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BAFTA SPECIAL 05.06.21

M AGA ZINE OF THE Y EA R

WHO WAS IN YOUR BUBBLE? A year of great TV – how would we have survived lockdown without it?

S TA R R I N G Ant and Dec, Tom Hollander, Holly Willoughby, Paapa Essiedu, Nicola Coughlan, Anne-Marie Duff, Phillip Schofield, David Tennant…

05.06.21 14

12

5 Caitlin Moran An ode to telly. 9 Spinal column: Melanie Reid My carer is a woman of many talents. 12 Cover story Bafta special We celebrate a year of great television. 34 Trump’s pandemic catastrophe unmasked White House insiders reveal all to Lawrence Wright. 37 Eat! Really fast fish recipes from Cornwall. 48 Teenage boys in the firing line Reports of sexual assault in schools risk demonising a generation of young men. 54 What next for Shamima Begum and the Isis brides? A new film shows what life is like in a Syrian camp. Anthony Loyd reports. 63 Home! Alfresco dining. 65 Shop! Hot shoes. 67 Pout! Nadine Baggott’s 10 essentials.

68 Giles Coren reviews Harrods Social, London. 74 Beta male: Robert Crampton I’m too middle-class for Hull these days.

ON THE COVER: ANT AND DEC PHOTOGRAPHED BY ROBERT WILSON

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EDITOR NICOLA JEAL DEPUTY EDITOR LOUISE FRANCE ART DIRECTOR CHRIS HITCHCOCK ASSOCIATE EDITOR JANE MULKERRINS ASSISTANT EDITOR TONY TURNBULL FEATURES EDITOR MONIQUE RIVALLAND CHIEF SUB-EDITOR AMANDA LINFOOT DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR JO PLENT DEPUTY CHIEF SUB-EDITOR CHRIS RILEY PICTURE EDITOR ANNA BASSETT DEPUTY PICTURE EDITOR LUCY DALEY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR BRIDGET HARRISON EDITORIAL ASSISTANT GEORGINA ROBERTS

The Times Magazine 3

CAITLIN MORAN

ALL DRESSED UP. NOWHERE TO GO. SO WE WATCHED TV To kick off this special issue, our columnist reveals her lockdown viewing habits

ROBERT WILSON

O

f all the most used phrases during the lockdowns, “We’ve needed TV now more than ever,” came just above, “Look at my sourdough!” and just below, “ARGH! ARGH! ARGH! ARGH! I’m so scared and sad and everything’s awful!”

Although I’m of the opinion we always need telly – why would we not? It’s a miraculous world-scrying box that will give you anything you want if you flick for long enough, costs less than any other comparable pleasure and you can have it in the front room, kitchen or bed – when coronavirus hit, it became the seventh emergency service.

After the actual emergency services, Valium, dog memes and Deliveroo.

With our worlds reduced to the size of our flat/house, the ability to wield the remote and Narnia yourself somewhere – anywhere – different was, for many, the difference between “things being incredibly weird and suboptimal, but survivable” and “feeling like the world had totally ended”.

TV both kept us company and made us feel free. While actual physical travel was limited to “staring at a park bench with ‘DO NOT USE’ tape on it” and “queuing for beans outside Costco”, on the TV we could go anywhere that Sir David Attenborough, Rick Stein, Sir Michael Palin, Steve Backshall or one of Michael Portillo’s trains wanted to go.

I spent most of this spring on a narrowboat with Robbie Cumming on his Canal Boat Diaries, getting pleasantly emotionally involved with the sections of the RochdaleManchester canal that have become silted up and borderline unnavigable. WILL NO ONE SIEVE THE ROCHDALE-MANCHESTER CANAL? ALL THE OOMSKA’S GUMMING UP CUMMING’S FLAT KEEL! And it wasn’t just travel by proxy that TV gave us. As the weeks went by and our social lives were reduced to mere memory, the people on our TV screens started to feel more familiar than friends and family; simply because they were. Whether it was the

‘Television was the seventh emergency service. After the actual emergency services, Valium, dog memes and Deliveroo’

The Times Magazine 5

BRIDGERTON HAD AS MANY MAD PLOTLINES AS THE KARDASHIANS HAVE CUBIC BUM INCHES star-crossed shaggers in Normal People, the demented big-cat hoarders in Tiger King or the beautifully dressed chess nerds in The Queen’s Gambit, all were subsequently discussed on social media or during Zooms with the same levels of love, horror and concern we’d usually reserve for the lives of friends or weird cousins. Let’s face it, the normal glue of social interaction – gossip – had major pipeline issues during 2020-21.

No one in real life was going to parties, hooking up, getting drunk, getting married or having rows in the staffroom. When you said, “How’s it going? What you been up to?” to a friend, they’d reply, “Like you, I have done absolutely nothing save quietly despair.”

But on telly, they were doing all these interesting things and more. And so we could talk about them instead. Who did not spend a portion of winter 2021 discussing the myriad astonishing life decisions in Regency pumpfest Bridgerton as eagerly as if its wiggy denizens were Neil and Jan from accounts?

Of all my favourite mad plotlines – and Bridgerton had as many mad plotlines as the Kardashians have cubic bum inches – my No 1 Most Boggled Over was Daphne Bridgerton’s repeated, heroic efforts to steal sperm from her husband, the Duke of Sexington. The Duke of Sexington, for reasons too complex and mad to go into here, really wanted to keep all his sperm away from her. Eighty-two million households watched this gladiatorial matrimonial jizz battle. Eighty-two million. The fact that it was all narrated by Julie Andrews, as the mysterious “Lady Whistledown”, made it all the more extraordinary. I half hoped she’d break into a version of My Favourite Things that included the line, “Doorbells and sleigh bells and spaff in my whoodle,” but it was not to be. Maybe for series two.

And it didn’t even need to be savoury genital gossip to scratch our itch for “people doing people stuff”. There were many, many things to both love and be in awe of in Steve McQueen’s garlanded Small Axe series, but the episode that seemed to resonate the most was Lovers Rock, set entirely at a house party, where the whole house spent a full ten minutes singing and dancing to Janet Kay’s Silly Games. For many of us, that house party was the only party we went to in 2020, and we hungrily marvelled at the everyday miracle of “getting dressed to go out out”, “having an intense, drunken conversation in the kitchen” and “howling along to a record until the neighbours bang on the wall”.

Of course, many of the things we watched and loved were already in the can before corona struck. When it came to other, live TV 6 The Times Magazine

staples – Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, This Morning, Springwatch, Strictly Come Dancing – these scheduling behemoths had to cope with churning out flagship shows in a world of masks, bubbles, social distancing and silent, empty chairs where once audiences would have been cheering, stamping and working up “a vibe”. This Morning sailed into the pandemic having already weathered one potential storm – in February, Phillip Schofield had come out as gay, live on the show, as “best friend” Holly Willoughby held his hand. As everyone including Schofield was aware, had he done this 20 years ago it would have been a very different affair. We know this because… he didn’t. But in 2020, cheeringly, the event was marked by little more than a nation going, “Ah, good for you, mate,” and then going on Twitter to ask Holly where she got her dark blue polka-dot dress (£39.99, Next).

The 2020 Springwatch had the great fortune to be covering one of the most intensely beautiful springs in recent memory.

On its daily, prescribed one-hour walk, the nation went all Dennis Potter over the blossomiest blossoms and so was primed for the return of Chris Packham, locked down in his house in the New Forest and copresenting with his stepdaughter Megan, who proved to be an instant star. I love Springwatch at the best of times, but I consumed last year’s with a borderline tearful rapaciousness. When the big story from the world of humans is, undeniably, death – lots of it, seemingly without end – there is an eternal comfort in watching the natural world continuing its small, vital, furry and feathered business as usual. The obliviousness of an oystercatcher to BBC News at Six is deeply consoling when the world is in flux. Packham found an albino badger in his garden and it took on an almost mythic status. The White Badger of Lockdown: summoned to be bumblingly captivating in our hour of need.

Meanwhile over on ITV, Ant and Dec had an almost impossible task. Saturday Night Takeaway is driven by huge amounts of live audience interaction. After all, the climax of the previous series was more than 200 viewers going away on a cruise together, before “cruise ship” became synonymous with “raging infection capsule”. With restrictions so tight that even Ant and Dec had to stand 2m apart – they’re basically a single organism! You might as well try to socially distance a pushmi-pullyu! – one would have feared the show’s usual, raucous social-club air would have been fatally muffled. Instead, the duo showed why they’re worth those 5,757,575,757 awards and £557,668,686,868 gazillion golden handcuff deals: holding Zoom calls with

families all over the country in a way that felt more interactive, not less; and managing to get an atmosphere going in the studio when their only audience was five crew members in PPE giggling into their masks.

I had so many TV grooves that I would fall into during the endless hours when there was nothing else to do. I think we watched every available show Rick Stein ever made: Rick in India, Rick in Spain, Rick in South America. Wherever Rick goes, it always seems like he’s travelled an unnecessarily long distance to do what, as he reminds us in every episode, he likes best: have a “simple piece of fish with a salad and a glass of wine”, and then find the nearest fishing port where he stares at the fishermen for hours. Rick! You live in Padstow! Just stay there!

On the other side of the travel coin is Steve Backshall, one of our most underrated TV presenters. As David Attenborough grows older we habitually ask, “Who is the next Attenborough?” overlooking the glaringly obvious answer: Backshall. Not just an infectiously ardent naturalist, Backshall is also a boyish adventurer. He seems to consider it a day wasted if he hasn’t abseiled into a previously unexplored valley, or totalled his kayak going over a waterfall while screaming, “Blimey!” Backshall started out as a children’s presenter with Deadly 60 and, during lockdown, me and my husband experienced one of those dizzying reversals that parenting often provides: our teenage daughters getting drunk in the garden while we watched Steve Backshall in the front room, eating hummus and carrot sticks. IT USED TO BE THE OTHER WAY ROUND. WHAT HAPPENED? What else? RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Great British Bake Off, I May Destroy You, I Hate Suzie, Succession, The Dog House, Europe From Above, Africa’s Great Civilisations – the last of which really should be shown as part of the curriculum. But then – and I don’t mean this facetiously – all the above should be shown as part of the curriculum. To play with your identity; to bake; to cope with sexual assault; to examine modern motherhood; to see how multinational corporations really work; to observe the miracle the right dog for the right family can bring; to find out what some of Poland and all of Africa are like. How lucky we were that it was all there, in the corner of the room, the year we needed it most.

And to top it all, it was also the year that Nigella Lawson saying “microwave” in a silly way – “Mee-cro-wah-vay” – was actually nominated for a Bafta.

Thank you, telly. Thank you for being such a great pal. n

SPINAL COLUMN MELANIE REID

Meet my carer: co-driver, cook, Covid enforcer, wheelchair fixer, And disposer of corpses…

MURDO MACLEOD

M

y carer, Janice, says working for me is the least dull job she’s had. While I think life here is ever so boring since I lost my ability to do anything, fix anything or act spontaneously in any way, she always expects the unexpected.

Everything’s relative, I guess. She spent most of her career working for the council, supporting frail and elderly people in their own homes. She was brilliant at it. Decades keeping vulnerable people comfortable, well fed and safe, often dodging petty protocols to do so, and fighting their corner with the authorities.

Everyone needs a Janice when they get old.

But she says that, until she came to work part-time for me, she hadn’t had quite so many adventures. In the line of duty she has, among many things, become an emergency co-driver, furniture shifter, physiotherapy assistant, wheelchair mechanic, Covid enforcer, souptaster, bin policewoman, coal-carrier, firelighter, dog-walker, gofer, enabler. And, like Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction, Winston Wolfe, she disposes of dead bodies.

In England, those assigned to the spinal injured are called personal assistants. This suits Janice far more than the narrow scope of the Scottish “carer” or “home support worker”. Personal assistant opens the door to a touch of anarchy.

Like our road trips, one up the west coast where we loaded the car with kippers and ate fish and chips (“I really only come for the food,” she says); the other when a motorway crash meant a 150-mile detour in the early hours with me driving and Janice working the dip beam because my fingers weren’t then up to it.

Bribed with sufficient KitKats, she is endlessly versatile. She created an isolation bedsit for Doug in the barn at the start of lockdown, complete with hot running water.

Because our washing machine is a ramp too far for me, and has a button too far for my husband, she also does the laundry, bedchanging and ironing. Occasionally, over coffee in the kitchen at the end of her daily shift, when I’m clean, dressed and in my chair finally facing the day, we celebrate her achievements.

“Folding up my clean underwear,” says Dave.

“Does that not bring you a shudder of joy?”

She gives him the withering look of a woman who has heard everything five million times before and usually responds with a rough wet flannel to the gonads.

“Getting rid of corpses,” I say. “That’s your greatest.” And it’s true: while so many other women would have the vapours, Janice handles dead things like a real countrywoman.

She has walked half a mile carrying the remains of a deer to stop our dog getting it.

Last winter, when our neighbour was away, she took charge of vermin control in his house.

Every day she checked the trap, keeping a tally of dead mice that ran well into double figures.

She was upset but unflappable even after finding she’d killed a weasel in the trap.

It was regrettable, but, well… If we’re being practical, best not to have a weasel running around inside your house.

But nothing compares to her heroism after her adopted Bambi garrotted itself in front of her. For several weeks, she’d arrived telling me about two roe deer yearlings she passed in the wood on the way up to our house. They didn’t run away. My pals, she called them.

But two weeks ago her pals ran in front of her car up between the fields. She held back, so as not to panic them. But while one found an opening, the other dived through the fence, flipping over and trapping itself by the neck.

Janice left her car and ran to get Dave to fetch bolt cutters. But when they got back the deer was in its death throes. What to do with a carcass the size of a Great Dane? None of us eat roadkill; nor are we capable of digging graves. Leave it with me, Winston Wolfe sighed, and loaded it into her car boot.

She loves a good crime thriller. I tease her that she was spotted furtively dumping the body, and one day forensics will track her down. She grins and gets on with the dull stuff, changing the sheets after the tubes of my night pee bag kinked and I woke up lying in a soaking wet bed. Carers? Respect. n @Mel_ReidTimes Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010 The Times Magazine 9

OUR YEAR IN FRONT OF THE BOX

They’re the household names, primetime duos, award-winning actors and breakout stars who kept us going during lockdown.

Ahead of the television Baftas tomorrow, we celebrate the talent we watched (night after night) from our sofas PORTRAITS Robert Wilson STYLING Hannah Rogers

Nicola Coughlan wears dress, emiliawickstead. com; jewellery, vashi.com.

Opposite: Ant wears suit, tombakerlondon.com; shirt, turnbullandasser. co.uk. Dec wears suit, thomsweeney.com; shirt, smythandgibson.com; bow tie, gucci.com

David Tennant wears suit, paulsmith.com; shirt, 1873 (matchesfashion.com); shoes, manoloblahnik.com

Paapa Essiedu wears suit, shirt and bow tie, ralphlauren.co.uk; shoes, malonesouliers.com

Huw Edwards wears jacket, Richard James (mrporter.com); trousers and shoes, hugoboss.com; bow tie, buddshirts.co.uk

Oti Mabuse wears dress, atelia-zuhra.com

The PRIMETIME DUO

ANT AND DEC

‘A lot of double acts are short-lived. Our relationship is a friendship first and foremost’

STYLING: TONI PORTER. GROOMING: CLAUDINE TAYLOR, ALICE BOND

I

f ever there were a year the nation needed the impish good cheer of Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, it was the one ushered in by the prime minister’s announcement of lockdown in March 2020.

In the following 12 months Ant and Dec – as of course we know them – became emblems of the showbiz rule that the show must go on, even if the show needed to change.

In its 20th season, their I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! forsook the steamy Australian jungle for freezing temperatures in a castle in Wales. No one at home seemed to mind the hemisphere change.

“We’d done the first show live,” recalls Ant in a dimly lit dressing room where he is sitting, as always, to the left of Dec, “and at the end of the night we checked our socials and people were like, ‘Oh my God, you guys have saved 2020.’ ‘Thank God for I’m a Celebrity.’ It was amazing. And the figures were really big. The following Saturday, and to give everybody a bit of a break, we decided to do a recap highlight show. And people tuned in expecting a live show and went, ‘Oh my God, they’ve ruined 2020.’ ” “It was like, ‘You arseholes! Why would you do a clip show?’ ” amplifies Dec. “We’d gone from hero to zero in six days.”

The relocation of I’m a Celebrity was not the only change the year forced on the pair.

Covid caused Britain’s Got Talent, which they also host, to be split between opposite ends of the summer. When Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway returned in February, a studio audience had been replaced by a home audience shown on a massive video wall.

“There were so many times we’d thought, ‘God, is it actually going to happen? Are we going to be able to make this studio-based live

entertainment show?’ ” remembers Dec. “It was not just having a live audience. It was, ‘How do we get guests there? How do we surprise people? How do we give away holidays when nobody can travel anywhere? How can we make this show in the current restrictions?’

“The planning and the preproduction that went on were so intense. It went on for such a long time. So when we finally walked out on that first show we were like, ‘We’re live and we’re in people’s living rooms and there’s people there looking back at us.’ It was quite overwhelming.”

“Yes, by the time we got on stage and said, ‘Welcome to the show,’ it was quite emotional,” says Ant. I have just watched their extremely soluble 2019 two-part documentary, Ant & Dec’s DNA Journey. I wonder if the old friends, who met on CBBC’s Byker Grove, are becoming more emotional at the ripe age of 45 (Ant is two months Dec’s junior).

“Yeah, we’re two big softies now, aren’t we?” says Ant. “We’ve probably cried more on television in the past two years than we have our entire career previously.”

