Thursday, May 22, 2025
Blog Page 311

Another Brick in the Postgrad Wall

Matthew Prudham
-
0
Another Brick in the Postgrad Wall

Right now, as I come to the end of my MSt at Oxford, I have felt as if I’ve been in a sort of no man’s land. I had spent, like many others in master’s courses, most of the Christmas vacation researching, writing and applying for PhD/DPhil places, whilst also carrying on with work – not much of a break, I guess. Yet, as I sit here writing this piece, I have only just found out that my l luck just ran out, and I’ll have to take a gap year before embarking on another application process. 

The question mark since receiving my offers (for which I was incredibly grateful) has been daunting. It hangs over you in moments before going to sleep. I’m not someone who deals well with a lack of a future plan. But it’s exacerbated by the fact that I simply do not know how close I was to securing funding: two institutions informed me (Durham and Oxford) that I was not allocated funding; from the other one, it’s silence after receiving an offer. 

The system is also reliant on students having the means to take a year out; one receives more ‘points’ for a completed master’s degree rather than having one in progress. It does somewhat make sense on a financial viewpoint — funding bodies want to ensure that the money they commit goes to the top candidates — but it also socially discriminates against students from working class backgrounds. I am in a fortunate position where taking year out and moving back home would be an option; but in a subject as middle-class, home-counties, private school-background dominated as Classics, I know there are others for whom this is simply not an option — a lack of a safe home space, a necessity to support oneself. For a person in their position, the silence they receive could be even more distressing; you can find out at any point — today, tomorrow, or in mid-July — and then suddenly find yourself jettisoned into a thrilling academic career; or you could keep hoping for that one email or phone call, and it never comes. The mental health toll is sizeable. 

Some do say that ‘if you don’t hear back after a certain date, please assume you’re not receiving our funding’, as if it’s acceptable. It’s certainly not. I understand that these funding sites are greatly oversubscribed, but all it takes is a simple, respectful BCC send-to-all  because these systems can end up being delayed, especially during a pandemic with panels ending up meeting virtually rather than in-person. I’d much rather have my hopes crushed properly and politely rather than them withering out, several months later. 

There’s another health aspect at hand. You could spend another four, five hours a day applying for additional funding, sending emails doubtful of a response, and scouring the internet for what’s available. Again, that’s inherently discriminatory and ableist. I, as someone with a long-standing epilepsy condition, cannot risk staying up until 2 or 3am, night after night, in this scholastic espionage — I need my sleep! That means I’m definitively at a worse chance of securing funding — since I’m not able to spend the hours required online. It should be readily accessible, with clear guides.

Indeed, having spoken to a few professors and staff in the faculty, they aren’t even clear about how the system works — even though they’ve managed to receive funding. Yet, they also know the system needs to change, that master’s students should be able to progress to the next level without this secondment back home. This is a way is comforting yet troubling; for sure, they sympathise and may have endured the same journey as myself, but I’m not sure when this change will occur. 

That being said, I’m fortunate at least that some potential funding options may have, if I were (incredibly?) lucky, come my way. Yet, to even reach this step, I had to go via a master’s. Master’s funding is even harder to come by; as funding has been continually slashed from 2011 onwards — when the Arts and Humanities Research Council announced that they were cutting funded master’s courses from 607 to 490.  That’s not a lot. My course alone takes on 25 students, and there is a wide smorgasbord of potential arts and humanities courses at Oxford alone, from Latin American Studies to Film Aesthetics, all vying with hundreds of other UK institutions for these grants. Some institutions are trying to make these courses affordable; Durham, from where I (virtually) graduated in 2020, offers a 25% alumni discount on all its courses, which are significantly cheaper than those offered at Oxford (the price for my current course goes above the maximum loan threshold). Again, therefore — and this is a current theme on master’s discourse online —, it is restrictive to those who can affordto have family support or who balance with their either full-time or part-time master’s workload, impressively, with a part-time job.  

Is there hope for change in the humanities, as the current Government aims to marginalise arts and humanities degrees, despite the fact that the vast majority of the current cabinet graduated from such courses? It’s hard to say yes. But, a more open system, where funding options are clear, where rejection is forthcoming, would lead to fewer students congregating in the virtual halls of The Student Room, wondering what is going on amongst the (currently virtual) decision-making panels. 

Image credit: Billy Watson Photography / License: CC BY-NC

A question of consent: sexual assault in Oxford

Anonymous
-
0
A question of consent: sexual assault in Oxford

CW: Sexual Assault, violence, rape.

Some time ago, I went home with a Tinder date and in the middle of our sexual encounter, coming as a complete surprise to me, he choked me. We tend to refer to this action as choking, probably because calling it strangulation sounds so much more sinister. But it is strangulation, and it is dangerous. I have no intention of kink-shaming anyone – consenting adults can do what they like behind closed doors – but on this occasion, I was never given the opportunity to consent. At the time, I sort of shrugged it off as just one of those bad sexual encounters – the ones where you never said no, but you never said yes, either. Perhaps it wouldn’t haunt me at all if it weren’t for the wildly different reactions of two friends to the story, and my subsequent research through which I learned that strangulation is the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40, that victims can continue to suffer symptoms days and even weeks after the fact, and that people being strangled or ‘choked’ can lose consciousness in as little as four seconds which indicates at the least a mild brain injury. Then again, perhaps it would.

The first friend I told was a fellow woman, and I presented it as a somewhat funny anecdote about the perils of one-night-stands. Her response was first to ask if I was okay. Up until she asked, I hadn’t stopped to wonder if I was okay. It wasn’t exactly fun, but I hadn’t died, and I wasn’t sure that I had been assaulted – I had consented to everything else that happened. I relayed this to my friend, and she told me how sorry she was that I’d had the misfortune to match with this man, and assured me that he absolutely should have gotten consent before throttling me. I realised that if our positions were reversed I would be saying exactly the same things to her, which is when I started to think she might be right. 

The next person I told happened to be a male friend, and his response was very different. I mentioned the incident as an aside again, this time adding that it had made me nervous because it made me think that consent wasn’t important to this guy. The interaction that followed was essentially an interrogation. ‘Did you say no?’ ‘Did you actually feel threatened or was it just a kink you don’t like?’ ‘If you felt threatened why didn’t you leave straight after?’ Reading these questions, some people might be feeling some second-hand anger, some people are probably thinking they’re entirely valid. When initially reading them, I was angry, because I had just come from a conversation receiving nothing but sympathy and without being asked a single question about what had happened – without being doubted. After sleeping on it, I started to think they were completely valid questions. I started to doubt myself.

