Trail of the Unexpected: Stargazing in France

The galaxy in all its glory can be enjoyed from the comfort of your bed in a luxurious prefab in central France, says Fiona Sturges
Read more...

TV review: The Churchills, Channel 4

Committed Winstonian David Starkey embarks on the history of an English aristocratic line
Read more...

Radio column: Nothing compares to Sinéad

Interviewing pop musicians can be a thankless task. I know this as I've interviewed a few of them myself. Their talents usually lie not in talking but in compacting their thoughts into three-minute pop songs, and getting them to explain what they do can be like trying to trap water in a sieve.
Read more...

Antony Hegarty: 'It takes nerve to get through your sense of shame on stage'

When it comes to magazine interviews, there are, as a rule, expectations on both sides as to how the conversation should go. While the interviewee is invariably there to promote their latest product, the interviewer is looking to find out something about the person behind the work. These differing objectives can sometimes lead to tension, with each party reluctant to yield to the other. But with experience and mutual understanding, a middle ground is usually found. I say "usually".
Read more...

TV review: The Men Who Made Us Fat, BBC Two

If your evening regime involves lying on the sofa with a KFC boneless banquet wedged between your knees and a bucket of Fanta, complete with multi-angled drinking straw to prevent unnecessary movement, under your armpit, then you would have been forgiven for avoiding The Men Who Made Us Fat. Who, after all, wants to spend their downtime being made to feel like a self-harming, NHS-crushing lard-arse?
Read more...

Radio column: Ferguson's fighting talk

"Be warned: the view that I am about to state is highly unfashionable," announced Professor Niall Ferguson in his final Reith Lecture on Radio 4. But which one?
Read more...

Woody Guthrie: These songs are your songs

He wrote a soundtrack for the 20th century but, 100 years since his birth, Fiona Sturges asks if it still rings true
Read more...

TV review: Episodes, Series Finale, BBC Two

There are a few things wrong with Episodes, the comedy series in which Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play a British scriptwriting couple who take their hit sitcom across the pond, but there’s a lot more that’s right with it. Look beyond the horrible title sequence, in which a television script literally takes flight and flaps all the way from London to Los Angeles, and the ghastly parping music which transports you not to a sunny Californian TV studio but a low-rent BBC panel game complete with plywood set, and you’ll find a show worth cherishing.
Read more...

Radio column: Class act that's right on the money

OK, so I might have exaggerated. A few months ago, I wrote about my intolerance of radio drama, two words that, when used separately are quite harmless in my mind but when put together provoke an overwhelming compulsion to dig a hole in the garden, drop the radio in it and fill it in with concrete, just to make sure.
Read more...

Theatre review: Dandy Dick, Theatre Royal, Brighton

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1887 comedy has been given a wide berth by directors - it was last staged in the West End in 1973 - and its author largely forgotten. Pinero was celebrated at his peak for his rehabilitation of the farce, and for a while outshone Wilde and Shaw, though his star waned and he died in relative obscurity.
Read more...

Book review: Diamond in the Rough, by Shawn Colvin

As a child growing up in rural South Dakota, Shawn Colvin liked to start fires. Out in the prairie she would build little mounds of straw and set them alight, though one day the wind blew too strongly and she was forced to raise the alarm. Nevertheless, this perilous hobby continued into adulthood as she burned the memorabilia of broken relationships. "Just like when I was a kid, there was trouble," she recalls. "All my fires backfired."
Read more...

Radio column: Estates of the nation deliver some home truths

If, on Monday morning, the news that David Cameron was to announce proposals to abolish housing benefit to the under-25s and restrict welfare payments to large families left much of the nation poleaxed, for radio editors desperate to move the national conversation on from the deficiencies of the English football team and a dead tortoise, it was nothing short of a gift.
Read more...

Jesca Hoop: "It feels good to tell people how it was."

Several years ago Jesca Hoop was sitting in the bath in Los Angeles when the phone rang. At the other end was Elbow's Guy Garvey. He had heard her debut album, Kismet, and wanted to know more about its author. It turned out to be a pivotal moment. As well as interviewing her on his radio show on BBC6 Music, thereby introducing her to a British audience, Garvey invited Hoop to support Elbow on tour. Through that she met her current partner, the band's manager, Tom Piper, prompting her move from sunny LA to the earthier environs of Chorlton in Manchester.
Read more...

Radio column: Ulysses blooms once more

Like many others before me, I attempted Ulysses in my late teens. I managed to read the whole of the spine before uttering an exhausted "Sod this" and turning my attention to what I felt was a more deserving literary cause: Jilly Cooper's Riders.
Read more...

Radio column: How Richard Branson grew up and found his wings

When Richard Branson was five years old his mother stopped the car, ordered him to get out and told him to make his own way to his grandparents' house. This, it turns out, wasn't an act of cruelty but an effective lesson in learning how to stand on your own two feet.
Read more...