28/02/2026
The Friese-Greene Club
March 2026 Schedule
March has been a month of sad farewells, and the schedule reflects that.
On Fridays, we pay tribute to Catherine O'Hara with a selection of Christopher Guest's mockumentaries — films in which she was, repeatedly, the funniest person on screen, which in that company is saying something considerable. If you have never seen Best in Show, clear your diary.
For those who joined us for The Godfather last month and have been wondering ever since what happened next — Part II is on Saturday the 7th. The only sequel widely considered to surpass the original. Duvall's Hagen is magnificent. De Niro's young Vito is something else entirely.
Which brings us to Robert Duvall, who we also lost this month, and to whom Saturdays are dedicated. We have played his greatest films over recent months — this time we turn to some of the lesser-known work. The Apostle, which he wrote, directed, financed, and starred in. Tender Mercies, his Oscar-winning masterclass in restraint. Films that remind you there was rather more to him than Tom Hagen and Colonel Kilgore.
Wednesdays belong to Béla Tarr, another we have lost. Rain, mud, stray dogs, doomed love, and 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. You know what you're getting.
And on Thursdays, the Surprise Screening continues. No titles. No clues. Just turn up.
The films speak for themselves. I, unfortunately, also speak for myself.
One of the few genuine pleasures of getting older is the right to be grumpy.
A grumpy young man is just a nuisance. Nobody wants to hear it. He hasn't earned it. He should be out there living, striving, reaching for the stars with the rest of them. But a grumpy old man is something else entirely — a treasure, an oracle, a social critic magnificently unencumbered by the whims of fashion or the tedious obligation to be encouraging. He has earned his grievances. He has road-tested his opinions. He has watched the world ignore his advice for decades and been proved right often enough to feel entirely justified in continuing. Those around him who have begun to suspect that he might have a point are, of course, the wisest people in the room.
As is my occasional wont, I enjoy a rant. Today I am grumpy about the persistence industry.
You know what I mean. The motivational speakers, the life coaches, the Instagram accounts run by people in athleisure on clifftops at sunrise. The TED Talks, the podcasts, the corporate away-day facilitators with their laminated cards. Any spokesman for any organisation with the word Youth in its title. And Americans. The entire vast, humming, extraordinarily profitable machinery of individual exceptionalism — the chorus that never stops, that follows you from school to retirement, telling you the same things in slightly different fonts:
You have it in you.
You can do it.
There's only one of you.
Be the best version of yourself.
Never, ever give up.
It is, of course, obvious nonsense.
The list of things I could never achieve in my lifetime — however much energy, money, time, sacrifice, positive thinking and motivational podcasting I threw at them — is approximately a thousand times longer than the list of things I could. I will never play piano at Carnegie Hall. I will never run a four-minute mile. I will never be appointed Secretary-General of the United Nations, perform a rap song in any manner that could not be described as a public health emergency, or remember my Google password on the first attempt. And no amount of someone telling me I'm special and unique and that the dream is just around the corner will change any of this. Reality is not a mindset problem.
Two men understood this with a clarity that eludes most of the human race.
W.C. Fields: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."
Homer Simpson: "Trying is the first step toward failure."
I am aware that one of these men is fictional. I do not consider this a disqualification.
We are not supposed to say any of this. According to the persistence industry, you are never — under any circumstances, at any age, in any situation — permitted to give up. Ever. You will have heard, approximately four hundred times in your life, that Colonel Sanders didn't start KFC until he was sixty-two. You know why you hear that so often? Because he is almost certainly the only example anyone has ever been able to find.
But no matter. You must never quit. Perhaps as you lie on the roadside, staring up at the sky while first responders crouch over you with expressions of professional concern, you might be granted a brief moment of reflection — a quiet "hm, perhaps I should have tried something different" — but not, the motivational industry would insist, until then.
The truth is that knowing when to stop is one of the rarest and most undervalued forms of human intelligence. That quitting, at the right moment, is not weakness. It is not failure. It is not something to be ashamed of in the small hours. It is, in fact, a profound and noble act, and it is high time someone said so.
The universe, it turns out, has opinions. It communicates them clearly. The tragedy of the persistence industry is that it has trained an entire civilisation to put their fingers in their ears.
