Category Archives: Television & radio

Rob Delaney on love, loss and married life: ‘No, my wife is not having an affair with her karate teacher’

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The star of Catastrophe and Home Sweet Home Alone answers your questions on everything from family tragedy to the value of comedy

Rob Delaney – comedian, actor, writer, tweeter, activist – co-wrote and co-starred in the Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe with Sharon Horgan. Now he has a starring role in the film Home Sweet Home Alone. He has also written and spoken movingly about the death of his two-year-old son, Henry. Here, he answers questions from readers about all of this, as well as being an American in London – and how he keeps his hair looking so great.

When you were offered the role in Home Sweet Home Alone, did you hesitate and think that maybe another remake of a successful movie would be pointless? Bernard Hautecler, Brussels, Belgium

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Weight loss, deadlifts and divorce: what we learned from Adele’s One Night Only special

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In her TV concert special, the singer got personal in an interview with Oprah Winfrey about her dreams of a nuclear family, fixation with her weight loss and how much she can deadlift

Adele opened up about the pain of her divorce, losing the dream of a nuclear family, commentary over her weight and her strained relationship with her late father in a candid, ranging interview with Oprah Winfrey.

During the sit-down in Winfrey’s rose garden, recorded prior to her first concert in more than four years for the CBS special Adele One Night Only, the singer revealed she felt “embarrassed” that she couldn’t make her marriage to Simon Konecki “work”.

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Will Smith: now Hollywood royalty, the star’s rise has been far from painless

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From Fresh Prince to King Richard, personal upsets have so far failed to derail his childhood goal to be the world’s biggest film star

There’s a seemingly offhand quality which is central to the appeal of Will Smith: an innate magnetism and loose-limbed, casual coolness. But the career path from teenage rap artist to TV actor to superstar status was anything but effortless; it was the result of a self-described “psychotic” work ethic and meticulous, perhaps even obsessive, planning.

For a while, at least, he was one of the most bankable film actors on the planet – a planet that he saved on a regular basis in summer blockbusters. But while that kind of success rate is hard to sustain, Smith has shown himself to be extremely adaptable compared to his contemporaries. From film actor/musician, he has evolved into a multimedia phenomenon. He has adopted a very marketable openness and accessibility, and embraced personal failures as teachable moments.

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Irvine Welsh: ‘We’re heading for an anarchist paradise where we play football and make love’

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The notorious author is breaking new ground with his TV debut. He talks about messed up cops, exorcising Sick Boy … and writing the tunes for Trainspotting: The Musical

‘I like the way you call me Irvine,” says Irvine Welsh to a young woman who’s just offered him a cup of tea, and pronounced his first name to rhyme with wine. “I’ve been living in Miami and it makes me feel like I’m back there.” The so-called Magic City is his happy place, “the polar opposite of Edinburgh. All people do in Scotland is fucking talk, they rabbit in each other’s faces. Miami is nothing like that. At the start, I found it so vacuous, but you can get all your stuff from Edinburgh and London, then take it away to Miami and write in peace.” The world is one long, warm bath to this man, it seems. He is “happy everywhere. All the shit comes out in the writing. In normal life, I focus on the good things: the beauty in life, romance, friendship.”

The undisputed king of the 1990s, of swear words, of Scottishness, is here to talk about Crime, in which he breaks new ground with his first script for television. It’s a riveting and quite surprising move from him – it starts off looking like a classic cop show, although I’ve only been allowed to watch the first three episodes. “I know this sounds like what everybody would say, but episode four is when it really kicks off, and five and six go absolutely fucking mental.” It really doesn’t sound like what everybody would say. It’s hard to figure out what is more charming about Welsh – how much of a one-off he is, or his conviction that he’s exactly like everyone else.

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Inside the world of foley artists: ‘Watermelons are brilliant for the sound of brains hitting the floor’

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They are film and television’s unsung heroes: the people who create sounds, for everything from crunchy snow, kissing and horses’ hooves. Just don’t mention coconuts

Monday morning in the small Essex town of Coggeshall, and in an unassuming building that used to be a laundry, a man named Barnaby is trying to sound like a horse. Trying and succeeding, uncannily. Not neighing or whinnying, just making the sound of the hooves on the ground.

In a big screen on the wall of a windowless room is an armoured knight astride a white warhorse. It’s Richard III, as it happens, accompanied by a gaggle of guards, also armoured and mounted. It’s a scene from The Lost King, Stephen Frears’s upcoming film about the woman who, after 30 years of looking, discovered Richard’s remains under a Leicester car park.

