![\"Archbishop](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/e94f519386817d1d286ec92e767f0982ed2ff0a4/0_0_6000_4000/1000.jpg\")
\n Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist. She is the author of She Left Me The Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me
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\nDulcie Collins and Eddie Redcliffe – ably described by a passing troll on a mobility scooter as “a shetland pony and a lesbian giraffe” – are odd couple cops who, in Deadloch’s first season, met to solve a murder in Tasmania. Now they find themselves in Barra Creek, a small town in the Northern Territory ravaged by rivalry between the two main, crocodile-based businesses: Land of Crocs, and Don Darrell’s Best Best Jumping Croc Tour. It’s written by “the two Kates” as they’re known in Australia, Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, and I’ve never heard swearing like it, not even in The Thick of It, none of which I can quote because it’s too rude. (Tiny example: Redcliffe, catching sight of a drone passing overhead, looks up and refers to it for no particular reason as a “hover-c***”).
\nThere’s plenty of fake swearing, too. An Aussie woman built like a cement mixer invites one of the cops to, “shove it up your clack”, a line that made me laugh so hard I nearly fell off the sofa, as did the line, “what adult eats yoghurt through a pouch?” and “the toilet’s non-load bearing”. The toilet’s non-load bearing – tears literally pouring down my face. There’s a joke about a hammerhead shark which I can’t explain, and a drive-by on UK tourists overstaying their visas (“The Croc-ettes have all been deported back to the UK”) which you also, possibly, had to be there for – but my point is, in hard times, what a bloody gift for us all from the southern hemisphere.
\nIt was an open casting call the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the search for Scarlett O’Hara in 1938; one in which every eligible primary school child in the land was given a hard shove in the direction of a casting panel by their absolutely-not-stage-parents (“it’s not us! It’s Tabitha who wants this!”) Finally, this week, we got to see the new stars of HBO’s forthcoming TV adaptation of Harry Potter in the series’ first trailer, and didn’t they look lovely!
\nThey really did, the three young people playing Ron, Hermione and Harry, in what looks like a less arch, more realistic adaptation of JK Rowling’s books than the film franchise. I was in my early 20s when the first Potter book was published and missed the rush, and the films never really worked for me, either – although we have them to thank for the delicious entry in Alan Rickman’s Diaries, in which the late actor grumbled that, after appearing in all eight of the Potter films as Severus Snape, he found his friends always expected him to pick up the tab for lunch.
\nThis hit home: the novelist Ian Rankin, speaking on a podcast that was picked up by the Times on Wednesday, sharing the extremely honest assessment that, despite selling 35m copies of his Rebus series, he has “wasted his life” honing sentences in his head rather than engaging with his family. “I mean, there’s big moments, big beats in my life that I just don’t have any memory of: holidays taken; first days at school for my kids and that sort of stuff because in my head I was somewhere else.”
\nThis distraction was possible, one assumes, because his wife, Miranda, picked up the slack, but in spite of how twitchy that kind of division of labour makes me feel, I understand, too; the near-permanent distraction of anyone trying to get anything over the line and, possibly, not 100% listening when their child goes in on their fourth go-around of the story of what someone said to someone else at break time and what this means for the friendship dynamic. “Are you listening?” one of my children will ask, glaring at me, and I’ll think, my God, I’ve turned into my dad.
\nIt must be said that while Rankin described this state of affairs as “kind of weird”, he didn’t sound overly vexed by it. The person who drove the point home to me more forcefully was Martin Amis, who in an interview in 2020 spoke of the ruinous influence of the puritan work ethic. “I remember once having a really nice drink in Paris with my wife and a friend of ours; and being really uneasy because I wasn’t getting on with something.” Why do we do this, he said; life is short. I think about his remarks all the time.
\n\n Members of the Garrick Club in London are still wrestling with the outsized challenge of recognising that women make up 51% of the population and letting them into their 195-year-old club. Reports in 2024 that the venue in Covent Garden was going co-ed were accompanied by a list of prominent women rumoured to be joining, among them Dame Judi Dench and Dame Siân Phillips. Now, two years later, we have confirmation of an actual woman joining the club and that person is ... the queen.
\nI mean, the queen is a woman, true. But her approval by the membership panel doesn’t strike one as the most rigorous enforcement of the democratic principle. The Standard this week quoted a royal source as saying the queen “was attracted by the Garrick’s strong literary connections”, which sounds empty enough to be true, and falls in the same week as an event at which Camilla and King Charles marked the 25th anniversary of the Eden Project by “cutting a cake with a sword”. Mmmm, this country.
\nOh, for the days when the wildest story in the tabloids came under the banner of “Tory sleaze”; a more innocent time before Epstein and Trump. Luxuriate, then, in the echo this week of vintage scandals with the story of Crispin Blunt, former Conservative MP for Reigate who served in David Cameron’s cabinet, and who the courts found, rather surprisingly, to have been in possession of a quantity of crystal meth. (His defence was, roughly, “all drugs should be legal”). Blunt was fined £1,200 and we all got to read this immensely enjoyable line in the BBC report, noting that the 65-year-old had been “hosting drug-fuelled chemsex parties at his home in Horley”. Bravo! Perhaps there’s hope for this country after all.
\n![\"Nigel](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/01c31fcc795f958409c99d937c64e831f718ef59/0_0_7864_5200/1000.jpg\")
\n Approval of the royal’s membership doesn’t seem to be the most rigorous enforcement of the democratic principle
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Both the experts and I have the same advice","rawTitle":"How to survive our doomed times? Both the experts and I have the same advice","item":{"trailText":"We have two choices: be paralysed by fear or just continue with what we are doing. I know what I choose, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"In the past, my response to any given large-scale world crisis has generally been to do nothing, which, as well as aligning with my personality, has the advantage of being exactly what the experts recommend.
\nDuring periods of intense market volatility, we are advised not to look at our investments, let alone touch them. If we are rushed at by a bear, we are supposed to stand stock still (unless it’s one of those bears you have to bang pots and pans at, but let’s leave them aside). The result of this is an avoidant philosophy hingeing on the motto “it’ll probably be fine”, that, this week, as Tehran mocked the US for pretending peace talks were under way, was accompanied by a cold, rival notion: what if this time it’s different?
\n\nTwo spirit-sinking thoughts followed in quick succession: as the war in Iran rumbles on and the energy crisis deepens, what if interest rates bounce up to what they were in the 1970s (impossible, surely?); and, does this mean I have to read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book about the Wall Street crash? The headlines aren’t reassuring. In the Financial Times at the weekend, the banner headline warned: Borrowing costs soar to 18-year high. Columnists in the Telegraph shared plans to stockpile petrol and tinned food. “Could the Iran war lead to WWIII?” asked NPR, cheerfully, while over in the New York Times, a hedgefunder turned US Treasury official wrote: “I predicted the 2008 financial crisis. What is coming may be worse” – a dire warning at least partially offset by the cheesy, business-as-usual configuration of the headline. Beyond the media, city traders last week started pricing in four quarter-point base interest rate rises in 2026, a complete about-face from previous predictions of rates coming down this year.
\nIt’s not just interest rates, obviously, but they are the canary in the coalmine of worse shocks to come. Meanwhile, the usual, default consolations are wearing thin. Yesterday, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, even put paid to that fantasy of last resort, universally reached for during hard times in this country – maybe-we’ll-move-to-Australia – by telling the Australian parliament that it faced a “new reality” in which distance wouldn’t save it.
\nAnd, so, what? What is the appropriate response here, other than to reverse ferret if you are on the brink of buying a house – as two friends did last week, considering possible 5.5% rates in two years’ time? Or pursue the kind of bad logic that one usually reserves for trying to justify the purchase of something you can’t really afford. For example, six years ago, the economist Nouriel Roubini predicted the likelihood during this decade of a “Greater Depression”, a prediction which resurfaced this week and to which I found myself thinking, irrelevantly: this is a man who, famously, had plaster casts of vaginas on the wall. He may not be reliable!
\nThere are other voices out there. My dad reminds me that interest rates in the UK were 10% in the 1970s when my parents bought the house I grew up in, reaching 17% in 1979, and everyone survived. But the average loan in 1979 in this country was £11,000, with borrowers maxing out on average at two to two-and-a-half times their annual salary. These days, the average mortgage in London is pushing £300,000, and for first-time borrowers, nationwide, that figure is £210,000. Meanwhile, the median full-time salary in the UK in 2025 was £39,039.
\nWe know all this. We also have the recent experience of Covid – surely a more brutal and shocking economic disaster than anything that might happen in the Gulf or be triggered by AI, and from which financial systems recovered. The US stock market returned to new highs five years after the 2008 crisis. It’s 1929 that you have to shield your eyes from – God, I am going to have to read Sorkin’s book – when it took, by many accounts, fully two decades for the stock market to recover from the loss of 90% of its value.
\nAt the individual level, short of taking cash out of the bank and sticking it under the bed, there are two options: abruptly stop doing whatever you were doing – booking a holiday, buying a house, quitting your job to write poetry – and hold fire until the picture clarifies. Or, working on the assumption that the picture may never fully clarify and that paralysis never helps, go about doing what you were doing, only more anxiously. What’s the worst that can happen? It’ll probably be fine.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
\nWe have two choices: be paralysed by fear or just continue with what we are doing. I know what I choose
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Both the experts and I have the same advice","type":"comment","headerImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d75f97af39ccef45068fcef7ce03c1d938ae8669/25_0_3722_2976/master/3722.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=227aa31321055940f1d2fa2799e24fa3","height":2976,"width":3722,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 October 1929. Photograph: Photograph: Icon Communications/Getty Images","credit":"Icon Communications/Getty Images","altText":"Front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 October 1929.","cleanCaption":"Front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 October 1929.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Icon Communications/Getty Images"},"palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#E05E00","main":"#E05E00","secondary":"#FF7F0F","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#FF7F0F","shadow":"#E6DED8","immersiveKicker":"#FF7F0F","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#E05E00","kickerText":"#E05E00","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#E05E00","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#C74600","featureKickerText":"#F9B376","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#8D2700"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#F9B376"},"atoms":[]},"byline":{"title":"Emma Brockes"},"trailText":"We have two choices: be paralysed by fear or just continue with what we are doing. I know what I choose, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d75f97af39ccef45068fcef7ce03c1d938ae8669/25_0_3722_2976/master/3722.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=227aa31321055940f1d2fa2799e24fa3","height":2976,"width":3722,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Icon Communications/Getty Images","altText":"Brooklyn Daily Eagle Front PageTop half of the front page of the newspaper Brooklyn Daily Eagle has banner headline reading 'Wall St. In Panic As Stocks Crash' which describes the massive fall in stock value on what became known as Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. The stock market crash is often considered the starting point of the Great Depression of 1929 - 1941. Other headlines recount an attempt to kill Italian Crown Prince Umberto (1904 - 1983) (left) and a campaign finance scandal concerning American industrialist and later senator Joseph R. Grundy (1863 - 1961) (right). (Photo by FPG/Getty Images)","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Icon Communications/Getty Images"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/25/headlines-doom-carry-on-paralyse-fear?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/25/headlines-doom-carry-on-paralyse-fear?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/25/headlines-doom-carry-on-paralyse-fear?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Is anyone as ill-suited for great office as Donald Trump? Yes, Pete Hegseth – that’s why Potus likes him","rawTitle":"Is anyone as ill-suited for great office as Donald Trump? Yes, Pete Hegseth – that’s why Potus likes him","item":{"trailText":"The US ‘secretary of war’ earns his keep as the loyalty-hire par excellence, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"Has there ever been a more ludicrous political character than Pete Hegseth, the US government’s so-called secretary of war, who makes Ronald Reagan look understated and urbane? Last week, Hegseth launched an attack on the American press for its coverage of Iran, which he called insufficiently “patriotic”. (A CNN commentator and former Republican congressman came back with “punk” and “cry baby” to describe Hegseth’s own demeanour.) When he stands at the podium with his Mr Incredible jaw and head extended, turtle-like, way out in front of his body, all you can think is this: which is a greater threat to American national security, Iran’s nuclear ambitions or Hegseth’s failure to meet even the most entry-level requirements for a person in his position?
\nThe majority of Americans who know who he is – only about 70% of them, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center – don’t like the guy, and his petulant outbursts last week at the Pentagon can’t have helped. Since Donald Trump appointed him in January last year, what has become evident about Hegseth is that, like so many bullies, he backs down sharpish if he meets any significant pushback. “Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst,” snapped Hegseth to a Fox News reporter last June in a phrase we should all have had printed on T-shirts. (Jennifer Griffin elegantly countered “I take issue with that,” and Hegseth backed away and pivoted to another point.)
\nMore recently, at a Pentagon briefing two weeks ago, he turned on a reporter who asked if he had a clear objective for the war with Iran. Hegseth cut his eyes at her like a child starting a fight in the playground and snarled, “Did you not hear my remarks?” This was several days before he made his bellicose remarks about the Iranian regime – “they are toast, and they know it” – all of which suggests the former Fox News host has two basic settings: upbeat, bomb-’em-back-to-the-stone-age Dr Strangelove, and surly sixth grader. It is sometimes remarked that Hegseth has a leading man outline, but the evidence points more in the direction of weird character-actor energy; a sort of Max Headroom, all angles and glitches, and eye contact that lasts slightly too long.
\nWhat makes Hegseth’s aspect more disturbing is the vast gap between his presentation as a straight-talking American hero, and the truth of the matter. Trump’s hiring policy has always been long on optics, short on detail, and so it’s hard not to see Hegseth through the lens of his backstory. Like a lot of Trump’s cabinet appointees, the “war secretary” has a full complement of lurid accusations, or leverage as Trump may see it, trailing behind him – financial mismanagement, personal misconduct, sexual impropriety, plus a history of alleged poor behaviour brought on by excessive drinking – all of which Trump presumably files under “maverick” and for which the rest of us supply other words. With exquisite understatement, the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate armed services committee, told the New Yorker in a 2024 profile of Hegseth, “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Well, quite.
