Richard Chamberlain, who has died at 90, achieved exceptional television celebrity by playing devastatingly attractive men whose professions made them unavailable to women. In The Thorn Birds – a 1983 miniseries that achieved huge ratings for ABC in the US and BBC One in the UK – he was Ralph De Bricassart, a Catholic priest … Read more
Adolescence’s stratospheric success has catapulted its young cast of unknown actors into the limelight. Reams of headlines have suggested that they have come from nowhere – yet the grassroots regional drama schools that trained them say this overlooks their hard work. To find undiscovered talent for the show, Adolescence’s casting director, Shaheen Baig, visited two … Read more
Criticisms that Doctor Who has become too “woke” prove the series is doing the right thing by being inclusive, its new star Varada Sethu has said. Sethu plays the Doctor’s latest travelling companion, Belinda Chandra, in new episodes airing next month. With Ncuti Gatwa returning as the Doctor, the pairing marks the first time a … Read more
Relations between the Trump administration and the White House press corps deteriorated further on Monday, as journalists pushed back on new plans to change their working arrangements in the West Wing. The latest skirmish came as the administration said that it would consider taking control of the reporters’ seating chart in the James S. Brady … Read more
When he was younger and his parents were out of the house, Ed Atkins used to sit on the landing and force himself to imagine all the ways they might die. “My thinking was that if I imagined it first, then it would be very unlikely to actually happen,” says the 42-year-old artist. Atkins’ parents … Read more
Should Jim Acosta wear a tie? For the last two months, since the former anchor quit his job at CNN, Mr. Acosta has been broadcasting online several times per week, usually from his dining room, using his iPhone. Often, he is troubleshooting in real time, far from the high-gloss desk and sophisticated cameras of his … Read more
It is, scarily, 20 years since Bruce Parry first brought Tribe to the BBC. The diffident but determined former Royal Marine visited Indigenous people in the world’s most remote places and, by living as one of them, earned a level of trust that previous documentary-makers had struggled to achieve. Parry was more patient, more respectful … Read more
Helen Mirren has said that there is no earthly point in getting a woman to play James Bond because the world’s most famous fictional spy was “born out of profound sexism”. The first thing to say is that of course she is right. Of course Bond was born of reactionary attitudes and only a bore … Read more
It has come to this: we are now in Ministry of Truth territory. In Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution, the US’s ensemble of 21 great national museums, last week became the subject of an executive order by President Donald Trump. “Distorted narratives” are to be rooted out. There will be no more of the “corrosive … Read more
When you think of the Bloomsbury Group – the writers, artists and intellectuals who congregated at 46 Gordon Square in London in the early 20th century – you might think of Virginia Woolf; the Omega Workshops, which brought fine art to modernist designs; Charleston, a farmhouse in Sussex, frequented by core members who painted every … Read more