Elevator Pitch

The eponymous Highlander is Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert), a sixteenth century Scottish clansman, who miraculously recovers from a mortal wound. The flamboyant Ramirez (Sean Connery) reveals to him that they are both members of a mysterious group of immortals who can only be killed by having their heads cut off. Now the immortals are gathering in ‘80s New York for a decapita-thon in which the last one with an intact noggin will win the nebulously defined ‘Prize’. All of which has attracted the attention of the NYPD, even as MacLeod must face the most fearsome of all the immortals, The Kurgan (Clancy Brown). Because, as the poster says: “There can be only one.”

It is somewhat ironic that Highlander uses decapitation as a plot element, because it is a film best enjoyed without a brain.

Quentin Tarantino has coined a meta genre he calls ‘the hang out movie’: one in which the core appeal is hanging out with the characters. In some movies — such as any film by Jim Jarmusch, or Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990) — the depiction of ‘hanging out’ is pretty much the whole film. But a ‘hang out’ movie can fall in any genre; Tarantino was specifically talking about Howard Hawks’’s Western Rio Bravo (1959). Tarantino’s own Pulp Fiction (1994) is a ‘hang out’ movie.

Highlander is a subtly different kind of ‘hang out’ movie, though; it’s the kind of movie you put on while hanging out. It was made in the VHS era, when you could put films on in the background while you played with action figures and recited the catchphrase dialogue. It is perfect for projecting on a blank wall in a hipster dive bar at 2 in the morning, so that the drunks can get hysterical about the OTT sequence that follows the first decapitation: cars in a parking lot rhythmically bumping up and down, a hose unfurling in a tumescent burst of froth, and Christopher Lambert moaning orgasmically. (This is referred to as ‘The Quickening’, a medieval term for the first sense a woman has of pregnancy, which should give you some idea of the adolescent Freudian stew involved.)

Highlander is an emblematic Hollywood popcorn flick, all hot air and explosions, too much sugar and too much salt. It is a high concept movie in which superficially ‘cool’ concepts are arranged in a vast and teetering pile, until everyone involved is dizzy and nauseous with altitude sickness. In no particular order, it confronts the viewer with a rain-slicked and neon ‘80s New York; Japanese katanas; swordfights in back alleys; smart, world weary cops; Highland battles in the bagpipe-skirling mists; Dutch angles and frenetic editing; Queen; Christopher Lambert’s slow and wonky smile; and Sean Connery’s eyebrows.

As with its VHS inheritance, Highlander belongs to the era of music videos; the director Russell Mulcahy made his name directing Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ and Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’ and, perhaps most pertinently, The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, the video that launched MTV. It has been designed to work like a music video; its visuals are an accompaniment to something else. Not music (although Queen wrote songs for the soundtrack), but the viewer’s own imagination.

It is a vibe movie, and the vibe is ‘what a teenage boy thinks is cool’.

Delights

All of which, on rewatch, made me wonder why I had loved it so much back in 1986. Sure, I had been a Queen fan, but by 1986 I was starting to drift away from them because they seemed so uncool: mainstream music for stadium-rocking dads. And, admittedly, I was a Christopher Lambert fan, having already seen him in Subway (1985). But while Subway -- a product of the ‘80s French ‘cinema du look’ -- is a very shallow film, it is the Mariana Trench compared to Highlander.

The very shallowness of the film, the fact that it is little more than a vibe, is part of its appeal. Of course, I wasn’t immune to the swords and sorcery, the mean streets of gritty Manhattan, the sheer velocity and chutzpah of Mulcahy’s hyperactive directions. But all that high concept -- the secret society of immortals, the head lopping, the ‘Prize’ -- could easily have turned into an indigestible slop of exposition and lore. Sure, it opens with a voiceover, which is always a bad sign: someone, while viewing an edit, said ‘wait, what?’ and demanded that an explanation be included.

But it doesn’t need it. Highlander, very wisely, doesn’t care. It knows that it’s all just an excuse for the cool bits. No one watching this cares where the immortals come from; they just want to see swordfights. It is notable that the sequel, which did try and expound on the mythology, is widely considered to be one of the worst films of all time.

Disappointments

This is a film in which Christopher Lambert, a Frenchman who couldn’t speak English when filming started, plays a Scot. Sean Connery, a Scot who has never once attempted any accent other than his own, plays an Egyptian with a Spanish name. Clancy Brown, an American, plays an ancient steppe warrior named after a kind of burial mound. This film is not just stupid on the surface; it is stupid all the way down, through the script, the idea, the casting, the production and the motivation. Its stupidity is the only deep thing about it.

But it’s not malicious; it is gleeful, boyish. It is stupidly fun. Stupidly entertaining. Maybe even stupidly cool.

Can We Show The Kids?

So, here’s the thing: you don’t have to. You can just wait for the remake. Yes, a remake, starring Henry Cavill, Dave Batuista and Russell Crowe, is being remade right now. It is directed by Chad Stahelski, the man behind the John Wick movies. Which are, not incidentally, an artisanal blend of the very stupid and the very cool.

Which rather begs the question:

Why Are They Remakering This?

Well, for the same reason they’ve just made yet another sequel to Tron (1982), the same reason they’re making a new adaption of the toy-line-turned-Saturday-morning-cartoon Masters of the Universe (1983--85), and the same reason the Star Wars will continue until morale improves.

Like John Favreau (the man behind The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)) and Travis Knight (the director of Masters of the Universe (2026)), Chad Stahelski is Gen X. Our generation is now ‘in charge’ (for a given value of ‘in charge’; obviously, we’re not competent to run a major government or anything) and is busily revisiting our childhoods. Boomers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg recreated the Flash Gordon and Rider Haggard adventures they had adored as kids and gave us the Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and now we, in turn, are remaking them. We might be lazy and feckless, but on the other hand, we’re entirely artistically derivative.

Those ‘70s and ‘80s blockbusters created the ‘four quadrant’ model: a massively expensive blockbuster with something for everyone, and nothing of substance for anyone. But there was another model: the stupid VHS cult hit. Highlander was distributed by Cannon, the production-house-cum-financial-shenanigan that was a prolific creator of thick-eared nonsense to be rented from Blockbuster on a rainy afternoon: like Cannon’s original adaptation of Masters of the Universe (1987), Highlander was a commercial flop that was re-rented, rewound and rewatched over and over again.

Now, the mainstream cinema of the twenty-first century is a mixture of event movie and enjoyable genre trash: endless brand-extending multiverses of imponderable lore and impenetrable visual effects. There is not much that distinguishes Highlander from a mediocre Marvel movie. The technology has improved; beyond the windows of Connor Macleod’s apartment in Highlander there is an absolutely awful backdrop photo of Manhattan, while a Marvel movie will have a slightly unconvincing CGI rendering, and costume design, fight choreography and scriptwriting have improved immensely.

But while Marvel movies have resources that Russell Mulcahy could only dream of, these are, basically, the same film over and over again. A vaguely drawn McGuffin; a bunch of one-dimensional characters; some lumpy plot mechanics; and, most importantly, a huge pile of ‘cool’ stuff with which to overwhelm the viewer. When they said ‘there can be only one’, it turns out they meant there could be only one kind of film.

There were some slightly more successful high-concept action flicks in 1986, most notably Top Gun:

Small Prophets (2026)

The BBC’s hit du jour, Small Prophets is a comedy drama that differentiates itself using comedy that’s actually funny and drama that isn’t grindingly predictable. As with his previous hit The Detectorists, it feels like Mackenzie Crook is trying to make up for being integral in Ricky Gervais’ rise to fame by making shows that are kind and human. (Crook recently told The Guardian that ‘after The Office, I wanted to write something that wasn’t cruel.’)

The closest the show gets to a villain is the protagonist’s next door neighbour Clive, an athleisure-wearing Millennial whose house is devoid of decoration or personality, and whose life is a stew of status anxiety and militant normality. He is the villain because the protagonist, Michael Sleep, is a slacker. (It’s right there in his name. He is a Sleep; dreaming through life.) Michael is a Gen X man in late middle age with an extravagant white beard and a vintage French artisan’s jacket; he spends his time on whimsical projects for his beloved, and he hoards ‘70s ephemera. I am in this picture, and I’m delighted by it.

The story is appropriately oneiric too, incorporating a little ancient Egyptian magic, rare books and a flock of folklore signifiers: birds and hares and the titular homonculi. In an even more laser-targeted Gen X feature, these supernatural beings are stop-motion animated, rolling in a little Ray Harryhausen to go with the Action Man helicopter and the Modest Mouse t-shirt.

Oh yes, the homonculi. At one level, the weird little creatures that <spoiler> prophesy truthfully </spoiler> act as a metaphor for contemporary technology: a magical Polymarket, a stop-motion AI. They are strange intrusions from imaginary worlds that threaten to completely upend the way we think about the real one.

Small Prophets tell us that magic is everywhere, even in the back alleys of an anonymous town; at one point an adult mugger mistakes Michael for Father Christmas. In a typically excellent piece on why fantasy is appealing, Frances Spufford inadvertently outlines most of the reasons why it works in Small Prophets. Most particularly, it insists that the world is full of small wonders. As Spufford puts it, fantasy is ‘a kind of necessary realism, arising in response to qualities of the contemporary world that we couldn’t properly attend to, couldn’t narrate, any other way.’

The whole thing has left me deeply torn about the prospects of Crook making a sequel. I’d love to see more of this quietly magical world; and yet I’d rather leave it as it is, a remarkable little jar of wonder. Just lovely.

Steal (Amazon Prime, 2026)

Top subscriber (we recommend his Substack if you like elegantly waspish missives about maths) requested our views on this one, and who are we to refuse to watch a big dumb thriller? Sophie Turner is Zara, a frustrated back-room staffer at a City hedge fund who has a terrifying day at work when armed robbers break into the office. There’s a twist at the end of the first episode that sets the narrative ticking, and then we’re off.

Turner is fabulous, but you probably already knew that. There should be a compound noun for ‘thinking you’ve discovered a promising actor, then finding out that they have been globally famous for a decade because they were on Game of Thrones.’ This has happened to us about five times now. (We are not watching Game of Thrones and you can’t make us.) What can we say? There’s a reason our strapline is ‘no hot takes’. Anyway: the downside of Turner being so convincing and understated is that you really notice when the actors around her aren’t. The romantic interest is flaccid, and one major character is so persistently whiny and helpless that it’s a surprise when he calls his own Uber. There are some great little turns though: Ellie James should have her own ‘tough London detective’ show, and Anastasia Hille is absolutely terrifying as Zara’s mother.

Professor Johnson (passim) said he thought Steal was good but was missing something, and that’s the TL;DR. As with Turner’s performance, it’s one of those shows where some things are done so well that the less successful aspects stand out all the more. It’s sharply written: the dialogue is cracking, and the exploration of Zara’s background is much more interesting and nuanced than you might expect. The police simply do their jobs, which is always a relief; investigative incompetence is overused as a plot-driver. As with The Diplomat, this is a show that actually understands London’s geography, and allows a realistic amount of time for a character to travel from the City to Hackney. It isn’t afraid to show finance jobs as mostly very boring, which is a departure for a financial thriller. And it’s pleasing to see these young, not that well paid support workers living in realistically nasty, poky London flats. (The realism has its limits, though; Zara’s one-bed in the Leopold Building on Columbia Road would be worth somewhere north of half a million.) All in all it feels like a show written by an intelligent, witty person who understands the world it’s set in.

But there’s an underdeveloped political angle that gets jammed in uncomfortably right at the end; and the actual plot, if you focus on it, is nuts. It felt like a show that’s 80% of the way there but needed a little bit longer to cook. Maybe there’s something about the financial imperatives of streaming that forces creatives to push things out the door before they’re quite ready. That said: we watched it all the way to the end.

Letterboxd Diary

What has enjoyed watching this month.

Predator: Badlands (2025)

A Predator (an alien species known in-universe as the Yautja) arrives on the galaxy’s deadliest planet to prove his prowess and finds himself up against the most dangerous prey of all: man. Well, man-made androids, which, as we’re all discovering, are worse than actual humans.

The Predator originated in 1987 monster flick that put one down in the Colombian jungle to hunt a special ops team headed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The idea is that these aliens are the ultimate killers, devoted solely to hunting and gathering trophies. The mythos has evolved a little since then, we’ve learned more about their simplistic language, culture and homeworld, but the core idea is pure and, equally, simple.

All of which makes me wonder: if they’re these vicious murder monsters with claws so long they can barely press their computer buttons, where did they get all their terrifying toys from? Their invisibility cloaks and absolutely-not-lightsabres and laser traps? There appear to be no scientist Yautja, or engineers or writers of instruction manuals. Who invented and designed and built those faster-than-light engines and anti-gravity generators?

I realise, of course, that I am taking this all too seriously. The point of the Predators is to be a brute force that highlights human ingenuity and intelligence, but that also makes them a metaphor for precisely those special ops types that Arnold played in the original film. The ‘tip of the spear’ that so conveniently forgets the long haft of science and culture and technology that supports them. All the people who know how to make big fucking guns and run supply routes for food and ammo and still remember that the proper name for the shaft of a spear is a ‘haft’.

On the other hand, there’s something there. Such stupid questions often open up new clever answers and more ideas for more story. The Predator franchise was reinvigorated by Dan Trachtenburg with the very enjoyable Prey (2022), which starred Amber Midthunder as a Comanche woman facing off against a Yautja in nineteenth century America, a film that made the colonial metaphor aptly monstrous. Badlands is not quite as enjoyable but Trachtenburg at least seems interested in trying to do interesting things with the concept.

What’s noticeable is how much more adaptable and pliable a silly movie like Predator is than a genuinely brilliant and artful film like Alien (1979). The two franchises are often yoked together as sci-fi movies full of homicidal monsters, but the original Alien film is simply too good to sustain good sequels (I know, I know, Aliens (1986) is jolly good fun, I grant you, but it can’t hold a flamethrower to the original). Start somewhere stupid and you have somewhere to go.

Late Shift (2015)

A single late shift in a Swiss hospital as nurse Floria (Leonie Benesch) is faced with mounting stress, panic and exhaustion.

The Metropolitan Editors have been Leonie Benesch fans since seeing her much put-upon naïf Greta in Babylon Berlin (2017—). She is an absolute master of wide-eyed distress and barely contained anxiety, and brings it all to Late Shift. Indeed, there’s a striking moment of relief in which Floria jokes with a colleague and I think that may be the first time I’ve ever seen Leonie Benesch laugh on screen.

The film ends with text highlighting the shortage of nurses in Switzerland, although I’m afraid that British viewers may greet that with a hollow laugh. Compared to some NHS hospitals, Floria’s seems remarkably well supplied, staffed and funded.

I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)

This is Mary Harron’s ‘90s biopic of Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor), the writer of the militant feminist S.C.U.M. [Society for Cutting Up Men] Manifesto and the woman who tried to murder Andy Warhol.

The film is remarkably even-handed. It details both the hideous and routine abuses that Solanas suffered at the hands of a misogynous patriarchy, and her mental health issues that – while socially exacerbated – may also explain the violence of her reaction. It also takes a long, curious but not cynical look at Warhol and the Factory movement. At its heart is a consideration of sexuality, gender and biology that takes in every angle and remains admirably inconclusive.

Two things stood out on this rewatch, having not seen the film in thirty years. One was how fascinated my friends and I used to be with the Warhol New York scene; how desperate we all were to be Factory workers. Not only were so many of the Warhol crowd so dissolutely, stupidly cool, but also they represented an alternative to the more legible ‘60s legends that Boomers couldn’t stop making films and albums about during their ‘80s midlife crises: Beatlemania, Woodstock, Chicago, Vietnam. A less mainstream alternative ‘60s ancestry runs from Warhol to the YBAs, from the Velvets to the indie charts, and from Solanas to Riot Grrl.

The other thing that stood out was that we had to watch this on YouTube, because it isn’t available for streaming. Which is a shame, because it’s good: thoughtful, spacious, affecting, political, insightful, compassionate, complex. Just as the Factory disappeared from the mainstream mythology of the ‘60s, so there was another, more interesting ‘80s and ‘90s that is missing from the retro recreations like Stranger Things (2016-25).

Michael Clayton (2007)

We have been catching up on the latter half of the second season of Poker Face (2023—25). The first half got bogged down in some complicated story arc business that caused us to give up for a bit, but after that was all wrapped up Poker Face gets back to the cases-of-the-week stuff that it does so well.

Anyway, in one episode characters kept going on about how much they loved Michael Clayton, and we realised that we could remember nothing about it. So we went and rewatched it and discovered why: it’s not in the least memorable.

You know, it’s fine. Everyone apart from Sidney Pollack overacts a bit, but only Tom Wilkinson goes too far. The plot is almost knotty, but is full of loose ends and not at all believable. It’s the sort of thing that the Coen Brothers would have played for dark laughs, and it might have worked better that way.

So why do I keep reading things by Americans who seem to think it’s an all-time classic? I recently read something comparing it, as a perfect Hollywood product, to Casablanca (1942), which is befuddling. For a start, it doesn’t have ‘Cuddles’ Sakall or a rousing rendition of ‘La Marseillaise’.

My theory is that the corporate thriller has more relevance and bite in the States than it can do here. The typical British corporation is a bunch of chinless wonders in drip-dry suits who play golf and musical chairs with board memberships. The typical American corporation is a quasi-nation state that destroys environments, runs politics and grinds up lives for no greater motive than making the line go up and to the right.

The corporation driving the plot of Michael Clayton – a chemical manufacturer fighting a class action lawsuit over its toxic products – is all too believable. However, the subplot – in which Tilda Swinton’s in-house counsel hires some assassins to do away with troublesome lawyers – seems slightly too cartoonish from this side of the pond.

It is noticeable that writer/director Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars contribution Andor (2022–2025) was able to take a fundamentally silly sci-fi setting and use that to create a persuasive, chilling and gritty story of fighting oppression in a way that the apparently realist Michael Clayton doesn’t quite manage. Perhaps the ludicrousness of the sci-fi genre allows you to build thriller-level stakes without sacrificing the realism of the politics.

The Red Shoes (1948)

In The Mood For Love (2000)

Two tales of doomed love for Valentine’s Day. Well, not quite, but I’ve been meaning to watch Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love for years, and so was delighted to find it had appeared on streaming. And now I’m going to have to buy it on DVD because it is utterly magnificent.

The Red Shoes, on the other hand, is the great masterwork by my favourite film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and I rewatched it solely because it was on iPlayer. It’s a good deal more histrionic than the achingly restrained In the Mood for Love, but the films have two things in common: they are not only very good but they are also extraordinarily beautiful. In the middle of a dull and rainy February I inadvertently created a little island of beauty, Wong Kar-wai’s cool greens and Michael Powell’s saturated red as an antidote to the endless grey of a British winter.

This might have to become a habit. Perhaps I might try the beautiful ‘half-asleep’ grainy midcentury colours of Ozu’s Late Autumn (1960) or Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958). Kubrick’s masterpiece of entrancing tableau Barry Lyndon (1975), or Wes Anderson’s sugar frosted dioramas of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Classic technicolour musicals, perhaps: the jewel colours of like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) or Cecil Beaton’s stunningly monochrome Ascot of My Fair Lady (1964). The magical scenery of Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (so perfectly cosy for late winter), the luminous black and white of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946). All that visual delight and untrammelled beauty in which to luxuriate while outside it rains.

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

The Word The War - Liam Kazar

This is a nice chugging groove to bring us into March, just a hint of warm weather to come.

Taivshral - ENJI

This is a woozy piece of lyrical jazz pop, I think Enji - Erkhembayar Enkhjargal - is Mongolian by birth, although I’m not sure what language she’s singing in.

Dead - Komeda

I was quite a fan of Komeda in the ‘90s but somehow I’d never heard this track before.

Garden Botanum - These Trails

Here’s a delicate piece of ‘70s hippie folk to carry us into the new green of Spring.

Talk To Leslie - Katie Alice Greer

I’m rather fond of these lyrics where you can tell that there’s a story there, but what it actually might be is left carefully opaque.

Rabbit - Youth Lagoon

This is a beautiful, elegiac piece of music that has ear-wormed me for days.

so unique - Tikhet, Sepalot, Angela Aux

This has a nice lo-fi hip hop tone to it, with a touch of Motorik driving it along (appropriately for a German outfit).

Lights Out - Santigold

I’d somehow managed to forget all about Santigold and this track until Spotify reminded me, and it’s still great.

Be My Forever - Don’t Thank Me Spank Me!

There’s a band name guaranteed to make middle-aged Dad-adjacent listeners uncomfortable.

