Category: Culture

By Lucy Atkinson

If someone were to ask me outright, I would probably describe my year abroad as a rather Eat, Pray, Love-esque affair: cultural enrichment, spontaneous travelling, questionable navigation skills and socialising with people from more countries than I could reasonably keep track of. All very picturesque. But what surprised me most were the quieter moments. The days spent in my own company, usually with a very British cup of tea and a YouTube rabbit hole that had started somewhere entirely unrelated. Somewhere along the way, I found myself poring over old Saturday Night Live sketches and discovering the comedic genius that was Gilda Radner. 

More than three decades after her death, Radner’s warmth, wit and sheer eccentricity remain as infectious as ever. One of the original Saturday Night Live cast members, she helped establish the programme as a fixture of American comedy, creating characters that were as ridiculous as they were recognisably human. There was Roseanne Roseannadanna (“It’s always something!”) whose increasingly unhinged news reports descended into glorious chaos, and Emily Litella, whose spectacular misunderstandings became comedy gold. Watching these sketches now, it is difficult not to be struck by just how much personality Radner brought to the screen. She was silly, unpredictable and entirely unafraid of making a fool of herself. Quite the achievement in an industry that has historically been rather less forgiving when women do precisely that. 

Born in Detroit in 1946, Radner rose to prominence in the mid-1970s as one of the original ‘Not Ready for Prime Time Players’, the ensemble that launched SNL in 1975. She was not simply a funny woman in a predominantly male comedy landscape; she was instrumental in changing what that landscape could look like. Her characters were often exaggerated caricatures, but there was always something recognisably human beneath the wigs, voices and absurdities. As she once explained, she frequently based her characters on the things she disliked about herself. There is something rather endearing about that willingness to turn one’s own insecurities into material. Rather than conceal imperfection, Radner made a performance out of it. 

Perhaps this is what makes her work feel so contemporary. Comedy has always offered a way of making sense of the things we might otherwise struggle to articulate. Radner understood that humour did not have to be detached from vulnerability; in fact, the two could make rather good company. 

In 1986, Radner was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She approached her illness with the same characteristic humour that had defined her career, documenting her experiences in her 1989 autobiography, It’s Always Something, published shortly before her death. The title itself encapsulates something of her outlook: an acknowledgement that life rarely unfolds as neatly as we might like, and that there is no point in waiting for everything to fall into place before deciding to enjoy it. 

It is a particularly pertinent sentiment in an age of carefully curated Instagram feeds, relentless productivity and the expectation that everyone should be having the time of their

lives, all the time. We are encouraged to document our experiences, optimise our routines and make every moment count. Even a year abroad, apparently, is supposed to resemble a particularly well-funded coming-of-age film. Yet some of the most memorable moments are not necessarily the ones that make it onto the camera roll. Sometimes they involve doing very little at all, or stumbling across a comedian who died sixteen years before you were born. 

Radner’s legacy also extends beyond the sketches themselves. Her husband, actor Gene Wilder, helped establish Gilda’s Club following her death, creating a network of community support for people affected by cancer. It was an extension of something Radner had believed in throughout her life: that humour, friendship and human connection could make even the most difficult experiences a little less isolating. The organisation continues to carry her name and her spirit, demonstrating that her influence was never confined to the stage. 

It would be impossible to discuss Radner without considering the women who followed in her footsteps. Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Kristen Wiig are among the performers whose work has helped shape contemporary American comedy, and Radner’s influence is evident in the possibilities available to women working in sketch today. Her characters demonstrated that women could be grotesque, ridiculous, loud, politically incorrect and unapologetically strange. They did not have to be the straight woman, the romantic interest or the sensible voice of reason. They could be the joke and the punchline as well as, crucially, the person telling it. 

There is an interesting parallel to be drawn with British comedy, too. From Victoria Wood and French and Saunders to Catherine Tate and Diane Morgan, British women have long carved out space for characters that are gloriously peculiar, socially observant and occasionally downright absurd. Our comedy traditions might differ from their American counterparts, but there is a shared appreciation for the character performer who can expose something uncomfortable about society by making us laugh at it. 

Perhaps that is what I find most appealing about Radner. Beneath the elaborate characters and wonderfully chaotic performances was someone who seemed to understand that life was not something to be perfected, but experienced. Her final reflections on uncertainty and imperfection, shared in an interview shortly before her death, are particularly moving. She had come to recognise that life rarely offers the neat narrative arcs we expect from it. Sometimes there is no satisfying conclusion, no carefully constructed beginning, middle and end. There is simply the business of getting on with things, adapting and making the most of what is in front of you. 

Radner may have left the stage far too soon, but her work remains a reminder that there is something wonderfully liberating about refusing to take yourself too seriously. In a world increasingly concerned with getting everything right, perhaps we could all do with a little more of her willingness to get things spectacularly wrong. After all, it’s always something.

By Daisy Lonergan

Sir Patrick Stewart was born on July 13th, 1940 in West Yorkshire, into a home and household that were less than easy. His family struggled financially, with Stewart growing up in a house that lacked an indoor bathroom, and with a father who repeatedly physically abused his mother. This early trauma no doubt left a mark, but Stewart found an outlet for his pain early on, when one day his English teacher gave him a copy of Shakespeare, encouraging him to perform, an act that would change the course of Stewart’s life. Later in his teenage years, he received a scholarship to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and never looked back. He once recounted in an interview that the stage was the one place where he felt truly safe. 

Stewart later went on to become a titan of British theatre, joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, and appearing in over forty of its productions throughout his life. Perhaps though, his most popular achievements in the world of acting happened across the pond. Stewart’s career truly soared to new heights when he joined the world of Hollywood, playing two beloved and iconic characters that would go on to become staples of sci-fi storytelling. The first was his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a role he reprised in four feature films. The second was his role as leader of the X-Men, Charles Xavier, in which he was able to reunite with longtime friend and partner-in-crime, Ian McKellen. Both of these roles were characterised by tolerance, morality and intellectual curiosity, with Stewart bringing a diplomatic style that helped firmly establish science fiction as a genre capable of exploring both philosophical and political questions, even in the world of popular entertainment. Stewart’s unique combination of classical training and Shakespearean gravitas with commercial Hollywood success enabled him to bring the two worlds together, challenging the perceived hierarchy between stage and screen and showing that the two do not have to be mutually exclusive. Rather, they can inform one another, depend on one another, and help each other thrive.

Furthermore, the popularity of the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, combined with the wisdom of the characters he played, helped establish Stewart as a household name connected with decency and intelligence, positioning him as a role model for many. Indeed, Stewart himself was certainly deserving of the title, having waged a long campaign against domestic abuse. He spoke publicly about the terrors of his childhood and used his platform to advocate for others to speak out too. He also became a prominent supporter of Refuge, a UK charity supporting the victims of domestic abuse. His hard work on and off screen did not go unrecognised, as Stewart has won many awards, including two Laurence Olivier Awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an OBE and a knighthood. However, the achievement he was said to have been most proud of was his role as Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, a position that allowed him to return to his Yorkshire roots.

Tragically, Stewart passed away at the age of eighty-six following a brief illness with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. According to loved ones, his last days were filled with tears, laughter and music. Stewart is survived by his wife, two children, and a rich and vital legacy, leaving behind a unique and indelible mark on the face of both theatre and film. And so, I can think of no better way to leave you than with the words of Sir Patrick Stewart himself (as he told the Oxford Union): 

‘The obvious conclusion is that art must somehow be essential to life. Art is a part of survival, art is a part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say: I am alive, and my life has meaning.’ 

Sir Patrick Stewart (1940-2026)

Featured image; GQ Magazine

By Evie Simons

An indisputable icon of feminist literature worshipped by A-Level English Lit students, Plath’s most well-known works— her posthumous poetry collection Ariel and her sole novel The Bell Jar (with its upcoming film adaptation, controversially starring Billie Eilish as protagonist Esther, having been recently announced)— often leave her other writing somewhat overlooked.

