Spectator Life

After more than a decade on comedy’s A-list, Russell Howard has a decent claim to being our best known ‘arena’ comic. Yet last July, in the midst of an already strange year, the rockstar comedian – used to selling out venues across Britain – found himself having to reconsider his definition of a stadium gig: as he performed to a sparsely-arranged audience of 2,000 spread across a 27,000 capacity football stadium. Tiny numbers by Russell Howard standards. But the gig itself still sits in a class of its own: as one of the largest live shows to take place in the gap between Britain's spring and winter lockdowns. Even for a workaholic comic, that’s quite a coup.

For a working musician like me – I compose and conduct – the run-up to Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year. I generally find myself writing some last-minute carols, then come the garage-sandwich weeks: endless travel to far-flung rehearsals in freezing churches and halls in preparation for the annual round of concerts and carol services where I’ve been invited to guest-conduct and perhaps to deliver a Christmas reading. It’s exhausting but inspiring. Two years ago I was due to join the Bath Camerata choir for a recital. Looking around at the jolly gathering of grannies, vicars, bushy-bearded real ale drinkers and earnest-looking students I started to sense that I hadn't quite reached my intended destination.

Is there anything more dispiriting at this time of year than the dreaded 'celebrity' memoir – the publishing industry's annual two-fingered salute to all us starving mid-list authors? Last week I managed to weave my way through a heaving Waterstones, eventually arriving at one of those vast tables groaning with needy 'personalities'; there they all were, present and correct in their neat hierarchical piles (the higher the advance the bigger the stack). This year's roll call of vaguely familiar faces has been much the same as any other year.

‘Timing is everything’, as the saying goes. The death of West Side Story composer Stephen Sondheim must have seemed especially poignant to Steven Spielberg coming as it did a week before the premiere of the new film version of his acclaimed musical. The composer surely would have delighted in the critical acclaim being accorded to Steven Spielberg’s remake. 'He and I became good friends,' the director told reporters at the film's premiere. The musical famously updates Romeo & Juliet to 1950s New York City. Spielberg keeps the action in the 1950s, with his recreation of the city at the time earning special praise.

The book Small Pleasures will warm even the stoniest heart. It defines joy as simple, brief instances in everyday life which people can access with little or no cost. My favourite chapters include: the joy of an evening sky, letting a child win at a game, a hot bath. We tend to let these things pass by unnoticed for the pursuit of other, bigger pleasures. This year, we had time to stop and pay attention. My new peace of mind was interrupted last week as I walked down a quiet pavement on a blue-sky day enjoying the cold air and sun on my face. A van drove past, the driver wound down his window, beeped his horn and shouted something sexist at me. I felt angry. I had an urge to chase after him and call out something equally offensive.

The 90s are back. From House of Gucci, Impeachment and the BBC's unmissable New Labour documentary, it's clear that this particular period is enjoying its turn in the cinematic limelight. For fans of the scandalous and surreal, this can only be good news. Hollywood has fixated on the 70s and 80s for years now which – while a boon to costume and wig designers – has begun to feel slightly repetitive. If drama commissioners are now shifting their gaze to the 90s, then we could be in for a wild ride. Admittedly, the 90s haven't exactly been absent from our screens recently. We've already had the superlative The People vs OJ Simpson (and its thematic follow-up The Assassination of Gianni Versace).

Want to treat an avid crime fiction reader to a book or two this Christmas? Or simply want to do a bit of literary self-gifting? From a beguiling South Korean mystery to a grizzly serial killer procedural, here are six new novels to consider. Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sunPeople Like Them by Samira Sedira This pair of short books, both published in translation, are two of the finest crime novels of 2021. Firstly, Lemon, by the South Korean author Kwon Yeo-Sun takes a well-worn starting point, the murder of a beautiful female high school pupil, and spins an idiosyncratic and beguiling mystery from it. A riveting police interview kicks things off, but this is the one nod to convention.

From Gordon Ramsay to James Corden, predicting which Brits will make a splash in Hollywood has long been a fool's errand – even in the Netflix era. After all, what's the latest British export to conquer the greatest entertainment market on earth? The Great British Bake Off. Well, almost. Like Cary Grant (born in Bristol as Archibald Leach), our humble baking show needed a slight rebrand ahead of its launch stateside. Instead the show made its debut, in 2014, under a slightly different name: The Great British Baking Show. After becoming a ratings hit, the competition was then snapped up by a much bigger name altogether: Netflix. Within three years, the Baking Show had gone stratospheric: finally earning its place, last year, as one of the most streamed shows in America.

