Spectator Life

Not since the pursuit of Peter Rabbit around Mr McGregor’s garden has rural drama been writ so large. From behind the wheel of his Lamborghini tractor, Jeremy Clarkson’s face crumples as the nine-ton machine rolls back over a field mouse – only to erupt into joy as the mouse emerges unscathed from beneath the wheel. A decade ago, the Top Gear host was fending off outrage after sharing on Twitter an image of a rodent squashed by the show’s film crew. Today, the petrolhead is a man transformed, his compassion for nature and enthusiasm for rural life lighting up our screens in Clarkson’s Farm, the Amazon Prime series documenting his attempts to run a 1,000-acre farm in the Cotswolds.

It happens a couple of times a week: in parks, usually; sometimes outside shops, on Tube trains or in pubs. ‘What kind of dog is he?’ they’ll ask. I answer: ‘Bearded collie crossed with a greyhound which comes out looking like a deerhound but is actually a lurcher.’ But this is pointedly preceded by: ‘She’s a…’ I don’t like to be rude when strangers are being interested and congenial, but I feel compelled to quietly make the point that the dog they’re expressing interest in is not a he but a she.  News emerged this month that God might be becoming gender neutral.

Harry and Meghan have yet to publicly speak about last week’s episode of South Park, presumably because they don’t have the staff left to formulate a press release. But California sources claim that Meghan has spent the past few days 'upset and overwhelmed' about how she was portrayed. If you’ve read anything about Harry and Meghan over the past three years, you’d think the pair would be delighted with how South Park parodied them. The entire episode, titled 'The Worldwide Privacy Tour', gives them enough fodder to moan for a few more books… or Netflix documentaries… or Spotify podcasts. Meghan can cry about how she is a victim of misogyny and Harry can claim that this was all a narrative concocted by the big, bad press.

New experiences are always good. Meeting new people is always good. This is what I tell myself when my friend Rae invites me to go speed dating. At the age of 42. ‘Am I not too old?’ I ask her. She reassures me that I am not, but I have my doubts. A woman old enough to remember landlines is surely not who the eligible young gentlemen of Kent are looking to meet on a night out in a bar. But Rae is running the event as a fundraiser, so if I spend my night talking to a series of youngsters who think Miley Cyrus was the first to sing ‘Like A Prayer’, it's all in a good cause. On the train there, I suddenly realise that this isn't actually the worst thing that could happen. I might bump into someone I know.

The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish. The only problem was, he wasn’t Irish – he was American and so were his parents and probably grandparents. ‘Pain lasts a long time,’ he assured me. What struck me about this encounter was not that it was typical of my Gen Z generation but that it was so obviously cringe-inducing – a sort of hackneyed pick-up line. Another student at the same bar – sporting an orange mullet and a thong as a T-shirt – tried to convince me my age was a social construct.

The secret of any great sitcom is the delicate balance of sit and com. Mess the 'sit' bit up and you lose the 'com'. Del Boy without Nelson Mandela House is as unthinkable as Alan Partridge without his 'grief hole' (aka the Linton Travel Tavern), which is why both of these characters eventually came unstuck. Sending the Grace Brothers' employees on holiday to Costa Plonka in the 1977 Are You Being Served? feature-length comedy fell flat because, devoid of petty department store politics, the characters had no reason to exist – thus audiences felt cheated.  Remove tightly written characters from their uncomfortable surroundings and viewers stop caring.

Hearing about the death of Burt Bacharach at the age of 94, I thought of one word: maestro. The word is variously defined as ‘a master, usually in an art’ (Merriam-Webster) or ‘a man who is very skilled at playing or conducting’ (Cambridge), but my favourite is the beautiful simplicity of the Longman definition: ‘Someone who can do something very well.’ The good (Brian Wilson: ‘He was a hero of mine and very influential on my work… he was a giant’), the bad (Billy Corgan: ‘A titan of beautiful and effortless song’) and the ugly (Mick Hucknall: ‘Farewell, genius’) of the music business spoke as one on this loss, with my favourite post coming from Noel Gallagher: ‘RIP Maestro. It was a pleasure to have known you.

