Leno and His Joke Obsession
By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - 6 Comments
I’ll have more to say later about Bill Carter’s The War For Late Night (aka Late Shift 2: The Shiftening), but one thing I wanted to remark on quickly is that although the book doesn’t do much to delve into the mysteries of why these people are the way they are — Carter got to talk to everybody, but the price for that is that he’s too close to provide a really hard-hitting portrayal of anybody — there are some bits that help clarify the mystery of why Jay Leno, a comedian whose talent no one doubts, has been such a creatively mediocre host. The book keeps repeating his mantra that what he wants to do is “tell jokes at 11:35 at night”; every time he talks about what he does, he says that his job is to “tell jokes.” Carter reminds us that Leno said, comparing himself and Letterman, “I’m a comedian, I’m not a talk-show host. I think Dave as a broadcaster is as good as there has ever been. I would say Dave is the better broadcaster and I am the better stand-up comedian.” That sounds about right. As I said, the people who disrespect Leno don’t deny that he was a good stand-up — even Bill Hicks’ vicious routine about Leno’s Tonight Show was premised on the idea that Leno used to be funny and chose to stop being funny.
The thing is, though, that there’s not a great deal of qualitative difference between Leno’s monologue and anybody else’s. Nearly all talk-show monologues fall into the same joke rhythms, same joke constructions. It’s the only way you can provide a large supply of new jokes every night. (A stand up comedian’s club act features many jokes that can be repeated several times, until they become tired or televised. A late-night joke is once and gone.) Conan O’Brien’s topical jokes are kind of lame, and the fact that he tosses them off as if he’s ashamed of them doesn’t make them any better. Letterman’s have marginally more edge, but are usually nothing very special. Carson, Cavett, the greats of the past, had lots of corny or cheesy monologue jokes. The only way to avoid the tired feel of the monologue is to replace it with something else, the way Craig Ferguson often chooses to talk about what’s personally on his mind — and he does this, as the book explains, because monologue jokes are so predictable in their rhythm. This is just the first monologue that came up in a YouTube search, but you could plug in different names in many of the jokes, and have them told by different comedians, and they’d be about the same. Carson got by with it more because his persona was more appealing than Leno’s, and he didn’t have the band playing loud music after every punchline. But the jokes themselves can never be much more than what they are: quick topical punchlines.
So Jay Leno’s monologue is not exactly lamer than his competitors, or at least the others are on a comparable level of lameness that cannot be distinguished by known science. But the topical stand-up jokes, the weakest part of almost any talk show, are the parts Leno cares the most about. It’s well-known, and mentioned in the book, that the monologue takes up most of his time. NBC knew he’d be willing to accept the offer of a half-hour at 11:35 because it would mean that he could continue doing his monologue. And of course during the Writers’ Guild strike he did whatever he could to make sure he would always have his topical stand-up routine. Once he sits down at the desk, the show is almost over for him. For most other hosts, sitting down is where the fun begins: depending on their particular strengths, it can lead to a good interview, or a funny new comedy bit, or just doing the famous Carson thumbs-up to a new stand-up comedian who pleased him.
In a way, Leno’s strength as a stand-up explains his weakness as a host. (Creative weakness, I emphasize again. He’s undeniably popular, even now, and one of the many mistakes NBC made was not realizing that his success on Tonight was more due to him than to any inherent strength the franchise still had — his audience and Conan’s audiences were very different, and there wasn’t a core group of viewers that would stick around and watch Tonight no matter who was in charge.) The only thing he really enjoys is standing in front of an audience and delivering jokes. Even if the jokes aren’t very good, and on any given night many of them won’t be, that’s the part he likes. O’Brien’s contempt for his monologue jokes is really no better than Leno’s smarmy style, but because he’s not a stand-up, he wants to get past those jokes as quickly as possible and get to something that could theoretically, surprise us. But Leno defines himself entirely as a stand-up comic, so he seems to define The Tonight Show as twenty minutes of stand-up followed by a bunch of filler. The part he lives to do is the part that is least likely to be good, in anyone’s hands.
