Category Archives: Television

Headspace Guide to Meditation: can Netflix deliver enlightenment in 20 minutes?

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The streaming service and the mindfulness app have joined forces to inject some calm into our tech diet. Elle Hunt tries to switch off, while switching on

Those who subscribe to the notion of “new year, new me” will be familiar with the advice to empty your fridge and kitchen cupboards of junk food before 1 January, so as to set yourself up for healthy-eating success. (Or else a New Year’s Day McDonald’s delivery, when you wake up very much the old you, and not in the mood for overnight oats.)

After all that bingeing on Love Is Blind and Selling Sunset last year, Netflix now provides a similarly aspirational refresh, with a new series of guided meditations. Produced with the popular Headspace app, the eight 20-minute episodes are billed as a beginner’s guide to meditation, helping you to start the year “by being kind to your mind”.

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Why Mr Bean and Borat are ready to retire

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Rowan Atkinson and Sacha Baron Cohen are killing off two of comedy’s most indelible characters. They’ve picked the perfect time

Nothing lasts for ever. In time the trees will wither, the seas will boil and the mountains will crumble to dust. And nothing reinforces the ephemeral cruelty of the universe like the news that Rowan Atkinson doesn’t want to be Mr Bean any more.

In an interview with the Radio Times this week, Atkinson said of Mr Bean: “I don’t much enjoy playing him. The weight of responsibility is not pleasant. I find it stressful and exhausting, and I look forward to the end of it.” And that’s fair enough; Mr Bean has now been a going concern for 31 years, and has taken the form of a television programme, two films, an animated series, a sketch performed for the Olympics nine years ago and – slightly improbably – four books.

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Doctor Who’s Sacha Dhawan on his battle with anxiety: ‘Getting help was scary’

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The young actor, who plays the timelord’s arch enemy The Master, talks about his meaty new role in The Great – and reveals how he overcame the fears that used to leave him traumatised in his trailer

When Sacha Dhawan learned that he had been chosen to play Doctor Who baddie The Master, it should have been one of the biggest moments of his career. “My agent was ecstatic,” he says. “The BBC was ecstatic.” But he wasn’t. “I put the phone down and I couldn’t have felt more sad,” he says. The reason, it turns out, is a hidden battle with anxiety that Dhawan had been waging for years.

The opportunity was too big to pass up, but at that moment its scale felt insurmountable. “I would be the first British South Asian actor to play The Master,” he says. “So I’m kind of representing not only the Whoniverse but my community. And if I fuck this up, they aren’t going to be casting another South Asian actor for this.”

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Emma Mackey: ‘You’d have to be a sociopath to want to be a celebrity’

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The Sex Education star on the perils of social media, playing Emily Brontë, and her new Disney whodunnit with French and Saunders

When the trailer came out, it felt really Hollywood, which makes me laugh. I was like: ‘Ah, OK. This is quite a big deal.’” Emma Mackey spent the last few months of 2019 filming Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot adaptations. It’s a big-budget, big-name Disney extravaganza, and for Mackey, who turns 25 on Monday, it marks a first dip into blockbuster waters.

“I’d never really had that experience of walking into a studio before, where the sets were all built, and the costumes were tailored to my body, and I had a wig, and it was just … ” She trails off, lost for words. “I clearly can’t talk about it!” she says, laughing. “It completely blows my mind, still.” She does an impression of a 1930s ingenue. “‘It felt like a movie! A proper movie!’ Which is a good sign, I guess.”

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21 things to look forward to in 2021 – from meteor showers to the Olympics

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From finally seeing the back of Donald Trump to being in a football stadium – the new year is full of promise

You probably found a few things to enjoy about last year: you rediscovered your bicycle, perhaps, or your family, or even both, and learned to love trees. And don’t forget the clapping. Plus some brilliant scientists figured out how to make a safe and effective vaccine for a brand new virus in record time.

