The future starts here: What's going to be hot in 2008

Another year, another chance for new acts and old favourites to delight audiences. Our reviewers unearth their crystal balls and make their predictions for what's going to be hot in the coming months

Andy Gill

There's been such a remarkable unanimity regarding the imminent success of both Adele and Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong that one feels a tad churlish demurring about what are effectively self-fulfilling prophecies. In both cases, the acts sound to me like the last gasps of two flagging modes respectively, the blue-eyed soul tradition that runs from Alison Moyet to Joss Stone, and the terse new-wave revival started by Franz Ferdinand rather than breakthroughs to something fresh and new.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but there are plenty of other new artists devising more original and distinctive styles from rock's basic building blocks, of whom Foals are probably the most celebrated. On their MySpace site, they describe themselves as "Snotty art school dropouts hungry for the dollar" which, when you think about it, could serve as the tag-line for virtually all British pop since the Sixties, but which in Foals' case is a droll acknowledgement that their blend of furious, furrow-browed math-rock and limber funk beats, perfectly evoked by the track title "Mathletics", may be too self-consciously arty for some tastes. It's certainly odd to hear a drummer given such prominence in a band's sound, but Foals' Jack Bevan probably merits it. Their Antidotes album is due in March.

Arcade Fire, meanwhile, are a significant influence on several interesting new bands. On their Wizard of Ahhha EP, Black Kids who are neither black nor, one suspects, exactly kids either project a fiery whirl of folk-rock hysteria that bodes well for their forthcoming debut album, while New York electro duo MGMT produce an art-rock blend that eschews few influences: individual tracks from their Dave Fridmann-produced Oracular Spectacular feature echoes of Supertramp and Eagles-esque harmonies amongst the electronica, with "Time to Pretend" sounding like Squeeze's " Up the Junction" jammed by Hot Chip and Arcade Fire together: a fantastic prospect, if they can keep all their plates spinning. Another electronic outfit worth attention though one that's unlikely to trouble the charts like MGMT is Our Brother the Native, whose unhurried ambient/post-rock style sounds like a cross between Dirty Three and Boards of Canada.

At the opposite extreme to all this studious, hyper-serious stuff are The Ting Tings, who look like an inverted White Stripes ie, it's the guy who drums and the girl (Katie White) who does the rest but whose minimal techno-rock style sounds like snarky girl duo Shampoo with added substance; their feisty individualist anthem "That's Not My Name" bodes well for their full-length debut. On an Americana tip, West Virginia combo The Wild Rumpus play country-blues skiffle in the vein of The Gourds, Boggs and Two Gallants, all frisky mandolins, banjos and bluesy intonation. But my own tip to make strange new waves in 2008 is New Zealand trio The Ruby Suns, who in March follow up the ambitious Brian Wilson-esque pop of their 2006 debut album with Sea Lion, an even more ear-boggling collection of blissful pop heavily influenced by African and Polynesian music.

Lily Allen has been recording new material, and can be expected to release that tricky second album this year. Her quirky style spawned a number of second-rate imitators, notably the execrable Kate Nash and her heinous debut Made of Bricks. But if Allen retains the originality of her debut, her next album will show the imitators a few tricks.

Comedy

Julian Hall

Unless the conjecture about a Jerry Seinfeld gig crystallises as fact, then 2008's undisputed comedy highlight will come in the shape of the first UK tour by Chris Rock. Until now, Rock has only appeared in this country for an impromptu warm-up at the London Comedy Store before his Live Earth appearance, where he gave TV bosses palpitations with an expletive-laden introduction to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Much to the undoubted delight of fans there'll be no call to cut the sound on his tour, which starts on 7 January in Manchester and stops off in Birmingham and London.

February sees the aptly titled Still Alive tour by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, reuniting the pair, live, for the first time in seven years for a long countrywide run. Audiences and performers alike are anxious to see if a household name of the now old school of comedy still has sparkle. As French puts it, "There's nothing like a live audience to change the colour of your pants."

