The Social World

Author: Alexander Larman

  • Don’t cry for Jimmy Kimmel

    The defenestration of the supposed talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, for the inflammatory remarks that he made during the monologue in his show on Monday night about Charlie Kirk, is both an unexpected and deeply predictable development. It was unexpected because Kimmel clearly believed that he was, like Lehman Brothers, “too big to fail,” and was therefore within his rights to make such comments as how “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” And it was deeply predictable because Kimmel now becomes the latest scalp that the right have seized this year, and perhaps the most high-profile yet. 

    In truth, Kimmel – whose show Jimmy Kimmel Live! should now, perhaps, be renamed Jimmy Kimmel Dead! as it has been pulled, or “pre-empted,” from the ABC schedules “indefinitely,” which means that the chances of its returning are negligible – was a marked man. It is, of course, possible that he may return in some form on a streaming service such as Netflix, and whether such employers of his as the Academy Awards are sufficiently cowed to take him off their roster remains to be seen. Certainly, the left will see the firing as Kimmel as a political action, and President Trump’s open gloating that the decision was “great news for America” will embolden his opponents even further, perhaps turning Kimmel into a martyr for supposed free speech. 

    If this does happen, they have picked the wrong person. In truth, Kimmel’s schtick wore thin a long time ago, and his continued presence hosting one of the nation’s late-night talk shows owed as much to a lack of imagination on the part of executives and producers as it did genuine talent. If there is a more irritating, drawn-out and smug running “joke” than his manufactured feud with Matt Damon – something that may have been briefly amusing for a couple of gags, but has now lasted, in some form, for twenty years (twenty years!) – then I would be horrified to hear about it, but the fake fracas sums Kimmel up perfectly: a bit that may or may not have been amusing for a short time, but was grotesquely overstretched far beyond any enjoyable or even bearable period. 

    Jimmy Kimmel Live! should now, perhaps, be renamed Jimmy Kimmel Dead!

    The talk show host has form. Many of the things that he should have been cancelled for on previous occasions, such as his donning blackface for a frankly racist impersonation of Snoop Dogg in 1996 and how he made some grimly sexist comments towards Megan Fox in 2009, were brushed under the carpet after Kimmel made the usual non-committal apologies of how “I believe that I have evolved and matured over the last 20-plus years,” even as he suggested that “I know that this will not be the last I hear of this and that it will be used again to try to quiet me.” He has always positioned himself less as a multi-millionaire interviewing celebrities and telling not-that-funny jokes on late-night television and more as a principled one-man source of opposition to Trump and MAGA. This may endear him to those on the left who will see his firing as an act of martyrdom, but for those on the right, or even of no political allegiance whatsoever, Kimmel’s attacks on the present administration will seem less like bravery and more like a childish urge to bear-bait. 

    Well, the bear has bitten at last, and apart from the fully paid-up devotees of this persistent man, who will be up in arms at ABC’s decision, many will be quietly relieved that Kimmel has been put out to pasture. No more wearisome Matt Damon “jokes”; no more MAGA insults. For any American who believes in dignity in retirement, let us hope that Kimmel enjoys a long and peaceful one, unburdened by the need to share his thoughts and feelings with the world again.

  • Trump will be on his best behavior for King Charles

    Trump will be on his best behavior for King Charles

    The Donald has touched down in Britain for his unprecedented second state visit. It makes sense in a way that this most unconventional of American presidents is being granted a privilege that has never been offered to any other US leader, namely a repeat performance of pageantry and pomp that will flatter this Anglophile’s ego to its considerable core. That the event is happening against King Charles’s wishes might bother any other prime minister, but such was Keir Starmer’s desire to curry favor with Trump that he even waved the King’s handwritten invitation on camera. And with that he ensured favorable treatment for the country he is (barely) governing. The question is what happens next.

    Unusually, Trump is not the issue at hand, at least as far as things currently stand. For all of his volatility and unpredictability, he is a fully paid-up admirer of the royal family. He has proudly, if erroneously, boasted that he was the late Queen’s favorite president. As such, he is unlikely to make any sort of trouble during his notably brief visit to Britain.

    He will be feted during Charles’s speech at Windsor Castle during the formal banquet, given every kind of pomp and respect that he surely sees as his due, and will generally be treated like a major global politician. Trump is a man of considerable ego, and that ego will be flattered. From Starmer and the government’s perspective, it is unlikely to be a troublesome trip.

