I like my bacon sandwich with brown sauce, but that means keeping a bottle for a long time. What else can I do with it? Will, via email In the early 1980s, Tom Harris, co-owner and chef at the Marksman in east London, made a beer mat from penny coins for his dad (and in the quest to secure a Blue Peter badge): “The instructions said to put the dirty coins in brown sauce overnight,” he recalls. “The next morning, they were all shiny and looked brand new, so there’s another use for it right there!”
Brown sauce is “an absolute marvel”, agrees Sabrina Ghayour, author of the recently published Persiana Easy, and not just for its cleaning prowess: “If you break it down, the sauce is packed with some pretty interesting ingredients, including my beloved tamarind.” It’s worth exploring your bottle options beyond HP, too, not least because there was much controversy back in 2011 when the brand gave its recipe, which had remained unchanged for more than a century, a tweak. “They reduced the salt [from 2.1g per 100g to 1.3g] and it completely upset the balance,” Harris says, “and that’s a great sadness.” That’s why Ghayour’s go-to these days is Tiptree: “It has a slightly less vinegary punch and a more rounded sweetness,” which comes with the added bonus of making it “even more versatile”.
If you were to ask Harris’ dad, one such use would be a piece of fried fish in a buttered roll with lots of brown sauce: “That’s a lovely, lovely thing.” Otherwise, use it in place of tonkatsu sauce “with anything crumbed or fried, such as a pork chop”, he adds.
The “tangy, savoury nature” of the stuff also works a dream with a hash, says Anna Tobias, chef-owner of Cafe Deco in London, which bottles its own brown sauce. “I often do a hash after a Sunday roast, when you have a bit of leftover meat, cabbage and potatoes,” she says. “Fry them up, top with a fried egg, put some brown sauce on the side and that’s delicious.” Or pair it with roast pork: “Instead of apple sauce, why not try brown?” Tobias says. “It has the same sweet-sour tang and will cut through.”
Brown sauce is, after all, a porky condiment, although it was traditionally partnered with sausages rather than bacon. “When I was the tea boy at Dad’s warehouse, I’d do the 11am sandwich run and it was always sausages with brown sauce and bacon with red,” Harris says. “That was the dividing line.”
Ghayour says our reader Will, however, could also harness the acidity in his excess sauce to “give wonderful life to soups, stews, sauces, gravies, marinades [think sticky barbecue-style] and beyond”. Meanwhile, as the weather cools, Tobias would be tempted to segue to homemade baked beans: “I know not many people bother making their own beans, but adding a bit of brown sauce to the tomatoes and cooking that with the beans would be very good.”
That all said, sometimes you don’t need to look beyond the obvious: “Brown sauce is really good for breakfast, and maybe that’s its purpose in life,” Tobias says very sensibly. A good dollop on the side of a full English, or on a bacon sandwich, is always going to be more than OK.
Brolin told a story about Powell getting ready for a scene they were doing together. “Glen is sitting there over and over, slamming his fist down on his thigh, and I’m like, ‘Goddamn, let up on yourself, dude.’ But: into it! Works himself into a state. And that can be embarrassing.” At a glance, something like The Running Man, Brolin said, could seem superficial—nothing to get worked up over. “You’re like, ‘Hey, man, it’s The Running Man, relax.’ You know? ‘It’s Big Top Pee-wee, it’s okay.’ And it’s not that. And he refuses to do that. And I don’t care if you’re cold plunging every morning, I don’t care what it is. I just want to see you doing it. I just want to see you proving to yourself that you’re there for real.”
Tank top by Skims. Shorts by Bode. Hand wraps by Islero.
One morning in Glasgow, Powell and his driver picked me up from my hotel. On our way to breakfast, we passed more locations for the J.J. Abrams film Powell was currently shooting. Powell said he had recently been negotiating with his home state to make it more possible for productions to shoot there. “There’s a few things in the deal points that I’m trying to get amended a bit, but Texas just passed a massive film incentive,” he said.
I asked Powell if he had elected himself to this role as Hollywood ambassador to the state, or whether he’d been asked to help. “I went to the Capitol when, probably when I was 17, 16, to talk about the incentives.” But, he said, “It is only now that I feel like I’m sort of one of the maybe four or five people that represent Texas in Hollywood that they’ve sort of been like, ‘Hey, we need you. It’s you. McConaughey, Woody, Owen.’ There’s not that many of ’em.”
