Thomas Sutcliffe
Thomas Sutcliffe: My nightmare at a horror show
Published: 12 October 2007
I've been feeling like the designated driver at a really wild party this week – and not just a good night out at the pub, but one of those once-in-a-decade shindigs that you know people will be talking about for years. Everyone else was intoxicated, reeling and exhilarated. I was stone cold sober and flickering between indulgent bemusement, envy and outright impatience at the delirium all around me.
Thomas Sutcliffe: How can we justify doing this to children?
Published: 09 October 2007
Experimenting on children and babies has, for very good reasons, traditionally been frowned upon. At its worst, the phrase summons the memory of Josef Mengele, and, at its best, raises tricky questions about informed consent.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Bubbles, what on earth did you start?
Published: 05 October 2007
Standing in front of the painting Bubbles at Tate Britain's big Millais show, I found myself thinking of two related questions. Query One was pretty straightforward: is the gallery correct when it claims that this picture was the first serious work of art to be adopted for commercial purposes? Leave aside, for the moment, the satellite question of whether it qualifies as serious at all – but is it really true that no Victorian entrepreneur had previously thought of borrowing a bit of cultural respectability by slapping a bit of fine art on the packet? Query Two was a little more complicated, and involved turning Query One on its head. Never mind the first time that the world of commerce turned to the world of fine art – when was the first time that the world of fine art turned to the world of commerce? Put another way, what's the earliest instance of branded goods appearing in a serious work of art?
Thomas Sutcliffe: Dawkins - what can't he be blamed for?
Published: 02 October 2007
Listening to Start the Week yesterday I was startled to hear the theologian Karen Armstrong blaming Richard Dawkins for Islamic fundamentalism. She didn't put it quite like that, of course, but in the course of a passing remark about literalist interpretations of the Koran she made the point that this was a relatively new tradition in Islam and explicitly connected it with Dawkins' intellectual attacks on religion in general.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Can we all be photographers?
Published: 28 September 2007
Of all the arts, photography is surely the one in which luck plays the largest part. Luck is a funny thing, of course, and has a fixed prejudice in favour of the talented and the dedicated, but even so the point holds. It is not actually inconceivable that an amateur could pick up a camera for the very first time and take a world-class photograph with the first click of the shutter.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Take a tip... end this patronising rip-off
Published: 25 September 2007
The news that The Good Food guide had finally dispensed with dress code recommendations for restaurants was taken by many to mark an overdue democratisation of fine dining. No longer, it seems, do we have to fear being turned away by a haughty maître d' for turning up without a jacket, or, even worse, being handed a greasy regimental tie to loop implausibly around our polo-shirt.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Plays aren't films, so say no to slo-mo
Published: 21 September 2007
I went to see Complicit�'s new show, A Disappearing Number, this week and – in common with most of the critics – I found it both ingenious and moving, a succession of brilliant theatrical effects that had been sanded flush with the play's purpose, so that they didn't snag at your attention in the wrong way. But it did contain one sequence that made me wince, with the same reflexive jolt you get when silver paper touches a filling. There was a point at which the actors on stage went into slow motion and – as it invariably does when this happens in a theatre – it momentarily made me wish I was somewhere else altogether.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Our lust for certainty is making us cruel
Published: 18 September 2007
From the very first reports that Madeleine McCann had gone missing from the holiday apartment where she and her family were staying, the event has been yoked by journalists to another kind of story – the primal fictions of fairytale. This was a story, according to several commentators, that was not just grim but Grimm too – recalling the power of fables in which a beautiful child is swallowed by something that has emerged from the dark.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Hard steel fist in a terracotta glove
Published: 14 September 2007
It would be a dull world if all our expectations were fulfilled, so it was intriguing, rather than disappointing, to visit the British Museum's much ballyhooed exhibition of terracotta warriors from the tomb of the Emperor Ying Zheng and find that it wasn't really the statues that stuck in the mind when I left. So what exactly was the expectation in this case?
