Page 297 – Cherwell

‘To help us survive’: On Stephen Sondheim

Theatre

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12th December 2021

‘To help us survive’: On Stephen Sondheim

Right after my GCSEs, as I was gradually exiting a deeply embarrassing Hamilton phase, I saw the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story. I was at a screening in Spitalfields Market, in an industrial former warehouse – the perfect setting for that film’s gritty vision of New York City. Yet what dragged me into a new stage of musical theatre obsession was not West Side Story’s sweeping approach to filming complex choreography, or its dazzling technicolour aesthetic, but the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, who passed away last November at the age of 91.

I didn’t know how to articulate this at the time, but watching West Side Story I encountered for the first time a quality I’ve come to look for in great musical theatre: the distillation of complex emotion into song in a rounded yet deceptively simple manner. Here was a prime example of showtunes’ unique ability to bring human feeling to a higher plane, whether that feeling was an immigrant’s anxiety (‘America’) or the immediate processing of first love (both the tense euphoria of ‘Maria’ and the giddiness of ‘I Feel Pretty’). Here, too, were the exhilarating aspects of Sondheim’s lyrics which would become his hallmarks, and which I would come to love: the complex, hyperactive rhythmical structures (‘Something’s Coming’), the patter songs that manage to be both comic and profound (‘Gee, Officer Krupke’), the unexpectedly raw comedown from a soaring chorus (‘We’ll find a new way of living / We’ll find a way of forgiving’).

If Sondheim had retired after West Side Story, his legacy would still have been notable, as a 27-year-old who had written lyrics which complemented and uplifted a domineering score by the more experienced Leonard Bernstein. But there was much more to come. After again contributing lyrics to another composer’s score (Jule Styne’s Gypsy), Sondheim first wrote both lyrics and music for a musical in 1966 with A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. He then spent the next three decades composing a string of shows unprecedented both in their melodic complexity and the themes with which their lyrics dealt, ranging from the ennui of dating in the city, to collective responsibility, to the price of artistic genius.

It would be at this point in the tribute essay that I would reflect on the formative experience of seeing Sweeney Todd or Sunday In The Park With George as a pre-teen, and how that encouraged a lifelong obsession. But as the old adage goes, Sondheim wrote musical theatre ‘for adults’, and I think that until a few years ago I was simply too young for his work; my first encounter with Sondheim was a secondary school production of Into The Woods, and I wish this had immediately triggered a deep fondness for his lyrics, but it would still be a few more years before that fateful West Side Story screening. Pretentious as I was at fourteen, I was too stuck on finding Into The Woods’ fairytale motifs passé, and failed to recognise its poignant message of human responsibility for others in the community, best expressed in the sinister yet beautiful lyrics of ‘No One Is Alone’.

If Sondheim did not exclusively write for adults, then, he at least wrote for those with some experience of life, who could benefit from having the truth of their lives put to them, without any bullshit. It’s been notable in the aftermath of his death how many social media mourners used his pithier lyrics as a form of therapy (‘No One Is Alone’ and ‘Children And Art’ from Sunday have become ubiquitous as expressions of grief for Sondheim himself), and it’s this universal quality that’s made his songs so adaptable when performed in other, completely different media.

In this light, it’s fitting that a watershed moment in my gradual discovery of Sondheim was watching Marriage Story two Christmases ago, in which Adam Driver performs ‘Being Alive’ from Company as a divorced man reeling from the memory of the love described in the song (in stark contrast to Company’s perpetually single Bobby). While the context of previous events in Company’s plot – Bobby’s disillusionment with love thanks to the eccentric married couples in his life – undeniably makes the climax of ‘Being Alive’ richer, even without this context Sondheim’s lyrics are sufficient to convey the song’s message, and were enough to get me instantly hooked. The way ‘Being Alive’ ricochets from dismissal of monogamous love as a waste of time (‘someone to sit in your chair / And ruin your sleep’), to a cathartic acceptance of wanting passionate, complicated love (‘let me be used / vary my days’), to a sort of tenderness amidst the chaos (‘I’ll always be there / As frightened as you / To help us survive’) helped me rationalise as a late teen all the contradictory notions I had about the relationships I wanted, and the lyrics became mantras to which I continually refer. I even took it one step further than personal therapy, and once used ‘Being Alive’ to express how I felt to a former romantic interest – humiliating, but an experience everyone should have with the work of their hero.

Though I believe certain earlier musical theatre lyricists, particularly Sondheim’s mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, don’t always get enough credit for their work’s thematic richness, Sondheim nevertheless turned a corner by being both a lyricist and a composer, allowing his scores as well as his lyrics to reflect his characters’ complex emotions. My emotional response to ‘Send In The Clowns’ from A Little Night Music has varied widely since I first heard it, from frustration and desire for missed romantic opportunities to resolve themselves, to resigned acceptance of things just not working out. I think this emotional turbulence is in part due to Sondheim’s score: the song’s unusual metre and short phrasing give the sense of something unfinished, and Sondheim’s confinement of the vocal line within a fairly narrow range of notes leads the audience to expect a belted climax which never comes, leaving them instead with a resigned, half-whispered ‘Well, maybe next year’. The emotional richness of ‘Send In The Clowns’ stems from its simplicity, and this is also evidence of Sondheim’s respect for actors who sing, as opposed to singers who act – when Glynis Johns originated the role of Desiree in A Little Night Music in 1973, Sondheim prioritised the husky, desperate quality of her voice over undue strain on her vocal range and inability to sustain notes.

So how should we honour Sondheim’s legacy? Firstly, by celebrating his work, through the inevitable revivals next year and the new film version of West Side Story, as well as engaging with parts of the canon which we haven’t yet touched (as a classicist, it’s shameful that I haven’t got around to listening to the Plautus-influenced Forum). Furthermore, the irony is not lost on me that I’m a 21-year-old who loves musicals mostly about people in their thirties or older, so we should be open to the resonance of Sondheim’s lyrics growing and changing as we age; Sunday In The Park With George, and especially its climactic number ‘Move On’, offers a message of encouragement to all who create (even those of us who write theatre criticism!), and the more I write, the more the words ‘Anything you do / Let it come from you / Then it will be new’ serve as comfort. The more relationships and friendships we form, the more Sondheim’s words can resonate. Just as I understood ‘Send In The Clowns’ more after accepting that teenage relationships don’t always last, I hope that Company will help me navigate the woes of third-wheeling and feeling stuck as one’s friends evolve, and that Merrily We Roll Along will provide a blueprint if and when cracks show in my idealistic university friendships (it was the perfect Sondheim to have seen in my first term at Oxford for this reason).

