Category Archives: Television & radio

From Naked Attraction to Love Is Blind: The couples who found lasting love on wild TV dating shows

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These series rely on gimmicks - whether contestants are required to take off all their clothes or get married at first sight. But romance can flourish regardless

After a half-century of dating shows, the genre has grown increasingly outlandish. Naked dating, marrying complete strangers, secret cameras – it can’t be long before singletons are blasted into space in one of Elon Musk’s rockets to find love. But behind all the gimmicks, do any of these shows lead to long-lasting love? We spoke to four couples.

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Louis Theroux: ‘I worry about not coming up to scratch’

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He made a film on Joe Exotic a decade before Tiger King, lulls interviewees into personal revelations – and can rock a leather suit. So why is he so anxious?

“There’s no getting away from the fact that, even aged 50, I’m a slightly awkward person, a fearful person, worry-prone,” says Louis Theroux, wriggling in his seat. The film-maker picks up and puts down a coffee without drinking. He wears all blue: navy sweater, stock denim, one of those indestructible plastic Casio watches on his wrist. “I worry about what people think,” Theroux continues, “I worry about giving offence, being judged, not coming up to scratch, being thin-skinned.”

We are in the corner of a photography studio in London, sheltering from rain on a Friday afternoon. The room has long emptied of people, but, even so, as Theroux chats, he snatches quick glances over his right shoulder, as if expecting to find somebody or something lurking there. “Everyone has things that preoccupy them, right?” he says. “I just tend to think, on a spectrum of people in general, I definitely skew, uh, anxious.”

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‘I won’t allow myself to be broken’: Russia’s Eurovision candidate Manizha takes on ‘the haters’

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The singer’s fight against domestic violence and homophobia and her body-positive posts on Instagram have led to a torrent of abuse – some from very powerful people

Russia’s 2021 Eurovision candidate breezes into a conference room, Channel One documentary film crew in tow, offering a simple tea of mint leaves brewed in hot water. “On days like today, I want something calming,” Manizha says, pouring two cups, as a boom mic hovers over us. No pressure.

The Tajikistan-born singer, who will perform her feminist ballad Russian Woman next month at the much-loved, much-mocked song contest in Rotterdam, is the target of a fiery conservative backlash for her foreign roots and her lyrics attacking female stereotypes.

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Ex-police reveal bribes and threats used to cover up corruption in 70s London

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BBC documentary to examine incidents that led to setting up of unit on which Line of Duty’s AC-12 is based

One of London’s most senior police officers, described by a colleague as “the greatest villain unhung”, was believed to be involved in major corruption in the 1970s but never prosecuted, according to a new documentary on police malpractice.

Former officers who exposed corruption at the time describe how they were threatened that they would end up in a “cement raincoat” if they informed on fellow officers and were shunned by colleagues when they did.

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Elizabeth Perkins on luck, sexism and Big’s love scene: ‘It would not be acceptable today’

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The star of hit films in the 80s and 90s has since moved into TV. She discusses life with 10 siblings, #MeToo and why she couldn’t ask for a better life

Veering from horror to joy and back again, Elizabeth Perkins is contemplating what it would be like if her adult children moved back home. “The thing is, you miss them so much, then they’ll come back for a holiday and within a week there’s dirty dishes everywhere, there’s wet towels on the floor, they’ve eaten all the food. After a couple of weeks, you’re like: ‘Will they ever leave?’”

This is the timely theme of Perkins’ show The Moodys, the first season of which, in 2019, saw three grownup children return home to Chicago for Christmas. Perkins plays Ann Moody, their mother; Denis Leary plays her husband. In the new season, all three children are living at the family home, with predictably messy consequences. “It really explored that dichotomy of: you love them to death, but, man, they get on your nerves,” says Perkins.

