Spots before the eyes

INTERVIEWED on the Today programme last Friday, Britart star Damien Hirst – he of pickled shark and diamond-encrusted skull fame – said his idea of a great painting is one you'd pick up and take home if you saw it in a skip outside a pub. Whether you would have had to have spent several hours inside the pub beforehand, he didn't say. But either way the quip was meant as a defence of his latest exhibition, Colour Space Paintings And Outdoor Sculpture, which opens today at Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

This stately pile was built in 1722 by Sir Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister, but it's now the country pied-a-terre of one of his descendants, old Etonian David Cholmondeley. He's currently the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, though previous titles have included Viscount Malpas (no relation to Maurice) and the Earl of Rocksavage, which is the one I'd have stuck with if I was him.

Back to the art. Much of Hirst's new work is situated in Houghton Hall's State Rooms, which are normally decorated with works by Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. For the duration of the exhibition they're lined with paintings of coloured spots which have been mostly produced by the people who work in Hirst's studio. The artist himself does add a bit here and there, but it begs a question that's often asked of him: is he just at it?

Hirst would say no, of course. But he did slightly undercut his own argument about the worth of his work as the interview progressed. Recounting a story about his son's choice of decoration for his bedroom, Hirst said he had once given the lad the opportunity to pick any of dad's pieces to have on his wall. The answer? “I'd like a Banksy”.

Touts and forgers welcome the Royal wedding wedding invite

HAS yours arrived yet? No, mine neither. I mean an invitation to the wedding of the year, of course, the upcoming nuptials between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, scheduled for May 19.

Apparently all 600 were posted out late last week by the Prince of Wales – does he have to pay for stamps seeing as his mum's face is on them? – and should be dropping expensively onto doormats up and down the country by tomorrow at the latest. Or a week on Friday, if they were coming registered delivery and you were out at the time.

Happily for touts and Old Firm fans who are bored of forging tickets for away games and want a bigger challenge, a newspaper has published a photograph of one of the invitations and provided many other salient details. Such as: they're made by the company of Barnard and Westwood. They're die-stamped in gold and then burnished (whatever that means). They're printed in American ink on something called English card and – trivial detail alert – hand-produced by a woman called Lottie Small on a printing machine from the 1930s that she has christened Maude.

How long before one turns up on eBay, do you think?

Not fade away

ROD Stewart has been at it again – “it” being mouthing off in public and making a spectacle of himself.

Stewart's Greatest Hits we know all about – Maggie May, Hot Legs, that one about the boat – but he's fast racking up an equally venerable Top 10 of ooh-la-la moments when he ventures out in public. Who can forget his epic encounter with a load of ping-pong balls during the draw for the fifth round of the Scottish Cup last year? It's already hard to separate myth from fact, but as far as I know the charge that he pinched the bottom of SFA President Alan McRae live on air hasn't been challenged, and it's certainly true that he brought to proceedings some of that same exuberance you'd experience if you had found a Damien Hirst painting in a skip when you were stumbling home from the pub.

More recently he took to the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, supposedly to present an award to a classical composer he'd never heard of. But before stumbling over the guy's name and handing over the gong he took the opportunity to make an impassioned speech about something else entirely. Was it #MeToo and #TimesUp? Nope. Did he have a pop at Putin over the use of chemical weapons on British soil? Nope. Did he bang on about Celtic's win over Rangers at Ibrox hours earlier, even reeling off the names of the scorers? That's it.

And last week he was at it again. This time it came in an interview with American broadcaster Andy Cohen in which Stewart took aim at his old pal Elton John, calling the Rocket Man singer's upcoming farewell tour a “dishonest” attempt to sell tickets. “I did email her,” he said (meaning John), “and said: 'What, again dear?'. I didn’t hear anything back”. He added: “If I retire, I won’t make an announcement. I’ll just fade away”.

Something tells me fading away isn't quite Rod Stewart's style. Even at 73 he's still having too much fun.

Smoking out Netflix!

MOST of us scour Netflix to be entertained and so we have something to talk about that isn't Brexit or Trump or what Rod Stewart will do next. But the good people behind Truth Initiative – “America's largest non-profit public health organization dedicated to making tobacco use a thing of the past,” it says here – have another reason for watching: they're looking for scenes showing tobacco use. These they call “tobacco incidents”.

The research they've now published covers all streaming platforms as well as terrestrial broadcasters. But Netflix is the prime offender with four of the top five worst shows. Way out in front is sci-fi chiller Stranger Things, with 182 gratuitous smoking scenes.

“There has been a revolution in television that now encompasses a complex universe including Hulu, Netflix and an emerging world of on-demand platforms,” says Truth Initiative heid bummer Robin Koval. “And while everybody was watching, but no one was paying attention, we’ve experienced a pervasive re-emergence of smoking imagery that is glamorising and renormalising a deadly habit to millions of impressionable young people. It has to stop.”

For the record, Big Bang Theory was given a clean bill of health with absolutely no “tobacco incidents”. Does any of this matter? Hell, no – Bazinga! Of course it matters.