The Man City captain turns to podcasting; Radio 4 gets deep on AI; into the woods with the team behind Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding; and poet Ian McMillan hymns the mundane

You’ll Never Beat Kyle Walker | BBC Sounds
The Artificial Human (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The Case of the Tiny Suit/Case
The Beauty of Everyday Things (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds

Launching a football podcast at the end of the season is a plucky move. You might have the balls to do so, as it were, if you captained a team who’d just won the Premier League title four times on the trot, and were expected to win the FA Cup just before your show’s premiere.

Balls indeed. You’ll Never Beat Kyle Walker arrived on BBC Sounds four days after his club, Manchester City, lost to Manchester United in a game described by the Guardian’s chief sports writer, Barney Ronay, as “a hungover performance”. This fact is conveniently left unsaid by podcast presenter Chris Hughes, the chirpy former Love Island contestant turned serial BBC sports host. Instead, Walker is called captain of the European champions, which he was on Wednesday, but isn’t now (this year’s Champions League final, between Dortmund and Real Madrid, is tonight). “The boffins at the BBC have spent months talking about what we could do in his series,” Hughes continues, laddishly, “but in the end, all we wanted to do was talk football and take the listeners inside the life of a serial winner.”

Continue reading...

💾

© Composite: Matt McNulty - The FA/The FA via Getty Images

💾

© Composite: Matt McNulty - The FA/The FA via Getty Images

This excruciatingly revealing reality show is so extreme it’s hard to believe that what you’re watching is the truth – and maybe you’re not

Hard to trust a standup comedian, isn’t it? Part of the job – the main part, really – is trying to convince people that you’re delivering your material spontaneously. Forget how meticulously scripted it is. Forget that it has been carefully crafted over a period of several months, and that it will be delivered word for word, night after night, for more months to come. An audience needs to think that you’re coming up with it in the moment or it’s over.

And very few standups are as skilled at this as Jerrod Carmichael. Always an eloquent and thoughtful performer, his 2022 special Rothaniel managed to change the way we talk about the entire form. In it, Carmichael came out as gay, and worried about how his mother would receive the news. Filmed in tight closeup, his routine appeared to dissolve completely as it went along. Vast, yawning pauses opened up between his words. A few members of the audience started offering encouragement to him, initiating a discussion that carried it along to its death.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: HBO/2024 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. HBO® and all related programs are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.

💾

© Photograph: HBO/2024 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. HBO® and all related programs are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.

Promoting his book at Hay festival, comedian says his mother and grandparents’ flight from Nazi Germany affected later generations

David Baddiel has said he makes comedy to process the intergenerational trauma passed on through the experiences of his mother and grandparents of fleeing the Holocaust.

Baddiel’s mother was born in Nazi Germany and arrived in the UK as a baby in 1939 after her father was persecuted during the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

💾

© Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Her literary debut was a smash-hit tale of female self-discovery. As it gets its long-awaited television debut, the author talks breakups, Bridget Jones and why Ian McEwan gets an easier ride than she does

A few minutes into my chat with Candice Carty-Williams, she receives a text message. “It’s Emerald Fennell,” she says, stealing a glance at her phone and smiling. “She’s one of the new friends that I’ve made.”

Of course Carty-Williams’s friendship circle has expanded to include Oscar-winning writers. Since the 2019 publication of her debut novel, Queenie, the 34-year-old has become one of Britain’s buzziest new authors. The story of Queenie Jenkins, a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman who seeks comfort in all the wrong places following a messy breakup with her long-term, white boyfriend, was an overnight phenomenon. It won book of the year at the British Book awards (making Carty-Williams the first Black author to do so), while reviewers praised it as both a “smart and breezy comic debut” and “astutely political”. Writing in Time magazine, Afua Hirsch said Carty-Williams had “taken a black woman’s story and made it a story of the age”.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

💾

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Hundreds of Beavers is an indie film made in six weeks for $150,000. It's like a modern combination of 20s and 30s slapstick films and live-action Looney Tunes. It's currently available on Apple and Amazon streaming platforms. A 19th century trapper battles nature and wildlife (depicted by people wearing mascot costumes) to win the hand of a furrier's daughter. It's filled with hundreds of gags. Here's the trailer, the opening, and a clip showing the costumes.

