The News Caravan

Tag: Brockes

  • Digested week: how can the US embrace James Corden, but not quiche? | Emma Brockes

    Digested week: how can the US embrace James Corden, but not quiche? | Emma Brockes

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    Monday

    A milestone in television history this morning, as the last ever Carpool Karaoke, the hugely popular section of James Corden’s CBS Late Late Show in which he interviews music icons while driving them around, airs ahead of his final show. Put it down to lack of eye contact, novelty format, or the sheer balls of a host willing to chip in and duet with Celine Dion, but even for Corden-sceptics the feature was irresistible. The most viewed Carpool of all time was the 2016 episode starring Adele, which has been watched on YouTube by more than 260 million people. Adele is a hoot. Corden is – I can’t believe I’m saying this – delightful. It is a genuinely great piece of television.

    Cut to this week and the farewell episode in which Adele returns for the final ride. As an exercise, none of us might welcome being held up against former versions of ourselves. Still, this is a tough one to watch. In the original segment, Corden and Adele drove around rainy London. She was bundled up in a coat, looked like she’d done her own makeup and banged on guilelessly about all the times she’d been drunk and unruly in public, or hungover in the park with her son. Corden, an effortless foil, was so spontaneous and funny that my friend Tiff and I still quote lines from it (“I mean, what I like is that you’re coming to me for this advice”; “I ain’t got time for that!”).

    Seven years later and the pair are driving around LA in harsh sunlight. Corden is sycophantic and lachrymose; Adele is styled to within an inch of her life. They spend most of the journey fawning over each other in what might be a public health warning about money and fame. Oh, well. Nothing lasts forever. The sad thing is Corden is quitting the show to return to the UK just as the Americans have got the hang of British attitudes towards him. In Variety magazine, a recent piece about Corden’s departure speculated about what he might do on his return and, breaking with the obsequiousness of the entertainment press, summarised his acting career in Britain as – sharp intake of breath at the stone cold viciousness of this – “relatively successful”.

    Tuesday

    I’m behind on the saga of William, Harry, Rupert and Charles, and have to scramble to get up to speed. Harry is suing Rupert for phone hacking, that much I know. But then in court on Tuesday it surfaces in documents that, according to Harry, in 2020 Rupert paid off William secretly – “a very large sum” – in return for him agreeing to take no further legal action against him. This was done, Harry says in the court filings, because the royals “wanted to avoid at all costs the sort of reputational damage that it had suffered in 1993 when the Sun and another tabloid had unlawfully obtained and published details of an intimate telephone conversation that took place between my father and stepmother in 1989, while he was still married to my mother”.

    The real target of these remarks would seem not to be Rupert, but Charles, as Harry’s Scorched Earth Tour: No Bridge Unburned continues to roll out. Harry would also seem to be targeting William for allegedly going along with Charles’s appeasement of Rupert, while tangentially going after Camilla for being in the mix at all. The spectre of Diana hangs over everything and oh, look, heads up, there’s Hugh. I have sympathy for them all at this point, with the obvious exception of Rupert, for whom, of course, no sympathy is due at this or any other time.

    Wednesday

    Donald Trump’s lawyers appear in court in New York on Wednesday for the former president’s second legal outing of the month, this time in answer to a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, who the former president called a liar after she accused him of rape. If Trump’s appearance downtown for his arraignment at the beginning of April was an anticlimactic affair, Wednesday’s proceedings are a different matter entirely. Before things can even get under way Judge Lewis A Kaplan has rebuked Trump for ranting against his accuser on social media (the former president called Carroll’s accusations a “made-up SCAM” and a “fraudulent & false story”). The alleged assault took place in 1996 in the changing room of a department store, and almost 30 years later Carroll is resolute in her testimony. Elegant, composed, carefully choosing her words, she is the polar opposite of the man having a meltdown in Florida. At the end of a day of testifying, and with the prospect of hostile questioning on Thursday, Carroll is, finally, emotional. She says the thing that the vast majority of alleged rape victims never get the chance to say: “I’m crying because I’m happy I got to tell my story in court.”

    Thursday

    A welcome retreat from Trump ugliness in the form of Judy Blume, who is everywhere this week: on Good Morning America, in a documentary on Amazon Prime, in a profile in the New Yorker and all media outlets in between. Her agent once told her that kids raised on her books in the 80s would grow up to commission the movies and so it has come to pass, with the release of the film version of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret next week, triggering the huge wave of interest. Blume is a modest figure, running her independent book store in Key West, Florida, where the foot traffic has become so huge that she can no longer sign books on the fly, instead taking home written requests to work through in her own time. One arresting fact from the documentary: in the 1960s, a publisher friend of Blume’s ex-husband condescended to look over an early manuscript of hers and sent her a letter telling her: back luck, old thing, you can’t write, give up. The letter galvanised her. In the almost 60 years since, Blume has sold more than 90 million books.

