If you’ve seen any of Mischief Theatre’s Goes Wrong productions, you’ll know that these guys are true masters of slapstick and farce.
People sometimes say that we don’t make great comedies any more – but the two hours I spent at the Marlowe Theatre last Thursday made me laugh at least as much as the very best episodes of Yes Minister or Father Ted.
Having seen the Play That Goes Wrong and Comedy About A Bank Robbery, I wondered if Peter Pan might not consist of the same jokes reworked but there was plenty of fresh humour here.
The genius of these actors lies in the fact that they can take gags that on paper might seem quite basic – how funny can someone being repeatedly smacked in the face really be? – but bring the house down thanks to comic timing and delivery.
The play operates on two levels, in that the actors performing in Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s ill-fated production are characters in their own right, who we get to know throughout the show. There’s Max (Theo Toksvig Stewart), the winsome young hopeful who charms the audience; Chris (Jack Michael Stacey), the irascible director whose second-half rant would have been worthy of Basil Fawlty himself; and Dennis (Clark Devlin), who, as the directors inform us at the start, “doesn’t know a single line” and has to have his words fed to him through a headset.
Devlin, as Dennis, illustrates perfectly how the play turns on apparently simple devices executed brilliantly. Every single one of his lines is preceded by a buzz from his headset and delivered in an emotionless monotone – which you would think would be both the easiest thing in the world for an actor to do and would wear thin during the course of the play. But Devlin creates such a fantastically bewildered persona that Dennis never stops being funny. Another standout moment centres around pirate Starkey (Matthew Howell), who asks Dennis to pick something up, but mangles his words so bizarrely that Dennis apparently can’t understand him – yet his odd pronunciation is still intelligible to the audience. To be able to do that takes enormous vocal skill – and as the gag runs on for a good few minutes, it becomes one of the funniest moments in the play.
Shout-out above all, though, to the audience member who, when Captain Hook was about to poison Peter Pan, shouted out: “Do you need a hand?” You too should be on the stage, sir.
I was getting off the tube at North Greenwich when I saw them. Women of about my age, dressed in black, with black lace headbands in their hair.
A look from forty years ago, yet of all Madonna’s looks, probably the one most associated with her, the one that means the most to people. The one that said: I’m from the streets, I’m real, I’m unpolished. I’m like you.
This is one of many contradictions about Madonna. She’s a good singer, but her vocal talents are not the reason for her superstardom. She is beautiful, but not in a conventional, Hollywood way. Some people say she’s an ordinary girl without a great deal of talent who made it big through hard work, marketing and getting to know the right people.
I have never believed this. Madonna is an extraordinary dancer – she won a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan and trained in New York with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre – an extraordinary pop songwriter, an extraordinarily hard and disciplined worker and an extraordinary person.
I have seen her live once before, in 2008. I don’t remember too much about it, except that I was miles from the stage, so that she was a tiny, faraway figure, and yet I was still awed to be in the same room as her.
This time she was much closer, and when she stepped onto the stage, I suddenly felt overwhelmed. I was beyond thrilled, and so honoured to be in her presence that I felt close to tears.
Madonna, to those of us who have followed her throughout her life and career – I have been a huge fan since Ray of Light – isn’t just a pop star. She is an inspiration, a trailblazer, a role model for every woman who was ever told she was too much, too different, too herself. To have her perform in front of you the music you have loved for all that time – to have her sing those songs, and to be singing and dancing along yourself – I can’t explain how amazing that is. But when you add in her serious illness last year, and the fact that she could so very easily have not been here, let alone able to perform, the experience takes on a whole new depth of meaning.
While it is Madonna’s personality that makes her a superstar, she is also a first-class pop songwriter. In less than two hours, she ran through 26 hits from her 40-year career, covering every era: Holiday and Everybody from her first album; Like a Virgin, Open Your Heart and Like A Prayer from the mid to late 80s; Ray of Light and Nothing Really Matters from the album that turned me into a superfan; Don’t Tell Me, Hung Up, Bitch I’m Madonna from this millennium; and many more. Whether you are a fan of her as a person or not, it is impossible to deny that Madonna has consistently produced excellent dance-pop for 40 years and has one of the strongest back catalogues of all time. I was also pleased that she performed Erotica, Human Nature, Bedtime Stories and Rain from her two early-90s albums, a period when she styled herself as a sex-crazed dominatrix, published her Sex book, and was widely held to have lost the plot. Because the truth is that she *had* lost the plot – but while she could easily try to brush over that period in her career, she doesn’t. Madonna owns her mistakes as much as her successes – something we could all do with doing a bit more of. She doesn’t try to be perfect: the Sex book happened, it was part of her journey and the Erotica and Bedtime Stories albums are still packed solidly with banging tunes.
As well as this litany of hits, there were musical interludes where she performed with her dancers or went offstage for a costume change and maybe a breather, and cover versions of I Will Survive and Billie Jean. I did not see Madonna perform at the height of her fame – I was a child – and I imagine she has slowed down since then but the energy, stamina and skill that went into her two hours of dancing and singing was still incredible. And I mean that almost in the literal sense of the word – she is 65, and almost certainly still recovering from her serious illness. She was probably fitter than almost everyone in that room – and she looked stunning, with no sign of the Wildenstein-esque puffiness that made me, always an admirer of her unconventional style, pretty sad.
Madonna doesn’t talk that much to the audience, but what she did say was important and there was very much a theme – slightly unusually perhaps for someone who has always prided herself on keeping moving, on facing forward – of looking back on her achievements, of celebrating how far she has come and, yes, the fact that she is still here. Her Bond theme Die Another Day took on a whole new level of meaning: “I guess I’ll die another day / It’s not my time to go.” She spoke briefly about her early years in New York, before she was famous, when she was “broke and anorexic”. Andrew Morton voiced suspicions of an eating disorder in his biography, but until then it was something I’ve never known her to confirm – to me, and I imagine to anyone else who has struggled with mental health, body insecurities or low self-esteem, that was a pretty major admission.
I thought I knew my Madonna lyrics pretty well, but the two gay guys in the row in front of me, who didn’t stop dancing for the whole show, knew every word – and I mean every word. I looked around at the thousands of people in that room and realised that Madonna must mean something slightly different to every single one of them, must have affected every individual in a way that’s personal to them. Some people have grown up with her, love her simply for her music and style; some, younger than me, love her newer electronic music and have no real idea of the cultural impact she had in decades past. I’ve written elsewhere about how for me, she is a role model: proof that a woman with a loud voice and a lot of opinions, a woman with a personality, can nonetheless be successful, admired and most of all, loved. For the gay members of the audience (and as Bob the Drag Queen told us as he opened the show, “Everyone is gay for the next two hours”), she represents something else: someone who championed their cause, controversially and at significant professional risk, at a time when, as she reminded us during a very emotional rendition of Live To Tell, “Being gay was not accepted in the 1980s. Can you understand that? It was not accepted.” During the song the big screens displayed photographs of people she had known, and in some cases been very close to, who had died of AIDS, including Christopher Flynn, her mentor and dance teacher, and Martin Burgoyne, her dancer and beloved friend who was just 23 when he died. For the second time during the concert, I felt tearful – and I doubt I was the only one.
What must it be like, I wondered, to stand on that stage in front of all those people, and know how much they admire you, look up to you, feel strongly about you? To know that you have touched their lives, changed something for them, maybe just a little bit, maybe a lot? In this technological age, we often ask if you can have a meaningful connection with someone who you have never met in person; for me, Madonna answered that question before the digital era even began. I don’t have to know this incredible woman personally to be inspired by her fearlessness, her determination, her work ethic, her philanthropy, her resilience, her feminism, her confidence, her unconventionality, her refusal to compromise and a hundred other things.
“And if I die tonight / At least I can say that I did what I wanted to do / Tell me, how about you?”
by Sarah Linney Editor theloopjournalism@gmail.com
Buddy Holly died at 22, after a musical career lasting just four years.
Yet in that time, as one of the pioneers of 1950s rock and roll, he changed the face of popular music, influencing the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and recording so prolifically that his record label was releasing music for a decade after he died.
Such is the life immortalised in the biopic The Buddy Holly Story, which came to the Marlowe Theatre last month.
I’d seen it before, remembered little about it, for some reason decided to go again even though I don’t know that much of Holly’s music. I’m glad I did.
The first half of the show focuses on Holly and the Crickets’ burgeoning career, their desire to play rock and roll rather than country, and their contribution to bridging the gap, through music, between black and white in a still-segregated USA. The Crickets accidentally became one of the first white acts to play the Harlem Apollo, then a ‘black’ venue, in 1957 after the booker mistook them for another group and after being initially booed, won the audience over.
Glen Joseph made an endearingly offbeat Buddy when I saw the musical in 2017, but the same can’t be said for A J Jenks, who just comes over a bit odd and slightly oily, his whirlwind courtship of Maria Elena seeming creepy rather than romantic. In the first half the band change the name of their song from Sandy Lou to Peggy Sue because the drummer’s girlfriend has promised she will “put out” if he does; I don’t know if I found this funny six years ago, but it just made me uncomfortable now, and I was kind of surprised that a modern audience still laughed at it. (The story’s made up anyway, according to the lady in question.)
But there is a star of the show, and it’s Miguel Angel as Ritchie Valens, the Latin American singer who dies in the plane crash with Holly. Angel isn’t just an incredible dancer – he was one of the choreographers for the show – he seems to be almost permanently smiling, and exudes a happiness and likeability that is incredibly charming. Honourable mentions go to Christopher Chandler as larger-than-life singer The Big Bopper – the third casualty of the crash – and Laura-Dene Perryman, whose dancing was something else in its sheer energy.
For most of the second half, it’s February 3, 1959 and we’re in Clear Lake, Iowa at Bopper, Valens and Holly’s final gig. They perform a top-class succession of rock and roll hits, both their own (La Bamba, Chantilly Lace, Heartbeat) and other people’s (Johnny B Goode) – it’s a fabulously fun celebration of some of the best music ever made. That’s what going to the show gave me above all – a renewed appreciation for and interest in the music of that era.
But we all know what’s going to happen, and the musical ends on a tragic note, with the announcement that all three performers died in a plane crash after the concert. If Holly was young at 22, he was a veteran compared with Valens, who was 17.
And yet, I’ve been listening to their music, and that of their contemporaries, ever since the show. Don Maclean named the day of the crash The Day The Music Died in his 1971 hit American Pie. Heartbeat, Every Day, La Bamba, Chantilly Lace, That’ll Be The Day? I’d argue that that music is very much alive.
by Sarah Linney Editor theloopjournalism@gmail.com
Dear Damian
I am writing to ask you to oppose the Plan B coronavirus restrictions proposed by this government when they come before the House of Commons on Tuesday.
I don’t think I have ever written to my MP before this year, and now I find myself doing so for the second time in two months. Because these are unprecedented times. There have been pandemics before, but there has never been an assault of the nature this government has undertaken on our personal liberties, our bodily autonomy, our right to live as free adults, our democracy itself.
The people of this country have endured almost two years of restrictions on their personal and professional lives. You do not need me to tell you about the toll this has taken on our economy, our mental health, our children’s education, the very fabric of our society. You know that a House of Commons briefing published in September described an “unprecedented” recession caused by the virus and stated that the economy may never recover. You know that in the travel sector, one of the worst affected sectors and one which has received no government support, one in two people are thought to have lost their jobs. You know that the NHS found that one in six children now has a probable mental health disorder, up from one in nine in 2017, and that already last December Ofsted was estimating that many children had fallen six months behind in their education. You have seen the footage of people prevented from comforting grieving relatives at funerals; you have heard the heartbreaking stories of people refused time with dying family members in hospital. You have seen your own government’s report stating that seven million people who should have come forward for treatment during the pandemic did not do so and that NHS waiting lists may take a decade to clear.
You know all this, so let me bring the numbers to life with some personal examples. I personally suffer from a heart condition for which I am currently receiving no care. I have not seen some family members who live abroad for almost two years. A friend who runs a travel business has had no income for 18 months; two of my other friends in travel lost their jobs. Like the hospitality industry, travel is on its knees. Anxiety has made one previously calm and balanced friend unrecognisable; another told me that the pandemic transformed her previously gregarious toddler into a child who became terrified her brother was going to die when he developed a temperature. Four of my friends spent last Christmas alone. Another has chosen not to have the vaccine and his father is now refusing to see him at all.
I say all this, because I want you to know that we can’t take any more. That those who say these are minor restrictions – a mask here, a test there – are missing the point. If they are a drop of water, then they are a drop into a cup that is already full to the brim. We have had enough. We had had enough in February, and only the promise of an end to all this – a “one way road to freedom”, the Prime Minister told us then – kept us from going mad. That promise has now been broken, and who knows how far back down the road we will go if we do not say no now,
We put up with all this because there was an emergency. There was a material risk of the NHS being overwhelmed. Even if, as I did, you opposed the restrictions right from the start, because you felt this was a line that no government in a free society should ever cross, you understood the reasoning behind them. This is no longer the case. 46 million people in the UK have now been twice vaccinated – 81 per cent of those eligible – and almost half have had a third jab, giving them immunity of well over 90 per cent against serious disease. 95 per cent of adults now have covid antibodies. If the NHS is still at risk of being overwhelmed by cases of a virus to which only one in 20 adults now lacks immunity, then the NHS has much bigger problems than covid. It is not the responsibility of the British public to restrict their lives indefinitely to “protect” a health service whose staff protest annually that it is at breaking point and which has been run at near-capacity every winter for years. The NHS is there to protect us. If it isn’t able to do so, then it is the government’s job to fix that through reform, not by asking us to spoil our lives.
The fact that this is a new variant of covid is largely irrelevant. Viruses mutate. It is what they do. There will be omicron, and pi, and endless variants of covid after that, just like there have been and will be endless variants of the flu virus and the common cold. We do our reasonable best to head off the flu virus’ mutations every year by updating the flu vaccine, and we get on with our lives, and despite the vaccine being far from one hundred per cent effective, the NHS has never been overwhelmed by flu deaths. Nor do we consider restricting our lives in case that year’s mutation happens to be particularly severe. Omicron so far appears to be mostly mild – and therefore arguably should be allowed to out-compete more severe variants such as delta, to strengthen immunity in the population without resulting in widespread serious illness. Furthermore, if we push the economy and our mental and physical health to the brink “just in case” every time a mild variant appears, we will have no resources left should there at some point be a serious variant which requires serious measures, or heaven forbid, a pandemic of something far more dangerous than covid.
To bring in restrictions outside of a genuine emergency situation is to change the relationship between citizen and state for the long-term. If we accept the need to do this now, we accept the possibility of doing it forever. Basic freedoms – how we can dress, where we can go, who we can see – become something governments can confer or withdraw at will. This is not in keeping with Britain’s long tradition of liberty, of being a country where we are allowed to live as we please so long as we do not directly harm others, an ethos which as a nation we have defended time and again on the world stage. To hear our Prime Minister now mooting the idea of compulsory vaccinations I find genuinely terrifying. If the state is able to override our bodily autonomy, there is no meaningful concept of freedom left. This is not the Britain I know, and it must not become the Britain I know.
I urge you, for myself and for every other constituent who feels as I do, to vote against these restrictions and oppose them unequivocally.
by Michelle Hawkes Writer theloopjournalism@gmail.com
When my daughter returned from nursery recently she told me she had been playing with numbers. When I asked her who she had been doing that with, she replied, “My friend Sophie.” “Oh,” I replied, having never heard of Sophie before. “Do you like her?” The rather surprising answer was: “No, not really.”
It turns out that at her nursery they call all the children friends. They don’t take the register, they count the friends, and they don’t choose a partner, they find a friend. Much as this seems like a lovely (if sickeningly sweet) world to live in, it’s unrealistic, unhealthy and unhelpful to their social development.
Most people are not your friends. People who are your friends might have taken a long time to get that way, and may well not always be your friends. Parents are often very quick to declare their friend’s child to be their child’s BFF (best friend forever), but just as arranged marriages from birth are considered archaic in most modern societies, so should this ridiculous practice be. A three-year-old child will make a decision 300 times a day, which they will simultaneously expect to last for the rest of their life, and be completely prepared to change almost immediately – and this is as it should be while they are constantly learning how the world works. A day is a long time when you are three, and we shouldn’t be expecting their friendships to necessarily go on past tomorrow, let alone another 80 years. Sometimes these friendships last; more often than not they go by the wayside at some point in the next 10 years, often in the next 10 weeks, and sometimes in the next 10 minutes.
In a world where everybody is your friend and you are encouraged to never say no to somebody who asks to play with you, how can you ever learn to assert yourself? In the pursuit of never letting any child be lonely, we seem to have created a situation where children who are trying to follow instructions are forced into playing with a child who may be repeatedly hurting or being unkind to them. A child who pinches you every time the teacher isn’t looking still has to be described as your friend, and you can never refuse to play with them if they ask. This can’t possibly be a breeding ground for healthy friendships – an adult who was in a relationship with somebody who treated them this way would be encouraged to leave, to stand up for themselves, so why aren’t we teaching our children the same thing?
During primary school years children will be taught about bullying, and recognising when somebody is being a bully. They are also taught about boundaries, and recognising when another person is being abusive, about online trolling and harassment, and about respecting those with different backgrounds or lifestyles. These are all things a child needs to know, they are all useful things to be able to recognise, but across the spectrum of people you will encounter in daily life, the number of those people who are a friend, a bully or an abuser is miniscule compared to the whole grey area in the middle. A grey area which is rarely, if ever, mentioned. We are not giving our children the vocabulary to be able to say “You’re all right but all you ever talk about is Power Rangers and I don’t really like them,” or “I’d rather not play with that child who likes to run around shouting in all their games because I find all that noise overwhelming and confusing.” The only vocabulary we are giving our children to express that they don’t particularly get on with somebody is that they are a bully, or that they hate them.
Expecting everybody to like you, everybody to be your friend, and labelling those who aren’t as bullies is unhealthy. It can lead to trying to change yourself to try to get others to accept you – or to being unable to recognise your own flaws, instead choosing to believe that everything about you is loveable, and labelling whose who dislike you as bullies. If children were given the vocabulary it would be easier for them to understand that there are people with whom we just have little in common. If we started to come to terms at a young age with the idea that some people simply don’t get on with you and that that is okay, then maybe it wouldn’t take many people until adulthood to be able to live comfortably with that fact. Indeed, some people never reconcile with it, which is exhausting and unhealthy. While it is okay to be who you are, it is very difficult to be just that unless you are also secure knowing that it is okay for some people not to like that person.
Children’s television (especially that aimed at girls) is full of groups of friends who rave about how they will always be there for each other, how they will be friends forever, but really how realistic is that? I’m not saying the Powerpuff Girls should have a big row and make other friends, but the best friends forever theme is pushed over and over again, almost as a mantra, and the desperation to have that idealised friendship frequently leads children into trying desperately to cling to a friendship which both parties have grown out of. Children change quickly and mature differently, so somebody who was your friend for a long time can become more distant, and someone you didn’t really think much of for a long time can become a friend for the rest of your life. This is normal, and glossing over the whole subject means it is confusing for children when it happens. Being taught to expect to choose your best friend at the age of three and to be their best friend throughout your life is confusing if you grow apart further down the track, and clinging to a close friendship which has become more of a peripheral one, or even disappeared altogether, is unhealthy.
More than anything I want my kids to be happy, I want them to be kind people who care about others, and who are comfortable with who they are. I want them to enjoy being who they are, and to accept that that means some people won’t like them very much. I want them to know that so long as those other people are respectful and polite that doesn’t matter, and it would be nice if I didn’t feel like I was constantly having to argue against what they are being told by the nursery or school.
Quite frankly if you are going to spend your life trying to please everybody so everybody will be your friend, you are only going to make yourself miserable. And exhausted.
We never got to say goodbye to each other, and I never got to give him the card that told him all the reasons why I loved him.
When I die, there will be a big drama. But Paul died the same way he lived – quietly, with no fuss – it was a full 24 hours before I found out from a thoughtful ex-colleague – and yet with enormous impact, leaving a hole in my life that is now filled with sorrow.
And yet even to write those words feels like a betrayal of his memory. For if Paul can read this from where he is – and I believe, and am comforted by, the idea that he can – he will be upset that I am upset and he will want to make it better – he will need to make it better. Paul never wanted anyone to be sad, and the idea that he was in some way connected with the sadness of someone he cared about would have upset him particularly.
Dear Paul. You had so much left to give – and yet you gave more, in your 59 years, than many give in a full lifetime.
Paul and I met in my last full-time job. Our paths might never have crossed but for the fact that a desk move left my team with insufficient seats, so I had to sit with his team of data processors for a while. I won his friendship, I think, when I gave out some leftover Quality Street from a presentation I did. If you want people to like you, give them sugar.
I did not sit there for long, and within a year had left that job in dramatic and upsetting circumstances, going on my Christmas holidays and never returning due to the deterioration in my mental health. The blur of my breakdown was pierced by the painful realisation that I had obviously not been liked by my team, none of whom ever got in touch individually to ask how I was. I kept in touch with few people, not sure how or why I had become quite so unpopular.
It was Paul who sought me out to keep in touch, reassuring me by that very act that I had been liked better than I thought. From then on we kept in regular contact. Quietly, gently, slowly, I realised that I had made friends with an incredibly supportive, kind, caring and loyal person. In everything he did, Paul thought first of others – of how he could help them, whether there was anything he could do to ease their woes or make their day better. He was always there when I was having a bad time – I knew he would come over if I ever needed him. If I went quiet, he would check that I was okay. When I was suffering so badly with OCD that I struggled even to do my shopping, he offered to take me, telling me: “It’s a thank you for the Quality Street.”
But Paul made my days better all the time anyway, even when he wasn’t trying, just by being who he was. He had a mischievous sense of humour, teasing me about my appetite for cheese and marmite, my politics, my habit of rescueing worms and anything else he could think of. He knew I loved France and would try out his non-existent French on me. His deep intelligence was allied to an interest in politics and current affairs and we would often set the world to rights, sometimes in the middle of the night, both of us being insomniacs. He was forthcoming with his opinions but could disagree with people while still respecting them, a fast-disappearing trait which comforted me in the aftermath of Brexit. He was a Remainer, but joked that MPs were anxious about a hard Brexit because then they might have to run the country.
Paul was everything I am not – self-effacing, quiet, unassuming, free from the slightest trace of arrogance, self-aggrandisement or ego. The irony, for someone who really just wanted to stick to the sidelines, was that the loveliness and purity of his nature thrust him centre-stage in other people’s affections.
