Television Frances Wilson

preamble after. But it didn’t work, did it? Sigh.

Baz fared better in a later programme, telling his own stuff: ‘A voice calls out in a train corridor, “Is there a Catholic priest on board this train? Is there an Anglican vicar? Is there a rabbi?” Finally, a voice pipes up: “I’m a Methodist minister, if I can help…” “Nah, you’re no use to us – we’re looking for a corkscrew.”’

Kate Clanchy broke down in tears on PM, talking about her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. A dedicated teacher, she salvages her immigrant pupils from their trapped lives, using poetry. Her publishers, bullied by social media into appointing sensitivity readers, ended by cancelling her. Luckily Swift Press swooped – so we can all still read her.

Clanchy writes brilliantly. It’s a revelatory book, even more so than Lucy Kellaway’s Re-educated, about switching to be a teacher. You can’t help asking, how many of us could do this? As for censorship by subliterates – just dip into Dickens and put the Fatboy or Fagin to the test. Literate readers love ‘offensiveness’.

In another radio tribute, to Bamber Gascoigne, the children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce said he’d loved University Challenge ever since he still believed the teams sat on top of each other. (A line that was repeated by a dozen commentators.) Boyce also gleaned that ‘Unless you study science, you will end up knowing nothing about science.’ And that, however the brain works, ‘It is still miraculous.’

On Last Word, real warmth suffused every memory of the amiable Bamber – who once told me the trick question he pulled out whenever a team was struggling: ‘If A is for Aardvark and B is for Because, C is for Cabbage and D for Dog, what is E for?’ (Answer: Elephant. Or any word beginning with E.)

Then PJ O’Rourke died. (It’s been a sad season.) The most-quoted living writer in the Penguin Book of Quotations was even funnier to meet, and not a line he uttered would get past a sensitivity reader. His was the humor (sic) of New Yorker cartoons – not the more laboured humour (sic) of Punch. (As Wordle players should know, there is a difference between the two.) But then Barry Cryer said that analysing what makes things funny – which, thanks to the ghastly Jimmy Carr, there’s been far too much of lately – is ‘like dissecting a frog: nobody laughs, and the frog dies’.

Oh dear. The BBC has become ‘our BBC’, like ‘our NHS’: ‘The BBC is something that belongs to all of us’ – and, doubly oh dear, ‘It only exists if we really believe it matters.’ Well, we do believe in Desert Island Discs alchemy. Lately celebrated: Leslie Caron (our Oldie of the Year), full of laughter at 90; and brave Lyse Doucet, poised against the wire of a new war zone. Then I relistened to what the late illustrator Jan Pienkowski (he, too!) had chosen: a Just William audiobook by Martin Jarvis; plus a perfect eight discs, ending with a Nunc Dimittis from Quarr Abbey. You can listen again, for ever.

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON

My screen life has turned into Groundhog Day.

Last month, I reviewed The Gilded Age, in which Bertha Russell, aspirational wife of a robber baron, tries to break into the inner sanctum of Manhattan high society.

This month, I’m reviewing Inventing Anna (Netflix), which is about the exact same thing. Except that, while Bertha is being shunned by the Daughters of the Revolution, Anna Sorokin, AKA Anna Delvey, achieved her goal in a few laughably easy moves and is now doing time for grand larceny.

Based on an article for New York magazine by Jessica Pressler, Inventing Anna begins with the disclaimer ‘This story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are completely made up.’

The joke is, of course, that everything about Anna Delvey, a penniless 25-yearold Russian posing as a German heiress, is completely made up. But why, when the material was so good to begin with, did Shonda Rhimes, the creator and producer, need to invent anything more than what Anna invented herself?

From what I can gather, most of Inventing Anna is invention, including the character of her boyfriend, Chase, and the existence of her friends Val and Nora, while sticking the knife into her former friend Rachel Williams, who wrote a rival account of Anna for Vanity Fair.

What might have been a timely analysis of Instagram culture, imposture syndrome and fake news is blown into a blowsy nine-hour (nine-hour) shopping trip, a porn show of product placement, a cutesy, pseudo-feminist comedy of manners, in which Sorokin is a folk heroine in oversize Celine glasses and a baby-doll dress.

I realise that everyone in New York is on the take, but it is hard to punch the air in support of a creature as utterly alien to the human race as Anna Sorokin – at least as she is played by Julia Garner who gives her, for some reason, an Afrikaans accent.

Sorokin’s creepiness is pitched against the high-fiving chutzpah of Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), the pint-size, pregnant journalist based on Jessica Pressler, who pursues Sorokin’s story against the express wishes of her editor. Visiting the prisoner on Rikers Island while contending with Braxton Hicks contractions, the intrepid Viv then chases up fraudulent bank statements when she should be constructing her baby’s crib. What is she like!

