Bits #68: GUEST EDIT
Writer Sophie Heawood on Tracey Emin, The Drama + that time she offended Paris Hilton at Coachella
For the the month of April, I am outsourcing my weekly culture round-up to an all-star cast. A gaggle of outrageously smart, funny, mildly eccentric writers whom I beg for recs every time I see them. “What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?” I hiss at them frantically across a film screening. “WHAT ABOUT TELLY?” I bellow at them over the din of a book launch.
My second guest is one of the funniest and filthiest writers I know. Sophie Heawood brings equal parts irreverence and pathos to her work - so that you often find yourself snorting and weeping at the same time. A journalist of top pedigree and a celebrity interviewer par excellence (Mark Wahlberg, Lily Allen, Emily Blunt, Jessica Chastain - to name a random handful), she is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Hungover Games, and has written about everything from single parenting to growing older to the appeal of romantasy.
I had the best time going through Sophie’s recs - I love running this guest series so much! It’s such a joy to be solely in ‘receive mode’ for a bit. As ever, I’d love to hear from you in the Comments. Sophie might even pause her Coachella livestream to come join us.
Under the paywall: why SNL UK is better than the American version; some saucy writing (and a saucy product); wine (something you never see here as I know jack sh*t about booze); a gorgeous piece on being a young glamorous divorcee; music (also something you never see here); masses of TV recs - I felt a palpable itch to turn on the telly; the best charity shop in London; memories of Coachella, including the time she offended Paris Hilton (she still feels bad about it); and her thoughts on the most chattered about film of the now: The Drama. (I’m going next week. Ditto, Tracey Emin.)
Over to Sophie.
I recently interviewed Harry Styles for Runners World (along with Haruki Murakami - what a gig) and while I’d like to say it’s the greatest Harry Styles interview of all time, it’s sadly only the second greatest. Because this one is the best: a Youtube conversation between him and comedian Brittany Broski, whose ‘Royal Court’ videos are hilarious. Somehow she gets more out of him in this absurd fake castle quiz set-up than the rest of us do in heartfelt conversations.
All I can add is that he’s an absolute darling but no, I don’t know why he has an Australian accent now. Still, “this is the most i’ve heard this man talk in YEARS,” as one of the comments says, so maybe the Aussie thing is helping.
I had a strong reaction in my guts to the Tracey Emin exhibition at the Tate Modern, which is on until 31st August. Of how important she is, of how much she has given to the culture, of how writers like me are able to document our own lives in the way we do because she went first. The shit she got for it all, the ridicule from critics, mainly men.
I gasped at how beautiful her naked crotch looks after in the series of photographs she took of it after her genitals have been removed during cancer treatment.
The exhibition made several of my female friends cry, and I’m sorry to be so gender essentialist but I think you’d be hard pushed to find a bloke who gets this show like women get this show. There’s a video in it - not a new one but it got me all over again - called Why I Never Became a Dancer. At the end of it she remembers how the boys who had all slept with her chanted ‘Slag, slag, slag’ at her on a Margate dancefloor as she danced so freely, a fifteen-year old girl dancing away from them all and their smalltown lives. The entire show takes you somewhere way beyond humiliation, to a land of post-humiliation glory that few of us have entered.
Her final words in that video are “Shane, Eddy, Tony, Doug, Richard… this one’s for you.” A powerful line that has stayed with me, under my breath, like a sarky mantra. This one’s for you, I mutter to myself, as I go about doing things, working on things, that aren’t going to please everyone.
The Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, on until 4th May, is excellent too, and I’m dying to escape London to see Fry’s Popular Delights in Essex.
Speaking of Freud, Bella Freud’s podcast, Fashion Neurosis, is the only podcast which makes it impossible for me to follow my own stupid rule about listening to them rather than watching the video. This is because Bella, great-granddaughter of Sigmund, gets all her interviewees to lie on the couch while they’re being analysed by her, and the camera gazes down upon them from the most unflattering angle you can imagine.
Honestly, seeing supermodels describe how secretly shit they felt in the ‘90s really does something for me. Probably because supermodels all made us feel shit in the 90s too, even though we loved them. They were a lot like our families in that regard.
But!
Bella’s interview with Riz Ahmed the other day was on a whole other level - subjects included daytimers, which were the parties he used to bunk off school for on a Friday afternoon, organised especially so that girls with conservative religious parents could actually get in, and how he’d wear clothes with green and white (like Stan Smiths) as a nod to the Pakistani flag. How much he argued with the teachers at school, and if they kicked him out of the room he took that as a sign that he’d won, because they had no argument left to counter him with. (There’s something really fascinating about that particular level of confidence, I think.)
And then - oh my God - the bit about him learning sign language for a film and what communicating bodily instead of verbally did to him, how it connected his body to other people’s bodies to the point that he would cry while signing.
I’ve been watching Your Friends & Neighbors, a TV series that scores very nicely on my ‘Can I do something else while watching this but only to a certain extent? gauge. What this means is, the show needs to be ever so slightly silly so I can watch it on my laptop while chopping vegetables, sorting out a pile of laundry or going through old paperwork to chuck out - but not so silly that I don’t need to look at the screen at all. It needs to be mainly well-written and well-acted telly because nothing kills my boner quicker than a naff script.
Your Friends & Neighbors is 70% compelling and 30% lol, a warm thriller-ish about sexily middle-aged Americans who have made big money and built perfect family lives and are now watching it all fall apart. A divorce drama, a midlife crisis drama, a therapy drama that turns into a crime drama: all my favourite things.
Plus it has Amanda Peet in it, who should be in absolutely everything, and in fact is in hardly anything, but then that’s why she’s Amanda Peet. In fact, I would probably watch Amanda Peet even if our screens were somehow reversed and it was her slicing the courgettes and sighing through old tax returns.
If you haven’t heard anything about Your Friends & Neighbors, that’s because it’s on Apple TV, a broadcaster who sadly haven’t found any way to market their excellent TV shows to anyone. It’s sad, really - if only they had some way of telling us. Maybe even some kind of digital communication device that lived in all of our pockets and talked to us all day long? Ha - crazy idea. So I guess we’ll just never know.
I only found out about Your Friends & Neighbours because Amanda Peet was so brilliant on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, telling the maddest story about how she had a temporary separation from her husband, who makes Game of Thrones, during which he dated her doppelganger. Yes, her husband went out with the woman she always gets confused for - and somehow their 20 year marriage survived.
Now for some British telly. Our very own version of Saturday Night Live - which is broadcast live on Sky TV and NOW TV on Saturdays at 10pm - has turned out to be brilliant. This couldn’t be more welcome news. It’s so sharp! The writers are so clever! It has really sharp teeth and doesn’t shy away from anything. In fact, it’s better than the American version, which I never found all that funny, even when I lived in LA for several years so knew my way around all the references. Guest hosts so far have been Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan, Riz Ahmed and Jack Whitehall.