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Klaus Nomi: The ‘singing alien’ loved by David Bowie, Lady Gaga and many more

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Nomi has also influenced fashion – Marc Jacobs, Jean Paul Gaultier and Bruno Pieters have all paid homage to his signature style – and inspired writing. In her acclaimed 2016 book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, British author Olivia Laing explores the way in which Nomi and several other artists including Andy Warhol convey an ineffable sense of loneliness in their work.

“I really think he’s out there on his own,” Laing tells BBC Culture. She describes Nomi as “an alien keening for his home planet” because of his unique look and vocal style. “That’s the magic of Nomi for me: there isn’t anything like him, before or since,” Laing adds.

An elusive genius

A certain otherworldly quality is Nomi’s hallmark, arguably heightened by his untimely passing, which only makes him seem more elusive as time goes on. However, Nomi’s alien-like persona also defined him when he was alive, and definitely enraptured David Bowie, who recruited Nomi and best friend and fellow performance artist Joey Arias to appear as uncommonly avant-garde backing singers for a famous 1979 appearance on Saturday Night Live.

During his performance of The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie wears a plastic tuxedo suit so unwieldy that Nomi and Arias literally have to carry him to and from the microphone stand. And during a medley of Bowie’s hits TVC15 and Boys Keep Swinging, Nomi delivers robotic dance moves alongside an inanimate pink poodle with a tiny TV screen in its mouth. The overall impression is deeply surreal, even today.

At the start of an 1982 interview on Belgian TV, a reporter asks Nomi, who is wearing an oversized trench coat and a bowler hat as along with his usual heavy makeup: “Who are you? Are you a mutant or a CIA agent?” Nomi’s reply is modest and ambiguous. “I’m just a regular person, I suppose, and I’m an artist,” he says.

Arias, who has served as the executor of Nomi’s estate since his friend’s death in 1983, says Nomi’s space-age style developed gradually and organically. When they first met in New York City in 1976, Nomi was working as a pastry chef, and still using his birth name, Klaus Sperber. “He was wearing a fedora, aviator glasses, a pinstripe shirt, beige Brooks Brothers chinos and a pair of penny loafers,” Arias recalls.

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August 14, 2023
The Day the Earth Caught Fire: The 1961 film that predicted a ‘boiling planet’

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One of the smartest creative decisions that Guest and Mankowitz made while writing The Day the Earth Caught Fire was to show the film entirely from the perspective of journalists, rather than the politicians that are trying to solve the problem. The result is that Peter, Bill, and Jeannie are all completely powerless as the end of the world looms larger and larger.

“I think the best novels out there on climate change show how people are affected in small communities,” says McGuire, who has written several books and short stories on the subject. “Small personal stories are the best way of getting across to people how bad things are going to be in the future.”

By not even naming the British prime minister, president of the United States, or UN general secretary, the film highlights how powerless they are in a battle against nature.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire also shows governments trying to play down and hide the seriousness of what’s happening. During a radio address to the nation, the prime minister suggests that the only impact the displacement of the Earth will have is that “some of the seasons may be disturbed and changed in their intensity”, before making a joke about the British weather. Within weeks, water is being rationed and the Thames has completely evaporated.

But it’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire’s ending that really enhances the power of its message and story (warning: spoiler). The world’s governments decide that, in order to try and return the planet back to a safe orbit, they will explode numerous nuclear bombs in western Siberia. However, even the prime minister admits that he doesn’t know if they’ll succeed.

Rather than revealing if the Earth is saved or doomed, The Day the Earth Caught Fire just shows that two versions of the next day’s newspaper have been prepared. One that celebrates with the headline “World Saved”, while the other laments “World Doomed”. By ending in this way, the film highlights the problems with passivity in the face of crisis. As Stenning asks, after the prime minister finally reveals that the planet and everyone on it could soon die, “I suppose they’ll do something? They’ve got to do something!”

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August 13, 2023
Taylor Swift’s 1989: The return of a pop music masterpiece

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But it wasn’t until her next album that Swift found the full expression of her new pop direction. 1989 was met with enthusiastic reviews the first time around in 2014: Billboard called it “a sophisticated tour-de-force”, while Rolling Stone said “it sounds like nothing she’s ever tried before”. And it’s fitting that Swift’s retrofuturist masterpiece should be returning to the mainstream nearly a decade after its first release. It is an album out of time, shuffling its influences and eras both musically and lyrically, through proleptic narratives of memory and loss, looking simultaneously backwards and forwards.

A message of hope

Created alongside friend, collaborator and Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff, at the beginning of his own super-producer ascendency, 1989 is a pitch-perfect exercise in musicianship and album structure, with diaristic lyrics accompanied by lush synths and vocal percussion. From the liberal sprinkling of glossy ’80s synths throughout, to the washed-out Polaroid cover, the album is nostalgic, while brimful of anticipation about the future.

Opener Welcome To New York is on the surface about arriving in an overwhelming city with “a kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats”, but underneath is about starting again, perhaps after a failed relationship, dreaming of a new beginning. Album highlight Out of the Woods features a woman in the present remembering a relationship in the past, and looking forward to the future. “I remember thinking – are we out of the woods yet? Are we out of the woods? Are we out of the woods, yet? Are we out of the woods?”

The album’s message is one of hope, of making something beautiful out of something difficult. In her 1995 book, She Bop: the definitive history of women in popular music, Dr Lucy O’Brien writes that in pop: “there is the impression of both embattled strength and fragility. It is in Dusty Springfield’s taut notes, Chrissie Hynde’s jangling rock guitar, Amy Winehouse’s bluesy contralto.” And it is in Taylor Swift’s 1989.

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August 11, 2023
Why William Friedkin’s undersung masterpiece Sorcerer represents everything Hollywood has lost

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An ambitious, budget-busting adventure-thriller set in a South American oil refinery town and its surrounding mountainous jungle, Sorcerer was intended as a loose remake of Henri-Georges Cluozot’s undisputed 1951 classic Wages of Fear. It was also well-poised to be a gargantuan flop when it was released the same summer weekend as George Lucas’ much more straightforward blockbuster Star Wars.

But that box office battle belied the spellbinding, strange, existential thriller itself: it was a terse, brilliantly hewn film, made with hard graft and featuring real rainforest exploits, soaked in endless tropical rain and humid sweat. It also had a fatalistic spirit that made it the most seventies of 70s movies (ie there were no requisite narrative resolutions, never mind happy ones.)

