Spectator Life

I am going to the Edinburgh Festival this August. That declaration could be said in a number of ways. Celebratory (unlikely). Showing off (possibly). Self-promotion (in there somewhere). However, I’ve been in comedy a while and have reached what my wife recently called ‘solid middle-age’, so announcing I’m going to the Fringe is more of an incantation: a chant designed to steel myself for a taxing endeavour. Not that there will be much tax owing afterwards, I’m not likely to make much money. No-one in Edinburgh does as well out of the Fringe as some bloke called ‘Josh’ who rents you his airing cupboard for six grand. I’m assured this year should be special, as the festival hasn’t happened (properly) since 2019.

Hollywood can appear self-satisfied and insular at the best of times, but it's been a rough few months even by Tinseltown standards. Judging by the slew of trailers that have dropped in recent weeks, this season in cinema land will centre on only one thing: biopics. From Madonna and Marilyn Monroe to Elvis (and even Hillary Rodham Clinton) it’s time for a barrage of films in which big stars play bigger stars – in return for your adoration.  Hollywood’s fixation on global fame might not be entirely new – Ben Kingsley’s turn in Gandhi is about to reach its 40th birthday, incidentally – but there’s no getting away from the fact that it has stepped up a gear in recent years.

Once upon a time, when the fingerprints on the Wimbledon trophy were more or less exclusively British, you could win in SW19 whilst wearing trousers. Even a tie if you go back far enough. But then, back in those days, tennis was a no-sweat sport. Well, perhaps a drop or two, but essentially there was much less of it around than today, when sweatbands, perspiration and frequent towelling off are part of a fetishised display of effort and strain – one that’s often accompanied by verbal ejaculations of sometimes rather alarming severity. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been forced to mute Wimbledon at times because of the repetitive baseline grunting. But it wasn’t always this way.

Along with films about real life authors, poets, comedians and artists, biographies of musicians are notoriously difficult to translate successfully to the cinema screen. Why? Writing and painting aren’t inherently cinematic; live music has more visual potential (hence the greater number of motion pictures). But the challenges of lip-synching and the existence in most cases of plenty of original concert footage raise the stakes for any actor prepared to take on such a role. There's a real danger of performances falling into pastiche and mimicry. Directors face an even greater predicament when music rights are refused, as was the case with the recent Stardust (2021) where actor/musician Johnny Flynn had to come up with songs in the style of David Bowie.

The debate about Swedish hospitality started on Reddit – a forum otherwise known for such profound discussions as ‘Can you watch porn on a hotel’s wifi?’ – and has now gone global. Even the New York Times has weighed in with an article entitled: ‘Do Swedish People Feed Their Guests?’  The whole fuss is difficult to comprehend from a Swedish point of view Suddenly, it seems, the world is talking about Sweden’s lack of domestic warmth. Here in Stockholm, the buzz was first brushed off as a joke. When the subject started trending on Twitter, it was in all seriousness thought to be the potential work of Russian troll factories; professional provocateurs spreading disinformation and propaganda.

When Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth I of Scotland) began her reign on 6 February 1952 (after the premature death of her father George VI) the British Empire was still very much in existence, with more than 70 overseas territories, despite the independence of India/Pakistan (‘The Jewel in The Crown’) in 1947. But, in the words of Harold Macmillan, there was soon an inevitable ‘Wind of Change,’ as the UK relinquished its colonies and embraced the woolly concept of The Commonwealth of Nations (formerly The British Commonwealth). Aside from the United Kingdom, the Queen is Head of State in 14 other nations – although, as recent Royal tours of the Caribbean have demonstrated, this may well decrease in the not-too-distant future.

Sunday mornings in the Hampshire countryside remind me of a medieval pageant. While marketeers open their stalls and labradors bark, you see hundreds of jousters in gaudy livery steering their two-wheeled chargers along the lanes, trying not to get knocked off. But while everyone loves a knight, everyone hates a cyclist. Reader, I must confess: I myself am a member of the brotherhood of Lycra. I don’t shave my legs, I hasten to add. Though the fact that I’ve just written that shows how seriously my tribe takes their pursuit. Since taking up cycling in 2019, I have ridden thousands of miles and competed in several amateur races.

Be honest. Aren’t you a teeny-weeny bit jealous of the super-rich? Are you a little annoyed by the new Sunday Times Rich List – which showed the top ten richest people in the country now have £182 billion between them, more than three times what they had in 2010? Don’t your hackles rise on seeing the masters of the universe pad around Davos in their identikit blue suits and tieless white shirts? Well, stop worrying and thank God you aren’t a billionaire. The Super-Rich World Problems are endless. Bucketloads of money should inoculate the rich against anxiety. In fact, money only heightens the worries, particularly about their two principal bugbears: staff and taxes.

After over a year of delays, Tom Cruise’s keenly anticipated sequel to the iconic Top Gun (1986) is released on 25 May. TG: Maverick’s seat-of-your-pants aviation sequences have whetted the appetite of both fans and non-fans for the picture, which has picked up almost universally positive reviews. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SvPJ0oEWR0 Not unexpectedly for Cruise, he handled some of the flying himself in the picture, returning as Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, a US air force test pilot and flight instructor, purposely stuck at the rank of captain to indulge his addictive 'need for speed.'Cruise dials down the cockiness of the first picture to deliver a more mature, nuanced take on Maverick – although he retains his authority-bucking attitude.

Finally, on 24 May, CrossRail will open. Named The Elizabeth Line, the stats are extraordinary and impressive. An £18.7 billion infrastructure project for a 62-mile-long railway line with stations stretching from Reading in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. It has taken 20 years to bring the project to fruition with the inevitable overspend running into billions. Once open, it will increase the London rail network's capacity by ten per cent. Now, if you’re expecting the whole line to open all at once, you’d be mistaken. The central section will open offering a train service between Paddington and Abbey Wood. The Bond Street stop won’t open for another three months. In fact, the route won’t operate as a single entity until 2023.

The Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard trial is now in its fourth week, and so many of us are still gripped. People are either consciously ‘following’ or ‘not-following’ the trial as if it were a television drama, which in more than one way it is. The two main characters are actors, after all. Kimberly Lau, a partner at the New York legal firm Warshaw Burstein, said this week that ‘the testimony of the witnesses and documentary evidence will be even more essential for the jury to determine who is really telling the truth and who may be acting out a role.’ The more slippery truth, however, is that both parties are playing out roles. As in reality TV, or any good court fiction, the thrill comes from trying to figure out who is faking what and when.

The BBC3/Hulu 12-part adaptation of Sally Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends (2018) comes hot on the heels of the success of Normal People (2020) – the author’s second work (2018). Normal People surprised some with its graphic but sensitive depiction of sex but won over even older viewers (well my mum liked it) due to the finely drawn characters and convincing acting by the two leads, relative newcomers Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. Indeed, for Edgar-Jones, Normal People has provided a calling card with producers, leading to her being cast in comedy-thriller Fresh (2022, Disney+),  true crime drama Under the Banner of Heaven (2022, FX) and upcoming adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing.

‘I’ve never been happier!’ Adele posted on Instagram last week, in celebration of her 34th birthday and her emotional ‘healing’ after divorce. Last year, Adele confessed that she ‘voluntarily chose to dismantle’ her child’s ‘entire life’ in ‘pursuit of her own happiness’, even though she ‘wasn’t miserable miserable’ in her marriage. The pop singer, who left her partner of nearly ten years, is now fêted by the media for her self-empowering divorce album, and has coined a catchphrase ‘divorce, babe, divorce’, and sells necklaces spelling ‘DIVORCED’ as merchandise. These days, divorce is seen as just another form of self empowerment.

During last year’s European Championship, England football fans switched, for some reason, from ‘Three Lions’ to ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond (‘so good, so good, so good’). If anything can make them switch back it’s the Football Association, who this week said they were thinking of dropping the Baddiel and Skinner anthem as England’s official song, because it could be seen as ‘arrogant’. Football fans are like children, and as any parent could have told the F.A., if you want to make sure someone does something then just tell them not to do it. The F.A. quickly had to issue a statement confirming there were no plans to change. David Baddiel himself feels the F.A. have long disliked the song.

‘Was that Will Smith?’  This was Chris Rock’s characteristically quick and hilarious reaction when his friend, comedian Dave Chappelle, was tackled by an audience member on Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl. Comedy venues need to be a sacred space, free from the threat of violence We don’t yet know the motive, we don’t yet know the man’s name, but this is the second high-profile attack on a comedian in two months. Luckily for Dave, he has great security, including Django himself, Jamie Foxx, who helped subdue the attacker, who some reported as being armed with a gun and a knife.  Video footage of the man being loaded into an ambulance has already started circulating on social media.

I would do anything to help a friend. Need money? A shoulder to cry on? A place to stay? A confidant to confess to? I’m your man. Want me to read your new novel? Forget it. I would do anything for a friend, but as the late Meat Loaf would say: I won’t do that. Sorry. I’ve been there. Read that. And I’ve had enough. Many years ago a really good friend showed me his first novel. It was so bad it left me speechless — but I had to say something. So I did the only thing a good and trusted friend could do: I lied. 'It’s really funny and smart!' I said. Since then he’s written four novels, all self-published and each one worse than the last one. And every time he asks me for my opinion I say, 'smart and funny' or 'funny and smart.

Until recently a ‘special military operation’ typically referred to a particular action/plan rather than all-out war. Unless you happen to live in Putin’s Russia, that is. John Madden’s (Shakespeare in Love) take on the real-life Operation Mincemeat is a solid entry in the canon of WWII movies that concern themselves with a particular military objective and the various forms of subterfuge that are used to achieve it. The plot of Operation Mincemeat centres on a ruse designed to distract the Germans from the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 by secreting false plans for the landing in Greece on a civilian corpse kitted out as a Royal Marine courier.

Is Steve Coogan a one trick pony? It's a question that has dogged the Mancunian actor's career ever since his preening Partridge flapped into the nation's affections over thirty years ago. Since then, with a couple of notable exceptions (his turn as Stan Laurel was a triumph), Coogan's projects have been little more than variations on a theme but without the genius of the source material. No matter how hard the actor tries to shake off his past with glossy Hollywood fodder, his polyester-pullovered alter-ego is never far from the surface.

News of the Anatomy of a Scandal billboards on Sunset Boulevard sits in my DMs while I shepherd my teens through the preschool chaos. It’s the morning I drive my youngest to school. ‘Have you seen my goggles?’ he calls, while I covertly flick to the Insta app on my phone and see that one of the executive producers of the Netflix show based on my thriller has sent me four messages. My heart trips. I may have written an international bestselling novel developed by the Big Little Lies dream team, but imposter syndrome rages; my default response that I’m about to be found out.

Britain's ancestral piles have had to move with the times. Nowadays it’s simply not enough to merely open up the state rooms. Today’s grand old houses have to offer something else to pull in the punters, and for the best of them that means focusing on fine art. Our stately homes have always boasted a wonderful array of artworks, but they were often hard to find. Today these treasures are properly curated, and, increasingly, they’re supplemented by first class contemporary art. Our country seats are now go-to places to see today’s leading artists, rather than sleepy repositories for rusty armour and dusty antiques. Seeing modern art in a stately home is far more fun than seeing it in a trendy gallery.