It’s a strange reversal, for us to be the ones waiting for Kate. At the start of her public career, the narrative was that she was the one patiently biding her time. Nicknamed “Waity Katie” by the tabloids, she was …
Why you want to be a millionaire
For better or worse, the TV quiz show is the perfect cultural expression of our age. Like the knowledge they require of contestants, they are too easily dismissed as trivial, but you only have to scratch the surface to discover …
The gladiatorial art of the quiz show
For better or worse, the TV quiz show is the perfect cultural expression of our age. Like the knowledge they require of contestants, they are too easily dismissed as trivial, but you only have to scratch the surface to discover …
The Noughties enabled Russell Brand
Back in the Noughties, pop culture was hard and nasty. The internet was corroding the mystique of fame, and the public wanted to read — in the words of Jessica Callan, one of The Mirror’s original 3AM Girl gossip columnists …
Peep Show is a national humiliation
The history of British comedy is a history of ever-increasing male humiliation. Let’s start in the Seventies, the decade of declinism and brown suits. Forced to bear witness to both is Basil Fawlty, the supreme specimen of self-righteous control-freakery who, …
How Elliot Page escaped womanhood
Ellen Page — a person who no longer exists, and who by strict application of the rules of gender identity never existed — became famous at the height of an exceptionally dark era for young women and fame. In 2007, …
The strange death of Jeremy Clarkson’s England
“Ask Clarkson. Clarkson knows — people like fast cars, they like females with big boobies, and they don’t want the Euro, and that’s all there is to it.” This surmise, from Peep Show, captures the essence of Jeremy Clarkson’s Noughties …
How Eminem became a role model
The other day, I was pulled up short by a poster on the tube. I didn’t clock what it was advertising, but I was struck by the text: “Guess who’s back? Back again. Guess who’s back? Tell your friends.” It’s …
The abject failure of Cool Britannia
Storm Eunice tore the Millennium Dome’s PTFE-coated fibreglass roof to shreds over the weekend. In the footage that circulated on social media, the steel struts that make up the underlying structure lie unnervingly exposed, like a whale carcass on the …
The death of intimacy
The sexual entrepreneur keeps a spreadsheet of every encounter she’s ever had. It’s populated with all kinds of information: how much they talked, the different positions they tried, whether it was the first or second or fifth time, and, of …