Section:GDN 12 PaGe:1 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 18:30 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

“ I like
characters
who are really
cocky and
really dumb

Arrested
Development’s
Will Arnett
on fatherhood,
friendship
and playing
the fool

Tuesday 08/02/22
Again! Again!
CBeebies’
20 greatest hits
page 4

’At 8pm I hit the vodka …’

The making of Stay
by Shakespears Sister
page 9
 Section:GDN 12 PaGe:3 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 17:53 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

Pass notes 3
The Guardian
Tuesday 8 February 2022

Zoe
Williams
As a parent, I have Cancel Netflix,
buy a house?
shifted from ‘oracle’ to Sorry, Kirstie, it
‘person who’s wrong’ doesn’t add up

F
irst your children idolise you, then they see through Kirstie Allsopp has been examining
you, then they forgive you. That’s how the parenting
cliche goes. I remember when I first read it. The kids
were really small, and I’d stolen 25 seconds from the
why young people can’t afford to
buy houses, suggesting they move
to cheaper areas, spend less time at
№ 4,369
ceaselessness to look at Twitter, which was all I ever
looked at then. Before long, two sentences came to
represent the absolute outer limit of my concentration span, and
the gym and not waste their money
on a Netflix subscription. You don’t
need me to point out the flaws in
The mile-high club
that, I’m afraid, is still true. The end of idolisation can’t come soon her arithmetic; that vital work has Appearance: Sexy, up in the air.
enough, I thought. Roll on seeing through me, bring forth scornful already been done. Age: Dates to the late 18th century.
self-reliance. Sure, it will be sad when the magic of childhood is These regular bulletins from But that’s well before the advent of powered
replaced by the cynicism of adolescence, but on the plus side, at the “things young people should flight. Yes, but the betting book of Brooks’s
least they’ll be able to travel unaided to the toilet. stop buying if they want to afford gentlemen’s club contains a 1785 record of
I maybe didn’t give enough thought to what the process of homes” gazette started in 2016, a wager between two lords, one of whom
being seen through would entail. It starts with the systematic, when an Australian demographer, was to receive 500 guineas from the other
real-time dismantling of all authority. These are all the things I’m Bernard Salt, criticised millennials if he had sex “in a balloon 1,000 yards from
no longer to be trusted on, as of last weekend: what length hair for going to “hipster cafes”. By the Earth”.
should be; where to play badminton; which of geography and the following year, this had been Sorry to be a pedant, but 1,000 yards is
history is more interesting; categories of skin type (“oily” and distilled down to the quintessential some way short of a mile high. Fast-forward,
“combination” are no longer in use, in the 21st century); anything hipster item, the avocado. If only then, to 1916: daredevil Lawrence Sperry,
to do with vegetarianism, or Ukraine, or animal husbandry; they would forego their fruit/ inventor of the autopilot, is giving a hands-
computers and phones; how to cross a road; the world of work; and vegetable on toast, they would be free flying lesson to a Mrs Polk when his
the identification of insects. I didn’t even realise how much casual able to save for a deposit. This line, plane crashes into a Long Island bay.
authority I had until it was all stripped away. I think I debased the like a lie, had got halfway round Rescuers find the survivors naked, making
currency by having too many strong opinions. Now I could have a the world before the truth – that Sperry and Polk joint founders of the mile-
full wheelbarrow of views and it wouldn’t buy it would take hundreds of years high club.
I didn’t realise me even a single slice of credibility.
I suggested we all take a new approach, work
before your daily avocado savings
would amount to a house – had got
How does it work in modern times? It varies,
but typically two people, not necessarily
how much casual on the assumption that I’m ignorant of almost
everything, and only mention the subjects on
its pants on.
Just as any coffee, so long as
previously acquainted, become intimate in
an aeroplane toilet mid-flight.
authority I had which I am still a trusted source. “The 1960s,”
said one. “I wasn’t alive in the 1960s!” “OK,
it was milky and Italian, came
to stand in for “privileged
Why would anyone want to have sex in a
plane toilet? To save the blushes of fellow
until it was all boomer,” said the other. “I’m not a boomer!
I’m generation X!” “Boomer is more of a vibe,”
metropolitan”, so the avocado
swelled to represent “any young
passengers.
I mean, why wouldn’t you just wait until you
stripped away said the first. “Being surprised by completely person, without any defined got home? For the thrill of accomplishing
predictable things,” said the second. “I range”. If you had coffee and something forbidden.
completely trust you to be amazed by things that avocado, that made you a privileged Is it forbidden? Generally – but no longer!
aren’t amazing.” young person, and, therefore, in the For $995 (£736), the Las Vegas charter service
It came at me quite fast, this shift from world of food symbolism, beneath Love Cloud will take you on a 45-minute
“oracle” to “person who is wrong about almost contempt, politically irrelevant. flight in a Cessna equipped with a bed, for the
everything”, but I’m developing some adaptive It didn’t make much sense, but it express purpose of having sex with someone
strategies, such as “being wrong on purpose, to made more sense than going after while airborne.
comic effect” and “not completely listening”. their Netflix subscriptions. It’s a Huh. Do I get to meet the person before? You
Much harder to process is the cast change: for platform you would be as, if not have to bring your own partner.
years, in the drama that is any household, the more, likely to associate with the A thousand bucks, other person not
parents are the main characters, and the children middle-aged, so it just reinforces provided? Yes, but after that each additional
have supporting roles, bringing cute moments and weird allergies the underlying message that what passenger is only $200.
to give texture to the narrative arc of the leads. Then, wham! One the middle-aged have as their What else do I get for that money? A
night, there you are, watching TV, perhaps you fall asleep a little birthright, the young will never certificate verifying membership of the mile-
earlier than you planned, perhaps the next generation stays up deserve. high club, signed by the pilot.
chatting past midnight. However they managed to orchestrate Allsopp should have gone after How does the pilot verify things? He wears
this, it has happened: they are now the heroes. If anyone were to this generation for “chilling”. noise-cancelling headphones throughout, so
make a poster of us all, their names would be bigger. The process Even people who don’t know what he’ll take your word for it.
must have been incremental, so how did I not see it coming? Did it “Netflix and chill” means still know What about champagne? Champagne is
start when one was suddenly taller? Or when one of the short ones that it’s a young person thing. extra.
started having a bath of their own free will? And people really go for this? They seem to.
Economists say that the individual’s contract with capitalism “My husband and I had joined the mile-high
is premised on seeing one’s children do better than oneself, and I club before, so to be able to do it privately
COVER: COREY NICKOLS/CONTOUR BY GETTY

always think: doesn’t that depend on the baseline? If you were rich
already, would you necessarily long for your children to be richer?
Could this be one of those things that economists are wrong about?
To see your children become the protagonist, on the other
hand – to become, yourself, a footnote to their story, a stub in
their Wikipedia entry – this was definitely the whole point. It’s the
natural order of things. You sure as hell wouldn’t want it the other
way round. So why is it so incredibly surprising? Oh right, I forgot:
being surprised by completely predictable things – that’s my
specialist subject.
was great,” party planner Frelima Howard
told the New York Times. “It was really nice
and exclusive and private.”
Could the idea take off in the UK? Not
without difficulty. In 2011, the Civil Aviation
Authority refused to recertify an outfit called
Kirstie Mile High Flights, claiming that inflight sex
Allsopp was too distracting for pilots.
Do say: “Please exercise care when opening
the overhead locker – the Fletchers are
in there.”
Don’t say: “How much for eight minutes?”
Section:GDN 12 PaGe:4 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
4 The Guardian
Isn’t it
time for …
CBeebies?
The BBC channel
has been delighting
young children –
and rescuing tired
parents – for two
decades. Here,
Stuart Heritage
picks his top 20
programmes from
its extensive archive
F
riday is a momentous
day. CBeebies, the
BBC’s dedicated
channel for viewers
aged six and under,
will be 20 years old.
There aren’t many television
companies around the world that
would devote an entire channel
to bright, educational, inclusive
output – but it isn’t until you
have kids that you realise what
a lifesaver CBeebies is. It is an
utterly trustworthy place, full of
wholesome stories and thoughtful
messages. Among the wild west of
YouTube and streaming platforms,
it is an outpost where you know
your children will always be
looked after.
CBeebies has produced so much
wonderful television that it is
impossible to list it all, but here is
a countdown of the 20 best shows
from the past two decades. Happy
birthday, CBeebies!
20 Tee and Mo
This show about a monkey and
her son features a series of songs
performed by Lauren Laverne. For
the most part, the songs exist to
remind parents that they are not
alone in their mundane struggles –
there is one about waking up, one
about tidying up, one about the
backbreaking effort of getting a
child out of the house. And then
there is a lovely lullaby waltz
called Go to Sleep. Almost without
exception, every new parent has
been caught off-guard by Go to
Sleep. Maybe it has been a hard day.
Maybe you are incapacitated with
exhaustion. Whatever the reason,
there will be a time when Go to
Sleep will come on unannounced
and reduce you to rubble. Most
parents have cried to Go to Sleep.
It is less a song and more a cruise
missile to the chest. It should
probably be banned.
19 Feeling Better
Hosted by Dr Radha Modgil, Feeling
Better was a 2018 series designed
to help children cope with the
emotions they encounter while
growing up. Every episode saw Dr
Radha attend to a puppet who was
experiencing new and complicated
feelings, by reassuring the puppet
that feelings are normal, then
singing a song about it. It was the
sort of show that would struggle
to be made anywhere else.
18 In the Night Garden
There are a couple of stages to
watching In the Night Garden.
The first comes when you are
introduced to its army of nonsense
characters – Igglepiggle, Makka
Pakka, the Tittifers, the Ninky
Sent at 7/2/2022 17:50
Rastamouse
Teletubbies
Nonk – and assume you have been
concussed. But sit with it for a few
episodes and In the Night Garden
unfolds with a beautiful logic.
Designed to appeal to a toddler’s
mind, this is often the first CBeebies
show a child will fall in love with.
17 Balamory
One of CBeebies’ launch offerings,
Balamory was a live-action show
about a small Scottish fishing
community, shot in the village
of Tobermory, on Mull. A bright,
otherwordly series, Balamory was
more traditional than the shows
CBeebies would later produce, but
it was a sensation nonetheless. It
still is: 20 years on, the comedian
Miles Jupp (Archie, the clueless
aristocrat who lived in a bright
pink castle) still hasn’t shaken his
association with the show.
16 Grandpa in my Pocket
A series based on the titular age-old
problem. Your grandfather was
the beloved actor James Bolam.
In a procession of staggeringly
inopportune moments, he kept
putting on a magical shrinking
cap, becoming the size of a mouse
and speeding around the house,
bringing toys to life. This show
was delightful, but, honestly, the
grandfather was a handful.
15 Swashbuckle
The closest your children will get
to Fun House or Finders Keepers.
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
Tuesday 8 February 2022
Hey Duggee
Gigglebiz
A fun, silly, nautical gameshow
where young contestants are pitted
against an uptight captain and
her idiotic crewmates. You could
write a thesis on the fact that,
since the protagonists are pirates
taking on the authoritarian might
of the navy, Swashbuckle is a way
to indoctrinate children into the
ways of guerrilla warfare. But that
would be stupid.
14 Bedtime Stories
Possibly the best-known CBeebies
show, and certainly the starriest,
Bedtime Stories ends each day on
the channel. A celebrity will appear
and read gently from a picturebook
close to their heart. The level of
celebrity Bedtime Stories attracts
 Section:GDN 12 PaGe:5 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 17:50 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

•
The Guardian
Tuesday 8 February 2022 5

is amazing; Tom Hiddleston, Tom Zephaniah criticised the characters’

Hardy, Kristin Scott Thomas, Dolly
Parton, James McAvoy and Elton
John have all read stories. I have
a soft spot for Nadiya Hussain’s
telling of My Little Star.
13 Tweenies
Tweenies predated CBeebies by
three years, but heavy rotation in
the ensuing years and its enormous
cultural footprint means it deserves
its spot. The series followed four
young (but adult-sized) children
as they played, sang, learned
and (often, in the case of Milo)
threw apocalyptic tantrums that
were quickly followed by needy
apologies. The Tweenies also
released several singles. Their
first was called No 1 and went to
No 5. Their last, bewilderingly,
was a cover version of the 1995
song Have Fun, Go Mad from the
Dunston Checks In soundtrack.
12 Twirlywoos Twirlywoos
Twirlywoos is a lesser-known
effort from Anne Woods’ Ragdoll
Productions – also known for
Rosie and Jim and Teletubbies –
but it is easily one of the best.
Each episode happens across two
parts. In the first, the Twirlywoos
(a family of four bulbous seafaring
creatures with propellers on their
heads) travel into the real world
and create havoc for a succession
of well-meaning but dimwitted
humans. Once some lives have
been ruined, the Twirlywoos head
back to their boat and learn lessons Numberblocks
about prepositions. Everything
about Twirlywoos is impossibly
charming; it deserves much more
recognition than it gets.
11 Old Jack’s Boat
The most delightful show CBeebies
ever made. In every episode, lovely,
twinkly Bernard Cribbins boards
his boat and tells a lovely, twinkly
story to his adorably old dog. Not a
huge amount happens in the stories
– they usually revolve around the
local community, which includes
Freema Agyeman and Helen
Lederer, and younger kids may be
PHOTOGRAPHS: BBC PICTURE ARCHIVES; MITCH JENKINS; THREE STONES MEDIA; RAGDOLL PRODUCTIONS
Bluey
appeals to children and parents,
Gigglebiz earns its place for never
pandering to its young audiences.
Also, it is a sketch show. Do you
know how rare those things are
these days?
8 Maddie’s Do You Know?
Old Jack’s Boat
production-line segments, but throughout. The manner in which
Maddie’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for he travels back in time, involving
everything she sees really sells it. a magic clock in a museum that
Andy seems to remember only
7 Let’s Play when anyone mentions the
In which Sid Sloane and Rebecca word “time” to him, defies logic
Keatley dress up in the uniforms to such an extent that it gives
of various professions then travel adults something to pedantically
West Indian accents – it is one of
the most loved. The characters are
beautifully designed, the humour
is happily offbeat and, as someone
who has suffered through more
CBeebies Spotify soundtracks than
most, I can gladly attest that the
music isn’t at all insufferable.
3 Teletubbies
Of course Teletubbies is up there.
For 25 years, it has been the
archetypal BBC kids’ show – which
is odd, given that it’s about a group
of infantile custard-drinking aliens
who blunder around under the
watchful gaze of a baby trapped in
the sun. But this loose relationship
with adult logic is exactly what
makes Teletubbies so special. Point
a preschooler – any preschooler
– at an episode of Teletubbies
and they will be transfixed. The
creation of Teletubbies was a
watershed moment when it
came to presenting information
to children. The fact that it is
still so popular underlines how
important it is.
2 Bluey
Joe Brumm’s Bluey isn’t just one
of the best children’s television
shows of all time; it is one of the
best shows full stop. A show about
a family of Australian blue heeler
dogs, Bluey is in reality a series
of short films, each with its own
distinct mood and soundtrack.
There is Takeaway, a story about
a father trying to entertain his
children, set in one location
and told in real time. There is
Sleepytime, scored to Holst’s The
Planets, in which a young girl
travels through space in order to
gain the bravery to sleep alone.
There is Movies, which includes
a big Disney-style musical number.
There is Camping, which involves
a genuinely ostentatious time
jump to show how the main
character is faring in adolescence.
There is Flat Pack, in which,
no joke, the characters roleplay
evolution, from prokaryotes all
the way to a posthuman utopia.

