How does the English National Opera get away with portraying Brünnhilde as a suicide bomber? “We confuse medium and message. In other words, more bluntly, if something – be it a person or an art form – is posh, it can play with as much fire as it likes, and if it isn’t, it can’t even play with matches. As Twilight of the Gods shows, this scheme obtains regardless of the gravitas the subject is actually accorded. If you’d seen a suicide bomber used this flippantly on Holby City, there’d have been resignations by now.”