Landscape Artist of the Year Final
Sky Arts
Bring the Drama
BBC2
A running joke about Landscape Artist of the Year is that they have made a TV show about watching paint dry. But, as it turns out, watching paint dry can be pretty mesmeric.
As a total and utter art duffer, I watched this gentle, polite finale with the wonder of a starving medieval peasant gazing upon a sumptuous feast. Everything I try to draw or paint fails to reach much beyond Mr Potato Head standard, so what these three finalists (all women) managed to produce in a few hours from crayons and pencils sitting looking over Covent Garden was, to me, little short of magic.
And I was astonished, as an art lummox, that the one I thought should win, did win. I have noticed that one common viewer complaint about LAOTY and its sister Portrait Artist of the Year is that the judges don’t pick the right winners and praise the wrong paintings to the rafters. But in the last episode I, with my zero qualifications, think they got it spot on. (Don’t read on if you don’t want to know who won.)
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The winner’s talent for reflecting how light interacts with buildings and the landscape and, as the judges said, her ability to tell a story with colour were hugely impressive. The other two finalists, Kristina Chan and Denise Fisk, were of course extremely gifted too, but Monica Popham’s art was beautifully vibrant.
I don’t know if you watched the second programme at 9pm but her prize, a £10,000 commission to paint a landscape scene from the Orkney Islands for the Science Museum to portray the harnessing of wind, waves and tides to produce energy, showed to me at least that she was the right choice. I thought it was stunning.
★★★★✩
Over to Bring the Drama and while we all know that Cillian Murphy is a great actor, it is only when you see other people trying to play Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders that you appreciate just what a presence he is.
It was Peaky Blinders week in this series, which is proving reliably entertaining, and what the casting director Kelly Valentine Hendry wanted to see from the untrained wannabe actors was not only the ability to fight convincingly but also the power of silence and the potency of a glowering stare. Not as easy as it looks, even though Murphy makes it look effortless.
Don’t get me wrong, some of these contestants were very good, especially in the choreographed fisticuffs. But I wonder if you either have that gift or you don’t. How far can it be taught, for instance, to “be” appealing and appalling simultaneously? Hendry taught them to minimise their hand movements, keep the stillness, rein it in. But some are clearly more acting “naturals” than others.
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Bring the Drama is a cut above your average reality TV competition, but I wish it wouldn’t fall back on those contrived clichés, such as making a contestant sit on a wall and say how much they want to win the task with a “the other cast members better watch out!” Ironically, it too could occasionally benefit from remembering that less is more, daahling, less is more.
★★★✩✩
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