Cheltenham Literature Festival - Maggi Hambling

Maggi Hambling, Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, October 12.

Richard Cork introduced Maggi Hambling in a conversation centred around her Scallop sculpture at Aldeburgh and, perhaps more to the point, the new book she has written about it.
Cork was a genial and enthusiastic straight man and it can't always be an easy job but his laughter and appetite for the subject didn't immediately carry the audience with him. Maggi, apparently sipping water, was possibly a fraction under-fuelled and the discussion took a little time to warm up.
Never short of high camp retorts or imperious opinions, Maggi's best early shot here was almost an aside, talking about Benjamin Britten's swimming in the North Sea at Aldeburgh every day of the year,'What,' asked Cork, 'even in December?'. 'He was never out of it.'
Frinton, Aldeburgh and Saffron Walden were places selected for satire, mostly on account of their attitudes to art and other such enjoyable frivolity. We heard about the new wave sculpture now in private hands, anecdotes of George Melly and some brief notes on the Hambling works of the past but it was mainly a history of the Scallop, from its conception, through manufacture to its controversial life since.
It was conceived as a tribute to Britten when unfounded rumours suggested that Maggi was to do a figure of the composer. After that, it took some time for the local contractors, Pegg's, to progress from the model to the full-size realization and the cost of course surpassed original estimates and achieved £110k. Disapproval and protest began at the planning permission stage, ran through the opening ceremony and continues with vandalism and graffiti although it develops in reacting with sea air chemically to develop a new patina and is now in fact further from the sea than when it started because the sea has rearranged some beach from further up the shore.
Never less than enchanting, Maggi remains completely the genuine article, saying she does what she does, not a part of any movement or school, which anybody authentically involved in their work would surely say, and pursuing it with energy and passion. The book is £13 on Amazon, not the marked £20 that you would have been asked for here with the chance to get it signed. After all, even though the Cheltenham Festival is a top class and wonderful jamboree with as much in it as one could manage, it is also a marketing exercise and these people have a living to make. At least they don't apologize for that.