Review - Alzheimer's the musical

Walked out of this one. Absolute shite.

Not sure what we expected but with a name like that we were prepared to be offended. The fringe has never been a bastion of political correct comedy or sensitivity, which is probably why I enjoy it so much, so we were quite ready to be shocked.

The reviews were good and the long queue, in the rain, boded well. We holed up under a bar table with a big brolly and tagged on to the end of the queue when it started moving.

This meant we were in the overspill area for the audience, a balcony with no seats but, what the hell, it's the last show of the fringe and we're are rock and roll enough to handle this.

Show was three Australian comedians doing comic songs about old age, dressed as grannies. I know of course that Australia is a cultural as well as an actual desert, but if your big opening number involved finding a rhyme of 'Viagra' and using your simmer frame as a dancing partner, you are fucked. We gave them half of the second sketch to redeem themselves but when it became clear that the biggest laugh was based around a lady who played bowls getting sponsorship from manufacturers of geriatric related products, we headed for the exit, quite pleased that we had not got a seat and hence did not need to make an exit that anyone would notice. We slipped out from the back and let the door close gently behind us...or it would have done if the springy arm thing that makes the door close with a gentle sigh had not been knackered, meaning a heavy fire door slam shut with the sort of bang normally associated with seismic activity.

After a brief debate about demanding our money back, we decided that a far better use of our now free evening was to make reservations for dinner at Magnum. Walking out was the right decision is just so many ways.

Review - David O'Doherty presents: Rory Sheridan's Tales of The Antartic

I know somebody who is related to an Antarctic explorer, her Irish ancestor was on Shackleton's expedition, the one that ended with the epic open-boat journey. And I've been to Ireland and seen a house with a plaque stating that a polar explorer lived there so I asked her, what is it about the Irish that compels their men to seek out the desolate waste? She replied that it's because it's the last place on earth that they are likely to have their mammies telling them what to do.

The explorer in this show went to the Antarctic for love, and love is probably the only thing in the world that is more likely to lead a chap into doomed folly than Antarctic exploration. So the combination of the two was going to be a winner.

The show was good. The venue was a sub-sub-sub basement of some council building, think underground car park with no lights and water running down the walls and you get the idea, I half expected to come across some lost cavers, or morlocks, as I took my seat.

A monologue of love, adventure, madness and the invention of the pub quiz, the writing and delivery was clever and funny, making some mileage from using modern references in the context of early twentieth century polar exploration, with plenty of straightforwardly funny stuff ('penguins, let me tell you, are stupid. They are more stupid than an bottle filled with meat') as well as a poignant conclusion.

In terms of performance, invention, charm, storytelling and laugh-out-loud funny moments, this show was the high water mark of this years fringe, just the sort of thing one hopes to see, deliciously different, wonderfully executed and will change your view of penguins forever.

Review - Tearoom

A show that starts at mid-day? What were we thinking? Surviving the Fringe means that late nights (or rather early mornings) need to be balanced out with late rises or stimulants by the fistful. The Fringe should not involve setting your alarm clock. And yet we rose at an (in)decent hour, took on the usual six to eight thousand calorie breakfast that is so necessary when your day is going to involve charging from venue to venue, drinking heavily, and wandered through a deserted city to our lunchtime play.

That's right, Edinburgh was more or less deserted at half eleven, one got the feeling that the last revellers had only gone to bed a couple of hours before. The city smells suspiciously of bleach at that hour of the morning and one would do well not to step any any area that smells more than averagely pine fresh.

Tearoom was an attempt at site-specific theatre. A couple of years ago, a theatre group had had great success in setting a play by Bukowski in a bar. Could this lot emulate that success in a tea total environment? Quite a challenge.

The play takes place in a large room, dressed to look like a tea room. The audience sit at tables around the edge and drink tea and eat cake while the actors sit at tables in the middle and drink tea and eat cake and act.

And act well. This was an excellent idea executed with all the elegance of a fine bone china teacup, occasionally as dark as black coffee, occasionally as light as a muffin. The triumph was that the premise of the play, that one was eavesdropping on a private conversation in a public place, worked and worked because one wanted to listen rather that pursue the natural urge in such situations - which is to plug in an iPod and raise the sonic screen.

