Monday
For the diary this week I think we should put our heads in the sand, pretend the world isn’t happening, and take refuge instead in the funniest, rudest Aussie TV show in history – namely, season two of Deadloch, which just dropped on Amazon Prime. We pride ourselves in Britain on leading the world in baroque swearing, so it pains me to say this, but I think the Aussies might have the edge.
Dulcie Collins and Eddie Redcliffe – ably described by a passing troll on a mobility scooter as “a shetland pony and a lesbian giraffe” – are odd couple cops who, in Deadloch’s first season, met to solve a murder in Tasmania. Now they find themselves in Barra Creek, a small town in the Northern Territory ravaged by rivalry between the two main, crocodile-based businesses: Land of Crocs, and Don Darrell’s Best Best Jumping Croc Tour. It’s written by “the two Kates” as they’re known in Australia, Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, and I’ve never heard swearing like it, not even in The Thick of It, none of which I can quote because it’s too rude. (Tiny example: Redcliffe, catching sight of a drone passing overhead, looks up and refers to it for no particular reason as a “hover-c***”).
There’s plenty of fake swearing, too. An Aussie woman built like a cement mixer invites one of the cops to, “shove it up your clack”, a line that made me laugh so hard I nearly fell off the sofa, as did the line, “what adult eats yoghurt through a pouch?” and “the toilet’s non-load bearing”. The toilet’s non-load bearing – tears literally pouring down my face. There’s a joke about a hammerhead shark which I can’t explain, and a drive-by on UK tourists overstaying their visas (“The Croc-ettes have all been deported back to the UK”) which you also, possibly, had to be there for – but my point is, in hard times, what a bloody gift for us all from the southern hemisphere.
Tuesday
It was an open casting call the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the search for Scarlett O’Hara in 1938; one in which every eligible primary school child in the land was given a hard shove in the direction of a casting panel by their absolutely-not-stage-parents (“it’s not us! It’s Tabitha who wants this!”) Finally, this week, we got to see the new stars of HBO’s forthcoming TV adaptation of Harry Potter in the series’ first trailer, and didn’t they look lovely!
They really did, the three young people playing Ron, Hermione and Harry, in what looks like a less arch, more realistic adaptation of JK Rowling’s books than the film franchise. I was in my early 20s when the first Potter book was published and missed the rush, and the films never really worked for me, either – although we have them to thank for the delicious entry in Alan Rickman’s Diaries, in which the late actor grumbled that, after appearing in all eight of the Potter films as Severus Snape, he found his friends always expected him to pick up the tab for lunch.
Wednesday
This hit home: the novelist Ian Rankin, speaking on a podcast that was picked up by the Times on Wednesday, sharing the extremely honest assessment that, despite selling 35m copies of his Rebus series, he has “wasted his life” honing sentences in his head rather than engaging with his family. “I mean, there’s big moments, big beats in my life that I just don’t have any memory of: holidays taken; first days at school for my kids and that sort of stuff because in my head I was somewhere else.”
This distraction was possible, one assumes, because his wife, Miranda, picked up the slack, but in spite of how twitchy that kind of division of labour makes me feel, I understand, too; the near-permanent distraction of anyone trying to get anything over the line and, possibly, not 100% listening when their child goes in on their fourth go-around of the story of what someone said to someone else at break time and what this means for the friendship dynamic. “Are you listening?” one of my children will ask, glaring at me, and I’ll think, my God, I’ve turned into my dad.
It must be said that while Rankin described this state of affairs as “kind of weird”, he didn’t sound overly vexed by it. The person who drove the point home to me more forcefully was Martin Amis, who in an interview in 2020 spoke of the ruinous influence of the puritan work ethic. “I remember once having a really nice drink in Paris with my wife and a friend of ours; and being really uneasy because I wasn’t getting on with something.” Why do we do this, he said; life is short. I think about his remarks all the time.
Garrick Club pulls out all the stops for its first female member. Photograph: Yui Mok/ReutersThursday
Members of the Garrick Club in London are still wrestling with the outsized challenge of recognising that women make up 51% of the population and letting them into their 195-year-old club. Reports in 2024 that the venue in Covent Garden was going co-ed were accompanied by a list of prominent women rumoured to be joining, among them Dame Judi Dench and Dame Siân Phillips. Now, two years later, we have confirmation of an actual woman joining the club and that person is … the queen.
I mean, the queen is a woman, true. But her approval by the membership panel doesn’t strike one as the most rigorous enforcement of the democratic principle. The Standard this week quoted a royal source as saying the queen “was attracted by the Garrick’s strong literary connections”, which sounds empty enough to be true, and falls in the same week as an event at which Camilla and King Charles marked the 25th anniversary of the Eden Project by “cutting a cake with a sword”. Mmmm, this country.
Friday
Oh, for the days when the wildest story in the tabloids came under the banner of “Tory sleaze”; a more innocent time before Epstein and Trump. Luxuriate, then, in the echo this week of vintage scandals with the story of Crispin Blunt, former Conservative MP for Reigate who served in David Cameron’s cabinet, and who the courts found, rather surprisingly, to have been in possession of a quantity of crystal meth. (His defence was, roughly, “all drugs should be legal”). Blunt was fined £1,200 and we all got to read this immensely enjoyable line in the BBC report, noting that the 65-year-old had been “hosting drug-fuelled chemsex parties at his home in Horley”. Bravo! Perhaps there’s hope for this country after all.
I’ll have a tea, a white one please Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian