Gareth Roberts

This weekend’s coronation will be an historic moment, a milestone in the mass memory. Just think how many dreary British films will be set against the backdrop of the coronation. (At least it will make a change from things being set against the backdrop of the miners’ strike – a mate of mine invented a game where you take turns adding that to the synopses of other famous films, e.g. ‘Jack Nicholson is possessed by the spirit of a murderous caretaker, set against the poignant backdrop of the miners’ strike’.)  But there is already a sense of a rather odd, half-in half-out, uncertain tone to the affair. This is meant to be a spectacle of majesty and splendour, but oh no, we can’t have the Speaker’s gold coach.

In the first sentence of his book, Jolyon Maugham – the anti-Brexit KC best known for clubbing a fox to death – achieves a mean feat. In 22 words, he conveys his trademark self-pity, self-aggrandisement and capacity for tying himself into pompous knots: 'The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not,' Maugham writes in Bringing Down Goliath. It certainly acts as a tantaliser. If this is only the first sentence, what other jewels are contained in the remaining 318 pages? After we’ve picked ourselves up from the floor, it’s worth unpacking – or trying to unpack – this remarkable string of words. ‘But’ and ‘and’ seem to be in each other’s places.

The incident at Manchester’s Palace Theatre last Friday night at the close of a performance of the musical version of The Bodyguard – audience members singing loudly over the showstopping final number ‘I Will Always Love You’, being manhandled out by security, the show actually being stopped, and police called – has led to lots of chat about etiquette in auditoriums. We are told that rowdy audiences are becoming more of a problem, with a similar incident the week before at Bat Out Of Hell in London, and a new campaign from the theatre union Bectu against anti-social behaviour in theatres.

The tragically early death of the magnificent Paul O’Grady struck a blow at the national heart that’s unusual for a celebrity death. After all, this is, for most of us, the death of a stranger.  This was a man who spent much of his professional life portraying a markedly waspish and unsentimental character, and even when he became more of what we used to call a ‘family entertainer’ he was never either sugary or oily. He reflected the British, or how we’d like to see ourselves, very well – unshowy, animal-loving, regularly quite angry, but most of all not fake.

Allow me to introduce you to a fun game you can play in your own parlour. You take it in turns for someone to shout out the title of a pre-21st century literary classic. The other player responds by giving the blurb of a 21st century television adaptation. It might go, for example; ‘Middlemarch!’ ’ A searing, never-more-relevant exposé of the rural chemsex scene starring Sophie Okonedo’. Or possibly; ‘Mapp and Lucia!’ ‘Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Izzard are locked in combat with the county lines gangs of the Sussex coast’. Or even: ‘Jane Eyre!’ ‘Lesley Manville and Cush Jumbo star in this accessible tale of the devastating mental health impacts of Tik-Tok addiction’.

BBC Radio 2 is one of the many modern cultural enterprises which seems to have as its primary aim alienating the people who love it. The shabbily executed departure of Ken Bruce from his long-established and still wildly popular mid-morning show feels like a final door being slammed shut. Bruce is to be replaced by Vernon Kay, a live wire television presenter. Like the breakfast show’s Zoe Ball, Kay is one of those people who is very excited about something the rest of us have not been let in on. They both retain a prepubescent bounce that is frankly odd in those around the age of 50. Is this tartrazine level of enthusiasm really necessary for the Radio 2 audience? Young people sleep like bears. They need to be blasted awake. Old people do not. We were up anyway.

If you don’t live online, you may have missed the controversy over Hogwarts Legacy, the latest computer game to have been spun out of the multi-billion Harry Potter franchise. A small but amazingly vocal band of activists launched a vicious campaign against the game because of its connection to ‘transphobe’ J.K. Rowling. Then the game came out and was instantly a phenomenal success – the most popular game ever on the streaming platform Twitch, physical sales of 12 million in its first two weeks of release, earning its makers $850 million (£709 million) in revenue. These cold, hard, commercial facts are like a glass of cold water in the face. The balance sheet shows that we have a very skewed understanding of the popularity and reach of ‘woke’.

Pop music – and specifically pop music stardom – has an incredible power to transform people into things they are not. The pop sphere enjoyed by my generation as teens transmogrified Morrissey into a sex symbol, Neil Tennant into an intellectual and Simon Le Bon into a surrealist poet.  More recently, pop’s alchemical potency has made Ed Sheeran someone people like to look at and Adele someone people want to hear from describing her emotional upsets at great length. But there are limits, and the singer Sam Smith has done us a favour by smashing into them.

Refugees and the NHS, we are told, will be at the heart of King Charles’s ‘diverse’ coronation in May. You’d think that a thousand-year-old institution tasked with steering clear of controversy might seek to avoid such hot potatoes. But there is nothing unexpected about this royal foray into politics. LGBTQ+ groups will perform at ‘a star-studded concert at Windsor Castle’ as part of the celebrations marking His Majesty’s accession to the throne. A royal source told the Daily Telegraph the coronation ‘needed to be “majestic” but “inclusive” to reflect a diverse modern Britain’.  Unfortunately, this sounds like another example of the utterly banal EDI (equality, diversity, inclusion) events we’ve become used to in Britain.

Splice the mainbrace! Howards’ Way, the BBC’s Sunday night sailing and sex 80s soap, is back, courtesy of UKTV Play, with the whole first series now available to stream free with ads. Nearly 40 years on, I’ve found myself caught in its swell all over again. The combination of corporate chicanery (Fry and Laurie’s ‘Damn you, Marjorie!’ sketches owe a lot to this) and sizzling sex on satin sheets is made all the more glorious because the backdrop isn’t the sun-drenched skyscrapers and rodeo ranches of Texas or Colorado but the village of Bursledon on the Hampshire coast, renamed Tarrant for the fiction. The sailing, and there’s a lot of sailing, all takes place on the river Hamble.