Spectator Life

On the face of it, Wikipedia’s list of the key events of 1 February, 2013 seems impressively comprehensive, ranging from Hillary Clinton’s resignation as Secretary of State to a hurling player denying he’d won €10.6 million in the Irish lottery. What’s missing, though, is something that’s surely had a bigger impact on our daily — and nightly — lives than any of Wikipedia’s choices. On that day Netflix released its first original series, House of Cards, the same way it had released its earlier bought-in repeats: by making all the episodes available at once. Now that we know how successful both the show and the format proved, it’s easy to forget how risky this was, especially for a $100 million production.

Is it really such a bad thing that the Chelsea Flower Show has been postponed to the autumn because of Covid?  Yes, we'll be missing out on the blousy, frothiness of early summer gardens that we see every year - not so many umbellifers, alliums or delphiniums - and yes, the Floral Pavilion will be strange without the heady scent of roses from the David Austin and Peter Beales stands. But the show will benefit enormously from a shake-up that forces designers to stop using the plants listed above until it seems there is nothing else you could possibly grow in your garden.

So.. you want to avoid anything trite for Valentine’s Day. No heart shaped chocolates, no pink champagne…actually, no pink anything. No flowers unless they’ve been gathered from your actual garden, or someone else’s. So where does that leave the classy romantic? With books, that’s what.  Essentially, any choice that’s based on what you know someone actually likes is touching. So, if you want to please a detective story fancier, Dorothy L Sayer’s Busman’s Honeymoon, might hit the spot … bookmark the wedding night. There’s also a case for flattery…the poems of Catullus, say (and there are some racy ones), suggest you think the recipient is no dope. But make them work.

The first thing you notice about Bridgerton, Netflix’s big winter blockbuster set in Regency England, is how bad it is: an expensive assemblage of clichés that smacks of the American’s-eye view of Britain’s aristocratic past. The dialogue is execrable, the ladies’ pouts infuriating. But bad things can be good, especially when it comes to sexy period romps. Bridgerton is no different. The story follows the elder children of the Bridgerton family as they look for love in a utopian sprawl of courtly landscape and sociality.

I connect to Netflix for yet another evening of no-choice entertainment. Well, I suppose I could take a turn around the room, mulling over the local gossip before playing a few notes on a musical instrument. But wait, there is NO gossip under this relentless lockdown, and I don’t have a musical instrument. So, as someone who is proud of my prolific TV habit I scroll through the crime section, and can’t help but notice the saturation of serial killer themed documentaries and dramas on offer. Night Stalker, Serial Killer with Piers Morgan, Confessions of a Serial Killer, Inside the Criminal mind, Mrs Serial Killer, Psychopath, Mindhunter, Evil Genius, Killer Women.

The news that cricket is returning to Channel 4 for the forthcoming series between India and England has been greeted with relief by cricket fans and absolute mystification by everyone else. In 2005, after the greatest Ashes series any of us will ever see, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) signed a long-term deal with Sky Sports, which made the ECB a fortune and blew a huge hole in cricket’s potential television audience. To this day I have cricket-mad friends who refuse to sign up to Sky Sports, either because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch or because it’s so bloody expensive, or possibly both.

At the moment, there are two costume dramas that everyone is watching, namely Bridgerton and The Great. If you’re a fan of the former, then you’re in good company; it seems to be the Netflix streaming show du jour and millions are enjoying its soap operatic storylines. However, The Great is the real thing, if you’re after laugh-out-loud outrageousness. It comes complete with a scene-stealing, career-best performance from Nicholas Hoult as the vile, hilarious Peter III, Emperor of Russia (not ‘The Great’, as he is constantly reminded, to his chagrin) and with an equally enjoyable Elle Fanning as a young, scheming Catherine (who really is the Great), and a fine array of supporting actors giving various degrees of incompetence, scheming or nastiness.

The office, as we once knew it, is dead. Zoom has killed it; the digital genie is out of the lamp. What most of us didn’t realise before Covid – back in April 2020 – was that the closure of offices was final and that the daily commute may well be confined to the history books. Even when things return to ‘normal’ we won’t be able to uninvent remote working, and companies know it. In fact, many of them knew it before the pandemic struck. As one leading business figure told me back the early summer, Covid – by forcing remote working – allowed companies to activate a decade’s worth of mooted corporate culture change in just three months.

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to remake a film that is already considered a peerless masterpiece. Netflix was roundly trashed for attempting it with Rebecca. 'Superficial and slapdash' was the New Yorker’s verdict (one of the kinder ones): 'somewhere between a lukewarm retread of Hitchcock’s original and a glossy Instagram feed'. As for the BBC’s Christmas three-part adaptation of Black Narcissus, not even Diana Rigg in her final role could save it from coruscating comparisons with the 1947 Powell and Pressburger film.  This year will see remakes, prequels and sequels of Top Gun, Cinderella and 101 Dalmations to name but three.

The furore in the US over the rocketing shares of previously written off companies such as GameStop, Blackberry, AMC Entertainment and Macy’s (the ‘Reddit Revolt’) has introduced stock market trading terms to the general public, with some folks newly opining (with a patina of assumed knowledge) about ‘hedge funds’, ‘penny shares’, ‘junk bonds’ ‘short-selling’ and ‘pump and dump’. But this is hardly the first-time similar events have occurred.

As culture and politics become ever more polarised, it's tempting to retreat into the reassuring hum of our own echo chambers and positive feedback loops. But this reluctance to engage with 'the other side' can only corrode civil discourse. As regular readers of The Spectator will know, listening to opposing views in good faith allows us to test our convictions, or as Bertrand Russell put it, 'those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.'  In these hyper-partisan times, it's not surprising perhaps that there are so few platforms where opposing intellectual heavyweights can go head to head — who wouldn’t want to see Douglas Murray and Paul Mason debate identity politics for instance?