This is the main rule of
representative casting,
although I’m not sure insisting
that Jews must be the ones
playing the grasping, greedy,
Machiavellian billionaires
helps anyone. I’m not
normally a fan of this kind of
thing, but oh how I wish
they’d got a Jew to play the
lead in The Shrink Next
Door, a new comedy on
Apple TV in which an
extremely wealthy
and Jewish curtain
maker living in New
York called Marty
Markowitz is
played by Will
Ferrell of all people.
THE
CRITICS
It has been developed from
a podcast of a true story about
a psychotherapist who took
Markowitz on as a patient, and
slowly, creepily, stole his life.
The three main characters are
full-on Jewish: Marty, his
sister, Phyllis, his shrink, Dr
Ike, who is played by Paul
Rudd. But two of the actors
aren’t even Jewish.
I’ll be honest: I never really
saw Will Ferrell having a
Woody Allen moment. It’s
truly weird watching this
gangly, Clarksonesque figure
making jokes about the Torah
and shul and participating in a
full-on bar mitzvah playing a
man of nearly 40. Even he
seems unsure how to do it,
stopping himself over
sending the whole thing up.
If this had been a proper
Jewish drama with a proper
Jewish writer, with proper
Jewish actors, it may have
been much better.
On ITV there was The
Tower, another off-the-
peg murder mystery spread
over three nights. Normally I
enjoy these, but this felt a bit
flat. It was a big new show for
Gemma Whelan, who you will
remember as a terrific,
headstrong, thigh-slapping,
leather-trousered lesbian
from Game of Thrones. At the
time she said, “Every single
thing I do, there’s a lesbian
touch to it,” and, indeed,
there’s more than a touch of
the lesbian to the woman she’s
playing in this show. Ironed-
flat hair, child’s jacket, sensible
shoes, the resolute air of a
gravedigger — she is just one
ill-advised tweet away from
the pro-trans mob sticking
posters up all over her street.
She made mincemeat — or
tried to — of her even greyer,
less male colleagues. Why was
a police officer up on the roof
of a nearby tower? Why did he
fall off it, taking a young
Muslim girl with him? Why
had the only police officer
who witnessed it gone on the
run? Why did this woman’s
boss, a detective played by
Emmett J Scanlan, who looks
not unlike a mixture between
Russell Brand and a Ken doll,
have a luxury penthouse
in the centre of London
where he can shag
the disappeared
police officer as
well as a huge
family home in
East Sussex? Are
policemen
millionaires now? cWhat is a woman?
BBC Radio 4 has been
engaging (some might say,
belatedly) with the culture
wars. There was Emma
Barnett’s rigorous Woman’s
Hour interview with Kathleen
Stock, the feminist philosophy
professor forced to quit
Sussex University over her
views on biological sex. On
Monday, on a re-energised
Start the Week, Andrew
Marr led an exploration of
intergenerational difference,
prompted by Bobby Duffy’s
Generations and linguist Sarah
Ogilvie’s GenZ, Explained.
Most notably, the station’s
latest flagship documentary
series is Jon Ronson’s Things
Fell Apart: Strange Tales
from the Culture Wars. The
title presumably alludes to
WB Yeats’s prophetic,
pessimistic 1919 poem The
Second Coming. Certainly “the
centre cannot hold... while
the worst are full of passionate
intensity”. For it, Ronson, a
softly spoken Englishman in
America, takes the listener on
a battlefield tour of historic
ideological skirmishes. He
retraces the odd story of how
a Swiss teenager’s arthouse
cinema ambitions galvanised
America’s evangelical
anti-abortionists. A second
episode explores a Christian
mother’s 1974 battle to ban
sex education in West
Virginia schools — a
cautionary tale in which Roger
McGough’s irreverent poem
At Lunchtime has a bizarre
drive-through role.
Fans of Ronson from his
2015 book So You’ve Been
Publicly Shamed, or podcast
series like The Butterfly Effect,
will know him to be a deft,
delightful documentarian.
With gentle, probing, polite
but persistent inquiry he
pursues interviewees not,
apparently, to harry or
point-score but to seek to
understand their motives.
In response to bigotry he
offers reasoned common
sense, good-humouredteasing. Still, it is hard not to
feel defeated by the
heartbreakingly wrongheaded
example of cancel culture that
ends the second episode.
Is it to promote perspective,
deflate tensions, or to swerve
an issue that Radio 4 has
commissioned an eight-part
report from America’s culture
wars, when we have battle
lines of our own? Most
saliently, to many people’s
beleaguered bemusement,
that a truly toxic debate has
spilled from academia about
who has the right to identify
themselves as a woman.
The Philosophy Bites
podcast has twice in four
years asked “What is a
woman?”, acknowledging that
this “is not a question that has
puzzled people for much of
human history”. Its first
respondent, the influential
Oxford professor of
philosophy Amia Srinivasan
(author of the recent The Right
to Sex) offers a 20-minute
primer of postwar feminist
thought, adroitly explaining
ideas such as intersectionality
and more recent pressures on
feminism “to politically
accommodate and vindicate
the reality of trans women”.
Srinivasan advocates inclusion.
In a subsequent episode,
from May 2019, Stock voices
a more cautionary note.
“Trans women and females
both deserve lives free of
violence, exploitation,
discrimination and fear. And
we need to put in social
arrangements that
accommodate these,” she
says. But the answer, for her, is
not that women should bend
to accommodate a redefinition
of what they are, or be
potentially forced to share
spaces, real or
online. “Weneed a richer set of concepts.”
The fear of being on the
wrong side of a baying Twitter
mob deters many from
engaging in this polarising
debate. A recent episode of
Honestly with Bari Weiss
was titled Women Like Hunting
Witches, Too. Weiss’s guest
was British feminist Julie
Bindel, accused, like Stock,
of being a terf (trans-
exclusionary radical feminist).
Where is the patriarchy in all
of this? Well, bearing up well.
Nobody’s debating incursions
into male spaces.
Nolan Investigates:
Stonewall is a ten-part
investigative series from BBC
Northern Ireland examining
the closeness of the BBC and
other leading institutions
(Ofcom, the Scottish and
Welsh civil service) to the
LGBQT+ campaigning charity.
At the heart of the
investigation is, frankly, a bit
of a racket: organisations that
vaunt impartiality taking
(often paid) advice from
Stonewall on issues that
might help their score in
Stonewall’s UK Workplace
Equality Index.
Its characterful host
Stephen Nolan is an old-school
investigative bruiser, who you
feel has never had to question
his right to take up space. He
hectors interviewees like the
PinkNews chief executive
Benjamin Cohen on terms like
“cis”. That said, he and his
colleague David Thompson
provide a rigorous,
informative, surprisingly
entertaining primer to
existing legislation, rights and
contentious issues, from
self-ID to the Tavistock’s
gender-identity development
service.
Some of these
recommendations may
seem one-sided but a lack
of engagement in debate is
a problem. Stonewall never
talks to Nolan and has refused
to engage with critics of
its stance on trans inclusion.
When it comes to such a
polarising issue, it is
vital that there is
discussion.
Otherwise,
well, things
fall apart. cPATRICIA
NICOL
Your podcast primer to understanding the culture wars
| RADIO & PODCASTS
questions that elicit
profound or revealing
answers — people were left
just to talk. He’s good for the
first five minutes — what
politician isn’t — but after
that there was no probing,
no weasely interest. You felt
like you didn’t learn much.
‘Big on energy’ Inside the
Care Crisis with Ed Balls
Resigned
professor
Kathleen
StockKEN MCKAY/SHUTTERSTOCK