put off by the slower pace at first –
but it is a great world in which to
immerse yourself. Several episodes
were written by Russell T Davies.
10 Dipdap
A wildly inventive series of three-
minute shorts, Dipdap revolved
around a simply animated character
forced to overcome the obstacles
created for him by a line drawing.
There was something beautifully
timeless about Dipdap – it was a
21st-century show with the feel of
a 70-year-old Warner Bros cartoon.
Don’t be surprised if children are
still discovering it anew several
generations from now. Balamory
9 Gigglebiz
Justin Fletcher has a whole array of
CBeebies shows to his name – there
is Something Special, if you need
something soothing, or Justin’s
House, if you want to feel as if you
are trapped in a hellish liminal soft
play centre for ever – but Gigglebiz
is probably the best showcase of his
talents. An all-out sketch show that
Maddie Moate is one of CBeebies’
all-time breakout stars – and her
ascent began here. Maddie picks a
thing she wants to learn more about
– soft-play cushions, say, or toilet
rolls – and visits the factory where
they are made. Deep down, it is an
update of those old Sesame Street
magically into their world. By itself,
Let’s Play would be a perfectly
diverting television show, but
what pushes it over the edge is
the dizzying number of characters
Keatley and Sloane play. There is
one episode, set in a courtroom,
in which Keatley simultaneously
plays a claimant, a defendant,
a witness, a member of the jury,
two lawyers and an usher. It is
astounding – Kind Hearts and
Coronets told in 20 minutes. People
should have thrown flowers at
Keatley’s feet as the credits rolled.
6 Andy’s Dinosaur
Adventures
Like Justin Fletcher, Andy
Day has an entire squadron of
CBeebies shows. Andy’s Dinosaur
Adventures is the most popular
and the best. The conceit is
simple – Andy travels back in
time to interact with various
prehistoric animals, by digitally
inserting himself into Walking
With Dinosaurs footage – but Andy
is a bright and charming guide
overanalyse during the long days
of parenthood. A godsend.
5 Numberblocks
A show so staggeringly effective
that they use it in schools. Prior
to Numberblocks, shows about
maths would be about characters
doing maths. In Numberblocks,
the characters are the maths.
They throw themselves together
and pull themselves apart to
demonstrate mathematical
principles in a satisfyingly visual
way. This means that children
are able to latch on to relatively
challenging ideas with ease. If I
had grown up with Numberblocks
in my life, I would be much less
stupid as an adult.
4 Rastamouse
Rastamouse is a stop-motion
animation about the crimefighting
adventures of a Rastafarian mouse
who also performs in a reggae
band. While it might not be the
most culturally accurate show
CBeebies has ever made – Benjamin
Bluey is absolutely breathtaking
television and it deserves to be
watched by everyone.
1 Hey Duggee
If anyone tries to tell you that
children’s television was better in
the good old days, sit them down
and make them watch Hey Duggee.
Grant Orchard’s animated series
about a dog who runs a cub-scout-
style youth group might well be
the best kids’ show ever made.
It is fast, it is funny, it is sweet,
it is educational, it is visually
distinct, it throws adult references
into the mix with wild abandon
(one episode is an Apocalypse
Now riff, for crying out loud).
And, Lord, is it inventive. In one
episode, the characters become
puppets; in another, ceramic
mugs. To watch Hey Duggee is
to watch a television programme
struggle to constrain the scope of
one man’s limitless imagination.
It is utterly astonishing and much,
much better than anything you
watched as a child.
Section:GDN 12 PaGe:6 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
6 The Guardian
‘My life shifted in five
years. Isn’t that wild?’
As his new show hits
Netflix, Arrested
Development’s
Will Arnett tells
Hadley Freeman
about fatherhood
in his 50s, getting
through his ‘weird
years’ – and making
Liza Minnelli swoon
N
o one is better
at playing idiotic egomaniacs than
Will Arnett, and I mean that as the
highest of compliments. From his
malevolent ice-skating champion in
Blades of Glory, to the nefarious TV
executive Devon Banks in 30 Rock,
to most famously, Gob (pronounced,
biblically, “Job”) Bluth, the
inept eldest son on Arrested
Development, Arnett has cornered
the market on fools who brag about
themselves to compensate for how
little they have to brag about.
“Like the guy in the $4,000 suit
is holding the elevator for the guy
who doesn’t make that in three
months. Come on!” Gob shouts at
his employees. So it is extremely
pleasing that when we connect by
video chat, and Arnett appears on
my screen from his home in Los
Angeles, that he is sitting in front
of a clutch of awards. Like the actor
with a shelf of awards is going to
talk to the journalist with nothing.
Come on!
“Oh man. I just figured out that
I probably shouldn’t be sitting
here,” Arnett says when I ask about
the metalware behind him. “It’s
embarrassing because it’s like: ‘Hey
man, we can all curate what we have
in our background – and you choose
to have that!’ I’ve gotten a lot of shit
from friends on Zoom calls about
it. But honestly, I didn’t put them
there, I just moved house …”
As well as moving house, Arnett,
52, had a baby over lockdown,
Alexander, known as Denny, with
his girlfriend Alessandra Brawn.
He also has two older sons with
his ex-wife, Amy Poehler. How has
having his third baby in his 50s
compared with having his first in his
30s? “Well, when you already have
kids, you know how long the road is.
Like, this morning, just getting my
two older boys out of the house and
to school took a couple hours and
by the time I’m home it’s 8.30 and
I’m three hours into the day already
and I’m like: ‘Oh my God. I’m in this
for A WHILE,’” he says, rubbing his
eyes. Arnett looks far better than
anyone with a 20-month-old baby
has any right to, but his handsome
appearance always did undercut
his loser persona (or maybe that
should be the other way around).
So he’s not planning the fourth and
fifth babies? He fixes his face into an
exaggerated grin with wide-open,
terrified eyes. “No. I am absolutely
not doing that.”
The awards are for his work on the
superlative animated Netflix series
With Jason
Bateman in
Arrested
Development
Sent at 7/2/2022 18:25
From left:
Will Arnett, And yet Arnett has been famous
Sharon
Stone and
Samantha
Cutaran in creator of Arrested Development,
Murderville cast him as Gob after years of false
BoJack Horseman, which ran from
2014 to 2020, because as well as
being the go-to guy for malevolent
doofuses, Arnett is the man to call
if you’re making an animated film
or TV show and you need a deep
and scratchy voice that audiences
adore. Name a blockbuster
animated film of the past 20 years
and Arnett was probably involved:
Ratatouille, Despicable Me, the
Lego films – in which he played a
hilariously arrogant Batman.
“I think the first thing I did was … dumb. That always seems to be a
I want to say Ice Age 2? Maybe? But
don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of
those actors who are like: ‘Actually
I’ve done so many, I can’t remember cocktail. BoJack Horseman and
which one it is.’ It’s purely bad
memory,” he adds quickly. Liza
Minnelli swooned to his baritone
on Arrested Development and I ask
when he realised he had such a
great voice and whether he does
anything to take care of it. He
laughs at the very thought.
“Never and no. It wasn’t until
Existential
angst ... BoJack
Horseman
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
Tuesday 8 February 2022
I moved to New York that people route to comedy through sketch
mentioned my voice to me. shows. The dramatic background
Maybe in Canada people don’t
really compliment each other.
helped his comedy: his idiots are
endearing because he balances the
Actually, a member of my extended
family said to me: ‘People PAY
silliness with epiphanic moments
of bleak self-awareness, most
you for that voice?!’”
Unlike his characters, Arnett,
obviously with Gob. As a result, we
Arrested fans laughed at Gob, but
who grew up in Toronto, is cursed we also wanted to things to work
with a very Canadian sense of self- out for him. Arnett was especially
awareness and self-mockery. “I excellent on BoJack Horseman, as
hope I’m not being too earnest,” the destructive has-been actor who
he frets at one point. “I just get so knows how awful he is. Yet he had
worried when I talk about my life.”
always been so winning at playing
losers, it was hard not to feel
now for almost half his life. He
didn’t break through until he was
that, in jettisoning his signature
character, something had been lost.
almost 33, when Mitch Hurwitz, the
So it’s a joy to see him in his
latest Netflix series, Murderville,
a US take on BBC Three’s Murder
starts. “From the moment I met in Successville, in which he plays
Mitch, my life changed. I learned a cop named Terry Seattle – “and
so much about the world from him, no, I’ve never been there”, Seattle
and I’m a better person because of growls. In each episode, Seattle has
my friendship with him. You’re not to solve a murder with a different
going to get me crying,” he says, celebrity trainee – Sharon Stone,
tears suddenly welling in his eyes. Conan O’Brien, Annie Murphy, Ken
Arnett was one of the breakout Jeong and Kumail Nanjiani all take
stars of Arrested Development, turns in the role, and the celebrity
going from unknown to being cast has no script. Yes, it’s the improv
in movie comedies such as Blades
of Glory, Hot Rod and Semi-Pro,
playing characters not a million
miles from Gob. “I like characters
who are really cocky and really
really great cocktail for me,” he says.
I hope I’m
And yet, over the past decade,
he seemed to have enough of that
not being too
Flaked, the Netflix series he created,
earnest. I just
wrote and starred in 2016, about
a man struggling to maintain his
get so worried
sobriety, were melancholic rather
than farce. “It’s a new phase,” he told
when I talk
interviewers at the time. Arnett was
always a good actor, having studied
about myself
at the Lee Strasberg Institute,
rather than taking the usual
 Section:GDN 12 PaGe:7 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
The Guardian
Tuesday 8 February 2022
PHOTOGRAPHS: COREY NICKOLS/CONTOUR BY GETTY; NETFLIX; REX; ALAMY
celebrity cop show you didn’t know
you needed in your life. I was a little
sceptical when I heard about the
concept, and I have seen Arnett in
too many short-lived shows. But I
ended up bingeing it and, at times,
especially with Nanjiani’s episode, I
cried with laughter. It’s shamelessly
silly, and watching Arnett try to
control the storyline, while also
bouncing off the bemused celebrity
guest and still maintain his persona
as the moronic cop feels like a
glimpse of sunshine after a long
winter: you can’t help but grin. But
why isn’t Arnett’s Arrested co-star
– and off-screen best friend – Jason
Bateman in the show?
“He was supposed to be! But
because of the scheduling of his
other Netflix show [Ozark], he
•
couldn’t. What happened was a
bummer because – well, wait,” he
says, correcting himself. “Here’s
the good news: I actually ended
up making the show with a bunch
of people I didn’t know, which
was amazing. Because I’m lazy,
I love doing stuff with my friends,
but everyone was working. But
actually, we ended up getting so
many amazing people.”
It works to the show’s advantage
to have Arnett trying to manage
people he clearly isn’t best buddies
with, as it makes proceedings feel
less chummy. Stone is an obvious
example. “She’s so confident and
smart, I felt like her assistant,” he
says, and this comes across very
satisfyingly on screen. But the real
joy of Murderville is that, after the
Sent at 7/2/2022 18:25
know you and they talk about
your relationship as if they know
what’s going on. So imagine how
weird that is. It’s brutal with any
relationship, and we have kids, and
without getting into specifics, you
then see stuff online, like, this one
journalist wrote: ‘I’m Team Amy.’
I’m like: ‘You’re a grown person.
What are you talking about? This
is a breakup. This is a family. This
isn’t some game.’”
I tell him that my favourite part of
Poehler’s 2014 memoir, Yes Please,
is her chapter in which she imagines
hypothetical books to help people
through a divorce. One is called I
Want a Divorce! See You Tomorrow! –
to help divorced parents with young
children “have a knock-down,
drag-out fight and still attend a kid’s
birthday party together on the same
day”. He makes a small smile. “Yeah,
you get on with it. It’s been almost 10
years and my kids are so lucky that
Amy is their mother and I’m so lucky
that we’re such a huge part of each
other’s lives, even more so than we
were five years ago,” he says.
At the time of the separation,
Arnett was making season four
of Arrested Development, when
Netflix revived the show in 2013
after Fox abruptly ended it in 2006.
He was thrilled to be back with the
cast, but the shoot was, he says
“almost excruciating … Just brutal,
brutal, brutal. I was driving to the
set one day and I pulled over to
the side of the road and cried for
an hour.” At least he was working
with Hurwitz at the time, who, he
says, helped him to turn his pain
into something “hilarious and
cathartic” on the show.
That pain directly fed into
BoJack Horseman and Flaked. His
self-loathing, narcissistic character
on the latter was, he says, “an
amalgamation of characteristics
that I didn’t like about other people
and other stuff about me that I
didn’t like. Yeah, what a weird thing
to do. But it was kind of the only
thing I knew how to do. It was a
painful couple of years, but I had to
go through it, I guess.”
At the time of making Flaked,
Arnett, who had been sober for well
over a decade, said he was struggling
with alcohol again. He winces when
I bring that up. “I don’t know. I
think we all go through things in our
lives, and when we’re in it, we talk
very honestly about it. I don’t regret
existential angst of BoJack, it’s nice
to see Arnett enjoying himself again.
“You know, the last couple years
have been so weird for me, and this
was just about having fun,” he says.
The weird years began in
2012 when Arnett and Poehler
announced, after nine years of
marriage, that they were separating;
they divorced in 2016. They had
often worked together and Mindy
Kaling, in her bestselling memoir,
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without
Me?, cites their relationship as the
ideal, a sentiment echoed by fans.
So their split sparked an enormous
amount of online commentary. With Amy
What’s it like going through a Poehler at the
divorce when the outside world is Emmys in 2008
so invested in you as a couple?
“People talk about you like they
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
7
Arrested
Development’s
last two seasons
were like a
very expensive
reunion
[saying it], but that was six or seven
years ago. You know what I mean?”
Arnett then went back to
Arrested to make the fifth series.
It is largely agreed among the fans
that the fourth and fifth seasons
aren’t a patch on the original three.
Did it feel different making them?
“You know, I think there were a
lot of things in those seasons that did
not work. We weren’t all together,
for a start,” he says, referring to the
scheduling difficulties that made
it impossible to get the actors all
together at the same time. “But
there were moments when we were
together and I was crying with
laughter, and it was worth it for that.
Maybe it was like a very expensive
reunion for all of us.”
Another problem was that Jeffrey
Tambor, who plays twins George and
Oscar Bluth, had recently been fired
from another TV show, Transparent,
after allegations, which he denied, of
sexual misconduct. It then emerged
that while filming Arrested he had
yelled at Jessica Walter, who played
his onscreen wife, Lucille, and who
died last year. An awkward interview
with the cast in the New York Times
in 2018 about this did little to help,
especially against the background
of the #MeToo movement. Tambor
has been little seen since. Is Arnett
in touch with him? “Yeah, no
comment. It’s just a bummer all
round,” he says carefully.
Other shows of Arnett’s have
also come in for criticism, including
BoJack (for having a white actor
voice an Asian character) and
30 Rock (for featuring multiple
occurrences of blackface; the
show’s creator and star, Tina Fey,
has apologised and removed
those episodes from streaming
platforms). Is it harder to make
comedy these days now that people
are more socially aware?
“I don’t know. Sure? I guess?
There are more ways for people to
voice their displeasure these days.
But when we made Murderville, we
had a lot of laughs,” he shrugs.
We go back to talking about the
“weird years”, and where he is now,
no longer a lost, divorced man,
but a happy new father with joyful
new comedy. “It is crazy to me how
much my whole life has shifted in
five years in such a dramatic way.
Isn’t that wild?” he says. Arrested
fans never confused Arnett with
Gob, but, as with Gob, we did always
want things to work out for him.
Murderville is on Netflix
Section:GDN 12 PaGe:8 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
8
Arts
Collaborators …
director Daniel
Evans and
Alecky Blythe
Beautiful world,
where are you?
T
Sieges, riots, serial
killings, sex work
… Alecky Blythe
has put them he first sight of
Alecky Blythe’s new play, Our
all on stage. Generation, comes via a trailer
on YouTube, which seems apt for
She tells Claire a drama that aspires to take the
pulse of today’s teenagers. Out
Armitstead it pours in the words of 12 young
people from across the UK, whose
about her latest comic ups and touching downs
have been meticulously recorded
epic project, over five years, with every stumble
and repetition left intact. “I’m an
a 254-scene only child, it’s just me, my mum,
my cat, my dog and my deceased
play about chicken,” explains one girl. Another
frets: “I have a really itchy roof of
how teenagers my mouth. I think I have hay fever.
I’ve gotta be at 100% health so I can
across Britain watch Love Island.” Yet another
bubbles: “I wanna go hajj so bad.
are coping with And Australia. I wanna get a tan.”
A play by Blythe has become a
cuts and Covid bit of an event – ever since, weary
of trying to find an agent, the home
counties-born actor turned to
writing in an attempt to jump-start
Sent at 7/2/2022 17:30
her stalled career. She specialises
in verbatim pieces, created from
recorded interviews, applying the
same listening skills to scenarios as
wildly various as the 2011 London
riots, a talent contest in Stoke-
on-Trent and a brothel for mature
women in Bournemouth. “I got
to a stage where I wasn’t getting
much acting work, and I fell in love
with [writing verbatim plays]
because, well, you couldn’t make Experience …
it up,” she says. “As an actor,
I found real joy in the fact that
you could play parts that maybe
you wouldn’t normally play. It
really opens up your range. And
I discovered that I could do it.”
For Our Generation, which opens
at the National Theatre in London
this month, she and a team of other
“collectors” with voice recorders
gathered nearly 600 hours of
testimony from interviewees
in London, Birmingham,
Northamptonshire, Anglesey,
Glasgow and Belfast. They set
out expecting the dramatic shape
of the piece to follow that of the
secondary school years, with its
familiar waypoints of success or
failure in exams. But they were
ambushed by the pandemic, with
the fortuitous result that its 254
scenes reveal how a generation has
coped with prolonged stress.
Seven weeks into rehearsals,
Blythe and director Daniel Evans
bustle into an interview room at
the top of the National with the
sort of adrenalised energy that
comes from keeping a rehearsal
schedule going on a road littered
with positive Covid tests. The
first three previews have been
cancelled, and the 15-strong cast
have only this morning started
to rehearse without earphones.
They don’t work from scripts but
learn everything by copying the
original speakers, piped directly
into their ears, with Evans finding
the dramatic shape while Blythe is
The Girlfriend
about a
Bournemouth
brothel
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
The Guardian
Tuesday 8 February 2022
One person we
interviewed
said: ‘My nails
are longer than
my future’
ready to pounce every time they
forget an “um” or fumble an “err”.
It sounds like a form of torture to
me, but they insist that even actors
who are at first terrified usually
come to love it.
Perhaps surprisingly for a
connoisseur of those unintentional
wrinkles in conversation that reveal
so much, Blythe’s own speech is
as crisp and smooth as a freshly
ironed sheet, unfolding in eloquent
paragraphs as Evans sits quietly
listening. There are two traditions
of verbatim theatre: one, pioneered
at Kilburn’s Tricycle theatre (now
Kiln theatre) in London, uses
pre-existing transcripts of trials
or inquiries. Blythe, working in a
tradition pioneered by the US actor
Anna Deavere Smith and the British
teacher/director Mark Wing-Davey,
takes all her material from face-
to-face interviews. When Blythe
first started writing, her plays
were performed with earphones
still on: actors repeated, in real
time, speech that was being piped
directly into their ears.
Her first play, premiered in 2003,
was about a 15-day police siege
in Hackney, east London, that
ended with the death of 32-year-
old Jamaican gangster Eli Hall.
Pushing her way to the front of a
police cordon, she picked up her
title – Come Out Eli – from the chant
of the people crowding outside,
 Section:GDN 12 PaGe:9 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
The Guardian
Tuesday 8 February 2022
Trauma
and hope …
rehearsals for of fantasy,” he wrote. “This
Our Generation miraculously innovative show finds
some of whom she went on to
interview. Some reviewers felt
uncomfortable about how exposed
the method left her interviewees
(“The technique of recreating the
voices of the witnesses often makes
people – whether absurdly posh
or desperately inarticulate – just
sound stupid,” grumbled one).
But many more recognised that
she had found a new way of giving
a voice to one of London’s most
diverse communities. “That play
ended up being quite successful,
and I got a literary agent off the
back of it,” says Blythe. “So I went
in a different direction. And for a
while, I was both writing them and
performing in them.”
That changed with her brothel
play, The Girlfriend Experience,
which ran in 2008 at the Royal
Court. “The style changed slightly
in that I was casting it more to type,
and I wasn’t really the right type. It
was the first time I stepped back and
was just the writer. I really enjoyed
it because I could commit to it a lot
more.” She made a return to the
stage for Little Revolution, though,
a snapshot of the 2011 London
riots, in which she played herself
in a dramatised scary encounter
with a group of looters, who had
spotted her taking photographs.
The situation could have been
PHOTOGRAPHS: DAVID LEVENE/THE GUARDIAN; JOHAN PERSSON; TRISTRAM KENTON/THE GUARDIAN
disastrous but, after checking her
camera for incriminating images,
they had let her go.
Our Generation marks Blythe’s
first return to the National Theatre
since 2011, when she pushed her
work into a new musical dimension
with the award-winning London
Road. It was only when then NT
director Nicholas Hytner said he
wouldn’t produce a play with actors five years, even though some of
using earphones that she took the
leap of abandoning them midway
through rehearsals.
Dealing with the aftermath
of a string of serial killings in
the Ipswich area in the 00s, this
collaboration with composer
Adam Cork was later made into a
film. It worked the hesitations into
astonishingly effective repeating
choruses: “Everyone is very very
nervous … UM … and very unsure
of everything … BASICALLY.” The
Guardian’s Michael Billington was
among those who saluted London
Road as fresh and revelatory.
“Conventional musicals, even
at their best, take us into a world
a new way of representing reality.”
Though Our Generation isn’t a
musical, Evans was chosen to direct
it because of his musicality. What
was it that piqued his interest?
“Well, I’ve been in some musicals,
and I’ve directed some musicals,”
he says, with an understatement
that sends Blythe into laughter. As
an actor, he is one of the UK’s most
successful Sondheim specialists,
winning Oliviers for his roles in
both Merrily We Roll Along and
Sunday in the Park With George. As
a director, he has demonstrated a
populist flair, with award-winning
productions ranging from Oliver!
and My Fair Lady to The Full Monty.
“And I’m Welsh,” he says. “I
think the Welsh bit is important.
People always bang on about
the tune of our accent, so I grew
up with an awareness of how I
sound, and this has taken it to a
whole new level.” He takes pride
in some of the language the play’s
two characters from north Wales
come up with. “What, you mean
the ‘My nails are longer than my
future’ line?” asks Blythe. “Well
there’s that,” replies Evans, before
soaring off into a sentence so
gloriously filthy it’s unprintable.
“It’s just how language is relished
unconsciously by people,” he
says. “It’s very sensuous, without
them even knowing that they’re
being sensuous.”
Their vivacity, Evans points
out, is all the more impressive
from a generation growing up after
decades of cuts, which mean they
wouldn’t have the chance he had,
as a talented child actor from the
south Wales valleys, to have music
and drama classes financed by the
local authority. “There’s a character
towards the end of the play,” he
adds, sadly, “who says, ‘We’ve been
left in the rubble.’”
Blythe is acutely aware of her
responsibilities to her young
interviewees, who were all invited
with their families to a taster
preview on the understanding that
anything they felt uncomfortable
with would get the chop. “It’s really
important to make sure that we are
representing them as truthfully as
possible, because they’ve been so
generous as to give us a portion of
their lives,” she says.
It says something about the
rapport between interviewees
and collectors that only one
interviewee dropped out over the
them found themselves dealing
with disappointments and traumas
they could never have anticipated.
But it’s not all hardship. “There are
others who are succeeding in sports
and in academia in an immense
way,” points out Evans.
“Plus there’s romance,” adds
Blythe. “You know, falling in love,
falling out of love. Sex. Yeah. Drugs.
Yes. What is remarkable about this
group of people is that, despite
everything, they still have hope.”
Our Generation is at the National
Theatre, London, 14 February to
9 April and at Chichester Festival
theatre 22 April to 14 May.
Sent at 7/2/2022 17:30
How we made
Stay by Shakespears Sister
‘It was inspired by a fabulously kitsch film called
Cat-Women of the Moon – a character has to
go back to her planet and leave her love behind’
‘Deranged
splendour’ …
Fahey, left,
and Detroit
Marcella Detroit
singer/songwriter
Stay came to life one morning in my converted
garage in the back of my house in LA: a very
unassuming studio, all knotty pine and
carpet, my recording equipment in a
cupboard. Siobhan Fahey lived down the
road and her then-husband Dave Stewart
[ex-Eurythmics] had given her a lift over,
then he came in, because he had an idea.
The idea came from these amazing
parties Dave and Siobhan used to have. You
would not believe the crew that would show
up – Tom Petty, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne
from ELO, Timothy Leary. Eventually, we
would all start singing and jamming, and
I would always end up doing ballads. Dave
said: “You know how you always sing those
ballads at our parties? Wouldn’t it be great
to style a song like that to feature
you?” And he had an idea for
chords and a melody.
Stay was rewritten maybe
four times – it sounded like
a Prince song at one point –
before Siobhan and I went back
to the original, developed it,
and made a cassette of it. We
played it to Chris Thomas,
the producer of Roxy Music and the Sex
Pistols, who was staying at Dave and
Siobhan’s. We weren’t expecting anything,
but I remember the room was completely
silent: everyone was listening really intently.
After it stopped, Chris stood up, and he
went: “No 1 smash!” And we were like:
“Yeah? Really?”
Later, when the final mix wasn’t working,
we asked Chris to help. He rescued that
song and made it sound incredible. Jennifer
Maidman, from Penguin Cafe Orchestra,
PHOTOGRAPHS: GIE KNAEPS/GETTY
came up with the great synthesiser parts for
the chorus, and Steve Ferrera, the drummer,
also did great things.
It entered the charts at No 27. Then we
played Top of the Pops and it kept steadily
going up. When it got to No 1 and stayed
there for eight weeks, it was really unexpected.
But it was incredible that that could happen.
I think it’s still one of the longest-running No 1s
by a female band.
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
9
Siobhan Fahey
singer/songwriter
For our second album, Hormonally Yours,
we’d had this lofty idea to acquire the rights to
Cat-Women of the Moon, a fabulously kitsch
3D B-movie from 1953, and build songs around
its narrative. The record company said no –
they’re not known for their creative thinking
are record companies – but we’d written half
a dozen songs already, so carried on.
If I remember rightly – 30 years is a long
time – the idea for Stay’s lyric came from a
woman in the film who had to go back to her
planet and leave her human love behind. I was
worried about it being too saccharine, but
alongside Chris Thomas we had Alan Moulder.
He’d recently worked with My Bloody
Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain, who
I loved. At that point, we were the only “pop”
band Alan had ever worked with
– and he went on to work with
Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch
Nails. There was nothing sugary
about the production.
Sophie Muller, my best friend
at the time, made the video. I’d
been getting into gothic ringlets
and sparkly glam-rock catsuits,
enjoying becoming an unhinged
Victorian heroine meets Suzi Quatro meets
Labelle! Now that look was combined with
me becoming the angel of death in the video,
in dark makeup coming down the stairs from
another dimension, trying to steal Marcella’s
human love away from her.
We only had a day for the shoot. Most of it
involved recording Marcy singing, so by the
evening I was getting bored – and the clock
was ticking. At 8pm, I hit the vodka and by
the time we filmed, I was, shall we say, in
high spirits, in full deranged splendour.
I loved coming down the staircase, which
was inspired by Powell and Pressburger’s
A Matter of Life and Death. The greatest
compliment were ludicrous takes on it [by
French and Saunders, and David Baddiel and
Rob Newman]. People expect me to be just
like the angel of death in real life, 30 years on.
They’re bitterly disappointed when I’m not.
Interviews by Jude Rogers. A 2-CD deluxe
edition of Hormonally Yours is out on 17 Feb.
Section:GDN 12 PaGe:10 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 17:47 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

