Spectator Life

Over five decades, I have been lucky enough to witness some of the great rock concerts of our time. Bob Dylan at Blackbushe in the late 1970s, The Everly Brothers Reunion Concert at the Albert Hall in the early 1980s, The Rolling Stones at New York’s Shea Stadium in the 1990s and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Paris a few years after that.  If that sounds overheated and inappropriately ecstatic I refuse to apologise There are many others but those are the first to light up my memory bank. Now add Taylor Swift’s Eras concerts at Wembley stadium to that list. Three nights last weekend and another five nights to come in August, this is one of the great events in modern popular music.

Prius owners are always demanding more legislation against drink driving, but an advantage of living in America is that if you are too trashed to drive home, your 15-year-old kid can pick you up from the bar. The only problem with this is that we Americans love reckless driving too much to let anyone else take the wheel. Drink driving is one of our great illegal freedoms. Actually, it’s called ‘buzzed’ driving in the States, and as we like to say, ‘it’s only illegal if you get caught.’  Driving while intoxicated is about the rights enshrined in the Constitution Justin Timberlake was caught indeed in the early hours of Tuesday morning after a policeman in the Hamptons saw him swerve between lanes and blow through a stop sign.

The son of the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, imaginatively named Marco Pierre White Jr, has been convicted of theft and sentenced to 41 weeks in prison. The former heroin addict briefly became a reality star after a stint on Celebrity Big Brother, but has since reverted to bad behaviour, being imprisoned in 2018 for stealing from Tesco and racially abusing a security officer.  His conviction this time was for taking £1,760 worth of clothes from a shop in Bath, £72 from a Sports Direct in Bristol, and £250 from the till at a deli in Bath. He was caught because of an unedifying complication as he climbed out of the deli window: his trackie bottoms were pulled down and his hoodie pulled up, so he emerged almost naked, like a peeled sausage.

I had always been interested in politics but had not done anything practical until the rise of Nigel Farage’s Ukip. He was proving a thorn in the side of David Cameron in 2013, which attracted my admiring attention, so I decided to try and get involved. Despite having done my bit for European unity by fathering a half-French daughter and a half-Austrian son, I had always been fundamentally hostile to the EU – an artificial and undemocratic structure inimical to British interests and traditions – so it seemed obvious that Ukip was the party for me. A large poster of me was defaced with a Hitler moustache – an episode I found deeply humiliating I was summoned to a hotel in Gillingham, Kent, for a test to see if I was suitable for the approved list of Ukip candidates.

Keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman once described progressive rock as the ‘porn of the music industry; you bought an album under the counter in a brown paper bag’. He was no doubt referring to the genre’s mid-1970s nadir when punk burst onto the scene and nicked all the cool kids, leaving the nerds to their embarrassing flares and concept albums. Fast forward 50 years and it’s the nerds who prevail. Anyone out there still listening to Sham 69? These are the marginalised, workaday Brits you rarely get to see on television anymore Yes, the proggiest of the 1970s rock behemoths, is on tour again with an album of new material in the pipeline. Wakeman quit the band years ago leaving 77-year-old guitar maestro Steve Howe as the only remaining member from the classic line up.

I recently had an encounter with Oliver Cromwell’s hat which, these days, rests on a bespoke hat-rest in the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon. It’s an astonishing piece of craftsmanship being far wider than any normal hat at nearly three feet across. The perfectly horizontal brim is constructed from thick black felt and the central head-holding part is a cylinder that rises sharp and perpendicular, like a chimney pot from a roof.  What is absent from small museums like this, mercifully, is the over-bearing hand of a committee of arts graduates What a sight he must have been, wearing this extraordinary hat, at the dissolution of the Rump Parliament in 1653, railing at the politicians: Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

When Rishi Sunak proposed national service for 18-year-olds as the first big idea of his election campaign, my initial thought was: absolutely, bring it on. But then I had a second thought, which was that if Sunak was trying to boost the Conservative vote, rather than the nation’s preparedness, his big idea probably wasn’t going to fly. Younger voters would recall their 18-year-old selves and reject the whole prospect out of hand – as would parents, concerned that their now not so little Harrys (and Hannahs) might be sent off to fight in Ukraine. Meanwhile, all those older people agreeing that the nation’s youth could do with some toughening up will probably be voting Tory anyway.

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is the epitome of Hollywood masculinity. His on-screen magnetism and talk show couch affability have endeared him to millions. Now though, the Rock seems to be crumbling.  Johnson first forged his identity in the testosterone-fuelled world of professional wrestling The Rock, who has referred to himself as ‘the hardest worker in the room’, has developed a reputation in the industry for his lateness and lack of professionalism on set. In April, the Hollywood trade publication The Wrap published a exposé, one that cast The Rock in the most unflattering of lights. According to the piece, The Rock used to pee in a bottle during movie shoots, rather than use the restroom – you know, like a respectable, housetrained human being.