A masterclass in tension

The tense story – as with Wages of Fear – is of criminals on the lam who go on what may well be a suicide mission to transport a truck full of highly explosive nitroglycerine down a treacherous road.

The opening prologues of the film take us to New Jersey, where Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider, Jaws star and the closest to a big Hollywood name the film had) is involved in the heist of a local church; Paris, where Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer) is a banker involved in business fraud and on the verge of being ruined; Mexico, where Nilo (Francisco Rabal) is a mysterious hitman, and Jerusalem, where Kassem (Amidou), a terrorist, has blown up a bank. As a result of their misdeeds, all four have ended up in the remote Colombian village of Porvenir, and when there is an explosion at the local oil refinery and dynamite is needed to quell the continuous fire, the adventure of the story begins.

With combined funds from both Paramount and Universal Studios, Friedkin – who was essentially given carte blanche after the astronomical box office success of The Exorcist – marched into the jungles of the Dominican Republic, sometimes halting production to literally build roads through the wilderness. Various crew members were bed-ridden with malaria and other tropical maladies, and the unpredictable weather led to costly delays.

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August 11, 2023
Hip-hop 50: The party that started hip-hop

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

It is 50 years since DJ Kool Herc’s ‘back to school jam’ in New York’s West Bronx kick-started a movement and birthed a whole culture, writes Rebecca Laurence.

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On a hot August night in 1973, Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, and his sister Cindy put on a “back-to-school jam” in the recreation room of their apartment block at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in New York City’s West Bronx. Entrance cost 25c for “ladies” and 50c for “fellas”.

The party wasn’t special for its size – the rec room could only hold a few hundred people. Its venue and location weren’t particularly auspicious. Yet it marked a turning point, a spark that would ignite an international movement that is still here today.

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The legend is a simple one – but the factors leading to the creation of a hip-hop culture were a fusion of social, musical and political influences as diverse and complex as the sound itself.

The original invitation for Cindy Campbell and DJ Kool Herc’s ‘back to school jam on 11 August, 1973 (Credit: Getty Images)

In his award-winning 2005 book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, the journalist and academic Jeff Chang locates the foundations of hip-hop in the social policies of “urban renewal” pioneered by the city planner Robert Moses and the “benign neglect” of US President Nixon’s administration. The Moses-conceived building of New York’s Cross Bronx Expressway razed through many of the city’s ethnic neighbourhoods, destroying homes and jobs and displacing poor black and Hispanic communities in veritable wastelands like East Brooklyn and the South Bronx, while the government turned a blind eye to those affected.

Completed in 1972, Robert Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway tore through the South Bronx, destroying homes and shops, and contributing to the area’s decay (Credit: Getty Images)

“Hip-hop did not start as a political movement,” Chang tells BBC Culture. “There was no manifesto. The kids who started it were simply trying to find ways to pass the time, they were trying to have fun. But they grew up under the politics of abandonment and because of this, their pastimes contained the seeds for a kind of mass cultural renewal.”

Break with the past

Following the waning of gang wars and the FBI’s suppression of radical black groups in the late 1960s, the emergence of hip-hop in the early ’70s represented a profound shift. Rather than taking direct political action, a new generation was expressing itself through DJing, MCing, b-boying/b-girling (breakdancing), and graffiti, the “four elements” of hip-hop. Brooklyn-born artist Fab 5 Freddy, who is credited with bridging the gap between New York City’s music and visual art worlds, argued that the looping interactivity of the four elements proved hip-hop went beyond a purely musical or artistic movement – it was an entire culture.

Marcyliena Morgan, Ernest E Monrad professor of the Social Sciences and founding director of the Hip-Hop Archive at Harvard University, asserts the importance of celebrating the positive narratives generated by the hip-hop generation. “Hip-hoppers literally mapped onto the consciousness of the world a place and an identity for themselves as the originators of an exciting new art form,” she tells BBC Culture. “They created value out of races and places that had seemed to offer only devastation.”

Finding the breaks

Kool Herc, along with Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, is known as one of the “three kings”, the “holy trinity” of the early days of hip-hop. But Herc’s story, insists Chang, is where it all started: “Without DJ Kool Herc, we wouldn’t be talking about [hip-hop] now… all around the world,” he says.

In the early 1970s, the b-boys and b-girls developed dance moves built around the music’s breakbeats. (Credit: Getty Images)

Clive Campbell was born in Jamaica in 1955, moved to New York in 1967, and picked up the nickname “Hercules”, (shortened to “Herc”) for his impressive stature. His father Keith had a diverse record collection, and as the technician for a local band – and importantly for Herc’s burgeoning DJ career – access to sound equipment. Herc began DJing at house parties, where he made some important technical innovations. He found a way to make his set-up the loudest around, using two turntables and a mixer to switch between records. Inspired by a youth spent watching rival sound systems in Kingston, Herc brought Jamaican culture with him to the Bronx – the booming bass and dub sound, and the custom of “toasting” or talking over records, which his friend Coke La Rock used to powerful effect at the Sedgwick Avenue party.

Even more importantly, Herc observed that the b-boys and b-girls were going wild for the instrumental breaks in the records, and he began searching for the tracks – and the breaks – to please the dancers. His most famous musical discoveries, Bongo Rock and Apache by The Incredible Bongo Band, were purely instrumental: the bongo and conga beats kept the crowd dancing for longer. It was a simple observation, but the creation of the “breakbeat” was one of the key innovations in contemporary dance music.

Such was the popularity of his block parties that by the end of 1973, Herc could no longer DJ in spaces as small as the Sedgwick Avenue rec room. He moved into bigger clubs and the Bronx’s Cedar Park, and for a few years – with his crew the Herculoids – was the main draw in the area’s music scene. But by 1977, his star had waned and other rival New York DJs, notably the South Bronx’s Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, were waiting in the wings.

In 2023, DJ Kool Herc (pictured in 2008) was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (Credit: Getty Images)

Remembering and preserving the legacy of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, DJ Kool Herc and the night of 11 August 1973 are ways to keep these positive values alive. “The Bronx won the rights to DJ history through constant repetition of the first time DJ Kool Herc connected his sound system and mixed records,” says Morgan, arguing that hip-hop’s pioneers transformed “the land of the ghetto into the land of myth and the future.”