I, like many others in my class, chose Plath as one of the authors to write my NEA on in year 13. In a bid to stand out to examiners, I went down a slightly different path and chose to look at her collection The Colossus, the only volume of Plath’s poetry published before her death. In doing so, I had my introduction to this greatly underrated collection, which, named metaphorically after her late father, delves into complex themes of death, grief, and how this connects mankind with the natural world. 

Plath’s focus on nature throughout The Colossus is what stood out to me the most in comparison with her other works. Having been written in the 50s and published in 1960, her eco-critical perspective seems rather prophetic and more relevant nowadays than ever. 

We can see this throughout the collection as Plath brings nature, or the resounding absence of it, to the forefront of her poems. She creates an anti-pastoral tone that we rarely see in literature, which seems to serve as a warning for readers as she demonstrates the repercussions that humanity, severing our intrinsic connection with nature, will have for society. We perhaps see this most clearly in her poem ‘Suicide Off Egg Rock’, in which an unnamed man sees his only option as suicide in a desperate plea to escape the torments of urban life. The poem begins with a strikingly unglamorous description of ‘hotdogs [which] split and drizzl[ed]/ On the public grills’, and ‘Gas tanks, factory stacks’, which likely explains the man’s suicidal state when we learn that he has become irrevocably connected with this environment (his‘bowels’ are described as part of the ‘landscape/ Of imperfections’). The poem tragically ends with the figure drowning himself in a final effort to find peace in nature, however even this is futile as he becomes part of ‘the sea’s garbage,/ A machine to breathe and beat forever.’

Plath highlights the interconnectedness of man and the environment and the importance of not destroying this bond— a theme that seems extremely pertinent in the current climate crisis and age of AI. 

This nihilistic yet necessary criticism of mankind’s growing identification with industrialisation and the urban world is also shown in the poem ‘Night Shift.’ This dystopian poem centres on factory workers and how their lives have become completely devoid of emotion and pleasantries as they have become enslaved as almost literal ‘cogs in a machine.’ Plath seems to continue her warning to us readers, demonstrating how destroying the natural world can have a detrimental effect on the human psyche. 

Although there are undoubtedly poems in The Colossus, such as ‘Manor Garden’ and ‘Watercolour of Grantchester Meadows’, in which nature and its beauty are depicted in a positive light, it is likely that Plath includes them to make its loss and consequences even more poignant. She urges readers to analyse their relationship with the environment and shows the significance of it by constantly using metaphors of nature to explore human experiences. We see this in the titular poem ‘The Colossus’, as Plath likens her late father to the fallen Colossus of Rhodes: ‘I crawl like an ant in mourning/ Over the weedy acres of your brow’, ‘The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.’ She uses natural imagery in order to navigate her grief and to immortalise her memory of her father, therefore once again highlighting how crucial nature’s presence is in our lives.

It seems a shame that such an important message, written around 70 years ago, remains extremely relevant and largely unaddressed. However, it exemplifies Plath’s foresight and her conscientiousness when writing The Colossus, which should be given much more credit and esteem than it has garnered. 

Featured image: Pinterest

By Ollie Cochran

There’s a moment in Howard Hawks’ seminal comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938) where Cary Grant’s David Huxley, a mild-mannered palaeontologist, has completely lost control of his life. He has spent a turbulent day being pursued by a woman he barely knows, tricked into escorting a leopard named Baby to Connecticut, kept from his own wedding, and, finally, relieved of his clothes. Now, wearing a ludicrous negligee and trying desperately to explain his garb, he responds with an exasperated, though now iconic, one-liner: “I just went gay all of a sudden!”

It is a ridiculous line in a ridiculous situation, made all the more remarkable by its reputation as the first use of “gay” (at least in its modern sense) in a Hollywood motion picture. But it also gets at something essential about Grant as a screen presence: no matter the circumstances, no matter the absurd getup, the persona seems to survive. Indeed, Grant is almost synonymous with the pinnacle of polished heterosexual masculinity – he wears immaculate clothes, he speaks with a clipped delivery, he carries the faint air of someone inherently aware of how the world works. But here these elements have been scrambled. 

Scrambled by what? Well, the question perhaps should be scrambled by whom. As it is Katharine Hepburn’s Susan Vance who has done the scrambling. She has made off with his clothes, as she earlier made off with his golf ball and car, and the line is uttered by a man finally dragged into her realm of nonsense. A lesser comedy might make one of them the clown and the other the foil. Here, both are funny, albeit in different registers. Hepburn’s comedy is momentum: Susan sails through each catastrophe in the film with total serenity, never once suspecting that her scatterbrained temperament is the cause. Grant’s comedy, on the other hand, is reaction: the double take, the strangled protest, the sentences he can never quite finish. Their lines collide at such a breakneck pace that the dialogue almost becomes percussion. Neither is the straight man, so every exchange lands twice. 

For, underneath the bickering, what they are doing is playing. There is scarcely a love scene in sight. Instead, Hawks treats us to scenes where two people who can hardly hold a conversation turn out to move perfectly together. Leaving a restaurant with her dress torn open, they walk out in lockstep, bodies pressed together, like a music-hall double act. Trying to coax a wayward leopard down from a roof, they find themselves singing in harmony. These are the film’s love scenes, disguised as slapstick: the pair are far more in sync long before they would admit to being in love. David’s fiancée promises him a marriage with no domestic entanglements, only work; Susan offers him a game. So, when Susan accidentally knocks over the giant brontosaurus skeleton David has spent four years painstakingly assembling, he can only admit that he has never enjoyed himself more. 

It is almost poetic that this same argument, that the right partner is the one who will play with you, is made in another film starring the pair. Released in the same year, George Cukor’s Holiday even repeats the set-up. Once again Grant is engaged to a woman who offers him work in place of fun: where David had his museum, Johnny Case has a nice desk reserved for him at his future father-in-law’s bank, when all he desires is a respite from the corporate ladder whilst he is young enough to enjoy it. And once again it is Hepburn who offers the game. Her Linda, the fiancée’s sister, keeps a playroom at the top of the family mansion, the only room which the Seton fortune has not managed to make solemn, and she recognises a fellow truant the moment Johnny walks in. On New Year’s Eve, whilst the engagement is announced to a ballroom of upper-class bigwigs downstairs, the real party is upstairs, among the toys. 

Where Susan and David collided, Linda and Johnny conspire, and this time the comic roles have been inverted. It is now Grant who supplies the momentum, with his somersaults and his scheme to retire young and work later, and Hepburn who is granted the reactions – the delighted stare, the slow grin of someone who has been waiting years for the right man to show up. Once again, the love scene arrives disguised as a stunt. The two tumble in the playroom together – the acrobatics performed by Grant himself with his background as a vaudevillian performer – and the game carries more weight than ever. Linda is falling for her sister’s fiancé and cannot say so. Play is the only language afforded to her, and lucky for her he is the only in the house who speaks it. 

This is why their screen partnership still works. Other couples of the period fall in love; Hepburn and Grant find someone to play with, and their films are all the more fun for it. As for the polished Cary Grant we began with, he never stood a chance. He looks far happier in the negligee.

Featured Image: RKO Radio Pictures

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533, oil on wood, 207 cm by 209.5 cm, The National Gallery

By Lily Whewell

The precise meaning of The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger has been subject to scrutiny by art historians and art aficionados alike for centuries. 

