Saturday Review - 09/10/2010

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests literary critic John Carey, novelist Deborah Moggach and architecture critic and writer Tom Dyckhoff review the cultural highlights of the week including Restrepo. Filmmaker Tim Hetherington and reporter Sebastian Junger lived with a US army platoon during its year long deployment to Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. The result is the film Restrepo which won the Grand Jury prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck's book Visitation explores the secrets of a house and its inhabitants from the Weimar republic to after the fall of the Berlin Wall, simultaneously peeling back layers of Germany's history. Handspring - the puppet company behind Warhorse - have joined forces with Neil Bartlett for the production of his play Or You Could Kiss Me. It's love story set in the South Africa of the past and the future. In the latter half of the 18th century, politician and writer Horace Walpole spent more than 40 years transforming a modest villa by the Thames into an audacious Gothic fantasy. The result was Strawberry Hill which has just reopened to the public following completion of the first stage of its £9m renovation. Lip Service is BBC3's six part drama set among a group of twentysomething lesbians in Glasgow. A bit of mystery here, a bit of comedy there and sex all over the place, it stars Laura Fraser, Ruta Gedmintas and Fiona Button.