But what do I know? Since Sondheim once referred to theatre critics as ‘ignoramuses’ and had a famous disdain towards their appraisal of his work, perhaps the decision about his legacy should be up to him. The answer to how Sondheim would’ve wanted to be remembered may lie in his commitment to mentoring the next generation, expressed most poignantly in an email to Lin-Manuel Miranda in which he wrote of ‘repaying what I owe Oscar [Hammerstein]’. Not only was Sondheim’s mentorship instrumental in the development of titans like Miranda, Jonathan Larson (a process fictionalised in the recently filmed autobiographical musical Tick, Tick, Boom), and Jason Robert Brown, but he also imparted wisdom and encouragement, replying to thousands of letters with aphorisms as simple yet profound as his lyrics, letters which are now documented on the wonderful Instagram account @sondheimletters. Therefore, Sondheim’s legacy may lie in the writers whom he inspired, and we might honour him by seeing an original piece of musical theatre writing next season: one unhampered by desire for commercial success and concerned with expressing its writer’s individual voice, just like Sondheim’s work did forty years ago.

Thank you, Stephen Sondheim. May your memory be a blessing, and may we remember that – in the words of the Baker’s Wife from Into The Woods – ‘no one leaves for good’.

Image Credit: Tantó / CC BY-SA 4.0

Emotional Contagion: an insight into Oxford University’s terrifying epidemic of burnout and hyper-productivity

Opinion

Dania Kamal Aryf

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12th December 2021

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Emotional Contagion: an insight into Oxford University’s terrifying epidemic of burnout and hyper-productivity

CW: Mental health issues, chronic illness, death, suicide

The main character Patrick Bateman from the film American Psycho, studied at Harvard and works on Wall Street. He is wealthy, intelligent, charismatic, attractive – he embodies conventional ideals of ‘success’, and surrounds himself with important, influential people. Yet, he is also permanently on edge, and he knows it.

Detached from his humanity is the shell of a man whose life is governed by entirely abstract and erratic perceptions of himself and his surroundings, distant from reality. In public, Bateman conforms to the façade of a calm exterior that is seen as highly desirable, yet, his inner world remains plagued by existential angst.

I could not help but notice how the neuroticism of Bateman and his circle seem to portray an eerily similar parallel to many of us here at Oxford.

While the film remains a timeless classic that brilliantly satirises The White Male Psyche™ in a world of relentless material pursuit, Patrick Bateman nevertheless embodies a genuine sense of always being “on the verge of frenzy”, that many of us constantly experience. Especially with our endless ‘essay crises’, weekly all-nighters, excessive drug and alcohol consumption, and the obsession with grades and internships – many Oxford students continuously joke about eventually losing grip on their own sanity. But how much of this is merely cynical humour, and how much truth are we revealing when laughing at our own misery?

Amongst these dreaming spires, emotional contagion hangs thick in the air like an intoxicating fog. It is a destructive concoction of morbid perfectionism, righteous self-obsession, and a sense of perpetual tiredness.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic had exacerbated our global mental-health crisis, Oxford’s ‘work hard, play hard’ culture has still been notorious for its destructive effects. In 2013, for example, Oxford was cited as “the worst place to battle depression”, and in 2016, the SU Welfare report showed that 58% of undergraduates think that being at Oxford has had negative impacts on their mental health, and that BAME students were twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression whilst at Oxford. The following year, a Metro article cited Oxford students as being ‘the most miserable’ in the UK, and more recently in 2018 and 2019, students were still writing about how this university continues to brazenly fuel a mental health epidemic.

The statistics on suicide rates at Oxford are also just as disturbing, and yet, remains nothing new. Over a period of 30 years, from 1976 to 2006, as many as 48 Oxford students had died by suicide, according to a case study published in 2010. As recent as last year, a student from Harris Manchester died of an overdose, and in 2013, Balliol College saw two of its students fall victim to suicide, with both incidents taking place only 3 months apart from each other. These terrifying headlines and statistics lie merely at the surface of Oxford’s genuine mental health crisis – as countless incidents of self-harm and suicide attempts, psychiatric visits to A&E at the John Radcliffe Hospital, and students suffering in silence still go unreported.

While these issues have never been exclusive to Oxford, it is perhaps fair to argue that the culture at this university nevertheless exacerbates it. We are constantly pushed to our limits – burning out without having the time to properly recover, and then instantly expected to be on our feet again. In enduring the solitude and isolation that accompanies Western individualism, and the cut-throat competition of our work-obsessed, capitalist world – our individual productivity ultimately becomes necessary to ensure one’s survival.

Whether within the workforce, or within this university, the measurement of one’s worth based on their productivity and functionality, essentially remains the same. From a eugenicist perspective, it could also be argued that our society also measures the value of one’s existence through their extent of material contribution, instead of all lives being seen as equally valuable, simply by virtue of being human. Especially within the myopic Oxford bubble, this sentiment becomes so amplified to a point where it is sometimes impossible to ignore.

In a strange way, being at Oxford has also further highlighted the many contradictions of our human existence. Here, we are constrained by the theoretical abstractness of academia, yet equally liberated by the privileges and opportunities that would be difficult to find elsewhere. We are sheltered, as we are exposed, and knowledgeable, as we are ignorant. In our pursuit of understanding more about our world, we end up understanding less so about ourselves – or rather, feeling like we have learnt too much, to a point where it simply becomes overwhelmingly incomprehensible.

While this same problem has been around for generations, and is ultimately nothing new, one could also argue that our generation experiences a much heightened sense of existential angst and unhealthy competition, largely due to living in an increasingly virtual society. Our online presence that we cautiously curate (whether through Linkedin, Twitter or Instagram) has become a hallmark of identity, an assertion of our existence, and a vain pursuit of validation. The desire to be recognised for one’s worth is only innate, and nothing to be ashamed of – yet, in an echo chamber where everyone screams to be heard, it becomes impossible to not drown in the loudness of one’s own insecurity.

Our culture of hyper-productivity demands us to ‘live up to our full potential’, but are we truly living our honest lives if we are merely chasing endless material pursuits after another? More seriously, I ask this as a genuine, non-rhetorical question: are most of us actually happy? Or, like Patrick Bateman, are we all just a little bit anxious, insecure, and always on the verge of frenzy?

