The Works is a new show which gets out of the studio and right into the middle of the creative arts, whether it’s music, visual art, film or literature. Alan Corr talks to presenter John Kelly and the team who’ll be getting to the heart of the art
The name says it all: The Works is a show that aims to get into the inner workings of the arts, discuss the works in question and, well, look at what’s in the works. It’s a neat title for a new series which hopes to drag discussion of the creative process out of a fusty studio environment and into the sunlit open.
Coming up over the next few weeks we’ll see Colm Tóibín talking about his new book of essays, How to Kill Your Mother, Michael Fassbender discussing his new movie Shame, a report from Amsterdam on a new biography of Van Gogh, a behind-the-scenes look at Neil Jordan’s new movie Byzantium, including an interview with its star, Saoirse Ronan, and music in studio from recent Celebrity Mastermind winner Neil Hannon.
This is not just The View, the long-running late-night review show helmed by John Kelly, rebranded, although he is joined by regular View panellists, Nadine O’Regan, Sinead Gleeson and Kevin Gildea, in their new role as reporters. The difference is that The Works will hit the streets, the studios, the concert halls and the galleries of Ireland and abroad with reportage and not just critique as its engine.
“My thinking about the whole programme is to make the arts open and accessible, coming from as many views as possible”, says producer Betty Purcell. “The people making the art as well as the people giving their opinions on it. The idea of having the new reporters involved is so we get many views and irreverent looks at the very forms of the art because the arts shouldn’t be scary.”
John Kelly, broadcaster, author and occasional harmonica player, is back and as ever he’s eager to explode the myth that the arts are some unassailable intellectual citadel. After all, aren’t we talking about books, movies, music, theatre and exhibitions here? Stuff, in other words. “I never used that term, ‘the arts’, when I was growing up and getting interested in all these areas like music and film”, says the Enniskillen man, sitting back in an RTÉ dressing room after the first dry run of The Works.
“To me, they’re just things that I’m interested in – I was interested in music, I was interested in movies, I was interested in what was on the television. I read books . . . that didn’t make me some kind of freak. My argument is, who’s going to the cinemas day in, day out, who’s watching Sherlock on television, who’s buying CDs? People don’t walk around saying ‘oh! I’m going to do something cultural tonight.’ You go to a movie or read a book or listen to music.”
Left to right: Kevin Gildea, Ulysses, Nadine O'Regan, John Kelly, Sinead Gleeson
The Works also aims to set agendas and not just report on events. “Absolutely”, says Betty Purcell. “We’re going to be looking at things coming up but also getting opinions from people within the arts who have strong views about how the arts should develop. One of the difficulties, as it is for everyone else, is that the arts are under so much pressure, moneywise. Artists are still trying to produce work of greatness with limited resources so how do they square that circle? We’ll be looking at that as well.”
Topicality is key and The Works will go right down to the wire, with editing still happening right up to the night of transmission. “I think after 11 years of The View it was time for something different”, says Purcell. “I think people really want to get their teeth into solid reportage of the arts. Irish people are so opinionated and they are just as capable of having a view on a work of art as they are on anything else in society.”
Very true. Movies, music, art, theatre, books . . . we’re talking The Works. And not a spanner in sight.
The Works is on RTÉ One on Thursday nights
The Reporters
The Works will feature location reports and opinion from reporters Sinead Gleeson, Nadine O’Regan and Kevin Gildea. We quizzed them on their own cultural favourites and highlights
Sinead Gleeson
Sinéad Gleeson is a journalist and broadcaster who loves books, music and film, and who owns too many notebooks.
Favourite film
Paris, Texas broke my heart. It’s an outstanding piece of work, full of intense performances. I tend to gorge on the work of certain directors, and love older auteurs like Hitchcock and Powell and Pressburger (Black Narcissus is astounding). I’m a big fan of Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch and one of the most interesting directors of recent years, Andrea Arnold.
Favourite book
I have too many, so a good gauge are books that I repeatedly buy as gifts. Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children blew my mind when I read it. It’s an epic story, beautifully written. Lorrie Moore is better known for her short stories, but her novel Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? is one the best novels about friendship ever written.
Favourite album
This is the most impossible question and I’m frequently asked it, so please permit me to cheat and pick more than one. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is over 20 years old, but the walls of guitar and hypnotic feedback still can’t be beaten. The Queen is Dead by The Smiths is one of those seminal albums that turn you into a music fan – it’s moving, funny and unique.
