Arts

times – and more effectively – not least last year in Downton Abbey: A New Era

There’s another familiar story in Conrad’s being eclipsed by the new kid on the block: Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the wisecracking, gorgeous actress, who can cry a single tear at will and do all the dirty dancing 1920s Hollywood can handle.

That’s the plot of A Star Is Born (2018) with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, itself a remake of A Star Is Born (1976) with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, a version of the 1954 film with Judy Garland and James Mason.

Don’t remake films unless you can improve them – which hasn’t happened here: the Judy Garland-James Mason version remains the best.

Babylon brings no improvements –only Grand Guignol debauchery, with shouted dialogue, endless sex and drugs, and dreary amounts of swearing.

‘Frankly, Scarlett, you’re a c**t,’ says Brad Pitt at one stage. Not funny. Not clever. And a childish attack on Clark Gable’s line in Gone with the Wind.

How strange it is that as human attention spans decrease, the length of Hollywood films increases. As does the length of scenes and individual shots.

The opening scene in Babylon, of a grotesque Hollywood orgy, lasts

32 minutes before we get to the relief of the opening credits.

The picaresque declines of Jack Conrad, Nellie LaRoy and film executive Manny Torres (a cipher played by Diego Calva) have no plot arc to them. The seedy episodes in their lives are unconnected. The end of the film bears no relation to the beginning. All the rules of tight scripts and structured plots Hollywood has learnt over the last century are ignored.

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are marvellous, though. Pitt in particular transcends the ages, despite his 21stcentury swearing, with the looks and demeanour of a thin Orson Welles and a doomed Rudolph Valentino. Tobey Maguire, too, provides a flash of macabre brilliance as James McKay, a debauched mobster.

But their talents are wasted, thanks to a dreadful script. This is an epic film with trivial lines.

The attempts at humour are woeful – Jack Conrad claiming to speak Italian when he can only recite menus (‘Tortellini con pesto’) is a stale gag.

There’s plenty of unfunny slapstick. The whole thing manages to be both frenetic and dull. At one moment, when Nellie LaRoy is losing her touch, she shoots the same scene eight times. We’re forced to watch all eight scenes.

The same self-indulgence cropped up in the 2019 Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, also starring Robbie and Pitt; also full of long, boring scenes, lasting a bottom-numbing two hours and 41 minutes.

In Babylon, real-life characters such as Irving Thalberg, producer of A Night at the Opera (1935), and the doomed Fatty Arbuckle are dropped in – for no real purpose other than for Damien Chazelle to show he knows his Hollywood history.

At one point, there’s a clip of Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, singing the title song. It’s all innocence and beauty. Oh, for old Hollywood!

Theatre William Cook Noises Off

Phoenix Theatre, until 11th March

In 1970, Michael Frayn wrote a play called The Two of Us, first performed by Lynn Redgrave and Richard Briers.

Watching it backstage one night, he found it a lot funnier than when he’d seen it from out front. This revelation prompted him to write a one-act play called Exits. The producer Michael Codron encouraged him to expand it, and the result was this perfect three-act farce.

Noises Off opened at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1982, starring Patricia Routledge and Paul Eddington. It was an instant hit, running for five years in the West End, and transferring to Broadway. It’s been revived countless times since then. New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich, aka ‘the butcher of Broadway’, called it ‘the funniest play written in my lifetime’. I wouldn’t disagree.

The plot follows the trials and tribulations of a rackety theatre company, on tour in the provinces, performing a corny sex comedy called Nothing On. It’s the sort of hackneyed romp in which, owing to a series of implausible mishaps, young women end up stripping down to their lingerie and middle-aged men inconveniently mislay their trousers.

Most backstage dramas tend to focus on the interludes between the onstage action – before the show, during the interval or after the curtain comes down. What makes Noises Off so engrossing is that Frayn manages to reveal the offstage lives of his actors while this play-within-a play is actually going on.

It’s a technical triumph requiring incredibly precise stagecraft. If only those master craftsmen, Terence Rattigan and Joe Orton, had lived to see it. They would have loved watching such a well-made play.

The first act covers a fractious dress rehearsal, in which the cast forget their lines, fluff their cues and lose their props and their tempers. Suave, lascivious director Lloyd Dallas (a suitably oily portrayal by Alexander Hanson) directs from the stalls, which draws the audience into the action. But what’s most remarkable is how well Frayn fleshes out his characters, even while they’re playing other characters in this cheesy play-within-a-play.

The second act is Frayn’s masterpiece. The country-house set from the first half is revolved, so we’re now backstage, watching these actors squabble in the wings as they make their entrances and exits.

Meanwhile, the play-within-a-play that we saw in Act One is proceeding, out of sight.

Because these actors are compelled to keep their voices down, much of this second act is almost mimed. It asks a lot of this seasoned cast, and they all rise to the challenge. Real-life director Lindsay Posner moves them around the stage at a terrific rate, like comic performers in a silent movie. It’s a masterclass in ensemble slapstick, like watching the Marx Brothers.

In the third act, the stage revolves again and we’re watching the performance, laughing and grimacing as absolutely everything goes wrong and the show descends into chaos. It’s marvellous entertainment, which reminds you that theatre should be fun, rather than a worthy, dutiful ordeal.

The performances are all first-rate. Matthew Kelly is delightful as drunken luvvie Selsdon Mowbray. Joseph Millson is hilarious as gormless leading man Garry Lejeune. And Felicity Kendal is almost unrecognisable as ageing actress Dotty Otley, playing doddery old cleaning lady Mrs Clackett.

