An Evening With Roger Moore, On tour
In a tragedy almost worthy of ancient Greek myth, Roger Moore’s health no longer allows him to drink martinis. But in all other respects, this most suave of octogenarians remains neither shaken nor stirred. And his eyes are still wide open to an opportunity to capitalise on his status as Alan Partridge’s favourite Bond. With Spectre in the cinemas and a new 007 appointment potentially on the horizon, there couldn’t really be a better moment to indulge in some quality Bond anecdotage – and maybe even take a moment to remember Moore’s sterling eyebrow-raising turns in TV shows such as The Saint and The Persuaders. Roger will be in conversation with Gareth Owen on these dates – Owen is something of a Moore scholar, having worked with the great man on two excellently titled volumes, memoir My Word Is My Bond and Bond On Bond. Expect maximum smoothness.
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Claudia Rankine, Gateshead
Winner of this year’s Forward prize, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is as urgent and topical as poetry gets. She confronts the big stuff – hurricane Katrina, the Ferguson riots, the Jena Six – while honing in, with painful accuracy, on the more “everyday” knocks faced by black Americans: noisy teens in Starbucks branded “niggers”, or a therapist presuming her client to be an intruder. As a speaker, Rankine has a quiet calmness about her, making the starkness of her observations – “because white men can’t / police their imagination / black men are dying”, for example – all the more shocking. Her message is clear: the struggle for racial equality is far from over and all of us, however awkward it makes us feel, need to call out prejudice. Opening Radio 3’s Free Thinking festival, she’ll discuss the power of making the private public and how language can be a force for change.
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Peep Show Farewell, London
Bringing a touch of brilliance to the banal, Channel 4’s Croydon-based sitcom has long been a pop culture powerhouse. Besides its quote-a-second script (gems include the perpetually stoned Super Hans’ warning not to trust “people” because they “like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis”), Peep Show’s magic undoubtedly lies in the unlikely camaraderie between its leads. In the real world, chronic over-thinker Mark and Jez – whose life is one part drugs to two parts delusion – probably wouldn’t sit next to each other on the bus, let alone share a fingernail-sized flat. However, almost 50 episodes, countless cock-ups, umpteen crappy jobs and innumerable existential crises later, telly’s favourite millennial odd couple are still going strong. To mark the show’s ninth and final series, stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb and writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong will be in conversation with The Guide’s own Julia Raeside, following a sneak peek at the duo’s latest mishaps.
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