*Rushes to find purse*

It's a wonder ingredient – and not just for fending off illness

Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House, tells Katie Law how Kim K, Trump and some nuns inspired her latest novel

Making fuzz-free fuss-free

'Practising mindfulness is like going to a gym, you have to exercise the muscle and it works with anxiety'

A quarter of all UK pharmacies have joined Hestia's 'UK SAYS NO MORE' campaign

CBeebies tapped the mental health campaigner to narrate the new game

Time to get moving again

Long weekend breakfast, sorted

If only everyone was kinder we would all reap rewards

A widow, a millennial and a cup of Lapsang tea

On losing a little sister and having a junkie as a dad

In a story about the challenges of communication, the characters in Normal People often find solace in reading

Transform your home with these festive decorations

London's wine shops and bars have shifted their booze online to beat the crippling financial effects of coronavirus. Abbie Moulton on the new way to drink responsibly...

Think time-restricted eating is just another diet trend? Think again...

The former First Lady has always been a believer that being highly educated and having an interest in high fashion don't have to be mutually exclusive

From learning Spanish to playing music, Happity is helping to keep toddlers occupied at home

It's been 75 years since Winston Churchill announced the war in Europe was over

Why not try these easy, tasty recipes at home?

For the latest episode of At Home With...JP Saxe opens up about his song with girlfriend Julia Michaels and challenges Amira Hashish to sing her verse of If The World Was Ending

Merry Christmas, glitterati! It’s a cracker of a lineup, but who will win that most sparkling of festive prizes, the Silver Star? Join us to find out

Afternoon all, hope you’re having a lovely Christmas day.

There’s no official liveblog for today’s Strictly Christmas special, but we’ve opened a blog so you can add your special brand of festive sparkle in the comments below. It’s a Christmas cracker of a lineup, featuring lots of our favourites from previous years – Chizzy Akudolu, Debbie McGee, Gemma Atkinson, Joe Sugg, Mark Wright and Richard Arnold. It’s also very much a couples’ choice – both Gemma and Joe will be dancing with their real-life partners Gorka and Dianne, which is all rather lovely.

The massive popularity of horror films like Joker and It have been a real downer for happy, family clowns. Mark Wilding hears how the entertainers are fighting back

In the corner of Matthew Indge’s kitchen is a photograph of the entertainer Kerby Drill. For many years, Drill was both a clown and a comic voice of authority. He toured the nation’s schools and appeared on television shows, often promoting road safety, until he passed away last year, aged 97. Indge describes him as his “clown hero”, but he recognises that Drill represents a very different era of clowning. “The truth is,” Indge says, “these days, I don’t know if kids are going to listen to a clown saying be careful on the road.”

Indge has been clowning for 32 years, since he was eight years old. In a way that wasn’t necessary for Drill, Indge must now take steps to prove to his audiences that he doesn’t represent a dark and sinister threat. When we meet, he’s preparing for a performance as Zaz the Clown at a five-year-old’s birthday party, and “just to save me any problems,” he says, “I’ll make up in front of the kids” – an attempt to provide reassurance that there’s a benign performer behind the mask.

‘The big mobile has been seen as a satirical take on phone culture, but it was just a good way of interrupting things that irritated me – like classical concerts and poncy restaurants’

I never planned to be a comedian. Some would say I never was. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, a diplomat, or a spy. After a degree in politics I worked for ITN doing interviews on College Green outside parliament. To spice them up, I got some mates to have a clown fight behind Paddy Ashdown, and to kick a football at David Mellor, which accidentally smacked him right in the face. ITN realised I’d set it up and I got fired.

Fairfield Halls, London
In his show Taxi Tour, the comic from last year’s Britain’s Got Talent offers only standard-issue middle-aged standup

Kojo Anim was a star of the black standup circuit for years, but “Britain’s Got Talent changed my life,” he tells his Croydon crowd. The Londoner has booked his Taxi Tour off the back of an appearance in last year’s final, and recounts how that brush with fame – and his Christian faith, and new fatherhood – picked him back up after a grim period in his life. The emotional honesty is refreshing, but plays only a cameo role in an otherwise unadventurous show. Anim certainly does have talent, but – on this evidence – it’s for performing, not for writing distinctive material.

The show opens with a justification for appearing on BGT, and an account of his experience of overnight celebrity. But it soon devolves into standard issue middle-aged standup comparing his unglamorous childhood with that of today’s pampered youth. His parents play their expected role, giving their son broad accents to mimic when not walloping him for the slightest impertinence. “Only an African parent,” reports our host ruefully, “will beat their own child when they see another child doing something.”