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Toronto school board considers paying students
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 4:29 PM - 5 Comments
Poverty reduction program would reward students for academic, social work
The Toronto District School Board is considering paying students to attend class as part of an anti-poverty initiative. So far, it’s not clear what kind of program the public school board is studying—only that it’s looking at the idea that students could be promised “some kind of financial benefit… to help you with your basic needs,” according to a TDSB official, and that the funding for such a program would have to come from “community partners.” Similar experiments in the U.S. have met with mixed results: in New York, students who were given $50 for doing well on a series of tests didn’t perform any better; however, elsewhere, students’ reading scores improved after they were promised a flat $2 fee for every book they read.
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A poor sap who doesn't get politics
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 3:46 PM - 24 Comments
Bob Rae writes about the extension of the Afghanistan mission.
It’s called doing what you think is right, talking to the public about it, and worrying less about who gets credit. There’s something almost pathological about the state of our politics, to say nothing of political commentary, if we can’t have that kind of conversation.
There should continue to be a debate about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and how to deal with the range of failed and fragile states that are emerging across the world. But enough with the nonsense about who played the partisan game better.
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The battle of Bavaria
By Jason Kirby - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 2 Comments
Audi is taking aim at its bigger rival BMW in the race to become the top German luxury brand
GORAN GAJANIN/ACTION PRESS/CP
As corporate brand battles go, Coke vs. Pepsi and Nike vs. Adidas are fine for the masses, but among the amply-lucred, nothing beats the raucous showdown between Audi and BMW for the hearts, minds—and wallets—of luxury car buyers. In the past few years, the two German automakers have stepped up their ad campaigns, calling each other out in TV spots and on billboards. But after months of red-hot sales, Audi clearly has the momentum.
In almost every month this year, the company has broken its previous worldwide sales records. In Canada, Audi is leading almost every other brand so far this year in growing its sales, up 33.3 per cent to roughly 12,700 vehicles, compared to the first 10 months of last year. And thanks to the fat margins on every new A4 sedan, Q5 crossover and spaceship-like R8 sports car, Audi fuelled half of parent company Volkswagen’s profits last quarter.
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Conservative senators kill climate change bill
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 2:45 PM - 144 Comments
Snap vote in the Senate abolishes bill passed by House of Commons
Conservative party senators have abruptly killed a climate change bill originally introduced by the NDP and passed by the House of Commons. The Tory senators profited from the absence of 15 Liberal senators to call a snap vote on Bill C-311, also known as the Climate Change Accountability Act, which was then defeated by a vote of 43 to 32. The bill in question called for greenhouse gas emissions to be cut to 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050. “This was one of the most undemocratic acts that we have ever seen in the Parliament of Canada,” NDP Leader Jack Layton said at a press conference Wednesday morning. “To take power that doesn’t rightfully belong to them to kill a bill that has been adopted by a majority of the House of Commons representing a majority of Canadians is as wrong as it gets when it comes to democracy in this country.”
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China hijacked the Internet last April
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 2:05 PM - 3 Comments
State-owned company sucked in data for 18 minutes
In what’s believed to be one of the biggest data hijackings ever, security experts have confirmed that a state-run Chinese telecommunications company sucked in 15 per cent of all Internet traffic for 18 minutes last April. It’s hard to tell what happened to massive amount of data re-routed through China, though the possibilities include eavesdropping on unprotected communications like emails and instant messaging, manipulating the data passing through, or decrypting messages. Even more worrisome is the fact the targets of the hijackings were pre-selected destinations like military, intelligence and civilian networks in the United States and its allies. “Imagine the capability and capacity that is built into their networks,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee, the world’s largest Internet security company. “I’m not sure there was anyone else in the world who could have taken on that much traffic without breaking a sweat.”
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The 5,000-year war on cancer
By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 13 Comments
An oncologist’s beautifully written history attempts to grapple with the disease
Cancer has eclipsed many rival diseases, but there has been treatment in progress, especially in children's cancers | Davide Monteleone/Contrasto/Redux
Sometime around 2600 BCE the Egyptian genius Imhotep—statesman, architect and physician—compiled a medical manual. Case 45 described “bulging masses on the breast, hard and cool to the touch.” As for therapy, he wrote only, “there is none.” His careful clinical language is a textbook description of breast tumours, according to New York oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, a beautifully written account of all the ingenuity, hubris, courage and utter confusion humankind has brought to its attempts to grapple with cancer.
