Just when we thought we were out...they pull us back in

Cinematic trilogies. There, you probably weren’t expecting that proposition on a Tuesday, but bear with me, as a trilogy - in fact, a trilogy of trilogies - have been somewhat on my mind of late. The trigger was sinking into The Mandalorian, Jon Favreau’s brilliant Disney+ Star Wars series, which fits into the original nine-film George Lucas canon by portraying events in the galaxy far, far away in the period five years after the events of Return Of The Jedi (sorry, Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi).

The Star Wars series is a perfect example of trilogies created by storytellers with a narrative vision to fulfil. In the case of Peter Jackson’s exhaustive adaptation of Tolkien’s three Lord Of The Rings books, it was the ambition of realising them into 11 buttock-numbing hours of celluloid (the third and final part, The Return Of The King, came in at 4.1 hours, and my gluteus maximus still hasn’t recovered). Other examples appear to be a mixture of directorial hubris and studio cash-ins, and you can take your pick of those featuring Indiana Jones, Mad Max, Spider-Man, Jason Bourne, Hannibal Lector and Austin Powers, George Romero’s zombie collection and the similar ‘Mariachi’ trio from Robert Rodriguez, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, Back To The Future, the Toy Storys, Terminators 1-3, X-Men and The Naked Gun. And then, of course, there are the franchises that have gone on beyond their third instalments, such as Die Hard and the Alien series. 

There are many, many more. Some are good, a few are very good, while others suffer from the law of diminishing returns. And while some trilogies serve a purpose of character evolution (as opposed to just creating box office queues), there is one instalment of a noted trilogy for which the jury is still out. Or at least was: The Godfather Part III. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 epic was released 16 years after The Godfather Part II and, two years before that, the original Godfather set the standard for modern film-making. They also established Coppola at the fulcrum of that club of Italian-American auteurs that also included Martin Scorcese and Brian De Palma. But between his second and third Clan Corleone films, Coppola had been somewhat eclipsed by these peers: Scorcese’s Goodfellas, released three months before Part III, had somewhat redefined the mob drama (using many of the actors Coppola had brought to the screen himself), while De Palma’s The Untouchables, which appeared in 1987, was even more uncompromising in its excoriating view of the Capone-era that pre-dated the rise of the fictional Corleones.

So, when The Godfather Part III came about, the question was raised: did we need a closing chapter to the Skywalker-esque arc of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, who’d made his own journey from innocent college boy at the start of The Godfather to the dark side of becoming ‘Don’ at the end of Part II? Coppola’s first two chapters were faithful interpretations of Mario Puzo’s novel, manifesting themselves as engrossing depictions of the American Dream mixed with Shakespearian and Greek tragedies. Part III, co-scripted by Puzo, was an attempt to bring some closure to the Corleone story, though many at the time felt there was something disjointed about suddenly presenting Michael, now in his 60s, as seeking redemption, freeing his family from crime, and finding a suitable successor to his business empire. 

Why this is important now is that Part III has been recut and, today, re-released on Blu-ray Disc and streaming platforms as The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. It is, says, Coppola, an opportunity to return Part III to the original vision of the film, though he doesn’t fully reveal why this wasn’t applied to begin with. It is, though, “an acknowledgement of Mario’s [Puzo] and my preferred title, and our original intentions for what became The Godfather: Part III,” he adds. “For this version of the finale, I created a new beginning and ending, and rearranged some scenes, shots, and music cues.” With these changes, he says, along with restored footage and sound, it is a more appropriate conclusion to Corleone saga.

Look through any online film forum and it’s easy to see how Part III has been long maligned. It even became a running joke in The Sopranos, with cheeky references every now and again. Coppola’s daughter, Sofia - cast as Michael and Kay Corleone’s daughter Mary - became something of a lightning rod for criticism, owing to what critics felt was an underwhelming performance (especially in her on-screen romance with Andy Garcia’s Vincent Mancini, the illegitimate son of Michael’s dead brother Sonny). It shouldn’t be forgotten that she was 19 when she made Part III, and largely new to the profession  (though she’d made her debut in The Godfather, playing her infant brother Michael). 30 years on, her performance is probably not as bad as you remember, not that she would care, having gone on to become a justifiably celebrated director (fun fact: when I lived in Paris, my French tutor had coached her during the making of Marie Antoinette). 

Part III has continued to be something of the unloved child of Francis Ford Coppola's film career. Thus, the new version feels like, in Mob parlance, ‘unfinished business’. The idea came from Paramount Pictures: with the 50th anniversary of The Godfather coming up in 2022 the studio approached Coppola with the idea of cleaning up the original print, frame-by-frame, with modern technology. He responded by saying that it was Part III that needed the work. Painstaking restoration from the film's original negative began, a process that included sifting through original takes to replace sequences with better imagery, often cleaning up flaws that 1990 technology had been able to deal with. At the same time, the film was given a 5.1 audio mix. But, perhaps, the real magic in the new version comes with the chopping back of some scenes and new dialogue being recorded, rendering Part III - according to those who’ve seen it - as tighter and with greater emotional impact than the original had. This gives something of a clue to the original purpose. “In musical terms, a coda is sort of like an epilogue, a summing up, and that’s what we intended the movie to be,” Coppola has said, reflecting on the fact that, critics-be-damned, Part III was never meant to be a third and equal to the first two. “You’ll [now] see a film which has a different beginning and ending; many scenes throughout have been repositioned, and the picture has been given, I think, a new life.” 

Despite the new title, it’s certainly not a new film. The technical and editorial changes will be subtle, but they are effective. We still find Al Pacino, doing Pacino-doing-Rob Brydon-doing-Pacino, as Michael Corleone, wrestling with legitimising the family business at the end of the 1970s amid new, more nefarious threats from rivals (most notably Joey Zasa, played by Joe Mantegna), while addressing his faith, his failed marriage to Kay (Diane Keaton continuing in the role she first played in The Godfather) and succession. Perhaps, if Part III didn’t sit well with you the first time around, it still might not. But weirdly, it was something of an anachronism in 1990. The first two parts, sequenced into post-war America felt like period pieces in 1972 and 1974, but Part III seemed more contemporary when it came out, set just over ten years after the period in which it was set. It still might seem like an afterthought, but it was a sumptuous one. 

If you haven’t ever seen Part III - either because you were disinclined at the time it came out, have been deferred by the snark, or are simply too young, you may find the recut version’s title the ultimate spoiler. But that, I’d wager, is a bit like revealing, in 2020, that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. Get over it. My recollection of Part III first time around is of a thrilling film which, while unable to scale the critical heights of its unassailable predecessors (and the debate over Part II being better than The Godfather will go on forever), it is still a classic. 

There was even talk, at one point, of a fourth instalment, but it never surfaced. I’m glad. Michael Corleone’s death at the end, slumped in a chair in the garden of Don Tommasino's Sicilian villa, is the closure the arc needed. Any more - even with Garcia continuing as Vincent - would have been exploitation. Part III really wasn’t that bad. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, which don’t get handed out by default. I suspect this new version will warrant serious revision of some of the haters' views. As Michael Corleone says himself in the film: “Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment. “ 

Return of football supporters is a kick in the ballots

© Simon Poulter 2019

It’s here. It’s actually here. The second of December, which means life in England returns to…well, not exactly normal. Since midnight, we’ve been placed into a revised system of tiers to keep us restricted without calling it a new lockdown. Non-essential shops, hairdressers and other businesses can reopen again. Tomorrow I will go for my first swim in four weeks, never really recalling the scientific wisdom of why I wasn’t allowed to go before, given that the local pool perfectly observed social distancing, disinfected the very ground you walked on and, while actually in the pool, engulfed you in wonderfully chlorinated water to keep COVID at bay.

