Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith is a former senior correspondent at Newsnight

Saturday

Stephen Smith

Choosing a coffin for my younger brother

From our UK edition

Ronnie’s family has been in the same line of work since the 1880s. His office is next door to a flint church which can trace its origins back even further. The churchyard has turned the colour of straw this year but Ronnie’s premises are cool. I’ve come to see him on the unthinkable errand of choosing a coffin for my younger brother. It helps that Ronnie’s exactly what you’re looking for at a time like this, beginning with his name. He doesn’t stay seated behind his desk but rises to clasp my hand in both of his; the same with my brother’s son, who is accompanying me, and for whom this is an even more unconscionable shopping trip. Ronnie is in his sixties, though he has younger-looking teeth, and is thinning a bit on top.

Sunday

Stephen Smith

Whatever happened to Mickey, Liverpool’s smoking chimpanzee?

From our UK edition

We haven’t lived. Yes, we’ve enjoyed the finest entertainment that Liverpool has to offer in our lifetimes – the Beatles, Ken Dodd, two great football clubs – but none of them can hold a candle to Mickey the chimp. Or hold a Benson and Hedges, rather. As parents rack their brains to fill the long school holidays, what they might give for the diversions of a century or so ago when Mickey the smoking chimpanzee was the toast of Liverpool Zoological Gardens. He was a hairier Noel Coward. Much hairier. He was billed as “the world’s cleverest chimp” In the thirties, crowds enjoyed the gooseflesh-making sensation of gawping at Mickey as he looked back at them through the fumes of his gasper. He was a hairier Noel Coward. Much hairier.

Tuesday

Stephen Smith

Antony Gormley’s lonely figures transfer to paper

If there’s any consolation to be had in the prospect of AI filling the world with humanoids, it will be the look on their glassy faces when they realise that one of us has beaten them to it. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, 75, has installed casts of himself from Crosby beach in Liverpool to Gateshead, from Texas to the Netherlands and western Australia. He and his simulacra might not detain our new overlords for very long, of course, but in the meantime ‘The Gormleys versus the Bots’ is the Doctor Who episode I’m here for. The man responsible for the magnificent ‘Angel of the North’ studied at Goldsmith’s, the playground of Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and other YBAs.

Thursday

Stephen Smith

Pornographer-in-Chief

From our UK edition

Like Black Rod and the Poet Laureate, screenwriter Andrew Davies occupies one of the most colourful and arcane offices in public life. He is Pornographer-in-Chief, a title that was first bestowed by the journalist Paul Johnson on the boss of Channel 4, Sir Michael Grade. Davies has assumed the mantle by virtue (or vice) of sexing up cherished texts from the literary canon for the gratification of television producers. His adaptation of War and Peace has taken critical grapeshot for including incestuous romps that do not strictly feature in the novel. Simon Schama, who bashfully admits he has made his way to the end of the book only eight times, claims to have detected no evidence of a sexual relationship between siblings Anatole and Helene.

Thursday

Stephen Smith

A paean to the fleshy delights and tacky excess of Soho

From our UK edition

The other evening, surrounded by Christmas shoppers in the West End of London, I happened to glance up at the illuminations and was moved all over again by the old, old story. Yes, the sign was lit up once more over the defunct Raymond Revuebar, all that’s left of the club where men and women used to act out the ageless tragicomedy of desire. Strange — even blasphemous — as it may seem, the lurid blazon of a topless dancer in feathers and stilettos affected me like a holly-decked hall or a Slade-loud department store. ‘Personal appearances of the world’s greatest names in striptease’, spelled out in throbbing neon, made me come over all festive, Christmassy even.

Thursday

Stephen Smith

I reshot Andy Warhol

From our UK edition

It’s one thing to make the most boring film in cinema history — at least you can kid yourself at the outset that it might turn out differently. It’s quite another to lovingly recreate the same film half a century later, shot by eye-bleeding shot, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’m proud to say. I say shot by shot, but since Andy Warhol’s Empire consists of a single locked-off shot of the Empire State Building running to 8 hours 5 minutes in black-and-white yawn-o-vision, that’s not much to write home about. Nor is the rest of the movie, from almost any popcorn-munching perspective you can think of.