And then, barely three weeks ago, Paul announced in a Facebook post that he had been suffering from cancer – and it was terminal.
I don’t know if he even told anyone that he was ill. In typical Paul fashion, even as he typed the post telling us all he was dying he was thinking of others, ending with the words: “If I stop liking your posts, it’s not because I have fallen out with you.”
Paul didn’t know how long he had, but I thought he had a few months at least – so when he came out of hospital a few days later, and I told him I wanted to go and see him when he was well enough, I thought I could wait until he became stronger. I thought I had time. We messaged a fair bit – he wasn’t up to a video call – and I told him: “You have helped people, you have made others’ lives better, you are very loved and liked and you have made sure the world is a better place for having you in it.” I resolved that when I visited, I would take a card telling him everything I loved about him – I thought it was worth waiting because I thought it would be nicer than a text.
I thought there was time. Don’t we all think there is time? But there wasn’t. About a week ago, the messages stopped. He told me he was in and out of hospital. They stopped again. And then, on the train to work on Sunday night, I had a message from my ex-colleague Lesley telling me that he had died. He had announced his diagnosis just two and a half weeks earlier.
I phoned my mum, almost instinctively. I thought afterwards how funny that was – that however old you are, when something terrible happens you just want your mum.
I didn’t cry. I never cry when people die. Five of my friends have died from cancer and I did not cry over any of them. I cried over my grandad, screamed and cried and kicked, but I was eight. Instead, I ache with an ache that will not go. Part of it is that I will never be sure, now, that Paul knew how much I loved him. Perhaps, before his diagnosis, I did not quite know myself.
I wanted to write about the lessons I wanted us all to take from Paul’s death, but I find that I don’t know how. Should we all be more like him? Yes, incredibly obviously, we should all be more like Paul, but also no. Paul loved people for who they were, and would have come tearing down all the way from Cheshire to talk sense into me if I had told him I planned to emulate him and become quieter.
Perhaps this is the lesson – that the best way to be is just to be ourselves, and to try as hard as we can to be good people, but to recognise that there are as many valid ways to do that, and to contribute to the world, as there are people on this planet. Paul always made me feel like I was enough – like I didn’t need to change, tone myself down, be better, that my imperfect self was exactly, perfectly, who I was supposed to be. He was hard on himself sometimes too, I think, and yet he too was perfect.
I hope he did know how much I loved him – but I can say for certain that I knew how much he cared about me. That, at the same time as making me want to be more like him, he made me want to be more like myself. And that is the gift he leaves me with – or one of them. Paul will live for as long as I do, not only in my heart, but in every moment that I strive for kindness, acceptance and thoughtfulness – both towards others and to myself. Take that lesson, all of you, and teach it to those around you, and he will live forever.
My friend Alastair Irvine was not a happy bunny after a train journey last week. To be fair, train travellers often aren’t.
But this time it wasn’t overcrowded carriages, unexplained delays or overflowing loos that were bothering him – it was mysterious platform numbering at Gravesend station which caused him to miss his connection.
“I crossed to what I thought was platform 1 – but what I thought was platform 1 was actually platform 0,” the former Kentish Express editor, 65, recalled.
“So I missed my train. I was pretty annoyed, because I had to then wait another 20 mins for the next train to Dartford to see my daughter Sophie.
“Who in their right mind runs a rail network which has a station with three platforms numbered 0, 1 and 2? Absolutely crazy.”
All sounds a bit like something out of Harry Potter – but less magical. However, according to Network Rail, since platform 0 was added when 1 and 2 already existed, calling it 0 – rather than, well, 3 – was a perfectly sensible way of keeping things in order.
Spokesman Chris Denham explained: “We try to keep platform numbering standard across our stations and when we build new platforms we try to leave the majority of platforms with their original numbers.
“Almost all platforms on the network are numbered in ascending order, starting on the farthest London-bound platform. When we build a new platform on the opposite side of the railway – country-bound – we will give it a number one higher than the existing platforms.
“However, at Gravesend and Rainham, we built new platforms to the left of the London-bound platforms, meaning we went one lower – 0.
“That way we don’t have to rename all the other platforms, as we would have to if we called it platform 1. That actually reduces the confusion in most cases and keeps the layout much the same for passengers.”
It’s not an explanation that seems to wash with Al, who remarked: “Would a new motorway be called the M0?”
But platform 0 is also a thing at Redhill, King’s Cross, Cardiff Central, Doncaster, Stockport and Edinburgh Haymarket – and one will soon be added at Leeds.
Writer and documentary maker Geoff Marshall made two YouTube videos in which he visited them all – indeed, he also expresses mild confusion as to why Gravesend’s new platform wasn’t numbered 3.
But mathematician Matt Parker, who travels with him, has a different take on the matter: “Zero is a perfectly good number. Computer programmers would use zero all the time – in a binary system, you start counting at zero.”
King’s Cross, of course, also has a platform 9 3/4 in homage to the Harry Potter books. A trolley embedded in the wall marks the spot on the station concourse, where visitors can have a professional photo taken with a scarf in their Hogwarts house colours, and buy merchandise in the Harry Potter shop next door.
Platform 9 3/4 is actually between platforms 8 and 9, not 9 and 10, as these are separated by tracks – and Rowling admitted in an interview with the BBC in 2001 that she actually got her London stations confused. “I was living in Manchester, and I wrongly visualised the platforms – I was actually thinking of Euston. So anyone who’s been to the real platforms 9 and 10 in King’s Cross will realise they don’t bear a great resemblance to the platforms 9 and 10 as described in the book,” she said.
Outside the UK, the platform zero trend continues. Lidcombe station in Sydney has one, as do several stations in Japan – the freelance journalist who blogs under the name Tokyo Fox says there are 43 of them. They include Kyoto station, which also doesn’t have a platform 1, because that track is only used for freight, and then has platforms going up from 2 to 14 before jumping straight to number 31. Network Rail must have nightmares thinking about it.
There’s a platform 0 at Madrid metro station too, but it’s not really a platform – it’s a railway museum exploring the history of the Spanish capital’s underground system. It houses the disused Chamberí station, which was designed by architect Antonio Palacios, who created many of the city’s buildings; the station itself, on line 1, has been closed since 1966, but the fittings and fixtures have been removed and restored here to provide visitors with a trip back in time.
Despite Network Rail’s love for order, there are also plenty of missing platforms across Britain’s rail network. Portsmouth Harbour station, which sits on stilts above the water, has no platform 2 due to structural issues (extremely reassuring, I’m sure we can all agree); Huddersfield station has no platform 3 or 7; and West Croydon tram station has no platform 2, as it was filled in when the railway line closed in 1997 to allow platform 3 to be extended. Cardiff Central has a platform 0 but no platform 5, although confusingly there are still signs for it.
Of the signage at Gravesend, Southeastern’s media relations manager, Paul Prentice, added: “We believe the signage is clear and if passengers are ever in any doubt our colleagues will of course be on hand to point them in the right direction.”
Sally is your archetypal female beauty: natural blonde hair, blue eyes, tall and slim, with nice clothes. She’s very clever and was able to follow her dream, pursuing the career she’d always wanted and was so obviously cut out for; she was really good at it too, an award-winner in fact. Sally’s now editor of her own website, on which she can write exactly what she wants. Her humour, kindness and loyalty make her popular, and she has a circle of amazing friends who adore her. She has no children, but a close family friend had a baby last year and Sally loves him as her own; he’s brought her incomparable joy and love. If you took everything else away, and just left that child, Sally would still believe she was the luckiest person in the whole world.
Sally’s a success; she has it all. Who wouldn’t want to be like Sally?
And yet, you might be a bit disappointed in Sally if you met her. Hair aside, she’s plain, her face marred by uneven teeth damaged and discoloured by major dental work. Despite, or perhaps because of, her cleverness, Sally has had lots of problems in the workplace and never had the big-time success she wanted in her field. No one reads her website, and she’s even pretty useless at the part-time job she’s had to take to stay solvent. And her platonic popularity is coupled, perhaps inextricably, with a love life that’s a dead loss – self-obsession, insecurity and melodrama do not a harmonious domestic life make. Sally has a history of severe mental illness, can’t sensibly work full-time or in any sort of high-stress job, and is troubled by frequent suicidal thoughts and feelings of worthlessness.
Sally’s a failure, and she knows it.
A failure, a success; lovable or loathsome; a wonderful friend or a stumbling disaster; a brilliant writer or a bitter, washed-up hack. Sally is all of this, all at once, and everything in between; depending on how you look at her.
Everything, everything in life, depends on how you look at it.
I write this in the wake of the inquest into Caroline Flack’s suicide – a suicide which I never expected, and which by its very unexpectedness has both shocked and resonated with me.
Like Sally, Flack was talented, bright, popular and had her dream career. Yet like Sally, she appears to have battled feelings of low self-esteem and of having royally fucked up – so badly that she took her own life.
Flack was my age; she would have been in my year at school. I have never met her or even seen Love Island, the show she was famous for presenting. But in the days when I read Cosmopolitan, she was on the cover numerous times, held up as someone to admire, a paragon of attractiveness, success and likeability. This was a few years ago; the celebrity fawning was one of the reasons I stopped subscribing. But I remember reading one of the interviews and envying Flack, in comparison to whom I felt really quite inferior. Her assault charge last year shocked me; how could someone so successful by almost every possible standard have such difficulties in her life?
In the months following first the charge, then her death, and finally the inquest, I have realised afresh how enormous the gap can be between someone’s public persona and the reality of their life. This is not new information, nor true only of the famous. The amazing journalist and mother who battled horrific mental illness; the company boss whose abusive partner tried to kill her; the beautiful journalist acquaintance who struggled with an eating disorder; these are just three of the people I know personally whose hidden difficulties, when I found out about them, I found hard to reconcile with the person that I knew. My struggles and mishaps had made me feel inferior to these people, yet their lives were every bit as imperfect as mine.
Each time, I think that I will learn the lesson – that everyone is struggling, that we never see the full picture, that no one is immune. Yet I never really learn it. The realisation never stops coming as a shock.
We have trouble telling the truth about our struggles. Even when we pretend that we are being honest, we present an edited, sanitised version, devoid of the really bloodsoaked bits.
I love to talk about mental health. OCD – at least the boss rarely has to complain that I missed anything! Borderline personality disorder – hold on tight for the rollercoaster of emotions! Disordered eating – well I’m making up for it now with lots of chocolate! Suicidal thoughts – at least I’d never have to endure another Conservative government! Make a joke of it all, leave out anything too painful, and people will say they appreciate your honesty. Talk about these things, but smooth them over so they are easy to swallow.
We want to come out of even difficult disclosures well. I suffered, but I behaved impeccably, nothing was my fault, everything was clean and no one got hurt. No one wants to hear the dirty reality – no one can bear it.
Twelve hours’ solid cleaning, a coat soaked in bleach at 3am. My dirty litter, the mucky wipes I used to clean my shoes, blowing around the compound in the breeze because I could not touch the bin, so just left my rubbish loose for someone else to find, every day for weeks on end. The neighbour who, quite justifiably, swore at me about it as I fled, horrified.
A terror of touching every single person who has ever worked for one of my former employers, and every single object that ever has been in their office, because of one incident four years ago. Baths at 1am, and again at 2am because I touched a speck of dirt, and again at 4am, all through the night, every night, ending only to begin again the next day. Rudeness, unfriendliness, blanking, exclusion. A beloved friend who I cut off five years ago, almost overnight and with no explanation, after she did something hygiene-wise that I regarded as revolting.
Still with me? A dirty, messy house, because OCD rules everything and you can only clean when it tells you to. Dirty habits that I won’t go into, a strange and shameful part of the battle. Gluttonous quantities of food, pain and shame and horror; scissors and knives, a desperation to give vent to emotional pain, coupled uselessly with an inability to ever get past scraping the skin. Accusatory, paranoid, deranged messages, and a patient, long-suffering friend who keeps forgiving. Screaming, hysterical rows, bullying, abusive rants – yes, still me – relationships which I say I’m ending each time we argue. Storming out of the house, and wandering the streets, and sitting in hotel bars for hours because I am too dirty to go home. Alone in the night, alone in the dark, consumed with unhinged, overwhelming hatred of myself and the world and everyone in it.
There are even worse bits, but it is not just myself I have to think about.
I didn’t mean to write this. I meant to keep it simple, lighthearted. To talk about how we make judgments all the time, about people we know, and people we think we know, and total strangers. To recall how, a few years ago, when I was off sick from work, one of my best friends took me to a posh restaurant, and as I handed my fake fur coat to the attendant, I thought about what someone would see if they looked at me right at that moment. Someone well dressed, presumably well off, happy-looking, full of laughter – in stark contrast with the truth, which was that my mental health was shot to pieces, I would end up having eight months off work, and I could barely afford a glass of water. We’ve all done it – looked across the room at someone and made favourable assumptions about them on the basis of details which can be totally misleading. Assumptions which almost always boil down to “everyone else has their life together so much more than I do”.
In the wake of Flack’s death, social media was awash with exhortations to “be kind”. But what does this mean? It is easy to say that we should keep our unkind comments to ourselves – and yes, we often should. I’ve written before about the seemingly greater willingness many of us have to share negative rather than positive thoughts about others, despite the fact that it should be the other way round – you can’t have too many positive comments, but you can have too many negative ones. Sometimes it’s as if we think we are diminished by building others up, and made stronger by tearing them down; it seems to me that the reverse is true, that we all benefit from an increase in collective happiness and self-worth.
But a bland world in which we only ever say nice things is equally damaging. Much has been said about the negative press Flack received, but the hagiographic coverage of the glossy magazines and celebrity websites is harmful in a different way. If Flack, and countless other (usually female) celebrities like her are presented as flawless, by comparison we, who know we are not, can only feel hopelessly inferior. And I wonder if the celebrities, too, are damaged by this coverage, unable to live up to an image of themselves that they know isn’t real.
Flack seems to have been particularly vulnerable to negative comments online – and it’s easy to say that she should just have stopped looking, or learned to discount the opinion of strangers. I would have said the same until this week, when a stranger on Twitter commented on my looks. I don’t care for his opinion and he was pointing out a flaw I am very well aware of, but while it didn’t get to me *very much*, I was surprised, at the grand old age of 39, to find that it got to me *a bit*. One always hopes that one’s flaws aren’t as evident to others as they are to oneself, I guess. Then suddenly, I wondered why I thought not being impervious to a negative remark was a sign of weakness. I’d be pleased at a compliment from a stranger – wasn’t it natural to be instinctively displeased by something less positive?
The question wasn’t whether I should experience a reaction, but why I still felt disappointed that I didn’t look perfect, which is really an inevitable consequence of having an actual face with actual features. I am not aiming for a career as an egg; I look like me, which is how I am supposed to look. We are not supposed to be perfect – and yet, faced with a world in which people cover up their insecurities, filter their faces on Instagram and subtly (or not so subtly) use social media to show us how wonderful they and their lives are, we lead each other to believe that there are perfect people around. Everyone, in fact, is perfect apart from us.
And the consequences of being truly honest can be very real – from others feeling embarrassed (though the mute button exists) to losing one’s job or one’s friends, all of which have happened to me. But the consequences of not being honest, in the long term, are worse – we all remain trapped in an unreal world where, literally, people present an image of themselves that does not exist. We fall short not only in comparison with others, but in comparison with our projected selves.
Of course, it is nice to feel that others admire us – and as someone who has often felt that others must pity her, the temptation to go the opposite way, and try to arouse envy, is strong. But for me at least, the people I admire now aren’t the people who feel the need to present an image of perfection, but those who I know have had the strength, courage, determination and self-awareness to battle their demons and still emerge as amazing people. It’s a strange thing that mental health issues are regarded as a weakness by some, when, as anyone who’s ever suffered with them knows, just keeping going when you’re suffering, never mind actually achieving anything, requires almost superhuman abilities. It’s harder to truly love and get close to people so determined to project perfection that they make others feel inferior. You can have envy from others, or you can have real love, but it’s hard to have both.
We all don’t have to share every detail of our lives – but we need to stop making each other feel that we can’t admit that something’s gone wrong, or that we’re struggling, or that we’re lesser for being not only imperfect, but profoundly so. We feel we need to somehow dress even our cock-ups up as successes, instead of just admitting that we’re people, and we get it wrong every day, and that for life to be a constant effort to improve on that is both normal and okay. A degree of honesty doesn’t just make us more relatable, it’s an act of generosity – to ourselves and to others. It shows others who are experiencing similar struggles that other people go through the same thing – maybe even helps them recognise an issue they didn’t know they had. But it also allows other people to offer help and support – which people generally like to do, especially to someone who’s helped them in the past. No one likes to be the one with the problems all the time. As my friend Elaine, America’s foremost dim sum expert, wrote on Medium: “If I only give and never receive, my relationships become imbalanced.”
In their careful positioning of Flack as someone we should aspire to be like, writers often described her as relatable. How much more relatable she would have been, at least to me, had we been shown a real person with real struggles, with good points even brighter against a background darkened by imperfection. Who knows, maybe she’d even still be alive.
Who would have thought being under what Peter Hitchens derided as house arrest for four months could have any positives?
Turns out that lockdown is like everything else – not all bad and an opportunity to learn. Here’s what I’ve discovered …
1. I only really missed a few people
I have lots of friends. I often say that, whatever else I’ve cocked up in my life, I’ve got it right with my friends. They are a loving, caring, hilarious, fantastic, supportive, amazing bunch of people who all make an immense contribution to the world and to my life. I make a lot of effort to see them and was appalled by the idea that I wouldn’t be able to do so.
So I was surprised by the ease to which I adjusted to the ban. I only see most of my friends every few months anyway, so although the general idea of not being able to see anyone felt like a big deal, most of my individual relationships have been largely unaffected. We all message a lot anyway – most days with my closest friends – and Facetime has been a godsend. My friend Bob says it’s encouraged people tell each other that they matter, too: “I’ve felt like people are being a lot more vocal in their appreciation of each other at a time when we’ve been unable to meet face-to-face.”
But also, not having to do anything, go anywhere, see anyone was restful, even as I missed doing so. There was a real peacefulness in just going back to basics: going to work, going for walks, video calling every week with my favourite child, listening to music, talking to friends, eating and sleeping well. As my friend Miriam put it: “It’s taught me to enjoy a gentler and quieter pace of life.” This was a surprise – but the flipside of it was that I missed some people with an intensity that was equally surprising. Even within my inner circle of around a dozen close friends, there were a handful of people who I really struggled to manage without seeing. And they were neither as numerous as I expected, nor always the people I would have expected them to be.
I wonder if, in the final reckoning, we all only really care about a few people – and I wonder if we know who those people would be until a crisis hits.
Me and my dear friend Miriam staying classy on an Essex night out
2. Family is really important
I come from a difficult family background. This is not a nice admission, but it’s the truth. I am close to my parents now, but I wasn’t always.
But as L M Montgomery wrote: “You may fight with your kin – disapprove of them – but there is a bond between you for all that.” My dad and I see each other maybe every few weeks, but suddenly I really missed him as if I’d been used to seeing him daily – so much that I set aside my loathing of the phone and actually started to call him every week or every fortnight just to talk. This is unheard of – and if was bad enough to find myself actually making calls, it was worse still to find I enjoyed and looked forward to them, only occasionally having to hold the phone away from my ear.
As for my mum, I had had to move in with her at the end of last year to save my finances, a situation which it would be fair to say that neither of us was particularly enjoying. But lockdown suddenly made us profoundly grateful to be living together – we couldn’t even see my brother, so I was the only person she saw for three months.
It hasn’t made everything in our family harmonious, but it has made us appreciate each other more and realise that in the hard times, we do actually need each other.
Dad, apparently surprised at being pictured with his daughter
3. Those “low-skilled” jobs are actually pretty essential
Due to my aforementioned finances, and inability to break into national journalism, since around the time I moved in with my mum I have also been working nights in a supermarket. This isn’t what I trained to do, and I’m not even very good at it, but the people are lovely and it’s actually better paid than a lot of writing jobs. Yes, you read that right.
People are often disparaging about jobs which don’t require a raft of qualifications, viewing them as “low skilled”, “jobs that anyone can do” or even “beneath them”. I’ve learned a lot working in a supermarket – not least that it’s certainly not something that anyone can do, given that I, highly intelligent, yet slow-moving, clumsy and riddled with OCD so that even the simplest task is complicated, am quite poor at it.
And as we all saw when the government brought in the furlough scheme, it’s one of society’s essential roles. As high-paid executives and fat-bonused desk-bound consultants found themselves suddenly dispensable, it was retail workers, bin men, carers, nurses and all the other underpaid, undervalued key workers who emerged as the ones the country actually couldn’t do without.
I’ve often heard high wages for top executives justified because, quote unquote, “only a small number of people can do this job – it requires a very specific skillset”. Watch a nurse save the life of a patient with coronavirus – watch my colleagues keep the store running in the middle of a wave of panic-buying that is quite overwhelming – and tell me these jobs don’t require skills, often very specific ones too. Not only do many of us have enormous talent, intelligence and personal qualities to offer, it has turned out that the country depends, not on those at the top, but on those of us at the bottom holding them up.
4. Most people are good
Lockdown has absolutely brought out the worst in a lot of people. From the people pushing their way into the queue at the chemist, verbally abusing supermarket staff and fighting over toiletroll, to the nasty little curtain twitchers calling the police because their neighbour’s been out for an hour and five minutes, it has shown us how many people are selfish, arrogant, unpleasant and spiteful. Unfortunately, several people have said to me that lockdown has taught them how horrible people are, how stupid they are, or both (where have they been up till now? – Ed.).
But it has also brought out the best – more so, I think, than the worst. Tales abound of people offering to help elderly and vulnerable neighbours; the Ahmadi Muslim community organised food deliveries nationwide; 750,000 people signed up to be NHS volunteers helping people in their area with shopping, medicine, transport or just a much-needed chat. My friend Poppy says: “I’ve felt that so many people are kind and ready to help. In my area we’ve had a wonderful Facebook and Whatsapp group with people always trying to help others in a responsible way.” Another friend, Kim, added: “People talk to each other more – neighbours, family, friends – there’s more appreciation of things around you.”
