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      Eurovision 2023: How to Watch and What to Know

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      The Eurovision Song Contest has been an annual fixture in the global pop calendar since 1956 — with the exception of 2020, when the competition took an enforced Covid-19 gap year — and this month, the competition takes place in Liverpool, England.Organized by public broadcasters gathered in the Switzerland-based European Broadcasting Union, Eurovision is a colorful, fiercely contested competition in which each participating country sends an act to perform an original song that’s no longer than three minutes. The winner is decided by vote at the end of the “grand final.”More than 160 million viewers from across the world watched last year’s contest, and Eurovision’s popularity continues to grow steadily. Eurovision has even begun to make inroads in the United States, a country generally immune to the event’s flamboyant celebration of pop music.Below are rundowns on this year’s hotly tipped acts, advice about how to watch from the United States and why the event is being hosted in England this year.The crowd during a Eurovision semifinal in Liverpool. Many fans can sing along to their favorite entries.Mary Turner for The New York TimesWho gets to compete?Only seven European countries competed in the first Eurovision Song Contest, which was staged as an experiment in live, international TV broadcasting.Today, 52 countries have participated in Eurovision at least once. To narrow the field before the grand final, since 2008 there have also been two semifinals. This year, the top 10 countries at each semifinal move on to the grand final.The 2023 edition of Eurovision features a total of 37 entries, including the “Big Five” — France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain — who are the top financial contributors to the E.B.U. These five countries go straight to the final, skipping the treacherous elimination round.Bulgaria, Montenegro and North Macedonia are not competing this year, officially because of the costs associated with entering. Belarus has been suspended since 2021, after its disputed 2020 election and subsequent brutal crackdown on dissent, with the E.B.U citing “the suppression of media freedom” in the country.Why does Australia take part?Eurovision has a history of inviting seemingly unlikely participants, provided they are members of the E.B.U. Morocco, for instance, joined the fray in 1980; Israel has won four times since its first appearance in the contest, in 1973.Those two countries are at least nearer Europe than Australia is. But Australians have long viewed the contest in impressive numbers, even though it airs live at 5 a.m. Sydney time, and they have competed in it since 2015. Australia’s current agreement with the E.B.U. is supposed to end after this year, however, so who knows what will happen next time.Ukraine’s entry this year is Tvorchi, featuring Andrii Hutsuliak, left, and Jimoh Augustus Kehinde, right.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesLoreen, performing for Sweden, is one of the bookmakers’ favorites to win the competition.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe hosts of the Eurovision semifinal, from left, the singer Alesha Dixon, Julia Sanina, another singer, and the actress Hannah Waddingham.Mary Turner for The New York TimesHow can U.S. residents watch?As in 2022, Peacock hosted livestreams for both semifinals, and will do the same for the grand final on Saturday, from 3 p.m. Eastern.For the final, viewers can opt to watch with commentary from the Olympic figure skater and longtime Eurovision fan Johnny Weir, who made an assured debut hosting last year’s livestream.How has the war in Ukraine affected the competition?Traditionally, the country that wins Eurovision holds the event the following year. Ukraine won last year with Kalush Orchestra’s track “Stefania,” but since the country is still at war, Britain — last year’s runner-up — stepped in to host. (And not for the first time: Britain has won five Eurovisions but hosted nine, including this year’s.)Russia was disqualified from the 2022 edition after its invasion of Ukraine. The E.B.U. then suspended Russia, so it will not be competing this year.Since openly political songs are forbidden at Eurovision, some acts are using generic messages of empowerment, like the Ukrainian duo Tvorchi’s song “Heart of Steel,” about bravery. Flirting more brazenly with disqualification was the Croatian entry, Let 3’s “Mama SC,” a bonkers, highly theatrical antiwar number that employs one of Eurovision’s favorite creative devices: allegorical satire.Representing Croatia, Let 3’s “Mama SC” is an insane, highly theatrical antiwar track.Mary Turner for The New York TimesHow does the voting work?Eurovision’s notoriously complicated voting rules and protocols have changed many times over the decades, and again this year. Previously, each country was awarded points based on a combination of votes from viewers at home and by juries in each competing country.After the contest’s organizers found “voting irregularities” among six countries’ juries in last year’s semifinals — many of whom seemed to be voting for one another — the rules were tweaked, with the semifinals now being decided exclusively by viewers and the grand final results combining points from viewers and juries.Oh, and all this voting happens live, which helps explain why the grand final broadcast takes about four hours.Can American viewers vote?Traditionally, voting was limited to viewers in countries participating in the contest — who couldn’t vote for their own act — meaning American Eurovision fans couldn’t cast a vote.But in a change that’s indicative of Eurovision’s world-spanning ambition, this year nonparticipating countries can vote for the first time, via an official online hub. That includes viewers in the United States.Finland’s Kaarija is competing with “Cha Cha Cha,” a track which is basically electronic body music, set in a glittery thunderdome. Mary Turner for The New York TimesWho are this year’s favorites?The bookmakers’ favorite to take the title is “Tattoo” by Loreen, from the Eurovision powerhouse Sweden. Loreen is a known quantity, having won the contest in 2012 with “Euphoria” — a 21st-century Eurovision classic. There are no restrictions on acts competing several times, and other familiar faces this year include Italy’s Marco Mengoni and Moldova’s Pasha Parfeni.Were Loreen to grab the top spot again, she would become the second performer to win twice, after Johnny Logan, who won for Ireland in 1980 and 1987.Finland is another favorite, with a demented entry, Kaarija’s “Cha Cha Cha,” which is basically electronic body music, set in a glittery thunderdome. For Weir, who presents Peacock’s Eurovision coverage, this all shows the daring tastes of Eurovision viewers. “The fact that the oddsmakers think that Finland will do so well this year shocked me just because I didn’t know if everyone could get behind that kind of wild, over-the-top character of Kaarija,” he said in a recent phone conversation.The competition’s dark horses include Spain, which has not won since 1969; this year bookies are placing a few euros on Blanca Paloma and her song “EAEA,” which sounds a bit like Cocteau Twins experimenting with flamenco.Who are the more surreal acts?It’s often countries most Americans would struggle find on a map that deliver Eurovision’s most memorable performances, even if they don’t necessarily make it out of the semifinal.“The response I got last year was just how impressed people were that there was an act for Moldova that had them standing on their couches and dancing,” Weir said.This year, the eye-popping numbers include the Austrian song “Who the Hell is Edgar?,” in which Teya and Salena sing about being possessed by Edgar Allan Poe, and Germany’s outré mini-rock opera “Blood and Glitter,” by Lord of the Lost.Competition for the most awkward Eurovision lyrics is close, as always, but let’s give Israel’s Noa Kirel a nod of approval for coming up with a tongue-twisting rallying cry in her song “Unicorn”: “It’s gonna be phenomen-phenomen-phenomenal/Phenomen-phenomenal/Feminine-feminine-femininal.”Classic Eurovision poetry. More

