Performer and presenter says he has been suffering ‘almost fatal’ condition of lithium toxicity
Former Goodies star Bill Oddie has revealed he has been suffering from an “almost fatal” condition this summer.
The 79-year-old conservationist and birdwatcher used Twitter to tell followers he had been “very ill” with “lithium toxicity”.
Continue reading...New director general says he wants to focus on impartiality after accusations of bias
Tim Davie is to crack down on staff posting their views on social media in a move to restore the view of the BBC as impartial, and raised the question of slashing the corporation’s output by a fifth, cutting more jobs and potentially shutting TV channels.
The new director general said the BBC had to focus on impartiality to address accusations of bias from politicians on both sides of the political divide.
Continue reading...The streaming giant’s Cape Town-set series has been a huge hit. But do dramas of its ilk lack authenticity, or is their global feel the key to their success?
Neon lights dance across an infinity pool, while, inside an enormous mansion, couples canoodle in immaculate white corridors and the cool kids sneak away to smoke. At this kind of party, there are those who are recognised at the door and those who have to blag to get their name on the guestlist. As the birthday girl schmoozes with her guests, an awkward attendee does anything to escape the hubbub and keep her head down, as red cups pile up in the garden and a queue forms for the bar.
So far, so teen drama. But this isn’t London or LA: the two girls are Fikile Bhele and Puleng Khumalo, and the show is Blood and Water, set in South Africa. The second African series produced and released by Netflix, it focuses on the class divide between private Parkhurst school in Cape Town and its unnamed public counterpart, as well as Khumalo’s search for her missing sister. Like many dramas aimed at younger viewers, the first instalment kicks off in the midst of a debauched, booze-soaked gathering before branching out into the dark underbelly of popularity – think student-teacher relationships and moneyed parents wielding their power in the education system in the form of “donations”.
Continue reading...He’s back – sporting a post-lockdown haircut and hosting a new podcast. Britain’s No 1 raconteur talks about his new hat, driving a Vauxhall, and why Boris Johnson looks like the evil rabbit in Watership Down
Turn right out of Norwich railway station, take the number 12 bus, change at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, ride eight stops on the number 4 towards Swanton Morley, walk 1.1 miles, and you can’t help but spot the twin louvred conical towers of the oasthouse that Alan Partridge calls home. It is from this very oasthouse that Partridge – raconteur, national treasure, wit – broadcasts his brand new podcast, From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast, and to which Partridge has invited the Guardian.
Partridge bounds out to greet me in what appears to be an effusive show of hospitality. He offers a handshake before snapping it back into a more pandemic-appropriate wave. “I am so fine with social distancing,” he says. “Remember, I work in television where you’re forever mauled, hugged and leant on by over-pally floor managers or cackling makeup ladies. Now I can say, ‘Get your hands off me!’ without appearing in any way rude.”
Continue reading...From Chewing Gum to I May Destroy You, the writer and actor has carved out a groove as a true original. Who better to convince us all to shop secondhand?
Michaela Coel could be wearing anything she wanted, right now. As the star and creator of I May Destroy You, the BBC drama that became a water cooler hit even in a summer without water coolers, Coel is the hottest property in town. Any fashion designer would jump at the chance to dress her. But today she is enthusing over a time-pummelled black sweatshirt with faded insignia, sourced not from a Bond Street boutique but from Oxfam’s cavernous warehouse in Batley, North Yorkshire. “I’m here for it,” she murmurs approvingly, pulling it over her head.
She’s here for all of it. She’s here for the pale pink Burberry trenchcoat, another Batley treasure unearthed for our shoot by Oxfam’s senior fashion adviser, Bay Garnett, a nod to Coel’s neon bubblegum bob as Arabella in IMDY. She’s here for the dynamite 80s jeans and matching jacket in toffee-apple faux-leather, a rare Gaultier Jeans find. She’s here for the Fanta-coloured boilersuit (think Ripley in Alien meets Bananarama on Top Of The Pops), for the elegant 70s Jaeger mustard blazer with anchor-stamped gold buttons, and for a knockout pair of Versace high-waisted shorts, illustrated with classic Rita Hayworth film posters.
Continue reading...Groups pitching to perceived desire for alternative output as trust in BBC falls
Rival efforts are under way to launch a Fox News-style opinionated current affairs TV station in Britain to counter the BBC.
One group is promising a news channel “distinctly different from the out-of-touch incumbents” and has already been awarded a licence to broadcast by the media regulator, Ofcom, under the name “GB News”. Its founder has said the BBC is a “disgrace” that “is bad for Britain on so many levels” and “needs to be broken up”.
