Anyone reading this is surely aware that we live in an era when what and how we eat is a worry for everyone, whether we're the unfortunate many with too little to eat, or the fortunate minority with too much choice in the matter. We, mostly Western, increasingly fat, few acknowledge that we have a moral duty to worry about the hungry masses. But we are also aware that we have turned the biological imperative to feed ourselves about three times a day into an obsessive pastime - we've made a hobby of our necessity.

         Yes, there's treviso in the supermarkets and trombone squash in the kitchen garden; it's been a poor year for apples, but the agretti crop has failed too. We eagerly wait to learn the price of this season's truffles. And London is the restaurant capital of the world - who'd have believed it during the Swinging Sixties, when London was merely the world's sex, drugs and style headquarters?  If you were to judge by what dominates the television schedules, manic cooking has replaced sex as our national entertainment.

         Are we all foodies now? This might not be such a good thing. "Foodies," someone once wrote, "are all palate, with a vestigial person attached."

         Actually, I wrote that, with Ann Barr -  in our 1984 "The Official Foodie Handbook." I happened recently to hear Fay Maschler on "Woman's Hour" talking about our book. She was discussing whether there has been a "foodie backlash" with Steven Poole who on October 18^th   published "You Aren't What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture."

         Mr Poole's frequent appearances are stirring up a tasty fuss; but he seems to be avoiding mentioning our names.

         Why? He's done his homework and knows that our best-seller grew out of a 1982 article, "Cuisine Poseur," in Harper's & Queen magazine, and that we coined the word "foodie" in that article (just pipped at the neologism-post by New Yorker Gael Greene in 1980).

         (He doesn't, I think, know that I wrote and compiled the unsigned 1982 article. At that time on H&Q we often put articles together with help from readers - and this time it fell to me to deal with the large manila envelope bulging with their contributions. Many of them were near-actionable assaults on me- "greedy, guzzling king of the gastro-pack" was typical, and of course I included the worst of them. The lawyers for the publishers got frosty toes at the last minute, and refused to okay it until I signed a disclaimer saying I wouldn't sue - myself, I suppose - for libel.)

         Mr Poole cites our book repeatedly, and has the grace to admit that we spotted the trend early on, and that our intent was satirical - though it also served as a guide to how to be a foodie (it is, after all, a Handbook).           I don't think it's just bad manners. It's that Mr. Poole wants to argue that foodies' (he calls them "foodists" - as in "homosexualists"?)  concentration on food, cooking, restaurants, agricultural practices, and so on, is extreme. We did not downplay the excess. Barr and Levy: "The unexamined meal is not worth eating"; "Be modern - worship food;" "Food is the frontier to be on;"  "Couture has ceded the centre ground to food;" "You know what exercise is for - to give you an appetite."

         In fact, we observed that "I am a foodie" is as proud a boast as "Civis Romanus sum": what they both mean is "I am a winner."

         Well, it's 2012, and Mr. Poole naturally doesn't want to call attention to the fact that we anticipated most of his arguments in 1984. Which would be fair enough, except that we missed something crucial - the ethical strand of foodism. Mr. Poole thinks this is insincere, and dismisses the organic movement, campaigns for sustainable agriculture and fisheries, locavorism, animal welfare concerns - the whole ethical package.

         The terrible Ethiopian famine that began in 1983 was finally noticed at around the time of the 1984 launch of the Foodie Handbook (and led to the launch of Band Aid the next year). Some felt it was obscene to tease the overfed, and objected to the book - though few of the pop-star righteous ever learned the lesson taught by Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen, that "there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy."

         The Ethiopian tragedy, anyway, did not lead directly to foodies reexamining their relationship to the environment. The Handbook had recognised the "Whole-foodier than thou" type, but didn't appreciate the dawning significance of those positive developments associated with words such as "organic," "free-range," "local" and "sustainable."  Mr Poole concurs that there's no possible reason for refusing to eat organic food or for opposing sustainable agriculture, but insists it all boils down to "so-called ethical consumerism," and that "simply shopping differently is not going to be the answer." He even seems to think consumer boycotts don't work. What about those UK supermarkets that no longer sell battery eggs or chickens?

         Thanks to the foodie vanguard, most of us are now aware of endangered fish stocks, environmental damage caused by food production, our carbon footprints, the obesity epidemic - and who wouldn't prefer to eat in a "sustainable" restaurant if given the option? We have to hope that foodies will eventually make us realists, like the French and Italians, willing to pay a higher percentage of our disposable income for our food.

         Mr Poole is a million food-miles away from identifying the real problem: our insatiable appetite for cheaply priced food. Poor crops this  year mean world food prices are rising. But our food is not really cheap anyway - not if you include the externalities, such as the cost of cleaning up after industrial farming, and the cost to the NHS of our poor diet. At the moment these costs might seem to be paid from a different pocket; but it's the same pair of trousers.

         It's to their great credit that most foodies appreciate this, and care about it. They are not egregiously extravagant, but realistic about how much they pay for their food. Maybe  it's unfashionable to say so, but foodism is good for us and for the planet.

The current scandal in Britain is about how a dead paedophiliac appears to have been protected and event abetted in his crimes by his employer. The trouble is that the employer in question was the second most revered institution (after the monarchy) in the country, the BBC. The nature of the complaint against the BBC is not clear, except that it failed to follow up and transmit "Newsnight's" posthumous exposé of Jimmy Savile's assaults on under-aged girls and boys, which were actually facilitated by the BBC and in some cases took place on BBC premises.