The play played to a full house, and as we left there was a lady at the door of the venue asking about tickets for the next performance. A popular production and, with the price of afternoon tea included in the admission price, the perfect combination of culture and cake!

Full disclosure - I know one of the actors. He was excellent. I managed to suppress the urge to wave when he appeared. I also know that when he handed out the flyers for the show, he told prospective audience members that it was in the 'pubic triangle', that is, the area of Edinburgh that has three stripper pubs in it. In truth, it's just off the pubic triangle.

Postcard from Edinburgh - Magnum bar

What with the breakfasts and the hog roasts and the drinking, fitting in a decent dinner was a challenge. This is probably one of the reasons we ate at The Magnum bar for two nights running. There is a school of thought that when one is in a city in the grip of a cultural festival, one should try and enjoy as diverse a range of activities as possible, for instance you can go to a different stripper pub every night for three nights running. However, there is another school of thought which is the one that I subscribe to, that the Magnum is an excellent place to eat and that going anywhere else is too big a risk. Nothing can put a crimp in your festival quite like substandard batter around your fish. Or biting into batter expecting cod and discovering a mars bar instead.

Review - The Queen Art and Image

Next year is the Queen's golden jubilee and one of the ways it is being marked is an exhibition of paintings and photographs of the Queen called 'The Queen Art and Image'. Before it travels to London, the exhibition was showing in Edinburgh. It is fantastic. As an icon or image, the profile and portrait of the Queen is ubiquitous. Her profile adorns stamps and her face is on bank notes and well as newspapers.

It was fascinating to see how she had changed as a person over the decades, from a glamorous deb in the1950s to a mother and a head of state. One really got the impression that she was a constant in a changing world and that even in times of peace and prosperity there is still strife and suffering.

As an icon, her image was, if anything, even more remarkable. They had Warholes, which were good, the Francis Bacon portrait, which was stunning, and the 'god save the Queen' Sex Pistols artwork, which mashes up the image of the Queen and the Union Flag. Disrespectful at the time it may have been, but it seemed perfectly in place here among the images of veneration.

Review - Al Murray The Pub landlord's Compete for the meat

Flogging the format...to death.

Al Murray has, for years, being doing exactly what it says on the tin, with the added recent development that the shows are now filmed, meaning he can turn a live show into a handy pitch to Channel Five executives, saving valuable time for coke and hookers or wherever else it is that television executives do when not listening to pitches from comedians.

This was essentially the Christmas version of 'Compete for the meat'. If you are actually competing, as we were last year, then there is the fun of a quiz and the edgy titillation of possibly being humiliated by Al. If you are an audience member, the show is not so immediate, you are essentially just watching a live version of a tee vee quiz show based on a pub quiz.

But they do work hard to make it fun. Al has raised his game from victimising individuals to victimising whole tables at once, and there are sing-alongside for the whole audience. If you go along to this with a sort of ironic detachment, you'll be miserable. If you grab hold of a 'thick and slow' foam finger and join in the abuse, rendering the whole experience not unlike some beery version of 'Lord of the flies' then you'll enjoy it.

Was it fresh? No. Was it slick? Very. Was it funny? Yes. Al did enough, in particular with his attempted wooing of one young helpless woman, to make an established format one has seen before seem fresh. What one was watching was essentially a comedians greatest hits, and, as anyone who has ever been to a gig and observed the audience reaction when a band announces that they are now going to play some of their new material will tell you, that's no bad thing.

Review - Andy Parsons: Gruntled

The Assembly Rooms was packed, this, remember, is a comedian who has been on television and expectations were high. There's always that extra bit of excitement when a television comedian 'fucks' for the first time on stage and that was certainly the case here, particularly in the seat near me where a dad had brought his son, who looked about nine, along to the show. I have no doubt that a nine year old probably knows just about all the profanities he'll need in the playground, but what he will have taken away from this show is how to use them professionally and for effect.

