19/05/2013 The Review Show

On The Review Show tonight -

Notoriety and excess in the Jazz Age.

A celebrity photographer takes on death.

Fame and the literary author.

The shock of the old.

And the horror of the returning dead.

Plus music from Mogwai live in the studio.

Tonight, my cultural flappers and gangsters

are Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature

at the University of East Anglia.

Her timely book on Gatsby is also out soon.

The critic Paul Morley, whose new book, The North, is about to appear,

and writer and critic James Delingpole,

author of 365 Ways To Drive A Liberal Crazy, amongst other books.

We begin tonight with THAT film.

The long-anticipated version of The Great Gatsby.

It's directed by Baz Luhrmann, who made Moulin Rouge

and Romeo And Juliet,

and arrives almost 40 years since the last big screen adaptation

of F Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel.

Set in the sultry New York summer of 1922,

The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's examination of the American dream

and of an unsustainable culture of greed and excess.

It centres on the story of Jay Gatsby,

an enigmatic self-made man,

renowned for extravagant parties

which he creates with the intention of luring back his lost love, Daisy.

You can't repeat the past.

No.

Why, of course you can.

Luhrmann's Gatsby stars Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role,

Carey Mulligan as the object of his desire

and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway,

the film's narrator and perhaps Gatsby's only true friend.

Major Jay Gatsby for valour extraordinary.

That's right.

The film bears the hallmarks of the director's flamboyance.

With stylised sets, theatrical acting and extravagant costumes

recreating Fitzgerald's world of the rich and reckless.

Their cars were just a little bit faster,

they were a little bit louder.

The costumes are just a little bit more outlandish.

And everything is just a little bit more extravagant

to make you understand how enormously wealthy these people were.

He's also chosen to film in 3D

to draw the viewer into Gatsby's world.

While the soundtrack, co-produced by Jay-Z,

brings a contemporary edge to the sound of the Jazz Age.

So, does Luhrmann's typically maverick take on Gatsby

match the timelessness of Fitzgerald's classic cautionary tale?

My life...my life is going to be like this.

It's got to keep going on.

So, Sarah, you could think that Baz Luhrmann's a perfect director,

given the excesses of the age.

Do you think his style does match the subject?

No, I really don't think it does in an important way.

Because the extravagance is so extravagant, it's so flamboyant,

that what it misses is, you said in the clip there,

it's a story about the unsustainability of greed and excess.

And yet this is a film that doesn't want it to be unsustainable.

It wants the greed and excess

to keep going and going and going and going.

And so the story is about disillusionment.

It's about how this ends up being empty and hollow.

And yet this is a film that is in thrall

to the spectacles it's creating.

I suppose, James, in some way,

you could admire the scale of the production.

I do agree very much with Sarah,

it is a kitsch, pimped-up version of the book

which has about as much in common with F Scott Fitzgerald

as the James Cameron Titanic movie does with the real Titanic event.

It's a completely different experience.

And that's no bad thing.

My 14-year-old son is going to love it, he's going to love that excess.

He's going to love the fact that, um...

-Is it West Egg or East Egg, where Gatsby lives?

-West Egg.

West Egg looks like a cross between the Disneyland castle and Sylvanian Families.

It's weird. It's entertaining. It's like a pop video.

Is there anything wrong with that?

It's like Scooby Doo does Citizen Kane.

It's Moulin Gatsby, it's Romeo and Gatsby.

If you can abstract the fact that

it's got very little to do with what we might think of as the book,

and take it as one man's version

of the idea that prose can be so resonant

that this is the only way he could interpret, Baz Luhrmann,

he's done his bit to interpret the magic of prose.

So in that sort of way, I loved-hated it for a start.

I loved-hated it. It wasn't over the top enough.

I was hoping it was going to be a musical like Moulin Rouge.

I thought it was going to be completely over the top

with tonnes of Jay-Z in it. So that was slightly underwhelming.

For me, too. I was hoping he would be more transformative.

That it would move further away from the book.

That's right. It has a strangely kind of pious relationship to the text,

and yet seems to misunderstand it.

So I kept having this kind of disjunction with it

where it was like it wants to love the book,

so much so that is actually throws letters onto the screen

as part of the 3D experience.

In a kind of a Sherlock style way.

Well, it does, and yet it rewrites in very kind of key moments.

The one that really struck me was that at the end of the book,

Nick Carraway goes and looks at Gatsby's mansion in West Egg,

this huge extravagant house that he built,

and Nick describes it as this huge incoherent failure of a house.

In this film, it's described as this huge incoherent house.

Luhrmann had to remove the idea of it being a failure.

He doesn't want this to be a failure,

he wants it to be a success story. I agree that there isn't actually...

He doesn't even have the courage of the extravagance.

I suppose in some ways, he changes it,

if you think about the narrator, if you think about Nick Carraway,

because the framing device of this film

is that Nick Carraway is in a rehab clinic,

but he's being treated for alcoholism and looking back on this period of his life.

That's just his handy filmic device.

It's very difficult to make Nick Carraway into an interesting character.

He is a cipher. He's the narrator.

A bit like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited.

You've got that same problem.

Um...but I think we all agree, don't we,

that this is an experience entirely different

from anything to do with the book?

It's interesting that I'm an un-fan of DiCaprio,

I'm an un-fan of Carey Mulligan, I'm an un-fan of Tobey Maguire,

but it didn't matter as such. They were lifted above it.

