CATHERINE O'HARA (1954 - 2026): A OBITUARY

Catherine O’Hara, who has taken her final bow at the age of 71, always seemed too vibrantly peculiar to succumb to something as mundane as mortality. Born in Toronto, she was the sixth of seven children in an Irish Catholic family, where chaos presumably prepared her for the absurdities of show business. Her sister, the musician Mary Margaret O’Hara, shared the gene for artistic eccentricity, but Catherine channelled hers into comedy with a precision that could skewer pretension without drawing blood. 

She cut her teeth at The Second City in Toronto in 1974, understudying Gilda Radner before joining the legendary SCTV troupe from 1976 to 1984. There, her impersonations and sketches earned her a Primetime Emmy for writing, proving she could craft laughs as deftly as deliver them. Hollywood beckoned with roles that amplified her off-kilter charm: the harried mother Kate McCallister in Home Alone (1990) and its sequel, frantically searching for a forgotten child amid holiday mayhem, a performance that resonated with every parent who’s ever misplaced a sock, let alone a son. 

In Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), she was Delia Deetz, the pretentious artist whose disdain for the afterlife was matched only by her questionable taste in sculpture—reprising the role in the 2024 sequel with undiminished flair. Her late-career triumph as Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek (2015–2020) brought an Emmy for acting, a Golden Globe, and the joy of watching a faded soap star reinvent herself with wigs and vocabulary that defied gravity. Married to production designer Bo Welch in 1992, whom she met on the set of Beetlejuice, they raised two sons, Matthew and Luke, in a life that balanced Hollywood’s glare with quiet normalcy. She also lived with situs inversus, her organs mirrored—a fitting quirk for someone who turned expectations inside out. 

O’Hara leaves a legacy of laughter that poked gently at human folly, reminding us that eccentricity is the spice of sanity. In a world of cookie-cutter stars, she was the odd one out, and we were all the richer for it.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF AMELIA (OR: HOW THE BRITISH STATE INVENTED ITS OWN NEMESIS)

One might have thought that, in an age when governments are meant to be wary of the internet's capacity for mischief, the British Home Office—or one of its satellite bodies, Hull City Council being the usual suspect in these matters—would have paused before commissioning an educational video game designed to inoculate the young against the perils of 'far-right extremism.' But pause they did not. Instead, they produced Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism, a digital morality play aimed at teenagers, in which the player, a blameless lad named Charlie, is tempted towards the dark side by a purple-haired goth girl called Amelia.

Amelia, you see, was intended as the villain of the piece: a choker-wearing, pink-dressed siren who whispers seductive heresies about borders, cultural compatibility, and the merits of low crime rates. Agree with her, and your score plummets; resist her blandishments, and you are rewarded with the warm glow of approved opinion. The designers, one imagines, patted themselves on the back for their subtlety. After all, who could possibly sympathise with a character so obviously coded as the embodiment of wrongthink? The purple hair alone was surely warning enough—practically a semaphore flag signalling "danger: unconventional views ahead."

Alas, the British public—ever possessed of a finely tuned sense of the absurd—took one look at Amelia and decided otherwise. Within days of the game's quiet release, she had been requisitioned by the very forces she was meant to repel. Memes proliferated with the speed usually reserved for royal scandals or unfortunate ministerial gaffes. Amelia appeared waving the Union Jack, delivering stirring monologues about the defence of Albion, or simply standing defiantly in the rain like a latter-day Boudicca with better hair dye. AI-generated videos had her addressing the nation in tones of measured outrage, while fan art transformed her into the waifu of the disaffected right. Merchandise suggestions followed: T-shirts, mugs, perhaps a limited-edition choker bearing the legend "Amelia Was Right."

The irony was exquisite. A project conceived in the spirit of Prevent—the government's counter-radicalisation programme, which has long specialised in treating ordinary scepticism about mass immigration as the moral equivalent of bomb-making—had accidentally created its own icon of resistance. Amelia, designed to embody everything the establishment feared, became instead a mirror held up to its own anxieties. The views she espoused in the game—concerns about cultural erosion, public safety, national identity—were not, as the designers evidently believed, the ravings of a tiny extremist fringe. They were, on the contrary, rather widely shared, which is why the attempt to pathologise them struck so many as both pompous and faintly comical.

