While watching an episode of the latest series of Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year, sometime before the three judges made another of their staggering, baffling decisions about who to send through to the semi-final, I was struck by a question posed by the host Stephen Mangan to one of the artist contestants. I can’t remember his exact wording, but it was to this effect: what do you do when you’re working on something, sit back, and realise that the painting is unimprovable?
What an incredible adjective that is — unimprovable.
A word which all but a handful of us might never encounter in our entire lives (outside of a crossword puzzle, if you do them).
A word which it never seems to occur to us to say, to use.
And a word which has never, I expect, been said to us, or used to describe anything we did, anything we made, anything we laboured over.
It’s got me thinking about what I would describe as unimprovable, and I thought I’d share a few of the ideas I had.
SONGS:
I found myself drawn to this topic very quickly, almost instinctively, and I settled on not one, but two candidates, both of them cover versions which, by some magical and mysterious process, attain an unimprovability which other versions seem to lack.
The Pet Shop Boys’ cover of Always On My Mind is, in my very humble opinion, perfect. (It seems I’m not alone in thinking this: in 2014, it was voted the top cover version of all time in a BBC Music public vote.) It was the UK Christmas Number One in 1987, back in the days when anyone cared about such things, and the full 5:19 music video, with Joss Ackland as a strange passenger in the back of the PSB’s taxi, is its own weird thing of beauty.
And then there’s Tiffany’s cover of I Think We’re Alone Now, also from 1987 — was there some kind of planetary alignment that year? — which also does things to me on a cellular level. Maybe it’s childhood memories of playing it on vinyl (which I still own, and still listen to) in the back bedroom at home, in the dark, with the flashing coloured lights blaring on the wall-mounted speakers (red and blue on the left, yellow and green on the right). Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s just sublime.
MUSIC:
Not so easy for me, as I have no ear for music, no understanding of how music works, and no vocabulary to articulate what I hear or think. So I let instinct guide me, and the piece I settled on — and please, no groans if you’re more musically sophisticated than I am — is Winter: L’Inverno — II, the Second Movement of Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 4 in F minor, Op. 8, RV 297, which forms part of the Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni), composed between 1718 and 1723.
The score is marked “Largo”, an Italian musical tempo indicating that it should be played in a slow and stately manner, which translates as somewhere between 40 and 60 beats per minute. I’ve got a Spotify playlist with 21 versions of L’Inverno — II on it, and across those examples, the interpretation of that indicated largo pace is very wide indeed.
Interestingly, though I couldn’t tell you why it’s so interesting, the versions I respond to most seem to be those which disregard the largo instruction altogether. Janine Jansen speeds it up, and Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica go even faster, but I particularly love Max Richter’s recomposition which is almost impudently slow, stretching the piece out to nearly three minutes long. I’ve already fantasised about it being used as the trailer music if my first novel The Radiant City ever gets turned into a streamed TV series. (Let an old man dream.)
LITERATURE:
I honestly don’t think anyone could disagree with me picking George Orwell’s Animal Farm for this category, could they?
Not even 30,000 words in length, and like a Jenga tower, I suspect if you tried taking more than a handful of those words out, the whole thing would be diminished, would be disgracefully spoiled. Much admired, much imitated, but never bettered.
I recently made a new friend, N, who is an expert on Orwell. I don’t say that casually or frivolously; he’s a Professor of English Literature. I must chat to him about Animal Farm sometime, and see if a blog post of some kind emerges out of what we discuss…
THEATRE:
I struggled with this one for a long time, partly because I was stuck trying to decide whether I should be considering plays which are unimprovable on the page, or productions which are unimprovable on the stage. An exquisite play can easily fail in production; an exquisite production can reimagine indifferent material into something that takes your breath away.
In the end, a chance social encounter made me realise the answer had been staring me in the face all along. I’ve opted for Of All The People In All The World by the Birmingham-based company Stan’s Cafe, a piece which is pure theatre and also light years beyond theatre all at the same time, borrowing elements from visual art, installations, and durational performance art, and squashing these balls of Play-Doh together into something unique, something uniquely itself.
Coarsely put, a space is occupied by piles of grains of rice, ranging from one grain up to many thousands or even millions. Each grain represents a single human being, and the piles are used to represent a wide and evolving range of human statistics. It really is as audaciously, as bluntly, as poetically simple as that. Writing about OATP singularly fails to do justice to it — if it’s ever anywhere near you, I beg you to experience it for yourself.
Over more than twenty years, in all sorts of locations, the rice has offered receptive visitors all sorts of insights, into the world they live in now, into the world as it has been in the near and distant past, and if they’re really receptive, into themselves.
Of course, people being people, not everyone is so open to these insights; the company routinely has to deal with the obtuse and the fatuous, with all manner of quailers and complainers, including those who miss the point entirely and insist it’s all an outrageous waste of rice when so many are faced with desperate food insecurity. (The rice is always disposed of ethically, either washed and resold, given away to charity, or used for animal feed.)
The company did Gareth and I the great honour of creating a bespoke version of OATP as a present for our wedding, which included a range of statistics including some relating to same-sex marriage (for obvious reasons); our birthplaces (mine in the UK, Gareth’s in Zambia); and dinosaurs (because our wedding was Jurassic Park-themed).
VISUAL ART:
Too broad a category, you’ll say, and you’d be right, so I plumped for one work which I think is a cast-iron, dead-cert masterpiece: Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, the 1991 installation which resulted from a garden shed and its assorted contents being blown up by the British Army at the instigation of Cornelia Parker.
I had the great joy of experiencing this as part of the amazing retrospective at Tate Britain a few years ago, and a good many of the other featured works could well have been described as unimprovable, but I really think Cold Dark Matter lays total claim to the title. Much like how people respond to Stan’s Cafe’s rice, the way people respond to Parker’s obliterated, wire-suspended, lightbulb-lit shed speaks as much about them as about the work. I fully expect loads of people hate this piece, and taunt it with the age-old “Is it even art?”. I adore it. I hope I get to see it again someday.
EVERYTHING ELSE:
I couldn’t settle on an unimprovable film; my cinematic tastes are all over the place. I will not hear a word said against the 1981 Clash of the Titans, but even Ray Harrryhausen himself would have been the first to admit that there was room for improvement — and as evangelical as I’ve been in recent months about Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (2025), even there I found some bits and pieces which could have been tweaked a bit, to my way of thinking.
I didn’t get very far with a painting, either. I was tempted to go for Edward Hopper’s The House by the Railroad or Henri Rousseau’s Surprised! or, Tiger in A Tropical Storm, but that’s just because I really like them, and not because I would know if either could be improved in terms of technique or composition.
I haven’t got a candidate for architecture, for horticulture, for ceramics, for sculpture, or any other forms of creative practice, chiefly because my brain had more than enough to occupy it thinking about everything I’ve already covered. Maybe there should be a follow-up post one day where I manage to get round to tackling these categories, too.
So, obvious question to end on — what would you say was unimprovable, if I pressed you to make some choices?