\n\nStill, make do and mend; let’s see what we have to work with here. A former presenter on Fox News, Hegseth can at least talk in sentences that roughly follow on, one from another – not a given in Trump’s cabinet. Googling “Pete Hegseth drunk press conference” fields inconclusive results; that’s a win. If you go back far enough in his history, Hegseth has said at least a couple of honest-sounding things about the challenges of returning to civilian life after being deployed with the military on three overseas tours (Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo).
\nMeanwhile, the president’s calculation in hiring people such as Hegseth and, until recently, Kristi Noem, who Trump booted as head of homeland security earlier this month for low-key landing him in it during congressional hearings, is probably more devious than it seems. On paper, Hegseth is an odd combination of characteristics, a midwesterner who went to Princeton before joining the military; a man with some establishment credentials, in other words, but enough disastrous professional and personal episodes to appeal to Trump. If the president’s No 1 hiring priority is loyalty, then Hegseth is the absolute exemplar of someone Trump has fished out of the fire. When it comes to standing up to the president, he has no fight in him.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
\nBizarre outbursts at the press, a backstory full of mishaps – the US ‘secretary of war’ earns his keep as the loyalty hire par excellence
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Plus, Crufts brings back happy memories","body":"I was going to start with the Middle East, but let’s give ourselves a break and, instead, do the final of Crufts from last night. Crufts! As soothing as the Olympics but with lower stakes and cuter contestants. When I was in my first year of high school, my best friend and I used to “play Crufts” – look, it was a different time; at least we weren’t pretending to be on horseback – which entailed someone being the presenter and someone the dog lady, and when the presenter shrilled, “and it’s the Westie! The Westie has won Crufts 1990!” the dog lady had to take off around the living room, leash held high while the crowd went wild.
\nI hadn’t really watched Crufts since then, but on Sunday night I had it on in the background and we all got sucked in. My kids had never seen a dog show before, let alone the GREATEST DOG SHOW ON EARTH, and what a moment it was for them, being put through their paces with the invitation to say things like, “oh, look, a pomeranian”, and ask the question all new initiates to the dog show must ask: “Why is that man running like that?” Because, my darlings, it’s Crufts; they all run like that.
\nBy the way, for years after we grew up, my mother and I would still, when triggered, exclaim, “and it’s the Westie!” to each other; that is the enduring power of Crufts and I couldn’t be happier to have found my way home. The championship title this year went to that right big fluffy one that the crowd loved and we loved him, too, and when the presenter boomed, “and it’s the clumber spaniel! The clumber spaniel has won Crufts 2026!” we shrieked with joy. What a time to be alive.
\nHat tip to Krishnan Guru-Murthy for his reference on Tuesday night to Iran’s new “nepo-ayatollah”, not a bad joke for the news and eked from extremely unpromising material. While the carnage grinds on and the war footage piles up, so too does that other staple of television news during any sudden conflict in a country where Brits go on package holidays: shots of hapless tourists, yanked back from the beach by the intrusion of geopolitics into their week in the sun, and jumped on by cameras at arrivals.
\nHere we are at Luton airport, where TV reporters capture a stream of returnees dragging their wheelie suitcases across the concourse and looking startled to report the sight of rockets flying over their hotels. Not only were these poor Brits caught up in a war, but they returned home to the sudden sea change in public opinion towards people who travel to or live in that part of the world.
\nOnce a high-end-seeming destination of choice, now here’s Ed Davey in the Commons referring to expats living in Dubai as “washed-up old footballers and tax exiles”. And the average punters haven’t entirely escaped, either; there is a lot of chat going around about the gormlessness of holidaymakers who travel to Dubai on the assumption it’s exactly like Greece or Spain, except cheaper. Turns out – who knew? – it was actually in the volatile Middle East the whole time!
\n![\"Conservative](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/3f4b55ff90fa39a3dc87966358012788a7027ce8/806_0_6540_5232/1000.jpg\")
\n Oh, Chalamet; now what have you done? In a recent event with Matthew McConaughey he made the remark that ballet and opera are niche interests that “no one cares about any more”, adding that get-out-of-jail-free afterthought that always works when you’ve said something insulting: “All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there.”
\nThe response has been more enjoyable than Marty Supreme and, thanks to the young people in charge of the US’s largest cultural institutions’ social media feeds, it just keeps going. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a video uploaded to Instagram showed off the efforts of hundreds of people backstage before a major production, while the words “all respect to the opera (and ballet) people out there” flashed across the screen. It racked up almost half a million likes and 6.5m views, while in the comments, up popped the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum and one of the stars of Operation Mincemeat on Broadway.
\nMeanwhile, over at the Seattle Opera, this post on social media: “All we’ve got to say is … use promo code TIMOTHEE to save 14% off select seats for Carmen.” My favourite pushback, however, was from Afonso Coelho, a dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet, who posted a 30-second clip of himself doing the most beautiful, mind-blowing ballet, like a representative from a superior branch of humankind. “Your turn,” he wrote, to Chalamet.
\nNew updates in the Carolyn Bessette/JFK Jr discourse in the form of an angry diatribe published in the New York Times by the actor Daryl Hannah, who is depicted in the first half of the Hulu series as JFK Jr’s girlfriend before he met Bessette, and to call the role unflattering would be an understatement. In the show, which has been causing uproar in the US, mostly for good reasons – the fashion, the 90s innocence – Hannah is portrayed as a grasping coke addict who Jackie O can’t stand.
\n“The actions and behaviours attributed to me are untrue,” writes Hannah. “I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fuelled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s.”
\nRigorous Oscars prep in the form of a thorough snack audit – reminder to get in more Jaffa Cakes before the ceremony on Sunday – and a last-minute effort to catch up on the films I haven’t seen, including Hamnet and Train Dreams (although, shamefully, I’m more in the mood for F1). Everyone, meanwhile, should watch every movie in the documentary category, but especially The Alabama Solution and The Perfect Neighbour, and spend the weekend kidding themselves, as I will, that they’ll stay up long enough to see even the first five minutes of the opening monologue. Happy Oscars!
\n![\"Princess](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/1bb4cb80a993598bcd538080283ce19d2ea4c05f/0_0_7418_4945/1000.jpg\")
\n Actor’s remarks about two of the dramatic arts draws a delicious backlash. Plus, Crufts brings back happy memories
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far","type":"comment","headerImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f3b30fd32f28d4f1a86f9ae4181d6a85ae8f240a/0_0_4240_3392/master/4240.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=1050e0519c945e690ba95c00090fbfbf","height":3392,"width":4240,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Timothée Chalamet at the Beijing premiere of Marty Supreme this week. Photograph: Photograph: VCG/Getty Images","credit":"VCG/Getty Images","altText":"Chalamet smiling as he listens with his hand on an earpiece","cleanCaption":"Timothée Chalamet at the Beijing premiere of Marty Supreme this week.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: VCG/Getty Images"},"palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#E05E00","main":"#E05E00","secondary":"#FF7F0F","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#FF7F0F","shadow":"#E6DED8","immersiveKicker":"#FF7F0F","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#E05E00","kickerText":"#E05E00","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#E05E00","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#C74600","featureKickerText":"#F9B376","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#8D2700"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#F9B376"},"atoms":[]},"byline":{"title":"Emma Brockes"},"trailText":"Actor’s remarks about two of the dramatic arts draws a delicious backlash. Plus, Crufts brings back happy memories","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f3b30fd32f28d4f1a86f9ae4181d6a85ae8f240a/0_0_4240_3392/master/4240.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=1050e0519c945e690ba95c00090fbfbf","height":3392,"width":4240,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"VCG/Getty Images","altText":"Chalamet smiling as he listens with his hand on an earpiece","cleanCredit":"Photograph: VCG/Getty Images"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/13/digested-week-geopolitics-package-holidays-collide-timothee-chalamet?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/13/digested-week-geopolitics-package-holidays-collide-timothee-chalamet?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/13/digested-week-geopolitics-package-holidays-collide-timothee-chalamet?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Saturday Night Live is surely only funny if you’re American. Can a UK spinoff really make Britain laugh?","rawTitle":"Saturday Night Live is surely only funny if you’re American. Can a UK spinoff really make Britain laugh?","item":{"trailText":"There are reasons to be sceptical. But if the sketch show’s British talent strikes the right tone, Saturday night comedy could become a family ritual, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"A strong contender for the most depressing four words in the English language – after “I’ve started a Substack”, obviously – is the formulation, “topical sketch comedy show”, a line that will yank many of us back to painful memories of late night Channel 4 in the 90s. British telly has never excelled at this live comedy format, or maybe, depending on your view, nowhere has. Near the end of this month, Sky is launching a UK version of Saturday Night Live, that most revered of American staples and a holy grail for US comedy writers going back to the 1970s. If it seems like a strange import, it may be that, as the dusty original fields kicks from all sides, SNL UK has a prime opportunity to reboot the franchise.
\nThe curious question for observers is whether there are things so rooted in their original context they can’t be expected to travel. We’ve seen a lot of this going in the other direction, with disastrous US remakes of British TV shows, such as Skins (cancelled after one season), The Inbetweeners (ditto) and any British show featuring actors who look ballpark normal, recast with Americans who look like Kristi Noem. (For my money, even the US version of The Office didn’t really work, although nine seasons and everyone else say otherwise). US television imports to the UK, meanwhile, have mostly been gameshows or reality TV, so SNL is a newish experiment. And yet the kneejerk response to news of its commissioning – see John Oliver, calling it a “terrible idea,” per GQ’s reporting – has been overwhelmingly negative.
\nIt shouldn’t be. After all, SNL is a broad format; if the UK version follows the American original, it’ll be a Saturday night show written from scratch every week by a large team of writers plus the 11 comedians who play all the parts, and an opening monologue by a big-name celebrity. For those who haven’t seen SNL, you may be familiar with details of the show from its proxies – the terrifyingly quick turnaround so faithfully and tediously documented by Aaron Sorkin in his big flop of the mid-2000s, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and with much more success by Tina Fey in 30 Rock.
\n![\"Amy](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/31f03b21e2b162090d41a23707102ad7e9230eb5/0_0_3000_1955/1000.jpg\")
\n A bigger challenge for the UK cast, which has been drafted after a huge, nationwide casting call, is that at this point in SNL’s 51-year history, the show’s appeal is almost entirely rooted in nostalgia. Anyone who spends more than five minutes in the US is guaranteed to run into a Gen X American who would like to share their memories of watching SNL as a child. This will not be a short conversation. They will want to share with you their favourite sketches, cast lineups, the ones who should’ve had bigger careers after the show, the ones who were wrongly overlooked at audition stage, some trenchant Thoughts About Lorne Michaels, and a lot of SNL lore that can only be matched for passion in this country by Gen X chat about Bagpuss, or someone reciting the shipping forecast. (If you’re very unlucky, the American monologue on SNL history will bleed into recollections of Steve Martin’s comedy albums from the 1970s, and before you know it you’ll be nodding along to observations about Sid Caesar.)
\nHere’s the thing: I’ve rarely met a British person living in the US who has actually found SNL funny. It’s hard to say why this is. The comedians have always been top notch, from Kristen Wiig and Amy Poehler to Fey and Will Ferrell. And going back to the 1980s, Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy. But – and I say this as someone who loves Americana – it’s somehow just very, very American. It doesn’t matter how pointed the comedy is, behind the sharpness of the material resides a kind of innocence bordering on indulgence. The brutally high turnover, meanwhile, means that a lot of the sketches are middling at best. And to those who didn’t grow up with the show, the bad wig-based nostalgia appears dated. I imagine this may be part of the appeal to the British producers; the opportunity it affords to invite British families to sit down on a Saturday night and create our own tradition.
\nUltimately, its success will come down to the ratio of good material to middling, and how willing the audience is to sit through mild amusement – which can be soothing when you know all the characters! – to get to the occasional out-of-the-park sketch. About once every 10 years there’s an SNL sketch so on the money that you have to watch it hundreds of times and everyone talks about it for ever. The last great one was, to my mind, Kate McKinnon’s Fire Island sketch from 2017. Nine years on and my friends and I still collapse hopelessly with laughter if anyone says: “That’s a wolf sanctuary, all right.” Let’s see what the Brits can do.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nThere are reasons to be sceptical. But if the sketch show’s British talent strikes the right tone, Saturday night comedy could become a family ritual
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Can a UK spinoff really make Britain laugh?","type":"comment","headerImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/99deda2498c01007352f5311e87ae60b62e64642/736_0_5905_4724/master/5905.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=1fe767b8320f0159d27348cf69703758","height":4724,"width":5905,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"The SNL UK cast. 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But if the sketch show’s British talent strikes the right tone, Saturday night comedy could become a family ritual, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/99deda2498c01007352f5311e87ae60b62e64642/725_0_5905_4724/master/5905.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=8c334ed49b7a3b07df96c8002780b7d4","height":4724,"width":5905,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Charlotte Rutherford/Sky UK","altText":"The SNL UK cast.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Charlotte Rutherford/Sky UK"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/12/saturday-night-live-funny-american-uk-spinoff-britain?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/12/saturday-night-live-funny-american-uk-spinoff-britain?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/12/saturday-night-live-funny-american-uk-spinoff-britain?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"In these troubled times, who isn’t loving the nostalgia of the Kennedys and Love Story’s 90s New York?","rawTitle":"In these troubled times, who isn’t loving the nostalgia of the Kennedys and Love Story’s 90s New York?","item":{"trailText":"It’s monstrously presumptuous? Unforgivably glib? Perhaps. But this stylised drama is the show we all need right now, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"If you are looking for a break in the clouds from this terrible news cycle, can I direct you towards Love Story, the nine-part series executive-produced – but crucially, not written! – by Ryan Murphy, which documents the love and untimely deaths of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette. You might think this isn’t for you, that it’ll be too tabloidy or that you’re not interested in JFK Jr. But while Love Story, which takes us back to a very particular version of early-1990s New York, might not seem like the show we want right now, it is exactly the show that we need.
