Spectator Life

Every August, thousands of comedians make the pilgrimage to Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. By the end of the month, those who manage to stand out in this crowded field (and it is a very crowded field) might have Live at the Apollo or Netflix calling, or maybe even a sitcom commission. But this year, with performers facing hefty registration fees, rent more expensive than a luxury foreign holiday and exorbitant marketing campaigns, all in the midst of a cost of living crisis, more and more are asking: has the Fringe lost its edge? As the festival kicks off for its 75th year, comedian Vittorio Angelone says its culture seems to have changed.

The flights are booked, the passports are dusted down and it’s time to pack. But which books deserve space in your suitcase? Here, Spectator writers share their all-time favourite summer holiday reads… Matthew Parris My all-time favourite re-read at any time of year is Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. A very short novel with the kind of perfection a geometrical proof may command, it starts with the death of a group of travellers crossing a Peruvian rope bridge who are linked only by the fact that they were on the bridge when it snapped, and traces the life of each up until that point. Wilder’s quest is to discover whether there exists any divine plan. Toby Young For pure escapism, I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes is hard to beat.

The Tory leadership race may already have supplied plenty of entertainment – but sometimes the real drama begins when a new ruler actually takes power. Many films have examined what can happen when an inexperienced leader assumes control, from the Biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) to sci-fi blockbuster Dune (2021). Others have explored the challenges that face new leaders at the helm – whether it’s being duped into invasions, subduing those who don’t accept your rule or catching conspiracists. Here are ten that might make informative (or cautionary) viewing for the next Tory leader: The King (2019) – Netflix https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Last week, pictures of the actress Sienna Miller frolicking with glee in a tiny orange bikini in St Tropez with her boyfriend were widely shared. Miller is 40, and her boyfriend, the Burberry model Oli Green, is 25. Miller was described as looking 'incredible', a mixture of fantastic abs and, it was implied, exuberance at her still-strong, possibly intensifying sexual power. Women at 40 are a fascinating breed, treading a line of dubious width between youngish and middle aged; between fertility and its winding down. In past centuries, women were lucky (or unlucky) to get to 40.  Now the ether resounds with rhetoric about how empowering it is, how the follies of youth have been left and in their place come the burnished glories of still-attractive maturity.

This week Mad Men celebrates the 15th anniversary of the show’s debut. Elmer Wheeler’s famous phrase about the science of advertising holds as true today as it did when he originated it almost a century ago: ‘Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.' Matthew Weiner’s series cast the advertising profession under a jaundiced eye, examining the mores and morays of Madison Avenue advertising executives from 1960 to late 1970. The show made Jon Hamm (as Don Draper aka Dick Whitman) a star, as well as boosting the careers of other regular cast members including Elisabeth Moss, John Slattery, Jared Harris, and Christina Hendricks.

For a woman whose life was all about ascent, there is a cruel irony to the fact that Ivana Trump was found dead at the age of 73 at the bottom of the stairs of her Upper East Side apartment last Thursday. Born in 1949 in Communist Czechoslovakia, the girl whose father was an electrical engineer made her name on the basis of dizzying verticals: first as a professional skier and then as billionaire’s wife and manager of her second husband Donald Trump’s eye-bending skyscrapers in New York and Atlantic City. After her acrimonious tabloid divorce from Donald in 1991 following his affair with chorus-girl Marla Maples, Ivana made her name from surviving - and exposing - the indignities of her marriage’s collapse.

That’s another prime minister the Rolling Stones have outlasted. When the band first plugged in under that name at London’s Marquee Club on July 12, 1962, Harold Macmillan was in No. 10 dealing with the ‘little local difficulty’ of sacking a third of his cabinet. Then came Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Wilson again, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and now the soon-to-depart Boris Johnson. Thirteen administrations, an even dozen US presidents and six popes. And through it all the Stones themselves have just kept rolling along. Not bad for a band of misfits that everyone, including them, thought would last a year or two at most.

Bella Hull started standup six years ago. Back then, she lived in fear of a bad set being uploaded to YouTube, where a shaky camera and lacklustre crowd might stain any Google search of her forever. Now, due to the rise of video ‘reels’, popularised by TikTok, Instagram and YouTube during the pandemic, for Bella and other digital savvy comedians, creating online video is a necessity for reaching fresh, young, and more global audiences. Bella has been publishing funny short-form videos in portrait (AKA TikTok reels) for one year and has amassed over 888k likes on the platform. Jacob Hawley on TikTok (jacobhawley) For a lot of circuit comedians, lockdown forced them to put down the microphone and pick up their smartphone.

As ever, there is an endless supply of crime novels and true crime books out there to pick from for summer reading. Here are five of the best to pack in your hand luggage… City on Fire by Don Winslow Don Winslow is rightfully regarded as one of crime writing’s big hitters. His monumental ‘Cartel’ trilogy about America’s war on drugs is a towering literary achievement. Now, he’s embarking on another three-book run. Set in 1980s Rhode Island and inspired by The Iliad, this first instalment sees a beautiful woman spark a war between Irish and Italian gangsters – and Danny Ryan, a faithful but undervalued member of the Irish clan, is thrust into the centre of the mayhem.

