Clarissa Tan | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

Good luck having a proper holiday if you own a smartphone

This time last year, the Spectator's Clarissa Tan discussed how you can never really have a proper holiday if you own a smartphone. A year on, and Clarissa is no longer with us, but her wonderful writing still is: I was sitting on some rocks by the Cornish coast when a teenager swanned by on the sun-warmed boardwalk in front of me. The boy stood on the burning deck, preparing to dash across the sand, dive. Then his phone rang. ‘Luce! Yes, I’m at the sea… Was just going to plunge… Ran back to my mobile… Ha ha!… No, didn’t forget, will share that file on Google Docs… How’s France?… Awesome… Ha ha!’ Rage washed over me. I was angry because the boy had broken the sound of the waves with his silly ringtone and sillier chatter.

Clarissa Tan

The Visit

Clarissa Tan

The Visit

Clarissa Tan, who wrote articles and TV reviews for The Spectator, has died of cancer aged 42. She came to London from Singapore after winning this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing and over the next seven years wrote about a great many things: Asia, race and the East; also smartphones, Sienna and socks. Clarissa paid attention to prose and all her pieces were beautiful and funny but, perhaps most unusually, they rang true. She was much loved by all at The Spectator and we miss her. Here is her prize-winning piece. I wish to write about a place of which I know everything yet nothing, where everything is familiar yet strange, a place where I feel I go too often, but never quite enough. This place is the same for everyone, only different.

Clarissa Tan

If BBC3 was allowed to keep its hits, perhaps it wouldn’t be getting booted online

Clarissa Tan

If BBC3 was allowed to keep its hits, perhaps it wouldn’t be getting booted online

So BBC3 will be online-only from next autumn. If the Beeb had presented this news as the channel being the first one to take the daring step of migrating to the internet, instead of it being booted out to save the likes of BBC4, perhaps BBC3 fans would be feeling less aggrieved. After all, as companies like Netflix demonstrate, the future of TV is probably on the web. Linear channels are just so, well, linear and old-fashioned. The Beeb says the move is part of its cost-cutting, and will result in £30 million more for BBC1 (presumably enough to replenish Sherlock’s coat supply). I had hoped that, as a consequence, our licence fees would also be cut, but apparently not. Instead, the BBC is now proposing that its fee be pegged to inflation.

Clarissa Tan

A quietly stunning quest for Bonnie Prince Charlie

Clarissa Tan

A quietly stunning quest for Bonnie Prince Charlie

What if Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he swept down from Scotland towards London to lay claim to the throne, hadn’t lost his nerve at Derbyshire but had instead pressed on — and won? What would Britain be like today? In the year that the Scots vote on whether to stay in the UK, the art world has discovered a painting from that other time when the union was in jeopardy. It’s a marvellous portrait of Charles, painted in Holyrood Palace by the famous Scottish artist Allan Ramsay, when both men were at the peak of their ambition. The only known portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie from this heroic phase of his life, it dates from around 1745, when he led the Jacobite rebellion. The discovery was made by the art detective Bendor Grosvenor, of Fake or Fortune fame.

Clarissa Tan

Britain has many major problems - racism isn’t one of them

Clarissa Tan

Britain has many major problems - racism isn’t one of them

I am a banana. In Singapore, where I used to live, this needs no explanation — it means I’m yellow on the outside but white on the inside, someone who looks ethnically Chinese but whose way of thinking is ‘western’. There are bananas all over Asia, and I daresay the world. We are better versed in Shakespeare than Confucius, our Mandarin is appalling, and we often have pretentious Anglo or American accents. Then there are people who are ‘ching-chong’, a reference to anyone who enjoys the kitschy bling of stereotypically Chinese things, sans irony — they like paving their entire garden with cement, for example, or driving a huge Mercedes, or placing two garish stone lions on either side of a wrought-iron gate. In Asia, there are lots of labels like these, based along racial lines.

Clarissa Tan

So long, Scandinavia. Bonjour, Benelux!

Clarissa Tan

So long, Scandinavia. Bonjour, Benelux!

Clarissa Tan

Jeremy Paxman’s Great War is great. But is 2,500 hours of WW1 programming too much?

Clarissa Tan

Jeremy Paxman’s Great War is great. But is 2,500 hours of WW1 programming too much?

Why are we so fascinated by the first world war? As its 100th anniversary approaches, we’re already mired in arguments about whether for Britain it was a ‘just war’ or a ‘pointless sacrifice’ of millions of lives. I don’t see why it has to be one or the other. Surely this huge and horrific event held elements of both, and more. If ever there was a time when glory ran alongside absurdity, when courage marched lockstep with catastrophe, this was it. We’re looking back at the Great War as if it were a mental exercise — should it or shouldn’t it have happened? But maybe our fascination is emotional as well as intellectual. In our age of individualism and self-gratification, something about this time, when so many were willing to die for a bigger cause, intrigues us.

Clarissa Tan

China’s banking problems are snowballing — fast

Clarissa Tan

China’s banking problems are snowballing — fast

The world's largest bank by assets, Beijing-based ICBC, has announced it won't take full responsibility for a trust investment worth 3-billion yuan (£300 million) that may go bust. In other words, one of China's 'big four' banks may be linked to a default on a loan pretty similar to the sort that started the Lehman crisis in 2007. In fact, it may be worse, due to the lack of transparency. The troubled Chinese loan was sold through a trust company that belongs to the nation's vast and opaque shadow-banking system, which offers credit to companies that might find it hard to raise money otherwise. Many of these trust loans are of the convoluted, 'structured' kind that sparked Lehman's downfall and rocked the world.

Clarissa Tan

Clarissa Tan’s Notebook: Why I stopped drinking petrol

Clarissa Tan

Clarissa Tan’s Notebook: Why I stopped drinking petrol

Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though through steam. The Arno river was a dense strip of dew. At the Piazzale Michelangelo, the statue of David was etched by the surrounding murkiness to a stark silhouette, the renaissance defined by gothic cloud. I peered through a telescope that overlooked the city and saw nothing for miles. My friend Alessandro told me this was unusual for sunny Tuscany, which made me feel quite pleased. Perhaps with each day that passed I would see less of Florence — the ultimate tourist experience. At a nearby cemetery, the milky arms of stone angels reached out through the brume, while creaking old Fiats disappeared into the ether.

Clarissa Tan

After Sherlock, TV will never be the same again

Clarissa Tan

After Sherlock, TV will never be the same again

You know the holiday season is over when, instead of being torn between The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday night, you have to choose between The Voice and Splash!. The good news for The Voice is that pint-sized superstar Kylie Minogue has joined its judging panel. In the season opener, competition hopeful Leo Ihenacho (formerly of the band The Streets) picked Kylie to be his mentor, as he used to fantasise about her when he was a boy. The premise of The Voice is that the judges, who have their backs turned to the stage, aren’t influenced by the aspirants’ looks, age or dress. In return, contestants seem to choose as their coach the judge they think is most, well, hot. Anyway, I’m afraid the amateur-diving platform Splash!, with its head-spinning mixture of Tom Daley, poolside judges, half-known celebrities, half-done half-twists and belly flops, is sunk.

Clarissa Tan

Is Sherlock starting to suffer from ADD?

Clarissa Tan

Is Sherlock starting to suffer from ADD?

Sherlock’s not dead. A good thing, since on New Year’s Day BBC1 launched its third series of Sherlock, and it’d be inconvenient if the three episodes didn’t have Sherlock. Last season, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes stood on a building rooftop, dramatic coat flapping, a tweedy caped crusader. Then he jumped to his death. Only he didn’t. He’s still alive. The Cumberbatch comeback! Hooray. Of course, the detective had some explaining to do. Not only to sidekick John Watson (Martin Freeman) — who grew a moustache as part of the grieving process — but also to the many Sherlock fans who’d taken to the internet in the past two years to post their survival theories. Indeed, the first episode didn’t come up with one scenario, but at least three, in a cheeky nod to these web speculators, and there’s even a geeky character who forms a club where members moot their hypotheses.

