Covid cases in the Byron Bay area have exploded since December
Cast members of the Netflix reality series Byron Baes have posted videos to social media of people dancing to live music at a crowded Byron Bay venue in apparent contravention of New South Wales Covid measures.
Two of the show’s other stars have posted videos in the days after receiving positive Covid tests that appear to show them out in public.
Continue reading...Actor’s achievements helping others embrace deaf identity and pursue passions on own terms
Amid all the noise, glitter and razzle-dazzle, the most iconic moment of this year’s Strictly Come Dancing took place in complete silence. The music paused for several seconds while deaf actor Rose Ayling-Ellis and her dancing partner Giovanni Pernice continued to glide elegantly across the floor.
The dance was intended as a tribute to the deaf community, but it has resonated far more broadly: as well as receiving a perfect score, the couple’s performance has been labelled the “greatest ever” on the show, while an official BBC clip has been viewed 1.7m times on YouTube.
There has been a resounding (silent) cheer for Ayling-Ellis’ success from the deaf community, who see her as a rare on-screen role model capable of inspiring deaf young people, who often struggle with pressures to fit into mainstream schooling, to embrace their deaf identity and pursue their passions on their own terms.
Continue reading...McFly singer and dancer Amy Dowden will miss next Saturday’s show while in separate isolation
The Strictly Come Dancing contestant Tom Fletcher and his professional partner, Amy Dowden, have tested positive for Covid-19 and will miss next Saturday’s live show, the BBC has said.
Fletcher, one of the lead vocalists from McFly, and Dowden had performed well in their first dance during this weekend’s show.
Continue reading...CBS says it will drop X-Factor-style competition from celebrity-fronted show after widespread criticism
A reality TV show that planned to pit activists against each other in an X-Factor style contest judged by celebrities is to be drastically “reimagined” after it sparked a backlash from campaigners.
The Activist, which had been due to air in the US in late October, prompted incredulity among many campaigners and elsewhere when its format was revealed last week, with many labelling it a “tone-deaf” distortion of true activists’ values.
Continue reading...Fans and figures from show business pay tribute to pop star who was diagnosed in August 2020 and wrote memoir during her illness
The pop singer and TV personality Sarah Harding, who had 21 UK Top 10 singles as a member of Girls Aloud, has died aged 39 from breast cancer.
Her mother, Marie, announced her death on Instagram, prompting a flood of tributes from fans and figures from show business. Geri Horner, the Spice Girls singer and a judge on the TV talent show that created Girls Aloud, wrote: “Rest in peace, Sarah Harding. You’ll be remembered for the light and joy you brought to the world. X”
Continue reading...The new reality show on Charli and Dixie D’Amelio attempts to transfer one kind of gargantuan fame into another with mixed results
“I get asked why I’m famous a lot,” says Charli D’Amelio, the most followed person on TikTok, early in the third episode of her family’s new Hulu reality show. Just two years ago, she was a high school sophomore in suburban Connecticut posting snippets of dances and jokes with friends to the app. Now 17, she has 123.6 million followers on the app; she and her sister Dixie, 20, are two of the most recognizable faces among Gen Z, superstars on the most culturally influential social media platform in the country right now.
Yet “I don’t consider myself famous,” she says. “I’m just a person that a lot of people follow for some reason. I think it was right place, right time. I think it was a vibe, maybe, that I give off.”
Continue reading...Robert Webb, AJ Odudu, Tom Fletcher and Nina Wadia are among the celebrities getting their dancing shoes on for Strictly. But who will succeed … and who on earth is Tilly Ramsay?
The 2021 Strictly Come Dancing line-up has been unveiled in full, which can only mean one thing. It’s Christmas already. Merry Christmas everyone!
But who are these brave celebrities who have dared to develop a close friendship with a professional dancer that has a statistically high likelihood of ending their marriage? Below you will find them all, ranked from worst to best in terms of probable success.
Continue reading...In Netflix’s dating show, contestants dress as animals, insects, demons and dinosaurs – so they’re not chosen for their looks. The results are so screamingly awful, you’ll end up weeping into your sofa
Sometimes I think it makes sense as a covert government anti-Covid strategy (now that they’ve given up on overt, data-driven, scientifically sanctioned ones): give the public a new dating show in which people are done up as figures from a plushy fetishist’s (look it up, I don’t have time to explain everything) malarial dream. This will keep them spellbound with delight, or weeping silently into the sofa at the thought that the western civilisation we once hoped for is over. But, either way indoors, alone, spreading nary an airborne droplet to the young and vulnerable.
