The actor, best known for her role as Lavender Brown, says her symptoms have lasted for weeks
Harry Potter star Jessie Cave has been admitted to hospital after testing positive for Covid-19 while pregnant with her fourth child.
The actor, best known for her role as Lavender Brown in the film adaptations of the hit books, said the virus had hit her hard and her symptoms have lasted weeks.
Continue reading...From defiantly turning her back on male approval to her seamlessly snappy defiance of the ‘women aren’t funny’ trope, Midge is a warrior whose example still resonates
The best line so far in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel – the Emmy award-winning comedy drama about a New York-50s-housewife-turned-standup-comic – isn’t a joke she delivers in a set on a dingy club stage. It isn’t even one of the endless, off-stage zingers by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino (also behind Gilmore Girls). It is, in fact, the searing three-word reply that Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) fires at her husband, Joel (Michael Zegen), halfway through season one, when he asks why she won’t give their marriage another shot: “Because you left.”
In that moment, Mrs Maisel becomes the ultimate single woman’s icon. In a world that measures her success and identity by her marital status, she makes the decision to be a single mother and blindly embrace whatever is ahead. While the social stigmas attached to being unmarried might have relaxed since Midge’s time, the reality today is this: in 2019 five hospital trusts and six clinical commissioning groups banned single women from accessing IVF; our prime minister once said the children of single women are “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate”; single people feel priced out of owning a house while couples have a double income; and – take it from someone who knows – if you’re not standing on a soapbox shouting “single, fierce and independent!”, friends and family assume you’re sitting at home feeling sad with the cat (or without the cat, because the landlord won’t allow it).
Continue reading...Playing junior doctor Shruti is a far cry from the standup’s ‘really silly’ sketch comedy but her improv background helped her find moments of levity in Adam Kay’s NHS drama
When Ambika Mod was cast in This Is Going to Hurt, Adam Kay’s TV adaptation of his diaries as a junior NHS doctor, it was late 2020 and health workers were facing a new Covid wave. “It felt like, now more than ever, it was an important story to tell,” she says. “I was filled with fear because of the sheer responsibility.”
Mod plays Shruti Acharya, a junior doctor under the tutelage of Adam (played by Ben Whishaw). “It’s so rare to see a well-written, complex, young south Asian female character,” she says. “Her arc is so brilliant.” The character is an amalgamation of people Kay worked with. “I share a lot in common with Shruti,” says Mod. “We’re both young Indian women, we’re both children of immigrants, so Adam was really receptive to my thoughts. I remember him saying: ‘If Shruti doesn’t make sense to you, she’s not going to make sense to anyone.’”
Continue reading...Having escaped an ‘existential lightning bolt’, you might expect the comic actor to be slowing down. You’d be wrong
For at least a couple of weeks after it happened, Bob Odenkirk couldn’t remember he’d had a heart attack. He would wake up, feeling pretty good, and think about heading to work. “And everyone would say: ‘Calm down, you had a heart attack,’” he recalls. There is an absurdity to this daily revelation of bad news that I think Odenkirk – a connoisseur of the absurd – might enjoy.
“Here, let me show you this,” he says. “This is something my daughter made for me because every day was the same thing of not remembering.” He gets out his phone and finds a picture he took of a whiteboard with a timeline of the events of that week or so in July last year – collapsing on the set of his TV drama Better Call Saul, hospital, his family arriving – so that Odenkirk would know what had happened. He holds it up to the screen. On day one, she has written “die” (the quote marks are hers).
Continue reading...After a meandering third season, Rachel Brosnahan is back on ferocious form as a ‘girl comic’ fighting to regain her career
After a treacly, uneven third season, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (Amazon Prime) appears to have found its fangs again. “Revenge … I crave it. I am completely consumed by the need for it,” purrs Midge/Miriam (nobody seems to call her Midge any more), rediscovering her sharp edges, now back on a small stage in a dingy nightclub, with an act that is heavy on the F-word. This show is never better than when Miriam is having to fight tooth and nail for her spot in the limelight, and it is a welcome relief to see her having to do it again. “That’s life. Shit happens,” she declares, ending the routine on a surprisingly acerbic note.