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      James Bowman, Who Helped Resurrect the Countertenor, Dies at 81

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      He took up the repertory for the highest male voice at a time when few were performing it. He was particularly known for two roles in Britten operas.James Bowman, a British countertenor who championed repertory for that voice at a time when few singers were attempting it and inspired more composers, including Benjamin Britten, to write for it, died on March 27 at his home in Redhill, south of London. He was 81.Terry Winwood, his civil partner, confirmed the death but said the cause had not yet been determined.When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”Mr. Bowman’s breakthrough came in 1967, when he was working as a teacher and was doing most of his singing in choirs. He described the moment to The Santa Fe Reporter in 1987.“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”He was invited to audition.“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.“James Bowman’s ringing Apollo sounded authentically unterrestrial,” Martin Cooper wrote in The Daily Telegraph, reviewing the world premiere of the piece at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, England.Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”In a tribute on the website of the London-based choir Tenebrae, Nigel Short, the choir’s director, recalled the crucial support Mr. Bowman gave him early in his career. He also shared fond memories of Mr. Bowman’s impish sense of humor.“He was such a brilliant, instinctive singer and musician, a huge character and incredibly kind and generous,” Mr. Short wrote, “but my fondest memories will always be of him giggling and snorting loudly at something totally outrageous he’d just whispered in the ears of anyone standing close by.”Mr. Bowman made for a lively newspaper interview as well. He was always eager to dispel stereotypes about countertenors, especially unflattering ones that branded them as effeminate and made them the target of jokes.“We’re a down-to-earth bunch who just happen to like singing in a high register,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 1996. “When I look around at my colleagues, I’m struck by how normal most of them are.”When Mr. Bowman performed Handel’s “Messiah” with the St. Thomas Choir at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan in 2005, one critic wrote that he “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesJames Thomas Bowman was born on Nov. 6, 1941, in Oxford, England, to Benjamin and Cecilia (Coote) Bowman. He attended the centuries-old school King’s Ely, beginning in 1951; originally a boy chorister there, he soon became head chorister. According to an obituary published by the school, he gave his first concert as a countertenor in 1959 to a small school group in a chapel at Ely Cathedral. The school now hosts an annual James Bowman Lecture promoting the creative and liberal arts.Mr. Bowman attended New College, Oxford, as an organ scholar and was a member of the New College and Christ Church choirs. In 1965 he met David Munrow, who invited him to join his Early Music Consort of London. He continued performing with that group well into the 1970s, and he was also a member of the early music choral group Pro Cantione Antiqua.Mr. Bowman and Mr. Winwood were together for 48 years. He leaves no other immediate survivors.Producing the countertenor voice, Mr. Bowman told The Sunday Telegraph, involved “using the edge of your vocal cords, and neglecting the central part, which is the bass area.”“I can sing bass,” he added. “I use my bass voice to warm up with, before I sing countertenor. But I can’t keep up a bass voice for long — it feels odd.”Although he was a champion of the countertenor and urged composers to write for it, not all of them hit the mark, he told The Independent of Britain in 1990.“People say, ‘I’ve written you an opera,’ and either the range is too wide or they want you to be something bizarre like a singing corpse,” he said. “I’ve spent my life fighting the idea of being a piece of exquisitery on a table — trying just to be a singer, not a countertenor.” More

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      in Movies

      Brett Goldstein Faces Life After ‘Ted Lasso’

