...on BBC2 at 11pm, discussing this week's cultural events. (It's the show that has succeeded Newsnight Review). If any of my lovely readers wants to put it on YouTube, send me a link, and I'll post it here.

I hereby renounce my republicanism – on the condition that Stephanie Beacham is immediately crowned Queen of England. Two weeks ago, the honey-voiced grande dame of Dynasty wafted into the Celebrity Big Brother house alongside a babbling gaggle of non-entities. She had nothing with her but an I'm-being-paid-lots-for-this Zen and an expensive handbag. But she has proceeded to show something that is almost never allowed on to television, or into any British workplace: a 61-year-old woman who is cleverer and wiser and more confident than anyone around her, freely expressing her complex emotions and longings and lusts. If we peer into the surprising story of Stephanie, we can see one of the great scandals of Britain today: the premature consigning of my mother's generation of women to atrophy and decline.

The Big Brother house is the graveyard of dignity. It is a place where every burp is recorded and replayed, and rows about a burnt chicken cause an international race row. It reduces everyone inside it to pettiness and tribalism and shrieks. Yet Beacham has an inherent poise that no amount of fish guts sprayed into her face while she is strapped to a roundabout (yes, they did) can dent. While the other "celebrities" neurotically fret about their status, she is the one who does the work, annihilates the fundamentalist political ravings of Stephen Baldwin, and makes languid but piercing observations about what is really going on. She gets the hot young men to massage her feet – "Darling, you can never be too hard" – and when they are given absurd tasks asks Ivana Trump with a chuckle: "Are we whores, or fools?"

Against a chorus of self-pity from the rest, she says simply: "This is the best holiday I've had in years ... I feel lighter [and] happier to just be me than I have in years. I could fuss around and try to make my hair and my face look better but [I choose] the pleasure of giving in, of just being."

This is the wisdom of so many sixtysomething women. It comes from a lifetime of seeing hopes fulfilled and dashed; from decades of being scarred and seeing the scar tissue heal, getting crinklier and richer every time. Yet we are a country that, today, is systematically writing off these women – in a way that is bad for all of us, whatever our age.

At the same time as the nation was falling for Beacham – she is favourite to win – Harriet Harman was giving an important speech about their generation. Today, when a woman turns 60, or a man turns 65, she is told her life's work is over, and to go home. Whatever expertise she has built up – my mother worked with victims of domestic violence for decades, for example, until last year – is dismissed. Retire. The end.

Millions of people don't want to live like this. While only 11 per cent of people work beyond retirement age, a recent opinion poll for Saga found that 38 per cent had wanted to carry on. The sacking of Arlene Phillips from Strictly Come Dancing – for a younger, dumber model – resonated because it happens in workplaces across the country. It hits both sexes, but women especially strictly: Brucie is still tap-dancing in his eighties, while Arlene is dismissed as a dried-out husk 20 years sooner.

Harman – another woman who has taken a kicking in her life, and only emerged more dignified and poised – says we need a more "mature" and flexible way of thinking about retirement. It should be about empowering people to live their lives, their way – not blocking them off in their prime, against their will.

It's essential to preserve the right to retire. My grandmother worked tough manual jobs, including scrubbing toilets, all her life; by the time she got to 60, her knees were ruined and she couldn't go on. That's why the Conservative proposals to rapidly jack up the retirement age, by millionaires who have never done a day's manual work in their life, are cruel. But it's equally absurd to say a woman like Beacham, or my mother, or Harman herself, is past it, has nothing more to give, and should be consigned to living life in her living room. This isn't just bad for them: it's bad for all of us, because it wastes great swathes of the country's talent.

So Harman has proposed a more open form of retirement. Today, it's a crash landing: you go from 9 to 5 to a P45 in one sudden fall. In Harman's vision, people could glide towards retirement more gradually. At 60 or 65, you would have the right (but not an obligation) to continue part-time. It's good for you, because you remain within the social network and stimulation of work, and you don't suddenly find yourself at a loss. It's good for your employer, because the knowledge you have built up continues to fertilise the company. It's good for the country, because we won't have so many clever, able people twiddling their thumbs. We are going to need their labour, too. In Britain today, there is a growing pool of older people, and a diminishing stream of younger people. In 20 years' time, half the population of Britain will be over 50. For the millions who want to work, it's crazy to block them off, and push them into dependency on a diminishing pool of the young.

Today, these are only suggestions being put up for discussion, and the current government clearly won't live long enough to implement them. But Harman has a long track record of pushing ideas that are derided at the time, and later become accepted as common sense: back in the early 1980s, she was derided for saying the Government should have a national childcare strategy and must require companies to allow parents to request flexi-time. It's a familiar pattern by now. They hurl sexist insults and call her mad, then 10 years later say that of course they support those feminist ideas – just not the mad ones pushed by Harriet Harman.

When women in their sixties are finally shown to us in all their richness, people respond: look at the glorious renaissance of Meryl Streep in the past few years. But too often they are bundled away, out of the workplace, off the TV screen, dismissed as too wrinkled to sit alongside a wrinklier man in his seventies. They are assumed to steadily lose the characteristics of human beings, like (for one) sexuality. Fellow housemates Dane Bowers and Cisco admitted Stephanie Beacham was "the fittest woman" in there, and they were startled to discover they could fancy a woman her age. We live in an airbrushed culture where 60 is always presented as sterile. It's a nasty trajectory: first jobless, then sexless, and finally characterless.

This is part of the reason that when it comes to people who are older still – the swelling army of eightysomethings and beyond – we avert our gaze. We skim over the headlines revealing that nursing homes are forcing elderly people to have unnecessary operations jabbing tubes into their stomachs because it's "a hassle" to clean them up. We don't want to know that hundreds of thousands of them are being given "chemical coshes" – anti-psychotic drugs that reduce them to drooling zombies. The dehumanisation begins at 60 and is complete by 80.

It doesn't have to be like this – but it requires a change in the culture and a change in the law. Arise, Queen Stephanie: your sixtysomething subjects await a better Kingdom.

History is a brutal sieve. Arthur Koestler is remembered now—if at all—for writing Darkness at Noon a hand grenade of a novel tossed at Joseph Stalin's Kremlin. Those 200 pages are all we retain of an intellectual nomad who stormed across the 20^th century. He seems to have been everywhere, like an angry, book-spewing Zelig. Even a thumbnail summary makes me feel exhausted (deep breath): He grew up in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, witnessing revolutions and counter-revolutions. He was one of the first Zionist settlers in Palestine. He became a star in the Berlin of Sally Bowles' cabarets and a rising Adolf Hitler. He was jailed and nearly shot by Gen. Franco. He fled the Nazis through Casablanca, Morocco. He gave Albert Camus a black eye, George Orwell a holiday home, and Soviet communism an enema. He had sex with supermodel twins, took magic mushrooms with Timothy Leary*, and helped create Intelligent Design. Oh—and he was a rapist.

To read this article in full over at Slate, click here.

When I was a child in the 1980s, the threat of nuclear war pervaded the culture. It was there in movies, in novels, even in pop songs: I still feel a little pre-adolescent shiver when I hear "99 Red Balloons". The mushroom cloud haunted every classroom. By comparison, the danger of a disrupted climate – which is not hypothetical; it has already begun – has been only nudged by our artists. There have been a few terrific novels, like JG Ballard's eco-haunted oeuvre, or Will Self's The Book of Dave, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But they are the exceptions. The vision of a world that is six degrees warmer – a gap as big as that between us and the last ice age – has so far been described only by scientists.

Yet human beings need to process information twice; once as fact, and then as imaginary narratives that tease out its implications. It's why we dream, and why we compulsively tell each other stories.

The swelling evidence of man-made global warming is now finally compelling artists into creation. The terrific new exhibition at the Royal Academy "Earth: Art of a Changing World" brings together dozens of the greatest visual artists in the world to respond to the climate crisis – and what it reveals about us.

The theme that pervades the exhibition is the slow realisation that our existence here is arbitrary and contingent. Life on this rock in space developed by fluke, and it can be ended by a series of man-made flukes – like releasing massive amounts of a colourless, odourless warming gas into the atmosphere.

The first exhibit is called Semiconductor. The artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have used the raw visual data from one of Nasa's space observatories to track the solar winds that wash across the universe. As you stare at them – and the utterly alien sounds of space are blasted all around you – it's hard to escape a sudden sense of being an object in a void, with nowhere else to go if we render this rock uninhabitable. Its images and soundscape dissolve – here, at your first step – our human-centred view of the universe. We think we're so important, so central to existence, that we can't be destroyed. But here we are; nothing but a speck in a celestial storm that would barely register our self-annihilation.

Nature Paintings by Keith Tyson underlines this point. Tyson had an accident in his studio where chemicals mixed with pigment, and they independently formed gorgeously painterly patterns. Like our world, it looks like it has so much meaning, and is the product of so much planning – but it is an accident. Nothing more. It could be undone in a moment.

In the corner of one part of the gallery there sits a small steel orb that will explode in precisely a hundred years from now. It was designed by Kris Martin, and it is called 100 Years. It stares at you, silently. Where will it be when the explosion comes? Will this part of London be underwater? Will it be forgotten in some dusty archive and end up destroying all the artwork around it? Will everyone ignore the problem it poses, until the detonation comes?

Some of the artists at the Royal Academy have taken a more literal look at the crisis. Antti Laitinen, in It's My Island I, films himself trying to build an island out of rocks in the open ocean, and we watch it being swallowed by the sea – a fate that awaits many nations. Lucy and Jorge Orta have built a makeshift refugee camp Antarctic Village, stitched from the flags of all the nations that would be crippled by runaway warming.

Shiro Takatani shows an ice core that has been drilled out from the depths of the Arctic, revealing the carbon dioxide levels at every point in history. There is the snow that fell during the Battle of Hastings; there is the snow that fell during the American Civil War; and there we are, changing the fossil record with a massive blast of warming gases.

The exhibition probes some of our darker impulses towards the ecosystem. With Doomed, Tracey Moffatt splices together shots of the end of the world from a great ream of old movies – and it is entrancing. Everybody stops and stares, open-mouthed, smiling. Is there some strange vandalistic impulse in human beings that makes us almost will the end? If we're honest, wasn't the most beautiful sight of the year Sydney shrouded in apocalyptic red dust, blown in from the dried-out centre of the country?

The only exhibit that doesn't work – that plays to the dumbest sliver of environmentalism – is Tracey Emin's I Loved You like the Sky. It is a (bad) drawing of several cute animals, with scrawled romanticised bursts of guff: "Your heart is like the wind," she announces, meaninglessly. You can't slop together any old sub-Michael Jackson ramblings and call it a green statement. Even if your heart was like the wind, what would it have to do with the climate crisis?

The exhibit that slapped me hardest was The Russian Ending by Tacita Dean. It is a series of stills from old industrial accidents; trashed ships and exploding mines and mangled men in graves. We are all, it hints, caught up in a giant industrial accident now. Just as the owners of these mines and ships didn't put in basic safety measures, we aren't putting in basic safety measures to regulate the vast belching, warming gases that are rupturing the climate. These pictures are becoming our story.

Dean's title comes from the fact that movies made for international distribution often shoot an extra "Hollywood ending" – a happy resolution for an American market that doesn't want to leave the cinema downcast. But they also used to shoot a "Russian ending" – a tragic and bleak conclusion to the story, for Russians who expected no less. Dean leaves us with a strange irony: American vandalism of a climate deal may leave us all with a Russian ending.

These visual artists are not alone. The Road, for example, is a parable about what would happen to humanity if we are stripped of a stable ecosystem. In the novel and in the new film version, something – we are not told what – causes nature to implode. Nothing grows; a thin layer of ash lies across the world. Almost everything dies. A man and his son stagger across this landscape, finding nothing, being nothing.

Utter collapse certainly won't happen overnight, as it does in The Road. But by accelerating the process so dramatically, McCarthy shows us what we are risking in the space of just a few lifetimes. Joseph Conrad said in 1896: "Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings." If you take away the web of life around us, we are reduced almost immediately to dying scavengers, feeding off rubbish, and each other.

We are in the process of dramatically destabilising the stable ecosystem that stands between us and The Road. To comprehend the gamble we are taking, and why we are responding so sluggishly, we need scientists first, for sure. But following closely behind, we need artists. Now, at last, they are coming in on the rising tide.

When I was a child in the 1980s, the threat of nuclear war pervaded the culture. It was there in movies, in novels, even in pop songs: I still feel a little pre-adolescent shiver when I hear "99 Red Balloons". The mushroom cloud haunted every classroom. By comparison, the danger of a disrupted climate – which is not hypothetical; it has already begun – has been only nudged by our artists. There have been a few terrific novels, like JG Ballard's eco-haunted oeuvre, or Will Self's The Book of Dave, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But they are the exceptions. The vision of a world that is six degrees warmer – a gap as big as that between us and the last ice age – has so far been described only by scientists.

Yet human beings need to process information twice; once as fact, and then as imaginary narratives that tease out its implications. It's why we dream, and why we compulsively tell each other stories.

The swelling evidence of man-made global warming is now finally compelling artists into creation. The terrific new exhibition at the Royal Academy "Earth: Art of a Changing World" brings together dozens of the greatest visual artists in the world to respond to the climate crisis – and what it reveals about us.

The theme that pervades the exhibition is the slow realisation that our existence here is arbitrary and contingent. Life on this rock in space developed by fluke, and it can be ended by a series of man-made flukes – like releasing massive amounts of a colourless, odourless warming gas into the atmosphere.

The first exhibit is called Semiconductor. The artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have used the raw visual data from one of Nasa's space observatories to track the solar winds that wash across the universe. As you stare at them – and the utterly alien sounds of space are blasted all around you – it's hard to escape a sudden sense of being an object in a void, with nowhere else to go if we render this rock uninhabitable. Its images and soundscape dissolve – here, at your first step – our human-centred view of the universe. We think we're so important, so central to existence, that we can't be destroyed. But here we are; nothing but a speck in a celestial storm that would barely register our self-annihilation.

Nature Paintings by Keith Tyson underlines this point. Tyson had an accident in his studio where chemicals mixed with pigment, and they independently formed gorgeously painterly patterns. Like our world, it looks like it has so much meaning, and is the product of so much planning – but it is an accident. Nothing more. It could be undone in a moment.

In the corner of one part of the gallery there sits a small steel orb that will explode in precisely a hundred years from now. It was designed by Kris Martin, and it is called 100 Years. It stares at you, silently. Where will it be when the explosion comes? Will this part of London be underwater? Will it be forgotten in some dusty archive and end up destroying all the artwork around it? Will everyone ignore the problem it poses, until the detonation comes?

Some of the artists at the Royal Academy have taken a more literal look at the crisis. Antti Laitinen, in It's My Island I, films himself trying to build an island out of rocks in the open ocean, and we watch it being swallowed by the sea – a fate that awaits many nations. Lucy and Jorge Orta have built a makeshift refugee camp Antarctic Village, stitched from the flags of all the nations that would be crippled by runaway warming.

Shiro Takatani shows an ice core that has been drilled out from the depths of the Arctic, revealing the carbon dioxide levels at every point in history. There is the snow that fell during the Battle of Hastings; there is the snow that fell during the American Civil War; and there we are, changing the fossil record with a massive blast of warming gases.

