thing off the top of her after an argument over a Manhattan for and against Woody from the same notable – and that moment seems to head was funnier than something it parking space. He has also been pool of people. One daughter is saying be slipping away. I hope we can would take me two hours to come arrested for disorderly conduct, he’s a sex off ender; his other son has rekindle it all, because it seems to be up with.” The show ended six years had a chatshow cancelled after he defended him. I have nothing but the waning. If [Harvey] Weinstein is ago. Has he got Jack out of his used a homophobic slur against a most profound sympathy for anyone presumed to be low-hanging fruit, There is disgust system yet? “Ah, no,” he replies. paparazzo, and been kicked off a who was the victim of sex abuse, but then why isn’t he in a courtroom? “No, no, no. Let’s put it this way. fl ight for refusing to stop using his I also have a bit of a conscience, if The only person who’s behind bars is about Trump There were no collar stays in my phone prior to takeoff . you will, about people who are [Bill] Cosby.” Abruptly, h e decides shirt the other day and I was livid as If he is known for poor control of falsely accused. That’s tragic, too.” that he has had enough of that topic. and humour is I left my house. Livid. So, yes, Jack his impulses, he still has principles. When I ask how he feels about his “We’re almost done,” he announces, is very much still with me.” He distinguished himself by refusing friend, the fi lm-maker James though in fact there are still 10 the medicine And with that, the wheels touch to join other former Woody Allen Toback, who has been accused of minutes remaining of our allotted down gently on the tarmac, the cast members (among them Colin sexual assault or sexual harassment time. “What else have you got?” Americans are cabin lights ping back on and Firth, Timothée Chalamet and Greta by 395 women, we are fi rmly back in What I want to hear about are Baldwin wishes me a good day Gerwig) in denouncing the legally the holding pattern again. “The only the two roles that have done the taking to quiet before proceeding safely with his exonerated fi lm-maker. “There’s thing I have to say about that – like most to bring Baldwin back from onward journey. a very small number of people who any of the other cases – is that there the brink, to dissuade the public the nausea Framing John DeLorean is at the know what really happened in that are people who have admirably from associating him with temper Prince Charles cinema, London WC2 situation,” Baldwin tells me. “Only the brought that subject to the fore – tantrums and divorce and bad from today , and on digital download

PHOTOGRAPH: REX/SHUTTERSTOCK people who were in that room can whether it’s Asia Argento or Rose parenting. The most recent is his from 29 July • 10 The Guardian Reviews Film Friday 19 July 2019

Peter Bradshaw’s fi lm of the week The Wedding Guest ★★☆☆☆ The Lion King Dir Michael Winterbottom

Starring Dev Patel, Radhika Apte, Jim Sarbh

Length 94 mins Cert 15

Film-maker Michael Winterbottom has always been a powerhouse of ideas and a uniquely valuable presence in the British industry – this prolifi c and eclectic director has taken on every kind of genre. (Maybe the nearest American equivalent is Steven Soderbergh.) Recently, he had great successes with his terrifi c music movie On the Road (2016), his Russell Brand documentary The Emperor’s New Clothes (2015), and The Trip , the foodie-travel comedy series with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Now as writer-director he returns to a theme he has explored in the past: the UK’s connection with south Asia, with an interesting but ultimately disappointing drama-thriller. It has an intriguing premise and a gripping fi rst act. But the ending fi zzles when it should explode, giving us neither the twisty and suspenseful entertainment that it seemed to promise, nor the serious response to sexual politics in Pakistan that also seemed to be on off er. Yet the initial scenes are laid out with enormous elan and a tremendous fl air for location work. Dev Patel is Jay, a British guy who shows up in Pakistan as a wedding guest at an arranged marriage involving UK resident Samira (Radhika Apte). But Jay is no ordinary Simba loses his mane appeal wedding guest. Before the ceremony, he thoughtfully looks through the three or four passports he has with him, rents cars with them under Donald Glover) who as a tiny cub animals to imitate scenes from stretch of dialogue from the fi rst various identities, buys duct tape and ★★★☆☆ is “presented” to his subjects in the 1994 fi lm? Maybe not. In some fi lm in which the hunter/meat-eater also a couple of handguns. Dir Jon Favreau the ceremony on the phallic Pride ways, I can’t blame them. This is is presented as morally equivalent As the action kicks off , the fi lm is Rock by his parents King Mufasa very smooth work, adding half an to the herbivore. Mufasa tells young very lively, whisking us from Pakistan Voices Donald Glover, James Earl (in which vocal role James Earl hour to the original running time Simba about all creatures being to India, and the relationship Jones, Beyoncé Jones is a survivor of the original simply by unobtrusively plumping respected in a delicate balance, between the stars develops into an fi lm) and Queen Sarabi (Alfre up each narrative part, although we from the crawling ant to the almost Hitchcockian romance. Yet Length 118 mins Cert PG Woodard). But wicked Uncle Scar get more of the backstory of Mufasa, leaping antelope. this tacitly rests on Jay being at some (did he have a real name before the Sarabi and Scar. We lose the quirkily “But dad, don’t we eat the level sympathetic, which involves fter 25 years, during nickname?) nurses evil designs on eccentric Morning Report song from antelope?” asks Simba, and Mufasa a tonal problem that the fi lm never which time it gained poor little Simba. the pompous courtier-bird Zazu replies sonorously: “Yes ... but really solves, because Jay appears classic status as the Here, the role originally played (originally Rowan Atkinson, now when we die, our bodies become to be a seasoned and entirely last Disney picture by Jeremy Irons has been given to John Oliver), but Beyoncé’s Nala has the grass, and antelopes eat the unrepentant killer. A in the old style that Chiwetel Ejiofor , who is capably a new song. grass.” I always expect Simba to The performances are perfectly Walt himself would insinuating, but does not relish But sadly we have also lost reply: “Erm, yeah, dad, but there’s solid and it always runs smoothly, but have endorsed, and enjoyed a long the evilness of the part in the same a couple of well-loved things a diff erence between getting eaten the fi lm itself seems to take its leave afterlife in theatres all over the outrageous and enjoyable way from the fi rst fi lm. The very funny after dying peacefully of old age and of us with a shrug. PB world with Julie Taymor’s staging Irons did; and this time around Scar diversionary “big pig” song from getting killed and eaten in a state of and costumes, the 1994 animation doesn’t get a goosestepping march- Pumbaa and Timon (voiced by terrifi ed pain.” The Lion King has been remade as a past from his evil hyena militia. Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner) has Basically, this new Lion King quasi-live-action digital movie, way An evil plot means Simba grows been junked, and when grownup sticks very closely to the original out in Africa’s uncanny valley. up in exile, where he must one day Simba and Nala sing their love song version, and in that sense it’s This is an anthro-leonine confront his destiny, helped by the Can You Feel the Love Tonight?, watchable and enjoyable. But deepfake of impressive proportions, young lioness he loves: Nala, voiced Nala doesn’t do her startlingly I missed the simplicity and vividnessness but the new Lion King gains in shock by Beyoncé. sultry come-hither expression of the original hand-drawn images,s, and awe while losing in character This is an almost shot-for-shot from the fi rst fi lm – perhaps the the wit and fun of human expressionion and wit. These are walking, talking reproduction of the original, and only purely erotic moment in the fabricated with a few lines, and animals that are realer than real some credulous souls have been Disney canon. some of the acrid satire has gone. and whose facial/speech patterns excitably posting side-by-side This new Lion King has been The circle of commercial life are eerily plausible – way past the images on social media, showing the modernised in the sense of having has given birth to this all-but- unsatisfying oddities of Babe the pig cartoon and its digital duplication. more African and African- indistinguishable digiclone from long ago, with moving mouths Have these people grasped that descended voice artists, and John descendant. I don’t quite feel likee pasted on animal faces. this is just an animation as well, Kani brings a lovely vocal lightness bowing, but respect has to be paidd Here, once again, is the story of do you think, and that director Jon to the priestly role of Rafi ki. Yet the to a handsomely made piece of the lion prince Simba (voiced by Favreau has not in fact trained real fi lm boldly keeps that famous entertainment. • The Guardian Friday 19 July 2019 11

