Theatre
Michael Billington
It was a tough year for regional theatre. Both the Bristol Old Vic and Derby Playhouse closed their doors in mid-season. If these theatres can suddenly shut down, either because of ineffectual boards or crass local councils, who is safe? Regional playhouses are vital to the structure of the nation’s theatre: close one or two and the dominoes start to tumble.
On a brighter note, the year saw a profusion of new plays from what we politely term “ethnic minorities”. But the old notion of a white mainstream and a subculture of black and Asian playwrights now looks nonsensical. Hassan Abdulrazzak’s Baghdad Wedding offered a thrillingly fresh perspective on Iraq. Ayub Khan-Din’s Rafta, Rafta merrily filled the Lyttelton. Roy Williams was everywhere, best of all with Days of Significance at Stratford’s Swan dealing with an ill-educated underclass. Even if Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Statement of Regret, about the divisions between Britain’s Africans and Caribbeans, was overloaded, this was a historic year, one in which the pace was set by dramatists from once-marginalised groups.
Definitions of theatre also continued to expand. More people than ever were drawn to site-sympathetic shows such as Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death at BAC. But, while I’m all for innovation, I yearn for an alliance between formal experiment and rich content. Three examples pointed the way. Complicite’s A Disappearing Number interwove maths, mysticism and mortality; Filter’s Water was an artfully devised piece that addressed climate change; and Ellie Jones’s conflation of Pinter’s short political pieces, A New World Order, took us on an extraordinary journey into the murky depths of Brighton Town Hall.
Even if male critics were accused of misogyny, it was a striking year for women, whether as writers (Lucy Caldwell, Alexandra Wood and Polly Stenham, all at the Royal Court), directors (not least Marianne Elliott with Saint Joan and a half-share in War Horse, both at the National) and performers. My list of the last, by no means exhaustive, would include: Eileen Atkins in There Came a Gypsy Riding at the Almeida; Portia as the maid in The Member of the Wedding at the Young Vic (my theatre of the year); Pam Ferris in The Entertainer at the Old Vic; Katherine Parkinson as Masha in the Royal Court’s Seagull, and Saskia Reeves as the maths don in the Complicite show.
Commercial theatre was erratic, but at least there was Boeing-Boeing, Equus, In Celebration and Hairspray. Since so much of our life is now dominated by musicals, it seems best to despatch them in categories:
Best score: Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms at Chichester.
Loudest snore: The Drowsy Chaperone at the Novello.
Largest flaw: The mismatch of Blondie songs and the Madonna movie Desperately Seeking Susan, again at the Novello.
Last straw: A badly reduced version of Rent at the Duke of York’s.
Michael Boyd
Director
This year we pulled off the RSC Complete Works season without going bankrupt. It was a complete aesthetic awakening for die-hard Shakespeare fans who would never have gone near a performance art venue or foreign-language production. My own cultural excursions this year have been mostly to the cinema with my six-year-old daughter. Ratatouille is right up there with the greats - a glorious, moving, subversive, humane story, brilliantly told. My other highlight was reading the diary of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. It is almost unbearable towards the end, knowing that you are heading towards her assassination.
Leanne Jones
Star of Hairspray
I was beginning to think that luck wasn’t on my side. On New Year’s Eve my boyfriend said, “I promise that 2007 will be a better year,” but I didn’t really believe him. Then I got the part of Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray, and now my family is keeping scrapbooks of my press cuttings. It’s a show for anybody who has ever doubted themselves, so it feels very true for me. One of the lyrics is: “Don’t make me wait one more moment for my life to start.” I sang that in my audition, and it felt as if it were me, not Tracy, pleading for the opportunity.
Film
Peter Bradshaw
This year was a sad one for cineastes: Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died on the same day in July, leading to an agonised revival of the dumbing-down debate. Are there any film-makers of their stature any more? Do our critics, press and media still have the intellectual substance to engage with film-makers who aren’t interested in celebrity and box office?
My own optimistic answer is yes. This year saw movies from a new generation of international heavy-hitters. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates, from Turkey, was a superb evocation of a dying relationship; Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne was a stunning Australian thriller built on the themes of fear, death and love; Paolo Sorrentino’s elegant Italian movie The Family Friend was pure pleasure. Meanwhille, Tsai Ming-liang’s Malaysian-set film I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone was visually ravishing, and perhaps most outstandingly of all, Thailand’s arthouse master Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul produced a superlative work of art in the dauntingly titled Syndromes and a Century. Great film-makers are out there; the challenge for critics is to find them and, in Clive James’s words, “to clear a space around them”.
