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Spectator
08-07-2025
- General
- Spectator
Jews are good at almost everything. Apart from food
We Jews make up 0.2 per cent of the world's population but have won 22 per cent of all the Nobel prizes ever awarded. And we have not done this with a tailwind. Mark Twain thought the reason Jews tended to do so well in business was above-average honesty. Jewish success has been so extravagantly out of proportion to their population that their finest gentile supporters have long sought reasons. Clive James, wondering about our influence in the arts, felt exclusion may have had its benefits. 'Whole generations of Jewish literati were denied the opportunity of wasting their energies on compiling abstruse doctoral theses. They were driven instead to journalism, plain speech, direct observation and the necessity to entertain.' Those who hate the Jews, of course – or merely feel polite distaste – have their own ways of explaining away their success. But to this crowded field I do not seek to add. My own question is this. Why, when Jews have given the world so much, when their appetite for culture is so discriminating, when they so consistently outperform their demographics and o'erleap adversity, and when they are not a group indifferent to the pleasures of the table – why is their food so bad? Ottolenghi is a fine culinary example, but of distinctively Middle Eastern food. Dim memories of Jewish ancestry for Jacob Kenedy, of the wonderful London Italian Bocca di Lupo, simply won't do. Carciofi alla giudia – artichokes Jewish style – may well have originated in the Roman ghetto but is plainly more Roman than it is ghetto. What's missing are not occasional Jewish dishes but a Jewish cuisine. Specifically, a Jewish cuisine people are eager to eat. Deep frying, arguably, takes us as close as one gets to a Jewish cuisine in Britain that people want to eat. Chips have no known parents, but the fish that accompanies it is Jewish. Or at least it's Jew-ish, which is to say that it was pioneered and invented by Jews in the 19th century. Chicken tikka masala is from Glasgow but still shows its Indian and Pakistani roots. Yet cod in batter – or whiting, since even haddock has become expensive – is seen the world over as quintessentially British. Yes, there are bagels, which would certainly merit more consideration in a piece like this, save for the important fact that they leave me cold, and I'm the one writing this piece. Frankly, I'd rather they left me altogether. If the top half of the bagel falls to the floor accidentally, I'm the happier; the stodge oppresses the filling when it is meant to flatter. There are Reuben sandwiches, which I adore, but seem mostly prized in Britain for their novelty and their air of Americana. There is even matzo ball soup, which is not prized at all. Nor are Jewish food franchises springing up on our high streets, piri-piri joints being pushed aside by takeaways flaunting their chicken livers. The point is not that Jewish food doesn't exist – but that most people, Jews included, aren't much interested. If I could put a little mental Star of David on the pickled cucumber it would make me happy. Faced with a choice between living an unexamined life, and one without dill pickles, I'd opt for the bracing vinegar tang and an idle mind. Pickles, however, may predate the Jews; the best we might say of them is that perhaps they were a necessary first step. Growing up in Kilburn I never thought of myself as Jewish. Even the concept of assimilation made no sense – to the truly assimilated, it never does. Occasionally a lace tablecloth would emerge, woven by a Lithuanian ancestor, and sometimes my mother would ceremoniously put a dish of chopped liver onto it, which we would ceremoniously ignore. But perhaps assimilation is part of the answer. Jews have been culturally successful partly because they have always been interested in culture, and wherever they have lived they have adopted the local cuisine – ravenously, for the most part. Whether you call that cultural appropriation or integration is your choice, but I will judge you. Jews excel beyond their numbers, and their success has enriched every culture they've touched. In cooking, not so much. Perfection, they say, is an insult to the gods – and besides, as the line goes in Some Like It Hot (directed by Shmuel Vilder and co-starring Bernard Schwartz, yielding the traditionally high Yiddish quotient for a Hollywood hit), nobody's perfect.
