Spectator Life

If you were a teenager anywhere in the vicinity of the late 1990s, the opening bars of Paula Cole’s ‘I Don’t Want to Wait’ will only ever mean one thing: Dawson’s Creek. Airing on The WB from 1998 to 2003, and broadcast in the UK on Channel 4’s teen-oriented T4 block, the adolescent angst fest starred James Van Der Beek, who died last month aged 48 from colorectal cancer. In a crowded field of literate pop culture, the smart, sexy soap opera stood out for its appeal to young adults who found in its storylines of mates, dates, and heartaches an echo of their own emotional turmoils.

France is holding local elections and the candidates are falling over themselves to appeal to a peculiar demographic: dog lovers. A candidate in the south-west city of Albi is promising shared human-dog drinking fountains, with the upper level for the owner and the bottom level for the pet. Her opponent has bitten back with a plan for a pet cemetery. Other hopefuls are proposing dog-friendly parks, food banks for needy mutts and dog-friendlier policies on public transport.   Dog ownership is up in France, particularly among the country’s ageing electorate, so canines have become an indirect electoral force. I can’t help thinking that British politicians may be missing a trick.

It was a given that the critics would indulge in emotional onanism when they covered the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Tate Modern – apt enough when you consider the sexual content of so much of it. But what surprised me was that it wasn’t just women. For the art is almost entirely about Being Tracey: her abortions, her sexual abuse as a teenager by horrible men, her diaries, her cancer with pictures of the bloody stoma, her famous unmade bed, with its used condoms, granny slippers and teddy (it sold in 2014 for £2.5 million) and her death mask, which was done in life … obviously. That, you might have thought, would put off the men.

Mondo Man and Wreckless Eric head the market for tomorrow’s big race at Sandown, the Betfair Imperial Cup Handicap Hurdle (2.27 p.m.), and a good case can be made for each of them landing the spoils. Mondo Man, trained by the father and son Moore team, is well handicapped over hurdles based on his flat form and, as a five-year-old gelding, his best days are surely ahead of him. However, odds of around 3-1 for a 22-runner handicap make zero appeal. Wreckless Eric, trained by the father and son O’Neill team, is well handicapped based on his run in this race a year ago when he was beaten only half a length by Go Dante, who will also be in the field tomorrow.

Reports that Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie have been banned from the Royal Ascot carriage procession raise an important question: what is the optimum fighting weight of the Royal Family?  For years now, we’ve been hearing about King Charles’s plans for a ‘slimmed down’ monarchy. Prince William, too, has declared that ‘change is on my agenda’ — which presumably means fewer floppy hats and chests stuck with improbable numbers of medals on the balcony at Buck House.   In the current torrid climate, few would demur that removing titles, cash and crash pads at Kensington Palace for the freeloading grifter elements of this extended family is a bad thing.

Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the death of Serge Gainsbourg at 62 from a heart attack. The only real surprise is that he ever made it to such an age. Gainsbourg, whose unlovely but strangely beguiling countenance can best be likened to a garden gnome left outside in the rain for too long, was a performer and composer who epitomised French popular music of the 1960s and 1970s in all its bizarre contradictions. Compared to such wholesome British figures as Cliff Richard and Tom Jones, Gainsbourg was a seedy, almost sinister figure whose demeanour gave off an odour of stale aftershave, Gitanes and day-old red wine.  That he was also a songwriter of genius who has influenced countless other musicians – everyone from Jarvis Cocker and Radiohead to R.E.

Bradford, West Yorkshire, is not known as the curry capital of Britain for nothing. The city is home to more than 200 Asian restaurants. In the main, these are Kashmiri and Pakistani – driven by the city’s Pakistani-Muslim population which is one of the most concentrated in the country – and much of the local economy relies on them for jobs and income. My memories of Bradford curry houses go back to the late 1990s when I worked at the university. Commuting from London and therefore living in student digs meant I would eat out more often than not. That meant curry almost every night I was in the city as it cost little more than a sandwich.  Bradford’s curry houses are known for their homestyle cooking, rather than fancy, westernised, Instagram-aesthetic grub.

The story must have been a sub-editor’s dream. The Telegraph could barely resist with its headline, ‘Bag snatcher poaches £2 million Fabergé egg’, while the Times opted for the less playful: ‘Police on a Fabergé egg hunt after pickpocket strikes at West End pub.’ Frankly, I’m disappointed: a story about a stolen Fabergé egg appears during Lent and that is the best they come up with? Pressure on The Spectator’s sub-editor for this article aside, the story is glorious clickbait, teasing as it does with the terms ‘Fabergé’, ‘millions’ and ‘theft’. One can’t help but think of Octopussy, museum heists, fast car chases and suitcases full of cash. The public is crying out for the glamour of it.

At Gordon Ramsay’s launch party for his new Netflix show, Being Gordon Ramsay, influencers could be found in every corner of the room. Soon after getting another ‘lemongrass cha’ and walking past Victoria Beckham, I came face-to-face with Eating With Tod, a man whose wide-eyed hand rubbing and hyperbolic cries for enormous dinners has earned him 2.3 million followers and counting – impressive however you bill it.   Next to Ramsay, near the pulled pork bao station, was Jesse Burgess, one half of Topjaw and the presenter on another one of the chef’s food programmes Knife Edge on Apple TV.

Kelso’s hurdles course is a specialist track – left-handed, sharp and undulating. Some horses handle it well, others do not. Cracking Rhapsody most definitely falls into the former category because tomorrow he will try to win the bet365 Morebattle Hurdle (2.55 p.m.) for the third year in a row. His form this season is modest but Ewan Whillans looks to have trained him to peak tomorrow and he can race off an official mark of just 4 lbs higher than his winning rating from last year. He has every chance of landing the hat-trick but he is likely to go off at around 5-1 favourite so he is not for me at those odds.

Until around a decade back, most of us either watched the Eurovision Song Contest because it was extremely camp, or for what passed for the ‘politics’ – Greece and Turkey not voting for each other over Cyprus, and that exquisitely rebuking nul points the UK invariably got from Germany and France, for being an uppity little island nation which was still celebrating winning Second World War.   The campness is still there, but it now sits uncomfortably with real politics – that of the culture wars. 'Trans' and Israel are the flashpoints, with the supporters of the first and the opponents of the latter overlapping in a vicious Venn diagram. This was summed up in 2024’s Irish entrant, one Bambie Thug, who offered ‘I’m queer!