Andrew scott

If you’ve spent any time gawping at Netflix over the past half-decade or so, you’ll already know that human culture has reached its final, perfect form. We made a good effort with cave paintings, epic poetry, theatre, literature and the rest of them, but the apex of culture is the bingeable, episodic rabbit-hole Netflix documentary about a sociopathic liar. Maybe we love con artists because they’re the only people still selling something new There have been so many of these now that it’s difficult to tell them apart. There was the one about the man who matched with women on dating websites by pretending to be the playboy scion to

Sunset Boulevard is a re-telling of the Oedipus story set in the cut-throat world of Hollywood. Pick a side in this tortured yarn. There’s Norma, a burned-out sex-goddess, who wants to make a comeback as a teenage ballerina in a dance epic. Or there’s Joe, a penniless scribbler, who becomes Norma’s reluctant toyboy while he works on her doomed screenplay (which stands for a stillborn child). Clinging to Joe is Betty, a drippy girlfriend who represents escape and artistic integrity. The final piece in the jigsaw is Norma’s discarded husband, Max, who stands for sadistic and destructive obsession. Each day he sends Norma a new batch of counterfeit love letters

Sea Wall, by Simon Stephens, is a half-hour monologue about grief performed by Andrew Scott. The YouTube clip has been viewed more than 250,000 times. The habitual quirks and irritants of Stephens’s writing are all here: the inept jokes, the laddish swearing, the fascination with 1970s pop, the preference for males over females and the improbable back stories of the characters. The narrator is an Irish cameraman who earns money photographing ‘cushions and digital alarm clocks’ for shopping catalogues. He tells us a bit about his wife and daughter (‘she was a Caesarean’), but he’s far more interested in his father-in-law, Arthur, a scuba-diving maths teacher who retired from the