British cinema did not quite have the banner year it enjoyed in 2006, but for my money the year’s best film was British: Anton Corbijn’s Control, a fantastically enjoyable (if that is the right word) study of the life of Ian Curtis. Shane Meadows’s This Is England and Danny Boyle’s sci-fi drama Sunshine were worthwhile, and Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland, starring Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, was a tremendous adaptation of Giles Foden’s novel.
There was also Joe Wright’s gorgeous romantic tragedy Atonement, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy - now the white-hot stars of UK cinema. Knightley is increasingly the centre of debate among those who claim that her performance, like that of Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation, is being promoted by a global conspiracy of besotted male critics. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Julie Christie gave what many believe to be the performance of her career in Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, playing a woman with Alzheimer’s; she surely deserves an Oscar nomination. In comedy, director Edgar Wright established himself as a real player with Hot Fuzz, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.
This was the year that Hollywood tackled Iraq and the “war on terror”, with movies such as The Kingdom, Lions for Lambs, A Mighty Heart and Rendition. These were mostly disappointing, conflicted by their liberal need to question the misadventures of Dubya, to ring up some Michael Moore-dollars at the box office, and to ensure that their own patriotism was beyond question.
Elsewhere in Hollywood, it was hard not to be depressed by the splurge of boring, big-money “threequels”: Ocean’s Thirteen, Spider-Man 3 and, most appallingly, Shrek the Third. Incredibly, there were yet further installments to other franchises, such as Die Hard 4.0 (the fourth) and Rocky Balboa (sixth). Let’s hope 2008 brings more original movies.
Mightiest award-winner: Dame Helen Mirren, who reigned over us at the Oscars and every single other prize ceremony.
Cheekiest false limb: Cate Blanchett, in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, for the fake right leg when Her Majesty rides side-saddle.
Sexiest newspaper: The Guardian, as read by Jason Bourne in The Bourne Ultimatum; Matt Damon’s co-star Paddy Considine, as a Guardian journalist, did his best to convey the glamour and excitement of our working lives.
Most outrageous accent: John Malkovich, as Unferth in Beowulf, speaking in a weird Welsh voice in which he, unforgettably, says the word “bollocks”.
Anton Corbijn
Photographer and film director
It has been an emotionally intense year: I finally finished Control, I moved to Holland, and my father passed away. A black-and-white movie about epilepsy and suicide with unknown actors and a first-time director is a difficult proposition, so to have found a place in people’s hearts is just wonderful. [The film director] Stephen Frears said to me yesterday: “You should quit while you’re on top. It will never be this good again.” I won’t be following his advice. I’d like to prove him either right or wrong.
Visual art
Adrian Searle
The year began and ended with Mark Wallinger. State Britain, his painstaking reconstruction of Brian Haw’s one-man anti-war protest at Tate Britain in January, complemented a tremendous William Hogarth retrospective in the lower galleries. While State Britain drew an imaginary line through Tate Britain, Doris Salcedo cut a beguiling and surprising jagged crack the length of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall floor, though many treat Shibboleth as an indoor Grand Canyon, a photo opportunity.
Mima in Middlesbrough opened with a terrific drawing show, while the Baltic in Gateshead slowly imploded, and director Peter Doroshenko announced his departure in November. In May, Antony Gormley invaded the London rooftops with casts of his own naked body, as an adjunct to his Hayward Gallery show.
The Venice Biennale, the five-yearly Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the once-a-decade Sculpture Project in Mьnster, Germany, all coincided in June. In Venice, Tracey Emin underwhelmed, upstaged by the French artist Sophie Calle, who took revenge on the boyfriend who dumped her with a show lampooning his break-up letter. Documenta 12 was universally derided, apart from by those who managed to eat at Ferran Adriа’s three-star El Bulli restaurant in Catalonia, designated a Documenta pavilion for the duration. Mьnster was an oasis of intelligence, wit, hearty German food and, in a play by Nordic duo Elmgreen and Dragset, talking sculptures. The motorised cast included a flirtatious Barbara Hepworth, a miserable Giacometti and a wisecracking Jeff Koons bunny.
Art rediscovered theatre this year. A live pedigree bull was coaxed into making love to a car on stage, while a contortionist spent the performance with her arm up her own bottom in Matthew Barney’s bizarre contribution to Il Tempo del Postino, a wonderful extravaganza at Manchester Opera House in July. Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art also mounted a terrific exhibition about art and theatre, while Tate Modern’s dreary one almost missed the mark. In Paris this autumn, a killer Courbet exhibition, a great show on Picasso’s cubist years and a terrific Giacometti retrospective outdid almost everything in London - except Louise Bourgeois at Tate Modern.