Some time ago, I went home with a Tinder date, and in between making out and going down on him, he put his hand around my throat and choked me. I’d never experienced this before, and I was scared. I didn’t know how to respond. Then suddenly his hand was gone and we were kissing again and I figured maybe it was a random one-off and he’d realised from my face that I didn’t enjoy it. Not that much later, while he was fucking my mouth, he choked me again, for a lot longer this time.

I remember telling myself not to panic, that he would surely let go soon like last time or orgasm and stop, all while wondering if I would die, if he knew enough to make sure I wouldn’t. This may sound melodramatic to people who are fans of a little breath play – but remember this was my first time having any form of constriction around my throat and I had met the man strangling me just a couple of hours before. Furthermore, I now know the only way to guarantee you don’t kill someone by choking them is not to choke them – people have died from just a few seconds of choking. There is no medically safe amount of time you can choke someone. Did he know that? The next little part of the evening is still blurry to me, but, at some point, he did let go and had his orgasm. I don’t remember what was going through my mind at that point – definitely some relief, and still some shock. I stayed a little longer, had a smoke with him, and then said I needed to get home. 

Where my female friend immediately empathised with the fear I felt, the fear that froze me in place, desperate not to escalate anything, my male friend didn’t understand how I could have felt threatened, felt my life in danger even, but not once said no and not immediately left once I was released. I told him it was pretty hard to say no when someone had either their hand around your throat or their penis inside it, but I knew that saying no hadn’t actually occurred to me. Or rather, it had occurred to me, but I had immediately dismissed it as a possibility because maybe he would stop, maybe he would even apologise – but maybe he wouldn’t stop. Maybe he would get angry. If I stayed quiet I could hope he would finish soon and let me go and didn’t mean me any harm, but if I told him to stop and he didn’t, then I was being attacked. To my male friend, this was an unfounded fear that wasn’t reflected in me staying for a smoke with the guy who assaulted me. To my female friend, this made perfect sense.

At the time, my male friend’s words prompted me to place a lot of blame on myself. If I didn’t tell this man to stop, how could he have known how uncomfortable he was making me? Since then, I have also been prompted to research this issue more and found out very quickly just how common non-consensual choking is. Two years ago, a study found that a third of UK women under the age of 40 have experienced unwanted choking, slapping, spitting or gagging during otherwise consensual sex. Though we commonly hear ‘fight or flight’ presented as the body’s only instinctive reactions to fear, there are several others, and ‘freezing’ is the most common response to incidences of sexual assault. Carine M. Mardorossian observed back in 2002 that “…only gendered crimes generate the kind of victim-blaming responses rape and domestic violence produce. Whereas forgetting to set the antiburglary alarm or getting robbed despite ‘the neighbourhood watch’ does not exculpate the thieves, getting raped always elicits an investigation into the ways in which a victim might ultimately have been responsible for what happened.” – and has anything really changed since then?

In 2018, a seventeen-year-old girl’s underwear was famously used as evidence against her in a rape trial – the man accused was ultimately acquitted. Perhaps the man I encountered couldn’t have known how much he scared me without me asking him to stop strangling me – but since when is strangulation such an integral part of sex that it doesn’t require specific consent from your partner? Porn consumption has been linked to the normalisation of what was previously considered more violent, unusual sexual practices but does this absolve the man I met? Maybe he meant me no harm. Maybe he thought choking was just a normal part of sexual intimacy. Does that make it my fault? Does that make it no one’s fault that I was subject to such violence and panic and fear? Why do we have this tendency to focus on what victims, usually women, were doing at the time? Because the reasons behind the man committing the act of sexual violence are understood. It’s as simple as that.

The male sexual appetite is understood and sympathised with, and far too normalised – rape and sexual assault should be an aberration. We should be studying serial rapists the same way we study serial killers. We should be considering one-time rapists the same way we consider one-time murderers. There are endless academic studies, interviews, novels and TV shows about the psyche and motivation of the murderer. There is nothing comparable with sexual predators. Our society permits, even encourages, men to focus on their own sexual gratification at the expense of their partner’s enjoyment, consent and safety.

It’s true that I never asked him to stop – but why did he start?

The Time-Travelling of Television

George Adams
-
0
The Time-Travelling of Television

TV shows can act as time capsules. Gossip Girl takes us back to the early 2010s, Friends acts as a souvenir of the 90s, and Peaky Blinders even transports us to the 1920s. These worlds are comforting and familiar; they make us feel in control. The characters in these shows become your friends – they are often more attractive than your friends and do more exciting things than your friends and have an inhuman capacity for devastating one-liners and comic timing that it is not humanly possible for your friends to possess. Yes, these shows are a little escapist, but right now a little escapism is no bad thing.

In a Back-to-the-Future-II-type-way, some period TV shows can take you back to two different eras – both to the era when they were made and the era when they are set. This is extremely useful for cross-generational appeal and profit margins – nostalgia is pretty powerful stuff. This type of time-travelling series is extremely popular, including shows such as Mad Men, and more recently Stranger Things and The Queen’s Gambit.

It is no secret that Mad Men does this kind of thing particularly well – depicting an advertising agency on Madison Avenue in the stylish but sexist era of the 1960s. The plot is rewardingly slow-burning, following creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm) as he navigates the ups and downs of his complex personal and professional lives. The sets and costumes and soundtrack all feel excitingly authentic – watching the show is like seeing the 1960s through the critical lens of the twenty-first century.

Like Mad Men, Gossip Girl also acts as a time capsule for the era in which it was created. As a (somewhat guilty) fan of Gossip Girl for many years, I keep being drawn back to the cutely constructed capsule of twenty-first century life in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The show is a fantasy-world of super-rich teenagers narrated by the blogger Gossip Girl, whose mysterious identity is pretty much the show’s MacGuffin. As a time capsule of the early twenty-first century, it is fair to say that Gossip Girl is hedonistically upper-class but still very good fun. The show embodies the nostalgic wish of some young people for the pre-smartphone life of the preceding generation – Gossip Girl cleverly parodies the possibilities of social media for Big-Brother-type surveillance. The sequel planned for release this year will reinvent the show in the 2020s with a new and more diverse cast, introducing a new generation to the high-octane lives of the Manhattan schoolkids.