The car pulled up to a restaurant on the east side of Glasgow’s downtown. When we walked in, the restaurant staff audibly giggled at the sight of Powell. We sat down and looked at the menu. “Would you mind, would it be annoying if I did sort of a customized version?” Powell asked the waiter.
One of the many ways that Powell symbolizes the peculiar dilemmas of modern manhood is the intense and deliberate way he takes care of himself and his body. He is a bona fide bro from Austin—increasingly, America’s home of a familiar strain of male optimization—who cold plunges, infrared saunas, and, on a nearly daily basis, submerges his face into a bowl of ice cubes.
In TheRunning Man, Powell does many of his own stunts. “I knew that based on the Stephen King book, Ben Richards was a tank,” Powell said about his character in the film. So Powell, with the guidance of Cruise, who taught him how to outline and prepare for the major stunts in a film, worked to become a tank. “I was like, Okay, I got to be a bit of a weapon. And so that’s why I trained the way I trained on this. I put on a lot of muscle. A lot of it was functional. A lot of it was so I could absorb hits. But a lot of it was also authentically for an audience.” It was Cruise who taught Powell to think about the job of acting as an inherently physical one. “I went from going, ‘Oh, I’m an actor on a movie,’ to ‘I’m a high-performance athlete,’ ” Powell told me. “And I’m just very lucky that I have someone like Tom who I could literally go, ‘Hey, what do I do to survive something?’ ”
The actor Michael Caine has again come out of retirement for one last job – in this case, Vin Diesel sequel The Last Witch Hunter 2. Caine will be reprising his role as a priest who assists the immortal warrior played by Diesel to stop the plague ravaging the planet.
Caine, 92, first retired in 2009, after shooting gang crime drama Harry Brown and then again, 24 films later, in 2021, after starring as novelist in Best Sellers. He returned for little-seen Croatian historical drama Medieval in 2022 and, the following year, starred in The Great Escaper as a D-Day veteran who travels to Normandy solo from his care home for the 70th anniversary.
Caine gave mixed messages about his retirement while promoting that film, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I’ve figured, I’ve had a picture where I’ve played the lead and it’s got incredible reviews. The only parts I’m likely to get now are old men, 90-year-old men, maybe 85. And I thought, ‘Well, I might as well leave with all this – I’ve got wonderful reviews. What have I got to do to beat this?’”
Speaking to the Guardian to promote that film, however, Caine indicated some appetite to continue working, saying that the following January, he would be shooting a new movie in which he played Charles Darwin. “And that’ll be it. I won’t do another one after.”
Caine with Elijah Wood in the first film. Photograph: Summit Entertainment/Everett/Shutterstock
Questioned whether he was certain, Caine said: “No! But the point is, can you do it? Can you remember all the lines? I’ve got used to not working and staying in bed till 11am and staying out late at night. I love it.”
The Darwin project appears not to have materialised, although Disney do have a Charles Darwin film in development.
The Last Witch Hunter attracted mixed reviews on release a decade ago, but was a substantial hit internationally and has since proved a staple of streamers, with Netflix reporting that it was one of their most-watched titles last year.
While Caine has been off our screens for two years, he has remained in the public eye through his sideline in thriller writing, as well as publishing a new memoir, and his sometimes gnomic tweets.
Later this year will see the first film for eight years of fellow Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis, another habitual retiree, who co-writes and stars in Anemone, the directorial debut of his son, Ronan.
Discover the whoppsy-whiffling new stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG…
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The fifth edition of the Filippo Nicosia International Award took place on 30 August at the Villa Medici Giulini in Briosco, Italy, following two days of intensive masterclasses.
The prize was ultimately won by Israeli quartet Ensemble Finale, which received €5,000, a debut recording with Da Vinci Publishing, a portrait by Archi Magazine, sets of Larsen strings, and a GEWA violin case. The quartet also receives performance engagements at venues including the Amici del Teatro Carlo Felice e del Conservatorio Niccolò Paganini, the Famiglia Artistica Reggiana, and the Gioventù Musicale d’Italia.
Duo Gullino-Troncarelli won the award for Best Italian Ensemble, receiving two concert engagements in China, as well as the Casa Musicale Del Rio Prize, gaining free use of Reggio Emilia’s Steinway Hall for concerts, rehearsals, and recordings.
