By the time the first act of ‘One Morning Only: Sir Olly Robbins At The Foreign Affairs Select Committee’ was drawing to a close, I’m made it to my settee - an enraptured audience of one as this senior civil servant filled all 42-inches of my telly (though I can’t say for sure that I wasn’t joined by the astral body of Keir Starmer, willed out of his physical form and into the home of every watching citizen to whisper, “Due process was followed! I did my duty! I did my duty! I did my duty!” like Yvonne Hartman being Cybermen-marched to oblivion).

What does it say about our culture that the must-see telly that’s proper set my pulse racing recently was a middle-aged posh guy in a suit (cracking cufflinks, Ols) attempting to roll out from under the bus our Prime Minister cobbed him under?

That we’re addicted to national melodrama? That our political system is buggered and bankrupt and so powerless are we that there’s nowt to do but stare into the abyss? That streamers broke the model for the kind of old-school text-your-mates event television that we’re still desperate for? That 24/7 rolling news broke our collective brains? That our reality can now only be parsed when re-branded and re-served to us as entertainment? That we seek to keep our sense of increasingly-wild (and increasing) injustice in the world tame by watching others seek justice for themselves? That we shouldn’t be allowed to work from home? All of the above? All of the above!

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As a viewing experience, it was part noughties X-Factor final, part nineties court-room procedural and part West Wing bottle episode. Very geeky, very intense, very complex, very dramatic and - chaired by Emily Thornberry, eyes blazing, grey-hair-streaks glinting - camp as a John Waters Christmas.

The anticipation! The one-liners! The bombshells! The f-bomb! The injustice! (Justice for Gamu/Sir Olly Robbins!). The ex-Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Oliver - Olly! Ols! - Robbins giving a masterclass in televised performance. Understated, controlled, commanding, precise. Hell, he was artful (he made it his own!).

And much like a post-performance Kelly Rowland critique vs a Louis Walsh slap-down, it was what Sir Ols said quietly and carefully that mattered most. A grenade or two (or three) ever-so gently rolled across the floor of the select committee like it was the freshly-trimmed lawn of his local bowls club.

NUMBER ONE: Ols cut to the chase almost-immediately. Not only did No. 10 pressure the Foreign Office to expedite Peter Mandelson’s security clearance so he could crack on with the job that had already been handed to him, publicly announced and rubber-stamped by the King and White House, the cabinet office weren’t that arsed about him being vetted at all, he said. Come on now, Sensible Sallys! Why would you need to run checks on Peter-Dark-Lord-Fired-Twice-for-Lying-Long-Time-Mates-With-A-Sex-Offender-Mandelson? In fact, it was only at the Foreign Office’s insistence that DV (developed vetting) took place at all.

That sound you could hear in the background? Tick tick tick tick BOOM! (Well, yo, are y’all ready for me yet? Pump it, Prince Permanent Under-Secretary! Well, here I go, here I go, here I go again!)

NUMBER TWO: There is no jobs-for-yer-mates culture in Westminster, Ol’s testimony revealed. It’s a jobs-for-yer-mates-who-are-mates-of-paedos culture, actually. Olly stating - like he was sharing what he had for his tea last night (the tears of your enemies?) - that Number 10, in another startling display of having-no-fucking-clue, had hit him up about finding a ‘head of mission’ role for then-comms chief to the PM, Matthew Doyle (oh, and, chef’s kiss, requested he keep it from the foreign secretary). Having to make do with elevating him to the Lords instead when our Ols - in a show of actual competence - rebuffed them.

And look, how were they to know that he was not just mates with, but campaigned for, proclaimed the innocence of, ex-Labour councillor Sean Morton after he’d been charged with possessing indecent images of actual children. Sure, it was public knowledge and all over the internet, but who do you think they are, the best and brightest? People who can read words of more than one syllable?

NUMBER THREE: The security risks flagged in relation to Peter Mandelson - the ones Ols decided could be mitigated when granting him clearance, the decision that he was fired over after Mandelson himself was fired because of his links to Jeffrey Epstein - weren’t Jeffrey-Epstein-related, he said.

Mandelson’s Epstein-adjacency red-flagged instead - as a reputational fucking nightmare - in the due diligence presented to the PM pre-appointment. Due diligence that included the reports (based on Epstein’s own words / emails) of a post-conviction relationship, one that saw Mandelson stay at his house in 2009 while (yes, while) Epstein was still serving his prison sentence for ‘soliciting prostitution’ from a child.

Due diligence that the PM read with his two eyes and - given Mandelson was offered the job days later - decided wasn’t a deal-breaker (the PM for his part has insisted that Mandelson was asked and lied about the ‘extent’ of their friendship, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say any friendship with a convicted child predator is BAD).

The PM only deciding that it was absolutely a deal-breaker and a sackable offence for whomever decided it wasn’t a deal-breaker, when newly-released emails in the US reminded our country what was already in the public domain, causing us to (belatedly) scream: Are you fucking kidding me?! Why is the long-time BFF of a paedophile anywhere near government, never mind the most important diplomatic servant to our most important diplomatic ally, you utter, utter unicycle-riding, water-squirting, pie-splatting, horn-honking clowns?!

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But given the PM would rather drag his party into the depths of hell/electoral oblivion than sack himself, he did the next best thing and sacked the man who explicitly didn’t make the judgement call on the Epstein issue (and when I say ‘best’ I mean ‘best for those of us who hoped his scapegoat was smart and efficient and civil servant-y enough to make the scapegoatery clear’).

As Keir Starmer has been crystal that Mandelson was fired due to the extent of his ongoing relationship with Epstein, his logic (sorry, ‘logic’) must surely go that Ols should have done HIS job as well as the one he’s actually paid for. Should have banged on the PM’s door and insisted that while Epstein hadn’t been red-flagged by his part of the vetting, the PM had been wrong to ignore it in due diligence and shouldn’t have appointed Mandelson in spite of it and what do you mean like his then-deputy Angela Rayner did before being promptly ignored?

Not that this situation demanded extraordinary judgement from the man running our country. My six-year-old son knows Peter Mandelson is a moral and ethical black hole. But it did demand that he put the morals and ethics that we keep hearing he holds so dear ahead of greasing our wheels with the orange toddler and his cabinet of sociopaths.

Ultimately, it demanded he put the pain and misery of countless women and girls who were exploited, trafficked, traded and sold ahead of the political capital Mandelson could stack up for him in Washington. He chose not to. And as I tell my six-year-old: all choices have consequences. But what yesterday’s on-screen grilling made clear is that those consequences continue to rain down on everyone else but him.

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‘Nightclub Predator’ begins as events themselves began last year: with a girl in torment picking up the phone.

“I can’t even say the words. I can’t talk about it normally,” she says to the 999 operator for Cambridgeshire Police, her voice already breaking. “The first time I even hinted at it was today”. The reply, a simple question that’s owt but: “What's happened?

“Well, we went to his house. I don’t know, there’s a lot of gaps. I remember waking up and I didn’t have my clothes, when I realise that I’m bleeding. And he’s washing blood off of himself. I just don’t know what happened.”

Do you think there’s a chance you might have been raped? “Well, to be honest, yeah…It was 2022. I didn’t want to say anything because I don’t want people to not believe me.” She says his name: Craig France. And then, through cries: “I have literally never been the same since it happened. I’ve literally gone downhill so much. I really tried not to let it. I really did try not to let it, but it just slowly becomes harder and harder.”

The calls ends with a breakdown and a breakthrough. She might not know what happened but clearly knows something did. The “it” that happened, that she’s been fighting to stay afloat in defiance of for the last two years.

It. The knowledge that gnaws at your insides like a cornered rat.

Twenty years ago on a Monday morning, I made a similar call to a specialist sexual assault centre in London from my desk at work, said similar words. I think, I don’t know, maybe something happened…to me? No, I definitely think it did. I don’t know. I have, I have…bite marks?. At least, that’s how I remember it going. Memory. To paraphrase Vivian Ward: it’s a slippery little sucker.

Which is, of course, what they rely on, what they exploit, those that exploit us. Power held in the complete picture only they see. Leaving us with fragments, scattered. On our knees we gather them in our laps, however small. Hold them up to the light, seeking out truth, even as we fear it.

What I’m sure of from that Saturday night. A solo dinner, meatballs and sangria. A bar before I meet friends, early for once. A man with with a face like any other professional man’s face and hair that might be blonde talks at my left ear. God, he’s boring, I think. Where did he appear from? I look around. Don’t know why he’s talking to me. He’s objectively far more attractive than me. Bet he’s an estate agent. A nice guy, objectively. Don’t be such a bitch. I smile. Look at my phone. Tense and relax my bladder. Need a wee! Thank god for that. I pick up my handbag, other hand pausing over my drink. It’s gonna look weird if I take it. Totally unhygienic. Deffo rude. To this man I don’t want to talk to me. Fuck it, he looks normal. I pull my hand back, walk to the loo. Christ almighty, he’s still here?! I’m back. He talks, moves closer, I drink. Losing the will to live, get me out of here. I smile. Get that drink down you. Explain I’m going to meet my friends now. Bye-bye mr nice guy!

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The teenagers and twenty-somethings in Peterborough’s bars and clubs didn’t appear to know that Craig France wasn’t around their age, but in his 30s. He was just like them, they thought. Fun. Harmless. Normal. Nice. Everyone said so.

A victim: “He was really friendly, funny, a really chilled-out guy.”

An investigator: “He looks like normal Joe Bloggs on the street.”

A victim: “He’s this nice guy, everyone likes him.”

A doorman: “No trouble at all.”

A victim: “You wouldn’t have expected him to do something like that.”

And until then, no-one thought he had. The CPS later seem surprised that he has no previous convictions for violence against women and girls, but as DCI Helen Tebbit says, with the knowledge of a woman who sees a Craig France day in day out, “Predators manipulate people.”

And boy, did he. He tried to stay pals, after. When challenged by the 18-year-old who’d woken up bleeding with what she calls “a big black hole” where her memory should be, he’d replied, “You wanted those things. It takes two to tango and that’s what happened, although you don’t remember it, apparently.”

Apparently.

But Craig France knew what he’d done; had committed it to film and made it verifiable fact. We, and she, then see what’s inside that black hole she’s carried for two years. The videos he shot that now play and play.

She’s in his back garden, naked apart from one sock, she stumbles and falls into the hot tub

She’s lying, not moving, on the ground next to the hot tub. He picks up her legs, which don’t appear to work, and drags her unconscious body backwards across the concrete

She’s naked, knelt down on her hands and knees in the shower

He positions the camera opposite the en suite bathroom, walks into frame, naked, then over to the toilet where he picks her up off the floor. Naked, she leans against the wall, staggers, head swaying back and forth

She’s lying on his bed, naked, her eyes closed, vomit bucket by her side, as he has has sex with her. As he rapes her

They’re videos unearthed - along with many, many others, leading to more victims being identified by police - after a second girl, just turned 18 at the time of meeting Craig France, comes forward to say she’d had sex with him, but didn’t know he was filming. “I classed him as a good friend. He seemed really nice,” she says, detailing the after-parties she’d go to at his with a gang of mates after the clubs closed. The alcohol he’d be handing over and over and over, the mornings she’d wake up in pain. Does she remember having sex with him? “I don’t remember the night at all,” she says, her knowledge of the ‘sex’ gleaned from videos Craig France sent her. “My mind is completely blank, I don’t remember one thing.”

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I wake up naked, in bed, at 4:25pm the next day, a Sunday. And there’s a thick line between what I’m sure of, and remember - leaving the bar, walking down the street, meeting my friends - and what comes after that, what I’m not sure of, what I don’t.

There are flashes - colour and sensation cutting through blank space, my senses trying to reconnect brain and body. And fleeting thoughts, like arrows I glimpse as they fly overhead. My fragments.

Red disco lights hit my eyeball, head snapping back like a flip-phone opening

The feeling of wet against my jaw, slack and spread on the dancefloor

My legs don’t work. Why don’t my legs work?

I’m lying on my bed, someone’s over me, breathing. I can’t open my eyes, move any part of my body. I will an arm, my little finger into movement. Nothing. I panic. Imagine tiny weightlifters standing in formation on my waterline, pushing up my eyelids so I can see

A heaviness moves off the bed next to me. I hear limbs being pushed inside cloth, the snap of a waistband hitting skin, a belly

He’s standing stock-still, looking down at me. I know he is. Why is he still? Oh god, oh fuck, he’s going to kill me isn’t he. I start screaming but my throat is still and my mouth closed

The click of my front door closing, I breathe

The rest? A black expanse. This is what we mean when we say, “I can’t remember”. The abyss both behind and in front of us. But what I can’t remember, my body tries to tell me. When I stand up, I’m seasick, the room tilts and sways. I can’t focus my eyes, see double. I hurt, inside and out. On my legs and arms, there are bruises and scrapes. I count them: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. On my breasts, bite marks. I count those, too: one, two, three. Trace them, painted black and red, roaring in pain. On my settee, when I make it there: a man’s glove. I count it: one.

Over the hours and days that follow, I’m on my knees, collecting more pieces that still don’t complete the picture. There’s the counting by the nurse, ticking off the marks I missed, marking up the outline of a woman’s body on paper that’s meant to be mine. The bare facts from a friend: the state I’d turned up in, being unable to stand up in the club, the mini-cab I’d been put into with my address.

But, as for my own memories, two decades on, there’s nothing more to fill those gaps. And probably never was, according to a scientist I interviewed a few years later about retrieving events from a blackout. At a certain point, she told me, your brain just stops recording. There’s no memory to be found. This is, for a long time, a relief. There’s a theory: if you can’t remember what happened, then you can’t know, so can’t suffer. A theory I first heard when after a few drinks (ooh careful! Don’t wanna get assaulted again!), I didn’t so much summon enough courage but suppress enough shame to tell someone about that night. “Think yourself lucky,” she said. “You don’t know what happened, and what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Anyway, be grateful he didn’t kill you. Could have done, you know”.

No shit.

Clearly she’d never read The Body Keeps the Score. And neither had I, then. Though I already knew it by heart, as did she. Many - if not most - women I know have a story like this. Perhaps not this exact story. But yes, a story like it. A night marked by absence. What’s missing. What we don’t remember. The feeling when we wake up. There’s something, we say. Something we’ll never know. Something I’ll never know. My body healed, bruises and bite marks faded, the nightmares ended (these ones anyway). Nothing remained, remains today, that could complete the story. And very rarely does.

An increasing exception: when the men who have used our blacked-out bodies like simple objects for their convenience - a pair of shoes to be worn while doing the bins, a car to travel from home to the office - have documented it. Man-made proof that'll deliver certainty. A certainty accessed by the girls on our screens this week, and delivered to police, the courts, and - via the documentary, by the looks of an overwhelmingly supportive social media response - to the public. But one only made possible by us and them seeing, hearing, knowing how they were positioned and propped up and penetrated, made a puppet with its strings cut.

As with Madame Pelicot, this is what it takes.

And justice? After multiple complaints to police and multiple charges, before the trial began, Craig France offered to plead guilty to one charge of rape, sexual assault, voyeurism and exposure. This was accepted and he received a reduced sentence of 10 years and 7 months. Investigators believe we still don’t know the full scale of Craig France’s offending. That there are very likely more women out there who are victims.

Some will hold their fragments up to the light, some will choose to forget that there’s a hole where their memory should be. Still they join us, Those Who Don’t Remember, and stare down the black expanse.

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‘Nightclub Predator’, the two-part episode of 24 Hours in Police Custody, is available to watch on demand now

Warning! Contains spoilers, swearing, all-caps and description of a ‘sex’ scene that might haunt you forever

You know that thing when you pull the lever on a one-arm bandit but the wiring’s wonky and so the reels spin and spin and spin without stopping, a frenzied eternal looping of cherries and citrus fruit? That’s pretty much what I reckon Big’s corpse has been doing since series two of And Just Like That - each new crime committed against his memory adding another thousand years of spinning in his grave.

A crime like, say, your wife using a big old chunk of your money (that’s now hers because you’re dead) to buy a (Mr) Big old Gramercy Park townhouse to please her new-old boyfriend after he refused to step inside her old-old apartment because she once had sex with you in it behind his back (okay, more than once). A townhouse he’s also since pledged to not step foot inside, along with the rest of Manhattan, for five whole years because *something about parenting his teenage son in Virginia* means he’s not just banned (himself) from seeing your wife, but also from speaking to her. It’s almost like he’s still punishing her for those crimes of yesteryear and hey, HOW’S YOUR DEFECATING DOG, AIDAN? HOW’S SHAYNA FROM THE BAR?

Anyway, where was I…turn that frown upside down, John James Preston! Your wife would totally, absolutely feel sad about you being dead (occasionally), but she’s frankly too busy mourning her Not Big But Gigantic Baby of a (living, breathing) boyfriend.

Ding-ding-ding-not-jackpot! That’ll be another twenty-five thousand years of spinning for you, JJP!

While Big spins (and spins), Carrie - who’s still sharing space with that cat she called Shoe (as if she wouldn’t have killed it like that plant in series four of the original TV show after Aidan moved in) - sits preparing to write a postcard. Only You by Yazoo plays (this show can only dream of the emotional heft of that Tim and Dawn moment in The Office, or the emotional heft of Alison Moyet just breathing), its lyrics here breaking down Carrie’s situation with all the subtlety of, I don’t know, a 50-something female character who lives alone getting a cat. And now, emotional stakes established, Carrie takes a pen and with the smug flourish of a woman who’s just worked out the exact nature of consciousness draws…a love heart.

“Came back only yesterday/Moving farther away/Want you near m-”

WAIT.

*Record scratch*.

Hang on.

Is that postcard really, truly-to-god, addressed to: “Aidan Shaw, 139 Handsome Pond Road”? One hundred and thirty-nine Handsome Pond Road?!

This exhausting intro - in which you’ll have gleaned nowt happens really - finally ends after eight and a half years (or one minute and twenty-nine seconds) when Carrie sets a Definitely Not Metaphorical alarm for her Big old house. And she’s off! Trotting down her Manhattan street as Hot to Go strikes up with a, “Five, six! Five, six, seven, eight!”. Chappell Roan tasked with transitioning us to a lesbian bar or as Still Not the Real Miranda calls it: “a lady bar”.

Cruising for chicks didn’t go so well last time, she says. She talked to no ladies and ran up a $37 mocktail bill - oh yes, she’s an alcoholic, one who fixed herself after ordering a book off Amazon! - so this time, Still Not the Real Miranda has brought Charlotte and Carrie along. Sadly, but inevitably, her cruising-crisis gets all of three minutes’ attention before we get into Carrie’s love-life. Sorry, “love” “life”.

She tells them about the postcards. A turn-your-own-skin-inside out ritual that began when she despatched vintage postcards of New York to the Not Big But Gigantic Baby boyfriend (Aidan) “just to let him know that I’m here, and I love him”. He in turn, began sending back blank postcards from Virgina. Charlotte, eyes so wide crop circle experts were summoned, claims it’s both sweet and “better than nothing!”. And, well, IS IT THOUGH? He’s refusing to write to, or be written to by, his girlfriend THE WRITER (not that she appears to give two-shits about writing anymore, now - in a very Charlotte season four move - deciding to…decorate). The writer he wants to be his girlfriend but have nowt to do with for five whole years. And Carrie? Well, she proudly says (with the self-awareness of, well, Carrie Bradshaw) that “Aidan asked for no communication while he deals with this family stuff. I’m giving it to him”. HOW, BY COMMUNICATING WITH HIM AGAINST HIS WILL? I’m not sure which one of these two toxic nightmares draped in skin is worse. Mr Big, be grateful for that grave of yours. Spin, baby, spin!

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It’s okay though, here come her friends with some tough love and reason. Or they would if Charlotte wasn’t out roaming with the croppies, and Miranda wasn’t Still Not The Real Miranda, saying things like, “As long as it’s working for you” with the kind of smile you get when they sedate you for a colonoscopy. (Anyone else miss the “every time you get near him you become this pathetic, needy, insecure victim” Miranda? The one that caused Carrie to howl, “My god, Miranda, you are SO judgemental!” right there in a thrift shop? Yes, yes she was! Bring her back! Dig her up from whatever grave you’ve buried her in, too!).

Still Not The Real Miranda soon has bigger things on her, erm, mind though when, after mistaking Brady’s old babysitter for a hot young woman who’s into her, she ends up copping off with…Rosie O’Donnell! Yes, yes, they say she’s a virgin nun called Mary from a small town outside of Winnipeg, but more to the point: she’s Rosie O’Donnell! The joy of lesbians the world over at this once-never-possible pairing in the sack was real and earned. Fair fucks, Sister Mary (no pun intended). One “you’re so pretty” and “I have a hotel room” later and Still Not The Real Miranda is waking up next to you looking like the cat that got the cream/escaped from Carrie’s apartment.

Not having quite so much luck between the sheets: Seema, who is waiting - ciggie in hand, body in flammable lingerie - to have late-night zoom-sex with director Ravi, but promptly sets her apartment on fir- and GOD, I’M BORED. This is the first of two narrative cul-de-sacs in quick succession. Let’s deal with this one first. Ravi soon arrives, bearing flowers while the men delivering her new presumably flame-retardant bed say, “This is like a movie or some shit” (you know, like working-class men do). And, guys, it really is like a movie! Knowingly so. He - spoiler and jumping ahead - messes Seema about, dragging her around New York in a recee van when they should be on their date (a recce van that anyone in film and TV would happily slaughter a line producer for), so she sacks him off in the most camp, mortifying set of scenes (a real line, “This pier is the end of your movie, and it’s the end of ours”). Though not before Carrie murmurs, “Isn’t it kind of sweet he wanted to share his work with you?” (Ladies, who said individualism & capitalism is the death of feminism!).

But even that has propulsion of storytelling compared to *tries to read my notes written in blood* a screaming woman with a dog in a stroller falsely accusing Charlotte’s dog, Mr Burton, of assault (I did enjoy Rose’s, “Believe women, mom!” jab). A sub sub-plot made only more stupid when later it’s run directly alongside Lisa trying to get her PBS documentary on unsung Black women made (with integrity and without selling out). My lord, this show is going to have to reckon with the fact that LTW is accomplished and driven and cool as fuck and simply would not be mates with Charlotte. Or, maybe they’ll just one day do what they did with Nya (unrealistic friend of Still Not The Real Miranda) and - after Karen Pittman couldn’t return for the new series - simply never mentioned her again (in the opening episode at least).

If all that shouting leaves you a bit parched, take a walk and have a lolly with Seema and Carrie and Carrie’s ridiculous fucking hat (hey, if you ever wondered what a super-size vagina sculpted from Super Gran’s hat would look like…). It’s a very old-school Carrie and Samantha walk - apart from Seema, having begun AJLT as a formidable woman, is now a needy, simpering girlfriend (and this isn’t necessary for vulnerability. Samantha had it, but her core never changed). “I kind of demanded that he fly to New York to see me,” she says of Ravi. “I need proof that he loves me. What must it be like not to need that? You. I’m asking you. What is it like?”