The material was good topical stuff, as anyone who has seen Mock The Week or, before that, listened to 'Parsons and Naylor's pull-out-section' on Radio 2. There was plenty of banker bashing, some slick interaction with the audience and an effective rant about the economy ('I've heard the accusation that some people have too much money and thought it stupid, then realised that, if you are one of the thousands of people who bought the autobiography of Alexander Meerkat, you have too much money').

Are established comedians a good ticket at the Fringe? Well, you have what you hope is a safe pair of hands and you can expect a reasonable return. Although the ticket price is normally at the higher end it's still cheaper than going to see the tour that inevitably follows. It's fun to see a comedian working up some new material and always enjoyable to see a panel show comedian doing their day job.

Good, yes, but probably because of the warmth that Parsons brings to the performance, providing a good counterpoint to his cynicism and anger meaning you leave entertained rather than thinking that you have just listened to a middle aged bloke moaning for an hour.

Review - Stewart Lee - Flickwerk 2011. Work in progress

Oooooooohhhhhhh, edgy. Stewart Lee has, in defiance of his status as a mainstream comedian who has been a continued television presence for a couple of years now, continued to play the Stand comedy club during his Edinburgh stints. So the audience that turn up are probably a mixture of people who like Lee enough to tolerate this frankly appalling venue year after year, and those who have seen the telly show and hope they will catch the live version, that is; as funny as the telly show but with more swearing.

It's not as funny as the telly show, but there is more swearing. It's funny, it's just not as funny as you'd expect. Then again, nobody could be that funny for an hour without distilling down hours of material and drafting in Armando to deconstruct the programme between sets.

There's warning signs a few minutes in when Lee explains that as a parent he never goes out and so has nothing to base new material on except Children's television. He does, however, really pull it out of the bag with a spectacular piece about his hate mail bag, and he had the best gag about the riots.

And, what was that...how could such social upheaval, with Greggs on fire, be so overlooked here, it was almost as if none of the comedians cold be bothered to build this into their sets because they had got the timing right and the construction just so and bunging in fifteen minutes of topical humour about chavs going on the rampage would upset the delicate balance of all those knob gags. Maybe it was that, just as the social unrest was apparently coordinated by social networking rather than the traditional method of scallys just telling asking other that they had just looted J.D. Sports but that, being innumerate, they had neglected to loot any trainers in their size and did they want a pair? The jokes were also posted instantly on twitter too and so the social media savvy Fringe goer would probably have read any punch line in the form of a tweet months ago.

The Stand is my least favourite venue by far. Small and pokey and painted black its the sort of place you wake up in after being abducted and know that everything is very much not going to be alright. And with self-important signs telling you to switch off your mobile phone and not to talk during performances. This was the sort of place that Hitler could have made an address from if the bierkeller had been busy.

There was, during Lee's act, the odd reference to Richard Herring, which was appreciated by the audience (you can't fit a crowd into the Stand, so...gathering? Group? Audience will have to do...fans! That's it, appreciated by the fans), but a bit odd, I bet the Beatles didn't name check each other after they broke up.

It was a good show to see so that you didn't wonder if you missed something special. If you missed it, you didn't miss anything special, apart from the hate mail thing - honest to god, I laughed so hard my colon almost came up my nose.

Review - Secret Window, Secret Garden

It was all very fringe. The venue was up three flights of stairs in an building best described as of the Chauchescu era Romanian brutalist school, dimly lit, grimy, probably started falling apart before the paint was dry and that was thirty years ago. By the time I had hauled my somewhat fringe-fried body to the top of the stairs, I was sweating at the irony that attending a festival that involves so much rushing from venue to venue also involves chips and beer as the power diet of choice.

We took our seats and waited for curtain up. More accurately, We took our seats and waited for the play to begin. Rows of seats surrounded the stage on three sides and two of the actions were already in position. We were joined by three other audience members. I looked at my watch and was wondering if there was going to be a late rush when the play started.

Six cast members. Five audience members, it was all very fringe.