10 The Guardian

TV and radio Tuesday 8 February 2022

This Is Going to Hurt

9pm, BBC One

Nikesh Patel
as Tom and
Rose Matafeo
as Jessie

A screaming maelstrom of patients swirls

Review Starstruck, that exist between her and Tom are mined for both
comedy and pathos. He is successful, and so wealthy
BBC Three that he has a big house without enough furniture in
it. She moves back into her old room, living with her
flatmate Kate, and has to beg for her old job at the
cinema. The sly subversiveness comes in the fact
Rose Matafeo’s
that Jessie is mostly comfortable with who she is,
while Tom is insecure, even needy. In an era of self-
destructive and self-flagellating female protagonists,
big-hearted from Sally Rooney’s female characters to Fleabag,
Jessie’s gentle messiness is a tonic. Yes, she makes
mistakes, but who wouldn’t put a Magic Mike Live
romcom is T-shirt on their credit card when swept up in a Magic
Mike moment?
around Ben Whishaw, as he lies atop a
moving hospital trolley, battling to save a
patient’s baby. En route, he has leapt from a
lift, shouted at a trainee doctor and not even
had time to change into his scrubs to start
his shift. “Welcome to the NHS,” he sighs
to camera. This seven-part adaptation of
obstetrician-turned-comedy writer Adam
Kay’s bestselling book sees Whishaw on
captivating form as a doctor on the brink,
who relies on wisecracks instead of tears
to get through long shifts while trying to
maintain his personal relationships. It
is a stellar comedy drama full of dry
humour, heroism and, occasionally,
tearjerking tragedy.
Alexi Duggins

Cheaters The Gilded Age

still magical
There is more depth given to Tom this time around,
including an episode where he goes home to his family 9.50pm, BBC One 9pm, Sky Atlantic
for Christmas; they care so little about his acting “No one knows their Julian Fellowes’s starry,
career that it’s easy to see why Jessie makes him feel so neighbours now.” So says silly period drama
comfortable. Starstruck has a cheeky punishing streak lead character Josh in canters on. George
★★★★☆ when it comes to fame, and while more minor characters the first 10-minute suffers some bad luck

Rebecca
are wowed by Tom, most of the major ones are episode of this zippy, that puts the new railway
nonplussed to the point of forgetting that he’s famous at well-acted 18-part station in jeopardy,
all. (Incidentally, my only objection to the character is comedy drama while Agnes bears the

Nicholson
that he is lacking the ego and easy confidence that true (it’s a triple bill tonight). ultimate indignity: not
movie stars deploy to dazzle, and also, that it is far too He has a point, given being heeded, as her
easy for him to be able to go about his grand romantic that he headed to headstrong niece Marian
gestures in parks without being harassed by either Finland and ended up refuses to steer clear of

T
he first series of Starstruck was a paparazzi or a wall of smartphone cameras.) downing shots with a Mr Raikes. Jack Seale
pure delight, sewing together a fresh Most of the series follows loosely the same pattern Lonely Planet writer
sitcom using patchwork pieces of old as it did before, with Jessie and Tom locked in a push- and cheating on his Toast of Tinseltown
Hollywood and new romcom. It saw and-pull situation that leaves both of them unsatisfied partner with her – later 10pm, BBC Two
Rose Matafeo create, co-write and at various points. Jessie is a fish out of water in Tom’s discovering that they It’s the series finale and
star in this story of “little rat nobody” world, and once again, Minnie Driver engages in a live over the road from thus finally time for
Jessie, a New Zealander living in London, floundering spot of scene-stealing as his shamelessly spiky agent, each other in London. Steven Toast’s long-
around the city aimlessly, mostly happily. On a night who demands that he makes her more money and The humour’s enjoyably awaited appearance in
out, she meets Tom (Nikesh Patel), goes back to his accuses him of workplace bullying when he tries to
And dry, the premise is great, the new Star Wars movie.
place, and the next morning discovers that he is a catch a different flight from the one on which he’s
another and it’s set to get even And no one’s happier
thing
very famous movie star. So far, so Notting Hill, except booked. Russell Tovey has a memorable appearance as better. AD than Clem Fandango and
that in this much less irritating version, Jessie is only a swaggering director who clashes with Tom’s nice-guy Danny Bear. Although
vaguely bothered about Tom’s celebrity, a fame that approach to film-making. Tom, meanwhile, can’t quite And Just Like AstraZeneca: A Vaccine given Toast’s track
complicates their blossoming relationship. It goes fathom Jessie’s more impetuous side, though he does That, it’s over, for the World record, their celebration
wrong as often as it goes right, and the imbalance forgive her shockingly bad approach to gift-giving. and I will 9pm, BBC Two may prove premature.
between their lives leads to an epic and occasionally They fight over Scrabble, money and exes, and each miss it. The AstraZeneca jab AD
swoonworthy will-they-won’t-they. does their best to forge a partnership while working was a source of national
Series two is as much of a treat as the first. It picks out who the other person is and could be. pride when it arrived Mel Giedroyc:
up at exactly the moment where it left off, with Jessie For all of its big-hearted sense of fun, it deals in in late 2020, seeming Unforgivable
half-heartedly on her way home to New Zealand, flaws, too, and what happens when two people who to herald an end to 10pm, Dave
interrupted by Tom, who joins her on the bus en route are fundamentally compatible keep getting it ever so the pandemic. But Cannabis theft, Nazi
to the airport. I don’t think it is a spoiler to say that he slightly wrong: adopt the brace position when Tom the scientists who waxworks and cheating
persuades her not to get on that flight, and if there are sort-of-accidentally refers to Jessie as “kooky”. It will developed it had a at Street Fighter are
any concerns about how to take a will-they-won’t-they air weekly on television, but the whole series is also on greater ambition: to see among the topics for the
story forward when they very much do, it’s swiftly iPlayer for viewers to “box set”. There are few series it distributed around return of this gameshow.
dealt with by the many reminders that Jessie has a that can sustain being watched in one sitting, but the world. In this Tonight’s confessors
tendency to act impulsively without always making Starstruck is one of them, and I would argue that this documentary, Fergus of outrageous antics
the most sensible choice. lovely, warm, witty series even benefits from a binge- Walsh tracks that include Sarah Millican,
Now Jessie has to figure out what to do next, in the watch. Each episode may be short and sweet, but the noble aspiration. Jamali Maddix and
aftermath of semi-blowing-up her life. The differences cumulative effect is magical. Phil Harrison Chris McCausland. AD
 Section:GDN 12 PaGe:11 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 16:51 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

•
The Guardian
Tuesday 8 February 2022 11

BBC One BBC Two ITV Channel 4 Channel 5 BBC Four

6.0 Breakfast (T) 9.15 Live
Winter Olympics 2022 (T) 1.0
News (T) 1.30 Regional News
and Weather (T) 1.45 Doctors
(T) 2.15 Hope Street (T) 3.0
Escape to the Country (T)
3.45 The Farmers’ Country
Showdown (T) (R) 4.30
Antiques Road Trip (T) (R)
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News (T) 6.30 Regional News
and Weather (T) 7.0 The One
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Way, starting at the Humber
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8.30 Garden Rescue The teams vie
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9.0 This Is Going to Hurt Drama
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Kay, documenting his time as
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9.50 Cheaters (T) New series.
After their flight is delayed,
strangers Josh and Fola end
up sleeping together.
8.0 Great British Menu (T)
Four chefs compete for the
North West region.
9.0 AstraZeneca: A Vaccine for
the World (T) The inside
story behind the creation
of the Oxford-AstraZeneca
Covid-19 vaccine, and
whether the jab fulfilled
the original hopes of the
scientists in Oxford.
8.0 Brit Awards 2022 (T) Mo
Gilligan hosts the 2022
Brit Awards, live from the
O2 Arena in London, with
performances by Dave, Doja
Cat, and Ed Sheeran. Brits
2022 Rising Star winner
Holly Humberstone, Liam
Gallagher and Simbiatu
Ajikawo, aka Little Simz, will
also be performing.
8.0 Geordie Hospital (T) A
patient undergoes her
second major cancer surgery
in a year, and plastic surgeon
Susan deals with a patient
who injured her finger on an
outing to get cake.
9.0 24 Hours in A&E (T) Doctors
treat 75-year-old Bipin, who
has been rushed to A&E
suffering a stroke.
8.0 Dogs Behaving (Very)
Badly (T) Graeme meets a
German Shepherd that barks
at anything and anyone.
Includes news update.
9.0 Ben Fogle: New Lives in the
Wild (T) Ben journeys to one
of Britain’s furthest outposts,
the Shetlands, to meet a
couple a few years into their
new life on the island of Yell.
8.0 Keeping Up Appearances (T)
(R) Hyacinth is thrilled to be
invited on a golfing weekend.
8.30 Yes, Prime Minister (T) (R)
A territorial battle develops
in the corridors of power.
9.0 The Secret Life of the
Motorway (T) (R) Peter Hall
and Will Self discuss the
eagerness with which Britain
expanded its motorways.

