Monsters are heinous, but they need collaborators to do their dirty work | Suzanne Moore

Mouths to feed, rent to pay: there’s always an excuse if you’re tempted to do the wrong thing

Where is Ghislaine Maxwell? Where? I sat through the four episodes of Filthy Rich, the Netflix documentary on Jeffrey Epstein. I had to force myself, not because it was so upsetting – which, of course, it also was – but because the tales of his sexual abuse were so monotonous. Brave and defiant, his victims had to numb themselves slightly to tell and retell what happened to them when they were as young as 14. The interviews with the monster himself, as always, were disappointingly banal. Monsters often are tediously ordinary. The magnetic charm, the immense intellect, is one of the biggest delusions of “true crime”. See also Ted Bundy.

Anyway Ghislaine, accused of procuring underage girls for Epstein, is said to be a free woman in Paris, living in the swanky 8th arrondisement. French law prevents her extradition. Many of those implicated in Epstein’s world of obscene exploitation, including all the art world and socialite scum, must have a clue where she is. Alleged scum, I should say. They love their children just like we do. Sure.

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Dutch football captains lead boycott of TV show over racist remarks

Virgil van Dijk and Sari van Veenendaal hit out at pundit and say ‘enough is enough’

The captains of the Dutch men’s, women’s and youth national football teams are boycotting a leading sports TV programme over the racist comments of a longstanding pundit, warning: “Enough is enough.”

The Liverpool centre-back Virgil van Dijk, and the Atlético Madrid goalkeeper Sari van Veenendaal have led the way after years of the behaviour of Johan Derksen on the Veronica Inside show being explained away as straight-talking humour.

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Sun screen: the best TV shows to watch over the summer months

From Love Island to Queer Eye, as the longest day of the year beckons our writers pick their favourite summery television so you needn’t brave the outside world

For many Brits of a certain age, the launch of the latest Love Island trailer is the bat signal that summer is truly starting. Whatever the weather, every July between 2015 to 2019, when Caroline Flack promised me a “long, hot, summer”, I knew I was in for one.

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Chris Lilley’s Jonah is not from Tonga, I am. It’s time to dismantle racist brownface stereotypes | Seini F Taumoepeau

Netflix was right to pull Lilley’s shows. We have no need for him to whitesplain Tongan people for entertainment

When I first watched Summer Heights High, seeing the character of Jonah – a lazy, dumb, breakdancing, Tongan teenager – I was mortified and struck dumb by the fact that in 2007 brownface was allowed on Australian TV.

This week it was revealed that Netflix had quietly pulled four of Chris Lilley’s television shows, specifically those that featured Lilley in black- or brownface portraying Tongan schoolboy Jonah Takalua and African American rapper S.mouse.

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Harry Enfield says blacking up as Mandela was ‘so wrong it was right’

On Radio 4’s Today programme, the comedian justified decision to portray former South African president in blackface

Harry Enfield has defended the use of blackface on television in an interview broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme. In conversation with host Nick Robinson and fellow guest Ava Vidal, the comedian aimed to justify his decision to portray Nelson Mandela, describing it as “so wrong that it was right”.

Enfield, known for playing characters including Loadsamoney and Kevin the Teenager on television, said he had also used makeup to play an Indian soldier in a BBC programme, a decision he also deemed appropriate.

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How Hollywood has tried, and mostly failed, to tackle police racism

From Birth of a Nation to Watchmen, the big and small screens have tried to wrestle with racial tensions within law enforcement with mixed results

As we’ve all seen, when it comes to American police brutality, the gloves are now off and the masks too. Faced with yet more incontrovertible evidence of brutal and racist policing both the killing of George Floyd and others, and some forces’ response to the public protests it has become virtually impossible to maintain the image of American law enforcement officers as straightforward protectors and servers of the people. 