“I think part of it is getting older,” continues Dec. “Some of that is just you appreciate things a lot more. We joke about getting nominated for awards, but it probably means more to us now than it ever has in our career.”

The pair have received 13 Bafta awards to date, and this year Saturday Night Takeaway has been nominated once again in the best entertainment category.

“You know, we had a bit of a break in our career a couple of years ago and then got back together,” says Ant. “We’re so much more grateful for everything.”

It’s a bit of a miracle?

“Yes, for me personally. Just to be doing work again with my best friend and enjoying myself and having a laugh.”

The “break” in their joint career began one Sunday afternoon in March 2018 when Ant crashed his Mini into another car while well over the legal alcohol limit. The following day he was suspended from presenting duties on Saturday Night Takeaway. Dec continued solo and later with Holly Willoughby on that year’s Celebrity. Ant, who had become addicted to drugs and alcohol after a botched knee operation led him to a reliance on painkillers, was banned from driving for 20 months and

fined £86,000. Earlier in the year he had announced that he had split up from his wife, the make-up artist Lisa Armstrong, after a 12-year marriage. He returned to television in January 2019 for Britain’s Got Talent. Last year he became engaged to Anne-Marie Corbett, his former personal assistant.

Although so much success over 30 years allows audiences to forget, Ant’s dark year was not the pair’s only career setback. Their early transition in 2001 from a Saturday morning slot to peak time failed.

“We had an idea of a show called Slap Bang because it was slap bang in the middle of the weekend, on a Saturday,” says Ant. “The title was the best thing about it,” says Dec. “And the rest of it didn’t work,” agrees Ant. “It was quite childish. It was too childish for the slot. The items weren’t as clever as they should have been. So we went away and came up with Saturday Night Takeaway.”

“We realised after Slap Bang that we had to really think about every item,” Dec continues. “Everything you put in the show has to have a reason and a logic to why it is there. Without Slap Bang we would never have got to Takeaway and now we’re on series 17.

I think as you get a bit older you realise you learn a lot more from your failures and your flops than you do from your successes.”

Takeaway is quintessential Saturday-night TV, containing notes familiar to older viewers with memories of departed predecessors such as Game for a Laugh and Noel’s House Party.

When Takeaway returned after a four-year hiatus in 2013, it gained comedy-drama serials inspired by Two Ronnies pastiches such as The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town.

Consistency is important, but change perhaps ensures longevity. In the past Takeaway was criticised for being too “white”.

Its comperes believe the latest series was probably the most diverse in terms of guests and contestants. “It should reflect its audience and I think the audience is diverse,” says Dec. “We definitely have put more effort into showing that on screen.”

The good news is the biggest change of all is not on the cards. Neither the left nor right wing of Britain’s most successful lightentertainment team has particular ambitions to do something different, and certainly not something apart.

“A lot of double acts only last for a certain amount of time and are very short-lived,” reflects Ant. Because they secretly hate each other?

“Which always disappoints me,” says Dec. “I think the difference is ours is a professional relationship built on a friendship, not a friendship built on a professional relationship. It’s friendship first and foremost.

That’s a solid foundation.” Andrew Billen The Times Magazine 17

The BRIDGERTON SENSATION

NICOLA COUGHLAN

NICOLA COUGHLAN: STYLING, AIMEE CROYSDILL; HAIR, HALLEY BRISKER; MAKE-UP, NEIL YOUNG. BIG ZUU: JACKET, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN (MATCHESFASHION.COM); SHIRT, EMMAWILLIS.COM; TROUSERS, MR P (MRPORTER.COM); SHOES, MANOLOBLAHNIK.COM

‘How many people in the world can say they job-share with Julie Andrews?’

In the past year, Nicola Coughlan, 34, has gone from relative unknown straight to the red carpet without ever leaving Galway. The actress, who plays Penelope Featherington in Bridgerton, finished filming in February last year and immediately decamped to spend lockdown with her parents in Ireland. When Bridgerton aired at Christmas it became Netflix’s most watched series: 82 million households around the world watched, agog, as Coughlan’s character was revealed as the mysterious Lady Whistledown, the society chronicler at the heart of the drama.

Meanwhile Coughlan was helping her mum with the cooking and cleaning, and the only thing that changed about her life was her Instagram following.

“I went from 200,000 followers to 1.2 million overnight, which is just ridiculous,” she says via Zoom from the London flat to which she’s only recently returned. “Drew Barrymore and Sarah Jessica Parker now follow me. That’s crazy! I’m posting a picture and I’m like, ‘What would Drew Barrymore think? Eightytwo million households is unfathomable, it’s surreal, and the only measure we have of it is online. A million followers on Instagram is a mad number of people.”

Coughlan was 30 when she finally got her break, cast as Clare Devlin in Derry Girls.

Since graduating from drama school in 2011, she paid the bills with minimum-wage jobs and wrote email after email to agents and

casting directors who never bothered to reply. Doors weren’t slammed in her face because they never even opened. Eventually, broke and despairing, she left London to go back to Ireland.

“I thought, well, I’ve failed. This is obviously not going to happen for me.”

Her family started gently suggesting that she should use her English degree to become a teacher. Then came an open audition at the Old Vic for a festival of short plays. Out of 1,500 actors who auditioned, she was one of only 7 to get the job. That got her an agent and her first audition was for Derry Girls, which premiered on Channel 4 in 2018. A black comedy about five teenagers growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, it was a cult hit that went mainstream and was picked up by Netflix.

Then came Bridgerton. She thought the auditioning process would be drawn out and painful, but in the event she sent in one tape and was offered the role. She burst into tears when she heard that Julie Andrews would be the voice of Penelope’s alter ego, Lady Whistledown.

“How many people in the world can say they job-share with Julie Andrews?”

Much has been made of the so-called colour-blind casting in Bridgerton, in which a black actor, Regé-Jean Page, was cast as an 18th-century English duke.

“Bridgerton wasn’t such a sacred cow as Pride and Prejudice,” is Coughlan’s take on it.

“The script didn’t read like a period drama, and I mean that in a good sense. Sometimes they can feel staid, like a dusty painting we can’t touch. Bridgerton gave us room to experiment.”

When we speak, Coughlan is mired in fittings for season two. An incredible 7,500 costumes were made for season one, but none of the actors know exactly what they’re being fitted for. The costume department won’t tell them, Coughlan complains, so the cast text each other saying, “I tried on this dress. Any idea what it might be for?” The standout star of season one was Page as the Duke of Hastings. He won’t be returning for season two and is hotly tipped to be the next James Bond, perhaps putting Coughlan in the running to be a Bond girl.

“Definitely not. I could be whoever Judi Dench was. I’ll do anything Judi Dench has done.” Hilary Rose

The TV COOK

BIG ZUU “I’ve always been a little fat boy who loves cooking and giving people food,” says Zuhair Hassan, 25, of the inspiration behind his series Big Zuu’s Big Eats on Dave. “Now, apparently, I’m a TV guy too.” The self-taught chef started cooking at nine for his mum when she was pregnant with his little brother. Later, when Hassan was “broke”, he began experimenting, his classic dish becoming macaroni cheese and buffalo wings. He was then spotted while sharing photos of his meals on Snapchat.

Ever since, Hassan, who also doubles as a rapper and DJ, has been driving around the UK in a food truck serving meals to some of the UK’s top comedians. The session with Jimmy Carr “was very weird and surreal. He did his seal laugh,” says Hassan.

He grew up with his Sierra Leonean mum on an estate in west London, and one of his most treasured filming moments is when she starred in the show. “No one was allowed to talk when we watched her episode. She wanted to embrace her moment on telly.”

As well as TV he has a cookbook, Big Zuu’s Big Eats, out this month, with a grime album and radio show to follow. Jade Cuttle The Times Magazine 19

Dress, andrewgn.com; earrings, larkandberry.com

The LEADING MAN

The NATURE LOVER

PAAPA ESSIEDU

GILLIAN BURKE

‘We want the chances to progress that we feel we deserve’

‘It was the first time I spoke genuinely from my heart’

Does television change lives? For Paapa Essiedu, it probably already has. An extraordinary RSC Hamlet five years ago, he became the breakout star of Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You last summer.

The eye-opening BBC-HBO drama set in a sexually precarious multiethnic London has garnered four Baftas nominations, with Essiedu up for the best leading actor award.

As we speak he is rehearsing with Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear for a new Alex Garland movie, Men, and can be seen in Channel 5’s Anne Boleyn.

Yet the reception that greeted I May Destroy You and Essiedu’s portrayal of Kwame, a confident gay man raped by a stranger he meets on Grindr, means more to the 30-year-old actor than the prominence it won him personally.

“I feel really grateful to have been a part of that show – grateful in terms of what it’s ended up meaning to people on a grander scale more than for what doors it has opened for me personally.”

I May Destroy You was a piece of art that, never mind changing lives, changed minds.

Centred on questions of sexual consent, it challenged notions of what rape is.

“Definitely ‘conversation’ was a big part of the response to the show,” he says, “and I don’t say that to be glib or reductive. I think it was a real opener-up, rather than pointing fingers or making accusations or trying to tell us what to think. I think it is a great achievement.”

Essiedu’s Gangs of London from Sky Atlantic is also up for a Bafta for best drama series. He plays the scion of a black London criminal family competing with Albanian mafiosi, Pakistani drug lords and Kurdish freedom fighters.

“It depicts modern London,” he says. “It’s always thrilling when the work that we make has the courage, the support and the funding to be able to mirror the world that we live in.”

Anne Boleyn may prove to be another breakthrough. Colour-blind casting has been the norm for years on the stage, but in the more naturalistic medium of television such liberties have mostly been resisted. In the

During the pandemic, the most vulnerable were unable to enjoy nature in person.

As one of the four presenters of wildlife programme Springwatch, Gillian Burke, 45, wanted to bring the natural world to them through their screens.

“We hoped it gave the sense that although our lives had been disrupted, there was some comfort from the knowledge that in nature everything kept going; the world kept turning.

Spring was going to happen no matter what.”

Burke joined Springwatch in 2016, when she replaced Martin Hughes-Games to become the show’s first black presenter. Her predecessor’s claims that he was sidelined for being white and middle class made headlines.

“My strategy was, let everyone else have a fight about this, because it’s not my fight.”

An event she did feel was her fight was the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death last summer. It brought “the most vulnerable moment I’ve had on live TV yet”, and was “the moment that things changed for me on Springwatch”, she says.

Blackout Tuesday, a social media movement to protest against racism and police brutality, was “a really tough day for me”, she says. “I felt like, ‘I honestly don’t know how I’m gonna go on air tonight.’ ” In an introduction to an item about beavers, she spoke in solidarity with the protests. “It was probably the first time that I looked down the barrel of the camera and spoke genuinely from my heart,” she says.

Not all viewers took kindly to her unscheduled political comment. “Some people felt it wasn’t the place to be talking about that.

But I didn’t know how I was going to carry on with my job until I acknowledged how I felt.”

The segment was in a lockdown format, which saw the Springwatch team beam in live from their respective homes. For Burke that means Cornwall where she lives with her son and daughter, although her initial love of nature was sparked much further afield.

“The way I learnt about nature wasn’t in any way academic,” she says of her childhood spent on the outskirts of Nairobi, where her mother was an environmental journalist. “If it was bright outside, outside is where I was – watching termites and ants, pulling out thorns from my feet,” she says. “It was the making of who I am now.” Georgina Roberts

Channel 5 historical drama, however, Essiedu plays sibling to Jodie Turner-Smith’s Anne.

Essiedu is Ghanaian-British and TurnerSmith’s parents are Jamaican.

“I think the production team would call it ‘colour-conscious’ casting. I’m not going to give you a definition, but it is definitely along the lines that when you cast your lead actor, you want to create a family unit that is consistent.”

We agree it is one way forward. Behind the scenes, however, Essiedu says there have been fewer advances. He asks me to imagine a football-team photo complete with coaches and physios, but with a TV production crew.

“The actors are all sitting on the front row.

They look a certain way. The rest of the crew look a different way. That would be odd [in other professions]. I think we’ve got to have an ambition to allow the boldness shown in moving on representation in front of the camera to extend to what’s happening behind the camera as well.

“All we want to do is be given the opportunities to progress that we feel we deserve. No one wants to be put in a box or reduced to something less than what they are.” Andrew Billen

The Times Magazine 21

David Olusoga wears tuxedo, ralphlauren.co.uk; shoes, manoloblahnik.com; bow tie, tieroom.co.uk

Anne-Marie Duff wears dress, dolcegabbana.com

The A-LIST ACTOR

TOM HOLLANDER For anyone believing that celebrities all sailed through the pandemic unaffected with barely a pause on the busy showbiz roundabout, actor Tom Hollander would like to correct you.

In his wry, dry piece for A Life in the Day, the Sunday Times column, published last year, the 53-year-old star of Doctor Thorne, The Night Manager and, most recently, the BBC’s adaptation of David Nicholls’ novel Us painted a picture of highly relatable lockdown sloth and tedium. In the morning, “I look at myself in the mirror and try to see what others see.

Examine my bald patch, weigh myself and pull my stomach in. Then let it out. Then pull it in again. If I’m feeling positive I might get dressed at this point,” he wrote. “Soon it’s time for my mid-morning nap. Followed by the

22 The Times Magazine

preparation of lunch, which I start at 12.15pm.

And at 1pm I turn on the radio again to listen to World at One and hear politicians lying or reports of the world ending.” In the afternoon he described “hobbies and extracurricular activities” – “If it’s sunny I might go for a cycle ride down the canal, if it’s raining I might masturbate and doze, or speculate on the extraordinary injustice of Philip Green’s knighthood.” The piece went viral.

Today, however, Hollander no longer has time for mid-morning naps and masturbation.

Speaking from Croatia, where he is filming an adaptation of Len Deighton’s spy novel The Ipcress File alongside Lucy Boynton, he reports feeling grateful. “I’ve spent my adult life in theatres and restaurants, and on film and TV sets. The first two on the list have been killed

by Covid. So, after many months of nothing, to be able to do the third feels like even more of a privilege than it was already.”

The experience of filming is necessarily altered by the heavy presence of masks.

“You can’t really tell what mood people are in. Which is really tricky,” says Hollander. “It makes making jokes hard, because you can’t tell if people are smiling or furious. It turns out the mouth area is incredibly important for expressing and reading emotion. Which as an actor I probably should have known.” And, he adds, “When you do see people without their masks, they very often have completely the wrong face from the one you were expecting.”

However, he says, “We’re shooting a spy thriller, in which everyone’s motivations are a mystery to everyone else and in which everybody suspects everyone else of lying.

So it’s actually perfect.”

Grateful though he is to be back in the saddle, “There are limits to what is possible,” he says. “Filming over five countries with five different crews and shooting as you travel, which is what we did on Us [in London, Amsterdam, Venice, Barcelona and Paris], would simply be impossible now.”

Jane Mulkerrins

Tom Hollander wears suit, tomford.co.uk The Times Magazine 25

OTI MABUSE: STYLING, JESSIE CULLEY

The NEWS ANCHOR

The STRICTLY QUEEN

HUW EDWARDS

OTI MABUSE

‘The Paxman and Humphrys approach is not me. It’s too aggressive’

‘I told Bill Bailey: everyone is expecting you to do a bad job’

On a park bench by parliament, Huw Edwards is reflecting on perhaps the busiest month of his career.

It began in April with a phone call to his home in south London relaying the news that the Duke of Edinburgh had died. A lift from his wife, a train, a Tube and a quick march got Edwards on air at 1pm to present the BBC’s rolling coverage from Broadcasting House. The funeral followed – Edwards’ first royal funeral as presenter – and then, a few weeks later, two days of election specials, the first, starting at 9am and finishing at 10pm, likely the longest continuous results programme in British broadcasting history. “The next day’s from 1pm to 6.30pm felt like a walk in the park,” he says.

The previous year was hardly quieter as recognised by his two Bafta nominations, one for BBC News at Ten’s coverage of Boris Johnson’s admission into intensive care, the other for the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance, which Edwards presented from an audience-bereft Albert Hall.

It was perhaps May’s elections, however, that showed how comfortably Edwards has assumed the mantle of two Dimblebys – one long dead, the other having only recently relinquished it. From his socially distanced anchor desk, BBC News’s chief presenter added value by relaying tip-offs from political contacts from his native Wales. He established a happy rapport with his co-presenter in Edinburgh, Kirsty Wark, at one point discussing with her the difference between Welsh and Scottish nationalism. He was funny too, assuring Reeta Chakrabarti at her sometimes sluggard results board that he would have lost patience with it long before.

With the politicians his interview approach was softly, softly. Before asking the uncomfortable question, he always first congratulated a winning candidate. “For so long,” he says, “we’ve been dominated by the Paxman and Humphrys approach; amazingly effective in some ways, but quite aggressive at times. For years I’ve felt that’s not me. I felt there’s a way of asking questions that are maybe more of an invitation to open up.”

A by-product of all this activity is that this spring, BBC News at Ten viewers may well have got to know their main man a bit more.

“There’s a danger you’re just seen as someone who delivers the news. People do pigeonhole you. There is no question about it. You need to find ways to show other sides of your personality – if you have other sides to your personality, or if there are sides you want to show. I’ve lost count of the times people have come up to me when I’ve done a talk or something and said, ‘We had no idea you had a sense of humour.’ ” There was less room for informality around the duke’s death. He had, nevertheless, taken the precaution a few months before of removing some of the starch from the scripts long prepared for the inevitable. Edwards’ funeral commentary was almost universally praised, although the Spectator columnist Charles Moore spotted a couple of trifling errors. Edwards grins manfully. It was Moore who accused the BBC of having a mission to remove Boris Johnson from office.