The online response was not merely mockery; it was a masterclass in cultural jujitsu. Where the state offered a clunky interactive lecture, the internet replied with satire, beauty, and a certain defiant glamour. Amelia's aesthetic—goth confidence married to patriotic sentiment—proved irresistible in an era when official communications so often feel sterile and hectoring. One suspects the game's creators had never quite grasped that making your antagonist more charismatic than your protagonist is a rookie error in narrative craft, let alone in propaganda.

And then, inevitably, came the retreat. Faced with a viral phenomenon they could neither control nor comprehend, the authorities did what authorities so often do: they made the offending item disappear. The game was quietly taken offline, leaving behind only screenshots, archived memes, and the lingering suspicion that someone, somewhere in Whitehall, had just learned a very expensive lesson about the perils of underestimating the British sense of humour.

There is, of course, a longer tradition here. Governments have been trying to shape public opinion through art and entertainment since the days of Tudor propaganda plays, and they have been failing at it almost as long. What makes the Amelia affair peculiarly modern is the speed and scale of the counterattack. In the age of AI and instant memetic warfare, a state-sponsored cautionary tale can be inverted into a celebration of the forbidden within hours. The establishment, accustomed to setting the terms of debate, discovers too late that the internet has its own ideas.

One cannot help feeling a twinge of sympathy for the earnest civil servants who dreamed up Pathways. They meant well, after all—or at least they meant to be seen to mean well, which in bureaucratic circles amounts to much the same thing. Yet in their eagerness to warn the young against dangerous thoughts, they handed their opponents a gift: a ready-made martyr with excellent cheekbones and impeccable timing. Amelia may have been deleted from the official servers, but she lives on in the collective imagination, a purple-haired reminder that propaganda, like comedy, depends entirely on knowing your audience.

And on that score, the British state appears to have rather missed the joke.

THE DAVOS DEMOLITION DERBY

There was a time, not so long ago, when the World Economic Forum at Davos resembled nothing so much as a gathering of the world's most expensively dressed penguins, huddling together on an ice floe of mutual self-congratulation while lecturing the rest of us about the virtues of melting it. Private jets queued up like taxis at Heathrow, disgorging billionaires who had come to explain why the rest of us should own nothing and be happy about it. The air was thick with the perfume of hypocrisy: men who had made their fortunes by exploiting national differences now preached the gospel of borderless bliss, while simultaneously ensuring their own offspring attended schools where the curriculum still included such quaint notions as patriotism and arithmetic.

And then, on a crisp January day in 2026, Donald J Trump strolled into this sanctum sanctorum and, with the breezy confidence of a man who has never read a Klaus Schwab white paper in his life (and why would he?), proceeded to administer the verbal equivalent of a wedgie to the entire assembly. He did not mince words. He did not offer the customary Davos platitudes about "stakeholder capitalism" or "inclusive growth." Instead, he reminded Europe that replacing its native populations with unchecked migration might not be the cleverest long-term strategy, suggested that Canada owed its continued existence to American forbearance, and floated the idea—yet again—that Greenland might look rather fetching in stars and stripes. 

The globalists, accustomed to being addressed in the soothing tones of management consultancy, sat there like debutantes who had just been informed that the orchestra had switched to punk rock. One could almost hear the collective intake of breath, followed by the faint clinking of champagne flutes being set down in disbelief. Here was a man who had wandered into their coven and, instead of genuflecting before the altar of global governance, had essentially told them to shove their dystopian blueprint where the sun does not shine. It was magnificent, in its way—raw, unfiltered, and entirely devoid of the polished euphemisms that usually pass for courage in such circles.

But let us not make the mistake of attributing this glorious moment of deflation to Trump alone. He is, after all, merely the messenger—or, more accurately, the megaphone. The true architects of globalism's current discomfiture are not to be found in the gilded halls of power but in the factories of Ohio, the oil fields of Texas, the construction sites of Pennsylvania: the blue-collar working class who, with the quiet determination of people who have nothing left to lose except their illusions, decided that enough was enough. Globalism, that glittering intellectual construct, was always a top-down affair. It was devised by people who fly first class and think "diversity" means hiring another Harvard graduate from a slightly different postcode. It promised a world without borders, where capital and labour would flow freely, and everyone would benefit from the efficiencies of scale. What it delivered, of course, was a world in which capital flowed freely to tax havens, labour flowed freely across borders to depress wages, and the only people who truly benefited were those who already owned the airports.