I say surprising because, while the first two seasons were a lot of fun, Mrs Maisel found herself in a rut during the third, which paired huge set pieces with a meandering plot and episodes that felt far longer than they were. Season three all-but guaranteed that Miriam was going to make it big, until her seemingly certain path to stardom and home ownership hit not so much a road block as a solid brick wall, when she accidentally(ish) outed the biggest star in the world to his adoring audience. It appears that few picked up on the Judy Garland references that felt a little ahead of their time, but it was enough to get her fired from her fame-making tour, and bring her back to where it all started.
Continue reading...Larry Thomas, the actor behind the Seinfeld character, gives his take on the viral gaffe: ‘You can’t write this shit’
The extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who previously alerted the US to the dangers of space lasers, issued a new warning to the American people on Thursday: the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has unleashed “gazpacho police” to spy on Greene’s colleagues in Congress.
It is, of course, possible that a clandestine network bent on the regulation of cold soup operates deep under the Capitol cafeteria. But Greene was presumably confusing “gazpacho” with the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.
Continue reading...Paramedics at the ready! Ten years after their last bone-crunching outing, the juvenile daredevils are at it again
The first episode of Jackass is a seminal work of the 21st century. It is titled Poo Cocktail, and features in quick succession the early stunts, pranks and goofs that make up Jackass’s enduring DNA: the show’s breakout star Johnny Knoxville flies out of a cannon into a net; another of its regulars, Bam Margera, roly-polys down a hill through a group of nonplussed golfers while a cameraman giggles from inside a nearby bush; Ehren McGhehey, the most viscerally headlockable man ever committed to film, intercepts someone’s drive-thru order and throws it for a touchdown. Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, painted orange and dressed as an Oompa Loompa, skates down Venice Beach in a way that astonishes a bystander in wraparound shades.
When Jackass first launched on MTV in October 2000, I was 13 and it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Now I’m 34 and, well, there’s a bit in the first episode of Jackass where Knoxville knocks over someone’s drinking water with a fake erection while politely asking: “Where do you get sodas around here?” and it’s still the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Its cast of daredevil idiots took vomiting, falling off things, and brief-but-agonising pain and made it into high art.
Continue reading...He was the shellshocked genius who channelled his anarchic brilliance into The Goon Show. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman explain why they’ve written a play about Spike Milligan – while comedians remember a legend
The tortured lives of comedians form a biographical genre all of their own; there’s always an audience for the tears of a clown. No wonder Nick Newman and Ian Hislop chose Spike Milligan as the subject of their new play. Milligan, who died 20 years ago next month, is the troubled comedy genius to end them all. Shellshocked in the second world war, repeatedly admitted to hospital for mental ill health, subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, and increasingly embittered as his career failed to deliver on early promise – the Spike Milligan sad-clown drama writes itself.
“But we didn’t want to do that,” says Newman. “We wanted to ask: how did he come to create these brilliant things?” Their play – a cheerful act of ancestor-worship by by Private Eye’s editor and its eminent cartoonist – is about the first three years (1951-54) of The Goon Show, as its chief writer Milligan battles the BBC to get his vision on air. “It’s: will he survive the fallout from the war?,” says Newman, “and will he crack radio?” And, “spoiler alert!,” chimes in Hislop. “Milligan wins! We just wanted to have a play where he wins.”
Continue reading...Forty years after his breakthrough role in Little House on the Prairie, the actor is thrilling TV audiences as a drug cartel money launderer. But he almost threw his career away
Jason Bateman appears on a Zoom screen from Los Angeles, bespectacled, calm and in uncluttered, butter-coloured environs. It’s as if Michael Bluth, the character he played in Arrested Development, had dressed up as a therapist for some hilarious purpose. To fans of the show, its entire cast will always have traces clinging to them, as if they have all been, well, arrested in that dysfunctional family. But today we’re here to talk about Ozark, a drama with a reputation that has been climbing each season (it’s now in its fourth and final) and so has, arguably, become even more defining for Bateman.