We murder our soulful and spiritual selves in pursuit of a material self who relentlessly chases after infinite ambitions. We exchange healthy hours of sleep for more caffeine and extra time in the library. We trade few meaningful relationships for a large network of fleeting, superficial connections. We regard ‘intellectual discourse’ as more worthwhile than small talk about the weather. We over-analyse the scientific, the structural, the social, and the psychological intricacies of our strange little world, while slowly losing touch of our own humanity.

“Best advice I got when I entered academia: We’re all smart. Distinguish yourself by being kind,” was a Tweet I saw a long time ago, and have held onto since. Yet, ironically, I failed to realise how “being kind” was also supposed to include kindness to myself, above all else. “Being kind to myself” did not entail being selfish, irresponsible or lazy. But instead, it meant the recognition of my own worth that still offers so much room for genuine curiosity, hard work, and achievement – in a way that does not kill me. Most importantly, “being kind to myself” entailed not comparing myself to others, because after all, I came here to learn, not to compete.

As a disabled student who reluctantly had to rusticate, I now realise that this was, perhaps, the universe’s way of telling me to be kinder to myself, in allowing me some time off from academics. In hindsight, it has also given me the opportunity to slowly reconnect with my soul, and allow myself to heal.

Yet, the struggles I endure, and the systemic barriers that I overcome and work to dismantle whilst being disabled at Oxford, are not meant to be a demonstration of my ‘resilience’, or an example of ‘never giving up’. Instead, they are merely experiences of what makes me human, especially in a broken world that has been fundamentally designed to kill us all.

But still, I refuse to die – at least not yet.
I realise that I no longer want to work myself to an early grave by conforming to unrealistic standards of “success”, or by constantly putting myself “out there, achieving great things”.

Instead, I simply wish to just be.

Slowly, I am learning to embrace the wholeness of my existence – in all its beautiful significance, in all its tragic meaninglessness, and its endless contradictions of being human.

Image Credit: Microbiz Mag / CC BY 2.0 via flickr.com

Spiking, injuries and disappointment at Varsity Trip club nights

News

David Tritsch

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10th December 2021

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Spiking, injuries and disappointment at Varsity Trip club nights

CW: Spiking

Students at the annual Oxford and Cambridge Varsity ski trip have reported serious injuries and spiking incidents at the Le Malaysia nightclub in Val Thorens. The club was selected as the venue for this year’s ‘Blues Bop’ event, advertised as “the most in-demand event of Varsity Trip”, with tickets re-selling for up to 1000% of their original price.

On Tuesday’s ‘Blues Bop’ event, security shouted at students and pushed them onto the ice, with many slipping and multiple students falling unconscious. Despite paramedics and medically certified representatives of NUCO, the holiday provider organising Varsity Trip, being present, several students received no medical attention at the event. Le Malaysia nightclub refused to provide guests with free drinking water, instead charging €3 for a bottle of water. Unlike in the UK, nightclubs in France are not legally required to provide guests with free tap water on request. Speaking to Cherwell, one Oxford student reported being pushed and manhandled by club staff, with security personnel calling guests “animals”.

Le Malaysia has served as a venue for Varsity Trip events before and hosted several club nights on the last trip in 2019. Joe Hilton, Co-President of this year’s Varsity Trip confirmed to Cherwell that Varsity Trip decreased the number of tickets sold for events in Le Malaysia this year, but maintained that capacity issues were likely caused by attendees that were not part of the Varsity ski trip. ‘Blues Bop’ has consistently been the most popular event on past Varsity Trips and tickets sold out in minutes. While tickets were sold for £10 on booking day in October, they have been offered for up to £100 on Facebook groups dedicated to reselling Varsity Trip tickets.

Inside the club, an incident of spiking by injection allegedly took place and was reported to both the Varsity Trip committee and NUCO. Over the past months, incidents of spiking by injection, where victims are injected with a spiking drug through a needle, have become increasingly common in UK nightclubs, and several incidents were reported in Oxford over Michaelmas Term 2021. Students reported that security did not check whether all attendees had tickets for the event and that several guests were let into the venue without a pat down search, which most attendees were subjected to.

Despite these reports, Hilton told Cherwell that the Varsity Trip committee is not ruling out booking Le Malaysia for future trips to Val Thorens. The day after the event, a meeting between NUCO, the Varsity Trip committee, and Le Malaysia club management took place, where Le Malaysia committed to refusing entry to guests not on the Varsity trip before 1am and to increasing the presence of NUCO staff on Varsity nights, should the club be booked again. Hilton also said that the Varsity Trip committee is considering paying for water for students on future Varsity Trip club nights if venues do not offer free tap water.

On Thursday night, a day after the meeting, Malaysia served as a venue for Varsity Trip’s ‘Final Night Party’. NUCO and the Varsity Trip committee again received several reports of guests being spiked by injection. While two cases were formally reported, Cherwell has been made aware of up to seven alleged incidents. Speaking to Cherwell, Hilton said that “one of the incidents took place so early in the night that we believe it is highly likely the person responsible was a student themselves”.

Eloise George, a student at Oxford, told Cherwell: “Fundamentally, I feel that NUCO and Varsity have let us down hugely. Both events I have been to at Malaysia have involved violence from bouncers, unsafe ground conditions, and no support. The atmosphere created before people even entered the club – any searches were so inadequate, they were brief pat downs that would not have detected a needle. The whole final night I was relying on my male friend to protect me. It’s just not good enough. I don’t think I’ve had a single good night out at Varsity as everything has been so disorganised and frequently really stressful. It’s been a jarring experience, and I wouldn’t attend another event held at Malaysia or recommend that others do until they work with NUCO and Varsity to improve their safety and duty of care.”

NUCO and Le Malaysia nightclub have been contacted for comment.

This article was amended on December 12th, 4:00pm, to account for the following: a) the Varsity Trip committee decreased the number of tickets sold for events at Malaysia this year (a previous version wrongly stated that ticket sales had been increased); b) the alleged spiking incident which occurred early in the night took place on Thursday (‘Final Night Party’), rather than on Tuesday (‘Blues Bop’).

Image Credit: Santeri Viinamäki / CC BY-SA 4.0

How conservatives are weaponising feminism to bring down Roe v Wade

Opinion

Iseult de Mallet Burgess

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10th December 2021

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How conservatives are weaponising feminism to bring down Roe v Wade

CW: Abortion

“Empower Women. Promote Life.”

