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The Herald Scotland
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Billion Dollar Playground: Will you be coming out to play?
*** KNOW your Louis Vuitton from your Bric's ? Adore a temperamental chef? Enjoy watching rich people behaving badly? Then you, my friend, are likely a veteran of the reality show Below Deck, and therefore the target audience of new arrival Billion Dollar Playground. Lucky you. Below Deck, with Kenny Rogers-lookalike Captain Lee and no-nonsense chief stew Kate, was set on a luxury charter yacht. Every week it cast off with a new batch of guests, but the crew stayed the same. Wildly differing personalities thrown together by circumstance, they bickered, bonded, got bladdered, and occasionally did something else beginning with 'b'. Think Upstairs Downstairs in deck shoes. One of the earliest streaming hits, you can still watch Below Deck for free on Channel 4. Billion Dollar Playground, set in an Australian luxury lets business, updates the idea. 'Our guests are the world's elite,' said Tom, one of the owners. The first let was an apartment in Rose Bay, Sydney Harbour, where a crack team was waiting to serve. In true Apprentice style they introduced/hanged themselves. 'I've had to be a best friend, the servant, and a downright slave,' said lead concierge Salvatore, not at all dramatically. His deputy, named Heaven, said her superpower was making guests' dreams come true. Hard as the team were working to get the place spotless, there was a distinct whiff of something in the air and it wasn't bleach. The clients, a group of business women, arrived and immediately began demanding their money's worth. The team were delighted to oblige in the spare moments between gossip sessions, with the Salvatore and Heaven clash top of the bill. 'I think Salvatore has had a go at Heaven,' said trainee concierge Nicole. 'Why?' said Elsie the chambermaid. 'I don't know why.' said Nicole. Elsie tried again. 'What for?' 'I don't know what for,' said Nicole. If you can stand an hour of this verbal jousting you'll feel right at home in the Billion Dollar Playground club. In the kitchen were George and Matt, brothers and chefs. They were already looking frazzled one episode in, having been asked to whip up extra canapes before dinner. I wouldn't fancy their chances in a below-deck kitchen. Trying to play it cool was JB, the French butler. Australian standards of hospitality were a 'little more laid back', he said. JB lost his cool in the Mystery of the Missing Dom, a fraught little episode involving a guest asking for the Champagne she had brought. It was in the boot of the car, but running around like headless chickens meant no one on the staff clocked it. A quick trip to the shops to buy replacements and the panic was over. More crises followed as a matter of course. Dog-gate, Bowl-gate, Missing Dessert Spoons-Gate, Salvatore and Heaven hissing at each other, living in the lap of luxury was hardly stress-free. No prices were given in the first episode so who knows how much it all cost, apart from your precious time. Another glass of Dom, anyone?
Otago Daily Times
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Obituary: Jean Marsh, actress
Jean Marsh in a publicity portrait for the British TV drama series, Upstairs, Downstairs, ITV, 1976. Jean Marsh and close friend and collaborator Dame Eileen Atkins created not one but two hit TV series, Upstairs Downstairs and The House Of Eliott. While different in subject matter — the former focused on the servants quarters of an Edwardian home while the latter told the tale of sisters who established a fashion house in the 1920s, each shared female starring roles, great scripts and exceptional acting. Marsh was born in London but raised in Stoke Newington. She left school at 15 to train as a dancer, before building a career in repertory theatre as an actress. Her big break came in 1959 when she appeared on Broadway with John Gielgud in his production of Much Ado About Nothing. That same year she moved into television and during the 1960s appeared in such shows as The Saint and Doctor Who. Marsh had a long association with Doctor Who: as well as being married to the third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, for five years, Marsh played Joan of England in The Crusade; Sara Kingdom, a companion of the First Doctor; and was a villain opposite the Seventh Doctor. Upstairs Downstairs first aired in 1971, and its five series earned two Bafta awards and Marsh won an Emmy for best actress. At its peak, viewership exceeded 18 million. The House of Eliott (1991-94), which the duo produced, proved equally as popular, rating highly and selling worldwide. In 2010 Marsh and Atkins remade Upstairs Downstairs, in which Marsh reprised her role as parlourmaid Rose Buck, but the show was overshadowed by another period blockbuster Downton Abbey. It was cancelled after its second season. Her film credits included Cleopatra (1963), The Eagle Has Landed, Return To Oz and Willow. Jean Marsh was made an OBE in 2012. She died on April 13 aged 90. — APL/agencies
The Independent
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
The working class have always produced ‘high' culture – the middle classes just stole it
