Uncle...

BBC3 has produced many excellent comedy shows: The Mighty Boosh, Him and Her, Cuckoo and Bad Education... But the new kid on the block may be the best yet.

Uncle stars Nick Helm as Andy, a perennial under-achiever and wannabe rock god who last romance ended in disaster. About to end it all, he suddenly finds himself having to babysit his young nephew, Errol, while Errol's mother, Sam, pieces her life back together after drug addiction and divorce.

The combination of man-child looking after child-wise-beyond-his-years is not a new one. But there's something incredibly funny and also very touching about the combination of Helm and young actor Elliott Speller-Gilott, who plays Errol. At turns, it's convincing, touching and hilarious without ever being mawkish, saccharine or crass. Both actors give beautifully balanced performances.

Daisy Haggard, from Man-Stroke-Woman and Episodes is also excellent as Sam, mum to Errol and sister to Andy. She also has some of the best lines and, in my opinion, remains criminally under-used by most comedy producers.

Thrown into this set-up is Andy's ex-girlfriend and two potential new love interests, plus various musical numbers penned by Helm, whose stand-up comedy persona is also a frustrated wannabe rock god who performs very sharp satires of different rock-music genres. Check out his work on the inter-net-web if you're in any way curious. It will be time well spent.

Uncle is genuinely heartwarming and genuinely funny. It could well be the comedy of the year. And it's only January. It is that good.

New York: Guggenheim...

The last time me and the Missus were in New York and we visited the Guggenheim, we saw an exhibition that was a retrospective of the work of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

It remains one of the most amazing art exhibitions I’ve ever seen. But with modern art, you pays your money and you takes your chance… and our return saw us visit while a Chicago artist named Christopher Wool was having a retrospective.

Wool’s work has something of a punk sensibility to the way it seems to be constructed, with the messy and almost agit-prop way that his canvases are constructed, with images from old work being used as the basis for something new and worked over so the squiggly lines and the images they produce are quite textured.

There were also lots of quite patterned prints with splodges where the ink or paint had run as he’d recreated what looked like wallpaper patterns or geometric shapes by hand.

Some of his paintings were word pictures where he’d used sentences or words stacked over several decks and broken up at irregular intervals. I quite liked those. I also liked his stark B&W photo sequences where he’d made photocopies of the photos then hung those to distance the image and make it look even more distorted.

But, as with much modern, it either connects with you or it doesn’t. And I struggled a bit with Wool and his work. Much of his work was also untitled so you didn’t have much to go on to extract meaning.

‘He’s been deliberately enigmatic,’ said the Missus.

‘He’s just been lazy,’ I replied.

One thing I did see that really blew me away, though, was an art installation called Impenetrable. This was by an Israeli artist called Mona Hatoum and it was constructed of hundreds of thin lines of barbed wire about three metres in length that were hung vertically about two inches apart so they formed a three-dimensional cube. 

It was utterly stunning and strangely moving.

New York: The American Natural History Museum...

The last time myself and the Missus were in New York and planned to visit the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), we were with the Boy and we got as far as buying tickets and going in through the entrance hall... before he started throwing up and we had to leave.

Five years later and the Boy is off living his own life with his girlfriend, so myself and the Missus were back in New York and determined to visit. And it started off as quite an odd experience.

A chunk of the ground floor is taken up by the diorama rooms, which are essentially painted scenes populated by stuffed and mounted animals. The information attached to each diorama is succinct and the staged scenes are fascinating to see, but it does feel a bit of an anachronism in the age of 3D nature documentaries. There were times it felt like a glorified version of the Stuffed Animal Museum at Tring.

But the thing about the AMNH is that it's a vast building with loads of other stuff. The art gallery houses an amazing collection of work, the Native American Indian rooms are stunning, and the collection of gemstones and the meteor gallery are fabulous.

The star of the show, however, is the dinosaur gallery, which is brilliantly staged and blends both old-school displays of skeletons with film and other hi-tech, on-screen information.

We spent about four hours there and didn't even scratch the surface. It was fab.

New York: A Bit Cold...

