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| Digested week: Victoria’s non-secret and a star born in form of a koala | Digested week: Victoria’s non-secret and a star born in form of a koala |
| (about 2 hours later) | |
| Plus Dolly Parton, and a vanishingly rare moment to celebrate in a court case related to sexual violence | Plus Dolly Parton, and a vanishingly rare moment to celebrate in a court case related to sexual violence |
| Monday | Monday |
| The most affecting scene in the first episode of Victoria Beckham, the new three-part documentary that arrived this week on Netflix, revolves around a moment in which she and her daughter, Harper, 14, create family content together. If this sounds like I’m being snide, I’m not. The pair improvise and film a dance, during which Harper, with amused tolerance, weathers her mother’s try-hard moves and Beckham, weathering her daughter’s condescension, reminds us that dancing was never really her thing. It’s sweet and, as is often the case when Beckham interacts on camera with her family, feels like the closest thing you get to a genuine moment. | The most affecting scene in the first episode of Victoria Beckham, the new three-part documentary that arrived this week on Netflix, revolves around a moment in which she and her daughter, Harper, 14, create family content together. If this sounds like I’m being snide, I’m not. The pair improvise and film a dance, during which Harper, with amused tolerance, weathers her mother’s try-hard moves and Beckham, weathering her daughter’s condescension, reminds us that dancing was never really her thing. It’s sweet and, as is often the case when Beckham interacts on camera with her family, feels like the closest thing you get to a genuine moment. |
| Not that Beckham, in the rest of the episode, appears to be performing. As Lucy Mangan pointed out in the Guardian this week, Nadia Hallgren, who made the series and is many leagues of experience below the team who made her husband’s documentary, is very bad at getting anything out of her subject. Without better prodding, you end up with a thin, flat, chaotically organised documentary, spiked with occasional, unintentional comedy. I have to confess I laughed out loud when Tom Ford popped up, arranged in front of a log fire like something from a Ken Russell film, to explain in sultry tones the meaning of Paris fashion week. | Not that Beckham, in the rest of the episode, appears to be performing. As Lucy Mangan pointed out in the Guardian this week, Nadia Hallgren, who made the series and is many leagues of experience below the team who made her husband’s documentary, is very bad at getting anything out of her subject. Without better prodding, you end up with a thin, flat, chaotically organised documentary, spiked with occasional, unintentional comedy. I have to confess I laughed out loud when Tom Ford popped up, arranged in front of a log fire like something from a Ken Russell film, to explain in sultry tones the meaning of Paris fashion week. |
| Paris is important because Beckham has been invited to show there for the first time this year, no small thing for a woman who was once the laughing stock of fashion. Not even a film this parched of insight can extinguish how genuinely dramatic this rise has been, from post-Spice Girls wilderness to credible, successful designer. That her husband turned a huge, once-in-a-generation talent into a global brand and business is impressive. But how much greater the achievement to take what Victoria Beckham had and still come out on top. | Paris is important because Beckham has been invited to show there for the first time this year, no small thing for a woman who was once the laughing stock of fashion. Not even a film this parched of insight can extinguish how genuinely dramatic this rise has been, from post-Spice Girls wilderness to credible, successful designer. That her husband turned a huge, once-in-a-generation talent into a global brand and business is impressive. But how much greater the achievement to take what Victoria Beckham had and still come out on top. |
| Tuesday | Tuesday |
| In a dowdier industry, led by nerdier icons, a turnaround of Victoria Beckham-size proportions in the form of Bari Weiss, who quit the New York Times in 2020 alleging office bullying and editorial cowardice – in what most hacks at the time thought was a self-aggrandising and self-defeating gesture – and is currently enjoying the last laugh. Weiss’s indy media company the Free Press was bought by Paramount for $150m (£113m) this week and she was installed in the top job at the Paramount-owned CBS News. “How Bari Weiss Won” ran the headline in the New York Times. Well, how do you like that? | In a dowdier industry, led by nerdier icons, a turnaround of Victoria Beckham-size proportions in the form of Bari Weiss, who quit the New York Times in 2020 alleging office bullying and editorial cowardice – in what most hacks at the time thought was a self-aggrandising and self-defeating gesture – and is currently enjoying the last laugh. Weiss’s indy media company the Free Press was bought by Paramount for $150m (£113m) this week and she was installed in the top job at the Paramount-owned CBS News. “How Bari Weiss Won” ran the headline in the New York Times. Well, how do you like that? |