“If there is, somebody had better tell me very quickly because I’ve not been told,” he says. “In a way, a tiny fraction of me wishes that maybe [Moore] had sat in the chair of the BBC Board [a job for which he was touted] because he’d have seen what the BBC machine is. It’s a very different machine from the journalistic machine he is used to: people who are very serious about doing a fair job.”

So what of GB News, a new station that has poached broadcasters such as the BBC’s Simon McCoy (“A good signing”) to provide a more opinionated take? He rather doubts that broadcasting legislation will allow it to be as controversial as it perhaps hopes, or whether it will work commercially.

“But I absolutely relish the competition.

And the more we get them saying things like, ‘We want to give people what the BBC is failing to give people, or what ITV is failing to give people, what Channel 4 is failing to give people,’ my answer, in my own assertive way, is, ‘Well, let’s see what you’ve got.’ ” The day we meet is the 20th anniversary of his debut as the anchor of the six o’clock bulletin. His mother retired after 40 years’ teaching at 59, his age now. Edwards understands that decision, but it is not one he will emulate. “She said at the time, ‘My batteries are on empty.’ Well, there are days when my batteries are on empty. But they’re not on empty most days, do you know? So why not carry on?” Andrew Billen

Oti Mabuse’s first name can be translated to mean “she has arrived”. The South African dancer did just that in 2019 when she won Strictly Come Dancing, repeating the feat in 2020.

It came as a shock to the 30-year-old to become the only professional dancer to win two consecutive Strictly series.

When she rewatches the finale results section, “You literally see me looking up in the sky because I’m thinking, ‘I have to clap for the next person,’ ” she says. “Then they said our names. I wish the mics weren’t on because you can hear me screaming, ‘No way!’ I didn’t believe it. I did that ugly cry.”

Initially she and her partner, comedian Bill Bailey, were the bookies’ favourites to be voted off first. “Nobody has faith in us so that means we have nothing to lose,” she told Bailey, who at 56 became the oldest celebrity contestant to win the show.

“You’re not a young lad who’s going to do backflips. Nobody’s expecting anything but for you to do a bad job. So this is where we have the chance to flip the coin,” she told him.

Bailey’s underdog status worked in their favour with a lockdown audience who felt like “voting for Bill was something to fight for”, she says.

Travel restrictions have prevented the eight-time Latin American champion in South Africa from visiting any of her family who live there since the pandemic began. All except her sister, Motsi, whose job as a judge on Strictly has brought with it accusations of favouritism from the Twitterati. “Having your sister on the panel of judges, the pressure is immense. It is so easy for people to go, ‘Well, you only got that because your sister’s on.’ ” Motsi is not the only family member in the industry. Since the age of four she has been dancing under the guidance of her “brutally honest” mother, who founded a dance school in South Africa. And Mabuse is married to the Romanian dancer Marius Iepure.

The apartheid South Africa Mabuse grew up in was not always safe, with frequent racerelated violence, but “dance did give me a lot of escape”, she says. “People think it goes away with Nelson Mandela. It really doesn’t.”

Georgina Roberts The Times Magazine 25

Professor David Olusoga is reviewing a disorientating year from a familiar place: his white-painted study, the one with the guitars hanging from its walls. “I have,” he admits, “a habit of falling in love with a style of guitar playing, buying a new guitar and then running out of time after learning about two things and then doing the whole process again with a new guitar.”

As black lives began to matter more to the television industry and a slave trader’s statue sank into Bristol harbour two miles from his home, television frequently called upon Olusoga’s historical commentaries via Zoom.

It felt right to see into his home. From time to time the 51-year-old Nigerian-born, Gateshead-raised Manchester University history professor will bring his life into his work. A new series of his programme A House Through Time is being filmed in Leeds, where he spent a year at journalism school. Previous series have also featured houses in cities in which he has lived. He has written about the racist attacks on his family as he grew up.

Nothing, however, was as personal as last summer’s keynote Edinburgh TV Festival MacTaggart lecture. In it he excoriated television for racism – one colleague had asked if Olusoga could be less difficult and more like his drug dealer – and revealed it had made him mentally ill. “I felt it was impossible and dishonest to talk about those issues in the abstract, as if they hadn’t affected me. It would have been to pretend that I’m something I’m not. It’s a much more comfortable position to let everyone presume that my time in television was all rosy, that the problems that affect other people I’d somehow been exempted from, but that would have been remarkably dishonest.

“Don’t underestimate this: it was extraordinarily exposing and personal.

I had not told my family that I’d had clinical depression twice because of work. I was embarrassed, and so I had to phone my family members and say, ‘I’m going to give this lecture and talk about something I haven’t told you,’ ” he says.

His allegations were precise. He did not say an underlying depression had been exacerbated by television. He said television had caused it.

“It was an industry that needed to marginalise and infantilise me, an industry in which I couldn’t be myself, an industry in which I was the only person in the room feeling certain things, registering certain warnings, alert to certain issues. And that is really bad for you.”

Was he so ill he was unable to work? “No. I think I did what I suspect the majority of people who have clinical depression did: I took my pills. I made sure that my pills were hidden in my bag and no one could see them and I tried my best to bluff my way through, and was silent about it to the people around me.

I don’t advocate that as the best approach to clinical depression, but it’s what I did.”

He says the lecture met an overwhelmingly sympathetic response, but no one apologised.

It is possible the former colleague with the amiable drug dealer has not worked out who Olusoga was talking about. “But I don’t know anybody of African or black descent among my colleagues who hasn’t at some point been deemed to be difficult.”

His own production company, Uplands Television, has a strong record of employing not just diverse on-screen talent but diverse crews. A recent Uplands documentary shoot with actor David Harewood was the first Olusoga had ever attended where the majority involved were black.

Yet this was also the year, he marvels, of Small Axe and I May Destroy You, two projects authored by black Britons. “The potential gain [to television] of including black stories and black storytellers was more manifest than ever,” he says. Andrew Billen

The A-LIST ACTRESS

Ann-Marie Duff, 50, the star of Shameless and classical actress, played Tracy Daszkiewicz, Wiltshire council’s director of public health and safety at the time of the attack. She is the apparently ordinary woman who determinedly led the battle to protect the county’s citizens from contamination. “All the stars were aligned in terms of people feeling a connection to a drama,” Duff says.

The pandemic, it turned out, had made the retelling of the Salisbury affair more relevant. Fear of infection was abroad in the land, but it felt that fear personalised in the drama. The Salisbury Poisonings also celebrated the spirit of public services the nation was now relying on. “I think we realised we had teetered on a precipice where things could have been much worse for the whole country. We were within a whisper of it happening. Once again it was down to our frontline services, the people who selflessly work very hard for our well-being.”

The miniseries was, Duff says, an example of how public service television can turn facts into “living people we recognise and

care about”. She is immensely proud of the BBC drama department’s year. In the autumn she again appeared as Ma Costa in its His Dark Materials serialisation, which co-stars, as Lord Asriel, her former husband, James McAvoy, whom she met through Shameless back in 2004. They were married for almost ten years and once described their divorce as like waking up “holding hands with a hurricane”. They are now on good terms and share parenting of their son, Brendan.

She has recently finished filming another series of Sex Education for Netflix and signed up to an unnamed Apple TV+ project. Home, however, is the theatre. Unable to proceed with a play planned for the Almeida in London last year, she did watch the live streaming of a two-hander, Hymn, from the venue. She cried like a baby at the end.

“There’s this great quote by Nureyev: ‘People don’t come to watch us dance; they come to watch our fear.’ It’s a brilliantly articulated notion: the idea of the nerves, the passion, ‘Oh God, anything could go wrong at any moment.’ ” Andrew Billen

The TV HISTORIAN

DAVID OLUSOGA

‘My antidepressants were hidden in my bag.

I tried my best to bluff my way through’

ANNE-MARIE DUFF On the day last June when BBC1 began transmitting The Salisbury Poisonings, 39,366 people in the UK had already died from coronavirus.

The three-part docudrama, in contrast, told a two-yearold story of a botched Russian assassination attempt against a defector in a small English town. It claimed only one life. In the age of Covid, who would be interested in such a minor tragedy?

It turned out millions of us would. The Salisbury Poisonings joined a club of just nine 9pm-dramas in the previous decade (excluding special episodes of soaps) to breach the 10-million-viewer barrier within a week of transmission.

26 The Times Magazine

From left: Amarah-Jae St Aubyn wears dress, rotatebirgerchristensen.com; shoes, aeyde.com. Phillip Schofield wears jacket and trousers, chriskerr.com.

Holly Willoughby wears dress, safiyaa.com; jewellery, chopard.com

Suit and shirt, alexandermcqueen.com; shoes, manoloblahnik.com

The TV DEBUTANTE

AMARAH-JAE ST AUBYN

AMARAH-JAE ST AUBYN: HAIR, DIONNE SMITH. HOLLY WILLOUGHBY: STYLING, DANIELLE WHITEMAN; MAKE-UP, PATSY O’NEIL; HAIR, CILEAR PEKSAH. PHILLIP SCHOFIELD: STYLING, DAVID O’BRIEN; GROOMING, SUZIE NARDEN

‘Barack Obama named Lovers Rock as one of his favourite films of the year’ “I feel very blessed that my first screen opportunity has been so well received,” Amarah-Jae St Aubyn, 27, tells me over the phone from her home in London.

She starred as Martha in the 2020 film Lovers Rock, which was directed by Steve McQueen as part of the Small Axe collection for the BBC. “His mind is just incredible,” she says of working with the award-winning director, who is best known for 12 Years a Slave. “It goes at 100 miles an hour.” Barack Obama named Lovers Rock among his favourite films of last year, she adds proudly.

Lovers Rock is an ode to the eponymous form of reggae that influenced many pop acts such as the Police, Culture Club and Sade, but it also speaks to a darker past. The film is set in Ladbroke Grove in west London over a single night at a house party in 1980. St Aubyn explains how these parties were a response to the racist door policies of many clubs.

It is the first time that these stories have been told on screen to a primetime audience, although for this actress they feel “close to home”. “My mum told me about going to these kinds of things,” St Aubyn says of her mother, who moved to England from Jamaica at the age of nine. Her father, meanwhile, was a reggae musician in the Eighties party scene.

She was “surprised” to see him featured on McQueen’s mood board, she says. The actress also enjoyed “switching between Jamaican and cockney [dialects], which I see my dad and my mum do all the time”.

The film was released last year, just a few months after the killing of George Floyd and the global attention around the Black Lives Matter movement. In this context the actress remains wary of labels like “timely” at the risk of reducing black British stories on television to a passing “trend”. “I want people to know this is not just Steve working off the back of last year,” she says. “He has had this film in the works for around 11 years. It’s about time these untold stories were told.” Jade Cuttle 28 The Times Magazine

The BREAKTHROUGH ROLE

THOMAS BRODIE-SANGSTER “I don’t often get to play the cool character,” says Thomas Brodie-Sangster, 31, of his role in The Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix drama that makes chess surprisingly sexy. “I was never the cool kid at school.” Playing the chess prodigy Benny Watts, Brodie-Sangster struts around with a leather trench coat, widebrimmed hat, chin beard and wispy moustache before seducing the flame-haired champion Beth Harmon, played by Anya Taylor-Joy. “He’s both cocky and arrogant, but still charming and likeable,” he tells me.

The only other time Brodie-Sangster has scored a “cool” casting role, the actor recalls, was when he played the confident town deputy Whitey Winn in the western

miniseries Godless. He forgets to mention Jojen Reed in Game of Thrones. Before that it was a string of adorable child acting roles, from the cute drummer boy Sam in Love Actually to the mischievous Simon in Nanny McPhee. He’s just started production on Danny Boyle’s Pistol, playing the role of Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols’ manager.

The unprecedented success of the chess series still catches the actor off-guard. “I knew it was going to be beautiful,” he explains. “But I was blown away by the sets, the costumes, the make-up and the characters.” But the dialogue was “very challenging. Talking in code makes absolutely no sense to me,” he says of lines like, “ ‘Bishop to D3.’ They were some of the hardest lines I’ve ever had to learn.” Still, acting is not just in the words.

“A lot can be said in small movements just from the eyes,” he explains. “Sometimes, it’s the art of being subtle.” Jade Cuttle

The SOFA COUPLE

PHILLIP SCHOFIELD and HOLLY WILLOUGHBY

‘People said, “What you did by coming out saved me.” That took me by surprise’

Few people are likely to have had a stranger pandemic than the children’s TV presenter turned ITV stalwart Phillip Schofield. In February 2020, just a month before Boris Johnson pulled down the nation’s shutters, Schofield sat on the sofa opposite his longtime co-presenter Holly Willoughby and talked about realising he was gay.

It was electrifying television, emotional and tear-stained, and a sign of their longstanding professional and personal friendship that they did it together.

With Schofield looking on, Willoughby read out a statement he had just posted on social media that said how much he had struggled with the truth of his sexuality, something that had caused “many heartbreaking conversations” at the home he shares with Steph, his wife of 27 years and mother of their two grown-up daughters, Molly and Ruby. “You never know what’s going on in someone’s seemingly perfect life, what issues they are struggling with, or the state of their wellbeing – and so you won’t know what has been consuming me for the last few years,” he wrote. “With the strength and support of my wife and my daughters, I have been coming to terms with the fact that I am gay.”

He added, “Yes, I am feeling pain and confusion, but that comes only from the hurt that I am causing to my family.”

On air he then spoke to Willoughby in a clearly emotional state.

“I was getting to the point where I knew I wasn’t honest with myself. I was getting to the point where I didn’t like myself very much

because I wasn’t being honest with myself.”

Social media being what it is there was some sniping, with some people accusing him of “deceit” or saying that they already knew his secret. Fellow ITV celebrities such as Dermot O’Leary, David Walliams, James Corden and Piers Morgan rallied round, as did his family. However, equality campaigners were struck by the positivity of the response, with many observers noting with understanding why Schofield had kept his secret, particularly the hostility gay people were experiencing when Schofield shot to fame as a children’s presenter in the Eighties.

But an event that he expected to dominate the next year was of course overshadowed by something he accepts proved to be “much more important.

“In a way it’s been perhaps a good thing that I have had time to look at the world and think, ‘You know, there are much bigger things going on than what’s going in your head,’ ” he says from the This Morning green room in the bowels of the old BBC Television Centre in west London. “And also, at the same time, to think how lucky I am to have been able to have worked through all of this [and] to have had the therapy that Holly’s given me all the way through. I have been broadcasting a long time, but I never thought I’d actually broadcast through something like this.”

More than 760 hours of TV later, having presented This Morning since 2009 (after co-hosting Dancing on Ice since 2006), the pair are still together, with barely a production hitch from the show’s reduced crew (which was soon granted key-worker status).

Their first day of lockdown saw them doing their own make-up and heading to a dark studio “not quite sure of what we were doing”, he says. Would the cameras that were being installed in their homes be required?

Fortunately not. But given millions of viewers were coming to them (and the show’s three regular doctors) for information and guidance, getting the right tone was key.

“What we wanted was to make sure that we weren’t hysterical, that we didn’t react to one headline in five minutes and then find out the next day that there was no truth in it whatsoever,” says Schofield, 59.

Adds Willoughby, “Having said that, just because we’re in the middle of a pandemic,

I still mess up my lines; we still get ridiculous giggles. Sometimes I think when you’re under pressure and you’re scared, the only way to blow away the cobwebs is to have a laugh.”

The safety net of a phone-in was always available, although so far they haven’t yet had to resort to “plan Z”, in which they start singing. And their professionalism has been rewarded with the show’s best ratings in 19 years: more than 10 million viewers tuned in during the first week of lockdown. In the first three months of this year, This Morning recorded an average audience of 1.3 million, an increase of 26 per cent year on year.

Their key, Schofield says, is that they are “best mates”, with an emotional shorthand that is invaluable during live broadcasting; they also socialise together and their first post-lockdown activity last summer was a joint bike ride. So it’s no surprise that they are scornfully dismissive of the occasional claims of rows and feuds.

“It’s just nonsense,” he says. “Doesn’t make sense,” adds Willoughby, 40.

Such rumours are indicative of the kind of scrutiny the pair are under – not just what they say and do, but also what they are wearing, especially Willoughby who rarely appears before the cameras without having her wardrobe choices or neckline the subject of online comment. What does that feel like?

“I don’t think it is scrutiny,” she says. “If it did feel like scrutiny, that wouldn’t be great.

But I don’t feel like it is.”

Schofield adds, “You can’t do two-and-ahalf hours with people not having an opinion.

I’m glad people have an opinion. There will always be the keyboard warriors, of which none of us take any notice. But if you have a sensible opinion and a sensible idea and you’d like us to do something sensibly, then absolutely we’re all over it.”

What he has observed, though, is the warmth of the response to his self-outing. Is it, I ask, a sign of more open and tolerant times?

“I hope so,” he says. “What I will say in addition to what I have said before… the side-effect of what I did took me by surprise.

Because when you do something like that, there’s an element of selfishness when you are protecting yourself. [But] I suddenly realised, and it was highlighted through lockdown, the number of people who said, ‘You just saved my life. What you did has saved me…’

“It doesn’t have to be a sexuality thing.

A lot of people have said, ‘I have sought help,’ or, ‘I have a gambling problem,’ or, ‘I have a drink problem.’ Whatever the issue, ‘I took strength in what you did and I have spoken to someone.’ I have spent time talking to people and talking them off the ledge. I am not a therapist, but at least I could be a little more insightful about what I did. It’s a good thing to have come out of it all.’ ” Ben Dowell The Times Magazine 29

The TEARJERKER

JAY BLADES

‘My careers teacher told me I’d always be a nobody’ As a youth on a council estate in Hackney in east London, Jay Blades never imagined he’d end up on screen, let alone presenting the runaway lockdown hit The Repair Shop.

“At school my careers teacher said, ‘You’re going to be a nobody, so there’s no point me even having an interview with you,’ ” says the 51-year-old. “I was brought up in the Seventies and there weren’t many people of my colour, from my neck of the woods, on television. So I never knew that I would be someone at the front of the show that everybody’s watching.”

Blades has been taken aback not only by being recognised in the street, but by the six million viewers The Repair Shop pulls in each week. “When you look at what it is on paper you would think, ‘No one would want to watch this; it’s people repairing things.’ ” The show’s concept might seem dull in theory but it has a heartwarming, wholesome charm. In a thatched barn, a team of craftspeople (with 500 years of combined expertise) rebuild guests’ broken heirlooms, which hold enormous sentimental value.

The big reveal – when the jacket, train set or teddy bear have been restored to their former glory – often moves their male owners to tears. Seeing men cry on screen is somewhat rare, but for Blades, “Showing vulnerability for men is really important.

Suicide is the biggest killer of men between the ages of 43 and 49. This is due to men not talking, or believing that they will show themselves as being weak.” Showcasing stories that “pluck at those heartstrings” demonstrates that, “Men can show their emotions and we’re not ashamed to do that,” he says.

Blades has spoken up about having suicidal thoughts following the end of his marriage.

His mental health was partly improved by being in a workshop. “Once you make something, it gives you a virtual pat on the back. Making things just allowed me to feel good every day,” he says.

Crafting might be his forte, but the other focus of the show – family heirlooms – is an alien concept. “I come from the poor side of town. Everything that was worth anything was pawned for shoes, clothing or to pay a bill. My family heirloom handed over to my children is just how to act and treat

people.” What do his three children make of Dad being on television? “My 14-year-old daughter gets embarrassed by it, because her friends’ mums love the show and make a big deal when she’s coming round.”

Georgina Roberts

The COMEDIAN

MAE MARTIN

‘I am demystifying addiction. All of us do stuff that’s bad for us’ One of Feel Good’s closing scenes finds its lead character, Mae, breaking two years of abstinence from drugs. After stealing cocaine from her colleague, she has convinced a fellow recovering addict from Narcotics Anonymous to snort it with her in a bathroom cubicle.

Comedian Mae Martin’s TV debut, Feel Good is a comedy drama about addiction, both to drugs and to toxic romantic relationships.

“It was just trying to demystify addiction,” says Martin, 34, of the show she jointly created and stars in. “People hear about 12-step programmes and they think it’s so far from their life. But actually, all of us have the experience of doing something compulsively that’s bad for us.”

Toronto-born Martin based the character of Mae on herself. “There’s a lot of truth in there. She’s where I was at about ten years ago,” she says. The fictionalised version of Martin is a stand-up comic navigating recovery from cocaine addiction, gender identity (Martin now identifies as non-binary) and a strained bond with her mother (played

by Friends’ Lisa Kudrow). Mae falls in love with George, a formerly heterosexual teacher who struggles to come out to her friends and family about their relationship.

George’s battle to accept her sexuality is plucked from Martin’s own experiences.

“I’ve dated lots of people who had previously been heterosexual,” she says. “We see a lot of stories about homophobia where people are bullied. But I think it’s much more interesting to look at the internalised homophobia that we carry.

“I don’t want people to think it’s not going to be accessible to them because it’s got a queer relationship at its centre,” she says. “It’s super-relatable – the experience of being with someone with whom you want it to work, but you bring out the worst in each other.”

After airing on Netflix (as well as Channel 4), Feel Good’s sex scenes reached audiences where gay marriage is still illegal. Even in the UK they raised eyebrows. “Directors we were interviewing would be like, ‘God, there is so much sex,’ ” she says. “But it’s relatively tame.

That’s confirmation that we’re doing the right thing – if it feels like stuff that people haven’t seen before.” Georgina Roberts The Times Magazine 31

The ZOOM STAR

DAVID TENNANT

STYLING ASSISTANT: LUCY TRIEVNOR. BAFTA HAIR PARTNER: PAUL EDMONDS. MAKE-UP: JULIA WREN AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING SKINCEUTICALS AND COSMETICS A LA CARTE

‘Performing on Zoom is like acting into an open letterbox. But it beats home schooling’ Talking to David Tennant on Zoom is a daunting experience. There, in the background, is the famous kitchen. And there – pondering, musing and occasionally wincing at the questions – is that highly mobile face. Anyone who watched the BBC sitcom Staged during lockdown will know the 50-year-old Scottish actor’s partnership with Michael Sheen turned the mundane video-conferencing platform into an arena for the most refined thespian talents. In the absence of Sheen, I feel I ought to be offering acerbic luvvie badinage, possibly in Welsh.

“I know, Zoom is a very strange acting environment,” he says, peering beakily through the screen. “At its worst it feels like you’re trying to act through an open letterbox. But supported by some great writing, I think we hopefully did something new with it.”

32 The Times Magazine

The show was written by Simon Evans in the very early days of the first lockdown last year, positing Tennant and Sheen as actors attempting to rehearse Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist masterpiece Six Characters in Search of an Author via video.

Of course, the pair are playing versions of themselves. Sheen is wonderfully astringent and arrogant. However, Tennant faced the greater challenge: a needy, wheedling grump.

“I hope I’m not as pathetic as in Staged,” he says. “I’m in trouble if I am. But that was the trick for me: find a few insecurities and then grotesquely magnify them. I must stress that: they were grotesquely magnified.”

The day we speak it’s a year exactly since Tennant and his wife, Georgia (an actress, TV producer and the daughter of Eighties Dr Who star Peter Davison and the actress

Sandra Dickinson), were offered the idea.

“We had a few doubts it was possible: a married couple locked down in a house with five children (Ty, 19, Olive, 10, Wilfred, 8, Doris, 5, and Birdie, 1), being asked to learn lines, act, direct each other and work the cameras – not easy. However, when the choice is home schooling or being able at least to claim you are working… anything is possible.

Post-pandemic, my respect for teachers knows no bounds.”

The show caught the mood of frustrated confinement very early. Now of course everyone wants to know if the story will continue. Tennant is cagey. “I don’t actually know Michael Sheen that well. What if we don’t get on in real life?”

His depiction of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen in ITV’s Des won huge acclaim last autumn. Tennant captured the chilling banality of former policeman Nilsen, who befriended young men, took them to his flat in north London and then murdered and dismembered them.

Earlier this year, BBC2’s The Investigation broke new ground by telling the story of the murder of Swedish journalist Kim Wall on board a homemade submarine without either naming or showing the man responsible.

“I can see how that is a very brave stance to take. And I agree we should always respect the victims. But at the same time I think we are fascinated by the whole question of whether evil is down to nurture or arrives fully formed. Could someone like Nilsen at any stage have been helped?”

Tennant lives in west London with his wife, children and a labradoodle called Myrtle.

Just like everyone else during lockdowns they sought solace in TV. “If they made it, we watched it. I May Destroy You – brilliant.

The Queen’s Gambit ditto. And we had a total binge of Line of Duty.”

Tennant also managed to finish an eightpart BBC adaptation of the Jules Verne classic Around the World in 80 Days due to reach our screens before Christmas, and he still hopes to revive his postponed theatre production of CP Taylor’s Holocaust play Good. The son of a Scottish presbyterian minister, Tennant says there has always been an element of guilt driving his work ethic. No two ways about it: he has thrived during the past year. In purely acting terms he has had a “good pandemic”.

“If I have one wish for the immediate future it’s that we get the British stage back up and running,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here without the theatre. I don’t think you can nurture talent over Zoom.” Michael O’Dell n

The Virgin Media British Academy Television Awards will be shown tomorrow night on BBC1

TRUMP’S COVID CATASTROPHE WHAT REALLY HAPPENED INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE Award-winning American writer Lawrence Wright talks to Oval Office insiders to reveal a barely credible level of incompetence (sound familiar?)

Donald Trump, July 2020.

Opposite: Melania Trump in December, after the Trumps had recovered from Covid

Story continues on page 42

FAST FISH!

SIX EASY RECIPES

GETTY IMAGES

(JUST ADD A CORNISH SEA VIEW)

Chef Emily Scott with her family. Top: Perranporth, Cornwall

T OU P LL EE PU D K AN

Eat!

1

E

mily Scott grew up in Sussex but it was on holidays in Provence with her French grandfather that she learnt her love of food. When not in France, she’d spend her summers in Cornwall and it was to the north coast that she moved with her husband, Mark, more than 20 years ago.

Her first restaurant was a small 15th-century fisherman’s cottage on the harbour in Port Isaac, where she produced food without “fuss or faff” while her children, Oscar, Finn and Evie, spent their days messing around on boats or fishing for shrimps and crabs in rock pools.

In 2013 she sold up to Nathan Outlaw and opened the St Tudy Inn a few miles inland, but the lure of the sea has proved too much and now she has opened Emily Scott Food in Watergate Bay, to once again showcase the best that the Cornish waters have to offer.

“Cornwall is so inspiring,” she says. “The rugged north coast, where the weather changes in front of you, contrasts with the softness of the south coast, with its sailing boats, palm trees and flowers. It’s exciting in all seasons.”

Despite the successful restaurant career, 45-year-old Scott says she’s a cook rather than a chef. “I like to use few ingredients and let them shine. Less really is more, on my plate.

Cooking is not always about being the best. It is about having a go, learning something new and being part of something.” Tony Turnbull 38 The Times Magazine

PHOTOGRAPHS Kim Lightbody

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1. PORT ISAAC MACKEREL WITH A RAW SALAD OF COURGETTES, CHILLI, NASTURTIUM FLOWERS AND ROCKET Serves 4 This recipe can also be cooked on the barbecue or baked in the oven for 10 minutes at 180C/Gas 4.

• 1 courgette, cut into ribbons • 1 fresh red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped • Zest and juice of 1 lemon, plus 1 lemon thinly sliced • Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper • 4 whole mackerel, gutted, cleaned and scaled • A few rosemary sprigs • Olive oil, for drizzling • 100g rocket leaves • 6 nasturtium flowers 1 Preheat the grill to high. Place the ribbons of courgette into a bowl, add the chopped chilli and lemon zest, season with sea salt and set aside.

2 Season the cavity of each fish and fill with rosemary sprigs and lemon slices. Rub the skin with a little oil, salt and pepper. Grill for about 6 minutes on each side, turning

occasionally, until the skin is crisp and charred and the flesh is opaque.

3 Add the rocket leaves to the courgette salad, drizzle with olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice. Gently tear the nasturtiums through the salad and toss to combine.

4 Place the mackerel on a plate with the courgette salad.

2. ENGLISH TIGER PRAWNS, CHILLI AND FLAT-LEAF PARSLEY Serves 6 A wonderfully simple dish – try to source sustainable English prawns. Eat with abandon, preferably with a view of the sea.

• 100ml good-quality olive oil • 16 raw English tiger prawns, in their shells • 1 tsp chilli flakes • 1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped • Juice of 1 lemon, plus extra lemon wedges to serve • Handful of flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped • Sea salt • Mayonnaise, to serve 1 Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan until

4

it starts to sizzle. Add the prawns and chilli flakes and cook, shaking the pan from time to time, letting the prawns turn from their raw blue colour to golden pink. Turn the prawns over and add the fresh chilli, lemon and parsley. Season with sea salt.

2 Serve with mayonnaise and lemon wedges.

3. MONKFISH, CHORIZO, SUN-BLUSH TOMATOES ON ROSEMARY SKEWERS Serves 8 Monkfish is known as the poor man’s lobster.

Here the combination of monkfish, chorizo and sun-blush tomatoes is delicious. Threading them onto rosemary skewers adds a depth of flavour to the fish.

• 1 x 200g jar sun-blush tomatoes, drained, oil reserved • 1 medium chorizo, about 225g, cut into 1cm rounds • 650g monkfish fillet, cut into chunks • 12 long rosemary sprigs, plus extra leaves for sprinkling • 100ml olive oil • Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper To serve • A handful of rocket leaves

• Hot buttered new potatoes • Mixed leaf salad 1 Preheat a barbecue or grill to high.

2 Place the sun-blush tomatoes in a large bowl and add the sliced chorizo. Using a skewer, pierce a hole through each piece of monkish, then toss in the bowl with the tomatoes and chorizo. Thread alternately onto rosemary skewers, allowing 3 pieces of each ingredient per skewer.

3 Barbecue or grill the monkfish skewers on all sides, keeping them moving, for a total of 6 minutes, or until browned at the edges.

Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, pepper and rosemary leaves.

4 Lay the grilled monkfish skewers on rocket leaves and serve with hot buttered Cornish new potatoes and a leaf salad.

4. HAND-DIVED CORNISH SCALLOPS, PAN-FRIED WITH THYME, GARLIC AND BUTTER Serves 4

Eat! FAST FISH

3

• 4 tsp olive oil • 12 scallops on the half shell (I remove the roes but, if you prefer, you can leave them on) • 30g unsalted butter • 1 garlic clove, finely sliced • 4 tsp picked thyme leaves • A squeeze of lemon juice 1 Heat a medium frying pan over a high heat.

Add the oil, then add the scallops and cook for 30 seconds on each side. Add the butter, garlic and most of the thyme and cook for a further 1 minute. Add a squeeze of lemon juice and put the scallops back in their shells (if you have them).

2 Spoon the pan sauce over the scallops and garnish with the remaining thyme leaves.

Emily with Mark and Evie

I love nothing more than simply pan-frying scallops with herbs and butter and serving them back in their shells. They can be a starter or a heartier main course with fries.

Enjoy with a bottle of chilled grüner veltliner.

The Times Magazine 39

Eat! FAST FISH

5

5. PORT ISAAC CRAB, TOAST AND MAYO Serves 4 I have spent much time watching the fishermen fishing off the shores of Port Isaac.

Crab is at its best from April to October.

• 1 garlic clove, crushed • 2-3 tbsp good olive oil • 4 slices of sourdough bread • Grated zest of 1 lemon, then cut in half for squeezing • 2 tbsp good-quality mayonnaise • 250g fresh white crab meat • 10g basil leaves, torn • Cornish sea salt and freshly ground black pepper • Rocket, to serve 1 Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4.

2 Mix the garlic with the olive oil and brush the surface of the bread with the mixture. Place on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for a few minutes until lightly golden and crisp.

3 Combine the lemon zest, mayonnaise and crab meat. Stir through the torn basil leaves and season well. Spoon the crab mixture over

40 The Times Magazine

6

each slice of bread and serve immediately with rocket leaves and a squeeze of lemon.

6. JOHN DORY SIMPLY ROASTED WITH LEMON AND THYME Serves 2 John Dory is characterful and a joy to cook with, but this recipe also works well with bass or bream. Eat with a baby spinach and lemon zest salad with a wholegrain mustard dressing.

• 2 medium or 4 small John Dory fillets • Good olive oil, for drizzling • 2 lemons (1 per person), sliced into circles • Fresh thyme leaves • Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper 1 Preheat the oven to 220C/Gas 8.

2 Wash and dry the fish, then place in a roasting tin. Season each fillet on both sides with salt and pepper and drizzle generously with olive oil. Tuck the lemon slices and thyme leaves between the fish.

3 Roast in the oven for 10-12 minutes. Remove from the oven and spoon over the lemonscented olive oil and cooking juices. n

Emily’s top Cornish restaurants • The Fish Kitchen A place that I love and sold to Nathan Outlaw in 2013, so it is in very good hands. Michelin starred. Delicious small plates of fish and seafood right beside Port Isaac’s harbour (outlaws.co.uk).

• Prawn on the Lawn A favourite restaurant of mine deep in the heart of Padstow. A wonderful atmosphere with excellent food.

Booking is a must (prawnonthelawn.com).

• Fitzroy One of the best restaurants in Fowey. A lobster and crab shack selling authentically good food and natural wine.

Fun and stylish (fitzroycornwall.com).

• Bin Two A great little Padstow wine shop and bar where you’ll find spruced-up diners rubbing shoulders with families fresh from the beach (bintwo.com).

Extracted from Sea & Shore: Recipes and Stories from a Kitchen in Cornwall by Emily Scott, published by Hardie Grant on June 10 (£26)

Trump’s Covid catastrophe Continued from page 35

25/01/20 ‘IS THIS GOING TO BE AS BAD OR WORSE THAN SARS?’ TRUMP ASKED

OPENING SPREAD: JIM WATSON/GETTY IMAGES, DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES. THIS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES

I

t was January 25, 2020, and President Trump was getting his daily intelligence briefing. Far down the list of threats was a mysterious new virus in China. The briefer didn’t seem to take it seriously.

Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, did. “This will be the biggest national security threat you will face in your presidency,” he warned.

“Is this going to be as bad or worse than Sars in 2003?” Trump asked.

The briefer responded that it wasn’t clear yet. Matthew Pottinger, deputy national security adviser, who was sitting on a couch, jumped to his feet. He had seen enough highlevel arguments in the Oval Office to know that Trump relished clashes. “Mr President, I actually covered that,” he said, recounting his experience as a journalist covering Sars and what he was learning now from his sources – most shockingly, that more than half of the spread of the disease was by asymptomatic carriers. Every day thousands of people were travelling from China to the US – half a million in January alone.

