The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 15

THE MONDAY, JULY 14, 1997 15 DAILY TELEGRAPH John Birt calls it (reinventing traditional formats', but too much irony can be a real turn-off, says John Lanchester Who do they think they're kidding? ALK to people who an and that work you at will the organisation confused, hear BBC of frightened, dominated by "Birtspeak" and run by cloned managment apparatchiks intolerant of dissent. Read the BBC's Annual Report and you're presented with a very different picture; the only evidence the truth of the other account is the presence of Birtspeak. The BBC's Annual Report, like its director-general, is sleek and confident and heroically unafraid of This is a world in which, as the D-G's Review insists, BBC1's morning schedule is now "refreshingly different' (He singles out for praise the moronic Kilroy presumably this was written before the drop-in fiasco and the execrable Can't Cook Won't Cook.) This is a world in which people say things like "We eclipsed the 1997 Sony Awards'' (where "eclipsed" means "did well or "Good Morning Scotland made, another significant contribution to the life of Scotland' or "They us, the need to be reassured that the new Producer's Guidelines will be enforced rigorously." Oh we do, we do. Meanwhile, it's comforting to know that, in the words of the governors, "People continue to be the BBC's greatest You somehow can't feeling that, translated into the purer dialect of Birtspeak spoken by the D-G himself, that may turn out to mean "We will continue to eradicate surplus Still, one promise or threat has stood out from the Report's multicolour printing (complete with nowobligatory picture of Zoe Ball) and grey prose. The D- says that the BBC has "improved its light enter- Superb: Gerard Horan tainment" by "reinventing traditional He lavishes praise on the comedyquiz shows They Think it's all Over, Have I Got News for You and the 'anarchic' Shooting Stars, as spoof chat shows Knowing Me Knowing You and The Mrs Merton Show.

The D-G says that 'other classic programme genres' need to be similarly "We must apply the same inventiveness to genres like vari- to genres ety and factual entertainment." In other words, he promises more of the same. The airwaves will be jammed with postmodern, ironic, reinvented programmes. (Incidentally, the two main ideas for "reinvented' television programmes spoof quizzes and parody chat shows were taken from radio, where they have been for thrivingy When you remember Caroline Aherne as Mrs Merton that the comedy-quiz I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue has been a staple of Radio 4's schedules for decades, it becomes surprising that it took the television barons so long to try the format.) The trouble with Birt's vision is partly its lumping together of very, different programmes, deciding that what's good about them is this alleged reinventiveness. Shooting Stars, for instance, is a wonderfully funny programme which depends not so much on parody of genres" but on the realitywarping force field Picture: ALASTAIR MUIR ARTS ated by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. That force field isn't totally unlike that of, say, Morecambe and Wise, who could share a double bed on Saturday night primetime without raising single eyebrow it was clear that this was an alternative comic universe.

The antic anti-logic of Reeves and Mortimer is similar. Here for instance is an exchange between Mortimer and Ulrika Johnson, one of the quiz team captains (and goodnatured comic butts) of Shooting Stars: Mortimer: Name part of a monkey. Johnson: Um the tail? Mortimer: No, it's "his little I thought that was funny; you might well think it imbecilic (thousands do); either way, it does not offer any formula about to safe- the BBC's future. There is depressing about something, that invisible inverted commas are a Good Thing. It suggests that programmes ought to be made for a knowing and audience.

This is television. that relies on the ubiquity of television, and the public's saturation in it, for the joke to work; no one who had never seen a chat show or a celebrity interview would think The Mrs Merton Show funny. Indeed, to think that Mrs Merton is funny you need not only to be familiar with the standard format but to think it a bit tired, a bit clapped- out well on the way to being a joke. This is fine as far as it goes, but it would be nice to think that the BBC also saw the of selfdangers. Television's inertial pull towards self- obsession is bad enough as it is.

For me, The Mrs Merton Show is not an example of what the BBC needs to do more of. (For those who haven't seen it, the show features a thirtysomething comedian called Caroline Aherne, impersonating a sixtysomething housewife called Mrs Merton, who hosts her own chat show.) The problem isn't with the these (carefully spoof interviews. per se scripted) moments. What's wrong with the programme is the use of an on-screen audience who, broadly speaking, are the kind of people Aherne is pretending to be. Although the programme is careful not to patronise the old dears explicitly, the whole structure of the show patronises them: the idea is that we see the inverted commas, but they don't.

One example: Mrs Merton made a reference to a Seventies rock star whose name, as the old dears don't know but the programme's trendy young viewers assuredly do, happens to be rhyming slang for the rectum. This enabled Mrs Merton to make a (carefully scripted) joke about her son Malcolm practising anal intercourse. None of the old dears laughed; but then, they weren't supposed to, since the joke was at least partly on them. This to me seems an unattractive kind of humour, in which people in the know exchange wisecracks and signals over the heads of the uninitiated. But perhaps that's why John Birt likes it.

He calls the show "Fifties REVIEWS Vic Reeves (glasses) and Bob Mortimer (right) with Ulrika Johnson and Mark Lamarr in Shooting Stars MUIR Tall tales and consolation for a stranger in rural Ireland AMONG NEW Irish playwrights, it has been Martin McDonagh who has received the lion's share of acclaim and column inches. But, though there is no doubt that he is hugely talented, there is a heartlessness about his writing that I find increasingly off-putting. You'll be able to decide for yourself when his Leenane Trilogy transfers from Galway to the Royal Court later this month. In the meantime the Court is offering this marvellous new play by another young Irish writer, Conor McPherson, who seems to me to be just as gifted as and far more sympathetic than McDonagh. Still only, in his mid-twenties, McPherson has until now confined himself to monologues.

