Sheffield, our great underappreciated city

I was born and raised in Sheffield, a proud steel-making city which drew much of its energy from a sense of under-appreciation. Manchester had the airport, York and Leeds the fast mainline to London. Film stars went to Birmingham for premières. But we were part of Yorkshire, the greatest of English counties, with more acres than words in the Bible. Yorkshire tea, Yorkshire pudding. Yorkshire grit. Now the grit has got caught in the works following the cricket scandal. It could be a long time before the Yorkshire brand recovers.

One great Yorkshire institution is Bettys of Harrogate, which provides tea, cakes and respectability to the ladies of God’s Own County. I was having a coffee in its Ilkley branch while filming A Private Function, when Alan Bennett, frustrated by the lack of local urinals big enough for a scene in which the town bigwigs confront me while I’m having a pee, appeared with a smile on his face. In a stage whisper loud enough to turn freshly permed heads right across the teashop, he cried: ‘Good news! We’ve found a lavatory in London that’ll take ten.’

Russian authorities are moving to close down the activities of the human rights group International Memorial. Its work in archiving details of those who died in their millions in Stalin’s Gulag camps doesn’t chime well with Putin. I’ve visited the site of one such camp, in the bleak Kolyma region of the Russian far east. What struck me was its comprehensive isolation. It’s so far away from anywhere that inmates could be worked to death and forgotten without anyone knowing. If, as planned, the authorities liquidate International Memorial’s archive, the spirit of the Gulags will have returned.

In all the global-warming figures I’ve seen since COP26, one stands out.