On my walks, I’ve noticed that people are more ready to smile, say hello and exchange remarks. People need other people, and at a time when normal interaction has been denied to us, we’ve looked for it elsewhere – if acknowleding a stranger in the sunshine enables us to still feel connected to wider society, we’ll take it. Being a miserable cow who doesn’t really want to speak to people, I resisted these interactions for a long time – but after my brother told me to stop being so sour-faced, I was surprised to find that smiling and saying hello instead of scowling made me feel like a better, nicer person (and came in handy when I got slightly lost). Who knew?
One of the nicest lockdown stories I have concerns my friend Phil – who, having suffered from agoraphobia for a number of years, could empathise more than most with the fear of going outside. Aware that most of his neighbours in his London block of flats would probably not be having the family time they’d looked forward to at Easter, he bought chocolate eggs for everyone on his floor and hung them anonymously on their doors with a note saying: “Happy Easter! Hope you are all keeping very safe during these challenging times. Stay well, The Easter Bunny.” Of course, his neighbours didn’t take long to work out the bunny’s identity – and I might have let it slip to Voice of Islam radio too, so he ended up on the airwaves.
The perils of going outside – sometimes Phil is at large
5. We are all fallible
I’ve written extensively about how mental illness has made me view the coronavirus differently from most people. When you have spent your life terrified of nebulous, intangible germs, the real ones, when they turn up, actually hold very little fear – they’re not worse than the trauma your imagination’s already conjured up. Other people with other mental illnesses have said the same. There’s a feeling that we’ve spent our lives prepared for the end of days, so when it comes, it’s just business as usual for us.
Conversely, it’s seemed to me that many of the sanest, least anxiety-prone people I know have absolutely lost their shit over this, and are still virtually confined to their homes by genuine terror. And it has been painful and unsettling to watch people adopt the same behaviours I adopted at the height of my illness – disinfecting their food, showering and changing their clothes when they come into the house, even wearing gloves to touch things outdoors – the latter a level I never quite reached.
People who don’t have (or think they don’t have) experience of diagnosed mental illness often like to set themselves apart from those of us who do, considering themselves somehow stronger and less susceptible. If the past few months have taught us anything, it is that any individual can descend into irrationality – that entire societies can. The rest of the world has derided me as mad, only to reveal it is equally so.
Perhaps it’s part of having borderline personality disorder, or perhaps it’s just a function of childhood and adulthood experiences, that I have a strange relationship with the rest of society. I am friendly and sociable, I have lots of friends, I think most people are good and I have a strong social conscience. But rejection for being different in both childhood and adulthood, plus the inevitable distance that mental health issues create between oneself and other people with normal lives, simply because your daily life is different, means I have always felt like an outsider. And I can never quite decide how I feel about this. There is a constant push-pull: love me, leave me alone, I want to be with other people, I want to be on my own, I want to be like you, I don’t want to be like you.
Seeing society at large thrust into a mass panic which strongly resembles severe OCD might conceivably have brought about a rapprochement. But in fact it has only cemented my alienation. Added to the fear and resentment I feel towards other people is now a seething anger – after 20 years of vilifying me for having a mental illness, society has now decided to adopt those exact same behaviours and legitimise them en masse. I have no sympathy for the misery and fear most people are experiencing right now, at least in the abstract. I realise I ought to; I wish I did; but I just can’t feel it. I have no empathy to give you all, for I so often did not receive it when I needed it.
A bit of me will miss lockdown. And I never thought I would find myself saying this. I opposed it because I know from experience that the costs are too high; I want it to end and I want people, me included, to get their lives back. But I’ve had four months where my mental illness has been not just accepted, but legally enforced. Four months where I’ve been able to go out of the house without fear of contamination – where people have been barred by law from coming anywhere near me. To someone who hasn’t been able to step outside in her home town without significant anxiety for three years, this has been enormous.
The price I will pay for a return of one kind of freedom is the loss of another. I wish I felt that mental health would be treated with more kindness and understanding as a result of the pandemic – taken sufficiently seriously not just by governments willing to fund proper treatment, but ordinary citizens willing to treat each other in a way that does not drive each other mad. We should now be able to see that we do not have sane people and insane people; we are all crazy. But I have known this for years – and known also that there is mainstream crazy, and there is outsider crazy, and that never the twain shall meet. And I am not even sure I want it to, either.
On a Sunday lunchtime four weeks ago, for the first time in more than 20 years, I used a public bathroom without shame.
It’s difficult, normally. As an OCD person, I can’t have anyone watch me wash my hands. There are the stares, sometimes the comments from strangers, or almost worst of all, the friends shifting uneasily, not knowing where to look, pretending they’re not uncomfortable and failing. Often, I’ll hide in the cubicle until the bathroom is empty, however long that takes, to avoid the embarrassment.
I don’t have to do that anymore. Welcome to coronavirus.
Until seven days ago, when everything suddenly got serious, it felt like the world was collectively going a little mad. That is strange enough to watch. But imagine how strange it is when it feels like everyone else is developing the very condition you’ve suffered from all your life – when the hysteria now raging across the world is something you have spent decades quietly battling against.
I have heard many people say they feel more anxious than ever. I have been feeling the opposite; suddenly the sane one.
OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) is a confusing and poorly understood condition. It is the mental illness of the person who wants to do everything right; the illness of the perfectionist, who believes that the risk of getting something wrong cannot be borne. You become obsessed with doing things right, afraid of terrible consequences if you don’t. Mine relates to contamination. A tape of terror, started in childhood, plays endlessly in my head, virtually every second of every day.
The treatment involves learning to face the things you fear, and to see dirtiness, rather than cleanliness, as the “right” thing to achieve (within reason). So you are constantly trying to drown the tape out with another soundtrack: that not only is it okay not to worry about this or that, but that it is beneficial, perhaps vital for you not to do so. You do this all day, every day, with varying levels of success; there are drugs to help you, and therapy, which is in itself traumatic as you are forced to face your fears. The results are confusing for other people, who sometimes then see your standards falling below theirs and are displeased, not understanding that it’s part of your medicine.
Hence I have been a stunned spectator, and even now, reluctant adopter of the panic – because everyone else is now displaying behaviours I have spent a lifetime, with the backing of professionals, trying to train myself to avoid. I have learned not to have a head-to-toe bath after every train journey (to be fair, in the dirty days of Connex, this wasn’t as unreasonable as it sounds), to blow my nose without having to wash my hands and face, and to wash my hands less thoroughly – I would never dream of washing them for a whole 20 seconds. So it is utterly freakish to be told to now go into reverse – and arouses all sorts of difficult feelings.
OCD is not a consistent or logical illness, where you feel disproportionately anxious about everything, or where the bigger the threat the more anxious you feel. You can be terrified of something minor and quite calm about something major. I left my last full time office job in difficult circumstances and ended up so ill that, more than three years on, the memory of a fairly minor hygiene incident while I was there has left me unable to come into contact with former colleagues, and hence unable to ever go outside in the whole of the eastern half of Kent without fear. Yet in the face of a real, live pandemic, I am pretty much completely sanguine. I have heard other people with anxiety disorders say they also feel calm: we are always prepared for the end of days anyway, so when it comes, we barely notice a difference. But in my case, it’s more that my capacity for fear and worry has already been used up. I live with terror inside my head every day, and there have been times when I have wondered if my life was worth living. What’s a global pandemic compared with that?
The panic has left me feeling frustrated – why have people never bothered before about the potentially serious illnesses inadequate cleanliness can lead to? Why have they made me feel silly for, often, simply practising basic cleanliness? It has also left me seething with hurt, anger and bitterness, emotions which I had a plentiful stock of in the first place. I doubt that I am alone, among OCD sufferers, in having been mocked, derided, criticised, told off, shouted at, belittled and humiliated countless times over the years – by laughing schoolmates in the washroom, by adult women coming up to me at the sinks to tell me how to wash my hands, by colleagues and even so-called friends and by my family, with whom there have been endless, painful rows. It now feels like everyone has decided that actually, I was right – 20 years too late. In a horrible twisted way, I feel vindicated. Even as I despise my anxiety, even as I hate it and fight daily to overcome it, I want to shout “In your face! Look who’s washing now!” at the rest of the world, as they scour supermarkets for the UK’s one remaining bottle of sanitiser.
Suddenly, opening the bathroom door with my elbow or stepping into the street to avoid touching strangers isn’t seen as strange. The scowl with which I greet fellow walkers to forestall any interactions is now a prudent social distancing measure. No one has said anything, but I can feel that the sidelong glances and the whispers are gone. People now think I’m just being sensible. But it’s a hollow victory when the damage – to my career, to my family relationships, to my confidence – has been done. Two months of acceptance cannot undo 20 years of jibes, nor eliminate the resulting and profound resentment and pain. My mental health has for years marked me, subtly but unmistakeably, as an outcast from normal society. When the same society which did this, in some cases the same individuals, now try to persuade me I have not lost my head quite enough, and need to buy into the collective paranoia (and it *is* paranoia), forgive me if I just can’t. I cannot throw my mental health under a bus, knowing that long after this is all over and everyone has gone back to their usual levels of scummery, I and I alone will be picking up the pieces.
For the other thing this has brought home is the lack of seriousness with which we take mental illness, still. As others have pointed out, around 800,000 people die by suicide every year, and the World Health Organisation believes that for every adult who dies by suicide, more than 20 others may have attempted it. It is the world’s second biggest killer of young adults aged 15 to 30. I am 39, and I have suffered from suicidal thoughts since the age of 15; I have had breakdowns, struggled hugely in the workplace and probably once lost a job because the company found out I had OCD. Yet because mental health is “all in the mind”, it still takes second place to a physical illness. My suicidal thoughts have been dismissed, minimised or derided as fake (what a strange thing that would be to fake!); even now, people exhort me to worry more over coronavirus, apparently oblivious to the fact that not only am I already super-clean, but that any extra worry is likely to therefore be not only unnecessary but counterproductive for me. If, as Mind says, one in four of us will develop a mental health problem, then one in four of us will develop a potentially fatal illness. Why is coronavirus so much bigger a deal than the nightmare conditions many of us already have? Every time I see an exhortation to panic, I have to wonder where the panic was when I and thousands of others with everything to live for held knives in our hands.
Yet isn’t all this still ultimately positive? Don’t I want to live in a society where everyone is much cleaner? That’s the weirdest thing of all: I am not sure that I do. One of the biggest factors in trying to get better has been observing everyone else and seeing how they manage to survive without the levels of anxiety that I experience. OCD sufferers tend to experience a lot of guilt at lowering our standards, and accepting that it’s okay to live as others live is part of how we overcome that. A world in which everyone was very clean would present fewer sources of daily anxiety; but it would also make the subsisting anxiety harder to overcome, if the rest of the world started to validate our dysfunction. Worrying about hygiene all the time is exhausting and unhealthy. It does not become less exhausting or unhealthy just because everyone else starts to do it.
Mind, if it cures you all of your revolting habit of blowing your noses on toilet paper, I’ll count that a victory.
Why take LSD when you could just go to the ballet?
Don’t get me wrong, I like ballet – and I really enjoyed Coppelia’s beautiful dancing, music and colourful costumes. It’s just that you have to leave any expectations of having the faintest clue what’s happening at the door.
Judging by other ballets I’ve seen – most notably the Nutcracker – plot and credibility are, perhaps, not central to the genre. Coppelia centres around a wooden doll of the same name, with whom our hero, Franz, becomes infatuated (depending on the men in your life, some viewers may not even find this stretches credibility). His girlfriend, who goes by the brilliant name of Swanhilda, feels jealous, so she breaks into the craftsman’s studio, but gets trapped and ends up having to pretend to be the doll.
This is all in the first half. And like I say, it’s highly enjoyable, with exquisite performances from the two leads. Franz actually comes across as quite sweet, and I keep having to remind myself that NO, HE’S IN LOVE WITH A DOLL.
In the second half, all semblance of plot is abandoned; I have to ask my mum what’s happening, only for her to reply, “I don’t know”. I’m not really sure that anything is, in particular. But that doesn’t matter; it’s an exuberant and highly impressive pageant of dance and colour, with an astonishing series of pirouettes by Swanhilda that you would have thought was physically impossible.
It’s all completely bonkers, but enjoyably so. And insofar as I could follow what was happening, it seems to end happily – even for the doll.
The Taming of The Shrew is my favourite Shakespeare play, just edging out Measure for Measure. No, I can’t imagine either what I can find to identify with in a play about a dysfunctional, difficult, confrontational woman.
So I admit that my heart sank a bit when Kate, in the RSC’s production at the Marlowe Theatre, turned out to be an uncouth, sullen young man, first seen tearing oafishly with his teeth into a chicken drumstick (behaviour which, surely, one should applaud). If some of the appeal of the play lies in your identification with its female lead, you don’t want to see her turned into a bloke. And if I want to see men behaving boorishly, I’ll just go down the Man of Kent.
In fact, the RSC reversed the gender of every character in the play, turning Petruchio into a jovial, fearless woman, Bianca into a preening, effete young man and Baptista into a terrifying matriarch. I really was poised to hate it.
But it turned out to be a brilliant commentary on gender relations, subverting everything we’re used to seeing – and hilarious too, thanks to an incredible cast.
We were shown a world where women hold all the power and men are entirely subservient – and even for someone who thinks of herself as an equalist, it brought home to me just how absurd so many of the things we’re used to accepting are. Bianco’s self-satisfied flirtatiousness, considered normal and even admirable in a woman, looks pathetic when done by a man. The sight of Kate, humiliated and powerless on his wedding day, wasn’t just ridiculous but malign and uncomfortable.
As you watch, you wonder ruefully how long a world in which men were treated as they have treated women for centuries would last; probably about five minutes. But you’re also forced to think about your own role in all this. Are you a Kate, refusing to conform to soft, unthreatening expectations of what a woman should be? Or are you a Bianco, content to accept your second-class role and leaving the dirty work of challenging stereotypes to your less compliant sisters?
But while you’re questioning your place in society and how you can throw off the shackles of the patriarchy and smash that glass ceiling, you’re also falling off your chair laughing, because this really is a first-class production. The farcical aspect of the play is exploited to the full and then some by a cast who are, to a woman, brilliant. By the time we reached the scene where Vicentia and the pedant both claim to be Lucentia’s mother, I was almost helpless. From Laura Elsworthy’s manic Trania to Amanda Harris’ frightening – yet, underneath, frightened herself – Baptista, everyone seems constantly on the verge of hysteria, desperately trying to hold it together and keep up appearances, yet only one false move away from everything collapsing around them. The ludicrous costumes – huge Elizabethan dresses, violent, clown-like spots of rouge – feel like a visual echo of this barely suppressed lunacy, with Sophie Stanton’s Gremia actually operating on wheels, gliding across the stage as if she really is an automaton. Whoever devised that particular surreal touch is brilliant.
I want a play to either make me laugh until I cry or make me really think. Rarely can one play achieve both. This one did.
Is the Taming of the Shrew a feminist play?
A play in which an independent-minded, intelligent woman is forced into an unwanted marriage, and gaslighted, bullied and mistreated by her husband until her spirit is broken? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Yes, there are certainly strong reasons for considering Taming of the Shrew a highly misogynist work. But it isn’t. I love this play – and I think it’s hands down Shakespeare’s most feminist work.
The mere act of presenting us with Kate as a heroine is feminist. Difficult, intractable, unmarriageable – this is the person the play revolves around and whom we are invited to find interesting. Kate might be a tricky character, but she’s the person we’re invested in. In contrast, who really cares what happens to Bianca? She embodies conventional feminine ideals – pretty, flirtatious enough but not too flirtatious, intelligent enough but not asking too many questions – Bianca doesn’t pose any problems at all. But she’s very much a secondary character – and that’s because she is far too dull to be the focus of the play. And so are her pathetic trio of suitors – whereas Kate wins the affection of one of Shakespeare’s most interesting characters.
Petruchio does initially show interest in her for her money – but there must have been more than one rich girl in Padua, so why does he not look elsewhere when everyone warns him off Kate? If he wanted a wealthy but compliant wife, he could easily find one. But he himself is a complicated character – intelligent, likeable and quick-witted, but also mercurial, arrogant and a violent drunk, and he answers to no one. Although society is more accepting of these traits in him because he is a man, he is still a misfit – “a devil, a devil, a very fiend”, according to Gremio – and both he and Kate have the same problem: they need a partner who can match them. If Petruchio is not dissuaded by the unflattering descriptions of his prospective bride, it must be because he is intrigued; and when he meets her, during their first conversation he sees immediately, as do we, that here is someone who has an intellect equal to his own.
Yet Petruchio then browbeats Kate into obedience through appalling methods – gaslighting, depriving her of food and sleep, and forcing her to abandon her own judgment completely. Is this right? Well, no. And yet. We have to remember that Kate is a deeply unpleasant character at the start of the play – not only ill mannered and ill tempered, but violent – towards her sister, her tutors, and indeed Petruchio when she first meets him. It is not hard to see how unhappiness at her second-class status as a woman, and (we infer) hurt from years of unfavourable comparisons with her sister (we glimpse this, along with Bianca’s subtle unkindness towards Kate, during the scene when the two sisters fight) might have made her like this. But that doesn’t change the fact that she’s horrible – and is destroying herself by her behaviour. Petruchio has chosen to marry Kate, so to treat her like this because he wanted to crush her would make no sense. He must, therefore, be doing it for her benefit and his – because he wants her to be the best version of herself that she can be, still intelligent and interesting, but also capable of giving and receiving love, which Kate is frankly not at the start of the play. Until he teaches her otherwise, she is so lacking in respect for others and basic manners that she does not even know how to say thank you.
This also tells us something else: that sadly, Petruchio is probably the first person in Kate’s whole life to have actually bothered to take an interest in her as a person, rather than merely a troublesome charge to be brought in line. For all his ill-treatment of her, he is also the only character to have anything good to say about Kate. He compliments her from their first meeting, and while his motivations and sincerity in so doing are initially questionable, one suspects that entirely sincere or not, these are the first good things Kate has ever heard about herself. And by the end of the play, his high opinion of her and his description of their life together as “happy” ring true, as evinced by his complete trust in her. Perhaps it is not just Petruchio’s bullying that changes Kate. Perhaps, also, it is the fact that he is the first person in her life to present her with a likeable, estimable vision of herself.
Is Kate crushed at the end of the play? I don’t think she is. She hasn’t become like other women – she still behaves differently from them, for they “sit conferring by the parlour fire” while she answers Petruchio’s call. But isn’t Kate also the one in control of everything here, even more than Petruchio? He’s staked a hundred crowns upon her loyalty to him, scorning Lucentio’s original bet of twenty – she has the power to publicly and completely humiliate him. That’s a huge amount of power to have, and an opportunity which one might expect her to take, if she really hated him for his treatment of her. But he chooses to give her that power, and she chooses not to abuse it. This is pretty conclusive evidence of the trust the pair now have in each other and of their equality in the relationship – and the genuine respect and affection between them contrasts sharply with the evident lack of affection and loyalty between the other two husbands and their wives, with Bianca, our feminine ideal, seemingly indifferent to the effect of her actions on Lucentio.
Of the three women, only Kate looks like she has achieved happiness through a marriage to someone who loves and understands her. And of the three women, only Kate – whose soliloquy at the end of the play is by far the longest she’s spoken throughout – commands respect from both the male and female characters alike. Far from being crushed, she’s in complete control of the whole scene, and the other characters are heeding her words for the first time. She hasn’t lost her strength of character – she’s grown into herself, losing the self-destructiveness which held her back.
For a woman so disempowered at the start of the play that her father could marry her off, against her clearly expressed will, to the first bloke who showed an interest in her, that’s quite a journey. A play in which an independent, intelligent woman is empowered, respected, loved and understood, and helped to become her best self by someone who cares about her? I’ll take that – and so should any feminist.
Last time I watched Strictly Come Dancing, Alesha Dixon was in it. So I knew next to nothing about Anton du Beke and Erin Boag when I first saw them perform at the Marlowe Theatre two years ago.
But I enjoyed that evening so much that I went back to see them again this year, for their Dance Those Magical Movies tour. The pair are obviously beautiful dancers, but there’s always much more to their shows than that – funny anecdotes, audience questions and answers, breathtaking costumes and amazing singing.
As you can guess from the title, Boag and du Beke (Anthony Beke to his parents) were performing to music from a variety of cinema classics, accompanied by their backing dancers, an orchestra and vocalists Lance Ellington and Laura Emmitt. Top Hat, The Greatest Showman, James Bond, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Singing in the Rain, Chicago, West Side Story – here was a lot of my favourite music in one go.
As well as the ballroom routines you’d expect from the duo, there was some brilliant musical theatre choreography too – and du Beke can sing, performing Razzle Dazzle from Chicago and music from The Greatest Showman. Emmitt particularly was outstanding on vocals, even managing to pull off a cover of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On. And the incredible costumes – Boag must have changed clothes a dozen times – included everything from a fabulous fur-trimmed gown to a replica of the pink dress Marilyn Monroe wore in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (more familiar to some of us from Madonna’s Material Girl video).
The pair talk a lot to the audience in between the dances, and here you see what a real showman du Beke is, able not just to have the audience in stitches with his anecdotes but to banter with them off-the-cuff. Both come across as warm and likeable, and in the question and answer session it was lovely to see the time and effort they put into responding to a young boy who asked how he could become a dancer when he grew up. Boag also spoke about her love of costumes, and gave the audience an insight into how that side of the show was put together – great for those of us who love not just theatre but fashion.
It’s touches like that which elevate their shows from being so much more than just dancing to evenings which warm your heart.
Nearly twenty years ago, I read a piece by journalist Amanda Craig, reviewing the Lord of the Rings films in the Sunday Times, who said that she had always found friendship more moving than romantic love.
I’ve always agreed. And that was what I liked best about As You Like – it wasn’t just the usual Shakespearean helping of tangled love affairs, cross-dressing and wandering in the forest, but a play about the power and strength of friendship.
In the French duchy where As You Like It is set, a duke called Frederick has seized power and banished his own brother, Duke Senior, from his lands. The play’s central love story involves Senior’s daughter Rosalind and the young aristocrat Orlando, both also banished to the forest shortly after the play begins – Frederick seems a pretty easy chap to get on the wrong side of.
But romance here is eclipsed by platonic love. When Rosalind is exiled, her best friend and cousin, Frederick’s own daughter Celia, runs away with her, preferring to leave her life at court and risk her father’s wrath (and presumably severe punishment or death) than to be parted from her beloved cousin. Orlando’s old servant, Adam, follows him similarly into exile, entirely of his own volition, and even makes him take money he has saved. When cold and hunger almost get the better of the elderly man, Orlando is desperate to save him, threatening a group of forest-dwellers (one of whom turns out to be Duke Senior) with violence if they don’t give him their food for Adam. Here too, friendship is found, as the forest-dwellers welcome the strangers into their midst and save Adam’s life.
