NOW I'm not the world's greatest art buff (which is something of an understatement). However, I know what I like and there's plenty of great art - and that includes music, theatre and film - that I appreciate.

And that's the thing with art; one man's masterpiece is another's pile of Turner Prize entries.

One particular hatred of mine is the way in which some people insist that if you don't have a great knowledge about art you can't appreciate it properly. The time of people you see on Newsnight's Friday review show. Artistic snobs to a man.

It's a bit like saying you need an intimate knowledge of the internal combustion engine to appreciate driving a particularly beautiful car.

Anyway, I digress.

Last night the BBC in Wales returned to one of its favourite subjects - the late painter Sir Kyffin Williams. A fawning, forelock-tugging piece on its main bulletin was dedicated to the unveiling of the artist's last "masterpiece" - a study of a sunset on Anglesey - and the showing of a variety of sketches, paintings and other artefacts bequeathed to the National Library in Aberystwyth.

I don't get the BBC's insistence that Sir Kyffin was a great Welshman and a genius. I'm sure he was very talented but his work looks somewhat infantile to me.

But the highlight of last night's piece was when the BBC reporter, in hushed tones, sat with one of the National Library's archivists who, donning white gloves, showed the watching millions (I exaggerate, as the Simpsons were on Sky at the same time) some of Sir Kyffin's artefacts.

These included his passport which our intrepid reporter told us breathlessly dated back "to the 1970s".

Is it me?

WOULD there have been more of a fuss if it had been David Blunkett rather than Jack Straw asking Muslim women to remove their veils?

Or if he'd asked particularly ugly visitors to his surgeries to put one on?

RECORD of the week time and I point you towards XTC's excellent Skylarking' album.

Released in 1986, it is for my money the best of a batch of terrific albums from the Wiltshire band through the Eighties and early Nineties.

Produced somewhat bizarrely by heavy rock god Todd Rundgren, Skylarking' follows a pastoral theme throughout with most songs segued into each other (a bit of a pain when downloading individual tracks).

Highlights include the Beatley Earn Enough For Us', the summery Grass', and the atheist rant Dear God'. Full of echoes of the psychedelic era mixed with New Wave sensibilities, it was never a big hit but gained XTC massive popularity on US college radio.

If they had toured more (lead singer Andy Partridge suffered from crippling stage fright), XTC would have been one of the biggest bands on the planet - but then they probably wouldn't have continued to released idiosyncratic classics like this.