Spectator Life

Where have all the Bad Girls gone? They used to rock up regularly at the Love Island villa – now in its eighth and rather underwhelming season – only to find themselves on the EasyJet back to Blighty after having full sex on prime time TV. (One of them, Zara Holland, being stripped of her Miss Great Britain title.) They brawled, boozed and bonked with gusto; now it’s two drinks a night and a cheeky snog on the terrace before an early – and chaste – bedtime. They used to be all over the soaps but now the women of EastEnders and Corrie suffer wall-to-wall ‘challenges’ like bulimia and infertility instead. There were songs about them (‘Bad Girl’ by Madonna, ‘Bad Girls’ by Donna Summer) films about them (from The Women to The Bitch) and books about them (Rebecca to Ambition).

Let civilisation fall apart if it must. I no longer care. The England men’s cricket team is suddenly playing with such swaggering magnificence that everything else – endless culture wars, inflation, even the threat of hypersonically delivered nuclear annihilation from Russia – pales into insignificance. I just want to watch my heroes – Ben Stokes, Joe Root and the rest – play the game I love like deities. If Putin is going to press the big red button then so be it. As the temperature rises to a million degrees celsius here in Putney, I will console myself that at least I witnessed Jonny Bairstow’s transcendentally perfect innings at Trent Bridge earlier this month. We deserve this, don’t we? We England cricket fans who over many decades have suffered so much.

I just stuck £15 on Emma Raducanu to win Wimbledon at 22/1 — and I think you should too. I’m no tennis expert, far from it, but I’ve a reasonable sports betting record and like many others I’ve watched Emma with patriotic enthusiasm over the last two years. It’s quite easy to see when she’s hitting form. And, in her victory last night over Alison van Uytvanck, we saw that raw and ridiculous talent that propelled her towards the US Open title last year coming back. Raducanu is a hot streak player — and her hottest streak yet came in America last year, when she just started blasting her way past various high quality opponents to become the first singles qualifier in the Open Era to win a grand slam. Emma struggles with nerves, famously.

Brace yourself for the unmistakable sound of a tennis ball thwacking away in the background of your living room for two weeks - Wimbledon is finally upon us. As skilled as the players on the court are, it's the delightful spectacle of my family's amateur commentary that I enjoy the most. 'Who on earth is that?' my grandmother used to ask, unfailingly, when anyone unseeded dared to play against her beloved Steffi Graff. 'The Spaniard is touching his bum again' is the refrain in our house when Nadal prepares to serve. For the casual spectator, it's our lack of true tennis expertise that makes the tournament such a delight to watch: we like to gaze at its alchemy, without knowing too much about how the magic comes about.

‘Glasto’ – the diminutive makes me shiver with distaste; like ‘Peely’ – as his fans affectionately called the late DJ John Peel, schoolgirl-admirer and all-round creep – it sums up everything I don’t like about rock music. I’m reminded of my years as a teenage reporter at the New Musical Express, coming home from some rancid punk club having pretended to enjoy the Drones lurking or the Lurkers droning, and dancing around my room to the Isley Brothers until the sweet soul music chased the awful white racket away. When Lenny Henry pointed out how pale-faced Glasto is, I wrote that this was because black people are less inclined to blow hundreds of pounds for the pleasure of using fetid toilet facilities between bouts of glazed staring at a stage so far away that it might be Billie Eilish but could just as easily be Billy Bob Thornton.

Wednesday saw a new entrant into the streaming world with the UK debut of Paramount+.The launch event in London on Tuesday didn’t hold back on star power, with Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, Gillian Anderson, Viola Davis, David Oyelowo, Michelle Pfeiffer, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Bill Nighy, Naomie Harris and Jessica Chastain all in attendance.Unlike BritBox and Apple TV, who have built up content slowly, Paramount+ have decided to come out all guns blazing with their programming.Apple TV+ boasted a limited slate of big-name originals when it kicked off in November 2019, but the likes of The Morning Show, See and For All Mankind were starry but not especially enthralling, as the service took time to find its feet with Ted Lasso, Severance, Mythic Quest, and Slow Horses.

