Only Fools And Boycies, On tour
There’s more to John Challis than one, very memorable TV landmark, however brilliant it might have been. But enough about the Brass Eye episode in which Chris Morris tricked him into believing that Clive Anderson had been shot by Noel Edmonds. Challis was Terrance Aubrey “Boycie” Boyce in Only Fools And Horses and that in itself is enough to deliver him into the higher echelons of British TV royalty. These evenings will be an opportunity to see if Challis possesses the showbiz patter to match. Expect tales of hanging out with Marlene in early 80s Peckham and a few more from The Green Green Grass, the Boycie spinoff that was filmed, fact fans, at Challis’s actual house. Challis also served time in classics such as The Sweeney and Citizen Smith, so material shouldn’t be a problem.
PH
The Unstoppable Life Of Artworks, Liverpool
Describing art as “an emancipatory tool for people to innovate, question and reinvent”, Tate Liverpool’s Francesco Manacorda will be among those discussing how to preserve art in a fast-changing world. The debate kicks off a major new exhibition, Works To Know By Heart: An Imagined Museum, an interactive collection of classic postwar artworks – including Bridget Riley’s op art and Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures – showing first at Tate Liverpool, before journeying to Frankfurt and Metz. The twist is that gallery-goers will be asked to imagine a Fahrenheit 451-esque future, where art is outlawed and can be saved only by committing it to memory. Joining Manacorda, Tamara Rojo of the English National Ballet and Gemma Bodinetz from Liverpool Everyman will consider how works of art live on through public memory, and how they might be reinterpreted to remain meaningful.
CB
Europe Is Kaput. Long Live Europe! London
What a year for anti-capitalists: just 12 months ago, the appointment of an acerbic, tie-phobic radical academic economist and errant Marxist, whose previous highest elected office was head of the Black Students’ Alliance at the University of Essex, to run the Greek economy at the height of the Eurozone’s worst ever financial crisis, would have sounded far-fetched. Now, it’s the subject of a nice night out on the South Bank. Retired finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, whose hardline stance, wit and refusal to even dress nicely has won him legions of fans – and the loathing, in his words, of Greece’s creditors – has been meeting with philosopher, joker, ex-Slovenian presidential candidate and “Elvis of critical theory” Slavoj Zižek since 2013. This week, like Watch The Throne for people who’ve read Gramsci, these two giants of insurgent thought will be sharing a public stage for the first time, when they’ll be discussing the tsunami of heck that’s gripped Europe this year, from near-currency collapse to the refugee crisis. Expect more laughs than attacks on systemic exploitation usually raise.
CJ