Varda By Agnès Tell It to the Bees Games

★★★★☆ ★★☆☆☆ Dir Agnès Varda Dir Annabel Jankel

Length 115 mins Cert 15 Starring Anna Paquin, Holliday Grainger, Kate Dickie Agnès Varda’s charming fi lm is a semi-dramatised lantern Length 108 mins Cert 15 lecture, an autobiographical, auto-critical work using footage Despite the hefty talent involved, Tetris Eff ect of her speaking at events, with there’s a preposterous pass-agg clips , playful reconstructions and tweeness to this fi lm – a contrived PC, PlayStation 4 superimpositions refl ecting on the and self-conscious aff air adapted director’s remarkable life and career. from Fiona Shaw’s 2009 novel and There’s a phenomenon in Her energy seems undimmed, directed by Annabel Jankel. It’s video games that people yet at ease, channelled into a tone of about forbidden love seen through call “the zone”: a state of beguiling wisdom: witty, equable, My Friend the Emma Friedman-Cohen plays the uncomprehending and then mind-body oneness . The gentle , making fi lm-making seem as Katie, the director, and Aneta semi-comprehending eyes of a child zone isn’t the territory of magically straightforward as writing Polish Girl Piotrowska gives a bold and in that foreign country famously blockbuster shooters: it words on a page. interesting performance as Alicja described by LP Hartley : the past. is the domain of puzzle We never see an angry or fearful (pictured), the Polish woman and The setting is a pinched and and rhythm games about Varda, although she talks about her part-time actor Katie fi nds through disapproving town in provincial patterns and refl exes that fears. She discussed the horror she ★★★☆☆ an audition process. Alicja allows 1950s Scotland, where Charlie pleasurably hijack your had of turning 80 , the fi gure seeming Dirs Mateusz Dymek, Ewa Katie into her life, at least partly Weekes is a lonely little lad in neural pathways. to her like the number on the front Banaszkiewicz through loneliness, and seems heartbreaking shorts and school Enter Tetris of an express train heading towards intensely sexual in a compulsive satchel. He is played by Gregor Eff ect, named after her. Here, 10 years on, she seems Starring Aneta Piotrowska, Emma and troubled way. Katie comes to Selkirk and his grownup self is the hallucinations amused by that fear. Friedman-Cohen, Daniel Barry believe that Alicja might have been supplied in voiceover by Billy Boyd, experienced by people Varda, who died in March aged abused as a child; she is partly excited looking back at the momentous who’ve spent so much 90, was fascinated by documentary Length 87 mins Cert 18 by the thought that her fi lm might events of his childhood. time stacking blocks that and documentary realism. Some of be on the verge of a revelation but Charlie’s mum, Lydia (Holliday they visualise falling the greatest moments of her early Here is a low-budget experiment also frightened by the intensity and Grainger, below, left), is separated tetrominos while falling masterpiece Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) are in metafi ction, or quasi-fi ction, responsibility that that would entail. from her abusive husband . She asleep . First released simply showing real people in Paris with a shimmer of anxiety, shot My Friend the Polish Girl is a forms a not-so-secret relationship last year on PlayStation reacting to her imaginary character mostly in black and white with fi ction about an imagined factual with the neighbourhood doctor, 4 and newly available walking through the streets. But here periodic excursions into colour and fi lm, and yet it is apparently so rooted Jean ( Anna Paquin, right ), who on PC, it is a sumptuous, she talks about how her approach animation – all about a young Polish in an exploratory, improvisatory is passionately idealistic about mind-altering, humanist to this realism is governed by a need woman living alone in a London fl at, process, that it seems almost a real- the fl edgling NHS. But some interpretation of the to juxtapose the image with the dealing with issues that are never time documentary about actors narrow-minded, homophobic classic Soviet puzzle reality. She loves to interview and clearly articulated. It often seems to immersing themselves in roles types in the community are not game. It combines the photograph people, show them the resemble a postmodern version of inspired by their own feelings. The happy, and chief among the thin- simple, pleasing act of results of these portrait s and record Polanski’s classic Repulsion . result is not perfect, but by the end lipped disapprovers is the factory fi tting shapes together their reactions. It is a collage eff ect, The fi lm itself appears to be a of the fi lm you fi nd yourself caring supervisor Pam (a fi ercely severe until they disappear with and this movie adds another layer. faux video diary by a (fi ctional) about Alicja . performance by Kate Dickie). intense visual backdrops She also speaks about her late independent fi lm-maker, In its way, it casts a compassionate Charlie is entranced by the fact and dynamic music . husband, Jacques Demy , and how recounting her experiences making light on migrant workers that a more that Jean keeps bees, and the fi lm Tetris Eff ect has a they were both briefl y courted by a documentary about the life of conventional documentary – or does show in an interesting way powerful emotional Hollywood. And she talks about a migrant worker in London. drama – wouldn’t. PB how these bees and their mysterious impact. As you clear her extraordinary fi lm about him, hive mind become symbols for blocks in the very fi rst Jacquot de Nantes (1991), with its unrepressed natural forces, their stage, sound builds from stunning dramatisations of Demy’s Making Noise Quietly swarm an ecosystem of cooperation ambient strings and odd childhood. But her emotions, then and acceptance. But in the fi lm’s nature-inspired noises and now? An enigma – they are third act these bees miraculously to full song. Forms of dispersed into her work. (and slightly bizarrely) become humans, whales and In her late phase, Varda ★★★☆☆ agents of rescue and revenge. plants briefl y materialise rediscovered her love of still Dir Dominic Dromgoole Of course, this might simply be and disappear from photography . The image she a representation of how memory luminescent particles returns to, again and again, is the Starring Deborah Findlay, Barbara supplies a poetic rearrangement that pulse to the beat. beach – an arena of timelessness. Marten, Geoff rey Streatfeild of the facts . But there is This is one stage of 30: “The opposite of a wall is a beach,” something jarring and unconvincing others take the imagery she says gnomically – the kind of Length 95 mins Cert 15 a woman in Redcar to bring the in the tough realism of local life in directions that evoke nicely turned phrase that deserved terrible news of her son’s death; then and the gooey magic-realism of Earth, water and the to be graffi tied around Paris in There’s a palate-cleansing lucidity in the Black Forest, a Welsh soldier, these wondrous bees, and we get human experience, 1968. Two hours in this director’s to this interesting movie, a narrative apparently awol from his posting a whiff of ham and silliness in the sometimes replicating company is a pleasure. PB triptych, showing three intimate in Germany, and in charge of a drama itself. P B the imagery that the brain scenes of English (and German) life, deeply troubled adopted young son, idly generates for itself, from 1944, 1982 and 1996: snapshots chances across a woman painting from interlocking cogs of homefront life infl uenced by war, in the woodland – a woman whose to unsettling fi re . The interconnected by an unstressed calm wisdom is to change their lives.es. music shifts from sounds generational thread. The fi lm is presented with a of sand and nature to It is adapted from the Oxford theatrical simplicity: contrived andd human voices, combining Stage Company play by Robert stylised in some ways, but presenteded all of them in its most Holman – who has co-written with refreshing seriousness. euphoric moments. the screenplay – and directed by Perhaps the most successful is the Euphoric is the best Dominic Dromgoole, a former central part in which May (Barbara word for Tetris Eff ect. It artistic director of Shakespeare’s Marten) gets the awful news from makes my skin tingle and Globe, London. Geoff rey (Geoff rey Streatfeild) andd my mind sink into a state The action takes us fi rst to Kent their conversation is fraught with of bliss. It is a puzzle game towards the end of the war. A gay tensions and complications. My leastast about the extraordinary man befriends a conscientious favourite is the fi nal playlet, whichh experience of being alive objector and has a conversation with is angrier and shoutier and achieveses on this Earth. him in which there is a tiny erotic less impact with more eff ort, thoughgh Tetris Eff ect is out July 23 charge; then in the middle of the it is always well acted. An unusual,, on PC (out now on PS4). Falklands war, a naval offi cer visits thoughtful piece of work. PB Keza MacDonald • 12 The Guardian Reviews Film Friday 19 July 2019

Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk

★★☆☆☆ Dir Jason Baff a

With Bill Murray, Nick Faldo, Fanny Sunesson

Length 80 min Cert PG

Viewers and critics versed in golf lore can pass judg ment on how well this documentary about caddies enhances their knowledge The Edge key personnel , each deployed to of the sport itself. But on the Gwen teenager Gwen whose father is away fi nd some new angle on the often behalf of those utterly uninterested fi ghting in the army. Her mother, grinding and convoluted business of in golf , I can report that it is Elen (Maxine Peake), is hard and fi ve-day cricket. Time and distance moderately interesting. angry, although her grief-fi lled ★★★☆☆ allows for a sensitive re-evaluation Director Jason Baff a’s fi lm is ★★★★☆ glances at her daughters when Dir Barney Douglas of the Kevin Pietersen situation, a mostly bland, workmanlike Dir William McGregor they’re not looking hint that she a Twitter-heightened fl ashpoint amble through the history of hasn’t always been like this. One With Andrew Strauss, Andy Flower, that threatened to undo burgeoning caddies. However, the fi lm does Starring Maxine Peake, Eleanor morning, the family wakes up to fi nd Kevin Pietersen, Graeme Swann morale – and which remains a sore reveal that Bill Murray, noted Worthington-Cox their sheep have been slaughtered. spot in certain quarters. Here, golfi ng enthusiast and co-star of Next, the horse is lamed. Worse, Length 95 mins Cert 15 Douglas opens the door to sports that revered comedy of golfi ng Length 82 mins Cert 15 Elen has epilepsy. There is ugliness psychology, and the fi lm starts to ribaldry Caddyshack , can smooth in the responses at chapel when she Landing days after the extraordinary reposition itself as a more nuanced talk a microphone with the best of William McGregor’s debut feature has a fi t mid-sermon. A predatory scenes at the Cricket World Cup proposition than the fl ag-waver it the world’s slumming A-listers as a is an eerie hybrid of gothic drama smile dances across the face of fi nal at Lord’s, Barney Douglas’s initially presented as. documentary narrator. and social realism. It comes on like a powerful local mine owner who documentary account of the The Edge’s second half provides Here, he enhances an otherwise a chilling mystery-horror in the has been eyeing up Elen’s land . reinvention of English cricket under an unexpected analysis of the plodding, cliche-riddled script tradition of The Innocents as a string The wildness of Snowdonia the aegis of coach Andy Flower cost Flower’s militarised push for with a wry, tongue-in-cheek of calamities befall a woman and is broodingly shot by McGregor and captain Andrew Strauss is glory took on his troops, seeing off merriment, throwing in a delightful, her two daughters fi ghting to keep (who directed episodes of almost as well-timed as a Joe Root 10 years of post-match interview fl uting whimsy to his lilting, their farm in 19th-century north Poldark ) and cinematographer cover drive. That World Cup fi nal spin to pursue a more candid mock-Scots pronunciation of the Wales. Is some kind of ghostly Adam Etherington; the elemental demonstrated how, at its best, this line of testimony. Wicketkeeping name Carnoustie, which crops up phenomenon at work? Or, isolated soundtrack of howling wind and sport writes its own outlandish warrior Matt Prior concedes a lot here given it’s the name of and alone, are the women slowly whispering trees nicely contrasts script. What Douglas underlines “life as a professional sportsman both a course and a posse of 300 going mad? McGregor adds a with the sparse script. Gwen and – defying decades of fi lm-making doesn’t necessarily lend itself to Scots immigrants to the US who further layer of ambiguity with the Elen are grafters, more than up to indiff erence – is that cricket can be you being a good person – because helped shape the game there in the possibility that this is a story about the job of running the farm, but, cinematic: at once widescreen (the it’s about winning”; a painfully last century. female oppression and the struggle without a man around, the mine Sky archives have been raided for vulnerable Jonathan Trott breaks To the fi lm’s credit, it tries to of the poor. owner feels emboldened to attack. aerial shots ) and close up in its duels down in tears. Toby Jones’s balance love for the game and Gwen is set in 1855 in Snowdonia This is not social realism in the style between batsmen and bowlers. narration sounds purplish by audience expectations on the as slate mining pushes out farming of Ken Loach , but it is a fi lm with Unpredictable, too: some intriguing comparison, but there’s something one hand and, on the other, some as the predominant way of life. a strong sense of outrage . Some turns elevate the fi lm a notch over useful (and very English) in the way cautious acknowledgement Eleanor Worthington-Cox ( The might fi nd it relentlessly bleak. standard sports-doc fodder. Douglas interrupts this moment that the class and race issues Enfi eld Haunting, above ) plays CathCath ClarkeClarke It’s primarily, Douglas realises, of sporting celebration to sound a embedded in the sport’s history a matter of squad management. cautionary note, and off er another are a bit tricky. It’s not as if it’s England’s rise to No 1 in the reminder of why these elongated, woke or anything, but there’s an L i s b o n B e a t rankings is described by the fl inty intensely pressurised matches are appropriately reverent celebration Flower, circumspect Strauss and referred to as Tests. PB of the skill of key caddies such as Willie “Pappy” Stokes, for example. And there’s a nod to how much ★★★☆☆ Tiger Woods, not interviewed Dirs Rita Maia, Vasco Viana here, changed the sport’s image and economic structure, Length 65 mins Cert n/a particularly for caddies. Leslie Felperin There is a short, sharp blast of energy in this brief music documentary by DJ Rita Maia and cinematographer Vasco Viana about the African-Portuguese music scene in Lisbon’s outer suburbs, the a 22-string instrument from west “corrugated villages” that appeared Africa that has been used for after the 1970s. It is not quite right to hundreds of years. call this ghetto culture; the milieu is The fi lm shows that the current more nuanced and complicated than culture evolved from Lisbon’s that in terms of nationality, race, vibrant vinyl record industry, generation and class , although it is which was exported to countries in certainly pretty male. Africa. For Maia and Viana, making The music is an engaging mix a fi lm about music is a great way of digital and analogue, new into people’s hearts and minds, and old. A lot of it comes from a royal road, perhaps, to both the DJs with Mac Book Pros and conscious and unconscious mind. music-editing software who play The documentary is about marathon-length parties. A lot identity, with many of the more comes from traditional participants hassled over visa and instruments such as a Ferro player, residency issues, but also about a percussive instrument lying over creativity, hedonism and fun. It is the shoulder like a length of steel perhaps a bit too brief to investigate that produces a weirdly hypnotic its ideas fully, but there’s food for thrumming noise, and a kora, thought here. PB • The Guardian 13 Friday 19 July 2019 Reviews Music

