16/10/2010

Sarfraz Manzoor and his guests novelist Louise Doughty, poet Cahal Dallat and writer John Lanchester review the week's cultural highlights including The Social Network. The Social Network is David Fincher's film about Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Written by Aaron Sorkin (of West Wing fame) it stars Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. Martin Sherman's play Onassis at the Novello Theatre in London stars Robert Lindsay as the Greek shipping magnate and focuses on the last 12 years of his life and his relationships with Maria Callas and Jackie Kennedy. Bernhard Schlink is best known for his international bestseller The Reader. His novel The Weekend concerns a former Red Army Faction member, Jorg, who is released from prison after serving 26 years for murder. He is reunited with his former friends and comrades for a weekend house party. Ai Weiwei is the latest artist to be commissioned to create an installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. He has covered the floor with 100 million handmade, hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds which took 1600 people two years to create. Mark Gatiss has adapted the H.G. Wells novel The First Men in the Moon for BBC4. He stars as the eccentric Professor Cavor who invents an anti-gravitational paint which allows him and his neighbour (Rory Kinnear) to become Edwardian astronauts and travel to the Moon. PRODUCER: TORQUIL MacLEOD.