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      Louis C.K.’s Grammy Victory Leads to Backlash

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      Some comedians are questioning how the Recording Academy saw fit to bestow an award to someone who had admitted to sexual misconduct.“How was your last couple years?” the comedian Louis C.K. says to the audience on the first track to his album “Sincerely Louis CK.” “How was 2018 and 2019 for you guys? Anybody else get in global amounts of trouble?”Louis C.K. did, after he admitted, in 2017, to masturbating in front of women. Several said in interviews that he had done so without their consent; in a statement acknowledging the incidents, he claimed he had always asked first, but later realized that was insufficient since there were power differentials at play. For a short time he disappeared from public view, as a movie he directed and starred in was shelved and other deals dissolved in the early days of the #MeToo movement.But Louis C.K. returned to stand-up, first at comedy clubs and then at bigger venues, which often sold out. And on Sunday night he received a sign of support from the entertainment industry: “Sincerely Louis CK” — his first album since the scandal — won the Grammy for best comedy album.The album opens with the chants and wild applause of an audience.The response to his Grammy was less joyous. As his name trended on Twitter, many comedians, comedy fans and others wondered how the Recording Academy saw fit to bestow an award to someone with an admitted history of sexual misconduct.“Every woman who has been harassed and abused in the comedy business, I hear you and see you and I am so, so angry,” the podcast host Jesse Thorn, who interviews comedians, wrote, followed by several expletives.Female comics shared their own responses. Jen Kirkman posted a segment from her latest album, “OK, Gen-X,” in which she recounts her own encounter with Louis C.K. She had avoided talking about in detail previously, she explained in the bit, because of negative and threatening blowback. “I’ll forward you the rape threats I get after this,” she said.On Sunday, Kirkman reposted some messages from supporters of Louis C.K. who responded to her, often hatefully and in terms that diminished the experiences of assault survivors.The Australian performer Felicity Ward offered a lengthy list of mostly female comics “who’ve never sexually assaulted anyone. Follow, see, buy their stuff.”And the comedian Mona Shaikh wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that the award sent a troubling message. “The comedy establishment sends a dog whistle to sexual predators, forgiving their abusive actions as long as they offer a superficial apology (often drafted by their publicists) and go underground for a year or so,” she wrote. “After that, they can emerge and revive their careers.”Last fall, after the nomination of Louis C.K. and others like Marilyn Manson — who is facing an investigation over multiple sexual assault allegations — drew public ire, Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy, defended the right to nominate anybody as long as they met the organization’s eligibility rules.“We won’t look back at people’s history, we won’t look at their criminal record, we won’t look at anything other than the legality within our rules of, is this recording for this work eligible based on date and other criteria,” he told the trade publication The Wrap. (Marilyn Manson was later removed from the nominations list as a songwriter on Kanye West’s track “Jail,” but remained eligible as one of West’s collaborators on “Donda,” which was up for album of the year.)Rather than weighing in on who could be nominated, Mason said the Grammys would instead draw a line around who was invited to the ceremony, held this year in Las Vegas. The comedy award was one of dozens presented in a ceremony that was held before the prime-time broadcast and was shown online only. Louis C.K. did not attend. Representatives for the Recording Academy did not return requests for comment.On the album, amid bits about religion, aging and sex, Louis C.K. addresses his misconduct a few times, mostly jokingly. “Man, I was in a lot of trouble,” he says in the opening. “Wait till they see those pictures of me in blackface. That’s going to make it a lot worse. Because there’s a lot of those, there’s thousands of pictures of me in blackface. I can’t stop doing it. I just — I like it. I like how it feels.”This trophy is the third Grammy for Louis C.K. in the comedy album category.The Recording Academy does not release details of how its more than 11,000 eligible members vote. Members are limited in the number of categories they may cast a vote in, as the academy tries to encourage them to vote in their various areas of expertise. The nominations process was tweaked for this year’s awards after complaints of secret agendas and uneven playing fields, and boycotts by major artists like the Weeknd.In recent years, the Recording Academy has also been roiled by accusations that it did not include or acknowledge enough women or people of color, and the organization has pledged to do better. But a report last month from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California found that the number of women credited on pop songs has remained largely unchanged for a decade, and that a Grammy-led effort to hire more female producers and engineers did almost nothing.The comedy category has changed names and focus somewhat over the years as recorded comedy shifted from musical numbers to spoken word. Bill Cosby won the prize a record seven times; in 2012, one of his albums was also named to a Grammys Hall of Fame. In the 64-year history of the Grammys, women have been nominated more than 40 times for comedy but only five have won awards outright: Elaine May (as part of a duo with Mike Nichols); Lily Tomlin; Whoopi Goldberg; Kathy Griffin; and, in 2021, Tiffany Haddish. More

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      Noah Reid Preps for Parenthood With Plants and Nina Simone