Related: George Floyd protests: fired officer to appear in court as calls to defund police sweep US – live

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History remixed: the rise of the anachronistic female lead

The lives of women from history, from Catherine the Great to Shirley Jackson, are being brought to the screen with a radical focus on character over facts

It is a point in favor of TV’s sprawling proliferation that one gets, in the course of a year, both a lush, serious historical drama starring Helen Mirren as Catherine the Great on HBO, and its tonal opposite, Hulu’s raucous, gleefully brutal The Great, which puts an asterisk right on the title card: “An Occasionally True Story.” The Great, developed by Tony McNamara, the writer of absurd court send-up The Favourite, cares little for the historical accuracy of the 18th-century Russian monarch. Its Catherine (Elle Fanning) arrives in the backward, hedonistic Russian court as a naive 19-year-old bride in 1761. The real Catherine was 35 and a mother by then, but that’s fine – free from the constraints of biography or pedantic seriousness, The Great’s occasional truth delivers, ironically, a more lasting impression of a real, flesh and blood princess – one slowly but determinedly amassing power, enlightened but ambitious to rule.

Related: The Great review – gleefully garish new series from The Favourite writer

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Tiger King’s Carole Baskin handed control of Joe Exotic’s zoo

Baskin, whose rivalry with Exotic was documented in the Netflix hit, is now the owner of the Oklahoma premises following court proceedings

Beleaguered zoo owner Joe Exotic, subject of Netflix’s hit documentary series Tiger King, has now suffered the indignity of rival Carole Baskin gaining control of what was once his zoo. Baskin, a self-styled conservationist and owner of the Big Cat Rescue facility in Hillsborough County, Florida, has been given control of the Wynnewood, Oklahoma premises by courts, after Exotic failed to pay her $1m in copyright and trademark suits.

Exotic – real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage – is currently in prison, having been found guilty of 17 counts of animal abuse and a murder-for-hire plot against Baskin, and sentenced to 22 years.

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Tributes paid to Boys from the Blackstuff actor Michael Angelis

Writer Jack Thorne among those to pay their respects to Angelis, who has died aged 68

Tributes have been paid after the death of Michael Angelis, an actor who will be remembered as the morose rabbit-obsessed Lucien from The Liver Birds, the desperate Chrissie in Boys from the Blackstuff, and the narrator of Thomas the Tank Engine.

Angelis died suddenly while at home with his wife on Saturday, his agent said. He was 68.

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‘It’s outrageous’: inside an infuriating Netflix series on Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich synthesizes legal information with first-person testimony of the billionaire’s abuse and bought immunity into a shocking watch

It’s difficult to watch Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-hour Netflix series on the now-deceased convicted sex offender without a choking sense of outrage. How many girls had to suffer to get attention? How perversely twisted is the American justice system that a Gatsby-esque billionaire, friends with such powerful figures as Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump, a longstanding donor to Harvard and MIT, could buy his way out of an almost certain life sentence for child sex abuse and trafficking?

Filthy Rich arrives, of course, less than a year after Epstein, 66, died, officially by suicide, in a New York jail last August. “There’s no justice in this,” Shawna Rivera, speaking publicly for the first time about Epstein’s alleged abuse starting when she was 14, says in the final episode. “There was just so much more to be said that will never be said.”

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‘No rear view mirror in this car’: Bob Geldof on love, loss and lockdown

The Boomtown Rats’ new album, their first in 36 years, coincides with a BBC documentary on the band

Bob Geldof doesn’t do nostalgia. Now 68, the Irish musician and activist says that he has lived his life refusing to look back. “I have the point of view that there’s no rear view mirror in this car,” he says.

So it might seem surprising that he not only agreed to the BBC making a documentary, Citizens of Boomtown, about his first band, The Boomtown Rats, but has also spent the last year actively engaged in reliving his past through it.

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Twiggy: ‘I don’t think high fashion will ever move completely away from slimness’

As a model, she was the face of the 60s, and went on to have a busy acting career. She discusses her new podcast, and life in swinging London

So enduring is that image of Twiggy – side-swept hair, heavy eyes, delicate neck – that it’s strange to think she was a model for only four years.

But Twiggy is an expert at reinvention (or “branching out” as her joke goes). The schoolgirl known as Lesley Hornby became Twiggy, the face of the 1960s, recognised then and now by a single name. At 21, she became the all-singing, all-dancing star of Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Boy Friend, which won her two Golden Globes. She has performed on Broadway, recorded albums and been a TV presenter. In her 60s, she turned fashion designer, with several collections for Marks & Spencer. Last year, she was given a damehood.

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Jerry Stiller, star of Seinfeld and father of Ben, dies aged 92

Comedian who formed a popular duo with his wife, Anne Meara, has died of natural causes

The comedian Jerry Stiller has died at the age of 92. His death was announced on Monday on Twitter by the actor Ben Stiller, who called him “a great dad and grandfather, and the most dedicated husband”.

Jerry Stiller enjoyed a long career on stage and screen, often accompanied by his wife, Anne Meara, with whom he formed a popular comedy act. They met in 1953, married the following year and regularly teamed up for improv sketches, performing in Las Vegas nightclubs and on The Ed Sullivan Show and other TV programmes, often in character as the squabbling spouses Mary Elizabeth Doyle and Hershey Horowitz, playing upon their Irish Catholic and Jewish cultures. In 2010, they took their act online, performing from the front room of their New York apartment. Meara died in 2015.

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Julie Andrews: ‘I was certainly aware of tales about the casting couch’

The celebrated actor had a turbulent upbringing before becoming world-famous for playing two perfect nannies. Now she’s bonding with a new generation of children through her storytelling podcast

“I’ll tell you what, shall I go outside?” Julie Andrews asks. We are talking by phone, but, alas, the reception inside her home on Long Island is, she says, “always terrible”. Torturous minutes pass in which I can hear only fragments of her conversation, and if anyone knows of a sweeter agony than being barely able to hear Andrews’ still lovely, melodious voice, I don’t want to know what it is. Eventually, I have to tell her this phone conversation isn’t working.

“I can stand out in my garden, although it is a bit nippy …” Andrews suggests.

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It’s boom time for podcasts – but will going mainstream kill the magic?

Fifteen years ago, when the word podcast was added to the dictionary, only the tech-savvy were listening. Now, as star names pile in, they’re big business. Can the quality survive?

Hello friends! Do you fancy listening to “a new type of time-shifted amateur radio”? No? How about a brilliant podcast? Of course you do.

Fifteen years ago, Macworld, a magazine for fans of Apple products, announced, with limited fanfare, that Apple was about to add podcasts to iTunes, its music download offer. Unfortunately, few readers knew what a podcast was, hence Macworld’s “time-shifted radio” definition. In June 2005, the idea of having thousands of ready-to-hear audio shows, anything from true-crime documentaries to all-chums-together comedy, to up-to-the-minute news to gripping drama to revealing interviews, and being able to listen to these shows whenever you want, wherever you are – well, that wasn’t quite happening. So Apple’s move didn’t seem important. Nor did the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary added “podcast” to its lexicon in the same year, after tech journalist Ben Hammersley came up with the term in 2004 (which was also the year the BBC launched a downloadable version of In Our Time). Podcasts were new. It takes time for the new to become everyday.

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Hafthor Bjornsson, Game of Thrones’ ‘Mountain’, breaks world deadlift record

  • Icelandic strongman lifts 1,104 lb at Thor’s Power Gym
  • 31-year-old starred as Ser Gregor Clegane in HBO series

Icelandic actor and strongman Hafthor Bjornsson set a world record for the deadlift on Saturday when he lifted 1,104 lb (501 kg) at Thor’s Power Gym in Iceland.

Bjornsson, best known for his portrayal of Ser Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane on Game of Thrones, broke the record previously held by Briton Eddie Hall who in 2016 became the first man to lift 500kg.

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Embarrassed TV host caught broadcasting in collar, blazer and … shorts

It’s easy to let standards slip during the lockdown but unlike Will Reeve not all of us see our pantless selves broadcast to the nation

Almost two months into the US shutdown, things are starting to get a little wild in quarantine. Perhaps you’ve stopped brushing your hair or started working in pyjamas. But a Good Morning America reporter took it a step further yesterday – he “went” to work without pants on for a nationally televised broadcast.

I have ARRIVED*

*in the most hilariously mortifying way possible https://t.co/2NQ85QEJVr

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Ronan O’Rahilly, Radio Caroline founder who inspired UK pop and pirate radio, dies aged 79

O’Rahilly, who also managed pop stars and James Bond actor George Lazenby, was diagnosed with dementia in 2013

Ronan O’Rahilly, the Irish founder of the notorious Radio Caroline that popularised pop music on British radio, has died aged 79.

His death was announced by the radio station that is still broadcasting, who said: “In a pastime populated by unusual people, Ronan was more unusual than all of them combined.” He had been diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013.

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