It’s brimming with confidence, bursting with enthusiasm and totally anarchic. What other show could go from quoting Marxist Pakistani poets to covering nu-metallers Hoobastank?

In the three years since this all-female, all-Muslim punk-band sitcom first aired, We Are Lady Parts has very much lived up to the creative, reproductive connotations of that title. Writer-director Nida Manzoor has further spawned a well-received debut feature, the kung fu coming-of-ager Polite Society, and star Anjana Vasan’s fruitful career has produced the Bafta-winning Black Mirror episode Demon ’79, an Olivier-winning stage turn opposite Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire, and a starring role in Brit-com flick, Wicked Little Letters. These are busy women, but they’ve managed to get the band back together anyway, and Lady Parts are once more ready to rock your living room.

We find them in the tour van, rounding off “a magical summer of gigs” and planning to “lay down our legacy” by recording an album with legendary producer, Dirty Mahmood (Anil Desai). First, though, they’ve got to find the money for studio time and that won’t be easy, with band manager Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse) struggling to book paying gigs and punk-purist Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey) determined not to sell out.

We Are Lady Parts series two aired on Channel 4 and is available online

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Peacock/Saima Khalid/WTTV Limited/Universal International Studios/Channel 4

💾

© Photograph: Peacock/Saima Khalid/WTTV Limited/Universal International Studios/Channel 4

Late-night host discussed end of Trump’s hush-money trial and public support from ex-president’s sons

Jimmy Kimmel took aim at Donald Trump and the end of his hush-money trial on last night’s edition of his late-night show.

On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host spoke about the former president’s New York City trial, where he faces multiple charges, which is coming to an end as the jury deliberates. Trump must stay in the courthouse to “sit there for hours farting next to the vending machine”.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: YouTube

💾

© Photograph: YouTube

The star hopes for some more of that Book Club magic although she’s the weakest link in a trio buoyed by Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard

The many gasps that met the $100m-plus box office total for 2018’s Book Club were not quite shared by all. The film, a frothy comedy led by four women over the age of 65, might have been an outlier at the time but it proved that once again, when smartly catered to, underserved audiences will come out en masse, a more inevitable result than many seem to think. When Bridesmaids proved this with younger women back in 2011, the industry was lethargic in its response, a wave of adjacent green lights failing to come as expected but Book Club had an instant impact, a string of grey-hued imitators in its wake.

But luck ran out a little faster than expected. Jane Fonda’s 80 for Brady and Diane Keaton’s Poms both fizzled upon release before even a Book Club sequel couldn’t lure audiences out, making less than a third of what its predecessor made. The reluctance of some older cinemagoers to return to the cinema as a result of the pandemic was an issue but so was positioning – nothing felt like an event compared with Book Club – and quality – nothing felt quite as sparky as it either. Keaton, who recently travelled to the UK for a British spin on the formula with Arthur’s Whisky, is trying her luck again with Summer Camp, a similarly lightweight tale of underused older female actors having fun on a bigger stage than they have become accustomed to.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

💾

© Photograph: Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

Her wildly successful sitcom about a Muslim punk band is back, better than before – and features the Nobel laureate in a Stetson. This time round, the writer-director is more confident than ever

When it came to penning the second series of We Are Lady Parts, Nida Manzoor started with a song. “All I knew was that it was going to be called Malala Made Me Do It,” she says. Next, she did what she has always done: she took it to her brother and sister, Shez and Sanya – who also co-wrote the songs for the first series of Manzoor’s gloriously idiosyncratic, spoof-laden sitcom about an all-female Muslim punk band – and told them she wanted it to be in the style of … a barn-stomping western. “I listened to Steven Spielberg on Desert Island Discs and he was talking about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” she says, “and I became obsessed with that song. It’s so catchy, so full of storytelling. I thought I’d love to do this amazing hype track that all these western heroes get but do it about Malala Yousafzai. My siblings really ran with it.”

