Sherlock returns Your full New Year TV guide
Heroes & Villains The winners and losers of 2015
Heroism inspires, but villainy endures, and with bad news looming menacingly as the new normal, the balance becomes harder to maintain. This was a year of grotesque wickedness (Isil), betrayal of trust (Rotherham Council), sharp practice (Volkswagen) and tastelessness (Lady Colin Campbell). It began with a hurricane and ended with floods, staggered from month to month between the shambolic (England’s Rugby World Cup campaign), the absurd (TV general election debates) and the embarrassing (hipster fashion). Our relief at seeing out 2015 is tempered only by the suspicion that the new year will be even worse.
For all that, the font of goodness hasn’t quite run dry, and the year helped remind us that it sometimes takes the worst of human nature to bring out the best. The November atrocities in Paris not only saw the city’s residents rushing to help each other, but people around the world rallying in support of civilised values over those of cruelty and nihilism.
We kept our spirits up, with champagne sales hitting their highest level since the 2008 crash (a good number of bottles being cracked to celebrate the birth of our thoroughly modern fourth-in-line to the throne, Princess Charlotte, even as her recordsetting great-grandmother steamed magnificently on).
Heroism tends to speak for itself, while villainy is harder to quantify. “All wickedness proceedeth from the wicked,” says the Bible, which should be plain to most of us, and enough for those on either side of our annual list to know where they stand.
The Queen
Sixty-three years ago, when the world was a bigger but less scary place, a new Queen became head of what could still just about be called the British Empire. Joyous were the celebrations, but Elizabeth II was a young woman about whom the vast majority of her subjects knew absolutely nothing. To a significant extent, they still don’t. Now approaching 90, the longest-reigning monarch in our history – surpassing that of her great-great grandmother in September – is as reassuringly familiar as anyone can be, but she remains a figure of mystery. No one knows what she really thinks, or how, in old age she remains so phenomenally industrious. Her reign has been fashioned around the words she uttered as a 21-year-old: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.” One thing we do know is that she keeps a promise.
Chris Norman
On August 21, when he eased himself into the seat of an afternoon train from Amsterdam to Paris, British grandfather Chris Norman wasn’t expecting to finish the journey splattered with blood, while subduing a terrorist with his teeth. Shortly after departure, 25-year-old Moroccan-born Ayoub El-Khazzani burst into the corridor with a Kalashnikov, a knife and 300 rounds of amunition. Three young Americans, two of them off-duty servicemen, went into action, quickly joined by 62-year-old Chris, who later explained: “I thought I was going to die anyway, so I might as well have a go.” He was awarded France’s highest honour, the Legion d’honneur, for his heroism.
Frankie Dettori
Frankie’s famous flying dismount from Derby winner Golden Horn in June confirmed the remarkable renaissance of the nation’s favourite jockey. Forced out of the Godolphin Stables in 2012 and banned for cocaine use a year later, the 44-year-old Anglo-Italian showman’s career appeared to be more in nose-dive than ascent mode. Word went around the tracks that Frankie was past it, and the quality rides became harder to find. Not readily chastened, he saw the error of his ways, buckled down, followed up his Derby win with another in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, and became once again the man the bookies fear.
Katie Cutler
A local newspaper report that Alan Barnes, a 4ft 6in, disabled pensioner had been mugged outside his Gateshead home in January, might have been read as just one more sorry dispatch from the underside of modern life. Instead, it was read by Katie Cutler, a 21year-old beautician, who responded by setting up a fund to help the injured victim. Within four days, it had reached £300,000, with donations arriving from all over the world. Miss Cutler, who was awarded the British Empire Medal for her efforts, now runs her own charitable foundation. Even more remarkably, the mugger, 25year-old Richard Gatiss, was tracked down by the police, taken to court and jailed for four years.
Lynton Crosbie
Revelling in such sobriquets as “the Lizard of Oz” and “the Outback Rasputin”, Lynton Crosbie, the architect of the first Conservative general election victory in 17 years, staked a convicing claim to be the world’s foremost political strategist. All manner of dark arts are attributed to the 58-year-old Australian, but his approach is essentially simple. The fringe issues that obsess the chattering classes are fringe for a reason: understand the public mood and address the concerns of ordinary people. Bathed in glory, Crosbie then went off to work some much-needed magic for Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, who, inconsiderately, lost.
