Category Archives: Culture

The Great British Bake Off 2021 final review – a Wonderland to behold

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It may not have felt as vital or soothing as last year’s series, but this was a corking final, with a Mad Hatter’s tea party Showstopper and disasters for all the finalists

• Warning: this article contains spoilers

Was this a vintage year for The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4)? I’m not sure it will go down as an all-time great, though it was a good, reliable series. It was, however, a strong finale, with strong contestants who were, as we were often reminded, the most evenly matched in Bake Off history. Perfectionist Giuseppe, aesthete Crystelle and self-taught lockdown prodigy Chigs had all shaken the hand of Paul Hollywood twice, and were all crowned star baker twice. It was impossible to tell who was going to win.

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2022 Grammys: Jon Batiste, HER and Justin Bieber lead nominations

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Olivia Rodrigo, Doja Cat, Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X also among those with multiple nominations in top categories

The highly versatile, socially conscious pianist, singer and composer Jon Batiste has topped this year’s Grammy nominations, with 10 nods.

Batiste’s nominations straddle everything from the top prizes of record and album of the year, to inclusions across R&B, jazz, roots and classical categories. His score for animated film Soul, made with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails, is also nominated, as are the directors of his music video Freedom.

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Neat enough for Pepys: Magdalene college Cambridge’s inventive new library

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The famous diarist’s dedicated building, left to his Cambridge alma mater, could not be altered. So architect Níall McLaughlin created a magical solution

“My delight is in the neatness of everything,” wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1663, “and so cannot be pleased with anything unless it be very neat, which is a strange folly.”

He was referring in part to the fastidious organisation of his magnificent collection of books. By the time of his death in 1703 he had amassed 3,000 of them, which he left to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Cambridge, to be housed in a dedicated building with his name above the door. He gave strict instructions that his library be kept intact for posterity, without addition or subtraction, its contents arranged “according to heighth” in the bespoke glass-fronted bookcases he had especially commissioned. The responsibility came with an added threat: if one volume goes missing, he instructed, the whole library must be transferred to Trinity.

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Crazy Frog returns, like it or not: ‘There will always be a place for novelty songs’

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With genitalia proudly exposed, the amphibian raced up the charts in 2005 and irritated much of the UK. Why has it been allowed a second chance? Its handler explains himself

For a few months in 2005, you couldn’t move without encountering Crazy Frog. First sold as a ringtone, his nonsensical catchphrase, “Rring ding ding ding baa baa”, entered the national vocabulary. Then it became the most popular – and divisive – single of 2005, coupled with a CGI video of an explicitly naked frog on the lam in a futuristic cityscape. “The frog is irritating to the point of distraction and back again,” wrote BBC News. “And yet at the same, it’s strangely compelling.”

The craze lasted for five Top 20 hits and then mercifully dwindled. The character was so hated that hackers found success with a virus offering to show users an image of him being killed off. But now the frog is staging a comeback. Next month, the once-ubiquitous amphibian will release a new single – a mash-up of a classic and a more recent song, the details of which the frog’s guardians are keeping under wraps, other than to say that both are popular on TikTok.

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Adele’s 30 becomes biggest-selling album of 2021 in US after three days

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Album also outselling rest of UK Top 40 combined, while Taylor Swift’s All Too Well (Taylor’s Version) becomes longest song to reach US No 1

Adele’s 30 is already the biggest-selling album of the year in the US, just three days after it went on sale.

Using a metric that combines sales of vinyl, CDs and downloads alongside streaming, 30 has sold over 575,000 copies. Adele has overtaken the previous highest seller Taylor Swift, whose December 2020 album Evermore has sold 462,000 copies this year.

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Brooding beauty: why Carmarthenshire is Wales’ best-kept secret

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With its glacial lakes, silky beaches and verdant hills, it’s a wonder this brilliant county for walking is often overlooked

Thank God no boozy poet or philandering painter was born or buried in Llandeilo in the heart of Carmarthenshire. If there were, it would probably be flooded with pilgrims. As it is, the small inland town on the mighty Tywy (or Towy) – the longest river that has its source and outlet in Wales – has a degree of quaintness, but not too much, and only a handful of gawpers admiring the pastel-painted facades. Most are, like me, on road trips, as the A40 which runs through Llandeilo is a greenery-fringed alternative to the busier Heads of the Valleys road just to the south, and there are coffees and buns and bowls of cawl (a local lamb and veg stew) to be had here.

Carmarthenshire – or Sir Gâr – known as the Garden of Wales, is one of the 13 historic counties. Still largely agricultural, it’s criss-crossed by quiet back roads and is where the M4 runs out. It’s one of many places in Wales people pass through without stopping and is something of a Cinderella county.

