The Tepid Take

Some sitcoms are more successful than others. Some run their course and never come back – like E4’s Wasted, which never really got the cult status it deserved. Some only get a short run because their creators have bigger ambitions – like Edgar Wright’s Spaced, which got the cult status it deserved, about 20 years ago. And some sitcoms – like Peep Show or Fresh Meat – have this immense staying power. One of the things that I think crafts a great sitcom, one that can retain viewers from series to series, is a sense of emotional resonance. Fresh Meat was definitely funny and occasionally also cruel, but it mixed light comedy with tension, creating difficult situations out of overarching jokes. Student sleeping with her professor? What if she falls in love with his son, without knowing they’re related? And then loses both of them, dealing a crushing blow to her academic career? You could argue that the first half of that synopsis is amusing, but it’s backed by the cutting counterpoint o

I am reading The Last London. I am trying, faithfully, to enjoy it; to wrap my head around the way Sinclair’s territory wraps around himself. I enjoy, after examination, the segments where Sinclair dissects the changing face of London, irrevocably altered by migration, different kinds of waves, economic necessity and economic greed. His walks – often bolstered by their aimless quality – encapsulate a newfound ethos in the latter-day capital: people feel lost. London’s minorities written out of its history. London’s homeless ignored, no matter how they seek to cry for attention. Walking through a park and feeling alone, upon remarking that the place is “a site of elective infantilism: mature adults on psychedelic skateboards bopping to earworm infills”. “Cell phones cancel surrounds in their addiction to a false intimacy”. I feel a generation (or more) divides myself from Sinclair, and I am an amateur of the trade he’s plied for fifty years: writing. But I sensed that generational g

This isn’t the first time I’m cosying up to The Elder Scrolls V. I’ve played a touch of it since the last piece – a cripplingly sentimental attempt at explaining why I love that game so much. Since then I wouldn’t say my opinion of it has soured – more that I now understand it, and its endless list of flaws, so well that it stops being a majestic open world sandbox and becomes an attempt to optimise every stat and bypass every invisible wall. When I boot it up, I feel like I’m one of those League of Legends champions, playing the game as a full time job and thereby, inexorably, being unable to either “play” it or really consider it a “game”; like asking Gareth Southgate for a kick-about right after getting metaphorically kicked out of the World Cup, these things stop being fun when we really pour ourselves into them. I’m not writing this in an attempt to enjoy Skyrim more – I’d be much better off dropping my as-yet-unconfirmed future pay cheque on a new game. Instead, I’m writing it

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. It’s 2019 and, if there was ever any doubt that the climate emergency wasn’t the existential issue of our times, it’s fading fast. Low-lying island chains are playing hide-and-seek with the sea, people in Iceland are writing eulogies to their favourite glaciers, the Great Barrier Reef has pulled a sickie and on top of all that this year looks to be the hottest on record. What a scorcher, they’ll say in the UK. It’s as if we think countries like ours are somehow predisposed to not being entirely blown to bits by extreme weather; instead, we get the benefits. To us a warmer climate brings up-and-coming Surrey wine and a good excuse for a balmy stay-at-home holiday, Somerset Levels be damned. But the UK already has proof of the damage the climate can do – a drowned city lost for good, our own Atlantis, the victim of shifting seas and a dangerous fable for any low-lying town that remains. They called it Dunwich, Anglo-Saxon for