Dressmaking next, Daniel – really? Stick to the Day-Lewis job | Peter Bradshaw

There are plenty of us hoping that Daniel Day-Lewis might yet find it in his heart to reverse his planned retirement and carry on in the acting business. So it is frankly a massive boost to hear the rumour that he is thinking of trying dressmaking. Day-Lewis says his final role is to be in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film Phantom Thread, in which he will play a brilliant couturier. And it is this complex trade which has reportedly captured his imagination.

Of course, there was famously a time when Day-Lewis was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Florence, a calling he eventually chose to lay aside in favour of acting again. I couldn’t hear the news about his possible foray into dressmaking without remembering the legendary episode of Larry David’s TV comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm, when David – with such a gigantic amount of cash and leisure at his disposal – decides the time has come for him to live his boyhood dream and become a car salesman.

And it is the very fact that he doesn’t need the money that attracts him. He can just concentrate on the purity of bantering with customers, chatting car stuff and offering sweet deals on Lexuses.

But he realises he should return to show business after his horrendous performance in the showroom tips everything into chaos. It could be the same for Day-Lewis, as he winds up with a mouthful of pins, holding up a little black dress that looks like a tent designed by Picasso.

Dig deep and beep

The late Rev Ian Paisley, founder of the Democratic Unionist party, was known for his insistence on “silent collections” when the plate went round in his church. He hated the chink of coins, preferring folding green.

Now the Church of England is to make the silent collection a digital reality. Well, not quite silent. There will be a beeping sound. The C of E is to introduce contactless payment technology at 40 churches this summer. As well as plates lined with a velvety material, worshippers will be offered a handheld terminal over which they can wave their debit cards, and they can give up to £30 including any tip for church staff – that is the limit for instant contactless payment.

It is a nicely poised figure. Giving more would mean the faff of pin numbers. So people may well feel that £30 is what they should pretty much pay.

You can’t get away with buttons or foreign coins with a contactless card reader – although some churchgoers may try pressing their National Trust cards on the machine and saying “beep!” with their hands over their mouths.

A comedy crisis is no joke

The growth of social media is causing what could be a crisis in the contractual nature of comedy. In the past the comic offered a joke; those who got it laughed, and those who didn’t stayed silent or faked laughing.

At Glastonbury, Twitter user Rachel Burns playfully complained about Barry Gibb doing cover versions of Take That, Boyzone and Steps – the joke being that his songs were Bee Gees’ originals. But then she was deluged with stupid people, each pointing this fact out in a tone of outrage, people resplendent in their sanctimonious righteousness, missing the point, each crucially unable to hear any group laughter which in the real world would have proved to them their error. But having to spell out to these people that, yes, this is the joke, feels like a fatal concession, because explaining a joke robs it of its instantaneous, self-evident force and potency. The militant obtuse are becoming more of a worrying online phenomenon than trolls.