Lee “Scratch” Perry and Friends: Disco Devil - The Jamaican Discomixes

Thomas H Green

Pet Shop Boys eleventh album leaps sideways into smooth, opulent US FM radio production in a way that will initially give long term fans palpitations. The duo sound… different. They recorded Elysium in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning Kanye West producer Andrew Dawson and it sounds that way too.

Welcome to another show, in which Joe guides us around some of the weirder, smokier corners of the broad church of hip hop, and discussion returns to how far genre can stretch and where originality can reside in a multi-channel, everything-available-at-once world. We also take a listen to more and less authentic sounds of South America courtesy of a Brit-in-Colombia, a Colombian Brit, and a legend of British underground sounds turning Colombian sounds into house music. There's some neo-psychedelia and neo-folk thrown into the mix for good measure.

There are a few things wrong with Episodes, the comedy series in which Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play a British scriptwriting couple who take their hit sitcom across the pond, but there’s a lot more that’s right with it.

Many people will be having their first taste of the late Pina Bausch’s dance-theatre in this copious London retrospective of 10 of her “World City” productions; others will have bought into several of the series, possibly by now wondering how many hours they can take of her barbed view of men and women. For all of us, reading programme notes is beside the point; the background you need is what’s inside you, your memories, your songs, your susceptibilities.

David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars 40th Anniversary Edition

Howard Male

Tonight on Channel 4, a new music series begins with a fantastic premise. A group of music obsessives drive around the USA in a London black cab, finding interesting musicians and recording them performing and talking in the back of the cab. Sounds a little bit like the 2008 Stephen Fry in America series, doesn't it? Well maybe, except Black Cab Sessions has been broadcast online since 2007.

Watch the Black Cab Sessions trailer:

Every year before the Academy Awards speeches are tacitly composed, flowing gowns and priceless necklaces booked and no doubt small blameless animals slaughtered in the Roman style for good luck. Before the gladiators enter the ring, we at theartsdesk continue our novel take on the 2012 Oscars by allotting a category each and asked our film writers to sift through the nominations, tell you who they think will win, who they really would like to win, and who has been most egregiously overlooked by Oscar's overwhelmingly ageing white male judiciary.

A bent cop movie with style, swagger and a sometimes questionable approach to characterisation, Oren Moverman’s latest at least gifts Woody Harrelson one of his best roles in years. Set against a backdrop of the Rampart police scandals of the late Nineties, it takes as its target one (fictional) Los Angeles law enforcer and his towering demons. Harrelson’s Dave Brown is an intelligent but difficult man, buckled into the straight-jacket of thuggery.

Those of a certain vintage will recall with fondness their childhood years (or those as parents of small children) gathered in front of the television on Sunday evenings between 1976-1981 to watch The Muppet Show. But The Muppets movie, their first big-screen outing in 12 years, is no lazy exercise in nostalgia; it's bracingly original and postmodern, with dollops of self-knowing humour and irony.