Culture

To a debate on the future of radio at the BBC where it turns out not to be a discussion on who’s listening now but how they’re listening. The Reithian ambition to inform, educate and entertain needs to change, says Mary Hockaday, controller of BBC World Service English, and become ‘inform, educate and connect’. But how do you find and hold on to your audience in the digital age? The buzz word here is ‘podcast’ after the extraordinary success of Serial, the American-made documentary that went viral and has now reached an astonishing 75 million downloads worldwide, still rising. In many ways, though, Serial was very old-fashioned radio. True crime told as a long-form narrative in 12 episodes.

In a late schedule change, Channel 4’s Coalition was shifted from Thursday to Saturday to make room for Jeremy Paxman interviewing the party leaders. With most dramas, that would mean I’d have to issue the sternest of spoiler alerts for anybody reading before the programme goes out. In this case, though, you know the story already — because Coalition was a dramatisation of what happened in Westminster in the days after the last general election. Fortunately, one of the programme’s many qualities was its Day of the Jackal ability to keep us gripped even though we were always aware of the outcome — largely by reminding us that the characters weren’t.

If ever I found myself at a pretentious literary party obliged to play David Lodge’s ‘Humiliation’ game and to confess to the great books I’ve never read, I’d only escape the ignominy of winning (by being the most ignorant) because of the radio and the almost weekly possibility of hearing yet another classic adapted as a drama or read at bedtime. The nuances of the novel may be lost in translation — the depth of characterisation, the complexities of the plot, its many threads and diversions — but a good adaptation will capture the essence, the true feeling of the original and take us there in our imaginations as effectively as reading from the page, if by a very different route.

My moment of the week was stumbling into the shocking, fantastical Cabinet of Curiosities in the Alexander McQueen show at the V&A. On the walls were tier upon tier of dresses, shoes and headdresses, feathered, leathered, beaded, painted, razored, or tenderly embroidered with a fairy needle. Rotating at the centre of the room was the Spray Paint Dress that a dazed Shalom Harlow wore while robots ejaculated paint over her in 1998. What could be more sinisterly resonant of classical ballet’s erotic world? McQueen made his one and only ballet working with Sylvie Guillem 18 months before his suicide — remember her as the cross-gender Chevalier d’Eon in Eonnagata? But fashion was a vastly more permissive (and richly resourced) playpen for his darkling artistry.

I came out in a rash when I heard that Emma Thompson was to star in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd at the Coliseum. Sondheim has that effect on me. And it’s an allergy I bear with pride. I’ve been the victim of a Sondheim evening only once in my life and I emerged feeling as if I’d been shrieked at for three hours by a gorilla with rabies. The show, Sunday in the Park with George, was conceived as an exercise in ‘musical pointillism’ to honour the painter Georges Seurat. Musical pointillism? Come on. Sondheim has supporters that I admire, like Michael Grandage, and I would put the following questions to these deluded fanatics.