From apocalyptic standup Frankie Boyle to the many hilarious faces of Tina Fey, Steve Coogan, Sharon Horgan and Kristen Wiig, we present the funniest comics of the era
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Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV show to be filmed in New Zealand
Auckland beats Scotland to NZ$1.3bn contract for what is expected to be the most expensive TV series ever made
New Zealand will reprise its starring role as Middle Earth with confirmation Amazon Studios will film its new Lord of the Rings television series on its shores.
The country – where Sir Peter Jackson filmed the original Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies – beat rival Scotland to be named the production location for the series, set to be the most expensive TV show ever made.
Continue reading...‘I got the guy!’ My 17-year manhunt for a $50m art criminal
For years, documentary-maker Vanessa Engle has been on the trail of a notorious swindler who escaped from prison and disappeared into thin air. Then one day, the phone rang ...
You probably haven’t heard of Michel Cohen. Do a search and you get Michael Cohen, the Trump fixer who went to jail. Wrong one. Though this one did go to jail, too. He’s French, born in 1953 on an estate in a poor suburb of Paris and his first job was to sell the Encyclopedia Britannica door-to-door, which he was very good at.
Cohen later went to the US and started selling French paté, then prints. He got into the art world, became a dealer, sold Picassos, Monets, Chagalls. For a while he lived the dream, drove fast cars, had a house in Malibu with his German wife and two kids, a chef, horses, everything. He got into the options market. That didn’t go so well, so he got into debt. Cohen started to put loans and artworks that weren’t his into the market; the hole got bigger and bigger. In the end he disappeared, having swindled the New York art world out of $50m.
Continue reading...‘75% of the audience get it!’ How Count Arthur Strong conquered comedy
As the dyspeptic old-school entertainer embarks on a tour, his creator Steve Delaney reflects on dedicating his life to one character
Comedy has its careerists: thrusting tyros zeroing in on the fame, the TV gigs, the movie roles. But there are other, more circuitous routes to the top. The fictional Count Arthur Strong certainly took one, via the dog days of vaudeville and bit parts in Hammer horrors. His creator Steve Delaney took one too, meandering from drama school to a carpentry career to the slow gestation of his alter ego, away from the circuit’s bright lights.
The Count is a star now; his sitcom – co-written with Graham Linehan – ran for three series to 2017. But he was once an oddity on the Edinburgh fringe, where I started watching him at the turn of the century – an experience never to be forgotten, for various reasons. Yes, this blithering, dyspeptic old-school entertainer was a creation of near-genius, and Delaney’s blood vessel-busting performance a spectacle to behold. But – wow! – those early shows could be gruelling. The joke was in Arthur’s frustration and confusion, as his own waning powers (of memory, movement, syntax) thwarted this or that overreaching set piece. Often, Delaney took that joke to painful, patience-fraying extremes.
Continue reading...The 100 best TV shows of the 21st century
Where’s Mad Men? How did The Sopranos do? Does The Crown triumph? Can anyone remember Lost? And will Downton Abbey even figure? Find out here – and have your say
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German Millionaire quizshow fan wins €1m – after 15 years trying
Jan Stroh built replica studio in his cellar, complete with palm trees and sound effects
A German lawyer who spent 15 years re-enacting episodes of the TV quizshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in his cellar, said his hobby had paid off as he walked away with the top prize this week.
Jan Stroh, 35, even crudely reconstructed the studio of the German version of the programme in the basement of his Hamburg home, complete with palm trees and exotic seascape backdrop, victory glitter and sound effects.
Continue reading...Terry Gilliam says he disagrees with John Cleese’s worldview
Director says Brexit makes him ‘terminally depressed’ while fellow Python Cleese backs it
Terry Gilliam has said he disagrees with the way his friend and fellow Monty Python member John Cleese sees the world, following comments from the latter endorsing Brexit and criticising the makeup of London.