On the one hand, the various elements which make up the composition are straightforward enough. It depicts Jean de Dinteville, Francis I’s ambassador to England, on the left, and his friend Georges de Selve, a bishop, on the right, standing either side of a table cluttered with objects. On the top shelf are a celestial globe and astronomical instruments whilst the bottom shelf displays a Lutheran hymn book and a collection of musical instruments in disarray; close observation of the flute case reveals a missing flute, and one of the lute’s strings is broken. The upper level of the table has been interpreted by critics as representing the unity of the heavens in contrast to the disorder on earth on the lower level. Many aspects of the work supply an underlying atmosphere of unease, the most obvious being the large and distorted skull which occupies the foreground, a memento mori or reminder of the fragility of life. In reading the rich symbolism of the work, art historians have tended to interpret The Ambassadors as a manifestation of Reformation-anxiety, the fear that Catholicism would be overturned by a new Protestant world order. 

Although religious instability is an undeniable aspect of the message conveyed by Holbein, Dr Bendor Grosvenor’s discussion of the work in the podcast Waldy and Bendy’s Adventures in Art supplies further understanding through his observation of one, easily overlooked detail: the floor. 

Grosvenor points out that the geometric pattern of the floor is the Cosmati pavement, which was completed in 1268 on the order of Henry III and found before the High Altar at Westminster Abbey. The floor also holds Holbein’s signature and the date of the work (1533), concealed by the shadow of Jean de Dinteville. Considering these details, Grosvenor argues that Holbein is transporting us to Westminster Abbey where Anne Boleyn was crowned that year, an occasion Jean de Dinteville attended. Subsequently, he suggests that The Ambassadors specifically reflects an anxiety over Anne Boleyn’s ‘reformist sympathies’, rather than a more general fear of Protestantism. This more nuanced interpretation, derived from an observation of the floor, is compelling. 

Much great art encourages the viewer to look up, but after Grosvenor’s revelation, I began to question what happens when we start looking down? How many other works of art could we further decode by simply paying attention to what is going on beneath the subject’s feet? 

Steven van der Meulen, Portrait of Elizabeth I (The Hampden Portrait), c. 1563, oil on panel, transferred onto canvas, recently exhibited at Philip Mould & Company

The floor in early modern portraiture proves to be often enriched with symbolism. The Ditchley Portrait of Elizabeth I, painted circa 1592 by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, is an obvious example. In the portrait, Elizabeth stands on a globe of the world with her feet firmly planted in Oxfordshire. In this instance, the floor alludes to the patron of the work, Sir Henry Lee, who likely commissioned the work to commemorate a performance he had held in the Queen’s honour at his home in Ditchley, Oxfordshire. In another portrait of Elizabeth, the earliest surviving full-length painting of the monarch painted by Steven van der Meulen, the floor is sumptuously covered by rugs to amplify the status of the subject. Oriental rugs and carpets originating from the Islamic world were frequently depicted in European artwork from the fourteenth century onwards, initially in works of religious themes, but subsequently co-opted by elite portraiture as a means of conveying wealth and high-status. 

Attributed to Jan van Belcamp, The Great Picture, 1646, oil on canvas, 254 cm by 358 cm, Abbot Hall. Image credit: Lakeland Arts

A less famous example of how an artist could utilise the floor for both symbolic and practical purposes can be found in The Great Picture, attributed to the artist Jan van Belcamp. This triptych painting is a visual history of the Clifford family, commissioned by Lady Anne Clifford in 1646 to commemorate her inheritance of the family estates after a forty-year legal battle with her uncle and his heirs. The central panel depicts Anne’s parents, George Clifford, 3^rd Earl of Cumberland and his wife Margaret, with their two sons before Anne was born. Upon the death of the Earl of Cumberland in 1605, Anne was set to inherit the vast Clifford estates after her two older brothers had died in their youth, but she was instead disinherited by her father who controversially named his brother as heir. The left panel presents Anne aged fifteen after she had been disinherited, whilst the right panel depicts Anne, twice married, having finally secured her rightful inheritance. 

Although this is a painting rife with encoded messages, it is – unsurprisingly – the floor I wish to draw your attention to. Under the feet of the young and disinherited Anne, the floor is plain and nondescript, simply scattered with a couple of books suggestive of her learnedness. The right-hand panel presents an obvious contrast; having now repossessed her family estates, Anne stands on an oriental rug to emphasise her status as a wealthy widow. The central panel does something entirely different. Belcamp has co-opted a chequerboard floor to imbue the room with a sense of depth, a device of perspective developed by the artists of the Italian Renaissance. An especially clear example of this effect can be seen in Juan Bautista del Mazo’s depiction of Queen Mariana of Spain in mourning. Whilst looking at the floor in The Great Picture does not provide an entirely new appreciation of the message of the work as it does in The Ambassadors, it does play a fundamental role in creating perspective and enhancing the symbolism of each panel. 

This article has provided just a couple of examples, largely focused on early modern English portraiture, of how our appreciation of figurative art can become more acute when we take time to look at what is going on, quite literally, under our noses. I challenge you to consider the floor, whether it holds an artist’s signature, a recognisable geometric pattern or a clever rendering of space, next time you find yourself in front of a work of art; it can be a surprisingly fruitful exercise. 

Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Queen Mariana of Spain in Mourning, 1666, oil on canvas, 196.8 cm by 146 cm, The National Gallery.

By Cara Crofts

“Sometimes, while I am making a tapestry, a melody comes to my head. Then I stop, grab the guitar, and the melody flows with the same ease as if… I was preparing soup!” – Violeta Parra.

Chilean folksinger and artist Violeta Parra dismisses any struggle in her relationship with song – tunes seemingly arrived to her on the breeze amidst the day to day dreariness of stock pots and weaving. Her life could not be characterised by the same soup-making, lyric-writing ease. Financial hardship following the death of their father sent a 13-year-old Parra and her siblings to the streets, playing music for spare change or food in the midst of Chile’s Great Depression of the early 30s. It was through singing for supper that her lifelong need for lyricism began to grow; she came to find – and to crave – solace in the storytelling capacity of music. Songwriting became an addictive antidote for her ensuing bouts of depression. In her poetic autobiography Parra prescribes writing as a remedy which “calms the torments of the soul” but, although her soul might have found some lightness in outpourings of words and melodies, a deep-rooted melancholy tugs on many of her verses.

Parra’s haunting “Gracias a la Vida” is a bittersweet thank you to life, released on her final album Las últimas composiciones in 1966 before her suicide in 1967. Some of its mournful tone is stripped away by the more upbeat tempo of Joan Baez’s famous 1974 anti-war cover. For Baez, recording a home performance in 2020 during the Covid lockdown, “Gracias a la Vida” has the potential – as it always did – to be an anthem which can “help to raise our spirit in difficult times”.

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado la risa y me ha dado el llanto
Así yo distingo dicha de quebranto
Los dos materiales que forman mi canto

It wasn’t until the 50s that Parra became a folklorista. A conversation in 1953 with her brother Nicanor revealed that Chilean folk culture, following its decline during the 40s,  was being put under the academic microscope by university students as though it was a thing of the past. “Tradition is already almost a corpse”, lamented Parra at the time, so she began crossing the country to learn the traditional folk music of the Chilean countryside. She would help rural families in the fields or with the household in exchange for being taught to sing. An elderly farmer taught her to play the 25-string Chilean guitarrón, an instrument normally only for men. Not knowing musical notation did not deter Parra – she invented her own. The stories and skills she collected fuelled the songs which Parra started to write and release, and the national reception of these albums popularised a culture that had been on the verge of extinction; her Dylan-like breathing of new life into traditional folk music was a radio success. Across the Atlantic over a century earlier, 19-year-old Edward Bunting began a 47 year-long project recording and preserving music of the last Irish harpers. The titular poem of Moya Cannon’s brilliant collection Bunting’s Honey (2025) pays tribute to him with words that ring true of Parra’s preservation of her country’s music: “for what do a musician’s hands ever hold / but the hammered treasure of the human soul?”

