The BBC has been asked to clarify if any efforts are made to “deliberately invite or attract” members of far-right groups to the audience of its flagship political programme, Question Time.
Baroness Warsi and Labour MP Debbie Abrahams have written to the BBC’s director general Tony Hall, asking him to consider also introducing a new code of conduct for panelists and the audience, and to stop sharing inflammatory videos from the show on social media.
Continue reading...Containing the epidemic requires both reliable news coverage and truth from the president
It has taken until the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency for the existential risk this narcissistic authoritarian poses to be fully exposed. There have been other tests: the unconstitutional squeezing of immigration; the brief week or so when war with Iran felt inevitable; the imprisoning of children in cages along the United States’ southern border; not to mention the engagement with foreign governments in seeking personal gain. But it is the arrival of Covid-19, the infectious respiratory virus, that threatens a presidency reliant on a strategy of all narrative and no truth.
Trump has a core support base of people who are most vulnerable to Covid-19. Older people – particularly those who might resist taking the kind of interventionist measures being suggested – are very much at risk. Trump may have to halt his famous rallies in the middle of election season. More alien to him even than that, if containment of the virus is ever going to work he will have to build a good-faith alliance with the press to push out a unified and coherent message.
Continue reading...The Auschwitz Memorial criticised Amazon on Sunday, for fictitious depictions of the Holocaust in its TV series Hunters and for selling books of Nazi propaganda.
Related: Outcry after MSNBC host compares Sanders’ Nevada win to Nazi invasion
Continue reading...ITV says Sunday’s Love Island will not be broadcast as calls mount for regulation of traditional and social media
Politicians have condemned press intrusion, calling for more regulation of both traditional and social media after the death of TV presenter Caroline Flack.
The former Love Island presenter is understood to have taken her own life on Saturday at her home in Islington, London. She had been charged with assaulting her partner and was due to stand trial in several weeks’ time.
Continue reading...Former Love Island host reported to have been found dead at east London home on Saturday
The boyfriend of TV presenter Caroline Flack, who was found dead at her home on Saturday, has said he is heartbroken by her death.
Flack, 40, was due to go on trial on 4 March for assaulting Lewis Burton, a prosecution he did not support. She had been forbidden by a judge from communicating with him before the trial.
Continue reading...Family confirms death and asks for privacy to be respected
TV presenter Caroline Flack has died, her family said in a statement.
The statement said: “We can confirm that our Caroline passed away today, 15 February.
Continue reading...Creators of Meray Paas Tum Ho could be facing legal suit amid accusations the hugely popular show was ‘misogynistic’
A court in Pakistan has summoned the creators of a wildly popular television series after a petition was filed demanding they apologise for portraying Pakistani women as “greedy, selfish and non-professional”.
In the petition filed at the Sindh high court last month, lawyer Sana Saleem said the television series Meray Paas Tum Ho (I Have You) was “ridiculing a woman who makes the same decision as every other man in society”.
Continue reading...The TV actor Jussie Smollett has been indicted by a special prosecutor on six counts accusing him of lying to Chicago police – almost a year after similar charges against him relating to an alleged hoax attack were dropped amid outcry from many sides.
Smollett faces six counts of disorderly conduct, the special prosecutor Dan Webb said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.
Continue reading...She loved her nude scenes in the Netflix hit but the West End’s Uncle Vanya gave her stage fright. The Stockport star remembers being the class clown and tracking down her tormentor
Aimee Lou Wood wasn’t sure she wanted to be in Uncle Vanya, even as she made her way to the audition. Having trained at Rada, she knew the lineage of actors who had played the prized part of Sonya, and what an honour it would be to star in a West End Chekhov at the age of 25. “But I just thought it was so the opposite of what I would want to do,” she says.
She did have a point. Sonya is a church-going, sexually naive teenager from the backwaters of 19th-century Russia. Wood, at the time, was fresh out of filming the Netflix teen drama Sex Education. Her character opens the first series with a bout of energetic sex that ends in her boyfriend’s faked orgasm. (Connor Swindells, who played the boyfriend, is her real-life partner of two years.)
Continue reading...Three new Muppets, Basma, Jad, and Ma’zooza, will star in new show for the millions of children displaced across the Middle East
Cooperation, kindness and the alphabet. For over 50 years, the characters of Sesame Street, from the Cookie Monster to Big Bird, have helped children from diverse backgrounds navigate the challenges of life as a small person in a big world.
From the moment it launched, Sesame Street has unflinchingly dealt with difficult issues – and from this week they are bringing their special brand of magic to the children who need them the most.
Continue reading...The popular HBO series about the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster has led to a surge in tourists to the site and nearby town of Pripyat
Continue reading...The MSNBC host’s show has become a safety blanket for many US progressives. She discusses her demonisation by the right, tackling the president’s lies – and coming out at 17
Rachel Maddow, the US TV host, has a message for her critics: “Bring it. Your hatred makes me stronger. Come on. Give me more. Give me more. I love it!”
That is just as well, given the way she has polarised viewers in the past few years. Maddow, 46, has presented her primetime show on MSNBC, a 24-hour cable news channel, on weeknights since 2008. If most cable news and social media is fast food, she tries to rustle up a three-course meal: sensible, sober, sometimes painfully detailed and replete with oblique references to half-forgotten politicians of yesteryear. Since Donald Trump’s rise in 2016, however, The Rachel Maddow Show has become a nightly safety blanket for many progressives who identify with the “resistance”.
Continue reading...Creator Peter Morgan reveals fifth season will be the last of the Netflix drama
The fifth series of Netflix’s The Crown will be its last, its creator and writer, Peter Morgan, has revealed, as Imelda Staunton is confirmed to replace Olivia Colman as the Queen.
Fans of the critically acclaimed show, watched by more than 73m households worldwide, had hoped for a sixth series, which Morgan himself had originally planned. But, he said he believed it was time to stop.
Continue reading...Actor stops playing immigrant Indian convenience store owner following years of controversy and accusations of racism
The Simpsons actor Hank Azaria has said he will no longer be voicing the character of Apu, following years of controversy and accusations of racism.
Azaria lends his voice to numerous characters in the long-running show, including Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum and Comic Book Guy.
Continue reading...Dressed in pyjamas and wellies, the great actor talks about his astronaut training in Russia, the original Cats – and putting his might behind his daughter Rosalind’s very personal plays
On a shelf in Brian Blessed’s study is a plastic toy, a replica of himself as Prince Vultan in the film Flash Gordon. There is a resemblance but, with this actor, the very idea of a miniature seems wrong.
The mountainous original is sitting at his desk, wearing a striking winter morning costume of red fleece, pyjama bottoms and wellington boots. He must be the hairiest 83-year-old man in existence, his huge head crowned by a thick grey thatch, his neck Tudor-ruffed by what seem metres of white beard.
Continue reading...Since returning with a female Doctor, the sci-fi smash has been accused of political correctness. But, as recent storylines prove, the truth is far worse
Doctor Who returned last week with another first: Sacha Dhawan’s casting as the first person of colour to play the Doctor’s arch nemesis, the Master. The decision was broadly met with praise, but in darker corners of the internet the argument that the show has become too politically correct rages on.
“Too PC” has become a familiar jibe levelled at the sci-fi hit since 2018 when Jodie Whittaker became the Thirteenth Doctor and new showrunner Chris Chibnall took up the mantle. As well as the first woman to play the title role, their first series featured two BAME companions and episodes about Rosa Parks and the partition of India, written by Doctor Who’s first ever BAME writers. The show quickly found itself embroiled in a culture war, with talk of its apparent political correctness becoming commonplace (see the Twitter hashtag #notmydoctor). Whittaker and Chibnall were forced to defend the show against these claims before this series began: Whittaker reminded viewers that there’s “still racism within our current society”, and Chibnall added that “the Doctor and the show are beacons of compassion and empathy”.
Continue reading...From Fleabag to Succession, it was hard to disagree with most of the TV awards at this year’s Globes. But all Colman did was sit in a chair looking glum
When it comes to television, the Golden Globes have a long history of getting it wrong. Last year it awarded best comedy to The Kominsky Method, for example. The year before that it went to The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. Two years before that the HFPA cast its gaze across the comedy landscape and inexplicably decided that nothing was better than Mozart in the Jungle.
With this in mind, you’d be forgiven for thinking something went badly wrong at the Golden Globes last night because, well, its winners were our winners too. Best drama? Succession, which came first in the Guardian’s best TV of 2019 poll. Best comedy? Fleabag, which came second. Best miniseries? Chernobyl, which came third. The acting awards lined up nicely with this, too; Succession’s Brian Cox won best drama actor, Phoebe Waller-Bridge won best comedy actress and Stellan Skarsgård won best supporting actor.
Continue reading...The breakout star of the cult TV series Sex Education talks about his Rwandan roots, family gossip and coping with overnight success
At the beginning of 2019, Ncuti Gatwa had fewer than 1,000 followers on Instagram. He had filmed Sex Education the previous summer, and by January, it was ready for the world to see. Though it starred big names – Gillian Anderson, Asa Butterfield – on paper the show sounded more like a cult oddity than a smash hit. Butterfield played Otis, a secondary-school student turned sex therapist for his peers in a gaudy world that sat between a John Hughes movie and a Just Seventeen problem page. Gatwa starred as Eric Effiong, Otis’s best friend. Netflix had flown the cast to New York to promote Sex Education, which was released when Gatwa was on the return flight – and his character was a huge hit. When he landed at Heathrow, Gatwa turned on his phone. In the space of several hours, his follower count had gone up… by a couple of hundred thousand.
“It definitely felt exposing,” Gatwa says. He’s sitting in a café in Soho, almost exactly a year after the show changed his life so suddenly. At 27, he is a decade older than Eric, and less flamboyant, though he shares the character’s ebullience. He sounds different, too – his own accent roams Scotland, Rwanda and Tottenham, where he now lives, and his broad laugh ripples across the busy lunchtime crowd.
Continue reading...Self-styled spiritual medium launched paranormal reality TV series Most Haunted in 2001
The TV mystic Derek Acorah has died aged 69, his wife has said.
The self-styled spiritual medium, whose real name is Derek Johnson, appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2017 and launched the paranormal reality TV series Most Haunted in 2001.
Continue reading...US actor hit by suspected typhoid while filming survival TV series in Papua New Guinea
The American actor Zac Efron has confirmed he recently fell ill while filming a survival reality TV show in Papua New Guinea.
Australian media had reported that Efron, 32, was flown by helicopter for treatment in Australia after contracting a bacterial infection, possibly typhoid, while shooting the Killing Zac Efron series.
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