For me, there were some great comic moments.

The moment when Gatsby's introduced and DiCaprio turns out,

it's almost Ken Russell.

-Fireworks were going off.

-In the best and worst sense of Ken Russell.

You realise, oh, my God, Baz Luhrmann is the new Ken Russell.

But again, as an experience, it's fantastic.

I think the thing that strikes me about the film,

is it keeps saying it's 1922 and it wants to be 1922,

and yet it is a film that is profoundly not about 1922

and it is profoundly about 2013.

I think that's why 14 year olds will like it.

But it's as if we get the Gatsby we deserve. This is...

And the Gatsby we deserve is 3D.

The 3D thing is interesting. What you realise about 3D, it's very old fashioned.

So it actually works in a quaint way.

-It's almost like art nouveau.

-Like Cinemascope.

It makes it ludicrous and preposterous.

-And much cruder.

-Yeah. Cruder and sillier.

It's like finding elephants have been in your fridge

and they've put footprints in the butter.

But what the genius is that it's about this resonant prose,

this 179 pages of resonant prose.

Somehow, as much as it is tastefully tasteless, tastelessly tasteful,

there is still an honour of the prose somehow.

The fact that he's turned Nick Carraway into himself, in a way,

and throws the words onto the screen, actually does work, I think.

I also thought the use of music was very imaginative.

I thought bringing in Jay-Z made the Jazz Age seem more edgy,

-more dangerous than it would have been...

-Less jazzy.

-Less jazzy.

No, more jazzy because of what it was.

-It was a hybrid of lots of stuff.

-Exactly.

Certainly, Luhrmann has said that that's his intention.

I agree with you the moments that Jay-Z scored that are original...

I'm going to damn with faint praise, they don't not work.

But then there's this extraordinary decision,

which I thought was a really strategic failure,

to bring in two really familiar pop songs into the soundtrack.

So all of a sudden, we're listening to Back To Black

and we're listening to Beyonce sing Crazy In Love.

And I just thought, what you don't need are songs we already know.

You need a new experience, if that's what you're trying to create.

But what a moment when Beyonce does that.

She's kind of whispering to her husband.

-That's a weird moment.

-It is a weird moment.

That's like if I'm rich enough to have everything in the world,

then I would have Beyonce whispering in my ear.

But why are we in this Gatsby moment?

I remember very well seeing the last big screen adaptation in 1974,

Three-Day Week.

And is it something about being in an economic downturn,

looking back with nostalgia towards the good times,

or with a moralising view?

Clearly, Baz Luhrmann thinks

it's a period to look back to nostalgically.

The good old days when we were rich and happy?

Yeah, exactly.

There is something really quite nauseating

about the excess of those parties.

I have never been to a... Maybe I'm a sad person.

I have never been to a party

as much fun and as excessive as those parties.

-They're just unreal.

-Haven't you?

The experience of drunkenness he depicts.

But that's Luhrmann, it's not Fitzgerald.

I think it's more about reinvention of a personality,

which I think does chime with the times

because I think everybody can do that now.

They can use social media to invent who they are.

In that sense, the Gatsby character's ahead of its time.

Yeah. It is a post-modern take

in that there's a party scene in Myrtle's apartment,

who's Tom Buchanan's mistress,

and that actually is a very kind of '60s feel.

It's almost like they're tripping. It's not like they're drunk at all.

-That's what I meant. I've never been that drunk in that way.

-Neither have I.

I don't know if they were drinking absinthe or what they were drinking,

but it's certainly not how the book depicts it. But I think that...

I will say that the one good thing about this movie for me

that makes it stand out is DiCaprio.

And I do think he is the best film Gatsby so far.

That's not actually saying very much

because Robert Redford, I think, is terribly miscast

and actually does a very bad job in the '74 film.

But actually, DiCaprio in colour, and it goes back to Paul's point

about the self-made man being of our moment,

I think DiCaprio pulls that off. He's the best thing about the film.

OK. Well, you can make your own minds up

because The Great Gatsby is in cinemas now.

From an adaptation of a book

regularly cited as THE great American novel

to new books by two authors who enjoy

towering reputations of different kinds.

An 87 year old whose work has been revered

by the likes of Susan Sontag and Richard Ford,

but who's less well known outside literary circles,

and after a six-year hiatus,

The return to Afghanistan

by the bestselling author of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini.

'So, then, you want a story and I will tell you one.

'But just the one.

'Don't either of you ask me for more.

'It's late and we have a long day of travel ahead of us.'

With his third novel, Hosseini returns to the familiar theme of separation.

And the Mountains Echoed takes, as its starting point,

a brother and sister, Pari and Abdullah,

who are forced apart because of desperate poverty.

'No-one in the village asked after Pari.

'No-one even spoke her name.

'It astonished Abdullah

'how thoroughly she had vanished from their lives.'

'This book speaks not only to my experience

'as someone living in exile,

'but also to the experience of people that I've known.

'And it speaks to the experiences of people I have met in Afghanistan.'

The book covers a sweep of history spanning several decades.

And, as with Hosseini's previous novels,

the stories are replete with betrayal, separation and tragedy.

While Hosseini is renowned as a bestselling storyteller,

American novelist James Salter

is often described as a writer's writer.

Set on America's East Coast, All That Is

is Salter's first novel in over 30 years

and follows ex-naval officer Philip Bowman

as he navigates ambition and love in post-war society.

