OK, so this hasn't been an all-singing, all-dancing blog-festing hive of activity of late for which I apologise. I'm now living in New York and have left my post as Arts Correspondent to go freelance in the States. ES have v.agreeably said I can continue to blog about the arts.

I want to take a break from drowning in logistics to pontificate on a v.British matter- Billie Piper. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has become hopelessly addicted to what seems like the best real-life soap opera in town- Treats:Trials and Tribulations. To recap. We've had romance between two of the play's three leads; benders in the Groucho Club; tearful encounters with copper-topped TV has-beens; opening night postponements and A Star Is Born reviews.

It's a hell of a lot more gripping than Piper's autobiography Growing Pains. In today's instalment (courtesy of Alison Roberts' interview in ES) Billie confesses that the show's opening night was delayed by a week to make significant changes to the production. So nothing to do then with the original opening night clashing with the RSC's production of The Tempest which was cited by producers as the reason for the postponement when I wrote about this a fortnight ago whilst still in Blighty.

But then Treats really did need to get a whole lot better. I saw the play when it was still previewing and, as a result, wasn't anticipating the glowing notices it received last week. Billie P and Laurence Fox are- as my mother used to term it- Special Friends but they somehow managed to convey a complete lack of sexual chemistry together the night I saw Treats. But my quibble was with the production not the play; evidently the extra time has paid off and impresario Bill Kenwright has another hit on his hands.

I'm pleased for the play's amiable writer Christopher Hampton. One of the loveliest Zen-like men in showbiz, Hampton, through no fault of his own, always seems to end up an inside witness to backstage shenanigans (A dreadful 2003 revival of his masterpiece Les Liaisons Dangereuses resulted in EVERYBODY hooking up with one another; filming his doomed political thriller Imagining Argentina, Hampton had to re-jig the original filming schedule so that star Antonio Banderas could watch the 2002 World Cup.)   

But I am amazed by the haphazardness surrounding Treats although it has a certain symmetrical neatness: a drama about an emotional crisis has become a hit drama following a string of crises. I couldn't see this scenario unfolding here in New York. For a start Piper on Broadway would have made her debut in a musical, not a play. And away from the stage, things would have needed to be a good deal more boring. Treats director Laurence Boswell was responsible for another Young People theatrical saga This Is Our Youth. Also staged at the Garrick Theatre its Hollywood casts included Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Freddie Prinze Jr. Yet I can't remember a single 'story' about that brilliant production except that Jake won an Evening Standard Theatre Award and Leo Di Caprio was (erroneously) reported to  be starring in the show.  Also consider the recent case of Tara Conner- allowed to keep her Miss USA 2006 title after a series of sex and drugs scandals- who was recently cast as Roxie Hart in the Broadway production of Chicago. However she has just been dropped by producers after they twigged that she just couldn't cut it.

In contrast Piper has seemingly proved that she can do it. But along the way she has had to wade through innumerable obstacles- most of which were of her own making. Currently she's basking in the role of Queen B but I would be stunned if there's not more entertainment to come.   

WELL DONE to Avenue Q for winning the inaugural TheatreRadio award for Best New Musical, as voted by internet radio listeners. It is vindication for Sir Cameron Mackintosh's innovative cyber-driven marketing strategy and cheap midweek ticket pricing structure which is aimed at young people who don't usually go to the West End.

When Avenue Q first opened in June, London critics were sniffy about the generation x puppet fest (Broadway was not impressed with Blighty's scribes). Theatreland was abuzz with rumours that  the Noel Coward theatre would soon be on the lookout for a new production. A rival producer told me that the show would be over by Christmas. When I asked them how they knew this, they replied that they had just bumped into two people involved with the production on Wardour Street and they were looking mighty glum. I was glad I never rushed this unscientific testimony into print. Avenue Q is booking until January 2008 and as well as taking advantage of new communication mediums is heavily reliant on an ancient one (word of mouth).