The Python animator and Hollywood director despairs of Donald Trump and Brexit, both of which make him “terminally depressed”. Cleese has previously faced a backlash for voicing support for the UK leaving the EU, and for saying London was no longer an English city.
Continue reading...Valerie Harper, Emmy award-winning star of TV series Rhoda, dies aged 80
Harper was a breakout star on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, then the lead of her own series, Rhoda
Valerie Harper, who stole hearts and busted TV taboos as the brash, self-deprecating Rhoda Morgenstern on back-to-back hit sitcoms in the 1970s, has died aged 80.
Longtime family friend Dan Watt confirmed Harper died on Friday, adding the family was not immediately releasing any further details. She had been suffering from cancer for years, and her husband said recently he had been advised to put her in hospice care.
Continue reading...China: A New World Order review – are we conniving with a genocidal dictatorship?
This documentary dared to do what politicians the world over would not, asking tough questions of Xi Jinping’s hardline rule
The drink Mihrigul Tursun’s captors offered her was strangely cloudy. It resembled, she said, water after washing rice. After drinking it, the young mother recalled in China: A New World Order (BBC Two), her period stopped. “It didn’t come back until five months after I left prison. So my period stopped seven months in total. Now it’s back, but it’s abnormal.”
We never learned why Tursun was detained – along with an estimated one million other Uighurs of Xinjiang province, in what the authorities euphemistically call re-education centres – but we heard clearly her claims of being tortured. “They cut off my hair and electrocuted my head,” Tursun said. “I couldn’t stand it any more. I can only say please just kill me.”
Continue reading...Home and Away star Ben Unwin dies aged 41
Actor, who played Jesse McGregor in the soap and directed Chumbawumba’s Tubthumping video, was found dead last week
Home and Away actor Ben Unwin has died aged 41, New South Wales police have confirmed.
The actor, who appeared as cult character Jesse McGregor in the long-running soap opera, was found dead close to Australia’s eastern Gold Coast on 14 August. The cause of death is currently unknown.
Continue reading...‘I didn’t want to do an ITV drama’: Matthew Macfadyen on making it big in the US
One of the stars of last year’s breakout hit Succession, the actor is getting used to being recognised in the US. He talks about juggling success with family life – and why he’s starring in a film about electricity
Matthew Macfadyen was idling on the stoop of his boutique Manhattan hotel last month when a man walked past and said warmly: “I loved you in Billions.” Macfadyen, at 44, is one of the handful of male British actors on US TV – among them Benedict Cumberbatch, Dominic West and the actor for whom Macfadyen was mistaken, Damian Lewis – whom to American eyes can appear indistinguishable. “Thank you!” he replied, cheerfully. (Macfadyen is extremely polite, and inclined to be grateful for any recognition at all.) “Then he came back two minutes later and said: ‘Succession! So sorry.’” He roars with laughter.
Tom Wambsgans, the role Macfadyen plays in Succession, is robustly against type. In the 14 years since he played Darcy to Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, Macfadyen’s career has leaned heavily towards period drama. He did Anna Karenina and Little Dorrit. When the pilot script for Succession reached him, he had just played Mr Wilcox in the BBC adaptation of Howards End. Tom, the ambitious, oleaginous husband to an Elisabeth Murdoch-type heiress was as far from these foppish roles as Macfadyen could get, a gift even before the show took off. “I thought: ‘I don’t know if this is going to have a life and I don’t know where the characters are going to go. But it’s clever and farcically funny.’” At the very least, he thought, “it’ll show I can do an American accent”.
Continue reading...Chinese-Australian history predates the first fleet – and my family helped me find out how | Benjamin Law
When you’re the child of migrants, your forebears may as well have come from the moon. So I set out to rediscover mine
Growing up in Queensland as ABCs (Australian-born Chinese), my siblings and I would get our backs up whenever strangers complimented us on our English – which was often. “Why wouldn’t I be fluent?” I’d think, fuming. “I was born in Nambour.” It didn’t matter: white Australians around us seemed as impressed by our English, as much as our Hong Kong relatives pitied our butchered Cantonese.
