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This column will change your life: think aikido
The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne – review
My father's miraculous wartime escape
Radical mum? Well, sort of ...
Weekender: Melvyn Posner, gallery owner, 70
The best album covers of 2013
2013: what you've already forgotten
The best exhibitions of 2013
Inside every great actor there's a mediocre singer
Modern Toss’s cartoon review of the year
2013's Singles Of The Year, reviewed by the stars
2013's biggest celebrity spats
2013 games of the year
Russell Brand, feminism, beards and apocalypse: more of 2013’s hottest trends
Twerking, trolling, J-Law and rustic pop: the key pop cultural trends of 2013
Australians urged to leave South Sudan
H&M, Uniqlo and M&S compete for a place on Australia's high streets
Christmas Island: delays in medical transfers life-threatening, say doctors
Obama: 'no need' for new Iran sanctions proposed in Senate
Barack Obama rejects claims 2013 has been worst year of his presidency
Martin Rowson on Mikhail Khodorkovsky – cartoon
$10m NSA contract with security firm RSA led to encryption 'back door'
Obama: Snowden leaks caused 'unnecessary damage'
Attacks on the ABC expose News Corp's hidden agenda
Best pictures of the day - live

This column will change your life: think aikido

Posted: 21 Dec 2013 01:01 AM PST

Relatives getting on your nerves? Try martial arts

When it comes to dealing with life's low-level conflicts – the kind of petty sniping some of you may just possibly be about to experience in the coming days – the Japanese martial art of aikido might not seem a promising source of solutions. Faced with a clash of views over turkey preparation, TV viewing choices or your uncle's thoughts on the immigrants, it's impractical to wait for a physical confrontation and then, using only the gentlest of movements, to rechannel your assailant's energy to send him or her somersaulting backwards over the dinner table, neutralised yet unharmed. But an approach surprisingly close to this in spirit – admittedly without the somersaults – lies at the heart of a book entitled Aikido In Everyday Life, by Terry Dobson and Victor Miller, published 35 years ago and due for rediscovery. Their metaphorical version of aikido won't impress bystanders like the person-hurling one. But it may prove more useful.

The key claim of Aikido In Everyday Life (which I found via Mark Peckett, a reader and aikido practitioner) is that we make one huge mistake where conflict's concerned. Conflict itself is unavoidable, but we're too quick to assume that any given conflict is also a contest – a zero-sum game, in which one side wins by making the other lose. Treat a friendship, job or marriage like a contest, and you've already determined how you'll respond: by trying to score points until someone admits defeat. (Often, that'll be you. And even if you "win" a battle with a partner or friend, the damage to the relationship may feel like a loss.) "You know why on some days it seems as if everybody's winning but you?" the authors ask. "Because you've bought into an imaginary, arbitrary system where everything's a contest and there are no ties – just sudden-death playoffs." You can only lose a contest once you've agreed to play by its rules.

The point of their system – which, in 1970s self-help style, they branded "Attack-tics" – isn't to pretend that conflict doesn't exist, or that you should claim the moral high ground and refuse to fight. It's that there are other ways to fight. You could use the tactic they call "doing nothing": pause, temporarily offering no response while your opponent exhausts his arguments, or even starts to argue himself round to your side. Or you could choose "aiki", the highest principle of aikido, which translates roughly as "blending" with the attacker, then turning his or her energies away from confrontation to resolution. How? First, seek "confluence" with your opponent, for example by conceding that his feelings are understandable, or that she might have a point. Then, use the surprised pause that follows to take the lead, reframing the problem as a shared one. (In one of their examples, a fight between neighbours over a dog gets recast as one about the challenges of living at close quarters.)

This all sounds rather mystical, I know; becoming a black belt in everyday aikido would surely take years of practice. But any of us could train ourselves to respond, when tempers flare, with an internal question: is this conflict a contest? It probably needn't be. "There is no rule that says every thrust requires a parry or riposte," write Dobson and Miller. You could just ask your attacker to pass the roast potatoes instead.oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com

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Oliver Burkeman

The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne – review

Posted: 21 Dec 2013 12:01 AM PST

Alex Clark admires a cross between a comedy of manners and a whodunnit

Littlefield is a lovely place to live, especially if you like being part of a soccer carpool or book group, or knowing the names of your neighbours, or strolling down the road to get a cup of coffee in the Forge Cafe – a bit more of a hit-and-miss affair than the Starbucks opposite, but with its own hand-cut doughnuts and wicker basket filled with plastic daisies. In fact, the compact Massachusetts town is, according to a (fictional) list in the Wall Street Journal, the sixth best place to live in America, which is precisely what has attracted the scrutiny of sociologist Clarice Watkins. Dr Watkins, whose previous work on "the effects of global destabilisation on urban matriarchal structures" based on fieldwork in inner-city Detroit and Mexico City has been much admired, has decided her next study should be into the far more mysterious business of equilibrium. What, in other words, do the contented find to talk about?

But Dr Watkins' project is somewhat scuppered before it begins, because Littlefield has come under what one resident, George Wechsler, calls "a domestic fear campaign"; he might be forgiven the slight grandiosity given that its first target was his bull mastiff, Feldman, whose poisoned body, "almost too big to be believable", has just been found in meadows adjacent to a local park. Unlucky for Feldman, but also for his discoverer, Margaret Downing, a woman so attuned to potential catastrophe that she often sets off to buy milk with the words, "Well, wish me luck." Margaret, who provides the novel with its primary point of view, is contending not only with her natural melancholy but with her husband Bill's sudden detachment from their marriage. A canine corpse is not really what she needs.

