DIARY
CLIVE JAMES Watching Sydney Harbour Bridge erupt in coloured flames to mark the end of a brilliantly organised Olympics, I wept for London, city of the dud Dome and the invisible River of Fire. Last week I was in Paris and wept for London again. When I first came to Europe, 40 years ago, the London Underground and the Paris Metro were much of a muchness, even if the Metro had the edge in style. Now the com- parison draws tears of blood. I still travel on the Tube, but only when there is no appointment waiting for me at the other end, because it might have to wait for ever. Also, I am getting to the age when a long staircase starts to matter. The Metro has an unfair advantage there: dug shallow, it needs few escalators. But in all other respects, the Metro's supremacy is a clear case of intelligent management. At St Ger- main in the late afternoon there was still room down in the entrance hall for a Piaf- style singer good enough to pull a shower of coins. The train came hissing in on rub- ber tyres: wheels that don't wear out rails. In my carriage there was a jazz band play- ing Hot Club standards. When I got off at Chatelet, there was a woman on the plat- form reciting Racine's Phedre from memo- ry at the top of her voice. Nobody mocked her and many listened in respect as the perfectly cadenced alexandrines resonated in the station's tiled vault. She was proba- bly a nut, but might well have been a licensed busker like all the others. Look at the map and you will see that all I had done was cross the river, but the trip was nearly as rewarding as walking across the Pont Neuf, and anyway it was raining. Remember the last time you rode the Tube when it was raining outside? How far did you get? We apologise for the inconve- nience caused.
ith John Prescott in charge of the W finances, no doubt the London Under- gound will soon be fixed. After all, he was the man who saved the Dome. Without him, it might never have happened and we would have been deprived of the best long- running entertainment since Nimrod. I have always liked the cut of Prescott's jib: in this government he stands out like a good man in a bad advertising agency. But it is often a mistake to suppose that honesty precludes cunning. I bet it was his idea to stage the Dome jewel robbery, which would have been a PR masterstroke except for one crucial flaw. The fact that it was a bun- gled robbery was right in keeping: the spec- tacle of the blaggers bouncing their ham- mers off the armoured glass was pure Dome. But the actors playing the Sweeney mucked it up. They should have arrested those children for singing hymns without a licence. Instead they arrested the villains, thus transmitting a fatal air of competence. The essence of Dome culture is that noth- ing must go right.
Afew years of weathering have done nothing for the Centre Pompidou, which still looks bloody ugly. But you have only to go up to the fourth floor to see what it's got that Tate Modern hasn't: paintings, proper- ly arranged. Again, the French have a cer- tain advantage. Most of the painters were either born in France or else lived there, so the state had ready access to so much good stuff that not even Goering could manage to take it all away. But, as with the Metro, those in charge know how to capitalise on a lucky break. The paintings are grouped so that you can see who's who, what's what and when's when. (The same applies on the top floor of the Musee d'Orsay: first the Impressionists, then the Post-Impression- ists. Get it?) The present arrangement of Tate Modern is meant to discount all that, purportedly so as to enlarge our compre- hension, really so as to make the holes in the collection look less gaping. But the con- ceptual drivel written on the walls is a fear- ful price to pay, and the Domish impulse behind the whole effort is neatly symbol- ised by the glowing plastic cap placed on top of an otherwise impressive building in order to deconstruct its monumentality. Over and above the candy-tipped chimney, or rather below it and stretched out fla- grantly ahead, is that unbeatable testament to architectural arrogance, the bridge that rewrites the rules of suspension with such virtuosity that it doesn't work. Paris has one just like it, but I doubt if its creator will get another commission for anything bigger than a funfair ticket-booth. In London, the same genius responsible for our non-cross- able bridge is currently erecting a new obovoid office block for the Mayor, who sensibly doesn't want to move into it. A country in which Ken Livingstone has become the voice of reason is facing an uphill struggle.
Sydney learned its lesson with the Opera House, which looks sensational from the outside but whose revolutionary inside caused more trouble than it was worth. The architect, rethinking the conventions of theatrical design to fit a restricted lateral space, proposed to work all the major set- changes from the fly-tower instead of the wings. It was expensively discovered that the conventions of theatrical design, like the conventions of bridge suspension, are not susceptible to being rethought. The remains of Utzon's innovatory fly-tower mechanism are now rusting in a paddock somewhere near Broken Hill. Eventually, London's Dome will reach a similarly obscure destination, but not before all the wrong solutions have been explored. The free market has spoken: the Dome site is worth hundreds of millions more without the Dome. But in this instance the govern- ment, with its dwindling prestige on the line, can't afford to listen to the free mar- ket. And you never know, the government might be right for once. It was Mrs Thatch- er who gave Blair's Britain the courage to be born. Believing that the state should get out of the economy, she never grasped that a government is either dirigiste or it is nothing. Apart from an utterly buggered broadcasting system, her lasting heritage is the transport chaos for which Blair will have to take the rap. The Dome might not be enough to sink him — he can always blame Heseltine, dump Prescott or hand Simon Jenkins a poisoned peerage — but the trains could lose him the next election.
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