Best-behaved pet award: Bourgeois’ giant spider Maman outside the Tate Modern.
Lost canoeist award: Baltic curator Jйrфme Sans, who curated a Beryl Cook show and then disappeared.
Gerald Ratner good taste award: Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull.
Wide-eyed shock and disbelief award: Documenta 12 - arrogant, intellectually confused, and horribly installed. The weather wasn’t very nice either.
Jazz
John Fordham
Jazz continued its steady journey from the margins to centre stage. Classic FM launched a new digital station, theJazz, and the biggest-ever London Jazz Festival went off brilliantly. All this despite a swathe of grim reapings that included the Americans Michael Brecker, Alice Coltrane, Max Roach, Andrew Hill and Joe Zawinul; the Britons Mike Osborne and Paul Rutherford; and the critics Whitney Balliett and Richard Cook.
UK shows by surviving giants included Sonny Rollins (still awesome at 77) and Ornette Coleman. Level 42 drummer/pianist Gary Husband played a thrilling avant-fusion gig at the Vortex; Britons John Surman (sax) and Phil Robson (guitar) both opened up new conversations between jazz and classical. Michael Gibbs and Maria Schneider produced large-scale projects that encompassed a wider soundscape for jazz, and British piano-playing wunderkind Gwilym Simcock released a debut album, Perception, that testified to his potential as a composer.
Style statement: Scottish drummer Tom Bancroft’s Elvis suit and quiff at the BBC Jazz Awards.
Life-force example: John Dankworth and Cleo Laine, partying ever more enthusiastically as they both hit 80.
World music
Robin Denselow
Another great year for African music, and for Mali in particular. Two discoveries were Bassekou Kouyate, who plays virtuoso rapid-fire improvisation on the ancient Malian lute, the ngoni, and Vieux Farka Tourй, who has inherited the guitar skills of his legendary father Ali. A good year, too, for Mali’s established stars: desert-blues band Tinariwen appeared alongside the Rolling Stones in Dublin, and the rousing, blind duo Amadou and Mariam made a startling appearance at London’s O2 arena supporting the Scissor Sisters. They also took part in the bravest live show of the year, the improvised Africa Express bash at Glastonbury, joined by Rachid Taha, Toumani Diabatй, Baaba Maal, K’Naan, Fatboy Slim, Billy Bragg and Damon Albarn. It wins Best Secret Show award- most of the Glastonbury crowd didn’t even know it was happening.
Best newcomer not from Mali: Mayra Andrade from Cape Verde, for her stunning debut, Navega.
Song of the year: Richard Thompson’s Dad’s Gonna Kill Me, the most chilling tale yet about fear and loathing in Baghdad.
Losing it: Manu Chao acting as a brash rock star (complete with bare-chested guitarist) on his British tour.
Classical
Andrew Clements
The Royal Festival Hall reopened in June, looking much the same. The opening concert was a hotch-potch - too long, too bitty - and a real assessment of the auditorium’s remodelled acoustics had to wait for the more coherent concerts that followed. But with the celebrations of the Elgar and Sibelius anniversaries generally underwhelming, all the indelible orchestral events seemed elsewhere. Two of them were Proms - Nicholas Kenyon’s last as controller - with the brilliant Gustavo Dudamel and his extraordinary Simуn Bolнvar Youth Orchestra provoking a capacity Albert Hall into a delirious ovation, while the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Claudio Abbado turned Mahler’s Third Symphony into transcendent chamber music. There was more great Mahler when the Cleveland Orchestra dropped into Birmingham’s Symphony Hall for an immaculate performance of the Resurrection Symphony with Franz Welser-Mцst.
In terms of new music, 2007 was less special, save for Magnus Lindberg’s fine violin concerto, Heiner Goebbels’s indefinably moving Songs from Wars I Have Seen, and Jonathan Harvey’s adroit chamber opera Wagner Dream. There were no premieres worth mentioning at the Proms, save Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, quite the worst new piece to come my way all year.
Glyndebourne, Opera North and Welsh National Opera had steady, unremarkable years, while Scottish Opera regained some of the ground lost when it ran into the financial buffers three years ago. The Royal Opera began the year by scoring a huge hit with Donizetti’s La Fille du Rйgiment, and ended it having demonstrated that its Ring cycle, directed by Keith Warner, was far more convincing as a whole than it had been when first seen piecemeal - even without the box-office draw of Bryn Terfel.
