I recreated all my favourite TV tropes, from crawling through pipes to being two kids in a trenchcoat
The dirty, dangerous and ‘obsessive’ world of mudlarking October 8, 2024 Once the domain of Victorian street urchins, the art of mudlarking has gone mainstream. Lucy Kenningham investigates
Children of The Cult review: Cult documentary charts abuse October 7, 2024 Children of The Cult | Dir Maroesja Perizonius & Alice McShane | ★★★★☆ Documentaries about cults have become sensationalist streaming fodder in recent years, but Children of The Cult strips away the headlines and brings you face to face with victims and their stories. It’s an investigation into the Rajneesh Movement, a cult that had [...]
Joker: Folie à Deux review – a strange, dark musical October 7, 2024 Joker was a fascinating outlier in modern cinema. The violent, Scorsese-inspired psychodrama was a huge risk, whisking the Clown Prince of Crime away from the world of comic books and placing him in a grimy 1980s Gotham City that resembled nothing more than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The gamble paid off, with an Oscar for [...]
What does it take to be the best… at Karaoke? October 7, 2024 Barging past a swarm of small children jostling upwards from the seafront, I arrive at the Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre. It is, with the best will in the world, an ugly building, like a bingo hall had sex with a secondary school. Inside is a different story. Its intestines are a marbled maze of tiles and [...]
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit at Tate Modern – a house of horrors October 3, 2024 Were you to stumble upon the works of Mike Kelley in, say, an abandoned warehouse rather than the galleries of the Tate Modern, you would fear for your safety, if not your sanity. Strolling through works collected from the late 1970s up until Kelley’s suicide in 2012 is like happening upon the headquarters of some [...]
No more Noma: What’s next for Copenhagen’s food scene October 3, 2024 For decades, Noma has been one of the most coveted restaurants on the planet. It birthed ‘new Nordic’ cuisine in 2003 and stamped the small Danish capital on the gastronomic map, winning the world’s best restaurant award multiple times and holding Michelin stars since 2008. Its stratospheric success was led by head chef and co-founder [...]
Cush Jumbo: On playing Hamlet and choosing which cake to eat October 3, 2024 There are two types of people: those who already know about Cush Jumbo, one of the finest British actors of her generation, and those who are soon to find out. The star of wildly successful TV shows including The Good Wife, Criminal Record and Deadwater Fell, Jumbo cemented her A-List credentials when she became the [...]
The eternal jobstopper? The future of face tattoos October 3, 2024 Jamie McPhee’s first face tattoo was a little star under his eye. He just fancied it. After the star under his left eye, he got a star under his right eye – the asymmetry was bugging him. Before you could say, “Are you sure that’s a good idea, Jamie?” he had a skull and crossbones [...]
‘I didn’t give a f**k what Ofcom thought’ – in conversation with Grace Campbell and Hannah Crosbie October 1, 2024 Wine writer Hannah Crosbie interviews her friend and comedian Grace Campbell in Soho’s Bar Crispin about the changing face of social media, the pull of TV and getting high in Edinburgh. Hannah Crosbie: So the last time we saw each other was that hilarious night at the Edinburgh Fringe. We went to Noodles & Dumplings [...]
When viral fame fades: From Binley Mega Chippy to the Spudman October 1, 2024 In March 2022, I visited fish and chip takeaway Binley Mega Chippy in my hometown of Coventry 10 minutes after it had opened for dinner, joining a growing queue of people snaking out across a tarmac car park on the side of a busy A road. A line of cars waiting for a parking spot [...]