In viral video, Instagram user Dan Bailey harangues primetime anchor at outdoor goods store in Montana
In a confrontation that swiftly went viral, a Montana man told Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “You are the worst human being known to mankind.”
Related: Michael Wolff: Murdoch hates Trump but loves Fox News money more
Continue reading...Viewers complain after rights-holder Discovery puts majority of events behind paywall
The BBC has faced a series of complaints about the lack of live Tokyo Olympics coverage on its channels, after viewers failed to realise the International Olympic Committee has sold the majority of UK television rights to pay-TV company Discovery.
During the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics the BBC was able to offer dozens of free livestreams of different sports, revolutionising how British viewers watched the games and providing much-needed publicity to niche events that would not normally have enjoyed their moment in the public eye.
Continue reading...A South Korean broadcaster has apologised after using offensive images to depict several countries during the opening ceremony of the Olympics on Friday.
MBC displayed photos and facts about each country as athletes walked out during the parade of nations. Most of them varied from inane to odd: Great Britain’s athletes were accompanied by a photo of the Queen, and El Salvador, where the cryptocurrency is legal tender, was summed up by a bitcoin symbol.
Continue reading...The actor was working as a bouncer when he got a small part in a new show called The Wire. Two decades on, he’s a blockbuster fixture. The Suicide Squad star talks about fighting for his big break, losing his dad, and why acting helped him out of a ‘dark, weird junction’
“I appreciate my quiet time, I really do,” Idris Elba tells me, “but I didn’t choose a career in quiet time.” At 48, his life seems relentlessly full of activity, projects, causes, releases. He’s the star of an imminent summer blockbuster, The Suicide Squad. He’s a rapper who releases music online at a rate of about a track a month. He hosts a podcast. He’s just released a new line of T-shirts. Earlier in 2021, Elba signed a deal with HarperCollins to write children’s books. He and his wife, the Canadian model Sabrina Dhowre Elba, have recently been petitioning world leaders (France’s, Belgium’s) on behalf of rural farmers in Africa. The couple have also co- designed a Louboutin sandal. When Elba sits down to chat to me over Zoom, it’s during a break between night shoots on a new movie he’s making, and I’m tempted to tell him to forget about it; shut the laptop; sleep.
Is he someone who hates sitting still?
Continue reading...The SNL star turned Hollywood mainstay plays a caring, sharing football coach in the award-winning comedy from Apple TV+ but is he as nice in real life?
How much of Jason Sudeikis is Ted Lasso, and how much of Ted Lasso is Jason Sudeikis? The extraordinarily strong hairline belongs to both, but that’s where the similarities start to swim apart and fuse together: Lasso wears a cheerfully thick moustache with his, while Sudeikis tends towards clean-shaven; since his 2003 start on SNL, Sudeikis has spent the last 18 years making people laugh, while Lasso’s attempts at humour (“Your body is like day-old rice – if it ain’t warmed up properly, something real bad could happen”) often whoosh over the heads of those around him. But they both seemingly spend an unusual amount of thought and care on the lesser-appreciated component parts that make a large organisation (a movie set; a football club) tick.
Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips
Continue reading...In Netflix’s dating show, contestants dress as animals, insects, demons and dinosaurs – so they’re not chosen for their looks. The results are so screamingly awful, you’ll end up weeping into your sofa
Sometimes I think it makes sense as a covert government anti-Covid strategy (now that they’ve given up on overt, data-driven, scientifically sanctioned ones): give the public a new dating show in which people are done up as figures from a plushy fetishist’s (look it up, I don’t have time to explain everything) malarial dream. This will keep them spellbound with delight, or weeping silently into the sofa at the thought that the western civilisation we once hoped for is over. But, either way indoors, alone, spreading nary an airborne droplet to the young and vulnerable.
I believe it to be a multi-pronged public health strategy. First they softened us up with last week’s Apocalypse Wow on ITV2, which left the nation staring bleakly past its television screens into an unknowable future that seemed suddenly not to brim with overwhelming possibility for humanity and its endeavours. Now there is Netflix’s Sexy Beasts, a reworking of a BBC show from 2014 with no other possible justification. What comes next, I cannot imagine. After a nugatory attempt, the mind quails and halts, unwilling to go further. Thus, do I fight to explain the advent of this monstrosity into our lives.
Continue reading...After 16 years, the BBC’s flagship sci-fi show is tired and suffering. It should go away to save itself
Three series is the usual tenure for an actor playing the Doctor, so rumours are rife that Jodie Whittaker is about to step down. Michaela Coel, Olly Alexander and Richard Ayoade are among those tipped for the role. But what if, instead of a new Doctor, the show actually needs something a doctor might prescribe to an exhausted patient – a rest.
The current run started in 2005, and even with such a flexible format as Doctor Who, there aren’t many TV dramas that can sustain 13 series in 16 years. (Call the Midwife is probably the best BBC attempt at that in the past decade.) Soap operas can manage it, but then soap storylines generally don’t revolve around such cataclysmic events as the universe being destroyed.
Continue reading...Regulator’s move comes amid fears that limited press freedoms are being eroded by the government
Nigeria’s broadcasting regulator has told TV stations to limit their reporting of rising insecurity in the country and withhold details of incidents and victims, in a move widely criticised by the country’s media and civil society groups.
In a letter sent to the country’s broadcasters, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) said TV stations should refrain from “giving details of either the security issues or victims of these security challenges”, and they should “collaborate with the government in dealing with the security challenges” by toning down reporting and commentary.
Continue reading...A disturbing new Netflix series makes dates dress up as animals – from rhinos to insects – so that choices are made on personality not looks. So why is everyone involved so hot?
“Ass first, personality second,” says a deadpan beaver at a bar. Meanwhile, a panda with pleading eyes says she wants a baby by the age of 26. A rhino in a dress shirt chips in with “Vulnerability is our biggest muscle” – and gets a high five from a delighted dolphin.
What fresh hell is this? Are we not, for just one moment, deserving of a rest? Netflix says no. After holding us hostage for three weeks with Love Is Blind – in hindsight, not a good use of our last days before the pandemic – the evil-genius algorithm has come up with another “dating experiment”.
Continue reading...She cooked, watched Countdown and was mentored by the legendary singer. Now, 10 years after her death, Dionne Bromfield has finally addressed the grief she couldn’t deal with aged 15
Dionne Bromfield is leaning into the screen as we talk on Zoom, recounting the moment 10 years ago when she received the news that would change her life for ever. On a sunny July day, the 15-year-old singer was waiting to go on stage. She was supporting the boyband The Wanted on tour in Wales, the atmosphere backstage fizzing with energy before each show. However, that day something felt off. People were unusually quiet, and no one would meet her eyes. Eventually, she was told something was wrong: “It’s Amy.”
Amy Winehouse, whose remarkable, all-too-brief career ended with her death a decade ago this month, had been the teenager’s godmother, friend and mentor. Winehouse had nurtured Bromfield’s burgeoning vocal skills and helped her break into a notoriously competitive industry. For years after her death, Bromfield couldn’t listen to Amy’s music, let alone think about her. After two albums and a stint presenting the CBBC show Friday Download, the singer who had been marked out by many as one to watch and performed on live television with Winehouse, stepped back from music.
Continue reading...TV station also hit by internal dispute over its direction after Guto Harri dropped for ‘taking the knee’
Nigel Farage is to take centre stage at GB News in a victory for the rightwing faction at the beleaguered television channel. The former leader of Ukip is to host a nightly primetime show from Monday as part of a reboot of programming designed to attract more viewers.
The new channel is facing plummeting viewing figures and a split in management between those angling to keep broader-based regional news coverage and those planning to boost coverage of the “culture wars”.
