2 1GT Tuesday October 20 2020 | the times

times

It’s more

power that

I crave

I’m as deeply in love

with my smartphone as

the next person, but I’ll

tell you one thing about

it that annoys the hell

out of me: that’s when

I’m juicing it up, and

it gets to 80 per cent,

and it beeps and

informs me “battery

sufficiently charged”.

Gets me every time,

that information. “Shut

it, phone,” I have taken

to responding, “I’ll be

the judge of that.”

Because hey, I’m

just not an 80 per cent

kinda guy. I want max

power, all the time. I

get jumpy when it dips

to about 97 per cent,

let alone 80. That’s

pretty much next door

to zero in my book, and

we all know modern

life cannot be sustained

for any length of time

with a dead mobile.

What’s more, as it

issues the liberty-taking

“battery sufficiently

charged” alert, the

phone also sees fit,

without so much as

a by your leave, to

switch over from the

power-saving yellow

icon mode I favour

to the juice-draining

full-on green level I

am otherwise careful

to avoid. Something

needs to be done.

R

onnie Wood has

revealed that he

sometimes gives

his four-year-old

twins caviar for

breakfast. They call

it “the black stuff”,

apparently, which,

given that that usually refers to

Guinness, would have been cause for

concern in Ronnie’s drinking days,

yet those are well behind him now,

the Rolling Stones guitarist having

clocked up a decade of sobriety.

Although to judge from his enviably

slim frame, I don’t suppose stout was

his tipple anyway. More likely straight

vodka and absolutely no other

calories all day.

Heaven forbid that Ronnie, 73,

and Mrs Ronnie — Sally Humphreys,

42 — are spoiling young Alice and

Gracie... but just assuming for a

moment that they are, I can relate.

Which is to say, in the rather more

humble home I share with my family

(Ronnie’s Breakfast Beluga bombshell

came in the course of a press interview

granted to flog his £4 million Holland

Park pile), we have also, on occasion,

been known to indulge in the

deliciously decadent fish egg early

doors. Albeit the cheap one from Ikea,

not the posh stuff Ronnie favours, still

less the really high-end product

Robert Maxwell used to spoon

down by the bucket load.

The phase soon passed — my wife

stopped shopping so regularly at Ikea,

more’s the pity — but not before I’d

made the schoolboy error of eating

caviar on toast when my two brothers-

in-law, proud Yorkshiremen both,

happened to be staying with us.

I’ve never lived that down. Suffice

to say, my choice of breakfast food

confirmed all their worst fears about

the corrupting effects of living down

south. Normally, when this subject

comes up, I can mount a reasonable

defence for drinking shandy on a hot

Beavers?

I’m happy

with socks

The much diminished

— in more ways than

one — Boris Johnson

has given his similarly

less-popular-than-

he-used-to-be dad,

Stanley, some beavers

for the old boy’s

80th. That family,

eh? They really are

dangerously oversexed.

Birthday beaver,

eh? I’d have thought a

large semi-aquatic tree-

chewing rodent made

a fairly unwelcome gift,

but then again I don’t

own a chunk of river in

Devon, a river that for

all I know is in dire

need of a dam. So

maybe Stanley was

chuffed. If not, I hope

he put on a good show

of pretending to be. We

dads have to do that

from time to time.

But less as you get

older, I find. Time was,

as the paper came off

on yet another pair of

socks from the kids,

I’d struggle to arrange

my face into some

semblance of surprise

and delight. Nowadays,

if it’s not socks,

I’m gutted.

It was Stephen Fry,

I think, who said that

the great indulgence

of being well-off was

wearing brand new

socks every day. As

with Ronnie’s caviar

habit, it’s a routine to

which I ardently aspire.

day, or wearing a coat on a cold one,

but caviar for breakfast? There’s no

coming back from that.

Breakfast tastes are not only a bit

of a social minefield — with fry-ups,

muesli, kedgeree, avocado on toast

and massive bowls of sugar-coated

cereal all carrying obvious class

connotations — they’re dangerous

ground medically as well.

Of all the frequently contradictory

advice about diets and health we hear

— coffee is very bad for you, coffee is

very good for you, vitamins are great,

vitamins are useless, fat is a killer, fat

is a lifesaver etc — the debate about

breakfast is the one that causes me

most grief. On the one hand, it’s the

most important meal of the day. On

the other, Halle Berry doesn’t eat

anything until three in the afternoon,

and look at her! So confusing.

I can go about an hour after getting

up without food, caviar or otherwise.

Much longer and I’m incapable of

rational thought, so powerful is the

pining for calories. Whereas in the

evening I find it relatively easy to

miss a meal. Once or twice a year,

at any rate.

The trouble with fuelling up early,

as Halle and others know full well, is

that an hour after breakfast, precisely

because of breakfast, you’re hungry

again, as in, “Yum yum, food is bloody

brilliant, isn’t it? I do believe I’ll have

some more!” And thus a far from

abstemious scoffing pattern for the

day is established. Tricky business.

