• The culture department is in a bit of a mess over the appointment of the next chairman of English Heritage, the government quango that looks after stately homes and monuments such as Stonehenge.

Two appropriately “stately” people, Lady Cobham, partner of David Mellor, and Lord Marland of Odstock, the Tory party treasurer, were chosen by a selection panel of the great and good. However, Tessa Jowell has rejected them both. The Conservatives claim this is because they are both Tories, rejected because Jowell does not want to upset the PM-in-waiting, Gordon Brown. Maybe Jowell just thought them too posh. Anyway, the whole selection process must start again.

One keen applicant who did not make the shortlist of two is Lord Howarth of Newport, formerly known as Alan Howarth MP. He crossed the floor in 1995 to Labour, where he became arts minister. Having both a Conservative and a Labour background, perhaps he’d make the perfect chairman.

• A new “British cultural test” is coming into force to determine whether films get tax rebates. To qualify, a movie must clock up points on matters such as setting, characters and reflection of British life. Some say this is culturally correct nonsense.

Certainly, it has made Simon Channing-Williams, who produced The Constant Gardener in 2005, nervous about Snow Country, which he plans to shoot in Canada later this year. Ralph Fiennes is set to direct the movie, which tells the story of an Inuit girl and will star local actors and use a local crew.

Already, producers are coming up with canny solutions to get round the rules. I hear that the next Batman movie, The Dark Knight, is moving a key setting from Paris to London to qualify. And I innocently thought Batman lived in Gotham City.

It would then make “a triumphant entrance up the Thames” in 2012.

I now hear that this nautical plan has been sunk. I still wonder what our cultural Olympics are meant to be.

• I’m not usually slow to criticise some of the junk that the Institute of Contemporary Arts stages, but I have long admired its cinema programme.

Next Friday, it begins showing a remarkable new documentary, Iraq in Fragments, shot by a brave American director, James Longley. It depicts life as it really is for Iraqis today, and I learnt more about the hapless country from this 90-minute film than from the combined television coverage I’ve seen over the past few years.

Yet the ICA is the only cinema in London to show it. Beyond the capital, it will be in key art houses. If only distributors were braver: ideally, Iraq in Fragments would push out some of the crass Hollywood fare at the Odeons and Vues.