Creator and star will return along with Allison Williams, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke and Andrew Rannells for five-episode revival
Girls, the seminal HBO series on millennial strivers that launched the careers of Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Adam Driver and more, will return for a limited run on HBO in 2027.
The five-episode addendum, set to begin production next year – a decade after the series finale aired – will reunite creator and star Dunham, as aspiring writer Hannah Horvath, alongside Williams as Marnie Michaels, Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna, Jemima Kirke as Jessa and Andrew Rannells as Elijah. Judd Apatow will also return as executive producer.
I watched the filming of the first jazz-hands epic. Two decades on, its sparkle hasn’t faded – and now it’s back on the London stage
Whenever I watch basketball, I come away disappointedthat the players’ shoe squeaks didn’t jumpstart a choreographed dance number, just like in High School Musical. Whether it was a lunch break turning into a confession of closeted passions or a pep rally evolving into a flashmob, the 2006 Disney Channel movie proved that teen drama can always be solved through song.
Quality entertainment? Meh. The corniest of lines? Oh, for sure. But the cheesiness was the point. Its 98 minutes became a deliciously enduring slice of pop culture not despite the cringe, but because the film embraced it so wholeheartedly.
Rachel Chang is a journalist and author specialising in travel and pop culture. Her book Unforgettable Walks: 52 Places to Stroll Around the World is published next year
This peculiar – some would say truly irresponsible – hagiography of boxing superstar Mike Tyson veers from psychedelics and sobbing to the inadvisable face tattoo via a cameo from the US president
Netflix’s new four-parter on Mike Tyson is one of the strangest sports documentaries it has ever released, or maybe just one of its strangest documentaries full stop. The streamer has form in sporting hagiographies – tales told with questionable distance from their subjects, and all the objectivity of cold war agitprop. Tyson is different, though: not only is it lopsided, but it also feels deeply icky. And that’s before Donald Trump arrives to defend its subject – a great catch for the programme-makers but a wholly baffling cameo that makes you wish he would stick with geopolitical meddling and golf.
It ends – spoiler alert – with the former boxing champion taking the hallucinogenic drug DMT (or as he calls it, “the toad”, after the animal that produces it), while sobbing and inviting the show’s director to join him. Its episodes are peculiar, sometimes compelling, and – as many viewers will surely feel – truly irresponsible.
The actor RJ Mitte, whose personal experience living with cerebral palsy informed his role as Walter White Jr in the television series Breaking Bad, has died aged 34 in Brownsville, Texas.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of beloved actor, philanthropist, and passionate disability rights advocate RJ Mitte,” Mitte’s representatives said in a statement. “Drawing from his own experience living with cerebral palsy, Mitte brought authenticity to the role and built a platform on disability awareness and inclusion.”
Mobeen Azhar isn’t afraid to tackle hard topics in a brilliant documentary about the rise of Islamophobia – even when it involves hearing criticism about his own decisions
In 2024, the journalist Mobeen Azhar made a documentary called Small Town, Big Riot that ought to have been highly influential, but, in our atomised modern media landscape, wasn’t. He deconstructed how anti-immigrant racists, radicalised by online propaganda, lies and hearsay, end up on the streets perpetrating shocking violence and rioting against a largely imaginary foe.
Azhar’s new film tackles a wider, thornier problem and is less satisfying as a result. But in his willingness to debate hard topics – even if it means hearing difficult arguments, some of which are aimed at him personally – he is still provoking thoughts and airing views that better-known journalists would never go near.
As she leaves the Traitors castle to star in The Pelicot Trial and receive a lifetime achievement award, the actor has highlighted ‘a loss of regional identity’ caused by funding pressures on UK theatres
There has been “a loss of regional identity” in the stories on stages around the UK due to the challenging circumstances facing theatres, according to Julie Hesmondhalgh.
The actor, who last week was the fourth contestant to leave The Celebrity Traitors, observed that for financial reasons regional theatres are increasingly making co-productions with other venues. This can lead to a “generic” product, she said, rather than a show that specifically says something about the local area.