\nThis probably sounds like a heartless summary of a true story that ends in the terrible deaths of two young people (in 1999, while flying his wife and her sister from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy crashed his light aircraft, killing everyone on board). But that tragic end only suffuses the preceding nine hours of storytelling with a kind of pearly, nostalgic light, just the thing to see off the iron-grey wash of today’s reality. The New York of Love Story isn’t the city’s current iteration, with its impossible rents and charmless finance bros ruining downtown. Nor is it the 1990s New York of, say, Home Alone 2, in which Donald Trump strides through the Plaza Hotel and Central Park is a crime-ridden disaster.
\nInstead, Love Story takes place in the stylised New York of Kate Moss, freshly discovered at Calvin Klein; it’s lunch at the Four Seasons and dinner at Indochine. It’s an excellent Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr, standing in the street using one of those half-enclosed pay phones, and Sarah Pidgeon, excellent as Bessette, blowing smoke through the three-inch crack of a window. Before this show, I harboured absolutely no nostalgia for smoking in offices or anywhere else. Now, apparently, scenes of people blowing smoke indoors make me sigh with sadness. (Ditto the wearing of black capri pants and loafers.)
\nI wasn’t aware of being nostalgic for the Kennedy dynasty, either. But there’s something weirdly moving about looking back to an era in which the worst thing a Kennedy did was wear his baker boy cap backwards and fail his New York bar exam – rather than, say, back vitamins as a treatment for measles during a surge of cases in the US.
\n![\"Paul](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/6399f5a84f034ed219ac13972b3f470fd7fd73eb/390_0_2500_2000/1000.jpg\")
\n This misty-eyed feeling is part of the broader revival of 90s nostalgia being pushed by gen Z yearning for what looks, to them, like a simpler, pre-internet time when people managed to meet up with each other without sending 500 texts documenting each stage of their journey, and you could ground yourself in the tangible pleasures of vinyl LPs. As such, people have been losing their minds about Love Story since it launched on Hulu and Disney+ last month. Here’s the New York Times this week with a handy guide to Bessette’s wardrobe. British Vogue has gone deep on the show’s costumes which, after paparazzi shots of cheaply and inaccurately dressed cast members were widely shared and mocked when the show first started filming, ended up being sourced via eBay, Etsy and a callout to fashion collectors. Real estate websites have gone in hard on the production design, while the soundtrack – highlights include Lenny Kravitz, En Vogue and Björk – keeps trending. When, in episode four, Madonna’s 1994 anthem Secret starts playing, you may cry for more innocent times.
\nAlso key to its charm: Love Story understands the sensibilities of those most likely to love it and gives us exactly what we need. Namely, Naomi Watts, aged up to play Jackie O in her dying days, landing a performance somewhere between Edie Beale and Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek. In one scene, Watts, cigarette in hand, sways gently along to Richard Burton’s finale from the 1960 Broadway production of Camelot while gazing at an oil painting of her late husband JFK. “It was supposed to be both of us that day in Dallas!” she whispers and exits left, via hearse, to the strains of Ave Maria.
\nOf course, not everyone loves it. Jack Schlossberg, nephew of JFK Jr and the latest pretender to the JFK throne, who is running for a congressional seat in New York, doesn’t like the show at all. He told CBS: “If you want to know someone who’s never met anyone in my family, knows nothing about us, talk to Ryan Murphy.” One absolutely sympathises. Shows like Love Story are monstrously presumptuous and unforgivably glib. And yet, give it one episode and I defy you not to swoon and keep watching.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
\nIt’s monstrously presumptuous? Unforgivably glib? Perhaps. But this stylised drama is the show we all need right now
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Now she’s finally getting a major UK show","body":"There is no direct reference to Trump’s America in Catherine Opie’s To Be Seen, the US photographer’s first large museum exhibition in Britain, featuring key works going back to the 1990s. Mythic and personal, the images depict the American landscape and American family. Above all, they are concerned with the 64-year-old’s career-long interest in the representation of gay, lesbian and queer Americans missing from mainstream art history. Most of the photos were taken long before the Trump presidencies and yet, browsing the show, it feels like a powerful rebuke to the current administration – so much so that it brings on a mood of almost hysterical relief.
\nFor 27 years, Opie taught photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and would tell her students that it was part of the mission of the serious artist to show “an example in a public space of what it is to be brave”. So it is with To Be Seen, which features some of Opie’s most famous and bravest works, from her portraits of friends to denizens of LA’s 1990s leather dyke scene: the iconic, androgynous Pig Pen, a friend who appears in a series of shots, looking coolly at the camera, daring the viewer to define them; her Being and Having series, an early challenge to gender norms featuring 13 butch lesbians posing in stick-on, Halloween-grade facial hair, in an absurdist performance of masculinity; and Dyke, in which Opie’s friend Steakhouse – speaking of brave – poses with her back to the camera, the word “dyke” tattooed in large ornate script across the back of her neck.
\n\nIn 1993, Opie staged what has become, to her annoyance, her most famous photograph, Self Portrait/Cutting, in which she, too, sits with her back to the camera, in this case with the bloody outline of a child’s drawing of a house and family scored into her skin.
\n![\"The](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/a32b3a9c6f5c735d92c0c98e298ca6dc75d65eba/0_0_1500_3000/500.jpg\")
\n But we’ll get to that. First off, here’s Opie via Zoom from her studio in downtown LA. She’s super busy, about to swing through London for To Be Seen’s run at the National Portrait Gallery. Opie is giddy with pre-show energy and what appears to be the basic fuck-you pushback required of a certain kind of artist working in the US right now, although it’s possible she is always like this: amused, exuberant, as spirit-lifting as her photos. She is happy to talk about creating an “iconic” image and all that, but her actual aim is “to make a photo move you in your body”.
\nOpie’s works do seem to hit the viewer at a primal level. In Divinity Fudge, the titular performance artist and drag act looks frankly at the camera, dressed in her best. In Self-Portrait/Nursing, we see Opie breastfeeding her infant son Oliver in a classic, art history pose, but with crucial differences: she is short-haired and tattooed, her naked skin scored with scars from her previous artwork, Self-Portrait/Pervert.
\n![\"Diana,](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/53c6c87dd53e7f379a6c9b173a8bbe989b9e89c7/0_0_1344_3000/448.jpg\")
\n What’s moving about these images is how, tonally, they oppose the bigot’s idea of the “radical lifestyle”. Opie, needless to say, isn’t trying to be radical, but rather seeks to document her life and the lives of her peers with a vulnerability that refuses to harden in the face of opposition. “Sincerity” is the word she uses for this: “Sincerity is really important to me. I think those basic qualities are actually very Christian. Meanwhile, Christianity has left me out of the mix because of my sexual preference.”
\nAt root these photos assert the moral right to exist so that “in a weird way,” she says, “I sometimes have what people think of as big spiritual ideas.”
\nThis sense of being moved by photography first struck her at the age of 11 when she saw a shot in a textbook of a girl working in a cotton mill in South Carolina. It was taken in 1908 by Lewis Hine and one thought immediately struck her: the child could’ve been her. Opie’s father owned a factory in Sandusky, Ohio, and the image triggered a dizzying moment of recognition. The factory made craft materials for hobbyists and amateur artists. So, says Opie, “While I came out of this family that didn’t want me to be an artist at all, especially my businessman father, I was surrounded by creativity.”
\n![\"Bo,](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/a7f926aad7f4e7db059ea708c285f2201248a323/0_0_1499_3000/500.jpg\")
\n Although the family moved to California when Opie was 13, she retained a deep interest in the romance of the American heartland – which, as she grew older, collided with an interest in what it meant to be pushed to its margins. There is a photo in the exhibition of Opie at nine years old – Self-Portrait 1970 – with a bowl haircut and big black glasses, throwing a strongman pose. Not a straight child. Was her non-conformity a problem?
\n“It was hard for my mom. Although what’s weird is I ended up being my mom. She always had a short haircut. She wore no makeup. She was a PE teacher. She wanted me in dresses and bows, but she was a Bermuda-shorts-wearing jock, the best at every single sport she did. She just turned 90 and swims a mile a day.” Opie throws back her head and laughs. “All my friends are like, ‘Lou’s a lesbian, right?’ And I’m like, ‘Lou’s not a lesbian.’”
\nThe funny thing is, says Opie, the experience of having Oliver forced her to confront her own assumptions, too. As part of the 2004-05 series In and Around Home, Oliver is photographed as a toddler in a pink tutu. She smiles. “Because, out of my butchness, I had wanted him to be a boy-boy. I didn’t want a girl because I didn’t know how I would talk to her about femininity. And with my son, here I was grappling with wanting him to toss a football with me in the back yard because that’s what I had always dreamed of – and he just wanted to play My Littlest Pets with the doll house. He was not a masculine boy. He was the pink-tutu boy. And now he’s come out and he’s still the pink-tutu boy.”
\n![\"Abdul,](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/27d52e03b6fa37721ec865cf0f7a92d8b0c57823/0_0_2225_3000/742.jpg\")
\n In the late 2000s, Opie crisscrossed the US creating portraits of school football players, an interest she developed after visiting the extended family in Louisiana of her then wife, the artist Julie Burleigh. Much like Helen Garner’s recent nonfiction book The Season, which considers male adolescence through the lens of her grandson’s football team, Opie started attending practices, fascinated by their symbolic weight. “I was really moved by them. And I realised this was an extension of American landscape.”
\nThe question she asked herself was: “How do I extend an American landscape through a body of work?” But she was also trying to expand her range to answer another question. “People were asking me, ‘Cathy, you only make portraits of queer people. Are you trying to empty the world of everybody but queers?’”
\n![\"Opie](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/449df8ab2c86d48122e49ab07c8a520307f30ca3/0_0_3273_4200/779.jpg\")
\n Not a question straight artists focusing on straight subjects have ever been asked. “No. Right. These are the questions I get. I’m dying for the day when every single heterosexual child has to come out to their parents as heterosexual.” Still, Opie says, she wanted to interrupt what had been a largely queer-focused body of work, which grew out of her experiences at art school in San Francisco in the 1980s. “A very specific time. We’re talking October magazine [an academic contemporary art journal]. We’re talking Foucault in the classroom. We’re talking highly theoretical training that was trying to frame art in this different way.”
\nArt school theory has its limitations and Opie has never been interested in sequestering herself within academia’s high walls. She’s a commercial beast: as well as her career as a teacher, she has always worked commercially. She shot Gucci’s 2025 autumn campaign and, back in the day, she says, “I was doing weddings, editorial shoots. I was shooting for LA Weekly. I was picking up as many editorial jobs along the way as possible. I had all the equipment. I knew how to use drones, all of that.”
\n![\"Oliver](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/cf88ca39aef2013a9ed8534123340681daf13ab1/0_0_2500_3000/833.jpg\")
\n Ostensibly, this side hustle was a way of making money to support her fine art. But honestly, says Opie, “I loved it. I loved making my toolbox as large as it could be. I’m super into being capable. I’m hardcore Aries. I believe in being capable.” I can just picture her in the cargo shorts, things dangling off her belt loops. “I know. I don’t have the photographer’s vest. But there’s a LOT in the cargo shorts’ pockets.”
\nSomething about this combination has made Opie very cool in fashion circles. Madonna is said to love her work. This is news to Opie but, she says, come to think of it, “I want Madonna to buy Walls, Windows and Blood!” She is referring to her body of work examining how the Vatican and the Catholic church asserts its authority through architecture. “Get one of those blood grids, Madonna!”
\nIf commercial work was one way for Opie to avoid getting bogged down in theory, another was to pivot to the physical. Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) was made in reference to the relationship between queer domestic life and a homophobic world, at a time when any depictions of the queer family were considered disruptive and radical.
\n![\"Opie](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/e23c9306733e469580ae96e883bf12c44ff8d0e1/0_0_2769_3000/923.jpg\")
\n When her friend, the artist Judie Bamber, delicately scored a child’s drawing of an idealised family and house into Opie’s back, the photographer hadn’t yet had kids: she would have Oliver almost a decade later. What amuses her now is the fact that it is still misunderstood: until the end of time, she will have to assert and reassert that her aim was not simply to shock. At the forthcoming exhibition, she says, “The audio tour has this really wonderful moment when you come to Self-Portrait/Cutting and I’m like, ‘OK, folks. There are some parents here that might have a kid with them and I’m going to tell you how to talk about this with your kid.’”
\nOpie has strong feelings about the double standards applied to certain kinds of “challenging” art. “I say in the audio guide, ‘Why don’t you ask them, ‘Oh wow, huh, what do you think the artist meant by drawing a house with smoke coming out the chimney? Why do you think the sun is coming out of the cloud?’ When you engage a child in those kinds of questions of representation, they’re not going to think it’s bad that it’s blood. They’re only going to think it’s bad that it’s blood if you teach them that. At the same time, if you’re going to church, do you all of a sudden gasp at Christ on the cross?”
\nIt’s a principle that underscores so much of Opie’s work: the drawing of a sardonic line between categories the mainstream considers hostile to one another – children’s drawings/lines of blood – but that, in Opie’s view, turn out to be part of the same continuum. “As soon as the Vatican puts trigger warnings on its work,” she says with a smile, “I’ll put trigger warnings on mine.”
