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Coronavirus: Game of Thrones actor becomes Asda delivery driver during pandemic

Michael Condron played Bowen Marsh in the fantasy epic




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Strictly Come Dancing: Brendan Cole says show is 'hideous' when dancers and celebrity partners don't get on

Judge Craig Revel Horwood recently said 2020 series could go ahead without studio audience




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Ricky Gervais says he negotiated with 15 lawyers and executives over how to refer to Judi Dench's genitals at the Golden Globes

Comedian made the off-colour quip after the veteran actor starred in 'Cats'




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Captain Tom Moore receives gold Blue Peter badge after raising more than £30 million for NHS

Captain Moore was presented the award by his grandchildren




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ITV viewers outraged by advert showing squirrel 'humping' Lynx Africa can

The Advertising Standards Authority received 155 complaints




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Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel hit back at Trump after Twitter attacks: 'Now get back to work royally f***ing everything up'

Trump took time away from coronavirus crisis to call Kimmel 'wacko' in a social media rant




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My Secret Terrius: Netflix show predicted coronavirus outbreak with alarming accuracy in 2018

It's the most accurate one yet




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How I Met Your Mother: Cobie Smulders' finale defence reignites hatred for ending

'Is there anyone on Earth who enjoys the ending?'




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Seinfeld star Jason Alexander says fans bribed him for series finale secrets

The controversial ending of Seinfeld ranks as one of the most-viewed series finale ever




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'Get back in your own area': Holly Willoughby forgets about social distancing on This Morning

Presenter said she was 'genuinely sorry' for blunder




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The Simpsons writer concedes series really did 'predict 2020' after new double 'prediction' emerges

People have noted a certain timeliness in a clip from the 1993 episode 'Marge in Chains'




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Stephen Fry lends voice to children's mindfulness app from BBC

The app aims to help young children look after their mental health




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Lenny Henry's daughter posed as comedian and sent 'manipulative' false messages in attempt to win back boyfriend

Billie Henry was given a five-year restraining order




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Stranger Things: Full list of films watched by writers reveals 'DNA of season 4'

All the clues you need in one picture




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Becoming, review: Michelle Obama's Netflix documentary gives emotion without intimacy

Ninety minutes in the company of the former first lady is like an inspirational infomercial, says Annie Lord




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Courteney Cox 'loved playing overweight Monica' in Friends because she 'felt free'

Actor also revealed her favourite episodes of the sitcom




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Space Force: Real chief wanted to be played by Bruce Willis instead of 'shaggy' Steve Carell

Series is a humorous response to Trump's actual Space Force




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For all its absurdity, Netflix's Dead to Me captures the grief, anger and sadness of losing a partner

The first season ended with a cliffhanger – did Jen kill Steve or not? But what is most poignant about the second season is not who killed him, but how well the show deals with grief, writes Charlotte Cripps




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National Treasure series from Jerry Bruckheimer coming to Disney+

A third film is also in the works




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Frances Quinn: Great British Bake Off winner 'banned from Waitrose' after being accused of shoplifting

Show's 2013 winner was approached by store detectives after she appeared to not pay for her shopping




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David Attenborough: 15 of the naturalist's best quotes

In celebration of his 94th birthday




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Donald Glover to reunite with Community cast for virtual table read and Q&A

The show ran for six seasons from 2009 to 2015




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Elon Musk says he's selling all his possessions so people can't attack him for being a billionaire

Tesla CEO is back on Joe Rogan's podcast




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Have I Got News For You: David Tennant jokes that Eamonn Holmes lives in a 'tin foil bungalow'

Holmes came under fire for giving validity to a conspiracy theory linking 5G to coronavirus




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Andrew Scott took Fleabag role to stop being typecast as a villain

Scott was best known for playing Moriarty opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in 'Sherlock'




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The Eddy review: Damien Chazelle's jazz drama sounds wonderful but the plot feels like an afterthought

Director's new series stars Andre Holland as a once-famous American jazz pianist who has been unable to play since his son died




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June Bernicoff death: Gogglebox star dies at the age of 82

Channel 4 star came to fame alongside her husband Leon, who died in 2017




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From 'Glee' to 'The Eddy', why are TV musicals so few and far between?

In our current climate, we need the escapism of musicals more than ever, writes Isobel Lewis. So why haven't television networks jumped on the bandwagon?




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Miriam Margolyes shocks fans after admitting she 'had difficulty not wanting Boris Johnson to die' during coronavirus battle

Actor is famous for making her opinions known during interviews




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Chrissy Teigen admits she feels 'crappy' after comments by food writer Alison Roman

Food writer Alison Roman accused Teigen of having people 'run a content farm' for her




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Brian Howe, hard rock singer who fronted Bad Company, dies aged 66

Singer who also worked with Ted Nugent and Megadeth dies at Florida home of a heart attack

Brian Howe, the singer who fronted the British rock supergroup Bad Company for eight years, has died aged 66. He had a heart attack at his Florida home.

