Mark Labbett: The Global Colossus of Trivia Who Makes the World Feel Inadequate By the time the satellite feed crackles into life in a windowless studio in Cardiff, a dozen time zones are already wincing. From Lagos to Lima, insomniacs and commuters alike are watching a 6’7″ British man in an off-the-rack suit annihilate another…
Gen V: The Post-Hero Generation That’s Too Tired to Save Anyone, Including Themselves by Our Exhausted Foreign Correspondent, currently stuck in a Warsaw co-working space that smells like oat-milk regret If you squint past the exploding torsos and TikTok-length attention spans, Amazon’s “Gen V” is less a superhero spin-off and more a 50-minute public service…
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale – A Requiem for Empire, Served with Tea and Schadenfreude By Our Man in the Cosmopolitan Wreckage So the bells have tolled at last for the Crawleys, and the final credits of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale have rolled over a lingering shot of Highclere Castle at sunset, looking every…
Zoe Slater and the Global Soap-Opera Industrial Complex: A Post-Brexit Parable from Albert Square to Abu Dhabi Our man in London reports that Zoe Slater—yes, the human embodiment of the phrase “she’s your muvva, not your sista”—has resurfaced in EastEnders after a two-decade hiatus. While half of Britain spent the week choking on its own…
PARIS—While delegates at UNESCO bicker over whether streaming performances deserve World-Heritage status, a quiet American named Tom Pelphrey is busy exporting something far trickier to tariff: the existential meltdown of the white, male anti-hero. From a soundstage in Burbank to a flat-screen in Bali, Pelphrey’s specialty is turning the implosion of U.S. masculinity into binge-worthy…
Alexander Armstrong: Britain’s Smiling Reconquista of the Global Living Room By our International Bureau Chief (who once spent three hours in a Moldovan airport watching Pointless reruns on loop) It’s 3 a.m. in Singapore, the air is thick with durian and existential dread, and yet the hotel bar’s lone television glows with an improbable sight:…
The NTA Awards: A Glittering Ritual in the Age of Streaming Apocalypse By “Globetrotting” Gideon Graves, Dave’s Locker Senior Correspondent LONDON – Somewhere between the Thames and a Pret A Manger that now charges £7 for a sandwich, the National Television Awards unfolded last night with all the self-congratulatory pomp of a Brexit trade deal….
When the World Ends, Bravo Will Still Be Green-Lighting Reunions by our correspondent in the last functioning embassy bar, somewhere between Reykjavík and oblivion Somewhere in the rubble of 2024, while governments topple, oceans acidify, and TikTok teenagers auction their bathwater as NFTs, one American man keeps the global living-room lamp on. His name is…
Channel 4: Britain’s Publicly-Owned Misfit and the Global Spectacle of Selling Your Weird Uncle By the time you finish this paragraph, at least three governments on three separate continents will have floated the idea of flogging their state broadcasters to the highest bidder. Yet only the United Kingdom has managed to turn the ritual into…
When Rob Reiner ambled onto the world stage in 1971, the planet was busy with other matters—China had just discovered ping-pong diplomacy, Nixon was rehearsing his exit lines, and half of Europe was still trying to find a decent tomato. Yet somewhere between Archie Bunker’s hollering and a meathead’s earnest protest, Reiner quietly became a…
Football on TV Tonight: 90 Minutes of Global Theatre, Sponsored by an Online Casino You’ve Never Heard Of Bylined from a hotel mini-bar in Doha, where the peanuts cost more than my first apartment. Tonight, somewhere between the war headlines and the weather report, a ball will be kicked on your screen and half the…
The Curious Case of Bradley Walsh: How a Cheeky Chappy from Watford Accidentally Became a Soft-Power Superweapon By the time the chyron reading “BRADLEY WALSH LAUGHS AT OWN JOKE FOR 47th TIME” flashed across Japanese breakfast television, it was already too late. The planet had been colonised—politely, inexorably—by a 63-year-old former Pontins Bluecoat whose greatest…