Tense and lingering, Ozark has the dizzying pace and visual sumptuousness that the modern long-running box set demands. What was haunting about it from the start were the subtle performances of Bateman and his co-star, Laura Linney; just a regular, affluent, middle-aged couple, except he was about to launder $500m for a drug cartel and she’d just watched the murder of the lawyer she was having an affair with. They were on the run, but only sort of. They hated each other, except they didn’t. What passed between them gave such propulsive energy to their characters that from the very beginning you could trust one thing: it might be improbable, but it was never going to be boring. But all that nuance was a double-edged sword. “Marty and Wendy are really intelligent characters,” Bateman says. “Sometimes that narrows your options as a writer, trying to keep things plausible. They can’t do really stupid things. The smart thing to do is to turn yourself in. Then the show’s over.”
Continue reading...Thompson gives an emotionally generous performance as a former teacher seeking sexual gratification in an amusing and compassionate two-hander
Emma Thompson gives us a very personal, emotionally generous and intimate performance in this entertaining theatrical two-hander from screenwriter Katy Brand and director Sophie Hyde. Despite some moments of sentimentality and naivety, it is really watchable and conceived with a flair for commanding the audience’s attention. It’s not exactly right to call it a crowd-pleaser, but Brand – who has her own record in comedy writing and performance – has a comic’s sense of how and where to elicit an audience response.
Thompson plays Nancy, a middle-aged widow and former RE teacher who after a lifetime of unsatisfying conjugal relations with just the one man (her late husband) has decided to pay for discreet afternoon sex in an upmarket Norwich hotel room.
With her brisk and schoolteacherly need for education and self-betterment, Nancy feels that she needs to experience some more sex before her death, including the most important and climactic sexual experience of all. Thompson makes her a cousin of sorts to the woman who secretly cries in the bathroom in Love Actually, because Alan Rickman is cheating on her, and to the nurse who had sex with Jeff Goldblum in The Tall Guy.
Daryl McCormack (Isaiah Jesus from TV’s Peaky Blinders), enigmatically plays the young man she has hired online who goes by “Leo Grande”. Until relatively recently, “escort” was the term used if you wanted to avoid the p-word, but Leo, of course, with un self-consciously polite professionalism, uses “sex worker”.
Leo has the tolerant, smilingly indulgent manner of a therapist who has seen and heard it all, or a concierge in a cool boutique hotel who can procure anything you like as Nancy babblingly confesses to him her unhappiness, her disappointment with her children and with herself, and her one frustrated moment of sexual rapture on holiday in Greece when she was 20. She is torn between delaying or abandoning this whole absurd idea and the need to get on with the sex right now (“I can’t bear the suspense!”) And, in fact, the audience might share that impatience, as it is the depiction of bought sex itself which is going to test this movie, rather than lines of bittersweet dialogue.
As for Leo, Nancy says: “You’re some sort of sex saint – are you real?” And again, we might well wonder the same thing. Just as the customer in the bought sex transaction is the one with the power and the capital, so Thompson’s character is the one with the wealth of backstory, and Leo sometimes seems blank, almost like a Stepfordian robot. We are waiting for Leo’s serenely trouble-free manner to crack, and of course crack it does, but the film refuses the traditional explanatory revelation of unhappiness, and shows us that some people selling sex can and do remain happy.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is showing at the Sundance film festival and will be released later this year
Continue reading...A brilliant cast lead this outrageously fun gorefest, which navigates a 90s-to-present-day timeline with laughs, panache – and exploding planes
What’s not to love about Yellowjackets (Sky Atlantic), a series largely driven by the central mystery of which teenage girl has been eaten, and who ordered the eating? The US horror/thriller/drama, which is also truly a comedy (is it so wrong to laugh at an exploding plane?), has acquired a big following over the course of its first season. It tells the story of a girls’ high-school football team, whose plane crashes while they’re travelling to a national tournament, leaving survivors stranded in the wilderness, having to fight for their lives. Think of it as a hybrid of The Craft and The Island with Bear Grylls, or Lost – with intentional jokes – plus a hint of Big Little Lies, if that had more of an interest in cannibalism than property porn.
I can’t remember the last time a TV series offered such unadulterated and outrageous fun. It even manages to navigate one of contemporary television’s most irritating trends, the split timeline, with style and panache. Half of the action takes place in 1996, starting out as a retro teen drama in the run-up to the crash, morphing into a folk-horror gorefest once the girls (and the odd boy or two) are right there in the thick of it. The other half takes place 25 years later, in the present day, as some of the women who made it out alive have to work out who knows what about the terrible things they did while they were stranded, and who is trying to blackmail them about it.