English National Opera had bright spots, too - a mesmeric staging of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, and a pair of Britten productions, Death in Venice and The Turn of the Screw. Yet set against those was a run of clunkingly bad shows that started with Kismet and peaked with Carmen, The Coronation of Poppea and Aida. The company’s obsession with showbiz names is now seriously undermining its credibility.
Double whammy of the year: Tenor Alan Oke sang Gandhi in ENO’s Satyagraha and Aschenbach in Aldeburgh’s Death in Venice - both outstanding.
Tokenism of the year: Getting all the London orchestras on stage at the end of the Festival Hall’s re-opening concert for Ravel’s Bolero. At least it was loud.
Hubris of the year: Director Sally Potter, who promised to drag opera into the 21st century with Carmen at ENO, and only showed her operatic illiteracy.
Many years ago, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I lived in East Berlin. For this reason, a major highlight of my year was the German film The Lives of Others, which seemed a towering achievement. I’ve had a year of intense activity. I take the whole Hallй Orchestra into schools and perform to children on their own patch. We tell them the story of the Flying Dutchman, and then we play it for them, and they’re riveted. It’s great fun getting them up to conduct. Now those children can never say they don’t know what a symphony orchestra is.
Mark Elder
Conductor
Many years ago, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I lived in East Berlin. For this reason, a major highlight of my year was the German film The Lives of Others, which seemed a towering achievement. I’ve had a year of intense activity. I take the whole Hallй Orchestra into schools and perform to children on their own patch. We tell them the story of the Flying Dutchman, and then we play it for them, and they’re riveted. It’s great fun getting them up to conduct. Now those children can never say they don’t know what a symphony orchestra is.
Pop
Alexis Petridis
A couple of weeks ago, Gordon Smart, editor of The Sun’s gossip column Bizarre, took time out from looking up Amy Winehouse’s nostrils (regardless of what he spotted up there, Back to Black proved this year’s biggest-selling album) to wax sorrowful on the state of music in 2007. Look, he ventured, at the top of the charts: Westlife, Katherine Jenkins and Leona Lewis. How different it was on the happy day that Gordon himself came into the world, when the Jam’s Going Undergound was No 1.
It was occasionally hard not to find yourself in a similarly glum mood - perhaps while listening to Mika or watching Editors (a kind of ITV2 version of Joy Division) doing their stuff at Glastonbury, or even while having second thoughts about Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible. Its sturm und drang sounded impressive on release, but seemed to shed its charm as time progressed; the question of whether it was one of 2007’s pivotal albums, or an imposing but hollow racket, still hangs heavy.
Conversely, Klaxons’ Myths of the Near Future got better as the year progressed. On release, critics concentrated on an alarmingly literal argument about whether “nu-rave” had anything to do with the early-90s foghorns-and-Vicks variety. This seemed a bit like criticising a heavy metal CD for not actually being made out of cadmium, but it succeeded in drowning out the actual music; when the clamour subsided, you were left with a richly inventive and striking collection of songs.
There were moments when it appeared that anything interesting had been forced to the fringes: at one extreme, Rachel Unthank’s mesmerising folk, at the other Burial’s enigmatic, melancholy dubstep and Prins Thomas’s warped, psychedelic take on disco. MIA’s thrillingly kaleidoscopic Kala failed to arrest hip-hop’s ongoing decline, but it wasn’t for want of trying. Equally, there were moments when something exciting happened right at the top of the charts: Rihanna’s undeniable Umbrella or Swedish vocalist Robyn’s With Every Heartbeat. And then there was Radiohead, whose masterstroke was less their decision to release an album online than to release their best album in a decade.
Worst lyric of the year: “I order the foie gras and I eat it with complete disdain” - Bloc Party, making the capitalist oligarchy tremble on Song for Clay.
Surprise of the year: The O2 Arena. Should have been a charmless corporate disaster; ended up hosting some of the year’s best gigs, from Prince to Kanye West.
Heartwarming sight of the year: Klaxons’ literally ecstatic Mercury Prize acceptance speech.
