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Front Row: The art of physical comedy, Damien Hirst, Andre Aciman, The impact of the arts on mental health

03/10/2018

The art of physical comedy, Damien Hirst, Andre Aciman, The impact of the arts on mental health

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, The art of physical comedy, Damien Hirst, Andre Aciman, The impact of the arts on mental health

The art and history of physical comedy: why is the unfortunate mishap hilarious?

The art of physical comedy: why is the unfortunate mishap hilarious? Plus Andre Aciman on his latest novel, and the value of a Damien Hirst artwork.

In the week Rowan Atkinson returns to the big screen as the hapless spy in Johnny English Strikes Again, which sees him batter innocent bystanders and himself in a series of pratfalls, we look at the art of physical comedy. Jonathan Sayer of Mischief Theatre, classicist and stand-up Natalie Haynes and Dr Oliver Double of the University of Kent attempt to answer an eternal question: why is the unfortunate mishap hilarious - so long as someone else is falling off the ladder?

Damien Hirst has just announced that he is scaling back business activities, including laying off 50 staff, to focus on making art. This news coincided with a recent report into the value of Hirst’s work, which found that the artworks he sold at auction in 2008, had plummeted in value when resold. Art market journalist Georgina Adam explains what this all might mean for the artist. 

Andre Aciman, whose first novel Call Me By Your Name, was turned into an Oscar winning film, discusses his latest novel Enigma Variations, which charts the life and loves of one man from adolescence through adulthood.

In the first in an occasional series looking at the way the way in which the arts can positively impact on people’s mental well being, Stig Abell talks to Laura Freeman about her book The Reading Cure in which she describes “the chaos, misery and misrule of an anorexic’s thinking”, and how she overcame it. Aged 24 she read Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol and describes how continuing to read about food in fiction gave her the inspiration to start enjoying food again and became the pathway to a fuller and richer life. 

Presenter: Stig Abell
Producer: Edwina Pitman

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