Peter Flannery’s 90s TV drama classic is getting a theatre reworking in Newcastle. The director and cast talk about doing justice to its themes of scandal and decay – and emulating its star-making actors
In a small room at the top of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Live theatre, four actors are bringing to life the principal characters from one of British television’s best-loved dramas. Sitting around a table strewn with coffee cups, water bottles and annotated scripts, Tosker and Geordie have been boozing in a nightclub and weighing up their chances of pulling. Mary and Nicky have been arguing about whether they have a future together.
The scenes are from a new stage version of Our Friends in the North, the landmark nine-episode series first broadcast in 1996 on BBC Two. Set against a backdrop of Labour politics and police corruption, it charted 30 years in the lives of four working-class geordies and made stars of Mark Strong, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Christopher Eccleston. It was a hit with critics and viewers, won awards and regularly makes “greatest ever” lists.
Mobeen Azhar and Masood Khan look at life after the terror attacks. Plus: investigating Roman Abramovich. Here’s what to watch tonight
9pm, BBC Two “There was a time, 25 years ago, when being a British Muslim was OK,” says journalist Mobeen Azhar. “We were on the cover of magazines, getting elected to parliament and even captained the England cricket team.” Then 9/11 happened. He and his film-making partner, Masood Khan, have made this documentary to explore how the terror attacks affected the Muslim community – including their own experiences – and why they still reverberate today. Hollie Richardson
Did Robert Louis Stevenson’s timeless swashbuckling tale need the addition of a superpower? Is it better for reducing its young hero to an afterthought? Nope
A lever groans, a pipe judders and thunk: another unsolicited adaptation of a beloved literary classic is deposited on our screens. This particular emission is a six-part take on Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s timeless tale of swashbuckling adventure, high-seas treachery and thick eyebrowed youths in tiny britches wrestling with double-edged superpowers. The 19th-century novel has of course long captured the public imagination, its themes of … hang on. Superpowers? Aye, that there be. An’ plenty more bilge besides. For this US-UK co-production be what lubbers refer to as a “reimagining”. Which essentially means much effort has been made to “jazz up” – or, if you will, “ruin” – the source material.
And so, for better or significantly worse, the Jim Hawkins (Tom Sweet) of this new Treasure Island, titivated by writer Robert Murphy, has been given a photographic and possibly quasi-mystical memory; a preternatural talent for recollection that is demonstrated in scenes of much whooshing excitement. Here we find the youngster scowling at various documents while the soundtrack whispers mysteriously and the camera zooms slowly in then quickly out of his face, like a bee too embarrassed to ask for directions to the toilet. Not that any of this makes him interesting, mind.
The third series of Jimmy McGovern’s terrifying and acutely moving prison drama is set in a young offender institute – and the reality it depicts needs national attention
Jimmy McGovern has said that this new, third instalment of his prison anthology drama Time will be the last. For the sake of audiences’ emotional equilibrium, you have to hope so. For the sake of scripted drama, for the sake of art that has a hope of stirring the conscience of authorities and effecting change, you have to hope not.
This time, Time is inside a young offender institution. It is crammed with under-18-year-old males, locked up often for 23 hours a day, all subject to the relatively new “keep apart” system whereby prisoners deemed likely to be violent towards each other are not allowed out of their cells at the same time. Naturally, this leads to a lot more boys being banged up for a lot more of the day and suits the officers a lot better. It is a facet of modern YOIs that McGovern and his co-writer Sam Bailey, a man evidently cut from the same socially conscious cloth, are clearly intent on bringing to wider attention. Their script, and the direction by Paul Whittington, do a wonderful, terrifying job of conveying the kinetic energy pent up and desperate for release, and the seething fury ever threatening to erupt, in every scene.
Sarah Soleman’s adaptation of Elizabeth Day’s bestseller is hugely moreish – it leaves you absolutely desperate to find out more about the mystery at its heart
Imagine going to a huge party in a country pile stuffed with posh Tory MPs. Now imagine being massively pregnant and unable to drink. Now imagine that the party is “Victorian freak show” themed, because the hostess thought that would be even more fun. Such is the situation Lucy Gilmour (Sarah Solemani) finds herself in at the beginning of The Party, Solemani’s adaptation of Elizabeth Day’s 2017 bestseller of the same name.
