Saturday Review - 17/10/2009

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by writers Antonia Quirke and Peter Stanford and comedian Danny Robins to discuss the cultural highlights of the week - featuring an immortal showman, a 3,000-year-old book and some short-lived comedy careers. Trevor Griffiths's play Comedians was first produced at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1975. Six aspiring stand-ups, under the tutelage of old hand Eddie Waters (Matthew Kelly), vie for a possible shot at the big time when they perform before talent scout Bert Challoner (Keith Allen). Will they stay true to Waters's vision of humour as a repository of morality and truth, or will they pander to Challoner's more pragmatic demands for populism? In the end, van driver Gethin Price (David Dawson) is the one who delivers the most uncompromising set. 1975 was also the year in which Terry Gilliam directed his first feature film, Monty Python And The Holy Grail. The one aspect of his latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, that inevitably comes to the fore is that its star - Heath Ledger - died halfway through filming. Following Ledger's death, Gilliam drafted in Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to play his character, Tony, in the remaining scenes. Fortunately, these take place in the imagination of the immortal Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), accessible via a mirror on the rackety old wagon his troupe travels around in, so the fix works surprisingly well. At the heart of the film is a battle between good and evil, with Tom Waits as the Devil trying to get his hands on Parnassus's daughter (Lily Cole). 'The First Book of the Bible Graphically Depicted! Nothing Left Out!' Thus runs the legend on the cover of The Book of Genesis, Illustrated by Robert Crumb and it describes exactly what lies inside. From the Creation to the death of Joseph, Crumb provides a strip-cartoon interpretation of all the action - the sex, the violence, the visions - without any deviation from a text gleaned from the King James version and a more recent translation by Robert Alter. A surprisingly uncontentious yet fascinating treatment of one of the founding texts of Western civilisation by an artist who created a defining look for the '60s counter-culture. Murderland sees Robbie Coltrane returning to crime drama for the first time since the highly-acclaimed Cracker. This three-parter on ITV1, written by David Pirie, features Coltrane in the role of DI Douglas Hain. The action centres around the murder of Sally Walsh (Lucy Cohu), who worked as a prostitute, and her daughter Carrie's (Bel Powley/Amanda Hale) attempts, as a teenager and later as an adult, to sift the truth from the murky events surrounding the crime. DI Hain is in charge of the investigation, but it seems that his involvement may run deeper than that. The Wallace Collection - featuring paintings by artists such as Titian, Rembrandt and Velazquez in an elegant London townhouse - may not seem a natural home for erstwhile enfant terrible of the Young British Artists, Damien Hirst. However, this is where Hirst has chosen to hang his latest work: No Love Lost, Blue Paintings. The exhibition comprises a series of 25 paintings created between 2006 and 2008 which marks the artist's return to the solitary practice of painting, rather than employing a team of assistants to assist in producing his work.