Category: 5. Entertainment

Cotswold District Council

Glen Manning

A chef whose brother was diagnosed with young onset Parkinson’s disease (YOPD) aged 45 is preparing to unicycle around the world to raise funds for research.

Luke Evison, 42, from Bristol, plans to travel through more than 40 countries, covering more than 25,000 miles (40,000 km), while unicycling solo during the three-and-a -half year trip.

Mr Evison said he is raising money for Parkinsons UK to help fund research in the hope it gets us “closer to a cure”.

He will set off from Bristol to begin his World on One Wheel challenge on Sunday.

Mr Evison is travelling solo and unsupported, so will be carrying his tent and supplies with him.

His route takes him through Europe, Japan, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and southern Europe, before returning to the UK.

He is only the second person to travel the world by unicycle after Ed Pratt, from Somerset, completed the challenge in 2018.

Following the death of Mr Evison’s father from pancreatic cancer last year, he will be splitting proceeds from his challenge between Parkinsons UK and Cancer Research UK.

“Turning 40 made me stop and think about what I really wanted,” he said.

“The answer was to see the world and what better way to do that than to combine it with a challenge that raises money for two causes that mean the world to me.”

He said his brother Neil, who moved to Australia, has undergone deep brain stimulation surgery to manage the condition, but still faces daily struggles with reduced mobility and energy.

There have been some positive steps with Parkinson’s research lately, but “more still needs to be done”, Mr Evison added.

Karen Safe, community fundraiser at Parkinson’s UK, said the charity was “grateful to Luke” for supporting his brother with the challenge.

“Parkinson’s is a complex brain condition that gets worse over time. Affecting 166,000 people in the UK, it has more than 40 symptoms, from tremor and pain to anxiety, and there is currently no cure,” she said.

Mr Evison will be documenting his journey online under the name Trip The Balance.

Jimmy Kimmel has launched a billboard in West Hollywood endorsing fellow late-night host Stephen Colbert for an Emmy.

The ad, located on Sunset Boulevard, features a photo of Kimmel next to the words “I’m voting Stephen,” promoting The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for Outstanding Talk Series, an award for which Jimmy Kimmel Live! is also nominated.

The billboard appeared during the official Emmy voting window and coincides with recent news that CBS is canceling The Late Show as part of broader corporate restructuring.

Colbert’s program has been a consistent presence in the category and remains among the nominees this year.

Kimmel has not issued any public statement regarding the ad. The billboard itself is being interpreted as the message, in line with the often creative nature of “For Your Consideration” campaigns seen throughout awards season.

Both Kimmel and Colbert are long-established hosts in the late-night landscape, with multiple Emmy nominations and industry recognition.

While direct endorsements between nominees are uncommon, Emmy campaign billboards are widely used to gain visibility among voters in the Television Academy.

The Emmy Awards are scheduled for later this year, with final voting currently underway.

Kimmel’s billboard remains on display along Sunset Boulevard, a high-traffic location frequently used for award-season promotions targeted at entertainment professionals and Academy members.

The director of the Cavern Club, the Liverpool nightclub described as the birthplace of The Beatles, says the venue “has to focus” on younger fans ahead of the city’s annual International Beatleweek later this month.

Jon Keats told BBC Radio Merseyside “younger fans luckily are attending the festival more and more every year, which is important”.

He said: “That’s a big thing that we have to focus on and that is happening because younger people are finding The Beatles for themselves.”

“At the heart of everything, it’s about the music, it’s all the emotions those four musicians left us,” he added.

The week-long festival, which celebrates the legacy of the Beatles, begins on 20 August.

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Name the airport after him

Reuters

A statue in his birthplace?

PA Media

The pub where it all began

Ross Halfin

EPA

Kirsty Bosley

We’re in the thick of festival season in the UK, where every weekend seems to host a dizzying array of musical mega-events. The likes of Glastonbury, Download, TRNSMT, Wireless and others may already be in the rear-view, but there are still plenty more to come across all manner of genres: Camp Bestival (happening this very weekend), Creamfields, Green Man, All Points East, Reading and Leeds, End of the Road and so many others, across farms, city parks, country estates and the odd mid-Wales mountain range.

For the people who run these festivals, months or even a full years-worth of work will have gone into readying for a single, crucial long weekend. The stakes are high: whether things go off without a hitch or not will, in some cases, determine that festival’s future. And boy, are there a lot of potential hitches: electricity, sanitation, ticketing, food and drink, security, and the fragile egos of famous musicians, to name but a few. “The scary thing about festivals is, if you take away one small element, the whole thing collapses,” says promoter James Scarlett.

James should know. He books and organises not one but two annual festivals: 2000Trees, a 15,000-capacity alternative, punk and indie festival in Cheltenham, which last month completed its 17th edition with headline appearances from emo veterans Alexisonfire and Taking Back Sunday, along with Keir Starmer faves Kneecap; and ArcTangent, which specialises in metal, math rock, prog, post-rock and general experimental music, and later this month (13-16 Aug) will lure 5,000 punters to a farm near Bristol to hear bands as varied as post-rock titans Godspeed You! Black Emperor, prog-metallers Tesseract, lugubrious indie dance veterans Arab Strap and a duo called Clown Core who play avant garde jazz fusion from a portable loo.

In addition, James is also the co-host – along with Gavin McInally, who runs Manchester extreme metal festival Damnation – of 2 Promoters 1 Pod, a weekly, unvarnished, slightly sweary look at how a festival comes together from the booking of bands to the construction of the site. If you have even the most cursory interest in how festivals work, it’s a fascinating listen.

All of which makes James the person you’d call for in case of something going badly awry on site. So in this week’s Guide we’ve decided to test his firefighting skills, by asking him to solve a series of festival disasters, including some ripped from recent headlines. Read on for his thoughts on awol headliners, heatwaves and herds of marauding deer.

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Festival disaster #1 | Your headlining band are playing a mind-blowing set but are overrunning. You’ve already reached the curfew time your festival has agreed with the local council and the band still haven’t played their biggest song yet. What do you do?

“I have, occasionally in the past, let bands breach curfew. We got caught once doing it at ArcTangent. A council member was driving home from another event and just thought they’d stop outside the farm. He heard the music stop at 11pm … and then start again at three minutes past! We received a slap on the wrist that time, and have a good relationship with the council as our crowds are never any hassle – but you can lose your licence over breaking curfew, and then the whole festival is gone. So I think normally the answer is the curfew is the curfew. Still, If you’ve got a headliner who, say, have 45 minutes of technical difficulties, I think there might be an argument to let them break the licence just in order to keep the crowd happy, you don’t want an angry 15,000 people who didn’t get the headliner that they wanted. There’s a health and safety argument for breaking your curfew if that happens.”

Festival disaster #2 | A heatwave has descended on the festival site. You’ve not been told to shut it down, but temperatures are reaching the mid-to-high 30s. What do you do?

“This year we had 53 cases of heatstroke at 2000Trees on the Wednesday of the festival, when people had only just arrived. It’s pretty impressive that people have come straight in and gone: bang, heatstroke! You have to have a really good first aid tent. We cleaned the local depot out of saline drips for ours, because so many people were coming in extremely dehydrated. In fact one drummer from a band, Future of the Left, had to go to the tent for severe dehydration and heatstroke. He’s a very energetic drummer and in those tents the heat rises, you’re higher than the crowd, and you’re properly going for it – not really a working environment you want to be in! Still, we’ve clocked up mid-30s temperatures at 2000Trees at least twice and once at ArcTangent, and you can still run an event in that. It’s about communication with your audience: drink water, wear a hat, wear sunscreen, try to find some shade.”

Festival disaster #3 | An Icelandic volcanic ash cloud leaves the headliner you’ve booked stranded in mainland Europe with no way of making it to the festival in time. What do you do?

“If a headliner drops out, you’re in trouble. You’ve just got to be honest with your audience that the band aren’t gonna be there. And all you can really do is bump whoever was second from top up a slot, and everyone moves up. We go into each festival with a long backup list of bands that are either local or already on site as punters. So if we get a dropout, we can usually fill the gap at short notice. You can always guarantee that someone will miss a train, miss a flight, get stuck in traffic or just get confused about what day they’re playing … which is quite frustrating if you spend all year booking a lineup!”