Speaking of bloomers, the new year sees a number of tours springing up from Edinburgh favourites such as Mark Watson with Can I Briefly Talk to You About the Point of Life? As is self-evident, even Watson's show titles don't allow for a pause for breath, but his nervous, neurotic energy carries audiences and rarely lets them fall into a lull. Also touring is the gay Asian former doctor Paul Sinha, whose style may not be the warmest but his wit and wisdom are ultimately rewarding

It was once said that the Comedy Store was "comedy's unofficial national theatre", but with Soho Theatre's Dean Street site entering its ninth year of being a receiving house for comedy it could perhaps be a contender for the title. The London venue offers up a menu of talent from the warm and accessible Zoe Lyons and Shappi Khorsandi to the darker hues of Americans Rick Shapiro and Ed Hamell and the Dutch star Hans Teeuwen.

Just outside the West End, the Bloomsbury Theatre also offers a regular diet of comedy and during 2008 plays host to Stewart Lee's collection of what he sees as the 10 best acts still working today, albeit without invitees Daniel Kitson and Jerry Sadowitz, who maintained their indefinable mystique by declining to appear. Despite their absence, however, Lee has among his collection Harry Hill, Simon Munnery and John Hegley.

Film

Geoffrey Macnab

Thanks to the writers' strike, 2008 promises to be a year of horrible uncertainty for the Hollywood studios. There are still plenty of tentpole movies already dug in the release calendar we'll see Batman again in Dark Knight, loincloths aplenty in 10,000BC, 007 (Daniel Craig) in Bond 22 (which may even have a proper title by the time it appears in cinemas); there will be further helpings of CS Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia: The Prince Caspian) and of JK Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince). Even so, the WGA strike might open up a small window for less obvious fare.

Happily, 2008 looks like being a strong and varied year for British film-making. Kicking off the year, Mike Leigh's latest feature Happy-Go-Lucky will be out shortly. As ever with Leigh, advance details are on the skimpy side, but (judging by its title at least) this promises to be cheerier than some of the master's more doleful recent efforts.

Meanwhile, one film bound to provoke a ferocious debate is Steve McQueen's Hunger, about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. The film-makers originally aimed to shoot in the Maze prison, but when that proved impossible, recreated the notorious prison on a specially built set in Belfast. At the time of writing, two-thirds of the film has been shot. The producers have been waiting for their star, Michael Fassbender, to lose weight before shooting the final third of the movie.

Keira Knightley, either the brightest young star in British cinema or a vapid, overrated ingenue depending on which critics you read, will be looking to win over the doubters with her new film, The Edge of Love. Scripted by her mum Sharman Macdonald, this comes billed as a torrid love triangle drama. Knightley plays one of the women in the life of troubled poet, Dylan Thomas.

Courtesy of the new screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited starring Ben Whishaw and Matthew Goode, we will all be able to wallow anew in Catholic guilt and admire public school boys' teddy bears. It remains highly doubtful, though, whether the film will erase memories of Charles Sturridge's magisterial 1981 television adaptation.

The Brits will also be able to indulge their passion for all things Tudor with a costume drama, The Other Boleyn Girl, starring those well-known Brits Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman. Another promising-looking British movie is Sharon Maguire's Incendiary, with Michelle Williams, about an adulterous wife whose life is torn apart when her husband and child are killed by a suicide bomber at a football match.

On a lighter note, the trailer for How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (the adaptation of Toby Young's book about his misadventures as a British journalist in New York) suggests this might be a British comedy that makes audiences laugh. One scene showing Simon Pegg (as the Young character) making an utterly hapless attempt to chat up Kirsten Dunst in a singles bar was very funny indeed in its own smirking, sub-Viz fashion.

Loftier in conception, Isaac Julien's Derek, his portrait of the late Derek Jarman, ought to serve as a poignant reminder of a kind of film-making that has been allowed to wither and die. In the brave new world of British cinema created in the New Labour era, directors as adventurous as Jarman or the late Bill Douglas are in very short supply.