So much so that the finished song – Coen brothers-esque, extremely silly – features a cameo by Yousafzai as you’ve never seen her before. In a jewel-fringed white Stetson. On a horse. With an almost completely straight face. “I hadn’t thought I would actually get Malala,” Manzoor says, “but I saw her talking about her love of Fawlty Towers, which I didn’t expect. I guess I saw her as this very serious figure, but oh my gosh, she’s so funny.” Manzoor wrote Yousafzai a letter asking if she would come on board. “It’s very silly but she was so game and such a joy. She made everyone feel so comfortable on set. We had such a laugh.”

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones Photographer/Gareth Iwan Jones for The Observer

💾

© Photograph: Gareth Iwan Jones Photographer/Gareth Iwan Jones for The Observer

Lady Parts head for the recording studio – but new rivals are waiting in the wings. Plus: haunting memories resurface in The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Here’s what to watch this evening

10pm, Channel 4
Nida Manzoor’s rollicking comedy about an all-female Muslim punk band – complete with original bangers – is back for a second season, and Lady Parts have just finished a summer of touring. With a growing fanbase behind them, it’s time to put an album together, but the £200 profit they made won’t cover the studio time. However, bassist and newly qualified doctor Amina (Anjana Vasan) is in her “villain era” so can make anything happen. Then a rival band come to the fore with the undeniably cool name of Second Wife. Lady Parts, of course, support the sisterhood – and there’s room for more than one band of Muslim women in the industry … right? Great fun. Hollie Richardson

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Peacock/Saima Khalid/WTTV Limited/Universal International Studios/Channel 4

💾

© Photograph: Peacock/Saima Khalid/WTTV Limited/Universal International Studios/Channel 4

Our series on transformative theatrical discoveries continues with the moving 1984 show exploring our buttoned-up approach to mortality

I had been brought up in Newcastle where the RSC used to come for a season every year. I thought theatre was Shakespeare. But this was something else, this was magic.

The story was about all the officialdom and desperate politeness around death, everybody having to pretend they are absolutely fine. It made you laugh, and cry, so hard: Marcello Magni’s dextrous and inimitable clown routine in the office for registering births and deaths. Jos Houben making a flickering fire with his fingers. A scene by the grave with them slowly, sadly, sinking as they walked away across the churchyard to leave. Simon McBurney alone at the grave at a loss for words. We lost brilliant Marcello in 2022 and so A Minute Too Late now feels ever more poignant.

Blizzard is at 59E59 theatres, New York, 12-30 June.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

💾

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

From jobbing workers to familiar names, legions of entertainers are working well into their 70s and 80s. Why? Our writer uncovers an alarming story of shrinking budgets, axed royalties, misguided mortgages and paltry pensions

‘The budgets were fantastic,” says Alexei Sayle, remembering making shows with the BBC in the 1980s and 90s. “We’d always go over budget and they’d just say, ‘Oh well.’ Since then, there’s been a rerouting of funds away from the talent. It doesn’t affect the superstars but it certainly affects the foot soldiers. It’s a lot harder to make a living now.”

At the age of 71, the comedian, writer and actor is still working. He feels “the drive” to create and perform, rather than financial pressure, but does notice major changes. “If you made your money in the 70s and 80s, you’ve got a better chance of being well off,” he says. Terms then were “much fairer”, with artists benefiting from residuals rather than just one-off payments.

Continue reading...

