Dea Birkett | The Spectator columnists & writers

As circus gets serious, is all the fun of the fair lost?

What’s so serious about a red nose? How should we analyse the ‘specific socio-historical relations’ and ‘aesthetic trends particular to geographic context’ of the circus? How can we ‘codify’ equestrian performance in the ring? With the publication of The Cambridge Companion to the Circus, this artform has tumbled out of the Big Top and into the library and lecture hall. It’s a recent arrival to lofty, learned spaces. When Vanessa Toulmin of Sheffield University, widely regarded as the world’s leading expert on circus and fairground history, first ventured into academia, she did so under the guise of an ‘early film historian’, as circus wasn’t regarded as worthy of study. Now ‘circademia’ has become a respectable area of research for PhD students, and higher education institutes offer degrees in circus studies.

Why do we envy nomads but treat Travellers so badly?

Oh for the open road! Who doesn’t want to abandon the suffocating suburbs – waking to an alarm at the same time every single morning, hearing brown envelopes pushed through the front door, filling the dishwasher, paying that damned mortgage – and head out for endless sunsets falling over infinitely empty land? Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand as a woman who leaves her home behind after she loses her husband and her job and travels around the United States in a campervan, is predicted to win Oscar for Best Picture this weekend. The film, whose large cast mainly consists of real-life nomads, has led to a flush of appreciation and enthusiasm for a less settled life. This portrait of those who give up all worldly possessions for a modest motorhome calls to people whose lives are surrounded by picket fences.

The Florence Nightingale museum has been abandoned

The Florence Nightingale Museum is unwell. Just as the government announced that Nightingale hospitals were being ‘reactivated’ to cope with the surge in coronavirus cases, the museum’s Director David Green also had something important to say. To prevent the museum becoming financially insolvent, their galleries are closing indefinitely. Any attempt to reopen in the coming months would just be ‘prolonging the inevitable’. I hope the Prime Minister is aware of this irony. He’s certainly keen to highlight the Lady with the Lamp’s legacy. The museum is housed at St Thomas’ Hospital directly over the river from Westminster, and on the bicentenary of Florence Nightingale’s birth her image was projected in lights across the Houses of Parliament.

Has Covid killed off Punch and Judy?

They’re one of the country’s most famous married couples. You just need to spot his colourful jester outfit and the long tassle bobbing from his sugarloaf hat, and you know it’s Mr Punch and his wife Judy. But now, with the Covid restrictions, this familiar sideshow is under threat. Mr Punch may be swinging his final blow. Punch and Judy’s red-striped puppet booth has been popping up in Weymouth, Dorset, since 1880. Mark Poulton first saw the mayhem caused by hooked-nosed Mr Punch and his giant baton in the 1970s when he was four years old. He was transfixed and decided that when he grew up he would become a professor, the title bestowed upon a booth operator. In his teens he taught himself the necessary skills — sewing, woodcarving, sign-writing and how to run a show.

How to travel in the captivity of your home

We can’t travel with ease anywhere, anymore. First it was Spain, now Luxembourg is the latest holiday spot to require a two-week quarantine on return. But there is one destination that is guaranteed to be hassle as well as quarantine free: your home. If you’re wondering how you can make your 15-foot square lounge the border of your annual vacation, there’s a guidebook to help. It was written in 1790 by young Frenchman and amateur hot-air balloonist Xavier de Maistre. Maistre had been condemned to 42 days confinement in his Turin studio flat for taking part in an illegal duel. Rather than sit on his sofa and mope, he took up his pen and wrote A Journey around My Room, a manifesto on how to travel while going nowhere.

The curious history of Britain’s last circus building

Guess which theatre is the first to open to the paying public post-Covid? Not Lloyd Webber’s London Palladium, where small audiences have been invited on trials, nor any of the other West End giants. This weekend the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome — Britain’s last stand-alone circus building — is welcoming audiences to its ringside seats for the first time since March. The Hippodrome is tucked behind a row of kerchinging arcades on Great Yarmouth’s decaying, half-lit seafront. But its imposing red brick facade, built by legendary showman George Gilbert in 1903, leads into a lobby glinting with art deco-glass. Its performance space is a traditional 42ft diameter sawdust ring that can be flooded and filled with water like a pool.