Continue reading...In an age of catastrophe, humour is more important than ever, argues the satirical author.
• Plus, 10 terrific 21st-century comic novels
I do not write historical fiction. But I envy those who do. I can picture them sitting in the lamp-lit halls of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, thumbing through fraying, early 20th‑century telephone directories or spinning the roulette of the microfiche machine, or meeting at a nearby coffee dispensary with fellow history-minded wordsmiths in the wee hours of the day, like hunters getting ready to put a bullet through the heart of a wildebeest. The best are able to address the current moment through deft metaphysical journeys between the present and the past, to illuminate our wayward realities by reminding us that it has ever been so, that the past is not even the past, or whatever Faulkner said.
Personally, I have trouble building a literary time machine. A decade ago, when I wrote a memoir set primarily in the 1980s, all I could remember of that era was Michael J Fox running around in a varsity jacket. The rest of my memories were just volumes of mist that sometimes trickled out of my minor brain holes, tantalising but highly suspect emissions that bore news of events which may or may not have been. When one’s teenage years are a distant Greek island, imagine trying to write a novel about the romantic entanglements of the Italian futurists or the political cataclysms of Meiji-era Japan, or anything at all about the ancient Egyptians.
Continue reading...Saget was found unresponsive in an Orlando hotel room on Sunday
Bob Saget, the actor and comedian most famous for his role in the much-loved 80s sitcom Full House, has died at the age of 65.
The Orange County sheriff’s office confirmed Saget’s death on Twitter on Monday, saying he had been found unresponsive in his hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, Florida on Sunday. The sheriff’s office confirmed that no cause of death had been determined, saying in a statement there were no signs of foul play or drug use.
Continue reading...Shaparak Khorsandi and Esther Manito both came of age during a time when women were expected to conform to male stereotypes. To reflect, they did what they do best: wrote comedy shows about it
When Shaparak Khorsandi’s teenage son recently discovered 90s music – the Shamen’s Ebeneezer Good, Pulp and more – he had questions for her. What did Jarvis Cocker mean when he sang “I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire?” Were they singing about ecstasy? Did she go raving, too?
Khorsandi was in her teens and 20s in the 1990s, and being swept along in ladette culture. Used by the lads’ mag FHM as early as 1994, “ladette” came to describe bolshie women who could out-party and out-gross any hardened lad. Sara Cox, Denise van Outen and Zoe Ball were the media favourites: often pictured binge-drinking and out on the town. Ladettes went hand-in-hand with 90s lad culture, where Britpop, banter and sport collided in a blizzard of hedonism. These “new lads”, posited one researcher, were retreating into a more simplistic masculinity in response to the Spice Girls’ concept of Girl Power; and middle-class boys were co-opting the dress and behaviours of working-class men.
Continue reading...Adam McKay’s celeb-packed Netflix comedy aims to be a farcical warning of climate change but broad potshots and a smug superiority tanks his message
When persuading someone to change their mind on a major topic, what’s being said isn’t always quite as important as how it’s said. If a person feels attacked or disrespected or condescended to, they’ll turn off their brain and block out the most rational, correct arguments on principle alone. Homo sapiens are odd, emotional creatures, more amenable to a convincing pitch than poorly presented rightness. It’s why we vote for the guy we’d gladly have as a drinking buddy over the somewhat alienating candidates with a firmer grasp on the issues. It’s why we feel heartbreak when the worst person we know makes a great point.
Adam McKay’s new satire Don’t Look Up, a last-ditch effort to get the citizens of Earth to give a damn about the imminent end of days spurred by the climate crisis, appears to be at least somewhat aware of this defect in human nature. It’s all about the difficulty of compelling the disinterested to care, in this instance about a gargantuan comet hurtling toward the Earth on a collision course of imminent obliteration, an emphatic if rather ill-suited, metaphor. (Everyone’s blasé about global heating in part because it’s so gradual, because it isn’t a force of instant destruction with a due date in an immediate future we’ll all live to see.) Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence portray astronomers Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky, flummoxed to find that no one’s all that alarmed about the “planet-killer” they’ve discovered – not the grinning daytime cable-news dummies played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett, not the White House led by Trump-styled president Meryl Streep and not the American people.