Continue reading...As the Game of Thrones star returns to screens in Sky’s Two Weeks to Live, she talks on-set scrapes, off-screen battles, and how the television industry could up its game overnight
When Maisie Williams was shooting a fight scene in her latest TV project, Two Weeks to Live, she took a blow to the head. “I got hit a couple of times with a glass bottle,” she says, matter-of-factly over the phone. I can’t see her face but I can almost hear her smiling, a faint giggle detectable between sentences. “I also kicked my co-star in the chin and made his mouth bleed. Other than that, it was pretty scrape-free.”
A kick in the face and multiple rounds of bottling might sound like the opposite of “scrape-free”, but perhaps it is for an actor such as Williams, best known for her role as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones. As the noblewoman turned assassin, Williams’s fight scenes included some of the show’s most pivotal, such as the one in the bloody, battle-filled penultimate episode, The Long Night, which Williams trained for a year to film.
Continue reading...Officials in Danbury, Connecticut, say they will name their sewage plant after the comedian John Oliver, in retaliation for an expletive-filled rant about the city on his HBO show.
Related: John Oliver: US is 'making a mockery of the phrase a jury of your peers'
Continue reading...Horrors of all kinds abound in HBO’s brilliant new drama; Afua Hirsch explores African history; and inside the mind of Derren Brown
Lovecraft Country (Sky Atlantic) | sky.com
African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power (BBC Four) | BBC iPlayer
Handmade in Africa (BBC Four) | BBCiPlayer
Derren Brown: 20 Years of Mind Control (Channel 4) | 4oD
Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom (BBC Two) | BBC iPlayer
Lovecraft Country was, in its ambitions and its potential heft, already a phenomenon just on paper. Add in the presence of JJ Abrams and Jordan Peele as executive producers, along with a sublime cast of strength in depth, and it landed on our screens last week with a burnished gleam of unmistakable triumph. It is that rare thing: a show that can deliver gut-punch messages of contempt (and hope), yet which remembers throughout that it’s a drama, keeping one thrillingly on the edge, ripe and reeking with surprise.
Continue reading...The comedian and actor has written a raw and compelling book about his early life, including the abuse he suffered from his father
Your memoir details personal experiences you have never talked about in public before. This includes the sexual abuse you suffered as a child, at the hands of your father, after your mother’s death from leukaemia. Why write about these experiences now?
I kept feeling their presence in their absence from so many parts of my life. I didn’t have the courage, strength or fortitude to confront them. They were never in my comedy. I’d always been focused to get to the next milestone, the next show, the next fringe. I’d also already written a memoir [2010’s Teenage Revolution: Growing Up in the 80s] but all the things that mattered were missing.
In 2016, you started a part-time MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths University. Was that to help tell this story?
I wanted to get this material out of myself, but I was writing about my life in the third person at first, workshopping it as short stories. Then, towards the end of the first year, I wrote something for an assessment, which became a chapter in the book, relatively unchanged [a chapter called Hands, which details the first incident of sexual abuse Davies suffered, at the age of “eight or nine”]. The assessment just had my student number on it, so it felt safe to write it. The tutor feedback was anonymous, too. It allowed me to present a version of myself where nothing was concealed from view.
A notorious ‘friendly fire’ incident during the Iraq war is picked apart in this meticulous 5 Live podcast
On the Ground (BBC 5 Live) | BBC Sounds
Audrey Gillan is known to radio lovers as the Scottish reporter who befriended two rough sleepers in Spitalfields, London, and made a six-part series about them. Tara and George was broadcast on Radio 4, and won radio programme of the year at the 2019 Broadcasting Press Guild awards. It was a tender and affecting series, with Gillan, if not at the forefront, decidedly involved: she was honest about her feelings around homelessness, her worries about Tara and George and how they were living. It was this relationship – as well as the one between Tara and George themselves – that gave the series its flavour and heart.
Continue reading...Updated guidance suggests directors take inspiration from classic films made when sex on screen was prohibited
British film and TV directors are being encouraged to seek inspiration from classic romances such as Casablanca and ditch depictions of sex altogether when planning intimate scenes under new guidelines for directing during the Covid-19 crisis.
Directors UK, the professional association for screen directors in Britain, suggested some creative alternatives to avoid sex scenes with physical interaction while social distancing is required, in an update to its Directing Nudity and Simulated Sex guidelines, which are focused on safe working during the pandemic.
Continue reading...Departures come amid backstage turmoil and complaints of bullying, racism and sexual misconduct against three producers
Three top producers on the The Ellen DeGeneres Show have exited the popular television talkshow, Warner Bros said on Monday, after an internal investigation into complaints of bullying, racism and sexual misconduct against them.
A spokesperson for Warner Bros, which produces the show, on Monday said that three senior producers had “parted ways” with the show.
Continue reading...The actor and comedian decided it was time to have the procedure after he and his wife had had four children. Here he writes candidly about the experience, and why it was the kindest cut
I got a vasectomy a few months ago. A vasectomy is when they cut and tie off the vas deferens, which are these little tubes in your ball sack (scrotum) so that there’s no sperm (sperm) in your jizz (semen) when you bust (ejaculate). I did this because my wife and I don’t want her to get pregnant again. It doesn’t mean we don’t want any more kids, it just means that if we did have any more, they’d have to be adopted or stolen or left to us because friends or family with young kids died in a plane crash or had their brain stems blown apart by less-lethal rounds fired at them at point-blank range while they were waiting in an 11-hour line attempting to vote in November.
I figured after all my wife, Leah, and her body had done for our family, the least I could do was let a doctor slice into my bag and sterilise me. Leah had taken birth control for decades, which is a giant pain in the ass and also decidedly sexist pharmacological slavery. IMAGINE a man having to remember to not only take a pill every day, but also having to deal with employer-provided private insurance prescription plans in the US which drop you or sell your plan to another company without telling you, among other crimes. And messing up once could land you with – for example – an ectopic pregnancy that isn’t diagnosed soon enough because you’re afraid to go to the doctor due to your high deductible, so you literally die and are dead, in a cemetery. I think I speak for my bros when I say: “No thanks!”
Continue reading...Radio 1Xtra presenter Sideman says he can no longer work for broadcaster after ‘slap in the face’
A BBC radio presenter has quit his job after the corporation defended its decision to broadcast the N-word in a television news broadcast.
Radio 1Xtra presenter Sideman said he no longer felt comfortable working for the national broadcaster after it stuck by the decision to broadcast the language in a report on a racially motivated hit-and-run attack.
Continue reading...Staff on DeGeneres’s talkshow have denounced its ‘toxic’ environment. The host may not be to blame, but she has always been spikier than her public image
What on earth is going on with Ellen DeGeneres?
Kate, by email
Things are not well in Ellen land. Things have been worse, but let’s catch up on the current situation first.
Continue reading...A portrait of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black emergency medical technician shot dead by police in her own home earlier this year, will appear on the cover of the latest issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.
It is the first time in the magazine’s 20-year history that the cover will not feature the magazine’s namesake: Oprah Winfrey.
Continue reading...The acclaimed HBO graphic novel adaptation leads the pack with 26 nominations, with the Amazon period comedy following behind
HBO’s acclaimed graphic novel adaptation Watchmen leads this year’s Emmy nominations with 26 nods.
Related: Lorde and Mick Jagger urge politicians to seek permission before using music
Continue reading...She stole the show in Orange Is the New Black. Now the actor is playing the first black woman to seek the US presidency – and rejecting suggestions she gets a ‘Hollywood smile’
Shirley Chisholm was a woman of many firsts. She was the first black woman elected to Congress, the first black candidate to seek the presidency, and the first woman, full-stop, to participate in a US presidential debate. She introduced more than 50 pieces of legislation, most championing racial, economic and gender equality, and is often credited as paving the way for Barack Obama. In doing so, she occupied a space that many black women recognise: the solitary seat as the only such face at the table.
Uzo Aduba, who plays Chisholm in the acclaimed new FX series Mrs America, says that this was a key factor in bringing this formidable politician to life. “That feeling of being the ‘only’,” she says, speaking via Zoom with a warm smile on her face. “It was important to get that right.”
Continue reading...In 2005, Anthony Walker was killed in a horrific attack, aged just 18. His mother talks about grief, forgiveness and how his death changed her, ahead of a powerful new drama about his life
Fifteen years after 18-year-old Anthony Walker was murdered in a horrifyingly violent racist attack, his mother is still dealing with the fallout. On every anniversary, every birthday, Gee Walker says, she feels the pain afresh. She stops herself. She knows she is playing it down. No, she says, every day she feels the pain afresh. “The ifs and buts, the should haves/would haves/could-have-dones … they are always there. They never go. You can’t help thinking what if I’d done something right? What if I’d done this on the night? What if I’d stayed home and not asked him to babysit? What if I’d given him a lift? What if I’d got home a few minutes earlier?”
At about 11pm on 29 July 2005, Walker returned home from singing in the church choir. Anthony, the fourth of six children, had been babysitting his nephew, along with his girlfriend, Louise, and cousin Marcus. The two boys walked Louise to the bus stop. As the trio – the two black boys accompanying the white girl – passed the door of the Huyton Park pub, a 17-year-old called Michael Barton hurled racist abuse at the group. Huyton was known as a tough, almost exclusively white town in the borough of Knowsley, Merseyside. Anxious to prevent a confrontation, Anthony replied: “We’re only waiting for the bus and then we’re going.” When Barton said: “Walk, nigger, walk,” the group walked off to another bus stop. Barton then told his 20-year-old cousin Paul Taylor that he had “lost face”, and the two pursued them in a Peugeot car.
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