Fyfe Dangerfield
Musician
I must have played Mathematics by Cherry Ghost 20 times in a row this year without getting bored. PJ Harvey’s gig at the Festival Hall was amazing - totally raw. I enjoyed Daft Punk at Wireless. It’s all about hearing those tunes through massive speakers. Having my classical piece performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in October was one of the biggest nights of my life. I had to write it while I was recording a new album with my band the Guillemots, so it was very frantic. We’ve spent almost all year in the studio. It’s been difficult to reach the point where we’re all happy.
Robyn
Singer
The most important song of the year for me was Young Folks by Peter, Bjorn and John - and not just because they’re Swedish. It’s so sad and catchy at the same time. I’m also really into the Queens of the Stone Age album Era Vulgaris. Then there was my single With Every Heartbeat. It wasn’t even on my album at first - [Swedish musician] Andreas Kleerup and I recorded it in an afternoon for his record, and then Radio One started playing it. It’s reassuring to feel there are people out there who appreciate good pop music.
Mark Ronson
Producer/musician
I hate to use terms like “breakthrough year”, but I guess this was the year I got noticed. I’m not sure if I’m a pop star or not; I enjoy playing the live shows, but it was never premeditated. Version [Ronson’s covers album] started out as a way of redoing my favourite songs for the hip-hop and soul crowds. It’s weird to have the NME hailing you as the best thing since sliced bread, and then five months later you’re the antichrist for the same song. LCD Soundsystem and Klaxons definitely put on the best shows that I saw this year. As far as 2008 goes, Adele’s record is going to be amazing.
Alesha Dixon
Singer
I’ve had ups and downs this year. I went through a divorce, but since September it’s been one of my best years. I’ve fallen in love with ballroom dancing through Strictly Come Dancing. I don’t want the show to end. People keep asking me whether I want to be in the final, and obviously I do, but that also means the end of the show. I’ll miss dancing with Matt [Cutler, her partner on the show], especially. I’d love to have my own TV show one day, something more serious that deals with current affairs, something inspirational for the younger generation. But I’m still a music girl: I’ve got music in my heart.
Dance
Judith Mackrell
The careers of dancers are famously short, but even so there was a general consensus that 38-year-old Darcey Bussell was retiring too early when she left the Royal Ballet this June. Millions watched Bussell’s final performance live on television - making her the first ballerina ever to bow out on camera.
Two of Bussell’s younger colleagues at the Royal saw their careers advance dramatically this year: Edward Watson proved an actor of intelligent, alarming intensity as mad Prince Rudolf in MacMillan’s Mayerling in April, while Stephen McRae revealed unexpected depths when he made his debut as Romeo in October. Youth also dominated the visiting Bolshoi’s summer season, with 18-year-old Ivan Vasiliev and 21-year-old Natalia Osipova goading each other to feats of near-suicidal virtuosity in Don Quixote.
The exception that proved the rule this year was From Here to Maturity, the charming, feisty company of older dancers who stack up an average age of 60 plus. Usually it is only choreographers who can plan for a long career - like Christopher Wheeldon, who announced his departure from New York City Ballet early in the year, and launched his own company, Morphoses, in September. Based half in New York, half in London’s Sadler’s Wells, this ambitious collaborative project may just give 21st-century ballet a terrific shot of energy.
Mark Morris celebrated his 50th birthday with a blissful evening of choreography to Mozart at the Barbican in July, while Michael Clark proved that he has returned from the professional wasteland with his ambitious yet lucid all-Stravinsky triple bill in November. The director of the Irish company Fabulous Beast, Michael Keegan Dolan, fulfilled his potential with his murderously comic The Bull.
The real survivors in the dance world are the old classics - the precious handful of 19th-century ballets that can never retire. Petipa’s Le Corsaire was in the spotlight this year, with Alexei Ratmansky restoring some of the ballet’s lost choreography and designs for the Bolshoi. Sleeping Beauty fared less well. David Nixon’s rewrite for Northern Ballet Theatre made an unsuccessful attempt to graft a space-age fantasy on to the libretto and score, while Rudolf Nureyev’s 1966 production as danced by La Scala was an expensive vanity project, weighed down by lavish costumes and fiddly choreographic extras.
Most surprising stage chemistry: Dancer Philippe Priasso and a five-ton mechanical digger in Transports Exceptionnels as part of Dance Umbrella in October.
Most misdirected good intentions: Carlos Acosta’s evening of Cuban ballet at Sadler’s Wells.
Most self-regarding performance: The Bolshoi’s Nikolai Tsiskaridze, who outvamped both the lead ballerinas in La Bayadиre.
