The following piece of mine is in today's Times:

I have never eaten a Velázquez. Or a Picasso, come to that. But I have eaten an Adrià. And it was pretty tasty.

Never heard of the Spanish artist Ferran Adrià? He’s based in Roses, on the Costa Brava. And the reason you might not have heard of him is that he’s usually described as a chef. Not just a chef, mind, but the chef: last month his restaurant, El Bulli, was voted the best in the world by Restaurant magazine. Other chefs refer to him as the greatest.

Next month Adrià will break new ground even for him: he has been invited to exhibit his food at the five-yearly Documentaart show in Kassel, Germany – one of the biggest events in the world of contemporary art. The invitation has, predictably, caused uproar in the art world. José de la Sota, art critic of El PaÍs, put it this way: “Adrià is not Picasso. Picasso did not know how to cook but he was better than Adrià [at art]. What is art now? Is it something or nothing?”

He might indeed ask: many of us have been wondering for quite a while, when we see elephant dung, protest banners and piles of bricks winning art prizes. Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic of modern art, defined it as “the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself”. That seems to me as good a definition of Adrià’s style of food as any I have read. El Bulli is the home of what has been called “molecular gastronomy”. It opens for six months a year. In the six winter months when it is shut, Adrià and his fellow chefs work in their laboratory in Barcelona, deconstructing and then reassembling food and combinations in all sorts of experimental ways.

The point of Adrià’s food (the same holds for Heston Blumenthal at the Fat Duck in Berkshire) is to remain true to the essence of an ingredient but to let us see it and taste it in a new light. Our expectations are confounded and we see what we are eating in a new way. That is a truly artistic experience. Adrià’s technical skills are unsurpassed and he puts most traditional chefs to shame in his mastery of their techniques. With that as his foundation, he then goes back to the essentials and starts again.

Take the margarita I was offered when I arrived at El Bulli. The “glass” was a square block of ice with a hole in the centre: on top was a foam of olives, with shards of margarita ice underneath. The canapés looked like four biscuits. The Oreo chocolate cream was two pieces of olive biscuit with a yogurt cream, the marshmallow was not coconut but parmesan, and the crunchy rice crispy biscuit was made of quinoa with almonds. Then there was a popcorn foam – literally, foam that tasted of popcorn – accompanied by a tiny ball of caramelised liquid pumpkin dusted with gold leaf. The box of caviar turned out to be intense, tiny balls of jellified melon . . . and on it goes, unexpected dish after logic-questioning dish.

Adrià reacts to the criticism from the Spanish art establishment thus: “True, I am no Picasso, but what is art in times like these? Many people act as if I should apologise for participating. I am not going to. I understand there might be people who are annoyed. It’s tough to see a cook get invited to this. But what is art? If they want to call what I do art, fine. If not, that’s fine too.”

Spot on. In an art world where anything seems to go, I can’t for the life of me see why Ferran Adrià’s food, which fulfils every criterion of modern art, should not take its place alongside the likes of Tracey Emin.

Come to think of it, shouldn’t it be the woman whose contribution to art is an unmade bed whose place in the exhibition should be in question? Why is that art, but Adrià’s not? The food at El Bulli is certainly a lot more elevating to look at.

I read Norman Lebrecht's Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry on the plane this weekend.

For any music obsessives out there, I'd say it's an essential read. It's far from perfect; there are a number of (small) errors of fact, and the second half of the book is a rather pointless list of what Lebrecht views as the 100 greatest recordings ever made. But despite that, it's a rip-roaring read outlining an argument which Lebrecht has made with huge effect: that the classical record indsutry has died a terrible death. And I have to say he makes his case persuasively - despite the great success of the small labels, which I have long preferred to the major labels for their interesting repertoire and artists.

When you see a press release such as this from EMI Classics, how can you not agree that the major classical labels are no more - and thoroughly deserve their fate:

Press Release

EMI Classics UK signs multi-album deal with Myleene Klass

On Friday 23rd March 2007 EMI Classics UK is delighted to announce the signing of a multi-album contract with classical pianist Myleene Klass. On top of the record contract, EMI Classics has created an ambassadorial role for Myleene to help build profile for EMI Classics and its artists over the coming months.

The albums under the series title 'Myleene's Music' will be compiled from the EMI Classics catalogue, with the tracks on each album united by a particular lifestyle theme. Each 2-CD set will carry the added bonus of at least two tracks performed by Myleene herself on the piano to complement the theme of the album. The first album 'Myleene's Music for Romance' featuring Myleene performing Ennio Morricone's Cinema Paradiso and Erik Satie's Six Gnossiennes No. 1 will be released in May 2007 and the remaining four will follow through to the new year.

I wouldn't clean my CD player with 'Myleene's Music', let alone expect such drivel to be signed to a label with the glorious history of EMI - "the label that introduced us to Schnabel, Richter, Argerich, Barenboim and Pollini", as Lebrecht calls it. Unfortunately, EMI is far from alone. Even DG, once a guarantee of high standards, is reduced to pushing out so-called 'crossover' rubbish. Lebrecht's book is particularly strong on this switch from classical music to records which supposedly appeal to 'the masses', and the consequent destruction of an entire artistic industry.

