Bart Simpson was a big fan, and the prank call has always been the curse of phone-in shows – as GB News discovered this week
Name: Prank calls.
Age: The oldest known dates from 1884, and involved telephoning undertakers in Rhode Island to summon them to the homes of not-dead people.
Continue reading...In new Guardian podcast, TV dramatist tells Grace Dent about writing Colin’s final hours
Russell T Davies, the writer of It’s a Sin, the Channel 4 drama about the HIV/Aids epidemic in the late 1980s, has revealed that the death of Colin, one of show’s characters, was partly based on the death of his partner.
Speaking to the food writer Grace Dent on a new Guardian podcast, Comfort Eating, which launches on Tuesday, Davies said he had drawn on the experience of watching his husband, Andrew Smith, die from brain cancer in 2018 to write the scenes featuring Colin’s death.
Continue reading...A football-free cultural guide to the week ahead, from comedy podcasts to Sean Bean dramas
Listen, I’m with you. I have no interest in Euro 2020 either. But luckily, over the years I’ve perfected the art of finding other things to do. Here’s a day-by-day alternative viewing guide for the first week of the tournament (after that, you’re on your own).
Continue reading...As the groundbreaking show ends its award-winning three season run, those involved with the show talk about its importance for trans and queer people of color
Gold crowns inset with emeralds, fur-trimmed capes and gowns embellished with glittering diamonds and pearls clothed The House of Abundance as they made their last-minute entrance into a New York City ballroom and their first entrance on to our TV screens in the premiere episode of Pose in June 2018, which aired its final episode on Sunday.
Related: 'I binged Six Feet Under just for the gayness of it': LGBT celebs on their favourite queer TV
Continue reading...This new Irish drama expertly manages a large cast of characters, with seeds of suspicion, red herrings – and a monstrous patriarch left for dead
Smother (Alibi), a new County Clare-set thriller by novelist and television writer Kate O’Riordan, reminds me – and I have few higher compliments – of the work of Maeve Binchy, if she had ever turned her hand to whodunnits. It has a seemingly effortless mastery of a large cast of characters, warm intelligence pervading everything, and promotes the gorgeous general sense of being held for the duration in a very safe pair of hands indeed. Like Binchy, it is also entirely addictive.
It opens with an altercation on a clifftop that ends with a man dead on the beach below. Then, as is currently TV fashion, we spool back to earlier that night, as successful businessman Denis (Stuart Graham) hosts his wife Val’s (Dervla Kirwan) 50th birthday party. Their three daughters are there – Jenny (Niamh Walsh), a heavily pregnant single doctor who works eternally for Daddy’s approval, Anna (Gemma-Leah Devereux), who is in the final stages of a custody battle with her husband Rory’s ex-wife for the latter’s two sons, and Grace (Seána Kerslake), the fragile youngest, struggling with mental illness and currently off her medication.
Continue reading...He charmed as slimeball lawyer Saul in the drugs drama and its spinoff – but now Bob Odenkirk has gone badass in action thriller Nobody. Has he left his comedy days behind?
On the surface, Bob Odenkirk’s new film is entirely preposterous. As the story of a man who goes on a murder spree after his house is broken into, Nobody is an all-out, full-throated action movie. In one scene, 58-year-old Odenkirk tears a handrail off the inside of a bus and beats a man senseless with it.
However, as he explains, the story stems from something much more personal. “My family had two break-ins,” he reveals from his home in LA, where he’s sitting beneath a vast Chinatown poster. “It was very damaging.”
Continue reading...Supernatural silliness, metaphorical monsters, and dread that doesn’t so much as build as never lets up ... not even Julianne Moore’s turn as a grieving wife can save this bloated bore
The advice that a writer should “kill all your darlings” has been variously attributed. William Faulkner, Allan Ginsberg, Oscar Wilde, GK Chesterton and Arthur Quiller-Couch all get a look-in. Stephen King approved the accepted wisdom in his book On Writing. “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings,” he said with the relish one would hope for from a master of horror. “Even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Related: Joan Allen: ‘Acting’s like tennis. You bring your game’
Continue reading...Meera Syal and Jennifer Saunders star in Audible’s new spoof, Raj! Plus: a tense history lesson in GunPlot, and Unearthed offers gripping plant-themed tales
Raj!
Meera Syal and Jennifer Saunders give standout performances in Audible’s new pod drama, spoofing life in British-controlled India. Ineffectual governor Henry arrives in a rural province, “allergic to emotions”, part of an unwieldy bureaucratic structure, and unwilling to acclimatise. As well as the lines you might see coming (“can’t imagine the British ever going for Indian food!”), there is plenty you might not, in this tale of blustering Brits, and Syal’s Rajmata side-eyeing and sticking it to the man.