I believe it to be a multi-pronged public health strategy. First they softened us up with last week’s Apocalypse Wow on ITV2, which left the nation staring bleakly past its television screens into an unknowable future that seemed suddenly not to brim with overwhelming possibility for humanity and its endeavours. Now there is Netflix’s Sexy Beasts, a reworking of a BBC show from 2014 with no other possible justification. What comes next, I cannot imagine. After a nugatory attempt, the mind quails and halts, unwilling to go further. Thus, do I fight to explain the advent of this monstrosity into our lives.
Continue reading...A disturbing new Netflix series makes dates dress up as animals – from rhinos to insects – so that choices are made on personality not looks. So why is everyone involved so hot?
“Ass first, personality second,” says a deadpan beaver at a bar. Meanwhile, a panda with pleading eyes says she wants a baby by the age of 26. A rhino in a dress shirt chips in with “Vulnerability is our biggest muscle” – and gets a high five from a delighted dolphin.
What fresh hell is this? Are we not, for just one moment, deserving of a rest? Netflix says no. After holding us hostage for three weeks with Love Is Blind – in hindsight, not a good use of our last days before the pandemic – the evil-genius algorithm has come up with another “dating experiment”.
Continue reading...The most commercialised show on British television has signed up nine official partners
Love Island has netted ITV more than £12m in revenues even before the first episode of the new series of the hit reality show airs on Monday, as sponsors and advertisers rush to attach themselves to the most commercialised show on British television.
With uncertainty over Covid restrictions scuppering holidays abroad for a second successive year, the arrival of the feelgood summer juggernaut could not be more perfectly timed to tap into a viewer and advertising boom.
Continue reading...Vladislav Ivanov says he regretted his decision to join Produce Camp 2021 but fans refused to vote him out
The reality TV ordeal of a Russian who joined a Chinese boy band show by accident – and made it to the final despite urging fans to vote him off – has finally ended after nearly three months.
Vladislav Ivanov, a 27-year-old from Vladivostok, was kicked out of the Produce Camp 2021 on Saturday after viewers ignored his pleas to leave and backed him all the way to the final.
Continue reading...From Bling Empire to Made in Chelsea, the uberwealthy trend in TV is here to stay – and it might even be good for diversity
In the first episode of reality TV show Bling Empire, heiress Anna Shay commits to an excursion so globe-straddlingly audacious it would make Greta Thunberg weep. Los Angeles resident Anna asks a friend and her objectively awful boyfriend to go to her favourite restaurant with her – in Paris. They chart a private plane, eat their dinner and head back to LA the next day. It sets the scene for a series that luxuriates in the lives of the super-rich, and the candour, conflict and rule-breaking that such an existence affords.
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Continue reading...Two cast members of the Australia and New Zealand edition of the reality TV show have apologised for their past, after racially insensitive images resurfaced online
RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under has already been marred with controversy after two contestants apologised for past racially insensitive behaviour, one having performed in blackface multiple times.
Less than a week after the cast of the hit drag reality competition’s Australia and New Zealand iteration was announced, images emerged of contestant Anthony Price, known for his drag persona, Scarlet Adams, in multiple costumes appearing to imitate other cultures.
Continue reading...For Clara Amfo, success is nothing without honesty, integrity – and a pinch of impostor syndrome. Here, the broadcaster talks about race, relationships and becoming a Barbie doll
Clara Amfo makes me want to join in with life. When she talks about the new series of Drag Race UK, I itch to go and watch it. When she’s dancing on Strictly, I want to tune into a show that doesn’t usually hold my attention. And when she’s describing the party scene in her parents’ home country of Ghana, “fast becoming the Ibiza of West Africa – honestly I was last there in December 2019 and everyone was out there”, I find myself wondering about flights. Which is quite something, a year into a pandemic, when spirits are flagging and the will is so weak it might give up entirely. But she knows all about that too, which is why her daytime Radio 1 show, every weekday, works so well.