Tonight, too, football will return. Well, I say ‘return’ but it’s never really been away, just the fans, the "12th player", as cliché-prone professionals have a habit of saying. After the initial halt caused by the pandemic, football returned in July - sans fans - and again in September after the briefest of summer breaks, again to empty stadia (albeit for an experiment at Brighton’s Amex Stadium with a friendly against Chelsea). Now, the football that was already back, is 'back', albeit in a limited form as grounds in England’s Tier 2 areas are opened up to up to a maximum of 2,000 supporters each. Grounds in Tier 1 areas will be allowed to host up to 4,000 spectators, which will be a boon to Truro City FC, Cowes Sports Football Club on the Isle of Wight (they play in the Wessex League Premier Division) and whatever professional clubs exist on the Scilly Isles. Not many, I suspect.

For the English Premier League, the return of people other than staff and club mascots is still only very partial. Essentially, the only clubs that can host fans are Arsenal, Brighton, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Everton, Fulham, Liverpool, Southampton, Tottenham and West Ham. Aston Villa, Burnley, Leeds, Leicester, Manchesters City and United, Newcastle, Sheffield United, West Brom and Wolves will all have to soldier on in deserted grounds, unless the Tier 3 restrictions imposed on their host cities are revised. With the tiering system either enabling or denying all English league and Women’s Super League clubs from opening, it all feels a little piecemeal. There is, also, the argument that those clubs who can now bring fans in, will be at an unfair advantage to those who can not. Plenty of players have spoken throughout this weird period about how the lack of crowds to buzz off impacts their performance, and it was noticeable that when games did resume after the lockdown in empty grounds, the quality of the football was below par.

Picture: Twitter/@CAFofficial

From a financial point of view, allowing 2,000 fans in is hardly going to boost the coffers of clubs whose grounds hold ten or 20 times that number (even if Chelsea - who probably need the money the least - are charging a whopping £75 for balloted tickets in one of their stands). 

For precarious clubs like Charlton Athletic, who will be amongst the first to host fans under the new rules, tonight at The Valley, it could be helpful, but hardly a lifesaver. But, even if it's only 2,000 fans entering a 27,000-seat stadium (and with a large fanbase in Tier 3 Kent, who will not be allowed to travel in to south-east London), I suppose it's foot traffic through the turnstiles of some kind.

While I’d be the first to admit that not going to Stamford Bridge every other weekend for the last nine months has been a price worth paying for my health, the absence of 'live' football has left a gap in my life over the course of a third of last season and a third of this one. The thing is, there’s a difference between 42,000 people at the Bridge, and a number closer to the school assembly attendance of a large comprehensive. Watching games on television is fine - we do it for away games or for cup matches we’d prefer to watch from the comfort of our sofas - but there is no substitute for being in the stadium. It's the rituals and traditions you miss: the pre-match pint, the arguments over spurious offside decisions, and the vehement disagreement with callers to 606 while stuck in traffic on the way home.

For those who do get tickets to see their clubs under the new protocols, the experience will be a lot different to what they’re used to. Each club will impose a code of conduct, based on guidance from the Sports Grounds Safety Authority. Along with requiring fans to wear facemarks when entering and leaving grounds, and while moving around them, some are likely to put even more health and safety requirements in place. Tomorrow night’s Europa League tie between Arsenal and Rapid Vienna at the Emirates will carry a very strict ruling on alcohol (“only available when purchased with a substantial food item and when seated at a table”) and on physical contact: “Avoid hugs, high-fives, handshakes and any close contact with people who are not within your group.” 

Liverpool has already asked supporters to “act responsibly” when “celebrating or engaging in key moments of the match”, reminding supporters that “COVID-19 spreads more easily when people stand, sing and shout”. Anfield, it shouldn’t be forgotten, played host to the alleged 'superspreader' event in March when Liverpool played (and were beaten by) Atlético Madrid in the Champions League, a game played before a capacity crowd that included 3,000 fans who’d travelled from Spain, just as Spain’s own coronavirus rate was going through the roof. On the same day as 54,000 people packed into Anfield, not to mention the pubs and chip shops around the streets bordering on Stanley Park, the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic, expressing “deep concern” for “the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.” The day before, Madrid had closed its schools as infection rates in the Spanish capital had gone through the roof.

© Simon Poulter 2019

My last visit to Stamford Bridge was a couple of days before the Liverpool-Atlético fixture, for Chelsea’s home league meeting with Everton. The gaps in our area of the East Stand were noticeable. In fact, the entire row below us was empty. Normally, when the dad and son who sit right in front leave ten minutes before the end you suddenly become aware of the cold wind. This time, we had it for the full 90 minutes. For those regulars who were there, there was awkwardness, as no one knew whether to shake hands (as is the custom) or bump elbows. No one, though, knew what was about to come, either.

For those lucky enough to win a balloted ticket under the new routine, the experience is certainly going to be odd. Tickets will be for carefully designated areas, the social distancing we’ve all grown used to over the last nine months will be applied, and fans will also have to adjust to sitting somewhere different. OK, minor inconveniences for the sake of getting to see live football again. But will people really respect the “respiratory etiquette”, as Ken Scott, head of inspectorate at the SGSA, described it to The Times yesterday? Shouting and singing would not be prohibited, he said, but it was important for fans to respect the people sitting around them. “I feel confident, however, that we will see supporters demonstrate that they can be trusted and surprise the doubting Thomases,” he said. We shall see. 

One will make up one’s own mind, thank you

Picture: Netflix

You would have thought - given the global pandemic - that Her Majesty's Government would have a little less time on their hands to get involved in things that really don't, frankly, need their involvement. But that hasn’t stopped Oliver Dowden, the squeaky-voiced Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who is also a Cabinet minister, from calling on The Crown to carry a ‘health warning’ to make clear that the series is a fictionalised account of life within the House of Windsor.

No sooner had I posted here on Saturday about how The Crown is just a glorious dramatisation of supposed real events and, in essence, is largely a posh version of Dallas or Dynasty, than Dowden told the Mail On Sunday (who else?): “I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact”, adding that while the show was a “beautifully produced work of fiction”, it “should be very clear at the beginning it is just that”. He is planning to write to Neflix to express his concerns further. Environment secretary George Eustice - this morning’s government stooge on the breakfast shows - even added to Dowden’s remarks when asked about them by Sky’s Kay Burley: “It is a very good drama, but it is a drama,” he said, adding that while the show was “clearly based on true events in our recent history” it was clear that it contained “colourful depictions” based on fact. While not the most explicit endorsement of his colleague’s comments, it was starting to sound like a government line. That in itself is a worry. Why should any minister have a view about something so obviously entertainment, while elsewhere there's a deadly virus on the loose and an economic meltdown and rising unemployment resulting from it? It wouldn't have anything to do with a backbench revolt over the tiering system, would it?

Picture: Netflix

If, though, The Crown is, now, a matter of highest importance for HMG, I strongly suggest that Dowden drops the BBC a note asking them to make clear that EastEnders isn’t a fly-on-the-wall series about a Cockerney community in working class London. And while he's at it, a missive should be on its way to ITV asking it to make clear that Emmerdale isn’t about real farming folk. Perhaps, too, an e-mail to Disney to have them clarify that The Mandalorian is, in fact, a drama about a bounty hunter in a galaxy far, far away, and not a hard-hitting documentary about life five years after the end of the facist Galactic Empire in Return Of The Jedi. Which also wasn’t real.

Inevitably, Twitter has piled on. “The Culture Secretary’s ‘intervention’ over The Crown is the funniest thing I've heard in ages,” said one tweet. “Netflix already tells people that The Crown is fiction. It’s billed as a drama. Those people in it are actors. I know! Blows your mind,” said another. One tweet ranted: “I just don’t know where to start with Oliver Dowden using his full powers of headed notepaper to demand Netflix proclaim The Crown is fiction, but maybe a trip round the back of the flat screen to check there aren’t little people living there.”

