For too many reasons to list — yes, even in a listicle — 2021 has been a year to forget. (Anyone remember anything unusual about 2020? No, us neither!) And yet there were still some surprising news stories that got us all talking, and great books that got us all reading, and gripping TV shows that got us all bingeing, and films that got us all buzzing, and sports tournaments that got us all singing, and petrol shortages that got absolutely none of us pumping.
Below, Esquire presents a chronological recap of some of the key heroes and villains of the year (although given we need the boost, let’s focus on the former, shall we?) so we can communally reflect on yet another year that kind of wasn’t. If you’d told us when it started that we’d all be on first-name terms with a cargo ship, we’d have told you to hoist your mainsail and sling your anchor. Here, in worldly wise December, we say: that’s 2021 for you. Poop poop!
Breakout Pop Star
Olivia Rodrigo
While the lurid story of a deposed Disney pop princess of an earlier era, Britney Spears, continued to preoccupy press and public, at the beginning of the year a new teenage star snatched her chance for fame and fortune (and all that comes with them). Adele may have been the biggest hit of 2021. Taylor Swift was busiest and best. Lorde burned brightly, then somewhat fizzled. Billie Eilish negotiated her difficult second album. But the surprise chart-topping package was an 18-year-old Californian: Olivia Rodrigo, whose trio of sweary global number ones — "Driver’s License", "Déjà Vu" and "Good 4 U" — made her, in the time-honoured fashion, an overnight sensation. Six months after the January release of her debut single, Rodrigo was in the Oval Office, helping President Biden promote Covid-19 vaccinations for young people. The former star of the magnificently titled High School Musical: The Musical: The Series was now a bona fide megastar. It was her year.
Strongest Evidence That Brits Still Make World-Class TV
It’s a Sin
How to compete with the blockbuster budgets, big screen star power, blanket media ubiquity and monopolistic cultural hegemony of Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and the rest? If you’re Channel 4 you commission the British TV savant Russell T Davies to write the warmest, most compelling, and devastating drama of 2021. It’s a Sin, which began its run in January, told the story of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Britain through the lives of a small group of young gay men, and their friends and families. Set mostly in London in the decade from 1981, the show directed an empathetic but also unflinching spotlight on a shameful episode in British social and political history, when sufferers from a deadly epidemic too often forgotten, or at best misremembered now, were demonised by their own government, among many others. In the process It’s a Sin made stars of its leads — Olly Alexander, Omari Douglas and especially the hugely affecting Callum Scott Howells, as Colin — and perhaps taught a lesson to the big American dramas: one season, five episodes, done. Always leave ‘em wanting more. La!
Colour of the Year
Black
Fashion, it is said, reflects the zeitgeist. We get happy, they go colourful. We get despondent, they go… black. Dior did, and Dolce and Gabbana. Dunhill, Zegna and Paul Smith, too. For while the vaccine summer showed so much promise, the second Covid winter proved that there was much to be sorry about, and fashion, holding up its big beautiful mirror, sent a funeral procession of black suits, black suits and more black suits down the runways of its capital cities. We’re sad. Fashion’s sad. We’ve never looked better.
Cleverest Novel That Is Almost As Draining As Scrolling Through Twitter But Not Quite
Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This
The internet novel went, ahem, viral in 2021, with Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts allowing readers to stick their head into the blender of bad news that was Trumpian America, and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? showing just how sad emails about Marxism and people not being able to shag each other can be. The best of the bunch was Patricia Lockwood’s Booker-shortlisted No One is Talking About This, named for the words people post all over Twitter about the latest saga that in fact everyone won’t shut up about. Many have noted how Lockwood’s book, published in February, is like scrolling through Twitter, complete with the dead-faced laugh at internet ephemera like the 9/11 mini muffins, but the real sucker punch is the story of grief which is waiting for the narrator when she finally puts down her phone. Everyone was talking about this book in 2021, and for good reason too.
Most Joyous Crossover Designer
Harris Reed
Fashion for men has been tiptoeing towards the avant-garde for the past few years. It took designer Harris Reed to give it one final push – with a raved-about London Fashion Week debut in February – and the game is now wide open. The British-American Central Saint Martins grad has developed a unique style he describes as “romanticism gone nonbinary”, and an aesthetic that’s one part Marie Antoinette, two parts Studio 54, and a season pass to the Salvador Dalí Museum thrown in. It has found ardent fans, with converts including Harry Styles, Ezra Miller, Solange and Gucci’s Alessandro Michele. As Reed continues to ruffle shirts (and feathers), more are guaranteed to follow suit.
