Culture

Gareth Roberts

An ode to Mrs Brown’s Boys

‘A mother hen watching all her chicks, a sassy old lady full of tricks’. Mrs Brown’s Boys recently returned to BBC One for yet more festive specials. Astonishingly the last actual full series of non-seasonal episodes was transmitted ten years ago, though a new one is imminent. This Christmas’s were, reassuringly, exactly the same as they always have been. In this case, ‘always’ goes back a long way. Although it only surfaced on the BBC in 2011, the ‘franchise’ – as we are now expected to call TV programmes, as if they were concessions for burger vans – originated in the mind of Brendan O’Caroll in 1992. But I think

Mary Wakefield

How Pope Benedict persuaded me to become a Catholic

I grew up in a traditional English family, surrounded by cousins, chivvied by aunts, presided over by my grandmother, who insisted on Sunday church. We weren’t religious but Anglicanism (of a 19th-century sort) was in the air. We read the Revd Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and if I thought about Jesus it was in an English setting. I imagined him barefoot walking through fields, rescuing the lambs that had fallen into cattle grids. Our family viewed Catholicism with suspicion. For us it was voodoo: foreign and crowded with unnecessary intercessors. The aunts would tell us that our great-great-grandmother had refused to let Catholics in the house and

James Delingpole

Detectorists Christmas Special is a triumph

They’re tricky things to get right, Christmas specials. Ideally, they should capture in one perfectly judged episode the very essence of everything you found wonderful about your favourite classic sitcom, be it The Royle Family, Father Ted or Peep Show, all dusted with the lightest sprinkle of tinsel, icing sugar and nostalgia. But if they get the mix wrong – usually by overdoing the saccharine and mawkishness – it takes you straight down to Christmas hell and tarnishes your memories forever. For example, I will never, ever be able to watch Only Fools And Horses again, not even the actually funny episode where the chandelier falls down, because of an

James Delingpole

The Recruit might be the worst show on Netflix

The Top Gun series received generous support from the US Navy because it was such an effective recruitment tool. I wonder if something similar went on between the CIA and Netflix’s new series The Recruit, this time as an exercise in reputation management. ‘There’s nothing sinister or threatening about the Company,’ this bizarre, horribly ill-judged and tasteless comedy/thriller series squeals at every turn. ‘We’re just a bunch of lovable, kooky misfits doing our bit to defend your freedoms.’ If you think I’m exaggerating, consider that one of the biggest baddies in the series – right up there with the evil Russians – is the Senate oversight committee responsible for holding

The political polyvalency of modernism

The late Sir Roger Scruton often pronounced in a harsh manner on modern architecture and modern music, perceiving in various work an assault on bourgeois culture and a break with tradition. Back in the 1950s, music critic and CIA agent Henry Pleasants (a station chief in Bonn) delivered if anything a more scathing view of the ‘agony’ of modern music, arguing that it had severed its connection with the idioms bequeathed by the human voice. It might seem natural that opposition to the iconoclasm of artistic modernism would go hand-in-hand with a relatively conservative politics. Furthermore, knowledge of Nazi attacks on Entartete Kunst suggests a clear disjunction between far right

Cindy Yu

A very good place to start if you want to understand China: Mark Kitto’s Chinese Boxing reviewed

In so far as it acknowledged them at all, the Chinese Communist Party has blamed ‘infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces’ for the recent anti-lockdown protests. It’s an accusation laden with historical baggage. Modern China’s history with foreign states, especially the Europeans, hasn’t generally been a happy one. For many Chinese, the collective memory is still raw. The most mutually traumatic episode in this history is probably the Boxer Rebellion, when thousands of foreign delegates were besieged in Beijing by Chinese rebels for 55 days. The siege eventually ended with an allied rescued mission which sacked the city, the soldiers raping and killing the Beijingers who were left. This

Illuminating and depressing: Fiasco – The AIDS Crisis reviewed

Fiasco is a podcast series on Audible that dives deeply into episodes in recent American history. It takes listeners through the smaller moments. Often those that, within the larger epoch-defining events, have been lost to history. In the first season, for example, which centred on the Bush v. Gore election, the opening episode is devoted entirely to the international custody imbroglio of Cuban-born Elian Gonzalez. This case – which saw President Clinton allow Gonzalez to be removed from his relatives in Florida and sent back to his father in Cuba – contributed to Al Gore’s loss of the Latino vote in Florida and thereby cost him the presidential election. Other

Graham Linehan: how the Father Ted musical got cancelled

38 min listen

Winston speaks with Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books. Graham took a stand as a women’s rights activist which led to Father Ted: The Musical being cancelled. He was also suspended from Twitter for writing “men aren’t women tho”. Winston asks why he took a stand, and how his comedy career unravelled.

What happened to my secret snap of David Beckham?

There is one footballer who will be under particular scrutiny at the Qatar World Cup – but not because he’s playing in it. David Beckham retired as a player, aged 38 in 2013, but nine years on his stature has continued to grow. The former England captain’s profile is so high that those tasked with the tricky job of getting positive publicity for Qatar agreed to pay him a reported £10 million to plug the tournament.  This is the story of my role as a cog in the wheels of the media machine that helped propel Beckham to this position – and of one particular incident, involving surreptitious snaps of

Michael Shellenberger: What Just Stop Oil gets wrong and COP27 corruption

64 min listen

With climate activists around the world vandalising great works by Monet, van Gogh and Goya, Winston speaks with environmentalist, conservationist and pro-nuclear activist Michael Shellenberger. They discuss the validity of Just Stop Oil’s methods and environmental imperialism at this years United Nations Climate Change Conference. They take a deep dive into Shellenberger’s book ‘Apocalypse Never’, evaluate the environmentalist case for fracking and consider why nuclear will save us all.

The Queen Mother’s tipsy bons mots and other stocking fillers

The standard complaint of anyone doing a Christmas gift books guide is that the books aren’t up to much. I myself may have moaned to this effect in the past. But either they are getting better or my critical faculties are beginning to fail. I think it’s the former, but if I’m wrong don’t be surprised if I’m sucking on milky rusks by this time next year. My daft picture book of the season – a vital category – is Ryan Herman’s Remarkable Football Grounds (Pavilion, £25), which is exactly what it seems to be: a collection of colour photographs of some of the most spectacular football grounds in the

Trump and the art of compromising material

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, they found a file titled ‘Info re: President of France’. Many have speculated (with no little encouragement from Trump himself) that it contains illicit details of Emmanuel Macron’s sex life.  Whatever the truth about this particular cache, political kompromat has long been a source of great drama – both on and off screen. Some bring it upon themselves – Gary Hart blew his chances of securing the US Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 by inviting reporters to dig up dirt on him (‘Follow me around, put a tail on me. You’d be very bored’). They promptly did – and the events surrounding the 51-year-old