10.0 News (T)
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11.0 Starstruck (T) (R) Return of
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10.0 Toast of Tinseltown (T) Toast
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Morgan, Kate is joined by
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12.15 The Bay (T) (R) 1.05 Shop:
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Women (T) (R) 3.50 Unwind
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Love (T)
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Death (T) (R)
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on Camera (T) (R) 1.0 The
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Britain’s Wild Rivers (T) (R)
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Doctor (R) 5.35 Peppa Pig (R)
10.0 Classic British Cars: Made in
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12.0 Africa With Ade Adepitan
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Other channels Radio

Dave The Big Bang Theory 7.0 Special 7.0 Brit Awards Sky Max Hepworth 8.0 David Radio 3 Usual Suspects. Major Weather 10.0 The World Clarke (2/5) 3.55 The
6.0am Teleshopping Hollyoaks 7.30 Celebrity 2022: Red Carpet 8.0 6.0am Stargate SG-1 Hockney: Time Regained 6.30am Breakfast figures from the QAnon Tonight 10.45 Book at Fanthorpe Investigations
7.0 Lazy Boy Garage Big Brother Australia 9.0 Bob’s Burgers 8.30 8.0 Supergirl 9.0 DC’s 9.0 White Riot 9.0 Essential Classics movement gather in Bedtime: Piranesi (R) (4/5) 4.0 The Museum
7.35 Last Stop Garage Celebs Go Dating 10.0 Bob’s Burgers 9.0 Legends of Tomorrow (2019) 10.45 Rudeboy: 12.0 Composer of the Dallas, Texas. (6/7) 11.0 Fortunately 11.30 of Curiosity (3/6) 4.30
8.0 Timber Kings 9.0 Celebrity Gogglebox Family Guy 9.30 Family 10.0 The Flash 11.0 The Story of Trojan Week: CPE Bach (R) 1.0 11.30 Headwaters. The Today in Parliament 12.0 Elephants to Catch Eels
Storage Hunters UK 11.05 Gogglebox 12.10 Guy 10.0 Plebs 10.30 NCIS: New Orleans1.0 Records 12.40 Toots Lunchtime Concert: origins and use of the News and Weather 12.30 (6/6) 5.0 Dot (4/4) 5.30
10.0 American Pickers First Dates 1.15 Celebs Plebs 11.0 Family Guy Hawaii Five-0 2.0 & the Maytals: From Chamber music from stream-of-consciousness Book of the Week: On Tudur Owen: United
11.0 Top Gear 1.0 Go Dating 2.15 Below 11.30 American Dad! MacGyver 3.0 DC’s the Roots 2.10 Classic Bucharest. 2.0 Afternoon narrative technique. Consolation (R) 12.48 Nations of Anglesey
Border Force: America’s Deck: Mediterranean 11.55 American Dad! Legends of Tomorrow Albums: The Wailers Concert: Pau Casals 12.0 News 12.01 (LW) Shipping Forecast 1.0 (2/2) 6.0 Earthsearch II
Gatekeepers 2.0 3.10 Gogglebox 4.05 12.25 Bob’s Burgers 4.0 Supergirl 5.0 The – Catch a Fire 3.10 Festival Orchestra. 5.0 In Shipping Forecast 12.04 As BBC World Service (2/10) 6.30 Soul Music
Expedition With Steve Don’t Spook the Bride 12.55 Bob’s Burgers Flash 6.0 Stargate SG-1 Chadwick Boseman: Tune 7.0 In Tune Mixtape Piranesi. By Susanna 5.20 Shipping Forecast (3/5) 7.0 The Goon Show
Backshall: Unpacked 5.0 Ramsay’s Kitchen 1.30 Don’t Hate the 8.0 An Idiot Abroad 2 Off Camera 4.30 7.30 Radio 3 in Concert. Clarke. (2/10) 12.18 5.30 News Briefing 5.43 7.30 Winston Back Home
3.0 Rick Stein’s Far Nightmares USA Playaz 2.15 Hey Tracey! 9.0 Strike Back: Shadow Unmuted 5.0 Unmuted Composer and sitar Call You and Yours Prayer for the Day: 5.45 (5/6) 8.0 John Mortimer
Eastern Odyssey 4.0 Top 2.55 Totally Bonkers Warfare 10.0 SEAL Team 5.30 Auction: David player Anoushka Shankar 12.57 Weather 1.0 The Farming Today 5.58 Presents the Trials of
Gear 5.0 Rick Stein’s Film4 Guinness World Records 11.0 NCIS: New Orleans Hockney Special joins the Scottish World at One 1.45 Lemn Tweet of the Day Marshall Hall (2/5) 8.30
Far Eastern Odyssey 11.0am Shane 3.20 Unwind With ITV 12.0 Road Wars 1.0 The Chamber Orchestra. 10.0 Sissay’s Poetry Rebels: S-Laughter in the Dark
6.0 Taskmaster 7.0 (1953) 1.25 The 3.30 Teleshopping Force: Manchester 2.0 Sky Atlantic Free Thinking: Diverse The Political Poets (R) Radio 4 Extra (2/4) 9.0 The Death
Richard Osman’s House Man Who Shot Liberty Brit Cops: Law & Disorder 6.0am Fish Town Classical Music II. New 2.0 The Archers (R) 6.0am John Mortimer of Illegitimacy 10.0
of Games 7.40 Room Valance (1962) 3.55 More4 3.0 Hawaii Five-0 4.0 7.0 CSI: Crime Scene Generation Thinker 2.15 Siege. Drama. By Presents the Trials of Comedy Club: Tudur
101 8.20 Would I Lie El Dorado (1966) 8.55am Kirstie’s MacGyver 5.0 Stop, Investigation 8.0 Six Christienna Fryar is Katherine Jakeways, Marshall Hall (2/5) 6.30 Owen: United Nations of
to You? At Christmas 6.40 Star Trek Handmade Treasures Search, Seize Feet Under 10.15 The joined by four scholars. Eno Mfon and Darragh S-Laughter in the Dark Anglesey (2/2) 10.30
9.0 QI XL 10.0 Mel Beyond (2016) 9.0 9.15 A Place in the Sun Wire 12.25 Game of 10.45 The Essay: The Mortell. (2/5) 2.45 (2/4) 7.0 Dot (4/4) 7.30 Cowards (6/6) 11.0 For
Giedroyc: Unforgivable Black Rain (1989) 10.05 A Place in the Sky Arts Thrones 1.30 Gomorrah Frozen River – Cairn Toul Little Lifetimes: The Tudur Owen: United One Horrible Moment
11.0 Taskmaster 12.0 11.25 Brawl in Sun 11.05 Find It, Fix 6.0am John Wilson 3.35 Six Feet Under 5.45 (R) 11.0 Night Tracks Kitchen Table (R) 3.0 Nations of Anglesey (1/5) 11.15 Warhorses
Comedians Giving Cell Block 99 (2017) It, Flog It 12.05 Find It, Orchestra Presents Cole The Wire 7.55 Game of 12.30 Through the The Kitchen Cabinet: (2/2) 8.0 The Goon of Letters (2/4) 11.30
Lectures 12.40 Room 2.05 Wild Honey Fix It, Flog It 1.05 Heir Porter in Hollywood Thrones 9.0 The Gilded Night: Kodaly, Ligeti & Home Economics (R) Show 8.30 Winston The Mark Steel Solution
101 1.20 Would I Lie Pie! (2018) Hunters 2.05 Four in a 8.0 Tate Britain’s Great Age 10.10 Raised By Bartok from Budapest. 3.30 The Long View Back Home (5/6) 9.0 (4/4) 12.0 Earthsearch II
to You? At Christmas Bed 2.35 Four in a Bed Art Walks 9.0 Tales of Wolves 11.10 Big Love Presented by John Shea. of the Future (3/5) The News Quiz (6/10) (2/10) 12.30 Soul Music
2.0 Mel Giedroyc: ITV2 3.10 Four in a Bed 3.40 the Unexpected 10.0 2.25 In Treatment 4.0 Word of Mouth. 9.30 Elephants to Catch (3/5) 1.0 John Mortimer
Unforgivable 2.45 6.0am Love Bites 7.0 Four in a Bed 4.15 Four Discovering: Eli Wallach 4.10 Fish Town Radio 4 The origins of modern Eels (6/6) 10.0 Micah Presents the Trials of
Insert Name Here 4.0 The Ellen DeGeneres in a Bed 4.50 Find It, 11.0 Discovering: Blur 6.0am Today 8.31 idioms. (5/7) 4.30 A Clarke (2/5) 10.55 The Marshall Hall (2/5) 1.30
Teleshopping Show 8.0 You’ve Been Fix It, Flog It 5.55 Find 11.30 Discovering: (LW) Yesterday in Good Read. Katherine Fanthorpe Investigations S-Laughter in the Dark
Framed! And Fearless 9.0 It, Fix It, Flog It 6.55 Bryan Ferry 12.0 Fresco White Riot, Parliament 9.0 Room Rundell and Nathan Filer. (4/5) 11.0 The Death (2/4) 2.0 Believe Me
E4 The Cabins 10.0 Dress Escape to the Chateau: Secrets 1.0 Tales of 5: Gavanndra. A woman (2/9) 5.0 PM 5.54 (LW) of Illegitimacy 12.0 (2/5) 2.15 Henry James:
6.0am Hollyoaks 7.0 to Impress 11.0 Love DIY 7.55 Grand Designs the Unexpected 2.0 Sky Arts struggling to make sense Shipping Forecast 5.57 The Goon Show 12.30 The Wings of the Dove
Ramsay’s Kitchen Bites 12.0 Supermarket 9.0 Car S.O.S 10.0 Discovering: Richard of a childhood trauma. Weather 6.0 Six O’Clock Winston Back Home (7/10) 2.30 Bette in
Nightmares USA 8.0 Sweep 1.0 Tipping Emergency Helicopter Widmark 3.0 Cold (5/6) 9.30 The Political News 6.30 Please Use (5/6) 1.0 John Mortimer Britain 3.0 Micah Clarke
Mike & Molly 9.0 How I Point: Lucky Stars 2.0 Medics 11.05 24 Hours War & Cinema 4.0 Butterfly Effect (5/5) Other Door. Satirical Presents the Trials of (2/5) 3.55 The Fanthorpe
Met Your Mother 10.0 Family Fortunes 3.0 in A&E 12.05 Emergency Discovering: Dire Straits 9.45 (LW) Daily Service sketch show. (1/4) 7.0 Marshall Hall (2/5) Investigations (4/5) 4.0
The Big Bang Theory The Ellen DeGeneres Helicopter Medics: Air 4.30 Discovering: 9.45 (FM) Book of the The Archers 7.15 Front 1.30 S-Laughter in the The Museum of Curiosity
11.0 The Goldbergs 12.0 Show 4.0 Dress to Crash Emergencies Eurythmics 5.0 Tales of Week: On Consolation Row 8.0 File on 4: Drink Dark (2/4) 2.0 Believe (3/6) 4.30 Elephants
Brooklyn Nine-Nine 1.0 Impress 5.0 You’ve 1.10 Car S.O.S the Unexpected 5.30 – Cicero’s Tears. By Spiking (5/10) 8.40 In Me (2/5) 2.15 Henry to Catch Eels (6/6) 5.0
The Big Bang Theory Been Framed! Presents 2.10 24 Hours in A&E Tales of the Unexpected Michael Ignatieff. (2/5) Touch 9.0 Inside Health James: The Wings of the Dot (4/4) 5.30 Tudur
3.0 Young Sheldon 4.0 Top 100 Shockers 6.0 3.15 Food Unwrapped 6.0 Discovering: 10.0 Woman’s Hour 11.0 (5/11) 9.30 Room 5: Dove (7/10) 2.30 Bette Owen: United Nations of
Brooklyn Nine-Nine 5.0 Catchphrase Celebrity Gets Chocolatey Terence Stamp 7.0 The Coming Storm: The Gavanndra (R) 9.59 in Britain 3.0 Micah Anglesey (2/2)
Section:GDN 12 PaGe:12 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 16:49 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

TODAY’S PET CORNER ANSWER EPONA

12
Puzzles
The Guardian
Tuesday 8 February 2022

Yesterday’s Quick crossword no 16,148

solutions 1 2 3 4

Wordsearch Across Down 5

5 Generous (9) 1 Calling (8)
8 Confused or crazy (informal) (4) 2 Quick — cross (6) 6 7
9 Tall clock part (8) 3 Yellow-brown pigment (6)
10 Disordered (6) 4 Humdinger (informal) (4) 8 9
11 Up to speed in French (2,4) 6 Excessive pride (9)
13 Place to get medical treatment 7 Burst of firing — filled USA (anag)
or advice (6) (9)
15 Walk in water (6) 12 Ebb (4,4)
16 Art of Basquiat and Banksy (8) 14 Cool (6) 10 11 12
18 Warhol or Williams? (4) 15 Lindisfarne or Castle Acre? (6)
19 Headgear once common in the City 17 Fall flat (4)
(6,3)
13 14 15

Solution no 16,147

T S T L
B R E A K T H E I C E 16 17 18
U N I Y N L
F L I T D E MO C R A T
L P E H S
B E A N B A G S P I T E
T O N P I I
19
S P L A Y C ON N E C T
R H M S B
M O N S T E R S D R A G
O A A E R N
F I R I N G S Q U A D
K T S G
Stuck? For help call 0906 200 83 83. Calls cost £1.10 per minute, plus your phone company’s access charge.
Service supplied by ATS. Call 0330 333 6946 for customer service (charged at standard rate).
To buy puzzle books, visit guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Sudoku no 5535

Sudoku no 5536 Suguru Wordsearch

Medium. Fill the grid so that each row, column and Fill the grid so that each square Can you find 15 words associated
3x3 box contains the numbers 1-9. Printable version at in an outlined block contains a with DIY in the grid? Words can run
theguardian.com/sudoku digit. A block of 2 squares contains forwards, backwards, vertically or
the digits 1 and 2, a block of three diagonally, but always in a straight,
squares contains the digits 1, 2 unbroken line.
and 3, and so on. No same digit
appears in neighbouring squares,
not even diagonally.
Word wheel
MODERATOR

