Transform your home with these festive decorations

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The first in a new series where each week we bring you an edit of the new-in skincare, make-up and hair products we're loving

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...

A ban on sweat towels could be introduced under new guidelines from ukactive

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

We could all do with a strong dose of escapism right now, so each week we'll be highlighting a banging boutique to bookmark for when the world presses play again

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

Work up a sweat while protecting your locks

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

From Ayurvedic cooking to traybake heroes, these are the cookbooks we've turned to over the last seven weeks

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.

What does our crystal ball say the new year will bring for celebs? Sex tapes, terrible singing and off-the-cuff sofa jokes that ignite the far right. Sounds great!

There are two ways to spend New Year’s Eve, as best as I can tell: you either dirty the floor of a house party and spend the smallest of the small hours running desperately out of drinkable alcohol until you realise it’s 7am and the sun is up and you just watched yourself pour Pepsi Max into half a cup of Bailey’s until they both curdled into a sort of vomitty pâté; or you watched Jools at home with a blanket over your legs, in bed with your teeth brushed by 10 past 12. You get absolutely zero points for guessing which one of the two I saw the new year in with. My body is still shaking.

Fair to say, too, that celebrities have yet to emerge blinkingly into the new decade. In the Christmas lull, the famous go into one of two modes of hibernation: either posting a succession of matching-pyjama family selfies in million-pound mansions that are identically decorated with plush beige carpets and tasteful but anonymous tonal greys; or going on holiday somewhere unthinkably lush and posting: “How’s the weather back home!” while sizzling in a hammock over aquamarine Maldivian waters. What I am saying is that there is no news, all right, and we can’t spend 1,200 words having a go at Cats again, so we simply have to preview the year 2020 and have a stab at guessing what the world of fame has for us. Is it a cop-out? Or is it actually quite a decent effort for someone who still has “brandy” in his system and who many doctors would advise shouldn’t be sitting upright at this still-early stage in his hangover? Well exactly. Let’s get on with it.

Singer imprisoned for nine years for getting teenagers to send him explicit pictures

A former star of The X Factor has been jailed for nine years for sexually exploiting seven teenage boys.

Danny Tetley, from Bradford, was described as “a despicable creature with very few redeeming features” for encouraging the youngsters to send him explicit pictures in exchange for money.

Singer and entertainer who, in a duo with her husband, Teddy Johnson, transformed the UK’s Eurovision prospects in the 1950s

In 1959 the husband and wife duo of Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson were invited to look at songs with which they could represent the UK in the fourth staging of the Eurovision song contest. These were pleasant ballads that owed nothing to the prevailing climate of rock and roll, and there was a trite but cheerful novelty song, Sing, Little Birdie. The pair saw how they could develop it into a routine with solo lines, immaculate harmonies and sideways glances at each other – and chose it as their UK song for Cannes. They came second, losing to a rendition of Een Beetje by Teddy Scholten for the Netherlands. In the event Sing, Little Birdie topped the charts in the Netherlands, having also made No 12 in the UK.

Carr, who has died aged 98, would like to have been remembered for something more substantial than that song, but it did demonstrate that the UK might actually win Eurovision. Sing Little Birdie’s writers, Stan Butcher and Syd Cordell, submitted Pickin’ Petals for Carr and Johnson as a contender for the UK entry in 1960, but this time Teddy’s younger brother, Bryan, represented the UK with Looking High, High, High – and also came second. The UK eventually won in 1967 with Sandie Shaw’s Puppet on a String.

‘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.

The ‘queen of daytime television’ created the two soap operas with her husband William Bell

The co-creator of The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, Lee Phillip Bell, has died aged 91.

Bell, an accomplished broadcast journalist and talk show host, and her husband William created two of the world’s most prominent soap operas, which have run continuously for over 47 years, and aired more than nearly 20,000 combined episodes.

We are all devastated by the passing of Lee Phillip Bell. A television pioneer and powerhouse in her own right, she elevated daytime television in co-creating “The Young and the Restless” with her equally iconic husband, Bill Bell. We sadly mourn our true matriarch. pic.twitter.com/V5nUaz4N5E

Lee Phillip Bell, Rest In Peace....Queen of Daytime Television https://t.co/4wIueloEF0

We are deeply saddened by the news of the passing of a member of our CBS family and Daytime community, Emmy Award winning broadcast journalist, and co-creator of Y&R and B&B, Lee Phillip Bell. She was a pioneer in television and will be missed dearly. pic.twitter.com/6BYpUYQwaU

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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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

A comedy that never quite whinges about new motherhood, but is frank and self-deprecating about its difficulties

I know this is a column about shows you recommend watching in isolation, but I’m not sure if this one is comforting or excruciating right now. Maybe both! But if you’re self-isolating with small children, it’s almost definitely the latter.

The Letdown is the story of a new mum, Audrey (Alison Bell), struggling to cope with her changed circumstances. As the primary caregiver to her daughter Stevie, she’s largely confined to her home. She feels inadequate, out of control, confused, and frustrated as her previous life – friends, parties, a semi-stable career! – slips out of grasp.

Related: Orphan Black: gripping sci-fi series shows that in dark times, family (or a 'clone club') prevails

Related: The Bold Type: candy-coloured take on millennial women shines with hope and comfort

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.

As new actors revive the Talking Heads TV monologues, the poignant tales they tell will resonate more than ever with viewers in lockdown

The decision, announced last week by BBC Drama, to revive and recast Alan Bennett’s landmark Talking Heads series was driven as much by necessity as sentiment. Monologue, delivered to camera, is just about the only form of acting possible at the moment. But, still, there will be a special poignancy in hearing how the mini-dramas sound a generation later in their new voices – Imelda Staunton instead of Patricia Routledge, Kristen Scott Thomas in place of Eileen Atkins, Tamsin Greig for Penelope Wilton, Jodie Comer instead of Julie Walters.

Bennett wrote the first of the monologues in 1987, giving voice, in his 50s, to lives that in several cases were facing their last act. He himself turns 86 next week, about the same age as Thora Hird was when he cast her so memorably in Waiting for the Telegram in the last of the second series of monologues in 1998.

Related: Jodie Comer to star in new BBC production of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads

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.

Pokemon GO (Free) from Niantic has been improving with letting people play the game in one place or at home. …

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Hello gentle readers, and welcome to the SwitchArcade Round-Up for May 7th, 2020. Like most Thursdays, today is mostly about …

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I love everything from developer Gionathan Pesaresi aka Neutronized, but I have an especially soft spot for the Super Cat …

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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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The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that …

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