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‘Sometimes, it’s shocking’: Raoul Peck on his bold new colonialism series

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The Oscar-nominated film-maker behind I Am Not Your Negro returns with Exterminate All the Brutes, a dense new HBO docuseries about a horrifying history

Truly, what else was there left to say about race in America after the words of James Baldwin? This is what Raoul Peck found himself contemplating after the success of his 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, which was nominated for an Academy Award and won an Emmy, a Bafta and a César award. He was confounded and disappointed to realize that some audiences, particularly in Europe, weren’t fully comprehending the work of what he calls “one of the best, if not the best analyst of what racism is”, believing it to be primarily an American concern.

Related: 'We're all part of the story': behind Will Smith's 14th amendment docuseries

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‘Brilliant and versatile’ Observer and Guardian journalist Sarah Hughes dies at 48

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Hughes’ work ranged from hard-hitting overseas reports, to sport and television writing as well as candid accounts of coping with cancer

Tributes have been paid to Sarah Hughes, the Observer and Guardian journalist who has died from cancer.

Hughes, a mother of two, was a hugely respected journalist whose work ranged from hard-hitting and acclaimed overseas reportage, to the television and entertainment writing that she went on to specialise in.

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‘A lovely bit of squirrel’: Paul Ritter’s most memorable roles

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Ritter carved out a wonderful career, culminating in the acclaimed Chernobyl – but he’ll be remembered most as oddball patriarch Martin Goodman in Friday Night Dinner

Paul Ritter, who died on Monday at the age of 54, is destined to be remembered as the dad from Friday Night Dinner. And rightly so. If you think of Ritter, or Friday Night Dinner for that matter, one image will almost certainly be seared into your mind: Ritter, walking around with his top off like it was the most normal thing in the world, complaining about the heat, or enquiring after a “lovely bit of squirrel”.

That role, and that image, brought Ritter a level of fame he had previously never achieved. Before the sitcom, which began in 2011, he had worked solidly in a number of small screen parts, usually playing characters who were professions first and people second – Detective Sergeant in 1998’s Big Cat, Geography Teacher in 2007’s Son of Rambow and Prisoner Louis in Hannibal Rising from the same year – while tending to a growing reputation on the stage. In 2006, he was nominated for an Olivier award for Coram Boy, and a Tony three years later for The Norman Conquests.

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Friday Night Dinner star Paul Ritter dies of brain tumour at 54

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Ritter, who also appeared in films including Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, died at home alongside his wife and two sons

The actor Paul Ritter has died of a brain tumour at the age of 54, his agent has told the Guardian. Ritter who starred as the family patriarch Martin in Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner alongside Tamsin Greig, Simon Bird and Tom Rosenthal died on Monday.

In a statement, his agent said that the actor, who also appeared in numerous films including Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Quantum of Solace, died at home with his family by his side.

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‘An escape from dark times’: how ancient history podcasts bring comfort and clarity

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I started listening to tales of yore in 2019, when long drives with my infant son became essential. They soothed him to sleep – and transported me to a different world

Fans of Paul Cooper’s podcast Fall of Civilizations will know that it usually begins in a particular way. A traveller, often far from home, encounters a ruin that hints at a vast and forgotten story of the past.

Hiding from bandits in the desert, the Italian nobleman Pietro della Valle takes shelter in the shadow of the crumbling Ziggurat of Ur. Clambering through the rubble of a once magnificent site of Roman Britain, an unknown poet of the eighth or ninth century writes an elegy to the broken “work of giants”.

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Damson Idris: ‘Mum would dress me in a three-piece golden suit’

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Peckham-born Damson Idris is a huge name in the US. But back here his star is still rising. He talks to Tim Lewis about breaking out in Snowfall, his American accent, joking with Jay-Z and the joy of dressing up

In 2015, when he was a young actor from Peckham with a couple of theatre credits and, naturally, an episode of Casualty to his Equity card, Damson Idris somehow wangled a big TV audition in Los Angeles. The part was Franklin Saint, a bright kid in South Central LA during the 1980s who becomes a drug kingpin just as the city is on the cusp of a crack cocaine epidemic. Snowfall was the vision of John Singleton, the director of the seminal 1991 coming-of-age film Boyz n the Hood. Word was that every tyro black actor in America, and beyond, wanted to be cast as Franklin.

