Culture

The Adventures of Pinocchio Grand Theatre, Leeds It’s odd how, even if you try to ignore Christmas, it still manages to determine the shape of your end-of-year experiences. Three weeks ago, four days before Christmas Day, Opera North enterprisingly mounted the world première of Jonathan Dove’s 21st opera, Pinocchio. I haven’t seen any opera since, except on TV and DVD, yet my memories of it are alarmingly faint. I have a pretty clear impression of what much of it looked like, but very little of what it sounded like. I’m not being snide at Dove’s expense, just wondering how far what seems like the interminable sequence of fragmented days is responsible for my failure of recall.

Foyle’s War is back on Sundays, sporadically, with Kingdom filling in the gaps on ITV. The BBC has followed Cranford with Lark Rise to Candleford, a series which makes the intervening Sense and Sensibility look harrowing by comparison. The danger to television is not dumbing-down but, on Sunday nights at least, a sort of down-filled duveting-down. Apparently, the night before we go back to work, we need our brains to hibernate. I’m sure that as the real problems of earning a living loom we don’t want dramas about feral children abandoned by junkie single mothers, or vicious crimes committed in the hell that is urban Britain today. We want pleasant, sanitised murders solved by Honeysuckle Weeks and her boss, Michael Kitchen, who plays Foyle.

Among the serially misused words of our time — celebrity, passion, caring, genius — we must surely count ‘plantsman’. Thirty years ago, it was a term given only to exceptionally knowledgeable, enthusiastic and botanically inclined amateur or professional gardeners, as well as to particularly experienced and thoughtful nurserymen. However, in recent years, ‘plantsman’ or ‘plantswoman’ has come to mean anyone who knows the difference between Amaryllis and Hippeastrum, or who puts a plant in the garden where they think it will be happy, rather than consciously associating it in colour and season with others. Plantsmen knew the names, provenances and, where necessary, complex cultural requirements of all their plants.

Much Ado About Nothing Olivier The Masque of the Red Death Battersea Arts Centre The Winter’s Tale Courtyard Theatre Simon Russell Beale is working through the complete works of Shakespeare like a Regency beau touring Italy. It’s mid-winter and he’s alighted in Messina to peruse the role of Benedick. With Russell Beale the question is not how well he’ll interpret a new role but how well the character suits his strengths — his warmth and intelligence, his sly donnish humour. Benedick is a good fit. Not perfect, perhaps. The dash and romantic energy aren’t quite there because Russell Beale is, shall we say, a little more settled in his ways than the part requires.

My resolution this year is to make huge sums of money, buy a vast country estate, surround it with a moat and spend the rest of my life hunting, driving fast cars round my private race track and generally trying to maximise my carbon footprint. At Christmas, I shall invite the poor people on to my land to admire my spectacular Christmas light display which will be much brighter and less carbon neutral than the one at Sandringham or even the famous ‘loights’ in Wollaston, nr Stourbridge. And if my vicar objects on environmental grounds, I shall have him sacked because of course his living will be in my gift, and my family will have a special pew in the medieval church and everything.

How do you stop people taking cocaine? Illegality keeps it at bay a bit. It stops it being quite so freely available, but it makes it sexy, too. I wonder how much its illegal status really affects people’s decision whether to take it or not. If the perils inherent aren’t a deterrent, the risk of punishment is hardly likely to sway the balance. People might be encouraged to start smoking, drinking, snorting and ultimately injecting their eyeballs by others, but other people’s efforts and assertions don’t enter the picture when it comes to stopping. In our vices, we hear no other voices. Obviously cocaine is a con, a bad long-term investment.