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s anti-abortion campaign is centred around a slogan that uses the façade of feminism to justify a reactionary agenda. Fitch is the face of the abortion case poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, which began with oral arguments on December 1^st. Fitch claims that abortion bans can “empower” women to “have it all” – utterly and wilfully deaf to the masses of lesser-privileged women who are and will be harmed by this agenda.

The right to abortion is recognised in Roe v. Wade: the landmark 1973 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that access to safe and legal abortion is a constitutional right. Roe has been under attack for years – but in the Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of a pre-viability abortion ban for the first time since Roe. Overturning or further eroding Roe would put more than 25 million women at risk of losing access to abortion, and in danger from unsafe, illegal abortions.

How did we get here? How did we get to a place in which the language of feminism is being used to dismantle the rights the movement fought to secure?

One answer is that today’s brand of mainstream, liberal feminism is an ineffectual and unfortunate result of the neoliberalisation of feminism – a decades-long process beginning in the late twentieth century, which watered feminism down so that it no longer threatens the status quo. A movement that once prioritised social solidarity and mass mobilisation now promotes individual achievement, self-optimisation and careerism in the name of “empowerment.” A movement once about liberation is now a de-politicised shell prioritising individual choice over structural analysis. A movement once critical of capitalism has become its handmaiden.

This process began with the rise of neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. Neoliberalism championed freedom, hyper-individualism, and self-optimisation. As women were granted greater freedom and autonomy through participation in the free market, second wave feminists began to view liberalism as the way forward for feminism. So although the second wave of feminism began as a critique of capitalist exploitation and the role of women in postwar, state-managed capitalist society, the movement was seduced by neoliberalism and allied itself with capitalism.

One particularly unfortunate consequence of this process was the emergence of “choice politics” as a central tenet of the feminist movement. Choice politics supposes that any choice made by a woman is empowering by default, which rests on the idea that the act of making a choice is the ultimate expression of a woman’s autonomy and freedom.

Because of choice politics and the narrative of “women’s empowerment” which touts the careerwomen as the ultimate image of gender equality – and because neoliberal feminism is entirely ignorant of the structural aspects behind gender inequality (such as patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy) – the language of liberal feminism is apolitical, and easily adopted by anyone.

Fitch’s argument is that because of feminism, women are now fully able to pursue both motherhood and a career, eliminating the need for abortion. To support her argument, she draws on her own experience as a (white, upper middle class) single mother.

According to Fitch, women are no longer inhibited by unwanted pregnancies. This could not, however, be further from the truth: overwhelming evidence suggests that denying people access to abortion has consistently proved detrimental to their mental and physical health. What’s more, if Roe v. Wade is overturned, the likely scenario is that people with means and privilege like Fitch will still be able to access abortions, but women without the same privileges – such as women of colour, poor women, and undocumented women – will be harmed most severely.

This is not at all to say that mainstream feminism is the sole culprit for conservatives’ languaging and agendas. The misappropriation of feminism is just a new approach by anti-abortion conservatives who have been waging war on reproductive rights for decades. It is, however, a particularly bleak perversion that women, such as Fitch, are increasingly becoming the face of this anti-choice agenda.

Image Credit: Adam Fagen / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Barbie reborn

Film

Eleanor Zhang

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9th December 2021

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CW: Body image

When I learnt that a new Barbie film is coming out in 2023, my first reaction was excitement. The batch of watchable Barbie films produced by Mattel trickled out more than twenty years ago, and the name Greta Gerwig never fails to ramp up expectations. Despite this, I’m not entirely convinced that choosing Margot Robbie to play the plastic doll would, as promised, give the production “a lot of exciting ways to attack” the Barbie stereotypes.

At six or seven, even slightly older, the Barbie industry to some girls in my generation could only be described as a religion. There was something liturgical about huddling together and rewatching the franchise films over and over, accompanied by re-enactments of the stories that were treated like gospels; there was the Barbie magazine that preached to us what to wear, how to care for your hair and, essentially, how to be a ‘real girl’. Our shared love for Barbie led to activities social as well as personal: while there would be exchanges of costume pieces at playdates after school, brushing your doll’s hair was something you’d want to do in private, in bed with your night lamp on, to form a deeper connection with the miniature mannequin.

Barbie to girls that age was truly omnipotent: she was a brilliant painter, a talented singer, a skilled ballet dancer, a good student, an elegant ice skater, and so much more. She could be a mermaid one day and have wings the next, and a year later she’d be forming a trio of musketeers with her best friends Nikki and Teresa. Her journey was whimsical but real enough to encourage children to follow her example. Because of her status as a role model, if not an idol, she lent many of us the will power to go to one more dance class, or spend an extra hour practicing our instruments. Parents would soon pick up on our adoration and make use of it, pushing us to wear this skirt or attend that performance, because “look, Barbie does it”, and there was nothing some of us wouldn’t do to keep it up with her.

Now an adult and aware of Barbie’s supposed crippling toxicity, I still find it very hard to deny the happiness it once brought me. It was hard to deny the social life I had because of the dolls I owned, and even harder when Barbie’s stories did bring good things to my world view. Things about friendship and love, and how a girl could fight villains and save the day with the right skills and company. Nostalgia complicates the belated realisation that the Barbie from my generation was, in fact, not made for everyone, myself excluded from its image of muliebral perfection. The majority of Barbies back then were generically blonde, and among the very few brunettes, all of them were white. There was also zero variation in the dolls’ figures, only the “original” skinniness, a body proportion later proven to be scientifically unrealistic to achieve. My later memory of Barbie comprised two instances that made me feel self-conscious about the distance between me and a beauty standard incorporated by my playmate of many years. One was of a curvy girl denied by the group of friends the chance to role-play Barbie; the other was of a white acquaintance introducing their blonde and white daughter matter-of-factly: “she never has a bad time at school, because all her classmates think she looks more like Barbie than themselves do.”

