I'll have a bowl of the Primal Soup, please

NB – if you haven’t seen Jurassic World, then this has all manner of spoilers. If you have seen JW, then a heads up – it’s the least concise review in the world. Grab your branded T-Rex lunch box and let’s get stuck in!

So, last weekend, I saw Jurassic World (which, along with binge-watching series 5 of Game of Thrones meant I was all about giant make-believe lizards.) It’s a great popcorn film (especially when seen in 3D, on an IMAX screen) – ie massive, loud, shouty, bloody and kill-y, with all the dinosaurs, and, indeed the action and characters, turned up to, to borrow Mark Kermode’s brilliant phrase for such a scale, ‘eleventy-stupid’.

The main problem when trying to reboot a franchise, is how much you throw back to the originals. Star Wars went for an origin story and made the bold move of taking all the fun and adventure out of it, concentrating, plot-wise, largely on intergalactic taxation, and introduced the most annoying film character in recorded history, in the form of Jar Jar Binks. Star Trek also went for an origin story, whilst making all the participants (other than Scotty), unfeasibly buff, with some in-jokes for fans. Batman kicked all that campy Tim Burton stuff into touch and went Dark. Superman just went for enormous shoulders and the two main protagonists throwing each other into buildings for the last half hour. Oh, and didn’t they wildly mis-cast Russell Crowe as Superman’s dad? If Russell Crowe were my dad, I’d try to leave the planet too. The upcoming Ghostbusters is going for gender inversion, so we’ll see how that pans out.

And so we come to Jurassic World. Jurassic Park, when it was first released, blew my mind. I have vivid memories of sitting in the cinema gasping in amazement at the T-Rex as it thundered into view in the middle of a massive rainstorm, then proceeded to try to eat everyone in sight. There are so many great set-pieces (the car crashing down through the tree branches; the moment when you realise that one of the kids might be about to be electrocuted because they’re about to switch the fence back on; Laura Dern scrabbling madly to get into the shed where the junction box is, pursued by the Velociraptors. OMG, THE BIT WITH THE VELOCIRAPTORS IN THE KITCHEN. Also, everything that Jeff Goldblum says.)  It was terrifying, it was thrilling and the effects and animatronics mostly still hold up now.

I’ve seen it countless times since, and other than Richard Attenborough’s supremely annoying park keeper, I still love it. It’s brilliantly constructed with great characters; the supporting cast are ace (Bob Peck! [‘Clever girl’]; Samuel L Jackson! The guy who plays Dennis the fat, greedy nerd!) They are killed off in satisfying ways that add to the drama. The kids are a bit annoying, but largely fine – and hey, it’s the girl who knows how to re-boot the computers (‘It's a UNIX system! I know this!’). And all the dinosaurs are female, so: Feminism.

Despite it being an action-packed blockbuster, Spielberg left enough room for some quieter bits, cleverness and fun – the glass of water shuddering to herald the T-Rex’s approach; the ‘veggiesaurus’ sneezing over Lex; the ‘objects in the mirror are closer than they appear’ visual gag and Goldblum’s inimitable, ‘Must. Go. Faster’ line. Back then, there was a shonky jeep and he had no weaponry to help him out. You really did wonder if any of them were going to make it through.

Also, you never quite know who’s going to save everyone. Obviously, the fat guy’s going to bite it. And the lawyer. But won’t wise-cracking Dr Ian Malcolm save the day? ‘Well. Uh. Yes. I would, uh, have loved to save the day. But. As you can see. Life has found a way to keep me in a bunker. With a busted leg. So I shall have to, ah, just sit this one out. Largely with my shirt off.’ Bob Peck, the only man who really knows his way around a shotgun, is, of course, hunted down. John Hammond’s just hiding. Our two palaeontologists aren’t very Indiana Jones (I know, archaeologist, but hey, dusting off ancient objects in the sand? Pretty similar.) Of course, as it turns out, none of the humans solves the problem of the dinosaurs wanting to scoff them all in the final encounter, which was a satisfying twist.

So, expectations were high for Jurassic World. We’re in a world where nearly everyone has forgotten that the first iteration of the park did not go well. JW is a safari park on steroids. Everything is bigger, but crucially, I found, not necessarily that much scarier, because everything has to move so fast, and in the process we’ve sacrificed any subtlety, all of the humour and, seemingly, any idea that women can be well-rounded characters. I’m obviously one of very many who were pissed off that Bryce Dallas Howard’s character (Career Bitch Claire) is so cardboard and one dimensional, you could make a whole Moonpig’s worth of birthday cards out of her.