    However, from Charles’s perspective, Trump’s ingress into Britain is less welcome. The two men may only be three years apart in age, but they could scarcely be more different. Charles is a liberal horticulturalist who has a great love of art, literature and history. Trump is a McDonald’s-munching pragmatist whose bestselling book was entitled The Art of the Deal; meanwhile, his host’s best-known publication is called A Vision of Britain.

    The King is a traditionalist – and a small, rather than large, ‘c’ conservative – who likes to think of his country as a fine place besmirched by ugly progress. Trump, meanwhile, shares the monarch’s idea of his own country having fallen behind, but his rabble-rousing slogan of “Make America Great Again” will find no echo this week. For Charles, Britain has never stopped being great.

    There are other issues that might prove contentious. The King has begun cautious steps towards a rapprochement with his younger son, and Trump’s last reported comment on Prince Harry was to say that, although he was now prepared not to deport him over his admitted drug use, “I’ll leave him alone. He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.” It is probably accurate to say that Charles’s thoughts on his daughter-in-law may be similar, but he would rather see his throne fall than ever be caught making such an indiscreet admission.

    This sums up the difference between the two men and their respective values. One has always believed that “never complain, never explain” is an admirable way to live one’s life; the other has complained, explained, and then, for good measure, hurled invective at his enemies. How they will make small talk off camera remains to be seen.

    Still, one thing that decades spent as Prince of Wales have taught Charles is the value of smiling and waving, even when a situation – or a person – is not to his taste. Veteran royal watchers can easily see when the King has exerted his own influence (witness his reception of Zelensky at his private home of Sandringham, a conspicuous mark of regard after his appalling treatment by Trump and his Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office earlier this year). Although Trump will be on his best behavior this week, every tactless or crass remark of the President’s will be noted. You can be sure that Starmer’s government will never be allowed to forget the help that Charles has given them – assuming, that is, Starmer is still in office, if not Labour in power, long enough for the King to ever call in his favor.

  • Robert Redford was one of the last of the old school

    In the end, the Sundance Kid died in his sleep. The death of the actor, director and Sundance Film Festival founder Robert Redford at the age of 89 removes one of the last great American icons of cinema from the world stage. 

    Redford was preternaturally youthful, even towards the end of his life, never quite losing that shock of blonde hair that first made him stand out as a star of the Sixties and Seventies. However, he was never a dumb blonde, being one of the most politically savvy actors of his generation, as well as an astute businessman who managed to avoid falling foul of the changing shifts in fashion and taste. His status as a Hollywood legend was assured long before he died, but now it will be cemented in history.

    The first film in which he appeared was 1962’s forgotten War Hunt, and the last picture that he starred in was – bizarrely – a cameo in Avengers: Endgame in 2019, in which he played the nefarious Alexander Pierce. Nevertheless, he was better used in 2019’s The Old Man & the Gun, in which he played an octogenarian bank robber whose ability to commit crimes well into his dotage was only matched by the charm and courtesy with which he conducted himself.

    Over the intervening five decades, Redford became legendary for such pictures as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the peerless conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor and the political satirical drama The Candidate. Yet everyone will have their own favourite incarnation of Redford. Journalists love him as the idealistic Bob Woodward, bringing down the Nixon administration by revealing the Watergate conspiracy in All The President’s Men; lovers of caper films treasure his second collaboration with Paul Newman in The Sting; and aficionados of old-school weepies are all about his falling in love with Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were. It was a more successful romantic pairing than the later Out of Africa, in which Redford was bizarrely cast as the Old Etonian Denys Hatton. Such was his charisma and the power of the film, though, that it, too, won Oscars.

    Redford mixed charisma, charm, political engagement and good old-fashioned star quality

    Seeing where the changing tastes in Hollywood were going after the Seventies, Redford took the smart decision to pivot away from acting into directing with 1980’s Ordinary People, a none-more-American family drama which won him Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars for his debut as a filmmaker. Although many would question the wisdom of the Academy awarding Redford the Oscars for his well-observed but ultimately conservative film over the far more enduring The Elephant Man and Raging Bull, it proved that Redford was a true son of the industry, and he continued an acclaimed career alternating between directing and appearing on screen himself for the rest of his working life. He was magnetic in the Tony Scott thriller Spy Game opposite the actor usually compared to a younger version of himself, Brad Pitt, and he directed Pitt in one of his breakthrough roles, in the elegiac A River Runs Through It.

