James Innes-Smith

Can anyone name the actors in the new Alien: Romulus movie? No, me neither. Which seems odd for such a massive franchise, but then I struggle to name a single film star under the age of about 35, and I consider myself a movie buff. As is often the case with the release of a new sequel, I returned to the original for reappraisal. Yes, Ridley Scott’s masterwork is still frightening and expertly paced, but what makes the film exceptional is the diversity of the acting talent. And by diverse, I don’t mean the sort of DEI casting-by-numbers that turns every movie into a shiny Benetton commercial. No, I mean that in the 1979 original, we witness the full gamut of acting talent available at the time.

Steve Coogan confessed in a recent interview on BBC1’s The One Show that he is morphing into his alter ego Alan Partridge. ‘There’s almost a complete overlap in the Venn diagram,’ he admitted, ‘by this time next year I will have completely become Alan.’ Maybe he was joking, but I suspect he kind of meant it. At a recent drinks party, I discovered to my horror that I’d come dressed exactly like every other midlife man in the room The comedian has spent years trying to distance himself from the boss of Pear Tree Productions, firstly by creating ‘other less successful characters’, his words, not mine, and then by retreating to Hollywood.

Keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman once described progressive rock as the ‘porn of the music industry; you bought an album under the counter in a brown paper bag’. He was no doubt referring to the genre’s mid-1970s nadir when punk burst onto the scene and nicked all the cool kids, leaving the nerds to their embarrassing flares and concept albums. Fast forward 50 years and it’s the nerds who prevail. Anyone out there still listening to Sham 69? These are the marginalised, workaday Brits you rarely get to see on television anymore Yes, the proggiest of the 1970s rock behemoths, is on tour again with an album of new material in the pipeline. Wakeman quit the band years ago leaving 77-year-old guitar maestro Steve Howe as the only remaining member from the classic line up.

Perhaps it was the anachronistic use of the term ‘gentlemen’ that finally put paid to the idea of the gentlemen’s club. If only these illustrious institutions had thought to rename themselves ‘cis-male inner-city safe spaces’, we probably wouldn’t be looking on aghast as another centuries old tradition is summarily flushed down the memory hole.

In 1909, London’s first Chinese restaurant was opened by Mr Chang Choy off Piccadilly Circus. Named simply ‘The Chinese Restaurant’ – so exotic! – Choy specialised in what was described as ‘imperial banquet’ style cuisine which required at least half a day’s notice to prepare. Customers were then required to pay a hefty deposit in advance to cover the purchase of ingredients for such imperial delights as ‘sturgeon bones’, ‘fish maws’, ‘gelatine’, ‘dried cabbage stalk peel’ and ‘chrysanthemum shoots’. A 1937 edition of Where to Dine in London declared that, ‘Englishmen who have spent their lives in the East will appreciate the traditional menu’. Hmm, I wonder.

Watching Frank Skinner perform his latest one man show at the Gielgud Theatre reminded me of what it must have been like back in the dying days of variety. By the late 1970s and early 1980s cheeky jokesters and all-round entertainers such as Tarby, Brucie, Doddy and Manning were feeling the heat from a new breed of alternative comedian vehemently opposed to the old guard’s reliance on tedious stereotyping and shallow observation. Now in their mid-fifties (considered ancient back then) many took the hint, hung up their dickey-bows and retired to Bexhill; others struggled on in tatty end-of-the-pier shows in front of dwindling geriatric audiences. Mystifyingly, Sir Bruce Joseph Forsyth-Johnson CBE continued his wearisome nice-to-see-you shtick right up until his death in 2017 aged 89.

Golf has always felt like the embarrassing uncle of the sporting world, from those garish check slacks and snobby clubhouse rules to the desperate middle-managers sucking up to the boss at the 18th hole. Like many non-golfers I could never understand the appeal. Surely only a masochist would find pleasure whacking tiny balls into tiny holes. For me, real sport involved sweaty blokes dashing round a playing field injuring each other. Golf had neither sweat nor injury unless you count a nasty chill from standing out in the rain all day. Tiger Woods may have briefly sexed-up the game back in the 2000s but it was never really considered cool to be into golf. Or so I thought.

It’s always sad to see a beloved landmark lose its identity – but when the landmark in question is one of the most recognisable places on earth, it’s doubly troubling. In recent years, Piccadilly Circus, once described as ‘the hub of the world’, has descended into a shamefully hollowed out sideshow. Stately Edwardian buildings, once home to department stores, elegant restaurants and upmarket entertainment venues, lie empty or have been colonised by dubious landlords and cancerous ‘candy stores’. All of life seemed to congregate here – it really did feel like the epicentre of the world The West End has always been London’s beating heart but these days the old ticker is in need of a defibrillator.

Nepo-narcissism has plunged new depths. Scarlett Curtis, the mauve-haired social justice activist and daughter of filmmaker Richard, has been grilling her hapless father about his wicked pre-cultural revolutionary past. During a creepy Soviet-style cross-examination in front of a crowd at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Scarlett harangued the creator of Blackadder for failing to include a single black person in his film Notting Hill. Rather than telling his daughter to check her thinking – duh, the film came out in 1999, long before it became mandatory to patronise people of colour – Richard made the fatal error of trying to excuse his problematic past.