Ethel Lang
In January, Britain lost its last Victorian, with the death of 114-yearold Ethel Lang. To have survived to such an age is heroic in itself, but Mrs Lang, a coalminer’s daughter from Yorkshire, enshrined many of the values of her era. When she was born, in May 1900, the Boer War was still being fought, and the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, would prove to be the last to serve a full term from the House of Lords. She lived through the reigns of six monarchs, two world wars, the invention of powered flight, television, computers and the loss of the Empire. With steadfast Victorian scruple, she remained respectable, hard-working and appreciative of everything life had given her.
Taylor Swift
When the world’s top pop singer went to war against the world’s biggest technology company, there was only one possible result. Taylor Swift and her vast army of adoring “Swifties” forced Apple’s capitulation within a few hours. Piqued by the company’s practice of witholding payment of music royalties for an initial – and costly – three months, the 25-year-old blonde from Pennsylvannia pulled her latest album from the company’s streaming service, prompting an immediate about-turn and apology. “No one else could have done this,” gasped
Fortune magazine. “Taylor Swift IS the music industry.”
Stuart Broad
The Australian cricket team arrived this summer as red-hot favourites to win the Ashes, but at Trent Bridge ran in – or rather out – to their leastfavourite Englishman, Stuart Broad. The angel-faced assassin, already a popular hate-figure Down Under, took eight wickets for 15 runs in an astounding first-session spell that ended with the Aussies all out for 60. “Pomicide!” howled the headlines back home, where our greatest cricket rivals, with characteristic
magnanimity, claimed the pitch must have been doctored. Broad, 29, a man inclined to the poetical, decribed his performance as “like a slow-motion dream sequence”. Not to the series-losing Aussies, it wasn’t.
Nadiya Hussein The Great British Bake Off has only so much to do with making cakes. Icings, fillings and stirrings all have their place, but, increasingly, the show is about the mixing of the contestants. This season, the BBC took some criticism for its suspiciously PC-looking line-up featuring a gay doctor and a Lithuanian bodybuilder, but it is hard to argue that Nadiya Hussein, a hijab-wearing Bangladeshi immigrant’s daughter from Leeds was an unworthy winner. Nadiya’s triumphal flourish was a patriotic, Union flag-themed wedding cake. A win not just for her, but the national mixing bowl.
Villains
‘Jihadi John’
Even the nickname was horribly wrong, bestowing a kind of ordinariness on Isil’s matinee murderer. Why not Throat-Slashing Sid, or Decapitation Dave? The man behind the balaclava mask was revealed in February to be Mohammed Emwazi, a 27-year Kuwait-born Londoner, who, we were assured by a director of Cage, the controversial Islamist charity, was “a beautiful young man… extremely kind”. In his younger days, Emwazi had apparently liked pop music and supported Manchester United, but found a more urgent calling in the Syrian desert. In November, he was reported to have been “evaporated” by a direct hit from a US missile. Condensation Charlie?
James Hewitt
Love him or loathe him, you just can’t stand him. Britain’s foremost cad resurfaced with yet another wheeze for making money out of his 30-yearold extra-marital fling with Diana, Princess of Wales. Looking these days more like a retired Hogwarts housemaster than a dashing exGuardsman, Hewitt, 57, was revealed to be seeking offers for the late princess’s love letters. The familiar denunciations echoed around his ears, but it was hard not to feel a smack of sympathy for the ageing bounder. Notoriety is all he has to live on, and it doesn’t pay as well as he had hoped. When he says that he now “regrets absolutely everything”, you sense that while not all of what he says is true, this just might be.
Bill Cosby
Once ranked as the most trusted being in America after God, Bill Cosby built a mighty repuation both as an entertainer and a sentinel of propriety. When he wasn’t cracking up the viewers in the landmark Cosby Show , he was to be found out on the celebrity lecture circuit, chastising – in particular – black parents for failing to set a high moral standard for their children. Cosby is now facing allegations by more than 50 women of rape, sexual battery and drugfacilitated sexual assault. Though no charges have yet been brought, the 78year-old comedian has been forced into limited admissions, his programmes have been pulled or cancelled, and while his $400 million fortune may be enough to meet any damages bill, the real damage is to the good work we thought he was doing.