Has Frayn’s script dated? Not really. The sort of saucy comedies he sends up are a lot less common nowadays, but anyone over 40 will surely be familiar with the territory. It made me rather nostalgic for plays like No Sex Please, We’re British. If anything, it has even more charm as a period piece.

And if you go along, be sure to buy a programme. You won’t find anything in it about Noises Off, but you will find plenty about Nothing On, including some priceless cast biographies (‘While still at drama school, Gary Lejeune won the coveted Laetitia Daintyman Medal for Violence’).

There’s also an utterly impenetrable essay about the semantics of bedroom farce: ‘Attention has tended to centre on the metaphysical significance of mistaken identity and upon the social criticism implicit in the form’s groundbreaking exploration of crossdressing and transgender roleplaying.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Radio Valerie Grove

A reader named Michael W Caldon is, like me, driven to distraction by babyvoiced women talking in croaky voices about ‘bucks’ or ‘berks’, rather than ‘books’. Our torment reached its apogee with Broadcasting House, when Paddy O’Connell celebrated the boom independent bookshops currently enjoy. Tim O’Kelly, of One Tree Books in Petersfield, a community hub, recommended two books: 33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine by Dr David Jarrett and the novel Still Life by Sarah Winman.

Paddy’s other guest was a Book-Tokker – ‘Hi!’ – who shares her reading finds on TikTok: ‘So, yeh, absolutely, I mean, definitely,’ she had been in a bookshop recently, and bought a book. Which one? ‘It was What Lies Beyond the Veil.’ ‘And what does lie beyond the veil?’ asked Paddy.

‘Fairies,’ replied Faith. Her baby voice babbled on.

Paddy asked her age. (I expected the answer ‘I’m eight.’)

But ‘T’enty-three,’ she croaked –whereupon Paddy, OMG, invited her to read Tim O’Kelly’s recommended books ‘and come back and review them for us’. What a sadistic idea! Paddy knows the gaping gulf between his mature audience and the airy-fairy ‘fantasy romances’ favoured by infantile Gen Z, like the one above set in ‘the land of the Fae of Alfheimr’. I await the comical/tragical result.

The trailer for a Radio 4 programme called Playing the Prince promised that various Hamlets would talk about the great challenge of the role; the presenter would be a current aspiring Hamlet. No surprises when the presenter, Jade Anouka, said, ‘I don’t know if there’ve ever been any queer, black, female Hamlets like me, from south London.’

By chance I had seen Jade in Twelfth Night at the Globe – the production with a female, black Sir Toby Belch. She can act. And we’ve known for decades that to question gender-bent, colour-blind casting is forbidden. As the admired black Hamlet, Adrian Lester, says, ‘The emotions expressed in great writing belong to everybody.’

But I shan’t apologise for wishing that anyone playing the lead in any Shakespeare play should be able to sound the letter ‘t’. Glottal-stopped Hamlet is Hamle’. ‘The first time I saw Hamle’ I though’, “Wha’ a par’,” ’ said Jade.

We heard from perfectly RP-speaking Sam West and Derek Jacobi as well as Lester, and were told about the Red Book passed on from the best Hamlet of each generation (currently with Tom Hiddleston, although I would nominate Ralph Fiennes at Hackney Empire in 1995).

But – a big but – I believe Hamlet is best left to well-schooled chaps who can pronounce their ts. ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you,’ as Hamlet advised the Players, ‘trippingly on the tongue.’ With lots of ts.

I had nightmares after seeing the film Tar, with Cate Blanchett as the lady maestro. But now we have a delightful heterosexual male maestro in Stephen Barlow, the composer and conductor, on a new podcast, Joanna and the Maestro, recorded with his wife, Joanna Lumley, in the music room in their garden.

‘I’m just Joanna, but he is the maestro,’ purrs Joanna. They talk and reminisce and she asks questions (why ‘maestro’? what’s a harmonium?) and he plays his Steinway grand piano (which she bought for him – ‘Sssshhh’) and the music they both love – Mozart, Wagner, Bach, Led Zeppelin. It’s a bit like her Conversations from a Long Marriage – with nice ‘Stevie’ replacing irascible Roger Allam. The diction, as in few podcasts, is superb. Well of course – these are oldie voices.

It was another pleasure to hear Diana Melly, aged 85, on Private Passions, choosing operatic arias – and confessing that ‘on the day of Patrick’s funeral [her son, dead of a heroin overdose at 24], I was too drunk to go.’

Also Patricia Hodge, 76, on Woman’s Hour, on having lost her husband to Alzheimer’s and steadfastly going back to work.

Thank you, Joanna, Diana, Patricia, for carrying torches for the beautifullyspoken word.

Television Frances Wilson

Funny Woman (Sky), with Gemma Arterton in the title role, is an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s seventh novel, Funny Girl, set in 1964.

Hornby’s earlier novels, High Fidelity and About a Boy, were made into two very funny films, and Arterton’s cool screen debut as Kelly, head girl of St Trinian’s, was followed by the part of the Bond girl, Strawberry Fields, in Quantum of Solace

So, with her brains and his looks, what could possibly go wrong?

Arterton plays Barbara Parker, a beauty queen from Blackpool who pursues fame in London. Her raw comic genius is revealed when, working as a sales assistant in a department store, she tells a customer the fur hat she is trying on looks like roadkill. What is she like! Barbara will say anything!