When I was watching it, most of my brain cells were being ridden roughshod by CGI, pounding music, bellowing ’saurs and flinching every time a pterodactyl came towards me out of the screen via 3D. So I was kind of going along with CBC without getting too Fourth Wave Feminism about it (other than The Shoes, which every woman in the audience picked up on immediately). But then the instant I was out of my seat as the credits rolled, I was booted back to an ancient semiotics module at uni and started to wonder whether the writers had had an actual brainstorm to come up with all the sexist signifiers and signifieds.

Viz: She has a really precision-cut bob! (‘I am a controlling bitch’). She wears all-white clothes, despite the fact she works in a wildlife park in the middle of South America, where it is super-humid! (‘I have no idea about the real world; also, I wear my white blazer like a cape for quite a lot of the running time, so I don’t even know how sleeves work’). She’s wearing ridiculous 4-inch nude stilettos, which she insists on wearing even past the point where someone could have given her some PRACTICAL FOOTWEAR, GIVEN THAT WE’RE ALL RUNNING FOR OUR LIVES, HALF THE TIME THROUGH JUNGLE, WITH A TON OF MUD. (‘I am a stupid woman who insists on maintaining her power wardrobe at all costs. Even when it is, literally, crippling me and I have to outrun a T-Rex. Through dead bodies and rubble. In the dark.’). She’s hopeless with children, to the extent that she doesn’t even know her nephews’ ages! (‘Why would I care about people who aren’t me? Children would stand in the way of my glorious and oh-so-fulfilling career! I probably need a hunky, capable man who is Good with Kids to make me see the light, teach me how to Care and correct my evil, non-breeding ways.’)

So even though she eventually (kind of ) saves the day, you’re still going, ‘but, LOUBOUTINS? That don’t break?’. It’s so distracting; all it would’ve taken is one line of dialogue, when the shit starts hitting the fan, where she jokingly says, ‘I think it’s time for these’ and whips a pair of flats/trainers out from under a desk somewhere. Because as the friend who I was with, who works in a pretty corporate environment, said, ‘Everyone has several pairs of shoes at work, and you spend quite a lot of your day changing in and out of them.’

Her character development is signified by her unbuttoning her impractical white shirt and knotting it jauntily under her ribcage, and finally ditching the GHDs and letting her hair go wavy (‘I’m not rigid any more!’) Plus, some driving, and presumably now that she no longer has a job (worst day for an appraisal ever) decides that a life with Hunky Saviour Chris Pratt, who is much admired by children, and thinks of Velociraptors as, really, just very fierce dogs with more teeth at their disposal, is a much better option.

The other women in the film are badly mis-served too – the boys’ mum is a whiny bitch who just keeps phoning CBC to chew her out for a/ not having children and b/ prioritising doing her job of running a multi-billion dollar enterprise, which she is seemingly in sole charge of, over nannying her two nephews around what is presumed by all to be an uber-safe theme park. On the face of it, the worst that’s going to happen to them is that they get drenched, courtesy of the mosasaur thing, or have to wait in line. (They don’t, CBC has got them VIP wristbands. Because she’s organised like that.) The only other significant woman is CBC’s PA, who is British, to reinforce the idea that CBC loves being uptight so much that she’s employed a woman who is more uptight than she is. The PA is understandably quite pissed off at being tasked with watching two boys who are perfectly capable of steering themselves around a theme park (don’t forget: they have VIP wristbands), 24/7. I’m sure she has a LOT of other stuff to sort out (Powerpoint presentations on the profitability margins of the new uber-dinosaur and the like). She is portrayed as a massive baddy, and given a death that I found unnecessarily protracted, gruesome and graphic. I was surprised it got past the 12A certification. (It’s not just me that’s picked upon this.) Even the actual baddy’s death is shown off-screen, with just a splatter of blood on the lab’s glass window.

