Gareth Roberts

If I had to summarise, in a word, the mood of the nation in 2025, I'd probably plump for fraught. There is something in the air that I can’t quite recall having sniffed before, the kind of crackle that might be quite exciting or intriguing if you were standing a little bit further back from it, flicking through the pages of a history book, maybe. But it's rather different to live through it. How quaint Britain’s big worries of the 1990s now seem People like me, and probably you, were socialised in a more stable and reliable world, where everyone and everything muddled along. So we find it very hard to adjust to the return of history with a capital H.

Two shirts were in the news at the weekend, both worn by politicians. In the light blue corner, we had Nigel Farage launching his personally branded football strip top – in Reform colours, with the name Farage and the number 10, a bargain at £39.99 (£99.99 if you want it signed by the man himself). In the red corner, meanwhile, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy attended Wigan Pride – one of the never-ending LGBTQ+ moveable feast days that populate the calendar on either side of the holy Pride month itself – wearing the official t-shirt of the event, emblazoned with a ‘trans rights’ slogan. Farage’s football top has gone down very well with the people it was intended to go down very well with, selling 5,000 units in its first day on sale.

Britain is in a terrible state (you may have noticed). We have a busted economy, a broken social contract and also what are euphemistically known as ‘community tensions’. But Reform is riding to our rescue. Apparently. Now if I’m drowning I’ll grab gladly at any piece of passing driftwood, however unpromisingly flimsy. But I’m afraid I just can’t successfully lie to myself – and I’ve tried – about Reform. There is something cheap and cheerful about Reform, an erratic, homespun quality that would seem amiably slipshod in a comfortingly British way – if only conditions weren’t so dire What is the essence of Reform? If you were going to assemble a mood board for the brand, what would you put on it? A Union Jack, a nice big friendly, messy dog.

‘As a gay man...’ is a handy signal; in 99 per cent of cases, it tells you that whatever follows is going to be irrelevant rubbish. This certainly held true during the excruciating appearance on Iain Dale’s LBC show the other day by Zack Polanski, one of the candidates in the current campaign for leadership of the Green party. Polanski had been ambushed by phone-in caller Dr Shahrar Ali, who isn’t just a random member of the public. In fact, he is the former deputy leader of the Green Party, who last year won a legal case against them for discrimination without following a fair process. The Greens had removed Dr Ali during a row over his ‘gender-critical beliefs’, which is the posh way of saying he is unafraid to state that there are two sexes.

Can the BBC do anything right? Just days before it messed up spectacularly by failing to cut away from Bob Vylan's offensive performance at Glastonbury, it released a podcast in which activist Munroe Bergdorf told listeners 'how transitioning allowed her to discover love'. The BBC, the former broadcaster that’s now a HR department with some channels attached, is increasingly ladling up such tatty ‘content’. But this podcast episode – part of the ‘How To Be In Love’ series – marks a new, desperate low. 'We are constantly told that trans people are an abomination,' says Bergdorf. Really?

Few things are more delicious to watch than an uneven battle of wits – and it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than one between Boy George and JK Rowling. 'Which rights have been taken away from trans people?', Rowling asked her followers on X this weekend. 'The right to be left alone by a rich bored bully!', Boy George responded. 'I’ve never been given 15 months for handcuffing a man to a wall and beating him with a chain,' wrote JK Rowling We waited with bated breath for the inevitable response from the Harry Potter author. When it came, it didn't disappoint.

Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve got accustomed to celebrities – particularly actors and comedians, but also pop stars and sporting luminaries – sharing their unsought opinions with the public. My eyes have gone grey from it, to the extent that the brows above them no longer so much as twitch when a celeb ‘drops’ some ‘content’ of this kind, unless it’s one of those very rare occasions when they don’t take the approved line. So I thought I was immune to such rubbish. French has form for getting carried away Enter Dawn French, who managed to induce in me a flinch response that I thought had atrophied in about 2002.

Twenty years on from its spectacular revival it looks like Doctor Who might not be returning to our screens again in the immediate future. I haven’t actually watched Doctor Who for a long time, but because I wrote an awful lot of it for years – on TV, but also books, comics, radio plays, yogurt pot labels, you name it – people always ask me what I think should become of it. My answer? I’d cancel it and flee for the hills. Doctor Who was born in an age when we didn’t need to rabbit on about our ‘values’ Twenty years is an incredible run, almost equalling its original marathon from 1963 to 1989. In TV parlance, it needs to be ‘rested’. Stepping back from a thing enables you to see it from the outside, which has been quite a jolt.

‘The UK’s first ever gay dating show is louder, prouder, and more irresistible than ever,' says the BBC about I Kissed A Boy. But things on the BBC Three reality dating show aren't what they seem. Amongst the gaggle of young gay men this time around is Lars: a 23-year-old hotel receptionist from Wolverhampton, who is, in fact, a woman. Yes, what was basically Love Island without women in its first series is now, in series two, like Love Island. Can't the gays just be left alone to have a dating show of their own? 'I‘ve been through 16 years of my life as a girl. It's aged me, but in a good way,' says Lars, who says they/them 'felt like a gay guy trapped in a woman's body.' What on earth that means, and how she could possibly know, is anybody’s guess.