“Should we shut down travel?” the president asked.

“Yes,” Pottinger said unequivocally. The economic advisers were horrified. Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser, couldn’t square the apocalyptic forecasts with the buoyant stock market.

“Is all the money dumb?” he wondered.

“Everyone’s asleep at the switch? I just have a hard time believing that.”

Pottinger had brought along Peter Navarro, an abrasive economic adviser. Navarro was thought by many to be a crackpot, but known to be one of Trump’s favourites because of his portrayals of China as an existential threat to American dominance. Navarro warned, “We have got to seal the borders now. This is a black swan event and you’re rolling the dice with your gradualist approach.”

Nothing changed in that meeting except that Navarro was so strident that Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff, barred him from future sessions.

Then a piece of data surfaced that shifted the argument. A Chicago woman had returned from China. Within a week, she was hospitalised. On January 30, her husband, who had not been in China, also tested positive. Human-to-human transmission was happening in America. Trump received the news soberly. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The curtain had risen on election season. A travel ban would reopen wounds with China. But the president made the decision and announced it the next

42 The Times Magazine

day. Trump would later repeatedly say that he made the decision alone, “against the advice of almost everybody”.

The threat in February still appeared small.

“It’s going to disappear,” Trump promised.

“One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

On March 6, on his way to play golf at Mar-a-Lago, the president stopped off at CDC headquarters (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in Atlanta. The president claimed to feel right at home because of his innate understanding of medicine. “My uncle was a great person,” he said. “He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great supergenius. Dr John Trump. [John Trump was an electrical engineer who taught at MIT from 1936 to 1973. He won the National Medal of Science in 1983.]

“I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised... Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’

Maybe I have a natural ability.”

At Trump’s side, gazing at him, was Robert

‘We have got to seal the borders now,’ argued one adviser in January. ‘This is a black swan event and you’re rolling the dice’ Redfield. The president had appointed him CDC director, possibly at the suggestion of Redfield’s friend, W Shepherd Smith Jr. An evangelical activist, Smith had started Americans for a Sound Aids/HIV Policy, which advocated for sexual abstinence and mandatory Aids testing and opposed condoms as a strategy for preventing the disease.

Redfield, a devout Catholic, wrote the foreword for Smith’s book, Christians in the Age of Aids, which stated that Aids was “God’s judgment” against homosexuals.

Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, boasted that four million tests would be available by the end of the next week, which was far from true. Trump was in a buoyant frame of mind, jousting with reporters. “As of the time I left the plane,” the president said, “we had 240 cases. That’s at least what was on a very fine network known as Fox News.” He turned to the reporter from that network. “And how was the show last night?” he asked, referring to his appearance in Pennsylvania. “Did it get good ratings?”

One reporter, observing that the lack of testing made it impossible to know how many cases there actually were, asked Redfield, “Don’t you think it’s likely that there are a lot more people out there who are going to come and actually be sick?”

“In this great country of ours, we have 240 cases,” the president reiterated, growing impatient. “Most of those people are going to be fine. A vast majority are going to be fine.

We’ve had 11 deaths, and they’ve been largely old people who are – who were susceptible to what’s happening.”

There was some confusion about how many tests would actually be available.

“Anybody that wants a test can get a test.

That’s what the bottom line is,” the president insisted, adding, “And the tests are beautiful.”

The president flew on to Mar-a-Lago, where there was a birthday party for Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and a visit from the Brazilian president.

Several guests from the weekend later tested positive, including the Brazilian president. At a fundraiser on the Sunday, Trump remarked that he had shaken hands with a guest whose hands were annoyingly clammy. “You hear any bad things about the health of our president, there’s the guy,” Trump said.

“Find out who the hell that guy was.”

The vice-president, Mike Pence, took over the chair of the White House Covid task force.

For days, they went round and round about what to do with the cruise ships without making any decisions. Meetings were often full of acrimony. “I can’t even begin to describe all these insane factions in the White House,” Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to Pence, said.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser, was considered too “outspoken and blunt” with the media, which led Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Navarro to describe him as “out of control”.

Troye summed up the administration’s prevailing view of Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response co-ordinator, crisply: “They hate her.” At task force briefings, Birx typically presented a slide deck and Troye noticed White House staff rolling their eyes. She overheard Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, remark, “How long is she going to instil fear in America?”

However, on March 11, it was time to confront the president. The task force crowded into the Oval Office, where they were joined

by Kushner, Ivanka Trump, secretary of state Mike Pompeo and a dozen others.

The discussion turned into a passionate

Judge Amy Coney Barrett is announced as Supreme Court nominee at the White House, later branded a superspreader event.

Right: Melania Trump and, below, a hugging Chris Christie, who would spend seven days in an ICU battling Covid, at the event

argument. The immediate question was whether to close off all travel from Europe, but it led to a showdown over saving lives or protecting the economy. “It’s the biggest decision of your presidency,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, said.

Pottinger believed the president felt a need to witness such verbal brawls. There were two modes to Trump’s decision-making process, Pottinger observed. When he was taking in new information, the president was receptive.

He didn’t try to be the smartest guy in the room. Once he made a decision, though, God help you in trying to change his mind.

After an hour, the president had another obligation and he asked Pence to keep the discussion going. The secretary of the treasury, Steven Mnuchin, argued that if the elderly were at high risk, why not sequester them and other vulnerable people, fence them off from their grandkids? “It’s 25 per cent of the population!” O’Brien observed. “You’re not going to be able to stick them all in hotels and think that’s the end of it.”

“If we just let this thing ride, there could be 2 million dead,” Birx said, “but if we take action, we can keep the death toll at 150,00 to 250,000.”

Mnuchin demanded data. “This is going to bankrupt everyone,” he said. “Boeing won’t sell a single jet.”

“You keep asking me for my data,” Birx said sharply. “What data do you have? Does it take into account hundreds of thousands of dead Americans?”

On March 15, members of the coronavirus task force presented recommendations on how to shut down the country. The goal was to break the transmission of the virus for 15 days.

Trump’s impatience flared. At a press briefing, he said of the virus, “It’s something we have tremendous control over.” Dr Fauci corrected him, observing that the worst days lay ahead.

Trump had a conference call with governors. “We’re backing you 100 per cent...

We’re backing you in terms of equipment and getting what you need. Also, though, respirators, ventilators, all the equipment – try getting it yourselves. We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves… Much more direct.”

Most governors had assumed that, just as in the event of a natural disaster – a hurricane or a forest fire – the federal government would rush to help. Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington state, was flabbergasted. He told the president, “That would be equivalent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on December 8, 1941, saying, ‘Good luck, Connecticut, you go build the battleships.’ ”

Trump responded, “Well, we’re just the back-up.”

“Mr President, I don’t want you to be the back-up quarterback here,” Inslee said. “We need you to be Tom Brady.

We need leadership. We need to bring all the forces of government to bear on this existential crisis.”

Trump later defended his stance. “The federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping,” he said. “You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.”

Medical workers were making their own protective gear out of office supplies and materials from craft stores. Garbage bags became surgical gowns. Doctors washed their masks in bleach in order to reuse them.

California governor Gavin Newsom sought assistance from Kushner, who had taken on the task of managing supply-chain issues.

Kushner reportedly told the governor to call the president and personally ask for swabs, which Newsom did and praised the president after being promised a shipment.

“You’ve suggested that some of these governors are not doing everything they need to do,” a reporter asked Trump. “What more, in this time of a national emergency, should these governors be doing?”

15/03/20 ‘IT’S SOMETHING WE HAVE TREMENDOUS CONTROL OVER’ The Times Magazine 43

23/04/20 ‘SUPPOSING WE HIT THE BODY WITH A VERY POWERFUL LIGHT…’ “Simple,” said Trump. “I want them to be appreciative.”

Kushner only added to the chaos. It was characteristic of the Trump administration to go around the very government it controlled.

He set up an “impact team” composed of volunteers, mostly from the financial sector.

They were eager, patriotic and ready to go, but they had little experience. One was Max Kennedy Jr, the 26-year-old grandson of Robert F Kennedy, the former presidential candidate. He and the others expected to help out the professionals, but they were surprised to learn that wasn’t their job. “We were the team,” Kennedy said. “We were the entire frontline team for the federal government.”

They were given a conference room, but no phones or computers. Using their personal laptops and email accounts, they were told to call contacts from a spreadsheet called “VIP Update”, which listed many of the president’s friends, including Fox News stars and a former contestant on The Apprentice, seeking tips about where to purchase PPE. “We would call factories and say, ‘We think the federal government can send you a cheque in 60 days,’ and they would say, ‘There’s someone with a briefcase of cash and they’re offering to pay me right now,’ ” Kennedy recalled. “And we would run around looking for someone who could tell us what payment terms the government was allowed to offer, and no one ever told us.” He said, “Our team did not directly purchase a single mask.”

“What if there’s already a cheap and widely available medication that’s on the market to treat the virus?” Laura Ingraham said on her March 16 show on Fox News. She introduced Gregory Rigano, whom she identified as the co-author of a study showing the benefits of two drugs used to treat malaria. “Gregory, how big a game-changer could chloroquine and its sister drug hydrochloroquine [sic] be if, say, we began using it fairly promptly to treat Americans who are highly at risk?”

Rigano was a 34-year-old lawyer. He had recently started several blockchain funds that aimed to “cheat death” and “end Alzheimer’s”.

What brought him to Ingraham’s attention was a document he self-published on Google Docs with James Todaro, a medical school graduate and crypto-currency investor.

Ingraham quoted from the document, which claimed that the drugs were “effective in treating Covid-19” and could be used as a prophylactic to prevent contracting the disease. Apparently, Rigano and Todaro got the inspiration from a Twitter conversation with Adrian Bye, who describes himself as a

philosopher living in the Wudang Mountains in China, where he tweets white supremacist musings. “My hobby is researching Jews,” he has said. He also prophesied that coronavirus would “destroy feminism”.

Three days later, at a press conference, President Trump said he had ordered the FDA to fast-track approval of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. “It’s been around for a long time, so we know that if it – if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody.” It was Trump’s first mention of the drugs, which would become his obsession.

During the next 2 weeks, Fox promoted hydroxychloroquine nearly 300 times.

At a task force briefing at the White House on March 20, Fauci was asked if he thought hydroxychloroquine was a promising

Four days after Trump’s endorsement of it, a man in Arizona died after eating a form of chloroquine used to clean fish tanks treatment. “The answer is no,” he said. The president stepped towards the mic. “I’m a big fan and we’ll see what happens,” he said. “I feel good about it... Just a feeling, you know.”

Four days later, a man in Arizona died after eating a form of chloroquine used to clean fish tanks. Under immense pressure, the FDA approved the emergency use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, only to withdraw it three months later.

Back in early March, as Pottinger was driving to the White House, he was on the phone with a source in China, a doctor. Taking notes while navigating the city traffic, Pottinger was excited by all the new information about how the virus was being contained in China.

“It’s great to carry around your own hand sanitiser,” the doctor explained, “but masks are going to win the day.” Still on the phone when he parked his car, Pottinger left it in neutral and neglected to apply the handbrake.

As he rushed towards his office, the Audi took a journey of its own, rolling backwards, narrowly missing a collision with the vicepresident’s limo.

No one in the White House wore a mask until Pottinger donned one. Entering the West Wing, he felt as if he were wearing a clown nose. People gawked. The president asked if he was ill. Pottinger replied, “I don’t want

to be a footnote in history – the guy who knocked off a president with Covid.”

Masks had become a political litmus test, with many conservatives condemning mask mandates as infringements on liberty and wearing one in Trump’s White House seemed borderline treasonous, as well as a risky career move. Pottinger was shocked to learn that the White House had no ready supply.

On April 3, the CDC finally concluded masks were vital. Redfield admitted that the sudden reversal by the CDC was awkward. The president made things worse when he announced, “This is voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.” Vice-president Pence congratulated Pottinger for his foresight. That afternoon, Pottinger was notified by Pence’s chief of staff that at the next task force meeting “no masks will be worn”. That was a signal.

Pottinger stopped attending the task force.

Trump was a notorious germophobe. He once told talk show host Howard Stern that he had a hand-washing obsession and later admitted he avoided his son, Barron, when he had a cold. By refusing to wear a mask, the president was making a powerful statement.

He demanded a reporter take off a mask, then mocked him for being “politically correct” when he refused. He even toured a maskmaking factory in Arizona without a mask.

The image of the maskless president animated his voter base. Maskless, he appeared defiant, masculine, invulnerable, whereas to wear a mask would be weak; it might hurt his chances for re-election.

“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light… Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way,” he mused on April 23. “Sounds interesting, right?” The awkward look on Birx’s face as the president bumbled forth became a social media meme.

“And then I see the disinfectant... [Birx’s head recoiled]... where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside, or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check.”

Birx took a deep breath. And yet, when Trump later turned to her and asked, “Have you ever heard of that, the heat and light, relative to this virus, safe to say as a cure?” she helpfully responded, “Not as a treatment.

I mean, certainly fever is a good thing. When you have a fever, it helps your body respond.”

Such remarks made some public health workers cringe. They didn’t know what she was saying in private.

The Times Magazine 45

27/10/20 ‘THE FAKE NEWS, RIGHT? ALL THEY TALK ABOUT IS COVID, COVID, COVID’ When Birx and Atlas [Dr Scott Atlas, Trump’s special adviser on the coronavirus] later had it out in the Oval Office, in front of the president, Birx accused him of costing American lives with his unfounded theories.

Atlas cursed her. Birx, who spent 28 years in the army, gave it right back. The president watched as they shouted at each other. “The president just let them go at it,” one of Birx’s colleagues said. “It’s all reality TV to him.”

REUTERS

From Trump’s perspective, Fauci was dangerous because he didn’t have enough to lose and could not be relied upon to bend to his will, as had nearly everyone who remained in his administration.

Trump said that Fauci was “a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes”. He accused Fauci of misleading the country about hydroxychloroquine. “He’s got this high approval rating, so why don’t I have a high approval rating, and the administration, with respect to the virus?” Trump wondered aloud.

When Fauci and I first spoke in July, I pointed to a study that stated that America was the best prepared nation for a pandemic.

So what happened? “It’s really, in many respects, befuddling,” he responded, with a despairing laugh. “How we as a nation, with all our resources, continue to fare so poorly?

We never got back to baseline” – the point where the contagion had been reduced so that contact tracing could minimise the spread.

Fauci said he had never seen such distrust and anger in the country. “Political divisiveness doesn’t lend itself to having a co-ordinated collaborative response against a common enemy. There is also this pushback against anything authoritative. And scientists are perceived as being authority, so that’s the reason I believe we have an anti-science trend, which leads to an anti-vaccine trend.”

I had heard that Dr Fauci’s home was under guard. I asked if he had been threatened. “Oh, my goodness,” he said.

“Harassing my wife and my children. It’s this dark web group of people who are ultra-ultraultra far-right crazies. They somehow got the phone numbers of my children. They’ve tracked them at work. They’ve harassed them with texts, some threatening, some obscene.

We have gotten multiple death threats.”

One day, he was opening a letter and a puff of white powder dusted his face. It could have been anthrax or ricin. People in hazmat suits came to his office and sprayed him down. It was a hoax, but it could have been a murder.

September 26 was a pleasant autumn day.

Guests were ushered to the Rose Garden, where there were 200 assigned seats, for the

Trump removes his mask after Covid treatment, October 5

The virus was circulating in the Rose Garden crowd. But the White House ignored a request to do contact tracing announcement that Amy Coney Barrett would be the new Supreme Court nominee.

The virus was circulating among the crowd, few wearing masks. Perhaps the president was already infected. The White House ignored the CDC’s request to do contact tracing, saying that it would be done internally, but statements by attendees said they were not contacted. The full extent of the contagion from the Rose Garden will never be known.

Dr Fauci labelled it a superspreader event.

The presidential debate was three days later in Cleveland. Trump’s family and entourage rejected the masks they were offered and which the organisers required.

Later, when pressed on the subject of whether he had tested negative that day, Trump responded, “Possibly I did, possibly I didn’t.”

While Trump slept on the flight back to Washington, his political adviser, Hope Hicks, isolated herself. She tested positive the next morning. The president did not immediately get tested. Instead, he attended a fundraiser in New Jersey, where he did not wear a mask. No one told the 400 staffers in the White House that Hope Hicks had tested positive; that news was broken by a reporter. The president and the first lady took a test.

Trump was coughing. At 1am, he tweeted, “Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!” Covid struck him hard – hard enough for him to admit, “I could be one of the diers.” He had lost a friend to the disease, Stanley Chera, whom Trump knew in the real estate world.

“He went to the hospital. He calls me up,” Trump recounted. “He goes, ‘I tested positive.’

I said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ He said, ‘I’m going to the hospital. I’ll call you tomorrow.’ He didn’t call.”

When Trump finally resumed his huge rallies, defying medical advice and leaving a trail of infections behind him, his fury was volcanic.

“Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid! A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it,” he complained at a rally in North Carolina. He added, “We’re rounding the turn, we’re doing great. Our numbers are incredible.” That day nearly 80,000 new cases were reported, overshadowing the highest levels of the summer.

“You notice the fake news, now, right? All they talk about is Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,” he said at a rally in Omaha on October 27. “I’m here, right? I had it.”

In the end Covid didn’t kill Donald Trump – but it would defeat him.