The exhibition probes some of our darker impulses towards the ecosystem. With Doomed, Tracey Moffatt splices together shots of the end of the world from a great ream of old movies – and it is entrancing. Everybody stops and stares, open-mouthed, smiling. Is there some strange vandalistic impulse in human beings that makes us almost will the end? If we're honest, wasn't the most beautiful sight of the year Sydney shrouded in apocalyptic red dust, blown in from the dried-out centre of the country?

The only exhibit that doesn't work – that plays to the dumbest sliver of environmentalism – is Tracey Emin's I Loved You like the Sky. It is a (bad) drawing of several cute animals, with scrawled romanticised bursts of guff: "Your heart is like the wind," she announces, meaninglessly. You can't slop together any old sub-Michael Jackson ramblings and call it a green statement. Even if your heart was like the wind, what would it have to do with the climate crisis?

The exhibit that slapped me hardest was The Russian Ending by Tacita Dean. It is a series of stills from old industrial accidents; trashed ships and exploding mines and mangled men in graves. We are all, it hints, caught up in a giant industrial accident now. Just as the owners of these mines and ships didn't put in basic safety measures, we aren't putting in basic safety measures to regulate the vast belching, warming gases that are rupturing the climate. These pictures are becoming our story.

Dean's title comes from the fact that movies made for international distribution often shoot an extra "Hollywood ending" – a happy resolution for an American market that doesn't want to leave the cinema downcast. But they also used to shoot a "Russian ending" – a tragic and bleak conclusion to the story, for Russians who expected no less. Dean leaves us with a strange irony: American vandalism of a climate deal may leave us all with a Russian ending.

These visual artists are not alone. The Road, for example, is a parable about what would happen to humanity if we are stripped of a stable ecosystem. In the novel and in the new film version, something – we are not told what – causes nature to implode. Nothing grows; a thin layer of ash lies across the world. Almost everything dies. A man and his son stagger across this landscape, finding nothing, being nothing.

Utter collapse certainly won't happen overnight, as it does in The Road. But by accelerating the process so dramatically, McCarthy shows us what we are risking in the space of just a few lifetimes. Joseph Conrad said in 1896: "Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings." If you take away the web of life around us, we are reduced almost immediately to dying scavengers, feeding off rubbish, and each other.

We are in the process of dramatically destabilising the stable ecosystem that stands between us and The Road. To comprehend the gamble we are taking, and why we are responding so sluggishly, we need scientists first, for sure. But following closely behind, we need artists. Now, at last, they are coming in on the rising tide.

....dscussing the cultural responses to global warming. It's at 11pm on BBC2. I'll post a link here so you can watch it online afterwards.

Over the past few years, there has been a drip-drip of artists defending old men who abuse their power over young boys and girls for sexual pleasure. It ranges from Alan Bennett's claim that a teacher who gropes his pupils can be the real child or true innocent, to the widespread assertion in Hollywood that when a 44 year old man drugs and anally rapes a 13 year-old girl, it is not "rape-rape". Indeed, Gore Vidal says the victim is "a young hooker".

Yet there is, largely, silence in response – and I realise I too have held off from writing this column several times. Why? Talking about this requires me to criticise some artists whose work I love, and it forces me to remember a period of my life I've tried hard to forget. But when I saw Alan Bennett's new play The Habit of Art at the National Theatre, I felt somebody had to say this.

I have no problem with artists sympathetically depicting the inner lives of paedophiles and pederasts; indeed, it can be a good thing. Every human being should be understood, and to understand is not to excuse. We should, for example, know that 70 per cent of child abusers have themselves been abused as children: it tempers the paedophile-bashing lynch mob, and forces us to look for humane solutions. It also helps avoid bad legislation like Megan's Law, which – by driving released offenders away from their families and friends and sending them into isolation – actually increases the number of children who are abused.

What I object to is not the compassionate depiction of these men, but the claim that the victims are unharmed, or even enjoy it. This suggestion has featured in the work of several writers I normally admire. In Bennett's previous play The History Boys, a 50-something teacher called Hector routinely gropes his 17-year-old pupils' genitals – and they react either with flattered amusement, or by longing to be the next to be groped. The headmaster who objects is depicted as a prejudiced buffoon. The most sympathetic boy in the class – Posner – also grows up to be a pederast himself, who finds it hard to resist groping his pupils.

In interviews, Bennett makes it clear he is on Hector's side, saying: "I've been criticised for not taking this seriously enough. I'm afraid I don't take that very seriously if they're 17 or 18. I think they are actually much wiser than Hector. Hector is the child, not them." He added that good teaching is inherently "erotic".

In his new play, Bennett takes this analysis further. Benjamin Britten, the composer, is one of the main characters. He was sexually attracted to young boys – 13 was his perfect age – and throughout his life he picked out choirboys, gave them a special role in performing his music, and lavished adoration on them. According to the book Britten's Children, he appeared naked before them, snuggled with them in bed, although he didn't actually have sex with them. As with Michael Jackson, the parents seemed to know what was going on, and acquiesce.

Yet Bennett, in his introduction to the play, expresses only one problem with this. "A boy whose voice suddenly broke could find himself no longer invited ... which would seem potentially far more damaging to a child's psychology than too much attention." He also spares a thought for the "fat boys and ugly boys" who were never admitted to this sanctum.

This analysis also underpins Stephen Fry's play Latin!, which was published in 1992. It is set in a prep school where the central character, Dominic Clarke, is a teacher who "carnally violates" a 13-year-old orphan in ways one character says are "too vile, too diverse, for the sane mind to grasp."

Fry distills the tragic psychology of paedophiles with his usual brilliance. Dominic says: "When I was a boy, I thought, slept and played like a boy. Then nature began to drop hints about a change in status: a cracking voice, hairs about the buttocks, acne ... I never asked to be a man. I never wanted to be man. I want to be a boy. If when nature starts thrusting pimples and hairs through the skin, a boy could be kept from school and the world of men and just carry on behaving as a boy, then perhaps nature would give up and the pimples and hairs would recede. The permanent boy could be found."

This is precisely how the paedophiles I have interviewed in prison viewed themselves. And isn't it a description of what Michael Jackson tried to do? When seclusion didn't work, he turned to the surgeons to create the permanent boy.

But the play has a nasty sting. Dominic runs away with the 13 year old to live in Morocco. They write back to explain that there, young boys and men can live together as sexual partners. The school's pupils, en masse, demand to be allowed to live in Morocco. The plain implication is that these 13-year-olds were also longing to be abused by older men.

I know Bennett and Fry are wrong, because when I was a teenager, I was subjected to the persistent sexual advances of an older man in a position of authority over me. I managed to escape the situation without being abused, but I know other boys did not. There can indeed be an initial element of being flattered, or even excited – but it is also married to feelings of fear and revulsion that somebody who is supposed to have offered safety is offering danger. The adolescent is not in a position to make an informed choice. It is healthy for adolescents to explore their sexualities among themselves – but when an adult intrudes into this process, it can damage their sexual development with consequences for the rest of their lives.

I'm not interested in launching a hysterical attack on Bennett and Fry. I would like to appeal to their empathy – a quality they have demonstrated in so much of their work – and urge them to direct it not just towards Hector and Dominic, but also to their victims.

This can be a difficult topic to raise because the vilest slur against gay people has long been that we are closet paedophiles. The defence of Polanski showed there are plenty of straight people prepared to make excuses for abusing young girls, just as there are – alas – some gay people prepared to make excuses for abusing young boys. Yet this prejudice still crops up: recently, Richard Littlejohn accused Peter Mandelson of wanting to live on "the Rue Des Jeunes Garcons". It is, of course, nonsense: Mandelson is no more likely to want to have sex with a young boy than Littlejohn to have sex with a young girl.

But let's look back towards Britten. Or indeed to Oscar Wilde, who would (rightly) still be imprisoned today for having paying to have sex with very poor underage teenagers. Did the violent suppression of homosexuality perhaps have a deforming effect on their sexualities? When they were 12 or 13, they had a fleeting moment when they could explore their sexualities with other boys without shame – but it quickly slammed shut as they realised this behaviour was deemed immoral. Is this why they seemed to keep returning to 13 year olds in their fantasies as representing an idealised time of sexual freedom?

The taboos protecting young people from sexual abuse took a long time to build up. They have to be protected from erosion, because Alan Bennett is terribly wrong – the "real children" are never old men who want to cop a feel of adolescents.

The great cliché of our age is that we are sinking into a lobotomised celebrity culture where we worship the worthless. We jabber on about Katie and Peter while carbon emissions soar; we yammer about the X Factor while Afghanistan burns. The new headline-snatching documentary Starsuckers, released today, expresses this view at great length: the West has been drugged by fame into a brain-coma, where our eyes can only follow the neon lights of Hollywood and the Big Brother house.

But is it true? The two-hour film – with all its haughty polemic – helped me to figure out why I am so queasy about this argument, even though I agree with some of its specific points. Yes, I worry that my young nephews' first question about anyone I mention is: "Are they famous?" Yes, I fret that one of my friends is obsessed with Justin Timberlake, and seems to have a stronger imaginary relationship with him than with anyone she actually knows. Yes, I find the creeping of celebrity gossip into serious news broadcasts disturbing.

But the sweeping, simplistic dismissal of celebrity culture misses some more deeper, tougher truths. Running through Starsuckers – and this wider debate – are two incompatible arguments about celebrity. The first is that this revering of celebrities is a new phenomenon, born with television, and intensified by the internet. With these new technologies, we have fallen under a form of electronic hypnosis. We stare numbly at our screens and imagine we are seeing something real, rather than a photo-shopped fiction.

The second argument is more interesting. It suggests that we are hard-wired to seek out Big Men (or Women) and copy them. Think about the hunter-gatherer tribes that we lived in a few minutes ago (in evolutionary terms). Those ancestors of ours who identified the most powerful or abundant people in their group, worked their way into their entourage, and imitated their ways were obviously more likely to survive. Seeking out celebs had an evolutionary advantage – so they passed this instinct on to us. The people who thought it was dumb to act this way dropped off the human family tree.

This seems more persuasive, because some form of celebrity-worship has always existed. In his terrific new book Fame – From the Bronze Age to Britney, the classicist Tom Payne shows how humans have always told lascivious stories about people they don't know.

The ancient Romans made celebrities out of their gladiators, cheering when they killed and weeping when they died. Later, they made celebrities out of the Christian martyrs who were gored by them. The ancient Greeks gossiped about their gods' love affairs – and far from being wholly mythical, the gods appeared among them all the time. As Payne says: "You could invite gods to dinner. The god Serapis [or rather, somebody posing as him] would hold parties at which he was once 'host and guest'.... You could even have sex with a goddess." The tyrant Pisistratus typically found a gorgeous woman, put her in a chariot, and announced she was the goddess Athene. The crowd howled and whooped like anyone at Madison Square Gardens.

And just as there has always been fame, there have always been people complaining that these days people get famous for nothing. In St Paul's letters to the Corinthians, he moans that people only become Christian martyrs nowadays "to obtain a corruptible crown" of celebrity. Here's Chaucer, writing in the 14th-century, giving voice to a crowd: "We have done neither that nor this/but spend our lives in idle play./Nonetheless we come to pray/That we should have as good a fame,/and great renown, and well-known name/as those who have done noble deeds." The Queen snaps: "What! Why should I serve/you the good fame you don't deserve/ because you've not achieved a thing?"

If celebrity has always existed, the debate changes. When people jeered at the Japanese game-shows Clive James put on air, where men ate maggots and crawled through shit, he counselled us to remember: a generation before, these young men would have been using the same drive for danger to fly kamikaze planes into Allied warships. He wrote: "Civilisation doesn't eliminate human impulses: it tames them, through changing their means of expression."

Our innate celebrity-instinct used to be directed in really dangerous ways – towards finding revering warriors like Achilles, who killed so many people that Homer ran out of names; or towards fanatics like the Catholic saints who believed God was talking to her. What were the the Jewish prophets, the Muslim martyrs or the Hindu gods but the celebrities of their day? They took this impulse and channelled it towards primitive superstitions, with all their cruelty, and all their backwardness. Compared to them, directing this impulse towards Zac Efron or Beyoncé or Robbie Williams – because they are hot, or sweet, or make pretty sounds – seems positively benign.

Modern celebrity isn't a deterioration from a pristine past; it's a taming of an impulse that was once met in far more harmful ways. Better Madonna than the Madonna. Better the Heat of celebs telling you to buy perfume than the heat of martyrs telling you you'll burn in hell.

It's only once you admit that celebrity has a place that you can keep it in its place. To a culture, celebrity is like sugar: fun in moderation, deadly if it's all you consume. We are letting one impulse – to vicariously enter the Big Man's entourage – over-ride the others, like the desire to enrich our minds. I have seen some of the best minds of my generation focus on nothing but discussing fame in ever more ironic ways, and they are left with a kind of intellectual diabetes. Whenever I see celebrity news bursting beyond its proper boundary, I remember Pauline Kael, the great film critic for the New Yorker and one of the first intellectuals to take trashy films seriously. When she was dying, she gave a final interview, and said sadly: "All that time I was promoting trash culture, I never imagined it would become the only culture we have."

We need an unwritten Celeb Code of Hygiene about what they should do, and how we should respond to them. Celebrities can provide us with pleasure and titillation – within limits. There needs to be privacy rules to stop us stalking celebs to despair or death. Remember – Greta Garbo didn't actually say "I want to be alone." She said "I want to be let alone" – and there's a world of difference.

And we should drop the mad idea that they should provide us with political guidance. The most effective part of Starsuckers is the exposé of how Bob Geldof and Bono hijacked the Make Poverty History campaign, defying the advice of the main aid groups to applaud political charades that later came to nothing. There's a more terrifying vision still in the film: in Lithuania, a "Celebrities' Party" ran for office, and became the second biggest party in government. The host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire became speaker of the parliament.

We will always have celebrities, and we will – if we are honest – always want them. If we rage against them Starsuckers-style, with an annihilating, snobbish superiority, we will lose the argument. The real struggle instead is to temper our instinct for fame – and stop it sucking up all the cultural oxygen.

You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johannhari101

He is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

It's on YouTube in four parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-1EMNSwfms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByKl4oa8uts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpJCLQboVk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG-ayGlSvEM

Or - for those of you in the UK - it's on the BBC i-Player here: http://is.gd/4INCT

Quentin Tarantino sauntered onto celluloid in the mid-1990s as a Natural Born Thriller, the boy-man who was going to stab adrenaline straight into the heart of American cinema. The movies he wrote and directed were highly stylized ballet dances of torture, haemorraghing internal organs, and rat-a-tat-tat pop culture monologues about Madonna’s vagina, the Brady Bunch, and what they call a Big Mac in France. (It’s Le Big Mac). He showed extreme cruelty in extreme close-up and – somehow – made the audience laugh with him through the screams. But there were always dark questions underneath the guffaws and applause – and his new film, ‘Inglorious Basterds’, sucks them to the surface.

The story of Tarantino’s rise is a film geek’s fantasy-screenplay. Born to a single mother in Los Angeles, he dropped out of school at sixteen, got a job at a video store, and marinated himself in the history of film. He absorbed everything from Lucio Fulci’s Italian horror-fests to Preston Sturges’ one-liners to John Woo’s Hong Kong shoot-outs. And as he took them in, they churned inside his brain – and spilled out, reassembled and regenerated, into a string of his own screenplays.

