Spectator Life

The perfect mini series is an elusive beast. In the pre-Sky and Netflix era, you’d get the DVD and it would last you a few weeks (back then, reading books was still a thing), lend it to friends, and fawn over it at dinner parties for the next few months. Yet back then we were watching less, didn’t have much choice, and consequently, weren’t so picky. The rise of on-demand TV was like moving from small town to the big city: our standards jumped, except this time, the dumped girlfriend was ITV, and the new belle was Sky Atlantic. When there’s so much new TV to choose from, it’s rather difficult to pick.

For those with work to do and kids to homeschool, the idea that you might have lots more time on your hands amid the coronavirus lockdown probably seems like a bad joke. But for those who have a bit of extra reading time to make the most of, here are five crime fiction series to help pass the lockdown hours: The LA Quartet, James Ellroy James Ellroy L.A. Confidential (Cornerstone) James Ellroy is well deserving of his status as the pre-eminent crime fiction writer of our times, and for those yet to discover the demonic delights of his oeuvre, the original ‘LA Quartet’ is definitely the place to start.

At the moment, what everyone needs is a good laugh. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the funniest comedies have to exist in their own bubble; many of the best examples of the genre have held a mirror up to society, in all its complexity and absurdity. But then many also manage to divert and entertain on their own terms, too. Whether you’re into jet-black political satire, deceptively clever romantic comedies or broad farce, there’s something here for everyone. Even if humour remains the most personal of inclinations, these half-dozen masterpieces are endlessly, hilariously rewatchable. The Death of Stalin https://www.youtube.com/watch?

1. Flattening the curve No, it’s not some sort of fat-burning home workout (though these have become extremely popular since the quarantine hit). Rather, this is about slowing the spread to reduce the burden on our NHS. A flatter infection curve will save the health service from ruin and mean that, when this thing finally tails off, we can all go out to the pub again and stop worrying about our curves for good. Mine’s a pork pie and a pint. 2. The Wuhan Shake Designed to minimise hand-to-hand contact, these dreadfully awkward gestures have been adopted in business meetings the world over. From serious-looking politicians to sports stars and celebs, everyone’s at it.

Spoilers can get people very irate indeed, so if that’s you, I’d suggested leaving this page pronto. What follows is a celebration of films that end with a brilliant twist, from classics to more recent gems. Even when you know what’s coming, there is still plenty of fun to be had through a rewatch… Planet of the Apes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjcpRHuPjOI Not only is Planet of the Apes still a fantastic sci-fi film from the pre-CGI age, but is also features perhaps the most dramatic and memorable twist in film history. Having survived his ordeal on a strange planet run by a load of highly-evolved simians, Charlton Heston’s George Taylor discovers the shocking fact that he is not quite as far away from home as he thought was.

While the coronavirus has paralysed the West End, theatre-lovers do have some small consolation. Several theatres have released recordings of their previous shows, some of which will be aired on television. Here are eight to watch out for: One Man, Two Guvnors James Corden stars in One Man, Two Guvnors Youtube (2 – 9 April only) Less a play and more an institution, Richard Bean’s globe-conquering comedy had sell-out audiences roaring with laughter in both London and New York. You can see why, then, the National would choose it as the first play for its NT at Home scheme, which will see a different play streamed online each week. After all, who couldn’t do with a laugh right now?

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Well, the coronavirus pandemic now provides us with the ideal conditions to test whether the opposite is equally true: does being cooped up together in a small space for a long period of time also do the same? I think we all know the answer to that one. It will come as no surprise to any married couple – happy or otherwise – that the Chinese city of Wuhan, epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, has seen a large spike in divorce cases after couples escaped from a month’s quarantine. So, as millions of families across Britain embark on weeks, and possibly even months, of lockdown in their homes, here are my tips for helping you and your increasingly irritating other half to survive with your marriage intact.

From serious sci-fi to spoofs in space, here are films and TV to watch on Netflix if you’re after some futuristic entertainment… Annihilation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89OP78l9oF0 One of Netflix’s in-house productions, Annihilation sees Natalie Portman play a biologist leading a rescue mission into a mysterious zone on the US coastland known as The Shimmer. It’s an area hit by a meteorite that is expanding and doing bizarre stuff to any living things that come into its orbit. What unfolds is a tense and imaginative sci-fi adventure that chucks plenty of other genres and film references into the mix.

Gomorrah (Sky) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4QORgagblU Life in the Naples Mafia (the Camorra) is nasty, brutish, short – and nothing like Goodfellas. Even when you’ve made your millions from the drugs trade, there’s nothing to spend it on save your fleet of armoured 4 x 4s and your gilded cage in some bleak, rundown suburb which it’s never safe to leave because you’ll only end up arrested or shot. Spoiler alert: almost everyone dies over the four seasons of this mesmerisingly bleak, moodily soundtracked, fabulously compulsive drama.

