Category Archives: Television & radio

Listen up: making music from the northern lights

Posted on by

A biologist and composer have turned the aurora borealis into sound to create a magic melding of art and nature

There’s a hypnotic crackle before a whoosh of sound flies from ear to ear. It’s followed by a heavenly chorus that might be whales whistling, frogs calling or the chirping of an alien bird. It sounds celestial because that’s what it is. The noise is the aurora borealis: the northern lights.

The vivid green lights that trace across the Arctic sky emit electromagnetic waves when the solar shower meets the Earth’s magnetic field, and these can be translated into sounds that are made audible to human ears by a small machine.

Continue reading...

T’Nia Miller: ‘I never saw a queer person on TV when I was growing up’

Posted on by

The star of Years and Years and The Haunting of Bly Manor reflects on coming out as lesbian to her mum, facing racism at drama school and the progress – or not – of the Black Lives Movement

When T’Nia Miller first told her mother that she was dating a woman, she explained to her mum that she wasn’t there to see her have sex with men, so this was no different. “It’s just about me having really good friendships and beauty in my life,” she recalls saying. “That was it. We never had more of a conversation than that. If she had any issues, they were hers to deal with, not mine. She knew that. She’s a very educated, very well-read woman. For her, coming to terms with it was easy.”

The east-London born actor is telling me this story over the phone as she walks her dog (she forgot about the interview and her seven-month-old pomeranian, Dilhi, needed his daily steps) because she’s taking part in the #YoungerMe campaign, an initiative by the LGBTQ+ young persons organisation Just Like Us, which asks how LGBTQ+ inclusive education would have helped older queer people when they were in school.

Continue reading...

TV stay home: all hail the medium that kept us entertained in 2020

Posted on by

We’ve watched more telly than ever this year. Our standards may have dropped – but then Covid does cause loss of taste

I know it is tedious to look back on 2020 and force everything through the prism of coronavirus – “Hey, remember that absolute horrorshow of a year we all just-about lived through? Well, let’s look back on the horror again, shall we?” – but it is slightly unavoidable when recapping what is arguably the weirdest year in television since the format was invented. We have, each of us, watched more TV in the last nine months than at any other time in our lives. And yet, with so little of it being newly produced, there has been an odd staleness to our viewing habits. I’m bored of live TV and I’m bored of box sets, so what else is there to do? Read a book? Behave.

The first thing we need to confront is the short-lived Zoom era of Lockdown 1.0, which wasn’t very good. It’s harsh of me to single people out, but The Steph Show on Channel 4 was an early example of form clattering up against need, as a cheery Steph McGovern tried to hold together a light magazine show from the comfort of her own home. Yes, it was rubbish (and the less-constrained Steph’s Packed Lunch studio variation shows that the desperately-broadcasting-from-a-house was the faulty part, not the rest of the show’s format), but crucially it started airing on 30 March – the date we still thought we’d all be back at work within a couple of weeks – and the sheer fact that someone tried to launch a magazine show to keep us all entertained in the middle of a history-shaping global emergency is something to be commended.

Continue reading...

Regé-Jean Page on Bridgerton: ‘We’re seeing this Regency romance through a feminist lens’

Posted on by

The actor reflects on the diverse casting of the Netflix period drama, facing up to British history and how the pandemic has made him find new ways to ‘make my skills useful to other people’

“As an artist, you have to constantly ask yourself: ‘Why this story? Why now?’”, says Regé-Jean Page. The 30-year-old actor is video-calling from his apartment in Los Angeles and expounding on his latest role as the rakishly debonair Duke of Hastings in the Regency-era romance Bridgerton.

A frothy period drama bolstered by a lavish Netflix budget might not seem like the most pressing nor most relevant of artistic choices for Page to be making. Yet, he sees the eight-part series as a subversive act, because of its diverse cast injecting multiculturalism and a boundary-breaking sense of sexual intensity into a traditionally white, staid setting.

Continue reading...

Olivia Colman on acting: ‘Take your job seriously and not yourself’

Posted on by

Star of The Crown and Peep Show opens up on her career, revealing she is plagued by self-doubt

She won an Oscar for her performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite, and is a household name thanks to roles as wide-ranging as Sophie in Peep Show and Queen Elizabeth in The Crown. But, despite such success, Olivia Colman has revealed she is plagued by self-doubt and a fear of unemployment, having never forgotten the pain of repeated rejection at the start of her career.

Colman, 46, graduated from the Bristol Old Vic theatre school more than two decades ago, but still recalls her early struggles and “the horrible feeling” of no one calling after she went up for acting jobs. “All those hundreds of auditions I did in the first two years. They don’t just say ‘sorry, no thank you’. You don’t hear anything. That’s heartbreaking.”

Continue reading...

David Attenborough: ‘The Earth and its oceans are finite. We need to show mutual restraint’

Posted on by

At 94, what has the world’s most-travelled naturalist learned? He talks garden birds in lockdown, the eerie silence of Chernobyl – and tackling the climate crisis

Before the stay-at-home orders of 2020 kept him in one place for months on end, David Attenborough had never sat in his garden and listened to the birds. Not properly, he says, not determinedly “swotting up with a notebook and keeping a bird list”. The foremost figure in natural-world broadcasting (so admired by naturalists around the planet, he has three types of plant as well as a spider, snail, grasshopper, frog, lizard, marsupial lion and shark-like fish named after him) hardly paid attention to the wildlife on his doorstep until lockdown forced his hand. From spring through to autumn, he says, he sat outside with a pencil and made a determined effort to identify every species he could hear. Blackbirds. Thrushes. Jays. Blue tits and great tits. Swifts.

“Actually, I couldn’t really hear the swifts,” the 94-year-old admits. Something to do with their pitch, and his failing ears. “My hearing,” Attenborough growls, using the breathy, mournful voice that often accompanies footage of an ageing alpha getting supplanted by a younger fitter animal, “is not what it was.”

Continue reading...

Barbara Windsor, star of Carry On films and EastEnders, dies at 83

Posted on by

Husband says ‘final weeks were typical of how she lived her life. Full of humour, drama and a fighting spirit until the end’

Dame Barbara Windsor, best known for her roles in EastEnders and the Carry On films, has died aged 83, her husband Scott Mitchell has said.

Mitchell said in a statement: “It is with deep sadness that I can confirm that my darling wife Barbara passed away at 8.35pm on Thursday 10 December at a London care home.

Continue reading...

‘Boys can be fairies – it’s the 21st century’: How Fate: The Winx Saga finds the reality in fantasy

Posted on by

The writer and star of the new Netflix series explain the myriad challenges of turning a manga-style kids’ cartoon into a live-action teen drama

How do you make teen TV magic? You call Brian Young. The writer cut his teeth on The Vampire Diaries, a supernatural teen drama that emerged from the Twilight era of sexy-horror fandoms, but it soon established its own identity, resulting in a successful eight seasons. So, when Netflix wanted to turn Winx Club – the hit Italian cartoon about fairies – into a live-action fantasy series for young adults, they recruited Young.

To him, the challenge of re-imagining the Winx world for a more mature audience was clear: “Tone. It’s trying to figure out how we ground this show in real character moments, things that any audience member would relate to. And this is coming from a massive fantasy fan – I had my Dungeons & Dragons character when I was a kid – but it is very easy to spiral off into absurdity with stuff like this.”

Continue reading...

Craig Revel Horwood: ‘I’m a baddie in panto but on Strictly I’m just being honest’

Posted on by

The Strictly Come Dancing judge reveals which contestant surprised him the most and why he’s looking forward to getting booed twice a day in Robin Hood

You’re a panto regular – what do you enjoy most about it?
I love live theatre – it’s where I started my career back home in Australia and I got into it as soon as I arrived in the UK. As much as I love my screen career, you simply can’t beat helping an audience to suspend their disbelief for a few hours and enjoy a shared experience live and in real time. While we all take it seriously and it’s hard work, panto is fun, festive and lets me show audiences what I can do when I’m not sitting behind my Strictly desk.

Panto has never fully been exported to Australia. When did you first see one?
The first ever pantomime I was in! Our producers, Qdos Entertainment, once called offering me the job of directing one of their productions, but due to filming commitments I couldn’t make it work. They called back five minutes later and asked me if I wanted to be in the panto instead and I jumped at the chance. It was a baptism of fire – wearing a dress, ridiculously high heels and getting booed twice a day. But I loved it, and I still do.

Continue reading...

Carole Baskin: ‘After Tiger King, my phone rang every two minutes for months’

Posted on by

The animal sanctuary owner was catapulted to fame by the Netflix series – and became an unlikely fashion trendsetter

Carole Baskin watched the Netflix documentary series Tiger King as many of us did: she binged it, devouring all seven episodes in one sitting as soon as it was released in March. “It was like watching a dumpster fire, you just couldn’t turn away from it,” says Baskin on a video call. “It was just mesmerising that there could be this many crazy people doing so many wretched things to animals.”

Of course, one of the “crazy people”, the show implied, was her. Baskin, a 59-year-old owner of the Big Cat Rescue sanctuary in Florida, she she had been told by the film-makers that Tiger King would be an exposé of the mistreatment of the animals by private owners in America. Instead, the series mainly focused on a long-running feud between Baskin and Joseph Maldonado-Passage, a mulleted, polygamous, country music-loving zoo owner from Oklahoma who calls himself “Joe Exotic”.

Continue reading...

Woman seriously hurt by tiger bite at Carole Baskin big cat sanctuary

Posted on by
  • Volunteer taken to hospital after incident early on Thursday
  • Big Cat Rescue in Tampa made famous by Netflix’s Tiger King

A female volunteer who regularly feeds big cats was bitten and seriously injured by a tiger Thursday morning at Carole Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue sanctuary in Florida, which was made famous by the Netflix series Tiger King, officials said.

Hillsborough county fire rescue received a trauma alert call about 8.30am Thursday from the sanctuary, agency spokesman Eric Seidel told the Associated Press.

Continue reading...

The Crown has slipped: how the Netflix epic captures our relationship with the royals

Posted on by

While the fourth series has come under fire for factual inaccuracy, it is just one of many series to reflect the royals long history of mythmaking

‘Let’s get it over with,” sighs Prince Philip as he reluctantly prepares to venture towards a crowd of adoring subjects. On the one hand, this moment in The Crown has the ring of truth: realistically, why would members of the royal family be enthusiastic about meeting yet another mob of curtsying, awestruck plebs? It must be tremendously boring. And yet, on the other hand, how dare they? Who pays their wages?

A few things have become clear during the fourth season of Peter Morgan’s Netflix epic. Firstly, it’s just as well The Crown isn’t on the BBC. Because if it was, the nation’s enraged rightwing culture warriors would have descended upon Broadcasting House and stormed it. Secondly, this is a portrait of managed decline. And finally, The Crown means The Queen. But Olivia Colman’s Elizabeth II is more Canute than Britannia – not ruling the waves but nobly, if eventually absurdly, trying to hold them back.

Continue reading...

The Prom review – is Ryan Murphy’s musical the first film of the Biden era?

Posted on by

Taste the treacle as Nicole Kidman’s Broadway liberals rebuke a rural high school – and learn a few things about themselves

Like High School Musical on some sort of absinthe/Xanax cocktail, The Prom is an outrageous work of steroidal show tune madness, directed by the dark master himself, Ryan “Glee” Murphy, who is to jazz-hands musical theatre what Nancy Meyers is to upscale romcom or Friedrich Nietzsche to classical philology.

Meryl Streep and James Corden play Dee Dee Allen and Barry Glickman, two fading Broadway stars in trouble after their latest show closes ignominiously; it is called Eleanor!, a misjudged musical version of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt with Dee Dee in the title role and Barry as Franklin D Roosevelt. Barry also has financial difficulties (“I had to declare bankruptcy after my self-produced Notes on a Scandal”). After unhelpful press notices turn their opening night party at Sardi’s into a wake, Dee Dee and Barry find themselves drowning their sorrows with chorus-line trooper Angie (Nicole Kidman) and unemployed-actor-turned-bartender Trent (played by The Book of Mormon’s Andrew Rannells). How on earth are they going to turn their careers around?

Then Angie sees a news story trending on Twitter: a gay teenager in Indiana has been prevented by her high school from bringing a girl as a date to the prom. The teen in question is Emma (a nice performance from Jo Ellen Pellman, like a young Elisabeth Moss), her secret girlfriend is Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) and it is Alyssa’s fiercely conservative mom (Kerry Washington) who is behind the ban. Our heroic foursome declare that they will sweep into hicksville with all their enlightened values and glamorous celebrity, and campaign against this homophobia, boosting their prestige in the biz. They gatecrash a tense school meeting, declaring dramatically: “We are liberals from Broadway!”

Continue reading...

Helena Bonham Carter says The Crown should stress to viewers it’s a drama

Posted on by

Actor who plays Princess Margaret adds her voice to calls for Netflix to add a disclaimer

Helena Bonham Carter has said The Crown has a “moral responsibility” to tell viewers that it is a drama, rather than historical fact, in the wake of calls for a “health warning” for people watching the series.

The actor, who played Princess Margaret in series three and four of the Netflix hit drama, told an official podcast for the show that there was an important distinction between “our version”, and the “real version”.

Continue reading...

Hugh Grant’s Undoing: how romcom leading men embraced the dark side

Posted on by

No more Mr Nice Guys! With his role in the HBO miniseries, Grant – like Richard Gere and Vince Vaughn – has swapped charm for smarm, reflecting a changing society

Hugh Grant made his name in the 90s as a squeaky-clean charmer, but anyone who has been keeping tabs on his career will not have been surprised to see him show up in the HBO miniseries The Undoing as an unhinged philanderer, attacking a man with his bare teeth in a prison-yard brawl. For a while now, the actor who used to warm our hearts has been doing his best to chill our blood. And he has been doing it pretty well: as a scheming politician in A Very English Scandal, as a scheming investigator in The Gentlemen and, best of all, as a scheming theatre impresario in Paddington 2. As mid-career renewals go, Grant’s has been one of the best and The Undoing, six hours of top-notch trash that wraps up tonight, has made the most of its newly depraved star.

The reinvention of the romantic lead is hardly a new phenomenon – it is more than 75 years since Murder, My Sweet turned Dick Powell from a fresh-faced musical star to a whisky-addled noir antihero, but in recent years it has become an especially popular trope. Richard Gere, who, like Grant, found screen stardom by flirting faux-modestly with flattered young ladies, has lately gone to great pains to show off his ugly side. He forged a career from playing wealthy, winsome suitors, but his recent turns as a hedge-fund magnate (Arbitrage), a moneyed philanthropist (The Benefactor), a high-flying politician (The Dinner) and a Murdoch-esque media mogul (MotherFatherSon) have all helped to flip the twinkly-eyed archetype on its head. Gere’s message is clear: I’m not the white knight you all thought I was.

Continue reading...

Culture secretary to ask Netflix to play ‘health warning’ that The Crown is fictional

Posted on by

Oliver Dowden says younger viewers might take historical drama’s portrayal as fact

The culture secretary plans to write to Netflix and request a “health warning” is played before The Crown so viewers are aware that the historical drama is a work of fiction, he said in an intervention that prompted criticism.

Oliver Dowden said that without the caveat younger viewers who did not live through the events might “mistake fiction for fact” following complaints that the fourth series of the drama had abused its artistic licence and fabricated events.

Continue reading...

How the Late Late Toy Show became an unlikely Irish TV institution

Posted on by

Annual special – where garish sweaters meet unrestrained children – airs on Friday evening

It is possibly the most anticipated moment in Ireland’s cultural calendar, a television event that draws huge ratings, unites the diaspora and is parsed as a barometer for the mood of the nation.

Expectation builds months in advance, rumours about the theme, leaks about participants, sometimes alarm that the formula may change.

Continue reading...

The Great British Bake Off final review – flawed gems worth celebrating

Posted on by

In a series where being put in a Covid bubble meant a reduction in the talent available, it was the failures that stood out

  • This article contains spoilers

This year needed The Great British Bake Off like never before, and The Great British Bake Off delivered. The programme has always been comfort food but, at times this year, it almost transcended television. It felt like a hug. It felt like medicine.

I have a theory about this. The context of this year’s series – with all the participants agreeing to abandon their loved ones and bubble up in a hotel – meant that the talent pool was smaller than usual. And this meant that the contestants weren’t quite as good as usual. And this meant that we got to witness more mistakes than usual. This wasn’t a demonstration of wall-to-wall technical wizardry by any means. Instead, what we got this year was a presentation of well-meaning but flawed humanity. And that’s what we’ve all been crying out for.

Continue reading...

Police investigate I’m a Celebrity over fears non-native bugs may be escaping

Posted on by

Rogue creatures from bushtucker trials including ‘ultimate survivor’ cockroaches could threaten Welsh countryside

Police are investigating I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! over concerns non-native wildlife could have escaped into the Welsh countryside during bushtucker trials, the Guardian can reveal.

Rural crime officers from north Wales police are looking into complaints that non-native creatures such as cockroaches, maggots, spiders and worms could threaten wildlife in the 100-hectare (250-acre) estate surrounding Gwrych Castle in north Wales, where the show is being held this year.

Continue reading...