Understandably, those involved in The Crown have been defending the latest season which, unlike the first three, seems to be closer to contemporary sensitivities because it focuses on a period of history played out in the media unlike any before it. That aside, Series 4 is no different to Series 1-3. Showrunner Peter Morgan has happily described its fictionalised account of real-life events as a "constant push-pull" between research and drama. Josh O'Connor, who plays Prince Charles in the latest run, told the BBC: "Sometimes people will want to believe this is what happened. It's always worth checking in and remembering that we're actors, we're not real and it's not a real story.” 

This hasn’t stopped former royal correspondents from piling in: Dickie Arbiter, the onetime Independent Radio News royal correspondent who became the Buckingham Palace press secretary, has branded the show’s fourth series a “hatchet job” on both Charles and Diana, whose ill-fated marriage forms the series' core theme, along with the Thatcher premiership. Its depiction of C&D's travails stretched “dramatic licence to the extreme”, Arbiter has said. Even ex-BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond has said she feared some viewers might treat the show "as a documentary".

The real worry, for me, is who the likes of Dowden (right) are trying to address with these comments. There’s an implied suggestion that some Netflix viewers are stupid, because they’ve also watched Selling Sunset and The Tiger King (as have I, and never once mistook them for fiction). Worse was that Dowden enraged the Mail On Sunday which, together with its rival the Daily Express, maintains a scary, mad-person-wearing-head-to-toe-Union-Jack obsession with the royals and, even 23 years after her death, Diana. “Viewers of this series,” it thundered yesterday, in total agreement with Dowden, “should never be in any doubt that what they are seeing is dramatic invention by Left-wing persons who do not in fact much like the institution or the family they pretend to portray.” 

Er, right. Let me refer the right-honourable gentleman to my remarks earlier in this post about EastEnders, Emmerdale and the Star Wars universe. They’re not all that deferential to the institutions they portray, either, but no-one’s going to think that there’s a London borough called Walford, and Phil Mitchell has been able to last 30 years as its resident alcoholic thug.  

Games of thrones: The Crown and other guilty pleasures

Picture: Netflix

So, it’s happened. I’m embracing pop culture in a manner I hadn’t previously thought I would. Full disclosure - I recently bought Kylie Minogue’s new album, DISCO, on the strength of reviews, and absolutely love it. Likewise, I ordered Paloma Faith’s new release Infinite Things purely because of her performing the corking breakout single Gold on The Jonathan Ross Show. Both purchases were made ‘on behalf’ of my girlfriend as gifts to her, but I've cast a sneaky ear to both quite shamelessly. More than once. Similarly, Steps were on BBC Breakfast yesterday morning doing their new single, and I actually quite liked it. Yes. Steps. WTAF? 

The trouble is that recent months have levelled many things up. We’ve craved comfort. My television consumption has changed out of all recognition, though this is partly to do with moving in with a partner and her teenage daughters back in February, shortly before The Plague descended. In stark comparison to my single life, watching repeats of ancient Mock The Week episodes and Cop Car Workshop marathons on Dave, I have now been introduced to Bakeoff, Masterchef, Gogglebox and something quite queasy called Naked Attraction. It’s not that I have an aversion to reality, it’s just that I’ve always preferred escape. Living on my own, and assuming Dave wasn’t showing an evening of old Would I Lie To You? episodes, I’d dip into the Bond movie collection, or something of that ilk. Now, amid my new family life, we’ve blown through Selling Sunset and The Tiger King, shows I wouldn’t have hitherto watched in a thousand years based on synopsis alone. Similarly, BBC1’s engrossing Ambulance fly-on-the-wall series about London's emergency responders would have been too much reality. But watched it we did. Every single episode. And it was good.

As the pandemic dragged through the months, and a warm spring begat a hot summer before sinking into a wet autumn, with lockdown coming, going, and returning once more, we have, as a nation, sought comfort in our tellyboxes. We have consumed things not out of intellectual fulfilment, but not out of mindless amusement either. Well, not all the time. I have, though, surprised myself with what I’ve actually been happy to indulge. Case in point: The Crown. I normally find biopics about people with whom I’m familiar uncomfortable, largely because I’m somewhat retentive and pick holes in any attempt to appropriate real individuals I somewhat know about. Thus, I struggled with Bohemian Rhapsody because I knew most of the stories already and didn’t see the need for actors - as good as Rami Malek was as Freddie Mercury - retelling them. And from the same director (Dexter Fletcher), Eddie The Eagle gave a mildly amusing account of Edwards’ story, although Rocketman at least sought to get under Elton John’s skin. But I still can’t help sitting there going “That wouldn’t have been like that!” or “He wouldn’t have said that!”, and similar such pedantry. Actually, all of this applies to just about every and any rock biopic you care to mention (and the less said about the Bowie effort, Stardust, the better...).

The Crown, on the other hand, has presented a very different dilemma. The British royal family are, arguably, one of the world’s most written about, scrutinised and gossiped over institutions. Even if you’re not particularly interested in royalty, you will have found it hard to avoid them. If you’re British, Her Maj the Q is on the front of every stamp and the back of every coin. And at age 94 not-out, Elizabeth II has transcended generations since she became sovereign at the age of 25. Her extended family, for good or for bad, remains the most photographed on the planet. There’s little we don’t know about the royals, and what we don’t gets confected by the press and so-called royal watchers as supposed fact. 

So, quite what Peter Morgan’s dramatisation of the Queen’s reign opens up is subject to question. High question. And yet the sumptuous Netflix series has been the ultimate lockdown comfort food. You know Princess Anne would never call her elder brother “Eeyore” out of mockery in real life, as she does in one episode, but it's a delicious thought (actually, the princess recently admitted in a TV interview for her 70th birthday that she had watched early episodes of The Crown and found them "quite interesting", though had not seen any more recent. That notwithstanding, she's the only royal known to have seen any of the series, a reminder that Anne has probably been the coolest of the Queen's offspring, though the competitive field for that title is not too broad...).

I have been in Prince Charles’ company on two occasions: in the first - for a speech he gave at Clarence House on climate change - he was exactly as you’ve seen him on television, sharing his thoughts on one of his genuine passions. The humour was light and somewhat contrived, and apart from being heir to the throne, he could have been any corporate executive doing a thing about a thing. 

The second occasion was at the COP-15 environment conference in Copenhagen, at which, as part of a delegation from a corporate sponsor of one of the PoW's worthy initiatives, I stood behind two of my then-company’s middle managers as they jostled for prominence as Charles - accompanied by a vast entourage (lackeys, media people and even his own camera crew) passed along a line, making vacuous small talk. I felt sympathy for him. The price of progressing his pet causes is a daily round of palm-greasing with people he wouldn’t otherwise have time for, while dropping carefully timed bon mots for mild amusement. On neither occasion did I find Charles morose or eccentric, or any of the other barbs aimed at him. But, then, these brief encounters hardly make me an authority.

This raises questions about how much The Crown has faithfully documented the House of Windsor’s dysfunctions over the last 70-odd years, or whether the show is simply a posh version of Dallas or Dynasty (which could have been its alternative title, now I think of it). The truth probably lies somewhere between the two. We have just burned through Series 4 with unbridled enthusiasm, almost to the point of addiction at squeezing in another before bedtime (how box sets should be consumed). After the first two seasons chronicled Elizabeth’s accession and adjustment to becoming sovereign so young, and in a post-war empire, too, with all its political, social and cultural upheavals, the third gave more prominence to the young Charles trying to find his way in the world against the backdrop of Britain’s place in the 1960s and 1970s. Series 4, however, has been the most anticipated so far, ever since Series 3 ended with the mouthwatering prospect of what the next would tackle. 