As Imhotep’s terse remarks illustrate, it has been killing us, on the record, for 5,000 years. In reality, for much longer: since cancer is a matter of uncontrolled cell growth, of our own bodies turning on us, it is the oldest human disease. “Cancer is us,” Mukherjee adds in an interview, except more perfect—we seek to extend our years, but the undying cancer cell is already immortal. We have dispatched so many of cancer’s rival diseases that we have cleared its path to us and our age-related cellular mutations: today we are both available for cancer and prone to it. The disease is still reaping its lung-cancer harvest from the 1900s, the century of the cigarette. Cancer, in fact, is entering upon its glory days. In Canada and the U.S., one in three women will contract it, and one in two men.
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Today's constitutional crisis
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 1:16 PM - 294 Comments
Conservatives senators called a snap vote last night and defeated Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act, that was passed by the House in May. This will no doubt outrage the Prime Minister, Mr. Harper and his government having periodically lamented the tyranny an unelected Senate can impose.
“We don’t believe an unelected body should in anyway be blocking an elected body,” he told a news conference in Calgary … “We are looking for the opportunity to elect senators, but if at some point it becomes clear some senators are not going to be elected, the government will name senators to ensure that the elected will of the House of Commons and the people of Canada is reflected in the Senate.”
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Fearless Females of the Year
By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 1:12 PM - 7 Comments
I could have called this post Two Tough Broads, but really, that sounds so negative, and who can resist an excuse to link to Cosmo in a political post.
Love them or hate them, here are two women who really don’t care who thinks they should just shut up and go away. If this politics thing doesn’t work out, Pelosi and Palin could team up with Hillary and give lucrative seminars on how to grow a thick skin.
Why Democrats Don’t Dump Nancy Pelosi (Politico):
“Talk to lawmakers privately, and many will freely acknowledge that from a public relations perspective it makes little sense for Nancy Pelosi — who made history as speaker and is now fighting hard to be minority leader — to remain the face of Democrats.
But many of those same lawmakers will cast their votes for Pelosi in this morning’s closed door Democratic caucus meeting — and the embattled San Franciscan will almost certainly win the validation she seeks…”
The Palin Network (NYT Magazine):
” “I am,” Sarah Palin told me the next day when I asked her if she was already weighing a run for president…”
(…)
“In truth, few are underestimating Sarah Palin anymore. In that endearing manner of the Beltway echo chamber, the prevailing narrative of Palin in 2009 was that that she was an incompetent ditz. This year’s story line is that she is a social-media visionary who purposefully circumnavigated the power-alley gasbags and thereby constructed a new campaigning template for the ages…”
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Health care: what we get for our money, Part II
By John Geddes - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 12:59 PM - 10 Comments
Assessing the performance of an entire national health system—if “system” is the word for any country’s amalgam doctors’ offices, walk-in clinics, imaging labs, hospitals and more—is notoriously difficult.
If you just look at how long people live or what illnesses they’re susceptible to, the big variables are what sort of food they eat, whether they exercise much, if they smoke, and how rich they are. Examining outcomes alone doesn’t reveal much about the narrow contribution of the health system.
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RCMP recovers documents stolen from Bank of Canada head's car
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 12:39 PM - 0 Comments
BoC says papers didn’t contain sensitive information
The RCMP says it has recovered documents stolen from Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney’s car earlier this month in Montreal. According to an official with the Bank of Canada, the documents contained in the stolen suitcase were primarily staff reports and briefing notes, but did not contain sensitive information. Investigators are going through the recovered papers to determine whether they are in order.