Best Use of Hoodie
Jason Sudeikis at the Golden Globes
The fact that nominees were expected to suit up for the 2021 Golden Globes, on 28 February, as if they weren’t all a short walk away from their own toilets, was pretty absurd. Most saw the remote ceremony as an opportunity to opt for some outlandish tailoring – and Jared Leto decided to go full Jared Leto, wearing a boutonnière sourced directly from Jurassic Park – but it was Jason Sudeikis’s hoodie that stole all the headlines. With it, he sat at the intersection of four enduring lockdown trends: Seventies facial hair, tie-dye, loungewear, and giving up. The brand? His sister’s yoga studio, Forward Space, which naturally sold out of the hoodie within hours. Who knows, the Ted Lasso star’s laid-back approach may even inspire a return to the red carpet’s ragtag, mid-Nineties heyday? Here’s hoping.
Scoop of the Year
Oprah with Harry and Meghan
Just in case the British press hadn’t got the memo, when, in March, the Duke and Duchess of Montecito decided the time was right to put a bomb under the monarchy (and one suspects that at least one of them feels the time is never wrong to do just that), they chose to do so not with one of Fleet Street’s finest (which is what really riles Piers), or on the sofa with one of our own gurning daytime hosts (ditto), but with the closest America gets to its own reigning monarch, Oprah Winfrey, for the US network CBS (ITV followed a day later in the couple’s second home/secondary market, the United Kingdom). The result was the most gripping, boring, hilarious, disturbing, important, meaningless (insert pretty much any opposing pair of adjectives here and they apply, or don’t) celebrity interview of the year. Topics discussed: a secret pre-wedding wedding; suicidal ideation; chickens; a gender-reveal (it’s a girl!); fraternal enmity; paternal estrangement, times two; racism at the highest levels, offender unspecified (allegedly); honorary titles denied (allegedly); learning to curtsy with Fergie; princesses in tears (allegedly); phone calls unreturned; “different paths”; Tyler Perry’s house. Reactions: er, polarised?
Best Flounce
Piers Morgan storms off Good Morning Britain
For a man who has made the freedom to speak his mind a raison d'être, it was particularly delicious to see just how thin-skinned Piers Morgan could be when calmly challenged, in this case by his Good Morning Britain colleague Alex Beresford, in March. After being asked, “Has she said anything about you since she cut you off?”, in response to Morgan banging on (again!) about the time Meghan Markle-as-was supposedly stood him up, Morgan’s ham head went from honey roast gammon to full Iberico. “OK, I’m done with this,” said the former tabloid tyro, stalking off his own set, never to return. “Sorry! See you later.” For once Piers put it best himself, in his somewhat prophetic Twitter bio: "One day you're cock of the walk, the next a feather duster."
Most Confusing Art Prank
Beeple aka Mike Winkelmann
WTF is an NFT? We still couldn’t tell you, and to be honest at this point we don’t even care. But Mike Winkelmann, a graphic artist from Wisconsin who goes by the name Beeple, certainly knows, given that he managed to sell one at Christie’s in March for a record $69.3m. “I think it probably means digital art is here to stay,” Winkelmann said as the winning bid was confirmed. Let’s just hope the new owner remembers to back up their hard drive (see, told you we don’t know how they work).
Hip Pop's Freshest Provocateur
Lil Nas X
It doesn’t take much to get the religious right fulminating. But in March, when Lil Nas X, the streaming charts’ incumbent terrible enfant, donned thigh boots and gave Beelzebub himself a lap dance before breaking the Dark Lord’s neck, feathers were well and truly spat. Released in March, "Montero (Call Me by Your Name)" saw the 22-year-old lament the fuckboy’s doctrine in a song that was refreshingly unapologetic in its tale of a secret gay romance. Kristi Noem, North Dakota’s governor, was but one Republican who tweeted her fury, much to Lil Nas X’s delight. Queerness, once only accepted by the mainstream if depicted in quieter, uncertain terms, is now well and truly up in faces – and the song made number one in over 20 countries.
