25/01/2013 The Review Show

Good night. Tonight on the review show, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln

comates the Oscar's shortlist -- dominates the Oscar's shortlist,

and Day-Lewis Louis just dominates. I'm the President of the United

States, clothed in immense power. Edouard Manet gets his biggest-ever

show in Britain, but is it big enough. Hammer Horror walks the

boards for the first time. Is Henry James's supernatural classic, Turn

of the Screw, as spooky on the stage as it is on the page.

I was just saying good night. Radio 4 celebrates George Orwell,

with a season the documentaries and dramas.

Hailed as a comic genius in the US, Louis CK crosses the pond and lays

his life bare, for a anarchic take on the sitcom. Why am I trying to

impress you, why not tell me about your God damn life and impress me.

Joining me tonight are the novelist Lionel Shriver, academic and writer,

Sarah Churchwell, and the art historian and Cambridge lecturer,

James Fox, you too can join us on Twitter.

Django, reviewed on last week's show is Jantore Tarnross's take on

slavey d Quentin tar Tino's take on slavery. But Lincoln dominates the

owes cars with 12 nominations, Tony Kushner has written a screenplay

where Abraham Lincoln is the head, heart and soul of the passing of

the 13th amendment, while the Civil War was in its dying days.

Spielberg's film provides an intimate portrait of arguably

America's most progressive President, as he attempts to

abolish slavery while the fighting continues. Shall we stop this

bleeding? Daniel Day-Lewis plays the statesman in the stovepipe hat,

he's already won the Golden Globe, and he's tipped for a third Oscar

with his portrayal. You are going to pass the 13th amendment to

abolish slavery. Doesn't waste your power. A stellar cast with Sally

Field as Lincoln's misunderstood wife, Mary Todd, Marian de Swardt

with Tommy Lee Jones and Thaddeus Stevens. How can I say that all men

are created equal, when here before she stands the stinking carcass of

the man from Ohio, proving some men are lower, impermable to reason,

with cold, climb slime in their veins instead of hot blood. Despite

taking on an historical subject, it focuses on one month in January

1965, when the President has only three weeks to get the 13th

amendment through the house of representatives. I can't end this

war, until we cure ourselves of slavey, this amendment is that cure.

We need two yeses. Get the hell out of here and get them. But how.

the President of the United States, clothed in immense power, you will

procure me these votes. Abraham Lincoln has been portrayed

on film more than 270 times, has Daniel Day-Lewis done the President

proud? The fate of human dignity is in our

hands. Blood has been spilt to afford us this moment, now, now.

James, was this the Lincoln you expected from Spielberg? No, not

really, actually. It was a sympathetic treatment of Lincoln, I

thought. The thing that surprised me, it was no real hagiography at

all. The Lincoln depicted was bad husband, bad father, a boring man.

As a leader he was passing draconian legislation against civil

liberties. Also, someone who was prepared to extend the Civil War

for longer than it needed to go, and see more people die than needed

to die in order to achieve his political objectives. And someone

who was willing to bully, bribe and lie in order to get this 13th

amendment passed. He's the hero? is not saint but he is the hero.

Tony Kushner was on the project from the start, but reworked it

radically, it was more of an epic, he brought it down to, I would say,

the Lincoln for the West Wing, it was about the machinations.

