Culture

According to a recently divorced friend of mine, the sex opportunities when you’re a single man in your forties are fantastic. Apparently, you don’t even need to bother with chat-up lines. You’ll be hanging about at the bus stop, or wherever, and, bang!, a flash of meaningful eye contact then back to her place for brilliant, uncomplicated sex miles better than you ever had in your teens or twenties because at this age you know what you’re doing. I’d like to be able to try out my friend’s theory but I’m afeared there might be opposition from the Fawn. Plus, this friend is a very rich banker, whereas I’m not.

Henrietta Bredin talks to the Young Vic’s David Lan and ENO’s John Berry about the joys of collaboration Walking into the Young Vic these days is a hugely pleasurable experience, and it’s even more of a pleasure to see the delight with which David Lan, its artistic director, looks around him at a theatre that has become so lively, busy and welcoming. The building recently underwent a much-needed overhaul and reopened in October 2006 — impressively on time and on budget — with three performing spaces, including two new studios, and public areas that are really appealing to spend time in.

Amazing Rare Things The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 28 September Do not be put off by the title of this show: in its barrow-boy eagerness to pull in the punters, such a naff title undermines the essential dignity of the exhibits (Leonardo is here, after all), and discounts the high quality of art on display. The Queen’s Gallery does not need to be so determinedly populist in approach, though I can understand that marketing people would not consider the exhibition’s theme — ‘The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery’ — to be sufficiently sexy. So we are lumbered with this teen-dream title. Ignore it, for your own good. There really are marvels to be seen.

How do you measure a truly awful movie? Joe Queenan explains: To qualify as one of the worst films of all time, several strict requirements must be met. For starters, a truly awful movie must have started out with some expectation of not being awful. That is why making a horrific, cheapo motion picture that stars Hilton or Jessica Simpson is not really much of an accomplishment. Did anyone seriously expect a film called The Hottie and The Nottie not to suck? Two, an authentically bad movie has to be famous; it can't simply be an obscure student film about a boy who eats live rodents to impress dead girls. Three, the film cannot be a deliberate attempt to make the worst movie ever, as this is cheating.

Susan Moore on how the Americans have become net sellers of works of art Junius Spencer Morgan caused a sensation in 1876 when he paid the staggering sum of £10,100 — more than the National Gallery of London’s annual purchase grant — for Gainsborough’s celebrated portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Since then a seemingly interminable line of nouveaux-riches American ‘Despoilers’ has relieved the impecunious (and often only too willing) European aristocracy of the art treasures their ancestors had amassed over the centuries. The phenomenon prompted the foundation of the National Art Collections Fund in Britain in 1903 to help save such treasures for the nation, and was subtly dissected by Henry James eight years later in The Outcry.

The ten worst Irish accents in cinema history? Check 'em out here. Amazingly, Tom Cruise doesn't take the top spot... So, yeah, Happy St Patrick's Day. Time then, to dust off this unnecessarily dyspeptic take from a few years ago: When I was a student in Dublin we scoffed at the American celebration of St. Patrick, finding something preposterous in the green beer, the search for any connection, no matter how tenuous, to Ireland, the misty sentiment of it all that seemed so at odds with the Ireland we knew and actually lived in. Who were these people dressed as Leprechauns and why were they dressed that way? This Hibernian Brigadoon was a sham, a mockery, a Shamrockery of real Ireland and a remarkable exhibition of plastic paddyness.