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      The “Schitt’s Creek” star makes his Broadway debut this month in Tracy Letts’s new comedy “The Minutes.”Noah Reid will be on the video call in a minute, his publicist tells me. The 34-year old “Schitt’s Creek” star, who played Dan Levy’s lover, Patrick Brewer, across four seasons of the Canadian comedy, just got home from a rehearsal for “The Minutes,” the new Tracy Letts comedy he’s starring in on Broadway. Then … Bam!He looks like he’s calling from the inside of a greenhouse.“These are my landlord, Marie’s,” Reid, his brown curls tucked in a black beanie, says of the half-dozen plants — there are more out of the frame — crawling up the door and stretching toward the early evening sunlight in pots on a table of his Ridgewood apartment in Queens. “I can’t tell if I’m more nervous for my Broadway debut or to keep these plants going.”“The Minutes,” a dark comedy about a small-town city council meeting that was originally slated for March 2020 at the Cort Theater, opens at Studio 54 on April 17. Reid, who plays the clean-scrubbed outsider Mr. Peel, replaced Armie Hammer, who left the production last spring amid accusations of rape and sexual assault, which he has denied.“It’s probably been four years since I’ve done a play,” said Reid, who has been a frequent presence on Canadian stages. “I’d completely forgotten how much physical, mental and emotional energy it takes.”He has a busy spring on the horizon, taking on the role of Billy Tillerson in the new Amazon Western mystery thriller series “Outer Range,” which he spent seven months filming in New Mexico. (The series premieres April 15.) He also has a sophomore album out, “Gemini,” which touches on his acting experiences and is reminiscent of the stream-of-consciousness style of 1970s singer-songwriters.Over the course of 45 minutes, he shared how Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Great Dictator” relates to events in Ukraine, the show he would play any part in and why his favorite piece of art is hanging on his refrigerator. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Nina Simone’s Live Recordings Her voice feels like it comes out of the center of the earth; it’s like a direct passage to the soul. As a pianist, she can navigate so many different genres: classical, jazz and blues. She plays with such confidence. And that’s what makes her live recordings so incredible, her ability to just, stream-of-consciousness, drop into her complete truth.2. David Shrigley’s “The Book of Shrigley” David Shrigley is somewhere between stand-up comedy and cave paintings. He does these brilliant esoteric, simple drawings — you might even say bad drawings. Part of it is that you feel like you could do the drawing, but you haven’t done the drawing — you haven’t found that moment of truth. There’s something incredible about the simplicity of it.3. Leonard Cohen’s Book of Poems “Stranger Music” When I first heard his music as a kid — this guy with this weird dark voice and these synthesizers — I didn’t understand why anyone would want to listen to this. And then, when I was in high school, I started reading his poems, and I was able to see the humanity, the spirit, the sense of humor. It became clear that music was a way for him to put his poetry into the world in a more easily consumed way.4. Sol e Pesca Restaurant in Lisbon It’s in an old tackle shop about the size of a shoe box on this little road in Lisbon. It feels very tucked away. You go in and sit on this tiny stool, they bring you a basket of bread and you order a few tinned fish items. They put them in a bowl so you’re not just eating out of the tin, and they have Vinho Verde on tap. It’s the simplest, most beautiful meal I’ve ever had.5. The Detroit Industry Murals by Diego Rivera My sister did her master’s in Detroit, and we went to the Detroit Institute of Art and saw these fresco paintings by Diego Rivera. There are 27 murals that are all 360, with a big skylight above you. It’s a tribute to Detroit’s manufacturing industry, and you have people pushing and pulling on machines, the fire and the uniforms. It’s so character driven, and the detail of each individual person — I was dumbstruck. I didn’t want to leave.6. Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” Charlie Chaplin said later that he wouldn’t have made the film if he had known what was going on in Nazi Germany at the time, but I’m glad he did. It was an entry point for me to understand how the arts can both start conversations about meaningful things — and make fun of them. It takes a turn for the serious and he gives this impassioned speech, this kind of plea for humanity at the end that people have been rediscovering and posting on Instagram. It’s one of the great speeches of all time. And it still has so much relevance, especially when we see what’s going on in Ukraine. There’s a line that’s like, ‘You are not machine men.’ It’s a plea to the army to put down your weapons.7. Canyon de Chelly I used to take part in the gold rush of pilot season, when all the Canadian actors would flock down to Los Angeles to try to scare up some work. I would drive down and take a different route each time because I thought it would be interesting to see a little bit of America. I did this walk down into this canyon, in the Navajo Nation in Arizona — it’s about an hour to the bottom — and it’s red soil and trees and there are buildings built into the cliffs from probably 1,000 years ago. I was just standing there and having this tangible realization that this country is ancient.8. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” by Eugene O’Neill When I was in 11th grade, I saw the Bob Falls Broadway production with Brian Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Sean Leonard. I bought the play shortly after and was completely obsessed with it. It’s certainly not my family history, but there are things in every family that it feels that you can’t talk about or, or things that are difficult to talk about or behavioral patterns that drive you crazy. I fantasize about getting to play any part in that play some time in my life.9. Spiral Arc on Lake Huron My parents bought this vacant piece of land overlooking Lake Huron in southwestern Ontario the year I was born, and it became our family cottage. That was in 1987, and over the next two decades, they spent countless hours designing and building the strangest building in Huron County. The neighbors call it the spaceship — it’s shaped like half a heart, and it’s clad in metal and it’s mostly windows and the sun sets over this uninterrupted view of Lake Huron. It’s my favorite place in the world.10. The Ultrasound This is my favorite piece of media at this moment. It’s an ultrasonic photograph of my son in his mother’s womb, and it’s occupying the gallery on my fridge right now. I’m completely obsessed. He’s about four months out from being born. I have a name in mind, but I might have to do some work with my wife to get it over the finish line, so I don’t want to say what it is yet! More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Mocks Donald Trump’s Endorsement of Sarah Palin