In contrast, the romantic love in the play inspires no such displays of courage or loyalty. The biggest thing Orlando does for Rosalind is write a few notes about how much he loves her and hang them on trees. Some people might find this romantic, but it just makes me feel a bit impatient. He doesn’t even know she’s in the forest with him – she spends most of the play disguised as a boy called Ganymede – so it’s not even clear what he’s hoping to achieve. (And where did he get a pen from?)
Indeed, the second half of the play doesn’t really live up to the promise of the first. There’s no big comic scene like in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night – or if there is then this production completely misses it – and it’s quite funny, but never *really* funny. Some of the scenes between Rosalind and Orlando drag, and the whole romance between Touchstone and Audrey falls flat and confusing. The play starts to feel like it’s meandering without necessarily ever intending to reach a conclusion. Some of this is undoubtedly the fault of the play itself – Shakespeare tacked the eventual conclusion on with all the grace of John Sargeant in Strictly Come Dancing – but it also feels like the production itself lacks focus at times.
Most of Shakespeare’s plays have a message, with even the dreadful Romeo and Juliet making a strong statement about the idiocy of feuds and division. But what is As You Like It’s message? It offers a moving illustration of friendship without really telling us anything about it, or anything else, other than that there are two types of people in the world: those of us who own dozens of pens but can never find one, and those who can conjure one up even in the middle of the woods.
Fact for Catherine Cookson fans: Duke Frederick and Duke Senior are played by Antony Byrne – Ginger Slater from the Cinder Path.
by Sarah Linney
Additional reporting by Simon Turner
I had no expectations of Waitress. None at all – I only found out I was going 24 hours before the show.
And as I stood waiting for Simon outside the Adelphi Theatre, reading the outline of the plot on the poster, the tale of a pie-baking waitress who changes her life, finds love and finds herself sounded frothier than a whole cafe full of cappuccinos.
Simon is a massive fan of Californian singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, who penned the music and lyrics for the stage show, itself adapted from an indie film. He had a spare ticket after the girl he originally invited dropped out. This ought to have boded very badly of course, but I like pies, so I accepted.
I was wrong. Waitress wasn’t frothy. It was amazing.
I’ll say that again: it was AMAZING. As I have already told anyone who will listen, you have to go and see it, if possible between now and March 7, while Bareilles plays the lead role of Jenna.
Waitress starts with Jenna discovering she’s pregnant – with a baby she doesn’t want, by a husband she’s not very fond of. It’s not the world’s worst predicament, and the laughs come thick and fast, as they do throughout the show. The actors’ comic timing is fantastic, elevating a script which could have been merely good to a thing of excellence. Evelyn Hoskins, as fellow waitress Dawn, nearly had me in tears during When He Sees Me. I should probably point out the show isn’t shy of referring to, depicting and joking about sex, which makes a prude like me squirm a little – but since it’s very female-centric and unthreatening, I could just about handle it.
Enter Jenna’s husband Earl, however, and we soon discover why she’s no longer overfond of him. He treats her as his property. He takes her tips. He puts her down, belittling her considerable baking talent. And as we get to know him further, things darken considerably – a pattern which, as we see in a flashback, has been passed down the generations.
It is very hard to understand, let alone portray accurately on stage, the complexities of abusive or dysfunctional relationships. It would have been easy to make Earl a cartoon villain. But he isn’t – we see his vulnerability too, and we understand that, as Jenna tells her friend and fellow waitress Becky, “he wasn’t always like this.” Most women will have experience of an abusive relationship, either their own or that of a friend of family member – and they are many-layered, nuanced affairs, rarely simply a violent brute beating the crap out of a helpless female. Both abusers and their victims are real and complex people – I found myself feeling sorry for Earl even as I willed Jenna to leave.
One scene in particular was so close to home it was as hard to watch as it was compelling. Experiences I had thought were singular reappeared in front of me with pinpoint accuracy. I could feel Jenna’s unspoken emotions from the stage – her guilt, her feeling of responsibility for someone else’s behaviour, her bemusement at how things went so wrong. She didn’t articulate them, she didn’t even hint at them, but to me they were as palpable as the ground under my feet.
This is one of the great successes of the show – its ability to capture both the dark and the light, the good and the bad, in people and in life. Both songs and script blend comedy and tragedy, and Jenna is not a perfect heroine; she makes mistakes, admits to raw feelings of failure and low self-esteem, and is real and relatable. Some critics didn’t like this, with Andrzej Lukowski, in Time Out, calling the show “weird – a bittersweet drama about human frailty that’s also a wildly OTT sex comedy.” But isn’t that exactly what life is like? We find sadness amid the humour, and humour amid the sadness, and that’s what keeps us going?
Bareilles is superb in the lead role; her voice has a power and range which I would never have guessed at from Little Voice and which puts her among the greats of our generation. The whole cast are strong, but along with Hoskins, special mention must go to the highly entertaining Joel Montague as Dawn’s paramour Ogie, and to Andrew Boyer as Joe, whose curmudgeonliness ebbs away throughout the show to reveal a kindness on which, in the end, Jenna’s fate turns.
I came out of this show slightly changed – for the better – shaken yet soothed, and at the same time still laughing. Waitress is brilliant – hilarious, moving, uplifting, yet above all, it made the world look different. Slightly less painful, maybe. And I am not sure you can ask more of any experience than that.
by Kes Grant, curate at St Saviour’s Church in Eltham
In Britain today there is lots of chatter about sexuality. One of our best-loved presenters has come out as gay despite having been married for 27 years.
Phillip Schofield is a national treasure and is often on our screens. People are surprised and don’t understand how you can be married for 27 years and have children and then come out as gay. The problem is they are looking at it from the wrong perspective. It’s more a question of why couldn’t he be who he was meant to be from the start.
Those of us that grew up under the government’s section 28, which banned the “promotion of homosexuality”, will understand the fear of finding ourselves attracted to someone of the same sex. Society told us it was wrong. The government told us it was wrong. The church said it was wrong. In fact, for men, it was illegal till 1967 and even after then it had a higher age of consent than for heterosexuals. Homophobia was the norm in schools and workplaces. Coming out was a big deal and LGBTI people risked being shunned by their families and friends.
On top of the toxic section 28 we also had a problem with HIV and AIDS tearing through the gay community alongside others like drug users and those who received contaminated blood products. However the gay community was singled out as being the worst of the bunch and narrow-minded bigots would say it was the wrath of God who was punishing the “fags” – like what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah.
When it’s put like that, why would anyone come out? To do so meant risking so much. It’s this pressure that becomes internalised homophobia and forces people like Phillip Schofield to comply with society’s norm. Many LGBTI people marry because they feel they have no alternative. It’s just expected that you get married and have children.
I have always maintained that heterosexuality is not the norm, it’s just more common.
Sadly if you are LGBTI, and have tried to be heterosexual, eventually you will struggle to live something you’re not. Even if you love the person you’ve married very deeply, you still feel empty inside. You feel the pain of not living your truth. One of the tragedies of this situation is that some people become so unhappy because of the rejection they feel that they take their own lives.
I think the Church in general, but particularly the Church of England, which I’m a member of, should hang its head in shame for its part in contributing to a society where homophobia is tolerated. Only recently we had the awful statement from the bishops which basically said sex was only the preserve of married heterosexuals. This, quite rightly, caused uproar and then a few apologies were forthcoming. What I find so distressing about the institution and those who prop it up is that they spend all their time being consumed by sex and genital acts and they never mention love at all. For me though, love is central to the Christian message, in fact all the world religions have love at their core. Why can’t we learn to live in love and celebrate our differences and leave sex to the consenting adults that wish to practise it? It’s time for the church to take this verse from the Bible to heart: “Be still and know that I am God.” Another way of putting it is: “Let go and know that I am God.” The Church Universal needs to let go of its obsession with sex and start living more in love and light. That’s what our world needs right now, not a few outdated people pontificating often from a position they have no knowledge of.
I think Phillip Schofield was brave to come out because he is such a public figure. I think his wife is brave as well, as are his daughters for being alongside him in this and for continuing to share the love and support and respect they have for each other. I hope people leave them alone as they heal from any hurt and allow more light and love in their lives.
As a priest in the Church of England, I also want to apologise for the hurt and pain caused to LGBTI people and their allies. I want to apologise for the rejection experienced by same-sex couples who would love to get married in church but can’t because of the church rules. I also want to apologise for the fact that, if asked, I could bless a spider, snake or cat. I can also bless a tank that is involved in killing and maiming people but I can’t bless a same-sex couple’s union. I want to apologise for all those who have been forced out of churches or into the now banned conversion therapies. It’s no wonder the shortest verse in the Bible is “Jesus wept.” Most Christians have no problem at all with same-sex relationships. Sadly there are a few people who have closed minds but very open mouths. They say they speak for the Christian voice. They certainly don’t speak for me or the vast majority. Please don’t judge God by the action of these insecure, bigoted people.
This week something significant happened. An ordinary man, who is much loved, has forced people to look at their own homophobia. Phillip, I applaud your courage and respect how you and your family are dealing with this challenging and painful yet liberating time. I applaud you for your decision to come out and will be holding you and your family in the light.
I was not sure. Estefan might be the queen of Latin dance-pop, but she’s hardly led her life in the glare of celebrity, she’s been happily married to a member of her band since before I was born and has never been remotely controversial. Still, if On Your Feet! was just going to be an excuse to listen to some great 80s hits, I was fine with that.
Turned out the music was only one excellent aspect of a show which started a little slowly, but which I ended up really enjoying.
The one drama in Estefan’s life which I knew about was her escape from Cuba to Miami at the age of just two, when she and her family fled Fidel Castro’s regime. On Your Feet!, however, starts when she’s a teenager, working hard studying and keeping house for her family (her father developed multiple sclerosis, almost certainly as a result of exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, and Gloria was his carer). And at first, it feels a bit clichéd. Difficult family life; secret dreams of being a singer; shyness meaning her abuela has to step in and push her to audition; beautiful and talented but reluctant to be a star; all check. There’s some clumsy exposition at times too, with characters telling each other things they would know so the audience knows them too, ignoring the adage ‘show, don’t tell’.
But the show soon picks up as it becomes clear Estefan does have a unique story to tell – that of her band Miami Sound Machine’s groundbreaking fight to bring Latin music into the English-speaking mainstream. In the mid-1980s, the group were doing brilliantly in the Spanish-speaking market – but their record company objected (and according to the show, flat-out refused) when they tried to release singles in English and told them it would never work. “Change your name”, a dismissive New York executive drawls at the band’s leader (and Esteban’s husband) Emilio, whose response constitutes one of the best moments in the show:
“Change my name? It’s not mine to change. It’s my father’s name – my grandfather’s name, who we left behind in Cuba to come here and build a better life. This is my home now – and whether you know it or not, this is what an American looks like.”
I almost clapped, but was afraid the rest of the audience wouldn’t follow me.
Moments like this lift the show out of the cliché into which I initially feared it would sink, and into a moving story of the struggles immigrants experience which is all the stronger for being understated. In a flashback to the night before the family left Cuba, Gloria’s mother, Big Gloria – herself a promising singer and actress who was offered a Hollywood contract to be the Spanish voice of Shirley Temple, but was forbidden to take it up by her own father – gives a dramatic, full-bodied performance of Mi Tierra which conveys the visceral pain of being forced to leave one’s homeland. Another flashback to Emilio leaving his mother and grandfather behind as a boy as he heads to America with his father is profoundly affecting – neither he nor they know whether they will ever see each other again, and indeed we never find out. While Gloria’s career, and her recovery from a serious road accident in which she broke her back, are at the centre of the show, these few scenes are enough to illustrate the hardship of exile with the prominence it deserves, and which I at first thought it would not receive.
Francesca Lara Gordon as Gloria and George Ioannides as Emilio are both charming, with believable chemistry, and Gloria’s profound love for her father and her abuela – which shines through particularly in the delightful scene in which she entices her on stage at a concert – contrasts with the rift with her mother, whose bitterness at not being able to pursue her own career manifests itself in an attempt to thwart her daughter’s. It takes Gloria’s future hanging in the balance after her accident to reconcile them, in another beautifully performed scene which reminds us all how stubbornness and rancour leave the bearer only ever one unlucky second away from lifelong regret of the bitterest kind.
There’s a lot going on in this show – which gave me not only a newfound appreciation of Estefan’s music, but of what the enormity of her success meant to so many of her Latin fans, whose well-wishes help give her the strength to recover and walk again. If you just want to see some Gloria Estefan tracks being performed, this is the right show for you. But if you want a thought-provoking exploration of immigration and identity which unfortunately remains highly relevant today, this is the right show for you too.
“I was sick over Christmas,” she says, and a look of sympathy crosses my face: what an awful way to spend the holiday.
“But on the bright side, at least I didn’t put any weight on!”
And suddenly, she isn’t a few feet, but a whole universe away from me.
I look at her across the gulf between two separate worlds: the one where it’s okay to eat, and the one where it isn’t, quite. A world where being ill might be a good thing, because it keeps you thin. The memory of that world had faded a little, but it comes back, now, because I used to live there.
I say nothing. A second later, the conversation is over. And yet in that split second I have revisited fourteen years: the fourteen years I spent as a disordered eater.
Christmas and New Year are ever thus. Months of being deluged with encouragement to overindulge, followed by an onslaught of diet adverts, and exercise regimes, and new year, new you, because the old one wasn’t good enough. Vegan food and salads on promotion in the shops instead of pigs in blankets and brandy butter, because lots of food was good yesterday, but it’s bad now. Easter chocolate’s on sale too, just to confuse you, because yes you should be salady and pure, but you also know you’re going to fall off the wagon and if you do, you may as well do it with a creme egg.
It washes over me now. I don’t care. I couldn’t afford to care, even if I wanted to.
But it leaves behind a certain sadness, like flotsam deposited by the tide. Because not all diets lead to eating disorders, but all disordered eating starts with a diet. Mine did, at least.
I was 18. A short, thin child turned tall, thin teenager, I had just finished school and went to live in France for six months. It was my first taste of freedom – literally. I was a kid in a candy, cheese, croissant, éclair, pain au chocolat and gateau store.
That sentence should help to dispel one of the enduring myths about disordered eaters – that we don’t like our food. In my experience, very often we love our food – it’s ourselves we don’t like. And that’s where the problems start, as food becomes the way you manage the awful reality of spending all day, every day being ashamed of who you are. Overeating helps: it offers comfort from the harsh real world. Undereating helps: when you feel plain and awkward, it confers on you the highest level of attractiveness a woman can have in modern society: thinness. Self-deprivation assuages your feelings of guilt and unworthiness; it makes you feel successful and strong-willed. I loved my food; but it was also something I could rely on to manage my negative emotions in a frightening and confusing world where nothing worked as it was supposed to.
And so these are the facts, which I state impartially. I was never fat. When I came back to England, I was at the lower end of the healthy weight range for my height. But the stone I had gained in six months sat uneasily with me, always enviably super-thin, and with my clothes. The wrong things were said, which didn’t help and I wish they had not been, but without them the same thing would probably have happened anyway; the real roots of this problem had been laid down years earlier.
So I went on a diet, stuck to it and had lost the stone by the time I went to university in the autumn. Once there, without scales to keep me on the straight and narrow (literally), I decided to err on the safe side and continue being careful – portions were larger than they were at home. I was happy to have lost a couple more pounds when I went home at Christmas.
At any point, I could have turned back, but if you’ve ever been on a slide, you’ll know it’s exhilarating.
It’s also hard to know at what point you have a problem, set against the backdrop of a society where worrying about food and weight is normal. Based on a quick assessment of my female friends and acquaintances, ten per cent have been diagnosed with an eating disorder or had experience of it in their close family; a further third have, at least from my observations, aspects to their relationship with food and weight which are not healthy. It would be obvious to most people that those in the former group were suffering – but that makes the existence of the latter group more worrying, because they’re the ones whose attitudes to diet and self-image are normalised. Attitudes like:
“I worry all the time about my weight, even now. It’s really sad, I really wish I could stop”
“I was always the fat friend”
“I don’t have an eating disorder, but I don’t like living at home because I worry about putting on weight”
“I weigh myself every day, sometimes more than once”
These are all things normal women, with normal, healthy bodies, have said to me, three of them within the last three months. Normal women of all ages, all cultural backgrounds, all nationalities, all social classes say and think these things, diet when they have a healthy BMI, refer to “being good” and “being naughty” around food as if they are five years old. And normal men, with normal, healthy bodies, fall victim to this too – the Priory Group estimates that a quarter of all eating disorder sufferers are male.
How, in such a context, do you know that your own eating habits are out of control? Outside my family, to whose concerns I was ill disposed to listen for a variety of reasons, no one apart from my schoolfriend Kelly ever said anything to me that I can recall. In fact the reverse was true. For most of my twenties, I weighed well below the threshold at which someone would normally be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. Yet even at this weight, people would remark frequently on how they envied my lovely thin figure, and my on-off boyfriend in my early twenties would praise my slimness. Even doctors rarely said anything apart from “you’re very thin,” despite the fact that I must have been at risk of weakened bones and other health issues.
Yes, it should have been obvious to me that there was a major problem. I weighed myself once or twice a day and would not eat dinner if I was a pound over my allotted maximum. Deciding whether or not to eat a biscuit could feel like a decision of monumental importance. I once cried when I had to buy a dress in a size 14. I can remember evenings when I wanted to throw my dinner against the wall. Yet in company, I still ate well, so no one realised, or appeared to realise, that anything was wrong. I didn’t hold others to the same standards as I held myself, of course, and vehemently believed that people should be accepted whatever their size – or thought I did. In reality there can be an ugly element of competitiveness to disordered eating – competitiveness born of insecurity, but still. However much you believe that size doesn’t matter, you still want to make sure you have the edge over everyone else.
The other myth about disordered eaters is that we all starve ourselves dramatically. I never starved myself, never went so much as a day without eating. I ate a reasonable amount of nutritious food. I just consistently didn’t eat enough. Indeed, you can be eating quite normally and still have a problem – it’s your attitude to food that matters. And towards the end, in my early thirties, I was definitely eating enough; I just ate little all day and binge-ate chocolate at night. I would probably have developed bulimia if things had carried on like this. Even seven years later, I cannot write this without shame. The shame is enormous.
The psychology here is slightly odd, in that this was an unhappy time in my life, when all my self-esteem issues had come to a head, and disordered eating had somehow become both the solution and the problem. Binge eating comforts you. It also leaves you in no doubt that you are really not well. But even that also feels like a comfort, because the unhappiness your disordered eating generates is a diversion from the underlying unhappiness and self-hatred at the core of your life. I still look back at that time and wonder how I would have gotten through without my eating problems to divert my focus. In reality, though, masking one serious problem with another just means you end up with two serious problems. Lack of proper nourishment was almost certainly affecting my brain chemistry, and I experienced a recurrence of the thoughts of hopelessness and suicide which had left me alone since I was 21. Things had to change. Perhaps, if I fixed one of my sources of unhappiness, I might also find myself able to do something about the others.
In the end, a dreadful stomach bug broke the starve-binge cycle, and I made up my mind I wouldn’t restart it. On Monday, March 18, 2013, I changed my life; I stopped being a disordered eater. I did this overnight: I started to eat properly, and I kept going. But whereas the physical changes can be made in an instant, the emotional ones cannot. The anxiety and low self-esteem did not go away. I relapsed. But the gaps between relapses got longer, and then they stopped happening. I still worried, still felt guilty about food, but gradually I thought about it less and less, and then that, too, stopped happening. In November of that year I threw away my scales. I had never lived without scales. I have not lived with them since.
The five-year relationship I started at the end of 2013 helped, not least because it meant regular meals from a good cook. When we broke up, in 2018, I vaguely wondered if I might wobble. I did not, for in those five years, I had gradually learned to like and accept myself, and this could not now be unlearned. I had never really learned to cook, and so I began to teach myself; I loved it and seem to be quite good. I realised then that it was really over. I was better. I had stopped caring. Life was too short. The price was too high.
Fourteen years of my life, given over to worrying about something that doesn’t matter; and yet I am glad that I was unwell, because it meant I got to escape. Instead of remaining trapped forever in the cycle of dieting-not dieting, of feeling happy with oneself only if the scales show a certain number, of judging one’s personal worth and moral standing by what one has eaten, I got out. I can now appreciate the extent not only to which many people’s attitudes to food are dysfunctional, but also to which they are in denial about it.
There is a bit of me that has not escaped and maybe never will. I cannot really judge portion sizes. I panic if my dinner plans are suddenly cancelled. Comments on what I am eating, or on what others are eating, why they are eating so much, why they are eating so little, can grate on me in a way that is sometimes hard to tolerate without losing my shit with whoever has made the unfortunate remark. How I would cope if I ever did become unhealthily overweight is not a question to which I really know the answer. I try not to think about it. But on the whole, I am more well than I ever thought I could be, and more well than we seem to want women to be in relation to food and weight.
So am I saying that no one should ever go on a diet, at new year or at any other time; that no one should worry about their weight or about eating healthily; no, of course not. I am saying that when fourteen years of tormenting yourself seems like a fair price to pay for escaping what otherwise is, for many women, a lifetime of anything from anxiety to wretchedness, we need to face up to how distorted our view of these matters really is. Most of us probably already realise that our collective values around weight and food are skewed; and yet between 1.25 million and 3.4 million people in the UK have an eating disorder, 64.3 per cent of adults are overweight and 26 million people were thought to have started a diet in January 2019. We not only aren’t dealing with the problem, we aren’t even close to being able to acknowledge the extent of it.
Solutions to this problem? That’s a whole other post. I wouldn’t recommend my own experiences – but I’d recommend the collective misery we remain trapped in even less.
If you’d told me as a child that as a grown-up, I’d be getting tickets to see Rod Stewart for Christmas, I’d have laughed so hard I’d have fallen out of the tree-house in our garden.
Stewart was one of the musicians we grew up listening to. Two tracks, Sailing and How You Broke My Heart, shoved for some reason on the end of a homemade Beatles tape and forced upon us during long car journeys. They’re not Stewart’s best tracks and I wrote him off as dreary and a bit ridiculous, thanks to Do You Think I’m Sexy?, and mocked my mum’s uncool musical taste.
