Saturday Review - 03/10/2009

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by writer Miranda Sawyer, historian Dominic Sandbrook and novelist Louise Welsh to discuss the cultural highlights of the week - featuring Darwin in the dock, Swedish state corruption and an (almost) fib-free world. The 1925 Scopes 'Monkey' Trial saw a 24-year-old science teacher in Tennessee facing prosecution for teaching his students about Darwin's theory of evolution. Thirty years later, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee used the trial as inspiration for their play Inherit The Wind. Trevor Nunn's new production of the play at the Old Vic in London sees Kevin Spacey as virtuoso lawyer Henry Drummond, defending his client against the charges laid out by creationist demagogue Matthew Harrison Brady (David Troughton). The Invention of Lying imagines a world in which everybody tells the truth. The feature film debut of co-writer/directors Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, it stars Gervais as Mark Bellison, an unremarkable man whose life is transformed when he discovers that he can lie. While trying to comfort his dying mother he inadvertently invents a new religion. And, of course, he is also trying to woo a woman who is happy to tell him that she's way out of his league. PD James's book Talking About Detective Fiction contains a series of essays tracing the evolution of the genre and its appeal, from Conan Doyle, through the Golden Age, the 'hard-boiled' school and beyond. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest is the final volume in Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millenium trilogy. Larsson, who died in 2004, was an investigative journalist on a small radical magazine in Sweden. So is his protagonist Mikael Blomkvist, who, along with outsider computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, is trying to expose crime and corruption at the heart of the establishment. The nights are drawing in so it must be time for another costume drama. Sure enough, here comes Sandy Welch's four-part adaptation of the perennially popular Jane Austen classic Emma on BBC1. Starring Romola Garai in the title role, Michael Gambon as her father and Jonny Lee Miller as an unusually young and handsome Mr Knightley, it has all the bonnets and beautifully manicured formal gardens that you could wish for. Pop Life: Art in a Material World at Tate Modern takes Andy Warhol's assertion 'good business is the best art' as its starting point and explores the intersection of commerce, notoriety and art exemplified by artists such as Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Loud and brash, it demonstrates the success with which a generation of artists embraced capitalism to establish themselves as commercially successful brands in their own right.