When you learn that a gun has gone off, your first thought may well be that this can only improve matters. At the very least, the circus troupe will probably decline to perform further, and I believe even posh people have to stop conga-ing to 80s hits once the police show up. Like most of us, I’d be tempted to fire the gun into the air myself.
We got our first look at Prime Video's new sci-fi series Blade Runner 2099in July at San Diego Comic-Con. With the show's premiere roughly six weeks away, the streamer unveiled the full trailer this weekend at New York Comic-Con. Co-stars Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer (Euphoria) joined showrunner Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) onstage for the big reveal.
We are 50 years after [Blade Runner] 2049 and, bad news, the worst has happened. The replicant uprising that has been bubbling up in the films has taken place and the humans have lost. So the creations have surpassed their creators. And the series, the big question it asks is, ‘What happens when our time as a species ends?’ 2099 is taking place at a junction point when one species is ending and a new one is rising. The first film, something I loved about it, was that it was looking at mortality on a micro level. Roy Batty and the other replicants were fighting for more life. This show asks that same question but on a macro level. Mankind—what happens when we realize our time is running out? And are we going to accept that loss? Can we hold on to our humanity during it?
Yeoh stars as Olwen, the dying Replicant, while Schafer plays Cora. The cast also includes Hugo Hamlet as Buster Friendly, as well as Dmitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, Katelyn Rose Downey, Daniel Rigby, Johnny Harris, Amy Lennox, Sheila Atim, Matthew Needham, Tom Burke, and Maurizio Lombardi—all in as-yet-undisclosed roles.
The choir leader and presenter on not fitting in at his all-boys grammar, how synthesisers changed everything, and his ‘dithering’ start on TV
Born in London in 1975, Gareth Malone is a choirmaster and broadcaster. He began his career running youth and community choirs for the London Symphony Orchestra and first appeared on TV in 2006’s The Choir. He has since created choirs with Leicester schoolboys, Aylesbury prisoners, as well as the Military Wives, which produced the No 1 single, Wherever You Are. He lives in London with his wife and three children. His new live show, Sing-A-Long-A-Gareth: At the Movies, is on tour across the UK this autumn.
I was 15 and just coming into my own with my confidence, as you can tell by the double denim and the pose. The photo would have been taken at a party at my parents’ house in Bournemouth. When I wasn’t filling up guests’ drinks, I’d be playing some songs – it looks like I’m playing B flat major, so I suspect at this very moment it was Hey Jude.
Major TV networks were notified on Friday that the department was examining whether they violated antitrust laws when they suspended pool coverage of President Trump.
The British actor on the genius of Bend It Like Beckham, the role she lost to Emma Thompson and why some actors get worse with age
What was the most Australian thing that you experienced while you were in the country filming Dustfall?
Working with a python? We don’t tend to work with snakes in the UK. I’m absolutely snake phobic but the python was very professional. Behaved better than I did.
As streamers poach viral creators to appeal to children, digital whack-a-mole has become a new kind of family challenge
Exasperated dad Simon Hooper shakes his fist at the camera in a viral video. “We managed to get rid of YouTube in our household six months ago and the kids are finally OK with it,” he says – but Netflix is “now commissioning YouTubers to make their brain rot and putting it back in front of my kids’ faces”.
The precise “brain rot” he’s referring to is the arrival of a polarising show that’s lighting up parent chats around the globe. And while Salish and Jordan Matter might be new to Netflix Kids users, the father-daughter content creators are familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on the internet.
The broadcaster on her days as a shoplifter, catastrophising, and a first kiss with her dance partner
Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, Stacey Dooley, 39, left school at 15 and worked as a shop assistant. In 2007 she was selected to take part in the BBC reality series Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. This led to the series Stacey Dooley Investigates and her career as presenter of hard‑hitting documentaries. In 2018, her face-to-face confrontation with an Islamic State soldier won her the One World Media award and she also received the MBE for services to broadcasting. She has made three new investigative films for the BBC and presents BBC series Clickbait Clinic. She met dancer Kevin Clifton when they were partnered on Strictly Come Dancing; they have a daughter and live in Merseyside.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I’m quite greedy. I achieve something or something’s feeling really brilliant and I’m, like, “Right, what are we doing next? What are we getting next?”