It’s hard to watch Nick Kyrgios for long without the sense he wants the world to know he considers everything beneath him. Clearly, journalists are beneath him and he treats them with open contempt at every opportunity, but so too are the officials he abuses, the opponents he mocks and even tennis itself. 'I don’t really like the sport of tennis that much. I don’t love it', he has stated publicly, claiming instead that his real affection is for basketball. To say Kyrgios has failed to realise his talent for tennis is one of sport’s great understatements, and something he seems to accept. 'I thought my ship had sailed,' he said this week about the prospect of ever winning a Slam.

On the Welsh coast, surrounded by Snowdonia, the village of Fairbourne sits on a low, flat stretch of land. With sea on one side and mountain on the other, it seems perfectly situated. It is also doomed. Defended by high banks, the village is already substantially beneath sea level during storm tides. As sea levels rise, the government has decided to abandon it to the waves. Funding for sea defences is set to end by 2054. Fairbourne is far from the only community to face this fate. Over the next 28 years, some 200,000 buildings in Britain are set to end up below sea level. In some places, sea walls and embankments will hold the line. In others, nature will be left to take its course. People have been living in Happisburgh, Norfolk, for a very long time.

Brace yourself for the unmistakable sound of a tennis ball thwacking away in the background of your living room for two weeks - Wimbledon is finally upon us. As skilled as the players on the court are, it's the delightful spectacle of my family's amateur commentary that I enjoy the most. 'Who on earth is that?' my grandmother used to ask, unfailingly, when anyone unseeded dared to play against her beloved Steffi Graff. 'The Spaniard is touching his bum again' is the refrain in our house when Nadal prepares to serve. For the casual spectator, it's our lack of true tennis expertise that makes the tournament such a delight to watch: we like to gaze at its alchemy, without knowing too much about how the magic comes about.

Wednesday saw a new entrant into the streaming world with the UK debut of Paramount+. The launch event in London on Tuesday didn’t hold back on star power, with Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, Gillian Anderson, Viola Davis, David Oyelowo, Michelle Pfeiffer, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Bill Nighy, Naomie Harris and Jessica Chastain all in attendance. Unlike BritBox and Apple TV, who have built up content slowly, Paramount+ have decided to come out all guns blazing with their programming. Apple TV+ boasted a limited slate of big-name originals when it kicked off in November 2019, but the likes of The Morning Show, See and For All Mankind were starry but not especially enthralling, as the service took time to find its feet with Ted Lasso, Severance, Mythic Quest, and Slow Horses.

You’re in a bar, on a date and it’s Saturday night. The lighting is low, the music is good and the drinks are flowing. Your opposite number is everything you thought they would be: intelligent, interesting and attractive. The conversation is easy and the evening looks promising. You start to think this one might be special.  But then you hear their laugh for the first time - it’s a grating string of huh-huh-huh’s - and it's all over. The attraction flips to disgust and, try as you might, you can’t look at them in the same way. It’s the moment you anticipate but never hope for…It’s the ick. Last week Keir Starmer cracked a cringeworthy Love Island joke in the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, the new film starring Emma Thompson, doesn’t know what sex is. It portrays a brief liaison between a widow (Nancy, played by Thompson) and a male prostitute as liberating for her, a blessed introduction to the world of sexual pleasure. The marital sex she knew was functional, orgasm-free (for her). Maybe religion’s to blame; she was an RE teacher. I don’t know if the film specifies whether she has a religious background, but it’s at least implied. And in an interview Emma Thompson blames religion for the shame that has denied so many people sexual pleasure. Back to my opening claim. Such a plot entails a two-dimensional view of sex.

Oisin Murphy is seen as a bad boy of flat racing. He’s one of the best riders in the world but he keeps getting into trouble. He’s been banned from racing for 14 months for breaching coronovirus protocols by going to Mykonos and he failed two alcohol tests last year.  Oisin is now taking some time, as he puts it, to reflect. This year he’s at Royal Ascot without his riding boots for the first time in his career.  I find him in the Parade Ring. A horse obsessive, he immediately starts talking me through the details as the jockeys begin to mount.

Not long after being diagnosed with cancer, David Bowie reportedly made a secret trip to London to say his farewells. One of his stops was No. 4 Plaistow Grove, a modest terraced house in the heart of suburbia where he grew up, having moved there in 1955. I knew the house well. It was five minutes down the road from our home, which stood in a private lane alongside the golf course, in the village of Sundridge Park. Here, Davy lived with his mum Peggy and dad John. Back in the early sixties, heady rock and rolls days even in Bromley, it was clear that Bowie – or Davy Jones, as he was then – was hell-bent on stardom.

Another day, another diva disrobes. If it’s not Madonna (63) being ‘outraged’ after being banned from Instagram Live (after continually breaking the app’s rules with her nude posts) for ‘digital depictions of her vagina’ it’s Emma Thompson (also 63) getting her kit off for her new film, in which she plays a widow who hires a sex worker. And like a bleak backbeat, we have the sad spectre of Britney Spears, a young woman used as an ATM machine by her immediate family and as fantasy fodder by strangers since she was old enough to wear a school uniform ironically.