Simon pegg

Friday

Tom Slater

Simon Pegg’s anti-Tory rant is embarrassing

If you haven’t seen Simon Pegg’s viral video about Rishi Sunak yet, you’re in for a real treat. It’s a genius bit of satire, a brutal send-up of left-leaning, self-righteous. middle-class midwits. In it, the cult Brit comic actor turned bona fide Hollywood star does a pitch-perfect impression of the sort of unkempt craft-beer botherer who gets all of his news from James O’Brien clips. In character, Pegg rages against Sunak for daring to say people should learn maths up to 18. ‘Rishi Sunak wants a f***ing drone army of data-entering robots. F*** the Tories’, he thunders. Genius. Only it isn’t really. I watched it, hoping it was a joke.

Thursday

James Walton

Watch Mark Kermode find 1950s political attitudes in 1950s films

The new series of Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema began with an episode on British comedy films. As ever, Kermode was terrific at demonstrating how persistent certain characters and ideas in his chosen genre have proved to be. He traced the theme of ‘the little man’ from George Formby and Norman Wisdom to Paddington Bear, paying due attention to its origins in Britain’s most successful early film export, Charlie Chaplin. Moving on to the subset of little men who think they’re bigger than they are, his judiciously chosen clips revealed how much Captain Mainwaring owes to Captain Waggett in 1949’s Whisky Galore! whom we even saw uttering the phrase ‘I