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      LONDON — A few minutes into coffee last spring, Brett Goldstein wanted to show me something on his phone.I leaned over and saw puppeteers sitting on skateboards while they hid behind a table, rolling into one another in apparent bliss as their hands animated a clowder of felt cats above their heads. For Goldstein this represented a kind of creative ideal, as pure an expression of fun, craft and unbridled glee as any human is likely to encounter.“Imagine this is your actual job,” he said, his breathtaking eyebrows raised in wonder.Goldstein shot this behind-the-scenes video during his time as a guest star on “Sesame Street,” an experience this Emmy-winning, Marvel-starring comic actor and writer still describes as the single best day of his life.The clip is inarguably delightful, but Goldstein hardly has to imagine such a job. As the breakout star of “Ted Lasso,” the hit comedy about a tormented but terminally sunny American coach winning hearts, minds and the occasional football match in England, he is part of an ensemble that brought as much bonhomie, optimism and warmth to the set as Ted himself, played by the show’s mastermind, Jason Sudeikis, brought to the screen.“I will be absolutely devastated when it ends,” Goldstein said last year. “I think we all will.”And now it has ended. Or maybe it hasn’t. What is certain is that the new season of “Ted Lasso,” which starts on Wednesday, will conclude the three-act story the creators conceived in the beginning and there are no plans for more. Whether and how more tales from the Lassoverse arrive is up to Sudeikis, who told me he hadn’t even begun to ponder such things. “It’s been a wonderful labor of love, but a labor nonetheless,” he said.So even if the new season isn’t the end, it represents an end, one that hit Goldstein hard. In a video call last month, he confirmed that while shooting the finale in November, he kept sneaking off to “have a cry.”But even if “Lasso” is over for good, it is also inarguable that Goldstein has made the most of it. Chances are you had never heard of him three years ago, when he was a journeyman performer working on a TV show based on an NBC Sports promo for a service, Apple TV+, that few people had. (Humanity had plenty else to think about in March 2020.)Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt and Jason Sudeikis in the third and final season of “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+But things have moved fast for him since “Ted Lasso” became the pre-eminent feel-good story of the streaming era, both in form — as an underdog sports tale about the importance of kindness — and function, as a surprise hit and career boost for a bunch of lovable, previously unheralded actors who have now amassed 14 Emmy nominations for their performances.None of them have turned “Ted Lasso” into quite the launchpad that Goldstein has. His Roy Kent, a gruff, floridly profane retired player turned coach, was an immediate fan favorite, and Goldstein won Emmys for best supporting actor in a comedy both seasons. He was also one of the show’s writers and parlayed that into a new series: “Shrinking,” a comedy about grief and friendship. Goldstein developed it with Bill Lawrence, another “Lasso” creator, and Jason Segel, who stars along with Harrison Ford. (It is Ford’s first regular TV comedy role.)Thanks to “Shrinking,” which came out in January and was just renewed for another season, you might have encountered Goldstein on “Late Night With Stephen Colbert,” “The Today Show,” “CBS Saturday Morning” or some podcast or another.Thanks to his surprise debut as Hercules — Hercules! — in a post-credits scene in Marvel’s 2022 blockbuster “Thor: Love and Thunder,” you will soon see him everywhere.Brett Goldstein in a scene from “Thor: Love and Thunder.”MarvelNone of this had come out when we met last year. Back then, he was still struggling to make sense of the ways “Ted Lasso” had changed his life after two decades of working in comparative obscurity in London’s theater and comedy trenches. Whatever the hassles of losing his anonymity, he said, they were more than offset by the benefits — the visit to “Sesame Street,” the opportunity to work with a childhood hero like Ford, the chance to work on “Lasso” itself.“I would happily do it for 25 more years,” he said, but that’s out of his hands.What Goldstein can control is what he does with his new Hollywood juice, which currently includes a second season of “Shrinking,” other TV concepts in development and whatever emerges from the whole Hercules thing. (He’s already mastered Marvel’s signature superpower: the non-comment.)No matter how long this window of opportunity stays open, he’s still chasing the same simple thing: a slightly coarser version of what he captured in that “Sesame Street” video.“It’s a bunch of grown people having the time of their [expletive] lives being very, very silly but also creating something that’s meaningful,” Goldstein said. “And it’s [expletive] joyous.”OK, a significantly coarser version. But to understand why, it helps to know a little about how he got here.‘I very much relate to the anger.’Goldstein, 42, grew up in Sutton, England, as a soccer nut by birthright — his father is a Tottenham Hotspur fanatic — who became just as obsessed with performing and movies, spending hours as a boy recreating Indiana Jones stunts in his front yard.Improbably, all of the above contributed to his current circumstances: It was his performing and soccer fandom that led to “Ted Lasso,” and he is now writing lines for Indiana Jones himself in “Shrinking” — lines Ford says while playing a character inspired by Goldstein’s father.But it took Goldstein a few decades to arrive at such an exalted position. After a childhood spent acting in little plays and his own crude horror shorts, he studied film and literature at the University of Warwick. He continued writing and performing through college and beyond, in shorts and “loads of plays at Edinburgh Fringe and off, off, off, off West End,” he said. A short film called “SuperBob,” about a melancholy lo-fi superhero played by a beardless Goldstein, eventually led to a cult feature of the same name.More important, it caught the eye of the casting director for “Derek” (2012-14), Ricky Gervais’s mawkish comedy about a kindly simpleton (played by Gervais) working at a senior care facility. Goldstein played a nice boyfriend. “That was my first proper TV job, and then it was slightly easier,” he said.Along the way he tried standup and it became an abiding obsession — even now he tries to perform several nights a week. “He’s always been the sexy, hunky dude in, like, really tiny comedic circles,” said Phil Dunster, who plays the reformed prima donna Jamie Tartt in “Lasso” and first met Goldstein roughly a decade ago, when he performed in one of Goldstein’s plays. (Dunster remembers being dazzled and intimidated by his eyebrows.)At some point a fan of Goldstein’s standup mentioned him to Lawrence, a creator of network hits like “Spin City” and “Scrubs,” who checked out Goldstein in a failed pilot and was impressed enough to cast him in his own new sitcom in 2017.That one also never made it to air. By then Goldstein was in his late 30s. “I had a sort of epiphany of, ‘I’ve missed my window,’” he said.Then came “Ted Lasso.”