You’re in a bar, on a date and it’s Saturday night. The lighting is low, the music is good and the drinks are flowing. Your opposite number is everything you thought they would be: intelligent, interesting and attractive. The conversation is easy and the evening looks promising. You start to think this one might be special. But then you hear their laugh for the first time - it’s a grating string of huh-huh-huh’s - and it's all over. The attraction flips to disgust and, try as you might, you can’t look at them in the same way. It’s the moment you anticipate but never hope for…It’s the ick.Last week Keir Starmer cracked a cringeworthy Love Island joke in the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions. The Labour leader said 'contestants that give the public the ick get booted out' and suggested either the public or the party do the same to Boris Johnson.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, the new film starring Emma Thompson, doesn’t know what sex is. It portrays a brief liaison between a widow (Nancy, played by Thompson) and a male prostitute as liberating for her, a blessed introduction to the world of sexual pleasure. The marital sex she knew was functional, orgasm-free (for her). Maybe religion’s to blame; she was an RE teacher. I don’t know if the film specifies whether she has a religious background, but it’s at least implied. And in an interview Emma Thompson blames religion for the shame that has denied so many people sexual pleasure. Back to my opening claim. Such a plot entails a two-dimensional view of sex. The physical act, detached from an enduring relationship, is seen as something that brings pleasure, and indeed psychological liberation.

Oisin Murphy is seen as a bad boy of flat racing. He’s one of the best riders in the world but he keeps getting into trouble. He’s been banned from racing for 14 months for breaching coronovirus protocols by going to Mykonos and he failed two alcohol tests last year.  Oisin is now taking some time, as he puts it, to reflect. This year he’s at Royal Ascot without his riding boots for the first time in his career.  I find him in the Parade Ring. A horse obsessive, he immediately starts talking me through the details as the jockeys begin to mount. ‘It’s a very warm day so it’s natural for the horses to sweat,’ he says in his thick Irish accent, pointing to the foam that is beginning to appear under the saddlecloths, ‘but it’s so important to keep them as calm as possible.

Not long after being diagnosed with cancer, David Bowie reportedly made a secret trip to London to say his farewells. One of his stops was No. 4 Plaistow Grove, a modest terraced house in the heart of suburbia where he grew up, having moved there in 1955. I knew the house well. It was five minutes down the road from our home, which stood in a private lane alongside the golf course, in the village of Sundridge Park. Here, Davy lived with his mum Peggy and dad John.Back in the early sixties, heady rock and rolls days even in Bromley, it was clear that Bowie – or Davy Jones, as he was then – was hell-bent on stardom. I saw Davy often on Bromley High Street; he was a well-known figure, hanging out outside the Wimpy Bar or one of the coffee bars where teenagers gathered, eschewing the upmarket Coffee Importers where mums met for cups of ground coffee after shopping at Marks and Spencers.

Another day, another diva disrobes. If it’s not Madonna (63) being ‘outraged’ after being banned from Instagram Live (after continually breaking the app’s rules with her nude posts) for ‘digital depictions of her vagina’ it’s Emma Thompson (also 63) getting her kit off for her new film, in which she plays a widow who hires a sex worker. And like a bleak backbeat, we have the sad spectre of Britney Spears, a young woman used as an ATM machine by her immediate family and as fantasy fodder by strangers since she was old enough to wear a school uniform ironically. Her social media since her recent emancipation shows her to be understandably confused about what she is valued for and she has shared a string of naked pics with her 41 million Instagram followers.

