Arts Reviews

You couldn’t move across the BBC’s airwaves this week without stumbling on an anniversary programme celebrating 40 years since the launch of Radios One, Two, Three and Four. The Corporation even laid on a self-congratulatory ‘Radio Week’ on BBC4, which seems a bit OTT to me. (Did anyone really choose to watch the ‘earliest episode of The Archers ever recorded’ at 11 p.m. on Thursday?) What surprises me is not so much that radio has survived the onslaught of TV — there’s an aural quality to the experience of listening to a play, a documentary, even a news bulletin that TV can never satisfy — but that it’s survived despite

A poem At Casa Verde, five in the afternoon after Rimbaud I ripped my feet to bits walking the pilgrim trail to Guadalupe as far as Hidalgo. At Casa Verde I ordered a bottle of beer and the special: greasy tortillas, fried cactus, chillies con carne. I cooled my feet on the dirt floor under the table, pictures of movie stars and saints papered the walls, out of the kitchen came a Cuban-heeled boy, able- bodied, slicked-back, skintight jeans and a scowl — He could have me in a heartbeat, that one! — carrying a plate piled with tortillas, bowls of hot sauce and meat, cool beer, and shot glasses

Positively oceanic was the season’s principal novelty. It was not a new commission; rather, the rediscovery 440 years after its composition of the Mass in 40 parts by Alessandro Striggio, whose final Agnus Dei rises to a staggering 60, which ought to leave Tallis’s celebrated Motet (whose inspiration is reckoned to originate here) pale and gasping in comparison. Which is to hint already at disappointment. In the event (17 July) it was Striggio who paled. Even what one expected — an exploitation of spaces and masses in great planes of slow-shifting harmony — was curiously ordinary for such an extraordinary venture; almost completely devoid of the intricate finesse of the

Too many musicals in London? It depends whether you think the West End should be a temple or a funfair. Room for both, I’d say. But the fact that many musicals are thriving doesn’t mean any musical will. Hit shows succeed because they get virtually everything right. Bad Girls gets three out of five things right. The stylised sets are magnificently gruesome, the acting is terrific and the lyrics are pert and witty. But the tunes are forgettable and the plot is mishandled. The writers style themselves ‘story drivers’ so they should decide which car they’re in. They’ve got half a dozen excellent storylines here and they want to keep