O tempora! O mores!

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This is one of the most extraordinary stories I have ever come across.

As a regular reader of Gramophone, I have followed with some awe their reviews of the unknown British pianist Joyce Hatto. Her story seemed incredible: totally off the radar, battling cancer, she made an extensive series of recordings across a hugely varied repertoire. At the end of her life - she died last June - her husband released them, to reviews which were beyond raves. I've been meaning to get hold of some of the recordings for some time.

Now, it seems, it might indeed be an incredible story - literally so, because it turns out that the recordings might be fakes. This website reveals what appears to be incontrovertible evidence that at least some of the recordings are not by Joyce Hatto. As Gramophone puts it:

Several days ago, another Gramophone critic decided to listen to a Hatto Liszt CD, of the 12 Transcendental Studies. He put the disc into his computer to listen, and something awfully strange happened. His computer's player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszt, but not a Hatto recording. Instead, his display suggested that the disc was one on BIS Records, by the pianist Lászlo Simon. Mystified, our critic checked his Hatto disc against the actual Simon recording, and to his amazement they sounded exactly the same.

In then went a recording of Hatto playing two Rachmaninov Piano Concertos and, sure enough, his computer's CD player listed it as another – by Yefim Bronfman, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, on Sony. Again, the critic compared, and again he could hear no difference.

Gramophone then sent the Hatto and the Simon Liszt recordings to an audio expert, Pristine Audio’s Andrew Rose, who scientifically checked the soundwaves of each recording. They matched. “Without a shadow of a doubt,” reported Rose, “10 of the tracks on the Liszt disc are identical to those on the Simon.” Of the remaining two, he now feels that he has identified a further one – which he identified as being, again “without a shadow of a doubt” from a CD entitled “Nojima Plays Liszt”, a 1993 release from Reference Recordings. Furthermore, his partner – who is based elsewhere with his own equipment – agrees.

More astonishing revelations were to come.

Read the whole thing for those extraordinary revelations.

I am suitably gobsmacked.

UPDATE: Jessica Duchen is similarly amazed. And it's in The Times.

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I'll be taking part in the first meeting of the Conservative Party's arts task force, speaking at a meeting on 26th February on 'Why should any government bother with the Arts?'

Naturally, I'll be arguing that it shouldn't.

Clive Davis has posted my contribution to his 'Old' books of the year feature, here:

I've just re-read John Kennedy Toole’s "A Confederacy of Dunces". I'm not a great fan of fiction, so the fact that I must have read it at least twenty times probably says as much about me as it does about the book. It is, by quite a long way, the greatest novel of the twentieth century (a judgement based on the most profound of all criteria – near total ignorance of the relevant material).

I won’t reveal the "plot"; if you haven’t read it, drop everything and do so NOW. The gist can be gained from the derivation of the title, which is Swift’s epigraph that: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Toole is a Dostoevsky for the modern age. His book explains politics, democracy, welfare, family, education, society and life. It is, to use a much-overused word, truly a work of genius.

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I love the way a sentence can be taken in an entirely different fashion by two people. Take this from Richard Brooks in yesterday's Sunday Times:

Over lunch, Tessa Jowell and I had a friendly spat about her government wasting zillions on the Olympics while it’s set to squeeze arts funding. Britain excels at the arts, while our current standing in sport, notably cricket, football, rugby and athletics, where cash now sloshes around, is abysmal. Naturally, Jowell defended the money for the games. But here’s the killer. The arts sector, which includes everything from live theatre and music to heritage, has been told to plan for annual financial cuts of 7% from 2008. The culture department does not deny these figures.

I read that and thought 'hurrah'. To me, the 7 per cent 'cut' (I doubt they are real cuts rather than a reduction in the increase) in the arts budget is a small but welcome development. The complaint should be that it too small. And I would take Mr Brooks' point about wasting zillions on the Olympics as, equally, a call for cuts there (preferebly to zero).

To Mr Brooks, however, the message is that instead of wasting zillions on the Olympics, we should spend it on the arts.

UPDATE: That philistine, Oliver Kamm, takes issue with me here.

BTW, the deleterious impact of arts subsidy is one of the subjects I will be dealing with in my new book. When I finish it, that is!

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This is just thrilling. My friend Trevor Brown's production of Gutenberg! The Musical!, a version of which was on at the Jermyn Street Theatre earlier this year, has just opened on Broadway for a 6 week run. And it has received a total rave in the paper which matters most, the New York Times.

If you are in NYC at all, do go. It is hilarious. And book before it sells out!

(Trevor is producing my comedy next year...of which more anon.)

Oliver Kamm was on Today this morning discussing the newly published diaries of Prokofiev. His basic point was that a piece of music is just that, a piece written in the language of music, and any diaries or biographical notes are irrelevant to it.

I take his point. We don't need to know if Prokofiev preferred apples to pears or whether he enjoyed football, but biographical information can be essential to a full understanding of some works or composers. What about, for example, Shostakovich? Of course his works can be enjoyed on their own terms, but I would contend that one can’t understand them – or what he intended them to be – without knowing at the very least their background, if not his own circumstances. Take the Fifth Symphony. It lends itself, in the fourth movement, to a garishly triumphant performance. Even the title he gives would support such a reading: "a Soviet artist's response to just criticism".