Yes, she’s really asking Carrie, QUEEN OF NEED (hello, she binned Big when they were due to go off on their holidays because he wouldn’t say she was The One after six months together). And Carrie replies - like Yoda minus the wisdom and truth - “Seema, Aidan and I have been in each other’s lives for a very, very long time,” (well, technically you went out for a bit (twice), bumped into each other (twice), but otherwise had literally nowt to do with each other for two decades because you had a husband and he had a wife and kids, but do carry on, Carrie). “I mean, we know how we feel about one another now, but trust me, there was a time…”. Er, a time like five minutes ago? All those years when you said he “just wasn’t Big enough.” You can fool these newbies, Carrie! You can’t fool me! “I wish I’d known you then because this girl...” says Seema and BABY CAKES, SHE’S LYING.

And soon, as karma would have it, Carrie’s actually lying - flat on her back. The Not Metaphorical alarm is going off and running to stop it, while telling the alarm guys on the phone that her identifying code is “Carrie and Aidan” (UGH), she slips and falls, unable to get up. And who does she call to rescue her? Miranda! YES, YES, EXACTLY LIKE MIRANDA DID IN SERIES FOUR. Now, given the writers previously forgot that Harry’s mum had died, I’m not sure if this is a deliberate call-back, but my god, I squealed. Because I’m taking it as a call-back all the same. To the memorable episode where, newly-back together, Aidan is punishing Carrie - HOW’S YOUR DEFECATING DOG, AIDAN? HOW’S SHAYNA AT THE BAR? - for boning Big. But when Miranda puts her neck/back out post-shower, and calls Carrie for help, Carrie being, you know, Carrie, sends Aidan to pick up her mate who’s lying sparko and stark-bollock-naked on the bathroom floor.

This time, Carrie listens to Miranda’s tangled romantic life, chipping in with helpful banter like, “You deflowered the Virgin Mary!”, before mocking Mary for being a tourist and wanting to meet at Tavern on the Green (this is a woman who post Big divorcing Natasha arranged to meet him - prompting Miranda to be so beautifully judgemental - at THE CENTRAL PARK BOATHOUSE).

Carrie being-a-bit-of-a-dick only increases when she takes Lily to see a boy she likes rehearse for a ballet performance (while Charlotte tries to find doggy daycare for her dog and a man says no through the medium of funny noises and lord, give me strength). Anthony and his boyfriend have come along too and when he questions how long the Gigantic Baby will be away for she says, “I don’t know” and pulls a face like HIS dog has shit all over her.

“How are you gonna be in a relationship if you don’t even know when he’s coming back?” asks Anthony like a perfectly normal human being and real friend. “And if he has family problems, that’s his problem. That has nothing to do with you. And what are you supposed to do? Sit in that big castle and wait? Who are you? Friggin’ Rapunzel”.

Never mind ballet boy, let’s give him a standing ovation! Oh, apart from…

“You know what I like about ballet?” Carrie sneers. “No words.”.

YOU’RE A FUCKING WRITER, MATE.

This is the least of her/our problems, though. And now, what follows is something I must apologise for. Something I never wanted to write, always hoped I’d never have to. But in the spirit of openness and transparency, I must describe the following scene in its totality.

Ready? Then I’ll begin.

Aidan rings - rings! Lucky Carrie! - from his truck that’s parked in a field behind his house. And - lucky Carrie part 2! - he’s had three beers. He can’t have them in the house, he says. “Why?” asks Carrie. “Don’t you mean Why-att,” says Aidan. Which Carrie calls a joke even when, upon asking how his son that crashed a car at 14 high on ‘shrooms and beer is, Aidan says, “I don’t wanna waste this buzz on him.”

I’m sorry, sir? You don’t want to waste your three-beer, country-bumpkin buzz on your SON?

“I ache for you,” he says. “Can men ache?” she asks.

Oh, OK. Now I feel bad. Maybe he did call for a bit of emotional intimacy. So tortured by their time apart (just like when Big emailed those love letters of great writers every day after the wedding fiasco. The “ever mine, ever thine, ever ours”). What’s he going to say nex-

“Well, this man can. And does. No shit.”

Did he say no shi-

“I ache.”

OK. We hear you, man. Now, what is happening to your jaw? Are you…gurning?

“If I was there right now…I’d be touching you the way you like. You remember how you like me to touch you?”

Well, I remember those phone sex days with Big (also, coincidentally, when she’d just started dating Aidan) when he was in a hot tub in Napa, chomping on a cigar. Come on then, Aidan, redeem yourself. After all, you were the man who upon meeting, Carrie said was “warm, masculine, and classic American…”

“Touch yourself.”

I mean, it’s not quite Ralph Lauren/Polo Classic but…

“Go ahead. Be me.”

OK, look, I’ve tried to look past the sitting in a pick-up truck sucking on a 12-pack thing but Carrie: DON’T YOU DARE. My skin has crawled right off my bones and there’s no way on god’s green earth you’re still wearing yours.

Oh, thank Christ! We’re saved. Aidan knees the horn when trying to, you know, unleash the, you know.

“I think I may have shit my pants a little,” he says as Carrie laughs and the rest of us wonder where the fuck the Pied Piper is when you need him to dance us all off the nearest cliff.

“No, no, no, hey don’t break it,” he says. I’m sorry, break what? Our collective gag reflex? Our ability to ever desire another human being? “Don’t break the mood.” The mood? The mood of you shitting your pants?

“That’s so fucking hot,” he breathes like a dog with heatstroke even though we’re not sure what ‘that’ is.

“Come on. We can get back there,” he begs. “Can we?” laughs Carrie in a truly heroic effort not to put the phone down and set her house on fire while she’s still inside it.

“Yeah, come on, I need…I need this so fucking much,” he says before…before…oh god, no, stop it. Stop it! Bad Gigantic Baby! STOP IT RIGHT NOW! Oh, but he won’t, and now he can’t, because he’s doing it! HE’S LICKING HIS ENTIRE PALM BEFORE SLIDING IT DOWN THE FRONT OF HIS HIS TIGHTY WHITIES LIKE A BAD, BAD MAN WATCHING PORN OR A DOG CLEANING SHIT OFF ITSELF.

A dog that, with very little in the way of reciprocation from Carrie begins shouting, “Here it fucking comesss! Fuck!”.

Do men do that?

Do dogs?

Anyway.

Well.

That’s that.

It’s not so much that this scene has put me off ever having sex again. But more like I no longer see the point in television shows, men, the English language, or hands.

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Later, Carrie confesses to her friends that she faked it on the phone, saying, ‘Aidan and mine’s sex life is the most honest thing about us.” Are we to assume we’re NOT talking about when your shagged someone els-

Ok, fine! Touchy!

But the episode isn’t done without Carrie’s dick-ness putting in a repeat performance. When Anthony, head bowed, comes over at a dinner for Lisa’s husband Herbert and says, “I should never have said any of what I said”.

ER, YES YOU SHOULD, ANTHONY.

“Please don’t cut me out,” he pleads. “It took me so long to get in”. And, well, now maybe the writers are onto something. Because it’s almost like Carrie Bradshaw is…toxic. Run away, Anthony! Take the cat! You can both live in that ridiculous fucking hat!

The episode ends with Still Not The Real Miranda in Times Square telling Mary (in a Wicked t-shirt) not to leave God for her (er, she wasn’t). And Carrie admitting she faked phone sex (because apparently saying “um” counts as an orgasm in Virginia). Then, the Not Metaphorical alarm goes off. And Carrie, after trying to have phone sex with Aidan while he’s sleeping next to his son (hanging up mortified, no return call to soothe her), finds herself unable to sleep.

So, she finally does the thing she always did before. You know, back when Carrie Bradshaw had interests beyond blank postcards and owning big houses, when she had…character. She opens her laptop, and writes.

“The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into”.

And so say all of us.

And Just Like That is on Sky/NOW TV

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I found out on LinkedIn.

Fucking LinkedIn.

I can see Baz now: indignant, then laughing until his bones shake the creases out of his (always black) suit. The passing of the man in a suit who was never a guy in a suit, marked on a corporate social media network not known for its soul (sorry LinkedIn, self-awareness is a virtue).

When Barry McIlheney – Baz, Barry Mac, B Mac, Barney Tabasco – magazine publishing’s man in black, was all soul. All heart. All velocity. Yet he had died in his sleep in the early hours of Monday, at the age of 65.

It seemed…impossible.

Not the way it should have been, should be. Any of it.

“I can’t believe it,” I dashed out to the man whose post I’d stumbled on (the only redeeming feature was that it belonged to Ballymena’s Paul McNamee, editor of The Big Issue, the only man I know who’s as passionate about magazines as Barry – himself from Belfast, some 32 miles up the road - and with a soul to match). “What a man. What a force. How can that end?”.

Everyone has their own specific line to Barry, has been inching their way back along the thread this week. Editors, journalists, designers, chief execs, marketers, all speaking of when he launched their careers, offered a hand or bit of creative genius, made them laugh until everything hurt. Of what they feel they owe him.

I knew of Baz for the first decade or so of my magazine career, the towering guy who’d written for Melody Maker, edited Smash Hits, launched EMPIRE and then scaled the cliffs of management without mortally injuring his glorious character (how many can say the same…?). We met occasionally at industry events, his energy, generosity and raw charisma pulling in me and everyone else gathered around.

Then, after I moved to New York, Barry asked if I’d be interviewed on my ‘success story’ - he’d become CEO of industry body the PPA - really, loving the story of how I got my very first job (my mum cobbed a drive-through McDonalds application form at me, prompting me to call editor Phil Hilton a likely-criminal number of times, begging for a job as his PA). He invited me to be interviewed again a while later: the PPA Festival was falling during a short trip back to London, the offer of a ‘primetime’ slot and on-stage grilling by Mike Soutar, then-CEO of ShortList (which I had edited at 29).

But the thread I’ve been tracing this week, is obviously, inevitably that of EMPIRE. The magazine he launched in 1989 after a suggestion from magazine genius David Hepworth (who’d co-founded music title Q with fellow-g Mark Ellen). Barry edited it for three wild, successful years. My own stewardship as EIC of EMPIRE came in 2015, my shift some six.

Just a day after landing back from New York for the gig, Baz took me out for lunch to Balthazar in Covent Garden. This is normally when ex-editors tell you the score, often try and assert the rules as they still see them. Baz, though, simply offered support, asked what I dreamt of doing with the magazine and, of course, told me a raft of spectacular stories from his days in the chair (David Lynch agreeing to come to the EMPIRE Awards if he could smoke all the way from LA; sitting next to Quentin Tarantino at the Awards [rest of the story part redacted, part forgotten]; David Schwimmer boarding the EMPIRE boat at Cannes).

And while things had certainly changed in the twenty-odd years between our tenures – A BOAT AT CANNES, ARE YOU KIDDING – some things hadn’t.

“Our mission statement at the time,” wrote Baz for the magazine’s 400^th edition in 2022, “though we would never have called it that back then, was ‘At last, the movies get the magazine they deserve’. I like to think it was a promise we lived up to in those halcyon days of 1989, and a promise that holds true to this day."

The pledges to deliver on that promise: EMPIRE would always make the film the star; lift the velvet rope and go elbow-to-elbow with insiders, closer than anyone else to the movies as they were made; would review and rate film after film, tell you what was really worth watching. It doesn’t sound radical, but it was. A blueprint, yes, arguably laid down by Q, but with EMPIRE, naturally, a different animal was born.

Baz built the structure of our house, made it easy for me, for those who took up residence between. He’d created a magazine with the spirit, the passion, the tug in your belly when the lights go down, all laid out on the page. He filled it with easy humour, knew that film lovers could be, yeah, a laugh. Something I grappled with as EIC. Were we too earnest? Did we dial up the granular obsession and down the garrulous joy of movies? Maybe. I don’t know.

But, what I do know, revisiting Barry’s own reviews this week, is that I probably would have (erroneously) marked up a line in his 1992 critique of Glengarry Ross that actually caused me to bark like a dog upon re-reading: “What wonderful guys, what memorable shite”. (See also: “Costner is less punchable here than recent outings.” The Bodyguard; “[It] lands like some species of oversized condom.” The Blob; “Ford [is] back to attractive leading man status after the disaster that was his haircut in Presumed Innocent.” Regarding Henry.

Fuck, I thought. I should have been just a bit more Baz.

Throughout my six years, he was a constant. On hand for advice, encouragement, a rollicking good tale, an excellent lunch. He’d pop up in my inbox, “Terri White!” (always my full name) “I need a favour!”. Could I host something/judge something/bring a director or movie star along to something. I never once said no to Baz. He was the giant I stood on the shoulders of.

When we published a special issue for the 25^th anniversary of Reservoir Dogs, I handed my editor’s letter back to Baz, the-then editor. His reminisces, as always, a riot. Upon being told the director was called Quentin Tarantin, thinking: “Great. Some ridiculous-sounding movie made by some unknown bloke with an even more ridiculous name”. And then he watched it, realised it was his and the magazine’s “Year Zero”.

I’ve read the end of the letter many times since the news came (fucking LinkedIn). The last two lines forming a lump in my throat I’m struggling to shift. “We are now further away from Reservoir Dogs than Reservoir Dogs was from the first man on the moon. Just strike up those opening bars, though, of ‘Little Green Bag’…and I’m gone.”

Italics all his. Oh, Baz.

-

Barry McIlheney, Baz, Barry Mac, B Mac, Barney Tabasco – 1960-2025.

My heartfelt condolences to Lola, Frankie and Mary, who Barry spoke of often with such chest-bursting pride, and his brother Colin.

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Quiet couple of weeks, Phil…? Come on, then, how trippy has it been?

You know what, right - when we were making it, I was like, I feel we're doing something a bit different, a bit special, do you know what I mean? And I think the UK will get behind it. But not in a million years did I imagine what it's done. Not in a million years.

You must be so chuffed. The first time we spoke was for Boiling Point [the feature film] in 2021, which was a one-shot like the short before it. Why did you think a one-er would work for this story, and what was behind the narrative decision to have four self-contained episodes?

When deciding to do a one-take, it's got to fit the story and the narrative, otherwise it can become a bit of a gimmick. And so we - me and Stephen [Graham] - were in the back of a car travelling somewhere around the release of Boiling Point, and we'd been approached to potentially do a TV series in one take. [US production company] Plan B basically said, ‘Go and have a think about an idea’. So we were sat in the back of the car, and me and Ste are massive 24 Hours In Police Custody fans-

Oh my god, I was going to mention that! I thought, he’s gonna go mad, you can’t mention 24 Hours in Police Custody to a proper fucking filmmaker…

[Laughing] I love it! Me and Stephen are obsessed by it. And we were like, what if you could do something in a certain time frame - obviously, twenty-four hours is a bit too short - whereby there is a ticking clock but also, not all your questions are answered…You’re dipping the audience in for an hour, and then pulling them out again. And then the next time they're in it, you’ve jumped forward in time and they’ve got to figure out where we are and what's going on - and there are clues around but also [we’re] leaving it up to the audience’s imagination. Audiences are smart. I don't personally like to spell things out for them, and for there to be too much exposition. I think we're so used to watching things in a specific format, certainly for telly, where you know where you are and there might be twists and turn - you can cut back to the police station, then you cut forward to the court case - and it's all very easy watching, but for this we were like, we really wanna break the mould, and go on this journey. But obviously it comes with challenges. Like, what can you show in a one take? You're limited to an hour, it’s in real time. So we really had to think hard about what each hour was. And we knew we wanted to just have four windows within this time-frame over 13 months. We wanted to see Jamie's [Owen Cooper] arrest, we wanted to see what he'd potentially been arrested for - and that's 24 Hours In Police Custody, where that reference comes from - and then jump forward a couple of days and we're with his schoolmates and teachers, and her schoolmates and teachers, trying to paint a picture of where this may have sparked from, what might have happened and how it's all come about. And then the third episode, we jump forward six months, and we're now in his head, in his world, and we're getting a sense of who he is and what may have drawn him to do this. And with the final episode, we always knew we wanted to be with the parents, and [show] what the ripple effect had done to this family. And this is a family just trying to hold it together for each other but, in turn, while they're trying to hold it together for each other, they're all falling apart.

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In a one-shot, the camera’s storytelling role feels even more vital - how it moves, who and how it frames. Like episode 2 when Jade [Fatima Bojang] is kicking the shit out of Ryan [Kaine Davis] and we hold on her - her face, her rage - rather than drop to Ryan’s POV. It feels like a different role for the camera, and your DOP [Director of Photography]?

Absolutely, it's a huge challenge, you know. And it all starts with the script, and what is being said - what are the important beats that we should focus on? But also, going back to the audience, and knowing that audiences are smart and really paying attention - which is what a one-take should be doing, it should make you sit up and pay attention - myself and Matt [Matthew Lewis, DOP], we had to really figure out who we're going to hold on for those beats and why. And do we really need to see what's happening in that moment, or can we just hear it? Because there's something really powerful when you're focusing on someone's face but listening to somebody else - that is almost more powerful than seeing someone's lips and mouth move. So it was finding those moments and and also, again, being bold with it, and just saying no, I'm going to hold on this face for ten lines of dialogue, and they're not going to say anything. They're just going to be listening or, you know, Stephen's face [playing his dad, Eddie] when Jamie is being strip-searched [in episode one], we’re just going to hold on that and hear his breath. It's all about hearing his breath and really focusing on what's going on in his mind. Because we're also feeling the same thing.

Matt’s been your DOP since Boiling Point, right? Wasn’t he like 23 when you made that?

Well, he’s 28 now. Yeah, insane.

Your partnership, particularly in that pre-production process - and I’m still trying to get my head around the mechanics of it, the dialogue, the camera movements, the actor’s movements but also props, light, sound! - how did you two do it?

It’s so important that we have the locations locked in very, very early on - like, way, way earlier than you would do normally - because then we can get a map and start to read the script together. And we'll both play different characters, then stop, because there's no scenes or breaks, so we will break the script down ourselves into moments. Then we'll work on that moment, and plan it - where the camera's gonna be, where the actors are gonna be, and the movements of the actors. Where we were based in Pontefract, there’s a studio called Production Park. They haven't done much film and TV stuff before, it's mainly used for big bands to go and rehearse their European tours. So, the space is incredible and we had our offices upstairs and the studio downstairs. As the sets were being built - we built the police station set in the studio, and we also built the secure training centre for episode three in the studio - me and Matt, when the construction was finished, would go onto the set. We'd have his iPad, and we'd walk around and block it out - we just built it in moments. And this is planned way, way in advance, before any actors come near us, right? So, each episode would have a three week block: the first week would be just a cast rehearsal, so me and the cast and [writer] Jack Thorne, and Matt would be filming on his iPad. The second week, we do the tech rehearsal - everyone comes in, and now that Matt and I know where the camera is going to be, that's when we put the booms in and that's when the sound team can watch it [before] on the Friday, a dress rehearsal. And then we come in the following week and shoot it twice every day. So, yeah, really extensive planning has to be in place. Like, for example, we knew we were building the police station in Production Park, so then we had to find a house that was no more than a three-minute drive away, because we've got to drive that journey.

Did you rigidly keep to the script, or did you have to invent action to take the camera physically between places ?

The script [when] it started out, obviously Jack had come up with all these locations in his mind. And then we were like, Jack, this is not going to work - these are the logistics, and this is the map - and he would work it into the script. But in terms of the rules that we gave ourselves, where the camera is never allowed to leave a person, right? So we always have to follow somebody. And so that means crossovers, and things like that, which just keeps it moving, [plus] you always have to put your attention on something as an audience. The only time we broke that was when we fly off in episode two on a drone, and then it becomes more sort of ethereal. But then we land it, and focus back in on Stephen. And I think Jack would write things to sort of push the boundaries and go, ‘They're never going to be able to do that but I'm going to put it in anyway!’. And then I’d come back and go, ‘We found a way to jump through a window, Jack - it's going to be amazing!’. And he'd be like, ‘Oh shit, okay’, you know. The bigger things didn't really scare me, because it was more of a challenge. And Matt and I, we're like kids when it comes to things like that. We're like, right, how can we do this? But it was a real, amazing collaboration, to be honest - between everybody.

I was thinking about the lighting and the sound - the scale of that challenge alone.

Yeah, the sound team were amazing. Rob Entwistle and Kiff McManus, the two sound recorders, and their team, were just phenomenal. They did Boiling Point as well, so as soon as I knew we were going to be doing this, I immediately [knew] these guys have got to do it. Because their background is they've done big movies but they've also done [shows] like Top Gear and fast-paced documentaries. All of the actors obviously had radio mics on, and we also had two booms, so it was like a dance. A choreographed dance. And we also planted mics in the cars and [places] where a boom couldn't fit in. And, you know, we’d be rehearsing the moment and I’d come back to Rob and Kiff and [say], ‘Is that all good? Can you?’. And they were like, ‘We've got a plan. Don't worry’. And my mind would be blown. Just the enthusiasm from every single member of the team, the whole crew, was unmatched in anything that I've ever done. It wasn't a case of people being, ‘Oh, I'm not sure whether we can do that’. It would be, ‘Right, how the hell are we going to do it? Let's fucking put our heads together and come up with a plan’. And it was just electrifying, you know what I mean? My energy is always up there, and so is Matt’s, and so to have that matched by every single member was just, as I say, like nothing I've ever experienced.

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As you say, as a director you’re asking slightly different things from your crew, and your actors, too. How does it change your relationship with them?

For me, it's about giving them power to be able to speak up and say, I've got an idea or, this is not going to work or, can we try this? With the crew it was giving them that empowerment to have a voice. And I say it on day one: there's no hierarchies on my set, there's no ego, we're all in it together. We can't make this project work without every single member of the team, right? And there was actually a little moment that really sticks out to me - in episode four, there was a beat where Stephen's character gets to the till, and then we pull focus to [daughter] Lisa [Amelia Pease], who says, ‘Are you alright, dad?’. Now I said, let's focus on Lisa at a specific point, on a certain beat and we rehearsed it, and the focus puller [Sean Beasley] pulled at a different time. And I said to him, ‘I think you pulled a bit later’ - or a bit sooner, or whatever it was - and he said, ‘My instinct was to pull’. So, I said, ‘Okay, let's try it again, let's have a look’. He did it again and I was like, ‘You know what, you're absolutely bang on. That is exactly when we should do it. Your instincts were right’. And for me, I don't consider myself to have that much of an ego, so I'm not going to be like, ‘It's my idea, so it has to be the idea’. He was right, so that's what we go with. It's always the best idea wins, right? And then in terms of the cast, it's the same thing - you've got to give cast the freedom to be able to to play a little bit around the script. Jack was wonderful at that. You know, some writers are really precious about the words, and that's absolutely understandable, but in my opinion, the actor is the person who's going to bring this character to life [so] they need to be able to put their own spin on it in a certain way - without, you know, them going off and doing a soliloquy or a bloody monologue - without it being in the script. Certainly giving them the power, saying, ‘If you drop the the baton, someone's going to pick it up for you, so don't worry about it. Don't feel like, Oh, you fucked it all up for everybody. Because ultimately, the audience don't know what's coming next, right? But [it’s] just trusting each other’. And I said, ‘Look, all of you know the line, know the text, but just listen - listen to each other and be really truthful in the moment. Just be in that moment’. Because in a one take, you can't be anything else but in the moment. If you're thinking about what you're going to do next, then you might mess it up - but if you're just in the moment and present, then absolute gold will come of it.

