Saturday Review - 13/06/2009

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by writers Paul Morley and Miranda Sawyer and poet Paul Farley to discuss the cultural highlights of the week. Eric Cantona and Ken Loach may not seem like the most likely bedfellows, but in Loach's new film, Looking for Eric, 'Le Roi' appears as a proverb-spouting life-coach to a depressed Mancunian postman. Inner city violence makes an appearance, but so do some remarkable goals and a surprising piece of trumpet playing. At the National Theatre in Racine's Phedre, Helen Mirren is the queen whose lust for her stepson Hippolytus sets in train a succession of disastrous events for the royal household. Nicholas Hytner directs and the translation is by Ted Hughes. With book sales in excess of four million, Antony Beevor is indisputably a popular historian. In D-Day: The Battle for Normandy he brings the same exhaustive research and eye for telling detail, that distinguished his previous works, to bear on the events of 1944 which culminated in the liberation of Paris. The Futurist movement began in 1909 with a highly provocative manifesto written by the Italian poet Marinetti which included the phrase 'We want no part of it, the past'. This suggests that they may not have had much truck with retrospective exhibitions, but this hasn't stopped Tate Modern from staging Futurism - an exhibition which shows how the shockwaves of that manifesto reverberated around pre-war Europe. Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith are one half of the League of Gentlemen team and their latest offering, Psychoville on BBC2, demonstrates a certain kinship with Royston Vasey. Meet Mr Jelly, the highly unsuitable children's entertainer, David Sowerbutts with his exhaustive knowledge of serial killers and Mr Lomax's room of unusual commodities.