Start the Week

25/10/2010

Andrew Marr talks to the Scottish writer and artist, Alasdair Gray about his life through the story of his paintings. While the director Josie Rourke brings to life the tough reality of 1930s Glasgow, in her staging of the play, Men Should Weep. David Starkey explores the history of the monarchy, showing its resilience but also fragility, over the last two thousand years. And James Stirling is considered one of the greatest British architects - Alan Berman celebrates his radical buildings while asking why the general public rarely appreciate what architects revere.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 41m
Broadcast on:: 25 Oct 2010
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, today we're going to be talking about radical architects and artists, strong women, queens and princes, as Britain digests the fairness or otherwise of the government's planned cuts, and the Big Society. Josie Rourke is here to talk about a place she's directing at the National Theatre, set in the Glasgow slums of the 1930s and embattled society, out of which came post-war idealism which itself then ran into trouble, and is well represented by James Stirling claimed by Alan Berman as one of the greatest architects of the century, a visionary whose buildings nonetheless infuriated some of those who used them. Later we're going to hear from the historian David Starkey about his vision of the future rooted, as you'd expect, in England's royal past, but reaching ahead to the next reign, and the one after that as well. First though, back to Glasgow, through the eyes, words and brushes of one of its most devoted sons, the novelist and artist, Alistair Gray, author of Lannock, creator of murals and poems, book covers and posters. Alistair, on the cover of one of your books you have in gold, the words workers, if you were living in the early days of a better nation, and much of what you have done is trying to create a stronger sense of part of the nation, a stronger sense of place. Oh good, I did not mean to, I just wanted to tell stories and make pictures that people would enjoy. And yet it's almost impossible to imagine your drawing and your writing without your native city. I mean you seem to be as rooted in Glasgow, and Glasgow is an important for you as, you know, parts of Northern Ireland are for shame as he and he or one could go on. Yes, there's some Petersburg, for Dostoevsk, your London for Dickens, yes, I'm perfectly ordinary that way. And yet an awful lot of, Britain would, you know, end us in discussing the big society at the moment in this country, but it seems to be very difficult to have a big society if you don't have a strong sense of place, a strong sense of city, a strong sense of your provincial or your local or your, whatever it is you come from. Oh dear, each Lawrence said, "All great art is local, all inferior art is provincial." By provincial art he meant, people who write as if they're explaining themselves to more important people. There's nothing more dull than the kind of writing. And a pale copy of an art produced somewhere else, provincial. Well, no, it can even be better than that. You can have a provincial art in which the writer is explaining, for instance, to give a horrible example, what scottishness is, there's no such thing as scottishness, any more than there's a thing like Englishness or Americanness. There's only notions of Americanness or not British behaviour, not really Scottish to be badly. I hate the notion of national, nationalness, because anybody who's any good at the art has learned from as many other countries and cultures as they can. And where do you think, I should say, we're talking about this partly because you've produced a book called A Life in Pictures, which brings us together a lot of your art, your graphic art, I should say, rather than your prose art, and the art of some of your friends who you feel have been undervalued or perhaps less well-known than they ought to be. And the line, the very specific way that you draw, seems to have fixed itself pretty early on. I mean, you look at some of the posters and the book covers and so on that you were doing back in the '70s, and it's a very clear, very distinctive style. Where did it come from? Partly from Walt Disney, partly from the Bino and the Dandy comics. But as I matured, increasingly from William Blake, from Aubrey Beardsley and every other artist I've ever had ever. This is looked at and studied. Because this is a book of pictures, and one of the very interesting parts of it is very early on you just show many of the illustrated books that you grew up with as a child. And it strikes me that we live in now in a world of screens and television and so on, but the notion of gorgeously illustrated, carefully drawn and coloured books, has rather fallen out of the culture, and this is a diminishment. Yes. I can only agree with you, sir. I'm going to start asking such long questions, and then we'll get on. But no, just going back to the drawing style, because it is quite distinct. I just wondered whether a lot of these feel as if they'd been woodcut type drawings, very, very clear lines, and lots of black space. And also drawings designed almost to be posters. Some work posters. But one of the earliest books, I think I mentioned it in this one, but my father had a habit, and I know seems a much more remarkable man than I ever thought when he was alive. He'd a habit when I asked questions, which he couldn't answer of getting books in order to provide the answers. It was amazing, and I think not because I'd been given any religious education at all. I think at the very early age I asked him something about God, who is this bloke. Being a Shavian, a socialist, he brought out and started reading to me Shaw's black girl in search of God, which was illustrated by magnificent woodcuts. Now, I don't remember him doing that, reading it to me. He told me he'd later on, and I'd found it rather boring. No wonder of the age of three. But at the age of tenor and I found the book at the house, and at that time I was an avid reader. And I remember reading it and being very excited by it, and also by the woodcuts, because she looks quite sexy, this naked black woman. And I think God was a considerable influence on there. And when you were growing up, and you go to art college and so on, there was clearly a very distinctive, very busy Glasgow world of writers and artists. Many of them amateurs, many of them unable to make a living at what they're doing, but nonetheless meeting and talking and so on. And I just wonder whether that's faded away a bit these days. Well, in the first place, I didn't think it was a very busy scene at all. I just knew a few folk who were, like me, trying to be painters, like me writing novels, not many, only Archie Eind, Betty Clark, the playwright, largely ignored. Now, with no sense of assurance, things have changed hugely in Scotland, certainly. We now have a thing we never had before, for which I'm glad to my friend, James Gilman, rather disparages it. But the fact that we've got now writers of detective novels are read internationally. You can have a Glasgow private eye detective who's read in America, and think, "Oh my God, that would never have happened." So actually, things are many ways have improved since the '70s. Oh, only for the writers and perhaps some of the artists. All the other industries have been destroyed. Yes, murals. Except tourism. Except tourism, right. What did the rest of us make of this work? I was fascinated by your comment towards the end of the book that some of the conventions that you were taught, which you despised when you were being taught, you now think should be revived. Can you expand on that? It wasn't a convention that I was against at Glasgow School of Art. The basis of it was learning drawing. That was good. The first year, however, it had to be from plaster casts. I hated that. I had gone to Glasgow School. Well, I wanted to draw Be of Naked Women. And you weren't allowed drawing life drawing until you got to your second year. That was fine. But all the teachers believed in drawing as the foundation of art. As all the Florentines did, you know, the Venetians had a looser attitude to it. But drawing, which Delacroix called the philosophy of art, drawing was the foundation of it. And we only thought our teachers in the drawing and painting department daft because they thought art had gone bad with Cezanne and Gauguin. Well, Picasso certainly wasn't in it. But nonetheless, the drawing, the learning to draw, hugely valuable, the eye and the eye and the eye. Exactly. And nowadays, drawing and painting has become visual art. And we've had heads of visual art in Glasgow who tells students you don't need to draw. I never learned to draw. You don't need to draw. Obviously silly. Fundamentally silly. Yeah. Well, I think so. Yeah, David's talking. Can we go because obviously this book is also an autobiography. From art to life. I read it with interest because although you're 11 years older than I am, 34, I was born 45. So much of your world was my world. I too was born into an aspirant working class. I too also had a family that was bookish, that took learning seriously, that even had pictures on the wall. But what struck me about the, I too had health problems. You had asthma. I had club photo. I had polio and whatever. These curious stigmata, which mark you. But what interested me was the completely opposite attitude that we had to origins. You've embraced them. You've essentially remained within the world of your childhood. I could not wait to get out. I remember sitting in my grammar school, looking at the honours boards, those who'd gone to Cambridge and Oxford and thinking, I am expletive. I even learned to swear for the moment, I am going to get out. You never felt that. No. No, I felt it. Well, why? I mean, you know, oh, Glasgow's an interesting city, but it's not the world. But he's made it a kind of world. He's made his own world. Sorry. The Glasgow of the 18th century was a world city. The Glasgow of the early 19th century was a world city. I'm afraid the Glasgow of the mid 20th is provincial. It's a backwater. You were right. Scotland had provincialised themselves. The Scottish educational system, which had once been the best in the world, sorry, one of the best educational systems in the world, particularly for the working classes, was by the early 20th century, the whole purpose of the Scottish educational system was to get jobs for the clever boys in England or the empire. And that was why Robert Buttons was never taught in schools, why the only scott novel that was taught in schools was Ivan Ho, which describes how the Anglo-Saxons eventually assimilated by their Norman conquerors and became England. What a good relation for Scottish school. Sorry. Isn't Glasgow infinitely more provincial now than it was in the first half of the 20th century? You said the only thing that connected it with the world was industry. It's now a mere state subsidised back. Well, let's. Exactly. It's as bad as any other country in the world. We're going to turn to to Josie Roth now because it's absolutely outpropos and straight on the money. Inelamant Stuart, a Glasgow playwright of the 1940s, not very well known now, has written this play called Men Should Weep, which was about Glasgow life in the 1930s and the Telemons, and is an astonishing play and very, very tightly wrought. I mean, it's almost ebsonian in its tightness. But it's about an awful lot of themes we started off discussing the big society. It's about the pressure to get by on small amounts of money when you're looking after the elderly, granny in the corner, and too many children, perhaps. Absolutely. I mean, I think that's an interesting just to pick up from what David was saying in terms of Lamant Stuart, who I think you knew after her in her career. There's a question that seems to me about the requirements of an artist to leave their home in order to be recognised, which seems to be underpinning what you were saying. And it's certainly the case with Inelamant Stuart that she wrote this extraordinary play, Men Should Weep. It was a huge success. It gave an account. I mean, she was not a working class girl. She was a daughter of romance, actually. Her experience of life in the Telemons was drawn from working as a hospital receptionist and having seen mainly women come in with children with TB as appears in the play and huge amounts of poverty, and also from her father's ministry, I think. But after this play, she disappeared and was largely forgotten, something not unknown, particularly of women playwrights at that time, and if you think of Sophie Treadwell in America or you know, Geeta Salbi, they did tend to write one great play and then disappear. Which is really frustrating because you can see here, this is somebody who could have, you almost feel it's like an early Arthur Miller play, you know, there's somebody on the way to real greatness. I think that's right, and she's... And then she stops. Yeah, she does stop. I mean, she continued to write, but what she certainly didn't have was the correct forms of encouragement. Seems to be the general perception, I don't know, perhaps, Alistair could add something to that, but it was... It's an extraordinary play in terms of its scope, it's very like a Miller play, it's both a piece of exquisite social realism in terms of how brilliantly it's observed, but there are also these huge themes running through it. And the other thing that's wonderful to do, because having directed a lot of classical plays is when you see the curtain call, you get an almost exact reversal in terms of the gender balance, where you normally have 14 blokes and about four women. In this instance, it's 14 women in about four blokes, which is just an incredible thing to see on the left and the stage, frankly. Do the London audiences struggle with the language? I think that it takes a long while to tune in. Yeah, it takes a long while to tune in. But it's a class to class with you, isn't it? Largely class with you. I mean, they range from across Scotland, and again, an interesting balance of actors who've left Scotland in order to work, or actors who've remained there working in the very vital theatre scene, but it takes a short while to tune in, I would say. But like any player, you know, I mean, like a Soy Inka player or a Shakespeare player, your ear has to become a tune both to the dialect and also to the Scots that sits within it. The opening scene is with Granny, so obviously she's got more old Scots in her language than the mum has. And at the time when we're talking about the need for the big society, in other words, people take on more of the burden and leave less to the state. I suppose this also points out how hard this can be, what a hard life it is, carrying in different directions and different generational directions. I think that's right. And of course, one of the great things that plays can do as well as being great literary documents is there can be great physical documents. So what you see, and she's very brilliantly dramatised in this play, is the toll that looking after children and looking after the elderly and working in, you know, without all the modern devices we have these days, but working to raise a family, the toll that takes on a woman's body is very vividly realised. And because we've got this large stage in the littlest and what we've done is we've portrayed both the room that she originally wrote and there are in total sorts of slices of eight or the tenement rooms that you can see as you look at the stage and to be able to populate that and to think about what that whole life would have been like and the kind of mutuality and support and the gossip and the difficulty of living cheap by jowl. It's really fascinating. There was a famous Scottish book called No Gods and Precious Few Heroes and in many respects there seems to be a play about that. It's a play about weak men in many ways and strong women isn't it? Or stronger women? Yeah I mean I sort of, I'd counter that slightly I think Andrew I think it's about how poverty emasculates men so that when there aren't enough work for this great kind of patriarch figure to take on, what happens is that he's systematically sort of plucked away at by the different forces in the play and what you have in terms of the portrayal of women is a series of the different roles that women take on. There are mothers in that play, there are women who have decided not to get married and to work in it. There's the sister who works in the pub, there's a girl who everyone thinks is really tardy but actually is living on her wits. You can see this great range of opportunities, well I say great range is about four or five and then all of them on some level work on this father figure to try and emasculating be it the daughter-in-law trying to seduce him or the mother eventually attacking him or the sister sniping at him for engaging and chatting on street corners about why there are no jobs rather than. And the world of the slums because it was such a leprous policy poverty-infested place became a world that the next generation wanted to sweep away physically. The buildings, the tenement buildings almost all went and now of course the few that are left have become sort of tarted up and very expensive and places to go and admire but it was a world that that generation, actually in a lament Stuart's generation, were determined to erase forever. I was to grace shaking his head but I'll let you answer first shake and head returns. And again it's wonderful to have Alan here to talk about this as well because actually it seems to me from the reading that I don't know if I'm talking to people, they didn't want to sweep away the architecture, they wanted to sweep away the poverty and they wanted to sweep away the overcrowding. There wasn't something rotten in the state of Denmark, actually what was in terms of the buildings, what was wrong was the conditions and the overcrowding in which people were forced and the alternative was certainly something that's a great sadness that lives on in Glasgow to this day. Well except that those, I mean those tenements did go and they were replaced by bigger states like Castle Milk and so on, built after the war. This was everywhere, I mean sorry, the whole, it was everywhere, it's not just Glasgow, even the little northern town that I grew up in in Kendall, destroyed magnificent 17th century yards because they were claimed as slums and throughout Britain there was a conspiracy between two people in every town. One of them was the surveyor, the town surveyor and the other was the barramedical officer of health and between them they created a desert and built a council estate and they are hideous destructive places that have recreated a poverty, every bit as I would argue worse than what the player describes because it's a poverty of the spirit as much more than a physical poverty. I'm very glad to hear you say that because usually the accusation is against the designers of the house, the architects but actually this was the medical officers who saw that they needed to erase this past, these slum houses and actually it was about poverty, failure of aspiration and all failure of opportunity and I think there's a terror. It was classically medical. So the disease was attached to the building, Alistair Gregory. I wouldn't blame the medical officers too much. You're wrong about seeing all but a few of the Glasgow tenements were destroyed, the point is most of the Glasgow tenements were built for the middle classes, they were built big, lay and spatiously, they became slums, they became slums in the gardens for instance, simply because with the expansion of the industry people moved out of them into pusher places outside and slum landlordism came in, so you'd hold families first living in one room and then families living in each corner of one room and of course since the landlords were not maintaining them properly, you had hideous slum conditions growing up. The best Glasgow tenements which had five rooms and kitchens or more still stand. The mansion flats, the elegant mansion flats. The elegant mansion flats, they still survive. The trouble was that Glasgow City Council labored from almost the late thirties continually up till now, alas, because any party that's in power for a very long becomes corrupt. They were actually persuaded by mainly English publicity, the global story, Glasgow tenements, ugly, nasty in sanitary and many of them really had grown up in these in sanitary conditions. John Wheatley, a minor son growing up with a hideously overcrowded big family, Catholic, it was he who brought in the Wheatley Act. That would enable local housing to build houses for folk that private landlords wouldn't or couldn't build as a result of course. The first built Nightswood and Riddrie, when I grew up, which were actually very posh, successful council estates, well felt really posh there, living in them because they'd did public libraries, municipal bowling greens. And quite right too. And the least ones didn't have them. We're going to move on now to somebody whose idealism and whose sort of sense of a possible better future came out of this world in the way. Didn't it Alan Berman? Jim Sterling was one of the post-war visionaries. Well, he was a post-war visionary in terms of his belief in architecture as something that could be significantly improved. What he saw, he did not design much housing at all. What he saw was a rather polite and I think rather similarly to the plate, I mean to men should weep. The architects in London and around the festival of Britain time were building what has been described as a rather scandaweogen, rather tame, a lot of international style buildings, not a lot of interest in terms of architectural form. And James Sterling was one of the, you might say, the equivalent of the angry young men who said that it was time to look back to the heroic period of modernism, pre-war modernism, whereas in England it had become rather tame, the international style. And he saw an opportunity or he saw the need rather to develop architectural forms which were much more exciting and much less banal. And to that extent he looked to the earlier