Yet I have an admission. Whenever I saw or encountered other Chinese-Australians speaking fluent English myself, my jaw would hang in disbelief. Seeing Chinese-Australians – or any Asian-Australians, really – on TV was rare in the 1980s and 1990s. But when people like Annette Shun Wah presented on SBS, Elizabeth Chong showed Bert Newton how to stuff a chicken with spring onions, or Dr Cindy Pan discussed prophylactics on Sex/Life – and with Australian accents, like mine! – my brain couldn’t process it. Weren’t my family the only ones?
Continue reading...Natasha Lyonne: ‘There’s a fighter in me that wants to survive’
Natasha Lyonne used her starring role in Orange is the New Black to shake off her demons and reinvent herself. The actor and director talks about third chances, crosswords and being the class rebel
In a busy Manhattan restaurant, Natasha Lyonne is eating chicken hearts and talking about resurrection. Her own. “And I had to forgive myself for wasting so many years, instead of punishing myself for this… misshapen life.” You don’t so much interview Lyonne, I quickly learn, as herd her conversations like existential sheep. It is a precise chaos – she has a lot to say and is aware of the many limits of time. Her voice crackles across the busy restaurant – she moves like Joe Pesci as a Simpsons character. A waiter interrupts with a second plate of glistening meats: “Madam, more hearts?” “In many ways, I did think I was going to die.” He makes briefly frantic eye contact with me, then disappears. “So now I’ve had to think, what is the most honest way that I can live? That feels the least like a lie? That means I’m less likely to self-destruct all over again?”
Lyonne has been acting since she was six, first in adverts “for dolls that don’t exist any more”, then with directors including Woody Allen, and in hits such as American Pie, before being hospitalised in 2005 with hepatitis C, a heart infection and a collapsed lung, and undergoing methadone treatment under the smirking glare of New York’s paparazzi. And some years later, having slowly worked her way back into the public eye (with the help of her best friend Chloë Sevigny, who vouched for her sobriety) she rose again.
Continue reading...Vicky McClure: ‘I couldn’t stay in London. I begrudge paying so much for a pint’
As she returns to our screens in a new drama about an abusive relationship, the actor talks about sexist directors, ignoring Line of Duty – and why people think she’s living on the moon
One of the best stories about Vicky McClure concerns the time she flew by private jet to attend the Berlin film festival in 2008 with Madonna. “It was, like, wow, a whirlwind.” And the next day, McClure was back at her office job sorting out the mail. “Answering the door: ‘Hello, postie? Yeah, I’ll let you through.’”
The film, Filth & Wisdom, wasn’t too well received, alas. But being handpicked by Madonna for her directorial debut – McClure must have felt she was about to make it? “When you’re young,” says the actor, her blue eyes widening, “it’s hard because your expectations are so high. Just having so much rejection, I’d built quite a thick skin. Even so I was like, ‘This is it, I know it.’ And it wasn’t, again.”
Continue reading...Rip Torn, cult actor, dies aged 88
Star of a string of 60s classics fell foul of Hollywood because of his temper but found a fresh lease of life in comedy, from TV’s Larry Sanders Show to the Men in Black films
Rip Torn, America’s celebrated wildman actor, has died aged 88. Torn, who had been a constant presence on stage and screen since the mid-1950s, was arguably better known for his eccentric, and occasionally violent, antics when the cameras weren’t rolling – and on one notorious occasion, when they were.
His publicist Rick Miramontez confirmed Torn died Tuesday afternoon at his home with his wife, actor Amy Wright, and daughters Katie Torn and Angelica Page by his side. No cause of death was given.