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Four in 10 honey jars fail chemical residue tests
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments
Government tests show massive increase in non-compliance
Tests conducted by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found that nearly 40 per cent of honey jars sold in Canada contain elevated levels of chemical residues. The tests found only 61 per cent of the containers passed federal chemical-residue requirements according to the report, a big drop from 2005-2006, when nearly all the jars—94 per cent—passed the test. However, the agency says the residues present no threat to consumers, and are simply the result of bee-calming agents used in the harvesting process.
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Number of EI recipients rises in September
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 12:14 PM - 2 Comments
14,000 more people get added to Canada’s EI rolls
The number of people receiving employment insurance benefits rose by 14,000 people, or 2.2 per cent, in September. The provinces registering the biggest increases were Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta, though all provinces experienced an increase. Despite the September spike, the number of EI recipients is still 16.5 per cent below the most recent peak reached in July 2009. The total number of people on EI has averaged around 650,000 for majority of this year.
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Prime Minister Ignatieff
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 11:32 AM - 102 Comments
From his scrum yesterday, the Liberal leader explains why we’re staying in Afghanistan for another three years.
Let’s get back to first principles. Why are we taking this decision? Because the only reason Canada is there is to help Afghanistan defend itself. What is not credible about the Bloc and the NDP is they say we don’t want to abandon Afghanistan. We want to make sure that Afghanistan is secure and safe. But they’re not willing to do anything that the Afghans actually want which is to train their army to be able to defend the country. We think this is a tough decision but it’s the right decision as a matter of principle …
We feel that this is a position that actually meets the national interest because the deal here is you can’t have the Bloc and the NDP coming out there and saying let’s just walk away from Afghanistan and leave them a lot of fine words. At the end of the day, this is about Canada. And when Canada is asked by its allies and when Canada is asked by the Afghan people get us ready to defend ourselves, I think Canada should respond as we are responding, as the government has responded… Continue…
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In (Fictional) Defense of Jumping the Shark
By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 10:49 AM - 1 Comment
This is one of those internet videos that is going to be primarily funny for old TV buffs — since the majority of it just consists of a straightforward plot summary of a TV episode that’s more than 30 years old — so naturally I enjoyed it: James Urbaniak interviews the fictional writer of the “Jumping the Shark” episode (played by Dave “Gruber” Allen). Ironically, the fake writer makes a somewhat better case for the episode than the real writer did.
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The Conservative-Liberal-Bloc-NDP coalition
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 10:33 AM - 16 Comments
The NDP says the Conservatives and Liberals have conspired to extend the mission in Afghanistan. Evangelical leader Charles McVety says someone in the government told him that the Conservatives and NDP have a deal to pass a bill on human rights for the transgendered. And the Hill Times says that the Conservatives are in cahoots with the Bloc Quebecois to keep the government in power and fund a hockey arena in Quebec City.
Thus are the Greens, the only party not presently said to be cooperating in any manner with any other party, well-positioned to benefit at the next election from an anti-coalition vote.
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The crushing recession that’s brought Ireland to its knees
By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 1 Comment
With 14 per cent unemployment and its banks on the brink, the Celtic Tiger is now more like a sickly kitten
One in three Irish under 30 are out of work | Cathal McNaughton/Reuters
Two years ago, Mick Doherty was tooling around Dublin in a brand new, cherry-red Audi A4. “A six-speed,” the young Irishman adds, with a rueful smile. Today, Doherty drives around his adopted Vancouver in a 1990 Chrysler Daytona—automatic transmission. “And I’m grateful for it,” declares the 32-year-old construction worker who, last year, emigrated to Canada to escape a crushing recession that’s brought his native Ireland to its knees. It’s shrunk the economy by a tenth—the textbook definition of a depression.
What a difference a few years can make. As recently as 2006, the roaring Celtic Tiger was held up as a model economy. Doherty was making money hand over fist, holidaying three times a year, in Bulgaria, Las Vegas, Spain. Ireland famously boasted more BMWs per capita than Germany, and its lawyers and managers were earning bigger bucks than their counterparts in the U.S. But in late September 2008, Irish banks, overexposed to the property market, came under severe pressure as the credit crunch bit in. “More or less overnight,” says Doherty, “everything came crashing to a halt.” Ireland led Europe into recession.
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Where to and what now?