The play was actually very good. I had read and enjoyed the Stephen King story it's based on a few ears ago, and I knew there was a film adaptation so knew it must lend itself to dramatic adaption.

The stage adaption was good. I'm not sure whether the theatre company had done it themselves but condensed to an hour, it had plenty of mystery, thrills and a few twists.

Having read the short story I had that unspooling in my head at the same time as the play unfolded in front of me, and it was fun to play 'spot the difference' between print and drama. The only thing that disappointed me was that the adaption did not go far enough, the accents were British but the names were still as American as perfect teeth and illegal wars. It would have been good to see an attempt to Anglicise it a little, with the writer's cabin in the woods turned into a caravan maybe?

The cast were young and enthusiastic, they were a little inexperienced maybe but hey, they were playing to five people so well done for not just saying 'fuck with it' and going to the pub.

The one thing we agreed on when we left, after congratulating the cast, was that we couldn't understand why there weren't more people in the audience. Must be the climb up those stairs.

Postcard from Edinburgh - trams

One thing missing from Edinburgh this year was roadworks in the city centre. The tram lines are down, awaiting the trams. The tram is a source of considerable consternation among locals but, having ridden trams elsewhere, you know that they are going to love them when they eventually arrive. And you just know that on the media coverage of the first day's operation, they'll have some pensioner who rode the last tram to run and considers the new trams quieter, but not as good because you can't smoke on them.

Postcard from Edinburgh - geography

The morning after the night before sees the streets gleaming, not so much with dew but more a weak solution of bleach that most shopkeepers and bar owners use to clean their doorways and shopfronts of misplaced pizza. As we wandered down the Grassmarket to a shockingly early noon start for the play 'Tearoom', Edinburgh was just about getting ready for another festival day. Of particular infest was a group of Japanese tourists who were conforming to stereotype by crowding round a shop window madly photographingsomething. It turned out to be a hog roast shop and the object of their attention was the full pig, roasted and lying invitingly in the window of the bap shop. Obviously, such generous displays of meat are rarely seen in the far East, where the preference is for delicate sushi arranged like a lotus flower, rather than an entire porker between two slices of white bread.


I was able to walk past because I had loaded up at breakfast. A large breakfast is an essential element of the Fringe experience. Once you're out in the city you don't know when your next meal might be, but it's a better than even chance that it will be after you have had your next alcoholic drink and so breakfast is not just a chance to prepare for the day but also to line the stomach.


Staying at a hotel with a buffet breakfast, the choice was good. One could have juice or cereal, one could even go continental, with cheeses and slices of ham, such as foreigners eat. I however went for the 'five meat breakfast': bacon, square sausage, black pudding, haggis and more bacon, with all that fat and grease offset with a tomato (fried), potato scone, scrambled eggs and mushrooms. I figured that as I was exceeding the recommended number of alcohol units every day, I had better also exceed the recommended calorific intake, for a giant.

Once again, every few yards there was somebody trying to give you a flyer informing you about their show, seeking your attention and trying to convey that your being in their audience would make their day, your festival and everyone happy. I know somebody who is performing at the Fringe this year and he was telling me about the challenges of leafleting. Apparently it is well known among performers that the public don't want any more leaflets, and so leafleting is something of a thankless task normally assigned to those who fluff their lines in rehearsal. Moreover, if somebody does show an interest you then have to try and explain where the venue is. With venues in obscure locations like the sports lockers of private schools and so on, this can sometimes be a challenge. My acquaintance explained that he had identified a quick and easy way of conveying the location, which was just that little bit outside the very centre of the city, by explaining that it was in the 'pubic triangle'. Everybody knows where this is. Even I knew where it was without his having to explain it. There are a trio of pubs in the city, set at corners of a road that splits off in a Y shape, and the pubs all have strippers.

Review - BBC Comedy Presents - Early and late

Usually the best ticket in in the Fringe and this year was no exception. The late night comedy from the BBC is always a good show, often a great show. It starts late enough for the audience to be sufficiently 'relaxed' and, because most of the comedians have come here after their shows have finished and the venue is a large one, they are a combination of relaxed and terrified, pleased to be playing before an full venue that's probably far larger than the tiny empty place that they have just come from and possibly regretting that drink or line they took to settle their nerves. But that's okay because the audience have been drinking too.

