Saturday, September 28, 2024

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TV | Nobody Wants This

A rabbi and a sex podcaster walk into a dinner party. No, that's not the set-up for a convoluted joke with a dubious punchline, but the premise for Nobody Wants This, Netflix's new odd couple romcom series. Unlikely pairings aren't exactly rare in the romcom world: it's a genre that's practically built on the concept that opposites attract, and that the two very good-looking people who have buckets of chemistry but very different lives (or just slightly different wardrobes) might actually have more in common than they realise. But Nobody Wants This has the advantage of being rooted in reality. Show creator Erin Foster converted to Judaism when she married her husband, so she has first-hand experience of all the highs and lows of a culture-clash love story.

Katie Rosseinsky | Senior culture and lifestyle writer

Art | Monet and London: Views of the Thames

This autumn sees these two titans going head to head in London. With Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers packing them in at the National Gallery, Monet and London at the Courtauld Gallery manages the extraordinary feat of substantially recreating a landmark 1904 exhibition of Monet's paintings of the city, in a gallery situated just 300yds from the Savoy Hotel, where the majority of them were painted. With the works hung as the painter himself intended, or as near as can be known, this is as close as we're going to get to Monet on Monet.

Mark Hudson | Chief art critic

Theatre | Coriolanus

It's a bit of a risk to put a lesser-known Shakespeare play with a vaguely comical name in the National Theatre's massive Olivier space. But you wouldn't know it from the monumental confidence of Lyndsey Turner's swaggering production, full of antique grandeur and up-to-the-minute fireworks. The story's set in the early days of Ancient Rome – the city's fierce origin myth referenced by a giant statue of the wolf who suckled its twin founders. But Turner's aesthetic is refined rather than feral, gesturing towards the remote elite that stifled Rome until it declined and fell.

Alice Saville | Chief theatre critic

Film | Megalopolis

Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola's self-funded $120m (£94m) epic, certainly isn't another Godfather or Apocalypse Now, but it's at least bursting with ideas. The filmmaker spent decades trying to get Megalopolis off the ground. What if it was no good? And what to make of the many claims of chaos on its set? Ultimately, this isn't the car crash it could have been. It is, though, deeply flawed and very eccentric.

Clarisse Loughrey | Chief film critic

The stand-up and TV presenter made his name pranking the previous government. He talks to Isobel Lewis about what he's going to do now, the problem of becoming known as a trickster, painting celebrities, and why his David Beckham World Cup stunt backfired.

Read an extract from our Saturday Interview below…

Lycett clearly loves attention, and admits as much. We're meeting in a central London coffee shop; Lycett is dressed in a Timmy Mallett-like ensemble of white shirt and trousers, both of which are covered in huge, colourful prints of paintings. A pair of garish, Elton John-esque blue sunglasses are perched on the table in front of him. On closer inspection, I realise his shirt is actually covered in his own portraits: the kind of scratchy acrylic paintings of celebrities Lycett frequently shares with his 1 million Instagram followers. "You can imagine people at Birmingham New Street looking at me wearing this thing," he says, brows raised.

The outfit might suggest otherwise, but Lycett is far more subdued in person than the fast-talking, prank-playing whirlwind he's known as. The coffee he orders, for one, is decaf. Nowadays, he admits, his comedy persona is "almost entirely different to what I'm like in real life". "I live a quieter life than I used to," he says. As a bisexual man who spends most of his evenings at home watching TV shows such as Severance with his girlfriend, he sees his work as his "outlet for campness".

Read the full interview here

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