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 9:16 AM - 14 Comments
Postmedia questions where Canadian soldiers will end up stationed after July 2011.
While Harper dithered for months before doing his volte-face, the Europeans took all the best (read: easy) training spots in Kabul or places nearby. As Canada is insisting that most of its trainers will be in or near the capital, which is already awash with trainers from other countries, there is immense interest in what specific training tasks Canada is to be assigned by NATO and how its trainers will be shoehorned into already-crowded bases in the capital.
The Globe says 2011 will also bring a reduction in aid and civilian officials.
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The nature of Canada's post-2011 mission in Afghanistan
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 8:20 PM - 25 Comments
A diplomatic source from a NATO member state with large numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan tells Maclean’s his country’s government will push Canada, privately, to expand its post 2011 military deployment to include combat.
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The Good Wife: Another Show That Blames The Title
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 7:41 PM - 5 Comments
Jace Lacob, the Televisionary, did this excellent interview with the creators of The Good Wife, and I see that they, too, put some of the blame on the title for the show’s soft ratings:
“If there was anything we could go back and reverse, it would be the title,” said Robert King. “I understand why some shows just name the show after the character. How do you find something that doesn’t just scream, ‘oh, this is a procedural,’ or ‘this is some kind of wanky feminine drama’? I don’t think we escaped that. Really, I think the title has a tendency to make men think, ‘Well, here’s the menstruation hour.’”
Well, I don’t really agree with that either, but I’m certainly rooting for more people to discover the show, which continues to do interesting things that even a good cable show might not do, at least not in the same exact way.
(Restricted to 10-13 episodes, a cable show would not have the luxury of letting the characters’ lives unfold this gradually, and it wouldn’t be able to tinker as much with its approach in the middle of the season.) The combination of personal stories with larger social and political issues is a major goal of drama, but in practice, most shows come down heavily on one side or the other: either they’re mostly about the characters with the bigger stuff as a backdrop, or they’re about larger issues (ripped-from-the-headlines stories about guest characters) with the characterizations providing atmosphere.Good Wife is trying to do both and still more, as a mashup of procedural, serial, law show, politics show, and character study. That “full-course meal” aspect of the show means that the episodes can a little bit different from each other, just by putting different emphasis on different parts of the mix. It’s like several different kinds of conventional shows have been skilfully combined to produce an unconventional show. And that’s an important advantage of the modern multi-story structure that most modern shows (broadcast and cable) use, where you have a procedural plot involving guest stars and character-based plots and ongoing arcs jockeying for position in the same 42 minutes. There are all kinds of reason why this structure has developed, including the need to find something for a large cast to do, but a creative reason for it is that a show can avoid predictability by changing the way these different story elements are combined, the way they’re spaced out, or what each story contributes tonally to this week’s episode.
The discussion of the what the show gets away with, notably the instantly notorious “NPR” scene, is a reminder of an odd paradox: CBS, the most conventional network, is the one that pushes the boundaries the most in terms of content. They already helped increase the amount of gore you could show (as long as the person is already dead) and more recently they’ve been upping the amount of sexual frankness — remember how NBC wouldn’t let Seinfeld say the word “masturbation?” Now every single one of the CBS comedies talks about it, sometimes repeatedly. Those shows do it mostly for cheap laughs; again, it seems like the Kings have cleverly figured out how to use the conventions of their own network for something different than the other shows on the same network.
And in a final paradox, the CBS procedural that is the most critically-acclaimed and (sort of) hip is the one that is the oldest-skewing — by some measurements the oldest-skewing scripted show on TV. I don’t think it should come as a surprise to me that a show like this should skew old, but somehow it does; there’s a stereotype that older viewers are old-fashioned or prudish, but it’s not really backed up by the numbers. Anecdotally, I find there’s a certain amount of overlap between HBO and CBS audiences — the older central characters, the frequent quiet spots in between the spectacular sequences, and the lack of specific focus on young viewers (a pay channel doesn’t care how old its viewers are, and CBS has decided to play for the most possible total viewers) mean that someone who watches Boardwalk Empire might well also want to watch the combination of personal stories and politics on Good Wife.