Mata Zyklek - Angine de Poitrine

My new favourite band. It’s ‘Tohogd’ on the Spotify playlist but there’s no video of them playing that live on YouTube and if you’ve never seen them before, it’s not to be missed. The Mighty Boosh plays Battles. They’re not just weirdo costumes though, it’s also incredible music. The perfect combination.

You can find the whole playlist on Spotify, as usual:

Here’s our piece on Andor, to make up for being mean about Michael Clayton:

Nu Shooz

I first heard ‘I Can’t Wait’ by Nu Shooz in a shop on the high street. I can’t remember which shop, but it can’t have been one of my usual haunts (the second-hand record shop, the comics store, or the model shop with a sideline in role playing games). They didn’t play that kind of chart music.

‘I Can’t Wait’ is an echt piece of mid-‘80s chart music, with that peculiarly crystalline ‘80s production that sounds machine-made. It is full of stuff, and yet full of space. There are all kinds of odd noises: insistently chiming percussion, stabs of tinny synthesised horns, gasping emulator barks like a robot faking an orgasm. Each of these noises was selected with care and skill and placed into an delicate but unbending structure, like lab-grown gems in a surgical steel tiara.

I wasn’t in the habit of listening to this kind of chart pop in 1986. I wasn’t entirely immune to chart music, but I was listening to Q-approved album rock like Paul Simon’s Graceland and crate-digging for second-hand copies of Japan obscurities. ‘I Can’t Wait’ reached number 2 in the UK charts, but I hadn’t heard it until I walked into whichever branch of whatever it was.

That meant that I didn’t know what it was. Which was a problem, because I really wanted to know what it was. I heard the hook, the ‘ah-ah-ah-ah-ah’ of the over-excited android, the big galumphing steps of the bass; but I had no way of knowing to whom they belonged. This was 1986: there was no Shazam, no internet (that I could use). Dial-a-Disc might have worked, but I didn’t even know that this was a chart hit. I knew nothing about it and could find out nothing about it, until I turned on BBC Radio 1 and managed to catch a DJ back-announcing it.

In a world of narrow media channels, that radio DJ’s act of curation was vital. Curation was how you discovered new things, whether they were new to the world and or simply new to you. In the week ‘I Can’t Wait’ reached number 2, John Peel’s show on Radio 1 featured — among many other things unlikely to trouble the official Top 40 — Eric B and Rakim, The Minutemen and some ‘60s ska from Roland Alphonso and the Ska-talites.

But even a daytime DJ off-handedly crashing the outros on the assigned playlist could perform crucial acts of curation, helping to build and refine the tastes of listeners. Even if their curation only confirmed the fact that you couldn’t stand Simply Red, freshly ousted from the Number 2 spot by Nu Shooz.

I Can’t Wait

But by 1986, DJs didn’t just play the hits.

‘I Can’t Wait’ originally appeared on Nu Shooz’s 1985 album Tha’s Right, but that version did not become a hit. The version that did was a remix by the Dutch DJ Peter Slaghuis.

John Smith, the founder and chief songwriter of Nu Shooz, claims Slaghuis didn’t like the song and ‘didn’t fool with it very much’. A lot of what he did do sounds terribly ‘80s now; basically a man playing around with new effects he’s found on his synthesiser. But it was undoubtedly his remix that made the song a hit.

The album version is eminently ignorable funk-pop, an indistinguishable wash of horns, guitars and vocals. It’s actually quite hard to pick the hook out from it. The production in Slaghuis’s ‘80s remix pares the song down to its elements, emphasising every sting and riff; if you’ll excuse the pun, it makes it pop. His experience of what worked on the dance floor no doubt informed his sense of what would work as a chart hit.

This reinvention is integral to the DJ function. Even if a DJ is just playing records at a wedding disco, they are always constructing: building an experience out of individual songs, building a taste out of influences or, as with hip hop DJs, building completely new music using a mixture of old and new parts.

The ‘80s DJ explosion was enabled by new, cheaper technologies. 1986 saw the launch of the Rane MP 24 (a mixer that updated club DJing) and the Casio SK-1, a consumer-level sampling keyboard that could (in theory) make the same robotic moaning noise as Peter Slaghuis’s E-mu emulator.

The collision of the punk DIY ethos, new independent record labels and newly affordable technology meant anyone with a Saturday job could sidestep a considerable part of the traditional music industry. Two people with a keyboard could be a whole band, like those ‘fire and ice’ synth-pop duos of the early ‘80s (or, indeed, like Nu Shooz themselves, who had considerably slimmed down from their original 12-person line-up). One person with two turntables and a stack of old soul records could be a hip hop DJ. Add in a sampler, a drum machine and a four-track recorder, and you too could reinvent dance music. As well as empowering creative people, new technologies were spawning new genres: techno, acid, rave. These genres were underground and, in the late ‘80s, practically outlawed, but they were about to completely revolutionise mainstream pop.

Now, anyone can create a polished production on their phone and broadcast it to the whole world. Amateurism — the act of doing or making something principally for one’s own amusement — has begun to feel like an odd, endangered pursuit; if technology can produce something with the veneer of pinpoint professionalism, it becomes hard to insist on the personal and creative value of making things that are slightly shit, things that no sane person would want to spend money on. (The repeated act of making slightly shit things is, of course, the means by which you gradually become able to make something that is not shit.)

Meanwhile, the ease of making professional-grade outputs apparently demands the simulacrum of a professional-grade distribution network, and so technology busies itself with the generation of artificial DJs. On Spotify I can activate ‘DJ X’, an AI host with a fantastically irritating upbeat American ‘voice’. DJ X can play tracks from my playlist, interspersed with authentically inane chatter. DJ X is awful but, more importantly, it is also useless. It plays songs that Spotify knows I like; it isn’t offering songs that I might like, but don’t yet know. It’s not going to play me anything from Radio Freedom: Voice Of The African National Congress And The People’s Army Umkhonto We Sizwe, as John Peel did in June 1986.

I’m not really a DJ guy, but I think we need DJs more than ever. Now that we have torn down the barriers to making music, we need curation at the other end. We need taste and expertise; people who can hear a muddy jazz-funk album track and realise it can be remixed into a banger. People who will add that banger to a high street shop playlist, where it can catch the ear of an unwary shopper.

And this time, I will have Shazam at the ready.

It might even be someone making a record by sampling the bass line from ‘Cavern’ by Liquid Liquid

Content warning for sexual assault

When I was 19 and sitting by myself on a cold beach in Swansea — I was wearing an actual coat — a man nearby took out his penis and started wanking while staring at me. He was white, and looked like he was in his thirties. He had fine shoulder-length blonde hair that was blowing around in the wind.

He was about 20 feet away. He had silently taken up position on top of a little sand dune in front of me, filling the sky. He was staring intently at me with something in his face: anger, disgust, malice.

But all that came second. I was reading a book, so it was the noise that I heard first. What’s that? And I looked up, as I was supposed to. The frictive swish. The sticky, clicky swick-swick-swick as he jerked his foreskin over his glans.

It was the noise that pinned me in place, and it’s the noise that I still remember now.

It was frightening, yes; there was nobody else around, and I didn’t know whether he would try to rape me. But more than anything else it was horrifying. He was like a maggot, striving in the darkness, no separation between form and purpose. There was no cognition, no explanation, no context. It was like looking up from your book and seeing someone eating a baby. I couldn’t place him. What on earth is happening here? Swick-swick-swick.

He was an ordinary man. He had limbs, a face, a brain. He was wearing clothes, so I assume he went into shops and bought things. There was a bag lying on the dunes at his feet, so I assume he had possessions. He definitely had parents; probably acquaintances, a home.

And yet he chose — he chose — to dislocate me, to permanently injure my sense of control and belonging and autonomy and safety. He had chosen all of this before I had even looked up from my book. And I can’t fathom, I literally cannot comprehend why you would choose to do that to an individual sitting in front of you, someone who hasn’t harmed you; someone you’ve never met.

It upsets me that I have spent my precious time wondering what he was thinking.

My initial response was to turn back to my book and pretend to carry on reading for five minutes. Swick-swick-swick. I kind of admire young me for this; it was objectively batshit, but I was in an objectively batshit situation through no fucking fault of my own. Non-compliance was my only weapon. I calculated that the absence of a response would be less gratifying for him than any of the other options.

I think this might have worked, because he was still fruitlessly jerking when I ‘reached the end of the chapter’, neatly packed up my sandwiches (I had gone off them) and walked away. I didn’t know whether it was better to look over my shoulder (to check he wasn’t coming after me) or not look over my shoulder (swick-swick-swick). Such is the dilemma of the modern girl.

What I wanted to do was kill him. This isn’t a figure of speech; I’d still like to kill him. I mean, let’s face it, men like this are a fucking waste of skin. If I could have been certain I’d physically be strong enough, and that I’d get away with it, I would have bludgeoned him or strangled him and not felt a moment of remorse from that day to this. Imagine how much you’d enjoy the news coverage: ‘Wife of murdered postman/civil servant/doctor pleads for information as police hunt continues.’ It would have been brilliant, and awfully cathartic, honestly. Because he wasn’t the first man to do something like this to me. He wasn’t the second. He wasn’t the third. You get the picture.

But I live in the real world, where women go to prison if they kill men like this on the ‘insufficient’ grounds that they are worthless sacs of gristle and shit. So I assume he’s still out there: passing women in the street, giving women his coffee order, dandling granddaughters on his knee. I’m left with the rage and the disgust, and it has nowhere to go.

I think maybe men, good men, don’t realise what the rage does to you. It’s become a commonplace that every woman you know has experienced sexual assault. I doubt any man reading this (Metropolitan readers being who they are) would dispute the significance of that. But I do think, really, that you don’t understand what it’s like: not the assaults themselves, but what it does to you, to carry around the accreting weight of fury over decades. To never achieve catharsis. And to know, with absolute certainty, that nothing will change.

I have watched the unfolding of the Mandelson/Epstein scandal and found myself unable to operate effectively. I can’t keep on task. How can it be that we’re watching this happening, again? As I write this, Harriet Harman is on a podcast pointing out that Mohammed Al Fayed may have trafficked and raped hundreds of women. He died in his bed in his nineties; the Met Police did not pass most of the complaints on to the CPS. The Guardian is reporting that a man has pled guilty to raping and assaulting a woman whose husband has already pled guilty to drugging and raping her; four other men are pleading not guilty. In Britain this week a man was convicted of raping several babies. He was working in a nursery. What the living fuck are we supposed to do with this?

So what I do is: I sit and stew, and I think. And what I think is, the outer edge of male sexuality is the fundamental factor that determines female subjugation. Women cannot fix this, and men have shown that they don’t want to. A tolerance of male sexual extremity is priced into our society and culture. Our systems accept that it will happen; all we can do is get out the swabs and buckets afterwards. There’s not a thing women can do about it: its drive, its implacability, its violence, its all-encompassing range. We just have to hope that our assaults will be small and survivable.

And I think we never talk about this, not in a serious way.

Women (and children) live within the bounds of the threat posed by male sexual predation. It sets the terms on which we are allowed to exist (wary forbearance, limited expression); it shapes our consciousness (complicit, ashamed). It determines the things human society accepts as the price of admission (the near-universal female experience of assault), and the things we absolutely cannot imagine (anything that would act as a structural brake).

Let’s face it: a female-dominated society would long ago have established a thousand different norms. Adult men would be assumed capable of sexual abusiveness until they had concretely established otherwise. Men would have to offer up their phones and hard drives for forensic investigation when applying for a job, joining a gym, moving home, joining a dating app or opening a bank account. Any ‘he said/she said’ cases would be explicitly legally weighted in women’s favour. You’d need your wife’s consent to get Viagra.

But that sounds nuts, doesn’t it? It would have some really unfair outcomes (ha!), and it goes against everything we believe about how justice and society works. And that is, of course, my point. It is extraordinarily hard to construct a plausible narrative about a society that effectively curbs the extremities of male sexuality. Those who try to imagine it sound like lunatics. Ask any political lesbian.

So can we please at least acknowledge — can we at least say it out loud and look it in the face — that in our actually-existing culture, in order not to inconvenience the majority of men who, yes, do not do this shit: in order to accommodate you, to not be unjust and unfair to you, to not limit your life chances, to not get all fucking hysterical about it — we accept that women’s safety and happiness and ability to thrive is permanently and consistently impeded.

And what I think is, ordinary feminism looks ridiculous and whiny to outsiders because we can do nothing more than tinker around the edges of this fundamental problem. Feminist action on male sexual violence — brave and difficult as it is — can be nothing more than a desperate rearguard action. Excuse me, sir, can South Yorkshire Police please more accurately record the numbers of men raping young girls in Bradford!

And I have to live in this world, this world in which a surprisingly large number of men search for rape-themed porn, and a bunch of lads in Downing St remove a talented woman so that Jeffrey Epstein’s friend can have her job. I live in the world where the Epstein affair is broken down in lots of different ways — a scandal about ‘paedophilia’ (so much more piquant than boring old misogyny for the jaded Westminster hack), an exciting political horse race, a chin-stroking conundrum about the moral bounds of lobbying, a scripted nod to ‘the victims’ — but is never viewed through the only lens that brings it all into focus. And I wonder why I can’t concentrate.

For more on the male gaze (as if there isn’t enough already):

Gormenghast is a vast and labyrinthine castle, immured by tradition and ritual. But new life has come in the form of Titus Groan: a son to the melancholy Lord Sepulchrave Groan and the countess Gertrude, a brother to the wilful young Fuchsia. There is also Steerpike, a youth who has escaped the monstrous kitchens to become an assistant to the family doctor Prunesquallor and who wishes to rise further. To do so he embarks on a campaign of manipulation and destruction that ends in the death of Sepulchrave. Change and youth has come to Gormenghast, and that may not be a good thing.

The Legend

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy -- Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959) -- is one of the great fantasy epics of post-Second World War Britain. However, it is not one of those fantasies.

Largely identified with the legacy of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954-55), fantasy as a genre has become associated with pseudo-medieval secondary worlds, complicated maps and names with apostrophes in them. There are other traditions associated with C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) and T. H. White’s Once and Future King (1938-58), although those are, respectively, secondary world and pseudo-medieval.

Titus Groan is not like these books; it is not an heroic fantasy of kings and monsters. To begin with, Peake goes under his full name, Mervyn, instead of his initials, which tells us something about the man. And while the book is full of silly names, it has no map in the front; indeed, the castle defies cartography. Titus Groan has more in common with Kafka than the Brothers Grimm, and more in common with Dickens than Beowulf. It is fantastical, rather than a fantasy.

What it does have in common with these other post-Second World War epics is that it is a product of its times. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (1950) is set during the Blitz and concerns a moral struggle with forces of oppression. The Once and Future King is about an Albion modelling for the world a better way of living than ‘might makes right’. Much as Tolkien resisted any contemporary political parallels, The Lord of the Rings features a struggle against a world-dominating power in which victory is won, ultimately, through the selfless service of the petit bourgeoisie (and his batman).

Peake sees mid-century Britain in a more acerbic light. The aristos are mad, and everyone else is a servant. Whatever glories it might once have had are mouldering or gone; the infrastructure is moribund and meaningless. The whole thing is bound together with maddening ritual and suffocating tradition that allows for no innovation, no life, no joy. Gormenghast is a model of post-Imperial Britain, and instead of looking back at past splendour it looks forward to future squalor: the Britain of the ‘70s and ‘80s, a grim little isolated island full of decaying relics and weird characters.

This was the last book I had read to me as a child. Well, not the whole book: my father read me the first paragraph or so and then handed it to me to finish for myself. Reading it subsequently at a British boarding school in the early ‘80s, I recognised its world immediately. Not only because I too was trapped by tradition in a crumbling pile of masonry haunted by monstrous individuals, but because that wider vision of an outdated and inward-looking culture was all too accurate.

The first paragraph captured me instantly:

GORMENGHAST, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat: by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

Yep, that’s just a paragraph. Remember the reference to Dickens I made earlier?

Peake was better known as an illustrator and painter before he wrote Titus Groan. And he writes like a painter: his style is Impressionistic, piling up language like paint to create an impasto, a physical landscape of verbiage, full of light and shade. But the effect is Expressionistic. Everything is packed with emotion. He looks as an artist, seeing everything minutely; but he describes what he sees with the pathetic fallacy of a poet, investing it with meaning. Everything becomes present and alive. It is, for a certain kind of reader, an intoxicating experience.

Peake was a child of Empire. The son of missionaries, he grew up in colonial compounds in China; he was an outsider there, and was subsequently an outsider in Britain. That view from without, and the Chinese culture he grew up around, deeply influenced the style and subject of his books.

This makes Titus Groan itself an outsider in the British post-War fantasy canon. It is not quite a secondary world, but it is also not quite ours; it is not pseudo-historical, but it is also not quite contemporary. It is not quite anything else; it is wholly itself.

Its legacy does not compare with the vast shadow that Mordor casts over contemporary culture, but it is perceptible in some places: in ‘All Cats Are Grey’ and ‘The Drowning Man’ on The Cure’s album Faith (1981); in characters in George R. R. Martin’s books; in the fugitive corridors and odd rooms of Hogwarts.1 A certain kind of reader will always find Titus Groan: outsiders, or those who would like to be outsiders. And then the book will find its way into them.

The Reality

‘A certain kind of reader’. Let’s be honest, a male reader, most likely. A young male reader. Probably not great at PE, possibly given to writing bad poetry, definitely with a high opinion of their own intellectual or artistic abilities.2

Like many ‘cult’ works, the cult is as exclusionary as it is inclusive. Peake’s prose bears a lot of responsibility for this. He is an artist with a thesaurus as a palette, picking obtuse and esoteric words to fling at the page. The reader is either going to embrace this kind of sesquipedalian extravagance, happy to have their vocabulary expanded along with their mind; or they will quail in horror, overwhelmed and under-entertained.

The prose is symbolic of a deeper theme. Peake’s paragraphs are as torturous and antiquated as the castle; the language models the dark complexity of his setting and typifies the density of the culture he is depicting. It also models a certain personality: the trivia-hound, the snapper up of unconsidered trifles, the flaneur, the collector. Gormenghast, the castle, and Titus Groan, the book, are as full of weird detail and strange objects as the bookshelves, pockets and mind of a certain kind of small boy.

Along with all that junk there are, of course, bright gems: startling visions that lodge in the imagination. The Hall of Bright Carvings. The Room of Cats. The Tower of Flints. The sisters, Cora and Clarice, taking tea on the trunk of a dead tree growing horizontally out of the top of a tower. Fuschia’s attic, populated with imagined characters who caper for her amusement. Gertrude’s bedroom, dark with ivy and rustling with birds and cats.

There is a moment in Titus Groan that is easily overlooked, but which I think is key. In an obscure corridor, in a heap of rusting and cobwebbed armour, Steerpike finds a swordstick. He purloins it, cleans it up and uses it as a cane. The swordstick is a metaphor for Steerpike; it presents as purely practical and useful, but contains the potential for violence and death. It is also emblematic of Steerpike’s role in the world of Gormenghast: crafting a new sharp reality out of untidy remains.

And it is also emblematic of a major theme of the book: that this terrible, stifling place is full of wonders, for those who look for them. Steerpike is one of those people; the Lady Fuschia, Titus’s older sister, is another. These are the young people who struggle against the dead weight of tradition and the stones of Gormenghast.

Steerpike, though, is the villain. Peake is very clear that his ruthless individualism is just as horrible as the relentless ritual of previous generations. Peake evidently has a cynical view of the coming generation of the ‘50s, seeing them as a mixture of rebellion for rebellion’s sake and of naked self-interest.

Fuschia has the soul of an artist, and covers the walls of her room with drawings; her mind is full of fertile imaginings, and she is consequently doomed. Neither the traditions of Gormenghast nor the manipulations of Steerpike have room for her. Titus, who is an infant for most of this book, will eventually flee the castle entirely.

The hero of the series turns out to be the unlikely Dr Prunesquallor, the family doctor. He is a ridiculous figure, etiolated and effete, and cursed with a hideous whinnying laugh. Behind his thick spectacles his magnified eyes swim like jellyfish. A member of the educated, tasteful, professional bourgeoisie, within the castle he belongs neither to the ruling class nor to the servants. He scorns the affectations and traditions of the aristocracy, but he also suspects the greedy insurrection of Steerpike. He is the only one with an independent and functioning mind and, more importantly, a moral core of iron.

