The BBC seems to have an “I’d Do Anything” attitude towards helping Andrew Lloyd Webber’s West End musicals. After the success of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? and Any Dream Will Do, they have him judging leads for a forthcoming stage production of Oliver!.

Lloyd Webber got free publicity for his productions of The Sound of Music and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat off the back of earlier television contests. Both are still going strong in his theatres.

The BBC says there is no conflict of interest with I’d Do Anything because Oliver! is a Cameron Mackintosh production. Yet Lloyd Webber will still benefit financially - the show is planned for the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which he owns. A production there will earn at least £60,000 a week in rent and other fees.

At last, the BBC’s pallyness towards Lloyd Webber is to be referred to the BBC Trust. Don Foster, the Liberal Democrats’ culture and media spokesman, has formally asked the watchdog to investigate.

Two of Britain’s leading intellectuals, John Tusa and Tom Stoppard, have particular reason to recall 1968. Both were born in Czechoslovakia, though both had moved to the UK by the time of the Prague Spring. But here’s the point. Stoppard’s dad was the company doctor for Bata, a Czech shoe company, until just before the second world war; Tusa’s father also worked there. So, as Tusa tells me, Stoppard’s dad probably delivered him into this (small) world.

What is the point of the Arts Council, asks a Radio 4 documentary going out on Tuesday. Well, there is some point to it, though it lost much credibility thanks to its mishandling of the recent redistribution of money to its “clients”. It was a PR disaster, the more so because, in October, the government had gained more money from the Treasury for the arts.

Now, in time-honoured fashion, the council is setting up an inquiry into the cockup, to be headed by Lady McIntosh, a former senior executive at the RSC and National Theatre. I trust she won’t pull her punches.

Do pop into the Air Gallery in Mayfair, London, to see a new exhibition of work by the Iranian-born Souren Mousavi. The 39-year-old was sent to prison in Tehran on a trumped-up pornography charge for her paintings of women. Inside, she was raped and tortured. She bribed her way out before, with a false passport, escaping to Britain in 2001. For six years she sought asylum while being given psychiatric care for her mental wounds. She finally got asylum late last year. This, her first exhibition, represents genuine suffering for one’s art.

I first met Anthony Minghella 20 years ago, when he was writing scripts for Inspector Morse. He always saw himself first and foremost as a writer, though he will be remembered more for directing movies such as The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley.

My own memories are more personal. Truly Madly Deeply was filmed in the part of north London I know intimately, and I can still “see” its shots of Highgate and Kenwood. Then there was his family ice-cream business on the Isle of Wight. One spring day, beside Freshwater Bay, I bought a cornet from the ice-cream van. It was called a Truly Madly Delicious. Lovely name; lovely man.

richard.brooks@sunday-times.co.uk

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