Richard Chamberlain, hero of Dr Kildare and ‘king of the miniseries’, dies aged 90

The actor died on Saturday night in Waimānalo, Hawaii of complications after a stroke, his publicist says

Richard Chamberlain, the hero of the 1960s television series Dr Kildare who found a second career as an award-winning “king of the miniseries,” has died. He was 90.

Chamberlain died on Saturday night in Waimānalo, Hawaii of complications after a stroke, according to his publicist, Harlan Boll.

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The White Lotus ‘goes too far’: Duke University unhappy over their prominence in show

Two characters in the troubled Ratliff family are Duke alumni, but the association has displeased the US university

  • This article contains spoilers for the third season of The White Lotus

In the aftermath of an incestuous threesome, many viewers of the latest season of The White Lotus may think the show has stepped over a line. But audiences have an unlikely ally in Duke University, which is unhappy that two characters happen to be Duke alumni.

The third season of the popular TV show, which follows wealthy guests and workers at a luxury resort in Thailand, includes the Ratliff family, with the father, Timothy (played by Jason Isaacs) and one of his sons, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) both having attended Duke, a prestigious institution located in Durham, North Carolina.

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Wendy Williams’s tragic tale shines a light on court-ordered conservatorship

Former talkshow host takes public her battle to remove her guardian, ordered by a court due to dementia and aphasia

The note dropped from the upper floor window of an assisted living facility in New York on the morning of 10 March contained a simple message: “Help! Wendy!!” it read.

For any patient inside, it would have been tragic. But, astonishingly, the writer of this note was Wendy Williams, a trailblazing television talkshow host and once one of the most recognisble daytime TV faces in America.

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Black Mirror: first trailer for new season offers more tech nightmares

Netflix will bring ‘six electrifying stories’ from Charlie Brooker to the small screen in April with stars including Peter Capaldi and Issa Rae

Black Mirror fans rejoice – or prepare to “lose your mind” and “lose your reality”, as promises a newly released trailer for Charlie Brooker’s dystopian sci-fi series. Netflix released the first previews of the new installment on Thursday, teasing “six electrifying stories” premiering on 10 April.

The trailer continues Black Mirror’s trademark uneasy, foreboding tone, previewing several new entries in a universe of tech gone awry. New stars include Peter Capaldi, Issa Rae, Paul Giamatti, Rashida Jones, Tracee Ellis Ross, Emma Corrin, Awkwafina, Chris O’Dowd and more.

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TV nostalgia continues with new gameshow based on musical chairs

Game of Chairs will have 10 contestants move around a circle who try to land on a seat when the music stops

A new TV show based on the children’s party game musical chairs is set to hit screens, tapping into viewers’ cravings for nostalgia and happy childhood memories.

The company behind Big Brother, Masterchef and Peaky Blinders is launching the elimination gameshow Game of Chairs – a series in which 10 contestants move around a circle of nine coloured chairs and aim to land on a seat when the music stops.

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Former Brookside actor sentenced to jail over sham modelling agencies

Philip Foster lives in Spain and was sentenced in his absence after defrauding more than 6,000 people

A former TV soap actor has been sentenced to eight and a half years in prison after masterminding a £13.6m fraud that targeted aspiring models.

Former Brookside actor Philip Foster, 49, ran an operation involving a network of sham modelling agencies for more than eight years.

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Sag awards 2025: Timothée Chalamet, Demi Moore, Kieran Culkin and Zoe Saldaña win major categories

Screen Actors Guild awards go to Shōgun and Conclave ensembles, while Jane Fonda gives a rousing political speech while accepting a life achievement award

Timothée Chalamet has won best actor in a surprise upset at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild awards for his performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, with Demi Moore and the ensembles of Shōgun and Conclave also winning big.

Chalamet won best male actor in a leading role, his first in an awards race that has been led all season by The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody, who has picked up the Golden Globe, Bafta and Critics’ Choice awards and is still widely predicted to win the Oscar next week.

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UK creative industries set behaviour standards after Strictly and MasterChef rows

An independent standards authority says the industry must learn from recent scandals and create safer working environments

New guidelines will be issued this week for the UK’s creative industries after a series of scandals including reports of inappropriate behaviour by Gregg Wallace and Gino d’Acampo, and bullying allegations on the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing.

The Creative Industries Indep­endent Standards Authority (CIISA) will set new standards with the aim of stamping out bullying, harassment and discrimination, and address “power imbalances”.

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BBC pulls Gaza documentary featuring child whose father was Hamas minister

Show removed from iPlayer as ‘further due diligence’ carried out and critics ask if any Hamas members were paid for filming

A BBC documentary about Gaza has been pulled from its iPlayer service while the broadcaster deals with intensifying accusations that the film was biased because it failed to make clear the father of its child narrator was a Hamas deputy minister.

BBC sources indicated the intention was to make the documentary available to watch again once a “due diligence” exercise had taken place, but the decision reflects a frustration that the filmmakers did not inform the broadcaster of the situation before transmission.

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Aacta awards 2025: Robbie Williams’ Better Man and Boy Swallows Universe dominate Australian film and TV prizes

Singer biopic wins best film and best actor for motion capture star Jonno Davies, while Trent Dalton adaptation wins in 12 of its 22 nominated categories

The Netflix adaptation of Trent Dalton’s bestseller Boy Swallows Universe has dominated the annual Aacta (Australian Academy of Cinema, Television and the Arts) awards, winning 12 of its record-breaking 22 nominations.

