The art world’s most prestigious award, The Turner Prize, is also, to many people’s minds, the most powerful symbol of its lunacy and pointlessness. Founded in 1984 to celebrate new developments in contemporary art, the way it works is that nominations for artists are invited each year, four are picked by a crack-team of art nuts to be exhibited before a winner is chosen to take home a cash prize which today stretches to £40,000.

Since the very beginning the Prize has polarised a nation. There are those who think it represents an increasingly rare forum for the most relevant and powerful stuff that the human imagination is capable of, and there are those who think that the whole thing is generally more arsey than the Rokeby Venus. The Prize temporarily disappeared in 1990 whilst people in white drainpipes and massive jumpers squabbled over the rules, the prize money, and whether the whole affair was just a waste of time. The debate has not stopped since.

What is all the fuss about then? In 2007, exhibition-goers would have seen a winning two hour film of artist Mark Wallinger dressed in a bear suit wandering around the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin at night. In 2008 Mark Leckey give a winning lecture on cats. In 2002, Fiona Banner exhibited her magnum opus, a piece entitled Arsewoman in Wonderland: a wall-sized blow-by-proverbial-blow account of a porn film in massive pink type. Sadly Miss Banner missed out on the prize that particular year, though evidently undeterred, she crashed into the press again last year by exhibiting an upside down aeroplane at the Tate. 

This year, we have two painters shortlisted, George Shaw and Karla Black. But before you traditionalists breathe a sigh of relief, know that one works in airfix paint, the other in lipstick, bath bombs and bronzer. Also featured at the exhibition, this year at the Baltic gallery in Gateshead, is the work of Martin Boyce, who creates installations based on urban landmarks, and Hilary Lloyd, whose display consists of video screens and projectors showing scenes including construction sites.

If on paper much of the material may strike the sceptical reader as justifying that perennial wail of ‘I could’ve done that!’, remember that all that can ever really be said in reply is, ‘Yeah, but you didn’t.’ Both perspectives are valuable.

The furore is as important to the identity of the Turner Prize as the unmade beds and transvestistism. The art world is more sophisticated today than in the days when all you had to worry about was not getting Monet and Manet mixed up.

In a society increasingly characterised by a mania for all things monetary, modern art is not contaminated by, but thrives from, its interaction with the marketplace, asking important questions about the value of creativity, the nature of investment, and, most problematically, what makes art art.

Divorced from an environment in which these questions are asked, two cheap plastic blow-up sex dolls with a dildo placed in the 69 position would amount only to the coffee break creativity of a bored Ann Summers employee, rather than the 2003 prize-winning entry. The consternation, the media din, the bookies’ bets, the Stuckist protests, the hefty price-tags: these are what make the Turner Prize valuably baffling and unique.

This year’s Turner exhibition is at the BALTIC centre and runs until the 8th of January.

Here’s a depressing thought – you know that novel you’ve been working on, the one you’ve invested so much time and energy in, the semi-autobiographical one that lays bare your troubled relationship with your father, that one? Well, when you finally send said document to a publishing house, before it can be placed in the expert hands of a revered, bearded editor, it must get past a bored, unqualified, speccy intern.

Like an unpaid Cerberus, the intern will block your passage to the house of fame. I should know – I spent my whole summer putting people’s hopes and dreams in the No pile.

On my first day interning at a publishing house in Soho, my boss defined my job thus: “You must ensure,” said he, gesturing to the pile of manuscripts on my desk, “That none of these people ever contact me again.” Each day I read at least 20 submissions and usually filled out 20 rejection letters. These rejection forms were brutal – a standardised two-line ‘thanks, but no thanks’, with the author’s name written in biro at the top.

To ease my guilt at having dashed so many dreams I want to give first time authors a few tips to make sure their novel gets past The Intern. Firstly, if you’re writing a tale of “ill-fated lovers set in the Second World War as recounted by a dying grandma”, stop. It’s been done. Secondly, if you’re writing “a thriller about biological warfare in a modern city”, that’s been done too. There’s nothing wrong with retelling a classic story, but remember: the intern is bored, the intern wants to go to lunch, the intern can guess what is going to happen to Mabel and Hauptleute Hans – and to Agent Mathias and the feisty-but-vulnerable-gorgeous-red-haired-pencil-skirted detective.

Thirdly, if your synopsis is long-winded and aimless and repetitive and confusing and seems to trail off without reaching a climax… this worries the intern. Finally, the title is the first opportunity you have to grab our attention – do not let this opportunity pass you by. Calling your book In the Quiet Shadow of the Rambling Man, or The Streets of Warwick, or Never Say Goodbye, is bad. Calling your book Sex Naked Boob is good.