Although lesser watched today than Gossip Girl, the cult show Twin Peaks is another example of the time capsule phenomenon. Because there are three seasons (two from the 90s and a third made in 2017) Twin Peaks reflects the idiosyncrasies of two very different eras. It is best, though confusingly, described as a kind of Lynchian small-town murder-mystery surrealist-horror. The plot hinges on the murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the investigation headed by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and anyone who has watched it will agree that is seriously creepy and sweet and funny all at once. It’s genre-defining legacy is still apparent today – the contemporary series Stranger Things is very much indebted to Twin Peaks. As a time capsule it features a kind of 50s-inspired 90s aesthetic, with prodigious coffee-drinking, doughnut-and-cherry-pie-eating, as well as fir trees and owls and all other kinds of creepiness elevated by a beautifully eerie soundtrack. Travelling back in time to the world of Twin Peaks is like being in a dream you don’t want to wake up from.

All in all, these three series are only a small example of the time-capsule content available at the present moment. The truth is that travelling to different time periods might even give us a better awareness of the idiosyncrasies of our own era – an era which, for all its shortcomings, could well be the golden age of the television series as we know it, with more streaming platforms and content creators than ever before. It is difficult to tell which TV shows might be associated with the 2020s in the future. The popularity of the shows The Queen’s Gambit and Lupin might suggest that the reign of the white male protagonist in television series is finally over (think Peaky Blinders, Mad Men and Breaking Bad). No doubt this move in television to represent the narratives of people of different genders and ethnicities is a positive sign of the times in the 2020s, and evidence, at least, that we are moving in the right direction.

Image Credits: Matthew Paul Argall via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Review: “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde//Trinity Players.

Hari Bravery
-
0
Review: “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde//Trinity Players.

As we sluggishly unlock, it is easy to speak of returning to the ‘magic’ of live theatre and other such clichés. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that I was blown away by the quality of the Trinity Player’s recent production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. To briefly summarise, the play is one of miscommunication and misunderstanding, a farce in which two women find that they can only fall in love with people by the name of Ernest, having already been proposed to by men who are not in earnest when they profess that Ernest is there name. Too many earnests, but that’s kind of the point. Through the discovery of family secrets, journeys from the city to the country and a fair bit of ‘Bunburying,’ the situation is comically resolved.

I was lucky enough to have tickets to the 5th of June Saturday matinée performance. This was not due to my own foresight, but rather due to my friend’s obsession with procrastinating by seeking opportunities for future procrastination. Perhaps my opinions on the play were already flavoured by the weather of the day, which was gloriously sunny, though with a slight breeze which consistently managed to blow down the string quartet’s sheet music. Anyway, we arrived at the austere gates of Trinity college – wine in hand, sun-cream slathered – and made our way into the President’s Garden to the sound of string music, where the play was to be performed.

The set was minimal, limited to two tables and two chairs, with the string quartet off to the left. The audience was arranged in a semi-circular affair; a mishmash of tables, chairs and picnic blankets that seemed to pre-empt the messy plotlines of the play to come. Trinity College’s President’s Garden was far from empty, with tickets for all showings of the production being sold out.

As chapel bells tolled three o’clock, the garden gradually began to fill with the characters of Wilde’s play, adorned with vibrantly coloured costumes brilliantly designed by Chloe Dootson-Graube, also responsible for art.

And what a cast of characters it was. Eugenie Nevin and George Diggle returned characterful performances as the minor characters Miss Prism and Lane/Merriman respectively. The play’s explicitly comic characters of Dr Chasuble and Lady Bracknell were similarly performed with distinction. Lorcan Cudlip Cook’s bumbling, wizened Dr Chasuble, with his white hair and right-angled body posture, was particularly successful, with the affected quavering of his vocals drawing plenty of laughs from the audience. With a voice that overflowed with enough rolled Rs and brittle articulation to put any royal to shame, Gracie Oddie-James’ Lady Bracknell was a pleasure to watch, evoking the aura of the elderly aunt borrowed from nineteenth-century fiction without resorting to pantomime. Henry Calcutt’s performance as Jack Worthing (one of the two ‘Ernests’) abounded with energy, and the chemistry between him and Abi Watkinson’s Gwendolen Fairfax was thoroughly believable. Watkinson’s Gwendolen, with her carrot-coloured dress, was brilliant, embodying a stubbornness that played excellently against the gushing confusion of Calcutt’s Jack. Grace de Souza too embodied the young Cecily Cardew excellently, delivering lines with an innocence and naïve fantasy that fitted her character’s status as Jack Worthing’s ward. Yet, the standout performance of the show, for me at least, came from Cormac Diamond in the role of Algernon Moncrieff, the other ‘Ernest’ of the play. Perhaps it’s just his ginger shock of hair, but there was something Redmayne-like in the mixture of timidity and poise with which Diamond delivered his lines, always feeling comfortable in the heightened language of Wilde’s dialogue. The cast as an ensemble really were excellent, and all should be praised for the performances that they gave.

I really can’t praise what the directors Rosie Robinson and Costi Levy, alongside producer Daisy Gosal and assistant producer James Waterman, have done enough. Battling a tricky set of lockdown restrictions over both Hilary and Trinity term, the team have produced a fully realised in-person production, for which this weekend’s weather – it seems – rewarded them. Couched in the presidential gardens of Trinity college and coming amidst end of year exams for many, this play really does provide what its subtitle promises: ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’. It’s the sort of production that would make even the most timid want to get involved in Oxford drama – and that’s in earnest.

Oxford University opening a vaccination centre for students

Charlie Hancock
-
0
Oxford University opening a vaccination centre for students

Oxford University will operate a vaccination centre from Wednesday 23 June for undergraduate and taught postgraduate students who are yet to receive their first dose. All students, including postgraduate research students, will be able to receive a vaccine from the centre at the University Club on Mansfield Road from Monday 28 June.

The centre will open at 10am on its first day of operation, and will then be open from 9:30am to 8:30pm until Sunday 4 July. It will provide a walk-in service, with no need to book in advance.

Students are asked to wear a face covering, and bring their university card with them. If students are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, they must not attend. Although students will not be turned away if they don’t know their NHS number, they are advised to find it via the NHS lookup service before they arrive.

The centre will administer 240 vaccines a day. Students are advised to check of Oxford Students Twitter feed for the availability of vaccines before they set off.

In an email to students where the vaccine centre was unveiled, the University reiterated the importance of limiting the spread of the virus at the end of term. 13 positive PCR tests were recorded by the testing service between 14-18 June. The email also reminded students to take two lateral flow tests a week, and take a test before attending social events.

Further information on getting vaccinated can be found on the student health pages, including information for UK and international students who may need to get their second dose at another centre. Further information on the vaccine centre can be found here.

