1970s
The greatest decade for British painting since Turner and Constable? The 1970s
Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and…
How Berlin nearly broke Bowie
This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the…
Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed
Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away.…
Band of Horses: Things Are Great
Grade: B That thing, ‘indie rock’, is so well played and produced these days, so pristine and flawless, that it…
Oh dear, Abba’s new album is a bit of a dog: Voyage reviewed
Time has been very kind to Abba. No one back in the 1970s thought of them as geniuses. But they've even lost the talent for writing memorable tunes
Cosy catastrophe
When the apocalypse comes, I want it to be scripted by a 1970s screenwriter. That’s my conclusion after watching the…
Filthy lucre
If you’re after an exciting, twisty programme about police corruption that doesn’t also feel a bit like sitting an exam…
Yes man
Rod Liddle talks to Rick Wakeman about lockdown, the Sex Pistols, and how you can’t have opinions any more
Drama gold or bullion dross?
Unlike with every other BBC period drama series these days, I didn’t have to sit through Small Axe: Mangrove grumbling…
Kinetic suitcases
While locked-down galleries compete to keep their artists in the public eye — or ear — by uploading interview podcasts,…
![Twiggy photographed by Justin de Villeneuve in the Rainbow Room at Big Biba, early 1970s. [JUSTIN DE VILLENEUVE]](https://new-dev.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/USE_JDV_TW046.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
A short history of art deco – from high art to two-tone shoes, garden gates to Twiggy
On 10 September 1973 the 1930s Kensington High Street department store formerly known as Derry & Toms reopened as Big…
The best album of the year so far, by some margin
Grade: A+ While the young bands plunder the 1980s for every last gobbet of tinny synth and hi-hat, the singer-songwriters…
Law & Order, made – and banned – in 1978, puts most recent crime series in the shade
It’s not every day that a television screenwriter is threatened with a trial for sedition, but G.F. Newman was after…
Sound and vision
To get a reminder of how strange the 1970s were, there’s no need to plough through lengthy social and political…
Last laughs
A card in a shop window — ‘non-unionised, auxiliary nurses sought… 35p per hour. Ideal for outgoing compassionate females’ —…
Marty’s way
Vinyl (Sky Atlantic) — the much-anticipated series, co-produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, about the 1970s New York record…
Passion play
Illness forced Kim Cattrall to withdraw from Linda, the Royal Court’s new show, and Noma Dumezweni scooped up the debris…
The hatred that Amis and Corbyn share
Everyone loves an underdog. It doesn’t matter how incompetent they might be — indeed, incompetence works in their favour. You…
Big is beautiful: A crushing case for brutalism — with the people left out
Elain Harwood’s flawed but impressive study of modernist architecture manages perfectly to reflect its subject, says David Kynaston
State of play
How has political theatre fared during the coalition? Not very well, writes Lloyd Evans
Un-PC Plod
There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of…
The triumph of the bores
Being boring was once the worst of all social sins. Now it’s practically compulsory
