He directed TV’s The Sweeney and Bergerac but Peter Smith would like to be better remembered for his paintings, writes Sunita Rappai

IT was the images of naked women that first drew Peter Smith to art.
The 69-year-old television director from Canfield Gardens in West Hampstead, whose credits include Bergerac, A Touch Of Frost, The Sweeney and most recently, Midsomer Murders, says wryly: “When I was at school, that was the only way you could see naked girls. We didn’t have magazines like Playboy in those days.”
Encouraged by an excellent art master at Westminster School, where he was a boarder, to look up artists like Delacroix and Ingres and Goya in the school library, Smith was transfixed by the sensual nudes on display.
From there, it was a short step to sneaking out of his strict public school to visit exhibitions of French impressionists, German expressionists and English painters of the 1940s and 1950s in the varied galleries of Mayfair nearby.

Theatre director Mark Rosenblatt tells Richard Hodkinson why three 100-year-old German plays speak to today’s audiences

Anti-Semitism is on the rise and abortion is an election issue. Sound familiar?
Proving that what goes around comes around, in art as in life, these same issues are central to a season of plays just opening at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston. They have a contemporary resonance but have occupied the minds of dramatists for over a century.
Welcome to early 20th-century Vienna – eerily similar to early 21st-century London.
The man behind the season is a director from Chalk Farm Mark Rosenblatt, whose Dumfounded Theatre Company has collaborated with the Oxford Stage Company on the project.
Their Last Waltz season comprises three plays: Frank Wedekind’s Musik, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Rose Bernd and Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler.

Wind farms are sustainable, clean alternative sources of energy to burning fossil fuels, right? Wrong claims composer Henry Lewis. And they’re blots on the landscape, he told Jane Wright

HENRY Lewis is a nervous man. “I don’t want to look like a dilettante,” he ventures anxiously before having his photo taken.
Now 58, the writer of musicals on topics as various as the tabloid press and the closure of railway branch lines is poised on the threshold of what for him is the big one: his musical farce campaigning against wind power, The Wind Thing, is set to open at the Rosemary Branch Theatre in Shepperton Road, Islington, on April 5.
Henry, who lives in Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill, explains: “I’m more nervous because it’s more important than my other shows. In the short-term, I’d like to get to the end of the week’s run without dissenters disrupting us. Then, if wind farms are off the government’s menu in three years’ time, I’ll judge it a success. But the noose is tightening and it’s now or never to get the message across.”