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Festival disaster #4 | The prime minister has said it is not appropriate for a controversial act to headline your festival. What do you do?

“What the UK prime minister says about Kneecap is of little interest to me to be honest. I’m not being bullied. We were having ex-MPs and current MPs writing to 2000Trees, like they have a say in what we do. We’re a business, it’s not up to them. I think it was a help that a few other festivals have stuck to their guns on keeping Kneecap on the bill: Glastonbury and Green Man for example. It does give you a little bit of solidarity. If everyone had folded on it and we were the last ones, I guess I would have felt more pressure. I don’t think we would have caved until such time as it was a risk to the business over it. And in the end there was no risk. Kneecap were good as gold at 2000Trees – they did a brilliant, amazing headline set, one of the best we’ve ever had at the festival.”

Festival disaster #5 | A fire breaks out on site just days before the festival begins, destroying your main stage, Tomorrowland-style. What do you do?

“If you don’t have the main stage for your festival you’re probably going to have to cancel because there’s not enough space for everyone across the other stages. So you’d be on the phone to every stage and marquee company across the country trying to find a replacement. The problem is, with the massive explosion in the festival industry in recent times, stages and marquees are very hard to come by. It’s likely to be squeaky bum time. In the case of Tomorrowland, amazingly, they borrowed Metallica’s stage. Bands like ACDC and Metallica tend to tour with two rigs, so they’ll be playing one night on a stage with a lighting and sound rig. And ahead of them, in the next city, there’ll be another team building their stage for the next show. When that show’s finished, they tear that rig down and move on to the next place. Which is crackers really – it’s hard to imagine the scale of that.”

Festival disaster #6 | A herd of deer has descended on the festival, trampling over tents and chomping on the merch stall. What do you do?

“Well, we had pigs and swans invading our VIP campsite at 2000Trees this year! The pigs had broken out of a nearby farm. There’s no gentle way of getting a pig out of a campsite, really, you have to manhandle them. Our production team were chasing them around – it was quite a comic scene. For the swans we rang up the RSPB – 999 for birds – and they advised us to not do anything, and eventually they’d take off, which they did. Deer would be more difficult. You can’t go manhandling deer, particularly stags with their antlers. We have 140 pages of risk assessments, covering every risk you could ever imagine … but pigs in the camp was not on that list!”

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Minecraft is my life. I got into it around 2012, when I was 23, and I’ve been playing ever since. It’s a game of endless possibility. You can do anything in it. You can build your own houses, machines, businesses, and put your own personality on to it. It’s an easy escape and can become quite addictive. It’s just so much more colourful, fun and cosy than the real world.

But when you play this game for a decade you start to learn this incredible lesson about patience. It’s essentially a game where you build your world one block at a time. In the moment it’s this lovely dopamine-drip exercise, but recently it’s started to change my perspective on the world. You look back at what you’ve created and begin to appreciate all the work you’ve put in. I know that might sound silly. It’s just a game about blocks. But until you zoom out with time and perspective you don’t appreciate it for what it is.

Since January, I’ve changed my approach to the game. We’d just shot my sitcom, Transaction, in the winter and it was a wonderful experience. But then Trump’s inauguration happened halfway through and all this terrible messaging for transgender people came with it. It all got too much. Everything became about patching over that pain with personal achievement. And that’s what Minecraft is on one level. You build and you build and you don’t think about anything. But that’s not a sustainable way to live. To stop and take a break and celebrate the things you have achieved – rather than trying to escape your worry by achieving more – is something I started to adopt.

So I’ve basically been playing Minecraft but not really building anything for the last six months. I just walk around and look at the water and the fish and the trees in these beautiful worlds that I’ve built. It’s got this strange sense of hygge about it. It’s a game where you can go hell for leather, or you can relax and turn relaxation into a craft. It’s a cosy game and I didn’t notice that until I needed a cosy place to escape to. The little journeys you take can be amazing. You can walk past a tree and even though it essentially stays the same over the years, you remember how that tree felt five years ago. There was a wolf here back then. It’s a living memory palace that also happens to be beautifully rendered.

