Culture

It sounds like a really bad idea — Lenny Henry, the black comedian, devising a set of radio sketches to celebrate (oops, I should have said ‘commemorate’) Abolition. You can imagine the scene. Early one morning in late November 2006. An emergency Radio Four planning meeting high up in Broadcasting House on Portland Place. Big table. Lots of coffee. A group of worried-looking producers, scriptwriters, the sound-effects team, all wielding spring-clip noteboards covered with last-minute scrambled ‘ideas’. ‘Tony Blair’s just reminded us that we’ve got this 200-year anniversary coming up next March. It’s going to be really big. A march from Hull. Questions in Parliament. A service in Westminster Abbey.

Rory Bremner is in a hurry. The controversial impersonator surges into his production office a few minutes late for our meeting. ‘So sorry. Did they tell you? We overran,’ he says in his light, energetic voice. ‘Won’t be a sec. Got to go to the loo. Ooh! Too much information.’ A few minutes later he reappears and sits patiently while I fiddle with the wrong buttons on the tape machine. ‘Quick soundcheck?’ ‘Testing, testing,’ he says helpfully. And we begin.

A courier staggered up the stairs to my flat bearing Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures with an essay by Rudi Fuchs (Tate Publishing, 1,200 pages, 1,500 full-colour illustrations, £39.99). It’s a two-volume hardback which comes in its own carrying case, but I was glad not to have to bring it home myself as it weighs over a stone on the bathroom scales. It is the season of G&G overload, for that much-exhibited, much-publicised and over-played pair have been given the signal honour of a grand exhibition of 18 galleries at Tate Modern. A whole floor is devoted to their asininities, which is nothing short of a disgrace. Never have I been to so empty and arid a major exhibition, the most overweening display of narcissism ever to have been mounted.

Joanna Lumley bears a distinct resemblance to the delectable Mrs Algernon Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, who, while still in bed of a morning, supervises the painting of a mural, fills in the crossword, offers useful advice on matters of state, attends to pressing correspondence, corrects a child’s construing of Horace and deals with a friend’s emotional and financial problems, before bowling merrily into the London traffic in ‘the latest model of mass-produced baby car, painted an invariable brilliant black’. Her modern-day equivalent tends not to run her life from bed but is capable of juggling quite as many and as varied tasks simultaneously, from filming and producing to writing and working unshowily for key charitable causes.

To be called ‘the squinter’, which is what ‘il Guercino’ means, might not seem an auspicious nickname for an artist, but it doesn’t appear to have stood in the way of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666), who became one of the most famous Italian artists of the 17th century. Not only was he a distinguished Baroque painter, he was also a very fine draughtsman, and it is this aspect of his achievement which is celebrated in a glorious new exhibition at the Courtauld. Guercino’s quarter-centenary was in 1991, and was appropriately commemorated, but there’s no need of an excuse for a show of this quality. It’s quite simply ravishing.

Got the right place? Yup, this looks like it. I’m about to meet TV’s grumpiest man, and his fixers have booked us a room in a fashionable media institute in Covent Garden. I peer through the frosted glass at what appears to be a hotel, a bistro, a therapy centre and a health farm all wrapped into one. It’s the kind of place where brunching executives can enjoy an organic chocolate bun and a milky stroppuccino while upstairs, in the anxiety suites, commissioning editors are being massaged, hypnotised and rebirthed from the comfort of their rowing machines. I glance down the street. A dark figure is ambling towards me. His collar is turned up, his head is low over his chest and his face is obscured by a cap and thick glasses. Is that him? I think it is.