| As narrative arcs go, I have to say I have enjoyed the whole episode immensely, notwithstanding how Paramount shamelessly sucked up to Donald Trump by paying him $16m last year to settle a lawsuit. Weiss, who has built her media brand partly on opposition to “woke” excesses on the left, is possibly part of the same broad raft of appeasement, although her support of Trump isn’t reliable at all. | As narrative arcs go, I have to say I have enjoyed the whole episode immensely, notwithstanding how Paramount shamelessly sucked up to Donald Trump by paying him $16m last year to settle a lawsuit. Weiss, who has built her media brand partly on opposition to “woke” excesses on the left, is possibly part of the same broad raft of appeasement, although her support of Trump isn’t reliable at all. |
| Meanwhile, sour former colleagues of Weiss’s can be found everywhere, anonymously cheesing about her lack of TV or management experience. As appointments go, however, it seems to me no more outlandish than offering the guy who directed a single successful indie movie the keys to the next Avengers instalment – a commonplace no one ever seems to have much of a problem with. | Meanwhile, sour former colleagues of Weiss’s can be found everywhere, anonymously cheesing about her lack of TV or management experience. As appointments go, however, it seems to me no more outlandish than offering the guy who directed a single successful indie movie the keys to the next Avengers instalment – a commonplace no one ever seems to have much of a problem with. |
| Wednesday | Wednesday |
| Dolly Parton is not dead and for that, at least, we can be grateful. With everything else going on, this is no time to lose Dolly. All news organisations were sent sharply back to their obits queues this week, however, after the superstar singer, 79, pulled out of an event at Dollywood citing a kidney stone. This might’ve passed without comment were it not for her sister, Freida, helpfully sharing a post on Facebook in which she asked the public to pray for her. | Dolly Parton is not dead and for that, at least, we can be grateful. With everything else going on, this is no time to lose Dolly. All news organisations were sent sharply back to their obits queues this week, however, after the superstar singer, 79, pulled out of an event at Dollywood citing a kidney stone. This might’ve passed without comment were it not for her sister, Freida, helpfully sharing a post on Facebook in which she asked the public to pray for her. |
| You have to wonder how the conversation between Parton and less able members of her family went down and has been going down for the last 50 years. But in a video put out to reassure panicked fans, the singer said: “I know lately everybody thinks that I’m sicker than I am. Do I look sick to you? … I’m not dying!” It’s a curious fact about Parton that she is a shrewder politician than any elected official, managing simultaneously to telegraph her support of liberal causes, keep her rightwing fans in Appalachia happy, and insist to journalists: “I ain’t talking about Trump!” And yet all of these constituencies are sure they know what she thinks. | You have to wonder how the conversation between Parton and less able members of her family went down and has been going down for the last 50 years. But in a video put out to reassure panicked fans, the singer said: “I know lately everybody thinks that I’m sicker than I am. Do I look sick to you? … I’m not dying!” It’s a curious fact about Parton that she is a shrewder politician than any elected official, managing simultaneously to telegraph her support of liberal causes, keep her rightwing fans in Appalachia happy, and insist to journalists: “I ain’t talking about Trump!” And yet all of these constituencies are sure they know what she thinks. |
| Thursday | Thursday |
| A star is born – in season 34 of the US version of Dancing With the Stars – in the form of Robert Irwin, 21, the son of the late Aussie wildlife star Steve Irwin, and firm favourite in the competition that concludes next month. Robert’s older sister Bindi won the show in 2015, but this is different. The younger Irwin’s fame, which has built over the course of the season to a peak of 8 million Instagram followers and a scramble of Hollywood managers to sign him, rests on his bluff Aussie charm and also, on the evidence of his social media videos, an easy broadcasting talent. | |
| After the live show this week, Irwin posted a video of himself limbering up with his pro dance partner, Witney Carson, joking: “I describe it as Witney having to teach a stick how to dance,” and announcing what every participant in the reality space dreams of – a move to acting. Irwin will be playing a koala called Robert Furwin in the forthcoming Zootopia 2. | |
| Friday | Friday |
| It is so vanishingly rare to celebrate the judgments of the criminal courts in relation to sexual violence that when an appropriate sentence comes along, it makes one snort with joy. Husamettin Dogan, a defendant in the Gisèle Pelicot trial who was sentenced to nine years for rape during the original hearing, put in a shameful bid for appeal that dragged his victim back to court this week. But the courts were having none of it. At the appeal hearing in Nîmes, the court not only upheld the man’s guilty verdict but increased his sentence to 10 years. Bravo. |