Spectator Life

There's a little fact about Frank Skinner that you might have heard before. That before his big television break, the future comic and Three Lions scribe had a rather different vocation: as an English teacher in an FE college. Throughout his time in the spotlight, it's been one of those things that gets brought up every now and then as trivia. An interesting titbit on an otherwise familiar CV. Then, at the beginning of last year, Skinner decided to go back to his educational roots: and launch a poetry podcast. Okay, it isn’t quite a full return to the classroom. But it isn’t far off either - at least not in the way Skinner does it. Who else, other than English teachers, spends their time gently working through poetry, patiently explaining the concepts and imagery?

It’s all eyes on Cornwall today as the G7 summit kicks off, bringing the leaders of the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan to Britain.  The various heads of government, having spent months in lockdown, will no doubt be brushing up on their small talk ahead of their various diplomatic meetings, with leaders' spouses set to mingle under the watch of newly wed Carrie Johnson.  Should the policy debates prove too fraught here's everything they'll need to know to navigate the (somewhat) safer subject of their better halves and children: The Bidens, USA First Lady Dr Jill Biden will sit down to tea with Carrie Johnson ahead of the G7 summit.

To his many readers, Stephen King is the Dreamcatcher; to others, less keen on his prodigious output, Doctor Sleep may be a more fitting appellation. On Friday 4 June, Apple TV+ will debut King’s own 8-part adaptation of his 2006 best-seller Lisey’s Story. Reportedly one of King's favourite books, the novel harks back to both Misery and The Secret Window, concerning as it does the widow of a popular author plagued by an obsessive fan and the thin line between imagination and madness. Julianne Moore stars as Lisey, with Clive Owen as her late husband, the immensely successful novelist, Scott Landon.

‘Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged to chilly summer,’ was how Jessica Mitford recalled her Cotswolds childhood in her memoir, Hons and Rebels. Our inclement climes have rarely been as hard to bear as they have this year, with the unusually cold, grey spring — coupled with the prospect of another staycation — severely dampening spirits that were already low. However optimistic the Met Office might be, we can never rely on a ‘barbecue summer’ in this country. So when weathering another rainy bank holiday or a soggy half-term in a damp cottage, try the literary equivalent of dressing for the job you want, not the one you have. But be warned: golden summers rarely make for happy endings.

How does the word 'literally' make you feel? For a lot of language-lovers, the answer will be somewhere between mildly irritated and fist-gnawingly furious. It’s the misuse of the word that most perturbs. It has a habit of lurking where it has no place to be, taking a perfectly acceptable (if conventional) metaphor and turning into nonsense. Metaphors are figurative, for heaven’s sake, say its detractors. If that’s how you feel, you’re far from alone. We all have our stylistic preferences, so I’m not going try to convert you to the ‘literally’ cause. But I do wonder why this particular word used in this way gets so many people so angry. It can’t be because it’s new.

Musical fans will be hyped for the film release of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s In The Heights, set to land in cinemas here on 25 June (seven years after its UK stage premiere at the lovely Southwark Playhouse). Of course the Dominican smash is far from the first big musical to make its way to Hollywood. Here are seven other classics - and one notorious flop - to enjoy: Chicago, Amazon (to rent) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EpaMmF9WVU Rapidly approaching the 50th (!) anniversary of its stage premiere, the Oscar-winning crime caper has lost none of its pizzazz. And looking at the cast it’s not hard to see why.

Whilst many Hollywood auteurs began their careers in television (John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Steven, Sidney Lumet etc), the received wisdom in previous times was that a return to working in the medium signalled a career in serious decline. Lower budgets, shorter rehearsal times, often inferior casts and tight deadline-driven schedules meant that television was very much the last resort for down on their luck movie directors. There has always been the odd exception, including when Steven Spielberg (who began directing network tv such as Columbo) helmed a few episodes of his anthology series Amazing Stories in the mid-1980s; and of course, Alfred Hitchcock (AH Presents). But the advent of streaming has led to what some have termed ‘The Golden Age of Television’.

I would love to have been there at the original pitch meeting for Friends, 'So yeah, it's about a bunch of friends.' Pitching The Office must have been similarly brusque, 'It's about some office workers working in an office.' And The Simpsons? 'Oh yeah, that's the one about a family called… the Simpsons'. Like all great comedies, the premise for Friends is so simple it sounds almost facile. But embedded within the simplicity of the idea is the entirety of human experience; the joys, the sadnesses, the heartache and the tragedy; it's all there in Ross's remarkable range of expressions that ran from deep melancholy to boyish wonder.

On 24 May Bob Dylan turns 80 and that gives fans like me the perfect excuse to celebrate our love of the great man (not that we ever really need one, of course). As well as regularly listening to the records, I spend far more time than is probably healthy trawling YouTube for videos of Dylan in action. So, if you fancy joining me down a freewheelin’ wormhole, here is a small sample of my favourite live performances from across his career. Boots of Spanish Leather, 1963 This is a YouTube video to listen to rather than watch. It’s an absolute wonder, not only because it is a lovely version of one of Dylan’s great ballads, but also because we hear him at ease, perhaps even enjoying himself, in an interview that bookends the performance.

Yet again, Britain’s Eurovision entry has come last getting nul points from tout le monde. Yet again, politics is being blamed – but wrongly. The UK was simply outsung and outclassed by smaller countries who made more effort. Eurovision has always been a collision between politics, music and culture. Winners game that system, coming up with an act that crosses dozens of linguistic and national boundaries. It’s tricky. But Britain stopped trying some time ago. The BBC chooses our entry and doesn’t bother with a contest. It also struggles to pick (and prep) Eurovision winners. As a result, every year, Britain sends some unprepared soul to perish on the world stage. A strange, outraged jingoism usually follows Britain's Eurovision flops.

Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad is earning rave reviews. The 10-part Amazon Prime mini-series imagines an alternate history where the abolitionist route for escaped slaves prior to emancipation is an actual, physical subterranean railway. Incidentally, the fantastical railway trope is the chief feature of Netflix’s sci-fi show Snowpiercer (2020-), whilst the rocket-powered ‘Bullet Train’ is prominent in the last season of Amazon’s alt-history Man in the High Castle (2015-19). When looking at motion pictures dealing with the subject of slavery in the United States, one must be aware of the seismic shift from its early onscreen depiction in movies such as D. W.

This July will mark 60 years since the beginning of the chapter in our nation’s history known as the ‘Profumo scandal.’ It was this unhappy episode in which my mother Christine Sloane, formerly Christine Keeler, had a starring role, and is credited with the fall of Harold Macmillan’s government. The story of that affair is well known: Chris met John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, at a summer pool party at Cliveden. She found herself the focus of the world’s press attention two years later when her relationship with the Tory MP became public knowledge. She had also briefly been with a Soviet called Yevgeny Ivanov, prompting feverish claims that she had been passing him British intelligence from Profumo.

News that Apple has updated its emoji range to include pictograms specific to the pandemic may either disgust you or inspire you to send a volley of missives out immediately. As an emojiste, I am in the latter camp. I am delighted that I now have a bandaged heart, a dizzy face with spiral eyes, a face exhaling with exhaustion and, of course, a bloodless syringe in my emoji lexicon. My nearest and dearest WhatsApp interlocutors may groan but I simply don’t care. Far from an erosion of linguistic standards, I see emojis as an exciting semiotic advance. I only wish that Roland Barthes, the grand French semiotician of the last century, were around to decode it all. Emoji, which originated in Japan in the 90s, can be used in different ways.