During Chile’s 50s folk revival, photographer Sergio Larraín accompanied Parra to a working class boliche (pub) in a disadvantaged neighbourhood of Santiago. She began drumming the table, singing until the crowned joined in. “They sang beautiful songs,” recalled Larraín, “they were guys who seemed very dejected, but that’s where the music was.” Shared hardship continued to inspire Parra’s musical output with her pioneering of the Chilean nueva canción (new song) musical and political movement in the 1960s. The nueva canción did not stay confined within Chile’s bordering Andes mountain ranges; it spread across Latin America and brought social consciousness and protest to the core of the continent’s music.

Photographs of Parra depict her curled over an acoustic guitar, or a 25-string Chilean guitarrón, but she had a polymath career as a composer, singer, writer, poet, painter, textile artist, ceramicist and sculptor. In 1959, she contracted hepatitis, and the following bedridden months spurred on her main burst of production of visual art, which continued until 1965. Chile’s elitist art scene during the early 60s favoured traditional oil on canvas, so Parra’s arpilleras (embroidered burlap tapestries) or papier-mâché sculptures were not well received. 1960’s Europe, brimming with experimentation and New Realism’s ‘poetic recycling’, took more kindly to Parra’s abstract style and creative use of materials. She was the first Latin American artist to have a solo exhibit at the Louvre in Paris in 1964, turning her space in the gallery into a traditional Chilean ramada by playing guitar and serving Chilean food. Few items beat empanadas for uniting groups of people, but the floors of the Louvre did not erupt into cueca dancing in the way Parra might have hoped.

Alongside scenes of rural campesino culture, Parra advocated for peace through much of her art. Her tapestry Contra la Guerra denounces the harsh political oppression in Chile during the years leading up to Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Contra la guerra (Against War), 1962, embroidery on fabric.

“This [political unrest] I don’t like at all,” Parra bluntly stated in a 1965 interview , “so my way of protesting is through painting.”  She explains the four embroidered figures in Contra la Guerra: herself and three Latin American friends, united by their desire for peace, each holding a dove. Unambiguous symbols are at play; a dove is shot in mid-flight by a rifle – those in power do not listen to their people. The flowers sprouting from the heads of the friends suggest continued resistance. Parra is unpretentious with her protest art; the pacifist messages are consistently clear and striking, much like her songs.

La cantante calva (The Bald Soprano), 1960, yute embroidered with wool.

With embroidering and painting Parra found an alternative to singing during her period suffering from hepatitis, but in her artwork sound still manages to explode out of the visual. La cantante calva evokes Parra’s frustration with her temporary inability to sing; the bird-shaped vases seem to be attempting to squawk a tune, but the swirling cords of wool are bottled up in their stomachs, unable to escape from the beaks in song form. Simultaneously, sound appears to be gushing out of the harpist’s mouth. The ascending circles serve a double function as the harp’s curvature and an outpouring of speech bubbles from the harpist’s perfectly aligned lips. The onlooking yellow figure adds to the imagined soundscape with a mouth curled into a neat ‘O’, perhaps whistling along.

As in La cantante calva, the neck of the player in Parra’s papier-mâché Violinista bends to meet the instrument.

Violeta Parra, Violinista (Violinist), 1964-1965, papier-mâché (left); Marc Chagall, Le Violiniste Bleu (The Blue Violinist), 1947, oil on canvas (right).

It is difficult to tell where the violin ends and the musician begins; in the three-dimensional crumpled fusion of paint and paper the instrument and its player appear inseparable. The figure’s tilting stature and colour tones are reminiscent of Chagall’s The Blue Violinist (1947). In both, a hand glows white as though reflecting moonlight, the fingers splayed widely around the violin’s bow. The hand takes centre stage and seems detached from the violinist’s body, playing of its own accord while the newspaper man’s face tilts towards us expectantly, willing us to hear some musicality.

Parra’s own expression captures her artwork perfectly – her arpilleras are “songs that paint themselves”. It is impossible to imagine Parra at a blank canvas. She sought out the fabric of her country and was a whisperer of the threads of people’s stories; as if under her spell they wove together into words, tapestries and song. Her hunger for stories never died. To hear and see Parra’s art and music is not to be bowled over by perfection, but to encounter people. When asked to choose between song, painting or embroidery as the only form of artistic expression, she replied simply: “I would keep people.” The response of a true folklorista. What Violeta Parra craved more than creating was to connect with and connect the folk behind the lore.

Featured image: Thiago de Mello, 1960-1961, Museo Violeta Parra

By Saoirse Pira

Around two-thirds of the way through Frances Ha (2012), Frances Halladay sits on the terrace at a dinner party she doesn’t quite belong to, drinking wine she can’t really afford, and delivers a monologue about what she wants from love. It’s what she wants out of a relationship, but it’s something altogether grander than that – “a secret world that no one else knows about, that exists right there in public unnoticed – sort of like how they say other dimensions exist all around us but we don’t have the ability to perceive them.” She’s drunk, but articulate, and it’s a clarity withheld from any of her romantic scenes. It’s not about romance, not really. It’s about her best friend; it’s about Sophie. It has always been about Sophie, about friendship, that foundational love. It’s recollection dressed up as longing; not wishing for some abstract love somewhere in the future, but reaching back through memory to the love that has, as of yet, defined her adult life. 

Frances, played by Greta Gerwig with a sort of kinetic awkwardness, is overcome with the particular humiliations of growing up and being outgrown. It’s not that she is opposed to adulthood, she just hasn’t quite found a version of it that feels authentic to her. Over the course of the film, we watch Frances, a twenty-seven year old dancer in New York, attempt to construct a life out of a series of increasingly unconvincing arrangements. She moves between apartments, between jobs, between friendships, between versions of herself. She is not quite successful enough to be successful, not quite unsuccessful enough to admit defeat, and not quite young enough to pretend that there is no urgency about her life. She is a dancer without a company, a woman without a permanent home, without a stable romantic relationship and, for much of the film, whose idea of the future still contains her best friend, at almost every point. 

The film opens with a montage, backed by the delightfully twee “Camille” by Georges Delerue (from Le Mépris), of the two women moving through life with pure and simple joy. They play-fight in public, fall asleep, head-to-shoulder on the subway, read and knit, cook, do laundry, smoke cigarettes out of two adjacent windows in their apartment. It’s all wrapped up in love. Later, after Frances breaks up with her boyfriend unceremoniously (he wants her to move in with him, she wants to stay with Sophie), the pair find themselves back in their apartment. Frances jokes that they are like a lesbian couple that don’t have sex anymore, they laugh about Sophie’s boyfriend, lie together in Sophie’s bed. Frances asks Sophie to tell her “the story of us,” and it’s a kind of dance they do together, rehearsed and metabolised. It’s a story that is a dream of the future, in which they are together, ever-inseparable. Their friendship is the beating heart of the film, and in this vision of the future, Frances and Sophie are upheld less as separate souls, and more as each other’s other half. They’re “the same person with different hair,” only Sophie is the version who might succeed at the ordinary business of adulthood. The problem isn’t that the two women have become dangerously entangled, but that the entanglement was the best thing either of them had, and that eventually, something would have to give – someone would have to grow up. 

Which is, of course, exactly what Sophie goes on to do. The centre cannot hold, and the story of us is interrupted by the ordinary attrition of adult life, in a series of small defections  that accumulate into one swelling ache of abandonment. Sophie is offered a better apartment in Tribeca, one Frances can’t afford to join her in, gets serious with her boyfriend Patch, moves to Japan with him, gets engaged. There’s a title card, a new address, a new chapter in the story of them. Sophie doesn’t wrong Frances explicitly; there is no instance of her telling Frances that she is leaving her behind, because that is not, technically, what she is doing, what she means to do. Sophie is simply doing what twenty-seven year olds with functioning careers and relationships do. It’s all perfectly reasonable, and that’s precisely what makes Frances’ grief so hard to name, let alone justify to anyone else. The tragedy belongs solely to Frances, who is left to grieve a friendship that has not ended, only outpaced her, and for which there is no accepted vocabulary of loss. Nobody sends flowers when your best friend’s life goes well without you.