I’ve gotta say, I’ve heard from crew who do say they love working for you. You’re from a working-class background and you didn’t go to film school - do you think that gives you a different sensibility? Makes you want to create something different or do it in a different way?

Yeah, I think so. For a long time, in the back of my mind, I was like, I'm not meant to be here. I'm really not meant to be here. And someone's going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to to get back to where you belong type thing. And I still have that, don't get me wrong, but I feel now that there are rules that have been put in place, but rules are there to be broken. And I'm smashing through them because at the minute, my mindset is like, what have I got to lose? You know what I mean? Like, okay, let me just go for it, see what happens. I think because I didn't train as a director, didn't go to film school or anything like that, I understand it needs to feel really real and believable and I think it's just an instinctive thing for me. Every job that I do, I always say I want someone to come and shadow me, someone different every week for the whole shoot. And it doesn't have to be someone who goes to film school, it could be someone who just wants to get into it, and has never been on a set before - come and hang out and see how it works. But if you're in film school, it's that as well, because they can teach you so much but you cannot beat being on a live set. Just come at it your own way, just try it. There's no set way of doing things. And for me, back in the day when I was acting, I would put directors on this sort of pedestal, and be like, they are someone, I would never be able to do that because I've not been educated in the way that they have. Or, you know, I didn't go to film school, I'm just some kid from Huyton in Liverpool, there's no way I'll ever be able to do that. And now: there absolutely is, and anyone can do it, anyone. [I know] how important it is to believe in yourself.

And how important are your partnerships and collaborations? Especially with other working-class people? On this you worked with [iconic indie production company] Warp Films and producer Mark Herbert; plus Matriarch, Hannah Walters’ and Stephen Graham’s production company.

I mean, I've been friends with Stephen for over twenty years, and we're like brothers, and Hannah is like my big sister. I just love them to bits. And we're going to work together forever. But they are paving the way. And Mark Herbert and Warp Films - from when I first was starting out, I remember thinking, ‘They're my people. They're a bit of me’. And then I met Mark a few years ago for the first time, in Manchester, in a cafe, and I was just like, Oh my God, he's just normal. It’s Warp Films, who’ve done some of the best films, in my opinion, you know, ever. And he's just sound! He's a working-class, sound, sound fella. And we got on like a house on fire. Again, I would consider Mark a brother now. And so it's just finding your people. We just all get each other, and I think we've come up the same way - a similar way, certainly - and we've fought for it, and we still are, you know?

One last question, which is kind of related, and kind of not. I thought it was genius to make the family a normal, likely lower-middle-class family. There’s none of the usual tropes about ‘benefits culture’, poverty, boys raised by single mothers. It could be any family, he’s a ‘normal’ boy in a normal school. How important was that in the framing of the story?

Incredibly important. That was one of the first things that we spoke about on that car journey, me and Stephen. We didn't want this to be [a situation where] you immediately blame the parents. Because that's what we do, that's what society makes us do. You blame the parents. Jamie didn't come from a dysfunctional family, his dad wasn't physically abusive to him, his mum's not an alcoholic or a drug addict or whatever. I mean, they're a hard-working family, like lots and lots and lots of people can relate to that. And the idea was that it’s a ‘why done it’, but also, ‘this could be my kid, this could happen to me, I could be that parent’. You know, Eddie's a hard working man, he's got his own business; [Mum] Manda [Christine Tremarco] we always imagine works as a manager at John Lewis; the daughter goes to college, and she's incredibly smart - and Jamie is as well. [But] he's gone down some dark, dark holes, and been influenced. And so it was very important that that was the narrative we were telling.

We’re out of time - massive congratulations, again.

Thanks, mate. It's mad, honestly. But you know, I'm over the moon. The fact that we've got a conversation started - now, you know, in fucking Parliament! - and we're talking about showing it in schools. And that's the biggest win for me. Everything else that comes with it is a bonus, and it's a beautiful thing to feel and see and and watch it thrive. You know when it came out, we were like, we're sending our baby off to college! Let’s hope that people like her and she gets on with people.

People love her…

Yeah. It’s amazing.

Adolescence is on Netflix

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Of late, I’ve been drowning, arms wide open, in a sea of wild, infuriating, and devastating documentaries. My bangers watchlist growing so rapidly that me and my mate Caz are working out how I can teleport to beneath her settee, popping up to blurt out a recommendation when she sits down of an evening. In the absence of that, there’s this: a list of opinion-heavy, spoiler-free reviews and recommendations. The best (relatively) new documentaries I’ve watched (relatively) recently, including a death penalty documentary that has barged its way onto the Greatest Ever list.

I’ve linked to where to watch in the UK and as there are quite a few of you in the US, I’ve included those details where applicable. Plus, I’ve listed three should-skip docs - AKA Save Your Eyeballs - not because I’m a hater (and I’m always cognisant of people working their arse off on them) but because, as we used to say on Pilot TV, you can’t watch everything. So let me waste my time so you don’t have to. And a final PSA for paid subscribers: I’m six-weeks deep into work on a greatest documentaries of all time mega watchlist - taking in all imaginable sub-genres - and that will be with you soon.

Right.

READY?

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I AM READY, WARDEN

Inmate #99954 stares down the barrel and says, “If you are seeing this then obviously the state of Texas has murdered me.” These words open I Am Ready, Warden - Smriti Mundhra’s film documenting the final six days in the life of John Henry Ramirez, the ex-Marine and father sentenced to death for the 2004 murder of convenience store worker and father (of nine) Pablo Castro. And while it only has a run time of thirty-four minutes, and there’s no traditional jeopardy (nope, no eleventh-hour possibility of the Governor calling), the film has an extraordinary velocity due to the unstoppable freight train of his certain execution, plus the tugging tragedy of two fathers and their sons. It’s obviously haunting to watch a man you know is dead alive on screen: hearing the timbre and tenor of Ramirez’s words, seeing the tears shed, the folding of his jaw with emotion. But it’s the sheer restraint in the filmmaking, and old-school commitment to documenting with patience - particularly when capturing Ramirez’s son saying goodbye and the extraordinary response of the victim’s son after Ramirez has been executed - that truly sets this (just nominated for an Oscar) film apart. It’s absolutely up there with Fourteen Days in May and Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss.

Watch on Paramount+ via Prime Video in the UK & Paramount+ in the US

MURDER ON TRIAL: GIRL IN THE RIVER

In the age of too-often-sensationalist true crime, there’s something oddly reassuring in the approach of Murder Trial, the BBC series following a case as it unfurls in the Scottish High Courts, intercut with largely factual and expositional interviews. The most recent two-parter covers the previously cold case of murdered 14-year-old schoolgirl Caroline Glachan, prosecuted by the now familiar Alex Prentice KC (who, by the way, I have weirdly come to trust more than any man I know). Some of the testimony is hard to follow, many of the witnesses cannot be shown, there’s none of the ‘pull you in by the throat within the first minute and a half’ stuff and my god, who cares. Patience is a virtue (for real).

Watch on iPlayer

ANATOMY OF LIES

My jaw first hung wide and low when Vanity Fair published this explosive two-part report on the wild (wild) lies of Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth ‘Finchy’ Finch in 2022. The journalist Evgenia Peretz now teaming up with filmmaker husband (David Schisgall) to make this limited series which (fair play) is not just a screen re-treading of the original magazine story, but a more substantive look at the human cost of Finchy’s constructed life. Those paying it primarily: ex-wife Jennifer Beyer and her (spectacular) kids, who granted deep access for this film. And it’s the treatment of this already-fragile family that propels this story from one that’s wild to entirely unconscionable. And, well, you may never trust a writer again. Hell, I’m not sure I trust myself anymore. You shouldn’t either. DON’T LOOK AT ME.

Watch on Sky/NOW in the UK & Peacock in the US

BOYZONE: NO MATTER WHAT

Okay, sure, news of this series was met with half an eye-roll (by me). I’d watched (and recommended) the very good BBC boyband series last year and well, did we need another look at how thrilling but personhood-rinsing it was to be a boy singing in a group in the 90s and Noughties? Turns out that yes, yes we absofuckinglutely did. And no, I did not have ‘That Boyzone documentary will shred your black heart and despatch the strips down into the bowels of hell to serve as replacements for Louis Walsh’s long-destroyed coattails’ on my 2025 bingo card but hey, life is a rollercoaster, you’ve just gotta ride it. I promised you no spoilers up top so I’ll simply say: Louis Walsh (boo!), Steveo (*puts a window through on his behalf*), Stevo (sob!), Shane and Keith (lovely lads, so they are), Ronan (boo! Yay! I’m so confused! But also why were you a producer DO YOU NEVER LEARNNNNN RONAN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD), Mikey Graham (my heart!). And man, I love a documentary that has the balls to leave you with a pile of unresolved issues on screen and feelings off (unless they’re setting you up for a hypothetical second series and then it’s war. Unless I then like the second series, obviously. Look, I’m a complicated woman). Anyway, sorry, where was I…Just watch it (don't fight it, fight it, fight it, na, na, na, na, na).

Watch on Sky/NOW

AVICII: I’M TIM

So, I know very little of Avicii, I know even less about EDM (um, beep beep?). But this film is a fascinating examination of the danger present when creativity and hardcore commercialism collide, and a deeply human (and humane) look at a son and friend inside one of the world’s biggest artists and most prodigious producers. It’s the story of Tim Bergling, that same son and friend who took his own life in 2018. It’s not the first Avicii documentary but arguably it’s the first to prioritise Tim - evidenced by the rare cooperation of his family - and one that tries to give him voice through never-before-seen personal footage and contributions from his (still clearly undone) parents. Truthfully, I just wanted to protect him and his talents from the awful awful world.

Watch on Netflix

JERRY SPRINGER: FIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

If you’re concerned that shows like Jerry Springer exploited (working-class, marginalised) people (“Woman in labour confronts mistress!”, “I’m a 14-Year-Old Prostitute!”, “Klanfrontation!”) and caused long-term harm with little conscience or care, then this show will confirm your concern as cold hard fact. Talking about cold and hard, the documentary features interviews with producers and bookers who still, years on - beyond flying weaves and nails - appear either unable to understand the consequences of what they created, or are just entirely unrepentant. And while it’s easy to dismiss this as a cultural horror relegated to the 90s, here’s 45,000 words from me on how the worst of contemporary true crime is exploitation of those same people in a fancier frock. Does any of this mean you shouldn’t watch it? Absolutely not. And much like Channel 4’s Jeremy Kyle documentary, this two-parter is most powerful when revealing the disturbing detail of behind-the-scenes manipulation and the impact on a single human life.

Watch on Netflix

ACCUSED: THE FAKE GROOMING SCANDAL

I’ve always struggled to see how you could make a documentary from the Ellie Williams case (the Barrow woman convicted of perverting the course of justice after falsely accusing local men of grooming, rape and torture) that wasn’t sensationalist or deeply irresponsible - but this might actually be it. Largely as the series doesn’t attempt to land easy answers or even easy narratives, and as the three episodes are built around interviews with the men she victimised and their accounts of exactly how their lives were - are still - ruined. It is, in truth, a story of racism and xenophobia, of trauma, of those left behind, the communities used as playthings by the right while those who are meant to represent us look away.

Watch on Channel 4

LIFE AND DEATH ROW

The fourth series of this impeccably-made documentary series just dropped and it’s as knotty and head-shredding as ever. Since starting in 2014, Life and Death Row has showed the death penalty - the lives ended to receive it, those on the line as it’s carried out - from every perspective. The prisoners, the victims, prosecutors, spiritual advisers, the lawyers, the families of the victims, politicians, law enforcement and the families of the convicted. Each case, each story, building a tapestry of the death penalty, systemic flaws and all. Each case asking difficult questions on justice, revenge, and redemption. John Henry Ramirez was actually featured in Series 3, four years before he was eventually put to death - an episode which now serves as a prologue of sorts to I Am Ready, Warden.

Watch on iPlayer in the UK & on BBC World in the US

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PLUS! Save Your Eyeballs (Three to skip, with love…)

1/An Update On Our Family (Sky Documentaries/NOW)

A complex adoption/family-vlogging story that on screen suffers narratively through lack of access, relying on a (super charming and compelling but random) YouTube viewer to map out events.

2/Face to Face With Scott Petersen (Sky Documentaries/NOW)

This is not the first documentary to employ bias as a narrative device (or one essentially seeking to litigate), but given that Lacey Peterson and her unborn son were brutally murdered and disposed of, here it’s in particularly bad taste. There’s (obviously) absolutely a way to interrogate convictions with integrity (and balance), but this ain’t it.

3/Britain’s Benefits Scandal (Channel 4)

I take back almost all of what I said previously when it comes to this film. I am 100% a hater (as I said here).

Comment and tell me the recent docs I’ve missed!

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Even when I watched the advert - or as a call it, a provocation - a man hopping on his skateboard then talking about how much money he receives in benefits the next. Even when the tone sure did sound like patronisation dressed up in concern’s dirty knickers. Still. I held my water. My tongue. Their knicker elastic.

Hey, I thought, it’s Dispatches! Channel 4! The very programme, channel, that three years ago worked with Disability News Service - and a disabled journalist, Richard Butkins - to expose the ‘cruel and inhumane system’ linked to the deaths of those in receipt of benefits. Had so much really changed in the last three years? Fuck, yes! The pretence is over. The right-wing is on the rise. Social and economic justice is for losers and *checks my in-law’s newspaper* communists. And as a media, a country, we’re back to shaming and demonising the vulnerable with gusto.

@c4news7% of the UK’s working age population is claiming long term sickness benefits - costing the taxpayer £48 billion - and the numbers are quickly rising. For Channel 4 Dispatches, Fraser Nelson investigates why this is one of the greatest challenges the new Labour government faces. Watch Britain’s Benefits Scandal: Dispatches 8pm on 2 December on Channel 4 and www.channel4.com #Benefits #WelfareSystem #DWP #C4Dispatches

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Still, I dutifully sat down to watch. “Across the UK,” begins Nelson, sorrowfully. “A crisis is building that affects us all.” Golly! A crisis? In the benefits system? Oh, he must be talking about the 109 kids being pushed - strategically, sadistically - into poverty every day by the two-child limit! Or maybe one of its many brutal side-effects? You know, interfering with a woman’s right to choose (freely), the yep-this-is-definitely-fine ‘rape exception’, the rape exception to the rape exception (women raped by the partner they live with - a statistical probability - getting nowt. That’ll learn them!). None of those? Hmm…

Oooh, oooh, the unpaid carers benefits scandal! You know, those DWP overpayments that have left hundreds of thousands in horrific debt and others in terror, facing a stretch. Nope? OK, go on then, Frase (can I call you Frase?) - we’re all ears.

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“More than 3m people are now on long-term sickness benefits, up by about a MILLION in just five years,” he says in an accent hailing from (gosh, hope I’m saying this right!), RicherthangodLand. “And these figures are set to get far worse.” Cut to the woman who puts the GET TO WORK into Work & Pensions, Liz Kendall: “We are not going to get Britain growing again until we get Britain working again.” Cut to the man who skateboards while wearing a Berghaus hat (nice touch, team), Michael: “I’m getting like thirteen to fourteen hundred pounds a month, and there’s people out there working and they’re not even earning that.”

That sound you can hear is the right-wing press choking on their Beaujolais. And they’ll need the Heimlich after a chap from the Iain-Duncan-Smith-co-founded Centre for Social Justice says, “It is frankly bankrupting the country”. I’m sorry, THIS is what’s bankrupting the country??

Anyway, “900,000 people” are set to pile in on long-term sickness “by the next election,” exclaims our presenter. Eugh, not more sick people! But hey, Frase, what about the nigh-on 700,000 kids set to be hit by the two-child limit - aka the single biggest driver of child poverty - by the end of next parliament, too? (Woo! Poverty and reduced life expectancies for everyone! YOU get a life on low-income! YOU get a life on a low-income!). Frase can’t hear me do my best Oprah though, as he’s telling us, “I’ve been investigating this for years. I think this is the greatest challenge the new government faces”. (It isn’t). “As a journalist…” he frowns now in slow motion, his eyebrows like two caterpillars moonwalking. “What I can’t work out is how such a huge scandal is going almost completely unnoticed,”. SAY WHAT NOW, BABE? Do you mean “almost completely unnoticed” like this? Or like this? Like this? Like this? Like this? Or like this? Or this? How about like this!

Hush now! He’s not done. “When unemployment hit three million under Margaret Thatcher, there was outrage but when the number on sickness benefits hits three million almost nobody seems to ask why…” Sorry to interrupt (again) but it’s kinda-like they’re not remotely the same thing! Well, at least he’s asked that all-important question in documentary-making: WHY. So sorry, you were saying - “…how on earth we got to this stage, or what life is actually like for those caught in the system.” To be fair, it’s a bloody tightrope, straddling (and balancing) shame and patronisation, but I’d give this a solid 101 out of 10.

And with that, Frase leaves London to meet some actual real-life human people who live in NOT LONDON. He and his puffer jacket arrive in Boston - where the numbers on long-term sickness benefits have doubled in five years - and pitches up at a church “giving out free lunches twice a week”. It’s here (just like God intended) that we’re treated to a quick-fire round of case studies. A 37-year-old security worker who was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid and referred for help, that he’s still not received, a year ago (“A year??” mouths a man seemingly unfamiliar with the NHS or its waiting lists). A software architect with bipolar disorder, anxiety and severe depression. A SEND worker with PTSD.

These human beings illustrate this point: 69% of those who apply for sickness benefits mention mental health and, says our intrepid reporter, “Instead of being given the help they need to get back into work, they end up sucked into a benefits system from which they’re unlikely to ever emerge.” Cool, so now for the stats and data to show that, the unearthing of the failures and hey, what about those NHS waiting lists he jus…What’s that? No? Oh, OK (and Oh, PS: ADHD is not a mental health condition). We haven’t got time for that ‘help’ chat now though, guys. Because to understand the cost of this ‘crisis’ to the economy, we have to go listen to employers slag people off!

Still in Boston, a company is “crying out” for workers. Well, a worker - a trainee metal worker starting on 26k/year. “We pay above the national wage, so I’m not really sure what’s putting them off - maybe because they get more on benefits,” they say. Whoa! Do they? Oh, there’s more, apparently someone came in for a trial day and “a waste of time he was.” (You’re not sure what’s putting them off…?). But there’s that punchy claim. The one that’s really the heart of this programme: why would anyone bother working when they can go on the sick (not always for real) and make more money? (The Guardian’s Frances Ryan is very good on this and, well, all of it here).

So, that big claim. Is it, what’s the word again…true? “Long-term sickness benefit in itself doesn’t pay more,” admits Frase. “But it usually comes with additional benefits.” Like? That’s for them to know and us not to find out apparently, but their unspecified “calculations” puts an unspecified “package” for a single person at £24k/year. So, not more. Even when all those benefits they don’t speak of are heaped on top. Wait, though! Liz Kendall’s back to put the SERIOUSLY GET TO WORK into Work & Pensions: “Many people are working with a health condition. I think many more could,” she says, without sharing any data on the “many more”, the methodology used to identify them, adding “…with the right help and support,” because, come on now, she is on the *checks my in-law’s newspaper, checks again* left! Anyway, we haven’t got time to dilly-dally on details - we’ve got a broken system to interrogate.

And who better to play bad cop than Conservative MP Mel Stride, who’ll go on to call this entire shebang a much-needed “grown-up conversation” (and yes, “grown-up conversation” is Latin for “new ways to tighten the thumb-screws”), but right now he wants to drop a truth bomb on sick/fit notes. They are, he informs us, handed out by doctors in 94% of all cases. “[potential claimants] are given a note saying, ‘You are not capable of any work whatsoever!’ And they drift further along the benefits system until they’re in this incapacity benefit cohort where they’re basically left alone.” Are they? What, forever? Not now with the questions, Terri! Mel Stride wants to talk about a (hypothetical) 18-year-old with a mental health condition, landing on long-term benefits and never getting off. This, he says with the emotion of Pre-Real-Boy Pinocchio, is “a real, full-life tragedy.” Personally, I think (not-hypothetical) babies in our most deprived areas DYING without living owt close to a full life is an Actual Tragedy but potato/potato!

Me and Frase might be on common ground, though. He and his wheely-suitcase are in Not London to talk to more real-life human beings - and specifically, My Not London! “I’ve come to Manchester,” he says. “A booming city trying to fill 20,000 job vacancies”. Meet Anthony, who lives in Sal- wait, he’s actually come to SALFORD. “A booming city” or a (cracking) area high in deprivation? Hey, it’s all NORTH (of t’Garrick Club), right? Anthony has been out of work “for years”, gets (not-even) £100 a week “unemployment” but now, sick-note in hand, he’s hoping for a successful sickness benefits application (doubling his entitlement).

What is clear (more by accident than design - this is the Make Awful People Angry case study), is Anthony’s heartbreak. “I’ve had like six, seven cans this morning, before I even function,” he says of his alcohol dependency, anxiety and depression. He tells us that he’s lost him mum and his siblings in the last few years. “Some days I don’t get out of bed, some days I can’t be arsed with the world. I’d rather go and get a can, crack it and get back in bed.” Helping him, Dave at the Citizen’s Advice (“there’s only you I trust”), who reckons reckons he has “a reasonable chance of succeeding” in the highest group. “He’ll get the money, but will he get the help he needs?” asks Frase. OK, here we go, now we’ll get into the help available, the failings. Right? because, you’re really worried about these people, right? Hello? Guys?

Well, we haven’t got time for all of that either, because CSJ guy is here! “For some, they will be completely incapable of working,” he says. “For others, actually work may be the best thing for them”. I assume someone told him he was talking about/to children, not actual adult human beings. Easy mistake! But Frase is becoming more and more shocked, specifically at the “sheer number” of young people on long-term sickness. It’s “astounding,” he says. “A staggering waste of young life.” Mate, I feel you. I simply cannot fathom why or how these children of austerity - raised in a country that saw its early years support and targeted intervention decimated, has seen levels of child poverty (that big old driver of physical and mental illness) spike - could possibly be sicker? Thank god we didn’t have a pandemic to boot!

Frase skips across to Keighley so he can hang around a run-down playground with 30-year-old Amy and her child. A single mum who wanted to be a barrister but broke her pelvis, underwent surgery and now uses a walking stick. “I am in pain all day, every day,” she says, before sharing that she suffers from C-PTSD, anxiety and depression. “You look healthy, you’re very articulate,” says Frase in disbelief to the woman who just said she’s in pain all day, every day. “You can imagine somebody looking at you and saying, ‘Here’s someone who seems perfectly well to me. She doesn’t look like she’s long-term sick’.” Guys, GUYS, hang on! What if you could look fine and still be…ill or disabled. Speak coherently too! Wouldn’t that be WILD? Amy (fair fucks to her) simply says, “I use a walking stick for a reason”. But soon she’s crying while speak to the difficulties of finding a job she can actually do and do consistently (and what’s at stake for her, as a single parent). Apparently she’d need to earn 35k/year to match her benefits, and while workings are not shown, this becomes the line the media runs with, cobs at all claimants.

