Spectator Life

The Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant was driving through America 20 years ago when he heard a radio station announce that if any listener donated $10,000, they’d never play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ again. Somewhat tired of the song himself, Plant rang up and pledged the cash. ‘It’s not that I don’t like it,’ he later said. ‘It’s just that I’ve heard it before.’ Rather the same attitude seems to have been taken in the band’s new biopic, Becoming Led Zeppelin, which was released in British cinemas last week. The trailer calls it the band’s ‘first ever authorised documentary’, but fans hoping that this means seeing rough cuts of ‘Stairway’ should beware: all that glitters is not gold.

How amusing to hear Steve Coogan and Emily Maitlis pontificate about the dreaded ‘establishment’ on Maitlis’s News Agents podcast recently. During a discussion about Coogan’s role as Brian Walden in Brian and Maggie – Channel 4’s two-part drama about Walden's final, sensational interview with Margaret Thatcher in 1989 – the comedian admits that although he identifies with Thatcher’s lower-middle-class background, he had concerns that the script might make her seem too sympathetic. Heaven forbid. Coogan considers the drama to be as much about class as a lament for long-form interviews, suggesting that intelligent outsiders such as Walden, Thatcher and indeed Coogan himself will always struggle to break through the cut-glass ceiling.

January can only mean one thing: The Traitors is back. For those of you who haven’t been initiated into this cloaks-and-daggers drama, the premise is simple: the traitors attempt to remove players by ‘murdering’ them, while the faithfuls try to work out who the traitors are. Each night the group votes someone off after a round-table discussion. It’s real-life Cluedo, with extra high-camp theatrics – hooded robes, crossed-out portraits, handwritten messages, crocodile tears and croissants in the breakfast room – all under the watchful fringe of Claudia Winkleman. The show lives and dies on the likeability of its cast and their relationships The first two series were an unexpected success.

In theory, I don’t care for actors – all that pontificating about climate change while taking private jets – but in practice, I find them great fun. One of my dearest friends, a small-screen siren, loves regaling me with tales of her shockers, like an American mini-series with a huge budget but an appalling script. ‘we were being housed in fabulous hotels, dined every night on fine food and wine so we shut up and took the coin. If you agree to do a job, even if you realise halfway through that it’s a pile, do it with good grace – learn from it and move on. But sometimes you have to consult your fellow actors and say “How the hell am I going to say this?” – it can create a great Dunkirk atmosphere.

Were there arguments? Undoubtedly. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, it was a dead cert that Great Aunt Mary would prefer BBC Two’s festive celebration from Westminster Cathedral (complete with the puberty-defying nearly-15-year-old Anglesey treble Aled Jones) to Kenny Everett’s reworking of A Christmas Carol on BBC One (louche, anarchic and probably regrettable, with its jokes about a pudding with cystitis and pantomime-style wordplay of the ‘Good golly, Miss Marley?’ variety). And it was 1985, so only 30 per cent of British homes owned a video recorder, making the ‘what to watch’ argument notably fraught in the season of peace and goodwill toward men. The problem with anticipation is the element of waiting. How long is it since patience was a virtue?

At this time of year, switching on the radio to hear the twinkling harp at the start of ‘The First Nowell’ from Hely-Hutchinson’s Carol Symphony has a profound Proustian effect on an entire generation. It takes us back to our childhood living rooms in 1984, sitting cross-legged in front of a boxy TV with a 14-inch screen, bewitched by the most exciting, terrifying and Christmassy programme we had ever seen. Part of the nostalgia comes from knowing that this wonderful series would probably never be made now As a bookish child who lived largely in my head, I thought the BBC had made The Box of Delights especially for me. So, it seems, did an awful lot of other people.

After Donald Trump’s election-win, many junkies of US politics will be needing another fix. But if you’ve already overdosed on Megyn Kelly post-mortems on YouTube or had your fill of Estee Palti’s Kamala imitations, where do you go to head off the pangs till inauguration day next year? Anyone without time for the entire West Wing series could do a lot worse than watch the films below. The first is Nixon (1995), Oliver’s epic three-and-a-half hour movie starring Anthony Hopkins as America’s disgraced 37th president – a surprisingly generous portrayal of a man as reviled by the Left, in his day, as Donald Trump is now.

Anyone watching The Mirror and the Light – the BBC adaptation of the final part of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – can admire the performances of Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, and Mark Rylance as Mantel’s hero Thomas Cromwell. But no one should confuse them with real history. The late Dame Hilary was a classic case of an artist letting her personal background and education slant her presentation of the historical record. Mantel had an awfully strict Roman Catholic upbringing and allowed her suffering at the hands of school nuns to dictate the way she saw the English 16th-century Reformation. She came to believe that ‘no respectable person’ could be an observant Catholic.