         Was it a cover-up? Did the BBC top brass know Savile was a paedophile?

Of course they did. Not only was it common knowledge here (just as it was common knowledge that Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks were pond life), but Louis Theroux had raised the question with Savile himself on a TV programme that was transmitted, and the scarecrow look-alike, cigar-chomping DJ made it clear that he would see anyone who alleged this in court with a great big action for libel.

         The BBC paid this repulsive clown so much that he could not only afford a white Rolls Royce, but also the very best libel lawyers.

         The airwaves and newspapers are full of the Savile story, but few have noticed what made it possible for this under-educated, not obviously intelligent, ill-spoken, probably smelly creep to gain access to schools for disturbed children, children's hospitals and wards, and even Broadmoor, Britain's secure hospital for the mentally-ill. Yes, Savile raised a good deal of money for several charities. But what made this possible?  He was, apparently, as talent-free as he was free of scruples.

         The answer is that he was a product of our Celebrity Culture. This celebrates people for no reason except that they have become well known. Paris Hilton, Katie Price and Kim Karsdashian's names spring immediately to mind as examples of celebrity syndrome. They're all female, but there are plenty of males besides the late Jimmy - though most of them have some vestigial claim upon our attention, such as being able to play football well. And, of course, none of them has criminal sexual tastes. But Jimmy's fame was drawn from the same poisoned well.

         In some cases, such as "Jim'll Fix It," his TV programmes actually gave him access to his victims. Again, why did the BBC give him these programmes? The only possible answer is: because he was famous.

         Until we as a society stop celebrating those of us who have little or nothing to offer to the rest of us, those who can contribute nothing to civilization but an ability to kick a ball, or a large and imposing bust or wardrobe, we'll continue to connive in the exploitation of the vulnerable.

         While we apply the thumbscrews to BBC manager and executives to force them to tell us exactly when they knew Savile was having his wicked way with kids, we are ignoring the underlying evil of celebrity-chic. In the meantime a few religious maniacs are worried about grown-up men and women getting married to other grown-up men and women (who just happen to be of the same gender). 

         Oh, and a candidate is running for the Presidency of the US, who believes that god lives on a planet called Kolob and that Jesus visited America not all that long ago. Would Romney, I wonder, be mounting his challenge to the sanity of the American electorate if we were not all obsessed by empty celebrity?

I am an EastEnders addict. Anybody reading this who doesn't have access to BBC television will probably be at a loss to understand this reference to the long-running TV soap opera, which takes place in "Albert Square," a fictional postal address in London's East End. I, like millions of other middle-class Brits (though I'm only half Brit, and that by dint of passport only, not birth), go slumming in Albert Square four times each week for a half hour starting at 7.30 or 8.0.

        And I mean "slumming." The whole point of the series is that the highest moral type you encounter in EE is the lovable rogue. Otherwise the dramatis personae consist of an entire catalogue of villainy, from Falstaffian slightly bent to Iago-like pure evil. There are no virtuous women living in Albert Square, and no honest men. Even the children, though charming, are adept at calculating the odds.

Janine Butcher

Why do we like it so much that we weep at the very idea of missing an installment of this weekly brew of nastiness?  The obvious answer, that it's the best-written, best-directed thing on TV, isn't the whole story. It's true that the dialogue is so up-to-the-minute that it doesn't simply reflect non-Received Pronunciation speech (the accent is not really the Cockney implied by the location, so much as it is the Estuary English now spoken by nearly all uneducated Londoners - and by a great many educated ones as well). In some cases, I'd claim, EE actually sets the linguistic trends.

         I met some of the writers a dozen or more years ago in - of all places - Almaty in Kazakhstan. (It's a long story, but they were there to help found the Kazakh TV industry.)  Many of them were upper-middle class public-school (or equivalent) educated kids from professional families living somewhere like Hampstead; but my god, did they have acute ears. They were true professionals, also, in the sense of being able to anticipate the next social problem that would affect those beneath them - way beneath them, as they were better paid than I was - on the socio-economic ladder. Whether it was single motherhood, abortion, gay schoolboys, obesity or baby-snatching - the EE writers were there before the broadsheet papers even noticed there was a problem. Governments could have done worse than use them as consultant forecasters.

         As for the directors - these vary from programme to programme and week to week, as do the writers. But they all have in common the breathless speed with which the cuts proceed in each episode. Remark on something to someone watching with you, and you've missed the next vital cue. Watching EE demands such mental agility that I'd argue that it improves the viewer's reasoning powers, maybe even increases your IQ. It certainly does wonders for your grasp of social issues; and by making the sufferers characters that you care about, gives you a certain sympathy with people that likes of whom you - the comfortable, middle-class viewer with a university degree - will probably never encounter in real life.

         Of course I should hasten to add here that the colossal viewing figures for EastEnders couldn't possibly be made up exclusively of middle-class people. A good many viewers, perhaps a majority, might come from the traditional working-classes (if there are any of these left) and from the underclass, for whom a TV set is one of the rights of life.  (This is probably the place to say that I have an ancestral tie myself, if not to Albert Square, to the Whitechapel district of the East End, from where my maternal grandparents emigrated to the USA - though I don't actually know whether either of them was born in London. We still have plenty of family in London, although we've lost touch with them.)