Changing her name to Sophie Straw, she wins a part in a ‘groundbreaking’ sitcom called Barbara and Jim, in which, playing a ballsy northern Brigid Bardot, Sophie redefines the nation’s attitude to funny women.

So this is a television show about the making of another television show – and the result is the worst television show I’ve ever seen. The problem with Funny Woman is that nothing Sophie Straw says or does is remotely amusing.

The humour that will turn her into a television star is based on burping, pulling duck faces, doing silly walks and making squawking noises while flapping her arms around.

The live television audience for Barbara and Jim might rock with levity as she flicks her feather duster around Jim’s ‘knick-knacks’, but the audience at home in 2023 stare on in disbelief.

Is it that Arterton has no comic timing or that the script (by Morwenna Banks) is so lame that no one, not even Jennifer Aniston, could salvage it?

Or is it that Arterton can’t rise to the challenge of a role this complex, and allows the Blackpool accent and blonde wig to do all the work?

Or could it be that Hornby, who made his name writing warmly about lads and lad culture, has never met a funny woman before and so has no idea how they work?

Sophie Straw is the kind of girl who is late for every important occasion, can’t walk into a room without falling flat on her face and is splashed in the rain by passing cars. Her period starts just as

Bob Wilson

the 1770s. They were close associates of everyone who was anyone.

One such was David Garrick, whose Drury Lane theatre had passed to the Linleys in 1776. Another was the musically obsessed painter Thomas Gainsborough, who’d have loved to adopt the violin-playing Tom as the son he never had.

And then there was Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who, aged 22, eloped with Tom’s eldest sister, the 19-year-old singing sensation Elizabeth Linley. Fashionable society, from the monarch downwards, had collectively drooled over her voice and sexual allure.

The elopement, which provided Sheridan with material for his first stage success The Rivals, was the talk of the town – unlike the eerie silence that followed the death of Elizabeth’s beloved brother five years later.

she goes on set, and the studio mic is still on when she calls her cheating boyfriend (also her co-star) a c***.

Most irritatingly, she misunderstands everything that is said to her. Told to read the script at an audition, she settles down to read it to herself (‘No!’ says the director. ‘Out loud!’) ‘Take a deep breath,’ says the producer before she goes onto the set. ‘You can breath out now,’ he suggests as she stands there with balloon cheeks. ‘Break a leg,’ the scriptwriter tells her before her first show. ‘Why?’ she replies. ‘Did you catch his Coriolanus?’ an actor asks.

‘No’, she replies, ‘I had the vaccine.’

To be on the right side of sixties attitudes to homosexuality and race, Funny Woman tries to say something about the clash between the permissive society and Mary Whitehouse, but these limp plot lines go nowhere.

In a nod towards feminism, Barbara’s flatmate joins a women’s group. ‘As women we’ve got to stand up for ourselves,’ she says, ‘and not put up with all their patracarcal bullshit’ (she means patriarchal). In one meeting, the girls use their compact mirrors to become acquainted with their vaginas.

The beacon of hope in all this social turbulence is Sophie Straw – the woman of the future, if only she can make herself heard! Will anyone see beyond the blonde beehive, blunt accent and big boobs? At one point, she goes to a comedy club where Eleanor Bron and John Fortune are improvising. Her dim eyes light up; she can do that!

I mean, how hard can it be to just muck about on stage? She has already stunned the producer by breaking the fourth wall and winking at the camera.

So what exactly is it that Sophie/ Barbara has to tell us? Beyond making an impassioned speech about the difference between men and women boiling down to whether you ‘tinkle’ standing up or sitting down, she has never had an insight in her life.

Thank flaming-haired Jesus that the BBC bought the US edition of The Traitors, so we could cleanse our palates with the honest showmanship of this madly entertaining reality show. There is more drama, humour, wisdom and skulduggery in one scene of The Traitors than in all six wince-making hours of so-called Funny Woman

Music

Richard Osborne The English Mozart

Tom Linley was the musician and friend Mozart never forgot.

‘He was a true genius,’ Mozart told the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, as they sat at supper in Vienna in 1784. ‘Had he lived, he would have been one of the great ornaments of the musical world.’

Mozart wasn’t the only person to be grief-stricken at news of Tom’s death at the age of 22 – in a boating accident on the newly created lake at Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire, in 1778.

The Linley family – composerimpresario Thomas Linley and his five inordinately talented children – were centre stage in English cultural life in

Quite why Tom perished at Grimsthorpe that August morning remains as much a mystery as what happened to Wagner’s patron, Ludwig of Bavaria, on Munich’s Lake Starnberg in 1886.

In Tom’s case, it was not a lake and an attendant physician but a muddybottomed, rural water, a sudden squall, two companions – both of whom survived – and Tom himself. He was dressed to the nines, like Goethe’s young Werther, in an outfit that – bizarrely for a summer morning – included riding boots and a greatcoat.

The scene is vividly re-enacted in the opening chapter of Tony Scotland’s new Tommasino: The Enigma of the English Mozart (Shelf Lives, £25). The book is an immaculately researched, beautifullywritten, finely illustrated and elegantly produced monograph. It addresses Tom’s mysterious death with an eye for detail worthy of Agatha Christie.

