Our Tracey is frantically finalising her show for next month’s Venice Biennale, where she is Britain’s official entry. I say “Britain”, though she is really “England’s” entry. These days, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own pavilions, though not in the main exhibition area of the Giardini, which sticks to national hierarchies from the late 1940s – still no China, for example. Emin, I hear, is working mainly on drawings (I liked those at White Cube three years ago).

Ukraine also has a female as its representative. Sam Taylor-Wood. What? Not the very British Sam who is married to Jay Jopling, the White Cube gallery boss? The very same. Kiev-based artists have protested at the snub. But why pick Taylor-Wood? Well, last year she had a show at Gateshead’s

Baltic gallery, where the boss is Peter Doroshenko, who is of Ukrainian blood and now the commissioner for that country’s Venice exhibition. “Also, Sam did recently work with a Ukrainian ballet star,” Doroshenko told me. So?

At least Taylor-Wood is a decent artist. Doroshenko might have chosen Beryl Cook for Venice, since her chubby characters look like Ukrainian labourers. Instead, he’s organising a summer retrospective of the painter’s work for the Baltic. Yet why show such a commercial artist in such a publicly funded venue?

Cannes opens on Wednesday with very, very few British films. Still, Britain can boast the chair of the jury in Stephen Frears, only the second Brit to hold this post, following Dirk Bogarde in 1984. Frears has been in Los Angeles for the past two months making a pilot TV series and, after Cannes, starts filming another script from Peter Morgan, who wrote The Queen. The Damned United is based on the book by David Peace about the disastrous six weeks in 1974 when Brian Clough managed Leeds United. Is there a contemporary resonance with the past six weeks at Leeds? Only five years ago, the club was in the Premiership. Next season, it will be in League One, playing Hartlepool and Tranmere. There’s a true disaster movie for Frears.

Black Watch, the National Theatre of Scotland’s Iraq war play, which was the star of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, was meant to come to London this summer in a joint production with the Barbican. It was to be staged in the car park of the Old Truman Brewery, off Brick Lane, where another antiIraq play, Fallujah, is currently on indoors. But Black Watch has been called off. Too much Iraq? Apparently not. Tower Hamlets council had worries about noise levels, which could upset sensitive locals such as Gilbert & George, Janet Street-Porter and Emin.

The movie version of Brideshead Revisited finally starts shooting next month. I’m sure it will be excellent, but it will be hard to better the iconic TV series. Michael Gambon recently told me at a lunch reception that he will be Lord Marchmain, played in the Granada version by Larry Olivier. “That’s interesting,” said Jeremy Irons, Charles Ryder from the TV series, who had overheard us, “I turned down Marchmain last year.” The great Gambo looked a little crestfallen.

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