Ten themes of 2021: a review of the year in arts and media
FRANCES MCDORMAND, NOMADLAND, 2020, ©JOSHUA RICHARDS/SEARCHLIGHT
1) The rise and rise of independent publishers
One of the surprise publishing hits of 2021 was The Passenger, a thriller set in Nazi Germany by a refugee, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz and published by Pushkin Press. Founded in 2014, Fitzcarraldo Editions has also had a terrific year, with Joshua Cohen’s new novel, The Netanyahus, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob and In Memory of Memory by the Russian poet, Maria Stepanova.
2) Jewish-American writing
Two big new biographies of Philip Roth by Blake Bailey and Ira Nadel reminded us that Roth is still the most controversial of the great Jewish-American writers. Cohen’s The Netanyahus, Cynthia Ozick’s Antiquities and Dara Horn’s first book of essays, People Love Dead Jews were all provocative books which packed a punch, though they largely passed British critics by.
3) Anti-Semitism and the arts
In the last few years anti-Semitism has swept through the Labour Party and our universities. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would spark controversies in British culture, from theatre to publishing. First, there were two provocative and polemical books about the reality of antisemitism in Britain: David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count and The Taming of the Jew by the Israeli journalist, Tuvia Tenenbom. The Irish writer Sally Rooney (author of the bestseller, Normal People) decided not to let her novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, be translated into Hebrew as part of her support for the pro-Palestinian BDS movement. The Royal Court showed how not to handle a PR crisis with a new play, Rare Earth Mettle, with a super-rich villain called Herschel Fink, who the theatre insisted was not Jewish despite his obviously Jewish name. At the time of writing, the scandal rolls on as two of the chief backers of the theatre have withdrawn their funding. The BBC broadcast an all-star drama series, Ridley Road, about anti-Semitic fascism in Britain in the 1960s, but this caused less stir than the BBC’s continued anti-Israel news coverage and anti-Semitic comments by BBC journalists.
4) Thinkers and philosophers
2020 was a terrific year for books on philosophy, including The Murder of Professor Schlick by David Edmonds, Cheryl Misak’s acclaimed biography of Frank Ramsey and the translation of Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians. 2021 has continued the trend with acclaimed biographies of thinkers like Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann and Hannah Arendt. Arendt has been the subject of a number of new books including Ann Heberlein’s On Love and Tyranny: The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt, Kei Hiruta’s Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity and Samantha R Hill’s Hannah Arendt, with Lyndsey Stonebridge’s major biography still to come. What is immediately striking about these thinkers is that, except for Ramsey, they are all refugees from German-speaking central Europe.
5) New news, bad news
Last year saw the launch of Times Radio, which is barely talked about. It looked like the same fate would befall GB News after its founder Andrew Neil quit, but the technical glitches stopped and the main presenters – Alastair Stewart (ex-ITN), Colin Brazier (ex-Sky News), Simon McCoy (ex-BBC) and Dan Wootton (previously Executive Editor of The Sun) — found their feet. Nigel Farage’s interview with Donald Trump brought the Channel its highest ratings since it launched. GB News’s audience figures have overtaken Sky News and as the BBC comes under renewed attack for its anti-Johnson, anti-Israel, anti-Brexit bias and continues to lose key figures (Neil and Marr, in particular), it has left the door open for its new challenger.
6) The biggest story in British sport
With the Euros and the Tokyo Olympics, who would have bet that an unknown tennis player and a relatively unknown cricketer would have been the biggest stories in sport in 2021? Emma Raducanu won the US Open at her first attempt and then came Azeem Rafiq’s allegations of racism at Yorkshire County Cricket Club.
7) They’re back
Six years after Spectre, Bond was back. Two years after Series 5, Line of Duty returned. Now we have Sex and the City (without Samantha) and Spielberg’s West Side Story, while Anthony Hopkins became the oldest winner of the Oscar for Best Actor for his moving performance in The Father, almost thirty years after winning it for The Silence of the Lambs.
8) The White Oscars
Everyone thought this would be the breakthrough year for Black talent at the Oscars. It wasn’t. Mank received ten nominations, but the biggest winners were The Father and Nomadland (Best Picture, best Director and Best Actress).
9) Female talent
2021 was a great year for female talent: Chloé Zhao was awarded the Oscar for Best Director and Frances McDormand for Best Actress, both for Nomadland; the Paula Rego exhibition at Tate Britain confirmed her reputation as one of the great artists of the post-war period; Michaela Coel won a Primetime Emmy Award and four BAFTAs for I May Destroy You; Cush Jumbo played Hamlet and Jessie Buckley played Juliet and Sally Bowles in Cabaret; and nearly half a century after her death, Hannah Arendt became the most written-about intellectual of the year.
10) The most shameful moment for the BBC in 2021
It’s a hard choice. Was the most shameful moment for the BBC in 2021 the Martin Bashir story, or accusations of anti-Semitism and political bias? My own choice is very different. When Sir Antony Sher and Stephen Sondheim died, two of the great creative talents of our time, not only did BBC News manage to get Sher’s career wrong, but they failed to use iPlayer or BBC4 to show some of the great works by both men or put together proper tributes. When Sinatra died The South Bank Show aired a tribute within days. When Nureyev died, BBC 2’s The Late Show put together an obituary straightaway. This tells a terrible story about the dumbing down of the BBC. Whether that is worse than accusations of bias, you will have to de
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