Me and the Missus are in New York and it is winter. To be fair, it is quite cold and one of the days apparently breaks all sorts of records for winter in New York.

But I then remember that Americans love a statistic. Weather, sports, politics, telly viewing figures, money… The nation seems to be obsessed and everything seems to be chronicled and understood in numbers.

Added to this is the phrase 'Polar vortex', which all the news channels seem to have grabbed hold of and run with to describe the cold snap. New York is in the grip of a 'Polar Vortex: Disaster Imminent', etc. I also recall Americans love a bit of drama.

The problem with 24-hour rolling news channels is that the beast needs constant feeding. And, because New York is one of the major cities in the world, anything that happens there becomes major news. So the beast is fed then it feeds other beasts. It's a frenzy of mutual news masturbation.

Me and the Missus, of course, are seasoned hacks with a healthy cynicism for such news-based doom mongering, so we wrapped up warm and walked 30 blocks, taking in Central Park along the way, to visit the American Natural History Museum.

I'm remind myself I'm from Yorkshire. We sunbathe in weather worse than this. But not much worse...

New York: Ten Thousand Waves…

UK artist Isaac Julien currently has an installation piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And it’s one of the best things I’ve seen in ages.

It’s essentially nine films that project onto nine different screens, which are hung at different angles and different heights in a huge gallery.

As a viewer, you can sit in the middle of the screens and try to follow all the action, or you can perch yourself off to the side and focus on two or three screens, then move around as certain screens go dark and the film is projected onto a new screen or multiple screens.

Sometimes the film only fills one screen while at other times it fills all nine. It’s a disorientating experience and it’s very easy to miss things. But that’s sort of one of the points.

The film employs news reports about a gang of at least 21 Chinese cockle pickers, all low-paid slave labour immigrants to the UK, who were drowned by rising tides in Morecambe Bay in Lancashire in 2004 as a launch point for a meditation on cultural migration and identity.

The narrative thrust, such as it is, interweaves either real or reimagined footage of the police search for the bodies along the Morecambe coast, alongside a Chinese myth about a wind spirit, Chinese calligraphy, a story about a mother who turns to prostitution to feed her child, and behind-the-scenes footage about how the 55-minute movie was made.

It’s a beautiful piece of film-making that looks utterly stunning and it manages to be thought-provoking, sad and moving, and the experience of sitting through it amplifies the ideas of disorientation as the viewer is never quite sure where to follow the narrative and can’t settle on one particular viewpoint.

The sound track, featuring traditional Chinese music and Jah Wobble, is also amazing.

Installation art usually leaves me cold. This didn’t. It was stunning and beautiful and moving and thought-provoking. It beguiled, it amazed, it inspired, it provoked. It did what the best art is supposed to do.

I was utterly sold on it.

New York: The Night Alive…

I missed Conor McPherson’s latest play, The Night Alive, when it premiered at the Donmar in London in June 2013, so I was delighted to catch it at the Linda Gross Theatre in New York.

I like McPherson. His award-winning, hit play, The Weir, and it’s haunting lyricism will stay me with me for many years, while the National’s production of a later plays, The Seafarer, and it’s tale of emasculated dreams was similarly good. His comedy, gangster, buddy movie, I Went Down, which starred Brendan Gleeson, was also quite brilliant.

I wasn’t, however, totally sold on The Night Alive.

The play begins with Tommy, a ne’er-do-well who scrapes by and lives in a room in his uncle’s house, saving Amy, a young prostitute, from a beating. The ensuing relationship between the two turns into a sort of love story that offers both an escape from ultimately failed lives… until outside forces, in the shape of the young girl’s violent former boyfriend, soon bring those dreams crashing down.

The central story of a ne-er-do-well filling in time and bumbling along rather than living  life to the full is a common McPherson theme, and there are some great bits of dialogue between Tommy and his dim mate Doc and his over-bearing Uncle Maurice.

But it didn’t feel whole or finished in the same way as his previous plays did. And, even though there was violence and a murder along the way, it just didn’t feel as though it headed anywhere.

It’s still worth seeing if you get the chance, though. I’d rather take a so-so McPherson than a good of most other playwrights.