On Wednesday of the week before last I filed one of my supposedly funny “columns” for last Sunday’s Observer. I wanted to write a personal pastiche of feel-good op-eds about England’s near victory in the Euros and reference how Boris Johnson government’s calculated culture war tried to draw the squad into its sights, as surely…
A mural of Jadon Sancho’s fellow footballer Marcus Rashford was graffitied after Sunday night’s final. Four semen streaks spurted simultaneously from a tumorous cartoon penis towards Rashford’s face, suggesting a ruined urethra with multiple lesions. Perhaps this satirical penis had been snagged in a waste disposal, caught in a cruel penis trap, or nibbled by…
Last week, the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, opportunistically pretended to have bailed out a picturesque Cornish theatre that had, like most arts practitioners, received nothing from him. Also last week, Dowden was outlining his plans for privatising Channel 4 in a piece penned for the Times, hidden behind the paywall. Dowden’s favourite kind of policy…
Last week, as a disciple of the religion of wokeness, I was busy boycotting products advertised on Andrew Sphagnum Moss Neil’s new anti-woke GB News channel, which has been difficult as many of them are goods and services I don’t use. Consequently, I spent Monday in the park under a willow tree trying determinedly to…
I am a pan-disciplinary recipient of the country’s two highest cultural accolades, the Bafta for film and television and the Olivier for theatre; I have been described by the Times as the “world’s greatest living standup comedian”; I have rapped in 10th-century Old English on a No 1 single; I won Celebrity Mastermind answering questions…