         All this is by way of saying how much pleasure I got from this week's Diary in The Spectator. The genius who edits it has commissioned Steve John Shepherd, who plays the character of Michael Moon in EastEnders to write it today.  In his first paragraph he writes about an Asian man who recognises him in a branch of (the middle-class shop) Marks & Spencer, and calls him "a very naughty man." Says Mr Shepherd, his interlocutor obviously "enjoys the psychological torture my character ...in EastEnders inflicts on people." Myself, I love Michael Moon - he's handsome, charming, and has married and had a child with the female Iago called Janine Butcher. So wicked is Janine that she became a Jewish convert in order to marry a rich man, whom she then murdered.  It's a brave fellow that takes on Janine, even if he is himself being transformed "into the devil's son." 

         I'm afraid I must have missed some of the episodes in which Michael's "diabolical stature" grew. I certainly did not catch the programme in which he was shown reading the Times Literary Supplement on a bench in Albert Square. I regret this omission more than I can say. I am very cross indeed with the TLS just at the moment, as they recently ran a cover piece on a book to do with food that was so incompetent that I felt bound to write a personal note of complaint to the Editor. I feel the piece did a great deal of damage to the fledgling academic field of food studies, and that it was unforgivable of the TLS to print such a foolish piece, let alone put it on the cover. If I hadn't been associated with the paper for about 40 years, both as reviewer and reader, I'd cancel my subscription. I wonder if that was the number of the TLS  Michael Moon was shown reading in Albert Square?

The Tempest is a play for which it is possible to feel real affection. In this it is, of course, unlike the tragedies: you can't imagine having warm, happy, cheerful or loving feelings about Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello. (There was a famous American Yiddish theatre production of King Lear - the moral of it being, "You bring them up, feed them, clothe them; then look what they do to you in your old age!" You can perhaps conceive of feeling affectionate in a superior, amused way about such a staging.) It's possible to love the tragedies, as it is The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet and several of the comedies and histories - and as it is not, say, the Taming of the Shrew or Timon of Athens.

         Why am I fond of The Tempest? Not because it suits my political feelings. I can see merit in the interpretation that says the play's point is anti-colonialism - it's a reading that fits.  But it can't be the whole story, and making it so has resulted in any number of poor productions that I've seen. The Tempest is too much a tale of the natural order being subverted and restored - of dukes being dukes and princes, princes, and of Miranda being a natural aristocrat, though all the home she knows is the desert isle - to impose a single ideological straitjacket on its plot and subplots.

Kirsty Bushell as "Sebastian"

It's also obviously about the dangers of nature - the storm; and about the unnatural - Caliban, Sycorax his dam, Prospero's spells, and Ariel's capabilities, for all that he is wholly lovable. Prospero's love for his daughter is genuine, as is hers and Ferdinand's, and The Tempest is a love story/comedy - with some funny lines, especially for Stephano and Trinculo. The felicitous language of the play is another attraction for its devotees - who ever tires of hearing  "Our revels now are ended," or  "O brave new world"?

         (The sole unsatisfying feature of Thomas Adès's opera, The Tempest, is the loss of some of these lines, made hard to hear by the soprano's soaring above the stave notes.)

         The Royal Shakespeare Company has found a relatively new way to approach the play, by making it part of what they call "Shakespeare's Shipwreck Trilogy" or "What Country Friends is This?" Using a specially formed (and talented) repertory company and much of Jon Bausor's set for the other two, The Comedy of Errors (which I've seen and relished) and Twelfth Night (not yet seen), this grouping of the plays zeroes in on the consequences of the initial calamity in each.

      It works a treat with this (mostly) modern dress Tempest, partly because the casting is so fine. Even that wimp, Ferdinand, is here given some smoochy romantic street-cred by Solomon Israel. Emily Taafe is a convincing teen-aged Miranda. Director David Farr has given Sebastian a gender-reassignment, and it works. Kirsty Bushell not only distinguishes herself by her slink dress, from the her co-conspirator, but also Sebastian's oaths and bitching stand out from the others' mutterings, coming as they do from a woman.

      The comic duo, Felix Hayes's just-right camp Trinculo and Bruce Mackinnon's leering Stephano, are ace. Amer Hlehel makes Caliban the Other, the foreigner in our midst, the Neanderthal up against Homo sapiens. Best though are the twinned Ariel of Sandy Grierson and Prospero of Jonathan Slinger, particularly in the second half. They are dressed alike in distressed suits, with lapels revealing the canvas substructure, and identical close-cropped haircuts and shiny makeup. (The attendant spirits are similarly costumed and coiffed.) The directorial genius is to have seen that it is their near-identity that makes Prospero's powers seem credible, as we already believe that Ariel is a spirit.

      This is only the second or third time I've seen a production of The Tempest in which the Act IV masque works as an integral part of the play. It succeeds here, too, because of the twinning - Iris, Ceres and Juno are just the sort of girls you expect this pair to hang out with.

      That wonderful actor, Nicholas Day, here has the part of Gonzalo, and performs it beautifully. It might seem a little unrewarding. But as my mentor, Harry Levin, taught us in his Harvard seminar, Gonzalo's speech describing his Utopian vision is the beating heart of the play.

