Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A man carrying a box: it says something for Jonah Hill’s talents that he can conjure up a character – in fact a little short story – in one expressive pose. In Rupert Goold’s True Story he plays real-life New York Times journalist Michael Finkel acting ‘on well-intentioned-schlub setting’, as Radio Times film critic Andrew Collins puts it in his review (schlub is North American derogatory slang for a ‘talentless, unattractive or boorish person’, so definitely not like Jonah Hill).
Katherine Waterston’s character Daniels, has all the kit she needs to terraform a lush alien planet. What could possibly go wrong?
Good to see Michael Rosen smiling again in last week’s Radio Times. This time last year, he was in an induced coma with a 50-50 chance of surviving Covid-19. In his latest book, Many Different Kinds of Love A story of life, death and the NHS, he recounts his near-death experience, illustrated by Chris Riddell.
this is a beautiful book about love, life and the NHS that celebrates the power of community and the indomitable spirits of the people who keep us well.
Waterstones’ website
Martin Luther King features in a couple of television documentaries this week, giving me an opportunity to draw him from two small black and white photographs. That rather unusual angle, looking up at his face, might explain why I struggled with proportions in my first attempt.
“Jolly nice meeting you but I’m sorry, you won’t ever make a film because your face is wrongly arranged.”
Director giving Judi Dench advice after an audition in 1960, as recalled in conversation with Richard Eyre on the BBC.
Glad that she didn’t listen to the advice. In Lindsay Shapero’s Red Joan, a spy drama based on actual events, she plays Joan Stanley, accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Russians. So a complete contrast to ‘M’.
I enjoyed John Malkovich’s older Hercule Poirot solving The ABC Murders a few years ago, introducing a rather darker version of the detective and convincingly evoking what I imagine a 1930s atmosphere should be. I loved that he had an apartment in the mansions near the Royal Albert Hall, as that was such a familiar spot in my student days as I walked to and from the Kensington Gore building of the Royal College of Art.
I’m studying Quentin Blake’s approach to illustration at the moment which is why I’ve tried to free up my drawing here. Blake’s hands are rarely observed with anatomical precision but they’re so confidently drawn and so expressive of the individual character that they look completely convincing.
But I feel uncomfortable deliberately drawing hands so rapidly, without attempting to observe every individual joint. Folds in material I’m happier with, as they’re fluid and semi-abstract anyway.
Yes, he has turned out looking rather like Ralph Vaughan Williams in my drawing but this is rumpled Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby, Neil Dudgeon’s lead character in ITV’s Midsomer Murders.
Hopefully the good inspector won’t have any trouble from these characters, Riz Ahmed’s Omar and Kayvan Novak’s Waj, the hapless northerners in Four Lions who attempt to train crows as bombers. I love the expression on the crow’s face.
And I’m sure that no crows were harmed during location filming in the hills around Sheffield.
These were all drawn from photographs in last week’s Radio Times, as was Sunny, played by Sajeev Bhaskar, another character from Unforgotten. Professor John Wright is a clinician and epidemiologist at the Bradford Royal Infirmary.
I had probably held more birds than stringed instruments, and the feeling reminded me of scooping a hen from its perch, its body always lighter than I expect, and pulsing with life.
Helena Attlee, Lev’s Violin, 2021
Helena Attlee, author of An Italian Adventure and The Land Where Lemons Grow, The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit, appears on the Books Page of this week’s Radio Times, on the trail of the “mongrel history” of a worn and weathered violin in her new book Lev’s Violin.
In a photograph in this week’s Radio Times, Maria Schrader’s character Lenora has the detached, intense look of one of a woman in a Stanley Spencer painting. Deutschland 89, a German-American spy drama, is currently showing on More4.
Emil Hostina is a Securitate agent, hunkered down with her in a safe house in Timisoara, Romania, at the time of the fall of the Ceausescu regime.
I love the theatricality of the production. I wouldn’t want to stay with these two if they opened and bed & breakfast in Scarborough, but they’re wonderful characters to draw. Perhaps Deutschland will be looking for an artist in residence for their next series?
Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
That makes it sound as if his work could be a bit tough, but he’s just as likely to get audiences laughing and applauding as he is to get them fired up with indignation or empathic and thoughtful.
Linton Kwesi Johnson, poet and best-selling reggae artist, is only the second living poet and the only black British poet to have his work published as a Penguin Classic.