This week we learnt that TV chef Ainsley Harriott is also Lenny Henry. Who knew? ITV did. As Henry received his knighthood from Her Majesty, the broadcaster showed footage of the one-man double-act’s career:
@itvnews Can I ask why you used footage of Ainsley Harriot in you segment about Sir Lenny Henry being knighted? pic.twitter.com/tgYene7dBo
Whoops! A spokesperson for ITV News went on the record:
“ITV News apologises for the error broadcast in the lunchtime news package today regarding Sir Lenny Henry’s knighthood at the palace. This was the result of an error in the production process in a piece intended to celebrate Sir Lenny’s significant achievements in British entertainment.”
The Daily Mirror reports that 811 shows broadcast over the Christmas period on the four main TV channels have been broadcast before.
The Mirror, which, like the Express and Mail, has broadcast adaptations of this story for the last 20 years, is dismayed by the news.
Says one tabloid insider: “Every year we have to report the same story as news but with a new headline. This year it’s “‘Tis the season for repeats”, whereas last years we reported “The season for repeats”, before that it was “‘Twas the season for repeats” and next year we have already written “‘Twill be the season for repeats”. These TV bosses just shove out Mary Poppins. It’s not fair.”
Sky News subtitles were running over an item on dress size changes over the past 20 years. The item was a day late lift on a Daily Mail story. The claim is a 10 dress size today would have been a 14 a couple of decades ago.
A gushing Sky commentator repeats the Mail’s headline which compared Kim Kardashian to the ultimate blonde bombshell which was converted by Sky’s superfast text translator as:
” Like comparing Marilyn Monroe to Kincardineshire“
Al Molinaro, the actor who played Al Delvecchio, owner of Arnold’s Drive-In on the hit TV show Happy Days has died. You might know him as Murray from The Odd Couple.
A modelling contract? A glass cake stand? A peerage?
Nadiya has managed to defuse the negative, politicised and stereotypical discourse surrounding Muslims in one beat of a whisk. Such is her resonance that even David Cameron – whose Tory party conference speech lists pet hates that can be construed as Muslim-related, including another dig at madrasas and his declaration that “this passive tolerance has turned us into a less integrated country” – backed her to win.
The elite who turn everything into a moral education for the masses. Cameron was mad for Brain Belo to win Big Brother. Show him a darker complexion on The Chase and Dave bangs the drum. “Go-gogo, Ali from Bury,” he yells. “Make Britain proud!”
While Nadiya is the most popular GBBO baker to date, with the charming anaesthetist Tamal Ray a close second, their combined appeal meant that this year’s finale was bound to break previous records… In addition to GBBO’s winning set-up of the brilliantly witty Mel and Sue, poker-faced Paul Hollywood and traditionalist Mary Berry… its inclusivity factor has been reflected in the competitors, with Nadiya having the extra edge of being a non-stereotypical British winner – as an Asian Muslim woman in a hijab, she both represents and transcends all her identities.
Poor old Ian. The white bloke is the only person on camera not included in Remona’s tribute to inclusiveness.
White bloke Simon Kelner (Independent), says Nadiya Hussain “serves up the perfect rebuttal to Theresa May’s xenophobic rhetoric.”
Nadiya does not represent Muslims, or British Muslims, or Asian women or even just women. She is simply an individual who represents no one but herself, in exactly the same way that if her fellow contestant Ian Cumming, a white middle-class man, had won the show, it wouldn’t have said anything meaningful about white middle-class men either.
How dare the BBC portray this cheery mix of ethnicities and sexualities and backgrounds inexplicably not at one another’s throats, and thus make it look as if multiculturalism might not be so bad after all? There was admittedly something a bit contrived about Hussain’s final showstopper, the wedding cake she’d apparently always wanted (they’re not traditional in Bangladesh, where she and her husband married). Even the dimmest viewer couldn’t miss the symbolism of an old-fashioned iced lemon drizzle accompanied by a red, white and blue sari.
MILLIONS of nut-cakes tuned in to the Bake Off final last night not entirely sure who’d win — but utterly convinced they knew who wouldn’t. We had a Muslim mum of three, Nadiya, looking quietly determined. A gay Asian NHS worker, Tamal, looking stupidly relaxed. And a bloke called Ian, looking utterly screwed.