The working class noticed this rather sooner than the commentariat. They noticed when their factories closed and reopened in countries where environmental regulations were treated as optional. They noticed when their communities, once cohesive if unpretentious, began to fracture under the pressure of rapid demographic change imposed from above. They noticed when politicians who had never changed a spark plug in their lives explained that their anxieties were merely the unfortunate but necessary birth pangs of a new global order. And, being practical people, they did what practical people do: they voted. Not for the polished technocrat who offered more of the same, but for the brash outsider who at least acknowledged their existence. 

Trump did not create this revolt; he surfed it. The wave was generated by millions of ordinary men and women who had grown tired of being told that their desire to preserve their culture, their wages, and their children's future was somehow evidence of moral failure. Globalism, for all its lofty rhetoric, had always rested on the assumption that the working class would simply accept its own obsolescence. 

It turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. The very people whom globalism claimed to be lifting out of poverty were the ones who finally pulled the plug on the entire enterprise. Not through violence or revolution, but through the humblest of democratic acts: marking an X on a ballot paper. The elites, who had spent decades explaining that nationalism was a primitive relic, discovered to their horror that it was alive and well in the hearts of people who still believed that a nation should belong to its citizens.

And now, with globalism's balloon comprehensively pricked, one cannot help but cast an eye across the Atlantic to our own benighted isle. Britain, having half-escaped the European Union only to find itself governed by a succession of leaders who seemed determined to reimport the worst aspects of continental technocracy, stands at a similar crossroads. The same forces that propelled Trump into power—the quiet anger of the disregarded, the sense that the country one grew up in is slipping away—are stirring here too.

Enter Nigel Farage, that perennial thorn in the establishment's side, who has spent decades being dismissed as a fringe figure only to watch his once-marginal concerns become the common currency of political debate. One detects, in the current climate, the faint but unmistakable rumble of another popular revolt. The British working class—those legendary figures who once built an empire and then, with characteristic phlegmatism, allowed it to dissolve—may yet decide that they have had quite enough of being lectured by people who cannot distinguish between a nation and a hotel chain. If they do, and if Farage becomes the vessel for their frustrations as Trump did across the water, then globalism's downfall will acquire a satisfying symmetry. The ideology that promised to transcend nations will have been defeated, in the end, by the stubborn persistence of national feeling among the very people it claimed to have rendered obsolete.

There is, of course, no guarantee. The British establishment has a genius for absorbing dissent and neutralising it with committee seats and peerages. But the signs are there: the growing disillusionment with both major parties, the sense that the country's borders, culture, and economy are no longer under meaningful democratic control. Should the working class here follow their American cousins and deliver a similar rebuke to the cosmopolitan elite, it would constitute the final, exquisite proof that globalism's greatest flaw was not economic but anthropological: it fundamentally misunderstood the nature of human loyalty.

In the meantime, one can only raise a glass—preferably one filled with something domestically produced—to the blue-collar voters who have reminded the world that history is not made solely in the conference centres of Davos, but in the polling stations of the forgotten provinces. Globalism, that most hubristic of modern projects, is not yet dead, but it is certainly reeling. And for that, we have not one man to thank, but millions of ordinary ones who refused to own nothing and be happy about it.

THE RANTING BRUMMIE REVIEWS: "RENTAL FAMILY" (2026)

In an age when genuine human connection seems to require a subscription fee and two-factor authentication, along comes Rental Family, a film that dares to ask the question: what if you could simply hire someone to pretend they love you? It's a premise straight out of Japan's more eccentric service industries – the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether loneliness has become so acute that even the pretence of family now comes with an hourly rate and a non-disclosure agreement. Directed by Hikari, who co-wrote the script with Stephen Blahut, this 2026 offering stars Brendan Fraser as an American actor adrift in Tokyo, reduced to renting himself out as surrogate kin. One might have expected a bleak satire along the lines of Werner Herzog brooding over a vending machine, but what we get instead is something far gentler: a dramedy that wants to hug you, even if it occasionally squeezes a little too hard.

Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, a once-promising thespian whose career peaked with a toothpaste commercial seven years earlier – the kind of gig that pays the rent but leaves the soul wondering whether it has been whitened or merely bleached. Desperate for work, he joins a company that supplies stand-in relatives for clients too embarrassed or estranged to produce the real thing. Weddings without fiancés, school interviews without fathers, even quiet companionship for the elderly: it's all on the menu, served with professional detachment. Fraser, that great lumbering bear of a man who has lately reminded us why we fell for him in the first place, brings a wounded gravitas to the role. He is by turns bewildered, tender, and quietly furious, his eyes doing the heavy lifting whenever the script threatens to lighten the load. This is Fraser in full post-The Whale renaissance mode, and the film is inconceivable without him. One watches him forge tentative bonds with a young girl who needs a father figure and an ageing actor slipping into dementia, and one believes every hesitant smile. It is, dare one say it, Oscar-adjacent work, though in these cynical times that phrase has begun to sound like a threat rather than a promise.

The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, a reminder that Japanese actors have long mastered the art of conveying volumes with a flicker of restraint. Takehiro Hira as the rental agency's proprietor brings a weary pragmatism that anchors the film's more whimsical flights; Mari Yamamoto as Fraser's colleague offers a sharp, knowing counterpoint; and young Shannon Mahina Gorman, as the half-Japanese girl who gradually thaws towards her hired dad, delivers a performance of such natural poise that one suspects child labour laws were rewritten just for her. Even the venerable Akira Emoto, as the dementia-stricken former star, manages to be heart-breaking without ever tipping into caricature. Hikari directs them all with a sure hand, allowing silences to do the talking and trusting the audience to keep up.

Visually, the film is a quiet triumph. Cinematographer Takurô Ishizaka captures Tokyo not as the neon overload of tourist fantasies but as a city of intimate spaces: cramped apartments, empty shrines, rain-slicked streets at dusk. The camera lingers on faces in close-up, catching the micro-expressions that betray the gap between performance and feeling, while wider shots frame characters against the vast indifference of urban life. It's understated work, never flashy, yet it gives the film a texture that elevates it above mere feel-good fare. Jónsi and Alex Somers' score, all shimmering atmospherics and plaintive strings, complements this perfectly – though one does occasionally wish someone had told them that less can indeed be more.

The story itself is cleverly constructed, weaving together several rental assignments into a mosaic of modern isolation. It explores the blurred line between acting and authenticity with more nuance than one might expect from a film that ultimately wants to reassure us that human connection is still possible, even if it starts with a contract. There are moments of genuine insight here – particularly in the way the film acknowledges the emotional toll on the renters themselves – and a satirical edge that pricks without drawing too much blood.

Yet herein lies the film's one noticeable flaw: a tendency to lean rather heavily on the sentimental accelerator. For all its restraint elsewhere, Rental Family cannot resist the occasional plunge into outright heart-tugging, complete with swelling music and reconciliations that arrive with the neatness of a PowerPoint conclusion. One scene in particular, involving a clandestine trip to a childhood home and a conveniently unearthed time capsule, threatens to tip the enterprise into the territory of those airport novels one pretends not to read. It's not that the emotion feels unearned – Fraser ensures that it doesn't – but rather that it arrives gift-wrapped when a subtler presentation might have sufficed. In its weaker moments, the film seems to fear that we might leave the cinema unmoved, and so it reaches for the emotional defibrillator when a gentle nudge would have done.

Still, these are quibbles. Rental Family is, in the end, a warm, intelligent piece of entertainment that treats its characters with respect, and its audience with something approaching trust. In a cinematic landscape increasingly dominated by explosions and superheroes, here is a film content to explore quieter devastations and smaller triumphs. Brendan Fraser, in particular, reminds us what a proper movie star looks like when given proper material. One leaves the theatre feeling, against all odds, mildly optimistic about the human condition – or at least about the possibility of renting a better version of it for a couple of hours.

FAR BELOW THE STARS: STAR TREK'S FLOP FRONTIER

One cannot help but admire the economy of a good internet meme. In a single image, split down the middle like a poorly edited diplomatic incident, we are presented with two visions of Star Trek captaincy. On the left, Avery Brooks as Captain Benjamin Sisko of Deep Space Nine, seated in the command chair of the USS Defiant as if it were carved from the very bedrock of moral authority: upright, resolute, the weight of a station, a war, and a prophecy resting on his shoulders without so much as a slouch. On the right, Holly Hunter as Captain Nahla Ake in Star Trek's newest offering; Starfleet Academy, sprawled in her chair with the languid abandon of someone who has just discovered that the replicator does a decent margarita and the Klingons can wait. The caption, one presumes, writes itself: 'Then vs. Now.' It is a cruel juxtaposition, but cruelty, when wielded with precision, can be the kindest form of criticism. 