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The other day, I was sitting by a lake in Minecraft. There’s no opacity. No light bouncing off the water. You can just see through it and you know it’s water and you get that same refreshing feeling. There’s also a night and day cycle but it’s expedited. So every five minutes the moon comes up, the sun comes down. And at night-time things get quite scary in the game. You have to go inside or the monsters will get you. There’s a primeval connection – like a rewilding in a virtual world. I don’t know if it’s the healthiest way to live but it works for now.

When the world feels like it is moving incredibly fast, it’s so helpful to think that it’s all just a conglomeration of thousands and thousands of steps, thousands of tiny blocks being placed or moved. It’s easy to forget that and think we’ve hit some sort of singularity where things have changed incredibly fast. That’s not the case. It’s just a series of tiny steps that are still happening. Minecraft constantly reminds me that we’re in a state of movement. There’s no big decision to be made now. We can go back and change things. We can take it down. Put it back together again. Take those components and change it into something new.

Jordan’s show, Is That a C*ck in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Here to Kill Me?, is at Assembly Square George Garden, Edinburgh, to 24 August.

Sylvia and Will are old college friends, without benefits, who have reunited in their 40s. They’re very close without being romantically interested in each other, and she has a habit of meddling in his relationships. Hmmm. We’re accustomed to onscreen chemistry of the explosive kind, which is generally used to exploit a heteronormative set-up. We see a man and woman getting along, and can’t help but wonder when they will burst into flames.

Platonic (Apple TV+, from Wednesday), which stars Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne and returns for a second series, is flame-retardant. Will and the married Sylvia do not pine for or want to roll around on each other, but they do rely on, delight in, irritate and deeply understand each other. It’s a worthy addition to what we might call the Ephroniverse – the slim canon of stories about whether straight women and men can be friends. As their titles suggest, Platonic comes to a different conclusion than When Harry Met Sally. It’s the correct conclusion – so why is the question still interesting?

Platonic digs into situations we’re more used to seeing in WhatsApp group chats. Sylvia is horrified that Will’s male friendships are more ribald than theirs is. Will realises he has incompatible personalities when he’s with his fiancee and oldest friend, so tries to avoid socialising with them together. Can a man and woman stay friends if his fiancee does not like her? Where do his allegiances lie? While these dilemmas could arise within any friendship, the gendered aspect has a specific thorniness.

Despite the title, this is no philosophical treatise. It’s a comedy, occasionally a brilliant one. Rogen made his name in stoner-bro buddy-hang movies, but has elevated himself since. Watching him, I’m mostly wondering: which Muppet am I thinking of? Cookie Monster? Grover? Fozzie Bear? He’s actually a comic straight man, albeit one in whom silliness gleams. Take his pronunciation of Veuve Clicquot, which in Rogen’s mouth delightfully becomes “Voove.” (He’s trying to replace all the bubbly at his engagement party, after a friend of his misplaces an LSD-laced flute. “You’re saying this is a champagne problem?” smirks the shop assistant.)

Byrne has proved equally funny, usually playing against her Audrey Hepburn looks. She’s nimble, intelligent, good with detail, able to play big or bone dry as required. She’s at her best when squashing discomfort. In the first episode of the new series, the engaged Will admits he has a crush on a young sandwich-maker. It’s a typical Platonic scenario, pitting Sylvia’s friendship obligations against her feminine solidarity. Byrne squirms as a reluctant wingwoman, yet manages to steer Will wisely, without preaching. “The thing about that girl in there that you have to remember is … she has a Deadpool tattoo. It’s terrible.”

Platonic is a comforting watch – low-stakes but precisely observed and full of mischievous turns. The best of its cameos may be Saturday Night Live alumnus Beck Bennett as former party animal Wildcard, friend to both Sylvia and Will. (A laugh-out-loud scene in which he and Will discuss Sydney Sweeney has, against all odds, a kind of magical innocence.) Sylvia’s Jeopardy-loving husband and their sardonic children make welcome returns, alongside her acerbic mom-friend Katie, played by Carla Gallo.

