November 2008 Archives

I'm back in town. Apologies for the long gap, but I've been globe-trotting - Doha, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Dead Sea - in search of enlightenment and encouragement in these gloomy times.

No sooner am I back than the BBC's Today programme asks me to defend my recent demolition of Imagine This!, the new Warsaw Ghetto musical, against its outraged producer, one Beth Trachtenberg.

Never averse to an early-morning exchange of sweet reason, I found it difficult to edge a word in between Ms T's storm of self-justification and free ticket offers. You can hear it here if you have five minutes and nothing better to do.

Apparently some of the show's backers are the children of Holocaust survivors. This does not in the slightest change my view that using genocide as a backdrop for trivial entertainment is ethically a very dubious thing to do.