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      “Trump endorsing Palin is like paste eating endorsing glue sniffing,” Kimmel joked.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Consider the SourceSarah Palin announced on Friday that she would run for Congress, and she already has the support of former President Donald Trump, who released a statement saying, “Sarah Palin is tough and smart and will never back down.’”“Even from Trump, it’s pretty impressive to fit three lies into an 11-word sentence,” Jimmy Kimmel joked of Trump’s “bigly endorsement.”“I guess the ‘Masked Singer’ money dried up and Sarah is running for office.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump endorsing Palin is like paste eating endorsing glue sniffing. It’s ridiculous.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I saw that Sarah Palin has announced that she is running for Congress in Alaska, which is good news for Republicans and great news for Democrats.” — JIMMY FALLON“You know, for someone who could see Russia from her house, she should have known years ago what Putin was up to, don’t you think?” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Special Message Edition)“Last night was the 64th annual Grammy Awards. And I think — I think it was a good night overall because nobody’s watching the uncensored Japanese version on Twitter, and that’s a good thing.” — JIMMY FALLON“Doja Cat nearly missed her acceptance speech, because she was using the bathroom. See? This is why they need litter boxes under the seats — I’ve said it a million times.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It was a fun night, hours and hours of musicians performing for free, or as that’s also known, Spotify.” — JIMMY FALLON“Ukrainian President Zelensky made an appearance on the Grammys. He gave a heartfelt address to the Grammys audience. He said, ‘The silence of ruined cities and killed people. What is more opposite to music?’ Which is very profound: What is more opposite to music? I thought he was going say Nickelback, which would have been a sick burn. But this was better — keep it focused.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And I got to say as a 48-year-old man, I was just happy to see someone at the Grammys whose name I knew.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden lamented the lack of great comedies like “Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion,” which starred Monday night’s “Late Late Show” guests, Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightOscar Isaac will appear on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutThe Polaroid wall in Jennifer Venditti’s office, covered with images of models and personalities and local eccentrics. Ryan Lowry for The New York TimesA new book about Jennifer Venditti, a casting director, goes behind the scenes of her work on projects like “Euphoria” and “Uncut Gems.” More

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      Cole Sprouse on Finding a Healthy Balance in Hollywood

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      The former child actor wanted to leave showbiz. Now, the “Moonshot” and “Riverdale” star is finding he can act and tend his photography career as well.“I hope you don’t mind, I’m going to be scarfing down this chicken wrap at the same time we talk,” Cole Sprouse politely informs me as he sits in the kitchen wearing a fuzzy, baby blue sweater. The wrap in question is already halfway to his mouth.Sprouse is used to multitasking.He and his twin brother, Dylan, began their professional acting careers when they were infants and worked steadily throughout their childhoods, sharing prominent roles on “Grace Under Fire” and in the Adam Sandler film “Big Daddy.” Cole went on to play Ross’s son on “Friends” before reteaming with Dylan in the Disney Channel sitcom “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody” (Cole played the brainy Cody). The tween hit led to a spinoff series, TV movie — and mega kid stardom for the twins. By age 18, they’d effectively burned out.But after graduating from New York University with a degree in archaeology, Cole Sprouse fulfilled a promise he’d made to his manager to give one more round of TV auditions a go before quitting the industry for good. He booked the role of the brooding outcast Jughead Jones on the CW drama “Riverdale” and was sucked in again.“I started acting when I was so young that I hadn’t actually attempted, as an adult, to think about if I really enjoyed performance,” Sprouse said in a recent video call from Vancouver, British Columbia, where he’s currently filming the seventh season of “Riverdale.” He continued, “When I returned, I reminded myself that I do very much love the art of acting. But I still have a very complicated relationship to celebrity culture.”He’s learned to guard his private life. Rare public comments about his relationships past (namely, with his “Riverdale” co-star Lili Reinhart) and present (the model Ari Fournier) are scrutinized by fans and widely recounted by entertainment outlets. He started a secondary Instagram account devoted solely to sharing the photos he takes of strangers while they’re trying to sneakily snap photos of him. “It was an attempt to go, ‘Hey, I actually have agency in the situation, too,’” he explained. “It helped me a lot.”Sprouse with Lili Reinhart and KJ Apa in “Riverdale.”Michael Courtney/The CWHis latest role is the lead in the HBO Max rom-com “Moonshot” — not to be confused with the unrelated 2022 releases “Moon Knight” and “Moonfall.” In the near future, where robots run coffee shops and Mars is being colonized, Sprouse plays Walt, a hapless college student who hitches a ride on a Mars-bound rocket alongside Sophie (Lana Condor) in an attempt to reach another girl on Mars he thinks could be the One.Intermittently puffing on a vape pen after finishing the chicken wrap, Sprouse spoke about billionaires, the effects of childhood fame and turning 30.