Fast forward a couple of decades to 2014, when I got offered press tickets to see the Rod Stewart musical, Tonight’s The Night, at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury. Knowing that my mum was still a massive fan, my conscience told me I had to go. I gritted my teeth and told the press officer I’d take them.
You can guess what happens next. The plot was paper-thin, but the musical was a night of revelation. That dull old crooner who whined his way through Sailing turned out to have penned a mint of pop classics. Maggie May, Baby Jane, You Wear It Well, Stay With Me, Do You Think I’m Sexy – Do You Think I’m Sexy is a GREAT song. How had I not realised this before?!
And so, fast forward another few years and we’re at the O2, sitting through a loud and rather irritating support act.
Johnny Mac and the Faithful’s tunes seem okay, but I can’t really tell because a) it’s uncomfortably loud and b) Johnny is deeply annoying, and also rather unconvincing, as he bounces around the stage, wiggles, jumps and gets in the faces of the rest of his band. Why none of them have poked him in the eye with a plectrum or a drumstick is beyond me. Fortunately, Johnny eventually gets off the stage and the great man comes on.
Stewart cuts a diminutive figure on stage – although apparently he’s 5ft 10 – and that spiky hair looks almost as tall as the rest of him. But he’s fantastically dressed in a glitzy, embellished jacket and trousers straight out of the 1970s. The rest of his band echo the theme – the male musicians are in bright pink jackets, while the female backing singers/dancers/musicians (a truly multiskilled sextet who do everything from Irish dancing to multi-instrument playing) are in splendid gold minidresses.
And this 75-year-old man – who has not long beaten prostate cancer – then proceeds to rattle through 24 hits in a solid two-hour show.
There are breaks for outfit changes or, presumably, just a rest, and there’s no throwing himself around the stage like a 25-year-old, but Stewart still has the mischievous, irreverent charm which shines through his songs and has made him loved by fans for 50 years. He has always struck me as someone who can laugh at himself; he makes the audience laugh, and he has a twinkle in his eye for the whole show. At one point, when he sings a somewhat dramatic note and pauses, actively looking to the crowd for applause, he reminds me of my friend’s baby, banging out random notes on his baby keyboard and looking up at the adults in the room to tell him how clever he is. Stewart wants our liking and approval. And he gets it.
Stewart is who he is, and he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. He says “fuck”. He mentions Brexit. During one song the huge screen behind the stage plays footage of his model railway, an incredible miniature city which it took him 23 years to build – he would book an extra hotel room for his constructions on tour. Another, in the 75th anniversary year of D-Day, is dedicated to the soldiers who fought and died in the Second World War, with wartime footage interspersed on the screen with shots of the on-stage action filtered to look like it’s happening in the 1940s. It’s incredibly moving and apparently something he always does.
When he says he’s now going to be joined by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, I think I’ve misheard him. But I haven’t. The curtain at the back lifts and there they are, all set to give a classical reworking to three of his songs, including The First Cut Is The Deepest. Already a great song about how someone can leave you so emotionally drained you simply don’t have the capacity for someone else, its melody is imbued with a new beauty by the orchestra.
The evening ends with Stewart galloping through some of his finest anthems, including Maggie May, Baby Jane and finally Do Ya Think I’m Sexy. He doesn’t do You Wear It Well or Hot Legs. He does virtually everything else.
Stewart might not technically be a great singer – but he’s certainly a great songwriter, a great entertainer and a great performer. And yes, when you mock your mum’s musical taste as a kid and then end up accompanying her to concerts 30 years later, you know it really is true about girls turning into their mothers.
How Rod Stewart was banned by the BBC
With three wives, and eight children by five women in total, Rod Stewart is famously heterosexual – but ironically it was a song about homosexuality which got him banned by the BBC.
The Killing of Georgie (Parts I and II) tells a true story about a gay acquaintance of Stewart’s who was killed by a gang in 1974 as he walked home with his boyfriend. Released two years later, it was groundbreaking for the way it dealt with society’s lack of acceptance of gay people. A decade earlier, homosexuality was still a crime in the UK.
But the BBC initially refused to play it – and Stewart told the Billboard website he was even told he couldn’t perform it during an acoustic set on Chris Evans’ Radio 2 show last year.
“They said no, it was too controversial. This was 1976 and now we’re in 2018 … Unbelievable,” he said.
Stewart told the Guardian in 2016: “I’ve had gay people thank me for the song many, many times. The boyfriend of a big-time British Olympic champion came up to me and said he heard it when he was 17 and it gave him some identity and independence, which is wonderful.” Boy George said his mother bought the single for him and left it in his drawer in a brown paper bag: “It was her way of saying, ‘I kind of understand but I don’t want to talk about it.’”
It was one of those moments when you realise that you’re not who you thought you were.
I’d been campaigning for five weeks, but I’d still have said: I wasn’t partisan. Socialist, certainly, but no Labour shill; I have too many problems with the party, I try to be accepting of a wide range of points of view and I’ve even campaigned for my Tory friend in previous elections.
And then I turned the TV on, just after 10pm, and I saw the exit poll – and I realised three things with a shock. One, we had been hammered. Two, I might need to revise my image of myself as someone with her finger on the pulse. And three, I was partisan all right – Labour through and through, both baffled and saddened at what had happened.
For how had it happened? We had put forward a brilliant manifesto, a plan to end nine miserable, gruelling years of austerity and rebuild the public services which are still one of Britain’s crowning achievements. The Conservatives had put forward virtually no policies at all, relying instead on a ridiculous three-word catchphrase which even I, as a Brexit voter, was utterly fed up of hearing, and the Lib Dems – the Lib Dems had put Jo Swinson in charge, for goodness’ sake. We had a great manifesto and no credible opposition – and hardly anyone votes Tory anyway, do they? What had gone wrong?
What, indeed.
First, there was Brexit. The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016 by a margin of more than a million votes, which is not small. Labour had campaigned for Remain, but then promised to honour that result at the 2017 general election. Everything seemed fine. But then things went odder than Diane Abbott’s shoes. The party spent the next two years chopping and changing its mind and stumbling through a bewildering array of Brexit policies before settling on probably the worst one possible: a second referendum, which as any sensible person knows would have solved absolutely nothing. And it wasn’t even a second Leave or Remain referendum, but a deal-or-remain referendum which automatically disenfranchised anyone who wanted to leave but didn’t like the deal on offer, which is probably most people who have bothered to read it.
I voted for Brexit after much soul searching and have thought and said previously that Labour ought to honour the referendum result. This is one valid view. Another is that the party ought to have the courage of its convictions, and cannot support something it truly believes to be a disaster. In which case, fine; be a Remain party, like the Greens, like the Lib Dems, and be honest about it. That would be difficult for many Leave voters, but the party would, at least, have a clear and genuine position which we could respect. There is, of course, still a profound problem with that position, which is that it leaves Brexit voters feeling unheard and abandoned by the party. It is not insurmountable, but it would involve something which we have not seen in the three and a half years since the referendum, which is Remainers actually engaging with Leave voters instead of browbeating and belittling them. This involves understanding (actually understanding, not making up reasons for) why most of us voted Leave in the first place, respecting that position, and then debating with us as equals. The total number of Labour members with whom I have had a memorably sensible conversation on this matter is three – and one of them was a Brexiter. I can hope, though.
Then there was the antisemitism horror – and the role it played in losing Labour the election cannot be overstated. The attitude not only of the party itself but also its supporters – dismissal, minimisation, outright demonising at times of those who raised concerns – has been truly shocking. I do not believe Labour to be an institutionally antisemitic party; I have never encountered racism at Labour events, and I do not believe my friends would be members of the party were it so. But I am at a loss to understand why the actions of what I do believe are a very small number of members have not been dealt with in a manner firm enough to convince the wider public that Labour wants to stamp out the problem. The obvious explanation is that it does not care to stamp it out; that is so appalling as to be inadmissible; yet no alternative explanation presents itself. And by the wider public I do not mean Tory voters delighted to find an axe to grind against the party, but Labour supporters familiar with the slew of failures it has made – the readmission of suspended antisemitic members, the failure to tackle the bullying of Luciana Berger, the refusal to apologise and try to make amends following the Chief Rabbi’s letter – who have withdrawn their vote from the party in disbelief because of them. At one of the hustings I was at, a candidate from the Libertarian Party compared Labour to the BNP. I booed him – but if it was an outrageous comparison, the fact that it was possible was more so. If Labour does not show true contrition, and take tough, visible and genuine action over this problem, then its actions will continue to speak louder than its words and to alienate voters across the board.
But what of those crazy policies? Well, Britain is by nature a small c conservative country. It is nonetheless a country which has a better record on public services than many considered more liberal – France, for example, has neither completely free healthcare nor an equivalent of the BBC, and a welfare system in some respects less egalitarian than ours. Britain is the land of the NHS, where nationalised public services were the norm until the 1990s – we definitely believe in public services, as long as they are administered quietly and efficiently and without fuss.
The trouble with Labour’s manifesto is not, therefore, that it was too radical. The proposed increase in state spending was certainly large, but that was partly due to the levels of parsimony reached under austerity; as a proportion of GDP it was, in fact, in line with a number of other European countries. The problem is more that, in a country whose last experience of real left wing politics was Jim Callaghan and his Winter of Discontent, generous public spending and nationalisation have become associated, rightly or wrongly, with inefficiency and chaos – an association which the Labour Party itself helped to further in the 1990s, when Tony Blair based his own rise to power on the claim, bought by a willing public whose memories of power cuts and three day weeks were in many cases still fresh, that socialism didn’t work. Labour presented some great ideas this time – and a very similar manifesto, under the same leader of course, proved very popular in 2017. But the party failed, somehow, to sell those ideas this time to anyone who wasn’t already on board with that sort of politics. The candidate I campaigned for, Seamus McCauley, offers more detailed thoughts on his own blog on why Labour’s messaging didn’t work. The same went for its leader. Jeremy Corbyn is, I believe, a good, principled and gentle man – unlike many of his toxic front bench, who also haven’t helped his party’s image. But when, like every single party leader ever, he was attacked by the media, neither he nor anyone around him seemed to know how to counter it. Blair, a far less principled character, understood at least that whining about media bias gets you nowhere, and that you must learn instead how to handle the media. Which is why Corbyn, who has spent his entire political career supporting and voting for peace, has been successfully painted as a friend of terrorists, while Blair, who actively sought out and took us into an illegal war at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, is viewed by many of the same people who are terrified of Corbyn with a sort of wistful nostalgia as a “softer” leader.
But though Corbyn may be gentle, there was nothing of that nature about the discourse coming from many of the party’s MPs, members and supporters. As politics professor Roger Awan Scully put it: “The trouble with telling people to ‘fuck off and join the Tories’ was that, it seems, quite a lot of them actually did.” Political debate in Britain, not especially pleasant since at least the start of the coalition government in 2010, has boiled over into cyanic levels of poisonousness since the referendum, with the proportion of adults capable of handling disagreement without resorting to insults, bullying and attempting to shame their opponents seeming now to be both tiny and ever-shrinking. This is not confined to the left, as I can personally testify. But the left seem more convinced that they occupy the moral high ground, and hence whereas right-wing voters seem more likely to dismiss you as stupid, lazy, insane or all three, left wing voters will categorise you as a bad person – and have no hesitation in telling you and the rest of the world.
This nastiness has been truly painful to see, with just two examples being the vitriol directed towards Kate Hoey and Ian Austin. In the wake of an emotional television interview in which he said he could no longer support Corbyn, which was, frankly, not easy to watch, Austin, like Hoey, was the target of spiteful remarks and accusations that he was a Tory. Not only is this a ridiculous statement to make about someone who has served the Labour party for 36 years (one year longer than Hoey), it only serves to alienate moderate people who dislike such meanness, and does nothing to further your argument, which can only be won by, well, actual arguments. Yet up and down the country, similar scenarios were repeated again and again, with hardcore left-wingers insulting and belittling the working-class, Brexiters, people who opposed Corbyn and pretty much anyone who disagreed with them. From National Executive Committee member Peter Willsman labelling rabbis who raised concerns about antisemitism as “Trump fanatics”, to Emily Thornberry sneering at “white van man” on the night of the Rochester and Strood by election in 2014, many Labour members have betrayed again and again their contempt for people with views or backgrounds which they consider less worthy than their own. Again, this is not confined to the left; but in a party purporting to represent the working-class, it is mind-boggling. In particular, the failure to understand the popularity of Brexit among the working class betrays a deeper failure by middle-class Labour members to understand the working class at all, their social and cultural conservativism alien to those from more liberal, metropolitan backgrounds. This is not to argue that Labour needs to be socially or culturally conservative, or that one set of values is superior to another; merely that if you want to appeal to a broad range of people, you need to understand and respect a broad range of values and appreciate that there is more than one valid moral code.
You wouldn’t think that I’d campaigned as hard as I could for the Labour Party, would you? But I did – and not just because I believed in my friend who was standing – because I believed in the manifesto, the vision, the ambition to build a better Britain. These are great things to believe in and campaign for and I was proud to do so; I would like to do so again, and next time I would like Labour to win. But if it wants to win, it has to take a long hard look in the mirror; it has to start listening, understanding, respecting and learning. If you can draw up plans for huge societal reform, you should be able to do these simple, basic things – yet for years the party has seemed incapable of them. Let’s hope it can finally start.
Craig Mackinlay was elected as the Conservative MP for South Thanet at the 2015 general election and is a committed Brexiter. He explains why he supported Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal
We take decisions all day, every day – is the gap in traffic sufficient for me to cross the road? This is a regular one but fraught with mortal danger. We make these decisions rapidly and instinctively and thankfully they’re rarely wrong. What I faced last month was a decision that has been 28 years in the making, the longest and most strategic game of chess ever played.
I helped found UKIP along with half a dozen others all those years ago – but my journey to achieve Brexit shifted away from that party when I returned to the Conservatives in 2005. They had the ability to become, in my estimation, the party that could and would deliver the UK’s extrication from the EU. That decision was the right one.
I was faced at the vote on the legislation to deliver the new deal with a binary choice: accept or refuse; not dissimilar to the one that we faced as the electorate on June 23, 2016. That night I voted for the Brexit deal negotiated by Boris Johnson. The deal is not a perfect one by any standards. The implementation period where we remain in limbo as rule takers for 14 months is unwholesome. Although it is not clearly expressed in the new withdrawal agreement, UK taxpayers will pay more billions of pounds for the privilege of divorcing ourselves from the EU club. Northern Ireland will find itself in a different bureaucratic arrangement across many areas of business, and that is a sadness that could have been avoided by the previous administration – but it is manageable and we can and will support them. Support of the union of our four nations is fundamental to me.
The revised political declaration has loose language regarding “level playing field” arrangements in the future. What might be given up in the pursuit of a future free trade deal with the EU? These are sound questions and real risks. But the prize is obvious – the opportunity to retake control of our laws, borders and money. The opportunity to capitalise on the biggest Brexit dividend of being able, for the first time in 46 years, to forge new trade deals around the world while negotiating a free trade and friendship FTA with the EU. Those negotiations will come later.
It would have been entirely comprehensible to refuse to vote for this deal because of its imperfections, but we don’t live in an ideal world of our own choosing. I’d love to live in a different house and own a different car – but circumstances do not allow that. I took no pleasure at all in being in a different voting lobby from the DUP that night; they have become friends and colleagues over my time in Parliament and I share their deeply held reservations.
The circumstances of that night – a result of the negotiating strategy, or more accurately lack of it, of Theresa May and her team – gave the new Prime Minister little wriggle room and little time. I am proud that I voted against Theresa May’s dreadful withdrawal agreement three times as one of the “Spartans” – it was truly foul with alignment to single market rules, domestic alignment on taxes and much else, and a destination of perpetual customs union membership with no unilateral way out. It was indeed Brexit In Name Only (BRINO). If I could see a clear route towards no deal – about which I have no fears – by voting against this bill I would have pursued that, but any hope of a path to no deal within the last Parliament was simply for the birds. If I could see that further delay would result in a better deal, that would also have been tempting, but similarly not likely. I have shared enough voting lobbies with Jeremy Corbyn, Jo Swinson and Dominic Grieve during this process as they continue to frustrate Brexit as I attempt to deliver it. I was not prepared to do so again.
The subsequent loss of the programme motion which set out the timetable for the progress of the Withdrawal Bill through the Commons was proof once more that the last Parliament would do anything to frustrate and prevent Brexit.
Those opposed to Brexit have cleverly, and by exquisite design, further restricted our choices. The Benn/Surrender Act meant an extension was inevitable if no further progress was made. Yet more time for those intent on frustrating the referendum result with a second (or third) referendum to meddle further, with the next moves being revocation of Article 50 or the festooning of the Withdrawal Bill with unacceptable amendments. The make-up of the last Parliament was militantly anti-Brexit. The Speaker was willing to flex any tradition, procedure and rule to frustrate our departure from the EU. We saw that on Monday, October 21 with his refusal to allow a fourth meaningful vote to be put following the previous Saturday’s obfuscatory tactics. The Fixed Term Parliament Act prevented an immediate general election. This truly was a choice of imperfect deal or no Brexit. Given that choice, a complex decision became a simple one. Additionally the public want this done. I am all too aware of how any remaining trust in democracy is ebbing away.
The other factor in my decision was of course Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom I supported strongly for the leadership. Commentators said that reopening the withdrawal agreement was impossible and that the Irish backstop was immovable. They weren’t. For the first time ever, we had a sitting Prime Minister committed to Brexit; it may never happen again. I have every confidence that a Johnson government would never extend the implementation period [the transition period as the UK moves from being a member of the EU to not being a member] and would exercise both the hardball approach necessary to achieve a sensible free trade agreement with the EU, and the commitment needed to maximise new global opportunities. A powerful factor in my decision was trust. A strong, Leave-supporting Parliamentary majority will also be needed to complete the job. That will come in due course and we will win.
We’re still in the foothills of the Brexit prize. After this length of time – I have patience, I can wait and I will enjoy delivering the fruits of nearly three decades of work to a newly invigorated and independent Britain.
I’ve seen the Jersey Boys three times, and Mum and I booked tickets for this year’s performance more than a year in advance. We are not even borderline obsessed, just obsessed.
The show has everything: a fabulous soundtrack of classic pop songs, a very funny script, colourful 60s customes, but most of all, a story not just way more hard-hitting than your average musical, but almost Shakespearean in its scope.
Forget the Beatles on LSD and Oasis and Blur’s playground scraps: the Four Seasons were proper trouble. The group had links to the Mafia, were friends with mob boss and serial murderer Gyp DeCarlo, and members Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi had both spent time in jail. (When writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice began work on the musical, they received an anonymous phonecall making it clear that it would be wise to portray DeCarlo in a “respectful” manner.) None of this was public knowledge until Brickman and Elice began work on the musical in the 2000s; had it come out in the 1960s, it would have likely have spelled the end of the band, whose sharp suits and upbeat songs, rendered by Valli in his unique falsetto, gave no clue as to the murky goings-on underneath.
Nonetheless, the first half of the musical is humorous and happy; DeVito and Massi manage to come out and stay out of prison, the group finally gets a record deal and stardom comes knocking. All four leads are pretty flawless, with Michael Watson getting Valli’s voice almost bang on and bringing an endearing mixture of vulnerability and strength to the role. Declan Egan rounded out goody-two-shoes (by the Four Seasons’ standards, that’s anyone without a police record) songwriting maestro Bob Gaudio with a twinkling, self-deprecating humour that I’m not sure I’ve seen in previous Gaudios.
Simon Bailey was thoroughly unpleasant as the bullying DeVito, yet nonetheless rounded – despite all his flaws, DeVito was the one who masterminded, hustled for and drove the group’s success. But it was Lewis Griffiths, previously seen in Dirty Dancing, who was a revelation to me, bringing a dry sense of humour and a surprising emotional range to Massi, who could be wooden and one-dimensional in the wrong hands. DeVito is supposed to be the cocky charmer, yet it was Griffiths who, as he masterfully broke into a church to help Frankie hone his singing, suddenly made a criminal record seem very attractive.
Fame was not the group’s salvation, however, and the second half is much bleaker: DeVito’s $150,000 gambling debts finally catch up with him, prompting the dissolution of the group in its original form. This is where the show elevates itself from just a pop biopic to a story about the human condition, taking in themes of loyalty, self-sacrifice and yes, morality, made all the more powerful by the quartet’s history of criminal behaviour. Valli decides that the group will take on DeVito’s debts and work to pay them off, and Massi tells the audience: “If you don’t understand why someone would do that, you ain’t from Jersey.” It is here that Valli really comes into his own, the kid who once surprised DeVito by standing up to him with the words “I ain’t your little brother” now showing that, for all the latter’s posturing, Valli is the real Big Man in Town.
The second half also shows how fame affected the group, as Valli’s marriage and family fall apart and Massi’s children end up being cared for by relatives and thinking he is their uncle – “You sell 100 million records. See how you handle it.” One by one, everybody leaves Valli: DeVito, Massi, his wife, his girlfriend, Gaudio (who stops performing but keeps on producing and songwriting), each of them walking alone across the gantry at the back of the stage as Valli, at the front, keeps the show on the road. Finally and most tragically, his daughter Francine dies of an overdose at 22, on the cusp of her own never-to-be-realised singing career.
All this might make the Jersey Boys sound hard going, but it’s absolutely not; it’s funny, clever and ultimately upbeat, ending with the now-reconciled group being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s not a sanitised Hollywood tale, but a true story about flawed, relatable human beings messing up but carrying on, getting up again when they get knocked down. They may have been morally airbrushed 50 years ago, but history tells a different tale: one of men made by their imperfections. And if that isn’t a good story, I don’t know what is.
Furious protestors turned out in their hundreds on Saturday afternoon to oppose proposals to axe the stroke unit at the QEQM hospital in Margate – and send patients all the way to Ashford for life-saving treatment instead.
Labour county councillor Barry Lewis warned that the proposals, which would mean emergency patients faced an ambulance journey of around an hour, amounted in his view to “corporate manslaughter”.
Non-political campaign group Save Our NHS Kent (SONIK) organised the rally, which began outside the hospital in Ramsgate Road before attendees marched to the Old Town.
Speaker Jason Tipple, whose father was treated at the QEQM after suffering a stroke, said: “People are going to die. People are going to be left disabled.
“The key is getting those drugs in you as quickly as possible. Within 15 minutes we were at the hospital, within 45 minutes Dad had been assessed and given lifesaving drugs.
“All the billboards say act fast. It isn’t acting fast to move services to Ashford.”