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The Crown’s Josh O’Connor: ‘My advice to my 21-year-old self? Find a therapist’

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Before his turn as a conflicted survivor of the first world war in Mothering Sunday, the star of God’s Own Country, The Durrells and The Crown answers your questions

If you weren’t an actor and you had to work in the film industry, what would you like to do? avishagfink

I would like to be a ceramicist. I still want to be a ceramicist while also being an actor. A functional ceramicist. My grandmother was a sculptural ceramicist and she was very brilliant, but I’d like to make plates and pots and mugs. I’m a big fan of Ian Godfrey and I’m very fortunate to have a couple of his pieces. Lucie Rie and Hans Coper I really like; Richard Batterham, very much.

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Dean Stockwell, Quantum Leap and Blue Velvet actor, dies aged 85

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Versatile actor had worked in Hollywood since childhood, and was Oscar nominated for his role in 1988 comedy Married to the Mob

A life in pictures: Dean Stockwell

Dean Stockwell, the former child star who became a key figure in the Hollywood counter-culture and enjoyed late success in popular TV shows, has died aged 85. According to Deadline, his family said he died at home “of natural causes”.

Born in Los Angeles in 1936, Stockwell had become a major name while still in high school, starring in the anti-racism parable The Boy With Green Hair in 1948 and alongside Errol Flynn in the 1950 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. However, Stockwell found the transition to adulthood difficult and after dropping out of university he re-established his film career with a lead role in Compulsion, the 1959 crime film based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, for which he won a best actor award at the Cannes film festival alongside co-stars Orson Welles and Bradford Dillman.

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Jemima Khan cuts links with The Crown over treatment of Diana’s final years

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Princess’s close friend says story was not handled ‘as respectfully and compassionately’ as she had hoped

Jemima Khan, a close friend of Princess Diana, pulled out of helping to script Netflix’s The Crown because the story was not being handled “as respectfully or compassionately” as she had hoped, she has said.

Khan said she was brought in to help the show’s creator, Peter Morgan, write the script of the fifth series, which includes the years leading up to Diana's death in a Paris car crash in 1997.

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‘I had to watch it with my therapist’: when real-life horrors get turned into TV

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From The Shrink Next Door to Dr Death, true-crime podcasts are being snapped up for TV. But how does it really feel when your worst nightmare becomes a bingewatch?

The dark new drama The Shrink Next Door tells an almost unbelievable story. Almost, of course, because it actually happened. In 1980s New York, wealthy businessman Martin “Marty” Markowitz fell under the spell of his psychiatrist Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, who manipulated Marty into giving him his house, handing over his business and cutting off his family for almost 30 years. In an adaptation penned by one of Succession’s writers, Georgia Pritchett, Will Ferrell plays the patient whom many assumed was the handyman in his own home, while Paul Rudd is the smarmy shrink turned cuckoo in the nest.

If the story sounds familiar, that’s because the show is based on the hit podcast of the same name. The Shrink Next Door is the latest in the podcast to TV trend, which includes Julia Roberts’s Homecoming, Dirty John, with Connie Britton as the gaslit victim of “Dirty” John Meehan (Eric Bana), and Dr Death – based on the terrifying tale of sociopathic surgeon Christopher Duntsch – starring Joshua Jackson, Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin.

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Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung: ‘I’m very strange-looking, in a good way’

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As the London Korean film festival kicks off, Youn Yuh-jung, talks about how her portrayals of racy grannies and scheming maids scandalised the nation

In her Oscar-winning turn in last year’s Minari, Youn Yuh-jung played the mischievous granny you wished you’d had: the one who ignores your fun-sucking parents, takes you on wild adventures and teaches you to do your own thing. “You’re not a real grandma,” her Americanised grandson tells her. “They bake cookies! They don’t swear! They don’t wear men’s underwear!” In real life, Youn is pretty similar: lively, funny, unpretentious, and, she admits, not all that good at cooking. The 74-year-old actor has had an unconventional life and career, and most of us in the west know only a tiny fraction of it.

“My problem is, I don’t plan anything!” Youn laughs over Zoom from Los Angeles. Unlike her character in Minari, she speaks fluent English, although she apologises for it not being good enough.

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David Chase: I was annoyed that fans wanted Tony Soprano dead

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Series showrunner tells podcast that ambiguous ending rankled with viewers who wanted to see the character ‘face-down in linguini’

David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, has spoken about his irritation at viewers’ desire to see Tony Soprano die at the end of the hit series.

Speaking on the Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, the 76-year-old said he had been “bothered” by people’s obsession with the blackout ending of the 2007 finale, which stopped short of confirming the fate of its lead character.