Dog deaths continue, grotesque, menacing and unexplained. Is the pooch-poisoner simply a mistaken do‑gooder, trying to free the community from troublesome coyotes but catching beloved pets in the crossfire? Is he or she enraged by proposals for a new dog park, which contentiously seeks to formalise dog‑walking practices that have existed without causing commotion for years? Or is there a more sinister threat afoot to Littlefield's dog-owners and their companions – to Emily (Boris the old English sheepdog), Naomi (Skittles the labradoodle), Sharon (Lucky the basset hound) et al?

The scene is set for a cross between a comedy of manners and a whodunnit, and there are elements of both in Berne's tale of suburban shenanigans; as the author of the Orange prize-winning A Crime in the Neighbourhood, she has a track record for this kind of nuanced, darkened but thoroughly enjoyable small-canvas writing. There are excellent set-pieces including a raucous town hall meeting ("Do dogs pay taxes?") and a horribly claustrophobic and disastrous Christmas dinner, complete with ersatz mashed potato and a ham decorated with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries, "as if it were covered in tiny archery targets". There is gossip, much of it centring on Wechsler, who is a recently separated novelist: "Last week Naomi had spotted him in Starbucks with his arm around a blonde in biking shorts and a white Spandex top with no bra." There is even a seductive graduate student named Willa Clamage (it rhymes with damage).

Much is also made of Littlefield's egregiously welcoming attitude towards the outsider Dr Watkins, who is first described as "a small fat black woman in an orange turban" and later as looking like a fortune-teller who may even be a friend of the Obamas. She is invited to a Celebrate Your Heritage Day and prevailed upon to bring some examples of her favourite "tribal cuisine". Meanwhile, Margaret dutifully instructs her teenage daughter to use the phrase "person of colour". "But who says that?" retorts Julia. "Who says: 'Hey, guess what, today I met a person of colour'?"

Dr Watkins herself is both fascinated and mildly repelled by Littlefield; she is also prone to writing summary sketches that, even allowing for academic jargon, seem harshly reductive of her objects of study. At the same time, despite knowing her profession, the town's residents continue unaware, and perhaps wilfully so, that she may be looking in their direction. Would their lives ever seem worthy of examination to them? Or would they simply feel that they are human beings trying to get by in an increasingly unstable world, where even a magazine listing doesn't inure your blissful surroundings to divorce, disease, depression?

The dogs of Littlefield do, eventually, stop keeling over; the fraught apprehension and the appalling mystery lifts. Temporary inhabitants move on; people die; children grow up. Meanwhile, Berne has created an intriguing portrait of the kind of loneliness that can only exist in a crowd, and given the lie to all those surveys that suggest a place or its community can be summed up by its house prices, crime statistics and performance indicators.

Alex Clark

My father's miraculous wartime escape

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 11:45 PM PST

anina Struk's Polish father never told her how close he came to being stranded in Nazi-occupied France. But after he died – thanks to a postcard – she traced his lucky steps

I am standing in the picturesque harbour of Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Atlantic coast of south-west France. In my hand, I have a black-and-white picture postcard that belonged to my father. On the back he had written in Polish: "I was in this place on 23 June 1940 at two in the afternoon."

I found this and a few dozen other postcards of French towns and villages in 1999 after my father's death. A Polish airman, his name was Wladyslaw Struk. On the postcards, he sometimes wrote a date, a time or an impression – information that enabled me to trace his route through France in the early part of the second world war from Marseille to Septfonds, then to Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Biarritz and finally Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the end of my journey more than 70 years later.

While my father was alive, I knew nothing about these cards. Like many others, he kept his war experiences to himself. So I knew little about the four months my father had spent in France as the Nazis conquered mainland Europe and nothing about why he might have been in this tiny fishing port. But unexpectedly, on that holiday to the French Basque country, the story began to unfold.

I had taken a few of the postcards with me, more out of curiosity than anything else. I hadn't expected to find a harbour that so closely resembled the image on the cards. It had hardly changed in the seven decades since.

Then, near to where I stood, I found a clue to why he might have been there. On a wall by the harbour was a stone memorial installed in 1996. It commemorated the French evacuees who, in June 1940, following the French surrender to Nazi Germany, "responded to the call of General de Gaulle" and boarded ships to join the Free French in England. No mention was made of any Poles among them, but I wondered: could they have been part of the evacuation?

I couldn't find any books or documents about it at the town's library, but a librarian suggested the maritime office. Here, I was put in touch with a local historian, author and the deputy mayor, Guy Lalanne. He told me that between 21 and 25 June 1940, as the invading German army swept south, thousands of Polish troops had poured into Saint-Jean-de-Luz in a last-ditch attempt to leave France. It transpired that this small harbour was the scene of one of the most dramatic rescue operations of the second world war.

The Nazi occupation of Poland in September 1939 had driven more than 30,000 Polish troops from their homeland. My father was one of them, and he spent nearly five months in internment camps in the Danube delta in Romania. He contracted malaria, was hospitalised and left for dead, but recovered and somehow managed to escape alone. On 10 February 1940, he procured passage on board the Dacia, a Romanian ship that sailed from the port of Constanta to Marseille.

By mid-February he had found his way to a camp near Toulouse where 3,000 Polish troops – mostly airmen – were accommodated.

On 10 May, the German army invaded France. It met with little resistance – to the frustration of the Polish troops fighting alongside the French, who wanted to put up a tougher defence. On 14 June, Paris fell and Marshal Philippe Pétain's government began to negotiate an armistice with the invaders.

Britain had launched Operation Aerial to evacuate British and other troops and civilians from the western ports of France. General Wladyslaw Sikorski, who had established a Polish government in exile, appealed successfully to Churchill to include the Poles. From 15 June, British, Canadian and Polish ships, packed beyond capacity, sailed back and forth ferrying evacuees to Liverpool, Plymouth and Falmouth.

