Straight Outta Crouch End

When I was ten my parents bought a dilapidated house for cheap in Normandy, against their own better judgement and the advice of everyone they consulted. The place was a noble ruin, with a huge wild field to the front, an overrun vegetable garden fenced off by rusty chickenwire to the side, a well at the back, a frigid outside toilet, and, in the kitchen, a magnificently vast brick chimney with a fine wooden beam, which the owners had cupboarded off to prevent drafts. There was a basin in the kitchen, a small table and two chairs. My folks moved an old gramophone in, and a Victorian bed, and we played old 78s of Little Richard and Eartha Kitt after dinner and slept on mattresses among the sawdust and tins of paint. At Christmas my grandparents and uncles came to stay, and we set out deckchairs by the fire in the sitting room, whose curlicued antique wood panels had been massacred bile-green. On Christmas Eve after dinner I retired to bed with my brother and sister while the adults wr...

- Any of the other Spice Girls - Anyone who auditioned for the Spice Girls but didn't make it - Anyone from All Saints - Anyone from any other girl band ever - Any Mitford sister - Michael Portillo - Elena Ferrante - My five year old - My two year old - My dad - Everybody else I know - The character 'Bubble' from Absolutely Fabulous - The Damn Daniel boys - Any teenager - My ex-colleague Ivan who worked in Business Development and enjoyed golf - Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman - Francis Ford Coppola - Gemma Collins - Mary Berry - David Attenborough - The ghost of Victoria Wood - Anybody from Eastenders - Anybody from Coronation Street - Simon Cowell - Simon Callow - Simon Cowley, whom I have just looked up and is apparently a former Australian breaststroke swimmer - Simone Culley, whom I have just looked up and is a head teacher in Detroit - Cat Bin Lady - That guy who got interviewed on the BBC that one time because they mistook him for their intervie...

If there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s how much I love water. I drink water every day - and so should you, if you don’t already! Did you know, if you don’t drink anything at all, you will die? Water is really good for you. Water is so delicious too. I feel like people don’t mention this enough, they’re always saying it tastes of nothing, or that they prefer Coke or whatever. Not me: I like a fresh glass of water. You can add ice and lemon if you like - but you don’t have to! Water is so good on its own. Sparkling water? Sure, that’s great every now and then, but I don’t need my water fancy. Just a plain old glass of water is the best thing in the world to me. People ask me, “Caspar, would you like a drink? I’ve got wine, or gin, or beer…” - and I stop them straight off and say with a smile, “No thank you, just a glass of water for me, if you’ve got such a thing.” That’s just a little joke right there - everyone has a glass of water, it’s right there in your taps! Just p...

He was Walt Disney, he was Forrest Gump. He was Captain Phillips. But to me, in the years when I worked as his personal assistant and came to see a wholly different face to the man so beloved of everybody, he was just Tom. Yes, Tom. No, Tom. I'm sorry, Tom, I'll do that again. Every day. Last year, a full six months after I had stopped working for the actor known to everybody worldwide as Tom Hanks, I met somebody called Tom at a party in Bed-Stuy, and instinctively tied his shoelaces for him. I thought long and hard, hard and long, before writing this piece. Who was I to step to the double Oscar winner, the darling of America, the boy from Big for chrissakes? Could I live with myself if I sat down and typed out my story? Did I really want all the limelight, the clicks and replies, the tweets and thinkpieces, that such a zeitgeist-capturing article would inevitably bring? Was I strong enough? Could I stretch it to 10,000 words? In a fever of delirium at midnight a few weeks...

"If you could choose" - he's standing in my bedroom doorway, adjusting his cap, shifting a little on his feet - and I lose what he's saying for some seconds, maybe longer, taking in his nervous body language; the slight edge of confrontation in him, in the way he keeps his voice stable; his warm and gorgeous smile that comes bursting through every now and then in a gleam of white criss-crossed with the grid of a mouth-guard. If you were filming this as a scene in a movie, you would use that worn out effect whereby the sound in the room goes dull as I think, and then his words fade back in, and I say, "what?" and he repeats the last part. "If you could choose," he is saying, "would you be gay or straight? You and me, we're gay, right? I can't help that. But I wouldn't choose this, if I could choose." I love the innocence, the simplistic terms of his argument - this is like debating with a seven-year-old! - and reconfigure my ...

I was 11 going on 12 when it became my misfortune to have heard a song from the musical 'Cats'. My sister had gone on a school trip to England with her English teacher (who was our mother), and the class had been taken to see Cats on the last night. When I had been on the same trip the year before, we had watched Me and My Girl, an altogether more suitable entertainment, but the show had since closed and, to her dismay, my mum had had to fall back on the Andrew Lloyd Webber show.  The class loved it, because they were silly children who knew nothing about anything, and my sister and her best friend spent the next few weeks singing the infuriatingly awful songs from the show around the house. Back then, in pre-internet days, and because my sister hadn't bought the CD, my only knowledge of the show had come through comments I picked up, and my sister's rendition of the songs. It's a... whole show... about cats? And the actors are all dressed up... as cats? And, sorr...