Continue reading...A fascinating new podcast delves into the life of Harry Pace, forgotten founder of the first black-owned record label in the US – and unlocks a shocking and prescient story about race
There are, according to the academic Emmett Price, “six degrees of Harry Pace”. He is referring to the man born in 1884 who founded America’s first black-owned major record label; desegregated part of Chicago; mentored the founder of Ebony and Jet magazines and spearheaded the career of blues singer Ethel Waters. Pace is a figure who is seemingly everywhere at once, yet his name has been suspiciously absent from the history books.
“This story encapsulates how progress comes about in America – and it is never in a straight line,” says Jad Abumrad. “It is often a cycle – one that contains hope and despair, smashed together.”
Continue reading...The thrilling star of stage continues her TV takeover. As she joins mercilessly dark drama Baptiste, Shaw talks about Fleabag, American burnout – and marriage as a cure for chaos
There is a man outside, doing something to the windows of Fiona Shaw’s house in London, and he appears to be following her from room to room. No sooner has she laughed, apologised, picked up her laptop (we’re speaking on Zoom) and sought peace elsewhere than – scrape, tap – the top of a ladder appears again, and his face looms behind her.
No wonder. I feel like following Shaw around everywhere too. She is such fun, bracing company. She can swing from references to Freud to word-perfect renditions of Yeats lines learned in childhood, and makes some lovely observations: describing lunch with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she says the Fleabag creator is “like April or May. She’s blossoming on all fronts, all her fingers are light green.” Even the man working on Shaw’s windows is likened to something out of Rapunzel. She seems to delight in everything.
Continue reading...The trailer for American Boogeyman, yet another film to cast a handsome actor as a serial killer, faces backlash. Who is asking for more Bundy content?
Ted Bundy, the serial killer convicted of murdering more than 30 women in the 1970s who probably killed upwards of 100 whose names receive little attention, once mused, in interviews on death row, that he hoped his story would sell. Thirty-two years after his death by electric chair, Bundy seems to have been prescient about a curiosity with the mild-looking sociopath. The past couple years has seen a veritable “Bundy binge” in true crime content: a two-hour Oxygen special, too many podcasts to list, the Netflix docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and the biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring Zac Efron as a suave Bundy.
Related: Just another pretty face: should Hollywood stop giving bad guys a face-lift?
Continue reading...An exciting selection of newcomers can’t fully take away the sting of some egregious snubs, such as Steve McQueen’s acclaimed anthology series
I just have to point this out upfront: there is a chance that Emily in Paris is going to win an Emmy this year. Emily in Paris, for crying out loud. A show so mesmerisingly awful that, when it was nominated for a Golden Globe this year, it caused such a crisis that it almost permanently ended the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as an entity. At least that nomination could be racked up to good old-fashioned jury manipulation. But this one – an Emmy nomination for best comedy series, no less – can’t be written off so easily. Did … did people actually like Emily in Paris? If so, this is not a world I want to live in.
Related: Emmys 2021: The Crown and The Mandalorian lead nominations
Continue reading...Never mind that the Hollywood star has never encountered a great white – this documentary has Thor, his perfect jawline … and flirting so full-on it could crack the camera lens
There are only three reasons why you would watch the new documentary Shark Beach With Chris Hemsworth: you love sharks, beaches or Chris Hemsworth. Hopefully it’s the latter, because that’s clearly what the producers have anticipated.
The opening scene sees the Hollywood actor gazing out to sea at sunrise, surfboard under his arm, blue-steeling the horizon. “There’s nothing quite like the ocean at first light,” he murmurs, as if auditioning for an aftershave commercial. Waves crash. Hemsworth smoulders. A didgeridoo blows.