If there had only been gay marriage in Melville's day, none of it would have happened. David Alden's production of Billy Budd at the English National Opera has received very good reviews from many of my opera critic colleagues. Paul Steinberg's set and Constance Hoffman's costumes send mixed messages about the location and period of the drama, but seem to be trying to place the action in the present, in some sort of forced labour plant - a Soviet oil refinery perhaps?  Or in the bowels of a nuclear submarine

But then there are the anachronistic early 19^th century costumes of Captain Vere and some of the other naval officers, and the William IV chairs and table in Vere's quarters. Probably just Mr Alden's attempt to have his Modernist cake and eat it, but confusing.

         I feel the staging compares unfavourably to Michael Grandage's at Glyndebourne, which was set about a breathtakingly accurate and detailed late 18^th century Man of War, as called for in Melville and in E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier's libretto. It must have been very expensive - I've never before seen a production of Britten's opera that attempted this degree of realism - but it was totally satisfying, thrilling even.

         Reflecting on the sets -curving black walls and brown wooden walls with shallow diagonal struts, black iron gantries and wheeled steps, a huge white tube that doubled as entrance to Vere's all-white quarters and as the cannon, plenty of ropes and some mattresses on the floor, a trap door for Claggart's bowels of the ship - I think I'd have preferred to let my imagination do the work with a bare stage to all this folderol.

         Mr Alden's directing of the enormous augmented chorus also left a lot to be desired, as he massed them in a more or less straight line at the front of the stage, which meant they were competing with the large orchestra to see who could be the noisier. The orchestra, under Edward Gardner, played with real passion, and my only reservation is that their piano could have been more controlled and quiet, with more dynamic contrast. There were some fine individual performances, especially in the title role by Benedict Nelson, Kim Begley and Vere, Duncan Rock as a mightily muscled Donald, and Nicky Spence sang beautifully as the Novice.

         ENO's programme notes, despite naval historian Andrew Lambert's use of "hung" for "hanged," are enlightening,  particularly about the good navy knots the gay Britten and Forster tied themselves into when it came to making explicit the homoerotic undertones of the Melville novella. They made me reflect that the piece is a terrific argument for gay marriage.

         The existence of gay marriage and the removal of the stigma regarding homosexuality would have nullified the Articles of War XXIX, which specified the death penalty "if any person in the fleet, shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery or sodomy, with man or beast."  With the disappearance of the taboos, attitudes towards homosexual love would have change to what they are in the civilised part of the world today, and both Claggart and Vere could have admitted to themselves and to others their love for Billy. It would still be conflicted by their power relations - but that would be another, possibly more honest, plot.  And in this openly gay Billy Budd Claggart could not be the Coleridgean unmotivated evil character that I think he is; as Auden pointed out, being capable of love would give Claggart a motive for his wickedness.

         If there had been gay marriage in 1951, we shouldn't have had one of Britten's greatest works: the silver lining to a very black cloud.

Besides the nasty weather we've had during and since the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations, a storm is brewing about the BBC's coverage of the events, from the flotilla of 1,000 boats to the big lunch and pop concert at Buckingham Palace, to the last day's service at St Paul's, the carriage procession and balcony appearance after them.

         At the time of writing, it has been announced that the Beeb has received 4,000 complaints. I imagine all of them were justified, as I'd guess every single one of them complained about the caliber of the presenters, who were the ultimate dumb-downers. 

Obviously the BBC made a policy decision to use these silly people, some of whom couldn't get the queen's title right (saying "Her Royal Highness" when the entire point is that she is the sole person entitled to be called "Her Majesty") and unable to tell the bow of a boat from its stern. There was near-universal ignorance about the small craft in the flotilla - and I speak as one who shares the ignorance of those who commented on them, and was therefore in need of enlightenment.

         There is a tradition here that royal events are anchored by members of another hereditary clan, (my friends, to declare an interest) the Dimbleby family. The originator of the claim to commenting on matters of the throne was Richard Dimbleby (1913-1965), who was more or less present at the birth of TV. He won his spurs (and his reputation for gravitas) by broadcasting the first reports in 1945 from Belsen concentration camp, and went on to present the TV coverage of the 1953 coronation (which I saw as a schoolboy in America), as well as the state funerals of George VI, Churchill and JFK. His mantle was inherited by two of his four children, David (who is a bit older than I, so technically of retiring age) and Jonathan (who is younger than I, but still past 65).

         Both David and Jonathan have the ability to be inquisitive but gracious, and serious without being grave or boring. The have never, ever failed to do their homework, as the intellectual pygmies who presented the Jubilee so egregiously did.

         There have been calls in the British press, radio and TV to "bring back the Dimblebys," and I am in complete agreement. Though I was very careful to avoid London during the Jubilee weekend and the Monday and Tuesday holidays that followed, I was eager to see it on TV. There hasn't been a Diamond Jubilee, after all, since Queen Victoria's in 1897, so even if you're a republican, it's a once in a lifetime thing. It was spoiled, ruined, trashed by the nobodies in front of the BBC's cameras. Shame on everyone concerned. I hope it was not the decision of the soon-retiring Director General, Mark Thompson, for I think he's done a grand job, and count him a friend, too; I certainly shouldn't like his place in history to suffer the black mark of responsibility for this fiasco.

