Manager posts critical statement on singer’s behalf after Panic on the Streets of Springfield airs
The Simpsons has earned the wrath of Morrissey after it parodied the former Smiths frontman in an episode of the show.
The singer was satirised during the episode Panic on the Streets of Springfield, which aired in the US on Sunday night. In the episode, Lisa Simpson becomes obsessed with a fictional band called the Snuffs and befriends its frontman, Quilloughby.
Continue reading...Locals fear ‘docu-soap’ about social media influencers will gloss over issues including the environment and lack of housing
Residents and business owners in the New South Wales beachside town of Byron Bay have held an emergency meeting over the proposed Netflix original series, Byron Baes, and called on the streaming platform to cancel the show.
Locals, including the owners of the Byron establishments the Byron Bay General Store and No Bones restaurant, gathered on Friday night to discuss what could be done to protect the community.
Continue reading...For many viewers, the final season ruined years of fandom. Enter HBO with a month of celebrations which they hope will lead to renewed interest in GoT – and its upcoming spinoffs
It’s time to crack open Cersei’s favourite Dornish wine and fill an incongruous takeaway coffee cup to the brim: Game of Thrones is 10 years old. To mark the occasion, HBO has inaugurated the Iron Anniversary, a month-long celebration honouring the grandiose but battle-scarred show based on George RR Martin’s as yet uncompleted cycle of fantasy doorstop novels. In traditional GoT fashion, there are merchandising tie-ins, from figurines to a commemorative IPA. But the main thrust of the Iron Anniversary seems to be the series itself: a ceremonial reminder that all eight seasons and 73 instalments are still available to watch on HBO Max (or Sky Atlantic/Now/Amazon Prime in the UK); the campaign announcements encourage fans to return to their favourite bloodthirsty battle episode or embark on a binge-watch “MaraThrone”.
Related: The battle of the binge: should you watch Game of Thrones in lockdown?
Continue reading...Adult humour in cartoons was once virtually unheard of – now, animated TV is saturated with grown-up jokes
In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it, once and for all
The phrase “The Simpsons did it first” gets thrown around a lot. But Matt Groening’s sitcom about a volatile nuclear family – now 700 episodes in and recently renewed until at least 2023 – was a genuine trailblazer. In 1990, its second season premiere received more than 30 million US viewers, proving a brightly coloured animated TV series with whip-smart writing could attract mature eyeballs in primetime. If their children liked it too, all the better.
Continue reading...For Observer Food Monthly’s 20th anniversary, the TV presenter and cook recalls baking cakes for her GCSEs 20 years ago – and the worst thing about cooking at home in a pandemic
In 2015, Nadiya Hussain’s life changed completely after she won the sixth series of The Great British Bake Off. She remains the most popular winner in the show’s history. “I mean, how do you even measure that?” she says, from her home in Milton Keynes. “That makes me feel weird and awkward, because we’re all just doing what we love.” Now 36, she has presented several cooking and travel shows and has written cookbooks, children’s books and a novel. She also baked the Queen an orange drizzle cake for her 90th birthday celebrations.
You must still have been at school 20 years ago.
I was 16, so I’d just left high school. Big year. I was studying for my GCSEs. Oh, man, that seems such a long time ago.
Actor did not want her professional or charitable work overshadowed by illness in final weeks, says friend
Helen McCrory, the Peaky Blinders actor who died from cancer on Friday, “swore friends to secrecy” as she underwent treatment, her friend Carrie Cracknell has revealed.
Cracknell, who directed McCrory in a 2014 production of Medea, said the performer did not want her illness overshadowing her family and professional life. McCrory’s husband, Damian Lewis, announced the news that his wife died peacefully at home aged 52.
Continue reading...Richard Eyre, the National Theatre director who cast the actor in some of her earliest roles, pays tribute to her after her death
Part of the tragedy of Helen McCrory dying at such a young age, leaving a husband and two young children, is that professionally she had everything to look forward to. She had established herself as a very considerable actor in the theatre and on film and television.
She had a brightness about her, a luminosity: she was, in short, a star. She lit up a stage or a screen – you knew you were in the presence of a force of character and talent.
Continue reading...Actor was also known for her roles in the films The Queen and The Special Relationship
The actor Helen McCrory has died at the age of 52. McCrory was best known for her roles in the films The Queen and The Special Relationship and the Harry Potter franchise, and TV series including Peaky Blinders.