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.“Moonshot” is a futuristic take on a conventional romantic comedy. Are you a rom–com fan?I have my favorites, and they’re all over the map. I’m a huge “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” fan, for example. And though there’s a heavy romantic element throughout it, most people would just call that a comedy — and yet, by all genre boundaries, it is a rom-com.I think for so long romantic comedies were put down as “chick flicks,” something lowbrow that only a female audience would care about. Male-centric entries like “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” made some people rethink that notion.The general trend with the arts always starts with a large female fan base really falling in love with something. In a lot of cases, we see the female audience braving the territory first, and then everyone follows. Ultimately, with “Moonshot,” we set out to make a movie that didn’t really take itself super seriously, that we had a lot of lighthearted fun on, and we were able to weave an old married couple dynamic into Lana and I’s relationship.Opposite Lana Condor in “Moonshot.”Warner Bros.The film also throws some solid punches at the billionaire space race: Zach Braff’s Elon Musk-esque character admits he could have used his fortune to solve world hunger dozens of times over, but went to Mars instead. How do you feel about the current space cowboy endeavors of people like Musk and Jeff Bezos?Oh, I think it’s tremendously masturbatory. It’s a ridiculous thing. When I was studying archaeology, we used to have this conversation about the resurrection of the mammoth. The conversation would always devolve into two camps: the camp that really wanted to see the mammoth walk the earth again. And the camp that was going, “Hey, we have active species that are currently going extinct. If we put the resources you are talking about putting into the already extinct mammoth and shift that focus to the present, we could do way more good.” I feel like this conversation about space cowboys is very similar. I’m in the camp where I go, let’s focus on the present. We have an active space that we are living in that is currently decaying. We need to shift focus and resources to here.So, no chance you’re booking a commercial ticket on a rocket any time soon.No, I’m already such a paranoid freak when it comes to flying. I couldn’t imagine what my control-freak nature would do when we started taking off. I would be a nervous wreck.People like to talk about former child stars in this dichotomy of either they spiral out of control or, somehow, “come out OK.” Do you think it’s possible for anyone to actually come through that experience unscathed?My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, “Oh, you made it out! Oh, you’re unscathed!” No. The young women on the channel we were on [Disney Channel] were so heavily sexualized from such an earlier age than my brother and I that there’s absolutely no way that we could compare our experiences. And every single person going through that trauma has a unique experience. When we talk about child stars going nuts, what we’re not actually talking about is how fame is a trauma. So I’m violently defensive against people who mock some of the young women who were on the channel when I was younger because I don’t feel like it adequately comprehends the humanity of that experience and what it takes to recover. And, to be quite honest, as I have now gone through a second big round of this fame game as an adult, I’ve noticed the same psychological effects that fame yields upon a group of young adults as I did when I was a child. I just think people have an easier time hiding it when they’re older.The Sprouse twins on “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.”Joel Warren/Disney ChannelAfter it was announced that “Riverdale” had been renewed for a seventh season, a lot of memes popped up imagining your reaction when you heard the news. The general internet consensus seemed to be that you were completely distraught to have to do another season. Is that accurate?[Laughs] It’s not completely accurate. One, because I’ve just assumed we’re going to see the finality of our [seven-season] contracts. Two, I think the internet assumes — because of how insane our show is — that we’re probably doing a bit worse than we actually are. It’s easy to forget that people love the show. And I do think it’s going to be much more appreciated in 10 years than it is right now. It would be pretty pompous of me to say that another season of financial stability is not something that would be appealing. Though I’m not going to lie. The memes do make me laugh.You’ve built a side career as a professional photographer, mainly in fashion. What is it about that medium that made you want to pursue it?When I was in school, I was traveling a lot for archaeology, so I always had my camera and I was taking almost anthropological-type photos of the people I was meeting, the culture I was surrounded by. And then, just by being in New York City, I got wrapped up in fashion work and built a portfolio. That was my main source of revenue until “Riverdale” Season 2.You’re turning 30 in August. Does this decade feel like the start of a new chapter?Definitely. ​​I feel like my ducks are in a row better than they’ve ever been. We’re also seeing the conclusion of a program I’ve spent the majority of my 20s on, so there is this world of possibilities that lies before me at the end of this production that I find incredibly appealing and intoxicating. And, I hate to break it to everybody, but I’m not the only 30 year old playing a teen on television.You made it to college in “Moonshot.” You’re starting to age up.Just stringing them along, slowly but surely. In an ideal world, when “Riverdale” finishes, I would love to be doing one to two movies a year and photography the rest of the time. And the logical intersection of those two worlds will eventually be directing.We’re living in a time of extreme nostalgia for the ’90s and 2000s. Is there any chance you’d go full circle and do a “Suite Life” reboot?I don’t think I’ll ever return to that. Not that I have a problem with other people doing the reboots thing. I’m just a big believer that if something is beautiful in the past, you should let it stay beautiful. To bring it into the future feels a bit like reheating a really good, fresh meal in the microwave. It would be hard to be in my 30s and go [in a deep growl], “Zack and Cody are back, man!” More