It also manages to give a fascinating tour d’horizon of the Linleys and their world in Bath, London – and Florence. Here, for three years, between the ages of 12 and 15, Tom studied the violin with the great Tartini pupil Pietro Nardini.

It was in Florence on 1st April 1770 that Mozart, just 14, and Tom, about to be 14, met and bonded like long-lost brothers. As Europe’s leading expert on the violin, Mozart’s father, Leopold, already knew of Tom – ‘my greatest scholar’, Nardini later said – but even he was surprised by what he heard.

As he wrote to his wife, this ‘charming English boy’, so like Wolfgang, ‘plays most beautifully’, the words heavily underlined. He wished she could see them ‘performing one after the other throughout the evening, constantly embracing each other’, their playing mature beyond their years.

They probably played some of the violin sonatas Wolfgang had already written, music that would feed directly into the 20 violin concertos Tom would eventually produce. They spent just ten days together, two preternaturally gifted, cosseted and yet in many ways lonely boys, who played like ‘twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ th’sun’. Bitter tears were shed when the Mozarts left for Rome.

‘What we chang’d/Was innocence for innocence,’ says Polixenes of his boyhood friendship with Leontes in that same passage in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Mozart was a dirty-minded little scamp, and Tom spent his life surrounded by seedy theatre folk and camp aristocrats, not least in Florence with its famously well-stocked community of exiled English queens.

Both boys would have been safe enough. Yet there was a certain added exoticism about Tom when he returned to London aged 15, fluent in Italian, with Italian dress and Italian manners, and much given to hugging and kissing. Un-English as he now was, he enjoyed a blameless reputation, until his trolling by an anonymous critic in the Westminster Magazine who may well have been trying to ‘out’ him during that fateful summer of 1778.

Happily, some of Tom’s music survives, with hints aplenty that here, indeed, was an English Mozart in the making. We can hear this on four beautifully judged CDs of his dramatic and instrumental music, now on Hyperion’s Helios label, which Peter Holman directed with the Parley of Instruments in the 1990s.

Tom’s sole surviving violin concerto, gamesome and affecting in the early Mozart style, is on Helios CDH5 5260.

Enjoy it for itself, or alongside the poem – reprinted in Scotland’s marvellous book – in which the multitalented Elizabeth apostrophises her most treasured memento, Tom’s abandoned violin.

Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson Britpop Is Back

This year is all very exciting already!

Elton is headlining Glasto for the first time. Stormzy is doing an all-day gig at All Points East. Reading and Leeds festivals are both looking tasty (the Killers, Billie Eilish, inter alia).

British Summer Time in Hyde Park is opening strongly with Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen – much to look forward to.

And the theme of 2023 is, it is agreed, the return of Britpop. Let me remind you. Tony Blair hosting the Gallaghers at Number 10. Ginger Spice in a Union Jack minidress. Patsy Kensit in a sheer black bra and black tights and Chelsea boots on a Union Jack (again) with Our Liam on the cover of Vanity Fair

Recall the Battle of the Bands when the nation divided. Were you going to buy the DVD single of Country House by Blur or Oasis’s Roll With It? Both were released on the same date – Monday 14th August 1995. The results of the chart chase were revealed the following Sunday (Blur won).

Now Oasis are still refusing to reunite (the brothers are the William and Harry of pop), while both Blur and Pulp are back in action. So is it déjà-vu Cool Britannia all over again, nigh on 30 years later?

Well, I hope so, but can this soufflé really be made to rise twice – especially after we lived through the absolute shower that was the Festival of Brexit? That proved how much our young people hated any expression of national exceptionalism and refused to wrap themselves in the flag.

Alex James now wanders round the Cotswolds in shorts talking about cheese. I danced with him at a Cornbury afterafter-after party, on a table as I recall, with Sam Cam.

Damon Albarn uses the same convenience store as I do on the corner in Notting Hill.

A few years ago, I sprawled on Noel Gallagher’s oversized sofa in his Little Venice house after interviewing him –and the closest we got to the hard stuff was cups of Yorkshire Tea.

The reason I mention the above is not to name-drop but to point out that if Alex James thinks Bermuda shorts are a look, and Our Noel has turned from scowling sibling into family man who offers me Hobnobs, then they are ipso facto no longer cool.

I tell you who is, though: Damon Albarn. And Jarvis Cocker, behind whom I once queued on an easyJet flight to Geneva. Stone-cold legends.

The not-so-high priests of Britpop may be back, and I’ll be there for you, but HMS Cool Britannia – remember her Majesty’s tears – can never return. That ship really has sailed.

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU DONATELLO: SCULPTING THE RENAISSANCE

V&A, 11th February to 11th June

This unprecedented Donatello show began at the Bargello and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence last year.

Since then, many of the exhibits have visited the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and now they have arrived at the V&A. Reviewers declared the Florence shows ‘spectacular’ (Wall Street Journal) and ‘definitive and thrilling at every moment’ (Financial Times).

Several masterworks were included that had never before left the Italian cities for which they were made. Even though some have quite rightly not been allowed to travel further, visitors to the V&A are unlikely to be disappointed.

Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, otherwise Donatello (c 1386-1466), may not have been the greatest Renaissance sculptor, but he was probably the most innovative and he was the essential precursor for Michelangelo and the rest.

His monument to the condottiere Gattamelata, the first life-size equestrian statue since antiquity, alas cannot be moved. It is not only a portrait of power, like his apprentice Verrocchio’s similar Colleoni in Venice, but also a human portrait.

