The exhibition in the Sunley Room is accompanied by a nicely produced book (£8.50) and a video (£10.95) and really one needs to look at the pictures while reading Gombrich’s text. This is as erudite as one would expect and has a subtle and illuminating way of changing the subject from one painting to the next. “Shadows” is part of the National Gallery’s series of exhibitions called “The Artist’s Eye” People often just choose their favourite pictures. But Gombrich (whose favourite artist, incidentally, is Pissarro) wants to make us reflect on “the intriguing problem of how and why cast shadows were included and again excluded from the repertory of Western painters”.Wisely, he avoids the key moments when shadows were most deliberately excluded from early modern art, for instance in Matisse’s Fauvism. Though the exhibition is wide-ranging, its emphasis is on the 17th century, perhaps because the painting of that period was itself so emphatic More delicate effects are not forgotten. Gombrich points to the beautiful Portrait of a Gentleman by Giovanni Battista Mor-oni, to the fresh and dappled effects of Guardi and Tiepolo and the architectural, dignified shadows of such Dutch masters as Gerrit Berckheyde.Most of the paintings are taken from the National Gallery’s collection.

One or two works are added, notably David Allan’s The Origin of Painting from Edinburgh and William Collins’ Coming Events from Chatsworth. Nineteenth- century British naturalism ought to have been given a more prominent role, I feel. It produced some intense shadow painting and the best of all modern writing on shadows, not noticed by Gombrich, in the fourth volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters.! ‘Shadows’: National, WC2 (0171 839 3321), to 18 June. ‘The Story of Art’ is re-published on 24 Aug (Phaidon, £29.99).. This week Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer bring their unique

brand of humour back to BBC2.
“IN LAUGHTER all that is evil comes together, but is pronounced holy and absolved by its own bliss.” When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote those words, he clearly had Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer in mind. The strangest and most mischievous entertainers ever to attain mass popularity in this (and possibly any other) country, they have warped the brain patterns of an entire generation – and in a time of media-saturated knowingness, they have managed to recapture the innocence of vaudeville.Seated opposite Bob Mortimer, at a long, biscuit-laden table in a Groucho Club meeting room, Vic Reeves ponders that Nietszche quote.

“I suppose it means that if someone has bug eyes or goofy teeth you can’t laugh at them in the street, but you can do if they’re on stage.” Is it a performer’s duty to play up the things about them which people would feel guilty about laughing at had they not paid good money? “You have to exaggerate, yes. If you put us on stage talking about something very mundane, we wouldn’t get many laughs.”I’m not so sure. This is what Reeves & Mortimer sound like when they are talking about something very mundane – in this case, handwriting. “I was taught that Marion Richardson writing,” says Bob, “which is partly joined and partly not, then I poo-pahed the joined bit and now I print like a child.” “So Marion Richardson’s claim,” Vic muses, impressed, “was, ‘I’ve thought of a new form of writing where you don’t join up all the letters’.” His partner’s train of thought will not be derailed. “Girls who went to school in the late Seventies,” Bob continues, “have been taught to write with very large letters. I think David Cassidy is responsible for that.”On TV, the oblique wit which fuels such conversational flights of fancy is filtered through production values worthy of D W Griffith, if not Roger Corman.

Starting next Friday, the second series of BBC2’s The Smell of Reeves & Mortimer (Vic and Bob’s fourth multi-part TV excursion) begins thus: “August 1831. Bank Holiday Monday at the banqueting hall of King Henry VIII.” The furious monarch curses the head waiter over the minute portion of cheese on which he is expected to dine, before a series of poignant historical tableaux outline the history of the dairy product in question. A pulsating calypso/ voodoo number then conclusively establishes “the link between cottage cheese and evil”. “Edam,” Vic adds, by way of an afterthought, “has long been associated with necromancy.”This archetypal Vic and Bob routine might no longer have the novelty value that made the duo teen idols, but its underlying thrust is as sharp as ever. Given that culture is a thing we consume with the same gluttonous appetite with which we might approach a tasty meat or cheese product, why not savour the two pleasures in the same language? The key to Reeves & Mortimer’s appeal, now that the days of Number One singles are behind them, is knowing when to move on.

“Nicholas Parsons, Jim Bowen, Bob Holness – they’ve gone into a strange, untouchable area now,” Bob observes. “Fish you can’t really mention any more,” adds Vic, “but cucumbers and melons are coming back.”Now that they themselves are verging on institutional status, it is hard to remember how roughly Vic and Bob used to rub against the comic grain. When the Big Night Out first appeared – in a succession of “Hogarthian” south-east Lon-don pubs in the second half of the 1980s – the ideological tyranny of alternative comedy was at its height “It just didn’t interest me,” Vic remembers “I hate being preached to. I can make my own mind up, tell me something new.”In Vic’s case, something new meant a potent blend of old-fashioned light entertainment and the pure spirit of anarchy. After several years in factories, overseeing the manufacture of aeroplane parts, Jim Moir (as he was then) had had enough of humdrum to last him a lifetime.