“I will be absolutely devastated when it ends,” Brett Goldstein said of “Ted Lasso.” “I think we all will.”Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe show’s creators, who also included Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly, wanted some English soccer fans on staff, and Lawrence thought of Goldstein. He was hired as a writer but soon became convinced that he was the person to play the surly, fading pro Roy Kent. As scripting on the first season wrapped up, he made a video of himself performing several Roy scenes and sent it to the creators, stipulating that if he was terrible, all involved would never speak of it again. He was not terrible.It’s a story he has told many times. But it hits different in person, as the gentle fellow in a fitted black T-shirt recounts how he felt a bone-deep connection to the irascible Roy. The face is essentially the same, but the eyes are too friendly and the voice is smooth and mellifluous where Roy’s is a clipped growl.“I get that you would be confused by this,” Goldstein said, setting his coffee cup neatly into its saucer. “But I very much relate to the anger. I used to be very, very miserable and had a quite dark brain, and I’ve worked very hard at changing that. But it’s there.”Lawrence said that “of all the shows I’ve ever done, Brett is one of the top two people in terms of how different he is from his character.” (The other: Ken Jenkins, the friendly actor who played the caustic Dr. Kelso in “Scrubs.”)In some ways the connection between actor and character is clear. Both are prolific swearers, for one thing, and Goldstein lives by the chant that defines his famous alter-ego: He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere.Colleagues and friends are stupefied by how much he does. While shooting the first season of “Lasso,” he was also flying to Madrid to shoot “Soulmates,” the sci-fi anthology series he created with Will Bridges. During filming for Season 3, he acted in “Lasso” by day and joined the “Shrinking” writers’ room on video calls by night. He found time to interview comics, actors, filmmakers and friends for his long-running movie podcast, “Films to be Buried With.” He regularly squeezed in standup sets.“I’m not sure when he sleeps,” Dunster said. “But I know he gets it in, because he looks so young.”Goldstein said his workaholism predates his newfound Hollywood clout. “Even when I was doing stuff that no one was watching, I was always working,” he said. “Either I’m mentally unwell, or genuinely this is the thing that gives me purpose and makes me happy.”He acknowledged that both could be true. But then if “Ted Lasso” has taught us anything, it’s that nobody is just one thing.‘We joke our way through this.’“Ted Lasso” is a sprawling comic tapestry woven from characters — a wounded team owner (played by Hannah Waddingham), an insecure publicist (Juno Temple), a spiteful former protégé (Nick Mohammed) — threading their way toward better selves. The new season finds the AFC Richmond squad at its underdoggiest yet, back in England’s mighty Premier League and destined for an uncertain but sure to be uplifting fate.“Shrinking” is more intimate, a show about hard emotions and hanging out that happens to star a screen legend whose presence still astounds everyone. “It’s a year later and I still go, ‘Bloody hell, that’s Harrison Ford,’” Goldstein said.Harrison Ford is one of the stars of “Shrinking,” an Apple TV+ series Goldstein helped create. “It’s a year later and I still go, ‘Bloody hell, that’s Harrison Ford,’” Goldstein said.Apple TV+Ford’s character is an esteemed psychologist who has received a Parkinson’s diagnosis. He was inspired by several real-life figures, including Lawrence’s grandfather, who also had Parkinson’s disease; his father, who has Lewy body dementia; and his old friend from “Spin City,” Michael J. Fox. The character was also based on Goldstein’s father, another Parkinson’s survivor.“Brett and I share this thing with our families that we joke our way through this,” Lawrence said.Goldstein is exceedingly private about his personal life, but his father gave him permission to discuss the link — his reasoning was that he wasn’t ashamed of the condition and couldn’t hide it anyway. “And also,” he told his son, “the fact that I can tell people Harrison Ford is based on me is a pretty cool thing.”Goldstein joked that this gift he has given his father has expanded their conversational canvas by roughly 100 percent: “Football is still all me and my dad talk about,” he said. “That and the fact that he’s Harrison Ford.”The former, at least, is the way it’s always been. “I think that’s why sport exists,” he said. “It’s a way of saying ‘I love you’ while never saying ‘I love you.’”Such Trojan-horsing of human emotion has become Goldstein’s default mode, whether it’s using his podcast guests’ favorite films to get at their real fears and desires, portraying the discomfort of vulnerability via a clenched soccer star, or writing Parkinson’s jokes to work through the painful fact of his parents’ mortality.“Even when I was doing stuff that no one was watching, I was always working,” Goldstein said. “Either I’m mentally unwell, or genuinely this is the thing that gives me purpose and makes me happy.”Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesSegel said that Goldstein is always the one on “Shrinking” insisting that no matter how punchy the punch lines, the feelings must be pure and true. This wasn’t surprising, he added, because Goldstein is a Muppets fan.“It sounds like a joke,” said Segel, who as a writer and star of “The Muppets” (2011) does not joke about such things. “But it speaks to a lack of fear around earnest expression of emotion.”Which brings us back to the cat video and Goldstein’s other Muppet-related fascinations. (“The Muppet Christmas Carol” might be his favorite move ever, he said, and he’s been known to perform an abridged version on standup stages.)Those looking for a felt skeleton key to unlock his various idiosyncrasies aren’t likely to find one. But his Muppet affection does offer a glimpse at what motivates him as a performer, creator and workaholic, which is less about opportunities, franchises or scale than the vulnerability and risks of trying to reach someone and the openness required to take it in. The thing he’s always looking for, he told me over and over — to the point that he started apologizing for it — is a bit of human connection in a world that can seem designed to thwart it.“They put up this Muppet and I’m gone,” he said. “But that requires from both of us a leap of faith, like, ‘We’re doing this, and I’m all in and you’re all in.’ And if one of us did not commit to this thing then it’s [expletive] stupid — it’s just a [expletive] felt thing on your hand, and I’m an idiot for talking to it and you’re an idiot for holding it.“Do you know what I mean?” More