Jeff Chang agrees. For him, looking back to hip-hop’s early days is also a way of looking forward.

“I’m not a purist or a nostalgist,” he says. “But I believe in the values that have sustained hip-hop from the beginning: inclusion, recognition, creativity, and transformation. In the end, hip-hop is about teenagers, it’s about youth. And as long as they are taking those values forward, hip-hop won’t die.”

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August 10, 2023
Red, White & Royal Blue is ‘a royal disappointment’

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(Image credit: Amazon Prime Video)

Amazon Prime video’s adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s hit 2019 LGBTQ+ romance novel is disappointingly predictable and clichéd, writes Louis Staples.

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The best romantic comedies have a specific skill: they can make us surrender our most basic ideas about what we consider to be realistic or plausible, even if they are grounded in a world we mostly recognise. That’s exactly what we’re asked to do in the opening minutes of Red, White & Royal Blue. The film – an adaptation of the 2019 romance novel by Casey McQuiston – stars a fictional British royal family. The US has its first female president, Ellen Claremont (Uma Thurman), whose son Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez) is a handsome, energetic trouble-maker searching for his purpose in life.

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On a diplomatic trip to the UK for a royal wedding, America’s “first son” Alex reignites his long-time rivalry with prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), brother of the heir to the British throne. After causing a scene during the wedding, the duelling pair are forced to embark on some PR damage control to soothe transatlantic relations. Soon, they end up seeing a different side to each other. One thing leads to another and, well, you can probably imagine what happens next.

From the start, the film’s aesthetic and tone feel akin to a big-budget Hallmark movie. It has all the predictable stereotypes: British people are uptight. And Americans? They’re loud and obnoxious! Groundbreaking. It also features all of the genre’s staple montages: the “getting to know each other” montage, the sex montage and, of course, the “it’s all fallen apart” montage just before the end. Even for a romcom – a genre that is often pretty up-front about being formulaic – there is very little that feels unexpected.

The romcom genre’s recent embrace of LGBTQ+ relationships has prompted debate about the type of representation queer audiences want, versus the stories that are getting made into films. There is a lingering scepticism that mainstream films featuring LGBTQ+ people are primarily made for straight audiences, while some queer romcoms, like Billy Eichner’s 2022 film Bros, have been seen as a missed opportunity to be more inventive with the genre’s tropes. From the outset, it’s certainly clear that Red, White & Royal Blue is not trying to revolutionise queer storytelling. And although both characters deal with the shared experience of coming out, they are navigating such specific and privileged circumstances that it would seem ridiculous to expect them to be representative of the wider queer community.

The film loses its sense of fun when it veers away from being a relatively silly love story and gets too detailed about the fictionalised specifics of Anglo-American relations. Even prestige TV shows like Succession and House of Cards have struggled to make audiences fully buy into a political landscape without big real-life players, like Donald Trump. Things get even worse when the film attempts to portray fictional royalty. Although McQuiston’s novel was written before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped down as working royals in 2020, the script leans heavily into the story of the real-life “spare” and his American wife. It’s unfortunate that there is a noticeable dip in the quality of dialogue between the film’s British characters, who are largely reduced to wooden and humourless caricatures. Not even Stephen Fry, the UK’s fictional king, could make the creaky script sing.

Despite being at least 30 minutes too long, with a script that often sounds like it was written by ChatGPT, there are moments where Red, White & Royal Blue is strangely entertaining. The film is at its best when it stops being so earnest and leans into the more eccentric moments that probably would arise in such unusual circumstances. There are small exchanges that take you by surprise, like when Alex comes out to his mother – in the Oval Office, of course – and she launches into an unexpectedly educated and supportive monologue about anal sex and the various sexual health precautions Alex should consider. “You’re ridiculous!”, he responds. “I can’t believe they gave you the nuclear codes!”.

There are also subplots that should have been explored more, like that focusing on a jealous gay journalist who outs the couple in the media. The opening scenes – where the prince and first son loathe each other – are the most fun, but their rivalry ends too soon. Perhaps there might have been interesting (and even humorous) ways to further explore the differences between Alex defining as bisexual and Henry as gay, and how that manifested in their relationship.

There are distinct tiers of romcom, and on paper, Red, White & Royal Blue sounded like it might be akin to 2001’s The Princess Diaries, except with more sex scenes and jokes about Lana Del Rey and Lady Gaga. But while the pop-culture references and intimacy are there – no one could argue that the film is de-sexualised or sanitised – it’s doubtful that it will have anywhere near the cultural impact of Anne Hathaway’s film debut. Red, White & Royal Blue sits in an awkward space: it isn’t quite “so bad it’s good” enough to fully feel like a Hallmark movie, or Netflix’s cheap and cheerful festive films like Single All the Way (2021) and The Knight Before Christmas (2019). But it’s also not good enough to be remembered as a classic romcom, or to become the subject of cultural conversation, like Andrew Ahn’s Fire Island or Eichner’s intensely discoursed Bros (both 2022).

Aside from the vaguest progressive platitudes, Red, White & Royal Blue doesn’t make any astute observations about romance, privilege or being LGBTQ+. Whether or not you’ll enjoy it probably depends on your expectations. If you’re looking for a film about beautiful men with perfect hair and sculpted abs, which doesn’t demand too much from you, then it might be for you. But if you’re expecting it to be in the grade of romcoms that are laugh-out-loud hilarious and actually say something interesting about relationships – or anything beyond lazy clichés – then you’ll be royally disappointed.

★★☆☆☆

Red, White & Royal Blue is released on Amazon Prime Video on 11 August

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August 10, 2023
Planet of the Bass: How a ridiculous Eurodance parody song became the most addictive song of the summer

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Planet of the Bass is the brainchild of Kyle Gordon, a New York-based comedian who has been portraying DJ Crazy Times since his university days. Discussing the character’s backstory with GQ, Gordon said: “I would say he’s of ambiguous Eastern European origin, and I would say he’s a very hyper-sexualised, late-’90s Eurodance DJ and rapper.” Ms Biljana Electronica is also a fictional figure. She is voiced by singer Chrissi Poland, but played in the original TikTok video by actress and influencer Audrey Trullinger. This is a witty flourish, Gotto notes, because it “harks back to Eurodance groups like Black Box and Corona who often relied on models [who didn’t sing on the tracks] for their visuals and promo performances”. Gordon has since doubled down on this dissonance by posting a second Planet of the Bass video in which Mara Olney lip-syncs to Poland’s vocals. In fact, there is now even a third video featuring another lip-syncing star, influencer Sabrina Brier, though this one perhaps runs the risk of overworking the joke. “The OG Biljana Electronica simply set the bar too high,” one fan commented on TikTok.