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    Friday

    I’ve had quiche on my mind ever since the coronation recipe came out (I’m not big on the broad bean element), and it’s a hard item to find in New York. Gourmet Garage near my house stocks a few, but the pastry is suspect and the flan, the soul of the quiche, is thin and grey and doesn’t have the requisite eggy wobble. Thankfully, there’s a legendary Aussie bakery in my neighbourhood that sorted me for hot cross buns at Easter (my only quibble with them was that, in capitulation to American tastes, they made the crosses out of – brace yourselves – white icing). Aussies love a quiche as much as we do, and at Bourke Street Bakery on Friday, there they are in all their glory: one spinach, one quiche lorraine. I have to stop myself breaking into a flat run to get them home and in the oven.

    Sunak and Meloni
    ‘If she leans out any further she’s going to get her head stuck in the railings.’ Photograph: Daniel Pereira/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
    Charles and flag
    ‘One would like to see what standards and colours they have in Montecito.’ Photograph: WPA/Getty Images

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    #Digested #week #embrace #James #Corden #quiche #Emma #Brockes
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • The terrible truth about the sacking of Tucker Carlson: someone just as odious will replace him | Emma Brockes

    The terrible truth about the sacking of Tucker Carlson: someone just as odious will replace him | Emma Brockes

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    It is a truism of the US news industry that no one is bigger than the network itself, an insight that Donald Trump – binned by Rupert Murdoch last year – may still be painfully processing, and which this week became suddenly clear to Tucker Carlson.

    The former cable news host, who, it was announced on Monday, had “agreed to part ways” with the network, has hired an aggressive Hollywood lawyer – and in line with the preferred volume of the man generally, seems unlikely to go quietly. Even as the share price at Fox dropped in response to the news, wiping $500m (£400m) off its value in apparent flattery of Carlson, the question remains pertinent as to how much he, and those like him, matter as individuals.

    If you are looking to fill a spare five minutes, it is an enjoyable thought experiment to rank in order of sheer flesh-crawling hideousness some of Fox News’s fallen stars. Where does Carlson place, for example, compared with Glenn Beck, the former Fox personality who, prior to his dismissal in 2011, had a shot at the title of America’s most awful man? Or Bill O’Reilly, a man who was given the boot in 2017 after news surfaced that the company had paid up to $13m in settlements to women accusing him of sexual harassment?

    For a while, a sense has prevailed that these former giants – add to the list the former Fox News head Roger Ailes, ousted in 2016 in the wake of sexual harassment allegations – have been banished from frontline positions, and the hope prospers that Carlson might be among the last. The fact he has lasted this long, and the likely reasons for his departure, however, point in another direction.

    For my money, Carlson – who is presently the subject of his own lawsuit, brought by Abby Grossberg, a senior producer who alleges he was responsible for creating a misogynist and hostile work environment – edges out even O’Reilly for pure anti-charisma. If O’Reilly was gross in a standard Fox News style, in Carlson’s case it was his very blandness, the Tintin hair and look of perpetual confusion, that made him more objectionable than all of his predecessors.

    It is always fascinating to consider the tipping point at which behaviour previously tolerated by Fox becomes suddenly intolerable to the company – and for Carlson, it seems unlikely it’s the Grossberg lawsuit. It might not even be his role in fanning the flames of the January 6 riot that has just cost the company $787.5m in settlement money to shut down the lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.

    Had it gone to trial, Carlson would surely have been a liability, given the way he encouraged viewers to regard the presidential election as rigged. At the same time, behind the scenes, he was lambasting Trump’s lawyers for selling a line to the public that Carlson himself seems not to have believed. “You’ve convinced them that Trump will win,” he wrote to an attorney for Trump in November 2020. “If you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.”

    More irksome to his employers, however, might have been his off-the-cuff comments about Trump at a time when Fox officially still backed the former president. In early January 2021, in an exchange with members of his staff, Carlson wrote: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” and: “I hate him passionately.”

    I dare say Murdoch hated Trump, too, at that point, but for a network like Fox, it is dangerous to show the workings of the sausage machine too closely. There comes a point where the gap between the true feelings of network bosses and the line they are selling to viewers becomes so large that even those at the back who aren’t paying attention may catch a whiff of the true venality of the operation.

    The most surprising thing to have come out since Carlson’s departure, however, is the breakdown in viewing figures. At the time of his ousting, Carlson was the highest rated cable news host in the US, pulling in more than 3 million viewers nightly. By contrast, Chris Hayes over on MSNBC attracts around 1.3 million viewers and Anderson Cooper, the most boring man on television, scores around 700,000 on CNN in that time slot.

