Like most Apprentice fans, there was one guarantee that kept me watching week after week. It wasn’t the stupidity of the contestants, nor Alan Sugar’s poor attempts at wit. Rather, it was the assurance of a look (sometimes many) of sheer disdain at the contestants from Lord Sugar’s faithful aide (and sidekick), Nick Hewer. Imagine, then, my delight, when I learnt that everyone’s favourite cynic was to take over as the new host of Countdown in 2012.

This excitement was, nonetheless, soon marred by a few slight worries. Would Hewer’s disdain be ever present during Countdown? Would he, rather than being liked by the Countdown team, be regarded as an aloof and unfriendly presence on an otherwise ideal show for grannies to watch over a cup of tea and a biscuit? Worst of all…would he actually ruin both his own career, and a loveable programme, by being a poor match? Thankfully, my fears were unfounded. Rather than being disdainful, Hewer has been mostly rather charming. Admittedly, that could also have been disastrous…but Hewer manages it wonderfully. His charm, believe it or not, is utterly genuine. He doesn’t overdo it and make the viewer feel queasy. Indeed, he’s certainly happy to let contestants know how he feels. I recall watching him chastise an otherwise very successful contestant after his poor attempt to guess the conundrum as “Mosquited” (It was actually ‘misquoted’). He responded with the air of disappointment that a teacher feels when their top student says something stupid in class: “Don’t be ridiculous…coming from a champ!” and three tuts. As if this wasn’t enough, he then appealed to the audience for the answer by claiming that there was “abject failure” on the contestants’ part. The man takes no prisoners.

Throughout the past two weeks, Hewer’s been slowly trying to settle in. He gives the audience regular updates on what number show he’s at, how much he’s still enjoying it, and how he’s getting to know the mechanics of the show. His introductions and goodbyes in every show take a little longer than they should (indeed, one never really knows when he’s finished with them!). He awkwardly tries banter with Rachel and regularly flirts with her (when Rachel recently claimed she’d have to take a numbers game home, for instance, he responded with “you can take me home!’). 

And…it works perfectly. The past three presenters have been good. Their chat was less awkward, they said the right words and they kept things professional. But the yardstick for any long-term Countdown fan is the late Richard Whiteley. Whiteley was neither polished nor ‘showbiz’. Whiteley appealed to people because he was genuine, likeable and that little bit mischievous. Hewer shares these qualities. Between his slightly awkward banter that brings an inevitable smile, and his cheeky comments to his female colleagues, Hewer is like the granddad everyone would visit and enjoy having at home for Christmas. For students and OAPs alike, then, Nick is just the ticket. Long may he reign!

If Blur had put down their guitars, acquired some synthesizers, stumbled upon a pitch-modification tool, and tried their hands at house music, it might have sounded a little like The 2 Bears.

To my mind, The 2 Bears, otherwise known as Joe Goddard and Ref Rundell, might just be the next big thing in the world of what has come to be known as (fairly or otherwise) indie electronica. If you haven’t heard ‘Bear Hug’ yet on a night out, undeniably a dance anthem as ridiculous as it is brilliant, then you surely will soon.

Anything Joe Goddard (of Hot Chip fame) turns his mind to comes out as an eclectic mix, to say the least: be it the chilled, summer’s day vibes of ‘The Birds and the Bees’, the atmospheric house of ‘Take A Look Around’, or the funky, country feel of ‘Time in Mind.’ Be Strong, their first full length EP, is no exception. If anything can be said of The 2 Bears, it is that they’ll work with any sound that tickles their fancy, as long as it gets people moving. That said, Goddard and Rundell are undoubtedly on their best form when they lay down an uncompromising, unashamedly pop-laced house track. ‘Be Strong’, a winning floor-stopper, sets a high standard right from the off, and marks the beginning of a record that, albeit with a few drastic diversions, becomes an increasingly subtle and sophisticated take on house music throughout.

While ‘Bear Hug’ is a track likely to find itself knocking shoulders with Hit 40 UK, the likes of ‘Take A Look Around’, ‘Faith’ and ‘Church’ seem more suited to the underground house sounds of Maceo Plex, Maya Jane Coles and Deniz Kurtel (with an obviously more pop oriented slant). This, for me, is why Be Strong is such a successful album. Joe Goddard and Raf Rundell have an honest, all-embracing approach to dance music that allows them to at once produce catchy, eclectic floor-filling anthems and the sincere, intelligent house music that characterises the album as a whole.