As the German army surged south, the number of ports open to the allied ships quickly diminished until Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just 13km (nine miles) from the frontier with fascist Spain, remained the only option.

By the time my father reached the harbour on 23 June, two Polish ships, the Sobieski and Batory, packed to capacity, had already sailed. Two British ships, the Ettrick and the cruise ship Arandora Star, were anchored outside the breakwater, unable to enter the harbour because of heavy seas.

The events of those few days have not been forgotten by the people of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Raymonde Sansebastian was 13 at the time. GuyLalanne took me to meet her and she described how she watched what seemed like an endless convoy of trucks rolling down the hill and along the quayside. At first, people thought they were Germans and were relieved to find they were Polish.

When I told Raymonde that my father was among them, she kissed my cheek and said: "To the memory of your father and the Polish airmen who passed through our town."

But it was the drama of their departure that is most vivid in the memory of the townsfolk – events in which the local fishermen played the crucial role. For three days and three nights, they braved the notorious swell of the Bay of Biscay to row the refugees in their fishing boats to the ships.

Pantxoa Goya, then a youth of 18, was one of those fishermen. I went to visit him in his apartment overlooking the harbour where he said the dense crowds had gathered. Panic and trepidation had spread as the Poles tried to weigh up whether to stay in France and face internment or possible death, or to be bombed, sunk or drowned at sea. Those who decided to scramble on to the small boats had to dump their luggage on the quayside or throw it into the water. "There were more than 30 of them in each boat. There wasn't enough room for luggage, so they had to leave it behind," he said.

The Ettrick sailed that afternoon. The Arandora Star started to load passengers, but the swell made the operation treacherous. By seven the next morning in calmer seas, the ship was ordered inside the breakwater so embarkation could continue. There is no official list, but according to reports there were perhaps 5,000 crammed on board. In mid-afternoon it set sail for Liverpool. A few hours later, at 12.30am, the armistice came into effect. It stated that no more ships were to leave.

My father was aboard the Arandora Star. I know this because among his postcards are five small, faded photographs taken on board. Four of them show dense crowds of uniformed Poles, while the fifth shows my father standing on deck. On the back, my father has written: "View of the Arandora Star during the transfer from France to England, 24.V1.1940."

The Arandora Star, the last ship destined for Britain from the last free port in France, berthed at Liverpool docks at 7.35am on 27 June – my father's 24th birthday. That afternoon, the German army rolled into St-Jean-de-Luz along the route that the Polish trucks had driven just a few days before. He had had a lucky escape.

Operation Ariel rescued 200,000 people – 25,000 Poles among them – in one of the biggest evacuations of the war, but it never captured the public's imagination in the way that Operation Dynamo at Dunkirk had done a month earlier.

For the rest of the war, my father and thousands of other Poles stayed in Britain and fought alongside the allies. He served in Polish air force squadron 307 as an aircraft mechanic.

The war ended in May 1945, but, for the Poles, conflict and strife continued. By 1945, the communist-led government in Poland considered those Poles who had fought Nazism alongside the western allies as enemies. This made it dangerous, if not impossible, for my father to return. Not only that, but the agreement between the victorious allies saw the eastern territories of Poland, where my father grew up, incorporated into the Soviet Union. He and thousands of his compatriots found themselves permanently exiled from the country they had fought so hard to free.

The new world order had sealed my father's fate. In 1944, his mother and two sisters were deported and resettled in the newly acquired Polish territories of Silesia. They would never see their home again.

In 1946, my father married an Englishwoman – my mother Joan – and found work as a bricklayer. He put his language and culture aside in an attempt to fit into a country to which he said he was grateful for giving him stability, but where he never really belonged – he didn't take UK citizenship.

As a girl, I knew nothing about Poland, its language or culture, but I was aware that my father was different. I had a foreign name, which at school I would have gladly exchanged for an English one to prevent unpleasant jibes. I often felt my father was separate from us. He spent entire evenings either in the cellar, making furniture and other things for our small terraced house or seated at the kitchen table writing letters "home", as he would say, wrapped in an intense concentration that made him oblivious to us all.

Every Christmas, he would make up parcels of food and clothing to send to his mother and write messages in Polish that we had to painstakingly copy on to cards, sending seasonal greetings we could not understand to people we had never known. I always had a feeling that my father belonged in Poland more than he did here, but he never went back and he never saw his family again.

Only in my late 20s did I begin to appreciate the complexity of my father's feelings and his history. I set out to learn Polish and visit Poland to meet his sisters – the recipients of his letters. I became a kind of ambassador between them and my ageing father. I travelled to his home town of Chodorow, now in Ukraine, and found the house in which the family grew up, virtually unchanged, and the graves of our ancestors in the cemetery across the road. I also discovered the heritage of the country with which I would form my own strong bond.

After my father's death when I found the postcards and began to research his story, I unearthed documents in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London that filled out his movements in France. I also discovered a number of photographs taken during the evacuation from St-Jean-de-Luz. Remarkably, my father is in two of them: his face and black beret partially visible between the crowds on the deck of the Arandora Star.

Among my father's picture postcards is another that he wrote in Saint-Jean-de-Luz just before he embarked. It was addressed to his family in Chodorow, but never posted. He wrote: "I am leaving France because this is my fate … I can't describe to you how I feel … but I am surprised how I manage to bear it. I am writing these words to you, I know that they will not reach your hands, but I will keep this memorable thought that one day God will allow me to read these words to you myself as evidence that I remembered you."

Janina Struk's book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence published by IB Tauris, £16.99

Radical mum? Well, sort of ...

