Two young women come to Paris to find jeux d’esprit and witty beaux in a new staging of the satirical comedy of manners Les Précieuses ridicules, produced by Projet Molière, an organisation which gives students of French an opportunity to practice the spoken language in a friendly environment.

Magdelon and Cathos are the précieuses, ladies who are desperate to integrate themselves into high society, through their exaggerated refinement, but scorn their eligible suitors, considering them too vulgar. In revenge the suitors play a trick on them, whereby their valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, call on the ladies, pretending to be nobility and behaving in the most outrageous fashion, only to be fawned over by the two social climbers. What follows is a ludicrous display of suavity pushed to the extreme. With a modernized set and performed in the original French (but with English surtitles for those of us who are somewhat less than fluent), this production is both light-hearted and enthusiastic. Undoubtedly I would have enjoyed it more had I been able to understand the French – in my ignorance I found my eyes constantly gravitating towards the surtitles and this caused me to miss some of the action not taking place centre stage, and I felt that Molière’s biting satire on the ‘preciousness’ of the circle which the title characters represent was rather forgotten under the silliness of it all. Nevertheless, the dialogue was fluid and the voices and movements were so full of character that I still would have been laughing along had I not understood a word of the text.

Particularly good was Aurélien Pulice as the flamboyant Mascarille, whilst Emma Maitland and Béatrice Mercier were entertaining as the précieuses; however the whole cast deserves praise, particularly those actors for whom French is not their native language. To memorise a script is one thing, but to do so in a foreign language is quite another, and the commitment displayed here was commendable. Combining French comedy, feather boas and Lady Gaga, Les Précieuses ridicules provides the audience with a whimsical hour of amusement without prompting them to think too hard.

Andrew Graham-Dixon, one of the BBC’s best known art critics and BBC 2’s The Culture Show presenter surprises me when I meet him in his North London home: the stories he tells me about his experiences as an English student at Christ Church in the early 1980s seem somewhat at odds with his laid-back, sociable manner. ‘I was enjoying the reading so much that I tragically neglected other aspects of university life, to the extent that when I went for a drink in the Buttery at the end of finals, they wouldn’t serve me because they wouldn’t believe I was at the college.’ He concedes that he did party at Bristol where his girlfriend studied and as a postgraduate at the Coutauld Institute in London he spent the majority of his time playing snooker.

He makes his rise to the summit of journalism sound like the sheer result of chance encounters: ‘I started doing journalism because I thought I had to do something’. He explains how the first job he got in journalism came about through writing a letter to completely the wrong person, Lynne Truss, who at that point was editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement – ‘She gave me a job reviewing exhibitions.’ But is this apparent insouciance belied by the fact he had managed to become the main art critic for The Independent by the tender age of 25?

Since then, his career has prospered. He became a Sunday Telegraph columnist and won several journalism awards before coming to the attention of the BBC. I wonder if prospects are less bright for today’s graduates considering a similar career. ‘You have to be determined,’ he says. ‘These are interesting times and there is economic pressure on things like television production companies. What that means is that people are more open to the idea of employing younger, therefore cheaper, people than five years ago. So in some ways it is easier for someone from university to get experience.’

Graham-Dixon’s own determination resulted in his promotion to the position of main presenter of The Culture Show, for which he has interviewed personalities such as John Lydon, also known as Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols, whom he describes admiringly as a ‘sacred monster’, adding ‘there is something just extraordinary about him.’

Much of Graham-Dixon’s energy, however, goes into his own art programmes. Planned for 2011 is a series entitled The Art of America (following on from his series The Art of Germany and The Art of Russia) as well as a ‘cultural and culinary’ history of Sicily, co-presented with the chef Giorgio Locatelli.

I ask if condensing hundreds of years of a nation’s artistic history, into – at most – 3 hour-long programmes is a daunting challenge and he replies ‘I think of them as essays not histories. Film can be poetic, elusive and suggestive.’ He cites John Ruskin in support of his view that ‘through a nation’s art you understand its history.’

What can we expect from The Art of America? ‘If you’re looking at America outside the ethnographic realm, you are essentially looking at it as a post 17th-century culture, starting with the Puritan movement. I personally would prefer to deal with that in one programme. I think the 20th century stories are so interesting. One could quite easily create a whole TV series about what is happening in American art now.’

The topic of art ‘now’ is a thorny one, as it must inevitably deal with the questioning of the very concept of ‘art’ itself. Graham-Dixon co-curated the first public gallery exhibition of Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and their generation, ‘Broken English’ at the Serpentine Gallery in 1991, and he has a clear view on the matter: ‘Anything can be art. It’s just a question of whether it is good art or bad art.’

So I could legitimately put my shoe in Tate Modern as an exhibit? ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘it’s just not very good art. I don’t have a problem a video of a man picking his nose being put in Tate Modern. What I do have a problem with is what tradition it claims to belong to.’ He suggests that we are being misled into believing that this form of ‘modern art’ is in some sense a mutation of the specific artistic tradition that began with Giotto and Michelangelo. To look for a truly ‘modern’ work that loosely occupies a place in the same tradition as, say, a Caravaggio painting, one might do better to watch a Tarantino film: ‘It’s lit, it shows characters, it tells a story.’