Image: Toa Heftiba via unsplash.com

The price of Citizenship: The inherent britishness of bureaucracy

Vlad Popescu
-
0
The price of Citizenship: The inherent britishness of bureaucracy

January 19th and I’m standing outside Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton. It’s pouring with rain on us as we’re queuing outside, waiting to go in. I check I have all I need, trying not to get my documents wet. I need my Romanian passport and my invitation to the ceremony. It’s the Citizenship Ceremony, where we will swear oaths to declare our loyalty to the Queen and all her heirs to the throne. We also swear we’ll be good, lawful citizens, but my impression is that there is less emphasis on that part. We go in, and although there’s less pomp and ceremony owing to the pandemic, we do our oaths, listen to the anthem and shake hands with the Mayor of Lambeth. I am now a citizen of the United Kingdom. Or at least that’s how it was supposed to go.

In reality, this ceremony was digital. They announced this change from an in-person affair only a few days before, as the winter coronavirus surge was still going strong at that time. Even so, my citizenship saga came to a happy end. Anyhow, I’m not sure shaking hands with the Lambeth Mayor was such an occasion. I was not even aware my London Borough had its own ceremonial Mayor. Several months later, there is a British Passport in my hands. It’s blue and it’s my own. What has been a very long journey has come to an end. It’s been well over a year since I’ve started the process of becoming a British Citizen, and the total cost has been some two thousand pounds. But the price of citizenship is not just time and money – it’s submitting yourself to a strange and tiring process, the saga of immigration bureaucracy wearing you out. Along the way I’ve also learned several things about the British government and how it treats prospective citizens – I’ve also learned very few people here at Oxford seem to know anything at all about it.

There was once a time when our greatest worry was not a killer virus. During my first term at Oxford, the focus was on the 2019 General Election. A typical conversation involved being asked who I would vote for, explaining that I’m not a citizen and what followed was usually shock that I was not a member of the electorate after living in Britain for ten years. At the time I found it quite strange that the UK’s academic cream of the crop would seemingly be so unaware of what is a reality for millions of people in this country. According to a House of Commons Library report on migration statistics, in December 2019 some 9% of the UK population was recorded as having a different non-British nationality. In other words, out of a 9.5 million born-abroad population, 6.2 million were non-citizens, a group I belonged to until recently. Voting in local elections is generally allowed, but general elections not so much. For a general election, along with age and other requirements, you must be a British or Irish citizen. A common theme in 2019 was then: ‘Oh, but you’ve lived here so long you might as well be a citizen!’. But it doesn’t quite work that way. If part of the Labour Manifesto in 2019 was allowing residency rather than citizenship-based voting, the story is currently and has been for a long time,t very different. Who could apply to become a citizen, and who can actually carry it out is under very strict controls with a wide array of obstacles to go through. The reality is that millions are left without a direct say into a government whose policies have a pervasive effect on their lives. From dictating the rights to work, access to social services, designing the process around visas and acquiring an indefinite leave-to-remain, and even the potential looming threat of deportation; representation in such matters is a more fickle process. And ultimately more slippery than that is acquiring British citizenship. Considering this university produces so much of Britain’s elite, I thought it would be worthwhile to try and inform Oxonians of what it takes.

In December 2019, the number of EU nationals in the UK was estimated to be around 3.7 million, however by December 2020, there were nearly 5 million applicants to the EU Settlement Scheme, which shows the European population has been underestimated. I bring this up, because it is with the Settlement scheme that my citizenship process began, and indeed a process quite different for non-citizens with origins from elsewhere. Ever since the Brexit referendum in 2016, European migration to Britain has slowed down, and many have returned to Europe. I cannot speak for immigrants everywhere, but an enduring sense of anxiety looming in the back of my mind has been fears of a recalcitrant government revoking residency rights. What would follow would entail deportation to a country I feel rather distant from and would struggle to adjust to. A sense of dread set in on that fateful morning on June 24th 2016 as I heard the results and then set off to school to finish my GCSEs, which felt like an omen. At that point I had been living in the UK some six years, and to be sent packing would have felt like being uprooted. But this fear was alleviated when news of the Settlement Scheme came out – ‘settled status’, or an indefinite leave to remain, would be available for application providing a continuous proof of residency for at least five years could be established. My family’s application in thist was quite straightforward – filled with delays and complicated online forms, but straightforward. The scheme has been criticised in its own right, from lacking a physical certificate to prove a settled status, which produces its own problems at the borders. As part of possessing settled status, application for citizenship becomes legible for those who meet the five-year residency requirement. From there a whole other host of other conditions, tests and bureaucratic hurdles lie in the way.

According to the Home Office website, in the statistical year ending March 2020, here were 165,693 applications for British citizenship, with a marked increase in the proportion of European citizens applying at 27%, compared to 12% in 2016. It seems that Brexit served this push for citizenship, for those thousands as much as for my family. Although my actual application was submitted in August 2020, I had decided the previous summer, falling into the previous statistical year, and for good reason. Out of those 165,693 applications, 163,624 were granted. This seems a high proportion, but it’s important to give good consideration to your likelihood to succeed, because the hoops to jump through are many. In the end, my family decided only I should apply. In terms of money, this was already a high cost- for my parents to do as well would have been collectively very expensive for us. For many, the price of citizenship is prohibitively expensive. Since 2018, the naturalisation fee for adults has been £1,330. By comparison, in 2007 when Romania joined the EU, the fee was £655. Of course, this is only for the application itself – other fees, such as for booking the various exams and so on are not included, and the overall cost turns out much higher by the end. This is further aggravated by the fact that an unsuccessful application, including the costs, is thrown out the window. Re-applying carries the same price, to appeal the decision carries its own fees. Even the ceremony where monarchism is imposed upon you carries such a penalty. If you miss it, it may be re-booked, but otherwise without completing it your application is overturned – and there is a deadline to go through with it, typically three months in virus-free times. This points to a common theme already, of the hostility towards the wider groups of people not born here. And particularly, towards those lacking the thousands to spare or those filling the ranks of lower-income ‘essential workers’, which have been given so much lip-service during the pandemic. Telling a friend of the difficulties in applying, they remarked quite funnily that those migrants in occupations the economy would most require would find it very difficult to become citizens, as opposed to an Oxford undergrad like me. Reflecting on it, I find that the point is the government is happy enough to have them exploited for their labour, not to give them the vote.

