The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 25

ARTS 1 9 The Guardian Saturday September 6 1997 powerful was going on, but for much of the time radio was part of the phenomenon, rather than an elucidator of it. So, although Isabel Hilton wrote pertinently in this newspaper on Tuesday of the excessive, pious coverage, she also contributed to it by presenting Radio late-night Monday programme of tributes from BBC foreign correspondents. By Tuesday the royal family had been so demonised, like panto baddies whose every mention provokes hisses, that I'd even begun to feel sorry for them. Throughout it all I found myself, like the rest of the world, in shock (as if disbelieving that Diana, in all her meta-fame, could lie slumped in the back of a car), sad at the loss of a colourful young woman and mother, and yet apparently unlike the rest of the world not in personal grief. After all, despite the simulacrum of intimacy conferred by the media, I didn't actually know her.

Since so many free-thinkers around me were gripped by this collective mourning, I sought affirmation from the radio that I wasn't mad or heartless. It came in two programmes. Talk Radio's resident intellectual, David Starkey, gave the subject his usual combative treatment, and already on Sunday morning was anticipating her posthumous mytholo-gising. While respecting the feelings of the distraught, he also tried to understand them. "Why should you care?" he asked one, later suggesting that if Diana hadn't been such a looker, her charitable works wouldn't have produced quite such adulation.

"I can't see why we should think better of when they're dead than when they were alive." It was a theme elaborated in Radio 4's Call Diana Madill, where dissenters were encouraged, and studio guest Anthony Howard provided a welcome note of cool sanity. Some callers were less temper Corporal punishment James Hazeldine (right) lays into Rupert Penry Jones in Chips With Everything at the National PHOTOGRAPH: TRISTRAM KENTON Hello again. Mr Chips back in fashion. And about time too, says Michael Billington Lest we ignore For three days this week British radio metamorphosed into one giant phone-in and found itself a new role bereavement counsellor. The airwaves throbbed with the grief and disbelief of listeners who called not because they had anything new to say about Princess Diana, but because they needed a shared, public space to voice their reaction to her death.

As after Diana's Panorama interview, radio became that forum. Yet even on Sunday, the scale and tone of the broadcasts were proving disturbing. BBC Radio, for instance, merged Radios 4 and 5 Live for the whole day, hastily (on an August Sunday a duty editor's nightmare) mounting obituary and news programmes. In the afternoon, Radio 3 transmitted Jacqueline du Pre's recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto, as if only another victim of a tragic early death could be entrusted with the sombreness of the occasion. By the end of Sunday, the idealisation of Diana was firmly entrenched as the dominant broadcasting style, and by Tuesday it seemed as if almost everyone liberals and traditionalists, monarchists and republicans, feminists and recanted feminists had claimed her as their own.

(Indeed, the phrase "I'm not a royalist, but became as widespread as its older sibling "I'm not a feminist, but In the daily panel discussions and news reports (like Radio 5 Live's After Hours and Nationwide), Diana had become emblematic of this, symbolic of that a prototype, template, beacon, evacuated of almost any unmetaphorical self. Clearly something culturally important and individually Fool's gold An estimated 15 million viewers saw the Gold Blend couple's final tryst on Monday night. Mark jumped on the train to reprove his love and diffidently plight his troth. "I can't believe you took the coffee," he told Louise. "You know, if we are going to have any kind of relationship, you're going to have to learn to share." The camera then pulled back and the train rolled on through a glorious South American landscape, taking the pair, their boring romance and their filthy coffee off our screens for good.

This was the end of Nescafe's remarkable decade-long TV ad campaign, which has boosted sales of the instant coffee by 70 per cent and made my life more miserable by at least 200 per cent. It has been a woeful trend, this drift towards cliffhanging, narrative advertisements: poorly written and always undermined by clunking product placement, they are the lowest grade of TV drama. Apart, obviously, from Sunset Beach. But millions think otherwise. In December 1992 some 30 million viewers watched the original Gold Blend couple finally declare their love for one another.

Britain had gone mad: the drama, such as it was, captured the nation's hearts, apparently, and prompted a disturbing culture industry a bestselling novel called Love Over Gold, and a tie-in CD of love songs. Thank Heaven those crazy days are over. Or are they? They are steadily being replaced by an even more loathsome and Arnold Wesker is Fashion is a giddy creature. Both Arnold Wesker and Bernard Shaw have lately been confined to the theatrical margins. They are, I suspect, considered a bit too preachy and tub-thumping for our non-ideological age.