One day in the 1940s, a young housemaid called Margaret Powell approached her employer, Lady Downall, to ask if she could borrow a book from the library of her Chelsea residence. The good lady visibly blanched. 'Of course, certainly you can, Margaret,' she said. 'But I didn't know you… read.' When the maid shyly chose the first volume of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust to read, it was a portent. In the 1960s Margaret Powell, who had grown up in poverty, herself became a bestselling memoirist. Her book Below Stairs inspired the classic BBC drama Upstairs, Downstairs in the Seventies, and in the 2010s it was Julian Fellowes' source material for Downton Abbey. Never heard of her? Well, that's not surprising. Downton was quality, literary-ish television, and despite touting egalitarian credentials, today's critics don't generally associate the working classes with that sort of thing. Remember the Booker Prize Foundation director Gaby Wood laughing at the book club in Scunthorpe in 2022 because it had 'a steel worker and a dinner lady' among its members? For the likes, there are the soaps, quiz shows and Foxy Bingo ads; as the artist Grayson Perry, brought up in a working-class household in Essex,says, these days you can't be seen as appreciating culture unless you have a certain level of 'education'. It's a typical paradox of our lip-service-paying times: creative industries proclaim their 'openness', and yet the proportion of people in the arts from working-class backgrounds has fallen to literally half of what it was in 1970. Young working-class adults are four times less likely to work in the creative industries than their middle-class peers. Top-selling musicians are now more than six times more likely to be privately educated than the general public. And yet from Flora Thompson and Irvine Welsh to Hilary Mantel and Sam Selvon, from Charles Rennie MacKintosh and LS Lowry to the Ashington Group and Steve McQueen, from Thomas Chatterton and Lennon & McCartney to Meera Syal and Michael Clark and Richard Burton, all showcase how artistic disciplines have always been practised in British working-class areas. In the South Yorkshire mining community I grew up in, there was a local literary heritage that included writers like Ted Hughes, Barry Hines and David Storey, and contemporaries such as Joanne Harris, Ian McMillan and, just a bit further away, Caryl Phillips and Simon Armitage. Musically, there was Sheffield, whose bands from The Human League to Pulp to the Arctic Monkeys have been as innovative as Manchester's. As for artists, we knew that Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and David Hockney, all had come from humble backgrounds. I'm not saying people sat around discussing modernist sculpture in the pubs, but plenty of ordinary folk knew who they were and took an interest in the work. And yet entire disciplines in these worlds have, as Grayson Perry has observed, been 'colonised' by the middle classes. Selina Todd, professor of Modern History at Oxford University, has pointed out that Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey 'would probably never be performed' if she wrote it today. 'In many ways, the arts have become more elitist since the Fifties.' The working-class author Pat Barker believes it has become 'easier for women, but harder for the working class' when it comes to publishing novels. 'It's the under-representation of the working class that really needs looking at. We've split off into little identity groups – women, gay people, trans people, various ethnic minorities. And what you need to see is that a lot of these people are working class, and it's the working class that are under-represented.' One infuriating thing about this is that despite including successful writers and artists, the working class – the dinner ladies, steel workers and the rest – is spoken of as if it's not even interested in art and culture. This is so patently untrue it could be argued only by people who substitute stereotypical images for actual experience. In many working-class homes with memories spanning multiple generations, the idea is laughable. It's not just about people knowing a few famous local working-class artists who made it either. There was – still is – a grassroots creativity and self-expression, although people wouldn't necessarily use those words. My grandad, a miner and lorry driver, was a self-taught jazz drummer who played in clubs (family legend: he once backed Liz Dawn, who played Vera Duckworth on Coronation Street, when she was a singer). As a teenager, my cousin Gary, who would go on to be a ventilation engineer, somehow worked out that the superhero comics he loved were based on Greek myths, and persuaded his library to get him a copy of The Odyssey. Above the bar in our nearest working men's club is a large, beautiful black and white mural commemorating the 1984–5 miners' strike; it was by a local painter and decorator. Growing up in my village there were dance schools, art classes, marching bands, folk clubs, jazz, rock and brass bands, tribute acts, drag queens and northern soul nights, and elocution classes that taught kids to recite poems without their Barnsley twang (my aunty Lynda still does a Walter de la Mare on occasion). If all that seems a