Hannah J Davies
The star of Good Girls discusses Mad Men, sexual harassment and squaring her glamorous reputation with her ‘weird, goofy’ personality
Christina Hendricks appears on our video call with the most dramatic backdrop. Art deco gold peacocks bedeck a black wall, making her look, as she has so often in her career, a bit too good to be human. Perfectly poised, perfectly framed, perfectly lit, she is more like a dreamy vision of what humans look like. “I, erm, like your wall,” I say, pointlessly. She flashes a smile, as if to say: “Obviously.”
We are here primarily to discuss the comedy-drama series Good Girls, the fourth season of which will resume in the US this month after a midseason break. The elevator pitch would be Breaking Bad for girls: three suburban women, each hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, unite to embark on a life of cack-handed crime, only to discover they are good at it. The ensemble – Hendricks, Mae Whitman, who plays her sister, and Retta, their friend – works strikingly well, their pacey comic rapport instilling a sense of perpetual motion. You just can’t imagine Good Girls ending. Every time a plot line seems to be reaching its climax, something worse – and funnier – happens.
Continue reading...The show you’ve waited 17 years for aired at last – and could you BE any more emotional? But what did you rate and what did you hate? And why did Matt LeBlanc come out on top?
Friends was a huge part of my life. Growing up, and realising I was gay but having nobody to talk to, I felt very alone and very isolated. Watching Friends got me through some really dark moments.
I sat down to watch [the reunion], fully expecting to hate it, but was crying within minutes. All the feelings I had growing up came back. I loved seeing the cast get together and hearing how they felt on set and how they reacted when they arrived. The bond they all share is so clear and strong. I always felt as if I was a part of Friends, as silly as that may sound, but watching it definitely influenced my personality. I’m sarcastic like Chandler, a clean freak like Monica and a little bit different like Phoebe.
Seeing them all together again just reminds you that lifelong ‘Friends’ are achievable. I just wish I could let the cast and the writers know how much it means to me. Scott, 30, Essex
The actor’s turn as a complex, fallible detective has been a privilege to witness, in a murder mystery that kept us guessing right to the profoundly moving end
In interviews, Kate Winslet always said it wasn’t a thriller. And she was right. Yes, Mare of Easttown (Sky Atlantic) began with a murder in a small, bleak Pennsylvania town and Winslet’s police detective Mare Sheehan being called upon to investigate. But it was almost immediately clear that the seven-part drama was setting up to be so much more – and even clearer soon after that it was likely to succeed in all its endeavours.
It was a character study, of how a woman ground down by life after the loss of a son to drugs and suicide, the consequent divorce from her husband and raising of her grandson in the face of a custody battle with his mother (her son’s former girlfriend, rehabbed but fragile) endures.
Continue reading...After a decade in Hollywood, French actor Omar Sy returned home to star in Netflix’s much-loved hit, Lupin. He talks about playing the charming thief, growing up with Arsenal’s Nicolas Anelka and his battle with racism
Actors, obliged to exhaustively market their wares, will pose for hours in front of posters of their latest film or TV show. They’ll hop between city premieres, sit on dreary festival panels, tell rehearsed comic stories on night-time talkshows, then get up early to be on breakfast radio. Before meeting Omar Sy, a 43-year-old Frenchman who stars in the massively popular Netflix drama Lupin, I’d never heard of an actor picking up a bucket and brush to spend a day gluing up their own billboard posters on the Paris metro. Sy, who is 6ft 2in, born in a working-class Parisian suburb to West African parents, explains the thinking behind this unusual marketing stunt that took place just before the first series of Lupin debuted earlier this year.
“A lot of people know me in Paris,” begins Sy, who worked as a comedian in France through his 20s before becoming a film star there in his early 30s. “Because people in France have watched me in stuff for years, I’m used to meeting strangers who recognise me and who already have smiles on their faces.” In Lupin, lightly adapted from the classic heist books by Maurice Leblanc, Sy plays a French-Senegalese man called Assane Diop, an anonymous Parisian who is used to being ignored and overlooked in his home town, but who is willing to use that to his advantage while robbing the city’s jet-set blind. “The show is entertainment and we want to have fun with it,” he says, “but at the same time we’re talking about something very serious: that some people in France are simply not seen.”
Continue reading...Roberto Saviano says that a court has shown that the crime clans – whose threats forced him to live with a bodyguard – are not invincible
The internationally renowned anti-mafia writer Roberto Saviano has declared that “journalism has been vindicated; words are vindicated – and so am I”, after a landmark judgment in Rome over threats to his life.
Judges ruled on Monday that a courtroom manoeuvre 13 years ago by a Camorra mafia boss and his lawyer constituted a threat to Saviano’s life, and that of a colleague – Rosaria Capacchione, then of the Naples daily Il Mattino – condemning the journalists to live ever since in the shadows, under bodyguard.
