Bridge | 10 June 2023

It’s a great idea to set a thriller in the world of high-stake bridge, and my friend Helen Erichsen has pulled it off brilliantly. Her debut novel, Murder by Natural Causes (Muswell Press), is about a young, amoral contract killer named Cilla, who the reader can’t quite help rooting for.

It’s a page-turner from start to finish, whether or not you play bridge; but there are delicious added elements if you do. The setting is London’s famous rubber bridge club TGRs (where the gamblers among us have passed many a crazy hour). Some well-known players make a cameo appearance, such as Zia Mahmoud and Nick Sandqvist. Others are disguised – and Helen has offered a game with her husband Espen Erichsen, a world-class pro, to anyone who can spot them all. If he’s unavailable, I’m sure people would be delighted to partner Helen instead – she has plenty of England caps, and is a former European Mixed Teams champion. On this deal, Cilla would have been proud of her creator’s subterfuge (see diagram).

West led the ◆10. Helen knew a club finesse would probably lose to East (who had opened), and a heart switch would spell defeat. So she resorted to deception. She won with dummy’s ◆A , then insouciantly cashed the ♣A and played a low club. East, assuming Helen had no more clubs and was trying to ruff out the ♣K for a heart or diamond discard, ducked. Helen won with the ♣J, cashed the ♠A, crossed to dummy with a trump and played the ♣Q. When East covered, she ruffed, played a third trump to dummy and discarded a heart on the ♣10.

Progress is coming to our remote corner of Kenya

The principal of the local polytechnic was waiting for me in the kitchen. Frequently in the kitchen there is a chief or a surveyor, or geese, or the cats Omar and Bernini, the dogs Jock, Sasi and Potatoes, foundling lambs or calves gambolling about hoping for milk, or stockmen with news of a sick cow, or armed askaris clumping in after a hard night to lay assault rifles down on the counter before slurping mugs of sugar-loaded tea. Bees try to swarm behind the fridge and one day Milka, the cook, primly announced there was a big snake coiled on the shelf of pots and pans. In her Cold Comfort Farm Miss Stella Gibbons talked of ‘clettering’ the dishes. You should have seen the clettering of kitchenware as I went after that snake, which rose up out of the Le Creuset, an 8ft Ashe’s large brown spitting cobra with a head the size of my fist.

But I hadn’t met a polytechnic principal in the kitchen before. As African despots wield power through their kitchen cabinets, I manage our African cattle ranch through the farm kitchen. All meetings with the highest officials or the closest friends take place here. When I arrived, it appeared the entire academic staff of the local technical college had come to say hello. The heads of plumbing, masonry, carpentry, farming science and accountancy all sat down to tea. They were polite and charming in that typically Kenyan way. They roared with laughter when I told them British tertiary education staff were always on strike. They were intrigued to hear how in England, all plumbers became millionaires without ever turning up to work.

Surrounded by gardens, our kitchen stands away from the houses and huts where we sleep, work or eat. Throughout our early years, when all this was just bush and elephants, we lived in tents and the kitchen was our first proper building. It’s so solid a Somali observed admiringly: ‘Those walls could stop bullets.’ The building isn’t only a cookhouse or scullery. Between the kitchen and a large store is a radio room where a VHF station barks out transmissions between herders. Flashing lights and boxes monitor the performance of solar panels and batteries running farm buildings, plus 12 miles of electric fencing, all powered by the sun. There is a table laden with livestock dip for ticks, deworming drench, antibiotics, penicillin and substances to help with bloat, foot rot, mastitis, eye problems, calving problems, injuries, bites and stress.

The local polytechnic has recently been built on a spot over the horizon from us where, until five years ago, there was nothing at all but wilderness and herds of zebra. Now the college is filling up with young students from every corner of Kenya. The idea of a Samburu cattle man’s son becoming a carpenter or electrician would, until now, have had people doubled up on the floor crying with laughter. But it is happening. Around the college a livestock market has sprung up and a trading centre that teems with nomads and farmers every market day. Jason, the polytechnic principal, asked if we could supply farm produce at cheap prices to his students and I said how keen I would be to do that. The kitchen already gets piled with trays of eggs from our chickens. The carcasses of sheep, goats and cockerels hang in the rafters and, when the seasons are right, we get citrus, papaya, bananas and vegetables in from our gardens. I have ambitions soon to supply avocados, vegetables, tilapia fish and whatever else I can rear for the burgeoning local population.

Jason asked if we could take some of his students on as interns for work experience and at this I had to confess that we ourselves were still learning. Farming for me has involved repeating my failures over many years, with only incremental improvements. I may claim it’s because we live on a frontier where I’m pioneering macadamia nuts. The truth is that I am a stubborn amateur, while my stockmen are traditional nomads who approach most veterinary problems with witchcraft. As for amateurs learning from their mistakes, nobody from the college had heard of Jeremy Clarkson. The fact is, I told Jason, we were probably the ones who needed to learn from his graduates. It impressed me that our remote corner of northern Kenya has become a place where progress is taking place. I wanted to live up here in order to get away from the world. Now the world is coming to us.

As it happened: Prince Harry accused of ‘total speculation’ over hacking claims

Prince Harry has finished his second day of giving evidence in the High Court. The Duke of Sussex is taking legal action against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) alleging that tabloid reporters broke the law to get stories about him. He was cross-examined by the Mirror Group’s barrister Andrew Green and then was asked questions by his own lawyer, David Sherborne. Here’s what unfolded today:

• Prince Harry says the media exposure for this court case has been ‘a lot’

• The Duke of Sussex found a tracking device under then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy’s car

• Harry calls several articles ‘suspicious’ because they have been attributed to ‘pals’ or ‘Palace sources’

• The Duke said the alleged phone hacking ‘could have been happening on a daily basis’

2.35pm Prince Harry leaves the witness box

Prince Harry has finished giving evidence. He is staying in court to hear other people give evidence, although it is unclear how long he will stay for.

2.30pm Media exposure of this court case is ‘a lot’, Duke says

Asked by Sherborne how Harry felt with the media watching this week’s court case, the Duke paused and says, ‘It’s a lot.’ His voice appeared to break a little as he said it.

2.20pm Harry: Photographers ‘enormous security issue’

Referring to himself and Prince William, Harry alleges that photographers from the Ikon picture agency ‘stalked and harassed us for decades’. ‘They were an enormous security issue.’

He says his security team suspected ‘consistent unlawful activity’.

2.10pm Harry found tracking device on Chelsy Davy’s car

Harry says he once found a tracking device on Davy’s car. He alleges it was placed there by a private investigator. He says his friend Mark Dyer also found one on his car.

2.05pm Court resumes

David Sherborne starts questioning Prince Harry.

1.05pm Court breaks for lunch

Court has broken for lunch with proceedings due to begin again in roughly an hour’s time.

1pm Harry’s cross-examination ends, questions from Duke’s lawyer begin

Harry’s cross-examination by Andrew Green has now finished. Now it is the turn of Harry’s own barrister, David Sherborne, to ask the Duke questions in what is known as the examination in chief.

12:55pm Does Harry have evidence he was hacked daily?

Green asks Harry if he believes his phone was ‘consistently hacked’ over the 15 years that make up his claim against MGN, 1996 and 2011. Harry answers, ‘It could have been happening on a daily basis, I simply don’t know.’

Pressed by Green as to whether the Duke has any evidence to show this, Harry responds, ‘No, that’s part of the reason I’m here, my lord.’

12:50pm Harry sought legal advice after bumping into lawyer in France

Harry says he sought legal advice on a claim against MGN after bumping into his now-lawyer David Sherborne in France in 2018. Prior to this, Green asks, was Harry aware that he had a case against the Mirror Group? Harry responds, ‘Not at all.’

Asked by Green if Harry has ‘never been able to identify any story in an MGN newspaper which was written as a result of a message left on [his] phone?’, the Duke answers, ‘That’s a question for my legal team…but I believe phone hacking started at Mirror Group.’

12:40pm Harry: ‘evidence has been destroyed’

Responding to questions concerning an article about a rugby match Harry attended with a woman at Twickenham, the Prince repeats his claim that the article was ‘suspicious’. He adds that he has seen evidence of six payments to private investigators in relation to the story.

Pressed by Green on whose mobile phones Harry thinks were targeted for the story, he responds ‘I’m not sure because the evidence has been destroyed.’

12:30pm Who knew about Harry’s meetings with Caroline Flack?

Harry tells the court of his shock when two photographers were lying in wait for him and Caroline Flack to arrive at a dinner party in Fulham. He says that only his friends knew of the dinner plans and that he was ‘highly suspicious and convinced someone had leaked the information to the press’.

He says that, at the time, he included Flack in his suspicious, but that he now believes the information about their meetings was obtained from his or her voicemails, or those of the friend whose house they met at.

Harry reportedly looks pained as he says Flack is ‘no longer with us’.

12:10pm Suspicious photographers

The court is now back in session and Green has turned to the 27th article included in the trial. The Sunday Mirror article is about Harry dropping off Chelsy near Kensington Palace in 2007 and includes a photograph of him dropping her off.

Harry says the presence of a photographer ‘poised and waiting’ was ‘highly suspicious’

Alexander Larman writes…‘There is an undeniable sense that Harry sees this, not as a legal issue, but as a crusade, in which he is wielding the “simple sword of truth” against the “cancer of bent and twisted journalism”.’

Read the full story here.

11.50am Court takes short break

11.40am ‘Hooray Harry’ celebrating dumping by Chelsy, claims Duke

Prince Harry claims the headline of a Sunday Mirror article titled ‘Hooray Harry’s Dumped’ was ‘hurtful to say the least’. Green questions, ‘You’re not suggesting that “Hooray Harry” was a reference to celebrating that you were being dumped, are you?’ The Duke confirms he is.

Green responds, ‘The article quotes that [Chelsy] got tired of “his hooray lifestyle”…it’s not celebrating the demise of your relationship,’

11.35am Harry ‘in the land of total speculation’

Discussing an article regarding his relationship with ex-girlfriend Chelsy Davy, Prince Harry says the attribution to a ‘palace source’ is suspicious because ‘I never discussed any details with the palace about my relationship with my girlfriend’. Instead, he alleges, the true source of the information was phone hacking.

Green says that we are in the ‘land of total speculation about where this information might have come from’. Harry says he disagrees.