The first to be made was ‘Reservoir Dogs’ in 1994. Like all his films, it took an old stock genre premise – an armed robbery goes wrong, and in the aftermath the gang tries to figure out which of them is an undercover cop – and made it twitch back to life. He scrambled the chronology, poured hot sauce onto the dialogue, and made the bleeding after a shooting slow and real. Trapped together in a bare warehouse, the characters slowly destroy themselves. In the most famous scene, Mr Blonde – played by Michael Madsen – captures a cop and tortures him to get him to give up the identity of the fink. As he dances to the old cheese-hit ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’, he hacks off the cop’s ear, and douses him with petrol, threatening to burn him alive. It’s entrancing and repulsive all at once – and one of the most disturbing scenes in cinema.

At the time, many critics recoiled, saying this was sadism served up as style. The film was even banned on video in Britain for several years. But I was inclined to defend the film: I thought this violence was more real and repulsive than the glib gore-free massacres of an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. When these characters bleed, they really scream. When they feel pain, you really flinch. Here was a director showing violence as it really is.

But since then, Tarantino has enthusiastically proved his critics right, and his defenders wrong. The moral vision of Reservoir Dogs turns out to have been something well-meaning viewers projected onto it: Tarantino really does think violence is “like, cool.” He has been systematically squandering his cinematic talent ever since – in ways that reflect disturbingly on us, the viewers.

He has turned suffering into a merry joke. From ‘Pulp Fiction’ to ‘Kill Bill’, he encourages the audience to chortle at torture and mutilation and anal rape. A typical punchline is – whoops! – a man being shot in the face. Where there should be a gag reflex, he gives us a gag. In ‘Inglorious Basterds’, a group of Jews undercover in Germany torture and scalp Nazis, and he gets the viewer to roar with laughter as people are carved up, alive and howling.

“Violence in the movies can be cool,” he says. “It’s just another colour to work with. When Fred Astaire dances, it doesn’t mean anything. Violence is the same. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a colour.” He scorns anyone who tries to see simulated violence as having meaning. With a laugh, he says: “John Woo’s violence has a very insightful view as to how the Hong Kong mind works because with 1997 approaching and blah blah blah. I don’t think that’s why he’s doing it. He’s doing it because he gets a kick out of it.” Praising Stanley Kubrik’s direction of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, he says: “He enjoyed the violence a little too much. I’m all for that.”

In the slightly pretentious language of postmodernism, he is trying to separate the sign (movie violence) from the signified (real violence) – leaving us floating in a sea of meaningless signs that refer to nothing but themselves and the sealed-off history of cinema.

What’s wrong with this vision? Why does it make me so queasy? I don’t believe works of art should be ennobling. I don’t believe the heroes should be virtuous, or that bad characters should get their comeuppance. It can show deeply violent and deeply cruel people, and tell us that – as in real life – they can be charismatic and successful and never pay a price for their cruelty. But what it should never do is tell us that human suffering itself is trivial. It should never turn pain into a punch-line.

Violence has particular power on film precisely because it involuntarily activates our powers of empathy. We imagine ourselves, as an unthinking reflex, into the agony. This is the most civilising instinct we have: to empathize with suffering strangers. (It competes, of course, with all our more base instincts). Any work of art that denies this sense – that is based on subverting it – will ultimately be sullying. No, I’m not saying it makes people violent. But it does leave the viewer just a millimetre more morally corroded. Laughing at simulated torture – and even cheering it on, as we are encouraged to through all of Tarantino’s later films – leaves a moral muscle just a tiny bit more atrophied.

You can see this in the responses of Tarantino himself. Not long after 9/11, he said: “It didn’t affect me because there’s, like, a Hong Kong action movie… called Purple Storm and they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a skyscraper.” It’s a case-study in atrophy of moral senses: to brag you weren’t moved by the murder of two and half thousand actual people, because you’d already seen it simulated in a movie. Only somebody who has never seen violence – who sees the world as made of celluloid – can respond like this.

Tarantino’s films aren’t even sadistic. Sadists take human suffering seriously; that’s why they enjoy it. No: Tarantino is morally empty, seeing a shoot-out as akin to dancing cheek-to-cheek. He sees violence as nothing. Compare his oeuvre to the work of a genuine cinematic sadist – Alfred Hitchcock – and you see the difference. Precisely because Hitchcock enjoyed inflicting pain, the pain is always authentic, and it is never emptied of its own inner horror.

And yet, and yet… I have to admit that part of me loves Tarantino’s films. The scene in ‘Pulp Fiction’ where John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance the twist in a 1950s-style diner, and later when he has to stab adrenaline into her heart after she ODs, are burned onto my brain, even though I have refused to watch the film for more than a decade. There are scenes in ‘Inglorious Basterds’ of perfect tension. This man knows how to make a scene work than almost any director working today. But I can’t forget – it sees the Holocaust as just another spaghetti Western, and one where the suggested solution is more torture, coming from the victims this time.

Can you love a film even while you are repulsed by its moral vision, or lack of it? This is a question that goes right back to the birth of cinema (and beyond). The three greatest silent films are all explicit hymns of praise for totalitarianism. ‘The Birth of a Nation’ champions the Ku Klux Klan, ‘Battleship Potemkin’ hymns for Bolshevism, and ‘The Triumph of the Will’ is a paean to the Nazis. They are ravishing and repellent all at once – and I defy anyone to watch them and not get swept up in their power, even as your frontal lobes yell: “Stop! Danger!”

But aesthetics and the rest of life are not entirely separable spheres – and anybody who claims they are is simply posing. We don’t leave our moral senses at the door when we go to the movies, or pick up a novel, or go to a gallery. We feel such tension in Tarantino’s movies because the good and sane part of us doesn’t want the violence to come – while the debased part of us is cheering it on. That’s a moral conflict underpinning the aesthetics; by denying it is there, Tarantino is wilfully misunderstanding the effect of his films on their audiences.

The artists who have claimed their work was purely aesthetic were either frivolous, psychopathic, or lying. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov – who I love – claimed in the introduction to ‘Bend Sinister’ that “politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of ‘thaw’ in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent.” He was writing in the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he and everybody he knows came within a few hours of dying in a nuclear war. How could he be “supremely indifferent” to that prospect? How can you revere aesthetics and not mind if every aesthetic object you love is incinerated? The answer is, of course, he wasn’t indifferent. If you read his letters, you find he worried about these issues at great length. Similarly, I suspect Tarantino has deeper instincts beneath his life-is-a-grindhouse-flick pose. He knows what he is saying isn’t – can’t – be true.

The tragedy of Tarantino is that he could have been so much more than the Schlock and Awe merchant that he has devolved into. If he had stopped mistaking his DVD collection for a life, he – to borrow a phrase from a real film, etched with real pain – could’ve been a contender. When I remember the raw force of Reservoir Dogs, I still hope that he will. It’s not too late. He could do it. How about it, Quentin? Step out into the big world beyond celluloid, and use your incredible talent to tell stories about it. As Mr Blonde says, “Are you going to bark all day, little doggie – or are you going to bite?”

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

The Slumdog Kill-ionaire is back, and he is reminding us how exhilarating fiction can be when novelists finally leave their seminar rooms and dive into the real world. The Indian writer Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize last year for The White Tiger, a story of an Indian slum kid who rises to riches by killing his boss. Now he has followed it with Between The Assassinations, an armoury of short stories about a typical Indian city as it rises with a great heave from poverty to power (for a few).

Adiga has become great by ignoring the clichéd advice given to all young writers, which has long since hardened into a dogma: write about what you know. He is from a typical, rich Indian family buffeted by servants who are treated as invisible. He is so talented he could have made that world interesting, for a while, in its small way. He could have done what too many British and American novelists are doing, and ever more exquisitely described his own navel.

But he chose instead to write about what he didn't know – by going out and discovering it, like a journalist. Between The Assassinations enters into the heads of a panorama of 21st-century Indians, from rich kids tossing bombs at the caste system to women steadily going blind in sweatshops to rickshaw drivers slowly pedalling their bodies into broken sinew. He learned about their lives by going out into the streets and writing about what he found.

It is a return to the great realist novels of the 19th century, when fiction captured the tectonic shifts altering our world by showing how they changed the characters of individual men and women, one by one. It's Charles Dickens in a call centre; it's George Eliot adding credit to her mobile phone.

Through his perfectly observed characters, some of the transformations of our time become clear. To name just one, the great shift in power from the West to the East takes on human form, where we can understand it best. The narrator of The White Tiger writes to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao: "Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday. I am tomorrow. This is the century of the yellow and the brown man. You and me." Yet as they wait for this new world, Adiga shows how most Indians have to sweat along, one screw-up away from destitution. As another of his characters says: "The rich can make mistakes again and again. We make only one mistake, and that's it for us."

There was a time when it seemed natural – obvious, even – for novelists to go out into their societies and describe them like this. As the mega-selling author Tom Wolfe says: "Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis assumed that the novelist had to go beyond his personal experience and head out into society as a reporter."

Dickens was constantly charging out into the "Great Oven" of the London night to witness its endless churn. Emile Zola went down the coalmines at Anzin so he could capture their dark dust-filled world in Germinal. John Steinbeck bought an old pie truck and drove down to live in the squatters' camps filled with people fleeing the dustbowl, and it gave birth to The Grapes Of Wrath. Graham Greene trawled across the dictatorships of the Caribbean and Latin America before writing his novels about them. George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway went to the Spanish Civil War before they smelted their masterpieces about it. Reporting didn't smother their imaginations, it fertilised them.

Yet there are so many talented young novelists I have read who seem to think the real, heaving world outside their study is a vulgar concern to be left to journalists and TV series like The Wire. They prefer to write books that ruminate on how epistemologically hard it is for "The Novel" to describe the real world, or to retreat into the stories of the distant past, or to concentrate on endless tales of middle-class adultery in Hampstead.

Occasionally, they find great work there, but I long to drag them to a run-down estate in Bradford or one of the climate change protest camps in Kent or to the club scene in Shoreditch or anywhere real and alive, to give them the best fuel for their talents.

In the 1950s it became popular (thanks to critics like Lionel Trilling and George Steiner) to say the realist novel was a dead form, belonging to the dull brickwork of the 19th century. The world now is too fast, too chaotic to be captured that way. But what could be more fast and chaotic than an Indian city at the birth of the age of the East, where a rickshaw-driving skeleton is pedalling a fat man who is merrily texting New York? Adiga makes it seem like the realist novel was designed to describe just this juxtaposition, on just this day. When it is written with skill, the realist novel is always – yes – real.

Wolfe, one of the great champions of the journalistic novel, warned a decade ago: "The American novel is dying not of obsolescence, but of anorexia. It needs food. It needs novelists with huge appetites and mighty unslaked thirsts for America, as she is right now." He says it would be "a revolution not in content, but in form".

The same goes for the fiction of the wider world. It's not that there aren't other great types of fiction – I love Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K Dick, and it's impossible to imagine either of them going down a mineshaft with a notebook. But Adiga has reminded us that the big realistic novel has enough adrenaline to draw in millions of readers. His was the best-selling Booker in years, because it wasn't some abstruse literary experiment, it was alive.

There are many bold writers in the West who are still acting on these reportorial impulses, from Dave Eggers to Monica Ali to Irvine Welsh – but there are not enough. I ran into John le Carre in the war zones in Congo, researching his novel The Mission Song, and I thought, "Where are the others?"

Wouldn't Greene have decamped to the Green Zone in Baghdad? Wouldn't Hemingway be in Helmand and Orwell in Burma – or at least in the abandoned mill towns of the North of England? How many great novels are going unwritten today, because novelists are not being urged to make these journeys into reality?

There's an intelligent response to this by Jessica Duchen, who rightly corrects a partial error of tone in this article. There's also an interesting (highly critical) response from Sunny Singh here.

Norman Geras has a critical response here and Max Dunbar answers him really well here.

What will endure from the plays of the late twentieth century? Already, the theatre that caused the greatest fuss at the time– the In Yer Face shockers by Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh and friends – look flashy and shallow and strangely dated; only Sarah Kane’s psychological slashing seems to have survived from this flashing pack of playwrights. Yet one genre seems to have solidified as the decades pass into bona fide masterpieces, and will perhaps define that period: the play of ideas.

It looks now like the theatre from the 1980s and 1990s that tried to dramatise the great intellectual mudslides and forest-fires of its time has thrived better than any other – from Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen to Caryl Churchill’s ‘Top Girls’ to Terry Johnson’s ‘Insignificance’. Using the old theatrical forms of the comedy or the thriller, they ask the most profound questions – what is human life for, and how it should it be lived? Standing above them all, making the case for the entire genre, is perhaps the greatest play of its time: ‘Arcadia’ by Tom Stoppard.

As it is about to have its first major revival in the West End since its premiere in 1993 – starring Stoppard’s own son, Ed – the vindication of ‘Arcadia’ seems close at hand. Yet Stoppard compresses so many ideas and guffaws and griefs into less than three hours that any attempt at a summary of the play will sound paradoxical. It is an English country-house farce about the death of the Universe. It is a laugh-filled tragedy about what happens if you take the intoxicants of poetry and science seriously. It is a play where Stoppard turns himself into a clown whose juggling balls are romanticism, classicism, and the meaning of life.

It sounds convoluted, yet it unfolds to the audience with the clarity of a cool breeze on a hot day. The play is set in Sidley Park, an English stately home, in two different centuries. It opens in 1809, in the style of an Oscar Wilde drawing room farce. A handsome young science graduate, Septimus Hodge, is living there, tutoring the precocious thirteen year old girl of the house, Thomasina Coverley. Reading through her Latin homework, she wants him to explain what “carnal embrace” means. When he tells her, she is appalled. “Now whenever I do it, I shall think of you!” she rasps. “Is it like love?” He replies: “Oh no my lady, it is much nicer than that.”

And he has been demonstrating this conviction: Septimus has just been spotting having “a perpendicular poke” in the gazebo with Mrs Chater, the wife of a visiting poet. The lesson is interrupted by a note from Mr Chater, demanding he receive “satisfaction” for his wounded honour in the form of a duel. Septimus sighs: “Oh, Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you demand satisfaction. I cannot spend my day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.” When Mr Chater arrives in a fury, Septmius insists he won’t engage in a pistol-fight to defend the honour of “a woman whose reputation could not be adequately defended with a platoon of musketry deployed by rota.”

The play then shifts suddenly to the 1990s, and a more realist style. In the same house on the same set, a historian called Hannah Jarvis – a role written for Felicity Kendall – is delving into the history of Sidley Park with the permission of the Croom family. She is a cool woman who has stripped herself of emotion and stocked her heart with icy frigid air, as she buries herself in piecing together stories from the past.

Her work suddenly is interrupted by a braying, patronising English don called Bernard Nightingale who – we soon realise – has discovered the note that Chater wrote to Septimus in an old book, after all this time. Only he is convinced it means something more – something much more. He believes the note was written by Lord Byron, the great Romantic poet, who happened to be visiting that weekend – and that he fought the duel and killed Chater. This would explain his until-now mysterious fleeing to France in 1810. It will be “the literary discovery of the century”, he neighs, turning him into a “Media Don – book early to avoid disappointment.”