moderns and he looked to Europe for that. And in reviving interest in his work, looking particularly at his work, you've produced a book about his Red Trilogy. Explain to us what the Red Trilogy was and is. The Red Trilogy are three buildings for Leicester, Oxford and Cambridge universities which he and initially his partner James Gown developed using a language which they saw as a vernacular and that's very important. They were interested in the vernacular but it was the industrial vernacular of red tiles, red bricks which is the northern engineering bricks that he saw when he grew up in and around Liverpool and very cheap patent glazing. And that was quite an adventurous set of forms, set of materials that he used. After the war there was a tremendous optimism about building new materials, building in new ways and in fact we see that optimism in, in for example the design of the mini and a lot of other things and those three buildings he designed were absolutely groundbreaking. And you make the point in the book that whereas Izzagonis designing the mini can keep redrawing it and fiddling with it and because the very first versions of the mini had all sorts of design problems with them and they let the water in and they were rusted and all the rest of it. Or indeed where an artist or a writer can constantly revise what they're doing until it's ready. An architect has only one go, up goes the building right or wrong and of course many of James Dirling's buildings in technical terms did not go well. I mean they dripped and they there were compensation problems and... Indeed they were in... I sat under the drops in a history library. Well indeed I make the point that I wouldn't for one minute pretend that they weren't technical problems, they were. The point is exactly the one you've identified that I write about in the book is that no artifact, no constructed artifact gets made apart from buildings which have to perform on their first go whether it's a car or a toast or any other artifact. It's road tested. So there is a real conceptual mistake here which is they always used to be very important temporary buildings that went up very quickly and came down very quickly and it seems to me that where we've gone wrong is that the idea of architectural experiment is all very well but it is now combined with a false monumentalism. The sort of building that I was referring to were the legion types, there were the great exhibitions, there were the temporary pavilions of great exhibitions. There were stage sets, there were entertainment... But they can't accept that because many many many many gothic cathedrals fell down because they were built too high and many many examples of great architecture in the past have failed. The only ones we have left now are the ones that have been patched. No they've been patched and repaired and every 50 years or so which is what is happening to Stirling's buildings now they're 50, 45, 50 years old. They are renovated and I see in Oxford colleges where I do a great deal of work that every 40 or 50 years there is no question that they need to be repaired, stonework needs to be repaired, roofs need to be replaced but when some when when this has to happen to a building of the mid mid 60s people get on their high horse and say these buildings don't work but most buildings don't work because they become out of stage. It's simply caution and that was a building that was designed not to function it was supposed to be a building with lecture rooms. The lecture rooms were deliberately designed with butt jointed glass between them which means if you're a lecturer like me with a powerful voice the people next door were hugely improved by listening to my lecture rather than the tedium to which they were being exposed. There was a library which was beautifully modelled on the 19th century prison that's to say a panopticon with the great problem being that not only was the librarian at the axis of the panopticon so was the place that you entered so nobody could actually read anything. This is a building, this is a building which is pure exercise of form over function. Well I was talking to a historian last week who spent four years researching there and he said he came from a school where a reading history was really considered you know not the done thing most of his friends were going into going into into the works into factory jobs and he came to this shining bright brilliant crystalline building and he absolutely loved being in the reading room because he was that reading room was at the heart of the history faculty. Now your research can I jump in? I want to just jump in here and ask about the way architecture is done but it's an interesting question here as to the balance between the purity of the architect in front of his drawing table looking at his forms and looking at the new materials which are available to him and the amount of time an architect should spend as it were with the client walking around thinking talking to the client before drawing. Well the architect has to do both it's an incredibly complex and elaborate process and if you look at the way Jim Sterling's three red buildings are organized they're very very well organized. The idea, the idea, the idea, you know, it was Jeffrey Elton, your colleague, historian, who actually championed that building because he and other people on the jury who judged Sterling's submission, Sterling and Gahn's submission at that time thought that the idea of putting the library at the heart of the history faculty with the academic rooms around it was absolutely a