Spectator Life

About 20 years ago, the actor and comedian Steve Coogan did a tour called, with typical self-deprecation, Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters. I saw the show and it was, as you’d expect from Coogan, amusing and cleverly performed. Yet it ended strangely; Coogan sang a self-lacerating song called ‘Everyone’s a Bit

My late son took film seriously, a taste I was delighted to see him develop, and regret not being able to see him grow out of. When he was little we watched the Pixar films, and they gave us great joy. The first 20 minutes of Up and the last 20 of Toy Story 3

The State of California v. OJ Simpson, Oscar Wilde v. the Marquess of Queensberry, Galileo before the Inquisition… now our age will be able to add its own entry to the annals of famed legal proceedings. Because Paddington is suing Spitting Image. It is the barmiest news story of late against fierce competition. The Telegraph

The long-awaited sequel to the documentary (or ‘rockumentary’) Spinal Tap, which told the story of a failing British rock band’s disastrous American tour, opened this month to decidedly mixed reviews. Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph advised us to dial down our expectations to -11 (ho ho) for The End Continues, which sees the band

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,

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

The Duchess of Sussex has achieved something quite remarkable. After the brickbats hurled at the first season of her Netflix show With Love, Meghan – the furious pro-monarchy outrage, the eye-rolling from critics, the memes that lampooned her syrupy anecdotes – many TV personalities would have flinched. They would have called consultants, tweaked the format, apologised by

A thought hit me when bingeing the first series of The Paper on Sky’s Now streaming service this week: how on earth did it take this long for someone to make a sequel to The Office? Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a glowing verdict on the comic merit of The Paper – an Office-style

It’s October 1994 and I’m rooting around in a garage in a non-descript LA neighbourhood, a few blocks from 20th Century Fox. The garage is piled high with clothes, cameras, audio tapes, reels of film and, in pride of place, a Nazi storm trooper helmet. This was the last resting place for a mountain of paraphernalia

Built in the 1840s, St Giles’s Church in Camberwell bills itself as south-east London’s ‘most stunning Neo-Gothic performance venue’. A niche category, admittedly, but when it comes to hosting events, it’s certainly a broad church. Downstairs, the crypt serves as one of south London’s best jazz clubs. Upstairs, in between services, weddings and funerals, the

On a trip to the local library, many years ago now, my dad was asked by a kindly but rather severe librarian if I was really allowed to borrow one of the Ramage books, as they were from the section for grown-ups and I was only about 11. The old man nodded assent and so

Just a glance at the cast list tells you everything you need to know. Netflix’s adaptation of Richard Osman’s cosy crime sensation The Thursday Murder Club stars Dame Helen Mirren, former James Bond Pierce Brosnan (as well as a former Bond villain Sir Jonathan Pryce), the Oscar-winning Sir Ben Kingsley and the gold-plated national treasure

As a good left-wing lad raised by Guardian-reading parents who didn’t drive, I knew Jeremy Clarkson was tasteless and unpleasant. In my first year as a junior doctor, my surgical ward had one of his articles pinned to the office wall. It was off-putting to see his shabby name and a piece from a tabloid,

The current Labour government grows ever more farcical. Despite its promise to ‘tread lightly’ on people’s lives, we’ve seen war declared on farmers, private schools, pubs, humour at work and even allotment owners. This week came the news that drivers over the age of 70 must take compulsory driving tests, with a mandatory ban if

Stanley Kubrick’s swooningly gorgeous film, Barry Lyndon, has just been re-released in cinemas to mark its 50th anniversary. Much ink has been spilled about its hypnotic beauty, its lavish attention to historical detail, its dreamy, luscious, candlelit photography. Yet William Thackeray’s bitingly satirical novel of the same name is often neglected – as is the

You know how this story goes. The cameras are rolling. The audience is cruel. You’re trapped in the game and the game is death and the game is going out live from the heart of the state of nature where empathy is weakness and you kill each other off until there’s only one left. What will you do to survive? Who

Denis Villeneuve, the Oscar-nominated director of such blockbuster behemoths as Dune and Blade Runner 2049, has been hired to reboot the James Bond franchise. Villeneuve is a hugely capable director, somewhat in the Christopher Nolan school of blending epic set-pieces with an intellectual and emotional core. As the first auteur to be hired to direct

I’ve been having this recurring nightmare recently that involves James Corden. The year is 2045. Society has collapsed and London is under quarantine. There is no transport in the city, so survivors get around on foot – though, for some inexplicable reason, TfL workers are still on strike. I live in a bin and survive

In her 1954 essay ‘The English Aristocracy’, the author Nancy Mitford popularised the descriptions ‘U’, i.e. upper-class or aristocratic, and ‘non-U’, to denote household terms. Although she did not coin the phrase (that credit belongs to the otherwise forgotten linguist Alan S.C. Ross), she brought it to wider public attention. When her friends John Betjeman

A new documentary is to be screened later this year celebrating 50 years of everybody’s favourite 1970s sitcom The Good Life. I will not be joining in with the festivities. During the two-hour show, 85-year-old Penelope Keith, who played the irascible Margo Leadbetter, will revisit some of the original locations, including Kewferry Road in Northwood,

A spell has been cast. Three children – Dominic McLaughlin, Alastair Stout and Arabella Stanton – have magically gone from obscurity to global fame, after HBO announced that they will be playing Harry, Ron and Hermione in the new Harry Potter series. HBO released a photograph of the trio, kneeling in the grass looking earnest,

We’ve been through a lot as a nation over the past few years. Watching politicians debate scotch eggs, finding out (without wanting to) how Prince Harry lost his virginity, Just Stop Oil’s tomato soup tantrums… so sometimes an event arises that makes you ask yourself: has this all taken a larger toll than we realised

With reluctance – but enticed by its surprisingly starry cast and the fact that it had landed, ironically enough, on Netflix – I recently tuned in to The Hour, the BBC’s 2011 political drama series. It’s about a BBC TV news programme being launched in 1956, against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis. And, goodness

The modern world of dating is ripe for disappointment, and recent dating app convert Sophie is certainly not immune. ‘I went on a date with an actor – not doing too bad – we go to Zuma. I ordered everything; Henry VIII in there, got it all. Then the bill came and he says, how

In a recent diary for The Spectator, the editor noted that many of the world’s leading tech companies have names inspired by The Lord of the Rings: Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Mithril; Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. ‘J.R.R. Tolkien has a curious hold on the minds of Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters,’ he wrote. Well, they’re not the

In Alex Garland’s new film Warfare, one detail stakes the film’s claim to be the most honest depiction of combat yet. Not the severed foot left lying on an Iraqi street after a bomb blast, nor a wounded US soldier’s screams as a medic bandages up what is left of his leg. Instead, it is

Next week, after Francis’s funeral, the College of Cardinals will assemble in Rome to choose the man who will lead their Church through these increasingly troubled times. That gathering has become more familiar to a wider, non-Catholic public thanks to the recent films Conclave and The Two Popes – though these are far from the

Boris Johnson didn’t like Adolescence. In his Daily Mail column last week he acknowledged the fine acting of the most talked-about television programme of the year, but still concluded that it was ‘tosh’. The problem, he felt, was that it wasn’t based on a real-life crime, which somehow lessens its worth as a lesson for

There is a decent chance that most Spectator readers have seen at least one of the following: the much-ballyhooed Adolescence, the rather less controversial Black Doves, and the once-magnificent, latterly tawdry The Crown. From the travails of royalty to the horrors of a child killer, via the acrobatic derring-do of unusually witty spies, these shows