Royle class

I was in Zagreb last weekend. The city closes early on Saturday, so I ended up watching television in my hotel. Once you’ve flicked past German stock-market reports and volleyball from Belgrade, there’s not a lot of choice, except one or two English-language cable programmes you would never dream of watching at home. Take CNN’s Quest, featuring someone — from his accent, British — called Richard Quest, who fancies himself as a character and goes around barking at people. He also barks banalities at us. His topic was art. ‘Art. We all know it when we see it. But do we really understand it?’ His interviewees, including David Hockney and Brian Sewell, looked fazed by his barked questions, as if fearful that he was really Sacha Baron Cohen in another disguise, there to make them look stupid. ‘Fake or forgery?’ he barked. ‘Is it just a pigment of the imagination?’ He sought enlightenment from Rolf Harris, who having made plenty of lousy TV programmes himself, clearly felt at home.