Musica Nova á Quattro was awarded the prize for the most deserving violinist, receiving a violin made by Liuteria Grisales, while both the Ineo Quartet and Trio David receive concert engagements during the 2026–2027 season.
Founded in 2020, Ensemble Finale consists of violinists Victoria Gelman and Omer Herz, violist Leikie Glick, and cellist Gali Knaani. The quartet has attended the Stauffer Academy in Cremona and has performed at festivals including the Muzi International Chamber Music Festival, the Tamir Chamber Music Series, and the Felicia Blumental Festival.
The masterclass teachers and jurors for this year’s award were violinists Boris Garlitsky and Cristiano Gualco, violist Dimitri Hoffmann, cellist Peter Jarůšek, and pianist Jacques Ammon. Each group received a lesson with every teacher.
As part of the prize, Ensemble Finale will perform at the 2025 Cremona Musica exhibition on 28 September.
Stuart Craig, the multi-Oscar winning production designer for The English Patient, The Elephant Man and the Harry Potter films, has died aged 83.
His family told the Guardian he had died peacefully at home on Sunday after 14 years with Parkinson’s disease. “Our beloved husband and father, deeply loved and respected, was not only known for his talent but also for his kindness and we are moved by hearing of how many lives he touched. He will live on in our hearts forever.”
Craig worked on a glittering array of high-profile British and Hollywood films from the early 1980s onwards, winning best art direction Oscars for Gandhi, Dangerous Liaisons and The English Patient and was nominated for eight more, including for four Potters. His record at the Baftas was even more impressive: 16 nominations and three wins.
David Heyman, producer of the Harry Potter series, said: “Stuart Craig was one of the greatest production designers to work in film. He was also the kindest, most generous and supportive man. He had exquisite taste and a wonderful sense of story. He also had the extraordinary ability to bring out the very best in everyone around him. It was a privilege to work with him, and to be in his orbit.” David Yates, director of the final four Potter films, said: “Stuart was a dear friend and colleague: he was a giant in our industry, graceful, talented, stubborn and always nurturing and supporting emerging design talent. We will all miss him a great deal.”
Sumptuous … John Malkovich And Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons. Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Images
Born in Norwich in 1942, Craig studied film design at the Royal College of Art before working in the art department on a variety of films in the 60s and 70s, including the Bond spoof Casino Royale, the Albert Finney musical Scrooge, and the George Macdonald Fraser adaptation Royal Flash. Craig established himself as an art director on the war epic A Bridge Too Far and superhero flick Superman, before making his breakthrough as production designer on The Elephant Man, David Lynch’s brilliantly atmospheric fable of Victorian London.
The latter film secured his first Oscar nomination, and Craig followed it up by reuniting with A Bridge Too Far director Richard Attenborough on the latter’s long-gestating Gandhi biopic. Conceived on a colossal scale (with the funeral scene alone estimated to have 300,000 extras), it won Craig his first Oscar, one of the film’s total haul of eight, including best picture and best director for Attenborough.
Craig went on to play a crucial role in some of the most successful and high-profile films of the subsequent four decades, becoming best known for lavish period sets rendered in sumptuous detail. After Gandhi, he designed The Mission for director Roland Joffé, won his second Oscar for 18th-century-set Dangerous Liaisons, and worked with Attenborough again on Chaplin, another biopic. In 1997 Craig’s achieved possibly his high point in serious period drama, winning his third Oscar for The English Patient, adapted from Michael Ondaatje’s novel. Shortly thereafter Craig completed probably his best known non-period film: the Richard Curtis romcom Notting Hill.
‘Hogwarts was his creation’ … Craig at The Harry Potter Experience in London. Photograph: Rune Hellestad/Corbis/Getty Images
Craig was then hired for what is likely to remain his outstanding achievement, designing all eight Harry Potter films, beginning with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, released in 2001. He later told the Guardian: “I was decorating a bedroom for my as-yet-unborn grandson when I got the call to come to Los Angeles and meet David and Chris. I read the novel on the plane over. My first reaction was fright: ‘How the hell are we going to do this?’” He and his crew took over Leavesden studios, a repurposed former aerodrome, and the studio became renowned for the dizzying variety of sets and workshops that Craig built. Heyman said: “Stuart Craig was vital to the films’ success, no question. Hogwarts is his creation, his vision.” After the films finished production, Craig was asked to design the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme parks, and continued his collaboration with the Potter film franchise by designing the three Fantastic Beasts films, released between 2016 and 2022.
