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      Mohamed Al Fayed accused in BBC documentary of raping five women

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 19 September - 08:38


    More than 20 of Fayed’s former employees tell BBC of sexual assault and of Harrods’ cover-up

    The former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed has been accused of raping five women and sexually abusing at least 15 others when they worked at the luxury department store, according to a BBC investigation.

    More than 20 women, all of who were Fayed’s former employees, told a BBC documentary they were sexually assaulted by him and that Harrods covered up the abuse.

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      A Very Royal Scandal review – Michael Sheen is excellent as Prince Andrew in THAT interview

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 19 September - 06:00 · 1 minute

    There’s a buffet of top-tier acting talent in this elegant, if slight, take on the disastrous Newsnight appearance – from Ruth Wilson as Emily Maitlis to Sheen’s buffoonish royal

    If you haven’t seen the lively Scoop , Netflix’s version of the catastrophic (for him) Prince Andrew Newsnight interview about his relationship with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, then you might find more to appreciate in A Very Royal Scandal. This is the second time the story has been given a “real events, fictionalised for dramatic purposes” preamble in the same year. As with Scoop, it’s a buffet of top-tier acting talent. Here, Ruth Wilson is Emily Maitlis, and takes the deep voice very seriously, while Michael Sheen is Prince Andrew, and Joanna Scanlan his adoring and doomed private secretary, Amanda Thirsk. The performances are predictably strong, but it lacks the heft you might expect from a such a heavyweight cast, and from a series that follows the excellent A Very English Scandal and A Very British Scandal .

    Over three steady episodes, it follows Maitlis and her Newsnight team as they pursue the interview with, and allegations against, the Prince, before re-creating the interview and exploring the fallout. Scoop focused on the producer Sam McAlister, played by Billie Piper, and turned her dogged pursuit of the sit-down into a sort of thriller. This sidelines her almost completely. Instead, it sticks with Maitlis and the Prince, fleshing out their private lives and offering a more in-depth character portrait of each, as they move towards their shared fate. It is elegantly done, though it ambles forward rather than sprinting for the finish line.

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      TV tonight: the return of a very lovely vet drama

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 19 September - 05:20

    All Creatures Great and Small is a warm antidote to the autumn chill. Plus: Olly Murs explores his family origins. Here’s what to watch this evening

    9pm, Channel 5
    Back to the lovely fictional Yorkshire village of Darrowby as the bucolic veterinary drama returns. It’s spring 1941 and Siegfried is struggling to keep the surgery going in James and Tristan’s absence. However, he might be in luck as uncertainty surrounds James’s RAF deployment. As ever, the success of this reboot hangs on its entirely reasonable reluctance to depart too radically from the vibes and values of the original. Phil Harrison

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      Agatha All Along review – the perfect show for Halloween season

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 19 September - 04:00

    This royally entertaining Marvel series slips seamlessly from comedy to tragedy, and Kathryn Hahn is so good you can barely take your eyes off her. An absolute treat

    The spin-off was surely ordained the minute Kathryn Hahn hit her first mark in front of the WandaVision cameras. She played the superhero couple’s nosy neighbour “Agnes”, who was in fact a Salem witch named Agatha Harkness bent on acquiring Wanda’s powers for herself. Hahn’s darkly comic, ineffably compelling performance almost stole the show. It was, for the longtime and well-respected character actor, a star-making part at last.

    Agatha All Along, the new nine-part series – from the creator of WandaVision, Jac Schaeffer – picks up just after the final events of the original, which saw Agatha drained of her powers and trapped in the perfect, and therefore hellish, suburb of Westview.

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      MrBeast sued over ‘unsafe’ environment on upcoming Amazon reality show

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 18 September - 18:51

    Popular YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson accused of harmful conditions behind scenes of competition show Beast Games

    MrBeast is accused of creating “unsafe” employment conditions, including sexual harassment and misrepresenting contestants’ odds at winning the $5m grand prize on his new Amazon reality show, in a lawsuit filed Tuesday by five unnamed participants.

    The filing alleges that the multimillion-dollar company behind YouTube ’s most popular channel failed to provide minimum wages, overtime pay, uninterrupted meal breaks and rest time for competitors – whose “work on the show was the entertainment product” sold by MrBeast.

