Bits #72
Your weekly round-up of things to read, watch and listen to
Happy Wednesday, booksenbitters!
Here’s an insight into the unwieldy process of assembling this culture round-up (probably why it never drops on the correct day). I don’t get FOMO about parties… but I do about print media!
Under the paywall today: two excellent pod recs for fans of Screen Rot, ICYMI and - dare I say it - The High Low; an ode to the stationary cupboard; how to hone patience in an instantly gratifying world; the stigma of widowhood; a tiny book I’m carrying everywhere (but not reading); and an excellent piece on the flattening of womanhood + some of my thoughts I had reading it.
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been busily filming a visual podcast for Disney+, to accompany Season 2 of Rivals, based on Jilly Cooper’s ‘80s bonkbuster, Rivals. You’ll have no doubt read masses about the series by now - I can’t remember the last time I saw a TV series get 5 stars from The Guardian and The Telegraph (who to my great entertainment often work in parallel, loving what the other has loathed, and vice versa) - so I won’t wang on about what an utter delight it is, except to say for anyone unfamiliar, that it is a witty, saucy, camp and tender triumph, so lushly colour-graded compared to the grey-hued tone of 2020s cinema - with, in a smart evolution from the book, a distinctly feminist lens.
There are some exquisite scenes with wives-of-terrible-husbands Katherine Parkinson’s Lizzie and Claire Rushbrook’s Monica, that I will remember in much the same way I recall that deeply affecting scene with Emma Thompson on the bed in Love Actually, listening to Joni Mitchell, before she visibly pulls herself together and briskly brushes away her tears.
I was lucky enough to interview all the heavyweights, like David Tennant, Aidan Turner and Danny Dyer, as well as some of my favourite comic actors (all who gain layers this season) like Rufus Jones, Gary Lamont and Emily Atack, the gorgeous leads, Bella Maclean, Alex Hassell and Nafeesa Williams, and the writers and execs behind the show, including Dominic Treadwell-Collins, Laura Wade and Felicity Blunt (writers are my favourite people of all to interview.) Famously, Treadwell-Collins operated a “no c*nts” casting policy, and look, I can’t say that no-one is without c*nty moments, but I will say that they were an astonishingly fun and filthy bunch to interview (it’s the first time I’ve discussed labias and perineums in an interview) and all incredibly close, thanks to the exceedingly long 10 month shoot.
The drop schedule is slightly erratic, so for clarity: the first 3 episodes dropped on Friday, with one coming every week for 3 more weeks. After the 6 have dropped, there will be a 6 month or so break, before the second half of Season 2 (still being picture locked) drops towards the end of the year. The podcast follows the same format. You can find the podcast on Disney+, or, as they used to do in the old days… you can listen to it on your podcast app. I so hope you enjoy it.
I should really change my bio to “professional Alex Hassell interviewer” because the week after, I interviewed the actor who plays Rupert Campbell-Black for the fourth time, for the cover of The London Standard (formerly The Evening Standard.) I can’t remember the last time an actor spoke to me so thoughtfully and openly. Hassell is an uncommonly honest sort, who has as much interest in seeing others, as he does in being seen.
He’s also the first person I’ve ever interviewed who is, like me, intolerant to onions and garlic (he recommended a seasoning called ‘astefeda’, which I immediately bought off Amazon; in turn, I shared with him the name of my gastro). I was particularly struck by something he said on the reformation of his character. Famously, Cooper created her premier heart-throbas a villain, before falling in love with him herself, and thus redeeming him over the course of her books. Bolstered by 88-year-old Cooper’s insistence that he remained macho, Hassell says he had no interest in nice-washing RCB. upert is generous, charming, and (finally) capable of love, but he is certainly not nice.
“I love people who have foibles and they do things that f*** me off and I do things that f*** them off. That’s what being alive is like.”
I keep thinking about that line - that’s what being alive is like. I love it.
I had such a joyful evening interviewing 3 of the most talented debut novelists of 2026 - Madeline Cash, Stephanie Sy-Quia and Imani Thompson - for the inaugural Selfridges Book Club, curated by Under the Cover Books. Ochuko and I have already waxed lyrical on Lost Lambs (and I will be writing about Honey and A Private Man in my next books round-up) but all 3 novels engrossed me in entirely different ways - Lost Lambs for its dialogue and tender ingenuity, Honey for its sass and intellectualism, and A Private Man for its scholarship and lyricism. The event wasn’t recorded, but here’s a great interview with Imani for Vogue, with Stephanie for Sunday Times Culture, and with Madeline for LARB.
Anna Wiener’s profile of a Californian tween for The New Yorker, is an enchanting, evocative study of an inbetwixt age. My daughter recently turned 8, and I am seeing the first flickerings of tweendom: she rolls her eyes; she calls me bruh; she explains nonsensical memes to me. And yet in many ways, she is still a small child, with her tiny shoulder blades, her love of scented pens, the bunny she hugs at night (a misnomer as it is, in fact, a highland cow). And so I was utterly engrossed in Wiener’s piece about 12-year-old Mira and her friends, growing up in San Fran.
“From Mira I learned… that Taylor Swift spends, like, thirty-five million dollars a year on her cats. I learned that Lucky Charms cereal is, like, seventy-five per cent sugar, bananas are poisonous to monkeys, and you should rinse Popsicles before eating them to avoid losing taste buds. I learned that you can kind of just say “slay” whenever, as filler, that you can address both your girls and your dad as “bro,” and that, at least in Mira’s telling, her whole life doesn’t revolve around her mom, but her mom’s whole life revolves around her. (“As it should be,” Mira said.)”
What felt so surprising - and reassuring - was while there are obvious nods to modernity (bubble tea, streaming platforms, slang like baddie and eats), it feels evergreen: the close physical proximity of pre-teen friendship; the simultaneous dismissal and need for your parents; the intense allegiance with a particular popstar (for me the Spice Girls, for them Sabrina Carpenter.) There’s a particularly compelling moment, when Wiener analyses how spending time with tween girls can make you revert into one: she starts to feel insecure around them, she wonders if they think she is a cool auntie, or a boring oldie. It’s a delicious piece, filled with optimism - maybe, just maybe, the girls are doing alright.
I recently discovered the newsletter, The Argument - this review of tradwife bestseller, Yesteryear, by the letter’s editor Jerusalem Demsas nails some of the niggles I have, but with much more clarity (although overall I enjoyed the book, while Demsas is less effusive.) It’s the smartest critique I’ve read on the book thus far.
“Most tradwives are not suffering from psychotic breaks; they are promoting a new social conservatism compatible with just enough female empowerment to allow them to pursue commercial success but not enough to cast off their central purpose as submissive wives and mothers. But if Natalie is just a crazy woman disconnected from her religious community, then what can she reveal or say about any of this?"
I’ve read 21 of the books in The Guardian’s 100 Best Novels of All Time - which was more than I was anticipating, given the typically esoteric nature of such lists: White Teeth; The Talented Mr Ripley; To The Lighthouse; Mrs Dalloway; Orlando (Woolf is the most decorated author on the list); Half of a Yellow Sun; The Turn of the Screw; Anna Karenina; The Colour Purple; Beloved; The Bluest Eye; Rebecca; Disgrace; Never Let Me Go; Frankenstein; Dracula; Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Jane Eyre; The God of Small Things; and The Great Gatsby.
Quite a few on there I’ve been meaning to read for ages and somehow keep failing to, like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Golden Notebook, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch and Crime and Punishment (kidding on the last one, have no intention, ditto War and Peace.)
What would I have added? Off the top of my head… Any Human Heart and We Need To Talk about Kevin (I can never understand why there’s so little contemporary fiction on these ‘best of’ lists.) WBU?
It’s had pretty mixed reviews (the general consensus being that Season 1, which I have not watched, is much stronger) but I devoured Season 2 of Lee Sung Jin’s dramedy, Beef. Oscar Isaacs plays Josh, a country club manager of 20 years (whose best friends are the people who pay him) and Carey Mulligan his wife, Lindsay, a bored and snobby British interior designer with terrible taste in cushions, clad entirely in Doen, clutching a pet pooch, Burberry (“honestly, they’d have never taken this shit at Soho House”).
The ‘beef’ in question is with two of the country club’s twenty-something employees, Cailee Spaeny’s Ashley and Charles Melton’s Austin, who are deeply and absurdly in love (they end every conversation with an agonisingly sincere “I love you so much”) and desperately broke. As often the case, the second half descends into farce - with a wince-worthy slew of evil Koreans - and Melton’s Austin is Joey-from-Friends levels of dumb (something I always found deeply irritating) but the series has interesting things to say on the precarity of American labour, their shockingly unaffordable healthcare and the manipulation of diversity (Austin is half-Korean only when it becomes useful for Ashley), while Isaacs and Mulligan sing as a husband and wife whose love has curdled into affectionate disgust and who know each other better than anyone else - and not at all.
If you need a fun, smart series to distract you from the slew of terrible true crime docs (don’t even get me started on the mistitled Should I Marry A Murderer) and you’ve already watched Rivals - then this is the badger.
I have two excellent pods to recommend this week, for fans of Screen Rot, ICYMI and - dare I say it - The High Low.