6 h. ago Mourners at controversial bishop’s funeral told one moment cannot define a life

Brendan Comiskey, who died this week at the age of 89, resigned as bishop of the Ferns dioceses in 2002 over his handling of clerical abuse claims.

Politics

18 h. ago The Four Seasons review – Tina Fey’s midlife comedy is properly funny and heartbreaking

Like The White Lotus without deaths, this brilliant tale of old college friends holidaying together is Fey’s finest work in years. Steve Carell and Colman Domingo are revelatoryIn my next life I am definitely coming back as an affluent American. Whatever the risk of being murdered in a White Lotus hotel complex or a beachfront property by Nicole Kidman, the benefits far outweigh it.The Four Seasons follows a year’s worth of the can-we-really-call-them-travails of three well off, beautifully clad couples in their 50s. They have been friends since their college days and now go for weekends away together four times a year, as we all would if we had the money, time and wardrobes. The eight-episode series is a remake and update of the 1981 Alan Alda film of the same name, by Tina Fey, Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher. It’s a creative triumvirate that promises much and – to the delight of Fey fans, who may feel it’s been a long wait since anything approaching the joy and genius of her Unbr...

Culture

5 d. ago ‘It feels empty’: is Hollywood film and TV production in a death spiral?

Filming in Los Angeles is at a historic low, with some suggesting the city might go the way of DetroitWhen screenwriter David Scarpa visits the great Hollywood studios these days, he is struck by what is missing. “It used to be you’d walk around those back lots and you’d see many people and they were very busy,” Scarpa muses. “They were like small cities. Now often you’ll walk around and have nobody else there. It feels empty. You definitely feel the absence of life on those lots.”Like the once proud industrial factories of the midwest, the dream factories of southern California are in decline. Last year was the worst for on-location filming in Los Angeles since tracking began 30 years ago apart from pandemic-hit 2020. Of all the TV shows and feature films that North American audiences watch, only one-fifth are now made in California. Continue reading...

Culture

1 week ago Kyren Wilson: ‘It’s not just me that’s world champion. It’s my whole family’

The 2024 winner reflects on the emotional backstory to Crucible triumph amid major health concerns for his family“‘I still believed in myself but it was quite soul-destroying out there,” Kyren Wilson says in a back room at Barratts Snooker Club in Northampton. The world champion once worked here as a barman because he had lost his place on tour after his first season as a professional in 2011. He was still only 19 and he had little idea that an avalanche of adversity would engulf him in the years ahead.Wilson begins the defence of his world title, with a first-round match against Lei Peifan, in the venerable Crucible in Sheffield on Saturday morning. But it seems fitting that we should meet here, in the unpromising surroundings which once defined Wilson’s life, as he describes his extraordinary world championship backstory. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Lorraine star Christine Lampard shares fun theory about ‘the song that defines your life’

Theory seems to date back to 2019 but was shared by Lampard in the latest episode of the ITV morning show

Politics

2 w. ago The Diamond Heist review – Guy Ritchie’s thrilling tale of the failed Millennium Dome jewel robbery

This three-part documentary about the attempt to steal hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of diamonds is pacey and stylish – but it definitely didn’t need to glamorise the real-life violenceI suppose the wonder is that it has taken Guy Ritchie so long to get around to telling the story of the Millennium Dome robbery, in which – way back at the turn of the century, children – a group of south-east London criminals ram-raided a national joke in pursuit of the 203-carat Millennium Star diamond worth £200m, which De Beers had unaccountably agreed to display in the capital’s gangster heartland.Strictly speaking, Richie himself is not telling it; the three-part documentary The Diamond Heist comes from Oscar and Emmy award-winning company Lightbox and is executive produced by Ritchie. But the subject matter is so perfectly him that any meaningful separation in your mind as you watch it collapses quicker than a Greenwich exhibition venue’s shutters under the weight of a JCB driven at spe...

Events

2 w. ago Your Friends & Neighbours review – Jon Hamm’s fun new drama is like The White Lotus back from holiday

Taking his first lead in a prestige TV drama since Mad Men, the actor is brilliant. He is on suave, nuanced form in a very funny show – which could use a little more bite You can understand why it might take an actor a while to tackle another dramatic lead role on television when their first was a life-changing, career-defining part in a critically acclaimed landmark TV drama that ran for eight superlative seasons. But it is 10 years since Mad Men ended and only now is Jon Hamm re-entering the fray. He has mostly been busy with comedy roles in the intervening years. Now, he returns to the type of part that made his name: era-specific masculinity under siege from a prestige production bent on feeding us our own horrors back to us in chunks. This time it is about the fall from grace of a New York hedge fund manager, Andrew Cooper – think a modern, misogyny-lite Don Draper, but one who loves his kids and really is who he says he is.The opening scene has Cooper coming to on a marble flo...

Events

4 w. ago How to spot, treat and prevent scabies, according to the experts

Scabies is a common skin infestation caused by the Sarcoptes scabiei mite

Politics