The choir of an all-girls school, Coloma Convent, was singing the carols in Trafalgar Square yesterday evening, and their chorus mistress introduced a beautiful Eastern European item with the words that we would recognise it as the jingle on the John Lewis television advertisements.

And indeed we did. Favourite tunes and songs often have to battle against the jarring new contexts in which they’ve found themselves: “Nessun Dorma” in Turandot and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” are the property, it often seems, of football hooligans, but the calm and beautiful rendition of the latter by Lesley Garrett in the new Carousel at the Savoy is a good fight back.

The best ever joke about this phenomenon was the kick of the jukebox in Jonathan Miller’s ENO Rigoletto, yielding the orchestral intro to “La donn’e mobile.”

But often the use of great classical music themes on film or television really can take an audience into new worlds of cultural delights, as I’m sure viewers of The Onedin Line and more recently The Apprentice have been lured into the wider Russian musical repertoire of Khachaturian and Shostakovich.

Music played its part in the wonderful selection of film clips shown yesterday at the National Gallery as part of the London Film School’s graduation ceremony, but most of it was original and newly composed.

The LFS has recently appointed Young Vic and Royal Court architect Steve Tompkins as their man for the new Covent Garden warehouse development in Dryden Street, now due to open as a BFI backed film centre in 2012.

The range of films produced by the students is truly amazing and, as veteran director Don Boyd commented, many of them are of a technical competence and professionalism unthinkable among film students of even just ten years ago.

The brilliant Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, not yet 40, was inducted as an honorary associate, and she reeled off a string of tips and hints for the new graduates: consider a job in plumbing; embrace a constant state of paranoia; make sure the first movie you make is your fully intended statement to the world — because it will always be seen as that; phone your mum regularly; and book some therapy for your partner.

I left Trafalgar Square mightily encouraged by the talent on view and momentarily transported by the carol singing. I was making my way happily towards a screening of the new James Bond movie and a long anticipated Indian dinner when a call from the office diverted me towards the opening of The Little Prince at Hampstead Theatre.

This proved a blessing in disguise, as the Bond movie was later described to me by my better half as all action and no content, and the Hampstead show was a timely reminder of the potential beauty of low-tech theatre in a high-tech media world.

It’s just a shame that The Little Prince isn’t quite as inspirational in reality as it should be in theory. Anthony Clark is a good director but I often feel his shows need a good kick in the pants; they come at us too tentatively.  

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