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The Commons: Why bother?
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 7:00 PM - 63 Comments
The Scene. The Prime Minister leaned on his left elbow and chatted happily with the Foreign Affairs Minister and the Environment Minister. He seemed entirely undaunted by the prospect of what was surely about to happen, unmoved by the gravity one might have applied to the moment at hand.A short while later, the Liberal leader stood and asked the Prime Minister en français to assure the House that Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan will not be involved in combat after July 2011. The Speaker then turned the floor over to the Right Honourable Prime Minister. And Mr. Harper here stood and, acknowledging for the first time on Canadian soil a complete and total reversal of his most recent position on this country’s involvement in a nine-year-old war, confirmed as much.
With his second opportunity, Michael Ignatieff, switching to English, sought not only a confirmation, but a guarantee. “Mr. Speaker, 20,000 Canadians served in Afghanistan since 2001, 153 brave soldiers did not survive and their sacrifices must not be in vain. We need to be clear about this new engagement of Canada after 2011,” he said, putting his hands together in front of his face as if in open prayer. “Can the Prime Minister guarantee that this is not going to involve combat, that it is going to be out of Kandahar and that the training will occur in safe conditions in Kabul?”
“The answer,” Mr. Harper responded, “is yes to all of those questions. As the Minister of National Defence, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and others have said, we are looking at a non-combat mission that will occur. It will be a training mission that will occur in classrooms behind the wire in bases. The government has been very clear and we do think this is a way of ensuring we consolidate the gains that we have made and honour the sacrifices of Canadians who have served in Afghanistan.”
Here then is how Prime Minister Stephen Harper committed Canadian military forces for another three years to the defining international conflict of this generation—a thousand people in all, at a total cost to the nation of something like $1.5-billion. Continue…
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Prince William to marry Kate Middleton
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 5:59 PM - 7 Comments
After much speculation, the second in line to the throne announces he’ll be tying the knot
Waity Katie will wait no more. Prince William, who will be Prince of Wales if Charles ever gets a shot at the throne, announced on Tuesday his engagement to longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton. No date has been announced yet for the wedding, though it will take place in spring or summer of 2011. William and Kate have been “on again and off again” for the last eight years; both are twenty-eight years old.For more on Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton, pick up this week’s special issue of Maclean’s, on newsstands Nov. 18.
TIMELINE: Prince William’s 9-year courtship of Kate Middleton
From their university days to their engagementPHOTO GALLERY: Prince William and Kate Middleton’s road to engagement
A look at the soon-to-be royal pair over the course of their relationship
PHOTO GALLERY: Will Prince William and Kate Middleton top these royal weddings?
A look back at the most memorable royal nuptials
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PHOTOS: Will Prince William and Kate Middleton top these royal weddings?
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 5:44 PM - 0 Comments
A look back at the most memorable royal weddings
0PHOTOS: Will Prince William and Kate Middleton top these royal weddings?
Charles and Diana
1 of 14 Photos
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TIMELINE: Prince William’s 9-year courtship of Kate Middleton
By Josh Dehaas - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 5:33 PM - 16 Comments
From their university days to their engagement
September 2001: Prince William and Kate Middleton meet at St. Andrew’s University, where they’re both studying art history. William learns art isn’t his strength. Kate convinces him to stay in school after he “wobbles,” but he switches to geography.February 2002: William reportedly pays £200 for a front row seat to a cheeky charity fashion show at which Kate walks the runway wearing little more than underwear.
September 2002: The pair moves into student housing together, along with two friends. Rumours of their relationship emerge, though Kate is still dating someone else.
June 2003: Rumours swirl that William is dating the heiress of wealthy family in Kenya, but it’s Kate who attends his 21st birthday party at Windsor Castle. Prince Charles tells the media that, to his knowledge, his son is single.
December 2003: Kate splits from her boyfriend. Continue…
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PHOTOS: Prince William and Kate Middleton's road to engagement
By macleans.ca - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 4:58 PM - 0 Comments
A look at the soon-to-be royal pair over the course of their relationship
