A tale of two Chelseas

If ever you wanted a weekend of footballing contrasts, these last two days provided it amply, and from one single club, too. On Saturday, Emma Hayes’ relentless pursuit of success saw Chelsea secure a fourth straight Women’s Super League title. 24 hours later Chelsea’s senior men’s team brought the curtain down on a miserable season that couldn’t have ended soon enough. One Chelsea delivered a league and cup double, the other, a Premier League bottom-half finish - 12th place, their lowest position since 1994 and their worst points tally for 30 years. That’s the kind of form that would have otherwise led to relegation were it not for the even more anaemic performances of the eight teams below them. 

Now, before anyone throws the gender debate back at me, the essential comparison being made here is that one Chelsea is managed by a tactically astute head coach who, over the past 11 years, has built, maintained and enriched the team with a profound working relationship with her players, backed by investment in the best available talent. The other has, over the course of this last season, had four different managers, each charged with integrating an embarrassment of riches acquired by a £600 million supermarket trolley dash.

And there, again, is that word: “embarrassment”. It was infamously invoked by co-owner Todd Boehly after a particularly egregious home defeat to Brighton in April. While he wasn’t wrong - chewing out the team in the changing room - many Chelsea fans felt that Boehly should have undertaken some self-reflection before making such a comment, even though in a literal sense, the players he was laying into, bought for inflated fees and in some cases, paid inflated wages, have been embarrassing. All. Season. Long.

Was it their fault though? To be blunt, yes. Six-figure weekly remuneration should be enough to incentivise anyone to deliver. But that, though, takes an extremely simplistic view of the problem. The harsh reality is that there is a collective responsibility at Chelsea for the way this season has gone - from the highest echelon on down. I don’t wish to sound churlish about the Boehly-Clearlake Capital consortium who effectively saved the club, after Roman Abramovich was forced to sell up. But the way they went about running their new toy in the wake of their £2.5 billion takeover has fuelled a level of negativity towards them that took rival club owners like Manchester United’s Glazer family and Liverpool’s Fenway Sports Group years, not months, to establish.

It shouldn’t be forgotten, though, that the ensuing dysfunction only spread to the men’s half of Chelsea. After the Women’s FA Cup Final, Hayes herself reflected on how things had gone elsewhere in her organisation: “It will bug me if I don’t say this - I’m a football fan and I’ve watched how much my club has suffered this year. We’ve had ownership changes, the men’s team hasn’t been brilliant.” And she added: “Chelsea fans - this [FA Cup title] is for you. I hope we had a little bit of joy tonight. I hope we gave you something where you can smile about it this year. The whole club, owners included.”

According to media reports, Boehly is now believed to be taking a step back from day-to-day control. Since the takeover, and the splurge on players that he personally oversaw, the management structure has supposedly been strengthened, with the appointment of co-sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, amongst other senior figures. But according to some players there have been critical exits elsewhere, particularly in medical staff and members of the ‘pit crew’ that keep the highly tuned Formula 1 car that is a Premier League football team on the road. Frank Lampard (manager #4), installed as interim manager following manager #2 Graham Potter’s sacking in April has hinted at this: “Chelsea has been a big success for 20 years but at the moment we aren’t in that position,” he said early in his tenure. “In the time I’ve been here, it’s pretty evident and clear to see - behind the scenes, on the training ground - the reasons why.” Ever the PR man, his comments were far from cryptic.

It is, though, possible that problems at Chelsea have been even deeper seated. Dysfunction, in one form or another, has long been the stream flowing though the club. BT Sport took fans of a certain vintage back to the era of chairman Ken Bates earlier this year with the excellent documentary Pound Land: Battle Of The Bridge. It sourced the origin of Chelsea’s modern day state to the hubris that followed a brief flirtation with the big time in the early 1970s, which brought a couple of trophies and Raquel Welch to Stamford Bridge. The spiralling cost of building the stand I sit in to this day amid the ’70s economy almost bankrupted the club, which was then sold to Bates for a nominal pound, only for him to be forced into an existential battle with property developers threatening to flatten the ground completely and put Chelsea out of business.

With the developers soundly beaten, Bates then took on the arrival of Matthew Harding as a director and investor, creating another power struggle. Harding, though, paved the way for new investment, and with it Glenn Hoddle, followed by European elite players like Ruud Gullit, Gianluca Vialli and Gianfranco Zola (admittedly, nearing the end of their careers). A new Chelsea emerged, enjoying less profligate times in the then-new Premier League. A remarkable goal on the final day of the 2002-2003 season from Jesper Grönkjaer propelled Chelsea into the Champions League at Liverpool’s expense, and along came Abramovich with his bottomless cheque book, followed by 20 trophies in 19 years. And 13 managers.

Low levels of job security were always priced in to any managerial appointment in the Abramovich era. The Boehly-Clearlake takeover heralded talk of long-term projects and stability. Tell that to Thomas Tuchel (manager #1): having replaced Lampard in January 2021 - with the club on much the same trajectory as it has this season - Tuchel took the team to a Champions League final within four months and won it. He then masterminded a victory in the World Club Cup the following year…only to be fired just a month into the season now ending. So much for a new regime.

Before tackling the What Happened Next? chapter of this story, it is worth framing managerial turnover in the context of player arrivals and departures. Player power has led to the undermining of many of Chelsea’s managers in the modern era. They know that if their form goes or they fall out of favour, the worst that can happen is that their agent lands them a cushy berth somewhere else. Such players are hardly likely to respond to a vulnerable coach when results go against them. Which brings me to Graham Potter.

From the outset he was handed an impossible task. Despite a reputation for creating the perfect developmental culture at Brighton on a relatively modest budget, at Chelsea he was effectively the driver of a family hatchback suddenly handed the keys to a lurid, bonkers Lamborghini. Actually, 32 of them. At first, Potter’s appointment seemed like a sharp move: a young manager who’d developed an attractive manner of play on the South Coast. But, by the time of the World Cup, and the extended international break, Potter was expressing his relief at having some time to figure out what was going wrong.

Boehly’s spending, seemingly adding people the club didn’t know it needed but bought anyway without strengthening in the departments where the need was most acute, loaded the dice for Potter. As his international players returned from Qatar, and the January window opened with Chelsea doing even more business, Potter’s fate was sealed. Despite having several weeks to figure it out, results continued to be dismal, and yet Potter now had even more new players to work with. Disquiet in the Stamford Bridge stands became more audible. As January gave way to February, the #potterout movement proliferated and, by the time he was eventually fired in April, hostility had become substantial.