In placing his hero among the bourgeoisie, Peake is finally in accord with the other post-Second World War British fantasy epics. T. H. White’s King Arthur is not raised as a knight, but as a lowly member of his foster-father’s household; he comes to Camelot as an outsider. Narnia is saved by a gaggle of middle-class kids; Middle Earth is saved by an independently wealthy gentleman and his gardener.

After all, these polite country squires and small town doctors and modest gardeners had just joined in epic journeys across North African deserts and South East Asian jungles and up onto European beaches to help save civilization. And these were the people who were to define the post-Second World War country, a country which is now majority ABC1s (although, tellingly, half of them claim to be working class).3

Perhaps the thing that has stopped the Gormenghast trilogy reaching the national treasure status of Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia is that, for all its fantastical setting, it’s entirely too truthful in its vision of that nation.

Speaking of treasures, national and eldritch, here’s where that ring came from:

Books to fall asleep to (non-pejorative)

: I finally wrestled Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell to the ground this month after a couple of false starts. Hilary Mantel and MacCulloch were researching Cromwell at the same time in the late noughties, and developed a close friendship while doing so. (This is ballast for my thesis that the pragmatic, adaptable and economically literate Cromwell was an appropriate hero for the anti-ideological age of Clinton, Blair and Obama.) Mantel published first with Wolf Hall in 2009, but MacCulloch managed to slip Thomas Cromwell (2018) in between Bring up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), a run of events that transformed this eminent historian of Christianity into a best-selling non-fiction author.

Thomas Cromwell is catnip for the Wolf Hall devotee, albeit necessarily a little confrontational in places. Rationally, I knew that Cromwell got up to a lot of, er, crappy stuff (self-enrichment, torture, toadying, killing), but Mantel tends to let him off the hook (or perhaps shows us Cromwell letting himself off the hook - although I honestly think it’s more the former than the latter). MacCulloch, appropriately, is unsentimental and unsparing in the details.

Thomas Cromwell has gone straight into one of my favourite genres: books that I can read myself to sleep with. The boundaries of this category – which exists only in my head – are extremely well defined. The writing must be excellent; mangled sentences, repetition, stupidity and boring vocabulary keep me awake. The subject matter must be non-fiction (novels are too involving), and it must be something I’m genuinely interested in (I mean no shade here, but I personally do not care about gardening or the history of aviation). The narrative must be as un-pulsating as possible, for obvious sleepy reasons; I love Michael Lewis, but he’s for staying awake with, not going to sleep with. And the author must be a genuine subject expert, preferably an academic or someone who works in one of the less groovy think tanks. Journalists and professional writers tend to be far too good at telling a story, and that only makes me want to stay awake so that I can find out what happens next.

What I like is an extremely erudite, clever, informative-but-meandering drone delivered with real panache. My favourite book of this kind is Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom (an 800-page, 350-year history of Prussia), which includes sections on the Brandenburg education system that would send a caffeinated cocaine freak into a deep snooze. Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb is another absolute killer (hundreds of pages about electrons hitting foil sheets), as is Tony Judt’s Postwar (much, much more than you ever needed to know about the European Economic Community).

Thomas Cromwell contains multiple passages about Tudor ‘affinities’, the informal groupings of men-on-the-make who clustered around Court personalities. MacCulloch is, quite justifiably, keen to establish exactly who was in Cromwell’s affinity, and these passages – in which the movements of Mr (later Sir) Edward Squidlington are painstakingly traced over decades, from abbey to fishpond to New Year present to account book – are absolutely, perfectly boring.

Letterboxd Diary

What has enjoyed watching this month.

Bourne-ville

The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

I was actually looking for The Matrix (1999) for a little January comfort watch and then discovered that it wasn’t available to stream anywhere so I settled on that other Gen X action stalwart, Jason Bourne.

At the time Bourne was heralded as a Bond for a new generation, with none of the blatant sexism, xenophobia or quippy amorality that Gen X found so queasy. Bourne had a serious German girlfriend, a begrudging facility with the beautifully choreographed and crunchy fight scenes, and knew that the intelligence services he once worked for were sinister and unreliable.

It’s that last point that really stood out on this rewatch. The films are solely about Jason Bourne’s relationship with the CIA he once served, and this severely limits the sequels. They keep having to go further up the chain of command to find ever-more-evil CIA chiefs for Bourne to hit with a rolled up magazine. Each subsequent film is a retread of the previous one, but with Albert Finney instead of Brian Cox, David Strathairn instead of Chris Cooper. We avoid the ludicrous threat escalator of Marvel films (I’m going to destroy you! I’m going to destroy the USA! I’m going to destroy the galaxy! I’m going to destroy THE MULTIVERSE!) But it also means that the films are only ever about Bourne and his vengeance.

More realistic stakes are also less idealistic ones, apparently. This super-spy isn’t capable of dispensing justice, serving their country or saving the world; he can only look after himself. Perhaps it’s this really that made Bourne the perfect action hero for Generation X: he was socially liberal and yet deeply individualistic.

Le Samourai (1967)

In which Alain Delon’s loner hitman screws up a job and finds himself on the run from the cops, the mob that hired him and, ultimately, himself.

It’s no less ludicrous than Bourne films, really, and I’m not sure I buy the porcelain Delon as a killing machine any more than the pug-nosed Matt Damon. But by golly, it’s beautiful. The opening sequence alone is worth the price of admission: a static shot of Delon smoking in bed in a darkened room as the credits roll over the top. At first you think the film is in black and white, until he finally moves and you really it’s just that his whole world is grey: a grey room, grey clothes, grey cigarette smoke. He is the only discernable thing in his world. And so, right from the beginning, you know what this man is like and can probably guess that he’s doomed.

Santosh (2024)

A Bourne antidote: a British/Indian film with a perfect Hollywood set up. Santosh is a young Indian woman living in a drab town far from the bright lights. When her cop husband dies suddenly in the line of duty, she discovers that she is allowed to take his job in lieu of a widow’s pension, and finds herself investigating the death of a young girl while under the wing of a rare senior female detective.

The film then proceeds to do something very un-Hollywood with the concept. Instead of telling a story about a counter-intuitively brilliant detective team fighting engrained misogyny, the film exposes a vein of brutal police corruption that provokes unpredictable responses from Santosh herself. (The film, which also touches on the status of Dalits and the self-serving behaviour of rural elites, still hasn’t been officially screened in India.)

One of things that stood out to me is how the film seems to deliberately protect Santosh herself from the threat of physical violence, and instead subjects her to moral violence. She is in a three-way fight between her desire to do a good job as a police officer, her desire to be accepted by her mentor and her fellow officers, and her basic humanity. Shahana Goswami plays this absolutely perfectly, simultaneously naive, hard, nervous, stern and troubled. We should warn you, though, that it’s incredibly depressing.

Mountainhead (2025)

Part of the job of satire – altogether now – is to comfort the afflicted as well as afflict the comfortable. In fact you could argue that is most of the job. Rude impersonations and clinical piss-taking don’t tend to change anyone’s behaviour, but they reassure the rest of us that we are not alone in finding things awful, ridiculous or frightening. Satire tells us that there are fellow humans who feel the same way we do: people we can trust, people with whom we might huddle and even organise; people alongside whom we could even seize power, thus becoming the objects of satire ourselves.

Jesse Armstrong’s directorial debut is a satire about four tech moguls who go on a retreat and, confronted with each other’s awfulness, lose their minds. It’s not telling us anything we don’t know: we know these people are awful. (Two of the characters are assumed to be avatars for Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; Steve Carrell is extremely good in the former role.) Part of how awful they are is that they insist on thrusting their awfulnesses into our faces every day through their apps. We know they’re over-schooled and undereducated, asocial and amoral, unloved and uncontrolled.

What Mountainhead does is reassure us that we’re right: they are awful. It gives us a space to laugh, with a ghastly sort of terror, at the men who have taken one of the greatest human inventions and turned it into a machine for producing misery, madness and money. And there are some good laughs and splendid jokes in Mountainhead. But sadly they start to diminish as the plot moves into gear.

Armstrong likes a dark realism in his satires. Part of the success of Succession (2018–23) was that the Roy family were realistic characters. The satire was still there, but as you got to know them – and to understand why they were like that – you started to feel some grudging sympathy for them (if not actual empathy). The satire bit harder and comforted the viewer a little more precisely because these were people, not thinly-veiled caricatures.

Because it has to establish a narrative and deliver plenty of laughs within a two-hour window, Mountainhead does not quite have the time to develop the characters enough. And the movement of the plot from character-based comedy to murderous farce perhaps needed a little more absurdism in it to help it take off. There is a moment in the film, in the middle of a murder attempt, when a bevy of lawyers are summoned to negotiate between the aspiring killers and the terrified victim. Sadly, we never get to see the drafting of the resulting contract. I would have liked to see that film: a film about the cringing minions, not just the monsters they tend to and facilitate (another thing Succession pulled off brilliantly with the ghastly Gerri, Hugo, Karolina and Karl.)

The Ice Storm (1997)

A case study in how a film can seem terribly adult and subtle when you’re in your twenties, and somewhat blunt and hysterical thirty years later. A group of affluenza-afflicted suburbanites in the early ‘70s treat Cosmopolitan and Playboy like instruction manuals (wife-swapping, self-actualisation, Valium, shop-lifting) while causing untold misery to themselves and everyone around them, particularly their kids.

We got kinda irritated by it on this rewatch and ended up mostly paying attention to the sets. It’s interesting to compare its echt suburban ‘70s interiors with those of The Holdovers (2023), which is rapidly becoming a Christmas staple in this house. The Holdovers takes place in a ‘70s that is not only a little bit ‘60s, but a little bit ‘40s and ‘50s too, and even a little bit 1890s in some places. Given that most people don’t throw out their furniture every ten years, The Holdovers feels like a more recognisable ‘70s. I do, though, want an awful lot of the furniture from The Ice Storm. Apart from the water bed. And the bowl of keys, obviously.

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

Give Me The Simple Life - Annie Ross, Gerry Mulligan Quartet. Starting January with good intentions of leading the simple life after all the Christmas indulgence.

Keshukoran - Sister Irene O’Connor. Sister O’Connor is Catholic nun who writes her own devotional music, produced and engineered by a fellow nun, Sister Marimil Lobregat.

Deeper - Attica Blues. Somehow January feels like a trip-hop sort of month: a little bit blue, a little bit woozy, a little bit unnerving.

Kamukamo-Shikamo-Nidomokamo!! - MONO NO AWARE. But perhaps we need to stop moping about and perk up a bit. Or a lot.

100 Horses - Geese. I’m old, so I’ve heard a lot of hip New York bands. At the beginning I kept expecting someone to shout ‘Blues Explosion!’ Then I thought David Byrne might join in. And then I wondered if it was The Strokes. But then, I like all those bands too.

Big Balloon - Dutch Uncles. I’ve heard a lot of Manchester bands in my time, too. This is a good one, a lovely mixture of muscular rhythm and soaring tune.

The Late Great Cassiopia - The Essex Green. Speaking of New York bands, here’s a nice piece of psychedelia-inflected rock.

Kantori Ongaku - Devendra Banhart. Ah, the twenty-first century Donovan. Well, I have a soft spot for the twentieth century Donovan n’all, so I am happy to have another one.

Musician, Please Take Heed - Emily Browning. I’m afraid I’m a Belle and Sebastian fan (a middle-aged indie white man? Really?), but I’m willing to admit that Stuart Murdoch’s whine can be an acquired taste.

Beartown - Polar Bear. Finally a little blue, woozy, unnerving circus march to accompany us into the dregs of winter.

You can find the whole playlist on Spotify, as usual:

For visions of history that are guaranteed to keep you awake, there’s always the genre that has termed ‘macaron timeclash’:

‘A lot of actors who are handsome when young need to put on some miles before the full flavor emerges... Here Clooney at last looks like a big screen star; the good-looking leading man from television is over with.’

Roger Ebert, review of Out of Sight, 1998

I’ve got a lot of time for the late film critic Roger Ebert, so I don’t mean to diss the big guy. But this approbative statement about George Clooney back in 1998 — that ‘the good-looking leading man from television is over with’ — merits some unpicking.

George Clooney was already a huge star before the release of Out of Sight, Steven Soderbergh’s sexy, grown-up crime caper. (If you haven’t seen it, or haven’t re-watched it in a while, you should get on it; it’s still enormous fun.) His turn as Doug Ross in ER from ‘94 to ‘99 had made him as famous as it’s possible for a mid-career actor to be.

And Clooney does nothing in Out of Sight that he had not done in ER. He delivers his lines confidently, looks at you from under his great big sable eyelashes, and doesn’t mess up. He is very beautiful, and has a carefully modulated and charming hyper-awareness of same. (Take that thing where he catches his breath in the middle of a sentence and then chuckles; I always interpret this as him happily remembering what his face looks like.)

This is all good. I like watching George Clooney do these things. But how was any of it a departure? Yes, Out of Sight is a film, not a TV series, but it’s a well-made, romantic slice of cartoonish Americana; it’s not flipping Eraserhead. And nobody argued they couldn’t take James Gandolfini seriously because he was in The Sopranos. So what is the key category distinction here? Could it be that medical dramas are regarded as flippant entertainments for women and children, while sweary dramas about guns and crime are regarded as profound meditations for serious, grown-up boys? Could it be that the anticipated audience for Out of Sight was considerably richer in testosterone than the core ER audience, and was therefore better able to confer distinction?

Anyway: because Clooney is basically movie wallpaper these days (albeit very nice wallpaper from a darling little studio in Amalfi), what you really notice, watching Out of Sight now, is how extraordinary Jennifer Lopez is.

I hadn’t paid much attention to Lopez since Out of Sight was released, but I had a dim impression that she became a mildly tragic figure whose fame-hungry manoeuvres keep the online gossip sites humming. The only things I ‘knew’ were that she was in that film where she said ‘gobble, gobble’, she sang ‘Jenny from the Block’, and at any given moment there’s a 50% chance she’s married to Ben Affleck.

This made Out of Sight a surprising re-watch. Because what Lopez is in that film, most of all, is a giant star; the audiences just didn’t know it when they took their seats. She is likeable, charismatic, slightly mysterious, a little withheld, massively cool, entirely believable and jaw-droppingly beautiful. She is on screen with an array of storied Hollywood talent — Ving Rhames, Michael Keaton, Viola Davis, Albert Brooks, Dennis Farina and even (briefly) Samuel L. Jackson — and it never occurs to us to think that she doesn’t belong there.

I’ve already admitted that I had zero knowledge of what happened to Lopez’s career after Out of Sight, so I will try to keep the thinly-disguised digest of Wikipedia entries to a minimum. But one way of answering the question ‘Whatever happened to Jennifer Lopez?’ is: She has been successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. She has starred in dozens of movies, owns a production company, has a streaming deal with Netflix, has made a string of studio albums, sells out enormous arenas, and has a residency in Las Vegas. She also has a consistent record of activism in Democratic politics, especially on immigration. After a speaker at a Trump rally made remarks about Puerto Rico being ‘an island of garbage’, she was one of the people who pushed back; her parents are from there.

What she isn’t, of course, is a critical darling. Interesting directors are not giving her cameos as a hot older woman or a wise midlife CEO or a hardbitten, wisecracking bitch. She’s not being cast by Rian Johnson or Wes Anderson or Kathryn Bigelow. She is not — as Clooney is — relaxing into a warm hip-bath of general acclaim. She is not — as Brad Pitt is — being invited to show her range. Nor is she — as Cate Blanchett is — having fun in Soderbergh’s latest. Maybe she’s ‘difficult’, but I mistrust the media’s reporting on these things; and anyway, have you met actors?

The turning point in Lopez’s career was the gleeful odium that rained down on Gigli, the 2003 rom-com where she first met Affleck. It’s in Gigli that she delivered one of the most brutally reviled lines of all time, the aforementioned ‘gobble, gobble’. As everyone quickly found out — mostly without watching the film — the line is a playful request for cunnilingus. It was delivered by this outrageously attractive woman who was, by the time of the film’s release, going out with the guy to whom the request is directed. He seems to have been the only person who didn’t mind.

I’m going to focus on the guy in question because I think his place in the American imagination explains something about what happened. Ben Affleck the person is a real boy who has some privileges and has faced some challenges. But ‘Ben Affleck’ was, at this time, the prime avatar of a white working class guy from some state where it’s always cold, and where the local plant is always laying people off. ‘Ben Affleck’ suffers the trials of Job, and nothing is ever his fault. ‘Ben Affleck’ turns up late to a job interview because he was nursing his invalid mom, and is told that the position has just been filled. He walks despondently through the snow to a neighbourhood bar where he spends his last ten dollars buying a beer for his brother, whose family — including the little kiddo with the bad chest — is about to be made homeless. In the parking lot of the bar, ‘Ben Affleck’ is set upon by psychotic motorcyclists for no reason. Bleeding from a head wound, ‘Ben Affleck’ stumbles off, trips over a loose bootlace and falls through the window of a local business, which unfortunately turns out to be a bank that is in the middle of taking a cash delivery. Reaching for his ID to calm the security guard, ‘Ben Affleck’ instead pulls out the unlicensed gun he is looking after for a friend. The only thing ‘Ben Affleck’ has going for him is the love of a demure local girl who says she will wait for him until he gets out of prison.

What ‘Ben Affleck’ is not supposed to do is happily comply with sexual commands from a fabulously beautiful and rich movie star lady.

Because of the blithely stupid recursive quality of popular media in the Noughties, the brutality of the critical response to Gigli became a news story in itself. (I don’t think this would happen in the same way now; there are too many people primed to say ‘Well, actually…’) For a couple of months after its release, everyone online in the English-speaking world was making jokes about how bad it was, even though hardly anyone actually saw it. (The ‘worst film of all time’? Do me a favour. I’m willing to bet that Ben Affleck has made worse films all by himself.)

It’s impossible to watch the ‘gobble, gobble’ clip now without cringing, but that’s partly because it’s impossible to separate it from its impact. It’s also very hard, on a female-solidarity level, to watch a woman request oral sex (still a bit of a mainstream taboo-buster at the time, honestly; there’s even a whole sub-plot about this in The Sopranos) while knowing how the request itself, an experimental assertion of ordinary female sexuality, was subsequently weaponised against her.

In fairness, it is also true that no amount of talent or sex appeal can render the phrase ‘gobble, gobble’ acceptable. It was an error to include the words ‘gobble, gobble’ in the script. A better director would have cut the words ‘gobble, gobble’, possibly after throwing up in a small bucket, and a better or more confident actor might have refused to say ‘gobble, gobble’. Mistakes on all sides.

In those few unwitting seconds, Lopez is kissing goodbye to any possible universe in which she becomes a four-quadrant movie superstar. For me, that’s what makes it hard to watch. I at least hope, for J-Lo’s sake, that Affleck was amazing at cunnilingus.

Lopez has said that she found the response to Gigli ‘eviscerating’, as well she might. In 2004, a year after it was released, her performance in another co-star vehicle with Affleck was cut to the bone after test audiences objected to seeing them as a couple (despite enthusiastically consuming media that insistently featured them as a couple). But, incomprehensibly, she chose not to lie down and die in a puddle of shame. She just kept on working in the fields that still welcomed her, becoming extremely popular with audiences that people are sniffy about: teenagers, pop fans, romcom aficionados, Spanish speakers, daytime TV watchers, wedding planners (sorry). (Her work rate is truly extraordinary; you get the sense she thinks everything she has might disappear at any moment.)

Throughout it all she has remained on the front page of the tabloids, all sequins and bikinis and gold hoops. She has been the opposite of demure. I can’t help but feel that part of the ‘problem’ with J-Lo is that she is brassy, not classy. She’s admitted that some parts of her experience have been painful, but she hasn’t shown any goddamned penitence; she hasn’t apologised for rudely continuing to exist and make oodles of money. She didn’t get down and stay down until someone told her she could get up.

Reviewing one of her movies in 2005, Ebert nailed the unreasonableness of her punishment while also encapsulating this sense that Lopez needed to be forgiven. (Forgiven for what, exactly?) He observed that the average reviewer ‘will have no respect for Jennifer Lopez, because she is going through a period right now when nobody is satisfied with anything she does... Give Lopez your permission to be good again; she is the same actress now as when we thought her so new and fine.’