Borgen. I thought it was intense? was greatly relieved that he didn't

decide to do a Saving Reb Ryan on me. I have seen lots of epic Civil

War enactments, we have had enough of that, I think. This film

probably has just a teeny bit much and it has too little. There is one

scene that says it all, the hospital attendants are taking out

a load of medical waste from the hospital, and they throw out this

huge VAT of severed limbs no a big pit of other severed limbs, that's

enough, you get it. I always like it when film or television manages

to enliven politics and make it seem really riveting, in this way

this film succeeds fatastically. You got the sense of Lincoln, they

humanised him, it showed what an intensely clever and political man

he was? Absolutely. I think you come into this film now everybody

has already heard all the hype about Day-Lewis's performance. I

thought it would be oversold. I would expect something a bit

thespie, and sceney eschewing, but the degree to which he humanises

Lincoln, it is hard to overstate how iconic Lincoln is to the

American population. To bring that statue to life, making him a living,

breathing human being, and show all of those machinations, all the

things he had to do, but that is the dirt and the blood and the guts

of 19th century American politics, indeed politics today, that is one

of the subtexts of the film, how much parallel there is between then

and now. Daniel Day-Lewis, you cannot say too much about how

absolutely brilliant it is. If that is Lincoln I'm happy. I think he

absolutely disappears into Lincoln? I honestly think that might be the

best screen performance of our lifetime. I have never seen

anything like that. Let's see a bit more, it is very much a film with

loads of dialogue, little action, and here he is talking about Euclid,

whom he studied since a boy. Euclid's first common notion is

this, things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

That's a rule of mathematical reasoning, it is true because it

works, has done and always will do. In his book, mm, Euclid says this

is self-evident. There has been lots of discussion

about what he did with the voice, raising the voice and so forth,

there were so many things that were actually particular, the way he

held himself. The study had been extraordinary? The voice of a

revelation to me. Usually you imagine Lincoln to be a fore score

and 70. He did this rather high meandering voice, that humanised

him. All that myth that accrued around this figure disappears and

he becomes this rather fragile me meandering individual. You see when

he needs to kick in he really kicks in. There is criticism that he can

delay and delay for other people, when he wants something he kicks in

fast? It is the range where Day- Lewis shows in the role, he can

switch from the folksy, warm, humour, telling these American

parables, which is how he got his point across indirectly all the

time. You could feel the warmth and why people love him, he turns on a

dime and you feel the pourb and ability to push things through, to

be unscrub Louis, he is Machiavellian as hell, but to

achieve greater aims. It is so much about the script and performances,

the Daniel Day-Lewis performance is allowed to be so brilliant because

he's surrounded by such a great cast. He feels comfortable with

that cast. David Strathairn as Seward is extraordinary, as is

Sally Field. Such an underestimated actor, David Strathairn. I would

say that they are so meticulous on the verse and militude of Lincoln,

the voice and everything, yet the whole political premise of the film

is going out on a limb. I'm not even sure they really make a case

for it within the context of the film. That is, it was vital to get

the 13th amendment passed before the war was ended. If the war ended

then all the excitement about passing the amendment would go away.

I just didn't see that. I thought that was very clear in the film?

They certainly lay it out. But I wasn't convinced of it, especially

since historically Lincoln was about to, this was a lame duck

Congress, and the next Congress coming in was far more behind him

than the one, than the lame duck one. It is historically accurate.

It is amazingly historically accurate. On the whole look of it,

the dark look. We were talking about the effort made to make it

accurate, apparently the sound engineer managed to find a match

that hadn't been turned for 100 years which he recorded, he

recorded someone sitting down in Lincoln's chair. Rather than that

being over the stop, it ated to the idea of the craft and -- it added

to the craft and air of the film, the idea of that? It was

understated everything, Daniel Day- Lewis's performance and Stefano

Pioli's directing. The camera hardly moved, we had close smoky

interior, desaturated colours, it looked like it was constructed out

of 19th Degara types. It is an interior film, despite it being

about the Civil War, which we associate with canons and that,

this is about rooms. Tommy Lee Jones is chewing sceney on screen.

He hams it up. He does. And James Spader who plays a character out of

Mark Twain, there are lots of familiar faces looking unfamiliar

and playing character roles. then there is Barack Obama, the

second inAugustation, with his hand on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. Lincoln

died just as Edouard Manet was making his way in the art world,

his canvasses reflecting Parisian life. His close friends were Zola

and others. He portrayed life as he saw it. Manet came to dominate the

scene in the latter half of the 19th century. He eventually formed

a close wond with Monet. Given his significance, it is surprising that

the first show in the Royal Academy now is the first showing of his

work in the UK. In portraying life in the Royal

Academy in London, 50 of Manet's portraits are hung together for the

first time. Yet, at first glance, many may not look like portraits in

the traditional sense. We have defined portraiture to mean

representation of an individual. Be it a bust length or half length or

even a full length, but we have also included portraiture within

scenes of every day life, as Baudelaire spoused and urged Manet

to represent. Manet painted friend, family and models in his studio,

and then placed them in a scene of Paris that was rapidly modernising.