And so the structure of the play is set. We watch the action unfold from 1809 to 1812, while the characters in the late twentieth century try to figure out what happened using the surviving scraps of their lives. The stories alternate – until, in the final scene, they appear on stage together, stumbling past each other, unseen, unseeable, yet locked in a waltz.

Hannah – and Stoppard – are obsessed with the way the garden at Sidley Park was redesigned while Thomasina was swotting and Septimus was shagging, because it represents the intellectual shift that was sweeping Europe at the time. Until 1809 the garden was in the classical style, modelled on Virgil and ancient Greece – ordered and clean and geometrical. As Thomasina’s mother, Lady Croom, describes it: “The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage… The right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged – in short, it is nature as God intended.”

But then the garden was demolished and remade to conform to the vision of the new romantic craze sweeping Europe – wild and irregular and disordered. Lady Croom exclaims: “Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden, [there will soon be] an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was never a spring. My hyacinth dell is to become a haunt for hobgoblins.” Hannah calls it “the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires.”

The idea of what Arcadia – paradise – looks like flipped in one generation, from order to disorder, from classical calm to romantic chaos. Hannah believes she has uncovered – in the crags of the garden’s history – a perfect symbol of this degeneration. When they were carefully constructing their fake wilderness, the gardeners built a fake hermitage – and Lady Croom demanded that the gardeners provide a hermit to live in it. “If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water,” she says. The bemused gardeners suggest advertising for a hermit in the newspaper, causing her to retort: “But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.” But a hermit was found – and he is the subject of Hannah’s new book.

He spent decades scribbling away in his fake hermit’s hut, unremarked on by the Croom family. When he died at the age of 47, he was discovered to have been writing tens of thousands of pages of incomprehensible equations and Cabbalistic proofs that the world was coming to an end. “He’s my peg for the breakdown of the Romantic Imagination… the whole Romantic sham!” Hannah explains. “It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and fake beauty… The decline from thinking to feeling, you see.”

And so the tension that runs through the play is set up, in the very set itself. It’s the old division that obsessed the eighteenth century. The classical order – which mutated into the Enlightenment – believed the world was ordered and comprehensible and was governed by rules that could be slowly uncovered. The Romantics believed this was a suffocating cage in which humanity was being imprisoned, and sought to overthrow all rules in the name of individual creativity. You make up your own rules as you go along: every man is an artist. There is no order other than the one you invent.

Against the backdrop of this transformed garden and the transformed ideas it embodies, a strange story begins to unfold. The young Thomasina is, it soon becomes clear, a genius. Even as she girlishly prances around failing to spot the series of the sexual farces unfolding in her family, she can grasp the implications of the newest scientific discoveries way ahead of any of the adults around her. Septimus teaches her about Newton’s laws of physics. They are clean, clear laws, promising an underlying, predictable order to the universe. Thomasina frets about what becomes of free will in a world where we are all merely atoms moving in line with his laws of motion – and then, suddenly, she spots a series of dark flaws in Newton.

She explains to Septimus that in Newton’s universe, equations can run in either direction – forward or back. But there is one equation that runs only one way: heat turns to cold. A cup of tea left to stand will always go cold; it will never spontaneously become hot. The same thing is happening everywhere, all the time: it’s called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The implications – only just being grasped by the generations after Newton – were plain, and bleak. “It’ll take a while, but we’re all going to end up at room temperature,” says one character. Septimus – sobered by Thomasina’s explanation – adds softly: “So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold.”

These are characters who take the implications of their ideas seriously. Septimus and Thomasina are stricken by the realisation that instead of setting up a perfectly ticking and well-oiled machine, Newtonian physics exposed us as living in an irrevocably doomed world. Hannah too says the inevitable end-game of this universe is summarised in one of Byron’s poems: “I had a dream that was not all a dream./ The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.”

In the present day, Bernard the aspirant Media Don scorns all the implications of science. In his struggle to prove Byron was a killer, he thinks gut instinct and aesthetics trump boring old scientific facts. He announces to the scientist who lives at Sidley Park, Valentine: “A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars, big bangs, black holes – who gives a shit?... I’d push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I’d lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through… If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me out, I can expand my universe without you.”

Bernard’s romantic passion – laced with a little charlatanry – is in opposition to Hannah’s classical reserve. She is afraid of emotion and passion; Bernard is afraid of sobriety and the nagging sensation that the facts might not justify his flights of fancy. He “just knows” Byron murdered Chater.

Meanwhile, nearly two centuries before, Septimus is clearly falling in love with Thomasina, as she ages into a young woman. He is thrilled by her discoveries, not only of the “heat death” implicit in Newton, but of another, deeper flaw in Newtonian physics. Why, Thomasina asks, can Newton’s laws and equations only predictably describe the physics of linear, manufactured objects like squares and cones and pyramids? “Armed thus, God could only create a cabinet… [But] if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” There surely must be a mathematical pattern underlying the things of real life too. She determines to draw these equations.

But the audience slowly realise this is impossible – not because she is wrong, but because she is so far ahead of her time. When Hannah finds her old notebooks, she gets Valentine to explain them to her. He is a mathematician living in the house, pining for Hannah, and trying as part of his PhD to unlock the numerical patterns underlying the changing population of grouse at Sidley Park, as recorded in the old game books. He explains: “When Thomasina was doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And then for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the real world.”

It turns out that so much of the world around us – rainfall averages or measles epidemics, say – follow bizarre equations. Valentine explains: “People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole pattern between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery… because the problem turns out to be different.”

How do we understand them? With a new kind of maths, known as chaos theory. Traditionally, scientists expected dynamic systems to settle into stable, predictable behaviour. But actually, tiny variations in inputs can cause huge changes. Simple equations can produce complex patterns. The way to decode them is a process known as an iterated algorithm. This is a piece of algebra where you take the solution to an equation, and plug it back into the start of the same equation, and keep repeating the process, again and again. Out of a simple equation, you get complex patterns. This is precisely what Thomasina was trying to grasp. But the maths is so complex and so time-consuming, it can only be done with computers. It was inaccessible to Thomasina with her pencils and notebooks, except as a glint in the distance.

So Thomasina, the audience realizes, glimpsed a truth, centuries earlier than anyone else. “She didn’t have the maths, not remotely. She saw what things meant, way ahead, like seeing a picture,” Valentine says. And she knew that if she was right, she could help us escape from the trap laid by Newton – of a predictable, determined universe shorn of free will, and doomed to freeze. With the day-to-day unpredictability of chaos theory, “determinism leaves the road at every turn,” she says. “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm.”

And maybe it, too, offered a form of hope beyond the universal freeze. When it is explained to her, Hannah asks Valentine: “Do you mean the world is saved after all?” He replies: “No, it’s still doomed. But if this is how it started, perhaps it’s how the next one will come.”

But what became of Thomasina’s insight? Hannah reveals its fate casually, in the sixth scene. (Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid a plot spoiler.) Thomasina died in a fire on the eve of her seventeenth birthday – a “heat death” of her own, caused by a candle Septimus lit for her. Her insights came to nothing. Then we see her alive again, skipping onto the stage, trying to persuade Septimus to kiss her. It is, we realize, the night of her death. And suddenly, it hits the audience. The hermit in the garden is Septimus, trying to prove Thomasina’s equations, alone and half-mad in the romantics’ garden after her death. His mind and pencil didn’t have the capacity to do what a computer can manage in a few minutes – but he tried, scribbling endlessly, for decades, trying to prove there is hope after all, and it can only be discovered “through good English algebra.”

The stale cliché about Stoppard – and about this genre – is that he is a brilliant manipulator of ideas, but with no heart. Yet here – at the core of his best play – is the greatest love story on the British stage for decades. Yes, the characters bond over ideas – but some of the most interesting people in life do just that.

That would be enough to make Arcadia a masterpiece – but it is even more than that. The play stirs the most basic and profound questions humans can ask. What is our relationship to the past, and the future? How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain – not just of ourselves, but of our species? Ideas and emotions fuse into one in ‘Arcadia’, and the audience weeps for both.

How are we, as human beings, determined by the past – of our ancestors, and all the thinkers who preceded us? The play suggests that we are forever re-enacting the patterns of the past with mild variations – or, in other words, that the human heart beats to an iterated algorithm. Thomasina’s distant relatives echo her lines through time, with a word misplaced. When Thomasina weeps for the destruction of the library of Alexandria and all the lost plays of the Athenians, Septimus says: “You should no more grieve for [them] than for a buckle from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which shall be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in our arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.”

The play is both a vindication of this speech, and a repudiation of it. Thomasina’s notebooks are picked up again by Hannah – but what about when the march ends? In our time, science suggests a threat to our ability to survive far more imminent that the frozen universe implied in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: our “heat death” could come under a blanket of our own warming gases. ‘Arcadia’ asks, in part, how do you live with the certain knowledge of extinction – not just your own, but your species’?

In the most important speech in the play, Hannah suggests the answer lies in the process of trying to understand, while you can. You find meaning by questing on, even in the face of failure and extinction. She tells Valentine: “It’s all trivial – your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.”

And so in the end, Stoppard suggests the division that obsessed the eighteenth century – between romantics and classicists – exists in all of us. Hannah prides herself on her classical reserve, but by the final scene, it is faltering. She finally agrees to dance with Gus, the mysterious, mute young son of the house who seems to have an inexplicable knowledge of the distant past. He is a symbol of all the things that lie beyond her rational explanations – and she embraces him. Septimus is a stern scientist who venerates geometry, but he ends as the most romantic figure of all – a lone hermit in a Gothic garden trying vainly to vindicate the theories of his lost love.

Stoppard seems to believe that without both halves of the eighteenth century self – an impulse to understand the rules that govern the world, and an impulse to overthrow them and create ourselves anew – we are not fully human.

Indeed, he even seems to present chaos theory – in a sweet irony – as a kind of romantic maths, vindicating the romantics’ belief that nature is wild and disordered, using the classicists’ method of good rigorous algebra. The divisions collapse into one.

In the last scene, the characters from the eighteenth century and the twentieth century are on stage together, occupying the same space. They cannot see each other, yet they seem to be speaking to each other all the same, as the implications of Thomasina’s discoveries tumble out. As the music rises, Thomasina and Septimus waltz together for the last time – a dance that is another iterated algorithm, always the same, always slightly different – and Hannah takes Gus’ hand for a dance of their own. The sound of the coming fire slowly rises. The waltzing couples dance in circles past each other, oblivious to each other, and intensely aware of each other, all at once.

It’s a moment that shows the power of the play of ideas to fuse together concepts and characters into a theatrical grenade. This final scene is the waltz that takes place inside all of us – of our ancestors dancing with our present, of reason dancing with irrationality, and of hope dancing with despair, as the roaring, crackling sound of the heat-death draws ever closer.

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Show me what scares you, and I will show you your subconscious leeching out into the world. Every culture – every person – imagines there are terrors waiting for us in the dark: the shape of the monsters changes from year to year, but the fear remains. Man, it seems, needs dread and circuses.

I was drawn into the world of horror movies by my grandmother, one of the sweetest and gentlest people I have ever met. Yet she has always loved terrifying movies – the more violent and savage, the better. Even though she is nearly 90, she loves to be wheeled into the Saw movies and to gasp at how the inventive serial killer Jigsaw has managed to rip out another person's ribs. "Dinnae be such a weakling! Look!" she will josh at me as another pile of guts splatters on the screen and I discreetly vomit into my popcorn.

Thanks to her, I can debate for hours which is the best Mutant Insect movie (it's a toss-up between Them! and Slugs, with an honourable mention for Ants), or whether Sewage Baby is a better evil-foetus film than The Unborn II. (It is.) I can recite whole sections of I Spit on Your Grave, and deliver monologues from Nightmares in A Damaged Brain.

And I know what some of you are thinking: how sick. Why would anybody want to watch blood and cruelty and sadism? Once a generation, there is a horror-panic against Victorian penny dreadfuls or 1950s horror comics or 1980s video-nasties: we are overdue for another flurry.

Yet our monsters are only our own hidden anxieties, sweated on to the page or screen. Look, for example, at the early Gothic horror novels from the 18th century. The villains are depraved aristocrats, who (often literally) live off and feed on the masses. This was a resentment that was not yet politically sayable in England – yet it emerged in nightmare-tales.

The fears that have rippled through our minds since have all taken their purest form in horror. The reactionary, romantic fear of science was distilled into Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818 – a metaphor that is used today against stem-cells, IVF or any other spurt of progress. The first great horror film was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, made in Germany in 1921. It shows how a charismatic, crazed hypnotist and fraud enraptures the German crowds and leads them to madness. "You will become Caligari", the posters warned – and the German people did.

The growing independence of teenagers in the 1950s spurred a string of teenage monsters, beginning with I Was a Teenage Werewolf: they spout hair, get a gruffer voice, and become obnoxious. (Sound familiar?) The freedom of women met a repellent backlash in the slasher movies of the 1970s, where women flirt with sex and get stabbed. The formula was simple: get your tits out, and get them cut off. Forget Star Wars; this was scar wars, in misogynistic technicolour.

Yet by the 1990s, horror looked like an exhausted genre that had finally had its own ribs ripped out. The films became knowing, camp comedies – the antithesis of fear. In Scream, the characters comment glibly on their chances of survival: "There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to survive a horror movie. First, you can never drink or do drugs. Second, you can never have sex. Big no-no." When they finally pull the Scream mask off the killer, there is nothing but a blank space: the perfect symbol of the emptiness of 1990s horror – and culture.

But something strange has happened in Noughties Britain: straight-faced horror has risen again. In the past year, a string of superb low-budget horror films have been released: Eden Lake, Donkey Punch, Hush, The Children and Mum & Dad.

They all have a similar aesthetic: they are stripped-down and ultra-naturalistic. There are no supernatural shenanigans, or incidental music, or self-conscious winks at the audience. There is just a steady camera and sweaty fear.

These films are the purest form of cinema. Movies aren't a cerebral medium; they are visceral. The first people to see a film screamed in terror and ran from the room – and these movies bring us back to that first, primal response.

And what do they show Britain to be frightened of today? Our country's prejudices against the young and the poor are the beating soon-to-be-ripped-out heart of the films. Eden Lake is the perfect example, distilling some of our ugliest fears into an hour and a half of torment. A glossy middle-class couple drive out of London to Eden Lake, a development in the countryside. There, they anger a gang of teenage "chavs" – who torture them to death.

It is superbly made – and expresses our vilest social anxieties. As we have become a grossly unequal country, we demonise and dehumanise the poor to salve our soiled consciences. They aren't human! They don't have feelings! They want us dead! Where early horror feared the rich, our horror fears the poor, and tells us to run from them, fast.

All the years I have loved horror films, I have asked myself: why? Why do I like watching this stuff, when what it represents is so foul? Is horror morally corrupting after all?

This is the question at the heart of the best horror film – and quite possibly the best British film – ever made: Peeping Tom, released in 1960. It follows a serial killer who films his own murders of young women and obsessively rewatches them. The film constantly forces the viewer to ask: why is he watching this? What pleasure can he get? Are we like him? It was such a disturbing question that the film was pulled from the cinemas in a great national retch, and the career of the genius director Michael Powell ended overnight.

Aristotle believed that by experiencing the terrifying vicariously through monster-stories, we are purged of our fears and hatreds – and our desire to act on them in the real world. It is a safety valve. In Greek mythology, Perseus has a polished shield that enables him to look indirectly at the Gorgon – and thus slay it. Are horror films our shield of Perseus, enabling us to see our monsters, and wipe them out? Is my grandmother so gentle precisely because she can exorcise her natural sadistic impulses before a screen – and is she an exception among horror fans?

