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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.
This week's magazine
Wes Streeting’s explosive plan
It is an old adage of leadership contests that ‘If you shoot for the King, you’d better not miss’ – but no one expected the starting gun to be fired at Charles III. At the exact time on Wednesday when the monarch was reading the King’s Speech to parliament, allies of Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, put a bomb under proceedings by making it clear that he is set to challenge Keir Starmer this week. ‘Yes, it’s inevitable,’ one says. The timing horrified MPs even on Streeting’s wing of the party. A cabinet minister declared: ‘Having failed with his kamikaze coup, Wes has now undermined every single one of his colleagues and disrespected the King.
It is an old adage of leadership contests that ‘If you shoot for the King, you’d better not miss’ – but no one expected the starting gun to be fired at Charles III. At the exact time on Wednesday when the monarch was reading the King’s Speech to parliament, allies of Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, put a bomb under proceedings by making it clear that he is set to challenge Keir Starmer this week. ‘Yes, it’s inevitable,’ one says. The timing horrified MPs even on Streeting’s wing of the party. A cabinet minister declared: ‘Having failed with his kamikaze coup, Wes has now undermined every single one of his colleagues and disrespected the King.
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
If Olivia Dean is the girl next door, Rosalia is the girl next planet. Their shows in successive weeks at the O2 – Dean had six nights, Rosalia two – were object lessons in presentation. Dean’s gig looked like some high-end light entertainment from the 1970s, Rosalia’s like something the National Theatre might dream up for a new revival of Murder in the Cathedral. Rosalia emerged in 2017 as the apparent saviour of flamenco – though flamenco traditionalists disagreed: she was Catalan, not Andalusian, and she wasn’t even a gypsy. Then across four albums, she travelled so far that it’s hard to categorise her extraordinary latest one, Lux: a heavily orchestrated, intensely dramatic reverie about the lives of assorted recondite saints.