Wrongest Wrong Turn
The Ever Given
Turns out international freight is a spectator sport, and a comedy of errors, and an alarming illustration of just how precarious the supply chain really is. Because, for a ridiculous 151 hours in March, the Ever Given, a hulking, creaking cargo ship, blocked the entire Suez Canal after spinning out during a sandstorm. When important trade routes are blocked, oil prices rise, livestock dies, and Twitter loses its mind. Hilarious. And, also, kind of not?
Best Bleak-As-Shit Nonfiction Page Turner
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
It’s testament to writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s lightness of touch that he can take a subject as deeply troubling as the opioid crisis in America – and the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, helped to create it – and turn it into a book, released in April, that is as engaging as it is horrifying. At times it’s hard to believe the callousness with which the Sacklers, whose name, thanks to their considerable financial donations, has been emblazoned on arts institutions the world over, seem to have pursued profit and influence over any recognition of the human cost of their company’s actions: in 1995, Purdue Pharma released a new highly addictive painkiller, OxyContin, with a powerful (and powerfully misleading) marketing campaign to match; in 2019, nearly 50,000 people in the United States died from opioid-involved overdoses. But there it is in the book, and often, thanks to Keefe’s meticulous research, in the Sacklers’ own words. You couldn’t – and wouldn’t – make it up.
Strongest Evidence That Even When Brits Don’t Make the Best TV, We’re Still the Best Thing on It
Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown
Back in April, there were those of us who were slightly irked by the reaction to the typically magnificent performance of the greatest screen actor of her generation in this above-average HBO crime drama. People seemed unaccountably surprised that Winslet had it in her to be so clearly a cut above anyone else not just on this show — although there were many other excellent performances (take a bow, Jean Smart, as Mare’s mother) — but any other show. The usual tiresome, faintly misogynistic noises of approval were made about Winslet’s decision to dress dowdily, go easy on the pancake, and not train for months to achieve the perfect hardbody before filming began, ignoring the fact that she was in character. The breathless reviews of her portrayal of a depressed divorcee cop in suburban Philadelphia made much of the fact that Winslet herself is a married, glamorous A-list actor who — would you believe it? — is actually English, not American at all. To which the rest of us, exasperated, replied, have you even seen a Kate Winslet performance before? The plot was the usual whatever-whatever-say-what?, the milieu was borderline poverty porn, the sexual politics were creepy but the leading lady was sublime. As the dauntless Mare Sheehan, Winslet gave us another of her deeply satisfying, richly detailed, superbly nuanced character studies. Just when we needed her most, there she was.
Most Gripping Podcast
The Lazarus Heist
It’s hard to believe that Seth Rogen set off a major international dispute between North Korea and the US when he released his film The Interview in 2014, not least because doing so sounds so much like the plot of a Seth Rogen movie (and was in fact, partly what happens in The Interview, a comedy about a plan to assassinate Kim Jong-un). This is where the BBC World Service’s excellent, twisty podcast began in April – with North Korea’s retaliatory hack of Sony Pictures – before presenters Geoff White, a cybercrime specialist, and Jean Lee, a North Korea specialist, led us on a journey into the DPRK’s astonishingly audacious criminal hacking endeavours, including a $1bn bank job.
Senior Citizen Award
Sir Anthony Hopkins
On 26 April, 83-year-old Hopkins became the oldest actor ever to win an Academy Award. It was his heart-wrenching performance as a dementia sufferer in Florian Zeller’s The Father that did it, rightfully lifting him into an elite category of performers who have earned the top prize twice. (He first won in 1991 for Silence of the Lambs.) But far more important than that, he put every single one of us to shame with the bucolic backdrop to his acceptance video, which he posted to social media once he’d woken up and heard the news. You see, Hopkins didn’t beam in from some God-forsaken box room, or appear in front of a carefully curated bookcase. There were no roaming pets, screaming toddlers or any of the other things that defined our Zoom-based existence in those buffering lockdown months. Instead, blue skies, chirping birds and miles of lush Welsh countryside, all of which he probably owns. We’d bet that he even wore trousers for the occasion, too. What a pro.
