Mighty Hoopla 2023: 7 iconic moments we’ll remember forever June 5, 2023 Drag, cabaret, live performance… Britain’s most colourful music and arts festival, Mighty Hoopla, has wrapped for another year. The festival welcomed over 60,000 people to London’s Brockwell Park over the weekend, and has become famous for uniting Britain’s pop music fans and LGBTQ people over two days of the most vibrant staging the festival circuit [...]
Three years after Covid began, Japan is welcoming tourists June 5, 2023 Just hours after arriving in Japan from London, a geisha girl is teaching me a drinking game. She sings a lilting, nursery rhyme-style tune as we take turns tapping the small wooden box between us, trying to catch each other out by whipping the box away so the other person must lay a closed fist on the [...]
Mad About The Boy charts 73 years of Noël Coward’s amazing life June 2, 2023 This new, bite-sized biography of the late playwright, actor, and raconteur Noël Coward squeezes a lot into just over ninety minutes, but while it rarely stops for breath, it paints an interesting portrait of a life of contradictions. Barnaby Thompson, director of the St Trinian’s reboot and likeable 2020 comedy Pixie, drags us through Coward’s [...]
Across The Spider-verse review: another hit animated romp June 2, 2023 It’s difficult to express just how impactful 2018’s Into The Spider-verse has been on Hollywood. Critically adored and a box office hit, it was a soft launch for the ‘multiverse’ concept in superhero movies. It played with possibilities safe in the knowledge that it didn’t need to be a part of any larger network of [...]
Pride Month 2023 in London: Where to go and what to do June 1, 2023 Summer is finally upon us and Pride Month has officially begun. Throughout June London will play host to hundreds of LGBT events in venues across the capital, culminating in the 2023 Parade on 1 July. As well as the usual host of fabulous drag acts, open-air theatre and coruscating comedy, there will be awareness events and [...]
Where Succession succeeded: An anatomy of a modern classic June 1, 2023 At the wrap party for the final episode of Succession, Jeremy Strong – who played Kendall Roy, the cursed sibling at the heart of this tragi-comic melodrama – had his head shaved by Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook. An infamous method actor (he actually drank the vile “meal for a king” of cacao powder, eggs [...]
Blur – The Narcissist: A deep-dive into the genesis of (another) hit May 30, 2023 There is a moment in the Beatles’ catalogue of which I’m particularly fond. It comes on the album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when Paul McCartney, ever the panting optimist, sings: “It’s getting better all the time.” Lennon improvises back: “It couldn’t get much worse.” The essentially dual spirit of the Beatles is encapsulated in that [...]
Ben Elton interview: Woke comedy and the scourge of individualism May 30, 2023 In a rundown rehearsal room opposite a housing estate in Oval, Ben Elton is spilling political truths in sharp, disarmingly blunt sentences. He’s been talking for almost fifteen minutes, nearly half the time I have with him, but I’ve barely asked him a question. Aged 63, Elton still fizzes with energy. He talks on three [...]
A tribute to Martin Amis: ‘He wanted time itself to flow backwards’ May 28, 2023 Last weekend Martin Amis died in Fort Worth, Florida at the age of 73 – the same age as his father Sir Kingsley Amis – of a disease I hadn’t known he had, in a house I wasn’t aware he had owned. Why should the death of our heroes be so shocking, being as it [...]
Aspects of love, London, review: Flatly ridiculous, utterly gorgeous Michael Ball musical May 26, 2023 Aspects of Love review and star rating: ★★★★ I think I must be mad, but I really enjoyed this absolutely morally bankrupt musical about a weirdly incestual group that all seem to have sex with each other, no matter their relation to one another, and no matter how flatly ridiculous it all seems. I’ve never [...]