Admittedly, the Barbies that girls play with today are not the same as their predecessors designed after a bachelorette party gift, the German blonde white doll named Lilli. With sales taking a tailspin all the way from 2012 to 2017, Mattel introduced three more body types in addition to the original slender frame, along with different skin colours and hair. The box of Barbies I was recently shown by a 13-year-old didn’t all remind you of Uma Thurman in her twenties, and the owner in question also liked the fact that they now don’t all look the same, some even looked “chubby”. But a recent browse on Mattel’s website made me very skeptical about the company’s claimed effort in promoting positive body image and diversity, a change of strategy that apparently brought about a 23% rise in sales in the quarter after the design overhaul. Out of the 18 dolls from the Fashionistas series, the only Barbie range that currently features alternative types, 12 of them have the original body shape. And while the remaining four are branded as “curvy”, they still look on the slim side, an impression corroborated by researches that put them on a UK size 6/8, with a BMI index of 0.38, meaning that the curvy dolls are still far slimmer than the average 16-24-year-old woman in the UK. As for racial representation — true, there are additions of skin tones, eye colours, hair colours and textures, the claimed “wide variety” only allows me to find exactly two dolls on the website who could potentially look like myself, a woman of East Asian descent. Ironically, it would not be wrong to cast someone looking like Margot Robbie to play Barbie in 2021, for dolls looking like her, Caucasian and thin, still take up an unproportionally large space on Mattel’s item list.

More than 62 years after its invention, Barbie’s influence on children’s perception of beauty is still a relevant topic. But we should also bear in mind that beauty standards are not only conveyed through dolls. A 2019 study that examined young girls’ reactions to Barbie’s new looks concluded that girls’ comparison of themselves with their dolls is also conditioned by their exposure to other social stimuli, such as peers and media.
Questioning a Barbie film adaptation’s choice of actress is therefore not about a doll’s stance on inclusivity and diversity, but our society’s stance on these issues. A society where blond white people are still over most of our grocery’s packaging, and less than half of models in Fall 2021 are people of colour. This is why I feel, as I’m disputing a blonde white actress’ eligibility to play a doll, that it’s all a bit pointless, with a cinema just starting to welcome protagonists who aren’t straight white and male. At least, with a female lead, the Barbie film won’t be a complete step backwards, as long as we’re still reaching for the day when all of us can be in the spotlight.

Queer As Folk: Pride is where community is

Film

Eleanor Zhang

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8th December 2021

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Queer As Folk: Pride is where community is

I was glad that I binged the American Queer As Folk instead of another round of Friends back in March 2020. Adapted from Russell T Davies’ original in 1999, the show was the first hour-long drama to feature homosexual men and women in the history of American television, as well as the first to include detailed depiction of sex between men. To many’s surprise, it quickly hit first place on the network Showtime’s roster after its initial release, despite the prediction that the viewship would primarily consist of gay and lesbian audiences.

I, for one, was grateful for the large cast in the show, back when I was cooped up at home and socialising on a screen. I remember how I motivated myself at the start of another online day with two episodes (which in hindsight must have been more, since I got through five seasons within two months), and feeling that I, too, was having breakfast at Liberty Diner in Pittsburgh, beginning a new day with last night’s gossips at the queer nightclub Babylon. In fact, I vividly remember several of my lockdown clubbing dreams all taking place in various shapes at Babylon, a place full of glam and glitter, and too good to exist in last year’s reality.

Babylon is where you see the biggest crowd in the show. It appears at least once in each episode, where the group of four friends, Michael, Brian, Ted, and Emmett, would meet up after a long day at work and, for some of them, a day of hiding their sexualities and therefore getting mistaken for being straight. Michael, for example, goes so far as to date a female colleague in pretence, just so his long-awaited promotion at the supermarket would not be compromised. Ted is an under-appreciated accountant, chronically taken for granted at work; at night, his confidence is repeatedly knocked on the dance floor, where young meat is favoured over middle-aged men like him. Brian, good-looking and successful at his job, has to work extra hard to earn respect as an openly gay man. Babylon for the queers in Pittsburgh is a literal shelter: outside on the street, they’re disregarded, insulted, beaten and murdered; inside there’s only them among themselves, huddled together in darkness with some that desire them, and the others that they desire. Sex in the back room is a collective protest. Looking for sex is the extertion of a freedom that’s otherwise hindered in the outside world. And the aggregation of movements and voices exudes a shared power that refuses to be denied.

But the sense of community in Queer As Folk, despite the abounding explicit sex scenes, is not shown through unabashed promiscuity. A sentiment so widely acknowledged among queer folks living on Liberty Avenue, it can only be described as family value. The group of central characters consisting of five gay men and a lesbian couple, Lindsay and Melanie, form a family that literally shares blood, as the two women bear children biologically fathered by their gay friends. But in more abstract – and important – ways, their bond is strengthened by a duty they take upon themselves to protect their own. In the course of five seasons, we see Justin evolve from a homeless teenager banished by his family to an ambitious artist, offered a roof by queer friends and allies ranging from his high school best friend to his first love. We also see Hunter, an HIV positive minor, settle in his new adoptive family and a second life away from teen prostitution. Admittedly, these personal journeys might be less frequently seen in real life than on TV. Yet the message carried in this little soap opera bubble is nonetheless heartening: that the queer community is supportive and inclusive, and that for the very vulnerable, it’s often more loving and nourishing than the institutions and relatives that have failed to accept them.

It reminded me of my own experience with fellow queer folks, from my first Pride in Munich, to Haute Mess at Plush in Oxford, to the ‘Queers Helping Queers’ Facebook group on my year abroad in Berlin – and how they’ve made me feel like I belong, wherever in the world or whichever stage I’m at in life. What also came to mind were the moments of seeing rainbow flags flying out of anonymous windows, or sitting across a stranger in Pride-print clothes, and feeling an instant strike of kinship. Of knowing that, in sharing a self discovery different from our peers but relatable to us each, what makes us similar often catalyses kindness. In the show, people living on Liberty Avenue are so tightly knit, they’re reluctant to leave their turf for bigger houses. As overly sentimental as their decision might seem, I find it understandable: in this community, the expected kinship rarely fails to deliver.

Queer As Folk as a TV production is far from perfect, not the least because of its aggressively Caucasian cast. Yet as the first queer equivalent of Friends, binging it brought comfort at a time when all there was in the world was uncertainty, rising discrimination, and hatred. It was an anchoring feeling, realising that, albeit with fictional characters and events, the pride elicited by the show is genuine, that being queer means having a community that will always have your back.

Hackers targeted Oxford vaccine research

News

Charlotte Keys

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8th December 2021

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Hackers targeted Oxford vaccine research

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has highlighted in their annual review that hackers targeted the University of Oxford’s Covid vaccine research this year.

Their review shows that the health sector has been experiencing record hack attempts, with 777 cases recorded between August 2020 and September 2021. This is an increase from the 723 incidents recorded in 2020.