You have had a gardening column in the Financial Times since 1970. How does the writing process behind these articles play out?

My garden writing always arises out of what I’m doing or reading. New College Garden and the nine outlying gardens are run with no retained full-time gardener. Instead we use valiant teams of contractors, and I buy and place everything they plant and am in regular contact about what to do. On top of that I have a garden of 2 acres myself which is in varying states of glory and decay. There is plenty going on to write about.

I try to vary the range of what I write about but it’s changed so much. When I began writing a Wednesday column for the Financial Times it sold about 130,000 copies, mainly in Britain. I was told to think of Virginia Water when I wrote in the 70s, which I’d been to once and hated. Now my Saturday column in the Financial Times has a circulation of 480,000, of which 350,000 are abroad.

I like to give the feeling that the reader will never be quite sure what angle of gardening they will confront. So I vary between ‘how to’ columns – particularly flower gardening and what to choose. I am inspired by things I’ve seen, sometimes paintings, which are very popular. Sometimes gardens I’ve been to when travelling for ancient history abroad can form the basis for an article. Persistent complaints about the doublethink of eco-gardeners fill my columns. I am an inorganic gardener and I do not believe that rabbits, badgers and deer are a privilege with which I am lucky to share my garden. I think at all costs they are to be removed!

Are you influenced by literature and art when you encounter a garden?

If I travel to a historic garden of a particular period, I try to think sideways to the novels and poetry of that era, if I know them. And quite often there is a mismatch. Many authors, then as now, are horticulturally blind. I used to advise Iris Murdoch on her rose garden but I wouldn’t expect Martin Amis to have the slightest idea about the subtle depths of any garden he mentions.

And equally there are scenes from painting that live in my mind and either nudge my taste in a particular direction or cause me to look on what I’ve planted in a particular way. I was in the Met in June and fastened on a painting by Degas called September. There was a large bowl of flowers – Michaelmas daisies and so forth. It caught my eye and mind. And it’s an effect that I try to work to in autumn in the New College borders.

But it is important to respect garden-doing rather than garden-watching. I admire anyone who can grow things and there are far too many designers who can’t. I think we are seeing a resurgence of gardening. I look to this generation as the great hope to repair the clueless vacuity of those I taught from 1973 to 2003, not one of whom knew what a primrose looked like. Unless the coalition decides to tarmac two thirds of the surrounding countryside, perhaps we might actually learn to participate in one of the supreme strengths of British culture.

What makes your personal gardening ‘style’?

Sustainability is sloppy thinking. I admire the classical Japanese who admired a flower even more if its beauty was transitory. Gardens with a natural look or trying to use natural methods are just as much of a pretence and an illusion as my borders full of Delphiniums on beautifully staked bamboo canes. I don’t want a garden that looks like the banks of a motorway.

As for gardening within the effects of climate change, I feel about the global greenhouse what Mao felt about the French Revolution – it’s too early to say. At the moment the warmer summers and dry years are very patchy in parts of the world, but they were in the 18^th century too. We haven’t yet, I think, crossed a barrier where a completely new range of plants is now possible outdoors in Britain. The effects, if any so far, have not changed the art of gardening.

I am not saving the planet nor creating a haven for wildlife. I am creating a garden of really beautiful flowers which is an illusion. We do not all need to have a garden full of rabbits. Despite the remorseless logic of Derek Parfitt and his book Reasons and Persons, I cannot live my life as if every tiny decision should be multiplied by a million and assessed for its overall difference to the world. Eco-freaks in camouflage trousers and pigtails soften when they see the beauty of my garden in June or September. That’s my style and I admire it.

Robin Lane Fox’s latest book is Thoughtful Gardening, published by Penguin

Tom Gauld’s work is perhaps most familiar to us in the form of the Guardian’s weekly cartoon; usually a little two or three frame story, at times a single image, the simplicity and geometric linearity of his drawing always striking. His cartoons have both a light fragility and a clean, bold firmness: a result of his unique method which combines hand-drawing in pencil and ink followed by digital manipulation. ‘I like the control that the computer gives me over my work, but if I made my work entirely on the computer I think it would look too clean and sterile. I think the tiny variations and mistakes of hand drawn images are very appealing.’

Gauld mentions he could never ‘sit in front of the computer’ and come up with an idea, and I remark that many of his cartoons deal with the complexities and difficulties of the creative process itself. ‘The first two times The Guardian asked me to make comics for them I was rather overwhelmed… I couldn’t decide what to do and I think this leaked into the work as both times I made stories about blocked artists. I suppose that those cartoons would be a bit boring if they were just about great people being great at doing great things. I like to look at the other side of things or people we might imagine to be magnificent, I’m pretty sure that we are all idiots most of the time.’