Firstly, the fourth season has entered the era my age group grew up in, the 1980s, and secondly, it was when the media landscape changed out of all recognition. The Fourth Estate became a different beast entirely in the 1980s: a more deferential press towards the establishment gave way to a more oikish press (no coincidence that a republican Australian owned The Sun, News Of The World, the now defunct Today and even The Times stable). This intertwines, in alternative waves, with the two core elements of The Crown’s fourth season: the marriage of Charles and Diana, and the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. 

I couldn’t ever say I’ve been that bothered about the royals. I’ve got nothing against them and quite like their presence in the national fabric, but I recall the saga of Charles and Diana, played out in the press (and not just the tabloids, either…) for what seemed like the entire decade, as tiresome. Equally, I would happily confess a loathing of Thatcher, no matter what the perceived conclusions might be of her tenure at No.10. I was at secondary school for most of her time in office (she was elected just after I took - unsuccessfully - my 11-plus), and my view of her was coloured, I’ll admit, by the influence of proto-typical, Lada-driving lefty teachers. The Crown’s depiction of her divisiveness is framed through background themes like South Africa, the Falklands War and the miners' strike. Even social injustices, vicariously through the episode of royal intruder Michael Fagan, supposedly discussing them with HRHtQ in her bedroom, brought back many raw memories from my teenage years, and a reminder that the 1980s weren’t all puffball skirts and party balloons on Top Of The Pops. But, then again, the '80s were the decade that defined me: they were the years of Live Aid, of me really discovering music and then getting to write about it for a living, including a spell for Smash Hits, one of the publishing phenomena of the pre-Internet age. I was 12 when the 1980s began, 22 when they ended, a child at the outset, a working man when they came to a close, and already in the thick of corporate politics with a job at Sky TV, having passed my O-levels and comprehensively failed my A-levels somewhere along the way.

Picture: Netflix

The biggest problem with dramatisations of real events is always the casting, and The Crown has been no different on occasion. That said, Olivia Coleman and Tobias Menzies have been superb as the sovereign and her consort, Philip, in the third and fourth seasons, and Gillian Anderson, despite an early tendency to sound more like Steve Nallon’s Spitting Image delivery, has been brilliant. In some respects, taking on Thatcher is one of the more challenging roles Anderson could have accepted. Get it wrong, and it’s hopeless parody; get it right, and you open up all the old wounds again. However, Thatcher shares the limelight of Series 4 with the doomed marriage of Princess Charles and Princess Diana, and I can imagine showrunner Peter Morgan took on the challenge of recreating that with some glee. As much as it evolved into a bubbling sea of acrimonious media froth, with Diana’s tragic adult life played out from the announcement of her engagement until her death in a Paris tunnel just 16 years later, The Crown’s depiction of the near-Shakespearian tragedy of a troubled heir to the throne unable to marry the married woman he actually loved, but instead being virtually forced into marriage with a sweet young Sloane Ranger from landed stock, is as engrossing as it was genuinely sad. Charles’ portrayal by Josh O'Connor does stray into pantomime villainy, and Morgan hasn’t held back from positioning the plant-whispering prince as an embittered control freak. Sadly, this has led to a social media backlash against the real Charles and Camilla. For this season only, Emma Corrin has played Diana with aplomb, not only getting the 'People's Princess' and her dewy-eyed, head-tilted coquettishness, but projecting her vulnerability and isolation and, ultimately, how she was so utterly a square peg in a round hole within Clan Windsor.

There is, of course, much to criticise The Crown for its take on real events. Since Series 4 was released two weeks ago, newspaper columnists and the twittersphere alike have been frothing at the alleged inaccuracies. Some have been valid. No, Lord Mountbatten didn’t write to Charles, on the day he was blown up by the IRA, urging him to do his duty and find “some sweet and innocent, well-tempered girl with no past” to settle down with; no, Margaret Thatcher and husband Dennis were not put through a purgatorial test of etiquette on their first visit to Balmoral in 1979; and, no, Diana wasn’t put through a horrendous rite of passage, early on, at a mob gathering at Buckingham Palace, where Princess Margaret (played not entirely convincingly by Helena Bonham-Carter) is depicted as castigating the novice princess for getting her curtseys wrong (“Spiteful rubbish,” said the Daily Mail). There are many more acts of clear dramatic licence that have brought former courtiers and royal biographers out of the woodwork, as well as those with a more genuine, personal connection.

Picture: Netflix

To state the bleeding obvious, any misconception that The Crown is a documentary should have been brushed away long before people pressed the Netflix button. If you step back from the reality that it depicts a family we all think we know, and filter out the fact that none of us, not even those who may have fleetingly been in the company of an actual royal, have any actual knowledge of what they’re really like, sat around the dining tables and state rooms of their castles and stately homes. But who cares. Who cares if the plot lines are Albert Square transported to Buckingham Palace ("GIT AHT OF MY PALACE!!!) or Coronation Street recreated at Balmoral. It’s engrossing stuff. Yes, a pile of cheese, but as cheese is one of the few things my dietary requirements can tolerate these days, I’ve lapped up every episode so far, and am actually getting quite impatient for seasons five and six (there will be no more after that) to get a move on. 

We’ve spent the better part of the last nine months in lockdown with our own families, ultra-dysfunctional or not, so virtually eavesdropping on a confected version of, arguably the most dysfunctional dynasty on the planet has been a richly delicious guilty pleasure. And I appear to be craving more. 

One less of the genuine seven

By now you will have read every obituary of Sir Sean Connery, so there’s not a lot left that I could add. Every tribute has commented on his being the actor who defined James Bond, and while there was much more to his canon than that one part, over six ‘official’ appearances as 007 he helped create the modern cinematic franchise. Almost 60 years on - give or take delays - it is still an event, and one of only a handful of film series that can genuinely classed as such.

Connery was the definitive Bond, not that he was meant to be. Ian Fleming himself had a very different idea for who should play his raffish gentleman spy. Cary Grant, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton were all in the frame to play Bond in Dr. No, and Connery’s physical appearance (an “over-developed stunt man”, according to Fleming) counted against him in the mind of the author who felt that the Scottish former milkman and coffin polisher was “unrefined”. And yet, today, we think of nothing else. Whatever fondness exists for Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and, the closest Bond has come to Connery’s authenticity, Daniel Craig, the first actor to say the words “Bond, James Bond” in that immortal casino scene in Dr. No cast the Scot indelibly as the 007 rarely improved upon.

Of course, the films that followed played their part: I still adore Dr. No and From Russia With Love for their noirish simplicity, unencumbered by the ‘gags’ and the gadgets that became the Bond films’ trademark. By Connery’s third outing, Goldfinger, director Guy Hamilton and longtime Bond designer Ken Adam started to spread their wings with the trickery and elaborate sets that would become an integral part of the total 007 theatre. But throughout them all, from Dr. No to Diamonds Are Forever, Connery was the undoubted star, even if he’d grown bored after his fifth appearance, You Only Live Twice, and was persuaded back to the part with a substantial cheque (a record fee at the time) in Diamonds, following George Lazenby’s one and only (and, it must be said, good) appearance in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

What followed, however, in Connery’s filmography, is the subject of some debate. Bond turned him into “one of the seven greatest film stars of all time”, according to Steven Spielberg, who would cast him as Indiana Jones’ father in The Last Crusade. Bond gave him the ability to pick and choose what he played, and when he played. There were questionable efforts, like The Man Who Would Be King and John Boorman’s sci-fi adventure, Sardoz, and even big-budget Hollywood blockbusters like The Rock which no doubt chewed up Connery’s star power, but was hardly a high cinematic watermark. But, like his age contemporary Clint Eastwood, amongst the so-so career fillers sat some genuine mid-career gems. The Untouchables comes immediately to mind: Brian de Palma’s gritty Chicago masterpiece, setting the wholesome Elliott Ness (Kevin Costner) against Al Capone (Robert De Niro), finds Connery on fine form as Irish-American cop Jimmy Malone, providing Ness with street-smart patriarchy. “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way,” he guides his earnest younger associate, delivering a line with atypical understatement. 

