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Evening Standard
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Dealer's Choice at the Donmar Warehouse review: savagely comic study of blokes playing poker
Dealer's Choice seemed to come out of nowhere in 1995. Marber was a former standup best known as a writer and performer on news spoofs On the Hour and The Day Today: suddenly, he had a play on at the National Theatre. The script showcased the sharp observation he's since honed as a playwright, screenwriter and director. It also drew on his experience of gambling while at Oxford.
Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Rebecca Front: ‘Dad nearly drowned on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales'
Rebecca Front, 60, is an actress, comedian and writer from east London. She is known for her roles in The Day Today, Poldark and Avenue 5 and her Bafta-winning performance in The Thick of It. She lives with her husband, the TV producer turned writer Phil Clymer, in north London. They have two children, Ollie, 26, and Tilly, 24. A couple of incidents on family holidays triggered tricky times for me as a pre-teen. One of these episodes occurred as I was climbing the spiral set of 325 steps in the central tower at Durham Cathedral when I was 12. Somebody stopped ahead of us and, tugging at my mum's jacket, I said that I wanted to go back down, but we had to wait as there were people in front and behind us. I found the whole situation very oppressive and it got into my head that we couldn't leave, leading to a lifetime of claustrophobia, with the worst of it usually experienced in lifts and Underground trains. However, no other holiday was as traumatic as the Yorkshire trip when my dad nearly drowned, which was f***ing dreadful. It was the summer before I started secondary school and we were visiting the Yorkshire Dales National Park, picnicking by the River Wharfe on a very hot day. My older brother, Jeremy, and my dad were wading in ankle-height water when dad's foot got caught in the roots of a tree. The current knocked him off balance and he couldn't get out of the river. My poor brother was desperately trying to drag him out, eventually saving his life by yelling for help. Two strapping guys pulled Dad out and he was barely conscious. If that wasn't bad enough, the following day Jeremy fell in the shower and hit his head, and the day after we received a phone call saying that my grandfather had died. At that point we packed and went home. Although that holiday ended in disaster, my mum was determined to create happy memories for us and decided to take us on the kind of road trip she had when she was young, using money that her father had left her. I hadn't been abroad before and it was so exciting as we took our inefficient, third-hand Triumph through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany for three weeks. Along the way Dad wanted to visit some war graves in Verdun, northeast France, where the gift shop sold bomb-shaped chocolate. Heidelberg, in southwest Germany, was an incredible town — it looked like every fairytale illustration I'd ever seen, with enormous hillside forests. My best work trip was for the BBC series War & Peace in 2015. We filmed in Latvia, Lithuania and the Russian city of St Petersburg, where we did two stints, shooting in summer and winter. I was very nervous about the long shoot, but it was a phenomenal job with the most glorious people — it was a brilliant social whirl, hanging out with castmates such as James Norton, Paul Dano, Jack Lowden and Aneurin Barnard, who was playing my son. Even though I'm much older than him he was lovely to me, and from rehearsals onwards he'd always say, 'You're coming with me!' whenever the cast would go somewhere. My phone would ping constantly with invitations to join whatever fun gathering was happening. The architecture in St Petersburg is beautiful, and our comfortable post-Soviet hotel was within walking distance of the Hermitage, the fantastic art and culture museum. We didn't start filming until 5pm, so I would spend the days sightseeing, walking to galleries and churches and lunching on blinis. It was thrilling; I absolutely loved it. I love a US road trip and American diners with their over-easy eggs and hot sauce on every table. Phil, the kids and I usually drive from Seattle to Los Angeles, or vice versa, as we have friends in those cities. In Washington state we always try to stay at the Sleeping Lady resort, which has fairly rough-and-ready cabin accommodation — and a fabulous swimming pool — in woods on the Cascade Mountains. In California we like to stay at Deetjen's Big Sur Inn, which has amazing home cooking and, controversially, no wi-fi — this stresses me out much more than it does the kids. • 12 of the best US road trips Shortly before our last road trip Ollie rang to ask whether there was room for his new girlfriend, Imogen. It's quite brave to be trapped in a car for three weeks with a family you've just met, but when she joined in with us singing along to the music I immediately knew that she'd fit People with Rebecca Front, featuring interviews with Peter Capaldi, Nicola Stephenson and Armando Iannucci, among others, is available from all podcast stores
Telegraph
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Imagine: The Academy of Armando, review: leaves no doubt that Iannucci is the foremost satirist of our time
There will be some people out there whose cultural lives haven't been improved by Armando Iannucci but not, I'd guess, that many. Imagine: Academy of Armando (BBC One) was therefore a bit of an open goal: simply string together a show-reel of Iannucci's greatest hits, from On the Hour to The Day Today to The Thick of It and onwards, throw in some illustrious talking heads (Chris Morris, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Palin and Steve Coogan all turned up) to say how brilliant he is and (to quote from his and Coogan's greatest creation Alan Partridge) it's back of the net. To its credit, Imagine attempted something a little more intricate than straight hagiography, telling Iannucci's story but trying to show his method ('quicker, shorter, funnier' are his watchwords), how it all fits with his world-view (dark absurdity) and his sphere of his influence (absolutely massive). A deft combination of the three left you in no doubt at the end of the hour that Iannucci is the foremost satirist of our time. With so many riches to choose from – not just the clips but the queues of grandees gushing with praise – Imagine only faltered occasionally. One misstep was to frame Iannucci as some kind of recluse in the JD Salinger mould. Presenter Alan Yentob spent the first 10 minutes appearing to be sniffing him out like a bespectacled bloodhound. But I've interviewed Iannucci before for this publication; many journalists have. I don't recall him being averse to talking about himself or his work at all. Maybe, just maybe, he didn't want to sit down with Yentob. When you watched the programme you sensed Iannucci's discomfort with the pomposity of talking about himself with the perennially po-faced other Alan (and there was a priceless moment when they talked about the naming of Alan Partridge, concluding that, 'he was just an Alan', with Iannucci staring hard at the other Alan in the room). Ultimately, Iannucci's work has always made fun of things like Imagine, people like Yentob, and the very notion that there could be an 'Academy of Armando'. None of this distracted from the excellence of the work, or the strength of the programme, but it did make you imagine if Iannucci's next project might involve the inner workings and egos of a flagship arts show.