Similarly, his standing figure of St George, made for the exterior of the Orsanmichele in Florence, presents a very human saint, his face expressing resolve and a certain trepidation. It is very much in the round, marking a clear break from Gothic tradition.

It also shows how rapidly he himself advanced in his twenties from his first masterpiece, the marble of David (c 1408), where the face is a classical mask. That David is one of about 130 works by

Donatello, his contemporaries and his followers in the V&A show.

Originally, the St George statue would have had a real sword and helmet, since it was commissioned by the armourers’ guild. Donatello not only was a carver, but happily combined different mediums. He did so in the Piot Madonna, a roundel on loan from the Louvre, in which he used terracotta with glass and wax inlays, much of which would have originally been gilded. Marble and bronze might also have been coloured.

Unlike other Renaissance sculptors, Donatello was not also a painter. That may be a pity, since he developed a new form of bas-relief, relievo stiacciato, in which the thickness of carving decreases from fore to background to resemble perspective drawing.

It is his willingness to experiment that led Paola D’Agostino, Director of the Bargello, to label Donatello the ‘most surprising artist of his time’.

Clockwise from left: Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1455-60); David (1408-9); Attis-Amorino (c 1435-40); Head of a Bearded Man, Possibly a Prophet

Gardening David Wheeler To The Manor Borne

Again, alas, I’m hors de combat –irksome in the extreme at this time of the year when, everywhere, the sap is rising.

Following major life-changing surgery in December (don’t worry, I’m still a bloke), I’ve been told not to lift anything heavier than a pencil for the next few months. I look from one bedroom window to an area of the garden destined for light woodland planting.

And, from a window on the other side of the room, I see the ranked pots of young trees, shrubs and perennials ready to be slipped into moist, warm soil.

As supervisor, not doer, I can at least for the time being direct proceedings, anxious not to miss the year’s optimum planting window. Stacks of gardening books accumulated over many decades help to assuage my frustration.

As car journeys are out of the question for a while, a headful of vivid memories of gardens visited all over Europe and beyond adequately fuel both my day and my nocturnal dreamings.

One such garden that seldom wanders from my mind’s eye is at Rodmarton Manor in Gloucestershire, just a few miles from where I grew up and which today remains one of the classic Arts & Crafts houses of the Cotswolds.

I once wrote, ‘Its scale should daunt and frighten, but it doesn’t.’

Built in the early-20th century, ‘on the basis not of contract but of confidence’ (C R Ashbee, no less, 1914), for Claude and Margaret Biddulph by Ernest Barnsley, a keen follower of William Morris, it grew out of its own ground.

In Over the Hills from Broadway: Images of Cotswold Gardens, I wrote that ‘estate workers dug and carried the local stone; masons cut and positioned it; craftsmen-carpenters took their timbers from the great trees thereabouts, while the blacksmiths burnt offcuts to generate heat to forge the latches and ironwork’.

The manor’s gardens were laid out at the same time. Twenty formal garden ‘rooms’ are stitched into the overall design, and superbly matured set pieces – the Hornbeam Avenue (‘a mighty nave’) and the exquisite little summerhouse terminating a vista flanked by long herbaceous borders –predominate. Topiary triumphs.

In the years I frequented Rodmarton most – the 1980s to 2000 – the house and garden seemed to lie if not forgotten then certainly underused. Vast, stone galleons like these, which have berthed themselves far inland, are not only expensive to maintain. They also need a series of beating hearts to animate them and to help fend off family ghosts (Rodmarton remains in the Biddulph family) all too willing to take over.

Enter Sarah Biddulph (her husband John took on the estate in 2017) and Sarah Rivett-Carnac, who run the Generous Gardener. It presents a series of Lecture Days by such luminaries as Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, author of English Garden Eccentrics; Chelsea award-winning designer Richard Miers; James Alexander-Sinclair; TV presenter Pippa Greenwood; the ever-colourful Jimi

Blake, whose Hunting Brook Gardens in the Wicklow Mountains is an essential destination; and world-renowned garden photographer Clive Nichols.

The day-long events run from March to October, with specialist plant sales involving several private nurseries, held on three separate days, run by Sarah Rivett-Carnac just down the road at Charlton Farm, Malmesbury.

The glory of such days out lie in their conviviality. Who knows whom you’ll meet and befriend over lunch? Who knows what new horticultural passions might be spawned? Who knows what hithertounknown plants will change the way you’ll garden for yourself in the future?

By midsummer, I might be fit enough to thumb a lift to one or more of these attractions. I’ll have my address book to hand.

David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld Tenderstem Broccoli

Broccoli comes in different guises.

There is the vegetable more correctly called calabrese, with a bunched green head and a tree-trunk-like stalk; purple- and white-sprouting broccoli; romanesco broccoli, with pointed pale-green heads; and what the Italians call broccolini or broccoletti and we know as tenderstem broccoli.

They are all brassicas of the species oleracea, while broccoli rabe, known in Italy as cime di rapa, are turnip tops and not of the same family.

Tenderstem broccoli was developed when calabrese was crossed with a variety of Chinese kale, and was introduced in Japan 30 years ago. It has become popular recently and often appears on restaurant menus. The

British-grown tenderstem is available during summer and until November, and in midwinter it is imported, mainly from Spain and Kenya.

If sown in mid-March under cover, and then transplanted, tenderstem should be ready for harvesting by the end of June. Or sow the seed outside from late April. Purple-sprouting broccoli, by comparison, will need up to ten months’ growth before it is ready.