Then there was The Hunt For Red October, another big budget yarn, based on Tom Clancy’s blockbuster novel, in which Connery - with no change whatsoever to his Scottish brogue - plays the rogue Russian submarine commander Marko Ramius, who steals a revolutionary new sub and parks it off the coast of America before defecting, making a new cinema hero out of the Jack Ryan character in the process. What it shares with The Rock in terms of confected tension, Connery - and a bizarre hairpiece - elevates it to something far more engrossing. As with his Indiana Jones outing, and The Untouchables, these are the films that underline Connery’s undisputed - some might say, unsurpassed - star power.

Indeed, taking the helicopter view of Sean Connery, whether you rate him for his Bond films, his occasional obscurities or the big-budget commercial monsters that cashed in on his fame, Hollywood has lost one of its greatest players. Charm, charisma, an occasional edge (and let’s not get into his politically incorrect comments…), the working class Scot traversed borders. He was 90 when he died, a good innings as they say. Even if he’d been in retirement since 2006, he’d put in a body of work that was everything we should love about a movie star. A proper movie star. And Steven Spielberg, of all people should know what they’re really like.

Letter From America: The Boss is back

What did you do during lockdown (and by that I mean the first lockdown…)? Did you discover the joys of Zoom? Were you sucked into a weekly online quiz with your extended family? Did you acquire a new hobby? Eat yourself into a Jabba The Hut-sized mound? Finally make use of that yoga mat you’d bought but never used? Or, perhaps you did a Captain Tom, and walked yourself into the record books and the nation’s hearts. 

If you’re a musician, lockdown has possibly been a boon to creativity, if only to compensate for tours not going ahead. Look at Paul McCartney - he recorded McCartney III, out in December, on his own at his studio in Sussex, handling all the instruments himself. And I bet it’ll be a corker.

Though this took place last November (a sweeter, disease-free time, right?), Bruce Springsteen’s approach to housebound boredom is to invite your mates round and, in a week, put together a new album. Not that those mates are anyone: they’re called the E-Street Band. And the album is Letter To You. 

Recorded over five days at The Boss’s home in Colts Neck, New Jersey, a twenty-minute drive from Asbury Park and the real Jersey Shore so steeped in Springsteen history, the album, in his own words, “turned out to be one of the greatest recording experiences I’ve ever had.” That might sound hyperbolic, but Springsteen says there’s a “emotional nature” to the album that he loves, a point that comes across in the Apple TV making-of film about the album. It shows the camaraderie of a group - trusted sidekick Stevie Van Zandt, Patti Scialfa (Mrs. Springsteen), Nils Lofgren, Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, Charlie Giordano and Jake Clemons (the ‘Big Man’, Clarence’s sax-playing nephew) - crafting an album, a band Springsteen says in the film informs how he writes, inspiring him to “write big”. 

Back in the spring of 1974, Springsteen and the band started work on the Born To Run album, labouring over the next 14 months - six of which on the title track alone - to create scale, something akin to the Spector ‘wall of sound’. It was an angry, frustrating time for all concerned, but ultimately, the exhaustive process produced a perennial classic. In sharp contrast, Letter To You took a fraction of the time to make, but the result is, it has to be said, equally impressive. That said, some songs on the album took an awful long time to reach a record: the epic If I Was A Priest was originally written for the Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. album, Springsteen’s debut almost 50 years ago. Dusted off and finally recorded in the November session last year, it’s as fresh as anything more freshly minted, even for a song which treads somewhat on religious sensitivities by imagining Jesus walking through the Wild West. Significantly, it has an important place in Springsteen lore, being one of the songs he played for Columbia Records executives at their first meeting in May 1972, prompting label boss John Hammond to hope that every song on the artist’s debut LP would be like it. 

Another resurrected from the 1970s is Janey Needs A Shooter (which Warren Zevon purloined with The Boss’s permission for his 1980 song Jeannie Needs A Shooter), while Songs For Orphans also dates back to the Greetings era, and has only previously been heard in public before at a single show 2005 Devils And Dust tour. “It's wonderful how the older songs fit so well into this album, Van Zandt told Forbes recently. “It's remarkable really. That, Janey Needs A Shooter and Songs For Orphans are all from the early '70s. To have something fit so well 50 years later - oh my God, I swear we have completely redefined chronological time, I'm telling you! I think rock and roll has changed science. Seventy is the new 40.”

Picture: Bruce Springsteen, 2020/Danny Clinch

Springsteen is now 71, but as if proof that age is just a number, Letter To You arrives in what feels like a period of unblinking industriousness. Like his near-contemporary Neil Young (or even, come to think of it, his somewhat British equivalent Paul Weller), there has been little sign of slowing down as he reaches his more senior years. Letter To You is his fourth in eight years, his second since 2014’s High Hopes with the E-Street band fully on board, and comes just a year after the wonderful Western Stars. All this, the Born To Run autobiography, and that extended run of Springsteen On Broadway, his New York residency that ran for five shows a week from October 2017 until December. The following year. Much like his legendary, near-four hour concerts, Springsteen has never done things by halves.

“I’m at a point in my playing life and artistic life where I’ve never felt as vital,” he recently told the New York Times. “My band is at its best, and we have so much accumulated knowledge and craft about what we do that this was a time in my life where I said, ‘I want to use that as much as I can.’” The product of this is an album recorded live and without need for endless overdubs, but also an album of undeniable energy, power and subtle texture in tremendous balance and, somehow, an inherent sense of love and camaraderie. Missing, of course, from this are the late Danny Federici and Clemons Snr, though their spirits - as witnessed frequently in the Apple TV documentary, are never far from any of the band’s hearts, least of whom, Springsteen himself. The band’s closeness undoubtedly was the fuel that drove the making of Letter To You.

“I had cut a song on the record called Janey Needs A Shooter earlier on for a one-off for Record Store Day,” Springsteen recently told America’s National Public Radio. “But when I listened back to it, it was the closest thing the band had ever sounded to Darkness On The Edge of Town. You know, that was because we all played together and sang at one time, and because we relied only on the instrumentation of the band and no overdubs. So I said, well, I'd be interested in making a record where we return to the template of Darkness On The Edge of Town. And so, consequently, I made no demos of the songs. I simply recorded them on my acoustic guitar into my iPhone, waited until the band got here, played in the songs on an acoustic guitar and then we went and performed the music.” 

“I knew I wanted to make a record with the band,” Springsteen added in his New York Times interview. “I knew I wanted it to be the pure instrumentation of the band: two keyboards, the guitars, the bass, drums and saxophone, and I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t want to demo or have preconceptions of the music, so I didn’t touch the songs until I taught them to the band. The approach is confirmed by Van Zandt, who told Forbes: “I kept emphasising if [Springsteen and the E-Street Band] do make another record - and it was really not clear if we ever would - but I said, 'If we do, let's go back to the old way’, which we had done on three records, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River and Born In The USA, where Bruce walks in with an acoustic guitar, plays his songs and everybody has a chance to give their input.”

The result is a classic Springsteen album, neither melancholy or overtly upbeat, but a continuation of the reflective mood he’s been in since the autobiographical period of his book and Broadway show. Along with the songs written in another time, there are nostalgic hat-tips to the past, such as the stonking Last Man Standing, which pays tribute to his teenage band, The Castiles, of which - he reveals in the Apple TV film - he is now the only surviving member. There is similar thought for mortality and absent friends on I’ll See You In My Dreams. While the dynamics of Letter To You may not vary from expectations of what a Bruce Springsteen/E-Street Band album should offer, there is so much more to enjoy that just the comfort food of familiarity. The understated opener, One Minute You're Here is as tender as the title track that follows it, or as prototypical as Ghosts, perhaps serving the simple purpose of being a celebration of what it is to be in this brotherhood of musicians.

