More from Arts

My favourite part of Banged Up (Channel 4, Monday) — the new reality show in which juvenile delinquents get to spend ten days in fake prison so they’re never tempted to end up in a real one — was the bit where the other inmates discovered Barry was a nonce. ‘Oi, Bazza. Just dropped me soap. Pick it up for me, would you, mate?’ someone said in the showers. And you should have seen Barry’s face as, glancing between his legs, he suddenly noticed the queue of eager lads building up behind him, led by the official prison Daddy, John ‘Baseball Bat’ Holmes. Priceless! No, not really. The scene didn’t happen because it would never have been allowed to happen.

I guess it’s no surprise that, while the rest of us were twiddling the dials on our cheap plastic transistors (made in Japan) to find Radio Caroline, the future Archbishop of Canterbury as a teenager in the Sixties was tuning in to Radio Three. He was hoping to hear the first blast of the latest Benjamin Britten, live not from Glastonbury but from the Aldeburgh Festival. Dr Rowan Williams was talking to Michael Berkeley on this week’s Private Passions (Sunday), Radio Three’s antidote to celebrity chitchat. As if to prove that the Sixties were not all about the Beatles and Bob Dylan, Williams told us that he shut himself in his bedroom to hear the première of Britten’s cantata, The Burning Fiery Furnace.

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons Tate Modern, until 14 September This year, Cy Twombly celebrated his 80th birthday. As the leading modern American artist who decamped to Europe and went his own way regardless of developments at home, Twombly was for many years out in the wilderness. But he held his course and now he is the darling of the art glitterati. However, his work is not so easy for the uninitiated and many feel slightly at a loss when confronted by one of his scribbly canvases. Those with closed minds tend to dismiss him, and, as Nicholas Serota in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue (£24.99 in paperback) points out, Twombly’s art is ‘elusive and, for many people, even enthusiasts of contemporary art, unfathomable’.

A Midsummer Night's Dream Opera North, Manchester Powder Her Face Royal Opera, Linbury At certain times all conditions seem to conspire to favour some opera composers, and to make others seem virtually impossible to produce satisfying accounts of. At present everything is going Britten’s way; every time I see a production of almost any opera by him my opinion both of it and of him rises; while I can hardly remember when I was last really satisfied by a performance of a work by Wagner or Verdi. A lot of that is due, no doubt, to the comparatively undemanding nature of Britten’s vocal writing, and to the consequent lack of need for stars.

Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1, until 7 September Alan Green: Joan Miro Annely Juda Fine Art, 23 Dering Street, W1, until 18 July  I can never visit the Wallace Collection without lamenting the filling of the erstwhile courtyard with an airless restaurant which scarcely does justice to the noble proportions of Hertford House. Meanwhile, temporary exhibitions are crammed into two smallish rooms in the basement, which just goes to show that apparently we value our stomachs over our hearts. Luckily, the Wallace regularly mounts high-quality exhibitions in its subterranean galleries (rather as the National Gallery occasionally does), and the current one is no exception.

‘London smells Tory,’ announced Ian Martin, the Beachcomber of architectural journalism post-Boris in his weekly column in the Architects’ Journal. Heritage wars have broken out over the future of a concrete housing scheme, Robin Hood Gardens in East London by Alison and Peter Smithson, that is beloved of architects, but not, it seems, of many others. The Guardian devoted a page to complaints from classical architects that they were excluded en bloc from the Riba awards that lead to the Stirling Prize, and The Spectator is shortly to conduct a debate on whether Prince Charles’s opinion, delivered nearly 25 years ago, concerning glass stumps and monstrous carbuncles, remains as valid today. Does architectural style have a simple relationship to political position?