brilliant concept and I've, I know the demented ideal look as well. Well I don't, that's an area I don't want to get into. Alistair Gray. No, I was just going to say what's not the repeating room of the British Museum? Where did Panopticon devised? Yeah but you didn't enter, you didn't enter the librarians sat at the heart of the Panopticon but you didn't enter in the middle, you entered quietly from the side and crept around the great desks and also it's the many- Another question here though that what happens when a new building, either radical, aggressive building goes up or a building that challenges you, is everybody who uses it thinks about the building whereas it when we're using traditional buildings an Edwardian lecture room and all the rest of it, somehow we're conditioned not to think about the building room. I've never been in Edwardian lecture room that leaked. I've never been in an Edwardian lecture room where I could hear the lecture next door more clearly than the one that I'm supposed to be and your point about medieval cathedrals is a sliver. The medieval cathedrals worked devotionally, in other words they fulfilled their function. They might have had problems about the form, about the ambition of the architecture but no medieval cathedral failed as a place of worship. What I'm saying is the history faculty fails fundamentally, totally and absolutely as a proper academic building. But that's your view. I've made academics that actually disagree and consider it's a wonderful place. Are you then suggesting I should be silent about that? No no no I'm not one moment. I don't think anyone's suggesting David that you're going to be silent about your users remotely likely to succeed. Have knows I don't want to try and cut into your clearly very traumatic experience of being leaked upon but there is an interesting question here I think about the right to fail in detail but to progress in experiments which is fundamental to my craft and experience. I run a theatre that that's dedicated to the production of new plays and we have as many failures as we do successes but the project is critical. One of the most interesting things about your book is the collection of essays from other architects talking about the conditions of inspiration really that are required and it seems to have been supplied by serving. Yes one of the essays points out that one of the marks of a classic is that years and years later it can be revisited and subject to controversy and it's very clear that architects of a whole range of outlooks and generations see in these radical buildings of stirlings that they are full of ideas they're extremely rich. I don't for one minute can't define this way let's move on. The practical stuff is really boring. Another thing that I thought was a real problem about your book was the notion that the proper judge of architecture is another architect. It's as mysterious as it were professionalization. The proper judge of architecture is the consumer, is the viewer, is the person who pays for it. You would want to be judged would you not buy other historians as much as by your readers? I would want to be judged much more by my reader and I write deliberately for my reader not for my jealous professional rivals. Do you feel that the architecture of the building Oxford, Cambridge has really set British history back by destroying the capacity of the lecturers and the students to become historians? No. All good. Right. On which point we'll move on to history and to David Starkey's own book, "Cranan Country" which is looking at the mere 2000 years or so of the monarchy in England. Rather disconcertingly you start this book however with the Romans and the departure of the Romans which you see as a crucial break point in the history of this part of the world. Why is that? I think because we are unique in the Western Empire. That's to say Britannia was, we don't quite know how many, it's a collection of provinces of the Roman Empire but elsewhere in Western Europe, Spain, France, Italy. Although Rome fell, Romanists didn't. In Spain it's very remarkable although you had not simply one but two massive invasions, the Gothic invasions followed immediately by the Islamic invasions and yet the elements of the language survive, traditional urban centres survive, patterns of agriculture and so on survive. In Britain, in Britannia they are absolutely obliterated. I'll just come back from Toulouse and the central square is so called the capital. It's called the capital. You still got squares which are essentially fora and I think this has utterly profound effects on language, on attitudes, for authority and power but also I think if I dare use the word English, one of the very peculiar things about being English is this fundamental nostalgia and sentimentalism and I think part of it is our awareness that we obliterated something greater. You can read the early passage of the Roman Empire because of course they look, not as they do now, terribly gentilised the 18th century. You would still have had a roof like the bars of Caracalla, I mean you're talking about experimental architectural structures which indeed eventually fell down though after having stayed up neglected for about 700 years, much better than sterling, though using the same materials. So I think there is that, that was one of the things I was trying to get at. So the encounter between the English and indeed the Scottish and classicism which is one of the great stories of what you're talking about, the classical, is different here. It's a different encounter in a France