    Redford could be accused of a certain middlebrow tastefulness as a director that meant that the films he made, while never less than intelligent and thought-provoking, perhaps endure less well than the ones that he acted in. To watch him in Butch Cassidy, bringing the mischief and irreverence as Sundance to Paul Newman’s more stately Butch, is to see a truly great actor having fun, even early in his career. This sense of joie de vivre never left him. 

    His performance in the Marvel films as Pierce brought him to a whole new audience, and even if the young viewers of The Winter Soldier may not have quite understood why this old guy was cast (spoiler alert: because the directors wanted to bring back memories of the great paranoid thriller Three Days of the Condor), he managed to remain relevant and brilliant right up until the end, bringing old-school Hollywood pizzazz and chutzpah into a generation who were not even born in his heyday.

    He mixed charisma, charm, political engagement and good old-fashioned star quality. While the phrase is overused, it is true to say of the great Robert Redford that we shall not see his like again.

  • Chris Pratt, Christianity and Charlie Kirk

    Chris Pratt, Christianity and Charlie Kirk

    Many people reacted differently after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, but the actor Chris Pratt chose to behave in a way that few, if any, of his A-list Hollywood peers would have been comfortable with. The Guardians of the Galaxy star put a short video on X showing him praying, with his eyes tightly closed, and then he directed his fans – I almost wrote “followers”, but he does have over eight million of them on the platform – to go out and do good works. With almost self-parodic seriousness, the erstwhile Star-Lord tells them to “go outside, get some sunshine, touch some grass… you’ve got time to reach out to someone in need and share this prayer with them”, before concluding, naturally enough “Amen”.

    There are, of course, many Christians in Hollywood, not least actor-director Mel Gibson, whose eagerly awaited (and sure to be insane) Passion of the Christ sequel, The Resurrection of the Christ, has started filming this summer and is slated to be released in 2027. Yet Pratt is different to the Gibsons (and indeed his star, Jim Caviezels) in that he is one of the biggest stars in the entertainment industry with a well-earned reputation for being able to combine action heroics with a gift for comic timing: in other words, just like Robert Downey Jr, who went from being a well-regarded character actor with a narcotics problem to the biggest star in the industry, just because he played Iron Man.

    Pratt, however, has always been open about his faith, sometimes to near-comical extremes. He posted an Instagram picture of a shining cross and exhorted his followers to prayer in language that sounded a lot like self-help – “cast down darkness, choose positivity” – and this was all because the post was his 666th. The tension between Pratt’s on-screen persona, all cocky one-liners and lazy charm, and the earnestness with which he conducts himself in matters of God would be detrimental to his career, one imagines, were it not for the fact that he has starred in some of the highest-grossing films of all time, and is, quite literally, too big to fail. If he wants to put a prayer out into the world in memory of Charlie Kirk, he is more than welcome to do so, in the eyes of studio chiefs, as long as he turns up on the Avengers: Doomsday set on time.

    It is notable that Hollywood seems unsure as to how to deal with the Kirk situation. His name went conspicuously unmentioned at this year’s Emmys, although the veteran star Jamie Lee Curtis wept on the Marc Maron podcast while talking of him, saying “I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say, but I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected with his faith. Even though his ideas were abhorrent to me. I still believe he’s a father and a husband and a man of faith. And I hope whatever connection to God means that he felt it.” This seems to epitomize what many in the industry might feel, at least privately, but few want to be seen to be associated with a man who appeared to represent staunchly conservative values: the antithesis of La-La Land.

    Pratt, however, seems to be immune to such criticism. Granted, there are always subsections of the internet and social media that bitch bitterly about him, calling him the “least likeable Chris” (the others being Pine, Evans and Hemsworth) and suggesting that he is a closet MAGA supporter. He may very well be, but Pratt is intelligent enough to know that the grief he would get for expressing his political opinions is not worth the catharsis that he would feel for coming clean about them. (He conspicuously failed to endorse Kamala Harris last year, although he also offered no support for Trump, either.)

    Yet whether because his religion is the most important aspect of his life, or because he feels that it is a back way of connecting to his conservative fans, he is unafraid of expressing his faith, and Hollywood, for the time being at least, has to be comfortable with that, too. The industry may not want to “do” God, but Pratt, at least, can do exactly what he likes – as long, that is, as his films continue setting box office records.