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The Wheel of Time actor Madeleine Madden: ‘As an Aboriginal woman, my life is politicised’

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The star of the new Amazon Prime fantasy series and granddaughter of Charles Perkins discusses her ‘dream role’, multiracial casting and finding freedom outside Australia

When she walked into the London casting room of The Wheel of Time, Madeleine Madden scanned the faces – a sea of white – and thought, “Yep, standard.”

To announce her presence, she politely inquired, “The Wheel of Time?”

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The Princes and the Press review – more degrading airing of the royal dirty laundry

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BBC programme is a compelling analysis of the troubled relationship between media and monarchy

A few days before her wedding, Meghan decided she wanted to wear a particular tiara with emeralds. True, this isn’t the sort of issue that should trouble citizens of a mature democracy but when it comes to royals, Britain is neither mature nor, let’s face it, democratic. Indeed, Amol Rajan, the BBC media editor who presented the Princes and the Press (BBC Two), is a declared republican who once branded the royal family as “absurd” and the media as a “propaganda outlet” for the monarchy. As his measured, compelling analysis of the troubled relationship showed, he may have been right about the former, but the latter? Not so much. The media, we might conclude from his programme, may be driving the monarchy to self-destruct, which would, ironically enough, suit his earlier republican views.

Back to tiaras. There was a problem: the Duchess of Sussex could not be allowed to wear the emerald tiara because it had some unfortunate history to do with Russia, according to the Sun’s former correspondent Dan Wootton. We never learned what that history was nor why it should matter. What we did learn from Wootton’s report is that Harry reportedly shouted at a royal dresser (who is a person, not a thing) that “whatever Meghan wants, Meghan gets.” This in turn prompted the Queen to tell somebody off.

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How a dream coach helped Benedict Cumberbatch and Jane Campion put the unconscious on screen

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Kim Gillingham explains how her work on The Power of the Dog enabled the ‘lioness of an artist’ and her ‘translucent’ star to access their inmost drives

To access his dreams the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí napped while sitting on a chair, holding keys over an upturned metal plate. After he lost consciousness, the keys dropped onto the plate, jangling him awake so he could paint fresh from his unconscious. Kim Gillingham tells this story to connect her practice to the history of artistic endeavour. She is a Jungian dream coach, based in LA, who combines ideas from psychoanalysis and the method acting of the Actors Studio to, in her words: “access the incredible resource of the unconscious through dreams and through work with the body and to use that material to bring authenticity, truth and aliveness up through whatever discipline the artist is working in”.

Jane Campion sought Gillingham’s services to help conjure the forces at play in her first film in 12 years, The Power of the Dog. It’s a western adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel that riffs on themes of masculinity and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank, a toxic alpha cowboy whose personality is designed to hide a secret that would have made him vulnerable in the story’s setting of 1920s Montana.

The Power of the Dog is streaming now on Netflix.

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Glennon Doyle: ‘So many women feel caged by gender, sexuality, religion’

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Glennon Doyle’s memoir inspired Adele – but do we all need to be ‘untamed’?

The marriage wasn’t unbearable, but it didn’t feel right any more. The lightbulb moment came when she realised she needed to think about what she truly wanted, rather than about what society had trained her to think she wanted. Also, she became aware that remaining in an unhappy marriage meant she wasn’t being the parent she wanted to be: following her heart would cause heartbreak to her family now, but it had a noble purpose. Today, her ex lives within walking distance and they share parenting. She got out, and she wants to tell the world how it’s changed her life.

Who is this woman? Well, it could be Adele, whose new album reveals why she decided to leave her husband Simon Konecki, and what it means for their son Angelo, nine. “It just wasn’t right for me any more… I didn’t want to end up like a lot of other people I knew. I wasn’t miserable-miserable, but I would have been miserable had I not put myself first,” she said in a recent interview.

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Film-maker Julia Ducournau: ‘Women kicked serious ass this year’

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Only the second woman to win the ​prestigious ​Palme d’Or, the French director behind Raw and new film Titane discusses the boom in female-led horror and ​how she’s terrified of being booed

“When I see a stereotype,” says French director Julia Ducournau, “I try to kill it.” She certainly did that in July by winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. The most revered and exalted award in cinema, a world away from the erratic glossiness of the Oscars, the Palme d’Or tends to honour films that both further the language of cinema and shed light on the loftier questions of earthly existence. You expect humanism, seriousness, perhaps a dash of difficulty. What you don’t expect is in-your-face sexuality, serial slaughter, a ferocious, electrically coloured techno-metal aesthetic – and radical DIY nasal surgery.

