Society

The warnings on what we now call ‘content’ (i.e. what we used to know as films and TV shows) are getting ever more ludicrous. Almost everything made before 2000 now carries a cigarette packet-style exhortation or exculpation about race, sex and offensive attitudes. But it’s getting even crazier. A friend of mine was channel hopping over the festive period and caught a stern banner, on nostalgia channel That’s TV, reading, all in capitals: CONTAINS ADULT HUMOUR AND REFLECTS THE STANDARDS, LANGUAGE AND ATTITUDES OF ITS TIME. SOME VIEWERS MAY FIND THIS CONTENT OFFENSIVE. What was this antediluvian horror? Birth of a Nation? Song of the South? No, it was an

For inadequate men scared by self-willed women, by the start of the 21st century, things were getting dangerously out of hand. The old right-wing ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ method of corralling and controlling us had been woefully discredited with the second world war. (Like the old brand of anti-Semitism, coincidentally, which was also looking for a new angle – and found it in the fresh’n’funky Islamist kind.) A ‘caring’ and ‘progressive’ way to thwart uppity women was needed, but repeated and risible attempts at ‘men’s rights’ movements were rightfully mocked. So how could men abuse women while not being accused of sexism? Simple, say: ‘We’re women too. How can we be misogynists?’ And so the shock-frock-troops of transvestism formed a pincer movement with the aggressive masculinists embodied by Andrew Tate to assault the gains

Walid Sharks is taking a nasty beating at the AO Arena in Manchester. It’s the second round of his fight against ‘Deen the Great’, and he has just been knocked down by a punch to the face. ‘His eyes are rolling right now,’ says a commentator. ‘He doesn’t know where he is!’ But Sharks doesn’t mind: he’s fighting before a sell-out crowd, with a million people livestreaming at home, and they’ll be loving the drama. ‘Hit ’is jaw off!’ someone in the stands shouts to Deen The Great, wishfully. Sharks isn’t a professional boxer, but a social media ‘influencer’. Being used as a punchbag is worth it to grow his internet

Armando Iannucci is a bit of a mystery to me. With shows like The Day Today and The Thick of It, he created some of the most astute political satire of the 1990s and 2000s. And yet put him in front of a microphone now and the man will display all the political insight of a draught excluder. Iannucci regularly pops up in the media to promote his new projects and dispense milquetoast Guardianista opinions. Trump? He’s so mad he’s beyond satire! Brexit? What a mess, eh? Now, inevitably, he’s weighed in on wokeness – and spectacularly misunderstood what it actually is. On Newsnight last night, Iannucci was asked about wokeness and whether it led comedy writers like him

Four days in, and 2024 shows every sign of being yet another annus horribilis for Prince Andrew. After – by his, admittedly reduced, standards – a triumphant Christmas, in which he processed to church at Sandringham with the rest of the Royal Family and, bizarrely, an apparently rehabilitated Fergie, the cold clear light of reality has intruded once again. To kick things off, Andrew is facing the prospect of not one, but two docudramas raking over the humiliation of his Newsnight interview. (The potentially consolatory fact that he is to be played in them by Rufus Sewell and Michael Sheen respectively has been dampened by the fact the famously handsome