Spectator Life

I wanted to hate it. In the weeks leading up to my trip to Paris, I was told incessantly about how much of a dump it was, about how I'd be faced with overflowing bins and skilled pickpockets. I was even warned against drinking the tap water.  According to some, to be properly British means hating the French. And there's plenty to take against: rude waiters, deliberate incompetence in maintaining their side of the Channel crossing, awkward double-cheek kissing, obsessiveness about cheese, astounding corruption in farming subsidies. My trip to France had one rule: do not enjoy it. Do not let them win. But I have a confession to make. It wasn’t long before I realised that perhaps not all elements of the French character are détestable.

Off to my old manor, the Globe theatre, to join a celebratory gathering of thems and theys for I, Joan, a non-binary telling of the Joan of Arc story. The show has caused no shortage of outrage in various communities on the left, centre and right, and has had the Globe labelled as misogynist by feminists of a certain generation. It is a great compliment to the Globe that even though it only opened in 1997, it is already held so dear that whatever happens there is quickly amplified into a broader debate. In my time as artistic director, we had one Sun front page ridiculing our engagement with foreigners; then later a concerted pile-on from left and right when we had the temerity to invite both Israelis and Palestinians to an international festival.

It is the evening of 30 May 1984. The country’s leading architects have assembled at Hampton Court to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the body that represents their interests, the RIBA. It is a sea of black polo necks, masculine chit-chat and clinked glasses. Given that the ‘R’ in RIBA stands for ‘Royal’ – albeit an honour actually awarded by William IV in 1837, three years after the Institute of British Architects’ founding – it is perhaps no surprise that a royal has been drafted in to politely murmur some congratulations over dinner. Yet what happened next was most certainly not expected.

I have a deep-seated hatred of the hospitality QR code. It ripped through the industry as part of questionable social-distancing initiatives during the pandemic, taking the place of menus and human interaction – and has stubbornly refused to disappear, making my heart sink when I find one sellotaped to the table of a bar or restaurant. However, there’s one hospitality QR code that I found myself developing a fondness for – the one that comes with Pret a Manger’s coffee subscription. Launched in September 2020, the scheme is a financial godsend for coffee addicts.

It’s the area that unites James Bond, Rick Wakeman and both Queen Elizabeths. In the first of our series looking at the quirky history and fascinating trivia of London’s postcode areas, we explore the delights to be found in W (West) – everything from fake houses to shaky newsreaders to dukes who are women… The BBC News TV studios are mounted on enormous steel springs to prevent the damage that would otherwise be caused by the Bakerloo line, which runs underneath Portland Place, right down the side of New Broadcasting House. Can’t have vibrations from the Tube trains sending Huw Edwards all wobbly, can we? The same problem was faced by the radio studios that used to occupy the basement – you would occasionally hear the trains on air.

As a city-dweller for 34 years, I am used to the hustle and bustle of other people. Cars, sirens, strangers chatting in the street: it’s the background noise of everyday life, a comforting reminder that you’re never alone. So when I moved to the Suffolk countryside in April last year, I found it a bit of a shock. Pregnant, freelance, with a husband often in London for work, I had a two-year-old for company, few friends and a big empty house overlooking fields, sky – and not much else. It's a 20-minute drive to the nearest town, and there’s nothing but a ramshackle pub in walking distance. We switched to online shopping for convenience, so I didn’t even have the weekly trip to the supermarket to fall back on.

In a corner of St Pancras station, Tracey Emin is always turned on. ‘I want my time with you’, a neon sculpture by the artist, has been on show here since 2018. It was part of the ‘annual’ Terrace Wires public arts programme, in which a new work is commissioned every year to hang from the station’s roof; but the pandemic distended time, and Emin’s words have stayed put. Though a new commission was unveiled yesterday, an installation by Shezad Dawood, that hangs on different wires, elsewhere in the terminus. Assembled from bright pink tubes, and shaped like Emin’s looping script, ‘I want my time with you’ looms over the grand Victorian concourse that sends the Eurostar to the continent.

There on my television screen, in a somewhat surreal sequence, was Boris Johnson contemplating the women in his life. And suddenly before me appeared the famous Wyatt features: first eyes, then a nose and then a mouth, right into camera. Medium-range shot and then a close-up. Ah, we had faces then. And then I looked harder, and my blood turned to Freon. It was just a large photograph of me stuck on a 10ft projector screen. Couldn’t those cheapskates at Sky have got a goddamn actress instead of a Polaroid?  As it turns out, This England, the Kenneth Branagh series about my old friend Boris, is more Psycho than psychodrama. Someone in the make-up department seems to have thought they were remaking What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

The good news – apparently; I haven’t seen it yet so this may just be a false rumour – is that House of the Dragon episode 6 is really exciting, full of incident and drama and intriguing, well-drawn characters. But the bad news, as I can personally testify, is that in order to reach that point you have to wade through five whole hours’ worth of ball-breaking tedium. Admittedly, even the original Game of Thrones used to do this a bit on occasion: episode after episode of characters talking to apparently little purpose, then suddenly the Red Wedding. But the difference was, you never doubted that the story was going somewhere, and that the whole was underpinned by the mighty creative vision of an obsessive world-builder who had mulled over every detail for eons.

Men do not come to see James Bond movies for the sensitive brooding of an ageing spy. They come for the car, the bikini and the volcano. This is apparently lost on some people in Hollywood – the same people who occupy the unfortunate position of actually making James Bond movies. The Daily Telegraph reports: 'The next James Bond films will have bigger roles for women and a more sensitive 007, according to the producers.' Variety quotes producer Barbara Broccoli saying 'Bond is evolving just as men are evolving', adding: 'I don’t know who’s evolving at a faster pace.' I have a difficult time believing that any fan of James Bond ever expressed a desire for the greatest secret agent in the history of film to be more in touch with his feelings.

It's a well-known fact that Michael Palin is a 'national treasure'. Or so you are told just about every single time the travel presenter and writer appears on television or features in a newspaper interview. So it was with grim inevitably that a few days before the first instalment of his latest expedition, Michael Palin: Into Iraq, aired on Channel 5 on Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times both felt it imperative to describe him with this phrase. Never mind that he's no doubt utterly sick of this lazy cliché – objectively, it's a misleading misnomer.

For the finale of the #FreeBritney franchise, it seems that the 2000s Queen of Pop is to return to music. Recent reports have claimed that Britney Spears will be collaborating with Elton John on a song titled 'Hold Me Closer'. As exciting as this is, I can’t help but think that – seeing as her conservatorship was ended less than a year ago by a court ruling – she may be biting off more than she can chew. I question if she is truly ready to return to the inevitable pressure that comes with being in the public eye. I’m no therapist, but the treatment that Britney has endured over the past 14 years surely has to have lasting mental effects on the star’s health.

Three episodes in I think I’ve worked out the thing that’s most annoying about The Rings of Power. It isn’t the gratuitously diverse casting. It isn’t the saccharine tweeness of the hobbity Harfoots. It isn’t the ‘You go girl!’ tediousness of the relentless female character heroics. It’s that the entire series appears to have been constructed with all the charm, flair, character, originality and artistry of an Ikea wardrobe. Take the scene where Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and her fellow shipwreck victim Halbrand arrive – looking ludicrously healthy for a duo who till recently spent days clinging desperately to a raft of the Medusa – in the city state of Numenor.