Do They Really Look Ill Though continues with Shane, a Brummie window-cleaner on “basic benefits" who “tops up” with part-time work, has knee and back problems, plus mental-health issues. And I’m sure filmmakers aren’t suggest owt at all by shooting him cleaning windows while complaining that he didn’t land full sickness.

And we’re firmly back on the mental health beat as Frase interviews Dr Lucy Johnstone, who says mental health isn’t getting worse (“I don’t see these problems as best understood as being some kind of medical illness”), that we are not sicker, but unhappier. Who is bang on when pointing to wider societal factors in improving mental health (access to decent housing and child care). This is the closest we get to recognition of austerity’s consequences, the same ones promised by today’s deprivation (on tomorrow’s generation - you know, those future numbers you’re so worried about?).

But this is all far too much sense, because now it’s time to suggest It’s Maybe All A Con (come on, guys - don’t be sensitive. Not all of you! Just some of you! Just some of you that could be all of you!), and in one of the more depressing moments, that case is made by a nurse and one-time DWP assessor. Who talks about a system open to abuse, describes “sickfluencers” she’s seen online who lay out how to get full benefits. I mean, given prior links investigated between DWP processes/systems and mental and emotional distress, any help is good, right? “It’s down to the integrity of that person,” she says, “And sadly, my opinion is that not everyone that is claiming, is quite telling the truth.”

If you’re suicidal - or claim to be - you apparently go straight into the top group. Now, I assume facts on suicidal people exaggerating/faking suicidality are…light. But hey, you know what people need, Dispatches? As they stand on the cliff edge of their own existence? People wondering if they’re just taking the piss!

Frase has another burning issue on his hands though - what happens when those on long-term benefits try to “escape the system”. We’re back with Michael who we now discover (late in the day), is homeless, previously heard voices, self-medicating to quieten them. But there’s news - he hasn’t shown up for his first day at college (for plastering) after apparently being told he’d “lose” his benefits.

“Did you think about taking the hit, about seeing if you could just go without the benefits, hoping that within six months, a year, you might be in a better place?” Frase asks a man who would then have £300 a month to live on and Frase, baby, could you live on £300 a month? Where would you live? How would you eat? Get the bus? Buy shampoo? The Beaujolais your people choke on? Taking the hit, seeing if you could go without benefits. THEY AREN’T INDEPENDENTLY WEALTHY OR SAT ON AN INHERITANCE OR FROM A WOMB BUILT OF GOLD. My god, man.

And now: the pièce de résistance. Someone who shows “how deep the rot has set in”. Gavin. A taxi driver for over 30 years who had open heart surgery and needed sickness benefits. Look, here he is washing his cab, here he is driving it. See, this guy is WORTH SOMETHING. He’s a grafter! He’s the deserving sick! Especially as he called the DWP three years ago to tell them to stop giving him money and they simply wouldn’t. Liz Kendall when she hears this, rolls her eyes and says like a woman who hasn’t got a child poverty strategy to urgently create, “Give me his number and I’ll sort it!”.

On which point, the conclusion: the numbers of long-term sick will reach over 4 million by the time of the next election, apparently. When, BTW, it still won’t touch the number of kids - some of the most vulnerable in our society, most in need of care and protection - in poverty (4.3million today and growing day on day), without food, without beds, their lives literally shortening. But, says Frase. “This can’t wait.”

So, truly: what was it all for? To soften the ground, get the public furious and on side before what many fear will be a brutal health and disability benefits Green Paper in the Spring? Quite possibly. To unleash journalists/other newspapers in a state of frenzy? Perhaps (The Daily Star: “Britain has become a nation of benefit cheats thanks to the rise of online “sickfluencers” The Sun: “Does the government have the stomach to fix Britain’s addiction to sickness benefits?“). A new but old cause, a crusade for the media class - you know, those almost-entirely from a professional/upper-middle-class, almost-entirely based in London, almost-entirely without chronic illness or disability, who wouldn’t know the word intersection if they fell over it, and count ‘scratchy sheets at boarding school’ as ‘lived experience’.

The ‘scandal’? That much of the political and media class - who really do, er, come together in this doc - are relatively relaxed about our poorest kids (and their parents) sinking into life-changing, life-limiting, life-ending poverty. That Britain’s benefits system is increasingly-designed to push people into it, NOT save them from it. That universal credit makes the disabled poorer. That child poverty is higher in households where a member has a disability. That benefits are needed because work is too-often low-paid, insecure and not the claimed-answer (69% of children in poverty live in a working household).

Needless to say, I’m not the only one who had a strong reaction. Channel 4 responded to criticisms with a statement: "Dispatches is a highly respected brand with journalistic integrity that has a reputation for tackling difficult subject matter. The film was based on deep and meticulous research, but the story was told through those affected. We wanted to give voice to claimants, place them at the centre of the film, as they are too often erased from the debate. This programme has created an important conversation and highlights the important issues that the Benefit System is facing. "

Man, the phrase “gaslighting” is overused and pretty much redundant and why do people even use it and CHRIST, THE GASLIGHTING. The very conceit that they’re genuinely centring the voices of ‘claimants’ in an effort to arrest their erasure. If I drank Beaujolais I’d be spitting it up the walls right now. (You might fancy contrasting Channel 4’s statement with the media rounds in which the ‘you earn more on benefits than working’ and ‘you just get signed off forever’ lines are bandied around, mental health is questioned, where Frase and Julia Hartley-Brewer discuss how people who don’t like the documentary (like me presumably) patronise the working-class, don’t understand them. How Frase is finally giving them a voice! Chufty badge for Frase! (What would I, a working-class woman in Oldham, know about the working-class and their communities??).

Well, this is what I do know. This is why people so often don’t trust journalists. This is what makes it harder for people to document with true empathy. This is why lived experience matters all around the camera. This is not how you frame, and lens, the stories of others. Represent communities. Build authentic narratives. Tell real stories. Tell the truth of what’s going on in our country today. And without that: truly, what the fuck is it all for?

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OI OI! WATCH IT OF THE WEEK

1)Your New Italian Crime Drama Obsession//Dostoevsky (Sunday)

What’s that? A messed-up cop chases down a killer in one of this year’s darkest shows? Ding! It’s what now? Italian? Ding ding ding ding jackpot! Truthfully, I could only ever be this gleeful about something so entirely committed to documenting the suffering it takes to be human (and the particular suffering it takes to be a human hunter of evil). On which point: episode one of Dostoevsky (Gomorrah’s third-cousin twice removed, if you will) opens with Detective (and Dad) Enzo Vitello (Filippo Timi) on the floor, pills scattered, narrating his suicide note. He’s saved by a call informing him of yet another murder victim (and a stomach-flipping vomit-sesh) and…we’re off! Safe in the hands of the D’Innocenzo Brothers (Boys Cry, Bad Tales) who more than know their way around cinematic telly and gritty trope-rejecting crime dramas. It’s beautiful, brutal stuff about obsession, loss and what keeping a soul costs. Watch it and wail.

Watch the first two episodes of Dostoevsky on Sky Atlantic, Sunday 8th Dec at 10pm

2)A New Horror Show to Stream//The Creep Tapes (available now)

If you thought ‘found footage’ was a noughties horror storytelling device unlikely to be resurrected, never mind given new life in episodic television…. surprise! Though The Creep Tapes - the series in question created by writer/director Patrick Brice and writer/actor Mark Duplass (The Morning Show’s manic producer Chip) - began life nigh-on a decade ago with feature film Creep (and Creep 2). And now, the meta-ate-meta-and then-had-a-meta-baby premise - serial killer Josef/Peachfuzz (Duplass) murders videographers on camera - has spawned this anthology of sorts constructed, like the films, from found footage videotapes, each episode the story of a different victim. Reviews - that are so far, shall we say, polarised - have criticised both the lack of character development in his victims, and lack of female characters. I mean, a)it’s not like we have a dearth of woman getting slaughtered on screen, lads and b)surely the brutal truth about serial killers is that they so often know nowt about their victims, choose them for broad or banal reasons that terrify precisely because they’re random. Does it all land? No. Are there flashes of kinda-genius? Yes. Did I stare transfixed at the telly as each episode rolled into another? I’m still there. It’s funny, trippy, weird, really stupid, really really awkward and still, crucially, genuinely scary (jump scares should never come that easy) - largely down to Duplass, an insane gift of a man/actor. One small disclaimer: the only episode not available on viewing was the final one about, yes, a woman. If they make everything I’ve said before a lie then I can only pledge to pull on my own wolf mask and go hunting (joking! Am I!).

Episodes 1-5 of The Creep Tapes are on Shudder now (available for £4.99/month after a 7-day free trial on Prime Video)

3)The Film That Declares Christmas Open*//Die Hard (Saturday)

*Or at least that festive argument open. You know…Of course it’s a Christmas movie! Of course it fucking isn’t! Frankly, who cares you absolute clowns! (Said with love, I’m pretty sure I commissioned a story on exactly this when EIC of EMPIRE. Sorry everyone). But, come on now. Bruce Willis at his most charming and flawed; Alan Rickman turning out an exquisite Hans Gruber (in his feature film debut. Debut! WTF!); the kind of tight, blood-pounding, fierce action that reminds you what action can do but rarely does…What more do you people want at any time of year? Oh, you want a viewing guide from Steven De Souza, John McTiernan and Jeb Stuart? Well, James Dyer and EMPIRE have you covered.

Watch Die Hard on Film4 on Saturday 7th Dec at 9pm

4)The Film That Should Declare Christmas Open*//Sleepless in Seattle (Sunday)

*OK, ignore everything I just said because the only acceptable film for application of this argument is Sleepless in Seattle. Yeah, yeah, there’s also Valentine’s Day and New Year in there, but the single most adorable moment in this film - and in fact any film from the 90s - is Meg Ryan (Annie Reed), driving home for Christmas, singing “Horses! Horses! Horses! Horses!” right before she tunes in to hear widowed Sam (Tom Hanks) and his precocious child Jonah (Ross Malinger) spill their guts on late-night radio. And hey, if you happen to be in my orbit around new year/the most existential time of the year, you might even catch my weepy THIS is romance in movies! He just held her hand! It was… magic! performance/sob session. God, I miss Nora Ephron. God, I miss romance films. God, I miss Meg Ryan. God I miss Meg Ryan being in romance films written and directed by Nora Ephron. (And yes, of course it’s a Christmas movie).

Watch Sleepless in Seattle on Film4, Sunday 8th Dec at 6:55pm

5)The Talent Competition We Need//Portrait Artist of the Year (Wednesday)

I’m about four years deep into my unexpected (and uncharacteristic) Portrait Artist of the Year fixation (briefly: amateur and professional artists create live portraits, in four hours, of well-known sitters). If early episodes of X Factor now feel like lemon juice in your eyeball, Portrait Artist is a warm bath before flannel pyjamas fresh off the radiator. Tonight is the final, the clutch of remaining artists competing to win the title plus a £10k commission to whip up a portrait of Lorraine Kelly. Their sitters: actors Andy Serkis and Lorraine Ashbourne who, HOLD THE PHONE, are married. Did we know this? Why didn’t I know this! Sherwood, Alma’s Not Normal, The Selfish Giant Lorraine Ashbourne! Do you think they’d let me move in? Just for a bit. Just to sit near her. No? Maybe? Fine. If you’ve missed out, all previous episodes are on Sky and NOW.

Watch the Portrait Artist of the Year final on Sky Arts, Wednesday 11th Dec at 8pm. The winner’s episode follows at 9pm

6)A Big Screen Belter//Queer (Friday)

Daniel Craig and poetry make me nervous (I blame his turn as Ted Hughes in 2003’s Sylvia), so I can’t say it wasn’t like the local fire station on bonfire night in my head when I heard William S. Burroughs, and Luca Guadagnino. And well, it just shows what I know (nowt as Ted would have said) because Craig as Bill Lee (a thinly-veiled Burroughs in the autobiographical novel adapted here by Justin Kuritzkes) is utterly compelling; searching and sensual. Guadagnino himself searches out a more direct frame - vital when the frustrations and disappointments of desire are present - than in Call Me By Your Name, though the purple blossom pull us back to the fruit trees in Lombardy, the fuzz of ripe peaches heavy on the branch.

Queer (MUBI) arrives in cinemas on Friday 13th Dec. Check here for screenings

RANDOM SORT

7)A Thoughtful Howl Of A Documentary//LISTEN

This 2023 investigation into the murder of Utah college athlete Lauren McCluskey at the hands of her ex-boyfriend (and the failures that led there) remains one of the most powerful, most enraging documentaries I’ve seen on violence against women and girls. The ESPN film - led and built by journalists over four years - documents the preventable path through evidence, and interviews with Lauren’s family and friends, a campus police offer, parole agent and state Attorney General. But what truly makes this film so compelling is the deep care and time spent introducing us to Lauren, the girl, emerging woman, not just the victim - and it’s unsurprising that director Nicole Noren spoke to being a survivor of intimate partner violence herself. Six years on, some things have changed, but so much (most) hasn’t. This rallying cry still demands to be heard (and watched).

Watch LISTEN on ESPN’s YouTube channel now

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Oh, and one last vital PSA before I depart (to finish an angry essay for you lucky buggers), The Shield has just recently pitched up on Prime Video. ENJOY.

Did I miss summat this week? Do you have your own Rare Sort you think I should consider/watch? Tell me in the comments! Was this handy? Share it! But most importantly: read, watch, enjoy.

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OI OI! WATCH IT OF THE WEEK

1)New Film Friday//Your Monster

What happens when the game isn’t banishing your childhood monster, but your childhood monster getting shot of you? The latest low-point for Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera) in Caroline Lindy’s sweet and savage romcom, Your Monster. The musical theatre actress diagnosed with cancer, dumped by her dickhead director boyfriend and losing the role she helped him create, when Monster (Tommy Dewey) emerges from the closet to help her get a grip (once he’d stopped trying to run her out of town). A cipher for Laura’s repressed rage? Yes! A reveal of who the real monsters are? Yes! A fucking delight? Yes, yes! I wept, laughed, screamed at Laura to just get off with Monster already (who knew I had a thing for Ron Perlman’s Beast in CBS’s 1987 Beauty & the Beast TV series? The spit). And just when you’ve got Your Monster all figured out, Caroline Lindy lands a gigantic rug pull and well, it’s a glorious, glorious last ten minutes that I’d buy a cinema ticket just to see up big.

Your Monster has a limited cinema run in London, Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Milford Haven (search here for listings). It’s also available on digital platforms right now

2)A Slick Thriller To Stream//The Madness

First things first, people. My god, Colman Domingo is charismatic: a human fish hook, tugging my eyeballs to follow where he leads. The Madness - even with a cast that includes John Ortiz, Alison Wright, Bradley Whitford (I drink from the keg of glory! Sorry, couldn’t help myself) - is entirely his show. He eats up the screen as Muncie Daniels, hopeful-CNN host and progressive media pundit (see! No good can come of being a media pundit!) and soon-to-be murder suspect who lands in hot water while writing a novel in the Poconos (no good can come of this either). There’s a mad conspiracy, far right maniacs, an estranged family and did I mention Colman Domingo is wildly charismatic? Your eyeballs deserve this.

Watch The Madness on Netflix now

3)New telly to tune in for//24 Hours in Police Custody: Living The High Life

A new series of 24 Hours always seems to arrive by stealth, episodes stumbled upon as they go out live (me, a thirsty girl seeing the pop man). It’s hardly like we need more true crime shows, but this one - airing for a decade - manages to speak to society right now and avoid being blatant PR for the police. Each episode - following the clock running down post-arrest - exposing the cracks in the system. The CPS at the end of the phone refusing to charge, limitations of the law leaving those who are meant to protect us powerless. The latter in (terrifying) action in last week’s stalking episode, ‘The Murder Messages’. The detective saying of the suspect landing bail, “He’s made death threats. He’s made rape threats. But these threats haven’t been acted on. This is where stalking falls between the cracks, because he is still out there - and if he’s really intending causing the victim serious harm, he can still go and do that. And by the time the police are aware, it could be too late.” And it so often is. This week’s episode features fraud, exploitation and a drug investigation.

24 Hours in Police Custody: Living the High Life airs on Channel 4 on Mon 2nd Dec at 9pm. The first episode in the series, The Murder Messages is now available on demand

4)Saturday Night Settee Pick//About Time

OK, if you haven’t seen About Time a)why? b)what could you have possibly been doing instead? c)beware! Spoilers ahead. Right, you good? Good! Truth be told, my feelings about About Time defy all logic and reason (much like time itself, amirite!). There’s Domhnall Gleeson as time-travelling dweeb Tim, being all umm ahh, well, umm, I actually quite like you ummm ahh; dad Bill Nighy, who passed on the time-travelling; wife Rachel McAdams in a spectacularly underwritten role (so much so I had to google her character’s name even though I’ve watched it 40-odd times); though perhaps not as underwritten as Margot Robbie’s Hot Posh Girl. Yes, OK, why did I watch it in excess of 40 times given, you know, *points upwards*? Because it’s also sweet and charming, so utterly pure of heart and well, profound. Because it provokes emotion in me that I had no idea I was capable of. Also, because there are a handful of weird characters that I enjoy greatly: Tom Hollander’s prick playwright Harry; Lindsay Duncan as dweeb’s rock-hard mum; even ‘kooky’ Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson), dweeb’s sister and ‘mad girl’. The perfect feel-good, feel-sad, feel-everything Saturday night movie. Oh, and it’s Mary! Of course. Her name is Mary.

About Time is on 5STAR on Sat 30th Nov at 9pm

5)Telly You Might Have Missed//Inside Barlinnie

Not to be confused with ITV’s 2017 documentary Ross Kemp Behind Bars: Inside Barlinnie this BBC documentary called, er, Inside Barlinnie was first broadcast last month and is now going again from this Sunday. Merry fucking Christmas from The Big Hoose aka Glasgow’s most notorious prison! Which, after 142 years faces closure, though not before we hear from prison staff, journalists and prisoners past and present. Riots, assaults, suicide, therapy, rehabilitation and reoffending: this ain’t no…About Time. But it’s utterly compelling, particularly the testimony of those who’ve been locked inside its walls - like the inmate who so succinctly says: “I widnae recommend it. I widnae recommend it at all.”

Episode 1 of Inside Barlinnie airs on BBC Two on Sun 1st Dec at 10pm. Eps 2 and 3 air the following Sundays (8th & 15th Dec). All episodes are available to stream now on iPlayer

6)An Early Christmas Classic//Christmas With The Royle Family

Remember when specials of shows like The Royle Family were on the Christmas Day schedule? We’d all crowd round the telly, bellies out? (Yes, I realise I sound 78 years old). This, from 1999, was the first of their six Christmas specials and as per, we’re welcomed in at the point of no-drama (when we’d be long gone were it not for Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne’s take on telly). Christmas day: dinner’s done, presents long opened and they’re all watching some “shite” on the telly (Noel’s Christmas Presents). Apart from Barbara (Sue Johnstone) who’s in the kitchen surveying the pots and Denise (Caroline Aherne) who’s ringing from upstairs, trying out her new ‘emergencies-only’ mobile. Heavily-pregs, she’s about to pop, and indeed she does - though only after 25 minutes of rinsing Anthony for playing “parlour games” at his girlfriend’s (“Is their telly broke??”), rating Barbara’s turkey and drinking Snowballs. Then, Denise shouts her mum from upstairs, her waters having gone on the loo. It’s left to Jim to comfort her (“Are you sure it wasn’t just a great big piss, love?”), and so we’re gifted another soul-shifting, dialogue-light, emotion-heavy scene with Denise and Jim (much like in the series one closer, ‘The Wedding’ - Denise, fag on,”Well…you know…you and me mam, more than anything”). This time, they’re on the bathroom floor, Denise sobbing, terrified, Jim, his arm around her shoulder, placing a light kiss on her forehead, the damp eyes and stare of a man transported back to when she came into the world. A moment, just a moment, between father and daughter, suspended in time. Is there a better way to open Christmas than with this episode? (No).

Christmas With The Royle Family airs on U&Gold, Sun 1st Dec at 9:40pm. It’s also available now on iPlayer.

7)The Sunday Night Scary//Cape Fear

De Niro and Scorsese’s (and Thelma Schoonmaker’s) second mention in as many weeks, this time for the 1991 remake of Cape Fear. I can think of nowt worse (by which, of course, I mean better) for the Sunday night fear than watching a psychopathic Max Cady (a deranged De Niro with gigantic cross - and scales of justice - tattooed across his back), astride Nick Nolte’s almost-mistress Lori Davis (the remarkable Illeana Douglas) poised to bare his teeth. And to the Cape Fear haters I offer….Juliette Lewis’s high-wire performance as Danielle; Thelma Schoonmaker’s increasingly-audacious edit, particularly in that wet & wild finale; the genius of Robert Mitchum as chief of police; the splash and flash of cinematographer Freddie Francis’s uncompromising work; De Niro’s farewell. speaking in tongues as he sinks. A regular old Monday morning suddenly seems like a walk in the park.

Cape Fear is on BBC Two, Sun 1st Dec at 11pm

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8)The Stone-Cold Sally Wainwright Classic//Unforgiven

Remember that 2021 Netflix film starring Sandra Bullock as Ruth, a convicted murderer looking for her sister? This isn’t that! This is the 2009 British TV series that became that film (called The Unforgivable. There’s also Mel Giedroyc panel show Unforgivable, Clint Eastwood Western Unforgiven, and John Ritter TV movie Unforgivable and IT CAN BE CONFUSING). The film is not entirely without merit (Sandra Bullock nails brutalised working-class female rage), but it’s nowt on the show, written by Sally Wainwright and starring Suranne Jones. She’s Yorkshire Ruth, searching for the little sister adopted by a middle-class family after she was sent to prison for killing two policemen as a teenager. Revenge, retribution, forgiveness, class, loyalty, betrayal, family! Suranne Jones and Sally Wainwright on full beam! Not to mention Siobhan Finneran, a young Emily Beecham, George Costigan, and (a very good) Will Mellor. I’m going to ruin your weekend by saying it’s not available on digital in the UK (it had been on BritBox - RIP - and it can be streamed on Prime Video in the US). You can buy it on DVD (below) for only four English pounds, but if anything needs a campaign to get it up on ITV player or one of the streaming sites, this is it. ARE YOU LISTENING, DISTRIBUTION FOLKS? Take our money!