Apparently a recent midnight charity performance of Avenue Q went down a storm. Someone should have told Society of London Theatre's Michael Cregan about the special performance. He could have skulked outside the theatre releasing details about the Olivier Awards, something he likes doing around midnight. Plenty of people have been asking me about Cregan apropos my previous post. The fact that this incapable technocrat plies his trade in an industry brimming with razmatazz and flamboyance pushes irony to its extreme limits but then I suppose his job is limited to selecting the right brand of sparkling water for the Oliviers. Anyhow I digress.

Sir Cameron is an incredibly astute businessman wrapped inside the body of a precocious, performing arts-loving   teenager. I once asked him if he was at all sad that his musical Les Miserables was overtaking Cats, another Mackintosh production, to become the world's longest running musical. He replied: "When you have the three most successful musicals, you don't really mind what order they come in." Only he  could have made this sound endearing rather than smug. It's also fantastic that Mary Poppins, talked about for so long, has ended up packing playhouses in London and on Broadway.

Most astonishingly of all Les Miserables will soon be running in the West End for longer than the entire duration of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel.  Anyone who has read the Napoleonic  era tome will know just how impressive a feat this will be.

FORTUNATE to witness Felicity Kendal's tour de force performance in Sir Peter Hall's revival of David Hare's mother-daughter drama Amy's View last night. A spellbinding evening at the Garrick Theatre made up for a frustrating afternoon largely spent seeking Michael Cregan.

Michael who? Well, exactly. Cregan, as the old joke goes, isn't a household name in his own household. But this year he's in charge of organising the Olivier Awards taking place next month. This is no laughing matter.

Normally award nominations- much like any other piece of significant arts news- are announced over the course of the day. But for some reason the Society of London Theatre (SOLT) decided to bypass London newspapers and "embargo" the story by giving it to the national newspapers first. This meant that people who live in, say, the Scottish Highlands, learnt earlier about the Olivier awards which honour London theatre than readers of the capital's newspapers. You might have gathered that I feel strongly about this but theatre producers and PR's have also been in touch to say it is an unacceptable state of affairs.

Mr Cregan- probably more than a tad embarrassed by the notion that he was doing the capital an incredible disservice with his suppression policy- would not return my calls. It often happens that superannuated lackeys are harder to reach than Chief Executives.

So it proved in Mr Cregan's case. Having left countless messages, I eventually got his direct line by combing through the SOLT's Annual Report and telephoned him seeking an explanation.

Initially Mr Cregan claimed he couldn't speak to me, referring me to the PR agency that handles the event. Then he said that the decision to delay the announcement until the evening had been taken so SOLT could break the news on its own website. (Is SOLT's internet supremo a fully-paid-up vampire who only operates at night?)

I pointed out that the Oscars and the Baftas seem to do OK by releasing their nominations normally during the day. He told me that he didn't know about them. It's no surprise that there is a vacancy on SOLT's website for an Awards Co-ordinator. Let's hope they fill it by next month.

I was reminded of what Hamlet says of Polonius: 'Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool no where but in's own house.' Which is worse- Mr Cregan or the society that has created him? I was pondering this question until Amy's View took my mind away from the matter. Exit the world of an insignificant minion inexplicably wielding West End clout. Enter the world of those genuine theatrical big-hitters Felicity Kendal, David Hare and Sir Peter Hall.

But it was a shame that rather spend the afternoon seeking out the new Damien Hirst or Zadie Smith, I had to chase up someone from the Society of London Theatre whose rightful home is in the Society of London Clowns.

CONFESSION time. Father forgive me, I didn't watch This Life- Ten Years On. I've never seen a minute of the show so I cannot claim to be a devotee of Miles, Egg and chums. (I do however know many young screwed-up lawyers who have complicated sex lives but that's another story.)

Having read Tim Teeman's Times review of This Life I don't feel like I missed anything. However even if it had been even more knockout than first time round, I wouldn't have watched it.

