When Archbishop Desmond Tutu was asked to speak on the importance of inclusion in the London 2012 legacy I suspect the organisers did not expect quite so much God - and sex.

But the 78-year- old veteran anti-apartheid campaigner provided - somewhat indirectly - the best of rebuffs to those who berate the diversity/inclusion agenda.

He told, touchingly, how when he arrived in Britain in the Sixties to study theology, he and his wife were astonished to discover that the British bobby would call them “sir” and “ma’am” if asked for directions. “It was such an extraordinary experience coming out of South Africa where they called us non-this, non-the-other. Frequently we would accost police officers asking for directions even when we knew where we were going just to savour this ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’,” he told a lecture at the RSA presented with the 2012 Games organisers, Locog.

It made those of us there quite proud, but less so when he emphasised how often people in wheelchairs are ignored while speakers address the people pushing them. We may have a better track record than South Africa on issues of race; we still have a long way to go on embracing equality in all its forms, he seemed to suggest.

The archbishop had a busy day yesterday, starting at the Olympic park where he met young people. He also spoke to 500 staff members at Locog about the importance of inclusion.

It’s exactly the kind of stuff that gets the anti-political-correctness lobby in a tizz. I wish they had all been there to hear Tutu last night. He made it very, very real.

When Archbishop Desmond Tutu was asked to speak on the importance of inclusion in the London 2012 legacy I suspect the organisers did not expect quite so much God - and sex. But the 78-year- old veteran anti-apartheid campaigner provided - somewhat indirectly - the best of rebuffs to those who berate the diversity/inclusion agenda.

He told, touchingly, how when he arrived in Britain in the Sixties to study theology, he and his wife were astonished to discover that the British bobby would call them “sir” and “ma’am” if asked for directions. “It was such an extraordinary experience coming out of South Africa where they called us non-this, non-the-other. Frequently we would accost police officers asking for directions even when we knew where we were going just to savour this ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’,” he told a lecture at the RSA presented with the 2012 Games organisers, Locog. It made those of us there quite proud, but less so when he emphasised how often people in wheelchairs are ignored while speakers address the people pushing them.

We may have a better track record than South Africa on issues of race; we still have a long way to go on embracing equality in all its forms, he seemed to suggest.

The archbishop had a busy day, starting at the Olympic park where he met young people. He also spoke to 500 staff members at Locog about the importance of inclusion. It’s exactly the kind of stuff that gets the anti-political-correctness lobby in a tizz. I wish they had all been there to hear Tutu last night. He made it very, very real.

I spent last night watching a lecture on Schoenberg variations and I have rarely seen anything as engrossing – and entertaining.

Unlikely though it may seem, the great pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim made Schoenberg sound almost straightforward. He elicited genuine laughter while also reassuring the audience that there were moments in the work in hand when not even an expert could fathom what on earth had happened to the main theme. (Himself excepted, obviously.)

It was a delivery of some genius, an uplifting conclusion to Barenboim’s extraordinary four-concert season at the Royal Festival Hall in which he insisted on programming Schoenberg – a notoriously challenging composer - alongside Beethoven.

If Barenboim were just a musician he would be a remarkable man. Even when, rarely, he was not utterly note-perfect in playing the Beethoven he had more musicality in his little finger than I will ever achieve in hours sitting at the keyboard.

But last night proved – again – that he is more than just that. He is a politician, a humanist and a hard-working, meticulous artistic leader of brilliance.

Watching Barenboim it is impossible not to remember, for instance, his political bravery with Jewish and Arab musicians as well as his musical courage in continuing to work at breakneck speed at an age when he could just gracefully bow out, reputation intact.

After a day in the office watching television rolling news headlines dominated by a talented footballer indisputably diminished by his extra-curricular activities, anyone wanting a definition of true leadership can scarcely be looking to John Terry.

What the England football team needs is not an allegedly duplicitous shagger but a Barenboim.

In the midst of the Christmas and New Year schedules, Melvyn Bragg slipped esoterically out of the ITV schedule with his serious and gloriously high-minded programme on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new play about the Ukrainian famine.

As I was enjoying the first week-long Christmas and New Year break of my working career, I apologise for this delayed tribute to the long-running arts programme. But even belatedly, I thought it should not go unmarked. It is a shame on ITV that it has been axed.

But it is also a warning that the market can’t - or won’t - deliver. If we want culture, on television or anywhere else, we have to plan - and pay - for it.

Taking nearly £1.7 million at the British box office in a single weekend with a story that has already been told on countless occasions must be gratifying for the team behind Disney’s A Christmas Carol.

But notching up more than £1.8 million with Paranormal Activity, America’s latest low-budget scary hit from left-field must make you feel even more smug.

I clocked the figures for Paranormal Activity after chatting with Stuart Ford, the chief executive officer of IM Global, the Hollywood-based sales and distribution company who snapped up the film long before the word-of-mouth terror buzz began.

Why I looked is because he’s one of those curious British success stories in America. At 40, Ford has done rather well for himself. After Oxford and law school he worked as an entertainment lawyer for Olsweng’s in London, then for the Weinsteins at Miramax and - in a rather abbreviated form of his CV - set up IM Global two years ago.

Although its slate also includes the Oscar-tipped A Single Man with Colin Firth, Paranormal Activity is clearly the money-maker of the moment, made for less than $15,000 and having taken well in excess of $100 million at the US box office so far.

Being of a nervous disposition, I’m yet to catch it despite Ford’s exhortation that it is “riotously good fun”.
I’m with his wife, Molly. She has refused to watch it because she’s too scared. He’s working on her.

For all Alan Bennett’s cosy reputation, there is a darker streak epitomised by the discomforting apologia for pupil groping in The History Boys.

While an artist is under no obligation to be principled and even less so to be politically correct, I was always astonished that nice middle-class audiences were so willing to embrace, apparently unquestioningly, the morally ambivalent hero of Hector (played by Richard Griffiths), a schoolmaster whose inspirational teaching skills seemed so undermined by his propensity to touch up his teenage charges.

I wonder whether Bennett, too, had later doubts about this abuse of authority. For in his new play, The Habit of Art, now at the National Theatre, any such sentiments are given short shrift. WH Auden (as again played by Richard Griffiths) pours scorn on his old friend, the composer Benjamin Britten, when the latter offers the self-serving defence that Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach is seduced by the beauty of the young boy in Death in Venice. Identifying the narrative as that of Britten’s own life, Auden tells his friend in no uncertain terms that he, Britten, was the predator. 

Curiously, a book, Britten’s Children by John Bridcut, a couple of years ago concluded the opposite - that the composer was a repressed puritan innocent, not a pederast. But I suspect Alan Bennett has started the hare of Britten’s tortured sexuality running once more.

The octagenarian impresarios who introduced generations of Russian ballet stars to a mass audience in London have been honoured with one of the top awards in dance.

Victor and Lilian Hochhauser, of Hampstead, were presented with the Royal Academy of Dance’s Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award for their lifetime contribution to dance in Britain in a ceremony at the Royal Opera House.

The award has been previously given to the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton and dancers Dame Marie Rambert and Dame Ninette de Valois.

Lilian Hochhauser said they were delighted. “I’m not accustomed to receiving awards although we had a very nice one from the Russian embassy.”

Mr Hochhauser, 86, whose family fled the Nazi threat in Slovakia in 1938, fell into music promoting when he was asked to organise a concert for schools when in his early 20s and it proved a huge success.

Within a few years, he had met and married Lilian, whose own parents came to London to escape pogroms in Russia, and they embarked on a career presenting music and dance at venues from the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Opera House.

They first introduced ballet to mass audiences at the now defunct Empress Hall near Earl’s Court with a short-lived London company called the Metropolitan Ballet whose stars included the partnership of Freddie Franklin and Alexandra Danilova as well as Svetlana Beriosova, Alicia Markova, Anton Dolin and Leonid Massine.

But for many, it is their association with the famous Russian companies of the Bolshoi and the Kirov - now known as the Mariinsky - that made them famous, working with stars such as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova.

No one had seen the Russians in London until 1956 when the Hochhausers were involved - although not responsible for - the Bolshoi’s first visit on a government to government initiative. “Of course, we were all completely and utterly bowled over,” she said.

They brought the Kirov to London for the first time on its first tour of the West in 1961 - on the trip during which Rudolf Nureyev famously defected -  followed by the Bolshoi again in 1963 on the first of regular UK visits.

Mrs Hochhauser said it was difficult to organise when they started. “Communications are better now. You had to wait for three hours to get a telephone call through to Russia in the early days. And it became easier when we could directly with the companies rather than through the ministry of culture.”

They have continued to present companies from a dozen different countries alongside a classical music programme with performers such as the violinists David and Igor Oistrakh and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and composers including Dmitri Shostakovich.

The couple have no intention of retiring and are bringing the Bolshoi ballet and opera back to the Royal Opera House next year. “And we’ve got plans for the future, they are just not ready for public consumption yet,” she said.

You would think that no one wanted to watch the Ashes from the headlines suggesting that they are being returned to terrestrial television because the Government is cross at Rupert Murdoch and Sky. That is, we are supposed to believe that Gordon Brown and the DCMS are governed chiefly by petulance rather than by the recognition that the Ashes contests have provided two of the most memorable sporting summers of recent years and more of us should have been able to share the experience.

It may amuse mischief-makers to argue that the Government will make the Ashes free-to-air because The Sun was horrid over the Prime Minister’s letter of condolence. But the decision now is a coincidence of timing, not cause and effect. Which is not to say it might not bring a small sliver of a smile to Labour lips.

Footnote - If this seems strange territory for an arts correspondent to enter, I should explain I was once a media correspondent. And I like cricket. More significantly, it was a journalistic accident that the day the DCMS announced its review of the so-called “crown jewels” of sporting events,  I was the person free to write the story. Even then, it was very clear there was momentum behind the Ashes being on the list of protected events that should be available for all to see. Whatever the Government’s issues with Sky, when we all get to watch the Ashes next time round, it really won’t be anything to do with the PM’s handwriting.

If Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw really does want to rally the arts world to stop an incoming Tory government, he really needs to grasp a few essentials.

The first one being the fundamental flaw in this call to arms: “We need a few more luvvies to be jumping up and down about it,” he told a Labour audience, “because that is not happening at the moment. I am trying to provoke them into doing it.”

Not calling potential supporters in the arts world by the dismissive pejorative “luvvies” would be a start. The outside world may laugh at the point, but a Culture Secretary should know that serious professional performers detest the term.

If mayor Boris thinks it is just a question of time before he gets his way over the Arts Council in London, he is in for a bumpy ride. And if he thinks installing his culture adviser Munira Mirza as interim chair, pending the long-term appointment of his chosen candidate Veronica Wadley, he is in for an even greater surprise.

Rarely have I seen such immediate and palpable arts world fury. And they are bedding in to take the fight right to the wire if necessary. For what very senior arts world figures have been shocked to discover is that Boris either does not understand or does not care about the principle that has been the sacred bedrock of arts-government relations since the war - the arm’s length principle that seeks to separate party politics from arts policy.

Many in the arts world were surprised that the mayor had the right to direct the arts in London at all. And of course, he doesn’t really. What, since last year, the rules permit him is the right to nominate the chair of the Arts Council in London. Boris has been stamping his feet ever since the Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw, who rules dictate has to ratify the appointment, refused to accept Ms Wadley, saying the choice was not made in accordance with Nolan principles.

Any interim chair also has to be sanctioned by the Culture Secretary - and it is hard to imagine how a political choice like Ms Mirza could be accepted. Besides, I am being told, a temporary political appointment would be far from satisfactory when the London chair sits on the national Arts Council ruling body which has important budgetary meetings for 2011-2012 as early as next month.

Political machinations have been afoot in the story from the start, for key details of the row appear to have been leaked by from sources close to the Culture Secretary himself. If so, that is hardly to his credit.
But for the last 12 years the Tories have been objecting to the alleged politicisation of the arts and raging that arts bodies have had to dance to a Labour tune of wider access and greater diversity to extract funding. It ill behoves them to ride roughshod through due process now.