Culture

It’s a pity Will Self didn’t embark on his bus tour round Britain before the Brexit vote. If he had, we might have all had a better understanding of what’s going on in the shires. In his series of ten short programmes on Radio 4, Great British Bus Journey (produced by Laurence Grissell), Self sets out to emulate Daniel Defoe, William Cobbett and J.B. Priestley by taking the bus not to the big centres of life in the UK but those smaller towns and cities we often rush past on the motorway or have no reason to add to our bucket list. Places like Plymouth, Preston, East Kilbride, Wolverhampton and Swansea. His big question is to find out what it means to be British today (the intention behind those earlier cross-country trips by horse and chauffeur-driven car).

I once knew a great conductor who claimed that he never boarded a plane to a new orchestra without a tube of lube in his pocket. Just in case he got lucky (which he often did). Conductors are migratory birds who fly where their agents point them, hopping from one hotel bed to the next. There is no shortage of bright young things on an orchestra’s staff and besotted fans backstage who are open to a wink and the whisper of a room number. A maestro is never alone for very long. Sex is one of the perks of conducting. Mostly, it’s consensual. My middle-aged maestro would sit up half the night reading poetry to a young woman before he made anything so crass as a lunge. Down the years, there have been few complaints about maestro sex. Seduction techniques vary.

Gary Oldman has joined a long list of actors who have portrayed Winston Churchill — no fewer than 35 of them in movies and 28 on television. He is one of the best three. ‘I knew I didn’t look like him,’ Oldman has said. ‘I thought that with some work I could approximate the voice. The challenge in part was the physicality, because you’re playing someone whose silhouette is so iconic.’ We all have our own mind’s-eye view of what Churchill should look and sound like, and his personality was so strong and sui generis that it is almost impossible for an actor to impose himself on the role. He is therefore almost always left with either mere impersonation or caricature. Oldman avoided this in Darkest Hour through research.

Claude Debussy died on 25 March 1918 to the sound of explosions. Four days earlier, the Kaiser’s army had deployed its long-range Paris Gun, and as Debussy’s cancer entered its final hours, artillery shells were bursting in the streets around his home in Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. This quiet modernist — who’d transformed music into an art of almost limitless expressive subtlety — died amid the thunder of mechanised war. The funeral was poorly attended, and as the cortège halted, curious shopkeepers glanced at the wreaths: ‘It seems he was a musician.’ The classical music world is morbidly addicted to anniversaries of major composers.