Peter Rhodes on a celebrity infection, the future for theatre and something wizard from Oz

Useful clichés on the subject of easing lockdown. We are all in the same boat and we may soon take our foot off the brake but the light at the end of the tunnel may prove to be the sword of Damocles and if we jump the gun we may burn our bridges and the grapes of wrath will come home to roost.

Rita Wilson, Tom Hanks's wife, says she is mystified how she and her husband came to contract the virus: “It was early March, so people weren’t social distancing yet. But I was already doing no handshakes, no hugging, trying to take my own measures. Then on the plane to Australia. . . .” Aha, a plane to Australia, eh? I think we may have cracked this mystery. If a virus is looking for a new host, what could be better than a few hundred people locked together in a metal tube breathing recyled air and yawning and sneezing, as people do?

I worry how many theatres will ever re-open. How do you attract or keep an audience terrified of the next cough? If the film Shakespeare in Love is to be believed, it's an old, old issue. The Bard (Joseph Fiennes) laments: "The consumptives plot against me. Will Shakespeare has a play, let us go and cough through it.”

How lawyers make a living. First, one bunch gets paid for drawing up legal restrictions on walking and exercising during lockdown. Then another bunch of lawyers appeal against “unreasonable” fines imposed by the cops. Then a third group of lawyers fine-tune the regulations, a process which turns one A4 page of rules into something resembling War and Peace with more double-meanings and get-out clauses than you can shake a truncheon at. And then a fourth lot of lawyers make an even fatter living, challenging such proposals as what constitutes “a reasonable excuse” to be windsurfing up the Grand Union Canal or exercising 27 dogs in a single day.

The latest lockdown rules remind me of the hideously complicated old 1950 Shops Act which allowed you to buy Playboy magazine on a Sunday but not a Bible, and ruled that a fish-and-chip shop could sell any food on a Sunday – except fish and chips. The more complicated a statute, the more money it generates for the legal profession. The lockdown bonanza. Trebles all round, m'learned friends.

I've just enjoyed Ladies in Black, the 2018 Australian movie directed by Bruce Beresford and now available online. It is a gentle comedy of manners in 1950s Sydney . You keep expecting something terrible to happen but it doesn't. It's just a happy story and all the more welcome in these times. One reviewer put it nicely: “It achieves most of the small goals it sets for itself.” There is a lot to be said for setting modest targets. I speak as an expert.