As you watch Lopez now opposite Clooney in Out of Sight, the subsequent mismatch of their career trajectories seems absolutely wild; it bears no relation to what you’re seeing on screen. I’d like to see what she would do now in a big, smart, grown-up movie. It’s only fairly recently that beautiful young women actors have been allowed to age at all; to — as Ebert puts it — ‘develop their full flavour’. I’m still not over the thrill I get every time one of these women pops up with a scraggly neck and a deeper voice: Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Kristen Scott Thomas, Kate Winslet, Winona Ryder (and yes, none of these actors are women of colour, are they?) I want more; we’re not at parity yet. Think of all the cumulative hours you’ve spent watching John Travolta and Alec Baldwin and Mel I-can’t-believe-I-am-having-to-say-this Gibson.

In her terrifying book Toxic, examines the ‘strange, febrile years of the noughties’ in which internet-driven incursions into the physical and emotional privacy of famous women had horrible consequences. Ditum writes: ‘For the public, tearing these women to pieces was both a social activity and form of divination. In the entrails of their reputations, we hunted for clues about what a woman ought to be.’ It’s hard not to hear echoes of Lopez’s experience in that.

I almost hope she fell foul of the complex forces Ditum describes, because the alternative is that audiences diverted the course of a woman’s career because she had the temerity to go out with Ben fucking Affleck. I mean, he’s fine, but he’s no George Clooney.

Speaking of which, here is George being a ‘good-looking leading man from television’ in ER

Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) is a suave, cunning and much put-upon member of the court of the capricious and all-powerful Elizabeth I (Miranda Richardson). With the hindrance of his idiot hanger-on Lord Percy Percy (Tim McInnerny) and his innocently dumb servant Baldrick (Tony Robinson) he is constantly devising schemes to get ahead, all of which fail, leaving him constantly just a few steps ahead of the executioner.

Blackadder

If you’ve ever noticed that older adults tend to have a peculiarly clear and immediate recall of events from their childhood and adolescence, you might be interested to know there’s a term for this phenomenon: ‘the reminiscence bump’. This refers to a fertile period, memory-formation-wise, that kicks off around the age of 10 and peaks somewhere between 15 and 25. This explains why cinemas are full of billion-dollar remakes of ‘80s comic books, why Facebook groups are full of crumblies posting about Spangles, and the existence of this newsletter.

It also explains why these memories are so beguiling and cosy: we were young when we formed them, and did not yet have the understanding or context to properly comprehend the world. The recollections might be clear, but they also tend to be narrow in focus and misleading in apprehension.

The reminiscence bump appears to happen because this is a period in our lives during which everything is new, including us; and new information is important information. So in it goes: into our memories, our world views, ourselves. All of which is a long-winded explanation of why, while watching Blackadder II recently, I raised a little cheer at random phrases. ‘A nugget of purest green.’ ‘You have a woman’s hand, my lord!’ ‘You’re so clever today, you better be careful your foot doesn’t fall off.’ The lines that provoke this response aren’t usually ‘jokes’ in the sense of punch lines; they’re set-ups, or bits of business. But they are nevertheless hard-coded somewhere at the root of my personality, impressed upon my brain at its most malleable and hungry moment.

It should be noted, however, that Blackadder II is also full of incredible jokes. One of the reasons it went in so hard and deep is that it is very, very good. It is significant that I don’t remember whether I even saw the previous series of the show, The Black Adder (1983).

The Black Adder was written by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson as a vehicle for Atkinson. It is set in the late Middle Ages, opens with the Battle of Bosworth, and features Atkinson as an idiot prince ineptly scheming to get ahead at court. It is not very, very funny. It is full of funny ideas, but the execution is off. It smacks of an idea that has been both over-thought and under-thought. The opening episode, for example, starts with a voiceover (never a good sign) explaining how Henry VII rewrote history, wiping a fictional Richard IV from the record. If this isn’t complex enough, a lot of the subsequent jokes rely on the audience having an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Blackadder II, on the other hand, begins with a knob joke. We are introduced to Blackadder as he and Percy are practising archery indoors, and Baldrick is holding the target. Blackadder distracts Percy, who consequently hits Baldrick in the genitals with an arrow.

Of course, this is not just any knob joke; it’s a good knob joke that escalates in all kinds of unexpected ways. But it is a knob joke nonetheless; a mangled knob, rather than a mangled quotation from Shakespeare.

Blackadder II was written by Richard Curtis again, but this time alongside Ben Elton, who had made his name with the anarchic student sitcom The Young Ones (1982). It is often claimed that it was Elton who brought the knob gags to Blackadder II, but this flies in the face of the evidence: there are plenty of rude jokes in The Black Adder. They’re just not very good. One thing that Elton clearly did do was persuade everyone that Rowan Atkinson — who later found international fame as Mr Bean, and whose true comic love is clowning — could get big laughs as a witty and intelligent authority figure.

In other words, Elton brought a different comic sensibility, which went along with his different background. Curtis and Atkinson had both been to Oxford, and Atkinson was already a TV star after appearing in the sketch show Not The Nine O’Clock News (1979—82). Elton, meanwhile, had studied drama at Manchester (alongside Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson), and was strongly associated with what was then called the Alternative Comedy scene. And while he was in the process of becoming a TV star himself with Saturday Live (1985—88), his preferred mode of performance was stand-up.

Elton has spoken about how torturous he found working on Blackadder with all those Oxbridge graduates: Curtis, Atkinson, McInnerny, producer John Lloyd, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. The ‘Oxbridge’ of it was relevant, and not for inverse snobbery reasons. It was Elton’s belief that the tutorial system at Oxbridge had encouraged in these men a strong preference for disputation. Script-reading sessions, he says, were like agonising quasi-tutorials in which the comedic potential of individual words was discussed at such length that everything stopped being funny. Eventually, unable to bear it any longer, Elton stopped attending them.

The combined backgrounds and talents of Curtis and Elton made the resulting partnership extraordinarily fecund. Indeed, I think there’s an argument that the three seasons of Blackadder they wrote together is the best work either of them has done. The historical satire is leavened with slapstick, the in-jokes with knobs. Just like The Black Adder, Blackadder II has plenty of Shakespeare jokes in it; indeed, there’s one early on in that first episode, shortly before Baldrick’s lucky willy. But it’s a joke about a woman disguising herself as a boy, instead of a ‘humorous’ misquote from a history play. At a more fundamental level, the show’s setting is not the incomprehensible Wars of the Roses, but a period every British child knows all too well; a period that is instantly recognisable from ruffs and codpieces; a period that needs no explanatory voiceover.

Baldrick’s lucky willy joke is a good example of how the rebooted Blackadder approached history. Elizabethans did indeed sometimes practise archery indoors (albeit in the long galleries of grand houses, rather than tiny sets in television studios), but it absolutely doesn’t matter if you don’t know that. If anything, the scene is somewhat funnier if you don’t, the idea of indoor archery being somewhat preposterous.

Then, there is the depiction of Elizabeth I. Miranda Richardson plays her as a psychopathic pony girl, a Tudor St Trinian with access to an executioner. This means there is somewhere around three different levels of comedy in this character. One comedic level springs from portraying Elizabeth I in this way at all. There is a view of the Elizabethan era that is foundational to British sensibility, and it runs as follows (please imagine it heavily italicised): it represented the end of the damp, incestuous, confusing quagmire of medieval Britain, and the glorious beginnings of Empire. Given this, it is comically impudent and slightly rebellious to present Gloriana as a petulantly insane schoolgirl.

Then there is a deeper historical joke, one that is more nuanced and a bit sad: Renaissance princes were, essentially, coddled posh kids who existed in luridly weird circumstances. Their childhoods frequently combined imminent violence with extreme luxury. They believed themselves to be anointed by God, and yet were repeatedly presented with evidence that they were human. They were often, as a consequence, driven more than a little mad.

But the primary-level joke is the obvious one: Miranda Richardson is hilarious. Elton has said that Richardson’s performance was the one that always surprised and delighted him and Curtis; they literally did not know what she was going to do next. It’s a wonderfully unhinged bit of business, totally mad and utterly committed.

But then, all the core cast are brilliant, including Tim McInnerny in his television debut as the spectacularly dim Percy and, particularly, Patsy Byrne as Queen Elizabeth’s childhood nurse, a deliriously lurid performance. And we haven’t even got to the cameos from legends, including Miriam Margolyes and Tom ‘The Doctor’ Baker.

This was the genius of Blackadder II: the marriage of deep wit, punchy jokes, and superlative performances.

II

These days, Blackadder II is a historical comedy in another sense. It is a testament to the BBC of the period.

When it was made in the mid-’80s, the BBC had all the infrastructure of a state broadcaster. Indeed, it was practically a little state itself. It had the studios at Television Centre, where most of Blackadder was filmed. It had a costume department that could handmake Elizabethan costumes for a six-episode sitcom. And, as one of only four television stations in the UK at the time, it had the clout to pull together an amazing crew to make it.

As well as not being hugely popular, The Black Adder was also hugely expensive; as John Lloyd said, it looked a million dollars, but unfortunately cost two. But it was nevertheless recommissioned, because this was a time when the BBC was willing to give shows a chance. Curtis cannily recruited Elton, who insisted that rather than being an expensive, location-shot parody, Blackadder had to become a much cheaper (and more familiar) studio-set sitcom. Then, with perfect comedy timing, the show was cancelled. But after reading the scripts, the incoming Director of Programmes, Michael Grade, reversed his own decision and gave it another go. This brave behaviour by a senior manager says something about the internal culture of the BBC at the time.

Now, that internal culture is as lost to history as Merrie Old England. Admittedly, it was a culture of state control, limited opportunity and suffocating bureaucracy; but it was also a culture that allowed for innovation, principles and taste. It was a culture in which an unsuccessful, niche period comedy was given the room to become a national institution, instead of being quietly cancelled halfway through by a streaming platform that cares only about quarterly results.

But that’s probably just my reminiscence bump talking.

Speaking of the hysterical terrors of the Tudor court: here’s Wolf Hall

There’s a famous dunk in Mad Men in which some young dweeb in a plaid coat (I don’t know who he is, because I’d stopped watching Mad Men by this point) says to Don Draper ‘I feel bad for you’ and Don Draper devastatingly replies ‘I don’t think about you at all.’ Zing!

When you’re young, this is a thermonuclear insult. The thing is, though, by the time you’ve reached middle age, it really should sound like sanity. Most of us aren’t thinking about most other people, most of the time. This rubric explains 99% of petty social hurts: birthdays that get forgotten, parties you don’t get invited to, Christmas cards that never arrive… why not assume that none of this stuff is intentional? ‘They’re probably not thinking about me’ is a life hack, not an opening of hostilities.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because I’ve been spending time with large groups of people over Christmas and New Year, and — as an introvert — socialising with large groups of people almost always makes me deeply uncomfortable. And when I can’t get comfortable, I have to guard against bad self-soothing strategies (getting drunk, falling silent, sulking), and coming up with wrong explanations of why I’m feeling uncomfortable (‘that person is unpleasant’, ‘I’m bored’, ‘everyone hates me’, ‘this is a terrible party’). I say I have to guard against them; I don’t say that I always succeed, which is why I am sometimes functionally indistinguishable from a grouchy, self-obsessed bastard. Or a drunk person.

If you think that saying things like ‘as an introvert’ is pretty much like saying ‘as a Capricorn’, I do understand your reservations. Introversion/extraversion is not, of course, a well-evidenced medical condition. It is a proposition, a theory about personalities; it derives from Jung, but then, what doesn’t? Jung didn’t intend that everyone should start labelling themselves ‘introverts’ or ‘extraverts’; he thought most people had elements of both, which seems true on a common-sense level. From my lofty position as someone who has a Level 3 Certificate in Counselling, I’m going to go ahead and say that if you’ve read brief descriptions of introversion and extraversion and found that neither particularly resonated with you, you can probably tick ‘N/A’ and move on with your life.

Any value in these personality theories lies in the extent to which individuals use them as constructive tools for understanding themselves and making positive changes in their own behaviour. (In this, you might say, they are exactly the same as astrology.) All I know is that around a decade ago, I saw a Twitter conversation about Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (2012), and the value of the introversion/extraversion model felt suddenly, startlingly clear.

I’ve never read Cain’s book. I don’t read self-help books, as a rule, and the Wikipedia summary linked above makes it sound a bit insufferable. (If it’s true that she claimed that introversion should be the next big civil rights cause, then I can only say ‘WTF’.) But the premise of the Twitter conversation was more specific: the idea that the difference between introverts and extraverts can be explained using the metaphor of a social ‘battery’. For introverts, this battery — the amount of available energy for face-to-face interactions with other people — is depleted by spending time with other people, especially in large groups, and can be ‘recharged’ only by solitude.

Until I read this, I’d always assumed that I wasn’t an introvert because I’m not shy. I’m pretty self-confident, not notably self-effacing, and sociable when I want to be. The social battery metaphor explains why someone like me might nevertheless frequently find it impossible to socialise. Introverts can be social; they can happily give a presentation at a conference or go to the pub. What makes you an introvert is when, after doing these things, you have an immensely strong, almost sub-cognitive need to sit by yourself in a quiet room for a few hours. The bigger the gathering, or the harder you have to work (eg getting to know new people), the quicker your battery runs down. If you’re in a situation in which you cannot recharge, the problems begin (see above: withdrawal, substance abuse, sulking, etc.)

When I saw this ‘social battery’ metaphor, a lot of pieces suddenly clicked into place, and I saw a whole bunch of slightly painful stuff in a different light. For instance: it made sense of why, while taking my A Levels, every working day for two years I bought a hurried sandwich in the huge, noisy canteen and then furtively took it to a toilet cubicle, where I would lock myself in and read a book for an hour until my next lecture. I’d felt bad about that for decades; it was objectively very weird (not to mention incredibly unhygienic) and I couldn’t work out why the young me had done something so strangely, self-defeatingly tragic. Why hadn’t I gone to the library, or a park, for crying out loud? Well: because other people were in the library and the park.

It also made sense of the fact that despite finding it easy to give public speeches and appear as a media spokesperson on TV, I am almost physically unable to ‘network’, even though it’s a critical part of my job -- another thing I’d been ashamed of for years, because it affected my professional competence. (The impossibility of networking, for me, is quite hard to describe. I don’t just mean ‘it’s difficult’ or ‘I don’t like it.’ It’s more like that feeling of total paralysis that you sometimes get when you’re dreaming.)

For decades, I’d thought of these things — and literally hundreds of similar incidents, big and small — as evidence that I was a deeply awkward and perhaps slightly broken person. This assumption was buttressed by the fact that my whole life, I’ve been relatively unpopular. I’ve always had some good friends, and believe me I’m extremely thankful for that. But I’ve never more than a handful at any one time, and often appreciably fewer than other people around me.

What’s wrong with that, you might say: if you’re an introvert, surely limited popularity is the goal. Which is kind of true, except that for a long time I didn’t understand why it was happening. I didn’t realise it was the logical outcome of my own core preference for limited socialising, a preference that turns out to motivate me more strongly than my (also-existing) enjoyment of friendship. Instead, I just thought I must be repellent in some mysterious way that nobody could explain.

Understanding ideas about introversion allowed me to shift the explanation. I wasn’t repelling people; most people probably felt neutral-to-warm about me. But making friends is an action, a process. You cannot just loll about, reading books and eating pies in total silence, and expect fully-formed friends to fall into your lap. I had subconsciously chosen to not do the things that are necessary to the active formation of friendships.

Decades ago I had a conversation with a friend during which she said something that I didn’t really understand, but which I’ve never forgotten. It had the force of something deeply true, and people don’t say deeply true things very often. We were talking about why she attracted roughly ten times more romantic interest from men than I did, despite (we both agreed) me being better looking. (I’m not trying to be all Samantha Brick about this. All the evidence demonstrated conclusively that my friend was much, much more attractive than I was. But I had a better face, and I thought that meant I was owed… something. Men’s attention.)

After nibbling around the edges of the topic for a while, she said — in a tone that suggested it was obvious, and she really shouldn’t have needed to spell it out — ‘It’s because I want it more than you do.’ She was talking about male attention, but she had loads of platonic friends too, and the principle is the same. She was honestly identifying the motivation that caused her to expend so much social energy: to stay upbeat and charismatic when a party was flagging, to take a lively and consistent interest in people, to be endlessly inventive in finding ways to make people laugh. All of this came at a cost to her, but it was a price worth paying to get the things she needed. Everywhere, all the time, people are doing costly things because they are sufficiently motivated by the outcomes.

As I’ve got older, and most particularly since I recognised my introversion, I’ve let myself off the hook about most of this stuff. I literally could not cope with a large friendship group, so it’s genuinely no skin off my nose that I don’t have one. And anyway, the absence of active friendship is not the same thing as hostility. After all, I’m not-friends with a lot of people towards whom I feel perfectly warm, people I’d happily give a lift to or buy a drink for. I’ve every reason to think they feel the same way about me. We just don’t proactively arrange to see each other, and that’s fine, because if we did I’d probably try to get out of it at the last minute, and then they would really start to hate me.

Letting yourself off the hook, making sense of difficult incidents, enabling a sense of chill: these are all good, constructive things that this kind of self-labelling can give you. What occurred to me over Christmas, when I was drawing attention to myself by being quiet and anxious, is that there’s also a raging egotism in introversion, an egotism that is both furtive and highly neurotic, and that I probably need to keep a check on.

I said above that I’m happy to give a speech but I’m not happy to network afterwards, and I said that this is because I need to get away and be on my own. That’s true; I really do need to get away and be on my own after an hour or so in a large gathering of people, and I have many strategies for doing so. (Show me an introvert and I’ll show you someone who knows where the toilets are.) But it’s also kind of convenient, isn’t it, that I’m happy with giving a speech — ie, the bit where I’m the centre of attention and I get to control what’s happening — and I’m unhappy with the bit I can’t control, the bit where I have to negotiate with the fleshy demands of other people’s wants and needs and interests and judgements; the bit where I come face-to-face with the concrete evidence that I am not at the centre of most people’s worlds.

There’s an undeniable correlation between situations in which introverts feel comfortable — intimate conversations, small groups of close friends — and situations in which the introvert gets to hold forth and be constantly affirmed. (Apparently lots of introverts like writing, which, again...) I don’t feel particularly bad about this; I rather like egotists. Some of my best friends, etc. But this egotism does explain why introverts, and all the other anxious neurotics who carry their personality types on a placard whenever they enter a room, have a tendency to expect everyone else but them to alter their behaviour.

This is where ‘they’re just not thinking about me, and that’s OK’ comes in useful. Maybe it’s because I spend a lot of time hanging around on internet forums (where neurotics and introverts tend to be over-represented), but I can’t help thinking that introverts everywhere need to recognise that socially adept people don’t owe us extraordinary consideration. Why didn’t the cluster of mums at the school gate break off from their conversation to say hello to you? Because they weren’t thinking about you! Why are you only finding out about your colleagues’ after-work socialising from the Facebook photos? Because they weren’t thinking about you! They haven’t ignored you, or left you out, or deliberately been unkind. They haven’t painstakingly constructed a ‘clique’ (or, as normal people call it, a friendship group) and barred you from it. They’re just not thinking about you at all, because they’re far too busy thinking about themselves. Just like you are.

Of course, good girls should be seen and not heard anyway.

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

An unimaginably powerful object, possibly from another universe, has appeared in an obscure corner of the galaxy and is attracting the attention of interstellar civilisations including the cruel and colonial Affront and the hippie explorers the Zetetic Elench, and the great, star-faring meta-civilisation The Culture. The Culture is essentially a collection of continent-sized starships run by god-like artificial intelligences called Minds. These Minds are now scheming about how they might take advantage of this new alien artefact, which they term ‘The Excession’.

Preface

The ‘M’ in Iain M. Banks is significant. He had a parallel life as the un-emmed mainstream author Iain Banks, but adopted the middle initial to signify to readers when he was indulging in science fiction. His conventional novels were frequently magical realist, or tinged with science fictional ideas or gothically grand guignol; but once he donned the M he became properly space operatic, all lightspeed spaceships and alien races and silly names.

What’s significant was that he had to signify this separation at all: that it was considered useful to demark which of his novels were ‘mainstream’. That there are some fictions that are ‘genre’ and some that are, inexplicably, not. That science fiction needed to have that ‘M’ stuck on it like a warning label. For imMature audiences only.

Science fiction has a bad reputation, literarily speaking. This is largely because of its origin. The term first emerged as ‘scientifiction’, a label coined by Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Amazing Stories magazine, in 1926. Gernsback was also an electronics entrepreneur and stipulated that the genre should include ‘scientific fact and prophetic vision’.

This was fiction by and for engineers, men (so many men) gifted in maths and science but not necessarily in literary style. Men like Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke, who could conjure fascinating scientific possibilities but who couldn’t write believable dialogue. These were books of plot and concept, not psychology or character.