11.10am Does Harry want to be phone hacked?

Green asks Prince Harry if he would be disappointed if the court finds that he was never hacked by Mirror Group journalists. The Duke says he isn’t sure if he would be ‘relieved or disappointed’ and ‘I would feel some injustice if it wasn’t accepted.’

The lawyer then asks, ‘So you want to have been phone hacked?’ to which Harry responds, ‘Nobody wants to be phone hacked, my lord.’

11.05am Cross-examination turns to News of the World phone hacking arrests

Green asks Prince Harry about the conviction of two News of the World journalists arrested for hacking phones related to royal aides. Harry says that despite the ‘enormous risk’ in targeting the Royal Family Green suggests their case would have shown, the ‘risk was worth the reward’ for publishers.

11am Distressing stories

Harry says that going through the knee injury story with his legal team was ‘distressing’. In response to a question from Green as to whether he remembered the article at the time, Harry says he doesn’t ‘remember seeing’ most of the articles at the time of publication. ‘Most of them were equally distressing then and more distressing today going through this process,’ he said.

10.45am What’s in the public interest?

Harry is challenged by Green to define what makes a story ‘in the public interest’ and therefore legitimate. ‘What would be a public interest story about you?’ Green asks. ‘I’m not entirely sure, other than speculating,’ Harry responds. The Duke suggests a life-threatening injury might count.

10.30am The Duke of Sussex is back in the witness box

The Mirror Group’s barrister Andrew Green KC picks up Prince Harry’s cross-examination where he left off yesterday. The Duke is being questioned on an article relating to his time at Sandhurst that alleged he was being let off training due to a knee injury.

He said he ‘was not going around freely discussing any medical issues or injuries that I had’. Green points out the article included a quote from Harry himself.

10am Prince Harry has arrived in court

The Duke of Sussex has arrived for a second day of evidence in his case against MGN. Prince Harry turned up in a Land Rover flanked by security guards.

9.30am What unfolded on Harry’s first day in court

The Duke of Sussex had a tough day, fielding questions from MGN’s barrister Andrew Green KC. Green, described as a ‘beast in court’ by Legal 500, skilfully unpicked Harry’s claim that articles about him were obtained using unlawful methods, wrote Alexander Larman on Coffee House: ‘Green’s line of questioning represents quite the most combative interrogation that the Duke of Sussex has faced in several years, possibly ever.’

You can read Alexander Larman’s full piece here.

Labour’s tax raid on private schools isn’t the money spinner it thinks

Would Labour’s plan to impose VAT on private school fees really raise £1.6 billion, as the party claims? Not according to a research paper by the education think tank EDSK. The £1.6 billion figure is often attributed to the Resolution Foundation, yet the original source, says EDSK, is a paper by the Fabian Society in 2011 – a paper which it says got its figures wrong in several different respects. It started with the assumption that there were, in that year, 628,000 pupils enrolled in independent schools. Yet this government figure did not just include pupils at fee-paying schools, but also children enrolled at academies and city technology schools. These were described as ‘independent’ because they were outside the control of local authorities. Moreover, it included children enrolled in pre-school education. Labour’s plan does not stretch to charging VAT on nursery provision.

A correct, updated figure for the number of pupils currently enrolled at private schools is 525,786. If you assume that pupils numbers would fall away by five per cent as a result of the imposition of VAT on fees – a figure assumed by the Labour party – that would come down to just under 500,000. But some believe that pupil numbers would fall away by 25 per cent, bringing pupil numbers down to 394,000.     

The trouble is that every pupil who switches from the independent to the state sector hits Labour’s expected revenue figure with a double whammy: firstly from the lost VAT income and secondly from the extra money the government has to spend on educating the child in the state sector. Put these two effects together, assume a drop-off in pupil numbers of 25 per cent, and the initiative raises £926 million in extra VAT revenue – almost entirely cancelled out by the extra £907 million which the government would have to spend in providing extra places at state schools. If the drop-off rate exceeded 25 per cent, the fiscal effect would move rapidly into the negative.

The EDSK does not claim that a 25 per cent drop-off in pupil numbers at private schools is the most likely outcome. Instead, it presents a ‘best-case’ scenario where Labour’s policy raises £1 billion and a ‘worst-case’ scenario where it raises virtually nothing at all. But even in the best case, the tax-take would be a lot less than the £1.6 billion claimed by Labour. 

Charging VAT on private school fees may be a totemic policy for many in the party, who see private schools as driving social division. Whatever the merits of that argument, the inescapable truth is that the more such a policy succeeds in driving pupils into the state sector, the less successful it will be at raising revenue. If Labour wants to raise more income for its social programmes it may have to look elsewhere. 

My rodent house guest has a Benadryl habit

The mouse has been eating his way through the medicine cabinet to the extent that I am really quite frightened of confronting him.

I opened the cupboard above the sink to find an entire blister pack of paracetamol, several sachets of Solpadeine and some 400mg ibuprofen nibbled away. Also scoffed were two packs of antihistamine, and a packet of high-potency iron tablets.

A plastic bottle of Vitamin D was somehow broken into. And my HRT was missing quite a few days. Holy smoke. What manner of mutant thing had he become?

Or perhaps it was a lady mouse who was going through a hard time and had been fobbed off with a Zoom appointment and cognitive behavioural therapy.

In any case, the mouse has stuffed him- or herself for months with pretty much everything in my kitchen cupboards, from larder supplies to dish cloths, and that was bad enough. But now it had got a liking for the hard stuff, for whatever reason. I wasn’t judging, I just wished there was a way through this that did not involve me going to B&Q.

The day after I found evidence of what surely constituted an overdose, the mouse was still scuffling around in the kitchen in broad daylight while I cowered in the living room next door. Desperate to get his paws on more, he was scratching at the back of the kitchen cabinets, trying to break through the backing and make more entry holes after I blocked the other ones up with bits of wood and gaffer tape.

I sat at my desk in the room next to the kitchen, a study come snug, where I was trying to type an email, and I froze. Listening to what I presumed was a monster mouse, I decided something had to change. I could no longer entertain these deluded Surrey ideas about putting food out of reach and politely encouraging my rodent house guest to consider moving out.  

Everything the builder boyfriend has done to thwart him has failed. He blocked off the larder shelves with anti-climbing mouse guards made from cardboard. He went down into the cellar and crawled under the house and shouted: ‘There’s a rodent superhighway down here! No wonder we’ve got mice! There’s about 17 bricks missing in the party wall!’ He worked himself into a frenzy with a far-fetched theory that a neighbour had knocked them out in order to vent their boiler room.

After hours of bricklaying on his stomach in the crawl space, lavishly swearing, he declared the house closed to mousery. And that night mousey came as usual and helped himself to Benadryl. (Although, to be fair, the pollen count was high that day.)

I got an old cat carrier and propped the lid open. Inside I placed seeded bread, a handful of muesli, some granola and a carrot.

I thought about putting a packet of anti-inflammatories in there, maybe a bowl of cough mixture, but I decided I would play it straight. If mousey wanted to get high, he could do it on his own time. I was not encouraging it.

I tied the lid to a bean pole which I propped on the edge of the ascending kitchen stairs and figured that if I sat crouched in the upper ground floor sitting room all night I could push the lid shut with a flick of the pole.

The only problem was that at 10 p.m. I fell asleep. But the next evening, the builder boyfriend came home with a present. ‘Mrs Andrewes has sent you this,’ he announced, placing a proper humane mouse catcher cage down in front of me.

Mrs Andrewes once told the builder boyfriend, after he had done work for her for years: ‘You know, there’s a builder just like you in a column I read.’

I told him to thank her for me very much, and I set it excitedly. It had a little trap door which propped open attached to a long pin mechanism attached to a plate. I placed the bread on the plate and when the mouse came in and trod on it that would release the pin holding the trap door open, and it would then slam shut.

We set the trap with the pin propped as precariously close to the edge as possible, so that the slightest pressure on the plate would trigger it.

I went to bed quite nervous about what I would catch. The next morning I came down sleepy, forgetting for a moment, and then gasped as I realised. The food had been eaten. The trap door was firmly closed. But where was the mouse? The pill-popping rodent had apparently managed to eat the goodies while avoiding the spring plate, then, perhaps for a laugh, he closed the trap door as he left.

The lost magic of the Hamptons

They’ve honed the skill of attracting attention by building some of the largest and ugliest houses this side of the Russian-owned Riviera ones, yet the luminous little village still retains signs of a bygone civilised era. A few grand houses built a long time ago are proof that not all Americans are nouveaux-riches, and some even have good taste in decoration – you know the kind: wicker chairs, yellow and white umbrellas, and long green lawns. I used to own a house like that, with swimming pool, tennis court and a cellar full of wine, but I sold it because of its proximity to a relative of mine. My daughter was heartbroken at the sale, especially after I bought a large piece of land in northern Connecticut and made plans to build a Yankee palace. She moved to England and her mother, brother and reluctant father followed.

As everyone who has not built a glass atrocity on Dune Road knows, artists and writers descended on the land now called the Hamptons around the late 1800s. When people such as Walt Whitman praised the place as magical, the rich burst in like gangbusters. Back then the rich copied their betters, and their good taste in building their summer ‘cottages’ is evident today. The recent dotcom crowd, alas, believed only in themselves, and ended up constructing monster houses that would scare away Frankenstein. Their imprimatur will one day be seen as proof of why AI decided to do away with humanity.

Never mind. The coup de grâce for the Hamptons came some time ago, when Paris Hilton, Puff Daddy, Busta Rhymes, Gwyneth Paltrow and other such rich undesirables (to me, anyway) discovered the place. I now visit once a year, stay at my private club, and rush back to the city after two nights. Even the club has changed, with many famous old Wasp names gone to a higher-ranked club above. The only person I knew at breakfast was the president, who came over to say hi and who was asked by a rude me who the hell all these new members were. This is the type of club where the white painted exterior resembles the membership. For a brief moment I contemplated going to Graydon Carter’s party in the Hotel du Cap, but I decided to stay with the memories of my youth and stick to the Hamptons.

I’ve been a bit off Carter for some time. A few years ago he filmed Reinaldo Herrera and me talking about the good old days. When manners were all-important and society dames were not on Twitter discussing their periods. He told me he was happy with the finished product but then #MeToo began. I reckon that what we filmed would have been awarded the Palme D’Or by #MeTooers. All we did was praise the gals for their beauty and elegance, and so on. But when Michael Mailer asked to see it and exhibit it, Carter refused. I’ve never seen it. We spent days filming and I was told that everything was hunky-dory. Then silence.