His bold use of the colour black has a firm presence in this

exhibition. Manet's interest in black. He made pilgrimages to

Madrid to Amsterdam, to study artists renowned for their handling

of black. He realised it could be a counter point to colour, but

compositionally was remarkably important. For many artists and

historians, Manet is the father of modernism, in his lifetime, though,

he was the subject of widespread villification.

He once said he wouldn't want a young artist to endure what he had

to experience from the point of criticism levied at him. But he

wrote it is his plate in life to suffer what's transpierg here. The

fates will tell how I'm to be received. Walking out of this

exhibition, which when I went there was packed out already, do you feel

you got to know Edouard Manet, and more about him as opposed to his

work? There is definitely as many Manet as I have seen in one place.

It was an education. I hadn't appreciated the degree to which he

hasn't an impressionist, I had hazely thrown him in with them.

That he was part of a separate movement called The Realists. The

irony was he was becoming less realistic, but the realists

referred more to the fact that he was picturing people in ordinary

circumstances, not necessarily posing for a portrait, but often

sitting in front of a fence, Or doing things, eating, looking at

their study. He pictured them in their own environment. That

environment becomes both part of the the composition but also the

character. They are not actually what you necessarily call portraits,

even railways, it is not necessarily what you would regard

as a portrait? Manet is such an inscrutable artist, I have never

been able to get to the bottom of him. Particularly with his

portraits. One artist said Manet's portraits were like still lives.

That is what it is, when you look at the people, none of the cities

are real people, they are mannequin -- none of the scenes are real

people, they are mannequins he's arranging in a shop window. If you

go and look at the paintings of Zola, it is one great writest of

the century, it is about Manet, he surrounded him with things that are

important to him. It is an inscrutable exhibition of an

inscrutable artist. If you look at the Smoker, that refers back to the

Spanish, Valasquit was a huge influence. The other painter who

painted every day life, The Smoker is like that, a restrained palate?

People talk about Manet being the father of this and the stepfather

and the uncle, all these relationships to modernism, but he

was a traditional artist, and Valaqez was his hero. What he was

trying to do in the exhibition is reinvented old master tradition.

The antithesis of the impressionism, his love of black? Absolutely. That

was a real revelation to me, I didn't realise how much that was in

there. And how cleverly he uses it. The velvet in the jacket of the

young boy? It is all the way through it. There were pictures

that were a revelation, and like guests it was the most Manet I have

seen. The other thing that was new was the influence of the new art of

photography, and how much these ideas about realist photography are

infiltrating into his porture. Having said that it is the most

Manet I have seen, there were an awful lot missing, even I knew that.

Some travelled from the Musee d'Orsay, and the one from Glasgow

won't travel, the women drinking beer? You can't blame the Royal

Academy if people won't lend them things, they have to be clever

about that. Did you miss stuff? There were glaring omissions, I got

the impression, I don't know what you thought, I got the impression

they had had original low wanted to do a major -- originally wanted to

do a major Manet retrospective, had he had missing things and they had

align it with portraits and it felt like they were trying to stretch it

There is also a whole room which has the timeline of his wife. I

wasn't interested. That could have been in the cafe, I thought. There

was room just for tables and people reading books in the exhibition.

thought the painting on the cover was underplayed, a hugely function

painting, a number of different paintings of the same woman, I

thought she was stuck with stuff. One of the other models had more or

less a whole room to herself. However, to be fair, it is still a

lot of paintings. It is not physically exhausting to walk from

room-to-room, on if they are not overly filled. I think that Manet

does not reproduce very well. This doesn't look very good. If you are

going to appreciate these paintings you have to see them in person.

is well worth seeing, I don't think there is any question. Those blacks,

you can't get those blacks in this. I stood in front of this for 30

minutes, mouthwatering, it was the most delicious black I have seen.