Here's my contribution to the Jubilee. In the summer or early autumn of 1986 I was commissioned by the NY Times - Magazine, I think I remember - to write a piece on the queen and her then prime minister, who was Margaret Thatcher. There had been some trivial business about the two of them wearing the same dress, and this led to a piece in the (British) Sunday Times saying there was some tension between the two 60 year-olds. The tiff has been dredged up for the Jubilee and you can read a summary of it at http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/Interviews/article1041265.ece

On making enquiries among friends, I discovered that there was some truth in the story that the queen had a down on Mrs T, and that the Iron Lady was miffed herself. My sources were impeccable. One of them was a cabinet minister, the Rt. Hon. John Biffen (who later became Lord Biffen and a personal friend, though I did not know him then). John Biffen was only the highest-placed of the several sources I had for the story that the queen and the PM were not seeing eye-to-eye over foreign policy.

         The crux of the matter was economic sanctions on the South African government. The Commonwealth, which represented what was left of the British Empire, was pressing hard for the UK to put in place sanctions against the South African apartheid regime. The queen, I was told, felt strongly that Britain should not only back the Commonwealth nations in this, but even give the lead.  Maggie didn't give a toss about the Commonwealth.

         Here she came up against the hard face of the monarchy: it is my Commonwealth, said the queen. We shall do what is required. And she meant it.

         I duly wrote this up for the NY Times, and explained the significance of what was nothing less than a constitutional clash. Moreover, I think I remember that I was even allowed to identify some of my sources. It was a dynamite story.

         But it was not published - "spiked" as we used to say. The reason: one of the NY Times editors had a flat in London, where he often stayed. He swanked about his inside knowledge of Britain and British politics, and this just didn't strike a chord with him. He couldn't see an argument over the Commonwealth as being even mildly interesting, let alone of sovereign-shaking importance. That it was true, a scoop for the NY Times and the first-ever indication of the queen having a controversial opinion about anything not to do with race horses just didn't float his boat. So I was paid a $300 kill-fee instead of the $3,000 contract-fee. And readers of the NY Times missed out on this story, not because it wasn't fit to print, but because it didn't fit an editor's prejudices.

Last night I saw the final, reduced-price "preview" of the new London production of Neil Simon's "The Sunshine Boys." It opens tonight, and in my review, to be published tomorrow, I express the hope that the play will improve when the run starts for real. Almost exactly the same thing happened at the end of February, when critics were allowed in early to see a revival of Alan Ayckbourn's "Absent Friends."

         Then, too, I noted a distinct absence of ensemble playing. A really talented cast, playing a pretty good piece by one of the best living playwrights, just wasn't giving their all. As I wrote in my review, I knew in my bones that the production simply was not as lackluster as it seemed at this last preview: the performances hadn't gelled, but it felt as though some of the actors were holding back. And, sure enough, the actual press night notices were better than those given by my preview colleagues and me.

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         There were other weaknesses. My companion and I are both bi-lingual in American and British English, and could hear poor Adam Levy (a Brit who plays DeVito's theatrical agent nephew) pronounce "over" in a very non-American way. And we could detect the stereotypical Brooklynese dialect he's been taught. As for Griffiths's speech, I was impressed that his plentiful errors of accent were so few.

         Lots of my colleagues are pleased by this new policy of press-night leniency. It makes for very welcome flexibility with respect to deadlines. For example, I was only able to review "Sunshine Boys" this week, because going on Wednesday night to the final preview meant I caught my Thursday deadline for Friday's paper. Had I gone to see it only tonight, which is the actual press night, I'd have had to hold over the review until next Friday's paper (as our arts coverage is confined to our Friday Weekend section).

         At both "Absent Friends" and "The Sunshine Boys" I felt the performances would probably improve. Maybe all the actors needed was the adrenaline shot of knowing that the critics were present, and that everything they did on stage mattered. Maybe some of them were just holding back, "marking" their notes in the way singers usually do in rehearsals, saving their full efforts for the critics and full-price audiences. But no critic can make allowances of this sort; you have to call it as you see it. You can, after all, only review the performance at which you were present.

         So apart from flexibility about deadlines, who benefits from this growing practice? No one on the creative or business side of the production - they risk less favourable reviews leading to diminished ticket sales. Maybe the PRs profit? They can claw back a fair number of seats to the opening/press night to give to friends, or to tacky tabloid slebs who'll get their pictures taken for the cheapo papers.

         If offered a seat at a preview that suits my deadline better than the press night does, I'll probably take it. On the whole, I think it would be healthier for the theatre if the option wasn't available.

The front page of the London paper for April 28 (London has only one paper, the Evening Standard; the rest are national papers) had a huge headline saying that Occupy, the group that formerly targeted St Paul's, has moved on to the Olympics. (Oddly enough, the only other stories I've seen about this were a follow-up the next day in the Standard, and one story in the Independent. I don't know whether the news is being actively suppressed, or whether our free press and broadcasters are just too gung-ho Olympics to print or broadcast this news.  But what wonderful news it is.

At last those good souls plus their fellow-travelling agitators, troublemakers and those just looking to make mischief, have a worthy goal. Disrupting the 2012 London Olympics before it cripples the national economy, brings London traffic to a stand-still and makes the entire place (even my broom-cupboard-sized flatlet in green and pleasant Hampstead) unbearable for three weeks, plus some more for the disgustingly patronizing Paralympics, is very worth doing. I wish I were young enough or brave enough to do it myself.