But that’s what you get in Ducournau’s Titane – only the second Palme d’Or winner by a female director, the first being Jane Campion’s shared win with The Piano in 1993. Her win, says Ducournau in transatlantically inflected English, “was incredibly powerful to me. Through this prize, a lot was happening. It took 28 years [since Campion’s win] and I believe it’s not going to take 28 years again.” She points to 2021’s award successes for women – Chloé Zhao at the Oscars with Nomadland, Venice winner Audrey Diwan (Happening), Romania’s Alina Grigore in San Sebastián (Blue Moon). “That can’t be looked past. Women kicked serious ass this year.”

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People said I was weak, lazy and fussy. I’m not – but I am autistic

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The late diagnosis of Melanie Sykes and Christine McGuinness came as no surprise to those who, like Sara Gibbs, have trodden the same path

The news of Melanie Sykes and Christine McGuinness’s late autism diagnoses may have come as a surprise to many. After all, they are glamorous career women. They look nothing like the stereotype of autism we as a culture are used to. I, however, was not shocked, knowing only too well that you can’t tell anything about someone’s private reality from their public image.

As I read their stories, I couldn’t help but imagine what they might be feeling. Were they elated? Confused? Excited? Terrified? Angry? Relieved? All of the above?

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‘I just can’t believe it exists’: Peter Jackson takes us into the Beatles vault locked up for 52 years

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Ahead of his epic series Get Back, the director reveals the secrets of 60 hours of intimate, unseen footage of the Fab Four – and why it turns everything we know about their final days upside down

When the world closed down in March 2020, most of us had to make do with pretending to enjoy video calls with friends or baking bread. Peter Jackson, meanwhile, was busy sifting through a mountain of unseen footage – 60 hours in total – of the Beatles, shot by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg in 1969.

His four-year project is now finished – “we finally completed it on Friday,” says a relieved-looking Jackson from his home in New Zealand – and the resulting series, The Beatles: Get Back, will be released on Disney+ from 25 November. Originally envisaged as a feature film, Covid uncertainty saw plans revised. It is now three two-hour episodes, using the mass of outtakes from Lindsay-Hogg’s work on what would become Let It Be, the band’s fourth feature film.

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No school, no hair cut: one girl’s journey through one of the world’s longest Covid lockdowns

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Antonella Bordon’s hair was her family’s pride and joy. But as the pandemic kept her out of school for 18 months, the 12-year-old Argentinian vowed to lop it all off as soon as she could return to class

When she finally cut her hair, Antonella Bordon had trouble sleeping. At the age of 12, her first haircut meant more to her than a simple change of style.

For most of her childhood, Bordon’s silky hair ran all the way down her back to her calves, such a deep brown it looked like a black mane. Her mother and sister would comb it every day, rubbing the locks with rosemary oil, and helping her style it in a way to keep her cool during the hot Argentinian summer.

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Lubaina Himid: ‘The beginning of my life was a terrible tragedy’

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As the first Black woman – and the oldest person – ever to win the Turner, the artist reflects on being a trailblazer, and how her early life moulded her

Lubaina Himid has waited a long time for a show at Tate Modern. She is now 67, and in 2017 she had the bittersweet honour of being the first Black woman, and the oldest-ever artist (at 63), to win the Turner prize. Bittersweet because “I knew very definitely, in the way that you don’t necessarily if you’re 45, that I had more years behind me than in front. You could think, if you won it at 45, that you might have the same amount of time again to try things, to fail, to try things again. To live fast and loose, and have big parties. And I suppose at 63 I thought: ‘Well, at the best, I’ve probably got 20 years of making.’”

We are in Preston, the city where she has lived since the age of 36. She holds a chair at the University of Central Lancashire, and her studio, where we are talking, is in a Victorian block above the Citizens Advice Bureau, right in the city centre, looking out over the covered market and a step away from the grandly Grecian Harris Museum. All is neat and white in her eyrie, aside from a few unfinished canvases that are bright with blues, oranges and greens. On a table are dozens of tubes of acrylic paint, set out in ordered rows. A sizable chunk of floorspace is occupied by an antique handcart that at some point she will use to make a work; there are some old wooden drawers whose interiors she has painted with male heads.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘Doing Hamilton every night saved me. It kept my head from getting off the swivel’

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When his Broadway show became a global phenomenon, the rigours of daily performance kept the actor and songwriter grounded. Then Disney and Hollywood came calling. Now, the ‘musical theatre fanboy’ has returned to his first love