Ah, so who is our Big Bad this time? Jurassic World has the least-believable villainous plot ever, viz: the Army (or a shady, one-man version of the Army), despairing of the backlash against drones as an effective way of war-mongering, decides that it would be ace if you could train and use Velociraptors to kill people instead. Umm, dude, several problems here: 1/ This would be very expensive in terms of production/training costs. Not to mention, transportation issues. You can just fly a drone where you want it, park it, and it’s ready to rock. Velociraptors, not so much. 2/ In terms of a ‘hearts and minds’ operation, V’raptors are a massive fail. They really will just kill everything in sight, including children. Children are sort of like the starters for a Velociraptor all-you-can-eat Battle Buffet. At least with a drone, you can go in for precision killing. 3/ Your main issue, however, is that unless you somehow breed them with bullet-proof skin, they are going to get shot the minute they hove into view. Or blown up by an IED. You know, like regular soldiers do. Although, the idea of a little Velociraptor flak-jacket-and-helmet combo is now pleasing me greatly.

So, all the characters, and, in fact, the plot, have been written on the back of a napkin, with room to spare.

The problem Jurassic World has is made explicit by the park’s own problem: we are only wowed these days by things being bigger, louder, smashier (but not nicier, of course), with bigger teeth which can eat more people. So that’s both the dinosaur, and the film, that they’ve had to create. It almost works as a meta-critique on the concept of our limited attention spans and the blasé short-termist nature of consumerism, not to mention product placement (I wasn’t sure if the clunkiness of that was satirical; I suspect not.) But I wish there’d been a way of making a clever point without making a dumbed-down version of Jurassic Park.

The main thing that’s interesting after a viewing is seeing how they’ve tried to recreate all the characters and beats (much as Ridley Scott did with the howlingly dull Prometheus), but also why this version doesn’t work nearly as effectively:

Who’s the barking mad billionaire who owns the park?

JP: Crazily naïve and excitable John Hammond. We know he’s crazy because he’s got a really wonky Scottish accent. And he looks like Father Christmas in a linen shirt. And he basically goes, ‘Yes, yes, yes. Pffft’ when all the experts point out all the massive flaws in his parky plan. Ruefully comes to his senses once a few people have been killed by rage-filled effects.

JW: Crazily cynical and unexcitable Masrani Global Corporation's CEO Simon Masrani . He is all about the numbers and is a honking dipshit who refuses to kill the ProfitsWillsaur when it starts off on its rampage, because of all the investment dollars they’ve sunk into it. The introduction of the helicopter he is ill-advisedly flying himself is much like Chekov’s maxim about guns. (‘One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.’) You know that helicopter is going to kill him. You’ll never know if he comes to his senses once a lot of people have been killed by rage-fuelled effects. One suspects not – he doesn’t seem big on the concept of ‘bad PR’.

Who’s the evil guy who wants to make money with an off-island breeding plan?

JP: Dennis Nedry. He’s a fat computer geek whose attempt to get cryogenically-frozen embryos off the island gets thwarted by rain, mud, wearing glasses, and assuming an ancient frilled lizard isn’t that dangerous. He gets the blood-splat-against-glass ending that’s transferred to Hoskins, JW’s baddie.

JW: Geneticist Dr Henry Wu. We know he’s evil because he’s wearing a black poloneck rather than a lab coat. This man means business. Big business. He’s also being veeery shifty about revealing exactly what’s gone into the Enormosaur. By rights, he should be chomped to death, but they let him get away to, what, create a Jurassic/Godzilla mash up for 2017?

Who are our experts?

JP: Two palaeontologists (a man and a woman, both equally capable, yay, but the man really dislikes kids, so: character arc) and a chaos theoretician. Who is ace at looking cool and making quips.

JW: Umm, Chris Pratt, I guess? He’s trying to train some Velociraptors for no real reason that’s ever explained. Does he want to spice up Cirque du Soleil in Vegas, perhaps? He can drive very fast, but takes on JP’s Dr Ellie Sattler moment of stroking a dying dinosaur in a field to demonstrate that he may be ex-US Navy, but in fact he is ALL HEART. Right, Claire? Chris Pratt is there to melt your frozen ovaries. Start thawing, lady.

Who are our imperilled kids?

JP: Super-keen on dinosaurs Tim and his sister Lex. Both turn out to be pretty brave, resourceful and, as mentioned above, useful in a tech crisis.

