Culture

I did not mean to snort so loudly. There I was watching the amazing Simon Russell Beale in King Lear at the National Theatre and things were all getting a bit nasty — what with daughters scheming and people having their eyes gouged out. And then, through a small earpiece, which no one else could hear, I heard the immortal words, said in a deep and quiet voice: ‘Lear enters to find Goneril clenched in tight embrace with Edgar. He clasps her tightly.’ At my snort, a very serious man behind me tapped me on the shoulder and ‘shushed’ me. He had no idea that I was tuned into the wonderful world of audio description, or AD as the industry refers to it. For the uninitiated, AD has been around for some time.

The ancients thought that the seat of female hysteria was the womb. My theory (just as credible) is that male charisma resides in the neck. The most magnetic films stars have always had impressive upper spines. Marlon Brando’s neck was so thick it was simply a continuation of his temples with only a jutting chin to betray the difference. While James Dean’s sudden bare nook between hair and leather collar is the definition of sexy vulnerability. Tom Hardy, one of the most exciting actors of the moment, is just as well endowed. His neck, playing the serial killer in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson and a charming forger in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, was in constant danger of overshadowing his head (not to mention the other actors on screen).

Some of the greatest minds of our generation have struggled to get to grips with the thorny conundrum of breakfast television. Should it be fluffy, should it be tough, should it do sofas or puppet rats or news? Back in the 1980s, many believed it shouldn't do any of them, and shouldn't exist at all. As Nick Ross, one of Frank Bough's acolytes on the BBC's pioneering Breakfast Time, put it, 'television in the morning was outrageous - it was just decadence beyond belief.' Judging by the opening salvo from Good Morning Britain, ITV's latest revamp to the redeye slot kicking off this week, today's state-of-the-art thinking is that it should be everything at once, presented with almost intimidating professionalism.

It was early evening and I had not yet eaten, so I took a glass of wine and a packet of Haribos into the private screening of I Am Divine: the story of Divine. I touched neither, because early on in the film I felt a little sick. I'm unsure as to whether that queasiness was a result of the mention of dog excrement (more anon) or the scale of misogyny contained within its 90 minutes. Divine, aka Glenn Milstead, was an American actor, singer and drag queen who died in 1988 of a massive heart attack. Divine developed a name for himself as a female impersonator known for outrageous behaviour in John Waters counter-culture pre-punk films. Following his death, People magazine described Divine as the 'Drag Queen of the Century'.

As children, we learn very quickly that a blame shared is a blame halved - but in the long-term, the ruse works only with the co-operation of the co-opted. This is a lesson that must have escaped David Moyes, whose public pronouncements regularly identified unwilling conspirators, illustrating precisely why he failed at Manchester United. Which is not to say that liability resides solely with him. Most obviously, Moyes was let down by his players; their performances were his ultimate responsibility - not excusing the indolence, indignation and entitlement that defined them. Also at fault is Alex Ferguson, who bequeathed Moyes a midfieldless squad - a partial consequence of a takeover he welcomed.

Earlier this month, when a 54-year-old man with the birth name James Brian Hellwig died of a suspected heart attack outside a hotel in Arizona, a million boyhood fantasies also clutched their chests and fell to the ground. To fans – and former fans – of professional wrestling, Hellwig was The Ultimate Warrior, the man who defeated Hulk Hogan at Wrestlemania VI and taught a generation of scrawny kids to nurture their own inner Warrior. Some of us never forgot that poignant lesson, and there’s evidence Hellwig never forgot either. Despite his obvious lack of in-ring talent (enough time has passed since his death that we can admit he wasn’t the greatest athlete) he believed in his own character until it bled into his civilian life.

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) is one of the great painters of the Venetian School, often joined in an unholy trinity with Titian and Tintoretto. But he was not Venetian, and only arrived in the city when he was well into his twenties. His formative years were spent in Verona, hence his popular name (he was also known as Paolo Caliari, and before that as Paolo Spezapreda, in reference to his early training as a stonecutter, following his father and grandfather), which suggests a very different background from his two most famous confrères. He has also been categorised as a Mannerist, but this is more art-historical pigeonholing than useful elucidation.