A weekly round-up of what's happening in the arts
All change at the Proms with the departure of the director, Nicholas Kenyon, who unveils his last season at the end of April. But who will replace him? Roger Wright, controller of Radio 3, has just come through a successful schedule revamp and has always made it clear that he would like the Proms job some day. Word is that he has even turned down tentative "approaches" for a number of other big jobs, including Kenyon's new post as head of the Barbican.
The playwright David Hare is, I am told, "seriously keen" to write a drama for television, but it's not quite happening yet. He turned down the chance to write the recent TV film about David Kelly (The Government Inspector, eventually overseen by Peter Kosminsky) on "compassionate" grounds: he thought it would be "too hurtful" for the Kelly family.
Those YBA scamps the Chapman brothers star in the illusionist Derren Brown's new Channel 4 series, Trick or Treat, this spring. Brown apparently makes the art critic Adrian Searle slash two of three canvases hidden behind sheets - promising to ensure that it isn't Arachnokitty, their prized painting of a cat with a cluster of eyes in its forehead. But after the picture was saved from the knife, the Chapmans got Searle to slash their painting off camera anyway. "It's now hanging in the Tate Liverpool under the title When Art Critics Go Bad," Brown tells me.
Charlotte Chandler's glossy new biography of Ingrid Bergman (below) seems oddly cavalier with certain facts. It has our heroine giving birth to Roberto Rossellini's baby . . . before she starts her affair with him. Maybe superstar "slebs" are capable of that sort of thing.
bendowell@ btinternet.com
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