Culture

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_July_2014_v4.mp3" title="Lloyd Evans and Kate Maltby discuss the National Theatre's funding" startat=1261] Listen [/audioplayer]Two glorious playhouses grace the south bank of the Thames. Shakespeare’s Globe and the National Theatre stage the finest shows available anywhere in the world. Both are kept in business by the play-going public who last year helped the Globe to turn over £21 million, with a surplus of £3.7 million. Audiences also flocked in record numbers to the NT and it notched up nearly 1.5 million paid attendances, with its three houses playing to over 90 per cent capacity. But there’s a massive difference between the two.

My Bed, one of the works that failed to win Tracey Emin the Turner Prize (she lost to Steve McQueen in 1999), made £2.2m at Christie’s this week, going to an anonymous buyer. Charles Saatchi, who put it up for auction, had bought it for £150,000 in 2000. It has apparently lost none of its controversy since it first went on display at Tate Britain 15 years ago. And by ‘controversy’ I simply mean that many people - and that includes art critics - don’t think much of it at all. And note, I only use the term 'controversy' – and in scare quotes – because many sections of the media are rather wedded to it when it comes to anything do with Tracey Emin.

We may have had the verdicts and the sentences in the hacking trial, but the biggest question remains unanswered: who’s going to play everyone in the movie? There’s one clear and obvious frontrunner for the part of Rebekah Brooks: Bonnie Langford. Sadly, however, Ms Langford has heavy panto commitments and cannot be released for filming. So we’ll have to make do with a B-list purveyor of ginge instead – Nicole Kidman, perhaps, or Julianne Moore. (Cate Blanchett might have got a look-in if we’d avoided the temptation to base everything on the hair, but Brooks herself never did so why should we?) Andy Coulson should be played by Ewan McGregor, though only if he promises not to repeat his God-awful ‘estuary’ accent from The Ghost.

For decades I’ve been aware of the work of Keith Grant (born 1930), but it is only in recent years that I have come to know it at all well. During that time both the style and the subject of his paintings have undergone a series of remarkable revolutions, as he determined not to rest on his laurels, but to explore the fundamentals of his approach and interests. You don’t often see an artist doing this, particularly one over the age of 80, when an ‘everything goes’ Old Age Style is a more common development.

Fwoooosh! That, were someone to write a strip about it, would be the sound of a thousand comic books going up in flames. They used to do that, you know; burn comics. It was mostly in America, in the late 1940s, after these DayGlo fictions, with their monsters and superheroes and suggestive curves, were declared bad for children’s health. But it spread to Britain too. Parents and teachers would search drawers and desks. Any comics they found would be gathered in small piles outside. A responsible adult would pull out some matches. And then, like I said: fwoooosh! Of course, comics are now treated with greater respect.