Morning:
8°c
Here we go again. The very week a nude photograph of actress Brooke Shields aged 10 has been removed from a Tate Modern exhibition, on police advice, we have Anna Friel appearing naked on the West End stage in Breakfast at Tiffany's — and nobody bats an eyelid. Far from it.
One middle-aged theatre critic went into ecstasy, saying Friel was the sexiest sight on stage since Nicole Kidman appeared in the buff in The Blue Room and provided “a thrilling frisson of eroticism”.
Does this sound like suitable family entertainment?
It smacks more of gratuitous titillation. And could the producers be hoping to cash in on the fact that the alluring Ms Friel first hit the headlines when she was just 17 after performing an on-screen lesbian kiss in Brookside? Perish the thought.
Isn't there just the faintest whiff of double standards here? Whenever I hear the sound of moral indignation, the libertarian within me burns and turns to HG Wells for consolation: “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
Richard Prince's nude picture of the 10-year-old Shields, titled Spiritual America, doesn't invite us to gawp at her.
As his defendants have pointed out, he was using a ready-made image — a publicity photograph of the prepubescent actresss naked, her body wet from the bath — which was commissioned with the approval of the child's mother, who let it be published in a soft-porn magazine to get her daughter noticed and advance her career.
Prince's picture was a comment on the sexploitation of America.
Hollywood, of course, lapped up the young actress: she went on to star, aged 12, in Pretty Baby, as a child prostitute, and Blue Lagoon.
Protesters against the Shields picture say it will be a “magnet” for paedophiles.
That may be so — but all children are “magnets” for paedophiles. Do we have to lock all the youngsters away? Should children never appear nude in public?
This is paedophilia-frenzy gone mad. The level of hysteria against paedophiles is comparable to the campaign against witchcraft in the Middle Ages.
Except these days we require our victims to be burned at the stake of public opinion.
This furore is reminiscent of the controversy over the Nan Goldin photograph of two young girls, owned by Sir Elton John, two years ago.
We encourage nudity on stage in respectable theatres, we permit pole-dancing clubs all over the West End and we allow our children to be sexualised from an early age by letting them wear make-up and suggestive clothing.
But if a work of art appears in a gallery which dares to challenge our so-called liberal values, we are desperate to cover it up. Bah, humbug.
Parrots, a rather tasty pest
Thank goodness parakeets have now officially been declared a pest.
Only this week I was walking in Wormword Scrubs (what could be more perfect than walking in the shadow of a prison wall? — on the outside, that is) and to my horror discovered hundreds of them squawking in the bushes.
I lived in the Amazon jungle for three months but not even there did I see so many green-feathered birds congregate in one place.
I was alarmed and felt that I had walked on to the set of Hitchcock's The Birds.
Tony Juniper, from Friends of the Earth, says the 40,000 parakeets in the UK have the potential to be the “the grey squirrels of the skies”. Do not be taken in by their exotic plumage.
They are a pest — but believe me, they are quite tasty. I ate a parrot in the Amazon and it was rather good. The only problem is trying to catch them.
Hawking the unfathomable
The resignation of Stephen Hawking from his Lucasian professorship is a cruel reminder that I have still not finished reading A Brief History of Time, 21 years after its publication.
Oh boy, have I tried. Every few years I take it down from my shelf and work my way through the first chapter. And then, guess what? Real life, or time, intervenes.
The mysteries of the universe are far better conveyed, as I discovered this week, by TS Eliot's Four Quartets.
In Josephine Hart's Poetry Hour at the British Library, the audience were treated to a splendid recital of all four poems by Jeremy Irons and Dame Eileen Atkins: “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past.”
That is surely all we need to know in a nutshell. Burnt Norton contains my favourite line: “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” The perfect excuse for not finishing any book by Stephen Hawking.
• The jury is still out on whether Andrew Marr was right to ask Gordon Brown on the eve of the Labour Party conference about pill-popping and his failing eyesight.
Even David Cameron thinks Marr overstepped the mark when he popped the questions on his show in Brighton regarding the former — but I'm not so sure.
When Tony Blair was leader of the opposition in 1995, I rang up his office to find out if it was true that he was taking communion in a Catholic church.
His then press man, Tim Allan, responded in a very un-Christian way: he said it was none of my business, told me to “f*** off” and hung up.
I did point out at the time that my query was surely in the public interest, because if Blair ever got into Downing Street he would soon be choosing Anglican bishops.
I think we have every right to know about our politician's religious convictions as well as their medical ailments.
Of course they have every right not to tell us. But it's when they start issuing hot-headed denials that we should be concerned.