I shall be keeping an eye out for the new project from Quentin Tarantino, and, on a less serious note, The X-Files movie.

British film lovers will have the chance to steep themselves in the works of one of the greatest British film-makers David Lean. To mark Lean's centenary, 10 of his 16 films have been restored by the BFI National Archive. It is conceivable that the new films mentioned above may turn out to be duds and that 2008 will turn out to be a lousy year for British cinema.

Books

Boyd Tonkin

The first half of 2008 promises a rich harvest of state-of-the-nation fiction. Settings for these chronicles of public upheaval and private passion range from the Warrington of Helen Walsh's Once Upon a Time in England (Canongate) and the Newcastle of Richard T Kelly's Crusaders (Faber) to the Sheffield of Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate) and the remembered outer-London suburbia of Hanif Kureishi's (left) Something to Tell You (Faber).

The inward and outward transformations wrought by migration and settlement will drive novels by Linda Grant (The Clothes on their Backs; Little, Brown) and Gillian Slovo (If Wishes Were Horses; Little, Brown), a grand theme given a contemporary spin by Robin Yassin-Kassab's debut, Road from Damascus (Hamish Hamilton). New Labour's decade of dominance will propel a family saga from Melissa Benn (One of Us; Chatto & Windus), and seems strangely relevant to the dystopian fantasy-island imagined by Will Self in The Butt (Bloomsbury).

True, the past can still cast a fictional spell. It may shape the present, as Louis de Bernires will show in a novel about the aftermath of recent Balkan wars (A Partisan's Daughter; Harvill Secker). A previous age may mirror the dramas of our own, as in Salman Rushdie's visit to Renaissance Italy, The Enchantress of Florence (Cape). Or a great historical figure may illuminate the enduring truths of love and art, as in Helen Dunmore's novel of Catullus in Rome, Counting the Stars (Fig Tree).

Further afield, watch out for a first novel by Junot Diaz of the Dominican Republic, The Brief Wondrous Life on Oscar Wao (Faber). Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl (Faber) marks a return to form for the Peruvian maestro. From "old" Europe, Bernhard (The Reader) Schlink makes a devastating raid on the German past with Homecoming (Weidenfeld), while Linn Ullmann draws on family life with her late father, Ingmar Bergman, in A Blessed Child (Picador). Faiza Gune, the voice of the Parisian banlieue, deepens her range with Dreams from the Endz (Chatto & Windus). Elsewhere, two novels by Chinese authors demand attention: Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem (Hamish Hamilton) and Ma Jian's Beijing Coma (Chatto & Windus).

In the year of the Beijing Olympics, non-fiction books about China and its ascent will proliferate, the tenor of most summed up in the title of Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World (Allen Lane). Modern terrorism will stimulate a spread of reflections, from the philosophical Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent (Allen Lane) and Slavoj Zizek's Violence (Profile) to the historical Michael Burleigh's Blood and Rage; (HarperPress) and the personal: Martin Amis's The Second Plane (Cape). And Russia's war in Chechnya prompts another work of reportage by Asne Seierstad (left), The Children of Grozny (Virago).

Questions of faith and death underlie Julian Barnes's memoir-cum-meditation Nothing To Be Frightened Of (Cape). Scientific answers to the meanings of life will be encapsulated in two guides to our knowledge of this planet, and others: Natalie Angier's The Canon (Faber) and Christopher Potter's The Portable Universe (Hutchinson).

Theatre

Paul Taylor

I have very mixed feelings about Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking, a bereavement memoir that is her equivalent of CS Lewis's A Grief Observed. And, though she is unquestionably a great actress, some of Vanessa Redgrave's performances create a teetering ambivalence. So I'm hugely intrigued by the prospect of her solo portrayal of Didion in David Hare's production of the stage adaptation of Didion's book, which comes to the National from its lauded run on Broadway.