Daily Mail
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Storyville - The Contestant: The game show so cruel it left me wondering at the depravities of TV
The Contestant - Storyville (BBC4) Back in the days when we laughed openly at foreigners and their peculiar ways, the strangest sight on television was a Japanese game show called Endurance. Contestants, all of them male, volunteered to undergo inventively sadistic tortures, with Clive James On TV airing the goriest excerpts every week to the astonishment and delight of ITV audiences. Some of the punishments, filmed all over the world, were merely brutal: cannonballs were lobbed at their testicles, and platefuls of frozen spaghetti were served to players immersed in ice baths. Others were Freudian nightmares. In one, they were tied to crucifixes before rats were released into Perspex boxes on their naked chests. At the same time, Dutch children fired tiny wooden clogs at the men's legs with powerful elastic bands. Those children looked traumatised at what they were being made to do. In 1982, Clive and his millions of viewers (and yes, of course I was one) thought this was hilarious. Producer Toshio Tsuchiya (pictured), a man who gleefully compares himself to Satan and revels in the fear and hatred he inspires in everyone who works for him, smirked as he described how in 1997 he created a format so cruel, it must surely be outlawed by the Geneva Convention After a few years, British TV executives began to feel squeamish about this and Endurance vanished from our screens. But in Japan, as The Contestant (BBC4) revealed, ever more extreme torments were being devised. Producer Toshio Tsuchiya, a man who gleefully compares himself to Satan and revels in the fear and hatred he inspires in everyone who works for him, smirked as he described how in 1997 he created a format so cruel, it must surely be outlawed by the Geneva Convention. He tricked a 21-year-old wannabe stand-up comedian, Tomoaki Hamatsu, into tackling a solitary confinement challenge called A Life In Prizes. Trapped in an apartment room, he had no clothes and no bed, and nothing to eat but crackers and water. Whatever he needed to survive, Tomoaki had to win by entering magazine competitions. He spent his days filling in forms and sending off entries, while slowly starving and going out of his mind. Although he knew there were cameras in the room, this gullible and desperate young man had no idea that footage from his cell was being screened weekly on one of Japan's biggest game shows. Soon, as he became an international celebrity, his life was livestreamed around the clock via the internet. Part of his appeal to audiences was his unusual face, with its long jaw. Bullied all his life for his appearance, Tomoaki's nickname was Nasubi, meaning 'aubergine' or 'eggplant'. To hide his naked genitals, the Japanese broadcaster used a cartoon aubergine. Incredibly, Nasubi lived this celebrity hermit life for 15 months, oblivious to his fame — eating whatever he could win, whether that was rice or dog food. The moment when he was set free, in front of a howling studio audience that included the BBC's Tokyo correspondent, Juliet Hindell, was one of the most excruciating scenes I've ever watched. Tsuchiya claimed this was a momentous episode in TV history. I was left, not for the first time, wondering at the depravities of the small screen.
Times
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Contestant review — the truth about the most extreme reality TV show ever
It doesn't seem that long ago (except it's 30 years ago) when we would laugh along with Clive James on TV at the Japanese and their crazy game show ways — specifically those madcap endurance shows where contestants were buried in sand, or forced to hold in their bladders after drinking litres of tea (that kind of thing). I'm not sure who this reflected worse on: us or the Japanese culture we were laughing at. The Contestant, Clair Titley's thoughtful, troubling film shown in the Storyville strand, took us back to the mad world of 1990s Tokyo TV, except this time you won't have laughed once unless you really are a sadist. The 'hilarious' show in question involved a young man being duped by producers into stripping naked, then being starved and bullied in solitary confinement for 15 months. Young Japanese audiences loved it. The show became a monster hit in 1998. Before we litigate the past too hard, it should be said that Tomoaki Hamatsu, the unwitting young man in question, was also funny and loveable. Yet the popularity of watching the weekly mental disintegration of a man certainly suggests something about audience detachment. The Truman Show, the Jim Carrey film that came out in the same year, clearly didn't go far enough. Denpa Shonen was an extreme Big Brother before Big Brother even existed. Any hopeful eager to go on the show knew it was about zany endurance antics, but when Hamatsu, an aspiring comedian known at the time as Nasubi, won his Willy Wonka ticket he had no idea what he was in for. Having been led blindfolded into a small room, he was ordered to remove all his clothes (a particular humiliation for him), then stay there as long as it took him to win one million yen from magazine competitions. After a few weeks, now emaciated, he was being given bags of dry rice to eat, even though he had no saucepan. Viewers split their sides. 'I was just about not dying, but that's when the real hell began,' recalled Hamatsu, a more sober figure than the manic one seen on the show. His memories were intercut with those of the show's big-shot producer Toshio Tsuchiya, who during the ordeal went from being 'a god' to Nasubi 'to the devil' and who seemed almost impressively candid about the amorality of it all back then. • Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews Hamatsu had turned to comedy partly to cope with the bullying he had received at school for his 'long face'. The strangest thing of all was how much Hamatsu played up to the camera as he wolfed down his treat of dog biscuits. At Day 333, he was still doing his best to entertain the single camera trained on him, even though he didn't know this was all being broadcast. In fact, he knew the door was unlocked. It seems he was caught in a kind of psychological trap — of not wanting to let everyone down, of proving himself as a clownish comic. He explained: 'You hear of people being held captive. How rather than escaping… staying put, not causing trouble is the safest option. You lose the will to escape.' Hamatsu reflected that it took years to process the 'big black void in my heart' after the show finally ended. Eventually, he turned to self-healing charity climbs up Everest, detailed in the film's lingering final third, which reached hard for a redemptive finish. Duty of care in reality TV has clearly come a long way, although the uneasy balance between emotional damage and drive for good ratings remains universal. The Contestant didn't interrogate very hard the questions around exploitation. If Tsuchiya had initially seemed the villain, by the end the guiltiest party was every viewer who screamed with laughter when Hamatsu was finally released — exposed on a stage naked, dazed, horrified, as he found out that he had been broadcast all along. Proof that audiences were laughing at him, not with him. Now this spectacle is replayed in a documentary not to laughs but astonishment at such cruelty. Which is progress of a sort.★★★☆☆ Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows , the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer, the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don't forget to check our critics' choices to what to watch this week and browse our comprehensive TV guide
