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 !!