Alexis Petridis’s album of the week Experimental Artist Lingua Ignota The Flaming Lips King’s Mouth Album Caligula Label Profound Lore Records Their most ★★★★☆ L ingua Ignota , appealing AKA Rhode Island musician Kristin Hayter, released album one of 2018’s most startling and unfairly overlooked records in in years All Bitches Die. Written in the wake of domestic abuse, it built through images of horrifi c violence towards Holy Is the Name, an eerily beautiful ballad imagining her lying alongside Pop her dead abuser . As a closing image it was emphatic, but her second album Label Bella Union announces that any Hollywood narrative of overcoming trauma is a lie: abuse, she asserts, can linger ★★★★☆ for a lifetime. “Life is cruel and time efore we turn to the heals nothing”, runs one bitter lyric. Flaming Lips’ 15th Once again, Hayter draws from studio album, it’s a wealth of inspirations to create worth considering a sledgehammer amalgam. On Do B the extremely You Doubt Me Traitor , she unleashes peculiar path that totally desperate shrieks – “How has brought the Oklahoma trio do I break you before you break to this point. They began life as a me?” – until she hyperventilates, minor psychedelic alt-rock band showing up much of the roaring you with seemingly zero mainstream hear from black metallers as safe, commercial potential beyond pampered and stable. But passages hand-to-mouth survival, on the like this, or spells of huge noisy same US post-punk gig circuit downforce that recall Sunn O))), are that supported umpteen bands off set with more spartan, stately with zero mainstream commercial strings-and-piano sections, evoking potential in the mid-80s. When they the relief and clarity one experiences were signed to a major label in 1991, with innocent wonder as he reads, or tended to obfuscate on recent after a bout of vomiting. Hayter it looked like one of the grandest like a man who hasn’t got a clue what releases. Multi-instrumentalist has spoken of her fascination with acts of folly yet in the crazed search he’s supposed to be going on about. Steven Drozd has the ability to Roman Catholicism, and there is a to fi nd the next Nirvana: their debut Still, after pausing for a moment mould a wildly varied set of musical liturgical quality to this latter style release under their new deal was an to refl ect on the reaction of the backdrops into a cohesive whole – she sometimes delivers her lyrics EP called Yeah I Know It’s a Drag, spittle-fl ecked audience at the Roxy – the album goes from the fi dgety like a terrible benediction . But Wastin’ Pigs Is Still Radical. Like in 1977, had they been informed distorted funk of Feedaloodum Those lyrics are often so pertinent a number of bands signed in the that the Clash’s guitarist was going Bee dle Dot to the 10cc-ish AOR of to the confusion that comes with post-grunge goldrush, they had a to end up narrating a psychedelic The Sparrow to the cinematic, choral abuse. “Who will love you if I don’t? minor novelty hit – 1994’s She Don’t concept album about a monarch sample-bedecked instrumental Who will fuck you if I won’t?” she Use Jelly – and that appeared to with a head that contained galaxies, Funeral Parade without seeming wonders, announcing her abuser as be that. it’s hard not to concede that the disjointed, largely because pathetic and yet pitying them ; by And then the damnedest thing advance publicity on King’s Mouth whatever style they’re essaying, titling the song May Failure Be Your happened: the Flaming Lips released (initially released in a limited vinyl- it somehow always sounds like Noose, she ends up deciding to wish the extraordinary 1999 album The only edition on Record Store Day) the Flaming Lips. Wayne Coyne them nothing but ill. Soft Bulletin , developed an equally other, a lot of this stuff has defi nitely is correct. Despite the concept and can still project childlike wonder Hayter is classically trained, extraordinary live show and became muddied the water between accompanying folderol, what lies at and homespun wisdom without and there is emotional as well as something like a mainstream “fearless and unbridled artistic its heart are a succession of songs sounding cloying. From Do You technical brilliance to the way she success. Its successor, 2002’s experimentation” and “apparently more straightforwardly appealing Realize? to Waitin’ for Superman, expands her vocal palette here – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots , just testing everyone’s patience for than anything the Flaming Lips have Flaming Lips’ biggest songs have Sorrow! Sorrow! Sorrow! sees her sold half a million copies in the US the sake of it”. come up with in years. Only the frequently hinged on presenting split her voice apart like a throat alone and won a Grammy, which It says something about their brief instrumental Mother Universe lyrical ideas that look a bit trite on singer, while other sections recall the Flaming Lips seemed to take releases in the intervening years speaks of the kind of self-indulgence paper, but gain a peculiar, aff ecting the ululations of Gaelic song. Sadly as a signal to let their imaginations that King’s Mouth has been that’s marked out their recent emotional heft when delivered in it sounds like her revenger’s tragedy run riot in the most confounding greeted as a concise return to form: releases. It’s nothing as craven as Coyne’s wayward, fragile voice. is not yet over, but the survival – way. They released unwatchable a concept album accompanied a direct return to the sound of The It’s a trick much in evidence here: indeed fl ourishing – of her unique Christmas fi lms, 24-hour long songs, by an immersive art exhibition Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles Giant Baby fi nds him refl ecting on artistry is its own triumph. experimental double albums that and a children’s book, about the Pink Robots – it’s comparatively his mother’s death and concluding Ben Beaumont-Thomas frontman Wayne Coyne promoted a monarch with a giant head that stripped-down, less widescreen that “life is sometimes sad”; on the with the suggestion that it “would contains galaxies and weather in its musical ambitions, more concluding How Can a Head , he’s have made a better single album if systems, narrated by former obviously reliant on electronics that gawping in wonder at the powers only the artist could have focused Clash guitarist Mick Jones. The sound like electronics rather than a of the human brain. themselves”, a series of releases on latter’s contributions are very much dense patchwork of samples – but it How Can a Head is the album’s which they covered The Dark Side in the vein of Stanley Unwin ’s shares with those albums the sense highlight, blessed with as lovely of the Moon, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely appearances on the Small Faces’ of a band marshalling their energies a melody as the band have ever Hearts Club Band and the Stone 1968 psychedelic opus Ogden s’ and abundance of outre ideas into written. Luxuriating in it, you’re Roses’ eponymous debut in their Nut Gone Flake, and, it has to be relatively short, honed, lushly struck by the sense that you entirety, a collaboration with Ke$ha said, don’t make much more sense melodic bursts. should probably enjoy it while it that was pressed on vinyl containing than the inventor of Basic Engly At their best – Mouth of the lasts. If the Flaming Lips’ recent Ke$ha’s menstrual blood , etc. Twenty Fido enquiring if you’re King, All For the Life of the City history has taught us anything, On the one hand, hooray for sitting comfortabold two square on – the songs here are a total joy, it’s that their next album will a band resolutely refusing to cave your botty . It’s a moot point as to reacquainting you with certain probably be confounding: in to commercial pressure. On the whether Jones sounds either rapt strengths the Flaming Lips have abnormal service resumed. • 14 The Guardian Reviews Music Friday 19 July 2019

Contemporary In brief Dorian Electra Sum 41 Canadian Ada Lea This Montreal album of treats gender as Order in Decline veterans get What We Say in songwriter may the month Dorian Electra a playground, ★★☆☆☆ “political”: Private have a casual, Flamboyant subverting over-produced ★★★★☆ even naive ★★★★☆ stereotypes pop-punk singing style, but around sugar and bombast. there’s depth, daddies and Heads Will experience and ostentatiousness, Roll and Never mystery to her humour carried There sugg est bedroom pop. by slinkily brash, they should The Party is seditious pop. slow it down one of many A star. LS more often. DS highlights. BBT