         It is the wretched Games that are siphoning off money that should be directed to the arts, and that are making good arts administrators prostitute themselves and pretend they are making a contribution to culture, when all they are really doing is providing a smokescreen for the unparalleled rape of public resources by the corrupt, sometimes depraved members of the IOC and the various bodies charged with "delivery" of Olympics projects. The opening and closing ceremonies have a budget of £41million!

         What do we get in exchange for this wodge of cash? Save for Barcelona, no country has ever had any "legacy" from hosting the Olympic Games. And we will be no exception. We already know, for example, that the housing being built for competitors will have no kitchens. Can they be converted into flats after the Games, for housing-poor London? An acquaintance tells me that they are all 3-bedroom apartments, and that, after the Games, one of the bedrooms will receive a slot-in kitchen, making them into useful 2-bedroom flats  (that is, if any middle-class person who can afford one of them wants to live in that dreary part of London). I wonder, especially as I've heard rumours that the builders have failed to provide mains services necessary for kitchens. I hope the rumours are false, but no degree of incompetence would come as a surprise to me.

         We have already been warned that it will be impossible to travel around London during the Games - we're told to avoid hotspots, such as Tower Bridge tube station. But as the imbeciles who run London transport are closing the Mall to traffic, and as special lanes, exclusively for Olympics bosses and cadres, are being instituted on many main roads, we already know that London will be one big traffic jam. I've asked each of the London cabbies who have driven me for the past few months whether he's going to work during the Olympics? We're talking dozens and dozens, but only one, a single enthusiast, said he was certain he'd be on the job come July. The authorities are encouraging Londoners to stay at home during the Games - it will be like the War: "Is Your Journey Really Necessary?"  In fact, you'll have no choice, unless you can walk everywhere you need to go.

         I suppose that means Londoners will be more fit as a result of bolding the Games. But with the prospect of theatres and concert halls going dark because the audiences can't get to them, and restaurants either empty because of the absence of their regular patrons - or else full up with foreign plutocrats, who'd choose to be a Londoner this summer?

Since the British Library split and moved away in 1973, the glorious space has been redundant. But it has recently been used as an exhibition space for:

·      The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army 13 September 2007 - 6 April 2008

• Hadrian: Empire and Conflict 24 July- 27 October 2008
• Shah 'Abbas: The Remaking of Iran 19 February - 14 June
•  Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler 24 September 2009 -24 January 2010
• Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings
  22 April - 25 July 2010
• Journey through the afterlife: ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead 4 November 2010 - 6 March 2011
• Treasures of Heaven: saints, relics and devotion in medieval Europe 23 June - 9 October 2011

And from the 26^th January to 15^th April, it is home to Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam. 

19th-C  Egyptian mahmal, ceremonial palanquin, symbol of the sultan's authority over the holy places (Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art)

I have seen, wondered at, and reviewed - enthusiastically - all the previous items in this list, with the slight exception of the relics show last year. (I felt a little skeptical about the organisers' silence about the magical aspects of these religious objects, which were logically on a par with those venerated or used by, say, followers of voodoo. Curators have no difficulty using the word "superstition" if the makers and worshippers of the objects are black. Doesn't this also apply to white Christians who believe in the efficacy of splinters of the True Cross and the virtue of ancient fragments of bone?) 

So there are some of my cards on the table already: I am made uneasy by the uncritical presentation of religious belief. In "Treasures of Heaven" I was able to see through to the beauty and craftsmanship of most of the many objects on display, without being made nervous by the nature what was ostensibly inside some of them.

But that attitude is not possible to assume with the current BM show, which is shoddy, even tacky in its installation (with some information plaques looking like signage in a pound-, or dime-store), unbeautiful, unscholarly, and in some ways no better than propaganda for the current Saudi régime. In fact, I am a little shocked that the BM agreed to mount this exhibition and lend its name and reputation to what is a pretty creepy enterprise. (I except from these strictures the book of the show, same title, £25, with excellent essays by Hugh Kennedy and Robert Irwin.)

It is a wholesale endorsement of the Muslim pilgrimage, the Hadjj, one of the five pillars of Islam.  Unlike the book that accompanies the show (but is not a catalogue of it), it doesn't seem to contain a word of criticism about any aspect of the Hadjj. Its sole concession to the physical dangers of having so many people in such a small piece of Saudi real estate at the same time is to mention the troubles of 1865, when Indian pilgrims seem to have transmitted cholera to Europe and the US, resulting in Thomas Cook becoming agents for the Hadjj for a year in 1866-7.

Overcrowding is a trivial issue. But overlooking the Sunni-Shi'a schism is serious. I came away from this show thinking that Islamic sectarianism is (and almost always has been) set aside completely by all pilgrims making the Hadjj. Indeed, the show's curator, Venetia Porter, told me explicitly that this is so - that both Shi'a and Sunni pilgrims perform the same rituals, and that their differences are suspended when making the Hadjj. Of course (you learn from the book, which she edited) this isn't quite true, as there have been times in history when the rulers of one of the sects (or political factions, indeed) banned members of others from making the Hadjj; and you only have to look at the internet to learn that such a ban is rumoured (untruly) every year. The exhibition glosses over the differences within Islam, and it does this on purpose, as it explicitly endorses, and is endorsed by, arms of the Saudi government and tourist authorities. The Saudis are thanked frequently and copiously in parts of the exhibition, not only for their support for the show, but for their contribution to making the Hadjj safer and less uncomfortable for participants.

