Monday
A milestone in television history this morning, as the last ever Carpool Karaoke, the hugely popular section of James Corden’s CBS Late Late Show in which he interviews music icons while driving them around, airs ahead of his final show. Put it down to lack of eye contact, novelty format, or the sheer balls of a host willing to chip in and duet with Celine Dion, but even for Corden-sceptics the feature was irresistible. The most viewed Carpool of all time was the 2016 episode starring Adele, which has been watched on YouTube by more than 260 million people. Adele is a hoot. Corden is – I can’t believe I’m saying this – delightful. It is a genuinely great piece of television.
Cut to this week and the farewell episode in which Adele returns for the final ride. As an exercise, none of us might welcome being held up against former versions of ourselves. Still, this is a tough one to watch. In the original segment, Corden and Adele drove around rainy London. She was bundled up in a coat, looked like she’d done her own makeup and banged on guilelessly about all the times she’d been drunk and unruly in public, or hungover in the park with her son. Corden, an effortless foil, was so spontaneous and funny that my friend Tiff and I still quote lines from it (“I mean, what I like is that you’re coming to me for this advice”; “I ain’t got time for that!”).
Seven years later and the pair are driving around LA in harsh sunlight. Corden is sycophantic and lachrymose; Adele is styled to within an inch of her life. They spend most of the journey fawning over each other in what might be a public health warning about money and fame. Oh, well. Nothing lasts forever. The sad thing is Corden is quitting the show to return to the UK just as the Americans have got the hang of British attitudes towards him. In Variety magazine, a recent piece about Corden’s departure speculated about what he might do on his return and, breaking with the obsequiousness of the entertainment press, summarised his acting career in Britain as – sharp intake of breath at the stone cold viciousness of this – “relatively successful”.
Tuesday
I’m behind on the saga of William, Harry, Rupert and Charles, and have to scramble to get up to speed. Harry is suing Rupert for phone hacking, that much I know. But then in court on Tuesday it surfaces in documents that, according to Harry, in 2020 Rupert paid off William secretly – “a very large sum” – in return for him agreeing to take no further legal action against him. This was done, Harry says in the court filings, because the royals “wanted to avoid at all costs the sort of reputational damage that it had suffered in 1993 when the Sun and another tabloid had unlawfully obtained and published details of an intimate telephone conversation that took place between my father and stepmother in 1989, while he was still married to my mother”.
The real target of these remarks would seem not to be Rupert, but Charles, as Harry’s Scorched Earth Tour: No Bridge Unburned continues to roll out. Harry would also seem to be targeting William for allegedly going along with Charles’s appeasement of Rupert, while tangentially going after Camilla for being in the mix at all. The spectre of Diana hangs over everything and oh, look, heads up, there’s Hugh. I have sympathy for them all at this point, with the obvious exception of Rupert, for whom, of course, no sympathy is due at this or any other time.
Wednesday
Donald Trump’s lawyers appear in court in New York on Wednesday for the former president’s second legal outing of the month, this time in answer to a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, who the former president called a liar after she accused him of rape. If Trump’s appearance downtown for his arraignment at the beginning of April was an anticlimactic affair, Wednesday’s proceedings are a different matter entirely. Before things can even get under way Judge Lewis A Kaplan has rebuked Trump for ranting against his accuser on social media (the former president called Carroll’s accusations a “made-up SCAM” and a “fraudulent & false story”). The alleged assault took place in 1996 in the changing room of a department store, and almost 30 years later Carroll is resolute in her testimony. Elegant, composed, carefully choosing her words, she is the polar opposite of the man having a meltdown in Florida. At the end of a day of testifying, and with the prospect of hostile questioning on Thursday, Carroll is, finally, emotional. She says the thing that the vast majority of alleged rape victims never get the chance to say: “I’m crying because I’m happy I got to tell my story in court.”
Thursday
A welcome retreat from Trump ugliness in the form of Judy Blume, who is everywhere this week: on Good Morning America, in a documentary on Amazon Prime, in a profile in the New Yorker and all media outlets in between. Her agent once told her that kids raised on her books in the 80s would grow up to commission the movies and so it has come to pass, with the release of the film version of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret next week, triggering the huge wave of interest. Blume is a modest figure, running her independent book store in Key West, Florida, where the foot traffic has become so huge that she can no longer sign books on the fly, instead taking home written requests to work through in her own time. One arresting fact from the documentary: in the 1960s, a publisher friend of Blume’s ex-husband condescended to look over an early manuscript of hers and sent her a letter telling her: bad luck, old thing, you can’t write, give up. The letter galvanised her. In the almost 60 years since, Blume has sold more than 90 million books.
Friday
I’ve had quiche on my mind ever since the coronation recipe came out (I’m not big on the broad bean element), and it’s a hard item to find in New York. Gourmet Garage near my house stocks a few, but the pastry is suspect and the flan, the soul of the quiche, is thin and grey and doesn’t have the requisite eggy wobble. Thankfully, there’s a legendary Aussie bakery in my neighbourhood that sorted me for hot cross buns at Easter (my only quibble with them was that, in capitulation to American tastes, they made the crosses out of – brace yourselves – white icing). Aussies love a quiche as much as we do, and at Bourke Street Bakery on Friday, there they are in all their glory: one spinach, one quiche lorraine. I have to stop myself breaking into a flat run to get them home and in the oven.
