Culture

You might think the main storyline in The Archers is all about Helen’s affair with dastardly Rob. (What does she see in him? It’s so obvious he’s a mean-spirited control freak.) Or the new ‘voice’ for Tony, as David Troughton takes over from Colin Skipp, who has played the part for more than 40 years. But actually the real drama in the past fortnight has been swept along by the 94-year-old actress who plays Peggy Woolley and by her younger sidekick Jill Archer played by the 83-year-old Patricia Greene. Together they’ve provided a masterclass on how to act on air, with their distinctive voices, precisely calibrated characters and ability to make us believe in them.

Here’s a heartwarming tale from the London fringe. A company named Above the Stag was merrily plying its trade at a small pub attic in Victoria. Then in March 2012 a bulldozer squashed the pub flat. In its place rose a glittering steel tower full of geeks, screens, beeps and loot. Undeterred by demolition trucks and by dollar-gobbling speculators, Above the Stag began searching for a new arena. After a difficult year cadging empty spaces from nearby theatres, the company has now found a permanent home beneath a Vauxhall archway. Good news: London’s theatreland is expanding even when freeholders are literally whipping the land from under its feet.

People will go to extraordinary lengths to get into a nightclub. Nowadays you must wear something tight, and look slinky. But, as Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s at the V&A shows (until 16 February), a handful of Eighties doormen were into something a bit more deviant. The combination of a new London Fashion Week, a vibrant club scene and a coterie of ambitious designers emerging from the London art schools was potent. On Thursdays and Fridays, St Martin’s was deserted. Everybody was at home working on their costumes for the weekend. Over two floors, a mixture of clubbing outfits and catwalk designs are showcased. There is a mirror with the slogan ‘Would you let you in?’ stamped across it.

‘It put a lot upon us,’ said Christopher Jefferies’s aunt. ‘The ripples went on and did not stop for a long time.’ She was talking about the after-effects of the media witchhunt that skewered her nephew after his arrest in connection with the death of the Bristol landscape architect Joanna Yeates in December 2011. Jefferies was depicted as being almost certainly guilty because of his long, hippie-like hair, his bachelordom, his love of poetry and ‘culture’, his brusque refusal to speak to the press. Yet his only link with the crime was that he owned the flat in Clifton where Yeates lived. Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio 4) reminded us of what happened to Jefferies and his family, and of some uncomfortable truths.

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street will set the cat among the pigeons as a number of films do. 12 Years A Slave set the cat among the pigeons with some critics claiming it was ‘torture porn’ and other people taking to the blah-blah-blah and jabber-jabber-jabber of the Twittersphere to say they had no intention of seeing anything ‘so harrowing’. (Luckily for them, I plan to open shortly a specialised cinema, The Comfort-Zone Cinema, possibly on the Finchley Road, which will never show anything upsetting, and Hello, Dolly! every other Tuesday.) This time out, the blah-blah jabber-jabber will, I imagine, take the following form: does Wolf exult in the excesses it intended to satirise? Does it get off on its own virulent misogyny rather than indict it?