Spectator Life

Gearing up for my fourth paternity leave, I knew the drill. For the older kids: batch-cooked meals, ready in the freezer. For the newborn: all the baby stuff down from the loft. For my wife: whatever the heck the heroic matriarch wanted. And for dad? A ready supply of films for those long solo night-shifts.  Paternity leave nighttime viewing has but one purpose: stay awake. Specifically, stay awake whilst sitting as still as possible so as not to disturb the sleeping newborn on your chest. As such, there’s no point making grand designs to watch the five-star, high-brow things that you’ve been meaning to watch for goodness knows how long simply because you feel you ought to. Theoretically, I will really enjoy the critically acclaimed Shogun on Disney+.

Over 20 years ago, my life was painfully turned upside down as I began to navigate the ruthless and costly world of high-stakes divorce as depicted in Sky Atlantic/HBO’s new legal A-list divorce drama, War about the expensive split between a caddish tech billionaire, Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and his high-maintenance and scheming actress-model wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller). After entrapping her husband with ‘selfie’ evidence (that would not, in fact, be admissible in court), her instructions to her lawyers are: ‘You take this photo, you take this case, and you take him for every f**ing penny he has - and he's got quite a few’.

Tom Cruise must be the most divisive big star in Hollywood. For everyone who salutes him as the last old-school movie icon, who has brought joy to millions, even billions, worldwide over a 40-year career, there are others who sneer at his Scientology faith, his supposed weirdness and many of the pictures that he has made.   But his latest film Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is something else altogether, and a rare example of where a picture’s obvious flop status does not mean that it is an uninteresting piece of cinema. Quite the reverse.

Sex, tragic, premature death, adultery, frenetic plotting for the throne, exile, obsession with status and security, lust for money… If you think Charles Spencer’s new dissection of the Royal Family is pretty gory, try watching I, Claudius.  50 years ago, on September 20, 1976, the first of 12 episodes were aired in the BBC’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934). They’re all on BBC iPlayer now. The Windsors have got nothing on the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the first Imperial dynasty of the Roman Empire. The first five emperors - Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero - are made for TV.

It’s a shame that Jane Austen can’t profit from selling the adaptation rights to her novels. In her own lifetime, she made but a modest living as a writer. Today, she would be fabulously wealthy.   As it is, the copyright has long expired, so it’s all fair game. In the last three decades alone, Austen’s stories have spawned over a dozen adaptations.

Like many families, we used to have a TV in our kitchen. But the default response when there was nothing immediately to be done became to reach for the remote. This suggested we were all developing a woeful lack of gumption so, when we moved house several years ago, I became a television dictator: it’s verboten Monday to Friday, and our 15-year-old monitor, with its cracked screen and unreliable controls, has long been relegated to the sitting room.  Every so often, however, I find my own resolve weakening. This happens every April when SVT, the Swedish national broadcaster, streams The Great Moose Migration, all day, every day, for three weeks.

Here we go again. Every year, with the inevitability of death, taxes and political regicide, the BBC’s Eurovision coverage reminds viewers that most pop music produced in European countries is of a terrible standard, and that our country’s banal offering is never going to inspire any patriotic fervour. This year, British hopes are pinned on an electropop act called Look Mum No Computer, with a truly terrible sub-Depeche Mode song called ‘Eins Zwei Drei’ that contains the lyrics ‘Counting in English doesn’t cut the mustard / So sick of munching roly-poly with custard.’ Don’t call me Cassandra, but I suspect that Look Mum No Computer (real name: Sam Battle) will be receiving rather fewer than drei punkte from many of the international judges.

Today, Rivals returns for a second series on Disney+. The first series was that rarest of phenomena: an adaptation that didn’t hate its source material. Sure, the producers decided to cram the plot with more subtle-as-a-sledgehammer politics than appears in the actual book, but you could tell they revered Jilly Cooper and the world of Rutshire and wanted to do it justice. Cooper executively produced the first series but must have been away on some days (I can’t see her let a well-heeled huntswoman pronounce the Beaufort hunt ‘Boh-fore’ rather than ‘Boh-fuht’, particularly when a major scene in the book hinges on the pronunciation of ‘Belvoir’).

Sometimes life disappoints you in interesting ways. I hated Giuliano da Empoli's 2022 book The Wizard of the Kremlin, a fictional political thriller about the dawn of Putinism, with a shuddering passion. I had, therefore, been looking forward to despising the film version when it arrived in cinemas last month, too.  Yet it turns out that TWotK, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, is an impressive film: visually stunning, well cast, a straight story well told. Paul Dano (the greasy-faced young preacher from There Will Be Blood) plays Vadim Baranov, the fictional ‘Wizard’ of the title, a whizkid theatre and TV executive tasked with creating and curating a successor to the ailing Boris Yeltsin.