Following the brief one-match tenure of Potter’s assistant, Bruno Saltor (manager #3 - effectively, the Liz Truss appointment of the season), the club decided that it would take time to consider its next permanent appointment, bringing back Lampard for the final few weeks.

Let’s be very clear, this was no more than a PR sop towards fan toxicity, but as an exercise in appeasement, it didn’t work. For all. Of the eleven games Lampard was in charge of, eight were defeats.Although most Chelsea fans still revere Lampard the player, these few weeks have damaged his managerial brand, possibly irreparably. “If you ask me what I have learned in this short period,” he reflected ruefully after the abject 4-1 defeat to Manchester United at Old Trafford, “In terms of coaching, not so much. I’ve been in in this situation as a player when you have an interim after a change of manager. A lot of the plus-points you gain are about what the team is fighting for. Can you find that extra bit? And we haven’t found that as a collective. The results say so.”

With yesterday’s final whistle at Stamford Bridge, Lampard’s second spell as Chelsea manager came to a dismal end, albeit with a smidgen of pride restored by a 1-1 draw with Newcastle at Stamford Bridge. But it also heralded a new cycle of change. Financial Fair Play rules means the club will have to trim its senior squad. Step forward, then, Mauricio Pochettino, announced today as Chelsea’s new head coach, on a two-year contract.

The 51-year-old Argentinian’s appointment has been in the works for a long time. He was even considered by Abramovich when Lampard left in 2021, and again by the new owners when Tuchel was fired last September. So, has Chelsea finally got their man? No one knows. History has shown that it doesn’t matter whether a club makes a considered appointment or a knee-jerk, instinctive hire, nothing lasts forever, no matter how smiley the obligatory contract-signing/shirt-holding photo session.

Chelsea promised a “thorough” process to identify and appoint a permanent new manager following Potter’s sacking, but whatever technical requirements were on the shopping list in early April, the weeks since will have amped up the need to restore pride and cohesion to a team that has become a laughing stock amongst rival fans. That same tribalism informed some initial misgivings about Pochettino’s Tottenham connection (before that particular quadrant of the Twittersphere was rightly shut down by reminders of where Hoddle had played for 13 years before launching Chelsea’s supposedly continuing era of elite competition). 

The task Pochettino is facing is huge. First, he has to prune an enormous 32-player squad (so big there aren’t enough spaces in the Cobham changing room for everyone). There are plenty of candidates, and while the process won’t be pain-free, those who’ve looked increasingly ineffective, disinterested or unmotivated will be easier to live without.

Hopefully, what will be left from this exercise will be a smaller, younger and more ambitious squad, something Pochettino is historically well suited to developing. He’ll have a lot to work with. It’s been hard to gauge what Lampard’s selection strategy has been over the last few weeks and what clues that might provide as to what his successor will do, given that as Pochettino has conducted his own contract negotiations he is also believed to have informed the Chelsea hierarchy who he’d like to work with from the existing squad. 

Given his reputation for developing youth, that bodes well for young homegrown left back Lewis Hall. Still only 18, and clearly with a lot to learn, he has taken his opportunity well with Ben Chilwell and Marc Cucurella both out of action, with gutsy performances since Lampard played him in his final games in charge. Similarly Noni Madueke, the 21-year-old Englishman signed in January from PSV Eindhoven who has already shown himself to be far more interested in playing up the right wing than Hakim Zyech or Christian Pulisic have ever done. More puzzling is the development prospects for Carney Chukwuemeka, the 19-year-old midfielder signed from Aston Villa with great expectation, but whom Lampard appeared to keep at arms length. At the centre of midfield sits the Argentinian Enzo Fernández, bought in January for a staggering £106.8 million but, at 22 and a long-term contract, the kind of player Pochettino might build around.

He is also thought to be a fan of using homegrown talent, something Lampard, during his first spell in charge, made good use of, with Chelsea Academy graduates like Reece James, Tammy Abraham (now at Roma) and Fikayo Tamori (now at Milan). Unless sold in the domestic departures, Pochettino would do well to retain Conor Gallagher, another youth product. He will also want to call upon 20-year-old Levi Colwill, the central defender who joined Chelsea as a schoolboy and who has been getting regular football on loan at Brighton. Given that 39-year-old Thiago Silva can’t possibly go on forever, the thinking is that Colwill could be integrated into Chelsea’s backline (ideally, with Silva retained as a defensive coach to maximise his exhaustive experience).

Pochettino’s biggest headache, though, will be Mason Mount. At 24, and a Chelsea player since he was 8, he is the ideal figure the club needs and Pochettino wants. Personable, mature, and therefore a PR asset (making him captaincy material, with Azpiliqueta nearing the door), he is also about to enter the final year of his contract, with nothing yet agreed on a renewal despite months of speculation. For such an asset, Mount and Chelsea have been engaged in a weird, socially-distanced dance in recent weeks, with negotiations either progressing slowly or not at all. Pochettino might make a last-ditch attempt to persuade him to stay at his boyhood club, but with Manchester United and Liverpool circling, and interest from Arsenal, too, the prospect of cashing in on a player valued at around £55 million could be too tempting for the club to resist. After the Newcastle game yesterday, Mount was part of the team lap-of-honour at Stamford Bridge. To most watching on, it felt like farewell.

As it did when Ruben Loftus-Cheek, another youth product, was subsituted, giving an emotional wave to Stamford Bridge that appeared to confirm speculation that he’ll be off, possibly to AC Milan. Selling Mount, along with Loftus-Cheek, Trevoh Chalobah, Callum Hudson-Odoi and even Gallagher would not only make money, but as homegrown players balance out Financial Fair Play regulations. Other disposals will just save money, such as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Kalidou Koulibaly, two of last summer’s inexplicable, and expensively reumunerated purchases. Whoever goes, it is understood that Chelsea will need to do their selling business before the end of June, when the transactions can be recorded in the club’s accounts for the season. That won’t rule out new players coming in (Leipzig’s Golden Boot-winning French striker Christopher Nkunku is believed to have already agreed a move to Chelsea this summer). 

