The Show Ain't Over 'Til the Fat Lady's on Page 3

The Sun sets on Covent Garden

The first night of a new Royal Opera House season is, traditionally, an occasion when the wives of Russian oligarchs and top City bankers take the chance to show off their jewellery in the bar, sneer at each others’ handbags in the toilets, and then sneak off in the interval, leaving a second-half audience of three octogenarian baronets snoozing in the stalls.

The eagerly-anticipated new production of Don Giovanni (eagerly anticipated by the half-dozen people who actually know anything about opera, anyway) at the Royal Opera House is going to be a little different. The only way to get hold of a ticket is to buy a copy of ‘The Sun’ on 30th July, and enter yourself in the lottery.

That’s ‘The Sun’. Home to Dear Deidre, Desktop Keeley (Google it), Page 3, and such noted opera critics as Jeremy Clarkson and Lorraine Kelly. The current top Arts stories on their website right now are ‘Madonna in Meltdown’, ‘Brooke to Bare All for Playboy’ and ‘Miley May Strip for Film Role’. The most recent mentions of ‘opera’ in the paper have been about Britain’s Got Talent’s Paul Potts (fair enough, but it is a year since he won it), and ‘Pamela Anderson goes bra-less for night out at Opera’.

The theory (based, I suspect, on watching the opera scene in 'Pretty Woman') is that if you get White Van Man and Essex Girl to come and see 'Don Giovanni' just once, they will immediately swap their alcopops for Chateau Lafitte, buy a Hampstead townhouse, take out an annual subscription to the ROH and start reading Gramophone magazine instead of ‘The Sun’. The concept that people might choose not to go to the opera because it’s expensive and a bit boring is obviously not one that has been much considered by Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas DBE and her merry band of trustees.

So when the show opens on 10th September, what can we expect in London’s most magnificent auditorium? There will be lots of journalists from the ‘Guardian’ and the ‘Telegraph’ wandering around frantically looking for interviewees who work in chip shops, and there will be plenty of City gents and oligarchs who bought their tickets on e-bay. There won’t be anyone who wouldn’t normally have turned up, since asking your butler to pick up a copy of ‘The Sun’ is not a challenge that would tax the wit of even the most antique opera-lover.

I suspect, in fact, that this stunt is going to backfire spectacularly. For all its faults (intermittent truth-stretching, obsession with breasts, borderline fascism) ‘The Sun’ is completely compelling reading. I fear that rather than getting a whole new audience for 18th-century Austrian opera, we’re going to see lots of broadsheet readers converted to the tabloids. And from there it’s just a short step to being unable to head out to Opening Nights at Covent Garden because it’s Big Brother Eviction Night on Channel 4.

Today’s Rubbish News, Tomorrow’s News on Rubbish

Here’s a shocker – giving away millions of newspapers in central London is creating loads and loads of paper that’s not being recycled. Commuters, after having the freesheets thrust into their hands (never mind the latte and briefcase!), are not seeking out recycling bins but scattering the newspapers they probably didn’t want in the first place around town. The 70 bins were installed quickly enough when Westminster Council told The London Paper and London Lite that their distribution could be restricted but now it appears they’re expecting them to be filled too.

On Tap

There’s been a definite move to “just a glass of tap water please” in recent times but it now seems we can omit the “just” from that sentence in London restaurants as though we’re apologising for ordering something that’s free; obviously meaning it could never be as good as their glacial fresh-from-the-Schlatenkees bottled water. We snootily snub water, ice even, when we’re in Europe, in case of a “jippy tummy” – it’s as if we’ve always known that London’s tap water is the only type to be trusted but now it’s a fact; according to the people-in-the-know-about-water, it’s the best in the country.

Four Years and Counting...

Word is out that our Ken (Livingstone, lest we forget) is looking for a job... nothing quite so ironic as Tony Blair becoming a Middle East envoy or as predictable as his recent attempt to take over the airwaves. Nope, it seems all he wants is his job in City Hall back. He’ll have to wait till 2012 of course – just in time for the Olympics, so hopefully that’ll take over from the rancour over bendy buses – but it appears Ken has already started an early campaign trail which involves, well, whining about Boris really.

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