My parents, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to bring me up with a TV. This gave them a certain amount of kudos among their pals but in the era of four-channel TV it left me conversationally challenged at school on Monday mornings. (However one nice side effect is that I was forced to see hundreds of classic movies in rep cinemas the way they were meant to be seen.)   

So anyway I was in sixth form when This Life first came out and was at a dinner party where we all pretending to be terribly adult. To my delight a girl, who I had a crush on the size of Pete Doherty's criminal record, was also present. Ah my 16-year-old self thought. Tonight I will begin my campaign to woo The Goddess of Twickenham.

Well it all went pear-shaped and I blame This Life. Talk turned to the programme and I was forced to listen as everybody else started talking about their favourite scenes. Feeling insecure I tried to be cool:"Oh This Life. No, I don't really do Michael Aspel." As if it were yesterday, I remember Goddess of Twickenham shouting: "Like, what are you on about?" There followed an excruciating post-mortem where it was established that I had thought they were talking about This Is Your Life, the long-running chat show which sought to look back on the life of a public figure- usually someone elderly and uncool.

The Goddess of Twickenham made a sarcastic reference to Michael Aspel later on that evening and I knew it was game over. I got home and although the host was very sweet about my cultural gaffe, I forced myself to have one of those "remember-kids-are-starving-in-Africa" remembrances.

Anyway I got over it long ago. But that's why I didn't watch This Life-Ten Years On. Goddess of Twickenham, did you?

FOR those of you who have their head stuck so far down the cultural well that you live your lives without a calendar or no longer possess any concept of time- 2007 beckons. It is custom at this time of year for legions of hacks to regale you with the list of their favourite things this past year. Fret not, I will not be joining them.

Instead my New Year compendium will be solely derived from screenwriter Joe Eszterhas's new movie encylopediac collection The Devil's Guide To Hollywood. I bought it in the US  last week and it will last me well into my cinematic anecdotage. Here are ten quotations/facts of which I was hitherto unaware: 

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald did an unsuccessful, uncredited rewrite of Gone With the Wind. He hated Margaret Mitchell's book.

2. Bill Clinton watched Blazing Saddles in the White House screening room 24 times.

3. Cult novelist Charles Bukowski greeted Arnold Schwarzenegger with the words: "You're a piece of shit."

4. Billy Wilder became a gigolo in Berlin after failing to sell some of his early scripts.

5. Jagged Edge, the courtroom drama that is one of Ezterhas's biggest successes, was originally entitled Hearts of Fire. The title was the brainchild of a lowly studio assistant who read the script and noted the description 'knife with a jagged edge' for the murder weapon.

6. Sliver, starring Sharon Stone, marked a disastrous attempt by Ezterhas to replicate the erotic thrills of Basic Instinct on which the pair had collaborated. Stone hated her Sliver leading man Billy Baldwin and would rather have got dirty with his brother Alec Baldwin, declaring: "Alec can put me over a table anytime he wants."

7. Notorious lothario Warren Beatty was eventually tamed by Annette Bening. But he thrived on trying to bed every girl he met concluding, "You get slapped a lot but you get f**ked sometimes, too".

8. Legendary producer Sam Spiegel and Harold Pinter failed to hit it off. Discussing Pinter's script Accident, Spiegel said: "They won't understand it in the Midwest." Pinter said: "F**k the midwest." Spiegel responded: "Do you want to f**k the whole of the midwest?"

9. Woody Allen's Annie Hall was originally called Anhedonia ("the inability to feel pleasure").

10. This one isn't about movies at all but Ezterhas relates that the novelist William Trevor once had nobody show up to a public reading he was doing. So he read for the cabdriver who had taken him to the bookstore, only to discover that his cabbie had charged him for his reading time.

Happy New Year.