He did do some tender and unfinished pictures of his family?

He had beautiful one of this ambiguous son. There was one of him

on a velocopede, the early bicycle, it is so blurred, there is a sense

of the boy racing towards you. It is lovely, the boy is in great

detail and the vlocopede is blurred. And the portrait of Zach y Astruc,

on the one hand there is a more modern painter in transition.

came to Monet and painted him and his familiary, in that painting

there is definitely a hint, there is an impressionist corner, which

says I get what you guys are doing but I don't like it? He had a

strange relationship with the impressionists, he endorsed them

and thought they were great and was friends with many of them, he

didn't want to go the way they were going. If you get a chance, it

doesn't give awe real sense of the black there. Manet Portraying Life

is at the Royal Academy until 14th April.

Turn of the Screw has inspired a whole host of adaptations,

including an opera by Benjamin Britten, and a film starring Nicole

Kidman. Now Hammer's first foray into the theatre, with the

company's reintention. Hammer's horror films made the careers of

actors such as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and were fameded

for their melodramatic story telling and gory violence. More

recently the company has updated its style with a production of The

Woman In Black, which starred Daniel Radcliffe. The brand has now

turned its hand to theatre, co- producing Rebecca Lenkiewicz's new

adaptation of London's Almeida Theatre. Turn of the Screw tells

the story of an unnamed governness, who is sent to a country estate to

care for two orphan children, there she appears to witness a number of

increasingly frightening ap pier rigss. We have the benefits of

thrills and spills and hopefully jumps of ghost moments, plus, very,

very complex and ambiguous theme, and the main theme, which is the

corruption of innocence. Please, you look a little ill yourself.

What could you be capable of? could be your heart beat, they

taught us how to care for people. Can I check your's. He Rebecca has

pushed with James said and made it more overt and sexual, and a

contemporary audience can take that. We try to manage what Henry James

may have written if he was writing now.

No. I was just saying good night. No you weren't. I was just checking

your heart old girl. No. I should like to go to sleep now, if I may.

If you don't get proper sleep it stunts your growth and I don't want

to be short. I think you have a very vivid imagination, do you

think so. Since it was first published, there

has been much debate over whether the ghosts in the Turn of the Screw

are real, or figments of the governness's troubled imagination.

We didn't come down on one side or the other, in the sense that I

think the audience needs to leave debating whether it is her fantasy

projection and she has gone slightly mad, or whether the ghosts

are real. The ambiguity was still there, it was said, did you feel

that? I thought it was there in the first act i thought they did a very

good job with it. In the second act, as you saw in some of the scenes in

the clip, there is no ambiguity, it is completely sexually explicit,

and Lindsay Posner said they made the choice. I have to completely

disagree with him that Henry James would have done this if he was

writing it today. He opens with something that the films leave out,

he says the story doesn't tell in a vulgar way, he thought to be

literal is vulgar not sexual, he's interested in ambiguity that is

what the book is about, he would have still written an ambiguity in

the book because that is what it was about. You have to have buy

into it, did you buy into it? first act is great. It is the only

time the theatre for me, when we got to the interval, it was like

what do you mean. Usually I'm looking at my watch, where's my

glass of wine. And I was a little annoyed. To be fair, I felt simply

about the second act in that I was not suffering. I was sorry it was

over. It is a very successful production. But I do think that as

the, as it becomes more literal, as it becomes more specific about what

the children were exposed to, it is less interesting. It is less

convincing to a modern audience. Because what, when you make it

explicit, what you are also making explicit is that sexual literacy

equates with corruption, and evil, and I'm not sure that we can accept

that. Or that Henry James meant that. As, in a sense, goes along

with the modern interpretation. feeling is I just thought it was, I

never thought I would be scared in the theatre, and it was pretty

scary. Particularly in the second half. This is what the second half

had going for it. There were half- a-dozen horrible shocks. One of the

shocks was so horrible that a woman about three seats down from me

jumped so high up, and then she said to the audience, I'm so sorry,

and everybody started laughing. There was a buzz, I think people

were really enjoying it. That was nervous laughter. But do you think

that the humour and horror were calibrated properly. I didn't think

there was nearly as much humour that is there was? It was not

subjectable -- subtle, what was lost was the tension and Spence.