South Thanet MP Craig Mackinlay with The Loop’s editor Sarah Linney at the protest
NHS bosses are proposing to concentrate stroke treatment in the county at three specialist units, known as hyperacute stroke units, where patients could receive intensive treatment.
But the only stroke unit in east Kent would be at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, with two others at either Maidstone, Medway, Darent Valley or Tunbridge Wells hospital. Campaigners say that if the plans for specialist units go ahead, there must be a fourth unit in Thanet.
A stroke can be caused either by a clot which blocks the blood supply to the brain, or a bleed in or around the brain. Psychiatrist Dr Dick Symonds explained that finding out which it is is essential if the patient is to be given the correct treatment.
“It is crucial – mandatory – to examine the person very carefully using scanning, and the scanners can’t be put into the usual ambulances,” Dr Symonds explained.
“The one hour to get to the hospital is crucial. The door-to-needle time [the time within which patients should be given the drugs they need] is 20 minutes in the Canadian guidelines.
“The alternative could be to have a mobile stroke unit – the consultant and apparatus come to you. Why not have the first UK mobile unit in Thanet?”
SONIK spokeswoman Carly Jeffrey addresses the rally in Margate Old Town
South Thanet Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay was at the rally, but North Thanet MP and fellow Tory Sir Roger Gale, whose most recent comments in the Isle of Thanet News indicated support for the QEQM closure, was not.
Mr Mackinlay told the crowd outside the hospital in Ramsgate Road: “These proposals do not do for the people of Thanet.
“Hyperacute stroke units are a way forward, they are excellent, and I’ll go along with three units, but one of them has to be here.
“We have been told for many years about the FAST campaign and the golden hour. There is no chance that people here will get down to Ashford within the golden hour.
“I’m not prepared for the citizens of Thanet to become the third-class citizens of the county, and I’ll be fighting every step of the way.”
Mackinlay has faced criticism from some campaigners who feel he is not doing enough to fight the cuts, and was reported as saying that he did not think the fight could be won.
However, he told The Loop afterwards: “It was never true that I had meekly given in! My warning to campaigners was an honest one about limiting expectations that the fight would be easy.”
‘Pull your finger out’
SONIK spokeswoman Carly Jeffrey, speaking at the end of the rally, seemed unimpressed with both MPs.
“They’re the ones who should be standing up for us. They’ve got the most power in Thanet, and what are they doing?” she said.
“We’ve got to put a lot of pressure on them and make them understand that they are here working for us. This is very important. Everybody feels this way down here – and it’s not just emotional, it’s fact-based. We’ve done the research.
“We need to come out in numbers like this, speak to everybody we know, write to our MPs and speak to our councillors.
“We’re going to say to them: pull your finger out. Stop worrying about the trajectory of your career in politics and do something for the people who elected you.”
The Loop says: Better care is only better care if it’s better for everyone
The NHS website puts it bluntly. “Strokes are a medical emergency and urgent treatment is essential. The sooner a person receives treatment for a stroke, the less damage is likely to happen.”
It stands to reason. When you have a stroke, the blood supply to your brain is impaired. Brain cells start to die, and if you are not treated quickly, this can lead to disability or death. The longer the patient goes without treatment, the more cells are likely to die, and the worse the prognosis.
For years, public awareness campaigns on stroke treatment have centred on the importance of recognising the symptoms and seeking medical attention immediately. Even the acronym used to help people identify the symptoms of a stroke is FAST (face, arms, speech, time). “When stroke strikes, act FAST,” the NHS slogan says. Call an ambulance right away, get to hospital, because those hours, those minutes, they can make the difference between life and death.
And now, all of a sudden, the goalposts have moved, and it’s okay to be an hour from hospital if you have a stroke, because when you do get there, eventually, finally, it’ll be proper nice.
Hyperacute stroke units already exist elsewhere in the country, and the NHS says they have been shown to improve outcomes for people who have had a stroke. Centralisation of stroke care in London has reduced deaths, increased the number of patients receiving anti-clotting treatments, and reduced how long patients are in hospital.
But London services were reorganised on the basis that no patient would be more than 30 minutes from a hyperacute stroke unit; NHS guidelines state that “travel time should be ideally 30 minutes but no more than 60 minutes”. Yet it’s easily a half hour drive to Ashford’s William Harvey Hospital from some parts of Canterbury; from Deal and Sandwich you’re looking at 40 minutes, and from most of Thanet, close to an hour. Crescent Road, in Broadstairs, which is about the furthest you can get in Thanet from Ashford, is more than an hour away. Factor in the time taken for the ambulance to get to you, and the risk of traffic jams, and those precious minutes are ebbing away more and more.
The care you get in a specialist unit may well be brilliant, but it’s no good if a large proportion of the population can’t access it properly. No doctor can help you if the damage is done before you even get to them. Better care is only better care if it’s better for everyone, or at least almost everyone; Thanet has a population of around 134,000 people, which is around 9 per cent of the population of Kent.
Those of us lucky enough to live near one of the proposed hyperacute units shouldn’t dismiss this as something that doesn’t affect us, either. As an unfortunately frequent visitor to the William Harvey Hospital, I can tell you that the hospital is already nightmarishly overburdened and under-resourced. How are the staff supposed to cope with extra demand? Will there be extra beds and resources for the extra stroke patients, or will they simply be taken from elsewhere in the hospital? The idea is that patients will only need to stay in a hyperacute unit for 72 hours, so what happens after that? Do they move elsewhere within the hospital or face another 50-minute ambulance ride back to Thanet in their weakened condition? If the former, the financial strain and emotional stress for families forced to make a 90-minute round trip every time they want to see their loved ones, who could be in hospital for weeks, could be huge; and patients’ recovery would surely be impacted if family visits had to be curtailed or reduced, because we all know that our physical health relies heavily on our mental wellbeing.
Even worse, there is still a big question mark over the future of emergency services at the Harvey and the trust states that the hyperacute stroke unit may open at the Harvey, only to move elsewhere if the hospital ceases to provide emergency care. Such inefficient planning – for such a move would surely be hugely expensive – is staggering at the best of times but from an NHS strapped for cash, it is ludicrous. And as someone who is herself at slightly increased risk of a stroke due to a heart condition, I find the idea that I might lose both my local emergency unit and my local stroke unit utterly terrifying. How quickly one can get the treatment one needs is starting to feel like a game of dice based not just on which hospital trust you come under (the famous postcode lottery) but on where they’ve chosen to site their emergency care that year. 2018? Yep, you’re still all right Miss Linney, you’re ten minutes from A&E in the car if you get a blood clot. 2020? No, sorry, we no longer offer that service; but it’s awfully nice over here at the seaside, we’re sure it’ll be worth the trip.
The reason why we can’t have a fourth hyperacute stroke unit at the QEQM is, you might have guessed, because we can’t afford one. The trust says: “Having more than three hyperacute stroke units would spread our staff and patients too thinly to make the service safe and allow the delivery of high quality care.” It adds that Kent and Medway only has a third of the stroke consultants it needs, that fewer than one in three stroke patients are getting brain scans within the recommended time, and that one in two are not getting anti-clotting drugs within the recommended time.
These figures are shocking. But it is unclear how the proposals would solve these problems: the trust gives various reasons, such as staff being concentrated at particular sites, but logic holds that wherever they are being cared for there will still be the same number of stroke patients, and therefore a need for the same number of staff. There is only one sensible solution to the problem of not having enough staff, and that is to hire more of them. There were actually more doctors per person in the UK in 2016 than when the Conservatives came to power, and health spending rose between 2010 and 2016; but it is obvious to anyone who has used the NHS recently that not enough is being done. Whether the NHS needs more money, or needs to use the money it has better, whether we need to train or import more doctors, or whether all of these and more need to be done, are issues outside the scope of this post. But although Craig Mackinlay blamed local NHS bosses for the stroke unit decision on Saturday, the truth is that health policy comes from the top. The notion that, in this day and age, in the fifth richest economy in the world, we have to choose between offering the best care we can and making care accessible for everyone is ridiculous. Providing the best care we can to every one of our citizens is surely the least a decent society aims for.
SONIK will be holding a campaign meeting on Wednesday at The Red Hall, Grosvenor Road, Broadstairs, from 6pm to 7.30pm; everyone is welcome.
You can find extensive coverage of the campaign so far on the Isle of Thanet news, run by the excellent Kathy Bailes.
Veteran Washington Post journalist Ted Gup talks to The Loop about working with Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham, his views on Spielberg’s The Post and its relevance to US politics today.
by Sarah Linney
To those who have seen The Post, Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham were the courageous Washington Post editor and publisher who defied the White House and published secret information showing the US government lied about the Vietnam War.
But to Ted Gup, Bradlee was the father figure who changed his life – spotting his potential as a green, unpolished youngster from the Mid West and setting him on the path to a highly successful career as a journalist and writer.
And Graham, despite being the first female publisher of a major newspaper, was a reticent, retiring woman who had found herself thrust unexpectedly into a man’s world. Her husband Philip committed suicide, leaving her in control of the family business – where she revealed a tenacity and core of steel that made her one of the most formidable, influential women in the history of journalism.
“We who worked for Ben felt like we were Knights of the Round Table and he was our Arthur,” Gup said.
“I feel incredibly privileged to have worked for him.”
“And Katharine – Kay – could hold her own with anybody. There was no messing with her. We respected her; you had to.
“I kept all the letters she wrote to me – not for posterity, but because it was like a note from Olympus, it really meant something.”
Speaking at the Centre for Investigative Journalism on Friday, Gup recalled how he applied for an internship at the paper in 1970, the year he turned 20, despite never having had an article published.
“All the other applicants were from Harvard and had an incredible pedigree. I had never read The Post; I was a classics major and had never taken a course in journalism,” he said.
“I was from Ohio, and I didn’t know how to be disingenuous. I just said what I thought. It turned out that was what Ben wanted.
“As I got up to go, he put his hand on my forearm and said please stay. He rejected me for the internship, but it was the sweetest, kindest, gentlest rejection I ever had.”
Bradlee mentored Gup, helping him get the training and experience he needed and finally taking him on at the Post in 1977.
Years later, when Gup was a published author, he sent Bradlee a copy of one of his books with an inscription telling him what his support and guidance throughout his career had meant to him.
“Except for my father, no one influenced me and inspired me more,” Gup said.
“Ben said that reading that made him walk around all day with his chest puffed out. This is the foremost editor of the century in my field, and his chest is puffed out because of a kid from Ohio. That tells you everything you need to know about him.”
Kay was different. She had had her confidence crushed as a child by her mother, and as an adult by her husband Philip. Although she shared her father Eugene’s interest in the newspaper industry, and had worked as a reporter, it was not to her he left the family business, but her heavy drinking, mentally unwell and unfaithful husband.
“The Kay I knew was the Kay at the end. She could be imperious and she was tough,” Gup said.
“But in the early stage she was a shrinking violet – diffident and reluctant to wield power.
“The Washington Post was not a thought leader in the journalistic community in the 1960s [Graham took over from her husband in 1963]. Ben came in to kick ass and transform that paper, and their relationship evolved into a remarkable symbiotic relationship between publisher and editor.”
His description of Graham gives hope to socially awkward, odd girls everywhere.
“She was never the graceful swan; she was never elegant, never the belle of the ball,” Gup said.
“She was a little bit of the odd duck. Part of her diffidence and lack of confidence wasn’t just because it was a pre-feminist era – she was painfully shy.
“But I think that was often overcome by a sense of responsibility – she felt she couldn’t indulge herself in that, because the stakes were higher.”
As relevant to today as the issue of the freedom of the press is that of gender equality. The film shows Graham being condescended to by male colleagues, with one telling her: “People are concerned about having a woman in charge of the paper – that she doesn’t have the resolve to make the tough choices.”
Gup recalled: “I can remember men in the newsroom joking about the feminist movement, the bra burners. We were not in the vanguard in any way I can remember.
“Women’s role was almost exclusively covering parties, food, social events, fashion. [White House correspondent] Helen Thomas was an aberration – she was incredibly tough.
“The place of women in the newsroom did not materially change till the late 1970s. Then there was a sea change.
“If I were to make a list of the ten greatest investigative reporters in the US today, more than half would be women. And most of the toughest investigative stories would be done by women.”
Gup said he had been afraid that watching the film would move him to tears because of the memories it would bring back – and that he had felt “choked up” during the scene when the women in the crowd look admiringly at Graham after the court rules in favour of the press.
“It’s a bit like watching home movies from long ago,” he said.
“It’s accurate in almost every way and I think it captured the people very well – except that Ben was not nearly so cavalier about secrecy. He was a Second World War veteran and very patriotic. He would never have done anything to jeopardise national security.
“I had a couple of stories Congress didn’t want us to publish, and one of them we sat on for four months. That was Ben. I think the film shaded that out to make the drama more acute.”
It was actually the New York Times, not the Post, which first got hold of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed that Lyndon Johnson’s government had lied to both Congress and the public about the war and had secretly bombed Cambodia and Laos. The Times ran a story before President Nixon used a court injunction to ban further publication.
The Post went all out to get its own copy of the classified papers, and published its own revelations in defiance of the President and the court – risking prosecution, jail for Bradlee and Graham, and the future of the business.
Gup said the staff at the Post hated their larger, more prestigious rival, but that he didn’t believe the Post would have sent an undercover reporter to the Times to find out what their story was, as depicted in the film.
“We never in my time did anything underhand,” he said.
“My rule of thumb – and I think it’s the same for most of my colleagues – is that whenever you are working on a story, assume you are on [US investigative news programme] 60 Minutes, and they are documenting your every action.”
The film includes recordings of Nixon threatening journalists with prosecution – and the parallels with a certain modern-day president’s attempts to thwart the press are obvious. But Gup says that the two have different motivations.
“For Trump, it’s a deep-rooted insecurity. Nixon was more driven by vengeance – he wanted to even the score,” Gup said.
“The Pentagon Papers were an early humiliation that kept building. There was no precedent. The implication at the end of the film is that it was a shot over the bows of the Nixon administration before Watergate.
“With Nixon, it was about individuals. He singled out reporters who he didn’t like. For Trump, it’s institutional – he has a profound contempt for the press itself and resents their existence.
“Nixon was a lawyer, and he was intelligent. Trump is kind of an unguided missile. Nixon understood that the press had a role to play – but he didn’t like to be on the receiving end.”
Gup said that there was a “siege mentality” between the present-day White House and the press.
“They feel as though not just their individual credibility but the First Amendment [the freedom of the press] is on the line,” he said.
“In my experience, I’m not sure we have been here before.
“The Washington Post’s motto is ‘democracy dies in darkness’ – the implication is that information, light, transparency solves all. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a lack of information that has got us to the point we’re in. I think it’s a difference of values.
“A newspaper used to bring people together, make them feel like they were American. Now it’s not a unifying force, because people are reading only that which is confirming their bias. It is fragmenting. There’s no common pool of facts, and it’s not a comforting model.”
He invoked Abraham Lincoln’s historic speech of 1858 in which the future president said “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
“We are a house divided. We have a president who was elected by a minority, and we had vast numbers of voters who sat out the dance and stayed home,” Gup said.
“The trick is to find ways of not preaching to the converted. Trump is content to rely on his base. The press can’t do that. They have to reach the people who sat out the dance.”
For me, the film Legally Blonde was always going to be a hard act to follow with a stage production. As soon as I saw Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods burst on to the screen with her brightly coloured outfits and chihuahua Bruiser, I was hooked. I watched the film over and over again, which sparked a lifelong wish to have my very own pet chihuahua – much to my husband’s delight. So I didn’t think that I’d ever love the stage show as much as that.
But I’m happy to say I absolutely did. Just like when I watched the film, I became completely absorbed as soon as the performers appeared on the stage. The set and costumes are fantastic, the song and dance routines are full of energy and canine companions Bruiser and Rufus make appearances too – receiving cheers from the audience every time.
As much as the vibrant, sugary musical numbers are uplifting and fun, the show carries so many important messages too. In the wake of numerous stories about workplace sexual harassment and powerful men abusing their position, Elle’s story is more relevant than ever.
Fellow fans of the film will already be well aware of the storyline, but for those who aren’t, the musical follows the adventures of sorority sister Elle. After she’s dumped by her boyfriend Warner, she works hard to follow him to Harvard Law School, where she discovers he’s already moved on with Vivian.
When I first watched the film at the age of 11, I was naïve to the feminist points it makes. But it was impossible for me to miss them in the stage production.
Elle is treated badly by Warner and mocked by her fellow students. This leads to her declaring she’ll be dyeing her hair brown – a decision she’s thankfully talked out of by beautician Paulette, played excellently by Rita Simons. It reminds me of Silicon Valley CEO Eileen Carey talking about becoming a brunette to be taken more seriously at work.
Elle is played amazingly by Lucie Jones, and her performance is the highlight of the show for me. She brings a charming mixture of humour, kindness and resilience to the role and comes across as being very genuine. Her beautiful rendition of Legally Blonde was full of emotional depth.
In fact, all of the cast are brilliant. David Barrett’s Emmett is affable and sweet. Bill Ward’s Callahan is cutting, shark-like and sinister, demanding excellence from his students but hitting on Elle as soon as they’re alone in his office. It’s awful to see her self-esteem crushed and with the #MeToo movement sweeping social media it’s representative of the pain so many women have felt. Callahan becomes the pantomime villain of the piece – with an audible ‘ooh’ from the audience when Emmett tells him ‘I don’t need to hit on interns.’
I liked the subtle adaptations the stage production makes to the story. It’s particularly great to see Vivian backing Elle and joining forces with her. It’s cheering to see Elle triumph over the stereotypes and harassment and, aided by the adorable Emmett and Paulette, get the happy ending she so deserves.
“You keep on hammering away, forcing the fit… Because that’s what you’ve got to do, right? The way it’s always been. And you’re exhausted. But the effort…well, that’s not the problem. Just look at the damage you’ve done to all those pegs.”
Tale Be Told Theatre’s dystopian play Square opens with a young man in trouble at work for taking too long to visit the bathroom, and descends into blood, screams, violence, terror and betrayal by the end. (So pretty much a normal day at the office, at least in a couple of the places I’ve worked.)
Cocky, laddish Norman (Kulraj Thethy) and uptight, exacting supervisor Norma (Terri Ann Creaser) work together in a suffocatingly rule-bound corporation. Norma takes a fastidious, almost sadistic pleasure in enforcing endless core directives covering every aspect of Norman’s working day; but he kicks against the system from the start, railing against her instructions with sarcasm, anger and a good deal of swearing.
Their job seems to amount to nothing more than waiting for round pegs to appear in a box and then putting them into a machine. Norma’s joy when the pegs are round, “perfect”, is evident – but when a square peg appears, things take a horrible turn and dark secrets emerge.
Performed entirely by just two actors, the 45-minute show at Camden’s Etcetera Theatre was impressively executed, requiring both of them to memorise huge amounts of dialogue. Thethy was particularly strong as Norman, oscillating between bellowing rage and impassioned frustration, and it was impossible not to root for him despite his laziness, drunkenness and (apparent) salaciousness.
The message of the play, as you may have guessed, is that we live in a world where square pegs are forced to fit into round holes – and that this is wrong. Square is hardly the first piece of work to tackle this premise, and although very cleverly conceived, its short length does not allow for a plot with huge complexity, or for the arguments for and against conformity to be explored in great depth. It is dramatic and compelling – you certainly have to keep watching – but occasionally some of the arguments and dialogue felt underdeveloped. I enjoyed it very much, but it reinforced, rather than challenged or added to, my world view.
But in the days after I saw the play, I kept thinking about it, and I realised something: the fact that I had found its premise familiar showed exactly why it was needed. The belief that conformity is neither necessary, nor even particularly desirable, is one I have arrived at only after long years of struggling to accept myself and believing that if only I could be like other people, and not ask so many questions, I would be so much more satisfactory. Until my early thirties, the idea that people might like you because of, not in spite of, your individuality, that what is presented as normal might often be vacuous and even harmful, and that we need to be asking some big questions about the world, was not something I had seriously entertained, and I had no idea that there were so many other people who thought like me. The aspects of working life which the play depicts as ridiculous – the enforcement of petty, dehumanising rules, the crushing of independent thought, the inability to admit that both the role one performs and the company itself are largely pointless – did not seem far-fetched to me but frighteningly familiar.
“Why can’t we build a new machine? Why can’t the machine change so everyone can fit?” Norman asks in anguish at one point. It shouldn’t be a radical idea; but until we, as a society, decide to build our new machine, works like Square will continue to be needed. Seven years ago this play would have been revolutionary to me; to a lot of people, it would still be revolutionary now.
Before we went to see The Planets I knew it was one of the greats of classical music; I knew I’d heard it before; but I couldn’t have told you how it went.
Now, whole sections of it are etched in my memory.
Of course, the Marlowe Theatre’s Philharmonia Orchestra didn’t play just that; they began with Otto Nicolai’s brisk, frolicking The Merry Wives of Windsor, as jolly as its title suggests, before moving onto Bruch’s Violin Concerto number 1. The exquisite beauty of this piece needs a true virtuoso to do it justice, and Callum Smart fortunately obliged.
But then came the dramatic opening bars of The Planets, and I forgot everything else.
There is no one word to describe The Planets. Mars is ominous, forbidding, with a sinister miltaristic drumbeat and furiously clashing cymbals. (I’m sure I remember this movement as the theme tune to a BBC programme, also called The Planets, in the 1980s – anyone else?) Venus is a complete contrast: beautiful and soothing, with gentle violins, flutes and clarinets conveying both great sadness and great solace. Mercury is a hop, skip and a jump; Uranus loud and commanding; Saturn fearful and troubling, at times actually sounding like an emergency alarm.
But it is Jupiter which turns The Planets from a great piece of music into an experience of the soul. From dramatic, to lilting, and back to dramatic again; then all of a sudden, the transcendental beauty of I Vow To Thee My Country takes over. This is the sort of music that takes you out of yourself, transports you to somewhere different; the sort of music that, if you’re one of those restless souls like me who is always searching for the meaning of life, gives you a few moments of having found it.
Sombre flutes announce the final movement, Neptune, whose high, tinkling melodies pave the way for an unseen choir singing wordlessly from the wings, a pure, almost celestial sound which closes the piece unaccompanied. It is a strange, unsettlingly understated end to such a larger-than-life work.
I love Grease, which must put me in a category with about 99 per cent of the girls of my generation and probably a good proportion of the men too.