This possible misstep aside, Gordon’s parody is also pitch-perfect because it is palpably affectionate. When Danish Eurodance act Aqua commented on his TikTok video, “Wait, is this play about us???” – a reference to the much-memed line from HBO teen drama Euphoria – Gordon replied with high praise, calling their 1997 debut Aquarium “one of the greatest dance albums of all time”. Gordon definitely owes the Danish band a debt: the way Ms Biljana Electronica’s melodious vocals dovetail with DJ Crazy Times’ macho raps echo the dynamics of Aqua members Lene Nystrøm and René Dif. Indeed, Gordon also told GQ he had a “hunch” that Aqua’s signature hit Barbie Girl would enjoy a revival this summer because of Greta Gerwig’s super-hyped Barbie movie, thereby paving the way for his own Eurodance riff. His instincts were spot on: rappers Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj used Barbie Girl as the basis for Barbie World, a hit single from the film’s soundtrack.

The Eurodance revival boom

However, Planet of the Bass is also benefiting from a broader renewed appreciation for Eurodance, which has been spearheaded by contemporary pop and dance artists. Earlier this summer, Minaj and singer Kim Petras cracked the Billboard Hot 100 and UK Top 40 with Alone, a pop-rap track that cleverly interpolates Alice Deejay’s Eurodance anthem Better Off Alone. Last autumn, DJ-producer David Guetta and singer Bebe Rexha topped the UK singles chart and climbed to number four in the US with I’m Good (Blue), which samples and interpolates Eiffel 65’s Eurodance classic Blue (Da Ba Dee). These new hits have proved the enduring popularity of a genre that was once dismissed as shallow and disposable. “In the 1990s, Eurodance existed in the shadow of grunge and then Britpop, which were seen by many as ‘proper music’,” notes Gotto. “There has always been snobbery around it.”

I’m Good (Blue) became a bona fide chart hit after going viral on TikTok – the same trajectory Gordon will be hoping Planet of the Bass achieves when it is released as a single on 15th August. It is surely no accident that Eurodance is finding a home on TikTok. The video-sharing app is particularly popular with Gen Z, an age group that has grown up with multi-genre streaming playlists and less entrenched ideas about what constitutes musical credibility. Whereas Eurodance was generally viewed as inferior to guitar-based rock music in the 1990s, it is now less likely to be perceived as a “guilty pleasure”.

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August 9, 2023
The Hours at 25: The book that changed how we see Virginia Woolf

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As in The Hours, this sequence in Woolf Works gestures towards Woolf’s death, opening with a reading of her suicide note. It is a bookend to the ballet’s beginning, which features the only recording of Woolf’s voice, a BBC radio broadcast from 1937 called “On Craftsmanship”. In it, she expresses the challenges of using English in writing, so enriched with “echoes, memories, associations” that it becomes impossible to deploy them to express a singular thought without triggering a thousand others. Woolf’s legacy is to be tied so intimately to language that her image holds symbolic power in works like The Hours decades after her own lifetime. She continues to give an interpretative language to others.

In the broadcast, Woolf asks, “How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question”. The answer, as provided by Cunningham in The Hours, is to retell the old stories in new ways, to place one foot in the past whilst acknowledging that we have no choice but to keep the other in the present. We lose a sense of the “real” Virginia Woolf, whoever she might have been, but it keeps her work fresh and alive in the way she so desperately wanted it to be.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf reminds us that we cannot write without laying down flowers at the tombs of the authors, poets, and playwrights who came before us. “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” How Woolf is perceived depends on what we want her to be, so that when a passer-by sits on the bench in Richmond with her statue, the conversation can hold whatever meaning they desire. Like the artist Lily Briscoe at the end of her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Woolf had her vision. Now we must have one of our own.

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August 8, 2023
The Last Poets and Watts Prophets: The radical hip-hop pioneers ‘written out of history’

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One way in which the street poets anticipated hip-hop is that they were deemed politically dangerous. Unlike NWA or Eminem, they lacked the commercial impact to inspire boycotts and White House denunciations (“We didn’t make a dime,” said Hamilton) but they certainly attracted hostile attention in the shadows. “We were on President Nixon’s list, the defence department list, the national security list,” Last Poet Umar Bin Hassan told me in 2010. “It kind of blew my mind.” In 1973, the Watts Writers Workshop was burned to the ground by a trusted employee who turned out to be an FBI infiltrator.

Looking back, Hamilton told me that the street poets shared a common impulse with hip-hop: “We were vomiting. We had a stomach full of pain. We were expressing what we thought, what we felt, what our people thought, what they felt. It wasn’t just rage – it had a lot to do with love and trying to understand what was happening to us.”

Hassan, however, was less charitable. “The difference between us and hip-hop is we had direction, we had a movement, we had people who kept our eyes on the prize,” he said. “We weren’t just bullshitting and jiving”.

The stubbornly solitary Scott-Heron, meanwhile, always downplayed his alleged influence. In 2010, two years before his death, the New Yorker asked him what he thought when people called him a rap trailblazer. “I just think they made a mistake,” he replied.

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August 7, 2023
How opera is aiming for net zero amid worsening climate change

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In the meantime, many companies have been looking to achieve sustainability through new buildings, while doing what they can to reduce waste in their pre-existing spaces. The Royal Opera House’s production workshop just outside London, built in 2015, is in the top 10% of sustainable non-domestic buildings in the UK. While Milan’s storied opera house La Scala’s new office is a zero-energy building, producing more energy than it consumes thanks to rooftop solar panels and an open-cycle geothermal system. La Scala has also cut its carbon emissions by more than 630 tonnes since 2010, according to a recent New York Times article, having upgraded to LED and smart lighting.

Elsewhere, the Opéra de Lyon, Göteborg Opera and Tunis Opera are currently partnered on a new project investigating how best to implement the circular economy of production materials, while Leeds’ Opera North is soon to launch its first “green season”, using shared set design across its three productions, recycled or second-hand costumes, and including a new “eco-entertainment” work titled Masque of Might.

As the Theatres Trust’s study shows, there is still a long way to go, and a lot of money required, to make the changes necessary to safeguard the future of opera amid the ever-worsening climate crisis, but there appears to be no shortage of determination and imagination among opera houses in their quest to do so.

Take Me to the Opera: The Power of Glyndebourne is on BBC News Channel and on BBC Reel

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August 6, 2023
Women’s World Cup 2023: How female players have finally got the football kit they deserve

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It’s a far cry from the days when women didn’t even have kits of their own, and instead sported baggy attire on the pitch that was made for men’s bodies. And while football’s ties with fashion are established, with male footballers dabbling in modelling and building relationships with fashion houses, the fashion world is starting to call on female footballers too as the women’s game continues to skyrocket.

How early women footballers had to make do

In the UK, women’s football started to build momentum in the late 19th Century, following the country’s first recorded women’s match in 1881, with local clubs later starting to compete against each other. But its popularity really boomed during World War One. With millions of men away from home fighting, women took on traditionally male jobs working in the factories – and as a way for them to keep fit and build their stamina for heavy physical labour, sports such as football were encouraged. The most famous factory-based team was Dick, Kerr Ladies who notably drew a huge crowd of 53,000 spectators for a match against St Helens Ladies in December 1920.

But just as women’s football was growing in popularity, its momentum was halted in 1921, when the Football Association (FA) announced a ban on women playing the sport on professional grounds and pitches. The reason given: that football was unsuitable for women and not to be encouraged. The ban was not overturned until 1971, and for 50 years women were sidelined to playing in public parks – a stark contrast to the roaring stadiums they previously shined in.

“Football was an underground activity and that meant women who played during this period would wear or borrow male football gear,” says football historian Professor Jean Williams, author of A Game for Rough Girls: A History of Women’s Football in England. Naturally, this typically looked loose and baggy on them. And it wasn’t just in the UK where women’s football was stymied: during the 20th Century, bans and restrictions swept across the globe in countries including Brazil, Belgium, France, Nigeria and Norway. Even when bans subsided, bespoke kits for women were still a rarity well into the 21st Century. Just six years ago, the Irish women’s team threatened to strike due to being treated like “fifth-class citizens”: they alleged among other things that they were forced to change out of their clothes in public toilets to and from matches because they shared kit with the youth teams. For Dr Ali Bowes, a lecturer in the sociology of sport at Nottingham Trent University, the designing of bespoke kits represents a wider attitude change: “One of the biggest changes in recent years has been the shift to women’s football being seen as its own entity and not the hand-me-down version of men’s football,” quite literally, she says.

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August 4, 2023
Eight forgotten forerunners of hip-hop, from jazz ‘hep cat’ Slim Gaillard to ‘dirty blues’ singer Lucille Bogan

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

As hip-hop turns 50, Arwa Haider traces the verbal pioneers who forged a path long before 1973, from jazz “hep cat” Slim Gaillard to “dirty blues” singer Lucille Bogan.

H

Hip-hop is a culture, and rap flourishes from a far-ranging lineage. There will always be hot debate about the first rap record – 1979 gave rise to both the legendary Rapper’s Delight by The Sugarhill Gang, and (the slightly earlier release) King Tim III by funk outfit The Fatback Band – but generations of poets, polemicists, multi-genre artists and entertainers resonate through rap’s expressions. And while this art form was certainly sparked and shaped in African-American communities, the broader heritage of that diaspora – and within hip-hop’s NYC birthplace – significantly played a part as well.

Rap music arguably traces its roots through centuries of oral tradition – including West Africa’s griot storytellers and South African kwaito music – as well as street competition and recorded song. It is a vivid patchwork of conscious lyrics and subconscious influences: big band leaders; loquacious radio DJs; sporting legends (Muhammad Ali proclaiming his GOAT status with knockout rhymes and moves), even nursery rhymes. As Run DMC declared in their anthem Peter Piper: “Now Dr Seuss and Mother Goose both did their thing/ But Jam Master’s getting loose and DMC’s the king”. Rap’s enduring power might also derive from its very human impulse – to tell a tale, raise a laugh, assert identity, make a lasting point before the ultimate mic drop. Here are eight vocalists and lyricists who were arguably channelling the spirit of rap decades before 1973.

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1. Slim Gaillard

Slim Gaillard was a phenomenal multi-instrumental jazz hep cat who could play piano with the back of his hands, tap dance, play guitar, sax and vibraphone, and sing – sometimes seemingly all at the same time. Gaillard also famously developed his own influential vocalese patter, “Vout-O-Reenee”. Gaillard’s mesmerisingly tricksy delivery and showmanship would set a high bar for future generations of MCs, and it remains on extraordinary display in his film appearances, including the musical comedy Hellzapoppin’ (1941). He also created prolific collaborations throughout his career; one of his final recordings was a track with Canadian hip-hop act the Dream Warriors, entitled Very Easy to Assemble But Hard to Take Apart.

In his book Rap Attack 2, David Toop writes: “[Gaillard’s] musical style would cause Afrika Bambaataa to double take – the easy-going bebop with its fractured vout lyrics could be quick-cut at the drop of a bagel into a few bars of Latin with some Spanish commercials or a sudden skid on the tempo for a dash of Billy Eckstine.”

Artist Ries Niemi describes Gaillard as “one of the midwives of the birth of postmodernism in music” in a correspondence on the Rifftides website. “I would argue [Gaillard] is one of the grandfathers of rap music,” writes Niemi. “The lineage from Slim and Slam’s ironic, insider hipster reworking of ‘the dozens’ [an insults battle game], ranking scat singing and the African-American oral tradition thru hipster ‘jazz poetry’ in the 50s, to The Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron in the 60s and thence to rap is pretty direct. And the irreverence and vocal gymnastics of Gaillard is discernible in one of the other ‘Godfathers’ as well – James Brown.”

2. Pigmeat Markham

North Carolina-born entertainer Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham developed his larger-than-life persona on the touring circuit, including a stint with blues star Bessie Smith’s Revue in the 1920s. Among his most loved – and most influential – creations was that of a Judge figure, poking fun at establishment authorities with a raucous catchphrase: “Heyea come the judge!”. He’d go on to capture this character on a novelty record, Here Comes the Judge (1968) that would inspire follow-up tunes, tributes, and samples on various hip-hop and R&B records. Decades on, there remains a strong case for this “prototype rap” record; as Markham declares: “This judge is hip, and that ain’t all/ He’ll give you time if you’re big or small”.