Funniest/Scariest Nervous Breakdown
Bo Burnham’s Inside
American musical comedian Bo Burnham has tested the structural integrity of his medium before – see his 2016 Kanye-style rant “Can’t Handle This”, in which he spliced, into a vocoder pop tune about burritos, a confession of his own worsening mental health – yet nothing could quite prepare us for Bo Burnham: Inside. Filmed entirely on his own in the guest house of his LA home, with a set consisting only of chaotically strewn recording equipment and lo-fi light effects, Burnham’s Emmy-winning Netflix special, released in May, was a lockdown project of the weirdest, funniest and most exquisitely painful kind. In songs like “Welcome to the Internet”, “White Woman’s Instagram” and “All Eyes on Me”, he ridiculed contemporary digital culture whilst also seeming to document his own mental unravelling. As the show went on, Burnham’s hair and beard grew longer, the jokes got darker and, as the boundaries between performed deterioration and actual deterioration start to blur, the experience was increasingly unsettling – and also, deeply familiar.
Greatest Refuseniks
Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles
The tennis champion and the greatest gymnast of all time began 2021 as global sporting icons and ended it as global sporting icons, although for their feats off the court and away from the gym, as much as on it/in it. Osaka and Biles’s decisions to prioritise their mental health over their performances — the tennis player first declined to fulfil media commitments at the French Open in May, then withdrew from tournaments, including Wimbledon, altogether; the gymnast became the face of the Tokyo Olympics by the unusual expedient of pulling out of most of her events, rather than competing in them — were met with mixed reactions in the media at first, before the shut-up-and-get-on-with-it booing was drowned out by the applause from everyone else. If it ever needed saying it needed saying in 2021: taking good care of yourself, mind and body, is more important than crushing the competition at work. Osaka and Biles brilliantly embodied that sentiment.
Cheeriest Wembley Singalong
Sweet Caroline
“Hands, touching hands / reaching out, touching me, touching YOU!” So good! So good! Etc.
Gaffer
Gareth Southgate
In almost every aspect of British life in 2021, especially at the very top — where, for once, it really mattered most — leadership was sorely, painfully, fatally lacking. But a certain former footballer from Watford proved that his generation of Englishmen can, just occasionally, provide the man for the hour. Kicking off in June, the competition, bizarrely, insisted on being called Euro 2020, even though it clearly wasn’t. But Southgate is undaunted by nonsense, and noise, and despite, ultimately, the cruellest of defeats, and its ugly aftermath, for a few glorious weeks in the summer of 2021 he and his young, bright, enthusiastic team gave us something to cheer for. (Unless you are Scottish or Welsh or Northern Irish in which case, erm, sorry?) England didn’t win, that’s true, but Southgate became the first England manager to take a team to the final of a major tournament since Alf Ramsay in 1966. It so nearly came home. Next stop (still more bizarrely): Qatar 2022.
Kim Kardashian Award for the Most 2021 Sex Tape of 2021
Matt Hancock and Gina Coladangelo
Sex in the pandemic: discuss. Apparently, it’s gone underground. Or maybe it’s gone online? Perhaps it’s given up entirely? On the other hand, maybe it’s never had it so good. For Gina and Matt, the Bonnie and Clyde of the broom cupboard, a snog and a grope behind closed doors — but, sadly for them, and anyone who’s watched it, not out of shot of a camera positioned inside a smoke alarm (!?) in his Whitehall office — was enough to generate the appropriately desperate sex tape of the year. In May, when the kissing and pawing took place, the embattled then-health secretary was already a laughing stock. By June, when the Sun newspaper published its tawdry scoop, the unfortunately named Hancock was a punchline. Forced to resign for having breached his own Covid-19 social distancing restrictions, Hancock returned to the backbenches, but not to his marital home. Perhaps the joke was on the rest of us though. Hancock’s replacement as Secretary of State for Health? Sajid Javid.
Uncanniest Unlikeness
Diana’s Kensington Palace Statue
Having never sculpted a statue of a former member of the Royal Family ourselves, we can only assume, if the bronze of Lady Diana unveiled by her sons on 1 July is anything to go by, it’s a lot harder than it looks. Sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley chose to portray the People’s Princess with her arms wrapped around three tiny adults, in an effect that was less Madonna and child(ren) and more breakfast TV presenter apprehending a trio of Wee Jimmy Krankies.