💾

© Composite: Shutterstock/ Getty Images/ Murdo MacLeod

💾

© Composite: Shutterstock/ Getty Images/ Murdo MacLeod

From the love/hate setup and the must-dump boyfriend to the kooky mate and frantic finale this well-crafted love story hits all the classic romcom beats, just don’t expect fireworks

Based on Sophie Cousens’ novel of the same name, and adapted for the screen by the author, this opens with a twinkly tourism-office-style visit-London-for-the-festive-season montage that lets us know from the off that the film will be playing by 1990s romcom rules. You know the sort of thing: a declaration of love delivered against a pressing deadline ideally involving a change of location. As This Time Next year progresses, it quickly becomes apparent that said rules have been thoroughly studied, to mostly satisfying effect, as from the get-go the story hits the expected beats. You’ve got heroine Minnie’s initial antagonism towards her love-match Quinn, a loser boyfriend who must first be seen through and ditched, and of course heartwarming subplots involving careers and family. And getting to see the comforting formula followed faithfully is exactly why you would want to watch the movie, so it’s a job well done.

The actors have been taking notes from the same playbook as the script. Lead Sophie Cookson gives us a very plausible blend of Renée Zellweger and Keira Knightley mannerisms circa the early 2000s. Lucien Laviscount smoulders effectively as the almost-too-perfect leading man. Will Hislop continues the consistently fun work he’s been doing in a small role as the dickhead boyfriend (no British actor is embodying millennial bell-end quite as skilfully right now). One real highlight, who will hopefully see more work off the back of their turn here, is a relative unknown: Charlie Oscar, who knocks it out of the park in a small role as a bakery assistant who somehow sits in the precise middle of a Venn diagram between Bubble from Absolutely Fabulous and the Emily Blunt character in The Devil Wears Prada.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Signature Entertainment Ltd

💾

© Photograph: Signature Entertainment Ltd

Furry critters and house elves run riot in this annoying kids’ movie, which is heavy on snarky dialogue but low on charm

Made in Russia in 2022, this animated flick has been dubbed in American English for global release, but it seems unlikely that it made much difference one way or another to what is a hectic, charmless and generally annoying piece of family entertainment.

The storyline concerns Finns, a sort of house-elf or goblin, whose stated narrative function is to help human households run more efficiently, and whose function in practice is to be incredibly irritating. The most infuriating one is our hero, Finnick, who, in addition to a grating array of Scooby-Doo style non-verbal vocalisations, comes out with lots of lines that have the cadence of a witticism without actually being funny. You know the sort of thing: “I can’t believe I signed up for this!” or “Where do my tax dollars go?” It’s the brand of sub-Garfield humour whereby the idea of a furry critter paying or indeed being aware of the concept of tax dollars poses fraudulently as a rib-tickler.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Publicity image

💾

© Photograph: Publicity image

After the runaway success of Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer, fellow standup Mark O’Sullivan has a new sitcom about personal pain

Comedian Mark O’Sullivan was sexually assaulted by a member of his extended family when he was 12 years old. In his 30s, he reported the abuse to the police and, following a court case, the perpetrator was convicted and jailed.

Now 47, O’Sullivan is addressing this painful part of his past through his comedy. A documentary My Sexual Abuse: The Sitcom, will be screened on Channel 4, with the accompanying sitcom streaming online.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Channel 4 / Jack Barnes

💾

© Photograph: Channel 4 / Jack Barnes

Comedian, writer and actor Stephen Merchant on standup, fame and the pressures of cancel culture; testing the ‘world-leading science’ claims behind the Zoe nutrition app; and the point when writer Harriet Tyce realised she didn’t want to be remembered only as a drinker

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Jessica Chou/The Observer

💾

© Photograph: Jessica Chou/The Observer

The comedian’s tell-all show reveals gobsmacking things most people would take to the grave. It may be masochistic – but it’s impossible to look away

Unlike most reality television stars, Jerrod Carmichael doesn’t seem to care about showing his best self. In fact, in Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show – which candidly documents the stand-up comedian’s life in the wake of his Emmy award-winning comedy special Rothaniel – he seems happy enough broadcasting things most people would take to the grave. He films a painfully awkward romantic rejection when he confesses his love for long-time friend Tyler the Creator over room service. He admits his love of race play and spitting into people’s mouths. And, after hours of therapy over a potential sex addiction, we watch him cheat on the first person he has ever loved.

