Culture

As usual after the end of Chelsea Flower Show, I felt as flat as champagne left out in the sun. I was glad that I had a holiday in Boston (Mass. rather than Lincs.) in prospect. And, as luck would have it, the trip provided me with an unexpected botanical box of delights, exactly where I was not looking for it. That place was the Museum of Natural History at Harvard, where the Ware Collection of Glass Flowers is housed. I don’t know why I had never heard of this — plainly very famous — collection before. But I have now.

Was television in Seventies Britain that good? Is today’s better? James Walton investigates On the weekend of 2–3 December 1978, two ambitious drama projects began on television. One was the BBC Shakespeare — which seven years later had finally carried out its promise to make TV versions of the entire canon. The other took rather less time, but these days is perhaps even harder to imagine. ITV (yes, ITV) gave over the first of six Saturday nights to a series of new and sometimes experimental plays by Alan Bennett. In late 1978, the solid cultural fare didn’t end there. The weekend before, BBC1’s long-running Play of the Month (in the slot recently occupied by such shameless heart-warmers as Lark Rise to Candleford or The No.

Henrietta Bredin talks to Janis Kelly about her role in Rufus Wainwright’s first opera, Prima Donna Anyone less like the clichéd idea of a prima donna than Janis Kelly would be hard to find. She is known and loved as a singer and consummate actress with a conspicuous lack of airs and graces who will throw herself into anything, the more challenging and off the wall the better, imbuing performances with her own particular brand of intense musicality and grace. Lucky Rufus Wainwright, then, who has cast her to perform the title role in his first foray into writing opera, Prima Donna, which will be given its world première at the Manchester International Festival on 10 July.

It’s a rewarding moment for a stroll round the London galleries. Good art is still being made and exhibited (some of it even selling), while more historical figures such as Winifred Nicholson (1893–1981) and Robert Motherwell (1915–91) are being accorded the benefit of monographs and mini-retrospectives. Winifred Nicholson is often overshadowed by the ambitious and radical modernism of her husband Ben, and, although they split up in 1931 (he went off with Barbara Hepworth), they remained lifelong friends and artistic allies. Ben acknowledged Winifred’s inspiration and influence, particularly in the realm of colour, but her work still gets sidelined in the histories.

This evening I have the pleasure of speaking about the ongoing battle between the Commentariat and the Bloggertariat at an Editorial Intelligence event. My fellow panellists are David Aaronovitch of The Times, blogger Iain Dale, Mick Fealty (Slugger O'Toole and Brassneck) and Anne Spackman of The Times). Where do I fit in? I guess somewhere inbetween the two. What are my concerns? That the emrgence of the bloggertariat is merely an outgrowth of the commentariat, but even more self-regarding than its precursor. The event takes place on the same day as the launch of Stephen Grey's Investigations Fund, a brilliant project to renew the investigative tradition and encourage the next generation of dirt-digging hacks.

Futurism Tate Modern, until 20 September The centenary of Marinetti’s ‘First Manifesto of Futurism’ is a wonderful excuse, if excuse be needed, for a celebration and perhaps re-assessment of a movement that attacked the past in the name of all that was modern. Today, Futurists would be execrating any movement as old and as passé as themselves, but we may look more calmly at their frenetic attempts to capture in paint and sculpture the dynamism of modern life. The large show at the Tate aims to do two things: to gather together as many as possible of the works that were shown in the first Futurist exhibition in London, at the Sackville Gallery in 1912, and to demonstrate how Futurism related to (and influenced) the other radical art movements of the time.

Even at 78 and from a distance, Sir Peter Hall has the look of an alpha male. There he is about 100 or so feet away, advancing towards me across the polished boards of his rehearsal room; head forward, bear-like, with the lonely charisma of a boxing champ. As he passes, the younger members of the Peter Hall Company fall back smiling, deferring. He’s king here, a Lear (act one). He pauses to pat a gamine young beauty on the arm, stroke his beard, pull his plump lips into a roguish grin — then moves on to the table where his lunch and I are waiting. One small sandwich, one large pile of lettuce. The great director sits, examines first me, then his lunch, then gives both of us a look of terrible, bored disappointment. Sir Peter Hall is a great connoisseur of life, a sensualist.