I try not to miss too much of Any Dream Will Do, or Any Queen Will Do, to give it its more popular title, the BBC1 Saturday night talent show in search of a new Joseph, but as the decibel level rises and John Barrowman and Bill Kenwright compete in the race to make the most ridiculously over the top glutinous back slapping, arse tickling compliments to the quite ordinary young singers on show, I’m beginning to long for it to come to an end. I guess the casting people are pretty certain that Lee will come through as the winner. I enjoyed the search for Maria much more, and through both programmes I have watched in awe as Andrew Lloyd Webber has shed his ugly duckling chat show skin and reinvented himself as a gutsy, fluent and very funny television performer; the thing is, of course, he is doing what he almost does best, live and breathe not only his own music but the best of show tunes and pop hits of other people. He knows what he’s talking about. He also managed a bit of crafty in-house promotion of Bill Kenwright’s long-running Blood Brothers by making two of the Josephs sing Willy Russell’s tear-jerking ballad “Tell Me It’s Not True.” Shame the song is meant to be sung by a woman, but who cares about details in these dog days of what passes for television entertainment?

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It was a grand send-off for Peter Hepple, the legendary former editor of The Stage, who died last year and was celebrated in a memorial today (Friday) in St Paul’s, Covent Garden. The comedian and writer Barry Cryer even managed to rhyme his surname with an old vaudeville sand-dancing act, Wilson, Kepple and Betty by transposing the billing: Wilson, Betty and Kepple! Cryer took the stage (sorry, the altar) and declared his name, just in case, he said, we thought he was Brad Pitt gone to seed. Peter had reinvented self-deprecation as an art form, he said; he was arrogant in his humility. He recalled Peter first seeing him in Danny La Rue’s club in 1960 and telling him afterwards that he was quite good, with a wicked emphasis on the “quite.” Danny himself told me afterwards at the reception that this was perfectly true and that Peter Hepple was a rare commentator in the arts: “All you poeople,” he said, giving me a funny look, “and with all due respect, never write about the reallity of light entertainment.” I took this a little awry as I’ve been a big fan of Danny ever since I first saw him sashay down a staircae in a bikini, covered in feathers, and say to the audience: “I know what you’re thinking, ladies, I wonder where he puts it…” Still, a little light bitterness is an essential part of any old timer’s performance, and Danny was in tip top form. Having spoken beautifully in the church — something about not recognising Princess Margaret with her clothes on came into it — he regaled the party with a stunning rendition of his signature song, “On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep” when they least expected it.

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David Suchet is drawing packed houses at Chichester as Cardinal Benelli, the scheming Pope-maker in the old-fashioned thriller The Last Confession, which is a load of papal bull, really. Still, it’s all done very well and a trip to the Festival Theatre is always a pleasure, even in the dodgy weather we had on opening night. Once the train from Victoria has cleared Gatwick Airport, you hit the countryside — pleasant rills and canals, country stations, meadows of wild flowers — and you know you’ve escaped the smog completely when Arundel Castle hoves majestically into view. As nothing is built above two storeys in the town itself, you feel in holiday mood the moment you arrive, assailed by sea breezes and a populace of elderly folk who all seem to live to 100, wizened and walnut brown in the pleasant climate. My old mucker, the former FT arts editor Antony Thorncroft, is nowhere near a hundred, but he is semi-retired in the delightful nearby village of Sidlesham (he and his wife didn’t downsize when they moved from Dulwich, they upsized, buying a judge’s large house and a couple of acres). He joins me and Robert Gore-Langton in the theatre restaurant for a pre-show supper.

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It had to happen, but why has it taken so long? The embargo on critical writing about the RSC’s new King Lear has been well and truly breached by the Guardian today, with Germaine Greer laying into the production big time and not even mentioning the Goneril of Melanie Jessop who has been standing in for the injured Frances Barber. She says the show is as perverse as anything Trevor Nunn has ever done, but regular watchers of BBC TV’s Newsnight Review will take this with a large sack of salt. Germaine is a wacky but woefully uninformed commentator when it comes to the performing arts, and like her fellow Aussie intellectual Clive James, she prefers her Shakespeare unsullied by anything so low as an actual production (James reads Hamlet once a year but never goes near it in the theatre). Greer regards Ian McKellen’s “impressive genitalia” an an unwanted distraction but at least recalls that Ian bared all as Edgar ( masquerading as Poor Tom of Bedlam) over thirty years ago. Even before then, we’d seen the McKellen giblets when he disrobed, unnecessarily, in David Rudkin’s fine play Ashes, in which a barren marriage was a metaphor for the political situation in Northern Ireland.

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“Aldgate East, all get out!” used to be the cry of the London underground guards, and they could do with reviving it as theatregoers these days find themselves down Whitechapel way as often as they do in the West End. As an original Cockney myself — born in the Mile End Hospital and resident in Jubilee Street in my early years — I have always enjoyed returning to old haunts, but going down Brick Lane for the first time in many years on Friday night was a complete eye-opener. En route to catching Fallujah at the Old Truman Brewery, I threaded my way through a maze of Bengali and Balti restaurants, upmarket bars and kebab stalls and a milling crowd who seem to have been cast for a mega-sized update of one of Ben Jonson’s city comedies. I still find it impossible to get my bearings, or cope with the transformation of streets and alleys that were once primarily Cockney Jewish and Cockney Irish, with a fair sprinkling of Eastern European. And the city towers encroach ever closer. When I debouched a couple of hours later into Liverpool Street station I felt I’d been on an exotic foreign trip, with an awayday included to shell-shocked Fallujah in the splendid old brewery.

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An altercation in the interval at the first night of The Letter set me thinking about what to wear to the theatre. Producer Bill Kenwright ribbed me for not making more of an effort, pointing to the example of indefatigable first-nighter Blanche Marvin kitted out in coloured silks like a scary superannuated geisha (The Letter is set in colonial Malaysia and Singapore). I was rather miffed, as I’d sported one of my newest suits and pinkest shirts for the occasion. At least, I retorted, I’m not wearing a T-shirt, casting a critical eye over Kenwright’s black torso-hugging casual wear. Peeling back his jacket, the great impresario revealed an Armani logo nestling above his left nipple. As if that proved anything! I thought to myself: if you’re going to be cheap enough to wear a T-shirt to a first night in one of London’s most beautiful and historic theatres, at least have the good grace to go down the Ian Shuttleworth route of “Here’s a T-shirt and I just don’t care.” One of the gargantuan Shuttleworth’s latest numbers is a tent-like T-junction-shirt proclaiming Hamlet’s “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt…” So Shuttleworth may be cheap, but at least he’s funny with it.

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Why do we go to the theatre? What are we seeking? Everyone, obviously, has his or her private answer. Many people are simply looking for what playwright John McGrath once called A Good Night Out. Others are devotees who approach theatre with the fervent enthusiasm of a stamp collector. In the end, I suspect, we are all looking for a combination of the three E’s: Entertainment, Enlightenment and Ecstasy.

Entertainment is itself a loaded, highly subjective word: some may find it in Coward, others in Corneille. But clearly we are all hungry for something that keeps us engaged from moment to moment. Enlightenment is possibly easier to define: it’s the notion that we gain some new experience or understanding from a piece of theatre. I got it recently from a double-bill of early Brecht plays at the Young Vic, in particular, The Jewish Wife, which told me exactly what it must have been like to have been living in, and escaping from, 1930s Berlin under the shadow of the Nazis.

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