For a talent like Carmichael, whose work has netted him huge acclaim, reality television might seem an odd choice. The genre is largely populated by the talentless and desperate, after all. Yet Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show wears the label proudly. And it’s not such a wild leap for him. As well as his confessional standup, he was previously behind the Norman Lear-style sitcom The Carmichael Show (gone too soon) playing a fictionalised version of himself. This new show brings things closer to home – and not only perfects the reality TV form but dismantles it.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: HBO

💾

© Photograph: HBO

Readers respond to Francis Beckett’s article on the great American singer-songwriter who gave up celebrity to teach maths

Francis Beckett doubts whether the Jesuits at his boarding school “ever realised the subversive nature of what we were listening to” (‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?, 22 May). It may surprise him to know that I was first introduced to the incomparable Tom Lehrer by my Roman Catholic parish priest, in north London, who found The Irish Ballad a perfect comment on hypocrisy, in about 1959 or 60, and gleefully brought a copy of the LP round to my parents’ house. It was listened to avidly, among much hilarity. It’s possible, and even probable, that the scholarly Jesuits had as good a sense of the ridiculous as the Benedictines who ran the parish I grew up in.
Kate Enright
Weymouth, Dorset

• Francis Beckett’s article on Tom Lehrer made me laugh and took me whizzing back in time. In the late 1950s, our big brother, Sandy Craig, started at Glasgow University. He discovered Tom Lehrer there and brought him home to us in the shape of two second-hand 10-inch vinyls, which I still have. Our railwayman father laughed his head off at the songs. My sister Pat and I developed a party piece singing one of them with some of the more gruesome lyrics, I Hold Your Hand in Mine. I can still sing it today, ending with: “I’m sorry now I killed you / For our love was something fine / Until they come to get me / I shall hold your hand in mine.”
Maggie Craig
Ruthven, Aberdeenshire

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

💾

© Photograph: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

Glen Powell plays a mild-mannered professor posing as a contract killer to catch would-be criminals in this diverting noir comedy loosely based on a true story

For this thoroughly entertaining comedy thriller, Richard Linklater finds the distinctive and weirdly uncomplicated register of sunny geniality that he so often gives us – when he’s not working on more demanding movies like Boyhood or the Before series. And yet the question of criminal violence presented in terms of goofy unreality gives this film the flavour of something by the Coen brothers.

It is loosely based on the true story of Gary Johnson, an undercover law enforcement officer in Houston, Texas. Johnson specialised in posing as a “hitman” in exotic disguises, setting up meets with people who wanted other people offed, secretly taping them while they said so explicitly leading to them being charged with conspiracy to murder, while always at risk of having the charge overturned due to entrapment.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

💾

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

The 74-year-old actor says he was ‘immediately sorry’ after he shouted the N-word at Black people in a comedy club in 2006

Seinfeld actor Michael Richards has addressed the racist outburst which effectively ended his career almost 20 years ago, saying he was “immediately sorry” but that he’s “not looking for a comeback”.

The actor – who won three Emmys for his portrayal of Cosmo Kramer from 1989 to 1998 – has stayed largely out of the spotlight since 2006 when he was filmed yelling the N-word at a group of Black people who heckled him during a standup set at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Alberto Rodriguez/Variety/Getty Images

💾

© Photograph: Alberto Rodriguez/Variety/Getty Images

Soho theatre, London
The comic traces a path from Arizona to Manhattan with a musical set that never quite lands

The comedian as self-fascinated ego-monster is quite the pose these days. Kate Berlant, Leo Reich and Catherine Cohen recently entered that territory where self-disclosure blurs into grotesque solipsistic caricature. Now Greta Titelman follows them with a show that found some success at last year’s Edinburgh fringe. Like Berlant and Cohen an alumnus of hipster comedy Search Party, Titelman’s hour professes to recap her life story, from bullied nine-year-old dork to grownup Manhattanite bludgeoning down her trauma with joyless threesomes and narcotics.