In August 2013, singer Brandy Norwood arrived in South Africa to perform at a national celebration at FNB Stadium in Soweto — a venue holding 90,000 people. The day had been long. The crowd had, largely, gone home. When Brandy walked on stage, approximately 40 people remained. Not 4,000. Not 400. Forty. The national broadcaster had already packed up and left. The lights were on — not atmospheric concert lighting, just the ordinary stadium lights they use when the cleaners come in.
She performed two songs and walked off.
The motivational poster people will tell you this was a failure of spirit. What it was, in fact, was a masterclass in situational intelligence. The universe had issued its verdict. Brandy had the dignity to accept it. She did not perform eleven more songs to prove a point to forty bewildered people and a cavernous dark. She went home. I salute her.
And if the universe can humble an individual, it can equally humble an empire. For all the might of a global brand, the vast marketing budgets, the armies of consultants and strategists and focus groups, sometimes even the most powerful companies in the world simply throw their hands in the air and run away. Which brings us to Coca-Cola in the United Kingdom in 2004, who launched a bottled water called Dasani, and ran into a few problems. First, journalists discovered it was filtered tap water from a factory in Sidcup. Then it emerged that the American marketing team had described it as being "full of s***k" — which in Britain does not mean what they thought it meant. Then, thirty-eight days after launch, the Food Standards Agency found it contained a suspected carcinogen. Coca-Cola had taken perfectly safe tap water, charged a five-hundred-fold markup, accidentally given it a slogan meaning "bottled semen," and then added cancer to it during the purification process. Five hundred thousand bottles were recalled. The product was withdrawn. It has never returned to Britain. Coca-Cola did the best thing they possibly could in the circumstances. They ran home.
But giving up need not always be a response to catastrophe. Sometimes it can be something altogether quieter — the serene acknowledgement of an intelligent adult that enough is enough.
On 16 September 2018, Buffalo Bills cornerback Vontae Davis was playing in an NFL game against the Los Angeles Chargers. The Bills were losing 28-6 at halftime. Davis walked to the locker room, removed his jersey and shoulder pads, and texted his partner. "Babe I'm done. I'm hanging up my cleats. I don't want to put my body through this anymore." She replied: "OK, I'll meet you at home."
He skipped the shower, changed into street clothes, walked to the car park, and was gone before his teammates arrived.
His captain called it disrespectful. His teammates were furious. And Davis, from his new holistic wellness spa, later said: "Most people thought I was going insane or something. But I was actually fine. I was totally fine."
In August 1973, NASCAR champion Bobby Isaac was running competitively in the Talladega 500 when he suddenly pulled into the pits and climbed out of his car. He told the team owner to get a relief driver. He walked to a payphone and called his wife Patsy, and she said: "Come home. That's fine with me."
He later explained himself with the calm authority of a man who has nothing left to prove: "I wasn't afraid I was going to wreck. I don't have anything to prove to myself or anybody else. I know how it feels to win. I know how it feels to be a champion. And now I know how it feels to quit. It just entered my mind at that moment. I decided to quit, and that was that."
There is a story — possibly apocryphal, certainly beloved — of an Irish stage actor, mid-performance, who stopped, surveyed the audience and the situation with the calm assessment of a man who has seen enough of life to recognise its patterns, and announced something to the effect of "F*** this, I'm going to the pub." And then went. The story floats around theatrical greenrooms without a definitive source, which may simply mean it is the Platonic ideal of a quit — a story so perfectly constructed that it no longer needs to have actually happened.
The military, it should be noted, has always had a far more sophisticated relationship with strategic retreat than the rest of us, because the military, unlike the life coaching industry, deals in consequences.
In August 1776, General Washington withdrew nine thousand men from Brooklyn across the East River in a single night, in complete silence, through miraculous fog, without losing a man — and in doing so, directly saved the American Revolution. History calls it a tactical retreat. It was, in fact, the most important thing Washington ever did, and it required him to stop doing the other thing he was doing.
During the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in 1950, General Oliver P. Smith's Marines were surrounded by several hundred thousand Chinese troops in temperatures of minus thirty-five degrees. When journalists suggested he was retreating, he corrected them with a line that deserves to be carved above the door of every motivational speaker's office: "Gentlemen, we are not retreating. We are merely advancing in another direction."