LOOKING ahead to next year, spare a thought for Andrea Levy. Her multi award-winning 2004 immigration novel Small Island is to be parachuted en masse into Hull, Leeds, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow. 50,000 copies will be deposited in shops, schools and community groups.  Apparently it will be "the UK's biggest ever one-book reading campaign" and is designed to improve literacy and mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.

Dear reader, we are coming up to Christmas and I have no desire to impersonate Ebeneezer Scrooge. Yet this is a ludicrous exercise which, in being funded by the Arts Council, will reinforce the stigma still existing towards public sector spending on the arts in unelightened quarters.

I am all for measures to improve the nation's literacy levels. But merely airlifting one tome into major cities is not the solution. Rubbish mountains of Ms Levy's acclaimed work will build up in northern towns; people who have already read Small Island will feel cheated. (The only alternatives-  Benjamin Zephaniah's Refugee Boy and Mary Hoffman's Amazing Grace- are for younger readers). 

This escapade ticks all of the PC boxes (Slavery,access, outreach etc.) except one: it is about as far from being diverse as you can get. One of the project directors Andrew Kelly says: "Everyone feels they can play a part in it. There is a sense of occasion about the project." Such grandiose preposterousness chimes with the Government's emphasis on the use to which art is put rather than the choice and quality of art in itself.   

Will there really be many non-literate types who read Ms Levy's book and are then inspired to embark on a voyage of novel buying? I doubt it. People are unlikely to be diverted away from The Dog and Duck or from seeing their Aunt Gillian because they are getting pelted with Levy's book everywhere they turn. It might even put them off reading.

And why pick a book that has seemingly won every prize with the exception of the Premier League title? Why not go for an unsung work by a penniless writer undeservedly earning a pittance?

You might as well have chosen the last three books I have read (Therese Raquin by Emile Zola, Life As A Party by Tina Brown- bloody good early 1980s social jeu d'esprit from the former Tatler Editor, by the way- and Nixon At The Movies by Mark Feeney).

The biggest loser will sadly be Andrea Levy. Her hitherto much-loved novel will all of a sudden acquire the cachet of a London free newspaper. Small Island, big mistake.

I experienced  of my favourite cultural moments of the year. Watching a revitalised George Michael remind us why he is one of the best UK singer-songwriters in recent times was a pleasure. But then Christmas came early- or more to the point Last Christmas came late in his set- and we really were witnessing something special. If, as has been alleged, George Michael hates Last Christmas then he's the only person I've ever met who does so.

Because of it's festive association and a nauseating video in which  Andrew Ridgeley reminds us why he never took to acting after Wham! split up, the song is treated as just another Christmas record. Watching Emma Bunton, for example, pronounce the other day that it was her favourite "Loved Up" Christmas song on Magic TV station made me want to take the former Spice Girl "Downtown" to a place which has easy access to firearms.

Rather than being a cynical attempt to capture the festive market, Last Christmas is actually a moving, poignant pop song about the consequences of being jilted. The lyrics are not terribly challenging but seamlessly flow in the way great records do: "Crowded Room/Friends with tired eyes/ I'm hiding from you And your soul of ice." Yup, I've been there (thankfully it was a long time ago). So it was wonderful to hear him perform the tune live.

Michael wrote the song whilst watching Match of the Day (there must be something about footie highlights show- it also formed the inspiration for Mansun's Wide Open Space). Perhaps Michael who proved last Sunday that he still has the potential to eclipse any other British musician, should sit down with his musical songbook this weekend and get inspiration from Middlesbrough versus Charlton.   

For 52 years, the Evening Standard Theatre Awards have been an essential date in London's theatrical calendar. They are a great barometer of the last twelve months in London theatre, both on and off West End, as well as being graced by a glittering litany of our finest acting talent. The awards also offer a useful environment for "resting" thespians and producers to feverishly network.

Of course I'm biased but also read Matt Wolf ( www.theatre.com/story/id/3004856 )

It was the second Theatre Awards that I was covering for the paper. Last year was very much The Billy Elliot Show. This year the afternoon belonged to Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll which won Best Play and Best Actor for Rufus Sewell.