Daily Mail
31-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
I moved from the UK to Australia two years ago. Aussies tell themselves a big lie - the real, infuriating truth about this country is clear, writes MAX AITCHISON
Long before I arrived on these sun-kissed shores, I thought I had grasped the idea of the Australian soul. The tolerant, open-minded, 'she'll be right, mate', approach to life Aussies like to show to the world. It was, my reading informed me, the great land of larrikins – a proud tradition of holding a healthy disrespect for rules and order that drew its inspiration from the legendary outlaw Ned Kelly. A nation of plucky underdogs who viewed their former British overlords with contempt. A land where rugged individuals laughed in the face of authority and forged their own meritocratic identity. A people who valued common sense, who fought for their own beliefs and scorned the establishment's stuffy rules. It seemed to me that Kelly and his heroic last stand embodied what it was to be Australian. Yet, having lived in this country for over two years, I now realise how naive I was. For it is painfully – infuriatingly – obvious that a very loud minority of modern Australians have much more in common with the men who strung Kelly up, than the mythical outlaw himself. As the late, great Australian critic and journalist Clive James once observed: 'The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.' I see this slavish adherence to rules and pettifogging everywhere, at all levels of society, from the individual to the state. I see it in my multi-millionaire banker neighbour who rang the council to send out a ranger to fine me $350 for parking four inches across his driveway, rather than leaving a note, which would have achieved exactly the same thing. I see it in the council rangers who not only demanded that a family pour out the champagne they were drinking to celebrate Christmas day onto the hot sand of Bondi Beach, but also to pop and pour their unopened bottles too. I see it in the surly staff at the Avoca surf club restaurant who, on Good Friday of all days, refused a table to a young couple and their two children, both of whom were under the age of three, because the toddlers had committed the inexcusable sin of not wearing shoes inside. I see it too, more times than I care to mention, in the power-hungry bouncers staffing Sydney's pubs and clubs who seem to relish in ruining any decent night out. 'How many drinks have you had?' – the question to which there is no right answer, honest or otherwise. I see it also in the intensely passive aggressive note left on my windshield after I had the temerity to leave my car parked in the same, entirely legal, spot on the street I live on for two weeks, which read: 'Has this car been abandoned? We will call the council and have it removed – residents.' I had half a mind to flip the paper and write: 'Hi resident. Also resident. Why don't you get a life and mind your own business?' (And yes, I am starting to wonder if there is something wrong with my neighbours). Regardless, I see it everywhere: this curtain-twitching, joy-extinguishing, fun-sponging desire to pursue conformity at all costs. And it's not just confined to neighbourhood spats, officious hospitality staff of lowly council bureaucrats. This rotten, rule-making insanity runs right through the heart of state and federal governments across the country. Of course, it plumbed new depths during the pandemic. State premiers, drunk off power and acting like Communist dictators, families unable to say goodbye to loved ones and the appalling case of a pregnant woman in her pyjamas being taken from her home in handcuffs for daring to stand up to the tyranny. But it didn't end there. Take the upcoming social media ban for children under the age of 16 or the $420,000-a-year eSafety Commissioner whose job seems to entail telling social media companies to remove mean posts, sometimes made by people in foreign countries. You hear politicians praising these measures as 'world leading', as if being the first country to do something precludes any discussion over whether it's actually a good idea in the first place. Because they're not. The eSafety Commissioner is about as useful as a chocolate teapot and if anyone sincerely thinks that children aren't going to get around any ban in a matter of seconds then I have a good bridge to sell you. No, what these laws are all about is pandering to Australia's obsession with policing other people's lives. And nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of Sydney restaurateur Nahji Chu, whose Lady Chu eatery in Potts Point was visited last Friday by unsmiling council bureaucrats who were unhappy with her potted plants. In an explosive showdown, filmed by a staff member, Ms Chu unleashed on the council employees: 'This is 'f***ed up, this whole city is f***ed up! 'I'm not a f***ing naughty school kid, so don't speak to me like that. 'I'm paying f***ing taxes and I'm paying your wages, so f*** off. 'I'm trying to activate this f***ing dead city, so don't shut it down.' While a family website such as this one cannot condone Ms Chu's colourful language, I applaud her sentiment wholeheartedly. Here is an Australian hero, willing to stand up for herself and others in the face of joyless officials. This is a woman who fled the communist Pathet Lao regime as a child in 1975, only to then be thrown into a Thai jail cell with her father where she caught TB and languished for three months. Her family then bounced around Thai refugee camps for three years before they eventually became among the first Vietnamese refugees to settle in Australia. Ms Chu has worked in the varied worlds of fashion (where she once helped dress Kylie Minogue) banking and hospitality, a sector in which she has built and lost an empire before starting all again from scratch with the popular Lady Chu in 2021. She was gloriously unapologetic when she spoke to my colleague Jonica Bray earlier this week. 'There is no fun in this city, you can't do anything or you face a fine,' she said. 'No one even leaves their house anymore - they just work to make money and go and spend it overseas where they can get culture and have a good time.' And she's right. If the average Australian allows the small but powerful minority of rule-lovers to win, then the country must drop any pretense to being some kind of laidback nirvana and must face a reckoning with its true identity. I urge all proud Australians to follow Ms Chu's lead and resist loudly and openly – to stand up for the values and the spirit that makes this country so great.
