Spectator Life

When Sir Richard Branson blasted off into space on Sunday he broke – or rather established – several important records. While he wasn’t the first billionaire to go into space – the extra-terrestrial ten-digit honours belong to Hungarian-born Microsoft Office software magnate Charles Simonyi, who went up to space on a Russian rocket in 2007 – Branson was the first man (billionaire or no) to go to space in a rocket that he had funded and built himself. For what it’s worth, he’s also the first knight of the realm to go into space, which has a certain anachronistic cachet, like a time-travelling Roman senator.

Is it any surprise that research carried out by the corporation for its annual report found that more than a quarter of men feel that the BBC 'no longer reflects people like me'? In a concerted effort to redress gender imbalance men are gradually being airbrushed out. Across much of the BBC men have become something of a rarity. Many of the corporation's high-profile dramas are now female-focused, including the Pursuit of Love, I May Destroy You, Starstruck and Motherland. Female presenters dominate shows such as BBC Breakfast, The One Show and Songs of Praise. A rejuvenated BBC Three will be almost exclusively female led while Radio 4 has turned into one long episode of Woman's Hour.

A giant chess board appeals in much the same way as a giant cake. Rationally, one realises that the size doesn't affect the essence of the thing. But the inner child knows that the jumbo version is just more fun. So I'm excited that a game of 'human chess', in which actors take the place of chess pieces, will be played on a giant board in London's Trafalgar Square later this month. I'm expecting a strong showing from the Red Queen and the White Knight, as the costumes draw inspiration from Lewis Carroll's 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. Their performance will pay tribute to the 'Immortal game', one of the most celebrated in history, which was played 170 years ago, just a couple of minutes down the road at Simpson's in the Strand.

Back in the summer of 2015 as I awaited the birth of my second son, when people asked me about my burgeoning bump — as they are wont to do of heavily-pregnant women — I kept receiving the same, curious response. ‘Oh you haven’t timed that well,’ random strangers would say. ‘August babies don’t do so well at school — and they never become Premiership footballers.’ As I smiled politely and thanked them for their unsolicited advice, I thought again and again, ‘What right-thinking mother would want their son to be a Premiership footballer?’ The sleaze, the moral corruption, the obscene salaries and conspicuous consumption.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines patriotism as ‘the quality of being patriotic; devotion to and vigorous support for one's country.’ Which is fine as far as it goes, but (at least to me), there is a uniquely ‘English’ kind of patriotism, one which I like to believe is not overtly jingoistic or nationalist in tone. This expanded characterisation of the word in relation to the Land of the Angles represents what may be thought as typically 'English' values, those of fair play, decency, hope, eccentricity, collegiality, individuality, humour, grace under pressure, courage and standing up for the persecuted. Whether we always conform to or live up to these ideals is another matter, but the England football team are certainly giving it a try.

On 25 June Netflix launched its latest offering, Sex/Life, which quickly became the service’s most-watched show in the UK.  The show revolves around Billie Connelly (no, not that Billy Connolly) a beautiful but unfulfilled suburban mum, whose mundane life is peppered with flashbacks of the raunchy youth she spent living it up in the Big Apple. She is married to Cooper, an investment banker with a big heart who possesses the looks and intellect of a Ken doll. You know the story already. Billie has everything a girl should want. A husband who adores her. A Dutch colonial mansion in upstate New York. A nanny. But she can’t help lusting over her ex-boyfriend, Brad, a hot shot record executive, and the tumultuous relationship they once had.

I have a new love in my life; Budgie, a miniature dachshund. After collecting our little friend from Kent, she has taken over the house. I am preoccupied with how to keep her entertained. I talk about her as if she were my child. My google search history includes “tips for surviving the first 30 days with a new puppy, bonding with my pooch and how do I know if I’m becoming a dog bore?” We go out to dinner for the first time in months. Our conversation centres around how soft Budgie’s ears are and how many poos she has done that day. The topic changes course when the fastidious looking couple sitting at the next-door table roll their eyes. The lockdown puppy craze has given rise to the latest breed of organised crime.

Jonny Lee Miller is to play John Major in Series Five of the Crown. In the 1990s, when Major was prime minister, Miller got his big break as Sick Boy in Danny Boyle’s iconic film, Trainspotting. So it looks like a counterintuitive piece of casting. The dour and insipid Major will be played by an actor who achieved fame as a jobless heroin-addict. When Major entered Number 10 in November 1990 he seemed like a bank of cold grey fog after the storms and excitements of the Thatcher years. But his image as a boring bean-counter is inaccurate. The real life John Major is attractively masculine. Though not exactly a pin-up, he has a strong jaw and a shapely, symmetrical face. He’s tall and stockily built (he was a sportsman in his youth), and there's a definite twinkle in his eye.

When many people think of films about ‘The Beautiful Game’, a few, (mainly mediocre) movies tend to spring to mind, usually headed by John Huston’s 1981 folie de grandeur Escape to Victory. As you may recall, the film cast Sly Stallone, a noticeably chubby Michael Caine, Max Von Sydow and real-life football legends Pelé, Osvaldo ‘Ozzy’ Ardiles and Bobby Moore in a ‘soccer’ themed homage to The Great Escape (1963). But there are a surprising variety of other motion pictures about the sport and some are well worth checking out. Of course, there are some real stinkers as well, most recently the Sky Cinema Original Final Score (2018), a lame attempt to repurpose Die Hard in the environs of West Ham’s London Stadium.

The moon would be more interesting with Wally Funk on it, and clearly Jeff Bezos agrees: the entrepreneur has just invited the 82-year-old female aerospace pioneer to join him on his inaugural space flight later this month.  In 1961, when she was 22, Wally took the physical tests to become an astronaut. They were grisly - ice-cream was dripped in her ears and she stayed in a floatation tank for almost eleven hours. She performed better than John Glenn - the vainest of the original Mercury 7 astronauts - but the tests were cancelled. No American woman entered space until Sally Ride in 1983. But Funk is too interesting to reduce to a fable about misogyny. Spacemen were sexist - who knew?

I expect there are those among you who are pleased to see their home towns returning to something like normality this summer. Well, not me. Brighton and Hove was bliss during lockdown. Without the endless Southward drift of London chaff – pronounce that word anyway you feel works, hard F or soft – my adopted home regained something of the elegance that had led Noel Coward to include it and its seagulls in a list of things that have style. Now, it has become once again the Brighton that Keith Waterhouse said, had the perpetual air that of a town that is helping the police with their inquiries.

In a watershed moment for modern history, the Pentagon’s long-awaited report on UFOs landed last week. And it will no doubt send parts of the internet into overdrive. Officials who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity said there were 'no clear indications' that the sightings in the report could be linked to non-terrestrial origins but that the data available was not sufficient to form a clear explanation for the various phenomena observed. If you're amongst the millions fascinated by mysterious flying objects, here are eight films you may enjoy: The Phenomenon Amazon - to rent https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Lockdown affects us all in different ways. During New York’s first lockdown renowned art creative Shai Baitel, recently appointed artistic director of Modern Art Museum Shanghai (MAM), felt so starved of creative inspiration that he begged anyone he knew with access to an art gallery near his New York City home to let him visit – just him, socially distanced – just so he could get his artistic fillip. ‘Everything was shut down from mid-March and by mid-May I started calling friends of mine who were owners and directors of galleries, asking them just to open for me so I could go and see the art,’ he says. ‘No-one else was there and I would walk between the artwork and actually sniff the frames. I was so art-deprived I couldn’t believe it.