Worse, sparse though the exhibits are, the information supplied is not good or plentiful. You have to peer closely at some of the wall captions to learn the date of the object on which it comments. Perhaps this is because a good deal of what is displayed is recent or even new. There is not much "art" included anyway - most of it illuminated manuscript pages, a few ceramic tiles, some porcelain and several textiles - and not all of the first rank. Even the exhibition design is poor. Given that one physical setting of the Hajj is an arena with the Ka'ba - a black monolithic-looking building supposedly rebuilt by Abraham and Ishmael - which pilgrims circle seven times, you would have thought the circular Reading Room was the ideal venue for this show. Though there is half a black rectangular-solid structure in its middle, the design singularly fails to cash in on the idea of circumambulation.

So what about the Hadjj itself? I speak from the vantage point of one of Sir Jonathan Miller's pious atheists, but this exhibition does no favours to Islam. Hadjj is required of any believer who has the means and opportunity to go to Mecca at the appropriate time of year. In fact, everything from the size of the 49 pebbles used to stone the pillars representing the devil to the seamlessness of the two white male garments is ritually prescribed in detail. Even today the pilgrimage is costly, arduous, uncomfortable and occasionally dangerous. Pilgrims undertake it, if not solely, then chiefly because of the promised reward of Paradise for doing so. If so many millions find it so easy to believe in Paradise gained by following sometimes physically gruelling rituals that have grisly aspects including animal sacrifice, is it not easy to understand why a few hundred of them might regard favourably killing people they see as enemies? Mightn't it be easy to persuade such people that assassination can be a shortcut to Paradise?

The best thing about this exhibition is the large amount of new work collected or commissioned for it from living artists. I'm afraid, though, the experience of seeing this mess is best summed-up in its final vitrine, a showcase of up-to-the-minute souvenir tat of the Hadjj.  I'd recommend staying at home and reading The Satanic Verses. Should this great international institution, the British Museum, really be hosting this feel-good exhibition? 

To be a member of the Critics' Circle in Britain you have to have been a regularly published critic of the theatre, music, dance, cinema or visual arts for at least two years. It's a handy form of accreditation and, unlike the way theatre and film people and musicians are organized, it has no aspect of trade unionism, and so is non-political and uncontroversial - for the most part.

         In addition to the Critics' Circle overall annual award to a practitioner of one of the arts, some of the five sections listed above give their own awards. Yesterday was the grandest occasion, the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for 2011.  The Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End was crammed with faces familiar from screens as well as from behind the footlights, as so many starry British film and television actors now seem to relish doing live theatre.

Eddie Redmayne at Awards Ceremony 24 January 2012

There were the stars of the Best New Play ("One Man. Two Guv'nors" in Richard Bean's cosmically funny take on Goldoni) including James Corden, Eddie Redmayne was there to receive a medal for his "Richard II", Sheridan Smith won best actress for "Flare Path" and only Benedict Cumberbatch was notably absent, filming in Canada. Danny Boyle collected his gong.

         Glamorous though it was, there was something worrying when the chairman of the drama section, Mark Shenton, read out - before each award - the names of those (or some of those?) also nominated for the award. Sometimes the list was so lengthy that you had to suspect that almost every eligible critic had nominated someone different. That in itself is fine and healthy. But what bothered me was that there is only one round of voting; so some of the award winners must have had only a handful of critics voting for them - or even only two or three.

         Unlike most of my colleagues (though I know of at least one who is in a similar position) I am - how to put this delicately?- not a full-time theatre critic. In my day job, freelancing as the culture critic for The Wall Street Journal Europe and for the online wsj.com, I review all the performing arts, especially theatre and opera, and also the visual arts. I have done this job since the 1990s, and I believe I have the distinction of being the only critic in the country who is a member of three sections of the Critics' Circle - drama, music and visual arts.

         In short, I cannot possibly get to see every new theatre production. Even so, I see so many every year that, when voting for awards comes around in late winter, I have trouble remembering what I have seen, and which of those productions is eligible. At yesterday's awards a colleague who sees a play almost every night of the week confessed to me that he had the same problem.

         It's a strength of the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards, and one of the features that makes them so valuable to their recipients, that there's only the single secret vote, no long list, no shortlist,  - so no horse-trading or even campaigning is possible.

         But now I'm beginning to feel that the system needs a tiny reform. Would it really make any difference to the cachet of the awards if, before voting, we were simply given a list of productions and people eligible for the awards? I can see that that means a lot of work for someone, but as the sponsor, the firm of London showbiz accountants, Nyman Libson Paul, is so generous in the provision of food and drink, I wonder whether they wouldn't be prepared to put up a small fee for someone to do the necessary research?

         That won't solve my other problem, that I failed to see several of the award-winning productions and performances - but that's a reflection of when space is available in the paper, and sometimes merely of my poor predictive powers. I'm very glad indeed that my colleagues gave the Most Promising Playwright and Most Promising Newcomer to people I didn't know, respectively Tom Wells and Blanche McIntyre, both working in London's fringe theatre. This is exactly as it should be.

 "We seem to be a society that celebrates all the wrong people."

Who said that? The wisest man in Britain today, Iain Duncan Smith, once caretaker leader of the Conservative Party, Work and Pensions Secretary in the current government. He chairs the cabinet social justice committee, and what he has to say about the summer urban riots is full of good sense.