Turn up without a box tick to your name, some viewers reckon, and you can bake an exact replica of the Taj Mahal using shortbread fingers and meringue nests and it still won’t be enough to win this most PC of BBC shows.
The Bake Off monster has got so big, the show is no longer just a cake-making contest.
It’s full-scale ideological warfare and another chance to argue about political-correctness in the BBC. To have the stomach for that, you also need to give an unhealthy toss about Flora’s cocoa carousel or Alvin’s plum tart…
BBC execs no doubt did a multi-cultural jig of politically-correct joy — long before she sealed it with a patriotic red, white and blue wedding cake. Tearful, victorious Nadiya was the best contestant. She deserved to win.
I’m simply glad it’s over. Now we can enjoy the less PC delights of the new Apprentice line-up. That includes: Ah. A Kosovan refugee, a Nigerian businesswoman and a former intern for a Liberal Democrat MEP.
Amanda Platell writes in Mail:
Poor Flora wasn’t PC enough for Beeb
When this series of The Great British Bake Off began, the BBC was proud it was the most inclusive, multi-cultural line-up ever.
Did you notice?
Now we’re down to the final three, it’s certainly a PC triumph. We are left with Muslim mum Nadiya Hussain, gay doctor Tamal Ray, and New Man Ian Cumming. Poor Flora Shedden never stood a chance. She was far too middle class — and was booted off this week after her chocolate carousel was deemed sub-standard. Perhaps if she’d made a chocolate mosque, she’d have stood a better chance.
The judges are Paul Hollywood (white; non-Jewish male), Mary Berry (white; non-Hindu female), Sue Perkins (white; gay; non-Satanist) and Mel Giedroyc (white; non-Buddhist; not a former refugee reading Gender Studies at Sussex University). We could go through the crew, whose names appear at the show’s end. Or look harder at Platell (white; immigrant). Or we could wonder if a chocolate mosque answered the brief to create a “stunning and delicious 3D centrepiece made from chocolate and biscuit”. No word was made of the need to create a place of worship from chocolate. No contestant did.
That’s not to say that something controversial, like a chocolate version of the Human Centipede, a dole queue or Jeremy Clarkson’s fist would not have given the middle-of-the-road show an edge. A chocolate mosque sounds a little dull.
A few days later, Platell adds:
…while I’m thrilled for Nadiya, I do also fear for her now she and her family have been catapulted into the seductive, cynical world of celebrity.
Stewart Lee has also seen how the winner of the twee TV show is being packaged as moral lesson for us all. He writes:
It was on 3 October that the Daily Mail content provider Amanda Platell introduced the notion of a chocolate mosque into the collective subconscious. But still, more than a week later, Platell’s enormous chocolate mosque continues to loom over my imagination like an enormous chocolate mosque, an image so absurd that it becomes a viable metaphor for its own self.
In case the news-blip passed you by, Platell made minor chocolate ripples by suggesting in print that a middle-class woman called Flora Shedden, and her chocolate carousel, were booted off the BBC’s Bake Off cake contest in favour of Muslim mum Nadiya Hussain, gay doctor Tamal Ray and “new man” Ian Cumming, because she wasn’t “politically correct” enough. Perhaps, wrote Platell, “if she’d made a chocolate mosque she’d have stood a better chance”.
…An obvious subtext to Platell’s story is that the other contestants were favoured, irrespective of the quality of their cake work, because they fulfilled some kind of politically correct quota, such as “Muslim mum” and “gay doctor”. But the idea that this could be a deciding factor is undermined by the presence of the third victor, Ian Cumming, for whom the best denigrating epithet that the increasingly desperate Platell can find is “new man”, a phrase last used pejoratively by a woman wearing legwarmers in the early 1980s.
And here’s food for more opinion writers: will Nadiya make a cake for gay weddings? A source tells the Sun:
“Since the final aired she has had a flood of requests from brides-to-be. A few she has already accepted and there is enough demand for her to consider making wedding cakes professionally. It’s something she could work on in her evenings. She is still a full-time mum, after all.”
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was interviewed by Eamonn Holmes on Sky News Sunrise. It was painfully enjoyable viewing. It gets worse and worse and worse… From 7 mins 40, Holmes causes wincing…
The figures do not lie. The OFCOM MEDIA TRACKER 2014 (16th May to 20th June and 1st to 31st August and 1st to 30th November 2014) says that 2% of viewers think there is too little sex on the telly.
