Scandals, sensation and super-sized stars: in culture, 2023 has been a year of crisis and catharsis

From the sensational confessions in ‘Spare’ to the box-office thrills of Barbenheimer, Netflix documentaries offering A-list therapy and controversies at the BBC and GB News, 2023 hasn’t been a quiet year for culture, writes Jessie Thompson

Gary Lineker, Margot Robbie, Holly Willoughby, Cillian Murphy, Taylor Swift, Matthew Macfadyen and Prince Harry (iStock/Getty/Universal Pictures/Warner bros)

Right… deep breath. Firstly, are you OK? It feels apt to borrow from Holly Willoughby’s infamous address to the nation because it has been quite a dramatic 12 months. In the world of culture, 2023 has been a year of both crisis and catharsis. When you think about it, things were pretty much falling apart everywhere you looked. For the first time in 63 years, actors and writers in America went on strike at the same time – in part because of the continued creative threat posed by AI. The triple whammy of Arts Council funding cuts, Covid aftershocks and the cost of living left the live arts reeling. The BBC was sucker-punched by controversies from all sides. There were high-profile scandals. Fallouts. Sensational memoirs. Heart-on-sleeve Netflix documentaries. When the stars haven’t been imploding, they’ve been reflecting on the time they imploded 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel like anyone has taken a deep breath.

Certainly not Prince Harry. His memoir Spare, released in January, was part psychological purge, part scorched-earth policy. Those thinking the self-exiled prince couldn’t have anything left to share after spilling the beans to Oprah and Netflix were quickly disabused. Across 416 furious pages, Harry told us about everything: his grief for his mother, his honest thoughts about his father’s second marriage, dog-bowl gate and Prince William, and, erm, the time he had a frostbitten “todger”. It didn’t bring down the royals, who kept a dignified silence – although one imagines this might be a bit of a weird Christmas – but it did cause a whole lot of stress for the publishers when copies accidentally went on sale early in Spain, with chapters being translated in real time ahead of publication. Ten months later, royal journalist Omid Scobie faced a translation mishap of his own: his book Endgame, a savage broadside on the firm, was somehow published in Dutch with the names of the alleged “royal racists”. The offending editions were quickly pulped, but – unlike Spare – the cock-up didn’t help sell copies: for all the noise, it sold just 6,448 in the UK in its first week.

It was Spare that would set the tone for the year, as we entered a new age of celebrity confessionalism. It became the fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time, shifting more than 3.2 million copies to date – but not far behind was Britney Spears, who sold a million copies in the US of her tell-all memoir The Woman in Me in its first week of publication. What were fans hoping for after years of not hearing from Britney, having battled to help free the singer from her conservatorship while wondering if it was really her posting those bizarre captions on Instagram? When we finally got her side of the story, it wasn’t pretty. “Raw, unfiltered and breathtaking in its rage,” was how my colleague Adam White described the book’s bleak portrait of life behind the scenes for one of the biggest stars of the Noughties.