3.5 STARS

If anyone’s entitled to have old ideas, it’s Leonard Cohen. His first book of poetry was published in 1956; his first album eleven years later. At seventy-seven, the Methuselah of Montreal could be forgiven for hanging up his trademark fedora; but his humour and humility remain intact.

Attendees at the listening party for this, his twelfth album, are greeted with typical self-deprecation: ‘I won’t be facing you during the playback, so you don’t need to guard your expressions’, and its lead-off single is a hymn of self-abasement. ‘Show me the place where you want your slave to go,’ Cohen begins over gentle piano, speaking more than singing these days. Redolent with the biblical imagery of stones and suffering, it has the complete exhaustion of a weary supplicant at the end of a long pilgrimage, laying an offering at an altar.

Many of the songs here are concerned with the imagery of conclusion, from the slow shuffle of ‘Going Home’ to the bluesy ‘Darkness’, its insistent three-note riff advancing like the footsteps of a monster in a horror movie. Cohen has always sounded like he’s writing his own epitaph; these days, he could use his voice as the chisel. What’s most striking here is its intimate centrality: it’s lacquered mahogany, and the production lets you see every grain. At the launch, his interviewer Jarvis Cocker comments on the feeling that the singer could be in the room with every single person listening. ‘I intend to,’ Cohen responds.

It’s this wit that rescues the work from morbidity; that allows it to be what it’s always been: ‘a manual for living with defeat’. Bathetic turns of phrase undermine grand conceits: ‘I dreamed about you baby/You were wearing half your dress/ I know you hate me/Could you hate me less?’ The sacred and the profane rub shoulders, and rather more besides.

Old Ideas is exactly the album you’d expect it to be; it’s not a title that promises novelty. ‘How old exactly are the ideas?’, one journalist asks its author. ‘About 2614 years,’ he deadpans back. Like most of Cohen’s work, it’s funny because it’s true.

4 STARS

In the past, Tim Hecker’s pieces have been described as ‘cathedral electronic music’. Ravedeath, his sixth solo album, is a direct response to this. Its foundations are a series of organ recordings from Fríkirkjan í Reykjavík, with the ‘overt spirituality and traditional theological elements’ of the sound removed. Hecker used to be ‘very wary of working with acoustic sounds. I thought it was a ham-fisted way of dealing with the real aesthetic issues: the limitations and insufficiencies of digital based music.’

In previous works, all acoustic instrumentation was pummelled beyond recognition, the source smothered. ‘I’m becoming more and more comfortable with letting traditional instruments not be cloaked in reverb. I’ve slowly brought in organic instrumentation over time but tried to do it in a way that keeps the potential for abstraction and sound transformation, and that liminality between being discernible, and not.’

Ravedeath, clocking in at 52 minutes, ‘buttresses up against contemporary penchants for short, digestible pop material; the alleged shorter attention spans of modern youths.’ The album functions as a continuous piece, but is subdivided ‘into shorter movements that keep the work’s integrity, but index it.’ Even so, ‘I always find the tracks a little underwhelming when taken out of the context of the work. I always want a piece of music to stand on its own, whether it’s a short piece or not. It needs to have an immediately suggestive quality to it that holds up outside of the context of the record.’

‘I’m not the kind of person who lines up my ten best tracks and presses burn on the CD player, album finished.’ This is the point at which Hecker starts to create an album, ‘which is a process of revisiting, layering and working the record like a composition.’

Hecker’s upcoming organ concert in London on 6th February ‘sold out in five days, still two months before the date. We try to make it work better for us since it’s so expensive setting everything up, buying the PA and miking up the organ, so for the first time in my life I decided to do two gigs in one night.’ For all the preparation, ‘you can’t really expect anything from the concert because there are so many unknowns. It relies on a sensitive feedback system between the organ (which runs through a computer and goes out of the PA system). You have both the organ filling the space in the traditional way, and the processed sounds being played through the PA system. The live space is associated with a lot of errors and things aren’t ideal, but there are also fleeting moments that are gone. I enjoy that aspect of it.’