And yet. Even without the evidence of Testimony, Solomon Volkov's much-challenged book (he claimed they were Shostakovich's memoirs as dictated to him), it is clear from all the biographical and historical evidence that the piece was meant as anything but a glorification of Soviet communism. To hear it performed properly with all the tragic irony of the final movement, surely it is not only the performers who need to know the background; so, too, does the audience. The same - even more obviously, I would argue - applies to his 'Leningrad Symphony'.

It's a longstanding and fascinating debate.

The following piece of mine is in today's Times:

Last week English National Opera announced details of its April to July season. Of its five productions, two — a revival of On the Town and a new Kismet — are musicals.

The ENO’s On the Town is wonderful. Kismet will doubtless be equally terrific. But their quality is irrelevant — it is wrong that ENO is staging them at all.

ENO receives an annual £16.5 million Arts Council — read “taxpayer” — subsidy. The point of a subsidy is to make good so-called market failure; to provide that which the market will not. So the three other operas in the ENO’s season — Death in Venice, Satyagraha and La clemenza di Tito — sit perfectly properly in the schedule.

On the Town and Kismet, however, are archetypal Broadway musicals that can, and should, exist without the need for you and me to hand over our money to the Inland Revenue so that the Arts Council can pay for them to be put on.

That there is a difference between opera and musicals is shown by the latest opening at the National Theatre. Confusingly, while ENO has decided to stage two musicals that are not operatic, the National Theatre’s new production, Caroline, or Change, is an opera in the guise of a theatre musical.

The story of a black single mother’s relationship with the liberal Jewish family who employ her as a maid in Louisiana in 1963, Caroline, or Change is moving, intellectually engaging and operatic in its themes. Commercial or not — its US production managed 159 performances — it is a stunning piece of work.

Many operas — The Magic Flute, for instance — fit the description of a musical, with large amounts of spoken dialogue, comedy and show-stopping numbers. Many musicals that might seem operatic in their sweep — such as Les Misérables — are meretricious trash. And some musicals — Showboat, for example — deal with the deep moral issues that are the concern of many operas.

In the end, the difference between opera and musical comes down to the old saw: if something looks like a duck and it quacks, chances are it is a duck.

But we know one thing: an organisation that depends on taxpayer subsidy and exists to stage productions that would otherwise not be possible has no business putting on musicals that need no subsidy from anyone.

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Thanks are due to the Man Booker Prize panel for selecting this year's book which we now know not to read.

Personally, I think it's been downhill all the way since The Bone People.

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To echo Clive Davis...

If you happen to be in NYC, rush to this!

(I have a vested interest - IDX Productions are also putting on my own forthcoming play, of which more soon...ish.)

A few people have questioned my statement about American vs UK comedy. Yes, there have been some wonderful British programmes, comedians and writers - the Goons, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, The Office etc. But the latter two had runs which were short and sweet. As for stand-up, I'm at a loss to think of anyone who is truly front frank.

But when it comes to consistent, regular comedy, we don't come close to series such as Seinfeld, Mash, Bilko, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Frasier, all of which have run for season on season and maintained an astonishing standard. And Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Jerry Seinfeld, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, even gentle comedians such as Bob Newhart...the list goes on.

As for films, I am struggling to think of a single funny British film in the past 20 years. 4 Weddings, I suppose. But the rest of Richard Curtis' output is simply embarrassing.

US v UK comedy? It's barely a contest.

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Daniel Finkelstein heralds the arrival of Aaron Sorkin's new show.

I would also recommend Sports Night, his show previous to The West Wing, which you can get on DVD from Amazon here. It's terrific.

It's a sign of how low one's expectations are now of TV that even a programme such as this seems more of a yawn than an outrage:

More tossers on TV

Leigh Holmwood
Tuesday July 18, 2006
MediaGuardian.co.uk

Channel 4 is to bring mass public masturbation to the small screen.

The broadcaster - once led by Michael Grade, dubbed "pornographer in chief" by the Daily Mail - has commissioned a documentary about the UK's first "masturbate-a-thon" as part of a series of programmes dubbed "Wank week", MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

In what must surely be one of the summer's more bizarre events, hundreds of people are expected to gather in a hall in central London on August 5 to pleasure themselves in aid of charity.

Media Guardian reports the return of The Royle Family this Christmas:

All of the main cast members, including Ricky Tomlinson, Sue Johnston, Ralf Little and Jessica Stevenson, are expected to return...

and then this:

...provided they are available.

In other words, none of them has yet said they'll be in it.

I'll win the 100 metres in the 2012 Olympics, provided I am faster than anyone else.

One of my longstanding pleasures is dreaming up policy slogans for a made-up think-tank. “Save energy: slaughter the first-born”, “Trees have rights, too”. That sort of thing.