Rock bands are, in general, uneven communities. Invariably riven by ego, creative tension and mismatched personalities, they are often held together by artistic tension alone. Bruce Springsteen has, at his disposal, an unique family, even when he dips into the E-Street collective on his 'pure' solo albums. Together they produce something no other entity in rock music is capable of. As hackneyed as it is to say, they are truly more than the sum of their parts. Letter To You, with its raw simplicity, its power and energy is an album to savour, for sure, but also one to just enjoy for what it is. And it may well be one of the best that Bruce Springsteen and his gang have ever produced.

Running down his dream: Tom Petty’s Wildflowers reissued

As the already-straining bespoke piece of furniture we had built in the summer testifies, there is no shortage of hefty box sets and ‘super deluxe editions’ peddled in good faith to purveyors such as myself (i.e. middle aged, curious, compliant). Some are genuinely worth it. Some offer a volume of richness to justify the expense, whether unearthed rarities or newly remastered albums are your thing. Some, though, can leave you cold, little more than the original albums filled out with studio offcuts, which were probably rejected at the time for all the right reasons.

It is, when you pull back and observe from cruising height, a bit of a racket, but there’s plenty of us willing to part with hard cash. The question, though, is often whether these box sets become trophies to put on display or genuine artefacts to savour - in other words, listen to. 

I recently had this conversation with a musician friend of mine, who has probably done more than most to fuel the collectables trade by being a pre-eminent master of producing multichannel remixes. I’ll admit, as a lapsed audiophile from my Philips career, there is something enjoyably fetishistic about listening to previously binary stereo albums three-dimensionalised by the application of surround sound. But it is, I recognise, enormously niche. Some artists make it worthwhile: Jimmy Page has personally worked on the numerous Led Zeppelin box sets, and the duty of care he applies is there to be heard, both in the production work and in the extras thrown in. The Bowie box sets, my other touchstone, are clearly aimed at completists, but the recent online (and soon, physical) releases of his 1990s live albums have provided much needed perspective on just how good The Dame was in a period many consider his wilderness years (or post-wilderness, if you consider the mid-80s to be his barren time). 

Recently I eulogised about the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup reissue, not for the excellent live album that comes with it (it’s an irrefutable fact that the Stones will never release a bad live album), but for a chance to reassess a studio album often disregarded because it came after the band’s run of classics, and to do so with new sonics to boot. Others, sadly, are often cynical exploitations, and I’m not going to waste your eyeball time here on a lengthy list of offenders.

Many box sets are, however, the product of passion, of a desire to reflect a legacy rather than a chance to fleece the fan. One case in point is Tom Petty’s newly-released Wildflowers And All The Rest, a five-CD/nine-LP package built around the late rocker’s tour de force 1984 solo album, Wildflowers. What makes it such an exception is that the package bears the hand of Petty himself, despite his death three years ago this month. Rather than merely being a reissue of the original album plus a few extras that didn’t make the original release, it is a rich and seemingly endless mining of the exhaustive process that Petty and producers Rick Rubin and Mike Campbell went through to produce what could have been originally a double-album of at least 25 songs, were it not for the record company insisting on it being a single-disc record.

This clearly stuck in Petty’s craw, and before his untimely demise he made it a personal ambition to restore Wildflowers to the album he’d originally wished to put out. “I broke through to something else. My personal life came crashing down, and it derailed me for a while. But I was at the top of my game during that record,” Petty has said. Thus, the new package contains the original 15-track Wildflowers, plus the All The Rest collection, which contains ten additional tracks planned for the original release, as well as five previously unreleased tracks, as well as home recordings and alternate versions of tracks that were eventually committed to record, all helping frame a creative process that yielded one of the most satisfying showcases of Petty’s songcraft. And as if all that wasn’t enough, the new release also includes 14 live recordings of songs from the Wildflowers sessions. 

Posthumous releases can, often, appear to have the ghoulish hand of record company exploitation, but there is a profound sense with Wildflowers And All The Rest of it being a heartfelt continuation of Petty’s own dream, with his widow Dana, daughters Adria and Annakim, and Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench of The Heartbreakers all involved in lovingly curating the project. The end result is a 54-track immersion into Tom Petty at his very best. Thematically and tonally, it fits within the cadre of Petty’s career, dating back to the swampy blues of Mudcrutch, the band he formed with Campbell and Tench in Gainesville, Florida, in the mid-1970s. That might suggest a lack of expansion or evolution, but you wouldn’t accuse Bruce Springsteen of varying little beyond his blue collar, blue-jeaned roots rock’n’roll, and that, at essence, is what Petty has shipped, and shipped so well throughout his time on Earth. 

From the oustset, the bluegrass-tinged title track, the original album meanders effortlessly through a brand of music that only Americans seem capable of pulling off authentically. The stomping You Don’t Know How It Feels is a worthy steering wheel-tapping radio hit, all drums, bass string riffs and harmonica fills, and the kind of chorus refrain that Petty should get far more recognition for as a pop artist. There are more familiar Petty sounds on the likes of You Wreck Me, with its grinding guitars and youthful vocals harking back to American Girl or Refugee, while Cabin Down Below gets into a pithy Southern groove. There are more downbeat moments, too, such as House In The Woods, which takes a slower pace and a grungier tone that could easily have come from one of Neil Young’s more oil-stained denim outings.

As for the ‘extras’ (or, to be more correct, All The Rest), it would be hard to say that they represent a Petty aiming for something different or reactionary. But it’s also hard to understand why Warner Brothers felt that what didn’t appear on the original release wasn't worthy, then, of airtime. Because, simply put, there’s not a duffer amongst them. Somewhere Under Heaven jangles away delightfully, with Petty’s shimmering™ Rickenbacker 12-string giving it the inevitable Byrds/Dylan comparison, but also a dramatic, even prog-rock landscape. California is full of optimistic pep, a paean to the Los Angeles the Floridian Petty made his home, and redolent of everything aspirational you can imagine about the state (and resonates with me as the part of America I have experienced more than anywhere else, and even lived in for a couple of years). In contrast, the introspective Harry Green finger-picks its way bucolically through a restrained rant about a redneck.

Picture: Mark Seliger

While the whole project is seen as a Tom Petty solo album, he is rarely far from the Heartbreakers, of whom most make appearances, as well as a couple of Petty’s celebrity chums, like Ringo Starr, drumming on To Find A Friend and Carl Wilson adding his vocals to Honey Bee. Personnel, however, rarely define a solo album, however. All, no matter how collaborative, depend on the direction of the principle, and that makes the ‘Home Recordings’ disc arguably the most interesting of all, as it features Petty’s demos for what would have constituted the full 25-track album he’d intended Wildflowers to be. Stripped to the intimacy of voice and acoustic guitar, these are more than just ‘unplugged’ arrangements, but black and white pencil sketches before the full colour rendering, and while they clearly provide the colouring-in template for the final versions, the performances of Wildflowers, You Don’t Know How It Feels and a couple of unused track, Confusion Wheel and There’s A Break In The Rain (Have Love, Will Travel) strip things away to the heart of what Petty was trying to achieve as a songwriter.

Posthumous releases are all-too often money grabs by greedy record companies trying to cash in, or even - sadly - desperate attempts by the bereaved family to make a few bucks out of their loved one’s legacy. No matter how much they get packaged up as “something for the fans”, usually they are often about exploiting the fans. Wildflowers And All The Rest is not one of those exercises. In fact, rather than being a rushed-out greatest hits collection, it is a lovingly-curated, delightfully engaging example of how best to let the music do all the talking. It is the perfect self-tribute.