Museums should stay shut

It’s been a promising week for museums. In Denmark, Germany and Australia some of their most famous galleries – Potsdam’s Museum Barberini, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum – will all be open within a week. In the UK, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport established a taskforce ‘paving the way for reopening’ and Arts Council England have declared that ‘helping the sector to reopen is a priority’. The Museums Association issued a statement: ‘We believe that it is possible for many museums to reopen to the public in the first phases of lifting the current lockdown. Many museums are well-placed to introduce social distancing measures similar to those currently used in supermarkets.

The faded charm of the Isle of Wight

I was worried my first trip to the Isle of Wight might be too late. These days, a holiday island would surely be no more than fanciful tearooms with hardening scones and flashing arcades. But alighting from the ferry at Ryde, I not only stepped into another place, but another time. It may not be fanciful or flashy, but the Isle of Wight has a faded charm, in the white-painted hotel fronts along the esplanade, the over-manicured patches of public gardens, and a pier without any fruit machines, but with a railway running all the way along it. I travelled around this 1950s throwback in a futuristic fashion — by electric bike — soaring up hills as if mere molehills. I’d never been on one before, and they go quite fast with very little effort.

Why I’m sick of politics being described as a circus

Jon Sopel has a new book out this month – A Year at the Circus. But the BBC’s North America editor hasn’t spent the last 12 months taming roaring lions in a sawdust ring or swinging on a trapeze wearing a skin-tight sparkly leotard. He’s been covering Trump’s presidency. And the ‘circus’ he refers to is the chaos and infighting inside the Oval Office. The book’s jacket shows a picture of the White House with a red and white striped circus tent perched over the stucco roof railings. ‘At the heart of Washington, there is a circus. It's raucous, noisy and full of clowns,’ Sopel declares. This distinguished member of the White House Press Corp is not alone as a political commentator in using circus to describe incompetence.

Fool’s paradise

Islands have a special appeal. We imagine that on an island we’ll somehow ‘get away from it all’. In the era of Brexit and climate concerns, Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, more than 3,000 miles from the nearest landmass, is flooded with requests from people hoping to settle there. I would advise them to think again. I spent several months living on Pitcairn — a mile-by-mile-and-a-half volcanic rock battered by a hostile ocean, home to a handful of descendants from the Bounty mutineers and the Tahitians they took with them. But I did not, as I’d hoped, discover a self-reliant paradise. What my time on Pitcairn taught me is that islands are no Edens. Adamstown, the capital and only settlement, is a tortured sea-surrounded village, thwart with divisions, where bullies and petty squabbles govern daily life.

A circus film with no circus

Dumbo is an elephant we can’t forget. More than 70 years since Disney’s 1941 film, the big-eared baby is still the most famous pachyderm on the planet. Director Tim Burton has dared to enter the ring with this iconic grey beast and remake the Disney classic not as a cartoon, but as live action. In his 2019 Dumbo, there are two competing circuses — a traditional, down-on-its-luck, tented American circus run by ringmaster Max Medici (Danny DeVito) that thunders across America by rail and the huge, sinister theme park Dreamland, run by the avaricious, unprincipled and flamboyant V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), whose character bears a passing resemblance to Trump, not least the endlessly played with and thinning strawberry-blonde hair.

Doing it for themselves

Balancing act

In a British circus, you will no longer find big cats, dancing bears or sea lions balancing on balls. Anne, the last elephant, paraded around the ring for the final time almost a decade ago, after a circus career lasting more than 50 years. The only wild animals that continue to perform under the big top are a fox, three camels, three raccoons, four zebra, half a dozen reindeer, a zebu, and a macaw called Rio. This menagerie travels with two small family--run traditional circuses, Circus Mondao and Peter Jolly’s Circus. Almost a million pounds have been spent on each animal, trying to get them banned from performing. The mighty Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) has been running this campaign, alongside the Born Free Foundation, PETA and the militant group Animal Defenders.

Big cats and acrobats

We’re celebrating 250 years of circus this year. In 1768, the retired cavalryman and entrepreneur Philip Astley, together with his trick-rider wife Patty Jones (whose act was to gallop around the ring smothered in a swarm of bees) took a piece of rope, laid it in a circle on a piece of marshy land at London’s South Bank, and filled it with astonishing acts — tumblers, acrobats, jugglers, clowns. This was the very first circus. Every circus, anywhere in the world, began at that moment. The extraordinary new art form — a collection of street acts and horse tricks, infused with spectacle and risk and set in a circle — quickly trotted off around the world. It first sailed to Dublin, then spread throughout Europe and over to America, India and Australia.

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