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      Netflix’s latest show is the worst live TV event ever

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 18 September - 12:48

    A self-described medium assembles the pals of a Selling Sunset cast member and claims to contact their dead relatives. It’s dreary, unconvincing and morally dubious

    For a while there, it was beginning to look as if Netflix had cracked the formula when it came to live broadcasts. In May, The Roast of Tom Brady ended up making global headlines for a week. John Mulaney’s chaotic Everybody’s in LA acted as a way forward for the ailing late night talkshow format. Chestnut vs Kobayashi: Unfinished Beef managed to transform a 10-minute hotdog eating contest into something on the scale of the Rumble in the Jungle.

    It was all looking so good. Then last night Netflix’s newest live offering single-handedly set all that progress back by a decade. Live From the Other Side With Tyler Henry, in which the titular Henry channelled the spirits of various dead people to a sofa-load of vaguely famous people. Never before has three quarters of an hour of celebrity clairvoyance felt more like six hours of celebrity clairvoyance.

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      Friends at 30 – the inside story: ‘Matt LeBlanc ate so much beef trifle’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 18 September - 09:00

    From leather pants to monkeys, romance, oddly emphasised words, smelly cats and superstar special guests, the sitcom defined the 1990s. Here the writers and producers tell all …

    It was on a night out in 1995 in Los Angeles that Friends writer Adam Chase realised the show had become a phenomenon. Out for dinner, while he was writing season two, he overheard a conversation. People weren’t just talking about Friends: they were quoting it. “It became a constant,” he says. “You would go out and you would hear at least one or two people quoting our jokes, arguing about whether they were a ‘Rachel’ or a ‘Monica’.”

    That was just the start. Launched 30 years ago this month, the sitcom – which followed six twentysomethings living in New York, largely hanging out in the fictional coffee shop Central Perk – would become a cultural touchpoint for a generation. At its height, it was broadcast in 60 countries, each episode watched by 22 million viewers, all bewitched by sarcastic roommates Chandler (Matthew Perry) and Joey (Matt LeBlanc), uptight siblings Ross (David Schwimmer) and Monica (Courteney Cox), spoiled-but-sweet Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), and kooky Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow).

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      The Body Next Door review – a jaw-droppingly addictive true-crime tale

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 11 August - 21:00 · 1 minute

    The discovery of a decaying body in South Wales was just the beginning of a breathlessly twisty case spanning five decades, two continents – and where the prime suspect was already dead

    We tend to refer to murders as whodunnits, says DCI Gareth Morgan, but he believes a better term for the extremely odd case that unfurled under his watch in south Wales during 2015 would be a “who-is-it?”. When a heinous, seeping package – a decaying corpse half-preserved in more than 40 layers of wrapping – is discovered in the village of Beddau, a woman named Leigh Ann Sabine – who recently died of brain cancer – quickly becomes the prime suspect. The problem is, police cannot work out who it is she has killed.

    Ultimately, The Body Next Door is not really a who-is-it or even a howdunnit; it is – far more compellingly – a how-could-she-do-it? We first encounter Sabine through the eyes of her neighbours in Beddau (whose pronunciation seems to be a local bone of contention, but the residents featured here insist on “beh-tha” rather than “beh-thai”). They understood her to be a narcissistic fantasist with an obscure past, an affected accent and a penchant for fishnets well into middle age, but reminisce about her eccentricities fondly. By the time this series is over, however, their affection is hard to stomach. For beneath the dense layers of this breathlessly twisty investigation lies a more resounding mystery, as we are forced to reckon with a character whose actions range from heartless to inexplicably vile.

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      ‘Actors are strange animals’: Jack Lowden of Slow Horses on playing an alcoholic and working with his new wife, Saoirse Ronan

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 11 August - 14:00

    The Scottish star talks about his forthcoming role in David Ireland’s new play in Edinburgh – and why making an Irn Bru ad counts as national service

    The actor Jack Lowden, 34, is Scottish in every respect, except that he was born in England. His parents soon returned the family across the border, where he was enrolled in Scottish Youth Theatre and, at the age of 19, bagged his first major role, the lead in the National Theatre of Scotland’s 2010 revival of the Olivier award-winning Black Watch .

    Lowden would go on to win an Olivier of his own, for the role of Oswald in the Almeida’s 2013 production of Ibsen’s Ghosts . Screen work followed, including a BBC adaptation of War and Peace, a Scottish Bafta-winning role in Terence Davies’s final film, Benediction , and the 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots , where he met his now-wife, the four-time Oscar-nominated Irish actor Saoirse Ronan (whom Lowden refers to simply as “Sersh”).

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