But both bounced back this week in major revivals that proved they are much more ambiguous, poetic and mysterious than the fashion-mongers assume. Wesker's Chips With Everything, dating from 1962 and buoyantly staged by Howard Davies at the Lyt-telton, famously uses National Service training as a metaphor for the English class system. We follow the progress of a group of raw RAF conscripts during their initial eight weeks' square-bashing and see them transformed from knobbly, awkward Fred Karno individuals into a highly disciplined unit. But the key figure is Pip Thompson, a general's son who mutinously identifies with the rankers and who, until the very end, resists all attempts at absorption by the officer class. It sounds like a piece of didactic realism; and it is perfectly true that Wesker has a point to make about the English class system's ability to ate: one regarded it all as a soap opera, another talked of "gross while a third suggested that canonising someone was another way of dehumanising them.

Most shocking was the man who admitted that he'd cried more I for Diana than for his late wife (and didn't seem to connect the two). Here was a programme which allowed one to glimpse the various and com plex ways in which we connect our internal dramas to figures on the public stage. But soon it was over and the plaudits recommenced. dramatically inept trend the endorsement that runs through the programme like a sore. Consider the ad for Wella that straddles the sitcom Friends.

A clutch of irritatingly nellie women settle down facing us to watch the show on their sofa, refreshments at the ready. In the first ad break the phone rings, but they ignore it; at the end of the programme they sit smugly back, happy in the knowledge that they have seen a funny show and that their choice of haircare products is unimpeachable. It's nauseating stuff, which has this unwanted effect: it's hard not to think, "If these fluffheads like Friends, then for the good of my mental health I shouldn't." Consider also that on Sky 1 The Files is brought to us by Hewlett Packard, the information technology conglomerate. Why would a computer conglomerate want to associate itself with Fox Mulder's paranoia, with a character whose computer password is "Trust no Yes, yes, to be associated with the ratings, of course; but The Files is too unsettling, surely, for product placement in its environs to be commercially wise. On Monday evening, the Gold Blend ad was followed by a cute little story for Cadbury's Roses, the sponsors of Coronation Street.

A chocolate cat bounded across the terrace rooftops and leapt at a chocolate pigeon, which flew off (clever that) across chocolate Wetherfield. By the time Coronation Street began in earnest, I felt purged, too dramatically challenged to take in self-righteous Sally's boring complaints about philandering Kevin and his badly-made up floosy. After the credits, we cut back to the chocolate-cat drama and were presented with this charming vignette. A chocolate fireman, having rescued the chocolate cat from the edible roof, was given Cadbury's Roses by a chocolate-cat owner. The present was the only thing not made of chocolate in the shot, which, from Cadbury's point of view, is surely unfortunate.

This second revolution in narrative advertising is grisly to witness. These ads mar programmes, affront the intelligence of viewers, and undermine writers, actors and directors. They have a big future. BSAMIB BABIES' UBUIILL RETURN THSM TO WUSVml I I Jonathan Romney sees three films inspired by cello music at the Venice festival Bach to front stifle dissent. When the Pilot Officer repeatedly tells Pip, "We listen but we do not we applaud but we do not act," he offers a classic demonstration of what Marcuse called "repressive But, seeing the play again for the first time in 30 years, I was struck by its theatrical ambiguity.

Behind the cool assurance of the rulers, Wesker implies, lies panic and uncertainty, beautifully caught in one scene where Angus Wright's Pilot Officer makes a nervous pass at a disdainful squaddie. But Wesker's ending is also theatrically equivocal. Intellectually, we deplore the transformation of the men into perfectly-drilled automata: emotionally, we can't help getting a buzz from their physical precision. And it comes as no surprise to find Wesker writing, in 1995, that he enjoyed square-bashing and that to see a rabble of clumsy men turned into an efficient unit is a "mesmerising The play has the complexity of art. But it is also much more than the piece of realistic data many initially assumed, indeed Nigel Dennis once wrote a mocking piece in Encounter suggesting it was actually written by RSM Brit-tain.

Seeing it again, one is struck by its weird poetry. The language is artificially lean. And the play Oh no Ma and Francois Girard years to complete and involved Yo-Yo Ma in such projects as the planning of a public garden in Boston. Of the three films that I've seen, one is magnificent, and as for the other well, I'm sure they were highly enlightening to work on. You can see why Yo-Yo Ma wanted to collaborate with Torvill and Dean BY GARRY TRUDEAU SMOOTH, rufiueiiiNv ftp.

der, is first-rate, the occasion exhilarating. In this of all weeks, the play acquires an extra potency, reminding us that, in the late nineties, the Establishment, far from successfully stifling internal opposition, threatens to be unravelled by it. If Wesker is a much more poetic writer than we allow, David Hare's fine revival of Heartbreak House at the Almeida also proves that Shaw is infinitely more than a manipulative brainbox. Once again explicit intention is subverted by art. Shaw's preface makes it clear that he was attacking the division between power and culture in pre-1914 England: his point is that the cultivated classes brought heartbreak on themselves by disdaining political responsibility.