Clarissa Tan

Shinzo Abe’s shrine visit is a sign of a new, hawkish Japan

Clarissa Tan

Shinzo Abe’s shrine visit is a sign of a new, hawkish Japan

Peace and goodwill seem to be in rather short supply in the Far East, with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe paying homage at Tokyo's controversial Yasukuni wartime shrine, provoking a sharp rebuke from China within an hour of his visit. Abe's appearance at the shrine - dedicated to those who died for the Empire of Japan, including the general responsible for Pear Harbour - also coincided with the 120th (hypothetical) birthday of Mao. It could all be almost comic, if Sino-Japanese relations weren't already so fraught, and the stakes now extraordinarily high. China last month declared an air defense zone covering the territory of the disputed Senkaku-Diaoyu islands, causing the US to fly B-52 bombers over the area.

Clarissa Tan

Are events in Last Tango in Halifax too bad to be true?

Clarissa Tan

Are events in Last Tango in Halifax too bad to be true?

Does love run out when life runs out? Or does it intensify, touching and changing all around it? Two series now on our screens make a strong case for the latter — one is about love striking in old age, the other about young lovers struck by Aids. Both pack a wallop. Since its Bafta-winning first series last year, Last Tango in Halifax (BBC1, Tuesdays) — about a widower and widow, Alan and Celia (wonderfully played by Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid), who reignite their teenage romance by getting engaged in their seventies — has been lauded for its celebration of love among the over-35s. But pensioner passion is not the only surprise this show offers — indeed, as the weeks go by, you realise that’s the least surprising thing about it.

Clarissa Tan

Why doesn’t Doctor Who travel far from Britain?

Clarissa Tan

Why doesn’t Doctor Who travel far from Britain?

If I could go back in time, I’d watch Doctor Who from the very first episode. I wasn’t born in Britain, and with the 50th anniversary of the series hurtling towards us like an Earth-bound Tardis, I’m wondering if I might understand this cultural touchstone better if I’d grown up in the country, along with the show. But Doctor Who neophytes are in luck, because there’s a tiny loop in the time-space continuum whereby we can quickly catch up on Time Lord lore. To celebrate the 50th, the BBC has commissioned a host of programmes, many setting out to explain Doctor Who’s place as a British icon. This week there’s An Adventure in Space and Time (BBC2, Thursday) and The Ultimate Guide to Doctor Who (BBC3, Monday). Whoosh! Off we go then.

Clarissa Tan

Come to the Spectator office, Gareth Malone, and hear our ‘Carmina Burana’

Clarissa Tan

Come to the Spectator office, Gareth Malone, and hear our ‘Carmina Burana’

They’re now televising proceedings from the Court of Appeal. Great. As if I didn’t have enough to do already, keeping tabs on Strictly Come Dancing and EastEnders, I now have to monitor what’s happening within the hallowed judicial temples of the land. The broadcasting of court cases has been much debated, with people fussing about whether it will influence the meting out of Justice, and the implications for Law and Order once these are exercised in front of the cameras, and other high-minded issues. My own worry is about my job scope. Everything is televised these days, which means everything can be reviewed. There are the main channels such as the BBC and ITV, plus satellite and cable channels, Netflix and LoveFilm, those Kevin Bacon ads, CCTV (China’s state broadcaster), CCTV (surveillance cameras, of which Britain apparently has more than China), YouTube, and goodness knows what else.

Clarissa Tan

Will the women of The X Factor stop perving?

Clarissa Tan

Will the women of The X Factor stop perving?

Will the women on ITV’s The X Factor (Saturday) stop perving? I suppose there are two ways to tackle the issue of gender equality — one is to dictate that nobody mention sexuality at all; the other is to make females slobber over the males the way men purportedly slobber over women all the time. The women judges of The X Factor are lurching towards the latter. ‘I’ve got my eye on you,’ Sharon Osbourne winked at a contestant, Nicholas McDonald. He is 15. She made him repeat the words ‘nearly sixteen’, because he pronounced it ‘sex-teen’. Young Nicholas is being sexualised before our eyes. ‘Tonight’s the first night I noticed those baby-blue eyes of yours,’ cooed ex-Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger, rallying the ladies in the audience to agree with her.

Clarissa Tan

View From 22 podcast special: Is Twitter killing travel writing?

Clarissa Tan

View From 22 podcast special: Is Twitter killing travel writing?