Finns ain’t what they used to be

The conventional wisdom is that people from Nordic countries are the world’s most easy-going and contented. Apparently, they enjoy the good things in life more than anywhere else, from health and wellbeing to work-life balance. Finland, in particular, scores by far the best on these things, coming top in almost everything the OECD regards as good, from living standards to employment, education to life expectancy. Finns are, in general, happier with their lives than the OECD average. This even extends to civic engagement: voter turnout, a measure of participation in the political process, was 67% during the country's last general election, an estimated three-quarters of the country’s top 20% earners voting, and even 62% of the bottom 20% casting their view.

Perhaps this explains why a brouhaha has erupted after Finland’s impressive young prime minister Sanna Marin appeared in a magazine profile wearing a very tasteful black blazer with - SHOCK! - nothing underneath but a vintage necklace. Despite the ensemble appearing no racier than a deep-cut ballgown, some social media users went nuts, accusing Marin’s outfit of being “inappropriate”, and that it “eroded” her credibility. In her defence, thousands of supporters countered the outrage, rightly accusing it of being highly sexist, and sharing pictures of themselves (including hairy-chested men) wearing identical jackets and necklaces, accompanied by the hashtag #imwithsanna. Some highlighted the misogyny of the fuss by posting pictures of male leaders exposing their chests, including Vladimir Putin fishing shirtless and one of former Finnish president Carl Gustaf Mannerheim…erm…posing naked on horseback.

What is ridiculous about the whole affair is that the pictures, which accompany a cover feature in the women’s magazine Trendi, are perfectly tasteful, and you’d have to have a particularly skewed moral bent to find them anything less. Inevitably the socially conservative nature of the photo’s criticism is directed at the 34-year-old Marin’s youth and somewhat alternative background. 

In the interview she makes the case for people to focus on her policies rather than her appearance. Unfortunately, the “plunging” (Daily Mail™) picture has had the opposite effect. The magazine’s editor, Mari Karsikas, responded by saying, very sensibly, that the comments about Marin’s picture said more about those making them than the prime minister herself,  adding that it was hard not to interpret the criticism as anything other than misogynistic. Finnish actor Kiki Kokkonen wrote on her Instagram account: “Everyone should be allowed to live in such a way that their character, dignity and professional skills are not determined by clutching at irrelevant straws.”

Still, this didn’t stop entrepreneur Aki Pyysing criticising Marin for “attention-seeking” in a blog post that attacked her economic policies and even mocked the dimensions of her barely visible cleavage in the apparently offending photograph. The post was tweeted by centre-right opposition party MPs Elina Lepomaki and Juhana Vartiainen, though their tweets were later deleted, with Lepomaki admitting: “My mistake. I shared it carelessly and did not read the entirety of the text, which got personal and mocked the prime minister’s appearance.”

Marin’s rise to the top in Finland - when elected in December she became the world's youngest serving head of government (a title conceded in August when 34-year-old Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz returned to power) - has been accompanied by inevitable attention to her youthful image, a point accentuated by her prolific use of social media, especially Instagram. Observers claim that she knowingly would have chosen the outfit for the Trendi shoot…but if so, why should that be a problem? Theresa May’s Amanda Wakeley leather trousers for a Sunday Times interview four years ago was seen as an otherwise dull politician trying to look more interesting, but no more, and yet the fact that the strides cost £995 was enough to generate a vacuous news cycle for days.

Picture: Austin Hargrave/Sunday Times Magazine

Anu Koivunen, Professor of Gender Studies at Tampere University in Finland said the social media storm over Marin’s outfit wouldn't have come as a surprise: “These politicians know very well what kind of discussions they are starting. They are very media savvy. Marin's actions are done with full cognisance.” During her pregnancy, Marin used her Instagram account to chart progress, posting selfies of her baby bump and even a candid breastfeeding shot once her daughter Emma was born. In August she married her long-term partner Markus Raikkonen at Kesäranta, the Finnish prime minister’s official residence, with Hello!-grade pictures of the couple posted to her account. Again, hard to fault a 34-year-old woman doing that, highly progressive prime minister or not.

Imagine Lennon at 80

Picture: Iain Macmillan/Yoko Ono

Today would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday, which would have been a curious prospect at the best of times. The thought of him today, in the age of Trump, coronavirus, Twitter and any one of the myriad cultural earthquakes since his murder on 9th December, 1980, is somewhat mouth-watering to consider, and mind-boggling at the same time.

The most startling reality, however, is that it is indeed almost 40 years since Lennon was taken from us, three months after his 40th birthday, by psychotic fan Mark David Chapman who shot the Beatle four times in the back, outside his Dakota Building apartment in New York. Plenty of our greatest rock and pop icons have been taken too soon - no need here to reel off membership of The 27 Club - but with no disrespect to, say Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix - Lennon was out there in an echelon of his own. Being one of The Beatles, alone, made him a deity: even if you disregard his arguably patchy post-Fab solo career, the body of work Lennon contributed to in just the briefest window of time that he, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were a creative entity transcends almost any other recording act I can think of. A grand statement, I know, but sometimes consideration of their contribution to music history is so awe-inspiring that it can make your head spin. That's not to say that anyone else isn't good. It's just that very little comes close, whatever your viewpoint or degree of objectivity.

The tragedy, here, is that in terms of time, Lennon would only live a further ten years after the breakup of The Beatles. Ten years. Some artists go that long without releasing anything. He would, though, like all three of his former bandmates, continue to be productive, producing the albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, Some Time In New York City, Mind Games, Walls And Bridges, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Double Fantasy (the posthumous Milk And Honey was released in 1984). Each contained no shortage of memorable (if slightly derivative) songs like Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) and the perennial festive hit Happy Xmas (War Is Over). These can all be reassessed today with the release of Gimme Some Truth, a sumptuous, reissued greatest hits selection which now contains multichannel, high-definition remixes of Lennon's best solo work, from Jealous Guy to the withering, McCartney-targeted How Do You Sleep?, as well as rockers like Whatever Gets You Thru The Night (featuring Elton John) and one of my all-time favourite Lennon solo pieces, Watching The Wheels.

The conventional wisdom, such is the perennial journalistic need for competitive comparison, is that the post-Beatles creative spoils were shared by McCartney and Harrison (let's leave poor old Ringo alone), and that even as a foursome, the sum of the parts was never greater than the whole. But that belies the truth that revolutions generally only happen once. The legacy of that whole is immeasurable, given how much of music since 1970 still owes a debt of gratitude to what the Fabs delivered in the eight years between Please Please Me and Let It Be. Lennon's own legacy becomes, often, complicated by his personality, his passions, his interests. And that makes contemplating how he would have spent the last 40 years such a head-shrinkingly impossible task.

One thing is for certain, and that is that he wouldn't have been able to escape his former band. Just as McCartney and Starr, today, and Harrison until his death in 2001, can't (or shouldn't) escape the its shadow, it would have been interesting to think of how Lennon would have dealt with The Beatles never-ending tail. The wide hypothesis is that a reunion, of sorts, would have taken place, perhaps at Live Aid, though this is not a forgone conclusion. Led Zeppelin have had vast sums of money dangled before them to reform, but Robert Plant, mainly, has not given in. Likewise Pink Floyd - with Roger Waters - reformed for Live 8, but with Richard Wright's demise, and little signs of Waters and David Gilmour's frosty relations warming up, that ship has probably sailed. McCartney and Starr have reunited regularly, usually at all-star charity events, but it's not quite the same. Not that McCartney hasn't sat still, creatively, which makes you wonder what it would have been like for him and Lennon to have returned to writing together, even as they reached their respective dotages.