"What's your name?" he called.

"Vivian," the blonde girl said.

He stepped closer.

The book is another epic span across generations,

charting Bowman's career as an editor in a publishing house

and a succession of romantic affairs.

All told in sentences constructed with meticulous care.

'Her face was as if, somehow,

'it was not completely finished,

'with smouldering features,

'a mouth not eager to smile,

'a riveting face that God had stamped

'with the simple answer to life.'

So, Paul, James Salter, known as the writer's writer.

Do you think the prose style in his new book,

does it live up to that reputation?

Well, I thought it did. Every word, every pause, every moment

was just exhilarating and transcendent and I loved it.

I'd actually not heard of that so much before I'd read it.

As I was reading it, I was thinking, "He's like the writer's writer.

"Technically, this is amazing."

If you're interested in how to put together a sentence

and how to make that up and then break a paragraph

and describe things in a really powerful way,

then he is technically someone you want to learn from.

So, Sarah, a beautiful prose style,

but does it go anything beyond one man's life, or does it need to?

I certainly don't think that books with a beautiful prose style

need necessarily to go beyond one man's life.

That certainly can be sufficient.

I agree with Paul that technically,

it's very adept and it's very skilled.

But I think that sense of insularity is strangely balanced

against a kind of distance, as well.

We actually never really get inside this guy's head.

And we just watch him go through a series of episodes and a series of relationships.

I think one of the beautiful things about the structure of the book

is that it flows almost seamlessly then into the story of that person

-and it will flow back to our protagonist...

-That is amazing.

It's very difficult to do and he does it beautifully.

My problem is that what happens is over the course of this man's life,

as he gets older and older,

he has a series of affairs with women who get younger and younger

and the prose starts to break down as he has these affairs with them

because the prose gets very, very pornified in those scenes.

You say pornified, but James Salter is renowned

for the way he writes about sex.

-I thought they were very good sex scenes.

-Did you?

For an 87-year-old man.

And I'm just wondering, is this how it's going to be when one is 87,

-thinking about sex in that kind of detail?

-Exactly.

Very impressive.

There is a phrase when...and I know I have to speak delicately at this time of the night,

but there is a phrase when he is having sex

and it ends and he is described as

being like a drinking horse.

And it is not clear to me exactly how that image is supposed to work.

There are a lot of mixed metaphors like that

and it actually becomes ludicrous.

-But what I love...

-And it is an old man's fantasy.

But what I love, though, is the technical challenge of aiming

to describe the sexual experience itself is interesting.

-And the fact that he goes for it and is known...

-He does go for it.

Well, he might not make it because it is the most difficult thing to do.

But the fact that he's still going for it, he still goes there,

to me, is part of the heroic sort of...

ALL TALK AT ONCE

-..heroic quality.

-Please don't act it out.

Maybe you're missing out on the male experience.

He's trying to describe the most intense experience with words. And that's pretty amazing.

And does the intensity carry on with the emotional relationships?

Because there's a certain extent to which it's true that they're episodic, aren't they?

They don't actually, any of them, amount to very much.

It's a different experience from reading the next book we're going to discuss.

It's got heft. He's measured every word.

"All night in darkness, the water sped past."

That's his opening sentence.

It probably took him days to think up that sentence.

-Or months. Years.

-Months. Years.

And it requires contemplation and time.

-And the incident is almost incidental.

-It's just...

But he lets it age, and what's wonderful

is the way he will suddenly introduce you into where we are chronologically,

with a little mention of 1963.

I thought that was really crude. All of a sudden, he'll go, "Oh, JFK just died.

-"Oh, and now he's got a new girlfriend."

-You have no feeling.

"Vietnam just happened, he's got a new girlfriend."

You were flowing through time and then suddenly...a fixed moment.

The combination of where we could be timelessly

and then suddenly in time, I really enjoyed it.

I think it plays...it's a very delicate game to try

to write about the evanescence and impermanence of experience

without writing something that has an evanescent relationship to the reader.

It didn't pull me in as much as it pulled you guys in.

Let's move on to our next book now and see how different that is.

And that's And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini.

Very, very well known for his writing.

Huge amount of sales, 38 million books.

What did you think about this?

I hadn't read him before because I really resented the fact

that anyone can sell 38 million books.

I didn't want to add to his riches.

So I read this book ready to be unimpressed

by this ghastly arriviste.

And I have to say, I really enjoyed it.

I think he's entertaining. He's a storyteller.

Indeed, the first line is something about,

"So, then, you want a story. I'll tell you one."

And what he does then is tell you a series of...

It's like the Arabian Nights. And you're entertained.

It's a different world. It's almost like a brand.

It's almost like a different set of skills is required

to review this kind of object from Salter.

And to an extent, I got the feeling, funnily enough,

even though he sold 38 million copies

and therefore he wants to perpetuate, that was part of it,

the experimentation he was doing with chronology,

that he really, actually, almost now wanted to be taken seriously in a Salter-esque way

just for the beauty of his writing, rather than the 38 million copies.

An ambitious structure.

James mentioned Arabian Nights because we go from Afghanistan

to Paris to California and many, many different characters.

Absolutely.

I have to say, I have sort of the opposite attitude to James

which is I want to be careful not to sneer at something just because it's popular.

If it's popular, it doesn't mean it can't be good in all kinds of ways.

Including well written.

Often, people have good taste, not only bad taste.

