Bradley Walsh got tongues wagging when he rocked up at the Strictly Come Dancing studio after hosts, Tess Daly and Claudia Winkelman sensationally announced they’re quitting the show
Bradley Walsh has sparked some serious Strictly rumours(Image: ITV/REX/Shutterstock)
Bradley Walsh has added fuel to rumours he’ll host Strictly after he was seen backstage with the show’s crew over the weekend. The presenter, 65, is odds-on favourite to replace Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman as hosts of Strictly when they step down at the end of the current series.
Gladiators host, Bradley, is reportedly in final talks to host the primetime programme after dynamic duo, Tess and Claudia, sensationally announced they were quitting in October.
Bradley headed to the BBC studio during a break in filming ITV’s The Chase, where he posed for a selfie with the crew from the dance show. Both The Chase and Strictly are filmed at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.
Head dressmaker Theresa Hewlett shared a photograph with star on X, formerly Twitter, with a smile a mile wide, posing alongside her colleagues ahead of Saturday’s live show.
She captioned the post: “The Chase is filmed next door and he popped in to say hi. What a lovely man Bradley Walsh is!”
Meanwhile a source told The Sun: “Bradley’s appearance in the studio has certainly set tongues wagging. Bosses are keen for Bradley to take over. He is a real pro and has brilliant experience hosting live shows.
“Producers need a safe pair of hands to steady the ship amid so much damage. Of course, he’d have a female alongside him as part of a duo.
And that female, is reported to be The One Show’s Alex Jones, who took part in Strictly in 2011. A source told the publication: “Alex and Bradley are both the favourites to take over from Tess and Claudia… they have been in the BBC’s sights for some time.”
“Alex is a massive fan of Strictly, too, so this would be the dream gig for her.”
The insider clarified that “nothing is set in stone yet”, but said discussions involving the pair had been “moving in a really positive direction” so far.
Tess and Claudia stunned Strictly fans when they posted a joint video in October, announcing they were calling it quits.
Addressing viewers, they said: “We have loved working as a duo, and hosting Strictly has been an absolute dream. We were always going to leave together, and now feels like the right time. We will have the greatest rest of this amazing series and just want to say an enormous thank you to the BBC and every single person who works on the show.
“They’re the most brilliant team, and we’ll miss them every day. We will cry when we say the last ‘keep dancing,’ but we will continue to say it to each other – just possibly in tracksuit bottoms at home while holding some pizza.”
Nov. 27 (UPI) — A federal judge who oversaw the sex trafficking case against Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday demanded prosecutors explain how they are protecting victims’ privacy after the release of unredacted documents.
New York-based Judge Richard Berman issued the order in response to a letter raising alarm about how the names of some of Epstein’s victims were included in a trove of documents released by Congress earlier this month.
The order comes amid a recent push for more transparency into the investigation of Epstein, a now-deceased financier who had ties to the wealthy and powerful.
However, Bradley Edwards and Brittany Henderson, attorneys representing the victims, wrote in a letter to Berman on Tuesday that transparency cannot “come at the expense of the privacy, safety and protection of sexual abuse and sex-trafficking victims.”
“These women are not political pawns,” the attorneys wrote. “They are mothers, wives and daughters. These are women who were abused by Jeffrey Epstein, and in some instances by others, and who have already had their rights violated in the past by the government.”
The House Oversight Committee has released dozens of documents from the Justice Department and Epstein’s estate that exposed victims’ identities, causing them “significant emotional distress,” they wrote. Victims have already been approached by the press after their names were released, the attorneys wrote.
The attorneys called the situation “absolutely unacceptable and a problem that must be rectified prior to the release of any additional documents.” One victim described being unable to sleep or function after the release.
The Department of Justice unsuccessfully asked Berman to unseal grand jury transcripts and exhibits in Epstein’s case. However, the victims’ attorneys wrote in their letter that the documents reveal little compared to the department’s investigative files.
Earlier this month, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a bill directing the DOJ to release files on its investigation into Epstein.
U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton wrote to a separate judge Wednesday that the department “intends to redact or withhold victim information to the fullest extent permitted” by the recently passed law.
Look around lately and 20th century science fiction has become 21st century fact. Real life in the year 2025 — the date in which Stephen King set his 1982 novel “The Running Man” — involves technological surveillance, corporate feudalism, infotainment propaganda and extreme inequality, all things that his story about a grisly game show predicted. King, like the great sci-fi authors Philip K. Dick and George Orwell before him, was writing a cautionary tale. But the decades since have seen people take their bleak ideas as a blueprint, like when Elon Musk bragged on X that the Tesla Cybertruck is “what Bladerunner would have driven,” missing the point that we don’t want to live in a dystopia (and that Bladerunner isn’t even Harrison Ford’s name in “Blade Runner”).
