Eileen Atkins and James Corden, the chubby one from The History Boys and the BBC’s wonderful Gavin & Stacey, may seem unlikely soul mates. So the prospect of a jointly written comedy intrigues.

Atkins, so superb in Cranford, got to know Corden through Russell Tovey, another History Boys “graduate”, with whom she acted in the West End earlier this year in that peculiar play The Sea. Atkins is not just one of our best actresses, but also the acclaimed writer and star of plays about Virginia Woolf, as well as the co-creator of two huge TV hits: Upstairs, Downstairs and The House of Eliott. Corden co-writes Gavin & Stacey as well as acting in it.

Now this surprising double act have had preliminary chats about a television series that Atkins wants to develop with Corden. However, she is a tad coy about specifics, pointing out, when I saw her recently, that she is concentrating on a new West End play at the Vaudeville that starts previewing this week. The Female of the Species, written by the Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith, is inspired, if that’s the right word, by a bizarre incident eight years ago, when the feminist academic Germaine Greer was held captive at her north Essex home by a student. The new play is, by the way, a comedy. I hope Greer can see the joke.

While Euro 2008 was on last month, Vienna, the main host city, suffered a dramatic decline in visitors to its cultural institutions. Locals and tourists had assumed the city would be a virtual no-go area and shied away. I also suspect few football fans went to the opera. The organisers of Britain’s Cultural Olympiad, who have high hopes that sports nuts will also be arts lovers in summer 2012, should take note.

It was a sensible decision by the department for culture not to list a rather horrendous block of 1960s flats, Robin Hood Gardens, in the East End of London. The normally intelligent architect Richard Rogers made a fool of himself by arguing that the flats were as important as the best Georgian terraces in Bath. However, residents who actually live there hate them. So now they will probably be knocked down.

Of course, modern buildings must be preserved if they are of architectural, historic or social worth. In this context, I hear there is a tussle between the Twentieth Century Society and the culture department over several buildings, including some London fire stations, a college in Stockport and a former psychiatric hospital in Stroud. The society wants them kept almost in aspic. The DCMS wants them adapted for new uses while preserving the main outlines. The latter approach makes more sense.

The Best of the Booker is announced this week. Frankly, this is simply a marketing wheeze, dreamt up to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the book prize. A shortlist of six was chosen by a panel and, over the past eight weeks, Joe Public has been voting for a winner. The front-runners are Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, JM Coetzee’s Disgrace and Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the last two being my favourites. Anyway, I hope the public picks a better winner than the judges of the Booker have in recent years. Why John Banville’s The Sea and Anne Enright’s The Gathering?

richard.brooks@sunday-times.co.uk

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