Pochettino will need - and want - to work with a much smaller squad, comprising players with a shared hunger and a sense of team spirit that has, this season, been glaringly absent. If some rumours are to be believed, a lack of commitment from some players has combined to disastrous effect with a lack of confidence in other. A fundamental rebuild will, then, be essential. Not just in personnel, but in what motivates them. In that, there is a lot to learn from the season now ended. 

All seasons can seem overly long by May, but for us Chelsea fans, 2022-23 has felt endless. A touchline mini-fracas between Thomas Tuchel and Antonio Conte, when Spurs manager, now seems distant. As does the World Cup, with all of the culture war brouhaha it engendered. Another new era at Chelsea awaits, but fans used to trophies will have to wait longer before seeing another open-top bus parade on the Fulham Road. But it’s not a lost cause: Erik ten Hag effectively rebuilt Manchester United in a season, following a similar period of managerial turmoil. Mikel Arteta took Arsenal to almost the Premier League title this term, despite a particularly rocky start to his time as their manager. As long as Pochettino is allowed to get on with his work, and expectations are managed accordingly, who knows where Chelsea could end up?

While he is, though, something of a compromise, his appointment at the third time of asking is more of a marriage of convenience. “Everything at Chelsea fits,” wrote Spanish football expert Guillem Balague when Pochettino emerged as the most likely candidate for the job. “It is a young squad, a thriving academy coupled with a desire from the owners to bring youth through, a philosophy that is aggressive and dynamic with high pressure and loads of energy.”

Pochettino has also been out of a job for almost a year, since parting company with Paris Saint-Germain, evidently taking his time to find the right project. “He has taken a good look at himself and what he did wrong at the French club, what he could have done better and how he can avoid making similar mistakes at Chelsea,” Balague added. “He needs to have the energy to be able to mould players, know that the players are listening to him and have the authority to ensure that this is happening.”

He will need a degree of autonomy rarely granted Chelsea managers in the modern era. Fixing Chelsea will not be an overnight job. Patience - the sport’s most precious commodity - has never been abundant at this football club. There’s no suggestion that the cycle is about to be broken by Pochettino’s appointment, but with no European football next season and a gentler fixture list, he will have a bit more time and space to craft the squad in the way that he wants to. How long he gets to restore incoming traffic to the Stamford Bridge trophy room remains to be seen.

At the end of the day, no one knows. Day One of a new coach’s tenure always brims with hope, expectation and optimism. Until it goes wrong. That’s been the case with Chelsea forever (with, perhaps, the one exception of Rafa Benitez, who trolled everyone by winning the Europa League as interim head coach, despite being regarded as an inflammatory appointment). Pochettino does have a record of playing good football, at Espanyol, Southampton, Tottenham and PSG, and while he is certainly not held in the same regard as, say, a Guardiola, he has at least managed well with what he’s had at his disposal. Even Chelsea’s most jaded fans should remember that he came close to winning the Premier League twice - in 2016 and 2017 - with Spurs. Which makes you wonder what he would be capable of in SW6, assuming he can sort out the mess he’s inheriting. He is, to cite Balague, a “hungry manager” after a year away from day-to-day management. Let’s hope that hunger pays off.

War!

Paramount Pictures

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I experienced many professional encounters with celebrities. As an entertainment journalist and, later, a press officer, I became immunised to the fragility of egos and the invariably capricious nature of volatile personalities.

When I wrote for a living, it was not uncommon to walk away from an interview thinking, “Well, they were nothing like their on-screen version.” That’s not to say that they were two-faced, but it was invariably priced in to dealings with some celebs that what propelled them to present, act or perform was often inverse to their real-life selves. 

Not to single anyone out, but Lenny Henry was a prime example: I got to meet him as a teenager, when my father was at the BBC working on the comedy show Three Of A Kind with Tracey Ullman, and David Copperfield. Henry was pretty much the larger than life loon who’d made Saturday mornings a laugh on Tiswas. Years later, now as a writer, I interviewed him at The Groucho Club and it was like pulling teeth. Perhaps he was simply having a bad day. We all do.

I assumed that some interviewees went into encounters with the press with their guards up. But so often there were reminders that whatever they did for a living was an extroversion, and underneath it all, many were fundamentally quite shy. The worst mistake to make was thinking you were about to become a mate (an idiom of showbusiness reporters, perfected by John Blake when he was the editor of The Sun’s Bizarre column, and continued by the likes of Piers Morgan in that role). Because you weren’t. Your relationship was purely transactional, designed to flog their record/film/show/book. 

I should point out that not everyone was a monster. Lorraine Kelly, I recall, was every bit the genuinely likeable person she appears on daytime TV. Jools Holland was another (I interviewed him on the day of his return from suspension from The Tube in 1987 and he couldn’t have been any more accommodating). But there were also marked contrasts: months before that trip to Newcastle, I visited the BBC’s then-new daytime TV show Open Air in Manchester. Its chief presenter, the late Pattie Coldwell loudly blanked me, apparently taking umbrage over a feature on swimsuits in the magazine I was working for (deeming the piece sexist). Her junior co-presenter, a young Eamonn Holmes, took pity and gave me a splendid interview.

When I moved to the other side of the notebook, and became a TV press officer, I encountered ego fragility from a more bruising perspective. There were tantrums (by presenters, not me) directed at the first lackey to stray into the wrong spot at the wrong time (mentioning no names, but he was also on Tiswas…), and no shortage of awkward moments, requiring the sort of diplomatic acquiescence of the kind so brilliantly satirised by obsequious promoter Artie Fufkin (played by Paul Shaffer) in This Is Spinal Tap.

Drop The Dead Donkey (Hat Trick Productions)

Treading on egomaniacal eggshells was an occupational hazard, and nothing more trepidatious as dealing with those threatened by rivals. When Channel 4 launched its sitcom Drop The Dead Donkey in 1990, poking fun at life in a fictional satellite TV newsroom, eyebrows were raised in Isleworth where Sky News had gone on air in February 1989. Suspicions were already raised as to where writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin were getting their ideas from, and fears weren’t helped by the fact that the show’s art department had sourced the exact same time of desk phones and vending machines that Sky had in use. One episode, when a TV awards dinner got out of hand as rivalry between Globelink News and a rival broadcaster spilled into a punch-up, appeared to be dangerously familiar, having attended a black tie awards event myself in which some ‘banter’ was exchanged between competing tables. 

