Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street
In bleak times, Brits could rely on light entertainment to get them through. George Formby and Vera Lynn made the Blitz bearable. Slade and T Rex got people through the three-day week and power cuts of the 1970s. In the good times of the money-in-your-pocket 1990s, we had equally cheery, cheeky media like The Fast
Is nothing sacred? Not quite, as it turns out. There remains one last object of piety in these, the early days of the third Christian millennium (don’t laugh). Surprisingly, it is a fictional bear from darkest Peru. Yes, Paddington is back in the news. Because he hath been desecrated. There is, or was, a sedentary
Stormzy has finally completed the journey from super-cool to super-cringe. The rapper, once the symbol of youthful rebellion, is to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge. Meanwhile, in your local branch of McDonald’s, you can partake of ‘the Stormzy Meal’. How depressing to see Stormzy abase himself in this way. Stormzy’s McDonald’s
Pity poor James O’Brien. The long-suffering remainer has always had a raw, fiery quality unusual in the British phone-in host. Where most of his male colleagues tend to be pear shaped more than bear shaped – and where female radio presenters often resemble head girls sitting bolt upright in the front row of the class
When will the BBC get a grip? The corporation which, remember, is funded by licence payers, appears to be strangely overgenerous to its ‘marginalised’ executives with saintly protected characteristics. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), ethnic minority, disabled and female BBC bosses typically earn more money than their colleagues, statistics buried in the corporation’s annual
The visits of Keir Starmer and president Zelensky to the Oval Office last week were both agonising to behold, in very different ways. We witnessed two examples of how/how not (opinions vary which was which) to approach the court of what is described memorably vividly in David Mamet’s brilliant 1987 film House Of Games (nothing
So much for the Special Relationship. Since Donald Trump took office in January, Brits have been taking quite a tongue-lashing from the US president’s team. Keir Starmer, who touches down in Washington on Thursday to meet Trump, has been nicknamed “two-tier Keir” by the president’s consigliere Elon Musk over his handling of grooming gangs. JD
Germany, not so very long ago, was the example of how to do it. Shiningly spotless and effortlessly efficient – the country where they’d got it right. Today, with its economy doom-spiralling and levels of internal unquiet that look likely to see the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) do very well in this Sunday’s federal election,
Values. Whenever some poor soul gets cancelled, sacked, scalped etc., there’s almost always a bland, impersonal statement from the institution carrying out the scalping. In third-person corporatese, from the moral high ground, such pronouncements will conclude with the sentence: ‘The comments of Person X do not align with the values of Institution Y.’ Where do
Labour MP Andrew Gwynne has been sacked from the government, and suspended from the party, for sending ‘vile’ WhatsApp messages. Gwynne, who reportedly wrote that he hoped an elderly constituent who had complained about bin collections would die, is also said to have made antisemitic remarks and jokes about Diane Abbott. He stands exposed of
The news that the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the adenoidal android, has employed a voice coach is simply astonishing. ‘I’ll take no lectures from the party opposite,’ is one of Starmer’s most well-worn sentences. At least now we know who he will take lectures from: actress Leonie Mellinger, star of The Winters Tale and the
A long life well spent doing what we love is more than most of us can hope to get anywhere near. Otto Schenk, who died a few weeks ago aged 94, took that trophy; his career as a director (and sometimes performer) of opera stretched over considerably more than half a century. Many of his
The Village People joined Donald Trump on stage at the conclusion of his pre-inauguration rally last night. ‘You won’t recognise them, they’re a little bigger, but that’s life,’ The Donald informed us beforehand, in one of the many interesting digressions in his long, long address. This was less of a speech and more of a
OnlyFans content creator Bonnie Blue claims to have broken a world record by sleeping with over a thousand men in twelve hours. I say ‘slept with’ but obviously the euphemism doesn’t really apply to this dubious feat. Blue, who was born in Nottingham but now lives in the United States, added to the glamour of
The re-eruption of the rape gangs scandal has shone a dazzlingly bright light on the language that makes us flinch and fluster, and clutch at euphemistic straws. For years, the mass sexual abuse of thousands of vulnerable girls in towns across England has been blamed on ‘grooming gangs’. But this euphemism hardly does justice to
The recent re-eruption of the grooming/child rape gang scandal has been disorienting, seeming to blow up from nowhere. It has re-emerged – as far as I can ascertain, it moved so fast – through posts on X that quoted horrific extracts from trial proceedings. Within hours the full horror of what happened (and may well
A feud can be very tedious and tiring if you’re one of the combatants. But let’s be honest: for onlookers, feuds are fun. Videos of spats in which one or other party is ‘schooled, owned, destroyed’ ratchet up millions of views. It’s even more fun when both sides don’t lose their temper and civility is
Pulp, the legendary band fronted by Jarvis Cocker, have revealed that they’ve signed a new recording deal with equally legendary independent label Rough Trade. Although they formed in Sheffield in 1978, when Cocker was 15, Pulp’s biggest success – and it was very big – came in the second half of the 1990s, with smash
There’s been a ‘vibe shift’. After the resounding victory at the recent US election, at long last things are changing, and heading towards some form of hope and sanity. This Christmas, there’s hope for the future on the right. Is this December 2024 or December 2019? Because the current anticipation for the second Donald Trump
What is going on with the drones buzzing over New Jersey in the United States? Reportedly ‘the size of cars’, sometimes flying low in formation, these mysterious semi-identified flying objects have been sighted in their thousands every night – and only at night – for weeks. They might not even be drones. Are they alien
