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Banned In The UK (C4)

ACCORDING to his wife, Alexander Spencer was "everything you could want in a man". She spoke of the twinkle in his eye and their happy family life. "He was perfect really," she said.

All very nice until you realise that the comments come from four different women, all of them married to him at some point. Now 51, he's had seven wives so far. Spencer is a serial husband who takes up with women with children, marries them and then leaves after a few months. He's been known to forget to divorce one wife before marrying again, known as bigamy in the trade.

Spencer remained a tantalisingly absent figure from the Extraordinary Families documentary. His wives spoke about their time as Mrs Spencer but the man himself was only seen in a clip from an interview on ITV's This Morning. This sounds like an outrageous plotline dreamed up by the writers of a soap, but the makers of the programme adopted a non sensational approach to the topic. They realised that the story was good enough to need no embellishments.

Thanks to the detective work of one ex-wife, Carole-Anne, we were able to discover what he'd done, although the reason for causing serial heartbreak remains a mystery. When he met single parent of three children Carole-Anne in 1999, he told her his wife of 23 years had died. His life was much more complicated than being a widower. She thought she was his second wife. After four months of happy marriage, he walked out, leaving a note saying, "Carole, I'm so sorry, I can't cope any more". She was bewildered by his disappearance, wanted to find him and sort through their problems. She discovered that he'd lied his way into the lives and beds of a succession of women, never staying more than a few months after the wedding ceremony. She found a trail of broken marriages with one thing in common - Alexander Spencer was the bridegroom.

This was the sort of thing you couldn't make up if you tried and, if you did, nobody would believe you.

Politicians are people we've grown to disbelieve too. On being elected in 1979, Mrs Thatcher declared that "In our society we don't believe in constraining the media, still less in censorship." There followed, Banned In The UK recalled, the introduction of video censorship in the wake of the video nasties scare as well as restrictions placed on reporters covering the Falklands War.

Having seen how anti-war images influenced the Vietnam War, politicians determined to deny the public the whole truth about the Falklands conflict. This was easy enough to do as communications back to England were controlled by the military and therefore the Government. Correspondents recalled even being denied the chance to report the end of the war until Mrs Thatcher had had her moment of glory announcing it in the House of Commons.

Tim Vine, Arc, Stockton

NOT too many years ago, almost every comedian worth their weight was a master of the one-liner. Even comic intellectuals like Woody Allen punctuated their acts with quick-fire gags. These days, the pun has taken a bit of a nose-dive, as stand-up comedy has become more observational. Tim Vine is almost single-handedly bucking that trend. Though his brand of humour owes more to Monty Python than Jackie Mason, he is adept at the one-liner.

Right from the off, the cheery audience at Stockton's Arc were battered by an endless stream of gags. Vine walked out wearing a green spiky plastic hat and dangling a brain on the end of a fishing rod. The delivery was so fast that you'd hardly had time to finish laughing from the first joke before two or three more came along in quick succession. "I've almost finished filling in my CV," he told us, producing a sheet with the letters CV printed on it and a small area waiting to be coloured in. It's all very silly but then like all good surrealist comics, Tim Vine raises daftness almost to the level of an art form. He sings a song about a dry flannel and plays his own rendition of Greensleeves, taking the song title literally.

Though this kind of comedy may evoke a bygone era, Tim Vine is anarchic enough to keep it fresh and, most importantly, to keep us laughing.

Paul Willis

Northern Sinfonia and Chorus, The Sage, Gateshead

FOR a chamber orchestra to take on the grand sweep of a Sibelius score would, on the face of it, be a gamble; and even more so his one-movement seventh symphony. But for the Northern Sinfonia, performing at The Sage Gateshead, it was a risk that paid off.

From the opening touch of the timpani to its driven conclusion, musical director Thomas Zehetmair had his finger firmly on the pulse of the piece. Evoking Sibelius' landscape of frozen tundras, the music blossomed. Every construct was clearly laid out, yet meshed into an organic whole. Sinfonia leader Bradley Creswick marshalled the forces of the strings in a shimmering display of swirling sound, punctuated by the noble strains of the trombones. The whole was perfectly modulated.

The sinfonia, joined by its imposing Chorus, then gave a rousing interpretation of Tippett's haunting masterpiece, a Child of Our Time. Modelled on Handel's Messiah and reinforced with the use of Negro spirituals, the oratorio tells of the assassination by teenager Herschel Grynszpan which led to the reprisal of Kristallnacht.

Neal Davies' powerful bass injected the narrative with just the right gravitas. Daniel Norman's crisp tenor oozed pathos and soprano Cynthia Haymon's soaring voice lifted the rafters. It may not have been a capacity audience, but those who were there made up for any empty seats with thunderous applause and cheers. An incomparable experience.

Gavin Engelbrech