“SO who do you want to win the Turner Prize?” I asked my newsagent as I flipped through a paper. “Me?” he answered, astonished that I should even presume he had an opinion. “Tina, of course.”

The Turner Prize is too often seen as the territory of a close-knit cabal. And if once even the most excluded were tempted to play a part by cranking up their faux outrage at some predictable shock, of late, even the most irritable cab driver had begun to grow weary of such theatrics. The prize seemed in danger of stirring little except intense public apathy.

But this year things are different. This year a Turner show challenges you not to feel indifferent because, this year, its artists set out to connect with as wide an audience as they can.

Who, stepping into Simon Starling’s Shedboatshed, cannot relate to that dream of sailing off into the sunset, or to its rather less dramatic flip-side, retirement to the allotment shed? The ramshackle structure that greets you as you enter the galleries stands as a metaphor for art itself: a refuge for imagination and dreams. Intuition is the starting point of this work, in the same way it is for Darren Almond’s evocative video installation recording his grandmother’s visit to the site of her honeymoon 20 years after her husband’s death, for Jim Lambie’s rather less lyrical but equally immediate psychedelic installation, or even Gillian Carnegie’s tensely atmospheric paintings.

The Grand Guignol and eye-popping drama (except of course in the case of Lambie’s dizzy hallucinogenics) that have come to characterise Brit Art seem to have been put aside in favour of a maturer, more meditative, even poetic mood. A strong whiff of nostalgia (evoked most literally in Almond’s piano sonata soundtrack) percolates through the galleries, whether for some purer, pre-industrial world or the kitsch of the Sixties. Even painting, a bit like some superannuated Forces Sweetheart, makes a comeback — albeit by a woman who specialises in, among other things, producing images of her own backside.

Using the past as a stepping stone, these works seek a way forward, whether into the mysterious fourth dimension that lies inside Lambie’s mirrored reflections or towards a world in which the painted image can be relevant again. Carnegie’s subtly disconcerting images confront the problems of depiction. They question of what it means to translate a threedimensional object into a two-dimensional image. They undermine the very pictures that they create. Destroying what they also enjoy, they have a slow-burning, thought-provoking power.

But I would like to see Simon Starling’s Professor Pat Pending-style inventions take the prize. I like the mad ingenuity of his ideas, the utter ridiculousness combined with a mental acuity, the complete zaniness mixed with a careful authenticity, the comic effect with a sharp political insight.

This is an inclusive, encompassing show. Between them the four shortlisted artists produce anything from painting to sculpture, video to installation. But in the pieces that Starling describes as a “physical manifestation of his thought processes”, the conceptual and visual meet to recreate that quintessentially British quality of the visionary that can give art meaning in the widest world.

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