I like both Graydon’s current and ex-wife and all his children, but he’s on my blacklist until he exhibits the greatest documentary ever made. Would Leo attend his publisher’s party after War and Peace had been turned down? Would Gustave go to his agent’s for drinks after the latter had convinced him Madame Bovary was a loser? If My Dinner with Andre put some people to sleep, the one I’m in with Reinaldo will make them feel as though they’ve been injected with ketamine, whatever that means (I’ve never taken it).

And now for more things that are verboten: Djokovic dared to say something about Kosovo, and some human-rights woman called him a fascist and demanded he be punished. What the hell is this? There is nothing in the rulebook that prohibits a player from making political statements. Athletes today might be as thick as polo ponies but they have the God-given ability to speak – most of them, anyway – so why deprive them of the only advantage they have over dogs and horses?

Black athletes and women are always going on about some outrageous prejudice against them, so why can’t little Novak also open his mouth? And speaking of sport, here’s some news for some of you Chelsea fans: you’re owned body and soul by an American, Todd Boehly, who also owns an American baseball team called the Los Angeles Dodgers. In order to celebrate Pride Night, the Dodgers have some fringe lunatic cross-dressers wearing nuns’ frocks raising hell by ridiculing Catholics and Catholicism in the most public, provocative and obnoxious manner. Remember this the next time you shell out lotsa moolah for a seat at Chelsea. Boehly makes one miss Abramovich.

Otherwise it’s time for a hasty migration from the Bagel. Alyssa, whom I recently wrote about, complained that I misspelled her Christian name, but I have complaints of my own: why, oh why, must she be so attractive and her skin so soft and porcelain? I’ll tell you why, because she’s 50 years younger than me and she’s half-Swedish, half-Norwegian, that’s why. It’s a well-deserved comeuppance for a serial philanderer, but one never knows.  Stranger things have happened, and I remain confident.

Hamlet fans will love this: Re-Member Me, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

A puzzle at Hampstead Theatre. Literally, a brain teaser. Its new production, Re-member Me, is a one-man show written and performed by Dickie Beau, whose name is a punning allusion to a bow tie. The oddly spelled word, ‘re-member’ refers to the process of reassembling the separated limbs of a dramatic character during the rehearsal process. The poster for the production centres on Mr Beau dressed in 1980s sports gear and wearing a T-shirt blazoned with the logo of ‘Wittenberg University’, written in German. Enfolding his skull is a rainbow headband.

These details tell us that the play examines the character of Hamlet with a particular focus on the travails of gay actors performing the role during the 1980s Aids epidemic. But this data is intelligible only to those who have already paid for and sat through the production. So as a promotional tool, the poster is useless. Crucially it neglects to mention that the show includes taped reminiscences from John Gielgud, Richard Eyre and Ian McKellen who discuss the unique challenges presented by the play. Why not use these starry names to spark interest at the box office? Very baffling.

The show opens in the same mysterious manner. The curtain rises on a stage scattered with broken tailor’s mannequins which Mr Beau gathers together as if trying to honour the promise about ‘re-membering’ made in the title. Bizarre.

Then the recordings begin and a measure of clarity arrives. Richard Eyre says he was electrified by Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet back in 1963. Ian Charleson, who starred as Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, was hired by Eyre to play Hamlet at the Olivier in 1989. Charleson succumbed to Aids early in 1990 and he played the Dane with unsightly lesions clearly visible on his face. The text is about dying and Charleson played it while doing so. As these recordings are relayed, Mr Beau silently mouths every word and delivers a balletic impersonation that seems to illuminate the character of the speaker and to animate their inner life. It’s marvellously original and effective.

The show moves on to Ian McKellen, who admits that he struggles to penetrate Hamlet’s mysterious character and instead delivers ‘notes’ about how the role might be played. Then Gielgud. The doddery old knight comes across as a self-deprecating charmer who modestly admits that his Hamlet was perhaps effective ‘in one or two scenes’. He recalls that as a teenager he was asked what he expected from the theatre. ‘I’m going to be a star,’ he replied. Looking back, he found this flash of ‘impertinence’ shocking and appalling. And yet his show of humility is itself a performance intended to burnish his own legend. As Mr Beau mimes Gielgud’s words he creates an exquisite mini-pantomime of snuffling bombast and self-congratulation. It’s hilarious and yet entirely lacking in malice. Affection and curiosity drive each of these vignettes which are executed with an astonishing degree of humour, skill and delicacy. The lipsyncing is perfect as well. Hours of laborious practice must have been required to raise this amazing show to such a sublime level and yet it’s done with a graceful carelessness and levity. If you’re a fan of Hamlet and you enjoy reading actors’ memoirs, you’ll love this. Hopefully the cryptic poster won’t kill it off prematurely.

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays and, let’s be honest, one of his worst. It opens with a long speech by Egeon explaining the impossibly silly plot. Years ago, a shipwreck separated Egeon from his twin sons who are both named Antipholus. The boys were brought up in Syracuse as master and servant. The same shipwreck affected another pair of male twins, both named Dromio, who were raised in Ephesus. As it happens, they grew up as master and servant as well.

Plenty of ridiculous coincidences there and we haven’t yet met the complementary sets of masters and servants. And when they appear, it seems that the masters dress identically and so do both the servants. A series of mistakes unfolds as every character in the play struggles to work out who is who. The mix-ups involve gifts of chains, rope and money, and there’s plenty of comic violence and fisticuffs. The plot is so baffling that the show might benefit from diagrams on stage to keep everyone abreast of the action.

At the end, Egeon returns and makes a second long speech describing what just happened. Sean Holmes’s period-dress production has a first-rate cast led by Michael Elcock as Antipholus (the one from the Syracuse, not from Ephesus). The crowd loved the show because the madcap storyline lends itself well to the Globe’s scrappy, informal, semi-improvised idiom. One of the biggest laughs came from a character in breeches who said: ‘OK.’ Is ‘OK’ Shakespeare? It is now.

The greatest female composer you’ve never heard of

One of the most intriguing piano concertos of the late 19th century is unknown to the public – and no wonder: so far as I can work out, it has only been recorded once, on a speciality label devoted to neglected French repertoire. As I write this, there are only 11 copies available from Amazon and I recommend that you grab one quickly, because the Second Piano Concerto of Marie Jaëll (1846-1925) demands repeated listening.

The concerto’s harmonic language is superficially conventional: sweeping tunes decorated by arm-swinging arpeggios. But the melodies are lopsided and from time to time the soloist’s butterfly textures are reduced to single notes on which the finger lingers defiantly, exploring every possibility of touch.

The relationship between the pianist’s body and the keyboard was Jaëll’s lifelong obsession. In 1894, ten years after Liszt himself hailed her concerto as ‘a brilliant masterpiece’, she abandoned composition permanently to work on her whole-body ‘Method’ of playing the piano. This is based on the notion – not easy to get your head round – that the touch on the key relates to movement in the same way that vision depends on light. Jaëll, a young widow from Alsace, believed with religious passion that the production of sound can boost our capacity to acquire knowledge of the universe. Finger movements ‘become artistic only if their image pre-exists in the brain’, she wrote.

Jaëll’s biographer Catherine Guichard argues that she anticipated the discoveries of 21st-century neuroscience; also, less convincingly, that ‘in spirit, Marie Jaëll was close to quantum physicists’. (French scholars can’t resist this analogy, despite the famous Sokal hoax in which a physicist humiliated a postmodern journal by publishing an attack on scientific objectivity based on deliberate nonsense about ‘quantum gravity’.)

Ironically, reports of Jaëll’s own playing suggest that subtleties of colour were sometimes lost in the heat of the moment. To quote one critic:

Then Marie Jaëll seized – that is the word – the huge Érard Hall. Not a beautiful or pretty face, but one that is original, determined, even imperious. Her supple hands, with long, flexible fingers, resting on the keys, gained possession of them with the passionate violence of an ardent, unbridled and immoderate nature. In fact, her extraordinary virtuosity was as uneven as her somewhat barbaric character… even capable of wrong notes, striving for forceful effects: a string-breaker, some called her.

‘Some called her’ is a nice touch, but it doesn’t conceal the flick of the stiletto. The critic, one ‘Jacques Vincent’, was actually the social-climbing wife of a banker, the aptly named Angèle Berthe Venem. Marie Jaëll left no recordings, so we can’t judge. As for her compositions, she received a typically withered bouquet from Johannes Brahms. ‘How insipid they are, these young women pianists who always play the same pieces by Liszt,’ he wrote. ‘But speak to me of La Jaëll! Here is an intelligent, witty woman: she produces her own works for the piano, which are just as bad as those by Liszt.’

Brahms could be a nasty piece of work, but there’s no denying that Jaëll’s music displays an unevenness of inspiration. On the other hand, even her inconsistency is interesting.

The Second Piano Concerto, in addition to its mixture of virtuoso swagger and late-Lisztian austerity, reaches a pitch of hysteria worthy of Messiaen’s Turangalîla. Some of the solo pieces have the forced prettiness of Cécile Chaminade, queen of Parisian salon music. In contrast, her last significant composition, the piano cycle Ce q’on entend…, uses fragmentary motifs to describe Dante’s hell, purgatory and paradise. The best numbers are as disconcerting as Satie and more haunting. They use repetitive patterns to illuminate touch; you can’t listen to them without thinking of the American minimalists.

When the music blogger Emily Hogstad discovered Jaëll’s ‘restless, passionate compositions’, she wondered why the hell she didn’t know this woman. I think it’s precisely because her work is so restless – that, and the fact that she didn’t trick the right boxes. The cottage industry devoted to celebrating dead women composers requires cinematic back stories and music that’s easy on the ear; hence the apotheosis of Clara Schumann and Florence Price. But if you want proof that women of the era could move beyond well-carpentered clichés, then I recommend a dose of the Alsatian string-breaker.

Gratuitously twisty, turny nonsense: Sky Max’s Poker Face reviewed

Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t you? The intelligence services would be queuing up to employ you for interrogations; top law firms would pay you top dollar to act as their adviser; you’d win gazillions in all the poker championships; you’d never buy a dodgy second-hand car, not that you’d need to with all that money you’d have. Admittedly, though, your life and adventures would make for a very boring TV series because everything would be so easy.

Hence the tortured premise of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face, in which we are invited to believe that our heroine, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), has blown her skills spectacularly. Instead of playing poker, for example, at one of those high-stakes competitions in Vegas, and allowing herself to lose the occasional hand so as not to give the game away, she has gone around the country, playing for low stakes, and always winning, till word has got out – because gamblers always talk. An evil, shadowy casino boss has rumbled her, and threatened her (why? Why doesn’t he make use of her skills instead?), and forced her to stop gambling. Now she lives in a trailer park and ekes a living as a waitress in the casino.

My problem with this is the same problem I have generally with Johnson’s most recent screenplays, such as the overrated Americans-do-Agatha-Christie Knives Out, and that even more annoying farrago that Netflix inflicted on us over Christmas, Glass Onion, about the Elon Musk-style billionaire with the plot so infuriatingly convoluted you felt envious of the characters murdered in the first half-hour. And it’s the same problem I have with the whodunnit genre as a whole: always but always, character – indeed plausibility of any kind – is subordinated to the needs of the gratuitously twisty, turny, well-I-never plot.

So, for example, Cale is by turns required to be tenacious, down-to-earth, jaded (as, of course, you would be in a world of relentless palpable insincerity) and all-knowing, yet, when occasion demands, she must be ditzy, feckless and naive. At one point, the plotline’s excuse for the latter is that she has drunk coffee (whereas normally she prefers beer), making her so garrulous and light-headed that she threatens to get herself bumped off by the baddies. Many, if not most, viewers will have tried coffee and experienced its effects: is it not a bit insulting of the script to demand that they conspire to pretend that this harmless stimulant can, on occasion, combine the effects of a truth serum with LSD?

Here’s another irksome thing. Cale has a deep, gravelly voice that bespeaks years of hard living. She has a trailer-trash twang and she drinks beer (some painfully blatant product placement for Heineken and Coors Light) out of a can. Yet she doesn’t smoke cigarettes. I find this as obtrusive and undermining as it was in that bar in Cheers all those years ago, the place where everyone knew your name but no one smoked. C’mon. If you’re going to set up a quintessentially implausible premise – a character can read lies – then you have a duty to your audience’s intelligence to counter the crazy bits by grounding the rest in verisimilitude?

The reason the Delingpole family ended up groaning through this nonsense – Boy: ‘you realise Adrien Brody is going to die at the end of this episode because he’s too big for a series like this and major actors only play these roles if they can play short-lived cameo villains?’ – is that my initial viewing choice, a Netflix series called McGregor Forever about cage fighter Conor McGregor, was rejected in the first 30 seconds by the Fawn. It opened with an infamous and grotesque incident in 2021 when, mid-fight, McGregor’s ankle buckled and snapped. ‘Don’t look, Mum!’ warned Boy, who knew what was about to happen. But it was already too late. ‘I’m not watching this,’ said Fawn. (I may come back to it later, if I can find time for some sneaky private viewings with Boy.)

Rounding off this week’s theme of ‘shows I really can’t recommend’, I’d definitely give a miss to The Days, a Japanese-made drama about the nuclear reactor in Fukushima taken out by a tsunami. What I’d been hoping for, obviously, was a kind of oriental version of that fantastically gripping drama set in Chernobyl. But whereas Chernobyl benefitted from a world-class cast and a script that, though factually inaccurate, knew how to spin a ripping yarn abundant with conflict, tension and character insight, this one appeared to have been thrown together by the Japanese equivalent of the team that does the cheesy TV ads for DIY superstores.

Besides cardboard characterisation, and comically inept acting, The Days had at least one other major disadvantage over Chernobyl: unlike the latter, which offered endless opportunities for blackly satirical takes on the corruption, ineptitude and buckpassing at a Soviet-era nuclear plant, this one was set in modern Japan where pretty much everyone is decent, professional, obedient, efficient and honourable. Props to the Japanese for having such a culture. But it doesn’t always make for the most riveting disaster drama.

Let’s hear it for the lesser-spotted nepo daddy

Rob Grant releases his debut album, Lost at Sea, this week. A 69-year-old millionaire and former ad man, furniture exec and domain developer, Grant has made a record of ambient, ocean-themed piano doodles glorying in titles such as ‘In the Dying Light of Day: Requiem for Mother Earth’, ‘A Delicate Mist Surrounds Me’ and ‘The Mermaids’ Lullaby’.

Not incidentally, he is also the father of one of the world’s biggest (and best) alt-pop stars, Lana Del Rey. The title track features his daughter’s unmistakeable contralto, while her name is emblazoned on the front cover. Father’s Day is just around the corner, and Ms Del Rey has delivered a pearl of a present for Pappy: his very own album.

We hear plenty these days about ‘nepo babies’ – those privileged spawn for whom the gateway to stardom is always unlocked – but let’s not forget the lesser-spotted nepo daddy. Grizzled grey-beards who have harboured delusional musical ambitions since their teens, they’re as hungry as any X Factor wannabe when a later-life, fame-adjacent break arises.

Grant has been hustling for decades. With a fancy to become a country-music star, when Del Rey was still a tot he sauntered to Nashville hawking a song called ‘Big Bubba’, which failed to cut the mustard. Now that his daughter has prised open the window of opportunity, he has reinvented himself as a free-flowing auteur. The music on Lost at Sea is pleasant enough – the title track is lovely – but it’s unlikely that Decca, which also releases music by Jeff Goldblum, would have taken a punt on a sixtysomething’s drifting soundscapes were he not Il Papa Del Rey; or that producer to the Gods (and Goddesses), Jack Antonoff, would also have clambered on board.

Grant, to his credit, is leaning into the absurdity of the whole thing. He refers to himself on social media as ‘Robster’ and is already flogging ‘Nepo Daddy’ merch online.

In any case, he has some way to go to catch Mitch Winehouse. The taxi-driving father of Amy, and a cockney roustabout straight out of central casting, Mitch is undisputed King of the Nepo Daddies. On the back of his daughter’s fame, he eagerly pitched himself as a finger-clicking, ersatz Sinatra. He released an album, Rush of Love, on which she featured, and has made others since her untimely death in 2011. He has crooned and swung at Ronnie Scott’s, the Royal Albert Hall and the Blue Note in New York. (It’s not all bad news: the proceeds go to the Amy Winehouse Foundation for disadvantaged young people.)

There is a more wholesome side to the father-child musical dynamic, one where stars make room for dads who made a living as jobbing musicians without ever quite ascending to household-name status. Ross MacManus, big band trumpeter in the Joe Loss Orchestra and sometime solo singer ‘Day Costello’, was the father of Declan MacManus, better known as Elvis Costello. In the 1970s, MacManus Snr wrote the music and sang the R. White’s Lemonade TV advertising theme ‘Secret Lemonade Drinker’, on which his son added backing vocals – the public’s first widespread exposure to Costello’s distinctive pipes. Ross later played trumpet on a couple of Costello obscurities – ‘A Town Called Big Nothing’ and ‘Invasion Hit Parade’ – and, until his death in 2011, was the first person to hear each new Costello album.

Prince’s father was John L. Nelson, a jazz pianist who fronted the Prince Rogers Trio in post-war Minneapolis; the Purple One was named after his dad’s stage alter ego. Despite an uneasy relationship, they co-wrote several songs together, including ‘Paisley Park’, ‘Computer Blue’ and ‘Under the Cherry Moon’. The father of Beck, David Campbell, is a renowned composer and arranger, whose name you can find on the back of countless classic albums by Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Carole King and Marvin Gaye. He has worked extensively with his son, most productively on Sea Change and Morning Phase.

The dynamic is not always quite so harmonious. Roistering folk adventurer John Martyn was the child of two (quickly divorced) light-entertainment singers, known professionally as Betty Benson and Thomas Paterson. Martyn once told me his Gilbert & Sullivan-singing parents thought he was a ‘trickster’ because he manipulated his voice with slurs and sibilance. In later life, deep in his cups and clad in tweeds and deer stalker, father was seen to berate son midway through a concert in Glasgow, shouting up to the stage that he was going to the pub and demanding to know why his son had changed his name from Iain McGeachy to John Martyn.

They mess you up, your mum and dad. Some children have the good grace to forgive. You hope Rob Grant is grateful for his shot at being a nepo daddy.

The final scenes are a knockout: Glyndebourne’s Don Giovanni reviewed

Are you supposed to laugh at the end of Don Giovanni? Audiences often do, and they did at the end of Mariame Clément’s new production at Glyndebourne. It’s usually the bit where Donna Anna’s fiancé Don Ottavio suggests that they get married sharpish, and she immediately asks him for a year’s delay. Readers of Middlemarch will know that a year’s formal mourning after the death of a close relative was a common pre-modern convention, and Mozart’s writings suggest that he (if not his librettist) questioned neither the sanctity of marriage nor the reality of Hell. That doesn’t bother many modern directors, though, and if they’ve presented Anna as a kickass girl boss and Ottavio as a clingy milksop (not that hard, to be fair) it generally gets a reliable guffaw.

That wasn’t the case here, exactly. True, there was plenty to laugh at – Elvira’s late-onset commitment to a life of prayer is another trigger for contemporary mirth, heightened in this instance by the fact that we’ve just seen her attempting to fellate Leporello. But it didn’t feel like laughter at a punchline; more like the genuine release of tension that da Ponte presumably intended, and which Mozart wrote into the brilliant, borderline-hysterical quavers that introduce the final ensemble. In Clément’s production there really was a shock to react against. Giovanni’s fate was as startling and as visually spectacular as any 18th-century audience could have wished. No post-modern fudging here: you’re left in no doubt at all that higher powers are in play and that the Don (Andrey Zhilikhovsky) is basically toast.

Oleksiy Palchykov’s Ottavio, meanwhile, was no sitcom boyfriend but a figure of integrity and weight, however ineffective his campaign against Giovanni. Palchykov’s tenor is trim rather than sensual, but he shaped his lines with such poise and sincerity that you could understand why Leporello (Mikhail Timoshenko) was listening with every sign of admiration: the alternative to Giovanni didn’t look at all bad. This Leporello is already half out of love with his master – a perceptive and more than usually ambiguous sidekick who, with his brown suit, spectacles and moustache (the setting was a modern-ish resort hotel, infested with stag and hen parties), resembled a put-upon clerk in an Italian new wave comedy. His character arc, this time, is not what you might expect.