It was announced today that Lilt, the drink with the ‘totally tropical taste’, is being discontinued three years before its 50th anniversary. The drink will be rebranded as part of the ‘Fanta family’. A senior representative from Coca Cola, the parent company, has sought to ‘reassure Lilt’s loyal fanbase that absolutely nothing has changed when it comes to the iconic taste of the drink they know and love’. Well, we aren’t reassured. How can these people expect us loyal Lilt drinkers to trust them when they didn’t even have the decency to give us advanced warning of their plans and time to come to terms with this shock – and, more importantly, stockpile? Lilt matters.

After Prince Harry’s first date with the future Duchess of Sussex, he repaired to a friend’s house off the King’s Road. ‘Out came the tequila,’ he recalls in his much-discussed autobiography, Spare. ‘Out came the weed. We drank and smoked and watched… Inside Out.’ Meghan, however, interrupted his stoned reverie by Facetiming him, and immediately asked: ‘Are you watching cartoons?’ Harry replied: ‘No. I mean, yeah. It’s… Inside Out.’ It was, he recalls, ‘good weed, dude’. The quality of the Disney film, he doesn’t mention – though his pointed double use of ellipses around its title suggests it perhaps has some significance in relation to this new girlfriend.

A transgender woman and a non-binary person dressed as Satan walk into a bar. That’s not the beginning of a bad joke, but the defining performance of the 65th Grammy awards, held in Los Angeles on Sunday.  You may have seen the clips. The singer Sam Smith wore what appeared to be a terrible Halloween costume: red high heels and a red hat with devil horns. He clomped around the stage performing 'Unholy' with Kim Petras, who was in a cage surrounded by flames and whip-wielding dominatrices.

Field sex is, I believe, an experience that unites those from all walks of life. Whether it was a drunken fumble, a discreet teenage quickie hidden from your parents or a planned act to inject some spice into your waning marriage, plenty of us have felt the vulnerability of walking to the car with a muddy back, anxiously wondering if we’d been spotted by a dog walker.  Admittedly, field sex etiquette isn’t something that I’ve put much thought into. But after Prince Harry’s older woman (two years older to be exact) laid bare her five-minute rendezvous with the adolescent royal, it got me thinking about the right way to do it.  The California-based prince is getting a bit of stick over this story.

The hashtag 'gym creep' now has more than 37.3 million views on TikTok. Honestly, I’ve watched hundreds of these videos and the only weird behaviour I can spot in any of the clips is from the women recording the unsuspecting men while they work out. 'Watch this creep,' the lady will say as a confused male just happens to glance at the camera that’s been shoved in front of him. Scandalous! Gina Love is one of these women. The TikTokker, whose feed mainly consists of her trying on different shades of lipgloss, went viral after posting a video of her doing deadlifts, supposedly catching out one of these so-called #gymcreeps. 'Watch this creep come over to my personal bubble while doing Romanian deadlifts,' Love wrote.

Reading that Madonna has decided to cancel the film about her life that she has been working on for the past two years, I felt a pang of sorrow. The biopic sounded like the biggest vanity project ever attempted – and thus promised to be an excellent ‘mock-watch’, as I’ve named the cinematic equivalent of the ‘hate-read’. In the specific case of biopics (always an easy thing to get wrong when one person imitates another, often with hilarious results), perhaps ‘sham-shaming’ is even better. Madonna was reported to be directing, producing and co-writing the film with the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, who has since moved on to the live-action Powerpuff Girls, obviously keen to get to grips with some real women of substance.

I simply love being sober. Isn’t it fun? Being totally level-headed throughout the day. Why would you want a glass of red when you can substitute some cranberry juice? January is just the perfect time to give up all of your vices because you get to hear, collectively, how great everybody feels. How much more productive and energetic your pals are after swapping out the sauvignon blanc for sparkling water. I’ll probably never have a drink again. I don’t even think about it. Then there’s the exercise. The only thing better than putting down the bottle is doing it amid multiple gym classes. HIIT class on Mondays, the best day of the week. Then I get to meet up with Jenny for Zumba on Wednesdays. Get those hips moving! Ahhh, I just adore it. Don’t you?

