Cultural Bling

The news that the daughter of Hans Rausching, the Tetra-Pak tycoon and Europe’s richest man, has bought the esteemed literary magazine Granta can come as no surprise. For a certain kind of wealthy person, owning a literary mag amounts to a kind of cultural bling. While others wish to have a bracelet of diamonds around their wrist, these types want to be encircled by a costly little coterie of waspish intellectuals.   More...

Travesties

To Wyndham’s theatre for the all-star cast, all-star audience opening night of Heroes, a French comedy translated by Tom Stoppard. I was in high anticipation. Stoppard was my theatrical inspiration as a teenager. I saw the first runs of Travesties, with John Wood starring, and Jumpers with Michael Hordern. I even put on a performance of Stoppard’s radio play Albert’s Bridge at my school. I associate Stoppard with delirious absurdism, razor-sharp dialogue and consummate ability to marry the transient with the eternal. Sadly, Gerald Sibleyras’s play had none of these attributes. Stoppard said that he translated it because he wanted to do something different, but as a motivation for bringing to the London stage a play about a trio of war veterans this is pretty lame. As lame as the character of Henri, played by Richard Griffiths. Watching Griffiths, together with alpha actors John Hurt and Ken Stott, bring life to a beautifully paced but ultimately trivial Stoppard script, was like listening to Daniel Barenboim play Chopsticks on a Casio electronic organ.   More...

Puff the Magic Dragon

What a ridiculous and toxic miasma obscures the current debate on smoking. Yesterday, the government’s Health Improvement Bill, which sets out its proposals for a ban, was delayed. Apparently the prohibitionists – health secretary Patricia Hewitt and her ally Tessa Jowell – are being dogged by “Doc” John Reid and Jack “˜Man o” Straw, who wish to engineer a compromise allowing for “smoking pubs” that don’t serve food.   More...

The Ebony Tower

There seems, at last, to be a replacement for the “Passion from Protein” man who for so many years promenaded the West End inveighing against the sexual depravity provoked by eggs and cheese. Nowadays I often see an elderly Afro-Caribbean man on Oxford Street, who declaims his own brand of Christian gospel using a curious portable PA system: a tiny speaker hung round his neck like sonic bling, a microphone rasped by his mobile lips. On Saturday this peripatetic preacher came towards me through massed crowds of frenzied consumers: “Life is but a dream!” he squawked with a Jamaican inflection. “An’ dis is not your real ‘ome!” How sage, I thought, how just. “In the midst of life,” he continued, “we are in debt!” Sometimes, I reflected, the truest revelations are quite unintentional.   More...

The Strong Arm of the Law

I’ve given Sir Ian Blair the benefit of the doubt since he became Commissioner of the Met. I’ve liked his insistence on community policing and his zero tolerance for racism and homophobia in the force. However, the fact that he’s thick as thieves with his namesake should really have alerted me to his true colours. As last night’s Reith Lecture displayed, Sir Ian is that most curious of creatures – a wholly political animal who understands little of politics.   More...

Foggy Weather

We no longer suffer the ‘London particulars’ which up until the Clean Air Acts bit in the 1960s laid up tens of thousands every winter with acute respiratory illness; instead we have a strange miasma of hypochondria which descends upon the metropolis once the mercury begins to fall. This season’s outbreak has been set off by anxiety about bird flu. Knowing full well that the standard flu vaccine is no protection against its deadly viral cousin, and never having had a flu jab before in their lives, flocks of ‘worried well’ have descended on their GPs intent on a shot in the wing.   More...