Sex and the sixtysomethings: the steamiest scenes starring older actors. When it comes to British TV, sex is considered a young person’s game.
Wrinkly bottoms and middle-aged paunches are rarely seen on our screens, banished from viewers’ eyes. The New Tricks actor Amanda Redman has pointed out how American audiences are much more accepting of seeing intimacy between older leads. “I’m watching Madam Secretary and the two leads are in their late 50s and have a really healthy sexual relationship,” she told the Radio Times.
Over a third of Britons admit ageist behaviour in new study. More than a third of British people admit that they have discriminated against others because of their age, according to new research on everyday ageism, with those in their 30s most guilty.
The Ageist Britain report, which surveyed 4,000 UK adults and analysed thousands of tweets and blogposts in the UK, found a further one in 30 people admitted to regularly discriminating against anyone aged over 50 – and more than one in 10 admitting that they don’t even know if they are ageist. “Old fart”, “little old lady”, “bitter old man” and “old hag” were, researchers found, the most used ageist phrases on social media.
Other common terms included “ladies/gentleman of a certain age”. CHANNEL 5’S “THE TOWN THE GYPSIES TOOK OVER”: ROMANI AND TRAVELLER PEOPLE DES... Charming review – a badly botched attempt at fixing fairytale sexism. Mothers, lock up your daughters – the under 10s.
Whatever you do, keep them away from this animated fairytale adventure running on 13% girl power. Why does Coronation Street keep exploding its lesbians? I grew up watching Coronation Street with my family, breathing in sharply whenever Sophie Webster came on screen.
What if Jeremy Corbyn had crashed his car? Phone hacking was widespread at the Sun, high court told. The high court has been told that phone hacking was widespread at the Sun, despite strong denials from Rupert Murdoch’s News UK that the daily tabloid newspaper was involved in any illegal activity.
A lawyer representing alleged phone-hacking victims also requested the historic expenses receipts of serving Sun reporter Nick Parker, in order to investigate whether his purchase of top-up vouchers for a burner mobile phone was related to the interception of voicemails. News UK has always strongly denied that any illegal activities took place at the Sun and declined to comment on the claims against Parker. Nun the wiser: how Call the Midwife secretly became TV's most subversive show. Is Call the Midwife the most misunderstood show on television?
The hugely popular series is frequently dismissed as mere “comfort TV”, yet those critics are wrong. Eight series in (the most recent began on Sunday), Heidi Thomas’s adaptation of midwife Jennifer Worth’s memoirs continues to be one of the smartest and, in its own way, most subversive shows there is. Subversive not simply because Thomas and her writing team consistently slide hard-hitting plotlines in among the heartwarming scenes of babies being delivered and cheerful nuns cycling through east London, but also because the series centres women’s stories, giving a voice to the poor, the sick, the old, the ignored and invisible, and showing modern audiences what the business of birth, marriage and death was really like in this era. Take Sunday’s opener, in which young would-be model Cath (Emily Barber) almost died after a botched backstreet abortion. Throughout it all, Thomas’s script was exemplary. World watches as Australian regulator rules on Facebook and Google.
A titanic struggle is taking place between some of the world’s largest corporations.
In one corner is Google and Facebook. In the other is News Corporation. It’s not alone. It stands with most of the established media companies which have watched with growing horror as their advertising revenues have migrated into the coffers of the digital behemoths. Alphabet, Google’s parent, reported worldwide revenues of US$33bn in the third quarter and is on track to top US$120bn in 2018, mostly from advertising. In contrast, News Corporation and most media companies have seen their revenues draining way. Now the conflagration has spread to free to air television, which depends on advertising for their existence.
According to the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the media sector has lost about 3,000 journalist positions since the growth of digital platforms escalated about 10 years ago. Why is populism booming? Today’s tech is partly to blame. Rightwing populists around the world have had a good couple of months.
The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats won 17.6% of the vote in September’s general election, making theirs the third largest party in the Riksdag. In Brazil, the far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro has become president. If the BBC is politically neutral, how does it explain Andrew Neil? Imagine this.
The BBC appoints a prominent radical leftist, a lifelong Bennite, the chairman of the publisher of a prominent leftwing publication no less, as its flagship political presenter and interviewer. This person has made speeches in homage of Karl Marx calling for the establishment of full-blooded socialism in Britain, including a massive increase in public ownership, hiking taxes on the rich to fund a huge public investment programme, and reversing anti-union laws. They appear on our “impartial” Auntie Beeb wearing a tie emblazoned with the logo of a hardline leftist thinktank.
Their BBC editor is a former Labour staffer who moves to become Jeremy Corbyn’s communications chief. They use their Twitter feed – where they have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers thanks to a platform handed to them by the BBC – to promote radical leftist causes. This would never happen. Now Theresa May can stand up to Rupert Murdoch. But will she? There was one reason for the recommendation that Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Sky should be blocked: the media empire he runs in the UK simply has too much power and influence.
Apple investors call for action over iPhone 'addiction' among children. Two of the largest investors in Apple are urging the iPhone maker to take action against smartphone addiction among children over growing concerns about the effects of technology and social media on the youth. In an open letter to Apple on Monday, New York-based Jana Partners and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) said the firm must do more to help children fight addiction on its devices.
“There is a developing consensus around the world including Silicon Valley that the potential long-term consequences of new technologies need to be factored in at the outset, and no company can outsource that responsibility,” said the investors, who collectively control $2bn of Apple stock. “Apple can play a defining role in signalling to the industry that paying special attention to the health and development of the next generation is both good business and the right thing to do.”
“I can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. Apple did not comment. Alexandra Burke and the trouble with reality TV and race. Bullying Paperchase and the Mail’s other advertisers just hurts everyone. Instagram Stories has turned life into a slideshow of content. “Disruptive” is a horrible buzzword, beloved by vape-huffing Silicon Valley types, because it implies that whatever bit of nonsense they are making is changing people’s lives rather than just an update.
Truly disruptive innovations don’t happen in a flash but percolate over time until you barely remember what life was like before: such as when you had to plan what time your taxi was going to pick you up three hours before you wanted to leave; or sit on a train with a crossword book because there was nothing else to do. The problem with supposedly disruptive technology is often not the tech itself but the people using it.
Apple, for example, can make all the epoch-defining updates to sync our watch to our toaster, but most of us won’t experience them because we have three different iCloud accounts and keep forgetting the passwords. I consider myself relatively tech-savvy, but that does not mean my online personas are well kept. Katharine Viner: in turbulent times, we need good journalism more than ever. Facebook has become the most powerful publisher in history by replacing editors with algorithms and has divided public debate in a way that challenges democracy, Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, has said.
In a wide-ranging speech that addressed the tumultuous challenges facing the Guardian and other media organisations, Viner also accused Donald Trump and other politicians of actively undermining journalism’s public interest role in a democracy and warned there was a “march against free speech” in countries such as Russia, Turkey, and Malta, where investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered. We can no longer pretend the British press is impartial.