JW: There is a teenage boy who spends the first third perving wordlessly at girls. Which wouldn’t be quite as bad (is he shy and not good at actual speaking?) if you hadn’t shown us he’s got a girlfriend. He thinks his brother is a pain in the ass. His brother is a super-keen dino-nerd with a haircut that even a modern boybander would deem ‘a bit much’. Not going to age well, that haircut. He eventually freaks out so badly that the older brother is forced to tell him it’ll all be OK and give him a hug. Neither of them are in any way resourceful or useful in a tech crisis. Although they do fix a jeep which would, in the real world after 20 years, in no way run. I wanted at least one of them to bust a leg in homage to Dr Ian Malcolm. Though not with their shirt off, obviously.

Who are our hate figures?

JP: A slimy lawyer who memorably gets bitten in half whilst cowering on a loo. MUCH CHEERING. Dennis, for being a greedy geek who gets half the island killed by shutting off the electric fencing.

JW: A female PA, whom there is no valid reason to think of as a hate figure, despite the fact she’s set up, and dispatched as, one. Dr Henry Wu. We’re not really given enough to go on here, other than the fact he’s keen on money and a bit carefree when it comes to gene-splicing. But then again, as he himself explains, he was only doing what he was told to. Hoskins, the least convincing military advisor EVS. I wanted him to have a more flashy death, frankly.

Who are the monsters?

JP: Clever Girl pack of Velociraptors. Massive, angry, stompy T-Rex, used as Dinosaur Ex-Machina.

JW: Massive, angry, stompy, under-socialised Mega-Rex. Which can also make itself invisible (it’s seen Predator) and wants to play around with a glass gyroscope. So is basically a gene-spliced version of your cat with a Christmas bauble.

Pack of Velociraptors which we’re now supposed to like, because they seem like they’re kind of on our side? Or at least, being ladies, they all fancy Chris Pratt, so they don’t want to kill him.

The T-Rex is now there to save us instead of eat us. Yay! So, the Mosasaur is now our Dinosaur Ex-Machina.

Were Health & Safety not consulted on this at all?

JP: All the fences go down. There’s no back-up, so all your dinosaurs are running around freely, and most of your vehicles don’t work. Actually, your dinos can breed. Tropical conditions will cause all sorts of problems. Turns out, an opposable claw is ace with the right kind of door handles. Try swapping them out for doorknobs you have to turn?

JW: The gyroscopes have no over-ride function, allowing them to be automatically recalled. You’re running a park with 20,000 visitors a day, but you have spotty mobile reception which keeps cutting out? Really? No-one’s complained about this? Your CEO thinks it’s fine to fly a helicopter, despite the fact that he looks like a drunk child in charge of an X-Box. Your aviary full of killer pterodactyls – have you made that kind of like a big conservatory, that you could just smash through? You have? Oh, good choice.Your head of operations doesn’t know how shoes work.

Who’s changed over the running time?

JP: Dr Alan Grant still has a job, and decides that aww, kids aren’t so bad after all, once you’ve spent an hour and a half repeatedly stopping two of them from getting killed.

JW: Claire Dearing has, definitively, lost her job, so  decides that aww, kids aren’t so bad after all, once you’ve spent an hour and a half repeatedly stopping two of them from getting killed. And she and Chris Pratt are now seemingly totes compatible.

What have we all learned?

JP: Bringing back dinosaurs will not end well. And Steven Spielburg is a genius.

JW: Making even bigger dinosaurs? Yeah, that’s still not going to end well. And perhaps we get the blockbusters we deserve. It’s breaking all kinds of box office records, so I’m sure this is merely the beginning of the second Jurassic evolution. However, in three months' time, I'm betting I'll remember pretty much nothing about the plot and action of JW. But I will still be annoyed by those bloody shoes.

Question Time! (No, Not That One)

Anyone who knows me is well acquainted with the fact that a/ I love a pub quiz and b/ I am BRUTALLY competitive when it comes to said knowledge competitions. I passively-aggressively grab the pen and paper and start smugly scribbling down the answers whilst my team-mates are still arguing over what the answers might be. Especially if there's an 80s pop music round. I'm not having anyone asking me, 'are you sure? That does sound a bit like Clare Grogan' if the answer is clearly 'Strawberry Switchblade'. I don't massively care what the team name is, but obviously I'd prefer it if it's a pun that I've suggested.