People text in saying they live alone, they work from home, they just needed to hear that tune she played, that friendly voice. Amfo physically gets up and goes in to work at Broadcasting House, speaking to the nation and meeting the skeleton crew who are still in the building, under endless Covid-testing regulations, “but I do live alone, and I get it,” she says. “I know I have definitely experienced loneliness in this thing. At the risk of sounding trite, well it’s been a time of gratitude, hasn’t it? – but I also believe that everybody, no matter what your life or what you do for a living, should be allowed to have a moan. I’m single and happily single but there have been a few nights where I’ve been like, you know what? Be nice to have a sofa buddy,” she explains, over video chat from the one-bedroom flat in Hackney that she got in a part-buy, part-rent housing scheme seven years ago and that she has grown out of, but not yet managed to leave. (It hasn’t always been thus – “Many memories were made in this flat, that’s for sure,” she says, with a dirty laugh.)
Continue reading...Who green-lit The Masked Singer, or dreamed up a dating show about Prince Harry? Insiders reveal how madcap ideas go from page to small-screen sensation
Nine years ago, TV developer Park Won Woo was taking a break in a car park after shooting auditions for a South Korean talent show. He had worked on number of similar programmes throughout his career, but had come to feel uneasy about their format. “They’re not always fair,” he recalls thinking, because on numerous occasions, people seemed to win because of their looks, not their talent. A solution popped into his head: what if the singers wore masks?
For three years, nobody wanted Park’s show, the idea for which evolved to feature celebrities behind the masks. The 48-year-old had 24 years’ experience in the TV industry, but his idea was rejected by network after network. “I felt sheer desperation,” he tells me.
Continue reading...Body shaming, media harassment, relentless cruelty – it’s time to reassess the decade that feminism forgot
I went to university in 2007. On my first day, every fresher had their photo taken; the pictures were pinned to a bulletin board in my halls. That evening, older male students scrawled on the photographs of the girls, rating our attractiveness. No one got in trouble. Later, the same men published a gossip magazine that Photoshopped images of female students on to porn stars, dissected our sex lives and made rape jokes. The magazine was printed using university funds. No one got kicked out. None of this seemed particularly objectionable to me, an 18-year-old girl. This was just the way things were. Internalised misogyny ran deep in the 2000s. Hell, I was just happy I got a high score on my photograph.
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Continue reading...Her TV show has been No 1 in the US since 1998, but many have criticised her approach to justice. As she hangs up her gavel after 25 years, she discusses wealth, success and repentance
Order, order. Court is in session, Judge Judith Sheindlin presiding, and while you are here you will follow her rules.
Don’t throw paper on the floor. Hang on to your gum wrapper until you get to a bin. Don’t befoul your community. Try not to scratch other people’s cars and, if you do, leave your details on the windscreen. Don’t tell lies. Confront your problems and try to solve them.
Continue reading...The reality TV and rap superstar couple known as Kimye are parting ways after almost seven years of marriage, following reports a split was ‘imminent’
Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are getting a divorce after almost seven years of marriage.
The reality TV superstar, 40, filed for divorce from the rapper, 43, on Friday in Los Angeles, court sources confirmed to the AP, and is seeking joint legal and physical custody of their four children, daughters North, seven years old, and Chicago, two, and sons Saint, five, and Psalm, 19 months.
Continue reading...The Strictly Come Dancing judge reveals which contestant surprised him the most and why he’s looking forward to getting booed twice a day in Robin Hood
You’re a panto regular – what do you enjoy most about it?
I love live theatre – it’s where I started my career back home in Australia and I got into it as soon as I arrived in the UK. As much as I love my screen career, you simply can’t beat helping an audience to suspend their disbelief for a few hours and enjoy a shared experience live and in real time. While we all take it seriously and it’s hard work, panto is fun, festive and lets me show audiences what I can do when I’m not sitting behind my Strictly desk.
Panto has never fully been exported to Australia. When did you first see one?
The first ever pantomime I was in! Our producers, Qdos Entertainment, once called offering me the job of directing one of their productions, but due to filming commitments I couldn’t make it work. They called back five minutes later and asked me if I wanted to be in the panto instead and I jumped at the chance. It was a baptism of fire – wearing a dress, ridiculously high heels and getting booed twice a day. But I loved it, and I still do.
Rogue creatures from bushtucker trials including ‘ultimate survivor’ cockroaches could threaten Welsh countryside
Police are investigating I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! over concerns non-native wildlife could have escaped into the Welsh countryside during bushtucker trials, the Guardian can reveal.
Rural crime officers from north Wales police are looking into complaints that non-native creatures such as cockroaches, maggots, spiders and worms could threaten wildlife in the 100-hectare (250-acre) estate surrounding Gwrych Castle in north Wales, where the show is being held this year.
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