I translated the video myself and added it in using FCP. It is as accurate as I can understand from it. Besides the obscure name of the villages, it is mostly accurate. Downloaded the video from Tudou. Xi’an Up Close 《西安零距离》, an investigative journalism programme which airs on Xi’an TV, has become a national laughing stock after airing a report on June 17 on a “mystery mushroom” which was discovered by villagers in a rural part of the city…
Why does everything about the last line sound like a euphemism?
Matthew Morettini let’s us compare and contrast three screen manifestations of Hannibal Lecter with this neat video
I always preferred the 1985 Manhunter, with Brian Cox as the terrifying Lecter. Anthony Hopkins reworked the character in Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs before Mads Mikkelsen appeared as the psychopath in the TV series Hannibal.
Take a look at the video. Which one do you prefer?
In readiness to shock to deadline on the corporate VMA awards, host Miley Cyrus appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live with most of her breasts exposed.
Kimmel was thought by many to be one of the three remaining human being not to have seen Cyrus’s breasts. Miley is now actively seeking an audience with the Pope and Lord Lucan, preferably both at once to save time before she can move on to stage 2 of Operation Primary Sexual Characteristics and show us her massive beefy knob.
Kimmel was keen to know if Miley’s dad had appraised his daughter’s naked chest.
“My dad’s cool, because I’m sure he’d maybe rather me not have my tits out all the time,” said Cyrus. “But he’d rather me have my tits out and be a good person than have a shirt on and be a bitch.”
Those are a pretty limited set of life choices in the Cyrus household.
“You know what I’ve learned? It’s not the tit—are you allowed to say ‘tit’ on your show?”added Cyrus. “Humans aren’t afraid of the human breast. It’s the nipple that’s the issue…Like, I’m showing my boobs and no one has a problem, but the nipples are covered, so somehow that’s OK. So America’s actually fine with tits. It’s nipples they don’t like.”
Which is great news for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The dystopian hell of BBC TV’s EastEnders isn’t all a middle-class liberal’s merlot-induced dream about the lower classes – it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary. The Sun catches up with one of the show’s stars, rheumy-eyed Dot Branning, who tells readers that her health could be better.
“DOT: I’M GOING DEAF AND BLIND”
In the soap’s competition to be every more miserable, you have to now expect a welter of rival headlines:
“ALFIE: I’m going deaf, dumb and blind”
“PHIL: I’m going deaf, dumb, blind and ate my own tongue”
“SONIA: I’m dead”
But this story is not about Dot. It’s not a plot driver. The story is about a woman called June Brown, the 88-year-old actress, who whilst at a Barbara Windsor stage show “struggled to hear her pal despite sitting in the front row”.
And when Barbara, 78, brought her on stage, she asked: “Are you talking to me Babs? Tell me, because I’m deaf you see and it’s very hard for me to hear so I don’t know what you’re talking about. What did you say to me?”
She then told the audience at London’s BFI: “Sorry, I would like you all to shout because I can’t hear, you see. I am ever so sorry. I am straining here.”
Meanwhile, in the far more real world of EastEnders, things have gotten worse for Dot. A “source” explains:
“It’s important for her that people know this isn’t an issue at work. The only reason she is off screen at the moment is because Dot is in prison.”
“She’ll be back at work imminently and is chomping at the bit to return.”
To Phoenix, Arizona, where Okilly Dokilly –the world’s first and only Ned Flanders tribute band – are talking to James McCann. They play ‘Nedal’ music. It being what The Simpson’s character would have wanted.
As their Facebook bio notes: “most of our songs are direct Ned quotes.”
Lead Singer Head NedOn How They Got Started
“Myself and our drummer (Bled Ned) were in line at a grocery store, entertaining ourselves by coming up with really cutesy names for really hardcore, brutal bands. The name Okilly Dokilly came up and was very funny to us. We ran with it. I contacted a few friends (Red Ned, Thread Ned and Stead Ned), and here we are. Most of us have played in other bands around our hometown. This is definitely the heaviest sounding project any of us Neds have done.”
The Sound
“Not as fast as Bartcore, and a little cleaner than Krusty Punk. Not as heavy as ‘Homer J.ent’ – Nedal is a happy medium in the Simpscene.”
Are You All Left Handed?