Uncannily, one real (at least in some senses) think-tank, Demos, always seems to beat me to it. Achingly trendy (in the same way that wearing tank tops is now back in fashion), it never fails to live down to one’s expectations. I used to think that its self-description as a “greenhouse for new ideas”, or the statement by one of its staff that she was “renowned for surfing the Zeitgeist” could not be beaten for self-absorbed, pseudo-literate, empty-minded drivel. I was wrong.

My imaginary think-tank’s slogan was “beyond thinking”. Demos has not — yet — adopted such a slogan. But its latest pamphlet, Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy: Why culture needs a democratic mandate is so absurdly removed from any normal perception of the real world that Demos clearly doesn’t need the slogan. That it exists in a universe beyond thinking is obvious.

The author of the paper, John Holden, argues that politicians need to show their support for British culture by “publicly embracing” artistic pursuits. Our politicians are shamed by their EU equivalents. Tony Blair, for instance, should take a leaf out of Dominique de Villepin’s book and start publishing poetry.

Ignore the worth of M de Villepin’s opus (although his poems do seem to emanate from the same well of inspiration as Eric Cantona’s “when the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea”).

Does it make M de Villepin any less of a twit that he has literary pretensions? Would Mr Blair, or any other politician in the Britain inhabited by those of us who are not employed by Demos, be regarded as anything other than a laughing stock if he started spouting his own poetry at the dispatch box? Being charitable, one might say that David Blunkett’s reputation was hardly enhanced when he published his own poetry.

Our cultural life has too much political involvement, not too little. When the Arts Council funds a disabled lesbian finger-painting dance group, it does so because that’s what politicians want it to do.

We need less of that, not more. The last thing we need is politicians who think they know about culture.

I've been too busy to post much this week, so apologies that this is a little bit after the event, but on Sunday night I went to hear Mike Leigh at Jewish Book Week. Some - most, if I'm honest - of the questions from the floor were pretty awful (most people seemed to be obsessed about his modus operandi, and repeatedly asked him about it when he had made clear at the outset that he would say anything more than he had already done).

But my, what a rude man! One audience member asked about the large number of uses of the f-word in Leigh's play, Two Thousand Years. It was not a remotely aggressive question; the questioner merely said that he did not think the f-word was used so freely in a typical NW London jewish house.

Leigh's reply? 'Fuck you'. (And it did not seem as if Leigh was maing a joke, however badly).

His response to others who dared to question any aspect of his work or beliefs was similarly dismissive.

I remain a big fan, but I will regard Leigh the man in a very different light from now on.

For those of us who cherish the sight of luvvies having a full-on hissy fit, the past couple of days have been a treat. On Sunday night, the Bafta awards saw the main British nominees going home empty-handed, pushed aside by the triumph of Hollywood. Instead of leaving with their tails between their legs, however, the British cinematic establishment cried “foul”. Joe Wright, the director of Pride & Prejudice, moaned on stage that Keira Knightley, the British star of his film, was not even nominated for Best Actress. The poor dear.

Ralph Fiennes did not even need to speak to convey his apparent contempt for the proceedings. Having himself failed to win the best actor award, after his co-star Rachel Weisz had failed to win best actress, the BBC director mischievously cut to Fiennes’s thunderously narked expression when The Constant Gardener was beaten to the best film award by Brokeback Mountain.

Then yesterday, the director Don Boyd complained that the awards were simply a “microcosm” of “the triumph of American cultural imperialism. A sad reminder that we live in the modern equivalent of a Roman-occupied Britain.”

Deary me. The problem that lies at the heart of the American triumph has nothing to do with imperialism, George Bush, global capitalism or any of the other pantomime villains so beloved by the luvvies. It is that the Brits’ temper tantrums are a damned sight more compelling than most of the films they produce.

Take a look at the American winners: Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Walk the Line. Not one is a caricature Hollywood blockbuster. All of them have depth and subtlety. Walk the Line might have looked commercial from the start, but a film about Truman Capote, or two gay cowboys in Wyoming?

Contrast that with the supposed British sure-thing, The Constant Gardener. Lavishly directed it might have been, but its student agitprop message — they’re worse than gun runners, those nasty drugs companies — and preposterous plot were so laughably stupid that even Bafta’s membership saw more sense than to honour such drivel in the face of three outstanding other films, which happened to be American.

If the moaners want the Baftas to celebrate British films rather than excellent films, they should find a community hall, and hope that they get coverage in the local papers.

You know those times when you have no idea what the fuss is all about? I had that experience last night, when I saw Hidden, which has had a series of rave reviews. Mark Lawson called it "the first great film of the 21st century", and Peter Bradshaw wrote that "Hidden is Michael Haneke's masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the great films of this decade".

Hmmm. Hidden is one of the most boring films I have ever seen. I spent two hours watching the cinematic equivalent of paint drying - nothing of any purpose happening to people who weren't even interesting enough to be loathsome. The dialogue was trite, and the plot, such as it is, manages somehow to be both stupid and nonexistent.

I had chosen the film because it had been so well reviewed. I wondered if, when I turned to my friend afterwards, he would tell me how wonderful it was and how enthralled he had been. Nope. He looked blankly at me and said he had been bored stiff for 2 hours.