Jimmy McGovern’s grab-you-by-the-throat prison show is back and it could hardly be more urgent, prescient or excellent. Brace yourself though … Bake Off it is not
It takes a lot to drag me away from comfort TV in the autumn. Blame the shrinking hours of light or the apocalyptic news cycle but the closest thing I like to get to televisual trauma in October is watching comedians get into their own graves in The Celebrity Traitors. I doubt I’m alone. I don’t want to psychoanalyse the British public but I’d take a punt that collectively we are just about capable right now of looking at Josh Widdicombe trying to find a purpose next to Emma Willis on the Strictly dancefloor (and reportedly, even that’s a struggle).
Enter legendary Jimmy McGovern with a new series of the Bafta-winning prison drama Time (Sunday, 9pm, BBC One) to drag the nation out of its Bake Off-related coma. Having already covered the devastation of men’s and women’s prisons in the first two series, the good news is that McGovern and co-writer Samuel Bailey’s trilogy surely can’t get any more distressing. The new episodes will be set in *checks notes* a youth offending institution for boys. OK great. It’s about children in prison. Thank you, Jimmy! I hope you’re happy! No one else is going to be.
Jeremy Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg in Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network, and the Last One Laughing star reckons with divorce in her new standup tour
The Social Reckoning Out now The David Fincher-directed The Social Network has only come to seem more canny over time, with the site co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg being held responsible for all manner of social ills. In this sequel from Aaron Sorkin (this time directing and writing) based on the incidents around the 2021 leak of internal Facebook memos, Zuck is embodied not by Jesse Eisenberg but Jeremy Strong.
Stephen King’s high-school scare-’em-up is reinvented for 2026, and the pop superstar brings the love in her feelgood live extravaganza. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews
Layby hookups are all in a day’s work for Romola Garai in her steamy new drama Adultery. She talks faking orgasms, keeping secrets – and making audiences pass out
In a raging storm in the Peak District last winter, a blue Toyota Yaris was parked in a remote roadside spot with a sex scene being filmed inside it. “It can pose challenges, depending on the size of the car,” chuckles Romola Garai. “Me and Dominic [Cooper] got in this hatchback and asked: ‘How far do these seats go back?’ Soon there was a gale blowing outside. We were in the car, ready to shoot, but outside the entire film crew were being buffeted by high winds. They said: ‘You guys stay in there, don’t get out!’ while all the lights were getting blown away.”
What did the co-stars do while the camera crew battled the elements? “What actors always do in these situations – have a long, gossipy conversation about people in the industry. While everyone else was trying to save the show, we were sitting in the car, like: ‘Well, I’ve heard he’s a total nightmare!’”
The comedy wunderkind shot to fame with his show Literally, Who Cares?! and a role in Lena Dunham’s Too Much. Now he’s bringing his take on self-involved zoomers to the TV screen. Just don’t call him the voice of a generation
Leo Reich’s new Channel 4 sitcom is “Girls meets Peep Show. That’s always my favourite part of pitching anything: choose two really good things and say it’s a mix of those!” says the comedian with a slight smirk. Still, it’s a fair summary: It Gets Worse is a bracingly candid, occasionally provocative hangout comedy about twentysomethings floundering professionally and personally in the big city that comes accompanied by a strong stench of British bleakness (see: the title, for a start). Yet it does fail to flag one key aspect. While Girls and Peep Show covered the travails of millennials and gen X respectively, It Gets Worse is happening now – making it the UK’s first true gen Z sitcom.
Or not. “I’m sceptical of the idea that generations have any real unifying features across the board, so I don’t want it to be like: this is a gen Z sitcom!” says the 28-year-old. In fact, it soon becomes clear that It Gets Worse is deliberately USP-less. We first meet Reich’s Ethan – “a middle-class loser gay guy” – and his pals Sam and Abi as they’re packing up their London flatshare, having been forced out because of a rent hike. But this isn’t the start of a meditation on the cost of living crisis – or anything else. “The point isn’t there’s some big concept where everyone’s a superhero, it’s: these are some people dot dot dot.” When I ask how closely the final show resembles his original idea, Reich looks askance. “The idea, I would say, was quite broad …”
Her unintentional buffoonery and disregard for the game makes Hall this season’s incredible agent of chaos
By rights, Jerry Hall should not still be a participant on The Celebrity Traitors. If there was any justice in the world, the traitors would have murdered her in cold blood at the very start of this Thursday’s episode. The fact they did not speaks volumes about what an absolute legend the woman is.
The crime that should have condemned her to death happened on last Friday’s show, during a mission where everyone had to be buried alive with a partner. Contestants had to choose between waiting to be dug up, or shouting the word “haggis”, which would release them but also make them eligible to be murdered. Needless to say, Hall shouted “haggis” approximately one solitary nanosecond after the game started. Nobody else shouted “haggis”. For sheer weakness in the face of adversity, she deserved to die.
After 37 years, the staunchly silent dog will speak for the first time in the audiobook of his autobiography – and it turns out he sounds like a hobbit
He has been on screen for 37 years, but he has never uttered a word. Now, Gromit will speak for the first time – with the voice of the Hobbit star Martin Freeman.
The claymation dog, who has partnered with his eccentric inventor-owner Wallace in a series of Oscar-winning films including The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, is releasing an autobiography this month – including an audiobook edition.
One of the lawyers is a mole in Sienna Miller and Dominic West’s soapy drama. Plus: the Lionesses shoot for the World Cup. Here’s what to watch this evening
9pm, Sky Atlantic The naughty divorce drama – made even juicier by its casting of two huge stars, Sienna Miller and Dominic West, whose own eventful relationships have been under the press spotlight – picks up after actor Carla is served on the red carpet (inspired by a representative for Jason Sudeikis handing Olivia Wilde custody papers on stage). Things look even worse for her as eager junior solicitor Johnny starts his first day on her legal team – as a mole for her husband’s side. Hollie Richardson
The third series of Jimmy McGovern’s breathtaking series Time stars David Tennant – and might just be its best ever. We go behind the scenes
“I don’t think you would find a young offender institution (YOI) in which stories like these haven’t happened. Seventeen years of age, loads of energy, hormones, bravado – you know they’ll kick off. It must be an absolute nightmare.”
Yes, Jimmy McGovern has gone back to prison again. After two series of Time, which told stories from men’s and women’s institutions, he has turned his attention to perhaps the most distressing ones of all. Set in a YOI, it’s full of tales of bad decisions, directionless rage and lost potential at the most vulnerable of ages. If this third series is, as he suggests, the last, it is quite the curtain call.
Don your best plaid shirts for this supernatural thriller about a gang of beefy fishermen who tackle sea monsters. It is totally ridiculous – but you will have loads of daft fun
Abandon all hope, ye who enter Below. And jettison disbelief while ye be at it. A six-part supernatural thriller forged from industrial-grade bunkum, Below is set in Snook’s Arm, a struggling Newfoundland fishing community beset by an ancient, unknowable evil. And plaid. And sea hags, shifty conservationists, mist, motorbikes, curses, a catch-all nostalgia for the 70s-90s, galoshes, wind and, horrifyingly, the collected works of the Waterboys. But mainly an ancient, unknowable evil (and plaid).
Here’s twitchy young roustabout Wade Penney (Charlie Heaton) with some combatively accented exposition. “I tells ye, these waters can be deadly,” he splutters, waggling his fish slice seawards as he prepares breakfast for his credulous Airbnb guests. “It’s been one seafarin’ tragedy after another for us.” Wade is an idiot but he is not, in this instance, wrong. First there was the seafarin’ tragedy of 1986, a splosh-based catastrophe that saw his family’s cottage – and his disconcertingly muscular grand pappy – dragged underwater by forces unknown. Then there were the fishing bans, the decades of economic uncertainty and the resettlement programme – a looming government-led scheme that threatens the town’s remaining hopes for survival. And now? “Jumpin’ Jesus,” blurts ripped paterfamilias Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett). “Will ye look at dat!” We look at dat. It’s an iceberg. A towering wodge of inexplicable CGI menace has materialised in the harbour, bringin’ with it yet more trouble for the embattled sea hunks.
