Arts feature

Given their track record, you might think that Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais would be spared the struggles that lesser screenwriters go through to see their writing on screen. But this, it turns out, would be naive. Clement and La Frenais may have written some of the best-loved programmes in British television history: Auf Wiedersehen, Pet; Porridge; The Likely Lads; Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? Their CV may contain the huge hit film The Commitments — as well as more recently acclaimed TV dramas like The Rotters’ Club and Archangel. Yet, when I meet Clement on a solo visit to London, the two most striking things about him are how driven he remains at 81, and how driven he apparently needs to be.

In the early 1370s an elderly Scandinavian woman living in Rome had a vision of the Nativity. Her name was Birgitta Birgersdotter, and she was later venerated as St Bridget of Sweden. In her account of the experience, transcribed by her confessor, she described herself as an eye witness. Her narrative began: ‘When I was present by the manger of the Lord in Bethlehem…’ Around a century later, Piero della Francesca (c.1412–92) used Bridget’s vision — or parts of it — as a starting point for a painting. This picture, now in the National Gallery, is one of the best-loved depictions of this immensely popular subject in the history of art. In some respects, Piero followed Bridget’s visionary account closely.

There is very little art about modern poverty, because who wants to know? It is barely acknowledged, unless there is redemption, or salvation, as in A Christmas Carol. Those most suited to make it — those who are actually poor — are usually too busy doing something else, such as surviving. So, it is remarkable to learn that Alexander Zeldin’s play LOVE, a success at the National Theatre in 2016, is now a film and will air this weekend on BBC2. The closest thing to it recently was Benefits Street, which was exploitative and, therefore, an instant hit. Zeldin is 33. He read French at Oxford University and is artist-in-residence at the National Theatre. His work is plain and understated. He listens, rather than writes, and there are no diatribes, just calm despair.

On 10 September 1973 the 1930s Kensington High Street department store formerly known as Derry & Toms reopened as Big Biba. It sold the dress designer Barbara Hulanicki’s distinctive look in furniture, paints and wallpaper, sports equipment and food, as well as her familiar fast fashion. If you had to define that aesthetic then, you’d have said it was campy and kitschy. But above all you’d have said it was deco, an increasingly familiar word for the between-wars moderne style in everything from buildings to jewellery. Derry & Toms itself was a 1933 moderne temple of commerce, slathered in stylised ironwork and bas-reliefs.

James I and VI liked to term himself Rex Pacificus. Like most politicians who talk a lot about working for peace, he was an appeaser. Inheriting the English throne after Elizabeth, whose foreign policy was defined by breaking Spanish dominance, James appears to have seen the purpose of his own Whitehall government as being to facilitate every Spanish demand. The first high-profile victim of James’s Iberophilia was the war hero and poet Sir Walter Raleigh. Within four months of Elizabeth I’s death in 1603, Raleigh was on trial for treason under the new regime. His death sentence was commuted until 1618, when it was carried out at the direct request of the Spanish ambassador. Shakespeare’s Globe is staging the trial of Walter Raleigh as a piece of theatre this month.

Avast there, scurvy dogs! For a nation founded on piracy (the privateer Sir Francis Drake swelled the exchequer by raiding the Spanish, who were in no doubt that he was a pirate), it is appropriate that Britain should give the international archetype of the pirate his language. The language of the Victoria & Albert’s exhibition A Pirate’s Life for Me at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green is a banquet of humour and doggerel. Whether you arrive a slipperslopper sea-cook, reeking of Havanas, or pushing treasures in a pram, you will stare at walls, speak in tongues and smile. These master (and mistress) mariners of yore have their grappling hooks deep in the psyche of maritime nations. In their infancies, modern states needed pirates.

Arriving in Budapest, I receive a summons I cannot refuse. Gyorgy Kurtag wants to see me. Famously elusive, the last of the living avant-gardists is about to present his first opera at La Scala Milan this month and, if past form is anything to go by, he’s unlikely to utter much about it beyond a cryptic Magyar aphorism. Kurtag is 92 and his Scala opera — Fin de Partie, after Samuel Beckett’s Endgame — is a hefty 450 pages long, which may be as much music as he has written in half a lifetime. So why is this master miniaturist — famous for compressing his ideas down to a few chords — submitting a vast opera to the unforgiving glare of an Italian first-night audience?