Suguru

Word wheel Pet corner

Find as many words as What is the name of Link’s
possible using the letters horse in the Legend of Zelda
in the wheel. Each must video game series?
use the central letter a. Epona
and at least two others. b. Zelda
Letters may be used only c. Malon
once. You may not use d. Ganondorf
plurals, foreign words or Answer top right
proper nouns. There is at
least one nine-letter word
to be found. TARGET:
Excellent-29. Good-24.
Average-18.
 Section:GDN 1J PaGe:1 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 18:27
Levelling down is when the Bank calls for wage restraint Polly Toynbee, page 3
Don’t blame Carrie Johnson for her husband’s failings Gaby Hinsliff, page 4
‘I was an addicted doctor, the worst kind of patient’ The long read, page 5
The Guardian Tuesday 8 February 2022
Opinion
and ideas
‘Community’
F
or a short period in the 1990s, it
seemed that Labour would launch a
communitarian counter-revolution to
bring the curtain down on the Thatcher
is something
era. Listen to a youthful Tony Blair in
1996, addressing the Women’s Institute.
“At the heart of my beliefs is the idea
of community,” said Blair. “I don’t just
British people
mean the villages, towns and cities in which we live.
I mean that our fulfilment as individuals lies in a decent
society of others. My argument to you today is that the
renewal of community is the answer to the challenges
still yearn for
of a changing world.”
That zeal for a politics that challenged the
individualism of the age did not last. As the Labour
MP Jon Cruddas ruefully noted in his recent book, The
Dignity of Labour, in power Blair and his party swerved
Julian off in a different direction. Choice, individual aspiration
Coman and the imperative to adapt to the consequences of
globalisation became New Labour’s guiding themes.
The party lost its focus when it came to protecting the
self-esteem and interests of places in its post-industrial
heartlands, although it did its best to keep many of them
financially afloat. Disillusionment and a sense of anomie
grew, paving the way for the “red wall” Brexit vote in
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
G2
Daily
pullout
life &
arts
section
Inside
2016. Damaging divisions – cultural as well as economic Angela Rayner
– emerged between more prosperous, younger cities and and Keir
declining, ageing towns; between the highly educated Starmer on the
and those without a degree, and between an asset-rich campaign trail
generation and those who would never own their own in Hartlepool
homes. Faith in a social contract that bound the nation before
together – and in Labour’s ability to secure it – faded. last year’s
Cruddas believes it could have gone differently. byelection
Last month, delivering a speech on the concept of the PHOTOGRAPH:
common good at St Mary’s University in Twickenham, IAN FORSYTH/PA
he confessed to his audience: “To me with hindsight,
1996 is a story of paths not taken, of missed
opportunities.” The result, he argued, “was a sense
of powerlessness that people feel, of exclusion and
estrangement, a lack of participation; a lack of virtue in
our institutions and our politics”.
Could the Labour party now resume the mission
that Blair abandoned? Suddenly, the early 2020s
have begun to feel a little like the mid-1990s. Like
John Major’s government a quarter of a century
ago, Boris Johnson’s is beset by scandal. While 
Major suffered byelection humiliation in the safe Julian Coman
Tory seat of Christchurch, Johnson has is an associate
endured Chesham and Amersham, and
North Shropshire. And, as last week’s  editor of the
Guardian
Section:GDN 1J PaGe:2 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
• The Guardian Tuesday 8 February 2022
2
‘Community’ is something
British people still yearn for
Julian Coman
 Continued from front
underwhelming “levelling up” white
 paper laid bare, Johnson’s own version
of a communitarian project – designed to
consolidate the new red wall intake of Tory voters – is
being starved of cash by a party that no longer trusts
him. If he is replaced between now and the next
election, none of his potential successors (other than
possibly Michael Gove) have an authentic instinct
for the concerns of the northern Labour voters who
helped deliver an 80-seat majority.
There is an opportunity here for Keir Starmer
that goes beyond the outcome of the next election.
Johnson’s essential unseriousness – and his party’s
faithfulness to the Thatcher legacy – means that he
is destined to squander the chance to forge a genuine
Tory One Nation response to a divided country. But
multiple signs of our times suggest that a yearning
persists for a vision that recognises that “our fulfilment
I
as individuals lies in a decent society of others”.
n Labour’s tradition, this sense of the “we”
being as important as the “I” used to be
expressed in the collective solidarity and self-
help movements that drove the working-class
politics of the industrial age. In our liberal,
secular and more atomised age, it is the
inner meaning of phenomena as apparently
disparate as the rise of leftwing Scottish
nationalism; towns that yearn for the restoration
of civic pride; the desire for a dignified social care
system; pride in the armed forces and the British flag;
the consistently strong support for enhanced forms
of public ownership, and the solidarity shown by
communities towards key workers and vulnerable
members during the Covid pandemic. The root
intuition, sidelined for 40 years, is that as political,
social animals we are about far more than the pursuit
of self-interest, and our mutual dependency defines
us as much as our individual liberties.
How can Labour open up this ethical seam in the
landscape that was so vividly glimpsed by the early
Blair? Some ideas are offered in Labour’s Covenant, an
ambitious pamphlet released last month by the Labour
Together group in which Cruddas is involved. Covering
the piste from the future of the union to foreign policy,
its scope is wide. But the essential spirit of Labour’s
Covenant is local. Proposals range from the promotion
of regional banks and vocational colleges to drive local
economies – and to give young people options to stay
in places where they grew up – to the need to invest in
locations where people from different backgrounds
meet, talk, argue and laugh: the “post offices, pubs,
community centres, art galleries, parks, nurseries,
hospitals and schools”.
The abstract term for this kind of thing is “social
infrastructure”. It requires far more investment
in people and institutions than the Conservatives’
levelling up programme is offering. And if places and
regions are truly to be empowered, Whitehall will have
to give away revenue-raising powers and resources
to an extent that no government has contemplated in
the past. But as the Conservative party reverts to type,
Labour should draw on its own rich heritage to do
the job of “renewing community” properly and with
conviction. In a society that knows itself to be fractured
and divided, this task can unite red-wall and blue-wall
aspirations and appeal across the generations.
Seeking to claim one-nation politics for the left in
2012, Ed Miliband invited the philosopher Michael
Sandel to the Labour party conference. In an address
that proved prescient, given the Brexit psychodrama
that would soon unfold, Sandel told delegates:
“Democracy does not require perfect equality. But it
does require that citizens share a common life. What
matters is that people of different social backgrounds
… bump up against one another. Because this is how
we come to negotiate and abide our differences.”
This was true then and remains so now, and Sandel’s
insights were heavily drawn upon by Germany’s new
chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in the Social Democratic
party’s election campaign. A radical politics of place
can enable a renewed common life to flourish and
prosper. The Tories will not deliver it. Labour could.
Sent at 7/2/2022 19:11
Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust № 54,575
‘Comment is free… but facts are sacred’ CP Scott
Health
By refusing to plan for the
NHS’s future, ministers
have become the problem
The NHS has some catching up to do. With 6 million
people in England currently on waiting lists, and
another 1.5 million in Northern Ireland, Scotland and
Wales, the mismatch between demand and supply in
the health system is one of the most serious problems
facing the country. This means it is also one of the
biggest challenges for ministers, who know that NHS
delays, and the problems including deaths that these
cause, will be a huge issue – perhaps the single biggest
issue – in the next general election.
So it is no wonder that the government is trying to
force NHS England’s bosses to fix the problem quickly.
Publication of a recovery plan for elective (non-
emergency) hospital treatment has already been delayed
once. Over the weekend it emerged that a sticking point
in negotiations is the deadline that will be imposed for
reducing waiting times. Waits of more than two years will
have been dealt with by the end of March. But ministers’
demand that waits of more than one year should also be
eliminated by March 2024 has met with resistance. That is
because the length of time that a person has been waiting
is not an indication of their level of need. And if people
who have been waiting for a long time for non-urgent
treatment are prioritised, then those who are more ill
but have been slower to come forward will suffer.
The extent of the delays is nothing short of a scandal.
Being told that you may have cancer is highly distressing;
the two-week maximum waiting time for patients in
these circumstances to see an oncologist exists for a
reason. For half-a-million people in England to have
waited longer than this, as new research suggests that
Social media
Commercial exploitation
of the metaverse may
mean it never arrives
In the 1992 sci-fi dystopia Snow Crash, the author Neal
Stephenson imagined a bleak 21st century where the
collapse of the global economy had seen governments
fall and their power replaced by a few giant businesses.
The book is notable for prescience, anticipating
the adoption of what was then seen as outlandish
technologies like the wireless internet, cryptocurrencies
and smartphones, as well as the rise of the gig economy.
But it is the book’s prophetic vision of “the metaverse”
that has revived interest in the work.
That is because Stephenson described the online
virtual reality experience that almost every tech giant
today wishes to commercially exploit. Last October,
Microsoft announced that users of its Teams online
meetings app would be able to turn themselves into
avatars – the term Stephenson popularised in Snow
Crash – to encourage users into virtual interaction.
Days later Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder,
rebranded his company as Meta, with a focus on the
potential for virtual worlds.
Mr Zuckerberg wants to convince the world that he
has found new ways to make money – a quest that has
become more urgent since last week it was revealed that
the company’s user base may not just have plateaued
but is starting to decline. This is in part because many
Apple iPhone owners choose to opt out of being tracked
by applications like Facebook and younger people
prefer to spend time on the Chinese-owned social
media network TikTok. Facebook users’ engagement
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
they have done over the past year, is a sign of a
brewing crisis. So are lengthy queues for operations
such as hip replacements, which have left thousands
of people who ought to have been fitted with new
joints trapped in pain and disability.
But the NHS is right to push back against unrealistic
commitments. Political expediency must not be
allowed to trump clinical judgments. And ministers
must be prevented from passing the buck, and blame
for departmental mistakes, to the NHS. The pandemic
has dramatically worsened conditions on the ground,
putting unprecedented pressure on primary care and
hospitals. But the problems of under-resourcing and
lack of long-term planning predate Covid.
A health and social care workforce strategy was
promised in 2019, as an adjunct to a long-term
plan that placed staffing front and centre. But the
work done in this area by Dido Harding at NHS
Improvement was feeble, and the plan is yet to arrive.
An amendment to the health and care bill proposed by
Jeremy Hunt, who chairs the health select committee,
would have increased transparency by requiring
regular updates on vacancies and training places – but
the government voted it down in November.
Labour should maximise pressure on this point
and others, both in the House of Lords and when
the bill returns to the Commons. The truth is
that Tory resistance to forward planning, as well
as insufficient spending, lies at the heart of the
NHS’s difficulties. With 100,000 job vacancies,
and worrying reports about burnout among staff,
Sajid Javid and his colleagues should be listening
carefully to health bosses. Instead, they combine
a high-handed approach to NHS management with
over-enthusiasm for big business – as was illustrated
by Mr Javid’s recent decision to force through a deal
with the private sector despite warnings about costs.
Overall, the conduct of the government suggests
that the problems of most interest to it are not
those facing the NHS. They are the problems facing
ministers and their party.
provides the personal data used to target advertising.
Mr Zuckerberg’s Meta rebrand is meant to signal that
he will improve his firm’s targeting and measurement
techniques – and extract more revenue from its users.
However, the metaverse may not be the future.
The corporate version of social media has been
blamed, with some justification, for rotting
democracy from within. Because Facebook, Twitter
and YouTube loom so large in the public imagination,
there exists a “blind spot”, suggests computer
scientist Ethan Zuckerman, for alternative models.
Yet they are here. Tim Berners-Lee, the web’s
inventor, wants to wrest power back from big tech
and put people in control of their personal data.
Other decentralised platforms – such as Mastodon
– make it possible to create online communities with
different rules. Progressive Twitter users in India
switched in 2019 to mstdn.social after a supporter
was suspended. However, the biggest decentralised
social network is Gab, which serves de-platformed
rightwing extremists. There are also social media
platforms built around cryptocurrency/blockchain
capitalism, which currently has a prohibitively large
carbon footprint.
Contributors to such sites are typically rewarded
with tokens, theoretically enabling high-quality
content to be rewarded. However, this model has its
downsides: notably that voting power is proportional
to currency holdings. When Steemit, one of the
original crypto-sites, was bought out, its new owner
used his market power to move it his own blockchain
system – precipitating a walkout by users.
Mr Zuckerman’s wish is for “lots more social
networks” that are explicitly governed by the
communities who are working with them and offer
tools that give more control over what is seen and
how it is seen. He thinks that a period of fertile
creativity may produce a new, more cooperative
form of social media. One hopes he is right.
 Section:GDN 1J PaGe:3 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 17:37
Tuesday 8 February 2022 The Guardian •
Opinion
W
Levelling down
ith just a few words, Andrew
Bailey, the governor of the
Bank of England, perfectly
crystallised the state and
is when the
the fate of the nation. Tone-
deaf and socially oblivious,
the voice booming out from
the economic seat of power
Bank calls for
captured the history of the last lost decade.
“We do need to see restraint in pay bargaining,
otherwise it will get out of control,” Bailey told the
BBC last week. As wages continue to fall, inflation is
wage restraint
set to hit 7.25% in a couple of months, while pay will
rise by far less. TUC leaders protest that “workers have
been hammered and now they’re coming back for
more”. “This is a very tough message to swallow when
take-home pay is falling,” the director of the Institute
Polly for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, tells me, pointing
Toynbee to a decade of lost pay – the longest period of pay
stagnation in many years.
The governor’s Marie Antoinette insouciance struck
a wearily familiar chord. This authentic voice of social
negligence has made the British economy one of the
most unequal and unproductive among its European
equivalents. Pre-pandemic, real wage growth in the
UK became the weakest among the advanced nations
in the G20. The prime minister and chancellor brag of
the “fastest growth in the G7”, but only because we are
climbing out of the deepest slump.
When the governor says, “We do need to see
a moderation of wage rises”, he ignores his own
prediction of falling incomes. “Why wages? Why didn’t
he call for profits to be squeezed?” Torsten Bell of the
Resolution Foundation asks with a rhetorical flourish.
He tells me: “The big picture is that wages have
been rubbish the whole decade, while productivity
plummeted after 2016 due to Brexit uncertainty.”
The governor’s destructive interest rate rises are
a doomed response to global price inflation that lies
beyond the Bank’s control. This kneejerk call to cut pay
is just a natural banker’s reflex. A silent class war has
taken place during the last decade, as the winners have
carried off undreamed-of booty. Thanks mostly to the
Bank’s quantitative easing, which inflated assets, not
productive investment, the decade created billionaires
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
3
The stance
summons
up scary 1970s folk
myths in which
unions were blamed
for trying to keep up
with rising inflation
whose wealth rose by 310%, according to The Decade
the Rich Won, a new documentary on BBC Two.
There were no such calls for a modicum of
“restraint” from those whose wealth ballooned
after the financial crisis. Quantitative easing gifted
such a vast asset bonanza to the already wealthy
that it astounded even the English financier Guy
Hands. “Those of us in private equity got incredibly
wealthy. The effect was the rich got richer,” he told
the BBC. Was he grateful? He removed himself and his
company, Terra Firma, to shelter in Guernsey.
This is the great levelling down. Public sector
pay has been hit the hardest, falling by 2.4% in
real terms in the year to November, despite Boris
Johnson proclaiming the pay freeze to be over. Local
government workers’ annual salaries are down by
£1,600, with teachers down on their 2010 salaries,
according to the TUC.
Falling pay isn’t just about hungry families relying
on food banks. It damages public services, too. In the
NHS, with its impossible waiting list, nurses’ pay is
already down by £2,700 a year. I talked to Ella, a highly
specialised neurosurgery nurse, precious to the NHS;
The Bank but she has just left, sad to go. She was being paid
of England £29,000 – around the national median – but now she
governor, earns more than £41,000 in a private hospital.
Andrew Bailey, It’s not just the money: in her NHS section there
at a press were 12 staff vacancies, and she alone cared for eight
conference very sick patients. “It gives you nightmares and
last week panic attacks that you’ll make mistakes. You do bank
PHOTOGRAPH: shifts to make up the pay and it’s very, very hard.”
DAN KITWOOD/AP
Now she cares for four patients with a senior nurse
supervisor, in a department with no vacancies. Nine
other experienced nurses left her NHS hospital with
her. Her story is a warning: an underfunded NHS that
underpays and understaffs will break the health service
T
if the contrast with private health grows too great.
he governor’s spectre of wages rising
“out of control” was greeted with
such indignation that No 10, with the
prime minister desperately seeking
popularity, slapped him down.
However, the chancellor’s silence was
widely taken as approval for Bailey’s
stance. It summons up scary 1970s folk
myths, in which unions were blamed for striving to
keep up with mushrooming inflation. In 1974, Labour
forged a social contract to curb inflation by holding
down prices if unions held back wage demands. It fell
apart when wages still fell below price rises.
Nowadays the governor offers nothing in exchange
for pay “restraint”, a sign of how weak unions have
become. They are virtually absent in a private sector
where an insecure, atomised workforce faces “fire and
rehire” and temporary contract threats.
Meanwhile, as Johnson woos his rightwing MPs
by ditching any “lefty” policies, the government’s
promised employment bill – which was supposed
to ease the worst of gig economy brutality – has
vanished. Expect no aspirant for Johnson’s job to
redress pay injustice. The one hope for wages, says
the TUC, is a Labour government implementing
Rachel Reeves’ pledge for fair pay agreements across
every sector. Labour would end zero-hours contracts
and bogus self-employment, with guaranteed access
to a union and employee working rights from day one.
Until that day, the boot is on the banker’s foot.
Section:GDN 1J PaGe:4 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
• The Guardian Tuesday 8 February 2022
4 Opinion
Don’t blame
Carrie Johnson
for her spouse
Gaby
Hinsliff
I
t seems a lifetime ago now that Camilla
Parker Bowles was a scarlet woman, a
mistress so reviled, some felt she would
never be accepted by the public. This week
it was announced that she will become
Queen consort when her husband becomes
king, in what felt like the final reward for
years of being a Good Wife; the kind who
supportively, unselfishly and discreetly enables
her husband to become the best version of himself.
As an anonymous royal source told the Daily Mail
approvingly, Camilla saw her job as doing whatever
she was asked to do: “You don’t try to shape the role
to your advantage. It’s about duty and service.” And
if it’s taken three solid decades of self-effacement to
transform her from hate figure to national treasure
Sent at 7/2/2022 18:32
– well, nobody said being a Good Wife was easy,
or indeed fun.
Carrie Johnson has certainly found it hard going,
judging by a new biography from the Tory peer
Lord Ashcroft, in which her critics portray her as the
wrong kind of wife entirely; too meddlesome, too
“woke”, and altogether too unlike her predecessor,
Marina Wheeler, who made Boris Johnson’s life run so
smoothly, he didn’t have to worry about anything (and
was duly rewarded for her efforts by being repeatedly
cheated on). Poor Boris needs “mothering”, we’re told,
not someone nagging him about net zero. The trouble
with this reductive nonsense is that as an explanation
for his current misfortunes, it simply doesn’t wash.
Wheeler was not some surrendered wife content
with reverently rearranging her husband’s sock
drawer, but a leading QC and committed Brexiter who
argued trenchantly in the run-up to the referendum
for curtailing the influence of the European court of
justice, and was widely credited with persuading her
wobbling husband to back Brexit. (Wifely influence can
be surprisingly acceptable in Tory circles, so long as it’s
in the “right” direction.)
Carrie Johnson, meanwhile, may well have been
guilty of using the network she once developed as a
special adviser to steer her husband’s government in
her preferred direction, but she has become a lightning
rod for unfair criticism and downright misogyny.
Downing Street can be a lonely place for spouses, but
perhaps particularly one dealing in quick succession
with the near-death of her husband, two births, a
miscarriage and rumours that he might be pining for
the last wife, all while trying to find her footing on
a very public tightrope. It’s too easy to blame every
controversial decision, intra-government tension
or inexplicable U-turn on her whispering in the prime
ministerial ear, when all too often the problem is his
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
own ideological slipperiness and strategic preference
for chaos. Just as it did in the days of Camilla being
pitted against Diana, setting two wives against each
other conveniently obscures the role of the man
standing between them.
All successful marriages are partnerships, and in
politics that’s perhaps unusually true. David Cameron
would have been a different man without Samantha
shaking up some of his assumptions; Theresa May
drew confidence from rock-steady Philip. But it
is prime ministers who set the direction of their
governments and the culture inside Downing Street.
Johnson’s hatred of personal confrontation,
learned in childhood, leaves him wanting to be all
things to all people. While this fuzziness is electoral
catnip – who else could have persuaded so many
starkly different groups of voters in 2019 that he
was simultaneously on all their sides? – it is no recipe
for clear leadership internally. Those who have
worked for him describe a secretive man, who in
an argument leaves both sides with the impression
he agrees with them, before reneging on one the
minute he leaves the room. As prime minister, he
is forced daily into making hard choices that reveal
either his true convictions or strange lack of them,
while the glib half-truths to which he resorts when
cornered are quickly exposed.
None of that is his wife’s fault. The strengths and
weaknesses Johnson exhibits as prime minister are
the same strengths and weaknesses that have been
evident throughout his career. And to the extent that
Carrie has power over his decisions, it can only be the
power he allows her to have. Like blaming a mistress
for the breakup of a marriage, blaming a wife for a
politician’s failures obscures the fact that he’s the
one who made a vow to the country – and the one
ultimately responsible for sticking to it.
 Section:GDN 1J PaGe:5 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 17:48 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

Tuesday 8 February 2022 The Guardian •

The long read

My drinking and drug

use pushed me into a
total breakdown. Then
a stint in rehab made
me question how much
we really understand
about addiction.