I hear that the Filter company, whose devised piece Water was one of the most theatrically thrilling and emotionally intelligent events of 2007, are working on a show that examines the genre of the western. I hope that they will take on board Fassbinder's Whity, which must be one of the few westerns of a bisexual bent and with a black star.

It's great that the National Theatre is providing good, stretching roles for the excellent young actor Rory Kinnear, and it's mouth-watering to think of him as Vindice, the pervy victim-turned-villain in The Revenger's Tragedy, which will be directed by Melly Still. The divine Clare Higgins is teamed with the equally divine Simon Russell Beale in Nick Hytner's production of Major Barbara. I thought I didn't like Shaw and then the NT gave us St Joan perhaps this new production will clinch my conversion to the old windbag. The National is also going to mount a new play by Michael Frayn, a writer who has always been brilliant but who just gets better and better with age.

At the other end of the seniority spectrum, the gifted Debbie Tucker Green joins forces again with director Sacha Wares at the Royal Court for Random and, at the same exciting and reinvigorated theatre, the fruitful partnership of Martin Crimp and Katie Mitchell continues with The City. Mitchell revealed in this paper that she is working on a devised show derived from Dostoevsky's The Idiot which, if it as full of theatrical daring as her take on Virginia Woolf's The Waves will be a red letter night.

In September, the Donmar begins its year-long residency at Wyndham's in the West End with Kenneth Branagh in a new version of Chekhov's Ivanov by Tom Stoppard. And, just in time for Christmas, Derek Jacobi will don yellow garters to play Malvolio in Twelfth Night an intriguing prospect.

I hear that the Young Vic is embarking on a Brazilian project that will result in next year's Christmas show which is when we'll be looking forward to theatre in 2009.

Television

Thomas Sutcliffe

Time travel has always been important in TV, the most favoured journey being a short hop back to revisit the hits of the previous year. So you won't have long to wait for the return of Gene Hunt from Life on Mars, now transferred to the Met in 1981 and working with a female visitor from the future in the BBC's Ashes to Ashes. Not to be left out, ITV has also commissioned a time-swap drama with Lost in Austen, in which a contemporary Bridget Jones type finds herself regressed 200 years and living with the Bennet family, where she has a chance to take a crack at Mr Darcy. Channel 4 will offer a slightly different twist on time-shift detection with City of Vice, a drama about the founding of the modern police service in Georgian London.

Not all drama seeks to escape the fierce urgency of now BBC2 has already provoked some controversy with news of its "White" season, a series of plays and programmes that examine the fears and prejudices of the white working class, including Abi Morgan's drama White Girl, about an 11-year-old who finds herself drawn to Islam in order to fit in at a school where most of her fellow-pupils are Muslim. And the black experience of inner-city gun culture and teenage killings is explored in Fallout, Channel 4's TV version of Roy Williams's critically acclaimed drama.

The big documentaries seem likely to work on your shudder reflex. For BBC1, David Attenborough is delivering the final chapter in his magisterial bestiary, Life on Earth, with a series about reptiles. Channel 4 is preoccupied with birds, with a major season about the food we eat kicking off with a documentary in which Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall tries to persuade us to turn to free-range poultry, and Jamie's Fowl Dinners, in which the chef aims to do for battery-farmed chicken what he did for the Turkey Twizzler. Addressing more cerebral appetites on Channel 4 are Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe, a major series about cosmology and physics, and a Nick Broomfield documentary about the Battle of Haditha, in which 24 Iraqi civilians were killed by US Marines.

As for light relief, BBC2 promises Lab Rats, in which Armando Ianucci and Chris Addison try their hand at traditional, recorded-in-front-of-an-audience comedy. There will also be the more experimental Taking the Flak, which follows the progress of a small war in Africa, with appearances by real newsmen and filming by a news cameraman. Channel 4, meanwhile, is pinning its hopes on Reaper, an American import in which a 21-year-old slacker discovers that his parents have sold his soul to the devil, for whom he now has to work as a bounty-hunter.