The show’s writing is equally weighted to its male and female stars, and it soars on their shared scenes, their bickering zephyrs. When all is said and done, it is a love story. TV has, in the past, contributed to a culturally threadbare understanding of that word. We should welcome this widening lens, a better aspect ratio to understand ourselves.

If Platonic had solely been a Larry David-esque examination of friendship’s minutiae, it would have been perfect. There is a higher stakes romantic storyline running through that feels more generic, and may struggle to sustain 10 episodes of interest. Friendship, though, is something we can watch indefinitely, along with peppery dialogue, relatable dilemmas and absurd scenarios. It’s also a healthy reminder that chemistry doesn’t only mean combustible. More often, it’s about fizzing merrily along.

The Count of Monte Cristo

9pm, U&Drama

Sam Claflin and Jeremy Irons star in a new epic adaptation of the swashbuckling story by Alexandre Dumas. Edmond Dantès (Claflin) is a young sailor returning to Marseille to marry love of his life Mércèdes (Ana Girardot). But he has ruffled the feathers of two peers, who conspire to get him locked up in an island prison (“No one leaves there alive”). However, Edmond meets Abbé Faria (Irons) who will help him to escape 15 years later and claim his revenge. HR

Beethoven’s Fifth at the Proms

6.50pm, BBC Two

“Dah, dah, dah, dahhhh!” Those unmistakable notes open Beethoven’s Fifth in this Prom, which is performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev. Before that, though, French pianist Alexandre Kantorow – who played at the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony – delivers Saint-Saëns’ “Egyptian” piano concerto. HR

Billy Joel: And So It Goes

9pm, Sky Documentaries

The original Piano Man looks back on a rollercoaster life and career in this two-part profile, which has gained extra poignancy after the 76-year-old’s recent brain disorder diagnosis. As well as Joel himself, Springsteen, McCartney, Pink and Nas weigh in on his legacy. Concludes Sunday. Graeme Virtue

Annika

9.10pm, BBC One

Although this Glasgow-set series (first shown on U&Alibi) frequently teeters into cop show cliche, Nicola Walker’s socially awkward detective Annika Strandhed lends it a quirky edge. She’s got her work cut out for her as series two begins, with a gnarly drowning video and a victim who was last seen “pished and mouthy”. Hannah J Davies

Griff’s Great American South

9.10pm, Channel 4

Griff Rhys Jones travels from the Atlantic to the Gulf and takes in all the US deep south has to offer en route. First up, in Tennessee he learns how a dam created in the 30s helped to forge the atomic bomb. Then, in Nashville, it’s all about the music and dancing. HR

Suspicion

11.35pm, ITV1

Katherine begins doubting Martin – the one person she thought she could rely on, while Eddie claims he’s secretly working for her, in the penultimate episode. Meanwhile, there’s a tense showdown and a bombshell, before things get really messy. Ali Catterall

Film choice

The Thicket, 9.20am, 6.05pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

Peter Dinklage heads up this impressively bleak neo-western, as a bounty hunter on the trail of a kidnapped girl. Ostensibly in the same redemptive vein as The Searchers, it’s closer in flinty spirit to something like The Revenant. His high body count decorating the snowy wilderness, Dinklage is as formidable as usual – but almost outmatched by Juliette Lewis as Cut Throat Bill, the misleadingly named varmint he’s pursuing. Director Elliott Lester goes in hard on seedy saloon atmospherics and a Darwinian survivalist vibe. Phil Hoad

Live sport

International Rugby Union: Australia v British & Irish Lions, 9.30am, Sky Sports Main Event The final Test from Sydney, with Lions captain Maro Itoje (pictured above) aiming for a 3-0 series win.

Test Cricket: England v India, 10.15am, Sky Sports Cricket The third day of the fifth and final Test from the Oval in London.

Golf: Women’s Open, noon, Sky Sports Golf Day three of the major from Royal Porthcawl.

Cycling: Tour de France Femmes, 12.30pm, TNT Sports 1 Stage eight from Chambéry to Saint-François-Longchamp.

Racing: Glorious Goodwood, 1pm, ITV1 The final day, featuring the Stewards’ Cup at 3.05pm.

BBC

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Deb Danahay

Deb Danahay family

Deb Danahay

Deb Danahay

Deb Danahay