The NCSC, part of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), revealed that one in five incidents were aimed at organisations with connections to health, with particular targeting of coronavirus vaccine research.

Additional cyber-protection support has been provided by the NCSC to those working in the health sector, from NHS workers to vaccine researchers.

Researchers at the University of Oxford received help from the NCSC this year after security experts alerted them to a threat from ransomware which had the potential to significantly disrupt the progress of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.

Ransomware, an area of growing concern, is a form of cyber-attack where the criminal or hostile state locks a user out of their data and demands a ransom for the return of their data. However, in some cases, even if the money is paid, not all data is returned to the victim of the attack.

The NCSC’s Active Cyber Defence (ACD) programme removed 2.3 million cyber-enabled commodity campaigns; this included 442 phishing campaigns using NHS branding.

The growth in reported incidents is in part due to “the organisation’s ongoing work to proactively identify threats through the work of its Threat Operations and Assessment teams,” the NCSC has said.

Earlier this year, NCSC Chief Executive, Lindy Cameron, warned that criminals and state-backed groups would use the pandemic as an opportunity for cyber-attacks; both in targeting information around vaccines and creating fear. She said, “some groups may also seek to use this information to undermine public trust in government responses to the pandemic, and criminals are now regularly using Covid-themed attacks as a way of scamming the public.”

The transition to remote work and use of third-party computing and cloud services has created an opportunity for criminals to target businesses during the pandemic, whilst hostile states have an interest in medical and vaccine research, threatening the UK’s medical industry over the past year.

The NCSC also predicts that ransomware attacks, which first gained prominence in 2020, are “almost certain to grow” in the next year.

Cameron, whilst talking about ransomware, highlighted “in my view it is now the most immediate cyber security threat to UK businesses and one that I think should be higher on the boardroom agenda.”

Director of GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, stated, “This year we have seen countless examples of security threats: from state-sponsored activity to criminal ransomware attacks. It all serves to remind us that what happens online doesn’t stay online – there are real consequences of virtual activity”.

Fleming added that “In the face of rising cyberattacks and an evolving threat, this year’s NCSC’s annual review shows that world-class cyber security, enabled by the expertise of the NCSC as part of GCHQ, continues to be vital to the UK’s safety and prosperity.”

The NCSC has expressed an interest in further international collaboration efforts from law enforcement agencies to target ransomware operators oversees, notably in China and Russia. This comes after talks at the G7 summit which was held in Cornwall earlier this year.

China, the NCSC states, is a “highly sophisticated” operator in cyber space and has been singled out as the biggest threat to Britain’s tech security. They warn in their annual review that “how China evolves in the next decade will probably be the single biggest driver of the UK’s future cyber security”.

A spokesperson from Oxford University said: “We welcome the NCSC annual report which highlights the cyber protections needed around the ground-breaking work of our vaccine researchers. Our information security team have been fortunate to have excellent support from within NCSC. They have provided a real contribution to the cyber protections around the vaccine research throughout the pandemic.”

‘Truly perceptive’ – Review: The Effect

Alex Bridges

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6th December 2021

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CW: Suicide, mental illness

Review contains spoilers for The Effect

Buzzcut Productions’ thrilling, cathartic staging of Lucy Prebble’s The Effect is an emotional rollercoaster of sex, sadness, love and jealousy. However, these age-old themes in literature and drama are explored in a novel setting: the cramped, isolating environment of a fully controlled clinical trial for new antidepressant medication. The play only has four characters – two doctors and two patients – and deals with the fraught, moving, and painfully human interactions between them. The play is well-written, well-staged, and deals with interesting and topical issues, but it is these painfully truthful human relationships that elevate it from an evocatively written commentary on medical ethics to a truly perceptive piece of art.

We are introduced at the play’s beginning to the two clinical volunteers, as dissimilar as can be. Tristan (Jules Upson) is tall, blond and bursting with life, filled with an easy confidence and a belief in his own charm that helps to distract, at first, from the emotional highs and lows he is prone to. Connie (Grace de Souza), by contrast, seems permanently on edge, fired by her inquisitive mind and destabilised by depressive tendencies that fluctuate throughout the play. Director Gabe Winsor’s apt casting helped to underline the disparities between these two characters, not least through their differing appearances and physicality. However, a stellar performance from both cast members of this well-written relationship gave their on-stage dynamic a forcefulness and intimacy that only mounted as their mutual curiosity and what seems to be rapturous love breaks down the barriers between them.

Monitoring the clinical trial is Dr Lorna James (Kaitlin Horton-Samuel), a psychiatric professional with a history of depression herself and a complicated relationship with the wealthy senior consultant Dr Toby Sealey (Alec Watson), who has organised the trial. These two have less onstage chemistry than Connie and Tristan, a potential flaw if one sees Prebble’s ‘two pairs’ as designed to mirror each other and strengthen each other’s characterisations through contrast; however, the superb individual performance of each actor more than makes up for this, and arguably reinforces subtly the themes Prebble is trying to explore. Watson portrays the sympathetic charm that propelled Toby so high up into the medical world with a perfect eye, while at the same time always undermining it with hints of his overriding selfishness and egoism. His self-effacing pride in the final scenes of the play at Lorna’s hospital bed after her suicide attempt, when he thinks “she might like to know” that he is finally going to step up onto the next rung of the corporate publicity ladder and start writing the book he has been planning, is a perfect example of this: the blindly mercantile workings of his character take on full force in Watson’s nuanced portrayal.

While Connie and Tristan are ostensibly the ones being tested for depressive symptoms or lack thereof, the play’s most penetrating analysis of depression and mental health issues comes in Lorna’s speeches. Her impassioned soliloquy at the end of the play seeks a reason for the senseless, numbing pain she and so many others are prey to, moving from faint sparks of hope and the knowledge that one must simply keep going, to an abyss of self-destructive despair. It is no exaggeration to say that the audience members were moved to tears (I myself could not stop crying during it, and judging from the muffled sniffles surrounding me on the night, I was not alone). It is fair to say that this scene is what really endows The Effect with a deep understanding of the existential angst and despair involved in being alive, that is so uniquely human. Horton-Samuel’s Hamlet-esque pose with Toby’s human-brain stage prop while delivering these ruminations was also an effective touch, harking back to the quintessential dramatic exploration of depressive misery without seeming the least bit derivative.

