Category Archives: Television & radio

UK agrees to consider providing safe haven for Afghan journalists

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U-turn over those who worked for British media follows outcry from newspapers and broadcasters

The foreign secretary has agreed to consider allowing Afghan journalists who worked for the British to flee to the UK if their lives are endangered by the resurgence of the Taliban, after an outcry from a coalition of British newspapers and broadcasters.

Dominic Raab signalled the policy U-turn on Friday, saying he recognised the bravery of the Afghan journalists. A scheme that was set up to offer a safe haven to Afghans who worked with the British will be expanded to include those who worked as journalists, it was reported.

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I Am Victoria review – a masterclass in what pushes a woman to the edge

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In the new series of Dominic Savage’s searingly truthful dramas, Suranne Jones plays a mother trying to do it all … and hurtling towards a meltdown

Two years ago, Channel 4 gave us the novel – not unprecedented, but still novel – series I Am … It comprised three dramas created, written and directed by Dominic Savage, who devised the stories with three female actors. I Am Nicola starred Vicky McClure as a woman realising she is in a coercively controlling relationship and trying to find a way out. Samantha Morton was the protagonist in I Am Kirsty, hemmed in by poverty and predated upon for all the vulnerabilities that go with that. Gemma Chan was in I Am Hannah, about a young woman appraising everyone’s interest in her biological clock.

There were moments when polemic overwhelmed the storytelling, but overall (and the Nicola instalment in particular) they were strikingly truthful stories told in a strikingly truthful way. I loved what they did and what they represented – a fine, new way to get women’s real lives and experiences on screen. Savage seemed to have got himself brilliantly out of the way, committed himself fully to that goal and succeeded.

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Kitchen nightmares: do we need more celebrity cooking shows?

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The release of Paris Hilton’s Netflix series where she semi-cooks semi-dishes is the latest in an increasing trend of stars spending more time in the kitchen

To state the obvious, nobody is going to watch Cooking With Paris to sharpen their culinary skills. The new Netflix series piggybacks on last year’s bizarre, almost Lynchian YouTube video where Paris Hilton cooked what can only be described an anti-lasagne, and stretches it out to a painful degree. In episode one, Hilton attempts to make marshmallows for Kim Kardashian and grunts with disgust when they make a mess of her lace gloves. In episode two, Hilton takes time out from making a funfetti flan to pose in the photo booth she installed in her living room. If you hang around long enough to find out what happens in episode three, you’re a braver soul than me.

Related: Cooking With Paris review – Hilton in the kitchen? Prepare to have your mind blown

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Comic Jamie MacDonald on being creative and blind: ‘It’s triumph with – not over – adversity’

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In new BBC show Blind Ambition, MacDonald and Jamie O’Leary meet artists who have lost their sight – including a rapper, a photographer and a wood turner ‘who still has all his fingers’

I’m a blind standup comedian, currently co-starring in the BBC Two documentary Blind Ambition. As the title suggests, the show is about blindness. But please don’t think this is a violins, tissues at the ready, “oh didn’t they do well” type of documentary. The show creator and Essex wide boy Jamie O’Leary wanted to make a different kind of show about disability.

You’ll know the classic disabled show formula: person has a dark phase then overcomes their disability and achieves something wonderful. In this paradigm the disability is a hurdle that needs to be jumped over. Or, if there are mobility issues at play, an obstacle to get around. In the Blind Ambition paradigm, blindness – a disability readers of the New York Times voted the worst thing a person could have in the world (which is bollocks as blind people can’t read the flipping New York Times so couldn’t vote) – is positive.

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‘A malignant narcissist’: uncovering the dark side of John DeLorean

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The defining car mogul’s ego and criminality are explored in the eye-opening new Netflix docuseries Myth & Mogul: John DeLorean

In Northern Ireland, many still revere the automotive magnate John DeLorean as a local hero for situating his car factory in Belfast at the height of the Troubles, a time of extreme economic deprivation during which the influx of jobs came as a godsend. Others – his family, his personal confidantes, his colleagues, the FBI officials responsible for his eventual arrest – remember the business tycoon as a greedy, flagrantly unethical megalomaniac. The new miniseries Myth & Mogul: John DeLorean triangulates the truth in hiding somewhere between these two characterizations.

Related: Myth & Mogul: John DeLorean review – how years of lies felled an automotive giant

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Jessie Cave on body image, bereavement and being relentless: ‘I don’t have any secrets’

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The actor, comic and writer talks about her bestselling debut novel, the cruelty of costume fittings, how it felt to be in the Harry Potter franchise – and finding hope in small things

As a compulsive diary writer – she has kept one since she was eight – Jessie Cave knows that, unless it gets written down, life gets forgotten. She is glad, then, that she wrote her debut novel, Sunset, because the way she felt at the time “would have just gone, and then you’re in a different place and you don’t remember”. This book, says Cave, was “absolutely the only thing I could write during that period”.

In March 2019, her younger brother Ben died in an accident aged 27. Her book was written in the aftermath, that manic feeling that sometimes comes with grief pushing her on. It went straight to No 1 on the Sunday Times’ bestseller list after being published in June. “I don’t know if I would have that energy now,” she says.

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Shailene Woodley: ‘Authenticity is my love language’

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Despite being only 29, Shailene Woodley already has 25 years’ acting experience under her belt. Here, the star of Big Little Lies and Divergent talks about being free-willed, her hippy passions and her late-night calls with Kate Winslet

The one and only time Shailene Woodley beams during our time together – a long conversation over Zoom, on a bright weekday morning – is when my young son sneaks into the room in which I’m bent over a laptop, points at the stranger appearing on-screen, and asks, not quietly, “Who’s that?”

There is nothing to do but introduce them.

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Jimmy Savile: 10 years on, what has changed in uncovering abuse?

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As TV revisits the scandal, the author of an acclaimed play about it asks what the media and key institutions have learned – and whether survivors are now treated any better

Journalistic parlour game question: what are the most significant news stories of the past decade? Few would argue with the pandemic and Brexit. Not far behind, perhaps, is the Jimmy Savile scandal.

Not many stories change our world. This one did. It transformed how we deal with allegations of sexual assault. We reassessed our attitude to celebrity. We saw more clearly than ever how morally corrupt institutions could be. It was the harbinger of the #MeToo movement.

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Bob Odenkirk says he had small heart attack but vows ‘I’ll be back soon’

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US actor, 58. makes first public statement since collapsing on set of Better Call Saul earlier this week

Bob Odenkirk, the actor and star of Better Call Saul, said Friday that he “had a small heart attack” but will “be back soon”.

Related: Nobody review – Bob Odenkirk is a blast in action man mode

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First image revealed of Imelda Staunton as the Queen in The Crown

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Actor best known for Vera Drake takes over from Olivia Colman for fifth series about the UK royal family

The first image of Imelda Staunton in character as the Queen in season five of The Crown has been revealed.

Staunton has taken over from the Golden Globe winner Olivia Colman, as the fresh series ushers in a new era for the royal family. Netflix gave fans a first glimpse of Staunton as the monarch while she was still filming the next instalment of the Netflix show.

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The X Factor: Simon Cowell’s show is dead – but it has been for years

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ITV is cancelling the TV talent show before it ‘fizzles out with a whimper’. After a decade of plummeting ratings, we remember its highs, lows … and Chico Time

“COWELL WIELDS AXE” roared the front page of The Sun today, as it alleged that Simon Cowell, bored of gazing over a world made in his image, has chosen to cancel The X Factor once and for all after 17 years. The story quotes an insider, who says “Simon remains at the top of his game … He owns the rights to the show, and it’s his call – not ITV’s – whether or not he drops it. Clearly the last thing he wants is for X Factor to fizzle out with a whimper and become a bit of a joke”.

About that last bit. If you wanted to produce a perfect scientific diagram of the concept of fizzling out, then it would probably look something like a graph of X Factor viewing figures over the years. After the show’s biggest year in 2010, ratings went into freefall, steadily losing droves of eyeballs every time it returned. What’s more, the show hasn’t actually been on television since 2018. For all of today’s attempts to mimic an explosive ‘The King Is Dead’-style dramatic impact, the truth is that most people assumed it quietly passed away in its sleep several years ago.

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The Suicide Squad review – eyeball-blitzing supervillain reboot

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Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn is a good directorial fit for the humour and freaky violence of DC’s bad-guy jamboree

DC’s new Suicide Squad movie announces itself as different from the coolly received first film from 2016 simply by adding “The” to the title, maybe sneakily trying for an unacknowledged rebrand or reboot. James Gunn, also in charge of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, is brought on board as director and co-writer. This second Squad outing (if you don’t count last year’s standalone Harley Quinn adventure Birds of Prey) is a long, loud, often enjoyable and amusing film that blitzes your eyeballs and eardrums and covers all the bases. There is Guardians-style comedy mixing humans and talking animals, there is freaky violence – including what I have to say is a gruesomely impressive interior-anatomical shot, showing a knife plunging into the still-beating heart – and there is colossal CGI spectacle for the final act in which a giant thing runs rampant in a city, while the gang look up at it; a trope that has become almost legally mandatory for superhero movies.

Viola Davis once again brings a touch of class to the Suicide Squad franchise as the chillingly manipulative security chief Amanda Waller who now springs supervillain Bloodsport (Idris Elba) from jail so that he can head up an elite new crew of misfits, desperadoes and undesirables. These include Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), the ironically belligerent Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark – a great big talking shark in Hulk-ish stretchy shorts – voiced by Sylvester Stallone, Ratcatcher II (Daniela Melchior), who commands an army of rats wherever she goes, and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who fires molten polka-dots at the enemy, revving himself up for the task by imagining that this is his overbearing mother. There is also a kind of B-team of Squadders whose job is to be hilariously expendable.

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‘You are the worst human being’: man confronts Fox News host Tucker Carlson

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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

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BBC Olympics coverage misses events after loss of TV rights

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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.

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Chernobyl for Ukraine, pizza for Italy: South Korean TV apologises for Olympic images

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  • MBC sorry for ‘inappropriate images and captions’
  • Syria and Haiti summed up by war and unrest

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.

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Idris Elba: ‘I used work to exorcise my demons’

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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?

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Jason Sudeikis: ‘Ted Lasso isn’t a show, it’s a vibe’

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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

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Sexy Beasts review – would you want to date a white mouse with a mullet?

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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.

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Exterminate! Exterminate! Why it’s time for Doctor Who to die

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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.

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Outcry after Nigerian TV stations told to curb reporting of security issues

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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.

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