So it’s hard to imagine going to see a production and not loving it – it’s almost guaranteed to be a winner. But last month’s performance at the Marlowe Theatre just felt a little flat.
This may have been partly related to the fact that three principal members of the cast had been laid low by a bug, with Danielle Hope as Sandy, Louisa Lytton as Rizzo and Ryan Heenan as Doody all too indisposed to perform.
It wasn’t a bad show, and definitely got better in the second half – but the first half in particular felt rushed, with bits of the script and at least one song cut.
Understudy Gabriella Williams was a very good Sandy – she was sweet and clear-voiced, but also brought depth and emotion to the part. I actually preferred her heartfelt rendition of Hopelessly Devoted To You to Olivia Newton John’s.
But Tom Parker as Danny … nope. As a former member of boyband The Wanted he could sing okay (and no more than okay); he could act passably; he didn’t seem to do much dancing. And there was no factor X.
To be fair, Danny Zuko is a really difficult character to play, because he is such a massive dick. I’ve never seen a Danny who could make me understand what Sandy sees in him, not even John Travolta. But one expects him to have a certain glamour, even if he isn’t likeable. This was absent. And Ailsa Davidson as Rizzo, who should be the strongest personality in the show, was also flat.
Plus there was a serious lack of good dancing. We Go Together, at the end of the first half, should be one of the high points of the show, full of exuberance and energy. Instead, the cast sat down and did a kind of hand jive. Yes, I know that was a thing in the 1950s, but there’s a song specifically for that in the second half – it was hugely underwhelming at this juncture.
There were good performances from some of the rest of the cast: Rhiannon Chesterman was excellent as Frenchy, with a fantastic accent; Oliver Jacobson and Rosanna Harris were sweet as Roger and Jan; and Rory Phelan was adorable as Doody, his mellifluous rendition of Those Magic Changes showing up Tom Parker’s vocal and charismatic deficiencies. He had more appeal in that one song than Parker had in the whole two hours and 20 minutes.
The absolute star of the show, however, was George Olney as Vince Fontaine and the Teen Angel. When he came on the stage, clad in his splendiferous silver costume, he owned it, and Beauty School Dropout was one of the high points of the afternoon.
Perhaps he or Rory Phelan should have played Danny?
Ever since I heard the male singer from Boney M growling “oh, those Russians!” at the end of their single Rasputin, I’ve been intrigued by the mercurial, artistic, elusive inhabitants of the world’s largest country.
So I was excited when I saw that the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra were coming to the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury – and even more so when I saw Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich on the programme. The latter I knew as the famous composer of Symphony No 7, written during the Siege of Leningrad as a symbol of defiance against the Nazis. Its premiere in 1942, by an orchestra who were themselves half-starved, was a pivotal moment, credited with restoring the morale of the desperate city-dwellers.
Tchaikovsky never disappoints, and Romeo and Juliet, sorrowful, longing and beautiful, was no exception.
But Shostakovich did. Cello Concerto No 2 was what critics might politely call inaccessible, in that I had no idea what was happening for most of it. The programme promised that it would showcase cellist Tim Hugh’s “rich and sumptuous tone” – I’m sure it would have, had Shostakovich not apparently been unacquainted with the concept of melody. This isn’t a criticism of the orchestra, who were excellent throughout the rest of the evening; when you haven’t got a tune, there really isn’t much you can do.
Fortunately, this was more than made up by Sheherazade, which had me from its gentle opening bars. Evocative and captivating, Rimsky Korsakov’s suite tells the story of the narrator of the Arabian Nights, who saved herself from execution by telling brilliant tales; and, just like the book, there is a fairytale, romantic feeling about the music.
I don’t actually know the name of the piece they did as an encore, but it was a great choice – fun, lively and a perfect ending. My mum and I always love watching the percussionists best, as they are so dramatic; and they excelled themselves during the encore, with the castanet player clicking away with so much enthusiasm I started to wonder if he’d just won the lottery.
All in all, it was a real privilege to watch these incredible musicians, and three excellent pieces more than made up for one which was just missing a melody.
by Mike Rolfe, former national chair of the Professional Trades Union for Prison, Correctional and Secure Psychiatric Workers
I watch with great interest as commentator after commentator offers multiple excuses for those identified as tax dodgers by the Paradise Papers, the spin and churn being used to disassociate those leading figures from their grubby business dealings designed to starve the economy of tax due. Tax that would potentially help millions of poor and less fortunate people – or that could have been used to ensure that we have a first class public sector.
While it would seem this is all legal and above board, it certainly lacks any sense of fairness and equality … I’m sure we would all love to give ourselves a pay rise by paying zero tax on our wages.
What bothers me most about the spin being used is the suggestion that those with all the wealth are not to blame for business dealings as they might not have known about what was going on or where all their money was being invested by employees running their finances. Do they really expect us to believe that when they employ people, they do not make it abundantly clear that it is fundamental to their reputation that finances are handled in an ethical manner?
Similarly, I have represented many people in my previous trade union role who were accused of not following the correct policies, sometimes in circumstances where there were thousands and thousands of pages of policy that was impossible to know. Yet they still lost their jobs, or were punished for their actions, as not knowing was not allowed as a plausible excuse in the eyes of those senior leaders.
If we were not to be honest with our tax returns, hiding elements of our income, do we think the authorities would be so forgiving as to just say “pay your taxes”, with no repercussions if we ignore the request? I think not. When we get a fine for accidentally crossing a toll road or entering a congestion charge area, are we let off if we say “sorry, I didn’t know”?
The law in this country is controlled by those with all the power and wealth and is adapted to keep those people in power and in wealth. While I’m not against people working hard and reaping the rewards of hard work, which should rightly be so, I also know people that work very hard just to keep their heads above water, sometimes questioning why they bother putting themselves through it all with nothing to show but spiralling debts and a dissatisfaction with life.
The law must be fair for everyone and everyone must be subject to the same fair treatment. Politicians are accountable for ensuring fairness runs through everything that we do in our society, and I think it is time for our elected leaders to step up – or do the rest of us a favour and step aside for someone who will promote fairness, equality and will not be afraid to stand up to the elite establishment in this country!
The founder of Wikipedia has warned of dire consequences for democracy, prosperity and trust within society unless the crisis in journalism is solved.
Jimmy Wales, who set up his own crowdfunded news website, WikiTribune, this year, told an audience at Goldsmith’s College that he liked the idea of a “slow journalism movement” – where quality was more important than speed and clicks.
“If the world ends up with serious journalistic enterprises dying because they have to compete with the crap on the internet, that’s not a world I want to live in,” he said.
“It has become a race to the bottom for advertising clicks, so serious journalistic outlets struggle. This year, trust in the news media fell to an all time low – it was as low as politicians, which is pretty grim.
“If we don’t have that fourth estate holding power to account, and we feel everyone is corrupt, a lot of people will feel that the only way to survive is to also become corrupt – and then you have a really low trust society.
“We don’t want to go there – it’s bad for prosperity and it’s bad for democracy – but it’s exactly where you go if you don’t have strong journalism.”
Wales’ talk, entitled Fighting Fake News, was part of a series of discussions organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
Director James Harkin interviewed Wales about fake news, Donald Trump, fact-checking and the dire straits in which journalism has found itself since the advent of the internet.
Wales, who set up Wikipedia 16 years ago, said that in particular, the importance of good quality local journalism should not be underestimated.
“In local journalism we have a huge problem,” he said.
“When I was a paper boy we had two good newspapers in my hometown. One has gone, and the second is now published three times a week, and is largely running national news. The number of people doing local journalism in the town is a fraction of what it was – maybe an eighth.
“What does that mean for the integrity of society? It’s a really good time to be in construction and be the brother in law of a mayor.
“When we think about investigative journalism, we think about things like Watergate. But equally important is the story about the councillor taking a bribe.”
In response to Harkin’s remark that “parts of the mainstream media are crumbling into echo chambers”, Wales said that news outlets’ current business model – with funding coming mainly from advertising – was problematic in the internet age.
“The advertising-only business model is incredibly destructive. If you have advertising, your priority is clicks,” he said.
“With the rise of programmatic advertising online, advertising doesn’t target a particular publication – it targets you. I see the same ads wherever I go, and whoever gets the most dollars is whoever gets the most raw page views.
“One publication ran a serious story they had worked on for three weeks at the same time as a listicle written by an intern, and it got as many clicks.
“A lot of the media are following each other, and they have the same business model – you have to get there fast, get it out there quickly and cheaply. There’s a lot of regurgitation of other outlets.”
WikiTribune, rather like The Loop, works by crowdfunding – there are no ads and no paywall. Since its launch in April it has attracted around 11,000 contributors.
“It’s a series of bad business decisions, but that’s how I have built my career so far,” Wales joked.
“I want people to come and read something with us and say: wow, I didn’t see that anywhere else. This is a meaningful story; this deserves to exist; I think there should be more of this in the world, and I should contribute to this.
“We want it to be popular, but not at the expense of being meaningful. I believe that if you establish something meaningful, people will trust it and they will come back to you.
“We have dull headlines, no clickbait; the title of the article is just what it’s about.”
So is WikiTribune competing with traditional media – or aiming to do something completely different?
“WikiTribune does present a challenge to traditional media, but that’s because I am quite traditional in terms of what I think we should be doing,” Wales said.
“I want serious journalism to succeed. If we have a lot of serious journalistic outlets in fierce competition, that’s a world I want to live in.
“I would like to see more experimentation in business models. Having a handful of very wealthy people owning the newspapers is not a good model. Wouldn’t it be much better if the money were sustainable and came from readers?
“It’s not just about the business model, but also the participation model. If we can get 10,000 subscribers in a town and get the community engaged, I think we would have a pretty interesting thing there – I want to try.”
Reliable sources of information which encouraged more informed debate would be a good thing, he added.
“All of us everywhere have to fight the good fight,” Wales said.
“I would like to see consumers expressing a long term desire for quality information so that when we disagree, we disagree based on facts and real choices. Fact-checking should be integrated into the process of journalism.
“Facebook should show you things that you are going to disagree with, but that are good quality. We read things that we agree with, and we don’t get a thoughtful approach to the other side.
“Diversity is intrinsic to the idea of quality journalism. I get really annoyed when people think this is about political correctness. We won’t be as good at what we do unless we have a lot of different minds coming at this from a lot of different perspectives.”
On fake news
“The term fake news is problematic, as it has a lot of different meanings right now,” Wales said.
“Wikipedia is almost entirely unaffected by the phenomenon. The Wikipedia community spend their lives wrestling over what counts as a valid source – how old the domain is, when it was registered, how well known it is. The community moderates itself.
“Wikipedia has flaws, but it’s honest. There is a desire to have quality and to always have reliable sources, and the volunteers are trying really hard to get it right. They aren’t just keeping you reading by telling you what you want to hear.”
On Wikipedia’s Daily Mail ban
“The Daily Mail isn’t banned as a Wikipedia source, people are just told that they should find something better,” Wales said.
“The Mail interpreted this as a political statement, but it really has nothing to do with that at all.
“And no, the Korean Central News Agency [North Korea’s propaganda outlet] isn’t banned as a source because it’s never occurred to anyone that it would be a reliable source.”
On Donald Trump
“Trump is exploiting the lack of trust in the media. He is helping people not trust the media,” Wales said.
“He’s not engaged in a serious debate with the media; he is engaged in demagoguery, and insulting things he doesn’t like. He’s very far from a libertarian – he’s an authoritarian.”
Despite reports to the contrary, he said that Trump had never, as far as he could see, made a donation to Wikipedia.
Words: Sarah Linney Pictures: Alan Napier, Gary Linney and Sarah Linney
One hundred years ago, the first flight into what was to become Biggin Hill airport landed in a farmer’s field.
And at the weekend, the airport celebrated its centenary with an extravaganza of aerial acrobatics, vintage delights and stunning displays by the planes revered for saving our country.
We arrived on the Sunday just in time to see the Breitling Wingwalkers – a Gloucestershire outfit who happen to be the world’s only formation wingwalking team. The team – all women – perform around the world and are seen by more than six million people in the UK each year.
Their incredible mid-air acrobatics aboard the top wings of two Boeing Stearman biplanes belting along at 170mph gave my dad the shivers – especially when the planes, and consequently the wingwalkers, turned upside down.
You can just make out the girls doing handstands on top of the wings.
Not sure what he’d have made of the efforts of early wingwalker Ormer Locklear, who entertained crowds at airshows in the aftermath of the First World War by climbing out of the cockpit, walking along the wing of his plane and even climbing from one aeroplane into another. Legend has it that he first mounted the wing to fix an engine problem during the war.
In those days, wingwalkers didn’t use safety equipment and Locklear was killed two years later filming a stunt for a film called The Skywayman. Undeterred, Fox Film Corporation released the film anyway, including the footage of his death.
Two helicopters from the Czech Air Force, Mi-171 Hip and Mi-24 Hind, were next to take flight …
Helikoptéra
… followed by an F-16 Fighting Falcon from the Belgian Air Force. First built in 1976, this plane is still in use today against Daesh in Iraq and Syria.
The F16 Fighting Falcon
Then thundering into life with a deafening roar came a Typhoon, fire glowing at the tip of its exhaust as it stormed up to a mighty 600mph, its swooping, birdlike grace completely belying the noise. Apparently this was nothing – it can reach 1,350mph. Sound, by contrast, plods along at a mere 720mph.
First developed in 1988, the Typhoon was deployed in the 2011 war in Libya, and has also been used since 2007 for the UK’s Quick Reaction Alert – planes (and their pilots) which are on standby 24 hours a day, ready to launch immediately if an enemy approaches our airspace.
The F16 on the runway
The Great War Display Team took us right back to the airport’s beginnings – and to a time when planes were only just beginning to be used in warfare. At the start of the First World War, the UK had just 113 military aircraft, and they were frighteningly basic – often made from skin, canvas and wood. Just making it to France was an achievement – Bleriot had only made the first Channel crossing five years earlier.
Understandably, not everyone was convinced of the usefulness of these fragile creations and at first aircraft were used just for reconnaissance – seeing what the enemy were doing and whether our own efforts were working. Opposing aircrew would even wave as they passed each other. Pretty soon, however, they remembered there was a war on and began to shoot at each other with pistols or rifles – and shortly afterwards aircraft were fitted with machine guns.
The average age of the pilots was just 19 or 20, and their life expectancy once they started to fly was a matter of weeks. The aircraft were liable to break if they were mishandled, yet many of the men had just 20 hours’ training. At first they weren’t allowed parachutes in case they abandoned their planes; a decision which cost many lives. Fire was the greatest fear and left a pilot with a horrific choice.
Yet as the war went on, development of aircraft and tactics accelerated rapidly; some aircraft would become obsolete within a few months. By the end of the war, the UK air force had more than 20,000 planes.
The next display came from an Extra 300S aircraft – a plane designed specifically for aerobatics – flying in pair formation (ie performing identical moves) with a radio-controlled model flown by British freestyle champion Mike Willams. The model was built in Mike’s own workshop, and at 3.1m wide and 2.9m long is 40 per cent as big as a full-size Extra.
Then came the highlight of the afternoon: the Red Arrows. As they zoomed in over the heads of the crowd towards the runway, plumes of red, white and blue smoke trailing in their wake, the excitement was palpable – we knew we were in for a spectacle of dazzling agility and adroitness.
Is this what a red, white and blue Brexit looks like?
Their stunning display featured them flying in all sorts of formations, including the shape of a Spitfire and of Concorde, with a perfection, precision and finesse that reflected the pilots’ exceptional skill and level of training. The pilots are among the very best in the RAF and must have flown for at least 1,500 hours, completed a frontline tour and been assessed as being above-average in their role before they can even apply.
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The Arrows have performed in 57 countries and give around 80 displays each year, featuring at major national events including the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee celebrations and the 2012 London Olympics.
The planes can reach up to 820mph and pull up to six times the force of gravity – the pilots have to wear inflatable trousers to stop the blood rushing from their brains to their feet. The coloured smoke is actually a safety device, helping the pilots to judge wind speed and direction – each aircraft carries enough dye to create five minutes of white smoke, one minute of red and one minute of blue.
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Next up was the B-17 Flying Fortress Sally B, the only airworthy example of the US’s most famous Second World War bomber, which has come to symbolise the critical role the US played in winning the war. Sally B is a memorial to the 79,000 US airmen who died between 1942 and 1945, and a plaque in the radio room is dedicated to them.
Businessman and pilot Ted White brought the aircraft to the UK from France in 1975, naming her Sally B after his companion Elly Sallingboe, and the plane made her debut at the Biggin Hill Air Fair that same year. White was tragically killed in an air crash in 1982 – and Sallingboe has dedicated herself to keeping Sally B going ever since. The plane receives no official funding, and survives thanks to donations, airshow appearances, sponsorship, souvenirs and the efforts of the 8,000 members of the Sally B Supporters’ Club.
We were then privileged enough to see the Patrouille de France, the French equivalent of the Red Arrows, who were making their only British appearance of the 2017 season.
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They were excellent, but they didn’t have quite the magic of the Arrows for me – or maybe the Arrows are always going to look extra special in front of a home crowd. The Patrouille did, however, make history in 2009 when Virginie Guyot was appointed their leader, becoming the first woman in history to lead a demonstration team.
A slightly bizarre pop music soundtrack accompanied their performance, rounded off for good measure by a rendition of La Marsellaise.
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After that we took a stroll around the airfield to see some of the other attractions on offer representing the last 100 years, including retro music and technology, classic cars …
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a display of vintage hats …
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and TV and film props including a time machine and a Tardis.
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An engine fault had grounded the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, preventing their appearance – but thanks to the Biggin Hill Heritage Hangar the afternoon ended in the only fitting way possible: with a display of Hurricanes and Spitfires.
It’s difficult to describe how moving it is to watch these planes soaring, tumbling and looping through the skies, knowing that we owe them, and the pilots who flew them, the freedom that we have today. It’s a truly humbling sight that always affects me no matter how many times I see it and reminds me how difficult all our lives could have been were it not for the insuperable heroism of these men.
The magnificent spectacle of a solo Spitfire, twirling and gliding with almost balletic grace through the sky to the strains of Jerusalem, ended the afternoon. We were cold, we had backache after standing for almost five hours (no one had thought to bring a chair or rug), but our discomfort was forgotten – we were simply transfixed.
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A bit about Biggin Hill and the Second World War
Despite modest beginnings – it was originally a testing ground for aircraft radio systems –Biggin Hill played a vital part in the defence of London and the Home Counties during the Battle of Britain.
Throughout the summer of 1940 it was in the thick of the fighting, with the four Spitfire and two Hurricane squadrons based there fending off enemy attacks almost daily.
These two planes played a critical role in defending this country during the Battle of Britain – and the Spitfire, in particular, was loved by pilots and the public alike. Yet production had been slow at first – there were only 292 Spitfires in use by the start of the battle. Fun Spitfire fact: in 1944 some of the planes were unofficially given Modification XXX, which allowed them to carry a full beer barrel under each wing for the troops fighting in Normandy.
Between August 18, 1940 and January 7, 1941, Biggin Hill was bombed 12 times. August 18, known as the Hardest Day, was one of the biggest air battles in history – the Luftwaffe launched an intense attack aimed at annihilating the RAF, and more aircraft were destroyed than on any other day during the Battle of Britain.
That day the Hurricanes and Spitfires dispatched the enemy within ten minutes of the start of the bombing, so it escaped major damage to its ground forces, but the airfield was left covered in craters and unexploded bombs. As usual, it was a woman who saved the day – Sergeant Elizabeth Mortimer, who had been manning the switchboard relaying vital messages and refused to move during the bombing, despite being surrounded by several tons of explosive. After the raid was over, before the all clear had even sounded, she went out onto the airfield, risking her own life and disobeying the officer who told her it was too dangerous, and marked the unexploded bombs with red flags. She was later awarded the Military Medal for her extraordinary courage.
Biggin Hill was not so lucky when it was attacked again on August 30. 39 people were killed and workshops, stores, barracks, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force quarters and a hangar were wrecked. The following day the operations room was hit, causing the roof to cave in, and leaving the telephone system out of action; there was yet another attack the day after, when three members of the WAAF received the Military Medal for their bravery.
Yet despite the butchery, the airport was operational throughout the whole Battle.
Emma Rice’s exuberant production of Twelfth Night bursts into life in a dazzling eruption of sequins, glitter, sailor outfits and 70s music – led by a mellifluously-voiced drag queen whose huge Afro wig would have made any disco queen proud.
Yes, we’re in full-on camp mode here for this cross-dressing comedy – and that’s pretty much where we stay for the full two hours and 45 minutes. Transposed to an unnamed Scottish island during the decade of disco, and featuring kilts and golf alongside I Will Survive lyrics, this production is an extravaganza of energy, vivacity, song, dance and joy.
Rice has effectively been forced to leave her position over her continued wild experimentation with Shakespeare – modernising productions, chopping the text about like nobody’s business and, apparently most controversially, using artificial lighting and sound. On the strength of this production, which admittedly takes more liberties with the text than Casanova in a Venetian dive-bar, this is a great shame.
Joshua Lacey turns the lovelorn Duke Orsino into a cocky smooth-talker determined to seduce Olivia – excellently played by Annette McLaughlin, who portrays with humour and likeability her ardour for Cesario. Tony Jayawardena brings an irresistible charm to his jovial, happy-go-lucky Sir Toby Belch, while Sir Andrew Aguecheek is brilliantly reimagined by Marc Antolin as a lisping, camp, pink-clad mischief-maker.
For me, those two stole the show, along with the glorious Le Gateau Chocolat as a reinvented Feste, his rich voice, sparkling robes and seductive smile almost daring you not to enjoy the performance. My two companions preferred Katy Owen’s officious, uptight Malvolio, whose overexcited attempts to seduce a baffled Olivia were the funniest scene of the show. What isn’t in doubt is that this was a performance of sheer brilliance by the whole cast – throughout which, against all the madness, beautiful Anita-Joy Uwajeh completely won our hearts as a strong, sincere, spirited Viola.
The purists who have decried this production have, it seems to me, misunderstood quite what makes Shakespeare so great. Half of his genius lies in his language; the other half lies in his ability to tell the timeless tales of human existence, stories of love and loss, trust and friendship, power and pride, justice and betrayal, right and wrong. Do we seriously think that the Bard’s works, which are more popular than ever 400 years after they were written, are so flimsy that they can be weakened by a line cut here or a song introduced there? They are infinitely stronger than that. Moreover, however much I love a production, I don’t want to have the same experience every time I go to see it – I want different ideas and interpretations that make me look at the text in a new way.