Clément makes Giovanni compelling without glamourising him (or at least, glamourising him any more than Mozart, da Ponte and our own baser instincts demand). There’s a cold hard chill on the edges of Zhilikhovsky’s dashing baritone that contrasts tellingly with Timoshenko’s plainer but warmer singing, and points up the cynicism of his encounters with Anna and Elvira (Venera Gimadieva and Ruzan Mantashyan, both of whom managed to project sweetness as well as steel) and even Victoria Randem’s crunking party girl Zerlina. The characterisation went some way to carrying the drama over the patches (noticeable in Act Two) where Clément’s direction seemed to stutter. But by the final banquet – with Giovanni sprawling in his vest atop a gargantuan, mouldering cream cake (fair play to the props department; it was enough to put you right off your Nyetimber) – it all came together at pace and again, those final scenes were a knockout.

Keep an ear out, too, for the conductor Evan Rogister, who went at it with terrific verve and had the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment playing with a reckless, headlong virtuosity that (probably unfairly) I hadn’t really expected from them. The brass roared, percussion thundered and in the climactic scenes it all boiled up and flooded the auditorium with harmonies and colours of Wagnerian darkness and power. Late classical opera really suits period instruments. The OAE was on fire at Glyndebourne and at Garsington the English Concert (an orchestra whose own music director once quit out of sheer boredom) was fizzing like an Aperol spritz. Douglas Boyd (a seriously underrated maestro) carved, and the opera was Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia.

No tricksy stuff here, either. Christopher Luscombe’s production takes place in a 1920s Italian townscape (the designer is Simon Higlett) which revolves to reveal the gleaming deco interior of Bartolo’s luxury townhouse. Cue gasps of delight: meanwhile Figaro (Johannes Kammler) rides a bicycle, Almaviva (Andrew Stenson) is bright young thing and Rosina (Katie Bray) is a minxy far-from-silent starlet with a Marcel wave. This show could get a long way on charm alone, but it doesn’t need to, because without singling out any individual cast members (OK: Callum Thorpe as Basilio exuded a double-espresso vocal kick out of all proportion to the scale of his role) the singing was consistently sunny and supple, and Boyd and his band matched it for grace, colour and wit. It looked good, it sounded delicious and the audience laughed even before they’d had their picnics. That’s entertainment.

Wikipedia does more justice to this fascinating story than this film: Chevalier reviewed

Chevalier is a biopic of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, whom you’ve probably never heard of, as I hadn’t. He was an 18th-century French-African virtuoso violinist and composer who wowed everyone in his day – in 1779, John Adams, then the American ambassador to France, called him ‘the most accomplished Man in Europe’ – but was erased from history and is only lately being rediscovered. Fascinating, you would think, and he was fascinating. Even a cursory look at his Wikipedia entry is thrilling. But this is not a fascinating or thrilling film. It is handsomely mounted yet strangely bland and strikes too many false notes. I was going to say it’s as if Disney had made it but then remembered: this is Disney.

Directed by Stephen Williams and written by Stefani Robinson, the film opens with a musical duel between Bologne (Kevin Harrison Jr) and a certain Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Joseph Prowen). Mozart is performing in concert and Bologne mounts the stage and challenges him to a violin-off. The audience is in raptures as cocky Mozart is upstaged. That’s the first false note right there: it didn’t feel true and it isn’t true. There’s no evidence that Mozart and Bologne even met. Creative liberties are all very well but it’s imperative that they feel as if they could be true. Amadeus was highly fictionalised, but it had such smarts you always believed it. I still believe it. If Mozart had really been humbled, I’d have wished Salieri could have been there to witness it. It would have cheered him up no end.

The story then moves to Joseph’s childhood. He was born in Guadeloupe, the son of a wealthy, plantation-owning Frenchman and an African slave. At seven years old, he was dispatched to France for his education, attending a swanky school where the headmaster is initially reluctant to enrol ‘a negro bastard’. Finally accepted on the basis of his violin playing, he must then endure name-calling from the other pupils, as well as beatings. Yet he emerges a champion fencer, impressing Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton), who appoints him a ‘chevalier’, the French equivalent of a knighthood.

This provides his entry into high society, yet his ambition to run the Paris Opéra is complicated not just by the violent racism of the time but also by an influential singer (played by Minnie Driver), whose advances he has rebuffed, and his affair with a woman (Samara Weaving) who is married to a powerful Marquis.

The film is far more interested in his love life than it is in the music, but what is his music exactly? I don’t think I can tell you. Some of the music included is his, and some isn’t, but which is which? Shouldn’t it be all his? To give us a proper appreciation? Isn’t that the point?

Harrison is a fine actor but he isn’t given enough material to produce a complex performance. The direction and script are both uninspired, while the character is essentially underwritten and shows very little emotion, hence the blandness. We know that Bologne is competitive – ‘be excellent,’ were his father’s last words to him – but here he’s mostly battered about by the whims of others, leaving Harrison to solely react. Meanwhile, I would also say that if the aim is to assert the presence of black artists in history, which is a valuable enterprise, why frame it via the stories of two white women?

The film is certainly handsome to look at, even if I did notice a modern handrail in one Paris scene. But the subject never feels fully explored. For example, the fact that Bologne was, extraordinarily, both musician and soldier – like James Blunt! – and was a colonel who led France’s first black regiment is mentioned only in the end titles. Wikipedia, in conclusion, may be the better bet.

Perfect radio for a nation of grumblers: Radio 4’s Room 101 with Paul Merton reviewed

Welcome back to Room 101, which has returned to the radio – after nearly 30 years on TV – and reverted back to its one-to-one format with presenter Paul Merton. The programme sits comfortably within that peculiarly British corner of the landscape that champions The Archers, the Proms, Rich Tea biscuits and knitted dog coats. And its success makes sense. A nation of good-humoured grumblers is arguably more likely to be excited by a list of common grievances than by, say, an overly jubilant selection of Desert Island Discs. Why listen to someone talk about what makes them happy when you can witness a guy losing it over the incomprehensibility of parking signs?

Merton indulges this demographic by channelling the spirit of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. Early on in the first episode he attempts to ‘play’ an aubergine as a musical instrument before joking that baba ganoush, the aubergine-based dip, was a hit for the singer Kate Bush. You sense that his guest, Claudia Winkleman, can get away with despising aubergines (not very British) and abhorring cleanliness (again), but when it comes to picnics, you can’t help but feel she’s on to a loser.

 Guests drop subtle reminders that the origins of Room 101 lie in George Orwell’s experience of a BBC conference room. Former BBC journalist Steph McGovern, for instance, speaks of her frustration with political vox pops or, more particularly, the pressure to gather a perfect balance of views on vox pops so that they’re allowed to be broadcast, which, as she says, renders the whole exercise ‘just totally pointless’. Her description of the ‘scrutiny’ she was under while engaged in precisely that ahead of the 2016 referendum feels oddly in keeping with the spirit of 101. 

 I thought I would miss the group dynamic of the TV version, but actually the radio format allows for more interesting argument and fewer clashing egos. There’s something of the Oxbridge tutorial room to the set-up, with Merton expertly picking holes in his guest’s logic, and his guest painfully back-pedalling when they realise their line of thinking is going nowhere. It’s great fun. With Winkleman, especially, Merton deserves plaudits simply for getting a word in.

 From one Winkleman to another (I’m guessing no relation), ‘Death in Trieste’, a recent Essay on Radio 3, explored the life and murder of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The German art historian, classicist and prefect of antiquities at the Vatican, is perhaps most famous today for driving the development of the neoclassical movement in the 18th century. I’ve read a lot of Winckelmann, but it had somehow passed me by that he was stabbed and strangled, aged 50, in a hotel room in Trieste.

 Dr Sean Williams, an academic at the University of Sheffield, plays detective in what he describes as an episode of ‘true crime-turned-cultural history’. While we know who killed Winckelmann – an impoverished traveller ‘with previous’ for theft was executed after being found guilty of the crime in 1768 – we are not entirely sure why he did it, other than that he fancied the medals and coins in his bag. It may well have been as simple as that, but Williams suspects that there is more to the story than meets the eye, and that Winckelmann’s sexuality had an important bearing upon his death.

 Williams’s journey through 18th-century coffee shops, Venetian canals and the antiquities of Rome makes this Essay more than a salacious whydunnit. True-crime fans may enjoy the descriptions of unpredictable acts of torture – the assassin had his body broken by a wheel – but for everyone else there’s plenty on the art and social mores of the period. Given that Williams’s ideas grow from his study of contemporary attitudes to homosexuality, it isn’t surprising that we are led through sculptures of historical gay icons such as Antinous, lover of Emperor Hadrian. But the foray into Oscar Wilde’s fate, with which most listeners will already be familiar, felt a little superfluous.

Ultimately, no one can know what was going through the mind of the man who killed the respected art historian, and I imagine some of Williams’s theories will draw sceptics. But these travels in Winckelmann’s footsteps made for fascinating, atmospheric radio.

The 19th century Chinese craze for all things European

By the 1800s, the mechanical clock had become a status symbol for wealthy Chinese. The first arrived with Jesuit missionaries and Portuguese merchants years earlier, but it wasn’t until the early 19th century that those outside of the imperial court could afford them. Rich merchant families displayed their clocks proudly, like their European counterparts had showed off pineapples. Women’s jackets started to be decorated with ‘clock buttons’ made of enamel and one family embroidered a clock face on to their baby’s silk bib.

European aesthetics made their way into other parts of Chinese society too. Traditional ink portraits became colourful and hyper-realistic, inspired by photography. Courtesans learned to play billiards and ate in restaurants decorated like European salons. The artist Wu Youru illustrated these early modern scenes along with vignettes from western life: village cricket played in the English countryside or New York firemen at work. The pictures were lithographically printed in the Dianshizhai Huabao, a Shanghai-based magazine founded by a British businessman in 1884.

You can see all these works in the British Museum’s new show China’s hidden century. The dark exhibition space is cloistered with glowing paper screens, among which sit more than 300 exhibits that tell the story of Qing China’s final century, through elite politics down to everyday life. Curious fusions in fashion, art and household items were created through China’s interactions with Europeans. The country was transforming from a feudal empire to a modern republic.

