Wifi Waspe
It would be hard to find a film actor who feels more strongly than Frenchman Jean-Paul Belmondo about the suffering that television is inflicting on the cinema, or more incensed by the fact that the cinema might be said to be conniving at its own destruction by allowing so many films to be shown on the small screen. He is said to buy the rights of as many of his own old pictures as he can afford, just to keep them off television. It is ironic, then, that Belmondo happens to be one of the stars of the Alain Resnais film, Stavisky, which BBC 2 has bought for showing this Sunday but which won't be seen in the cinema in this country until it opens at the Curzon in London the following Thursday. Whatever might be thought of Belmondo's general complaint, he would seem to have a legitimate grievance in this case against Gala Films who seem to be breaking the trade agreement not to sell films to TV until they're at least five years old.
Valuations
Ruskin Spear RA, that potentially promising portrait painter who can usually be relied upon for a spot of sensationalism at the Royal Academy's summer exhibition, might be said to have suffered some mild humiliation this summer. While his 'True Blue', a portrait head of Margaret Thatcher (price tag £1,250) executed in about three tons of blue paint without any sittings being thought necessary by socialist Spear, was grabbing the Academy publicity, a ghost from a previous summer — Harold Wilson painted in pink behind a cloud of pipe smoke — was being auctioned at Sotheby's round the corner in Bond Street, and being knocked down to the National Portrait Gallery (!) for only £100.
Pro-market
Incidentally, though much has been written and said in recent weeks on the inevitable break-up of a large part of our national heritage if a Wealth Tax were to be imposed on works of art, neither Sotheby's nor their great auctioneering rivals, Christie's, has been moved to join the public chorus of voices raised against the possibility of such an iniquitous measure. Only the irredeemably cynical would see any connection between their silence and the fact that a Wealth Tax would bring a flood of valuable works of art into the leading auction rooms.
Snag
Anyone who saw my colleague Benny Green's Omnibus programme on the life and songs of Irving Berlin will doubtless be wondering why he didn't make a stage show of it instead — as a follow-up to his recent money-spinner, Cole (withdrawn from the Mermaid while still packing them in, to make way for the revival of The Doctor's Dilemma). The explanation is in the fact, mentioned in passing by Green on the box, that Berlin owns 100 per cent of the rights in all his songs and is such a hard bargainer that no one except Berlin would be making anything out of such a show.
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