Editor-At-Large: So, Julie's a racist and giant squid are taking over the world. Must be August...

It's August all right. According to the tabloids, giant squid are taking over the world. Radio 4's afternoon programme Questions, Questions calls in experts to calm anxious listeners worried we may be hit by an asteroid at any minute, only to follow that with in-depth analysis of why biscuits go soggy.

Meanwhile, Today moves effortlessly from arms inspections in Iraq to the world-shattering news that organic slugs are on the rampage. An Irish social worker has reported the Guardian columnist Julie Burchill to the police, accusing her of inciting racial hatred because she opined that the Irish tricolour represented a nation which aided and abetted Hitler and whose national church molested children. Anne Robinson has been visited by the North Wales police because she stuck the Welsh nation in the bin on television's Room 101. Mad weather means I'm slapping factor 30 on in Kent while a friend telephones to say Northallerton has closed due to flooding. These are unsettling times.

I write from Whitstable which has just celebrated its Oyster Festival, at a time of year when the local variety is unavailable. The nearest gastro-pub isn't serving dinner after 8.45pm, so you can tell we're at the height of the holiday season. The people running Britain's motorways have closed the M11 at junction 8, where you turn off for Stansted airport, as they construct a new access road. The result: three-mile tailbacks at 1.30am as anxious relatives queue to collect families marooned because there's no public transport through the night from Stansted to London.

All of the above would normally reduce me to tears of frustration, but this week, my sobbing has been celebrating great art, rather than the state of Britain's roads. Forget about monster squid and rampaging slugs and go and see Ivans xtc, a low-budget (though you'd never guess) film by British director Bernard Rose, charting the death of a Hollywood agent. This film is a bleak portrayal of the shallow world of tinsel town and stars Anjelica Huston's brother Danny as a man with huge charm and the inability to say no to any challenge, be it of the social or pharmaceutical variety. When he signs a homophobic megastar who specialises in brainless action extravaganzas, Danny becomes the agency's top dog. A couple of days later, the same people refuse to believe he's died from a massive lung tumour. Cancer isn't plausible; it must be cocaine abuse. In his friendless last hours, Danny's vacuous model/ wannabe-writer girlfriend is uninterested, and he ends up mumbling out his fate to a couple of bored hookers. Let's face it, in showbiz and the media cancer is just so unchic compared to class A drugs. Why have the papers been so full of the alleged activities of Lord Irvine's son in California? The magic words crack and cocaine were involved, that's why. Ivans xtc is an almost unbearable film to watch because it is about loneliness, and the sacrifices people are prepared to make for their careers.

So why see a movie about a world inhabited by unpleasant people, and why care about Ivan's predicament? Because Ivans xtc isn't just about what goes on in California, it's about the world we inhabit in the 21st century, when it's so easy not to have real friends. You can tap in, log on, and order anything, chat (via a pseudonym) to anyone. The mobile can be a perfect substitute for a real, messy, unravelling conversation. You can fill your ears with a personal stereo, watch a DVD, tune out to social interaction. You can go to brilliantly shallow, unengaging candy-floss movies such as Men in Black II, out this weekend, or you can try and sit through 90 minutes of Ivans xtc without crying. It's really not surprising no one in mainstream Hollywood wanted to finance or promote the film, and Rose ended up shooting it documentary-style on digital video, using the cast's homes as locations.

Thin-skinned Celts Â

Accusing Julie Burchill of racial hatred is so blinkered it, too, makes me want to weep. When the BBC apologised for Anne Robinson's remarks about the Welsh (she simply asked "what are they for" and accused them of smugness) I thought that political correctness had gone mad, but following it up with a police visit shows just how lily-livered and pathetic this country has become. Julie, hardly the Prince Philip of the bon mot, simply wrote a column celebrating the fact that, as a patriot, she could now fly the Union Flag without feeling like a quasi-NF supporter. Her diatribe, which picked all the things she couldn't stand about the Irish, and why she wouldn't be flying their tricolour, so incensed one sad, narrow-minded man that he claimed it contravened the Race Relations Act. I might have found this funny if I hadn't experienced it as well.

When I wrote in this column last year of the arrogant councillors in North Wales who wanted only Welsh-born people to get council houses, I received a sack of hate-mail from offended Welsh people. I, too, was accused of racism, even though I pointed out I was half-Welsh and had spent a considerable part of my childhood there. Do the Celts have thinner skins as well as other failings? Those born in North Wales are thoroughly racist, despising the English and loathing those born in the South. Can Julie Burchill be racist because she attacks the Catholic church? You may find her strident – but she is a daring social commentator, writing what many of her educated middle-class readers secretly think. Do the Celts have no sense of irony? Yes, you may now weep.

¿ As popular taste dictates that the West End is full of revivals and musicals, you might not look forward to spending an evening in the company of Anita Dobson and a paedophile. Frozen at the Cottesloe Theatre is, like Ivans xtc, an evening on the long rinse cycle. At the end of almost three hours you stumble outside with a damp-eyed audience. You've been on a long journey spanning 20 years with a mother whose small daughter disappeared and is found murdered under the earth floor of a lock-up garage. Her murderer is chillingly cold, methodical and remorseless. Bryony Lavery's play won plenty of awards when it was premiered in Birmingham in 1998, but seems even more topical today. This excellent revival with the original cast is a series of monologues; it is a challenging evening. This play requires absolute concentration, and a big commitment from the audience. It should be seen as a passion play, a larger-than-life reworking of a parable, uncomfortable to watch but unforgettable as a result, engaging with important issues such as hatred and forgiveness in an uncompromising way.

The choice is yours. You can engage with the real world and enlarge your vision of it, read Julie Burchill and see Frozen. Or ban all jokes about race and pop along to Men in Black II, a thoroughly anodyne night out. No chance of getting offended, let alone having to get the Kleenex out.