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In St Nicholas Brian Cox gave a tour de force as a boozy, self-loathing theatre critic who became bizarrely entangled with vampires. This new piece represents something of a breakthrough, because for the first time the characters actually talk to each other. But McPherson continues his habit of turning drama into spellbinding story-telling. The action is set in a quiet bar deep in rural Ireland, beautifully in Rae Smith's lovingly detailed design. You can even smell the peat smoke.

McPherson brilliantly captures The Weir Royal Court at the Ambassadors Theatre inconsequential pub chat between the landlord and two locals, all of them unmarried, but then a pushy local businessman arrives with a young woman who has just moved to the area. What follows is a series of tales of the supernatural, as these delightfully drawn characters attempt to impress the stranger from Dublin. But then Valerie tells her own story. I don't want to give too much away, because stories lose their point if you know how they end. Suffice it to Kirov's unforgettable lovebirds AT THE end of Act 3 of Swan Lake, apocalypse rends the world in the persons of Odile and Rothbart.

The devil has landed and shattered the faith of the man whose job it was to defeat them, Siegfried. Hope is over for all of us. It's a pity the Kirov's production doesn't end because until that point I believe you could hardly be left more crazed with misery and excitement. The last act spoils everything. There are strong likenesses between Swan Lake and Wager's Ring the same belief that man should accept the consequences of misjudgment, and yet that nature does not heed whether we are evil or not.

A great Act 4 like that at the Royal Ballet has the lovers killing themselves, because Siegfried's broken oath cannot be mended. The corps of Swans, in the most marvellous passage of dance and mass like the waters of the Rhine at the end of to wipe the slate clean. In post-Revolution Russia such ambivalence was considered dangerous to public order: so with one quick, lethal twist to Rothbart's feathers, Siegfried bounds free, resurrects Odette they pose for the camera like Hollywood lovebirds. Never mind. This performance was unforgettable: Siegfried was Igor Zelensky, Odette-Odile was Uliana Lopatkina, and the corps de ballet were their unchangingly tragic portrait of mass, docile despair.

One could enjoy a long discussion of the 24-year-old Lopatkina's physical qualities, her etiolated body, her superlative technique, say that Valerie's tale is an account of terrible personal loss, and it turns this amiable comedy into something much deeper and more painful. What makes The Weir so moving is the grace with which the characters treat and attempt console McDonagh, Valerie, McPherson seems to find the best in people and his writing has a compassion that never curdles into sentimentality. The play brings a whole community to life, showing lives that are far from fulfilled, indeed desperately lonely, but which are nevertheless endured with courage and humour. And without ever lapsing into the self-consciously poetic, the writing is rich. vivid not a woman bursting out of her feathers, but sedated by the deprivation of liberty.

She seemed both modern and mythic. Her Odile was the other face of that coin: inhuman, a a terrifyingly irresistible doll of murderous intent, like Chucky in a tutu. What sort of man would be seduced by these two visions? Usually there's a character vacuum where Siegfried should be. But not with Zelensky, whose current Weltschmerz in real life only deepens his Hamletlike prince. He is so big, so light, so solemn; he makes the strange story personal.

Tickets 0171 632 8300; Telegraph Box Office: 0541 557000 ISMENE BROWN Fans, Linen Lace We are now collecting for our forthcoming sale of Fans, Linen and Lace, to be held at our prestigious London Salerooms. For Free Auction Valuations on one piece or an entire collection telephone Joanna MacFarlane on: 0171 393 3989 Detail of a rare Queen Anne or send us a brief description of your Silk embroidered Linen Dress. item(s) with a photograph, if available. Sold for £14,375 DESCRIPTION OF NAME ADDRESS POSTCODE TELEPHONE To Joanna MacFarlane, Bonhams, Montpelier Street, London SW7 1HH BONHAMS and often wonderfully funny. Ian Rickson does this lovely play proud with a production that beautifully captures the mixture of comedy and pain, and the rhythms of the stories.

You find yourself hanging on to every word. All five members of the cast are superb, with especially fine work from Julia Ford as the brave, grieving Valerie, Jim Norton as old Jack, who touchingly describes how he missed his one chance of love, and Kieran Ahern as the gentle, melancholy Jim. McPherson is a distinctive talent to cherish and I await his next play with considerable impatience. Tickets: 0171 565 5000 CHARLES SPENCER (left) and Jim Norton Ballet Lake Coliseum the ability to unfurl those legs not merely but slowly, strokingly, like a cat's tail. Such finesse is not seen in many Kirov ballerinas and never in British ones.

But that total conquest of technique has been made for its purest end, which is to express a complete union between the music, choreography and drama. sees a dancer so musically sensitive, filling out every phrase with sustained legato (rescuing the sluggish conducting of Boris Gruzin) or so powerful an interpreter. Lopatkina's Odette was REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME PRIDE AND PREJUDICE) 00G PRIDE PREJUDICE) THE BEST IN CLASSIC DRAMA AVAILABLE ON VIDEO. Pride and Prejudice double video, Jane Austen box set (Available from 1st September) Available from all good retailers PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND THE WOMAN'S HOUR JANE AUSTEN COLLECTION IS ALSO AVAILABLE ON AUDIO CASSETTE. BB.