This photo is from this time a year ago, when I was off on holiday and also recovering from shingles. I’m not going to subject you to a picture of me at my worst (which was basically a year ago on Wednesday just gone) but suffice it to say that it was a really rubbish time for me personally and professionally.
There have been a lot of challenges over the last year, but standing here at the moment I’m pretty proud of myself for finding a way through and out the other side. I remember how beaten down I was this time last year and I’m pretty sure I’m in a better place now. I don’t often talk about the various people in my life, but a lot of the fact that I’m happier now is down to them and their support in various ways, so today I want to say thank you to them for all they do for me and for believing in me – often more than I do myself!
I’m back in podcast land for this week’s Not a Book – with Wondery’s series about Michael Jackson.
It’s nearly 15 years since Michael Jackson died – which felt really shocking to me, even though I know logically that it must be that long ago because of where I was living and what I was doing when the news happened. It would be understating it to say that Jackson’s legacy is complex, and for those of people who can remember parts of his career there probably some complicated feelings. But there’s also now a whole generation who don’t remember Jackson at all. And I think Wondery’s Think Twice does a really good job of setting out the whole story – the child stardom into solo supremacy and beyond but also the accusations of child sexual abuse.
Obviously the content of this is pretty grim at times so bear that in mind before you listen – it has a lot of graphic details from the court transcripts when you get to the abuse allegation episodes. The presenters are Jay Smooth, who presented a hip hop radio show in New York for nearly 30 years and is now a cultural commentator, and Leon Neyfakh, who did the Slowburn series on Watergate and the Clinton Impeachment and then went on to present Fiasco (all for Wondery). So it’s got a mix of music expertise but also investigative journalism that works really well. I think everyone of my age or older has an opinion on Michael Jackson, but I think this is a pretty even handed series – it doesn’t minimise his musical impact and legacy, but it also doesn’t minimise the allegations. I learned some stuff – despite having watched Leaving Neverland back when that came out and Janet Jackson’s documentary about her career – which also touches on what growing up in that family was like and having also read a bunch of stuff about Jackson over the years.
It’s a ten part series – if you’re not a Wondery plus member the final episode drops today (the 17th) on all the usual podcast platforms. If you do have wondery plus (which I do) you can get the ad-free versions – and you could have binged it already like I did!
The NFL season gets underway this Thursday with Detroit Lions at reigning Super Bowl champions Kansas City Chiefs, so to get you in the mood today I’m talking about the the new Netflix documentary about the University of Florida Gators that dropped on Netflix about ten days ago and which I watched across two nights this week.
The four part series is part of Netflix’s Untold strand and looks at the hot run that the Gators went on in the mid-2000s under coach Urban Meyer and with star quarterback Tim Tebow. It looks at how the team went from massive underdogs to double champions – and how it could have been more. There are sit down interviews with all the key figures and lots of match and locker room footage.
I’m an NFL watcher (although not really college football so much) so it’s maybe not a surprise that I would be interested in this, but why should you watch this if you’re not an American football fan? Well Him Indoors is emphatically not an NFL person, and he came in midway through episode 1 and got hooked and wouldn’t let me watch it without him. And I think that’s because it’s such an interesting slice of culture and sport. In the UK we have teenage sports stars coming through all the time – but they go into teams where the other players are a range of ages and experience. In college football everyone is between 18 and about 22 and in this period they’re also amateurs – they’re playing the sport alongside studying in the hopes that it will propel them in to the NFL. They’re also the rock stars of their universities – with students following them around campus and tens of thousands turning out to watch them play: the Gators’ stadium, known as The Swamp, has a capacity of nearly 90,000 – which is about the same size as Wembley Stadium here in the UK. So these guys playing for the Gators are basically like premier league footballers, but without the salary and while students. And if any of you remember what the rugby team at your university got up to for initiation (it’s always the rugby team, don’t know why) you’ll have a sense of some of the stuff going on in the locker rooms and the sort of ethos. It’s absolutely wild – and a little bit disturbing at times.
In fact a lot of this series of Untold looks pretty good – they’ve got a doc about another college football star – Jonny Manziel – and one about the Balco doping scandal that I think I’ll watch, and one about Jake Paul which I’m pretty sure I won’t!
As I wrote about Crazy for You the other Sunday, rather than Dr Semmelweiss, I thought I’d redress the balance this week and add a bit of Mark Rylance to the blog. As I said last week, I think he’s the best actor I’ve ever seen in person and I count Wolf Hall as the start of when he started to cross the path of non-theatre people.
