I think the only time I ever assaulted anyone – have I mentioned this before? – was when a loud American talked all the way through Ninigawa’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But I’m definitely on the intolerant side when plays are disrupted.

And I would have been more than willing to deck the mobile phone owner who let their phone ring for, ooh, several minutes at the opening of Martin Crimp’s play The City tonight.

There was Benedict Cumberbatch (from the film Atonement and TV’s Stuart: A Life Lived Backwards as well as recent Court hits) and Hattie Morahan (recently seen in TV’s Sense and Sensibility) embarking on the intriguing but not exactly a-walk-in-the-park venture of a premiere.

And there was some (probable) idiot who failed to curtail their ring tone for what felt like a life-time.

I am opposed to the Richard Griffiths’ approach of castigating the perpetrators. I was told – and it may have been wrong but sounded plausible – that a noise-maker who The History Boys star humiliated at the National Theatre was hearing impaired and didn’t realise the ‘phone was his.

But my heart went out to Cumberbatch who wondered afterwards whether they should have stopped entirely and started again so near the start were they.

It’s a tricky call. When a mobile interrupted Simon Rattle at the Proms a couple of years ago, it was within seconds of the concert beginning. It was an open and shut case and he went from the start after a fierce rebuke to the offender.

Several minutes into theatre struck me as less than clear-cut.

But it does reinforce the need for mobile vigilance. There is no excuse. All mobiles should be put on silent in theatres, cinemas and concert halls. It's not exactly difficult to do, even for the most technologically inept. Bravo to the Court cast for ploughing on regardless. But they should never have faced that dilemma.

ends

I’ve just spent the day with 700 people watching nearly 10 hours of Shakespeare.

I’m a little weary with a slightly numb rear, but heaven only know how shattered the ensemble company of the Royal Shakespeare Company feel after performing Henry IV parts one and two then Henry V, starting at 10.30am and finishing around 11pm tonight.

But I love the idea that on a rather nice spring Wednesday morning, the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm was buzzing with people about to embark on an epic theatrical experience.

Even more stunning in some ways is that given some of the audience, such as AC Grayling, the philosopher, and Ed Vaizey, the Tory’s shadow culture spokesman, could only make the third part of today’s trilogy, that must have meant others got out of bed for the trickier Henry IVs alone. And they don’t even have the benefit of all those rallying speeches – “Once more unto the breach….” - at which Laurence Olivier excelled.

But arts audiences know love the big event. From all-weekend music festivals to the complete run of Shakespeare’s history plays  there are people who want utter immersion. Already the RSC London season is close to sold out.

And though the series had some terrific reviews in

Stratford

before the

London

transfer, past experience suggests that isn’t entirely the point. The Coast of

Utopia

trilogy at the National Theatre was far from being Tom Stoppard at his best but was still a riveting day on the South Bank. The first time I ever saw this sequence of Shakespeare’s was about 20 years ago when I was a student and I can still remember the sense of achievement – and excitement. There’s a sense of ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish.’

And Michael Boyd, the RSC’s artistic director, is right – you get a different perspective on Shakespeare’s history cycle seeing the works all together. It may be too late now to get your tickets. But if you can, go.

ends

If I were James Purnell, I would be hopping mad.

He helps secure a more generous funding settlement for the Department for Culture than anyone dared hope for.

But now Arts Council England (ACE) – which dispenses the arts allocation to nearly 1,000 bodies across the country – seems to be doing its best to fritter the achievement away.

The current drip-drip revelations of who are the winners and losers in its allocation of grants is causing widespread anger and dismay – and with good cause.

ACE’s contention that no organisation should continue to be funded just because it always has been is absolutely right.

But if funded bodies are expected to be excellent and innovative – the new buzzwords of cultural policy as propounded in the review for Government by former Edinburgh Festival head Brian McMaster – then they do have every right to expect due warning if they are failing to cut the mustard.

Unlike my colleague Norman Lebrecht, I am not a routine Arts Council basher. For the record and for what it is worth, for instance, I know and admire the incoming chief executive Alan Davey whose appointment Norman has roundly criticised.

I have not, until now, commented on the process because my principle job is to report on what I find and the Arts Council already thinks I have been unfairly negative so far.

But the more I have spoken to body after body in recent weeks, the more baffling and shocking the process has seen.

The Arts Council says most of those affected should not have been surprised. They had been warned, it says.

But if so, the warnings were manifestly less than clear. I have attended a string of briefings in the last year or two where Christopher Frayling, the chairman, and Peter Hewitt, the chief executive, intimated that in the face of a less than satisfactory spending settlement, they would not oversee “equal for misery for all”.

But that is a far cry from deciding that, whatever happened, a fifth of bodies would face cuts. The scale of the reductions now is not a consequence of the Government failing to come up trumps but of Arts Council policy.

In which case, I fail to see why it could not have begun to issue warnings to the likely victims far, far earlier. The precise sums obviously had to wait until the new budget for the three years from April was known – and that was alarmingly late, in October.

But why wait until the day after the Northcott Theatre in Exeter opens after a refurbishment to tell it its grant is to be axed?

The Arts Council had long wanted Jacksons Lane arts centre in north London to update its premises – and thanks partly to storm damage and an insurance claim, it has been closed for refurbishment for the last year. It, too, got the devastating letter just as it was preparing to re-open.

And why allow the Bush Theatre to advertise and shortlist for a new executive producer only to announce its £180,000 budget cut exactly as the candidates are supposed to be interviewed? Is that not pertinent information for the contenders?

Few organisations stand a chance of replacing the axed cash in the handful of weeks remaining before the end of the financial year. And it may be that some really aren’t good enough to warrant survival and should go to the wall. I don't know.

