As schools prepare to reopen next week, columnist Emma Brockes examines the melancholy of summer's end and the distractions that soften the blow. This year, the need for rain makes autumn's arrival slightly less depressing, attic conversions become usable again, and for women around 50, the cooler weather brings relief. However, the prospect of dark nights and the slow descent toward Christmas clenches the spirit, prompting a form of self-indulgence Brockes calls "micro-nostalgia"—a wistfulness for past anticipation based on the certainty of future nostalgia.
Back-to-School Shopping Nostalgia Falls Flat
Seeking distraction, Brockes decides to do the back-to-school shop the old-fashioned way, taking her actual body to an actual shopping centre. The excursion involves walking around for five hours, visiting 700 shops, and buying just two lip glosses and some stick-on nails. The entire back-to-school haul is ultimately ordered online at home, proving that nostalgia doesn't always translate into practical action.
Pride Musical Moves Audience to Tears
On Tuesday, Brockes attends a production of Pride, the musical, at the National Theatre in London. The show, which chronicles the solidarity between striking Welsh miners and gay activists in the mid-1980s, has been making people weep since it opened in Cardiff in March and London in June. It will transfer to the Bridge Theatre in Southwark this winter. Brockes managed to hold back tears, despite the show's best efforts.
The stage production is even more moving than the 2014 film, partly because it leans more heavily into the Aids story. Towards the end, Pride uses a trope popularised by Madonna during her 2023 Celebration tour, where she sang "Live to Tell" while images of her old cohorts who died of Aids flashed on screens. The recently shuttered Broadway show Cats: Jellicle Ball, which celebrates 80s drag queens of Harlem, did something similar to stunning effect. Pride uses this method to flay the audience into a final state of sniffing and hiccuping as fallen heroes appear on screens in black and white, captured in a youth made more glorious by its truncated end.
Harry and Meghan's Return Sparks Media Frenzy
On Wednesday, Harry and Meghan fly back into Britain after six years in the US, and the world's media is treated to the opinions of British people stopped on the street. Brockes notes how much better prepared the average American is when called on by a passing TV hack for a spontaneous view. Passers-by in Nashville were effortlessly fluent when asked about Dolly Parton, while those in the Cotswolds, where the couple are reported to be moving, were required to say something sensible about them. There was a lot of shifty body language and "made their bed and lie in it" commentary, which made Brockes feel fond of her people.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail dug up the term "praetorian guard" and raised the prospect of the two brothers running rival courts, while the New York Times speculated on William's "silence" since his brother's return. Brockes questions what anyone actually expected the Prince of Wales to say, feud or otherwise.
Ali G Movie Faces Petition and Backlash
On Thursday, pushback against the forthcoming Ali G movie, Ali G: Who Iz I?, gathers force in the form of a petition with 35,000 signatures and counting, aiming to keep the film out of cinemas on the basis that it reinforces racist stereotypes under the cover of satire. However, it may be that no petitions are necessary if Sacha Baron Cohen's 20-year-old vehicle strikes modern audiences as an embarrassing anachronism that is as bafflingly bad as it is crashingly unfunny.
Early indications aren't good. Baron Cohen appeared in character earlier this year at Wimbledon, towing a camera crew and getting himself thrown out. Dressed in a white tracksuit with a marijuana leaf insignia, he joked that tennis was a "crap version of ping pong" and made gags about drug dealing. The other Baron Cohen characters haven't aged well either. Bruno plays a screaming gay that relies on homophobic tropes, ostensibly to flush out bigotry but inviting the audience to recoil alongside. Borat was the best of the bunch, retaining an endearing core that gave the character more humanity and lacked the speciousness of Ali G.
Baron Cohen has also directed the movie, and surely nobody wants it. If Ali G had novelty value back in the day, he has long been replaced by characters such as Diana Morgan's Philomena Cunk, who send up dumb TV culture without humiliating people or trading in caricatures that get a charge off the very thing they purport to be spoofing.
Barbican Screening of Beautiful Thing Ends the Week
On Friday, the week ends well with an outdoor screening at London's Barbican of the 90s film Beautiful Thing, an adaptation of Jonathan Harvey's classic coming-of-age play. The film, directed by Hettie McDonald and starring Tameka Empson as Leah and Linda Henry as Sandra, Jamie's mum, killed Brockes then. This is partly down to the soundtrack from the Mamas and the Papas and all those 90s references, like peppermint foot lotion from the Body Shop, that feel so far removed they might be signifiers of a lost world in a JG Ballard novel. Of all the film's lines, the one Brockes keeps thinking of ahead of the screening is: "The whole of bloody Thamesmead can hear you!" More tissues are needed.