Classical Music & Opera

Edward Seckerson

In the best of all possible worlds, Leonard Bernstein's musicalisation of Voltaire's Candide would be as immortal as West Side Story. A problematic libretto decreed otherwise. But it's still one of the most audacious scores ever written for the Broadway stage, and the word on Robert Carsen's staging, which arrives in June at English National Opera via Paris and Milan, suggests that it may have rediscovered its satirical edge.

Carsen is opening Glyndebourne Festival Opera's new season, too. Monteverdi's last work, L'incoronazione di Poppea, presents a rather different challenge from the Bernstein, though you could argue that the great good triumphs in neither. And what will Laurent Pelly (whose La Fille du Rgiment won every heart at Covent Garden last year) make of Humperdinck's bitter-sweet Hnsel und Gretel?

At the Royal Opera House, Nicholas Hytner's hotly anticipated new production of Verdi's Don Carlo has a cast to die for, with Rolando Villazon in the title role and the rising sensation Marina Poplavskaya, freshly graduated from the Young Artists Programme, as Elisabetta di Valois. And I can't wait to see what naughtinesses David McVicar might unveil in Strauss's Salome.

In a characteristically eclectic programme at London's Barbican, I look forward to the residency from the world's oldest orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, newly revitalised under Riccardo Chailly one of the relatively unsung international "greats".

The prospect of Daniel Barenboim bringing a lifetime of musical and humanitarian wisdom to bear on Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas makes the Southbank Centre the place to be during January and February. Esa-Pekka Salonen journeys "From the Canyons to the Stars" with his Philharmonia contributions to the Messiaen series, including the psychedelic love-fest that is the Turangalila-symphonie. Vladimir Jurowski promises more intriguing programming at the London Phil: I imagine 8 March will be the first time Ravel's darkly subversive Piano Concerto for the Left Hand has ever prefaced the utopian triumph of Shostakovich's great "Leningrad" Symphony No 7. What a brilliant idea.

And what a surprise to be able to welcome Nigel Kennedy back to the Royal Festival Hall. The most compelling violinist of his generation, he will play the piece he all but made his own the Elgar Violin Concerto. He may have shunned the big time for a quiet life in Poland, but let's just hope that his local football team aren't playing at home on 12 March.

Radio

Robert Hanks

The tectonic plates have been shifting in the world of radio for the past few years, as internet radio, podcasting and digital radio have offered new means of listening. A potential earthquake begins this summer when Channel 4 is due to launch the first of a string of digital stations, starting with a music, comedy and entertainment channel, E4 Radio.

Until then, the BBC trundles on, trying to ignore its shrinking budgets. The forward-planners are dominated by the customary run of anniversaries, festivals and big news events. Among the centenaries are that of Ian Fleming, marked on Radio 4 by the first radio dramatisation of Dr No, with Toby Stephens as Bond; and of the French composer Olivier Messiaen, marked by a season of his music on Radio 3 in December.

Radio 3 also has seasons to mark 50 years since the death of one of our great national composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and 400 years since the birth of one of our great national poets, John Milton; while at the end of the year, Radio 2 will be celebrating 50 years of the Motown label.

Radio 2 dominates the festival season South by Southwest from Texas in March, the Cambridge Folk Festival in July, and so forth; but of course, Radio 3 has the biggest of all, the 2008 Proms, programmed this year by their new director, Roger Wright: as controller of Radio 3, Wright has been an ambitious and mostly, though not infallibly, astute programmer; now is his chance to wipe out the memory of 2007's atrocious Michael Ball Prom.

The big news events include the Beijing Olympics, more or less taking over Five Live in August, and in November the US presidential elections, for which Radio 4 has dug up an election-related series of the late Alastair Cooke's Letter from America. It is also, don't forget, election year in Russia and, hopefully, Pakistan: the World Service is the place to go for coverage of both, and in March it has an interesting series of documentaries on contemporary Russia.