Continue reading...Digging deep into the nonsensical and narcissistic – yet apparently acceptable –ways that we behave online, Tim Robinson’s Netflix series is ahead of the curve
In the first season of I Think You Should Leave, Tim Robinson’s superlative Netflix show, there’s a sketch that made me laugh more than any joke I have ever seen on social media. In it, a trio of brunching women decide to post an attractive picture of themselves on Instagram, accompanied by an obligatory and utterly transparent self-deprecating caption, “so it doesn’t look like you’re just bragging”. But one of the party can’t get to grips with this odd internet etiquette. “OK, got it,” she grins earnestly. “Slopping down some pig-shit with these fat fucks, and I’m the fattest of them all. If I died tomorrow no one would shed a tear. Load my frickin’ lard carcass into the mud, no coffin please, just wet, wet mud. Bae.”
You might think the vortex of narcissism, desperation and mindless rote behaviour that characterises many people’s Instagram use would be an obvious, not to say rather tired, subject for satire by now. In fact, TV comedy that mines laughs from the warped ways people behave online is vanishingly rare. But I Think You Should Leave – which returned for a much-lauded second season this week – does it in practically every sketch, drilling down into the absurdity of online interaction, and, in doing so, exposes the half-obscured egomania and self-interest that drives it.
Continue reading...He may have an impressive film CV, but the actor is destined to be remembered as The Office’s resident dork. He talks about why he was perfect for the role, his new movie, Don’t Tell a Soul – and his love for Steve Coogan
Some actors associated with a signature role will tire of talking about it. No such preciousness from Rainn Wilson, who appears on camera from his Los Angeles home wearing a grey T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Scranton”. That Pennsylvania city provided the setting for the US version of the mockumentary sitcom The Office, which ran for nine widely adored, award-winning series. Wilson earned three Emmy nominations for playing the livid, disagreeable Dwight, the Rust Belt equivalent of Mackenzie Crook’s Gareth. Today’s beard and baseball cap, as well as his chipper demeanour, banishes all memory of the pasty face, DIY haircut and startled expression he wore in that show.
Wilson has starred in everything from Juno to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and the Jason Statham shark thriller The Meg, but he knows that any conversation will inevitably lead back to The Office. “Dwight is the part I’m best known for and always will be,” says the 55-year-old. “And that’s fine with me.” First, though, there is his new thriller to discuss. In Don’t Tell a Soul, a cross between A Simple Plan and Paranoid Park, he plays an unassuming security guard who gives chase after encountering two teenage brothers (Fionn Whitehead and Jack Dylan Grazer) stealing from a house in rural Kentucky. During the pursuit, he plunges into a hole in the forest floor, which leaves the boys with absolute power over him. The question is not whether they will use it, but how.
Continue reading...Star of music, TV and film who had UK Top 10 hit in 1978 with Do It, Do It Again had been suffering an undisclosed illness
Raffaella Carrà, the pop singer and actor who was an entertainment icon in her native Italy, has died aged 78.
Her long-term partner, Sergio Iapino, announced her death, saying: “Raffaella has left us. She has gone to a better world, where her humanity, her unmistakable laugh and her extraordinary talent will shine forever.” He said she had been battling an unnamed illness for some time.
Continue reading...The non-binary comedian’s hit TV show draws heavily on an often troubled life. They talk about addiction at 14, the loving parents who kicked them out, the older men who abused their trust – and the happiness they eventually found
At the beginning of the pandemic Mae Martin’s first TV series, Feel Good, was broadcast on Channel 4 to great acclaim. Just recently, the second series came out on Netflix to even greater acclaim. While most of us have disappeared in lockdown, Martin has become a star.
Feel Good is a disarmingly autobiographical love story. It tells the story of a character called Mae struggling with relationships, addiction, identity and life on the comedy circuit. Mae is attracted to men and women, but to women more, particularly women who identify as straight. The first series focuses on Mae’s relationship with Georgina, a teacher who had previously only slept with men and is reluctant to admit to her super-straight, super-posh friends that she and Mae are living together. Mae is a mix of streetwise and naive – reckless, precocious, promiscuous, self-absorbed and a bag of nerves.
Continue reading...