Margot, BBC Four

TV film hints maybe it was Fonteyn and Arias all the time

If Margot Fonteyn and Rudy Nureyev were the most massively important people who ever existed in ballet, then the most massively important question that ever existed in ballet was, did they sleep together? Last night Margot got this over pleasingly quickly. There was the quivery BBC anno at the start that there would be scenes “of a sexual nature”, and hop-skip-jump the couple were at it like rabbits straight after their first performance together.

Interview: Anne-Marie Duff plays Margot Fonteyn

The turbulent life and loves of the prima ballerina

Anne-Marie Duff doesn't really resemble Margot Fonteyn. Blonde, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, she has nothing of the exotic, olive, Latin complexion that Fonteyn inherited from her Brazilian grandfather. And she never learned ballet, even if, with her long, lean frame and elegant swan neck, she looks more like a dancer than the rather more compact Peggy Hookham of Reigate (as Fonteyn started out in life).

Creation

This bicentennial Darwin biopic looks set for swift extinction

The exhilaration of scientific enquiry turns out to be dead on arrival when it comes to Creation, the Jon Amiel film about Charles Darwin that is simultaneously brilliantly timed and also a snore. Survival of the fittest in this context takes on a new meaning that will be immediately clear to those who make it all the way through.

DVD Release: In Search of Beethoven

Can you praise Beethoven too much?

Early on in Phil Grabsky's documentary In Search of Beethoven (out today on DVD), handy fortepiano player and Ludwig van-lookalike Ronald Brautigam starts screwing up a section of Beethoven's very first, unpublished piano concerto. "If I concentrate on playing it," he laughs nervously, his hands covering his reddening face, "I might be able to do it." Brautigam is not just screwing up for our amusement. He's making a valuable point.