Monday
Credit for the success of the TV show Baby Reindeer is largely owed to one woman, Jessica Gunning, who rescues Richard Gadd’s baggy, self-absorbed script with her brilliant performance as Martha, Gadd’s stalker. (When Gunning disappears, mid-series, we are effectively left in a room with a man doing bad standup). For the last week or so, coverage of the show’s success – it’s No 1 on Netflix in the UK and No 4 in the US – has rubbed shoulders with commentary about the ethics of the race to unearth the real people on whom the seven-part drama is based.
That search resulted, this week, in the spectacle of Piers Morgan publicising an interview on his YouTube channel with the “real” Martha, a woman who, if the show is to be believed, is a deeply unwell individual. The proper thing would have been not to watch. I did watch, however, for the first five minutes, to see how the supposed reality held up against the show – predictably, as it turned out. Where Gunning imbues Martha with pathos and meaning, the interview was just boring, exploitative and sad.
I don’t blame Gadd for any of this – I blame him for writing a show that falls off a cliff three episodes in – or for the breadcrumb trail of the show’s sexual assault storyline that has led to other, wayward speculations. Most writers would sell their own grandmothers at auction if there was promising material in it, or thin but stretchable material, or flat material that with enough massaging might be useful for something, or any material at all. Gadd did what he had to and fair play to him.
More broadly, my feelings about TV this week are that we should move on from Baby Reindeer, acknowledge that the first two episodes of Hacks season 3 are so bad that Jean Smart looks embarrassed to be in them; and state for the record that the two best shows available for streaming right now are Tokyo Vice (HBO Max) and Shōgun (Hulu).
Tuesday
People living on the east side of Manhattan must put up, each year, with the disruption of the Met Gala, which closes streets and snarls up the traffic. In previous years, the reward for this disturbance was getting a glimpse of the stars as they walked the red carpet. More recently, a white tent has been thrown up on the sidewalk outside the Metropolitan Museum, so that civilians can’t see celebrities and, more importantly, celebrities don’t have to gaze on the unlovely form of the ogling civilians.
The official reason for this, I assume, is security but the result is in keeping with the killjoy vibe of the entire event, which, each year, generates enough social anxiety to capsize at least one attender. We have seen Cara Delevingne bopping about with the words “peg the patriarchy” nonsensically printed across her chest, and witnessed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez enjoying a $75,000 (£60,000) night out while lecturing us all about wealth.
This year, there were no politics at the Met Gala, presumably because New York is so embroiled in political unrest already that Hollywood shrank back into its lane. Instead, the court jester role was filled by Kim Kardashian, who gratified us all by showing up in a corset so tight she looked like a balloon animal with a twist in the middle.
Wednesday
Who wants to join the Garrick? The club, which was founded in 1831, this week voted, after a tremendous public fuss, to accept women into the club. (Whether the tipping point was Sting threatening to resign his membership – or whether the episode caused the singer to reflect on why he became a member in the first place – we will probably never know).
The question is will women want to join? Like Buckingham Palace or the Dorchester Hotel, one imagines the Garrick to be a chintz-filled nightmare with a terrible menu where none of the food is adequately seasoned. Male members, meanwhile, seem to have a very particular idea of the sort of woman they’re after, with members anonymously telling the New York Times that they had in mind, for example, “the actress Judi Dench”. Good luck with that, lads.
Thursday
A return to the headlines of the nation’s least beloved company, Fujitsu, which was involved in a series of airport delays this week during a failure of e-gate technology at border control. Passengers at Gatwick and Heathrow were kept hanging around in long queues until the early hours due to an apparent wifi outage that prevented the e-gates from opening. The technology, which is part of a £372m computerised immigration system introduced by the government three years ago, is now supported by the Japanese company behind the Post Office IT scandal, on the strength of which we should probably update our assumptions about how early to get to the airport, and revise upwards how long it will take to get home.
Friday
“It’s not giving,” is what my nine-year-olds say when they want to throw shade, the term “throwing shade”, itself, an alright-grandma term only used by millennials and older. Insults date quicker than other aspects of language and so, according to a poll of 2,000 Britons undertaken by Perspectus Global this week, some of the old classics are dying out. A majority of those polled had, for example, never heard of boomer insults “ninny,” or “lummox”. Fine by me. But retiring Gen X terms “tosspot” and “git”? Unacceptable, and a failure on the part of young people to hear the terms’ intrinsic comedy; “git” in particular, which speaks to a very specific type of (male) irritant. Although, interestingly, “arse” never seems to go out of fashion.
