Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street
It’s forty years since the Smiths released their first single ‘Hand In Glove’. We’ve already seen a slew of articles on the anniversary, and the clichés about this most singular, most wonderful pop group are doing their weary rounds yet again. The Guardian tells us that the Smiths are incredibly influential. But this is sadly
The government has paid a whacking out-of-court settlement of £100,000 to Anna Thomas, a whistleblower sacked after she tried to warn them about the infiltration of the DWP by political activists. Baroness Falkner, chair of the equality watchdog, was placed under investigation after a spurious ‘dossier’ of complaints was compiled by staff, which just so
It’s strange to reach the end of something you’ve relished with a sense of relief. HBO’s Succession has given me and many others lashings of pleasure, but I was glad as the credits rolled on the final episode. Fascinating though they were, it was satisfying to wave goodbye to the Roys, every one of them
The rift between Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield, long-standing sobbing/giggling presenters of This Morning, has been one of the big talking points of recent weeks. A torrent of Holly ‘n’ Phil headlines has covered every twist and turn: Holly’s shock This Morning departure! (She clocked off ten minutes early to attend a function.) Shock This
Radio 4 is in trouble. Listening figures for the station have dipped to their lowest level since 2007. The Today programme, Radio 4’s flagship morning show, is doing particularly badly: its audience fell 12 per cent year on year, from 6.5 million to 5.7 million, according to Rajar. For anyone who has tuned in to Radio
Talk of a new Labour-Lib Dem coalition is in the air. This is piquantly nostalgic to those of us whose earliest political memories were forged in the fire of the red-hot excitement of David Steel and Jim Callaghan’s short-lived Lib-Lab pact of 1977-78. My initial reaction, along with many others I’m sure, was a guttural
Two things are buzzing about in the air at the moment: decline and artificial intelligence. Douglas Murray and Louise Perry have written recently in these pages about social desuetude: Murray on the five million or so Britons who seem to have opted out altogether of economic activity; Perry on the worrying lack of new humans
This weekend’s coronation will be an historic moment, a milestone in the mass memory. Just think how many dreary British films will be set against the backdrop of the coronation. (At least it will make a change from things being set against the backdrop of the miners’ strike – a mate of mine invented a game where you
In the first sentence of his book, Jolyon Maugham – the anti-Brexit KC best known for clubbing a fox to death – achieves a mean feat. In 22 words, he conveys his trademark self-pity, self-aggrandisement and capacity for tying himself into pompous knots: ‘The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it,
Who are Labour? Focus groups regularly report a lack of familiarity on the part of voters with His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, even with their leader. ‘Don’t know’ looms quite loudly on Keir Starmer’s focus word cloud, though dwarfed by ‘Boring’. Despite this – maybe because of it – Labour are still a good stretch
The incident at Manchester’s Palace Theatre last Friday night at the close of a performance of the musical version of The Bodyguard – audience members singing loudly over the showstopping final number ‘I Will Always Love You’, being manhandled out by security, the show actually being stopped, and police called – has led to lots of chat
The tragically early death of the magnificent Paul O’Grady struck a blow at the national heart that’s unusual for a celebrity death. After all, this is, for most of us, the death of a stranger. This was a man who spent much of his professional life portraying a markedly waspish and unsentimental character, and even when
It’s been 60 years since Muswell Hill brothers Ray and Dave Davies – then 19 and 15 respectively – formed The Kinks. What is now known as the ‘catalogue’ division of record companies love an anniversary, particularly when fans of the band are likely to be edging into pensionable disposable-income territory. And so, a new compilation titled The Journey has
Allow me to introduce you to a fun game you can play in your own parlour. You take it in turns for someone to shout out the title of a pre-21st century literary classic. The other player responds by giving the blurb of a 21st century television adaptation. It might go, for example; ‘Middlemarch!’ ’ A searing,
The Gary Lineker debacle has exposed the breathtaking historical and political ignorance of the supposedly educated. Lineker’s suspension – and subsequent return – has also demonstrated (as if we didn’t know it) the power of the managerial class establishment. But the transmission of Match of the Day last Saturday sans Gary and his co-mutineers revealed
BBC Radio 2 is one of the many modern cultural enterprises which seems to have as its primary aim alienating the people who love it. The shabbily executed departure of Ken Bruce from his long-established and still wildly popular mid-morning show feels like a final door being slammed shut. Bruce is to be replaced by
When Covid first hit the headlines in early 2020, I remember asking myself a question: who’s the health secretary again? And then I remembered: Oh God. Matt Hancock is, you may have noticed, back in the news. The disgraced ex-health secretary doesn’t ever seem to be out of it for very long. But even prior
The recent self-defenestration of Nicola Sturgeon led to a rash of columns listing her dazzling lack of actual achievements, many of which added the caveat that she was the consummate, in fact the most successful, politician of her generation. These statements seemed somewhat contradictory at first glance. But then the reader remembered – oh, yeah,
If you don’t live online, you may have missed the controversy over Hogwarts Legacy, the latest computer game to have been spun out of the multi-billion Harry Potter franchise. A small but amazingly vocal band of activists launched a vicious campaign against the game because of its connection to ‘transphobe’ J.K. Rowling. Then the game came out
I have a problem with magic. Even as a small child with a big imagination, I found magic very hard to swallow. If a character in a story teleported using a technological aid, that was fine. If a character vanished in a magical puff of smoke after an incantation, I was having none of it.