By coincidence, my pandemic novel, The End of October, was published in the first wave of the virus and although it received good reviews, I heard whispers that I was exploiting a catastrophe. The main reaction, however, was that I was clairvoyant, that I knew before anyone else that a pandemic awaited us, and that it would unfold in ways I had eerily foreseen. I don’t have those powers. The reason the novel parallels reality is that I talked to the experts. They all knew what was going to happen. The knowledge of how a virus would disrupt society was always there.

If a novelist knew, my critics persisted, why didn’t the government know? The president kept saying, “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion…

There’s never been anything like this in history,” and, “Came out of nowhere.”

But of course lots of people knew. The administration simply didn’t trust its own public health officials. The administration decided to control the narrative, play down the threat – this was something I did predict.

I was asked what I got wrong in the novel.

I underestimated the willingness of people to isolate and do this for months. Neither did I expect the food chain to be so resilient or the banks to be able to keep the cash owing.

But my fictional virus is deadlier. More like the one that may come one day. n The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright is published by Allen Lane on June 8 (£20) At the time of going to press, the United States had recorded 33,218,607 confirmed Covid cases and 593,293 deaths

The Times Magazine 47

Porn-obsessed and predatory?

Joe Langley, 19, makes TikTok videos about consent. Wilfred Bates, 17, opposite, has written about boys’ experiences, in support of Everyone’s Invited

Or scared and confused?

THE TROUBLE WITH BEING A TEENAGE BOY TODAY

After the shocking revelations of rape culture in schools on the Everyone’s Invited website, teenage boys are being cast as the villains. Could the reality be more complicated in a hyper-sexualised culture – are they the victims too?

Alice Thomson reports PORTRAITS Tom Jackson

PREVIOUS SPREAD: STYLING, GEORGINA ROBERTS. WILFRED WEARS JUMPER, CHAMPION, AND JEANS, LEVI’S (BOTH URBANOUTFITTERS.COM), TRAINERS, NIKE (SCHUH.CO.UK). THIS PAGE: T-SHIRT, ALLSAINTS.COM, TROUSERS, DUBBLEWARE (URBANOUTFITTERS.COM), TRAINERS, REEBOK (SCHUH.CO.UK)

‘C

an anyone tell me what we need for sex?” The boys in Year 8 don’t hold back. “Protection, Miss?”

“Two people?” “A private bedroom?” “A male and a female?”

“Two males?” “Genitals?” “Sperm?”

“There’s one word missing,” says the volunteer. “Consent. That’s the important word we are talking about today. It’s the difference between a crime and innocence.”

Sitting in on a class of 12-year-olds at St Benedict’s School in Ealing, west London, who are learning about sexual consent with the Schools Consent Project, it’s clear the boys find it complicated. It’s easy to explain how to say no to an ice cream and they all know that consent means permission or “where you both agree”. But when the volunteer, a trainee barrister, asks them what they would do if a girl were drunk and unconscious at a party and a boy touched her between her legs, one immediately says it’s fine if it’s her boyfriend.

When the volunteer asks what capacity means, they think it’s a scientific term, but when she explains capability they are all horrified and say they would come to the girl’s defence or “slap him”. It’s clear that the boys want to get it right. Their questions are thoughtful and considerate. They worry.

“I’d make sure she got home OK.” We need to talk about boys. They stand accused of violating girls by looking up their skirts on the stairs at school, demanding nudes, coercing other pupils into having sex, objectifying them and abusing them.

In the past few weeks, boys have become the villains, girls the victims. They are seen as out of control and callous, perverted and porn-obsessed.

The revelations around the Everyone’s Invited testimonies are terrifying for girls, revealing details of a rape culture that appears to have been condoned for years, but many boys have also been shocked. Some have no idea how to act now to reassure girls or regain their trust; others are relieved that toxic masculinity has been called out.

It’s complicated for parents too. As the mother of a teenage daughter and three teenage sons, it’s easy to empathise with my feminist daughter as we share stories of being followed on public transport or harassed at parties. My husband naturally feels protective.

My eldest son is gay and has always fought against misogynistic behaviour. But it’s harder to know how to talk to our younger sons.

You can lecture them – never say anything demeaning or disrespectful about women, don’t get drunk, don’t watch porn – but accusing them all of being dangerous, testosterone-fuelled predators is unfair.

Wilfred Bates, 17, a deputy head boy in west

50 The Times Magazine

REPORTS OF RAPE AND SERIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT AT UNIVERSITIES

2016

476 2019

1,436

‘ALL MY MALE FRIENDS ARE EXAMINING THEIR BEHAVIOUR. IT’S MADE ME NOTICE CATCALLING’

London, says he was stunned by the number of testimonies on Everyone’s Invited. “All my male friends are examining their behaviour.

My sister advised me to imagine if it were her or my best friend experiencing the harassment.

It’s really made me notice when girls are catcalled on the street and, as a 6ft 2in boy, I’m much more aware now that I might look dangerous to a woman late at night.”

Teenage boys returning to school and socialising after a year, or to universities trying to make new friends, are navigating their way, often nervously. They may feel guilty, bewildered or even angry that men are being blamed. They haven’t sat in the same classroom as girls or gone to a party or been on a campus for much of the past year, but they know their behaviour now must be exemplary while also having to cope with the pressure of catching up with their academic work. The police have already asked parents to contact them if they think their son has done anything illegal, which could include sending a nude to a long-time girlfriend in lockdown if they are both under 18. Schools have been told to take a zero-tolerance approach to any misbehaviour, but some older boys are worried they may be condemned by a rumour and cast out without a proper investigation.

Many parents I’ve talked to in the past few weeks are as concerned for their sons as their daughters. One mother of a 16-year-old boy, who was asked to leave his school after a disputed claim that he had forcibly kissed a 15-year-old girl last summer at a party, said, “She was his friend. He is very shy and may have misread the signs. They had both drunk some alcohol for the first time. He wasn’t one of the cool boys who partied every weekend.

But if he’d been accused of dealing drugs, it would have been less devastating. Someone even scrawled ‘paedophile’ on his folders.”

At first, boys came forward to the campaign Everyone’s Invited to apologise for not calling out unacceptable toxic behaviour and lad culture in their peer group, but some are now concerned about admitting that they or their friends may have behaved badly.

Even before Everyone’s Invited started sharing anonymous testimonies this year, reports of rape and serious sexual assault at universities had trebled in three years, from 476 in 2016 to 1,436 in 2019, causing many universities to provide consent courses.

My eldest son ran one for freshers at his university college before the pandemic.

First-year students were given various potentially ambiguous situations, but the answer was always clear – unless you get an enthusiastic endorsement from a potential partner for any sexual activity, you must stop.

Some of the male students I talked to are

modifying their behaviour. “No one wants to be called a f***boy now,” says Kitty, a secondyear languages student at Edinburgh, one of the most cited universities on Everyone’s Invited. “It’s really changed the atmosphere after the pandemic. Boys used to send dick pics; now they send a thank you text or even flowers after a night together. It’s almost Victorian – they are so chivalrous.”

Others are backing away from any intimacy in case they misread the signs. Jake, a third-year engineering student at Sheffield, says he has done some serious thinking in lockdown. “I have loads of girls who are friends, but I would never date one now because I’m not sure I’d know how to flirt with them, and I worry they’d tell everyone if I wasn’t good enough. I watch porn instead, but the more I watch, the more difficult it is to think about having a loving relationship.” He’s swapped to the dating apps Tinder or Hinge for local anonymous hook-ups because “it’s more transactional”.

Some students seem to have given up on sex altogether, according to a new report, Sex and Relationships Among Students, conducted by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI). Just 16 per cent declared themselves excited at the prospect of having sex when they became a student. “Male students are now less likely to be sexually active than their female friends, with 34 per cent saying they have had sex during their time at university, compared with 47 per cent of women,” says HEPI director, Nick Hillman. “It may be because they are working harder.” But it could also be because they are nervous, and the drinking and drugs culture has exacerbated the issue. Just 30 per cent of students said they were confident about navigating consent after the consumption of alcohol.

How did we get here? “For me, it started at 11,” says Jake. “If you wanted to be in the cool crowd of boys at secondary school, you had to rubbish girls, rate them, get with them, collect and share nudes like Match Attax cards. If the girls wanted to be popular, they went along with the macho behaviour.”

A teacher on Mumsnet elaborates on the kind of behaviour Jake is talking about. Some boys, she says, now see it as an act of rebellion to slag off their mothers and female teachers as “thick, stupid whores” or “feminazis”.

Meanwhile, they swap stories about how far they’ve gone with girls. She says, “I’ve encountered many more who are absolutely delightful young men and a joy to work with.

However, it seems as though a significant and growing minority of boys are incredibly angry, rigid and sexist in their thinking. It worries me that these boys will become men in a few years, men with views that I thought were outdated long ago, and nobody is challenging

A THIRD OF 11 TO 12-YEAR-OLDS HAVE SEEN PORNOGRAPHY ONLINE. MOST OF THE CONTENT IS VIOLENT AND NON-CONSENSUAL them. Or helping them, for that matter, because they don’t seem very happy either.”

According to the NSPCC, 71 per cent of secondary school students have heard girls referred to as “slags” and “sluts”. Justine Roberts, the founder and CEO of Mumsnet, and mother of two girls and two boys, says posts on her site back this up. “Guys don’t want to look ‘weak’ by being nice and decent because they fear being picked on themselves, so they put on the ‘tough’ persona.” She worries for boys. “Underneath, they’re mostly pretty decent and kind, but psychologically they feel their world is now precarious in so many ways and everything could come crashing down on them. It’s vital they understand how appalling it is for a girl if she is abused, but they also need to feel safe that they will be judged fairly if an issue arises or if they call someone out.”

Teenage boys are already more likely to become addicted to gaming and drawn into gangs, more likely to fail at school, less likely to go to university and more likely to commit suicide than teenage girls. Male eating disorders and body dysmorphia are also on the rise as they increasingly feel the same pressure as girls to conform to the new sexual stereotypes.

Many spend hours in the gym and post pictures of their transformation online.

While some girls feel they are expected to look and behave like porn stars, with hairless, glistening bodies, a few boys are turning to plastic surgery because they worry their penises aren’t large enough. A friend who is a north London GP and mother of two boys says, “I’m getting requests from teenage boys for penis enlargement. That’s surely a result of too much porn.”

Almost every expert, parent, teacher and teenager I talk to feels that it’s the rise of online porn that underlies the current problems – for boys and girls.

Only 25 per cent of parents think their 16-year-old sons have watched porn.

Yet a survey by the NSPCC showed that two thirds of 15 to 16-year-olds have seen pornography online, and nearly a third of 11 to 12-year-olds, with the majority being violent and non-consensual.

“Pornography is everywhere,” says Mohammed, now in the sixth form of an all-boys school in Yorkshire and a champion debater. “You can’t avoid it. It’s just a click away while you are doing your homework and it makes you feel inadequate. That’s why my generation needs alcohol or drugs to do this kind of stuff. I envy my friends who’ve been in a steady relationship since they were young, and my parents, who had an arranged marriage.”

Our children have become subject to the whims of a vast $97 billion profit-seeking industry that has no concern whatsoever for their emotional or sexual health, according to Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on child protection. He has been demanding a national debate about the potentially devastating impact of online porn ever since I first interviewed him a decade ago. The sense of young male entitlement, he says, “sometimes feels medieval. Boys get some of their sex education from porn, which once might have been a picture of a naked woman spread across a page,” but now involves images of gagging, rape, anal sex and domination. “More and more children are watching hardcore porn and it soon becomes normalised,” says Bailey, who is heading the police service response to investigating the Everyone’s Invited allegations. “You can’t rely on families or schools alone to tackle this. The tech industry needs to take responsibility. No one under 18 should be able to see this stuff.”

Dr Caroline Douglas-Pennant, a counselling psychologist working in west London, who has four daughters, believes boys need new boundaries. “Boys think about sex a lot of the time, but it’s vital they understand that their sexual needs are not more important than women’s and what may even have been tacitly acceptable in their parents’ generation is unacceptable now,” she says. Children receive sex education classes at school. “But a lot of boys and girls feel that adults and teachers are still letting them down.

They are being tokenistic and just ticking the boxes with their relationship and consent classes without helping them address the real problems. It’s the competitive, pressurised, misogynist culture we need to tackle.”

Porn, she agrees, has exacerbated the situation. “It gives the message women are constantly available and enjoy aggressive sex.

Boys at 17 are driven by testosterone. They need to be shown how to control it. Dads

The Times Magazine 51

ALAMY. POSED BY MODEL

are important role models for loving and respectful relationships for their boys and we need to encourage them to think about their position in the conversation and be curious about why they may feel defensive or attacked.”

Some younger boys who feel men are now under attack are in danger of becoming alienated from girls, rather than engaging with them on an equal basis, she says. Joe Langley, a 19-year-old musician from Nottingham, has been using his large TikTok following to talk about consent. “There’s been a split,” he says.

“Some boys have really listened, but there’s another extreme where they are offended that it’s all about girls and they think they’re being attacked. I’m explaining this isn’t a war – girls shouldn’t have to go through this. Adult men do it too. They catcall my girlfriends and leer at them. They should set an example.”

My 14-year-old son’s TikTok account was filled with memes warning boys they could be locked up when women suggested a male curfew to help reclaim the streets after the horrific murder of Sarah Everard in Clapham.

While young girls have Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg, boys struggle to find role models. Even their heroes in film and sport sometimes turn out to have behaved obnoxiously towards women.

So what’s the solution? Soma Sara, the 22-year-old who set up Everyone’s Invited, and who has now read through 16,000 testimonies, is a quietly spoken, polite member of Generation Z. “The important thing to teach boys is to have respect for girls, explain to them that female pleasure matters and sexual relationships are about mutual enjoyment, not power or control,” she says.

Boys, she admits, may initially feel worried.

“It’s understandable if some boys feel confused or guilty, but this isn’t about blaming boys.

This is about teaching young people to be more understanding and have the courage to stand up to their peers and call out behaviour that they know is unacceptable” Marvyn Harrison, founder of Dope Black Dads, which aims to help fathers raise healthy adults, started addressing these issues with his young son and daughter before they went to primary school. “Conscious parenting means teaching your children about consent early, which is really showing them that their actions affect other people,” he says. “I ask my son how the Gruffalo feels and I teach my daughter her body is not there to please others and how to say no. This isn’t about having one embarrassed conversation; it’s about having a million micro-conversations.”

In Britain, parents rarely want to discuss sexual relationships or porn with their children, but the sooner we start, the better, according to academics in Holland. A study of

BOYS WORRY THEIR PENISES ARE NOT BIG ENOUGH ‘I WOULDN’T DATE A GIRL NOW. I’D WORRY THEY WOULD TELL EVERYONE I WASN’T ANY GOOD’ teenagers in both countries found that while boys and girls in the Netherlands gave “love and commitment” as the main reason for losing their virginity, boys in Britain cited “peer pressure and physical attraction”.

On a visit to De Burght junior school in Amsterdam to discover their secret, I bump into eight-year-old Carla carefully balancing a dish. It is a sample of her father’s sperm for “show and tell”. In the Netherlands, talking about sex isn’t an awkward, taboo subject with

children. Families watch babies being born on the birthing channel together and discuss sexual preferences at breakfast. Fathers explain “rimming”, which involves anal licking, to their sons. A 12-year-old at the senior school show me how to roll a condom onto a broomstick while her friend asks me if I masturbate. Teachers also discuss porn with pupils from a young age after two female academics, Laura Vandenbosch and Johanna van Oosten, discovered the more a young person had learnt about the pornography industry from their school education, the less likely they were to see women as sex objects.

The Netherlands is now one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, according to the United Nations.

The Dutch treat sex as a healthy physical activity between two committed adults who are in love, whether they are gay or straight.

Sanderijn van der Doef, who writes sex books for Dutch children, says, “It’s a normal part of life, like theatre or football.” At Nemo, Amsterdam’s science museum, children can put their arms into tongue puppets to imitate French kissing in the Teen Facts gallery and one sign says, “Your pleasure is your partner’s delight.” The most popular sex-ed curriculum, kriebels in je buik, means butterflies in your stomach.

Anne Longfield, the former children’s commissioner for England, also believes the conversation must begin at primary school.

“The stereotypes still start very early for both sexes, with boys being expected to be tougher and braver,” she says. By secondary school, she believes, “The urge for boys to conform is overwhelming. Most boys want to do the right thing, but parents, teachers and society need to help them. If they think throttling is fine to joke about now, what next? Everyone is so focused on exam performance, they have forgotten that character building is just as crucial to navigate life. And when boys start working in an office, any kind of sexual banter could lose them their job.”

Cressida Cowell, the children’s laureate and the author of How to Train Your Dragon, believes books can help. “I wrote Hiccup because I wanted a different role model for boys. Hiccup may be a Viking, but he doesn’t loot and pillage. He thinks his way out of problems and is imaginative and creative. He stands up against his peer group and calls out bullies. He’s strong, not in a stereotypical male way, but morally strong, and he looks after his friends. Girls need strong heroines, but boys need empathetic heroes.”

Most boys, she thinks, are just as romantic as girls. They may want adventures along the way, but they also want the fairytale ending, finding a partner of either sex, love, commitment and companionship. n The Times Magazine 53

‘SHAMIMA IS NOT A THREAT. SHE’S TOTALLY BROKEN. SHE NEEDS HELP’ A new documentary reveals what daily life is like for the ‘Isis brides’ now held in camps in Syria – including Shamima Begum, the Bethnal Green schoolgirl who has been denied the right to return to Britain.