Craig’s most valued collaborator was set decorator Stephenie McMillan, whom he worked with on 16 films, beginning with Chaplin and taking in The English Patient, Notting Hill and all the Potter films. On McMillan’s death in 2013, Craig wrote: “Her work was always characterised by technical finesse, elegance and wit.”
Craig was married to Patricia Stangroom in 1965, who survives him along with two children, Becky and Laura, and four grandchildren.
Filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho is known for directing some of South Korea’s biggest commercial hits of screens large and small, such as the zombie blockbuster Train to Busan (a $140 million box-office smash), or breakthrough Netflix series like Hellbound and Parasyte: The Grey. But the director’s most recent feature, The Ugly, was made for a mere $160,000.
A miraculous feat of independent filmmaking amid Korea’s increasingly hyper-commercialized entertainment sector, the period thriller nonetheless has all of the gloss and production prowess of a midbudget studio feature. Yeon fully self-financed the film, which he also wrote, through his production outfit Wow Point, ensuring total creative control. He paid his small but distinguished cast — including stars and industry veterans Park Jeong-min (Uprising), Kwon Hae-hyo (Peninsula) and Shin Hyun-been (Revelations) — a modest day rate, while promising them a share of backend profits. Similar arrangements were made with the skeleton crew and award-winning department heads. Leading local studio Plus M Entertainment later boarded as distributor and international sales agent. Financial details remain undisclosed, but international presales moved briskly at film markets over the past year, suggesting Yeon and his collaborators have likely already made a tidy return.
The Ugly will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 9, followed by commercial releases in South Korea on Sept. 11 and the U.S. on Sept. 26.
Korean media outlets have hailed The Ugly’s production approach as a potential creative solution to the skyrocketing actor fees and production costs that have plagued the local film industry in recent years, as swelling K-content slates at Netflix and Disney+ continue to drive up the cost of talent. Yeon has similarly urged fellow Korean creatives to experiment with financing and production structures.
A haunting thriller that weaves mystery with social critique, The Ugly follows Im Dong-hwan, a man who learns that the remains of his mother, Jung Young-hee — who vanished 40 years earlier — have been unearthed in a forest. Teaming with a TV journalist, he investigates her past as a garment factory worker in 1970s Seoul, only to find that her former colleagues recall her merely as an especially “ugly” woman they would rather forget. Dong-hwan also begins to suspect that his father, Yeong-gyu — a blind man who overcame his disability to raise him and become a master artisan — may be guarding secrets of his own. What begins as a family mystery gradually opens onto broader questions of social resentment, morality and the enduring trauma of history.
Ahead of this year’s Busan International Film Festival — where Plus M will be selling The Ugly at the Asian Contents & Film Market, and Showbox will be selling Yeon’s upcoming zombie thriller Colony — The Hollywood Reporter connected with Yeon via Zoom in Seoul to discuss the layered meanings of The Ugly and the bold microbudget experiment that brought it to life.
(Warning: Spoilers for The Ugly follow.)
I understand The Ugly is a project you’ve been working on and thinking about for a very long time. How did it begin?
I wrote the script around the time when I did The Fake (2013). I wanted to tell a story about generational differences. My father’s generation in Korea was focused so heavily on achievement and economic development. My generation came after that and everything was changed for us. The main character [in The Ugly], Im Yeong-gyoo, overcomes obstacles in a very dramatic way, and he’s almost a symbol for Korea’s modern development. As a counterpoint, I created the character Jung Young-hee to explore who and what was erased during this period of miraculous growth.
The camera avoids showing Young-hee’s face throughout the entire film until the very last shot, where you reveal a photo of her. But the face we see isn’t the actress TKTK who plays her. How did you come up with that image you use to represent her? I found it almost heartbreaking in its frank ordinariness.
I wanted a face that could be anybody’s but also nobody’s, representing that entire generation of Korean society. The final reveal is almost documentary-like, and I wanted it to extend the film’s world into our reality. Everyone will be naturally curious about just how “ugly” she is, but the experience of ugliness is a very subjective thing. Most importantly, she is a deeply just character, and her relentless sense of justice makes those around her very uncomfortable. I wanted to pose the question: Is it really her face that’s ugly, or the corruption of those who scorn her? To me, she symbolizes a kind of “discomforting justice.”