Wolf Hall is the adaptation of the first two books of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. Thomas Cromwell rose from obscurity to be Henry VIII’s chief minister and then fell from grace after the failure of Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves. The mini series opens as Cardinal Wolsey is about to fall from power because of his failure to get the King’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled and follows Cromwell’s rise to power up until the death of Anne Boleyn. You see his origins in flashback and how he exploits the rivalries and networks of the Tudor Court.
I studied this period at A-Level and I can tell you it is some acheivement to make Thomas Cromwell a sympathetic figure, and yet the combination of Mantel’s writing and Rylance’s acting does it. I still haven’t read the final book in the trilogy because I’m not sure I want to see it all fall apart – and I’m struggling so much with reading things that are not cheerful or that I don’t know end well at the moment (by which I basically mean the last three years). When Hilary Mantel died almost a year ago, Peter Kominsky who directed this said that the script for the final book was underway, but there’s still no news on whether it is happening, and given that it was meant to film this year and Rylance has been in the West End all summer you can’t help but feel that it may not year have happened. But after the way they did Anne Boleyn’s beheading, I’m not sure I can bear to to see how they would do Cromwell’s execution anyway. We rewatched the series recently and I had to look away for that section.
Anyway, that aside, it’s well worth watching if you like historical dramas – and probably easier to watch it than read the books – which are very long and although beautifully written (two Booker wins and nominated for the third too) are not light reading. And you can play spot the locations too – I’ve been to Montacute House, Lacock Abbey and Barrington Court which are among the National Trust Houses that feature in the progamme, and the photo below is the steps leading up to the Chapter House at Wells Cathedral which we visited in January.
If you’re in the UK you can watch Wolf Hall on the BBC iPlayer, if you’re elsewhere, it’ll likely be on whichever streaming service gets BBC or PBS programmes where you are.
It’s the August bank holiday weekend here in the UK, which is one of the most popular times to have your wedding – in fact one of my co-workers got married yesterday. So today’s not a book is one of my favourite films set around weddings – the late 90s Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore classic: The Wedding Singer.
It’s 1985 and Robbie Hart (Sandler) is the singer with a covers band in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Their main gig is weddings, and as the film opens he’s performing at one the week before his own wedding. Newly employed at the venue is waitress Julia Sullivan (Barrymore), who Robbie meets during his break and promises to sing at her wedding which she is just beginning to organise. But it seems that they may both have chosen the wrong people to get engaged to…
I have watched this film more times than I care to mention – and it’s one of those films where if I come across it on the TV I can’t help but stop to watch it. It was in Amazon Prime a month or so back and I watched it again then. In fact, while I was writing this paragraph I went back to see if it was still on Prime so I could watch it again (it’s not, it’s back to being a rental, gnash). I can recite along with large parts of it because it was one of about half a dozen films that my sister and I had on heavy rotation on Saturday nights when we were teenagers – it’s in a group of films* where even now if I send a line from them to her and she’ll message be back the next. It’s one of a couple of Drew Barrymore movies that I love but it’s also maybe the only Adam Sandler film I’ve watched more than once.
There was a musical of the film made in 2006, which falls into the category of shows I’ve never seen but still know all the lyrics to – because it hit Broadway during the period where I was deeply into the BroadwayWorld message board and when YouTube was starting to get videos of clips from TV shows – which happened to include their Tony Award performance. Although the soundtrack to the musical is iconic, the musical has an original score – except for Grow Old With You which is from the movie – which I think does a great job of capturing the energy of the 80s songs of the movie. So enjoy their opening number – It’s Your Wedding Day – from the Tony’s and see what I mean.
Anyway, I love it to the point where I find it hard to believe that there can be any one out there who hasn’t watched it, but if you haven’t and you like the sort of romances that I write about on this blog and you like romantic comedy movies, then you should definitely seek it out at your earliest convenience.
Have a great Sunday and enjoy the rest of your long weekend if you have one.
*The other films in this basket include Bridget Jones’s Diary, Drive Me Crazy, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill and on the TV front large swaths of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I actually saw two shows in the West End in four days last week, so I guess I could have written about either of them, but as Dr Semmelweiss is a limited run ending at the start of October (and has been selling well so if you don’t already have tickes you might not get them) and Crazy for You is under two months into a six month run, I’ve gone for the musical. Also much as I think Mark Rylance is the greatest actor I’ve ever seen live, I just love Gershwin’s music.
