This week I love Dick, hate Ken, and worry about the rise and rise of new Tory messiah Moggsy

Bacon has always had a bit of a slow-burn but successful career – who could have watched Footloose in 1984 and ever imagined, after all that dreadful angry dancing in a hay barn (while smoking!) he’d still be around 30 years later? Not just that, but be much loved, the subject of a popular parlour game (Six degrees of Kevin Bacon – name any actor, then link them in six jumps to KB – endless fun in power cuts) and doing really annoying British mobile network adverts.

But Kev is back on top these days thanks to I Love Dick (if you haven’t seen it, don’t panic, Dick is a person, not a pastime). Set around a privileged artists’ colony in Marfa, Texas, it’s been delighting and horrifying viewers in equal measure with its raw and hilarious depiction of Chris Kraus, a woman in meltdown, directing its female gaze on art, creativity, sexuality, desire, monogamy, monotony, obsession and fantasy.

The titular character and object of Chris’s desire is Bacon’s Dick, a real-life Marlboro man who saunters into town in double denim and a western saddle (and a horse, obvs).

What I love about Chris is her unashamed batshit craziness. Her obsession with Dick has unhinged her, and she’s going to hell in a handbag, and she doesn’t care. Smug husband, privilege, career, being a nice girl – all heading down the crapper. But this is where the audience starts to split. One male friend stopped watching, saying he’d gone off it. But men are not good when women go batshit crazy. It’s too naked, too real, too, um-did-I-have-something-to-do-with-this? It makes them uncomfortable. But stick with it, I say, it’s a glorious mess and the backdrop of big-sky Texas is a lovely place to go a bit cray-cray.

Of course, she’s not really, and there’s the rub. Most men will see a crazy chick, when most women will just see another woman at the end of her tether, blowing off steam. You don’t have to be nuts to love Dick, but it helps.

Man Bun Ken

Horrible news last week that Ken, of Ken and Barbie fame, has been restyled in various modern guises from hipster to effnic, innit. Most offensive is the Man-Bun Ken, whose plastic hair has gone all post-ironic, artisanal coffee-dude. He looks camper than a 1967 VW Kombi-Van. Having worked in the East End of London for six years, I am so over this look – the epitome of smug, self-regarding narcissism.

When you have stood, ten minutes late for work, waiting while three hipsters with assorted pony tails, man buns and other arrangements involving kirby grips, fuss over an enormous chrome machine that looks like Nasa developed it, telling you they can’t serve you coffee because the temperature’s not quite exact as they fuss with thermometers, looking concerned and kind of upset, till you want to scream and yank their silly man buns off their heads, you will understand why I hate them.

Don’t do it Ken. Bad enough they have given you cut-off denims and twiglet legs, but the man-bun is a hair-do too far. Sadly, the manufacturers have also vetoed Paunchy Ken, a love-handley doll who’d probably been good looking once, but let himself go a bit. When it comes to Ken I’d pick the gut-barging version any day.

In Mogg we trust

Ever since the second coming of Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury last week, the mid-market tabloids have been frothing at the mouth, incandescent with fury that young people have the temerity to treat Jezza like a god. But this week they hit back, deploying their own new messiah of the right: Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Tall and wan and young and lovely, Moggsy looks like a cross between Bela Lugosi and Hen Broon, exhibiting the hair-do of one and the big gangly daftness of the other.

Incredibly, despite the pre-war styling (see suits, specs, side parting), Moggsy is a youthful 48, so his position as the darling of the Daily Mail and its batty old auntie the Daily Express is fully secured. But now they want to go the whole Mog and crown him the next Tory PM.

They love him because he tells it like it is, went to Eton and Oxford, made his first million in the womb, blah blah blah. I knew his time had come the other night during Question Time when my stern Northern Irish protestant father said, “I like him, he talks sense.”

Moggsy looks at the entire world with disdain, as if he is permanently offended by what he sees. He is quite possibly one of those posho aristos who grew up in a huge hice with servants, nannies and wall-to-wall fox hinds, but didn’t believe in central heating. He’s positively chilly.

But that doesn’t stop the slavish devotion to his 1930s looks, good breeding and political leanings that tilt somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. There are no end of reasons for giving him a jolly good drubbing: he’s a Trump fan; an enthusiastic Brexiteer; he doesn’t believe gay people should be allowed to marry; and he once used the word floccinaucinihilipilification (google it) in a parliamentary speech. That alone is grounds for a Flashman flogging.

But that’s not the worst of it. While preaching the joys of austerity, Moggsy has just bestowed on the world his sixth child: Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg, I kid you not. Paging social services! But wait till you hear the names of the other five: Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius; Tom Wentworth Somerset Dunstan; Peter Theodore Alphege; Anselm Charles Fitzwilliam; and the slightly more prosaic Mary Anne Charlotte Emma. Probably because she’s just a girl.

Aside from the fact that he could have been invented by the Beano, those poor children’s names must tell you the man is not to be trusted. If he can do that to them, what he could he do to us if he was Mr Large And In Charge?

Little angels

I have never been a fan of Gogglebox, sorry. It’s too contrived and largely seems to be a bunch of adults pretending to act completely naturally in the presence of a camera – then hamming it up shamelessly for an hour. Although I did rather enjoy the posh wino couple from time to time.

But now, along comes Gogglesprogs, which is just delightful, because they really do forget the camera is there and just behave like the wide-eyed, adorbs little kids they are. Highlight this week was assorted cuties honking themselves silly at Mrs Doubtfire.

“Dad!” yells one cherub to his father, off camera. “Have you ever put on a lady’s dress?”

“No, just mummy’s pants,” deadpans Pop from the kitchen, where presumably he’s doing the washing up in just his marigolds and an apron.