| | | | | What did the Friends reunion teach me? That global fame is the opposite of happiness | Deborah Frances-White | | by Deborah Frances-White Jun 2, 2021 | | For some of the Friends cast, the answer to Joey’s favourite question ‘How you doin’?’ seems to be ‘just about hanging in there’
At a time when the whole world is stuck in second gear and it hasn’t been our day, our week, our month or especially our year, the Friends reunion felt unavoidable. I may have been the only one who didn’t want a new episode. I don’t need to see Ross shouting “Hashtag not all men!” across Central Perk. I think we need to be honest and admit he and Rachel are divorced now and she has finally realised that no one is ever going to love her more than tech billionaire Gunther, who has created an app to identify the closest coffee shop with a big empty sofa. Fortunately, we weren’t forced to see that dramatised. Instead we got what I wanted – the gang wandering round the set of their spectacularly well-paid youth, choking back tears and watching bloopers. I really wasn’t expecting to feel for them so deeply. The whole thing seemed to be blinding evidence that global fame is diametrically opposed to happiness. Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston and co spent a formative decade gasping for connection because they had no choice but to live in the bodies of everyone’s favourite fictitious characters. Continue reading... | | | | | Christina Hendricks: 'We were critically acclaimed – and everyone wanted to ask me about my bra' | | by Zoe Williams Jun 2, 2021 | | The star of Good Girls discusses Mad Men, sexual harassment and squaring her glamorous reputation with her ‘weird, goofy’ personality Christina Hendricks appears on our video call with the most dramatic backdrop. Art deco gold peacocks bedeck a black wall, making her look, as she has so often in her career, a bit too good to be human. Perfectly poised, perfectly framed, perfectly lit, she is more like a dreamy vision of what humans look like. “I, erm, like your wall,” I say, pointlessly. She flashes a smile, as if to say: “Obviously.” We are here primarily to discuss the comedy-drama series Good Girls, the fourth season of which will resume in the US this month after a midseason break. The elevator pitch would be Breaking Bad for girls: three suburban women, each hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, unite to embark on a life of cack-handed crime, only to discover they are good at it. The ensemble – Hendricks, Mae Whitman, who plays her sister, and Retta, their friend – works strikingly well, their pacey comic rapport instilling a sense of perpetual motion. You just can’t imagine Good Girls ending. Every time a plot line seems to be reaching its climax, something worse – and funnier – happens. Continue reading... | | | | | Tonight's TV: Britain's first nuclear reactor in 20 years | | by Ammar Kalia, Hannah Verdier, Ali Catterall, Phil Harrison and Paul Howlett Jun 2, 2021 | | Behind the scenes at the construction of Hinkley Point C. Plus, The Great British Sewing Bee reaches the quarter-finals. Here’s what to watch this evening With an estimated construction cost of between £21.5bn and £22.5bn, the nuclear power plant in question – Hinkley Point C – was one of eight announced by the government in 2010, but the only one on which work has since commenced, meaning it will become the first nuclear power station to have been built in the UK in more than 20 years. This series goes behind the scenes of the project, as workers struggle to keep to their deadlines while digging the reactor’s foundations. Ammar Kalia Continue reading... | | | | | 'An architectural fashion show': Greenwich peninsula's Design District | | by Oliver Wainwright Jun 2, 2021 | | From a rooftop basketball court to a caterpillar-shaped food hall, the souk-like London development is architecture at its trendiest. Can its eye-popping buildings lure young creatives – and bring the buzz? A mirror-polished silver box stands proudly on a corner of the Greenwich Peninsula, reflecting a curious new world of architectural experiments. To one side wriggles a transparent caterpillar of a building, with clear plastic stretched around a bright yellow frame, forming a space-age chrysalis. Next door stands a veiled stack of raw concrete floors, the bare bones of a building draped with a ghostly shroud of steel netting, giving it the look of a multistorey aviary. Nearby there is a sturdy, low-slung box covered in rusty panels of Cor-ten steel, and a little tower-like block wrapped in a corduroy cloak of slender white tubes. Elsewhere in the menagerie we find a pair of triangular wedges dressed in harlequin costumes of pink and green terrazzo diamonds, and several other creatures whose exotic plumage has yet to emerge from behind the scaffolding. Continue reading... | | | | | Gatsby, Ripley and the fake heiress: inside the tech fantasy Anna X | | by Natasha Tripney Jun 2, 2021 | | Journalist turned playwright Joseph Charlton on how the Anna Sorokin case inspired his play about identity and power, starring Emma Corrin One night, while out with friends in London and looking for a place open late, Joseph Charlton decided to talk his way into Soho House. It wouldn’t be that difficult, he reasoned. He’d been working as a journalist and recently had a meeting at the private members’ club, so it was just a matter of using someone else’s name to gain entry. He and his friends paid their own tab, but there was a Ripley-ish thrill to accessing a place off limits to all but a few. Charlton references Patricia Highsmith’s con artist Tom Ripley several times when discussing his play Anna X, which is part of the Re:Emerge season, created by producer Sonia Friedman, to bring new voices to the West End. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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