The award-winning war correspondent Anthony Loyd, who first found Begum in February 2019, talks to the film-makers

Shamima Begum, now 21, photographed in Roj camp in northeast Syria in March this year by Sam Tarling. From far left: Anthony Loyd’s portrait of Begum when he found her in the al-Hawl camp in 2019; Begum with Hoda Muthana and her son in the documentary The Return: Life after Isis

PREVIOUS SPREAD: SAM TARLING/THE TELEGRAPH, ANTHONY LOYD/THE TIMES/NEWS LICENSING, ALBA SOTORRA. THIS PAGE: DELIL SOULEIMAN/GETTY IMAGES, ALBA SOTORRA

O

ne day in Roj camp Shamima Begum sat back in a wooden cart used as an improvised pram by the women detainees. Spare-framed and expressionless, she watched a group of mothers and their children playing with kites. After a while a single teardrop rolled down her face.

Watching her from a distance, Alba Sotorra noticed the moment as the first time she had ever seen the girl from Bethnal Green cry. The Spanish film-maker had met Begum many times by then. It was the spring of 2020. She recalled Begum, who had lost all her friends, her three children, her citizenship, and become the banished and broken teenage chalice of Britain’s hate, as being so traumatised that she was almost incapable of expression.

“In the beginning, Shamima was like a ghost just sitting there, covered, lifeless, like a marionette, a doll,” recalls Sotorra, who was inside the Syrian detention camp to make a film about a workshop run by a Kurdish woman for the Islamic State-affiliated women incarcerated there. Begum was one of a small group, most of them mothers, who participated. To begin with, she sat alone at the back of a tent in silence.

“Her lack of ability to express her feelings made me feel deeply sad for her,” Sotorra continues. “Then, maybe two or three months after I met her, we had this game with the kids. The kids were playing with kites.

Shamima was always very silent. And she sat on one of these carts watching. I saw a teardrop fall from her eye. It was the first time.”

Sotorra made no attempt to record the moment on film and the incident will undoubtedly be met with a howl of rage by those who prefer to regard Shamima Begum not as a profoundly traumatised young woman overwhelmed by the magnitude and consequence of decisions she made when a Year 11 schoolgirl at Bethnal Green Academy, but as a remorseless individual, devoid of regret, so dangerous that she poses a threat to the nation’s security.

A year earlier, I had found Shamima Begum in al-Hawl camp, one of two internment centres in northeast Syria that hold a total of 64,000 women and children, including 13,500 foreigners, from Isis-affiliated families. Most are children under five years old; 16 British women and 35 children are held among them.

The only survivor among three school friends from Bethnal Green who had run away from London to live in the caliphate in February 2015, within days of

‘SHE’S A KID, HORRIFIED AT LOSING HER OWN THREE CHILDREN, RIPPED APART BY THAT LOSS’

Clockwise from left: al-Hawl camp, May 11, 2021; Shamima Begum in The Return; stories from The Times, February 2019

speaking to me in 2019 Shamima Begum had her citizenship stripped by the home secretary, Sajid Javid. She gave birth to a baby boy who died three weeks later, her third child to die in the space of a few months.

She is currently detained in Roj camp, in a better managed, less overcrowded environment than al-Hawl, where disease and killing remain rife. Though conditions in Roj are austere, tents in the camp are equipped with electricity and televisions, and detainees are banned from wearing black clothing.

Earlier this year the Supreme Court, despite hearing evidence she may have been trafficked and was a victim of child marriage, ruled that Shamima Begum could not return to this country to challenge the removal of her citizenship as she is a threat to national security.

The media’s portrayal of Shamima Begum has been a driving force behind the government’s refusal to allow her return. Their reports are riven with failure.

The written word, allowing such a broad range of subjective

interpretation, largely fails to convey the complex reality of Shamima Begum’s story, and most newspaper reports fall into a binary paradigm, describing her either as a victim or a perpetrator. This in turn elicits polarised public responses, sympathetic or retributive, and provides too few of the tools needed to establish the four key pillars – fact, context, responsibility and accountability – by which Begum’s case should be examined if ever she is to be allowed home. Television reporting also fails her story. Most interviews with her appear predatory. The worst involve an aggressive, gleeful schadenfreude that sets her up to fail.

Conventional mediums of journalism were always going to struggle in calibrating a subject that involved a “vulnerable teenager” (the phrase used by the Metropolitan Police to describe Shamima Begum in a letter written for her family in February 2015, before she left the UK), motherhood, dead babies and a decision to live within the remit of the most repugnant terrorist organisation in modern times.

Lawyers, absent in war and dependent on correspondents for information, but flocking in its aftermath and suddenly critical of the media for interviewing detained clients, do no better in advancing her case or the cases of the other British women held in Syrian camps. Indeed, simplistic exculpatory legal arguments threaten to trivialise the complexity of the choices made by these women, and

The Times Magazine 57

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may further antagonise public opinion against those behind the wire.

I take my own bow in this pantheon of failure. Almost every remark that Shamima Begum made when we met that fateful February 13, 2019, has been utilised, regardless of context, in the government’s case to revoke her citizenship: printed out and put before judges with the Special Immigration Appeals Commission as proof of her threat; used to consolidate her banishment despite every argument I made to the contrary.

However, something has just changed in the telling of Shamima Begum’s story. Alba Sotorra’s sensitive and unusual film from Roj camp, The Return: Life after Isis, showing tomorrow in the UK for the first time at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival, gives the banished London woman the chance to express herself on a platform of trust with interlocutors that she has not previously had with any journalist.

Told through the prism of Sevinaz Evdike, the Kurdish woman running a creative writing workshop in Roj camp for the detainees, The Return examines the experiences of Shamima Begum and five other Isis-affiliated women through Evdike’s own journey, as she grapples with the memory of dead family and friends killed fighting against Islamic State.

In this way, the film allows its audience to judge Shamima Begum and her companions participating in the workshop only after it has first judged itself against Evdike’s inspiring efforts to engage with those who came to her country uninvited, to join a caliphate whose borders were drawn in Kurdish blood.

Even the most choleric armchair critic of Begum might first have to wonder why Syrian Kurds, who suffered so egregiously at the hands of Islamic State and provided the core of the ground force that eventually destroyed the caliphate, are willing to open dialogue with Isis-affiliated women in Roj camp, while those so far from the Syrian killing fields are not.

Indeed, dialogue lies at the heart of The Return. The revenants in the workshop have their own internal dialogue as they re-engage with life after Islamic State, while at the same time being engaged in dialogue with women from the force that defeated Isis.

Sotorra, 42, an experienced documentarymaker who has been visiting northeastern Syria since 2015, is succinct in describing the need for dialogue not just as a means to start defusing the threat posed by the internment of the thousands of foreign women currently in Roj and al-Hawl camps, whose children will grow to adulthood with their citizenship of origin intact, but also as a preventative measure to break further cycles of violence.

“I was inspired by the Kurdish women,” she says, “who had experienced Isis violence in the most extreme way, yet who are somehow the

first ones to have opened a space for dialogue with their former enemies. In the aftermath of a war, when you have been involved in so much violence, you have to realise that there is no way out. You need to break this circle of violence. You need to find a way to connect to those who were your enemies – because you cannot be fighting endlessly.”

The first days of film-making in Roj camp were predictably tense. It was April 2020, just over a year after the last territorial slither of Islamic State’s caliphate had been destroyed by a Kurdish-led force at Baghouz. Trust was zero. The antipathy felt by Kurdish members of the all-female film crew towards internees in the camp was so acute that in breaks between shooting they preferred to go outside the perimeter fence to relax rather than be

Evdike’s best friend was murdered while eight months pregnant during an Isis assault on a government hall in Qamishli. Even as Evdike slowly warmed to the women in the workshop, recall of the suffering inflicted by Islamic State shadowed her days.

Burdened with this accumulation of pain, she consciously avoided reading details of any of the women attending her creative writing workshop in Roj, so knew nothing of their personal histories. “It was the first time I saw anyone from Isis up close and face to face,” Evdike recalls of her first meeting with the women. “It felt like I was speaking with an enemy, but my ideology refuses to allow me to say that. Then I saw that, though they are the enemy, they were also women inside a tent who needed help. They needed support.”

‘YOU MUST FIND A WAY TO CONNECT TO THOSE WHO WERE YOUR ENEMIES – YOU CAN’T FIGHT ENDLESSLY’

Hoda Muthana, who left America to join Isis in 2014

near Isis-affiliated females. The atmosphere was further complicated by threats from more extreme Isis women towards those who wanted to participate in the workshop, and the small group who did attend spoke to Evdike in such a wooden, contrived manner that at first Sotorra wondered if the film was possible at all.

Meantime, as carrier of the film’s conscience, Evdike was in acute internal turmoil during those early days. The 29-year-old activist is a member of the Kurdish Women’s Movement, whose revolutionary ideology espouses the necessity of emancipating women as a way of recalibrating society. From this perspective, Evdike regarded the internees as being in need of her help, as victims of an extremist patriarchal society that had allowed women little personal choice, confining them to the roles of housewives and child breeders.

Yet Evdike was also revolted by her own experiences of the war with Isis. Four of her cousins, two men and two women, had been killed fighting Islamic State. Her uncle was killed by Islamist militias, her home destroyed.

Shamima Begum’s role in the film came by happenstance. She was neither known to Evdike, nor was someone Sotorra had specifically sought out, but had chosen to attend the workshop of her own volition.

At first the Bethnal Green girl barely spoke.

Even among the women in Roj camp, who had been sequestered in their households during the time of the caliphate and were discouraged from independent thought or expression, trust was scarce, and it took time for the workshop group members to bond before individuals developed the confidence to speak out in a tent with a camera rolling.

However as time passed Evdike grew to like her. The description she gave me of Shamima Begum – defined as a threat to the UK’s national security by the Supreme Court – was this: “I found Shamima to be the most honest one and also the most childish. She’s a kid, horrified at losing her own three kids, ripped apart by that loss. She’s not a threat to anyone; she’s totally broken, totally gone. She needs at least ten years of help – a lot of help.”

The workshop was no soft option.

Its aim was to empower women through internal dialogue, and to trigger the necessary levels of self-reflection the women were shown Islamic State propaganda films, footage of destruction left by the group and clips of interviews the women had made with journalists. They were then encouraged to talk about themselves and their reasoning for coming to Syria, as in turn Evdike explained to them her own experiences of war and loss in the face of Islamic State.

Written projects for the workshop included a daily diary, letters written to their imagined

The Times Magazine 59

selves in ten years’ time and their past selves as they prepared to travel to Syria; recollections of dreams and recollections of nightmares.

(They were also asked to write to their mothers, but none could complete the task for shame.)

One of the first breakthroughs in trust came around the appearance of fruit and chocolate in the women’s dreams, along with dream-state recollections of being able to provide bountiful food for their children. These dreams introduced the shared recall of wartime hunger both to the film crew, five of whom were Syrian Kurds, and to the Isis affiliates attending Evdike’s workshop. Little by little, the women found commonality in pain: pain of hunger, pain of fear, pain of rage, pain of grief.

“Pain can be a common ground to connect,” Sotorra notes. “We live with pain together. We cause pain to each other. Pain is something we share. We can heal from that.”

Yet the real extent of this shared experience is hard to gauge. Recognising personal pain is certainly a key step to internal dialogue, yet it only gains utility if it leads to an understanding of another’s suffering. Without that connection, empathy does not exist, and without empathy the mere awareness of personal pain often enforces a dangerous sense of victimhood.

While The Return does not hold back from its depiction of Isis atrocities, and discussions of shared hardship and loss regularly take place, Evdike remains circumspect about how far those attending the workshop really grasped the pain caused in Syria by Islamic State.

“When we didn’t have the cameras on, some of them, I wouldn’t say all, would talk with me about moments from the war, but I could tell it was something they felt horrible to talk about, ashamed or embarrassed,” she says. “They were ashamed, but at the same time they were trying to protect themselves by saying, ‘We didn’t know. We came with our husbands,’ or, ‘We were frustrated because Muslims in Europe have no base.’ Some of them said that they had just come to help the Syrian people, and didn’t know this was going to hurt us. Most of the conversations were like this.”

The activist was unafraid to challenge such denials. A telling moment in the film comes when a Canadian Isis affiliate at the workshop named Kimberly warbles away any sense of her own responsibility at having travelled to Syria.

“I think that I shouldn’t be here at all,” she trills glibly. “I never had so much as a parking ticket back in my own country. I never killed anybody. I never did anything.”

Evdike, clearly struggling with anger, snaps back, “Maybe you did not, but maybe your husband killed my cousin, or my mother’s cousin, or killed my neighbour or killed my teacher or killed my friend.”

Reality checks like these preserve the film’s integrity, preventing it from ever wandering too far down the victimhood road. However,

‘I FELT MY WHOLE WORLD FALLING APART AND I JUST COULDN’T DO ANYTHING. I WANTED TO KILL MYSELF’ the greater issue of whether or not Isis-affiliated women can really discern the level of their own responsibility in going to live within the caliphate – a decision which by definition involved marriage to Islamic State terrorists – is left largely unaddressed.

Without that recognition of responsibility, and a commitment to some sort of atonement, western societies will never accept these women back, and efforts by lawyers or human rights groups to describe them merely as victims will only antagonise, just as accusations that all are perpetrators pointlessly, erroneously inflame.

Neither during filming nor now does Evdike engage with the victim-perpetrator stereotypes so commonly used to describe the women. “If you look at them only as ‘victims’, well, maybe this ‘victim’ is a woman who killed people,” she explains. “Or if not, then their husbands killed and the women saw it...

They were part of it. But if you say, ‘They are all killers,’ this ignores the reality that some of them really were betrayed in the way they were brought here, or else have changed for the better since then. Either way, the attitude that they should just be left here in Syria, or killed, is the most horrible way of thinking of all.”

Yet in terms of addressing the women’s responsibility for their actions, The Return asks very little of its subjects. Hoda Muthana, for example, a 26-year-old mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, currently detained in Roj camp, previously drew national outrage in the US after she tweeted exhortations to Isis supporters to “kill” and “terrorise” Americans.

“Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them,” she tweeted in 2015 using the alias Umm Jihad.

These tweets are shown in The Return, but Muthana, participating in the workshop, never accounts for them on camera, apparently on the advice of her lawyers. It is a notable omission. What else is omitted?

Paradoxically, the absence of tough questioning, combined with the slow evolution of trust between Evdike, the crew and the women attending the workshop, allows the film its greatest strength: intimacy. The women are given space, and in that space emerges a unique portrayal of their terrible sorrow.

There is no doubting the suffering they all have experienced during the war. But is suffering without self-responsibility enough reason to allow them home?

Moreover, this selective group – six of the most liberal revenants who wanted to participate in Evdike’s workshop and were

prepared to be filmed – does not reflect the overall camp populations in Roj or al-Hawl, which include westerners who are assassins, enforcers, recruiters and propagandists.

The film is unwittingly deceptive when it comes to the Syrian Kurds too. There is no doubting Evdike’s commitment to establish dialogue with the women, nor the personal ordeal that involves. Yet the notion – so skilfully played by the Kurdish authorities and misadvertised by western media – that the Kurdish self-administration in northeastern Syria would allow western women and children home were it not merely for the intransigence of the UK and Europe, is a false narrative.

The Syrian Kurds, surrounded by enemies and conscious of the international political card these women and children present, have proved deeply unwilling to repatriate them even to countries that have approved their return.

The obstacles to Shamima Begum’s return lie as much in Qamishli as in Whitehall.

Nevertheless, those thirsty for Shamima Begum’s tears in The Return have their thirst slaked. She cries several times. She cries for her dead friends; cries for her dead children; cries to be with her mum. On each occasion, she sits with controlled poise, as if wanting to hold back something her eyes let go, so that watching her weep is like watching an Easter Island statue cry: an impression of oceanic sadness.

“I felt my whole world falling apart and I just couldn’t do anything,” she weeps, remembering how her children died one after the other.

“I just wanted to kill myself. The only thing keeping me alive was the baby I was pregnant with. I felt like I had to do him right by getting out and giving him a normal life.”

Shamima Begum was holding that thought above all others on February 13, 2019, fresh from the battle at Baghouz, when she heard a member of the Kurdish staff at al-Hawl camp mention that a British journalist was nearby and looking for her. So we met. She hoped that by speaking to me I would save the life of her unborn child.

In this way she ended up sitting in a cart a year later watching children play with kites, a single tear running down her face, so alone that one of those there that day tells me, “It was as if her soul was skinned.” n The Return: Life After Isis will launch on Sky Documentaries and streaming service Now on June 15 at 9pm after premiering at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival this weekend

The Times Magazine 61

Home!

By Monique Rivalland

ER BRING ON SUMM

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1. £86.95, emmabridgewater.co.uk.

2. £50, Bordallo Pinheiro (libertylondon.com).

3. £26, anthropologie.com. 4. Cotton tablecloth, from £19.99, and napkins, bowls and plates, £7.99 each, zarahome.com.

5. £20, libertylondon.com.

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6. £17, Bitossi Home (madeindesign.co.uk).

7. £29, Tar Hong (wayfair.co.uk). 8. £12, Xenia Taler (endclothing.com). 9. £22, Casa Cubista (libertylondon.com). 10. £20, &klevering (trouva.com). 11. £32 for 4, anthropologie. com. 12. £35 for 4, Poketo (selfridges.com).

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13. £111, Bordallo Pinheiro (amara.com). 14. £29, laredoute.com. 15. £18.99, souschef.co.uk. 16. £60, matildagoad.com.

17. £65, Hay (selfridges.com). 18. £22.50 (oliverbonas.com). 19. £39, Hay (endclothing.com). 20. £75, Raawii (padlifestyle.com).