The venue, St. Giles-in-the-Fields church, strikes me as an interesting one, as are most of the places Hecker is invited to play at – theatres and gallery spaces, for example. You rarely find him on the bill of the local O2 Academy. To him, ‘space is always an important consideration. Inappropriate places can ruin a concert.’

‘I would prefer the concert not to be in a religious space. It’s not saying that I’m going to deliver a spiritual experience just because the concert is in a church. I prefer secular spaces for that because they are stripped of any spiritual expectation.’ The spiritual connection is an obvious one for me. The density of the sound and the seemingly infinite layers envelope you. Although the message isn’t a spiritual one, there are ‘people who say they had a moment; a really great moment of loss of self, which is as much as you can ask for. I’m happy however people take it and try not to be too prescriptive about the correct way to digest my music.’

It’s tempting to think we might have seen and done with film-noir. One term bandied about is Chiaroscuro, a word to describe those blacker than blacks and whiter than whites. Or ‘femme fatale’, the deadly women with Jennifer Rabbit sized swinging hips. We shouldn’t fool ourselves in thinking we know the hard-boiled detective just because we know his name. It’s like only half-remembering a picture-book. 

‘Neo-Noir’ (Reservoir Dogs, Memento, Blue Velvet) certainly owes a great deal to the violent crime films of the 40s. The pseudo-philosophy babble of the Joker in The Dark Knightresembles closely the amorality offered by Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949). Atop a ferris wheel, Welles gives us an anarchic vision, offering his friend a hypothetical 20,000 dollars for every person he would kill: ‘Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever … Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare’. Yet our familiarity with noir’s obvious descendants can make us seek out the stereotypes and prevent our discovering more surprising films.
 
Parodies can grant us something of a side-ways perspective. Beat the Devil (1953) is director John Huston’s camp reworking of some of his earlier films like The Maltese Falcon(1941). The actors can’t take their roles seriously, as if film noir had already hardened into a cliché. Wide-eyed Jennifer Jones, sick of her dull husband, implausibly suggests to Bogart that ‘you could have him done away with’ or later, utters the unintentionally laughable: ‘I think you’re doctors, evil ones I mean’. Leaning in for the kiss, Bogart and Jones suppress a giggle just as the camera fades. It’s only a short step from here to Leslie Nielsen accident prone detective Frank Drebin of The Naked Gun, who spoofs the smart-talk of noir films. Without a badge, Drebin worries: ‘Just think; next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested.’ 
 
The only way to really discover noir is to go back and watch a medley of the films. The Maltese Falcon is one of the most entertaining. Sam Spade churns out one-liners faster than a bag of fortune-cookies: ‘I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble’, ‘When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it’. Noir can be funnier than we expect. It can also be more brutal than Tarantino’s colorful homages, riddled with wanderers, addicts and implausibly violent veterans. Detour (1945), ends with Tom Neal tugging on a telephone cable winding under a locked door, inadvertently strangling a drunken Ann Savage to death.
 
Instead of referring to the manual, you’d be wise to follow Philip Marlowe of The Big Sleep (1946) and throw away the book which gives us ‘diagrams on page 47 of how to be a detective in 10 easy lessons’. Instead, pursue the Marlowe of Murder my Sweet into a drug induced nightmare, into the dark heart of the hard-boiled genre: ‘I dived in. It had no bottom.’ 

Doug Glatt is a goon, in more ways than one. The font of all knowledge that is Wikipedia tells us that a goon is ‘a personal bodyguard or a ruffian who is kept on staff to intimidate or batter people’. Doug does all of these things, and more. Somewhat ostracised by his brainy family, he is eventually signed to a Canadian ice-hockey team as in ‘enforcer’, which means he is to beat up anyone who gets in his team’s way. Because, you know, ice-hockey is the only professional sport where, not only does fighting occur an awful lot, but it seems to be actively encouraged.