or a Spain or an Italy. They're recovering their own past. Here we're colliding cultures. What worries me about that is this notion that there is, you talk about the looking back and the sentimentalising and the romanticising of the past. One of the concerns as an architect is that we are in a culture but in England where anything old is preserved and nothing and everything new is, you know, is to be despised or to be berated and experienced. That's nonsense. Look at the change, the revolutionary change of fashion in interior design. The worship of the contemporary... Well because we've got different sets of values, we're a wonderfully conflicted and arguing society which is one of the great virtues of England and Britain. Through this, sorry, I just want to come back to the narrative of monarchy first, then we can go back off again. But through this book you make the argument that actually a lot of the sort of central thrust of English civilisation is connected to the monarchy in different ways and it's a long and complicated history. I just wanted to jump, Prince Charles has mentioned just now, jump right into the contemporary world and ask how you think, first of all, history is going to judge the present queen and talk a little bit about your enthusiasm for a new reign as well and a new way of re-imagining of monarchy. I think the present queen will be judged very favourably in that she hung on and survived and stayed the same. I think she'll be judged unfavourably for precisely the same reasons, that she stayed the same and that of course the world that she evoked, remember she's been on the throne, she's about to be the longest reigning monarch, she's just coming up to it. She came to the throne in 1952 and in 1952 she was already old-fashioned. She was consciously looking back to her father and a grandfather. I must be one of the very few people, apart from the Duke of Edinburgh, who largely wrote them, that has ever read all the Queen's Christmas broadcast and her only frames of reference is not Elizabeth I is not William the Conqueror, it's to George V and George VI. Who created the Windsor? Who created the House of Windsor, which she sees herself as the embodiment of but those values of the 50s and those values of the 20s, 30s, 40s are infinitely remote, much more. Prince Charles is clearly trying to do something different and he obviously, he couldn't keep on doing the same thing because the failure of his marriage was what finally broke the old Windsor monarchy which was essentially a family worship, I call it English Shinto, the English, very English thing of course, despite the scotticism of Balmoral and whatever, is the English worshiping themselves through the King Emperor and their common institution of bourgeois family marriage, planning like a Marxist. But anyway, it's sort of more or less true. Charles of course couldn't do that because of him and Diana and what he's obviously experimenting with and as usual, being a little bit ahead of the curve. Look at his ecology, look at his doubts about industrialized medicine, about agriculture and genetically modified food. He's always in a funny way, very old-fashioned on the one hand and rather a head of things on the other and he was already talking about most of the elements of the big society, long before Johnny come lately, David Cameron got around to it. I can't disagree with that and it is fascinating that somebody from that background can look at some of the cultural things that he's doing in alternative medicine, but of course for me as an architect, he's a disaster. He's a disaster, well I'm delighted to hear you say that, I think that's probably one of the things I wanted to hear you say and I didn't think I would. I am the least naturally conservative of people, I'm a Thatcherite radical. There you are, the Alistair can get cross with you. No, no, I took it for granted, you belong to the majority nowadays. Just to draw a line through, you write about Victoria reviving her reputation through re-engaging with pageantry and I'm just interested in this new model of the monarchy, what kind of pageant you think Charles may present. It's unbelievably difficult, you see, in the late 90s, particularly the earlier 20th century, history provided, again, talking about historicist styles. It provided, as it were, a legitimation. So what you do is, you consciously revive bizarrely at the great moment of the triumph of democracy in Britain, you consciously regard the whole medieval pageantry. The next coronation can't be like that. We no longer have an hereditary peerage, that's half of the cast, you're a producer, that's half of the cast of characters gone. The other half is in deep doubt because of the widespread contempt to the tongues over the Church of England. Who will be there to crown in the name of what will he be crowned? Well, my cast of characters haven't gone, but they have gone out of time or run out of time. Thank you to all my guests, that was great fun today. Josie Rourke's production of Men Should Weep is on at the National Theatre in London, David Starkey's Crown and Country, a history of England through the monarchy is out now, as are Jim Sterling and the Red Trilogy, edited by Alan Berman and Alistair Gray's auto-pictography. A life in pictures. Next week, reputations are at stake as Deborah Cadbury looks back at her family's firm and the chocolate wars, Stephen Isilis, stands up for south song and we'll be discussing Ireland's financial woes and immigration with Fintano tool and Nick Bowles. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.