A twirl and a half in Covent Garden

14st 7lb; 4.0 units of alcohol; 1,439; Judaea.

I had a rather disturbed night, thanks to some early evening channel-hopping that led me to watching a chunk of the BBC’s 80th birthday tribute to Bruce Forsyth. Brucie himself is remarkably well-preserved, though perhaps best avoided in close-up. However, a glimpse of his former Generation Game colleague and ex-wife Anthea “Give us a Twirl” Redfern was enough to make anyone shudder. The effect was made worse by watching a subsequent drama, in which it became clear that the make-up artists had not had to work too hard to transform an actress I once much fancied into a haggard old crone. I woke up in a cold sweat as the objects of desire who normally inhabit my dreams transformed themselves into hideous memento mori.

Today I returned to London by National Express and my attempt to build up a dossier of serious moans received a catastrophic setback. Not only did I enjoy an excellent lunch in the restaurant car, but the cheerful lady steward even insisted on extending the restaurant by bringing a tablecloth, cutlery and glasses so that I didn’t need to move from my seat.

This evening I took a delightful lady barrister and viola player (which is one woman rather than two) to see David McVicar’s new production of Salome at the Royal Opera House. It contained many of the things I like most in life: the gorgeous music of Strauss (R) superbly played by a vast orchestra, world class singing and a generous dollop of depravity, with special emphasis on gratuitous nudity. There was an attractive young actress standing around in the buff from the minute the curtain went up, presumably to provide a subtle clue that this Herod bloke might be considered a bit of a sleazebag. The set was the kitchen of his palace, with the Tetrarch’s candle-lit dinner party going on above. There was a carcase hanging in the pantry in the background, and it looked pretty much like a pig to me. Making a subtle point, no doubt. I am still wondering what it was.

There was a near incident when Jokaanen emerged from his cistern and someone sitting in the row behind us boomed ““How can a bloke that fat possibly climb out of that hole?” He was loudly shushed and physical violence narrowly averted. The costume designer might indeed have paid attention to the fact that their star would end up paying as much attention to trying to hold his stomach in as to his actual singing.

What disappeared in the Dance of the Seven Veils was not the soprano’s clothes, as recent convention dictates, but the set. Instead it became a Dance of the Seven Rooms, involving as much dressing up as stripping off. There was a lot of lunatic flailing around rather than dancing in any recognized sense of the word, which is pretty much how people used to describe my own technique in the days when I went to May Balls. The climax involved Nadja Michael in the title role splashing herself with water from a Belfast sink (a common feature of King Herod’s Judaea, apparently), producing much the same outcome as a Miss Wet T-Shirt contest. Her subsequent shenanigans with John the Baptist’s severed head were as depraved as anything I have ever seen, and I feared that I should have more nightmares. And I did, though they all turned out to feature the distinctly non-Biblical figure of Anthea Redfern and the severed head of Bruce Forsyth.