As I gaze out over my small mountain of horror DVDs and contemplate watching The Evil Dead for a 10th time (highlight: a woman is raped by a demonic tree), I wonder: when we peer into the dark, do we become darker – or do we leave lighter?

I have met children who became killers several times in my life: in the warzones of the Congo and the Central African Republic, and in the grey Young Offenders’ Institutes of Britain. When I read about the events that are alleged to have happened last weekend in South Yorkshire, I kept thinking about their small, paranoid eyes. Two brothers – aged ten and eleven – have been charged with torturing two other, younger kids. The victims had been hit with bricks, burned with cigarettes, and slashed with knives in a wild field.

We are a long way from knowing what happened in that field that afternoon, or who carried out these acts. But the visceral temptation when any children face accusations like this is to brand them as inherently evil demons who should be locked far from us for life. But the most famous case of child-on-child killing in British history – that of Mary Bell – shows us how flawed this initial reaction is.

In 1968, in the sagging streets of the poorest part of Newcastle, a ten year old girl strangled two toddlers – Martin Brown, and Brian Howe – to death. She then cut their bodies, and with her best friend, a mentally disabled thirteen year old, she left notes in a nursery saying: “We did murder Martain brown, fuckof you BAstArd.” She was reflexively described in the press as a child who had been “born evil”, a “monster” and “demon.”

Now we know what happened to her to make her into such a child. Mary’s mother, Betty Bell, was a severely disturbed alcoholic who had been sectioned at least once. She worked as a prostitute specialising in sado-masochism – whippings and stranglings. The first thing she said when Mary was placed into her arms after giving birth was: “Take the thing away from me!” She rejected her daughter and repeatedly tried to kill her by feeding her an overdose of sleeping tablets. But eventually, she did find a use for Mary. Once she turned four, she began to pimp her to paedophiles.

Mary never knew who her father was, but she suspected her mother had been inseminated by her own dad. Later in life, she asked her mother point blank if this was the case. She didn’t deny it. Betty simply said quietly: “You are the devil’s spawn.”

When she was ten, Mary made friends with another girl who was being raped by a local paedophile. All they had known in their lives was violent abuse – and they began to act it out. Mary tried to cut off one of the boy’s penises with a razor – a plain, crazed act of revenge for what she had experienced since she was a toddler.

Yet it is strangely comforting to see evil as a primordial external force, something alien that can be hunted down and confined to cages. It dodges the colder truth that I have learned from all the child-killers I have met: we all have the capacity for terrible cruelty and sadism, especially if we are subjected to horror ourselves. Which of us can be confident that, given such Mary Bell’s childhood, we wouldn’t have done something depraved?

Yet the trial of the two children who killed Jamie Bulger – and the websites trying to figure out where they are now, so they can be lynched – suggests we have barely progressed since then. Excellent works of investigative journalism like Blake Morrison’s book ‘As If’ have uncovered evidence that these children were subjected to violent and probably sexual abuse. We don’t want to hear it. We want devils and demons and a black-and-white world that tells us: no, it couldn’t have been you; this crime belongs to a different species.

These killings are not political parables. However much right-wingers want to make this a story about welfare dependency and left-wingers want to make it a story of brutal Thatcherite economics, these rare murders have happened in Britain at the same rate for over a century. They have to be understood at the personal, human level.

To understand and explain these cases is not to excuse, or justify. We are talking about the most terrible thing that can happen to a person: torture, and murder. The children who do this need to be humanely detained for as long as they are a danger. But everything we know about children who kill tells us they are invariably victims of extreme abuse themselves, deserving of compassion, not hysterical condemnation.

I have watched my friend Camilla Batmangelidh – the director of Kid’s Company – work with children in South London who have bricked, bottled and tortured other children. She explains: “Since the Bell and Bulger cases, we’ve learned a lot about how a developing brain reacts to abuse, but the judicial system hasn’t caught up. We now know from brain scans that if you have really poor quality care in childhood, your pre-frontal lobes don’t develop properly. Those are the parts of the brain that think rationally, empathise, and exercise self-control. It is physically impossible for these children to calm down and think a situation through. Their brains haven’t developed that way.” So to treat them like morally responsible mini-adults who just made a bad decision – as the British courts do today – doesn’t make sense. It is a neurological fiction.

When this impaired brain chemistry combines with violent abuse and rape, the children can become time-bombs. “They have been taught to see the world through one template: you’re a victim, or you’re an abuser. That’s how they think human relationships work,” Batmangelidh puts it. “At first, they are abused, and at some point they become determined to be a perpetrator, because then at least they have power and control. If you think those are your only two options in life, it seems preferable.”

As she said this, I remembered the child soldiers in Central Africa who pointed guns into my face and smirked. Their families had been bayoneted in front of them, and they had buried the bodies themselves. In the warzones of the Congo, I met eleven and twelve year old boys who had seen their mothers and sisters snatched away, and were then picked up by the militiamen and trained to rape and kill. Like Mary, they were re-enacting the violence they had experienced in a desperate attempt to switch roles: this time, they were the Big Men.

Children who kill are a question of mental health, not morality. They are internally destroyed children, not devils. Given the love and support that they deserve, such children can develop their frontal lobes and their capacity for empathy over time, and be released. As Gita Sereny’s reportorial masterpiece ‘Cries Unheard’ shows, Mary Bell eventually developed into a morally responsible adult and “a very, very loving mother” – albeit one perpetually haunted by the knowledge of what she had done.

Haven’t we progressed enough since the Middle Ages to see these truths, and reject the barbaric theology of “evil” children?

When accusations like this bleed into the news, we need to stand at the front of the looming lynch mob and say: Stop. Think. In 1861, a leader in The Times commented on the trial of two eight year old boys in Stockport who had tortured and killed a toddler. It said: “Children of that age cannot be held legally accountable in the same way as adults. It is absurd and monstrous that these two children have been treated like murderers.” Isn’t it time we progressed to 1862?

In the endless babbling torrent of news, it’s easy to miss the small signs of how a culture – and a country – changes. For me, a marker almost as sweet as a black man in the White House flickers into Britain’s cinemas today. Clint Eastwood is the quintessential icon of the old America: an icy Everyman who made his fame cursing liberals, shooting down suspects, and slaying Injuns on screen. But now, in his eighth decade, Eastwood has done something remarkable. He has been making beautiful, understated movies that apologize for the filth he pumped out early in his career – and propagandize for a very different America. Yes: Dirty Harry has turned pinko-peacenik.

Eastwood strutted into the American consciousness in the 1950s in the TV series ‘Rawhide’ and a string of big-screen Westerns. He caught the tail-end of the uncomplicated Us-vs.-Them cowboy flicks where the Indians were evil scalping savages who had to be destroyed by the white heroes. The films were gorgeous, romantic accounts of a genocide, told adoringly from the perspective of the genocidaires. The attitude of the genre was typified by John Wayne’s jeer: “I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them… the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

The approach lovingly idealised by Wayne and Eastwood lingers long: George W. Bush told his staffers to read a book that describes the Middle East as “Indian territory.” Even today, Washington D.C. has a museum dedicated to the genocide in Europe, but not the one on which their own society is built.

But Eastwood found his most iconic role as a new kind of urban cowboy. In the 1971 film ‘Dirty Harry’, he plays Inspector Harry Callhan. It was the first of the wave of backlash movies, explicitly taking on the sixties counter-culture and accusing it of destroying America. The plot focuses on a serial killer called Scorpio, who is a pansy-parody of the peace movement: a long-haired, androgynous, lisping hippie who wears the peace logo. He shoots random civilians on the streets of San Francisco, and says he will only stop if he is paid a ransom of $100,000.

Dirty Harry is an old-style cop, fond of beating and torturing confessions out of suspects. He summarises his approach by saying: “I shoot the bastard, that’s my policy.” His colleagues boast that Harry “is an equal opportunities hater – spicks, niggers, kikes, dagoes – especially spicks.” He sets out to catch the killer – but at every turn, he is emasculated by insane liberal regulations. The new laws prevent him from breaking into homes without a warrant, committing torture, or harassing suspects. Appalled, Harry spits: “That man has rights?... The law is crazy!”

As a result of the evil liberals fettering Harry, Scorpio is left free to suffocate a fourteen-year old girl and hijack a schoolbus full of kids. In the end, Harry shoots Scorpio in cold blood and throws his police badge away in disgust.

Pauline Kael, the greatest film critic of her time (or any time), famously called the film “fascist”, saying it “propagandizes for para-legal police power and vigilante justice.” It is designed to make you curse the fact the police aren’t allowed to shoot or savage whoever they please, and scream at the screen: “Kill, Harry!” Dirty Harry’s motto – “Go ahead, punk. Make my day” – became a classic.

In the 1980s, it looked like Eastwood’s shtick had run into the sand. His films were becoming even nastier and more right-wing – he was the only film-maker to glorify Ronald Reagan’s insane anti-democratic adventures in South America. In the end, he was reduced to co-starring alongside orange apes, even less convincingly than Reagan himself.

But then something odd happened. The old black-and-white world of Dirty Harry bled away – and a subtle, supple film-maker emerged in his place. There were hints of a change in ‘Unforgiven’, his 1992 Western. Suddenly, the old gun-slinger at the centre of the film – played by Eastwood – was broken and traumatized by the sadism he had inflicted in his earlier life. We no longer yelled for him to kill more: we felt uncomfortable, and ambiguous.

Since then, Eastwood’s films have been populated with people broken by the kind of casual violence inflicted to such noisy cheers by Dirty Harry. ‘The Changeling’ is the true story of what happens when the police disobey the rules and embark on torture and violence to achieve their goals – told from the perspective of the victim. ‘The Flags of Our Fathers’ is the true story of the soldiers who raised the US flag on Iwo Jima during the Second World War – and how the Native American soldier there, Ira Hayes, returned to face internal Apartheid and abuse. The companion-film, ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’, is even more bold, telling the story of the war from the other side – of the Japanese soldiers who faced them on the battle-field. Eastwood began to be attacked by the likes of Rush Limbaugh for becoming “liberal.”

But with his latest film, ‘Gran Torino’, Eastwood makes his repentance explicit. He plays Walt Kowalski, a cussed old widow and Korean war vet living alone in a neighbourhood that is increasingly populated by immigrants. Walt could be Harry Callhan in retirement: he curses the “babbling gooks” who move in next door and clings to his fat guns.

But one day, Walt sees a gang attacking his Hmong-immigrant neighbours, as they stumble onto his lawn – and he scares them off with a gun. The Hmong family begin to shower him with gifts and affection, as the gang circles every closer. It becomes clear Walt is broken by the violence he committed fifty years ago in Korea. “You want to know what it’s like to kill a man?” he asks. “It’s gooddam awful and the only thing worse is being given a medal of honour for killing a guy who just wants to live.”

Yet it becomes clear that Walt will fight back against the gang to defend his neighbours – and it seems like progress from Dirty Harry, but not much. Yes, liberal vigilantism is better than illiberal vigilantism, but only by inches.

But then the film surprises you – and shows how far Eastwood has really come. (If you don’t want to know the ending of the film, skip this paragraph.) He goes to confront the gang, and we expect a gleeful shoot-out. But the gang are waiting for him, armed like a militia. Walt watches them slowly, sadly, and reaches into his jacket. As he does, he dares the gang to shoot him first. “Go ahead,” he says – deliberately echoing Dirty Harry. They fill him with lead, there, in the street. But it turns out Walt was unarmed – and now the gang is going down for life. His neighbours are free at last. The echo of the old catch-phrase is ironic: Eastwood’s smiling form of apology. The first time the actor said “go ahead” on the big screen, he was sacrificing the law with violence to attack liberals. This time, he was using the law and non-violence, to defend immigrants.

In an age of forced apologies, here is a real one. This shift in one of America’s greatest icons is – I think – a helpful, hopeful sign of the wider shift in American culture. Although it was obscured by the back-lash jolts of 9/11 and the Bush years, the US has been slowly becoming a more liberal and open-minded society. Look at the difference between the reaction to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Abu Graib horror in Iraq. When My Lai broke – the deliberate massacre of a whole village, including children – 40 percent of Americans defended it, and songs celebrating it topped the charts. When Abu Graib broke, only the madder fringes of talk radio praised it; more than 90 percent were repulsed.

The old Dirty Harry racism and brutality is abating, as the country’s great civil rights movements slowly win. Of course, that doesn’t mean the actions of the government will necessarily follow Walt and public opinion. They are often driven by forces that aren’t as accountable to democratic pressure, like corporate power, or the super-rich – but in time, they too can be eroded. If Inspector Harry Callhan can say sorry and change, anyone can.

Go ahead, America – make our day.

On the 21st October 1953, John Gielgud – the dream-voiced Shakespearian star of his generation, and Knight of the Realm – walked into a public toilet off the Fulham Road. There, he exchanged a few nods and prods with a young man who winked at him – and triggered Britain’s most high-profile prosecution for homosexuality since Oscar Wilde.

In ‘Plague Over England’, the entrapment of Gielgud by a “pretty policeman” is the centre of gravity for a play that swoops across the gay underworld of 1950s London – from the bushes of St James’ Park strewn with guardsmen to the Whitehall clubs where the crackdown on this “filth” is planned.

As Gielgud is convicted and shamed, a self-consciously gay London is emerging around him from the darkness of the toilets and parks, trying to find light. As panicked men approach their doctors for help with their “disorder”, they are prescribed oestrogen to shrivel up their genitals, or electric shocks to burn their urges away.

And in the middle of it stands Gielgud, an empty, air-headed genius, so great at donning masks because there is so little there. When he is caught, her mutters only a pitiful, desperate: “I’m sorry.” He sees no chance for political redemption: when somebody urges him to act like a Suffragette, he laments: “Ah, but they had a just cause.” He only achieves eloquence once in the play when, lost and facing ruin, he turns to the audience and quotes Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’: “What must the King do now? Must he submit?... Must he lose/ the name of king? O God’s name, let it go.” Gielgud is only himself when he is pretending.

The play’s author, Nicholas De Jongh, is best known as the acerbic theatre critic for this newspaper. But here, in his terrific first play, he sensitively traces a lost world: the dark waltz of cottaging where men circle each other for small signs of lust, and of politicians pledging to “eliminate homosexuality” from these crevices. He manages to pull onto the stage the inner lives of a remarkable range of characters, and only fails in his depictions of the homophobes. They had complex, disturbing motives of their own – but here they are buffoonish caricatures motivated by only idiocy.

Of course, Michael Feast has an impossible job playing Gielgud. Nobody can bring back that voice – as pure and seductive as a Caribbean ocean – and nobody can bring back those eyes. But it is an extraordinary tribute that at times, there are flickers of the lost actor. As the play swings forward to the 1970s and the age of gay liberation, he captures the pathos of Gielgud still agonising. “The parade,” he says softly, “has passed me by.”

Fifty-six years after Gielgud ended up in court for a harmless act, it is a victory that “his crime” can now be re-enacted so compellingly on stage – in the knowledge the audience will damn the police, not the gay man.

