Afternoon:
10°c
I adore musicals - the cheesier and more ridiculous the better. I loved Never Forget, the Take That extravaganza, and when Merrily We Roll Along was on at the Donmar a few years ago, I went to see it three times.
The idea, however, of a prancing Billy Elliot bursting into song seemed a step too far even for me. Until I saw it and loved it. Now the most unlikely of stage shows has won the ultimate accolade: an unprecedented 15 Tony nominations, including a shared Best Actor nod for the three young actors currently playing Billy on Broadway.
This is an extraordinary coup, all the more satisfying for its peculiar Britishness, complete with miners in donkey jackets, all performing in broad Geordie. And it's especially heartening because Billy Elliot - whether as film or musical - should by rights be complete rubbish.
Imagine the elevator pitch: "It's 1984 in County Durham. The son of a striking coal miner wants to learn to pirouette."
Yet somehow Stephen Daldry made a credible film out of it and now a show with the most nominations that any musical - including Broadway's homegrown finest - has ever received.
How can this be? Because dance translates. When I saw Billy Elliot: The Musical here last year I was one of the only Londoners in the audience - since it opened in 2005 it has been a huge tourist draw.
I must have heard 20 different languages during the interval and marvelled at how they were all coping with the Tyneside dialogue. They weren't, of course. They didn't understand a word. But it didn't matter. You didn't need to know anything about Margaret Thatcher or Arthur Scargill to get the point: the audience was spellbound.
Maybe it's partly down to Elton John (nominated for Best Original Score). He sprinkles some sort of magic crying dust into his songs which makes you tear-up even though you know it's hideously embarrassing and you are just being suckered by the most obvious sentimentality.
More likely, though, it's the universal themes: a child missing his lost mother, a father's fears for his son's future, a teacher finding a student who really could make it. Oh God. I'm weeping just thinking about it.
Most of all, though, Billy Elliot: The Musical has the mark of authenticity. Although it has been performed in New York, Sydney, Melbourne and (soon) Seoul and San Francisco, wherever it goes the script is unchanged and the actors are made to learn fluent Geordie so that they can deliver the lines exactly as they were written.
"They learn it like a language. Like a song," says Stephen Daldry. You have to love the draconian eccentricity of this edict.
The show's success is also weirdly poetic - to think that 30 years after Mrs Thatcher's rise to power, the miners' strike is inspiring our greatest theatrical export.
Very British, isn't it? We make a right old mess of things but, as Billy proves, we always come good in the end.
A Gormley or just gormless
Only three weeks to go until the first participants are announced for Antony Gormley's Fourth Plinth on Trafalgar Square.
Gormley is looking for 2,400 volunteers to pose for an hour at a time. The exhibit will work around the clock for 100 days — and will be filmed. It's Big Brother for time-starved bohemians.
So far, 10,000 people have applied. I'm sorely tempted. But something seriously puts me off. I recently went to a private viewing at Gormley's studio near King's Cross: it's packed with stunning sculptures and metallic experiments, any of which would look amazing in Trafalgar Square.
It's very uninteractive and 20th-century of me but who wouldn't rather see one of Gormley's beautiful creations up there than someone like, well, me?
I know we're all special and everything but are we really works of art? The plinth will be the judge.
• Binge drinking is something of a specialist subject, prone as I am to champagne "intolerance."
So I am bemused by this week's findings from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Women are binge-drinking more than ever, apparently, up from eight per cent of us in 1998 to 15 per cent in 2006.
For women, "binge drinking" is classified as "drinking two or three units at least once a week." So if you have two and a half glasses of wine two nights a week, you've got a problem.
Only 15 per cent? Surely shome mishtake. Unless the term "binge" is simply irrelevant and alarmist.
• Just when I thought the credit crunch had closed down every independent neighbourhood restaurant in central London, I was in Truc Vert on South Audley Street on a Friday night — a stone's throw from Bond Street but affordable, with friendly service and even a "mixed platter" (charcuterie and cheese) option for anyone too tired to read the menu.
The last to leave, an hour after the 10pm closing time, we were still picking away at the gorgonzola and they didn't seem to mind.
This wouldn't have happened a year ago. A late-night corner of Paris for £30 a head? Maybe we need more recessions.