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21. £68, uk.jonathanadler.com. 22. £45, Georg Jensen (royaldesign.co.uk). 23. £12.99, hm.com. 24. £30, House Doctor (nunido.co.uk). 25. £24.99, wayfair.co.uk.

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26. £8.99, zarahome.com. 27. £75, klimchi.com. 28. £8, anthropologie.com. 29. £98, Seletti (nunido.co.uk).

30. £25, johnlewis.com. 31. Melamine serveware, from £8.99, zarahome.com. 32. £49.99, zarahome.com. 33. £45, Hay (nordicnest.com). 34. £24, anthropologie.com. 35. £37, &klevering (notanotherbill.com).

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Shop!

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By Monique Rivalland

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1. £665, Christian Louboutin (selfridges.com).

2. £87.50, miista.com. 3. £245, ganni.com.

S E O H S UMMER

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4. £119.99, Alohas (zalando.co.uk).

5. £129, penelopechilvers.com.

6. £59.99, zara.com.

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8. £125, miista.com. 9. £285, miista.com.

10. £276, Rejina Pyo (farfetch.com).

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11. £99.99, zara.com.

12. £237, Rejina Pyo (farfetch.com).

13. £220, uk.rouje.com.

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14. £115, miista.com. 15. £783, Gucci (farfetch.com). 16. £185, russellandbromley.co.uk. 17. £19.99, hm.com.

18. £70, dunelondon.com. 19. £32.95, na-kd.com. 20. £100, uterque.com. 21. £45.99, zara.com. 22. £265, ganni.com.

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23. £140, essentiel-antwerp. com. 24. £135, russellandbromley.co.uk.

25. £125, russellandbromley. co.uk. 26. £170, Larroude (koibird.com). 27. £294, Sergio Rossi (uk.cettire.com).

28. £125, bimbaylola.com.

29. £110, manebi.com.

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Pout! 10 BEST SUMMER BEAUTY BUYS

Home or away, these holiday-season essentials won’t let you down. By Nadine Baggott The perfect summer mascara has to do it all: lengthen, add volume, curl, lift and be pool and rainproof to cope with our unpredictable weather.

This has a huge, pliable brush with a clever tip for outer smaller lashes and bottom lashes. A single coat of this is enough; two gives you va-va-voom for evenings without clogging.

A BOOSTING BODY SPRAY

A

celebration of sunshine, staycations, sipping cocktails and the seaside – sometimes summer beauty buys simply need to put a huge, happy smile on your face.

A BEAUTIFUL BRONZER Zara Refillable Bronzer (£14.99 in four shades; zara.com) A great bronzer should be matte, come in a range of shades to suit all skin tones and, let’s tick a big box here, be refillable. The new Zara make-up is perfection; created by cosmetics maestro Diane Kendal, who has previously worked with Armani and the original Calvin Klein make-up, the compacts are weighted and magnetic, in a high-shine white resin, and the more neutral colours will suit everyone. Run – don’t walk – to your nearest store to feel, see and try them yourself.

THE WATERTIGHT MASCARA MAC In Extreme Dimension Waterproof Mascara (£22; maccosmetics.co.uk)

Hada Labo Tokyo Superhydrator Hyaluronic Body Mist (£15.95; Superdrug) You will have heard of hyaluronic acid to hydrate your face. Well, now it’s available for your body too. This superlight body spray instantly hydrates legs and arms and can be applied after you’re dressed, when you look down to see dry, ashy or flaky skin. No stickiness, no tacky, heavy, wait-until-itsinks-in finish; just a spray-on hit of instant hydration.

TINTED FACE SERUM Erborian CC Water (£18 for 15ml in three shades; uk.erborian.com) When is a face serum tinted and with a soft-focus finish?

When it’s the new Erborian CC Water. Goes on as a clear gel, then microbubbles of pigment burst to give sheer colour without covering your natural complexion, freckles and underlying skin. A very clever hybrid of skincare and cosmetics that’s ideal for minimal make-up days.

A SUPERLIGHT SPF La Roche-Posay Hyalu B5 Aquagel SPF30 (£34.50; laroche-posay.co.uk) Fans of the cult Hyalu B5 hyaluronic acid serum will love this lightweight hydrating gel. This sits under make-up, suits even the oiliest and most breakout-prone skin types, yet also offers a hit of hydration for drier skins. Truly this is the SPF for everyone who hates SPF.

THE FOOLPROOF FAKE TAN

A LUSCIOUS LIGHTWEIGHT LIP COLOUR Bobbi Brown Crushed Shine Jelly Stick (£25 in six shades; bobbibrown.co.uk) Long days out or on the beach are all about low-maintenance beauty, and this tinted lip balm/ moisturising colour is ideal. Every shade is gorgeous, but Honey is your lips on their best day. It has skincare properties with a hint of shine and pigment.

Amanda Harrington Jet Set Duo (£30; amandaharrington.com) Harrington revolutionised self-tanning when she decided to apply and buff it out with her brushes. Her face kit comes in her three signature shades – Natural Honey, Natural Rose and Natural Olive – and can be applied at night before bed or in the morning under make-up for an instant hit of colour and soft-focus finish. It really is the best idiotproof self-tan system around.

THE BEAUTY BALM Dr Lipp BFF (£18; lookfantastic.com and drlipp.com) This is a multipurpose lip, cuticle, dry knees and elbows, stick-iton-your-kids-andpartner balm. It’s perfect for insect bites, scratches, cuts and grazes as well as dry, cracked and sore skin and lips.

THE NO-POWDER POWDER Dior Backstage Face & Body Powder-NoPowder (£29.50 in ten shades; dior.com) I know lots of you are wary of powder for fear of looking cakey in summer, but you should try the new Powder-No-Powder. This has a soft blur finish that will mattify but also offer a hint of healthy radiance. Formulated for face and body, it works well on legs and chests to hide skin imperfections without looking like make-up.

THE SUMMER SCENT Molecule 01 + Mandarin (£95; escentric.com) Molecule is the cult fragrance with its no-fragrance fragrance hit of Iso E Super that makes you want to inhale someone’s scent trail and grasp them closer.

Now three notes have been added: choose from iris, patchouli and this one, mandarin, which is soft and fresh and perfect for summer, although I urge you to sniff out all three. n Find Nadine @nadinebaggott on Instagram and YouTube, where she answers all your beauty questions Lesley Thomas is away

The Times Magazine 67

Eating out Giles Coren ‘I was once a Harrods Christmas elf. I wore lederhosen and even welcomed Princess Diana and five-year-old Prince William into the grotto one morning’ Harrods Social

TOM JACKSON

A

68 The Times Magazine

s a restaurant critic, I am a stickler for thoroughness. Not for me the single, random, unplanned visit to a newly opened restaurant for a frantic barge through the crowded menu, too much booze and a wake-up next morning with no memory of what I ate, followed by the smashing out of 800 words of unrelated guff to get me over onto the second page and then a desperate scroll through my phone in the hope that I took photos of the food that I can describe in such a way as to make it look like I bothered to form thoughts at the time. Oh no. That isn’t how I roll.

Before I write up a restaurant, I visit at least once more, to make sure I have got everything right. And then, more often than not, I’ll keep going back in the run-up to filing copy, until I have eaten everything on the menu at least seven times, like those critics in The New York Times who go in disguise and give you chapter and verse on the subtle ways in which the burger toppings changed over the weeks and months they had the joint under surveillance.

Indeed, before writing today’s review about a restaurant in Harrods, I ate there not seven or ten times, but more than 300 times: breakfast, lunch and dinner, every day, for three months. Not in the restaurant that

this review is about, obviously – Harrods Social

by Jason Atherton has only been open a couple of weeks – but in the staff canteen.

It was a while ago, to be fair. OctoberDecember 1987, when I worked as an elf in Santa’s Grotto on the fifth floor. So it’s possible the menu has changed. But for those three months, a third of a century ago, it was bacon, egg, sausage, mushrooms, baked beans and six triangular hash browns every morning at 8am, from Monday to Saturday. Then three slices of gammon with pineapple, chips and salad for lunch. Cod mornay, boiled potatoes and carrots for supper, followed by trifle.

Bloody delicious. And fully subsidised so that breakfast was 75p, lunch £1.10 and supper £1.20, which was a generous indulgence and meant that after paying tax on the wages Mr Al Fayed handed out personally at the back door each Friday evening, one had almost enough left over for the bus home.

I tell you this so that you don’t think I wandered into Harrods Social like some rube just off the coach, attracted by the name of Britain’s most reliable restaurateur over the door. I went to Harrods Social for lunch for the same reason that I chose to work in Harrods all those years ago, because I LOVE department stores.

I love the completeness of the world in there. The endless options for consumption.

The absence of windows and clocks – like in a casino – so that you are freed from the confines of time and space and can fully lose yourself. I love the signs and the escalators and the weird little cafés in forgotten corners

Harrods Social Harrods, 87-135 Brompton Road, London SW1 (020 7225 6800; harrods.com) Score Can’t give a score, didn’t pay.

Price I don’t know precisely, but about £150 including water and service, which is what I donated to Hospitality Action when I got home.

and the outdoorsy smell of the back stairs and the girls who spray you with perfume because they really, really love you.

I loved John Barnes on Finchley Road as a child, back when grey suburbs could sustain their own giant branches of John Lewis. And after that, Brent Cross. And Selfridges with my grandparents, for a pack of Top Trumps and a salt beef sandwich – each as chewy as the other.

When I applied to Harrods, I told them all I had ever wanted was to spend my life here and to be on the business end of Christmas.

And so they let me be one of three elves, along with three elfettes and (sorry, kids) three Santas, in the Tyrolean-themed Enchanted Forest on the fifth floor. I wore lederhosen and Timberlands and a Wee Willy Winkie hat, and the only rule was that I wasn’t to let the children see me smoking in uniform.

I even welcomed Princess Diana and fiveyear-old Prince William into the grotto one morning (they told me I had to call him “Sir”, but I just couldn’t) and it was without question the best job I’ve ever had.

So I’m always delighted to go back there.

The old place is looking fine after its recent refurb, even blingier than it was before, and more glamorous for being empty of tourists, thanks to international travel restrictions.

On my way through the shop to the Social, I passed miles of million-pound watches and oceans of jewellery, all jealously protected by phalanxes of scowling security gollums, a gleaming wine gallery full of ancient Pétrus, a £5,000 book about Ferraris, and

a “Louis XIII Room” with methuselahs of grog on show for £75,000. Marvellous stuff. I cannot imagine what sort of terrible snob would have anything negative to say about such a place, blossoming in the heart of the capital at this difficult time. It gladdens the heart.

As does Harrods Social: big, breezy and built originally as the inhouse Harrods Brasserie, before closing for lockdown barely a week after launch, and reopening last month as the latest addition to the Atherton “Social” brand.

I was so far from being on a social, however, as to be not only alone, but visiting straight from my dentist in Harley Street, with a mouth full of scraping and novocaine.

But the menu was a joyful little thing and I rubbed my hands with glee at the sight of all this fresh, British, seasonal stuff – Cumbrian beef tartare, Wye valley asparagus, English garden salad, south coast halibut – which is not always the way with department store caffs (glorious though those fried potato triangles were).

Although, ye gods, the prices! My salad – a dozen good leaves, one thinly sliced Jersey Royal, four chopped runner beans and a well-salted “green goddess” dressing – was marked as “21”.

“Is that pounds?” I asked the Atherton stalwart in charge, hoping it might be dollars or euros or, better still, roubles or yen.

“I’m afraid it is,” he said.

“So the Cornish hake with white miso emulsion, pak choi, spicy ponzu dressing and crispy squid is – cough – £39.50?”

“Yes, I know. It’s a lot. When we submitted the menus to Harrods our prices were lower than this, but they came back saying they had to be much higher.”

Hence, I suppose, the £59 steak and chips and a whole Cornish lobster and chips – which is £39 at the Ivy – for £65. A side of bread and butter is £6, the mac & cheese a possibly record-breaking £29. (Although up on the fourth floor, opposite the “Wellness Clinic”, there is a Gordon Ramsay café charging £80 for a hamburger.)

My food was excellent: a small bundle of gleamingly fresh Devon crab on a slice of nashi pear with tiny leaves and a sharp lemon gel (£19), followed by three spears of asparagus with its hefty parmesan sablé, the buttery heads of four morels and a ball of confit egg yolk that was not as nice as an actual egg (£19), that salad and then the hake.

I enjoyed myself. I wasn’t too full (well, it was only £100 worth of food), I didn’t drink, and I wrote this review (first time I’ve worked in Harrods since the 1980s). I also established, after a bit of chat, that the pricing truly isn’t the Atherton group’s fault at all. Not only are the prices set by the not especially bargain-hunty sovereign wealth fund of Qatar, but the chefs Atherton puts in have to come off his payroll and join the Harrods one. Harrods buys the produce. In short, it’s still the Harrods Brasserie but they get to put “Social” above the door and have a Jason Atherton menu in return for a consultancy fee – which I hope he negotiated better than I did in 1987.

Speaking of which, just as I was rummaging for my wallet and thinking how it would have taken two weeks of my old salary to pay for this short, boozeless lunch for one, a lady from Harrods came out and said there would be no bill – no doubt because I had given my name when booking as “Al Fayed”.

I laughed and told her I wasn’t really him, so, please, my bill. She refused twice more and as I couldn’t very well take it to fisticuffs in her own place, I said, “Thank you,” and got up to leave. Which was when I realised what had happened. Of course, nobody really charges £6 for bread, £21 for lettuce and £59 for steak frites. Which is why this lady comes out at the end of EVERYONE’s meal and tells them they don’t have to pay. Otherwise, nobody could afford it.

I’m not sure how this is going to pan out as a business model, though. So I should hurry along quick, if I were you, while the offer lasts. n The Times Magazine 69

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

Beta male Robert Crampton

TOM JACKSON

‘Am I really too middle class for Hull these days? I took a test to find out’

A reader, Sue Carless, kindly alerted me to the Hull Citizenship test, published a couple of weeks previously in the Hull Daily Mail. She assumed I’d already be aware of it, but I wasn’t.

I am now, though. I scored 21 out of 31. The quiz invited participants to “find out how Hull you are”. Turns out I’m only 67.74 per cent Hull. I am covered in shame.

Sue tells me that, despite leaving the city in 1966 at the age of 12, she scored 25. I left in 1986 aged 22, and yet I’m almost 13 per cent less Hull than she is. Poor show. Maybe, as my in-laws regularly tell me on visits back north, not that there have been many of them this past 15 months, I really have been down south too long.

Or maybe I was only ever two thirds Hull to start with. I wasn’t born there; we moved to the city when I was six. And what’s more, we didn’t really move to the city, but rather to a posh suburb six miles out of town.

Where the good schools were, my parents were told.

I never acquired the local accent. That’s partly because we were middle class – but then so were many of my classmates, and they all had Hull accents – and partly because my dad was from Lancashire and my mum was a Londoner. And thus I do not now nor ever have referred to the head of the Catholic Church as the Perp.

My lack of true local lad authenticity is actually even greater than the mediocre quiz result suggests. Why? Because several of the questions relied more on general than specific knowledge.

I didn’t know Captain Bligh’s ship was built in Hull, for instance, but I know it was called the Bounty. Just as I know King Billy was the nickname for William III. I know the city council meets at the Guildhall not City Hall because my mum was on that council for many years.

I can imagine someone more deeply rooted in the city, living on Orchard Park or Bransholme or Hessle Road, their family there for generations, grandad a former trawlerman, dad on the line at Reckitt’s, mum a nurse at HRI, who perhaps didn’t know the answers to some of these questions. Or maybe I’m doing them a disservice.

As I said at my mum’s funeral, the number of mourners was no doubt boosted by local Conservatives checking to make sure she was dead. And indeed my parents’ involvement with the Labour Party does bequeath me a

certain amount of reflected cred. It meant I grew up knowing trades union officials and visiting east Hull, something many people in west Hull, let alone the western suburbs, might never do.

My mum taught at the local private girls’ school for a while. But she taught at Greatfield comp next to the docks for much longer.

Guess which fact I tend to mention when meeting fellow Hullensians?

On other questions, I didn’t know the answer but played the percentages. I had no idea when Hull Fair was founded, but I reckoned the earliest date, 1278, was the most likely, given the antiquity of the fair is a source of local pride, and so it proved. As I said, I’m middle class and if there’s one thing we’re famous for, it’s knowing how to game the system. Any system. Even a fun quiz in a local newspaper. We can’t help ourselves.

We’re looking forward to the return of the fair this October. It’s the highlight of the Hull social calendar, an event for which the diaspora faithfully return decades after moving elsewhere.

On questions requiring hardcore immersion, I performed poorly. I didn’t know that “booling” means pushing a pram or that “mafting” means “hot” in Hull dialect. I’ve never heard anyone use either word in 50-plus years in and around and about the city. I didn’t know what Hull FC’s nickname used to be nor where the city’s other rugby league club, Hull Kingston Rovers, used to play.

I went to see Hull FC a few times when they still played at the Boulevard. Standing in the old thrupenny stand was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I bet the blokes there knew what booling and mafting meant.

Mind you, I’m not a total fraud. I know that a bain or bairn is slang for a child.

Interestingly, the word bairn in Norwegian means the same thing. I saw it on a separate gate for kids when we went skiing in Geilo.

I know that a ten foot is a wide alleyway.

That’s one expression that crossed the class divide. And I know, obviously, that the local nutritious delicacy called a pattie is a mix of potato and herbs, so when you order pattie and chips you’re basically eating two types of fried potato.

And absolutely delicious it is too. n robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk

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