Do you tweet when you travel? We bet you do, that you post your photos and observations as you visit new places — if not on Twitter, then on Facebook, Instagram, tumblr, etc. That's great, but what's to become of more conventional forms or writing, especially travel writing? And even if there are some wonderful authors out there, will they find readers with attention spans stretching longer than 140 characters? Our View From 22 special is about how social media is changing the nature of travel and travel writing. We caught up with Gary Arndt, who's amassed 125,000 Twitter followers on @EverywhereTrip, as he travels around the world. It was hard to get hold of globe-trotting Gary, but we finally found him in an exotic high-rise location.

Clarissa Tan

Introducing the celebs of Victorian reality TV

Clarissa Tan

Introducing the celebs of Victorian reality TV

Did Dr Jekyll turn into Jack the Ripper? Besides becoming evil Mr Hyde, did Robert L. Stevenson’s fictional creation morph into the serial killer who terrified Whitechapel? In a way, he did. A stage version of Stevenson’s novel was playing in the West End at the time of the East End murders. On stage, the actor who played both Jekyll and Hyde performed the switcheroo to such effect that women in the audience fainted. At the same time, the bodies of dead prostitutes — their internal organs expertly removed — caused many to surmise: a doctor did it. That good/bad doctor who was scaring everybody! A newspaper declared: ‘Mr Hyde is at large in Whitechapel.’ Some even pointed fingers at the actor, Richard Mansfield. Obscuring things further, hoaxers sent letters to the police, some signed ‘Jack the Ripper’.

Clarissa Tan

Give us your views! Here is Fraser Nelson’s

Clarissa Tan

Give us your views! Here is Fraser Nelson’s

Spectator readers are known for their views — fierce, funny, original. Now we want not only your opinions, but your visual views as well. This week's magazine features Sam Leith's lovely review of Simon Jenkins' wonderful book, 'England's 100 Best Views'. What are your favourite views, from these shores and beyond? Send them to us. Also, don't forget we're canvassing your viewpoint with our Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize — the £2,000 award for unconventional travel writing. Only three more weeks till that competition closes. To kick off our reader photo spree, we thought we'd give you some views of our own. The photo above shows editor Fraser Nelson's favourite view, Eilean Donan Castle on Loch Duich. Fraser says: 'We Highlanders have a great many stunning views to choose from; this is perhaps, for me, the most emotional.

Clarissa Tan

Downton Abbey is now a weird parallel universe of the royal family. Except with less action

Clarissa Tan

Downton Abbey is now a weird parallel universe of the royal family. Except with less action

Are you following the world’s most watched aristocratic family? If you recall, they recently took into their ranks a member of the middle classes. The family, headed by a matriarch, is as dysfunctional as any other. But they do live in a palatial home and have a coterie of servants. Their sense of fashion is unerring. There are worries about the future and about inheritance. A boy, George, has been born. Downton Abbey — now a global phenomenon — caters to our insatiable curiosity about the royal family. The more we see of Queen Elizabeth, Charles, William and Kate at processions, and so forth, the more it leaves us wanting. How do these blue bloods actually live? Downton takes us there. The costume drama has been compared to Upstairs, Downstairs, even to Brideshead Revisited.

Clarissa Tan

The ideal death show

Clarissa Tan

The ideal death show

I am in a yurt, talking about death. Everyone is seated in a circle, and I am the next-to-last person to share. The last of the summer sun is shining through the entrance. At one end is a display coffin of biodegradable willow — there’s also tea and coffee, and coffin-shaped biscuits with skeleton-shaped icing. ‘I am a reporter,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to cover this event. But don’t worry, I won’t report what you share in this yurt. Also, I have cancer. I have been in treatment for one year, but now the treatment is over. I take one day at a time.’ There is silence, then hugs. I thought I would cry, but I don’t. Instead, I feel acceptance and a strange kernel of satisfaction. For the rest of my time here I am Death Girl, shrouded in drama.