I cannot begin to understand why it has been so lauded. Utter rubbish with literally nothing to commend it. Save two hours of your life, and give it a miss.

I've had some really thoughtful and well argued responses to my Guardian piece today - and it's barely lunchtime!

Not one supports my argument, which comes as no surprise at all. I will, when there's been time for others who might wish to respond, post a selection of the comments.

Watching Otello last week at the Royal Opera House, I was gripped from beginning to end by this most intimate and emotionally painful opera. I must have seen a dozen performances over the years, and although some have left quite a lot to be desired, the combination of Verdi's music at his most inspired, and Boito's taut libretto, means that there are never longeurs. Every note is precious, every word matters, and every scene accentuates the power of the story's impact.

Some might consider this sacrilege, but the contrast with Shakespeare's play, Othello, is striking. As Rossini remarked about Wagner: "Mr Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour." How long those drawn-out minutes feel, as they seem to drag into hours, the poignancy of the story lost in the padding, the emotions dulled by the sheer boredom of so much of the text.
The superiority of the opera over the play is not that Otello is, as a distillation of Othello, a uniquely fine opera. It is more fundamental. On every level, opera is a superior art form to theatre. It is, indeed, the finest art form of all, an assertion that can be proved in direct comparison.

Look at the schedule of the major theatres and opera companies and there is rarely a week without a performance of a play that has been turned into an opera. My point is not merely that opera is better per se. No one would disagree, for instance, that an opera composed by a genius is better than a play written by a hack. It proves nothing that Beethoven's Fidelio is a transcendent piece that enriches the soul, but that Jean-Nicolas Bouilly's play Leonore would be deservedly forgotten if it had not provided the story on which Beethoven based his opera.

The point is that when two works of undoubted lasting merit, both based on the same story, are placed side by side, the operatic version is, by the very fact of it being an opera, superior. And so superior as to render the play pointless.

Otello is merely one example. In every respect, the opera is a finer work than the play. First, it strips away the unnecessary digressions of the play, dealing only with the kernel of the story. But that alone would be merely a Readers Digest version of the play. What lifts the opera into a different level - and beyond the play - is the combination of the text and the music.

In his classic book The Language of Music, Deryck Cooke showed that tonal music is the most powerful and immediate language of emotion. It is capable of speaking to us, and moving us, in ways that expose the spoken word as one dimensional and limited. By telling the story in both languages simultaneously - through speech and music - Verdi lifts Otello into a different dimension from Othello.

Music also has the unique ability to portray a variety of emotions, and the views of different characters, concurrently. If more than one character speaks at the same time in a play, the result is simply unintelligible noise. In opera, two, three, four - five in Mozart's sublime Idomeneo quintet - characters can sing at once, with each musical line clearly audible and understood, portraying the individual emotion of each character, but combining to produce a sum greater than the various parts.

This is not to denigrate the play. If Otello did not exist, we would marvel at Othello for its poetry and its emotional power. But where the "opera of the play" does exist, we can see the latter's limitations.

Julius Caesar is typical. For all its intelligence, poetry and power, Shakespeare's play drags far more than Othello, even when masked by a production as stunning as Deborah Warner's recent version at the Barbican.

Antony and Cleopatra, a much greater play, also has plenty of scenes that seem pointless. However, David McVicar's production of Handel's opera, Julius Caesar, (which has just opened at Glyndebourne and is being performed at the Proms on August 23) shows how much more can be packed into operatic form: heightened drama, heightened passion, heightened awareness - even within the confines of the rigid structures of baroque opera.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is what happened to Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro in Mozart's hands. The play, premiered in 1784, is of historic importance; revolutionary in its portrayal of servants running rings around their masters. But as a play it has no life beyond that of the historical curiosity. Adapted by Mozart, it became one of the finest works of art known to humanity.

It is not merely theatre that opera beats. Herman Melville's short novel, Billy Budd, is a complex piece of writing that deserves to be read on its own terms. But adapted by Britten into opera, it becomes something more engaging and more resonant. The act of transformation into opera works an alchemy on the story that no other art form can match.

I'm off to see Henry IV Part 2 this week. I'm keen to see it. But how much better if it was Verdi's Falstaff.

It reminds me of the old joke: first prize is a week in Rhyl; second prize is a fortnight. On Monday night we discovered the winners of the Golden Globe awards. But as if one set of mutual back-slapping, aren’t-we-all-wonderful-dahling film awards ceremonies wasn’t enough, we also learnt the identities of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award nominees this week.

Is there anyone not directly involved in the film industry who could care less? I’d wager a hefty bet that, by tomorrow, barely one in a hundred people will have any recollection of the names of the Golden Globe winners.

As for the Baftas — I don’t know what’s more of an embarrassment. The star-struck thrill when the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman find time away from washing their hair to turn up for our little awards ceremony? Or the announcement from the stage when the likes of DiCaprio and Kidman have not been able to find the time away from washing their hair to turn up for our little awards ceremony?

Not that the Golden Globes are wholly pointless. Just as the ‘t’ in Bafta is their only worthwhile aspect, so the TV awards which come with the Golden Globes reveal why film awards are so tiresome. The truth is that, today, quality TV far surpasses almost all film. Take a look at the Bafta nominees.