So this is a revival of the early 1990s musical, which in itself was based on the 1930 Ethel Merman vehicle Girl Crazy. The original Broadway production won the Tony, the original West End production won the Olivier, and I suspect this one will probably get some nominations this year. It originated at the Chichester Festival (one year I will make it to Chichester, so much good stuff starts there!) and has come into town with the four leads intact (although I saw the Standby Bobby who was performing for the first time and who was excellent).
To the plot – which feels like it could have come straight from a Fred and Ginger film to be honest: Our hero is Bobby,a wannabe dancer who is working in his family’s bank because he hasn’t been able to persuade any one to give him a role on stage. At the start of the show he tries to convince theatre impresario Bella Zangler to give him a chance without any success. Then his mother appears to tell him that he needs to take over her share of the bank and to do this he needs to go to Nevada to foreclose on a theatre in the town of Deadrock. Deadrock is a mining town that has seen better days, filled with cowboys and one woman – Polly – daughter of the theatre owner. Bobby arrives in town, falls in love with Polly at first sight and comes up with a plan to save the theatre, but when she finds out he’s the man sent by the bank, she suspects it’s a trick and won’t give him the time of day. And so Bobby decides to pretend to be Bella Zangler and sends for his friends the Zangler chorus girls to put on a show to save the theatre. It’s all going reasonably well – I mean except for the bit where Polly thinks Bobby is someone else, until the real Zangler turns up in town to see what his dancers are up to.
And that’s a rough outline of some of the key points of the first act, and as much as I’m going to tell you so I don’t ruin all the fun of anyone going to see it. It’s got a bunch of Gershwin’s most recognisable songs – pilfered from all over his catalouge – like Embraceable You, Someone to Watch Over Me, I Got Rhythm and three from my favourite Fred and Ginger movie Shall We Dance – the title number, Slap that Bass and They Can’t Take That Away From Me.
It’s quite an old school plot and it’s a quite old fashioned musical in many ways and there were what sounded to me some fairly ropey American accents , but it’s directed by Susan Stroman so the dance routines are absolutely on point – with some wonderful tap dancing – as well as some great physical comedy and obviously the music is wonderful and they’ve got a nice big band to play it (in West End terms). If you like shows like Anything Goes, or the recent stage version of Top Hat, then this is a show for you.
Oh boy. I’m not even sure I can explain how excited I was about seeing the Freddie Mercury auction exhibition at Sothebys. Honestly. It was the one thing my sister and I wanted to do together this summer and it absolutely was everything we were hoping it would be.
I may have mentioned before that I am a big Queen fan, and I’m also too young (or not old enough?) to remember them when they were still performing. So I’ve done pretty much all of my fandom through the music and the documentaries (and the musical), which meant that when Mary Austen announced that she was selling basically everything Freddie had left her it was a Big Deal. Mary was his girlfriend during the early days of Queen and was one of his closest friends for the rest of his life. And now for about a month, you can go and look at what is up for sale.
I saw the David Bowie is… exhibtion at the V&A back in the day and had always vaguely wondered why there had never been an equivalent exhibition for Queen. This auction sale is the answer: Freddie himself kept hold of all of his stuff- and passed it on to Mary and she’s been looking after it ever since. Things like the jacket from the Bohemian Rhapsody keep when he sings “I see a little silhouetto of a man”:
And basically every other outfit you’ve ever seen him wear on stage, in a video or at a public appearance. The only exceptions I can think of are the yellow jacket from the Wembley 86 tour and the harlequin leotards. But everything else is here. The “prawn” costume from Its a Hard Life, the leather jacket from Radio Gaga, the suits from Barcelona and Great Pretender, the winged cat suits. The cat waistcoat.
And then there’s all the ephemera – white label pressings of singles and albums, hand written lyrics, photographs and contact sheets, the tour handbooks, the paperwork for Live Aid. My sister and I were wandering the the rooms with our mouths hanging open. It’s truly astonishing.
Then there’s the art and furniture. I’m going to predict that this is going to be popular not just with the Queen fans and music collectors but also the art collectors. Freddie was an art and design student and he loved beautiful things and had an eye for it. He was buying pieces from Sothebys himself back in the day. So there’s a Picasso and a Chagal and a wall of Goya drawings. Plus beautiful pieces of Japanese art and so much more. However much they think it’s going to make, I think it’ll be more.
So if you’re in London before the start of September, this is very much worth a visit. And it’s free.
