Thomas Schütte's colourful Hotel for the Birds was due to replace Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant (below) on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in April. The date was then put back to this month - and now it's been delayed indefinitely. There are mutterings of conspiracy, some suggesting the perch-like Perspex sculpture was too pigeon-friendly for the Greater London Authority, which oversees the project (under Ken Livingstone, the GLA has implemented a drastic pigeon-eradication programme). Still, the great Sarah Lucas's rejected proposal - a red Ford Fiesta spattered with pigeon droppings, called This One's for the Pigeons (Oi! Pigeons, over here!) - would, I suspect, have been even more embarrassing . . .
It's not only his decision to include Michael Ball in the programme that's causing headaches for the departing Proms director, Nicholas Kenyon. His plans to screen concerts at Odeon cinemas throughout Britain were scuppered last year after "technical problems" - but may (only may, mind) be resurrected for this year's season.
Channel 4, desperate to regain credibility and prestige, has commissioned the first British drama project by the former Mormon Neil LaBute, writer of In the Company of Men. It will be an "epic" drama series called 21 to 30 and, I'm told, will be a fictional version of Michael Apted's documentary series 7 Up.
The London Coliseum, home of English National Opera, remains the most likely sacrifice to the 2012 Olympics. A clause in the Coliseum freehold contract states that ENO must stage a production there every six months. "If the Arts Council deliberately starved it of production cash, it would have to foreclose and sell up," a musical bigwig tells me. "It would be easy."
bendowell@btinternet.com
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