The bad news for video game fans – and the parents or grandparents of same – as Christmas approaches is that our old friend 'supply chain issues' means that the latest consoles – the PS5 and the XBox Series X – are going to be tricky to get your hands on. Best hope that Santa drops a bumper sack of the elusive components they need down the industrial chimneys of the Sony and Microsoft manufacturing plants. The good news, though, is that 2021 has bought a goodly crop of new games to play in the consoles you already have; or to download onto your PC via Steam. First off, whoohoo! There’s a new Halo.

What’s up with Kirsten Dunst and Benedict Cumberbatch? It’s rumoured that the pair refused to speak to each other on the set of their new movie, The Power of the Dog, because Cumberbatch had embraced ‘method acting’ and his character hated her character. To protect the truth of his interpretation, he deliberately snubbed his co-star throughout the shoot. Is that true? Something about it doesn’t feel right. Any thesp who follows ‘the method’ is likely to infuriate their colleagues. HBO’s hit series ‘Succession’ has generated rumours about Jeremy Strong who plays Kendall Roy. Strong, in the words of his fellow thesps, is ‘complicated’ to work with.

How cowardly of the BBC to axe Michael Vaughan from Test Match Special for the winter Ashes series on the basis of two words – 'you lot' – he might or might not have said more than twelve years ago.  Is this really how the BBC wants to play this? Anyone can make accusations of any type against someone famous that can’t be proved either way and then sit back and watch their life implode? If so then what’s to stop me, for example, from using this space to recall that in 2003 BBC Director General Tim Davie told me something deeply transgressive about, say, the trans community?

With all of our institutions now firmly under the iron fist of progressivism it was only a matter of time before social justice mission creep slipped under the doormat and into the home. You can only promulgate the idea that we live under a tyrannical patriarchy for so long before young people take notice and begin to lose trust in the whole idea of intimate relationships with the opposite sex. Fourth wave feminism has shifted its focus from the work place to male/female relationships and a growing underclass of men is turning its back on women by joining poisonous underground groups such as INCELS and Men Going their Own Way (MGTOW). Why would any young person choose to settle down and have kids against such a toxic backdrop? Well, increasingly they aren't.

Every year there are more of them; more extravagant, more utterly pointless. I refer to Advent calendars, which used once to be rather a quaint German thing: a way of counting down the days of Advent by opening little windows on a cardboard, paper or wooden Nativity or winter scene to reveal some pointer to Christmas until the pictures culminated in the arrival of baby Jesus – or the worship of the shepherds at the crib – on 25 December. It was the sense of anticipation, opening the windows one at a time which represented the point of Advent, which is a waiting time, until finally we get the big reveal on Christmas Day.

The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me, 40-years-old this month, is not merely great. It may be the greatest pop song ever. Pop is an open invitation. It creates, as Don’t You Want Me did in the bleak midwinter of 1981/82, a warm glow of collective experience. This is the wellspring of any profundity we attribute to it. That’s true of all pop’s grand arias, such as She Loves You, West End Girls, Dancing Queen, Reach Out And I’ll Be There, Billy Jean or Hit Me Baby One More Time. Whereas River Deep Mountain High is deliberately epic (no bad thing), Don’t You Want Me is greater still by its accidental nature. What could be a finer example of perfect pop than something that wasn’t intended to be so?

Ageing screen siren Norma Desmond’s lament that 'it's the pictures that got small' in Billy Wilder’s classic black comedy doesn’t appear to apply to the Hollywood stars of today, who only a decade or so ago saw acting on TV as the sign of a career in box office free fall. The warning signs were there for all to see; when oldsters Charlton Heston and Barbara Stanwyck starred in the 1980s Dynasty spin-off The Colbys, no-one imagined they were doing it for anything other than pecuniary reasons. More recently there has been a rash of US actors appearing in British shows, although admittedly not quite the stature of Chuck and Babs.

Was the lefty comic Hannah Gadbsy right to call Netflix an ‘amoral algorithm cult’? Granted, the creator of Nanette (worth watching!) may have been referring specifically to the company’s decision to greenlight the latest Dave Chappelle special (also worth watching!) but her wider point – about the omnipotence of the Netflix algorithms – isn’t far off the mark. For evidence just look at the streaming giant's winter schedule, which is dominated, at least this month, by the release of Tiger King 2 (17 November). Do we really need a sequel to a one-time phenomenon which stopped being funny more than 18 months ago?

