Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Before we talk fellatio, let me get the boring, snide observations out of the way. It’s great to see the ENO experimenting with space etc - exploring 'new' venues, going outside their comfort zone blah, blah, blah - but they really need to do better than this. Ambika P3 is a fantastic industrial box in the middle of Marylebone (where they made the concrete to build the Westway). It’s not as undiscovered as the ENO like to think it is (it’s been around for nearly a decade) but still, good on them for finally realising it’s here.

A revival of Anna Nicole will open the Royal Opera House new season, it was announced today. And students will be able to get in for £1, tweeted Kasper Holten proudly. A quid! So that’s an orchestra, an excellent cast of 17, a chorus, a production team of two or three dozen, two hours of words and music and a very good conductor all for less than one pot noodle. The news might baffle. The received wisdom is that opera tickets are too high. Far too high. So high that they are the principal (if not sole) reason why the art form has fallen behind the others in the popularity stakes. But the reality has always been quite different. Even for adults, a portion of Royal Opera House tickets has always been dirt cheap.

Always try to get the worst seats for the opera. Upper circle. Foyer. Toilet. The nearest bus stop. The further back the better. You’ll regret it if you don’t. There really is nothing more off-putting than being able to see the singers. Opera up close, as Princess Margaret once said, is just two fat people shouting at each other in a large room. And then there’s the clown make-up and trannie costumes to deal with. It all makes much more sense from afar, where it assumes a lovely dreamy abstract fuzz. Was that a smile? Or a stroke? Who knows. The words and music will carry you along. But even 'good’ theatrical acting looks absurd close up. Gemma Arteton knows this. She let the truth slip out during the new arts visiony thing at the Beeb the other day.

FILM: Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer)  Critics who saw it at the Venice Film Festival thought it either ‘laughably bad’ or a ‘masterpiece’. This week you get the chance to decide whether Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson plays a kind of alien butcher on the hunt for human meat to ferry back to a group of extraterrestrial gourmands, is in the mould of Glazer's Oscar-nominated Sexy Beast or, like his Birth, will sink without trace. OPERA: Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal Opera House Richard Strauss’ barmy opera about a part-human, part-gazelle Empress whose husband will turn to stone unless she can find a shadow for herself (and you thought you had problems) opens this Friday at the Royal Opera House.

One of the greats of French cinema, Alain Resnais (1922 - 2014), has died. His early films, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year in Marienbad (1961), which experimented boldly with visuals and narrative, were the key inspiration for the French New Wave, dictating the direction Godard and Truffaut headed in. But where some saw innovation, others only saw pretentiousness. Of Last Year in Marienbad, the New Yorker's Pauline Kael wrote: 'The term 'sleeping beauty' provides, I think, a fairly good transition to Last Year at Marienbad — or Sleeping Beauty of the International Set, the high-fashion experimental film, the snow job in the ice palace.

Boy, the crap that opera’s allowed to get away with. The mime, the mugging, the movement, the ideas. Richard Jones's new production of Rodelinda at the English National Opera seemed to be channelling that heady mix of bullshit and banality that that signer had nailed so well at the Mandela funeral. Theatre wouldn't have got away with it. Daytime telly wouldn't have got away with it. Even the Chuckle Brothers, I reckon, might have thought twice about some of these routines. But apparently it’s absolutely fine to stuff Handel’s Rodelinda with tripe. Especially as the music's just about to hit the heights. Thus were several sung glories ruined by mindless, barely acted fannying about. 'Here I am slamming a door!' 'Here I am opening a cupboard!

That’s right. The evil scumbags who work in the City appear to be doing a better job at being modern and liberal than the state-subsidised art world. According to last year's Creative Skillset Employment Census, 5.4 per cent of those working in the arts were from the black or ethnic minorities. In the City, by contrast, figures from 2012 show that 30.5 per cent of employees were from the black or ethnic minorities. So the decades of smug hand-wringing, the diversity drives and ethnicity awareness classes, the form-filling and box-ticking, has produced an arts workforce that Enoch Powell would have been proud of: 94.6 per cent white.

For a committed, if unsuccessful, capitalist, I enjoy French culture an embarrassing amount - every last state-funded drop of it. Give me five-act operas with cast lists the size of a small Chinese city, give me obscenely expensive works of public art, give me inhumane concrete estates, give me unintelligible modernist music and I’ll be drooling with pleasure all night. In fact, I'm seeing a five-act French opera with a cast list the size of a small Chinese city tonight in Bordeaux. That’s the kind of disgusting thing I like to do. In my defence, I am aware that what I am doing is immoral and what is being created should be consigned to hell.