Re-reading the utterly original Rachel Cooke

The writer, who was the New Statesman’s TV reviewer for nearly two decades, has died aged 56

On 14 November, the writer Rachel Cooke died, aged just 56, after a short and brutal experience of cancer. That weekend, British newspapers were awash with admiring tributes by everyone from Delia Smith to Jonathan Coe. She wrote prolifically and enthusiastically about books, art and food – in the form of criticism, interviews, reporting and personal columns. At the Observer, her main outlet of more than 25 years, she totted up over 100,000 words a year.

Rachel – one of the most talented and brilliant writers I ever had the pleasure of reading, let alone editing – was this magazine’s television critic for almost 20 years. In the decade I worked at the New Statesman, she never once turned in a piece that failed to pass her own toweringly high bar. Week in, week out, Rachel’s reviews were fiercely insightful and devilishly witty. Her sentences dazzled; she was utterly original, her voice unmistakably her own. Like all the best writers, her pieces seemed effortless – her jokes and observations rolled on from each other with an easy rhythm – but can’t have been. That level of consistency and flair comes from dedication and ambition, and an outright refusal to rest on one’s laurels. You had the sense that Rachel never rushed a piece out because she was busy or tired – each one was crafted, turned over with care. She would push herself a little further to find just the right comparison, just the right gag. This determination never wavered – amid grim treatment, she insisted she would not “sit around feeling sorry for myself”.

Rachel invariably sent her reviews over with the words “hope you enjoy”, or, on special occasions, something like: “I hope this makes you laugh – or splutter – at least once.” I would invariably reply quoting the line that had done just that. Some recent ones that leap to mind. “Nicole Kidman: is she still in there? Increasingly I wonder… At this point, there are bathroom tiles more expressive.” On the second dramatisation of Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview: “Crunch, crunch. Listen carefully, and you can hear it: the sound of TV eating itself.” On “the sheer, unadulterated perkiness” of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals: “As I type, I bounce, like Rupert Campbell-Black in flagrante… What a multiplicity of backsides are here! If Rupert has one that brings to mind best butter toffee, sinewy and bronzed, Declan O’Hara’s is as soft and pale as caster sugar: a chiaroscuro thrill.” On the falseness of Meghan Markle’s lifestyle series, in which she cooks for her supposed famous “friends”: “You’re so tall!’ she says to her pal, which I’m afraid did suggest to me a certain lack of familiarity… Can she really cook, or garden, or do any of the other things she coos about?” She found new depths in the BBC series Amandaland – Amanda’s “inner emptiness is a form of minimalism in itself” – which, she felt, captured “our present vanity and extreme neediness – the endless scroll of the 21st century”.

Rachel was a staunch and committed feminist. “What is wrong with our culture,” she wrote in one characteristically excoriating review, “that stories about abused women are served up, like so much supper on a tea tray, week after week, month after month?” (She despaired that yet another series about the Yorkshire Ripper “made entertainment from some of the most terrible crimes against women ever committed by one man – and not even good entertainment at that.”) If Rachel was a great champion of women – she admired Sally Wainwright, Sharon Horgan and Abi Morgan; when the New Statesman was redesigned in 2021, we were thrilled that one of the first new issue’s flagship pieces was her monumental interview with the great Hilary Mantel – then she was also, like her heroes Nora Ephron and Katharine Whitehorn before her, a writer who defined her feminism on her own terms and refused to be in thrall to hollow platitudes. She couldn’t tolerate writing that valued ideology over quality, and loathed the “faux-feminist puerility” of certain “messy woman” comedies, writing of Henpocalypse!: “Somewhere up above, assorted Pankhursts, Andrea Dworkin and even Helen Gurley Brown are wondering what the hell it was all for.” In more than one column, she begged Davina M cCall to leave middle-aged people alone. She was dismayed by Hillary Clinton’s self-congratulatory series of interviews with famous women: “Here is the woman I sincerely hoped would be the 45th president of the United States of America trapped like some ebullient mother-of-the-bride in an endless rehearsal dinner where all the speeches comprise nothing but self-help woo-woo and minor-celebrity gossip. Where is her dignity? What has happened to her intellect? How much did Apple spend on this drivel, and what on Earth was her cut?”

Some of my favourite moments in Rachel’s pieces were those evocative asides in which she captured the Britain (particularly the north) of her childhood and youth in the Seventies and Eighties. In a review of a documentary on the miners’ strikes, she wrote of growing up in Sheffield at that time, when “our teachers all pinned ‘coal not dole’ badges on their regulation donkey jackets… You can almost smell the Brut and the old Spice.” In such columns she conjured a Britain of Dick Emery and Pan’s People, of the Gin and It and shoulder pads. Of Rod Hull and Grange Hill. Of toxic masculinity and Trifari earrings. Of Björn Borg’s nylon tracksuit, Jimmy White’s gleaming cheekbones and Margaret Thatcher’s “helmet of hair rising dramatically like Hokusai’s wave”.

Rachel once wrote that Gods of Snooker, a documentary she loved, contained on its green baize “Thatcher’s Britain in microcosm”. Whether she was writing about the past or the present, Rachel seems to me to have produced in her collected TV columns a detailed, colourful portrait of Britain in miniature, in all its glory and all its naffness. How to feel about the possibly rather bathetic fact that her last piece for the New Statesman was a review of Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters with Lenny Henry and Rachel Riley? (It is the celebrities, not the sharks, Rachel posited, who most resemble “savage tubes of teeth”.) On reflection, there’s nothing sad about this. It’s only sad that the last piece had to arrive so soon.

[Further reading: Rachel Cooke’s archive]