The meme, circulating like a subversive pamphlet in the darker corners of X, captures in one glance what volumes of earnest fan discourse have laboured to express: that somewhere between the 20th century and the 21st, Star Trek lost its posture. It stopped standing to attention and started lounging. The culprit, if we must name one - and naming culprits is half the pleasure of cultural decline - is Alex Kurtzman, the producer whose name now adorns the franchise like a corporate sponsor on a once-pristine starship hull. Kurtzman, a man whose chief qualification for stewardship of Gene Roddenberry’s legacy appears to be that he once wrote a Transformers script that made money, has presided over what we might charitably call the 'Devolution Era'. Under his watchful mediocrity, Star Trek has mutated from thoughtful exploration of the human (and Vulcan, and Klingon) condition into a garish light show punctuated by therapeutic weeping and explosions that obey no known laws of physics.

"Classic Trek" - let us define it, for the benefit of younger readers who think "classic" means anything made before the advent of lens flares - was built on sturdier stuff, albeit made on shakier sets. The Original Series boldly dared to smuggle allegory past the network censors; Asians and black women in positions of authority, the first interracial kiss on network television between Kirk & Uhura in the episode "Plato's Stepchildren", and Kirk himself - shirt torn gloriously askew - wrestling with gods on distant planets while quietly asking whether America’s adventures in Vietnam were quite so noble. 

The Next Generation gave us Jean-Luc Picard, a captain who could quote Shakespeare while negotiating peace with the Sheliak, embodying the Enlightenment ideal that reason might yet prevail. Voyager - helmed by Trek's first female lead in Captain Katheryn Janeway - and Enterprise had their inconsistencies, but even they still retained a certain dignity of purpose. And then there was Deep Space Nine, the underrated jewel in the Trek crown, the series that proved Star Trek could sustain moral complexity over seven seasons without once resorting to a character sobbing in a Jeffries tube. DS9 dared to examine occupation, collaboration, faith, and the cost of victory. Its social commentary was woven into the narrative fabric rather than stapled on like a diversity badge. The Bajoran struggle mirrored real-world post-colonial traumas without ever needing to spell out the parallel in bold captions. The Ferengi episodes dissected capitalism with a sharpness that would make a modern showrunner reach for the smelling salts.

At the centre of it all stood Benjamin Sisko - black, widowed, a single father raising his son Jake amid the ruins of utopia after the loss of his wife to the ruthless, homogenized, confirmatively-obsessed Borg at the Battle of Wolf 359. Here was diversity done authentically: not announced with fanfare, but embodied in the very soul of a man who commanded respect because he rolled up his sleeves and earned it, flaw by painful flaw. Sisko was no perfect avatar; he was a prophet who doubted, a commander who bent the rules, a father who worried his son might prefer writing to warp cores, but ultimately let him choose his own path. In the season 6 episode; "In the Pale Moonlight," arguably the finest hour ever of televised Star Trek, Sisko conspires with the amoral Garak to fake evidence that will bring the Romulans into the Dominion War. "So, I will learn to live with it...Because I can live with it...I CAN live with it." he says at episode’s end, staring into the void of his own reflection. The line lands like a phaser set to kill because we have watched a good man compromise his soul for a greater good. It is Shakespearean in its tragic nuance, and it trusts the audience to grapple with the ambiguity itself, rather than spoon-feeding a TED Talk on ethics.

Compare this to Kurtzman-Trek, where moral dilemmas are resolved by group hugs and where every third scene features someone whispering, "I’m scared," as though fear were a novel emotional state in deep space. Combat, once a tense ballet of shields and tactics - think Sisko manoeuvring the Defiant like a pugilist in a bar brawl - has become a Michael Bay fever dream of meaningless detonations. Practical effects, those glorious models and miniatures that gave the ships tangible weight, have been replaced by weightless CGI that looks expensive and feels cheap. One longs for the days when a starship felt like a vessel you could walk around, not a screensaver.