Gernsback was also, incidentally, the publisher of a magazine called Technocracy Review (1933) which championed the then-fashionable idea of ‘Technocracy’, a society designed and run by engineers. One prominent member of the Technocracy movement was Joshua Norman Haldeman, the maternal grandfather of Elon Musk. Musk, in turn, is a massive science fiction fan and has named several of his SpaceX vehicles after spaceships from Iain M. Banks’ books.

Sci-fi might have had its roots in scientific experimentation, but the genre grew. Writers like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut attempted the previously unattempted experiment of writing well. The New Wave of the ‘60s brought writers like Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard who went for more formal, structural, literary experimentation. Meanwhile writers like Ursula K. LeGuin and Philip K. Dick (look at all these middle initials) seized on the genre as a way to conduct thought experiments in psychology.

This is precisely what Iain M. Banks did, too. Most of his science fiction books concerned The Culture, a pan-galactic meta-civilisation that has mostly abandoned conventional planets and solar systems to live on giant spaceships and artificial habitats. The Culture has also, more importantly, abandoned conventional politics and economics. This is a post-scarcity society in which anyone can have anything they want, whenever they want it. There is no work, no money, no hierarchy and very little class differentiation. The civilisation is almost entirely run by the Minds, immeasurably intelligent artificial beings who pander to everybody’s whims and still find time to run the galaxy.

What interests Banks is how this utopia might be flawed. Having created a perfect anarchy in which the only laws are individual morality and the bounds of social relationships, he questions how that might actually run and what it might mean for people living in it. This in turn throws up fascinating insights for our own contemporary, real world cultures.

Not that Banks is immune to a little ‘prophetic vision’. Rereading this thirty years later in 2026, his vision is a little too familiar. This is a world run by inscrutable and frequently incomprehensible artificial intelligences; a world in which the majority of people live happily in a haze of drugs and sex and interactive entertainments; a world in which artists are seen as exhibiting ‘a pitiably archaic form of insecurity and a rather childish desire to show off’. Sadly, we still have the capitalism, though.

Contents

The first three books set in the Culture skirt round the edges of it. They tell the stories of people and civilisations outside of it, observing it or being acted on by it. Excession was the first book to properly bring the reader within it, to consider its workings. In one core strand we are caught up in the machinations of the various Minds, trying to keep track of their cabals and connivings as well as their sardonic names (Serious Callers Only, Ethics Gradient, Not Invented Here, and the war ships Frank Exchange of Views, Attitude Adjuster and Killing Time). In one ‘prophetic vision’ the reader must pick through message threads between ships, like trying to catch up on email conversations after a long holiday.

The other main thread is the story of a handful of humans caught up in all these secret plans. Core to this is the tragic story of Byr Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil Gelian. Once lovers, Byr’s infidelity tipped Dajeil first into a murderous rage and then into isolation. She chooses to hide away on the ship Sleeper Service, remaining pregnant for 40 years rather than give birth to Byr’s baby. The main human plot of the book is the Sleeper Service trying to bring Byr and Dajeil back together, to try and convince Dajeil to finally have her baby and create a new life for herself.

Both these storylines concern themselves with misunderstandings and miscommunication, and with the relationship between individual self-definition and the social function. But they also, crucially, involve lots of cool spaceships, weird aliens and breathtaking outer space stuff.

Hugo Gernsback’s definition of scientifiction begins: ‘a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’. That romance -- often termed, slightly derisively, ‘sensawunda’ (sense of wonder) -- is another key part of science fiction. Part of the thrill of Excession, for a reader who was already a fan of Iain M. Banks’s science fiction, was finally getting to mingle with the Minds and to explore the ships that are their physical existences. The Sleeper Service is a cup of sea held floating in space by silvery force fields; in the middle of it there is an island that is the ship itself, a 50km slab, its great halls full of diorama of ancient wars featuring the bodies of passengers held in suspended animation.

Another thrill is to follow characters across the strange worlds of the Culture: asteroids hollowed out to create living space; ‘Orbitals’, giant rings of landscape flung into the heavens like glittering bracelets of life; artificial habitats like Tier, intricate interlocking levels of self-contained environments, all rotating round each other. All are peopled by extraordinary characters and aliens and artificial intelligences.

It is no mistake that part of the inspiration for Excession was the computer game Civilization. The titular Excession is what is termed in the novel an ‘Outside Context Problem’, which Banks describes in this way:

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given… was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered…

This is a situation straight out of Civilization, a game that Banks said he had to uninstall in order to make himself finish the book.

Science fiction is simply another form of game playing, of imaginative exercise. It allows the creative mind to run free, to invent for the enjoyment of invention and the enjoyment of the reader. But play has a purpose. It is a practice as much as a pleasure, a way of modelling reality and thinking about it. The Minds of the Culture spend a lot of time in play themselves, in a virtual world they call The Land of Infinite Fun; but they must always be aware of base reality, because that is where real things happen.

One of the lessons of Excession is that the ideal is all very well, but that reality has a habit of rendering it moot. Theory is admirable but practice is all that matters. It’s fun to wander in the wondrous spaces of science fiction, as long as you return to Earth now and then.

Afterword

A core theme in Excession is a sort of exploration of Popper’s paradox of intolerance: that a truly tolerant society should reserve the right to be intolerant of intolerance itself. Some of The Culture’s Minds want to use the appearance of the Excession as a way of forcing toleration on the hideously intolerant, warlike species The Affront; others argue that this goes against their own principles of toleration, particularly since the ruse involves tricking The Affront into a war with The Culture that they will definitely lose. A war to enforce peace; an act of punishment in the cause of toleration.

This is just one of many of these juxtapositions of theory and practise throughout the book. One significant theme is the dichotomy between the intellectual and the biological: the disembodied Minds struggle to understand the actions of their human counterparts, while human biology undermines their social ideals. Ulver Seich, a sort of space influencer, is a descendent of the founders of her home vessel, which gives her a sort of class distinction in defiance of The Culture’s flat social structure. Ulver’s emotional intelligence also helps her solve the relationship between Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil, a solution that eluded the super-intelligent Sleeper Service. (The book is full of these highly gendered characterisations: Ulver is highly emotional, whereas the hermit Gestra Ishmethit is the archetypal male nerd, hiding away on his lonely space station making model ships. Genar-Hofoen is a childish, shallow Lothario; Dajeil is an instinctively monogamous perpetual mother.)

But then, members of the Culture can change their biology as they please. When Genar-Hofoen commits the infidelity that causes Dajeil to attack him, she is a woman. The problem, Banks seems to be suggesting, is not aliens and humans or minds and bodies or men and women; it is people. Another person’s consciousness, their personality and intelligence, encountered from inside our own consciousness, is the ultimate Outside Context Problem. It is perhaps possible for us to encounter other people in much the same way as ‘a sentence encounter[s] a full stop’, but what matters, of course, is how we adapt our theories to that practice. How we can create a culture that embraces that diversity to make it a strength. If not to rule the galaxy, then at least to get through the day.

We’ve covered Iain Banks before, without his' ‘M’, with the book that earned him to right to get on with his science fiction: The Wasp Factory.

Here we are again

It’s that time of year again: carols on the playlist, Christmas movies on the box, annual round-ups in the inbox.

The Metropolitan year seems to be taking a predictable shape. Everything generally ticks over: new pieces go out and new subscribers come in, both at a predictable rate. Then Rowan writes something that goes viral and a whole bunch of new readers show up en masse. This year it was her piece ‘I’m not watching ‘Anora’’ that earned a few hundred fresh subscriptions. Fortunately, most of you seem to have stuck around, despite most of our content not being hot takes about porn. We’re now closing in on 1500 subscribers, which is really something (this time last year we were kvetching about not reaching 1,000). We’re delighted to have you all here.

Back in the normal world, the two things that drive regular weekly subscriptions are recommendations and Notes. We get a lot of new subscriptions from other Substacks that recommend us; thanks in particular, this year, to Sandy and Conal. But the real driver is, slightly to our surprise, Notes.

I was slightly suspicious when Substack introduced Notes, because it felt opposed to the core offer.Substack was supposed to be newsletters in your inbox, not in yet another ‘walled garden’ app. However, it has proved to be a crucial part of the community. We already had a fairly rigorous self-imposed social media calendar, putting out posts every day on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook, so we just added posts on Notes to that regimen. The other platforms seem largely ineffectual, but the Notes posts seem to work. They seem to drive not just ‘follows’ but also subscriptions, bringing in a pleasantly steady stream of new readers.

Substack has something of a ‘reputation’, especially on platforms like BlueSky, but, frankly, we wouldn’t be getting new readers or finding our audience without their community tools and platform. Generally the advice on building a big audience for newsletters is ‘be famous somewhere else and bring your fans to Substack.’ We’re not famous (thank goodness) and have absolutely no audiences on any other platforms, so these kinds of features really help us reach new readers.

All of which is to say, please do share stuff on Notes if you use it — it really does make a difference for us.

Metropolitan Wrapped

The most popular stories this year were:

1. I’m not watching Anora

2. Are we… the baddies

3. Charlotte Raven

4. The Wire, but make it Keeley Hawes

5. Canon Fodder: Easy Rider

We only had one guest post this year, but it was, at least, a cracker, taking in gravitational waves, the sound of the Universe and sex:

The most popular playlist this year was June’s, which was a splendidly upbeat one.

In the interests of balance, the least popular piece this year was our piece on The Pink Panther, should you be looking for some viewing appropriate to a Bank Holiday in the next week:

Thank you

Thanks first of all to all of those readers who have liked and restacked and commented. It really does make a difference to hear from people who have enjoyed (or, in the case of ‘Easy Rider’, been enraged by) our pieces.

A by no means exhaustive list includes: Lou Tisley, Rosie Millard, Mapledurham, Oliver Johnson, Robert Machin, Kerstin Rodgers, L. E. Mullin, Richard Ashcroft, Victualis, Eliot Wilson, Whitney McKnight, Luke Honey, Dra, Chris Norris, Stroness, Hayley Dunlop, Promachos, and Sarah Ditum.

Then there’s the extended Metropolitan family: Annette Richardson, Chris Waywell, Finbar Hawkins, Lucy Thomas, Adam Goodfellow, Ross Sleight, Adam Frost, Kate Williams, Margaret Fiedler MacGinnis, Simon Stephens, Polly Heath and Emma Whitehead (apparently our most prolific recommender this year; thank you, your ladyship).

An extra special thank you to Herr Doktor Peter Wolf of the Paris Observatory for his splendid piece, but also for being an indefatiguable reader and commenter. Thanks, Pete.

And finally thank you to actual family, who read it all and say absolutely nothing: Morgan, Bella, Pippa, Jon and Caroline.

Happy New Year!

If you’re in need for something restfully seasonal to read/listen to now that all the fuss is over, can we suggest our sister Substack, Christmas Stories, and this year’s serial: The Wish List?

Christmas Stories

The Wish List - Item 1

‘The Wish List’ is the story of Alfie, who takes a seasonal job packing boxes at an e-commerce company, only to discover that the warehouse contain a good deal more than just presents…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Tobias Sturt

I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several places…

“I suppose,” I remarked, “that, homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to it—that it is the clue which will guide you in the solution of some mystery and the punishment of some crime.”

“No, no. No crime,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles.”

So begins Conan Doyle’s 1892 Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892). It opens with this apparently trivial mystery: who owns this hat, recovered in the aftermath of a street brawl. But this apparently meaningless thread turns out to be one end of a tangled skein which leads, finally, to the solution of a crime that has stunned all of London: the theft of the Duchess of Morcar’s ‘Blue Carbuncle’, a giant gemstone.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle is the only Sherlock Holmes story that is properly Christmassy. (As well as being set at Christmas, the story leads us through the guts of at least two geese, both of whom end up as seasonal dinners.) This is the last essay in our Sherlock Holmes season, and it’s nearly Christmas, so focusing on The Blue Carbuncle struck me as being a neat solution. But, like Holmes with his apparently innocuous hat, this choice has led me to solve a far greater mystery: the mystery of what makes a truly great Holmes adaptation.

Sherlock Holmes is, as we saw at the outset of this season, roughly coeval with cinema. This is not at all a coincidence; both were the products of a technological revolution, and the cultural and social revolutions that ensued from it. The Industrial Revolution led to massive demographic changes in Britain. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, over 50% of the population lived in cities. As this increasingly urbanised populace became more literate, it created a new mass market for print, as well as for new forms of media: the telegraph, radio, photography and cinema.

Sherlock Holmes was a creation of and for this new mass media: fundamentally democratic, available and comprehensible to all. And he was the perfect hero for the times: an urban bourgeois professional, distinguished by talent and training rather than birth. Such figures stand for the rule of law, not rule by aristocrats. They are fundamentally democratic, binding together and equalising the diversity of urban life.

And Conan Doyle positioned his characters perfectly for this new Imperial city. Part of his genius was to take the neurasthenic aesthetes of Edgar Allen Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories -- shut up in their dim, smoky boudoirs languidly turning the leaves of abstruse philosophies -- and turn them into approachable, bourgeois, British figures. Watson is a square-shouldered, rugby-playing ex-army doctor, bluff and approachable; Holmes is an egalitarian autodidact, so patriotic that he shoots the Queen’s initials into the wall of his sitting room. This makes Holmes the perfect detective for the newly mobile, ambitious and fervid Victorian London.

The detective story was structurally well suited to the new mass media, being easily comprehensible and endlessly reusable. The inherent touchpoints -- set up, development, resolution -- lend themselves to almost any theme, and can take all kinds of shapes. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, for example, gives us a series of strange vignettes: first the hat (which proves inconsequential), then the gemstone, then a goose, then a chance encounter, and finally a confession. At the end Holmes, in a fit of seasonal charity, lets the villain run free -- apart, that is, from his burden of guilt.

This episodic structure echoes Conan Doyle’s approach to the Holmes universe. The original stories are, for the most part, episodic; each is a self-contained story, and aside from recurring characters each is largely unrelated to the others. This makes them highly suited to adaptation into single, coherent movies, items of mass entertainment that can be picked up and put down as the audience requires, easily disposable and always on hand.

For the same reasons, the stories are well suited to television. There are three basic forms of fiction on television: the single play or TV movie; the endlessly evolving serialised drama; and the episodic show. As we have seen, Holmes can be fitted into all of these structures. Sherlock (2010) attempted to make Holmes the hero of a serialised drama; the 2002 TV movie Hound of the Baskervilles featured an excellent Watson from Ian Hart. Episodic drama, however, is Holmes’s natural home, partly because of its urban setting. It mimics the experience of everyday life in the city, relying as it does on encounters with a stream of starkly drawn strangers; unpredictable little stories that we come into long after they’ve begun, and leave long before they’re finished.

So as well as choosing Holmes’s most Christmassy story, I’m ending this series of essays with a look at my favourite Holmes adaptations: Granada TV’s ‘80s series, and the BBC Radio Four adaptations of the ‘90s. The Granada series was a serious undertaking. Not only did the producers build a whole Victorian street set in Manchester; they also adapted over forty of the original stories before the untimely death of the star, Jeremy Brett. The Radio Four series, meanwhile, is the only adaptation to have covered all of the stories using the same actors as Holmes and Watson (Clive Merrison and Michael Williams), and is a masterpiece of audio drama.

Both are faithful period adaptations, but both have to do a little work to squeeze Blue Carbuncle into the episodic structure. Conan Doyle could get away with his strange shaggy dog construction in print, using Watson’s narration to paper over the gaps, but broadcast drama needs something more predictable. Both adaptations have to rearrange it into a more conventional mystery shape: crime first, then detection. In the unerring hands of lead writer Bert Coules the Radio 4 version deftly introduces the core mystery and the main characters without giving away anything that might spoil the rest of the story.

Where the Granada TV version succeeds, however, is in casting. Jeremy Brett twinkles and dances, as befits a complicated piece of Christmas decoration. His Holmes manages to combine cerebral asperity with a larky sense of drama that perfectly matches the detective of the stories, as well as perfectly fitting the Christmas atmosphere; japes and jollity in the midwinter darkness.

But it’s in the cameo casting that the Granada version really shines. Rosalind Knight might overplay it as the Duchess of Morcar, but she is set off by that great Discordian of British theatre, Ken Campbell, who is utterly delightful as the capering, quavering villain Ryder.

The best performance, though, is a tiny little appearance by Frank Middlemass as the pitiful Henry Baker, the down-at-heel owner of the mysterious hat with which the story opens. Sat in the firelight of 221b Baker Street, trying to understand what’s happening to him, he delivers a perfect depiction of an educated but impecunious man who has, as Holmes puts it, ‘fallen on evil days’. He captures not just the spirit of the character but the spirit of the story, the way it manages to be both tragic and comic, criminal and trivial. He is, personified, ‘one of those whimsical little incidents’.

And this, it seems to me, is truly key to the successful adaptation of the Holmes stories. In themselves they are decent little plots: murder mysteries, cunning heists, locked-room puzzles. But the plots are not the true delight of the stories, and nor are the characters of Holmes and Watson. Indeed, you could argue that a great deal of the success of the stories is down to how sparingly Conan Doyle draws them, keeping them as iconic as possible.

Instead, what distinguishes Conan Doyle is his use of odd little details on which Holmes fixates. Sometimes these are key to the plot: the smearing of the Hound of the Baskervilles with phosphorous, the strange little drawings in The Adventure of the Dancing Men. Sometimes they’re frankly peculiar, and in the man who is forced to copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica by hand in The Red-Headed League. And sometimes they’re intriguing, like finding an abandoned hat and a goose on Tottenham Court Road.

Any adaptation of Sherlock Holmes must find a way to maintain this weird, sinister, slightly comic note; the odd behaviour and unexpected actions that one discovers among ‘four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles’. The life of a city, in all its venality, comedy and strangeness.

That, and Jeremy Brett in the lead role.

You can catch up with our all our pieces on Sherlock Holmes in our Seasons strand, starting here, right at the beginning. The beginning of the century, the beginning of cinema and the beginning of the Holmes myth entirely:

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

It’s bloomin’ Christmas Eve again. Father Christmas wakes up in his terraced two-up-two-down, makes breakfast, goes to the loo, feeds the animals and loads up the sleigh. Then it’s ‘good bye cat’ and ‘good bye dog’, and he’s off into the bloomin’ weather to do his rounds. On through the night he slogs, squeezing down chimneys, stopping for a sandwich between chimney pots, and bumping into a milkman. Finally it’s all done and he can go home, make his Christmas lunch, open his presents (Cognac! Good old Fred) and go back to bed.

Down the chimney

Father Christmas isn’t Raymond Briggs’s best known Christmas book; thanks to the famous Channel 4/David Bowie (??) animated movie, that would be The Snowman (1978). But Father Christmas came first. (And anyway, Briggs himself always said that The Snowman wasn’t supposed to be particularly Christmassy.)

It inaugurated his great innovation: the use of comic book layouts in a picture book. This approach enabled Briggs to pack in more story. It also meant he could make full use of visual storytelling, building the narrative frame-by-frame where necessary. He does this so well that the text becomes additive rather than explanatory, a bravura technical achievement that culminated in the entirely wordless Snowman.

Not that Father Christmas has a dramatic story arc: it’s simply the events of one Christmas Eve told from Father Christmas’s point of view. And this isn’t the moral and mysterious Christmas Eve of A Christmas Carol (1843), or the wondrous and whizzy Christmas Eve of The Polar Express (2004). It is a realistic, hard-working night-in-the-life of a realistic and hard-working Father Christmas: one who swears at the rain, puzzles over how to get into a caravan, and nods off at the reins of his sleigh.

The simplicity and directness of this vision feels extraordinarily brave. To take something so straightforward and plotless and make it work required Briggs to place a great deal of trust in his own talent. He was, of course, entirely right to do so. He was a truly brilliant illustrator, marrying a cartoonist’s eye for character — all dynamism and economy — with exacting, accurate details in the backgrounds.

The specificity of the detail is where Briggs shows that as well as knowing and trusting his own talent, he also knows and trusts his audience. Small children live in a small world; small matters such as household brand logos — mysterious, impenetrable, laden with occult meanings — receive the full focus of their attention. The settings in Father Christmas are beautifully specific. The big man’s house is full of recognisable branded goods (a box of Corn Flakes for breakfast, an empty ‘Uxo’ tin for his sandwiches). When he flies over the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace they are architecturally accurate, greebled about with inky crenellations. There is even, on one spread, a legible fingerpost that precisely places one house as being somewhere on Underhill Lane at the foot of Ditchling Beacon under the South Downs, not far from Raymond Briggs’s own house.

