The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-03)

The Sunday Times April 3, 2022 V2 25

COMMENT

DVDs, do we? No one’s

virtually — or otherwise —

barging into your front room

demanding confirmation that

you’ve watched and

understood the implied

textual meaning of Bruce

Willis’s entire back catalogue

as your groaning shelves and

Death Becomes Her poster

would suggest.

And — apart from “Keep

your eye on your own page,

pal” — I’ll say one more thing

in defence of the Tisdales:

whether they read every one

of those 400 pretty books or

not, they probably put a

suitcaseful of cash into a

local bookshop. We readers

of the world should be

carrying them around on

our shoulders.

To read or not to read? That is

the trick question, revealed

last week when the American

actress and singer Ashley

Tisdale outed herself as a

buyer, but not necessarily a

reader, of books. Many were

aghast when she was shown

in front of her gigantic

bookshelves, saying that — in

preparation for a magazine

photoshoot — she had sent

her husband out to buy 400

books because she didn’t

have enough of her own to fill

them.

Books as props that she

didn’t necessarily plan to

read? That were just for how

they looked? The moral fabric

began to come undone at

speed. At the other end of the

spectrum — and also

frequently provoking fury —

are the voracious readers

who share the towering pile

of books they’ve completed

at speed. No way, holler the

detractors. They didn’t read

them properly!

Our culture is often

powered by outrage, but

what is it about books, and

reading, that so spectacularly

winds everyone up? Who

does it; who doesn’t; who

says they don’t but do; or do

but don’t — my word, it’s

more loaded than sex. Is it

about class? Intellectual

elitism (we haven’t even got

into acceptable genres, a

whole other hellscape of

judgment)?

We don’t, for example,

have the same approach to

Buying 400 books is better than not

buying 400 books — ask an author

A Twitter thread sharing the

stories behind the most

irrational, volcanic toddler

tantrums went viral last week

— and, four weeks into the

terrible twos with my own

son, I can relate.

My recent crimes and

provocations have included:

singing along to the radio,

putting on the exact cartoon

that was requested, starting

to brush my teeth seconds

before he did and trying to

convince him to eat his

spaghetti with a fork rather

than a knife.

As he fixes me with that

steely gaze, starts to chant,

“No, no” — with a third and

final “no” being delivered as a

blood-curdling scream — I

think, boy, I’ve thrown some

wobblers in my time, but I

have nothing on him. What a

kid (yes, that’s pride you

detect).

A little glimpse of the

Newark state of mind

It may be a swathe of

England sandwiched thick

and fat between the north

and the south, but for

many the Midlands lacks an

identity or even grating

stereotype.

Many of the accents are

unfamiliar to the ear, the

slang is often crackers and the

characters are just a shade

away from relatable (though

always real).

And there’s a world of

difference between a city like

Birmingham and the proper

weird and quietly wonderful

market towns dotted in the

country’s middle.

Watching the new sitcom

Newark Newark — written by a

Newark-on-Trent native,

Nathan Foad — after

mounting word of mouth last

week, I was transported

home to my own East

Midlands market town.

It nails the yearning, the

claustrophobia, the flat-out

oddness and the inescapable

warmth. The absolute

hilarity, expressed like no one

nowhere else.

I’m going to assume

everyone from above and

below us is scratching their

heads, completely baffled.

How does it feel, ducks?

April ... fuel —

there must be

a joke in there

April 1 had barely dawned

when it squashed under our

collective heel: what’s the

point, people said. After all,

we’re already living in a

totally surreal and messed-up

reality (ha-ha, the energy

price cap will rise 54 per

cent!). Why heap on more of

the same for supposed fun?

Yep, not only is satire

apparently dead, but so are

April fools. I’ve got to say,

though: after spending an

entire day on hold to my

energy company as if it was

my first Glastonbury ticket

run, I needed it. The kind of

lame, kind of funny

marketing guff from a burger

chain or kitchen towel

company or crisps brand —

what else are we to do while

our chancellor decisively

steps in to stop pensioners

and kids freezing?

Gotcha! April fool!

NEWMAN’S

VIEW

Terri White

Week ending

Crazy little

thing called a

two-year-old

Will Smith’s slap overshadowed the real

scandal — that he won an Oscar at all

Camilla Long

What is the difference

between Putin and a

St Tropez socialite circa

2003?

Answer: nothing.

Both are obsessed with

image, both have strange,

puffy, steroidal faces, both

employ more doctors than a

mid-sized town. We learn

from a Russian news site that

in 2019 Putin was averaging

nine medics “on his visits to

Sochi”, where he has a

palace in a compound 39

times bigger than Monaco.

I cannot tell you how much

rich people obsess about

staying younger longer — it is

all they have to do. Vampire

facials, the foreskins of baby

lambs injected into one’s

cheekbones, building a

“villa” with a motorway, port,

no-fly-zone, strip dens and

an “aquadiscotheque” — now

money is no object, they will

try anything to get high.

In the past decade Putin

has transitioned, mentally,

from semi-functional judo-

loving head of state to the

insane third wife of a Filipino

billionaire. He is attended by

a retinue of doctors and

indulges in a series of ever

more bonkers treatments to

improve his “male potency”.

These include “deer antler

baths”, for which young male

deer have their fresh antlers

hacked off to produce a

blood extract put in a bath.

