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“Wonderful stuff,” he sighed, “but a pity that Frankie Valli left them.”. After three months he asked for and got more money, but produced nothing. Sir Denis concludes: “As I see him reorganising the BBC today with much the same degree of confidence and much larger sums of money, I hope the end result will be better…”John [Birt] had no talent for the management of people, which in the end is the sort of management that matters most.”You may not believe it but… He describes “the moonlike smile stretching from ear to ear beneath a pair of huge circular spectacles…He reminded me,” writes Sir Denis, “of the wartime graffiti character Chad whom one would encounter peering over walls or round corners asking, `Wot, No Tea?’” The chap with the moonlike smile apparently got from Sir Denis money to subsidise a group of actors for three months to develop “the comedy show to end all comedy shows”.

Is Mr Fisher, a staunch supporter of trade union rights, a member of Equity? Or will he attract the pickets on opening night?Who is this arrogant spendthrift referred to in the new volume of memoirs from Sir Denis Forman, former chairman and MD of Granada Television. The revival at the New Victoria Theatre, Stoke, will mark the first time an arts minister has not just supported his portfolio, but nabbed a starring role in it.Mark Fisher, arts minister, is undeterred by the sporadic boos when he made a speech from the stage at the Glastonbury Festival. A method actor, Mr Fisher has apparently been studying ITN’s Trevor McDonald, and if he manages to mix McDonald and Moore, he should give a performance worth walking to Stoke for, particularly with such couplets as:”Confused? Amazed? Now gentles please take heartFor we will now commence the second part.”But there is one snag. But I, for one, shall cough on regardless, and impress my neighbours with my musical expertise.Stars are so expensive these days, but who needs ‘em when your local MP is an actor manque. Yesterday a new acting discovery was being filmed for a video cameo, playing a newsreader – originally played by astronomer Patrick Moore – in the stage revival of Return to the Forbidden Planet, Bob Carlton’s rock ‘n’ roll send-up of The Tempest. “That’s a bad cough,” he would muse, “what’s a good cough?”, which led on to a quasi-linguistic debate. There is, they would have us believe, no such thing as a good cough at a classical music concert.

This week Radio 3 announced it would be handing out cough sweets, with waxed, silent wrappers, at its live recordings, to silence the coughers

This is a retrograde step. One of the aesthetic pleasures of attending a classical music concert is coughing between the movements, and glaring at those novice concert-goers who applaud instead. A light clearing of the throat for early music, a heartfelt splutter for the romanticism of Brahms, a rasping hack for the drama of Beethoven.
So why the assault in every national newspaper on the aficionados of concert-going whose coughs emanate from years of musical study? The answer could be that Radio 3 has employed a marketing agency, Amadeus, to raise its profile. The coverage this week was ostensibly about Radio 3’s alarm over coughing, but it also served to remind the nation that Radio 3 made live recordings at concerts around the country A clever piece of classical music spin-doctoring. But, as always, the American dream has its dark underbelly: in this case, the revelation that Marilyn had been raped by her father regularly from the age of five.This is a powerful piece of irony but, in the end, that single irony was all the programme had to offer.

It didn’t come across as a critique of society, even as possessing a consistent moral viewpoint, and in another 30 years, when the Swinging Sixties have become as irrelevant as the Naughty Nineties or the Jazz Age, one suspects it will look pretty arthritic. But, for the moment, it’s looking spry enough.More leakage in the first programme of Not Just a Pretty Face (Radio 4, Thursday), a new series about the Miss America pageant: this time, the way that childhood leaks into our adult lives, how we fail to contain pain. The comedian Arnold Brown had a nice ad lib when people coughed in his Edinburgh Festival shows. Marilyn’s account of her traumas had been rehearsed to blank perfection. Whether this was a symptom of America’s culture of self-revelation, or a technique for coping with the awfulness of her life, the effect was to reduce her story to a trivially shocking anecdote.. Jean Snedegar told the story of Marilyn Van Derbur, Miss America 1958, who went on to become one of America’s most highly regarded public speakers. And the fine performances, particularly Debra Gillett as the briskly efficient serial murderer Nurse McMahon and Timothy Spall as Truscott, emphasised Orton’s individual ear for language – the deliberately Wildean paradoxes (why won’t Hal attend his mother’s funeral? “It would upset me” – “That is what funerals are meant to do”), the cadences of rigidly pious grief, the occasional obtrusive adjective (Hal describes his partner as “a very luxurious type of lad”), the baroque banality of sexual fantasy (Hal’s list of the various sizes and nationalities of the “birds” in the perfect brothel).All in all, Loot emerged as an engagingly watertight piece of comic craftsmanship.

The knowledge of life’s leakiness is the basis of most farce: the protagonists have a secret to keep, but false moustaches fall off, cupboard doors won’t stay shut, lavatories won’t flush, careless words are dropped, and bit by bit secrets trickle out, respectability dribbles away.
Joe Orton’s Loot (Radio 3, Sunday) is a classic example of the form, with its complex machinations involving stolen money, an embalmed corpse with loose-fitting artificial eyes, a bank robber who is constitutionally incapable of lying, and a thinly disguised policeman. Orton’s innovation is that the parties with the secret to keep are thorough-going criminals rather than put-upon bourgeois; the audience is invited to sympathise with Hal and Dennis’s straightforward criminality rather than with the cringing Catholic respectability of Hal’s father, or the state-sponsored viciousness of Inspector Truscott.Lindsay Posner’s production, broadcast to mark the 30th anniversary of Orton’s death, was a remarkably effective piece of farce – the swift pace and comic impact suggesting that radio need not be afraid of visual humour, only of humour that’s been insufficiently visualised. Our control may improve for a while in the middle, but we can’t ever hope to stop the leaking altogether. We ourselves begin life leaking out of every available orifice, and we carry on leaking all the way to the grave (even there, we don’t stop for a while). His latest release is Liszt’s Transcendental Studies (8.553119). Everything leaks. “I’m so happy to have this amazing opportunity, to record everything that I love.” Budget schmudget: this is a man in heaven.Jeno Jando’s bestsellers: Mozart Concertos Nos 12, 14 & 21 (Naxos 8.550202), Beethoven Sonatas Nos 14, 21 & 23 (8.550294).