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 11:16 PM PST

She recycled jam jars and reused plastic bags, but protests had never been her thing. Until Alice O'Keeffe packed her tent, said goodbye to her children and set off to join the fracking protest

My first attempt at activism did not get off to a promising start. "I don't mean to be funny, but … are you a cop?" The woman in the tie-dye headscarf shot me a piercing look.

"Er, no." It was a squally weekend in August and I had come to Balcombe in Sussex to join the demonstrations against fracking. I was slightly surprised at myself. I have never been much of a radical. Protests are not my thing. I even managed to miss the anti-Iraq war march.

But something odd had happened to me since my two sons had been born – the first, three years ago and the other 18 months before. My previously rather vague worries about the future of the planet had become increasingly frightening and real. I cared about the environment before – I have always recycled my jam jars and reused my plastic bags, but there is a difference between caring in a general way, and really, personally, passionately caring.

The warnings about "catastrophic climate breakdown" in a matter of decades suddenly seemed more than theoretical. I will have had a good innings by then, but my children will not be much older than I am now. They may well have children of their own.

As I threw myself into the challenges of new parenthood – balancing the needs of babies and career; reading stories and giving cuddles; spending large chunks of disposable income on organic vegetables and sugar-free snacks – I was increasingly aware of my own inconsistencies. On the one hand, I would break my back to give my children the best of the best; on the other, I would stand passively by while their future was trashed.

The problem was that I didn't have time for changing the world. It was hard enough to get my shoes on the right feet in the morning. But deep in my fuggy, sleep-deprived brain, the question nagged away at me: how could I consider myself a half-decent mother if I didn't at least try?

So that Saturday afternoon I packed my tent and rucksack and set off for Reclaim the Power, a protest camp organised by the anti-fracking group No Dash For Gas. I was alone for the first time in more than a year. The baby and I were going to have to cope without each other for two whole days.

The scene on arrival in Balcombe did not allay my nerves. I had been expecting to camp in a nice green field somewhere, but the protest appeared to be right outside the gates of the fracking rig, next to a fairly major road. Tents were packed in higgledy-piggledy, some of them almost toppling into the roadside ditch. Cars, trucks and articulated lorries roared heedlessly past.

Even more disconcerting was the tangible tension between the protesters and the police. A few minutes after I arrived, a lorry tried to turn in through the gates of the rig to make a delivery. There was much jostling and shouting as protesters tried to block its progress, and the police tried to block the protesters.

I had never been on the "wrong" side of the police. I had always found them pretty cheery and helpful when I needed directions, and they were very efficient when my bike was nicked. I was not quite ready to engage them in verbal or physical combat, as some of these protesters clearly were.

Feeling dubious, I wandered over to the kitchen tent. My tummy was growling. There was a wholesome smell, but no obvious food. That's when the woman in the headscarf spotted me and started up with her interrogation. Clearly, I was not muddy enough or wearing enough tie-dye clothing to pass muster. "Sometimes they dress as normal people, you know. There's a book about it," she said.

"I know. But I'm still not a cop."

As I walked away, homesickness hit me in a crippling wave. What was I doing here? I sat down outside the Druids against Fracking teepee and dialled home.

"Hi babe!" Jonny sounded distracted. I could hear the baby squealing in the background. Of course – it was bathtime. Not a good moment to talk. "Are you there yet?"

"Um. Yeah." My voice had gone small.

"How is it?"

"It's a bit … weird. Anyway. I just wanted to see how you all were."

"Fine. We're fine. Listen, can I call you back?"

"Sure. Of course. Love you. Bye."

The line went dead. I stared at the phone for a few seconds, as a shipwrecked mariner might stare at a disappearing boat. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to turn around and go straight back home. Perhaps fracking wasn't so bad, after all. Hadn't they scientifically proved that it caused only minor earthquakes?

Back at the kitchen, a crowd had gathered. I chatted to a nice aromatherapist from Brighton in the queue, and we ate our chickpea curry together. It was really tasty. There was even a fragrantly spiced rice pudding for dessert. I began to feel a little cheerier.

"So have you been to the camp down the road yet?" asked the aromatherapist.

"Which camp down the road?"

"It's lovely down there. Really well organised. I think later tonight there's going to be a ceilidh."

Eureka! I had come to the wrong camp. I was eating rice pudding on what was effectively the militant frontline. Reclaim the Power was in full swing just a couple of miles away. I sped off. Over the brow of the hill, I found it: the great green field I had dreamed of. Smiling, friendly young people ushered me in, gave me leaflets, told me where to get a cup of tea and pitch my tent.

That evening, as the ceilidh band played, I wandered around the site taking in the eye-popping logistics of the operation. There was a central marquee, two kitchens, composting toilets, sinks with running water. There was a welcome tent and a wellbeing marquee. If I had wanted to, I could have spent the whole weekend having massages (I did consider it).

There were security people with radios. There was a family area with a paddling pool and climbing frame. Best of all, there was a huge range of people: young, old, able-bodied and disabled, fat and thin, black and white, muddy and – relatively – clean.

Plenty of parents had brought their children and babies. The air buzzed with proper, open-minded discussions about what was right and wrong with the world. After years of fretting in the privacy of my own head, it all felt enormously liberating.

There was a new question to consider, however: how far was I prepared to go? At my "village" meeting the following morning (the camp was organised into several large groups for ease of communication), we were told that we would be divided into smaller "affinity" groups for the actions on Monday. Affinity groups brought together people with similar interests and abilities. We were asked to fill in a form; if we were willing to face arrest, we had to tick a box marked "up for it".