Certainly the show I saw contained two comics who had taken a drink, one obviously, one not so much but both still very funny as they reeled out the highlight ten minutes from their set. The compare was sober, he has to be as he interacts with the audience and that can get interesting at this time of night.

Most of all though, it was tremendous fun, the compare was great, the acts were good and the star turn, Nina Conti, was outstanding; make no mistake, ventriloquist dummies are creepy, Nina embraced that, turned the creepy into funny, the funny into spooky, the spooky back into funnier and the funnier into disquiet bordering on dread. I haven't been that scared and amused at the same time since I was tickled at gunpoint.

This showcase tends to provide the acts that you tell your friends about when you get back from the Fringe and they ask you who you saw, because as cool as it is to tell them about the comedians they know from panel and stand up shows, it's cooler still to tell them about the comedians they'll be seeing in a few months time on panel and stand up shows.

This is still the best ticket in town.

Review - Ed Reardon: A writer's burden

A half hour radio show stretched out into an hour-long play. Twice the fun or the same among of fun stretched out over twice the time?

Probably somewhere in between, forty five minutes of fun stretched out over an hour.

It was excellent to see Ed in the flesh. More thrilling somehow to see a radio character doing a live show than seeing a television character appearing on the stage. The reality did not disappoint, Ed was everything one imagined, although the shorts were possibly a surprise.

The audience filled about a third of the large theatre, and was very radio four, lots of beards and sensible anoraks. It might have been better to go for a more intimate venue, as the show usually plays either in a room with a radio in it or a head with headphones in it. The show also suffered a little from recycling material from last year's fringe one-off, the success of which led to a longer run this time round.

But it was, ultimately, very satisfying, like a live action version of a spin off book from a radio or telly series that reveals hitherto unknown aspects of the character. There was also a truly outstanding line about Berkhamstead's transport links with London.

I have a great fondness for Ed Reardon on the radio, and like any fan get a little prickly when anyone takes liberties with the character, even if that character is the character himself. The show served up more of the same Ed and, if it felt a bit over-long that's probably because I expect the show to be half an hour followed by the news and then Front Row.

Review - Richard Herring: What is love anyway?

A full theatre and an interesting premise, that after doing a show last year about how god was made up, Richard tackled something else that was made up.

This was slick stuff, with lots of very funny stuff being linked by some thought provoking stuff, and a lot of stuff about angst and being single. There were even some very funny jokes in there, which was good for a comedy show, and one protracted routine about chocolate and mathematics that kept the audience on a sustained roll for a good ten minutes.

The show I attended included a member of the audience being taken ill and the attention of the audience slowly switching from the stage to events in aisle F. Richard struggled on but eventually had to concede that somebody was being helped from the theatre and decided to play the uncaring sod card by thanking them for their money. He managed to get the audience back but it was a bump.

And he mentioned Stewart Lee. Is this desperate? Like asking about your old girlfriend to a group of mutual friends? Because, you could tell, most of the people coming to see Richard were going to see Lee too, surely. It was as if he was hoping somebody might say 'oh, yea, Stew mentioned you in his set last night'. 'Did he, maybe he...maybe there's still...look, did he say if he was doing a double act with anything else at the moment?'. Cue much embarrassed looking into pint glasses until somebody says 'look, just let it go mate'.

He was funny, he was thought provoking, he had good hair and he made for a convincing fourtysomething confused by love. And I have used one of his jokes because it's easy to pass off as your own, but not the chocolate routine, partly because a ten minute monologue is not easily adapted to a pub environment but mostly because it involves a logical flaw at an early stage that a theatre crowd is too polite to correct at an early stage, but which a group of your friends would show no such reticence about.

Review - BBC Festival cafe

It's a live broadcast. You are part of the audience of a live broadcast. It's like the moment of being in the congregation at a wedding when the vicar asks if the is any just reason why these two people should not be wed, sustained for forty five minutes. The urge to shout 'knickers' grips you hugely and the first five minutes are an exercise in self control until you begin to enjoy yourself.