  • The superficial edginess of the Emmys and The Studio

    The superficial edginess of the Emmys and The Studio

    When I previewed the 2025 Emmys in July, I wrote “it must feel pretty good to be Seth Rogen today.” His Hollywood satire, The Studio, had been nominated for a mighty 23 Emmy awards, and Rogen himself was up for acting, writing and directing. Well, today it must feel even better to be Seth Rogen. The show trampled over its competition to win a hugely impressive 13 awards – the most ever won by a comedy in a single season, let alone a debuting one – and Rogen himself won Best Actor, Best Director (for the self-consciously tricksy one-shot episode “The Oner”) and shared the Best Writing award with Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez. Obviously, The Studio won Best Comedy Series, and equally unsurprisingly, Emmys favorite Bryan Cranston had already won Best Guest Actor in a Comedy.

    An unusually humble Rogen accepted his award by saying “it’s getting embarrassing” as he made repeated appearances to the podium, but in truth Rogen has now cemented himself as a Hollywood fixture and The Studio – which I found entertaining but considerably less caustic than, say, Ricky Gervais’s Extras – will be renewed by a grateful Apple TV for as many seasons as Rogen and Goldberg want to create. Yet in truth, the Emmys for The Studio and the Netflix cultural phenomenon Adolescence, which won plaudits for its stars Stephen Graham, Erin Doherty and 15-year-old Owen Cooper as well as the award for Best Limited Series, could have been predicted a mile off. The most noteworthy parts of the evening are always, in no particular order, the shocks, the host and the controversy, and the Emmys delivered on all three counts.

    Another Apple TV show, Severance, came into the running with a staggering 27 nominations, but walked away with eight, of which the two most significant were Britt Lower’s Lead Actress and Tramell Tillman’s Best Supporting Actor. Instead, it was Noah Wyle’s The Pitt that won both Best Drama and Best Actor for Wyle, even as the controversy as to whether the medical drama is an ER spin-off in disguise (the Michael Crichton estate says so, and has commenced legal action) threatens to overshadow its success. Colin Farrell, thought to be a shoo-in for Best Actor for The Penguin, went home empty-handed and the third series of The White Lotus, generally seen as its weakest and most unfocused to date, received no wins from its 23 nominations. The excellent Andor and Slow Horses, meanwhile, had to be content with one major award each, namely Outstanding Writing (for the mighty “Welcome to the Rebellion” episode) and Outstanding Directing (for “Hello Goodbye”).

    Host Nate Bargatze, currently America’s most popular comedian – perhaps because of his determination to major in clean, cuss-free content – was hamstrung by a gimmick that probably sounded cleverer and funnier than it ended up being. He vowed that the Boys and Girls Clubs of America would receive a $100,000 donation from him and the Emmy producers, but that the amount would be docked $1,000 by every second a winner went over time in their acceptance speeches. By the end of the show, the donation was $60,000 in the red. A nastier comedian, like a Gervais, would have made a joke out of billing the charity for the amount, but the amicable but bland Bargatze has a soft touch and so the Boys and Girls Clubs will receive $350,000 anyway, turning his big schtick into a meaningless distraction. He might have been better off coming up with some more memorable jokes instead. The stint will do his career no harm, but it’s unlikely to bring in new admirers.

    And, of course, there were some winners who wanted to get themselves noticed. Ten-time Emmy winner Stephen Colbert might have been forgiven if he had attacked CBS for canceling The Late Show, but he was magnanimous instead, even as he joked “While I have your attention, is anyone hiring?” He was more good-natured than Hacks star Hannah Einbinder, who ended her speech for Best Supporting Actress by saying “Go Birds, fuck ICE and free Palestine!” This was the most political that anyone got on stage (although Javier Bardem made similar comments on the red carpet) and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most hot-button political issue of them all – the assassination of Charlie Kirk – was not mentioned by anyone.

    In a sense, then, The Studio was the perfect reflection of Hollywood and the Emmys in 2025: superficially edgy, perfectly entertaining, but with absolutely nothing to say about the bigger, more serious issues that are consuming the world (and the entertainment industry) right now. Some might see this as diplomacy, others as cowardice, but that has always been showbiz, folks.