Buy Unforgiven on DVD here

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A New Buried Gem//The Case of Barbara Nelson

The antithesis of the sensationalist, slap-dash true-crime slop usually tossed up on YouTube, ‘The Local Whisper’ is an ongoing series of original documentaries - each months in the making - shining a light on those cases long cold and long ignored by media. Just the second film in two years, The Case of Barbara Nelson digs deep into the unsolved 1980s abduction and murder of Wisconsin woman Barbara Nelson. The Local Whisper team of emerging filmmakers - director Regan Ernst, producer Evanna Milea, and co-DPs Jo Willenbrink and Taylor Bevirt - say they’re ‘inspired by detective stories and true investigative journalism’. The result: excellent (excellent) films that are ethically made, robustly researched, rigorously investigated, sensitively presented, beautifully shot and victim-centred. That may even, wait for this, help people. WHAT SORCERY IS THIS. My find of the year, brothers and sisters.

Watch The Case of Barbara Nelson on YouTube now

New Film Friday//Bread & Roses

This urgent, ferocious film (an Apple Original) was the idea that followed actor Jennifer Lawrence’s devastation and fury at the Taliban’s oppression of women and girls after the fall of Kabul (and the withdrawal of US troops). She recruited blazing Afghani director Sahra Mani (A Thousand Girls Like Me), who was already gathering footage, vital first-person testimonies, from women on the ground (they were joined by Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai as a producer). There was one additional occasional cameraperson - it wasn’t safe for crew to enter the country - but this is a film built almost entirely from raw footage captured by three women - Zahra, Sharifa, Taranom - who are facing daily life with their most basic rights removed, brutality if (when) they fight it. It’s brave, upsetting, righteous stuff, rarely told by those living it.

Bread & Roses premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday (22nd)

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New Telly To Tune In For//Boybands Forever

This three-part BBC documentary series on the age of the boyband - which boasts access to the pop stars, the svengalis and the journalists of the time - is eye-opening and surprisingly, extraordinarily moving. Each episode begins with narration hailing “a time when working-class boys were celebrated for singing and dancing in tight formation”. Or, as I’d put it by the end of the final episode, “a time when working-class boys had their bodies, talent and insecurities exploited by middle-class money men who rinsed and then ditched them when they expressed the slightest desire to be treated like a human being". But, you know, each to their own.

Episode three of Boybands Forever is on BBC Two, Saturday (23rd) at 9:25pm. All episodes are now on iPlayer

Catch a Classic Live//Raging Bull

Is Scorsese ever better than when he’s squatting in the loss, impotency and tragedy caused by a specific kind of self-destructive masculinity? (This is not a hypothetical question, the answer is NO, clearly). And no other film does it more powerfully than his De Niro-starring masterpiece, Raging Bull - a brutal portrait of the rise and fall (and fall) of Bronx boxer Jake La Motta, a man who feels at home only in the smallest, darkest corners of violence. Everyone involved is on the form of their lives - Scorsese, De Niro, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, cinematographer Michael Chapman and sound design god Frank Warner. It’s what the word visceral is meant for: blood splashing, bone crunching, a sponge dripping water (anointing a martyr).And if this doesn’t sufficiently scratch your Scorsese itch, he’s also the subject of this week’s episode of The Directors on Sky Arts immediately before the film airs (Sunday at 9pm).

Watch Raging Bull this Sunday (24th) on BBC Two at 10pm

From Big Screen To Small//The Substance

I mean, what is there left to say about one of this year’s greatest films? (That I didn’t say here anyway). Perhaps just that Demi Moore has never made a greater call; Coralie Fargeat is one of the most exciting filmmakers working right now; and that the last twenty minutes is the greatest argument for a full-throated return to practical effects - and specifically prosthetics - in contemporary film. If you didn’t watch it on the big screen, you truly missed the experience of the year, but now it’s arrived on digital, watching it at home with the volume and vibes turned way up will absolutely do instead.

Watch The Substance on MUBI right now. Seriously, run

You Might Have Missed//Little Miss Innocent

This exceptionally-made, skilfully-handled (and judged) documentary is built around the first interview with Kaitlyn Conley, several years after she was convicted of killing her boss (and ex-boyfriend’s mam) Mary Yoder. There’s so much I want to say - but can’t because of SPOILERS - so I’ll simply say, holy shiittttttttttt. Is it right to give a convicted killer this platform? One who’s still so actively campaigning to prove her innocence? The answer really depends on whether you buy what she’s selling or think this simply reinforces her guilt…

Watch Little Miss Innocent: Passion, Poison. Prison on Disney+ now

Saturday Night’s Settee Pick//Shirley Valentine

Shirley Valentine walked so that Fleabag could run (rings around a hot priest). Willy Russell’s hit one-woman play about a Scouse housewife thirsty for life made it to screen in 1989, the film smashing through the fourth wall, often by using the actual kitchen wall. Shirley Valentine’s genius has sometimes been misunderstood and/or entirely unappreciated (I’m looking at you and your one-star “a realist drama of appalling banality” review, usual-fave Roger Ebert), but any woman who’s fried an egg for a man who moans about the yolk while your beautiful brain shrinks and your libido goes for a lie down WILL KNOW.

Shirley Valentine is on 5STAR on Saturday (23rd) at 9pm

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It seemed unthinkable then, when I began writing this, and seems unthinkable now, as I attempt once again (34th time lucky) to finish it. My rational mind repeating that at 77 he was closing out his eighth decade (scant solace for those who love him, I’m sure). And what a career! A calling. Still, there it is, again: that cognitive kick.

Maybe it’s because until that October day, his body of work was in forward motion, even full bloom. Pope made a film every year, every two, rarely a gap greater since the Noughties. And maybe because his latest Mike Leigh collaboration, the Marianne Jean-Baptiste-returning Hard Truths, hadn’t even made it to cinemas yet (it’s slated for release this upcoming January).

After the drama about a family buckling under a woman’s blind anger (“People - can’t stand ‘em. Cheerful grinning people…”) debuted at Toronto Film Festival, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “a Mike Leigh classic” - and you wanna bet my pulse galloped (aided by the already-iconic “What’s a baby got pockets for?!”). We were off to the races, once again. Though it would heartbreakingly, only ever be once more (again).

Their creative relationship - what Leigh in a beautiful tribute to his dear friend and Director of Photography called “a marriage made in heaven” - began in 1990 with Life Is Sweet and spanned 34-years and nineteen projects (feature films, commercials and shorts). And with their final film, they returned to where I’ve always loved them most - with a glass to the wall of an English semi, a family the other side fucking about and falling to bits.

Inside the four-walls, Pope and Leigh created their own brand of magnified realism, building worlds around dinner tables, in the fingered-creases of a net curtain, where an arse-crack meets a settee. Stories, unbothered by strict narrative roles, unspooling through verging-on-outsize characters to lay out brutal and bittersweet truths about contemporary society and modern humanity. In short: what it is to be this human being stood on that bit of carpet right now.

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Our shared humanity is what Dick Pope - and what he called his “quiet photography” and “under-the-table cinematography” made real in their ‘domestic’ films (oh, and I know why the d-word, but kill me). Granted whether it was a white-knuckling-it working-class family in the frame, or one lower-middle-class and dissatisfied. This didn’t always look pretty (don’t get me started on the current ‘it’s good because it looks dead pretty’ misunderstanding of cinematography), but it was always right, always great. Because Pope rejected billy-big-bollocks style and technique for billy-big-bollocks style and technique’s sake; ego-swelling formal beauty in a landscape that didn’t demand it. That demanded something else, something equally worthy of being committed to film. Something real.

Leigh and Pope both clearly believed that life’s hope, humour, hurt, horniness, disappointments, deceit, daftness, devastation and love were to be found right there, in the everyday details, in the mess and chaos. Pope’s camera moving amongst the elbows and edges, into the tightest and most-awkward of corners. Squatting in the front seat of a taxi, inside a deserted cafe, a dilapidated bathroom, the corner of a settee, up against the door of an outdoor bog. We peer round open doors, clamber up the stairs, tab-hang onto that phone call. It’s an intimacy we instinctively want to invade, and run from. That makes us not just see, but feel.

Pope’s skill at nailing place and person so precisely was likely honed in his early documentary work, then fed and fattened by Mike Leigh’s approach to fictional realism. Particularly, the way he found it, in the prep and production method Pope called his “conjuring up process”. The director extensively workshopping, improvising and rehearsing with his actors on location, creating the action in the moment. Then, said Leigh, “Dick and I would watch it together, and refine and define it, shot by shot, through the camera”. Not a storyboard in sight, but every shot worked out, worked through, character and story.

Simply, Dick Pope’s stylistic choices came from story first. The painterly, tactile look of Mr Turner, a summoning of spirit in the painter’s own colour palette (in the DP’s first whirl with digital, using antique lenses); Naked’s skeevy bruised capital located in the grain of a black and blue cityscape; Peterloo’s in the thick of it POV (Akira Kurosawa an influence for their first action-dalliance): dust rising, bodies of working men falling under the state’s thundering hooves.

Dick Pope, at his very best, didn’t just capture humanity, but aided in the creation of it. Proof? All or Nothing. Timothy Spall’s broken cabbie Phil and the “I feel like an old tree that ain’t got no water” scene. My god: the dignity, the respect shown by the camera as it sits with him and his missus, Penny (Lesley Manville). Who may be inches apart in their small front room, but really, many miles adrift. Somehow, inch by inch, miraculously, they’re pulled together, into the same shot. Phil still in his armchair, Penny at his knee as she kisses his hand: a gesture almost-unbearably full of compassion, igniting a flicker of hope. Then, a moment - just a moment - when Pope doesn’t make their surroundings dissolve but seem brighter, richer, more real somehow. The frame filling with romance, with emotion, their faces cracked open with joy.

Kitchen sink? Now, you didn’t come here for my ‘Not All Filmmaking About the English Working-Class is Kitchen Sink’ talk, but suffice to say, I think Mike Leigh’s description of their work - as an “ongoing serious investigation into pushing the boundaries of cinematic heightened realism” - is a far more accurate description of the quietly radical and loudly empathetic films they made. And this investigation into humanity endured film on film, with Leigh explaining five years ago, why he worked exclusively with the cinematographer: “A violinist who owns a Stradivarius is not going to arbitrarily use another fiddle. That is the tool and you can play anything with it”. And play owt they did.

Life is Sweet (1990), that first glass to the wall, a (hilarious) masterpiece of poignancy; Naked (1993), David Thewlis’ tour de force as nihilistic misogynistic arsehole Johnny, on his “Dickensian journey through the underworld” at the fag-end of Thatcher; Secrets & Lies (1996), the Palme d’Or-winning, Marianne Jean-Baptiste-starring classic about an optometrist kindling a relationship with her emotionally-chaotic birth mother (Brenda Blethyn); Career Girls (1997), the infuriatingly-unappreciated, painfully-observed drama spinning around the ferocious Katrin Cartlidge (for which Pope photographed the past and present in 16mm handheld, and 35mm shot formally); Topsy Turvy (1999), their joyful period piece celebrating London theatre via the birth of Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado’; All or Nothing (2002), that exquisite portrait of family life on a council estate over a long weekend and, for my money, Timothy Spall’s greatest Mike Leigh performance (also, for a bonus point, his son is played by a baby James Corden); Mr Turner (2014), the lush story of the painter JMW Turner’s final 25 years in love and life; Peterloo (2018), their big and ballsy three-hour epic re-telling of the 1819 massacre in Manchester…

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But it wasn’t just Mike Leigh who wanted to own a Stradivarius, of course. And Pope - between their films - lensed films for Richard Linklater (Me and Orson Welles), Gurinder Chadha (Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging), Edward Norton (Motherless Brooklyn), Neil Burger (The Illusionist), Christopher McQuarrie (Way of the Gun) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind). My own personal cinema dreams were of Dick Pope and Shane Meadows, Dick Pope and Frances Lee, Clio Barnard, Lynne Ramsay, and Luna Carmoon.

His photography has long carried its own fingerprint. Supernova, Harry MacQueen’s underrated early-onset dementia drama with Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci (I know!) as a couple (I know, I know!) navigating looming-loss while camper-vanning around the Lake District, was soaked through with him. The DP’s emotional register and moderation setting the pace from the opening shot: one man’s hand sitting upon another’s. Literally nowt else happens. And it’s devastating. It’s a film that also serves as the DP’s love letter to light.

Because this was a man who knew how to locate the heart of a character, the truth of the story, in both the darkness, and particularly the light (Pope lit his films himself, in addition to laying hands on the cameras). It creeps up onto the rooftops of London as it wakes, in the aftermath; softly diffuses across Turner’s width as he paints; flickers and dissolves as an illusion is attempted; casts vulnerability across a man’s profile as he’s cradled by his lover. Pope sought out, coaxed the light into frame. A master of naturalism by way of amplification, replacement and restraint.

At some point during my 34 goes at finishing this, I read that JMW Turner’s final words were: “The Sun is God”. I can’t help but think that this is a sentiment Dick Pope, as a man who wrangled light - and life - with such class, would have shared.

He will be missed more than I think we yet know.

Hard Truths (StudioCanal) is released in UK cinemas on 31st January 2025

If you want to read more about Dick Pope’s partnership with Mike Leigh, I can heartily recommend Amy Raphael’s Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh

All films mentioned are hyper-linked to where you can rent/buy digitally, or purchase as physical media (& I get no kickback, it just took me bloody forever to find them all when I was rewatching, so this is just me being…helpful. I can’t believe it, either)

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Back-splitting body horror. Demi Moore. A feminist director. A French feminist director. DEMI MOORE. A final twenty minutes that made me shriek and scale my chair in a packed picturehouse like a spider when the big light goes on.

WHOMP WHOMP. THE SUBSTANCE. WHOMP WHOMP.

You ready?

Demi Moore (DEMI MOORE!) is Elisabeth Sparkle, a one-time Hollywood mega-star turned telly aerobics queen who, as her 50^th birthday knocks on (Moore is 61 in our reality), looks absolutely cracking in a leotard cut-high. But she’s still committed the cardinal sin as a woman, as a woman on TV, she *gips* has aged! Something the network, and the world, simply cannot forgive.

On the day of that big birthday, Elisabeth has lunch with producer Harvey - yes, you heard me, producer Harvey - a shellfish-sucking misogyboss in a brocade blazer (Dennis Quaid, cast after Ray Liotta’s death and man, that’s a bit of forever-lost screen magic). And well, when I say lunch, I mean a Los Angeles Lunch: the men eating like starving, predatory wolves and the women watching the men eat like starving, predatory wolves while pretending not to be prey (or starving). For Elisabeth though, there’s something worse than being prey. Being nothing at all. “At 50…'“ Harvey trumpets about TV desirability, spitting crustacean brains onto the fisheye lens, “…it stops!”. In other words: Happy Birthday, nana. You’re fired!

Elisabeth’s image, created in the fires of patriarchy and capitalism, is now incinerated by those same forces, her face ripped from freeway billboards while she watches, so aghast she ends up in a traffic accident. Getting the once-over in hospital, Elisabeth is slipped a flash drive by a shiny-faced spine-admiring nurse. On it, and soon filling the widescreen in her sky-high apartment, is an ad for The Substance. “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” a deep, silky-smooth voice asks. ER, YES PLEASE, SILKY-SMOOTH.

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A back-alley jaunt later, Elisabeth is in possession of the wonder drug that promises to “unlock” her DNA and release a young-hun version of herself (that’s not the actual younger version of herself, and although apparently someone she shares a consciousness with, not someone she shares memories with). Struggling to keep up? Well, the drugs come with handy info cards: instructions for Elisabeth and exposition for us in VERY BIG LETTERS.

The rules: only one woman can wander the world conscious at any one time; every day, the young-hun must inject herself with a stabilising serum; and the two must swap places every seven days or Something Dead Bad But Unspecified will happen. The most important thing, says Silky-Smooth, “the one and only thing not to forget. You. Are. One. You can’t escape from yourself.”

What goes down when Elisabeth sticks herself suggests that if Revenge, writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature, was her tango with Dario Argento, The Substance is her two-step with David Cronenberg.

Elisabeth’s cosmetic experiment goes full-body-horror-show, as she (and seemingly her reality too) buckle and bend, contort and crack, threaten to shatter completely. The agony serves a purpose though: ripping Elisabeth quite literally open so as to expel the younger, better her into the world (untold pain to allow you-with-the-clocked-turned-back to emerge? WHAT COULD THIS BE A METAPHOR FOR?).

Margaret Qualley’s Sue is Elisabeth’s second self, crawling out of a thick slit in her (unconscious) back, one that opens like a vagina during childbirth (or, let’s be real, is brutally torn open). A clearly-disgusted Sue - YOU DON’T KNOW, SUE - then has to sew the thick, curling lips of Elisabeth’s spine skin back together with heavy black thread (all that’s missing is an offer of tea and toast while you bleed from your third-degree tear and dream of murdering your husband for telling yet another nurse that he watched his favourite pub burn down).

Sue marvels at her hot body as Elisabeth lies sparko and dribbling on the bathroom floor. Soon, she’s landing the opportunities that young-huns with hot bodies do, including Elisabeth’s show. Gentle workouts are out and hip-thrusting, lip-biting, arse-bobbing sexaerobics - Pump It Up With Sue - are in. And as the name suggests, she’s pretty much screen viagra: the camera gobbling up Sue’s springy-smooth skin and labia-skimming leotard with a male-gaze that’s lech-specific and porn-adjacent. After seven days, as instructed, Sue swaps Elisabeth’s unconscious body for her own. And so it goes. Until, well, it really fucking doesn’t.

Elisabeth moons around the apartment and stuffs her face, isolated from a world that can no longer bear to look at her (what does she get out of The Substance? Who knows! Nowt! Don’t ask boring Qs!). While Sue, during her seven-days in the world that craves her image, enjoys a consequence-free life of late-nights, booze and boys. But somebody always pays, Sue. First, Elisabeth, who ages at warp speed as a result of young-hun’s bad-for-the-body antics, and then Sue, as her OG-self’s food intake tries to escape her skin.

“Would you like to stop?” asks Silky-Smooth, already-knowing the answer. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” says a not-fine Elisabeth (I’m presuming they’re holding back “No worries if not!” for a sequel). Still, something, it’s clear, is gonna have to give. And that something is largely chunks of Elisabeth, as Sue begins to push the seven-day rule to its limits.

And here’s where The Substance becomes absolutely deranged (this is not a complaint, BTW). Did I ever think I’d see Demi Moore as an actual Old Crone gnawing on a chicken carcass and screaming like a banshee? No, no I did not. But do I want to carry her around on my shoulders for her absolute abandon of ego, vanity, and sense in a Hollywood still measuring an actresses’ worth by whether her nipples point to the ceiling? Yes, yes I do.

(Would you like to stop?)

(Oh, baby it’s too late).

*Seriously, spoilers. Only read on if you’ve seen it/are up for it, huns*

What follows is a loud, bloody, unhinged primal scream of fury against ageing, of what it costs you, and me. One that ends with Sue - booked for a career-making NYE telecast and in no way willing to give it up for nana or some stupid rules - beating a seemingly 135-year-old Elisabeth to death in a gratuitous, brutal (longgggg) way. It’s the inverse of the usual titillating ways women are brutalised and murdered on screen, and so dementedly over the top as to be made unreal (and yet still somehow more real than 99% of female deaths).

The primal scream, says The Substance, can’t just be against the patriarchy, the idea of ageing, but one we must unleash in the mirror. For it isn’t just about how men lech on women, but on how women need it. It’s not just on the futility of trying to defeat ageing, but our complicity in attempting it. It isn’t just about the male gaze, but the female one that meets it and internalises how they’re seen. It’s a primal scream against each other for buying into the bullshit that tells women they have a shelf life, one they have to do everything possible - no matter the cost - to delay. That killing our old selves is preferable to becoming them. Because we don’t just fear our older selves – who we will inevitably, always become – we fucking hate them. AND our younger selves, too, so painfully reminding us of who we once were, of who and what we’ve lost, of the value we’ve lost. We hate them. Her. OK, us. Me. I. You.

(“You. Are. One”.)

This theory is made, er, flesh and blood in the film’s second birth and the arrival of Elisabeth’s third self, Monstro ElisaSue (I know, I know. This is when I started screaming and scaling). Who’s brought into the world by the young-hun’s crazed misuse of The Substance, misuse which causes Sue’s body to break apart The Fly-style. Though while Seth Brundle lost his humanity when his teeth fell out, his ear dropped off, this is when both Elisabeth and Sue find theirs.

For this warped mash-up of both women, where youth and age twist around each other (Elisabeth’s face bursts out of Sue’s back), this baroque monster has the balance and serenity neither woman has ever had, finally freed from the gaze of men and the world created in the image of their youth-and-porn-obsessed fantasies.

But wait, ElisaSue has a goddamn live telecast to host!

And so, to the denouement. And if there’s a funnier moment in cinema this year than ElisaSue dragging herself on stage wearing an Elisabeth Sparkle cardboard mask like she’s pitching up for the world’s shittest hen do (by which I mean, any hen do), I’ll eat ElisaSue’s tiara.

When her full monstrous self - the logical conclusion of needing youth so much, doing owt to get it - is revealed to the audience, men and women scream, clamber and climb, trying in vain to flee the auditorium (complemented by a note-perfect Carrie topshot of a spinning ElisaSue). There’s no walking out while they all perish though. This ain’t that kind of fairytale. ElisaSue is decapitated by – OF COURSE – a random man (you know, the kind who pops up on Twitter with an unsolicited opinion), the audience sprayed with blood like a water sprinkler timed to go off at sunset.

ElisaSue is reduced to lumps of skin and fat (and god-knows-what) that inch and slide away, until just Elisabeth’s original face crawls to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame where it gradually soaks into the concrete before being scrubbed clean. The mess of another dirty day in Hollywood, the remnants of another destroyed woman, washed away, ready to go again tomorrow (and honestly, put the final shots in the fucking Louvre).

Hang on, you’re probably thinking, that doesn’t all make sense! There are logic holes as big as her back slit! I’m sorry, did you not hear the bit where a woman crawls out of another woman’s vagina-spine? Or where Elisabeth’s face crawls down the street like a crab doing the shuffle across St Annes beach? Come on now. This is a fairytale turned parable turned absolute fucking horror show.

This is not a film to imprison with rationale and real-world rules, but one to surrender to, arms and brains and eyes wide open. With throats readied to squeal, chairs to be scaled. As Coralie Fargeat told Vogue.“We don’t care about realism or reality – we’re in the world of The Substance”.

So, abandon all hope, ye who enter here…

And welcome to our world.

The Substance (MUBI) is still in cinemas

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Clio! Hi! When I spoke to James, I asked, “Clio? How did that happen?” and he said it was like, oh, wouldn't this be amazing, in my wildest dreams. And then…it happened. What made you say yes to Sherwood?

I read this email saying, “Would you be interested,” and I'm a massive procrastinator, but I did not procrastinate about that. It was just, “Yes, absolutely!” because I loved season one. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I felt I hadn't seen anything like that on telly since, I don't know…Boys From The Blackstuff, and Alan Clarke, his work for TV was really important to me. [With Sherwood] I was watching something that dealt with the legacy of the miners’ strike, had this incredible cast, where the politics were absolutely upfront and really direct, and the characters were so fantastic.