But I read The Kite Runner and I hated it. I absolutely hated it

because it seemed to me that it did the things popular fiction does wrong.

-Well, that's saved me an effort.

-I wouldn't.

It's very melodramatic and it has good guys and bad guys.

This novel seems to me a tremendous advance on that book

and I agree with Paul that what is admirable about that

is here's this guy who could completely just be resting on his laurels.

-But it's part of the appeal...

-He's trying to get better.

Part of the appeal of The Kite Runner was because it came at a point

when people didn't know very much about Afghanistan,

a book about Afghanistan had real novel value.

Absolutely. That definitely opens up the exotic side of the unknown

that is told actually very generically.

I found in this book, the Afghanistan elements are very generic.

-He says he's not interested in that.

-Absolutely.

-I completely disagree with you.

-I didn't get any Afghanistan from it.

-I did.

-You've been there.

-I have been a couple of times.

But what I thought was clever about it was this is the modern Kabul,

you know, post the war, of the NGOs,

the expatriate Afghanis coming back and boasting

and I thought that was very specific.

But what I find interesting, say compared to Salter,

which in this instance we're doing,

is there's something about the tying up,

the tidying that you have to do when you're working in this world,

as he is with 38 million readers, that it seems to be a lie,

it seems to be not true. There's not a... It's manipulative because he cannot be true,

because the truth, ultimately, is too devastating to really put into a kind of popular book.

So what he does is he marginalises it. He says, "I'm not going to talk about the war. That's been done."

And what he focuses on...it's an episodic book, as well, which we haven't said.

It actually shares that with the Salter. What he actually focuses on

is small individual relationships between parents and children.

-That's actually the theme of the book.

-That's a theme I thought particularly interesting,

brother and sister. We don't hear about those in books.

You have sibling rivalry between brothers, between sisters, but that brothersister relationship,

-which is very important in South Asia, I thought he brought across that very well.

-Yeah.

I think we can be too sniffy about literature on the one hand,

and popular fiction on the other hand.

And after all in the 19th-century, there wasn't quite that distinction.

You know, I read a few years ago, I read War And Peace for the first time,

and one of the things that struck me was how unlike a classic it was.

It was just a readable book

with a good story and lots of fantastic characters

and brilliant set pieces.

-Or Dickens.

-I don't think we need to be...

-I don't think we need to put Hosseini in the calibre of Dickens.

-Be very careful...to elevate these

-to Dickens.

-Exactly.

-Especially at the end when it does sentimentalise to such an extent.

That is the complement he is making.

There's plenty of sentimentality in Charles Dickens.

You know what, in a funny sort of way, I don't quite believe it in the way that he seems to do it.

He's doing it as a writer of books that are brands

and I think it's very different than the isolated sort of Dickens...

The girl with the...whose face had been gnawed away by a dog.

Do you think that was a bit too much of a grotesque,

wheeled on for the sympathy value to show that he's got a...?

I just thought it was fascinating to realise, and it has to be taken,

considered, the world that he's in, which is the readers' club world

and the book gets distributed first of all to all of these

people before it goes to critics, so they're basically

the people dictating what this book is, and it's interesting.

Is he aware that he's now writing formula?

Is he, you know, dismayed by that? Is he trying to break out of that?

-It's improving.

-It IS improving.

-It's less formulaic. It's more creative.

-It's more inventive.

-He's better than Dan Brown.

But what does that say about the early books, then?

Is he now admitting that, in a way, they were REALLY manipulative,

because really what he wants to do is...

But if it had been completely formulaic...

There's a point at which a surgeon could have saved a little girl's life.

-Exactly.

-No, no, no.

It's absolutely on the formula NOT to save the little girl's life.

It's an O Henry formula, but I think we're not being fair to it.

I think every book should just be taken on its own terms.

This is a very well written book about storytelling,

with lots of quite touching relationships and some that are less successfully manipulated.

But within that, taking it on its own terms, there is a new sort of book being written

with the awareness of this new sort of audience that is in a way taking the place of the critic.

A lot of people will like this book very, very much.

I think it's guaranteed to add to the millions of Khaled Hosseini's...

A lot of people like Coldplay.

That's not fair. This is much better than Coldplay.

"Better than Coldplay" I want to see that on the cover!

You may well see it.

You can find out more about both of those new books on our website.

Now, to a new series from France which has been a smash hit

with audience and critics alike there.

Les Revenants - The Returned -

is a supernatural drama which turns a familiar genre on its head.

In a remote Alpine village, a number of residents are coming home

unaware they've been away for some time.

In fact, they all died years ago.

The Returned answers the prayers of any bereaved parent,

sibling or spouse.

But as the dearly departed return to their former lives,

the effects of that homecoming are extreme.

Likened to David Lynch's Twin Peaks,

the series presents supernatural events in an atmosphere of realism.

With a sense of creeping chaos building as more

and more of the undead reappear in their former homes.

With its first foreign language drama in 20 years,

can Channel 4 rely on Gallic ghouls to match the success of Nordic Noir?

So Paul, we've got here the undead,

but it couldn't be further from traditional zombie films on TV.

I watched this without reading any of this stuff and I was disappointed when I read the stuff

and it mentioned the Z word. I hadn't wanted to think of the zombies. I hadn't wanted to think of that.

To me, it was something that was way beyond that, you know, it was...

I think it's interesting it's gone out on Channel 4, in the sense that the modern television that is now

becoming iconic and becoming both popular and critically important,

Channel 4 haven't got any of that. Channel 4 is the worst channel ever. And Channel 4 have to do this now

and in fact it's a sort of descendant, in a way,

of something that Channel 4 once did once upon a time, which is

the godfather of all this great television, which is Heimat,

you know, this wonderful way of mixing... It's not novelistic,

but it mixes great writing with a cinematic technique to create

a new form of television.

And so Channel 4 have managed to find one. And what's also interesting about that,

certainly in terms of what we're just about to listen to later,

is the fact that sometimes you can just be listening to great music

but it's got this wonderful set of images over the top,

this wonderful story, these great characters,

this great setting, which is also important.

The point is that, of course, nowadays, the most important character is where it's set.

And the setting is quite extraordinary, isn't it?

These mountains, and this rather ordinary little town

in the middle of it that's imbued with a sinister feeling.

Exactly. I mean, for me it's the setting of the ambiance,

the atmosphere that it creates, this mood of foreboding,

and you're just... And we only saw the opening episodes,

but this sense that it's all just being established,

and yet it just gets creepier and creepier,

and you're just wondering exactly how... I think part of what's

clever about it is that they're not, I don't want to give anything

away but they're... As they're coming back, they're not menacing.

And there are these teenage children, and as you say, the bereaved people who loved them,

not just parents but also siblings and friends, are desperate for them to be back,

and yet, there's this sense that something terrible is happening

and yet, they're not frightening, they're not sinister figures. They're themselves.

And because this is a plot which is spun out over eight episodes,

it can afford to have its own pace, can't it?

We are dying to... We've seen the first two episodes,

we're dying to know what's going to happen next.

Are these undead people, are they going to turn bad?

Is it just going to go on in this glacial way?

Can I just say what a treat it is to be here tonight in the same

studio as Mogwai.

Their soundtrack is absolutely perfect, that slow-burn moodiness.

It's... I'd like to talk about this show all evening.

It is just... You saw that wonderful scene where the pinned butterfly

suddenly burst out of its glass cabinet

and you get moments like that. You compared it with Twin Peaks it's better than Twin Peaks.

We're talking up there with Game Of Thrones, I would say. That good.

That is the trouble as well. The number of these we've got to juggle.

You know, Game Of Thrones, I've got The Good Wife, I've got Hannibal,

I've got Grimm, you know, I mean... Even Banshee.

That is interesting.

-You were talking about this being a new art form.

-I think it is.

The slow burn beginning, when? With the Sopranos, or, you know...

Unexpectedly, television is this new art form,

and it is this mixture of people coming from the world of novels,

because in a way, they can't do it in the world of literature,

people coming from cinema because they can't do it in the world of cinema

because of commercial reasons, and they've found

a place in television to create this new hybrid, and it is extraordinary.

And television is attracting amazing directors.

I mean, Baz Luhrmann - query after what we said earlier -

-but Ang Lee, David Fincher, recently with House Of Cards.

-Jane Campion's doing some.

Yes, she's doing that New Zealand one. Exactly. I mean, what I really like about this,

though, is that it doesn't have any of the apparatus of either

the supernatural, at least in the opening episodes that we've seen.

And even the children themselves, well, they're teenagers,

but as they come back, they have no idea what's happened to them.

They think they've just... she said, the girl who it mostly centres around,

thinks that she was just sort of passed out for a while and she's come back and it's 10 years later.

What I liked about it, it didn't rely on gore or horror.

-Exactly. That's why the zombie would put me off.

-It was sinister and frightening

-but without... I didn't have to look away every five minutes.

-Suspense it's using suspense.

But there is a confidence about it. I think one of the things these TV epics have is space.

They know that you're going to sit down and they don't have to grab your attention instantly.

-They can just ease you into it.

-And yet it does grab your attention.

Yes, it does indeed, in a subtle way.

Which becomes very gripping. TV has finally learned the art of the nonlinear.

So the subtle going back and forward, the renewing, the replenishing

the beginning again of a story. The finding of a new story.

It's the novelistic pleasure of serial fiction.

So people are finding the novel, alas, in television

but maybe that might spin them out and go back into the novel.

But it is novelistic. And yet not.

We all can't wait until we can see the very next one.

Have you got one there for us, Martha?

If you're very good, I'll give it to you with your Coldplay CD!

Now, The Returned is coming soon to Channel 4.

We'll have music from the soundtrack to that series,

and we will be hearing from Mogwai at the end of the show.

But here they are now with their classic track, Rano Pano.

We'll have more from Mogwai later.

The photographer, Rankin, is renowned for his portraits

of the fashionable and the powerful.

The likes of Kate Moss, Madonna, Tony Blair and the Queen.

His new exhibition in Liverpool sees celebrities again,

but this time in death masks, as well as portraits of people

with terminal illness, facing up to their own mortality.

Meanwhile, the National Gallery's artist in residence Michael Landy

has brought seven saints to life in gigantic moving sculptures.

The National Gallery's collection is rich in Renaissance paintings

of saints and their symbols.

St Catherine and her wheel.

St Michael and his scales.

St Lucy and her eyes.

Now, modern artist Michael Landy

has breathed new life into these Old Masters

in a series of giant kinetic sculptures

created from recycled materials.

I was surprised to be invited to become

associate artist in residence at the National Gallery.

Their concerns are to preserve and conserve artworks,

whereas quite a lot of the time I destroy things.