My pencil hovered over the box. I thought with awe about the mothers who have endured long periods of separation from their children for a political cause: Aung San Suu Kyi, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot. I had begun to understand how they got to that point, but even one night in a Brighton police cell would have been too much for me. I did not tick the box.

I did, however, attend an excellent, thoughtful training session on taking direct action, and went on the march down to Balcombe, where we joined the activists from the other camp and many local people. In the weekend's most magical moment, hundreds of us encircled the perimeter fence around the rig and joined hands. You don't get that feeling from signing an internet petition.

I clattered home on Monday morning, exhilarated and triumphant, and scooped up the baby for a much needed cuddle.

"Hi, Mum," said the three-year-old matter-of-factly, as if I had done nothing more significant than popping out to the shops.

"You didn't get arrested then?" said Jonny, looking slightly disappointed.

Maybe next time.

Weekender: Melvyn Posner, gallery owner, 70

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 11:01 PM PST

'I'm at my most creative in the very early morning and often wake at 4am'

I met my wife Sheila, an artist, in 1963 at the Last Chance, a disco near Tottenham Court Road, London. We married in 1967 and moved to the Bahamas for three years. We missed the sunshine when we returned to London, so we moved to Australia in 1971. We now run the Mesh Gallery in Woollahra (meshgallery.com.au), where Sheila is the resident artist. It's 5km from downtown Sydney, and we can walk to Bondi Beach.

Being self-employed means work and play just merge. But we enjoy nothing more than a walk in Cooper Park – a rainforest near our house – or around Sydney harbour.

I'm at my most creative in the very early morning and often wake at 4am. I make myself an espresso and savour it with a piece of homemade lemon yoghurt cake, which I keep in the freezer so it's there when I want it. The morning it runs out, I make another.

I love shopping and always make an effort to look stylish. My style is eclectic, co-ordinated with panache. Sheila was an art and fashion student in London in the 60s and has been a great influence. My cap is from Zara, the jacket from Saba – an Australian label – jeans by Paul Smith and boots by Country Road. I have four pairs of these spectacle frames in different colours (they're from Ottica Carraro in Venice), so I can coordinate them with whatever I'm wearing.

• Are you a Weekender? Email a photo and a brief description of how you spend your weekends to weekender@theguardian.com

Nicole Mowbray

The best album covers of 2013

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

From R Kelly to Arcade Fire: the finest sleeve art of the year

Skye Sherwin

2013: what you've already forgotten

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

Who won Eurovision again? And other big TV moments that instantly slipped your mind

What annoyed Huey on Buzzcocks

Nostalgia is famously not what it used to be. But neither are Never Mind The Buzzcocks walk-outs. November saw Huey Morgan get inexplicably pissy with Rizzle Kicks for quoting his own lyrics, and he chucked a mug. Which, sadly, is not violent cockney slang, but literal and silly behaviour. Storming off as the end credits are rolling is like swearing at your parents under your breath: it doesn't count. Still, I've heard he makes a smashing cup of tea. (Come on, it's Christmas.)

Seth McFarlane's Oscars jokes

Brought in to make the gongs'n'songs snore-off more appealing to that overlooked demographic: young men. The frat boys' posterboy prepped his scattergun with gags about Chris Brown, a song about boobs and a meta-segment about being the worst host ever. Michael Haneke praised the gig as "epic ROFL-copters", though reception elsewhere was sharply divided. Is there anything less important to care about? The Huffington Post don't run op-eds about Bruce Forsyth on Strictly. I've asked them.

Who won Eurovision

With the spectre of austerity stalking the continent like death itself, most countries want to host the grim bauble of Eurovision like they want the menopause on their wedding day. The UK's kamikaze offering was 62-year-old Bonnie Tyler who came 19th, and Ireland fielded Ryan Dolan, who combined bodhráns and plucked eyebrows to finish last (reflecting the countries' respective international credit rankings). To paraphrase kids' musical Bugsy Malone, we're the best at being bad. Commiserations to Denmark, who won.

Queen appears on BBC News

Remember when our monarch popped up in the background of BBC News, pulling focus like nobody's business? The presenters, unsure of "videobombed by a sovereign" protocol, simply stopped talking for an awkwardly deferential minute, as the news tickertaped irrelevantly beneath them. How to repay this job sabotage? Fingers crossed newsreaders Sophie Long and Julian Worricker manage to crash Her Madge's Christmas Day speech to shout "CROMWELL!", or walk down some invisible stairs.

Any of the contestants in Splash!

Proclaimed "a new low for television" and "the highest-rating new ITV show in five years", a programme so obscure and defiant it could win the Turner prize, featuring a parade of contestants that looked like it had been compiled, drunk, in a Comic Relief green room. Here was Britain's Olympic legacy: Joey Essex, Caprice and a Sugababe you'd never heard of lining up to bellyflop into a Luton swimming pool, judged by Jo Brand. Will we ever see their like again? Yes. It's back in January.

The plot of Day Of The Doctor

So exciting! Basically John Hurt was a new (old) Doctor who nearly blew up his own planet in a painting but Billie Piper came back (but as a Sky Box or something) and David Tennant and Matt Smith were both there at once (it was double dreamy) and then the – …Zygons? – replicated them to blow up London, or stop London being blown up, and David Tennant married Queen Elizabeth I. Peter Capaldi's forehead was there. To be honest, it was all quite confusing.