And that yes was before seeing a script?

They sent me a kind-of outline that James had written, which had all the fundamental stuff that's in season two - the mine, ‘Shottingham’ and a post-industrial vacuum and what happens to the people within that. Bradford, which I've done a deep dive in with the community there, is not dissimilar because it had a thriving textiles industry that just completely disappeared in the ‘80s. And so there are parallels, [it’s] socially and politically close to my heart. TV with a sense of social justice.

[Photo: Nick Wall]

And it’s not conventionally-shot social realism. I rewatched Ali & Ava this weekend, and Bradford looked so beautiful - the same with Sherwood, and Nottingham as a place that has beauty in the soil, in the landscape. How did you bring your eye, your cinematic lens, to series two?

As you know, it’s collaborative and Simon [Tindall] who was the DOP, I'd worked with him before, and I love his work. Whether you're making a film or making television, it's a collective. So we looked at season one a lot because obviously, it's like a relay race - not a race, but you've got to pick up what they were doing and work with that. And obviously our locations were different: I got to go inside the cooling tower, which was basically a dream come true.

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And those shots were incredible

Oh, I mean, he's incredibly talented, Simon. And yeah, it was brilliant. It was quite a hard location to find and secure. Actually, it was closing down and the guy who ran it, he loved Sherwood series one, and said yes. We’d asked all these different ones and just thought it's never going to happen, we'll never get to go inside a cooling tower. But there was a lot of love for it because he's part of that deindustrialisation story, this guy who was running that power station. The other new element was Skegness and the coast. And how you get the landscape and the city and all these different elements to play a part within James's storytelling. It was a real joy making this because the intention behind it is so good. And in some ways, I was really happy to be picking up the baton from season one, because it feels like the whole is more important than something like individual style. Yeah, who gives a fuck, really? Because it's about those big themes that James wants a big, popular audience to engage with - and to achieve that, you know, is brilliant.

How granular did you get when trying to maintain certain things from series one and continue into the Sherwood universe? Were there any rules, red lines?

There were things that were already set, like the street where Julie (Lesley Manville)'s house is and the choice of the location [being] Ashfield. And the first thing that we did after I'd replied and said yes, and met everybody, was me and James and Kate Ogborn, the producer, did a trip up to Skeggy and up to James's world, to Ashfield where he grew up. It was a really brilliant thing to do because it gave me so much information in terms of the feel of the place and the understanding of where it was in relation to Nottingham. James wanted it to be more about Nottingham, so Simon and I went back and did lots of shots from rooftops to make sure the city was a really strong presence in the show.

Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook (Ali & Ava) both starred in series one, and it was cast by the brilliant Shaheen Baig, who you've worked with in the past. Were these indicators that this was a Clio universe as well?

It really felt like that. And also Sean Gilder and Lorraine Ashbourne who I worked with on The Selfish Giant. And I love Lesley Manville and David Morrissey - I think they're brilliant actors.

When it came to collaborating with James, you seem to share a fascination with detail - proper detail - in conveying authenticity. I always think about the pile of dirty mugs on the side in Ali & Ava - not just the token one - which is like every working-class kitchen I’ve been in, where you drink more brews than you can wash cups

He's an absolutely lovely, open, generous collaborator. I just can't say enough good things about him. And in terms of detail, Jane Levick, who was the production designer, her eye for detail is incredible, and her care for the characters and their environments and understanding of how much is conveyed by those small details…It makes the characters feel whole and real, so big up Jane, because she's absolutely brilliant.

I’m thinking about the design of the inside of the Bottomley’s house in particular

It’s an interesting one, actually because James and and I - with Janey as well - there was a digging down: whose house is it, who lived there [before]? You know, stuff that isn't there in the script, but [in] the photographs, their family history that's on the walls. There’s a scene that ended up shorter than it was in the script when [Ryan’s] watching Saturday night and Sunday morning, and there’s this parallel between him there with his shotgun and Albert Finney with his shotgun in Nottingham in the ‘60s, and it's this lovely parallel between those two characters and that film and that history of industry. And then there’s the lace market and all of that - Pam used to work in the lace factory - so that deep storytelling in a way is done through a little article on the wall, or a dog. There's a little china dog that in Saturday night and Sunday Morning gets its ear shot off, so Janey went and got these little porcelain dogs recreated and that's what gets shot when their house gets shot…Those details, they do matter.

I want to talk about how you worked with the actors on some of the new characters - and can't wait another second without saying Monica Dolan and Ann Fucking Branson…

So, this is a bit of a tangent, but female characters of a certain age are the heart of this story. Thank you, James Graham, because there's not enough of that. And also a bit of a tangent, I love your Substack and was looking at the thing about how few female directors of my age there are out there. And you kind of think, fucking hell, that's really shocking. Anyway, that's the sort of side issue - or maybe it’s central - but you can see how we end up where we end up, right? And I think when somebody like Ann Branson comes along - I mean, she'd be an extraordinary character no matter the landscape - but when the landscape is barren, and, you know, we women of midlife and over are invisible, and if they are visible, we know every trope going…The reality is that if there were more women over 40, 50, 60, writing scripts and making television, that would shift. So, Monica, she is a fucking extraordinary actress, I worked with her on The Arbor. I remember the very first time I met her - she walked in when we were casting and I just thought this, this woman is amazing, and I want to work with her. And she is forensic in the way that she'll dive into a character and and prep for a role - she'll make decisions about things, and you just totally trust them. We talked quite a lot about grief and Ann Branson’s response to grief, and revenge, her status. There's something very, very twisted in her that turns that energy of grief into something very brutal. Like, beyond brutal…

The new young men are also incredible - like Oliver Huntingdon (Ryan Bottomley), who had a smaller role in Happy Valley and was trained at the Television Workshop. Who we meet as we follow him out of the forest, looking about seven feet tall, doing that insane neck-crick-move, his eyes…

The Television Workshop is phenomenal, we'll start there. Honestly, I think every city should have one and follow that model. Because you think Samantha Morton, Jack O'Connell, the list [of those who trained there] is massive, such fantastic actors, people from working-class backgrounds on the whole. It’s a shining example of what the arts can do, a good use of public money, and how transformative it can be - not just for the community and for those people, but for us as viewers. And yes, I would really like to talk about Oliver Huntingdon, because I think he's brilliant. And that scene of him walking in was not as seen in the script, it wasn’t a scripted scene. It was about wanting to join up the the walk from the woods so you understood the street where Julie lives [in relation], and a storytelling thing: this is a threat coming into town. And when Ollie very first came into the casting, and he's really big guy, it was just like, yeah, that's him. He was absolutely fizzing with the energy of it, and you could see what he was going to bring to it. And as I say, I'm a massive fan of Alan Clarke, and so Simon and I talked a lot about these following shots and leading shots and using the steadicam. That was the first shot we did with Ollie and I didn't quite realise how charismatic his version of that character was going to be until we did that shot. That particular look, he brought [in] when we did the rehearsals. He came in with this notebook, he opened it and showed me these two pictures of a hyena that he'd cut out and put in his notebook. And that’s his hyena look. It's really amazing. And I think he'd really thought about that. It was just this visual trigger for him. I don't want to over-intellectualise it, because it was a picture and it worked, but there's something very specific about a hyena. And then the other thing was his bond with Stephie (Bethany Asher) and the way that they built that was phenomenal. And with Charlene White, who plays Pam, his mum, that scene of trying to understand what has happened in this family, and the backstory we had to build around that. And so that scene needed to do so much in terms of creating a kind of empathy for him, and understanding that there's this whole load of people who've been abandoned. And if you do that, and then other forces start to take hold, a lot of that story is told through Oliver's character…It matters to me. I care a lot and it’s partly why I made The Selfish Giant after The Arbor because of getting to know boys who were not getting a secondary school education at all, were essentially very misunderstood. Also, I think, and I don't know this might be bollocks, but there's a strong matriarchal feeling in that community, in those communities in Bradford and I think the boys [can] seem so lost to me, and sort of criminalised. And, you know, it's a crisis of not quite understanding who they're meant to be, or how they're meant to be, or, you know, feeling demonised. And it's really, really upsetting.

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You are one of the great chroniclers and documentarians of working class life. What’s your own personal relationship with class?

We could probably talk about it for the rest of the day, but, yeah, James’ [MacTaggart] lecture was brilliant, and he talked about working-class as being cultural. And I was thinking about that, and thinking the culture in my home was middle-class, thoroughly middle-class. You know, I was brought up by my dad, a single dad, a university lecturer, and yeah, it was middle-class. And my environment in terms of my school and my peers, my mates, was on the whole working-class. And the other thing he's right about is people get a bit squeamish and awkward talking about it, and I find it awkward and squeamish. I can feel like that, too. So, just sort of laying that on the table is useful, because then we can say, oh, yeah, why does it feel so weird to talk about? And I've had lots of interviews where people kind of try and worm out what class I am. It’s like, you just asked me straight. I'm not hiding anything. I suppose what's happened, and in a way, part of what I was trying to do with The Arbor, was look[ing] at representations of working-class communities by drilling down into one very specific working class-community that had been represented by somebody who was from that community. Making The Arbor meant I couldn't un-know what I got to know through making it. And those became the stories that I wanted to tell, and of that community in particular - I felt very driven to talk about the boys who were hanging around the set. And then, in a way, that then led on to wanting to make Ali and Ava, because of this brilliant woman that I met who Ava is based on. I [always] try to bake into the form: how do we represent communities like like this? And why do we represent them in that way? And what is social realism and what is verbatim theatre, and why? Why do we use one camera technique for one type of story, and one camera technique for another type of story? The other thing that's happened over the last 10 years is there's been this question of positionality: who are you to tell this story? Which is such a brilliant and valid question. And in a way, I've got no right to tell those stories, because that's not my background. [But] in a way, the films are collaborative portraits, so I work with the people who are being represented on screen, through interviews, workshops, getting the actors to meet the people, and maybe if I had grown up in that community, I wouldn't be needing to do that in that way. And working with James, I didn’t need to that because he is that person…

And we really could have talked for the rest of the day, but I allowed brilliant, generous Clio to crack on with her day, relieved - as someone usually found marching through the streets screaming for working-class storytellers - that we have Clio Barnard to so empathetically, poetically, full-heartedly tell the stories that so rarely get told. Putting her with James Graham? Now that really was the genius move…

Sherwood finishes tonight (SOB), BBC One 9pm. All episodes are on iPlayer. If you haven’t watched them, seriously, what are you doing? Correct it, immediately. I’ll wait while you do it. No rush. Tick-tock

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Between 1999 and 2015 the Post Office convinced themselves, and everyone else, that nearly a thousand branch managers - normal men and women, respected figures in their communities - had suddenly started stealing money. Ignoring repeated claims of bugs in Horizon, the new computer system developed by Fujitsu for automating accounting processes, the Post Office pursued private prosecutions in such numbers that it averaged around one a week (they operated independently of the CPS).

Ultimately, more than 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted, 736 were convicted of fraud, false accounting and theft, and thousands of others (3,500 to be exact) blamed for shortfalls in their accounts. Lives were destroyed, overnight. And not a single person responsible has ever been brought to account.

As these (enraging) historic events unfolded on screen on New Year’s Day evening - and across the three nights that followed - we watched as simultaneously, off screen, Shit Actually Happened. The two-decade-plus scandal, for which justice has always moved at a glacial pace (if at all), seemingly now attacked with speed in the face of huge public emotion.

But it’s not been without hand-wringing: that it wasn’t the acres of journalism produced over the years, or even the tireless campaigning by the very human beings who’d been through the very worst things, that galvanised the country into demanding action from those in power but, of all things… telly.

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While we can’t know the moment the dam collapsed, if I had to put money on it, I’d say it was about 9:03pm on January 1st. The opening scene of Mr Bates vs The Post Office: subpostmaster Alan Bates (Toby Jones) takes on the Bad Men with Briefcases steaming mob-handed into his Post Office branch. “Management,” warns his wife Suzanne (the ever-excellent Julie Hesmondhalgh). “Thugs in suits,” he clarifies.

Toby Jones has never been more, well, Toby Bloody Jones: a getting-on subpostmaster and weekend walker in a v-neck jumper, back rod-straight in righteous defiance as he refuses to submit (even though he’s already lost the fight). The suits are here to close his branch after taking his job, so he says his piece from behind the counter that soon won’t be his, the self-respect of an ordinary bloke striking.

“Post Office Limited is stealing my livelihood, my shop, my job, my home, my life-savings,” he announces, before finishing on perhaps his most significant loss: “My good name”.

The dam goes.

Since Mr Bates aired, the Metropolitan Police, already investigating potential offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice against two ex-Fujitsu experts, announced a new investigation into possible fraud offences for the prosecutions; ministers said they were urgently looking at ways to hasten compensation and exoneration, including legislation; and ex-Post Office CEO Paula Vennells handed back her CBE - awarded for her work with The Post Office a decade after concerns were first reported - once a million people signed a petition demanding its return (prior to Mr Bates, it reportedly stood at 4,000 signatures).

Clearly, (successive) governments, responsible ministers, Post Office execs and the Police shouldn’t be kicked up the arse and into action by a TV series. It’s a disgrace. But if that’s what it takes, so entrenched is the resistance in some to transparency, truth and justice, then so fucking be it.

And the rest of us? Is it really so shocking that a primetime TV drama created such a groundswell of support and outrage? And why would it be, as seems to be suggested, shameful? (Anyone else got the tartness of snobbery on their tongue? It was on television? On…(gasp) ITV?!

Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, and the events since, don’t point to a failing of journalism as some have claimed, or proof that the media simply didn’t bother reporting the scandal.

This Press Gazette article tracks the media coverage: the first investigation into Horizon came from Computer Weekly’s Rebecca Thomson in 2009, and was followed up by BBC Wales. In 2011, Karl Flinders at Computer Weekly picked up the story from Thomson, and, freelancer Nick Wallis (who wrote the book, The Great Post Office Scandal) broadcast an investigation for the BBC, before later making Panorama (twice) and a Radio 4 series. Private Eye also began covering the scandal in 2011, and was followed in the years to come by the Daily Mail, Yorkshire Post, and The Times.

The original report, which made the cover, can be read here.

Of course, great journalism, seeks to tell compelling human stories, to render a personhood in text (and these days, in audio and video), with as much colour as possible. But much of telly’s unique power lies in the canvas that the human experience is so vividly painted on, combined with sheer scale and precision of delivery. Put simply, stories that are upsetting in the written word, are unbearable when summoned to life on screen. Stories that are then torpedoed straight into people’s homes, en masse (part one of Mr Bates was watched by more than nine million viewers).

And as people gather on their settees, with the world locked outside, the best writing, the best storytelling, the best drama, will make them weep, rage, change. Break their hearts, call them to action. It comes down ultimately to connection. To getting people in the gut. Or the heart. Or both. And Mr Bates (written by Gwyneth Hughes), manages this by shrinking a big, unwieldy, complex story of corporate reputation and legal battles, down to a simple, deeply human story.

We see Jo Hamilton (Monica Dolan) who, after investigators turn up and blame her for the £36,000 shortfall in her Post Office accounts, cries out in horror: “Why would I do this? I love my Post Office”. Those last five words holding the memory of every pension book she looked after for “her ladies”, every scone she baked.

We see Saman Kaur (Krupa Pattani), based on the real Jess Kaur. One of the ‘lucky’ ones cleared after the Post Office was forced to concede that her pin pad was faulty. Her mind is destroyed in the three years it takes for charges to be thrown out, tormented by an impossible choice: plead guilty and escape prison, or plead not guilty, but risk custody for a crime she didn’t commit. We see her stare, the absence, as she sinks: as horrifying as her suicide attempt, the convulsing of her body during ECT.

While focusing on just a handful of the real human stories, Mr Bates still conveys the scale and severity of the full picture. The 236 people sent to prison in terror, the hundreds more left destitute, homeless, divorced, physically and mentally-destroyed. Some suicidal, almost all without-reputation. As a viewer, you’re as furious and devastated for those off screen, who step in the shadow of those taking centre stage, as you are for those on.

My god, the despair. Just imagine. Well, Mr Bates helps us to do just that.

-

Would the impact have been so great if Mr Bates had landed on Apple TV+, Prime Video or Netflix? Absolutely not. The power of a linear channel to create a nationwide tune-in moment, millions reaching for the remote at the same time, is still unrivalled. Telly - and specifically a big, mainstream series on a traditional channel - was always likely to be the thing that provoked a full-scale pricking of public consciousness.

We should see the last week as, of course so overdue the sky should be ripped down, but also, in the end, a testament to the power of screen culture, of popular culture, of British telly. Mr Bates now standing beside Cathy Come Home, Three Girls, Hillsborough, Who Bombed Birmingham, Help, Sunday: the slices of drama that, whether by explicit design, or happy creative coincidence, made a real difference.

Here you can see how television is a bed fellow, not rival, of great campaigning journalism. And that it owes, well, everything to the tireless campaigning by Alan Bates and all of those who suffered unthinkable injustices. And wouldn’t exist without the journalists who told the stories of those wronged over and over and over again, who doggedly reported every cough and hack along the way.

Still want to wring hands? Here are a few things I think deserve it: that (so far), four suicides of subpostmasters have been reported; that the government still awards IT contracts to Fujitsu; that the only people ever prosecuted were subpostmasters; that Paula Vennells may have handed back that CBE but still pocketed 4.5 million in pay for her work at The Post Office (including an estimated £2.2million ‘performance related bonus’); that now-Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, while postal affairs minister, refused to meet with Alan Bates; that even after a 2012 Post Office-funded investigation and 2019 High Court victory confirmed Horizon faults, only 93 people saw their convictions overturned (and only 30 have been compensated); that the Post Office, even after publicly apologising, was still opposing appeals as recently as a few months ago.

And the bigger picture: one that would feel almost indulgent to mention in the same breath, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s why I’m writing this. The reality of the bleak landscape for British drama and British culture more widely, its potential and power cut off at the knees by public funding cuts, the fight to secure investment, rising costs and risk averse industries prioritising profit above all else.

“It’s now harder to fund these British stories,” said ITV’s Head of Drama Polly Hill, who commissioned the show. “We must be able to keep making them, because Mr Bates vs The Post Office shows that drama can help make a difference, and importantly that the audience wants to hear them.”

And boy do we. We’re thirsty for them. Fucking parched, in fact. So let your hands hang loose now. And ignore that most British of beliefs, the one that we’ve got so used to it’s like wallpaper: that culture is a right for the rich and not even a privilege for anyone else. That it can’t change owt, not really.

Because they forget (but we mustn’t): popular culture is ours, for us. And look, just look, at what it can do.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office is available to stream on ITVX

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The news: the number of female writers and directors on British TV shows has fallen in the last six years. Yeah, those years when we were told, guaranteed, we were making progress! Let’s look at that progress shall we, ladies? Glass of fizz, babe?

-One in three directors are women, but they made 25.3% of director ‘contributions’ to British TV in 2021/2 (down from 26.9% six years ago). 32.4% of shows were written by woman, down from 42.8%

-30.2% of writers in comedy are women, 21.2% in entertainment

-The proportion of Black and brown writers on shows ‘hit a high’ of 15.6% in 2021/2 but immediately fell to 14% the following year

-Disabled writers contribution was 7.6% (writers) and 4.6% (directors)

-Writers over 50 saw it drop from 42.8% to 21.4%

Allow me to put it reductively: women are directors and writers, but they’re not fucking hired. Unlike say, men, who make up two-thirds of directors (66%), but do 76% of the work.

And this isn’t just a UK problem. A telly problem. The problem exists, has long existed, across behind the camera gigs (composers, cinematographers, editors too) in telly and film.

Panels, competitions and schemes can’t fix this. Not if there’s no willingness to hire or commission at the end of it. And especially if, in some cases, a public-facing ‘fix’, the reputational panacea, removes the imperative to do the actual thing. 

What is the actual thing? Hiring women. Because that’s the answer, the only possible answer.

Employ disabled women. Black and brown women. Working-class women. Queer women. Women over 50.

HIRE WOMEN.

Trust them with big budgets/IP/long-running shows/primetime shows

(Hire women)

Believe in their ability to tell, craft, someone else’s story - someone who maybe (wait for it) isn’t even a woman/a woman just like them

(Hire women)

Give them genre work

(Hire women)

Give them ambitious work

(Hire women)

Make more stuff in the regions

(Hire women)

Hire them to direct, then hire them again (that second elusive gig that’s not elusive to everyone now is it)

(Hire women)

Don’t insist they make that same thing over and over again

(Hire women)

Commission them. Greenlight their pitch

(Hire women)

Option their work

(Hire women)

Fund their ideas

(Hire women)

Don’t hang them out to dry, alone in the fucking wind, when the work doesn’t land like you hoped 

(Hire women)

Pay them properly

(Hire women)

Allow them to fail. And then hire them again

(Hire women)

If you’re a commissioner, work with production companies who are committed to equitable change

(Hire women)

If you’re a production company, work with commissioners who are committed to equitable change

(Hire women)

Work with producers who champion women and diverse stories (some of them live outside London. Steady yourself)

(Hire women)

Believe in challenging, unconventional, non-traditional scripts (you can pretend they’re men if that helps!)

(Hire women)

Be less concerned with notions of relatability and likeability (you can pretend they’re men if that helps!)

(Hire women)

Consider running sets that don’t operate 10+ hour days as a pretty short day actually why are you crying about wanting to see your kids/go to the pub/have a life?

(Hire women)

PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD realise that “woman” isn’t a synonym for ‘risky as fuck” (and that risk can be, you know, GOOD)

(Hire women)

Believe that they can do the job

HIRE WOMEN HIRE WOMEN HIRE WOMEN HIRE WOMEN HIRE WOMEN

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I often think about an interview I did with Patty Jenkins in 2020. Wonder Woman 1984 was being scored in London, she was flying high after the first instalment - 2017’s Wonder Woman, which she wrote and directed - had been a hit for a beleagured DCEU.

She had it good, right? A success story that women could hang their hopes on! Well, sure. But…

WW was Patty’s second film, coming out just the fourteen years after her first. She’d ended up $100,000 in debt after making (the Oscar-winning) Monster, spent years “living hand to mouth, pay cheque to pay cheque, rental to rental”. And as we sat watching Hans Zimmer score her $200million film, she told me that she still lived in a small rental house “because I’ve never made a dime until this movie”. She had been offered studio movies in those intervening years (while her own passion project was repeatedly turned down), and her argument for not accepting them is no-notes perfect - and absolutely crushingly relevant today.

“There were a lot of male-visioned versions of female films. My biggest complaint against Hollywood for a long time was: it’s not that you’re not trying to hire women, you need to involve us in what movies should be made in the first place. Because you’re not really interested in my point of view. You want me to walk around on set so you can take a picture of me, but you don’t actually trust in and believe in women-driven content being anything but tampon commercials. Like, there’s something they think is inherently soft about female filmmaking — which is changing.”

