Category Archives: Television & radio

Headspace Guide to Meditation: can Netflix deliver enlightenment in 20 minutes?

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The streaming service and the mindfulness app have joined forces to inject some calm into our tech diet. Elle Hunt tries to switch off, while switching on

Those who subscribe to the notion of “new year, new me” will be familiar with the advice to empty your fridge and kitchen cupboards of junk food before 1 January, so as to set yourself up for healthy-eating success. (Or else a New Year’s Day McDonald’s delivery, when you wake up very much the old you, and not in the mood for overnight oats.)

After all that bingeing on Love Is Blind and Selling Sunset last year, Netflix now provides a similarly aspirational refresh, with a new series of guided meditations. Produced with the popular Headspace app, the eight 20-minute episodes are billed as a beginner’s guide to meditation, helping you to start the year “by being kind to your mind”.

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Why Mr Bean and Borat are ready to retire

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Rowan Atkinson and Sacha Baron Cohen are killing off two of comedy’s most indelible characters. They’ve picked the perfect time

Nothing lasts for ever. In time the trees will wither, the seas will boil and the mountains will crumble to dust. And nothing reinforces the ephemeral cruelty of the universe like the news that Rowan Atkinson doesn’t want to be Mr Bean any more.

In an interview with the Radio Times this week, Atkinson said of Mr Bean: “I don’t much enjoy playing him. The weight of responsibility is not pleasant. I find it stressful and exhausting, and I look forward to the end of it.” And that’s fair enough; Mr Bean has now been a going concern for 31 years, and has taken the form of a television programme, two films, an animated series, a sketch performed for the Olympics nine years ago and – slightly improbably – four books.

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Making waves: the hit Indian island radio station leading climate conversations

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With its unique blend of gossip, jokes and songs mixed with serious global issues, Kadal Osai has built a devoted audience

Selvarani Mari is a fisher and seaweed collector who lives on Pamban Island of Tamil Nadu, on the southernmost tip of India.

Every day she helps her husband cast the fishing nets, maintains rafts for cultivating seaweed, and dives into the ocean to gather sargassum. But she always makes time to listen to the radio.

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Denmark launches children’s TV show about man with giant penis

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Critics condemn idea of animated series about a man who cannot control his penis, but others have backed it

John Dillermand has an extraordinary penis. So extraordinary, in fact, that it can perform rescue operations, etch murals, hoist a flag and even steal ice-cream from children.

The Danish equivalent of the BBC, DR, has a new animated series aimed at four- to eight-year-olds about John Dillermand, the man with the world’s longest penis who overcomes hardships and challenges with his record-breaking genitals.

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Doctor Who’s Sacha Dhawan on his battle with anxiety: ‘Getting help was scary’

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The young actor, who plays the timelord’s arch enemy The Master, talks about his meaty new role in The Great – and reveals how he overcame the fears that used to leave him traumatised in his trailer

When Sacha Dhawan learned that he had been chosen to play Doctor Who baddie The Master, it should have been one of the biggest moments of his career. “My agent was ecstatic,” he says. “The BBC was ecstatic.” But he wasn’t. “I put the phone down and I couldn’t have felt more sad,” he says. The reason, it turns out, is a hidden battle with anxiety that Dhawan had been waging for years.

The opportunity was too big to pass up, but at that moment its scale felt insurmountable. “I would be the first British South Asian actor to play The Master,” he says. “So I’m kind of representing not only the Whoniverse but my community. And if I fuck this up, they aren’t going to be casting another South Asian actor for this.”

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Emma Mackey: ‘You’d have to be a sociopath to want to be a celebrity’

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The Sex Education star on the perils of social media, playing Emily Brontë, and her new Disney whodunnit with French and Saunders

When the trailer came out, it felt really Hollywood, which makes me laugh. I was like: ‘Ah, OK. This is quite a big deal.’” Emma Mackey spent the last few months of 2019 filming Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot adaptations. It’s a big-budget, big-name Disney extravaganza, and for Mackey, who turns 25 on Monday, it marks a first dip into blockbuster waters.

“I’d never really had that experience of walking into a studio before, where the sets were all built, and the costumes were tailored to my body, and I had a wig, and it was just … ” She trails off, lost for words. “I clearly can’t talk about it!” she says, laughing. “It completely blows my mind, still.” She does an impression of a 1930s ingenue. “‘It felt like a movie! A proper movie!’ Which is a good sign, I guess.”

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‘I did hate TV’: Selina Scott on Trump, Prince Andrew, Frank Bough and the BBC

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She was one of television’s biggest names, before giving it all up to live on a farm. She talks about her friendship with Princess Diana, the horror of tabloid harassment – and the extraordinary sexism she faced

Selina Scott has come in from the cold. She lights a fire and makes herself a cup of tea – black, no sugar. The former “golden girl” of the BBC lives on a farm in North Yorkshire with a couple of dogs, a handful of rare belted galloway cattle, a waddle of ducks and swans, and the odd otter. The room looks dark and bleak, and the internet isn’t working well, so we struggle to Zoom. “I’m going to move you into another room.” Scott still pronounces room aristocratically as “rum”, but her voice is different from the old days. Back then, it was more of a stately caress, offset by a youthful giggle. Today, her voice is deeper, more flinty, though still with a hint of grandeur. The Yorkshire roots of her childhood have re-emerged and planted themselves firmly in the peaty soil.

It’s 40 years since she made her name presenting News at 10, followed by BBC Breakfast Time, The Clothes Show, The Selina Scott Show for NBC, the magazine show West 57th for CBS and a brief stint at Sky. Scott wasn’t any old presenter. She bore an uncanny resemblance to Princess Diana (or, as she prefers it, the younger Diana bore an uncanny resemblance to her) and, like Diana, she became the nation’s sweetheart. Like Diana, she was hounded by the press – in a way that no other journalist has been. And like Diana she decided to walk away from it all at the peak of her fame. Unlike Diana, she lived to tell the tale.

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Irish state broadcaster apologises over TV comedy depicting God as rapist

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RTÉ New Year’s Eve show included mock news report about God implicated in sexual harassment case

Ireland’s state broadcaster, RTÉ, has apologised after an outcry over a television comedy sketch that depicted God as a rapist.

A countdown show on New Year’s Eve included a mock news report about God being the latest prominent figure implicated in a sexual harassment scandal.

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Larry King, TV chatshow veteran, in hospital with coronavirus – reports

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The 87-year-old is reportedly being treated at the Cedar-Sinai medical centre in Los Angeles after contracting coronavirus

Veteran talk show host Larry King, 87, is being treated at a Los Angeles hospital for Covid-19, according to multiple US reports. CNN, his employer for many years, said he had been in hospital for a week.

“Larry has fought so many health issues in the last few years and he is fighting this one hard too, he’s a champ,” ABC News reported a source close to the family as saying, after the story was originally reported in a showbiz column.

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‘Like a mission to Mars’: making David Attenborough’s A Perfect Planet

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Disco-dancing crabs, flamingos under a volcano … and a frog freezing itself alive. Behind the scenes of the BBC’s new nature documentary

Ed Charles, producer, Weather and Oceans
We were really lucky on this series in that we had finished our filming and were in the edit when coronavirus hit, so it was something that we could do remotely. I’ve been working on this project since 2016 so it has been a long time in the making.

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Fearne Cotton: ‘I have found clarity’

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She was the face of popular culture, but then Fearne Cotton reached crisis point. Now she has found her voice again...

Fearne Cotton keeps a pile of notebooks next to her computer, each brimming with plans for projects. Many of us have struggled to focus during the pandemic, but for Cotton, the past nine months have been among the most productive of her professional life. “I’ve found this time really creative,” she says, in that presenter voice of hers, so soothingly familiar. “It’s like when I go on holiday. In moments I’m forced to do nothing, I find this clarity.”

It’s 10am on a grey December morning when we meet over Zoom and her schedule, when she takes me through it, sounds exhausting. Her lockdowns have been busy. She’s written two books since the pandemic started and has kept up her popular wellness podcast, Happy Place, alongside her weekly Radio 2 show. And though the second instalment of her annual summer wellness event, Happy Place Festival, could have become another Covid casualty, Cotton and her team took the programme online. She juggled all this with home schooling her kids.

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‘The idea was to put smiles on faces – and it snowballed’: the people who saved 2020

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From the Spider-Men who rescued the children of Stockport, to the women who won the Nobel prize, here are seven people who brightened the darkest days

When Andrew Baldock decided to don a Spider-Man suit for his daily jog in March, to cheer up locked-down children on his estate, he never expected such a huge response. “The original idea was just to put some smiles on faces and then it snowballed,” says Baldock, 45, who lives in Stockport, Greater Manchester. “Everyone loved it.”

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Charlie Brooker: ‘There’s a certain release in laughing into the abyss’

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Black Mirror co-creators Brooker and Annabel Jones discuss new comedy special Death to 2020, and the importance of being silly in the face of disaster

I have been uncharacteristically optimistic this year,” Charlie Brooker says cheerfully from his west London living room, a prop sign from Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch episode behind him. “Partly because I’ve always been a pessimist and feared the worst. Suddenly, I don’t have to worry about the worst happening, because it’s happening. I think being a neurotic, worrisome person has slightly prepared me for it. After swine flu, I wouldn’t touch a door handle for about a year.”

There are other reasons for his unusual levels of cheer. Considering that a global pandemic has resided for years in Brooker’s buzzing mental database of potential catastrophes, he has not had a bad 2020. In May, he hosted the BBC’s Antiviral Wipe, the first network comedy show to be made about (and under) lockdown. In July, Broke and Bones, the new production company launched by Brooker and his long-time creative partner Annabel Jones, announced a Netflix deal that extends far beyond its breakthrough hit Black Mirror. The pair are opening their account with Death to 2020, a one-off (obviously) about the rotten year that was. As Leslie Jones, one of several A-list guests, says in the trailer: “I’d say it was a trainwreck and a shitshow but that would be unfair to trains and shit.”

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Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal: ‘It’s been a wild few months for us’

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The stars of the BBC’s hit Sally Rooney adaptation on their quarantine viewing, and how their lives have changed since playing Marianne and Connell

Was there a show this year that everyone else loved but you just couldn’t get on with?
Daisy: That’s a hard one. I honestly think I watched every show that’s aired on TV in the last few months. I have watched, and enjoyed every one. I’m trying to think. The news?

Paul: What was the one you tried to get me to watch, Daisy? I can’t remember the name of it. I think it was Selling Sunset? The one with the realtors in LA. I couldn’t get into it.

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Indian news channel fined in UK for hate speech about Pakistan

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Ofcom imposes £20,000 penalty on Republic TV for ‘highly pejorative’ comments on talk show

A rightwing Indian news channel known for its strong pro-government stance and firebrand host has been fined by the UK regulator Ofcom for broadcasting hate speech about Pakistan.

Republic TV was fined £20,000 for airing a segment on its UK service, which conveyed the view that all Pakistani people are terrorists, including “their scientists, doctors, their leaders, politicians […] Even their sports people”.

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Dan Levy on Schitt’s Creek: ‘Winning nine Emmys was surreal’

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The writer and star of the dysfunctional-family sitcom on his top shows of 2020 and the touching legacy of his hit series

Was there a show that everyone else loved this year that you just couldn’t get on with?
Tiger King. I couldn’t do it. Something about it felt a little too exploitative for me. I never felt OK when I was watching it. Maybe that’s the main thing. There was a full month when everybody was watching it, when I desperately tried to stay part of the conversation. But I just could not invest. And I don’t know, there is something kind of icky about what was going on there. But this is one man’s opinion in a sea of other people.

Conversely, were there are any shows you enjoyed over lockdown that you didn’t expect to?
The Real Housewives of Atlanta. I feel like the characters on that show are so strong and opinionated and have a sense of humour and self-awareness. It’s an incredible alchemy. It’s a great social group that they’ve put together to film. I was surprised to enjoy it, because I worked in reality television for a long time. I hosted the aftershow for The Hills before my career started. And I think that when you work in reality TV, it kind of pulls back the curtain in a way that doesn’t necessarily make you want to watch more of it. So this was the first reality show that I had watched for a really long time.

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I May Destroy You’s Weruche Opia: ‘Michaela Coel showed our flaws and complexities’

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The breakout star of the Guardian’s show of the year on her small-screen picks of 2020, and how her role as Terry divided viewers

What shows did you get into this year, over our various lockdowns?
I watched a lot of stuff. That’s all we could do really, apart from eat – I worked out a lot, too. I fell in love with 90 Day Fiancé, which I think is the most brilliant reality show on TV right now. I loved the latest series of Insecure, and Gangs of London with Paapa [Essiedu, Opia’s I May Destroy You co-star]. I loved I Hate Suzie, and Adult Material – Hayley Squires did a fantastic job. That was a brilliant little find, and it was so interesting to learn about the porn industry and the human side of it.

And were there any series you got into that you might not have ordinarily watched?
I couldn’t stop watching Ted Lasso on Apple TV+. I was like, what is this actually about? An American who coaches American football comes to the UK to a weird team and is … teaching them football? But it was just nice, simple and uplifting – it was a little treat to forget about the world and just watch something wholesome.

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The roles I’ve played brought home to me the scourge of violence against women | Nicole Kidman

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There is a pandemic of violence against women and girls – and we can all act as the vaccine

• Nicole Kidman is an Oscar-winning actor, who played a lead role in 2020 drama The Undoing

We have been through the unimaginable this year. Separated from family and people we love, our dreams put on pause, while fearing for our health and our very lives.

In addition to Covid-19, a shadow pandemic has been unfolding: violence against women. Calls to helplines increased up to fivefold in the first few weeks of the pandemic. And an issue that was already pervasive before Covid-19 hit – evident on the streets, in the tube or a hotel room, on the news, in a conversation with a friend, in the scripts I read and the roles I played – became even more pressing.

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