Howe’s manager Paul Easton said: “It is with deep and profound sadness that we announce the untimely passing of a loving father, friend and musical icon.”

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Kemistry & Storm – the tragic story of the drum'n'bass originals

As a pioneering female DJ duo, the two best friends were integral to the rise of the 90s dance scene, before a car accident changed everything. Storm talks about the soul sister she lost

Storm remembers the sound of glass shattering, but not how many seconds or minutes had passed before she realised something awful had happened. A 4.5kg metal cat’s eye had been dislodged from the road ahead by a passing van, and had smashed through their car windshield on the passenger side. It left Kemistry – her best friend and partner in one of the UK’s most pioneering drum’n’bass outfits – with devastating injuries. Minutes later, she died.

“I’ve had some really dark times and really dark thoughts,” says Storm, 20 years on from the accident. “Thoughts about me not being here, about going to join her.”

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Tony Allen: the Afrobeat maverick who blazed a trail across the globe

The Nigerian musician was a restless creator who embraced the physicality of drumming and innovated until the end

Few musicians can claim to have invented a revolutionary rhythm, but then few are quite like the late Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen. Brian Eno called him “the greatest drummer that ever lived”, citing his style alongside James Brown’s funk breakbeat and the constant pulse of German band Neu! as the “three great beats of the 1970s”. Allen’s swirl of jazz, Yoruba and highlife was unlike anything the world had ever heard: a full-body polyrhythmic workout that would give most drummers sore wrists just thinking of it.

Allen came to prominence in Lagos alongside Fela Kuti. He started drumming in the late 50s while working at a radio station, looking to jazz icons such as Art Blakey and Max Roach for inspiration as he taught himself to play. In 1964 he met Kuti and they spent the next half-decade fine-tuning their fusion of west African party music and American funk and jazz, in the bands Koola Lobitos and, by 1969, Africa ’70. While Kuti, who died in 1997, is more well-known than his musical soulmate, he said that “without Tony Allen there would be no Afrobeat”.

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Dave Greenfield: putting beauty at the rotten heart of the Stranglers

The keyboardist, who has died aged 71 of coronavirus, upended the rules of punk with organ arpeggios and a moustache – and pointed the way to post-punk

Music writer Pete Paphides’ recent memoir, Broken Greek, contains a vivid description of its seven-year-old author encountering the Stranglers for the first time, during a 1977 Top of the Pops appearance. “They landed in the living room while I was totally unsupervised,” he writes, “and scared the shit [out] of me. By now I would have seen images of punk rockers … but they looked like circus entertainers compared to [the Stranglers]. They looked too old to be punk. They looked like the sort of people you pass in the street and your mother puts her arm round you, stares at the pavement and doubles her walking speed … The point at which it all got too much was when the camera cut to Dave Greenfield – who has died from Covid-19 aged 71 – jabbing his keyboard while looking straight ahead with what seemed, beyond doubt, to be the eyes of a murderer, an effect somehow compounded by the army-surplus boiler suit he had decided to wear. Just like that, my list of phobias had got a little longer: worms, biting into mushrooms, insects, the fibreglass King Kong which stood next to a ring road in Birmingham city centre and, now, Dave Greenfield from the Stranglers.”

It’s funny writing, but it’s also very incisive about the Stranglers: in real life Greenfield was, by all accounts, the band’s most approachable and charming member, but otherwise Paphides has it spot-on. The Stranglers complained relentlessly about not being accepted by the punk cognoscenti, but what did they expect? They didn’t look like punks, particularly Greenfield, who defiantly sported that least punk of facial accoutrements, a moustache. They were old, at least by the standards of the day, old enough to have the kind of musical pasts it was wise to keep your mouth shut about in the scorched-earth environment created by the Sex Pistols: Hugh Cornwell had played bass in a band with Richard Thompson, later of Fairport Convention; Greenfield had been in a prog rock band called Rusty Butler.

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Florian Schneider: the enigma whose codes broke open pop music

The Kraftwerk co-founder remained a mystery even after death, but there is no doubting the impact he made with his group’s sublime, visionary music

Florian Schneider’s death came shrouded in a degree of secrecy. Gossip among fans about his health was first provoked at the end of April, when his fellow former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür posted a sweet photo on social media of him and Schneider together in a bar, without explanation.

It had apparently been taken in 2016 – a decade and a half after Schneider and fellow founder member Ralf Hütter had served Flür with a lawsuit provoked by his autobiography I Was a Robot – and was subsequently deleted from Flür’s Facebook page. Then, a week later, another electronic musician based in Germany, the Manchester-born Mark Reeder, posted a brief eulogy; one commenter claimed that Schneider had died “several days ago”.