Boldest Extraterrestrial Midlife Crises
Bezos, Branson, Musk and the Space Race
We’re not sure what Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk are paying their therapists, but it doesn’t take a session with Sigmund to work out that sending a giant phallic rocket into space is sign that your ego needs an overhaul. All three billionaires’ space programmes – Bezos’ Blue Origin, Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Musk’s SpaceX – successfully sent rockets to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere this year, fulfilling every narcissistic man-boy technocrat’s ultimate wet dream of a life free of gravity and plebs. At least Bezos, who took to the skies in July, had the self-awareness to fashion his, New Shephard, in the shape of an actual penis, complete with bell-end. Takes one to know one.
Succession Award For Most Enjoyable TV Satire of the 0.1 Per Cent
Mike White for The White Lotus
Like the foreboding orchestra of crickets chirping, there is a pervasive sense of dread that thrums in the background of The White Lotus, the HBO series set in an uber-luxe Hawaiian resort. Succession might have got more airtime, but Mike White’s Parasite-goes-to-the-beach cautionary tale, which aired in July, was an even more enjoyable breakfast buffet of privilege and narcissism. It also featured perhaps TV’s meanest, and best-read, teenage mean girls, Olivia and Paula, who take the secondary prize for most terrifying TV performers of 2021. Yes, that includes the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and Roy Keane’s half-time analysis of Man Utd’s midfield.
Boldest Sneakerhead Reissue
Nike Dunks
Of all of Nike’s billboard sneaks, the Dunk hadn’t seen its name in lights (or on the StockX homepage) for quite some time. Then Nike gave it a bit of attention. Co-signs with the late Virgil Abloh in August, Travis Scott and Kylie Jenner were all part of a wider strategy to get sneakerheads to remember the canon’s forgotten child. Resale prices jumped from around $200 to $800 last summer. Suddenly, Nike was releasing the Dunk in brand new colourways beyond minute limited edition runs. Dunks are for everyone! Inevitably, this will change on the fickle but bullish stock market of the sneakerverse: what goes up will always come down. But for now, Nike Dunks, you’re a star (again).
Most Welcome New Avenger
Simu Liu
Marvel wouldn’t be the overpowering cultural steamroller it is if it made modest character studies about the humdrum lives of everyday heroes: Spider-Man: Far From Home wasn’t, in fact, about a millennial getting his foot on the property ladder. Superhero films are about larger than life fantasy figures living outsized existences. And yet we (and our kids) are meant to relate. And until recently millions, even billions, of viewers (and their kids) could not fully see themselves in the all-powerful Avengers. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, released in September, was the first Marvel film with an Asian lead, in Chinese-born Canadian actor, Simu Liu, and it was widely agreed that the former stuntman kicked global ass. The inevitable sequel is keenly awaited. The MCU continues to diversify as it expands. More of this, please.
Best Supported Actor
The Puppet in Annette
Is it funny when earnest A-list actors (in the case of Annette, Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver) are upstaged by an inanimate piece of cloth held up by strings (in this case a demonic puppet child)? Yes of course it’s funny, as director Leos Carax’s bizarre movie musical, released in September, proved. See also: every episode ever of The Muppet Show.
Second Best Supported Actor
Jared Leto’s Latex Bodysuit in House of Gucci
Sir Ridley Scott’s soapy true crime saga, released in November, was, not unlike some fashion shows, fun to look at in clips on the internet, but a slog to sit through in person, its tone lurching like a minibar-raiding drunk from wacky comedy to lurid drama, without ever quite finding a groove. The performances ran the gamut, too, from sober naturalism (that man Adam Driver again) to outre scenery munching (Al Pacino). But nothing — not even Lady Gaga’s Milan-by-way-of-Moscow accent — came close for frenzied farce to the performance of Jared Leto, an actor whose increasingly outlandish interpretations have begun to seem pathological rather than executed by design. Here he played poor Paolo Gucci, cousin of Driver’s more powerful Maurizio, as an overweight, overdressed no-hoper, bald of head, pudgy of stomach, enormous of face and unrecognisable as the dainty lounge lizard behind the face mask. It was certainly bold, it was arguably courageous, it was undeniably silly. Top marks for the brown Porsche 924, though.
Hero of the Nation Number 1.