About halfway through Tick, Tick ... Boom!, the new movie directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the patrons of a diner in 90s New York all turn to the camera and sing. The movie, Miranda’s directorial debut, is based on the autobiographical stage show of the same name by Jonathan Larson (creator of Rent) and tells the story of Larson’s late 20s as a struggling writer and waiter. Andrew Garfield is extraordinary in the lead, but it’s the people around him who make this particular scene; as the number unfolds, it becomes apparent that every extra in the diner is a legend of musical theatre, from Bernadette Peters, to Brian Stokes Mitchell (a veteran Tony award winner), to Roger Bart (original cast, Tick, Tick ... Boom!), to Jim Nicola (former artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop) to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Joel Grey, chasing the waiter for the bill. “I don’t know that I’m the guy you hire to make your next Marvel movie,” Miranda says, speaking via video from his office in uptown New York, “but I am the guy you hire to make this musical about a guy who wrote musicals.” It is simultaneously funny, moving and monstrously self-indulgent – or, as Miranda puts it, “about as musical theatre nerdy as it can get.”

Imagining Miranda as the steward of an alternate Marvel universe – Comic-Con, but for musical theatre geeks – restores him to what, prior to the opening of Hamilton in 2015, was his quieter role in the cultural landscape: as the champion of a much-loved, much-mocked art form that rarely troubled mainstream popular culture. Hamilton changed all that. The show not only won 11 Tonys, a Pulitzer, and more than $850m in box office receipts, it conferred on Miranda a singular status, variously crediting the 41-year-old with reanimating history, diversifying Broadway, and provoking children all over the world to memorise large chunks of lyrics about America’s revolutionary politics, some of them concerned with the restructuring of the national debt. (“Hey yo, I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy and hungry / And I’m not throwing away my shot” – still being hammered out at a million barmitzvahs). The most surprising thing about all this, perhaps, is that Miranda, appearing today in his customary flat cap and goatee, has the boundless enthusiasm and apparent absence of cynicism of the aspiring artist still untouched by success.

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Omar Souleyman: singer held by Turkey over alleged militant links is freed

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Syrian questioned by police after reports he has ties to banned Kurdish People’s Protection Units

Celebrated Syrian singer Omar Souleyman, who has performed at festivals around the world, has been released after being detained over alleged links to Kurdish militants.

Souleyman was freed at 10.30pm (19.30 GMT) after a confusing day during which he was released in the morning before being taken back to a detention centre.

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Oxford University identifies 145 artefacts looted in Benin raid

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Plundered items likely to be returned to Nigeria include plaques, bronze figures and musical instruments

The University of Oxford is holding 145 objects looted by British troops during an assault on the city of Benin in 1897 that are likely to be repatriated to Nigeria, a report has said.

More than two-thirds of the plundered items are owned by the university’s Pitt Rivers Museum, and 45 are on loan. They include brass plaques, bronze figures, carved ivory tusks, musical instruments, weaving equipment, jewellery, and ceramic and coral objects dating to the 13th century.

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Marry Me: do you take the J-Lo/Owen Wilson romcom to be the weirdest film of 2022?

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Jennifer Lopez proposes to Owen Wilson, a maths teacher she’s never met. What was she thinking? How will it end? And does anyone care?

Nobody really wants it to be 2021, do they? A vicious global pandemic is about to enter its third year, the world is on fire and populist politics threatens to overturn democracy as we know it. Some people have reacted to these terrible times by trying to change things. Others are willing themselves back to a more innocent era.

By “others”, I mean Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, who are doing their level best to make it 2005 again. How? By making a romcom, that’s how. If this was a decade and a half ago, then Marry Me would automatically be one of the biggest hits of the year, bringing together the unstoppable forces responsible for Maid in Manhattan and Wedding Crashers. But it isn’t 2005, it’s 2021, and the thought of watching Lopez and Wilson shuffle through a romcom together is baffling. Perhaps it’d help to go through the Marry Me trailer beat by beat.

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‘It was mind-boggling’: Richard Gere on the rescue boat at the heart of Salvini trial

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Exclusive: the Hollywood actor, who lawyers have listed as a key witness, describes scenes of desperation on the Open Arms vessel

The Hollywood actor Richard Gere has revealed for the first time the full story behind his mercy mission to the NGO rescue boat Open Arms as he prepares to testify as a witness against Italy’s former interior minister and far-right leader, Matteo Salvini, who is on trial for attempting to block the 147 people onboard from landing in Italy.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Gere, 72, who lawyers have listed as a key witness to the situation aboard the NGO rescue boat Open Arms, described the scenes of desperation he saw when he arrived on the vessel being held off the Italian island of Lampedusa in the summer of 2019 with conditions rapidly deteriorating.

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