Booking to 16 May. Box office: 0870 890 1103

Just as you think you are so bloated with turkey you can shunt it aside for another year, the most succulent and lush of all turkeys has landed before us – and I am twitching for the carving knife.

I am, of course, talking about ‘Australia’, the ten-thousand-hour epic by Baz Luhrman that has crash-landed in our cinemas. It aims to create a new national myth for Australia, no less, by dropping Nicole Kidman – playing a frozen-faced English aristocrat called Lady Sarah Ashley – into the Australia outback, where she promptly rescues the Aborigines, melts the heart of a calloused Aussie ranch-hand, and becomes one with the land.

The film is appalling, excruciating, offensive – and I loved every moment. While everyone else in the cinema walked out or lapsed into a coma, I howled and yelped and wept as Hugh Jackman tells Lady Sarah – with real pain in his eyes – “I mix with dingoes, not duchesses.”

I, dear reader, am always ready to buckle up for a cinematic car-crash. But what makes a glorious turkey? It must be utterly straight-faced. The film-maker must believe he has a profound message humanity needs to hear. That means many of the films often lauded in Great Bad Movies lists have to be dismissed. Goodbye ‘The Swarm’, where the bees turn on humanity and Michael Caine howls: “Why the bees? They have always been our friends!” Farewell ‘The Exorcist II’, where Richard Burton is acted off the screen by a giant prosthetic locust. Who is surprised you suck?

No, the great turkeys aim for profundity. Their pleasure lies in the chasm between the film-maker’s expectations and our guffaws. For me, nobody has yet matched ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, Hollywood’s 1965 take on Jesus Christ. Claude Raines plays King Herod as a shrieking-camp queen – “Ooooh, kill the first-born!” he hisses – while John Wayne is given the last line. Gazing at Jesus’ ascending body, he says: “Truly, this man was the son of God.” When the director told him to say it with more awe, Wayne, with his eyes to the skies and his hand on his heart, said: “Aw, truly this man was the son of God.”

Hollywood did not regain this golden slurry until the 1990s, when Kevin Costner decided to stage the Apocalypse - twice. In ‘Waterworld’, he is one of the last survivors of a drowned world – but it hard to take his long existentialist speeches seriously when he is wearing flippers. In ‘The Postman’, he wanders through a burned landscape, keeping – yes – the postal system running. "You're a godsend, a saviour!" a woman squeals at him. “No,” he says, “I'm a postman.” Can we agree now that if there is ever an apocalypse and we are all dependent on Kevin Costner for survival, our species should just call it a day?

Go to ‘Australia.’ Go now. Go twice. Aw, truly this film is the work of God.

If you can’t afford a ticket to ride around the world, there is another way. You can tour the craters of Baghdad, the swelling skylines of China, and the mud-villages of Senegal from a cinema seat at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival. There, over the past week, I have been staring – through celluloid-glasses – into the eyes of people scattered across the earth. Even the best print journalists cannot give you the immediacy of a great documentary: of feeling you are walking through the shrieking metal factories in China that manufacture almost everything you own in the film ’24 City’, or trudging through the vast concrete sink-estates where the British ghettoize the poor in ‘Sighthill Stories.’

But the films that riveted me most were the stories of people embarked on their own epic journeys – from country to city, from exile to home, from Africa on capsizing boats to the shores of Europe. The most devastating is the film ‘Life After the Fall’, which takes us home with an Iraqi exile – then makes us watch as the home is burned down. Kasim Abid fled Saddam’s goons in 1974, and returned three decades later after the Anglo-American invasion. At first, this is a family-reunion film. He embraces the brothers and sisters he has not seen in so long, to find war and sanctions have “turned their hair grey”. They explain how the secret police came looking for him, and they were terrified they would pay for his exile. But now they are all filled with “a dreadful sense of hope”: Saddam is gone, democracy beckons.

And then the lights go out, and the petrol runs dry, and the tanks keep rolling, and the suicide-bombs begin. Kasim and his family stand frozen. “Is this supposed to make Iraqis support them?” Kasim asks, staring on TV at the jigsaw of body parts after a bombing. His camera stays distant, peering at the chaos in long-shots, as if paralysed. But the optimism takes a long time to die. The house a few doors away from his sister is blown up by a mysterious package. His niece is in a car that is stopped by gun-men, and one of the passengers is shot. Kasim’s coffee is blown out of his hand as he sits in his home. They don’t talk about it much. They try to continue with normal family life.

After all the headlines, after all the impossible-sounding statistics – a million dead, four million forced from their homes – we finally see what this war has been like for ordinary Iraqis. You are driving to work and you get stuck in traffic – and shooting begins all around you. What do you do? Your child wants to go to school in a country where the sky is scarred black with bomb-smoke. What do you do? The US soldiers – glimpsed briefly, peering from tanks – seem like surreal extras from another movie set, stumbling into the streets of Baghdad by mistake.

Slowly, the pools of hope and optimism curdle. The camera pans across acres of rubble as Kasim says: “This is American reconstruction.” His nieces – smart, determined young women – find themselves imprisoned in their homes by Islamist militias. “No-one has the right to force me to cover my head,” one of them says, in despairing anger, before adding: “We might as well be dead, so what’s the point of living?” Through it all, the streets of Baghdad have a surreal beauty, with their concrete brutalism and dust-storms and groaning rubble.

The war blasts deeper and deeper into the family’s life – and then, one day, a gang wearing balaclavas enters the grocery shop run by Kasim’s brother Ali. They put a gun to his head as his young son watches, and bundle him into a car. The family waits – one day, two days, seven days. There is no ransom demand. They know Ali had long ago converted to becoming a Sunni, and all over Baghdad, the rival religious sects are slaughtering each other. The family squeezes into the overflowing morgue – and Ali is there. In the chaos, the morgue loses the body. They never get to bury him.

‘Life After the Fall’ is a heart-breaking film because it is a heart-broken film. Just before she flees her country, Kasim’s sister Ilham sits stunned and says to camera: “After the fall, we would sit on our balcony and talk about the future of Iraq. We had high hopes. My husband used to say – Dubai, the Gulf [states] will be nothing compared to Iraq… But in the end everything failed. We didn’t benefit at all. The country didn’t get better or rebuilt, it just got destroyed some more.”

The Czech film-maker Miloslav Novak has been on a very different journey: to find a creature we are killing. The Mediterranean monk-seal is Europe’s most endangered species. After fourteen million years dappling in our seas, there are fewer than 500 left in the wild, and none in captivity. These odd wriggling blubber-creatures, with arms like men and snouts like pigs, are about to pass from history. In most wildlife films, the camera is a God, swirling anywhere the wildlife swirls. Not here. In ‘Peace With Seals,’ Novak has made a wildlife film about his inability to find any wildlife. He trawls across Europe trying to find the seals. He tries to lure them with large plastic replicas of female seals, the amphibian equivalent to sex-dolls. He interviews elderly seal-hunters. But he only ever gets fleeting glimpses of the creatures themselves – and then the seals are gone.

The film becomes a meditation on the great ecological die-off we are living through – and causing. The seals are a seal of our fate too, he believes. He quotes one of my favourite novels, Karel Capek’s ‘The War With the Newts’, where humans and amphibians go to war. If this is a war, we have won. Wildlife has lost. And we will pay for our victory. The film ends with a hellish image. In the 1950s, a seal was captured in Sardinia and brought to Rome, where it was made to live in a fountain. Novak imagines the animal flapping in concrete while photographers burst flashes in its face and a crowd of tourists roars its approval. This is what the world looks like now, on a grand scale.

The seals are not the only beings dying in the seas around Europe. The film ‘Barcelona or Die’ opens in a tiny village in Senegal whose poverty-starved young people dream of sailing to Europe. Every day tiny rickety boats stuffed with people set off. Some make it to the Canary Islands and onto their dream-city, Barcelona. But many only reach ‘Barca’: the afterlife in their language. The few who return tell of how their boats capsized, they watched family members drown and had to drink sea-water.

And why? Why do they come? The African village is coming to Europe because Europe has come to their shores – and destroyed their livelihoods. “There’s nothing in the sea anymore,” explains one fisherman. “There was a time when the sea was good, and there were lots of fish… The [huge, industrial European] trawlers put an end to that. It’s not right. It’s not right that they came here from Europe and take everything. What’s left for us?” One of his last acts before leaving the European Commission was for Peter Mandelson to try to extend Europe’s “right” to Africa’s fish. The film ends with hundreds more desperate young people setting off in half-broken boats, to skivvy or to drown.

What do you learn if you watch dozens of movies from every continent in one concentrated burst in the dark? I kept thinking of Salman Rushdie’s definition of globalization: “everywhere is part of everywhere else now.” These stories about Iraq and the shores of the Mediterranean and Senegal were stories that lead directly back to us. Next year, see the world at the Sheffield International Documentary festival – and you will see your own actions staring right back at you.

You can buy the film ‘Life After the Fall’ at www.lifeafterthefall.com

We are living in the Age of Porn. In every home, tens of thousands of anonymous strangers are a second away from being splayed before you, staring out of the screen into your eyes. This has never happened to human beings before; it confuses our evolutionary wiring. Of course, the Romans had pornographic murals, and Kingsley Amis swapped smudged dirty pictures with Philip Larkin – but the volcanic-spurting scale of porn today is unprecedented. Hardcore porn is now mainstream – and leaking into every e-mail inbox on earth.

Like all liberals, I am torn on porn. I believe in sexual freedom, and detest the Puritanical view of consensual sex as shameful. So this Dionysian bonfire of taboos – this eruption of sexual self-expression – seems at first glance to be something to celebrate, a glorious rutting end to the old hang-ups. And yet, and yet... Are the "performers" being exploited? Seventy per cent of prostitutes have been sexually abused; as they lie on their cheap beds waiting for our double-click, are porn stars chasing the ghost of a childhood rape? We know the film that sucked porn into the mainstream – Deep Throat – is actually the record of a rape: its star, Linda Lovelace, revealed that she was forced to "perform" on camera by her psychotic pimp husband. Doesn't the thought of the nations of the world masturbating over abused or raped women suddenly make the language of liberation look like a squalid trick?

I decided that the only way to resolve this debate in my own brain was to journey into the world of porn-performers. I was told by one editor who used to work with porn stars that there is a "strict code of Omerta in porn... They will all tell you they love it and nothing bad ever happens. Porn stars don't air their dirty laundry in public – well, except on camera."

Phil – a well-known 25-year-old gay porn star – suggested meeting one afternoon in the Café Nero on Old Compton Street in London's West End. He was sitting at a steel table sipping coffee, a long, lean tree of a man with a surprisingly soft voice. I asked – a little awkwardly – how he got involved in the industry. "I've always had a streak that likes being watched. I started porn when I was 18," he said, leaning forward. "I sent some photographs in and they had me in for a photo shoot. Then they asked if I wanted to do a scene, and it was a couple of hundred quid, so I said yes. And I've had some of the best sex of my life on porn sets."

"That little bit of cash becomes addictive," he said, looking down into his coffee. "You're making £250 a scene. The industry sells a lie to teenagers – boys and girls. They say you'll get more and more money, people will like you more, it'll prove you are sexy and people want you. But it doesn't happen – you don't become a big-earning star, not in Britain." He seems to have an abstract, almost Zen distance from it, as if he is talking about somebody else.

"When you're 18, you don't really think about the consequences of what you're doing," he said. "After I had been doing porn for a few years, I was really lost at sea. I used a lot of drugs – coke, K, ecstasy. I started having unprotected sex in my personal life. I thought – I'm going to end up dead. That's what scared the shit out of me. At this health clinic they suggested I see a psychiatrist. It's the best thing I ever did. Because..." his sentences stopped now; he spoke more haltingly. "It's difficult to... I was sexually abused by a neighbour."

And his real story emerged: the truth behind the groaning. Between the ages of six and 12, a neighbour periodically raped him. His mother was being so violently abused by his father she didn't see it happening. "I thought I had done something wrong," he said, the calm barely breaking. Do you think that exploitation led you to porn? It was the first time he paused. "Maybe. Maybe you think you can control it when you're being filmed. You can't. It's just a different kind of prostitution." And then: "I don't know." Do you think this has happened to a lot of porn stars? "I don't know."

Why was he giving up? "I only ever do films wearing condoms. But I was told by a producer if I didn't do bareback [sex without condoms] I'd lose my career because the industry is moving to bareback. One of my friends turned up to do a film for a low-production company and they didn't even check his HIV certificate. He was having unprotected sex without anyone knowing what his status was. I can't get work because I insist on safe sex. But if I was 18 now? Yes, I would have done it too." He looked away. "I'm hanging up my hat now. I'm not doing it any more. You know, I'm very political and I would have liked to have been a politician. Obviously I can't do that now."

I had arranged that same night to meet a female porn star who was very anxious to not be identified: she wanted it in writing. When she arrived at my flat, I was expecting another horror story. Hannah was 40, and slim, and tense; she asked for a glass of water. "I hope you're not going to portray us as victims!" she said. "I'm not a victim. I have been treated badly at work – but never in porn. When I was a nurse, I used to get pains all down my side from the stress of being shouted at and treated like shit all day for terrible wages. Now everyone says I look so much better, and I'm happy too. At the end of the day it's sex. It's a great thing! I enjoy it. I'm not hurting anyone. When I told my mother [about her job] she said 'You're selling your body!' and I said – we're all selling something."

Hannah used to be like me. She used to think (as she put it): "Down-trodden, low self-esteem, male-dominated." But, she said: "I have been treated with such respect on porn sets. Women earn more, and your boundaries are totally respected. Sometimes it's like the men are walking on egg shells to respect what you've said your limits are."

Hannah was thoughtful. She admitted that there are "dangerous" ends of the industry – "sleazy amateurs who can exploit you" – and people who are too vulnerable to be there. When I asked her what she would say to people who thought she was kidding herself, she said: "I think I would know. I am genuinely enjoying myself. How can that be a delusion?" She said she felt "liberated", adding: "I had a boyfriend who used to call me a slut during sex and I hated it and told him to stop. Now I don't feel that. The way that word is used in porn – it's empowering for me. A slut is a woman who's happy with her sexuality and enjoys sex. That's me. Yes, I am a slut. Deal with it."

I don't think she was lying. And yet as I walked her to the Tube, I felt a strange sensation: the desire to protect her. Was this a leftover of the old Puritanism, lingering in my supposedly liberated mind – or a rational fear?

Over the next fortnight, I met more porn stars – young women at the start of their careers, and older men who'd been round the porn-block and back again. They all insisted they knew what they were doing, and they liked it. They all spoke in awe of the Queen of British Porn: Daisy Rock. When I called her to ask if I could come to see her in Hove, she said with a flirtatious laugh: "It depends. What do you want to do to me?" Oh, don't worry, I'm gay, I added. She replies: "Darlin', I learned everything I know from gay men."

I arrived at the converted stable where she lives, and within minutes she was showing me her vagina. She had logged on to her website, and said: "I want you to see how in-your-face it is... See, this is the section where I fuck fans who have written in to me..." And it is in-your-face. Or rather, in hers.

Sitting at her big wooden table, Daisy looked like a small, lovely blow-up doll. Discovering the porn-world was, she said, like a gay man discovering the scene. "My mum was always calling me a slut when I was a teenager, but I never saw what was wrong with liking boys. I was always a very sexually charged person. When I did normal jobs, I was always being sacked for flirting too much. I got fired as an air stewardess for being too filthy. So finding the porn world... you know all the black sheep? We've all got together and we're making films. It's like you're not a freak any more. You feel comfortable."