Favourite painting
I had a wonderful art teacher (Miss O’Brien) in school, who instilled in me a life-long love of visual art. She once brought us on an art school trip to London – not just to the usual spots like the Tate and the National Gallery, but also to tiny galleries like The Wallace Collection. Years later, I went back to London’s Tate Modern and discovered Frida Kahlo, who remains one of my favourite painters.
What are you looking forward to in the arts in 2012?
Three brilliant composers – Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hauschka and Dustin O'Halloran – all play on the same bill at Cork Opera House in May and should not be missed. Paul Simon is apparently planning a tour, playing Graceland in its entirety, which I’d love to see. There are new albums on the way from Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective that I’m really looking forward to, and one from Irish singer Jennifer Evans.
Nadine O’Regan
Nadine O'Regan is The Sunday Business Post's Books and Arts Editor, and an arts columnist and feature writer with the newspaper. She also presents and produces The Kiosk, the weekend culture show on Dublin station Phantom 105.2.
Favourite book
JM Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace. The story of a disgraced college professor in South Africa, Disgrace is intense, chilling, thought-provoking and totally gripping: ‘For a man of his age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.’ How could you not want to read on after an opening salvo like that?
Favourite album
PJ Harvey's 1992 debut Dry had a serious influence on me. It arrived (on a taped cassette with 99.9°F by the brilliant Suzanne Vega on the other side) as a gift from an older, cooler Leaving Cert-aged friend. Spare, minimalist and throbbing with barely disguised fury, Dry was a blueprint for the early-to-mid-Harvey sound, with hooks good enough to hang your coat on, chameleon vocals and swaggering, guttural guitar.
Favourite painting
A body and soul in turmoil: that's the world Francis Bacon conjures up on canvas – and his Pope paintings are hard to look at – and hard to look away from. ‘There is an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else’, he said and when you see his works, the line makes sense. Bacon's paintings convey a frenzied complexity of emotions – despair, rage, pathos, failure, pride – and they're riveting.
Favourite film
While Finding Nemo probably won't threaten The Godfather in the Best Films lists any time soon, it's a gem of an adventure quest, with wonderful lines, superb characterisation and top-notch Pixar animation. The story of the clownfish Marlin, who's desperately scouring the deep sea to find his son, facing down threats from sharks, and aided by the memory-addled Ellen DeGeneres, the film is surprisingly cruel at points (the opening scenes are heartrending), incredibly touching at others, and always clever.
What are you looking forward to in the arts in 2012?
I'm hugely looking forward to the big-screen adaptation of The Hunger Games in March, and Joe Wright's take on Anna Karenina, coming in September. Colm Tóibín and Jonathan Franzen have collections of essays on the way, and HHhH by Laurent Binet is generating quite a stir already – published on these shores in May, the novel is a winner of the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman.
Kevin Gildea
Kevin Gildea is a comedian, improviser and writer. He has won first, second and third place in the RTÉ Radio PJ O'Connor playwriting awards, was shortlisted for the Francis McManus short story competition, and won an Arts Council Bursary for his novel Audience.
Favourite book
2666 by Roberto Bolano. 893 pages – five books in one. An erudite pageturner that explores the brutal heart of the world we live in. It is a magnificent work of art created through an engagement with the savagery that exists beyond the bounds of a certain cosy literary world, the brutality that exists and surrounds our own very world. Plus: The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe.
Favourite album
Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. Soulful bandages – soulful enough for even for those without the baggage of a soul. When I hear the song Sweet Thing it twangs some inner strings of my being, lifts me and I'm floating, as if obeying this magical external instruction. Bit like Red Bull.
Favourite painting
The Star by Edgar Degas. I love the perspective and the rendering of movement. I like the composition, which is unusual in that the foreground is empty. The stage on which the dancer moves has an insubstantial quality – as if she is on air. The backstage dancers and observers are, in the main, formless daubs of paint – and it is only she, by being centre-stage, alone, who has gained full form.
Favourite film
Withnail and I for one of the great comic performances and nostalgia for a time and place; Andrei Rublev for the poetic creation of another time and place; the original Ladykillers for a perfect comedy with every piece in place; There Will Be Blood for a great director and great actor at the peak of their greatness; and Inland Empire for the gift of watching what seems un-filmable.
What are you looking forward to in the arts in 2012?
Kevin Barry's new collection of short stories, Dark Lies the Island; Carnage, Polanski's film version of Yasmina Reza’s play The God of Carnage; the new series of Mad Men. Best television ever. The first three series were the Sistine Chapel of TV. Or a great chipper when you're coming home drunk from the pub. Pick your analogy – high or low!