Nevertheless, my journey began around autumn 2019, just before university began. One of the perks of a blue passport is not having to provide proof for your continuous residency in the UK for everything. From UCAS to other applications, I was a common fixture at my secondary school’s reception to ask for letters confirming that I had in fact been attending the school the whole of my secondary education, which fell in quite neatly with the usual five-year requirement. This is one of the requirements for naturalisation, assuming the application follows settled status. For an indefinite leave to remain granted to those from outside the EU, many of the requirements for such follow the same as for a citizenship application, with the addition that following the granting of the leave they continue to reside for a year before applying to become full-fledged citizens. I too, had to wait at least a year following my settlement under the EU scheme, but for the citizenship application I had yet again to prove my continuous residency. A letter from school could only provide for four of those years, so I had to get a letter from my College showing my years of attendance here. When I submitted my application in August 2020, I was told it could take up to six months to process it. Mine was processed within a few weeks, although my invitation to a ceremony took longer due to renewed lockdowns. I could not help but feel my being a student here helped in this – I can’t imagine many applicants come with letters from Oxford. At this moment of it being accepted, I could not help but feel that despite the costs and stress of the whole process, mine was still from a position of relative comfort. And looking back on all the other stages, I started to recognise this as well. 

An episode where I recognised this well was during the famous Life in the UK Test, coming with its own £50 fee for what is a very odd questionnaire. Announced in 2002 and introduced for naturalisation and eventually settlement in 2005 and 2007 respectively, the test is a very strange beast. It’s been constantly criticised again and again the newspapers as being factually incorrect, not actually providing any incentive for learning, containing questions on knowledge the average Brit would not know about, or just being plain ambiguous on the meanings of Britishness. The test is based off information in an official booklet, which is a jumble of various things from history, to cultural events, Olympics gold medallists, or the UK’s different nations structure. The questions are primarily British history, and by ‘British’ the focus is obviously on England, which meant that as a History student I found it very easy and no trouble at all, which I doubt many of the other applicants could relate to when there are such questions as who was declared Lord Protector, or just very outdated British culture such as who directed The 39 Steps. I doubt the next person on the street is well acquainted with the 1930s catalogue of Hitchcock films. But I could not help but find the history section fascinating in the narratives it created and the image of Britain it pushed onto prospective citizens that must learn the booklet inside out, people which probably lack much complex history education unlike snotty Oxford students. 

The booklet has gone through three revisions since its introduction, but it seems that regardless of whether Labour or Conservatives are in charge, there is little room for a nuanced look on Britain’s history, and even less room for its unsavoury aspects bar the occasional acknowledgement here and there. In a political atmosphere where the National Trust daring to inform visitors to country houses with historical links to Atlantic slavery causes a culture war and major backlash, Chapter Three, ‘A long and illustrious history’, fits in very well. Ireland is mentioned here and there, with some unfortunate rebellions and potato crops failing, the Ulster Plantation being glossed over, and no mention of illustrious England desolating the island in the Tudor and Stuart periods and causing famines – no mention of the laissez faire approach to famine relief during the Irish famine and maintaining grain exports from Ireland while millions hungered. Empire is treated much the same. The Boer War in South Africa gets mentioned, but for all the mentions of industrial innovations during the Victorian period, there are no references to Britain’s illustrious innovation in being the first to deploy concentration camps in the modern sense in the same war. Discussing the slave trade fares better, but the focus is on its eventual abolition from 1807 to 1833, with no mention of the plantation owners receiving major reparations for the “cost” of emancipation. Inventions, kings and queens and Empire nostalgia occupy the history section, making a clumsy but clearly triumphalist and glossy narrative with mentions of an atrocity here and there, those mentions muted enough to imply unfortunate accidents which British prowess can always overcome and otherwise don’t stain this illustrious story. I can’t help but wonder if future editions will just sing the Empire’s praise without any self-restraint at all. For historians, writing history is complicated stuff; for the government it isn’t.

An equally expensive but more amusing episode was proving I knew English. The requirement seems reasonable, but the conditions seem like another occasion for prospective citizens to be fleeced for their money. GCSEs and A Levels don’t count, and only a completed degree is proof. Instead, a certificate is required, a certificate acquired through a £65 speaking and listening exam which consists of a five minute chat with the examiner. You pick in advance what topic you would like to discuss, and deciding to liven up these bored bureaucrats’ conversations, I decided to speak about Oxford. The examiner was very surprised indeed and towards the end of those five minutes, she asked why I was having to do this test. I replied quite simply ‘Bureaucracy’. What else?

The most difficult episode in this saga was the naturalisation referees, where luck saved the day. A legal website I browsed at the time made note that the requirement for two referees seems more like being induced into a country club than the process for citizenship. Signing some forms and potentially being called by the Home Office, the referees must be British Citizens in an approved list of professions. That same website noted that this is usually the point of struggle for most applicants – the profession list. From teachers and doctors to CEOs and even MPs, the list is obviously exclusive for the professional, middle and upper-class sort. Essentially, I got lucky – one of my old teachers at school agreed to referee for me, while I discovered one of my friends’ parent fit the bill. They happily refereed for me, but it felt quite denigrating in having to bother them so they could confirm I would be a good citizen and not a terrorist. But otherwise, I would have been left in the dust, as are many with no personal acquaintance with anyone in these professions. And the point is clear in its favouring of those with connections and those with very high incomes. The citizenship process is designed to be as prohibitive as possible, to discourage and block as many applicants as possible. I can only see it as a wider extension of the Hostile Environment policy, which despite its stated aim of targeting those without leave to remain, denigrates and abuses all those with migrant origins, as the Windrush scandal has shown again and again.

As I finished my Life in the UK test, I was preparing to leave the examination hall. At the doorway I stopped and looked back around for a moment. I had finished in around ten minutes, while the other applicants were still going at it. Many were middle-aged and the only thing we seemed to have in common as we registered earlier was thick accents. I looked around and wondered what their occupations were, what were they doing with life as they lived here in Britain. And I left wondering why it was necessary they should know about Henry VIII’s wives. Would they not be worthy citizens otherwise?

Artwork by Rachel Jung 

UFOs, Space Baboons, and Masculinity

Wang Sum Luk
-
0
UFOs, Space Baboons, and Masculinity

Somehow, “Pentagon confirms UFOs may exist” barely registers as news. It’s a shame, since our cultural obsession with the great unknown of outer space makes for fascinating fiction, such as James Gray’s Ad Astra, a film about an obsessive quest to discover alien life that meditates on themes of stoicism and masculinity. But you don’t need to just watch slow-moving (some would say boring) arthouse sci-fi for complex themes. That’s why I’m pairing Ad Astra in this article with Flash Gordon—a gaudy, silly movie about a football player fighting aliens on the planet Mongo—to show how both use space as the backdrop to dissect our assumptions about masculinity.

