Category Archives: Television

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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TV stay home: all hail the medium that kept us entertained in 2020

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We’ve watched more telly than ever this year. Our standards may have dropped – but then Covid does cause loss of taste

I know it is tedious to look back on 2020 and force everything through the prism of coronavirus – “Hey, remember that absolute horrorshow of a year we all just-about lived through? Well, let’s look back on the horror again, shall we?” – but it is slightly unavoidable when recapping what is arguably the weirdest year in television since the format was invented. We have, each of us, watched more TV in the last nine months than at any other time in our lives. And yet, with so little of it being newly produced, there has been an odd staleness to our viewing habits. I’m bored of live TV and I’m bored of box sets, so what else is there to do? Read a book? Behave.

The first thing we need to confront is the short-lived Zoom era of Lockdown 1.0, which wasn’t very good. It’s harsh of me to single people out, but The Steph Show on Channel 4 was an early example of form clattering up against need, as a cheery Steph McGovern tried to hold together a light magazine show from the comfort of her own home. Yes, it was rubbish (and the less-constrained Steph’s Packed Lunch studio variation shows that the desperately-broadcasting-from-a-house was the faulty part, not the rest of the show’s format), but crucially it started airing on 30 March – the date we still thought we’d all be back at work within a couple of weeks – and the sheer fact that someone tried to launch a magazine show to keep us all entertained in the middle of a history-shaping global emergency is something to be commended.

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Regé-Jean Page on Bridgerton: ‘We’re seeing this Regency romance through a feminist lens’

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The actor reflects on the diverse casting of the Netflix period drama, facing up to British history and how the pandemic has made him find new ways to ‘make my skills useful to other people’

“As an artist, you have to constantly ask yourself: ‘Why this story? Why now?’”, says Regé-Jean Page. The 30-year-old actor is video-calling from his apartment in Los Angeles and expounding on his latest role as the rakishly debonair Duke of Hastings in the Regency-era romance Bridgerton.

A frothy period drama bolstered by a lavish Netflix budget might not seem like the most pressing nor most relevant of artistic choices for Page to be making. Yet, he sees the eight-part series as a subversive act, because of its diverse cast injecting multiculturalism and a boundary-breaking sense of sexual intensity into a traditionally white, staid setting.

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Olivia Colman on acting: ‘Take your job seriously and not yourself’

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Star of The Crown and Peep Show opens up on her career, revealing she is plagued by self-doubt

She won an Oscar for her performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite, and is a household name thanks to roles as wide-ranging as Sophie in Peep Show and Queen Elizabeth in The Crown. But, despite such success, Olivia Colman has revealed she is plagued by self-doubt and a fear of unemployment, having never forgotten the pain of repeated rejection at the start of her career.

Colman, 46, graduated from the Bristol Old Vic theatre school more than two decades ago, but still recalls her early struggles and “the horrible feeling” of no one calling after she went up for acting jobs. “All those hundreds of auditions I did in the first two years. They don’t just say ‘sorry, no thank you’. You don’t hear anything. That’s heartbreaking.”

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‘Boys can be fairies – it’s the 21st century’: How Fate: The Winx Saga finds the reality in fantasy

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The writer and star of the new Netflix series explain the myriad challenges of turning a manga-style kids’ cartoon into a live-action teen drama

How do you make teen TV magic? You call Brian Young. The writer cut his teeth on The Vampire Diaries, a supernatural teen drama that emerged from the Twilight era of sexy-horror fandoms, but it soon established its own identity, resulting in a successful eight seasons. So, when Netflix wanted to turn Winx Club – the hit Italian cartoon about fairies – into a live-action fantasy series for young adults, they recruited Young.

To him, the challenge of re-imagining the Winx world for a more mature audience was clear: “Tone. It’s trying to figure out how we ground this show in real character moments, things that any audience member would relate to. And this is coming from a massive fantasy fan – I had my Dungeons & Dragons character when I was a kid – but it is very easy to spiral off into absurdity with stuff like this.”

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Craig Revel Horwood: ‘I’m a baddie in panto but on Strictly I’m just being honest’

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The Strictly Come Dancing judge reveals which contestant surprised him the most and why he’s looking forward to getting booed twice a day in Robin Hood

You’re a panto regular – what do you enjoy most about it?
I love live theatre – it’s where I started my career back home in Australia and I got into it as soon as I arrived in the UK. As much as I love my screen career, you simply can’t beat helping an audience to suspend their disbelief for a few hours and enjoy a shared experience live and in real time. While we all take it seriously and it’s hard work, panto is fun, festive and lets me show audiences what I can do when I’m not sitting behind my Strictly desk.