\n• Catherine Opie: To Be Seen is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 5 March to 31 May
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Photograph: Photograph: © Catherine Opie/Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong","credit":"© Catherine Opie/Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong","altText":"Not simply to shock … Opie’s most famous image, Self-Portrait/Cutting, from 1993.","cleanCaption":"Not simply to shock … Opie’s most famous image, Self-Portrait/Cutting, from 1993.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: © Catherine Opie/Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong"},"campaigns":[],"designType":"Feature","palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#A1845C","main":"#A1845C","secondary":"#EACCA0","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#A1845C","shadow":"#DCDCDC","immersiveKicker":"#EACCA0","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#A1845C","kickerText":"#A1845C","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#A1845C","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#866D50","featureKickerText":"#E7D4B9","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#6B5840"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#E7D4B9"},"atoms":[]},"trailText":"Famed for having a child’s drawing of a family carved into her back, the photographer has devoted her life to queer America, from endurance swimmers to drag artists to her son in a tutu. Now she’s finally getting a major UK show","showQuotedHeadline":false,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2499e5c0e51911a4d2f963c92381733511a36c9f/150_1610_2108_1687/master/2108.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=5f952a58f042163880cb8d6ea48fab7f","height":1687,"width":2108,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"© Catherine Opie/Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong","altText":"Catherine Opie’s most famous image, Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: © Catherine Opie/Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/mar/02/catherine-opie-photographer-queer-america-drag-pink-tutu?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/mar/02/catherine-opie-photographer-queer-america-drag-pink-tutu?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/mar/02/catherine-opie-photographer-queer-america-drag-pink-tutu?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Feature","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Digested week: ‘Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water … ’ but this time, it’s real","rawTitle":"Digested week: ‘Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water … ’ but this time, it’s real","item":{"trailText":"Three-part docudrama makes notion of going into the sea in the UK terrifying – much as Jaws did for Americans in 1975","body":"Since I was a child I’ve been going to the same beach on the south coast and never given a second thought to its safety. Swimming in the US, you have the occasional panic about sharks. In South Africa I got stung by a jellyfish. But the English seaside, give or take the odd riptide and the constant threat of hypothermia, has always seemed benign in its outlook, a dull, unthreatening sea.
\nWell, those days are over. Much as the release of Jaws in 1975 changed the relationship of Americans to deep water, the three-part docudrama Dirty Business, which started on Channel 4 on Monday and concluded midweek, has made the notion of going into the sea in the UK terrifying – and unlike Jaws, this story is real.
\n\nIt is an example of what good drama can do that even the best reporting can’t quite achieve. David Thewlis and Jason Watkins, both brilliant as the real-life amateur detectives on the trail of industrial-scale polluting, drive home in a visceral way a complicated, shattering story. Namely: the absolute scandal of this country’s privatised water companies dumping untreated effluent into its rivers and sea, and the utter disgrace of the Environment Agency in failing to prosecute them.
\nThis is what the show does; forces you to become someone who uses phrases like “utter disgrace” and “absolute scandal”. The first episode is organised around the death from E coli of an eight-year-old girl after a trip to the beach in Devon (the cause was not identified and a verdict of misadventure was ruled by a jury), where her family saw untreated sewage pumping out of a waste pipe. After the final episode, I freaked out and downloaded one of the water-monitoring apps that tracks sewage-pipe activity countrywide. There was my beloved beach on the south coast with a big red dotting pulsating over it. “Please be aware there is currently a situation at this location,” it read. “Sewage pollution alert. Southern Water is responsible for this discharge.”
\nI have been half waiting for the tide to turn on Sarah Ferguson and someone to suggest that sympathy for the disgraced former duchess is due. Various reports this week claim sightings of her at retreats in Switzerland or Ireland. First thought out the gate: how is she paying for that? But no sympathy, so far, is forthcoming. Meanwhile, as the Epstein files continue to burp forth grim content, the emergence of a photo of Stephen Hawking flanked by bikini-clad young women on a Caribbean island feels like this story’s natural shark-jumping end point. His family has since said the women were Hawking’s long-term carers. Thank God Mahatma Gandhi is no longer with us; per the current news cycle, there’s no question he’d have turned up in the files trading chipper messages with Epstein or in a photo sitting next to Woody Allen at a dinner.
\nVery much still with us, on the other hand, is national irritant turned something darker and more odious, Russell Brand, who showed up at Southwark crown court on Tuesday to face one count of rape and one of sexual assault while wearing a leopard print shirt open at the chest. It’s a curious wardrobe choice to settle on for a hearing before one’s rape trial; a cheeky take on accusations of serious sexual assault from a man who apparently continues to find himself – despite all evidence to the contrary – intensely, immensely charming. Brand denied the charges and has previously insisted all of his sexual relationships have been consensual.
\n![\"Anne](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/597a812e4365b83aa7c930ec018b588f443614e6/0_0_6000_4000/1000.jpg\")
\n The sun comes out for a whole day on Wednesday and everyone promptly loses their minds. Over the course of the day I mention the sky, the sun, the temperature, the flowers, the air, my mood, my joints, the future, the thrill of being alive, the wonder of nature’s renewal phase, how much I love birds and trees and grass, the smell of spring, the fact it’ll be “light soon” after 6pm, the coming of Easter, how great this coffee is – I mean, actually, maybe, the best flat white I’ve ever had – and the fact that everything in life is likely to turn out OK on a rotational basis for eight hours solid. Giddy with spring, I then brazenly leap off my low-cholesterol diet and in a state of absolute sun-drenched hysteria eat six sausages and have a lie-down. Happy day.
\nIt’s slightly painful to watch the rollout of Liza Minnelli’s publicity tour for her new memoir, Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!; not because the icon is any more eccentric than she ever was – the word “disorienting” is frequently used to describe her – but because the stories from her showbiz bloodline keep coming: the marrying of terrible men, the financial boom and bust, the health scares, the comebacks. In the middle of the week, People magazine runs its exclusive interview with the legend, opening with the line: “At 79, her humour remains intact.” Which sounds very much like code for: “Ugh, this interview was nuts.”
\nMeanwhile, the Times runs an extract from Minnelli’s book, in which she writes of David Gest, her fourth husband: “What in God’s name was I thinking? I clearly wasn’t sober when I married this clown.” They fought. They sued each other. Gest accused her of striking him with a stiletto. She accused him of holding her prisoner. And then, one day he went too far. “Gest was coming for my Warhols!” writes Minnelli, breathlessly. With the help of friends, she spirited the art work out of her apartment and Gest went away empty-handed. “Loser,” she says. Minnelli, of course, has always been in on the joke. It’s just that, occasionally, the joke is exhausting.
\n![\"Trump](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/1e62d9f275185dfb131b07efb8a4aee4c1247212/0_0_6000_4000/1000.jpg\")
\n Anti-theft boxes in supermarkets are increasingly being installed to stop thieves from sweeping entire shelves of chocolate into their bags and the Metropolitan police are having a crackdown. Accordingly, new data emerged this week about the most stolen chocolate brand in London, which is, wait for it, Ferrero Rocher! A stunning discovery given that the unsatisfying wafer-based orb is very much on my list of supposed treats I’m convinced nobody actually likes – alongside Christmas cake, pumpkin pie and, of course, the big one: macarons.
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Photograph: Photograph: Rob Baker Ashton/Channel 4","credit":"Rob Baker Ashton/Channel 4","altText":"Family of four on sand at seashore","cleanCaption":"A beach scene at the English seaside from the Channel 4 docudrama Dirty Business.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Rob Baker Ashton/Channel 4"},"palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#E05E00","main":"#E05E00","secondary":"#FF7F0F","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#FF7F0F","shadow":"#E6DED8","immersiveKicker":"#FF7F0F","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#E05E00","kickerText":"#E05E00","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#E05E00","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#C74600","featureKickerText":"#F9B376","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#8D2700"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#F9B376"},"atoms":[]},"byline":{"title":"Emma Brockes"},"trailText":"Three-part docudrama makes notion of going into the sea in the UK terrifying – much as Jaws did for Americans in 1975","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d431b480cd73732c6caeb6ea74bef66ab37cb1c5/89_0_3008_2407/master/3008.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=0ed7b3adcb63912c2c226707f271aef2","height":2407,"width":3008,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Rob Baker Ashton/Channel 4","altText":"Family of four on sand at seashore","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Rob Baker Ashton/Channel 4"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/27/digested-week-just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe-to-go-back-in-the-water-but-this-time-its-real?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/27/digested-week-just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe-to-go-back-in-the-water-but-this-time-its-real?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/feb/27/digested-week-just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe-to-go-back-in-the-water-but-this-time-its-real?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"How did Epstein ensnare so many rich men? By knowing they were entitled and insecure","rawTitle":"How did Epstein ensnare so many rich men? By knowing they were entitled and insecure","item":{"trailText":"The sex offender could exploit these masters of the universe because, despite their privilege, they still felt short-changed by life, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"One of the things that has been frequently puzzled over as the effluent of the Epstein story flows on, is how a college dropout who thought it was cool to do typos managed to persuade the world’s most powerful into his lair. What, precisely, was the nature of his “genius”? Was it blackmail? Was it the social pyramid scheme of using one big name to reel in another? Nothing has come close to explaining it until, with the latest crop of details from the Epstein files, something has become suddenly clear: that it wasn’t the trafficked girls and women who Jeffrey Epstein groomed. The man’s real talent, if we want to call it that, was in the grooming of his cohort of associates.
\nThis isn’t to say, of course, that the men and occasional woman who threw in their lot with a man we must straight-facedly refer to as “the dead paedophile” weren’t culpable. Nonetheless, if you study the huge amount of Epstein-related material, from the New York Times’s deep dive into his finances to the vast cache of correspondence contained in the files, a picture emerges of a man who did the kind of number on his peers that you would more commonly see directed at victims. While multiple survivor testimonies indicate that Epstein regarded the girls and women he trafficked as of such low consequence he didn’t even need to bother to groom them – per Virginia Giuffre’s account, Epstein raped her the first time they met – all of his resources, via a variety of tactics, went into capturing the allegiances of powerful men.
\nLet’s look at Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who after his arrest last week has been subject to a sudden relaxing of public inhibitions around describing the man as he actually is. Perhaps you saw the video from 2022, now widely circulating, in which Mountbatten-Windsor’s former protection officer told an Australian news channel that the nickname they had for their royal boss was “the cunt”. With slightly more civility, Labour MP Chris Bryant on Tuesday called Mountbatten-Windsor “rude, arrogant and entitled”, observations that may prove useful in explaining just how Epstein excited such loyalty from the eighth in line to the throne. In Mountbatten-Windsor we see a vain, weak, entitled man living in the shadow of his brother, and whom Epstein may have lured into friendship through a combination of flattery and the performance of power.
\n\nCrucial to this approach is the fact that, judging by Epstein’s emails, he was never obsequious, at least not to Mountbatten-Windsor. His tone towards the former prince and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, often borders on rude, ordering them around, barking directions in a sort of parody of a thrusting, dynamic businessman who is there to offer the pair a shot at something they’ve never in all their lives had – real, centre-of-the-machine relevance. “Sarah, could you are [sic] one of your daughters show [redaction] buckingham thanks,” wrote Epstein in an email from 2010 – two years after his first jail sentence – and in which he appears to be asking the former Duchess of York to give someone a tour of Buckingham Palace. (The “Sarah” of the email replied the same day, “of course.”)
\nProfessors at MIT probably care less about relevance than two washed-up former royals, but may, on the other hand, experience lingering insecurities about their status with women. Look at Marvin Minsky, the late MIT professor who, in Giuffre’s memoir, she claimed she was trafficked to on Epstein’s island. In this instance, the power held by Epstein over men such as Minsky may be less about sex than self-image. In Giuffre’s book, she alleged that after a day spent on jetskis and doing regular tourist activities, Minsky got up the juice to ask her for what Epstein had advertised to him as “one of your famous massages”. It’s a terrible passage, not least because, if we believe Giuffre’s account, Minsky is clearly desperately awkward about what he is doing. Epstein allegedly offered this man an opportunity to play out a fantasy version of himself that – Google the guy – is wildly out of line with reality, and, my God, he grabbed it.
\nThis is where the late sex offender excelled: in milking influence and protection from powerful people by identifying and exploiting their weaknesses. As such, he understood something better than anything else: that no matter how different they were in their particulars, these men, masters of the universe all, still fundamentally felt that life had short-changed them; that they were entitled to more than they had. Epstein could help them with that and, judging by how and at what risk they continued to appease him, they loved him for it.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
\nThe sex offender could exploit these masters of the universe because, despite their privilege, they still felt short-changed by life
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By knowing they were entitled and insecure","type":"comment","headerImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/50a6f651a5a684be1f7074432853778cfd6e242e/964_478_2255_1803/master/2255.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=cac211b3f5e84236fa125c6ec044e6c9","height":1803,"width":2255,"orientation":"landscape","caption":"Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor pictured in 2019. ‘Judging by Epstein’s emails, he was never obsequious, at least not to Mountbatten-Windsor.’ Photograph: Photograph: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images","credit":"John Thys/AFP/Getty Images","altText":"Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor pictured in 2019 at a ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Bruges.","cleanCaption":"Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor pictured in 2019. ‘Judging by Epstein’s emails, he was never obsequious, at least not to Mountbatten-Windsor.’","cleanCredit":"Photograph: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images"},"palette":{"background":"#00000000","mediaIcon":"#00000000","pillar":"#E05E00","main":"#E05E00","secondary":"#FF7F0F","headline":"#121212","commentCount":"#707070","metaText":"#707070","elementBackground":"#FF7F0F","shadow":"#E6DED8","immersiveKicker":"#FF7F0F","topBorder":"#DCDCDC","mediaBackground":"#EDEDED","pill":"#EDEDED","accentColour":"#E05E00","kickerText":"#E05E00","kickerColours":{"plainKickerText":"#E05E00","plainPill":"#EDEDED","liveKickerText":"#F6F6F6","livePill":"#C74600","featureKickerText":"#F9B376","featurePill":"#EDEDED","featureLiveKickerText":"#EDEDED","featureLivePill":"#8D2700"},"mediaPillBackground":"#121212","mediaPillForeground":"#FFFFFF","featureAccentColour":"#F9B376"},"atoms":[]},"byline":{"title":"Emma Brockes"},"trailText":"The sex offender could exploit these masters of the universe because, despite their privilege, they still felt short-changed by life, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/50a6f651a5a684be1f7074432853778cfd6e242e/964_478_2255_1803/master/2255.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=cac211b3f5e84236fa125c6ec044e6c9","height":1803,"width":2255,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"John Thys/AFP/Getty Images","altText":"Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor pictured in 2019 at a ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Bruges.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/25/jeffrey-epstein-rich-men-entitled-and-insecure?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/25/jeffrey-epstein-rich-men-entitled-and-insecure?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/25/jeffrey-epstein-rich-men-entitled-and-insecure?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"It’s said that Tony Blair thought he was Jesus. At least Jesus never thought he was Tony Blair","rawTitle":"It’s said that Tony Blair thought he was Jesus. At least Jesus never thought he was Tony Blair","item":{"trailText":"The idea of the former PM being driven by delusions of grandeur runs through Channel 4’s new documentary. Still, there is fun in seeing the world as it was, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"There’s a funny moment towards the end of The Tony Blair Story, Channel 4’s three-part documentary about the former prime minister, in which Blair is asked to introspect about his own personality. For the previous three hours or so we have enjoyed a series of talking heads picking over his premiership. Now he breaks the fourth wall and, with something like incredulity, says what’s the point of asking him to identify his own weaknesses when all he’ll give is a “politician’s answer”. Reminded he’s no longer a politician, Blair replies as honestly as at any point in the encounter: “You’re always a politician.”