Daisy became a stripper in her twenties, and says she "loved it." That led to porn – and in the decade or so since, she has made more than 100 films. "It makes me angry some people think it's OK to invade countries but not to watch sex. I'd rather a teenager watched two people having sex than people being blown up and stabbed on the news. I have the most amazing life. I enjoy my work. For me, it's an art form, it's a way of self-expression. I make films for couples to watch together to get in the mood. How can that be bad?" She spoke passionately, like the Martin Luther King of anal sex. She has a dream that one day, a little white penis and a little black anus will come together.

She said she had had one crisis of confidence. "Yes, I'm scared now. I've been so close to STDs and it makes you think. I started to think about all those religious people who say STDs are a punishment. You know – why do you get cervical cancer if you have too much sex? Why is there all this disease? I concluded it was bullshit – religion is just an imaginary friend for weak people – but I did think about it. It got me worried. I'm tested every two weeks when I'm working, and I think everyone else should be too."

Daisy seemed bizarrely sorted – so I told her about Phil. "There wouldn't be many porn stars if it wasn't for sexual abuse," she remarked casually. "Look at Jenna Jameson, or all those early porn stars." But surely that's pretty shocking? "I really believe this: you shouldn't be reprimanded for having had a hard life." She lit a cigarette. "For a lot of these girls it's a safe outlet. Where else are they going to go? Do you run away from what's happened to you, or do you wrap your arms around it and bring it under your own control? I think it's changed now," she said quickly. "People look for people who actually enjoy the sex. I can't think of one porn star now who has been purely sexually abused." Purely abused? "Who is doing it just because they were abused." Were you abused? "No," she said, "I wasn't."

I kissed Daisy goodbye and reeled across the Brighton seafront. I was – and am – as conflicted as when I began. Yes, there are people such as Daisy who do it because they love it; I did believe her. But there are also people like Phil sitting in a café on Old Compton Street, confused and abused. It seems repellent to build our liberation on his nightmare. When you log on, you have no way of knowing which you're getting. That, for me, leaves a damp fog of sadness hanging over our long triumphant Age of Porn.

Debo confesar que me encantan dos géneros musicales despreciados: el heavy metal y el country. No sólo eso: estoy convencido de que ambos tienen una fuerte carga política que no se ha reconocido.

En el caso del heavy metal, lo descubrí en el campo de refugiados de Jaballya, en Gaza, cuando, al entrevistarlos, me describieron sus sentimientos con palabras sacadas de letras de Metallica y Slipknot. “Me muero por vivir,/ estoy atrapado en el hielo”, dijo uno. Me mostraron sus cedés y playeras, que guardan cuidadosamente por el peligro de que se los decomisen los milicianos de Hamas.

Ya de vuelta en mi país, descubrí que el mayor mercado del heavy metal fuera de Estados Unidos es el mundo musulmán. En estacionamientos subterráneos de Teherán, en graneros de Peshawar, en tumbas en El Cairo, surgen hoyos donde se reúnen los metaleros.

Constantemente nos dicen que los musulmanes son una masa homogénea representada por cuatro mullahs. Pero Alan LeVine, en su estudio Heavy metal Islam, nos presenta una sorprendente estadística: en Marruecos, sólo dos fuerzas han congregado multitudes de más de 200 mil almas: la oposición islámica, y las bandas de heavy metal que truenan contra la religión. Azotar la cabeza al compás de una banda llamada Deicidio puede ser diversión en Londres, pero en Irán o Egipto es un acto político de impactante valentía.

A primera vista parece extraño. ¿Cómo esta música, nacida en la ciudad industrial inglesa de Birmingham a mediados de los sesentas, ha llegado a ser enemiga del jihaidismo? En una región controlada por el fundamentalismo, los jóvenes desempleados que forman 65 por ciento de la población tienen muy pocas salidas para gritar su furia. El metal se las brinda. La música les permite estallar contra “los vampiros de la intolerancia y la superstición”, señala Reda Zine, uno de los fundadores de la onda metalera en Marruecos. “Llevamos el metal en la sangre –coincide el guitarrista de Tarantist, la banda más prendida de Irán–. Es nuestro dolor, y un antídoto contra la hipocresía de la religión que nos inyectan desde que nacemos.”

Los estados policiacos responden a los fanáticos del metal pesado golpeándolos con barras de metal pesado. En Egipto, la dictadura de Hosni Mubarak –financiada por Estados Unidos y la UE– ha ordenado arrestos en masa de metaleros por “socavar la fe musulmana” y Mahmoud Ahmadinejad no le va a la zaga en Irán. Aun así, millones de jóvenes musulmanes y ateos entonan desafiantes, junto con Metálica: “No necesito oír lo que dicen./ La vida es para vivirla como yo quiera”.

Recordemos esto la próxima vez que un mullah afirme hablar por todos ellos, o que la derecha dé a entender que todos los musulmanes están representados por los fundamentalistas.

Al otro lado del mundo, el country ha llegado a ser visto como el coro de los partidarios de Bush, los “traileros”, la “basura blanca”. Lo que pocos saben es que este género nació al principio del siglo XX como la música de los estadunidenses pobres; fue la más izquierdista que se haya producido en Estados Unidos. “Había mucha conciencia de clase en ella –comenta el historiador Bill C. Malone–, mucho resentimiento contra los ricos y privilegiados.” Las canciones hablaban del horror de los talleres de costura y los campos de algodón. De hecho, en ese tiempo el estado de Kansas eligió candidatos socialistas.

¿Cómo fue que el sur se volvió republicano? Los demócratas dejaron de hablar por los pobres y se volvieron adictos a las donaciones de los ricos, igual que los republicanos. Dos partidos y una sola política económica. Y como ya no quedaba quien hablara de la ruina económica del sur, comenzó la obsesión por las diferencias culturales. Los llamados a rebelarse contra los ricos fueron sustituidos por himnos de odio a los jipis, como Okie from Muskogee: “No fumamos mariguana en Muskogee/ No hacemos viajes de LSD./ Vivimos como se debe y somos libres”. (Lo irónico es que el autor estaba pasadísimo cuando lo escribió.)

Esta tendencia llegó al clímax en 2003, cuando las Dixie Chicks fueron vetadas en las radiodifusoras y quemaron sus discos porque dijeron sentir vergüenza de ser del mismo estado que Bush.

Hoy, sin embargo, el country comienza a reaccionar al engaño. Las Dixie Chicks están de nuevo a la cabeza de las listas de éxitos. Una de las mejores rolas del género en años recientes, de Robbie Flux, ataca a Bush por ser “más country que tú”: “Tiene un rancho, usa sombrero Stetson,/ es un ex rey del petróleo que dispara desde el cinto,/ pero ¿alguien puede explicar/ cómo se puede tener un sheriff campirano/ con mentalidad de niño fresa?”

Cantantes country como Darryl Whorley, que escribieron loas a Bush luego del 9/11, hoy tienen éxito con rolas de protesta contra la guerra. Hasta Toby Keith ha elogiado a Obama, quien entró en escena en la convención con un tema country: Only in America. El sur podría dar un giro… si tan sólo los demócratas le ofrecieran economía country.

Si uno escucha suficiente heavy metal y country, descubre que ni los musulmanes ni los sureños estadunidenses son como los pintan: son seres humanos que buscan una tonada que cantar. Quién sabe, el camino hacia un mundo mejor podría pasar por un hoyo metalero musulmán, o por una loa de Nashville a un presidente negro.

* Periodista galardonado, colaborador de The Independent y una veintena de periódicos y revistas de GB, EU, Francia, Canadá y otros países. Amnistía Internacional lo nombró Periodista del Año 2007 por sus reportajes sobre el Congo.

© The Independent
Traducción: Jorge Anaya

I just took my grandmother to see 'Mamma Mia' – and, yes, it is my fourth viewing. So much for defying the gay stereotype. But this mad Abbathon is for me pure cinematic Prozac, combining so many of my favourite things: Abba, Meryl Streep, Greece, Julie Walters, a topless Dominic Cooper on a jet-ski… Ah, bliss.

As I watched my granny gurgle with glee at the sight of Meryl Streep actually having fun after all those years of cinematic torment, it suddenly occurred to me that we should remake all of Streep's films, giving her an Abba number to belt out in the middle. Even her most depressing roles could become high-jinks.

Think about it. In Sophie's Choice, she should sing 'Winner Takes It All.'

In 'A Cry In the Dark', she can sing 'S.O.S.'

In 'Manhattan', she can perform 'Does Your Mother Know?'

In 'Silkwood', she can do 'Money, Money, Money.'

In 'Kramer vs. Kramer', she can do 'Slipping Through My Fingers.'

In 'The Bridges of Madison County', she can belt out 'Take A Chance On Me.'

Any suggestions for Abba-fying 'The Devil Wears Prada', 'Out of Africa' or any others?

You cost post your suggestions - and read the suggestions of others - here.

When did it become a ho-ho-ho national joke for our celebrities to beat people up? The nation is chortling today over the photos of a trashed Lily Allen punching a member of the public outside Ronnie Scott’s. Because she was reacting to a rude comment, the on-line message boards are filled with cries of “Get her Lil!”

She’s not alone. Cheryl Cole has been appointed the empathetic new judge on the X-Factor. Nobody seems to think she disqualified herself when she beat up a toilet attendant who merely asked her to pay for some sweets she had taken. As he blacked her eye, Cole called her a “black bitch”. Both John Prescott and Prince Harry were cheered for throwing punches. Alan Davies even bit a homeless man’s ear outside the Groucho Club, but we still see him as a cuddly national treasure.

There have always been violent celebrities – but this snickering applause is a return to an earlier, cruder age. Londoners used to cheer public executions and stroll past heads on spikes on London Bridge, but gradually praise for public violence faded. By the 1960s, if Lulu had beaten up a member of the public or Ronnie Corbett had set upon a tramp, their careers would have been over.

We mustn’t be naïve and nostalgic about that time: Sean Connery could say it was okay to hit a woman to “keep her in line”, and few objected. Wives and gay people were bashed with impunity. I don’t agree with David Cameron that our society is “broken” now but was by implication “fixed” then. But in this one crucial area – public indifference and abuse – we are regressing.

You can see this all around us, usually in more subtle shades. It’s considered normal now to go into a shop and buy something while talking on your mobile, without even acknowledging the minimum wage worker behind the till.

Are there political causes? The period when it was least acceptable to cheer on public aggression was the 1950s to 1970s, when the classes were moving closer together in income and life-chances. But for three decades now we have been pulling apart again: London is more unequal today than at any time since 1937. All over the world, the most unequal cities have the most paranoid and envious cultures. You are more likely to lash out at people you think are nothing like you. Look at Johannesburg or Houston or Sao Paulo: as London mirrors their income distribution, we mirror their aggression.

The solution is partly political – and partly personal. It’s hard to be kind when everyone around you is jostling and yelling and goading-the-Lily – but it is even more essential. When he was dying Aldous Huxley wrote: “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.’” We can all start by acknowledging that a punch in the face is not a punch-line.

This article was also accompanied by some shorter boxes I wrote:

Box II:

Today, I will board a Zeppelin, and sail above London. You might have seen the great floating phallus on the skyline this summer: a company called ‘Star Over London’ is takes you soaring above the streets like a bird for £180. But the reaction of my family has been bizarre. I have vanished to Iraq, Congo and the Gaza Strip, and they were annoyingly unpanicked, muttering “Have a nice time, love.” But yesterday my mother howled: “You’ll be burned! Burned!” Actually, the only Zepellin that ever blew up was 81 years ago; a German company is about to start offering week-long ‘air cruises’. Surely that’s a bit safer than Iraq?

Box II: Coming to a street near you: General Musharaff? Some poor Londoner is about to get the ex-dictator of Pakistan as a neighbour. He will join a long string of dodgy figures: Boris Berezovsky, Thaksin Shinawatra, and the Saudi opposition, for starters. But London has long provided a home for the political outsiders nobody else will take. When we let in Garibaldi and Marx and the ANC, they were despised by many. If we pick and choose too much, we exclude the deserving as well as the foul. The likes of Musharaff are the price we pay for the privilege of hosting the world’s great dissidents too.

Box III: Every Londoner should see the suffocating new Brazilian film Elite Squad – because it exposes the ‘war on drugs’ we too insist on fighting. The movie follows an idealistic recruit to Rio’s drug squad as he realises that even when these cops use extreme violence, they can only ever scratch at the surface of the drug trade. Why? Prohibition hands one of our most profitable industries to gun-toting gangs. It is their best friend. As Milton Friedman said: “Al Capone was the product of alcohol prohibition; the Crips and the Bloods are the product of drug prohibition.” If we hand the supply of drugs to doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses, we can bankrupt the gangs in one swoop.

In her tiny black dress with her tiny blackened lungs, Edith Piaf stands, clawing at her stomach for the music to come. But she is wheezing and weeping. The Voice – the one that sounds like it has swallowed razor-blades – isn’t there. An anonymous hoarde press forward to pick her up and strip off her clothes one by one – and ‘Piaf’ begins.

In these first moments, it seems like Pam Gems’ play will be yet another version of that old and ever-new story: the star who overdosed on herself. We all know the cliché: the talent and the sickness feed off each other, lifting the heroine up while tearing her down. Think the myth of Judy Garland; think the myth of Amy Winehouse. But it soon becomes clear this production is more raw, and more real, than these honeyed lies.

This Edith Piaf is on a 47-year trajectory from gutter to gutter, via the great concert halls of the world. Born on the streets, she staggered into success and soon surrounded herself with a coterie of addicts and beautiful young men who feasted on her fame. In Jamie Lloyd’s bare, low-tech production – on a black, brick stage - the romance is stripped away as surely as her clothes: she is an addict with great lungs.

There is no redemption in this pain; it doesn’t buy the lie. We watch her vomit and stab needles into her arm and morph into a prematurely-old, balding gargoyle. This is a guttural and smelly and authentic show: it is as far from jazz-handing feel-goodery as musicals get. The only thing reaching up for the sky is her veins.

Before I saw this production, Elena Roger seemed odd casting as Piaf: an Argentinean as the most iconic Frenchwoman of the twentieth century? She was great as Evita – but this? From her first moments at the microphone, every doubt evaporates. She has folded herself into Edith Piaf so perfectly you cannot see the join. She might be smaller than ET but her voice is like her subject’s: vast and bitter and irresistible. For nearly two hours, she is Piaf. She crashes through life with only The Voice as armour – a singing car crash, skidding on booze and opiates. As Edith destroys herself, Roger’s body shrivels, and her voice grows.

‘Piaf’ is structured so each scene bleeds into the next; there is little sustained dialogue in this opium-haze. The audience has to pull the story together from the jagged shards of narrative that jut between Piaf’s songs: the dead baby, the pimping, the lost love-of-her-life. The ensemble melt in and out of a range of roles, so Piaf’s ego – at once monstrous and broken – is the only fixed point we have. “I’m a draw,” she says, “They come to see if I can stay on my feet.”

When Rogers ends the show inevitably singing ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’ with pitch-perfect pain, it seems less like an act of defiance – and more like a grasping, ironic anthem to denial.