It works, moment to moment: Titelman is a mesmeric performer, her delivery swooping and soaring from whispers and butter-wouldn’t-melt sing-songs to shrieking into the faces of the front row. The show is top-loaded with the sweet-little-girl shtick, as Titelman plays the blushing junior ambushed by parental discord and a friend at boarding school introducing her to opioids. She is the faux-naif in these scenes, wide-eyed at the discovery of her flair for drug-taking, blithely blackmailing her adulterous dad for a Hervé Leger dress.

At Soho theatre, London, until 25 May

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

💾

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

A baffling misunderstanding of the charm and appeal of the grouchy cartoon cat is one of many reasons to hate this atrocious new take, along with the many, many ads

There’s not that much to Garfield. Understanding the orange tabby of funny-pages repute is pretty simple: he has a set of integral, inalienable traits – his ill temperament, his cynical outlook, his sedentary lifestyle, his motivation primarily in self-interest and his indifference to owner Jon Arbuckle – that define the grouchy yet likable pop-cultural fixture. Any depiction of a Garfield that eschews these qualities, even while adhering to such superficial markers as his love of lasagne or hatred of Mondays, ceases to be Garfield at all and instead becomes a common cat by any other name, no different than Get Fuzzy’s Bucky, or worse, the godless bastard Heathcliff. In fact, insofar as Garfield-ness is inscribed from the feline personality model projected on to cats by humans, a Garfield in spite of himself may as well be a dog, an unnatural oxymoron with nothing to distinguish himself from the rest of the herd.

The makers of The Garfield Movie chose not to heed this ontological lesson in their approach to Jim Davis’s blueprint. The all-new, all-animated vehicle for the newspaper comic-strip fixture mutates him into an on-trend, readily marketable rebrand of himself. Given slightly larger eyes and a slightly smaller mouth to up the cuteness factor on some of his expression models, this Garfield has softened his rougher edges, even going so far as to relax his staunch anti-Odie stance. To be fair, director Mark Dindal and the writing brain trust of Paul Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds had to do something, the source material’s premise of “lazy a-hole cat mostly just sits around” fighting the narrative needs of cinema. But audiences have spent decades of mornings with Garfield. We know Garfield. Garfield is a friend of ours. Senator, Chris Pratt is no Garfield.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: DNEG Animation/AP

💾

© Photograph: DNEG Animation/AP

Cannes film festival
Seven world leaders – including Charles Dance’s dozy US president – are trapped in a forest in this amusing but bizarre apocalyptic comedy

Cate Blanchett has supplied the strangest moment of this year’s Cannes film festival; for Brits of a certain age, anyway. Her character reverently invokes the name of the late Roy Jenkins, Labour grandee and former chancellor of both the exchequer and Oxford University. Blanchett plays a fictional German chancellor called Hilda Ortmann who mentions Jenkins as the first president of the European Commission allowed to attend a G7 summit (which, as political trivia connoisseurs would say, is “one for the heads”.) Perhaps in her next film Blanchett can do a big speech about Peter Shore.

Rumours is an amusing drawing-room absurdist comedy, co-written and directed by Canadian film-maker Guy Maddin with his longtime collaborators, the brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. The title is inspired by the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album, because of the emotional crises that are said to have accompanied its recording. The setting is a forest in the German town of Dankerode in Saxony where a fictional G7 summit is taking place. Seven government heads have gathered to discuss an unspecified (but apparently ecological) crisis and to draft a lengthy and fantastically unhelpful communique which, as Hilda murmurs to her French counterpart, President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), should be worded vaguely enough so they are not committed to any specific action.

