Former One Direction members to reunite for docuseries set on the road in US after death of bandmate Liam Payne
Former One Direction members Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson are set to reunite for a Netflix road trip series.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the docuseries will follow the pair as they travel across the US. The show will be directed by Nicola Marsh, who was also behind the Demi Lovato documentary Child Star.
Continue reading...Tributes paid to ‘consummate pro’ and ‘rock solid’ presenter of Newsnight, Watchdog and GMTV’s News Hour
Tributes have been made across the world of television to the “rock solid broadcaster and ultimate gentleman” John Stapleton, who has died at the age of 79 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2024.
Stapleton’s agent, Jackie Gill, said on Sunday: “John had Parkinson’s disease, which was complicated by pneumonia. His son Nick and daughter-in-law Lise have been constantly at his side and John died peacefully in hospital this morning.”
Continue reading...Educating Yorkshire Part 2 shows inspirational teachers negotiating challenges in young people’s lives
“Basically, there’s summat wrong with me. I’m like … a psychopath. Genuinely!” A teenage girl with the face of an angel is confiding in Mr Wilson, one of the student managers. He listens solemnly, but his mouth twitches with the beginnings of a smile.
“I’m going to start by disagreeing with you,” he says with all the seriousness he can muster. “You’re not a psychopath.” The girl in the sky-blue hoodie relaxes and rewards him with a broad smile.
Continue reading...Documentary about Billy Mail’s connection with orphaned pup Molly airs on National Geographic next week
National Geographic will be streaming a new documentary about an unlikely bond between a man and an otter in Shetland.
Billy Mail met Molly, a starving pup, in 2021 when he saw her jumping off a pontoon into the sea near his Shetland home. Mail wanted to see how close he could get to her before she fled. But it turned out that Molly had no intention of running away.
Billy and Molly: An Otter Love Story will be available from 14 November on Disney+, and will air on 15 November on National Geographic
Continue reading...Sibling of murder victim says it is ‘difficult to understand’ purpose of eight-part series co-produced by Knox
Meredith Kercher “will always be remembered for her own fight for life”, the sister of the murdered British student has said as filming began in Italy on a controversial TV series co-produced by Amanda Knox about the case.
Filming of the eight-episode series, Blue Moon, has coincided with the 17th anniversary of the murder, for which Knox was twice convicted before being definitively acquitted in 2015.
Continue reading...Programme that follows the lives of 14 children at seven-year intervals tops Broadcasting Press Guild’s 50th anniversary chart
The groundbreaking Up documentary series has been voted the programme that changed television the most over the past 50 years in a poll of the country’s leading TV writers.
The series, which follows a group of children from different social backgrounds and documents their progress every seven years, topped a list of the the most influential shows from the last five decades compiled by the Broadcasting Press Guild (BPG).
Continue reading...Exclusive: Channel 4 film says officials contacted the palace in 2020 owing to concerns about Lord Lebedev’s father’s links to Putin regime
Government officials asked whether the late Queen would block Evgeny Lebedev’s peerage because of concerns that he could be a national security risk due to his father’s links to the Putin regime, a documentary has claimed.
The aides contacted Buckingham Palace in July 2020 to request that the monarch intervene, which she was constitutionally entitled to do, after Boris Johnson decided to press ahead with the controversial peerage despite warnings from the intelligence agencies, according to the film-makers.
Continue reading...Lesley Regan, women’s health ambassador for England, says ‘destructive’ changes to NHS system in 2012 are failing women
Women are finding it harder to access contraception than they did a decade ago, resulting in more unplanned pregnancies, the women’s health ambassador has said.
They have been discouraged by bad experiences, a confusingly disjointed system and long delays for procedures such as the coil or implant insertion, according to Prof Lesley Regan, a leading gynaecologist who was appointed women’s health ambassador for England last year.
Continue reading...Footballer’s wife tells how she was ‘shamed’ and ‘blamed’ as she recalls the trauma of her early years for TV documentary
Rebekah Vardy has said she was sexually abused while growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, an ordeal her former community failed to protect her from.
Vardy, 41, opened up about her upbringing in a Channel 4 documentary titled Rebekah Vardy: Jehovah’s Witnesses and Me, which will air on 16 May.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Decision to make episode about natural destruction available only on iPlayer angers programme-makers
The BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of Sir David Attenborough’s flagship new series on British wildlife because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the rightwing press, the Guardian has been told.
The decision has angered the programme-makers and some insiders at the BBC, who fear the corporation has bowed to pressure from lobbying groups with “dinosaurian ways”.
