CRIES & WHISPERS

n SO, WELCOME Virginia Bottomley to your new role as Secretary of State for Arts, or National Heritage as we are now supposed to call it. (Was there ever a more cringe-making phrase?) But don't sit down, dear, you won't be staying long. None of them ever do. Eighteen months is about average for the job. Nor will it further your career. As far as the Cabinet is concerned you're irrelevant. Still, you are not averse to imposing your demands upon institutions about which you know nothing. So here are a few suggestions: 1. Don't take advice from anyone with an axe to grind. They will tie you up with their silly demands. Listen instead to the punters, such as me, people for whom the arts are a source of delight and inspiration in an unhappy world. 2. Combine the two London opera companies and give them Covent Garden exclusively. No other capital city wastes money on two opera venues. Then give the Coliseum over entirely to all the different dance companies, who badly need a single venue. 3. Halve the subsidy to Covent Garden. Ban all future building on it. Let the people in the stalls pay the true price of their ticket. They are all either bewildered Japanese businessmen, or rich socialites, and they can afford it. Halve prices for the enthusiasts in the gods. 4. Demolish the National Theatre. It's an eyesore. The acoustics are dreadful. And some of the technical facilities have never worked. Let them return to the Old Vic, which is a proper theatre. 5. Give the film industry, such as it is, tax concessions. It is a tried and trusted method in virtually all civilised countries. That way we can produce at least one Four Weddings every year, and the money will find its way back to the Treasury tenfold. 6. Curb Rupert Murdoch's voracious media appetites. 7. Remove John Birt. Sit on him, hug him to death ... anything. 8. Abolish all censors. There is not nearly enough sex and violence around. 9. Insist that art students pass an exam in life drawing and painting technique. If they want to pickle sharks, let them do it in their spare time.

That will do to be getting on with. I expect results in three months, then I will give you some more suggestions. If any readers have their own ideas I will be more than happy to pass them on.

n AS MY colleague Chris Peachment pointed out in his film review last week, this is a great time for sword-fighting fans at the movies, what with First Knight, D'Artagnan's Daughter, the forthcoming Mel Gibson film Braveheart, and the current release of Rob Roy. This last has the best duel of the lot, in which Rob finally cleaves the villain with his claymore from the nave to the chaps (a phrase which has always sent a shiver down my spine, in spite of not having a clue what either nave or chaps are). I used to be something of a fencer in my youth, until the spring went out of my knees, but I still know my septime from my octave. And there is a move which began somewhere long ago with Errol Flynn, which is still being practised, and which puzzles me. And that is the parry to the septime (a thrust at the lower right quarter of the trunk, to you). In real life all you do is move your wrist sideways to the right and fend off the blow with the outside edge of the foil. This leaves you in a good position for a riposte to the attacker's lower right quarter. But what they do in the movies is swing the sword around so that it is upside-down vertically. A hopelessly cack-handed move. Can anyone tell me how this came about and why they persist in doing it?

Jack Hughes