By Carl Erik Fisher
Section:GDN 1J PaGe:6 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
• The Guardian Tuesday 8 February 2022
6 The long read
I
’m lying in bed when I hear the
commotion. I peer through the doorway of my room,
and right outside, the new guy is getting in Ruiz’s
face. There’s a phone right outside the door, one of
those sturdy metal payphones like one you’d see on
a street corner, and Ruiz, a gentle older man with
shoulders stooped by the demoralisation of his nth
relapse and hospitalisation, is just trying to talk to his
family. But the new guy has been manic and pacing
since he arrived a few hours ago, and he won’t take no
for an answer.
I watch the new guy stalk the other way across
the doorway, muttering to himself, menacing even
in retreat. Then a warning shout echoes from much
too far in the distance, and he appears once again –
flying, near horizontal – to tackle Ruiz, dragging him
off the phone.
The staff quickly take him down; thankfully,
no one is seriously hurt. Shaken, I try to focus on
my journal, but my mind races. I’m 29 years old,
writing notes in a sloppy felt-tip pen (no ballpoints
are allowed), trying to understand how I went from
being a newly minted doctor in a psychiatry residency
programme at Columbia University in New York to a
psychiatric patient at Bellevue, the city’s notorious
public hospital.
Bellevue is synonymous with the most challenging
cases of mental illness, and now I’m locked on the
dual-diagnosis ward on the 20th floor, near the top
of the building, where they put people who have
substance use problems alongside other mental
disorders. I’ve already recognised some of the
faculty from when I applied here for residency,
and I know from the tour I took as an applicant that
the special prison ward, protected by a guardhouse
with bulletproof glass and thickly barred gates, is
one floor below us.
I need the phone those two men have been fighting
over. It’s my only way to reach the outside world, that
other plane of reality where I was once a psychiatry
resident. I’m having trouble accepting that I belong
here. Day by day, it seems more likely that what the
doctors have been telling me is correct – that, just like
the new guy, I too have had a manic episode, in my
case induced by weeks of stimulants and alcohol. But
I’m still not sure what I should do.
The next day, I meet with the whole treatment
team – half a dozen psychiatrists, therapists and
counsellors facing me across a massive table in one
of those windowless hospital conference rooms. For
the first time, I truly let my guard down and recount
my whole drinking history. How I grew up with two
alcoholic parents and swore to myself I’d never be
like them. How, even as I finished medical school at
Columbia, I had the creeping sense that my drinking
was out of control. How the blackouts got more and
more frequent, but I didn’t reach out for help, and I
didn’t accept the help that friends, colleagues and
supervisors had all offered, then implored me to take.
I tell them everything, even about the time I woke
up on the floor of the hallway in my building, shirtless,
my skin sticking to the tacky linoleum, locked out of
my own apartment. It was only by getting up to the
roof and climbing down the fire escape that I made
it in to work that day at all. I was late again, and so
ashamed and scared by what it said about me. It
was obvious that something was wrong, but I never
Sent at 7/2/2022 17:49
told anyone about it, because to do so would be to
acknowledge what I had long suspected.
They ask me about my family, and I tell them about
my father’s four stints in rehab and the bottles of wine
my mother secreted around the house. I describe my
parents as alcoholics, as I usually do, but I also finally
give voice to that dangerous suspicion about myself:
“I’m starting to realise that I’m an alcoholic, too,” I say,
and then break down crying.
Later that weekend, I call my friend Ravi from
that payphone, looking down the disorientingly long
hallway that stretches the length of the ward. He’s
helping me with all the logistics, setting up disability
insurance, getting my rent paid and generally making
it possible for me to go to rehab – a place I don’t quite
want to go to, but am told that I need.
We talk about how it’ll be good for me, and how I’ve
struggled for so long. His voice is strained. It’s clear
he’s worried about me. So I hesitate for a moment – I
have the clear sense of telling myself that this is a truly
ridiculous question, that I shouldn’t ask him this – but
then ask him anyway, even as I keep one eye down the
hallway for any potential assailants: “Do you really
think I can never drink again?”
I’m supposed to be going to some specialised rehab
for doctors, but I know nothing about it. I want to go,
but not really. I need help, but maybe I can do it on my
own, or at least find a better way. Why is this so hard?
Addiction is a terrifying breakdown of reason. People
struggling with addiction say they want to stop, but,
even with the obliterated nasal passages, scarred livers,
overdoses, court cases, lost jobs and lost families, they
are confused, incredulous and, above all, afraid. They
are afraid because they cannot seem to change, despite
the fact that they so often watch themselves, clear-
eyed, do the very things they don’t want to do.
Addiction is often explained in terms of a dichotomy
of free choice v total compulsion. By claiming that
addictive behaviours are simply a kind of choice,
people have justified punitive measures for centuries,
from putting drunkards in the stocks to imprisoning
people for drug possession. If their drug use is a free
choice like any other, the argument goes, people
should accept responsibility for their behaviour,
including punishment. The opposite view, which
these days is commonly presented as a compassionate
counter-argument by neuroscientists and advocates,
is that addictive behaviours are involuntary and
uncontrollable compulsions, and thus people with
addiction deserve compassion and treatment, rather
than punishment.
But this dichotomy between choice and compulsion
is unsatisfying. Lived experience contradicts such
a stark binary, and many people with addiction feel
themselves occupying a confusing middle ground. The
thing that is terrifying to most people with addiction
is that they watch themselves making a choice even
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
while feeling there is something wrong with the
choosing. It is, in other words, an issue of disordered
choice: a problem with choice, choice gone awry.
The ancient Greeks had a word for this experience
of acting against your present judgment: akrasia,
often translated as “weakness of the will”. Akrasia
isn’t just doing something that is arguably harmful,
like eating too much pie or spending too much
money on clothes. Everyone indulges, even though
indulgence is rarely the best option according to a cold,
utilitarian calculus. Akrasia is doing something even
though you truly believe it would be better not to, of
recognising in the moment that you are acting against
your better judgment.
Aristotle was deeply invested in the idea of akrasia.
To him, it was self-evident that people sometimes
acted against their better judgment. He saw more
nuance in the notion of choice, and he believed
there were various ways that internal conflict might
interfere with that choice. Surely, he asked, emotions
or misguided reason can often get in the way of one’s
better judgment?
Plato arrived at a different point of view. He
understood the problem of self-control partly as
the result of a divided and conflicted self, one he
illustrated through the famous metaphor of the
chariot: the intellect is the charioteer attempting to
wrangle the two horses of positive moral impulses
and irrational, passionate drives. The notion is also
found widely in classical narrative, such as Medea’s
psychological struggle in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
torn between love and duty: “But a strange power
attracts me against my will – desire urges one thing,
reason another.”
In the study of addiction today, the divided self
is a prominent explanation of how choice can be
disordered. For example, behavioural economics
research describes the psychological feature of “delay
discounting”, in which smaller but more immediate
rewards are favoured over larger, delayed ones –
this process is universal to humankind, but more
pronounced in addiction. Immediate rewards are
grossly overvalued, causing extreme impulsivity that
feels like loss of control.
Nudging these types of choices can be a highly
effective component of addiction treatment. The most
obvious example originates from the 1980s, when
Stephen Higgins, a psychologist at the University of
Vermont, developed a “contingency management”
programme to treat people with cocaine addiction.
In addition to counselling, Higgins used a voucher
system that gave people small rewards, such as sports
equipment and movie passes, for cocaine-negative
urine samples, and gave them a bonus for longer
stretches of abstinence. This strategy was highly
successful. One of the early experiments found
that 55% of the voucher subjects were continuously
GETTY drug-free for 10 weeks, compared with fewer than
15% of subjects receiving the usual treatment. After
decades’ more research, contingency management
now has strong evidence in its favour, especially
for stimulant problems, for which there aren’t good
medication treatments.
After my time at Bellevue, I did go to rehab, and
in time, I returned to the residency programme at
Columbia. For years afterward, I was in supervised
treatment. At a moment’s notice, I had to be prepared
to run across the medical centre or across town to
my “urine monitor”, a woman who would watch me
urinate to make sure I didn’t try to pass off someone
else’s bodily fluids as my own. My monitored treatment
was a form of negative contingency management.
I wasn’t totally committed to abstinence at first,
but my medical licence was on the line, so I chose
not to drink. This powerful contingency is, in large
part, why these physician health programmes have
extraordinary five-year success rates of 75% or higher,
eclipsing the effectiveness of essentially all other
addiction treatments.
Yet some people don’t stop, no matter what the cost.
There is still that nagging 25% of people who don’t
make it to the five-year mark, for example. Some of
my friends and colleagues from the physician health
 Section:GDN 1J PaGe:7 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
Tuesday 8 February 2022 The Guardian •
programme did relapse, and they were trying their
best – none thought in the moment that it would be
better to start drinking or using again. Those outcomes
are a testament, I think, not to the power of a simplistic
compulsion, but to the complexity of the internal
forces that lie beneath the stereotype.
As I was researching the subject of addiction, my
mother was slowly wasting away from lung cancer.
During her illness she told me about how her own
father, a Swedish immigrant, fell into a severe
depression every winter. He would remember his
happy childhood in Stockholm and compare it with
their life in Newark: no hot water, working the night
shift at a bottling plant, never seeing his wife, who
worked an opposite shift on a different assembly line.
Though he tried not to drink, he’d always relapse on
alcohol as Christmas approached, and for months my
mother, still a young girl, would be sent out into the
Newark winters to trudge from bar to bar to find him
so he could get a few precious hours of sleep before
his next shift. From an early age, she was taught that
alcohol was a way to cope with a difficult world.
I don’t intend to diagnose my parents or
grandparents. It is rarely useful to attempt to arrive
at one major “cause” of anyone’s addiction – genes,
environment, trauma, the trauma of everyday life. But
it has helped me immensely to see their addictions at
least in part as a function of their unprocessed pain.
Like everyone else, they were drinking and smoking
for a reason: because those substances did something
for them. Sadly, their use simultaneously helped
them to cope and made their problems much worse,
perpetuating a vicious spiral.
This is the core of the addiction-as-dislocation
theory. Beyond soothing the concrete effects of
physical dislocation, people use drugs to address
an alienation from cultural supports. This kind of
alienation is what Émile Durkheim, the founder of
Sent at 7/2/2022 17:49
The thing that is terrifying to
most people with addiction is
watching themselves making
choices they know are wrong
ALAMY modern sociology, called anomie: the social condition
of a breakdown of norms and values, resulting in an
existential lack of connection to meaning and purpose.
This sense of dislocation, some scholars argue, is one of
the core drivers of today’s opioid epidemic.
Epidemics are never caused solely by some inherent
power of the drugs themselves. There is often, if not
always, social wounding underneath, driving the
substance use. In 2014, the Princeton economists
Anne Case and Angus Deaton (the latter of whom
won a Nobel prize the next year) happened upon an
unexpected finding: a significant uptick in the number
of suicides among middle-aged white Americans.
Case and Deaton found that death rates from three
causes – suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver
disease – were rising rapidly, and the increases were
almost all among people without a college degree. In
their subsequent analyses, Case and Deaton connected
these deaths to a rot at the core of today’s societal
structure. True, these working-class whites were
suffering some concrete losses from the globalising
economy, such as worse jobs with lower wages, but
beyond that, work had become far less meaningful.
People no longer had a real connection to their jobs
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
– they were less likely to belong to a union and less
likely to have any stability or structure in their work.
Beyond that, there were plenty more reasons for
despair. Marriage rates were declining, and religious
participation was falling. More people were living
alone than at any time in recorded human history.
All these dislocations were fatally exacerbated
by the US’s stark inequality – the highest income
inequality of all the G7 nations – combined with what
is objectively the worst-performing healthcare system
in the developed world, with its bloated costs and
inefficiencies holding down wages and destroying
jobs. Case and Deaton labeled these deaths from
suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease
“deaths of despair”. In 2017 alone, there were more
than 150,000 deaths of despair in the US, and many of
them among people between 20 and 50.
It’s crucial to note that all these white people
– my family and myself included – were spared
from other, more direct forces of oppression and
racism that have driven deaths from addiction in
Black and Brown communities for decades, even
centuries. Persistent health inequities by race and
social class have long dwarfed the white working-
class deaths of despair identified by Case and
Deaton. The “deaths of despair” narrative should
not enable an exclusive focus on white problems;
to do so would draw a false distinction between this
epidemic, populated by images of white middle-
class users who are portrayed as blameless victims,
and the ongoing crisis of substance-related deaths
driven by structural issues such as poverty, trauma,
concentrated disadvantage and hopelessness. In
reality, these crises are deeply intertwined. The point,
rather, is that the psychological dislocation driving
addiction is powerful enough to reach into all corners
of human society, and it is not limited to concrete,
material resources.
One of the first patients in my internal medicine
rotation during medical school was a rail-thin man
with a heroin addiction who had a tumour the size of
a melon sticking out of his jaw. He had tried to get a
little nodule on his tongue checked out a few months
earlier, but the clinic doctors didn’t have a lot of
patience for his drug use and “noncompliance”, and
he had quickly fallen out of care. Now his family had
brought him to the medical centre to die.
It was four years before my breakdown, and I was
in the middle of the third year of medical school –
the dreaded “clinical year”, when students rotate
through different specialties as part of the teams
directly caring for patients – and it was wearing on
me. That man seemed to embody everything wrong
with modern medicine: not our inability to cure the
cancer, but how easily patients could be left by the
wayside. The churn of the system was demoralising.
We’d patch up acute conditions and dump people
back into nursing homes or even on to the streets,
with little opportunity for working with the human
problems so often at the root of unhealthy behaviour.
As the winter rolled on, I got tired of waking up at 4am
just to tackle checklists of tasks that didn’t seem to be
helping anyone.
I started drinking more – much more. I started
crying unexpectedly. I met with a bushy-bearded
psychoanalyst in a cramped cinder-block office at the
medical centre, though at first I hid the extent of my
distress behind safe, professional language, claiming
I was there because I wanted to develop as a future
psychiatrist and learn about myself.
I limped through the year of clinical rotations
and took a research fellowship, but even during the
comparatively relaxed research year, my drinking got
progressively worse. I set countless limits for myself,
then immediately violated them. After telling myself
I wouldn’t drink at a scientific conference in Miami,
I passed out against a palm tree and then puked in
a cab. I wondered if I was an alcoholic, but I quickly
dismissed the possibility.
I had gone to an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
meeting as a med student – we were
all required to go as an educational
Section:GDN 1J PaGe:8 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
• The Guardian Tuesday 8 February 2022
8 The long read