Every now and again I write about a radio programme instead of a film or a show or a TV programme, and this is one of those weeks – although as I went to a recording in a theatre does it also count as a show? Anyway, the new series of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue starts on Radio Four this week, so I get to tell you about my night out watching them record two episodes in my home town back in June.
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue started in the 1970s as a parody of TV and radio panel games and has been running ever since. My parents were very much Radio Four people – and it was one of the 6.30 in the evening programmes that I started listening to when I was getting ready for bed when I was little (along with Just A Minute and The News Quiz) and I’ve been listening to ever since. There aren’t many of the original panel left now – it’s Jack Dee giving the panel silly things to do instead of Humphrey Littleton for example, but they’ve managed to replace them with people as funny as the originals.
I tried to figure out a way of describing what’s going on, but I couldn’t do it justice, so I’m just going to settle for giving you this clip from One Song to the Tune of Another because it’s always been one of my favourite rounds and it just sums up the whole show:
There are no winners, some of the games make no sense at all (Mornington Crescent for example) and despite the fact that there are singing games there is always at least one panelist who cannot sing at all (at my recording it was Milton Jones). As children we used to play the completely unconnected word game in the back of the car on the way home from after school lessons – with much complaining from my mum as my sister and I descended into lavatorial humour. Basically it’s one of the silliest ways you can spend half an hour and I’m really looking forward to hearing what makes the cut for the broadcast episode as each recording was at least an hour long.
If you’re in the UK you can listen to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on BBC Radio 4, or on the BBC Sounds app – the Northampton episodes start tomorrow, and several of the episodes in the series are already available. If you’re outside the UK, I’m hoping it appears on Sounds for you – but it may also be on some of the other podcast providers too.
This week has seen at the Proms to hear Beethoven and Elgar but also to the Barbican to see a new musical. I have more Proms to come – and they’re one offs – so today we’re talking about A Strange Loop.
A Strange Loop is a musical about a queer black Broadway theatre usher writing a musical about a queer black theatre usher writing a musical. Still with me? Good. Usher’s story is told by him and his six Thoughts, who are the inner voices in his head and also play all the other characters in the play. It’s very meta. It also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2020 and the Tony for best musical in 2021.
It’s a really powerful piece – and although I wasn’t sure where it was going or how it was going to end, it did come back around (yes, that’s a loop reference!) from a very bleak point about 20 minutes from the end. The music is great – I came out humming some of the songs and the cast are giving stellar performances. It is definitely not a show for younger audiences – there’s a warning that it’s not suitable for under 16s because of the themes it’s dealing with. So I’m not surprised that it’s on a limited run at the Barbican rather than in the West End. It’s definitely worth seeing if you’re a musical fan though – and I’m not sure when it will come around again. And of course there aren’t that many musicals that have won the Pulitzer – it’s the first since Hamilton, and one of only ten total. It runs until September 9.
A film this week and one that features Margot Robbie, but sadly not Barbie as I haven’t managed to get to the cinema to see that one yet. I’m sure I will though. Probably not as a double bill with Oppenheimer though because I’m not sure I can cope with Christopher Nolan at the moment.
So this is a dramatised version of true events – and is inspired by the real life sexual harrassment allegations made against Fox News boss Roger Ailes by women who worked there. Nicole Kidman plays Gretchen Carlson, who was the first to sue Ailes and Charlize Theron plays Megyn Kelly, who we see at the start of the film being insulted by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump for asking him about his offensive comments towards women. Margot Robbie plays Kayla, a composite character who is a young journalist who joins the newsroom and faces unwanted attentions fromAiles.
I think whether you followed the story at the time or not this is a compelling look at power dynamics in the work place and the pressures that women can face from men in positions of power. I’m not in the US so I don’t really have enough experience of watching Fox News to comment on how accurate the portrayals of Carlsson and Kelly are – except to say that Charlize Theron is unrecognisable (Him Indoors didn’t realise it was her at all!) but the make up teams won the Oscar and the Bafta for their work – and Theron got an Oscar nomination – as did Margot Robbie.* It is a bit of a tough watch – but it is very good – and if you’re planning on doing some of the other films about famous/powerful men who have faced sexual harassment allegations – like She Said (which I’m waiting to hit the movie channels) then this is definitely one to watch.
And because I hate ending posts on a down note – all the reports that I’ve heard about Barbie so far have been favourable, so I really am going to try and get to see that soon!
Happy Sunday!
They lost to Renee Zellweger’s Judy Garland and Laura Dern in A Marriage Story respectively.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 