The Aviator — a sprawling, overblown mess which, for drama and characterisation, isn’t a patch on any number of long-running TV shows (such as The Sopranos, by far the greatest drama known to film or TV, or ER, a genuine high-class soap).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — mildly amusing, occasionally diverting comedy which doesn’t come close to TV programmes such as Six Feet Under, Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Finding Neverland — a film about the creation of Peter Pan; yawn. The Motorcycle Diaries — a whitewashed homage to the vile politics of Che Guevara, without the style and wit of the similarly liberal West Wing.

And Vera Drake — of course; where would the British film industry be without Mike Leigh’s regular dose of misery?

And that’s without even mentioning Golden Globe winners such as Nip/Tuck, Desperate Housewives and Deadwood. There really is no contest. For quality, panache and inventiveness, TV beats film hands down.

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Here is a modest proposal. Let’s hire a theatre, assemble a cast, commission a playwright and stage a play on the moral dilemmas involved in deciding if Saddam Hussein should hang or get life. And, then, let’s put on a prequel, a play which asks how he ended up in the hands of the Iraqi people themselves in the first place, ready to be tried for his crimes.

And let’s write it as a satire. Let’s satirise the monstrous stupidity of the “million morons” — we’re trying to be as offensive as possible — who marched last March to try to ensure that we did nothing to prevent Saddam remaining in power, free to carry on butchering his own people. It would certainly be different from Follow My Leader, Alastair Beaton’s “satire” on the Iraq war.

Here’s a challenge: have a guess how George Bush and Tony Blair are portrayed. Not that difficult, really. Bush is — who would have guessed? — a brain-dead religious fanatic. And Blair is his fawning crony.

If you want to guarantee yourself an adoring audience among the chattering classes, make sure you have Beaton’s penetratingly original take on events. You’ll go down a treat.

War has always been one of the prime subjects of theatre. Since theatre quite rightly deals with both timeless and immediate issues, so it should be. The Iraq war has prompted a series of plays and productions that attempt to deal with the war on stage. I would love to be able to write that it has prompted a range of such events; if only. With one exception, the range, such as it is, extends from attacking Bush and Blair for being stupid to attacking them for being evil. That the issues involved might be rather more complicated seems to have passed most playwrights and directors by.

Take Guantanamo, the latest in the Tricycle Theatre’s “Tribunal Plays”, a series of adaptations of transcripts from inquiries, including those by Lord Justice Scott and Lord Hutton. Based on interviews with some who have been released from the Guantanamo detention camp and with their friends and relatives, the production was such a hit at the Tricycle earlier this year that it has had a West End transfer and will soon be off to New York.

The play has been garlanded with praise from bien-pensant opinion. And yet to any observer who has not already decided that the US Government is malevolent and the al-Qaeda threat effectively made up, the play is at best naive, at worst grotesquely biased agitprop. The excuses of the detainees — in the main, that they just happened to be on the battlefield in Afghanistan and are innocent, kind to their mothers and thoroughly decent chaps — are trotted out one after another. The audience laps it up as further confirmation of how awful the war is and that the real threat to democracy is the Americans’ abuse of human rights.

There is no hint that the story might be rather more complicated — that how democracy deals with threats from sources which do not recognise our laws of decent behaviour poses an impossible dilemma.

The programme contains this jaw-dropping account of the Taleban by Gareth Peirce, a solicitor who represented the detainees and is portrayed on stage: “By the mid-1990s the Taleban — the name means ‘scholars’ in Arabic — had formed the government in Afghanistan and were attempting to set up a truly Islamic state. A diaspora of refugees, and indeed non-refugees, around the world thought that the ideal was one in which they wished to participate and a small but significant number of individuals moved to Afghanistan in an attempt to be involved in the creation of that state. They set up schools, rudimentary industry, agriculture that was not based on the production of heroin, and were inevitably, as a diaspora, in touch with the wider diaspora worldwide.”

Decent chaps, then. And how thoroughly beastly of the Americans to get in the way of their altruism. Let’s not concern ourselves with the fact that they were in league with al-Qaeda and just happened to facilitate the hijacking of four planes on 9/11 to murder as many Americans as possible. They did, after all, set up schools — even if Afghans of Ms Peirce’s sex weren’t allowed to use them. And al-Qaeda members caught in Afghanistan and elsewhere were simply part of the “diaspora”.

Playwrights and directors seem concerned only to pander to their audiences’ and their own prejudices. There is an easy — and lazy — way to get the audience on side at the moment. Flash up a picture of George Bush whenever there is a mention in the text of murder or crime and the audience can see immediately that you, the director, are as sophisticated as they are and know how awful the man is.

Even Measure for Measure isn’t exempt. The production at the National, an otherwise thoughtful and gripping updating of Shakespeare’s difficult play, can’t resist gratuitous projections of the image of George Bush. He is a modern-day pantomime villain. At the performance I saw, the audience hissed when his picture appeared.