Would a male director have walked such a difficult road to a second film? After making a Monster? Everything I saw and heard and experienced in my six and a half years editing EMPIRE leads me to say: absolutely fucking not. Patty put it more eloquently.

“I think if somebody directed a movie like Monster who was a man, somebody would have financed their crazy second movie. But me it was like, “Hmm, no.” They were like, “Oh, we’d love to meet with Patty Jenkins,” but they didn’t want to read my script. They wanted me to direct something about a hooker with a heart of gold.”

Speak to enough female writers and directors working in film and telly and you’ll hear story after story, told in the same language. One that hasn’t changed, shows no sign of doing so.

Sorry, we already have one of those shows

It’s just a bit…niche

Oh, we already have a female writer in the room

You just don’t have enough credits I’m afraid - but come back when you manage to find people who are willing to give you the opportunity that we won’t!

Love it, love it, what do you think to someone else writing it?

Love it, love it, what do you think to someone else directing it?

Er, look at Sally Wainwright and Phoebe Waller-Bridge: what problem?

Would you like to be on our panel about why we need to hire more people like you even though we’d probably not hire you?

-

Glass of fizz, babe?

Share White Noise with Terri White

Warning: contains swearing

Warning: contains all-caps

Warning: contains a disproportionate amount of anger and upset at a fictional TV show

Still up for it? THEN LET’S GO, MOTHERFUCKERS (see, I told you).

Those five words:

“Was Big a big mistake?”

My five-second reaction:

What did she just say?

Did she say what I though-

I’m sorry, what?

WHAT THE EVERLIVING, EVERLOVING FUCK?!

Hang on, though. Before we get into all that: a bit of context. I’ve not felt compelled to join the slating of And Just Like That. Well, OK, any more than I did when reviewing the opening two episodes of the first season. It just seemed too…easy. Like, say, kicking a 65-year-old man who’d carked it after a Peloton class when he was down.

So, what changed? Episode eight of series two. Forty minutes of television that rendered me so furious I briefly lost feeling in my left arm. Reaching this breaking point has hardly been a weekly experience of small-screen excellence. I could (I won’t) write several thousand words just on the fuck-ups that I’ll kindly refer to as missteps. But I will give you the highlights version, in list form (that doesn’t even include them all forgetting when Harry’s mum actually died). It’s a list I’m calling, The And Just Like That Missteps That Were Really Massive Fuck-Ups.

The Samantha Situation

So, let’s get this straight: Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), PR powerhouse, giver-of-few-fucks was so ‘embarrassed’ at being dropped by Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie (a minor client, come on) that she fled to London and killed friendships that were a lifeline. If that was the shot, then the chaser was this from Carrie: “I thought I was more to her than an ATM”. Quite the scripting choice given headlines claiming Cattrall’s refusal to return came down to money.

But the stage was set. Nothing that had gone before was sacred: plot, characterisation, world-building, believability, credibility. In fact, anything that existed in the two and half decades prior could be undone, retconned or ignored. Just you wait, just you watch…

The New Miranda

Without wanting to co-opt that Avril Lavigne conspiracy theory, if anyone knows who bumped off the real Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and left a like-her-but-absolutely-nothing-like-her-imposter (sometimes excruciatingly called Rambo) slipped inside her skin, please call the Find Miranda Hotline on 666-666-666.

The Great Steve Injustice  

Turning Steve from the sexy bartender who during their initial one-night stand (and in the years after), gave Miranda “great sex”, into a hard-of-hearing cartoon grandpa who doesn’t know his wife’s vagina from a 64 oz growler, is one of TV’s great injustices. To show your support, please call the Find Hot Steve Hotline on 69-69-69.

Just (Not) Friends

The new core female characters, building out an incomplete three to a more satisfying six – Seema (Sarita Choudhury), Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) and Nya (Karen Pittman) - are fantastic, even if, let’s be honest, they aren’t given enough character development or beats of their own. We can absolutely see why Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) would want to be friends with them; might chase them down the street, begging them to come to a shit brunch. What’s not clear is why they would want to be friends with those three. The show’s entire credibility supply could be used up just on (goddess) Nya even entertaining being Not The Real Miranda’s mate. (And PS: Seema totally had Carrie’s number this week. Ditching her mate for her man? CARRIE BRADSHAW?!).

Carrie’s Momentary Mourning

This is absolutely not a commentary on how long mourning should last, what grief should look like. It absolutely is a commentary on how Carrie, based on the world of Sex and the City, and everything we know about her character, would behave. This is the woman who grieved more heavily when left by Big (Chris Noth) at the altar (well, he didn’t really. She technically left him. A debate for another time). She spent most of her five-star not-honeymoon mute and in bed. She forlornly asked, “Will I ever laugh again” (before Charlotte shit her pants and she did). She took up a Miss Havisham-like position in her apartment for several months. My god, she loved a wallow.

Yet, Big dies – ACTUALLY DIES IN HER ARMS WHILE HER WEDDING MANOLOS GET RUINED - and she cries for a couple of episodes, feels sad for a bit and then, largely – bar losing her shit last week while recording the audio book of her memoir about his death - cracks on, coughing up meaningless memes like, “Life’s too short not to try new things!”. Carrie Bradshaw would never. Come 2057, framed by the same brownstone window, she’d sit in her decaying Vivienne Westwood gown, that fucking dreadful wedding-day bird still stapled to her head, writing her column, ‘Death in the City’ (tag-line: ‘Will I ever laugh again? Why, have you shit yourself?’).

Which brings us back to where we started. To the apex of the Fuck-Ups. The new episode. Season two, episode eight. When the entire history, universe, of Sex and the City - forty-seven hours of telly and just-shy of five hours of films - was casually set alight. When Missteps and Fuck-Ups were eaten for breakfast by Everything You Watched Over the Last Twenty-Five Years Was Wrong, Dickheads. How…?

Enter Aidan ‘The Coat’ Shaw

Ever since those photographs of Carrie and Aidan (John Corbett) together on the streets of New York appeared, the fear was real. Why bring back Aidan? The man whose heart was broken by Carrie twice (if we’re not counting when she fled without a word from him in Abu Dhabi post cop-off). The guy who we - and he’d - been told was, like the other men in her life, “not quite Big enough”. Because Carrie’s great love, her happy ending, the Sex in her City, was Mr Big, aka John James Preston. But hey, I reasoned, it's an easy, quick hit of nostalgia. Or an extended dream sequence! They wouldn’t make Carrie’s New One the One Who Wasn’t The One. Would they?

We waited seven episodes into season two for their reunion (or in my case, hoped they’d forgotten entirely). It began when Carrie sent a mundane collection of words to her ex and called it an email. ”Hey Stranger…” said the subject line and opening line (CALL YOURSELF A WRITER). Then: “Remember me?”. Babe, of course he does! You’re the one that destroyed him so successfully he “lost his ability to open up and trust women” (courtesy of Steve via Nina Katz aka The Face Chick).

They agree to meet for dinner on February 14^th. Come face to face (well, face to coat) on the street outside, Aidan having apparently come from the front lines of the American Civil War. They sit in a booth, the space between them a yawning void where their chemistry should be.

Aidan looks at Carrie like she’s a bucket of chicken. Carrie looks at Aidan like he’s someone auditioning to play John Corbett playing Aidan Shaw. And me? I couldn’t help but wonder…was he always so boring? (yep). Was she always so boring around him? (yep).

By the end of the night, they haven’t even snogged, but are about to scale her brownstone steps, having seemingly (unspokenly) agreed that they’ll get back together and have a Dead Serious Relationship. Until…Aidan whips around like he’s been shot by a pellet gun, noticing that they’re at her old/new apartment (did he not hear her give the cab driver her address? Did he not see where the cab was heading? Recognise the sidewalk he stepped onto as the one he stepped onto a hundred times before?). He spins out - BECAUSE OF COURSE HE DOES - refusing to cross the threshold of the apartment in which she did him over while he did DIY.

So now they must enjoy their Dead Serious Relationship in hotels and er, Che Diaz’s apartment becaus-OH GOD, WHO CARES, JUST GROW UP, AIDAN. YOU’RE OLD! Instead of telling him to get a grip, Carrie sacks off her own home to go and excitedly buy a pepper grinder with the new/old boyfriend that refuses to enter her new/old home. They laugh at bone-dry things the other one says. Enjoy an extended ‘Che’s cousins’ gag. Talk about some chicken doing something in Aidan’s house. It’s genuinely more painful than watching Miranda be fingered by Che while Carrie pisses the bed.

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Those Red Flags aside (the homeware behaviour is as disturbing as the refusal to enter where she lives), the very idea, as advanced by the characters and creatives that this would now automatically work - of course it would - after she cheated, refused to commit and he clung on for a love that didn’t exist, is deranged and entirely unearned.

Some home truths! Aidan could be controlling – you know, like when weeks in, the first time, he gave her the ultimatum of quitting smoking or being dumped. Second time around, he could be a straight arsehole - slapping on that nicotine patch a bit too hard, flirting with/contemplating revenge sex with fit bartender Shana as Pete the Dog literally shit on Carrie while she was dressed as Joe DiMaggio. He was insecure and threatened; pressuring Carrie into a quickie wedding so he could “lock this thing down” (KEEP GOING, SMOOTH TALKER), because he wanted “the whole wide world to know that you’re mine” (and more importantly, Not His). If Aidan was threatened by a living, flawed Big, how would he really handle a dead, sainted Big? That he’s replacing only because the heart she’d spent years trying to get her hands on packed up?

And what about that last dalliance between Aidan and Carrie? The now-thirteen-year-old kiss when both were married (it’s understandable if you haven’t seen it given it’s in the second film - a crime against cinema). Carrie, flashing-flesh, bangles-jangling, caked in eyeliner (I think that’s movie code for ‘slut’), uses him to get back at Big for *checks notes* sitting on the settee after work and buying them a telly to watch black and white movies on together (fuck this: if you weren’t dead, Big, I’d marry you. Actually, I’m not sure even that’s a dealbreaker). But for Aidan? She was still, always is, that bucket of chicken. (And by the by, I bet his once-wife will be thrilled that Aidan’s back with the ex she was so worried about she’d google during their marriage. And that she’s about to meet their kids, including the 14-year-old who was just a baby when she got off with his dad. A Meet Your New Mommy icebreaker, maybe?).

But apparently, none of this matters now. Or perhaps even exists anymore. Instead, we’re meant to believe that the 25 years she was madly, unmistakably, irrevocably in love with Big were, as she says to Miranda, “a big mistake”. That she should have chosen Aidan all along. Even though she didn’t, repeatedly. “Aidan, in the original series, was Carrie’s best boyfriend,” said episode writer Samantha Irby on the show’s official podcast. “He is the one who should have won”. I DON’T THINK SO, NOT THAT SAMANTHA. This runs entirely counter to the conclusion of the TV series and both films. Big was The One (actually, from the very first episode). And Aidan wasn’t. She just wasn’t that into him.

I suggest we insert some logic into this absolute shit-show of a situation. So, allow me to present the evidence, ladies, and gentlemen, for Carrie Just Not Being That Into Aidan.

-That time, early doors, when Aidan wanted to introduce Carrie to his parents and she freaked out, said no, and then turned up at breakfast anyway and ‘surprised’ them.

-That time she slept with Big behind his back (and the second, third and twelfth time). The sex seal broken while Carrie was writing in a hotel, having been driven out on deadline by Aidan SANDING HER FLOORS FOR FREE.

-That time she went to his country shack in Suffern, hated it and had a meltdown at a squirrel because she knew they were incompatible (Carrie and Aidan, not Carrie and the squirrel).

-That time he tried to help her with her broken computer, and she freaked out and was mean to him in the broken computer store and then was mean to him when he bought her a MacBook (OK, OK, he did say it was like “a little purse”) and then made it about her reluctance to commit (has she mentioned that yet, Aidan?).

-That time Aidan moved in, and she became a Bit of a Bitch because his stuff was, you know, around. Oh, and she didn’t like him speaking to her when she came home (though, to be fair, if a man said, “hey pop-tart, where you been and what you been doing” every time I walked in the door, I might wear his skin as a coat). It was almost like she didn’t really want him to move in, and was reluctant to comm…OK, you get it.

-That time she found the (ugly) ring that Aidan was going to propose with and instinctively chucked her guts up.

-That time – after saying yes to his proposal with a better ring – she insisted on wearing it on a chain around her neck, not her finger (“It’s closer to my heart that way,” she said to Susan Sharon, who knew she was full of shit).

-That time she took her new Aussie gay pal rather than Aidan to Bungalow 8 because THEY WERE INCOMPATIBLE. Carrie liked The Club and he liked staying at home, drinking beers and eating chicken (NO COMMENT), waiting for the day that Carrie devolved into a 1950s housewife, hips broadened in anticipation of a siring.

-That time she had a panic attack and broke out in big red hives while trying on awful wedding dresses with Miranda (saying her body “literally rejects the idea of marriage”).

-That time she pressed pause (indefinitely) on their wedding plans because she “wasn’t ready”.

-That time she bumped into Aidan and his baby post-break-up on the street and she wasn’t remotely arsed that he’d married someone else and sired a child with her, merrily chirping, “You can’t fight City Hall!” when he revealed his wife was a designer, too.

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Let’s not fuck about: Carrie didn’t fear commitment. There was no spewing, no rash, no breathing into a paper bag with Big. In fact, she turned into a Posing for Vogue Loon in the run-up to their first attempt at a wedding. She just didn’t want to commit to Aidan. Sure, Big could be a dick - and so could she frankly, what with the stalking him and his mum to Church (“I’m Carrie. Carrie, Carrie.”); breaking up with him when he wouldn’t declare she was the one after six months; stalking his ex-wife by way of a fake meeting about a fake book etc etc etc), but since when has that been mutually exclusive with someone (some dick) being your soulmate?.

The first film opens with Carrie saying they’re right where we left them, ‘in love’, before Big pushes her up against an expensive bit of brick work for some how’s your father/mortgage broker. In the first episode of And Just Like That, their physical chemistry crackles, not a hint of regret.

And then, within the space of one-and-a-bit episodes, just a hop and a skip since she was weeping over the dead husband SHE’S WRITTEN AN ENTIRE BOOK ABOUT, Carrie floats the idea that not only does she now have the best orgasms of her life with Aidan (AIDAN!), but that Big himself was a mistake. Are we really meant to swallow that just weeks into round three (four?) with Aidan, her feelings for him, that always squatted, small and shallow, in the shadow of her romance with Big, towers over their entire history? (Which wouldn’t even make sense because Big was the Chrysler Building, remember!). That either Carrie was mad and deluded for the best part of three decades, or we were for investing and believing in it? (Also: up is down, north is south, Santa’s real and that fucking coat was a good decision).

And there’s no sign that the ridiculous speed at which the two are travelling, the hasty leap into retconning her past, is a plot point that’ll be explored (which actually could be interesting: is it easier to go backwards than forwards? Can the pain of her new reality without Big drive her to try and obliterate what was, still is, true? Is that easier to live with somehow? Is moving on not enough, when what lies ahead might never be as good?). But as creator Michael Patrick King said: “I didn’t bring Aidan back to fail”. And in that case, while he may not have brought Aidan back to fail, it might mean the show does.

You see, it’s not so much the betrayal of Big (though honestly, just spit on his grave why don’t you), but the betrayal of Carrie, of the audience, of every minute of Sex and the City that was made, aired and watched before this.

Big wasn’t a “big mistake”. But this is.

RIP Mr Big.

RIP Carrie and John.

RIP Sex and the City.

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IF YOU CAN BEAR IT: all aired episodes of ‘And Just Like That’ are on Sky/NOW TV. A new episode is available to watch in the UK every Thursday

Using the words of Moat himself - left behind in the form of audio recordings and written testimony - Hankinson takes us inside Moat’s mind during and after the brutal shootings of his ex Samantha Stobbart, her new boyfriend Christopher Brown and PC David Rathband.

Unbelievably (but also, you know, not), there are some (men) who glorify Moat, seeing him as a kind of anti-hero of twisted masculinity. But word by precise word, Hankinson pulls down that perch. Moat’s self-pitying is laid bare; his misogyny; the flashes of self-awareness that never bloom into acceptance of blame. But perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is in eviscerating the idea that his violence was the result of an unknowable evil. It’s entirely knowable and, in a country where on average two women a week are killed by their partner or ex-partner, everyday.

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It can be uncomfortable to sit slap bang inside the thoughts of a murderer. To hear his justifications (however absurd). To realise how warped his world-view was. To watch different paths being swerved. To bear witness to his delusions. To ask questions about deprivation and masculinity (and receive few answers). To squat in the mundane details of his life. But why shouldn’t we be uncomfortable? Why should we be granted the comfort of distance? The comfort in believing men like Moat are pure evil, almost inhuman. That their minds are impenetrable. Making Moat into a person, cracking his mind wide open, isn’t to make him sympathetic, but to acknowledge his ordinariness. To make him, in the end, just a man. Like the men who came before him, and those who will, we know, come after.

You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat]: An Extract

At least you don’t need to die worrying about her.

…

She’ll have a good life now.

…

You were setting her up for life.

…

Making sure she got compensation.

…

There’s no going back with her now.

…

Going back isn’t an option.

You’re committed.

It’s just a case of doing your thing.

They did this to you.

…

They bullied you.

…

Wherever you went, wherever you worked, they were spoiling it, every good woman chased away under advisement by some police officer doing a PNC check in front of her with their radio turned up full, your kids in tears, you and Sam hounded, negative comments, and it would have been fair enough years ago, but not now, uplifting your vehicles, arrests for violence you didn’t do, yet the stuff you did do you didn’t get arrested for. It’s been a sorry state of affairs. And like with all bullying, it affects your frame of mind. It affected how you behaved with Sam. Not violence, but losing your spark for fun living. You miss her, you really fucking miss her and you’re never going to see her again. It fucking hurts. You wish you could turn the clock back. Because you never wanted this. You and her used to be like Siamese twins. You could have lived a normal life with Sam, you really do believe that. She would have loved it round here, though not the spiders and stuff because Sam’s all hair and nails and spider, eek. Like, if you ever wanted to get some peace you’d go in the shed because spiders were guaranteed in there. She’d have liked living in the sticks though. You and her talked about getting a place out here, either buying a place or going privately rented, which is what you would have done probably, on the lease. You saw this one house which had a bit of farmland, and it would have been ideal. Because you’re a bit of a farmer type. People probably realise that. It comes from the French side of your family. They’ve been into farming for years. The truth is, you never got used to the city, not at all, even after twenty years, with all the hustle and bustle and traffic jams, but when the family moved to England they went straight to Fenham, so you’ve spent the best part of your life there. Well you moved around a bit, up and down the country [you’ve lived in Fenham all your life, but you told people otherwise, including a psychiatrist and social workers]. You ended up back in Fenham because of the good schools for the kids, but you knew you needed your space, so you and Sam were looking for a place out here, because she could have had her horses, and you’d have land for your animals, dogs and rabbits and stuff, which you’ve always liked the idea of, having your animals. Maybe that’s something you got from your gran. She got you into all that. She had a pond with koi carp in it, a couple of ducks too, though the ducks didn’t last long. The council probably told her to get rid of them. But you used to feed the fish and put frogspawn in the pond, and you and Tony [Tony Laidler, who lived down the street and is still a good friend] would catch tadpoles in the Pond of Life and put them in Gran’s pond, and the two of you would go on adventures all over Newcastle, hunting for little beasties. You’d catch wasps [and put them in jars, and make them fight or drown them]. You’d catch spiders and put them in the road to see whose got squashed first. It was just kids’ stuff. Or you’d get all the eggs from different nests and put them in one nest, or take them home and tell your gran the nest had been abandoned, and she’d try to incubate them, and sometimes you went up to the golf course to find baby shrews around the edge of the golf course to take home [but one night you put them in your bed and forgot about them and when you fell asleep you squashed them]. You used to go all over the place exploring and fishing. You were an outdoors kid, really. You used to come up here, to the river at Rothbury, catching minnows, literally a stone’s throw from here, staying at a caravan. That’s a great holiday for a kid to go on, because you make loads of friends on a holiday like that, and sometimes you’d skip school to come up here. The thing of it is, your schoolwork probably did suffer, though anyone will say you’re a clever kid. You had a cat for a bit. It was called Kitty, a ginger female, which is unusual, because usually they get torn to pieces by the male for being a freak, but that cat died when you moved into your mum’s house [when you were about ten], and you got another cat after that, but it died as well. And you had a bullfrog. You can remember because when you and Angus argued over whether it was South American or North American, Uncle Charlie asked whether it was wearing a Stetson or a sombrero. Ha. And you wanted hamsters, but Mum and Brian said no [so you got some anyway and hid them in the garage, but when Brian found them he came upstairs and you ended up crying and you couldn’t keep them].

…

You get up off the ground. You’ve got a gun. You stay under the trees. You walk to the crags. You hide.

Taken from You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] by Andrew Hankinson (Scribe Publications)

But. But. Given the recent wave of OH MY GOD, THAT’S THE BEST EPISODE OF TELLY I’VE EVER SEEN - much of it from people I like and respect - I thought I should give it a proper go. It’s my professional duty.

So, I'm going to fuck around and find out. Wanna fuck around and find out with me?

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Season one, episode one: Celebration

And old man (Brian Cox!) is pissing on the carpet. “We’re in the new place,” says a woman as she leads him back to bed, but doesn’t clean the piss off the fancy carpet.

A guy who looks like a stubby pencil (Jeremy Strong!) is sitting in the back of a car, seat-punching and ‘rapping’ along to the Beastie Boys. The ‘rapping’ is in ‘inverted commas’ for a ‘very good reason’.

As he’s dropped off, the driver (you know, the guy he pays to drive him) says, “You’re the man Mr Roy. You’re the man.” Mr Roy’s chest swells even though there’s a truth universally acknowledged that if you need your driver (who you, you know, pay to drive you) to tell you you’re the man, you’re not, in fact, the man. You’re a man.

A Man AKA Stubby Pencil steps out the car, takes a puff on a cigarette and drops it on the sidewalk. A single puff! DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THEY COST THESE DAYS.

The credits play, vintage and contemporary pictures intercut and…is that the work of Nicholas Britell?! YES IT IS. The old footage: big houses, lawns, linen, servants, kids riding on an, erm, elephant. The current: towers and bridges of Manhattan, computer screens, a man reading a piece of paper that’s clearly about B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S.

Stubby Pencil walks into a board room, the other attendees already present. “We ready to fuck or what!” he says. In my experience, New York is full of uptight corporate pricks who couldn’t find a personality if they were handed a bag marked PERSONALITY IN HERE. So, I’m up for his particular bullshit! Yes, Stubby Pencil, we’re ready to fuck!

The meeting does not go well. Because the guy who currently owns Volta, the media company he’s trying to buy, (Or is it Volter? Vaulter? Actually, it’s a new media company, it’s almost certainly VoltUGH), would sooner chop something off (Stubby Pencil, not himself) than sell the business to him.