The League of Gentlemen and Inside No 9 co-creator has always displayed a sense of gothic unease, and his new book combines myth, memoir – and his own disquieting drawings
When Reece Shearsmith was a boy, he overheard relatives chatting at a New Year gathering. “One of them was talking about [the ghost of] a woman they’d seen standing on the village green at three in the morning,” he recalls. “Another knew a woman who woke up and found a figure sitting at the end of her bed. It’s my first recollection of being properly scared and loving it.”
From then on, the Yorkshire-born Shearsmith was fascinated by all things uncanny. He would stay up late to watch Hammer horror films – his mother allowed it because she loved them, too – and immerse himself in books including the Hamlyn Book of Horror, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. His obsession carried through into adulthood and his work: Shearsmith is best known as the co-creator of the surreal comedy series The League of Gentlemen, Psychoville and the horror anthology Inside No 9. “I’ve managed to forge a career from the things I loved as a kid,” he says.
The game is in full swing, as we find out the first famous face to be banished. Plus: The Paper finale gets emosh. Here’s what to watch this evening
8pm, BBC One We’ve had our first round table – and incredibly frustrating cliffhanger ending – so now it’s time to find out which celebrity is the first to be banished. After confessing he is a traitor minutes after being chosen, surely it will be Richard E Grant? But that’s what’s so delicious about this game: you just never know what twist will come next. Continues on Friday with another murder. Hollie Richardson
Peeing in the sink he shared with Derek Jacobi, making a badger video with Brian May, climbing Everest with Alan Hinkes … as the great actor blasts into his 90s, stars celebrate his ‘loudness and madness’
From Carrie’s bullies to Cathy Ames, sympathetic backstories have made villains boring. It’s time to bring back truly awful villains – in all their deliciously sinful glory
The new Netflix adaptation of East of Eden largely sticks to the plot of the John Steinbeck novel. There are tweaks – the introduction of a wedding photograph, for example, which becomes a significant item – but otherwise, it is faithful to the book. That is, in terms of the plot. There has already been some discussion about what it has done to Cathy Ames, played with considerable ferocity by Florence Pugh. Cathy, who later changes her name to Kate, kills her parents by burning down the family house. She shoots her husband, Adam, and leaves her baby sons wailing and alone. She slowly poisons the brothel madam Faye, a woman who acts as a mentor to her and treats her as a daughter, while simultaneously tricking her into leaving her everything in her will. In the book, Steinbeck lets Kate reflect on killing Faye. She finds that she has “no feeling” about it at all.
She is a brilliant, brutal character, but on television, she becomes something else: complicated. Her cruelty remains intact, but Pugh and showrunner Zoe Kazan have fleshed her out and given reasons for her fury. They invent a scene that implies Cathy was abused as a child by two men in the woods, and when she takes her final bow, the series returns to this moment in flashback, suggesting that her campaign of destruction has been shaped by a life of trauma and pain. In Steinbeck’s hands, Cathy is cold and unfeeling. In the 2020s, Cathy is more sympathetic and less of a brute.
Rightly described as ‘Gremlins meets Hot Fuzz’, this fun series has the high-spirit and gusto one hopes for in a show about evil killer gnomes
One can never trust marketing materials to accurately describe a movie or TV series, but I’m pleased to report that Gnomes’ official synopsis gets its tone right: “Gremlins meets Hot Fuzz.” This six-part horror-comedy series indeed feels like the kind of rambunctious, high-spirited production that’d be right up the alley of Joe Dante and Edgar Wright, directors of the aforementioned films. Particularly in its air of barely controlled chaos, staged with a slight wink to the audience but never too self-consciously.
It’s also – without a doubt – the greatest television series ever made about murderous garden gnomes awakened by an ancient evil.