Baumbach and Gerwig get at something about coming-of-age here – an understanding that growing up is rarely, if ever, a single threshold deliberately crossed. Rather, more often it’s an ache inferred over time, from the fact that someone you grew up with, built your identity alongside, has started living a different kind of life that is not predicated on you.

I first watched Frances Ha at eighteen, and I’ve watched it more than ten times since – it’s my favourite film, which is not a claim I make lightly or revise often. Somewhere along the way, it also became a kind of accidental litmus test; I’ve made most everyone in my life sit through it with me, and I don’t mean for it to function as a test of character, but there is always something telling, something pointed, in the way a person responds to the film, to Frances. I should not take it as a personal attack, of course, when a friend tells me they found Frances annoying, embarrassing, pretentious – but I can’t help it, really. I can’t shake the feeling that the embarrassment is the point: it is so incredibly humiliating to be shaking off your adolescence, to be suddenly so publicly behind schedule. 

Back home in Sacramento for Christmas, Frances is submerged in the bathtub at her parents’ house. It’s a close up of her face, she’s catching water in her mouth. Her mother is at the door, she wants to come in. Exasperated, she asks Frances, “How much longer?” It’s a short scene, all of fifteen seconds. There’s no grand swell of music, there’s no music at all. It’s quiet and intimate, it’s absolute urgency. She’s in the bathroom, taking up space – she’s underwater, and it’s on purpose. How much longer will she be? How much longer can she remain, submerged and arrested, grieving an abstract loss, suspended between adulthood she can’t quite claim and adolescence she can no longer justify? That’s the thing about growing up, in the end. There is no definitive moment at which somebody tells you that you have to become an adult, one at which you oblige. Eventually, you are simply expected to get out of the bath.

In “the story of us”, Frances and Sophie dreamed in tandem. They would co-own a vacation apartment in Paris, have lovers and no children, speak at college graduations, and receive honorary degrees. Then, later, on a credit card and a whim, Frances does actually go to Paris, alone, for a weekend. It is a place she had imagined as part of the shared mythology of their friendship, but it’s one she wanders through alone, jetlagged, sleeping through the day. She has flown halfway across the world to do precious little, trying to conjure a dream into reality with only half the parts. While Frances tries to bring about some sense of the future they had imagined, Sophie is doing the opposite. She has changed the score – she is living a life, building a future, and it’s not the one they had dreamed of together. It’s a life that has begun to make sense to other people.

But what becomes clear is precisely how little either woman actually gets from moving forward alone. Frances returns from Paris, having spent money she doesn’t have to visit a city that means nothing without Sophie in it. It’s not long after this that Sophie, too, spins out. Drunk and adrift in her own way, she comes to Frances in the middle of the night, needs her in a way that both recalls their old way and subverts it slightly. She tells Frances that she always felt competitive with her, and it’s an aspect of their dynamic we, nor Frances, had ever realised. There’s a sort of clarity there, an admission of fallibility, the quiet part is finally said out loud. 

Sophie goes on to marry Patch, and Frances goes on, too, to build something of her own. She takes a desk job at the dance company, she makes herself useful in a way that is less glamorous, though considerably more stable than anything we had seen her hold down previously. She choreographs her own piece, her own show. It’s gorgeous and decidedly Frances. Sophie comes to the show, and it happens: across a crowded room, Frances and Sophie catch each other’s eye. They look at each other, each kind of laughing, and they’re two bodies made up purely of love. Colleen, Frances’ boss, asks her who she is making eyes at, and of course it’s Sophie, it’s her best friend. It’s the moment Frances had always wanted, the pair of them in that secret world, finally, again.

We leave Frances as she moves into an apartment of her own; it’s far from the sort of place that would have made it into her and Sophie’s story, but it’s nice, and it’s hers. She writes her name on a piece of paper to slide into her mail box. She tries it, it doesn’t quite fit – she has to fold it slightly to get it in. Once in, it simply reads: FRANCES HA. It lands somewhere between punchline and good closure. It isn’t the life she and Sophie had dreamed of together in youth, it’s not Paris and lovers and honorary degrees. It’s smaller, it’s compromised, and it fits. She has made a life that fits.

Featured Image: IFC Films

By Liv Thomas

The mid-19th-century pavements of Manchester and Salford would often bear the footsteps of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose encounters with the harsh industrial conditions kindled ideas that would reverberate far beyond the city’s rauch und ruß. In the 1950s, those same pavements felt the same steady tread of L.S. Lowry, an artist who, when his paintings failed to make any profit, turned to the prosaic vocation of rent collecting – wandering the less fortunate quarters of both cities, gathering his modest income, and taking in the quiet scenes that would later find their way onto his canvases. 

One cannot help but notice the irony wherein the very streets that bred The Communist Manifesto would later see an artist navigating them as rent collector, inspecting the homes of working class families and simply trying to make ends meet. Having missed his train one day in 1916, Lowry stumbled upon the loose end of a Manchester suburb with a happenstance ACME Spinning Company Mill in full churn. He would later recall, “The mill was turning out hundreds of little, pinched figures, heads bent down… I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture.” This view, a boilerplate skyline of brick, chimney, and chilly smoke, suddenly brimmed with a new life under the realisation that no one else was painting this. Lowry thus decided to put the industrial scene “on the map because nobody had seriously done it”, and from then on, Pendlebury’s mills, Salford’s back alleys, and Manchester’s markets became his muse.  

Today’s Manchester is a hive of activity, its identity manifesting in the iconography of worker-bee souvenirs and a pulsing music scene. Much the same could be said of Lowry’s Manchester, though gift shops were much less in vogue and its soundtrack not yet touched by the likes of ‘The Smiths’ and ‘Joy Division’. Nevertheless, his canvases feature a similar population of matchstick figures in dense crowds, set against red-bricked factories and rows of terraced houses. 

In a 1957 BBC documentary on his life’s work, Lowry comments, “I just paint the people as I see the people in my mind’s eye,” a philosophy that creates an almost dreamlike process in which, rather than sketching soldiers or machinery from life, memories and local lore fill the scene – figures he described as “not exactly” Manchester workpeople but ghostly silhouettes that “seem to me so beautiful,” drifting through factories and streets. His speech was marked throughout by an insouciant “I don’t mind it at all,” and on the particular settings of his paintings, he observes, “I don’t mind it at all whether they’re today or yesterday or any other time.” A Christie’s curator notes that “Lowry is beloved by us for making the industrial scene his own. These works were created in his own unique way, poetic yet not sentimental, compelling… but never judgmental.” Indeed, Lowry claimed he did not paint to agitate or reform. “I was not thinking very much about the people in the way a social reformer does,” he admitted, “They are part of a private beauty that haunted me.” 

After all, it is not difficult to locate his work within the mid-century backdrop of Manchester’s smoking chimneys and flat caps, all seemingly tethered to a different alien to our own. The idea that it could belong equally to today or yesterday feels, at first, like a fragment of his time rather than ours. And yet. Watching that documentary during the final stretch of a degree in English Literature at Durham University (with all the existential static that attends a completed education and its ensuing blurry prospects), I found myself looking out of my bedroom window and recognising that today and yesterday. There is something in Lowry’s figures, drifting through those industrial thoroughfares, anonymous and unhurried, that refuses to be confined to any particular moment, and, for all the years that lie between Lowry’s world and our own, you may also find yourself absorbed into the slow ebb of a crowd. 