But I certainly sympathise with the widespread view among the victims that the way the Arts Council has handled the whole sorry affair scarcely induces confidence in their capacity to identify excellence.

ends

Sincerest apologies, dear putative readers, for having been so tardy in my blogging.

In my defence, it’s been a bonkers fortnight in the arts what with Frieze, the comprehensive spending review settlement, the Man Booker Prize and the Turner Prize show and the opening of the London Film Festival.

So lots of idle thoughts that might have come your way are now long gone. (Howard Davies’ Man Booker Prize speech – if you’re going to have a business brain in charge of the judging, couldn’t he at least make it sound as if he’s doing more than beancounting? Alex the cartoon hits the stage – it will get lots of City bums on seats but will it convert them to theatre? And so on.)

But do you want the serious ponderings or the idle gossip? I am so not a 3am Girl so we’re not talking sex, drugs and rock’n’roll here.

But snippets like these. That Alan Yentob, the BBC exec, was incandescent with rate at the latest Sunday Times allegations in the noddy-gate affair. That Dustin Hoffman, who arrived just as I did at the Royal Academy’s opening night party for Georg Baselitz, really is astonishingly short in a way that would undoubtedly preclude him from being a British political leader.

Anyway you see my problem. I'm not a natural blogger, (evidence - this was nearly filed as the words of my colleague, Amar Singh) I'm a hack with a fascinating job. But tell me what you want, what you really really want. And I'll give it a shot.

Who has the knowledge required to tell you, the public, what you should go and see?

I thought about it tonight as I watched a dance collaboration between the former Turner Prize nominee Isaac Julien and the choreographer Russell Maliphant at Sadler’s Wells.

Most of the critics I spotted were, understandably, dance reviewers. There was the occasional art critic as was right. The chance to watch Julien’s films in such a forum was to be relished.

But it’s interesting. As an arts correspondent, I try hard to have a working knowledge of all the arts I cover – across film, theatre, visual arts, dance, music, books, heritage, cultural policy (it’s late and I’m sure I’ve forgotten something).  But I also know what I don't know as well as what I do.

But, oddly, that isn't a talent valued by the world at large. I always know who will be reviewing on shows such as Newsnight Review because many of its reviewers I see only at the specific events they have been asked to cover. Few people are genuinely informed and entertaining across the (arts) board.

There are genres where I might just take a shot at reviewing. Theatre, perhaps. Visual arts or books, possibly. Experience makes me think I would not be a disaster but there are others, I know, who would be better.

But it raises an interesting point about the increasing number of cross-genre artistic collaborations. Is it right to send a dance critic to an event where, like tonight, there is no live performance, simply (fantastic) film incorporating dance for the first half hour? It is an issue because in Julien/Maliphant's  Cast No Shadow, the visuals are as intrinsic as the movement.

I am certainly not questioning any dance critic’s credentials. And many are, I’m sure, at least as adept as I at crossing boundaries. But whether Mr Maliphant and Mr Julien will emerge from the process with the appropriate amount of informed analysis in reviews in the next few days, I will be curious to see.

ends 

I have been immortalised in art and I am inordinately chuffed.

Wandering through the Turner Prize retrospective at Tate Britain yesterday I discovered my name inscribed on a Grayson Perry pot.

The work concerned was not only dedicated to me, obviously. What Grayson Perry did was create a pot immortalising the night he won the prize in 2003. So the entire seating plan for the dinner is recorded in clay – and although it was not one of the works displayed for his Turner Prize show, in the circumstances the gallery decided to include it now.

As a journalist, you can have a Forrest Gump-like capacity to be there at great moments in (art) history. Look closely and I can be spotted in one of the photographs always dug out of the archives showing Tracey Emin’s famously unmade bed.

But it’s not quite like being Ossie Clark for David Hockney or Kate Moss for Lucian Freud.

Whatever your own claims to fame, as an artist's subject you survive for future generations, which is evidently why families still get painted for posterity even though photographs are quicker.

If Lucian Freud ever asks, I'd be more than willing to grab my chance. He's a fabulous artist but even Jerry Hall looks fleshy in his hands so I could blame the artist for my natural flaws.

In the meantime, I do now have a small cultural afterlife, albeit it as a name on a pot. Thank you Grayson!

The only time I have ever hit anyone was the loud American who decided to add his own appallingly crass commentary to Ninigawa’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Yes of course it was in Japanese. But the rest of the audience was either Japanese and understood it or an averagely educated Brit who was willing to rely on whatever they could recall of Shakespeare’s plot without recourse to discussing it with their neighbour.

Anyway at the risk of coming over as excessively violent on my blogging debut, this story always comes to mind whenever I’m next to someone who insists on talking through a play, concert or film.

Even so, the etiquette of gigs is a tricky one. They’re clearly more informal than Covent Garden or the National Theatre.

But if you pay £50 for a couple of tickets to see one of your teenage heroines – as I did with the fabulous Melanie at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire on Friday night – then having some really talkative middle-aged bloke booming in counterpoint to Tuning My Guitar is a real downer.

That said, when I pay £50, I don’t expect to be seated in front of the gents’ loos with banging and squeaky doors either. Venue managements may find it tricky to do anything about their more irritating ticket-holders. They can do something about their doors.

Louise Jury has been the Chief Arts Correspondent of the Standard since the spring after doing the job with a slightly less grand title on another paper for many years. She thinks it is one of the best jobs in the world though would probably actually do the things she writes about if she had the talent. In earlier years, she acted on the Edinburgh Fringe, played the piano, cello and guitar and painted a lot before accepting these were unlikely to prove ways of earning a living.