It used to be that an ‘artist's impression’ of a proposed building development was just that; an architectural drawing designed to give planners an idea of what to expect. Then along came CGI and a new era of photorealistic visualisations. On the surface, these glossy new artist's impressions are anything but impressionistic. Indeed the renderings are so lifelike it's virtually impossible to tell if they are actual photographs. Ironically, as we are now discovering with AI, hyperrealism is rarely as real as it purports to be.

Hotel restaurants have come a long way since they were dingy add-ons geared towards a captive audience, once the preserve of holidaymakers too lazy to leave the lobby. London is in the midst of a literal feeding frenzy of swish new hotel restaurant openings. The whole ‘dining experience’ – what is dining if not an experience? – has become a way for hard-pressed hoteliers keen to make a bit of extra cash. My dream has always been to live in a grand London hotel with every whim catered for. The dowdy old Dorchester, once a second home to reprobates such as Burton and Taylor, always held a particular appeal, even more so now that the hotel has finally received the facelift she deserves and with it the launch of two celebrity chef offerings.

As I gazed upon the first circle of hell, otherwise known as Stansted Airport, I felt as though I was witnessing a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with our hapless nation. Thousands of desperate flyers were left stranded across the UK earlier this week after what appeared to be another air traffic control cock up. The utter confusion seemed to reflect the growing ineptitude inherent in so many of our institutions, where despite huge leaps in technology, nothing works, no one is accountable and no one cares. As the delicate tendrils of civil society withered around me, the thing I found most unnerving was the reaction of my fellow travellers.

When asked how his production of Goodnight Vienna was going down with audiences in Huddersfield, Noel Coward is reputed to have replied ‘about as well as Goodnight Huddersfield would be going down with audiences in Vienna.’  I cannot vouch for Huddersfield’s cultural riches but there has never been a better time to visit Austria’s ‘City of Dreams and Music’. Over the past couple of years, many of Vienna’s most important buildings have undergone a thorough clean in preparation for the 150th anniversary of the World’s Fair. The sprucing up has certainly paid off; buildings once shrouded in layers of soot now gleam sugar white against the clear summer sky.

For the past week Hollywood’s film and television actors have been on strike, plunging Los Angeles’s most famous industry into chaos. Performers joined screenwriters (who have been striking since May) on the picket line after talks broke down in what has become the first simultaneous strike in more than 60 years. The strikes have attracted plenty of headlines, not least when the cast of Oppenheimer walked out of its UK premiere last week. But do we really care if studios have to shelve Fast and Furious 15, or if the latest superhero movie fails to take flight – or indeed if the entire cocaine-encrusted edifice crumbles into the Pacific Ocean?

With Pride Month beginning tomorrow, how proud are you of your sexuality? As a white cis-gendered male, I am frankly a little embarrassed about mine. I mean, it’s not exactly cool to fancy the opposite sex these days, and many of us hetero-normies have become increasingly wary of appearing ‘inappropriate’ when making a move on someone we like the look of. So don't expect me to be parading my vanilla-flavoured proclivities through central London any time soon. What would I even wear to signal hetero-pride – baggy cords and a neatly tucked-in shirt? That said, you might well spot me at some of this year's shenanigans; after all, the organisers certainly know how to put on a show.

I'd always questioned the creative genius of self-confessed 'living sculptures' Gilbert and George. Their dogged determination to be seen as 'different' felt archly self-conscious and not particularly interesting. Like so many fly-by-night avant-gardists of the 1960s, the duo's 'originality' tended to hang on hoary old controversies such as scatological imagery, sex and nudity – hardly revolutionary even back then. But listening to the pair's touching interview with John Wilson on BBC Radio 4's This Cultural Life recently made me reassess their contribution not just to art, but to the gaiety of the nation.

When George William Wilton opened his shellfish-mongers close to Haymarket in 1742, he could never have imagined that his business would still be thriving 280 years later. The place has outlived ten monarchs and is as old as Handel's Messiah. Before visiting, I imagined a typically Hogarthian scene with portly gentlemen in dandruff-flecked suits feasting on potted shrimp and vintage port. Perhaps they had dropped by for a 'spot of luncheon' before toddling off to their various clubs at nearby St James's.  Up until relatively recently you might well have witnessed just such a quintessentially English scene; sadly, the agreeable old buffers who would once have frequented places such as Wiltons no longer exist in quite the same way.

As the pandemic gently recedes into history, many of us have been embracing the liberties that have followed. For anyone whose work relied on a desk, a chair and a computer, video-conferencing services such as Zoom left us questioning long-held assumptions about the need for those increasingly anachronistic offices to which we once trudged. The thought of traipsing across town to sit in front of the same computer perched on a slightly different desk suddenly felt absurdly outdated.   But just as we became accustomed to typing in our slippers, more adventurous feet began to itch. Being stuck in a corner of the sitting room all day could be just as stifling as those open-plan offices we thought we'd escaped.