The HR department has killed day-to-day divadom. No longer can you tell your co-worker that her hair needs a good brush; nor can you explain to Richard from accounts that his tan brogues and shiny blue suit sting your retinas. That might upset them. People would be a lot more presentable if you could say these things, but you can’t. Nobody can.  French actress Eva Green, who starred as James Bond’s love interest in Casino Royale, seems to have escaped the great diva slap-down. She was at the High Court this week suing White Lantern Films over a $1 million fee for a film that never got made. It seems Green and the producers had artistic differences over the budget, location and preparations.

The letter was polite but to the point. The PR firm where I’d applied for a job thanked me for my time but told me I hadn’t been successful. The position was going to someone else. Ouch. This wasn’t the first time I’d been rejected, of course – and it certainly wasn’t the last. I’ve been dumped, ditched by friends and overlooked for work more times than I can remember. Who hasn’t? Not even the most successful among us is immune, as Sir Ian Rankin, 62, who has sold more than 20 million books, admitted last month. ‘I have had all kinds of projects turned down,’ he told the Write-Off with Francesca Steele podcast. ‘The rejections are abrupt. They are not at all apologetic, the buggers.

What a year it’s been for sex on TV. As we emerge blinking from the annual glut of televisual entertainment, I can’t get over how far we’ve come. Bridgerton, Babylon Berlin, Lady Chatterley… everybody’s at it, with no period in history so tragic that a few cheap thrills can’t be extracted from it. If you’d have told the teenage me that in my lifetime I’d see a comedian with breasts playing a piano with a penis on television, I’d have very much approved; having seen Jordan Gray do so on Channel 4’s Friday Night Live last year, I wish I hadn’t. Sex on TV has been such a long, strange ride.

On a recent Sunday evening, the Shaftesbury Theatre in Soho was packed to the gills with a crowd celebrating a dramatic tribute to a landlord: the best kind of landlord, the landlord of a pub. And not just any old pub, but the pub he ruled with an iron fist for 63 years until his retirement in 2006. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Norman Balon, sole proprietor of the legendary Coach and Horses. ‘London’s rudest landlord’, as he was known; it said so on the matchboxes. On for one night only, Norman Balon – It’s All True was a play written by the person who took over the lease, Alastair Choat.

To understand Bob Dylan’s Fragments – Time Out Of Mind Sessions (1996-1997) – due to be released on Friday – you have to go back half a century to the release of the Beatles’s Let It Be. As millions of fans around the world bought the band’s final album, Paul McCartney was horrified. This was not the disc he had conceived: some of the most cherished songs in his oeuvre had been hijacked by superstar producer Phil Spector, who stamped his trademark ‘Wall of Sound’ during the album’s post-production process, filling it with lavish embellishments. Fast-forward to the mid-1990s and another legendary songwriter was at loggerheads with a different superstar producer, then still a dominant force in the era of mega-selling records.

Only a mother could love a nepo baby – but there are some professions in which the far reach of the dead hand of nepotism strikes me as worse than others. In such frothy fields as modelling and television presenting, the prettiest face will still usually win out: look at Maya Jama, the new compere of Love Island, daughter of a teenager and a jailbird, who resembles a film star from the golden age of MGM – Fortuna’s apology for Brooklyn Beckham. Nepotism becomes far more damaging to the culture when it sidles out of light entertainment and into newspaper columns, novels and stand-up shows; when it moves the undeserving into jobs which need wit, because wit, unlike cheekbones, is something that can’t be inherited.

When I was a philosophy student at King’s College London in my early twenties, I came across a book called Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee. A history of western philosophy told through the story of the author’s relationship with it, it opens with a three- or four-year old Magee trying to catch himself falling asleep every night. Try as he might, he can never experience himself crossing the threshold from wakefulness into unconsciousness, a conundrum that keeps him in a state of ‘active mystification’. Magee spent the rest of his life like this, wrestling with the mysteries inherent in everyday experience. Far from being a fusty academic discipline with no relevance to the ‘real’ world, philosophy was, for him, an existential matter of immediate importance.