This wasn’t always a happy (or voluntary) process. As much as artists and merchants were intrigued by the ideas and aesthetics brought by the foreigners, the foreigners were also (more often than not) brutal in their methods. Colonial European powers were expanding their reach ever eastwards. Cultural histories of Chinese art have often skated over this era, writes co-curator Julia Lovell in the exhibition’s companion catalogue, hence ‘hidden’. In China, we simply call it ‘the century of humiliation’.

The last Qing rulers proved no match against their industrialised rivals, who had the hard power of gunboats and muskets and the soft power of Christianity. The Brits added Indian-made opium to the mix. The Chinese typically mark the start of this century with the first opium war, in 1839. (It’s worth noting that the war was controversial in Britain from the start – ‘All the alleged aims of the expedition against China are vague, illimitable and incapable of explanation, save only that of making the Chinese pay the opium-smugglers,’ The Spectator wrote in 1840.)

Upon defeat in 1842, the Qing signed away Hong Kong to the British in the Treaty of Nanjing. The original copy is on display, borrowed from the National Archives. This would be the first of several ‘unequal treaties’, and in the following decades more territory was carved out by the victors and much treasure taken back to Europe and America (the BM’s exhibits are almost entirely from British and American collections). Queen Victoria was even given a Pekingese pooch, who she named ‘Looty’.

Hubris may be why the Qing never saw the end coming. Eight blue scrolls open the exhibition. It’s the ‘Complete Map of All Under Heaven Unified by the Great Qing’, showing the empire’s borders including the new territories of Tibet to the west and Mongolia to the north (forming the basis of the Chinese Communist party’s territorial claims today). Deeper into the exhibition, one hears snippets of Mandarin, Manchu, Mongolian and even Chagatai (a predecessor of modern Uyghur), all languages spoken in this Asian superpower. The Qing were Manchus, not Han Chinese, and their empire was multi-ethnic.

Dynastic pride was epitomised by the self-satisfaction of the Empress Dowager Cixi, widow of an emperor and regent to two more: ‘I have often thought that I am the cleverest woman that ever lived… I have heard much about Queen Victoria… Her life was not half as eventful as mine.’ Later generations would remember Cixi for her contribution to China’s downfall – from choosing a boy emperor to extend her own power, to violently ending that emperor’s modern reforms after just a hundred days, even as the country desperately needed to adapt to the industrial age.

But China’s hidden century is all the more interesting for going beyond the political and into the personal. Well-preserved prints, jewellery and clothing reveal the very human priorities of those who had the (mis)fortune to live through this time. A colourful child’s jacket with geometric shapes, matched with a handmade hat in the shape of a dragon’s head, reveal a mother’s creativity and her commitment to warding her child from evil. A set of ivory and jadeite thumb rings show how Han-Chinese men adopted nomadic Manchu fashions even as the latter made the former second-class citizens. A primitive peasant raincoat, made from palm leaves and straw, betray the huge economic inequalities of the dying empire.

Cixi died in 1908, and after the brief reign of another boy emperor, the Qing dynasty finally spluttered its last in 1912. Manchu queues were cut off as men grew their hair in the western fashion; women stopped binding their feet. China’s long and brutal 19th century had ended, as a modern republic (led by the Han Chinese) was founded. If only it were easy sailing from there.

We must save this Tudor masterpiece for the nation

Last month there was rejoicing that Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Portrait of Omai’ had been saved for this country at a cost of £50 million. My hat was in the air with everyone else’s. But much less attention has been given to another artwork that is in need of rescuing, one of far greater national and artistic importance: an object that proclaims the birth of the Church of England – and is available for less than a tenth of the cost of ‘Omai’.

‘Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books’ by Pieter Coecke van Aelst is a monumental tapestry, nearly 20ft long and 12ft high. It is the sole survivor of a series of nine tapestries that Henry VIII commissioned in the mid-1530s on the life of Saint Paul. Tapestries were the currency of culture in kingly circles at the time (a generation later, the taste had turned to Titians). Only the very wealthiest could afford them. Half a dozen gold-embroidered tapestries would set you back almost as much as a fully armed warship. Van Aelst’s piece became one of the Royal Collection’s most expensive objects. Today monumental woven marvels are not a curatorial must-have, and the institutions that possess them – the Historic Royal Palaces and the V&A in particular – have many in storage. In the battle for space, they are dreadnoughts, superannuated, off-message.

This one, though, is an orchid among the daffodils. The former head of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Dr Thomas Campbell – whose expertise in this field led him to be nicknamed ‘Tapestry Tom’ – described it as ‘the Holy Grail of Tudor tapestry’. Though the subject matter of the tapestry is no bodice-ripper – indeed it is scarcely comprehensible to a modern audience – the work does directly concern Henry’s sex life.

The piece was a crucial element in the mosaic of Henry’s jettisoning of Catherine of Aragon, his first wife. When the Pope refused to grant a divorce, Henry sacked him, and declared himself head of the Church of England – an action that transformed the shape of our national church. But he was at pains to make it clear that the Church of England was still a Catholic church – i.e. unchanged, except for the headship. The tapestry was the King’s public statement as to the implications of the act of parliament in which this declaration was made. In St Paul, he found a fierce and pious biblical counterpart in his Defence of the Faith. The burning of the heathen books referred to Paul’s actions in Ephesus, and, in the propaganda of the tapestry, was echoed by Henry’s 1529 and 1534 proclamations against the protestant Tyndale Bible, which were publicly incinerated. At the same time it reminded the faithful of the lineage of the English Sarum liturgy, which was based on the theology of St Paul – in contradistinction to the Roman liturgy, which was based on St Peter. This tapestry was in essence the public certificate of the baptism of the Church of England.

Aesthetically the object represents the high watermark of royal tapestries, both in the superiority of the materials used and in its ambitious and innovative design. As with most tapestries, the work is woven in wool, but here it’s accompanied by silk and gold braid in such extravagance that the palette of colours had to be toned down further to showcase the opulence of the embroidery. The design was arguably Van Aelst’s masterpiece – and he was the greatest of all the tapestry designers, operating in Antwerp. The clouds of smoke – central in the scene and the crucial element in the narrative – have a rhythmic undulance of immateriality that defy belief: ‘With characteristic audacity of design, flames seem to take hold of the textile support, and books tumble from the bonfire as though out of the composition and into the viewers’ space,’ wrote Elizabeth Cleland in the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum’s recent show The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England.

Why is the tapestry not safe, tucked up in some public place, deep in England? Commissioned soon after the Act of Supremacy in 1534, it was delivered to Hampton Court in the late 1530s. It was subsequently moved to Windsor Castle – the last record of it was in an inventory there, dated 1770. After that, silence.

It turned up in Spain about 30 years ago, having been sold at an English auction house, unrecognised, some time previously. An image of it was seen by Campbell, who immediately recognised the tapestry for what it was, but by then the Spanish government had placed an export ban on it.

An export ban is dungeon country – few artefacts escape this catch-all imprisonment. It is, of course, a national treasure here, not in Spain, but export control is based on where the object is located. Only a hero can cut the knot, and – amazingly – there is a hero and that hero is Spanish. The ministry in Spain has indicated that it would be prepared to reconsider its position if there were an ‘appropriate institution’ in the United Kingdom prepared to take it on.

Did Britain roar into life at this extraordinarily generous offer? Nope. It was made four years ago, and one-by-one the invitation to the feast has been rejected by UK institutions. It would have been reasonable for the ministry to say that we’d had our chance. Luckily, they haven’t – twice bless them!

Enter Auckland Project, which I founded. Auckland is an uncannily appropriate place for this work to live. One of the Prince-Bishops of Durham was Cardinal Wolsey, whose failure to win the Pope’s cooperation set in train the events that ended in the creation of our national church. Another, Cuthbert Tunstall, went on to become Bishop of London, in which capacity he became arsonist-in-chief of the Tyndale Bible. We also have one of the seemingly only 14 Tyndale Bibles to survive the holocaust. This provides the context, but, being fresh to the task, we have what none of the great institutions can bring to bear: the space to house such a magnificent object. For sure, the collective refusal by the metropolitan institutions has been based not on indifference but on a lack of space; by chance, we have a new building by Niall McLaughlin, whose design nods to medieval public spaces, and is made up of stone quarried from the same deposits as Durham Cathedral.

So a call to arms. If the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) – the patron saint of our country’s ‘last gasps’ – is to help, then the public must rally round, and show that the country has earned the right to it. This is a prior condition of public money, and it means, to put it bluntly, that many people giving a little is more powerful than a few people giving a lot. While you can have a baptism in an Anglican church for free, if you want a certificate it costs £18. I have a quixotic thought that if people of goodwill were to subscribe £20 – the cost of the certificate (plus £2 P&P) – to help buy this original woven certificate of baptism, we’d raise the last £1 million that we need for its purchase, and we would demonstrate to the NHMF that this is something that belongs in Britain, because it is our treasure.

Will the first migrant flight to Rwanda take off in September?

Rishi Sunak attempted to get on the front foot this week by giving an update on the progress he has so far made on his pledge to stop the Channel migrant boats. The Prime Minister announced that the government had procured two new barges to house those seeking asylum and said that small boat arrivals to the UK are down by 20 per cent this year. However, the game changer would be flights to Rwanda getting off the ground. The Sun reports today that flights could take off as soon as September if they win a key legal fight in the coming weeks.

As I reported last month, September is viewed within the Home Office and No. 10 as the best case scenario for flights departing to Rwanda. The Court of Appeal’s verdict is expected in the coming weeks. If it finds in favour of the government, campaigners are likely to go to the UK Supreme Court. However, it could refuse to consider the case, saying the Rwanda scheme has already been ruled lawful by very senior judges and does not merit yet another appeal. If so, deportations could start by September.

Campaigners would then go back to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), but this would not stop deportations. The blessing of three UK court rulings could be enough for the government to get Rwanda-bound planes on the runway, potentially with caveats such as a promise to return individuals if Strasbourg eventually found against them. By then, the Illegal Migration Bill may have passed into law, explicitly giving ministers the power to ignore Strasbourg and the interim junctions from the court, known as Rule 39 orders, that halt deportation flights. This would allow the government to get flights going on a significant scale.

Flights have been grounded since Boris Johnson’s Rwanda deportation scheme was stopped by the ECHR, pending legal consideration. The government won the first ruling, but campaigners appealed.

