Saint Jude
The 100 Club, London

There remains something distinctly old school about London’s 100 club, located in a basement on Oxford street, fitting then that this famous venue should play host to Saint Jude, fronted by singer Lynne Jackaman. Wearing ‘spray-on’ leather-look leggings, Jackaman, petite beneath unkempt blonde tresses, looks every inch an old school ‘rock chick’- fortunately for the crowd she sings the part as well as she looks. When Jackaman opens her mouth to sing Soul on Fire the audience surges towards the stage, it’s going to be a steamy night with more than a few surprises thrown in.

Frank Furedi is the leading light of that strange, strange group around the website Spiked Online that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party way back in the 1980s and turned into LM magazine in the 1990s. Starting off as (fairly) orthodox Trotskyists with a penchant for the Provisional IRA and anti-fascist street fighting, they have transmogrified into a bunch of media savvy contrarians whose place on the political spectrum is hard to define.

Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England by Helen Pierce
Yale University Press, £35

Challenging the peculiarly English division of words and images as equal partners in communication lies at the heart of Helen Pierce’s book about early graphic satire. Looking beyond an early dictionary definition of satire as a nipping and scoffing verse, Pierce explains how the combination of drawn or engraved line and text helped to deliver powerful pieces of communication in early modern England. This despite a society which distrusted images and iconography because of its close association with Roman Catholic religious observance.

There is a growing movement of people who want to get off the merry-go-round of modern life and just enjoy things. Joining this chorus against over-consumption is Andrew Price, Professor of Biosciences at Warwick University, who believes that while the modern world may boast ever more ingenious technologies, they are fragile and often cause more problems than they solve.

Slumming It
Channel 4

Dispatches: The Slumdog Children of Mumbai
Channel 4

As part of Channel 4’s Indian winter season, Kevin McCloud in Slumming It cast an architect’s eye over the slums of Dharavi where more than one million people are crammed into a single square mile of open sewers, rats and hazardous chemicals. What McCloud discovered was an engine room of industry – from cobblers and potters to bakers and luggage makers, plus a conundrum common to many slum communities. One the one hand, there are housing and amenities desperately in need of improvements; on the other, there is a community rich in history, resourcefulness and social networks.

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
Director: Lee Daniels

OSS 117 – Lost In Rio
Director: Michael Hazanavicius

The Book of Eli
Directors: Allen and Albert Hughes

The Princess and the Frog
Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker

Diamond Star Halo by Tiffany Murray
Portobello Books, £12.99

Tiffany Murray was brought up at Rockfield Studios, a little slice of rock’n’roll glamour on what used to be a farm in rural Monmouthshire, where her father was a record producer and her mother was the in-house chef. It was there, on the border between England and Wales, that Dave Edmunds recorded I Hear You Knocking – the studios’ first number 1 hit – and a pile of stones in the paddock inspired Noel Gallagher to write Wonderwall.

This is not a book about China, its history, society or culture, but rather a book about how the West superimposed its imagination on reality. About how people who had barely visited the country and had the most cursory knowledge of its people – in some cases had never been there at all – shaped the country and its inhabitants in the eyes of Europe. It was, at best, looking at an elephant with the telescope the wrong way around and detail turned into definition. At worst it was to impose Western prejudices and racism on a population that had little say in the matter.

Progress
Union Theatre, London

Sexual politics has always been fertile (oops) ground for comedy and Doug Lucie’s vigorous 1984 satire, Progress, is now revived on the London fringe. For us older lefties, it’s a bit of a nostalgic trip into the past. We are in Kilburn during the Margaret Thatcher era and the local right-on Labour Party members have turned inward. As 30-something Will and his wife Ronee decide to experiment with radical sexual politics, the men’s group that he hosts explores, often hilariously, the subject of sexism and what it might mean to be a “new” man.

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2009
National Portrait Gallery, London

The problems of painters who produce portraits in a genre that seems to be dominated by photography may be mild in comparison to those facing photographers who also set out to produce “portraits” that must catch and hold our attention, despite the fact that we know little about the subject shown. Such is the task faced by the photographers competing for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize last year, who responded impressively. Some 2,451 international photographers submitted a total of 6,413 prints, from which 60 were selected.