Seventy thousand men made it out.
In May 1996, mountaineer Lou Kasischke turned back from the summit of Everest when he was four hundred feet from the top. He had spent years preparing, had come further than almost anyone. But it was late, his oxygen was running low, and something felt wrong. He turned around and descended. Later that day, four of his teammates who pressed on died in one of the deadliest disasters in Everest's history. Kasischke attended their funerals.
The summit was four hundred feet away. He went home. He is alive. This is not a coincidence.
"But what about the times people didn't give up and succeeded?" I hear you say. Churchill didn't negotiate. Edison tried ten thousand filaments. Rocky went the distance.
Yes. And we tell those stories precisely because they are exceptions — rare enough to be remarkable, dramatic enough to sell. For every Churchill, there are a thousand people who should have negotiated. For every Edison, there are ten thousand who should have tried a different filament somewhere around attempt four hundred. We do not tell their stories because defeat, however instructive, has never sold a motivational calendar.
But telling someone they should quit almost always makes you the bad guy. Nowhere is this more apparent than on a television singing competition.
We have all sat and watched Simon Cowell dismantle some poor soul who has spent the last six months telling their family that this — this — is their moment. The family in the audience, clutching each other, weeping in anticipation. And then the audition begins, and it is immediately, catastrophically, irreversibly clear that this person cannot sing in the way that a stone cannot float.
We resent Cowell, of course. He has the most democratically punchable face of his generation — people who disagree on nothing else are united on this. But in the back of our heads, underneath the discomfort, we know he is right. We know, with the grim certainty of people who have ears, that this individual will never — not with training, not with time, not with the full resources of a major record label — sing a decent song. Not in this lifetime. Not in any conceivable lifetime. If they were bitten by a vampire tonight and condemned to walk the earth for all eternity, they would still, ten thousand years from now, be unable to hold a note.
The genuinely kind thing — as opposed to the performatively supportive thing — would have been to tell them so. Gently. Privately. Before the cameras. Before the family. Before the moment that will live on YouTube forever as an exhibit in the prosecution's case against human optimism.
But here is the problem. They will not believe you. They will not listen. They will simply think you are mean. The parents in the audience, jabbing their fingers at the screen as Cowell delivers his verdict — do they go home that evening and think, quietly, over a cup of tea: "Hm. Could he have a point?" The girl who swears, jaw set, eyes bright with fury, that she will show him one day — does she ever pause, in a private moment, to consider the possibility that she will not?
She does not. And perhaps that is the real problem. Not that we fail to tell people the truth, but that the truth, in these circumstances, is essentially undeliverable.
And then one wonders — what if she did listen? What if that girl from Wigan threw away her songbook and never sang another note? What if she resigned herself, sensibly, to a life without music, without the dream, without the dressing room and the spotlight and the moment she had spent twenty years imagining?
Maybe she would find her true vocation. Maybe she would discover, in the wreckage of one ambition, the seeds of another. But maybe — and this is the thought that gives one pause — maybe she would simply settle into the same dull, dreamless existence of everyone around her who never tried at all. And maybe, for all the disappointment and frustration and YouTube humiliation, she was happier with a dream than without one. Even an impossible one.
I say: give up. Give up loudly, give up proudly, give up with your head held high and a clear conscience and somewhere better to be. Life is short and the pub is open.
But perhaps we should not condemn the dreamers. Can one really blame them for desperately trying to leap above the heads of others to catch a glimpse of the sun, even if they are doing so on crutches? And is the resilience of their dream not all the more wonderful for the modesty of their talent?
Perhaps we should be thankful for the dreamers — those maddening, wonderful, irrational souls who cling to their impossible dreams long after all evidence has advised otherwise, who stand in the face of reality with a song in their heart and absolutely no sense of pitch, who defy criticism, ignore statistics, and refuse, on principle, to consult the exit signs, and who are, for all that, the truest manifestation of that strange, defiant, entirely impractical spark that separates humans from the animals and the life coaches.
The rest of us, of course, will be at the pub (or maybe watching old films in a film club)
Have a great March!