In Ad Astra, the protagonist Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is a hyper-competent astronaut with a pulse rate that never goes over 80—but the first shot of him is also slowly revealed to be behind a sheet of glass, our first sign that this calm comes at the cost of some essential element of human contact. His unflinching stoicism makes the challenges he faces, from Moon pirates to an antimatter explosion, look minor in comparison. But McBride’s real obstacles are ultimately psychological ones. The film has an infamous and somewhat jarring scene where Roy fights a baboon in zero-gravity; John Axelrad, one of the film’s editors, suggests in an interview that it represents that “primal component of us”, the animal part of our minds that snap in the isolation of space. It’s a reminder that, however machine-like and mission-focused Roy tries to be, there are other facets of his psyche that he’s buried deep down. And in that way, it’s perfect foreshadowing for how Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), Roy’s father and the movie’s antagonist, has lost his mind in space, and how the same begins to happen to Roy.

Roy McBride’s professionalism and poise is a facade, and the film is about peeling back that shell. He’s good at his job, but not even he can do everything right, and Roy racks up a significant body count throughout the film, with the director calling him an “angel of death”. Each of these deaths weigh on him, a reminder that he’s not quite the steely-eyed mission man he wants to be. And as the film continues, we see where he gets it from—James Gray calls Clifford McBride an “ogre father”, a man so caught up in wanting to find alien life that he coldly admits that he never loved his son or wife. Both father and son are so obsessed by their respective missions that they become inhuman, although Roy manages to recognize this error before it destroys him. The film makes the human cost of this obsessive stoicism clear, laying out the danger of confusing these masculine archetypes for reality.

In contrast to the grounded and oh-so-serious Ad Astra, Flash Gordon is a movie that knows how ridiculous it is. The film may be about protecting Earth from destruction, but the brief glimpse of normalcy before the film’s plot kicks in—a grey airfield where the main characters do nothing—is clearly supposed to be less interesting than the garish planets and strange creatures we see later. This rejection of the “normal” is best described as camp, a sensibility which Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on Camp” defines as “a love for the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration”. Every part of the movie is over-the-top, but played with complete sincerity. Characters are moved by powerful soap-opera emotions, grand passions of love and honour, and every moment of the movie—especially the ridiculous ones—are performed with total seriousness.

This is perhaps what makes Flash Gordon such an excellent exploration of masculinity. Flash Gordon is a charming all-American jock, a himbo before the word existed to describe men like him. He’s surrounded by other outsize masculine archetypes, from Prince Barin, the Errol Flynn-esque swashbuckler, to Vultan the boisterous warrior, and Ming the Merciless, who is a perfectly flamboyant evil overlord. And yes, this sounds like it’d be a shallow, boring story at odds with a cultural climate reckoning with the flaws in male stereotypes—but the point is exactly that these characters are all stereotypes. We don’t just laugh at what the characters do, we also laugh at who they are. These characters, from the outrageously masculine heroes to the effeminate villains, are all as artificial and campy as the film’s style, impossible to confuse with something that could exist in reality.

Ad Astra takes its time showing us the darkness that the aggrandizement of male competence hides, with the search for alien life ultimately hiding flaws that start closer to home, where words like “competence” and “stoicism” are dangerous barriers to emotional honesty. While it tries to unpack stereotypes, Flash Gordon throws them in your face, a (probably unintentional) portrayal of how artificial and ultimately silly all of these visions of manhood are. These movies might seem to focus on what lies beyond in the far reaches of space, but they also explore how strange these expectations of masculinity really are, and how they’re as alien to real life as extraterrestrial tyrants and space baboons.

Asylum Welcome to host alternative Oxford tour for community leaders during Refugee Week 2021

Joshua Low and Yan Chen
-
0
Asylum Welcome to host alternative Oxford tour for community leaders during Refugee Week 2021

Asylum Welcome, an Oxford-based charity for refugees and asylum seekers, is planning to take local councillors and community leaders on an alternative walking tour of Oxford on Friday 18th June. The tour is one of a series of events in Oxford marking Refugee Week, a UK-wide celebration of the contributions, creativity, and resilience of refugees, held from 14th June until 2021 World Refugee Day on 20th June. 

Volunteers at Asylum Welcome with refugee status will lead the guided walk, giving community and local political leaders a glimpse into ‘their Oxford’ by describing the contemporary experience and challenges of a refugee arriving in Oxford. They will also share about organisations and locations that are vital for people building new lives in Oxfordshire. 

Razan, a tour guide, hopes to use the walk to broaden the discussion about refugee status. “Granting a refugee status is the least we can give to someone who has fled war, fear, torture, and suppression,” she said, going on to state that “This is a human matter not a political one, and it should be discussed and defended all around the earth not only in parliaments.”

The walk is held in line with the main theme of Refugee Week, ‘We Cannot Walk Alone’, which is inspired by Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The theme aims to “celebrate how families and communities have come together” over the last year and to remind the public how they can support one another to ‘create inclusive and resilient communities”. 

The activities of this year’s Refugee Week take place against the backdrop of potential enormous change in the landscape for refugees in the UK, as the Home Office plans a significant overhaul of its immigration and asylum systems. Asylum Welcome has challenged the Home Office’s proposed New Plan for Immigration since it was put forward in March 2021. The organisation is against the plan’s punitive measures against ‘illegal immigration’ as the UK government proposes for the first time ever to brand an asylum-seeker ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ based on their route of arrival. “With the Walk, we want to create a tangible link between national policy and local constituents,” said Dr Hari Reed, Policy and Advocacy Coordinator at Asylum Welcome. 

Supported by a small core staff and more than 120 volunteers, Asylum Welcome serves over 1,700 clients per year. A host of other events during Refugee Week will involve the organisation. At Gloucester Green Market on Wednesday 16th June, Asylum Welcome held a fundraiser and lent its support to the launch of a photo exhibition at the Old Fire Station, a collaboration between fellow refugee charity Refugee Resource and photographer Phillipa James. The exhibition, also titled ‘We Cannot Walk Alone’, features portraits of refugee women and explores themes of trauma, the inner and outer self, and societal expectations. 

Asylum Welcome staff and volunteers have also been carrying a giant orange heart around Oxford during the week to collect messages of support and solidarity with asylum seekers and refugees, as well as distributing orange heart stickers. The orange heart, a symbol of compassion and support for refugees, is the logo for Together with Refugees, a coalition of more than 200 national and local organisations embracing these principles which was formed in May 2021. 

