One space, one person, one story, one voice – the monologue is theatre distilled, the purest form of entertainment.
BBC Four is the TV music equivalent of those oldsters music mags like Q and Mojo. Have there been five, or is it six, documentaries about Queen on the channel?
African Scream Contest 2 opens with a burst of distorted guitar suggesting a parallel-world response to The Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today”. Then, the song beds in and a James Brown groove plays off against spindly lead-guitar lines also evoking California in the psychedelic era: the extemporisation of Jefferson Airplane. At 3.06, the vocalist and percussionist are left to get on with it for 30 seconds. Next, a wheezy organ comes to the fore and injects some “Light my Fire” vamps.
What a superb location for a performance! The flats on the north-east corner of Islington Green back onto a crummy atrium from which a staircase leads down to a vaulted, concrete pit (pictured below). A cross between a car park and a bull ring, or a subterranean version of a de Chirico painting, this huge chamber reminded me of the stark designs of the Italian modernist, Aldo Rossi.
QCC isn’t the name of a new football club, nor some higher qualification for those toiling at the Bar, but stands for "Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy". Had you heard of it? On the eve of the Commonwealth conference, along came Jane Treays's gently hilarious, and finally rather tender film to fill in the gaps.
You may have seen Daliso Chaponda on Britain's Got Talent last year. He came third but, as he says, he was delighted as it brought him to a wider audience after working in comedy for 15 years – and made possible his first UK tour What the African Said.
After the suave theatrical persuasions of Simon Schama and the earnest professorial shtick of Mary Beard, in episode six of Civilisations (BBC Two) it was the turn of David Olusoga, the third of the documentary's triumvirate of presenters.
Shakespeare's death-laden play is alive and well and breathing with renewed force in Hackney, the last British stop for an RSC touring Hamlet that moves on from London to the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC in May. Let's hope the American capital takes to Simon Godwin's characteristically acute, alert production with the palpable affection that was afforded the staging closer to home one recent evening.
Lord Clark – “of Civilisation”, as he was nicknamed, not necessarily affectionately – presented the 13 episodes of the eponymous series commissioned by David Attenborough for BBC Two in 1969; it was subtitled “A Personal View”, and encompassed only Western Europe (from which even Spain was excluded).
A superstar elsewhere in the world, particularly in West Africa, Femi Kuti still lives somewhat unfairly in his dad, Fela Kuti’s shadow in the West. While this might be somewhat inevitable to those with a limited taste for afrobeat grooves, One People One World needs no family leg-up with its funky guitars and scorching soul-powered brass.