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Gemma Whelan: ‘Sex in Game of Thrones could be a frenzied mess’

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She had one of the most notorious sex scenes in TV history. But the actor is now making waves as an upstanding cop in The Tower. She talks about intimacy coaches, on-set innuendo and cracking America


Deadlines meant I saw ITV’s twisty police corruption drama The Tower as a rough cut, featuring on-screen notes about final editing perfections, computer-generated backgrounds, extra lines of dialogue – and the instruction: “Hide pregnancy bump.”

This related to the increasing evidence of Freddie, now four weeks old, and sleeping between feeds in a pub garden near the London home of his mother, Gemma Whelan, who is amused to hear of this prenatal technology. “Wow!” she says. ‘“How are they going to do that? Paint it out? Or cut in a waistline from earlier?”

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Netflix’s Emily in Paris to focus on diversity, says star Lily Collins

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Cliches aside, new hires and storylines add inclusivity to the menu in show’s series two

It has been criticised for trotting out cliches about France and the French and mocked for its idealised portrayal of Paris. But now the Netflix show Emily in Paris will focus on diversity and inclusion for its second series, according to its star, Lily Collins.

The actor, who stars as Emily and is also a producer on the series, said she had heard viewers’ concerns about the show, which first hit our screens last year, and efforts had been made to address them.

The second series of Emily in Paris is scheduled for release in December.

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Mark Gatiss: ‘I’m currently very, very ashamed of being English’

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The former League of Gentlemen star on his love of low-budget British spinechillers, his loathing of Brexit and a slew of projects opening this winter

Mark Gatiss scans the breakfast menu at an east London restaurant with a famished eye. We’re at the hinge moment between the nightlife of an A-lister, who attended the James Bond premiere the previous evening, and the day job as an actor who, by his own account, could only land a role he had wanted all his life by writing the play himself. “It was a long evening,” he says of No Time to Die. He hadn’t had dinner and was trying to stave off the hunger pangs by sipping water, but not too much, because he couldn’t get out to the loo: “So I’m just really hungry.” He’s like a jovial Eeyore, painting himself into a lugubrious picture of the turnip fields of celebrity, before deciding, with a giggle, that a hearty breakfast of avocado on toast is exactly what’s needed to put everything to rights.

This is certainly no time to die of hunger for Gatiss, who has rocketed out of the pandemic as one of British showbusiness’s most sought-after all-rounders. He’s currently putting the finishing touches to his remake of the 1972 children’s film The Amazing Mr Blunden while rehearsing his new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The latest in a series of half-hour ghost stories, The Mezzotint, is ready to roll into his now customary slot on the Christmas TV schedules. But it’s not all fear and Victorian clothing, he spent part of the lost year in the Outer Hebrides, playing a country doctor in a first world war romance, The Road Dance, and another part messing about in a pedalo on a boating lake with his old League of Gentlemen muckers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith for a new series of their TV comedy Inside No 9.

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Succession’s Nicholas Braun: ‘I feel better being honest than hiding’

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He’s the reluctant sex symbol who is now partying with the Clintons. But actor Nicholas Braun is only just coming to terms with his life-changing role as Cousin Greg, TV’s favourite antihero in Succession. He reveals how he is learning to embrace his newfound fame

Nicholas Braun arrived on Long Island by train, and then he took a car to the compound. This was three years ago. Braun had been invited to a weekend-long party at a fancy home owned by friends of the American actor Jeremy Strong, who Braun knew from the set of the Emmy Award-winning television show Succession, in which they both star. At the compound he was patted down by members of the secret service, which startled him at first, and then delighted him. (He later referred to the agents as “my boys”.) As guests flashed around, Braun remembers thinking, “How is it I’ve ended up here, at a party in a locked-down compound that has a federal agency working the door?” And then the Clintons arrived.

By this point, Braun had filmed just one series of Succession, the HBO juggernaut, which revolves around and pillories the Roy family, a venomous media dynasty in the mould of the Murdochs. (Perhaps you’ve heard of it.) Braun plays Greg Hirsch, a distant cousin and Roy family satellite who, as the show progresses, finds himself increasingly surrounded by powerful and prestigious people and the mucky opulence in which they operate, and becomes both seduced and confused by his new surroundings, often to comic effect.