Rhik Samadder

The best exhibitions of 2013

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

Wit, phallic symbolism and a general trend for spooky stuff: a look back on the year in art

Up north

Car-crash frights, spooky disorientations, surreal apparitions and restless nights were just a few of the recurrent themes that threaded through art during 2013. Mike Nelson infiltrated Birmingham's Eastside Projects with an array of blown-out car tyres salvaged from the M6. Almost tastefully composed (uncharacteristally for him), the installation nevertheless resonated with the artist's always enjoyable dystopian gloom. At Derby's QUAD Lindsay Seers presented Monocular4, a video installation that played out in a tin hut and took the audience on a trip into the world of genetics while exploring gestation, siblings and rebirth. You can still catch two of the years' very special highlights as they stretch into 2014. The Leonora Carrington exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art reveals a painter of spectral dreamscapes whose work has, until now, been largely under-recognised. But the shining star of the year has to be everybody's art world darling, the late Louise Bourgeois. There's a selection of her infamous sculptures at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, while at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket, there's a series of doodly little things simply titled Insomnia Drawings.

Down south

Sarah Lucas's survey show at the Whitechapel Gallery confirmed her position as one of contemporary sculpture's true greats. Beginning with the gritty humour and tough melancholy of her early reflections on sex and Britishness, it concluded with the current bone-white giant phalluses that might be the excavated totems of some forgotten pagan fertility cult. Further earth magic was provided by Tate Modern's exquisite Paul Klee retrospective. His intimate little paintings of mysterious dancing shapes pull you in, while the relentless experimentation is dizzying. The Daumier survey at the Royal Academy, revealed why the 19th-century caricaturist was beloved by everyone from Van Gogh to Paula Rego: his prints and paintings captured Paris in all its pungent, heart-breaking humanity. Young artists making an impact included Andy Holden whose video installation MIMS! at the Zabludowicz Collection explored the earnestly wide-eyed, often hilarious creative ambitions of his Bedfordshire teen-hood. And Catherine Story's witty reflections on art, cinema and making were the discovery of the revamped Tate Britain's Contemporary British Painting show.

Skye Sherwin

Robert Clark

Inside every great actor there's a mediocre singer

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

Since Anne Hathaway landed her Oscar, every movie star's been threatening to break into song

Anne Hathaway
Les Misérables

Hathaway's heart-rending portrayal of Susan Boyle won her the Oscar for most severe haircut and opened the floodgates for a year of thespian ballad-belting. Ever the trendsetter, she dispensed with the usual X Factor trappings and opted for a Sinéad O'Connor-meets-the-French-revolution theme. Work it all the way to the workhouse, girl!

Peter Mullan
Sunshine On Leith

Who knew? The gruff Scot's sandpaper-rough, booze-slurred rendition of the Proclaimers' Oh Jean suggests he has a Christmas album in him at the very least. But, really, someone needs to whip up a Glasgow-set musical for him built around Leonard Cohen's back catalogue. First We'll Take Buchanan?

Vithaya Pansringarm
Only God Forgives

After a hard day's dismembering, impaling and beating the crap out of Ryan Gosling, there's nothing a Bangkok cop likes more than kicking back with his buddies, a few Singhas and some sentimental Thai ballads down the karaoke bar. Give the man a hand… and he'll chop it off.

Steve Coogan
Alpha Papa

Alan Partridge's musical tastes were always ahead of the curve (just wait for next year's T'Pau revival). He's so au fait with Roachford's bouncy soul hit Cuddly Toy, he can simultaneously sing along, negotiate Norwich's one-way system and dish out advice to fellow road-users ("Your fog lamps are on; there's no fog").

Ken Jeong
The Hangover 3

Mr Chow's tone-deaf karaoke butchering of Hurt was hardly the worst of Hangover 3's crimes, but Johnny Cash was doubtless turning in his grave. Trent Reznor was said to be, er, hurt.

James Corden
One Chance

That someone made a biopic of Britain's Got Talent's Paul Potts was astounding enough. If Corden had replicated Potts's amateur operatics for real we might have been stunned into actually going to see it. Fortunately, he didn't. "I got about a third of the way through Nessun Dorma and they just went, 'Yeah we're going to get someone else to do this,'" Corden gamely confessed.

Susan Boyle
The Christmas Candle

OK, SuBo can sing, but unfortunately she can't act her way out of a saccharine, Rick Santorum-produced festive atrocity. They should have got Anne Hathaway.

TWILIGHT: THE GREAT PRETENDERS

The glittery vampires said ciao in 2013, and many new movies tried to take Twilight's place. They all failed

The Mortal Instruments
Phil Collins's daughter discovers she has special powers and comes to lead the war against demons.

Beautiful Creatures
Jane Campion's daughter discovers she has special powers and comes to lead the war against witches.

Ender's Game
The kid from Hugo discovers he has special powers and comes to lead the war against Harrison Ford's retirement plan – and high-tech aliens.

Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters
The kid from, er, the last Percy Jackson movie discovers he's half-Greek god, and comes to lead the war against… a sea of monsters.

The Host
Stephenie Meyer – Ms Twilight herself – discovers her franchise-creating powers have deserted her, when nobody turns up to see Saoirse Ronan leading the war against futuristic memory-erasing… what were they again?

Steve Rose

Modern Toss’s cartoon review of the year

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

2013 in Tossville: Thatcher's death ray, electronic crack pipes and Rylan's teeth

Modern Toss

2013's Singles Of The Year, reviewed by the stars

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

Chlöe Howl, Connan Mockasin and Tiga run the rule over 2013's biggest tunes

Lorde
Royals

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Chlöe Howl I have a problem with Lorde. But I think it's just 'cos she's a better 16-year-old than I ever was. This is a great song.

Connan Mockasin The gaps are long, but when the music comes in it gets special. The boomy bass is heavy, and the beat confuses me a bit.

Tiga I love this song. I think it's clever, sincere, spontaneous and catchy. Is it a coincidence that the Maybach got axed within days of this song's release? Yes; it was always a shit car.