I will not be joining in the praise heaped on the current Sky remake of Frederick Forsyth’s classic thriller The Day of the Jackal. Apart from the fact that the series’ star Eddie Redmayne – who plays the Jackal, an ice-cold hitman – is about as menacing as a field mouse, the new Jackal is very much a woke version of the story, complete with a far-right German Chancellor who is one of the Jackal’s victims. Eddie Redmayne’s Jackal is about as menacing as a field mouse Forsyth himself, a solidly right-wing Tory, seems to share my lukewarm opinion of the new adaptation of his masterpiece. He damned Redmayne with faint praise in a Times interview as a ‘nice young man’, hardly the encomium a ruthless killer would wish to have.

Tonight, the BBC will be broadcasting what is – to my mind – the scariest film ever made. Indeed, I would go further than that, I would say this movie is the scariest human artwork in any form – and that includes novels, plays, stories, the lot. This film beats them all, and by a distance. What is it? Of course, I’m not going to tell you that straight off, that would break all the rules of scary suspense writing. First, I want to examine the underlying questions: why do we like being artificially scared? And what makes a particular ghost story or Dracula remake genuinely frightening? The questions sound simple; they are not.

They were loud, vivacious and gloriously un-PC.  Sometimes they seemed to be learning how to cook as they went, barely one step ahead of the viewer. It didn’t matter. If anything, it only made the BBC's Two Fat Ladies more watchable. And 25 years on – the last of the two dozen episodes pairing Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright aired on 28 September 1999 – I miss terribly their jaunty style of cooking, glass in hand. I don’t think I’m alone. Spectacularly and unexpectedly successful in their lifetimes – 70 million worldwide watched their programme over its four-year run, including many in the US – the internet has allowed them to find fresh admirers since their death.

Hollywood has been good to war photographers this year. First came the dystopian blockbuster Civil War, with Kirsten Dunst as a veteran photojournalist touring America at war with itself. Now comes Lee, starring Kate Winslet as second world war legend Lee Miller, who captured the liberation of Paris and the horrors of Dachau. Both demonstrate the screen appeal of war correspondents, whose hell-raising, bullet-dodging image is tailor-made for the movies. Yet in an era with nearly as many frontlines as in Miller’s time – Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan to name a few – ask yourself this question: can you name a single war photographer who’s doing the job today? My guess is probably not. And if you’re wondering why, try this test.

Early in the first episode of Holding, an adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel of the same name, a young, ambitious, foul-tempered detective is called to a village in west Cork where human remains have been found. Before handing the investigation over and returning to the city, she spits out her contempt: ‘I’m not spending weeks down here in the arse end of nowhere.’ Similarly, in the first episode of Bodkin, a Netflix series released last year, a young, ambitious foul-tempered journalist is sent to investigate decades-old disappearances in the same region and forced to team up with an American podcaster and his researcher. ‘I’m stuck consulting on a true-crime podcast in the arse end of nowhere,’ she declares.

Few franchises have the cult-like devotion of Harry Potter. One only has to watch the video of hordes of adults counting down the arrival of the Hogwarts Express at King’s Cross, and their fury when it didn’t arrive, to understand the religious fervour people feel for the wizarding world. Yet one announcement did come last which, one that will send shivers down the spine of every magic-loving millennial super-fan. HBO has launched a casting call for its new Harry Potter series. Even the teaser trailer makes it clear the creative chokehold the series is in I am sure this is exciting news for some: mainly pushy parents who are already prepping their little darlings on how to pronounce ‘wingardium leviosa’, ready for the ultimate vicarious thespian high.

Can anyone name the actors in the new Alien: Romulus movie? No, me neither. Which seems odd for such a massive franchise, but then I struggle to name a single film star under the age of about 35, and I consider myself a movie buff. As is often the case with the release of a new sequel, I returned to the original for reappraisal. Yes, Ridley Scott’s masterwork is still frightening and expertly paced, but what makes the film exceptional is the diversity of the acting talent. And by diverse, I don’t mean the sort of DEI casting-by-numbers that turns every movie into a shiny Benetton commercial. No, I mean that in the 1979 original, we witness the full gamut of acting talent available at the time.

The video game Star Wars Outlaws is to be released this week. The game is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi – so in the universe of the original, still-greatest film trilogy – and has been several years in development. According to its ‘narrative director’ Navid Khavari, ‘We didn’t just look at the original films, we looked at George Lucas’s own inspirations: Akira Kurosawa, world war two movies like The Dambusters and spaghetti westerns. You see the care that was taken in that original trilogy to make it tonally consistent. We need to make this feel like it has high stakes, lighthearted humour, emotional tension, growth between characters [and] the hero’s journey.

In a 1962 interview, Alain Delon pushes aside a carafe of red wine and explains that when offered his first cinema role, he didn’t really want it: je n’avais pas envie de faire spécialement ça. Delon, who died over the weekend at the age of 88, may not have been immediately seduced by cinema, but cinema was instantly seduced by him. In a lifetime filled with roles playing rogues and gangsters – Plein Soleil (1960), Il Gattopardo (1963) and Le Samouraï (1967) – the role he is best known for is himself, a shapeshifter who flirted with the actor’s mask; sometimes hiding behind it, sometimes letting it slip off altogether.