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      A Century of the BBC, a ‘Quasi-Mystical’ Part of England’s Psyche

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      David Hendy’s “The BBC” looks back at 100 years of wartime reporting, dramas, satires and weather reports.THE BBCA Century on AirBy David HendyIllustrated. 638 pages. PublicAffairs. $38.The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC — the Beeb — turns 100 this year. “Hullo, hullo, 2LO calling, 2LO calling,” a few thousand listeners heard through the hissing ether at 6 p.m. on Nov. 14, 1922. “This is the British Broadcasting Company. 2LO. Stand by for one minute please!” What followed were short news and weather bulletins, read twice, the second time slowly so that listeners could take notes.David Hendy, in his thorough and engaging new book, “The BBC: A Century on Air,” writes that you can’t understand England without understanding the BBC. It occupies, he says, “a quasi-mystical place in the national psyche.” It’s just there, like the white cliffs of Dover.The BBC sparked to life in the wake of World War I. Its founders included wounded veterans, and they were idealists. Civilization was in tatters; they hoped, through a new medium, to forge a common culture by giving listeners not necessarily what they wanted, but what they needed, to hear.The audience was fed a fibrous diet of plays and concerts and talks and lectures; sports included Derby Day and Wimbledon. Announcers wore dinner jackets as well as their plummy accents, “as a courtesy to the live performers with whom they would be consorting.” Catching the chimes of Big Ben before the evening news became a ritual for millions.Equipment was primitive. A framed notice by the microphone warned guest speakers, “If you sneeze or rustle papers you will DEAFEN THOUSANDS!!!”Radio was new; the BBC felt that it had to teach people how to listen. “To keep your mind from wandering,” it advised, “you might wish to turn the lights out, or settle into your favorite armchair five minutes before the program starts; above all, you should remember that ‘If you only listen with half an ear, you haven’t a quarter of a right to criticize.’”The BBC gained a reputation for being a bit snooty, and soporific. One complaint can stand for many: “People do not want three hours of [expletive] ‘King Lear’ in verse when they get out of a 10-hour day in the [expletive] coal-pits, and [expletive] anybody who tries to tell them that they do.”The BBC took it from both sides. To mandarins like Virginia Woolf, it was irredeemably middlebrow; she referred to it as the “Betwixt and Between Company.” The BBC loosened up over time and took increasing account of working-class and minority audiences, and of audiences who simply wanted to laugh.The broadcaster was created by a Royal Charter; it has never been government-run, yet it must answer to government. Hendy recounts attempts to limit its editorial independence. Churchill and Thatcher were especially vocal critics: They felt there was something a bit pinko about the whole enterprise.The BBC’s scrupulous reporting during World War II gave it lasting prestige across the world. It largely lived up to the motto of R.T. Clark, its senior news editor: to tell “the truth and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.”During wartime, the company occasionally broadcast from a safer perch. When announcers intoned “This is London,” with British phlegm, they were often in a countryside manor. The London headquarters took a direct hit from a bomb in October 1940; the reader of the evening news “paused for a split second to blow the plaster and soot off the script in front of him before carrying on with the rest of the bulletin.” Seven people were killed in the attack. After the war, the BBC’s foreign services became a prop to the Commonwealth, the new euphemism for “empire.”One of this book’s best set pieces is of the BBC’s wall-to-wall televised coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. One reporter referred to it as “C-Day.” This sort of thing had never been on TV before. The hard part, Hendy writes, was “persuading royal officials that mere subjects had a right to witness the ceremony in the first place.”Over time the BBC’s tentacles grew longer and more varied: Clusters of radio and television stations catered to different demographics. Competitors crept in.The satire boom of the postwar era arrived, led by “The Goon Show,” which ran from 1951 to 1960. There were TV dramas from iconic talents like Ken Loach and Dennis Potter. The BBC began to take the critic Clive James’s advice: “Anemic high art is less worth having than low art with guts.”From left, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, members of “The Goon Show,” which aired on the BBC from 1951 to 1960.Mirrorpix via Getty ImagesLanguage battles fought at the company are never dull to read about. For decades, “bloody” could be used only rarely and “bugger” not at all. One internal stylebook, Hendy writes, “included a ban on jokes about lavatories or ‘effeminacy in men’ as well as any ‘suggestive references’ to subjects such as ‘Honeymoon Couples, Chambermaids, Fig leaves, Prostitution, Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on, Animal habits, e.g. rabbits, Lodgers, Commercial