Finally, he leaves me with a question: if visitors at Tate Modern can be shown a 24-hour video by Christian Marclay, why would the gallery never consider showing a two hour Hitchcock film?

It was 2001 when Joe Cornish first conceived Attack the Block, in what seem like fairly unlikely circumstances for inspiration: he was being mugged by a gang of young kids. In fact, the same scene opens the film itself, which has finally leapt onto the silver screen after ten years of gestation and hard work. When I sit down to chat with Cornish, I’m sceptical that his first thought when having his wallet taken was, ‘Ooh, this’ll make a good film…’, but he laughs at this. ‘Oh no, that’s my first reaction to everything that happens to me. I’ve wanted to make a film since I was a kid, and my head’s been full of films since I was about seven. I’m afraid I’m one of those people who looks at everything and thinks about how it would play as a film.’

Although inspiration may have come from a somewhat unconventional source, the result is stunning. The plot is both simple and outlandish: a group of kids are midway through mugging a young woman, when they are interrupted by an alien invasion, and they spend the rest of the film defending their tower block from the extra-terrestrial threat. Although largely made up of unfamiliar faces, the young cast are brilliantly convincing, inhabiting a film that’s far more thrilling and cinematic than people might expect.

Attack the Block is one of the most original and stylish debuts of a British writer/director in years. This might surprise those familiar with Joe’s prior career as one half of comedy duo Adam and Joe, where the only hint of his cinematic future was the cuddly toy film re-enactments they used to make for their TV show. Despite the lack of cuddly toys here, Attack the Block looks like the work of a supremely confident and film-literate mind. Yet given its abundance of action and special effects, Cornish didn’t give himself the easiest first gig: had he always intended to direct it himself?

‘Yeah, absolutely. Always intended to. I’ve always wanted to direct, and particularly on this because I felt that would be the way that I would know exactly what was going on in the script, and be totally confident that I understood all the elements of the story, and I wouldn’t end up fucking up someone else’s masterpiece.’ So did he feel confident in steering it towards the screen? ‘No, it was surprising. To be honest, I had no idea. I’m one these people that for years has enjoyed film-going like sport. But when you actually make one, you realise what an incredible endeavour it is just to make anything coherent , and you realise the genuine amount of hard work involved. It annihilates all your personal relationships and your weekends and your holidays – it’s 24 hours a day for years, literally. But I loved it, I thought it was incredibly good fun.’

Still, Cornish isn’t quite new to this game. Over the past few years, he’s secretly been making a name for himself in Hollywood, co-writing the upcoming Tintin and Ant-Man while rubbing shoulders with, amongst others, Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson. I suggest that hanging around with such experts seems to have paid off, but Joe hesitates at this. ‘Riiight. Well, that’s nice of you to say, but those were both writing gigs. Ant-Man I’ve been working on for a while with [Shaun of the Dead director] Edgar Wright, and being friends with him has been a huge boon to me, because he’s taught me a huge amount, and tolerated me hanging around, watching how he does things.’ As a result of this association (Wright executive-produced Attack the Block), as well as due to its niche genre of horror-comedy, I remind Cornish that there have been an abundance of pretty lazy comparisons to Shaun of the Dead by both reviewers and the film’s marketing team.

‘Sure. I think it’s a very different film. I think Edgar’s a genius and I would be an idiot to try and do something similar. I think mine is more like a John Carpenter film. It’s less funny than Shaun of the Dead, it isn’t intended to be as joke driven. It wants to be a little more real, and maybe with a tiny bit more social commentary.’ Apart from anything, the setting is a very different one; while Shaun seemed fairly closely modelled on Wright and Simon Pegg’s own lives (give or take a few flesh-eating zombies), Attack the Block must be far less familiar territory for Wright, with its young cast and their distinctive inner-city slang. I suggest to Cornish that it wouldn’t necessarily be the first setting that people might associate with him, but he riles at this.

‘No, with great respect I think that’s a very reductive attitude. If you go through art and culture and eliminate everything that isn’t based on the author’s first hand personal experience, you’d lose the vast majority of it. So I wouldn’t even begin to think about it like that. I think that’s reductive and not the way to look at things, really.’ Feeling thoroughly scolded, and surprised by the irritation in Joe’s voice, I guess that I’m not the first to ask such a question. In fact, it’s understandable, given the work he put into immersing himself in that world. ‘The script was evolved from months and months of workshops with youth groups around south London, in which I interviewed them and talked them through the story. I recorded and transcribed personally everything they said and I taught myself the language they spoke, as if it was a foreign language. We worked extremely hard to create an authentic argot or slang, but we’ve also kept it quite simple and accessible.’