“I am,”says Head Ned. “The other Neds aren’t so lucky. It made writing All That Is Left pretty fun,” he continues. “It’s our homage to the Leftorium, and the bridge is entirely left handed puns.”
The Dream
In reality, this is all just an over-the-top attempt at getting Matt Groening’s autograph, even if it comes on a cease and desist letter.
Danniella Westbrook’s Celebrity Big Brother comeback is off. The Sun says a CBB “shrink” (actually the show’s psychologist) talked with the 41-year-old former EastEnders actress and reformed cocaine addict who became known to millions as the “girl with no nose” and decided it would be best to cancel.
But the real shocker is that CBB was prepared to pay the former star £200,000 to be on the telly. We don’t know what the actress was paid to appear on I’m Famous – and Frightened with former TV chef Rustie Lee. ‘Handy’ Andy Kane from Changing Rooms, Jade Goody’s boyfriend and Madge from Neighbours but we’d guess it was shy of £200,000. And surely it was alway a risk to hire Westbrook who quit I’m a Celebrity when she found a rat in her hammock.
Westbrook’s hopes to rival Katie Price in the hardback bestseller lists are dashed.
A nameless “source” arrives to tell us what legend Danniella is:
“The producers were desperate to get Danniella on the show because, let’s face it, she’d make great TV. She was invited to meet them and alarm bells started ringing straight away. She was incredibly incoherent.”
That’s what happens when you work too long on EastEnders. You end up talking in a BBC Cockney patois. Trains of thought are interrupted by massive pauses. You reply to questions by barking ‘Sort it aht!’. You are routinely out-thought and out-acted by a dog.
It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Danniella. TV careers have been built on less.
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LONDON - JANUARY 30: Actress Danniella Westbrook poses for photographers as she arrives at the premiere of Two Weeks Notice on January 30, 2003 in London. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
Katie Hopkins is having an operation on her brain. The Sun’s vile-to-deadline columnist gives the newspaper an “exclusive” in much the same way a baby gives their parent an exclusive look at their filled nappy. But let’s not knock Katie because this is serious.
I’m having a brain op… I could die
EXCLUSIVE: Katie Hopkins reveals she’s ‘full of fear’ over epilepsy surgery
Media loves little more than talking about media. No surprise, then, that a letter in praise of the BBC signed by such entertainment bigwigs as JK Rowling and Chris Evans should ride high on the news cycle. But what did the Press make of it?
JK Rowling and Chris Evans have joined a host of A-list names to have signed an open letter to the prime minister calling on him to protect the BBC from cuts to its service
If your names on the list, you’re in. Imagine the upset as celebs not on the BBC register realise they rank below Adil Ray, Mark Rylance and Reggie Yates.
The full text of the letter:
The battle for the BBC
Dear prime minister,
We have seen that the government has pledged to modernise the licence fee, return funding that had been diverted to pay for broadband roll-out, and increase the licence fee in line with inflation in return for the BBC taking on the costs of licence fees for the over-75s.
The government and the BBC are now entering the charter review. We are writing to place on record at the very start of the process our concern that nothing should be done to diminish the BBC or turn it into a narrowly focused market-failure broadcaster.
In our view, a diminished BBC would simply mean a diminished Britain.
The BBC is a very precious institution. Like all organisations, it has its faults but it is overwhelmingly a creative force for good.
Britain’s creative economy is growing and enjoying unprecedented success. The BBC is at the heart of this as the global showcase for our creative industries. The BBC is trusted and loved at home by British audiences and is the envy of the world abroad.
During the course of the charter, we will continue to make the case for a strong BBC at the centre of British life and will be vocal in making the case for the BBC as it approaches its centenary.
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Yours sincerely
Clara Amfo David Attenborough Clare Balding Melvyn Bragg Brian Cox Daniel Craig Richard Curtis Judi Dench Chris Evans Stephen Fry Nick Grimshaw Miranda Hart Lenny Henry Gary Lineker Michael McIntyre Steven Moffatt Trevor Nelson Annie Nightingale Graham Norton Jamie Oliver Michael Palin Adil Ray JK Rowling Mark Rylance Simon Schama David Walliams Rachel Weisz Claudia Winkleman Reggie Yates
Over in the Times, the story is how so many names got together to write a letter:
BBC organised celebrities’ protest letter
Well, of course someone must have. Sat in the BBC canteen, one of them must have kickstarted the project and drafted the thing. Given the lack of wow!, fist bumps and seagull droppings we’d says the root was either Schama or Adil Ray*, the latter chiefly because we don’t know who they are and they could only benefit from the exposure.
