Call to ban gambling sponsors from UK sport as hidden harms are revealed

Posted on July 28, 2024 by Admin

Eleven Premier League teams start season with major bookmaker backing as industry watchdog report says stats can ‘mask’ scale of problem betting

Official figures on rates of problem gambling in Britain – which have been put as low as 0.3% – can “mask” the scale of harms by including people who never bet, a report published by the industry regulator has warned.

Various surveys suggest a problem gambling rate in Britain in a range of between 0.3% to 2.5%. But in the new report that figure rose sharply when non-gamblers were excluded – and was even higher among those who gambled on online casinos.

Fewer than one in 10 arts workers in UK have working-class roots

Posted on May 18, 2024 by Admin

The cultural sector falls short on other measures of diversity too, with 9o% of workers white, says new report

Six in 10 of all arts and culture workers in the UK now come from middle-class backgrounds, compared with just over 42% of the wider workforce, according to new research.

And while 23% of the UK workforce is from a working-class background, working-class people are underrepresented in every area of arts and culture. They make up 8.4% of those working in film, TV, radio and photography, while in museums, archives and libraries, the proportion is only 5.2%.

Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society

Posted on December 10, 2022 by Admin

Study shows the proportion of musicians, writers and artists with working-class origins has shrunk by half since the 1970s

The proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s, new research shows.

Analysis of Office for National Statistics data found that 16.4% of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, but that had fallen to just 7.9% for those born four decades later.

Dining across the divide: ‘It felt like such a direct attack at points … I actually started crying’

Posted on February 10, 2022 by Admin

Can two strangers, one anti-abortion, the other pro-choice, find some common ground?

Click here if you’d like to dine across the divide

David, 31, near Norwich

Occupation Anti-abortion campaigner

Dining across the divide: ‘He’s such a nice guy but supports Brexit. He’s young; it’s not normal’

Posted on December 16, 2021 by Admin

Both have experienced being treated as outsiders in the UK, but can they broach one of Britain’s most divisive topics?

Click here if you’d like to dine across the divide

Batuhan, 22, Bournemouth

Occupation Support worker and neuropsychology master’s student
Voting record Batuhan is not eligible to vote in the UK. In the last Turkish local government elections, he voted for the centre-left Republican People’s party
Amuse bouche Huge fan of basketball; supports any team LeBron James is playing for

Dining across the divide: ‘I think some of the ideas are horrible – but it’s nice to sit and talk’

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Admin

One is a Belgian resident in the UK, the other was a Ukip candidate: can two strangers find any common ground?

Click here if you’d like to dine across the divide

Stijn, 47, Norwich

Occupation Humanitarian aid worker

People opened up because I’m the Beavis and Butt-head guy’: Mike Judge on his new funk direction

Posted on April 15, 2020 by Admin

The writer-director’s comedies – from Office Space to Silicon Valley – always sum up the spirit of their times. So why has he made an LSD-soaked cartoon about George Clinton and Bootsy Collins?

Few writer-directors have been as consistent and ruthless at capturing the moment as Mike Judge, although he never actually intends to do so. “It’s always a shock when something comes out and it feels so relevant,” he says, in his laconic surfer-dude tone, talking to me by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I tend to look at stuff that feels as if it’s everywhere, but nobody’s talking about.”

Judge, 57, is so beady at spotting what’s everywhere, his shows themselves end up becoming ubiquitous, the thing everybody’s talking about. It is impossible to imagine 90s TV without his seminal hits, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the former satirising the worst of youth culture, the latter fondly depicting gentle American conservatism acclimatising itself to the Bill Clinton era.

Auteurs assemble! What caused the superhero backlash?

Posted on October 23, 2019 by Admin

They’ve conquered the box office. Now it’s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?

Alan Moore’s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that’s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when “comic-book movies” meant Christopher Reeve’s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature “graphic novels” was born.

Now we appear to have come full circle – which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO’s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we’re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again?