David Lister: With museums, it's useful to get inside before you get lost

The problem with the Hayward Gallery was that no one could find the front door

It's funny how money concentrates the mind. With the possibility of lottery cash and private funding, the new director of the Victoria and Albert Museum Mark Jones announced a complete "transformation" of the institution. Walls will be knocked down, new signs will be put up, whole galleries relocated. The problem, said Mr Jones, is that visitors simply can't find their way around. The place was "confusing and unruly". The museum's most senior curators nodded sagely when he made this admission at a press conference on Wednesday.

Being able to find your way around is quite useful when you visit a museum, and it is odd that this hadn't occurred to the V&A's management before. The head of London's Hayward Gallery once told me that the problem with the place was that no one could find the front door. At least at the V&A you do get inside before getting lost.

No one got inside at the London Palladium on Wednesday evening for the second night of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The £750,000 flying car wouldn't fly, which rather spoilt the magic, as did hanging around outside until 8.15pm for the 2,000 audience members, who were only then told the performance was cancelled. It was unfortunate for them and unfortunate for Sir Richard Eyre, the former director of the National Theatre, who boasted in an interview in the Evening Standard the next day that theatre always started on time and as advertised, and he wished builders could be as reliable. Any builders who were standing in the rain outside the Palladium can debate the subject with Sir Richard on Newsnight Review.

The Arts Council, on the other hand, will be less concerned about whether Chitty Chitty Bang Bang flies and more concerned about whether Truly Scrumptious is truly ethnic. A report from the Council on Thursday said future funding of theatres could be dependent on quotas being introduced, as the numbers from ethnic minorities working in theatre was still lamentably low.

"It's the programmes, Stupid," was Greg Dyke's rallying cry when he became director-general of the BBC and knew where he wanted the money spent. Now the Independent Television Commission has decided that the programmes are stupid. It has no jurisdiction over the BBC, but in its annual report this week it gave an overview of commercial television. It found that soaps had increased and other drama had decreased, while programmes on current affairs, the arts, religion and regional affairs were all "threatened species." It added that there had been a "narrowing in diversity" of programmes across all terrestrial channels, including the BBC over the last four years. Well, you don't have to have jurisdiction to aim a barb or two.

The ITC was particularly disturbed by "the preponderance of similar formats across channels, the tendency to exhaust generic series, whether Top 10s and other 'list' programmes or 'from hells', and a reliance on programmes observing and revealing coarse behaviour." Coming next week ... a list of the 10 worst offending programmes, naming the channel controllers from hell, and examples of coarse behaviour such as the BBC director-general telling his staff to "cut the crap".

The quest for more serious programming may have been on the agenda at BBC2 and Sky One (but that section of the agenda may not have been reached). This week BBC2 announced new leisure programmes including The Life Laundry, in which experts declutter people's houses. Sky One's summer lineup had as its highlight Models Behaving Badly, a one-hour "special" on the antics of high-maintenance supermodels.

The British film industry got a shock from a little-noticed phrase in the Budget about "rooting out tax avoidance". Department of Culture, Media and Sport civil servants said afterwards that numerous claims had been received for tax relief from producers claiming to be working on British films. Apparently, these "British films" included television programmes, and not just dramas, but documentaries and even quiz shows. The claims were easily rumbled. The quiz shows were far too entertaining to be British films; and not one of them had a cameo for Jim Broadbent or Pete Postlethwaite.

The staying power of television viewers isn't what it was. The re-make of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga lost viewers in just its second week, with audience share going down from 39.8 per cent to 29.8 per cent. But the real surprise blow came with the axeing of Ally McBeal. The American networks feel the show has run its course and there are only so many ways of telling the story of a female lawyer looking for love.

Oh yeah? The series writer is not so easily deterred. Having made a mint out of the comic travails of one female lawyer, he is working on a radically new format. It will have three female lawyers sharing an apartment. Why didn't Galsworthy think of that?

d.lister@independent.co.uk