Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
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Is there a German word for when someone you loathe does something you admire? ‘Feindbewunderung’ perhaps? I’ve been taken aback to feel it twice in recent weeks, and both times inspired by pop singers, of all the unlikely characters. Both times, less surprisingly to anyone who knows what an incorrigible philo-Semite I am, the issue was Israel.
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In theory, being a wizened old sexagenarian, I should feel resentful of gorgeous young women, particularly those who have monetised their erotic capital in a way I could never have dreamt of, even at my fruitiest. But on the contrary, they make me feel like cheering; I’m particularly keen on Sydney Sweeney and her fantastic rack. There is, however, one famous actress who really gets my goat; I feel an almost physical reaction when I see her photograph. Sometimes, in restaurants, when they say ‘Any allergies?’ I want to reply ‘Yes - Sarah Jessica Parker.’ On paper, I should love SJP. (It pains me to be so familiar with someone I loathe, but I resent the time it takes to type out her full name.
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They say that politics is showbiz for ugly people – but with the rise of the radiantly beauteous Keminator (and, grudgingly, for the eyelashes, Soft-Lad Burnham) this is no longer true, though Zack Polanski is bravely still flying the flag. I’d say these days that it was truer of the legal profession, especially the limousine-chasers among them who often end up working for celebrities; it would be interesting to see what proportion of those currently strutting and pontificating in courts of law originally dreamt of treading the boards. Everything about this puffed-up popinjay is absurd Exhibit one, Jolyon Maugham.
One of my favourite one-I-made-earlier aphorisms is ‘Men are the sum of their parts; women are some of their parts.’ But now I’m wondering if it’s a bit out of date. When I thought it up, women were the only ones who bothered with ‘tweakments’ and cosmetic surgery and generally turning themselves into living dolls, hoping to hook what in the common parlance is known as ‘a live one’. But now, with transplants for receding hairlines and male film stars no longer looking like their passport photos, I don’t think this is true anymore. Becoming a ‘lad’ once meant swerving Sports Day, drinking beer and generally letting oneself go Where there is still a gap in male and female attitudes to looks is in dieting.
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There’s an ungallant phrase from the old days, generally used by men, the rotters; ‘Coyote Ugly’ which refers to the unhappy happenstance of having a few shandies and falling into bed with a pleasant-seeming partner. On waking up sober, however, one realises that the bedmate is so unsightly that the option of gnawing one’s own arm (inconveniently placed under the sleeping swain) off, as coyotes are reputed to do to escape from traps, rather than wake them seems preferable. You see the reflections of a series of grotesques: freshly elected local councillors yelling ‘Allahu Akbar!
In case you missed it (well done, if so), last week Will Self wrote an extraordinary rant on Substack attacking various journalists for how they wrote about Jason Arday and demanding they be held responsible for his death. It reminded me of one of those dogs in a pub that starts barking at some imagined threat to its owner, then gets carried away with the excitement of its own barking until it totally loses its mind and has to be taken outside to calm down.
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Rather like Andy Burnham, you can imagine a younger version of Zia Yusuf being sent into Love Island in the third week – when things are getting a bit comfy between the youthful love-seekers – as a ‘bombshell’ to freshen things up a bit (probably the only thing they have in common). Looking like a Disney prince – the modern, inclusive kind, not the boring old blond-haired blue-eyed type – you can see the girls getting all a-flutter over this dashing self-made swell who suddenly makes the humdrum Tylers and Jordans look a bit too boy-next-door. All the ladies would be hoping to be picked for the romantic dinner, but as the also-rans peep over the parapet, their envy of the chosen girl starts to wane. Isn’t the dark-eyed charmer a little…boastful?
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I was on friendly terms with Rod Liddle for quite a few decades. He applied for the job I got when I was 17 at the New Musical Express, which kicked off my writing career. Though I wouldn’t claim we were bezzie mates, we had a lot of the same friends and we met up in a couple of group lunches and had a laugh. So I was surprised at my lack of grief when he died. (Apparently he too was remarkably sanguine about his ending.) My overwhelming feeling was: ‘Good for Rod – he escaped!’ It’s the first time I can recall feeling that way about the premature death of someone I knew a bit and liked a lot. Why, I wondered, did I react like this?
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When I was a young punk, my favourite badge (we loved badges!) was a big white one which a reader sent me and which simply read I HATE STUDENTS YEAH! I wore it proudly pinned to the thigh of my skin-tight jeans for many a month, until I lost it in a 1977 scuffle with a police horse during an anti-fascist demonstration in Lewisham. (I trust that no wiseacre is going to ask which side I was on.) A lot of people simply shouldn’t be at university wasting their time and money on Mickey Mouse degrees But the sentiment has stayed with me throughout the decades and still remains strong; living in Brighton, with its manifold institutes of ‘higher’ and ‘further’ education, it’s very hard to avoid students.
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In the interests of complete candour, I should reveal that Dawn French and I have had ‘beef’ (and how suitable that word is, as we were both beefy at the time) for decades. Since 1994, to be precise, when she made a television documentary on ‘Big Women’. She asked me to appear in it; I refused; she put my name repeatedly on the credits. What a way to celebrate porkers - by calling someone a porker! I was merely chubby at the time, being a good 5’9 in my prime (I’ve shrunk a bit with age and disability) whereas she was only 5 foot and maybe 19 stone at her ‘peak’.
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Like a lot of things, it started with Harold Wilson. This deceptively homely politician was the Queen’s first Labour leader and not reckoned to be quite her speed. Yet she developed a relationship with him which was notable for its warmth, to the extent that they had been known to natter while sharing the washing up after Balmoral barbecues. But it was Wilson’s lust for taxing the highest earning – ‘squeeze them until the pips squeak’ gloated his chancellor Denis Healey – which brought him into conflict with The Beatles.
