A not very funny thing happened on the way to the Proms in the Albert Hall last night: stuck in a tail back in the park caused by road works in the area, I read a yellow sign by the Serpentine Gallery proclaiming that “delayes are suspected.”

Dogberry is alive and well and working for the road sign department of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea! O villain, who e’er thou art, thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this…dost thou not suspect my place, or my years, but only talk of delayes and humps and deductions?

I suspect the suspect achieved A grades in all A-levels and was appointed immediately chief suspector of the transport division and what is more is a wise fellow and which is more is an officer and a householder. Write him down an ass!

Our fellow guests in Proms director Roger Wright’s box had enjoyed no such diversion. Journalists Kim Fletcher and Sarah Sands had merely popped round the corner from their home in Notting Hill. They had driven. Where had they left the car? Oh, quite near the house!

It was a great concert: middle period Mozart symphony, revelatory Vaughan Williams piece for choir, viola and orchestra, my friend Nigel Osborne’s brilliant flute concerto (Nigel took a bow looking like a shaggy bison) and Beethoven’s Mass in C.

This was more than balm and compensation for the previous night’s outing to see Christopher Nolan’s over-long and incomprehensible Batman movie, The Dark Knight. If Heath Ledger wins a posthumous Oscar for his grotesquely self-indulgent performance as the Joker I will not be a jot surprised; it’s the sort of acting that always does, and the sentimental vote will kick in big time.

Should the movie have a 12A certificate, allowing  young children to be accompanied by an adult? I find this an impossible question to answer as the whole film is drenched in an atmosphere of apocalyptic violence, car-smashing and gloating thuggery I increasingly find unpleasant and depressing in the cinema — unless the director is Martin Scorsese.

The psychopathology of violence on stage and screen is a subject of endless debate and unfathomable mystery. Some people simply won’t go and see King Lear because of the eye-gouging. And is the baiting of Malvolio, say, in Twelfth Night, any more unpleasant than the ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs (a scene at which my wife promptly removed our young son from the cinema, not because she thought it was bad for him, but because it was impossible for her)?

As any fool, or road sign writer, know, it is necessitous to suspect your good neighbour’s onion in these materials, and I wish it to be known that I am tolerable of all views on this topiary. So write me down an ass, too, prithee.

Nastiness is everywhere, even in the most suprising of places, such as Gigi in the Open Air, Regent’s Park. In the full context of Timothy Sheader’s beautiful and affectionate revival of the Lerner and Loewe My Fair Lady Mark Two, “Thank Heaven For Little Girls” is no longer a slightly dodgy number for a dirty old man with paedophiliac tendencies, but a hymn to the tendency of little females to grow into suitable fodder for the courtesan market. But the show is written in such a way that the story is both a celebration of hedonism and exploitation and a stern critique of the bell epoque. Very clever.

I was sorry to learn that Sheader missed his own first night, undergoing tests in hospital after feeling the strain of his first season in charge in Regent’s Park. I suspect he will be back without delaye when our whole dissembly appears. Masters, be vigitant: I certainly hope not. 
 

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