Culture

Now here’s a series that would make a brilliant podcast but is also classic Radio 4 — they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, why can’t podcasts be more like Radio 4? Programmes where the presenter’s role is to draw out the knowledge of experts, and the pace is measured, allowing the fascination of what’s being revealed to make an impact before leaping on, and where there’s no background music except when it adds to the timbre, the meaning, the purpose. Each episode of Classified Britain (produced by John Forsyth) is only 15 minutes long, so not too demanding of one’s time, and yet a lot of information is packed into that slot without it seeming too hectic or over-enthusiastic.

On Tuesday next week, The Spectator is laying on what is perhaps our biggest-ever event: Rod Liddle in the London Palladium. We booked a 2,300-capacity venue and have been holding 60 tickets back for the last few days. They’re on sale now, and they’re the last ones left. This will be one of these events where we’ll get phone calls at the last minute, asking if we can magic tickets out of the ether for very important guests. We can’t: there are just a few dozen left. It should be quite something: I’m not sure any other journalist could sell out the Palladium on their own. We didn’t think we’d sell out a venue as massive as the Palladium, and it looks like we will soon. A sign, surely, of what’s going right in the world.

Which was your favourite outfit then, for the Met Gala on the theme of Heavenly Bodies – Catholicism and Fashion – the images of which are everywhere right now? Madonna was true to form with a heavy black mantilla, channelling a Sicilian widow, and Anna Wintour’s dress was, apparently, Cardinal Chanel – though if I may be pedantic, a Cardinal’s colour is scarlet, not white (that’s for the Pope). But Elon Musk, the Tesla man, was pretty good with a kind of reverse clerical suit…white, with a black dogcollar. Frankly, an awful lot of people missed the point of the thing, the theme being Sunday best, loosely interpreted as going to church crossed with fancy dress, crossed with the highest clerical camp.

As the curtain opens on the second act of Don Pasquale, I hear a rustle of discomfort. Donizetti’s opera has not been seen at La Scala since 1994. Its restoration, on the orders of a new music director, sets off a critical flutter and Davide Livermore’s new production, set in the Cinecittà film studio during the 1950s dolce vita, seems designed to tweak the Roman nose of national vanity. Italy is supposed to be a serious country these days, burying buffoonery and hedonism among the Coliseum ruins. Even Silvio Berlusconi is seen as an archaeological relic, not to be disturbed. So Riccardo Chailly’s embrace of opera buffa in his first full season as music director provokes the kind of disquiet that we might feel if Covent Garden reinstated Gilbert and Sullivan.

The first thing you notice is the frumpy tweed overcoat. Realistic bobbling. Fussy check. Bit pedantic, bit GCSE. Then the smooth, dull face. Enough wrinkles, modelling, to define age, but not really enough to examine character with any realism. She's hard to read. It's not the face of someone happy to be here. It's more the face of someone enduring small talk. Maybe she's being mansplained to? The unveiling of Gillian Wearing's statue to suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square is no doubt a cause for celebration. For if the suffrage movement was about anything it was about the right of iffy female artists to be allowed to make mediocre, stiff bronzes and to receive just as much blind acclaim as iffy male ones.

One of the prettiest pieces in the V&A exhibition Fashioned from Nature is a man’s cream waistcoat, silk and linen, produced in France before the revolution, in the days when men could give women a run for their money in flamboyant dress. It’s embroidered with macaque monkeys of quite extraordinary verisimilitude, with fruit trees sprouting all the way up the buttons. And what we know is that they were derived from the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, of 1749–88.