SIR – I was surprised to read that Marks & Spencer has permission from Westminster City Council to demolish its fine Art Deco Marble Arch store (report, November 26).

Why are we allowing our cities to become so ugly? Soon they will all look the same.

Any long shot of London now fills one with dismay. Images of our long-loved and admired buildings are now dominated by hideous monstrosities.

Have our architects simply lost or abandoned their sensibilities? They design nothing of value, nothing of beauty and nothing that will last. Is there a global conspiracy to make us all feel depressed? If so, it’s working.

Barbara Davy
Ilkley, West Yorkshire

SIR – On the many television antique shows Art Deco objects are greeted with reverence and appreciated for their part in artistic dialogue, yet a building like this can be flattened.

The store was built in an era when big changes were sweeping through our social culture and, as such, it should be left in Oxford Street as part of our retail heritage.

Avril Wright
Snettisham, Norfolk

Falklands play

SIR – May I offer some context to the controversy over The Falklands Play by Ian Curteis (Obituaries, November 26).

I was the controller of BBC One at the time and read the script in early draft. I judged it nowhere near good enough yet to justify investing a lot of licence-payers’ money. I had no problem with Curteis’s pro-Thatcher point of view at all, but it needed a lot of rewriting, not least the dialogue.

For example, I recall General Galtieri being required to gaze out of the Casa Rosada window exclaiming that Margaret Thatcher “embodied the spirit of Elizabeth the First and Winston Churchill”. Another example had Willie Whitelaw saying: “Argentina, isn’t that where the nuts come from?” Really?

In the somewhat highly charged political atmosphere of the time, Ian mistook every script suggestion as an attempt to get him to change his point of view. I asked him to clarify his view of the sinking of the Belgrano, as this wasn’t clear in his script. He publicly described my call as an attempt to get him to condemn the sinking.

There was an important play in there somewhere, which the normal process of script editing and development could have delivered. Tumbledown, the film by Charles Wood (starring a very young Colin Firth), to which I gave the green light at the same time, was about how disgracefully Commander John Lawrence, who had the top of his head blown off in the conflict, was treated by the Army establishment on his return. It was not anti-Falklands, anti-Thatcher or political in any narrow sense.

Ian Curteis was an iconic television dramatist to whom we owe the “historical docu-drama” genre. I greatly regret his politicisation of the normal editorial process that made it impossible to develop his script into a work to match his previous ground-breaking efforts.

Lord Grade of Yarmouth
London SW1

GPs out of reach

SIR – After a bout of viral pneumonia, I had what I thought could be a fungal infection. I bought a cream, but my symptoms were atypical so I followed the advice to seek medical attention.

An attempt to get a GP appointment resulted in a most embarrassing discussion with a receptionist (Letters, November 25), followed by a text. This did not contain the expected appointment details, but informed me that a prescription had been sent to a pharmacist – for the product I had bought in the first place.

I wasn’t aware that the introduction of remote consultations removed the requirement for a clinician, at the very least, to speak to a patient. I’m surprised that I can get a prescription after a chat with a receptionist.

Carole Molyneux
Heswall, Wirral