This may seem like a new and unique plot, but actually, it’s been done before. And it will be done again. Slap Shot (1977) followed pretty much exactly this premise, and did remarkably well at box office, as well as being praised as the greatest hockey film of time, beating out stiff competition such as The Mighty Ducks, and, er, …(?) Whilst Goon was actually based on a true story, it plays out very similar to a song by Warren Zevon called ‘Hit Somebody’, and so the success of this movie must have been particularly tedious for filmmaker Kevin Smith, who is also in the process of making a hockey film based on that same song. Ouch.

The eponymous Goon is played by Seann William Scott, who surprises everyone but not simply reprising Stifler, but by playing a character who is somehow much, much dumber. However, he is good-natured at heart and his ridiculous bumbling lines and physical actions are really what make this film what it is: a laugh out loud comedy. It appears that director Michael Dowse really doesn’t give a puck when it comes to gratituous violence. The blood and gore in this movie makes the Canadian seal hunt look tame in comparison.

Starring alongside Scott are Liev Schreiber as Ross Rhea, the infamous enforcer of a rival team who Glatt will inevitably face at some point, and Alison Pill as Eva, a promiscuous local girl with whom Glatt falls in love. All in all, this film isn’t smart, nor does it try to be. It comes out, fists a-blazing, and doesn’t let up till the final buzzer, and it’s not just the laughter that’ll have you in stitches.

2 STARS

The thing that always captivated me about Margaret Thatcher was her voice. Rich and resonant, booming and sonorous, it gave her the ability to use such Churchillian rhetoric  as “I am in politics because of the battle between good and evil” and sound determined and compelling where most politicians would simply sound ridiculous. The Iron Lady succeeds at having Meryll Streep turn in a thrilling performance which embodies the mannerisms that made Britain’s first female Prime Minister so arresting a figure; this is fortunate because the film succeeds at little else. There are effectively two films here, the first following the elderly Thatchers struggle with dementia and the loss of her husband Dennis, and the other being a chronicle of Thatchers political career. The intention seemingly is to show the prizefighter at both the zenith of her powers and the pity of obscurity, a la De Niro in Raging Bull.

But the films screenplay is formless and mediocre, and never develops any of its themes nearly enough to deliver emotional resonance. Mrs Thatchers attachment to Dennis is somewhat touching, but for a love story to have any impact, the audience must be privy to the struggles of the couple throughout there relationship. There is a perfunctory scene before Margaret runs for leader of the Conservative Party where her husband accuses her of putting her family before politics, but this theme, which is still a cliché in the best political films, gets barely two minutes treatment and comes off as hackneyed and saccharine. Regardless of whether you agree with her politics, Margaret Thatcher was a woman who refused to compromise on points of principle and revelled in battle, whether against the Trade Unions, the European Commission, the Labour Party, the Argentinian Junta or those in her cabinet she derided as “wets.” But none of her adversaries are given more than a minutes screen time, and this makes it impossible for her battles to seem at all compelling. The film constantly stresses how she will never compromise or back down, but we never see Thatchers resolve truly tested, nor the consequences of her actions examined in any depth.

The film seems to have been made purely as Oscar bait for Streep, as the camera virtually never leaves her. Britain in this time of turbulence is shown through a few short, hectic montages of protest and conflict and the contrast between these styles is so jarring that they never gell; at no point do you ever get the feeling that Thatcher is the historical figure she was. Hollywood blockbusters rarely go into political depth, but at a time when the worldwide Neo-Liberal consensus of which she was so instrumental in implementing is starting to break down while her predictions about German hegemony in Europe or the infeasibility of the European single currency that were dismissed in 1990 as “paranoia” are being vindicated, a film that critically examined Thatchers legacy would have been timely and relevant. As it stands, The Iron Lady is quite forgettable.

TWO STARS

Borgen, produced by the broadcasting company behind The Killing, is a Danish political thriller in ten parts. The drama centers on Birgitte Nyborg, leader of the Moderate Party, as an unexpected turn of events places her in a position to become Denmark’s first female Prime Minister. The drama traces both what takes place in parliament and how this is reported by the media, focusing in particular on the television reporter Katrine Fønsmark.

