Dawn French’s warm, funny show about an insurance scam

Dawn French is back, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph, in a new BBC comedy series that is the best thing she has done since “The Vicar of Dibley”.

In it, she plays a woman who tries to defraud an insurance company by pretending that her husband William (Mark Heap) is dead. This scheme arises from a “misunderstanding”: after William takes too much of his Parkinson’s medicine, at their home in the West Country, the germophobic local GP issues a death certificate without properly examining his body. When he then wakes up alive, Debbie (French) urges him to stay dead, so that they can claim a £250,000 insurance payout.

William, we learn, has always been a near-hermit, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Now his isolation is “simply enforced”. But the couple’s son Harry (Craig Roberts), who had been grieving for his father, is “traumatised by both the deception and the criminality around it” – not least because his wife (Mandip Gill) is a police officer.

None of this creates groundbreaking comedy, but “Can You Keep a Secret?” is warm and funny, with an underlying sense of melancholy that those familiar with classic British sitcoms will recognise.

Some of the gags could be “sharper”, said Ben Dowell in The Times, and a running joke about a character called Pigfish who is given to sticking petrol pumps up his bottom outstays its welcome. But the show is “beautifully performed”, and a blackmail subplot creates a real sense of jeopardy. The series takes a while to find its heart, but turns out to be “a surprising treat”.

by Katie Prescott 

“Mike Lynch was the UK’s answer to the truculent titans of California’s Silicon Valley,” said Martin Vander Weyer in Literary Review. An “authentic tech genius turned billionaire”, he had many “rebarbative traits to match” – not least a tendency to bully staff.

Today, Lynch is known above all for the freak accident that ended his life in August 2024, 10 weeks after he was cleared of fraud by a court in San Francisco. As he celebrated with friends and family, his superyacht Bayesian was struck by a tornado, which toppled its 72-metre mast and drowned Lynch and six others, including his daughter Hannah.

Now Katie Prescott, a Times journalist, has written this engaging biography, which examines “with exemplary fairness and clarity” Lynch’s life and business dealings, along with his “terrible” end.

Born in 1965 in the “rough suburb” of Ilford, east London, Lynch was “blessed with brains, musical talent and drive”, said Charlie English in The Guardian. He earned a PhD in computing at Cambridge and in 1996 launched Autonomy, the software company that made him famous. Four years later, it floated on the London Stock Exchange with an “astonishing valuation of £4.1 billion”, and in 2011 was bought by Hewlett-Packard for an even more remarkable $11.7 billion.

As Prescott makes clear, these valuations were artificially inflated: Autonomy deployed various tricks to overstate its revenues – tricks, she suggests, that Lynch must have known about. He emerges from her account as a “monstrous man in many ways”: a “fluent liar” who set out to create a “sinister corporate culture” (at one of his companies, meeting rooms were “named after Bond villains”). This is an “excellent, meticulously researched” biography of a “gifted”, flawed and – in the end – desperately unlucky man.

Flamboyant painter, writer and fashion designer

Molly Parkin was a girl from a chapel-going family in the Welsh Valleys who emerged as one of Swinging London’s most flamboyant figures. She was unmissable on that era’s social scene, in her extravagant hats and brightly coloured costumes. In a long career, she worked as a journalist and fashion designer. She ran her own boutique off the King’s Road in Chelsea, appeared on chat shows and wrote racy novels. She lived in 52 different homes, married twice, and had sexual encounters with “men beyond enumeration”, said The Guardian – experiences that informed her novels, and that she detailed in her memoirs. But she died, aged 93, as “an acknowledged artist”, which is what she’d really wanted to be. “Art was her first and last love”, and her “serious talent”.

She was born in 1932, and brought up in the mining village of Pontycymer. Her father aspired to be a painter, but ran a sweet shop; her mother played the organ in the chapel. Molly loved the local landscape; “the darkness was at home”, where her father beat her and sexually abused her. Later, when they moved to north London, he took her to stage doors – thinking to pimp her out to actors – and also to the National Gallery. In 1949, she won a scholarship to Goldsmiths College of Art. After graduating, she taught art at an inner-city school by day, and by night frequented West End clubs, where she sought out a “sugar daddy”. Aged 22, she began an affair with her “sexual Svengali”, the actor James Robertson Justice, who was married and 25 years her senior.

She ended it when her father died, in 1956, and soon after she met Michael Parkin – a charming, Oxford-educated media executive – at a party. They married in 1957, and settled in a house in Old Church Street, Chelsea, paid for largely with the proceeds of her paintings, which sold for large sums. They had two daughters, and joined the King’s Road “beau monde”, said The Daily Telegraph. But while her life then was one of “rackety splendour”, her excessive drinking was already leading her down a path to Hogarthian decay. When she found out that her husband was cheating on her, she threw him out. At that moment, her artistic inspiration left her. So to support her daughters she turned to designing hats and bags for Biba, and launched her boutique, The Shop, while pursuing a very busy romantic life. Her lovers ranged from John Mortimer (who loved being spanked, which she found tiring after a long day) and Anthony Shaffer (who wrote his play “Sleuth” in her bed) to John Thaw, Bo Diddley and George Melly.

At a party in 1965, she got talking about fashion to a magazine executive – which led to her being made the fashion editor of Nova. She later worked for Harpers & Queen, and in 1971 she was named fashion editor of the year. Around that time, she became a TV pundit (though the BBC soon banned her for swearing on air), and in 1974 she produced the first of her “comic-erotic” novels. By then, she was married to the artist Patrick Hughes, with whom she lived first in a converted barn in Cornwall and then in New York, at the Chelsea Hotel. Its hedonism was too much even for her. It was, she said, like “living in Hades”. She and Hughes split up, and she returned to London, where she became a habitué of the notorious Colony Room in Soho, and devised her own one-woman show. Her drinking, though, was now out of control.

She reached her nadir in 1986, when she woke up in a gutter in Smithfield Market. She joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and rediscovered painting. After going bankrupt in 1998, she moved into a one-bed flat on the World’s End estate in Chelsea, where she continued to paint. In 2012, she was awarded the rare honour of a civil list pension, for her lifelong contribution to the arts.