Because more time is spent admiring Anna’s handbag collection than exploring her motivation or her apparently hypnotic effect on those she robbed, we are left with questions rather than answers. Why, for example, did none of the Internet-obsessed entrepreneurs who encountered Sorokin during her onewoman raid on New York’s hotels, banks, estate agents, lawyers, restaurants and designer outlets think to Google the father who was apparently controlling her purse strings?

I celebrated the end of Inventing Anna by watching The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (Netflix), about another young American female conartist, Elizabeth Holmes. Would that Anna Sorokin had been given a no-frills documentary like this.

Holmes’s appeal, we learn from those who invested in her fake multibilliondollar health-care industry, consisted in blonde hair and an ability to speak for a full hour without blinking. She also adapted her vocal cords in order to sound baritone, which means that we should never invest in young women with weird voices.

Dramatising true stories needn’t detract from the truth. Despite the fact that Norman Scott complained that he came across, in his portrayal by Ben Wishaw, as ‘a weakling’, A Very English

‘Now that’s what I call real Northern Lights!’

Scandal, with Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe, got to the marrow of the affair. In the same way, A Very British Scandal, with Claire Foy as the Duchess of Argyll, nailed the case for Margaret Argyll. Both dramas were character studies and the characters made sense. A Spy Among Friends, out in November and based on Ben Macintyre’s book about Kim Philby (played by the always superb Guy Pearce), promises to do the same thing.

Anna Sorokin, on the other hand, makes no sense at all: what makes her tick? Is she a psychopath? Is she a criminal mastermind? In New York magazine, she explained to Jessica Pressler that she sees herself as a version of Tom Ripley: ‘Money, like, there’s an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know? But there’s limited amounts of people who are talented.’

There is no talent in evidence anywhere in Inventing Anna. Only a desire to make a shedload of wonga. colours torn but visible above the fray, appear to be back with a bang.

Buxton, for instance, promises ‘the biggest, bravest, boldest line-up yet’. (The most recent festival I visited, back in 1987, seemed pretty big and bold, but I take the point.) Operas include a rare Donizetti, Rossini’s powerful and affecting realisation of Walter Scott’s lovely narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, and Violet, a new opera on the modish theme of time running out, by Tom Coult and Alice Birch. That’s also being seen at Aldeburgh, garaged last year but returning this June, firing on all cylinders.

Our summer opera festivals appear to be in reasonably rude health. Garsington has rather more revivals than usual; a chance perhaps for newcomers to hoover up tickets from disappointed regulars. But Longborough’s Wagner Ring cycle is back, on course and on stage, with Siegfried, while elsewhere Verdi’s Shakespeare is much favoured with new productions of Macbeth (the Grange Festival) and Otello (Grange Park Opera).

Glyndebourne’s three-month season offers operas by Mozart, Donizetti, Puccini and Poulenc and begins with a rarity, Ethel Smyth’s Cornish-set opera, The Wreckers. As I wrote here in June 2018, it’s a fascinating piece – Beecham and Bruno Walter both conducted it; Mahler planned to stage it – that is both a precursor to and a

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE FESTIVALS IN 2022

‘Normal service has been resumed,’ rejoices pianist Iain Burnside, artistic director of Ludlow’s annual English Song Weekend (8th-10th April). Being a prudent soul, he adds, ‘As I type these words with one hand, I cross the fingers of the other, muttering fervent prayers to the gods of viral variants.’

It would be an exaggeration to say that festivals – or ‘music meetings’, as such events were called before the Three Choirs Festival set up shop in Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester in the 1710s – have never had it so bad. But with the wreckage of COVID and Brexit strewn all about us, inflation once again raising its ugly mug above the parapet, and theatres, arts centres and churches, all key elements in the festival ecosystem, ‘going dark’ at an alarming rate, no one can pretend that these are propitious times for the arts in Britain.

Take my own local gaff, Windsor and Maidenhead, one of the country’s most affluent local authorities, which is proposing to reduce its arts funding to zero. Zilch – not a penny. Shades of Falstaff drinking in Windsor’s Garter Inn with barely a groat to his name.

It’s a move that suggests it was no accident that the celebrated Windsor Festival, founded by Yehudi Menuhin and Ian Hunter in 1969, was allowed to wither on the vine, or that in 2006 the town’s second-richest institution, Eton College, casually threw over a long and cherished tradition of hosting prestigious (and, to the music profession, lifesustaining) subscription concerts.

Some festivals are clearly struggling to release a 2022 programme. Others that came through the pandemic, their