For all that the Marvel Universe has provided us with intensely cinematic moments over the years (who can forget Captain America single-handedly pulling a helicopter back down to ground, or the screwball chemistry between Iron Man and Pepper Potts?), the franchise has come to resemble nothing so much as a rollercoaster ride. And what a ride it has been. Now, with Endgame, as the carriage trundles along the tracks towards its final destination, don't expect any decrease of pace, but on the contrary loop-the-loops and precipitous drops galore. Whoosh! The last time we saw the Avengers, at the end of Infinity War, there were a number of complications that the gang faced, in a variety of ways. Fans of the MCU will recall that Thanos (Josh Brolin, having the time of his life) had set about his wicked business of attacking the Avengers, in a manner which we'll skate over here, save to say that it left the gang in a certain state at the end of the film. Who, if any of them, survived...

Television comedies didn't use to have much truck with altruism. Generally speaking we would watch awful people doing terrible things, and there was a certain catharsis to be found in either cheering them on or witnessing their failure - and this went for Basil Fawlty as much as for Larry David, Homer Simpson, the Bluths from Arrested Development or Nighty Night's Jill Tyrrell. In Britain this tendency appeared blunter, but there was a considerable vein of misanthropy in US television as well. But in recent times we've had a number of programmes chewing on the idea of human kindness, where the comedy of misbehaviour or or social anxiety is counterbalanced by ideas of caring for others and making our lives on earth worthwhile. Why? Why now? Michael Schur's The Good Place was the first off the mark, making ideas of human goodness central to its very conceit. In the show, we follow four supposedly bad people (note that Schur can't actually bring himself to write terr...

The end of US, Jordan Peele's gnarly new masterwork, sees him pull off a coup, by panning away from the family at the film's heart, towards a shiver-inducing formation of bodies clothed in orange-red clothes reminiscent of prisoner uniforms, holding hands in a line that stretches to the horizon. A supremely ambiguous shot given the social, racial and identity politics that have preceded it, this finale marks a leap forward for a filmmaker whose previous masterpiece, GET OUT, seemed to close down on itself in the final moments, finding a resolution of sorts and giving its audience a much-needed catharsis. In opening his film out like this, and accepting the inevitable messiness that this implies - Peele allows his movie to swell and sprawl, throwing ideas at the screen almost constantly - Peele gives the full measure of his thinking, giving us a film that asks much more than it answers. Both GET OUT and US locate horror in the heart of the family. In the former, Chris finds hi...

Beautiful Boy comes out on British screens tomorrow - and if the film has socking great flaws in its concept and execution, well, that's OK, because it's 'about' something. Dismiss it at your peril, for here is a film whose subject is so obviously necessary and important, and so self-seriously handled here by a team wishing to 'do justice to the subject matter', that it hardly matters if the film has any qualities of its own. We demand aboutness now - or at least, from those few movies that don't centre on magic immortals beating ten shades of Stars and Stripes out of each other. And how blessed we are, to have--alongside the obligatory biopics 'about' recognisable stars whose fame simply demands a film treatment--an endless supply of 'issue' movies. HIV, slavery, drugs, gay conversion therapy or the financial crash of 2007-2008: these are all not just valid topics for a film, but subjects whence it's easy to dispense an ever desirabl...

At one stage in Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels’ stop-motion animation short This Magnificent Cake!, a child is rattling the lid of a grand piano, which causes the instrument to shake, tumble out of its castor-holders, and roll down a marble floor, whereupon it falls down on one level, on top of a poor unfortunate standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mere minutes later, in this film whose every shot exhales a delicate inner life, a large man crossing a rope bridge over a vast precipice while eating a banana tosses the peel over his shoulder. It lands on the bridge, where he is being followed by five other people, a groanworthy cartoon cliché just begging to be subverted. But as with the grand piano landing on someone’s head, the banana peel serves here to puncture our expectations and feed into a quietly bristling politics, since these dark jokes fall on both occasions at the expense of people of colour, who suffer from the unthinkingness of white people. The child pro...

When I was a young boy my parents bought me a big hardcover book about cinema for my birthday, which traced the art form from silent film through to the 90s. The book had lots of glossy pictures of Hollywood and European cinema stars, segments for each year about who had won the major festival awards and Oscars, and little sections on the main releases, scandals or developments of any particular year. In the pre-IMDb years, before I had seen any, really, of these films, I looked at photos of Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice, or read about the release of Last Tango In Paris or the early days of the Venice film festival, and was semi-obsessed with the whole shebang. I acted in a couple of films on time off from school, and was generally fascinated with the world of cinema - with the smell of a film set, with the gossip, the posters, the galas and prizes. Growing up in France and reading Premiere magazine, I thought I was a sophisticated cinephile by seeing Clerks or La Haine. Now, when I...

On the day I force-feed Piers Morgan a vegan sausage, Piers Morgan will cry a single tear, his mouth full to bursting with an oogy foreign foodstuff, and I will say, “How does it feel to be the foie gras now, BITCH?” Piers Morgan will say, “Please - no more sausage.” But I will be the one with all the power over the disgraced former editor of the Daily Mirror, and will calmly make him eat more sausage. And I will crow: “Ha ha, Pier (I will call him Pier throughout the ordeal), you snivelling clam, you called it sausage! So you admit that it is, in fact, a sausage!” “Or-ride or-ride, sdob, Ibe sorry, ig ig a foffage”, Morgan will say, his mouth full of vegan sausage, which is actually made of meat like every other sausage in the world but made to taste like tofu so that liberals can enjoy owning rightwingers. “What’s that Pier?” I shall say, with a cheery wink. “I couldn’t quite hear your mouth sounds just now from all the veganism in your face.” “I seg, ig ig a foffage, I wud w...