Personally I don't think that Rock'n'Roll is vintage Stoppard. For me it was a well-acted diet of digestible cultural and political biscuits lapped up by unreconstructed Baby Boomers. However, its success in the West End, at what is a difficult time for straight plays, is highly welcome. There are no great lines in the play that come close to rival my favourite Stoppardian observations ("If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation"- The Real Thing) or " (I'm with you on the free press, It's the newspapers I can't stand"- Night and Day). When I saw Rock'n'Roll at the Royal Court in July, to my left was a winsome girl who slept through most of the play. She awoke for the Pink Floyd and U2 but nodded off during the discussions on the ramifications of Communism on the Czechs. I was amused to see at the end that she burst into wild penguin-style applause, encapsulating for me the subservience that audiences can sometimes show towards Stoppard. But I would kill to see his Coast of Utopia on Broadway starring Billy Crudup and Ethan Hawke which opened in New York.

It was great to see Frost/Nixon given a special Editor's Award. It's spellbinding drama- actually more suited to its current West End home at the Gielgud than in the Donmar Warehouse, its original home. I must confess that I feel guilty that my favourite scene in the play is where Frost is chatting up Caroline on the plane rather than the final confrontations between the showman and the politician.

By far the most intriguing guest yesterday was Kristin Scott Thomas, soon to be seen in Christopher Hampton's new version of The Seagull at the Royal Court. Interviewing her is a precarious experience, akin to listening to a radio programme being crackily broadcast on a foreign station. Ask a question that makes her remotely uncomfortable and you'll risk losing reception. But this fragility adds to her status as a bona fide   national treasure and Hollywood's loss at her inclination to foresake screen for stage is London theatre's gain.

Someone asked me the other day what I thought about the "1990s revival". Apparently raves are popular again whilst Jarvis Cocker and the All Saints have snaked and slithered back onto the scene. And I keep hearing Baby D's Let Me Be Your Fantasy in coffee bars and shopping malls.

I resisted the temptation to ask the friend who mentioned this if he had just consumed a large consignment of Ecstasy tablets. Forgive me for not getting into the (teen) spirit of things but the notion of celebrating the cultural legacy of the 1990s strikes me as a moribund exercise.

For a start, there's no point in reviving the 90s since the era in itself largely consisted of recycling movements and fads from previous decades. Oasis and Blur? cf.   The Small Faces and The Who. The explosion in dance and house music began in the previous decade. And you didn't have to be the world's greatest expert on the "auteur" theory to detect the influence of Brian De Palma, Sam Peckinpah and Ringo Lam and John Woo on Quentin Tarantino.

I highly recommend Michael Bracewell's book The Nineties (When Surface Was Depth) on this subject. He painstakingly pinpoints the decade as marking the time when authenticity replaced irony, when originality became old hat. Of course I liked countless bands, movies and personalities of the 90s (Manic Street Preachers, Trainspotting, Before Sunrise, Mansun, even the antics of Liz Hurley proved an entertaining spectacle) but generally the decade didn't pay lip service to Hugo Boss's mantra "Don't Imitate. Innovate."

Whether it's pop music or artistic dynamism, the Great British Novel or the blockbuster musical, the much-maligned 1980s has proved to be a far superior era in cultural terms. I came of age in the 1990s and one of my defining memories is attending an exruciating "mini-rave" in East Sheen aged 16. Some moron started a chant of "Speakers are pumping/ Everybody In The Place/Nuff Respect/To The Drum and Bass". This was followed by scions of chartered accountants chanting abuse against the "Pigs" after the police, evidently having nothing else to do on a Sunday night in Surrey, had tiptoed into the fray.

We've all learnt alot since then. The Criminal Justice Bill didn't put an end to partying as we know it. Slackers eventually had to put in more than a day's work. Let's just draw a line and move on.