Oscar-winning actor celebrated for her outstanding performances in On the Waterfront and North By Northwest
Eva Marie Saint, who has died aged 102, made a lasting impression in two outstanding American films: as Edie Doyle, the wholesome, sensitive, Catholic girl who befriends the docker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954); and as Eve Kendall, the intriguing beauty helping and hindering the pursued advertising executive (Cary Grant) in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959).
In the latter, Saint, the coolest and wittiest of the “Hitchcock blondes”, was lit so beautifully that her fair skin looked like porcelain. In the scene when they first meet in the dining car of a Chicago-bound train, Saint and Grant deliver the double-edged banter with supreme style. Assessing him, she says, “Good taste in clothes. Good taste in food.” He continues, “Good taste in women – I like your flavour.”
From a breathless tango to a kiss that sent fans wild, the pair crafted a sensational seven-year TV crush. The real-life best friends talk first impressions, Casablanca moments – and having hot husbands
It was a crush. An unexpected one. The psychiatrist Niles Crane (snooty, conflict-avoidant, married to a high-society wife with a fear of buffets) fell for his father’s physio, Daphne Moon (working class, Mancunian, reckons she’s a bit psychic) the moment he met her in his brother’s Seattle apartment.
From Miss Babs in Acorn Antiques to Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and her infamous appearance on The Celebrity Traitors, it’s hard to know where to begin
Celia Imrie has had such a varied career, it’s hard to know where you might know her best from. Maybe it’s as Miss Babs, the permanently flustered antiques-shop owner in Victoria Wood’s Acorn Antiques, or as Philippa Moorcroft, Dinnerladies’ spectacularly uptight HR manager. Perhaps it’s as Bridget Jones’s family friend Una Alconbury, or from Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.
Maybe you know her as Mrs Quickly, the ghastly would-be stepmother in Nanny McPhee. Or maybe you first encountered her in Upstairs, Downstairs, To the Manor Born, Bergerac, Lovejoy or The Darling Buds of May, or as Claudia Bing, the magnificently awful PR rival of Jennifer Saunders’ Edina in Absolutely Fabulous.
This witty, smart remake takes bullying and telekinetic violence to new extremes. Even the shower scene is more excruciating than the original
The automatic response to the news that a stone-cold classic of any genre is to be remade is: “Why?” In an accompanying letter to critics, the creator of the new TV series Carrie, Mike Flanagan, promises us that this was the first question he asked himself too when he was approached about the project. Why mess with perfection – in this case, the Brian De Palma horror film, based on and nearly eclipsing in terms of cultural currency Stephen King’s debut novel about a telekinetic teen, that has been gloriously shocking audiences for half a century?
But it’s a far less necessary question than usual. Why remake Carrie, a story of teenage bullying, alienation and the vengeful violence they can fuel, for the modern age? Babe, look around! We’ve got the internet now. We’ve taken teenage bullying, alienation and the fuelling of vengeful violence to levels that De Palma and King, with all their vaunted capacity for darkness, could never have imagined! We are, to use a construction popular among the very youth of whom we are speaking, Carriemaxxing these days. The question is not why remake but quite why it has taken this long.
I was gripped by fear, aching all over – and still recovering from cancer treatment. But Dancing With the Stars was a joyous celebration of survival
It was an invitation I accepted in a moment of madness – and, over the next three months, regretted many times a day. I was in over my head, often with my heels literally over my head: I’d signed up to appear on the Greek version of Strictly Come Dancing.
Dancing With the Stars, as it is called in Greece, follows the same format as its UK counterpart, with an identical studio, a matching shiny floor, even many of the same costumes that are hired out and circulated among the 70 or more international versions of the BBC show. Of course, it’s all in Greek – and in the season I took part in, Covid restrictions had been imposed, which intensified its strangeness.