  • Is Prince Harry’s charm offensive working?

    Is Prince Harry’s charm offensive working?

    Over the weekend, Prince Harry attracted the best headlines and coverage in Britain that he has received for months – possibly since he and Meghan staged their abdication of all responsibilities and fled to Montecito in 2021. This was all because of his carefully choreographed charitable and public endeavors. The praise included “how easy he made it look” and how Harry had “stopped sulking and played a blinder.” Even the Daily Telegraph wrote that “it was genuinely gratifying to see Harry back in Blighty, doing what he does best this week” and urged Prince William to reconcile with him.

    This was exactly what Harry had wished for with his quasi-royal visit to his home country. In order to celebrate, naturally, he gave an exclusive interview to the Guardian, that well-known bastion of royalist sentiment, to mark his trip to Ukraine after his British visit. Those expecting revelations about his father after their brief meeting earlier in the week would be disappointed. Harry stuck to the party line, speaking highly of his work with the Invictus Foundation and his military service. 

    This made Harry sound like a respected statesman. It also certainly makes a change from petulant serial litigant, although I suspect that I am in the category of the media that he detests. He said to the Guardian that:

    It is only in certain elements of the press where you see this talk about me being down or saying I am not smiling. This comes from people who think they know what I am thinking and how I am feeling. They are wrong.

    Some of us have had to sit through Harry & Meghan, where he’s definitely not smiling, but clearly that wretched show was not a fair insight into his psyche. He sniffed instead that “I think parts of the British press want to believe that I am miserable, but I’m not. I am very happy with who I am and I like the life that I live.”

    The interview was positive – almost sycophantic in places – and included the attention-grabbing hint that Harry probably had a private audience with Zelensky during his visit. If that had been made public, it would have gone down poorly with the British government, who tend to frown on freelance diplomacy of that sort. Harry was asked whether he had regrets over any of his actions, and he responded with typical bullishness:

    I don’t believe that I aired my dirty laundry in public. It was a difficult message, but I did it in the best way possible. My conscience is clear.

    He refused to acknowledge that he may have been recalcitrant (“it’s not stubbornness, it is having principles”) and described Spare as “a series of corrections to stories already out there. One point of view had been put out and it needed to be corrected.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. 

    The Prince Harry charm offensive stands at an interesting crossroads. Many people would prefer that he were in closer touch with the royal family, less out of filial obligation and more because he might be easier to influence or control. He himself appears to wish for more regular family visits to Britain, saying, “I feel a lot of support from the British public. Even now, when I feel like I have been destroyed by certain members of the British press.” Even those who are now praising him are not spared. Instead, Harry remarked that:

    For as long as I have known, certain elements of the British press have tried to speak on behalf of the nation. I think they are out of touch with the nation on lots of things. They hope to bring the public with them, but… I think the British public can speak and think for themselves.

    Although Harry tried to conjure up his mother’s spirit in the interview, remarking, when it was said that he followed his own path, “You know who else did that? My mum,” I was also reminded of another America-based royal, the Duke of Windsor. Like Harry, he left the country because of his love for a divorced American; like Harry, he became bored in exile and started pining for England. While the former Edward VIII initially believed his people’s great love for him would see him returned to popularity, he soon discovered that their affection for him only went so far, and he ended up spending his days miserable and alone in Paris, with only Wallis for company. 

    It remains to be seen which path his great-great-nephew will take, but Harry might be well advised to bank the goodwill that he’s received from this visit, concentrate on mending relations with his father and wider family behind closed doors and then – and only then – give any more interviews. Otherwise, the whole process of blame, anger and media outrage is likely to repeat itself all over again.

  • Please let this be the end of Downton Abbey

    Please let this be the end of Downton Abbey

    The third and supposedly final Downton Abbey picture released in American cinemas this Friday. Ominously subtitled The Grand Finale – oh how I wish, given the residual camp elements within the show, that it had instead been called The Final Curtain! – it supposedly wraps up the story of the Grantham family, the privileged idlers who inhabit the eponymous grand house, and their unusually devoted and long-serving staff, all of whom converse with their superiors on easy and intimate terms that bear precisely no relation to how the English upper classes have ever spoken (or been spoken to) by their servants in history.

