Jerry Springer – The Opera has been getting glowing reviews. But Arnold Wesker writes that the praise isn’t deserved. “I have no religious sensibilities to offend but I do have an intelligence that can be offended. It’s not the poor black actor looking absurd in shit-filled diapers that offends, or the fat lady having no greater ambition than to pole-dance which so obviously is beyond her size and weight; it’s that in both the live Springer show and this celebration of it we are invited not to understand but either to laugh at them – which insults them – or, because they are all rather intimidatingly jolly about their offbeat desires, to laugh with them – which is patronising!”