BBC · 3h ago
Government minister calls for review of 'unacceptable' BBC Scotland channel closure
The BBC announced the dedicated Scotland channel would move online as part of measures to make savings of £500m.
The Guardian · 4h ago
Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi given new prison sentence
Charges against him are unclear after return to Iran despite being sentenced last year for ‘propaganda activities’An Iranian court has handed the award-winning film director Jafar Panahi a new prison sentence of five years and one month and ordered the seizure of all his assets.The 66-year-old, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year for It Was Just an Accident, was sentenced in absentia, his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, told the Iranian news outlet Emtedad. The court also imposed a two-year travel ban and barred him from using social media for two years, Nili said. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 6h ago
Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s midterms mindset: ‘If his side wins, elections were honest’
Late-night hosts discussed Trump discrediting midterms results, and Don Jr’s friendship with a Russian oligarchLate-night hosts looked into Republicans’ efforts to discredit election results ahead of the US midterms and Donald Trump Jr’s questionable friendship with a Putin-aligned oligarch. Continue reading...
BBC · 7h ago
Mum quits job as lawyer to voice Netflix cartoon
Emily McGonagle, 42, decides to change careers after watching Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol on repeat.
The Guardian · 9h ago
‘I knead the audience, like a baker!’ House music legend Peven Everett on life after cancer and vanquishing the ‘Disco Sucks’ movement
A new documentary follows the Chicagoan from child trumpet prodigy to Gabriel-singing icon and DIY maverick. ‘Not everybody wants to see musical genius’, he saysAt We Out Here festival in Dorset in August, thousands of people could be heard singing a trumpet melody as if it was a giant brass-band karaoke session. On stage was Peven Everett, performing a rendition of Gabriel, one of the most celebrated anthems in dance-music history. Co-created with producer Roy Davis Jr, the best-known version, which blew up in UK clubs in the mid-90s, is a spiritual garage-house track about the “archangel of love” that can bring both punters and DJs to tears.But Everett is much more than one song. Damon Albarn of Gorillaz tells me that “Peven has a once-in-a-generation voice … he’s a great inspiration to us all.” We Out Here founder, Gilles Peterson says that the Chicagoan is, alongside Detroit’s Moodymann and Amp Fiddler, “the closest thing dance music has to a Prince-type figure”. A prolific multi-instrumentalist and one-man cottage industry, Everett’s catalogue spans more than 500 tracks, across house, neo-soul, hip-hop, samba and more. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 10h ago
Film buffs love it. Trump and Tom Hanks hosted it. Can TCM survive a Hollywood mega-merger?
Since 1994, Turner Classic Movies has been a haven for old film lovers. Now with Skydance’s David Ellison calling the shots, fans are panicking over its unclear futureI have made many attempts to lessen the existential disaster we call Tuesday – tacos, trivia – but lately only one thing works. Every night just before 8pm, I hide my phone under a pillow in the next room, plate up a carb-heavy dinner, and turn on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) for Sweater Weather, a series of films dedicated to the transitional season.Every Tuesday in October, Alicia Malone, an affable Australian film historian wearing business casual and a flippy bob, introduces a double feature. These are often midcentury melodramas featuring striking leads, serpentine plots, and the burnt hues of fall rendered in indulgent Technicolor. Like All That Heaven Allows (1955), about a widow who finds herself crushed under the weight of 1950s suburban conformity – and the teeny waistline of her swing skirts – while nursing a crush on her much-younger gardener. Or Leave Her to Heaven (1945), about a beautiful socialite so obsessed with her hapless husband that she will kill anyone who threatens their bond. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 10h ago
The Devils review – Ken Russell’s 1971 possessed-nuns tale is a frenzied aria of confrontation and hysteria
Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave put in the performances of their lives in this film originally banned for obscenity that highlights the violence of power‘I could never be Satan’s boy. I haven’t the humility.” The speaker is Father Urbain Grandier, the 17th-century French priest accused of witchcraft, stylishly played by Oliver Reed, in Ken Russell’s scabrous 1971 classic; it is now restored and rereleased in its complete form after years of censorship. It comes from an era when movies, playing in high-street cinemas, still had the power to shock, to position that shock in the polite cultural mainstream and to compel serious discussion about whether that shock – or, conversely, a ban – was justified.The Devils is based on a true story of politically directed mass hysteria, adapted by Russell from two literary works: Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s stage play The Devils. Of course it is obscene; obscenity is the glowing sulphurous paint which Russell is applying to the canvas. It is about obscenity – but the obscenity does not reside in the sexualised images of the crucified Christ or naked nuns disporting themselves; it is the violence of authority that is shown to be obscene. The idea of martyrs or heretics being burned at the stake has long been an accepted fact recounted in U-certificate history lessons, and a punishment which survived well into the European enlightenment. Russell shows you what it might actually look like and that is to involve a confrontational assault on good taste. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 11h ago
‘There is no inevitable dystopia’: Jeanette Winterson on AI and the future of humanity
The author believes we are at a turning point as a species – and even in the shadow of big tech it’s up to us how we want to proceed‘I am a storyteller by trade,” writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes, an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking series of essays in which she considered just how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. “And I know everything we do is a fiction until it’s a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, the dream of speaking to someone instantly, across time and space, the dream of not dying – or of returning.”She had already been thinking about our possible futures for at least 15 years – her 2007 novel, The Stone Gods, for instance, imagined a post-climate catastrophe world populated by robots and humans who never age, while 12 Bytes was preceded by Frankisstein: A Love Story, which alternates a recreation of the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a trans doctor’s travels among present-day cryogenecists and AI-enabled robots. Continue reading...
BBC · 11h ago
Celebrity Traitors' Joe Lycett's tribute to viral TikTok nan
Anne Hughes found fame after being hoisted into the air after getting caught in shop shutters.
The Guardian · 11h ago
‘Dear Charlie’: letter revealing move to snare future Rolling Stones drummer up for auction
Brian Jones wrote to Charlie Watts in 1962 asking him to leave his R&B group and join his ‘far better’ band insteadA handwritten letter from Brian Jones to Charlie Watts in which he attempts to recruit the drummer to join the band that would soon become the Rolling Stones is being auctioned later this year.The 1962 letter, which comes directly from Watts’s sister and has remained in the family for more than six decades, will be revealed to the public for the first time. Continue reading...
The Guardian · 12h ago
‘Fear is contagious’: why horror shows are taking over the New York stage
Hit London plays 2:22, Paranormal Activity and A Ghost in Your Ear are now spooking audiences on and off Broadway amid high demand for communal experiencesAs we escaped the restrictions of the pandemic, with many also trying to escape the smartphone addiction that was exacerbated by it, there was widespread desire for the in-person communal experience. It was a slow crawl back with casualties along the way but as the Hollywood and Broadway box office return to pre-pandemic levels this year, our craving for IRL thrills appears to be stronger than ever.It’s why Imax and 4DX formats are breaking records, concert attendance is at a new high according to a mid-year report and the most recently tracked season of New York theatre grossed more than the previous. It also helps to explain why the hottest tickets of the fall are for plays in the most communal genre of all: horror. Continue reading...
BBC · 15h ago
6 Music Festival 2027 heads to Newcastle
The station's flagship festival will return to Tyneside after 12 years.