Daft Punk
Get Lucky

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CH My friend was DJing one night and he played this three times in three hours. I never tired of shouting "TUUUNE!"

CM When I hear this song, I sing it out loud. It gives me confidence when I'm dancing.

T Nothing is more 2013 than talking about this song. It's catchy, I hate it; they should have used a real singer, and it's dangerous when electronic kids get the power to work with "real" musicians. But I still love them.

Robin Thicke
Blurred Lines

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CH Anything with Pharrell wearing a silver shellsuit gets my vote. It's a bit of a terrifying shame that Robin's deluded himself into thinking all females want to have sex with him, though.

CM I watched the video and was confused by it. But after three times I began to get it; they are mixing old with new. Cool!

T The fact that this weird, middle-aged-looking white creep is accepted, let alone popular, just leaves me baffled and confused.

Disclosure Feat Alunageorge
White Noise

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CH This song always comes on at the right part of a night – not too late that everyone's too pissed to go mental, and not too early that everyone's too scared to grind on each other. It's the soundtrack to fun memories of excellent moves.

CM I'm surprised by this one! It reminds me of disco, but from another planet.

T Not my cup of thrills, but it's inoffensive, well-done, classic 90s-style vocal house.

Arctic Monkeys
Do I Wanna Know?

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CH It's the perfect soundtrack for Alex Turner's recent transition into super-sexy.

CM The band name and title freaks me out. It sounds like they've been smoking dope.

T I'll fess up: I have a soft spot for Alex Turner. I like his voice, I like his hair, I love his phrasing. I have some vague sense of "respect" for their "journey" based on no facts at all. I had actually never heard this one, and I really like it.

Ace Hood Feat Future & Rick Ross
Bugatti

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CH I feel like when I was 15 and sneaking Strongbow into village hall parties. Me and the boys in Topman shirts would've raised our gun-fingers on the dancefloor.

CM Probably my favourite of these songs. The video is quite scary, but then again so is the music! It got me hooked – 10 out of 10.

T What's not to like? This is energetic, catchy, and actually has some new ideas, however simple. Like trap for dads.

Kate Hutchinson

2013's biggest celebrity spats

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

When even Lorde and Taylor Swift are beefing, you know it's been a quarrelsome year

Lorde v Taylor Swift

Lorde wins the award for most insanely precocious teenager this year, taking issue with everything from global capitalism to the promiscuous lyrics of Selena Gomez. But what could she possibly have to say about prim and perfect Taylor Swift? Well, exactly that: "She's so flawless and unobtainable. I don't think it's breeding anything good in young girls." Yeah. The cow. Taylor responded the same way any evil-breeder would, inviting Lorde to her birthday party and immediately forgiving her for her comments.

Kendrick Lamar v all rappers

Kendrick's guest verse on Big Sean's Control was no ordinary diss track. He began by comparing his arrival to the moment Nation Of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan met Saddam Hussein and then went on to rubbish everyone in the rap game: Wale, Pusha T, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky, Drake, Big Sean, Tyler and Mac Miller. All came in for a drubbing. Yet there was barely a peep of response; clearly Kendrick had the rap world running scared. This was the hip-hop equivalent of completing Grand Theft Auto without ever picking up a weapon.

Sinéad O'Connor v Miley Cyrus

Miley Cyrus claimed her Terry Richardson-directed video for Wrecking Ball, in which she fellates a sledgehammer, was inspired by the feminist anti-industry stance O'Connor took in the 1980s. The Irish singer was moved to pen an open letter, a mixture of concern and condescension, which accused Miley of being a prostitute of the music industry. Miley responded by mocking Sinéad's mental health problems on Twitter, somewhat undermining her LOL PARTY TWERK WTVR attitude.

Monica Galetti v chefs

Most hard-nosed TV judges have to rely on pre-scripted put-downs or withering abuse. But MasterChef's Galetti can compact a thousand Cowell insults into one disappointed grimace. Yet rather than cowing contestants into quivers, Galetti wins their respect. Perhaps because after years of anyone-can-do-it, give-it-a-go-at-home cookery shows, she's the one person to say: "Actually this bloody difficult and almost everyone is terrible at it."

Walter White v Nazis

He hired them in the first place, so you might have thought Walter White might have shown a little more understanding for Jack's white-supremacist prison gang after they murdered his brother-in-law and turned his protege into a slave. But no. Instead our mild-mannered meth lord had to go and extract revenge via a particularly bloody reimagining of the lawn sprinkler.

Sam Wolfson

2013 games of the year

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

In 2013 games went mobile and got emotional. Nick Gillett picks 10 of the best, featuring tears, heists and a 'dystopian document thriller'

Grand Theft Auto V, Xbox 360 & PS3

Offering an unprecedented level of freedom to perpetrate comic criminality – from petty robbery to gratuitous high-speed traffic offences – GTA V and its slice of faux-Californian larceny is one of the most absorbing games ever made. It also offers an intensely satirical view on the state of the American dream.

The Last of Us, PS3

After humanity is wiped out by a rogue strain of fungus, this road trip through the decaying detritus of civilisation is a perfect stage on which to play out the game's emotional, as well as physical, dramas. Tense, moving and beautiful to look at, it's refreshingly free of the usual glib answers and easy resolutions.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, 3DS

A Link Between Worlds takes the familiar ingredients of a Zelda adventure – an expanding array of equipment, a kidnapped princess and a force of ancient evil that still manages to be cute – and remixes them for greater accessibility and fun. The result is one of the most enjoyable Zelda games for years.

Bioshock: Infinite, Xbox 360 & PS3

Bioshock trades its dank undersea dystopia for a sun-infused cloud city. Its combat may be too simple for some, but the story, which includes well-drawn characters, a proper twist and even a bit of social commentary, more than makes up for it.