Later in my time at Sky, I arrived at work one morning to be informed - by a current presenter on the channel - that a pair of anchors (I think that was the phrase used…) had, the evening before, been involved in an actual punch-up in the newsroom, resulting in the two rolling down a corridor in a tumble likened by one witness to “a clothed version of Alan Bates and Oliver Reed’s naked wrestling bout in Ken Russell’s Women In Love”. 

As soon as I was informed of the event I knew exactly who it would have involved: the incident had been brewing for some time: as I recall, it had begun when one took umbrage to the other’s claim, in their PR biography handout, that they’d been on air the moment Nelson Mandela had walked free from his Robben Island prison cell. The other claimed that, no, they were on air at the time. The truth was that one had indeed been broadcasting live at the exact moment of Mandela’s release, while the other was merely on air that evening. Over time, this built into a passive-aggressive conflict similar to that between Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito’s rival ’aluminium siding’ salesmen in Barry Levinson’s hilarious Tin Men (a feud that begins with a minor car accident before turning into a full-scale war of attrition). In the case of the Sky presenters it manifested itself in things like one childishly occupying the other’s (undesignated) chair in the newsroom, purely to wind them up when they arrived for their shift..

Their dispute was perhaps the most notorious that I encountered, but it wasn’t alone in the organisation. And because I was dealing with working journalists, all of whom knew journalists in Fleet Street, it didn’t stay internal for long. By the following Sunday, one of the presenters called me at home in a panic, unable to leave his front door because a pack of photographers was outside. Quite bizarre, now I think of it: Sky News at the time was hardly front page news, given that its audience was relatively small (as it is now). But the media likes to eat itself, and none more so when a rival organisation is  involved (Sky, being Murdoch-owned at the time, rarely earned any favours from other media groups). Journalists like gossipy stories about their own. And somehow, newspaper editors seem to think the public does too.

Hence, yesterday’s front pages, dominated by Phillip Schofield’s “stepping back” (when did that phrase replaced “sacked”?) from ITV’s This Morning, following weeks of a supposedly growing feud between him and co-presenter Holly Willoughby. 

In case you’ve been holidaying on Mars with dodgy 5G coverage, morning TV’s ‘golden couple’ (as they are always branded), have seen their once “brilliant chemistry” eroded by…well, no one is fully sure what. The common narrative is that public flak the couple faced after seemingly queue jumping at the Queen’s lying-in-state last September (i.e. ‘Queuegate’, of which it has since been positioned that they were there for editorial reasons) started to drive a wedge between them. There has been the additional element that the paedophilia conviction for Schofield’s brother Timothy put further strain on their working partnership. That, so we’ve been fed, is the cause of a feud that grew over several weeks to a tabloid crescendo (and not just the ‘red tops’ - even the notably highbrow broadsheets have weighed in on it).

Schofield - who I interviewed when he was still presenting children’s TV on the BBC with sidekick Gordon The Gopher, and was every bit as affable as his on-screen persona - had enjoyed a 14-year screen relationship with Willoughby that seemed genuine. But something has gone irretrievably wrong. When Schofield issued a statement on Saturday afternoon, admitting that “the last few weeks haven't been easy for us” as the tabloids had been giving daily updates of behind-the-scenes frostiness, Willoughby was said to have been blindsided. 

After last Thursday morning’s show - the pair’s final scheduled appearance of the week - Schofield was apparently informed by This Morning editor Martin Frizell that his contract would not be renewed in the summer. Schofield’s statement confirmed that he was leaving the show, giving the politician’s resignation message that he was becoming too much of a distraction, that the dispute with Willoughby had “become the story” and that he wished to “protect the show I love”. 

That’s telly for you. And none of this is exactly important. As plenty of people have noted, following the blanket coverage of the affair yesterday, that surely with Ukraine, the cost of living crisis and plenty of other topics worthy of attention, a pair of TV presenters falling out is hardly essential. It’s not. But I think that, perhaps snootily, ignores the fact that television plays a greater part in people’s lives than those who denigrate it are prepared to admit.

I can’t say that I’ve ever watched an episode of This Morning, and can only attest to Schofield and Willoughby’s chemistry from frequent clips of the couple giggling uncontrollably at something one of them said or has happened in the studio. Not my kind of informative TV, but plenty have loved it. And will continue to, whoever sits on the sofa. 

Eammon Holmes who, since my encounter in 1987 went on to present GMTV, Sky News’ breakfast show, This Morning itself and, latterly the reactionary GB News (where his apparently conservative politics have found a home), made a somewhat caustic remark about the Schofield-Willoughby falling out (for the record, Holmes and wife Ruth Langsford were dropped by ITV as This Morning’s Friday presenting team). After the BAFTA TV awards, at which neither Schofield or Willoughby appeared, Holmes was quoted as saying: “I think there should have been a special award for Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby for best actors.” Ouch. He did, though, go on to make the salient point that This Morning is something of a daytime TV institution. “It will carry on no matter who presents it and anyone can check the viewing figures, there’s no difference between whether they present it or anyone else.”

That, though, doesn’t appear to be ITV’s view of it. In the wake of Schofield’s announcement, “friends” of the presenter have claimed that he’s been “hung out to dry”, that This Morning’s producers had to make a choice: if the supposedly perfect chemistry between their hosts was broken, do they discard both or retain one, and if so, who do they keep? It would appear that would be Willoughby. And core to all this is the actual business of commercial television: ratings. At one point This Morning was getting an audience of 1.4 million - relatively large for daytime TV - but in recent weeks that number has dropped considerably, with just 726,720 tuning in this time last week, as the war between the presenters played out relentlessly in the press. Once viewers start tuning out, so do advertisers. And when that happens, there’s always a casualty. That, then, will be Schofield. Oh, and the dignity of anyone who takes this stuff too seriously.

The shows where everyone knows your name

Picture: Paramount

In the history of television’s greatest shows reaching the end, there’s an accepted list of those that bowed out with the right mixture of pathos, completion and even a little intrigue. Leading this parade is The Sopranos - not only the best series ever to grace the small screen, but one which ended with brilliant, ambiguous flourish: mobster Tony Soprano, long-suffering wife Carmela and their children Meadow and Anthony Jr taking their seats in a New Jersey diner, its front door opens and Tony looks up, slightly pensively...before fading to black, and Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing cuts in to lower the curtain on a modern masterpiece.