My ten-year-old daughter Rose is a thoroughly modern child in many respects but one endearingly old-fashioned characteristic that she has is a deep love of Enid Blyton. She thrilled to the Malory Towers books, as well as the BBC’s uncharacteristically old-fashioned adaptation, and was equally enamoured of the The Secret Seven, although curiously, she was left entirely cold by the wilder antics of the The Famous Five.   However, a particular favourite were the four Faraway Tree books that Blyton wrote between 1939 and 1951, at the peak of her popularity and fame. They are hardly great literature, but as usual with Blyton, are rich in imaginative vigour, as she follows the fortunes of Jo, Bessie and Fanny, a trio of girls who discover the Faraway Tree.

Nostalgia is often seen as a positive emotion, but the word actually derives from the Greek nostos, meaning ‘homecoming’, and algos, meaning ‘pain’. Nostalgia is really a type of homesickness, an ache for something lost. As audiences watch the new trailer for the HBO Harry Potter television series, the algos may hit pretty hard: those tantalising two minutes are the reminder we need that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice.  The first thing you notice is simply how bad everything looks.

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.

A Real Pain was one of my favourite films of recent years, a tragicomic exploration of family, history, place and identity featuring two Americans in Poland - specifically in Warsaw and Lublin.  My wife was also quite smitten - with Lublin as much as the film - and on the back of this began planning a weekend in the eastern Polish city. I was a little wary of such an overtly fan-like step - this felt one notch down from trying to emulate an influencer, of all the awful modern things. But she’s very good at arranging interesting weekends overseas on a miniscule budget so on this question I relented.

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!

When Wuthering Heights (first published in 1847) is splashed across the front page of the Daily Mail as a free offer to readers and sells more than ten thousand copies in a month, you know that this says something significant about our current cultural tastes.  Just as Mr Darcy’s soaking shirt was a pivotal moment for millennial women in the 1990s thanks to the television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, so another screen version of a 19th century novel written by a woman has captured the imagination of young adults, Gen Z.   It is, however, doubtful just how many of those who buy Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a book will manage to read over 300 pages.

‘Do you want to stream something?’ my girlfriend asked me. It was 5 p.m. on a Saturday and I’d had a horrendous week. I’d caught one of those mutant viruses that you learn about in nursery rhymes or at the London Dungeon. The cough was the worst part. It was the sort of cough that evacuates a Tube carriage. It was the sort of cough you hear in a western before the protagonist says: ‘Old Billy Boy got consumption. There ain’t a darn thing we can do ’bout it. Doc says he got weeks. Poor bastard. He ain’t never gon’ make it to Montana.’ In short, I was feeling out of sorts. And as such, I was ready for some mind-numbing television. ‘We can watch something,’ I said. ‘What do you fancy?

I have been having a John le Carré holiday. Five years after the great master of the spy thriller went to his final safe house in the sky, I spent chunks of the festive season watching two of his series on TV, and reading a slim volume called The Secret Life of John le Carré by his biographer Adam Sisman. BBC1 and Amazon Prime’s big New Year drama offering is The Night Manager, a sequel series to one of le Carré’s later stories, and simultaneously BBC4 has been re-running le Carré’s 1970s masterpiece, the seven-part mole hunt Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring the late, great Alec Guinness as spymaster George Smiley. Sadly, on two successive nights I found myself falling asleep in front of the dramas.

Deep in the backwaters of BBC iPlayer there lurks an American film with an all-star cast that time forgot. In its day I think it was all but forgotten, too – garnering some critical acclaim but bombing at the box office, presumably because it was too clever or just didn’t appeal enough to teenagers (I can’t see why). Fortunately, 25 years on, Wonder Boys, the campus-novel film starring Michael Douglas as a creative writing professor with writer’s block and an unravelling marriage, truly stands the test of time. You could even go so far as to say that it’s a modern classic.

It may come as surprise to discover that A Room with a View, the celebrated Merchant-Ivory adaption of the E.M. Forster novel, is 40 this month. Yes, as hard as it is to believe, the film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith had its premiere in December 1985 and went on general release in April 1986. Step back, if you will, from the baffling realisation that somehow A Room with a View is therefore exactly equidistant between the present time and the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945, and instead focus on a rather more cheerful point altogether. Because A Room with a View, the low-budget tale of mismatched love in Florence, is almost certainly the greatest period drama ever made. I know, it’s a bold claim.