Emma Raducanu
Those who stayed up late to watch on the night of September 11 will not forget it: a wildcard qualifier, 18-year-old Emma Raducanu from Bromley, made a nation (this one) spill its sleepytime tea all over its sofa by winning the US Open in New York, having not dropped a set throughout the qualifiers or the tournament. With style, power, finesse and extraordinary self-possession, Raducanu put her opponent, fellow teenager Leylah Fernandez of Canada, to the sword: 6-4, 6-3. In the process she became a superstar, her winning smile (copyright all newspapers) and unaffected joy helping propel her from back pages to front, where she is likely to stay. Whether or not she can repeat the feat, we hardly care. Raducanu has already earned her place in history. And didn’t Tim Henman know it.
Hero of the Nation Number 2.
Bukayo Saka
Of the three brave, completely shanghaied lads who missed penalties for England in the July 11 Euro 2022 final (that we’ve definitely moved on from and don’t think about it that much actually) our heart goes out to Arsenal’s phenomenal Bukayo Saka the most. Of course, it wouldn’t have been easy for Marcus Rashford or Jadon Sancho to swallow, either. But this was Saka’s first EVER senior penalty kick, and its success or failure would guarantee the elation or lament of a nation for months, maybe years to come. For a 19-year-old to step up to the plate shows incredible strength, and we will be forever grateful for everything he and the team did this summer. But beyond all that, Saka blessed our collective timelines with images of him frolicking about the recovery pool with Unity, the inflatable unicorn, now permanently installed at the National Football Museum, and in many ways, that’s better than a European trophy, anyway. (Footnote: when the London primary school attended by Esquire’s editor’s son was recently asked to name a new classroom in honour of an inspirational figure, they voted for Bukayo Saka. Too much too young? Time will tell.)
Crime Writer of the Year
Colson Whitehead for Harlem Shuffle
Earlier this year, the double Pulitzer prize-winning American novelist told Esquire he hoped his writing was timeless, rather than timely. Well, it’s both. Following the spectacular Amazon adaptation of his novel The Underground Railroad, directed by Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, Whitehead returned in September with the bustling Harlem Shuffle, a truly excellent crime caper. Like the earlier work, it is another dispatch from the past with lessons for the present, although this time the author gave himself permission to have some fun, and so the reader could, too.
Best Reason to Wear White Vans
Squid Game
While numbered turquoise tracksuits didn’t quite take off, white Vans slip-ons, the standard-issue shoes worn by contestants on the enormous hit Korean Netflix show, in September, saw an absurd 7,800 per cent uplift in sales at Sole Supplier.
Best Panic
Petrol Crisis
In what must have been a bumper year for beta-blocker manufacturers, 2021 was somehow able to inflict even more anxiety and existential dread than the year before. You’d think we’d have learned from the toilet-roll shortages of 2020, understood that there’s plenty of everything to go around if everyone just STAYS CALM, but no. As soon as there was the faintest whiff of petrol shortages, we lost our minds. In late September, queues for fuel snaked through town centres and proper preppers finally got a chance to christen that jerry can they’ve had since Trump was elected. Eventually the Tories scrambled the military, which did little to increase the flow of petrol, but it seemed to assuage the British public and soon enough, like it always does, the news cycle moved on. But wait ‘til you here about the turkey shortage…
The Longest Goodbye
Daniel Craig’s Double-0 Exit
Esquire has had plenty to say about James Bond in the past. And doubtless we’ll have plenty to say about him / her / them in the future. But on the topic of Daniel Craig’s final outing, in the long, long, long delayed No Time to Die, by the time of the premiere, in London on September 30, we were as knackered as a 007 stunt double, all superlatives exhausted. And DC himself? A vision in a bespoke strawberry velvet tux, the man who has been Bond since 2005 took his final bow at the Albert Hall with, for our money, his position confirmed: the best of all of them, from Connery to Brosnan and back again. Thank you, Daniel. It’s been a blast. And no one could say you didn’t go out with a bang.
Most Pervasive Naturally Occurring Substance
Sand
Sand is one of those things that you like more in the abstract (slipping between your toes!) than the reality (fucking up your phone!) but, with beach holidays out the window for significant periods, there was nothing like a little absence to make the heart grow fonder. Mostly, we had to settle for sand in cinematic form: from the rapid-ageing beach of M Night Shyamalan’s Old to the CGI Italian Riviera of Pixar’s Luca, and the desert planet Arrakis in Denis Villeneuve’s much-hyped Dune in October. And hey, what’s the occasional giant bum-hole sandworm when you’re on (virtual) vay-cay.