3. Zora Neale Hurston

Writer, filmmaker and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was a leading luminary of the inspirational African-American cultural and intellectual movement known as the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s. Hurston’s multi-faceted works reflected her interest in folk cultures as well as her broad worldview; she travelled to Haiti and Jamaica to study the spiritual traditions of the African diaspora. Her life also involved a tight friendship and eventual beef with Harlem Renaissance peer and poet Langston Hughes.

Hurston’s famed publications included the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), though her sharp wit and use of African-American colloquialism and sharp wit is particularly evident in her Story In Harlem Slang (1942), which included a glossary, and featured snappy lines like: “I’m crackin but I’m fackin” (I’m wisecracking, but telling the truth) and “I shot him lightly and he died politely” (I completely outdid him).

The US actress Kim Brockington would portray Hurston in a 2013 play, which also highlighted the writer’s connection to rap lyricism. “The Harlem Renaissance like hip-hop created words, and it became a whole new language,” explained Brockington. “Zora would love hip-hop since she was of that tradition.”

4. Moms Mabley

Comedian and entertainer Jackie “Moms” Mabley started her career touring on the “Chitlin’ Circuit” of African-American venues during a still heavily segregated era. She was a trailblazer in numerous ways – openly out as a lesbian in 1921 (aged 27), and also becoming the first female comic to perform at Harlem’s landmark Apollo Theatre in 1939 (her crossover appeal was sealed in a Carnegie Hall performance in 1962). Mabley’s folky, social satire stand-up monologues and musical numbers like Hide the Whiskey are widely acknowledged as an influence on rap delivery as well as later generations of stand-up comedians. According to Toop, Mabley was godmother to NYC record label owner Paul Winley, who went from releasing 50s doo wop records to the likes of Afrika Bambaata, and she has been sampled on rap records including the Beastie Boys’ Sure Shot.

5. Lucille Bogan

Deep South singer and songwriter Lucille Bogan emerged in the 1920s as an entertainer on the New York vaudeville scene, but her musical legacy includes her status as queen of the “dirty blues” – delivering strictly NSFW lyrics on tracks including the fantastically raunchy Shave Em Dry (recorded under her alternate stage name, Bessie Jackson, in 1935). Her emboldened stance would arguably encourage later generations of lyricists – right through to contemporary stars such as Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B. Bogan had a no-holds-barred approach to her sex-centred song themes, and a bold delight to her delivery that still spares no blushes. Decades later, the likes of hip hop duo 2 Live Crew might have claimed to be As Nasty as They Wanna Be (1989), and Lil’ Kim would make a Hard Core debut in 1996, but Bogan was the original X-rated vocalist.

6. The Jubalaires

Rap music is famed for its crafty irreverence, but it also has roots in sacred music. Florida folk-gospel group The Jubalaires started out in the 1930s (originally named the Royal Harmony Group), and earned a following for their smoothly rhythmic close harmony flow. Their 1946 track Noah is often cited as the first rap record, with a snappy spoken verse that relates the Old Testament tale: “When God walked down to the brandy sea/ He declared that the evil descend from man/ And then he decided to destroy the land”. In a 2016 interview with Bloomberg, Claude “Paradise” Gray, curator of the Universal Hip-hop Museum in the Bronx, described The Jubalaires as “a rap group from the 1940s… They were a Christian gospel group that sang and rapped with almost the same cadence as The Sugarhill Gang.”

7. The Chords

This 1950s doo-wop group formed at high school in the Bronx, and proved to be talented songwriters as well as brilliantly agile vocalists, as demonstrated by their best-known work Sh-Boom (1954). The track crossed over the highly genre-segregated Billboard charts of the time, and flaunted experimental flair alongside the sweetly romantic melody (even the seemingly nonsensical background rhymes – “A langala langala lang” – took inspiration from everyday details like church bells, according to band member Jimmy Keyes).

Prior to recording, Sh-Boom was reportedly rejected for not being “commercial” enough by eminent record producer Bobby Robinson, who had established his career with blues and soul groups. Still, Robinson would later produce numerous breakthrough hip-hop tracks including Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s Superrappin’ (1979) and Doug E Fresh’s Just Having Fun (Do The Beatbox) (1984), and in an interview for Toop’s book, he was clear about the creative bond between these youth music scenes: “Doo-wop originally started out as the black teenage expression of the 50s and rap emerged as the black teenage ghetto expression of the 70s. Same identical thing that started it – the doo wop groups down the street, in hallways, in alleys and on the corner… It’s kids – to a great extent mixed-up and confused – reaching out to express themselves.”

8. King Stitt

Decades before NYC block parties burst into life, Jamaica’s reggae scene gave rise to the “deejay” phenomenon, where a vocalist would chat or toast over records to entertain revellers – and to demonstrate prowess over rival sound systems (a precursor to “battle rap” showdowns across the US East Coast and beyond). King Stitt was a heavyweight talent who began toasting with Sir Coxsone’s Downbeat Sound System in 1956, and moved into groundbreaking studio tracks in the 1960s.

Born Winston Sparkes in Kingston, 1940, Stitt acquired his nickname because of a vocal stutter; he was also born with a facial visible difference, which he expressed with brilliant defiance – on classic anthem Lee Van Cleef (referencing spaghetti western movie The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly), he booms: “I am The Ugly One!” over the groove.

Stitt died in 2012, and his vocal influence and showmanship remains widely celebrated; as a Billboard obituary notes: “Stitt’s animated shouts and nursery rhyme phrasings, mimicking the ‘jive’ talk of American radio jocks of that era as he introduced records or freestyled over their instrumental breaks, was the genesis of the Jamaican deejay phenomenon which in turn gave birth to rapping.”