    Still, if you’re looking for historical accuracy from Julian Fellowes’ Downton, you are not going to find it. However, on the evidence of six seasons of the television series and now three spin-off films, it is not quite clear what you are going to find. Consistent, believable storylines? Decent acting? Any sense of period or genuine interest in life in pre-World War II England? Dialogue that isn’t quotable for all the wrong reasons? I suspect that such things are about as likely to occur as a Joe Biden presidential bid in 2028. Instead, the mixture of amateurishness and cold calculating cynicism epitomized by the Downton formula represents the British costume drama at its absolute nadir.

    When the first series of Downton Abbey came onto British and American screens in 2010, it was essentially billed as Gosford Park for television, and was acclaimed as such. A strong script by Gosford creator Fellowes, engaged and committed performances from an excellent cast led by the ever-superb Maggie Smith and some genuinely interesting shades of nuance in the characterization made for appointment viewing. It nodded to shows and films past – Gosford, of course, but also Remains of the Day and Upstairs Downstairs, which found its own revival comprehensively overshadowed by its glitzier rival – but managed to be sufficiently in tune to 21st century mores to feel fresh and energetic. And, in Lady Mary’s ill-fated tryst with Mr. Pamuk, “the Turkish gentleman,” it introduced an element of deeply black humor into the mix without compromising on the lavish frocks and houses that discerning audiences always want from their historic dramas.

    Fast forward 15 years, and the affection and goodwill that many – including this writer – felt towards Downton initially has long since curdled. Fellowes wrote all the scripts himself, and he could have done with a writers’ room that he oversaw instead. Instead, the plotlines were frequently incoherent and nonsensical, with characters flitting in and out apparently depending on actors’ availability and willingness to commit themselves to a show that most of them knew was bogus. Some of the better stars – Dan Stevens, Jessica Brown Findlay – jumped long before the series ended, fearing that they would become typecast. Others stayed. Between Downton and Paddington, Hugh Bonneville, in particular, has now cornered the market in playing good-natured but exasperated patriarchs. It is a useful, lucrative piece of typecasting, but terribly, terribly boring to watch.

    I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t enjoyed some of the moments and actors in the later, largely wretched, seasons. Jim Carter, who plays the officious but decent butler Carson, can do no wrong in my eyes, and it is notable that he and Phyllis Logan (as the housekeeper Mrs. Hughes) are giving by far the best performances throughout, bothering to act rather than simply appearing on screen. And occasionally Fellowes’ scripts reveal an apparently dormant sense of sly wit, too. I always relished the moment when Carson, castigated by the housekeeper for his apparent homophobia, replied in stentorian voice, “I cannot help it, Mrs. Hughes. I am what I am.”

    Yet by the time that the first film miserably rolled into cinemas, where the action stopped for moments at a time to allow some piece of mid-budget pageantry to take place, it was clear that Fellowes et al no longer had any grip on the material or any interest in doing anything other than pandering to fans. America has always been a more receptive market to the show than Britain (where a lot of the nonsense was not taken remotely seriously) and so it is likely that The Grand Finale will be well-received in the United States. The inevitable absence of Maggie Smith, occasioned by the death of both character and actress, means that there is a hole at its center, but in truth the entire saga is now so riddled with holes that it represents a kind of cinematic Swiss cheese. Inevitably, there will be cries for ‘just one more film,” and Fellowes and the producers may yet heed them. But this nonsense really has to stop now. And, in truth, it should have done so a very, very long time ago, too.

  • Stephen King, The Long Walk and Charlie Kirk

    Stephen King, The Long Walk and Charlie Kirk

    Under normal circumstances, the author Stephen King should have been feeling pretty good about things and himself at the moment. The latest film of one of his works, Francis Lawrence’s horror-thriller The Long Walk, opened in American cinemas this weekend and has been met with almost unanimously rave reviews, many of which have called it a more socially aware, darker Hunger Games. He recently published a Maurice Sendak-illustrated retelling of Hansel and Gretel, which brings his trademark dark and macabre sensibilities to the age-old fairytale. And his last novel, Never Flinch, was, naturally, a bestseller – as all his books have been since he first published Carrie, over half a century ago in 1974.