England's rugby match against Australia at Twickenham last Saturday was my first visit to the home of English rugby in 42 years. During my school days, football was not only third best after rugby and cricket but frowned upon. I quickly rebelled, rejecting what I saw as the establishment sport and falling for the illicit populism of the round ball. Since that day I estimate I have been to something like 700 football matches, principally at West Ham where I’ve had season tickets for most of the last 30 seasons. So what is it like to be a football fan at the rugby? First off, Twickenham’s transport links make Wembley look like Piccadilly Circus.

Actor and singer Jared Leto’s eye-catching performance as the late Paolo Gucci in Ridley Scott’s biopic The House of Gucci is already generating talk of a second supporting actor Academy Award, after his win for Dallas Buyers Club in 2014. In The House of Gucci Leto gets a full prosthetic makeover to transform him into the dumpy, overweight, and balding former Gucci VP and chief designer, following in the footsteps of Tom Cruise’s turn as fictional Hollywood producer Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder (2008). Leto’s performance as Gucci hasn’t gone down well with his daughter Patrizia, who called it: 'Horrible, horrible. I still feel offended.' House of Gucci isn’t the first time Leto has donned a fat suit and prosthetic jowls.

I’m 58 years old and have spent 40 of those years as a journalist and yet there is something that shames me, that makes me inferior to so many of my colleagues and, indeed, many of my friends and family outside the world of journalism. I'm rubbish at drinking.  Instead of being wasted on booze, booze is often wasted on me. I've never had a Lost Weekend, never woken up tied to a lamp-post with a traffic cone on my head, never got a tattoo while under the influence. I've been to Magaluf with the lads and Las Vegas on a press trip. I've been to stag dos and TUC conferences and away days with both Spurs and England football fans. And, embarrassingly, I can remember every moment of every one of them.  It's not that I can't get drunk.

Halloween might be over, but Witching Hour has accelerated on TikTok. #WitchTok (or Witch TikTok) is the viral take on spirituality – think Paganism, psychics, and seances in 60 second videos. The hashtag #WitchTok currently has over 20.7 billion views on the video app. In comparison, #Kardashian only has 6.4 billion, and #LoveIsland clocks up a mere 4.9 billion.  As an enthusiastic TikTok user, I started liking WitchTok videos during lockdown. I found myself drawn in by beautiful witches with their crystals and soft-spoken voices. Influencer branding has inevitably pounced on this spiritual trend; the creators of this content practice both magic and sales, and while I can’t speak for the former, the latter is extremely effective.

'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Father of the Atomic Bomb Robert Oppenheimer once claimed that these words from Hindu scripture’s Bhagavad Gita raced through his mind when he witnessed the first nuclear weapon detonate on July 16, 1945. Much of Oppenheimer’s life and work are seen through the lens of the moral dilemma he faced in leading the Manhattan Project that developed the deadly bombs (dubbed ‘Fatman’ and ‘Little Boy’) which destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later. Director Christopher Nolan has chosen the scientist as the subject of his next film, the follow-up to the underwhelming Tenet (2020).

Last weekend, the first formal inter-gender mixed martial arts cagefighting contest – post Enlightenment, at least – took place in front of a paying audience in the city of Czestochowa, in Poland. Remarkably, the fight went to a second round. Many well aimed blows were landed by Piotrek Lisowski on his female opponent Ula Siekacz. But the referee eventually called things off when he had her pinned helplessly to the floor with his knees and was thumping her in the face. A second fight, between Michal Przybylowicz and Wiktoria Domzlaska was stopped in the first round when the female fighter had no answer to a vicious early Przybylowicz onslaught.

My aunt, Charlotte, had a profound influence on my life. A second mother, a friend and someone who was always there. The thief that took her was the rare disease PSP. It slipped into our lives with no warning and ripped her away from us. The house she lived in was a home to our family. Somewhere we could always go. An anchor in my childhood. Recently her son (my cousin) and my four siblings spent a weekend there. We lit the fire and chatted about the goings on in our lives. Pictures of our aunt and her beautiful treasures which remain in the same place as well as the familiar smell when I walked through the front door. We looked at the space on the sofa where she always sat with her two dogs. It was as if she was there, listening to us, but of course she wasn’t.