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August 3, 2023
Meg 2: The Trench review: Ben Wheatley’s sequel is ‘plain awful’

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The end of The Meg teased Jonas’s romance with the oceanographer Suyin, who had a young daughter, Meiying (Sophia Cai). In the sequel, we learn that Suyin has died, and Jonas seems to be 14-year-old Meiying’s stepfather. It’s all murky, but relationships were never The Meg’s strength. Suyin’s brother, Jiuming, has also joined the institute. He is played by Wu Jing, a Chinese superstar. His presence speaks to the film’s global box-office aspirations, but he fits in smoothly in a bland, unexciting role. Cliff Curtis returns as the level-headed manager, Mac, and Page Kennedy sits behind a computer as DJ. He is the film’s meta voice, the “Don’t go in the house” guy.

Jonas takes a crew that includes Jiuming and even little Meiying (don’t ask how; it’s ridiculous) 25,000ft below the ocean floor to explore a trench that these megalodons seem to be escaping from. When things inevitably go wrong and every major character is in danger and soaking wet, the gang end up in a raft. “This feels unpleasantly familiar,” DJ says, and another veteran of The Meg says, “I just hope it goes better than last time.” Ha. That rare moment, with the audience meant to laugh knowingly, stands out. DJ seems to be in a different movie, especially when he takes out a gun to defend them from the supersharks and says, “I even made poison-tipped bullets, just like Jaws 2”. No other character is that aware that they live in an echo of other movies.

The director, Ben Wheatley, is the latest indie filmmaker to take on a big commercial project, as Taika Waititi did spectacularly with Thor: Ragnarok and Chloé Zhao less so with Eternals. Wheatley’s films are quirky and different from each other, ranging from black comedy Sightseers, to the eco-thriller In the Earth. But each has a single distinctive tone, something the floundering Meg 2 lacks.

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August 3, 2023
11 of the best TV shows to watch in August

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11. Star Wars: Ahsoka

In the latest live-action Star Wars spinoff, Rosario Dawson stars as the warrior Ahsoka of the Togruta species, complete with serpent-like tails sprouting from her head. Seen recently in episodes of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, now Ahsoka must try to save the Galaxy once more. Mary Elizabeth Winstead joins the fight as green-faced pilot Hera Syndulla. As Ahsoka and her allies battle the evil Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), there will be lightsabers all over the place. Although Ahsoka has a long Star Wars history, a crash course may not be necessary. Dawson recently said of the series, “It is a new part of the journey, but you don’t need to know the previous part of it to get engaged.” Maybe.

Star Wars: Ahsoka premieres on 23 August on Disney+

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August 2, 2023
How Angus Cloud’s remarkable Euphoria performance showed a star was born

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Unlike his already well-established co-stars like Zendaya, a former Disney star, and Elordi, known from Netflix hit The Kissing Booth, Cloud was scouted by a casting agent while walking on the street in New York. He initially thought it was a set up, he told GQ: “I was confused and I didn’t want to give her my phone number. I thought it was a scam.”

What Cloud brought to Euphoria was vital to its success. Amid the show’s often whiplash-inducing plot twists and anxiety-inducing pace, Cloud was a stabilising, almost grounding presence: stoic in his demeanour, despite Fezco often being involved in much of the most terrifying action in the series.

In another actor’s hands, Fez might have been an overwrought, melodramatic stereotype – a macho, drug-dealing blowhard – but Cloud had a deadpan, understated quality that made the character feel authentic. “I had to change it a little bit,” he explained to GQ about amending the Sam Levinson-written script. “To make it sound real, like how I would say it.”

It obviously worked: as Cloud revealed to GQ, his co-star Elordi let slip to him that Fez was never meant to be a returning part. “I think Jacob told me, he was like, ‘oh yeah, you didn’t know? Your character gets [imitates brains getting blown out]’” he said, “I don’t know, but apparently, because they cast me off the street, I guess the character of Fezco was [never meant to stick around]. I don’t even know how. I never saw that script. No one ever told me.”

A many-layered performance

Cloud played a complex character of contradictions – a caring drug dealer, a gentle gangster, a protector and an enabler – and had exactly the depth and the range needed to depict them. His scenes with Zendaya, as his addict friend Rue, demonstrated this; he was crackingly intense as he showed Fez grappling with the idea of selling Rue the very thing that could kill her, set against his almost paternal desire (he often referred to her as “family”) to protect her from the underworld that he worked in.

To some extent, Fez was the voice of the show’s complicated conscience, flipping from mild-mannered soul into menace when wreaking revenge on those he believed deserved it: Nate, who Fez viciously attacked after he blackmailed and tormented Rue’s girlfriend, Jules and Nate’s hateful dad Cal, who had videoed himself abusing teenagers. What happens when the “bad” guys might be better than the “good”, upstanding members of society, the show asked? And can we forgive people’s actions when we understand their own traumatic backstories? These were questions that Cloud embodied.

Meanwhile Fezco’s gently understated and heartwarming flirtations with Lexi (Maude Apatow) were a real source of fan joy, and the scene where he sung Stand By Me with Lexi – “one the most beautiful moments I’ve ever watched,” in the words of one Twitter user today – has now an acquired an extra poignance.

If Euphoria’s first series in 2019 established Fez as a compelling presence, it was the second series in 2022 that really deepened him as a character – particularly the first episode of the run, which focused on Fez’s origin story, highlighting how important to the show the character had become. It was a story that had parallels with Cloud’s own life. In Euphoria, we see a young teen Fez being accidentally hit in the head with an iron crowbar by his drug-dealing grandma, and in real life Cloud also suffered brain damage from a head injury, aged 14.

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August 1, 2023
Passages: The erotic drama too hot for the US censors

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The ratings controversy around new erotic drama Passages

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July 31, 2023
Twitter’s rebrand: Why ‘x’ could be the most powerful letter in English

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When German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a new kind of radiation in 1895, he called it an X-ray because its nature was unknown. To have the X-factor is to possess some intangible star quality. In sci-fi, x comes to represent something otherworldly, extraterrestrial. This ambiguity isn’t always positive. Think pieces on Generation X – those born between 1965 and 1980 – often described them as a lost, aimless generation.

The letter can also signify an absence or an erasure. The X in civil rights activist Malcolm X’s name stood for his unknown African name, taken from his ancestors during slavery. The Straight Edge punk movement – who abstain from alcohol, tobacco and drugs – use X as their identifier. Yet, at other times x symbolises a presence – x marks the spot; the x used to mark our choice on a ballot paper. It is a letter full of contradictions.