    These are decent figures. But dig down into the details, and among viewers aged between 25 and 54 – the most attractive demographic – Carlson hovered around the 330,000 mark. This is more than his rivals, for sure, but is still a tiny number of people relative to the sheer amount of oxygen this man has taken up over the last five years.

    He will write a book. He’ll launch a podcast. He may accept a flippantly offered $25m job opportunity from the far-right news channel OAN. As with his predecessors, the memory of Carlson will fade quickly to irrelevance as we’re reminded it’s the platform that pulls the strings, not the person. Someone equally odious will replace him.

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    #terrible #truth #sacking #Tucker #Carlson #odious #replace #Emma #Brockes
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Uber Eats is begging me to come back – but I’m out there in the real world, supermarket shopping | Emma Brockes

    Uber Eats is begging me to come back – but I’m out there in the real world, supermarket shopping | Emma Brockes

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    There’s a pathetic but satisfying thing that occurs when you stop using an online service you’re used to frequenting. This was Facebook a few years ago, when plummeting engagement whipped the social media platform into a frenzy of desperate invitations and prompts. It’s Fresh Direct when you fill your basket with groceries and – I can’t recommend this enough, if you’re looking for the tiny high that comes from withholding – don’t check out, triggering a bunch of wheedling automated messages, begging you to come back.

    This week, in my life, it’s Uber Eats. For the past couple of years I’ve ordered from them once a week and now I’ve stopped, causing the food delivery service to issue a flurry of semi-hysterical special offers. Each spam text, each begging notification, reminds me of the money I’m saving. If you like rejecting things (I like rejecting things) then this exercise will thrill you: rejection without the human cost of hurting someone’s feelings.

    The bigger picture, obviously, is a consumer trend away from the convenience-related services that surged during the pandemic. Companies that boomed and attracted millions in investment are starting to wither as our online habits change. In the US, instant delivery startups such as Buyk and Jokr, which briefly boomed in 2021, are declaring bankruptcy or pulling out of the US market. The meal-kit company Blue Apron has seen its share price plunge as food costs have risen and consumer interest in pricey convenience products has dwindled. The same goes for Stitch Fix, a service for clothing delivery that briefly boomed during the pandemic. And all of this in the context of mass lay-offs in tech at a time when those companies, seemingly, have nowhere left to expand.

    Supermarket shopping: ‘The joy, withheld during those two years of disruption, of going to a place and doing a thing.’
    Supermarket shopping: ‘The joy, withheld during those two years of disruption, of going to a place and doing a thing.’ Photograph: Adam Vaughan/EPA

    Though it may be bad for the economy, from the perspective of an individual trying to have a life that entails leaving the house, this trend is perhaps an encouraging sign. The same encouragement might be taken from the slowdown at Netflix; many of us are capped out after too many hours of watching TV. I’m not exactly out there every morning taking invigorating walks, but I am reading again, feeling more inclined to work rather than pass out on the sofa, and to seek out real-world rather than online experience. If habits inculcated during the pandemic were supposed to augur the future, as Derek Thompson wrote in the Atlantic last month, “the post-pandemic economy has been much weirder than most people anticipated”.

    For me, the weirdest of these impulses has been a desire to return to supermarket shopping. This is partly money-related; the downturn in fast-food delivery earnings is clearly linked to pinched household incomes. It’s also a health thing; many of us are still trying to reverse the damage done by all the junk food we ate during lockdown.

    But of all the habits adopted in the past couple of years, it seemed as if grocery delivery might be the obvious keeper. Post-pandemic, maybe no one wants a hulking great Peloton in their living room and the appeal of the third place – be it the gym or Starbucks – is enjoying an obvious bounce-back. But supermarket shopping, at least in New York where I live, has rarely been a pleasure. It has always been time-consuming, stressful and over-crowded, with in-store prices not much lower than what you pay for delivery. And yet, every Monday, I feel compelled to stand in line at Trader Joe’s, and stagger home carrying six bags of shopping.

    All I can put this desire down to is a combination of the small satisfaction that comes from making even minor economies in the present climate; and something less tangible to do with the joy, withheld during those two years of disruption, of going to a place and doing a thing. The expense of energy has itself become a virtue. Its inverse – ordering in; falling back on convenience and paying for it – seems not only to belong to a sadder period but, at this point, when one can go out, using one’s actual body, to feel like a moral failing. If it’s a hair shirt, perhaps it feels good simply in contrast to our pandemic wardrobe. Meanwhile, I suspect watching Uber Eats freak out will never get old.

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    #Uber #Eats #begging #real #world #supermarket #shopping #Emma #Brockes
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )