Saturday Review

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelists Terence Blacker and Deborah Moggach and theatre writer David Benedict review the week's cultural highlights including Anna Nicole.

Anna Nicole is a new opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas, starring Eva-Maria Westbroek as Anna Nicole Smith - the Texan waitress and Playboy pin-up who acheived fame and notoriety when she married an 89 year old oil billionaire.

Tim Pears' novel Disputed Land is narrated by Theo, looking back on a childhood Christmas when his entire family was summoned to his grandparents' house in Shropshire for reasons which were not immediately obvious.

The jumping off point for Enda Walsh's play Penelope is the fate of the suitors who were vying for the hand of Odysseus's wife in Homer's epic poem. Here there are four of them remaining, with expanding waistlines and receding hairlines, occupying an empty swimming pool ouside Penelope's house and wooing her via CCTV.

Robert Popper's new comedy on Channel 4 - Friday Night Dinner - stars Tamsin Greig and Paul Ritter as parents who are joined every Friday evening by their twentysomething sons played by Simon Bird and Tom Rosenthal for an uneasy and fractious meal.

Watercolour at Tate Britain is an exhibition which spans 800 years and brings together over 200 works including pieces by historic artists such as William Blake, Thomas Girtin and JMW Turner, through to modern and contemporary artists including Patrick Heron, Peter Doig and Tracey Emin.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests, poet Craig Raine and writers Susan Jeffreys and Kevin Jackson, review the week's cultural highlights including the remake of True Grit.

The Coen Brothers' version of True Grit stars Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn - the role which finally secured an Oscar for John Wayne in Henry Hathaway's 1969 film. Cogburn is a grizzled US Marshal who is co-opted by 14 year old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) to track down the man who shot her father.

Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour is being revived at the Comedy Theatre in London, starring Keira Knightley and Elizabeth Moss as Karen and Martha - two women who have set up a successful girls' school. Their lives are transformed when rumours that they are lovers begin to circulate.

In 1995 poet Sarah Manguso started experiencing symptoms which were finally diagnosed as being caused by a chronic auto-immune condition. Antibodies in her blood were stripping the myelin coating from her nerves. The Two Kinds of Decay is her memoir of the seven years of successive relapses which she experienced.

Sexual Nature is an exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London which explores the extraordinary range of behaviour and adaptation that has developed to service the ends of sexual reproduction. Included in the exhibition are several of Isabella Rossellini's idiosyncratic Green Porno short films.

The latest classic that Andrew Davies has adapted for BBC1 is Winifred Holtby's 1936 novel South Riding. It stars Anna Maxwell Martin as Sarah Burton - a forward thinking young headmistress who takes up a new post in a Yorkshire town and becomes embroiled in local corruption over land deals.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests - writers Sarfraz Manzoor and Bidisha and musician Pat Kane - review the week's cultural highlights including The Fighter.

Boxing half-brothers Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) are the central characters in David O. Russell's film The Fighter. Dicky's attempts at a comeback are hampered by his crack addiction, while Micky finds himself playing second fiddle to his brother instead of establishing his own career in the ring.

The Champion by Tim Binding is a novel which explores the yuppie era and its fall-out through the eyes of Charles Pemberton - a perpetually disappointed young man who sees the old order of his small hometown in Kent swept away by the charismatic and forceful entrepreneur Clark Rossiter.

Greenland, at the National Theatre in London, is a play about the challenges of climate change, written by four playwrights - Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne. It takes the form of a collage of overlapping narratives, many of which deal with the gap between our intellectual and emotional responses to the problem.

The work of artist Susan Hiller often deals with hallucinations, dreams and supernatural beliefs. A retrospective exhibition of her work at Tate Britain in London brings together work from her 40 year career.

Peter Kosminsky's new drama for Channel 4 - The Promise - deals with Palestine just after the Second World War, when British troops were vainly trying to keep the peace between Jewish refugees arriving from Europe and the region's Arab inhabitants. Claire Foy plays Erin - a young girl who finds the diary which her grandfather kept while he was stationed there and takes it with her when she visits Israel with a friend.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Liz Jensen, historian Dominic Sandbrook and academic John Mullan review the week's cultural highlights.