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Look further afield for good television | Brief letters

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Best TV shows | The European Economic Area | ‘Bigly’ | Classical music | Renaming the Severn Bridge

While I thoroughly enjoy your annual lists of the best TV shows (The 50 best TV shows of 2020, 22 December), I cannot help noticing that non-English speaking programmes are never included. In recent years some of the most gripping and enjoyable shows have come from Germany (Babylon Berlin and Dark, for example), Scandinavia and other European countries. Perhaps, now that we are adrift politically, it is the time to embrace the wonders of European television.
Christina Neal
Cullercoats, Tyne and Wear

• However long it takes to rejoin the EU (Could Britain rejoin the EU? It seems like a hopelessly lost cause – but so did leaving, 1 January), the first aim should be to join the European Economic Area. That would at least restore some of the freedoms which Boris Johnson’s government has deprived us of.
Alan Pavelin
Chislehurst, Kent

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‘I did hate TV’: Selina Scott on Trump, Prince Andrew, Frank Bough and the BBC

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She was one of television’s biggest names, before giving it all up to live on a farm. She talks about her friendship with Princess Diana, the horror of tabloid harassment – and the extraordinary sexism she faced

Selina Scott has come in from the cold. She lights a fire and makes herself a cup of tea – black, no sugar. The former “golden girl” of the BBC lives on a farm in North Yorkshire with a couple of dogs, a handful of rare belted galloway cattle, a waddle of ducks and swans, and the odd otter. The room looks dark and bleak, and the internet isn’t working well, so we struggle to Zoom. “I’m going to move you into another room.” Scott still pronounces room aristocratically as “rum”, but her voice is different from the old days. Back then, it was more of a stately caress, offset by a youthful giggle. Today, her voice is deeper, more flinty, though still with a hint of grandeur. The Yorkshire roots of her childhood have re-emerged and planted themselves firmly in the peaty soil.

It’s 40 years since she made her name presenting News at 10, followed by BBC Breakfast Time, The Clothes Show, The Selina Scott Show for NBC, the magazine show West 57th for CBS and a brief stint at Sky. Scott wasn’t any old presenter. She bore an uncanny resemblance to Princess Diana (or, as she prefers it, the younger Diana bore an uncanny resemblance to her) and, like Diana, she became the nation’s sweetheart. Like Diana, she was hounded by the press – in a way that no other journalist has been. And like Diana she decided to walk away from it all at the peak of her fame. Unlike Diana, she lived to tell the tale.

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Irish state broadcaster apologises over TV comedy depicting God as rapist

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RTÉ New Year’s Eve show included mock news report about God implicated in sexual harassment case

Ireland’s state broadcaster, RTÉ, has apologised after an outcry over a television comedy sketch that depicted God as a rapist.

A countdown show on New Year’s Eve included a mock news report about God being the latest prominent figure implicated in a sexual harassment scandal.

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Stowaway tells how he survived 11-hour flight to UK in new film

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South African man, now known as Justin, speaks for first time of friend Carlito Vale, who died after 430-metre fall, in Channel 4 documentary

A South African man who survived an 11-hour flight from Johannesburg to London after hiding in a plane’s undercarriage has told of the last words he exchanged with a friend whose body fell from the same British Airways flight as it came in to land at Heathrow.

“He said: ‘We made it,’ and then I passed out with the lack of oxygen,” said the man, who was then known as Themba and who has spoken publicly for the first time about the desperate journey both men undertook in 2015.

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‘Like a mission to Mars’: making David Attenborough’s A Perfect Planet

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Disco-dancing crabs, flamingos under a volcano … and a frog freezing itself alive. Behind the scenes of the BBC’s new nature documentary

Ed Charles, producer, Weather and Oceans
We were really lucky on this series in that we had finished our filming and were in the edit when coronavirus hit, so it was something that we could do remotely. I’ve been working on this project since 2016 so it has been a long time in the making.

