Shakespeare's sister.

Funny. The BBC are about to embark on yet another Shakespeare rehash (it's been at least 5 minutes since the last one), and it made me think, this morning, of the lazy way in which Shakespeare is bandied about.

In the Renault Clio ads, for example, Annelise says, browsing among some books, "Jules Verne, Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire," and he replies with "Shhhhhh..... akespeare," as if Shakespeare is the ZAP - Game Over bazooka that every kid needs to win an argument. The script demands that she makes a face at that moment, as if to concede the point, but why?

Apart from a kind of cultural imperialism and blinkered ignorance, it's kind of pathetic to keep falling back on Shakespeare, isn't it? The kind of last refuge of the sort of person who pretends to own artists and writers. "He's one of our best writers," they say. But the point here is that - whereas your average literate French person might indeed have read/seen Shakespeare's plays - most literate Brits haven't read Sartre, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Jules Verne, or anybody "foreign," and certainly not in the original language.

Which brings me, bizarrely, to the new Martina McBride record. Martina, in 2003, was a little light on good songs, in my opinion, certainly not up to the standard she set with Emotion a couple of years before that. Now she brings us Timeless which is a collection of so-called classic country songs. 18 of them. Jeez, but it goes on. Funnily enough, though, I preferred the second half of it.

Something about the project depresses me, in the "Shhh... akespeare," kind of way. There's nothing wrong with pulling out a few oldies and dusting them off, after all, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with her voice - fantastic as ever - or the standards of musicianship and production. No, for me, what let this set down are the arrangements, which are uninspired copies of the originals, in most instances. One of them - I think it was "I Can't Stop Loving You" is so ploddingly slow that I'm surprised that the drummer didn't fall asleep and drop off his stool.

After 6 or 7 tracks I was thinking this would be the one and only play this would get - I just don't like the style of old-time country songs - but as I said above, it picks up in the second half, with Buddy Holly's "True Love Ways," so I might give it another listen.

This isn't actually bad, but if you don't really like the songs, you're not going to enjoy this. It's country sounding as a lot of people imagine country still sounds, so not for the faint hearted, and not really for me, because I feel quite well served by country music since the mid-80s, and my only complaint is when people sing the praises of "trad" stuff like this. Still, she clearly doesn't care what I think, and she's at #1, so that's that.