bit basic and parochial, that wasn't always the spirit of the participants. Take brass bands: they are pigeonholed for doughty traditionalism, but in several cases this reputation obscures serious artistic ambition. The Grimethorpe Colliery Band might be famous for inspiring Brassed Off, for example, but less famously it commissioned its own avant-garde pieces from composers such as Harrison Birtwistle. If you think any of this was rare rather than typical, then you have swallowed an idea peddled by politicians of both major parties since the 1980s. The idea is that wanting better material conditions – nicer houses, clothes, cars, whatever – means you want more middle-class behaviours and culture. Its implication is that the working class has no culture, and no urge to self-improvement. Yet you need only turn on the television and watch the brilliant work of Bafta winner Sophie Willan, Stephen Graham, or filmmaker Shane Meadows, and playwright James Graham and, further back, to Harold Pinter or Arnold Wesker to realise how baseless that claim really is. If you're looking for the antidote to the relentless vilification of working-class culture, you need Jonathan Rose's masterful 2002 book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, which painstakingly documents the self-education and artistic endeavours of ordinary Brits since the industrial revolution. It's true that this industrial culture began to recede under the attack from Mrs Thatcher's government in the 1980s, but it is far from dead. Not for nothing did the artist Jeremy Deller create an image showing the relationship between brass bands and acid house, or Oasis drop references to their Burnage childhoods, or Ayub Khan-Din document the intersection of race and class in East is East. Since the 2000s, apart from grime and pockets of other musical creativity, that class consciousness has faded as the arts have been professionalised and colonised by the middle and upper classes. Increasingly, working-class kids are shut out by nepotism, the inability to take low-paying entry-level jobs, and to pay for courses that are now needed for professional qualifications. A new set of barriers has been put in place. Reading the Rose book, you realise that we have been here before. The enjoyment of the arts has been seen as a way of improving lives, and when the universal education acts of the 19th century made everyone literate, the working class read voraciously. The dominant class of intellectuals loathed that new mass readership, who they felt had lower standards and insufficient respect, and set about trying to distance their work, parodying the self-educated; this is why T. S. Eliot uses Greek with no translation in The Waste Land, and E. M. Forster created his hapless, culture-loving clerk Leonard Bast in Howards End. As a result, we have 'literary' books and the mass market. In a way, the same old fault line is being reopened. If you take Jonathan Rose's book out in public, I have found, a strange thing happens. Someone will notice the title The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and say something like, 'That must be a short book.' Then you will get talking, and they will tell you a personal story about someone they knew who loved art or books or music, and changed their lives through it. Earlier this month the actor Danny Dyer eloquently described on Desert Island Discs how a drama teacher's encouragement changed his life. Shunned by middle-class peers in the theatre, he had his confidence boosted when Harold Pinter took him under his wing. And yet he still had to endure snooty headlines such as 'How on earth did Harold Pinter and Danny Dyer become such good friends?' in The Spectator. However, it is also true that for every individual whose life was transformed through a love of culture, you'll find plenty of others who'll tell you they had an interest discouraged and knocked out of them. Many might see their own story as a weird anomaly. It's the same reason we see, say, Welsh male voice choirs as charming quirks and not evidence of a rich, self-made musical culture among working people. We need to give people their due, and see them for what they are: not anomalies, but a big part of the foundations of British culture. In the 1990s, I was fortunate enough to edit The Face magazine, an internationally successful and influential magazine that was founded by the working-class Nick Logan. If The Face was not entirely about working-class culture, it was certainly driven by a distinctively modern, multiracial British working-class energy, and many acclaimed writers and artists came up writing, taking photographs and designing for it. Inspired by that, I worked with New Writing North and the actor Michael Sheen to launch a magazine specifically for new and established working-class writers. Called The Bee, we're publishing stories and photographs documenting the whole spectrum of 2020s working-class culture. The response has been incredible, and unanimous in confirming the need, and I hope that ultimately we can help to restore a truly great British traditional voice. I don't doubt that it'll be entertaining too: after all, as Stephen Daldry, the film director, says, 'The really successful work in England tends to be working-class stories.'
Daily Mail
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
STEPHEN DAISLEY: Dangerous cranks? The kale munchers didn't like that, either
We've all been there. You've been forced to talk about the Scottish Greens and are struggling for a suitable description. There are a number of adjectives that would seem to apply but, mindful of your granny's admonitions, you want to avoid using 'language'. Russell Findlay was struck by just this dilemma at First Minister's Questions when speaking about the impact of the Bute House Agreement on energy policy. ' John Swinney personally brought the Greens into government,' he reminded the chamber, 'These dangerous fanatics want to shut down all oil and gas production—' A wounded howl went up from the kombucha corner and Presiding Officer Alison Johnstone scolded the Scottish Conservative leader to be more respectful. She had a point. Whatever you think of dangerous fanatics, they don't deserve to be compared to the Scottish Greens. Findlay had another go: 'Sorry, these dangerous… cranks.' The kale-munchers didn't like that either, earning the Tory chief a withering rebuke from the PO. For all Johnstone's cool-hippy-aunt energy, the slightest hint of rudeness and it's like Mrs Bridges from Upstairs Downstairs just discovered the under-house parlour maid flashing her ankles to the footman. The Scottish Tory leader struggles to rein it in at Holyrood 'Mr Findlay!' she gasped. If the clerk had smelling salts on hand, she would have huffed the lot in one go. Findlay had the look of a man weighing up whether to push further or cut his losses. He tried again: 'These dangerous… ideologues.' The PO let that one stand. So now we know the proper parliamentary term to insult the Scottish Greens. I reckon I'll stick with the most insulting term of all: 'Scottish Greens'. The Swinney-Russell exchanges were a reminder that Nicola Sturgeon continues to loom large over the Scottish Government. Not literally, of course. That would require her to turn up on occasion. But in manner, style and tone it very much remains her show. Findlay proposed that, in light of the decision to cease crude oil processing at Grangemouth, the First Minister reverse his presumption against new oil and gas exploration. Swinney assured the workers that they had his 'solidarity'. That's a relief, because banks accept mortgage payments in solidarity. He added that ministers would 'support the individuals that are affected'. Shutting down an industry then offering help to the workers facing redundancy. There could scarcely be a better definition of politics. 'The SNP used to say 'It's Scotland's oil', Findlay said. 'Now they want to just stop oil.' Hiyo! It was a pun, you see, because of Just Stop Oil. At least Findlay sounded impressed with himself. I shouldn't nitpick. Dad jokes are pretty advanced for a parliament where some struggle to speak in complete sentences. Swinney dismissed Findlay's line of questioning, noting that 'the Conservatives are involved in a pivot and want to deny the climate challenges we face'. Here he broke out some familiar moves: the vertical karate chop (used to emphasise a point), the reverse jazz hands (his trademark reasonable-to-a-fault gesture), and the prayerful palms ('let's all come together and see that I'm right'). The First Minister recalled that Findlay had backed climate targets then hailed Kemi Badenoch's 'refreshingly honest' call to dump them. Findlay was guilty, Swinney charged, of 'barefaced dishonesty'. 'It's quite something to be lectured by a career politician about barefaced dishonesty when he's built a career on it,' Findlay shot back. Well, that set the Presiding Officer off again, and it was another round of tongue-lashings for the lot of them. If Swinney was so concerned about emissions, Findlay argued, he would back nuclear. Swinney sniffed that Hinkley C nuclear power plant, due for completion this year at a cost of £34 billion, now wouldn't be online until 2031 and the bill had risen to £46 billion. So said the head of a government that promised two ferries by 2018 for £97 million and delivered them in 2025 for £400 million. If the First Minister is going to throw stones in glass houses, he should get a price and timescale in writing from the glazier.
