Music lover

AT the start there's much talk of him being "the giant of 20th Century English music" and "perhaps the greatest composer of symphonies this country has ever produced".

His music "for many encapsulates Englishness"

but there was - and here the warning bells start to ring - "far more to Vaughan Willams than wistful evocations of the English landscapes".

He was, it emerges, all for making music with the ladies as well as with orchestras.

Thank goodness for that, the idea of a 90- minute documentary about a composer who wasn't "an energetic, redblooded man, both of spirituality and passion" isn't that appealing to some of us.

So there you have it - the twin passions of Ralph Vaughan Williams: music and women. John Bridcut's portrait does a fine job in balancing the public and the private sides of the composer, with the aid of some of his ladies, male friends and observers.

If a director like Ken Russell had made this film, it would have been one long orgy with naked bodies writhing to the music of VW, as people like to call him.

This one behaves more responsibly, intercutting talking heads with performances of his work, forthright about his complicated love life, but not at the expense of examining the link between his relationships and his music.

We also learn that a swim off Robin Hood's Bay in Yorkshire nearly put an end to VW before he achieved success. He went for a swim, found the sea rougher than anticipated and couldn't get back to shore. He was on the point of giving up through a mixture of exhaustion and despair when a freak wave swept him right on to the shore.

Some good came of it - A Sea Symphony, the composition that put him on the musical map.

The film has an interview with Ursula, who died last year. She was what might be termed the other woman. He was 65, she was 27 when they met. They were both married to other people at the time.

He'd wed Adeline Fisher, a cousin of Virginia Woolf. By the time she was in her forties, painful arthritis saw her often confined to a wheelchair.

She and VW moved to Surrey to make life easier for her.

It was, someone says, "a high-minded marriage"

that played a close role in everything TWIN PASSIONS: Ralph Vaughan Williams was all for making music with the ladies as well as orchestras LIVE WARE: Donelle Woolford at the Baltic, Gateshead he did. He looked after her, became her carer but his eye wandered.

"I fell madly in love with him the first time I met him, most women did," says a female friend. Another admits: "I never expected him to be quite so gorgeous." This despite being compared to looking like a sack of potatoes by another friend (male, jealous probably).

He could be frightening and "had the rage of Zeus". Not that it seemed to bother Ursula, who pursued him while her army officer husband was away. They were kissing and past first base soon after meeting.

After Adeline's death, VW and Ursula married.

He was 80, she was 41. His life changed as he moved back to London and went travelling, although the creative urge never left him.

THERE isn't much creative about House Guest, ITV1's new daily afternoon series in which four strangers cook meals for each other. This is a formula that aficionados of C4's Come Dine With Me will recognise. The twist this time - just to prove the idea hasn't been pinched - is that one of the dinner guests also has to stay the night.

If it goes any further, the next variation will finding the guest having to sleep with the host and give them marks out of ten.

Inevitably, the diner who has to stay is the one who moans most about the hosts and the meal. Linda knocks off marks because of the "fumes" - she means smoke - from the log fire in the 16th Century cottage.

She turns down a bedtime drink because the only toilet is on the ground floor and she doesn't fancy a night-time trip down the spiral staircase from her upstairs bedroom. "I will keep liquids to a minimum," she says.