Headgear of the Year
The QAnon Shaman
The year in horned beasts got off to a flyer when, on January 6, at the urging of the then President of the United States, a bunch of mouth-breathing wing nuts stormed the US Capitol. Not the least eye-catching among their spittle-flecked number was the man who became known as the QAnon Shaman. Wearing a horned fur headdress, carrying a stars and stripes flag on pole topped with a spear, his face painted red, white and blue, and barking into a bullhorn, Arizona native Jake Angeli became, as he no doubt intended, the standard bearer for moronic conspiracists everywhere. On November 17, he was sentenced to 41 months in prison for his role in the Washington disorder. One imagines he is wearing a standard orange suit now, and no hat.
Fabbest Eight Hours of Television
The Beatles: Get Back
“You do realise this tape costs two shillings a foot?” George Martin’s amused voice asks from the control room, several hours into The Beatles: Get Back, released on Disney+ in November. Martin is talking about audio tape, and the band’s profligate use of it. Early reviews of Peter Jackson’s “documentary about a documentary”, remade from original director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1969 Let It Be footage, arrived with similar concerns about brevity. It was almost eight hours long! Enough to test the patience of even the most dedicated Fabs fan, surely? Such overindulgence felt like a “schlep” and “a drag”, a “meandering” and “joyless” attempt to reframe the original’s dour reputation, these reviewers noted. They were so, so wrong. Saying The Beatles: Get Back is too long is like saying Van Gogh’s Starry Night is the wrong shape. It is neither too long nor too short. It is exactly the length it needs to be for Jackson to convey the transcendence of the band’s creative process. The story of 21 days in the studio (plus one on the Apple HQ roof), where new “numbers” in the Great 20th Century Songbook are magicked into existence daily via tea and toast, a truly heroic appetite for Kent “ciggies” and boyish, joyful camaraderie. Jackson’s film is a towering masterclass in editing, colourising and sound design that makes being in a band with your mates look like the most fun you can have, ever. Did Get Back’s schlep-utation come from Episode One, where we find The Beatles out of place and out of practice at Twickenham Studios? Did those reviewers even make it to Episode Two? Because once the band decamp to 1 Savile Row, bolstered by keyboardist Billy Preston, who only drops by to say hello, Get Back becomes pure TV Prozac. The enormity of the task – write, record and perform a new album to a self-imposed deadline – is insane. You’d never know it. Driven forward by Paul “BASSMAN” McCartney, both tape and time are running out – but pressure is notable by its absence. There is, apparently, always time for another knockabout cover version, silly-voiced skit or lunch. The Beatles use up all that tape because they’re enjoying themselves. Anyone who’s ever freaked out over a deadline could do worse than take a lesson from Get Back. Hours before the world-famous rooftop gig John Lennon suggests they should just “put the ones [songs] in a hat and shuffle them around” to pick a setlist. The best argument for streaming’s longform possibilities and use of Disney’s deep pockets we can think of; you can imagine a similar treatment now being applied to rehearsals for a play or planning an exhibition, or any other worthy work of art. Was I the only one choking up during the rooftop concert – tears of joy from having just watched history write itself, rather than anger or exhaustion, I think. I suspect not. Jackson says he couldn’t believe this footage existed. It was worth every shilling.
Most Missed Style Icons
Charlie Watts, Prince Philip, Virgil Abloh
The menswear fraternity, though open to newcomers, has lost some irreplaceable names this year. Prince Philip, the Grand Duke of classic British style will much missed, as will his mastery of equine élan sub-equatorial chic. As the enigmatic drummer of the Rolling Stones, Charlie Watts was one of the sleeper hits of menswear, a little overshadowed by the bravura of Jagger and Richards, but always far more elegant and poised than his louder bandmates. Perhaps saddest of all, given he was only 41, the artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton and founder of Off-White, Virgil Abloh died of cancer in November. A demigod for hype kids and high fashionistas alike, Abloh ushered a new era of gonzo creativity and pop culture into a once staid industry. Also mourned in men’s style circles, and beyond: the coolest and best looking British male model of all time, Nick Kamen; and Seventies Scottish pop sensation, Les McKeown, lead singer of the Bay City Rollers. No one, not even the Duke of Edinburgh, could pull off a tartan suit like Les could.