    So it says quite a lot for the 77-year-old King that, for absolutely no reason, he decided to offer his opinions about the Charlie Kirk saga. King’s first reaction to Kirk’s assassination was to call it “another example of American gun violence” and to echo Barack Obama’s comments that “this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.” All perfectly normal and (relatively) uncontroversial. And then King decided to say of the recently murdered Kirk that “he advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”

    The activist had, of course, said nothing of the kind, and King swiftly deleted his tweet and has spent much of the day of his new film’s release apologizing to various public figures who reacted in outrage his comments, most notably Ted Cruz, who called him “a horrible, evil, twisted liar” and asked ,“Why are you so dishonest & filled with hate?” King, presumably through gritted teeth, wrote “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter [sic] w/o fact-checking. Won’t happen again.” Yet the reputational damage has already been done. Admittedly, the author has never been remotely shy about his Democratic, pro-Palestinian sympathies, which have never endeared him to the MAGA crowd, but if The Long Walk underperforms this weekend, especially with viewers in the heartland where the film is set, fingers will undoubtedly be pointed in King’s direction.

    Not, of course, that it will make any existential difference to the writer’s popularity. He has been involved in many other high-profile spats, not least when he dismissed James Patterson, saying of his fellow author, “I don’t like him, I don’t respect his books because everyone is the same,” and remarked of Stephenie Meyer, who was unfavorably compared to JK Rowling, that she “can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.” Rowling, of course, came in for her own implied criticism, when an X user asked King what he thought of her political stances, and he replied, “Trans women are women.” And although most people believe Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining to be a classic of the horror genre and an improvement on the scary but schlocky book, King has always despised it, calling it “a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little.”

    The reverse might be said of King himself. His willingness to take to social media and share his opinions, interact with his millions of admirers and discuss matters wholly unrelated to his books is commendable, and there is a reason why he has 6.8 million followers. Yet as his timely dystopian picture arrives in cinemas to shock and provoke audiences, even those who might be well disposed toward this ornery, ever-controversial author might hope that he’ll engage his considerable intellect before pressing “send” next time.

  • Does Britain want Prince Harry back?

    Does Britain want Prince Harry back?

    “Success,” Winston Churchill was once reputed to have said, “is the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” By this metric, Prince Harry must be about the most successful figure in public life today. Despite a series of myriad embarrassments and humiliations, which have included his Sentebale charity descending into chaos, his well-publicized legal shenanigans (which, apparently, cost him over a million pounds, for little reward) and a consistent ranking as Britain’s third most unpopular royal (ahead only of his disgraced uncle and perennially disliked wife), he is returning to Britain this week, for his first significant visit to 2022.

    Harry is “determined to press the reset button,” according to press reports. Although Harry’s popularity has been in the gutter in his home country over the past few years, he has decided that he is going to go on what amounts to a public relations offensive to change this. Ominously, according to a well-sourced report in the Sunday Times of London, the Duke of Sussex has decided that “he is going to have some fun” on his return to Britain. Given that the younger Harry’s definition of “fun” included everything from dressing up in a Nazi uniform to being surreptitiously photographed playing poker naked in Las Vegas, we might fear the worst. In fact, the itinerary that has been briefed to the media is impeccably wholesome. There are the WellChild awards on Monday, plenty of receptions with charities that he supports, including the Invictus Foundation, and he will be attending a meeting in Nottingham for young people affected by violence. This is, those around Harry hope, the best of him: his mother’s compassion and sincere interest in others channeled through to a new generation.

    At least, this is the hope. Yet during his four-day visit, which is, perhaps wisely, “jam-packed with hardly any downtime,” there are two rather significant elephants in the room.

    The first, of course, is Harry’s family. He is not believed to have any direct contact with his father in recent months, since they last met in February 2024, and his ill-judged remarks about the King’s health in his equally ill-judged BBC interview in May – after failing to succeed in taking legal action against his government – are understood to have caused deep offense that will make any reconciliation hard.

    As for relations between Harry and William, there is more chance of Meghan Markle making her West End debut in a one-woman production of Mother Courage than there is of the two estranged brothers speaking any time soon. The tawdry revelations in Spare set the kibosh on another very frosty relationship. Notably, he will be staying in expensive hotels, rather than at Buckingham Palace.