Shin Hyun-been as Jung Young-hee, the murdered and mistreated moral center of ‘The Ugly.’
Moral complexity is a hallmark of your work. How do you approach shaping the audience’s sympathies to create this multilayered aspect?
When I start imagining the world of a film, I approach it in a Socratic way, where I look for two opposing egos that can clash and question one another in an endless loop with no decisive answer. Finding themes where characters can continuously engage and undermine one another in this way, as a kind of contrasting ideal, is the most gratifying thing to me as a creator. My criteria for a great film is one that begins as soon as it finishes, because it starts a line of questioning in the audience’s mind that can’t be easily resolved.
Okay, here’s an overlong reading of the story’s allegory: The blind stamp carver, Im Yeong-gyoo, represents Korea in its rapid development era, as you said, after the country has suffered historical hardships and humiliations on the world stage. Like the blind father, the country is desperately trying to overcome its past and disadvantages, in pursuit of a more beautiful future — but that pursuit almost necessarily entails a brittle form of pride, which leads to various injustices along the way. Young-hee, meanwhile, represents pure moral conscience, which is unwelcome during the intensity of this competitive, fast-developing era. She stands for the vulnerable who are cast aside, erased from the narrative of the country’s self-overcoming. But the scars from that era are still very much present in society, and the son, Im Dong-hwan, represents the youth of today who are trying to come to terms with that generational complexity and its legacy. His father has largely been a good dad and he’s proud of him, but he’s also coming to terms with the truly terrible acts that were entailed in his father’s overcoming. Am I on the right track?
On the whole, that’s very close to my intention. I’ll point out a couple of other details that are important to grasping the code that’s embedded in the film. One is the character of the factory owner, Baek Ju-sang, who has a very dark, hidden side to him, but who is also considered a good boss and decent person by the people around him. In that time of incredible economic hardship, he was one of the rare few who never skipped paying his employees and kept the factory humming for everyone’s gain. The second detail is the cut that Young-hee leaves on her husband’s hand in the moment that he kills her. In the beginning of the film, Yeong-gyoo explains it away as an injury he got while perfecting his stamp carving artistry. The way he twists the story of this scar — which cannot be erased — is key to what I wanted to express.
You mentioned the project began with thinking about your father’s generation. Have you shown the film to your parents?
Not yet. My father isn’t well enough to watch my films, sadly, but I think my mother, who is from that same generation, will see it. I’m really curious to see what she’ll think.
Since the film is an allegory about South Korea, did it shift your thoughts about your country in any meaningful way?
Not really. I tweaked and smoothed a lot of things to make for a better film, but my core view and the central theme were all there in the original script. Something that did change was my view of the Korean film industry. Thanks to incredible works like Parasite and Squid Game, Korean content has made huge achievements on the world stage. But at the same time, I’ve begun to feel that the artistic quality and value of our films has started to be defined by their ranking on streaming platforms. It’s become all about quantitative appeal for global audiences. Ironically, this unspoken industry atmosphere reflects the same desperate growth-oriented era that The Ugly is all about. So I thought deeply about how I could evade that logic as I put The Ugly together. This was an incredible motivation for me with this movie.
Yeon Sang-ho on the set of ‘Peninsula,’ his big-budget sequel to ‘Train to Busan’
Courtesy of Contents Panda
I’ve read about the film’s very low budget, small creative team and the tight shooting schedule. You also were able to recruit high-profile actors who were willing to forgo up-front payment for potential backend. Why did you set the film up this way?
Two reasons. First, my daughter, like many young people, watches a lot of YouTube — it’s almost the only thing she watches. So I end up watching a lot of YouTube content with her, and this made me start to question the way I make films. Because when you think about it, the online content that is really competing with film for attention is often incredibly compelling and entertaining in its own right, and it requires very little up-front budget to create. As a film buff, I also realized that a lot of the films I most love — by legendary Asian masters like Edward Yang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and others — were made for very little money. So, these two factors in combination got me thinking that I should try doing something on a much smaller budget.
Do you feel the experiment was successful for you — both artistically and as a business model?
The cast and crew were all people I’ve been working with for a very long time. There was no external funding, so the creation of this film was essentially a group of friends clustered around the script, having intense artistic conversations, and nothing else existed outside that circle. So I just hope the end result — both commercially and creatively — is as satisfying for everyone as the process of making it.
