Netflix

Full marks to whoever tweeted, after watching the trailer for the dire new version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, that, "I’m sorry but Dakota Johnson has the face of someone who knows what an iPhone is." In that pithy phrase, the failings of Carrie Cracknell’s film are laid bare immediately. Johnson, despite the utter dreadfulness of the Fifty Shades films that launched her to fame, is a talented and likable actress, but she is also contemporary in a way that many of her peers are. You can dress her in all the crinolines and bonnets and Regency finery in the world, but she still looks like a California resident from 2022 cosplaying, rather than an inhabitant of early nineteenth-century Britain. But Johnson is not the only problem with Persuasion.

You may already have read early reviews of Netflix’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion saying it’s ‘the worst adaptation ever’ as well as ‘mortifying’ and ‘a travesty’, but I know you won’t believe it unless you hear it from me, so here you are: it is truly horrible. I would also add that everyone involved should probably be sent to prison. Not for life, but until we could be confident they’d learned the error of their ways and there was minimal risk of reoffending. A probation officer would possibly be required to keep a close eye, just to make sure. Better safe than sorry. There are ways to adapt Austen for a contemporary audience, but those ways are not this way, and I say this not as a purist.

When Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Ball back in May, the world was aghast. Many claimed the dress was damaged (something the owners deny), and the dress’s original designer, Bob Mackie, told the world it was a “big mistake," saying, “Nobody else should be seen in that dress.” Some of the concerns came from the fact that Kim Kardashian had had to lose a significant amount of weight to fit the blonde bombshell’s proportions — the dress was so tight on Monroe that she'd had to be sewn into it — and that it set a dangerous precedent for the preservation of historical costumes.

Just how edgy and dangerous is Ricky Gervais? There is no one more edgy and dangerous, we learn from no less an authority than one R. Gervais. He keeps reminding you of this at intervals in his latest stand-up special, for which he was reputedly paid $20 million (to go with the other $20 million Netflix paid him for its predecessor). Every few sketches, he’ll announce to his live audience that this one was so offensive there’s just no way Netflix is going to broadcast it. But Netflix has done just that – and yet, quite incredibly, neither it nor Gervais has been cancelled. Funny that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Recently, Kate Bush went to the top of the iTunes charts — yes, such a thing does still exist — with her 1985 single "Running Up That Hill." It’s an excellent song, one of her finest works, but the reason for its somewhat unexpected resurgence in popularity is because it was prominently featured in the fourth and penultimate season of Stranger Things. It's testament to the show’s continued popularity that its consistent, even ruthless channeling of Eighties nostalgia can lead to unexpected knock-on effects.

Streaming services have a school violence problem. For all the hand-wringing and anti-gun stances actors love to indulge on social media, their industry has no problem glorifying the very terror they claim to condemn. Two such cases came last week, right after the Uvalde school shooting that left twenty-one people dead, nineteen of which were schoolchildren. On Friday May 27, three days after Uvalde, the fourth season of Stranger Things premiered on Netflix with an opening scene of mass child death, apparently at the hands of the show’s protagonist, Eleven, in a flashback. Several kids' corpses lie on the floor with smears and pools of blood around them. The streaming service added a disclaimer at the beginning of the season specifically referencing the incident in Texas.

Ricky Gervais has caused a stir. This is not, perhaps, the least expected thing you could hear about the sixty-year-old British comedian, but his new Netflix show, SuperNature, has attracted an unusual amount of opprobrium for what people have perceived as anti-trans jokes. In the show, Gervais makes a distinction between “the old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs” and “the new women... with beards and cocks.” He calls upon the latter to “lose the cock,” and the audience laughs along with him hysterically.

Netflix’s share price has collapsed and a major factor, people are saying, is its relentless pushing of agendas. I think I have the solution. Perhaps it should follow the BritBox model and instead of making dramas it feels that audiences ought to like – e.g. the very creepy-sounding He’s Expecting, a Japanese series about a man who gets pregnant – it should instead capitalise on our growing yearning for a lost age of chocolate-box innocence and relative normality. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is a good example.

One of the most enduring images from the Oscars came two decades ago, at the 2002 ceremony, when director David Lynch revealed himself as one of the most courteous and pleasant figures in contemporary cinema. Ron Howard had just won the Best Director award for his work on the dishonest and ephemeral mental health drama A Beautiful Mind. As the beaming Howard — one of the most popular figures in Hollywood — headed onto the stage to collect his prize, two of his defeated rivals, Robert Altman and Lynch, embraced one another.

The only impersonation I can do is my Jimmy Savile impersonation. This is not uncommon among people of my generation: if you were a child or a teenager in the 1970s and 1980s, Savile was quite possibly the most famous person in your entire world. His show Jim’ll Fix It was the most popular on TV with weekly audiences of 20 million. From Top of the Pops to his endless chat-show appearances promoting his relentless work for charidee, he was excruciatingly ubiquitous.

The most disappointing pop performance I’ve ever seen – and in the course of my 15-odd years as a music critic I saw an awful lot – was Kanye West at Glastonbury in 2015. Perhaps he was making some kind of ironic statement on the nature of celebrity and fan expectation: blinding lights all focused on himself; no attempts to engage with the crowd; relentless, mechanical rapping but with most of the amusing samples and catchy hooks removed, the better to punish us all by ordeal with loud, righteous verbiage.