When The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos’s absurd take on a period drama, landed in 2018, it earned critical raves for its incisive rupture of conventions, and its recasting of a historical shadow – Britain’s dowdy, gout-ridden Queen Anne in 1711 – into the linchpin of a lesbian love and political intrigue triangle. Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz were both nominated for best supporting actress for their...
For Aisha Dee, even idyllic places are shaped by codes that dictate who belongs. When she was growing up on Australia’s Gold Coast, strangers would stop her because of how she looked. She’s never forgotten it. “1990s Gold Coast was the heyday of Movie World and Dreamworld and honestly it was a very special place to grow up,” says the actor, who has an Anglo Australian mother and African American...
Afew years ago, when he was still a couple of years off his 50th birthday, Billy Crudup liked to half-joke that his 50s would be his time. It looked as if he would be proved right, at least until a global pandemic stopped his career – along with everyone else’s in his business – in its tracks, leaving Crudup at home in his New York apartment trying to master making home-cooked pizza (“absolutely...
The Bandersnatch boy is back. After the innovative-if-not-wholly-unprecedented interactive standalone episode under the Black Mirror umbrella, Charlie Brooker’s anthology series (created with co-producer Annabel Jones) has returned for a proper run. Season five comprises three episodes – each a discrete story set five minutes from now – that continue in Black Mirror’s lightly terrifying dystopian...
Jon Ronson’s new podcast, The Last Days of August, is a sparing, delicate and at times harrowing series, ostensibly about the suicide of the porn star August Ames, who killed herself in December 2017, at the age of 23. Ronson first delved into the adult entertainment business with his previous podcast The Butterfly Effect, which offered a sympathetic picture of an industry that many within it...
The actor Simon Barnes, best known for playing Tinky Winky in the BBC children’s series Teletubbies, has died aged 52. The father of three, who once described being in the Teletubbies as being “a bit like the Beatles or Take That of television”, died four days after celebrating his birthday. Barnes was a trained ballet dancer and choreographer, but found fame as the tallest Teletubby who always...
In late January it was announced that Nintendo had ceased production of the Wii U console. The follow-up machine to the hugely successful Wii had sold fewer than 15m units worldwide since its launch in 2012. PlayStation 4 sold more in a year. Wii sold more than 100m in its lifetime. What happened? How did Nintendo, one of the oldest and most respected companies in the video game industry, get it...
Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play is a monologue disguised as a series of breakup phone calls in which we hear the anguish of a woman being left by her partner. Using the telephone as a metaphor – the cut or crossed lines a mirror to the couple’s emotional disconnect – it is not just a dramatic experiment in voice but a painfully human play about being desperately, frantically, in love with someone as...
When news broke last week that comedian Joe Lycett had been reported to the police for a routine in his touring show, the joke was very much on the offended punter. “Imagine someone calling the police over a joke they didn’t like? Snowflakes everywhere,” tweeted Lycett’s fellow comic Janey Godley, while the Spectator fulminated: “We need to kick the cops out of comedy.” But where there’s comedy...
A letter from Andrew Lloyd Webber, read on stage at the closing night of Cinderella, suggested that opening his new musical during the pandemic “might have been a costly mistake”. The musical finished its run at the Gillian Lynne theatre in London on Sunday after heavy criticism for the way in which some of its workforce had learned of its closure on social media. Boos could be heard in the...