Would you work this way again?
Absolutely. Most of my work will still be within the larger Korean system, but I definitely want to continue making smaller films like this. I hope investors and distributors become more open to supporting such projects, and I urge other artists explore new approaches, too. Different mediums — digital versus theatrical — have different speeds of delivering story and information. YouTube and streaming need to be fast and instantly stimulating, while film is slower and more immersive. The Ugly, for example, is a drama thriller that’s not really about finding the culprit behind the murder — it’s pretty obvious from the start. It’s about slowly exploring the twisted inner lives of these characters and what they represent — and that requires a theatrical experience. I don’t think cinema is dying — but we need to be open to transformation. I look forward to seeing what emerges.
To watch BBC One’s new reality series Stranded on Honeymoon Island is to be hit with a barrage of questions. To be fair, the main question is, “Weird, I thought I was watching BBC One, but this is clearly an ITV2 show. Does this mean my television is broken?” However, the more pressing one is probably, “Where’s Davina?”
To look on iPlayer, Stranded on Honeymoon Island – in which a bunch of strangers get married to each other and are then shipped off to a remote island with only each other for company – is absolutely a Davina McCall show. There are five figures on the show’s thumbnail, but four of them are pushed back into the middle distance, while McCall looms heavily in the foreground, towering over everyone else like a preternaturally delighted Godzilla. And that would be fine … were McCall actually part of Stranded on Honeymoon Island.
Reader, she is not. Aside from her voiceover – which, for the overwhelming majority of the production process, would have been performed by a researcher – actual flesh and blood McCall is nowhere to be seen. Her physical involvement in the first episode starts two minutes in and ends five minutes in. That’s it. In the next two episodes, she pops up to make highly sporadic blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances on the contestants’ iPads, reading scripted remarks from thousands of miles away. It is, you have to assume, the cushiest job in all of television.
Or at least it would be, were it not for Elizabeth Hurley’s presence on Channel 4’s The Inheritance. Hurley is nominally the host of this vaguely Traitorseque gameshow, but – and this must be the reason why she agreed to turn up – she is dead. Despite being the main draw of the show, her role involves appearing in exceptionally brief videos in fancy dresses while sitting on an array of suffocatingly plush sofas, and literally not a single thing more than that.
Phoning it in? … Elizabeth Hurley as The Deceased in The Inheritance. Photograph: Channel 4
What’s going on? Is remote hosting a thing now? Even a couple of years ago, the expectation would have been that McCall would have flown out to the honeymoon islands and delivered pieces to camera, or at least interacted with the contestants for a bit. And, even if Hurley were still playing a dead person, there would have been a stipulation that, at the very least, she would have to lie motionless on the floor with an axe through her head or whatever.
But why bother with all that when you could just book the pair of them for three hours and get them to film brief little clips on a phone? Do McCall and Hurley even know they were involved in these programmes? So far, it does feel like someone tricked them into making a bunch of Cameo videos and tried passing it off as legitimate work.
To make matters worse, Stranded on Honeymoon Island and The Inheritance seem to understand that this is suboptimal. Compare them to The Traitors, where – even if she isn’t there the whole time – Claudia Winkleman sets the tone of the entire show with her presence. The series as a whole is off-kilter and melodramatic, and Winkleman’s devotion to leaning into this mood lifts it immeasurably. Imagine if, during the Round Tables, she was reduced to making a series of preprepared statements via an iPad on a stick. It would be terrible.
Hands on … Claudia Winkleman in The Traitors. Photograph: BBC/Studio Lambert
Without this, production on both shows is reduced to shore up the hosts’ meagre screentime with ungainly reaction shots from the contestants. After McCall wafts out of the room five minutes and 42 seconds into the first episode of Stranded on Honeymoon Island, one of them calls out “Love you!” after her. Similarly, Hurley’s first appearance is bookended by someone cooing, “God, she looks good.” You have to assume that nobody has ever said that to Stephen Mulhern when he’s in the room hosting Deal or No Deal.
If this is a trend, it’s hard to know where it began. You have to wonder if Love Island – where Maya Jama presents, despite having minimal involvement – has set a tone that the rest of television has chosen to follow. Or maybe it’s The Apprentice, where Alan Sugar would sometimes introduce tasks with distracted remote videos rather than a physical appearance. You could even argue that this is simply McCall coming home, since her job as the host of Big Brother 15 years ago essentially required her to sit out the bulk of the show and only turn up for evictions.