With over 160 million subscribers – which ranks somewhere between the population of Bangladesh and Nigeria – Netflix’s biggest shows command staggering audiences worldwide. But the streaming platform has also snapped up the rights to hundreds of lesser known series, some of which are just as good. Here’s our pick of the undiscovered gems: Rectify https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd0_nNkdi0c When it comes to sheer critical acclaim, few shows can match Rectify. From the moment this slow-burn crime drama debuted in the US in 2013, it was praised to the hills by television aficionados. Yet even after four successful seasons, and an excellent finale, the show remains relatively unknown compared to the likes of Breaking Bad and The Wire.

As this year’s Oscar-winning films continue their box office reign, it’s salutary to remember that some excellent films have been honoured over the years. Even as many have faded from memory (Crash, anyone?), some of the award-winners that can be found on Netflix represent the very best in contemporary cinema. Here are some of our favourites. The Silence Of The Lambs (1991) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Mm8Sbe__o Jonathan Demme’s psychological thriller was the last (to date) film to win the ‘big five’ at the Oscars – Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay.

With South Korean film Parasite taking home the Best Picture gong at this year’s Oscars, it’s clear that foreign language films and series are having a bit of a moment. Keen to polish your language skills whilst devouring a good box-set at the same time – or just looking to sound more cultured at your next dinner party? Either way, you won’t regret getting stuck into these subtitled Netflix dramas: Fauda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2rm_4e3iYQ Following hot on the heels of Homeland (which also began life in Israel), Israeli terorrism thriller Fauda – which means ‘chaos’ in Arabic – has been a bit of a global smash for Netflix.

Every generation, and individual, has to rediscover the arguments for free speech for themselves. Some people learn from major incidents. Some when the censors come for someone close to them, or an opinion that they hold. Others come to believe in free speech because they realise that while being offended on occasion might be terrible, it is nowhere near as terrible as any system designed to make being offended impossible. Fortunately there are short-cuts to finding the best defences of free speech. The English language provides an especially rich tradition on which to draw. From many centuries of literature allow me to list just four works: two classic, two modern.

1917, the World War One epic that has picked up 10 Oscar nominations (including for Best Picture and Best Director for Sam Mendes), is currently going great guns in cinema. If it has put you in the mood for more war on screen, then fire up Netflix, where there are plenty of military flicks to pick from. Jarhead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aBP-c28_1M 1917 is not Sam Mendes’s first foray onto the battlefield. Jarhead, released in 2005, was an adaptation of a memoir written by US marine Anthony Swofford about his experience of serving in the first Iraq war – the resulting film is a different kind of war movie in which the longueurs of conflict are brought to the fore.

Lords, Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages: the moment you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived. Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are calling time on their membership of the royal family, deciding to live a financially independent existence, and flying off into the sunset for the snowy wilds of Canada, to live among the trees and elk, beavers and bobcats, presumably to get involved in the fur trade, or logging business, in order to support themselves. Of course, they’ll be doing nothing of the sort.

These days we political anoraks can usually get more than our fill of drama – and laughs – from the real world. Just look at what’s happening in Westminster – not to mention the White House. But what if you’re still craving more? Here’s our list of the best Netflix choices, including documentaries, dramas and comedies, for political obsessives. Mitt Through intimate access to Romney and his family on the campaign trail, Mitt seeks to present a more rounded picture of the man who failed to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. And the picture that emerges is a quietly moving one: a man of charm and kindness who never quite understood his own failure to bond with middle America.

It’s no secret that people are fascinated by crime. Nor is this a new phenomenon: writing in 1946, Orwell noted that murder gave a ‘great amount of pleasure to the public’, and proceeded to identify the common features of the gruesome and grisly crimes that gave the British most satisfaction. Psychologists, meanwhile, say that murder in particular is not only ‘a most fundamental taboo’ but ‘also, perhaps, a most fundamental human impulse’. This seems plausible. We all know those people who, stuck in a queue or sat in an interminable meeting, seem moments away from indulging that impulse. At any rate, lovers of the lurid and the macabre are spoiled for choice in the streaming age.

Left-wing people are funny and Conservatives are not. That’s the myth the Left like to perpetuate – particularly left-wing “comedians”, usually with all the wit and subtlety of John McDonnell at a Palestine Solidarity rally. We have in Boris Johnson a Conservative Prime Minister famous for his wit and wordplay – a man who famously declared during the 2005 election campaign that “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” But, he’s not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, Tory to light up Parliament with his quips.