Panto has never fully been exported to Australia. When did you first see one?
The first ever pantomime I was in! Our producers, Qdos Entertainment, once called offering me the job of directing one of their productions, but due to filming commitments I couldn’t make it work. They called back five minutes later and asked me if I wanted to be in the panto instead and I jumped at the chance. It was a baptism of fire – wearing a dress, ridiculously high heels and getting booed twice a day. But I loved it, and I still do.

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Scottie Pippen: ‘I told Michael Jordan I wasn’t too pleased with The Last Dance’

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The ex-Chicago Bulls star won new fans in the acclaimed Netflix documentary. He talks about his special relationship with MJ – and basketball’s equality problem

Born in Arkansas in 1965, the youngest of 12 children, Scottie Pippen is one of basketball’s all-time greats. He played alongside Michael Jordan for the Chicago Bulls when they dominated the sport in the 1990s, winning six NBA championships. (He also won two Olympic gold medals.) That period, the Bulls’ and, in particular Jordan’s, extraordinary achievements are the focus of the 10-part, critically acclaimed Netflix docuseries The Last Dance, which has been a major hit in 2020.

You and Michael Jordan seemed to have a special bond in the film. When you were both on your game, it seemed like the team was going to win. Was that the case?
Yeah, that relationship, we established that we felt like that in the late 80s, playing against the Pistons, just starting to grow and mature and have each other’s backs. We grew up together and we defended each other. That respect we had on the court, that competitiveness we took through to the top – it was special. That was the respect we had for each other, because we had to be on the court to do what we did. We had to be dominant.

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Carole Baskin: ‘After Tiger King, my phone rang every two minutes for months’

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The animal sanctuary owner was catapulted to fame by the Netflix series – and became an unlikely fashion trendsetter

Carole Baskin watched the Netflix documentary series Tiger King as many of us did: she binged it, devouring all seven episodes in one sitting as soon as it was released in March. “It was like watching a dumpster fire, you just couldn’t turn away from it,” says Baskin on a video call. “It was just mesmerising that there could be this many crazy people doing so many wretched things to animals.”

Of course, one of the “crazy people”, the show implied, was her. Baskin, a 59-year-old owner of the Big Cat Rescue sanctuary in Florida, she she had been told by the film-makers that Tiger King would be an exposé of the mistreatment of the animals by private owners in America. Instead, the series mainly focused on a long-running feud between Baskin and Joseph Maldonado-Passage, a mulleted, polygamous, country music-loving zoo owner from Oklahoma who calls himself “Joe Exotic”.

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Helena Bonham Carter says The Crown should stress to viewers it’s a drama

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Actor who plays Princess Margaret adds her voice to calls for Netflix to add a disclaimer

Helena Bonham Carter has said The Crown has a “moral responsibility” to tell viewers that it is a drama, rather than historical fact, in the wake of calls for a “health warning” for people watching the series.

The actor, who played Princess Margaret in series three and four of the Netflix hit drama, told an official podcast for the show that there was an important distinction between “our version”, and the “real version”.

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Hugh Grant’s Undoing: how romcom leading men embraced the dark side

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No more Mr Nice Guys! With his role in the HBO miniseries, Grant – like Richard Gere and Vince Vaughn – has swapped charm for smarm, reflecting a changing society

Hugh Grant made his name in the 90s as a squeaky-clean charmer, but anyone who has been keeping tabs on his career will not have been surprised to see him show up in the HBO miniseries The Undoing as an unhinged philanderer, attacking a man with his bare teeth in a prison-yard brawl. For a while now, the actor who used to warm our hearts has been doing his best to chill our blood. And he has been doing it pretty well: as a scheming politician in A Very English Scandal, as a scheming investigator in The Gentlemen and, best of all, as a scheming theatre impresario in Paddington 2. As mid-career renewals go, Grant’s has been one of the best and The Undoing, six hours of top-notch trash that wraps up tonight, has made the most of its newly depraved star.

The reinvention of the romantic lead is hardly a new phenomenon – it is more than 75 years since Murder, My Sweet turned Dick Powell from a fresh-faced musical star to a whisky-addled noir antihero, but in recent years it has become an especially popular trope. Richard Gere, who, like Grant, found screen stardom by flirting faux-modestly with flattered young ladies, has lately gone to great pains to show off his ugly side. He forged a career from playing wealthy, winsome suitors, but his recent turns as a hedge-fund magnate (Arbitrage), a moneyed philanthropist (The Benefactor), a high-flying politician (The Dinner) and a Murdoch-esque media mogul (MotherFatherSon) have all helped to flip the twinkly-eyed archetype on its head. Gere’s message is clear: I’m not the white knight you all thought I was.

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