Spectator Life

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.

This year is a bumper year for the UK in terms of international summitry; in June Prime Minister Boris Johnson hosted the G7 ‘Build Back Better’ conference in Cornwall; and on Sunday he welcomes participating countries to 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. Before the 13-day summit, which perhaps ominously begins on Halloween, the PM jets off to Rome for the G20. International conferences and high-stakes meetings being largely static events, are not inherently cinematic, although movies such as Oslo (2021), The French Minister (2013), Paris 1919 (2009), In the Loop (2009), Conspiracy (2001), and The Name of the Rose (1986) all enjoyed popularity with audiences.

I couldn’t get to sleep the other night for worrying about the future of liberalism. So I got up and put the telly on. Maybe there would be something soothing on, to help me forget my worries. There was a show on Channel 4 called My First Threesome. The voiceover explained that lockdown had led many of us to be more sexually adventurous, and even to explore ‘what is for many of us the ultimate fantasy’. Before we met some enthusiastic adventurers, a brief historical segment explained that many wise ancient cultures saw sex with more than one person as a perfectly natural desire. ‘Then for centuries religion and shame pushed it to the realm of fantasy.

England cricket fans rejoiced on Monday at the news that few saw coming. It was not their side’s comprehensive victory over reigning T20 World Champions West Indies at the weekend that had champagne corks popping and hope for a renaissance after a less than impressive summer coursing through the veins of the Barmy Army. Rather, it was the announcement that their talisman and Ginger General, Ben Stokes, had been added to the Ashes squad to tour Australia next month. Stokes had been sidelined for the vast majority of the 2021 season with a badly broken finger, sustained while playing for the Rajasthan Royals in the IPL last April.

The Yorkshire Shepherdess was raised in suburban Huddersfield, not a sheep in sight. Amanda Owen was a romantic type who pored over pastoral images in library books – by chance, one image of some men at a cattle auction contained her future husband, Clive. She determined to head for the moors and, like some Thomas Hardy heroine, make her way in the windswept world of sheep farming.  She is now the nation’s chief supplier of pastoral, today’s version of a rural-hymning poet, warbling the woodnotes wild. She is also an icon of motherhood, having produced no less than nine young farmhands. For many of us, Our Yorkshire Farm, the Channel 5 programme that mixes family and farming, was an ideal escape from the stresses of lockdown life.

The Prime Minister is known to be fond of dropping pop culture movie references into his speeches, so it came as no surprise when he threw in a few attempted zingers when addressing the Global Investment Summit on Tuesday morning. Given the audience, it may have seemed impolitic for the Prime Minister to quote Trading Places (1983) and Wall Street (1987), two movies that deal with greed, corporate corruption, and financial fraud. Peppa Pig, Adele, Coldplay, and Ed Sheeran also made appearances in his speech; the latter trio termed as a 'cyclotron of talent.' As a man in his mid-fifties, many of Boris’s filmic allusions are from movies that he may have seen in his childhood, teens, and twenties, maybe in the local Windsor/Slough fleapit as a pupil at Eton College.

For most little boys of my generation, and several before, the only man who could conceivably have beaten up their father was Superman. Which is why now discovering that Superman is sexually attracted to men is so brilliantly subversive. It’s like discovering Mount Everest is gay. Back in August, DC Comics artist Ethan van Sciver first broke the news that Superman was coming out, although then it sounded as if the plan was for him to be fully gay, and not just bi, during a YouTube livestream. ‘I guess Clark Kent is going bye bye,’ he said. ‘Superman is effectively gay everyone. He is gay.’ Now the first images have been released of the new Superman – Jonathan Kent – deeply French kissing his boyfriend Jay, of all things a journalist.

Even a few seconds can feel like an eternity when your favourite Spectator TV debate is interrupted by a sweaty bloke in a bedsit flogging digital currency. YouTube understands how painful its ludicrous advertising interludes have become which is presumably why they invented the five-second skip button. Regular ads are bad enough but it's those twenty-minute infomercials that somehow manage to catch us off guard that really grate. How does YouTube know when I am least able to reach for the skip button? It happened again the other day during my morning shower; midway through a favourite song a perky female voice barged in to ask whether it was 'ok to call someone queer'.