Culture and Environment: Britain Reckons With Its Past

Editorial digest April 19, 2026
Last updated : 08:20

British culture this weekend looks like a battlefield between memory and reckoning. The Queen gets a centenary tribute, Michael Jackson gets a biopic, Malcolm in the Middle gets dragged back from 2006 — and meanwhile, in a warehouse in east London, a museum is quietly rewriting whose music built this country. Over in the opinion pages, George Monbiot delivers the week's sharpest paradox: the man hired by oil executives to kill the energy transition may have just turbocharged it.

Is the V&A East finally telling the right story?

The V&A's new east London outpost opens its doors this weekend with The Music is Black, an exhibition tracing Black British music from early African drumbeats through jungle, garage, grime and drill. Curator Jacqueline Springer tells The Guardian the show aims to reposition the scene as "central to UK's cultural history" — a framing that quietly concedes how long it was treated as peripheral.

The symbolism cuts deep. For decades, Britain's official music narrative has run through the Beatles, the Stones, punk and Britpop, with two-tone, jungle and grime tacked on as footnotes. Putting Pauline Black's drainpipes and porkpie hat at the heart of a national museum's inaugural show is not decoration — it is a statement that the footnotes were always the main text. In a year when British identity is being yanked in every direction, the V&A is picking a side.

Why does Britain keep digging up its dead icons?

Then there is the other kind of remembering — the kind that sells tickets. The BBC marks what would have been Queen Elizabeth II's 100th birthday with Her Story, Our Century, complete with Barack Obama and Helen Mirren contributing the kind of soft-focus reverence you can already picture. A Michael Jackson biopic looms, which The Guardian notes will have to reckon — or not — with the 1993 Santa Barbara police photographs, the Jordan Chandler allegations, and a posthumous estate worth billions. And Malcolm in the Middle is back, stripped, the reviewer observes, of the original's political edge.

The pattern is hard to miss. A culture running low on new ideas is strip-mining its own archive — and discovering, awkwardly, that some of those archives come with footnotes of their own. The Queen doc will sanctify. The Jackson film will almost certainly launder. The Malcolm reboot simply sands off what made the original uncomfortable. Nostalgia, as practised in 2026, means keeping the name and losing the teeth.

Even Madonna's new single I Feel So Free — a creditable return to her club-scene roots, per the review — arrives wrapped in the language of comeback rather than discovery. The lone exception this weekend is Kae Tempest, whose new novel, a decade after his debut, interrogates a life and identity mid-transformation rather than mid-reheat. It reads, pointedly, as the only cultural artefact this week that is not trying to look backwards.

Did Trump just accelerate the energy transition?

Cross the Culture/Environment line and the absurdity compounds. Writing in The Guardian, George Monbiot argues that Donald Trump — bankrolled, he notes, by fossil fuel money explicitly to kill the green transition — has done more than anyone alive to accelerate it. The strike on Iran sent oil prices soaring. Chevron's chief executive, according to the column, has cashed out $104m in shares so far this year. Vladimir Putin pockets a war bonus on every barrel.

The column's point is not celebratory. It is that renewable energy has stopped being an environmental argument and become a national security one. Every country now has to ask whether it wants to keep funding regimes that can shut a strait and double pump prices overnight. Monbiot's verdict is that environmentalists — long caricatured as idealists — are being unmasked as the pragmatists. If he is right, the Iran crisis will do more for British wind farms than a decade of white papers.

What to take from this weekend

Britain's culture is not short of content; it is short of courage. The V&A East is doing the harder thing — widening the canon — while broadcast schedules keep relitigating the narrow one. And the environment story is now inseparable from the geopolitical one: the question is no longer whether we transition, but who profits from the delay. Watch what the V&A opens next. Watch what the BBC commissions instead of another centenary. Watch the share prices of the oil executives cashing out while telling you the transition is a fantasy. Three different weathervanes. All pointing the same way.