I cannot think of a more

barbaric and frankly pathetic

way of shoring up one’s

boner, except, of course,

unnecessarily storming

another country.

Vlad has rich

man’s disease:

a love of mad

I health fads

don’t think there can be a single

person who watched Will Smith

lamping Chris Rock at the Oscars

last Sunday who didn’t think it was

a hilarious comeuppance for the

insufferable clowns of Hollywood.

It’s not that I don’t take assault

seriously — the 30 seconds itself was

horrible to watch. It’s just pure joy to

discover that people who spend their

lives pretending they are better than

other people are, in fact, worse.

Over the past five years we have

endured political chaos, a frightening

pandemic, economic instability and,

now, the possibility of world war, but the

painted twerps of Tinseltown have been

frivolously obsessed with one thing only:

victimhood and race.

We have felt broken and

disenfranchised, sitting in our homes

and lonely bedrooms, but somehow we

have also had to put up with these glossy

bedwetters lecturing us divisively from

their stupid glassy tombs about

“standing in hate against love”.

Do you remember the year they all

brought a brown person to the Golden

Globes and showed them off as if they

were a bag or a shoe?

The Oscars itself has become a

ludicrous shell of PR twaddle and

nothingness in its scramble to satisfy

every minority audience. It is almost as

if the more you shriek about inequality

but don’t really mean it, the less

genuine and meaningful everything

about it seems.

On Sunday it was unwatchable: not a

single award deserved, not a single film

of real quality, all awards meted out

according to who would look best

receiving them rather than who actually

did good work.

The ridiculous Jessica Chastain,

receiving the Oscar for best actress, in an

outfit that, to paraphrase Dolly Parton,

must have taken a lot of money to look

that cheap, actually made her speech

about suicide.

I personally didn’t think I could sit

through another second of this boring,

bland, self-congratulatory, content-free,

box-ticking ceremonial pap without an

outbreak of serious violence, so for that

at least I am grateful to Smith.

What happened was simply

astonishing, though — laugh-out-loud

mad. It was as if all Smith’s wild

Scientology urgings came out in one

intense Thetan rush.

We know Smith is impulsive — he

cannot stop talking about his open

marriage, telling GQ he took a journey to

find himself that involved more than a

dozen ayahuasca seshes in Peru, plus

seeing an intimacy coach to discuss the

“harem of girlfriends” he would like to

have including Halle Berry and the

muscular ballet dancer Misty Copeland.

But even by his standards this seemed

way beyond the usual routine of doing a

Facebook Live session to talk to his wife

about the time that she shagged

someone else.

If you watch footage of the actor, you

can see he was nervous. Straight-

backed, tense, with Jada Pinkett Smith,

his wife, next to him in that snail-vomit

dress. A kind of “GI Jane” look, joked

Rock, a crappy filler joke for a crappy

filler event. Maybe Rock didn’t know

Pinkett Smith had alopecia, but even if

he did, so what? The first thing he said to

her was: “Jada, I love you.”

Smith gets up, strides to the front and

smacks “the shit” out of Rock before

returning to his place and tearfully

giving an Oscar acceptance speech in

which he tells people he believes in

peace and love and wants to be “a river

to my people”.

It is peerless: the single most

astonishing television event of the year.

Will Smith and his wife spoke of

“choosing chaos” in an online

video ahead of the Oscars

Remarkable, of course, not only because

Smith is the first rapper/global

humanitarian/legacy dancer to have

been given an Oscar for best actor, but

because he is also the first black man in

America to hit someone in full view of

the police and not get shot, “restrained”,

strip-searched, chased or even arrested.

Why wasn’t he arrested? What were

the cops doing? In the days after the

drama a stream of producers were

seconded to give explanations. The

police were there, said one, but Rock

refused to press charges, thereby

“saving” the event, as if that somehow

made Smith’s thump less bad.

If Hollywood really wants to know

how privilege looks, it is a toweringly

rich celebrity assaulting someone who

cannot obtain redress because it is just

too much hassle to do so. It is people

immediately dreaming up excuses for

this behaviour, such as the woman in

The Guardian who said the white

response was “pearl-clutching”,

projecting a “layer of hyperviolence

onto Smith simply because he was a

black man defending his black wife”.

If you think anything that happened is

anything to do with what race Smith is,

then you are racist yourself.

Smith, of course, was one of the first

big names to play the Oscars race card,

boycotting the ceremony because black

and Asian actors weren’t nominated,

including him. What puzzles me is why

he let the anxiety and ego get on top of

him. Didn’t he realise he had created a

situation where they literally couldn’t

give it to anyone but him? He has now

resigned from the academy, presumably

jumping before he was pushed.

I kept on wondering what Smith’s

mother thought, as she sat watching this

embarrassing spectacle with her friends

“in Philly”. According to an emetic,

folksy and particularly ragged section of

Smith’s speech, she was enjoying the

ceremony with her “knitting crew”.

What was the chat there?

I wondered, also, what Denzel

Washington would have thought,

watching this tedious fool squander his

good fortune. In my view the far bigger

scandal is that Will Smith won for his

schlucky role as the father of the

Williams sisters in King Richard, and not

the wonderful Washington as Macbeth.

The awards were

given according to

who would look

best receiving

them, not who did

the best work