The sixth and final season of House of Cards has begun without Kevin Spacey, who played the murderous Democratic American president Frank Underwood. Netflix fired Spacey when he was accused of multiple sexual assaults last year, although he is not yet charged with any crime. The longed-for dénouement of Frank Underwood — the moment when he realises his crimes have been in vain — never came. Instead his wife Claire, so lovely in looks, is now president. (It’s TV.) When the trailer for the final season appeared, Underwood was already in his grave, with Claire, played by Robin Wright, standing over it. Wright gave an interview saying that she had never known Kevin Spacey, which made me smile, because it is exactly what Claire would have said.

Ennio Morricone, the Oscar-winning Italian film composer, has died at the age of 91. Here, Richard Bratby spoke to the 'Maestro'. Ennio Morricone’s staff wish it to be known that he does not write soundtracks. ‘Maestro Morricone writes “Film Music” NOT “Sound Tracks”’, explain the printed interview guidelines. ‘Maestro Morricone is a composer. Composers do not use the piano to compose music with, they write their music down directly in musical notes without the interference of any musical instrument.’ Well, that’s Beethoven told. In the classical music world, you hear tales about ‘riders’, the Spinal Tap-like lists of minimum requirements that pop stars issue before consenting to walk among mortal men.

Lounging confidently on the sofa of a Soho hotel suite, Dominic West has been beaming at me, but now his handsome smile dissolves into a hurt look. I have just asked him to explain why he, in common with so many actors, feels the need to voice his political views. ‘I should just pipe down and carry on acting?’ he asks, leaning forward to pour tea. I don’t like to be rude, so I raise my eyebrows and shrug as the most polite way of saying, ‘Well, it’s an idea.’ West, who is giving interviews to promote his new film Colette, has also made a campaign video calling for a second EU referendum. In it, he warns people that Britain won’t be able to make trade deals with America, Turkey or India on its own.

Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of that both, generally, are reviled. But architecture is more important than politics. Unless you are an anchorite or a polar bear, it’s unavoidable. And it lasts longer. The best architecture affects our mood. Exaltation, if you are lucky. And the worst influences our behaviour: a riot with burning Renaults, if you live in a French banlieue. But, as a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection suggests, architecture may also, in one way or another, affect our health. At ground level, this is quite obvious. Damp, foul air, extreme temperatures, bad drains, structural collapse, fire risks, asbestos and socially hostile environments can all, alas, be experienced in buildings.

Sometimes Andrea Mantegna was just showing off. For the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, he painted a false ceiling above the Camera degli Sposi. Around a great trompe l’oeil oculus, apparently open to the sky, assorted gawpers and cherubs lean nosily over the parapet: ‘What’s going on down there, then?’ Only the Duke and Duchess of Gonzaga entertaining their friends from Ferrara. A terracotta pot is half off the edge, supported only by a thin rod. One nudge from a misbehaving putto and — whoops! — just missed the Duchess. Some of the putti stick their heads through the trellis. Another stands on a ledge, flashing us his bare, plump, crinkly bottom, brilliantly foreshortened by Mantegna. Giovanni Bellini’s figures tend not to show us their bums.

‘I always think they’re not lusting after me,’ Brett Anderson says of the middle-aged fans who still turn up to see his band Suede and leave the shows a little flushed and excited. ‘They’re lusting after something that doesn’t really exist. They’re remembering their wild youth. It’s faintly comical to me when I think about myself in the 1990s and the sexuality of it. That got a bit out of control, I suppose. And it’s odd, because I’m quite a reserved person in lots of ways, so I don’t really know what was going on there.’ Oh, Brett, you do yourself a disservice. Look at yourself! Not an ounce of flab, dressed like a clothes-horse, face all sharp lines and clean planes. You’re a well-preserved man.

I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and unpredictable. Like his plays, where the hyper-banal surfaces — the synthetic memories and false nostalgia of Old Times, the aural drivel of Rose in The Room, the bogus familial warmth of The Homecoming — are fragile and about to be displaced by something ugly and authentic, something obscure and violent. Plays where on countless occasions — think of Lenny in The Homecoming or the alcoholic Hirst in No Man’s Land — a speech will take off into dramatic Tourette’s, unstoppable and at the edge of sense. The plays are edgy, alert to something sinister at the periphery.