Alongside my fear of suddenly finding myself on stage in the middle of a play and not knowing my lines, I have another fear: of being rung up by somebody compiling one of those questionnaires about "my cultural life" or "what I wish I'd known when I was 17" which appear in newspapers and magazines, and of not being able to think of the right sort of impressive answers. If I had spent as much time writing as I have spent working out what my Desert Island Discs would be, I would have written 247 novels by now.

The questionnaire in Q magazine asks its subjects if they "know a line of poetry". My mind would go completely blank. But one of the ones that I might be able to retrieve would be: "Sex and drugs and rock and roll/All my brain and body need/Sex and drugs and rock and roll/Very good indeed." Ian Dury died too young, but it is quite something to have written a line that is so famous that people have probably stopped thinking that anybody wrote it. It is one of those things that seems to have been there always, like "Happy Birthday To You" (a song written by two people in the Thirties, and still in copyright, which is why people so rarely sing it in movies).

Well, we know that our Prime Minister is in favour of rock'n'roll. But what about sex'n'drugs? Is that what we all need? When John Betjeman was asked in a TV documentary whether he had any regrets about his life, he replied: "Well, I haven't had enough sex." Philip Larkin said much the same in his poetry (although when Andrew Motion's biography was published, it emerged that he'd been doing rather better than people had thought). Alan Bennett once said that to ask him whether he was heterosexual or homosexual was like asking a man crawling across the Sahara desert whether he would prefer Evian or Perrier.

Is this a British thing? The last sensation on the London theatre scene was when Nicole Kidman took off some or all of her clothes (accounts varied, and apparently it depended on precisely where in the Donmar Warehouse you were sitting). And now the entire run of Terry Johnson's adaptation of The Graduate has sold out within hours of the announcement that Kathleen Turner will be appearing naked. Have you ever bought tickets only to be told that it's a "restricted view" seat? Presumably, similar advice is having to be given for The Graduate tickets: "I'm afraid these tickets only give you a side view of Kathleen Turner. Is that acceptable?"

It's not as if stage nudity is a novelty. During the Seventies, it was virtually impossible to go to the Roundhouse or the Institute of Contemporary Arts without the cast members taking off their clothes in order to assault our inhibitions. I don't know that it did much for my inhibitions, but it was frequently the only interesting part of the play. The problem with nudity in plays is that it is so distracting. You - or, let's come clean, I - stop paying attention to the play and suddenly become interested in the details of this particular actor or actress's body. And fringe theatres tend to be rather cold places. I once saw a play about the IRA dirty protests in which the main character was naked throughout. My companion's only comment was to suggest that, contrary to the superficial republicanism, the real argument of the play was that the protagonist had joined the IRA to compensate for having such a small penis.

Are other countries less preoccupied? This week, I was staying in a hotel in France. Flicking through the channels, I zapped past the French rubbish, the German rubbish, CNN, some strange sporting event, BBC world news and then, hang on, blimey, bloody hell, what's going on, yes, they're really . . . And then, after three minutes, a notice appeared saying that you have to tap in your credit card number if you want any more. Of course, I didn't. I'm too English. It would be on my credit card bill. I would be exposed and destroyed like Gary Glitter. But that's what we're protected from in England. That's why we're all so sorted out about it.

I've spent so much time on sex that I've almost no space left for drugs, except for some advice. People who say that governments can't influence social behaviour aren't entirely right. Levi sales of blue jeans have plummeted, and one explanation is that teenagers don't want to dress like the Prime Minister. If, as well as his jeans and his guitar, Blair could be seen with a spliff occasionally, that would do more to reduce drug use than any war against drugs.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website