Just as The Godfather is regarded as one of the greatest pieces of 20th Century film-making, with Goodfellas its rightful heir, The Sopranos dipped into the same gene pool, coming to be universally thought of as the catalyst of a golden era of cinematic storytelling in television, on a scale never previously achieved. Over six seasons, the epic HBO show coincided with the emergence of non-broadcast platforms and the artistic boldness that new players like Netflix would approach televised drama, giving us programming that was less formulaic gogglebox fodder as compelling novels in video form. 

Concurrent with The Sopranos, we had The West Wing, followed by the expansive arced narratives of The Wire, Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul, the latter of which both ended with epic finales of their own. All are indebted to The Sopranos and, in particular, its 2007 finale. While such shows invariably carried a grim subtext (murder, drug dealing, violence, etc), they had a wit about them that television drama had rarely displayed before. Moreover, they could be compared to sitcoms for their depiction of strong, memorable and clearly defined characters. 

The best sitcoms are those with which we enjoy kindred familiarity (or aversion) with the cast, their on-screen personas and the situations they find themselves in. And the best sitcoms, too, concluded with a tear and a knowing look. It’s also why they have been televisual events. 

In 1983 105 million Americans tuned in to watch ‘Goodbye, Farewell And Amen’, the final episode of M*A*S*H, the series that had combined comedy with a moral conscience (having been spun out of Robert Altman’s anti-war film of the same name which, despite being set during the Korean conflict was clearly a statement on the contemporary battle raging in Vietnam). Over 11 seasons, viewers adhered to Hawkeye, BJ, Hotlips, Klinger, Colonel Potter and Charles Winchester with a sense of in-the-trenches camaraderie as they wisecracked their way through the horrors of an attritional war. The finale was as perfect an ending as those 11 years deserved. Obvious comparisons can be drawn with the ending of another war comedy, Blackadder Goes Forth, set amid the senseless slaughter of 1917 France, which signed off with that poignant ‘over-the-top’ order, before dissolving to a field of towering poppies.

Only Fools And Horses embedded itself in British national culture, with its cast, characters and their catchphrases acquiring a familiarity that made them extended members of our own households. Fools will forever be prefixed by the phrase “much loved”. No wonder its final episode, on Christmas Day 2003, attracted more than 24 million viewers - the highest recorded audience in the UK for a comedy, and roughly half the country’s viewing population at the time. The difference between Fools and American sitcoms is that it was written by just one person, John Sullivan. US shows tend to be written by squads of writers, but the effect is much the same, with the characters and their catchphrases becoming our own friends. Which inevitably leads me to Friends, which ended in 2004 with ‘The Last One’, concluding ten years of fun with the six New Yorkers who became, well, friends to all of us. In so many ways Friends was a spiritual successor to Seinfeld which, a few years earlier, had also focused on an equally dysfunctioning group of New York apartment-dwelling chums, their insecurities and mania, in a show that had prided itself on being about nothing at all. Over two episodes - the show’s 179th and 180th, respectively - ‘The Finale’  drew a US audience of 76 million.

Most of us will never be members of a New Jersey crime family, but many can identify with the ordinariness of suburban life at Casa Soprano (yeah, I know we don’t all have a stash of Uzis in the loft, but we have taken teenagers on tours of potential colleges, albeit without a rival being ‘whacked’ along the way). Ultimately, this affinity comes from the discernible gallery of individuals with whom we whom we might associate ourselves either partially or completely. Sitcoms, generally, bae this game easier to play: are you more Chandler than Joey? More Monica than Rachel? Del Boy or Rodney? George or Kramer?

Arguably the greatest example of sitcom ensemble casting reached its own finale 30 years ago today, when time was called on Cheers. I hold a particular affection for this show as, over its 11 series, it became the anchor of my Friday night viewing here in the UK, thanks to Channel 4. Even when I wouldn’t have been old enough to buy a pint in a British pub, let alone an American bar, Cheers was - and remains - the perfect half hour of gags and characters you couldn’t help love.

TV & Satellite Week, 18 May 1993

When it ended in 1993 I wrote a piece for TV & Satellite Week magazine in which I drew on Cheers’ status as the wittiest, most intelligent, most sophisticated television comedy of its time. And, possibly, since. This reverence, I argued, had much to do with the way it challenged the established order of sitcoms, being comprised of a group of somewhat disparate people linked by locale, not family. 

Cheers redefined the sitcom, abandoning the safe predictability of wholesome domesticity (i.e. The Cosby Show, Family Ties, et al), by abandoning the home to set itself in a downtown bar (the original concept was for the show to be set in a hotel as a US version of Fawlty Towers). 

In this setting, where punters went to escape their home life, Cheers presented a gallery of distinct personalities, generating laughs by exploiting these personas, either to prick the lasciviousness of Ted Danson’s Sam Malone, the pretentiousness of Shelly Long’s Diane Chambers, the slovenliness of George Wendt’s Norm Peterson, the dullness of John Ratzenberger’s Cliff Clavin, the naivety of Woody Harrelson’s Woody, the causticity of Rhea Perlmann’s Carla, the pomposity of Kelsey Grammer’s Dr. Frasier Crane, and latterly, the unfulfilled ambition of Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca Howe. But more than just being a platform for jokes about or from these characters, humour came from pitching their interactions - Sam’s pursuit of Diane, Norm’s bafflingly interdependent bromance with Cliff, Carla’s inverse bullying of everyone, Woody’s apprenticeship of adulthood with all of them, and so on.

Sexual and even social tension became a constant theme on Cheers, again in sharp contrast to the confected safety of American network television’s usual conservatism. The show also made much of the fact that it was set in a place of both work and recreation. Although many episodes featured scenes set away from the titular Boston bar, most were concentrated in the one set, giving the show a theatre-like environment. 

Not for nothing, Cheers won 28 Emmy Awards (and was nominated for a colossal 111). In its final episode, Sam would fix his final date; Carla would dish out her last barb; Cliff would regurgitate his one unused irrelevant fact; Woody would draw on his only remaining recollection of life “back in Hanover”; and Norm would down his last beer, though there is no record of him finally settling his bar tab (over 273 episodes he managed to avoid paying for a single drop of beer). 

That it got to that point after 11 years, growing to regularly commanding audiences of 83 million a week in the US, is testament to the perseverance by the US network NBC that ran it. Its first season, in 1982, suffered from poor ratings, but winning five Emmys, coupled with critical acclaim kept it going.

