There is the sacked director of sales Keith Cooper earning a crust as a waiter; the former chief executive Mary Allen tending her garden; a deposed box office manager running a record shop.Even Lord Eatwell, it seems, as Royal Ballet chairman and president of Queens College, Cambridge, is not in what he sees as the most “real” employment. “When I see old pals carrying their red ministerial boxes, I do feel a bit envious,” he told me a little forlornly.THE revival of Peter Shaffer’s farce, Black Comedy, has prompted many memories in print of the original Sixties’ production at the National Theatre. There have been many references to the young Maggie Smith, Albert Finney and Derek Jacobi in the original cast: but none to the lightly- gifted actress who played the fluffy deb in the show, Louise Purnell. She was a mainstay of Laurence Olivier’s company, portraying a definitive Abigail in The Crucible among many other roles. But she left acting for domesticity, and with no film successes seems to get forgotten whenever critics reminisce in print.WHEN Sliding Doors had its premiere on Monday it was noted that the Arts Council had refused to give the movie any lottery money. It’s far from being the Arts Council’s only failure to pick a winner. In his new history of the council, Richard Witts reveals that it turned up its collective nose some years back when urged it to invest in Cameron Mackintosh’s new venture.The worthies on the council laughed heartily at the preposterous idea Whoever heard of making a musical out of T.S Eliot’s cat poems?.

“THINGS fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” wrote Yeats; and how very wrong he was. At present, the centre is holding so bloody well that it looks as if there won’t be anything else left within a few years, not only in politics but in radio. Talk radio is converging with music radio, radio is converging with television, and the stations are all converging with each other.
At any rate, new “bi-media” departments now reign at the BBC (so the people who make Watchdog and Esther will now also be in charge of all the features at Radio 4 – inspires you with confidence, no?), and TV personalities (Martin Bashir, Peter Snow) abound in the new schedules. Meanwhile Radio 3 seems to be trying to disguise itself as Radio 2 to escape its creditors, and Radio 4’s new party-piece is its spot-on imitation of Radio 5. You notice this most with Broadcasting House, Four’s new Sunday morning current affairs chat-show – not simply because of the presence of Eddie Mair, a Five Live alumnus, but because it has the free-form, time-filling feel of so much of Radio 5.The show’s most notable innovation has been its glance at the front pages: where other current affairs programme will give you the headlines, Broadcasting House will also give you the plugs for inside features.Since Mair doesn’t seem to open the paper to actually read these features, this must be one of the least labour-intensive services offered by any radio programme, as well as one of the least useful.More interestingly, on Monday, fiction seemed to converge on reality: in On the Whole It’s Been Jolly Good, a monologue written by Peter Tinniswood to mark Maurice Denham’s 60th year in broadcasting, the actor played Sir Plympton Makepeace, a Tory buffer from the Shires who after 60 years marking time as a backbencher has just lost his seat to one of Blair’s babes.

Makepeace is a self-indulgent, lazy and not especially intelligent man with few, if any, convictions.His one contribution to political life was a bill to outlaw traffic on roads frequented by badgers; and he managed to go through the 1980s without registering Margaret Thatcher as anything but “That woman with the loud voice – I think she was the Prime Minister, but to me she looked more like a power-mad swimming baths attendant”.On the other hand, he is kind enough, as long as it doesn’t interfere with his pleasures (he is a connoisseur of what he calls “dalliance”, and an enthusiastic train-spotter): it is his proud boast that in all his time in Parliament he has done no harm to anybody.Perhaps it was just Denham’s shrewd, energetic performance, but this seemed more concentrated and thoughtful than most of Tinniswood’s work – allowing the listener to see the damaging apathy of this sort of genteel reaction, but also to see that there are worse sorts of damage.It made an intriguing pairing with Collapse of Stout Party, Sir Julian Critchley’s daily readings from his autobiography. Heaven forbid we should draw our own conclusions.This nudging shows little faith in his readers’ intellect, and slows the otherwise snappy pacing. I have always thought that a story engages its readers as much through what it leaves out as what it includes With Irving, nothing is excluded; no ellipses are allowed The omniscient author both shows and tells. He stage-manages not only character and action but the reader’s responses. Events in books find equivalents in reality and vice versa: so Ruth’s old phobia about clothes closets comes chillingly to life in Rooie’s red room.However, if you’re looking for a subtext: forget it.