This is just one way in which Briggs uses familiar tools, forms and settings to reveal the enchantment of the everyday. He uses coloured pencils a lot — like those Caran d’Ache pencils you might get for Christmas — and they give the book a friendly beauty, full of bright colours and soft details. And he composes brilliant cut-throughs; houses are opened up to show Father Christmas worming his way down chimneys past stuffed attics and sleeping children, and emerging into sitting rooms lit by the soft light of Christmas trees.

The kind of pencils you might have at home; a comic layout like The Beano; a story set in recognisable homes. The everyday is exploded: hidden spaces are made visible, reality is reconfigured, and the secret workings of the world are revealed.

Among the gutters

As well as revealing the enchantment of the everyday Father Christmas also injects magic into the humdrum, capturing the way a child’s world is made (even more) mysterious and wonderful by the season.

Briggs’s comic book format uses very wide gutters (the white spaces between illustration panels). Gutters play an interesting role in comics. They serve to contain the imaginative space of the story, isolating the specific moments of the visuals from each other. They are also, however, a magical imaginative space, in which time and space become flexible, so that panels can be both sequential and singular. (In this way they are different from page turns, which are definite endings and reveals, and are the traditional locations of twists and cliff-hangers.)

Gutters are, literally, liminal spaces, defined by and outside the lines. What’s interesting is that Father Christmas constantly intrudes into them. Things — legs and arms, the sleigh, bits of scenery, speech bubbles — are forever poking out of the frames into the snowy white gutters. The story is escaping the confines of the book; the world of the imagination is irrupting into the world of the reader.

This is appropriate in a story about Father Christmas, an apparently fictional character who nevertheless manages to leave a delightfully tactile and splendidly real stocking on the end of your bed every Christmas morning. And it is appropriate to Christmas, the season in which we take ordinary trees, dull suburban cul-de-sacs and humdrum high streets and turn them into objects of wonder. We literalise friendship and love in the form of presents; we dramatise community and conviviality in feasting and celebration. We take the physical and make it mystical, take the emotional and make it physical.

Part of the joy of Christmas is that it suggests this enchantment is there all the time, just out of view. This is where Briggs’s specificity collides delightfully with the subject matter. By depicting a recognisable and familiar world, and making Father Christmas himself a recognisable and familiar grumpy old man, he is insisting on this most mysterious quotidian magic.

Across the rooftops

Apart from a few interludes (an igloo, a lighthouse), Father Christmas takes place in Britain. In southern Britain to be precise: in and around London and Sussex. Even Father Christmas’s house — which should be somewhere far away, judging by the flight times — is a recognisably British terraced house. This is because it was modelled on Briggs’s parents’ house; that’s his milkman father who bumps into Father Christmas in the early hours of Christmas morning. And that’s an electric milk float that his father is driving, a distinctly British vehicle.

And this book isn’t called Santa Claus; it’s called Father Christmas. Santa Claus is an invention of the Dutch heritage of New Amsterdam, and is more recent than Father Christmas (or, as Ben Jonson rather splendidly named him, ‘Captain Gregory Christmas’). This latter fellow was once associated with a more adult vision of Christmas, full of feasting and foolery. He was crowned with holly, as often dressed in green as in red, and brought beer and song rather than presents.

Raymond Briggs’s muse isn’t quite Captain Gregory Christmas, but he isn’t quite Santa Claus either. He’s a recognisably British character, and not just because he’s mostly landing on roofs in southeast England. The book is a little memento of a time when British and American culture wasn’t quite as intertwined as it is now; when Bonfire Night was more important than Halloween, and when none of us knew what a ‘Black Friday’ was.

This is not to make a tedious Facebook point. I’m not saying life was necessarily better and more pure back in the days of power cuts and Fingerbobs and open-access landfill sites. I’m just pointing out that there was a time in Britain, not that long ago, when ‘Santa Claus’ was not the biggest name in nocturnal present-delivery logistics. When I was a child in the ‘70s, it was Father Christmas we visited in Hamleys every year, Father Christmas to whom we wrote letters, and Father Christmas who left me a copy of Father Christmas when he visited my house on Christmas Eve, 1973. It had not been a cheerful year in Britain. As well as the Cod War and strikes and IRA bombings, the oil shock that followed the Yom Kippur War resulted in mandatory measures to conserve petrol and electricity.

Father Christmas, inspired by Briggs’s father’s own experiences as a milkman, is a fully recognisable British working man of the period, begrudging and swearing his way through the night shift. He’s every grumbling grandfather, and every dyspeptic uncle round the Christmas dinner table.

But, Father Christmas reassures the child reader, these gruff characters aren’t cross with us. Father Christmas may curse the rain, but he still struggles through it to bring the presents. He cares about doing his job properly, visiting every child in every domicile, from caravan to palace. And he still, for all the rain and drudgery and effort, leans out from the panel to personally wish us a ‘Happy Bloomin’ Christmas’ at the end.

Tobias is laid up in bed with the ‘flu and has unwisely left the formatting of this email to Rowan, which gives me an opportunity to commend to you one of his best Christmas Stories. ‘An All Too Magical Christmas’ is the tale of a middle-ranking government magician who takes the Christmas duty rota in the City of London hoping for a quiet bit of overtime but — like a social media intern left in charge of the corporate X account — becomes catastrophically overwhelmed by a chaotic eruption of malignant ancient Magick. Features trolls, geese, Puss in Boots, Herne’s Hunt on fixed-pedal bikes, an enchanted miniature toyshop, and some splendidly confused nutcracker soldiers.

Christmas Stories

An All Too Magical Christmas #1

When a magician (second class) chooses to do Christmas duty in the City of London, it's because he's hoping for a nice, quiet, seasonal time, not for ancient magic to break loose and the enchanted city to be filled with ghosts, monsters, wonder and danger. Not on his watch. Not when he's going to have to deal with it all on his own. That would be an all…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · Tobias Sturt

Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal to the teenager on your sofa about the teenager you once were? Forewarned is forearmed…

Elevator pitch

On December 1 1958, inventor and rube Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) arrives in New York. He finds a job in the mail room of Hudsucker Industries, then — as part of a plot by Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman) to depress Hudsucker stock — is almost immediately promoted to President. But Norville’s invention (the Hula Hoop) becomes an overnight success, upsetting Mussburger’s plans. Meanwhile, investigative journalist Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is trying to find out what’s going on at Hudsucker. Luckily, it’s the season for miracles, and everything is all cleared up at the stroke of midnight on December 31.

The Hudsucker Proxy isn’t the most obvious Coen Brothers film to show the kids. You might prefer to start with a bona fide classic like Fargo (1996), or one of the larky ones like O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). But it’s December, and The Hudsucker Proxy is a Christmas movie. More specifically, it’s a seasonal movie that parodies and celebrates other classic seasonal movies, from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) to The Apartment (1960), taking in Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges on the way.

It was a big commercial flop. The Coens had had a string of critical successes with their first few films, culminating with three awards at the Cannes Film Festival for Barton Fink (1991). Following this, the echt Hollywood producer Joel Silver — the man responsible for Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and The Predator — decided to bankroll their next movie. They ended up with a production budget of something like $25 million, almost three times the budget of Barton Fink.

Quite what Silver thought he was getting for his money is anyone’s guess. What he actually got was a movie that manages to be simultaneously baggy and hectic. It is full of rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and exemplary visual storytelling, as in the bravura Hula Hoop sequence. It has all the Coens’ customary quirkiness and eclectic references. The story takes in stock fixing, mismatched romance and the invention of the bendy straw. It blends ‘40s magic realism with ‘50s corporate cynicism; the whimsy of Frank Capra with the fast-talking of His Girl Friday (1940); breathtaking, vertiginous deco production design with weird, comedic Gene-Kelly-style dream sequences. As Silver said to cinematographer Roger Deakins after watching the dailies: ‘What the fuck is this?’ (Or, as characters in the film remark every time there’s a ridiculous plot twist: ‘Hey, what gives?’)

The public sentiment was similar, and the film was a commercial disaster. (It was not helped by the direct comparison with the uber-successful and astonishingly cheap Four Weddings and a Funeral, released in the same year.) It is tempting to wonder what might have happened if the Coens had followed a similar trajectory to their old friend and collaborator Sam Raimi, who directed The Evil Dead (1981), helped write the script for Hudsucker, and directed that wonderful Hula Hoop sequence. In 2002 Raimi went mainstream with the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie. In a world where Hudsucker had been a vast success, might the Coens now be directing Doctor Strange movies for Marvel? Could we have had John Goodman as The Ancient One instead of Tilda Swinton? Steve Buscemi as Dread Dormammu of the Dark Dimension?

But in truth, this could never have happened. The Hudsucker Proxy was the movie the Coens had wanted to make; they had been planning for it and tinkering with it for years. This was their dream, and their dreams were and are not those of the American public. The Coens responded by returning to low budget indie production and making what is arguably their masterpiece: Fargo.

Delights

If it’s any consolation to Joel Silver, you can see where his money went. It’s there in the casting of genuine movie stars, most notably Paul Newman, who turns in a typically splendid performance as the cigar-chomping mogul Sidney Mussburger. Tim Robbins is perfect as a giant, goofy, genial idiot, and Jennifer Jason Leigh has honed her Rosalind Russell impression to a cutting edge.

As you would expect from the Coens, the film is also full of delightful character actors, including John Mahoney as a perfectly irascible newspaper editor, Bill Cobbs as a possibly magical timekeeper, and an absolutely unrecognisable Jim True-Frost as a manic elevator operator, a world away from his hapless Roland ‘Prez’ Pryzbylewski in The Wire.

The budget was also spent on a stunning model of mid-century Manhattan, all Atom Age skyscrapers and deco streamlining. Indeed, the model was so stunning that it has since been used in many other films, including The Shadow (1994) and Batman Forever (1995), two of the superhero movies the Coens might have ended up making in our parallel universe. (Warner Brothers sold the model to Universal for The Shadow, only to find that they needed to hire it back to make Batman Forever. This is exactly the kind of over-complicated financial footwork The Hudsucker Proxy satirises.) This re-use seems like the perfect metaphor for the movie’s ‘quotation generation’ re-appropriation of Golden Age Hollywood movies. It conjures the effect of seasonal channel surfing, creating an ideal gestalt of mid-century Christmas movies.

It also, naturally, has a terrific script, melding an accurate approximation of screwball cross-talk with an affectionate parody of period movie tropes, and adding the Coens’ usual relish for language and weakness for delightfully terrible jokes.

Disappointments

Of course, if you didn’t spend your childhood Christmases flicking through TV channels that were showing Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), and bingeing on Wilder and Hawks, then a lot of this is going to leave you cold.

The film also showcases the Coens’ perpetual reluctance to settle on a clear theme or tone. Their Gen X fans appreciate their penchant for splicing together wildly different approaches and sliding gleefully across genres, as if the canonical guidelines weren’t there. (Which, of course, they’re not.) The Coens’ eclectic approach makes sense to those of us whom Bob in Drugstore Cowboy (1989) calls ‘the TV babies’; raised in a saturated media environment, culturally omnivorous, endlessly curious. They are also insistent on leaving their films as texts to be interpreted, shy of providing any definitive meaning or argument. The audience can read them how they like, which is catnip to some (present!) but anathema to many.

You know, for kids!

So, can you show it to the kids? We showed it to a kid last Christmas; he was very taken with it, and immediately started trying to puzzle it out. This is partly because he is a child of a Metropolitan Editor, but it’s also because he and his brother were Coen Brothers fans already, having discovered for themselves The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). So, yes, you can show it to the kids, even the ones who have never heard of Preston Sturges. Which is pretty much all of them, I’m going to bet.

Is it still worth it?

Definitely. Not least because — given the sackfuls of substandard seasonal slop that get sicked onto the streaming channels every December — we need all the good Christmas movies we can get.

But it’s also worth it if you like reading too much into things, which we, evidently, do. This time, for instance, I was particularly struck by the recurrent symbols of circles, orbits and cycles. They’re hardly subtle, as in Norville’s famously idiotic sketch of a Hula Hoop; but I hadn’t quite noticed how deeply they permeate the script with ideas of rebirth, reinvention and eternal return. It’s tempting to see this theme as being an echo of the endless reruns of Christmas movies (re-runs that turned It’s A Wonderful Life from a flop into a classic).

But it’s also — obviously — about time, most clearly in the big Hudsucker building clock, the mechanism of which powers the climax of the film. This is another interpretation of one of the echt Christmas-movie plots: how should you spend your precious few orbits round the sun? Is your life on the right path, or will the equinoctial rebirth prompt a rebirth of your own heart, like Scrooge, and George Bailey, and C. C. Baxter?

The Hula Hoop was actually invented by the splendidly named Wham-O corporation, which was also first to market the Frisbee, Silly String and the Hacky Sack. Founded in 1948, Wham-O took the technological advances of the post-War military industrial complex, plastics and mass production, and turned them to frivolous jollity and pointless pastimes.

Their inventions are the perfect instruments for Norville Barnes, a man of glee and energy in the grey, reptilian world of Hudsucker Industries. Like It’s A Wonderful Life, the film seems to be asking: are you a Sidney J. Mussburger, a Mr Potter, sitting on a horde of gold like a dyspeptic dragon? Or are you a Norville, bringing joy to the world? A George Bailey, surrounded by friends? Do you want to be Joel Silver, churning out mindless multiplex filler, or the Coen Brothers, making mad little entertainments for mad little people?

At the end of the movie the universe (in the shape of Moses the janitor and the ghost of Waring Hudsucker) intervenes to set everything to rights. This is pure fantasy; just, you know, for kids. And this movie is set at Christmas, a time that is famously, you know, for kids. But if you can’t think optimistic thoughts at Christmas; if you can’t hope it’ll turn out alright in the end; if you can’t dream, like the Coen Brothers… when can you?

If you want to know how much I like The Hudsucker Proxy, try counting all the references to it in my Christmas story The Elf Service:

Christmas Stories

The Elf Service, Episode 1

All over the city children post letters to Santa Claus and they go undelivered and unanswered. Until Irving Jefferson founds the Elf Service, that is. The Elf Service is the story of charity, journalism and mayhem, the extraordinary story of an extraordinary young man, his extraordinary plan to make Christmas happen for the children of his city and all …

Read more

3 years ago · Tobias Sturt

The BBC’s movie seasons in the Christmas holidays were our film school, introducing us to classic films we might never have seen otherwise. So now, each Advent, charges to curate a movie season based on a theme of her choosing.

This year:

Musicals!

There is one featured movie per day on the run-up to Christmas, plus a little extra if we have time. They’re roughly in chronological order until we get to Christmas and everything goes jingly. I’ll try and include a link to Just Watch for each film, where possible.

December 1^st

The Jazz Singer (1927)

The first sound film and, therefore, the first movie musical, so we ought to start with it really. Although it does contain technology, sentiment and opinions of its time, most noticeably a lot of black-face.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-jazz-singer

The Sound of Movie Musicals (2018)

The estimable Neil Brand’s history of the genre is the perfect introduction to the season and, more importantly, does not contain offensive minstrelsy.

December 2^nd

42nd Street (1933)

You can’t do the movie musical without some Busby Berkeley choreography and this is the original ‘the star has fallen sick and can’t go on, this is the understudy’s big break’.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/42nd-street

20 Feet from Stardom (2013)

A documentary about backing singers. The musicians whose sound you know, whose work is vital to making the stars and who are so often simply not seen.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/20-feet-from-stardom

December 3^rd

Top Hat (1935)

Fred and Ginger, inevitably. Astaire is an incredible dancer, obviously, and Rogers does it all ‘backwards and in heels’, but his gentle, tentative voice is charming and she was a terrific comic actor.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/top-hat

Band Wagon (1953)

A musical about musicals (because what else would those involved in musical theatre be interested in) and a later Astaire, paired with Cyd Charisse here and, most importantly, directed by Vincent Minnelli.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-band-wagon

December 4^th

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

The story of George M. Cohan, the songwriter, performer and ‘The Man Who Owned Broadway’, giving James Cagney a little break from playing psychotic gangsters.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/yankee-doodle-dandy

Broadway: the American Musical (2004)

A PBS documentary on the history of the Broadway musical over the twentieth century, telling the evolution of a quintessentially American art form.

December 5^th

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

The holotype of the Hollywood musical: a musical about Hollywood musicals, featuring great songs, great performances, romance, comedy, and inspiring a classical Morecambe and Wise sketch. Perfection.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/singin-in-the-rain

Brigadoon (1954)

More Gene Kelly, this time directed by Vincent Minnelli. Two hunters discover a hidden village in the Scottish Highlands that only appears once every century.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/brigadoon

December 6^th

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

One of the more remarkable things about Broadway is how songwriters could take something like the Roman myth of the Rape of the Sabine Women and make a musical out of it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/seven-brides-for-seven-brothers

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Another possibly unlikely subject for a musical: Jewish life in an early 20th century Ukrainian shtetl, but perhaps not so unlikely, given that that was the origin story of so many Broadway songwriters.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/fiddler-on-the-roof

December 7^th

A Star is Born (1954)

Starring Judy Garland and James Mason, this was the second of four different adaptations of A Star is Born, which just emphasises how much Hollywood loves stories about Hollywood.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/a-star-is-born

A Star is Born (2018)

The one starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper just to show that we should be expecting another version some time around 2060.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/a-star-is-born-2018

December 8^th

Funny Face (1957)

Come for ‘Think Pink!’ and the title song, stay for the slightly squeamish May/December pairing of Hepburn and Astaire and the absolutely excruciating Existential party scene (pair with Tony Hancock’s The Rebel for maximum effect).

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/funny-face

High Society (1956)

A slightly less yawning generation gap between Bing and Sinatra, but a massive one between both of them and 26 year old Grace Kelly, in this musical remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940).

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/high-society

December 9^th

West Side Story (1961)

Bernstein and Sondheim together, adapting Shakespeare for contemporary Broadway and directed by Robert Wise in one of the great late Hollywood musicals.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/west-side-story

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened (2016)

A documentary following the making of the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/best-worst-thing-that-ever-could-have-happened

December 10^th

The Music Man (1962)

You’ve got Trouble, my friends, right here in River City, with a capital ‘T’, that rhymes with ‘P, which stands for ‘pool’! How many trombones is it in the big parade, Professor Hill?

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-music-man

The Producers (1967)

More musical con men, and a film very much for our times, when a musical about Hitler would almost certainly do unnervingly well.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-producers-1967

December 11^th

My Fair Lady (1964)

The reason why, when the dog steals my shoes, I put on my best Rex Harrison voice to ask him “Eliza, where are my slippers?”

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/my-fair-lady

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)

Absolutely stunningly beautiful film from Jacques Demy, which is entirely sung throughout, with no spoken dialogue.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-umbrellas-of-cherbourg

December 12^th

Jailhouse Rock (1957)

The young Elvis at his most electric, capturing him at the height of his early, pre-Army fame, transforming popular culture forever.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/jailhouse-rock

Help! (1965)

Basically, much as I’d love to pair Hard Day’s Night (1964) with Jailhouse Rock, I’m not convinced it’s strictly a musical, but I reckon we can get away with Help!

