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Willie Nelson: 'I don’t believe in closing the border. We have a statue that says: Y’all come in'

At 85, Willie Nelson still spends half the year on the road and is busy supporting Texan Democrat nominee Beto O’Rourke. And the giant of country music’s 2,500 song catalogue just keeps growing In the Boston suburb of Mansfield, Massachusetts, I am summoned to Willie Nelson’s tour bus a couple of hours before he takes to the stage at the Outlaw music festival. Meanwhile, in Dallas, the progressive Democrat Beto O’Rourke is wrapping up his first debate with Ted Cruz , his Republican opponent in Texas’s too-close-to-call US Senate race. O’Rourke will later be seen celebrating his strong performance by air-drumming to the Who in a Whataburger drive-thru. Soon after Nelson signed on to headline a major O’Rourke rally on 29 September, some conservative fans reportedly planned to boycott his music in protest. A doctored photograph went viral of Nelson in a Beto for Texas shirt, flipping off at the camera like his friend Johnny Cash. But an actual boycott appeared to be bogus, or at least o...
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From Freefall to Benefits Street: how did TV respond to the financial crash?

After the 2008 collapse crippled the world economy, bankers briefly got the blame before British TV quickly moved on to find new targets as ‘credit-crunch commissioning’ took hold It’s a cliché that British people recoil with awkwardness at the idea of publicly discussing money . Property shows have allowed us to privately indulge the British obsession with house price from our sofas, with money primarily existing on television as a financial prize. When the financial crisis hit in 2008 and the economy began dominating the headlines, UK TV was forced to engage in the most un-British of conversations: how would it reflect the biggest financial crisis since the great depression ? It began with big, chewy dramatisations. The Last Days of Lehman Brothers premiered on BBC Two in September 2009, a year after the crisis started. Packed with apocalyptic imagery, it offered a dramatic account of the weekend the financial crash began. Instead of following the widely propagated narrative that ...
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