Picture: Netflix

What finished the show was Danson’s desire to concentrate on his film career, but also the intention to quit while Cheers was still at its peak (he was also earning a then-record $450,000 an episode). Most of the principle cast would go on to enjoy significant success elsewhere, though arguably it was ‘new boy’ Harrelson who would have the most critically successful career. Following Danson’s decision, the remaining cast members contemplated making a 12th series without him but they, too, concluded that Cheers would never be better.

Grammer, of course, would take his character Frasier Crane into his own eponymous sitcom which, for UK viewers, would also find a home in Channel 4’s Friday night fixture. It too - in its original run - enjoyed an 11-year run of ratings success, adopting both the traditional domestic formula with Cheers’ workplace setting. Frasier gave a somewhat lesser Cheers character a life of his own - in Seattle - creating with brother Niles, father Martin and his carer Daphne, radio producer Roz and standout star Eddie the dog another beloved ensemble (with Niles’ social-climbing but never seen wife Maris repeating the gag established by Norm’s Vera in Cheers).

‘Event’ finales like those of Friends, M*A*S*H and Cheers are unlikely to ever occur again. TV consumption has changed out of all recognition. 30 years ago, Cheers’ final episode became the 1983 season’s most watched show with over 93 million Americans watching it - some 40% of the entire US population. This had been partly engineered by clever marketing by NBC, which had promoted the episode as “the television event of a lifetime“ and television’s “greatest night”. Others got in on the act: Massachusetts governor William Weld (in the manner of The Simpsons’ publicity opportunity-seeking Mayor Quimby) declared 20 May 1993 the state’s ‘Cheers Day’. In the show’s fictional home, giant video screens were set up on Boston Common so crowds could watch the finale. Jay Leno even broadcast a live episode of his Tonight Show from the city’s Bull & Finch pub, the Cheers bar’s supposed location (the show was, of course, shot in Los Angeles). NBC devoted most of its programming that evening to Cheers, leading right up to the ‘One For The Road’ episode.

Just as the Friends finale would do a decade later, Cheers concluded with character closure. Woody entered public life as a Boston city councillor, getting Norm an accountancy job at City Hall in the process. Cliff got a promotion at the post office. Rebecca finally achieved her ambition of marrying a rich man. And TV’s greatest will-they, won’t-they romance, between Sam and Diane was revived…briefly, before calling last orders on one of the best sitcoms of all time by remaining, like that Sopranos ending, delightfully, ambiguously unresolved.

How Nick Heyward almost ruined my marriage, and other stories

My wedding, last year, might not have happened at all, thanks to Nick Heyward. Four days after my first date with the woman who is now, thankfully, my wife, she invited me out for a drink. Unfortunately I had other plans: a ticket to see pop’s perennially boyish, melodically gifted, all-round nice guy at The 229 in London. 

Even though I’d only seen Heyward three weeks before, at the Water Rats launch of his Woodlands Echoes album, I chose another evening with him over, potentially, eternal happiness. Thankfully the correct order of things was restored the following Saturday night when Nic - yes, I recognise the confluence of names here… - and I went out for a splendid dinner.

This might sound obsessive - about both - but Heyward has long been one of pop’s most under-recognised giants. Perhaps he prefers it that way. But I know I’m not alone in my regard for both Heyward’s songwriting gifts (if you’ve never heard his solo song Kite, what’s wrong with you?), not to mention his everlasting charm, honed no doubt by his upbringing in Bowie’s Beckenham. 

“I think so many of us have that thought, ‘Why isn’t he right up there?’,” says DJ Gary Crowley, a fan since before Heyward with Haircut 100 made their debut, 41 years ago, with that extraordinary explosion of effusive pop, Pelican West. That record earned a rave review from Danny Baker in the-then punk bible the NME. David Hepworth in his Smash Hits review wrote that the album possessed “winning vocals”, “a sturdy, flexible rhythm section, creamy saxophone” and “poignant, exhilarating and thoroughly British songs”. It would, however, remain the only album by the Haircuts that Heyward would appear on, but it was enough to propel him - and them - to stratospheric levels of adulation...before the singer himself was dumped, seemingly inexplicably, by the band.

Haircut 100 were the perfect combination of music and image, not least of which their preppy Fair Isle sweaters and upbeat, choppy funk (the jumpers, by the way, were a happy accident: rehearsing for an episode of Top Of The Pops in a freezing studio at BBC Television Centre, the band wore them round their necks as scarves. According to Heyward, “our publisher said: ‘You looked fucking great on the monitors. Keep the jumpers.’” And they did).

But, then, the band’s golden-haired, dimple-cheeked focal point was ousted. Sudden fame had not been kind to Heyward, leading to mental health struggles. To boot, resentment had grown within the band over royalties and other legal matters. So he was fired (“I wasn’t in a strong enough place mentally to fight for my band,” Heyward told The Times’ Dan Cairns earlier this year), just as Haircut 100 were on the cusp of something truly enormous. There was even talk at the time of a Monkees-style TV show. 

A follow-up to Pelican West, Paint And Paint, featuring Fox as lead singer, disappeared without a trace. As, largely, did Haircut 100. Heyward didn’t, however. His debut solo album, North Of A Miracle - released in 1983 and produced by Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, with singles Whistle Down The Wind, Take That Situation and Blue Hat For A Blue Day - commenced a career that has produced a series of gems, albeit on his own terms. 

“He works at his own pace,” says Gary Crowley. “He’s probably picked it up in the last 10 years or so, but personally I’d love it if he was releasing albums every year! You just have to wait really, but you know the quality is always good”. Back in 1985 Heyward himself told Smash Hits that his ambition is always “...to make the kind of LP you can wrap up and give to someone as a present. No duff tracks at all, just 12 shining wonderful singles”. It’s something he has never, since, strayed from.

Gary Crowley speaks to Nick Heyward at The Exchange in Twickenham, 1 May 2022
© Simon Poulter 

“I think he’s so happy with where he is [today], to be perfectly honest,” says Crowley, who interviewed Heyward just over a year ago in a very entertaining evening in Twickenham. “He gets the respect, he gets the adulation, from the ones who know - if you know what I mean.” He adds that while Heyward would get recognised walking down the street, it wouldn’t be to the same extent as a ’80s pop peer like, say George Michael did when he was alive. Plus, given Heyward’s state of mind when he left Haircut 100, you’d expect him to be just fine with that relative anonymity (and basing himself for part of the year in Key West probably helps, too).

