Saturday Review - 12/09/2009

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by playwright Mark Ravenhill and the novelists Liz Jensen and Patrick Gale to discuss the cultural highlights of the week - featuring a fashionista who runs a tight ship, a salty old sea dog of a writer and a flawed station master Vogue editor Anna Wintour has a fearsome reputation, so when film-maker RJ Cutler was granted access to make a documentary about her and the magazine, there seemed to be a good chance of cinematographic fireworks. The resulting film, The September Issue, which follows the production of the year's most important edition, may not be filled with tears and tantrums, but it provides a compelling portrait of the working relationship between Wintour and her creative director Grace Coddington John Carey's biography of William Golding is subtitled The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies which was of course the work which not only established his career as an author, but cast a long shadow over the rest of it. Carey has had access to Golding's journals which reveal a difficult man who never overcame the feelings of social inferiority which marked his upbringing and whose relationship with his editor, Charles Monteith, was crucial to shaping his impressive body of work Trinity is a new drama on ITV2 set in the venerable Trinity College, Bridgeford University. Tradition is the byword of the college, especially when it comes to the aristocratic Dandelion Club. But opening up admission to students from humbler origins and the appointment of a progressive new Warden (Claire Skinner) is undermining some of the old certainties. Presiding over everything is the sinister Professor Maltravers (Charles Dance) who seems to have dark reasons for protecting the Dandelion Club from reform. And there's been a murder. Grandville by Bryan Talbot is a graphic novel described as 'an anthropomorphic steampunk detective thriller' The detective in question is Inspector LeBrock of Scotland who is a badger. His sidekick, Detective Ratzi, is a rat. Together they investigate the murder of a British diplomat in an alternative reality where France is the major world power and its capital is thronged with steam-driven hansom cabs, automatons and flying machines. John Constantine, occult detective, is a character who has inhabited graphic fiction for the last twenty years. His latest outing, Dark Entries, has been written by Ian Rankin with artwork by Werther Dell'Edera. Constantine is persuaded to enter a reality TV house which has started to attack its inhabitants. Once inside he realises that there something which connects all the housemates, but working it out will take him to hell and back. Odon von Horvath wrote the play Judgement Day in 1937. It's finally getting its first major staging in the UK at the Almeida in London in a new translation by Christopher Hampton. When the station master at a small provincial railway station allows himself to be distracted by the inn-keeper's mischievous daughter, leading to a fatal train crash, the ripples spread out in a web of deceit, hypocrisy and recrimination.