The Aacta president, Russell Crowe, hosted the awards ceremony at Hota (Home of the Arts) on the Gold Coast on Friday, which featured a live performance by Robbie Williams, whose musical biopic, Better Man, collected nine awards on the night.

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BBC and ITV slash big-budget TV spend as US streamers pour money into UK

Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky also among UK broadcasters making cuts as Netflix, Disney and Amazon pile on pressure

UK broadcasters slashed their spending on big-budget TV shows to the lowest level in almost a decade last year, even as their US rivals Netflix, Disney and Amazon ploughed hundreds of millions more into British-made premium content.

In a sign of the increasing competitive pressures of the streaming era, the amount spent on high-end TV shows costing more than £1m an hour to make by domestic operators such as the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, plunged by a quarter last year to £598m.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot in the works with Sarah Michelle Gellar returning to the titular role

Oscar-winning director – and longtime Buffy fan – Chloé Zhao is onboard to direct, with Dolly Parton as executive producer

A sequel reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is reportedly in the works, with Sarah Michelle Gellar expected to return to the titular role and the Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao to direct the pilot episode.

On Tuesday Deadline reported sources close to the project confirming that the streaming service Hulu is “near a pilot order”, with lifelong Buffy fan Zhao onboard to direct the episode, written by the Poker Face writers Nora and Lilla Zuckerman.

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Linda Nolan, singer and television personality, dies aged 65

Agents says the ‘celebrated Irish pop legend’ died ‘with her loving siblings by her bedside’

The singer and TV personality Linda Nolan, who had chart success alongside her sisters in the pop vocal group the Nolans before a TV career, has died aged 65.

She had been diagnosed with cancer in 2017. Her agent, Dermont McNamara, said in a statement that she had died in Blackpool’s Victoria hospital “with her loving siblings by her bedside, ensuring she was embraced with love and comfort during her final moments”.

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Lego links up with TV hit Bluey for toy sets to be launched this year

Partnership ‘a long time coming’ and is latest expansion of Australian-made animated series

The global hit children’s TV show Bluey is to make its Lego debut with the first sets due to hit shelves later this year.

The world of Bluey, which has proved such a small-screen hit a film is to be made for global release in 2027, is to be brought to life in plastic brick form with six sets to be revealed this spring before going on sale later this year.

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Wicked, A Complete Unknown and Shôgun lead Screen Actors Guild nominations

This year’s SAG noms see a strong showing for music-led films while Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie are snubbed

Music-led films Wicked and A Complete Unknown and TV shows Shôgun and The Bear lead this year’s Screen Actors Guild nominations, it was announced this morning.

Blockbuster musical Wicked heads up the film side with five nominations including for actors Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey, as well as the ensemble. It was also nominated for stunt ensemble. The film, based on the long-running Broadway hit, has made more than $680m at the global box office.

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The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez and Shōgun triumph at the Golden Globes

The low-budget immigration saga and the Netflix crime musical picked up major film wins while the historical epic dominated television awards

The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez and Shōgun won big at the 82nd Golden Globes, the unofficial kick-off to this year’s awards season.

The low-budget epic The Brutalist, a drama telling the story of a Holocaust survivor turned immigrant architect in the US, won three awards for best film – drama, actor for Adrien Brody and director for the actor-turned-film-maker Brady Corbet. At the end of his speech, Corbet paid tribute to the film-maker Jeff Baena, who died this week by suicide.

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Harlan Coben says ‘quite a bit of tragedy’ in his 20s made him a better writer

Bestselling author and Netflix producer said extensive early experience of grief was ‘very cruel but effective teacher’

American thriller writer Harlan Coben said experiencing “quite a bit of tragedy” in his 20s made him a better writer.

The bestselling author, who wrote the Myron Bolitar thriller series and novels turned Netflix shows such as Fool Me Once and Missing You, said he was in his 20s when his father died of a heart attack at the age of 59 in 1988.

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German artists sign open letter against TV show host accused of sexism

Choice of Thilo Mischke, author of Around the World In 80 Women, for ARD’s flagship arts show criticised

More than 100 prominent German writers and artists have signed an open letter refusing to appear on one of Germany’s top culture programmes on public television after the broadcaster announced a new host who has been accused of sexism and racism in his writing.

ARD said in late December it had picked the author Thilo Mischke, 43, to co-present its flagship culture show, ttt – Titel, Thesen, Temperamente (Titles, Theses, Temperaments), after the programme’s veteran host Max Moor stepped aside.

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‘A look into the future’: TV drama about Danish climate refugees divides opinion

Families Like Ours has become national talking point but some scientists say events depicted could not happen

Featuring scenes of huge crowds boarding ferries, protest and desperation as six million Danes become climate refugees and life as they know it rapidly collapses, the new TV series by the Oscar-winning director Thomas Vinterberg is a potential “look into the future”, he says.

Familier som vores (Families Like Ours) – a drama which depicts a flooded Denmark shut down and evacuated – has been viewed nearly 1m times and become a national talking point. At its premiere at the Venice international film festival, it evoked tears, shouts and a standing ovation, with one critic describing it as “grimly prophetic”.

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