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We’re living in a golden age of parliamentary sketch writing; never have so many been made mincemeat of by so few. Our own Madeline Grant combines coruscating character assassination with a sense of humour so light and playful that she often appears like a kitten prancing on a keyboard, delighted by the sound she’s making. And of course there’s Quentin Letts, the doyen of sketch writers, formerly of the Times and Telegraph and most recently returned to his natural home at the Daily Mail. I reviewed a book of his some years back and found it elegant, muscular and witty. It’s always a joy to behold someone who excels at what they do – that is, if the beholder is also good at their job. If not, then excellence can appear somewhat… threatening.
As one who’s always been keen on putting their hand up and admitting to their faults (a perverse form of boasting, I suspect) I was always suspicious of the medicalisation of character flaws which apparently render us helpless in the clammy hands of Fortuna. It was bad enough when friends who’d generally always seemed highly capable jumped on the ADHD bus in later life, suddenly flinching at loud noises when they’d spent a good deal of their lives dancing to ear-splitting techno. But it was another sort of annoying when ex-friends who were merely awful people started blaming all their past ghastliness first on ADHD and then – still not feeling special enough – on autism, a serious condition which affects a tiny amount of people.
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Oh Thomas Tuchel, how I love you! Unlike the last boss of the England team, Saint Gareth of Southgate, there’s no smart suit and fashionable theories about sad young men for you. You won’t write a book called ‘Anything Is Possible: Be Brave, Be Kind & Follow Your Dreams’. No one will ever write a play about you, though you are beautifully portrayed in the current series of Radio 4’s Dead Ringers, repeatedly correcting Gary Lineker’s sloppy thinking and Harry’s Kane’s flights of fancy with a kindly but firm ‘No, Gary’ and ‘No, Harry’ before explaining to them exactly what’s what. There’s always a special affection about the way the studio audience laugh at your small speeches and cheer when the sketches conclude.
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Before I became confined to a wheelchair two years ago after an operation for a spinal abscess, I’d never read a book about disability. More remarkably, considering the tiny amount of time it would have taken, I’d never read a newspaper article about it either. The only media stories about disabled people I’d bothered with concerned famous sufferers, such as Christopher Reeve and Robert Wyatt. I’d also followed with voyeuristic revulsion the 2021 story of Giles Coren celebrating the death of the young, working-class, disabled journalist Dawn Foster after she’d had the temerity to cross him. So there you go. My concern with disability was confined to where it overlapped with showbiz and media.
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I knew that the endless hours I’d spent watching reality TV would one day stand me in good stead in my trade – and now it’s happened. For Andy Burnham’s journey to No. 10 is recognisable from a good many such shows. It’s notable that his wife, Marie-France van Heel, was once a contestant on Blind Date. Andy himself would be a shoo-in for its sexy and souped-up heir, Love Island. There’s always an episode a few weeks in when the original contestants get a bit bored with each other – so enter the Bombshell. Bombshells can be of either sex, but they have to be more attractive than the majority of the boys or girls already in place; this is certainly true of Burnham.
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I didn’t fully realise how much Brexit Derangement Syndrome – the reaction to being on the losing side in the 2016 referendum – had got hold of even people I loved until I complained to a friend that my 2018 play People Like Us (co-written with Jane Robins, who had been asked to leave her North London book group for liking a pro-Brexit Spectator column of mine on Facebook) would close in the small London theatre where it had played for six weeks. It wouldn’t transfer to a bigger London venue, it wouldn’t open in any provincial theatre and it wouldn’t tour – despite selling out before it opened.
I’ve always been keen on Kim Kardashian, going right back to the earliest years of her family reality show. At one point in an over-excited piece for the Sun, I even compared her to Helen of Troy – a modern day icon of beauty whose bum launched a thousand quips. Hamilton has a long history of acting like both a princeling and a drag queen in terms of entitlement and drama, while also liking to present himself as the underdog But my word, she can pick them. Starting with Ray J, who appears to have been talking about little else since 2007 but the sex-tape they made as youngsters in 2003. Then there was most famously Kanye West.
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Many of us have been flirted with by fruit; perhaps it can’t help being fruity, following the principles of nominative determinism. ‘PLEASE DON’T SQUEEZE ME TILL I’M YOURS’ blushing peaches on market stalls used to beg, lest we bruise them with our greedy paws. ‘UNZIP A BANANA’ leered a television commercial, so typical of the licentious 1960s. As if knowing that vegetables can never be as sexy, fungi could only fight back with the highly uninspired ‘MAKE ROOM FOR THE MUSHROOMS’ slogan of the 1980s - a limp retort at best. What they all had in common was the anthropomorphisation of food. It seemed like a bit of fun at first.
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As I’m an OAP, it’s not very often that I see an amusing online game I got into early trending online, so imagine my glee on seeing the following on X this week: ‘Peter Murrell Meme Turns Follower Counts into Luxury Kitchen Splurges.’ Freelance journalist Jill Foster started the game by pairing a pound sign with her follower count and a kitchen item, sparking replies from a £35,900 cutlery tray (the proud possession of The Spectator’s own Gareth Roberts) to a £394,000 salad dressing bottle. The humour stems from Murrell's real court-listed buys, including a £3,232 Jura coffee machine and Jamie Oliver spoons, all funded by SNP donations from 2010 to 2022.’ To be specific, it had to be the last item in the kitchen that one touched.