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Ghostpoet: I Grow Tired But Dare Not Fall Asleep review – dark but defiant

(Pias)
Since his last outing, the south London musician and producer has eased up and moved to Margate. Yet this atmospheric return still carries the weight of the world

Ghostpoet – the brooding alias of south London-born Obaro Ejimiwe – is roughly a decade old this year. This dour bard has long been an artist ahead of his time. A track such as Cash and Carry Me Home, one of the highlights of his eclectic, jazz-inflected debut album – 2011’s Peanut Butter Blue and Melancholy Jam – defied genre as it mourned the self-inflicted pain of one drink too many. It now locates Ghostpoet as roughly adjacent to the south London jazz renaissance of the past few years – a multi-hyphenate scene in which most things go. Were it to be released today, its languorous, self-aware aperçus would find an even more receptive audience.

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Car Seat Headrest: Making a Door Less Open review – cult indie star in middle of the road | Alexis Petridis' album of the week

(Matador)
Will Toledo’s alt-rockers have emerged out of lo-fi fuzz, but seem unsure of where to turn as they drift toward the mainstream

Anyone wondering how things have changed in the world of lauded US alt-rockers Car Seat Headrest might consider the four years that separate Making a Door Less Open from their last album of new material. Ordinarily there would be nothing unusual about that gap – but in the first four years of Car Seat Headrest’s existence, its mastermind, Will Toledo, released seven albums (one of them a two-hour double), four EPs (one of them as long as an album) and two compilations of outtakes. That’s more than 150 songs and 12 hours of music: a lo-fi spewing forth of ideas that won Toledo a cult following, which then grew exponentially, both in size and rabidity, when he recruited a band and signed to the august US indie label Matador.

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Watkins Family Hour: Brother Sister review – a model of sibling harmony

(Family Hour/Thirty Tigers)
Sean and Sara Watkins are back and in reflective mood

California’s Sean and Sara Watkins are akin to royalty in American folk circles, firstly as founding members of the hugely successful Nickel Creek, and secondly as hosts of an 18-year residency at LA’s Largo club, where they perform alongside invited guests. Brother Sister draws on both strands of their history. Like its self-titled 2015 predecessor, the album sets aside the pizzazz of Nickel Creek for a down-home approach, but instead of boisterous, star-studded cover versions come five original songs and a minimal musical palette.

Alternating on lead, the pair’s vocals remain a model of sibling harmony, while the interplay between Sean’s intricate guitar picking and Sara’s elegant fiddle is similarly impressive – the breakneck bluegrass instrumental Bella and Ivan is a case in point. Mostly, however, the mood is reflective. Lafayette and Miles of Desert Sand chronicle the search for a better life, and Fake Badge, Real Gun is an artful snipe at Trump – “Throw your tantrums but the truth will be waiting”. Warren Zevon’s forlorn Accidentally Like a Martyr fits in neatly, while Charley Jordan’s ribald Keep It Clean is a gleeful example of a Largo session.

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Paul Heaton: 'Love feels like someone is hitting your heart with a cricket bat'

The musician on DIY smooching, dinner parties and why he won’t do interviews between 1.45pm and 2.15pm

Raised in Sheffield, Heaton, 57, founded the Housemartins in the early eighties. They had hit singles with Happy Hour and Caravan Of Love before splitting in 1988. Heaton then formed the Beautiful South, releasing 10 albums before disbanding in 2007. With former band member Jacqui Abbott, Heaton has released three albums, the most recent being Manchester Calling. He is married with three children and lives in Manchester.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Forgetfulness.

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50 Cent on love, cash and bankruptcy: ‘When there are setbacks, there will be get-backs’

Curtis Jackson was shot nine times before becoming one of the world’s biggest rappers. He discusses growing up, getting rich and the art of the hustle

Curtis Jackson has downsized. The rapper/actor/businessman, better known as 50 Cent, used to live in a palace of a house formerly owned by Mike Tyson. Not any more. He has been in self-isolation for six weeks and is more than happy to make do with a three-bed apartment (on four floors, mind) in New York. He can’t remember when he was last in one place for so long, he says, and is learning about himself. “I’ve become a bit more comfortable with being in my own space. I don’t think being at home is a punishment.”

He bought the Tyson house after his triumphant first album; Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ shifted 12m copies in 2003, making it the bestselling album of the year. It was explosive – growling rap packed with threats, boasts and great songs such as In Da Club and Many Men.

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Kelly Lee Owens: ‘I still have to fight to not be seen as ‘just the singer’’

The Welsh nurse-turned-indie rocker is now one of electronic music’s best exponents. She talks proving herself, the NHS and climate-crisis bangers

Kelly Lee Owens is showing me her crumpled bed, pixelated on the screen. It is five weeks into quarantine and this has quickly become the norm: an interview with an artist in their close quarters; ambivalent levels of grooming. Neither of us is wearing makeup, and neither of us care. “You know what I read?” begins the electronic musician, incredulously. “This is bullshit. There’s a [Daily Mail] headline saying that women’s breasts will be sagging because they’re not going to be wearing bras during this lockdown. So what?! Leave me to my saggy breasts.”

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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I Just Flew. It Was Worse Than I Thought It Would Be...


I Just Flew. It Was Worse Than I Thought It Would Be...


(Third column, 10th story, link)


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