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Colin in Black and White review – Kaepernick drama will take your breath away

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The athlete turned activist joins forces with Ava Duvernay for a bold and devastating docudrama mixing the story of his early life with shocking stats on racial inequality

Colin Kaepernick became famous in the US as an NFL quarterback. He became famous around the world, and infamous in his own country, when he became a civil rights protester and – shortly after that – no longer an NFL quarterback. Kaepernick drew admiration and condemnation when he took the knee during the playing of the US national anthem at a preseason game in 2016, in protest against US police brutality and racial inequality after multiple police shootings of black people and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

His actions inspired many more players to join him in similar actions – then president Trump to recommend that such players should be fired. At the end of the season, the managers at his team, the San Francisco 49ers, told him they were going to release him – a move largely seen as politically rather than practically motivated, despite the 49ers’ claim that he didn’t fit in with their new coach’s plans. His activism has increased and he has remained unsigned since.

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Mark Strong on acting, insecurity and life without a father: ‘I got angry as I got older. It took years to fix’

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After three decades on the stage and screen, the star is still worrying about where his next job will come from. Meanwhile, at home, he frets about letting down his family

Mark Strong has a good face for villainy – spare and inscrutable, with thin lips and “eyes like tunnels”, as Arthur Miller might have put it. On camera, he gives a sort of fractional disclosure, expressions altering in tiny increments, so that watching him perform is often an exercise in judging how much good can reasonably be seen in the bad. He specialises in antiheroes and authority figures, from gangsters (Kick-Ass, The Long Firm) to heads of intelligence (The Imitation Game, Body of Lies, Zero Dark Thirty). His latest incarnation – as a surgeon who operates in the criminal underground in the TV drama Temple, now in its second series – melds these roles as he crosses and recrosses the line between conscientious and cruel.

Although highly regarded for his work across stage, film and TV, Strong is not a big winner of awards (though he earned an Olivier for his outstanding portrayal of Eddie Carbone in Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 2015). He comes across as somehow outside the system. He is reputable rather than starry, plays parts rather than leads and has retained the air of a jobbing actor. Surely at 58, after 30 years of nearly constant work and more than 100 screen credits, with a voice so sonorous and distinctive it draws you to the depths, he deserves a bigger breakthrough. Is he frustrated by the lack of leading parts?

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Last Night in Soho review | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week

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Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith star in a horror-thriller that takes a trip to the sleazy heart of London’s past

A trip to the dark heart of London’s unswinging 60s is what’s on offer in this entertaining, if uneven, film from screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns and director Edgar Wright, serving up a gorgeous soundtrack and some marvellous re-creations of sleazy Soho and the West End. There’s a tremendous image of the marquee for the 1965 Thunderball premiere in Coventry Street, and a show-stopping crane shot of Soho Square, apparently filmed from where the 20th Century Fox sign is now no longer to be found atop that company’s former premises.

Last Night in Soho is a doppelganger horror-thriller about a wide-eyed fashion student called Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who has brought her mum’s old Dansette record player and Cilla Black and Petula Clark LPs up to London from Cornwall on the train. Eloise has a fetish for the lost innocent glamour of the 60s but, moping all alone in her manky bedsit, finds herself stricken with neon phantasms. Like a ghost from the future, Eloise dreams her way through a portal in time back into 60s London clubland, where she witnesses Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a blonde singer – exactly the kind of retro showbiz princess Eloise moonily idolises – who is being forced by her slick-haired manager Jack (Matt Smith) into having sex for money with creepy old men. Gradually, Eloise feels her identity merging with Sandie’s. Is she having a breakdown, or is this nightmare really happening?

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The last laugh: is the television sitcom really dead?

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From Friends to The Thick Of It, the TV sitcom has evolved – but it’s no longer in rude health. Enter offbeat shows like Stath Lets Flats, bringing joy and potential redemption

The sitcom has a long history of being dead. According to the former NBC president of entertainment, Warren Littlefield, in the early 1980s many people believed the sitcom was over. In 1999, Entertainment Weekly noted the genre’s demise. In 2005, so did Victoria Wood. The following year, the former ITV director of programmes, David Liddiment, made a programme called Who Killed the Sitcom? In the decade and a half since, similar questions have been posed repeatedly by publications on both sides of the Atlantic. Declaring the sitcom dead now seems more like an annual ritual than a convincing take on the state of comedy. But what if this time it’s actually true?

There are a few reasons why the sitcom seems, if not comprehensively deceased, then at least less responsive than it has ever been. In terms of the comedy zeitgeist, the sadcom – a frequently bleak drama hybrid – continues to rule (see: I May Destroy You, Feel Good, This Way Up, Insecure). Streaming giants increasingly shape our viewing habits, and they don’t tend to make sitcoms (their discrete episodic plots mean they are not very bingeworthy, for a start). The newly established National Comedy Awards, meanwhile, doesn’t include a sitcom category, while Bafta dropped its sitcom award in 2015 and replaced it with one for scripted comedy: this year’s winner, the comedy-horror anthology Inside No 9, in no way fits the sitcom mould.

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