Artist Laura Jurd

Album Stepping Back, Jumping in

Label Edition Records ★★★☆☆ Live-wire trumpeter’s textural puzzle

aura Jurd (above) is a staggeringly good trumpeter – a specialist in hard bop and modal jazz who could hold her own on any jazz bandstand on earth. But one gets L the impression she is constantly pushing against the constraints of whatever lineup she is in. She emerged through the ranks of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, leads electronic jazz-rock band Dinosaur , and has reinvented classic trumpet works, recently playing the Miles Davis role in a reimagining of Sketches of Spain. Jurd’s solo ventures, however, take her into even weirder territory . Stepping Back, Jumping In is another massive stylistic reinvention – one that leaps from strident minimalism to orchestrated chaos via fi dgety Bartók-like folk forgeries. The Ligeti Quartet feature, their spiky harmonies and shimmering textures taking centre stage. Jurd’s comrades in Dinosaur also appear, including pianist Elliot Galvin , whose composition Ishtar is a wonderful mess of woozy horns set against coma-paced beats. But Jurd throws in other wildcards – Rob Luft’s banjo motif makes the opening track sound like a joyous riot in a wild west saloon bar, while composer Soosan Lolavar plays the santoor (a hammered dulcimer) and also writes one of the stand-out tracks – a gorgeous nine-minute ambient drone called I Am the Spring, You Are the Earth. Not all of it works – some of the churning melodies and fi dgety rhythms become quite headache-inducing – but there are moments of unalloyed beauty. One of them is Companion Species, an extraordinary nine-minute track written by Anja Lauvdal and Heida K Jóhannesdóttir Mobeck, where a series of shimmering textures slowly mutates into something that resembles the Art Ensemble of Chicago entering Afrobeat territory. Maybe Jurd, for all her manic inventiveness as a composer, shouldn’t stray too far from jazz.

Also out this month Marking the 50th anniversary of the moon landings are a fl urry of space-themed albums. Brian Eno is re-releasing his 1983 LP Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, with a new disc of material. The original soundtrack, featuring ambient classics such as Drift and An Ending (Ascent), is timeless and beautiful; the additional disc is quite dull. Gods of Apollo sees saxophonist Rob Cope creating a virtual fi lm soundtrack mixing archival speeches and N asa recordings with music that lurches between densely written atonal pieces and ruminative free Reviews by improv. Manchester duo Spectral Bazaar features Dave Laura Snapes, Clarkson (synths) and Ruth Davies (cello, oboe, fl ute) and Dave Simpson, their album The Planets is an immersive electro-acoustic Ben Beaumont- voyage, a barrage of drones and treated noise. Thomas John Lewis • The Guardian Friday 19 July 2019 15

Classical Pop Their territory not a million miles album of from the 1975’s: millennial anxiety Artist Freya Ridings pops up time and time again (“I’m the week in my 20s, so I panic in every way / Album Freya Ridings I’m so scared of the future, I keep missing today,” they sing on You’ve Label Good Soldier Records Got Your Whole Life Ahead of You Baby ), and the way their harmonies fall sometimes calls to mind Matty ★☆☆☆☆ Healy ’s double-tracked vocal. London songwriter What Emotional Education F reya Ridings found perhaps lacks is the grain of sand success thanks to that makes the pearl. Despite the Love Island, which emotional turmoil of the lyrics, played her song Lost the musical consistency – smooth, Without You over tasteful synthpop – perhaps some emotional moments in the last serves to fl atten out the moods, series. so Invincible’s declaration that It’s hard to think of an artist Pop “I’ll wear our life like armour” further from Mallorca’s teeny is off ered up at the same level of bikinis, burnished tans and brash Artist Ider intensity as the panicky Swim. emoting: Ridings specialises in But there’s so much promise here. Artist Shafer/Mumford/Sewailam/ chilly, pained piano balladry, and Album Emotional Education Markwick and Somerville can Boehler/Odense SO/Starobin/Shwartz her debut album plays like a 12-part write a terrifi c lyric . Swim itself audition to bag herself this year’s Label Glassnote Records works outwards from its opening Album Ruders: The Thirteenth Child John Lewis Christmas ad. verse, in which the narrator swims Most of it is just Brit School “in neat lines from the poolside”, Label Bridge graduate Ridings at the piano: ★★★☆☆ until it becomes about the fear of playing tinkly high notes so delicate The debut drowning in life. The melodies are they would struggle to summon album by Megan good, though Emotional Education ★★★☆☆ a two-inch plastic ballerina from Markwick and lacks the single indelible song her music-box slumber. You could Lily Somerville that takes a group from admired Fairytale with see her minimalist approach as is a cigarette cult to huge crowds. Imperfect, admirably defi ant in light of the paper away from then, but so many seeds have current charts arms race – every brilliance: all it lacks is little more been planted. Don’t be surprised if a touch of evil song a fi ring squad of hitmakers – if colour, a little more variation, Ider’s second album turns out to be it wasn’t so dull. Poison sounds like just the little spark that sets the a masterpiece. t’s very rare for a new opera to make it on to disc the Muzak version of Evanescence’s extraordinary apart from the rest. Michael Hann before it is seen in public. But Poul Ruders ’ fi fth goth-pop classic Bring Me to Life; the stage work, due to receive its world premiere at shadow of Florence + the Machine Santa Fe Opera next week, is an exception. The hangs over everything, showing up I Thirteenth Child was jointly commissioned by Ridings’ meagre vocal powers. Santa Fe and the Odense Symphony , and this She can belt, and does, often, but recording was made in Denmark and New York in 2016 it’s that kind of indie-voiced, back- and 2018, and released to coincide with the premiere on of-throat emoting that has become the label founded by David Starobin, who, with his wife, a byword for authenticity. It sounds Becky, is responsible for the opera’s libretto. as if she’s detached her lower jaw to The text is adapted from one of the lesser-known reach the low notes of You Mean the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, The Twelve Brothers. World to Me , while her enunciation A king banishes his 12 sons so his 13th child, a daughter, melts on Wishbone : “ Tell me can succeed him. When the daughter discovers what her that I’ll see you again” becomes father has done, she embarks on a search for her long- “tehmethaaseeyahga”. lost brothers, before everyone lives happily ever after. When she and producer Greg In the Grimms’ original, only the king’s youngest Kurstin attempt to dress things up, son has a name, Benjamin. But the Starobins give all the results are never anything but their characters more precise identities – the King boilerplate. The pounding Castles becomes Hjarne, king of Frohagord, his queen Gertrude, wants to be Rolling in the Deep but is his daughter Lyra, and so on – and they fl esh out the more splashing in the shallows. Love Metal With their heavy riff ola, pounding action, too, adding an evil cousin and a prince who is Is Fire hits the button marked “Edge drums and the sort of demonic the love interest for princess Lyra. But even with two guitar” and comfortably assumes its Artist Sabaton choirs that soundtracked the horror acts compressed into less than 80 minutes, there is role as the rousing climax towards fi lm The Omen, the likes of The plenty of space for lyrical solo numbers in Ruders’ score, the end of her live setlists. With its Album The Great War Future of Warfare and Seven Pillars which veers between mid-Atlantic neoromanticism hollers of “water!”, stomp and vocal of Wisdom could be an operatic and something edgier and more expressionist in the frenzy, Holy Water is like a parody of Label Nuclear Blast metal Iron Maiden, who have also orchestral interludes. But the work never gets too bland white pop stars’ attempts to go found much mileage in songs about demanding, and after his previous opera, a rather gospel. Except it’s real. warfare’s blood and gore. unconvincing adaptation of Lars von Trier’s Dancer in Tying all this together are Ridings’ ★★★☆☆ Sabaton’s choruses are certainly the Dark, it’s easy to understand why Ruders should pained yarns of love lost, her voice Swedish power catchy, although the barrage of want to tackle something diff erent; it’s particularly wobbling so fi ercely you wonder metal band Sabaton gutturally sung lyrics (“Fire and Sarah Shafer (above) in the role of Lyra, who makes the whether she was forced to record in have created brimstone, heading your way!”), most of his smoothly contoured vocal writing. a deep freeze. You want to off er her a rather specifi c proggy keyboards and twiddly a blanket, suggest she deletes Tinder oeuvre, based on solos can sound overwrought. Also out this week for a bit. Maybe a stint on Love Island modern warfare Helpfully, the album also comes The latest off ering in Palazzetto Bru Zane ’s sumptuously would do her the world of good. and the accompanying sacrifi ces in a documentary style “history packaged French opera series marks the bicentenary of Laura Snapes and endeavours. Their ninth version”, in which voiceover the birth of Jacques Off enbach, with La Périchole , taken album reaches an apogee of human narratives mix with metal. This from a run of stage performances in Bordeaux last year. confl ict , the fi rst world war, in format – in which statements It’s sparkily conducted by Marc Minkowski , who opts which an estimated nine million such as “a single bullet, that for the 1874 three-act revision of the score, complete soldiers and almost as many changed the world for ever” with dialogue; the period instruments of Les Musiciens civilians died. The band certainly combine with tales of sniper tactics, du Louvre are in the pit, with a cast led by the mezzo don’t spare the horses. There are Lawrence of Arabia and Manfred Aude Extrémo as the street singer who is lined up by the cannon and mortar fi re eff ects. von Richthofen, the notorious viceroy of Peru to be his next mistress. Extrémo doesn’t Songs rage about gas, trench warfare “Red Baron” – is more interesting. sound to be at her best, and she’s rather outpointed by and the Fields of Verdun on the One can learn about a fascinating, the tenor Stanislas de Barbeyrac as her lover Piquillo, and western front in 1916, where “the if dark, period of history while Alexandre Duhamel in the buff o role of the Viceroy. All bombardment lasted all day long. unapologetically rocking out. good, Spanish-fl avoured froth, though. Yet the forts were standing strong.” Dave Simpson Andrew Clements

• The Guardian 17 Friday 19 July 2019 Live reviews

Rapt intensity Elvis moves … … Vanessa Vicky Malin and Theatre Redgrave Claire Cunningham Our Church

★★★☆☆ Watermill, Newbury

Until Saturday

eToo has inspired a number of plays giving voice to Dance M the victims of sexual predation. Thank You Now comes drama tackling the inner lives of sex off enders themselves, Very Much the most prominent of these being Downstate , a Steppenwolf and National Theatre co-production, and David Mamet’s current West End ★★★★☆ play, Bitter Wheat . Ukrainian Cultural Centre, Marietta Kirkbride’s Our Church Manchester is far quieter and more English than Much of the fi rst part is taken up together by the presence of Vanessa either of these. It is set in a fi ctional Theatre with the story of Muriel Gardiner, Redgrave, who is like a benignly Until Saturday village that could be the backwaters an American anti-Nazi activist reminiscent aunt with passionate of Ambridge. Three church Vienna 1934 – who worked tirelessly to rescue convictions. Even when seated at committee members eat Hobnobs Austrian socialists after the murder an upstage desk, she gazes with he world of Elvis and discuss parish matters, from Munich 1938 of the country’s chancellor, Dolfuss, rapt intensity at the three actors tribute artists proves dwindling volunteers to a diseased in 1934. Gardiner’s story was who play multiple characters in far more than a medley pear tree, a renegade cow and a controversially co-opted by Lillian this restless political kaleidoscope: of quiff s and capes in game of croquet for villagers. ★★★☆☆ Hellman in her book, Pentimento, Robert Boulter appears as Spender, T Claire Cunningham’s It is only when June (Kirsty Cox) which was the source of the fi lm Michael Redgrave and Vanessa’s Thank You Very nominates a churchgoer called Tom Ustinov, Bath Julia , in which Redgrave herself naval uncle, Nicholas Kempson , Much . From a consideration of the to be part of the group that their starred. But Gardiner also had an who kept a journal recording King and his impersonators, the conversation becomes charged. Tom Until 3 August aff air with Stephen Spender , which Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia; disabled dancer and choreographer is a convicted sex off ender who was prompts a reading of his polemical Lucy Doyle, on her professional draws together a thought-provoking caught with downloaded images poem, Vienna, and an account of debut, is highly impressive as the and poignant show about identity, of underage girls. Now elderly, the his is a show unlike the sexual ambivalence of many public-spirited Gardiner, who is performance and disruption. sustained suspicion towards him in any other. Subtitled of the prominent socialists of the also allowed a private skittishness; While Elvis unsettled staid white the village is aired by Michael (Robert “A Family Album”, it 1930s including Vanessa’s father, Paul Hilton delivers Mann ’s attack America with his hips, Cunningham East, who doubles excellently as is written, narrated Michael . The show builds towards an on appeasement with a lean and draws attention to the confounding Tom) and Anne (Susan Tracy), who T and directed by extended climax in which Thomas hungry ferocity. force of disabled bodies, recognising has her own history of abuse . Vanessa Redgrave, Mann delivers a lecture in New While this may not be the tidiest in Elvis’s way of moving a physicality Nik Partridge’s production and is a mixture of private memoir York in 1938 fi ercely denouncing of shows, it makes abundantly clear that, like her own, is free of straight captures the awkward reckoning and public portrait of the antifascist the passive attitude of western that this was a decade in which lines. Sporting a leather jacket, and reconciliation process. At times, movements of the 1930s. Discursive democracies, Britain most especially, governmental failure was off set by collar popped, she introduces these it treads a fi ne line between potent and haphazardly structured, it is towards Hitlerian fascism. the activism of dedicated socialists ideas via a 50s chrome microphone, drama and debating society rhetoric also fascinating to anyone with an Watching the production is living under what Spender called while perched against one crutch but it never slips into judgment, and interest in the Redgrave family or like going on a switchback ride “the shadow of war”. and balancing on her toes; her Tom’s argument – that he can only do the politics of the period. through the 1930s, but it is held Michael Billington protracted, rubber-legged shake a good in society if that society begins demonstration of bodily limitation to trust him again – is a powerful one. and formidable control. What is extraordinary is that Our Ringham brothers’ music jangles Audio recordings of insights from Church is constructed for the small Theatre loudly overhead as four young Elvis tribute artists reiterate a sense communities it refl ects. It has toured people scour the internet and hang of otherness. Against a repeated 17 village halls and arts centres, and Games for out in bars, searching madly for love refrain that Presley’s power to Anna Orton’s set of a church hall has in all the wrong places. shock was akin to “a creature from an airy, minimal quality . Lovers The script is propped up with space”, Cunningham and dancer There is something very brave endless games – word play, role play Tanja Erhart perform a duet using about a young writer channelling and a deliciously heated session of intersecting crutches. elderly voices, a nd Kirkbride does truth-or-dare. Craig carefully spells There’s an illuminating sequence so excellently. It is, in the end, a ★★★☆☆ out his metaphor: love is merely a in which Erhart shows how she focused study, perhaps too light on Vaults, London game of chance in the era of online learned to raise and swing her hip plot, but with a power that lies in its dating (when was it anything to walk with a prosthetic left leg – quiet, emotional understatement. Until 25 August else?). Evanna Lynch ( who played the pelvis becomes a site of simple Arifa Akbar Clueless … Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter human mechanics rather than Evanna Lynch fi lms) and Billy Postlethwaite are conservative cultural anxiety. giddy carefreeness and Billy particularly good as the quirky When performer Dan Daw underpins this Postlethwaite lovers at the heart of the tale. struts authoritatively around the light-hearted new Postlethwaite – whose last space in pants and a gold-spangled comedy about love Banks’s production is effi cient and performance was as a swaggeringly jacket, the work compellingly A in the internet age – easy going – a perfectly fun yet fairly macho Macbeth – plays an calls into question notions about it feels as if everyone predictable watch. endearingly clueless lad, a fi nancial voyeuristic spectacle and how we is cutting loose for the summer. Simon Scullion ’s brightly analyst who refers to women as watch bodies that don’t conform Playwright Ryan Craig has penned coloured set vaguely resembles a TV targets and, for dating purposes, to a dancerly ideal. Heavyweight a couple of big hitters for the recording studio. The word love is has changed his name to Wham. topics are delivered with a light Sustained National Theatre, including spelled out across huge neon blocks There’s a spontaneity to his and touch and warm tone, as the dancers suspicion … The Holy Rosenbergs , and the that fl ank the stage and sections Lynch’s performances that elevates take chatty turns addressing the Susan Tracy superlative sound designers of the audience lounge about on the script and, just occasionally, audience, demonstrating moves and Ben and Max Ringham are also love-seat sofas. In between scenes, makes all that game-playing sporting assorted belt-and-jumpsuit on board. But no one has particularly the cast dance manically about the feel real. combinations.