Perhaps most tellingly, both I and my two companions loved the production – and one of them admitted that he had not expected to enjoy it so much as he “didn’t really like Shakespeare”. If a few cosmetic changes bring Shakespeare to life for a new audience who struggled with his work at school and might otherwise never appreciate his genius, isn’t that a good thing? The theatre looked pretty full – surely the audience are the only arbiters who matter?
Personally I rather imagine that Shakespeare, the greatest innovator the English language has ever known, whose plays are the very essence of invention, creativity and boldness, would have been delighted to see the artists of today reinventing his work in the same way he reinvented both language and theatre itself.
“Go and see The Play That Goes Wrong,” was my brother’s enthusiastic recommendation. “I just could not stop laughing.”
I knew if he found it funny, I probably would too; and I wasn’t disappointed. The Play That Goes Wrong is hilarious.
As you might guess from its title, it concerns the attempts of the hapless Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society to stage a 1920s murder mystery in which just about everything that could go wrong, does: from collapsing sets to missing props to dozens of other disasters which I won’t spoil for you.
The entire cast are brilliant and extract the full comedy potential from every line in the supremely clever, perfectly conceived script. A particular favourite was Alastair Kirton, as Cecil, who beamed delightedly at the audience every time he made us laugh.
The programme is also a joy – the first half is a spoof Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society effort, complete with cast biographies, interviews, reviews from the Cornley Express and adverts (“Cornley Sunam Balti House – There’s Naan finer”.)
That said, I wouldn’t rank it quite up there with Don’t Dress For Dinner or even One Man, Two Guv’nors, both of which have also graced the Marlowe in recent years. Occasionally, as you found yourself laughing at someone getting knocked out for the 176th time, the jokes felt ever so slightly repetitive.
But that really is a tiny quibble, as it never stopped me laughing – not one bit. The show’s Canterbury run is now over but you can catch it in London and on tour around the UK.
I never knew how exhausting going to the cinema could be until I saw Dunkirk.
Its depiction of the rescue of 300,000 stranded soldiers from the beaches of France in 1940, snatched from Hitler’s clutches just in time, is excellent; but I could hardly say that I enjoyed it, and nor should I.
Everyone knows what happened: the disastrous routing of the British and French armies that saw France fall to the Nazis and, had the Germans not inexplicably halted their advance on Dunkirk, could well have seen the British army all but annihilated. The film does not explore this wider context; we do not explore why the defeat happened, nor how it almost lost us the war. It focuses neither on plot nor character, and features comparatively little dialogue, with much of the sound being provided by Hans Zimmer’s unsettling score. Like Churchill, which I saw a few weeks previously, it is more a portrayal of a particular moment in the war than a complex exploration of the how and why.
To take issue with this is to miss the point. This is a story about the rescued, their rescuers and the terrors they endured; that story is quite enough on its own.
There were moments of light relief in Churchill, despite the subject matter. There are none in Dunkirk. It is relentlessly gruelling; horrendous scene follows horrendous scene, and the tension is permanent; we constantly await the next bomb, the next torpedo, the next lives hanging in the balance. There is no blood and gore, as the Guardian pointed out with bizarre disapproval. But the gore isn’t necessary. One feels the hideous claustrophobia of the sinking, torpedoed ship, the thrashing terror of the drowning soldier for whom the surface is just out of reach, the furious desperation of the pilot trapped in his cockpit as the plane slowly sinks into the Channel. One sees the bodies of the young men washed up on the shore in their droves, still in their uniforms, anonymous, possibly forever. The dread of an attack by the Germans is ever-present; but the sea itself is just as much the enemy, its suffocating pull as merciless as any Luftwaffe bomber. The two perils even combine when burning slicks of oil set the waves alight as grease-covered soldiers scramble aboard the rescue boats.
Equally unsparing is the film’s portrayal of how fear and desperation can bring out the worst in people – even those fighting on the side which is right. We see a young French soldier cowering in terror not at the Germans, but at the Englishman who wants to throw him overboard to lessen the weight on the torpedoed ship. And a shellshocked soldier who turns to violence accidentally causes the film’s most heartbreaking death – a reminder that the devastation caused by war extends far further than the battlefields and bomb sites to all kinds of knock-on tragedy.
Ultimately, however, Dunkirk is a story about the heroism, not even of soldiers, but of ordinary people. The one truly uplifting moment in the film is when the flotilla of civilian craft sent to rescue the soldiers can be seen heading towards the Dunkirk shores; a fleet not of destroyers, which could not reach the beaches, but of tiny yachts and pleasure boats bobbing on the waves, individually unassuming, together a mighty army. Amid all the shells, the bombs, the flames and the terror, it is the unswerving courage and kindness of Mr Dawson (another brilliant performance by Mark Rylance) that illuminates the film and turns it, despite its chilling final scene, from a horror story into a tale of hope.
Dunkirk isn’t easy to watch. But especially right now, with more than one world leader who seems to think starting a war is just something you do on a rainy day, it’s something everyone should see.
Since discovering the excellent Changeling Theatre company two years ago, I’ve eagerly anticipated their outdoor Shakespeare performances each summer. Hamlet this year exceeded my expectations.
If you’ve never seen the play, our hero, the eponymous Prince of Denmark, vows revenge on his uncle after learning he murdered Hamlet’s father, the King. I had never seen or read it, but was gripped from the moment when the hooded figure of the King’s ghost appeared and recounted the grisly circumstances of his death.
This scene was extremely well done, with Michael Palmer’s spectral soliloquies accompanied by eerie sound effects from the rest of the cast. And from that point on, Alex Phelps was captivating in the title role.
A complete natural, he portrayed with equal authenticity the turmoil and anguish the prince grapples with as he plans his vengeance, the flipped-out, almost jocular madness which may or may not be real, his love for his father and Horatio and his revulsion towards his mother, Gertrude.
There were also strong performances from Niamh Finlay as Ophelia, heartrending in the second half, and Tim Bowie, as her devastated brother Laertes. And Bryan Torfeh, whose main role was Polonius, delighted with an unexpected comic star turn as a gravedigger which turned one of the play’s most famous tragic lines into its funniest moment instead.
One never quite forgot that Michael Palmer, as Claudius, and Sarah Naughton, as Gertrude, were acting, nor felt any real emotion from either of them – which was perhaps the intention, but one might at least have expected Claudius to have a vague interest in whether his wife lived or died. His lacklustre utterance of “Gertrude, do not drink” was said with about as much feeling as a comment on the weather.
Watching the play, I realised just how many phrases from Hamlet have passed into common usage. We’re all familiar with “to be or not to be”, but I hadn’t realised that “there’s the rub”, “weary, flat, stale and unprofitable”, “murder most foul”, “to thine own self be true” and many others all came from the play too.
The Changeling Theatre never disappoint and I loved this production, with my mum declaring it her favourite so far. Phelps alone makes it a must-see – so if you can catch their final performances this week, do.
Kaleem had warned me about the traffic. He had warned me about the mud. But he hadn’t warned me about the friendliness.
The car crawled into the field at an impossibly slow pace, not because we were stuck in traffic, or mud, or even the interminable security queues (you think Muslims don’t fear terror attacks too?), but because about every 20 seconds the driver, Subby, would run into someone he just had to say hello to.
“As salaam alaikum! How are you?” he would exclaim joyously, shaking hands and grinning, Arabic and English mingling as an almost continuous parade of friends knocked on the window excitedly.
Welcome to Jalsa Salana.
Ahmadi Muslims at this year’s Jalsa Salana. Picture: Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Press Office
The Jalsa – its name means ‘peace gathering’ – is the UK’s biggest Muslim convention, attended by almost 38,000 people from 114 countries and watched by tens of millions more on TV and online.
It is run entirely by volunteers, who transform a farm in Hampshire into a 200-acre festival site, with kitchens, food tents, exhibitions, accommodation, a bazaar, an international bookshop, radio and TV broadcasts and much more.
So what am I, an infrequent church attendee, doing at a Muslim event? I’ve been invited by my friends Faiza and Kaleem, who told me it was “their version of Glastonbury” – and so, hoping I wouldn’t have to sit through a set by Ed Sheeran, I accepted.
This is the first thing you need to know about Ahmadi Muslims – they are super-welcoming and super-friendly. And, far from the stereotypical image of chauvinistic Muslim men who, we’re often told, view women as “second-class citizens”, I was treated like royalty.
There are shuttle buses between the site and Alton station, but Subby and a friend were sent to pick me up instead, which neatly got me out of possibly struggling to convince the bus driver that yes, this white-faced, blue-eyed blonde really was going to Jalsa. They brought me an umbrella, which I promptly managed to break, and opened the car door for me, perhaps afraid that I would break that too. On the back seat was a welcome sight after a long train journey – cans of diet Pepsi and mango juice.
On our way in, Subby talked to me about the charity work that the Ahmadi Muslims do, and how an important part of the festival is pledging their allegiance to the UK as well as to their religion. Later that afternoon the community’s spiritual leader, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, led a ceremony in which the UK flag and the Ahmadi flag are raised together.
“Real Islam is helping the poor and serving the community we live in,” Subby tells me.
Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the Ahmadi Muslims’ spiritual leader, at the flag raising ceremony
Eventually we make it through the entrance, I go through security and Subby leaves me in the care of my guides for the day, Zain and Furqan. The site is divided into men’s and women’s sections, so they will show me round the men’s half.
I am surprised to discover that these two mature and intelligent young men are just 24 and 16 respectively, as they seem older and wiser. Zain also has a brilliant sense of humour and it isn’t long before he is mischievously mocking my terrible photography skills.
Our first trip is to the huge kitchens, where dozens of volunteers are hard at work mixing vast tubs of curry and dough. Even children, it seems, want to do their bit – a beautiful little boy called Hashim is helping with the procession of chapatis on the conveyor belt in front of me, made at the rate of 10,000 an hour. Over the three days of the festival, the volunteers will make 300,000 slices of bread and 270,000 meals.
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There are 5,000 volunteers helping out at the festival in total – many of them high-flying professionals like doctors, nurses and even pilots (the man who drives me back to the station at the end of the day is an A&E doctor at a hospital in Kent, where I live). “There is a huge volunteering spirit – everyone wants to take part,” Zain explains.
“If all Muslims followed the teachings of their religion, no Muslim would ever be radicalised.”
Our next stop is a tent where I can learn more about the Ahmadi Muslim faith. Unlike other Muslims, Ahmadis believe Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a 19th-century religious leader, was the Messiah whose advent was foretold by the Prophet Mohammed. Other Muslims believe the Messiah is yet to come.
Because of this, Ahmadis have often been persecuted in Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where it is all but illegal to be an Ahmadi. Prohibitions on practising their religion, arrests, attacks and killings are commonplace. Some 2,387 Ahmadis have been arrested for religious practice in Pakistan since 1982, 256 have been killed, and 48 mosques have been destroyed.
Several of the people I meet over the course of the day will tell me, quite calmly, how their parents had to flee to the UK for their own safety. When I tell one woman how matter-of-fact she seems about it, she replies: “It’s everybody’s story.”
The Ahmadis’ motto is Love For All, Hatred For None, and the community has repeatedly spoken out against extremism and terrorism – Mirza Masroor Ahmad did so again at this year’s Jalsa. In the tent is a game of giant Jenga symbolising the concept of world peace. On each brick is inscribed an important tenet like tolerance and women’s rights; the idea is to show that if you remove just one of the bricks, one of the tenets, global peace collapses.
I also get to play a game where I work out which statements about Islam are true and which are misconceptions:
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It’s then time for the flag-raising ceremony – or, rather, for standing in the cold for half an hour waiting for a flag-raising ceremony which Zain thinks is happening at 4pm, but which is actually taking place at 4.30pm.
On our way round the site he, like Subby, bumps constantly into people he knows. Though there are 30,000 people here, it feels like everyone knows everyone else. There is an enormous community spirit and camaraderie, and I don’t feel like an outsider at all; I feel part of it.
Travelling in style
And, quite by chance, the high point of my day comes when we walk right past one of my Twitter heroes, Qasim Rashid. A lawyer and Muslim scholar who has come all the way over from America from the conference, he is ultimately the person who brought my attendance about, as it was a Twitter conversation between us about Ramadan that led to me meeting Faiza and becoming friends.
To my astonishment, he remembers me and we take a picture together with our mutual friend Kaleem (also known as Chris – he is a Brit who converted to Islam). One tweet sent across the Atlantic Ocean, and suddenly here we all are together, celebrating peace and friendship on a farm in Hampshire.
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Also among the guests are a number of prominent politicians – I spot Education Secretary Justine Greening and meet Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon without even realising. I think he talked to me about the weather. Richmond Park MP and former London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith is also there.
In search of a warming cup of tea after our wait for the flag-raising, Zain, Furqan and I head into the Humanity First tent where I can learn about the Ahmadis’ charity work.
Humanity First’s 30,000 volunteers work across the globe in areas including disaster relief, education, providing clean water, caring for orphans, healthcare and restoring sight. The charity provided relief in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, a number of recent earthquakes, including Nepal and Haiti, and the Bosnian conflict, which is when the charity was set up.
“The tenets of Islam are for everyone. The only criterion is need,” explains the charity’s implementation analyst Quddous Ahmed, one of only five paid staff at the charity’s UK headquarters in London.
“We are on the front line right there with the Red Cross when there is a disaster. 97p in every pound raised goes to our projects.
“People spend their holidays going to do this work. It’s about serving mankind and the love we have for mankind.
“Painting a classroom, for example, has such a massive effect. At one school where we helped out, some of the kids who had left came back to study again just because the learning environment was so nice again. It was lovely to see their faces. And it cost just £100 as the only thing we used the money for were the supplies.”
Most of the funds come from the Ahmadis themselves, including the proceeds from selling merchandise at Jalsa and a telethon earlier this year which raised £2 million.
“Our income is increasing every year, and so is our impact,” Mr Ahmed added.
He quotes anthropologist and author Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
After finally letting myself and a near-starved Zain and Furqan sit down to grab some curry, it was time to head over to the women’s side – which I’ll cover in a separate post.
So what did I learn from my experiences at the Jalsa Salana?
It reminded me what a force for good religion can be. It’s certainly true that religion can be misused as an excuse for persecution and hatred – but it’s an overwhelmingly positive influence in the lives of these people, inspiring them to give huge amounts of their time and money to help others, and giving them faith, hope, gratitude and a love for humanity.
It reminded me how wonderful difference is – because there’s always something to learn from people who are a little different from you. Everyone I met exuded such positivity and cheerfulness that I resolved to be a little less negative and down on myself.
It reminded me that underneath our differences, we’re all the same as long as we know how to laugh and be kind. These people, almost all of whom I’d never met before, accepted me and laughed with me as if they’d always known me.
It reminded me of the power of the random encounter, something I’ve always strongly believed in. You never know where the most casual conversations and questions will lead.
And, most importantly, it reminded me of the importance of keeping an open mind. If I’d been scared of things that were different, I’d have missed out on an amazingly fun experience, a great many opportunities to learn, and new friendships with people who have helped me to be a better, happier person.
Mamma Mia, here I go again! I’ve seen this show three times on stage now, as well as being a proud owner of the film, and my enthusiasm for it never wanes.
But there’s always the worry each time you see a new production that it can’t possibly live up to previous incarnations. Happily, that wasn’t the case with yesterday’s performance at the Marlowe Theatre.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, the musical is based around the songs of chirpy bonkers- costumed 70s popsters ABBA, whose many hits include Dancing Queen, Waterloo and Super Trouper.
Set on a Greek island, it follows the story of 20-year-old Sophie and her quest to find the father whose identity she has never known. There are three possible contenders among her mother Donna’s old flames – so she invites all three of them to her wedding, hoping to work out which one he is.
But the heroine of the musical is really vibrant, feisty, self-reliant Donna, who has brought Sophie up alone, single-handedly runs a chaotic Greek B&B, and still carries a candle for the man who loved and left her all those years ago.
Kay Milbourne is a very good Donna, effectively combining vivacity and vulnerability, with a beautiful, clear voice which brings the necessary level of emotion to songs like Winner Takes It All and Slipping Through My Fingers.
However, it is comic geniuses Gillian Hardie and Emma Clifford, as Rosie and Tanya respectively, who completely steal the show. They both bring new levels of hilarity to their parts, with Take A Chance On Me almost bringing the house down thanks to Christopher Hollis’ equally brilliant performance.
Lucy May Barker, as Sophie, and Phillip Ryan, as Sky, are not as strong; Barker doesn’t sufficiently convey her character’s childlike sweetness, and Ryan doesn’t play her boyfriend, supposedly so wonderful that she wants to marry him at the age of just 20, with much charm or likeability at all. His singing isn’t great either.
Jamie Hogarth is adorable as Harry, but Jon Boydon could perhaps have played Sam with more charisma; it’s hard to see why Donna is still in love with him.
The chorus are fantastic, bringing immense energy and sharpness to Anthony Van Laast’s choreography, with a standout performance from Louis Stockil as Pepper.
The costumes are brilliant too, with the fluorescent pink and yellow bathing hats of Sophie’s dream sequence a delight.
As the show goes on you’re reminded how prolific Abba were – and, though they’re usually associated with lighthearted pop, several of their songs have darker emotional undertones.
The show’s run at the Marlowe has unfortunately now ended but you can catch it elsewhere as it continues its UK tour. Go on – take a chance on it.
I’ll get this out of the way now: I didn’t really care about the 2012 Olympics.
I know, it’s wrong, but it’s true. I didn’t get excited, just wondered if London would be impassable for the entire fortnight. I didn’t watch a single event on TV, let alone at the stadium, even though it’s a mere half hour from where I live, nor did I want to. I was dimly aware that Britain had won some medals, but even now I couldn’t tell you what for.
I have bad memories of athletics from school and didn’t get any of it at all. Until I went to the Para-athletics at the weekend – and they changed my life.
The shot putters and discus throwers began the competition, hurling several kilograms of metal over huge distances despite, variously, having cerebral palsy, intellectual impairments affecting their reaction times, or severe physical limitations. I thought back to secondary school, to the embarrassment of not even being able to lift the shot, let alone put it; and to my frustration when the discus, which I had thought would be like throwing a frisbee, turned out to be another intractable, leaden lump. To be able to move these objects at all, let alone chuck them 20 metres or more, has always seemed to me a pretty tremendous feat; to be able to do so despite such limitations is staggering.
But it was the running that made me really sit up in awe, that took the shot put and the discus and knocked them out of the park, over the roof of the stadium, and away into the London sky. We could see the runners warming up in front of us while the field athletes showed off their might at the other end; they were warming up in pairs, and then I realised what was happening. These runners are visually impaired and, all completely blindfolded to level the playing field, run with a guide, whose hand is attached to theirs. From the moment the starting gun fired on the first race, I was mesmerised. For someone who can barely run for a bus, it is breathtaking in itself to watch human beings shoot round the track at speeds which almost seem physically impossible; it is almost as if they are no longer human, but a superior species which has evolved to be capable of feats out of the reach of ordinary mortals.
But, on its own, that would just be on a par with the hundreds of amazing sporting feats attained around the world every year. For the Para-athletics are not, at their core, about sport; they are about the great qualities, and the great relationships, that define what it means to be human. They are about determination and resilience in the face of often horrific adversity; about not merely refusing to let our limitations define us, but being spurred on by them to new kinds of achievement. The desire to win is paramount for any athlete; but when you see runners so single-mindedly committed to simply doing their best despite not being able to see whether they are first, second or last, to pursuing victory despite the fact that they will have to be told whether they have achieved it, their dedication takes on a new purity, a new magnificence.
And they are about the incredible bonds that humans can form with each other – the trust, faith and love that they place in each other, the strength and support that one person can give another when they need it. To see people trust another human so completely that they will run without being able to see where they are going, knowing that their guide, on whom they depend totally for their safety and partly for their success, will not let them down is incredibly moving. And to know that someone is willing to do that for another person – to be a crucial part of their sporting achievements, indeed complete the achievement with them, yet take no glory or medal for it is equally moving. The sight of Samwel Mushai Kimani and his guide, James Boit, powering to victory in the men’s T11 5000m will stay with me for the rest of my life. Long-limbed, lithe and graceful as gazelles, the two runners were so perfectly in sync with each other that they seemed to move as one, gliding with such apparent effortlessness over the whole distance (a cool 3.4 miles in 15 minutes) that they barely even appeared to break a sweat. “Those two are going to win,” my best friend Kelly said early in the race, as they jogged along calmly in second place; when they slipped into the lead several laps later with less fuss than someone darting into a shop, I knew she was right, and I have never felt a victory was more deserved.
We saw British athletes Richard Whitehead, Sophie Hahn, Hollie Arnold and Sammi Kinghorn win gold – the women all set new world records, with Arnold breaking her own previous world best – and the atmosphere has to be experienced to be understood. The same girl who couldn’t even tell you what event Usain Bolt competes in was on the edge of her seat, screaming and shouting with the best of them, standing up in genuine homage, pride and admiration as the victors did their laps of honour.
Sentiments about the achievements of the parathletes being all the more remarkable because of the difficulties they have overcome are often expressed; but it is not until you see them happening in front of you that you really realise what that means. The female discus thrower who we watched on her own at the end of the evening embodied sheer physical strength; as she hurled the disc with almost Herculean might, putting the full force of her body into the throw, I thought how wonderful it was so see a woman so powerful, so much mightier than any man. I had not even noticed, until Kelly pointed it out, that she had no legs. These are people that we see as disabled – a word I have always hated, as if certain limitations render someone less of a human than other people – yet not only are they achieving physical feats which many of us would never be capable of even if we trained for 20 years; they have made their weakness their strength, used the thing that is supposed to hold them back to become the best in their field. To say this is humbling is an understatement; it is aweingly, overwhelmingly inspirational.
As a struggling journalist meeting knockbacks at every turn, I left that stadium a different person from the girl who had gone into it three hours earlier. Those men and women had given me a renewed commitment to excel, to never give up on the goals and dreams which at times feel so unattainable, but which I hold so dear. I went into that stadium not knowing if I would ever succeed, and came out knowing that I would accept no alternative; for if these athletes refuse to give in to their limitations, then what excuse do I have for giving in to mine? They are superhumans for their sporting achievements, for their dedication and strength, for the modesty they universally showed on achieving success; but more than any of that, they are superhumans because they make the rest of us that little bit better too.
The Loop 