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Monthly arts column

New Year Honours

I'm writing in a damp grey bleak December as 2003 winds to a close. Although the wrong side of Christmas, it's my pleasure to announce the winners of the Evangelicals Now 2003 Arts & Media Awards, which as you know are the ones that people in the business really want to win.

The EN Award for Most Successful Unfinished Film Trilogy goes to Lord of the Rings, whose completion is currently an eagerly awaited Christmas treat. The only other contender for this award blew its chances royally with a dreadfully indulgent part 2 - I highly recommend The Matrix (part 1) as an excellent discussion starter for youth groups and other gatherings, but you're in for a frustrating evening if you try to make sense of the sequel.

Disastrous excursions into romantic strife, woolly politics and a storyline that lost focus couldn't be redeemed by some of the best-staged spectacles yet seen in the cinema. An American pastor friend made the mistake of seeing it before he'd seen Part 1. Two hours of total incomprehensibility, he told me.

Soap silliness

The award for Best Sheer Silliness in a TV Soap Opera is a tie this year, between the last episode of Crossroads (yes, it was all a dream in the mind of a check-out girl) and the extraordinary Brenda in Coronation Street. Brenda is a Christian. You can tell, because she quotes the Bible a lot and has a mad gleam in her eye when she does so. It goes without saying that she is completely batty. As I write she is about to abduct baby Bethany. Really, you'd think that with the respect that other religions get on TV these days, Christianity would just occasionally be granted a fictional portrayal that gives it some credibility. So another good discussion starter there, then.

Best Male Vocalist is a late entry by Bob Dylan, whose Shepherds Bush concert I attended in November. Listening to musical history singing just a few yards away is a magical experience. I found myself wondering what Dylan's feelings are today about his Gospel albums, and hoping that those of us moved and excited by his Christian lyrics continue to pray for him in one of the most difficult environments in which a Christian can ever find himself. On the night, he was fabulous, his band magnificent and the venue appealingly intimate.

What made me laugh!

Most Interesting Comedy Newcomer is Little Britain, which in December transferred from obscure digital BBC3 to mainstream BBC2. It's a programme in the tradition of grotesquerie that includes League of Gentlemen and Harry Hill's TV Burp (which in a less strong year would have walked away with the award). Almost entirely performed by the prodigiously gifted and anarchic Matt Lucas and David Walliams, its bizarre view of Britain disarmingly slides past logic and leaves you thinking without knowing why. It has its share of crudity and offensiveness, but also an unmistakable amiability. You may not like this kind of TV, but few programmes so precisely target the freaky humour of today's young people.

Most Moving Art Experience of the Year was for me the discovery of the post-conversion paintings of Peter Howson, about which one can't possibly be flippant. These are some of the most remarkable observations by a relatively new Christian that I have ever come across. If you haven't yet looked at his work on the Flowers East web site (www.flowerseast.co.uk), do so, as soon as you can. More information in my June 2003 EN column.

And finally...

Finally, the 2003 award for The Politician Who Has Been Good For The Arts goes to Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, for presiding over some stunning civic transformations. Over the past two years illness has prevented me getting to London very often, and now things are getting back to normal it seems almost a different city.

The new Millennium Bridge, as novelist Peter Ackroyd predicted it would, has transformed the demography and landscape of the Southwark end of the South Bank, and at Waterloo the new Hungerford Bridge is a magical fairy-tale confection, lightly echoing the outlines of the Houses of Parliament and providing a view of them not seen for over a century. Further inland, the congestion charge has reduced London's traffic, and the pedestrianisation of Trafalgar Square has returned to us a national plaza, a place to throw people into fountains at times of national jollification without getting run over. His 2003 report on multicultural London arts and media was pretty good, too.

A good year, especially as regards Peter Howson and the Hungerford Bridge. As in other years, the arts and media provide us with endless resources for understanding and often enjoying this creative and created world, and seeing it through the gifted eyes of others. Make it your resolution in 2004 to extend your knowledge and enjoyment of the arts and media, and to share your findings with family and church.

Happy New Year, everybody!
David Porter