A self-proclaimed simple and lazy man, with little penchant for the “usual humdrum job,” Lowry occupies a peculiar position in the landscape of British Painters. Despite establishing an absence of ideology behind his art, it nevertheless maintains an air of its own reason. His canvases carry a certain passivity, the quality of an image recalled only in the fleeting, unfocused moments of everyday life: walking to the shops, walking through a familiar street, trying not to make eye contact with the strangers who are also simply getting on with things – reminiscent of the life my own grandma would describe to me. 

Yet. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had cast a long shadow over conservative British taste, its legacy of medieval romance and religious symbolism still colouring the expectations of what serious painting ought to look like. Within this same broad moment, artists like René Magritte were fashioning their ordinary figures within the realm of surreality, bending the everyday toward the uncanny and the subconscious. 

Stanley Spencer, with his quiet English churchyards and resurrected dead, transfigured the familiar into something devotional and intense. All of it, in its various ways, beckons beyond the everyday… reaching toward a distant past, an exploration of the self, or some higher plane of meaning which the visible and tangible world alone cannot contain. The Royal Academy, meanwhile, clung to its traditions of historical grandeur and mythological scene-painting, its Arthurian knights and Sunday School virgins dressed in a culture reluctant to look itself in the eye. 

Lowry wanted none of it, though not out of any particular rejection so much as something closer to indifference. Where his contemporaries turned the outward world into a framing for the inward one, Lowry showed little interest in being the kind of man who made his own mind the subject. He painted what he saw, and from this, he made something that the Southron art scene never would have thought to.

As such, within this peculiar space occupied by Lowry, and in spite of his assertions otherwise, he has come to embody a politics of representation, in that, by portraying the today and yesterday of Northern England, his art performs an act of attention that the broader culture had largely refused to make. The mills, back streets, and crowds filing out of factory gates were not the typical subjects that hung in the Royal Academy, nor the stuff of which artistic reputations were typically made, so much so that critics would describe the people in his paintings as “figures like insects”, one reviewer conceding he was “original but narrow and repetitive.” Yet Lowry paid them no mind: when asked why his figures always came out the same, he shrugged, “Because I can’t do them in any other way.” 

I would locate these criticisms in their own explicit form of classism towards the industrial North and its people; regardless, Lowry has made a legacy out of what these critics turn their noses up at, a legacy experienced by many. At a time when art was expected either to transcend its surroundings or to interrogate them, Lowry did neither. Within Lowry’s paintings, the lives of working people in the industrial North were as worthy of a canvas as an Arthurian legend. He did not sentimentalise them, and in doing so, preserved something that might otherwise have passed entirely unrecorded. 

While Lowry’s location is settled in Manchester, this legacy speaks to his future and our present. With the passing of Bradford legend David Hockney, the way in which northern artists offer us a grounding with reality seems more relevant than ever. Hockney, whose work occupies a much later decade than Lowry’s but who was also initially criticised for his simplicity and subject to mixed reviews from the Royal College of Art, is evidence of what Bradfordian journalist Ben Forrest writes: “Working-class people, and northern people more generally, aren’t afforded much of a foothold in the art world, and children are increasingly being persuaded to ignore their artistic sensibilities in favour of developing practical skills aimed at funnelling them into the job market.” And Lowry, the self-proclaimed simple man, demonstrates a similar trajectory – his mills may no longer churn, his crowds may wear different coats, but the ebb and flow stays steady. 

Featured Image: Pinterest

By David Bayne-Jardine

This year, on June 11^th, British artist David Hockney passed away at the age of 88 in his London home. 

A record-breaker on many fronts, Hockney’s iconically bright and bold paintings garnered him immense success within the market. In 2018, his famous Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) sold for $90 million at Christie’s, New York, making it the most expensive artwork sold at auction by a living artist.

Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 120 in.

Despite this, his is usually not the most famous name associated with the Pop Art movement (we likely imagine the technicolour renditions of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol). However, David Hockney played a substantial role in defining not just the UK’s version of the trend, but also Modern British art more broadly. 

Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and educated at various prestigious art schools, Hockney found his success, like many of his contemporaries, in railing against the traditional aesthetic values taught to him at the Royal College of Art. Tired of being expected to engage with the lofty subject matter and conventional techniques of ‘classical’ art, Hockney and other likeminded Pop artists turned to mass culture for their inspiration. 

This is why 1960s California – a setting known for its post-war consumerist culture, booming media industries and shifting political landscape – served as inspiration for much of Hockney’s art when he was living out there. His use of acrylic paint on canvas, rather than oil, worked to capture the garish shininess of the swimming pools and glass houses that dotted the scenes of the American South West. A Bigger Splash (1967) depicts the almost eerie stillness of this lifestyle. Soaked and saturated in sun, with the splash of a swimmer frozen in time, this poolside scene captures leisure and wealth without a visible subject. 

Acrylic on canvas, 95.5 x 96 in. 

Returning to the UK and France in his later life, Hockney’s subject matter shifted to portraiture and the sweeping landscapes of his home county, Yorkshire. In the final decades of his life, Hockney became known for his iPad artworks of the area, with a print of his Arrival of Spring in Woldgate (2011) selling for $1 million at Sotheby’s in 2025, making it the most expensive iPad painting ever sold at auction. 

Beyond the successful and experimental artist, however, lay a man equally as memorable for his personal life. As a gay man who came out before the legalisation of same-sex relationships, Hockney has become an icon for the LGBT+ community – one who engaged boldly with touching scenes of same-sex love and intimacy in a time when many sought to bring down his emerging community. He was also an icon of style, famed for his signature round glasses, eccentric clothing and bright yellow Crocs, which he famously wore to meet the King at Buckingham Palace in 2022. 

It seems, then, that there are many versions of Hockney to be remembered upon his death: the artist, the activist, the fashionista… But perhaps it was Dame Tracy Emin, another titan of Modern British art known for her provocative confessional works, who summarises him best:

‘[Hockney was] a great artist and a wonderful man, who with the power of art changed the perception of Britishness. [He was] a proud chain-smoking homosexual, who flew the flag higher than any other British artist.’

Rest in Peace David Hockney, 1937-2026. 

Featured Image – Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, accessed at https://pallant.org.uk/perspectives-art-in-focus-kaisarion-hockney/

By Matthew Dodd

‘Change my dear, and it seems not a moment too soon’

–        The Sixth Doctor, Doctor Who, 1984

‘I don’t want to go’

–        The Tenth Doctor, Doctor Who, 2010

In the most unceremonious of ways, a midweek Instagram post, a British cultural institution of more than half a century was, not for the first time, put to rest. Or rather, it was, like a wounded dog limping from showrunner to showrunner, lifeline to lifeline, finally put out of its misery in an overwhelming cloud of indifference. Doctor Who – the British science fiction show launched in 1963, cancelled in 1989, temporarily resurrected in 1996, and brought back proper in 2005 – was confirmed by the BBC to not be returning to screens this Christmas, as was previously announced. Indeed, the show will not be returning to screens at all, until such time as a new co-production partner can be found. The current showrunner and production company have left the programme, and the property is to be put out to competitive tender in the coming months. Russell T Davies, the man who has the peculiar distinction of having both resuscitated and euthanised the programme, washed his hands of the show he credits with launching his interest in television – as well as, in no small part, his career – with curious detachment: ‘and so GOODBYE from me to Doctor Who but HELLO to a big new future for the show’, he wrote in a rambling Instagram caption. In the same caption, he admitted that he never had a plan for the show going forward, and that previous assertions to the contrary were but a clever piece of theatrical misdirection.