His forthcoming graphic novel, Goliath, certainly fits this theme. It retells David and Goliath from the perspective of the rather timid and awkward giant, moving the focus onto the overlooked. ‘I do like the contrast (in visual scale and ideas) between big/grand/important things and small/ordinary/everyday. In Goliath I wanted to tell his story, and make it unexpected… In my version I haven’t made David a bad guy, it’s just that seen from Goliath’s perspective he’s not good news.’

Gauld himself comes across as quite an understated character, and gives the impression that complementing his talent is a lot of quiet hard work. His intricate cross-hatching technique takes ‘quite a while, but I guess probably not quite as long as most people imagine’, he got to his position not by a wild stroke of luck, but by ‘calling up all the magazines, publishers and ad agencies whose work I liked’, and he is clearly drawn to the ‘immediacy’ and ‘intimacy’ of self-publishing.

The polar opposite of any David-like hero, he is far more the retiring Goliath. ‘I always just try to make the sort of thing I’d like to see and, since I think I’m not a terribly unusual sort of person, I assume that it’ll work for other people. I think of my work in terms of ‘communicating’ (i.e. thinking about the audience) rather than ‘self-expression’, which I think sometimes leads to what may be meaningful and interesting to the creator but baffling to anyone else.’

The momentum of Gauld’s softly spoken humour is a natural partner to the simplicity of his visual aesthetic, and together they form the accessible language which makes Gauld’s drawings so innately likeable.

www.tomgauld.com

It’s easy to guess that Eve Best did an English degree. Her descriptions of acting are studded with metaphors: it’s like ‘surfing’ on a wave of people; the audience is a ‘video camera’, a ‘catalyst’, the ‘third person in the room’. When describing the actor-audience dynamic she helpfully substitutes ‘dialectic’ for my clumsy suggestion ‘dialog…ical?’

Best, (born Emily) studied at Lincoln in the late eighties, and remembers it fondly. ‘We had a good time. I had a very, very good time. I remember doing a lot of plays and hanging out in gardens and falling in love and out of love quite a lot, and crying and laughing a lot.’ 

Yet after graduating, Best went on to do something totally out of the ordinary for a drama-loving English student: she actually became an actress. Her slow burning career over the past 15 years has included many small television roles which have led up to what you could call her ‘big break’, a starring role in the American series Nurse Jackie, and a small part in the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech. Yet viewing these roles as the pinnacle of her success would be to massively underplay her many successes on – and her clear preference for – the stage.  

With an Olivier Award win for Hedda Gabler and another nomination for A Moon For the Misbegotten, Best is currently one of the most talented British actors on the London stage. Her recent turn as Beatrice in the Globe’s Much Ado About Nothing garnered unanimously positive reviews and a sold out season, with audiences on their feet for virtually the entire final act. From the moment Best walked onstage and began chatting to members of the audience, taking their hands and asking how they were, the production was full of the kind of audience interaction you would never see in the West End. Interestingly, this is what Best cites when asked why theatre is her favourite medium: ‘It’s a human experience. The audience has a spirit – a camera doesn’t have a spirit. You can’t reach out and hold the camera’s hand.’ 

Comparing acting at the Globe to more mainstream theatre, she says ‘the audience is going through the story with you, much more so than in a regular theatre where you’re in the dark and the focus of your attention is on the person standing opposite you on the stage. At the Globe, because you can see the people, the experience of the play becomes triangular.’ It seems that naturalism is not really her thing. She loves the awareness of acting that it is acting, and the joy of bringing characters to life for an audience. ‘It’s impossible to ignore the audience. If you tried to you’d get into terrible trouble,’ she says. ‘It’s like having a conversation.’ She does acknowledge how intimidating it can be to act in front of so many faces; Best goes to watch plays at the Globe herself and ‘I stand there thinking this is terrifying, I could never in a million years imagine ever acting on this stage or wanting to act on this stage, it just seems impossible and overwhelming. But then when you’re there to act, when you walk onto the stage about to do a play it’s very welcoming. It feels much smaller than it seems when you’re standing down in the pit.’

One can understand why one reviewer called the Globe’s Much Ado About Nothing ‘self-indulgent’, as the humour did sometimes stray into pantomime, yet with a three hour play to present to a thousand shivering audience members, one cannot blame the company for overplaying a little. The production was very joyful, distancing it from the po-faced formality of the West End or the camp theatricality of London musicals. Another reviewer called Best’s performance ‘impish and audience embracing’, perhaps with a better understanding of what type of performance is necessary on the very unusual Globe stage. Whatever the reviewers said, I have never seen an audience respond so well and so unanimously to a piece of theatre. 

