Irvine Welsh: The Next Chapter review — a fearless and frank half hour

Times

2 days ago

'Culture isn't moving forward, culture is dying'; the working class has been 'destroyed and immiserated'; and a populace wrestling with 'species extinction' are 'despondent'. Oh, and food delivery apps are creating an addicted underclass that is now 'morbidly obese and malnourished'.
Cheery stuff, eh? But if anyone knows about addiction and the dark nooks of human life it is the Scottish novelist and former heroin addict Irvine Welsh, and we should be glad we have him. Now that Martin Amis, another chronicler of the seedy and sulphurous, has left us I cannot think of another living British writer about whom a half-hour telly interview would create such anticipation, and in Irvine Welsh: The Next Chapter (BBC2/iPlayer) he delivered a fusillade of observations that for the most part felt entirely sensible.
• Irvine Welsh: Why I've turned Trainspotting into a disco album
And it wasn't as if his sit-down with the BBC culture editor Katie Razzall was all doom and gloom. The flower pattern on the shirt he wore in the Leith Dockers Club was certainly cheerful and there was something bracing about his fearless honesty. Scotland is uniquely set up for drug addiction, he observed, partly because its national drink favours the instant hit over the slow release of other forms of booze. And he really does think the internet has helped destroy creativity, fostering a timid cultural uniformity thanks to the pervasive power of cancel culture.
I hope this description doesn't make Welsh, 66, out to be a moaning old geezer muttering miserably to himself in the bath. There is still a youthfulness about him — an interest in the world as well as an awareness of the importance of love — which actually gives you cause for hope and shows that his punky Trainspotting energies are still burning away. He can't take seriously a world where Jeff Bezos earns so much; he even imagined the Amazon founder going to the loo and returning to his phone $100 million richer. It felt so wonderfully Welsh-like to imagine one of the world's richest men on the toilet.
Cutaways to him sparring in the boxing ring also provided a fitting image of a man still up for a fight. Welsh thinks overweight people might struggle to be writers because you need to be comfortable in a chair. Most people would be wary of publicly articulating a potentially fat-phobic remark. Welsh simply thinks it's true. Boxing helps him focus as well as stay slim, he said. When someone is punching you, you need to look them squarely in the eyes. At times I felt he was doing the same to the viewer.
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As the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen knew, there are few more dramatic encounters than two people in a room talking to each other. Razzall didn't really need to do much apart from read from a list of pertinent questions, which she did perfectly well. But even just hitting the top notes in a duet for one, as he did across this half-hour, Welsh was dazzling.
I even believed him when he said that he was glad that he didn't win the Booker prize for Trainspotting, which he says would have been the 'kiss of death', effectively making him a fashionable insider. 'Why would I be pro-establishment?' he asked. Another thought that didn't need an answer was Razzall's stock question about whether he would ever accept a knighthood. He just laughed.★★★★☆Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows , the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer , the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don't forget to check our comprehensive TV guide for the latest listings