‘Inspiration’ is a tenderstem variety offered by most seed companies. For some unknown reason, an alternative name for the vegetable is Asparation. Is it because someone thought (mistakenly) that it looked and tasted like asparagus?

Tenderstem prefers a soil that is not too acid and, like all brassicas, it may need to be netted or otherwise protected if you have trouble with pigeons or cabbage caterpillars. When the plant is almost ready for cutting, remove the main head to encourage more side shoots.

This vegetable has been described as the king of broccoli because of its superior health benefits. It contains more manganese and calcium than other broccolis, and a significantly higher concentration of vitamin A, important for the immune system.

It is noted for the delicate flavour of its stems, and tastes better than it looks. One recommended method of cooking the vegetable is to parboil it and then stir-fry in oil and soy sauce. I have also roasted tenderstem broccoli in a hot oven for about ten minutes with oil and sliced garlic.

Cookery Elisabeth Luard A Lenten Feast

Lent this year is from 22nd February until 6th April.

It makes for 40 days of short commons in the run-up to Easter. And it’s a chance to repurpose what’s lurking in the back of the store cupboard and recycle the unmarked leftovers from the freezer.

It’s good to use them up. Dried herbs and powdered spices lose much fragrance over a year. Storable pulses harden and need longer cooking as they age. Dried fruits, left over from Christmas, are the perfect material for a well-spiced sweet-and-sour chutney – and curry powder is a great addition.

During Lent, prohibitions on rich food and strong liquor may work wonders for body and soul. But nothing makes a person feel so good as getting rid of the evidence of that pre-lockdown panic-buying.

Boston baked beans

Baked beans were originally a seafarers’ one-pot dish from which the famous commercial brand was hatched. Cook these in quantity and freeze in bags in one-person portions. Delicious in a baked potato. Serves 4 hungry sailors.

500g white haricot (aka navy) beans, soaked overnight

Aromatics: peppercorns, bay leaves, parsley stalks (tied in a bag)

Second cooking

150ml maple syrup (or molasses or brown sugar)

1 tsp English mustard powder

1 tsp salt

½ tsp freshly-ground pepper

2-3 cloves

250g unsmoked bacon in a single piece

Drain the beans, put them in a roomy saucepan with 3 litres of cold water and the aromatics, bring to the boil, turn down the heat, lid loosely and simmer for an hour (longer, if necessary), until the beans have softened.

Remove the bag of aromatics and reserve 1.5 litres of the cooking liquid.

In an ovenproof casserole, combine the beans with the syrup, mustard, salt and pepper. Push the cloves into the bacon, bury it in the middle and add enough of the reserved cooking liquid to submerge everything generously.

Cover and cook in a very low oven –300°F/150°C/Gas 2 – for 3-4 hours. Uncover for the final hour so the beans develop a crust. Add more boiling water if it looks as if it’s drying out.

Apricot and ginger chutney

Vary the recipe as you please. Possible inclusions/substitutions are dried figs, pears, prunes, diced apple, quince, pumpkin. Makes enough to fill 4-5 one-pound jars.

500g dried apricots, soaked to swell

250g sultanas or raisins

500g light muscovado sugar

1 large onion, skinned and diced

100g fresh ginger root, roughly chopped

2-3 garlic cloves, skinned and crushed

1 tsp coriander seeds

½ tsp dried chillis, de-seeded and crushed

½ tsp peppercorns, crushed

2 tsps salt

1 litre cider or white-wine vinegar

Drain the apricots, chop roughly and put in a heavy pan. Blanch the onion for a few moments in boiling water to soften, drain and add to the pan along with the rest of the ingredients. Include any left-over chutney from last year –maturity, as with the solera system in sherry-making, adds distinction.

Bring to the boil, turn down the heat and cook very gently, stirring regularly, for an hour or so, until thick and jammy.

Chutney is the devil of a sticker in the later stages. If a blackened crust forms on the base, tip the whole lot into a clean pan without stirring. Whatever sticks to the base of the first pan will taste burnt, but the rest will be fine. Pot up in clean, hot jam jars and don’t cover or lid till it’s perfectly cool.

Restaurants

JAMES PEMBROKE

LAST LUNCH WITH MY FATHER

My father died on New Year’s Eve, aged 87. He deserves all the credit for my lifelong obsession with restaurants, because we ate out pretty much every night during my childhood. The only time I was told I was spoilt was when, aged four, I demanded ice cream, and wailed at the waitress, ‘And don’t you dare bring me a wafer.’ I have hated them ever since.

It never occurred to my parents or me that we were spoilt, eating our way through the seventies at Hungry Horse, Borsch N Tears, Le Bistingo, Bistro Vino, Halepi or Bertorelli.

Every night was theatre, especially if we went to Flanagans and sang along with the pianist. By the age of six, I was precociously menu-literate, flipping between boeuf bourguignon and duck à l’orange. Even during our weekends in our heavenly, slug-smeared cottage in Dorset, we ate out for lunch and dinner while the more perfect dads loaded barons of beef into their Volvos.

I now know that all this dining out was run through my father’s City business. Just about everything was: even holidays abroad were for research. Even my first school fees went through the books because the bill came not from Spyway School but from the headmaster brothers, E and G Warner.