Robert Crampton

I can totally relate to

Ronnie Wood’s breakfast

beluga bombshell

‘A confessional

Sara Pascoe mined her relationships

for her sitcom Out of Her Mind. What

on earth was that like for her parents

and siblings, asks Dominic Maxwell

‘M

y name is

Sara Pascoe

and I am

going to

destroy your

faith in love.”

Well, that’s

one way to

introduce yourself at the start of your

new sitcom. And, given that Pascoe

is talking straight to camera, wearing

bright Lycra and balancing on

rollerskates at the time, you fast

get an idea of the mix of the clever, the

heart-on-sleeve and the just plain daft

in which Out of Her Mind will trade.

On the one hand cynical Sara

brainily bombards us with science

intended to reduce romance to mere

chemicals firing off in our brains. On

the other she acts like a big kid while

berating her best friend (played by

Cariad Lloyd) for having a baby, her

sister (Fiona Button) for getting

married and her brittle mum (Juliet

Stevenson) for her taste in men.

Is there a risk that you will find

this “Sara Pascoe” character a bit

much as she collides with friends and

family over the six self-written, semi-

autobiographical episodes? If you do,

you’re in good company.

“I love it, she’s so annoying,” Simon

Pegg, one of the show’s producers,

wrote to Pascoe in an email about the

first episode. Before she could work

out how to reply, Pegg emailed back.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean you’re

annoying, I meant the character of

you.” She guffaws at the thought.

Talking on Zoom from her flat in

north London, books piled up behind

her, Pascoe, 39, is far more grounded

than her outwardly fizzy, inwardly

wounded character. Yet she admits

that there is a significant overlap

between Sara Pascoe and “Sara

Pascoe”. Both are stand-up comedians.

“I’ve been on Mock the Week,” Sara

explains to a shop assistant in episode

two. And although in her stand-up

shows and two books (Animal and

Sex Power Money) Pascoe has long

been mixing a fearless openness about

her personal life with her fascination

with philosophy, psychology and

science, she admits that she can be a

bit of a big kid. “Sometimes I get

furious when I’m asked to behave

like an adult: ‘How can you expect

me to fill out these mortgage

forms? I’m nine!’ ”

Pascoe and her two sisters grew up

in Dagenham and Romford in east

London. They were brought up by

their mother, Gail Newmarch, after

their father, Derek Pascoe, once singer

and saxophonist with the Seventies

band Flintlock, left the family. Pascoe

is yet to know what her father thinks

of being reinterpreted as a jazz-

scatting, beret-wearing Adrian

Edmondson in the sitcom. Yet she felt

that she had to send both her parents

and both her sisters the scripts to OK,

and the BBC agreed that she had to

because she was using her real name

and they were therefore identifiable.

“I think having a confessional comic

in the family isn’t that fun,” she says.

“They take their version of events and

say that that was the truth. ‘That’s my

dad. That’s my mum.’ What I’ve

worked so hard to do is talk about my

truth without looking like it’s me

trying to represent my real upbringing,

or my parents’ real relationship.

“So everyone in the show has full

deniability. I have two sisters in real

life, only one in the show, and that

was so they can both say, ‘Oh, it’s the

other one who does that.’ ”

Still, Pascoe says that neither parent

actually read the scripts. “Basically

they both said, ‘I trust you, I am proud

of you, I am sure it’s going to be fine.’ ”

After all, they have already heard

her discuss them in her stand-up

career, which she started in her mid-

twenties, almost as a hobby, after

getting nowhere in her desire to be an

actress. She used to “despise” comedy

when she was studying English at the

University of Sussex and trying to

change the world with radical political

theatre. Then, once she started doing

stand-up, she got obsessed with it and

realised how many big ideas she could

get into comedy as long as she made

them entertaining.

It took a while to get really good at

it — there is no sidestepping the

lengthy process of learning to be

comfortable on stage, she says — but

she considers herself lucky to have

only had to wait six years until she

first got on the BBC’s big stand-up

showcase, Live at the Apollo, at the end

of 2012. She thinks it helped that

she was a woman.

“That’s the thing about comedy: if

you are underrepresented, whether it’s

gigs or TV or radio, they are looking

for people like you. You get given

opportunities, there’s a fast track.”

She went out with fellow comedian

John Robins for four years. Then,

after they broke up, she and Robins

did shows at the Edinburgh Fringe

in 2017 giving their respective sides of

the split. Her show, LadsLadsLads, was

her big live breakthrough. She was

researching weighty issues for Sex

Power Money by day, doing stand-up

at night, and decided that she needed

to keep the big ideas for the book and

keep the stage work for “silly Sara”. It

toured, went to the West End, and

then a live recording from the London

Palladium appeared on the BBC.

Meanwhile, Robins’s show, The

Sometimes I get

furious when I’m

asked to behave

like an adult

I can go about an

hour after I get

up without food

l h S f 8 e d e

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