Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street
The warnings on what we now call ‘content’ (i.e. what we used to know as films and TV shows) are getting ever more ludicrous. Almost everything made before 2000 now carries a cigarette packet-style exhortation or exculpation about race, sex and offensive attitudes. But it’s getting even crazier. A friend of mine was channel hopping
Fireworks at New Year are the purest distillation of the spirit of frippery. All Sadiq Khan had to do was give ‘em the old razzle dazzle. There is no higher meaning to these colourful explosions, no significance to the spectacle beyond the fun of communal cries of ‘ooh!’ and ‘aah!’ Fireworks are quite enough – more than enough – in
You are bloated and binged. Your bloodstream is 35 per cent blood, 60 per cent a mix of Nurofen Plus, Gaviscon and acetaldehyde and 5 per cent Quality Street. You will either be making more mess, or clearing up the mess that everybody else is making more of. There are tiny pieces of plastic everywhere,
Christmas pop song lyrics play by different rules. Children, food and family togetherness are never mentioned in pop songs from January through November. It would be unthinkable for a non-Christmas pop song released in the last 50 years to mention ‘Children playing having fun’ or God forbid, anything religious. But this was not always the
The coronation of Sam Thompson, Scrappy Doo in human form, as King of the Jungle in this year’s I’m A Celebrity… was an inevitability. It was unthinkable that Tony Bellew – his still, stoic Scouse sparring partner – would not come second. And that Nigel Farage wouldn’t trail in third. When Farage made it through
One of the most regrettable things about the last decade of general cultural awfulness has been the politicisation and sexualisation of drag. The crude and frequently obvious art of blokes dolled up in women’s clobber has been a golden thread running through British comedy for centuries, from Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor to
Farewell Nella Rose, second to be voted out of the jungle on the 2023 series of I’m A Celebrity… As always, it’s hard (at least for a soft-hearted chump like me) not to melt and mellow when an evicted campmate returns to the real world via the recivilising medium of an Ant and Dec exit interview.
When I first heard about ebooks, I was horrified. Something deep within me flinched. Surely, I thought – my surface brain trying to rationalise this atavistic spasm – the tactile reality of books is an intrinsic part of the joy of books? Nowadays I only read a physical book if there really is no alternative
When Nigel Farage entered the jungle on I’m A Celebrity… there was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. ‘I feel a little bit uncomfortable,’ TV critic Scott Bryan confessed on BBC Breakfast, ‘if his political opinions – not only on migration, but also around climate change and supporting the election of Donald Trump
When Doctor Who returned to wild acclaim in 2005, after 16 years off-air and about a generation of being regarded as an embarrassment, I remember turning to a fellow long-time apostle and saying of its legions of new young fans: ‘Well, maybe this time around they won’t be quite as mad as we were.’ They turned
David Cameron is the king of the wishy-washy compromise. Cameron has never looked happier than when he appeared in the Downing Street Rose Garden in 2010 with Nick Clegg. There was something about being in that awkward Conservative-Lib Dem coalition that suited Dave. It was, of course, another attempt at compromising – by striking a
Rishi Sunak’s decision to recall David Cameron from his shepherd’s hut has been hailed as a triumph by centrist dads. They’re convinced that axing nasty Suella Braverman shows that the grown-ups are back in charge. No . 10 insiders are pleased with themselves: one person working in Downing Street told the Sun that the PM’s phone
It’ll be years before the Covid Inquiry reports back on what we can learn from the pandemic, but already there is one key lesson for us all: don’t write anything on WhatsApp that you wouldn’t want read out in court. The vividly-phrased WhatsApp messages published, and very memorably read aloud, as part of the inquiry
Little Britain is ‘explicitly racist and outdated’. That’s the verdict of viewers asked by Ofcom to watch a 2003 sketch from the hit BBC show. Back in the noughties, millions tuned in each week to watch the abominable David Walliams and Matt Lucas dress up as characters with names like Ting Tong Macadangdang and Bubbles
There’s no room for racism in Britain, we’re told. EDI (equality, diversion and inclusion) initiatives and anti-racism strategies are everywhere. We’re all familiar with the ‘horror’ of micro-aggressions and unconscious bias. We are forever on alert for dangerous racial ‘dog whistles’. And yet the last few weeks has exposed a troubling blind spot when it
In 1979, I was 11 years old, and I had a quite remarkable teacher. Don’t worry, though – this isn’t going to be one of those anodyne paeans to an inspirational educator that the Department for Education use in their ads to lure people into teaching. In fact, if the lady I’ll refer to here
Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, recently took a pop at immigrants who she accused of failing to ‘embrace British values’. But these newcomers to our shores might be forgiven for being confused about what these ‘values’ are. We live in a country, after all, in which misgendering someone can land you in hot water but
‘I don’t feel safe’ is the cry of students the western world over at the prospect of hearing terrifying opinions such as ‘there are two sexes’ or ‘your skin colour shouldn’t matter’. This bluff talk of ‘hate’, terror and even, incredibly but regularly, ‘trans genocide’, used to come over merely as pathetic and entitled. Singer
Sometimes, the amazing crassness of television can still take your breath away, even from the longest-in-the-tooth viewer. Sky News has a correspondent reporting live from Jerusalem, in the midst of the worst pogrom since the second world war. On Tuesday evening he broke off from bringing details of the mass murder of babies in a kibbutz and
Big Brother is back – again. The show was axed by Channel 5 in 2018 but ITV has dragged it out of the grave. Watching the show’s opening episode last night made me wonder whether we’re trapped forever in a time loop with the big TV shows of the early noughties – Strictly, I’m A