Nicky Barnetson, Education and Employment Coordinator at Asylum Welcome, explains that the design takes inspiration from both the Refugee Flag, conceived by Syrian artist and refugee Yara Said, and the colour of lifejackets. “Oxford has a heart, it’s orange, and it’s growing”, Barnetson describes. “We want to tell people, ‘We want you here.'” The giant heart made an appearance at Gloucester Green Market on Wednesday and will be displayed at Headington Market on Saturday 19th June. 

Other events during Refugee Week will take diverse forms, including a music evening, a paper puppet collage workshop, presentations, and talks. 

At the University of Oxford, Mansfield College and Somerville College will also host the Oxford’s Colleges of Sanctuary Annual Event on Thursday 17th June, a conversation between Dr Reverend Inderjit Bhogal OBE, founder of the Cities of Sanctuary Movement UK, and Syrian educator and campaigner Afraa Hashem. Both colleges were recognised as University-Colleges of Sanctuary by City of Sanctuary UK earlier this year, the first colleges at the University to be so recognised. 

On the same day, Sanctuary Hosting, a charity which matches homes with spare rooms to homeless asylum seekers, refugees and vulnerable migrants, will host a book presentation with Bharti Dhir, author of memoir Worth, who will share excerpts from her book and answer questions from the audience. The memoir is about her journey growing up as a biracial female child and refugee, nurturing self-worth, and overcoming abandonment, discrimination, and adversity. 

A list of Refugee Week events hosted by organisations in Oxford can be found here. 

Image Credit: Asylum Welcome

Live in the Opera House: A Review of 21st-Century Choreography

Patrick Gwillim Thomas
-
0
Live in the Opera House: A Review of 21st-Century Choreography

The disjunction of leaving a street protest to go to the Royal Opera House was a lot easier to navigate than I had expected. That said, the contrast did make me more attentive to a list of qualities I would normally bungle together somewhere close, but not too close, to beauty: power, messaging, relevancy, wokeness, etc. In other words, I didn’t sit back and enjoy the show. And I ended up with a lot more opinions than I had ever expected four pieces of 21st-century choreography to evoke.
The night began with Within the Golden Hour by Christopher Wheeldon. I had been looking forward to this piece after having seen Wheeldon take my favourite part of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (the denouement by tapdancing Mad Hatter) and making it a major variation in his ballet adaptation. In this new work, he moves away from the excesses of Wonderland to the minimalist restraint of Ezio Bosso’s strings score. Rather than toning down, however, Wheeldon takes the minimalist score as an exercise in repetitions and centres his choreography on the unsettling inevitability of copies. Couples are joined on the stage by perfect mirrors only slightly out of sync or only a single move of their routine will repeat in the background as they dance on, unaware.

These descriptions are far from exhaustive, Abraham’s piece excels because he quickly presumes the audience’s understanding and starts exploring his characters.


Yet, when the dancers can escape from repetition, there is harmony within the dance couples themselves. The male always acting as the structure of which the female drapes—a relation clearest when all the males link arms and lock shoulders, turning into the metal bar from which the women practice their battements. This harmony peaks in the 4th section, which is dedicated entirely to one couple. The man guides the woman through her twirls to a soothing purple backdrop, he lifts her up spreads her arms, they separate, then finish in a sheltering embrace. Meanwhile copies, and their anxiety, peak in the 3rd, 5th, and final sections respectively. In all three the backdrop blares red and the strings are plucked, the patterns in the music spawning rapidly. The dancers are perfect mirrors of each other, sometimes facing one another, other times arrayed in front of the audience like leotarded space invaders.
What is bizarre though, especially given Wheeldon’s own homosexuality, is that he lets the supreme symbol of this transgressive mirroring be the gendered pairing. In other words, while the man and women are allowed to be joined in their difference when two men come on the stage in the third act they are copies, a pairing inherently unsettling because of their innate similarity. This continues into the 5th act where the red backdrop accompanies four women all mirroring each other. Then into the final act when, despite the couples themselves being the repeated signs, they are only reproducing as couples, as if there could be no sameness within the male-female couple as if their gendered dance roles will always prevent the horror of mirroring. All in all, the piece explores well the patterning of the minimalist score but lazily grafts it onto heteronormative anxiety about mirrored sexes—3 stars.
If Wheeldon played the dangerous game of universals, Kyle Abraham’s Optional Family: a divertissement was a refreshing change. Right from when the iPhone auto-reader blares out the scathing texts between the husband-and-wife duo, you know precisely the characters you are dealing with. The texts are skillfully employed. Abraham makes sure that what he loses in interpretation over the dancer’s identities and orientations, he gains by fleshing out the three distinct characters. The husband is stubborn, willing to tuck himself in the corner and stand arms crossed as if fed up of the performance. Opposite him, the wife cannot stop dancing, always twirling, always throwing herself into their back and forth even when the husband is with another man. And as for that other man, he has the same love for the game found in the wife, but there is greater independence to him—he enters the stage alone, worming his way up a jagged trail of spotlights until he twirls into a romance with the husband.
These descriptions are far from exhaustive, Abraham’s piece excels because he quickly presumes the audience’s understanding and starts exploring his characters. You see the husband pulled into the gaudiness of a ballet threesome, you see the shock as the wife finds out she cannot keep playing at romance, and you see the once independent lover collapse after the husband’s exit stage left. Abrahams clearly knows what type of show he wants to put on and delivers. I look forward to him becoming head choreographer of the Opera House next year—4 stars.
The night then ends with two pieces by Crystal Pite, which are so dumbfounding as a pair that I will just say she shows off her breadth as an artist and leave it at that. Her first, The Statement, is a cosmic horror tale of corporate scandal. It reminded me of the film The Big Short, in that it is unexpectedly funny. The board-room argument, which plays over the four dancers, is a brisk display of semantic stretching matched only by their acrobatics. Their heads jerk to the side as they ‘look at the situation from a different angle’; their arms splay on the black boardroom table as they try to dominate the conversation, and their legs jingle like a marionette’s as they desperately reposition. The effect is over the top. The widely meaningless business-speak seeming sillier with each move they make.

The first half begins tentatively with its theme of connection; solo performances get their chance to shine, and the dancers are only brought together in twos. The second half is more forceful; the dancers stay awkwardly tightknit as a human wave from which bodies will collapse only to be re-absorbed.