As any fan of the longest running Sci-Fi show in history will know, Doctor Who has long been lumbering through crisis after crisis, constantly battling an existential danger far worse than any Dalek or Cyberman. The show has been haemorrhaging viewers for over a decade and hasn’t been the nationally unifying Saturday night staple it once was since Matt Smith left the TARDIS. Their own worst enemies, Doctor Who fans will endlessly debate when it was that the show went off – after David Tennant morphed into a CGI goblin, after Russell T Davies left the first time, after Matt Smith made an erection joke with his sonic screwdriver, after Chris Chibnall rewrote the show’s mythology and cast Bradley Walsh, etc., etc. – but the truth is that the show has been held hostage by its own mythology from the very beginning. For twenty years it has grown heavy under the weight of its own narrative baggage. In this way, it has become the archetype for the kind of cultural inertia experienced across our contemporary mass media: a self-reflexive world of ‘fandom’ written by and for people who already know and love the property. For a show so fundamentally about change, Doctor Who – like so much of our modern culture – is terrified of the unknown.

The great trick to Doctor Who’s longevity is both narrative and practical. In 1966, when William Hartnell, the first actor to play the titular role, was becoming an increasingly difficult and unreliable presence on set, the show’s producers came up with a novel idea to continue the show without its hero: regeneration. In regeneration – the in-universe mechanism by which The Doctor is able to heal himself from mortal injury by changing his chemical construction – had the effect of offering Doctor Who a method to continue in perpetuity. Regeneration allowed for characters to be reshuffled alongside writers, directors, and design philosophies. If the show was failing under one team, regeneration offered a mechanism to swap them out, supported by the show’s own mythology. Under such a guise have instrumental changes been made to the show’s format, soundtrack, logo, and everything in between. More than that, however, regeneration cemented the central theme of the show as one of change. When Patrick Troughton emerged as the Second Doctor, he proclaimed to his questioning companions that ‘life depends on change, and renewal’. It’s that notion of constant evolution, of the way in which we all live many lives in our one, which has guided the show for sixty years. As long as the show believed in that conviction, it could live forever. In recent years, however, change has been overtaken as the driving force of the show by its more sinister cousin, regression. So then, we might contend that the moment Doctor Who precipitated its own doom was not with any shift in writer, actor, or storyline, but rather when David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor looked towards the camera in his final outing and, with tears mounting in his eyes, proclaimed, ‘I don’t want to go’.

The moment functions well in its context. It is the tragic sight of a character, burdened by years of narrative angst, finally buckling under the weight of trauma and accepting, as we all must, our innate fear of death. A few seconds later, Matt Smith arrived on screen and the machinery of the Whoniverse began running once more, with a successful rebrand under showrunner Steven Moffat. Yet it represented a paramount concession to fan expectation and the reluctance to change. It was, perhaps, not a major incident at the time – the show would achieve wide international acclaim in the Moffat era – but nevertheless planted a seed of reactionaryism that would come to the fore years later. Tennant was, and remains, certainly the most popular of the modern iterations of The Doctor. As such, it was no surprise that his leaving the show should be worth a teary adieu. Yet, compared to the departures of previous fan favourites, his can’t help but feel egregious. When Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor – by far and away the most popular of the original run – left the show, his final words were of hope and perseverance: ‘it’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for.’ The turn from one philosophy to the other, from the stoic farewell to the bleary-eyed plea, is a turn inward: the sign of a show rapidly becoming centred on itself.

Hayao Miyazaki, the great Japanese animator, courted controversy for his criticism of anime – a genre he helped to popularise – as being ultimately doomed in the modern day by its lack of inspiration. As a young director, he recalled being inspired by the films of Kurosawa and the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin, and how these broad multimedia influences came through and were synthesised in his animation. Now, he claims with regret, anime directors are expressly and solely influenced by other anime. As such, the genre becomes self-feeding and incapable of genuine growth. We can track the same trend in the sphere of western popular culture. In the 1980s, when Steven Spielberg and George Lucas wanted to make an homage to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the adventure films of their youth, they made cinematic history with Indiana Jones. In 2023, when James Mangold was tasked with making an homage to Indiana Jones, he made a sequel to Indiana Jones. In the same vein, we need only look at the most culturally ubiquitous of American cinematic exports: Star Wars.

With the first film in 1977, George Lucas was drawing on his love of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress – at one time considering Toshiro Mifune for the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi – and concerns about the imperial machinery of the United States. In the franchise’s most recent outing, The Mandalorian and Grogu, the inspirational roots of the film are found nowhere deeper than those previous Star Wars films, as well as the attached apocrypha of television shows and comic books. The leads – heralded as the faces of a new era – are, in effect, stand-ins for two of the franchise’s original characters, Boba Fett and Yoda. This, concocted with a culture of ‘fandom’, has created a cultural ouroboros. As Roger Ebert observed in 2009, ‘a lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It’s all about them. They have mastered the “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion.’ It is these extreme fans who now hold the keys to our popular culture: either as the creative minds behind the latest Star Trek reboot, or else the ‘influencers’ endlessly agitating about their pet franchises. The studio system upholds this cultural stunting: why take the risk on a new property, or even a new character, when you can endlessly resuscitate an old one? In 2026, we reach a new low in this chronic resistance to the new with HBO’s Harry Potter. After J.K. Rowling’s prequel series Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them failed to live up to the box-office juggernaut which was its predecessor, Warner Bros have returned to the, by now, decomposing horse of the Harry Potter corpus to create a reboot which shares music, designs, plots, and even actors with the original films. There is nothing new to be extracted from this project, only subscriptions to the newly launched HBO Max streaming service. Popular culture is becoming a simulacrum of itself.

Doctor Who provides, perhaps, the clearest and largest scale example in British popular culture of this destructive self-reflexivity. The seeds of Doctor Who’s undoing have always been rooted in an over-reverencing of the show’s canon. When the show returned under Russell T Davies in 2005, it presented itself as something genuinely new. The original show, though a national institution, had become something of a laughing stock by the time of its cancellation. It was a show for strange, emotionally stunted men in anoraks, replete with over-complicated plots, flimsy sets, and saltshaker robots. With Christopher Eccleston, it became must-watch television. It was well-written, funny, and grounded. The world of the show felt genuinely relevant and rooted in the experience of 21^st century British life. Rose Tyler, the Doctor’s companion across the first two series of the revived show, was a shop assistant who lived on a council estate, offered the keys to the universe. The monsters were analogues for trauma, weight loss fads, the Iraq war, and modern slavery. The stories were personal and drawn together by coherent thematic threads: escapist fairy tales that were never afraid to touch on the real. After twenty years in the wilderness, Doctor Who was a show that meant something again. Two decades later, with Russell T Davies once more at the helm, Doctor Who has never felt more out of touch.

A popular prognosis for Doctor Who’s decline has been its surrender to so called wokeism. Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, blamed the BBC for ruining a show he once loved with its flagrant kowtowing to the militant left (we are to assume this was an allusion to the recent introduction of Ncuti Gatwa, the first black Doctor). In their autopsy of the show, The Telegraph contended that its downfall was having become ‘mired in preachiness and identity politics’. The suggestion that Doctor Who had suddenly shifted towards social and political concerns in the last few years is both laughable and ahistorical. Genesis of the Daleks, one of the original run’s most acclaimed stories, drew direct comparisons between the creation of the villainous Daleks and the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany; in 1971’s The Claws of Axos, Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor admonishes the nationalist Minister of Defence Mr Chinn for his cries of ‘England for the English’; the Davies written Turn Left depicts an alternate timeline where economic crisis leads the British government to intern settled immigrants, whilst the war veteran Wilf laments, ‘labour camps, that’s what they called them last time.’ Indeed, when it launched in 1963, Doctor Who was helmed by the BBC’s only female producer, Verity Lambert, and directed by the gay, Indian-born Waris Hussein. All this to say, the heart of Doctor Who has always been one of progressive social and political conviction. The issue with the contemporary show is not that it has become exceptionally left-wing, but rather that it has become painfully reactionary.