If you saw the Edgar Wright–Stephen King adaptation The Running Man in the cinema last weekend, with Glen Powell as the eponymous fugitive in a dystopian future, then you were one of the relatively few. The film has flopped at the box office, with audiences resistant to Powell’s charms and Wright’s visual pizzazz, and in a tricky year for King adaptations. It’s not been helped by some idiotic remarks the author made at the time of Charlie Kirk’s assassination; there will probably be fewer big-budget films based on his work in the future. Yet The Running Man’s failure also suggests that there is a wider issue at hand, and that is the death of the ‘bloke film’.

Nobody Wants This, the Netflix romcom that brought us the ‘hot rabbi’, recently returned for its second season. For the uninitiated, the first series introduced us to sex and relationships podcaster Joanne, played by Kristen Bell, who meets Noah, played by Adam Brody (of The O.C. millennial crush fame), a reform rabbi who has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend. The premise felt fresh and original: a romcom that dared talk about religion and even made it the key part of the plot. It’s undoubtedly a hit, with season two racking up more than eight million views in its first four days of streaming, taking it to the number one spot on Netflix’s chart.

About 20 years ago, the actor and comedian Steve Coogan did a tour called, with typical self-deprecation, Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters. I saw the show and it was, as you’d expect from Coogan, amusing and cleverly performed. Yet it ended strangely; Coogan sang a self-lacerating song called ‘Everyone’s a Bit of a Cunt Sometimes’. It was oddly bitter and angry, but clearly Coogan stood by its sentiments, because he attempted to reprise the number in a dream sequence from his restaurant-review comedy The Trip several years later. The song, given full production values, was, perhaps wisely, deleted from the programme’s final cut. (Although you can still find it on YouTube.

My late son took film seriously, a taste I was delighted to see him develop, and regret not being able to see him grow out of. When he was little we watched the Pixar films, and they gave us great joy. The first 20 minutes of Up and the last 20 of Toy Story 3 have been called the only perfect bits of cinema, a formulation with a high quotient of truth. After our son’s death, my wife commented that she had never before seen me cry. I had always wondered if she’d spotted my tears at the end of Coco, or those I shed during Guardians of the Galaxy 3, during a Sicilian family holiday, but I don’t cry easily. We watched Coco, which is about remembering the dead, shortly after my mother’s funeral. In Sicily, I wonder if it was a reaction to being uncomplicatedly happy.

The State of California v. OJ Simpson, Oscar Wilde v. the Marquess of Queensberry, Galileo before the Inquisition… now our age will be able to add its own entry to the annals of famed legal proceedings. Because Paddington is suing Spitting Image. It is the barmiest news story of late against fierce competition. The Telegraph has revealed that Canal Plus, the holders of the rights to Michael Bond’s furry Peruvian, are launching an action against Avalon, the makers of Spitting Image. You may be surprised to hear that Spitting Image is still a thing. After an ill-advised revival on ITV in 2020, via the now-defunct streamer BritBox, it has recently returned yet again, this time on YouTube.

The long-awaited sequel to the documentary (or ‘rockumentary’) Spinal Tap, which told the story of a failing British rock band’s disastrous American tour, opened this month to decidedly mixed reviews. Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph advised us to dial down our expectations to -11 (ho ho) for The End Continues, which sees the band reform for a final, contractually obliged concert in Las Vegas. Collin mused that for many aficionados the first half at least would put them in mind of a description of one of Tap’s early albums, Shark Sandwich, which ran to just two words: ‘shit sandwich’. Mark Kermode seemed pained at the comparison with the original and deemed the new film a footnote of interest to die-hard fans only.

They have been blowing out candles for Fawlty Towers, and it is meet and right so to do. Fifty years old this month, John Cleese’s portrait of a Torquay hotelier at war with the world remains a masterpiece of British comedy. But there’s another Seventies romp we should not ignore, which was just as funny, and featured a central performance every bit as convincing. Leonard Rossiter may be better known as Reggie Perrin in David Nobbs’s series about a dreamer who longs to escape suburbia, but his greatest role was Rigsby, the seedy landlord, in Rising Damp. Eric Chappell adapted the show, which ran for four years from 1974, from his stage play, The Banana Box.

The Duchess of Sussex has achieved something quite remarkable. After the brickbats hurled at the first season of her Netflix show With Love, Meghan – the furious pro-monarchy outrage, the eye-rolling from critics, the memes that lampooned her syrupy anecdotes – many TV personalities would have flinched. They would have called consultants, tweaked the format, apologised by going in a ‘new direction’. Meghan Markle (or should I say Sussex) has done the opposite. Season two arrived last month: unchanged, unrepentant and every bit as twee as the first.  Like her homemade ‘jam’, that’s not to say it’s gone down well. ‘Painfully contrived’, ‘irrelevant meets intolerable’ and ‘tone-deaf’ were just some of the newspaper reviews.