Joe Orton was murdered in the 1960s by his lover, who then did himself in. Orton was to British sexual ethics what Martin McDonagh is to the Irish revival - he who names the worms crawling underneath the marbled stones and then squelches them underfoot. The George Michael meets-Alan Ayckbourn ethos of his anarchic overbite, in plays such as Loot and What The Butler Saw, brought him a commission to write a new Beatles screenplay, but his head was bashed in before he could finish it.
Linking Orton with the Beatles' lavatorial humour must have seemed a good idea at that reportedly swinging, psychedelic time, but not now, not without the lads, and certainly not over 90, sometimes indulgent, minutes. Up Against It (BBC Radio 3, Sunday) adapted by John Fletcher, was a weird and faintly wonderful rebellion against 1960s Trumpton culture, told as a fanciful quest fable by cardboard characters, full of wicked lines and some cruising in-jokes that Brian Epstein would have blushed at, then cut. But Epstein died just two months before Orton, the Beatles split up, Lennon was murdered, and the play finally counted more for that knowledge than for any intrinsic power.
Its central conceit had some historical prescience: women ruling England, Downing Street press briefings devoted to news of the latest wallpaper purchase, men as a new underclass of "husbandettes". Wonderfully politically incorrect, and a host of sexist jokes ("matronising cows") it was good to laugh at, but even if someone could write a cultural history thesis about its relationship to lad culture and middle-class male angst, retro voyeurism was its only real interest, peppered with tight production values, surprisingly effective use of a narrator, and excellent performances from Leo McKerns, Jacinta Mulcahy, Douglas Hodge, Prunella Scales and Mark Lambert, with blink-and-you'll-miss-them contributions (I did) from Sir John Gielgud and Joe Dowling.
Retro is what passes for history these days, unless you're Prof Camille Paglia, in which case you can inter-cut the posh and the popular without missing a beat. Some exemplary entrepreneur in the British Film Institute had commissioned her to write a critical study of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960s scarey classic, The Birds, for BFI's current Festival, and she lashed into her subject on Night Waves (BBC Radio 3, Thursday), bandying theories like a Moore Street hawkster. You want to think? You need a theory. Paglia's theories sound like a Wimbledon commentary told by Freud and Nietsche - sex, conflict, sex, power, sex, eroticism. A dude on the panel talked about Hitchcock as "the underbelly of the stiff upper lip", but Paglia reckoned he was much, much more: a great 20th-century visual artist of Picasso's dimension, speaking to contemporary generations more powerfully than the film icons of her youth such as Bergman and Antonioni. Hitchcock's erotic energy took the form of voyeurism, according to her new theory. Apart from conceiving one child, he was "as monastic as a Catholic priest" (she spoke without irony), so with hem lines going up, as they did in the post-war period, Hitchcock measured the culture in repeated motifs of the exposed female leg, always ending on a very, very high stiletto heel. Her urgent, intense vocal rhythms matched her intellectual passion, creating scenes your memory filled in which were probably even scarier than the original movie - that nightmare of flapping wings, Tippi Hedren as the blonde in trouble starting the movie near a pet shop, finishing in a state wilder than your imagination could measure. You sleep with a light on after you've seen it.
Art couldn't match the horror of Sunday's news about the murder by burning of Richard, Martin and Jason, the Quinn brothers, in Ballymoney. Archbishop Robin Eames stopped short of closing Drumcree Church, but called for the protest to end, as did a succession of political leaders on This Week (Sunday, RTE Radio 1). "Sorrow, anger and shame" was how Assemblyman, David Ervine, put his feelings, then came closest to saying the unsayable: that in real terms we are all complicit, that leaders and representatives like him are morally bankrupt, that he thinks a new kind of responsibility needs to be found which stops the dead weight atmosphere where violence can be ambivalently tolerated by all sides.
"We had a completely different introduction planned for this week," said Tommy Miller on Radio Ulster's Pipes And Drums, and it being the Twelfth and all that, you thought you knew what he meant. "But after sampling the delights of Kilkenny '98, we had no option but . . ." and on he went into disco piping as though Ballymoney had never happened. No doubt the show was pre-recorded, but coming immediately after some shocking current affairs, this lack of attention to context stood as a metaphor for how one seemingly discrete set of actions can and does connect with the rest of the world, no matter who tries to deny it.
Harry Browne is on holidays.