travelers.”The eclectic and influential disc jockey John Peel was brought in; so, alas, was the cigar-chomping comic Jimmy Savile, the zany-uncle host of shows like “Top of the Pops,” who was found after his death in 2011 to have molested dozens if not hundreds of children across five decades. An inquiry found that the BBC did not do nearly enough to stop him.The BBC’s nature documentaries were pathbreaking, and big hits. (They left James “slack-jawed with wonder and respect.”) Hendy walks us through how, under David Attenborough, these things got made. They take years, enormous staffs and a global network of freelancers willing to sit out in the cold and rain to get the money shots.Attenborough was told, early on, that he couldn’t appear onscreen because his teeth were too big. Richard Dawkins has written, in his memoirs, about how difficult it is to talk while walking backward, a crucial skill for any BBC documentary host.More recent BBC hits include the reality series “Strictly Come Dancing,” the brainy documentaries of Louis Theroux and the comedy-drama series “I May Destroy You.”The right has retained its distrust of the BBC, including up-to-date complaints about wokeness; it would like to see it become smaller and more “distinctive,” in the manner of PBS and NPR. These American stations have had nothing like the BBC’s cultural impact — though Greg Jackson, in his story collection “Prodigals,” was correct to refer to Terry Gross as the “Catcher in the WHYY.”Hendy can be critical of the company, but at heart he’s a fan. He reports that across any given week, more than 91 percent of British households use one BBC service or another. He cites academic surveys showing that the broadcaster’s news output is, if anything, tilted slightly to the right.The BBC can still be snoozy. I’m not the only person I know who, at least before Putin rattled the world’s cage, listened to the BBC World Service app at bedtime because it’s an aural sleeping pill.I deserve to lose style points for borrowing Hendy’s last lines for my own, but he puts it simply about the BBC’s precarious position: “We sometimes never know just how much we need or want something until it is gone.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: A Pair of New Docs, and ‘Killing Eve’

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      Major documentaries about Benjamin Franklin and Tony Hawk are on PBS and HBO. And “Killing Eve” airs its final episode.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, April 4-10. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBENJAMIN FRANKLIN 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In the last half-century, Ken Burns has become among the most prominent chroniclers of American history — so maybe it was only a matter of time before his attention panned to Ben Franklin. This two-part, four-hour documentary from Burns looks at Franklin’s life and legacy. The first installment, subtitled “Join or Die,” focuses on the years of 1706 to 1774. Part 2, “An American,” covers 1775 through 1790, the year of Franklin’s death; it will air at 8 p.m. on Tuesday.JOHN AND THE HOLE (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime Showcase. Michael C. Hall is probably best known for starring in the serial-killer drama “Dexter,” which was revived last year. But in the eerie, surreal drama “John and the Hole,” it is Hall’s character who gets put in the ground. He plays the father of John (Charlie Shotwell), a 13-year-old who traps his family in a large hole in the forest. (John’s mother is played by Jennifer Ehle; Taissa Farmiga plays John’s older sister.) In her review for The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis praised the “excellent” cast, but wrote that the underlying ideas of the story aren’t given the same attention as the eerie atmosphere. “Chilly, enigmatic and more than a little spooky, ‘John and the Hole’ patrols the porous border between child and adult with more style than depth,” she wrote.TuesdayTony Hawk in a scene from “Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off.”HBO Documentary FilmsTONY HAWK: UNTIL THE WHEELS FALL OFF (2022) 9 p.m. HBO. At the Academy Awards, Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater and Shaun White introduced a tribute to 60 years of James Bond movies by saying that no one Bond actor could possibly be considered the greatest of all time, before reconsidering. Hawk said: “Well, I don’t know about that,” there are a few athletes who you know are clearly the greatest in their field.” That the line got a laugh — more than two decades after Hawk made history by landing the aerial trick known as the 900 at the 1999 X-Games — speaks to how much Hawk remains synonymous with professional skateboarding. This documentary from the photographer and director Sam Jones gives a deep look at Hawk’s life and career. It pays particular attention to the challenges that came with his fame.WednesdayTHE KARDASHIANS — A ROBIN ROBERTS SPECIAL 8 p.m. on ABC. The “Good Morning America” anchor Robin Roberts takes a late shift for this prime-time interview with the famous sisters Kim, Khloé and Kourtney Kardashian and their mother, Kris Jenner.ThursdayDR. WHO AND THE DALEKS (1966) 10:15 p.m. on TCM. Here’s a curiosity: A vintage, noncanonical “Dr. Who” film with Peter Cushing in the title role. Shot in Technicolor by Amicus Productions, a British studio known for low-budget science fiction and horror movies, the movie imagines Dr. Who as an older human scientist who, in his efforts to invent a time machine, accidentally transports himself and a few companions (including two granddaughters) to another planet, where they get mixed up in a battle of good versus evil.FridayA BLACK LADY SKETCH SHOW 11 p.m. on HBO. Puppets, cannibalism and a “funeral ball” with a dance floor are some of the things teased in a recent trailer for the new, third season of Robin Thede’s successful sketch comedy show, which debuts Friday. Like the previous two seasons, Season 3 has a stacked lineup of guests, including Wanda Sykes, Jay Pharoah and Ava DuVernay.SaturdayJoaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman in “C’Mon C’Mon.”A24 FilmsC’MON C’MON (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime 2. Joaquin Phoenix plays an uncle who steps in to parent his nephew in this black-and-white drama from Mike Mills (“20th Century Women”). Johnny (Phoenix) is a single radio journalist with no children. When his sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), asks him to take care of her 9-year-old, Jesse (Woody Norman), so she can deal with a family crisis, Johnny takes Jesse on a cross-country road trip. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that the movie can’t quite carry the emotional weight that it tries to, but she praised Mills’s ability to create believable, recognizable people and places. “Although he always lavishes conspicuous attention on the visual scheme of his movies — everything is very precise, very arranged — his gift is for the seductive sense of intimacy among characters,” she wrote, “which quickly turns actors into people you care about.”SundaySandra Oh, left, and Jodie Comer in “Killing Eve.”Anika Molnar/BBC AmericaKILLING EVE 8 p.m. on BBC America. The fourth and final season of this dark and funny spy thriller ends on Sunday night, bringing to a close the layered relationship between the former MI6 agent Eve (Sandra Oh) and the assassin she has long pined for, Villanelle (Jodie Comer). When Oh and Comer spoke to The Times recently, they naturally had only vague discussions about the ending (“we were together on set,” Comer said), but went deeper in their discussion of the relationship between Eve and Villanelle — which is itself ambiguous. “A lot of people describe this as a ‘cat and mouse,’ and I understand that within the first season,” Oh said. But, she added, “for me, the show is really exploring the female psyche and how these two female characters need one another.”ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN (2021) 9 p.m. on CNN. The documentarian Morgan Neville (“Won’t You Be My Neighbor”) looks at the life, career and death of Anthony Bourdain, the chef turned writer and TV host. The movie presents two overlapping sides of Bourdain: It celebrates his idiosyncratic energy, curiosity and charisma while also examining the struggles that led to his death by suicide in 2018. “In many ways, his strengths were his weaknesses, too,” Neville said in a 2021 interview with The Times. “His deep romanticism, his wanderlust, his profound curiosity and seeking, were his strengths, but also things that really kept him unrooted and unable to kind of sit back and enjoy things.” More

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      ‘Billions’ Season 6, Episode 11: I Like Mike

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      Prince’s grand plan is revealed. Chuck is less than impressed.Season 6, Episode 11: ‘Succession’“Michael [expletive] Prince is running for president.”There you have it, as summed up by Chuck with all his usual verbal panache. After a season of oblique references and sotto voce hints, Mike Prince’s grand plan beyond all his other grand plans is revealed, with a bumper sticker reading “I LIKE MIKE 2028.” Behind the seizure of Axe Cap, behind the creation of the Prince List, behind the moonshot play for a New York Olympic Games, behind this episode’s introduction of universal basic income in the form of Prince-funded “Mike money,” behind every hard-to-parse interaction with his right-hand man, Scooter, and his wife, Andy, there it is. Mike Prince, billionaire, wants to become Mike Prince, president of the United States of America.You can all but feel the shock waves roll through the characters who wise up to this plan in real time. For starters, there’s Wags, who brought Prince a plum deal with the Chinese government only to watch the bossman blow it up as publicly as possible over human rights violations, and who wonders why Prince would offer a job to Chuck Rhoades, of all people. The move against China is an attempt to carve a path as an ethical billionaire; the job offer is an attempt to take an enemy off the board for good.Then there’s Taylor and Philip, the characters who theoretically give this episode, “Succession,” its title. (I’m inclined to believe it’s a cheeky reference to television’s other tale of the lifestyles of the rich and shameless; it’s a bit like that meme of the two Spider-Men pointing at each other.) They spend most of the episode jockeying for position as Prince’s heir apparent, although neither can quite fathom why he has chosen to name a successor at all.Taylor’s pitch involves the proverbial “move fast and break things” approach. Philip’s approach is more methodical. But when the dust settles, both of these wunderkinds realize they’re better off presenting themselves as a team of two, in which the strengths of one complement those of the other. This seems to free up space in their brains to finally puzzle out the why of Prince’s maneuver, and that why comes emblazoned with the presidential seal.Finally, there’s Chuck and Dave. Rhoades has set up shop in an old office straight out of “Mad Men” — complete with an aging secretary rumored to be one of the boss’s sexual conquests — maintained by his father for tax purposes. It is here that he is ensconced when his latest move against Prince — a digital billboard outside Prince’s home that gives a running tab of his personal fortune — becomes a viral sensation. It is here where Scooter and Kate Sacker come to encourage Chuck to join Prince’s team, an offer he predictably declines.When Prince’s “Mike money” plan is rolled out, ostensibly with the Brooklyn borough president (played by Joanna P. Adler) on board, Chuck encourages Dave to pull the plug by reclaiming all the land Prince bought in service of his Olympic bid, on the grounds that with the Games no longer in play, he is violating the compact under which he purchased the parcels.It ought to be a kill shot since Prince had been counting on leveraging the land and a private-public partnership to bankroll his universal basic income scheme. But Prince then makes the very un-billionaire move of promising to fully fund the “Mike money” initiative himself. When Dave and Chuck put their heads together to puzzle out why he would go out so far on a limb, there is only one conclusion they can draw, and