Perish the pub quiz, though, which is too tricky and where we're languishing in the bottom quarter after the first two rounds. If I've got no hope of winning, then what's the point in doing it at all? Then I essentially just 'get a face on' and go all mopey and, like, sure, you can put Clare Grogan down if you like, but it's not right. I go totally teenage. I don't really know why I'm such a freak about pub quizzes, but I'd guess that having been awful at all sport at school, and never having a hope of being picked for a team, never mind winning anything, that 'knowing stuff' was the only way I was ever going to win a prize. Especially as one of my key skills seems to be collecting the most random bits of information and retaining them. I couldn't tell you who the current Foreign Secretary is, but I've been able to correctly name a proboscis monkey, based on a really grainy black and white, stamp-sized photo in a pub quiz. (Thanks mainly to a lifetime of watching David Attenborough documentaries. Truly the best teacher I've ever had.)

So it came to pass that a friend emailed the other day asking if I wanted to go to a Literary Quiz. Ooh, tricky one, this. Because of course, working in publishing, everyone thinks you're going to ace the Literary Quiz. But the last LQ I went to was part of a literary festival in Battersea and was so alarmingly intellectual even Jeremy Paxman might have suggested throwing in 'a few easier ones'. All the questions seemed to be about historical novels from the 1780s written by politicians of the time under pseudonyms. We were a whole team of publishing types, including an actual man (very rare in publishing circles) and so we thought we were in with a shot. Turned out everyone else taking part appeared to be over 70 and had spent all their working lives in a library nearby. I think the most recent book there was a question on was published in 1996. I essentially offered up the answer 'Disraeli?' to about 40% of the questions and a massive, huffy shrug for the rest. It was very dispiriting.

But this one looked more my bag. For a start, it was being hosted by Grazia! Wasn't likely to be that dauntingly clever, even if it was to promote the Baileys Prize shortlist. Ooh, now, this is sounding like my perfect evening - likely to get a goody bag with a free mag (nothing I like more than hate-reading Grazia when I haven't actually paid for it myself); some free Baileys (don't judge me, but I ruddy love Baileys. Have you tried the chocolate one? It's like blancmange. Ace); possibly a free book. I didn't anticipate any questions on pseudonymous historical novels from centuries ago. I was in. I was very much in.

We turned up at the venue (another clue as to the likely standards of the questions: All Bar One on New Oxford Street) half an hour before the alloted time. We tried to force our way upstairs, past a guy giving out wristbands who didn't seem to know what was going on. We darted past him up the stairs, to be met by a gaggle of alarmed-looking Grazia staffers. I think they mistook our, 'we don't want to miss out on any of the canapes' faces for 'we want to start answering literary questions immediately' faces. We were hastily ushered back downstairs whilst they carried on plonking branded pencils and answer sheets onto the tables and taking thousands of photographs of different drinks featuring Baileys for their Twitter feed.

We grouched around downstairs, being rude about this week's issue of Stylist, which apparently seems to think that 'Why thoughtful women are falling back in love with make-up' is a statement that makes any sense, and sees fit to put it on the cover featuring a woman's face covered in mad disco holographic eyeshadow and shiny red lipgloss. Finding content every week for a women's magazine must be a trying business, is all I can say. Sometimes, you must just be in an editorial meeting and find yourself muttering, 'how can we fuse FEMINISM and MAKE-UP? We know that our readers are interested in both, there must be a way of bringing these two elements together in one article.' 'Why thoughtful women are saying it's fine to love make-up?' 'YES! Sarah, you are a genius. Call Sali Hughes and ask her for 1,000 words, and call in some of that Mac "Simone de Beauvoir" lipgloss.'

Anyway, we were eventually granted access to the Quizzatorium. We bagged a table and one of our number was despatched to the bar to pick up free drinks. (On our first foray upstairs, one of the Grazia Gals had, on seeing we'd bought a drink, told us not to buy any more, as it was all free. God, d'you know what you're letting yourself in for here? A load of bookish geeks being offered free booze all night? Could get messy, even if it is a Tuesday.)

I, obviously, started to noodle my way through the 'pull-out' section of the quiz, which had tempting amuse-bouche questions (anagrams of book titles; book jackets with the titles and the authors blocked out; riddles. The riddles had the authors' names in them, which seemed to be kind of cheating. The book jackets were of the level of We Need to Talk about Kevin and To Kill a Mockingbird. We fell down on a Joan Didion. Haven't we all?)