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Dawn Wells, Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island, dies of Covid complications at 82

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Actor played the wholesome character in the goofy, good-natured show that became an unlikely but indelible part of pop culture

Dawn Wells, who played the wholesome Mary Ann among a misfit band of shipwrecked castaways on the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island, died Wednesday of causes related to Covid-19, her publicist said. She was 82.

Wells died peacefully at a living facility in Los Angeles, publicist Harlan Boll said.

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Game of Thrones video game tycoon dies in suspected poisoning

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Police in China detain colleague of Yoozoo Games founder Lin Qi on suspicion of involvement in death

Shanghai police have detained a man in relation to the suspected poisoning death of the wealthy founder of a video games company.

Lin Qi, 39, died on Christmas Day, eight days after he was taken to hospital with “acute symptoms of illness”, according to his company, Yoozoo Games Co, known for the Game of Thrones: Winter is Coming strategy game and as the producer of a forthcoming Netflix adaptation of the science fiction hit The Three-Body Problem.

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Speaking with the Serpent: my encounters with serial killer Charles Sobhraj

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The notorious murderer who preyed on 70s backpackers is the subject of a new BBC drama. Our writer recalls his bizarre meetings with a charmer and psychopath

At the beginning of The Serpent, the new BBC drama series based on the exploits of a real-life serial killer, a title page declares: “In 1997 an American TV crew tracked Charles Sobhraj down to Paris where he was living as a free man.”

The ABC team were not the only ones back then to speak to Sobhraj, who was suspected of committing at least 12 murders. I too made the journey to Paris and managed to arrange an interview for the Observer with the Vietnamese-Indian Frenchman. He had just been released from jail in India, where he had spent 20 years on various charges (but not for any of the murders for which he was alleged to be responsible).

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Charlie Brooker: ‘There’s a certain release in laughing into the abyss’

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Black Mirror co-creators Brooker and Annabel Jones discuss new comedy special Death to 2020, and the importance of being silly in the face of disaster

I have been uncharacteristically optimistic this year,” Charlie Brooker says cheerfully from his west London living room, a prop sign from Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch episode behind him. “Partly because I’ve always been a pessimist and feared the worst. Suddenly, I don’t have to worry about the worst happening, because it’s happening. I think being a neurotic, worrisome person has slightly prepared me for it. After swine flu, I wouldn’t touch a door handle for about a year.”

There are other reasons for his unusual levels of cheer. Considering that a global pandemic has resided for years in Brooker’s buzzing mental database of potential catastrophes, he has not had a bad 2020. In May, he hosted the BBC’s Antiviral Wipe, the first network comedy show to be made about (and under) lockdown. In July, Broke and Bones, the new production company launched by Brooker and his long-time creative partner Annabel Jones, announced a Netflix deal that extends far beyond its breakthrough hit Black Mirror. The pair are opening their account with Death to 2020, a one-off (obviously) about the rotten year that was. As Leslie Jones, one of several A-list guests, says in the trailer: “I’d say it was a trainwreck and a shitshow but that would be unfair to trains and shit.”

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Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal: ‘It’s been a wild few months for us’

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The stars of the BBC’s hit Sally Rooney adaptation on their quarantine viewing, and how their lives have changed since playing Marianne and Connell

Was there a show this year that everyone else loved but you just couldn’t get on with?
Daisy: That’s a hard one. I honestly think I watched every show that’s aired on TV in the last few months. I have watched, and enjoyed every one. I’m trying to think. The news?

Paul: What was the one you tried to get me to watch, Daisy? I can’t remember the name of it. I think it was Selling Sunset? The one with the realtors in LA. I couldn’t get into it.