But what about cosmic horror? Well, it’s horrific in that the vagueness of business-speak eventually undercuts that humor. The dancers are shocked to stillness, or collapse, in the face of ‘the board’ who reside ‘upstairs.’ And though the upstairs has no dancer, its presence looms large, quite literally by the end when a booming voice accompanies a descending black pall. Against this disembodied power those moves which were funny for their excesses seem more like a sign of impotence, just a reminder that they can move anywhere but upstairs. In all honesty, their arguing would have remained comedically petty if it were not for the dancers being so utterly terrified.
All in all, the sense of unspecific foreboding comes through well and the comedy was engaging against the otherwise vague language about a ‘situation’ and ‘sorting it out’—4 stars.
I should probably explain why I have given the last two pieces 4 stars despite saying nothing negative about them. Quite simply, I don’t like voiceovers. I try to give respect to how Abrahams and Pite use them well—one grounding us in the marital drama the other tapping into the ominous hilarity of corporate-speak—but when I go to see dance, I want a break from the semantic heaviness of dialogue and, as long as it is done well, I will always prefer a vague heading, taught strings, and moving bodies to a monologue. Hence Crystal Pite’s second piece Solo Echo, with its title like a zen koan and no voices to speak of, gets five stars.
The work is a mediation on humanity’s struggle to find connections that leaves you teary-eyed, if not still ultimately optimistic about human life. The first half begins tentatively with its theme of connection; solo performances get their chance to shine, and the dancers are only brought together in twos. The second half is more forceful; the dancers stay awkwardly tightknit as a human wave from which bodies will collapse only to be re-absorbed. And as the insistence to connect increases throughout, the disconnects, the times when dancers crumple to the floor or walk off the stage, become more acute. But what really elevates Pite’s work is that she always takes time to problematize what it even means to connect: people fumble over one another’s faces, grab onto legs, sprawl together on the floor, hook ungainly legs over necks, control each other like marionettes, and, if they are lucky, perform ballet together—5 stars.
Taking the pieces together, we see the responses to the flaws with the first piece by Wheeldon. His Within the Golden Hour relied on heteronormativity when it made the rigid male-female roles the only source of harmony through difference. But Abraham’s piece counters this. It increases the rigidity of the dancing roles yet does so to outline the particular characters of the marital strife rather than break into generalities. Right after Abraham’s, Pite’s Solo Echo comes with another response. It removes dialogue and returns to generalities, but constantly problematizes what it means for humanity to be a harmonious unity in a distinctly queer fashion.
I’m trading the pieces off against each other like this, not just because it is a neat analysis, but because there is no better way to get across the variety this collection gives you. It is difficult to introduce contemporary choreography with just four pieces, but the Opera House has certainly given it a good shot. And like all worthwhile art, it will make you want to make more art—(3+4+4+5)/4=4 stars.

Could the Friends Reunion BE any more nostalgic?

Elara Oakes
-
0
Could the Friends Reunion BE any more nostalgic?

It’s fair to say the Friends Reunion was a mixed bag. The best? A heavy hit of nostalgia from seeing the cast reunited. The worst? Odd celebrity cameos and James Corden as a poor choice of host. But my biggest takeaway from the reunion was the continuing affection from fans. Their stories showed how Friends has been a source of comfort and laughter – across the globe and across generations.

So, why is Friends still the ultimate comfort watch?

The show is dated in many ways: the fat jokes, the gay jokes, the whitewashed version of 90’s New York City. Yet none of these impact the core premise. Friends will be relevant as long as young people feel lost, aimless, underperforming. Its world is simple, comforting and low-stakes. No matter how neurotic the characters are or how badly they mess up, their friends will always be there for them. 

It’s these loveable flaws that make the show so special: Phoebe’s songs, Chandler’s defensive jokes, Janice’s laugh, Ross’s leather pants. The reunion was at its best when it celebrated these running jokes and revived the chemistry between the actors. Matt LeBlanc as Joey wearing all of Chandler’s clothes was glorious. 

Friends is a tribute to the time in your life when your friends are your family. The show puts that stage of life in a time capsule. For ten seasons, no amount of marriage, babies or career changes can get in the way of hanging out and drinking coffee all day at Central Perk.

Going through a breakup? Hungover? Living through a pandemic? You can enter a world where Monica and Chandler are always across the hall and everything works out in the end. No one ever moves on. That neverland bubble of supportive friendship is the key to the show’s enduring appeal. It is only burst in the final episode when the six friends get their happy endings. In the reunion, the creators, Kauffman, Bright and Crane explain that this is why there can never be another series or a movie. Instead, the reunion was a hodgepodge format of interviews, clips and even a catwalk. So, how did the Friends Reunion do? Did it meet fans’ expectations?

Seeing the cast reunited and reminiscing was lovely. It will seem odd to a Friends novice, but the highlight of the reunion was just seeing the cast together on set. The simple moments were the sweetest, like seeing Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc in the Barca loungers again. LeBlanc was joyful to watch, putting the others at ease. He seemed truly chilled-out and the only cast member to embrace his age and greying hair. A highlight of the reunion was a cosy table read of some iconic scenes, in which Lisa Kudrow sounds spookily similar to the original show. Gunther attended by video call, looking totally unrecognisable. Maggie Wheeler made a brief appearance to do Janice’s famous laugh and catchphrase. In the other OH. MY. GOD. moment, David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston admitted to a real-life romance that fuelled the Ross-and-Rachel love story. Cut to newly revealed behind the scenes footage of them cuddling on the sofa.

James Corden’s interview segment was superficial (who has the loudest laugh..? Does anyone care?) and brushed over Matthew Perry’s obviously painful experience of fame and addiction lest it spoil the mood. The result was a palpable tension: worse than if Corden had let the cast talk authentically about Friends and its success. Instead, they rushed ahead to see Justin Bieber dressed as a potato. The tangential celebrity drop-ins were continuous and a little distracting. They did make it clear that Friends fans come in many forms – from Lady Gaga to Malala Yousafzai to David Beckham.

Next came stories from Friends fans around the world about what the show means to them. There were numerous and heart-warming anecdotes of the sitcom getting fans through a hard time, forging friendships or helping them learn English. Fans of all ages look to the show when they need a laugh and some companionship. 

Above all else, the Reunion made one thing clear: the world’s love for Friends is timeless. 

Image credits: Prayitno Hadinata via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

1...310311312...2,498Page 311 of 2,498

Support Student Journalism

Cherwell is Oxford’s oldest independent newspaper, established in 1920. We are entirely student-run. By supporting us, you will contribute to keeping our paper in print and online. Every donation makes a difference.

Donate

Explore

Follow us

More

Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy

Website by James Ashley