There was much discussion of a team name (get more than two women together, and coming up with a team name becomes very fraught.) We spent quite a lot of time trying to cobble something together based on our mutual love for Jilly Cooper (man, we're highbrow). Eventually I suggested 'Donna's Tartts' (literary but still a bit smutty) and we were off. The prize for the best name of the evening might have to go to the three girls who called themselves, 'Well Read & Good in Bed'.

Baileys and Grazia had done the sensible thing of ploughing most of the money for the evening into food, in an attempt to stop us all getting blind drunk within the first hour. I've never seen so many canapes in my entire life. We had quite the picnic table going on. Especially when one of the waitresses, seeing just how bloody awesome we thought halloumi on a stick was, offered to leave an entire plateful with us. We accepted with alacrity.

Having spotted a photobooth in the corner, and thought, 'Oh God, really?', there was a break in the proceedings when of course we had to have a 'team photo'. Everyone immediately regresses to being four years old, then shrieks when shown the result. 'Oh my God, I look like a sweaty ghost!' howled one of my team-mates, who'd drawn the short straw of being nearest to the camera and the flash, and is a natural ginger and thus quite pale. We spent about fifteen minutes going, 'just one more go!', trying to get an arrangement of four people where we all looked sane, if not necessarily 100% attractive.

But, back to the nail-biting excitement of the quiz, I hear you cry! Round one - we were up near the top. Round two - we were leading, but by a solitary point. This could go either way. I was nearly gnawing the table I was feeling so adrenaline-fuelled. (Well, that, plus the Baileys cocktail and two glasses of red. And the excitement of a branded canvas bag and a free copy of Grazia with 30% off at Gap this week). Damn! Why do I not know George Eliot's real name, despite having done an English degree? Thankfully, I knew the answer to a multiple choice question on which was the longest of three books, because a friend had helpfully emailed the day before to say he was still ploughing through the 1,000-page belter that is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged after about six months.

The results table was being announced. Crikey, this was more exciting than Election Night! (I presume; I didn't stay up for any of that, and so was genuinely flummoxed when I turned on the radio the next morning to find that the Tories had had a landslide win. What the hell went wrong with all those polls, then?) We were in the top two. There were two points separating us. We tried out a variety of 'f*cking hell, we've lost by two points' sore loser faces (this seemed like fun - there were a lot of men wielding film cameras and cameras with proper-looking lenses - where on earth was this stuff going to end up?) Only to find that, yes, WE HAD WON. Donna's Tartts had beaten a load of other geeks in glasses - particularly the bunch at the table next to us, who we were determined to take down. They kept objecting to stuff, and one of them failed a 'spot prize' question on the correct order of the Harry Potter books, despite looking really, really confident about it. I neglected to flag to anyone that we hadn't managed to get the actual Donna Tartt question right, which was a bit of a low.

We were summoned to the bar to collect our winnings (bottle of Baileys each, another free cocktail - this time decorated with pansies - flashy - and a huge stack of the Baileys shortlist. I'd assumed we'd be splitting the six books, [typical publisher - 'You want to give away HOW many?'] but no, it was all of them, for each of us). And many, many photos. I finally worked out why Caitlin Moran gurns like she's been on a 3-day bender every time someone points a camera at her. Having your photo taken for a mag/Twitter feed is mortifying. Especially when you haven't had time to put on any lipstick and have been doing a lot of 'ironic' fist-pumping when it was announced that you'd won. Hadn't really factored that in, when I'd been hell-bent on winning. I looked like some mad child that had overdosed on Haribo, then been given a load of hefty hardbacks to hold, to try to stop them bouncing off the walls.

Anyway, it was all really good fun, my only disappointment being how many questions there were about JK Rowling. Don't get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of hers (both as an author and as a person). It just seemed a shame that over 6 rounds, there seemed to be so few female authors or books that the question-setters assumed we'd have (mostly) all heard of and could answer questions on. (Gone with the Wind featured quite heavily too.) But then I'm inclined to believe that the two points we won by were afforded by:

1. Knowing the name of Nancy Drew's boyfriend
2. Me being old enough to recognise a clip of The Cure's 'Charlotte Sometimes'

Can't all be intellectual giants...