exercise – and it seemed clear that I wasn’t like
those people, or my parents. My problem, I thought,
was more sophisticated, something more complex
and existential than a “disease” like alcoholism or
a psychiatric disorder like suicidal depression or
debilitating OCD. Patients facing those conditions
were the ones really suffering; they were the ones who
needed treatment. I just needed to grow up.
And yet, as the consequences mounted, I started to
believe that I might have a problem. My psychiatrist
fired me as a patient because of all the sessions
I missed, and I poured a full bottle of gin down the
sink and swore to myself that I’d really cut down this
time. I didn’t realise then, but I do now, that I was
doing the same thing I had tried with my parents
once I got old enough to recognise just how bad
their drinking was: searching the house for hidden
bottles and pouring them out in front of them. It
worked just as well.
In the end, it was the mixed amphetamines of
Adderall that tipped me over the edge into a complete
breakdown. I had accessed the drug easily, because
it was an entitlement for a white and privileged user
like me. I got it through medical channels, paid for
it with medical insurance and, most of the time,
used it in a relatively sanctioned way. It is the kind
of drug that preserves and supports the existing
social order; stimulants get you to work, after all. Not
long after it was in my hands, though, I began using
Adderall dangerously, and the combination of alcohol,
amphetamines and days of sleeplessness combined to
put me into a drug-induced manic episode.
At first, it was glorious. I felt the total dissolution
of my ego and a lucid clarity, a taste of an imminent
and transcendent mystical experience. Then the
delusions set in. I understood that I had got wrapped
up in a spiritual war of good versus evil. At times I did
wonder whether the drugs had caused a psychotic
mania, but I could no longer identify reality, as all
those thoughts and feelings and fears came rushing in
at once. We describe mental illness as if it’s an entity,
a clearly demarcated state, or at least a state with
some sort of checkpoint or transition, but I passed
no such gate. I felt like I was straddling the gap
between sanity and insanity, or, perhaps better put,
inhabiting the quantum uncertainty of both at the
same time, multiple states of being flashing through
my disordered mind.
A few days later, it was getting harder to deny to
myself how bad things had got, but in my mind I still
protested. I started whispering the same phrase over
and over to myself: “I know what crazy is, and this is
not it. I know what crazy is, and this is not it.” For just
one precious moment, I saw just how wrong I was,
and, realising that I couldn’t do it myself, I screamed
out for help. My neighbour called the police.
On my second day in rehab, almost two weeks after
I was taken to Bellevue, I was summoned to meet
the medical director, Dr Summers, in his office for
my intake interview. I had heard that he would
probably have the final say over my case, and I had
been watching him closely as he stalked the hallways
with an impatient, kinetic energy. This I could
work with. I had spent my entire career sucking up
to older doctors.
As soon as I sat down in his office, he scowled
and began to interrogate me. How much had I been
drinking, exactly? What else was I using? Was I sure?
My hopes withered, but I tried to stay positive and
calmly presented my case: young man with binge
drinking exacerbated by Adderall and occasionally
cocaine, in the context of overwork and burnout.
Far from healthy, but now highly motivated. I could
really do this as an outpatient. I had learned my
lesson and wanted to get better.
I watched his face for any signs of an opening.
Instead, after a long pause, he leaned across the table
and told me that he’d be testing my hair for drugs.
“Tell me now,” he asked portentously, “what will
we find?”
At first, I was confused – I had just told him
everything I’d been taking – but then the realisation
Sent at 7/2/2022 17:49
The realisation landed: I wasn’t
a colleague or a trainee any more,
not to him. I was an addicted
doctor, the worst kind of patient
landed: I wasn’t a colleague or a trainee any more,
not to him. I was an addicted doctor, the worst kind
of patient, perfectly equipped to massage my story
and maintain my denial. In Bellevue I had also been a
patient, but treated with respect, even like a colleague.
Here, though, I was just a liar, and apparently I had to
be broken down and reformed.
During the nine weeks I was in rehab, I saw things in
the programme that seemed wrong, if not downright
harmful, and which fed my resistance. A sense of fear
and surveillance permeated the group I was in, all
of us health professionals. A flirtatious surgeon was
“therapeutically discharged” because he wouldn’t
stop talking to female patients; he was transferred to a
long-term care programme in Mississippi that would,
we were told, break down the entrenched personality
issues standing in the way of his recovery.
In a regular group exercise titled Responsible
Concerns, we called out other people for troubling
behaviour, such as expressing any doubts about
treatment or AA. A family practice physician – older
than most of us, and gentle, but quietly, awkwardly
obstinate – refused to stop pointing out the elements
of AA that he thought were illogical, so he was given
a pamphlet titled King Baby, which described how his
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
resistance was just a symptom of his own immaturity.
It all felt crazy to me. The targets of their interventions
were sweeping – people’s very personality and
character – and in psychiatry, we would never set out
to engineer a fundamental character reconstruction in
the space of a few weeks or months.
To this day, I am not entirely sure how to think
about that rehab programme. Was it too harsh, or
did I need to be challenged? Was all their focus on
character and personality rehabilitation overkill? I am
convinced that I did need to be coerced, in the sense
of being faced with a hard choice. Most people going
to addiction treatment are going with some form of
coercion – at least informal coercion, from family
and friends – and I was there because I had to be, at
least if I wanted to practice medicine anytime soon.
I am glad that I was coerced in that sense; if I hadn’t
had the monitoring programme in place, I might not
have stuck with treatment and entered recovery, and I
could have harmed other people, or died myself. Still,
I’d like to believe that whatever deeper rehabilitation
I experienced had more to do with connection than
confrontation. I didn’t really need to be broken
down, and the most meaningful and transformative
experiences were less about the formal treatment and
more about being put in a situation where mutual help
could take hold and do its work.
After residency, I devoted a year to training in
forensic psychiatry. I spent one day a week at New York
State’s maximum-security prison for women, and it
seemed as though every patient sent to our psychiatric
clinic had both a low-level drug offence and trauma
history. Many of them jockeyed to get time off their
sentences by going to tough-love boot camps, where
their heads were shaved and they did push-ups in
the snow while staff screamed at them. I couldn’t
shake their stories. The injustice of how, if not for
an accident of birth, my own story could have been
entirely different. The NYPD chose to take me, a white
guy living in an upscale Manhattan neighbourhood, to
a hospital rather than booking me. If I’d been a person
of colour in a different neighbourhood, I could have
been imprisoned, like so many of the people who
populate our current system of mass incarceration,
or even shot and killed.
Disparity in access to medical treatment remains
one of the strongest examples we have of the stark
racial disparities in the understanding and treatment
of addiction. Black and Brown people have long had
to fight for treatment. Addiction in communities
of colour, perennially a major problem, is too
often explained in a stigmatised way that justifies
prohibitionist approaches: portrayed as self chosen
and irresponsible. On a structural level, addiction is
explained away as the intractable effect of poverty or
other root causes, treated as inevitable and expected,
and thus left to the criminal legal system.
In my psychiatry practice, I see “non-addicted”
BSIP/UNIVERSAL people struggling with food, work, cheating, power,
IMAGES/GETTY
money or anger all the time. One psychotherapy
patient of mine uses compulsive bingeing and purging
as a way of managing negative emotions such as fear
and shame. Another cannot put down his phone or
stop checking his email – despite his clear intentions
and plans to do so, and despite the fact that it causes
real problems in his marriage – because of a crushing
need for external validation from his work. I don’t
insist that they call themselves addicted, and in
general I don’t assume that the roots of my own
addiction are similar to others’, or that others need
what I have needed to recover. But I also don’t see a
tremendous division between me and them. We all
suffer from a divided self, and we all have too much
confidence in our judgment and our ability to exert
 power over our environments and ourselves. And in
Carl Erik Fisher that, I think we share a fellowship, in that addiction
is a bioethicist, is simultaneously a tremendous problem that causes
addiction unthinkable suffering, and something contiguous with
psychiatrist all of human suffering.
and assistant
professor at This is an edited extract from The Urge: Our History of
Columbia Addiction by Carl Erik Fisher, published by Scribe and
University available at guardianbookshop.com
 Section:GDN 1J PaGe:9 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
Tuesday 8 February 2022 The Guardian
Established 1906
Country diary
Creedy Valley, Devon
When winter has settled into the
bones, not a sound carrying over
the stones, into the silence of earth
and frost – a tiny, tinkling goldcrest
drops. Along with the firecrest, it
is the UK’s smallest bird, flickering
through bark in busy bursts.
Weighing about the same as a 20p
piece, it can be hard to spot high
in fir and pine trees. Yet, when
you catch sight of the gold-striped
head, it is not the kind of light you
forget. The yellow or orange crown
gleams, flooding the bark with its
golden stream.
Where I stand in the field by
a border of pines, the ground
encrusted with a rust of ice, a pair
dash in and out of sight – bright
sparks flying as the trees ignite.
With counts slightly lower this
winter, it is especially reassuring
to see them. I catch one’s eye –
gleaming, wild – then watch the
small run of its beak and feel the
tingling release. Notes so high-
pitched that they’re inaudible
to some strum like sunbeams
across the leaves. If sunlight
could be heard, perhaps it would
be this – I tilt my head back to its
golden pitch. Ears shift into higher
frequencies for its contact call
of “zree-zree-zree”.
With their small size, lighter, on
average, even than the firecrest,
goldcrests can use up a lot of their
energy to keep warm – on cold
nights, up to 20% of their body
weight. But as the notes flow
between us, the coldness goes.
The gold seems to find its way into
the bones. There is, everywhere, a
warming current. Waves of sound
splash upon us. The colour begins
to return to my cheeks as I stand
in the glow. Yellow drips down
from branch to branch as the birds
continue their glistening advance.
Despite their small size, their
impact is huge. I am held by the
spectacle and cannot move.
Through lit peals, their chime
resounds, tolling the days through
to warmer ground. Their presence,
even now, delivers an ease, a heat
that pours steadily down through
the trees. The earth, the leaves
and treetops thaw, and winter,
for just a moment, withdraws.
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER
We may edit letters. Submission
and publication of letters is subject
to our terms and conditions: see
theguardian.com/letters-terms
•
Letters
Renaissance Florence is
a ludicrous model for UK
Andy Haldane, co-author of the
government’s big levelling-up
report, wants to pair a swathe of
the UK’s major material needs
with the thrust of achievements
in Renaissance Florence (Report,
5 February). It would be difficult to
entertain a more idiotic vision.
Florence had no coordination
between public expenditure and
urban improvement. Taxation
staggered from one need to
the next. Churches and rich
patrons were the prime movers
behind all major architectural
commissions. Michelangelo
and Leonardo da Vinci deserted
Florence for more promising
venues. The Medici began to put
their hands into the public till even
under the 15th-century republic.
Any conception of the public good
was rudimentary. The political
upper class swiftly made its peace
with the overmighty Medici in
the 16th century. Enough said.
Lauro Martines
London
• Levelling up isn’t just about a
new bus route or train line, it’s
about rebuilding the foundations
of this country’s prosperity. At the
PM’s death by a thousand cuts harms us all
Nesrine Malik colourfully describes
the protracted demise of Boris
Johnson as a “slow bleed, rather
than an immediate fall” (Leaving
Brexit populism behind will cost
the Tories dear, 7 February). She
rightly suggests that because the
Conservative party narrative is
built on lies, it will reframe the
prime minister’s lies and allow
him to live another day, and then
another, and yet another.
Those of us who have written to
our local Conservative MPs about
our distress at partygate and the
flouting of rules seem to all have
received replies with common
phrases indicating that action
is being taken to improve the
Why we should be asking for big pay rises
Once again, it’s remarkable to see
how little is understood about
the workings of capitalism by
those who operate at the very top
of it (Bank chief criticised after
urging workers not to demand
big pay rises, 5 February). “The
rich cannot buy great quantities
of bread,” the economist
JK Galbraith observed after the
Wall Street crash of 1929 and
America’s struggle to revive its
economy. He meant that the
Sent at 7/2/2022 17:17
heart of levelling up should be the
reform of our education system.
We need to teach creativity, which
helps people solve problems.
We need to value engineers and
tradespeople such as electricians,
plumbers and gas fitters, so we
need more focus on those skills
at ages of 16-plus. It’s ironic that
the person in charge of levelling
up is the one who took England’s
education system back to learning
by rote and destroyed what
would really make a difference.
Michael Sanders
London
• One of the projects that will
apparently receive funding in
the white paper on levelling up
(Report, 2 February) is money for
the electrification of the Midland
mainline north from Bedford to
Sheffield. Some 15 years ago, I
was a member of South Yorkshire
Passenger Transport and I can
remember councillors welcoming
the news that the rail line up to
Sheffield was to be electrified.
Since then, this announcement
has been trotted out a number of
times, with a lengthy hiatus when
we were promised an extension
operation at No 10. Not one word
of contrition or recognition of the
prime minister’s individual failings
and personal responsibility.
In almost every conversation
I have these days, both young and
old share shock at the nonsense
going on in parliament, and
anxieties about the economic crisis,
the rising cost of living and how
they are going to manage.
While this prime minister and
his government bluster on, it is the
rest of us who will experience the
slow bleed of increasing prices,
increased taxes, real incomes
falling, further diminished public
services and the removal of a
safety net to catch us when we
goods and services that keep the
high street (and its suppliers and
manufacturers) going come from
the everyday spending of the
masses, not from the activities
of the very few mega-rich
speculators and rentiers who
always end up causing volatility
and boom and bust.
While no one would want a
return to the union militancy of the
1970s, it was pointed out at the time
by some economists that at least
 guardian.letters@theguardian.com
 @guardianletters
to the city from the proposed
HS2 route to Leeds instead.
Work is finally beginning on
electrifying the line from Bedford
to Market Harborough. Yet again,
we are faced with a recycled project
with recycled funds, the eventual
completion of which stretches
further and further into the future.
Sylvia Dunkley
Sheffield
• Lisa Nandy is right to point to
the vacuum at the heart of the
levelling-up plans. Tagged on to
the prosperous south-east, the
Isle of Wight has been underfunded
for decades in terms of money
per pupil. We have had a gutful
of education change and boast
such a mosaic of secondary
provision that it lacks coherence.
Local housing is well beyond
the means of residents thanks to
second homes and holiday lets
cornering the market.
Our ferry links remain among
the most expensive in the world.
We are deprived of subsidies
enjoyed by other coastal crossings.
This has led to higher prices and
less frequent crossings, which
have affected social mobility
and trade. We don’t need more
of the same tired policies. We
need levelling up of the money
that we have been deprived of
in the past and involvement of
island people in their future.
Yvonne Williams
Ryde, Isle of Wight
fall. All this government offers
are sticking plasters when what
we really need is major surgery.
Peter Riddle
Wirksworth, Derbyshire
• Nesrine Malik emphasises the
need for the survival of some sort
of credible Conservative party.
Those of us who have never voted
Conservative, and never will,
should be hoping that the downfall
of Boris Johnson does not leave
behind a vacuum that a new Nigel
Farage (or indeed the old one) will
be only too happy to fill. It would be
tragic if the mainland Conservatives
went the way of Ulster unionism,
steadily replaced as contenders
for office by hardliners.
Geoff Reid
Bradford, West Yorkshire
the big pay rises to workers put
money in their pockets to spend,
which stopped the economy tilting
into recession.
The real problems today come
from high rents, a dysfunctional
housing market and private sector
greed. The average household is
mired in personal or mortgage
debt – a problem that wouldn’t have
been so evident in the 1970s, but
is certainly a problem today, as the
Bank of England worries about the
effects of raised interest rates.
David Redshaw
Gravesend, Kent
cYanmaGentaYellowblac
9
Corrections and
clarifications
• An article said that “ITV bought
the Dutch production company
Talpa Media, which makes BBC1’s
The Voice”. Talpa Media owned
the rights to the talent show which
premiered in the UK on BBC One.
It now airs on ITV (Creator of The
Voice accused of victim-blaming
over sex claims, 22 January, p39).
• We meant to refer to the Gina
vaginal oestrogen tablets, not
“Gina 10” (HRT tablets could be
made available in UK without
prescription, 3 February, p16).
Editorial complaints and corrections can be sent to
guardian.readers@theguardian.com
A postcode lottery
that I just can’t win
I moved into a newly built house
in June 2020. HMRC has still
not updated my postcode on its
records, so passport and driving
licence renewals have had to be
completed by post. I have tried
to complain about this using the
online complaints system. After
spending 45 minutes completing
six pages of the signing-in
process, and receiving a one-time
password and my 12-digit ID, I was
asked for … my postcode.
Jim Rotheram
Preston, Lancashire
• It’s hard to impress on non-south
Asians what Lata Mangeshkar
meant to one-sixth of humanity
(Indians mourn Lata Mangeshkar,
‘nightingale of Bollywood’, at
92, 7 February). She was the
background music of the lives of
millions over many decades. In
a time and place where division
was – and remains – the modus
operandi, she was a bridge
between generations, castes,
religions, and even countries.
She was a national treasure.
Sheilendr Khipple
Wilmette, Illinois, US
• Growing weary of Wordle,
I have devised an alternative
mental challenge – Sunaku – in
which the sum of the numerals in
each square, with an appropriate
number of zeros inserted in the
correct positions, will equal the
total government write-off for
fraud during the pandemic.
Hilary Veale
Weymouth, Dorset
• Dr David Mathieson (Letters,
3 February) got off lightly on the
duty that he paid for his books
post-Brexit. My son sent me a
painting for Christmas, marked
as a gift. I had to pay £65.12 before
Parcelforce would deliver it.
Philomena O’Hare
Farsley, West Yorkshire
Section:GDN 1J PaGe:10 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone:
10
Lata Mangeshkar
One of India’s greatest
playback singers who had
a four-octave vocal range
and was adored by millions
L
ata Mangeshkar,
“the nightingale of
Bollywood”, who
has died aged 92
after contracting
Covid-19, was a
much-loved Indian
national and
international figure, whose songs
provided the backdrop to the lives
of millions for seven decades.
Music sung by her was heard
constantly across India, in shops,
restaurants, taxis or on the radio,
and she became known as “Didi”,
or sister, because so many people
identified with her often emotional
songs. And yet she was best known
as a playback singer, a vocalist
who does not appear onscreen but
provides the soundtrack for films in
which actors lip sync to her singing.
Her output was extraordinary –
she is estimated to have recorded
25,000 songs, which appeared
• The Guardian Tuesday 8 February 2022
Obituaries
in more than 1,000 Hindi films,
and she also sang in more than 20
different Indian languages. With an
impressive vocal range, covering
four octaves, she became massively
popular with film directors for her
ability to understand the context in
which her songs would be used.
Mangeshkar did not just sing, but
made sure that her performance
matched the storyline and the
character, saying that she always
read the lyrics and listened to the
tune before agreeing to sing.
She first came to fame in India
with the song Aayega Aanewala
(meaning “the one who is destined
to come will definitely come”),
which she recorded in 1949. A
charming and dramatic song, which
featured in the film Mahal that year,
it was the start of a remarkable
career in which she interpreted
work by all the major Indian film
composers. For more than three
Sent at 7/2/2022 18:01
decades she recorded hundreds
of songs by the composing duo of
Laxmikant-Pyarelal (Laxmikant
Shantaram Kudalkar and Pyarelal
Ramprasad Sharma), including
such hits as Sheesha Ho Ya Dil Ho
(from the film Aasha, in 1980).
She also worked with SD Burman,
and later with his celebrated son
the composer RD Burman (who
would go on to marry her sister
Asha), recording RD Burman songs
including Bahon Mein Chale Aao
(from the film Anamica, 1973).
Later she collaborated with the
most internationally celebrated
Bollywood composer, AR Rahman,
and sang several of his best known
Mangeshkar’s songs including Jiya Jale (from
output was the 1998 romantic thriller Dil Se)
extraordinary. and Luka Chuppi (from the 2006
Known as ‘the film Rang De Basanti), which she
nightingale of recorded when she was in her mid-
Bollywood’ she 70s. Rahman remembered how
is estimated to carefully she would rehearse: “She
have recorded would sit with her assistant, and
25,000 songs would start singing very slowly,
PRODIP GUHA/GETTY with every lyric clear.” She was,
he said, “part of a soul, part of a
consciousness of India”.
If she had any competition as
India’s finest playback singer, it
was from her younger sister Asha
Bhosle. After all, it was Asha who
had Cornershop’s 1997 hit Brimful of
Asha written about her, and who had
recorded the most number of songs
(according to The Guinness Book
of World Records Lata was ahead
in 1974 but Asha overtook her), and
it was Asha who recorded with the
experimental Kronos Quartet. Lata
insisted there was no sibling rivalry,
cYanmaGentaYellowbla
saying: “We’re very close, we never
competed with each other.”
Mangeshkar was born in Indore,
in what is now Madhya Pradesh
state, the oldest child of Shevanti
(later renamed Shuddhamati) and
Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar,
a musician and teacher who ran
a touring theatre company. Lata
never went to school, as she quit
on the first day when the teacher
refused to allow her to bring her
then 10-month-old sister Asha
into the classroom.
Much of her childhood was spent
singing alongside her father at
concerts. He died in 1942, when she
was 13, and she then had to support
her mother and four siblings.
A close family friend, Vinayak
Damodar Karnataki, offered
her work with his film company
Navyug Chitrapat, acting in minor
roles. When the company moved to
Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1945, she
and her family moved with them.
She said she disliked acting
“because I was very small and
hated putting on makeup and
having to laugh and cry in front
of the cameras”. But she loved
playback singing, and was given her
first break with a song in the film
Majboor (1948). Then came the film
Mahal, which included her hit song,
and she rapidly became known as
India’s Playback Queen.
Though most celebrated for her
film work, she also gave concerts.
In 1963, shortly after the Sino-
Indian war, she sang the patriotic
Hindi song Aye Mere Watan Ke
Logon (“Oh people of my country”)
Away from to an audience including Jawaharlal
music, her
passions
Nehru, the prime minister, who is
said to have been moved to tears.
In 1974 she performed many of
included
fast cars
her Bollywood hits at the Royal
Albert Hall in London, backed by
musicians including SD Burman,
and cricket;
she would
and was hailed as the first Indian
artist to have performed there.
Away from music, her passions
insist on
taking time
off to watch
included fast cars and cricket – she
would insist on taking time off to
watch matches. The former Indian
captain Virat Kohli was among those
matches who paid tribute to her, as did Imran
Khan, another leading cricketer and
now Pakistan’s prime minister. He
wrote that “the subcontinent has
lost one of the truly great voices the
world has known” – a reminder that
she had a vast following beyond
India’s borders.
Mangeshkar may have recorded
thousands of emotional love songs,
but she never married. Asked about
her private life by the Hindustan
Times, she said, “there are some
things only for the heart to know.
Let’s keep it that way.” In 2001 she
received India’s highest honour for
civilians, the Bharat Ratna.
She is survived by her younger
siblings Meena, Asha, Usha and
Hridaynath, all of whom are singers
or composers.
Robin Denselow
Lata Mangeshkar, singer, born
29 September 1929; died 6 February
2022
 Section:GDN 1J PaGe:11 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 18:03 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

