The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday February 15 2010
Perry Green, Henry Moore's former home and location of the Henry Moore Foundation, is in Hertfordshire, not Hampshire.
A week of clever fellers. Let's start with comedian Mark Thomas, a man revered among the smart right-on, as his thing is politics, with jokes, done very forcefully. He bashes you around the head with his beliefs, then busts your gut with a bon mot. When the balance is right, it's very entertaining; when it's not, you feel like you've been beaten up and you're not sure to what purpose. Not everything in life is as simple as "working class = good", "posh = bad". We're not in the 80s any more, Toto.
Still, I like his returning Radio 4 series, Mark Thomas: The Manifesto, mostly because the ideas come from the audience. On Thursday, suggestions included: if you see a balding man with a ponytail, you are legally required to cut it off; you also have to push over anyone who dithers on a pavement; 4x4 cars should be transparent. (You'll know about these because they've been heavily trailed on R4, thereby killing the joke, hey ho.) One of the more popular ideas, though, was less of a laugh: that prime ministers should only be allowed to serve two terms. Thomas had some fun with this, telling us just how much Clement Attlee managed to get done in his short office of five years: Attlee established the National Health Service and the welfare state, he nationalised water, gas, coal and steel and he "de-Empired Britain".
All very interesting, but ruined for me by Thomas's laughable (in the wrong way) punch-line: "Let's look at our three termers – Thatcher and Blair." Stop it! Knee-jerk smugness is horrible, no matter which flag it's wrapped up in.
No smuggery during Poetry Please. But plenty of cosiness, like having tea and toast while wearing an all-in-one panda bear suit. Roger McGough's light, wry presentation is fine, though his tendency to swallow the end of his sentences can be irritating. But it's lovely to hear poems read out loud to you, as though you're a child. My favourite was "Nuns", written by Mark Haddon, who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The nuns are on their holiday at the seaside: "Their ankles are like flashes of lightning…"
No lightning flashes during Mary Moore's recollections of her father, sculptor Henry Moore. But she did shine a steady light on both the man and his work, with her descriptions of his early years spent burrowing into the slagheaps of mining town Castleford and, later, the lively Moore family household in Perry Green in Hampshire.
Students, artists and film-makers all dropped by, as and when – except for Wimbledon fortnight when "a large line went through the diary" and Moore and his wife would just watch the telly all afternoon. Mary and contributors such as Anthony Caro and Antony Gormley also kiboshed the idea of Moore's work as the friendly face of public sculpture. Gormley was eloquent on Moore's "Shelter" drawings, of people in the tube stations during the Blitz, of Moore's "anger and shock at their poverty and the fact they were left to fend for themselves".
Profile was about satirist and film-maker Chris Morris, enlivened with precisely one quote from the man himself. This was lifted from a podcast called daily.greencine.com which has a full interview with Morris, conducted by Aaron Hillis, about Four Lions, his new jihadi comedy movie. I recommend a listen. It's rare to hear Morris speak, let alone discuss his directing methods – apparently, he starts filming before everyone's ready – and he's a clever man. He explains that he doesn't like doing interviews because he doesn't want to be part of the "major bun fight" that is the media discussion of the war on terror. Four Lions is "an attempt to step outside" the bun fight, so why get involved? All far more revealing, naturally, than Profile's attempt, which boasted this quite astonishing intro: "What is it that drives this 47-year-old former Catholic schoolboy to push at the boundaries of taste?" A parody of itself. Like Brass Eye never happened.