Perhaps, however, the origins of this are even older. Readers of a certain vintage might remember the 1991 boardgame Atmosfear, in which the direction of the game was influenced by a figure who barked orders from the accompanying VHS tape, regardless of what was actually being played. Essentially, Elizabeth Hurley on The Inheritance is the 21st-century equivalent of Atmosfear. This isn’t something that any of us should be proud of.
I was going to write about how riding a bike seems to stimulate my brain. It’s like going to a well for ideas. And the radio, I love the radio, particularly Talk Radio. I listen to it in all the in-between moments of my day. I think it’s the best way to get out of the bubble.
But the truth is, and at risk of sounding like a plonker, the single biggest source of inspiration for me is talking to people. When I think about where my ideas have come from, or whenever I’ve got stuck, chatting to people has always helped. Every conversation holds an insight, something you should look up, a window to outside our adland bubble. I think this is why I’ve always preferred being a creative director to a creative. It’s a people job. A large chunk of your day is spent talking through embryonic thoughts, swapping references, and figuring things out. I get a lot of creative energy from this.
Here are three people I’ve had inspiring chats with:
Paula Laren is a trained accountant and business controller for a Swedish industrial company.
Her work is about as far as you can possibly get from advertising, which provides me with a healthy perspective. Think of compressors more than 360 campaigns. She was born in Peru but moved to Sweden as a teenager, which makes her an unusual mix of South American and Scandinavian. Over the years, I haven’t just gotten to know Paula, I got to know two completely different cultures too. From ceviche to rollmops, Pisco Sour to schnapps, Mario Vargas Llosa to Astrid Lindgren, Maná to ABBA, if I hadn’t shimmied up to Paula in a dodgy nightclub in Nottingham, I wouldn’t have experienced any of this.
Meditation and spiritual connection may be OK in small doses, but after three floors and 30,000 sq metres of darkened rooms, theatrical installations, altars and votive sculpture, more sound work than I’ve ever encountered in a single show, and a general encouragement to be moved, mesmerised and in touch with my spiritual side, my ears are ringing and I feel quite on edge.
The São Paulo biennale, the second oldest art exhibition of its type in the world, takes the title Not All Travellers Walk Roads for its 36th edition, a line, which, with some irony, is from Of Calm and Silence, a poem by the Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo. In Cameroonian curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s show of 120 artists, this translates as imagining alternative forms of consciousness, invariably looking to nature and non-western belief systems.
The sound of birdsong greets you as you walk into the exhibition pavilion from São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park. There are birds outside, but this is the recorded soundtrack to a garden planted in the gallery by US-Nigerian artist Precious Okoyomon. It features fresh earth, boulders and a tranquil pool, a mass of moss and trees that bow in the Brazilian heat coming through the pavilion glass. Later in the show, a botanist interviewed for a video installation by Theo Eshetu – all extreme closeups of plants, flowers mirrored and botanical footage shot in kaleidoscope – explains about plant “consciousness”, and how consciousness may not always be linked to the brain and could be experienced through other means. In this artificial garden we are encouraged to convene with nature.
Convene with nature … a garden planted by Precious Okoyomon at the São Paulo biennale. Photograph: Levi Fanan
The tweeting and chirrupping has competition though: a sound system has been set up by Gê Viana, the speakers interspersed with the artist’s collages of forest fauna and old reggae maranhense parties. The subgenre of reggae that flourished in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, melodic and perhaps a bit sexier, booms across the gallery space. If this is the kind of alternative consciousness being encouraged, maybe I’m down with it. Whether the festivities are appreciated by Nádia Taquary’s bronze bird-women is unclear however. They don’t seem party types: their eagle heads bowed, they pray and adopt yogic-style poses around a great yellow tree, beaded branches hanging low from a bronze trunk. It is titled Ìrókò: The Cosmic Tree, and represents the orisha lord of ancestry in Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion. More objects of worship are apparent too in a series of “altars” and “guardians” by French artist Carla Gueye, black clay obelisks with protruding breasts sat on beds of charcoal. Such votives become a recurring theme throughout the show, symbols of belief in this busiest of environments.
