The Best, Worst & Downright Ugliest Moments Of Lockdown Culture

The Good

Leslie Jordan

Well, well, well. Listen, Leslie Jordan has been an icon ever since he faced off with Megan Mullally’s Karen Walker on Will & Grace – “I thought I smelled gin and regret” – but over the course of lockdown the rest of the world finally seems to have cottoned on to that fact, hanging on his every update for his “fellow hunkerdowners”. Homer himself could not have come up with a better epithet for Tiger King’s John Finlay than “meth mouth”.

Talking Heads

Any production that contains Jodie Comer, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Imelda Staunton is going to be excellent. When that production happens to be a remake of Alan Bennett’s classic late ’80s monologue series Talking Heads, filmed in the vacant EastEnders studio, it becomes essential viewing.

Folklore by Taylor Swift

In case you were feeling too emotionally stable at the moment, Taylor Swift decided to write an album about life-altering regret, past loves and… the Lake District. It’s basically an entire record of “All Too Wells”. (If you know, you know.) Special mention to Dua Lipa’s remix album Club Future Nostalgia, which is the upper to Folklore’s downer.

Oumi Janta

Berlin-based Oumi Janta looks so graceful on skates that she’s inspired hoards of otherwise “sensible” adults to put on hot pants and roller blades and begin terrorising their fellow park-goers every weekend. She’s even shared her own Spotify playlists to skate along to, if you’re looking to break a hip or something.

Jordan Firstman’s Impressions

“Are you sitting down? I have some exciting news… How would you like to be Time magazine’s person of the fucking year?!” Jordan Firstman’s impression of banana bread’s publicist made enduring never-ending WhatsApp pics of friends’ lockdown “bakes” actually worth it. “They’re trying to get me to represent pumpkin pie right now; I’m like, bitch, come back in four months.” Bring on Thanksgiving.

Malcolm & Marie

Yes, it’s still in post-production, but the fact that Zendaya and John David Washington managed to responsibly shoot an entire film at the height of a pandemic deserves to be mentioned here. Written and directed by Euphoria’s Sam Levinson on location at the Caterpillar House in Carmel, California, it’s bound to be quietly powerful and emotionally resonant. In other words, the complete opposite of Tenet.

Tabitha Brown

Since launching her TikTok channel on 8 March, Tabitha Brown has gone from just another vegan blogger to actual plant-based sensation/self-help guru/garlic powder spokesperson – because that’s her business. You could be on the carnivore diet, and still find her videos about making late-night pickle salads engaging.

Intimations by Zadie Smith

“Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self,” Zadie Smith wrote in the introduction to Feel Free in 2018. That truth is self-evident in every word of Intimations, her most personal collection of essays yet, written entirely in the spring of 2020. There are dissections of Trumpian rhetoric, yes, but there are also musings about her own fertility after a visit to a Greenwich Village garden and a touching meditation on what it means to write, in the tradition of George Orwell and Joan Didion (but without an ounce of self-aggrandisement).

Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway

On a practical level, Samin Nosrat’s lockdown-inspired podcast tackles how to get a meal together with dried beans/tinned sardines/whatever weird shape of pasta you have in the back of your cupboard. More importantly, though, it’s just a joy to listen to while puttering around your kitchen or trying to make the focaccia from Salt Fat Acid Heat (an infinitely better use of time than making sourdough).

The Bad

The Clean Version Of “WAP”

Cardi B spent more than $100,000 on Covid-19 tests to safely film the “WAP” video, and we’re still going to make her say the word “gushy”?

Quibi’s The Princess Bride

If you feel like you’re having a rough 2020, imagine being on Quibi’s executive board. Don’t feel too sorry for them, though – these are the people who greenlit a celebrity “tribute” to The Princess Bride. Is nothing sacred anymore? 

The Obsession With Connell Waldron’s Chain

Yes, it started out funny, but approximately three million think pieces and one viral Instagram account later, it just got weird.

The Ugly

Illegal Raves In The Countryside

Remember that Britney Spears’s video for “Till The World Ends”? Like that, but with less attractive people in a disused airfield in Somerset that’s now a breeding ground for the Covid-19 virus.

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