\n\nIt is one of the more satisfying exchanges in Michael Waldman’s series, which, depending on your view, is either a futile exercise in confirming one’s existing prejudices about Blair, or more than three hours of great telly. I’m inclined towards the latter, partly for the enjoyment it offers of being yanked back to the memory of all those old horribles. Nothing dates quicker than an out of office politician and it’s a particular nostalgia that’s triggered by footage of Robin Cook at John Smith’s funeral, or Max Hastings describing Blair’s henchmen as “absolutely ruthless bastards”, or Jack Straw being interviewed in a black velvet jacket like something from Death on the Nile.
\n![\"Tony](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/54332e44d330382f99bfd321f9caed42ac4732b0/0_0_2272_1536/1000.jpg\")
\n And if there’s nothing new to discover, the remembrance of old battles still satisfies. I was amused by Jonathan Powell’s recollection of Mo Mowlam telling him, in relation to Blair’s success in Northern Ireland, that “Tony succeeded because he thought he was fucking Jesus.” After Kosovo, says Robert Harris, Blair “thought he could walk on water” – diagnosing Blair’s Jesus complex runs like a motif through the show. So, too, does the accusation that Blair’s EQ always outstripped his IQ, often made by people who may themselves not be the brains of Britain. Here’s Jeremy Corbyn, look, whose assessment of Blair as “a man in denial” – not an unfair judgment – would be more authoritative if it didn’t come from someone so apparently incapable of internalising lessons from his own clanging defeats. Blair, he says, got himself into a “messianic trench” over Iraq, which is certainly a trench I’d like to see.
\n![\"Tony](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/76a4b3a713fe536566a74dd168e0dcd8993d9802/326_169_7157_4894/1000.jpg\")
\n If Waldman doesn’t relitigate Iraq in any meaningful way, that leaves the voyeuristic family stuff. Look at baby Leo, now a strapping 25-year-old, and two of his three siblings, Kathryn and Euan, saying sensible things about their dad. Cherie comes across as a real force, talking with a don’t-give-a-monkeys-any-more honesty. Asked whether she felt sorry for Gordon Brown when Blair snatched the leadership, she looks frankly astounded, as well she might. Cherie, per her own account, pushed her husband to get behind a different successor when Brown’s turn finally came around, underscoring a persistent unwillingness on the part of observers to process the vicious reality of political rivalry.
\nSimilarly delusional on the part of Blair’s critics: the perennial question of money, about which this country remains wilfully babyish, affecting to be shocked – shocked! – that someone with the ambition for high office might be interested in spending more than 300 quid on a suit or making more money than an entry level banker. (See Jacinda Ardern’s current presence on the world’s speaker circuit, and who can blame her.)
\nOther stuff: Bill Clinton clearly sympathetic to Blair’s divided loyalties between the US and Europe in the run-up to Iraq, and choosing his words very carefully. Pushed on whether he thinks Blair made a mistake going to war, Clinton concedes of his old friend that “he was in a pickle”. Blair, meanwhile, presents his decision to support George W Bush not as poodledom, but pragmatism. Britain, he implies, is a small country with a middle-sized economy deluded about its own place in the world; of course he threw in his lot with the US.
\n![\"Tony](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/b3add30abe9e582bc78e5a250fc1b11e6310a7c6/0_0_2048_1488/1000.jpg\")
\n The irony of this assessment is that, of course, the thing Blair ends up being most credibly accused of is his own delusional overreach. Possibly that delusion persists. Prodded by Waldman, Blair avers that, in his role as head of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, he may have more power now than he did as prime minister. That he has been announced, alongside Jared Kushner, as part of the transitional authority to oversee post-conflict Gaza makes one think: “Hasn’t the region suffered enough?”
\nAnd so it wasn’t for Blair himself that I came away feeling nostalgic; shots of the Gallagher brothers at Downing Street in the late 90s remain embarrassing. I did, however, feel nostalgic for an era of political optimism that is impossible to find anywhere today; an era during which the country’s spirits matched the energy of a leader habitually captured by cameras boarding a plane by sprinting up the stairs at full speed.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nThe idea of the former PM being driven by delusions of grandeur runs through Channel 4’s new documentary. Still, there is fun in seeing the world as it was
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Still, there is fun in seeing the world as it was, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/33b3e08e435d97bf83da5e7919619017a3aaac28/285_0_1350_1080/master/1350.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=6cc2e869aec59dd5f61517959c50c275","height":1080,"width":1350,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"72 Films","altText":"Tony Blair in Channel 4’s The Tony Blair Story.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: 72 Films"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/18/tony-blair-jesus-pm-channel-4-documentary?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/18/tony-blair-jesus-pm-channel-4-documentary?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/18/tony-blair-jesus-pm-channel-4-documentary?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot review – a unique memoir by a figure of astonishing power","rawTitle":"A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot review – a unique memoir by a figure of astonishing power","item":{"trailText":"Pelicot’s riveting account of her ordeal refuses to conform to any agenda but her own","body":"It is a mark of the power and honesty of Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir, A Hymn to Life – a seemingly impossible writing project in which the author must reconcile herself with horrors of which she has no recollection – that in the first 40 pages, the person I felt most angry towards was Pelicot herself. Her ex-husband, Dominique, who will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life for drugging and raping his wife and recruiting 50 men over the internet to do likewise, takes his place among the monsters of our age. In his absence, the reader may experience a version of what happened in Gisèle Pelicot’s own family – namely, the misdirection of anger towards her.
\nI have read enough books by female survivors of male sexual violence to say with confidence that Hymn to Life is unique. Pelicot – she decided to keep her married name in the interests of giving those of her grandchildren who share it a way to be proud rather than ashamed – was 67 when her husband of almost 50 years was arrested in 2020 for upskirting women in a supermarket in Carpentras, a small town in the south-east of France near the couple’s retirement home in the village of Mazan. When the police investigation uncovered a cache of videos and photos in which an unconscious Pelicot was shown being sexually assaulted by scores of men, she entered a nightmare.
\nA Hymn to Life is alive with the kind of detail that wouldn’t look out of place in a good novel, but it’s the expression it gives to something glimpsed at during the trial that makes it so singular; namely, the transformation of Gisèle Pelicot from a self-avowedly ordinary woman, “content with my little life”, into a figure of astonishing power. After her husband’s arrest, she moved from Mazan to the Île de Ré, where in an effort to share her state of mind with new friends she told them she’d “been struck head-on by a high speed train”. (In a moment of grim humour, one neighbour took her literally and remarked, “the surgeon who had rebuilt my face had done an excellent job”.) Detailing what it took to emerge from this state to become a national – if not global – icon is the unsparing mission of the book.
\nPart of Pelicot’s renewal entailed confronting a question that lurked in the minds of millions of observers during her husband’s trial: how could she not have known? She writes wretchedly of “the shame of having understood nothing – of feeling like an idiot in the eyes of others, and in my own.”. To that end, the book is a detective story in which the reader accompanies Pelicot back through her memories in search of clues overlooked. Was it significant that her husband came from a violent, sexually abusive family governed by a father who brutalised them? Was his behaviour linked to “our patriarchal, sexist society” – words, she writes, “I would never have uttered before”? Had her own beloved mother not died of cancer when Gisèle was nine, might she have been less quick to marry this person?
\n\nBoth Pelicot and her husband are from rural backgrounds two generations removed from poverty. But while Dominique struggled to stay employed, Pelicot thrived, rising from an entry level job as a secretary at an energy company to a management position. She wonders if her success fuelled her husband’s resentment. And then there was the couple’s sex life. Sifting for evidence, she puts before us Dominique’s decades-old request for anal sex and to film them in bed. If she had indulged him, she wonders, might his offences have been forestalled?
\nThis last thought experiment will be recognised by anyone who has been involved with an abuser and pursued the logic that by acting differently, they might’ve altered the outcome. Or as Pelicot puts it: “I might have prevented it all, I might have saved us.” In the days and weeks after her husband’s crimes were revealed, she sought refuge in memories of the happy times, urging her three children to remember that Dominique had been a good dad, a form of denial that upset them so violently that for a while, of her three kids, two weren’t speaking to her. (They have since reconciled).
\nThe most serious rift was with her daughter, Caroline, who has written her own memoir and with whom Pelicot was at loggerheads for months. Whereas Caroline “broke down”, growing so distraught she spent a night in a psychiatric unit, her mother returned home from the police station and did her husband’s laundry. “Putting on a brave face was all I knew how to do,” writes Pelicot, but it went further than that. When the weather took a turn for the worse, she worried that Dominique would be cold in jail and dropped off a sweater. “What is left for a woman my age,” she laments, “when she doesn’t have a husband any more, just her children and grandchildren?”
\nI’ll confess, this is where I lost it; the abject thrust of a sentiment in which Pelicot seems to register the loss of a husband – any husband – more forcefully than the violence her actual husband had done to her. She explains that she is of a generation of women for whom, “the principal axis of our lives was the man we had married”, and that this conditioning can’t be undone overnight. If we’re angry with Pelicot, she’s angry right back. The worst thing about being a victim, she writes, is being lectured – by her children, by court psychologists, by the press – that there’s a right and wrong way to do it. How dare we, she implies, and of course she is right.
\nThe trial took place in 2024 and occupies only the last fifth of the book; “It was those bastards I wanted in the spotlight, not me,” she writes of her decision to open proceedings to the public, giving rise to her famous statement and the subtitle of the book, “shame has to change sides”. She wrestles with the word “dignified”, often used to describe her in that period and which she finds coded and judgmental – another incitement to silence. While the horrific rape videos play in court, Pelicot stares fixedly at her phone, scrolling through happy photos of her grandkids. Her courage, she writes, comes from the memory of love from her mother and from the women who gather outside the court every day to support her. “This crowd saved me.”
\nBy the end of the book, by feeling her “way forward at my own pace”, she reaches a place where she is able “slowly and painfully” to let her husband go. He is “a pathetic creep”, she writes, but she won’t be bullied into arriving at someone else’s conclusion. “I know my story has fuelled disgust for men, but it has not done that for me.” The memoir ends not only in defiance of her abusers, but of those observers who would bend her story to a different, more strident conclusion. Instead, this: she meets a man, Jean-Loup, falls in love and moves in with him. What can one possibly say but bravo? “The feeling persists: love is not dead.”
\n• A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides by Gisèle Pelicot, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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Officially released in the UK this Friday, Emerald Fennell’s movie adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel features the biggest female star in the world (Margot Robbie), the second-biggest male star (I’m putting Timothée Chalamet ahead of Jacob Elordi, don’t fight me), and Fennell’s unique writing and directing style that gave us so many memorable moments in Saltburn. On Monday the flag goes up and we’re off!
\nLet’s start with the nice stuff; it’ll take less time. Still cleaving to the counterintuitive, New York magazine gave the film a thumbs up for being “smooth-brained”, “incredibly moist” and Fennell’s “dumbest movie”, which, the writer assured us, also happens to be – wah-wah – “her best to date”. The Hollywood Reporter judged it “pulpy, provocative, drenched in blazing color … and resonantly tragic”, while the Atlantic went for “a heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time at the cinema”. Fennell cannot, after all, be held responsible for bad writing from her reviewers so we’ll put down to coincidence the fact that every critic who liked the film was having an off day.
\n\nUnsurprisingly, the Brits were less generous than the Americans. The Independent’s one-star review called the film “an astonishingly hollow work” and “whimperingly tame”, while the Times went for “vapid” and “awful” and this newspaper deemed it “ersatz” and “quasi-erotic”. I can’t judge; I’ve only seen the trailer, in which Elordi looks like the comic Joe Wilkinson and the movie like bad Baz Luhrmann – which is saying something, given how bad the actual Baz Luhrmann is these days. But maybe it gets better as it goes on.
\nBack to the US for the final word, where “underneath her brazen streak” Fennell is accused by the New Yorker of showing “a certain wobbliness of conviction – a failure of nerve”, and the film of exhibiting a “curious redundancy” – a very New Yorkerish way of saying it sucked.
\n![\"Kemi](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/750dd60f7114f48dcfa42ae3dc1b4a033e4827dd/0_0_3000_2000/1000.jpg\")
\n The Fargo-esque kidnap of Savannah Guthrie’s mother enters its second week in the news cycle and the number of fatuous experts continues to multiply. Guthrie, a prominent US newscaster who should have been anchoring NBC News during the Winter Olympics this week, is instead appealing nightly on US TV for whoever kidnapped her 84-year-old mother from her Arizona home on 1 February to please get in touch and return her.
\nThe New York Post rustled up a retired FBI man who suggested the aggressor seen on Nancy Guthrie’s doorcam was likely “an amateur” based on how he’d holstered his gun. ABC News’s retired FBI guy said the ransom note may not have been authentic, while on CNN, a retired FBI agent encouraged viewers to study the doorcam footage in case they recognised the masked figure from his walk – “so-called ‘gait analysis’,” said the agent. Only the best and the brightest at the FBI.