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/help

December 13^th

Oliver! (1968)

A little break from Broadway, with Lionel Bart adapting Dickens, directed by Carol Reed for a thoroughly British musical.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/oliver

Bugsy Malone (1976)

A weird offshoot of the Disco Deco, ‘20s revival of the ‘70s - a musical set during prohibition performed solely by child actors.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/bugsy-malone

December 14^th

Cabaret (1972)

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome. A film about, as Peter Cook put it, “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/cabaret-1972

All That Jazz (1979)

Completing our Bob Fosse double bill with a Bob Fosse film about Bob Fosse.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/all-that-jazz

December 15^th

Funny Girl (1968)

A musical biopic of comedienne Fanny Brice, that brought Barbra Streisand’s Broadway performance to film, giving her her debut and making her a star.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/funny-girl

Rocketman (2019)

Another biopic, this time of a musician: Elton John, with professional chameleon Taron Egerton in the lead and directed by Bugsy Malone star Dexter Fletcher.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/rocketman-2019

December 16^th

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

The original cult movie musical, possibly the ultimate cult movie, come to that, favourite of theatre kids and suburban weirdoes everywhere. Viewers must provide their own props and costumes.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-rocky-horror-picture-show

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

A film adaptation of a musical adaptation of a film. More to the point, a cult film adaptation of a cult musical of a cult film. What a load of cults.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/little-shop-of-horrors

December 17^th

Grease (1978)

A ‘70s reimagining of ‘50s high school making for an unlikely hit musical in an age of punk and disco.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/grease

Fame (1980)

Fame costs. And here’s where you start paying. In sweat. For bonus points you can add some episodes of the TV show that we all obsessively watched as teenagers.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/fame

December 18^th

Pennies From Heaven (1981)

The Hollywood version of Dennis Potter’s TV series, with Steve Martin in the Bob Hoskins role. Just be glad that I didn’t include the adaptation of The Singing Detective with Robert Downey Jr.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/pennies-from-heaven-1981

Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

Woody Allen’s tribute to the golden age of Hollywood musicals, guaranteed to upset everyone who doesn’t like amateurish singing and dancing.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/everyone-says-i-love-you

December 19^th

Topsy-Turvy (1999)

A biopic of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan from Mike Leigh. There’s also the 1983 film of Pirates of Penzance, although without Tim Curry as the Pirate King, who was spectacular, of course.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/topsy-turvy

Original Cast Album: Company (1970)

A D. A. Pennebaker documentary about the production and recording of the cast album of the Sondheim musical Company.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/topsy-turvy

December 20^th

8 Femmes (2002)

Eight women come together to celebrate Christmas, only to discover that the family patriarch has been murdered and any one of them could have done it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/8-women

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

Two showgirls set out to find husbands. Talk to me, Harry Winston, tell me all about it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/gentlemen-prefer-blondes

December 21^st

La La Land (2016)

Damien Chazelle’s loving ode to the Hollywood musical, predictably enough a Hollywood musical about Hollywood which you might be beginning to notice is something of a trend.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/la-la-land

Hamilton’s America (2016)

A documentary about the hit musical, its production and the history behind it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/la-la-land

December 22^nd

Meet Me In St Louis (1944)

The film that brought Vincent Minnelli and Judy Garland together, thus uniting several films in this list, including Cabaret, of course. Have yourself a merry little Christmas, Judy insists on it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/meet-me-in-st-louis

Road to Utopia (1946)

It could have been any of the Hope/Crosby ‘Road’ movies, but this one has lots of snow and a cameo from Santa Claus, so here we are.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/road-to-utopia

December 23^rd

Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

What’s this!? Why, its a stop motion musical about the Halloween King trying to take over Christmas, of course.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-nightmare-before-christmas

Spirited (2002)

Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds in a modern comedy musical retelling of A Christmas Carol.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/spirited

Christmas Eve

White Christmas (1954)

You can’t have Christmas without Bing. The song actually first appears on screen in a different musical: Holiday Inn (1942), but it was such a hit they gave it its own film.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/white-christmas

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Possibly the best adaptation of A Christmas Carol, probably the best Muppets film, almost certainly the best Michael Caine performance. You absolutely cannot have Christmas without The Muppet Christmas Carol.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-muppet-christmas-carol

If you’re still feeling festive, we’ve now gathered all our seasonal material into one place:

A Very Metropolitan Christmas

The Diplomat (2023—)

: For those of you who enjoy The West Wing, we recommend The Diplomat if you haven’t yet discovered it. Created by Debora Cahn, who began her writing career on The West Wing, The Diplomat is the story of a career American diplomat, Kate Wyler, who is appointed ambassador to Britain in the wake of a terrorist attack on a Royal Navy aircraft carrier in the Gulf.

The Diplomat is a good deal pulpier than The West Wing, and it’s more of a thriller than a political drama. Indeed, it contains a lot of elements that usually make me hate a show: the constant escalation of plots with increasingly bizarre developments, storylines that only ever involve the same five people we met in episode one, regular revelations of the kind usually associated with soap characters. But I loved it. We have binged it intemperately and now have nothing to watch.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I loved so much. To start with, many of the performances are great: Ali Ahn is splendidly dry as CIA station chief Eidra Park, and Rory Kinnear is having a whale of a time as an unhinged British PM, a sort of hideous Boris Johnson/David Cameron hybrid. We also get the onscreen reunion of Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford, and it’s a treat.

But what blows me away is the details. A beautiful degree of thought has gone into researching exactly the right class markers for high-ranking Americans living in London: in one scene, Eidra eats a Sainsbury’s ‘Taste the Difference’ takeaway salad while drinking from a Le Creuset mug. Almost uniquely, this is an American-made show that acknowledges there’s more to London than Westminster Bridge and the Brompton Road, and exterior shots are almost always geographically accurate. This sense of care extends through the whole production.

All three seasons so far have been driven by the spiralling fallout of a single inciting incident, the attack on the British carrier. Sure, that fallout becomes increasingly ludicrous; but each twist is taken seriously. The politics are developed believably; the intelligence and personalities of the characters are consistent. It also, I suspect, captures a fundamental truth of politics: that there is no ‘solution’, no right answer. Instead, there is just a constant scrabbling to keep everything together, like Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (1993) desperately laying down train tracks in the path of onrushing events, dear boy, events.

Strange New Worlds, Season 3 (2023)

: Quiff, the final front hair. Speaking of ludicrous but wonderful, Captain Pike and The Enterprise are back for some further boldly going. For the Star Trek-agnostic (barbarians), this is a prequel to the original series, although the Enterprise is increasingly full with classic characters. It’s had a young Spock, Uhura and Chapel since the beginning, but we’ve now picked up a young Scotty, and a young Kirk keeps popping in to practise his idiosyncratic empha… sis.

Each version of Star Trek is a reflection of its time. The original ‘60s series is full of Kennedy-era American gung-ho; the ‘90s Next Generation is endless committee meetings and corporate empathy. Strange New Worlds is… silly. Delightfully so, I should point out, and not without an accompanying darkness. Most of the characters are dealing with some kind of trauma from their pasts, and we already know from the original series that Pike himself is heading for a grisly end. But the show insists on dancing, sometimes literally, in the face of certain doom, which is rather like watching a fantastical sci-fi adventure in today’s political climate. Anyway, it is at least absolutely doing what I’m here for, upholding that central Star Trek tenet: that if we learn to work together, we might just make it through.

Letterboxd Diary

: I complained in the last Mixtape about how I’d seen all the classic Universal monster movies (often multiple times) and now had nothing to watch for Halloween. But then I remembered that people keep remaking those classics, including some of the most inventive film-makers currently working. And since that Mixtape came out well before Halloween, I was able to have a lovely seasonal mash with the monsters.

The Skull (1965)

A rather silly Amicus horror in which the skull of the Marquis de Sade is haunted and causes whoever owns it to become a murderer. It’s basically a ‘60s-set story about the seedy purveyors of esoteric artefacts and amateur occultist collectors (Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, what a delight!). It put me in mind of a Charles Williams novel: dark magic in a mid-century setting. The last half hour, as the skull drives Peter Cushing’s mild-mannered antiquary homicidally insane, is almost entirely without dialogue. It’s just pure visual storytelling, with the skull floating menacingly around and Cushing acting his little socks off, all beautifully photographed. After all, director Freddie Francis did also work as a cinematographer, on, for example, The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984).

Frankenstein (2025)

Speaking of silly but beautiful, here’s Guillermo del Toro’s version of Mary Shelley’s foundational gothic horror. Everyone always exclaims in wonder that it was written by a 19 year old, but by god you can tell. This is compounded by the fact that dialogue is not del Toro’s strong suit: at one point his brother even tells Frankenstein ‘You are the monster’. But while del Toro might be a little too faithful to Shelley’s dense early-nineteenth-century prose, he perfectly captures her hallucinatory gothic vision. It is a wonderfully designed and directed film. And wonderfully cast, too; finally, someone’s found a good use for Jacob Elordi.

Nosferatu (2025)

Very much not Dracula, legally speaking, because F. W. Murna — the director of the 1922 original — didn’t properly license Bram Stoker’s novel, and the film was supposed to be destroyed following legal action by Stoker’s widow. Fortunately not every copy was, which is how Robert Eggers has come to remake it. He captures that sense in the original of a vampire as a force of disease, of physical corruption, rather than the sexual and moral corruption of Dracula (1897) and of so many subsequent adaptations. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) would make a particularly lush and romantic comparison to this shadowy, skin-crawling film. I think I might even prefer it to Werner Herzog’s chilly 1979 remake.

The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025)

I was slightly worried that this was going to be an awkward and squirm-inducing comedy of embarrassment, but it’s not. It is awkward, but not unbearably, and it’s largely cosy and unthreatening. You do have to slightly recalibrate yourself when you realise that it’s not about the lost romance between the two musicians, but instead is about the burgeoning bromance between the musician and his slightly weird fan. But then, I’ve been a slightly weird fan of Tim Key and Tom Basden since their excellent late-00s sketch show Cowards, so that was fine with me.

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Speaking of something that should have been awkward and squirmy and absolutely wasn’t: I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard at a film in years. It also has a deep layer of sadness, and a jaundiced view of modern corporate life, EU expansion, and the cultural and economic gaps between different parts of the continent. (It’s a particularly European film, with its own idiosyncratic rhythms and interests; the rumoured remake starring Jack Nicholson and Kirsten Wiig sounds like the ravings of a madman, impossible and stupid.) Most of all, Toni Erdmann is about a relationship between a tightly wound, high achieving daughter and her lunatic father, played by the always extraordinary Sandra Hüller and the excellent Peter Simonischek. There are some quite stunning moments in which Hüller appears to do nothing, and yet you can watch an entire series of emotions cross her mind. It really is a masterclass in film acting, from both of them. A terrific, idiosyncratic and hysterical movie. Straight into the Letterboxd Favourites, this one.

The Irishman (2019)

: In an inversion of our usual form, I made Toby write about The Diplomat because I wanted to write about the Scorsese film.

It’s possible that, like us, you’ve been avoiding watching The Irishman because a) it’s three-and-a-half hours long (!!), b) it’s yet another gangster film, and c) it uses ‘de-ageing technology’ to allow Robert De Niro (76 when it was released), Joe Pesci (also 76) and Al Pacino (79) to play men in their 30s and 40s. Taken together, this was not — for me at least — an appetising proposition, but I was eventually drawn in by the premise; The Irishman is adapted from the memoir of a man who claimed to have killed notorious US union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

So, does it work? Well…

The ‘de-ageing technology’ is creepy as hell (everyone looks like Tom Hanks in The Polar Express), and is also a failure in its own terms, because the de-aged De Niro is not, at all, a plausible approximation of a 40-year-old. Even without the weird facial denaturing, he has the voice of a 76-year-old, the gait of a 76-year-old, the energy of a 76-year-old. Ageing is a whole-body process.

The film is also incredibly slow and plodding. At times it’s outright monotonous, so that you think ‘Marty, you could just have cut that entire scene.’ There are sequences that recall the famous tracking shot in the restaurant in Goodfellas, but they are less glamorous and overwhelming. There are scenes that riff on the ‘take the gun, leave the cannoli’ vaudeville from The Godfather, except that they’re not funny. The Irishman feels like something that has gone to seed: flabby and slack, pushing at the seams of its leather blouson jacket.

There are two possible explanations for a film with these flaws making it to the screen. The first is that Martin Scorsese has suddenly lost the use of his faculties and all his five senses. The second is that he’s doing this deliberately. And if he’s doing it deliberately — and I think you have to give him that much credit — the whole things becomes a cinematic portrait of Dorian Gray, a revelation of moral and literal corruption.

I think, in The Irishman, Scorsese is atoning for Goodfellas, a film that made the life of a mafia thug look so beautiful, so exciting and compelling and urgent and funny and narratively perfect. Don’t get me wrong: I love Goodfellas. But there’s no getting away from its moral glibness, the way it covers violence with a dusting of starlight and refuses to properly contextualise the depravity and narcissism. The way it makes shooting people in the head look real fuckin sexy, like Elliot Gould and Grover.

In The Irishman, Scorsese is saying: you know what? Not only are mafia hoods evil; they’re also boring. They wade slowly through life. They bump into furniture; they’re slow on the uptake; they look bad in their suits. Their much-vaunted social culture is thin and tedious. And the soundtrack consists of whatever happens to be playing on the radio at the time. I think Scorsese knows very well that nothing about the de-ageing technology works, but using these actors — so much less energetic and attractive than they were in their prime, and encumbered with an uncanny, awkward visual effect — is a stunningly effective way to dramatise the corruption of a culture these men once did so much to glamourise.

Playlist

: Traditionally, the November playlist is a Christmas one (by which I mean, it was last year and I intend to keep doing this indefinitely). I was going to make this a list of sad Christmas songs as a sop to those Scrooges who hate the season (or, more specifically, hate the genre), but then a narrative arc started developing and I couldn’t help myself. The playlists are all on Spotify.

Blue Christmas - Elvis Presley. We’ve already talked a lot about Elvis this month, so it seemed only right to kick off with him.

Santa, Bring My Baby Back (To Me) - Eleanor Friedberger. More Elvis but reinterpreted by Eleanor Friedberger sometime of The Fiery Furnaces.

Some Hearts at Christmas Time - Low. You’ve got to have Low at Christmas. We had the classic ‘Just Like Christmas’ last year so here’s an alternative.

Hard Candy Christmas - Dolly Parton. There’s a bright ache in Dolly’s voice that just perfectly sells this song of seasonal blues.

Just Me This Year - Rachael & Vilray. But then does the season need to be blue? It could be cheerfully jazzy instead.

Last Christmas - Lucy Dacus. Are you playing Whamageddon? Good news: you can stop worrying about that now, thanks to Lucy Dacus.

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? - Nancy Wilson. There are certain genres that are perfectly suited to Christmas music: brass bands, obviously; amateur choirs; foot stomping Glam. But mid-century jazz might be the cosiest.

All I Want for Christmas Is You - Carla Thomas. Or maybe its mid-century soul.

I Don’t Intend to Spend Christmas Without You - Margo Guryan. We’re starting to get a little more hopeful now, thanks to this lovely little slice of ‘60s pop.

I’ll Be Home For Christmas (If Only In My Dreams) - Frank Sinatra. Maybe it’ll be alright, after all, thanks to Frank.

You can also find this playlist on Spotify:

If it’s almost December, it’s almost time for this year’s Christmas Story. Here’s a sneak preview from The Metropolitan’s seasonal sister Substack:

Christmas Stories

The Wish List: Sneak preview

‘The Wish List’ is the story of Alfie, who takes a seasonal job packing boxes at an e-commerce company, only to discover that the warehouse contain a good deal more than just presents…

Listen now

3 months ago · Tobias Sturt

In which our season of Sherlock Holmes adaptation reaches the (other) one you’ve all been waiting for, Sherlock (2010—17), and we get so exercised about it we run out of space to discuss Elementary (2012—19) and, thankfully, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009). Although there’s little to be said about the latter other than to wonder at how a film so full of stuff could be so dull. Right, put the hat and coat on, here we go.

I blame Joss Whedon.

A lot of people blame Joss Whedon for a lot of things, but I specifically blame him for the disaster that was BBC’s Sherlock (2010—17), and how an inventive, spirited and breathless pulp-adventure became a self-indulgent, self-obsessed, self-sabotaging soap-opera.

Sherlock was an updating of the Sherlock Holmes stories. It was masterminded by the writers Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and starred Martin Freeman as Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes. Freeman was already pretty well known from the original The Office (2001—03); but Sherlock arguably sealed both star’s careers, earning them places in Middle Earth and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The show was immensely successful; and it was successful, importantly, as a broadcast TV show, before streaming and binge-watching. People had to actively tune in, every week. And they did, largely because it was an energetic, inventive and sexy updating, full of contemporary technology and tropes and set in an energetic and compelling contemporary London.

So what are we blaming Whedon for? He is best known for Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), a TV series (spun off from his 1992 film) about a high school student who discovers she is fated to fight and kill vampires. Buffy showcases a pattern that Whedon would go on to repeat: a Strong Female Lead™ blessed with Mystical Movie Martial Arts, who is nevertheless young and apparently innocuous, and must be schooled and moulded by an older man. You might think that this sounds like a fantasy about relationships between directors and ingénue actors; you might be reminded of the multiple allegations about Whedon’s abusive on-set behaviour. But Buffy, too, was extraordinarily popular.

Buffy reinvented Victorian gothic tropes for a modern audience. It reinvigorated traditional modes with its verbal and visual style and its treatment of the canon. Picking up on the horror lore approach of ‘80s vampire movies Lost Boys (1987) and the peerless Near Dark (1987), Buffy repositioned the gothic from Victorian to post-punk. It also understood what the monsters meant thematically, and how they are used to dramatise and symbolise adolescence.

It also reinvented the format. Traditional syndicated shows — including the sitcoms on which Whedon had cut his teeth — required standalone episodes that could be watched in any order. Buffy had a basic monster-of-the-week structure of the kind that worked for syndication, but it also had loose, season-long storylines that culminated in a season-finale confrontation with a ‘Big Bad’. Alongside shows like The X-Files (1993—2002) and J. Michael Straczynski’s sci-fi epic Babylon 5 (1993—97), Buffy helped to map out the transformation of narrative TV: from stories to sagas, from episodic to progressive, and from discrete weekly helpings to binge-watching.

Sherlock was made in a TV environment in which Buffy had been a massive hit, and it embraced both these approaches. It is full of sparky dialogue, modern characterisation and contemporary stories; and it introduces a ‘Big Bad’ in the form of Moriarty, and builds its own fictional lore.

These innovations make the first episode, ‘A Study in Pink’, thrilling. But the urge to be contemporary and to recraft the canon quickly overwhelms the show. Eventually it is buried alive, stifled by soap opera plot convolutions and a deadweight of lore.

Read more

I seem to have accidentally retired at the grand age of 54 (thus becoming one of the 50--64-year-olds whose ‘economic inactivity’ forms part of the Treasury’s ongoing cluster headache). Not being a productive node is inconvenient in some respects — we haven’t had a foreign holiday in a while, let’s put it that way — but honestly, it’s mostly brilliant. When people talk about the ‘dignity of work’ or the pleasure of their careers, I never have the faintest idea what they’re talking about. I’d always rather be on leave, because:

• I’m fundamentally very lazy;

• I’m not one of those people who becomes anxious when I don’t have anything specific to do; and

• at the most basic level, I have never come to terms with the fact that half of my time — the essential commodity that comprises my existence, my one brief shot at consciousness — must be measured out and sold to other people by the day. I know this makes me sound like an A Level student directly after a prodigious bong hit, but there it is.

Nevertheless, over the decades I’ve needed to live in houses and eat food, and so I’ve been working for money (with breaks to contribute to the literal survival of the human race) for 33 years. At times, I’ve even enjoyed it. The thing I really haven’t enjoyed is the rising tide of professional management bollocks. And I think this might be another transition — like the UGC internet and the rise of populism — that Gen X experienced in real time.

For instance: if you’re Gen X, you too will remember a corporate function that used to be called ‘personnel’. But at some point in the ‘80s, the term ‘human resources’ was imported from the States and adopted by wankers.

In a sentence that can only have been written by someone who works in human resources, Wikipedia asserts that the switch in terminology ‘resulted in developing more jobs and opportunities for people to show their skills which were directed to effectively applying employees toward the fulfillment of individual, group, and organizational goals’. Like so many missives from HR this prompts a reflexive ‘what the fuck?’, but if you read it enough times the message becomes clear: this was a change from the functional (hiring, firing, retiring and paying) to the exhortative. Stuffy old ‘personnel’ did boring things, like paying your wages to the right bank account and clearing up problems with your tax code. HR ensures that you sing the company song, and reminds you to smile while you’re doing it.

I distinctly remember reading the words ‘human resources’ for the first time not long after I started my very first proper job in 1992. I didn’t really think about any of the wider implications; I just noticed that it made me sound like a herd animal on the way to the abattoir. Relatedly, it was around this time that office workers were gathered together in vast sheds under bright lights: the ‘open plan office’, a panopticon with Garfield desk calendars. No opportunity to snort, stretch, yawn or cry in private; nowhere to have delicate conversations or tricky phone calls; no chance of staring out the window for 15 minutes before returning, refreshed, to your inbox. Your employer had bought your consciousness by the yard, and wanted to keep you under its revolving eye while extracting every last drop of compliance. (Not performance; compliance.) And anyway, you were several hundred yards away from the nearest window. The only thing you could see was the foam partition walls of what Douglas Copeland called the ‘cattle pens’.

That first job was a doozy all round. I shouldn’t have been offered it — it was a technical role, and I wasn’t remotely qualified — but the hiring manager was an older man who, I suspect, found me compelling for reasons unrelated to my competence. My line manager, a woman who (quite rightly) had wanted to hire literally anybody else, decided to make my working life as unfulfilling as possible in the hope that I would bugger off and allow her to re-open the recruitment process.