Her husband, fellow actor Damian Lewis, announced her death on Twitter, saying that McCrory had died “peacefully at home”. Lewis said: “I’m heartbroken to announce that after an heroic battle with cancer, the beautiful and mighty woman that is Helen McCrory has died … surrounded by a wave of love from friends and family.”
Continue reading...The Autocue is loaded up to see if Jeremy Paxman was right to dismiss the art of TV newsreading
The words keep rising, white against a dark blue background, and I keep saying them, occasionally mispronouncing them. All the while I am conscious of the fact that somewhere behind the words there is a camera. Very soon I lose all sense of what I’m saying. I’m just reading on for dear life.
In March, Jeremy Paxman dismissed the art of newsreading as “an occupation for an articulated suit”, claiming that “any fool” could read an Autocue. Last week, the BBC presenter Reeta Chakrabarti took him to task. “I’ve written a lot of what I’m reading out,” she told the Radio Times. “Those aren’t someone else’s words.”
Continue reading...She went from Leicester to Los Angeles – and is now bound for outer space. But Intergalactic, which was filmed in Manchester, has made the British star want to return home
I can’t tell if the pained expression on Parminder Nagra’s face is because of the bad Zoom connection or the words I can’t help blurting out the moment she appears on my screen. She’s sitting at a table in her home in Los Angeles, the California sun streaming through sash windows into a sitting room dotted with keepsakes from her many films, and all I can think to say is: “I can’t believe I’m talking to Jess from Bend It Like Beckham! I loved that film!”
We’re meant to be discussing the actor’s new role in Intergalactic, a dystopian sci-fi drama about a group of female high-security prisoners who hijack a spaceship and set off in pursuit of freedom. But instead we’re discussing the role Nagra took on almost 20 years ago, playing Jess, a teenager who discovers herself on the football pitch, while navigating her Indian heritage and British life. Is it annoying that people still talk about Bend It? “No,” says Nagra, “because it’s such a huge part of my life. I’ve just gotten older. I keep thinking people are going to think I still look the same, when I don’t. But I’m still proud of the film. It’s probably what I’m most recognised for.”
Continue reading...Exclusive: Sharon Johal left the Australian soap last month but says she endured a ‘painful’ four years, alleging ‘direct, indirect and casual racism’ from fellow cast members
One of Neighbours’ longstanding cast members has claimed she endured “direct, indirect and casual racism” on set, including racial slurs and mockery, saying the past four years starring in the long-running Australian soapie were “painful and problematic”.
In a detailed 1,500 word statement provided to Guardian Australia, Sharon Johal said she tried to “deny, bury and ultimately survive” racist taunts allegedly from some of her colleagues. She also claimed that the television show’s production company, Fremantle Media, failed to take any effective action to rein in the alleged behaviour and left her feeling powerless, isolated and marginalised.
Continue reading...Azaria, who is white, voiced the role of the Indian American shopkeeper from show’s inception in 1989 but stood down last year
The actor Hank Azaria has apologised “to every single Indian person” for his portrayal of Apu in The Simpsons.
Azaria, who is white, voiced the role of the Indian American shopkeeper from the show’s inception in 1989 but stood down last year amid criticism of racial stereotyping. He said he was willing to be held accountable for its “negative consequences”.
Continue reading...He made a film on Joe Exotic a decade before Tiger King, lulls interviewees into personal revelations – and can rock a leather suit. So why is he so anxious?
“There’s no getting away from the fact that, even aged 50, I’m a slightly awkward person, a fearful person, worry-prone,” says Louis Theroux, wriggling in his seat. The film-maker picks up and puts down a coffee without drinking. He wears all blue: navy sweater, stock denim, one of those indestructible plastic Casio watches on his wrist. “I worry about what people think,” Theroux continues, “I worry about giving offence, being judged, not coming up to scratch, being thin-skinned.”
We are in the corner of a photography studio in London, sheltering from rain on a Friday afternoon. The room has long emptied of people, but, even so, as Theroux chats, he snatches quick glances over his right shoulder, as if expecting to find somebody or something lurking there. “Everyone has things that preoccupy them, right?” he says. “I just tend to think, on a spectrum of people in general, I definitely skew, uh, anxious.”