Architecture
Jonathan Glancey
The architectural year ended full of cheer and bonhomie with the Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, ordering three super-sized jails to house at least 7,500 freshly sentenced prisoners. These punitive giants will doubtless become the default building style of 2008 and beyond, in bullying New Britain.
When not being imprisoned, fined or generally pushed about, the British people are to be offered more and more mass entertainment. The Olympic Delivery Authority unveiled plans in November for its 2012 athletics stadium on a wind-blasted site in east London. The design and the accompanying “urban regeneration” (dread words) looked increasingly unimaginative, vainglorious and, of course, costly.
There were some good tidings. Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary Brazilian architect who created Brasilia, celebrated his 100th birthday on December 7. This inventive Modernist is, as ever, hard at work: a few months ago, he was asked to design a new capital city for Angola.
The new-look St Pancras station in London is a winning affair, except for an asinine statue of two young executives bumping into one another under the station clock. The refurbishment of the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank was completed by a team led by Allies and Morrison architects, to a happily high standard. Further from home, Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus pilgrimage chapel in a field near Cologne and his Diocesan Museum in the city itself are two of the most haunting new buildings I’ve seen in a while.
Television
Gareth McLean
Trust - or the abuse of it - dominated the year in television. As phone-line scandal was heaped upon rigged competition, as misleading editing was compounded by neglected votes, there were more -gates than down Walthamstow dog track - from BBC1’s Queengate through Blue Peter’s Kittengate to ITV’s premium-rates-gate.
On screen, too, there were questions and inquisitions. Noel Edmonds asked Are You Smarter Than a 10-Year-Old?, as Adam Curtis inquired, in The Trap, What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom? Andrew Marr tackled the history of modern Britain, Stephen Fry confronted HIV, and Richard Dawkins challenged Enemies of Reason. Louis Theroux went under the knife, John Sweeney went puce on a Panorama about Scientology, and Malcolm Pointon went the way of all flesh in Paul Watson’s Malcolm and Barbara: Love’s Farewell (or rather, he didn’t). Victoria Beckham went to America.
From America, we were treated to Heroes, Brothers and Sisters, The Riches, Californication, and old Friend Courteney Cox digging Dirt. But the best import of the year - besides 30 Rock - was the appealing serial killer, Dexter. This may, or may not, say something about our amoral times. In related news, The Sopranos now sleep with the fishes.
Homegrown drama was a whistlestop tour of the country, with visits to Cranford, Mansfield Park, Cape Wrath, Clapham Junction, Joe’s Palace, A Room with a View and Fanny Hill. (OK, so technically she’s a person, but she sounds like a place.)
There was an array of one-off dramas, from the excellent Boy A to BBC2’s Daphne du Maurier biopic, from Tony Marchant’s military drama The Mark of Cain to Irvine Welsh’s bawdy Wedding Belles. These were as impressive as the new series were disappointing. Party Animals, Talk to Me, Kingdom (Stephen Fry again), Whistleblowers, Bonkers and Secret Diary of a Call Girl ranged from the unfortunate to the atrocious. Billie Piper’s appearance in the latter qualified as the worst career move of the year - notwithstanding Jade Goody’s shameful performance on Celebrity Big Brother.
Becoming the first black person to triumph in a British reality show, Brian Belo won the regular Big Brother. Simon Ambrose beat favourite Kristina Grimes to become The Apprentice, and The Restaurant under Raymond Blanc opened for business on BBC2 and was unexpectedly tasty.
Doing its bit for charity, BBC1’s Any Dream Will Do found a new Joseph for Andrew Lloyd Webber. Life On Mars bowed out, ITV1 went Primeval, Doctor Who begged us not to Blink, Virgin 1 was born and Emmerdale turned 35. And, as part of a celebration of Stephen Fry’s 50th birthday - and ubiquity - Nigella Lawson, star of the year’s weirdest cookery show, declared: “Reviewing is the most churlish, resent-laden genre of journalism that exists.” Quite.
Best advice: From Spooks: “Love your enemies - in case your friends turn out to be bastards.”
Comedy-drama that managed to be neither comic or dramatic: Bonkers starring Liza Tarbuck. Or Sold starring Kris Marshall.
Best soap storylines: Hannah’s anorexia, and Craig and John-Paul’s affair in Hollyoaks. Yes, really.
Most annoying ad: Cadbury’s drumming gorilla. What next? Orville advertising Creme Eggs?
Interviews by Paul Arendt.
For more artists’ picks of 2007, including Brendan Burns and Mark Wallinger, go to «guardian.co.uk»
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