As the interview draws to a close, I feel obliged to ask about the future of The Adam and Joe Show on BBC 6Music. Even if Joe does become a big-shot director, will he continue to chat entertaining rubbish with Adam on Saturday mornings? He chuckles at this. ‘I hope so. I think what we’ll probably try and do is do little runs every now and then, if someone will have us. I think it’s quite healthy for both of us to do something outside of the radio show, and I don’t think either of us necessarily wants to spend the rest of our lives doing that show… But I came straight back from shooting, straight back onto the radio – I didn’t even have a day off, and that’s an expression of how much I love doing that show and how much I feel I owe the audience.’ Some fans might be a little disappointed by Adam’s absence from this film (if you discount his brief aural cameo, narrating a moth documentary on TV in one scene). Did Joe not want to give his professional other half a starring role? He laughs. ‘He’s my best friend in the world, and very talented, and as such, for my first film I wanted to be careful. If I fucked it up, I didn’t want to take him down with me.’

So after twenty-five years of looking at everything in the world and thinking about how anything might make a film (even a mugging), did he treat this as his one chance to shine? ‘Kind of. I didn’t sort of throw everything in like someone on a ridiculous trolley dash. But I have been waiting to do it for a long time and I’m acutely aware that the British film industry has a huge list of first time directors, a smaller list of second time directors, and a very small list of third time and career directors. I knew I had one shot. I wanted to do something ambitious, so that if it succeeded it would be exciting and if it failed it would be a heroic failure.’ In fact, it’s neither. And Joe certainly hasn’t ‘fucked it up’. Instead, Attack the Block is a fiercely original action flick that, along with similarly brilliant debuts like Moon and Submarine, represents a new wave of young British filmmaking talent. Being mugged can really pay off.

Clova Stuart-Hamilton was in the first cohort of Ruskin Fine Art students to be integrated into the collegiate system at Oxford and although nominally based at Somerville, she had to be at the Ruskin from 9am to 9pm every day, the sort of schedule which would make an English student drop his roll-up. Clova talks about how lucky she was to receive the technical grounding she needed to evolve into a figurative painter, ‘a rather rare species nowadays.’

Based in Jericho for over 20 years now, Clova enthuses about the Oxford Art Weeks, which she believes have contributed to ‘a heightened awareness of the benefits of patronising artists and craftspeople.’ She emphasises their educational value, explaining that ‘perhaps if you know nothing about print-making you can go and see a print-maker pulling lithographs off the press.’
Clearly a perfectionist, when asked what she finds the most difficult part of the creative process she answers ‘I find stopping paintings incredibly difficult.’ This is why she often paints things which are transient, such as plants which are dying.  As she’s very engaged with ‘working in the moment’, she has to finish an autumnal scene before the first frost or return to it another year, and tends to have a morning and an afternoon painting on the go at the same time to cope with the changes in light.

Clova often returns to certain themes in her work: ‘Going back to the same thing can propel you forward as you’re so conscious of the fact that you don’t want to repeat yourself.’ Living with a family of musicians, instruments regularly crop up in her paintings and she is particularly fascinated by interiors; the play of light with windows is a particularly common motif in her work. She always tries to balance more familiar compositions in her exhibitions with new subjects which excite her.

I ask how she reconciles a realistic portrayal of the modern world with the aesthetics of her painting style and she calls it a ‘fascinating challenge.’ She smilingly announces that she has sold one painting with a fridge in it and another, when her children were small, which involved a bottle of Calpol. She confesses, however, that she has ‘a big issue with cars’ and tries to avoid them when painting street scenes. ‘I do feel as a figurative painter working in the 21st century that ideally I would like to reflect back the world that I’m living in and when I was in New York, I did a little painting of a modern interior of what’s called IHOP, it’s a chain of cafés.’ She describes how she was ‘very taken with these two workers who were on their break’ and found that there was ‘a sort of poetry of the moment’ among the formica tables and ugly lights.

We turn to modern art and I ask for her feelings on more abstract and subversive pieces. ‘So much work nowadays is connected with ideas and I wouldn’t ever say my work is to do with ideas, my work is to do with experiences and using a visual language to record them,’ she explains. She suggests that ‘there’s a limit to the “shock-ability” of the British public’, who may eventually tire of art pieces which strive to offend. She points towards the enormous numbers of visitors to blockbuster exhibitions of Van Gogh’s letters or large retrospectives of Monet and says ‘I think there’s an interest there which isn’t actually represented in the media, who are concerned with sensationalism.’

She names Bridget Riley as a contemporary artist who excites her, generating visual rhythms with large bars of colour: ‘It’s at the opposite end of the scale from my work in terms of its pure abstraction but not in terms of it being to do with paint and colour.’ Her favourite artists, however, are the 19th century French Intimists Bonnard and Vuillard, who she credits with having produced ‘some of the most poetic and quietly inspiring painting of all time’. Art is a translation of personality and experience for Clova but it’s also about the economy of the brushstroke, the physicality of the materials and the visceral, sensual nature of painting as an art form. She talks about the sand embedded in the paint of Monet’s pictures of beaches and grins ‘it’s that sort of “in the moment-ness” of painting which I find exciting’. And I realise that I too have been ‘quietly inspired’.

Clova Stuart-Hamilton will be exhibiting her work at 92 Walton St, 21-22 and 25-28 May