4-CD 40th anniversary edition of Pelican West 

Haircut 100, and Pelican West, have never gone far, however. No Heyward gig can be allowed to conclude without at least Favourite Shirts and Fantastic Day, which he plays with crowd-pleasing relish. Perhaps, then, it was always inevitable that this Friday’s one-off show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, celebrating Pelican West’s 40 years-plus anniversary (marked earlier this year by a super-deluxe reissue box set), would happen. 

For a start it’s not their first gathering: the band first reunited in 2004 for a VH1 special, and Heyward, Jones, Nemes and Cunningham performed Pelican West in its entirety in 2011. But if Friday’s show goes well, could they be tempted out on the road for a longer tour? “There was a bit of a bunfight for tickets for [this] show,” Heyward told The Times, “which we weren’t expecting at all, and it sold out in just hours. The promoter is now saying: ‘Let’s see how it goes and then think about a tour.’ ”

While any so-called ‘heritage act’, reliving the glories of four decades ago, relies on those who adored them at the time for a fix of nostalgia, especially in these equally dismal times, Friday’s show and Heyward’s regular solo performances have afforded an opportunity to marvel at, for me, what their appeal was to begin with: songcraft. I would certainly put Heyward in the same category of melodic ease as arch pop tunesmiths like Paul McCartney, Elton John in his ’70s pomp, and Neil Finn, but there is so much more running through his musical veins.

Appearing earlier this year on Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt’s excellent Rockonteurs podcast, Heyward explained that like many of his contemporaries - including Kemp - he’d grown up listening to progressive rock and fellow Beckenham resident David Bowie. Punk, too, factored in their musical awareness (it’s a frequent theme - ’80s pop stars denouncing the notion that punk came along to do away with prog). In a 2017 interview with freelance journalist Malcolm Wyatt, Hayward revealed that Fantastic Day was inspired by a certain mod band from Woking: “I was pogoing to The Jam! I’d go home inspired by them and others around that time, ending up buying a practice amp and guitar. I locked myself in my bedroom and kept playing D major, C major and G. I had to sing something over those chords, which just happened to be, ‘It’s a fantastic day’. I then thought, ‘Actually, that sounds like a song.” He has also cited The Beatles as an obvious point of reference, and even A Trick Of The Tail, Phil Collins’ 1976 debut as Genesis frontman. 

Gary Crowley

“Nick had all these lovely influences going on with Haircut 100,” points out Gary Crowley, citing elements of Earth, Wind & Fire’s funk and The Monkees’ melodies (and, clearly, charm). You could probably throw in Chic, too. 

Heyward himself has also drawn on the emergence of suburban soulboy bands like Animal Nightlife, Blue Rondo A La Turk, Southern Freeze and even Spandau Ballet as part of what shaped Pelican West. Also, New Wave (Jones was a huge fan of The Clash) - an early single, released by Heyward and Nemes under the band name Moving England, could easily have come from a Talking Heads record. Little, though, is ever spoken about Haircut 100’s influences on others. 

“I’m not sure Wham! would have existed without them,” says Crowley, who knew George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley well, having DJ’d on their first UK tour. “Andrew talks about it in his book [2019’s Wham! George & Me]. They were big, big fans. I think Haircut 100 signposted for George and Andrew as to where they could go. Their influence on Wham! was immense.”

41 years on Pelican West, still sounds as fresh and as vibrant as it did when it was released in 1982. The 40th anniversary box set is worth every penny, even if you know the original album well, with that record given a delightful remastering, and additional discs containing B-sides, 12-inch mixes, a collection of previously unreleased tracks, as well as a stonking live recording of a 1982 Hammersmith Odeon gig. 

Remarkably, though, Pelican West didn’t make it to Number 1 on its original release, peaking at 2, but it remained in the upper reaches of the chart for 34 weeks. Listening to it today, it is still a stone-cold ’80s classic. In his 8½/10 Smash Hits review, David Hepworth also commented that “…you can dance to it. The fact is, you simply will dance to it.”. This Friday evening I’m looking forward to doing exactly the same. And you know what? My wife will be dancing right alongside me.

Alright for some...

And so another bank holiday comes around - the second of three this month - which means yet another four-day week for those who nominally work 9 to 5, to use a patently anachronistic term. For some, however, today means the start of a three-day week. No, we haven’t suddenly returned to the industrial chaos of the 1970s, but the progressive shortening of the working week - for some - and intended to make life sweeter for those who benefit from a bit more free time. Alright for some, then, and of no benefit to those who earn by the hour...

In many workplaces, a relaxation of the five-day grindstone has been happening in one form or another for a number of years. When I moved to Amsterdam in 1999 the company I joined had established a ‘Dress Down Friday’, which basically meant male Dutch executives exchanged their dull grey suits and ties for button-down Oxford shirts and those ridiculous red (or orange) spongebag trousers popular amongst Faragists. From one perspective it marked a truncation of the working week, but the reality was that in many other parts of industry, it had always been common for men - and it was always men - to slip off to an 18-hole meeting room for an afternoon of essential “networking”, while those of us non-golfist drones from Sector 7G carried on the toil.

To some extent, and in some professions, the idea of a working ‘week’ has long been amorphous. In all the years I’ve worked in corporate communications, mobile phones and e-mail have meant 24/7 connectivity. News and crises rarely respect the conventions of a weekend. The creep of working from home - a digitally-enabled capability available long before Covid came along - has, though, changed the patterns of working days previously dictated to my office hours and commuting. 

When we emerged from lockdowns we started to witness the emergence of the ‘TWAT’ - people who only went into the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. This resulted in pubs and bars near offices thronging on the third of those three days, in the way that Friday nights used to be. But not for all. Even with the World Health Organisation last week declaring the Covid “global health emergency” officially over, 44% of the UK’s workforce is still classed as WFH for all or part of the time, according to the Office for National Statistics. 