Landy's best-known work is Breakdown

in which he and a team of disciples destroyed all of his worldly goods.

With Saints Alive, Landy continues this dialogue with destruction

and offers a fresh and irreverent perspective

on familiar tales of martyrdom.

I like the idea that somehow we've forgotten about the saints

and they're just in a big junk heap somewhere

and then some artist comes along and starts pulling bits out

and says I'll have a Cosimo Tura arm,

a De'Roberti chest and a Cima base and suddenly, I've got a Frankenstein kind of St Jerome.

The new exhibition from celebrity photographer Rankin

sees him exploring unfamiliar territory.

Over the past four months he's created portraits of people facing up to death and mortality.

From survivors of the 7/7 bombings to people living with terminal illness.

I love Lou Page's image.

We discussed the idea of having a shot

where she is really beautiful and quite glamorous,

then a photograph of her crying

and then when we took the crying photograph

it was just so brilliant and so strong.

Rankin's images immortalise his subjects,

empowering them to create their own lasting legacy.

In fact, the show is called Alive

because I didn't want it to be about death.

I wanted it to be about the fact that people that are alive

and so full of life

especially people that have got any closeness with death.

I've actually found it one of the most inspiring

and definitely energising things I've ever done.

We begin, James, with that Rankin exhibition

and the idea that it was a celebration of life

when people are facing death. What did you think of that concept?

I'm a great fan of Rankin's fashion photography.

This felt, to me, like your foundation year project

where you are sent off to do something and the theme is "death"

and he goes, well, I know, I'll photograph some people

on the verge of death, some people who have, oh, I know!

Survived near-death experiences.

Oh, and here are some celebrity friends of mine,

with life masks or death masks.

It didn't seem to do anything more than that.

The only bit of the show that really moved me

and said anything about anything, I thought,

was the collection of old photographs of his parents

who'd died a few years ago.

And you could connect with those, because they told a story.

A mysterious shot with his father holding this fledgling he'd found.

But the other photographs, what was Johnson Beharry VC doing painted yellow?

It just seemed gimmicky to me.

And the essence, the centre of it, was the photograph

you come across when you first go in, which is those that are dying.

And that has an interesting power,

the idea of a celebrity photographer taking photographs

to glamorise those people who want to be taken by the celebrity photographer, in a way.

And there's something about it, if it had just settled at that,

it probably would have had more power.

The fact that then it has other things, it has people who work in the death industry,

it has the death masks, it has the heart-shaped collection of family portraits,

for me, I absolutely take on board that idea of the student element

but also for me, also, it was a series of slightly gimmicky fashion spreads in a magazine,

which is very pure to what Rankin does, but it didn't seem to

lift it above, into approaching the idea of death and what death is in the way that he would hope.

You see, I thought it rose above that idea of gimmickry

with the death masks of the celebrities.

Because, in the exhibition, it was the celebrities

who we are used to seeing glowing and beautiful.

They looked much older, all the lines were etched on their faces.

They looked like the dead people.

Whereas, the people facing terminal illnesses

had been given this beautiful look to them,

that was full of vibrancy in life.

I went into this exhibition really braced, thinking

this is going to be difficult to see, to look at terminal illness

and to confront death, and this is going to be very challenging.

The problem for me is that it wasn't challenging enough.

And it's very difficult to talk about, because as you say, here are these people who are facing,

with incredible courage, their own deaths.

And of course they want to be presented in these glamorous and defiant and proud and brave ways.

And that seemed the better part of it, how they wanted to be portrayed.

Which is totally understandable. And yet, as artwork,

what happens then is for those pictures to get their poignancy,

they're totally dependent on the caption

that explains that these people are actually dying

because you don't see that in the image itself.

That's interesting because I was wondering if, without that information,

we would get a sense of these photographs with people in a different situation.

I don't think we would, at all.

There are some unbelievable looks in the eyes.

Obviously the one we know very well is Wilco Johnson of Dr Feelgood.

That's an unbelievable photograph in many ways

because of what's in the eyes...

He's so defiant, because he's decided not to have chemotherapy.

And there's fear, too, and I found that in all of them.

The one element I thought was transcendent

was, ultimately, beyond all the other bits and pieces was what's in their eyes,

because Rankin traditionally does that thing anyway, very front-on.

Because otherwise, and I'm not being flippant at all,

I'm being completely serious, otherwise, the fact is that

we are all life in the midst of death. That's what life is.

And so you end up with just these pictures and it's like, yeah,

this is the experience of lots of people who are confronting death.

I thought that the heart-shaped pictures of his parents was far and away the weakest part.

And it was that studenty aspect. And I thought, you know what?

I can't believe we have a heart-shaped collage, on the wall of a major museum.

If you were not a celebrity...

But more weak was Rankin himself appearing in the exhibition.

Wasn't there something quite poignant about the family photos

going back to what you were saying earlier,

these were unposed photographs of an age where photography was far less commonplace.

Yeah, but this is a sort of Tracey Emin trick, isn't it?

This assembling collages of all the people you've known

or slept with, or whatever.

It just, I went expecting, because we don't talk enough about death.

We're not like the Victorians who, their whole culture was about death.

Now, we avoid it.

And I thought Rankin is going to teach us about death. And he didn't.

The Great Gatsby is more about death than this exhibition was.

