No prizes for Oliviers on radio

I didn’t go out of my way, exactly, to avoid the Olivier Awards last night, but I’m glad I wasn’t there. Instead, I was driving around West Yorkshire catching up with friends.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of tuning in to Radio Two for an outside broadcast that plumbed the depths even of recent BBC outside broadcasting standards.

Presenter Paul Gambaccini was oily and under-informed, while Jodie Prenger on the red carpet — was there a red carpet? it should have been flowing with Jodie’s blood — screeched like a banshee at James Earl Jones: “Are you chuffed to bits?”

Before I turned off sharpish and ripped the radio from its housing in the dashboard, I heard Jodie ask Mark Rylance if he, too, was “chuffed to bits,” ditto Jude Law, while Jodie wasted no time in telling us how chuffed to bits she was herself.

After five minutes of this you wished she was chopped to bits, and fed to the nominees on little squares of burnt toast, which I bet would have tasted better than the rubbish food you always have to endure at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

Jodie sounded like Su Pollard on speed, and gushed incontinently at everyone and every show she had either seen or not seen. Hilariously, everyone she spoke to in their wonderful “chuffing” new shows informed her politely that these shows were puffing their chuffing-well last and all coming off in a week or so’s time.

It all painted a bizarre and ghastly picture of West End sycophancy and failure, and I reckon SOLT president Nica Burns will be lucky to get an item on BBC Radio Budleigh Salterton next year.

At least the judges — and who are they, pray? — got the best actor and best musical awards right, and I fully approve the awards for Michael Wynne’s The Priory and Mike Bartlett’s Cock, both at the Royal Court.

But it seems not just perverse, but positively stupid, to declare the two-hander The Mountaintop best new play in the same year as Jerusalem and Enron, Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art or even Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice.

Katori Hall’s winning play, which I admired, especially for the performances of David Harewood and Lorraine Burroughs, is a sly debunk of Martin Luther King on the eve of his assassination, and the chamber maid played by Burroughs is very loosely based on Katori’s own mother, who was in the vicinity but nowhere near King; she always regretted not hearing him speak.

But it’s not a play with any great reverberation today, nor does it signify any grappling with our native culture in a resounding or meaningful way, as do all the other plays I’ve mentioned.

And I bet it doesn’t herald any truly significant playwriting career on either side of the Atlantic. It’s a fairly good fringe play grown way too big for its boots.

Still, I’ll be delighted to be proved wrong when it bows on Broadway.

I just hope they don’t ask Jodie Prenger to host the Tonys. Unless they’re feeeling very masochistic, of course; but I bet they’ve learned their lesson over there from inviting the egregious Ricky Gervais to host the Golden Globes, and he was a professional stand-up.