Continue reading...One of the original line-up of the BBC’s car show, Baker had been suffering from motor neurone disease
Sue Baker, one of the original presenters of BBC’s Top Gear and the Observer’s former motoring editor, has died aged 67. Baker, who joined the original format of the TV series in 1980, died on Monday morning after suffering with motor neurone disease (MND).
She appeared on more than 100 episodes of the car programme until 1991. She then left to continue her work as a motoring journalist.
Continue reading...Filmmaker James Jones had no idea when he started it two years ago that a terrible synchronicity would make his blistering documentary about the nuclear accident in northern Ukraine a must-watch
Had it been released at any point in the past few years, Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes would have been an important documentary; a feature-length blend of audio interviews and largely unseen archive footage that puts the 1986 disaster into horrifying new perspective. That it comes out now – just days after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including an attack on the Chernobyl site itself – makes it as unmissable as it is harrowing.
Obviously, this timeliness was never the intention. Indeed, the film-maker James Jones had a different historical event in mind when he started work on it two years ago. “I initially thought the relevance was Covid,” he says. Like Chernobyl, the early days of the pandemic were marked with mysterious illnesses that the local government attempted to keep a lid on. “I was interested in the idea that this invisible enemy was threatening us,” he says. “An authoritarian regime was lying about it, and Chinese citizens were starting to voice their disquiet publicly.”
Continue reading...From snails the size of dogs to the most venomous arachnids on the planet, the true-crime series Bug Out profiles the bizarre investigation into a robbery at the US’s first bug zoo
A room swarming with thousands of giant, exotic creepy-crawlies may sound like your worst nightmare (or one of Ant and Dec’s Bushtucker Trials on I’m a Celebrity). It is also the starting point for Bug Out, the latest bizarre true-crime documentary series, which is set in the US’s first bug zoo, the Philadelphia Insectarium & Butterfly Pavilion. Prepare for a mystery with more twists than a worm colony.
The show focuses on the moment in August 2018 when the museum’s boss, Dr John Cambridge, arrived at work and did a double take when he realised his room, that ought to have been full of critters, was suddenly empty. Glass tanks were upended, shelves bare, displays cleared out. Thousands of live bugs, worth an estimated $50,000 (£38,000), had been stolen. It was the biggest insect heist in history.
Continue reading...Dodgy graphics, mysteriously sourced computers and a bemused artist: a new Youtube documentary celebrates 30 years since the release of computing classic Lemmings
When you try to describe the much-loved video game Lemmings, it sounds like a wind-up. Your mission: herding a collection of tiny, green-haired, blue-jumpered, bipedal sprites from a trapdoor entrance to a safe exit without them dying horribly. It looked, if not bad, then wilfully basic even for 1991. But, released years before mobile phone games were a thing, it was nonetheless a fiendishly addictive game that feels like the spiritual precursor to the likes of Angry Birds. And it was manna to many, many kids like me, whose sole household computing device was a rubbish PC with a horrible four-colour CGA screen that basically couldn’t play any video game of the time … except Lemmings!
To mark 30 years since its release, Exient – current holders of the franchise – has made a YouTube documentary about it. Made remotely, Lemmings: Can You Dig It? largely consists of interviews with the people involved in the creation of the original game, plus spirited nostalgic interjections from various nerdy talking heads.
Continue reading...Netflix’s continued obsession with the pandemic hit has brought a follow-up special, a second season and now a spin-off but enough is enough
To think of Tiger King is to immediately transport yourself to the heady days of lockdown 2020. Remember it? Remember how filled with artificial purpose we all were? We did Zoom quizzes with all our friends! We made banana bread! We clapped for frontline workers!
Looking back, it seems relatively clear that all those things were stupid. Nobody wants to spend more time on Zoom than they have to. Nobody likes banana bread. The clapping didn’t change anything. And as for Tiger King? With the benefit of hindsight, Christ, we chose the wrong show to obsess over. Looking back, Tiger King was grubby and exploitative. Once you’d crossed the “Are these people for real?” hurdle, you found yourself sitting through a carnival of monstrous behaviour. Tiger King was the documentary equivalent of that old Black Mirror episode: as fun as it sounds to watch someone have sex with a pig, at the end of the day you actually have to watch someone have sex with a pig.
Continue reading...He managed the Bee Gees and created Saturday Night Fever but the closeted impressario ‘never felt that sense of success’ according to a new documentary
According to film director John Maggio, two types of executives run the entertainment industry – one far rarer than the other. “The vast majority of them don’t know what’s good, or what will be a hit, until ten other people tell them,” he said. “But a few can tell you right away. They’re the visionaries.”
For an extended time, one of the most clairvoyant was Robert Stigwood. Yet no one had made a feature documentary about him until now. Mr Saturday Night lays out the rocket-like trajectory of this manager turned producer turned impresario who scored hits in the worlds of music, theater, concerts and film. Stigwood’s projects ranged from managing the Bee Gees to running a record label featuring artists like Eric Clapton to producing two of the biggest movies of all time – Saturday Night Fever and Grease, as well as the successful movie version of the Who’s Tommy – to bankrolling smash plays like Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. “For a time, he was the Wizard of Oz of entertainment,” said Maggio, who directed the film, to the Guardian. “Between 1970 and 1978, he could not not make a hit.”
Continue reading...In Alex Gibney’s harrowing documentary, the tale of Abu Zubaydah, seen as patient zero for the CIA’s torture programme, is explored with horrifying new details
From “a black site” in Thailand in 2002, CIA officers warned headquarters that their interrogation techniques might result in the death of a prisoner. If that happened, he would be cremated, leaving no trace. But if he survived, could the CIA offer assurance that he would be remain in isolation?
It could. Abu Zubaydah, the agency said in a cable, “will never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others” and “should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life”.
Continue reading...Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary on the Fab Four reveals Ringo is an amazing drummer, McCartney was a joy and their entourage were coolest of all
The concept for Let It Be was: no concept. The Beatles arrived in an empty studio and wondered where the equipment was. (And revealed that they knew very little about setting up PA systems.) What were they rehearsing for? A show on the QE2? A concert on Primrose Hill? A TV special in Libya? A film? What would the set look like? Would it be made of plastic? Why, George Harrison wondered, were they being recorded? Get Back makes clear that the Beatles didn’t have a clue what to expect from Let It Be.
Continue reading...A cultural ‘cancer’, soft porn … or the height of empowerment? A revealing documentary examines the debates around one of the raunchiest – and most talked about – rap records around
As winter forces many of us to ditch nights out with friends in favour of nights in on the sofa, Belcalis Alamanzar’s iconic words ring out across the digital ether: “A ho never gets cold!”. In a clip that went viral in 2014, the rapper better known as Cardi B parades up and down a hotel corridor, clad in a plunging, barely-there bralette and tight-fitting skirt. For women who wear little and care about it even less, Megan Thee Stallion has made a name for herself in the same vein. Together, Meg and Cardi would go on to birth a movement with their hit 2020 single, WAP, an ode to female sexuality and “wet ass pussy” which brought a slice of the club to the worlds’ living rooms at the peak of lockdown.
In three minutes and seven seconds of poetic dirty talk, the pair walk us through the spiciest of bedroom sessions, except – contrary to patriarchal norms – they are firmly in the driver’s seat. From fellatio to make-up sex, Cardi and Megan leave their targets weak. With the video quickly becoming a talking point around the world, their sexual desire (and that of women in general) became the subject of fierce debate. While many praised their cheeky candour, others were unimpressed, with Fox News’s Candace Owens going as far as to call Cardi a “cancer cell” who was destroying culture.
Continue reading...The New York Times and FX special Malfunction revisits the ‘Nipplegate’ scandal of 2004 but adds little new understanding
In January, the New York Times documentary team released Framing Britney Spears, a succinct and bruising retrospective on the pop star’s career and the shadowy legal arrangement that governed her affairs. The 75-minute documentary, which included virtually no new information but offered a cohesive, damning portrait of her treatment by the press, launched a grenade in pop culture. It triggered widespread calls to end her conservatorship, which Spears, 39, later championed (a judge terminated the 13-year arrangement last week); as well as meditations on punishing cultural commentary, callous treatment of mental health, or the hollow, deceptive empowerment proffered by Spears’s sexy teenage image; and a queasy wave of Britney Spears content (including an NYT follow-up, Controlling Britney Spears, that was part retrospective and part, uncomfortably, true crime.
Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, the latest New York Times documentary for FX on Hulu, aims for the same type of cathartic reframing through an infamous episode of early 2000s pop culture: the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast for nine-sixteenths of a second at the 2004 Super Bowl, and the subsequent cultural firestorm. The 70-minute film follows a similar format to its predecessors – archival footage (including plenty of gag-worthy early 2000s fashion) synthesized with first-person interviews and commentary from cultural critics.
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