Boardwalk Empire was created by former Sopranos co-writer Terence Winter and is being shown on Sky Atlantic. Set in Prohibition era Atlantic City, it stars Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson - a man who seems to have a finger in just about every pie in town. The first episode was directed by Martin Scorsese - it's rumoured to be the most expensive TV pilot ever shot.

The 'O' in the title of O: A Presidential Novel by Anonymous is Barack Obama. The author is apparently "an anonymous insider who has spent years observing US politics and its players" and someone who "has been in the room with Obama". The novel tracks Obama through the next two years of his presidency, culminating in the October 2012 election.

Nominated for an Oscar in the Foreign Language Film and Best Actor categories, Biutiful is a film by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, set in Barcelona, which stars Javier Bardem as Uxbal - a terminally ill man who is trying to make amends for the mistakes that he's made and put his life in order during his final months.

Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales at the Lyric Hammersmith in London features six of Dahl's short stories adapted for the stage by Jeremy Dyson who first came to prominence through The League of Gentlemen. The title alludes to the twist in the tail which was typical of the stories Dahl wrote for an adult readership.

John Stezaker has taught some of Britain's leading artists at St Martin's, Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, but he is also an artist in his own right, adjusting, inverting and slicing classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations to create unique, subversive images. The show at London's Whitechapel Gallery is the first major exhibition of his work.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests playwright Mark Ravenhill, critic and academic Maria Delgado and novelist Michael Arditti review the week's cultural highlights including Black Swan.

Natalie Portman stars as Nina - a timid but ambitious young ballerina - in Darren Aronofsky's film Black Swan. Cast as the lead in Swan Lake, her struggle to find the necessary sensuality to play Odile, the black swan, leads her into some very dark places indeed.

David Vann follows up his critically-acclaimed first book - Legend of a Suicide - with a novel: Caribou Island. Gary and Irene are a couple whose 30-year-long marriage is unravelling in the wilderness of Alaska as Gary pursues his dream of building a cabin on a remote island.

Nina Raine spent three months observing doctors and surgeons at work for her play Tiger Country, which has opened at Hampstead Theatre in London. Set in a hospital, it features a hard-bitten registrar who is forced to care more and a junior doctor who is trying to care less.

Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy is the first exhibition to be staged in the UK for 30 years which examines British sculture of the 20th century.

Faulks on Fiction is a BBC2 series in which the author Sebastian Faulks traces the history of the British novel through four programmes - The Hero, The Villain, The Snob and The Lover.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer Paul Morley, novelist Dreda Say Mitchell and broadcaster and cleric Richard Coles review the week's cultural highlights including Blue Valentine.

Derek Cianfrance's film Blue Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as Dean and Cindy. The narrative jumps between two points in the couple's relationship - the beginning and the apparent breakdown of their marriage several years later.

Linda Grant's novel We Had It So Good concerns another couple - Stephen and Andrea. They meet as students at Oxford in 1960s - he's a Rhodes scholar from California, while she's come up from Cornwall. The novel tracks their lives - and their fellow baby boomer friends - through the intervening years to the present.

JMW Turner is the subject of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's play The Painter at the Arcola Theatre in London. It explores the artist's relationship with the three key women in his life: his mother who ends up in Bedlam, the prostitute who models for him and the widow with whom he has a child.

Gilbert and George have been making work with postcards since the 1970s. They call their latest collection of 564 pieces - created from a combination of sex workers' advertising cards and London tourist postcards - The Urethra Postcard Pictures. 155 of them are on show at the White Cube gallery in London.

Laura Linney plays Cathy in the US comedy The Big C which is being broadcast on More 4. Cathy's behaviour towards her family and friends undergoes a radical change - she begins telling them exactly what she thinks and doing exactly what she wants to. What she doesn't tell them is that she has been diagnosed with terminal skin cancer and has refused treatment.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Louise Doughty, literary critic John Carey and comedian Natalie Haynes review the week's cultural highlights including The King's Speech.

Tom Hooper's film The King's Speech stars Colin Firth as George VI, battling against his stammer with the unorthodox help of Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue played by Geoffrey Rush.

In Paul Bailey's book Chapman's Odyssey, 70 year old writer Harry Chapman is admitted to hospital with acute abdominal pain. During his time on the ward his life plays back in his mind, with visits from his dead parents and also from characters out of the books that he has enjoyed.

Rudolf Nureyev's choreography for Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was first performed by English National Ballet in 1977 and became one of their classic productions. It has been revived for the company's 60th anniversary and has arrived at the London Coliseum on the final leg of its tour.

