Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show ended after thirty years last night with a film about the RSC that embodied all the programme’s virtues and vices: a patient, informative documentary with an almost Stalinist lack of critical rigour.

The decline of the company under Adrian Noble was air-brushed out, the present situation taken as good, brave, positive.

There were embarrassing shots of the rehearsal room and a risible film sequence in the Ukraine with artistic director Michael Boyd and designer Tom Piper, both scruffily dressed with their shirts hanging outside their trousers, listening to a bunch of old peasant women in headscarves.

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The last few days have been glorious on the heath and I’m not the only comedian slithering around in my trainers and woolly top.

I’ve seen Ricky Gervais and Russell Brand — not together — blowing away the cobwebs of the old year in sporty fashion.

Ricky’s obviously not a natural athlete, but he looks comfortable enough at an old man’s ten mile an hour pace round the icy ponds.

And Russell came prancing down Kite Hill with the high-stepping elegance of a pure thoroughbred, although the all-black gear suggested he wasn’t quite as pure as the driven snow. 

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There was an odd conversation on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme about the staggered Press perfomances of Legally Blonde next month.

Director Deborah Warner — she’s directing T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, not Legally Blonde — thought it was a good idea to detonate the first night frenzy when critics, or a few of them, rush away to file overnight copy, looking as though (as Richard Eyre said) their trousers were on fire.

She then said it was the critic’s duty to record the audience response and a critic could only do so if he or she was still hanging around through the curtain calls and phoney standing ovations we’re lumbered with these days.

What bilge. Does she not think critics can gauge an audience reaction before we get to the end of a show? I was surprised that Quentin Letts didn’t pull her up on this, though he did say that writing fast and in the heat of the moment was all part of the fun of the job.

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There was a thin coating of snow in North London last night, and some neighbours had even started snowballing as we reached home after Keira Knightley’s opening at the Comedy.

Festivities were in order: the skinny actress had walked across the stage without falling over and had even done much better than that, confounding the doubters who thought the role of a bitchy Hollywood bimbo was beyond her range.

The critics were squirming, too, not only to try and do right by Keira ( contrary to popular opinion, critics are warm-hearted softies who like nothing more than basking in the success of others) — but also in keen anticipation of seeing themselves on the stage.

Martin Crimp’s Moliere adaptation transforms the poetaster Oronte into a creepy drama critic called Covington, nothing to do with Julie, but a nominal amalgam, perhaps, of myself and Billington.

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Madeleine and Andrew Lloyd Webber greeted friends and associates for a Christmas drink in their Chester Square home last night and Baz Bamigboye split his trousers.

This reminded me of the old seasonal gag my grandfather used to play around this time of year. He’d point out a threepenny bit on the floor, you’d bend down, and he’d tear a piece of material he happened to have about his person in a snorting raspberry.

Nothing so inelegant transpired with Baz, who wisely kept his back to the wall, sipped cranberry juice and edged discreetly towards the exit to seek reinforcements.

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As the decade closes in, round-up mania gathers apace and top ten lists proliferate like young girls claiming they’ve slept with Tiger Woods.

There was a lot of happy back-slapping in a Guardian article by Mark Lawson which quoted Sam Mendes, Sonia Friedman and Nick Allott explaining an apparent West End boom in a period of recession.

It has indeed been a remarkable decade. But there are clearly tough times just around the corner, in the regional theatre, which is tottering, the RSC which is on a knife edge and in the classical repertoire which is lacking in thrust and adventure.

Was Billy Elliot the best new musical of the decade? Sadly, it probably was, but I don’t think anyone will be performing it in fifty years time.

And what was the best new play? You can’t really point to anything by Pinter or Ayckbourn or Stoppard (except for Rock ‘N Roll, perhaps; but it’s not as good as The Real Thing or Arcadia) or Churchill (possibly A Number) or Hare.

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It has to be done. At least once in the panto season I close the office and sally forth to panto land, setting myself the task of an appropriate journey concomitant with the genre.

Will I go to old Peking or the deserts of Morocco, take in the ancient port of Baghdad or the cannibal tribes of Robinson Crusoe?

I played safe and went to Chipping Norton.

That was an adventure in itself, though a mere prelude only to the excitement of then getting from Chipping Norton to Bristol to catch the opening of Kneehigh’s Hansel and Gretel.

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So I said to Claire Price, as I shimmied through the throng, I especially enjoyed the last half hour of David Hare’s The Power of Yes at the National.That’s good, she replied, because that’s the part of the play I’m in.Phew, I’d said something right for a change. I’d had a bit of a rough ride up to that point at the star-crazed galaxy we call the Whatsonstage Awards party in the twinkling, pounding lights-and-music cockpit of the Cafe de Paris.Steven Berkoff made it quite clear that he was disappointed I hadn’t liked On the Waterfront more. And Richard Bean veered away from my cheery greeting with the look on his face of someone who’s just trodden in something nasty on the pavement. (more…)

There won’t be a clutch of overnight reviews this morning, for some reason, so we’d better start spreading the news: Sweet Charity at the Menier Chocolate Factory is an absolute humdinger, the best musical theatre revival of the year by several Manhattan blocks.

Judging by the audience last night, it was also the Cameron Mackintosh company Christmas outing. Unless they’re planning to move it straight into the West End, perhaps after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Novello.

(The Novello, incidentally, would be the wrong theatre, and it’s not that great for Cat, as it happens.)

The trouble is that by the time the Charity shop closes at the Menier in March next year, everyone in London who wants to see it probably will have — two or three times.

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James Sargant and Jill Fraser met when they were working for the RSC, were married, then bought the Watermill Theatre in the village of Bagnor, near Newbury, in 1981.

Jill died of breast cancer three years ago and now James has published the touching memoir she managed to complete in the last days of her illness, full of good colour photos and a bubbling sense of joy in having lived the dream in the delightful Berkshire venue.

My Watermill Story is also a more than useful history of an unfashionable venue, a converted mill, opened by Judy and David Gollins in 1965, that has launched countless fine careers, the pared down musicals of John Doyle, and Ed Hall’s all-male Shakespeare troupe, Propeller.
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