\nOn social media, meanwhile, a popular casting director used her experience with actors to offer insights into the family, in particular Guthrie’s two siblings, who appeared on camera in an appeal to the kidnapper (she thought their upset looked fake). As of Friday morning, Nancy Guthrie remained missing and all the armchair analysts took their place in the pantheon of ghouls going back to news around Joanne Lees, the McCanns and Lindy Chamberlain.
\nPrincess Eugenie has been seen in the Middle East at Art Basel Qatar – an event she attended, according to Hello magazine, in her capacity as director of an art gallery. It must be hard, and I do sympathise; the sins of the father, etc. Still, the fact is that even the most innocent business undertakings emanating from that branch of the royal family trigger unfortunate echoes.
\nIn the past year or so, Eugenie’s sister, Princess Beatrice, has attended an investment conference in Saudi Arabia, appeared in a promotional photo for a UAE bank, and addressed an energy conference in Abu Dhabi in which she referred to AI as “literally my favourite subject”. The princess was there in a private capacity, you understand, although possibly not one recommended by her extensive knowledge of AI.
\nAll of which makes one look admiringly in the direction of the Phillips children. Zara on her horse, Peter doing whatever it is Peter does, neither of whom, at Princess Anne’s request, took on royal titles when they were born and who have rarely if ever felt moved to “promote British trade” abroad, officially or otherwise.
\nIt’s very Fleabag season 2, only instead of a whimsical hamster cafe promoting social health via Chatty Wednesdays, it’s an initiative by English Heritage to encourage social interaction via Bonding Benches. The benches will be introduced at some of the UK’s most famous landmarks, including Stonehenge and Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, where users will be able to slide a sign between “up for a chat” and “craving quiet”.
\nI love this idea, even if it mainly works only at the notional level. The initiative has been designed with parents of young children in mind, who are prone to isolation and might like a more structured opportunity to bond. The only improvement I can think of is to expand the range of the signs. As well as “quiet” and “chat”, how about: “Don’t even look at me”, “Stay at least three inches away from my body” and “Don’t come anywhere near me with anything that looks like a need”.
\n![\"Wallace](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/c39914498363e031b6b644f60b0430af9d45227b/0_0_8192_5464/1000.jpg\")
\n Friends visiting from out of town want to go on the tourist bus through London, so here we are in light rain on the open-top deck. My observation, never having done this before, is: so many bridges! Also: did you know that All Hallows by the Tower is the oldest church in London and was founded in AD675? Take that, New York – and sorry, in this instance, even Paris can do one. Turns out the bus tour brings on feelings of jingoism, for which I apologise but it’s all very stirring.
\nA couple of things: I’m not sure the Royal Palaces of Justice deserve to be summarised in the audio tour with: “Here are the steps where Johnny Depp stood recently”, and maybe there’s something about Southwark Bridge more notable than the fact it served as the backdrop for a scene from Harry Potter? Other than that: no notes, I loved it. Oh, look! St Paul’s!
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But I’ll take it every time over the bone-chilling New York winters","rawTitle":"Sure, Britain’s constant rain can dampen spirits. But I’ll take it every time over the bone-chilling New York winters","item":{"trailText":"People are (rightly) complaining about the records being set for extreme rainfall. Personally, I’m finding it oddly rewarding, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"Whenever it rained when I was a child, my mother did something that seemed normal at the time yet seems quite mad looking back: she dragged the huge, heavy plants from the living room – the massive bird of paradise; the hulking clivias in their enormous tubs – out on to the patio so they could “enjoy a drink”. She came from the southern hemisphere where water was in short supply and, while she grew depressed every January and hated English winters, she never found rain less than thrilling.
\nWell, here we are in February after more than a month of what the Met Office is delicately calling the “unusually southerly jet stream”, what Shakespeare neatly immortalised with “for the rain it raineth every day” and what the rest of us have been summarising with the sentiment “is it ever going to fucking stop”? I’m English, so talking about rain and its related conditions occupies 30% of my personality at any given time, but most of us have hit a wall at this point. According to the weather people, 26 weather stations in the UK set new records for the highest-ever January rainfall last month and in Aberdeen they haven’t seen the sun since the iron age.
\nIf the unremitting gloom contributes to a background condition in which everything seems bad and likely only to get worse, I would like to offer an alternative view. Even during a brighter February, it can be hard to make a case for the superiority of the British winter. Most people, afforded the choice, would go for sunny and freezing over mild and grey. For a long time I was one of them, luxuriating for 17 years in the bright blue sky of the average New York winter and thinking myself extremely clever for getting away from Britain. But this is my second winter back in this country and, having done a real number on myself, I’m here to persuade you that dank and gloomy is by far the better option. We don’t know how lucky we are!
\nIt helps, of course, that bright and cold northern climates are suffering their own extremes this winter. The US’s eastern seaboard has experienced record-breaking low temperatures since the new year, resulting in ice floes in the Hudson, “feel-like” temperatures as low as -29C in New York and piles of snow-covered rubbish that haven’t been cleared for weeks. The last time I experienced a winter like that, it took me 20 minutes of careful layering to prepare for a three-block walk, and even then the pain of stepping out was so sharp and surprising it felt like having my face plunged into cold water. Whereas here in this damp, dull place, one of my kids recently went to school in shorts and the other hasn’t worn a coat since that cold snap in the first week of January.
\nThere is plenty of literature dedicated to the idea that gloomy winters are an opportunity, among them Katherine May’s Wintering and a whole shelf of hygge-related Scandi self-help books. Most of these titles promote the idea that you get through these dark months via big jumpers and board games, a hibernation technique that makes a virtue of being inside and powered down. This makes sense to me, but what’s been surprising this year is that I have found being outside in the rain extremely rewarding.
\nI’m aware I’m in danger of drifting into woman-in-midlife-advocates-angry-cold-water-swimming territory, and I’m not suggesting we are all one stout outer layer away from forest school for grownups. I also don’t think, for example, that activities such as outdoor ice skating are ever the answer. But while we’re conditioned to moan about wet, grey days, I have found the endless rainy school runs this month weirdly lovely. Not having to wear a £300 coat that weighs as much as I do and has the word “Polartec” in its product description; the luxury of going out bare-necked in February without fear of frostbite or agonising pain, as in New York; moving through air that is just cold enough to alert one to how cold it would be if it were genuinely cold, but instead is sort of clammily brisk – all of these things seem deeply gratifying.
\nAnd at the back of my mind, always, the counter-conditioning of thinking when it rains: “Mmm, so good for my plants.” (The largest plant I own is the size of a cereal packet and has never been outside, but that, as they say, is not the point.) My point is, I think our winters are very nice indeed. All of which aside, obviously, I can’t wait for spring.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nPeople are (rightly) complaining about the records being set for extreme rainfall. Personally, I’m finding it oddly rewarding
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Personally, I’m finding it oddly rewarding, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/66b9bbc61e4e82455720af330c0f165c08ba0185/397_0_6706_5367/master/6706.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=e6643fb4ef966c30a9785b0bcec2141c","height":5367,"width":6706,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Christopher Furlong/Getty Images","altText":"Person walks on pier with umbrella flattened against their head, with greasy skies","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/12/britain-rain-new-york-winter?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/12/britain-rain-new-york-winter?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/12/britain-rain-new-york-winter?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Trump 2.0 is proving a challenge for Hollywood – just look at this deeply silly new thriller","rawTitle":"Trump 2.0 is proving a challenge for Hollywood – just look at this deeply silly new thriller","item":{"trailText":"Anniversary depicts a rightwing takeover of the US inspired by a book of essays. But it’s fuzzy on the bits in between, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"As we all know from history and the current news cycle, autocracy is bad. But it can also be boring. For every explosive confrontation in Minneapolis, there is a quieter, less tangible threat in the form of Kash Patel’s FBI seizing voting records from Fulton county, Georgia – a state Donald Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020 – or the steady implementation of 900-page manifesto by the influential rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, neither of which lend themselves to blockbuster treatment. And so we have a problem: how to animate the quiet part of what’s happening in the US to reflect a dangerous but tedious reality – namely, that this thing ends not with a bang, but a combination of voter manipulation and federal electoral interference that undermines faith in the democratic process.
\nI bring this up after a week of watching popular movies that resonate in Trump’s US, most of which go heavy on the firefights and light on the details of how we arrive at them. The latest, Anniversary, which launched this week on Netflix – a streamer increasingly uninterested in the subtleties of any situation, let alone this one – depicts a US in which an evil rightwing genius in the shape of a beautiful young woman talks the country into ditching democracy via the medium of (I love this detail; the sheer optimism of it) a stirring book of essays.
\nActually, I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the film, in which Diane Lane plays a centrist mom and political scientist at Georgetown University, trying to keep her family and the discourse together. In essence, it’s a domestic drama with some autocracy for dummies around the edges. But what’s clever is its presentation of an Orwellian-style assault on democracy via language that sells plurality as hostile to “togetherness” and “unity” – very credible in today’s landscape.
\nThe book of essays, meanwhile, is entitled The Change and is a nod, possibly, to Project 2025, the shadowy rightwing playbook published by the Heritage Foundation that is now enjoying realisation on Capitol Hill. What the film doesn’t have patience for is the finer detail of how a New York Times bestseller leads to the collapse of the electoral system, and a new order in which subversive comedians are chased across bodies of water by paramilitaries in speed boats and drones threaten citizens in their own gardens after curfew.
\n![\"Cailee](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/bf1779af5fda880f9d44ccb59ffdca033aa6b812/0_57_3810_3050/1000.jpg\")
\n If I sound like a killjoy, I apologise. It’s not the job of our creative industries to act as political shills (though we do have the Melania documentary for that). But this failure, to me, seems imaginative rather than political. Consider the impact of Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, in which the full horror of Gilead hits home precisely because the show (or rather, Margaret Atwood’s source material) meticulously joins the dots about the bureaucracy of how the US got there.
\nWith this in mind, after suffering through the second half of Anniversary, I returned to Alex Garland’s 2024 movie Civil War, which imagines a US in which three states have seceded against a strongman president in his illegal third term. I was quite critical about this movie when it came out; the supreme court was hearing arguments about the January 6 riot that week and, despite the film’s delicious touches – the on-brand randomness of Florida joining a secessionist cause for reasons wholly unrelated to the broader popular uprising – its apolitical landscape seemed to me like a dodge.
\nYou could, I felt, sense the deep, can’t-be-arsed energy of the film’s creative team when they got to the political science part and it’s a fatigue to which we as American voters are vulnerable. It is easier, always, to pay attention only to the parts with explosions.
\nWhat does that leave us with? There is Paul Thomas Anderson’s multi-Oscar nominated One Battle After Another, a slightly different beast to the other two movies in that it shows the US in the grip of a brutal military establishment hell-bent on chasing down “illegals” – in other words, the country as it is now rather than in some future dystopia. I’ve never got on with Anderson’s movies but I loved this, particularly the perfection of Sean Penn as Colonel Steven J Lockjaw, the psychopathic rogue officer who absolutely anticipated the border patrol official Greg Bovino. By reflecting back to us the seriousness of our present situation, the film makes a future reign of terror easier to imagine.
\n![\"Teyana](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/0325efcd4b559b4dc675f65534ebd00e5b090d3c/436_0_5120_4096/1000.jpg\")
\n Here’s the weird thing, though. Of everything I watched this week it was Civil War, a far inferior movie to One Battle After Another, that really affected me. The movie occupies a quaint, pre-ICE symbolic order in which, even as civil war rages, the main external reference is to “Charlottesville” and a time when the biggest threat to the US was a bunch of tiki-torch-bearing dickheads, marching for fascism and armed by Bed Bath & Beyond. On first release, Civil War, so sketchy on details, made it easy to sit back and conclude “couldn’t happen here”. But the country has changed since then and, despite the film’s limitations, this time the violence on screen seemed to me suddenly, upsettingly closer.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nAnniversary depicts a rightwing takeover of the US inspired by a book of essays. But it’s fuzzy on the bits in between
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But it’s fuzzy on the bits in between, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8642b999675d8875af8fdedc40431a380b19b7a3/318_0_2497_1996/master/2497.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=82f3b6af6ce36841ef4eb95e23a9a9bb","height":1996,"width":2497,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"FlixPix/Alamy","altText":"Diane Lane in Netflix’s Anniversary.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: FlixPix/Alamy"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/04/hollywood-challenge-trump-second-term-anniversary?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/04/hollywood-challenge-trump-second-term-anniversary?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/04/hollywood-challenge-trump-second-term-anniversary?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Digested week: ICE’s performance is intimidating and deadly, but also farcical","rawTitle":"Digested week: ICE’s performance is intimidating and deadly, but also farcical","item":{"trailText":"Seeing large men dressed in goggles and trenchcoats echoes the camp fascism of musical comedies","body":"An aspect of ICE’s deadly performance in Minneapolis that goes hand-in-hand with its mission to intimidate is the absolutely farcical tone of the ICE aesthetic. Broadway numbers like Springtime for Hitler in The Producers and, more recently, Das Übermensch in Operation Mincemeat, a showstopper performed with a German techno beat and Nazi boyband – “Third Reich on the mic” – vocals, present fascism as an essentially camp enterprise and we’re reminded this week that ICE fits the mould entirely.
\nIt’s always about the costumes, isn’t it? Here’s border patrol chief, Greg Bovino, swishing around Minnesota in his long, green trenchcoat – as Gavin Newsom, the governor of California put it, “as if he literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb” – while rank and file ICE agents were described by Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, as prancing about in “full battle rattle”. The vests, the fatigues, the goggles; I swear most of these goons are only in it for the accessories and an opportunity to admire themselves and each other under cover of rugged co-combatant team spirit. Meanwhile, as Lydia Polgreen pointed out in the New York Times, their sheer incompetence adds a darkly slapstick layer to events via videos of, for example, large men dressed for war slipping on ice and going “ass over teakettle”.