Clarissa Tan

The Wipers Times - 100 years on, this newspaper still lives

Clarissa Tan

The Wipers Times - 100 years on, this newspaper still lives

Clarissa Tan

The sight of a rose-and-pistachio cake with lychee flavouring, strewn with petals, makes Clarissa Tan’s heart lift

Clarissa Tan

The sight of a rose-and-pistachio cake with lychee flavouring, strewn with petals, makes Clarissa Tan’s heart lift

I’m not crazy about cookery shows. I suspect they indicate how little we are cooking, rather than how much. We’re fascinated with celebrity chefs because we think they’ve mastered something exotic and foreign to us — no surprise their shows are often slotted next to travel programmes. Looking at Jamie Oliver potter about his kitchen, we smugly feel we’ve given some time to cooking, though in reality we’ve done no such thing. On the whole, I think you are better off making yourself some buttered toast than spending an hour watching Anthony Bourdain experiment with spring rolls in Hanoi. The Great British Bake Off (BBC2, Tuesdays) is different. Like Masterchef, we follow the series not so much for the culinary expertise — though that is important — but for the human drama.

Clarissa Tan

Faulty towers

Clarissa Tan

Faulty towers

Clarissa Tan

The Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul prize for outstanding travel writing is open for entries

Clarissa Tan

The Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul prize for outstanding travel writing is open for entries

The Spectator, as it does every year, is offering you good money to write about your travels. What’s more, our £2,000 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize — named after the late Trinidad-born writer and brother of VS Naipaul — is not awarded for travel writing in the conventional sense. You need not have gone anywhere highly exotic or far away: the prize is for 'the most acute and profound observation of a culture alien to the writer.' You can write from outer space or from your back garden, what we’re looking for is writing that is fresh, current, different, intelligent, incisive, witty, sad or funny — or all of those things. Besides the cash prize, the winner will also get his or her entry published in The Spectator.

Clarissa Tan

Big School left me po-faced

Clarissa Tan

Big School left me po-faced

How did our comedies become so sad? BBC1’s new sitcom Big School (Fridays) opened with a scene that would probably tickle the ribs of many, but I, in my usual humourless way, found it depressing. Chemistry teacher Mr Church, played by David Walliams, hoped to excite his morbidly uninterested pupils about the effects of dunking a bottle of cold liquid nitrogen in warm water by using hundreds of table-tennis balls to dramatise the resultant explosion. But the bell rang, and his students filed out of class radiating boredom and contempt, leaving Mr Church gazing forlornly at a thousand ping-ponging shells. A similar sense of vulnerability permeated Boom Town, BBC3’s ‘structured reality’ series featuring a host of real-life eccentrics doing eccentric things in partly choreographed set pieces.

Clarissa Tan

If you’re on your summer holiday, why are you reading this?

Clarissa Tan

If you’re on your summer holiday, why are you reading this?

I’m in two minds about blogging this post. On the one hand, I’d really rather be on a sunny beach somewhere, reading a good old-fashioned book or staring at the blue horizon. On the other hand, I really, really want to publicise my Spectator cover story about summer and our addiction to technology (it’s fab!). Then I want monitor any comments it gets on this website, and post it on my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Each Like and retweet would give me a shot of satisfaction — ping! That’s where we’re all at, aren’t we? We now lead double lives, one in the real world and the other on the internet. While we go on holiday our other, internet self still occupies its usual place on the Web. So we’re really not ‘getting away from it all’, at all.

Clarissa Tan

You’re never really on holiday with a smartphone

Clarissa Tan

You’re never really on holiday with a smartphone

Clarissa Tan

Clarissa Tan experiences the greatest show on earth, and laughs

Clarissa Tan

Clarissa Tan experiences the greatest show on earth, and laughs

I watched Top Gear (BBC2, Sunday) for the first time in my life last week (the rock under which I’ve been living is pretty large, practically a boulder). I thought I’d better plug this knowledge gap before it got too embarrassing, seeing that Top Gear is the greatest show on earth, the travelling Big Top de nos jours, a daredevil combo of acrobatic stunts, mechanical wizardry and freakery. Fakery too, apparently, as it’s emerged that in a recent episode scenes that looked spontaneous were actually staged. These involved flashes of watery chaos, upturned tables and angry diners shaking their fists as an amphibious vehicle hastily built and even more hastily driven by Jeremy Clarkson & co. blasted past a bucolic restaurant by the River Avon, spraying all and sundry.