The US president Edison Wolcott is ageing and somnolent; he is played by Charles Dance, confusingly with his own English voice, and the script has a joke about Dance being apparently unwilling (but surely not unable) to do an American accent. British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is stressed because she had an affair at the last G7 summit with troubled Canadian premier and ladies’ man Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who also carries a torch for European Commission secretary-general Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) and has a moment with Hilda. Rolando Ravello plays the nervy Italian PM Antonio Lamorte and Takehiro Hira plays Tatsuro Iwesaki, the modest, shy Japanese premier.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Rumours 2024

💾

© Photograph: Rumours 2024

Set for revival at the RSC, this perfectly structured revenge comedy has an earthy vitality that no aristo or scholar could have created

I have a question for those theatrical luminaries (and I’m looking at you Sir Mark and Sir Derek) who doubt the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Do they seriously believe that a capricious aristo such as the Earl of Oxford or a legalistic scholar like Francis Bacon could have written The Merry Wives of Windsor? In case they have forgotten, this brilliant comedy – about to be revived by the RSC – shows the middle classes getting their revenge on a knightly predator, Sir John Falstaff. It could only have been written by someone who understood the intricacies of a close-knit, provincial community.

What strikes me about the play is its quintessential Englishness, and you see this in myriad ways. One is in the earthy vitality of the language. There is a classic example when Anne Page, offered the prospect of marriage to a preposterous Frenchman, says: “Alas, I had rather be set quick i’th’earth / And bowled to death with turnips.” It is an extraordinarily vivid image and one of the play’s rare excursions into verse: 90% of it is in prose. But the language throughout has a localised vigour that stems from a writer steeped in English life. At one point Mistress Ford urges her servants to take the buck-basket containing Falstaff and “carry it among the whisters in Datchet Mead.” The “whisters” were the bleachers of linen who could be seen by any English river bank including the Avon.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

💾

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The comedian on strange encounters with fans, performing to a room full of silence and the state of sketch comedy

How did you get into comedy?
I auditioned for Durham University’s sketch group when I was a fresher because I was slightly drunk and wanted to impress a cool third year who lived on my corridor. I vaguely remember doing a monologue for [fellow students] Ed Gamble and Nish Kumar in a sort of white noise haze of fear, and then got in.

Can you recall a gig so bad, it’s now funny?
I did a preview where the audience watched it entirely silently like it was theatre. Not one single laugh. I was very close to asking if I should cut it short, just because they must be so bored, but decided to keep going as a challenge to myself. At the end they gave me a standing ovation. It was absolutely baffling.

Stevie Martin: clout is at Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, 29 July-25 August

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: (no credit)

💾

© Photograph: (no credit)

Cannes film festival
Moore plays a fading Hollywood star whose career is set to be axed by misogynists when she’s offered a secret new medical procedure

Coralie Fargeat, known for the violent thriller Revenge from 2017, now cranks up the amplifier for some death metal … or nasty injury metal anyway. This is a cheerfully silly and outrageously indulgent piece of gonzo body-horror comedy, lacking in subtlety, body-positivity or positivity of any sort. Roger Corman would have loved it. It’s flawed and overlong but there’s a genius bit of casting in Demi Moore who is a very good sport about the whole thing. And as confrontational satire it strikes me as at least as good, or better, than two actual Palme d’Or winners: Julia Ducournau’s Titane and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness.