If the Court of Appeal’s decision does not go the government’s way – or the matter goes to the Supreme Court – the timetable will slip further. If the UK Supreme Court strikes down the Rwanda scheme, the Tories could even end up going to Strasbourg to ask its judges to overrule those in London. This option is being considered.

Should Strasbourg somehow manage to frustrate the scheme, or the UK courts find against the government and declare Rwanda is an unsafe country, this would mean a showdown. The Tories could pledge a referendum on leaving the ECHR in their manifesto, hoping to reconvene the Brexit alliance of voters that delivered the 2019 majority. (The assumption is that the public would support the Rwanda scheme by a margin of two to one.) ‘It’s either stop the boats or leave the ECHR,’ says one senior Tory.

The Saudi blood money takeover of sport is complete

Some of football’s biggest names are revealing themselves to be shameless mercenaries on a scale that is staggering even by the sport’s abysmally low standards. Karim Benzema, the Real Madrid striker, is the latest superstar to answer the siren calls of one last big pay day plying his waning talents in Saudi Arabia. Benzema will receive a reported £86 million a season playing for the Saudi champions, Al-Ittihad. He will play in front of an average home crowd of just 30,000 supporters.

Benzema joins his former Madrid teammate Cristiano Ronaldo who earns a reported £175 million a season playing for rival Saudi club, Al-Nassr. All eyes now turn to Lionel Messi and whether he too will take the Saudi shilling. He is apparently mulling an offer to play for Al-Hilal in a deal worth some £450 million over two years. It is a statement of the blindingly obvious to suggest that these staggering sums make no economic sense. It is depressing to see such high-profile players  — already absurdly wealthy — sell themselves and their legacy to the Saudis. Do they even bother to ask why they are being offered this kind of money to play in an irrelevant football league? 

The supremely wealthy Saudis don’t need any lessons in the power of money. A few hundred million pounds spent on footballing gods with a global profile and millions of followers on social media is money well spent for a regime that is trying to change its image on the world stage. It wants to be seen as a tourist and sporting destination, a country where Messi, Ronaldo and co are happy to play football, helping turn international attention away from its abysmal human rights record.

Sportwashing is the term commonly used to describe this cynical strategy – and the Saudis are deploying it to great effect in sports from football and boxing to motor racing. The Saudi-backed LIV tour has split the world of golf by poaching top players including Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson. This week, LIV announced a merger with the PGA Tour. Donald Trump is delighted. ‘A BIG, BEAUTIFUL, AND GLAMOROUS DEAL FOR THE WORLD OF GOLF, CONGRATS TO ALL!!!,’ he wrote. But many golf fans are horrified by this Saudi blood money takeover, which shows, yet again, that money is all that matters in sport. The good guys in golf, like Rory McIlroy, who turned down a fortune to join LIV golf, have been left high and dry.

No sport is immune from the lure of the Saudis. In 2021, the country hosted the first ever Saudi Formula 1 Grand Prix. It will host the 2023 Club World Cup football tournament later this year. The 2029 Asian Winter Games will be held in Saudi Arabia; and there are reports that it is angling to host the 2030 World Cup.

Money is the only currency that matters in international sport and the Saudis have more of it than anyone else on the planet. The latest Forbes rich list, published last month, is further evidence of the country’s growing influence. Four of the world’s ten richest sports stars owe their place on the list to Saudi money. Ronaldo comes top, thanks to his mega deal with Al-Nassr. The golfers Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson make it into the top 10 after joining the Saudi-backed LIV tour. The Premier League is another case in point. The Saudi takeover of Newcastle United, through the state-backed Public Investment Fund, was initially controversial but appears less so now that the team is doing well and the Champions League beckons. All talk of human rights abuses and sportswashing has given way to fevered discussions of the big name players the club might sign in the summer transfer window. 

The lust for Saudi money has given birth to a self-serving amnesia in the highest echelons of sport. It suits everyone involved to turn a blind eye to the regime’s appalling record of human rights abuses. It is only four years ago that the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and his body dismembered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. A CIA report concluded that this was ordered by the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. He denies doing so.

Women’s rights remain severely curtailed under the Saudi male guardianship system. The regime routinely resorts to using the death penalty as punishment for a wide range of crimes: on a single day in March last year, 81 people were executed. Is it really plausible to suggest that taking Saudi money can be separated from the regime’s politics and human rights abuses? Are we really supposed to believe the fiction that sport and politics are separate? The Saudis clearly don’t believe in such nonsense. They’re blatantly using international sport – its governing bodies and superstars – to buy international respectability and immunity from criticism. Shame on the greedy fools in football and golf for aiding and abetting them. 

The joy of colleague-cancelling headphones 

I’m writing this with headphones in, sitting at my desk on Old Queen Street. Please don’t tell Debrett’s. Apparently listening to headphones in the office is a huge faux pas, akin to cutting camembert with a fish knife. The company’s etiquette adviser, Liz Wyse, told the Times: ‘If you work in an open-plan office where there is frequent conversation and interchange of ideas between colleagues, do not wear AirPods or headphones.’ 

We will, she assures us, be ‘much more valuable staff members’ if we instead choose to ‘tune into conversations’ and ‘stay alert’. Beep boop. Jeeves3000 has spoken. Modern manners are about productivity, you pop-addled layabout. But ask anyone who works in an office and they’ll tell you that headphones are among the greatest contributors to efficiency, up there with filter coffee and a lax policy on desk vaping. How else are you supposed to get through your to-do list? 

Workhorse Liz does make a grudging exception for those at work who want to, you know, actually work, admitting that sometimes headphones can be useful for periods that ‘demand intense concentration’. However, she would prefer it if we found ourselves a ‘breakout room or quiet space’. To think the people who once advised on the correct shade of chestnut for your riding boots now tacitly accept phrases like ‘breakout room’. Talk about decline. 

Funny Debrett’s is still going, really. The nice thing about politeness in our current era is that it’s pretty easily intuited. Firm handshake, don’t go overboard on the cheek kissing, laugh at their jokes, etc. I suspect Debrett’s guides are today mainly bought as a comedy item, perhaps as a 21st birthday present for the girl who enjoyed Jane Austen a little too much. I’d go so far as to suggest that Debrett’s is rather leaning into their reputation for silly, pointless advice. Their Guide for the Modern Gentleman helpfully reminds us that ‘women can make good friends too’. Thank goodness someone thought to tell me that. Otherwise, I’d spend my evenings sitting around with a gang of headphone-wearing men. 

Could there be any sillier advice than Debrett’s latest edict? The overuse of headphones has nothing to do with rudeness and everything to do with an unhappy office. You simply don’t sit in silence with people you get on with. The real problem is things like Slack, an in-company instant messaging app. I’ve worked in offices that were totally silent where most of the staff wore headphones while furiously bitching about each other over instant messengers. It’s utterly miserable. But the headphones aren’t the cause, they’re a symptom of dysfunction. That’s why sane people hate working remotely: all the friendly hellos are stripped away, the polite comments about new shoes and tasty-looking lunches gone, and all that’s left are cold instructions. Who on earth can live like that? 

Sometimes, though, you do just need to crack on; all things in moderation. That’s the joy of headphones. They’re a temporary blast of solitude, one from which you can return with the flick of a finger. The worst thing that happens when zoned out on David Bowie is that a colleague has to wave near your eye line or, at worst, tap you on the shoulder. The horror! Who is actually upset by this? Because I’d like to give them a bit of etiquette advice: there is nothing as rude as being easily offended.

What noise should an electric car make?

One of the great pluses of electric cars is that they are so quiet. The driver’s seat is a peaceful place to be, although safety regulations dictate they must emit artificial noise to alert pedestrians to their presence when travelling below certain speeds.

Now that steps have been taken to prevent the visually impaired from falling victim to their silent menace – a subject that for some reason provokes laughter, but they have killed people, so they now make a friendly bleep – another sense can be spared the intrusions of the combustion engine.

But no. Car manufacturers, concerned we’ll feel deprived, are investing in replacement forms of noise. The electric engine, as they used to say in the Westerns, is ‘quiet, too quiet’. It is almost as if Hyacinth Bucket had decreed that the four-wheel equivalent of a lull in tea-party conversation calls for someone to make a noise – any noise – to avoid a sense of social failure. So large amounts of money are being spent in filling the gap.

The obvious way to do so is to ape the sort of throaty vroom that traditionally goes with belting down the motorway, and when I was speeding alongside Lombardy’s Lago Maggiore the other week in BMW’s (electric) i4 M50, I could hear the case for that. The car goes like a rocket, as even the most diehard of petrolheads have admitted, but BMW offers optional noise (paler, less testosterone-charged) lest they feel nostalgic. Other companies are seeking to fill the void but no one is showing quite the commitment – and cultural sensitivity – to compare with BMW.

The person behind the big push is Renzo Vitale, a 42-year-old Italian PhD engineer and musician. Rarely has filling a gap that didn’t need filling been taken so seriously. He has teamed up with double Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer (Lion King, Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean), not merely to modify your va-va-voom but also, he hopes, to shape the future of motoring.

The company wants Vitale to produce a sound experience that makes the driver say ‘That could only be a BMW’. He tells me: ‘Sound is one of the most effective elements in space-time travel… If you close your eyes and you play the sound of a tree, you’re in a park. You play the sound of water, you’re by the sea. Sound is the ultimate element of envelopment.’

Cars provide the current arena for his obsession. ‘Humans are defined by their voice and voice conveys feeling. If I don’t see you but I hear you, I can tell how you are feeling. This is your identity. Sound identifies people.’ The quietness of electric motors, says Vitale, presents ‘an opportunity to find that identity – cars have been hated in the past because of their noise. How can that be transformed? BMW is a lion that doesn’t need to roar to be looked at,’ he says. He is searching for sounds that enhance that distinct sense of ‘BMW-ness’ and is using any number of electronic and classical noises to create a variety of sensations. Different sounds go with different modes of driving.

For Vitale, this is art’s latest frontier. (Those with a low threshold for the avant-garde may wish to look away now.) At an event in Milan and on a drive with him from Lago Maggiore in BMW’s new iX XDrive 50, at times accompanied by a sepulchral, heavy, deep organ and vibrato strings, I heard the following phrases: ‘The driver is a performer’, ‘you hear the sound not so much of a machine but of an idea’, ‘the car is a highly complex performative art installation’, ‘I have to thank art for what it can become not for what it is’, ‘I want people to understand what it means to listen and to perform and to find a language of electric mobility.’ How much this will mean to frazzled parents on the school run is debatable, although apparently there is research showing that nerves are calmed, and driving safer, in this new world of sound.