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      in Television

      Samuel West Takes Comfort in D&D, Mendelssohn and Ron Swanson’s Whiskey

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      The British actor, who appears in “All Creatures Great and Small” and “Slow Horses,” talks about bird-watching, history podcasts and why he stands up for rats.In the first episode of the current season of “All Creatures Great and Small,” Siegfried Farnon wins a rat in a drinking contest.The actor who plays him, Samuel West, felt victorious, too. He’d been angling for a rat to make its way into the PBS series — about a rural veterinary practice in England in the late 1930s — and has been a fan of them for even longer.“I’ve had five rats in my life, but they were sort of baby substitutes,” West said in a video interview last month from his family’s home in North London, which they share with a pair of kittens but no rats. “I can’t wait for my children to be old enough to have them again.”In addition to “All Creatures,” whose third season began in the United States this month, West can also be seen in Apple TV+’s spy thriller, “Slow Horses.” He spoke to us about the days he looks for 100 birds, the years he’s spent on a single stamp and why chamber music can feel more like acting than acting. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Dungeons & Dragons I was a very early adopter of Dungeons & Dragons. I started around Christmas of 1977, when I was 11, playing on the floor of the boy’s loos at school, literally sitting down with paper and rolling dice before school. Now, I play every week online. The game has evolved so much over the years. The new edition has completely transformed the game: It’s much simpler, it’s full of mechanics that are easy to learn, and it’s very inclusive.2. Tom Phillips He painted, wrote books, made art for album covers, wrote an opera called “Irma.” I met him when I was 16. I’d never really met an artist before, and I didn’t really know what an artist’s life was like. Tom showed me that it didn’t really have to be like anything, or it could be like as many things as you wanted, because it was only really limited by his skill and his curiosity, both of which seemed to be infinite.3. Darcy Clothing This clothing retailer in the United Kingdom used to be a very well-kept secret among costume designers who needed to buy a large number of period shirts dating as far back as the 16th century. Anyone can shop there and it’s all very good quality. Siegfried Farnon and I both get shirts there. I particularly like shirts with long, pointed, soft collars without stiffeners, like men wore in the 1930s.4. Stamp Collecting At a party 20 years ago, a woman was trying to pretend to be interested in the fact that I collect stamps and asked me how many I had. It’s not a question that anybody who collects stamps would ask somebody else. I realized that what she was asking about was an accumulation. And I thought, What’s the difference between an accumulation and a collection? I suddenly realized that a collection is defined by what it leaves out. That was incredibly enabling.5. Bird-watching If we’ve got a full day to go birding, we almost always go to Norfolk, which is the best bird-watching county in Britain, bar none. And we try and do what’s called a Big Day, which means we start just before sunrise — usually in a wood on the Norfolk/Suffolk border — and we drive through Norfolk maybe with one stop. Then we go along the A149, which I call the birding Silk Road, and we finish just after sunset listening for owls. We try and get to 100 species.6. Gem There’s a great restaurant in our neighborhood called Gem that serves Greek, Kurdish and Turkish food. Twenty years ago, I went in and they said, Before you order, do you want this? Because we’ve made too many and it’s really nice. So, I sat down and I had this sort of chopped-up kebab with tomato sauce and bread and butter. It was absolutely delicious. I had nothing else for about eight years.7. Lagavulin 16-Year-Old I have about 15 different whiskeys upstairs on a shelf. It takes quite a long time to get through because I don’t drink quickly. But it’s very warming and lovely in the winter. The darker, the peatier, the smokier, the better. My favorite whiskey is probably Lagavulin 16-year-old, which is the Scotch that Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson drank on “Parks and Recreation.”8. Sleeper Train to Penzance The train leaves Paddington at five minutes to midnight, but if you have a sleeper, you can get on at 10:30 p.m., check into your room, and go to the buffet car for a whiskey — crisps for the children — before wandering back to your berth. In the morning, they knock on your door and bring you coffee and croissants or bacon rolls. If you’re lucky, when you lift your curtain, you can see the sun rising behind St. Michael’s Mount, and you get to Penzance at about five past 8. We just took our children and they adored it.9. “The Rest Is History” Sometimes when you’re looking out of the window or reading the paper and thinking, “God, everything’s a bit of a bin fire,” it helps to go back and look at other times in history where things were also a bit of a bin fire or to just get a bit more perspective on the fact that things change and even terrible things pass. That’s one of the reasons I like the podcast “The Rest Is History,” hosted by the British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. They have a wonderful series on the American Civil War.10. Mendelssohn Octet Felix Mendelssohn wrote the first version when he was 16. The piece is so brilliant, so joyous, so full of energy, tunes, life and vivacity. When I was a teenager playing cello, it was my gateway drug to chamber music. The chamber music repertoire actually reminds me more of acting than acting does sometimes — the togetherness between a string quartet and the way you have to really listen to each other. I love working with musicians because, in addition to being talented, they also practice. Actors, on the whole, don’t practice. More

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      Mike Hodges, Director Acclaimed for ‘Get Carter,’ Dies at 90

