Come on Gwyneth, give us an entire channel of Goop TV
Exciting news. Goop – the $250 million “wellness brand” famed for its “detox recipes”, tips on “clearing out old energy” and promotion of startlingly intimate steaming treatments – is coming to television, after its founder, the Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow, signed a deal with Netflix.
Disappointingly, however, they are only planning to produce a series of weekly documentaries. Personally, I’d like to see an entire channel devoted to Goop-themed programming. Just imagine it.
The Goop British Bake Off
Episode one. The contestants are challenged to make a chocolate croquembouche using only a pound of spirulina, two cartons of activated cashew milk, and a six-week course of Nepalese cryotherapy.
I’m a Celebrity... Goop Me Out of Here!
Reality series, in which a group of television personalities are deposited in the jungle and forced to eat a variety of disgusting items, such as white bread, microwave meals and dairy.
Goop Blue Peter
How your child can turn an empty
chia seed packet, a reusable drinking straw and some sticky-back plastic into their very own essential oil diffuser.
Goop Casualty
Popular medical drama. The team perform emergency surgery after a Hollywood yoga enthusiast accidentally ties her nose in a reef knot. Meanwhile, an actress dials 999 in a panic after swallowing a doughnut.
Tomorrow’s World: Goop Edition Test-driving a car powered solely by Ayurvedic meditation.
Goop Gogglebox
A succession of extremely middle-class families take turns to announce that actually they don’t own a television, and that their children’s screen time is limited to 49 seconds a day.
Paltrow’s Kitchen Nightmares Episode one: gluten.
One of the weirdest things about the hard Left is their obsession with Emily Benn. Ms Benn, 29, is not a household name, or a figure of towering national influence – her political career to date amounts to two years as a Labour councillor in Croydon. But she happens to be the granddaughter of the late Tony Benn. And as a result, she suffers relentless online abuse from Corbynistas, who claim that her grandfather would be “ashamed” of her – simply because she isn’t quite as Left-wing as he was. Why anyone should be required to hold the exact same political views as their grandfather, I don’t know. But if the hard Left are going to attack Ms Benn for this supposed transgression, surely they should attack Tony Benn for it, too. After all, his own grandfather, Sir John Benn, was a politician as well. But Sir John wasn’t a socialist. He was a Liberal. So, according to
Corbynista logic, Tony should have been a Liberal, like him.
Of course, Tony Benn is venerated by today’s hard Left not only because he was a socialist, but also because he was the idol of a young Jeremy Corbyn. The two men were friends. Then again, I can’t help thinking about Mr Benn’s diary entry from May 27, 1994, in which he describes the funeral of Ed Miliband’s father, Ralph.
“Anyone on the real Left of any significance was there,” he writes. “Jeremy Corbyn couldn’t make it.”
In a speech on Thursday, Donald Trump hailed “the abolition of civil rights”. I think – or at least I hope – it was a slip of the tongue. Still, he isn’t the first politician to say the opposite of what they meant – and inadvertently live up to the image their opponents paint of them.
Take David Cameron. During a speech in 2012 celebrating Conservative values, he cited “mothers who work all the hours God sends”, “teenagers who want to make something of their lives”, “children from the poorest estates” – and then, with great passion, cried, “This is who we resent!”
The word on his autocue was “represent”.
A similar misfortune befell Sajid
Javid, the Home Secretary, at last year’s Tory conference. In his keynote speech he promised members that their party would always “fight hope”. He meant to say “hate”. Luckily, no one in the audience seemed to notice.
It happens even to the most accomplished speakers. For example, Barack Obama, who in 2009 predicted that his reforms to US healthcare would “bring greater competition, choice, savings, and inefficiencies”.
The king of the political Freudian slip, however, remains George Wbush – who, at the height of his War on Terror, declared: “Our enemies never
stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we.”
They grow up so fast. My son is barely half way through his first year of primary school, yet he’s already decided on his future career path.
Ideally, he announced the other afternoon, he wants to be either a king or a ninja. Should opportunities in these fields of employment not prove forthcoming, however, he would settle for being “a shopkeeper, so I can be rich and have lots of money”.
Alternatively, he added, he wouldn’t mind being “a treat man”.
Hang on, I said. A what?
A treat man, he explained proudly, was a job he’d thought up all by himself. Essentially, a treat man would be “a man who sneaks into children’s rooms while they’re sleeping, so he can leave sweets for them”.
As business ideas go, I’ve no doubt it would appeal strongly to its target demographic. For one reason or another, however, it might not be quite so popular with their parents.