Vitale is highly skilled, both as a musician and engineer. What is fascinating is that BMW, despite a degree of internal resistance, has put their shirt on him. ‘You can change things at BMW but you have to fight for them,’ says Vitale, who joined the company in 2015 as an engineer. ‘You have to prove it is something worth investing in. Let’s say there have been many interesting moments and conversations… I don’t want to sound pretentious but I was saying “Don’t worry… be sure that we’re going to do something special”. I was so sure about this.’ Now, he says, they are ‘active, supportive and committed’. New iterations of Vitale’s art are appearing all the time, with refinements and customisations in the offing.

But the question stands: isn’t silence, or your own choice of music or whatever, the preferable accompaniment to driving? He says the marketing people have been very positive about the public reaction. ‘You can have your silence, but if you are open to trying something else, come and try this car. I am very, very confident that people will engage in this conversation. Give us an opportunity. Drive it without preconceptions. If you don’t like it, fine.’

Isn’t it a fact of life that a great many potential buyers enjoy the showing-off, the head-turning roar of a combustion engine, though? No optional extra will ever replace it. For Vitale, it’s a fundamental question. Many people, he admits, ‘are searching for confirmation in others’ eyes and the car is one of the easiest ways of getting attention, of being praised, though for something you haven’t done. You are showing your status, but it is an easy way out’. To show personality you need to decide who you are, to define your identity. That is the way to recognition and respect. Buying a sweater with a prestigious logo, for example, will not do that for you. Be your own person rather than someone who seeks easy acclamation.

And without screaming for attention, you can say ‘yes, there is another way’, something that ‘goes beyond’, that brings some elegance and is a bit more sophisticated. ‘Don’t remain at the logo, at the first level. If you go a few steps further you might find a depth that is also a positive for you. Go to the brand that speaks to you.’

So for BMW, read sophistication, and of a particular type. That is the message. Here I have to ask him a difficult question. The Brits are famously rumbustious, disrespectful of pretension, philistine even. Will they be receptive to such a pitch? Other companies have their gimmicks. Won’t British petrolheads see this venture into soundscapes in the same light? Vitale admits some markets will be more receptive than others, though he mutters respectfully about a need in some quarters for education, personality and capacity for listening. In other countries and cultures – China, for example – ‘we know they like to have the opportunity to show other people. Maybe because it shows you have something that someone else does not. And you can show it right away. It is something audible and tangible’.

Will this venture make a buyer choose BMW ahead of another brand? It seems unlikely, although sound is moving up the rankings in buyers’ hierarchy of preferences. In any case, it is an area that says something about how BMW wants to be regarded. It’s a new dimension in their identity, but Vitale is not stopping there. He is also in charge of acoustics with Rolls-Royce, which is owned by BMW. Now there is something for a British philistine to get used to.

Can Apple make virtual reality relevant?

Earlier this week, Apple unveiled their latest product: the Vision Pro ultra-premium mixed reality headset. It’s sleek, advanced and luxurious, powered by Apple’s class-leading M2 and R1 chips, running their new VisionOS operating system, and built with a blend of glass, aluminium and plush fabric.

Put simply: it’s the world’s most technically advanced pair of ski goggles. With dual ultra-high-resolution screens, five sensors, and 12 cameras, it can pull you into virtual worlds of unprecedented fidelity or – with a turn of a dial – project digital objects, tools, screens and notifications onto the world around you. It’s the most advanced, stylish, consumer-mixed-reality headset ever made, and pretty damn cool, but priced accordingly. It starts at $3,499 (£2,814) and releases next year.

For many, virtual reality (VR) headsets just seem like a toy. But for Apple, this is no joke. It’s the first big, new category of product since 2015’s Apple Watch, the first new computing platform for the company since Steve Jobs died, and the finale of five years of careful plotting, as Apple tried to cripple the VR industry leader, Meta.

In 2019, Apple put up big black billboards asserting its belief in the importance of privacy, and the tight-lipped Cook did a flurry of interviews, complaining about how his Big Tech peers – notably Facebook – made billions through their aggressive ad tech programs. How altruistic of him to warn us! In 2021, Apple dialled up the tension with its ‘Ad Tracking Transparency’ feature, which limited third parties from accessing Apple user data. This torpedoed Meta’s ad revenue, costing the company an estimated $10 billion in 2022 and tearing down their stock by 70 per cent over the following year, while Apple simultaneously built one of the fastest growing ad-networks in the world, anchored on their (new) monopoly on Apple user data.

This wasn’t the end goal though. VR headsets are a risky business and require a ton of user information – Vision Pro is constantly watching your eyes, facial expressions, speech, movement, hand position, home environment and more. If you watch porn while using it, that matters a lot. To make this work, Cook needed to frame Apple as a privacy-first company (despite selling out the privacy of Chinese users on CCP request) and could sabotage his chief competitor in the process. And, of course, credulous journalists bought it. Credit where it’s due, Cook knows how to play the long game.

Then again; the conclusion of such a Machiavellian path may seem pretty daft: have you visited the metaverse recently? Cook set fire to the online ad industry and sparked a privacy panic to gain a leg up in a sector where no company has turned a profit, and (statistically) nobody uses the products. Meta has so far lost approximately $49 billion on its ‘Reality Labs’ division, and the Wall Street Journal reported that fewer than half of their best-selling $400 Quest headsets were in use just six months after purchase. Though venture capitalists spent 2021 edging over ‘the metaverse’, they have long since dumped it for AI.

The Vision Pro isn’t even the product Cook wanted to release. As Mark Gurman reported in Bloomberg, his vision had been for ‘a pair of unobtrusive eyeglasses that could be worn all day’, projecting navigation, contextual information, and notifications onto the world around you; but even Apple’s best couldn’t make it work. That would have been (theoretically) an eventual iPhone replacement, but – however gorgeous and technically impressive it is – the Vision Pro is ultimately just a luxurious, polished, high-end take on the existing VR headset formula.

Worst of all, there’s no ‘killer app’. Sure, it has a more immersive version of FaceTime – adding three-dimensional sound and visuals to video calls – and controlling multiple virtual screens is cool, but that’s not enough to convince your average person to buy this, so they’re hoping developers will (eventually) pick up the slack and fill up their new mixed-reality app store. In the meantime, its customer base will be limited to wealthy tech nerds, wealthy VR designers, and wealthy Apple fanboys. Gurman reported that they expect to sell fewer than a million units in its first year. For context, Apple sells 200 million iPhones; and the phones have far better margins than the headset.

That’s a tough sell. But, if anyone’s going to make VR a real thing, it’s Apple. Apple is the world’s most valuable company and, oddly, a victim of that size. Namely, it can only invest in areas with a large enough opening, high enough margins and the enormous sale figures necessary to continue its (already stratospheric) stock price growth. An Apple mirrorless camera would be incredible; as would a TV, and yet, even those multi-million and multi-billion-dollar markets are just too small. With Vision Pro, Apple is declaring that there’s significantly more money in VR headsets than selling TVs; and they may well be correct.

Though we don’t talk about the metaverse much, there’s an established market for highly engaging, highly lucrative digital worlds, in which people are happy to spend thousands of hours; it just hasn’t been in virtual reality. As of May, Roblox has 66.4 million daily users – 214 million monthly users – and approximately half a billion players are registered on Fortnite. Both apps are free, but users spend billions annually on in-app purchases, for collectibles and digital skins. Counter-intuitively, though the hardware of virtual reality has been limited (which Apple’s screen quality and silicon efficiency helps with), the biggest problem has been the lack of compelling, consistent, easy-to-use software. Watching TV on a giant virtual screen sounds awesome; it’s just been clunky, and ugly in practice. The same is true for augmented reality, where any glitch makes you nauseated. It’s not incidental this product has been announced at an Apple software-centric event, the Worldwide Developers Conference, and it’s here that they really make their mark.

Rather than using clunky controllers, VisionOS is navigated with eye-tracking, voice commands and small hand gestures. though most VR user interfaces allow you to place digital screens in 3D space, they’ve never been as intuitive, obvious and stylish as this. There are even small, thoughtful details, like these digital windows casting shadows, or people appearing in small portals in your vision when they approach you. This isn’t to say it’s perfect. Apple’s EyeSight mode – which projects an image of your eyes onto the outside of the headset – looks hilariously bad, and however cool the 3D camera tech is, the notion you would attend a wedding or child’s birthday with a headset on is absurd. None of that is to mention the price.

But Apple’s expertise has been in making products and services that all work together smoothly, without difficulty; and though this is lovely on a phone, laptop, or watch, it’s essential – and has been missing – on devices that fill your vision. If Vision Pro is as good as they advertise, it will be a game changer.

Are we all going to be working in the metaverse next year? No. Apple doesn’t even use the term. Though Apple has raised the standard enormously with the Vision Pro, we’re still a long way out from the Ready Player One future. But it’s coming.

It’s also worth noting that, simply by entering the space, they bring more attention to it. Customers will hear about the concept through Apple but look for a cheaper entry to it. As much as Cook has attacked Meta, Mark Zuckerberg will be the chief winner here (at least for now). It’s not incidental that he surprise-revealed their latest Quest 3 last Friday; a far less ambitious headset that still offers many of the same experiences for the comparative pittance of $499 (£402). Even if Vision Pro vastly outsells expectations, Meta will still dominate the affordable VR market; and playing in the same sandbox as Apple will make them seem slightly less uncool too.

The Vision Pro will not sell well. But just because this first generation won’t be a hit, doesn’t mean it won’t turn into one. After all, Tim Cook has tracked this path before. The Series 1 Apple Watch was an expensive, flashy piece of hardware that didn’t have a killer feature, and only tech nerds and the status-obsessed bought them. But, through generational improvements and third-party software (from companies like Nike and Strava), they became ubiquitous, and for some people, essential. Apple Watches are everywhere, and they made the wearable market a real thing. Seven years after that messy launch, the Watch division made Apple $41 billion last year. Maybe this will all fizzle out; but I bet you, if we check in on VisionOS in 2030, it will have made Apple far more than that.

This article first appeared on The Spectator World edition website.