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      He was best known for complex crime dramas like “Croupier.” But he also made the big-budget 1980 science-fiction yarn “Flash Gordon.”Mike Hodges, a director whose visceral feature-film debut, “Get Carter” (1971), is regarded as one of Britain’s best gangster movies, died on Saturday at his home in Dorset, England. He was 90.Mike Kaplan, a longtime friend and a producer of Mr. Hodges’s 2004 film, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Hodges wasn’t prolific — writing about him in The New York Times in 2004, the critic Terrence Rafferty said, “The English director Mike Hodges has made so few films he should be legendary,” like Stanley Kubrick and other limited-output directors. But he had successes, none bigger than his feature debut.Mr. Hodges had directed for a handful of British television series when he stepped up in class with “Get Carter,” a movie he wrote based on a novel by Ted Lewis. Michael Caine starred as a criminal out to avenge his brother, who had died under suspicious circumstances.“Its violence is so ghastly and unremitting and its view of the human condition is so perfectly vile that one would almost rather wash one’s mouth out with soap than recommend it,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The Times when the movie came out. “Yet it is so finely acted and crafted — and is so spectacularly better than the run of its genre — that as a lover of movies one feels practically duty‐bound to sing its praises.”After “Pulp” (1972), a crime comedy that also starred Mr. Caine, and “The Terminal Man” (1974), a blend of science fiction and horror based on a Michael Crichton novel, Mr. Hodges took on a high-profile assignment, the big-budget sci-fi yarn “Flash Gordon.” Released in 1980, the movie divided critics.“It means to be escapist entertainment,” Vincent Canby of The Times wrote, “but it’s all so extravagantly witless that it stirs the social conscience, if not too deeply. It reminds you that there are people in India who would be glad to eat the spinach you leave on your plate.”But Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times admired Mr. Hodges’s campy take on the story, which was based on the popular comic strip of the same name.“At a time when ‘Star Wars’ and its spinoffs have inspired special effects men to bust a gut making their interplanetary adventures look real, ‘Flash Gordon’ is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is,” he wrote. “I don’t mean that as a criticism.”Michael Caine in “Get Carter” (1971). “As a lover of movies one feels practically duty‐bound to sing its praises,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New York Times.Everett CollectionLater in the 1980s Mr. Hodges made some flops, including the sci-fi comedy “Morons From Outer Space” (1985) and the crime drama “A Prayer for the Dying” (1987), which he disowned because he objected to the editing. But “Croupier” (1998), a crime drama about a writer (Clive Owen) who goes to work in a casino, brought him a burst of new attention.The movie didn’t get much notice when it had a limited release in Europe, but then a friend found an American distributor willing to give it a two-week run in some markets in the United States, and critics hailed a comeback.“‘Croupier,’ filmed by Mr. Hodges from a screenplay by Paul Mayersberg, shows that the director hasn’t lost his knack for whip-smart, tongue-in-cheek suspense,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in 2000.Mr. Hodges said that until those American reviews, his disappointment over the original lack of attention to “Croupier” had him considering quitting the business.“I was sitting at home in Dorset, getting over a hip replacement,” he told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2001, “and these amazing notices from America started pouring from my fax machine. I couldn’t believe it. It was like some crazy fairy tale.”Yet he directed only one more feature, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” which also starred Mr. Owen, as a gangster who investigates his brother’s suicide. With a plot not unlike that of “Get Carter,” it seemed like completing a circle.“It’s hard not to see ‘I’ll Sleep’ as a kind of unofficial sequel to ‘Get Carter,’” Xan Brooks wrote in The Guardian in 2003. “The film plays as a wearied elegy to the gangster life, full of characters slightly past their sell-by dates, angry and outmoded as they nurse their ancient feuds and clamber in and out of their E-type Jags. Hodges watches their decline with a cool, clinical eye.”Mr. Hodges, center, directing “Flash Gordon” (1980). The movie “is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is,” Roger Ebert wrote. “I don’t mean that as a criticism.”Universal/courtesy Everett CollectionMichael Tommy Hodges was born on July 29, 1932, in Bristol, England, to Sandy and Norah Hodges. His father was a cigarette salesman, his mother a homemaker. He grew up watching the westerns and musicals of the 1940s and set his sights on becoming a director, though at his father’s urging he studied accounting for a time.He had grown up in Salisbury and Bath — “cities with soft centers,” as he put it — but in the mid-1950s, two years of national service in the Royal Navy, which sent him to “every fishing port in the U.K,” opened his eyes to a rugged, saltier side of life, an experience later reflected in his films.After the Navy he got a job as a teleprompter operator for the BBC in London, which introduced him to television. He began writing advertising copy and was eventually producing and directing.In 1999, when a retrospective of Mr. Hodges’s movies was showing in Los Angeles, Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times said that the crime films stood out for their complexity and ambiguity.“Just when you think Hodges is building to a payoff that will clear everything up,” he wrote, “he may leave you to sort things out for yourself.”Mr. Hodges’s first marriage, to Jean Alexandrov, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Carol Laws; two sons from his first marriage, Ben and Jake; and five grandchildren.Mr. Hodges reflected on his career in an interview with The Evening Standard of Britain in 1999.“I’m always astonished that my messages in bottles, as I think of my films, ever got off the ground at all,” he said. “Astonished, but very happy too.” More

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      Wilko Johnson, Scorching Guitarist and Punk Pioneer, Dies at 75