Just in case SP didn’t get the message, VoltUGH Guy says, “I’m not letting you neanderthals in to rape my company, ever.” before signing off with, “Fuck you, Daddy’s boy”. One strike of the axe is landed in Stubby Pencil’s thin skin; the second as VoltUGH Guy squirts sanitiser onto his hands as he gets in the lift, finding even an interaction with him distasteful.

The men in suits with SP look worried. “Do you want to call your dad?”. Uh-oh. “Do you want to call your dad?” he shoots back. Then, unfortunately, Stubby Pencil’s dad does call him. NOT NOW, DADD…DAD. And hey, it’s the old guy who weed on the carpet! Dadd…Dad - Logan Roy - is disappointed that SP hasn’t closed and in between unreassuring words, his son manages to stutter, “Happy birthday, old geezer,” with the warmth and intimacy of that cousin fourth-removed.

We cut to a staff room at Waystar ROYCO, in another part of America called Not-LA-Or-New-York. A stoner puts on an animal costume and gets attacked by some feral theme park kids, before vomiting weed out of his eyes (well, the animal’s eyes). “I sort of screwed up,” The Stoner aka Greg (aka Nicholas Braun!) says to his mum. “What the fuck,” she answers for the 34,987^th time since expelling his body from hers.

We’re back in New York and, “Hey, hey, motherfuckers!” says…hang on, it’s a Culkin! The good one! Roman, the bad brother, spends the entire scene rinsing Stubby Pencil (who’s allegedly called ‘Kendall’) and the suits who work in the business he calls “a cage”. “Bit of content and a brand name!” he smirks at the price SP is paying for VoltUGH and, as a magazine journalist of twenty-odd years, I enjoy the sensation of my career being reduced to dust and laughing gas.

There’s an unnamed woman cleaning up Logan’s piss, while other unnamed workers lay a fancy table for his not-a-surprise surprise birthday lunch. He sits on a white settee in a white room, seemingly never having sat on a settee before. He leaves to go somewhere with no soft furnishings and after he wanders off, the daughter arrives. It’s Sarah Snook! I love her! But what did they say her name was? Ship? No, wait, Shiv? Like the thing you fashion in prison to gut someone like a fish? Shiv, really?

Speaking of being gutted by a fish, Logan turns up at the office just in time to see Stubby Pencil chewing on a wrap while saying of the deal, “I’ll throw in a blow job, a reach around, I’ll grab his balls!”. He shits himself on the spot as he sees Daddy, quickly twitching with nerves, sweat tickling his forehead (and presumably his balls).

Back at the gargantuan apartment, we witness a complete normal sibling relationship as Shiv, Really leans in to hug Roman and says with a sniff, “What’s that, Date Rape by Calvin Klein?” and he replies, “You wish!”. You. Wish.

As Logan returns, a confused Greg is waiting in the lobby, like a stalker who’s forgotten who he’s stalking. Uncle Logan grudgingly takes him upstairs, before not being arsed enough to fake surprise when his family, gathered around the lift, fake surprise him. What he can be arsed to do though is humiliate Shiv, Really’s husband Tom (Actual Matthew Macfadyen, doing his best Demonic Labrador).

“Where’s Tom?” Logan asks. “He’s right there,” says a puzzled Shiv, pointing to him, you know, stood right there. The Demonic Labrador, terrified of his not-yet father-in-law, laughs like a blocked drain after Logan deadpans, “Oh well, never mind.”

They’re not the only odd couple - SP’s wife, who was definitely the one to leave him, arrives with their kid, confessing she’s seeing someone: “Just hoping this one doesn’t leave coke smeared all over the kids’ iPads”. Oh, yeah, SP had a drug problem.

He can’t get too upset over his missus moving on though, it’s coronation day! Stubby Pencil is taking over from Daddy and the announcement is imminent. Apart from - UH-OH - it’s not. Daddy lands a blinder on all the kids (there is a fourth one, but every time he’s on screen my mind wanders to dishwasher tablets). Firstly, he wants them to sign a deal agreeing that his wife Marcia (Hiam Abbass) will receive a double vote on the board, if he dies (they have one). Then the killer blow: “I’m going to give it a couple of years,” he says of being Chairman and CEO, like he’s announcing he’s off for another piss on the carpet. The succession is off.

Unsurprisingly, Stubby Pencil is livid, urging his siblings not to sign. “You’re gonna give a double vote to a power-hungry maniac who will do fuck know what with it because she’s got our dad’s dick in some super-max pussy grip and she’s juicing him before he croaks!” he shouts, appearing to find his (sweaty) balls.

“So, you fucked me,” he says to Daddy, who then goes on to destroy him in response (like only a sociopathic and/or narcissistic parent truly can). “I’m concerned you might be soft,” he begins. “I hear you bent for them, and he fucked you”. As SP clenches his fist, he taunts, “Do you want to hit me? Go on. Go on. Give it your best shot. Are you going to cry? Are you crying, Kendall?”

Because he can’t hit his dad, or cry in front of him, Stubby Pencil trashes the bathroom (well, smashes a hairdryer, rips up a magazine and snaps some cotton buds) and screams into a plush bathrobe. And then cleans it up afterwards.

“I think it’s time to play the game,” says Logan when everyone’s around the table. Yes! Spin the bottle! Five minutes in the closet! Pin the tail on the psychotic billionaire!

Cars take them to the helicopters that take to the sky above Manhattan like flies above a clogged deep-fat fryer. Logan and Roman talk on the journey and Christ, I think he actually likes him. I mean, I know it’s his son, but still! It’s kinda touching!

As they arrive to play ‘the game’ - rounders? Baseball? - Stubby Pencil urges his siblings to trust in the power of three and not sign (The power of three will set you free! Yes, a Charmed reference) but Roman says succinctly, “Fuck you”.

Fucking around must be catching, because the Demonic Labrador is across the pitch (is it a pitch?), tormenting Greg. “I may look like I’m fun, but I’m a terrible, terrible prick…I’m razzing you!”. And then: “Would you kiss me If I asked you to? If I told you to….I’m joking!”. A predator or your run of the mill twisted private school boy who spots an opportunity to not be crushed like a bug at the bottom of the pile anymore?

SP leaves the game to do some B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S and is replaced by the son of a groundsman. “I’ll give you a million dollars if you hit a home run,” says Roman. Woo! Poor kids as sport and entertainment! As the kid only makes it to third, he rips up the cheque in the boy’s face saying, “Take this back to your life”. OK. I’ve gone off him. When I say ‘gone off him’, I mean that I want to turn up at his house and turn his skin outside out before folding it back over his bones. FUCK YOU, ROMAN.

And fuck you, Roman times two. During that helicopter ride he wangled a new job at the expense of loyal lieutenant, Frank (Peter Friedman!), who is put on “lighter duties” (aka completely fucked over) by Logan. Poor Frank. It’s like Tom getting whacked in The Godfather and Vito doing the deed with a gun handed to him by Michael.

The family of the boy is given an NDA and, as the helicopters take off again, they’re clutching the very, very expensive watch the Demonic Labrador gifted to Logan.

Daddy thinks he’s played it perfectly - he offers the two hard core kids (Shiv, Really and Roman) what he thinks they want. But then, they fuck him right back - YES, KIDS! APART FROM YOU ROMAN - saying, “This doesn’t quite work for us at present”. And they’re pretty chuffed with themselves until he goes and collapses on them. Stubby Pencil hears all about it as he finally closes the deal.

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We end at the hospital where Mrs Roy looks actually, genuinely upset. Is it because the kids didn’t sign the deal granting her two votes? (That “supermax” you-know-what must be tired). Or does she, you know, love him? I have more questions. Is Logan going to die (no)? Will Stubby Pencil keep a-hold of his balls? Will that kid take revenge on Roman in two decades in a satisfyingly bloody way? Will the Demonic Labrador chill the fuck out and LEAVE COUSIN GREG ALONE?

Stay tuned for season one, episode two of Succession: The Years After Everyone Else Watch-Along

Succession is on Sky and NOW TV

Note from me: I’ve been writing this one and off for a couple of months, taking breaks, between rewatching every series. So I’m with you when I say…Go steady. If it’s too difficult, the next newsletter in a few days is on Suzie Too and, WELL, couldn’t be more different.

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“I loved it,” says June afterwards.

And she did. They all did. Each woman who enters the woods one by one, flanking the ex-handmaid (Elisabeth Moss). Who set off in pursuit of her rapist and ex-Commander (Joseph Fiennes) as the fate that lies ahead, there in No Man’s Land, dawns on him with just one word from June: “Run”.

The women, also of Gilead, share something, the very thing that brought them there that night: they too had been brutalised. In the same way, in different ways. Each degradation, each violation both a stranger and kin. And they wanted, needed, revenge. Revenge that could be their justice.

Those final seconds of The Handmaid’s Tale Season 4 - You Don’t Own Me playing as Fred’s body is torn apart; feet, fingers and teeth separating flesh from bone - are shocking in their brutality, but also inescapable. For Fred and for June. For each and every woman that runs in the mud with them.

As Season 5 opens at daybreak, they emerge from the woods smeared in Fred’s blood. They go for breakfast: June's the last to arrive and the first to pile her plate high with pancakes, eggs and bacon. The others join her, barely a breath taken, not a word spoken, as they bite and swallow, chewing hard. We see, hear, the appetites of women finally sated and satisfied in mind and soul, soon to be in body.

June, though knowing her own fate (imprisonment for his murder), is happy, lighter. The ungenerous can mock June’s set jaw and hard stare throughout the first four seasons, but that’s precisely what unexpressed rage looks like. Rage controlled, contained, by someone else. Running through every bone, every muscle even as your body remains still and your mouth stays shut. As June says about the ‘relationship’ with her Commander: “Don’t run, don’t kick, don’t scream…don’t bite.” There, in the woods, they do all four. As does he.

And that’s really not how it’s meant to go. Or how it does go on screen, in drama, where revenge - especially female revenge - is the consequence of wild, uncontrolled emotion. A moral, personal failing. A vivid split in the core that drags in her as it does him. Eventually, inevitably, a terrible, terrible mistake. One that leaves her forever traumatised, regret supplanting rage. It’s a surefire path to more pain, they say. It won’t make you feel better. You can’t hurt me any more than you have, the women of The Handmaid’s Tale shout in response. I feel better already.

Radically, June - though hellbent on revenge - isn’t hysterical, isn’t unhinged. She has been beaten, raped, dehumanised, had her child ripped out of her arms - and she’s pin sharp on why she needs (one of) those responsible to pay. “He raped me, he was a monster, he deserved to die,” she says coolly. Her anger is channelled; a tool, as well as a weapon. When she chooses to unleash it on Fred, teeth bared, it’s exactly that: a choice.

In truth, it didn’t have to end in what remained of Fred strung up on the wall. There could have been another future for Fred, for June. By then her anger was bone-deep: a fuse lit when Commander Waterford first lifted Offred’s red dress to perform the ‘ceremony’ - the monthly ritualised rape - but justice was still a (distant) possibility. One day, in another land, another life. A better one.

But the slow burn became a big bang in this better land, her other life, when June is told by the Canadian government - who’d arrested Fred for war crimes including rape and sexual slavery - that, in return for intelligence on Gilead, he’ll be pardoned.

June had tried to do it the official way, the ‘right’ way. In ‘Testimony’ the eighth episode of series four, June gives evidence in preliminary proceedings against both Fred and Serena (Yvonne Strahovski) . While she speaks, factually recounting years of brutal attacks in measured words, the camera holds on her, refusing to pan and capture the reaction, the perspective, of those she’s testifying against.

But it isn’t just for herself she speaks, her voice wrung of the emotion and the anger, we’re advised against. “Mine is just one voice,” she reminds the court, the Waterfords, and us. “Countless more will remain unheard, imprisoned by men like Fred Waterford. Women, my friends..” - at this her voice cracks, briefly - “…who lost their lives and can never be heard. It is for those women that I ask the International Criminal Court to confirm the charges against this man and put him on trial. I ask for the maximum possible sentence. I ask for justice.”

It’s an ask - not a plea, for June is past pleading - that’s not ignored, but rejected.

“I told my story. I got up and I told them everything. They know what he was, what he did, how it felt. And they made a deal with him anyway,” says June upon hearing the news of his pardon, taking it with the resignation that comes with grim inevitability. The grim inevitability that sits like sediment within all women. Not just the one in three of us who’ve been the victims of sexual violence. Or those of us in the 99% who never see our attackers convicted. Or those of us in the 98.7% who never even see them charged. Just as rape is decriminalised in Gilead - and as June found, similarly in Canada where it’s still technically a crime - so it is in the real word.

Yet, we’re still told, as she was: believe in justice. Let it take its course. Submit to the process. Even though ‘justice’ at this point is nothing more than a concept. One that completely dissolves upon contact with reality. So, as June loses something she knows deep down she was never going to receive, a match is put to her rage. Rage, a feeling that lived within her since that first night, becoming righteous action. There is no justice to be found, only created.

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At this, we’ll say that we understand the rage of a woman denied the due process she deserves, before telling her to process it, then let it go. She must. That’s ‘healthy’. That’s the social contract that exists, still. Even when we know about, are, the one in three and the 99% and the 98.7%. We cry, we are counselled, we release it. You cry, you are counselled, you release it. I cry, I’m counselled, I release it. Anger evaporating into air.

Sometimes, some of us tell you that’s how it is. That sure, absolutely, we feel better. That we don’t think about. That we’re over it. But we’re lying to you. Instead we dig and dig and bury not just our injustice and rage beneath the earth, but our entire selves, soil filling our throats.

Through June, who doesn’t take this option, we’re given the catharsis we don’t get to either experience or see. Even as we’re told that makes her (and would make us) as bad as them, that this proves that she’s a ‘product’ of Gilead, has been infected with their brutality. Particularly as the attack on Fred is indistinguishable from a Particicution: the public murders (‘salvagings’) that the handmaids took part in.

These ritualised state-ordered killings, in which men usually accused of violence against handmaids, were ripped apart in a frenzy by the bare hands of these women, were invented in part so that handmaids could exorcise their anger (the theory being that they’d not have any left in the tank to turn on their commanders, wives or Gilead at large). In the attack on Fred, June and the other women - primarily ex-handmaids - took the very thing used to manipulate and control their anger and used it against him. Fred is guilty: he’s a rapist, a perpetrator of the very worst violence against women. And justice, Old Testament style, was always the Gilead way: “The righteous will rejoice in vengeance and wash their feet in the blood of the wicked”.

But crucially: unlike those who govern Gilead, June doesn’t expect her behaviour to be without consequence, without its own response of justice. When she ties the laces of her boots that night and slips out of her front door, she does so knowing what comes after. That she’ll be separated from her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and daughter Nichole. That she’ll be taken from the very life that she fought so long to reach. A decision she makes with certainty and resolution. For it isn’t about getting away with it, for her actions to disappear on the wind. She wants the world to know that he did something so bad, so entirely unforgivable. Not just to her, but to others. And that actually, this was an act of vengeance, not revenge. Retributive justice.

You can, of course, argue about whether Fred’s fate was justified, could ever be justified (and June’s own evasion of ‘justice’ as she isn’t charged), but the wider, actual point is that a woman’s rage, the revenge she takes on the back of it, isn’t always the product of a broken mind. Something to be silenced and squashed. And what’s more, can be part of reclaiming of a broken body. Revenge, here in the real world, can be sharing your story loudly, without shame; refusing to use the palatable, respectable words we’re told to; fantasising happily about what you could do but wouldn’t; refusing to let go of your rage; refusing to forget; refusing to forgive.

June too chooses an entirely different revenge for Serena. In episode seven of series 5 (called, pertinently ‘No Man’s Land), a pregnant Serena, on the run from her own Gilead oppressors, goes into labour with June by her side. June chooses to save both the baby and Serena , a decision that’s been called entirely ‘uncharacteristic’. Which is to miss the point. The greatest pain June ever suffered was losing her child and while she will absolutely tear off Fred’s cheek with her teeth, she will not cause that same pain to a mother. She also knows, in that moment, that Serena understands what it is to be reduced entirely to her biology, to be a shell for male use, their needs and desires. For her entire worth to be bound up in bearing their child. When she also knew what is was to be a woman, with her wants, her own longings.

‘“A vessel” that’s what you thought I was,” says June. “But we were who we were, where we came from, what we wanted. None of that mattered to you. To any of you…We mattered. We were, we are, people. We have lives. And that’s why I’m going to save yours, Serena. Because this isn’t Gilead. And I am not you.”

This doesn’t mean she doesn’t still seek vengeance though. In the following episode ‘Motherland’, June refuses to help Serena (currently in a detention centre) find an advocate or sponsor. When June declines, Serena is confused. She thought she had been absolved, to June’s bemusement. “No, I can never forgive you,” she says emphatically.

For it’s an uncomfortable truth that forgiveness is for some, but not for everybody. It’s not always the best outcome or even an appropriate response. Who decreed that we all deserve redemption, or even a shot at it? That every victim or survivor is soothed and saved by gifting that to another? That this is not just their responsibility but a command anyone gets to make? “Why the fuck do you think you deserve forgiveness?” demands June of an Aunt seeking it.

Why the fuck indeed. Ask for it, beg for it if you must, but don’t expect it.

This isn’t to say that these events won’t imprint on June, change her in some way. As it does for all of us. But she was fundamentally changed, down to her DNA, when she was first forced on her back. To accept that isn’t to allow ‘them’ to win: we can only truly condemn the act, understand its gravity, when we hear the bell of trauma and rage as it rings. And let it ring, and ring, and ring.

The Handmaid’s Tale and June let it ring.

Refuse to smile, not fight, not bite.

We can all refuse too.

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All series of The Handmaid’s Tale is on All4 channel4.com/programmes/the-handmaids-tale

Rape Crisis can be contacted at rapecrisis.org.uk

And the answer: yes! And also, sometimes, no.

Jack (Harry Styles) and Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) are a young, beautiful, hot-between-the-sheets (and on top of the dinner table) couple living in Victory: a sun-bleached, pastel-perfect west coast 1950s desert community. Every morning, along with the other husbands of the cul-de-sac, Jack jumps in his car and speeds away to work at the Victory Project, where he makes “progressive materials”. The wives, forbidden to ask for details on just what the fuck they do all day, wave them off, grins rictus, hemlines rising on their exhaust fumes.

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Their days, the hours until the men return, are filled with dance classes, bathtub-scrubbing and window-buffing; a radio playing the sermons of Frank (Chris Pine), the enigmatic slash creepy-as-hell boss who founded their community, this utopia. As night falls, the wives - lipstick set, heels on - greet their returning husbands at the door, whisky in hand, cooked meat resting, thighs throbbing.

It’s a rich, gorgeous, seductive world built out in establishing scenes that truthfully operate as little more than vignettes to set mood and tone. But what a mood. What a tone. Under Olivia Wilde’s direction, DP Matthew Libatique’s captures Arianne Phillips’ costumes and Katie Byron’s production design with gusto. Water boil, steaks fry, coffee is poured, toast cut. Cars reverse in synchronisation. Walls close in. Perfect white eggs wobble but don’t crack.

But soon - too soon arguably, the pacing is 0-100 - the edges of the world begin to fray. The ground and walls shake without explanation, or comment. A plane crashes. Alice has visions and disturbances, her mind seemingly splintering. She asks questions that no-one wants to hear, or answer. Neighbour and friend Margaret (Kiki Layne) loses it, warning the other women of something while, er, someone tries to make her disappear.

Something. Someone. Somewhere.

For a world rendered visually with such specificity, the vagueness with which the plot is sketched is frustrating. The script’s architect is Booksmart’s Kate Silberman (who worked on a story from the Actual Van Dyke grandkids, Carey and Shane). Oh man, that Booksmart screenplay: the punch, the bite! The confidence, the nuance! Here, exposition is ladled on like thick, unsieved soup; the dialogue by turns contrived and leaden.

The working rule seems to be: show do tell. And then tell again. “Everyone is acting like I’m crazy, and I’m not crazy!” cries Alice after acting like she was crazy when she was not crazy. The foreboding is heavily signposted - and when I say heavily, I mean rigged up to the national grid and lit up like Blackpool illuminations - tension evaporating under its weight.

And yet, even with all the showing and telling and telling and telling, the narrative holes just deepen, the questions grow and the answers recede or disappear altogether. Some promising plot strands are dead ends, while others peter out and even more are abandoned. Make it make sense!

There are a handful of brilliantly compelling ideas at the heart of Don’t Worry Darling. Bodily autonomy, female desire, misogyny, radicalisation, coercive control, female complicity, late-stage capitalism, the dysfunction of the nuclear family. But just as the film gets its hands around the girth of any one of these ideas, it halts. We edge towards something truly bold, potentially radical, before retreating. Keep going, screamed the voice in my head. We’re almost there!

Just as the ideas don’t get fully off the ground, many of the performances are similarly stuck. Chris Pine and Gemma Chan (his wife Shelley) have a handful of superb scenes, but just when both bite into interesting characterisation, they stop.

And yes, OK, let’s address the elephant in the room: Harry Styles. To be clear about one thing: the camera loves him. The camera would marry him and have a school-bus full of his kids if it could (which makes sense: you don’t become the biggest pop star in the world without being up to the gills in charisma). But that isn’t enough: his character - and performance - is thin, a blank page. You could argue - especially after the third-act reveal that I absolutely won’t spoil - that this was a deliberate strategy, but the page then isn’t filled as the film ends. There’s no crack in the veneer to hint at substance beneath.

But (and this is a big but) all is far from lost. There are two formidable heartbeats pounding away in Don’t Worry Darling, keeping the hot blood circulating. The first is Florence Pugh, who turns in an electric, typically fearless performance without a scrap of vanity or self-consciousness. The second is the ambition of Olivia Wilde’s direction.

Vanity Fair revealed that Wilde gave the cast a watch-list including The Truman Show, Inception, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the original Ocean’s 11. Throw in Suspiria and Midsommar and you have a sense of not just her reference points, but vision. This is a director who doesn’t hedge, place safe bets. If there’s an easy road and a difficult one, she’s throwing herself down the dirt track. The sheer scale and aspiration in her world-building, the spirit in her big-swings, demand to be respected.

The reality is that it not only remains difficult for a female filmmaker to get a second feature greenlit, but rarer still for them to get their hands on a budget of this size (it’s a significant step up from Booksmart and it shows). And while many have been quick to point out flaws, few have been keen to credit Wilde for the filmmaking bullseyes. How does it go: male directors are responsible for it all and female directors just happen to be around, right? You cannot praise Don’t Worry Darling’s look, feel and fuck-this creative bravery without praising Wilde (oh, and she also puts in one of the best performances in the film as chain-smoking, martini-swilling fellow wife Bunny). Knockout performances from your lead actor don’t just appear, fully-formed.

If the world is right and good (*insert laughing emoji*), Wilde will make a third feature and a fourth (and there are projects in the works), the knots untangling, the vision shoring-up. There’s promise tucked inside the corners of this film. So Don’t Worry (Yet) Darling: there is (Probably) much, much more to come.

Don’t Worry Darling is out in UK cinemas on September 23rd. Going to see it? Tell me what you think of it in the comments!