PHOTOGRAPHS: PHILIP TULL; NOBBY CLARK; HUGO GLENDINNING; TRISTRAM KENTON/THE GUARDIAN PHILIP TULL; PHOTOGRAPHS: NOBBY stretched themselves. Anthony stage. Lights fl ash brightly and the Miriam Gillinson Anna Winter • 18 The Guardian TV and radio Friday 19 July 2019

First Night of the Proms 7.30pm, BBC Two

Adnan Sarwar … handling a controversial subject with delicacy

Live coverage of a momentous occasion at London’s Royal Albert Hall, where Karina Canellakis becomes the fi rst woman to preside over the opening Prom. She guides the BBC Symphony

dressing the wound that usually heals within a week Orchestra and Chorus through Long Review A Cut Too Far? Male or so. It is an important rite in the Islamic and Jewish Is the Journey – Short Is the Memory, a Circumcision, BBC One religions, marking the child’s entry into the faith. The daring new commission by Canadian infant Sarwar, born to Muslim parents, was circumcised as a matter of course and didn’t give it a thought until composer Zosha Di Castri to mark he was in the showers after PE at his school in Burnley the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 , and and noticed the diff erence between him and his Muslim peers and their non-Muslim ones. Dvořák’s symphonic poem The Golden An act of love or Is it a depredation? An assault? An act of love by Spinning Wheel. Coverage switches to parents, a handing down of a tradition so signifi cant BBC Four for Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass. an assault on a it amounts to a gift? We wouldn’t sanction it between adults without consent – why are babies diff erent? As a Mike Bradley lawyer specialising in the fi eld pointed out, we normally child? Discuss give children more rights than grownups because they are that much more vulnerable to decision-makers on Politics Live Special: them. We, meanwhile, their behalf. Not in this case. Legally, parents can only Liberal Democrat are treated to unseen sensitively consent to operations in the best interests of a child. Hustings moments from the Does induction into a faith and culture count? 7.30pm, BBC Two gobsmackingly unironic There are those who will say that of all the things to The recent Lib Dem documentary After the ★★★★☆ justify taking a knife to a child’s nethers, a belief in an revival means that Screaming Stops (which invisible friend in the sky is not one of them. Sarwar the party might soon follows at 11.30pm). rightly didn’t dwell on this but got stuck into meatier wield genuine political MB Lucy Mangan questions, highlighting how love, religion and law power, especially if a intersect and the ability individuals and countries have general election arrives The Lateish Show With to resist, interfere with and circumscribe their demands. earlier than expected. Mo Gilligan As well as talking to men who felt they had been harmed Would-be leaders Jo 10pm, Channel 4 (physically, as well as emotionally, in the case of one Swinson and Sir Ed Davey Co-presenter of The Big ut of context, most of the things we victim of an operation that went badly), he spoke with enter the Politics Live Narstie Show Gilligan do seem mad. I just voluntarily ate a Muslim and Jewish leaders and scholars to interrogate thunderdome to pitch presents the fi rst edition combination of sugar, cocoa solids, milk the scriptural basis of the practice (greater in the their visions. of his own brand of solids and emulsifi ers that made me latter faith than the former) and delineate the cultural Graeme Virtue sketch and chatshow in O happy at the time but I knew would make signifi cance around it. And whatever your feelings which he invites singer me sad later. Then I went for a run that about the subject, it was such a rare and welcome sight Inside Britain’s Jessie J and comedy made me unhappy at the time but I knew would make to see people sitting and talking frankly about religious Factories actors Steve Coogan me happy later, because it would allow me to pretend I matters without anger or hostility, but interest, patience 8pm, Channel 5 and Asim Chaudhry to had not eaten a combination of sugar, cocoa solids, milk and nuance. It was a tiny oasis in an earth scorched by And Reportedly “over the volunteer their thoughts another solids and emulsifi ers. Then I spent 10 minutes painting manufactured media outrage and it would have been thing worst” following a recent on celebrity culture. Plus my nails with more-or-less toxic chemicals so they lovely to linger longer and drink deeper there. stroke, John Prescott viewers get the chance to would be nicer to look at during my day of typing and Likewise with psychotherapist and Jewish feminist popped up earlier in win prizes. MB give the illusion that I was intending to go out tonight. An Dr Jenny Goodman, who has been taking issue with The Jack the year in this gentle alien without any preparatory lectures on human foibles, circumcision in her community for three decades and Reacher books doc series, originally Celebrity 5 Go Barging biology, psychology or grooming rituals would be foxed. declined to have her own son undergo it when he was are coming to titled British Made. As 9pm, Channel 5 Adnan Sarwar’s documentary about the whys, born 20 years ago. She considers it an issue of children’s TV via Amazon. it continues, he lends Michael Buerk welcomes wherefores and growing controversy around male and mothers’ rights; to be required to deny the maternal I hope they are wide-eyed amazement shipmates on a joyous circumcision ( I had an extended metaphor about pulling urge to protect your newborn, she points out, is literally casting and occasional help to canal trip. Joining him back the foreskin of the issue to examine the sensitivities profoundly disempowering. Uncircumcised boys remain a brick privy in the staff at Tyrrells crisps on the boys’ barge are beneath, but decided in my infi nite professionalism to Jewish in law and in practice, so why cleave to what for the title role. and Ribena, respectively. Barry from EastEnders set it aside) posed the question of when context should at least half the population is an unnatural practice? Hannah J Davies and a baseball-capped be allowed to make sense of a procedure that seems, on But she opposes banning it in law. Change, she says, John Prescott, while Carry the prepuce of it, very odd indeed. has to come from within – otherwise antisemites and A Night in With Bros On graduates Amanda BBC One’s A Cut Too Far? (I assume The Unkindest Islamophobes will surely use changes in legislation to 10pm, BBC Four Barrie and Anita Harris Cut of All? was rejected for begging the question) didn’t fuel their tanks and only create greater suff ering overall. Luke and Matt Goss are at the helm for the mention the standards of care applied in earlier times A Cut Too Far? raised a plethora of fascinating relive some of their most girls. It’s not a spoiler to or in other places now, but here in the UK the removal questions and if it didn’t – couldn’t – come up with any memorable moments in say that getting stuck of baby boys’ foreskins involves a local anaesthetic in answers, it still stood out as an open-minded, generous- 80s band Bros, revealing and sailing puns feature the infant groin then a few minutes of snipping away hearted look at an underexamined subject. And the shows, music and heavily. round a metal cap to protect the head of the penis, before touched, occasionally, with grace. fi lms that have inspired Hannah Verdier • The Guardian Friday 19 July 2019 19