you think it came out in the set, the set was amazing? And the light

something great. Even the rotation of the rooms was ominous, you are

thinking what will I see next. I felt you didn't really have that

sense of a build-up of tension. It was very entertaining because it

was either scary or funny. I didn't think it was that scary, there were

moments that were, they relied on startling you, which is what Hammer

does. It is good at startling you, is that frightening, I'm not sure

it is ultimately frightening. By making the choices to become more

and more explicit, they take the mood of hor yo, which is what James

sustains very well, you are not sure of the source of the evil.

should talk about the performances, 17-year-old Miles Lawrence, and

there are three girls, last night it was Amelie Jones, to play Floral,

I was worried they could stay, they were stand-out performances?

girl ten years old had a lot of lines, she was terrific.

timing? The boy delivered one of the most sinister performances I

have ever seen on stage. That is a contest, that literal girl is

magnificent. What makes it work, especially in the beginning, is

this creepy, greaseyness to the kids. They are so happy, and sweet,

and what I loved about these performances is they got that

without overdoing it. They are very restrained, like Lincoln. They are

very finely calibrated. The little girl, Amelie Jones was spectacular.

The problem is not at all, the boy who played Miles, Lawrence Belcher,

he gave a terrific performance, he's far too old for the part.

Miles is ten years old in the story. Again, this question about

innocence isn't nearly as interesting when it is played by a

17-year-old. He was supposed to be pubesant. I'm not taking it away

from his performance, it was terrific. This was a collaboration

with Hammer and Almeida, this is the first stage we have, The Woman

In Black, and we have some Newham hams. Can you see more Hammer on

stage, as you say it is difficult to deliver horror on stage?

haven't seen it done before, I thought it was pretty successful.

There was a sequence that was very Hammer, you have chalk and a board,

I'm still clueless about how they did this. But there are great

shocking moments. It was very Hammer, I think it is good to see

this British cultural brand, reviving itself.

The Turn of the Screw is running at the Almeida thee -- theatre.

The adaptation of George Orwell's dramatisations of his life and work,

which shed light on his background and the intensity of his political

beliefs. The inaugural Orwell Day was launched this week. An annual

celebration of the great writer's work. The occasion is marked by the

publication of new editions of his best known works, and his

influential essay, politics politics.

Radio -- Politics and the English Language, there is an ensemble cast

of the play, including Patrick Brennan as the Trotsky inspired pig,

in Animal Farm. It must show manor farm for what it is, the whole farm

in the whole country and the whole of England owned and operated by

animals. The farm of the animals. Beast farm.

Animal manor! Animal Farm. So be it Napoleon. Animal Farm.

Also dramatised are Homage to Catalonia, and the dystopian

classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with Christopher Eccleston as the

