LONDON CALLING

Adrian Noble, the theatre director, has a "personal crusade". It is to march the Royal Shakespeare Company out of London. Bad for the capital, but great for the rest of Britain. Not that the response has been quite the unanimous delight you might expect. Several Scottish and northern theatre directors have voiced concern, sensing cultural colonialism. If there's Shakespeare to be done, they'll do it, thank you very much - the RSC's received pronunciation is not appropriate outside the South (where, of course, we all speak like Larry Olivier - "a-bagg-of-crrissps- and-twooo-hal-ves-of-laager, bahrmann"). According to Northern Stage's Alan Lyddiard, they do not want "be subsumed by this southern English view of what culture should be".

By coincidence, Terry Christian, the trans-Pennine presenter of The Word, the Channel 4 youth programme, has been reflecting this week on a related issue. According to Christian, the criticism of his programme - for featuring such items as an exploding colostomy bag and a vomiting Santa Claus - is explained by the same phenomenon. "The Word has always railed against the usual unthinking Cultural Metrocentricity of the media," he says.

His implied suggestion is an ancient one: that non-metropolitan culture revels in an earthy honesty, which effete Londoners, with their powdered wigs, Sedan chairs and pubs that sell coffee, cannot stomach. Christian's North is the voice of authenticity. "Tha shits here and tha pisses there," growls Mellors. "Gosh, they never told me that in Knightsbridge," swoons Constance.

Perhaps the RSC should invite Terry to help out. "The Bard" tour might feature Titus Andronicus with real amputations and the soon-to-be-famous Golden Showers scene from As You Like It. That'd provide the necessary "irreverent, anti-establishment tone".

But what really connects these two stories of high culture is that they are the latest manifestations of a long-running resentment against London and all its works. In recent times this has led the BBC to set a quota of one third of programmes to be made outside London, whatever the cost. In the NHS the 1992 Tomlinson report, which recommended wholesale hospital closures in the capital, was accepted with unusual alacrity because everybody wanted to believe the argument that London was over-provided. And scarcely a day passes without someone talking about the need to keep in contact with "the real world" - ie, the world outside London.

This Regional Correctness has gone too far. Current affairs television programmes are never allowed to film in Greater London, for fear of being thought too metropolitan. They can show battered babies in Brum, empty factories in Falkirk, but can't go to Perivale or Pinner. It is hardly surprising that most people's mental map of London has three placenames - Westminster, Islington and Here Be Muggers.

The real London is a vast, important and grossly under-reported place. Its population is half the size again of Scotland's - but when was the last time you saw a major analysis of the politics of the capital? Remember the row over Ravenscraig? Well, have Scots heard about Bart's, the London hospital about to be closed? How aware is the country of the sheer size of London's unemployment and poverty?

Why is there this pathological resentment of London? It's partly because everything of importance happens in the capital. In the US the jealous animosity of Middle America towards elites can be divided up between the moral delinquents of LA, bent politicians of Washington and the greedy corporations of New York. This is not true here - we have only London, and because this huge city seems to dwarf everything else, it is demonised and blamed.

And not only by outsiders. For many incomers London remains a dirty, difficult and expensive place, where house prices and transport make it nearly impossible to live as well as their parents did back in the sticks. Some yearn for home; others lead horrendous lives, commuting between the smoke and the twittering hedgerows of the suburbs. From cottages in commuter villages they join the chorus condemning London for lack of authenticity. Perhaps they ought to consider the alternative delights of Huddersfield and Lampeter.