But you never forget that this is a radio show. Firstly, there is the reason why the license fee is so much, the BBC staff are everywhere, they have people in headphones bringing guests on, bringing guests off and standing about with clipboards, and this is just for a radio show! Janice Forsyth, the presenter, is smooth and sexy with one of those fabulous radio voices that should be used at times of crisis to just tell you everything is going to be okay, combining as it does authority and assurance, she makes the perfect ringmaster for an arts crowd magazine programme with over the top, and festival over the top at that, guests.

It's always interesting to see a show recorded, more interesting still when it's a slick BBC job and most interesting of all when it's a live broadcast, there's a real sense of anything can happen. Good guests, great host and unpredictable excitement, what more could one want from a festival show? A bloke in the audience in a leather kilt with two back pockets, one for a mobile and one for an iPod? It had that too!

The guests were Frisky and Mannish, who did their singing pop songs in the style of other sorts of songs act. A bloke who sang funny songs in an operatic voice, a writer and finally a chap who had won the 'so you think you can stand up' or whatever competition the night before, had had about two hours sleep and was doing an interview about overnight success before being returned to a life of obscurity that's probably going to culminate in a job managing an electrical goods warehouse and a fair to medium sized crystal meth habit.

The show was also enlivened with a spectacular thunderstorm and rain drumming on the roof of the temporary pavilion that was the venue.

It was interesting to see this actually take place before you, not simply tumble out of the speaker of the radio in your kitchen while you wrestle with the larger problems of the day, like whether to cook up some bacon that's two days past its best before date. It's like being in one of those adverts for radio where the host is actually sat at the kitchen table with you, although if you found Chris Moyles at your breakfast table your first impulse would be to hide the pies and find the cricket bat.

It did make me think though that his could be a daily treat if you were up there for a while, I think the only uniformity would be that it's consistently good.

Postcard from Edinburgh

In the beginning, there was the Pleasance. Ranged around a courtyard were venues and bars. Over the years the venues extended out and more bars sprang up. There were tables, and places to eat. It was like a little village. Then a few years ago E4 set up their Udderbelly pasture, with bars and so on. This year, the media villages were out in force, with the addition of a BBC media village and the Assembly at George Square.

The BBC are obviously fed up with paying rent to other theatres and have poached the Radio 1 roadshow outside broadcast gear, resprayed their big tent with fabreeze to get rid of the smell of roadie and teen to act as a venue, and set up on the corner of Pottersrow. The's a beer tent, toilets, and a little booth where you can be funny for thirty seconds. As it's sponsored by BBC3 it means that anyone achieving this is funnier for thirty seconds longer than any sitcom on BBC3.

The Assembly gardens was something else. On a rainy night there were actually people queuing to get in who didn't have tickets for the shows at the venues there. They simply wanted to drink in a muddy field heated only by patio heaters (meaning you are toasted one side and inviting hypothermia on the other). Possibly they had missed Glastonbury, or maybe the gloom makes it romantic, or easier to slip rohypnol into the glasses of unsuspecting women.

One thing is for sure, Edinburgh keeps going late into the night, early into the morning. When we were staggering back to the hotel at half past midnight we were weaving through people on a crowded pavement. Fair to say that most of those we were weaving our way through we're doing a fair amount of weaving themselves, but many others seemed to be taking on slices of pizza. Pizza seemed the midnight food of choice and it was very much not a last, desperate attempt to eat something solid and so avoid a mortifying hangover, but rather carb loading for the next round of revels. The demographic was wide too, because with the late show from the Tattoo emptying out at midnight, you had pensioners and partygoers wandering the pavements in search of pizza.

Busy as it was and crowded as the pavements were, it was all very good humoured. Possibly this was because in Edinburgh everyone is too preoccupied trying to get home or to the next venue and stay dry to start any trouble.

