This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Doing the hustle
Don’t tell the bookers — I’d hate them to get the idea that I’m an easy get — but I love being a studio guest on live TV. The lights go up, the cameras roll, the adrenaline flows and, for five minutes or so, you’re relying on your wits to save you from national humiliation. It might not be everyone’s idea of fun, but it definitely makes you feel alive.
So when Newsnight invited me to talk about Lily Phillips (the British porn star who has achieved outrage-propelled fame with her extreme sexual stunts), I was more than happy to be the feminist killjoy explaining why this might not actually be an “empowering” career.
I shared the sofa with a young woman who put the pro-sex work position — like Philips, she uses the OnlyFans platform — and we had a cordial disagreement.
After the show, she spent some time getting pictures and videos of us for her ’gram. “You don’t mind being associated with me, do you?” she asked, sweetly. I didn’t at all: I was just fascinated to see close-up how much hustle she put into her job. In a competitive market, you do what you can to stay relevant: like every other “creative” these days, sex workers spend as much time posting as they do on what it says in their job title.
* * *
When did I lose my TV nerves? Probably in 2018, when I took part in a chaotic live discussion about the trans issue on a Channel 4 show called Genderquake. I knew I was in for a rough ride as one of the designated gender criticals on the panel. I found out exactly how rough when I got booed by the audience in the first five minutes for not declaring my pronouns.
Even before the show, tensions had been high. In the green room, Olympic hero turned corsetted glamourpuss Caitlyn Jenner (6’2” plus stilettos) had loomed over me (5’1”, no stilettos) and announced: “We’ve been researching you.” Brrrr. Get through that, and you can probably get through anything.
Back then, I was one of a handful of people willing to say publicly that sex wasn’t just a feeling in your head, and it made me a target. The Supreme Court ruling in April on the meaning of “woman” in the Equality Act showed how much things have changed. Hundreds of women have taken the lead in multiple causes, and my once-eccentric position is the mainstream.
Alas, political victories rarely come with a restitution package. It’s extraordinary, but barring the most extreme hold-outs, everyone now appears to have believed the same as me all along. I wonder whether some of those boo-ers from the studio have reconsidered over time; I wonder if they know what exceptional media training they gave me.
Cremains of the day
After a busy few days in London — doing Newsnight, having meetings — it was good to get away for a long weekend in Rutland with my parents. Whenever I go to the Midlands, I take my swimsuit in case my little sister has time for a dip on my way home, and this time I was in luck. “Meet me here,” she texted, pinging over the coordinates for a farm track just off the motorway.
My sister is a hardened cold water person, and, if there’s something I’ve forgotten, she usually has a spare. This time it was a fluorescent tow float, which she attached to me by rigging up a rabbit lead (who doesn’t keep a rabbit lead in their car?) — essential because the stretch of river she’d chosen is in frequent use by boats. Hindu families scatter the ashes of loved ones there mixed with flowers.
When we got in, the water was already littered with blooms, meaning we were swimming through cremains. I wasn’t squeamish about it, but I appreciated my tow float: my sister told me about a woman she knows who forgot hers and, invisible to the mourners on one of the boats, ended up with a fistful of somebody’s grandma scattered on her head.
• • •
The next weekend I was back in London, and, for a change, I wasn’t going to a gig. This time, I was the gig — a quarter of it, at any rate. My friend Jesse, of the podcast Blocked and Reported, was visiting from New York and had decided he wanted to put on a show. So on a Saturday afternoon, me, Jesse, Helen Lewis and Hadley Freeman took the stage in front of a paying audience at the Leicester Square Theatre.
Showbiz isn’t all glamour. But it is a lot of fun to share your opinions about politics, especially when you get to go to the pub afterwards and chat to everyone who turned out, some of whom clearly found it a great release. “I didn’t know you could just say the things you were saying up there,” one attendee told me — suggesting that the days of compulsory pronoun-sharing are still alive and well in a few places.
My favourite part, though, was that our dressing room was decorated with twin portraits of the Two Ronnies, personal comedy heroes of mine: one of my earliest memories is of watching their TV show, sunk into a brown corduroy beanbag that was bigger than my whole body. I don’t suppose the joys of Fork Handles and pun-heavy monologues meant much to a yank like Jesse, but it felt good to have them watching over us.
A quick note to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who sent their sympathies about Jessie the dog after my last entry in these pages. I still anticipate a scuffle of paws and a happy wet nose whenever I come home but less pointedly with time. Jessie always liked people better than other dogs (my daughter used to call her a “little pickme”); I think, in her animal way, she’d have appreciated how many humans who know the pain of losing a pet were comforted by reading about her time with us.