Continue reading...Franco Zeffirelli was a master charmer – no wonder we all fell for his Romeo and Juliet
His take on Shakespeare’s tragedy tapped the zeitgeist, but Zeffirelli’s whole body of work pulsated with an irresistible camp and romanticism
Franco Zeffirelli was the mainstream maestro of high culture on screens big and small who dashingly made his international movie reputation with an exuberant and accessible adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in 1968; this had some pretty trad doublet-and-hose stuff and featured the syrupy “Love” theme composed for the film by Nino Rota which was to become notorious as the music for Simon Bates’s regular tearjerking Our Tune feature on Radio One.
But there were also muscular and athletic performances from a bright-eyed young cast, vigorous and enjoyable playing all round and bold location work. The year before, Zeffirelli had directed Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in another Shakespeare adaptation: The Taming of the Shrew: clever casting of course, but it was the honeyglow-sunlit romanticism of young love in Romeo and Juliet — not cynical middle-aged love — which caught the public imagination, tuned into the zeitgeist and gave Zeffirelli his massive hit.
Continue reading...Chernobyl writer urges Instagram tourists to ‘respect’ nuclear disaster site
Spike in visitors, including some who pose in little more than a g-string, prompts writer of HBO hit to speak out
The writer of the acclaimed HBO drama series Chernobyl has spoken out about the proliferation of lewd and inappropriate selfies taken by tourists visiting the nuclear disaster site in Ukraine.
Since the five-part miniseries about the 1986 catastrophe at the former Soviet Union power plant began airing in May, tourism at the site has reportedly increased by 30–40%. Social media influencers visiting the site have been subject to criticism in recent days for using renewed interest in the disaster to stage glamour shots for their Instagram accounts.
Continue reading...‘Without my daughter, drinking would have been a problem’: Patton Oswalt on bereavement
The comedian’s life was upended in 2016 when his wife died. He discusses her role in the Golden State Killer case, the ‘shadow slog’ of grief – and the reaction to his remarriage
The sad clown. The chronic depressive comedian. It is one of the greatest cliches in showbusiness. Patton Oswalt – ebullient, life-affirming, swearing as he hurtles along the Interstate 10 highway in California – does not sound like one of those. At least, not any more.
Oswalt’s wife, the true-crime writer Michelle McNamara, died suddenly in 2016 at the age of 46. That was the second-worst day of Oswalt’s life. The worst was breaking the news to their seven-year-old daughter, Alice, the next day.
Continue reading...Laura Dern: ‘I feel like I’m ready to try anything – and to dive deeper’
Laura Dern decided to become an actor when she was just six. But it’s only now, with 55 films under her belt and as Big Little Lies returns to our screens, that she really feels free to ‘try anything’
To hear her mother tell it, it’s a miracle that Laura Dern exists at all. In the early 1960s Diane Ladd and her then husband, Bruce Dern, suffered an excruciating loss when their 18-month-old daughter drowned. The trauma was not just emotional but physical, and doctors told her that she would be unable have another child. But they were wrong, and the proof was Dern. One confounded doctor travelled to the hospital to witness “the miracle child”. From her home in Ojai, California, Ladd’s smoky southern voice over the phone ripples gently with emotion as she talks to me about her daughter.
The miracle child, now 52, grew up to be a great actor in her own right, sometimes even appearing alongside her mother. In 1991, Princess Diana was so taken by the idea that a real-life mother and daughter could play alternative versions of themselves on screen that she flew them both to London for a royal premiere of their garlanded film, Rambling Rose. Ladd recalls “pouring sweat” as she sat next to the princess. Dern was struck by the ways in which her host connected to her character. “She was empathy in cellular form.”
Continue reading...63 Up review – documentary marvel makes all other reality TV look trivial
Michael Apted’s groundbreaking seven-yearly series returns, seeming more dreamlike than ever as it follows its subjects into retirement and beyond
Though Michael Apted’s groundbreaking documentary series Up remains resolutely focused on the reality of its (originally 14) subjects’ lives, the experience of watching the programmes is becoming strangely more dreamlike with age.
Related: 56 Up: 'It's like having another family'
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