A right Royal show

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is a fixture of the summer cultural calendar in London, a fixture of the cultural output of the BBC Arts Unit (if you can call a handful of commentators lolling on sofas in the courtyard of the RA and bickering about whether a particular piece is worthy of inclusion or even saving from the recycling ‘output’) and a fixture for the many amateur artists who send their efforts to the RA in the hope of having them included in the largest exhibition of public works anywhere. In essence, it’s not unlike an exhibition of the local art club’s works at a village fete, except it is lent credibility by being housed in a large building and anyone in a village art club can draw better than Tracey Emin (though credit where credit is due, her oversized post-it note with the provocative script on it bubbles up unbidden in my thoughts since seeing it).


Courtyard

This year was a very, very good show though. On previous years, the approach seemed to be to have as many works as possible crowding the walls of the galleries, effective tiling the place. I’m not sure if the curators love art, but they obviously hated white emulsion.


Raphael Revisited
Tom Phillips RA

It may be because I was late in seeing the show this year, in the final weeks in fact, but the gallery was less crowded and so, it appeared at least, were the walls. This was particularly true of the smallest gallery, where in previous years the crush of bodies resulted in the sort of close proximity and temperature that normally results in somebody bolting from the room to roll in the snow. What’s more, you could even see the art.


China Dog, 2010
Humphrey Ocean RA

On the whole, the standard was very good this year. The chaps had got the Pimm’s to lemonade ratio right and the champagne was chilled and not overpriced. As usual, the bar remained the best installation in the place and confirmed my suspicion that one should never see art sober. Certainly, most artists produce the stiff either pissed, stoned, out of their heads on thinners or a combination of all of the above and surely the best way to appreciate it is with a glass of something refreshing firmly clenched.


Four Vases, 1984
Lisa Milroy RA

As well as ‘professional’ artists being well represented, the RA affords and opportunity for members of the public to submit their works also. These are them casually glanced at by a collection of judges, most, but not all, wearing unnecessary scarves. The artist is then either sent a letter telling them they are crap (work didn’t get through first round of judging), they nearly made it (we need the entry fees from the continually hopeful and reckon that this letter is worth you entering for at least the next three years) or you’ve made it. The only thing that approaches this sort of middle-class uncertainty is the result of applying for planning permission for a new conservatory.


Abergwoun (Fishguard)
David Humphreys

While the exhibition seemed less hectic, more relaxed (certainly by my third Pimm’s it was), what it clearly evidenced was that there are, in sheds and garages, back rooms and spare rooms, an awful lot of genuinely talented artists out there who will never outrage the Daily Mail, maybe never get their own exhibition but have created something wonderful and, for one summer at least, had their work exhibited in one of the greatest galleries in the world and were glorious.

Criticism

What purpose does criticism serve? If you’re a child then the criticism you encounter is likely to be fairly unsophisticated; for instance a playground of kids chanting ‘Janet smells! Janet smells!’. Later in life you might start to encounter criticism of your creative efforts, as your work is branded ‘bland and lacking the essential element of whimsy prevalent in many of his contemporaries’, which is a bit fucking harsh given it was the first time you used finger paints and you were only five. Still later and one gets used to the knocks of opinion, which is useful for when you develop romantic feelings for somebody, go out with them and suddenly find yourself on the wrong end of a ‘it’s not me, it’s you’ conversation during which your insensitivity is mentioned no fewer than seven times before you realise you are being dumped. But don’t worry, you will eventually find somebody to settle down with who will criticise you but not leave.

There is a danger that criticism sometimes just seems like an excuse for the critic to show how clever they are by being both cruel and amusing, all the while demonstrating that they are not as talented as the person they are criticising and making a pretty good case for the argument that critics are just frustrated artists.

But people like to read reviews, because tickets are expensive and going to the theatre is time consuming. So you don’t want to waste your time and money seeing something that is crap only to discover afterwards that every critic was united in their opinion of its crapness. Of course worse still is coming out of a show thinking it was crap and not understanding the rave reviews. This is especially true of foreign films, which reviewers invariably praise because they are worried that if they say that a three hour documentary about an Armenian orphanage lacks even one decent car chase, they may be accused of being shallow.