Culture

Rambert Dance Company, Sadler’s Wells I am more and more convinced that getting easily bored is symptomatic of growing old. Twenty years ago, when I was 24, I stopped being a ballet boy and devoted myself to writing about dance; I seldom suffered from boredom, even when watching delectable rubbish. Nowadays, as soon as I realise that things are not exactly exciting, I plunge into a disheartened state. Indeed, what I consider to be a symptom of age, others might regard as ‘experience’. And, in the end, ‘experience’ is something one acquires only by growing old.

A pair of dames made last night’s new television adaptation of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford. Dame Judi and Dame Eileen played the two sisters Matty and Deborah Jenkyns in this terrific 19th-century drama. Eileen Atkins had some wonderful one-liners: ‘Speculation is the enemy of calm’; and ‘Clearly they are not carriage people’, as she saw a family new to the town step down from a hired coach. The rest of the starry cast includes Michael Gambon (yet to be seen), Francesca Annis, Julia McKenzie and Jim Carter and will run on BBC1 for the next four weeks. The period detail, the witty dialogue, the costumes and the sets, plus the top-class acting make this compulsive Sunday-night viewing — a real treat.

The date of George Frederick Bodley’s death (1907) offers a partial explanation for a commemorative exhibition, but ‘comes the hour, comes the man’ also applies, and in this case the man is Michael Hall, the editor of Apollo magazine, who for some years has studied Bodley’s work and succeeded in presenting it as a key to understanding many aspects of the late-Victorian mind, rather than simply as the oeuvre of a skilled but possibly rather conventional designer whose successors followed him into a dead end of style. He is the instigator and curator of this small exhibition in the V&A + RIBA Architecture gallery at the V&A. There is a book coming, but for that we shall have to wait a little longer.

Act one, scene one The curtain opens on the offices of The Spectator magazine, London SW1, where a woman stands, stage left, staring at a telephone. A clock on the wall says 7.15. Something about the woman’s demeanour suggests it to be p.m. How long can she look at a phone? Just as the audience is beginning to wonder, the woman sighs, picks up a sheaf of papers from the desk and starts to read out loud: Me: Tom Hollander, actor, born 1967. Read English at Cambridge. TV and film credits include: Absolutely Fabulous, Martha, Meet Daniel and Laurence, Gosford Park, The Lost Prince and Pride and Prejudice...Pirates of the Caribbean parts I and II. The Libertine with Johnny Depp, Elizabeth: The Golden Age with Cate Blanchett...In 2006, took part in the 24-hour plays at the Old Vic.