My father’s bookkeeper assumed they were a firm of stationers, and for four painless years my father never corrected him. I remember his woe when, after the school closed, the next bill arrived more accurately from the Old Malthouse School. Still, this urban Pa Larkin could always restore his equilibrium with lunch at the Contented Sole or Sweetings.

He was a surprisingly slim man and rejoiced in the role of the Charles Atlas of Swanage beach, where his own gastronomic career began during the war at his Aunt Nancy’s hotel, the Wolfeton. No slouch in the kitchen, she got the hotel into one of 91 slots in the first-ever Good Food Guide in 1951.

He had no interest in making friends, and was bemused by the concept of seeing anyone regularly, but my father revelled in the sociability of restaurants and pubs.

He was only too happy to talk to neighbouring tables in London or on holiday, heckling them with his views on his pet topics, Charles and Di in the nineties and Madeleine McCann in the noughties. While his various audiences regaled him with their own conspiracy theories, he would suddenly burst out laughing at his own sense of the absurd before delivering another well-honed soliloquy on Edwina Currie and John Major.

My last lunch with him was in September at the Pier Head, overlooking Swanage Bay. Like a boy released from boarding school, he leapt out of the car, forgetting he was tethered to a small oxygen tank the size of a fire extinguisher.

It was the weekend of the Folk Festival; a passing troupe of Morris dancers untangled him and sat him down. We had a massive sea bass for just £38, he still adhering to his childhood rule of eating all the vegetables first.

Like me, he wasn’t a perfect dad, but he didn’t mind a bit. When my brother and I were small, he loved to ask us, ‘Would you prefer this daddy or another daddy?’ And he delighted in our guaranteed response: ‘ANOTHER DADDY.’

I’ve changed my mind.

Drink Bill Knott Modern Greek

As I recall, the wine list in Angelo’s Taverna at the western end of Agios Georgios beach on Corfu was brief: retsina, Demestica white, or Demestica red. That was 40 years ago – and I drank Henninger lager for a week.

The Henninger brand has, sadly, gone to the great Bierkeller in the sky, but the Greek wine industry’s star is definitely in the ascendant, as I discovered at a recent tasting organised by Greek wine specialists Maltby&Greek. More than 100 wines from 25 wineries were on show, with styles ranging from bone-dry Assyrtiko to ambrosial sweet Muscat, via strawberryscented Xinomavro and sparkling Vidiano.

According to Maltby&Greek’s co-founder Stef Kokotos, Greece’s great strength – a multitude of ancient, indigenous grape varieties, each with its own personality – is also perhaps its biggest problem (‘especially pronouncing them!’). He singles out Agiorgitiko as being a particularly difficult mouthful.

Business partner Yannos Hadjiioannou – who left his job as an investment banker to start the business and was soon ‘driving, delivering, cleaning the loos, cooking for the team… actually, I still do that’ – sees Greek wine’s strong suit as in the mid-market, between £10 and £20 a bottle, ‘where we can offer a lot more individuality and excitement for drinkers, compared with many traditional regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy’.

Their website – maltbyandgreek.com – lists 40 or so wines in that price bracket. Like that of many wineimporters, their pre-COVID business was heavily focused on the on-trade, and they quickly realised retail sales would be crucial to their survival.

These days, the restaurant trade has returned, and they supply independent wine merchants around the country – but their retail arm is thriving too. As well as wines, the website offers artisanal cheeses, Cretan sausages spiked with wild thyme, olive oils, honeys and preserves.

On the wine side, I recommend trying one of their dozen mixed cases: the six-bottle For the Love of Burgundy case (£167.45), perhaps, featuring whites from Santorini and reds made from the Pinot Noir-esque Xinomavro; or a six-bottle case of winter reds (£102); or three bottles of winemaker Chloe Chatzivaritis’s stunning natural wines from her family estate near Goumenissa, in the hills above Thessaloniki.

And what of the future? Greece may have an ancient history of winemaking but, as Stef points out, ‘It’s not a continuous history, and the industry has only recently started to modernise.’ Stef and Yannos have supreme confidence in the winemakers they represent and in ‘the unique sense of place that their wines offer’.

Yannos’s tips for grape varieties to look out for include Savatiano (traditionally used to make retsina) and two Cretan varieties: Vidiano, an aromatic white grape; and Liatiko, a pale, early-ripening red grape once used to make Malvasia.

Getting your tongue around the names on the bottles is tricky, but doing so with their contents is gratifyingly simple.

Wine

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a Chardonnay with a nice weight to it, a classic, clean-as-a-whistle Grüner Veltliner, and a pleasingly fruity and uncomplicated Sicilian red. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.

Montsablé

Chardonnay, IGP Haute Vallée de l’Aude 2021, offer price £9.50, case price £114.00

Aged on its lees, with a judicious amount of oak, plenty of fruit and a dry finish.

Funkstille Grüner

Veltliner, Ferdinand Mayr, Niederösterreich, Austria 2021, offer price £10.99, case price £131.88

More rounded in style than many Grüners, with agreeable notes of grapefruit and melon.

Frappato Incanto del Sud, Baglio Gibellina, Sicily 2021, offer price £9.99, case price £119.88

Fresh, lively, unoaked Frappato with plenty of red fruit: great with charcuterie.

Mixed case price £121.92 – a saving of £30.99

(including free delivery)

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Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk

Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD

NB Offer closes 28th March 2023.

Sport Heroes And Villains

One of the joys of sport for us spectators is watching a participant refusing to yield.