Tuesday 8 February 2022 The Guardian •

 obituaries@theguardian.com
 @guardianobits 11

into a vibrant open-plan workshop
Nicholas Thirkell in Victoria, central London.
Macmillan continued to rely on
his group for jackets. “We were
Designer admired for his lucky to have this assured income,
and it gave us the freedom to be
adventurous,” Thirkell wrote in a
Birthdays and Stephen Glover (whose book
Mohammad
Paper Dreams documented the
frenzied launch and Thirkell’s
role in it), he ditched the blocky
Azharuddin,
cricketer and
politician,
masthead of the mockup that he
had been given. Instead, he chose a
neoclassical flag based on Bodoni,

innovative book covers special issue of Illustrators magazine

marking the 10th anniversary of the
group, which renamed itself NTA
59; Malorie
Blackman,
author and
with chiselled inlines giving it both
elegance and heft – a feel echoed
by his introduction of Oxford rules

and his work on the Studios after Thirkell left. “We

could afford to turn down boring
work and take creative risks.”
former children’s (thick and thin) to the column
laureate, 60;
Prof Andrew
framing. Bucking the purists, he
mixed different typefaces for the

Independent newspaper These risks included memorable

partnerships with Radio Times,
Tommy Roberts’s pop art emporium
Brewerton,
poet and writer,
64; Prof Dame
page layout: Century for its novelty
and warmth in the headlines, and
Times for its clarity in the columns.

F
rom the time he
joined Macmillan
Publishers as art
director in 1966,
Nicholas Thirkell,
who has died
aged 79, did much
to overhaul the
conventions of book design. He did
this by using hardcover jackets to
raise “questions that can only be
answered by reading the books”,
as the Guardian put it in 1970.
The observation was prompted
by a Design Council exhibition
of book covers by Thirkell and his
competitor at Heinemann, and
future business partner, Mike
Dempsey, displaying “a richness
and variety in hardback covers
that puts posters to shame”.
Thirkell’s jacket for The Smaller
Sky (1967) was a facsimile of a
railway ticket, front-and-back,
which hurled readers into the
brain of John Wain’s protagonist,
a suburban clerk who takes up
residence in Paddington Station. For
a 1969 biography of the first world
war naval commander Lord Jellicoe,
Thirkell blocked five bands of gold
foil on dark blue. A loop in the top
stripe instantly called to mind the
admiral’s signature coat sleeve.
Though he was a thinker more
than a draughtsman, Thirkell
possessed an uncanny eye for
illustration. In the course of
overseeing the production of
hundreds of covers, he scouted
illustrators who were conversant
in the possibilities of colour offset
printing and eager to make a splash
against traditional photographic
Thirkell in 1969.
Below, the front
page of the first
issue of the
Independent
newspaper,
1986, and Flora
Thompson’s
The Illustrated
Lark Rise to
Candleford, 1983
ED BUZIAK/ALAMY
and typographic jackets. This
primed him, in 1970, to assemble
for his own firm, Nicholas Thirkell
Associates, a quartet of young
illustrators, all but one fresh from
university, that would dominate
British graphics for the next decade.
They were the machine-precise
George Hardie; Malcolm Harrison,
a typographer who excelled in
caricature; a surrealist, Bush
Hollyhead, working in graphic
puzzles and puns; and Bob Lawrie,
an Australian expat who married
comics to the visual world of
Wassily Kandinsky.
Plying a combination of pop
art, abstraction and formal design
elements, they brought gallery-
level rigour to a commercial
industry. And they were versatile
– equally suited to Penguin
paperbacks and glossy monthlies
as to counterculture rags and the
LP sleeves at Hipgnosis Studio, the
photographic firm that challenged
listeners to interpret rock music
visually. Throughout the 1970s,
graphics for Led Zeppelin, Pink
Floyd, Paul McCartney and Kevin
Ayers were produced by the four
illustrators Thirkell had dropped
Mr Freedom, and men’s magazines
such as Club International, where,
in that heyday of illustration,
art directors had the budgets to
distinguish editorial content with
cutting-edge graphics.
Thirkell’s departure came in
1973, after he had grown restless
in what had become a managerial
role. For 15 months he travelled
round India with Priya Kuriako,
a colleague from Macmillan. On
their return to Britain in 1975
they married and he worked as
art director at WH Allen. In 1979
he went independent again, this
time setting up Nicholas Thirkell
& Partners. There he employed
a broad array of artists from the
burgeoning illustration scene he
had helped set in motion. One
project was Penguin’s Lives &
Letters, a paperback series with
evocative period covers.
Throughout the 80s, Thirkell’s
thought-driven book design, in
which content and packaging
worked mutually, earned him
awards from and jury placements
at industry competitions such
as Design & Art Direction and
European Illustration.
For the bestselling The Illustrated
Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora
Thompson’s trilogy of Victorian
Oxfordshire published in a luxury
edition in 1983 by Century, four
decades after its original publication,
Thirkell was invited to go for
broke. He did the boards in English
polka-dot kerchief, without spine
text. A researcher tracked down
period photographs, ephemera and
flowers to be pressed in the style
of a herbarium and photographed
in-line with the text. All of this lent
Thompson’s pages the feel of an
anonymous country scrapbook
rather than a carefully wrought
hybrid of memoir and fiction.
In 1986, with Dempsey and
fellow designer Ken Carroll, he
formed Carroll Dempsey & Thirkell
(CDT). Specialising in corporate
identity, they designed for Royal
Mail, Our Price, the Barbican and
WH Smith. Thirkell’s first job at
CDT was looking at the layout for
the launch of the Independent
newspaper. The editors wanted
the impression of longevity and
newness at once, what they called
“classic with a twist” – clear,
authoritative and conservative.
Crushed between a deadline
and a harried team of editors
including Andreas Whittam Smith
Averil Cameron, After refinement from the
historian, 82; paper’s design editors and
Luke Coppen, picture editor Michael Crozier,
former editor, the Thirkell’s basic design formed
Catholic Herald, the paper’s first graphic identity
46; Rachel Cusk, and became a case study in
novelist, 55; John successful news layout. His eagle
Grisham, writer, logo, once in-house designers
67; Bethany had brought its wings from a
Hamilton, surfer, roosting position to flight, stayed
32; Lucy Heller, with the paper throughout major
chief executive, redesigns and the cessation
Ark, 63; Wera of its print edition in 2016. In
Hobhouse, Lib 1990, he returned to design the
Dem MP, 62; Independent on Sunday. “One of
Lady (Elspeth) the greatest attributes of a good
Howe of Idlicote, designer,” Thirkell wrote after the
former chair, Independent proved a success, “is
Broadcasting an understanding of how people
Standards think and how they respond to
Commission, 90; images portrayed by type.”
Ralf Little, actor, This sensitivity to viewer
42; Sharman response was a signature of his
Macdonald, career. His talent lay in arranging
screenwriter existing visual realities – and
and novelist, 71; the artists around him – without
Tony Minson, appearing to make a mark himself.
professor of “Nick would sit at his desk,
virology, 78; creating tiny sketches with
Sarah Montague, equally tiny written instructions,”
broadcaster, recalled Dempsey. “He would
56; Nick Nolte, wander down the studio in his
actor, 81; Richard favourite Savile Row suit, which
Sharp, chairman used to belong to his father, lean
of the BBC, 66; over one of his assistants and have
Dame Victoria a quiet chat; he would then return
Sharp, president to his desk, roll up a cigarette and
of the Queen’s go outside for a smoke.”
bench division, Born in Epping, Essex, Nicholas
66; Mary was the son of Barbara (nee Baker),
Steenburgen, who before her marriage was a
actor, 69; John dancer, and John Thirkell, an
Williams, advertising copywriter. Nicholas
composer and left Forest school, Walthamstow, in
conductor, 90; 1960 after his A-levels. Rather than
Trinny Woodall, receiving formal design training,
broadcaster, 58. he took a trainee position at Service
Advertising, London, and an
advertising course at the College for
the Distributive Trades (1961-62).
In an initial spell of three years
with Macmillan he worked as
a copywriter and subdesigner.
Before returning to the firm as art
director he worked at the Planning
Unit design studio (1965-66).
From then until his retirement
in the late 1990s he remained a
leading light in the field.
Priya survives him, along with
their daughters, Nisha and Maya.
Walker Mimms
Nicholas John Vyse Thirkell,
graphic designer and art director,
born 7 June 1942; died 9 November
2021

.
Section:GDN 1J PaGe:12 Edition Date:220208 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/2/2022 17:24 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

• The Guardian Tuesday 8 February 2022

12 Puzzles

Yesterday’s Killer sudoku Codeword

solutions
Easy Each letter of the alphabet makes at least one appearance in the grid,
and is represented by the same number wherever it appears. The letters
Killer sudoku The normal rules of decoded should help you to identify other letters and words in the grid.
Easy sudoku apply: fill each
row, column and 3x3
box with all the numbers
from 1 to 9. In addition,
the digits in each inner
shape (marked by dots)
must add up to the
number in the top corner
of that box. No digit can
be repeated within an
inner shape.

Medium

Medium

Codeword

Cryptic crossword Guardian cryptic crossword No 28,675 set by Nutmeg

Solution No. 28,674
O S N C M C W C
S T EVEDORE LORC A 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Across Down
L X W N R O A V 8 Plumed hat not quite right in 1 Typically stand in line with key
OU T DO MA C E DON I A (4)
E R A H G 8 9 formal dance (8)
CATA L AN ANGE LU S 9 Risk husband blocking free 2,11,14,15 Adventure story’s
O E N I E I entertainment (6) thematic end televised out of
ME C C A BOT NAR K S
I H N U G A 10 Left-wing dictator and dictator’s sequence (4,3,3,10)
CLAS S I C UTENS I L 10 11 12 bird tailed (6) 3 Outburst from Cook tackling
R K N R P
HEADSTART SCRU B 12 Birds and fish-eating mammals England opener down under (6)
A D H R I N A A 13 devouring rejected haul (8) 4 Stuffiest bar on street (7)
C R E DO O L DMA S T E R
K S T O Y P S B 13 Last letter from America? (3) 5,25,30 Hard up but bound to get
14 15 16 14 Very little Brahms and Liszt? (6) paid? (8,3,4)
16 Stone Age pottery, possibly first 6 Accomplished Republican bribed
pieces found in county (8) guards (7,3)
17 One impressed by potential 7 Pot roughly round, roughly litre
17 18 19 20 21 titles? (7) content (8)
20 A presenter at home cutting 11 See 2
22 unusually large borders (7) 14 See 2
23 Express difficulty finding 15 See 2
23 24 25 temporary solution (5,3) 18 Award winner from bureau
24 Puzzle from mischievous child limited charges recently (8)
26
given tremendous backing (6) 19 Oddly, stuff merges fast in floods
26 Letter from internet company (8)
27 28 29 30
returned (3) 21 Female stars do it, dropping in (3)
27 Extra note is switched for two (8) 22 Tramp pursuing former wife
28 Unoccupied cottage on cliff in finally set off (7)
demand (6) 24 Spicy starter replaced by second-
31 32
31 Only female parts concerned rate soup (6)
patroness of the arts (6) 25 See 5
32 US chemist rotated screen, 29 Ship in the past taking king
Stuck? For help call 0906 200 83 83.
Calls cost £1.10 per minute, plus your extracting middle substance (8) aboard (4)
phone company’s access charge. 30 See 5
Service supplied by ATS.
Call 0330 333 6946 for customer
service (charged at standard rate).
Want more? Get access to more than
4,000 puzzles at theguardian.com/
crossword. To buy puzzle books, visit
guardianbookshop.com or call
0330 333 6846.