By contrast, Tris and Connie’s struggles with mental health pale slightly before those of their doctor (a nicely unsettling twist from Prebble); however, the electric sparks of love and intoxicated rapture that fly between them more than make up for this. Their portrayal of love as bewitching and easily lost is effective and scarily accurate, as is Tris’s violence and anger when he finds Connie attempting to distance herself from him, showing with pinpoint accuracy the often-overlooked knife edge on which love and hate for a person can balance when emotion reaches an overwhelming fever pitch.

However, the play ends with a display of hope and kindness by Connie. The audience, by this point wrung out by the play’s comprehensive coverage of the whole gamut of human emotion, is left with the unexpectedly uplifting, highly cathartic sensation that, even when it has all gone wrong, and there is no guarantee that ‘everything will be okay’, the love two people feel can make the decision to keep on living worth every minute of the pain that this brings.

Image credit: Daisy Day

Oxford begins human trials for ebola vaccine

News

Thomas Britton

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5th December 2021

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Oxford begins human trials for ebola vaccine

The University of Oxford is beginning the clinical trial stage for its new Ebola vaccine, called ChAdOx1 biEBOV.

The new vaccine uses the same viral vector technology that was pioneered in the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, also developed in Oxford.

The trial, being run and overseen by the Jenner Institute, will have a sample size of 26 volunteer patients, between the ages of 18 and 55. They will receive a single dose of the vaccine and will then be monitored and assessed on several occasions over six months.

We can expect the results from the Phase I trial in the second quarter of 2022, with a further trial set to commence in Tanzania by the end of 2021.

The vaccine targets two of four species of the Ebola virus- the Zaire and Sudan species. Between them, they cause the vast majority of both cases and deaths from Ebola, and the Zaire species has a death rate of between 70 and 90%.

It was the Zaire strain that was most prevalent in the catastrophic West African outbreak of 2014-16 that caused over 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths, primarily in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The ChAdOx1 virus, or Chimpanzee Adenovirus Oxford One, is a weakened and harmless variant of a common cold virus, genetically designed so that it cannot replicate in humans. The use of a chimpanzee virus is so that no human will have any previous immunity to it.

Although there are already two approved vaccines for Ebola, the new vaccine offers several advantages.

Dr Paola Cicconi, Chief Investigator of the Trial, said that similar to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, the Ebola vaccine “can be rapidly manufactured at high volume for low cost, with storage conditions amenable to use in the developing world”.

These factors are all very important since the main market for the vaccine will likely be in sub-Saharan Africa, and especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is facing a renewed outbreak in the North Kivu region.

This vaccine is also unique in being multivalent – targeting multiple variants of the virus. By being able to target both Zaire and Sudan variants, the vaccine can be used in virtually all outbreaks and therefore governments can stockpile it, secure that it will be useful if a new outbreak appears.

It is also at present a single-dose vaccine, which is more beneficial in crises and severe outbreaks than the two-dose vaccinations which take longer to be effective.

Professor Teresa Lambe OBE, the Lead Scientific Investigator, has underlined the continued importance of Ebola vaccines, saying “sporadic Ebolavirus outbreaks still occur in affected countries, putting the lives of individuals- especially frontline health workers- at risk. We need more vaccines to tackle this devastating disease.”

Dr Daniel Jenkin, who is the Principal Investigator of this trial at the Jenner Institute, has emphasized the novelty of this vaccine: “This disease can be caused by several different species of virus and each of these may require a targeted immune response to offer protection.

“We have designed our new vaccine to target the two species of virus that have caused nearly all Ebolavirus outbreaks and deaths, and now look forward to testing this.”

The Jenner Institute, named after the inventor and pioneer of vaccines, Edward Jenner, is funded by Oxford University along with many partners, including the Ministry of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission.

It supports research into vaccines and other treatments for diseases as varied as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, zika, and now-famously, COVID-19.

The ChAdOx1 viral vector that is crucial to this vaccine’s effectiveness has been used in several other projects by the Institute- not just the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, but also for vaccination trials against malaria, MERS, and zika virus.

It was in the aftermath of the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak that ChAdOx1 was first used by researchers from the Jenner Institute to try and prepare for ‘Disease X’, a fictional infection that was used to plan for the next serious epidemic or pandemic.

While Ebola was certainly a greater threat in 2014-16 than it is now, with only very few, sporadic infections across remote regions of Africa, this vaccine could help ensure that no major outbreak happens again and that hundreds or thousands of lives could be saved across West and Central Africa.

Image: Global Panorama/CC BY-SA 2.0 via flickr.com

In Conversation with Amelia Dimoldenberg

Profiles

Prakrit Prasad

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5th December 2021

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In Conversation with Amelia Dimoldenberg

Starting as an ambitious crossover between chicken nuggets and grime, Amelia Dimoldenberg’s YouTube show, Chicken Shop Date, launched her career as an interviewer and presenter at the top of her game. Having now amassed 100 million views and close to one million subscribers, she quite literally ‘dates’ pop culture figures from Ed Sheeran to Maya Jama in chicken shops across the U.K. A hilariously cringey five-minute interview ensues, brought to life by an exquisitely tuned combination of awkward silences, sarcastic wit and unaffected questioning. Who else would ask Jack Harlow if he was able to read, or tell Aitch he “look[s] a bit like a prawn”?

Logging into the zoom call, I half-expect to be met by this same stone-faced, self-professed serial dater I had so enjoyed watching over the years. Instead, I am greeted by almost the antithesis: an incredibly personable, smiling Dimoldenberg sitting in her brightly-lit kitchen.

“I feel like it’s obviously an exaggerated version of myself,” Dimoldenberg explains. “I’m just extending aspects of my personality that, if I pushed them further, would be funny and would get a reaction from the person I’m interviewing, in the best kind of way, that would make for a really entertaining video.”

Dimoldenberg initially created Chicken Shop Date as a written column in a youth club magazine, and was first introduced to grime and rap through fellow members. She then decided to interview artists in order to learn more about their music. Having seen journalists pose the same unoriginal questions to celebrities time after time, Dimoldenberg was keen to do something different: “I wanted to do an interview in a way that you don’t normally do an interview, so I thought I’d do it as a date. I also really wanted to go on a date as well. Then someone said you should go on a date somewhere where you would never normally go to make it fun and that’s how the chicken shop happened. Luckily there’s quite a few in London to go to.”