“The audition was about two, three weeks out,” recalls Idris, “so I went to my family and said, ‘Guys, I’m going to be in an American accent for three weeks and onwards if this process keeps going on. Don’t, don’t, don’t make no jokes. Don’t ask me, “Ahhhh, why are you talking like that?” No. My name’s Franklin and from now on you’re going to address me as Franklin. You hear that Mum?’ I was still living with my mum at the time. And she’s like, ‘Yeah, whatever. Go wash the dishes.’”

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How Leslie Jordan made it big: ‘If you want to get sober, try 27 days in county jail’

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After starring in Will & Grace and American Horror Story, his life took a twist in lockdown and he became an Instagram superstar at 65. He discusses fame, fun and sharing a cell with Robert Downey Jr

For a man of such diminutive stature – 4ft 11in in shoes – Leslie Jordan loves a tall tale. A cursory question at the start of our interview about where he is calling from, for example, results in this glorious flight of fancy: “I got on a bus in 1982, from the hills of Tennessee. I had $1,200 sewn into my underpants by my mother and I arrived in LA and found West Hollywood, which is where I currently live.”

Such vivid storytelling – delivered in a honey-thick southern drawl, accentuated perfectly by a knowing campness – is part of the reason for Jordan’s unexpected career boost at 65. A jobbing actor best known for his role in American Horror Story and his Emmy-winning turn as Beverly Leslie, the acid-tongued rival of Megan Mullally’s Karen in Will & Grace, Jordan spent most of 2020 becoming an accidental internet sensation, racking up 5.6 million Instagram followers – including the likes of Rihanna and Lily Allen – thanks to his charmingly chaotic videos.

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Let’s have an answer! Take our fiendish University Challenge quiz

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Ahead of the grand final of the brain-squeezing series next Monday, test your mental mettle with 15 questions set by the show’s quizmasters

The opening scene of which of Shakespeare’s plays comprises just 61 words, the longest of those words being "lightning", "hurlyburly" and "graymalkin"?

Macbeth

Twelfth Night

Timon of Athens

Comedy of Errors

What term for a type of particle accelerator also applies to a type of electromagnetic radiation generated by charged particles spiralling in magnetic fields?

Cyclotron

Gamma

Synchrotron

Collider

The works of which Italian artist, born in 1449, include St Jerome in His Study and the frescoes for the Sassetti chapel in Florence? His numerous apprentices included Michelangelo.

Fra Angelico

Domenico Ghirlandaio

Leonardo Da Vinci

Sandro Botticelli

For which film set in Rome did Paolo Sorrentino win the 2014 Academy Award for best foreign language film?

Life Is Beautiful

The Great Beauty

Parasite

The Postman

What bird does the British Trust for Ornithology describe as: "By far the biggest passerine, with a similar wingspan to a buzzard. The bill is strikingly long and heavy"?

Long-tailed tit

Rook

Raven

Tawny owl

In March 1969, the Ussuri River was the scene of armed clashes between which two major powers?

China and the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union and the US

China and the US

The UK and Argentina

In April 1912, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly solo over which body of water, crossed earlier by Louis Blériot?

The Channel

Atlantic Ocean

Black Sea

Lake Superior

Described as "the little town keeping the lights on in France", Arlit in Niger was until 2021 the site of one of the world’s largest mines of which toxic metal?

Bismuth

Mercury

Lead

Uranium

What colour links the field of the flag of the Basque country, William Morris’s house in Bexleyheath and leading football clubs in Belgrade and Salzburg?

Red

Green

Purple

Blue

Who wrote the Nebula-award-winning novels Doomsday Book and All Clear?