Pikmin 3, Wii U

Nintendo's plant creatures and the natural habitat in which they live are in fact a battleground where tiny life-and-death struggles are played out in pursuit of delicious alien fruit. Real-time strategy has never been so affecting.

Device 6, iOS

Device 6 is a story you read and participate in, its prose leading you from room to room, while puzzles gently insinuate themselves into the imagery and layout of the text. Ethereal, elliptical and satisfying when you manage to get past one of its trickier conundrums.

Super Mario 3D World, Wii U

Playing Super Mario 3D World, you realise that this is what Nintendo's cheerful plumber must always have looked like in the mind of his creator, Shigeru Miyamoto. Clean, plump, shiny little worlds that stretch off in every direction, with Mario joyously plundering them.

Remember Me, PS3

Starting in brightly coloured future Paris, Remember Me is a game about the fallibility of memory, breaking up its customisable combo-driven combat with levels where your bio-terrorist heroine hacks into someone's mind to tinker with details of memories until they believe what she wants them to.

Papers Please, Android & iOS

You're in charge of immigration at a border crossing into fictitious Arstotzka. Using the game's simple 8-bit-style interface, you compare increasingly complex details on applicants' passports and paperwork to decide whether they're allowed in. It's utterly addictive, drawing you effortlessly into its moral maze.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Xbox 360 & PS3

Assassin's Creed gets its swashbuckle on in this exquisite blend of naval battles and land-based skulduggery, which sees the game's antihero turn from callous buccaneer to man with a cause, in the process making himself the scourge of a lusciously reimagined vision of the 18th-century Caribbean.

Nick Gillett

Russell Brand, feminism, beards and apocalypse: more of 2013’s hottest trends

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

But who comes out on top of our sliding scales of zeitgeistery?

The Guide

Twerking, trolling, J-Law and rustic pop: the key pop cultural trends of 2013

Posted: 20 Dec 2013 10:00 PM PST

You know you're in 2013 when…

…Pop's gone rustic

All music in 2013 started to sound a bit Mumfordian. Vampire Weekend beefed up their preppy indie with tin whistles. Avicii, the bumfluff Guetta, made a single with a bluegrass singer. And Take That's Gary Barleymow premiered his comeback single on The X Factor surrounded by beardy types tapping on crates. Behold, the advent of faux faux folk.

…Your nan asks you what twerking is

Why, it's the popular dance move that makes your bum jiggle like custard in a bin bag. Pop strumpet Miley Cyrus has done more for its profile this year than any other: she twerked her way to the top of the charts via a controversial bounce on Robin Thicke's insignificant non-dong at the MTV VMAs. By August, twerking was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

…Everything is dark all the time

We had nightmares for days after the Ozymandias episode of Breaking Bad. But Walter White was just one of an ever growing number of dramatic antiheroes making the world a darker place. Dexter bowed out in a sentimental bloodbath, Jamie Dornan's Paul Spector was the loving father who did a bit of murdering between bathtimes and Dr Valentin Narcisse was the latest colourful bad lad to join Boardwalk Empire. Heck, even Superman went moody. We blame Christopher Nolan.

…Big comebacks take you by surprise

The year was only eight days old when David Bowie leapt from his deathbed to blindside everyone with his first new music in a decade. A month later, having procrastinated for 21-and-a-bit years, My Bloody Valentine unexpectedly released their Loveless follow-up midway through Match Of The Day. By the end of the year other stars had got the bug, Beyoncé dropping 17 new videos while most of her fans were at their Xmas party.

…And Blockbusters goes bust

Like the banks, Hollywood studios blithely assumed there was no limit to the amount of subprime multiplex dreck the public would swallow. But this was the year the golden goose stopped laying. Literally, in the case of Jack The Giant Slayer. Big names such as Johnny Depp (The Lone Ranger), Will Smith (After Earth) and Guillermo del Toro (Pacific Rim) crashed and burned. In sympathy, video chain Blockbuster also gave up the ghost.

Digital life is the new real life

This might seem old news but 2013 seemed to be another step on the path to us becoming half-robot. The tsunami of selfies, the blitzkreig of trolling, the Favstar accounts, the immersive gaming: with every month people's digital lives become more about expression than consumption. Who knows where we'll be by 2030. Ruled by Limmy via an app?

…But everything looks like 1993

Did you ever close your eyes in 2013 and open them to a grainy scene from 1993? Are all this year's Hot New Bands really wearing ill-advised curtain cuts, fluffy crop-tops, and those round spectacles not seen since Madchester's heyday? Why does everything look like a Cameron Crowe film? Are Haim really Hanson? It's not just in sight but in sound: shoegaze, baggy and even chill-out have ruled the indie roost this year.

…The best TV isn't actually on TV

Walt and Jesse may have cast a meth-blue shadow over the TV landscape this year, but, remarkably, none of us in this country were actually watching Breaking Bad on the old gogglebox. This was the year where the best series were found on streaming sites such as Netflix and Lovefilm, from the Kevin Spacey-fronted remake of House Of Cards to the gloriously daft "historical" saga Vikings. Best of all was Orange Is The New Black, the sharp, funny and achingly honest drama set in a women's prison, which darn near convinced us to throw out our flatscreens for good.

…And Jennifer Lawrence is everywhere

Like enriched uranium, J-Law's weapons-grade celebrity fuelled whole quadrants of the mediascape this year. If she'd taken a break from interviews, red carpets, fashion ads or haircuts, there'd have been blackouts. She began the year with Oscar prospects (Silver Linings Playbook) and ended it with another massive blockbuster (Catching Fire). Warning: over-exposure can lead to harmful side effects.