It also has a whiff of sexual danger. John Singer Sargent’s provocative painting Madame X, depicting an American woman known for her extra-marital affairs, scandalised late 19th-Century Paris. In 1951, the British Board of Film Censors introduced the X certificate to indicate a film was “extremely graphic.” Though this originally referred to violence and bad language as well as sex, “X-rated” was co-opted by the porn industry and is now shorthand for sexually explicit material.

Its association with the extreme seems apt for Elon Musk who, when he first bought Twitter, asked staff to commit to an “extremely hardcore” working culture.

The letter x doesn’t just have multiple meanings, but multiple pronunciations too – not ideal when you make it the centrepiece of your huge global brand. There’s confusion on what it might be called in Japan, where the term X Japan is already trademarked by a rock band.

It’s assumed Musk wants his X to be something akin to China’s WeChat, an app where users can communicate, consume news, make purchases, pay bills and even order a taxi. For an app that will offer such disparate services, it perhaps makes sense to use a symbol with so many meanings.

But the rebrand has got off to a bumpy and confusing start. Police arrived midway through the removal of the twitter sign from the company’s San Francisco headquarters, putting a halt to the “unauthorised work” and leaving just “er” hanging on the building. There is uncertainty about how we will talk about X, too. Will tweets now be Xs? The word “tweet” made it into the dictionary as a verb – what will the equivalent be?

“Because of its multiple potential, sometimes contradictory meanings, the X symbol at first sight will certainly strike many as mysterious, puzzling, perhaps intriguing, but should a brand be provoking uncertainty or confusion?” asks Thorne. The future of Musk’s X project is yet to be seen – but harnessing the power of this most beguiling and shape-shifting of letters might prove too much, even for the world’s richest man.

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July 30, 2023
Antonio Pappano: How opera can be ‘open to everyone’

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The main focus of the film, though, is Pappano’s mission to open up opera to everyone. “Opera shouldn’t cater just to one audience, or be focused on just one corner of the repertoire,” he says. “It must be open to the interests of many different people.” While he asserts that the ROH, like every big opera house, wants to entice young audiences, he does concede: “I think you have to be honest and say, yes, but younger people can’t afford very expensive tickets, can they?”

It’s true that the price of opera tickets can seem too high to be anything but a rare luxury for most, especially young people. Halley Bondy, writing on the arts website Paste Magazine, describes herself as someone who has been to the opera many times “for a millennial”. And although she loves opera – “from the hyper-real grandness to the unbelievable talent, to the septuagenarian, fur-hatted audience” – she finds it “easy to see why places like The Met [Metropolitan Opera House in NYC] are ailing in sales; young people just don’t go. It’s too expensive, too arcane, too massive… The onus is on the opera houses to do a better job of catering to the young.”

Bondy has only managed to attend so often by being treated by a “ridiculously generous friend” or chasing discounted tickets. “Like everything else in the world, the opera is a lot of fun if you have gobs of money,” she observes, but she concedes anyone could get in with the $25 [£19.40] rush tickets, student tickets or commercial offers – which make it “affordable, if you just dig a little”.

In opera’s defence, ticket prices are generally high because it is notoriously costly to produce. All the more reason, argued The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins in February, for adequate government funding. Discussing recent cuts to opera funding, she wrote: “If you starve something, run it down constantly, gradually reduce the provision of it so that few can afford it, it becomes ‘elitist’… And if opera in the form that its creators imagine it becomes for toffs, that is nothing to do with opera itself… [it is] precisely the result of neglect and underfunding”.

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July 30, 2023
From Blue Beetle to Bottoms: 10 of the best films to watch in August

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10. White Bird

Adapted from RJ Palacio’s hit novel, Wonder (2017) was a drama about Auggie (Jacob Tremblay), a boy who was bullied at school because of his facial deformity. White Bird is the sequel, but it isn’t the sequel you might expect. Rather than continuing Auggie’s story, it follows Julian (Bryce Gheisar), one of the boys who bullied him. And rather than focusing on Julian, it has Julian’s grandmother (Helen Mirren) recounting her memories of being hidden from the Nazis as a Jewish-French schoolgirl during World War Two. The film is directed by Marc Forster (A Man Called Otto, Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace). “Sometimes life brings us the rare and beautiful possibility to inspire and uplift the human spirit through the act of storytelling,” Forster told Matt Grobar at Deadline, “and it is my heartfelt hope that this film will do just that. White Bird is a story about the power of kindness and its ability to grow exponentially once set free.”

Released on 25 August in the US

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July 27, 2023
The hoax ‘documentary’ about human flesh-eating that shocked the UK

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And TV viewers have learned to be especially wary on April Fool’s Day. As far back as 1 April 1957, the BBC’s current affairs programme Panorama carried a report about that year’s bountiful spaghetti tree harvest. Australia’s This Day Tonight once reported that Sydney Opera House was sinking. France 3 claimed that the French government was going to release giant pandas in the Pyrenees. Russian Public TV carried a story that a spring in the Caucasus mountains could cure male baldness.

But the TV hoax without equal was not an April Fool’s gag. British TV “event” Ghostwatch was broadcast on BBC One on Halloween 1992. Presented as a live broadcast hosted by Michael Parkinson, its supposed purpose was to gather evidence of the supernatural. It featured footage of poltergeist phenomena and culminated in a malevolent entity taking over the TV studio. It was genuinely terrifying, resulting in tens of thousands of calls to the BBC and outrage in the newspapers.

“Ghostwatch was always intended to be two things,” its writer Stephen Volk tells BBC Culture. “First of all, a scary ghost story. Secondly, there was going to be a subtext of satire regarding television itself and the way the media was going. The idea of a BBC light entertainment show exploring the metaphysics of paranormal research using well known TV personalities was just too delicious and potent and irresistible a mix.”

“Centrally, as a drama – and this gets overlooked in the obsession with it being a ‘prank’ – Ghostwatch was about, who do you trust? Do you trust this broadcaster? This expert, just because they have a caption in front of them? Do you trust this image we are showing you? Do you trust your eyes?

“We now live firmly in the age of fake news – even before we get into AI – so there’s never been a more important time to get people to question where they are getting their information, from whom, and whether they can trust it.”

The influence of Ghostwatch has been visible in a number of TV specials since, among them Derren Brown: Séance, in which the famed illusionist purported to hold a live séance. Who knows what future shows might be cooked up as a result of Miracle Meat?

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July 27, 2023