rebellious Winston Smith, instigating an affair out of sight

of the all-seeing Thought Police. She squeezed my hand, briefly. And

the world has changed. I'm behind, slightly to one side of her. Thes

of her breasts and shoulders and thigh -- the mounds of her breasts

and shoulders and shys press against the blue of her party

overalls. The hated uniform is made beguiling by her presence inside of

it. The anti-sex league sash pinchs her waist and adds form to her lean

muscular body and pronounced bossom. I'm excited by her as the enemy

corpses dance on the jibbits. Jo let them hang! There is also a

series of biographical dramas starring Joseph Millson and Eric

Blair, the man behind the pen name Orwell. The dramas cover his life

in Burma, through to his months on the island of Jura, and explore his

relationships with women and battles with himself. I'm not a

good man, not even a very nice man. I have done discredible things, I

have, what did you say earlier, used people. What's worse I have

used people I love just the same as those I despise. I think I have

done good work, a little. But do you know there is nothing worth a

single damn that I have ever written that hasn't been about

politics. So, a whole host of opportunities to discover Orwell in

the weeks to come. Does his writing continue to have powerful and

resonant messages for today's world. Do you think that for people who

have never read Orwell, or who perhaps have forgotten much of what

they have read, it would be hard to imagine that, this is a timely

primer on Orwell? It is very timely. The performance of Animal Farm, is

not only delightful, it is a lot of fun to listen to, but now that we

are post-Soviet Union to which the original alluded, I find that the

text is released. It is about much more than just communism it is

about the inevitable corruption of any ideology as it gets put into

practice. I kept thinking of Egypt. And the ones still there, North

Korea, for example, let's not forget. Did you take it and enjoy

it as a drama? I have to make a confession, you are going to hate

me for this, I love Orwell very much, I love him as an essayist and

journalist, I have never liked his fiction, I think it is really very,

veryed bad. I think Animal Farl, the adaptation was terrific as far

as I was concerned, but the story was risable. I just can't believe

it. It is a parable. But it is also, you know, I felt this is a problem

I think with political art, actually. If the purpose of the art

is simply to make a political point, the art becomes secondary and

unnecessary and dry. It seemed much more interesting, like, hearing it

on the radio, it seemed much more like a teenage book? Absolutely,

that is what I would say. It is very good for students, it strikes

me that its lesson is very, very obvious. I agree, it is political

art and it dates very quickly and stays flat. It has a message to

purvey, and it does. It does it perfectly well. Once you know what

it is doing, and the parallel with Stalinism and any type of

corrupting, totalitarian force, you are awaiting the inevitable. It

doesn't go anywhere interesting. It is a children's book. It is an

excellent children's book. It is not YEA, it is a children's book,

that is what is good about it. That is why I like it T it is written as

a children's book, and yet the grown-ups understand. Both children

and adults understand it. I think the recording is one that I think

children will enjoy. They have the actors do the animal voices, so the

sheep are saying "four legs baaaa- d" so they can listen to it, adults

might find it too cute. Getting to know Eric Blair, what about

Dreaming, did you feel it was a successful drama? That I found flat.

It wasn't a perfomance, it was the text. This was all about him going

to visit? That is what I found flat, the disillusionment of the

revolutionary coming back to Britain after having participated

in the Spanish Civil War. But the characters are just defined by

ideology, the dialogue is wooden. I didn't find this entertaining and I

was waiting for it to be over. of course, was a new piece of

writing. Then we have the other adaptation, which some of us

managed to catch hold of, that was Christopher Eccleston, in Nineteen

Eighty-Four, I thought was riveting, I was looking at the radio when I

was listening to it? It is terrific. Agreeing with James almost entirely

about Orwell as an essayist, preferring him as an essayist

rather than fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four stands out. It is a

classic for a reason. It is obvious as well. It is much subtler, it is

much more complex, and it goes in other directions, it is bigger, it

has a psychology. It is written for adult. It is an adult version of

Animal Farm, Eccleston is fantastic. In the same way you talk about

Animal Farm and it being relevant without the Soviet bloc. If you

listen to Nineteen Eighty-Four and look around you, you think the

relevance is in so many different organisations and the way people

talk, it hasn't gone anywhere, it is as relevant as when it was

written? That is the relevance of him, the discussion of language,

the uses and abuses of language, how it can be used to manipulate

and deceive us. That is where for me, this essay, the gem of the

whole season. I remember reading this as a student, I remember being

delighted it was only 20-pages long, and I read it four times it was so

good. This is more relevent today than in 1946, now everyone has all

these cliches and euphamism, "touching base", "blue-sky

thinking". There is not a politician that wouldn't do well to

read this? One of the ironies about the essay written in 1945, is that

Orwell is completely disgusted with the quality of both or Asian and

the written word, and yet I put money down, if any of us went back

to 1945 we would be thrilled with the way people wrote and talk.