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      Known later as an actor on “Game of Thrones,” he helped lay the foundation for a 1970s rock revolution on England’s pub circuit.Wilko Johnson, the searing yet stoical guitarist for the British band Dr. Feelgood, whose ferociously minimalist fretwork served as an early influence for punk-rock luminaries in the 1970s, died on Nov. 21 at his home in Westcliff-on-Sea, England. He was 75.His death was announced on his social media channels.In 2013, Mr. Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 10 months to live. A cancer specialist in Cambridge, England, soon discovered a rare form of tumor — Mr. Johnson called it, at six and a half pounds, “the size of a baby” — and removed it in an 11-hour operation.He lived for nearly another decade and took an unexpected detour into acting, playing Ser Ilyn Payne, a mute executioner, in the first two seasons of “Game of Thrones,” as well as recording and touring with Roger Daltrey of the Who.His legacy, however, is rooted in his tenure with Dr. Feelgood, a rowdy pub-rock band of the 1970s whose high-adrenaline take on rhythm and blues helped lay the groundwork for the punk-rock revolution to follow.In performance, he cut a wild-eyed figure. Often clad in a black suit, Mr. Johnson, who was prone to amphetamine use in his early days, appeared equal parts robotic and manic onstage, glaring murderously at the audience while pacing the stage frantically.His staccato guitar phrasing formed a sound all his own. Mr. Johnson, who was born left-handed and learned to play right-handed, avoided basic rock staples like barre chords and even picks, relying instead on quick, aggressive finger strums — he called them “stabs” — on his black Fender Telecaster. His playing was explosive, as percussive as it was melodic.Mr. Johnson in what was billed as a farewell concert in North London in 2013, after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told that he had only 10 months to live. Joel Ryan/Invision, via Associated Press“Wilko Johnson was a precursor of punk,” the British singer and songwriter Billy Bragg said on Twitter after Mr. Johnson’s death. “His guitar playing was angry and angular, but his presence — twitchy, confrontational, out of control — was something we’d never beheld before in U.K. pop.”Mr. Bragg added that John Lydon (otherwise known as Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer of the Clash and Paul Weller of the Jam “learned a lot from his edgy demeanor.”The volcanic approach of Mr. Johnson and his bandmates — the singer Lee Brilleaux, the bassist John Sparks and the drummer John Martin — helped make Dr. Feelgood a must-see band on England’s pub-rock circuit in the early 1970s.The band’s second album, “Malpractice” (1975), reached No. 17 on the British album chart. The live album “Stupidity” rocketed to No. 1 the next year, providing “the antidote to all those prog-rock double concept albums,” the British music writer Clinton Heylin wrote in an email, “and not a guitar solo in sight.”While his guitar sound was forward-looking, Mr. Johnson drew from the soulful sounds of the past, working out demons from a difficult childhood on Canvey Island, a once-thriving resort town at the mouth of the Thames that became a hub of the petrochemical industry.“My first inspiration was the blues, but I realized I couldn’t write about freight trains and chain gangs,” he said in a 2013 interview with the London-based music magazine Uncut. “There weren’t any in Canvey. So I tried to keep it all in Essex, to get the landscape, the oil refineries, into songs.”Mr. Johnson in 1981. He often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said were “certainly rooted in my childhood.”David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesWilko Johnson was born John Peter Wilkinson on Canvey Island on July 12, 1947. His father, a gas fitter, was violent and abusive, Mr. Johnson recalled in a 2013 interview with the British music magazine Mojo.“I hated him,” he said. “He wasn’t just uneducated, he was stupid with it. The older I get the more I look like him. Every time I shave, I see that bastard looking back at me. So I thought by eradicating his name I could start my own dynasty.”Mr. Johnson often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said in one interview was “certainly rooted in my childhood.”“But I don’t think you should blame that,” he added. “You grow into an adult and you are what you are, whatever the influences.”By the time his father died, when Mr. Johnson was 16, music had already become an escape for him: He played guitar in local bands while attending Westcliff High School for Boys, where, he said, his mother “used to scrub floors at the gas company to pay for our grammar school uniforms.”He went on to study English at Newcastle University, where he taught himself Old Icelandic so he could read the Icelandic sagas. It was one of many antiquarian literary interests in which he would indulge over the years. Mr. Heylin said he once found Mr. Johnson backstage during a soundcheck reading “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th-century romance written in Middle English. “So much for the image of a bruiser who took up the guitar,” he wrote.After a trip to India following his university graduation, Mr. Johnson changed his name and joined with the other three musicians to form Dr. Feelgood in 1971. By the middle of the decade, the band was rolling in Britain but had failed to make a mark with record buyers in the United States.Yet the band was not unknown across the Atlantic. In a phone interview, the guitarist Chris Stein of Blondie recalled a party in 1975 at his band’s de facto headquarters, a loft on the Bowery near CBGB, the seminal New York punk club, before any of the major bands from that scene had made an album.Mr. Johnson, at left, performing in 1976 with the other members of Dr. Feelgood: the singer Lee Brilleaux, the drummer John Martin and the bassist John B. Sparks.Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“We were having a huge party, and everyone in the scene was there — the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, probably some of the Talking Heads,” he said. “It went on all night.”Halfway through, Clem Burke, Blondie’s drummer, showed up after returning from a trip to London. He was enthusiastically waving a copy of Dr. Feelgood’s new album, “Malpractice.”“We put that on and played it repeatedly,” Mr. Stein said. “Everyone was transfixed. It was so simple and raw. I remember people saying, ‘This is what the Ramones are going to sound like when they make a record.’”Dr. Feelgood would not last long enough to ride the new wave it helped inspire. Rifts between Mr. Johnson and the other members came to a boiling point in 1977.“I think they lost it, they threw me out,” Mr. Johnson told Mojo. “The final argument that split the band came just after they had all my new songs in the can.” He added, “I was in a terrible state for months.”Mr. Johnson formed a new band, the Solid Senders, which released an album in 1978. He served a stint in Ian Dury’s band, the Blockheads, appearing on the group’s 1980 album, “Laughter.” He released “Ice on the Motorway,” the first of several albums under his own name, the next year, and he performed for decades with the Wilko Johnson Band.In 2009, the director Julien Temple released a documentary about Dr. Feelgood, “Oil City Confidential,” which “promotes Wilko Johnson as a 100-1 shot for the title of Greatest Living Englishman,” Peter Bradshaw wrote in a review in The Guardian.Mr. Johnson and Roger Daltrey of the Who, performing in 2014. The two released an album that year.Associated PressMr. Johnson’s survivors include his sons, Matthew and Simon, and a grandson. His wife, Irene Knight, died in 2004.While his pub-rock legacy became something of an obsession for rock connoisseurs and historians, Mr. Johnson experienced an unlikely career renaissance after his 2013 cancer scare. The album he made the next year with Mr. Daltrey, “Going Back Home,” which included songs from his Dr. Feelgood days as well as later compositions, reached No. 3 in Britain.“He’s one of those British guitarists that only the Brits make,” Mr. Daltrey said in a 2014 British television interview. “Wilko is a one-off, he really is.”By that point Mr. Johnson had found an unlikely home on premium cable, earning a role on “Game of Thrones” despite having no acting experience.“I got offered this part and it was a brilliant part, because the character that I play has had his tongue cut out, so I’ve got no lines to learn, right?” Mr. Johnson he said in a 2011 interview with the entertainment website Geeks of Doom. “I say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘Just go around giving everyone dirty looks.’ I go, ‘I’m very good at that!’” More

