Skip to main content

Two is the magic number: why are we fascinated with power couples?

From Ant and Dec, through the Rodham-Clintons, to the Knowles-Carters, some people work better when they’re part of a duo

There is something about the “power of two” in our culture, a unique, contained bond that can form between two people and generate a particular catalysing spark. We are fascinated by “odd couples” but not odd trios; we love watching double acts and obsess over Hollywood couples; so many great achievements seem to have been the work of dual partnerships: Lennon and McCartney; Marie and Pierre Curie; French and Saunders. But what is that something?

Perhaps one of the reasons I’m so drawn to duos like this is that I am not a natural collaborator. As a child, I ploughed my own furrow and was, I suspect, rather similar to Briony, the hero of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement: “One of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so.” Briony not only writes the play she puts on at the start, but designs the posters, programmes and tickets – and constructs the sales booth. Way to go, Briony! Well, up to a point. In my professional life I’ve had to learn to be collegiate. Television – and to a lesser extent the newspaper industry – relies on teamwork to get the programme to air or the paper to press.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2S4HAQ0
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more