\nIf you laugh in their faces you run the risk of being shot, but there’s nothing to stop it going on behind their backs. If I were an editor in New York I would send someone to Broadway to report on how recent events are affecting audiences at Operation Mincemeat – specifically, how they react to a line that passed unremarked in the London West End production, but has been stopping the show in the US: “If people like us just blindly follow orders, the fascists won’t need to bash the door down. They’ll have already won.” Friends who saw the show two weeks ago reported that the performance ground to a halt at this line as the entire theatre rose to its feet, screaming and clapping. One can only imagine how long the interruption is now.
\nJust when you think the world can’t get any more disappointing, here’s Nicki Minaj on stage with Donald Trump, supporting him at an event in Washington DC and declaring herself “probably the president’s number one fan”.
\nWell, this a blow from the artist who gave us the lyric: “My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hun.” Although it does, of course, usher her into the long, tawdry tradition of When Good Cultural Icons Go Bad. From Kanye to Roseanne and the enduring disappointment of David Mamet, whose swing to the right was a particularly bitter pill given he wrote the greatest line in stage history (“coffee is for closers,” from Glengarry Glen Ross). Still, if we got over the loss of Kelsey Grammer, we can get over Minaj.
\nThank God for lovely Deacon Blue, who, while on tour in Australia this week, were informed that Reform UK’s “first Scottish leader”, Malcolm Offord, had approvingly referenced their 1987 hit Dignity while making a speech in Glasgow. The Scottish band promptly issued the statement: “It appals us to see the lyrics of any of our songs being used to bolster a campaign and ideology which is completely at odds with what the song, and we as a band, believe.”
\nA bit crushing for Offord, one imagines, who said he liked the song “for the message of working hard and saving up to make your dreams come true”, but was hazier about how, under a Reform government, a dinghy called Dignity sailing up the west coast would probably be stopped and turned back by UK border patrol.
\n![\"Left](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/ce0811723c0b0ef889cfe7bc0d2ab3b5f0cd50c2/0_0_8192_5464/1000.jpg\")
\n For some light relief from world events I just finished reading Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser. The brilliant, fascinating, genre-defining book was published last year and posits that lead poisoning in the Pacific north-west caused the huge spike in serial killers in that region in the 1970s. It sounds bizarre, but Fraser is completely convincing and it’s beautifully written to boot. After the book, I turned to what feels like a companion piece, David Fincher’s Mindhunter on Netflix, which covers the same ground from the perspective of the FBI’s first serial killer profiling unit. (And, fun fact, it features Anna Torv, an actor I love who also happens to be Rupert Murdoch’s niece).
\nThe only downside to all this American grimness – 496 pages of murder followed by two seasons of more murder – is trying to readjust to daily life. I went down to my bin room this week to throw out the recycling and had to focus very hard on not picturing Ted Bundy, back from the dead and naturally hiding behind my bins, poised to jump out and get me.
\n![\"Keir](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/8ff2ac90a125e20fc513cde67b59040db8f3343b/840_149_6257_5006/1000.jpg\")
\n To the Australian Open, where the first week was dominated by Naomi Osaka’s Edwardian jellyfish outfit and the second has been all Coco Gauff’s. The 21-year-old American and world No 3 was knocked out of the quarter-finals by the 31-year-old Ukrainian Elina Svitolina – a stunning upset, but not the main story from Melbourne.
\nBackstage after the match, Gauff was caught on camera unawares as she repeatedly smashed her racket into the ground, trashing it with the methodical rhythm of someone hammering a nail into the floor. The fact it was 44C in Melbourne probably didn’t help her mood, and at the press conference afterwards she explained calmly that it was better for her to release her frustration in private – as she believed herself to have done – than courtside in front of young fans. In fact, Gauff’s actions strike me as the inadvertent provision of a public service. For anyone over-invested in the news cycle, watching the racket smash on repeat may prove cathartic.
\nIf the Golden Globes two weeks ago were mostly bleached of politics, Sundance this week made up some of the shortfall with “ICE Out” badges being worn by famous attenders, including Natalie Portman, Olivia Wilde and Zoey Deutch. A more useful list of names, perhaps, is that of the people who attended the other big-screen event of the week: the launch of Amazon’s Melania documentary at the White House. While Minneapolis burned, these people showed up to support Donald Trump: Eric Yuan, the head of Zoom, Lynn Martin, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, and Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple. Maybe wait a beat before upgrading your iPhone.
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But for a country shaped by booze, it does pose questions about what comes next, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"It’s November 2024 and my puritanical American children are attending their first autumn fair at their new English primary school. There’s a laser show and hotdogs and a raffle. There’s also a bar for the parents, which makes my two pull up short. Newcomers to this country experience many cultural differences but perhaps none as striking as this: “Is that alcohol?” says my child, scowling up at me like a tiny member of the Taliban. “At a school thing?” I’m two Baileys hot chocolates in at this point and give her a smile 10% broader than necessary. Yes, my darlings; welcome to Britain.
\nOr at least, welcome, possibly, to the last vestiges of how Britain once was. For a while now we’ve known anecdotally that people in this country are drinking less than they were. My own generation X is deep into middle age and many of us – save for the odd life-saver at a school event and the biggest occasions – have given it up. Where the anomalies fall more glaringly is in the generations below us, among young people whose behaviour differs from our own at their age. This week, official confirmation came in the form of a survey of 10,000 people commissioned by the NHS that found almost a quarter (24%) of adults in England had not drunk alcohol in 2024, an increase from just under a fifth (19%) in 2022.
\nThe top line, of course, is that this is a good thing. Not for the drinks industry, obviously, but for the NHS, and also for people trying to maximise their life expectancy, which is all of us. Rigorous self-optimisation via application to the data is how we spend our leisure time these days, on the strength of which, after reading a piece about cancer-reducing foods this morning, I bought a “wheatberry, lentil and green vegetable salad” that I’m almost certainly not going to eat. What even is a wheatberry? Nobody knows. The point is we’re trying.
\nIf I sound sarcastic, I don’t mean to. I love not drinking. And it’s important not to join the ranks of those people in the generation above mine who, in the 1990s, when smoking bans took hold across the US, wrote long pieces arguing that cigarettes represented the buccaneer spirit of the country and, as a result, smokers were more interesting than people who drank “green juice”. These were, objectively, the worst people in the world and, while no one likes a teetotaller, it’s important to resist turning into them.
\nMy interest is more in what youth culture will look like without alcohol. The new survey results, which were commissioned as part of the Health Survey for England, found that women are slightly less likely to drink than men and that across the age groups young people are the most abstemious. In the 2022 NHS survey, gen Z reportedly contained the lowest proportion of people who drank frequently (10%), compared with 34% among 55 to 64-year-olds and 37% of 65 to 74-year-olds. Some of this is cost-of-living related, but most of it is likely to be cultural. It’s just not cool to be wasted.
\n\nIn my own case, the calculation to cut back had less to do with cultural trends and more to do with the sudden, sad collapse of my metabolism, plus the fact I changed primary-care physicians. During the intake interview a few years ago, my new doctor made a note of what everyone in my family going back three generations had died of, before giving me a very stern look. “If I were you I wouldn’t drink,” she said. “At all.” This was harsh, but she was right.
\nAnd yet, still my imagination falters. I look at my two and wonder what, when they’re 25, a Saturday night out will look like if it doesn’t terminate in them lying half off the sofa crying to Elaine Paige doing the big ballad from Chess. Where will their war stories come from? (Actual war, probably, but let’s not think about that.) What will they reminisce about when they are my age?
\nThere’s nothing funny about my friend who threw up into a heating vent and, for the rest of her tenancy, couldn’t expunge the smell of sick from her flat. Standing, swaying gently, in the middle of a busy A-road trying to work out a strategy for getting to the other side that didn’t involve putting one foot in front of the other isn’t funny, either. I told my children this story and they were horrified. “You could’ve DIED,” they said, which was precisely the teachable moment I was after.
\nMeanwhile, the new findings aren’t anything to grow complacent about, since, even with these reduced numbers, we’re still sufficiently a nation of alcoholics to cost the NHS in England £4.9bn a year in alcohol-related illness. In the spirit of which: I’m actually quite looking forward to eating my salad. I’m going to put an egg in it because, while not drinking is extremely good for you, as everyone knows it’s actually protein that will save us.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nIt’s just not cool to be wasted any more. But for a country shaped by booze, it does pose questions about what comes next
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But for a country shaped by booze, it does pose questions about what comes next, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7032f3940f85d328e183f93ba848be3f3cf8c348/0_0_2240_1792/master/2240.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=a010fab73e13773048645e6f9a39245e","height":1792,"width":2240,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Jeff J Mitchell/REUTERS","altText":"Young people drinking in a pub in Newcastle, 2005.","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/REUTERS"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/28/young-british-people-alcohol-drinking?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/28/young-british-people-alcohol-drinking?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/28/young-british-people-alcohol-drinking?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"David and Victoria Beckham learned the hard way – modern kids go ‘no contact’ with no guilt or stigma at all","rawTitle":"David and Victoria Beckham learned the hard way – modern kids go ‘no contact’ with no guilt or stigma at all","item":{"trailText":"No one is suggesting the sort of decision Brooklyn made is taken lightly, but support networks and the language of therapy seem to lessen the sting, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"As we continue to unpack the meaning of the Beckham family feud, I don’t think enough attention has been paid to the roast chicken. Perhaps you were busy having a life in December and missed it. But this week’s explosion by Brooklyn Beckham was the culmination of a chain of events triggered last month when Victoria Beckham, advisedly or otherwise, chucked a like at her son’s video of a roast chicken on Instagram.
\nFor some, the takeaway was that Brooklyn’s chicken looked undercooked. For others, it was a reminder that you could draw a face on a balloon and achieve roughly the same level of sentience as Brooklyn in his cooking videos. All of which was to miss the point: that according to the new semiotics of family alienation, Brooklyn’s mother, by liking his post, had crossed a fraught boundary between “NC” (no contact) with her son to “VLC” (very low contact). Had Brooklyn not blocked her and the rest of the family immediately, she may have gone the whole hog and escalated to LC – “low contact” – at which point all bets would’ve been off.
\nThese terms derive from burgeoning online communities in which adult children estranged from their parents gather in groups for mutual support. This kind of alienation isn’t new; it probably goes back as far as the family unit itself. What’s unique to the era of gen Z and millennial kids cutting their gen X and boomer parents out of their lives is codification, an attempt to legitimise and name a traumatic experience in an effort to remove stigma and guilt from painful decisions.
\n\nIt is the weight of these decisions – the question of whether they are being increasingly flippantly, if not petulantly, made – that critics of the “no contact” movement call out. As you would expect in an era in which terms formerly used by psychiatrists are bandied about by all of us, parents in these groups stand accused by their estranged offspring of an entire medical textbook of damaging behaviours including narcissism, borderline personality disorder, controlling and “high-conflict” behaviours, and gaslighting. And while there aren’t many examples of families driven apart by a business model premised on parental oversharing – to take Brooklyn’s rationale at face value – the Beckhams are, in other ways, typical: the damage inflicted by attention-addicted control freaks is a very common theme.
\nOn the other side of the dispute are various shades of the culture-war position: suck it up, snowflakes, we all make mistakes. (David Beckham put it slightly more gracefully this week when he said, cryptically, that “children are allowed to make mistakes”.) Personally, I don’t know anyone who has taken the decision to walk away from their family lightly. I’m also aware of people whose parents are life-wreckingly damaging but can’t bring themselves to walk away. In data cited in Anna Russell’s excellent deep dive on this subject in the New Yorker in 2024, 27% of Americans are said to be estranged from a relative, while in Britain, charities estimate that 20% of families are affected by estrangement. These numbers don’t seem to me either excessive or surprising.
\nAnd there are half measures. These, too, have helpful handles with followings on TikTok. One is called “grey rocking”, the practice of staying in contact with toxic family members while not being drawn in by their provocations, instead simply nodding, smiling and going along with what is being said, while taking none of it in and remaining entirely emotionally uninvolved. (It strikes me that large numbers of men nail grey rocking without even realising it.)
\nBut back to the Beckhams. It is a measure of Brooklyn’s limitations that the method via which he chose to attack his parents for living on Instagram was a series of Instagram stories. Anyone seeking further insight into the Peltzes, meanwhile, might enjoy spending half an hour browsing the counter lawsuit filed by Brooklyn and Nicola’s wedding planners in response to the suit Nelson Peltz, Nicola’s father, brought against them. Put it this way: as personality types go, the Peltzes seem every bit as lovely – even more lovely, perhaps – as the Beckhams.
\nElsewhere, there are early indications that accused parents are fighting back. Doormat Mom is a social media account set up by 59-year-old Laura Wellington after her daughter failed to invite her to her wedding and which now has 140,000 followers across various platforms. “Were you a really good parent who did the best they could and yet your child has decided to be an ungrateful little bastard as an adult?” says Wellington in the opening video. “We need to connect here. We need to support each other, and we need to talk about it.” Victoria and David: your support group awaits.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nNo one is suggesting the sort of decision Brooklyn made is taken lightly, but support networks and the language of therapy seem to lessen the sting
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The presentation of the Men's collections runs from 16 to 21 January 2018. 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The HFPA was disbanded in 2023 after allegations of racism, but 95 former members retained voting rights and on Monday, the show went on.
\nAnd what a year it was for the second Penske Media Golden Globe awards, featuring not only a commercial tie-in with the betting tool Polymarket (“integrated branding and real-time market insights designed to enhance audience engagement”) but a new category for poor-relation-to-the-screen, best podcast. Against stiff competition from Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy and The Mel Robbins Podcast, the award went to Amy Poehler’s Good Hang, a show in which she yuks it up with her friends to remind us how important Tina Fey was in their partnership.
\n\nIn the TV awards, meanwhile, there was well-earned recognition for the actor and thought leader Stephen Graham, for Adolescence, his Netflix show exploring the complexities of men’s rights, and I was happy HBO’s The Pitt won best drama, even though you still need a VPN to watch it in Britain. (I was also happy Michelle Williams won for Dying for Sex, a hugely under-rated FX show that wasn’t helped by its terrible title.)