The nadir - or so we hoped - arrived yesterday with the premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a series that asks the question no one was asking: what if Hogwarts were in space, but with more hormones and fewer rules of magic? Set in the 32nd century (because nothing says "fresh ideas" like leaping another thousand years forward), it follows a gaggle of cadets navigating friendships, rivalries and, inevitably, first loves while a mysterious threat looms. Early notices suggest it is less a successor to Roddenberry than a spiritual cousin to Riverdale in zero gravity. Holly Hunter, an actress of genuine gravitas, is reportedly wasted as a captain who barks at teenagers in a manner more suited to a boot camp than the enlightened Federation. The dialogue, from what leaks out, veers between cringe-inducing slang and on-the-nose sermonising. One reviewer called it "horny high-school spinoff"; another, more charitable, praised the production values while mourning the absence of anything resembling Star Trek’s traditional philosophical spine.

The backlash has been swift and, in certain quarters, gleeful. YouTube’s more combative critics have declared it "abysmal," "dreadful," a final betrayal of the franchise. Even milder voices detect tonal whiplash: the show cannot decide whether it is a teen soap, a prestige drama, or a desperate bid for the TikTok demographic. Where Classic Trek smuggled progressive ideas beneath the surface, Kurtzman-Trek broadcasts them like red alert klaxons, as though subtlety were a war crime. The result is not enlightenment but exhaustion. One suspects Kurtzman himself does not quite grasp what he has inherited. He approaches Star Trek the way a tourist approaches the Louvre: eager to snap selfies in front of the Mona Lisa but vaguely aware he is missing the point. The franchise, once a forum for grown-up questions about war, identity, and the final frontier, has become a delivery system for contemporary talking points, delivered with the subtlety of a photon torpedo.

And so we return to that meme: Sisko in his chair, Hunter in hers. The image is funny because it is true. Command once meant bearing the weight of the unbearable with dignity. Now it means kicking back, cracking wise, and hoping the algorithm notices. Somewhere, Gene Roddenberry is probably polishing his spectacles and wondering how the future managed to arrive both too soon and not soon enough. Live long and prosper? On current form, one fears the franchise may do neither.

SCOTT ADAMS (1957 - 2026): AN OBITURY

Scott Adams, who has died at 68 after a characteristically unsparing encounter with metastatic prostate cancer, leaves behind a comic strip that did more damage to corporate self-esteem than a thousand management consultants ever managed to repair. Dilbert, that narrow-shouldered, tie-flip-wearing engineer, was not so much a character as a mirror held up to the modern office at the precise angle that made everyone wince and laugh at the same time. Adams understood, with the clarity of a man who had himself endured fluorescent-lit meetings about synergy, that the true horror of white-collar life is not evil but incompetence elevated to religion.

From its modest debut in 1989, Dilbert grew into a daily act of quiet subversion, syndicated in thousands of newspapers and pinned to cubicle walls like samizdat. The pointy-haired boss, that magnificent embodiment of authority without aptitude, became the patron saint of every employee who has ever been told to “think outside the box” while locked inside one. Adams’s genius lay in his economy: three panels, a few lines of dialogue, and the entire edifice of late-twentieth-century managerialism collapsed in muffled laughter. He never raised his voice; he simply observed that the emperor’s new paradigm was, as usual, naked.

Later, Adams took to the internet with the enthusiasm of a man escaping a burning building, offering opinions on everything from persuasion techniques to politics with a confidence that sometimes outran caution. Newspapers, suddenly discovering principles they had mislaid during decades of printing his strip, dropped Dilbert in 2023 after remarks that managed to offend almost everyone except, presumably, the offended. Undeterred, he relaunched the comic on friendlier platforms, proving that cancellation, like performance reviews, is rarely terminal.

Yet the work endures. Dilbert captured something permanent about the human comedy of hierarchies: the way power rewards vacuity, the way bright people are paid to pretend stupidity is strategy. Adams gave the cubicle dweller a voice—dry, resigned, devastatingly accurate—and in doing so performed a public service more valuable than any mission statement. He will be missed, not least by those who still arrive at the office each morning, glance at the clock, and think, with affectionate resignation: “Close enough for now.”

DEREK MARTIN (1933 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Derek Martin, best known for portraying Charlie Slater in EastEnders, has finally departed the real-life Albert Square—having outlasted his on-screen alter ego by a full decade, a rare victory over the scriptwriters who dispatched Charlie with a heart attack in 2016. Born Derek William Rapp in Bow, east London, on April 11, 1933, Martin grew up in the authentic East End at a time when the Krays were still weighing their vocational options. 

