The dead parrot has come squawking back to life. This week, Monty Python fans were treated to the surprise spectacle of the comedy legends conquering social media a full decade after their final performance together.
When I meet comedian Adam Burke, his voice has a throaty, bass-like quality. Has he been unwell? While it might be cold season, his rasp is the result of a three-night stint hosting Bingo Loco; part disco, part game show with prizes such as Mini Coopers and trips to Las Vegas. Burke belongs to a crew of gold-jacketed staff and clearly adores the work, which he has most weekends.
Light on details, packed with melodrama, Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Bob Marley biopic is a bit of a non-starter. A soulless, sanitised portrayal of a game-changing talent, Green’s film adopts the Bohemian Rhapsody approach to flashy music-flick storytelling. You know how these things go.
In galleries and museums we now spend, on average, 29 seconds in front of a masterpiece and that includes the time it takes to click a selfie. But sometimes a work is so unusual, so interesting, so accomplished that it will hold the viewer for much longer – and one such work is this large, almost life-size oil-on-canvas painting of a young man in an artist’s attic studio.
Although she was in The Beach in 2000 with Leonardo DiCaprio, and About a Boy in 2002 with Hugh Grant, some people had Victoria Smurfit stuck as Orla O’Connell, the priest’s sister in BBC series Ballykissangel in the late 1990s. That view, however, was presumably revised when they saw her as Cruella de Vil in series four of the American ABC drama Once Upon a Time.