Although the basis of the plot – Birgitte’s struggle to retain her honesty and ethics whilst being a strong leader of her party – gives it the potential to fall into cliché, her personal drama is presented in a way that is original and convincing. Her closing statement at the end of a televised debate bears worrying resemblances to Nick Clegg’s performance before the 2010 election, but is saved by Sidse Babett Knudsen’s charisma in her role and the deftly scripted combination of almost unbelievable but heartwarming promises with some comparatively concrete criticisms of current politics.

Furthermore, although Birgitte Nyborg (unlike the heroines of similar dramas, such as Sarah Lund in The Killing and Bel Rowley in The Hour) has a functioning family life, the director’s portrayal of her happy home life is neither abbreviated (it does not appear to be there purely to prove that she has one) nor romanticised: just as much care is put into these scenes as into those set in Parliament, resulting in the creation of a character who, despite being such an impressive woman, does not alienate her audience. Knudsen is the leading light of the drama, seamlessly combining a politician who is brave enough to change her policy on live television with a forty-something woman whose skirts are getting too tight.

Some would criticise the drama for its omission of actual politics and its focus instead on political practice — presumably to avoid bias – and would argue that to give one without the other is automatically to give a partial view of the political world (we are essentially persuaded that Birgitte must be the right choice for Prime Minister not because of her values themselves, but simply because she sticks to those values). I have no real objection on this count as Birgitte and her unstated policies are fictional, and hypocrisy seems to me just as pertinent a focus as political values.

4.5 STARS

Mephisto tells the astonishing true story of the progress of the most sexually and politically radical cabaret troupe of 1930s Germany, The Peppermill. The club was set up in 1929 by siblings Erika and Klaus Mann (children of the internationally famous playwright Thomas Mann). Erika established the club with the aim, which now seems charmingly naïve, of promoting communism through theatre. Klaus was a homosexual writer, slightly lost after a short-lived engagement to a childhood friend, and happy enough to write the sketches for his sister’s quirky theatre troupe. 

At the start of the 30s the club flourished with a string of risqué productions: they mocked Hitler’s traditional values and flaunted their social (and sexual) deviance. Their sketches depicted lesbian foreplay, they employed black dancers and their lead actor was a Jew. Mephisto tracks the real-life rise and eventual fall of the club, as members of the company were forced to flee from Germany or face arrest

When Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, many of the left-wing actors and directors were forced out of Germany. This left a wealth of new positions suddenly available for those whose racial and political backgrounds passed Nazi inspection. The dilemma faced by Hendrik, the main character in Mephisto, was one that affected every actor who remained in Germany: whether to accept the job offers flooding in from theatres in Berlin and Munich (generally under Nazi control), or whether to reject them and let other, less scrupulous actors become the stars. Their decisions were usually pragmatic rather than principled. 

Of those who left Germany, most of The Peppermill club — including Klaus and Erika Mann – reformed in Switzerland where they continued their anti-Hitler performances. They quickly built up a huge fan base and spent several years touring Europe before the rioting  of Swiss Nazis in Zurich meant they had to move on. Next they tried America but the Yankee appetite for European political satire was limited, and their run ended after just a few weeks. 

Most of the troupe wandered back to Europe or lived out the rest of their lives in the States. Erika Mann started a relationship with one of the cabaret’s leading actresses (and then had affairs with several others). She became a journalist and at the end of the war she and Klaus were forced to leave America due to FBI investigations into their homosexual and communist activities. She moved back to Germany, eventually becoming one of the few female writers to cover the Nuremburg Trials.

Klaus coped less well and  found life in post-war Berlin unbearable. When his novel, Mephisto, was rejected for publication in Germany he committed suicide. And what of the character of Hendrik, who had stayed in Germany to progress his career? He was invited to join the Berlin State Theatre (now under Hitler’s thumb) and in a brilliant ‘meta’ twist made his name starring in a production of Faust as the man who sells his soul to the devil. 

Many from The Peppermill tried to recreate their old lives after the war. But the intensity of life as seen in Mephisto – the sex and the music and the politics – must have been uniquely thrilling and they never regained that sexual liberty.  In a sense they were the first hippies of the twentieth century. With their liberal attitude to sex and drugs and incestuous relationships, they took ‘free love’ to a new level.

‘Mephisto’ adapted by Ariane Mnouchkine is showing at the Playhouse from 22nd-25th February