Thomas Sutcliffe: There's no denying it... faith schools divide
Published: 11 September 2007
I'm not sure I'm in a position to preach about faith schools, having sent two of my children to one at and even, to my perpetual shame, attended church services to rack up the Frequent Flyer points needed to guarantee admission to an admired Church of England primary. Perhaps, though, this confession might count as a kind of credential rather than a disqualification.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Does my waste look big in this?
Published: 07 September 2007
It might seem a little perverse to write about an art exhibition the day before it closes, but I'd like you to think of this as an exercise in waste reduction. Because, while the odd Royal Academy blockbuster or Tate Modern crowd-pleaser might reach their projected capacities, most shows – particularly those in commercial galleries of contemporary art – never get close to pulling in all the visitors they could physically accommodate and an even smaller proportion of those they might intellectually satisfy.
Thomas Sutcliffe: You can give a child a plate of healthy food ...
Published: 04 September 2007
When Jamie Oliver launched his campaign to improve the food we feed to our children, he memorably characterised what he wanted struck off school menus as "horrible scrotumburger fish-finger reconstituted mechanically-recovered sacks of old shit".
Thomas Sutcliffe: What's so horrible about typecasting?
Published: 31 August 2007
I watched Sullivan's Travels again recently, steered in that direction by David Mamet's Bambi vs Godzilla, in which the films of Preston Sturges are regularly invoked as a benchmark of Hollywood grace – not to mention an exemplary model for any wannabe scriptwriter. And Mamet is right: it's very good. I'd forgotten just how sexy Veronica Lake is, playing an aspiring starlet who ends up in the lap of Hollywood's hottest comedy director after buying an anonymous bum a cup of coffee in a diner (the bum turns out to be Sullivan, researching an earnest epic about the plight of America's indigent poor – a project that he eventually scratches after a spell on a chain-gang). The scene in which Lake brushes Joel McCrea's hair is so playfully intimate and unforced that it could serve as a type specimen for onscreen sexual chemistry. What delighted me most about the film, though, was my refreshed infatuation with another cast member: Eric Blore, the British character actor, who here – as in many of his 85 films – plays a manservant.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Keep Surrealism under your hat
Published: 10 August 2007
Douglas Hodge's ingenious production of Absurdia, the Donmar's triple-bill of two NF Simpson pieces and a new Michael Frayn sketch, begins with the arrival of stage-hands supervised by a pin-striped figure who, like both his underlings, is wearing a bowler hat. I guess that this headgear is the first thing that most people will notice. You don't see them much on the streets anymore, after all, so they now carry a faint charge of the exotic that would have been unthinkable to those who, originally, wore them precisely because they didn't.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Malcolm and Barbara: flawed but virtuous
Published: 09 August 2007
Paul Watson is a film-maker who prides himself on being a cut above most of his colleagues. In fact he opened his last documentary - Rain in My Heart - with a little vignette in which he attempted to convey the superiority of his methods and motives to a suspicious hospital administrator: "I make documentaries which are about real things that happen," he explained pointedly. Which makes it awkward for him, to say the least, that he should now find himself caught in the latest of television's falsification scandals - that concerning the exact nature of the climactic scene of Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell. The film, sequel to a critically acclaimed documentary about a couple coping with the husband's Alzheimer's, was widely reported as capturing the moment of Malcolm's death, though it soon emerged that what the film actually showed was the moment when Malcolm slipped into his final coma, and that he actually died a few days later. Watson then claimed that the false impression was the responsibility of ITV's publicity machine - and that he'd strenuously attempted to clarify matters, though this attempt at clarification seems to have been made after the false impression had been revealed, not, rather oddly, when the taboo-busting fuss it had caused was at its height.
Tom Sutcliffe: Is this really a true picture of Britain?
Published: 07 August 2007
We are, it seems, obsessed with caravans, floral wallpaper and scenes of bleak urban banality. Or at least that's the conclusion you might draw if you were inclined to treat Tate Britain's shortlist of pictures submitted by the public for their photographic exhibition How We Are as a representative snapshot of the nation. And, however wary you might be about the methodology of such an exercise, isn't that what that title invites you to do?
Thomas Sutcliffe: Sport needs a dance lesson
Published: 03 August 2007
I have to confess to following the recent sports scandals in the Tour de France and cricket with a less than disinterested attitude. To say I am still scarred by the experience of compulsory sports at school would be over-melodramatic. There are a couple of very faint lesions on the knees – the legacy of some over-zealous tackling during an under-13 rugby session – but, apart from that, I can't really claim to be still carrying any injuries.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The bitter harvest of an illogical policy
Published: 31 July 2007
For those of you who like brainteasers, here is a conundrum. Last Tuesday in the Lords, the freshly ennobled Lord Malloch Brown, Minister of State at the FCO with responsibility for Africa, Asia and the United Nations, was coming clean about the failure to eradicate opium production in Afghanistan. He said: "It is a terrible black mark on the international community's performance in Afghanistan ... that so far we have not prevailed in the efforts to defeat the growth of this pernicious crop."
Thomas Sutcliffe: Was Hollywood a promised land?
Published: 27 July 2007
It's always intriguing when you find books having a conversation that the authors may never have intended. I came across one the other day while I was reading David Mamet's Bambi vs Godzilla, a collection of essays on the movie business that includes a knowingly provocative piece about the role of Jewish producers and directors in Hollywood. As I read it I had a faint feeling of d�jà vu – or rather, a feeling that this was the continuation of something started by somebody else.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Do you really care if a Rolex is fake?
Published: 24 July 2007
One of the most satisfying design objects I've ever encountered was a 1930's loo-roll holder in a Broadcasting House toilet. It used a ratchet mechanism to lock itself in place - the release spring being concealed behind the roll of paper itself. When the paper was finished you had to tear the cardboard tube apart, unlatch the mechanism and slide on a new roll which effectively became its own lock. And the beauty of the thing was that the ratio between the pilferability of the toilet roll and the ease with which it could be pilfered was perfectly inverted. It was hardest to steal when it was most valuable, relatively easy to steal when it was worthless.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Video games can't make me cry
Published: 13 July 2007
What's the difference between a toy and an artwork? I might as well confess that I don't know the answer to this question – although I suspect it may be rather more complicated than first instinct would suggest. But I do know that there are a lot of people who would like to think that the distinction is only one of degree, and that one of those people is Steven Spielberg.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Just what I want from a political diary
Published: 10 July 2007
Of the extracts from Alastair Campbell's diary published so far the one I enjoyed most was the account of Martin McGuinness's remark as he entered the Cabinet Room with Gerry Adams to discuss the Irish peace process. "So", McGuinness reportedly said, "This is the room where all the damage was done".
Thomas Sutcliffe: What the people really want
Published: 06 July 2007
So, it's official. After a substantial exercise in public consultation, British viewers and listeners have told the BBC that they want "good" programmes rather than "bad" ones. Reporting on a comprehensive survey of public attitudes to BBC performance, the BBC Trust reported that 72 per cent of audiences rated "good programmes" as important but only 51 per cent agreed the BBC was performing well in this area.
Thomas Sutcliffe: When is a bishop like a suicide bomber?
Published: 03 July 2007
On the face of it, the Bishop of Carlisle and the young man who staggered blazing from that Jeep at Glasgow Airport on Saturday afternoon don't have a lot in common. The Right Reverend Graham Dow is a grey-haired man with a twinkling smile, rarely armed with anything more lethal than a crozier.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Not enough time? That's life
Published: 29 June 2007
There was a nice sketch in That Mitchell and Webb Sound on Radio 4 last week. A man has come to visit his friend in hospital and the news is bad. His friend doesn't have long to live. Making awkward small talk, the friend alludes to a famous Al Pacino line from the film Scarface – a line that evidently sails over the dying man's head. He hasn't actually seen Scarface, he admits, when the allusion is explained to him. "You haven't seen Scarface?" his friend says in appalled tones. "It's Number 36 in Total Film's list of 100 Films to See Before You Die! And you're about to die!"
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