25/02/2012

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests Deborah Moggach, Paul Morley and Kevin Jackson review the week's cultural highlights including Capital by John Lanchester. The Bomb: A Partial History at the Tricycle Theatre in London is a series of ten specially commissioned short plays on the subject of nuclear proliferation. It includes work by Zinnie Harris, David Greig and John Donnelly. The action in John Lanchester's novel centres around the people living and working in a well-to-do London street - Pepys Road - in the months leading up to the banking crash of 2008. The characters include a banker, a Polish builder, a Premiership footballer and a Zimbabwean asylum seeker working as a traffic warden. Woody Harrelson stars as a corrupt LA cop - Dave Brown - in Oren Moverman's film Rampart. Brown is under investigation after savagely beating a motorist who crashed into his patrol car, but he is unrepentant and both his personal and professional life are out of control. Paula Milne's BBC2 drama series White Heat traces the lives of a group of seven friends who first meet as students sharing a flat in London in 1965. It stars Claire Foy, Sam Claflin and Juliet Stevenson. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.