Show with art at its soul

ONE of the kindest things the people at Sky TV have done lately, in terms of making this troubled world of ours a better place for all – and I know they do a lot because they keep telling us – has been to make their Sky Arts channel free to air.

This means you no longer need to be a Sky subscriber to watch

PORTRAIT ARTIST OF THE YEAR.

And tonight you can really appreciate this to the full, because at 8pm its latest series gets under way, hosted once again by Joan Bakewell and Stephen Mangan.

The prize this year is a tremendous one, too, because the winner will be awarded a £10,000 commission to paint the brilliant Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, or at least a picture of her.

But first, of course, there’s some whittling-down to do, contestantwise.Ten weeks of it, in fact.And that’s the job of the expert judges, all of whom I’ve absolutely definitely heard of.

Sitting for our nine artists tonight are singer Gabrielle, actor Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and tattoo artist-and-TV presenter Grace Neutral, “who is,” says Joan, “in herself a sort of work of art”. By which she means Grace is very, very tattoo-ey.

In other news, I’m relieved to discover that ICELAND WITH ALEXANDER ARMSTRONG (C5, 9pm) is still called Iceland With Alexander Armstrong.

As I may have pointed out before, Channel 5 has a curious habit of tinkering with its programme titles, often when a series is already under way, which I don’t mind telling you can make life jolly confusing. But this one seems to have got all its faffing out of the way beforehand.

Its early working titles included Alexander Armstrong’s Icelandic Adventure – which I’d have thought would have been fine, but what do I know? – and Alexander Armstrong In Iceland, which OK, might have sounded as though he was panic-buying pigs in blankets.

Anyway, in episode two (there’s one more to come after this, by the way, so I’m still taking nothing for granted) Armstrong is heading away from Reykjavik, the capital, and driving north, “to explore Iceland’s wild side”. Last week, you may recall, Alexander suggested Reykjavik was just like Brighton, which personally I found rather odd, as I wasn’t aware the country had a council run by blithering idiots.

But if he’s now expecting to arrive in somewhere roughly akin to Haywards Heath, he’s in for a surprise.

“The north,” he discovers, “is as wild as this land of snow and ice gets.

“Here the peaks are higher, the plains flatter, and life – and possibly the people – a good deal harder.”

So, more like Croydon, really.