Sinning and skinning

TVReview: 'I doubt there is a more heartless crew than poets, painters and composers - art is so sacred, the love of it covers a multitude of sins, and so we excuse ourselves." A Multitude of Sins: John Lavery, a languorous film on the life and times of the Belfast-born painter, revealed the fascinating personal history of a man "whose head was usually in the paint-pot", a man who claimed an "inherited discretion" and an absence of courage and yet whose work brought him to the centre of political life both in Ireland and his adopted city of London (a city he loved but which he described as having "a trying superiority complex").

Probably most readily remembered in Ireland for the portrait of his delicately lovely American wife Hazel posing as the iconic Kathleen Ní Houlihan (which graced our banknotes until the mid-1970s, and then as a watermark until the introduction of the euro), Lavery was a hugely successful painter, a favourite of British royalty and the pre-war bourgeoisie.

The documentary focused on his life in the great big west London home he shared with Hazel, who used the cavernous rooms to set up a salon. Twenty years his junior and apparently with a penchant for glamorous young men, she was, the programme claimed, most certainly a lover of Kevin O'Higgins and in all probability also of Michael Collins. With a modern understanding of image, networking and celebrity and a fascination with "the Irish question", it was Hazel, we were told, who persuaded Collins to sign the Treaty and who drove the "tall young herculean", as Lavery described him, to Downing Street to sign it. Movingly, Lavery later wrote of a day and night spent painting in the mortuary chapel where Collins had been laid out after his assassination, describing one woman kissing the dead man's lips and how he himself "strove to record the mystery that played about that mouth".

"Neither friend nor foe," Lavery said of Collins, "ever accused this man of lacking courage." The flaw in this examination of the Laverys' role in our history was a deeply purple and alarmingly flowery performance from Simon Callow as John Lavery. Genteelly daubing a canvas in unlikely sleeves and narrating sections of Lavery's autobiography with an incautious actorly abandon, he appeared misplaced and vaguely absurd.

Why not have a voice over and allow more of Lavery's tender images of Grez-sur-Loing, of his Monet-like Moroccan interiors, of Hazel's fawn-like face, and of the ghostly portrait of his sister, Jane, whose suicide (which he could have, but failed, to prevent) haunted the painter until his death, and which ranks perhaps largest in his self-proclaimed "multitude of sins".

"ALL ART FORTIFIES an inwardness," said Seamus Heaney in relaxed, occasionally pensive, conversation with John Kelly on The View. Kelly, whether he's interviewing a bunch of skinny musos or a Nobel laureate, seems genuinely pleased to talk about art; about the confluence, as Heaney put it, of the temperament of the artist and the temper of the time.

Forty years on from the poet's excited anticipation of the publication of his first volume, Death of a Naturalist, Heaney described the more measured pleasure of handling his new volume, District and Circle. He hangs on to the work a little longer now, he said, and is no longer curious about the reviews - "like an old field that's been ploughed over quite a lot", he could write them himself.

Discussing his choice of title for the new collection, Heaney described travelling on a London Underground train and seeing his father emerge in his face when he caught his reflection in the window: "You can see the lineage reflected in the glass."

He went on to speak of his childhood in Derry as an innocent time, an "Arcadia" where the horrific events of the second World War were distant and unknown, of turnip-snedders, of the musicality of tubular iron gates, and of neighbours slaughtering their pigs on a Tuesday morning.

He spoke too of his later life and of an occasion when Polish railway sleepers were being laid in his garden, giving him a sense of the lawn being "blackened with sleepers", of the "blackest image of the century, the train running into Auschwitz".

When Kelly asked Heaney about the nuts and bolts of life as a working poet, about the "Nobel business" and its ensuing demands, Heaney spoke of working "the head", whether he's in airports or at exhibition openings, but also of the importance of his "bunker" in Co Wicklow, where he writes in solitude for a couple of days a week.

Listen to Heaney read or discuss his work and his poetry seems to become burly, solid, necessary; he is a heavy hitter in an arsenal of great poetry that provides, as Heaney told us, quoting Robert Frost "a momentary stay against confusion".

"NO ONE'S BEATLE-PROOF," not even the British prime minister, who returns Paul McCartney's calls within 10 minutes. Not that the sanguine superstar told us so himself; it was his wife who quoted his words in The McCartneys v The Fur Trade, a documentary offering "exclusive access" to the couple. Heather Mills McCartney, former-model-turned-Beatle-wife and animal rights campaigner, guards her privacy, having taken a few whacks from the British media, presumably for mixing blonde ambition with a prosthesis, whatever about marrying a slice of the national heritage while Paul's late wife Linda's face still haunted the tofu-burger packs.

The "exclusive access" was in reality a couple of chats with Paul and Heather around the greenhouse, Paul clutching a handful of leeks and Heather a laptop as she planned her assault on the booming fur trade.

Maybe it sounds unkind but Mills McCartney seemed a little tetchy and distracted beside her ageing Beatle, like an antsy teenager trying to get out of the house before being asked whether she's warm enough in her belly-top. But once out there, she proved herself to be a tough cookie, and if I was a Chinese pussycat about to be turned into a pom-pom I'd be very pleased to be represented by her.

From Los Angeles and a well-orchestrated media assault on fur-loving J-Lo, to the fashion district of New York City and a generation of urban music stars who view fur as a major status symbol, and then to Brussels to campaign for a ban on domestic animal fur, Mills McCartney remained undaunted. This despite some personal difficulties - "My left leg is starting to slide off in this heat," she matter-of-factly told her anti-fur friends as they were being chased out of J-Lo's offices, before slipping out the fire exit to whack it back into place.

The images of Alsatian puppies skinned alive for their pelts and the unspeakable cruelty perpetrated on cages full of kittens should most certainly make us think twice about where our fur trim comes from and, indeed, about whether to boycott shops selling unlabelled fur (which the consumer often mistakenly thinks is fake), as Mills McCartney has done so successfully. As she said, we really should try being happy in our own skins.

June Ambrose, New York fashion guru, stylist to the stars and serious fur-lover, helpfully informed us that "throwing paint [ all over people's rabbit furs and minks] is a federal offence". In the interest of public wellbeing I'd like to suggest another one: Dennis Waterman as an old wide-boy throwing clichés all over the telly.

HAVING ENDURED THE opening salvo in the new series of the popular crime drama, New Tricks, starring the crinkly Waterman as detective Gerry Standing and Amanda Redman as Sandra Pullman, his ever-so-buoyant sleuthing partner, I'd like to unburden my anxiety by sharing some selections of dialogue with you:

Waterman: "Women get what they want by leading men around by their dicks!" (Redman rolls eyes and shifts bosom to the right.)

Waterman: I'm a top scorer in more ways than one! (Redman rolls eyes, bosom left.)

And:

Male prostitute (with reefer jacket, silk sheets and too much education): I'd give one to the elephant woman! Wink wink . . . (Redman heaves bosom all over the set.)

New Tricks is probably the worst crime drama I have yet to encounter. The actors look totally mystified by the script, Waterman shouting out every turgidly dated line as if being accosted by a vicious new syndrome - and still the clichés roll like malevolent thunder: "He couldn't find a way around a woman without a map!"