it comes soundtracked by “Hail to the Chief.”Running parallel to all of this is the surprise story line to which we were introduced last week: Wendy Rhoades’s book. Turns out it’s a nonfiction effort of sorts: “Rewards of the Ruthless: How I Make Wall Street Killers,” a chronicle of her tenure as Axe/Prince Cap’s performance coach. The book includes very thinly disguised versions of all your favorite traders, from the timid Tom (a Tuk analogue) to the hard-charging Lance (Victor all the way).Wendy attempts to soften the blow of the book’s existence by giving pretty much everyone an advance copy so they can weigh in on their own portrayals. The idea is to involve them as, essentially, co-conspirators instead of springing the book on them after the fact — effectively daring them into libel lawsuits.But Wendy ultimately puts the kibosh on the book herself, burning it up with her Buddhist priest by her side. She realizes this wasn’t an attempt to vent her bile but to service her ego. “In the end,” she says, “it’s a ride that only leads to needing more, which is exactly what I don’t need.” If only any other character on this show would realize the same.Loose change:To the usual “Billions” soundtrack staples — your Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands” and so forth — this episode adds the playfully raunchy tune “Chaise Longue” by the British indie-rock darlings Wet Leg. Crank it up, folks.“A man in your position can’t afford to look ridiculous,” Wendy quotes at Ben Kim when he, Tuk and Bonnie angrily confront her about her book. “I wasn’t going to quote ‘Godfather’ at you,” Ben replies, but he has to admit that she’s right. Cue the Nino Rota.I don’t know about you, but Prince and Wags’s meeting with the Chinese officials was a little bit too “inscrutable foreign menace” for my taste. Don’t we have domestic menaces enough?Chuck refers to Prince as “Greg Stillson from ‘[The] Dead Zone,’” a reference to the Stephen King book in which a psychic sets out to stop a wildly dangerous presidential candidate by that name. Prince may be fictional, but take a look around the political landscape: Greg Stillsons are one thing this country still manages to produce in bumper crops.Am I the only person who wonders why Victor, Prince Cap’s most intimidating trader, is not in line for successor alongside Taylor and Philip? It’s weird to see him grouped alongside the likes of Ben Kim and Tuk instead of with the alphas.That said, I was pleased to see Sarah Stiles return as Bonnie, another Type A trader, when the crew confronts Wendy about her book. I’m still holding out hope she joins Mafee and Dollar Bill at their breakaway firm.The most prominent “appearing as himself” in this episode is the journalist John Heilemann, the star of Showtime’s “The Circus.” Here’s hoping for a “Dexter” crossover next time.Heilemann also earns this episode’s wrestling reference, in which Prince compares him to the chrome-domed monster George Steele, known also as the Animal. Sadly, Heilemann does not seem to have a green tongue from eating turnbuckle padding the way the Animal did.Prince’s aversion to obscenity is so pronounced in this episode — his exclamations include “Dang it!” and “Mother husker!” — that when he refers to Chuck as “that son of a [expletive]” in the end, it has a real impact. Will this stop me, personally, from dropping f-bombs in polite conversation all the time? Probably not, but it’s something to reflect on. More

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      Joni Mitchell Will Make a Rare Televised Appearance at the Grammys

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      The singer-songwriter, who has spoken in public infrequently since a 2015 aneurysm, will present an award live at the ceremony Sunday night in Las Vegas.Follow our live coverage of the 2022 Grammy Awards.When viewers tune in to the 64th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday night, they will see some familiar celebrities at the microphone as presenters, including Megan Thee Stallion, Questlove, Dua Lipa, Lenny Kravitz and Jared Leto.And one surprising one: Joni Mitchell.It will be a rare public appearance for Mitchell, 78, the revered singer and composer from Canada who was one of the defining figures of the singer-songwriter movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Never one for the limelight, Mitchell has kept a very low public profile since she had an aneurysm in 2015, and spent subsequent years in gradual recovery.The last year or two has brought a wave of recognition for Mitchell. Her 1971 album “Blue,” which had little commercial impact upon its release but was long a connoisseur’s favorite, was widely celebrated last year, upon its 50th anniversary. In December, she was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor, and a sampling of her songs, like “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Both Sides Now,” were performed by Brandi Carlile, Brittany Howard and Norah Jones. In a speech during the White House reception for the event, she addressed her health, saying, “I’m hobbling along but I’m doing all right.” She even joked in an on-camera interview on the red carpet, “I’m old enough to have been honored before.”In a taped interview last year, for a virtual Grammy gala hosted by the music executive Clive Davis, she gave an overview of her career, saying that the folk music world of the mid-1960s was “territorial” about repertoire, and that she learned “the only way around this dilemma is to begin to write your own songs.” She also told Davis that she had only recently realized the breadth of her influence; for years, she said, “all I was aware of were bad reviews.”Mitchell last released an album of new songs in 2007. In January, she asked Spotify to remove her music after Neil Young did the same, as a protest against the streaming service over its role in giving a platform to Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.On Friday, Mitchell will also be the honoree in a gala for MusiCares, a Grammy-affiliated charity that helps needy musicians, with Cyndi Lauper, Stephen Stills, Herbie Hancock, Jon Batiste, Sara Bareilles, Beck, Carlile and others performing her music. More