But, in performance, one is struck by Shaw's ungovernable compassion for his despairing, self-destructive Bloomsburyites. Hare is not the first director to tap into Shaw's emotionalism: Trevor Nunn's 1992 Haymarket revival did precisely that. But Hare's gift is for propelling the action forwards (this version runs three hours compared to Nunn's four) while revealing the pain behind the social mask. Nowhere is this better seen than in Penelope Wilton's superlative 5EI to mm- i in pin ii il ium hi mi Will Iff UHHH1HIK1II BHJl-nU I IBIW-liliriiiflHh lt 1 Hesione Hushabye, who rejoices in the role of radiant enchantress and then stops the heart with her admission that she does so in order to go on living "in this cruel, damnable Hare gets across the key point that Shaw's play is a form of moral strip-poker in which despair is finally acknowledged. Richard Grif-fiths's Captain Shotover, though lacking the blasted antiquity of a Sussex Lear, movingly reveals himself to be a rum-fuelled dreamer.

Emma Fielding's supposedly ingenuous Ellie Dunn finally shows herself to be a tough realist driven by economic need. And Patricia Hodge's Lady Utterword is the outwardly cool colonial wife, terrified she may not have a heart to break. This is not Shaw the preacher but Shaw the poet showing Edwardian England to be a House of Illusions forced to face the truth by the imperatives of history But if the play lives on it is because it has the ambivalence of art and because there is still something insufferably moving about the spectacle of a whole class craving apocalyptic destruction. Chips With Everything is in rep at the Lyttelton, London SE1 (01 71 -928 2252). Heartbreak House is at the Almeida, London N1 (01 71 -359 4404), till October 1 1 Longpigs, Cinnamon Smith The Falcon TOMORROW'S SECRET LOCATIONS IS: Dr Martens Department Store, 1-4 King Street, WC2 contains two pieces of physical theatre.

In one, the men, patronisingly invited by the officers to sing Presley numbers or tell dirty jokes at a NAAFI party, menacingly chant a peasant revolt song, The Cutty Wren. In the other, under Pip's direction, they carry out a perfectly choreographed night-raid on a coke depot. Neither episode is particularly plausible. Both, however, are theatrically thrilling. Today we tend to divorce physical from verbal theatre.

Wesker's great achievement, both here and in The Kitchen, was to show that they are allies rather than enemies. Howard Davies's production, staged in a wire compound designed by Rob Howell, also captures Wesker's blend of the comic and the serious: the opening scenes of Reluctant Heroes farce shade into something much more sinister with the persecution of the haplessly incompetent Smiler. And the touching scenes between Rupert Penry-Jones's priggishly authoritative Pip and Eddie Marsan's loyal working-class disciple, Chas, authenticate Wesker's claim that the characters are two sides of himself. The cast, including James Hazeldine as the corporal who lives with the men but sides with the officers, and Julian Glover as the lofty wing comman for Patricia Rozema's film, but you wonder why he didn't predict the kitschiness of the result. And I've rarely seen a project as elaborately pointless as The Sound Of The Carceri.

Francois Girard, who made the extraordinary Short Films About Glenn Gould, inserts Yo-Yo Ma's image into computer mock-ups of the cavernous Carceri, the prisons of Piranesi's engravings. There's something desperately literal-minded about the whole conceit miking up the cello with the right amount of reverb for each engraving, as if. Yo- Yo Ma were actually playing at the bottom of some echoing dungeon. It doesn't much help to corral in a group of philosophising yes-men to give the project intellectual clout he still looks as if he's been magicked into the sleeve of a seventies progressive-rock LP. But Sarabande, the contribution by Atom Egoyan, is something else again a complex little gem of a film that is far more satisfying than Egoyan's latest full-length feature, The Sweet Hereafter.

Instead of simply giving us something to look at while Yo-Yo Ma plays, Egoyan builds a story around the playing. It's a circular, several-stranded narrative in the style of Exotica and his earlier films. More importantly this is about music, after all it's conceived in the spirit of Bach counterpoint. On Monday's aits pages Jonathan Glancey on buildings that kill. Brian Logan on black comics making it in the mainstream.

Plus reviews and Nancy Banks-Smith's TV Some musicians are fussy about choosing just the right concert hall. Not cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He'll play anywhere on crowded street corners, rooftops, in the back of limos, even on a ledge over a vertiginous chasm in virtual space. If it serves no other purpose, the series ot six hour-long films called Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired By Bach adds some bizarre new venues to the classical repertoire. Publicity for the series doesn't actually bear the screaming tag-line "The Bach cello suites as you've never heard but it's implied.

This isn't quite the Wig-more Hall answer to MTV, but it often comes close even though it is intellectually bolstered by the cellist's philosophical interest in music's relation to other disciplines, including architecture, kabuki dance, gardening and ice-skating. The series, directed by six Canadian film-makers, took five i haw a Berimim. sinczi Nouwm Narjusrem-rmwusiDm COPS WHO AT in Mm i ABOUICWeK. I Doonesbury.