So we’ve come to it once again: busybodies fretting about what the kids are watching on TV. It’s one of those things that comes around at least once every decade, alongside video games, rap music, pornography and social media — a medium that needs to be strictly controlled, lest it infest the suggestible lesser minds of those who consume it to the detriment of wider society. This generation’s Mary Whitehouse is a TV writer by the name of Daisy Goodwin, responsible for the twee Downton Abbey tribute act Victoria. Goodwin, in the Radio Times, has called for the BBC to stop showing repeats of the favorite sitcom Dad’s Army, for fear that it promotes eurosceptic views, and the misleading idea that doddering old Britain really can go it alone.

1. Being funny is the main way men attract women; we can’t take that away from them. There’s nothing better then a man who makes you laugh – it’s a quality women value highly and one used to describe every successful date and suggested set up. If women were funny it would be unfair, I mean we already have the gloriousness that is breasts, what more do we want! It’s why male peacocks have colourful feathers, why lions have manes. Women have to tone it down because, without the upper hand in the humour stakes, what do the unfairer sex have? 2.

For the poor souls who paid to live-stream the Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek debate, the $15 ticket price must now seem like an act of grand larceny. In what was rather cringingly billed as the ‘debate of the century’—premature in 2019, if nothing else—the psychologist and bestselling author of 12 Rules for Lifeshared a stage in Toronto with the world’s most idiosyncratic philosopher and critic. The topic was ‘Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism’. Of course, neither Peterson nor Žižek are strangers to crowds.

In celebration of their tenth wedding anniversary, the Cambridges have released a 40 second vignette of their painfully British existence. It’s all Barbour jackets, laughing children and windswept beaches. It is, in other words, a John Lewis nightmare. But who wants an aspirational royal family? That’s kind of the point isn’t it, that they’re not like us? No, apparently the focus groups have spoken and Britain wants a set of Boden models to represent the nation. https://twitter.com/KensingtonRoyal/status/1387778071319781378?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw The Cambridges' performance is arguably just as confected as anything Harry and Meghan said on Oprah’s sofa Why can’t we just have a nice formal photo of the family together with the Queen?

The internet has changed beyond recognition in recent years. In the noughties we consumed short, digestible bursts of information online. But now there’s a growing appetite for long-form intellectual content – the internet is chockablock with podcasts, discussions and debates. People are going online to explore ideas that, before, would never have been found beyond the bounds of a university campus. As Douglas Murray revealed here on Spectator Life, the most radical contemporary thinkers are joining the likes of Jordan Peterson in tapping into this growing desire to discuss philosophical and political questions online. In doing so, they sidestep the censorious culture of some universities and reach an online audience of millions.

Winston Churchill was no Adonis but most of his portraitists did what they could to flatter him. However, when the British artist Graham Sutherland (1903–80) was commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of Churchill in 1954 for 1,000 guineas (about £27,000 today), paid by the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and to be presented in a lavish public ceremony, things did not go well. Sutherland was chosen not by Churchill but by members of the Houses of Parliament in honour of his 80th birthday. Churchill asked to be portrayed in his Knight of the Garter robes but the commissioners specified he be portrayed as he most commonly dressed when visiting Parliament.

Most men have been appalled at the abusive behaviour unveiled by the #MeToo movement. We have reflected on past indiscretions, salacious conduct and incidents of raw maleness and we feel shame. We wish to show contrition and demonstrate our commitment to feminism but we just don’t know how. We feel excluded by third-wave feminism and we are in awe at the oncoming fourth wave. Something had to be done. So I went undercover and ‘identified’ as a feminist woman to produce her/his guide to help you/him/her become a true feminist, a ‘FeMan’ in fact. Just follow these simple steps. 1. How to look at a woman Feminists have discovered that sometimes men are sexually attracted to women.

I’m on a narrowboat in Leiden, nursing a filthy hangover, watching this antique city floating past, when I’m awoken from my daydream by a strange whirring noise above me. The glass roof of the canal boat is rapidly descending, and the jolly Dutchman at the tiller is telling me to mind my head. I end up flat on my back, with the roof a few feet above. ‘We have some low bridges here in Leiden,’ says the tillerman, by way of explanation, as if this weird contraption was the most natural thing in the world. For me, this canal boat with its collapsing roof encapsulates the quirky appeal of Leiden, and why I was so keen to come back here.

In January, Channel 4’s Cathy Newman interviewed the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson. The channel broadcast a short version of the interview on the evening news bulletin, where it would have been seen by the few hundred thousand people who watch the programme nightly. But to its credit, Channel 4 also published online the full half-hour encounter. Within days, it was viewed by millions around the globe. The interview, in which the presenter repeatedly tried to misrepresent the views of her interviewee, and in which his responses finally brought her to a confounded silence, became a sensation. Memes of Newman saying ‘So what you’re saying’ washed across social media.