The move from office desk to kitchen table has been a boon for many, liberating them from the relentless slog, frustrations and expense of commuting. A godsend, in particular, for family life, especially those with childcare responsibilities. However, it has also been a boon for the leisure sector. Golf courses have seen a notable increase in weekday afternoon usage. A Stanford University study in the US last August found that, with the use of mobile phone geolocation data near 3,400 golf courses, there were almost 300% more people at 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon than three years before. Data in this country has also suggested a more leisurely approach to working hours: contactless payments company SumUp reported that midweek spending on hair and beauty treatments grew last year by 5% - and notably 10% higher in Liverpool, for reasons not explained. Gyms have also reported being busier during the middle of the day, rather than at the traditional peak times of early evenings and weekends.

So does this suggest The Great Shirk at work?  Not necessarily. There is no doubt that companies are taking a more relaxed approach to working hours - something that was impossible to police, realistically, during lockdown (despite dystopian talk of firms installing keystroke-tracking software on corporate laptops to see monitor home working productivity).

As, currently, a man of enforced leisure, thanks to being made redundant at the end of March, it’s been noticeable in many of the discussions I’ve had with potential employers that the topic of work-life-balance is high on their list of selling points. At my last company I was contracted to work between 8.30am and 5.30pm Monday to Thursday, with an hour off on Friday afternoons, but such was the nature of what I did that I rarely worked those hours - sometimes less, sometimes considerably more. I had a boss who took the progressive view that the most important thing was for the work to get done, and done to everyone’s satisfaction. When you’re responsible for the reputation of a Eur 44 billion company, you can’t afford to be slack. But there was an acknowledgement that we weren’t in a workhouse.

Picture: Microsoft

If anything, working without being conditioned by ‘office hours’ has made people more efficient in how they structure their working day. That, though, hasn’t stopped some companies becoming increasingly insistent on returning to in-office attendance, with chief executives like Amazon’s Andy Jassy stating that in-person working enhances engagement. Others, like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, have complained that performance and productivity has not been the same since before the pandemic due to WFH.

Some have taken drastic action: insurance giant Aviva’s CEO Amanda Blanc has made getting staff back into the office part of her senior managers’ bonuses (a less pass-ag version of that Victorian pencil, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and his one-man crusade when Cabinet Office minister, leaving official notes on desks inscribed: “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon. With every good wish, Rt Hon Jacob Rees-Mogg MP”). Blanc’s approach may have worked - with most employees back in Aviva’s offices for at least part of the week.

Other businesses have taken a more incentivised approach. PwC has been luring staff back to the office with one-off £1,000 bonuses, while others have introduced Silicon Valley-style perks like free food and snacks. There is also evidence that more companies are urging a return to in-office working for at least part of the week to get collaboration and engagement going. Some bosses have even expressed the view that home working can harm career development. I can see that: I joined my last company at the start of the 2020 lockdown, and didn’t see the inside of the office until August 2021. It would not be until last year before people were returning in significant numbers, which meant that my internal network development was done through virtual means - e-mail and video calls, mainly, when they could be scheduled. 

It does, of course, depend on what industry you’re in. Bank CEOs have, in particular, been the most vocal about encouraging - or instructing - staff back into the offices (at Canary Wharf, the eastern annexe to the City of London, commuter traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels). In other sectors, however, WFH continues, albeit in many places as a “hybrid” model, a somewhat loose concept in which there’s no prescription as to when you come into the office. One company I recently interviewed with adopted a “flexible-hybrid working model” at the beginning of last year, applying what it said was lessons learned from remote working during the pandemic, while impressing upon its employees the need for collaboration through both co-location and remote working. “We’ve better understood the benefits that remote working can bring - improved work/life balance, less time spent commuting, greater inclusivity and involvement” for its people, its head of HR has said, calling out the benefit of giving staff more focused time free from distractions.

But with the pandemic well behind us, many companies are still trying to work out the best approach. It has meant a complete rethink of property portfolios, with corporates downsizing office space and moving to smaller headquarters, leveraging the cost efficiencies that come from discarding gargantuan corporate citadels. For many, though, its providing a more ‘optional’ approach to providing venues for collaboration when it is needed, and enabling solitude when that is best for concentration.

Picture: WeWork

However, some companies appear to be ripping up the rule books of the working week altogether. Another benefit of the pandemic, and the somewhat apocryphal ‘Great Resign’ (as people supposedly reassessed their lives), is that companies have had to rethink how they attract and retain talent. In the tech industry it was the offer of free snacks and lunches to keep engineers tied to their coding stations, and all those other Silicon Valley cliches of playrooms and ‘fun’ distractions to take the edge of the intensity of software development. 

The latest thing is the four-day week. With the summer approaching (as indicated by the relentless rain), employers are introducing significantly shorter Fridays, with some cancelling afternoon working altogether. “Pressure for a four-day week has been building and it’s resulting in companies looking at different ways of doing business,” Joe Ryle, director of the 4 Day Week Campaign, recently told The Times. ‘Summer hours’, he said, were being applied as a means of raising morale (probably essential with pay rises in short supply amid the cost of living crisis). “Seasonal hours give companies the opportunity to experiment with shorter working hours in a much smaller time period so workers can adjust and get used to it,” Ryle added.

According to The Times, L’Oréal allows staff to knock-off at 3pm on a Friday, with full half-days available at brands like Cadbury and Nike. It’s not new, though: Kellogg’s have been offering summer hours for 20 years, saying that they believe it allows staff to “recharge and unwind”, benefitting mental and physical wellbeing, as well as productivity and motivation.

Have we, then, become entitled since being given “permission” to work in our trackies from sofas, with no requirement to endure overcrowded, expensive trains, transport strikes and congested streets? Possibly, but there’s no denying that almost instantly Covid transformed the accepted norms of working (it would be horrendously arrogant to lump into that statement the key workers who went into their workplaces throughout lockdown or, simply because of the nature of their jobs, had no choice to work from home).

Certainly, the world of work has changed out of all recognition to that in which I started out in 37 years ago. WFH for me has been a convenience, but not my preference. I actually like getting out of the house for the day, and work infinitely better when in a traditional environment. During lockdowns I even experienced commute envy as my wife, a primary school teacher, was going out every day. Even if her commute only lasted 15 minutes, she was getting to see more than the hedge outside our front window that was my vista while I perched on the sofa doing Teams meetings. But I don’t share the more draconian views of WFH-sceptic CEOs.

That said, at this stage of my unemployment, I’d be happy to have any job, regardless of its mandated hours or where it is conducted. And if any employers are reading this, I’ve managed to make it to the midst of middle age without yet swinging a golf stick in anger. And have no intention of doing so, either.