Continue reading...BBC documentary to examine incidents that led to setting up of unit on which Line of Duty’s AC-12 is based
One of London’s most senior police officers, described by a colleague as “the greatest villain unhung”, was believed to be involved in major corruption in the 1970s but never prosecuted, according to a new documentary on police malpractice.
Former officers who exposed corruption at the time describe how they were threatened that they would end up in a “cement raincoat” if they informed on fellow officers and were shunned by colleagues when they did.
Continue reading...The star of hit films in the 80s and 90s has since moved into TV. She discusses life with 10 siblings, #MeToo and why she couldn’t ask for a better life
Veering from horror to joy and back again, Elizabeth Perkins is contemplating what it would be like if her adult children moved back home. “The thing is, you miss them so much, then they’ll come back for a holiday and within a week there’s dirty dishes everywhere, there’s wet towels on the floor, they’ve eaten all the food. After a couple of weeks, you’re like: ‘Will they ever leave?’”
This is the timely theme of Perkins’ show The Moodys, the first season of which, in 2019, saw three grownup children return home to Chicago for Christmas. Perkins plays Ann Moody, their mother; Denis Leary plays her husband. In the new season, all three children are living at the family home, with predictably messy consequences. “It really explored that dichotomy of: you love them to death, but, man, they get on your nerves,” says Perkins.
Continue reading...The Oscar-nominated film-maker behind I Am Not Your Negro returns with Exterminate All the Brutes, a dense new HBO docuseries about a horrifying history
Truly, what else was there left to say about race in America after the words of James Baldwin? This is what Raoul Peck found himself contemplating after the success of his 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, which was nominated for an Academy Award and won an Emmy, a Bafta and a César award. He was confounded and disappointed to realize that some audiences, particularly in Europe, weren’t fully comprehending the work of what he calls “one of the best, if not the best analyst of what racism is”, believing it to be primarily an American concern.
Related: 'We're all part of the story': behind Will Smith's 14th amendment docuseries
Continue reading...Hughes’ work ranged from hard-hitting overseas reports, to sport and television writing as well as candid accounts of coping with cancer
Tributes have been paid to Sarah Hughes, the Observer and Guardian journalist who has died from cancer.
Hughes, a mother of two, was a hugely respected journalist whose work ranged from hard-hitting and acclaimed overseas reportage, to the television and entertainment writing that she went on to specialise in.
Continue reading...Ritter carved out a wonderful career, culminating in the acclaimed Chernobyl – but he’ll be remembered most as oddball patriarch Martin Goodman in Friday Night Dinner
Paul Ritter, who died on Monday at the age of 54, is destined to be remembered as the dad from Friday Night Dinner. And rightly so. If you think of Ritter, or Friday Night Dinner for that matter, one image will almost certainly be seared into your mind: Ritter, walking around with his top off like it was the most normal thing in the world, complaining about the heat, or enquiring after a “lovely bit of squirrel”.
That role, and that image, brought Ritter a level of fame he had previously never achieved. Before the sitcom, which began in 2011, he had worked solidly in a number of small screen parts, usually playing characters who were professions first and people second – Detective Sergeant in 1998’s Big Cat, Geography Teacher in 2007’s Son of Rambow and Prisoner Louis in Hannibal Rising from the same year – while tending to a growing reputation on the stage. In 2006, he was nominated for an Olivier award for Coram Boy, and a Tony three years later for The Norman Conquests.
Continue reading...Ritter, who also appeared in films including Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, died at home alongside his wife and two sons
The actor Paul Ritter has died of a brain tumour at the age of 54, his agent has told the Guardian. Ritter who starred as the family patriarch Martin in Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner alongside Tamsin Greig, Simon Bird and Tom Rosenthal died on Monday.
In a statement, his agent said that the actor, who also appeared in numerous films including Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Quantum of Solace, died at home with his family by his side.
Continue reading...Westworld actor tells Vogue she is reverting to Zulu spelling, saying ‘I’m taking back what’s mine’
The actor formerly known as Thandie Newton has said she will reclaim the original Zulu-derived spelling of her name for use in her professional career, declaring: “I’m taking back what’s mine.”
For more than 30 years, the actor, born Melanie Thandiwe Newton Parker, has been known by an anglicised version of her name since the “w” was dropped “carelessly” from her first acting credit.
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