Hollywood can appear self-satisfied and insular at the best of times, but it's been a rough few months even by Tinseltown standards. Judging by the slew of trailers that have dropped in recent weeks, this season in cinema land will centre on only one thing: biopics. From Madonna and Marilyn Monroe to Elvis (and even Hillary Rodham Clinton) it’s time for a barrage of films in which big stars play bigger stars – in return for your adoration.  Hollywood’s fixation on global fame might not be entirely new – Ben Kingsley’s turn in Gandhi is about to reach its 40th birthday, incidentally – but there’s no getting away from the fact that it has stepped up a gear in recent years. Rather than tell stories about noble historic figures, today’s biopics prefer to play out like glorified jukebox musicals – at least if recent efforts like Rocketman and Elvis are anything to go by.

Once upon a time, when the fingerprints on the Wimbledon trophy were more or less exclusively British, you could win in SW19 whilst wearing trousers. Even a tie if you go back far enough. But then, back in those days, tennis was a no-sweat sport.Well, perhaps a drop or two, but essentially there was much less of it around than today, when sweatbands, perspiration and frequent towelling off are part of a fetishised display of effort and strain – one that’s often accompanied by verbal ejaculations of sometimes rather alarming severity. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been forced to mute Wimbledon at times because of the repetitive baseline grunting.But it wasn’t always this way. Long before the relentless moaning, women once played tennis bowling underarm while dressed like Downton Abbey dowagers, while the men, like thrice-1930s winner Fred Perry, even wore sweaters.

Along with films about real life authors, poets, comedians and artists, biographies of musicians are notoriously difficult to translate successfully to the cinema screen. Why?Writing and painting aren’t inherently cinematic; live music has more visual potential (hence the greater number of motion pictures). But the challenges of lip-synching and the existence in most cases of plenty of original concert footage raise the stakes for any actor prepared to take on such a role. There's a real danger of performances falling into pastiche and mimicry. Directors face an even greater predicament when music rights are refused, as was the case with the recent Stardust (2021) where actor/musician Johnny Flynn had to come up with songs in the style of David Bowie.

As Britain toasted seven decades of the Queen’s reign outside Buckingham Palace, the Welsh basked in their 1600-year survival. Dafydd Iwan, the republican nationalist folk singer, bellowed Yma O Hyd around the Cardiff City Stadium as Wales took on Ukraine in their World Cup qualifier. A simple title – We’re Still Here – makes you want to weep and, then, fight. What was once a marginal protest tune, composed at the height of Thatcherism after Wales rejected devolution in 1979, is now an apt anthem for spurring on Welsh footballers. Until recent years they were not a celebrated or well-known species but Gareth Bale, Aaron Ramsey and Joe Allen have changed all that. A surprising ascent during Euro 2016 (when the country reached the semi-finals) created excitement for the future.

The debate about Swedish hospitality started on Reddit – a forum otherwise known for such profound discussions as ‘Can you watch porn on a hotel’s wifi?’ – and has now gone global. Even the New York Times has weighed in with an article entitled: ‘Do Swedish People Feed Their Guests?’  Suddenly, it seems, the world is talking about Sweden’s lack of domestic warmth. Here in Stockholm, the buzz was first brushed off as a joke. When the subject started trending on Twitter, it was in all seriousness thought to be the potential work of Russian troll factories; professional provocateurs spreading disinformation and propaganda.The famously neutral Sweden has just taken the historic decision to apply for Nato membership.

Eleven years ago, I was summoned to the Manoir de Ban, a huge white house overlooking Lake Geneva, to meet Michael Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s oldest surviving son. Charlie Chaplin had lived here for the last 24 years of his life. Now the house was empty, and the family wanted to turn it into a museum. I doubted it would ever happen, but I was keen to look around the house and I was eager to meet Michael. Chaplin’s biographer, Simon Louvish, had called him ‘the family rebel’. Michael had written a frank teenage memoir called I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn. The house was all shut up, but Chaplin’s looming presence was everywhere. ‘He was a little man, but he took up a lot of space,’ Michael told me, as we sat in the deserted dining room, looking out across the lake, towards the snowcapped Alps beyond.

When Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth I of Scotland) began her reign on 6 February 1952 (after the premature death of her father George VI) the British Empire was still very much in existence, with more than 70 overseas territories, despite the independence of India/Pakistan (‘The Jewel in The Crown’) in 1947. But, in the words of Harold Macmillan, there was soon an inevitable ‘Wind of Change,’ as the UK relinquished its colonies and embraced the woolly concept of The Commonwealth of Nations (formerly The British Commonwealth). Aside from the United Kingdom, the Queen is Head of State in 14 other nations – although, as recent Royal tours of the Caribbean have demonstrated, this may well decrease in the not-too-distant future.

Sunday mornings in the Hampshire countryside remind me of a medieval pageant. While marketeers open their stalls and labradors bark, you see hundreds of jousters in gaudy livery steering their two-wheeled chargers along the lanes, trying not to get knocked off. But while everyone loves a knight, everyone hates a cyclist. Reader, I must confess: I myself am a member of the brotherhood of Lycra. I don’t shave my legs, I hasten to add. Though the fact that I’ve just written that shows how seriously my tribe takes their pursuit. Since taking up cycling in 2019, I have ridden thousands of miles and competed in several amateur races. The sense of achievement, the thrill of speed, the sublimity of the English countryside, the endorphins that follow intense exercise; for me, these things make life worth living.

Be honest. Aren’t you a teeny-weeny bit jealous of the super-rich? Are you a little annoyed by the new Sunday Times Rich List – which showed the top ten richest people in the country now have £182 billion between them, more than three times what they had in 2010? Don’t your hackles rise on seeing the masters of the universe pad around Davos in their identikit blue suits and tieless white shirts? Well, stop worrying and thank God you aren’t a billionaire. The Super-Rich World Problems are endless. Bucketloads of money should inoculate the rich against anxiety. In fact, money only heightens the worries, particularly about their two principal bugbears: staff and taxes. They make for the most popular topics of billionaire conversation: how your staff are letting you down; and how to pay less money to the government.

After over a year of delays, Tom Cruise’s keenly anticipated sequel to the iconic Top Gun (1986) is released on 25 May. TG: Maverick’s seat-of-your-pants aviation sequences have whetted the appetite of both fans and non-fans for the picture, which has picked up almost universally positive reviews. Not unexpectedly for Cruise, he handled some of the flying himself in the picture, returning as Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, a US air force test pilot and flight instructor, purposely stuck at the rank of captain to indulge his addictive 'need for speed.'Cruise dials down the cockiness of the first picture to deliver a more mature, nuanced take on Maverick – although he retains his authority-bucking attitude. When pal and onetime rival, Admiral Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky (Val Kilmer) assigns Mav to train an elite cadre of Top Gun graduates for a special mission, you can bet that the ageing enfant terrible isn’t going to sit this one out.

Finally, on 24 May, CrossRail will open. Named The Elizabeth Line, the stats are extraordinary and impressive. An £18.7 billion infrastructure project for a 62-mile-long railway line with stations stretching from Reading in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. It has taken 20 years to bring the project to fruition with the inevitable overspend running into billions. Once open, it will increase the London rail network's capacity by ten per cent. Now, if you’re expecting the whole line to open all at once, you’d be mistaken. The central section will open offering a train service between Paddington and Abbey Wood. The Bond Street stop won’t open for another three months. In fact, the route won’t operate as a single entity until 2023.

The Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard trial is now in its fourth week, and so many of us are still gripped. People are either consciously ‘following’ or ‘not-following’ the trial as if it were a television drama, which in more than one way it is. The two main characters are actors, after all. Kimberly Lau, a partner at the New York legal firm Warshaw Burstein, said this week that ‘the testimony of the witnesses and documentary evidence will be even more essential for the jury to determine who is really telling the truth and who may be acting out a role.’ The more slippery truth, however, is that both parties are playing out roles. As in reality TV, or any good court fiction, the thrill comes from trying to figure out who is faking what and when.