Who needs pretentious chefs? After a decade away, TV’s simplest cookery show is on the air again, and with Rylan at the helm it’s the perfect recipe for success

This week, the first new episodes of Ready Steady Cook for a decade are broadcast on BBC One. The miraculous thing is that, watching it, you’d never know that it ever went away.

Sure, some things are little different. The budget for the ingredients has risen from £5 to a colossal £7.50, and they are presented in reusable totes rather than single-use plastic bags. The theme tune now comes with a weird techno burble that makes you feel as if you are playing an imported PlayStation 2 game about different methods of cooking mince. Sumac exists. And there is a new host in Rylan Clark-Neal, continuing his monomaniacal quest to seize and hijack every defunct daytime gameshow made during the 1990s.

Romesh Ranganathan plays Andy Murray at crazy golf and much more. Plus: a forensic look at our guts. Here’s what to watch this evening

Netflix is cutting down traffic to ease internet capacity as more people work from home. Here’s what it means for Australians’ streaming experience

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• See all our coronavirus coverage

Netflix has agreed to reduce the data it uses to stream movies and TV shows across Australia as more and more people are working from home due to the coronavirus shutdown. But what will it mean for your viewing habits while you’re staying at home?

Related: Australian government asks Netflix and Stan to reduce data to avoid broadband overload

Related: As cinemas go dark, the film industry may go straight to Netflix

TV and news website audiences are sky-high but, with few ads or new shows, future looks fraught

• Find all our coronavirus coverage here
• Coronavirus – latest news and updates

From TV channels running out of shows, to newspapers facing the threat of closure, the British media industry is facing a financial shock that will permanently reshape how we consume news and entertainment.

Media analysts and insiders warn the pandemic will have a long-lasting impact on the country’s cultural life, predicting that changes in consumer behaviour expected to take more than five years may have happened in five weeks, with many people unlikely to entirely return to their pre-lockdown habits.

BBC One’s star-filled charity appeal needed imagination and technical skill to get round distancing rules

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Socially distanced presenters, a skeleton crew, no live audience and automated phonelines only – this is national telethonning, lockdown-style. Comic Relief and Children in Need have joined forces to create The Big Night In on BBC One and raise money for the charities and projects who need more support than ever as Covid-19 strains resources everywhere.

First shift is taken, as is traditional, by Lenny Henry and Davina McCall – joined, not too closely of course, by Matt Baker this time – whose recreation of normality for the viewer in what must, in the studio, be an absolutely bizarre set-up is unimpeachable proof of their professional talents.

Ricky Gervais’s After Life struggles second time round, as 21st-century London’s answer to Peaky Blinders gets off to a violent start. And how long can live shows survive via video-call?

After Life (Netflix)
Gangs of London (Sky Atlantic)
Emergence (Fox)
Twin (BBC Four) | iPlayer
The Graham Norton Show (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Mash Report (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Have I Got News for You (BBC One) | iPlayer

Ricky Gervais is, take your pick, ever reinventive (a la Madonna, Lady Gaga, the royals) or ever mutating (the worst kind of spirally viruses, the royals). A year ago, in Tony Johnson, subject of his latest drama, After Life, he combined aspects of past characters: The Office’s gloriously unself-aware Brent; the more savvy Andy Millman in Extras; the saccharine platitudes that sat so ill in Derek alongside gags about mental health or other disabilities. After Life was a surprising runaway hit on Netflix, for an arguably slight comedy about a very singular, small-town man’s depression after the loss of his wife, and how an angry man learned to be kind again.

The sector is wrestling with issues such as staging plays with social distancing, or running rollercoasters half full

The row between cinema chains and Universal Studios over the digital-only release of Trolls World Tour is one of may crises racking the entertainment industry during the coronavirus lockdown. The challenges range from working out how to stage live performances to managing social distancing in queues for rollercoasters. Here are some of the issues they face.

Sticking to social isolation just became easier. Keeping the kids occupied and their creativity flowing during coronavirus lockdown has just …

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Last year, Square Enix brought two SaGa games to the west on PC, console, and mobile platforms. Romancing SaGa Re;universe …

Continue reading "‘Romancing SaGa Re;Universe’ Pre-Orders Are Now Live on the App Store Revealing the Release Date for iOS and Android"

Hello gentle readers, and welcome to the SwitchArcade Round-Up for May 8th, 2020. Today was basically a nightmare scenario for …

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