The major turn to wokery, in the popular consciousness, came about with the announcement in 2017 that Jodie Whittaker would portray the first female incarnation of The Doctor. The news was divisive: Fifth Doctor actor Peter Davison mourned ‘the loss of a role model for boys.’ Yet the show under Jodie Whittaker was not a polemic work of left-wing propaganda. Quite to the contrary, in Kerblam!, The Doctor comes face to face with a disgruntled worker at a space-age version of Amazon who turns to domestic terrorism to protest the harsh and dehumanising conditions at the company. Her response to him is one of chronic centrism: ‘the systems aren’t the problem! How people use and exploit the system, that’s the problem!’ In the same series, the Malorie Blackman penned Rosa sees The Doctor and co. have to help ensure that Rosa Parks ends up launching her bus protest – portrayed in the show as a random accident rather than a coordinated act of political disruption – and find themselves forced to sit and watch her be racially abused as, were they to leave, they would create enough space on the bus for the white man to sit down. The most egregious case, perhaps, occurs in the episode Spyfall, when The Doctor’s nemesis The Master – played by Sacha Dhawan – appears as a Nazi officer, using a perception filter to disguise his race. Having already foiled his plans, The Doctor deactivates the filter and warns that ‘now they’ll see the real you’. The rest of the episode implies that The Doctor had his archenemy sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Such episodes display a deeply noncommittal if not conservative politics, buried under the veneer of progressivism.  

With the return of Russell T Davies, the disconnect between how the show presented itself and how it operated only deepened. His first episode back in post, The Star Beast, has The Doctor berated by his old friend Donna for his inability to just let things go – ‘something a male presenting Time Lord will never understand’ – mere moments after asserting the character’s fundamentally non-binary nature. The show integrated social politics in the most oblique and clunky of ways – often fundamentally misrepresenting sensitive issues – to become a kind of self-caricature, characters operating less as psychologically grounded figures but conduits for well-intentioned but frequently malformed social critique. Beneath this dusting of progressivism persisted the undercurrent of conservatism: in The Interstellar Song Contest, The Doctor appears to take pleasure in torturing a genocide survivor for his attempt at revenge against the corporation that destroyed his home planet. What has become increasingly clear is that the issue of ‘Doctor Who gone woke’ and the issue of its self-mythologising are one and the same.

During the ‘Wilderness Years’, those between Doctor Who’s cancellation in 1989 and return in 2005, the franchise was kept on life support by a dedicated fan culture, manifest in books, comics, and Comic Relief sketches. A key element of this culture met regularly in London’s Fitzroy Tavern, where they would, over some number of pints, wax lyrical on their love for the programme, and notions of how they might write it if they were only given the chance. Amongst this crowd were Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Chris Chibnall, Mark Gatiss, Nicholas Briggs, and Paul Cornell – to name a few. When Davies was offered the chance to bring back Doctor Who in 2005, he brought the Fitzroy set with him. Twenty years later, they have not left. This group of upper middle class white men have controlled the show’s direction since its return, and, like any group that governs for decades, the waning of their creative insight has become ever more apparent. Instrumentally, the show has not been allowed to change. This is, of course, not entirely the fault of the writers. When Chris Chibnall left (in something of a cloud) in 2022, the rumour mill suggested that Davies returning was the only thing that would stop the BBC from pulling the plug entirely. Just as Hollywood studios favour established IP over new ideas, the BBC sought the certainty of the old guard rather than risking anything on the new. Davies brought back Doctor Who in 2005 as a bright young thing, fresh off his groundbreaking series ‘Queer as Folk’, and made it something new and exciting. Increasingly clear now is that, despite his great recent successes with shows like ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘Years and Years’, the attitude he brings to Doctor Who, alongside his Fitzroy peers, is quite simply at odds with the freshness of his original stint and instead feels blisteringly stagnant.

As with Star Wars and Miyazaki’s anime warnings, Doctor Who has become a show that self-destructively recedes into itself. In Davies’ second run as showrunner, he has leant on the show’s back catalogue in lieu of creative advancement. When David Tennant said he didn’t want to go sixteen years ago, we could accept it as a tragic denouement for a beloved character, rather than a genuine resistance to progress. When, twelve years later, Tennant was returned to the role in a move that amounted to little more than exaggerated fan service, it became more difficult to write off. In bringing back David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, Davies seemed to concede that the best ideas were behind him, and that there was nothing wrong with regression into the familiar. Across the next two series he would make similar allowances – bringing back characters largely unremembered by those of us who hadn’t pored over the 700 episodes of the show’s original run. This kind of writing does nothing to bring in any new audience members, playing purely to those already caught up on at least two decades of narrative lore. For a show like Doctor Who, at its core a family show, this is especially fatal. No child can stumble upon an episode of this new series and be drawn into its wonder, because it functions in effect as half a story, with the other half scattered across 700 previous episodes. Davies’ final blaze of glory, the image on which Doctor Who appears to be left for the foreseeable future, was Ncuti Gatwa, having killed himself to ensure that his companion remains a single mother, regenerating into none other than Billie Piper, the actor who played The Doctor’s companion Rose twenty years ago. It was, perhaps, one wink to the camera too many, and an ultimate declaration that this was a show no longer concerned with change, or indeed anything other than itself. As Davies had sinisterly declared on returning to his role, the intention was simply ‘to generate content’ by an endless retreading of the past. No more were episodes inspired by geopolitical conflicts, or philosophical debates, or even simple interpersonal dynamics. Instead, the show is governed by a principle of content creation: of which surprise reveal can get the most engagement on Twitter. Doctor Who has become a show, more than anything else, about Doctor Who. Every episode, good or bad, is an argument for or against its own existence; every success is read as a manifesto on how the show ought to be.

Aside from its position as one of the longest running television shows ever made, Doctor Who is an institution of paramount importance to our national culture. It has, across the last sixty years, become a kind of oral poetry, passed down and shared, reiterated and expanded upon. It was a triumph of collaborative creativity – a germ of an idea, rolling through the minds of other writers until it became something far bigger than any one author – and remains a testament to the possibilities of televised storytelling. In its current state, it has become, like so much of our contemporary culture, drawn into its own centre of gravity, under the pull of which it is slowly crushed. If it wants to survive, it must be about something again. It must be a show both escapist and humanist, about the broad spectrum of experience and the wonder of the universe’s infinite beauty. Whether it’s with an allegory for radicalisation or a story that preys on an innate human fear of the dark, Doctor Who must blossom out of a novel idea, not a recession into its own history. No longer can it be inward-looking, speaking only to the faithful with no care for the as-yet-unconverted. Should it be allowed to wither away, a martyr for our modern culture of inertia, it would be a colossal failure of imagination. Doctor Who has, by nature, a concept of boundless inventiveness: an open invite to a universe of possibility. To turn from that, and regress instead into known territory, is to place a limit on our self-belief. Fundamentally, Doctor Who is a show that has meant perhaps too much to too many people – this writer included – and one whose personal importance to countless self-styled whovians cannot possibly be overstated. At its best, it is a grand narrative of hope, compassion, and growth; of triumphing good and the dignity of life; of the monsters who live under the bed and the imaginary friend who will always be there to save us. Like all of us, it must be unafraid of change, of jumping into the unknown with nothing but belief and hope. To be held hostage by our pasts is an affront to the possibilities of our futures. We all regenerate throughout our lives, casting off one skin for another, and it is the readiness to change and evolve that makes a life, to coin a phrase, fantastic. Our culture is a mirror, and what hope can there be if it reflects only itself?

‘One day I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine’

–        The First Doctor, Doctor Who, 1964

Featured Image: The BBC