Continue reading...Future-proofed Apple smart TV upgrade has widest selection of streaming apps but is super pricey
The second-generation Apple TV 4K gets a faster processor and future-proofed specs, but is really all about its new iPod-inspired Siri remote. And it all comes at a price.
Costing £169, the Apple media-streaming box is very much at the top of the market despite being £10 cheaper than its predecessor, with direct competitors priced between £50 and £130. But the Apple TV 4K offers something most others cannot: full integration with all of the iPhone-maker’s services including Siri, iTunes, TV+, Music, Fitness+ and the AirPlay 2 streaming system.
Continue reading...After being abducted on assignment in Afghanistan, journalist Mellissa Fung shares an intense bond with the teenage girls who were held captive by Boko Haram
The journalist and filmmaker Mellissa Fung is showing me her wound – or to be precise, the scar where her wound once was. It’s from the struggle with one of the Afghan rebels who, 12 years ago, kidnapped Fung near Kabul and held her in a pit in the ground for a month, a place she refers to simply, and rather chillingly as, “the hole”.
“In combat training they teach you not to fight back, but I played ice hockey as a kid so I couldn’t help it,” Fung says. “The guy had a knife so I learned my lesson.”
Continue reading...Journalist defends 1995 Panorama special saying he and Diana stayed friends after the broadcast
Martin Bashir has said he “never wanted to harm” Diana, Princess of Wales with the Panorama interview, adding: “I don’t believe we did.”
The journalist’s reputation is in tatters following Lord Dyson’s report that he used “deceitful behaviour” to land his world exclusive 1995 interview.
Continue reading...Good evening, Europe! The song contest is back at last. Join us on a glorious ride through every performance, every vote ... expect pyrotechnics, dry ice, green screen gimmicks and one giant Russian dress
I keep thinking that the pods the artists are sitting in look like the galactic senate from Star Wars: Phantom Menace but I can’t find a picture where we won’t have to pay Lucasfilm a zillion galactic credits to use it so I can prove it to you. So just imagine that I have.
I’m just taking a breather while they do this recap. After this we are going to get – I believe – loads of performances from former winners on the rooftops of Rotterdam, some weird orchestra/DJ mash-up, and also a spectacular dancing countdown. I mean, why not? It’s Eurovision. I’ve honestly loved it, it has been a really strong final this year so far. I just said in the comments, there’s about eight or nine songs that if they won, you’d think, “Yep, sure, it was always on the cards”.
Continue reading...The characters she plays do not match her own life, the actress insists, but it’s hard not to see parallels with her own journey
Billie Piper has occupied a near continual, if shifting, position in the public imagination for almost a quarter of a century. That’s a notable achievement by any reckoning of a performer’s career, but it’s also rather alarming, given that she’s still only 38.
Having started out as 15-year-old chart sensation, she walked away from the pop music treadmill, enjoyed a boozy marriage with the DJ Chris Evans, returned to frontline fame in Doctor Who, struck out on a path of acclaimed dramatic performances on TV and the stage, and has now made her directorial debut with the feature film Rare Beasts.
Continue reading...The actor, 43, on hiding from her children in bed, hanging out with Matt LeBlanc and her love of Wotsits
I do all my writing in bed. Not due to decadence, but because it’s the place I can hide from my children most effectively.
My recent Bafta nomination genuinely came as a huge shock. I assumed it was Breeders that had been shortlisted, not me [for female performance in a comedy programme]. When I finally clicked, I blurted out, “Good God!” I don’t think I’ll win, but if by some miracle I did, my kids would immediately steal the trophy and put hats on it.
Continue reading...The Pennsylvania detective’s unvarnished realness has hit a fashion nerve with viewers
The style icon everyone is talking about wears drab flannel shirts with flat shoes and crumpled jeans. She has frown lines and dark roots. She might wear mascara if she’s going out to eat but if she’s going to work she doesn’t bother. As a Pennsylvania detective in Mare of Easttown, the Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet bucks the trend for high fashion on the small screen that has given us a string of glossy shows such as Succession, Queen’s Gambit and Halston, with a character whose unvarnished realness has hit a nerve.
A grizzled detective with a complicated personal life; a naked female corpse; a sleepy small town squirrelled with secrets. The set-up of HBO’s hit show, Mare of Easttown is familiar TV fare, but the transformation of serial Vogue cover star Kate Winslet into Mare Sheehan provides an unexpected plot twist. Nowhere to be seen are the blow-dries of Big Little Lies or the silk blouses and velvet coats of The Undoing. Instead, the first episode sees Detective Sheehan dressed in nondescript denim and sack-adjacent plaid, one woolly-socked foot up on her kitchen table, drinking a bottle of beer while using a bag of frozen oven chips as an improvised ice pack for a sprained ankle.
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