Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
Where to start, with a police force where decent behaviour seems to be the exception rather than the norm? For a quarter of a century since the murder of Stephen Lawrence caused the Macpherson report to call the Metropolitan police ‘institutionally racist’ we’ve been comforting ourselves – in the manner of frightened children humming in the dark
Before the Sussexes – before the Grabdication was a twinkle in Meghan’s crocodile eye – there was Sarah, Duchess of York; greedy, grasping, grubby Fergie. Some see Diana as when the stiff upper lip of heritage royalty became the trembling lower lip of the new breed. But the Princess of Wales was a teenage virgin with
When I was a girl, footballers had a somewhat limited vocabulary. That wasn’t to say that they were seen as inferior to wordy types – on the contrary, like blind piano-tuners, they were seen as accessing a higher level of excellence in one specific realm which we Normals had no chance of achieving. Thus when they
Three weeks after that South Park episode and the memes just keep on coming. Despite years of highly articulate fulminating against the preposterous pair by essayists like myself, there’s a feeling that the satirical cartoon was the conclusive blow to the Sussexes’ reputation – no well-turned phrase will ever better the glorious awfulness of ‘The Worldwide Privacy Tour’.
I was interested to read that the next Joker film has the subtitle ‘Folie à Deux’ – a lovely phrase not used enough these days. When shrinks talk about folie à deux (also known as Lasègue-Falret Syndrome, after the 19th-century French psychiatrists who discovered it) they mean a ‘shared delusional disorder’ in which symptoms of
On hearing the rumours that the boxer David Haye is in a ‘throuple’ – a three-person romantic relationship – with Una Healy from the Saturdays and a model named Sian Osborne, I felt a rare flicker of carnal pique. Apparently Victoria Beckham is off her feed (a prawn and two capers) with worry that her
Ghoul – ‘a person morbidly interested in death or disaster’ – is such a descriptive word. There are a lot of them about these days; all too many emerged in the aftermath of the disappearance of Nicola Bulley. In this tragic case, involving a 45-year-old woman who went missing three weeks ago while walking her
I see Scotland as the brain of the UK, with Wales as the soul and Northern Ireland as the heart. Though I like being English – our lovely language is second to none – we’re probably not the most sensible nation on earth, so I’d call us the sense of humour. Because of this, I’ve
Hearing about the death of Burt Bacharach at the age of 94, I thought of one word: maestro. The word is variously defined as ‘a master, usually in an art’ (Merriam-Webster) or ‘a man who is very skilled at playing or conducting’ (Cambridge), but my favourite is the beautiful simplicity of the Longman definition: ‘Someone
Pamela Anderson’s life story contains several showbiz-beauty clichés: an abusive childhood, accidental fame and many marriages. Unlike Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth, she didn’t grow up with the Hollywood studio system, so there were no brilliant writers and directors laid on to make her acting career memorable. But the absence of this structure
I hope I’ll be forgiven for not dropping my dog-eared copy of The Female Eunuch in sheer molten awe upon reading in the Times that ‘Courses for teachers on how to tackle Andrew Tate’s views are selling out as schools try to persuade teenage boys to shun so-called toxic masculinity.’ One teacher said, ‘Andrew Tate is just a personification
Reading that Madonna has decided to cancel the film about her life that she has been working on for the past two years, I felt a pang of sorrow. The biopic sounded like the biggest vanity project ever attempted – and thus promised to be an excellent ‘mock-watch’, as I’ve named the cinematic equivalent of
Just a quick plea to those who know me; if you’re going to burst upon me with a revelation, make it a juicy one, please – preferably sex-related. No gender reveals, no late-onset allergies – and please, most of all, no adult ADHD diagnoses. Before you start up berating me as lacking in ‘compassion’ and
What a year it’s been for sex on TV. As we emerge blinking from the annual glut of televisual entertainment, I can’t get over how far we’ve come. Bridgerton, Babylon Berlin, Lady Chatterley… everybody’s at it, with no period in history so tragic that a few cheap thrills can’t be extracted from it. If you’d
Europe, I’m told, is entering the age of the ‘sober-curious’. Curiosity is a wonderful thing; why, then, did hearing this make me want to drink whisky until I talk in tongues and pass out? I’ve had such a long and varied relationship with alcohol since we met when I was a shy provincial child. It’s
Only a mother could love a nepo baby – but there are some professions in which the far reach of the dead hand of nepotism strikes me as worse than others. In such frothy fields as modelling and television presenting, the prettiest face will still usually win out: look at Maya Jama, the new compere
Watching Jacinda Ardern’s departure speech, I reflected that even though I invented the word cry-bully – ‘a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper, duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political’ – in this very magazine way back in 2015, it’s never had so many adherents as in the past couple of
Seeing the swathe of superlatives wheeled out about Vivienne Westwood after her death last year at the age of 81, it felt for a moment like Elizabeth the Great had died all over again. Acolytes from Victoria Beckham to Sadiq Khan delivered their fawning tributes – my favourite was from Bella Hadid, who lamented the loss
‘Tears are not enough,’ ABC once sang defiantly – but these days, they’re more than enough for handsomely rewarded celebrities to assure us that they suffer like the rest of us, so please don’t hate them. Watching the BBC Breakfast presenter Sally Nugent – a 51-year-old woman – boo-hooing recently after watching a clip of
And still it keeps on coming. We had barely absorbed the first wave of revelations – jewellery mashed, dog bowls smashed, a brother trashed – before the new tsunami of tattle related to Prince Harry’s imminent book Spare broke over our fevered faces. Dissing duchesses getting aerated over hormones, teenage deflowerings in desolate fields, cocaine
