Gareth Roberts

A long life well spent doing what we love is more than most of us can hope to get anywhere near. Otto Schenk, who died a few weeks ago aged 94, took that trophy; his career as a director (and sometimes performer) of opera stretched over considerably more than half a century. Many of his productions – ‘traditional’, or ‘hackneyed’, according to taste – continued in repertoire for decades. Schenk's face was set very much against the cultural wind of his times. We have much to learn from his life. His 1972 TV movie version of Die Fledermaus – based on his very long running production at the state opera house in his native Vienna – is a masterpiece. I say movie, but it was recorded on videotape rather than film.

OnlyFans content creator Bonnie Blue claims to have broken a world record by sleeping with over a thousand men in twelve hours. I say ‘slept with’ but obviously the euphemism doesn’t really apply to this dubious feat. Blue, who was born in Nottingham but now lives in the United States, added to the glamour of the occasion by uploading a video of the aftermath, where she walks the streets with her face covered in what appears to be a pot pourri of male ejaculate. The reason Blue and Tate horrify us is that we mostly subscribe to a simple view: that men should treat women with respect If the 25-year-old adult star's stunt was designed to get attention, she has certainly succeeded in doing just that.

Pulp, the legendary band fronted by Jarvis Cocker, have revealed that they’ve signed a new recording deal with equally legendary independent label Rough Trade. Although they formed in Sheffield in 1978, when Cocker was 15, Pulp’s biggest success – and it was very big – came in the second half of the 1990s, with smash hit singles such as ‘Common People’ and ‘Disco 2000’, and albums including ‘His ‘N’ Hers’ and ‘Different Class’. They broke up in 2002 but have reformed, on and off, for celebratory live appearances since 2011. But the Rough Trade deal is the first sign of new songs for 22 years. Pulp are back. This is very good news. Who cares?

It’s bad manners to complain about a gift of any kind, and very bad manners to complain about a Christmas present that comes with epic historical significance. But the Trafalgar Square tree, supplied from the good people of Norway every year since 1947 as a thank you to Britain for looking out for them in the second world war, is a particularly sorry sight this year.  The Norwegian spruce has, it’s true, always been a slightly underwhelming specimen. I remember it looking a little sad in the 80s. But this year it’s looking unusually flat, rather like an underfed cactus, and a lot of people have noticed.

The current series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! has been a big contrast to the previous two. The 2022 and 2023 camps contained politicians, and they were two particularly hot – in the potato sense – politicians. Matt Hancock and Nigel Farage carried baggage with them into the camp. In Hancock’s case, radioactive baggage. None of that this year. Ant and Dec opined last year that they were a little sick of politicians on the show, and ratings took a small tumble. There was a feeling that Celeb was a place viewers went to escape from the sturm und drang of current affairs, and that it needed to return to drama between the standard variety of reality TV bigheads – pop stars, presenters and models.

There’s no need to be afraid, but 40 years since the advent of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ by Band Aid there is a dispute raging about the commemorations. There is to be an ‘ultimate’ version of this haunting ditty – haunting in the Borley Rectory sense – in which vocals from across each of the four versions of the star-spangled roundelay are combined, including those of the sadly deceased. For me, the release of Band Aid was the day the music died Perhaps inevitably, given the fraught cultural world we now live in, even at the frothiest end, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ has sparked rancour this time around. Given that it hits several boiling hot spots – international politics, racial and cultural difference – how could it not?

Gary Lineker is to leave Match of the Day at the end of the current football season, and to exit the BBC entirely after the 2026 World Cup. It was 1999 when he took over Match from Des Lynam, though in a strange discord with the usual swift passage of time, it feels much longer.  Because despite his close association with it as a player and a pundit Lineker is really nothing much to do with football. His punditry, as we all know, is far wider in its scope than such enjoyable trifles.

‘Kindness is like marmalade – a little goes a long way,’ Paddington Bear tweeted recently. But it isn’t only imaginary talking bears who take this approach on social media. The News Agents’ Emily Maitlis was inspired by the rather sickly – and given the seriousness of current events, rather inappropriate – chummy love-in between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer at their final Commons encounter last week. ‘Just imagine if PMQs was like this every week,’ she tweeted wistfully, ‘Conciliatory. Helpful. Bipartisan. Passionate and compassionate.’ Paddington’s thoughts on social media are enthusiastically greeted by the kind of grown-ups who feel tewwibly sad about Brexit Thankfully, as it turned out, Rishi Sunak was faking.

Halloween is approaching. The Americans, who go very big on it normally, are distracted this year by the election, so it feels like we have it more to ourselves than usual. And nobody in Britain will be having a happier Halloween than Danny Robins, a former comedy writer and journalist who has cracked the big time with his extremely successful spooky BBC podcast Uncanny (which became a TV show last year), and his play 2:22 A Ghost Story, which had a four-year run in the West End and was taken up in productions around the world. This year the podcast is running an advent-style Halloween event, serving up a fresh, bitesize experience sent in by a listener every day throughout October.