George R R Martin

Neil Gaiman

Connie Willis

Ursula Le Guin

Nenagh, Clonmel and Cashel are towns in which inland Irish county, bordering Galway and Cork?

Kerry

Tipperary

Kildare

Offaly

According to Jeff Bezos, what "has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in the human being"?

Online reviews

Social media

Email

Hunger

In materials science, the ratio of the contractile to the tensile strains is named after which French scientist, born in 1781?

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Charles Friedel

Siméon-Denis Poisson

Louis Pasteur

Which English cathedral is noted for stained-glass rose windows known as the Dean’s Eye and the Bishop’s Eye?

Lincoln

Durham

Ely

York Minster

Totem and Taboo, and Civilisation and Its Discontents are early 20th-century works by which thinker?

Otto Rank

Frantz Fanon

Carl Jung

Sigmund Freud

15 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

14 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

13 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

12 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

11 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

10 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

9 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

8 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

7 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

6 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

5 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

4 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

3 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

2 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

0 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

1 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

The University Challenge grand final airs Monday 5 April at 8.30pm on BBC Two

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Pandemic 2020 review – a masterly mapping of the Covid outbreak

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The team behind Once Upon a Time in Iraq has compiled a moving and sometimes hopeful three-parter that offers a global perspective on the crisis

Like the virus itself, the programmes about it have moved from localised subjects to a slightly wider field and now have expanded to take in a global view. It hasn’t been a perfectly linear progression, of course, but most of the first documentaries were composed largely of footage recorded by medical professionals themselves, at work and then – exhausted and tearful – at home.

After that came socially distanced films recording the impact on local communities and bereaved families, the experiences of survivors and the long-term consequences for those who do not make a full recovery. Alongside that have come considerations and critiques of the UK response to the crisis and comparisons – not generally favourable – with that of other countries.

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‘Rehab made me grateful to be alive’: Margaret Cho on sobriety, solitude and Stop Asian Hate

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One of the world’s most outrageous comedians, Cho is helping to lead the battle to end racism against Asian-Americans. She discusses hatred, hope and how humour saved her life

● Warning: this article contains discussion of suicide from the start

The thing about being a standup comedian is that you can never turn off that part of your brain, not even when you are trying to kill yourself. Margaret Cho learned this in 2013 when she attempted suicide in a hotel room, using a shower curtain rail. “It started bending and I was like: Oh shit, I’m too fat to kill myself, so I had to get down,” says Cho. “I thought: I’ll go on a diet and I’ll try again when I reach my goal weight, which means I’m never going to kill myself, because I’ll never reach my goal weight.”

The 52-year-old Emmy-, Grammy- and Oscar-nominated comedian, author, actor and podcaster lets out a delighted cackle. “That joke … people get really upset. They’re like: ‘You should put in a trigger warning.’ I don’t know how to do a trigger warning!” The point Cho is trying to make is a serious one. “My sense of humour probably saved me from dying,” she says. “You can’t really shut that part of you off, because humour is really hope. Humour and laughter is the intake of breath, which is the preservation of the body for the next moment … at your darkest moments; it’s actually the thing that shines the brightest. I’m really grateful for it and I’m really grateful I got to live.”

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The anti-Marie Kondo: Netflix celebrates the clothes we keep

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Worn Stories looks to unravel the tales behind the most treasured items in our wardrobes – but is such meaning and emotion easily conveyed via television?

I am not a minimalist: I don’t want to live with extreme amounts of nothing. I like “things”, and I like my things, which means I have several boxes of clothes, bags and shoes in my possession that have accompanied me through the best part of two decades. One of the boxes is my best and largest suitcase. When I was still travelling fairly regularly, I would have to empty out the contents of the suitcase and pile them somewhere else for my return, a process that feels a bit like uncovering memories and repressing them again, two weeks later, with a zip that goes all the way around.

