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Tuesday

James Innes-Smith

Frank Skinner: twilight of an insurgent comic

Watching Frank Skinner perform his latest one man show at the Gielgud Theatre reminded me of what it must have been like back in the dying days of variety. By the late 1970s and early 1980s cheeky jokesters and all-round entertainers such as Tarby, Brucie, Doddy and Manning were feeling the heat from a new breed of alternative comedian vehemently opposed to the old guard’s reliance on tedious stereotyping and shallow observation. Now in their mid-fifties (considered ancient back then) many took the hint, hung up their dickey-bows and retired to Bexhill; others struggled on in tatty end-of-the-pier shows in front of dwindling geriatric audiences. Mystifyingly, Sir Bruce Joseph Forsyth-Johnson CBE continued

Michael Taylor

Dinosaurs and culture wars

Last week marked the 200th anniversary of the most significant evening in the history of palaeontology. On 20 February 1824, the learned gentlemen of the Geological Society gathered at their rooms on Bedford Street in Covent Garden for a meeting that would transform human understanding of prehistoric life. To begin, the clergyman William Conybeare announced and described the Plesiosaurus. A vast marine lizard that Mary Anning had discovered in Dorset, the Plesiosaurus was memorably described as ‘a serpent threaded through the shell of a turtle’; it would later leap from the rocks of Lyme Regis into the fiction of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, and into the popular imagination

Monday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The enduring ghastliness of Alastair Campbell

As someone who was fond of Derek Draper (a feeling that probably wasn’t mutual, as I nicked his bird) it was strange to see photographs of his funeral. It seemed like a state occasion for some legendary leader who had died in battle defending his country, rather than for the husband of a likeable TV presenter who had been unlucky enough to catch a virulent version of a sickness which so many shook off. Sir Elton John sang; Sir Tony Blair speechified. Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls and Alastair Campbell showed up; the Blair Bunch reunited. The dignity of Draper’s widow and children sat oddly next to this ghastly

Sean Thomas

AI just exploded. Again

When they come to write the history of the AI revolution, there’s a good chance that the writers will devote many chapters to the early 2020s. Indeed, such is the pace, scale and wildness of the development, it is possible entire books will be devoted to, say, what happened in the last week or so. This is happening now, not in some dystopian future If you’ve not been paying attention, let me talk you through it. On 15 February Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Demis Hassabis, the head tech bro at DeepMind (the London-based AI company bought by Google in 2014) announced the launch of Gemini Ultra 1.5 Pro.

Ella Dorn

Every woman needs a nemesis

My nemesis is a student at another university. She has not always been my nemesis. We were friends until I realised that she was not who she purported to be. Her interests had been systematically poached from the people around her. Talking to her always felt like an interrogation from a particularly insecure detective. Real feminists know that empowerment comes from defining the breadth of your own animus She mined me constantly for pointers on speed-reading and language-learning. Rarely did she actually follow my advice, especially when it required resourcefulness and hard graft. The final straw came when my nemesis inquired, out of nowhere, about my career plans. ‘Thanks,’ she

Friday

Penworthy

Looking ahead to the Cheltenham Festival

Tomorrow’s Bet Eider Handicap Chase at Newcastle is just the sort of marathon contest in which I usually like to have a bet but, with so many of the 13 runners out of form and the going likely to be very soft, I am happy to give it a miss this time around. Instead, I am going to turn my attention to the Cheltenham Festival, which is less than three weeks away. Unusually for me, as I tend to like the value odds often offered by horses from the smaller yards, I am going to put up two horses from the two most successful stables in Britain that have gone

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Airbnb has ruined Cornwall

Michael Gove’s restrictions on Airbnb are too late for Mousehole, the next village along. It mirrors Dull-on-Sea in The Pirates Next Door: ‘Too busy in the summer and in winter it shuts down’. Last year there was so much traffic in Mousehole that the bus couldn’t get through, and it dumped trippers at the top of the hill. Down by the harbour, at the bus stop, I saw a Sainsbury’s van instead. And that, to paraphrase Niall Ferguson, is how empires fall. ‘What about my view?’ is their worldview. My husband calls them coffin dodgers Any analysis of the impact of Airbnb on Cornwall must include the question: what happened to

Zoe Strimpel

Logan Roy is disgusting

The other day I met a young woman wearing a crop top emblazoned with the words Waystar/Royco – the media conglomerate at the heart of Succession, HBO’s cult television drama about the nasty Roy family and their insane attempts at one-upmanship for control of their father’s company. It won Emmy and Golden Globe awards three years running for best drama, plus numerous extra gongs for the cast, making it – in my book – the most overrated piece of entertainment of all time.  Shouldn’t men like Logan Roy, and behaviour like Cox’s, be relegated to a distant era? What I disliked most about Succession, which I finally forced myself to

Ettie Neil-Gallacher

The dangers of skinny dipping

Several years ago, I went for a swim after I’d been for a job interview. I’d just finished my lengths, had my shower, and as I wrestled my knickers back on, a voice from behind me said ‘It’s Ettie, isn’t it?’ Quite how she recognised my bare bottom I don’t know, but the woman who’d interviewed me earlier in the day was certainly keen to continue our conversation, up close, personal and starkers. And for those of you who’ve never tried, I can assure you that trying to juggle one’s bosom into a bra in a flustered hurry when one is still slightly damp to protect what shreds of self-respect remain is inelegant at best.  I’m generally far too ill-adjusted

Wednesday