    The other problem is that Harry is incapable of keeping his mouth shut. He is an impetuous, emotional man who is all too keen to use the media to get his message across, but as his lack of popularity shows, he could often do with removing his foot from his mouth. It has been briefed that Harry would someday like to bring his young children back to the country of his birth – where they have not visited since June 2022 – and that: “He wants to be able to show his children where he grew up. He wants them to know their family here. He really would like to come back to the UK much more.” Yet the myriad difficulties with the practicalities of this may well make such a thing impossible. For the Duke to be accepted once more into the bosom of his family, one can imagine that various conditions might be made – which may or may not include leaving his fragrant wife in Montecito, where she would certainly rather remain – and a proud and headstrong figure like Harry might be unwilling to debase himself in so public and humiliating a fashion.

    The Duke’s visit this week will inevitably attract headlines and much attention, and he is hoping, as one well-sourced friend has briefed the papers, that it will go well. “He is excited to be on the ground, helping his organizations where he can. He’s pumped for the visit, he’s happy.”

    Should it proceed according to plan – in other words, uneventfully – then it might be the beginning of a rapprochement with his home country. But should anything go amiss, or the coverage of his visit be less rhapsodic than he might wish, then it will be hard to imagine that this return will be as regular an occurrence as Harry might be hoping for. How heartbroken his former subjects would be by this remains to be seen.

  • The Paper is really, really bad

    The Paper is really, really bad

    Making a spin-off of a spin-off is the trickiest task on television, not least because it assumes that the audience is sufficiently fond of the original and the reinvention alike to be happy to go steady with the third round, too. In all fairness, the new workplace-themed sitcom (although on the evidence of this first season, comedy-drama is probably a more accurate designation) The Paper is only a callback to the US The Office, in that its premise is that the same documentary crew that captured the bewildering banality of life at Dunder Mifflin has headed to Toledo, Ohio, there to follow the travails of a once-proud, now-flailing newspaper, the Toledo Truth-Teller.

    This couldn’t be more timely, as newsprint journalism is an increasingly endangered species, and at first glance The Paper should be every bit as compulsive a watch as the earlier show, not least because they both share a creator in Greg Daniels, this time joined by Michael Koman. It also boasts a great cast, led by the ever-excellent Domhnall Gleeson as Ned Sampson, an idealist who manages to fend off accusations of everything from having been #MeToo’d to masquerading as a “proper” editor in his quest to bring integrity and old-fashioned journalistic standards back to Toledo. Gags, superb acting, timeliness, and a holdover from The Office, in the form of Oscar Nunez, reprising his role as Oscar Martinez, Dunder Mifflin’s accountant: what more could you ask for?

    Unfortunately, The Paper proves not to be worth the material that it has been written on. On the evidence of the first few episodes, this is a hugely disappointing, profoundly unfunny and tonally wildly uncertain show that may yet bed in and find its feet, but few viewers are likely to invest the time and effort that such optimism would require. The usually excellent British actor Tim Key is miscast as Ken, a David Brent stand-in, all conspiratorial looks to camera and self-aggrandizing puffery, as the paper’s “business strategist,” i.e. the person who wants to shut down the loss-making organization as quickly as possible. But his performance is a masterclass in subtlety and nuance compared to Sabrina Impacciatore, so good in the second series of The White Lotus, who is diabolically over the top in the role of the paper’s managing editor Esmerelda Grand. (This is not a subtle show.)

    Whether or not you think that the American version of The Office was a comedic masterpiece (or, for that matter, the British original), it cannot be denied that it hit its targets with real vigor, and, in Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, created a larger-than-life character for the ages, a man-baby who was just about human enough to be pitiable but not quite sympathetic, either. Gleeson, always good value, seems stuck in the kind of role that requires him to Do Anguish a lot, to greater or lesser comic effect, but he comes across better than Chelsea Frei’s Mare, the paper’s compositor, who might as well be wearing a T-shirt saying “potential love interest” on it.

    There are some nice-ish gags about AI’s insipid influence on the journalistic industry and Martinez’s reluctance to once again become the butt of the documentary makers, but this isn’t particularly funny. Instead, it falls into the trap of many contemporary comedies, mistaking the ability to stage minute-long situations that might conceivably work OK as stand-alone clips on TikTok for a genuinely inspired series of jokes. Had Daniels and Korman had the courage of their convictions and brought in Tim Robinson in full I Think You Should Leave mode in the lead, this could yet have been an absurdist classic. Unfortunately, on the present evidence, it’s another “what might have been.” A second series has already been commissioned, but it’s likely that its chances of being embraced by an audience are roughly akin to the Toledo Truth-Teller winning the Pulitzer. This paper, alas, probably should have been canned.