Jake Fritz

I nudge the recording device a bit closer to Patsy Ferran as we chat under the bright lights of the National Theatre foyer. The Olivier award-winning actor is an electric presence on stage – a performer you cannot bear to stop watching –…
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Much of the plot of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is lost to me, though I consider it one of my favorite books. I have a sense that it involves a young priest rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church as New Mexico is…
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In his second full-length documentary, Swiss director Andrea Pellerani gives us a guided tour of what a post-industrial, post-growth, or even an eerily post-human future might look like. We are on the south-western Japanese island of…
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The first songs I remember hearingBowie, Steely Dan and Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles were the stuff my parents played when I was little. I was born in 1973, so it was a good time for music. I’ve still got all my mum and dad’s vinyl.The…
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Twenty years ago, Paris Hilton was the stiletto-heeled embodiment of the zeitgeist. With a chihuahua called Diamond Baby kennelled in her designer handbag, this nepotistic partygoer juggled five mobile phones while cantering across…
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Philip Hensher’s latest novel, To Battersea Park, is not the first Covid novel – Ali Smith’s turbocharged Summer got there two and a half years ago. Sarah Moss’s The Fell and Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat were also propelled by the narrative…
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In the village of Bungmati, Nepal, above an ancient spring, stand two stone shrines and a temple. On the side of one of those shrines is a large hole where a statue of Shreedhar Vishnu, the Hindu protector god, used to be.Carved by master…
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Forget TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Philip Larkin’s High Windows and Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus. While those works may have more cultural heft, for sheer popularity no 20th-century British poem can touch John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be…
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The Gold: The Inside Story9pm, BBC OneFollowing Neil Forsyth’s hit six-part drama about the Brink’s-Mat robbery of 1983, here is the real story – told by the detectives who investigated Britain’s biggest bullion heist and led the…
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Why did you get into musical comedy?I did musical comedy first because that was all I could do! I’d written and performed songs since I was young, so it was the most obvious way in. Doing standup straight away would have terrified me at…
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