He began his working life in a variety of trades—gambler, racer, market trader—before drifting into stunt work, doubling for safer actors in series such as The Saint. A broken collarbone on Elizabeth R persuaded him that falling off horses for a living had limited long-term prospects, and he turned to acting proper, without the benefit of formal training or, apparently, any hindrance from that omission. Early television roles included brief appearances in Z-Cars, The Sweeney, and—most fleetingly—Doctor Who, where he featured as an uncredited extra in The Web of Fear, managing to look suitably alarmed for several seconds without once upstaging the Yeti. It was the sort of cameo that only dedicated fans notice, which is to say, the sort that guarantees immortality among a discerning few. 

True fame arrived in 2000 when he joined EastEnders as Charlie Slater, the beleaguered taxi-driver patriarch of a family whose collective misfortunes could have filled a tragedy by Euripides, had Euripides possessed a louder shout and a weaker grasp of probability. Charlie endured domestic violence storylines, runaway relatives, and enough shouting in the Queen Vic to qualify as a vocal endurance test. Martin played him with a gruff, unflappable decency that made viewers believe, against all evidence, that Albert Square might one day run out of fresh catastrophes.

He left the show in 2011, returned briefly for funerals and farewells, and thereafter enjoyed a quieter retirement, occasionally resurfacing in Law & Order: UK or to remind interviewers that real cockneys once existed. He is survived by his family, who described him as a devoted father. EastEnders rolls on, of course, but for Derek, the cab meter at least, has finally stopped.

BOB WEIR (1947 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist, singer and occasional songwriter with the Grateful Dead, has played his last chord at the age of 78, following a brief but victorious skirmish with cancer—an outcome that will surprise no one familiar with Weir’s lifelong habit of emerging unscathed from situations that would have finished lesser mortals. Born Robert Hall Parber in San Francisco in 1947 and promptly adopted by a more conventionally named family, Weir met Jerry Garcia on New Year’s Eve 1963 in a music shop, an encounter that led, by a route only marginally less circuitous than one of the band’s own solos, to the formation of the Grateful Dead. 

The name itself was a masterstroke of misdirection: to the casual observer it suggested a death-metal outfit specialising in gothic gloom, whereas the reality was nearer to a travelling folk festival that had accidentally ingested the entire West Coast’s supply of lysergic acid and decided to keep going for thirty years. Weir’s role was ostensibly that of rhythm guitarist, a position he interpreted with heroic latitude. While Garcia took the solos that wandered off like lost hikers, Weir supplied chords that arrived from unexpected angles, as though he had been taught harmony by a jazz musician who had then wandered off himself. 

His singing voice—boyish, slightly nasal, eternally hopeful—carried songs such as “Sugar Magnolia” and “Playing in the Band” with a conviction that made even the most sceptical listener believe sunshine daydreams were a viable career path. After Garcia’s death in 1995, Weir continued touring with various permutations of the surviving Dead, most recently Dead & Company, proving that the band’s audience was prepared to follow him almost anywhere provided there was adequate parking for recreational vehicles. His later projects—RatDog, Wolf Bros—suggested a man unable to sit still, a trait that endeared him to fans and exhausted everyone else.

He is survived by his wife Natascha Münter and their two daughters, Monet and Chloe. The Grateful Dead’s music, once described by a critic as “the sound of tie-dye being wrung out”, will continue to circulate among the faithful, who may now reflect that the long strange trip has, for one of its principal navigators, finally reached journey’s end. Or, knowing Bob, merely paused for a very long drum solo.

STARMER'S X-IT: COWARDICE IN CHIVALRY'S CLOAK

Ah, the noble pursuit of protecting the fairer sex—or so Sir Keir Starmer would have us believe, as he gazes upon the digital wilderness of X with the solemnity of a school prefect discovering a bit of graffiti in the boys lavatories depicting him with a tiny penis. One might almost admire the gall, if it weren't so transparently flimsy, like a prophylactic balloon inflated with hot air and pious intentions. The catalyst, we're told, is the scourge of AI-generated deepfakes, those pixelated phantoms that have lately haunted the likes of Samantha Smith, a victim of such electronic effrontery. Hundreds of erotic images, conjured by the mischievous Grok tool, have prompted Ofcom to rattle its regulatory sabre under the Online Safety Act. And yet, as Smith astutely observes in her post, the Labour government's sudden zeal for platform bans smells less of chivalry and more of a desperate bid to muzzle the masses who dare to question their betters.