Can you hear the cheers? Can you see the standing ovation? Yes, the London theatre is alive and high-kicking, with a record-busting thirteen million ticket sales just announced for the whole of 2007. But – wait – what’s this? One little portion of the audience is resolutely sitting on their hands, scowling. Yet, it’s the critics.

Their lament is as familiar as it is ugly. Dah-ling, we know more people are going to the theatre, but aren’t they going to mere – cough – musicals? Isn’t the West End being taken over by (shudder) coach parties from (retch, retch) Milton Keynes? They have killed Serious Theatre, and left us in a neon desert. The Lion King has eaten Chekov. Spamalot has spammed Ibsen. Oh, how do you solve a problem like ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’

But this contempt for coach parties is pure snobbery. Why are audiences bussed in from the provinces for a night of fun worth less than those who took the tube in from Hampstead? Are they too greasy for Grease? Do they have too much hairspray for Hairspray? Is their hair too bad for Hair? Giving anyone a good night out – two hours of live entertainment – is a valuable and precious thing to do. Every coach-dweller is worth as much as every critic.

Yet beneath this class-and-regional sneering, there is a deeper contempt – for pure entertainment itself. We still seem to think that theatre has to be the Alpen of the arts, providing you with dry fibre in every dose. Well, I love chewing over a Chekov character’s infinite flavour and complexity as much as anyone. But there is a lot to be said for just cheering people up, and sending them out with a tune they can hum.

Stand outside the doors to Grease or Wicked or Dirty Dancing any night of the week, and you will see cascades of buzzing, humming crowds awash with endorphins. Why should anyone feel bad about that?

And musicals can have hidden depths. You may think they are silly or superficial or saccharine, but remember: Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ is about a magic flute; people thought that was frivolous and empty too, once upon a time. Today, only a philistine would deny Rogers and Hammerstein or Stephen Sondheim are some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

It is time the jeering, groaning critics of musicals were sent on a coach trip of their own – to a retirement home.

Pack your bags! Sell your house! It’s time to leave behind sleepy, dull old London and head for the wild, crazy adrenaline-rush of… Copenhagen. Or Vancouver. Or Zzzzzzzurich. Yes, another one of those “studies” to discover The Best City In The World has come up with these excruciating museum-cities, and left us off the list. Who draws up these charts – ninety-year old valium addicts?

I have been to five of the top ten cities. The experience was invariably like being in a coma, with Rowan Williams talking incessantly at your bedside. When I arrived in Munich, I thought it was closed. When I visited my relatives in Zurich, I found the city riveted by a debate about parking offences. It had been going on for six years. I have been to Helsinki, Stockholm and Minneapolis – and I cannot remember a single thing about them. The only vaguely interesting city on the list is Paris – and even she has become the Disney-Land of Love, selling a parody of herself for a tossed-aside euro.

These lists pose as impartial assessments of “quality of life”, but they involve value judgments most of us don’t share. They assume we would choose serenity over excitement. Monocle magazine chose Copenhagen as the best city because life there is, they said, “frictionless” – but it is friction that causes sparks. Those of us who choose to live in this big dirty stretch of concrete on the Thames knowingly sacrifice peace for something we value more: the thrill of knowing we are at the centre of the world.

With an Oyster card, you can tour little Beijing and miniature Bangladesh and small Krakow. You can go to the tower block that broadcasts Zimbabwe’s only opposition radio station, or a Bollywood movie where you eat poppadoms not popcorn, or to more club nights and plays and movies in one night than Denmark serves up in a decade. Isn’t all this worth living in a shoe-box in Hoxton and cramming sweatily onto the District Line for? Doesn’t the shouting on the street and the howling in the night remind you that you are alive?

Of course there are some aspects of Copenhagen we should copy. The city is more extensively pedestrianized than any other in the West: imagine if turned Oxford Street from an eternal traffic jam to a brisk pollution-free stroll, and you get the idea. And Copenhagen doesn’t have our staggering extremes of inequality, because they tax and spend and redistribute more.

But even with these boons, Copenhagen remains a lush, plush cul-de-sac. I would rather live on the crossroads: it is worth the noise and crush and sweat to see the world go by. Here in London, we value the fastened beating of our hearts over the punctual emptying of our bins.

This article was accompanied by some boxes on other subjects:

Box I:

Last Thursday, I was two hours late to meet a friend – but I had a glorious excuse. “Don’t blame me,” I said, “Adolf Hitler stopped my train.” An undiscovered Nazi bomb dropped during the Blitz was found near Bromley station, blocking up the District line. It put the disgusting little jihadis who want to bomb London today into perspective: for month after month, this city rained with bombs, killing 3000 people a night. It was 9/11, 24/7. An elderly friend of mine was buried in rubble – twice. The teenage jihadis need to ask: if that didn’t break London, what chance have they got?

Box II:

Does anybody else find the annual burst of snobbery about Big Brother baffling? I don’t enjoy sport, or opera, or ballet – but I don’t fume at people who do. Yet the critics of reality TV are strangely self-righteous, yelling after just five days on air that Channel Four should have dumped the show. “It encourages the viewers’ worst instincts!” they announce. Really? This is a show where the British people voted to make a Portuguese transsexual and an Indian victim of racism our heroes, and booted out their bullies. “Ah, but it’s trivial!” Actually, there’s more rich emotional truth in Big Brother than in twenty-four men kicking a piece of plastic into a net. The show dramatizes the tensions in our culture – about race, or gender, or class – better than almost any Royal Court play. If you don’t want to watch, fine – but enough with the condescending rage.

Box III:

Are our theatres being hijacked by celebrity? The director Sir Jonathan Miller is enraged that his celeb-free Hamlet didn’t transfer to the West End, and says the casting of the “merely famous” is trashing theatre. I think the problem is more subtle. TV and movie stars are a useful tool to draw in the punters – there’s no point having great theatre nobody sees – but too many big stars are being put into inappropriate venues. Nicole Kidman – who started the trend in 1998 – and Chiwetl Ejiofor were terrific in the Donmar Warehouse because it is a small, intimate space, where the tricks you learn for the screen can still work. But dropping Woody Harrelson or Orlando Bloom or Neve Campbell into thousand-seater West End venues was a disaster: it’s too big a leap. Theatre needs stars – but not if they are inaudible to the Gods.

I used to think poetry was a rotting art form, waiting only for its own Eleanor Rigby funeral. In an age that gets faster and faster and faster every day – where great gallons of information are spewed all over us constantly – what place was there for these compressed, opaque little patches of words that required us to slow down and incessantly re-read?

I had only a few vague memories of decoding poems about daffodils at school, and thinking that Wordsworth could wander lonely as a cloud off a cliff for all I cared. Let it go. Let it die.

But then, four years ago, a person I had a crush on suggested going to a poetry reading. If he had suggested we go on a date in an abattoir, I would have beamed and brought a carving knife. On the night, I fidgeted and felt embarrassed by it all – but then something strange happened. Over the next week, passages from the poetry kept surging through my brain involuntarily.

So I began an experiment. I bought some books of poetry, and every day, set aside 20 minutes to read one, again and again, until I understood it. At first it was hard. We all live in a state of permanent partial attention: we check Facebook, eat breakfast, watch the TV and yell for somebody to feed the dog all at the same time. Poetry doesn't allow you to do that. Its quiet, still voice demands you listen to it slowly, alone.

I found, to my bewilderment, the poetry was changing the way I acted. There was an old woman in my grandmother's home who constantly walked woozily in circles, saying she had to clean her room quickly or she would miss her bus. Nobody ever visited her. I found that as I hurried past, I kept thinking of the passage from Byron: "What is the worst of woes that wait on age?/ What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?/ To view each loved one blotted from life's page,/ And be alone on earth, as I am now." That distillation of a feeling – of being old, and abandoned – stopped me from being able to suppress my guilt and scurry away. So we would talk, and eat chocolates. When she died on her feet, I thought of Emily Dickinson: "Because I could not stop for death/ He kindly stopped for me."

After the September 11 massacres, why did so many people e-mail to each other the astonishing Auden poem "September 1st 1939"? Partly it was the eerie echoes: "I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street/ Uncertain and afraid/ As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade... The unmentionable odour of death/ Offends the September night." Partly because we all wanted, like Auden, to be one of the "ironic points of light" flashing in the swooping darkness. But it was also because we suddenly saw the need to cut out the clutter and concentrate.

I have been thinking about this since Andrew Motion reminded us he was standing down soon as Britain's Poet Laureate. The institution as it currently stands represents everything that put me off poetry. It is a position in the Royal household, tasked with periodically writing dreary sycophancy about the Windsor family. Occasionally it tries to be "cool", and that is even worse. Look at Motion's "rap" about William Windsor's 21st birthday: "Better stand back/ Here's an age attack,/ But the second in line/ Is dealing with it fine." Actually, don't look at it.

Is this Motion-sickness inherent to the idea of a Poet Laureate? Two years ago, the brilliant 26-year-old performance poet Luke Wright staged a show in which he campaigned for the role to be reformed – and given to him. He showed the Poet Laureate was the first spin-doctor, created to sell the monarchy. That's why so many great poets turned it down: Thomas Gray said he had no interest in being "the queen's personal rat-catcher". It has barely evolved since: "They give him £5,000 and a butt of sherry. That's 700 bottles of sherry. Not really a great advert for the job – here's a pittance and enough to booze to drink yourself to death."

There is another way. Separate the institution from the need to write about the hereditary freak-show of monarchy. Make her write a poem a month on a national issue. (Wright's poem about the riots that broke out in the Ikea in Edmonton is a great example.) Tour the country as a national enthusiast for poems. Pay it £20,000 a year from the Arts Council budget. And – most boldly of all – make it an elected one-year job. No, I don't want Simon Cowell judging Poetry Idol; a panel of worthies can select a shortlist that we vote on. Draw as many people in as possible.

Until the early 20th century, most poets were desperate to reach a wide audience. We only have Homer's poetry because it was chanted by the masses; Shakespeare wrote for the Stratford throng. The shift to deliberately obscure poetry is actually very recent – and I blame T.S. Eliot. He was a monstrous snob, appalled that reading was no longer the preserve of a small elite. Mass education was crow-barring culture open to the "complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass". So, as Professor John Carey puts it, literary modernism was invented to make poetry incomprehensible to most people once more. It restored Eliot's genius – which was real, and great – to a tiny cadre of the cognoscenti.

For years, this incomprehensibility defined poetry for most people. But – partly due to the rise of performance poetry – there is now a bubbling-up of accessible, clever, beautiful poets eager to be understood: Nick Laird, Sophie Hannah, the members of "poetry boyband" Aisle 16, and more.

But if we are searching for the first great Poet Laureate of this new era, I nominate Clive James. He has written both the funniest poem I have ever read – "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" – and one of the saddest: "Son of a Soldier", about his father, who died before James was born. It begins: "My tears came late. I was fifty-five years old/ Before I began to cry authentically: First for the hurt I had done to those I loved,/ Then for myself, for what had been done to me/ In the beginning, to make my heart so cold."

He enthuses for poets with infectious erudition – and he has even written lyrical takes on the news for the London Review of Books.

Poetry needs a great salesman, because in our whizzing speeding shoving lives, its moments of careful pause are more important, not less. Appropriately, the words of a poet – Emerson – made this point best: "For most us, there is only the unattended/ Moment, the moment in and out of time,/ The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,/ The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning/ Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all, but you are the music/ While the music lasts."

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Tonight, the corpse of Mary Whitehouse will rise from the grave for a few gloating hours. The vicar’s wife – and self-appointed spokeswoman for God – is the subject of a new BBC film called ‘Filth’. She is played by Julie Walters as a warm Northerner whose campaign against “depravity” on television is in the long tradition of English eccentricity. The programme has already inaugurated the media cliché of the week: nice progressive people are sprouting up everywhere to declare that, although they didn’t like her at the time, they look through the pimp-my-ride TV schedules and realise she was right after all.

But this is only possible if you forget what Mary Whitehouse actually stood for. She was not driven by opposition to violence, but by the Christian fundamentalist belief that women should be “submissive”, homosexuality was a disease, and great swathes of those who disagreed with her should be thrown into prison.

In the film, when she sees two men having sex in a bush, she reportedly waves cheerfully. In reality, she said gay people should be forced to have medical treatment because “psychiatric literature proves that 60 per cent of homosexuals who go for treatment get completely cured." She believed their “repugnant” feelings were caused by their mothers having “abnormal sex… during pregnancy or just after.” If gays persisted in their “depravity”, then they could expect to die horribly: Aids was, she said, “God’s judgement.” These weren’t just words: she fought to have people jailed for showing homosexuality on stage, and for condom adverts to be banned at the height of AIDS.

She saw sex everywhere. Whitehouse wanted the Chuck Berry song “My Ding-a-Ling” to be criminalized because it “encouraged self-abuse.” And she wanted the greatest British icons criminalized, demanding a ban on the Beatles and Monty Python, and for Darwin to be expunged from the curriculum.

Every time there was an advance in freedom for women, Whitehouse tried to slap it down. In an old episode of her favourite show, ‘Dixon of Dock Green’, you can see the dark side of the world she fought to preserve. When Constable Dixon stumbles across a woman being beaten black and blue, he reassuringly tells the camera it’s nothing to do with the police.

While Whitehouse presented herself as the plucky Everywoman standing up to a depraved elite, she was a theocratic bully who said her opponents were “the Anti-Christ.” Any why did she do it? “The way the Lord is using me,” she said, “is quite incredible.” I too am uncomfortable about kids watching the violence on TV today too – but the idea this vindicates her theocratic bullying is bizarre.

What would London look like today if Mary Whitehouse had won? Gay people shuttered in the closet. Women locked in loveless marriages. No rock concerts. No comedy. No teaching about evolution. No freedom to mock her fundamentalist religion, which would be relentlessly enforced by the state. Now that would really be filthy.

This column was also accompanied by some boxes.

Box I:

Londoners are so ungrateful! This weekend I went to the West End with a friend to see the new Woody Allen film, Cassandra’s Dream starring Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell {pictured}. We were the only people in the audience. Now, I grant you the film was an unimaginably awful attempt at a sort-of-gangster tale – imagine Woody directing an Eastenders omnibus – but my theory is that he has given us such joy that we owe it to him to watch his duds. It’s like visiting a senile relative in a home. Have you no conscience, Londoners?

BOX II:

There’s a campaign here in the East End to rename Shoreditch High Street station before it finally opens in 2010. A few local councillors who want to call it Banglatown – and I love the proposal. One of the best things about the tube is the richness of the station names. In New York they are bone-dry and unevocative: take the A-train to 53rd, then the C train to 32nd. But in London you can hop from Angel to Barking to Mudchute to Tooting: names that suggest worlds. This is Banglatown, just as it was once the Shtetl – so give it the seductive name it deserves.

BOX III:

I have mixed feelings about the Dalai Lama’s arrival. I totally oppose the Chinese rape of Tibet - but then I remember the time His Holiness called me fat. When I interviewed him in 2004, I didn’t want to go into the usual fawning you’re-so-great routine, so I challenged him about the fact that when he ran Tibet, it was a slave-owning theocracy. He became uncommunicative, so I brought it back to something we agreed on. “You’re very critical of income inequality in the West,” I said. “Yes,” he replied, "Why do the rich need so much? We each only have one stomach.” He paused. "Not you. You appear to have two." The bitch!