And it’s not the first time it has happened, either.”I’ve refused parts in two West End plays,” she says. She’s achieved a unique position as the grande dame of the avant garde. It’s a title that’s almost an oxymoron, but she pulls it off.”* The actress Kathy Staff – battleaxe Nora Batty in Last of the Summer Wine – shares her alter ego’s distaste for the decline in modern manners.Staff, 76, was offered a starring role in Elton John’s West End musical of Billy Elliot, but turned it down because of the “vulgarity” of the script. “Sure, Yoko is quite pretentious, but she’s also fantastically talented. John Lennon’s widow isn’t averse to Britain’s grander venues, though.

For I hear that she’s also been asked to take the stage at the Royal Festival Hall this summer.Supporting her at the one-off gig will be another close relative of pop royalty: Paul Simon’s guitarist son Harper.”We get on very well, so it’ll be huge fun,” he says at a party organised by the Lisson Gallery. “It was a hot day and he was sweating like John Prescott in a sauna,” I’m told.* Yoko Ono makes occasional forays into the world of live music, and recently agreed to perform at a music festival at Pontins in Camber Sands, Sussex. “I’m going to have to think of another way to get myself that sort of coverage.”Mr Yentob has certainly proved to be as good as his word. Filming his new Imagine programme, on the history of tall buildings, he decided to climb the Empire State Building, dressed in a King Kong outfit.* A wag in his office has kindly sent me the following before-and-after shots. ” The whole area is undergoing huge regeneration, and although it’ll be some time until Hirst can set up a viable place, he’s anxious to get a finger in the pie as early as possible.”Hirst raised £11m before Christmas, when the contents of Pharmacy were sold at Sotheby’s.

His current venture is being dubbed the “new Pharmacy”, though it is likely to contain more recent artwork.Science declined to comment on their future plans yesterday, but Hirst has recently made a quiet return to the restaurant game: last year, he opened a fish restaurant in the sleepy Devon village of Ilfracombe.* Alan Yentob recently admitted to being jealous of the publicity given to his chum Mark “rottweiler” Thompson, following the revelation that he’d once bitten a BBC colleague during a newsroom argument.”I wouldn’t sink my teeth into someone; that would be derivative,” he told Pandora. The Big Blue needs to slim down and modernise if it is to carry on competing successfully in the global IT business.. * Damien Hirst is getting back into the London restaurant scene, two years after his Notting Hill eating-house, Pharmacy – a spiritual home of the Cool Britannia movement – was forced to close its doors for good. The artist himself – who has now moved from London to rural Dorset – became personally involved in the project last month.”There are a range of large bar and restaurant plots being built around the Eurostar terminal,” I’m told.

IBM was in a position to offer these “end-to-end” solutions.They also recognised that things were going to fragment further as the internet and digital networks ­developed, which would require larger and more sophisticated servers to manage the ever-increasing flow of digital data All this played into the traditional strengths of IBM. It was developed into a huge software business, having bought the likes of Lotus, with its famous Notes software, in a hostile bid in 1995.However, the company is now realising that size is not everything. More nimble, lower-cost rivals such as India’s Wipro are eating into IBM’s traditional business. In 1993 Louis Gerstner, the former American Express and RJR Nabisco hero, was hired to save it from likely extinction. Although it failed to dominate the global PC market, Mr Gerstner at least recognised its sheer scale could save it in an IT world becoming increasingly complicated and fragmented.As technology suppliers multiplied, Mr Gerstner and his team correctly predicted that companies would want experts to offer solutions to integrate all this new kit that somehow connected together but came from a plethora of suppliers.