It is a terrible thing to say,

but if we are talking about the ephemeral nature of existence,

this, oddly, didn't do that, which is really weird, because

some people in there are really going.

And I thought, that is awful, in the end, that they have been manipulated into this situation.

I thought...

But they looked very proud of how they've been betrayed.

Because some of those images are very beautiful,

and one hopes that they are finding this inspiring and transcendent

because I think, for the viewer, it's not.

Let's move on to some other images now, in some cases

rather familiar images, these images in the National Gallery,

which have been manipulated and changed extraordinarily

by Michael Landy. What did you think of Saints Alive? Great title.

I think this show is a great success and it will be very popular.

When my kids were smaller,

I used to try and drag them into the National Gallery

to give them some culture, and they always resisted,

like Damien being dragged inside a church in The Omen!

This is going to grab people of all ages in an interesting way.

There's the Catherine Wheel.

He's got this model of the Catherine Wheel,

which is like a wheel of fortune. A wheel of misfortune!

And there are various options, and sometimes,

you're going to be "up on a wheel, torn to pieces",

sometimes you're going to be, "you will be a virgin for the rest of your life". This is fun.

Is that what you got?

No, I got "torn to pieces on the wheel".

But, what it does is it kindles your excitement about

these actual works of art which are in the rest of the gallery

and you want to go out there and check them out for yourself.

You've seen the dress from the Memling portrait, the red dress,

now you want to go and see the real one and see how it compares

with these weird, Toy Story-esque sculptures.

Quite a risk for the National Gallery to take.

Michael Landy was saying this himself.

As an artist, he is known for destruction.

They could have ended up with a couple of Botticellis in a skip!

But a great idea, that sense of replenishing

the murky depths of history, that sometimes you don't look at.

And suddenly, we're looking at these paintings that Landy has appropriated

and they are unbelievably psychedelic and gorgeous

and hallucinatory and fantastic and entertaining and hilarious.

I thought, before this, that Landy was

to his mentor, Jean Tinguely, the inventor of the kinetic sculpture,

as Oasis was to The Beatles.

And I've now slightly changed my opinion.

I think it's more Todd Rundgren to The Beatles. And that's a good thing!

Because, in many ways, it is an unbelievable rip-off of Tinguely,

the whole idea of the self-destructive sculpture

the whole idea of the building of these machines,

but there's something about this that's so life affirming,

so wonderful, the way that it illuminates some of the murky depths

of the National Gallery, that it is, as you say, a wonderful, positive thing.

You can go further back than the kinetic sculpture,

to those kind of machines, to the Renaissance itself, and to Leonardo.

He does these wonderful collages.

There is a real sense that he's doing the mechanical drawings

and the engineering drawings of a Leonardo.

And up through the 18th century,

those wonderful diagrams we've all seen,

of the machines, and trying to create artificial life,

and so there is this palimpsest of history that goes through.

I absolutely loved this exhibition.

It was hugely violent, though, hugely violent.

Things fall apart...

It is absolutely a must-see exhibition, and it's free, I think. You can just wander in.

I recommend everyone go there. Can I just sound a note

of old-fartishness amid all this praise?

Which is that you go to the National Gallery,

and you go into the different galleries,

and you are blown away by the skill and craft and invention

which went into the making of these wonderful paintings.

Michael Landy is not a great draughtsman.

When you see his drawings, they're not actually that good.

And, you see the collages, and you think, "this is rather good."

He's actually gone and recreated the cracked surface of these paintings

and then you realise that he's just use a photocopier.

And this is the problem about art colleges.

I think, for me, it's very on the moment,

this way of exploring history at the moment.

And kind of working out what it is that we need to be concerned about.

What it is we need to be concerned about in this period of history,

about our past, and making it not something where we think

these people are old and dusty and musty and should be dismissed,

but they were great minds, and for me, Landy just reminded us,

whatever his own skill is, that these were tremendous minds,

and it just completely explodes in the present.

It's actually a critical impulse that he's bringing here.

He's reframing and contextualising and educating.

You see it anew. It is like a great essay.

He's making you look at details that you hadn't seen before.

Bring your children, bring all your relatives. Go yourself.

Both of these exhibitions are on at the moment.

The Rankin exhibition is at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool

and there's a Culture Show special in June,

and you can crank up Michael Landy's sculptures

at the National Gallery from Thursday,

while they still stay standing.

Now, with David Bowie this week showing us decadent priests

and mutilated nuns, and an opera in Germany banned

because of its Nazi setting,

the power of art to shock audiences seems undimmed.

That's nothing new. 100 years ago this month,

one of the most shocking events in cultural history took place.

It's hard to imagine the police being called to a modern ballet,

but that's exactly what happened

at the premiere of the Rite Of Spring in May 1913.

The crowd whistled and jeered at the performance by Ballets Russes,

with music by Stravinsky.

The idea of Les Sacres du Printemps

came to me while I was still composing the Firebird.

I had dreamed a scene of pagan ritual

in which a chosen sacrificial virgin dances herself to death.

Told through a series of rituals, at the heart of Stravinsky's score

is a primal chord which is repeated a total of 211 times,

capturing the spirit of a new artistic age.

But it wasn't just the avant-garde music

that bewildered the audience in Paris that night.

Vaslav Nijinsky's daring deconstruction

of classical dance steps also sent shockwaves through the crowd.

Now, the Rite of Spring's symbolic importance

is being commemorated around the world.

100 years on, many artists set out to shock.