         In an interview with the Guardian of 9 December Duncan Smith had the guts to blame the riots on celebrity culture. Children, he said, are regarding contestants on the degraded TV programme The X Factor and doltish Premier League footballers as role models. His point is simple and obviously true: British kids think success in life is achieved by being one of these undereducated yahoos, rather than by hard work. "Kids," he said, are meant to believe that their stepping stone to massive money is The X Factor. Luck is great, but most of life is hard work. We do not celebrate people who have made success out of serious hard work."

         There's something in common - besides lack of taste - between the talentless who win The X Factor and the banksters with their undeserved giant bonuses, namely being rewarded incommensurately for the amount of skill and work involved in the performance.

         Because the people this young social-media-alerted mob are emulating haven't themselves done any genuine work to own these trophies, the rabble feel a sense of entitlement themselves. They want these baubles, and they want them now. During the riots safety of the crowd was all that was required to get them.

         This is a pessimistic view, of course. The world is in recession. We middle class wage-earners can't really afford to educate other people's kids as they deserve to be educated. But if we don't, we will have a generation where the majority is unlettered, enumerate, amoral and so lacking in taste that our institutions of high culture will find their audiences shrinking to the point where the museums, galleries, theatres, opera houses and concert halls will have to close their doors.

         Yes, it's frightening, and Duncan Smith sounds very like an Old Testament prophet. Speaking about the special difficulties facing boys today, he says:

         "It becomes a problem for boys in that the only male role model they do see is the deeply dysfunctional guy with sinning hubcaps that teaches them, 'All you need to succeed is guts, not qualifications'."

         There is a faint shimmer of hope. The "celeb" magazines appear to be losing circulation. Maybe one day "celebrity" will be a boo-word, and people will once again be celebrated for what they have achieved, rather than for their absence of talent, taste and moral capacity.

         (Diverting footnote: I intended to end this post "Whenever I hear the word 'celebrity' I reach for my revolver." But when I checked the quotation I thought I was parodying for the correct attribution, I discovered - from Wikipedia:

"Whenever I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my revolver."

• The actual quote is "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" This translates as: "Whenever I hear [the word] 'culture'... I remove the safety from my Browning!"
• This quote is often mistakenly attributed to leading Nazi Hermann Goering, or occasionally to Julius Streicher, a lower-ranking Nazi. This misattribution may date from the famous Frank Capra documentaries (Why We Fight) shown to American troops before shipping out.
• In fact, it is a line uttered by the character Thiemann in Act 1, Scene 1 of the play Schlageter, written by Hanns Johst. The association with Nazism is appropriate, as the play was first performed in April 1933, in honour of Hitler's birthday.
• Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitlerjugend, delivered this sentence in a public speech, circa 1938.)

Ace Clicker

I've known the Indian photographer Pablo Bartholomew since the 1980s, when he accompanied me and a troupe of (mostly) French Michelin-starred chefs on our post-publication (of The Official Foodie Handbook) tour of India. Our lot included Pierre Troisgros, Michel Rostang, Alain Dutournier, Jean-André Charial, Jean Lameloise and journalists Gilles Pudlowski, Fay Maschler, Gael Greene and Craig Claiborne. But when this crew got to Goa, the local English-language newspaper heralded our arrival with the headline: "Ace Clicker in Town."

That, of course, was Pablo, then the best-known photographer in the subcontinent.

Pablo Bartholomew 

         Pablo proposed that we should make our way to where the body was. I was astonished - how were we going to get through the crowds? He asked: "do you have an Observer press card?" I had only my Observer  SmartCard, used for buying lunch at the staff canteen, but it had my photograph, and doubled as a security pass at our office. "Perfect," said Pablo, "show it to the policemen here." And indeed, we were escorted through the one million to the bier, where Pablo startled me by photographing the body and the grieving family. ("Don't worry," he said, "I know/ was at school with/are family friends" or whatever.) We made the front page - but I have to make an admission. I was too lazy or frightened to push our way backwards through the crowds to the ghat, and watched the cremation on live television from my hotel room.

         Aged only 19, Pablo won the World Press Photo Award for his 1975 series on Morphine Addicts in India. He is now having a splendid all black-&-white exhibition at a new venue in the East End of London called Fishbar. Though he is known for his documentary photographs of the less comfortable aspects of Indian life, and specially for his work with tribal people, Pablo is here showing what he called (to me) his "teen-aged diary," photographs of himself and his circle of friends mooching, smooching, smoking, dancing and being decorative, along with some of the photographs taken by his artist, critic and writer father, Richard (1926-85). Richard Bartholomew was Burmese, and escaped during WWII by walking the General Stilwell Road from Mandalay to Ledo in Upper Assam. (It sounds a great deal more romantic than it was, as I know from tales told by my own stepfather, who was stationed with the US Army on the India-Burma border.)

         Pablo's photographs are printed on a very thin material and mounted flush to the wall in an installation in the back room of the gallery. The effect is disconcertingly pleasing - though it has the commercial drawback that you can't buy the work and take it home with you. Unlike a few of his father's really stunning small, conventionally framed photographs of his family, friends and larger social circle. I am knocked out by the c. 1962 portrait of the painter, the late M.F. Husain entitled "Old Delhi". (Richard wrote a monograph on him published by Harry Abrams in 1972.)  This show deserves a wide audience.  Pablo is now collecting his father's work in the many forms in which Richard worked. Judging by the Fishbar show, the result will be exciting.