Lately, it's been easy to feel that if men aren't battling with their own demons, then they're wasting their lives getting furiously angry about Hollywood remakes and communicating entirely through frog memes. But this is to do us a disservice: while the noisy idiot fringe certainly exist, there's a massive amount to celebrate in the world of men. So in the spirit of the new year and positivity, here's our celebration of those among us who led by example in the last year. If you're going to make one new year's resolution, it's simple: be more like these guys.
And don't miss our special mention at the very end (which comes with a big GoT Season 6 spoiler).
There’s obviously an element of us already feeling misty-eyed about the days when there was a qualified politician in the most powerful governmental job on earth. But as Barack Obama’s stint as POTUS draws to a close – eight years without a major scandal, having ushered in healthcare reform and claimed bin Laden’s scalp – he is leaving office with record approval ratings, five points up on where he was in the summer and back to the numbers he registered at the start of his tenure. Thankfully, he wasn’t being assessed on his honkingly awful singing voice.
Filmmaker and vlogger, and one of the genuine success stories of the new digital media who built an audience of six million viewers before developing his own video-sharing app, Beme which was sold to CNN as part of a deal worth $25bn. Beme will be shut down so Neistat can develop a new stand-alone project with the network, in an attempt to bring his audience to their channels. It’s due for launch in the summer.
Even in a remarkable year for British sport (Leicester City’s title, Mo Farah’s gold, the Brownlee Brothers’ tear-jerking joint finish), Andy Murray’s combined achievements stood out. Between June and November the 29-year-old became Wimbledon champion for the second time, defended his Olympic singles title at the Rio games and then took the world number one ranking from Novak Djokovic. He also found time to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award and become a father for the first time.
Leonardo Dicaprio’s ongoing failure to win an Oscar was beginning to look like one of the Academy’s more perverse decisions. He’d been nominated for physically arduous, emotionally challenging roles (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape in 1994), serious American epics (The Aviator in 2005) and noisy box-office smash hits (The Wolf of Wall Street in 2014). Yet still no gong. That was finally fixed this year when his bear-battling performance in The Revenant saw him win the prize for best actor. He even managed to give an acceptance speech that didn’t see him burst into tears (Kate Winslet did in the audience, though) and avoided a collective giant eye-roll from the watching public.
At the start of the year, Jeremy Clarkson’s prospects looked somewhat bleak. His contract at the BBC had “not been renewed” after he punched a colleague, before Clarkson and his team were picked up by Amazon Prime, very much an untested platform in terms of broadcast quality. However, the response to his new show from fans and critics alike was almost universally positive, with a final victory coming in late summer when Mark Thompson, the former director general of the BBC told the Sunday Times that the corporation should have kept Clarkson. "He spoke to people who didn’t find much else in the BBC…As a fan, I regret its passing."
Resembling a member of The Strokes after being sent on a pre-tour health kick by their record company, Joe Wicks is the personal trainer and fitness expert who conquered Instagram. This year saw him step up to a whole other level with his new cookbook selling 70,000 copies in the first four days of January, and subsequent news reports detailing that he was pulling in a million pounds a month through his business empire. “This is insane, I can barely cook. I just put stuff out on Instagram,” he told Radio Times, presumably while his publicist made a frantic throat-cutting gesture at him.
In a year when experts were reduced to being sneered at by part-time journalist and failed politician Michael Gove, it fell to David Attenborough to publicly defend the whole concept of “qualified people doing their jobs really well.” In his case, crafting the second season of Planet Earth, a magisterial cavalcade of animal drama that debuted with the highest viewing figures of any nature show for 15 years, drew more young viewers than X-Factor and marked what, one assumes, must be the great man’s retirement from long-form series. As he delivered his final speech from the viewing gallery of The Shard, we were watching a man go out on a high, in more ways than one.
While his peers are largely content to honk their way through the American songbook or hoary old blues covers while plodding through stadium mega-tours, David Bowie’s last decade saw him evaporating into a quiet, rumour-shrouded life in New York. Having released a surprise new album in 2013, he followed it up in January of this year with Blackstar – immediately reviewed as one of his best pieces of work since the early 1980s – and promptly died three days later. The accompanying video for the "Lazarus" single – showing a wizened, worn-out Bowie, blinded in bed and retreating into a wardrobe – suddenly took on a morbid significance and confirmed the idea that he was as aesthetically precise in death as he had been in the best of his life.
Glover has been drawing plaudits for several years for his comedy writing, rap side-career and acting work. He obviously didn’t feel he was making all other men look useless enough as 2016 saw him launch his own ticket-buying app, release his TV series Atlanta, drop his Awaken, My Love! album and confirm his appearance in both the forthcoming Spiderman film, and also as Lando Calrissian in the Han Solo Star Wars spin-off due for release in 2018.
A special mention to Game of Thrones’ simple-minded giant for a final, terminal reminder that gentlemen always hold the door. Even if it kills them.