Continue reading...The doctor turned comic and bestselling author on writing children’s books, hiding useful facts in disgusting jokes and how bad at Scrabble he is
Adam Kay, 41, trained as a doctor and worked for the NHS for six years before quitting to become a writer and comedian. Both his memoirs, This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor and Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas, were bestsellers, with several million copies sold, making him the first author to have simultaneous No 1s for hardback and paperback nonfiction titles. He turned both books into hugely successful standup shows. Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas is touring the UK and a BBC Two series of This Is Going to Hurt, adapted by Kay and starring Ben Whishaw, is coming in 2022. He has also started writing children’s books, publishing Kay’s Anatomy last year and, in September, Kay’s Marvellous Medicine.
What made you want to write children’s books?
I have always been fascinated by the human body; I think it is the most extraordinary bit of kit ever. But it’s never had the same cool billing among kids as outer space and dinosaurs, probably because they’re forced to do biology in a rather dry way at school. So I thought I’d have a go at getting across my enthusiasm for the topic, with some jokes thrown in.
He has made a career out of winding people up in everything from The Office to his Golden Globes speeches – but is the comedian’s bark worse than his bite?
Ricky Gervais’s assistant leads me past a huge, empty room to the top floor of an office above a shop on a swanky London high street. Gervais is sitting behind a desk at his computer in another huge, empty room, and looks as if he’s just squatted the place. There is nothing that suggests this is his office, except for the branded mugs sitting on his desk; one shows his face, the second says Tambury Gazette, the fictional newspaper where Gervais’s character, Tony, works in his hit Netflix series After Life.
As soon as he sees me, he swings his legs off the floor and on to the desk. I expect him to say, “Right, shoot”, as his fabulous fictional creation David Brent might have done, but he reins himself in. It’s 20 years since Gervais made his name with The Office, and it’s often been difficult to know where Brent ends and Gervais begins.
Continue reading...After a year of criticism over diversity, the Golden Globes have come up with a decent slate of nominees, with Gaga surely the favourite for best actress
• Full list of 2020 nominations
The Golden Globes nomination list has been announced with a solemn introduction from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s president Helen Hoehne, to the effect that the Globes’ much-criticised controlling body was “trying to be better” and that its constituent membership was more diverse than at any other time in its history. Which is better, I suppose, than being less diverse than at any time in its history.
At any rate, leading the pack are Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s unashamed heartwarmer about the home town of his early childhood, with seven nominations and Jane Campion’s stark, twisty western-Gothic psychodrama The Power of the Dog, set in 1920s Montana with Benedict Cumberbatch as the troubled, angry cattleman who begins a toxic duel with his new sister-in-law played by Kirsten Dunst and her sensitive teenage son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Continue reading...Despite the abuse and anger, the comedian spent hours a day online. But then his daughter Dolly became dangerously drawn in. Was it time for a rethink?
Over the past 30 years, I have read and heard David Baddiel’s thoughts on many subjects, including sex, masturbation, religion, antisemitism, football fandom, football hooliganism, his mother’s sex life and his father’s dementia. “I am quite unfiltered,” he agrees, “mainly because I am almost psychotically comfortable in my own skin.” But today I have found the one subject that makes him squirm.
How much time does he spend on social media a day? “Oh, um, too much,” he says, his usual candour suddenly gone. What’s his daily screen time according to his phone? “It says four hours, which is a bit frightening.”
Continue reading...Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
The Australian comedian has opted for a feel-good show, but without any easy sentimentality
What better way to symbolise your favourable turn in fortune than with adorable bunnies, the sign of good luck? Comedian Hannah Gadsby has marked her return to the Sydney Opera House with four rabbits across the stage, though you will probably first notice the one in the Joan Sutherland theatre that functions as a lantern, a beacon of hope.
Of course, none of these rabbits are alive, which turns out to be apt, given the desecration of one unlucky bunny that hopped into the middle of the performer’s toxic relationship with an ex she struggled to shake off and another that emits a high-pitched squeal of terror as it crosses paths with Gadsby, her new wife and producer, Jenney Shamash, and their two dogs, Douglas and Jasper, on an outdoor stroll.
Continue reading...