The Beatles are one of the few pop/rock acts who truly merit the adjective 'iconic'. Groundbreaking and hugely influential, they constantly pushed the envelope during their career without ever compromising their unprecedented popularity. This may be the conventional view, but it is not one shared by Natalie Haynes. In our occasional series where a guest is allowed to take a pot shot at a cultural sacred cow of their choice, Natalie takes aim at the Fab Four.

Alan Bleasdale's new BBC2 drama - his first work on television since Oliver Twist in 1999 - is The Sinking of the Laconia. It is based on the true account of a merchant ship which was torpedoed by a German U boat in September 1942 and the rescue mission instigated by the U boat commander when he realised that there were civilians among the survivors.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests Director of the National Theatre of Scotland Vicky Featherstone, Director of the Serpentine Gallery Julia Peyton-Jones and writer and Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival James Runcie look at the future of funding for the arts and ask if the new austerity is a problem - or an opportunity?

Historian Dominic Sandbrook, theatre critic David Benedict, former Chairman of the Arts Council Sir Christopher Frayling, Chairman of the UK Film Council Tim Bevan and CEO of Faber & Faber Stephen Page also offer their views on what happens to the cultural life of the nation when the purse-strings are tightened.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the writers Kevin Jackson and Bidisha and the historian Kathryn Hughes review the cultural highlights of the week including Tron: Legacy

In Tron: Legacy Jeff Bridges reprises the role of computer buff Kevin Flynn that he played in the original 1982 film. His son Sam (Garret Hedlund) goes looking for his Flynn inside the game where he's been trapped all these years. Daft Punk provide the soundtrack.

Ours Are The Streets is Sunjeev Sahota's first novel. Its narrator - Imtiaz - is a second-generation Pakistani lad living in Sheffield. When he travels to Pakistan to bury his father he takes the first step on a journey which leads to his radicalisation and to his decision to become a suicide bomber.

Richard Eyre's production of Feydeau's farce A Flea In Her Ear at the Old Vic in London stars Tom Hollander as a respectable businessman - Monsieur Chandebrise - whose wife suspects him of infidelity. Her attempts to prove her suspicions lead to a spiralling series of complications, compounded by the fact that Chandebrise's doppelganger (also played by Hollander) works as a porter in a very disreputable hotel.

Upstairs Downstairs was a hugely successful ITV costume drama which ran from 1971 to 1975. It now reappears on BBC1 starring both of its creators - Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins. The action has moved on from the Edwardian era to the 1930s and 165 Eaton Square has new occupiers, but former lady's maid Rose (Jean Marsh) is persuaded to return and take up the role of housekeeper.

Norman Rockwell's America at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London assembles all 322 of the covers which the celebrated illustrator created for the Saturday Evening Post from 1916 to 1963 along with other pieces. It is the first time that these original works by the man described as "the Dickens of the paintbrush" - the archetypal chronicler of smalltown America - have been shown in the UK.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests - crime writer and playwright Denise Mina; comedian, writer, and former rapper Ben "Doc Brown" Smith; and Journalist Matthew D'Ancona - review the cultural highlights of the week.

The National Theatre's seasonal offering is a revival of Season's Greetings, Alan Ayckbourn's farcical yet brutal comedy which stars Mark Gatiss, Catherine Tate, and Marc Wottoon.

Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp star in The Tourist, a thriller from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, writer and director behind the award-winning film The Lives of Others. The screenplay is co-written by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) and Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and has a supporting cast including Timothy Dalton, Paul Bettany and Stephen Berkoff.

For the first time in Europe, the robes worn by emperors and empresses of the Qing Dynasty - the last ruling dynasty of China - are being shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibition features over 50 garments and accessories from the collection of the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Tessa Hadley's new novel The London train is written in two parts. Each is a story in its own right, but brought together in a single moment. The stories examine the lives of Paul and Cora who both learn someone close to them has gone missing.

Episodes is a new seven-part sitcom from acclaimed writing partnership David Crane (Friends) and Jeffrey Klarik (The Class). Sean and Beverly Lincoln - played by Green Wing's Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig - are the successful producers of a British television show who are seduced by a powerful US executive to remake their hit show for an American audience, with disastrous results.

Producer: Ella-mai Robey.