I first heard it in the spring of 1999 from a bloke who was sitting behind me at a West Ham game. It concerned David Beckham and Victoria Adams of the Spice Girls, who were then on their way to becoming the UK’s most prominent celebrity couple. They were set to marry that summer – and they particularly wanted to book an Essex country hotel for the event, he told me. But his friend of a friend had long since secured the booking on the day in question for his own wedding. On learning this, Beckham had been so keen on getting the coveted slot himself that he had offered to pay for the friend of a friend’s entire wedding if he moved it to a later date – and, as an extra sweetener, he would pay off his mortgage too.

As predictably as the tides, as welcome as a pebble in your shoe, the bogus question of ‘who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays?’ is in the news again. Jodi Picoult, the writer, thinks that Emilia Bassano (aka Aemilia Lanier), the daughter of a musician, must have had a hand in them, because, she says, Juliet is 13 in Romeo and Juliet, and Bassano was forced to become a mistress at that exact age. This despite the fact that in the play Juliet isn’t forced to love Romeo, and that Bassano was in her late teens when she became Lord Hunsdon’s mistress. Not convinced? In Othello, Desdemona’s servant is called  – wait for it – Emilia! I don’t know about you, but that clinches it for me.

As we are reaching 100mph, I can hear the muted sirens and see blue lights reflecting on gawping onlookers. I’m neither an officer, nor a criminal but I’m in the back of a police car on my way to an incident that apparently involves two men fighting in the middle of a road. I am a celebrity gossip columnist by trade so the only abusive men I deal with are usually the likes of Jeremy Clarkson (via Twitter) and lecherous millionaires (at 5 Hertford Street). I feel scared of what I’ll see when we arrive at the scene, but I have long been curious about the Met – whose misconduct I feel as though I read about on a near daily basis – and curious too about the people who work there. So, a few months ago, I signed up for a ride-along.

My son and various well-meaning friends have been advising me to abandon writing history books and cash in on the trend for boarding school misery memoirs. On the face of it, as someone who was sent away aged seven and remained in these institutions until I was 18, I am well qualified to add my contribution to what has now become a recognised sub-genre of English literature. My problem, though, is that I quite enjoyed my time at boarding schools and I cannot claim – as so many do – that it adversely affected my life; rather the reverse. In his extended essay ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell recorded his awful schooldays at St Cyprians, a snobbish boys preparatory school in Eastbourne.

In Gerald Weiner’s book The Secrets of Consulting, there is a case study in which a bright MBA graduate tells a giant multinational burger chain to eliminate just three sesame seeds from each bun to save the company $126,000 a year, under the assumption that none of the customers will notice. This works, so the next year they remove five sesame seeds, and, each year or two, they remove some more, until the bun is barely recognisable. Suddenly, nobody buys their burgers anymore. I get the sense that nothing on the internet really works – or at least no longer works for us I would suggest that the same thing has happened to the internet.

Three years ago, I started employing actors, when I had my first play in the Brighton Fringe. I always think they slightly disapprove of me as I’m a fidget and tend to leave rehearsals early (as I remarked to my husband and co-writer of the latest one as we hightailed it off to the pub one day after only an hour of watching our cast run lines: ‘We didn’t ask them to sit in the room and watch us write the ruddy thing, did we?’) but I love to observe them. In fact, I find it almost too affecting an experience, which could explain my reluctance to watch them too much. That and being a booze-hound. I even made up a word, ‘limberessence’ - a fusion of limbo, limbering up and luminescence - which describes that perfect moment between privacy and performance.

One of the things I really regret is that I didn’t spend more time down the British Legion with my dad. I was a bit snooty about it, I suppose. All those ex-squaddies talking about the army and playing darts and having a pint or two.I was an indie-kid, heading to university to read English. I preferred Camden to Greenford. But now I’d choose the Legion any day. And if more us don’t then you might see your local club closing as a result of the cheap pints at a local Wetherspoons. I realise now that the old British Legion clubs and the Legion itself is of such importance that we need a national drive to support it. To get into one of the clubs you need a membership, but that’s not difficult. Everyone is welcome, even with no connection to the military at all.

I must admit to being somewhat taken aback on reading – in a new survey by the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index, whatever that is when it’s at home – that we women of Blighty are sadder and more ‘stressed’ than our sisters on the European mainland. Odd because I’ve always found us a cheerful bunch; after all, we were churning out the Carry On films, graced with Babs Windsor’s lusty chuckle, while French, Italian and Scandinavian film actresses were all looking like they’d lost a fiver and found a euro.