Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street. He is the author of The Age of Stupid substack.
Watching the Christmas John Lewis ad, over and over, I’m struck by how much British life has changed – and not for the better. We’ve all become so tastefully downbeat, introspectively sentimental and utterly lacking in brightness. In the early 1980s, the big TV advertisement of the Christmas season was for Woolworths. I should
Matt Hancock’s ongoing humiliation in the I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! jungle is bad news for lots of people, not least his long-suffering family and his mortally embarrassed children. His constituents in West Suffolk, who can watch their right honourable representative eat kangaroo penis (but probably not expect a reply to their
Greta Thunberg, the Shirley Temple of the apocalypse, let the cat out of the bag last week. She told the audience at her book launch that her environmental focus is merely part of her bigger secret plan to overthrow society. Apparently there’s a lot of ‘colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North’ that has to be stopped. Gosh. Some have
Appropriately for Twitter, the arrival of Elon Musk has been regarded by some as the coming of the antichrist and by others as the apotheosis of the messiah. I think both sides may be getting a little overexcited. This is not a person whose movements can be anticipated with any accuracy. Musk’s defining characteristic is
As Liz Truss prepares to leave Downing Street after 47 days in power, the PM’s reputation is in tatters. Seeing out the reigning monarch after seventy years, spooking the financial markets like a distant hyena terrifies a family of meerkats, and, incredibly, tanking the Tories’ poll rating to its lowest ever level at the same
The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius had the Delphic Oracle smashed up in 390 AD, but the gifts of the old gods were already well on the way out. The Sibylline Books were burned shortly after. Scrying glasses across the ancient world had misted over. The prophets fell silent. Well, they hadn’t seen that coming. It
‘Grow the pie’. Somebody thought ‘grow the pie’ was The Thing, that ‘grow the pie’ was it. That this knockout phrase would silence the army of doubters and bring millions of voters back on side. They were proud of ‘grow the pie’. They thought ‘grow the pie’ was a great idea that people can really
Our common culture – the huge audiences that tv, film and pop music used to attract – has evaporated. Politics is about the only thing remaining where we are all on the same page. It’s perhaps inevitable then that public reaction has become ever more febrile and volatile. Poll percentages now go crashing and soaring
‘I’m not sure I even know what woke means,’ tweeted barrister Chris Daw at the weekend, ‘but if it’s just treating all people fairly, and with kindness and dignity, it doesn’t seem so bad.’ This is the perfect example of the faux-naïf, head shaking sadly, cosy boast – well, when you get right down to
Recent sad events have seen everybody behaving exactly as you would expect. There’s nothing wrong about that. A certain continuity of conduct is reassuring, a truism that the late Queen herself exemplified better than anyone. Her job was to be regal. Similarly, it’s the job of chippy academics to spill their thoughts, of the New
The death of the Queen has led to a host of peculiar postponements. Perhaps the strangest was the announcement that the launch of ‘Bowie On The Blockchain’, a sale of NFT artworks inspired by the deceased pop star, has been delayed ‘out of respect for the people of the UK and Queen Elizabeth II’. It’s
On a recent trip to Sainsbury’s, I was perplexed to find nothing where it should be. I’m used to things being switched about to a small extent. It can even be quite fun to track down rice pudding where the clingfilm used to be and the clingfilm where the baked beans once were. But this
The Conservative party leadership contest (sometimes referred to as a ‘race’, which is pushing it) is nearing its end. It’ll be hard getting used to the world without it. We’re all such different people now, 900 years on. At least we’ll always have the misty water-coloured memories. One thing that both candidates agree on is
We’re being asked to credit Liz Truss with a lot of unlikely things now that’s she almost certainly on course for No. 10 – that she’s a snazzy, relaxed media performer; that she can solve the eruption of problems caused by decades of cross-party can-kicking in a few weeks; that she has Churchillian resolve and Thatcherite
Rarified cable TV channel Sky Arts has recently revealed its list of the top 50 most influential British artists of the last 50 years. Even in the crowded field of clickbaity lists, which usually contain at least one or two names calculated to raise eyebrows and hackles – ‘Octopussy is the best Bond film’ –
When I was 11, I was a pompous little git, but was I also a playground prophet? It first dawned on me that I was one lunchtime in the late 1970s as I looked around at my peers. There they were shouting, swearing and hitting each other. Were we, I wondered, the clueless inheritors of a system we wouldn’t
Has Justin Welby met his match in Sandi Toksvig? The entertainer has sent an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, complaining about his attempts to compromise with African bishops and avoid a showdown at the Lambeth Conference on the issue of same-sex marriage. The gist of it is: ‘Even though I don’t believe in God,
Watching people brazening it out can be tremendous fun. The higher the stakes, the more extreme the disparity between reality and what we now call ‘cope’, the greater the cheer. We remember the brass neck of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister dubbed ‘Comical Ali’, still denying the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime as
Barring a disaster — given her record, that’s not impossible — Liz Truss will soon be the prime minister. She didn’t slip up in last night’s debate. She even surprised observers by showing mental dexterity when being needled by Rishi Sunak. Nevertheless, the adjective most often used to describe her – I’ve seen it in
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In this week’s episode:Will Donald Trump have a second shot at the US presidency?Freddy Gray and Sarah Baxter debate the return of Donald Trump. (1.10)Also this week:A look at the history of Scotland’s paradoxical relationship between Scottish identity and the Union.The Spectator’s Scotland editor, Alex Massie talks with Murray Pittock about his book Scotland: The
