From the South Downs to North London and Babel by Wildworks, the theatre company which last year had a hit with The Passion in Port Talbot. That had the mesmeric Michael Sheen as a secularised Jesus (you did not seriously expect a contemporary Passion play to make the Messiah religious, did you?) and the tunefully rowdy Manic Street Preachers as part of the finale. A cast of a thousand mainly civilian actors made the trek to Calvary. 

By way of a follow-up, we were offered a vague adaptation of the Babel legend in Caledonian Park, near Holloway prison. The only possible explanation for the venue was that it had a clock tower, which is very nice for Holloway but hardly a coup de théâtre in itself.

I wouldn't bother you with all this, were it not very telling about the vogue for immersive drama and its limitations. Babel was woefully thin on form, content and execution. The sole reason it got anywhere near being produced, let alone on this scale, with several London theatres and the Battersea Arts Centre involved, was that it promised London a big immersive event of its own.

So we shuffled through the bushes at dusk in search of something worth watching. "Look closer, stay a little longer," pleaded a woman in a tatty armchair somewhere in the foliage. A tent featured knitted versions of London sights: knit one, purl one for the London Eye, which is impressive, for about 30 seconds.

The message seemed to be that diverse London is a Babel of its own, but that we have become alienated from each other. Well I never.