Enter Starmer, that paragon of principled leadership, who now contemplates blocking X in the UK, not because he's a knight errant charging against algorithmic indecency, but because the platform has become a thorn in his side—a veritable briar patch of barbs aimed at his policies, his party, and, heaven forbid, his person. It's all too clear: this is no crusade for women's safety, but a craven attempt to silence political dissent. One imagines him in his study, poring over reports of public mockery, his brow furrowed like a poorly ironed napkin, whispering to his aides, "Make it stop." For what else could explain the selective outrage? Other AI tools roam free, unmolested by ministerial edicts, while X, that hotbed of unfiltered truth-telling, is singled out. It's as if the government has decided that the real threat to society isn't deepfakes, but the deeper fakes of their own making—those glossy manifestos that evaporate upon contact with reality.

Starmer, you see, is the very model of a weak-willed tin-pot dictator, a man who ascended to power not on a wave of public adoration but on the tepid ripples of apathy toward his predecessor. He lacks the iron fist of a proper autocrat; instead, he wields a wrist limper than month-old celery, slapping at shadows while pretending it's a bold strike for justice. No public support buoys him—polls whisper of disillusionment, and the streets echo with the indifferent shuffle of feet that once might have marched. He's a sanctimonious prefect, forever tut-tutting at the rowdy pupils in the playground of public discourse, enforcing rules he scribbles in the margins of his own ego. But beneath that starched collar lurks a deeper fear: exposure. For Starmer, one suspects, has no mortal soul to speak of—merely a hollow core, echoing with the wind of opportunism. He's terrified that X's unbridled users will peel back the layers, revealing not a statesman but a silhouette, a cut-out figure propped up by spin doctors and sycophants. Ban the platform, and poof—gone are the memes, the exposés, the relentless drip of ridicule that might otherwise erode his fragile façade. 

Contrast this with the laudable pragmatism of Elon Musk, who, upon sensing the winds of controversy, shrewdly tucked Grok's image-generation wizardry behind a paywall—a velvet rope for premium subscribers only, thereby curbing the casual conjurers of calamity while keeping the tool aloft for those willing to pony up. It's a move of elegant restraint, like installing a lock on the liquor cabinet rather than prohibition outright, acknowledging human mischief without smothering innovation. Starmer, meanwhile, opts for the hollow heroism of incarcerating the murder weapon itself, dispatching the hapless tool to the clink while the true wielders—those crafting the deepfakes in the first place—saunter free, unscathed by his sanctimonious sabre-rattling. How richly ironic, coming from a man who never tires of trumpeting his lineage as the son of a toolmaker; one might think he'd show more sympathy for the implements of creation, rather than treating them as scapegoats for his own political impotence.

And why shouldn't the British people have the right to insult and belittle him personally? It's a time-honoured tradition, as British as soggy chips, tepid tea or queuing in the rain. From the lampoons of Swift to the cartoons of Gillray, we've always reserved the privilege of puncturing pomposity with a well-aimed pin. X is merely the modern broadsheet, where the hoi polloi can hurl their verbal volleys without fear of reprisal from the head boy's cane. To deny that is to deny the soul of democracy itself—or whatever passes for it in these 'enlightened' times. 

Let the people mock; let them deride. Let them outright insult him on the most personal level possible. It's the least we owe ourselves, after enduring the spectacle of a leader who mistakes censorship for courage. In the end, one can only pity poor Keir—that clammy-fingered fraud oozing flop sweat from every pore like a festering boil on the body politic, that beetle-browed bungler staggering through screw-ups like a maggot-ridden corpse flailing in a cesspit, that snivelling bootlicking quim drooling bile over crumbs of authority as his backbone liquefies into pus, that rodent-snouted ruin of botched revolutions, stinking of stale slogans marinated in the rancid piss of panic, that spineless slack-jawed savage scavenging for scraps in the slime-slick sewers of statecraft, that empty-eyed husk of hollow pledges, barren of backbone and quivering with the spasms of a gutted fish on a foul hook. If words could wound, these would disembowel him like tissue paper shredded by a jagged, rust-encrusted blade, spewing his phony piety in viscous gobs of gore, stripped naked as the rotting wraith he so wretchedly feigns to conceal.

Pray he falls this year. I shall crack open my oldest bottle of scotch the day he and the entire Labour cabinet leave No 10. And I shall savour it with the same pleasure he gives himself when another small vulcanised vessel of vagrants wash up on the shores of Dover.

Welcome to 2026 everyone !!