Unlike traditional media interviews, Dimoldenberg’s show is as much about the interviewer as the interviewee. She attributes her success to people wanting to see how typically composed celebrities manage the gloriously uncomfortable atmosphere that she so effortlessly creates through her ‘chicken girl’ persona. ‘Chicken girl’, of course, being one of the many names she has turned around to in the streets of London, alongside the simple, but effective, ‘CHICKEENN’(spellings may vary).

“I think that people like the show because of my awkwardness. They want to see whatever guest, how they interact with my awkwardness and how it makes them appear. I hope that through my own awkwardness and weirdness, their personality comes out because they’re affronted with something they don’t expect (…) It just makes them act in a different way that actually maybe makes them a bit more relaxed because they’re thinking ‘oh my god at least I’m not as weird as her!’”

With her tremendous success, Dimoldenberg certainly seems to be making ‘awkward’ fashionable, something she tells me is a bit of a conscious mission: “I feel like awkward is a negative term,” she pauses. “If you’re being called awkward it’s not something you’d shout about. But I’m trying to turn it into a positive (…)So many interactions are awkward. Especially dates and just meeting people generally. I think it might be quite nice for people to see someone being awkward and think ‘oh god, I can relate’, or if you can’t relate, then it makes you feel better about yourself,” she trails off in laughter.

As we talk about the filming process, Dimoldenberg explains that a lot of the humour is derived from how the footage is edited, and she’s a wholehearted proponent of ‘less is more’.

“We film for about forty minutes. Minimal is used. That’s the beauty of it really. I watch so much content where I’m like ‘this could be half the length. So much of this stuff is like, not interesting’. That comes from a place of me watching so many things and me being like, ‘I don’t want it to be like that’. If you’re not laughing, what’s the point in even having this clip in it.”

Whilst Dimoldenberg’s content is well-understood and loved in the context of British humour, I wonder how she deals with situations where the person she is interviewing might not quite ‘get it’.

“The ideal with any guest is you want someone that is coming back with something interesting to say.” She pauses briefly, and changes her mind. “No, funny first. In my head I’m saying: ‘say something funny, say something funny, please can this be funny’. And if it’s not funny then at least it should be interesting. And if it’s neither of those then you’re a bit like ‘oh, goodness’. If someone’s sitting opposite me and giving me back one word answers it is tough, but to my advantage with Chicken Shop Date, it thrives off the awkwardness. It’s meant to be a terrible interview and terrible date. It’s spinning it all on its head, like the inverse of what those things should be and that’s where the comedy comes from. So I’m actually pretty lucky that if someone maybe just gives me one word answers I can make that the punch line, make that the ‘thing’ of the interview and that’s funny in its own way.”

So how does Dimoldenberg select the ‘ideal guest’?

“I am very picky. Like everyone is with who they date. It goes through criteria. Are they exciting enough? Is there a buzz around them? Do we think they’re going to be big if they’re not already? Watching previous interviews, do they have charisma? Are they funny? All these different things.”

The more we talk about her career, the more I get a sense that Dimoldenberg is certainly not to be seen as a one-hit wonder. From starring in her own cooking show to presenting a documentary, ‘Meet the Markles’ for Channel 4, she seems keen to diversify her portfolio. Most recently, Dimoldenberg filmed a six-episode investigative series for Dave, called ‘Who Cares?’, posing questions to the British public about topics including the housing crisis, billionaires and fast fashion. How did she manage the transition from the more light-hearted nature of Chicken Shop Date to more serious conversations while maintaining her comedic personality?

“I’m not propositioning them for a date, and I’m not flirting with them on the street. I’d probably get arrested!” Dimoldenberg laughs. “I’m trying to use humour to get something interesting out of the conversation. That, I guess, is the kind of thread between all my work – my tone of voice, the deadpan humour,” she says wisely.

While Dimoldenberg is most well-known for these skills as an interviewer, I wonder whether she has considered making content on her own. Perhaps the recent change in name of her YouTube channel from ‘Chicken Shop Date’ to ‘Amelia Dimoldenberg’ speaks to a desire to establish herself as a comedian in her own right?

“Of course, most of the stuff that I do is opposite someone. I’m interviewing someone and I actually love that. That’s my favourite type of thing to do and that’s what I think I will be doing for a long, long time. As you said, it needs that dynamic and something to riff off. But at the same time, to build my audience and to build my name, I need to be doing stuff on my own. Working with talent is amazing and you get such brilliant content from it, but it also can be such a hassle (…) Maybe it would be easier if I was just vlogging in my bedroom and all I needed was me and my camera and my handbag with all the stuff I was going to show you that’s in it. But I don’t think that’s what I’m interested in making. I’m interested in making iconic pop culture moments, which I feel like I’m kind of doing. I think you need to have celebrities involved. But I think it is important for me to make sure my name stands out on its own.” She pauses deliberately.

“Still, so many people don’t know my name in terms of people that watch Chicken Shop Date. So many people just call me ‘the girl from chicken shop date’ or like on the street they’ll be like ‘CHICKEEN’ or ‘CHICKEN GIRL’ and I will just turn around because I turn around to that now. But more and more I find people are like ‘Amelia!’ and that’s when I know I’m doing something right – when people start to remember my actual name.”

As our conversation draws to a close, she tells me about what’s in store for the rest of the year. In addition to monthly uploads of new Chicken Shop Date episodes, she hopes to continue filming with members of the England football team:

“I’m fully obsessed (…) I would love to do more football episodes but at this point I don’t know if I could because I don’t know if I would be able to control myself and my emotions!”

With plans to write her own screenplay “in the long term”, she’s also taking some time off. We both take a moment to lament the fact that neither of us own a picturesque lake house to which we might go on a writing retreat.

Just before we end the call, I ask the question that I’d been waiting to ask since we started. When are we going to see Drake on Chicken Shop Date? She laughs. It’s no secret that Drake has been her dream date since the show started.

“Drake did slide into my dm’s just before the pandemic hit. That was just an insane thing that happened that I just can’t get over and it’s just incredible and means so much to me that he even watched the show. Fingers and toes crossed. I’m thinking in my head that when he comes back to do another tour, which I’m sure he will, that that’s the perfect time. He’ll be in London. I’ll slide in again: ‘You owe me a favour, Drake. Hello. I’m available.’”

Image Credit: Who Cares? with Amelia Dimoldenberg airs weekly on the Dave YouTube channel. Watch Chicken Shop Date and Amelia’s Cooking Show on Amelia Dimoldenberg’s YouTube.

UrbanObserver

Oxford's oldest independent student newspaper, est. 1920