Bowie being banned from YouTube is useful publicity.

So, does art still have the power to outrage cynical modern audiences?

And should that ever be its aim?

Thank you, everybody.

Sarah, seeing these centenary celebrations,

commemorations of the Rite Of Spring,

do you think that's because of the intrinsic worth of the work,

or is it because of its symbolism, its place in cultural history?

For me, it's more important as an historical work

than as a musical work, although I may be in a minority there.

But it kicks off modernism.

It's one of the great urtexts of modernism.

And, as you said in that VT, it has a deconstructive mode,

and that's taken over a lot of art over the 20th century.

I think that it is, and I think it's important to mark those kinds

of historical milestones in the cultural landscape.

But, you know, as a piece of music, is it shocking any more?

We've all heard it a million times.

We've heard it in Fantasia, for heaven's sake.

It's been completely made safe.

But, is it an important piece of music? Of course it is.

Do you think there's a certain nostalgia amongst artists

for a point in time where police were called,

where it really could cause such incredible reactions?

There's the illusion of that. I think a lot of it is in hindsight.

I think we look back, in hindsight, and realise where it was in history

and a year later, the First World War started.

And that gives the piece a greater resonance

because it was tapping into cultural currents that were in the air

that changed everything more dramatically, in a way.

If the Rite Of Spring was played on Britain's Got Talent on a Saturday night, at seven o'clock,

it would still cause a shock.

But people nowadays have the chance to turn over.

And I think that's what's changed, in a way,

is that sense that, for a start, so many anniversaries get in the way

of anything really happening.

We are now being nostalgic for controversy, for shock.

So it's very difficult to work out where the shock would come now.

Where would shock come from? Apart from on Britain's Got Talent?

Modernism and post-modernism were phases

that the arts had to go through in the same way that

you have to go through adolescence.

You have to go through that ghastly teenage period.

And now, we're living in a period, post-post modern,

whatever you want to call it. And I think...

What could shock us now?

Artists are really struggling to find...

Reality shocks us more now. Big events that happen shock us now.

Stylistically, I don't think you could do much that is shocking.

It would be more like breaching certain current taboos.

For example, were anyone to be brave enough to do a sort of

Muslim version of Andres Serrano's Piss Christ,

then I think that would really shock people.

But, that's because it's a taboo, not because of the aesthetic form.

But that's the thing. Any kind of art that ever shocked

was always because it took on a cultural taboo.

It was taking on propriety, it was taking on sensibilities,

so, when you have Manet's Olympia

being scratched on the walls of a gallery,

it was because it was breaking a taboo about nudity.

And, can art still shock? Of course it can.

Last week, as you just said, everybody walked out of a Wagner performance in Germany

and it had to be cancelled because, people were hospitalised over it.

So they were clearly shocked.

That's the Germans being silly, isn't it?

You say that, but that's the point.

So then Parisians were being silly when the Rite Of Spring was played.

-They probably were.

-Of course they were.

But audiences can be shock when you break taboos.

But weren't Parisians being shocked because of the kind of dance steps,

not because... Nazism is something that's in society.

The shock of the Rite of Spring was to do with what was happening aesthetically.

And a different kind of time from now.

Obviously, there was a smaller focus on a smaller area of culture,

so the idea that people got used to what a piece of music might be,

of what a ballet might be, in a very small area, so therefore could be

completely disconcerted that everything had changed.

Whereas now, everyone can just turn the channel,

they can just put up a different thing on their screen.

It's very difficult to create a thing.

Because people don't believe so much in the ideological properties of art.

And also, aren't we suspicious of when we think

-people are setting out to shock us? As a modern audience.

-Yes. Yes.

But I like this idea that the shock of the original Rite Of Spring

was just confected shock.

It probably was in the same way as Gerard de Nerval

taking his lobster for a walk. I mean, that's pathetic, isn't it?

-Exactly. Duchamp and his urinal.

-It's just nonsense.

They were a bourgeois audience that were being challenged,

their pieties were being challenged.

And that kind of audience doesn't like that.

I don't think anything has changed except the taboos.

Now, we have different taboos.

And, if you break those taboos, people will be shocked,

and they will try to scratch the pictures.

And I don't think anything's changed at all,

it's just that what we're pious about has changed.

And who receives it, though. Because if you play certain things

to a certain audience, at the moment, it would cause outrage.

-But that doesn't happen any more.

-The Danish cartoons.

-It happens very rarely.

And where it does happen now is much more realistic, terroristic,

I mean, Stockhausen went very close to this

with his discussion about 9/11. But there was a grain of truth in that.

That that's, ultimately, what's completely changing the world.

Where does the 21st century begin the way that it began in the 20th century because of Stravinsky?

We're still waiting for it, in a way.

Write an opera about a sympathetic paedophile

and you will shock audiences today.

But, it won't be where the 21st Century begins,

in the way that this was where the 20th Century began.

Well, if you want to...

Maybe the 21st century begins right now!

Well, there are countless centenary interpretations

of the Rite Of Spring taking place around the country now.

Thanks very much indeed to my old sports tonight.

Paul Morley, Sarah Churchwell and James Delingpole.

Next month, Kirsty will be looking at the new BBC adaptation

of Philippa Gregory's historical novel, The White Queen.

But as promised, we will leave you with more music from Mogwai,

and a haunting theme from their soundtrack to The Returned.

This is Wizard Motor. Goodnight.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd