TIM CURRY (1946 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Tim Curry, who has Time-Warped his last at the age of 80, spent a lifetime proving that the line between high camp and high art is thinner than a fishnet stocking. The British actor, forever embalmed in the public mind as Dr Frank-N-Furter, the sweet transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, shuffled off this mortal coil on 25 August at his home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, having long since mastered the art of making the ridiculous look like destiny.

Born Timothy James Curry in Grappenhall, Cheshire, he arrived in the world with a voice that could curdle milk or seduce it, depending on the lighting. His father, a naval chaplain, departed early via stroke when Tim was twelve, an event the son later outdid by surviving his own, in 2012, with characteristic stubbornness and a wheelchair. From that point he continued working mostly by voice, which was just as well: the instrument had always been the real star, a baritone capable of velvet menace or velvet seduction, often in the same breath.

It was The Rocky Horror Picture Show that fixed him in amber. On stage and then on screen in 1975, Curry strutted about in heels and makeup as if the universe had been waiting for someone to demonstrate that gender is merely a costume change. Audiences of a certain age still shout the dialogue at midnight screenings, which must have been both flattering and faintly exhausting. He followed this with a gallery of villains and eccentrics: the devil in Legend, the butler in Clue, Pennywise the clown in the 1990 version of It, each performance suggesting that evil is best delivered with a raised eyebrow and perfect diction.

Nor did he neglect lighter fare. In Home Alone 2 he played Mr Hector, the Plaza’s haughty concierge, eyeing a credit-card-wielding child with the disdain of a maître d’ spotting a ketchup stain—comic precision in every arched brow. Four years later, as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, he swaggered among the felt and foam with RSC gravitas, singing and scheming as if the Muppets were fellow professionals of the highest order. Both roles showed his unerring instinct for the ridiculous: bureaucratic irritation made hilarious, piratical villainy oddly paternal.

Hollywood never quite knew what to do with him beyond the grotesque, and he never seemed to mind. He collected Tony nominations, voice roles by the dozen, and a memoir, Vagabond, published only last year, in which he revealed just enough to keep the curious hungry. Of his private life he remained resolutely opaque. “I have loved and been loved,” he wrote. “The rest is none of your business.” One suspects the line was delivered with a small, satisfied smile.

In an age that mistakes sincerity for depth, Curry specialised in surfaces that glittered with intelligence. He made excess look like restraint and restraint look like a missed opportunity. The world is a shade less interesting without him, and considerably less well dressed.

DOLLY PARTON (1946 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Dolly Parton has left the building, or more accurately the mountain, at the age of eighty, after a brief and characteristically discreet engagement with cancer. The news arrived with the usual mixture of disbelief and resigned nods from those who had long suspected that even sequins and willpower have their limits. She died in Nashville, surrounded by family, having spent a lifetime proving that a girl from a one-room cabin in the Smokies could out-sing, out-write and out-charm most of the professional charmers who ever darkened a recording studio.

Her songwriting remains the least disputable of her achievements. From “Coat of Many Colors” to “Jolene” and the deceptively simple “I Will Always Love You,” she turned Appalachian plain-speaking into commercial gold without ever sanding off the edges. The songs arrived fully formed, as if she had merely transcribed conversations overheard between the washing line and the church pew. Other writers laboured for years to achieve half the emotional clarity she tossed off between hair appointments. Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” made the world weep; Parton’s original merely raised an eyebrow and suggested the tears were optional.

Then there was the blonde bombshell business, and the bosom that launched a thousand late-night monologues. Parton treated her own silhouette with the same cheerful practicality she applied to everything else: if the Lord had seen fit to equip her like a Tennessee walking horse in a rhinestone bridle, who was she to argue? The wigs grew higher, the waist stayed improbably small, and the cleavage operated as a kind of national monument, visited by photographers, comedians and the occasional startled airline passenger. She never pretended the look was accidental, nor did she allow it to become the whole story. It was stagecraft, pure and simple, and she ran the stage.

Her philanthropy was quieter only by comparison with the rest of the act. The Imagination Library has shipped well over two hundred million books to children who might otherwise have met the alphabet solely through cereal packets. She poured money into COVID vaccine research when it was still fashionable to pretend the virus was a media invention, and she kept the cheques coming long after the applause faded. Dollywood employed thousands in a region that had previously specialised in poverty and picturesque decay. She gave away money the way most people give away opinions: freely, repeatedly, and with surprisingly little regard for the tax receipts.

In the end she managed the rare feat of becoming a living trademark without ever becoming a bore. The hair, the voice, the business empire and the apparently bottomless capacity for kindness all belonged to the same improbable package. Heaven, if it has any sense of theatre, has already ordered extra storage for the wigs.

MIND YOUR MANSIONS

The latest bulletin from the Ministry of Domestic Surveillance – or, as it still coyly calls itself, HMRC – informs us that valuation agents will shortly be empowered to demand entry into any private residence valued at more than two million pounds. Refusal will constitute a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to two hundred pounds. One almost admires the thrift. In the old days of proper authoritarianism the penalty for obstructing the people’s inspectors was rather more comprehensive. Here the fine is modest, almost apologetic, as if the state is merely testing the water before the real drowning begins.

Andy Burnham, now installed as Prime Minister with the slightly stunned air of a man who has finally been given the keys to the sweet shop and discovered that the sweets are all medicinal, has inherited a mansion tax first sketched by Rachel Reeves and is proceeding to give it teeth. Not metaphorical teeth. Actual ones. Agents will arrive, notebooks in hand, to peer into your drawing room, count the bathrooms, assess the cornices, and decide whether your home is sufficiently grand to require an annual tribute ranging from two and a half to seven and a half thousand pounds. Should you decline the pleasure of their company, the law will regard you as deliberately obstructive. The spirit of the thing is pure 1930s Berlin filtered through the genteel bureaucracy of modern Britain: the Gestapo with a polite letter and a fixed-penalty notice.

One searches in vain for any evidence that the British public requested this particular refinement of the state’s gaze. They did not queue for commissars of square footage. They did not petition for the right of strangers bearing official warrants to walk through their front doors and compile inventories of domestic privilege. Yet here we are, under a premiership that seems determined to treat private property as a temporary concession granted by the collective, subject to periodic inspection and moral re-education.

Burnham himself cuts an improbable figure as the commissar-in-chief. For years he cultivated the persona of the northern everyman, the thoughtful mayor who understood the struggles of ordinary folk in Greater Manchester. Now he presides over a policy that treats the ownership of a desirable house as a form of original sin requiring official absolution. The transformation is almost touching in its thoroughness. One imagines him studying the collected works of the more practical Soviet planners late at night, underlining passages about the necessity of accurate cadastral surveys and the unreliability of self-declaration. The British, he appears to have concluded, cannot be trusted to value their own homes honestly. They must be supervised.

There is a certain dry comedy in the detail that the fine for resistance is only two hundred pounds. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of a slap on the wrist administered by a rubber glove. The real penalty is the principle established: that the state may enter your home not because you are suspected of crime, but because it wishes to confirm that you are rich enough to be milked more efficiently. Once that door is open – quite literally – the question of where it ends becomes academic. Why stop at two million? Why not one and a half, as some of Burnham’s more enthusiastic advisers have already whispered? Why not every property above the median, in the interests of fairness? Fairness, in this lexicon, is the word used by people who have decided that your living room is their business.

Soviet-style communism, in its classical form, at least possessed the honesty of grand ideology. It claimed to be building a new man and a new society. The present version is more modest and therefore more insidious. It arrives not with banners and five-year plans but with valuation officers and satellite imagery, supplemented by the occasional internal inspection when the remote sensing proves inadequate. The rhetoric is all about closing loopholes and ensuring the wealthy pay their share. The practice is the quiet assertion that private space is conditional. You may live in your house, provided you open it upon request so that the people’s accountants can take notes.

The British public, for all its famous tolerance of mild eccentricity in government, has never shown any marked enthusiasm for this particular strain of managerial collectivism. They have endured high taxes, meddling regulations, and the occasional outbreak of virtue-signalling legislation. They have not, as a rule, asked to have their homes treated as taxable exhibits in a permanent exhibition of national equity. Burnham’s premiership appears determined to test that patience. One detects in the policy the same instinct that once led planners to believe that the state knew better how to arrange people’s kitchens. The kitchens have been rearranged; the people remain stubbornly attached to the idea that the front door is theirs to open or close.

There is a certain sardonic elegance in the way the measure is presented. No jackboots, merely sensible shoes. No midnight knock, merely an appointment letter. The language is carefully sanitised: “arrange a visit,” “intentionally delays or obstructs,” “reasonable excuse.” One almost expects the agents to apologise for the inconvenience while measuring the hallway. Yet the underlying premise is unchanged from older, less polite systems: the individual’s claim to privacy yields to the collective’s claim to accurate information about his assets. History is littered with regimes that began with such modest, practical requirements and discovered, to their mild surprise, that the appetite grows with the feeding.

Burnham, one suspects, does not see himself as a revolutionary. He sees himself as a moderniser, a man of the people who has simply noticed that some people have nicer houses than others and has decided that the discrepancy requires official documentation. The satire writes itself. A former mayor who once specialised in regional grievances now specialises in national inventories. The north-south divide is to be addressed not by growth but by more precise counting of bathrooms in the south. It is the politics of the spirit level applied to real estate.

The United Kingdom has, in its better moments, been a country that regarded the home as something more than a taxable unit. The Englishman’s castle may have been a romantic exaggeration, but it contained a useful truth: that there ought to be a place where the state’s curiosity stops. Burnham’s valuation regime suggests that the curiosity has been granted permanent access. The population, if the opinion polls and the general atmosphere of weary resignation are any guide, neither wished for this development nor particularly desires its logical extensions. They are being offered it nonetheless, with the quiet insistence of a bureaucracy that has decided the argument is already over.

One can almost hear the future circulars. Properties below the threshold will, of course, remain untouched – until the next adjustment of the threshold. Refusal will remain a minor offence – until it becomes clear that minor offences are insufficiently deterrent. The agents will be polite. The forms will be correctly filled. And somewhere in the background the ghost of a more candid system will nod in approval, recognising the essential continuity: the state has decided it needs to know, and therefore it will enter.

Lew Rockwell, the American libertarian author, once observed that the trouble with bad ideas is not that they are loudly proclaimed but that they are quietly implemented by people who believe themselves to be reasonable. The mansion-tax inspectors, with their modest fines and their official notebooks, are the latest illustration. Reasonable men, reasonable procedures, and an entirely unreasonable premise. The British public is invited to regard this as progress. One can only hope they retain enough of their traditional scepticism to treat the invitation with the dry contempt it deserves.