Given the displacement of a series of house moves in my earlier 20s, the fact that I even still possess the navy corduroy American Apparel hotpants I wore to go clubbing at university (now, for users of the fashion app Depop, a vintage item), or the 70s-era yellow, white and purple-striped T-shirt I was wearing when I had an encounter with the far more colourful Iris Apfel, the interior designer, feels nothing short of miraculous. Today, I can recite what I was wearing to interview various figures in my former role as an editor at a fashion magazine, outfits carefully planned though liable to go awry, like when the zip on my green, chequered skirt broke off while meeting Chloë Sevigny.

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Ruby Rose on gender, bullying and breaking free: ‘I had a problem with authority’

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After coming out as a lesbian, aged 12, she suffered a horrendous attack at school. Now a successful actor, she is determined to help those wrestling with their identities

Ruby Rose spent much of her childhood travelling around Australia with her mother, an aspiring artist, trying to make ends meet. They were poor, but they were unstoppable, says Rose. Her mother had sold their TV, so there were no dreams of becoming the Hollywood action star she is now, nor the model, presenter, DJ, VJ and campaigner she has been over the years. When Rose was a child, she just wanted to write.

“I wanted to write a book for kids that were my age. I just wanted to have a way to communicate and speak to kids like me, who didn’t have someone,” she says, over Zoom. “I was just this kid who had no friends, who was super unpopular, got bullied and beaten up at school, and was like: ‘I’m going to be a famous writer.’”

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The return of the bonkbuster: how horny heroines are starting a new sexual revolution

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I longed for novels about female desire - women empowered by sex and their expressions of lust. So I sat down and wrote my own

The idea for my novel Insatiable emerged from a simple question: where were all the horny women? I knew that we were secretly legion. In fact, I suspected that I was surrounded by women, sitting on buses, standing in queues, staring out of the window and simultaneously entertaining all kinds of filthy daydreams. After all, millions of us had bought and read Fifty Shades of Grey. Even if half the sold copies were bought by people who wanted to mock it, that left millions of genuinely horny women unaccounted for – and buying the sequels.

I was not transported in the way I had hoped; I did not find Christian sexy, I did not relish the BDSM and, most of all, I struggled to connect with the beautiful, blank lead character, Anastasia. She seemed similar to every other sort-of-horny woman I had seen on screen, a sexual object before she was a sexual subject, a person who had to be perfect and prove herself desirable before she was allowed to pursue desires of her own.

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George RR Martin signs five-year, eight-figure deal for more HBO projects

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Game of Thrones author also has a Netflix film on the way, but there is still no word of his finishing the fantasy series that made his name

After the huge success of HBO’s adaptations of his Game of Thrones books, George RR Martin has signed a deal to develop several television series for the network and its streaming arm, HBO Max.

Related: George RR Martin: ‘Game of Thrones finishing is freeing, I’m at my own pace’

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Fear in your ear: the unstoppable rise of the horror podcast

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The Battersea Poltergeist is just one of many surging up the charts. Its creator, and others, explain why the pandemic has led people to seek out scary stories

By his own admission, Danny Robins has always been “obsessed with ghosts”. “I think it might have been growing up with atheist parents,” says the writer and broadcaster, who co-created Radio 4’s lauded Sir Lenny Henry vehicle Rudy’s Rare Records, among many other works. Among them is the 2017 investigative podcast about the paranormal, Haunted. “As a kid, I was very aware of the absence of belief,” he continues. “I think I might have just wanted to be part of a club. To be part of a club of believers.”

Now in his early 40s, Robins is trying to recruit as many believers as possible to the club via his new docudrama podcast, The Battersea Poltergeist. Available on BBC Sounds, it tells the story, beginning in 1956, of a bizarre 12-year-long haunting that resulted in Shirley Hitchings (just 15 at the start of it all) and the victim of the titular spook, fleeing to Bognor Regis. A poltergeist in Enfield in 1977 may have inspired Hollywood, but it’s south-west London’s one that put in the longest shift.

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