I didn’t need to be encouraged to get a different job; I’d worked out for myself that I’d made a terrible error. But there was a recession on, so it took me a three years to get a job offer: three years in which I attended compulsory parties in Weybridge hotels, received three chocolate penises in three successive Secret Santas (I ‘brought this on myself’ by angrily throwing the first one in the bin), and pretended to learn the principles of Total Quality Management (which was everywhere in the ‘90s). Three years in which I somehow survived three waves of redundancies mandated by management consultants, and watched as the North American parent corporation drove a 200-year-old British publishing house out of its wits and then to the brink of extinction. By the time I left, I had spent a lot of time wandering around the building, looking for walls to bang my head against.

It was during one of these desk-dodging trips — I think I’d been on a cigarette break — that I saw an A2 poster that had just been hung in the stairwell. I reproduce it here, using exactly the same levels of care and thought that went into the original:

That really was it: just a giant triangle with three labels and acres of white space. Bearing in mind that this was a company that employed a team of graphic designers, the howling visual incompetence was a calculated insult all by itself.

It was quite impressive, really, that this poster contained so many grotesqueries in such an abbreviated form: the assertion that a corporation has ‘values’ (and, by implication, personhood); the revealed belief that employees are gaping moral voids in need of basic instruction; the conceptual mire (these things interrelate how? How is ‘technology’ a value? Why a triangle and not a circle?); the ickle-wickle Sunday School tone. But more than all of this, I objected to the bald-faced lying. This was a company that didn’t give me a day of training in three years of employment, and my only experience of ‘teamwork’ was that my manager wanted to hurt me.

That poster drove me absolutely bananas for the remainder of my time there. It wasn’t just that it made me want to shout ‘TIZER!’ or ‘TITS!’ or ‘TERRY THOMAS!’ every time I went past it. No: it was the infernal, contemptuous shithousery. And it’s driven me bananas ever since I left; it has lived rent-free in my head for decades, because it’s absolutely emblematic of the intellectual prostration that management bollocks requires of employees. Not only does management bollocks consist of things that are meaningless or patently untrue, but it also requires staff to pretend to believe them, to give presentations in which they say things like ‘And here’s how this activity lines up with our values!’

It’s this, I think, that has made me so mulish over the decades. I don’t like having to sell my existence by the yard, but I can cope with it. Employers have the right to require specified work to a specified standard, appropriate behaviour, and the presence of both of my bum cheeks in a designated chair; but I’ve never accepted that they have the right to direct my thought processes. I cannot bear having to pretend that I believe things that I don’t believe, especially when those things are directly contradicted by the evidence of my own eyes. I refuse, for instance, to acknowledge that ‘teamwork’ is a ‘value’, as opposed to an utterly basic requirement of functional working. Like ads for reformulated products, the real utility of ‘company values’ is that they are infallible tells. If a company cites ‘transparency’ as a value, you can bet your house that the culture is irredeemably furtive.

When I talked to my mother about all this, back at the tail end of the last century, she pointed out that I come from a long line of shop stewards. Of course, thanks to Mrs Thatcher, I’ve never worked for an organisation that recognised a union; and, thanks to the union movement, until a few years ago there wasn’t a union that represented workers in my field (corporate editorial and communications: the ‘effete bastard’ functions).

And anyway, what would a union have offered me? My work was not dangerous; I was not at risk of industrial injury; I didn’t work shifts; I wasn’t badly paid. (People in my sector get made redundant a lot, but so does everyone.) My complaint in that first job — the insidious, injurious, undignified, coercive requirement to recite corporate horseshit — was less material, and more difficult to address. My employment contract was, in effect, a non-compete clause on my cognition, a promise that I would not think on company time. They should have put that on the poster. At least it would have had the value of honesty.

I’m gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow. So if you could be here around 9 that would be great, oh! and I almost forgot, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay? We ahh lost some people this week and, we sorta need to play catch up.

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl; it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

You Give Me Fever

As a fresher at university I joined two societies: the drama soc, and a group that amounted to a dating service for musicians. Guitarists would pair up with guitarists and form axe-toting gangs, battling over scarce resources, like drummers.

These two interests came together when my friend Simon wrote a play about an Elvis obsessive and decided he wanted a live band to play Elvis songs during the performances.

Turning a play into also a gig was, of course, a smart decision, as anyone who has ever mounted a jukebox musical will tell you. If the play turns out to be terrible, the audience gets to watch a band. If the band sucks, there is always the play. And if both are terrible, there is at least some variety of suckage.

The less smart decision was bringing me in as lead guitarist. I owned a rather nice tobacco sunburst Gibson Les Paul guitar, it is true; but — given that I am unable to hold a tune or stay in rhythm — it might have been wiser to make me lend it to a musician. I liked punk, which is just about the only genre of music in which a lack of talent is a coveted quality. But in covering Elvis songs, I was essentially being asked to pretend to be Scotty Moore, one of the greatest rock n’ roll guitarists of all time.1

Simon’s smartest decision, however, was the counterintuitive focus on Elvis.

My friend Lucy tells the story of hearing the news of Elvis’s death in 1977 and asking her mother if John Travolta would be the new King of Rock n’ Roll. Travolta was more like one of those medieval pretenders who ended up watching their own intestines being roasted in front of them at Smithfield; but the King was, indeed, dead, and by this point had been so for some time. More terminally, he was unhip.

When we pictured him we saw bloated, spangled Vegas Elvis, all sweat and dyed sideburns, yelling his way through ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ in front of an audience of frantic grannies. The karate kicks and photo ops with Richard Nixon had a certain kitsch appeal, of course. Vegas Elvis embodied a moribund and decadent dark reality, a feverish excess and fatal self-indulgence that ran counter to the neon ‘80s of Madonna and Hollywood teen comedies. It was an image of mainstream pop culture that that mainstream was trying to pretend wasn’t there, like a demented relative in a distant nursing home. This reading was, inevitably, popular with the counter-cultural post-punk bands that Simon and I listened to.

You certainly didn’t hear the music much. Generation X was busy indulging in its own musical inventions, and didn’t have time for those of its parents. This was the era of rave and hip-hop and, for me, industrial punk that sounded like someone slowly demolishing an East German machine tool factory. Even if you were listening to ‘50s rock n’ roll, it was de rigueur to insist you preferred the Carl Perkins’ original of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and to point out that ‘Hound Dog’ had been a Big Mama Thornton song first.

So, when preparations for the play began, I had never heard most of our set list, and spent the first few rehearsals just guessing. Finally Simon sat me down and made me listen to Elvis’s recording of ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, although admittedly this did not make my playing of it any better.

I did know ‘Fever’, though. I knew the Peggy Lee version, but that’s the version that Elvis copies (rather than the Little Willie John original). It is a gloriously strange song, somehow typical of that moment in the ‘50s when the new pop music genres were still trying to decide what they were. The music is stripped back to somewhere between jazz and soul, while the new lyrics that Lee apparently wrote for herself are splendidly hip and slangily erudite.

That image of the over-the-hill Elvis, stuffed full of fast food, drugs and his own ego, missed a (literally) vital element: his vitality, the culturally transformative force of his performance. This was the reason he had been crowned King of Rock n’ Roll in the first place. His performance on ‘Fever’ is blunter than Peggy Lee’s, and lacks her sly wit, but he puts a smouldering desperation into it that is threatening and vulnerable at the same time. Like many of his hits, Elvis’s ‘Fever’ is pure pop in its most sublime form: hooky and surprising, energetic and compulsive, full of sexual angst and a deep joy at being young and alive. More urgently for the purposes of our jukebox musical band, it goes heavy on the bass and drums. This allowed us to give full rein to our terrific rhythm section: Claire, whose upright double bass neck would be slathered in blood at the end of a gig, and Sam, our Charlie Watts, the irresistible, still but propulsive centre that rooted the whole shebang.2

Everybody’s Got The Fever

In a moment when Elvis’s music was deeply unfashionable, this all came together in an unexpectedly brilliant way. Being in a band was probably the closest I ever got to playing team sports. The same physical ineptitude that made me a terrible musician made me an even worse athlete. My experience of being part of a side was being the part everyone picked last (or, if I was lucky, never picked at all). As a consequence, I did not have any team spirit; but then, teams had never had any ‘me’ spirit either.

But I imagine that bands operate in a similar fashion to sports teams. Not only do you get to mess around with your mates, but there is also a purpose to it. You are creating something together, supplementing and integrating your skills to a mutual end. This frequently requires the sacrifice of your own creativity, the misinterpretation or disregarding of your invention as your collaborators ignore or pervert your contributions. But from that sacrifice comes gifts. The diversity of creative impulse is both uncomfortable and uplifting. From the conflict and concert of individual ideas comes a new whole.

One could argue that there is perhaps slightly less of a competitive element to making music than there is to sports, although anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of Britpop or hip hop may demur there. But there is, I think, a small but crucial difference in what this does to the performance. Sport has spectators; music, like theatre, has an audience. Spectators play a crucial part in sports, but you can play a match without them. Sport can happen, meaningfully, without spectators. But art without an audience is what we call ‘a rehearsal’.

To play in a covers band is to be an entertainer: the value you are creating lies in the audience’s enjoyment. In some ways you are barely there at all; much of the audience’s pleasure is in the songs. The performance — so long as it is competent — is just a means to an end. You are merely a conduit: a sweaty, sloppy stereo system.

We did try to write our own music as a band, but I got the distinct impression that not even all the band thought this was a good idea. When we played our songs live we did not have an audience so much as witnesses; rubberneckers, simultaneously aghast and confused. We were pleasing ourselves and no one else. What the audience wanted, quite rightly, was the Elvis material. It was as an Elvis covers band that we got hired to play parties on campus, busked during the Edinburgh Festival, and played the last night of the Fringe Club.3

One of the reasons we had (re)discovered Elvis in the first place was because we listened to Nick Cave, not least his song ‘Tupelo’ on The First Born Is Dead (1985; a title that surely references the fact that Elvis was the twin to a stillborn brother). In recent years Cave has talked a lot about how, as a young man, he saw his relationship with his audience as antagonistic, and how he now sees it as one of mutual joy and creation. Playing with a band doesn’t only require you to integrate your individual needs with those of the group; it also requires the band to integrate the needs of the audience.

Like Cave, when I was a young man I did not appreciate the value of the audience response. I wanted to shock and astonish with my own vision. Now, the memories of whole rooms dancing and singing along to the Elvis songs that we were playing is, naturally, deeply satisfying. Art does not exist without an audience, and that goes double for entertainment. Whether it is playing in a band, putting on a play or even writing a pop culture email newsletter, the tempering of one’s own creativity to the enjoyment of an audience is a crucial part of that creativity. The audience is yet another collaborator, pushing us to step beyond our instinctive, comfortable spaces, to meet their desires and so create something wholly new: not just to them, but to us.

I really should have taken Elvis a good deal more seriously.

Being a fan of unfashionable Elvis in the early ‘90s was just one of many defiantly hipster anti-hip choices:

I reckon there are two things all Gen Xers remember about Monica Lewinsky: that she wore a beret while shaking Bill Clinton’s hand in a line-up, and that she owned a Gap dress that still bore the presidential seal of approval when she put it back in the wardrobe.

The ‘Gap’ label had semiotic weight. It had arrived in the UK at the end of the ‘80s blazoning clean, Benetton-style images of white backgrounds and ethnically diverse models. It was a little bit smart, a little bit different, a little bit pricey; somewhere you might go on pay day, or in the sales. In 1998 — when we first heard the name ‘Monica Lewinsky’ — it was still a reasonably fresh, aspirational brand. It felt very, very American, in a way that made its clothes difficult to parse (Are putty-coloured chinos cool? These guys seem to think they are.) But ‘American’, as a fashion vibe, was more desirable than it had been in the ‘80s. I had a Gap top with crossover spaghetti-straps of such baffling complexity that I briefly throttled myself every time I put it on.

If you were in your early 20s in the 1990s and had landed a starter-level job somewhere exciting, you might well have treated yourself to a Gap shift dress in celebration. Professional, ‘decent’, but slyly sexy; workwear that made people think ‘Audrey Hepburn’, not ‘Susan from accounts’. The kind of thing that probably costs a bit more than you can afford, and nevertheless probably doesn’t fit brilliantly, because in the scheme of things this is still cheaply-made clothing. But you’re 22; you look better in it than a 40 year old looks in Vivienne Westwood. You’ll cope.

These days, of course, Gap is where you go if you don’t have the nouse to go to Uniqlo or Cos. And the fact that Lewinsky was stitched up like a kipper in a Gap dress that she couldn’t afford to have dry-cleaned… man, that’s poignant. Like a Kids from Fame! LP in the rain.

I think about Monica Lewinsky quite a lot; I suspect a lot of Gen X feminists do. It was a public fight between an incredibly powerful old man and a junior female staffer of our own age, and most of us called it wrong. But I think about her not so much because our feminist power-analysis was off, but because we were nasty about her. We smirked at her hairspray, her weight, her clothes, her make-up, her eager-beaver toothy smile. We didn’t only fail to recognise the not-so-subtle misogyny; we participated in it. We flubbed the ‘basic solidarity’ test. We thought she was a silly slut, and that she was destroying Clinton — the first Democrat president of our adult lifetimes — out of spite. We were mean, as well as wrong. Our instincts were to make it personal.

It’s hard to take a principled stand when the relevant conceptual premises are all tangled up with your real, everyday life. (This is a general problem with feminism.) I’m roughly the same age as Lewinsky, and when I first heard her name I knew plenty of women my age who were shagging their married bosses. They made me angry; the bosses, yes, but also the young women. They thought fucking the boss was an enviable achievement, and so did I. I thought it was mucky and immoral to cause that much pain to wives and children, but I also saw the procurement of male sexual attention as a competition. And a boss who had chosen to screw my colleague was a boss who had chosen not to screw me.

I like to think that I wouldn’t have shagged a married boss, although my opinions about these things were more about personal morality than they were about structural power. And anyway, none of them ever asked me to, so who knows? My more immediate problem was that I couldn’t incite a man to be so cruel and reckless, and it felt like a judgement on my lack of sexual distinction.

As Hanif Kureishi wrote in the year the ‘Lewinsky scandal’ broke, ‘There are some fucks for which a person would have their partner and children drown in a freezing sea.’ (‘Person’, eh? Pull the other one.) It’s not clear whether this is ‘fucks’ as in acts, or ‘fucks’ as in person-who-fucks; but whichever it was, it was, like, totally aspirational. I heard Kureishi’s line at the time because there was a lot of fuss about it, perhaps more than he had expected. It was a gleefully destructive obscenity of the kind that is thought awfully clever; but it also spears an actually-existing phenomenon, which is why it made so many people so angry. Adrift in this miasma of addled bollocks, I had one fixed point of concrete knowledge: I wasn’t the kind of woman for whom any man would risk his marriage, let alone watch his children drown. And I felt kind of second-rate about it.

This is what I mean about analytical premises getting tangled up with your real life. When these boss-fucking women dragged me into pub corners, a bottle of wine down and bursting to tell, they glittered. They had all the distinctive marks of a ‘promising young woman’: thin, clever, pretty, determined, quick, charismatic, a little bit dangerous. It did feel a lot like a competition, and they did seem empowered. They all made quicker progress in their careers than I did, and in the next ten years or so they will have the pensions to show for it. After all, they conducted pay-and-progression negotiations with someone who was naked, post-coital and had suddenly remembered that he quite enjoyed spending time with his kids. When the boss dumped them unceremoniously; when people around the office started to laugh at them; when they had to find a new job in a hurry because he wasn’t going to… When everything, eventually, came crashing down around their ears, as these things tend to do, it was hard to see them as women who required my feminist solidarity. They certainly hadn’t seemed very interested in it last time I’d checked.

And then Monica Lewinsky came along and I thought: why is she making such a bloody fuss? Silly cow.

Most recently I’ve been thinking about Lewinsky while re-reading Primary Colors (1996), the gossipy novelisation of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. Primary Colors s one of those novels that is so close to real life that the reader has no way of knowing where the facts end and the fiction begins; Clinton is not even remotely disguised as Jack Stanton, a white governor from a southern US state running an outsider campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was published anonymously, which was a terrific wheeze; but it would have been an enormous smash in any circumstances, because it’s highly enjoyable, well-drawn and tightly plotted.

There’s no Lewinsky avatar in Primary Colors; it was published before her affair with Clinton became public, and it covers the period before Stanton/Clinton entered the White House. Nevertheless, the candidate’s ‘bimbo eruption’ problem is at the heart of the book. Stanton’s staff are aware that their candidate keeps having one-off assignations in hotel rooms between campaign stops. But these incidents don’t qualify as ‘affairs’, nor (wearing our 1990s goggles) do there seem to be any troubling questions of consent. (Unlike Clinton’s real-life presidential campaign, none of the women accuse Stanton of abuse.) When the skeletons in Stanton’s boudoir are more ruthlessly interrogated, though, it turns out there is something worse: a ‘deeply, lusciously adolescent’ girl who says Stanton is the father of her unborn child. Even more serious — it is implied — is that this girl is the daughter of a Black restaurateur who is one of Stanton’s friends. The combination of age, ethnicity, pregnancy and friendship makes this a deadly political threat, and something must be done to find out whether her accusation is true.

The term ‘bimbo eruption’ is deeply redolent of the late ‘90s. It gave us a collective noun for all the big-haired, over-made-up, unclassy women who went public with accusations about Clinton’s behaviour. Like Kureishi’s line, it was cruel, funny and seemed to describe something real, something we could all see happening. It named a phenomenon, channelled a public intuition, and told us who to laugh at (and who to laugh with); it was a drive-by insult and a good joke; it was a highly effective piece of political comms.

So here’s the thing: ‘bimbo eruption’ was coined by Betsey Wright, the deputy chair of Clinton’s first presidential campaign. And Wright was not only a long-time Clinton devotee; she was a staunch advocate for women’s causes. She was the model for Primary Colors’ Libby Holden, the stroppy feminist activist who uncovers Stanton’s criminality and refuses to back down (Kathy Bates in the film; astonishingly great).

Wright remained loyal to Clinton through decades of revelations about his sexual affairs; ‘bimbo eruption’ was just the peak of her public prominence. It was Wright who warned Clinton not to run for the Arkansas governorship until he had a strategy for dealing with all the women who said he’d screwed them. Throughout his first presidential campaign she defended him against all-comers. In 1994 Time called her his ‘chief squelcher of controversy and scandal’, a role she was able to perform precisely because she knew so much of the truth, and because journalists found it hard to believe that a feminist — and a long-time close friend of Hillary — would stand by Bill if he had done the things he was accused of. She did not go with Clinton into the White House; her messy, ‘emotional’ professional style was enough to see her categorised as ‘not ready for prime time.’ (Funny, the things that are and are not considered disqualifying.) But in public at least, she kept her counsel as Kenneth Starr pursued Bill Clinton through seemingly endless tortuous legal procedures. Perhaps, like most left-aligned or ‘progressive’ activists, she thought it was all a radically right-wing Republican tactic to destroy a successful Democrat president.

We all thought that. Joe Klein, the Democrat-aligned journalist who wrote Primary Colors, still thinks it. In an afterword to the novel written in 2006, he dismisses the ‘Lewinsky insanity’ and asserts that Clinton’s political genius and performance in office excuses behaviour that was harmless, if faithless; ‘I remain convinced that his presidency will be judged far better in history than the reputations of those who attacked him so mercilessly and trivially.’ But then, Klein these days is to be found on Substack advising Democrats to be ‘less feminised’. I’m not really sure what that means. In office, Clinton required employers to allow (unpaid) pregnancy leave, and shored up family planning programmes. Was that enough to justify placing a man of dubious sexual morality in the White House? Those were the real-world choices.

Who knows what to make of Wright’s story? In Primary Colors, when Holden reaches the final, rotten bottom of Stanton’s amorality, she kills herself rather than choose between covering for him and going to the press. The fictional arc of Libby Holden — an adamantine, copper-bottomed Second Wave feminist defending a powerful man who, at best, exploits his position — could end only in self-murder; the dissonance was real, and even Klein didn’t know how to handle it. Wright, though, preferred to go on. A longstanding campaigner against the death penalty, in 2009 she was accused of smuggling ‘a knife, tweezers, a boxcutter, and 48 tattoo needles’ into prison while visiting an inmate awaiting execution. Most of the charges were dismissed, but it’s kind of a magnificent rap sheet.

If you’re not the sort of woman who fucks the boss, then you just might be <shudder> a good girl.