DIARY

Hockney: it's round 2

David Hockney has already announced his intention to give a Royal Academy lecture on why Boots the Chemist and the police don't understand pictures. But I see that the new year has diverted his wrath from the arrest of Julia Somerville, and he has a new target in his sights. It is his erstwhile friend Melvyn Bragg. Television's best-known arts commentator does not understand television or its artistic possibilities, thunders Britain's best-known artist.

In a heartfelt letter in the new edition of Modern Painters magazine, Hockney writes of how he defends painting every day, but that the art world in England seems to be obsessed with "grunge", avoiding all the real issues. And what is the real issue? Apparently, the artistic abuse of television. Hockney says: "Why, for instance, has the TV picture not altered for 30 years, whereas the illusion of reproduced sound has 'improved' enormously? Who controls what the picture is like? Not, it seems to me, people who think about pictures a lot. It's now making the world seem all the same colour and lacking any space or texture - what has that done to us? No photograph of a landscape can compete with a Monet or Van Gogh and many people know this, yet the art world thinks the TV picture has got nothing to do with it. I think TV is a very unvisual medium. Melvyn Bragg doesn't really understand this."

To Maggie

Taking a breather at the South Mimms service station on the interchange of the M25 and A1 north of London, I notice the plaque marking the opening of the service station by Mrs Thatcher and find that she is commemorated here as Margaret Thatcher FRS. This is thought to be the only public place where the former Prime Minister's academic honour is thus emblazoned. But why? Is there a link between being a Fellow of the Royal Society and motorway service stations? Perhaps an expert on etiquette can enlighten me.

St Nic

What do you get the girl who has everything? A clue is contained in the prenuptial demands of the Hollywood actress Patricia Arquette, when asked for her hand in marriage by the scowling star of Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage. Miss Arquette set him on a quest to prove his devotion. Her needs included: the autograph of the reclusive novelist JD Salinger, a black orchid, a wedding dress from a tribe in northern Tibet and a fibreglass statue from a Los Angeles hamburger restaurant.

Cage bought a purple orchid and painted it black, and found a letter signed by Salinger in a specialist autograph shop, he relates in an interview in the February edition of Esquire. At this point Miss Arquette, like the orchid, wilted, though it took her a further eight years to marry Cage, presumably because of her inflexibility over wedding dress designs.

The courtship might have been briefer and less challenging if she had questioned him on his social conscience. Few women could have resisted the kind of new man who makes the sacrifices for his fellow human beings that Cage reveals. "I will never, ever park in a handicapped space," he says. "It's not my style and I think that people who do are inviting some kind of bad karma."

Cry havoc

Before Christmas, I explained how the strikes in Paris were upsetting the fashion world by causing folk to walk to work. Now, the social editor of Harpers & Queen, Lady Celestria Noel - a name that predestines one at birth to be the social editor at Harpers & Queen - tells me I underestimated the havoc that was caused.

Worse than the cream of society arriving late for the Debutantes' Ball, the real problem was a result of all the Paris socialites overestimating the time it would take them to get there because of the strikes - and arriving early. According to Lady Celestria, this "flustered the organisers, as such a thing had never been heard of in such fashionable circles".

Mogged

Cats can be awfully expensive to feed these days. Could this have anything to do with the cost of advertising cat food? The advertising agency BMP DDB Needham, which has a serious feline interest, holding the accounts for Purrfect, Arthur's, Felix and Choosy, reveals in its internal newsletter that the total billing for the account is more than pounds 8.5m.

Awful Elvis?

It's so hard to hear clearly on those transatlantic phone calls. Or maybe the staff at Rolling Stone magazine in New York had just had a good lunch. Either way, they contacted the British rock star Elvis Costello for a tribute after the death of Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and reported Costello as saying that Jerry "sang with the awfulest voice". This did seem a slightly churlish comment to make about a chap so recently departed. And sure enough, in the current issue Costello points out that he actually said Garcia "sang with the author's voice".

If you say the latter very quickly, then say "awfulest" in a New York accent, you can just about see how the confusion might arise. For Costello, the most literary of songwriters, the unkindest cut was that he could be thought to have used an expression like "awfulest". "'Is there even such a word?" he asked.

He's never heard the Grateful Dead on a bad night.