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Wednesday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Oscar Wilde would loathe Stephen Fry

‘I was born to play Lady Bracknell,’ Stephen Fry swanked recently, in an interview to mark a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest, running until January. I can’t be the only one to greet the idea of another round of Fry interviews with a desire to go to bed and not come out till it’s all over. But that would be a long hibernation. For Stephen Fry pronouncements are like professional tennis; it’s always open season. You can’t get away from the clown, particularly when he’s lecturing women on how they should feel about having great hairy men in mascara sharing their private spaces. Magnificently, J.K. Rowling denied

Zoe Strimpel

Le Creuset is for amateur cooks

There have long been Le Creuset fanatics. During lockdown, John Lewis reported that sales of Le Crueset increased by 90 per cent. And last year, a sale at a Hampshire outlet store brought a crush of hundreds of people; police even had to attend. Then there was the affair of Pauline Al Said over the summer, a Le Creuset burglar who boasted that she was Britain’s poshest thief. Pots and pans have become part of a competitive aesthetic portfolio that not only indicates your degree of stylishness as a cook, but your attitude to the latest trends in wellness and health. The ideal kitchen is now free of ‘forever chemicals’,

Michael Henderson

Shouldn’t we celebrate Rising Damp?

They have been blowing out candles for Fawlty Towers, and it is meet and right so to do. Fifty years old this month, John Cleese’s portrait of a Torquay hotelier at war with the world remains a masterpiece of British comedy. But there’s another Seventies romp we should not ignore, which was just as funny, and featured a central performance every bit as convincing. Leonard Rossiter may be better known as Reggie Perrin in David Nobbs’s series about a dreamer who longs to escape suburbia, but his greatest role was Rigsby, the seedy landlord, in Rising Damp. Eric Chappell adapted the show, which ran for four years from 1974, from

Tuesday

Arabella Byrne

Carrying Peter Mandelson’s coat

As coats go, it was very nice. A dark blue cashmere Loro Piana number that reeked of quiet luxury. But for a man who once identified as a communist, it was laughable. It was 2016 and I was standing in the atrium of the newly remodelled Design Museum on Kensington High Street. As assistant to the museum’s director, I was engaged in a normal day on the job: as Peter Mandelson’s coat bearer. Other humdrum days at the coalface involved talking to Terence Conran about his dogs, making sure Alexandra Shulman had a hard hat on and holding then culture secretary Matt Hancock’s champagne glass while he posed for pictures.

James Innes-Smith

A Bagpuss film is a terrible idea

News that the classic children’s TV show Bagpuss is to be given the full film treatment doesn’t bode well for fans of the original series, which ran from February to May 1974. Set in an old-fashioned bric-a-brac shop, each of the 13 episodes featured the eponymous ‘saggy cloth cat’ and his eccentric friends poring over an object delivered to the shop by a little girl named Emily. In a world where brash, epilepsy-inducing cartoons have become the norm, you’d think a whimsical tale about a stuffed cat rifling through detritus might seem old hat to hyped-up, instantly gratified youngsters. But you’d be wrong. Seventies children’s classics such as Basil Brush,

Julie Bindel

The gospel of garlic

My partner’s mother, Enid, introduced me to duck with 40 cloves of garlic. She told me it originated from an old Jewish Ashkenazi recipe, although the French claim it’s theirs. It doesn’t matter because it’s delicious, with most of the cloves shoved under the crispy duck skin, permeating the meat, and several pushed into the cavity along with half an orange. Because it is cooked long and slow, and the duck is very fatty, the garlic turns mellow, sweet and extremely aromatic. When I asked Enid if she counted the cloves, she held out both hands and said, ‘about this much’. That opened my eyes to the world of garlic

Monday

Rob Crossan

Wild swimmers are the most boring people in Britain

There’s much to enjoy about the autumn months in the UK. Teenagers are restricted to school playgrounds rather than the high street between the hours of nine and three. Landlords in rural pubs start remembering that they have a fireplace that might be worth lighting. And provincial airports become populated with polite, cashmere-wearing pensioners on their way to the Azores, rather than gangs of stags and hens drinking the Wetherspoons dry at 7.30 a.m. But there is a fly (or should that be waterborne parasite?) in the ointment. There was a time when there was no such thing as ‘wild swimming’. You just called it swimming outdoors. Or you didn’t

Alec Marsh

Happy 200th birthday to our railway

You might have missed this because it hasn’t exactly been saturated with media coverage, but this week is the 200th birthday of Britain’s railway. In fact, it’s the 200th birthday of all railways, since we invented them. It was on 27 September 1825 that service began on the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Travelling a distance of just eight-and-a-half miles at about 15mph, the world’s first public commercial rail service arrived to a crowd of 10,000 and – as would become a characteristic feature of future British rail travel – was delayed by half an hour due to engineering problems. Yes, the worldwide rail revolution began in the north-east of England