Will Waspe
Even should Labour come out on top in this week's election, it is no certainty, I hear, that Mr Hugh Jenkins will retain his post as Minister for the Arts. Though Jenkins has tried hard and loves his work, he is in his sixty-seventh year and Harold Wilson is said to be thinking of younger men (who do not, however, include the ebullient Andrew Faulds).
Tougher line
One thing any future Arts Minister will have to steel himself to is taking a tougher line with the big subsidised theatre and opera companies which are already preparing their demands for bigger handouts.
The National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company both have holes in their cases, despite the palpable truth of their claim that costs have rocketed since their present grants were decided. The RSC expects to be at least E100,000 in the red, attributing the fall in 'attendances at Stratford to the 20 per cent fall in tourism, whereas it might more properly be attributed to productions that offend the Shakespearian purists who would otherwise patronise the theatre. As for the 'National', Peter Hall's complaint that he is committed to a programme for theatres in the new building seating 2,500 (whose opening has been delayed yet again) while able to collect revenue only from the 800seat Old Vic, would be more persuasive if the plays he had put on this year were actually filling the Old Vic.
Party whip
I am a little surprised that Lord Who should have resigned his party Whip so casually, since I am told he is hot on discipline. Reports reach me that parents of the hearty tots who join his club are asked on the application form whether they have any objections to occasional chastisement "by proper authority" being meted out to their young, and indeed have to sign their consent to this procedure.
Flight of angels
My report a couple of months ago that there was much unease among the backers of the London production of the Broadway hit, A Little Night Music (starring Glynis Johns and Margaret Leighton), has proved to be all too true. So many of them have now defected that the show scheduled for the Adelphi cannot now go on.
Punty menaced
The octopus of institutionalised unseemliness, not to say filth, seems to be insinuating its loathsome tentacles even into the pure world of peak-hour children's television. I am disturbed to note that the Master on Captain Pug. wash's ship is surnamed Bate, and that even the clean-limbed cabin boy is wont to address him politely by rank and name, in that order to the sniggers behind the hairy hands of the Beeb's liberated avant garde.
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