I can barely begin to imagine what Sir David Hare, the liberal establishment’s favourite playwright, will come up with in Stuff Happens, his take on the war, which is due to open at the National in September. According to the blurb, “David Hare has fashioned both a historical narrative and a human drama about the frustrations of power and the limits of diplomacy.” Hmmm. Let’s venture a guess. Bush wants to bomb the crap out of Iraq because Saddam outlasted his daddy. And Blair was his poodle.

Yawn.

There is, however, one valuable exception to this otherwise uniform approach: Cruel and Tender at the Young Vic, a play by Martin Crimp based on Sophocles’ Trachiniae. Sophocles’ story is about a war hero, Heracles, and his wife, Deianira, and the cycle of violence engendered by her jealousy. Crimp turns Heracles into a contemporary army general fighting in the war on terror. Through his story, Crimp prompts a thought-provoking series of questions about how best to deal with terror — through force, through appeasement or through some other method — and how democratic societies are unwilling to face up to the dirty deeds which might need to be done to save them from their enemies.

It is a rich, deep play which is of immediate contemporary relevance and which manages to avoid the trite anti-war, anti-Bush certainties of so much else.

So there is hope that there are still some in the theatre who are able to step outside the confines of the knee-jerk liberal establishment view. There is hope, too, from the reaction of some of those who are not in the audience. As I was waiting outside the theatre to see Guantanamo, an American family stopped to look at the billboard. “I wonder,” said the father angrily, “if the Houses of Parliament had been blown up whether they would be so keen to let the terrorists run free.”

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The Exorcist performed by bunnies.

Well, why not?

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Sorry about that headline.

A strange posting on Brian Mickelthwait's excellent Culture Blog (which I greatly recommend for its quirky posts).

Writing about the new production of Hamlet which has opened to, literally, mixed reviews - some raves and some pretty lukewarm - he makes a valid point about the predominance of the director's name in the marketing:

No problem about telling us all about how important Trevor Nunn is though. He gets start billing on the posters. You'd think he was playing Hamlet. "Trevor Nunn's Hamlet." As they say in America: please. You do eventually learn, if you follow that link and read past the big picture of Trevor Nunn, that Trevor Nunn's Hamlet is actually being acted (as opposed to directed/produced) not by Trevor Nunn as you might have expected, but by a certain Ben Whishaw, 23.

Guess who's playing Gertrude. Correct. Mrs Trevor Nunn.

In case you are confused, and given that Trevor Nunn doesn't actually act Hamlet in Trevor Nunn's Hamlet, did Trevor Nunn perhaps write Trevor Nunn's Hamlet. No again. Trevor Nunn's Hamlet wasn't actually written by Trevor Nunn at all, but by William Shakespeare (1564-1616). True. Not Trevor Nunn at all. Trevor Nunn just told the actors where to stand and organised the rehearsals. Just for that, Trevor Nunn gets to have Trevor Nunn up on the poster in big letters. TREVOR NUNN.

But.

For one thing, it's a bit unfair attacking the nepotism of having his misses as Gertrude, since she happens to be one of the finest actresses in the country, Imogen Stubbs - and she is an especially outstanding Shakespearean actress (I still recall her Desdemona in Nunn's production of Othello, with Willard White).

But his other point is plain wrong:

One of the more annoying affectations of the British subsidised theatre is that even when a production clearly has a Big Star Performer, as here, they nevertheless list the actors in alphabetical order. So who the hell is playing Hamlet? Impossible to tell.

It may be an affectation of the subsidised theatre, but the Old Vic isn't subsidised and nor is this production.

Thus Brian's complaint -

The crappiest seats to watch Trevor Nunn's Hamlet, where you don't actually get to sit down at all, to watch Trevor Nunn's Hamlet, are £10. The crappiest seats where you do get to sit down and watch Trevor Nunn's Hamlet are, if I remember it right, £12.50.

The genuinely decent seats for Trevor Nunn's Hamlet are £37.50. This is way out of my league. No offence to Trevor Nunn's Hamlet (keep reading, we'll get to offending Trevor Nunn's Hamlet quite soon now) but this is more than I can afford. What if I really like it and want to go again, to Trevor Nunn's Hamlet? What if I want to take another friend to Trevor Nunn's Hamlet. That's a whole trip to the South of France.

- is surely misguided. It's a purely commercial venture, and they can charge what they want. If Brian considers it way too much, so what? There'll be plenty of others who do think it worth paying that. No one is having to pay tax to fund the production. We can all take it or leave it.

(And, as it happens, the £12.50 seats at the Old Vic are excellent, and terrirfic value - I've sat in them myself.)

It's the market. They charge, and we decide whether or not to pay. If enough of us do, they make money. Possibly lots. And if we don't, they lose money. Possibly lots.

BTW, rush, rush, rush to see the Tom Stoppard adaptation of Pirandello's Henry IV at the Donmar. Ian McDiarmid's performance is stunning.

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Excellent piece in The Times by Julia Magnet on being Jewish in Britain:

...Jewish culture is at the edge of British society, an opinion confirmed by my long tenure here. There is no British Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, not even a Mel Brooks.

