The Culture Show

Lauren Laverne, BBC

An eclectic mix of old and new masters come out to play in this week’s ( 9th Feb) hotchpotch of gay icons, quivering electro, and genuine hobo blues.

Method artist and self confessed dandy-masochist Sebastian Horsley introduces Guido Reni’s suggestive paintings of Saint Sebastian, brought together for the first time by Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Refusing to be upstaged by any picture, a bare-chested Horsley, tied to a tree and shot through with arrows, strikes his own pose of ‘beautiful suffering’. According to the artist, who staged his own crucifixion in 2000, the paintings are a little lacking in the horror department. The less said here about his views on the revitalising benefits of pain, the better. Next item please.

An unremarkable featurette with Mark Kermode rounding up the week’s big film releases - among them Julien Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood - shows the critic at his smug best, and warrants some feeble nodding-dog action from presenter Lauren Laverne.

Luckily geeky punk-funkster band Foals (no ‘the’) are only a link away, and blast in with some jangling electro.
But Laverne is still hanging around to put a damper on things, silencing the Foalsters mid-song like a mum crashing band practice.
Foals are better off playing then talking; vocalist Yannic, peering through a greasy curtain of hair, looks like he’d rather crawl under a rock and die than be interviewed on a high profile TV show, and almost says as much.
But their awkward innocence is endearing, rare in a band already subject to considerable media hype.

Offsetting all this testosterone, two remarkable women, Canadian country singer k.d. Lang, and French-Iranian film director and novelist Marjane Satrapi, speak out about their relationship with themselves, and with their work.
Lang, after 16 disillusioned years out of the spotlight, is about to tour her new ‘coming of age’ record, Watershed.

Satrapi made waves in Iran with cult graphic novel Persepolis, an autobiographical account of a girl growing up during the Islamic Revolution, and now an Oscar-nominated animated film.

Lang is less fierce than Satrapi, who aggressively hammers home the seriousness of her art, but both women sparkle with talent, leaving the glassy-eyed Laverne to flop like a wet rag in their wake.

An electric performance from gravel-voiced 'Seasick' Steve Wold, the man bringing back original boogie blues to the White Stripes generation, makes all else pale in comparison.

A show whose draw rests solely on the appeal of its line-up is never going to be anything other than hit and miss. Tune in, tune out, turn down the boring bits, but listen up for Seasick Steve.

Rosie Jackson
The Culture Show, Saturdays, 6.55pm, BBC2

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