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Dan Levy on Schitt’s Creek: ‘Winning nine Emmys was surreal’

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The writer and star of the dysfunctional-family sitcom on his top shows of 2020 and the touching legacy of his hit series

Was there a show that everyone else loved this year that you just couldn’t get on with?
Tiger King. I couldn’t do it. Something about it felt a little too exploitative for me. I never felt OK when I was watching it. Maybe that’s the main thing. There was a full month when everybody was watching it, when I desperately tried to stay part of the conversation. But I just could not invest. And I don’t know, there is something kind of icky about what was going on there. But this is one man’s opinion in a sea of other people.

Conversely, were there are any shows you enjoyed over lockdown that you didn’t expect to?
The Real Housewives of Atlanta. I feel like the characters on that show are so strong and opinionated and have a sense of humour and self-awareness. It’s an incredible alchemy. It’s a great social group that they’ve put together to film. I was surprised to enjoy it, because I worked in reality television for a long time. I hosted the aftershow for The Hills before my career started. And I think that when you work in reality TV, it kind of pulls back the curtain in a way that doesn’t necessarily make you want to watch more of it. So this was the first reality show that I had watched for a really long time.

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I May Destroy You’s Weruche Opia: ‘Michaela Coel showed our flaws and complexities’

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The breakout star of the Guardian’s show of the year on her small-screen picks of 2020, and how her role as Terry divided viewers

What shows did you get into this year, over our various lockdowns?
I watched a lot of stuff. That’s all we could do really, apart from eat – I worked out a lot, too. I fell in love with 90 Day Fiancé, which I think is the most brilliant reality show on TV right now. I loved the latest series of Insecure, and Gangs of London with Paapa [Essiedu, Opia’s I May Destroy You co-star]. I loved I Hate Suzie, and Adult Material – Hayley Squires did a fantastic job. That was a brilliant little find, and it was so interesting to learn about the porn industry and the human side of it.

And were there any series you got into that you might not have ordinarily watched?
I couldn’t stop watching Ted Lasso on Apple TV+. I was like, what is this actually about? An American who coaches American football comes to the UK to a weird team and is … teaching them football? But it was just nice, simple and uplifting – it was a little treat to forget about the world and just watch something wholesome.

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T’Nia Miller: ‘I never saw a queer person on TV when I was growing up’

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The star of Years and Years and The Haunting of Bly Manor reflects on coming out as lesbian to her mum, facing racism at drama school and the progress – or not – of the Black Lives Movement

When T’Nia Miller first told her mother that she was dating a woman, she explained to her mum that she wasn’t there to see her have sex with men, so this was no different. “It’s just about me having really good friendships and beauty in my life,” she recalls saying. “That was it. We never had more of a conversation than that. If she had any issues, they were hers to deal with, not mine. She knew that. She’s a very educated, very well-read woman. For her, coming to terms with it was easy.”

The east-London born actor is telling me this story over the phone as she walks her dog (she forgot about the interview and her seven-month-old pomeranian, Dilhi, needed his daily steps) because she’s taking part in the #YoungerMe campaign, an initiative by the LGBTQ+ young persons organisation Just Like Us, which asks how LGBTQ+ inclusive education would have helped older queer people when they were in school.

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Jeremy Bulloch obituary

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Stage and screen actor who played the bounty hunter Boba Fett in the Star Wars films

Jeremy Bulloch, who has died aged 75, was a busy character actor who staked a claim for cinematic immortality by playing the inscrutable Boba Fett in the Star Wars films. A masked, enigmatic bounty hunter with a jet pack and distinctive costume design, Boba Fett debuted in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), capturing and carbon-freezing Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in order to convey him to the slug-like paymaster Jabba the Hutt.

Despite relatively limited screen time and dialogue (his few lines were post-dubbed by the American actor Jason Wingreen), both Bulloch and Boba Fett became much loved contributors to the franchise and he reprised the role in Return of the Jedi (1983). In the eventual Star Wars prequels Boba Fett was played by the child actor Daniel Logan, and so Bulloch was instead hired to play the spaceship pilot Captain Colton in the third of them, Revenge of the Sith (2005).

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