Friday
Coalition credibility is only as strong as its weakest link – and right now that’s Angus Taylor
‘The fact this episode is still something to speculate about eight months later, that even the minister hasn’t, or can’t, fluently explain what happened, is a matter of concern. It goes to credibility.’
Experience: we drove 25,000 miles home from New Zealand
‘Crossing the Pakistan-Iran border was the only hairy moment. Tourists are given an armed escort but, as we passed through a military base on the way to the border, the guards were tense and warned that the Taliban were in the area. We passed them several times as our escort yelled at me to keep driving. It was a terrifying half-hour before they dropped us off, but it’s the kind of experience that locals have daily.’
My favourite game: Iverson stuns Kobe’s Lakers in the 2001 NBA finals
‘The 2001 Philadelphia 76ers are a tall tale that only grows unlikelier with time. The premise flatly stated is absurd: the Sixers built a ballclub around a 5ft 11in delinquent from Virginia Beach and it worked. Allen Iverson became the least conventional star ever to lead a team to the NBA finals and the Sixers became the ultimate underdog squad for the ultimate underdog city.’
The Premier League’s best young players of 2009-10 ... a decade later
‘There is an assumption that footballers get better with age before peaking in their late twenties and regressing in their thirties. However, a look back at the best players aged 21 or under in the 2009-10 season shows that not every promising youngster is destined for greater things.’
‘The audience booed, the cast fled’ – playwrights relive their worst flops
Alan Ayckbourn: ‘The biggest failure I ever had was my first attempt at a musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had just had two big successes with Joseph and Jesus Christ Superstar, and I was the golden boy of the West End at that point. So somebody had the bright idea of bringing the three of us together to adapt the stories of PG Wodehouse.’
Saturday
Blind date: ‘I hope my lockdown haircut didn’t count against me’
‘My housemate played waiter in exchange for a cut of the food and an attempt to score a date with her housemate.’
My favourite game: Liverpool v Wimbledon, 1988 FA Cup final
‘Everything about the day was special. First, my dad drove us to the match; no getting the tube for this game. The brown Morris Marina was full of sweets and we arrived a mile or so away from the stadium in style. FA Cup finals were staged in searing heat back then and this was no exception. However, in what was an ominous signal for the result that followed, the Chewits melted in the car.’
Tim Dowling: Oh no! I’m being visited by ghosts of bosses past
‘On my way back to the kitchen I find the tortoise lying on his back in a puddle of his own urine. He cranes his neck and fixes me with a look that says: please don’t write about this. “What happened?” I say, turning him over. Evidently he took a shortcut over brick edging and got unlucky.’
Paul Heaton: ‘Love feels like someone is hitting your heart with a cricket bat’
‘One review said, “You know where he lives, now go and kill him.” I was reading it in my house at the time. I went to the window, pulled the curtains to one side, checked the street and went back to picking my nose.’
Neil Morrissey: ’I hated the press making me out to be a love rat’
‘Maybe those relationships would have been different had they not been all over the papers, but no matter what happened, the press shouldn’t have been hacking my phone or having private detectives follow me. I turned into a mistrusting, quieter, reticent person.’
Sunday
Betrayal and bombast: the surreal story of the Terry v Bridge scandal
‘For Perroncel, a 33-year-old single mother who had broken no laws, the events of early 2010 would be a cruel tutelage in the way football and society treats women: the sex‑shaming, the humiliation, the public guillotine. The way they are regarded as male property, to be held and exchanged without agency. The way they are framed in terms of the male gaze, a framing that is then used against them.’
‘I was a boy who wanted nothing so much as to join the police’
‘The rest of my white liberal friends at university were having none of the police’s public statements about changing and they certainly didn’t share my vision of hope about the public drive towards diversity in the force. They repeatedly warned me about racism and homophobia still being rife. But I didn’t let any of my friends shake my resolve. I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.’
Britt Ekland on Peter Sellers: ‘He was a very tormented soul’
‘Sellers’s former wife Britt Ekland has opened up about their troubled marriage, describing Sellers – who suffered from serious ill health as well as alcohol and cocaine dependency – as deeply controlling and mentally unstable, but unable to receive the medical treatment that he would have got today, partly because he was so valuable to the studios.’
Denis Goldberg, the man who offered to sign his own death warrant to save Nelson Mandela
‘Mandela’s defiant speech from the dock was widely reported and made him a household name throughout the world. Less widely reported was that Mandela did not act alone and that of the eight defendants who were convicted and sentenced to life without parole one was white. They all approved his speech, knowing that it made it more likely they would hang.’
Homeland finale review – Claire Danes thriller goes out with a bang
‘Many viewers didn’t get beyond the divisive season-one finale and more still left after the departure of Damian Lewis when Carrie’s lover/nemesis Sgt Nicholas Brody died at the end of season three. More fool them. They missed the show’s transformation into a fortune teller, eerily predicting contemporary news.’
How we create the Antidote
Every day we measure not only how many people click on individual stories but also how long they spend reading them. This list is created by comparing the attention time to the length of each article, to come up with a ranking for the stories people read most deeply.