Andy Murray battling through the early hours in Melbourne. Michael Smith and Michael van Gerwen exchanging 180s in the World Darts final. The time the now sadly departed Jim Redmond stepped on to the Barcelona track to help his stricken son Derek hobble and stagger across the finish line in the 1992 Olympic Games 400-metre race.

These are moments that are central to our understanding of what sport is all about, those involved doing whatever is required to make it to the last.

Nobody, we believe, sets out to lose. Unless, that is, they are playing snooker. The revelation that the 2021 Masters champion Zhao Xintong and nine other leading Chinese players are being investigated for match-fixing should alarm not just those who follow the game, but anyone who takes delight in sport.

China is these days not just snooker’s biggest market; it is becoming the centre of the next generation of talent. It’s on the tables of Shanghai and Beijing that the biggest flowering of young players in the game’s history is happening.

Goodness, they are good. And now we discover that many of them are also being recruited by criminal syndicates wishing to exploit the ever-growing gambling market that surrounds the game.

It is pretty obvious why this has been happening. It’s far easier to manipulate results in an individual sport than when a team is involved. Plus the criminals know where to target – because few of those on the professional snooker circuit are earning enough to make them immune to financial incentive. Of the top 100 players in the world, more than 50 earn less than £20,000 a year from their efforts. The sharks have long been circling.

Sure, the insidious proliferation of gambling around sport has opened up all sorts of areas of betting. The FA recently launched an inquiry into an Oxford United player getting himself booked in a Cup tie. Apparently people were placing bets on his receiving a yellow card at some point in the game – just as it was possible to wager on the first throw-in or corner, things that can be simply organised without any influence on the final score.

But the better odds have always been available on outcomes. Gambling, like sport, is after all a results business. And that is why this news is so depressing. No gangster is going to fork out for victory, because that can never be guaranteed.

Not even the kind of industrialised doping of the Russian sporting system could ensure that. No, it is the requirement to lose that the bad guys are buying.

And paying for defeat undermines sport’s very purpose. If Murray had been being encouraged to lose, we would never have been treated to his magnificent, age-defying grunt-and-growl on that Melbourne court.

Had the two dartsMichaels been being paid to throw the game rather than their arrows, we would never have been on the edge of our seats, astonished by their unworldly exchange of maximums.

These are moments that make sport special, elevate it and turn it into drama. And that is what’s under threat from this proliferation of cheating. Here’s hoping the snooker authorities agree with the insistence of former world champion Shaun Murphy that anyone found to have taken a bribe to fail should get a lifetime ban.

For all of us fans, this has to be stopped.

Motoring Alan Judd My Fuel Crisis

Over Christmas, I joined a club I never sought to join: the Ancient Order of Misfuellers.

To qualify, you have to fill a diesel car with petrol or vice versa. This usually happens when people muddle the pump nozzles. My case was worse – I did it unthinkingly but deliberately.

On Christmas Eve, I took the diesel Volvo out for some last-minute shopping. The day before, I had taken my wife’s petrol Polo and filled it with superiorgrade fuel. I was musing on the wisdom of this: superior grade costs more and the cheaper premium grade is perfectly adequate for almost all cars.

People denigrate ‘supermarket fuel’ but that’s nonsense – all fuel has to meet the same minimum standards. The advantage of superior grade is its higher octane, allied with cleansing additives, which benefit the engine.

More octane means more bang for your bucks. It’s what manufacturers use when achieving their published fuel-consumption figures. But any car should run happily throughout its life on premium grade.

Whether it’s worth paying the extra for a few more mpg and a cleaner-running engine depends on the costs/savings ratio and will vary with the car, its use and how long you keep it.

I’ve used superior grade since an unscientific test in an old Discovery, when it appeared to yield an extra 2-3 mpg, just enough to pay for the price difference. Also, I could ascend a particular hill in top gear which had previously compelled me to change down. But other factors, such as weather and the way I drove, could account for both.

Musing thus, I noticed a local garage selling superior grade less expensively than the competition. I pulled in, selected it and filled my diesel car. If you had asked which fuel I was using, I would have told you. If you had asked which fuel the Volvo required, I would have told you that too.

I realised what I’d done only when I’d driven half a mile, parked, done my shopping and tried to start again. It sounded like a car without fuel. Fuel? Surely, I thought, I’ve just…?

Thus it was that I spent Christmas in and out of touch with the AA. It’s understandable that on Christmas Eve it took a long time to speak to an operator, after I’d been told by the AA app that it didn’t recognise me and been told online (I had to get a lift home for this) that my server was unrecognisable.

Eventually I got through to a human who said that no specialist AA misfuelling patrols were available (they have about 35 nationwide) but they could arrange for a subcontractor to do the job. Either way, it would cost £255. Well, stupidity is rightly punished. The ETA for the subcontractor was 14.55 hours. I returned to my car.

It was 21.35 by the time I spoke again to someone who could explain what was (not) going on: the contractor had gone home. But no one had told me.

They offered me my money back so that I could make alternative arrangements, or the promise of an AA man on Tuesday morning. I chose the latter, and a friendly patrolman did the job competently, as AA people usually do.

The lesson (apart from the obvious one for me)? Apps are not enough. When you break down, you need human contact. The AA should spend less money on promotions and other frippery and employ more human beings.

That said, I’ve just got £100 off my membership by asking to pay less. It works every year. Make sure you do it, too.