\nOne thing that struck me as the camera swept over the audience during standup comedian Nikki Glaser’s affable opening monologue: is there any circumstance on Earth that would make these people skip this thing entirely? The HFPA was a joke, the awards then and now are a joke, but short of some kind of Pompeii-like event reducing nominees on the red carpet to ash, we have to assume they’ll keep turning up in their finery. I know, I know; it’s about the work.
\nA low-key flex in New York used to be to say you saw Hamilton when it was on at the Public (I didn’t see it at the Public). The newest version of this is to claim you saw Oh, Mary!, the hit Broadway show that recently transferred to London, when it opened downtown at the Lucille Lortel theatre. (I didn’t see it at the Lucille Lortel. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything before everyone else saw it and told me to go.)
\nI did, however, see Oh, Mary! this week at the Trafalgar theatre in the West End and it made me so happy I got off the tube at the wrong stop on the way home. Cole Escola’s starring role as a depressed, alcoholic, former cabaret star, Mary Todd Lincoln, is reprised by Mason Alexander Park and any concern that we’d missed the only version worth seeing evaporates in the first five minutes.
\nNot everyone feels this way. Escola tells the story of hapless folk from New Jersey showing up to the Broadway production anticipating a sombre engagement with American history rather than a series of jokes about Abraham Lincoln being gay, and huffing out after five minutes. I don’t know if that has happened in London yet.
\nBut while the show here is sold out, there’s no question Oh, Mary! hasn’t had the same impact that it had in New York, partly, perhaps, because the American history part is off-putting and partly because London, in my view, is a much straighter town. I have heard more than one puzzled or disapproving reaction from Londoners who might have been happier at the Michael Jackson musical or Wicked. On which score I feel towards Oh, Mary! a certain combative protectiveness that makes me think if you didn’t like it, it wasn’t for you in the first place.
\n![\"Farage](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/3c5aff60d491deb1172ec6b50fcfda5034343780/0_0_8192_5464/1000.jpg\")
\n If it’s risible to show up at the Golden Globes, how do you like AARP’s Movies for Grownups awards featuring – no stage too obscure, no appearance too lowly as long as there are cameras to record it – the former leading man George Clooney. It’s quite the turn up, isn’t it, that Noah Wyle, ever the bridesmaid on ER back in the day, has leapt over Clooney with his role in The Pitt, while Clooney is reduced to moping about in ponderous films by Greta Gerwig’s sad-looking husband, Noah Baumbach.
\nAnyway at least someone at AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) liked Jay Kelly and this week Clooney showed up on stage to collect an award for it, during the course of which he defended Paul Dano from something Quentin Tarantino had said about … Oh, I can’t even bring myself to get into this.
\nWhat interests me is the AARP itself, an organisation of immense if invisible cultural reach in the US. Like Costco magazine (circulation: 15.4m), AARP’s publications arm is one of the few juggernaut media enterprises that isn’t slowly circling the drain. It is a behemoth of a brand that reaches 38 million members in the US, has the highest circulation of any print media in the country and a readership at least partly made up of people with money. I take it all back; smart move by Clooney.
\n![\"Mandelson](\"https://media.guim.co.uk/740225d93af44383609997c3c9d2a0788c348a30/0_0_2988_1992/1000.jpg\")
\n I wouldn’t take a kid to see Oh, Mary!, obviously, but I’d also hesitate to take anyone under 15 to see Sondheim. Clever programming at the Barbican, however, means I might do it. News this week of a forthcoming production of Sunday in the Park with George featuring Wicked co-stars, Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey, is a clever piece of programming for the theatre’s 2027 season that will be even harder to get tickets for than Kenneth Branagh’s forthcoming The Tempest at the RSC.
\nI have a soft spot for Grande after being made to sit in a room for what seemed like decades while Sam and Cat played in the background. But even the attraction of a former Nickelodeon star won’t take the edge off this hard sell. Sondheim is long, and to get my kids out of the house I’ll have to lie about the running time, again, despite poor results in this area. I told my kids Operation Mincemeat was only 80 minutes long and by the end of the pushing-towards-three-hour-long production on a school night there were some very cranky faces indeed.
\nLovely to read about Alan Rickman in all the tributes collated by the Guardian this week to mark the 10th anniversary of his death. It sent me back to his diaries, one of the great reading experiences, in which Rickman is waspish, indignant, very pissy indeed and wonderfully, warmly entertaining. One anecdote that stayed with me: after attending a party thrown by the Guardian in the late 1990s, Rickman remarked that, even for an actor accustomed to this kind of thing, he had never seen a group of people more uncontrollably drunk and disorderly. Proud, yes, surprised, no.
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A system that sends paramilitaries on to the streets will observe no limits, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","body":"A few years ago, towards the end of the second Obama administration, a friend and her wife flew back to New York from a holiday in Mexico, landing for a connecting flight in South Carolina. At immigration, the officer looked from one to the other, asked their relation to one another and on receiving the reply, made a noise of disgust – “ugh”. On the pretext that American citizens can’t go through the same lane as a spouse on a green card (not true), he sent them to the back of the line, causing them to miss their connection. But that’s not the point of the story.
\nMy friend is a white Australian who is generally conflict-averse; her wife is a Japanese-American who can stop traffic with a single, hard stare, and who teaches in the South Bronx, where many of her students have been harassed by law enforcement since the day they were born. As trouble got under way, my friend kicked off like a good’un, swearing and muttering sarcastically in the Australian style, while her wife shot her desperate, angry looks. Shut up. Shut Up. SHUT UP.
\nI have been thinking about this incident a lot since the death last week of Renee Good, the Minnesota woman fatally shot by an ICE agent. The use of deadly force was justified on grounds of self-defence, according to the US administration. That explanation doesn’t appear to be borne out by the videos, but the thing I also keep thinking about is the way in which, immediately prior to the shots being fired, Good and her wife, Becca, addressed the agent. “You wanna come at us?” says Becca, in the agent’s general direction. “I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy.” When the officer approaches Good’s open car window, she smiles, addresses him as “dude” and says mockingly: “I’m not mad at you.”
\nIt goes without saying that in a healthy democracy, mouthing off at authority shouldn’t constitute putting oneself in mortal danger; sarcasm is my stress response, too. But this assumes that civic norms apply. This is the US, where even in normal times use of deadly force by cops isn’t an infrequent occurrence – a conservative estimate by the University of Illinois puts the average number of people killed annually by US law enforcement at 600. We may not yet have all the facts surrounding what motivated the ICE agent to use deadly force, but on the evidence of the videos alone, it seems to me apparent that both Good and her wife made a single, terrible, understandable miscalculation: they underestimated the danger they were in.
\nSome commentary on the right has suggested that the jocular tone adopted by the women is an indication of their political glibness; that they were somehow “playing” at protest. I don’t think this is true. It did, however, suggest a sheltered understanding of the country they’re living in, and one that isn’t unique to their side. The invasion of the US Capitol on January 6 by crowds, some dressed for a costume party, resulted in the death of Ashli Babbitt, the Maga martyr who was shot and killed by police. Participating in a violent mob invading the seat of government isn’t the same thing as driving away from law enforcement. But in both cases, apparently deeply felt political convictions were expressed with a levity – a larky tone of protest – premised on assumptions of safety.
\nIt’s a devastating misapprehension. A few years after my friend’s trouble in South Carolina, I was pulled out of the passport line at JFK airport and made to sit in a side room for questioning. My indignation was total. I swore, I carried on. As my two toddlers screamed, I felt the phrase “I’m a British citizen!” bubble up through my system like a character from a Paul Scott novel. After three hours with no toilet or phone access, I was released to go home, whereupon I relayed the story to my partner at the time as if returning from war, a conquering hero.
\nShe looked at me coldly. “You’re a fucking idiot,” she said, when I told her how rude I’d been. “What if they’d asked you where the girls’ father is? And why aren’t you travelling with their birth certificates?” I couldn’t believe that I was getting grief off this person who has never met a cab driver she couldn’t start a fight with – but then, her antecedents were murdered by Nazis. She understands a real threat when she sees it. Nothing should take away from Good’s courage or convictions. But there are lessons to be learned: a system that puts paramilitaries on US streets to round people up willy-nilly should be approached by those protesting with the understanding that there is nothing – nothing – it won’t do to shut them up.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
\nA line has been crossed, and it’s vital to understand that. A system that sends paramilitaries on to the streets will observe no limits
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A system that sends paramilitaries on to the streets will observe no limits, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes","showQuotedHeadline":true,"showLiveIndicator":false,"sublinks":[],"mainImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/aa736a17ba73d7cd0727a0397d3924812fb075ee/944_280_3925_3140/master/3925.jpg?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=49f344416f02043f690a11da2db7713c","height":3140,"width":3925,"orientation":"landscape","credit":"Stephen Maturen/Getty Images","altText":"Federal Agents Descend On Minneapolis For Immigration Enforcement OperationsMINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA - JANUARY 14: A portrait of Renee Good lies at a memorial near the site where she was killed a week ago, on January 14, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Good was fatally shot by an immigration enforcement agent during an incident in south Minneapolis on January 7. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)","cleanCredit":"Photograph: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images"},"cutoutImage":{"urlTemplate":"https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/06/Emma-Brockes,-L.png?w=#{width}&h=#{height}&q=#{quality}&fit=bounds&sig-ignores-params=true&s=c48b57da90097f52354f583e3159eed0"},"renderedItemProd":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/14/renee-good-shooting-dissent-fatal-trump-america?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemBeta":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/14/renee-good-shooting-dissent-fatal-trump-america?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"renderedItemDebug":{"minBridgetVersion":"1.11.1","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/14/renee-good-shooting-dissent-fatal-trump-america?dcr=apps&edition=uk"},"cardDesignType":"Comment","correspondingTags":[],"type":"Article","importance":0},{"title":"Want to scare a Hollywood star? Just set up a fundraiser in their name","rawTitle":"Want to scare a Hollywood star? Just set up a fundraiser in their name","item":{"trailText":"More horrifying to a celebrity than any scandal is having the public believe they’re down on their luck. Just ask Mickey Rourke, says Emma Brockes","body":"It’s a tough time to be famous in Hollywood, what with dwindling respect levels for movie stars and the inability of anyone under 35 to recognise that George Clooney’s lips weren’t always that thin or that Brad Pitt, at one time, was a thing. Add to this a painful new pitfall for celebrities; not defending their unremarkable offspring from accusations of nepotism or explaining how big a role Ozempic has played in their new look, but rather the small, horrifying possibility that in the event of a bad year, some enterprising fan or assistant will whip up a GoFundMe for them.
\nMost of us know instinctively that there’s nothing worse for business than admitting that business is bad. Unless you’re a parent soliciting donations to fund your Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, or have just committed an act of heroism and are rightfully in line for a reward, being the beneficiary of a whip-round by strangers is not a good thing at all. With this in mind, one can only sympathise with Mickey Rourke, the latest dwindling star to fall victim to an act of public charity, who this week was forced to issue an extremely Rourkian statement denying all knowledge of a fundraising appeal set up in his name by one of his manager’s enterprising young assistants.
\nWith a baffled air and cradling his dog, Rourke popped up on social media to put the record straight. He had, he conceded, done “a really terrible job in managing my career,” and, per reports, had indeed been fighting with his former landlords. But, he said, “if I needed money, I wouldn’t ask for no fucking charity. I’d rather stick a gun up my ass and pull the trigger”. Well, quite. “Don’t give any money, and if you gave money, get it back … it’s humiliating.”
\nAs humiliations go, Kevin Spacey has known worse. But in November last year, the 66-year-old felt compelled to issue a correction to the notion he was homeless, a misapprehension that arose from an interview published in the Telegraph in which he’d said, “I literally have no home”. Parsing Spacey’s meaning required one to understand that the word “literally” in this sentence was, per common usage, intended to mean “not literally”.
\nAfter the piece came out, the former actor got quite shirty, blaming the headline writer for quoting him out of context and saying, “I feel it would be disingenuous of me to allow you to believe that I am homeless in the colloquial sense”. Yes, that old causer of confusion, the “colloquial sense”. Spacey may be unemployable as an actor, but his feel for public relations is still keen enough to know that, even by the standards of someone accused of sexual misconduct, this latest development was not a good look. “As we know,” he said, “there are many people … who are indeed actually living on the streets or in their cars or are in terrible financial situations – and my heart goes out to them.” Meanwhile, he claimed he had received thousands of offers from fans to move into their spare rooms, and for those of us who can’t stand Kevin Spacey, it’s hard to think of a more exquisite comeuppance – worse than prison; worse than appearing in season two of Ryan Murphy’s All’s Fair – than an offer of charity from the little people.
\nWhich brings me to this: you could weaponise this phenomenon, you really could. We must be mere moments away from someone prominent suing the originator of their GoFundMe or Kickstarter campaign for putting it about that they’re finished. Wouldn’t it be a brilliant and almost unprovable piece of defamation disguised as a charitable act? The reputational damage is total. There was nothing funny about the fires in LA last year, except this: an extremely powerful agent who represents some of the biggest names in Hollywood and whose beautiful, multimillion-dollar house was burned down, discovered that their assistant had whipped up a GoFundMe to help them and couldn’t move fast enough to shut that shit down.
\nFor Rourke, meanwhile, at least there’s an upside. Clad in a pink shirt, eyes skimming this way and that, he struck an appealing figure in his pushback video. My first thought on watching it was: I wonder how big a role Ozempic has played in his new look? And my second was that he seems like a good egg, smiling wryly at his own ridiculousness, rambling off topic in the style of the baffled old rocker, confused and amused and authentic. If I was a casting director, I’d call him.
\nEmma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
\nDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
\nMore horrifying to a celebrity than any scandal is having the public believe they’re down on their luck. Just ask Mickey Rourke
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