teach this don't you? I do, I think it is something that students

really need to come to grips with. It is like the economist school of

writing? He boils it down it a six basic principle, they are still

good principles of writing, but also of thinking. The key point he

make, something that I really tried to hammer foam, forgive the pun

from the last segment, with my students, thinking is inextricable

from language, you can't think well if you are not articulate, if you

become inarticulate your thoughts become fuzzy. Writing is a process

of thinking and refining your thinking. He reiterates in the

essay how important it is not to be lazy but search for the write word,

any writer knows that is the key to the whole enterprise. The whole

idea is we will have Orwell every year, is that merited, or do other

writers? I don't think we need to rescue Orwell from obscurity, it is

nice to revisit him every year, why not. I'm not sure that Orwell

himself would warm to the idea of "Orwell Day". The real George

Orwell season becomes on Radio 4 tomorrow. Louis CK is regarded as

one of the finest stand-ups of his generation, he honed his skills

which writingor David Letter plan and the likes of Chris Rock, he's

the writer, director and producer of the award winning series, Louie.

Who are you, what is your contribution, you are cute and have

a flat stomach and you are young. Why am I trying to impress you, why

not tell me about your God damn life and try to impress me. Why

He is such a big hit in America, what do you make of the sitcom, has

he done something radical with it? I'm not sure if it is radical yet.

We only saw the first few episode, it is going for three series in the

US. My friends and family rave about it. It becomes radical. In

the opening episodes he's feeling his way through it. It is certainly

smashing the conventions of the sitcom to an extraordinary degree

right from the outset. No narrative, long, long scenes. And inKong grus,

he will jump from one thing to the next, and will use the same people

from unepisode to the next. He's not interested in character

development and continuity in one sense. I have known his stand up

for a long time, I think he's hysterical, and wonderful at

breaking taboos and being inappropriate as you though there,

I was surprised at what a good actor he is, and how moving he is.

Gets these big sad eyes, and your heart goes out to him. You think

this guy is actually very, very interesting. This is definitely a

show to watch.'S A one man band, writer, producer, director, editor?

It is extraordinary, it surprises me on what you would think as a

commercial medium, an artist as quirky as Louis CK could be given

such freedom to do what he wants to do. He doesn't have to get his

scripts approved, he does everything. And the result of this

is a completely bizarre and wonderful programme, I found it

extremely funny as well. Probably not everyone's cup of tea. I

thought it was brilliant. I was amazed he found so many taboos to

break that hadn't already been broken. One after the other!

gave me hope for the future, apparently it is still possible to

be outrageous. On American television! Considering how out

there people have gotten lately, this was incredibly refreshing. One

of the things it does is it reveal, we have broken various taboo, most

having to do with sex, we have replaced them with others. You are

not supposed to have a shiftless, lazy, black bus driver, who doesn't

know the way to the broings zoo, and is going to throw Bronx Zoo,

and is going to throw it on you, and parks the bus because he lives

two blocks from there. Louie's poker night the scene goes on and

on, for seven minutes, becoming more out there. It is really rude,

really rude. Really rude, and really will offend some people

enormously. But it is funny. He just gets awhich with it being

funny? That scene, I would recommend anyone who hasn't seen

this programme to just watch that scene, you can probably find it on-

line. It is the most incredible seven-minute discussion that is

both offensive and amusing, and quite moving at times. Because in

order to have this conversation these guys have to be very friendly.

It is about homophobia, that is what they are taking on, we are

skirting around it, it is a bunch of straight guys with one gay

friend getting him to talk about gay sex. He says they are more

obsessed with gay sex than anybody else. Louie is running on the Fox

channel. You can find out about everything

we have discussed tonight on the website. Thank you very much to my

guested. We are off to the Green Room now for our a dram to

celebrate Burns Night, to raise a toast to the Bard, we are playing

out with a performance from 2009 from the wonderful musician Michael

Maram, who died last year. Here he is. Good night, slainte, and go Go

Andy Government -- go. # The lovely dears

# Ow noblist work she classes up # A painter's hand

# She tried on mine # Then she made the lassi, he's

# Green grow the rashs up # The sweetest tours that