By the time Lennon was giving his final interviews in 1980, seemingly more contented with life, living with Yoko in New York, there appeared to be a mellowing. While traces of his acerbic, sometimes cruel wit remained, you could imagine an eventual reparation in his relationship with McCartney. He is, though, unlikely to have eased up on the social injustices that fired him so. Even at 80, he would have a point of view about the environment and Black Lives Matter. He would have opposed both Gulf Wars. He would still be maintaining that we should give peace a chance. It would have been fascinating to hear his thoughts on the death of his great friend and fellow-adopted New Yorker, David Bowie. Conceivably they would have worked together several times beyond their collaboration on Bowie's Young Americans album and the hit Fame in particular. The pair first met at a party in Los Angeles in 1974, and hit it off. Bowie revealed in 1995 that he thought they'd be "buddies forever", drawn to a similar sense of humour as much as anything else, though strangely they had differing views on each other's work ("I asked [John] what he thought of what I was doing, glam rock, and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, but it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on’.").

Lennon was, in Bowie's view, "probably one of the brightest, quickest-witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life," qualifying the statement with: “Socialist in its true definition, not in fabricated political sense, a real humanist." In the same interview, Bowie - of all people - nailed what it was that kept the Beatles' legacy in universal consciousness. "They gave the British the illusion we meant something again and we love hearing that, boy do we love hearing that.”

Like Bowie, it's probable that Lennon's career would have dipped in the 1980s and early 1990s. Even with the patronage of upstarts like Liam Gallagher, with his allusions of being Lennon himself (even naming his son by Patsy Kensit after the Beatle), the creative fires within are unlikely to have dimmed. Contemporaries, like Paul Simon, for example, have continued to produce intelligent while hardly radical music long into their 70s. McCartney himself is still making albums which, but comparison with younger, lesser acolytes, are still on their game. The flames of anger, too, would continue to flicker, just as Roger Waters continues to rail at pet causes.

The most obvious touchstone here are the Rolling Stones. In the 60s it was a binary choice between them and their Fab rivals (which, like most battles in pop was entirely confected, and they were all, actually, good friends). But whereas The Beatles came to a halt, the Stones have rolled on, doing their thing and doing it well. They still hold the title "Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World" with aplomb, and with little sign of relinquishing it, even as their eighth decades on this planet beckon.

And that's a good place to leave this. John Winston Ono Lennon was, from the outset, a rock and roller: "I only liked simple rock and nothing else," he told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in an interview published in his book Lennon Remembers. Rock and roll - even at its most essential, with Little Richard screaming "a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" - was, for Lennon, a vessel that got directly to the point.  It's quite possible, that at 80, he'd be still getting directly to the point on many things.

This is no time to die for cinemas - and they won’t

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

"Saturday night at the movies, who cares what picture you see. When you're huggin' with your baby In the last row in the balcony." So sang The Drifters in a song that perfectly captured the cinema experience of 1964, which arguably is no different 56 years later. "Well, there's technicolor and cinemascope, and a cast out of Hollywood. And the popcorn from the candy stand makes it all seem twice as good."

Except, more than half a century on, we're not going out to the movies, on Saturdays or any other night of the week. The coronavirus has, evidently, put paid to a British tradition dating back to 1896 when Auguste and Louis Lumière brought their Cinématographe technology to London to show off the short silent films they’d made. In the decades that followed, cinema became both a source of welcome escapism and a window on the world. By the end of the 1920s, just as the silent era gave way to the first talking pictures, cinemas had become fixtures in most major towns. Almost 100 years on, and last year some 176 million cinema tickets were sold in the UK, the second highest on record since 1970. And then COVID struck.

Six months on since the lockdown came, that Saturday night tradition is, like so many businesses, apparently in ruins. An industry that had remained surprisingly resilient in the face of widening home entertainment choices (compare this with, say, the impact of streaming services on the physical media music industry - we still valued that big-screen experience) has been forced onto its knees. Yesterday, the Odeon chain - a name synonymous with cinema - announced that it was cutting the opening hours of some of its UK and Ireland screens, with a quarter of its theatres only now opening on Fridays and Saturdays. Worse came from Cineworld, the chain which controls around one in seven of the UK’s screens, which announced the temporary closure of its venues.

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

The culprit? Well, obviously the coronavirus, but the repeated villain in the piece appears to be James Bond. Last Friday’s announcement from MGM and Eon, the ‘home’ of 007, that No Time To Die was to be delayed - again - to next April, one whole year after it’s original release date, sent a chilling shudder through the cinema industry. It had been counting on the 25th Bond film to fill coffers emptied by months of lockdown closures, followed by restricted openings with reduced seating due to social distancing requirements. That, though, only tells half the story. To blame Bond is not entirely fair. True, No Time To Die would have been an extraordinary draw, but in many respects, this is more to do with Hollywood as a whole. At the end of the day, there’s been an overall dearth of new, high-volume blockbusters to draw in the multiplex crowds, even those prepared to endure distancing and mask-wearing throughout screenings. Without the audiences, studios are reluctant to release the big-draw titles. Without the big-draw titles, punters are reluctant to venture out.

No Time To Die, Robert Mitchell of Gower Street Analytics told Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, “is the straw that broke the camel’s back”, pointing out how release dates from the bigger studios - an industry dominated by just a handful - have been moving for some time. “Ultimately the cinemas need a pipeline of regular content to draw cinema goers in,” he added. The trouble, here, is that the cinema industry has become over-reliant on the blockbusters. Bond may have been seen as the industry’s Autumn saviour, but this year we’ve seen delays to guaranteed seat-fillers like Fast And Furious 9, Marvel's Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984 and Top Gun: Maverick. What has been released hasn’t exactly inspired confidence amongst the major studios: Christopher Nolan’s Tenet only earned $45 million in the US market. If a cinephile release like that can experience such miserable box office returns, the coming months of a second spike of the coronavirus and local lockdowns simply means that for the studios, releasing a high-budget film simply makes no economic sense. Not even streaming - such as Disney’s live-action Mulan being made available via the Disney+ service on a pay-per-view basis - can truly replicate the cash generated by box office receipts. “If going straight to streaming was a slam dunk, then all studios would be doing it,” one former industry executive told The Times. "The theatrical and studio worlds are interdependent,” they added saying that Disney’s experiment had proved far from conclusive, pointing out that for a film to be a hit on streaming services it “generally needs a good result at the cinema” as well.

This, though, highlights a point that many critics of the film industry have been saying for some time, that the industry’s reliance on a handful of franchises, be it Bond or the Marvel ‘universe’ to sell Saturday night popcorn by the bucketload, is a false economy. A $200 million-budget action movie still needs to cover its costs, as much as it promises to satisfy an audience’s need for the instant gratification that a $50 million independent production might not deliver, even if it would satisfy a more cultural nutrition, not to mention balance the books with a healthy return. One irony of all this, if you can call it that when thousands of people are facing redundancy, is that the UK is consolidating its status as a global production centre for film. Film and ‘high-end’ television production in the UK has become one of the country’s biggest industries, with studio capacity increasing all the time. According to the BFI, the value of UK production activity last year was £1.95 billion, representing 93 new homegrown films and 23 co-productions, with films carrying budgets of £30 million or over accounting for 78% of total UK film production spend. High-quality television production represented another £1.67 billion last year, a 29% increase from 2018. Comcast, the owner of Sky, recently announced plans to build 14 production stages at Elstree, creating 2,000 skilled jobs in the process. Seren Stiwdios - formerly Pinewood Wales, near Cardiff - is planning to add a further 150,000 square feet of stages and other facilities to cope with demand, which has even seen normally US-based productions move to the principality.

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

Arguably the constant demand for television series is understandable, and won’t diminish while we’re all staying at home. Film won’t be going away though: some optimists believe that despite this week’s gloom across the cinema industry, the experience of China, where repeated lockdowns have been ridden out, and cinemas have rebounded, points to a dam-burst of cinematic life next spring. That won’t comfort any of Cineworld’s 5,000 employees facing a bleak Christmas, or for those delightful independent picture houses who differentiate locally from the multiplexes. But for those - like me - who still value the big-screen experience significantly over living room consumption, the industry that has sustained Saturday nights out for more than 100 years is merely going into hibernation. And I will still be at the front of the queue next April for that Bond film.