It’s July 2024, and Netflix has decided we have to go back. In honour of the 20th anniversary of the pilot, all six series of Lost have been uploaded to Netflix in the US, and now younger audiences get to experience one of the biggest pop culture obsessions of the noughties for the first time. This character-driven, mythologically-rich, Emmy-winning existential island adventure was once so popular (it averaged between 11 and 18 million viewers a series) that the White House pledged not to disrupt the final season’s premiere with President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. I even loved the notoriously divisive finale, which didn’t necessarily resolve many of the metaphysical mysteries I am, and always have been, a Lost super-fan.

I blame Brexit. In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, when the whole nation was still in the throes of a collective nervous breakdown, I succumbed to the prevailing mood of madness and went on a TV dating programme. No, it wasn’t Naked Attraction, the Channel 4 show in which participants strip down to reveal all to their prospective partners, but a rather more restrained show on the same channel called First Dates. I hadn’t actually even seen the programme when I noticed an ad in The Spectator appealing for single middle-aged people. I chose a Dover sole, which was an error as I was filmed plucking fishbones from my teeth My 18-year relationship had recently ended, I had moved to a new town, and like Britain freeing itself from the EU, I felt ready for a fresh beginning.

Sexy time at the cinema is becoming a thing of the past. That’s according to research on the prevalence of vices in top live-action films from film maven Stephen Follows. His study shows that drug taking and violence are as popular on screen as ever in the 21st century. Profanity has dipped only slightly, but sex has dropped off a cliff since the year 2000. We used to love what they used to call a steamy blockbuster. I came of age in an era where the ‘erotic thriller’ – 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct – were the box office draws, in which big stars lost their drawers. Comedies like A Fish Called Wanda, Green Card or When Harry Met Sally relied on frisson and fizz for a large part of their appeal.

Fiona Harvey appears to be having the time of her life. She’s the ‘real Martha’ in the Netflix hit, Baby Reindeer, where she’s depicted as a convicted stalker with a rage problem. Denying almost everything, Harvey is suing Netflix for libel on a global scale, hoping to secure a tidy £133 million. Since the show aired, her story has become almost as sensational as the drama itself – it’s all over social media and is now playing out with particular ghoulishness and high-drama on YouTube.

Bridgerton is an American fantasy of ye olde England – right down to the absurd if enjoyably playful not-quite colour blind casting and its insinuation that Regency London was peopled with an equal number of Bame and white aristocrats. Even the casting of Queen Charlotte, played by half-Guyanese actress Golda Rosheuvel, is an allusion to the dubious speculation that the real Queen Charlotte had African heritage and was in fact a woman of colour.  So the unspoken final frontier of oppression is also the most debilitating: not being hot Bridgerton’s beloved first season saw an explosively sexy performance from its male lead, an antisocial Duke played by the gorgeous British-Zimbabwean actor Regé-Jean Page.

The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that. You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed and set in a battered, broken, postwar Vienna. It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Orson Welles as Harry Lime and there’s sterling support from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White, whose comic cameo almost steals the show.

Colombian pop singer Shakira caused quite the stir earlier this month when she revealed that her sons ‘absolutely hated’ the Barbie movie, which had a major cultural moment last year. Hot pink came back in fashion, people were hosting Barbie-themed parties and everyone was obsessing over lead Margot Robbie’s vintage Barbie-inspired clothing on the movie’s press tour. It was Barbie-mania, and the film earned $1.4 billion worldwide. Shakira’s family, though, weren’t fans of the global phenomenon. She said her nine- and 11-year-old sons didn’t enjoy the movie because they found it to be ‘emasculating’. And, she added, ‘I agree, to a certain extent’.

There should be a salacious German word for the blissful relief one feels at not being in another’s uncomfortable situation. Not pleasure at their misfortune, as in schadenfreude, just toe-stretching- and-dancing joy that you are safely under a blanket on the sofa while others are undergoing intense public scrutiny.  First impressions suggested earnest, caring individuals fed up of the transience of modern-day hook ups This is the feeling I have when watching Married At First Sight, the hit American TV programme that is now franchised to 24 other countries across the world.

Last month, the BBC offered an apology of sorts after a red-carpet reporter at the Baftas asked Andrew Scott, star of the film All of Us Strangers, about fellow Irish actor Barry Keoghan’s appendage. This had been the subject of conversation thanks to Keoghan’s naked dancing in the film, Saltburn, in which Keoghan’s floppy bishop steals the final scene. To settle this nagging concern the BBC turned to a gay man. ‘There was a lot of talk about prosthetics. How well do you know him?’ the reporter asked an annoyed Scott who shook his head and walked away.