Coffee-Table Notes

Norman Lear – Television producer, screenwriter Born July 27, 1922; died December 5 2023      Norman Lear, who has died aged 101, was a writer and television producer, whose sitcoms broke taboos to depict warts and all portrayals of working class lives. He did this most notably with All in the Family (1971-1979), in which blue collar New Yorker Archie Bunker offloaded his assorted prejudices onto his infinitely more enlightened family.   Based on Johnny Speight’s British sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part (1965-1975), All in the Family broke more than one mould. Thematically, its depiction of previously no-go areas for TV comedy such as racism, feminism, homosexuality, religion, and the Vietnam War was a daring intervention into the mainstream. Secondly, it was one of the first sit-coms to ditch pre-recorded laughter tracks, with the show taped in front of a live audience.    This combination saw Lear’s creation become regarded as one of the greatest American TV...

27 Hazel Johnson Hazel Johnson spent the first outing of her tenure as incoming director of Edinburgh’s Hidden Door festival, transforming the former Scottish Widows building into an expansive hive of artistic activity. Leading a tireless team of volunteers, Johnson aims to open up even more of the city’s hitherto unexplored spaces.   29 Fred Deakin Fred Deakin’s very personal rewind on his past in Club Life, a smash hit autobiographical excavation of the uniquely styled club nights the designer and one half of Lemon Jelly ran in Edinburgh in the late 1980s and early 1990s. More big nights out may follow.   32 Joseph Malik Joseph Malik’s heroic musical renaissance has been a thing of wonder. After several years out, the Edinburgh singer/composer/producer returned to become a favourite of Craig Charles’ Funk and Soul Show. With Proxima Ebony the latest of five albums in five years, Malik has truly found his time.   35 Neil Forsyth The final part of Neil Forsyth’s TV trilog...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It was Liverpool’s late, great Ayrshire born manager Bill Shankly who once famously declared football to be more serious than life and death. Let’s hope Shankly is looking down on this brand new play by Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse, developed and created with the women of Dundee Change Centre. Here, after all, is a tale of teamwork and togetherness for five women who triumph in the face of adversity both on and off the pitch in a way that is very serious indeed.   The game these women play is not some money driven sausage fest, but the Homeless World Cup, the international competition founded in 1999 for teams of homeless people, with a women’s event begun in 2008, and running annually since 2010.  Bryony Shanahan’s Traverse company production kicks off as the audience enter to a fanfare of happy hardcore bangers. With the women already warming up, they invite those in their seats to limber up alongside them on designer Alisa Ka...

When the first Scarred for Life book appeared in 2017, Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence’s bumper compendium of 1970s pop culture’s darker side tapped into a time when teatime kids’ TV seemed steeped in folk horror and dystopian sci-fi, and public information films gave you nightmares. A second volume did something similar for the 1980s.   A new Scarred for Life podcast takes this further, with Brotherstone and Lawrence joined by presenter Andy Bush as they ask suitably culty guests to confess three things from their childhood that genuinely terrified them.   “ Scarred for Life has always been a conversation,’ says Lawrence. “The original idea for the books came from conversations that Ste and I had over many years, the conversation continued in the live show Q&As with audiences, and it just seems a natural progression to take that conversation forwards in a podcast.’   Now five episodes in, Scarred for Life has seen the likes of producer/director/writer Jamie An...

Chris Parr – Theatre and television producer and director   Born 25 September 1943; died 24 November 2023   Chris Parr, who has died aged 80, was a producer and director, who led Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre during a crucial time in the new writing theatre’s history, before carving out a successful career as a TV producer. With little interest in the London or international theatre scenes, Parr was, according to Joyce McMillan in her book, The Traverse Theatre Story (1988), the nearest thing the Traverse had to a working class director.   Parr’s career, McMillan said, was ‘marked by a cultural antipathy to the British establishment, and its metropolitan values’. What this meant in real terms was opening the door on an already vocal wave of Scottish writers who spoke directly in their own voice. Both Tom McGrath’s play, The Hardman (1977), written by McGrath with convicted murderer Jimmy Boyle, and The Slab Boys (1978), by John Byrne, were produced during Parr’s tenure. ...