Finally, a threesome of programmes to listen out for: Sebastian Baczkiewicz's dramatisation of The Trial and Death of Socrates (Radio 3, February); World on the Move (Radio 4 and World Service, February and March) , a multimedia collaboration following global animal migrations; and a wild card, The City Speaks a pair of plays on Radio 4 produced by writers, film-makers and sound designers around a "narrative frame-work" by Peter Ackroyd.

Dance

Zoe Anderson

There's plenty of it. This year sees an expansion in British dance, with local and British companies touring more widely, aiming for bigger theatres and wider audiences. In March, Sadler's Wells takes over the London Coliseum for a season. There are shows from Sylvie Guillem, Carlos Acosta and the Stuttgart Ballet, but I'm most looking forward to New York City Ballet. This is Britain's first chance in years to see one of the world's major companies in a substantial repertory. Beside ballets by Balanchine, NYCB's genius founder choreographer, there's new work by Alexei Ratmansky, plus an anniversary tribute to Jerome Robbins. There's more Robbins later in the year, too. The Royal Ballet revives his Dances at a Gathering in May a much-loved ballet that needs a big, brilliant cast. Robbins may be most famous for his West Side Story choreography. A 50th anniversary staging of the musical is at Sadler's Wells in July.

Outside London, the Kirov Ballet visits Birmingham with Don Quixote and Balanchine's lovely Jewels. Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, the Irish physical theatre company, tour Britain for the first time. The diva of dance theatre, Pina Bausch, appears at Sadler's Wells in February.

China is everywhere. The Peony Pavilion is a three-part opera spectacle that comes to Sadler's Wells in June. I suspect the most jaw-dropping will be the Chinese Acrobatic Swan Lake, touring this summer. It features a Swan Queen who balances, on pointe, on top of her partner's head. Choreographer Akram Khan will collaborate with the National Ballet of China on Bahok, which has its British premiere at the Liverpool Playhouse in July. In May, choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui works with sculptor Antony Gormley and martial arts monks from the Shaolin Temple.

One of the most intriguing projects comes in November, when the splendid Mark Morris brings his new Romeo and Juliet to the Barbican. Morris goes back to Prokofiev's original score and scenario with happy ending.

Visual arts

Tom Lubbock

The best shows are all modern. Three major 20th-century painters pace out the year. In May, Gustav Klimt opens at Tate Liverpool. His feasts of sex and decoration from fin de sicle Vienna provide the centrepiece of Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture. In the summer, the most imaginative and dynamic of British modernists, Wyndham Lewis, appears at the National Portrait Gallery. It's a portrait show, not the full retrospective he needs but then he was a supreme portraitist. And in the autumn, there's a not-quite-centenary exhibition for Francis Bacon at Tate Britain.

Really old masters, on the other hand, are in short supply. For the second year running, there's no big show of a historic European artist. The German Renaissance master Lucas Cranach enjoys a select display at the Royal Academy in March. The National Gallery offers the absurd Pompeo Batoni, painter of souvenir portraits of 18th-century gentlemen-tourists, but compensates with the classy The Renaissance Portrait: Van Eyck to Titian as its end-of-year show.

So back to the moderns. Very shortly, fingers crossed, From Russia at the Royal Academy will reveal a rich trove, drawn from Russian collections, of French and Russian painting: Van Gogh's Portrait of Doctor Rey will be joined by Matisse's wild Dance, among other gems of realism, impressionism and abstraction. The Hayward Gallery follows with the Russian revolutionary photographs of Alexander Rodchenko. And Tate Modern brings together three pioneering artistic anarchists in Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia, and later presents a survey of Mark Rothko.

Coming up soon, retrospectives for two important contemporaries: at Tate Modern the work of the short-lived Spanish sculptor Juan Muoz; at Tate Britain, the landscape paintings of Peter Doig. And at some point, the new Saatchi Gallery will open in former barracks in Chelsea. No information is available, but I predict, when the time comes, you'll hear more about it than you could possibly want to know.