School shooting

Thursday

Gareth Roberts

Reform’s camp following, masculine rage & why do people make up languages?

51 min listen

First: Reform is naff – and that’s why people like it Gareth Roberts warns this week that ‘the Overton window is shifting’ but in a very unexpected way. Nigel Farage is ahead in the polls – not only because his party is ‘bracingly right-wing’, but ‘because Reform is camp’. Farage offers what Britain wants: ‘a cheeky, up-yours, never-mind-the-knockers revolt against our agonisingly earnest political masters’. ‘From Farage on down,’ Roberts argues, ‘there is a glorious kind of naffness’ to Reform: daytime-TV aesthetics, ‘bargain-basement’ celebrities and big-breasted local councillors. ‘The progressive activists thought they could win the culture war simply by saying they had won it’, but ‘the John Bulls and Greasy Joans are stirring again’.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Predictable, repetitive and exploitative: Run Hide Fight reviewed

In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really must see, as it wowed a festival in Bulgaria. But the other day, a PR reached out to boast excitedly about a film because it had been savaged, which was a first. ‘The film has absolutely enraged Hollywood critics,’ this person wrote, with obvious pride, before quoting the following from reviews: ‘insanely poor taste’, ‘wildly misjudged’, ‘tone deaf’, ‘gross’. What’s more, this person continued, while critics hate it — it has a critics’ score of 25 per cent at Rotten Tomatoes, the review- aggregator site — audiences are loving it (93 per cent).