Specific materials reappear throughout the exhibition, too. Gueye’s briquettes are recalled in Emeka Ogboh’s The Way Earthly Things Are Going, a darkened room in which a series of spotlit tree trunks are embedded in circles of charcoal. Looped chanting emerges through speakers embedded in the wood. There’s charcoal, too, in Antonio Tarsis’s Orchestra Catastrophe: Act 1. Lumps of the stuff suspended on pendulums rhythmically hit a series of drums. Tree trunks pop up several times too, such as in Indigenous American composer Raven Chacon’s collaboration with producer Laima Leyton and former Sepultura drummer Igor Cavalera. The wood is again spotlit in spectacular fashion and soundtracked, this time with a composition inspired by Brazilian Indigenous music.
Fabric and textiles, knotted, pleated and tied, are everywhere: Theresah Ankomah has wrapped the biennale pavilion in multiple nets Christo-style. Indo-Caribbean artist Suchitra Mattei invites us into an elegant tent made from twisted sari material and Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos has created a series of floor-to-ceiling pillars from found fabric that run throughout the show. On each level is one of Otobong Nkanga’s beguiling tapestries of the natural world (or the natural world despoiled) while Laure Prouvost’s giant kinetic pink textile orchid suggestively floats up and down the height of the building’s atrium.
Materials reappear … Emeka Ogboh’s The Way Earthly Things Are Going. Photograph: Levi Fanan
The audio works take the form of spoken poems; there are chants and ambient electronica within installations, high frequency noise and hormonal humming, darkened rooms in which mechanical instruments play; there are smoke and mirrors, literal and symbolic. As he does at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, where he’s been director since 2023, Soh Bejeng Ndikung keeps signage to a minimum (so it’s often tricky to identify which work is by whom), and so the show shapes up as one giant sensory installation.
On the second floor, hints of urbanity creep in with a series of photographs of rivers by Wolfgang Tillmans. One shows a barge on the Amazon laden with cargo, in another we see the night-time illumination of a city on the shore of the Rhine. There’s another tent-like structure, though unlike Mattei’s silks, Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa’s walk-in sculpture is made of old bottle tops and strung together discarded computer keyboard keys.
This welcome bout of realism is continued in a multi-work presentation by one of Brazil’s most interesting artists. Gervane de Paula hails from Mato Grosso, which is called a “hinterland” state, and he aggressively plays with the cliches attached to rural culture, making hybrid wooden animals that mess with the vernacular art traditions of the region. Turning the cute souvenir on its head, two birds sport pistols for beaks. More disturbing still, the base on which they perch is marked “Comando Papo Vermelho”, a play on the name of one of Brazil’s biggest drug gangs. Like other artists in the biennale, de Paula has built an altar, but his is a cross with a Perspex front revealing it to be packed with prescription drugs: the artist’s sculpture is playful even as it riffs on the often grim reality of life beyond Brazil’s major centres.
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Walk-in sculpture … a work by Moffat Takadiwa. Photograph: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images
This sense of transgression – absent from some of the more obliquely sensorial works – is joyfully present in much of the historical work. Maria Auxiliadora da Silva paints wild scenes of parties in her 1970s works; the Moroccan painter Chaïbia Talal renders jolly couples in great impressionistic colourful strokes; while the fantastic Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopez depicts glamorous women with red lipstick and matching nails in an art nouveau style. Even better are the forays into painting by the Rio de Janeiro samba legend Heitor dos Prazeres (a return for the artist, he was in the 1951 edition of the biennale): all cool-cat Black Brazilians pulling shapes and having a laugh on the streets, evocative and full of charm.
When I was lying on a hard metal bed, staring up at a light show projected on to the ceiling of Camille Turner’s domed installation, DreamSpace, a voice imploring me to “Send love to guide the path to truth”, I’d been close to that panic attack. I’m saved by a series of extraordinary five-metre copper scrolls by octogenarian artist Gōzō Yoshimasu; the Japanese lines inscribed on their surface are mostly obscured by the material’s slight reflection though, so really it’s just light and shade I’m staring at. It is extraordinarily beautiful. These calm and silent banner-poems are accompanied by Yoshimasu’s blotchy abstract watercolours on graft paper. They are titled Dear Monster and it makes me wonder whether I’m the monster for not being moved by so much of the clearly dearly felt art that preceded Yoshimasu. Yet after these hi-tech, AV-heavy simulacra of spiritual experiences, of nature and meditation, the Japanese artist seems proof that perhaps the best art doesn’t rely on complex bells and whistles.
