Fern Britton, the Woman Who Outlived the British Empire (and Your Attention Span) By the time you finish this sentence, another minor royal will have claimed victimhood on breakfast television. Yet Fern Britton—yes, that Fern Britton—keeps appearing on the global periphery like a polite ghost of Pax Britannica, reminding us that the sun never truly…
Rylan Clark and the Strange, Borderless Afterlife of British Camp By Our Correspondent in a Marriott Lounge Somewhere Over the Atlantic Somewhere between the croissant basket and the CNN ticker announcing yet another currency nosedive, the hotel television flickered to a clip of Rylan Clark—yes, that Rylan, the one whose teeth once outshone the Blackpool…
Guy Ritchie and the Global Art of Selling Swagger By Our Man in the Hotel Bar, Somewhere Between Duty-Free and Despair Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, between the recycled air and the third miniature bottle of airline gin, it occurred to me that Guy Ritchie has become the United Kingdom’s most reliable cultural export since the…
Radio 1 Anthems Live: Britain’s Cheery Pop Megamix as the World Burns By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, now filing from a windowless press pen somewhere vaguely European They streamed in from every corner of the Commonwealth and beyond—Singaporean finance bros on “team-building” blowouts, Barcelona art students doing Erasmus on the cheap, two bewildered Canadians who thought…
Coronation Street Vicky: A Soap-Opera Saga for the End of the World By Our Foreign Desk, Somewhere between a Manchester drizzle and a geopolitical tempest LONDON – In the grand tradition of British understatement, the nation currently losing prime ministers faster than most people lose AirPods has decided that its most pressing international export is…
Myleene Klass: The Global Afterglow of a British Pop Casualty Who Refuses to Leave the Party By Our Correspondent, still nursing a hangover from Eurovision 2006 LONDON—Somewhere between the collapse of the post-war pop order and the rise of TikTok monarchies, Myleene Klass became an international monument to the theory that fame is less a…
Olivia Attwood: A Very British Export in an Age of Global Fatigue By the Foreign Desk, somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the existential dread To the uninitiated, Olivia Attwood is a former grid-girl turned reality-TV veteran—Love Island, The Only Way Is Essex, and now her own documentary series, Olivia Meets Her Match—whose greatest talent…
Jane McDonald and the Curious Soft Power of a Cruise-Ship Chanteuse Dave’s Locker – International Desk, somewhere between the buffet and the lifeboats If you mention “Jane McDonald” in a Manchester pub, someone will involuntarily hum “Cruise,” raise an imaginary piña colada, and reminisce about 1998—the year Britain briefly convinced itself that nautical karaoke could…
Billie Piper and the Great British Export Crisis: How One Actress Became a Global Rorschach Test for National Identity LONDON—While the pound sterling continues its graceful swan-dive off the Brexit cliff and the nation’s top diplomatic strategy appears to be “keep calm and blame the French,” Britain has managed one reliable export: Billie Piper’s face….
