If you are a keen follower of social media, you will know how it can pollute your whole life and way of thinking. People such as the fitness guru Joe Wicks cannot perform so much as a single burpee without belching it out to their four million followers. It is an illness.
Another casualty of this appears to be the actor Alec Baldwin. Why is this man, or for that matter his wife, still posting online? I know he has been through a terrible tragedy: just over a fortnight ago he accidentally shot dead a cinematographer on the set of a film. But surely this is the time to decide, let’s definitely not share those pictures of the family japing around at Halloween.
Underneath snaps of the Baldwins and their six children in “last min costumes” I was astonished to see that Hilaria Baldwin wrote last Sunday: “Parenting through this has been an intense experience, to say the least. Today, we rallied to give them a holiday. Last min costumes ... a little hodge-podge ... but they were so happy and that warmed my mama heart.”
Who writes that? I know she is a mummy blogger and feels she must provide content, but why turn someone else’s death into a branding opportunity? Why are these two people not hiding under the furthest rock? Why are they still blogging, chatting, posing, giving interviews, doing “lifestyle”? It is tone deaf. Why is it that whenever anything happens to a certain type of celebrity, however devastating or horrible, it is now simply a scramble to claim victimhood?
Baldwin seems unable to go silent: he makes the classic assumption of the true narcissist that people want to hear from him 24/7. Barely a day goes past without paparazzi shots of him with his wife and children, smooching her in a bar or hugging the father of the child who has now not got a mother.
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If Hilaria wants to know what’s “intense”, parenting-wise, it is being the widower Matthew Hutchins. I looked at the pictures of Baldwin hugging him with his son Andros, and thought: why did that happen in full view of the press? Why not meet behind closed doors? The actor is a seasoned celebrity — he should know how to protect people.
And why did he even consider a press conference just over a week ago, at the edge of what looks like an A-road in Vermont, at which his wife angrily filmed reporters as if they were the culprits? Doesn’t he have a team of press officers? Hilaria even tried to bark “no details” when someone asked her husband an innocent question about the shooting. At which point he turned on her and snapped, “Do me a favour? I’m going to answer the question.” He describes the death of Halyna Hutchins as “one in a trillion”, as if it were by chance that she died, but it wasn’t. It sounds as if no one checked the gun.
I understand the actor’s position: he is watching his entire career and livelihood drain away, with that huge family to support. He’s a voluble, entertaining person — as he told me during an interview eight years ago, he is “funny and charming ... I’m a great bullshitter as evidenced by the fact that I have a 29-year-old Spanish yoga-instructor wife”. (In fact it turned out last year Hilaria faked being Spanish, but that’s another story.)
But he’s also impetuous: just days before we met, he’d been defending himself over yet another extraordinary loss of temper, during which he called a black photographer a “drug dealer” and told a female reporter he hoped she “choked to death”. He’s a great comic actor and socialite, but would I want him running a film? No.
The film he was producing sounds badly organised: no food; freezing temperatures; long, punishing days of lumping equipment; camera crew preparing to resign. It is rare for crews to walk out, especially after Covid. But there had already been three dangerous incidents on the New Mexico set. At one point someone from the props department had “actually shot herself in the foot” with a blank. You can’t imagine Tom Cruise putting up with this. Who runs a sloppy set in a pandemic? It sounds like it was “chaotic, even by its low-budget status”, as one source put it.
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Baldwin himself wasn’t disliked; more “feared but respected”. Reading the damning report on the dire conditions, you’d have thought he might have been humbled and reflective, but no. He decided to go on the offensive, posting a stinging, seven-page hissy fit from someone else who worked on the film, who denounced her fellow workers as spoilt for demanding “fancy hotels”.
Is now really the time to be circulating posts saying your devastated colleagues are “camera jerks” who are talking “bullshit” in order to save your reputation?
Trading dons will follow as ivory towers go up for sale
So Linacre College, Oxford, becomes Thao College, renamed after a self-made Vietnamese businesswoman who gave it £155 million.
I get that these are trying times and the dons need to be kept in gold-plated gowns, and vintage port. But why does a college need that sort of money? Oxford already has several billions in assets.
Besides, Madame Thao is an unlikely patron: the woman who set up Vietnam’s answer to easyJet, also known as Bikini Air for its semi-naked hostesses. Are Oxbridge colleges now like football clubs, for sale to the highest bidder?
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I can see all parts of universities being parcelled off to oligarchs, minor dictators and dodgy Far East politicians. There will be merch, VIP boxes to watch lectures and a European Super League containing the Sorbonne, Bologna and Heidelberg. I can’t wait until they start trading academics.
No Mr Bond, I expect you to be sexist, not to be a hero for everyone
Why on earth do we “all” need to identify with James Bond?
I am speaking, of course, of the three new James Bond books, which will be written by a woman.
Kim Sherwood says she will write them from “a feminist perspective”, with an “ensemble cast of heroes who we can all identify with”.
Why do we always have to do this? Assume that women, minorities, gay people simply won’t be able to understand a piece of art unless it is told from a marginalised perspective?
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It is so patronising: as a woman I don’t actually want a female Bond or female Bond books. I don’t need him to be exactly like me, although I suppose I would have a glance at any film containing a bitchy, petty Bond, juggling after-school clubs and clacking out television reviews and columns about Kim Kardashian’s boobs.
Why not try writing a new character that appeals to everybody? I’ll tell you why: because it is impossible. The whole point about characters in books and films is that some people will like them and some loathe them — as is true in life.
