Culture

King Lear Globe That Face Duke of York's Beau Jest Hackney Empire Every time I see Lear I discover something old. It must be at least two centuries since somebody first noticed that one of the many factors that make this titanic play unplayable is that the great speeches are delivered by a bearded geriatric in acute distress crawling about on his knees like a stricken bison. This rather affects the actor’s vocal projection. How he must wish, as he sobs his anguish into the boards, that he were playing Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello or Antony and were free to stride about the stage flinging the poetry to the back wall with measured passion and full-throated athleticism. Dominic Dromgoole’s decent, handsomely dressed production opens on a jarring note of humour.

Royal Ballet Triple Bill Royal Opera House There was a time when dancers were very often given the means to gain a deep understanding of what they were supposed to be interpreting on stage — the well-known story of Ninette de Valois taking her artists to see William Hogarth’s paintings while creating The Rake’s Progress is but one of many examples. There was also a time — long before ballet-training turned into a money-churning business of marketable diplomas — when the rudiments of artistic interpretation were embedded in the blossoming dancers’ daily routine. Today, little or no significance seems to be bestowed upon the artistic side.

As budgets fall and standards slip, it’s inevitable that TV is going to get worse and worse and that the job of the TV critic in trying to shame the bosses into arresting this decline will become more important than ever. But this doesn’t make me feel happy. It just — like so many things in the modern world, from biofuels to ‘best practice’ — makes me want to kill myself. I mean, I’d much rather have wall-to-wall brilliant TV and a near-meaningless job function than rubbish TV and a vital corrective role. After that portentous start, you’re probably expecting me to have found something truly abysmal to review. But I haven’t.

While the TV chiefs squirm with embarrassment, exposed for misleading the public in the phone-voting scandals, radio has had a brilliant week. Not just an announcement that 34.22 million listeners have been listening each week to BBC radio (let alone all the commercial radio stations, digital and online) but also endorsements from two people not normally mentioned in the same breath. Pete Doherty, the badly behaved rock star, told reporters on leaving Wormwood Scrubs that he’d spent the last few weeks with ‘a lot of gangsters and Radio Four’. Radio Four? Not Radio One? Or BBC6? What a coup for Mark Damazer, Four’s Controller (and his station’s just won Gold at the Sony Awards, radio’s Oscars).

William Feaver explains how his book ‘Pitmen Painters’ inspired a new play at the National ‘It means knaaing what to de.’ This is Jimmy Floyd speaking, his Ashington accent spelt out, his words — more dialect than dialectic — written by Lee ‘Billy Elliot’ Hall. In Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, newly transferred from Live Theatre, Newcastle, to the National Theatre, the ‘Jimmy Floyd’ character is more canny, more droll, than the man I remember from 37 years ago when I first came across the Ashington Group. The actual Jimmy, retired after 60 years down the pit, had a perky air and a slight speech impediment. ‘One time I used to paint drab sort of pictures,’ he told me. ‘But now I like a bit colour in them.

Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book V&A, until 29 June The partnership between the written word and the visual image has a long and distinguished history. Leaving aside the pictographic tradition and the fertile area of calligraphy, the first artists’ books must date from the modern period when artists began to grow ever more independent and self-confident. Although it could never be said that Leonardo or Piero della Francesca lacked self-confidence, it should be remembered that they functioned within a culture which recognised the position of artists primarily as craftsmen who were employed to fulfil a need — mostly in the domain of religious imagery, and increasingly in that of secular portraiture.