Jeremy Clarkson
The star presenter of televison’s wildly popular car-bore programme Top Gear could have anything he wanted. What he wanted, on a wet night in Yorkshire, was a sizzling steak and chips. Poor Jezza. If he’d been working for any other network, they’d have given him a personal chef. But this was Britain and the BBC, and the kitchen at the crew’s hotel was closed. Cue a career-altering tantrum, with Clarkson socking the producer he held responsible. A fortnight later, he was fired. Proving the adage that villainy pays better than virtue, he quickly found a plum new job with online giant Amazon, while the Beeb was left nursing the hit to its fragile finances.
Sepp Blatter
Not everybody in the Swiss Alps lives to the clang of cowbells and the whiff of edelweiss. Inside the bunkerlike headquarters of Fifa, football’s governing body, the smell is of dirty money and the sound of circling police sirens. In the middle of sport’s biggest scandal sits 80-year-old Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the organisation’s suspended president. Longstanding allegations of bribery, cronyism and fixing by Blatter and his circle came to a climax this year with indictments issued by the US Justice Department. Until he was finally banned by football’s ethics committee this month, he had suggested he was the best man to clean up the mess. Perhaps it’s the altitude.
Rachel Dolezal
In the kind of world that racial equality campaigners yearn for, it shouldn’t have mattered if Rachel Dolezal was black, white or spotted. There she was, a prolific activist in America’s largest minority-rights group, the National Associaton for the Advancement of Colored
People, when she was “outed” as a white woman passing herself off as a black one. The uproar that followed served to confuse rather than clarify the ever-sensitive issue of racial identity. Ms Dolezal, who had been born to white parents in a virtually allwhite town in America’s whitest state, Montana, insisted she hadn’t misled anyone, as she “felt black” and had bravely borne her white skin as “a punishment”.
Jeffrey Epstein
In terms of filth and lucre, the smoothly mannered New York financier already had most boxes ticked, but it was his intriguing friendship with the Duke of York that produced the year’s first royal scandal. According to court papers filed in the US, Epstein, 62, a convicted paedophile, had supplied an underage girl for Andrew to have sex with. The Duke was exonerated when a judge ordered his name to be struck from the record, but Epstein, once voted Cosmopolitan magazine’s “Bachelor of the Year”, wasn’t finished. A forthcoming book, timed for publication before next year’s US presidential election, is said to contain sizzling material about candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband, Bill.
Angela Merkel
German chancellor Angela “Mutti” Merkel’s magnanimous opening of Europe’s doors to the world’s dispossessed reflected an urge to provide help and shelter – but it also obscured the longer-term question of
how a politically divided and economically sclerotic continent can absorb so many people without destabilising its own societies. The suspicion that Mrs Merkel had not thought things through grew with the revelation that at least one of the Paris terrorists had arrived as a “refugee”, and reports of growing chaos in towns across Germany as up to 10,000 migrants a day entered the country. The image of open doors lasted only as long as it took for the barbed wire fences to start going up.
Emojis
When it’s just too much bother to say you are happy/sad/angry/amused or puzzled, use an emoji. This, dear wired-up world, is what we have dwindled to as a species. The little yellow faces that increasingly infest electronic communications were invented in Japan as a fun feature for children. Today they are a substitute for communication. Anyone still capable of reading and writing may know that the Oxford Dictionary honoured emoji as its 2015 “Word of the Year”. It won’t be long before there’s an emoji for “emoji”.
The safe space
The infantilisation of Britain’s university students grew apace with the spread across the nation’s campuses of kindergarten-like “safe spaces”, wherein the poor petals could hide from the voicing of opinions that might upset them. Operating in censorious tandem with the “no-platforming” craze (whereby the invitation to a guest speaker at an event is rescinded), the safe-space movement effectively claimed a right for students not to be offended. But the absurdities became apparent when feminists at Cardiff University tried to ban Germaine Greer, the La Stupenda of feminism, for not being feminist enough. “University is not a safe space,” fumed the prominent atheist and academic Prof Richard Dawkins. “If you need a safe space, leave, go home, hug your teddy and suck your thumb until ready for university.”