Richard Hamilton, the true father of Pop art and spiritual descendant of Duchamp, is not a particularly prolific artist. Rather, he sticks to an idea and works on it over several editions and in different media, so that we get a large body of work repeating the same image in paint, in collage, in photography and in mixed media. For Hamilton, now 87, in so much of what he has done over the decades the key idea cannot be conveyed by a single unique work of art, because the key idea is often to do with the multiplicity of images: in other words, the medium is the message.

It always used to be said that boarding school prepares you for every hardship. Whether that includes prison in one of the most impenitent dictatorships in Africa is not a question that was put to Simon Mann in last night’s edition of Storyville. Mann, still incarcerated when the BBC caught up with him, was awaiting a pardon from President Teodoro Obiang, the very potentate he had attempted to topple five years earlier. Never mind that they like to keep a battery and electrodes handy for interrogations, Mann wasn’t about to slag off the great man’s excellent hospitality.

David Hare is one of the giants of contemporary British theatre. His skill is to be the Balzacian social secretary who records the mood of the day. So his recent work has examined the state of the nation in a poetic rather than a literal way, and the result has usually been emotionally powerful and resonant.