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10.0 News (T) 10.30 Newsnight (T) Weather 10.20 News (T) 10.0 The Lateish Show With Mo 10.0 The Death of Amy 10.0 A Night in With Bros (T) 10.25 Regional News (T) Weather. 11.05 Stargazing: Moon Landing 10.50 Local News (T) Gilligan (T) (1/6) Chat and fun Winehouse: 13 Reasons 11.30  Bros: After the 10.35 Killing Eve (T) (R) Villanelle Special (T) (R) Prof Brian 11.10  Lethal Weapon with guests Steve Coogan, Why (T) The tragic early Screaming Stops (David has a new target. Cox is accompanied on an (Richard Donner, 1987) (T) Jessie J and Asim Chaudhry. demise of the star. Soutar, Joe Pearlman, 2018) 11.20 Room 101: Extra Storage exploration of the night Action thriller with Mel 11.05 Shipmates (T) 11.30 Naughty Naughty! Utterly (T) Feted rockumentary (T) (R) With Bill Bailey, Una skies by Dara Ó Briain. Gibson and Danny Glover. 12.10  Paranormal Outrageous Comedy (T) (R) about the boy band. Stubbs and Alice Levine. 12.35 Sign Zone Panorama: Sex 1.0 The Voice Kids (T) (R) 2.20 Tour Activity: The Marked Ones 1.25 The Live Casino Show 1.0 Bros’s Matt Goss Introduces: 12.0  Man Up (Ben Palmer, Education – The LGBT Debate De France Highlights (T) 3.10 (Christopher Landon, 2014) (T) 3.25 Lip Sync Battle: Sinatra – All Or Nothing at 2015) (T) Comedy starring in Schools (T) (R) 1.05 Britain’s Teleshopping 3.40 All Star (T) 1.40 GameFace (T) (R) Katherine Ryan v Kayvan All (T) 2.0 Bros’s Luke Goss Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. Next Air Disaster? Drones (T) Mr & Mrs (T) (R) 4.30 ITV 2.05 Year of the Rabbit (T) Novak (T) (R) 4.0 GPs: Introduces: Robert Plant – By 1.20 Weather 1.25 News (T) (R) 2.05 This Is BBC Two (T) Nightscreen (R) 2.35 Ackley Bridge (T) (R) Behind Closed Doors (T) (R) Myself (T) 3.10 TOTP: 1988

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(5/5) Service 5.20 Shipping Good Omens (5/6) 12.30 Big Bang Theory 11.0 Date 8.0 Emmerdale Hours in A&E Double Bill Discovering: Robert First Night of the Proms. 10.0 Woman’s Hour. Forecast 5.30 News Off the Page (3/10) 1.0 Brooklyn Nine-Nine 12.0 Double Bill 9.0 You’ve 12.15 Ramsay’s Kitchen Duvall 1.0 Tales of the Live from the Royal Includ es at 10.45 5.43 Prayer for the Day Red Joan (5/5) 1.30 Young Sheldon 1.0 Big Been Framed! Gold 9.25 Nightmares USA 1.15 Unexpected Double Albert Hall , presented Drama: Moon . (5/5) 5.45 Four Thought (R) Just a Simple Old … 2.0 Bang Theory 2.0 Melissa The Ellen DeGeneres The Supervet 2.15 The Bill 2.0 Supertramp: by Georgia Mann and 11.0 D for Diagnosis: Eleanor Oliphant 2.15 & Joey 3.0 Brooklyn Show 10.25 Superstore Secret Life of the Zoo Live in Paris ’79 4.0 Petroc Trelawny. Asmik What’s in a Label? (2/3) Radio 4 Extra Plants … 2.30 Madame Nine-Nine 4.0 Black-ish Double Bill 11.15 3.20 8 Out of 10 Cats Passions 5.0 Discovering: Grigorian (soprano), 11.30 Maskirovka. 6.0 Red Joan (5/5) 6.30 Bovary (5/10) 2.45 Philip 5.0 Young Sheldon 6.0 Dress to Impress 12.15 Jack Nicholson 6.0 Jennifer Johnston One-off comedy by Jack Just a Simple Old New Larkin … 3.0 John Gabriel Big Bang Theory 7.0 Emmerdale Double Bill Sky One Discovering: Jane Fonda (mezzo), Ladislav Elgr Bernhardt about a secret Zealand Bee keeper 7.0 Borkman (2/2) 4.0 It’s Hollyoaks 7.30 School of 1.15 You’ve Been Framed! 6.0am Monkey Life 7.0 Classic Albums 8.0 Bros: After the (tenor), Eric Owens British military unit Sketches By Boz (4/5) Not What You Know Rock 8.0 Big Bang Theory Gold 1.50 The Ellen Double Bill 7.0 Animal Video Killed the Radio Screaming Stops, (bass-baritone), Peter dedicated to fighting the 7.30 Absolutely Radio (1/4) 4.30 Mr Finchley Double Bill 9.0  Die DeGeneres Show 2.45 999 Double Bill 8.0 Star 8.30 Discovering: Holder (organ), BBC social media cyberwar. Show (2/4) 8.0 Burkiss 5.0 Sketches By Boz Hard 2 (1990) 11.25 Rick Dinner Date 3.50 Dress RSPCA Animal Rescue Jethro Tull 9.0 Rush: BBC Four Singers, BBC Symphony 12.0 News 12.04 Sweet Way (6/13) 8.30 Steptoe (4/5) 5.30 Absolutely • TODAY’S PET CORNER ANSWER 20 The Guardian Puzzles Friday 19 July 2019 HL MENCKEN Quick crossword no 15,350 Garry Trudeau

12345 Across Down 1 Raw cured Italian ham (10) 1 Black-and-white bear (5) Doonesbury 6 7 Heartfelt (7) 2 Sign of things to come (4) 8 Buckwheat pancakes (5) 3 Of the same period – alcove 78910 Gosh! (1,3) (anag) (6) 11 Capital of Bosnia and 4 Impartial (8) Herzegovina (8) 5 Ancient vessel with three 13 Deeply distressing (6) banks of oars on each side (7) 15 Decapitate (6) 6 Aid (10) 10 11 17 Item of jewellery (8) 9 Excessive (10) 18 Complain (4) 12 Charlotte Brontë novel (8) 12 21 DVD player button (5) 14 Toxophilites (7) 22 Vertical (7) 16 Clothing worn in an 13 14 15 23 Evaluation (10) operating theatre (6) 19 Should (5) 20 Veracious (4) 16

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23 Stuck? For help call 0906 200 83 83. Calls cost £1.10 per minute, plus your phone company’s access charge. Service supplied by ATS. Call 0330 333 6946 for customer service (charged at standard rate).To buy puzzle books, visit guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Sudoku no 4,470 Suguru Wordsearch

Hard. Fill the grid so that each row, column and 3x3 box Fill the grid so that each square in an outlined Can you fi nd 15 words that can contains the numbers 1-9. block contains a digit. A block of two squares precede WEIGHT in the grid? Words contains the digits 1 and 2, a block of three can run forwards, backwards, squares contains the digits 1, 2 and 3, and so on. vertically or diagonally, but always in No same digit should appear in neighbouring a straight, unbroken line. squares, not even diagonally.

Yesterday’s solutions Word wheel

Sudoku no 4,469 Suguru Wordsearch Solution no 15,349 Find as many words as possible using STRONGHOLD the letters in the wheel. Each must TEAOUT use the central letter and at least SUCC INCT NEAR two others. Letters may be used only MLALDN once. You may not use plurals, foreign POUT T I DY ING SIN E words or proper nouns. There is at GREENKEEPER least one nine-letter word to be found. AFSU TARGET: Excellent-48. Good-43. WR E S T L E BR I G Average-33. NEABPE HEAP TEATOWEL TIERSS JARDINIERE Word wheel EMBRACING

Pet corner Who said: “Living with a. James Agee a dog is easy – like living b. Ernest Hemingway with an idealist”? c. HL Mencken d. John Reed Answer top right