..Like everyone else in New York, I’m only half-Jewish, and the wrong half at that, but I’m all Jewish American Princess. Mine is, after all, the only city that could be dismissed with a racist epithet — Jesse Jackson’s “Hymie-town” — and embrace said slur, applying it gleefully at any occasion. In Hymie-town, which sets the cultural agenda for elite America, even Italians have passable Yiddish and there ’s a synagogue every fifth block. There’s no need, then, for New York Jews to cling to each other, to fret about marrying out. There is no out — Jews have influenced and been accepted by urban American culture: take Broadway’s most popular show, the Jewish-fest, The Producers. Of course, mothers still nag: “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a Jew, as a shaygetz,” but their world doesn’t end if the boy’s a goy.

...Notwithstanding half-Jewish Michael Howard, Jewish culture is still quite hidden in Britain. It could be the legacy of T. E Laurence-style Arabism, or a culture clash between gentlemanly amateurism and the “may you grow up to be a doctor” Jewish work ethic. But the less open a society, the more closed and protective its Jewish culture will be...

Just one small quibble: turning a racialist epithet on itself, and embracing it, is not just the preserve of New Yorkers. Spurs fans long ago responded to the chants of 'yids' and now scream 'yiddo' and 'come on you yids' at every opportunity (to good effect this afternoon, when we beat the cheats of Newscastle 1-0).

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I wonder if the playwright, Sir David Hare, regrets that his knighthood was awarded all of six years ago. I’d bet that, had the offer been made more recently, he would have chosen to remain plain Mr. Given the otherwise full set of fashionable views that he parades through his plays, he would probably have joined in the current craze for dumping on the idea of honours.

There seems to be no left-liberal cliché which escapes Sir David’s attentions. His current play, The Permanent Way — in which he uses transcribed interviews to show the evils of rail privatisation — is merely the latest in a long line. Since his first outing at the National Theatre, Plenty, he has delivered a series of plays all with one thing in common: a slavish adherence to the left-liberal received wisdom of the day. Plenty was about a French Resistance fighter who becomes — as if you couldn’t guess — disillusioned with Britain. Pravda was about nasty, brutish press barons, Racing Demon the cynicism of the Church, Murmuring Judges the deformities of the legal system, and The Absence of War the betrayal of the Left by modernising Labour politicians.

His next National play, Stuff Happens, is going to focus on the role of US neoconservatives in pushing for war in Iraq. Yawn. I doubt if Sir David had even heard of the term “neocon” — let alone had the slightest idea what it really means — until a year or so ago, when its use became de rigueur among the chattering classes, who latch on unthinkingly to modish phrases.

Now, it seems that Sir David’s record is being questioned. One of the people he interviewed for The Permanent Way has accused him of manipulating his words for cynical effect. The biter is bit.

If you have never heard of Sir David and wonder why you should care about such a spat, remember that it’s your money which has ensured that his agenda is given so prominent a platform at the National Theatre. He is, you see, the archetypal modern Establishment playwright. Championed by the National — and thus funded by the taxpayer — Sir David is given free rein to trot out his left-liberal propagandist clichés on all the great issues of the day.

The rise of Sir David, and the Establishment’s veneration of him, symbolise what is so wrong with the artistic life of the country. Can you think of a single play dealing with, even on the loosest definition of the word, a political issue, which has been commissioned by the National Theatre — or indeed by any subsidised theatre — which does not come at its audience directly from the Left? Of course you can’t. Even to ask the question is ridiculous. And that does not cover directors’ habit of imposing their own agendas on existing plays. Last year’s National production of Henry V was not about Henry V but, as the director put it, the “dubious legitimacy” of the Iraq war (as opposed, one presumes, to the obvious legitimacy of a subsidised theatre pushing an explicit political agenda in its productions).

When Sir David and those of his ilk put their political beliefs into the form of their characters, they claim that they are giving an issue breadth and depth. What they usually do, however, is to sterilise debate with caricatured portrayals of evil, money-obsessed capitalists. Power, money and status are almost always, in their world-view, to be despised.

Fine. Sir David is as entitled to his views as the rest of us, and to test the success of his plays alongside all-comers. What he should not be entitled to do is peddle his views at our expense, as the beneficiary of a funding mechanism which refuses to allow any alternative to show its head.

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A brilliant analysis of the films of Whit Stillman (my favourite filmmaker) by my friend Julia Magnet.

It's far too good a piece to precis - anyone who has seen Metropolitan, Barcelona or The Last Days of Disco (and if you haven't, rush to your video store and get all three, NOW! - you'll thank me) will be gripped by it - but the kernel of her argument is this:

What Stillman notices in Barcelona is that irresponsible politics and irresponsible sexual behavior spring from the same ideology. The moral relativism that informs post–sexual revolution mores also undergirds European anti-Americanism. To a relativist, there is no difference between Soviet Russia and NATO; the Americans are no better than the fascists—what they all really want is power, which, like judgment, is one of the only postmodern vices.

As she concludes:

Although Hollywood, post-9/11, is now edging toward patriotism, it is still at the simplistic level of the action film—usually a war film set in the past. Stillman stands for the America we want to see—of traditional mores, aesthetic sophistication, wry patriotism and wit—and does so with a style and intelligence that put to shame European babble about America’s “total lack of culture.”

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