Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
The brave clown who speaks the truth and shames the devil is a showbiz tradition, from Charlie Chaplin to Lenny Bruce. The comedian more than any other creative is best-placed to play the role of the cheeky urchin who points out that the Emperor has no clothes. But in recent years, drolls have ceased to
The elegant, serpentine word ‘lesbian’ had a place in the sun only briefly. In the first real novel about lesbianism, 1928’s The Well Of Loneliness, the protagonists are gloomily and somewhat puzzlingly called ‘inverts’, conjuring up an image of some sad Sapphic wondering why she was condemned to spend her life upside-down. Amazingly, Christopher Hawtree, writing
I was in S&M relationships from my teenage years to somewhere in my naughty forties. Why did I go in for such strange antics? Damned if I know. Is it because I wanted to be different? Because I didn’t want a calm, cosy, devoted relationship, like my parents had? Because when I thought of romantic
I remember a time when I didn’t object to Adele. Working-class in the increasingly posh world of popular music, always pretty but not a glamour girl in a profession where female singers are expected to be hyper-sexualised, she was prized for her voice more than her looks. That I might have referred to that voice
‘Please don’t let this be a scolding!’ I thought as I moved past this book’s tempting title to read the author’s bio, noting that she is ‘the chair of the Writing Programme at Columbia University’. Sure enough, the very first line of the prologue – ‘The sound of a diva’s voice was how I knew
Observing the tremulous travails of Joe Biden, I reflected that we’re in two minds about old age. On one hand we pay stiff-upper-lip-service to the stoicism of old people; on the other they’re a warning about what awaits us. (I say ‘us’ out of habit; I got used to always being the youngest person in
The pop star Sam Smith appears not only to have a magic mirror which affirms that he’s stunning and brave, but also that he’s a lovely little thinker. During lockdown, self-isolating in his £12 million home, he filmed himself weeping because he was already bored with his own company. ‘I hate reading,’ he cried, suggesting
There’s a funny saying the Cockneys have to describe something ghastly coming in the wake of something lovely: ‘After the Lord Mayor’s show…’ One online dictionary describes it thus: ‘Said of a disappointing or mundane event occurring straight after an exciting, magnificent or triumphal event… from the proverb “After the Lord Mayor’s show comes the
Anne Hathaway’s latest film, The Idea of You, has become Amazon’s most-streamed rom com, causing me to reflect that Hollywood’s young man/older woman scenario has changed for the better since The Graduate. Though everyone was mad for it at the time, was there ever a grimmer film about relationships? We’re meant to empathise with the
Most people have a soft spot for the first ‘X’ film they legitimately saw as an alleged ‘adult’; mine was Magic, the 1978 film by Richard Attenborough, starring Anthony Hopkins as a mild-mannered ventriloquist who becomes possessed by the spirit of his verbally vicious dummy, leading to awful consequences when a steaming hot and sex-starved Ann-Margret
The day after the Serbia vs England match, while sunbathing on my balcony, I espied an interesting vignette taking place on the lawns beneath my apartment block. A little boy was playing football with a man I took to be his father, who looked like a hipster of the kind you can see by the
In an excellent essay I wrote for this magazine at the start of the year – ‘Sir’ Ed Davey’s Lib Dems are the real nasty party’ – I touched on my adolescent crush on the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe: ‘I felt confusion watching Thorpe speak – he sounded so kind, yet looked so cruel – but dismissed
Like a lot of people who didn’t know him, I felt sad hearing of the death of Michael Mosley on the Greek island of Symi, being familiar with him as a doctor whose pleasant voice I often heard on the radio. He had the gift of giving advice without being patronising or preachy. Mosley seemed
I love to make up new words and see them gradually used more by others – for a writer, there’s no greater thrill. My brilliant ‘cry-bully’ – coined in this magazine back in 2015 – has probably been the most successful, to the point where it’s sometimes amusingly used by cry-bullies themselves, Owen ‘Talcum X’ Jones being
On reading that the Maldives are to ban Israeli passport holders from entry as an alleged protest over the war in Gaza, I hooted with laughter. That dump – I wouldn’t go there if you paid me, – which is exactly what happened in 1995, when the Sunday Times sent me abroad for the very
I’ve always loved voting. No matter how many times I’ve been disappointed, I’ll be out there next time round getting all misty-eyed as I put my X on the ballot paper and embarrassing the poor people running the show by blurting ‘Thank you for everything you do for democracy!’ before bolting for the door. It’s
It’s always handy for parents to have someone they can use to put their children off any particular profession. ‘Don’t be a comedian, son – you’ll end up like that Eddie Izzard!’ ‘Don’t be a journalist, my girl – you’ll end up like that Julie Burchill!’ Quite a few politicians have vied for this inverted ‘top spot’
When I was a kid in the music business, I became aware of a funny phenomenon whereby visiting American bands would suss out which British punk groups were good and which were bad – and then hire a bad one as their support band, with the ignoble purpose of making the headline act look better
I’m a highly insensitive person, which means that I’m rarely perturbed by aural excitement. I love public noise, the sound of the crowd. I would never want double-glazed windows – and I even like the sound of drills and construction because I enjoy living in a boomtown where lots of people want to be. The
Like many Brits, I never had perfect teeth. Even when I was young they weren’t gleaming white and the two front ones had a gap between them. I grew to quite like my gap – ‘diastema’ to give it the correct name – and found out all kinds of interesting facts about it. In The
