New Zealand Listener

ATTENTION, PLEASE

Just before the end of 2020, the culture section of the London Sunday Times lauded an elite list of people from the arts as “bright sparks in a year full of gloom”. In among The Charlatans’ singer holding Twitter parties and Andrew Lloyd Webber trying to save British theatre from extinction was a 63-year-old psychotherapist with a distinctive black-and-white bob and a best-selling book on raising children. And the reason for Philippa Perry’s inclusion? She was, it claimed, “the perfect sidekick” to the artist/presenter of Grayson Perry’s Art Club, the TV series “that helped the nation to dig out its paintboxes and Philippa to get out of her husband’s orbit”.

“I’ve yet to meet a parent who hasn’t altered their parenting to some degree after reading it, me extremely included.”

Everybody in the UK knows Grayson. He’s the Essex-born transvestite potter who in 2003 won Britain’s major visual art award, the Turner Prize. He took to the podium to collect his cheque for £20,000 accompanied by his wife and daughter while dressed as his alter ego Claire, in a pastel-hued satin Little Bo Peep outfit and full-on panto-dame

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