The Substance is a grisly fantasy-parable of misogyny and body-objectification, which riffs on the crazy dysfunctional energy of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda with borrowings from Frankenheimer and Cronenberg. It’s about successful careers for women in the media and public life being contingent on being forced to keep another, older, less personable self locked away. But unlike Dorian Gray’s portrait, this can’t simply be forgotten about, but continually tended to. Fargeat saves up an awful reckoning for an odious media executive called Harvey, but in an interesting way locates her horror in women’s own fear of their younger and older selves.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Working Title

💾

© Photograph: Working Title

Cannes film festival
Noémie Merlant’s first film as a director is relentlessly silly, self-indulgent and unsuited to its themes of misogyny and sexual violence

Here to prove that “actor project” movies are always the ones with the dodgiest acting is the otherwise estimable French star Noémie Merlant who presents her writing-directing debut in Cannes, with herself in a leading role and Céline Sciamma on board as producer and credited as script collaborator. It’s got some funny moments and there’s a great scene in a gynaecologist’s treatment room whose calm, straightforward candour completely annihilates all those other coyly shot gynaecologist scenes you’ve ever seen in any movie or TV drama. And the opening sequence is very dramatic, centring on a woman whose story is sadly neglected for the rest of the film in favour of the younger, prettier people.

But I have to say that the film is relentlessly silly, self-indulgent and self-admiring with a certain tiring kind of performer narcissism, always tending towards a jangling tone of celebratory affirmation which can’t absorb or do justice to the themes of misogyny and sexual violence that this film winds up being about. The cod-thriller scenes of corpse disposal do not convince on a realist level (though given that these corpses keep coming back as unfunny ghosts, a realist level is not needed) and do not work as comedy either.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Nord-Ouest Films – France 2 Cine’ma

💾

© Photograph: Nord-Ouest Films – France 2 Cine’ma

The comedian on how he rates his cooking skills, food disasters and the link between the chicken restaurant and David Attenborough

Growing up, our big treat was that once a month we’d go to Pizza Hut. Me and my brother would think about it all the time: Pizza Hut; salad buffet; Ice Cream Factory. Until The Simpsons came out on VHS, it did not get any better than that.

Restaurants are the closest thing to a family business. Because it was my grandad’s racket: he ran Indian restaurants in Leicester in the 1980s. His last job before he retired was running a greasy spoon, like a proper English greasy spoon, which I always thought was a triumph of cultural integration.

Continue reading...

💾

© Photograph: Alex Lake/The Observer

💾

© Photograph: Alex Lake/The Observer

From female art trailblazers to playful performance fests, a ridiculous funk wannabe to a clubby Argentinian dance spectacular, our critics pick the arts events that will light up your summer

National Treasures
Twelve museums across the UK, closing dates vary
Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire visits Tyneside, Artemisia Gentileschi shows at the Ikon in Birmingham and Caravaggio goes to Belfast in this epic tour of paintings from the National Gallery. The revered London museum has collected art for the nation since 1824 and this celebration sees its masterpieces more widely spread than ever. Jonathan Jones

Continue reading...

💾

© Illustration: Thomas Burden/The Guardian

💾

© Illustration: Thomas Burden/The Guardian

A comedian's only responsibility is to make the audience laugh. If you're not making the audience laugh, then you're failing at your job. You want to speak truth to power, you want to make a political statement, you want to be confessional—none of that is more or less valid than doing ventriloquism or doing an impression of Christopher Walken. They're all equal, so long as they make people laugh. If it's more important to you to do something that doesn't make the audience laugh, fine, but it's not comedy. It's something else. from Two Guys Walk into a Bar: Kliph Nesteroff on the Evolution of American Comedy [The Sun Magazine]

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones, an English comedian with an interest in geography and a former geography teacher who's also very funny, are the Map Men ("...Map Men, Map Map Map Men Men" ), whose highly entertaining YouTube channel is chock full of educational cartographic goodness. Try any of their (27) videos at random, or all of them—even the ads are worth watching. Their recent episodes on undersea internet cables and country codes wouldn't be a bad place to start for the extremely online.

And when you're done with those, there's Jay Foreman's 15 episodes of Unfinished London and 8 episodes of Politics Unboringed (for UK definitions of "unboringed"). Hours of fun! (N.B. Approximately 6 hours and 36 minutes of fun.)