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      Book Review: ‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

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      Joanna Quinn’s “The Whalebone Theatre” breathlessly follows a trio of British youngsters from frolics on the beach to service and spycraft.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE, by Joanna QuinnWhales loom large not just in the ocean but in landlocked imaginations: these mysterious mammals, gentle but fearsome, threatened and threatening, almost unfathomably enormous. So like us with their warm blood and communication skills, and yet so not.You might never have cracked Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and still use the phrase “great white whale” to mean an obsessive but elusive goal. The massive model in the Museum of Natural History was immortalized further by Noah Baumbach in “The Squid and the Whale.” Don’t forget Carvel’s Fudgie, the ’70s sheet cake that won’t quit. And one of the most appealing characters in Lidia Yuknavitch’s recent novel “Thrust” was the wearily maternal whale who helped out the human protagonist.The 60-foot-long, seven-foot-tall creature that appears in Joanna Quinn’s first novel, “The Whalebone Theatre,” is, alas, D.O.A., found beached on the coast of Dorset, England, by a 12-year-old named Cristabel, with the all-too-apt surname Seagrave. She quickly pierces her discovery with a homemade flagpole fluttering with the family coat of arms and shouts, “A mighty leviathan, I have claimed it,” to amused fishermen in the vicinity.Taking up toy weapons and disdainful of marriage plots, Cristabel is outlined in the endearing if slightly stock shape of unconventional heroine. Having wondered, “Why aren’t there interesting girls in the stories?” while being read the “Iliad” by Maudie, the kitchen maid who for a time shares her attic bedroom, she is determined, perhaps a little overdetermined, to write her own.She and her younger half sibling, Flossie (nicknamed “the Veg” for an indelicate countenance), and cousin Digby, whom she treasures as a brother, circumvent the laws about “fishes royal” belonging to the king, and will make of the whale skeleton a giant play space: to stage actual plays, the greatest hits of Shakespeare’s catalog, with help from the bohemian adults visiting Chilcombe, the estate where they live. Quinn has said in interviews she got the idea of the skeleton set from a Kate Bush concert.She is being eagerly interviewed because “The Whalebone Theatre,” a generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “The Cazalet Chronicles,” is a big hit in England. Centered on imperiled aristocracy during the well-trod period of 1919-45, it’s also been compared (inevitably, and to Quinn’s dismay) to “Downton Abbey,” Chilcombe being almost a character in its own right. I was reminded further, at least during its delightful first third, of Dodie Smith’s cult classic “I Capture the Castle” and of a lesser-known work by the prolific children’s book author Noel Streatfeild, “The Growing Summer,” in which four siblings are sent to live with their eccentric aunt in Ireland.Shimmeringly if sometimes a little preciously, Quinn depicts the strange, resourceful magic that can be conjured by a cluster of children when they’re neglected by selfish adults. Overseen by a vague French governess, they educate themselves with books stolen from the study, by eavesdropping from cloakrooms on drunken dinner parties and by running around with young “savages” they encounter scuttling naked around the shore, the progeny of Taras, a daring Russian artist.We first meet Cristabel when she is just 3, finding the taste of snow “disappointingly nothingy.” Her mother died in childbirth and her new stepmother, Rosalind, is vain, beautiful and cold like the snow, though not evil. Her stolid father, Jasper — still mourning his late wife, who haunts the ancestral pile like a more benign Rebecca de Winter — will soon be dead as well, tumbled from a horse (of course), his dashing younger brother, Willoughby, stepping easily into his shoes.The new couple will entertain a parade of international visitors of which Taras is the most vivid and voluble, enjoying boozy picnics by the sea and shopping expeditions — at least until it’s time to fight the Nazis. “We don’t have a choice,” Willoughby tells Rosalind, crackling his newspaper, when the doted-upon Digby enlists. “Surely they had a choice. They always had a choice,” she thinks, suspended in the recent past. “They chose extravagantly and at length. Fabrics, perfumes, tables in restaurants.”On atmospherics, “The Whalebone Theatre” is absolute aces, to borrow the patois of the Americans who drop in for cultural contrast, new-moneyed and loud. Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas. You’ll immediately want to change your font to Garamond and start saying things like “Toodle-pip, darlings!” The weather, whether misty or stormy, dappling sunshine or “moonlight falling through the window like an invitation,” is consistently impressive.Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced.The novel begins to veer off the rails, however, when a grown Cristabel, “sick of pushing tiddlywinks about” as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, becomes a secret agent, wrestling down an SS officer with the sudden physical dexterity of Angelina Jolie in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The theater of childhood has become, yes, the theater of war. Flossie joins the Women’s Land Army, remaining at Chilcombe, where the finances have become predictably shaky, skinny-dipping with a German prisoner of war as vegetables fill their onetime proscenium. Maudie writes of sleeping with a Black soldier who plays her Billie Holiday (“he calls me a tall drink of water, but he is a river and I will lay myself along him”). Like many characters, even the older principals, even the poor whale, he is just passing through.Gorgeous and a little breathless, with luscious food scenes from beginning to end — enough cake and pudding for a thousand Carvels — “The Whalebone Theatre” could have been tighter corseted. But Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold, boding more commanding work to come.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE | By Joanna Quinn | 576 pp. | Knopf | $29 More