Stills, Edinburgh Five stars   Over the last decade, Craig Atkinson’s Café Royal imprint has become one of the most vital platforms for documentary photography in the UK. Since 2012, an array of artists have utilised Café Royal’s punky A5 zine-like format across some 600 editions and rising to produce a street-smart archive of a population at work, rest and play. These have ranged from short form photo essays by well-known artists including Martin Parr and Syd Shelton, to less familiar but just as vital fly on the wall witnesses to a pre digital, pre gentrified age.   All life is here, be it on red brick streets, in back street boozers and social clubs, out of season seaside towns and 1990s raves. Middle-aged matriarchs scream in close up at 1980s wrestling.  Ballardian breezeblock monoliths reach for the sky in what we used to call concrete jungles .    This exhibition consolidates Atkinson’s tireless vision in collecting and curating the vast swathes of materi...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars  Waking up in a bin at the back of Wetherspoon’s is something of an occupational hazard for the kid with the unfortunate surname played by Mark Thomas in Ed Edwards’ play. What happens to his mate who joined him on the mother of all benders, however, is even less pleasant.   Thomas’ boy, on the other hand, lives to tell the tale, as he is left with one more set of war wounds in a life already scarred by an upbringing marked by violence, loss and a messy descent into drug use. The shadow that hangs over all this is his dad, himself a casualty of war as cannon fodder caught in the crossfire of colonial genocide in Malaya.    Drawing from real life experience, Edwards’ monologue is brought to full brutal life in Cressida Brown’s production. Thomas’ confessionals are pulsed along by MJ McCarthy’s low-key but insistent sound design, and wrapped in occasional swathes of Richard Williamson’s blood red lighting.    Seen earlie...

  John Byrne – 6 January 1940 - 30 November 2023  “I was brought up in Ferguslie Park,” painter, playwright and all round polymath John Byrne told Scottish Art News in 2014 of the Paisley housing estate he grew up in. “And I remember thanking God when we moved there, because I knew then that I had all the things I needed for whatever it was that I wanted to do.”   Ferguslie Park was never far away in everything that followed, right up  to Byrne’s death aged 83 following a long and maverick career that saw him renowned as an artist of vigorous imagination, be it as a painter, playwright or stage set designer.    As the 2022 retrospective at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum –  John Byrne: A Big Adventure  - showed, Byrne’s output was a vast and deeply personal affair. The exhibition was also recognition for an artist whose first experience of Kelvingrove came as a child, when he saw works by Titian and Salvador Dali's ‘Christ of Saint John of the ...

2023: WTF is going on? As The KLF come into view once more by way of the BFI’s forthcoming DVD collection of assorted videos and films from the self styled ‘Stadium House’ duo of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, you might well ask. Cauty and Drummond, after all, aka Rockman Rock and King Boy D, gatecrashed the pop charts in the 1980s with their epic brand of conceptual rabble rousing before self-destructing at the 1992 BRIT Awards. As The K Foundation, they rebooted late twentieth century pop culture as we knew it, burning a million quid as they went.    23 Seconds to Eternity – The Collected films of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The KLF and The Timelords (1988-1992) brings together video clips for assorted smash hits including 3 A.M. Eternal, What Time is Love? and Justified and Ancient. The collection also features rarely seen ‘ambient road movie’ The White Room (1989), plus restored or previously unreleased shorts, all directed by Bill Butt.   For long-term K watcher...

Summerhall, Edinburgh Four stars Love, apparently, is not only the true meaning of Christmas. According to less than sharp suited corporate wonks Warren and Stew, love is the driving force behind crypto currency, that curiously intangible online exchange that has apparently made some who buy into it exceedingly rich. Once the emperor’s new currency becomes worthless, alas, they become very poor indeed.    Warren and Stew’s hapless evangelical spiel comes with a bargain basement alternative to the bells and whistles power point presentations beloved of the regular corporate lecture circuit where many of their ilk tout their wares. To whit, a more interactive exchange - read that as audience participation - involves life size block chain choreography and anti banking escapology. There is a lo-fi re-enactment of a couple of Christmas crackers - sorry, classics - and a chocolate coin chucking competition that has shades of 1970s kids TV riot, Runaround. The retro feel is heightene...

Dundee Rep Five stars One could be forgiven for thinking the mountain of flight cases piled in the centre of an otherwise empty stage is for an impending rock concert. Especially as Dundee Rep’s  troupe of actors are milling about the auditorium in standard issue front of house apparel before this new musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ festive classic by Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie, aka Noisemaker.   Don’t be fooled, however, because while the cast eventually get to the story of Scrooge’s wake up call from miserdom after they channel a dressing up box of story books past, best keep an eye on those flight cases. As designer Emily James’ ingenious construction morphs into everything from a flying bed to a grave to something a lot more seasonal, the tower becomes integral to the show’s action.   The monumentally arranged pile is pretty much the only thing that stands still in Andrew Panton’s non-stop burl of a production, first seen in 2022...