Michael Sheen: knowing when you have enough is a rare trait in the age of avarice
It is hard to find something to dislike about Michael Sheen. You have to really try: I managed to squeeze out the fact that he didn’t much enjoy his bow tie in Good Omens, but it took some effort. In an interview with the Big Issue last week, Sheen raised the Decent Bloke stakes again by explaining that he had “essentially turned myself into a social enterprise, a not-for-profit actor”.
This is not some Jeremy Strongstyle method approach, in which Sheen, playing the role of Social Enterprise, goes all-in to benefit the community. Or maybe it is, in a way; he revealed that he is putting the majority of his future earnings into good causes. “I don’t want to just be someone who enjoys the fruits of what other people have done and then pull the drawbridge up and go, ‘Well I’m all right, Jack, I’ve had a nice time’,” he said.
I thought about Sheen’s decision, to have enough for himself and to do something good with the rest of it, when I read another piece, by Courtney Love in the Financial Times, in support of the paper’s campaign to advocate for wider financial literacy. One idea stood out and, although it is not radical, I was surprised to find that it sounded as if it was. “I don’t think artists should be expected to be billionaires,” she said, arguing that a poet, for example, doesn’t need a second home. “I think artists should get what we call ‘right-sized’ about what to expect from their careers.”
In their individual ways, both are raising the question of what it means to have enough. It’s old-fashioned as an idea. We live in an era, and a culture, that not only prioritises growth for the sake of it, but fetishes it. Everything is about having bigger, better, more, from desserts piled high with other desserts until they’re photogenic enough for Instagram, to the absurd expansion in car size that means parents drive their kids down the road to school in vehicles more suited to country tracks or Ben Nevis.
The wealth gap in Britain has widened to a sickening degree during the pandemic. Obviously, I am talking about one end of it and that is not the people struggling to put food on the table with any regularity. In the world of work, we are largely expected to strive for more: promotions, a pay rise, more status, more money, infinite growth. Philosophers and economists have long grappled with the idea that this is unsustainable. On an individual level, though, we are rarely asked to consider what is enough. To consider what is “right-sized” for us.
Bernie Sanders’s mittens broke the internet
Google’s annual end-of-year roundup of search trends showed that in 2021, the world searched for a lot of cricket, a lot of superhero movies and a lot of Squid Game. In the UK, we still preferred football and made space for Line of Duty, wanted to know when Love Island finished more than we wanted to know when lockdown started, were less interested in Pete Davidson than we were in Matt Hancock and persisted with making the ubiquitous banana bread.
But most shocking was the news that searches for “mittens” reached an all-time high in January, thanks to Bernie Sanders keeping his hands warm, cottage-core-style, at the presidential inauguration. It was shocking because how, by any measure, apart from calendars and clocks, was that this year? I don’t wish to deny mittens their moment in the spotlight, because it’s taken them forever to hit that record for most searches. But I could have sworn that Sanders wore those mittens at least 15 years ago, that those memes about him sitting grumpily loaded up slowly on a BlackBerry screen. As if that happened less than 12 months ago. I simply refuse to believe it.
And Just Like That: no sex in the city for these baffled gal pals
It had to be done. The Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That… was a rare moment of must-see TV, at least among my friends. On Thursday, there was a synchronised press-play, a flurry of texts, though “are you watching?” quickly became “what... are we watching?”
The cast ploughed on gamely, but it was a strange experience; there was little sense that these characters had actually aged while they were off screen, more a sensation that they had been picked up in 2004, when Sex and the City ended (I am ignoring the films, which is a kindness), and plopped back down in the present day, where they stared, baffled, at a world in which people said “woke” and confused them with their newfangled podcasts.
One of the oddest things was the feeling that the characters were too famous to be believable on screen. This is fairly normal with actors; there are some who only play tweaked versions of the same thing and look like Bambi on ice when they try to do something different.
But I didn’t get the impression that these famous women were struggling to lose themselves in the characters, more that the characters were struggling to lose themselves in the story. Also, there was hardly any sex, not helped by the most fond-of-sex character Samantha being famously indisposed, although I did enjoy the loose explanation as to why she’d chosen London over this.
Until that twist at the end of episode one, I don’t think anyone could blame her. Obviously, I will be watching every week, just to make sure.