She joins Lennie James and Sheridan Smith on Sky’s Portrait Artist of the Year. Plus: reaching the bottom of Britain’s deepest cave. Here’s what to watch this evening
8pm, Sky Arts Stressful or soothing? It’s always a fine line between the two with this portrait competition. Art historian Katy Hessel joins the judging team for the show’s 13th series, with Stephen Mangan resuming hosting duties. The first three sitters are actors Lennie James, Sheridan Smith and Vanessa Williams. Who will break down in (happy) tears, telling a painter: “You’ve captured something I thought I’d lost”? Hollie Richardson
Beldina Odenyo was on the verge of stardom when she took her own life in 2021. In this beautiful documentary, her grief-stricken sister Leah attempts to finish her album – and her journey will make you cry again and again
In 2021, the Kenyan-Scottish singer-songwriter Beldina Odenyo was on the brink of major stardom. That October, aged 31, she headlined a gig at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, delivering an instantly legendary performance; barefoot, cloaked and bone-shaking in its intensity. Everyone in that concert hall knew they were witnessing something extraordinary that night. Two weeks later, Odenyo took her own life.
This tender and grief-stricken documentary, which opens a year after her death, is directed with remarkable care by Louise Lockwood. What emerges is a sensitively drawn portrait of a visionary artist haunted by trauma, formed through her teenage video diaries, the words of those who loved her, the handful of exquisite songs she left behind – kept in a folder on her hard drive named “passable demos” – and the determination of her older sister, Leah McAleer, to keep her astonishing voice alive. A deeply painful venture that she understands is itself a product of her insurmountable grief.
John Fisher recalls meeting a Casualty actor offering medical assistance to a passenger on a plane
Re Adrian Chiles’s article on TV medical dramas (I have a new favourite medical drama – and now I want to have a nasty accident in Pittsburgh, 30 September), my wife (a nurse) and I were on a flight back from Malta when the pilot called for any doctor or nurse on board to assist the cabin crew. My wife went to the back of the plane and found a hysterical woman freaking out on one of the seats. Standing over her were a cabin crew member and another woman, “attending” her. My wife said: “Oh, are you a doctor or a nurse?” She said: “No, I’m an actress, but I’ve been in several episodes of Casualty.”
The cabin crew member told her to clear off, and my wife looked after the hysterical woman. Some of these actors really get lost in their parts. John Fisher Eastleigh, Hampshire
David Ellison and ex-Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz to oversee both film studios, HBO Max, CNN and CBS News as co-executives
Paramount completed its $111bn acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery on Tuesday, consolidating some of the world’s most recognizable studios and news outlets after a bidding war with Netflix and months of legal turmoil.
The new company, now called Skydance, will have David Ellison, the son of a billionaire tech mogul, at its helm, with the former CEO of Mattel, Ynon Kreiz, as co-executive. They will oversee Paramount and Warner Bros’ movie studios, HBO Max, CBS News and CNN.
After being cancelled, former Vanderpump Rules star Stassi Schroeder is fighting for redemption with her own show – never mind what her family and friends think
Across the 2010s, Stassi Schroeder was the star of Vanderpump Rules, the hit reality TV show that tracked the near-psychopathic interpersonal relationships between the staff at Lisa Vanderpump’s peak-millennial restaurant SUR. From the moment she appeared on screen – all statement necklaces and crispy flatironed hair – it was clear that Schroeder was an early master of the reality genre. While the cast were all villainous in their own ways, she stood apart for her singular mix of charisma and chaos.
For eight years, Schroeder slapped her friends, belittled her bosses, bullied other women, insulted customers and was generally terrible at her job. But despite the frequent physical and psychological violence, she remained a firm audience favourite. In the years since, she has spoken about the impact this kind of adoration can have on a person: the worse she behaved, the more she was rewarded with attention from producers and the adoring – and admonishing – public. For a time, she was the people’s princess of darkness. That was until 2020, when she discovered there are limits to what even blond, leggy reality TV prodigies can do.
100 Zeros, a collaboration between Google and Range Media Partners, aims to give the tech giant a foothold in movies, TV and emerging forms of entertainment.
Jonathan Zepp, left, Google’s head of entertainment content and platforms, and Peter Micelli, chief executive of Range Media Partners, at Google offices in Los Angeles.
“The Social Reckoning” and other movies reflect growing discontent with Silicon Valley founders. But such films may be at the mercy of the companies themselves.
The prolific producers Michelle and Robert King target tech bigwigs in their newest show. “They’re really the stupidest and dumbest people,” Robert King said.
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