Best is fairly unique in her move to American television, which is not lacking British actors, but (as she pointed out to me) British actors without American accents. Damien Lewis, Dominic West, Hugh Laurie and Rufus Sewell all have major roles in US TV shows, but as Best says, ‘I’m the only person I can think of playing a British person. They changed it for me, it was written as an American.’ It doesn’t surprise me that they did, as I can imagine many people find themselves promising things they don’t expect after coming face to face with her exuberant personality and earnest manner. She went straight from finishing at the Globe to New York to begin shooting again, and says ‘it was very strange having to go immediately from one to the other, very extreme. Going from running around barefoot as Beatrice and then suddenly I’m playing a very high maintenance character.’ Talking about Nurse Jackie Best is, as always, enthusiastic, but she refers to ‘lots of high heels’ and ‘spending hours with rollers in my hair,’ instead of the in-depth discussion of her craft she delves into when talking about theatre. She does, however, hint at dramatic developments for her character, Eleanor O’Hara, saying ‘I probably can’t tell you what I am in this season. I can’t give away the plot, but [O’Hara] is a very polar opposites kind of person.’ 

Despite her seemingly permanent move to New York, her film roles and the move to US television, the Eve Best I spoke to seemed determinedly attached to her roots in stage and in the UK. Nowhere was she more animated than when speaking about Oxford, the Globe, and UK politics. ‘I kind of now wish that I could go back to Oxford again’, she says, and asks ‘What’s the lovely little pub that you go into down the little tiny alleyway? The Turf! Yes. Which is now enormous! They’ve extended it all through the back!’ with the same enthusiasm she showed for acting to a sold-out theatre in central London. On the subject of tuition fees, she is ‘shocked and appalled’, but says that ‘the worst thing would be for people to stop doing degrees. Do the degree and then deal with the wretched overdraft: money can be found.’ When I ask about the future of the arts, she has similar advice. ‘The thing to remember is that in the darkest political times, times when there’s been least support and most censorship, least money, most restrictions, there has been huge artistic flourishing because there’s always such hunger for art. Although it’s getting harder and harder the key is to just keep on doing it.’ Coming from an actor who is getting her biggest roles now, aged 40, this is heartfelt advice.

This production sets Camus’ play around the time of its writings, in Mussolini’s Italy. Although I am always dubious about de-Romanising plays set in Rome, in this case it really worked. Partly it worked because the play itself is such that its themes and messages are universal. But more than this, transposing Caligula in time, this production reflects on the writer himself, and the political turmoil from which his play possibly sprang. We see a world of lavish dressing, old money, and hanging at the side, the hint of the threat of the nouvea riche, and of course, that of madness.

The play opens with the patricians all coming on stage and the direction strikes the delicate balance between presenting them as a kind of classical chorus and as individual characters. When they speak together, they run on one another’s lines, seeming to form a homogenous group, but as the dialogue progresses these witty little individuals who are both distinct from one another, but also linked to each another emerge. There is a real lightness of touch that makes this group of characters both amusing and human. We can laugh at them collectively as a group of pontificating old men, but we can also feel their fear, their desperation at being at the mercy of an out-of-control ruler, and their need to save their own skins.

For me, Caligula will always be John Hurt in I Claudius, so however good this Caligula was, I expected to be a little disappointed. I was not. Jack Powell captures that same mixture of vulnerability and seething threat that Hurt’s performance shows.

First, we see a man shaking, hurting, talking nonsense about wanting the moon, we wonder what these old men are afraid of. When we see him later, he is disconcertingly calm, showing Octavian, one of the patricians, his newly painted nails. It all seems rather sweet and harmless, but moments later we see that this is the facade of controlled mania as Caligula flashes from docile to violent. Caligula is at once the most mad possible, and as Heilcon his freedman calls him, “not mad enough”. This play shows a different side of the famously barmy emperor, as one who is trying to come to terms not with his own madness, but the madness of existence, and of human experience. A play like this depends so heavily on the ability of the lead actor to embody all of these contradictions without appearing ridiculous, and Powell manages it admirably.

Not all of the performances are as strong as they could be, and granted I saw the teasiest of teasers, far from the whole production, but what I saw was a sensitive and intelligent production of a great play – it is both funny and moving, it is lively and engaging, it is nuanced and subtle. What I saw was as yet a little unpolished, but it held the promise of something really and deeply human, a drama that is touching as well as entertaining.

3.5 STARS