The Times says that’s wrong.
The letter was presented as an independent protest against plans to reform the BBC, but The Times can reveal that executives at the highest level helped to co-ordinate it while the corporation officially denied all knowledge.
Annie Nightingale, BBC Radio 1’s longest-serving presenter and one of the letter’s 29 signatories, said she had been invited to be a signatory by Ben Cooper, the controller of Radio 1. She had not seen the text of the letter before its publication.
And then this:
Mr Cohen is friends with two Hollywood stars who signed the letter, Daniel Craig and his wife, the actress Rachel Weisz. They attended his 2012 wedding, where Weisz was a bridesmaid. Neither the actors nor the BBC would comment on whether Mr Cohen had helped to persuade the couple to sign.
Is that a big deal? And, in any case, when Hollywood stars tell the unwashed how great the BBC is, does anyone listen? Yeah, weak politicians do, the ones who view the arts as mirrors to their own sensitive souls, shiny things to pick up and drop when an easy photo opportunity is needed.
But better than reading the grandstanding talent and listening for the politicos reactions are the readers comments papers chose to feature. The Guardian, which is pretty much the BBC’s in-house news sheet, heads its readers’ letters page:
Friends of the BBC will oppose the government’s vicious attacks
…
Tories, and their friends among the circling vultures of the commercial sector, assume that in doing popular programmes the BBC has been muscling in on natural commercial territory. But they are getting their history back-to-front. The BBC got there first – by several decades. It would be more accurate to say that commercial broadcasters have been muscling in on the BBC’s natural territory. Perhaps the government needs an expert panel to investigate whether they should be scaled back? Professor David Hendy University of Sussex
Compare and contrast that to the top reader comment in the Times, the paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Sky TV:
John Prince What a sad reflection on the Beeb! They try to play dirty by organising their grubby little letter, then lack the testicular fortitude to admit their involvement.
The FOI request will get nowhere – emails inexplicably deleted, so sorry. Spike All the luvvie rats trying to save the ship how quaint, a few will go to the bottom. I must admit though the list of people who signed are actually talented there are some exceptions but not many.. John black I have a sickening feeling that the BBC problem will turn into another Greece. We all know it is wrong, however it will drag it on and on until the public get taken again.
* Ray created Citizen Khan, the dire – and I mean turd-stinking bad – BBC sitcom.
TV works in seasons. Summer means Celebrity Big Brother. And that means a visit to Blighty for Farah Arbaham, famous for a sex tape and all the things that go with it: rehab, regret, ‘Made in Hollywood’ jugs and a rubber mould modelled on her primary sexual characteristics avilable to anyone in need of a novelty washing up glove or moneybox as Full-On Farrah Vibrating Pussy and Ass.
But things didn’t quite go to plan for Farrah. The chance to stick your penis or head inside a fake rubby anus shaped like hers (with ‘love tunnels’ heated to a ‘lifelike’ temperatute buy two ‘warming wands’) was not her ticket to fortune.
In January toldInTouch where she says the release of her sex tape was a huge mistake and if she could take it back, she would.
“It made it hard to have friends and a private life and to trust family, who I feel use me for money. If I went back in time, I would not have done it. The sex tape ruined my life.”
Despite warnings from family who feared selling the X-rated tape would send a terrible message to her 4-year-old daughter, Sophia, Farrah did it anyway — and says she quickly realized it was a bad idea. “Knowing my sex tape was out there for everyone in the world to see … was overwhelming,” she says. “I wanted to hide my face and not go out or pick up my phone.”
One other reason it was bad idea was that those porn tapes don’t pay as well as the marketing states. The headline story was that sex movies are so rare that Farrah’s backdoor romp earned her $1.5 million. FOX411 said Abraham actually earned around $10,000.
Farrah is now much changed:
“Therapy helped me understand I can’t continue experiencing life [the way I had been], that I’m more special than sex tapes. Hearing others tell me my worth is [all based on] my body. … I’m stronger than that.”
Or as the Sun puts it:
The former star of MTV shows Teen Mom and Sixteen and Pregnant has cashed in once again thanks to CBB bosses, who hope she’ll make the series more X-rated than ever.