The timing couldn’t be better — and worse — for Edgar Wright to remake “The Running Man,” only to put no fire into it. He and his co-writer Michael Bacall have adapted a fairly faithful version of the book, unlike the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger meathead extravaganza. (The only way to suffer through that one is if you imagine it’s a parody of pun-driven testosterone flicks.) Tellingly, they’ve left off the year 2025 and only lightly innovated the production design with spherical drones. But there’s little urgency or outrage. Instead of a funhouse mirror of what could be, it’s merely a smudged reflection of what is.
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Glen Powell stars as Ben Richards, a cash-strapped, employer-blacklisted father who begrudgingly agrees to be a contestant on a television hit that no one has survived. There’s only one network, FreeVee, and its goals overlap enough with those of the government that the distinction between them isn’t worth parsing. Every day Ben dodges a death squad, he’ll earn money for his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), and sick baby, up to a billion “new” dollars if he can last a month. (The updated bills have the Governator’s face printed on them.)
But as ever, the game is rigged. The network’s boss, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), and smarmy host Bobby T (Colman Domingo) rally viewers to turn Ben in for a cash prize, fibbing that he’s a freeloader who refuses to get a job, the typical tax-leeching scapegoat trotted out to turn the middle class against the poor and the poor against themselves. One enraged FreeVee-addicted granny (Sandra Dickinson) genuinely believes Ben eats puppies. “She used to be a kind, clever woman,” her son says with resignation.
Clearly, Wright wants to make a political satire that echoes the drivel of our own actual news. The politics are there in the armored vehicles rolling down city streets and the masked militias out to nab Ben for the bounty money. Yet we don’t feel the paranoia of eyeballs over the streets, even though it turns out that there’s no way to disguise Powell’s foxlike features under a silly stick-on mustache. A hustler named Molie (William H. Macy) warns that the TVs themselves are watching people. It doesn’t really feel like they are. I’ve felt more uneasy in a house with an Alexa.
As for the satire, this faintly cruder version of right now doesn’t have much bite. Little we see is surprising, stimulating or even that futuristic. Screens blare commercials for a drink called Liquid Death (real) and a Kardashian-esque reality show called “The Americanos” (essentially real). The film’s sole representative of upper-middle-class normality — a hostage named Amelia (Emilia Jones) — could trade places with any Pilates instructor.
When an underground rebel, Bradley (Daniel Ezra), breaks down how the network chases ratings by flattening people into archetypes, he’s not telling today’s audience anything it doesn’t already know. King wrote the character as an environmental activist; here, he’s more of a TV critic. Likewise, Bradley’s crony Elton (Michael Cera) has mutated from a pathetic idealist to a Monster-chugging chaos agent — as if “Home Alone’s” Kevin McCallister grew up to join Antifa. Elton’s motivations don’t make sense, but at least Cera barges into the movie with so much energy that his sequence is a hoot. Chuckling that he likes his “bacon extra crispy” as he takes aim at a police squad, he also breaks the seal on this remake’s use of bad puns. From his scenes on, the script crams in as many groaners as it can.
Wright has talent for casting actors that pop. Domingo’s fatuous celebrity host is fantastic, even doing the retro running man dance with Kid ‘n Play aplomb. We see just enough of Ben’s fellow competitors, played by Katy O’Brian and Martin Herlihy, to wish we had more time with them. One of the hunters, Karl Glusman, has so much intensity that I’ll be looking out for what he does next. Pity that the charismatic Lee Pace’s main villain has to spend most of the film covered by a shroud.
Meanwhile, Powell is being put through his own test of Hollywood survival. Everyone seems to agree that he’s the next movie star, but he hasn’t yet landed the right star-making vehicle. Here, as ever, he’s being treated like a Swiss Army knife on a construction site: Handy at a lot of things from humor to action to drama to romance, but his character lacks the oomph to truly showcase his skills. We’re told over and over that Ben is the angriest man in the world, but Powell’s innate likability, that cocky-charming heroic twinkle in his eye, makes him come across peevish at worst. His best moments are all comedy, like when Ben slaps on a thick brogue to hide out as an Irish priest, or his snappy back-and-forth with a psychologist who puts him through a word-association test. (Anarchy? “Win.” Justice? “Hilarious.”)
Still, I missed the truly misanthropic lead of King’s novella, a sour bigot radicalized to see himself not just as a cog in a machine but as a spoke in a revolution. There’s lip service to that idea here, but the film doesn’t take itself seriously enough to give us the chills. It’s not fair to judge “The Running Man” by how closely it hews to the book — and if you remember King’s ending, then you know there’s no way Wright could have pulled that off, although his fix is pretty clever. But tonally, there’s just not enough rage, gore or fun.
Maybe Wright feels the same way too. He’s been wanting to make this movie since 2017 and had the lousy luck to do it for Paramount in the year that the studio embraced the government and sacrificed its employees for its own billion-dollar reward. There’s no bleaker satire than making it through “The Running Man’s” end credits, past images of a raised fist that reads “Together Against the Network,” to see the last words on screen: A Skydance Corporation. Or maybe there is, if someone makes a documentary about what Edgar Wright may have had to cut.
‘The Running Man’
Rated: R, for strong violence, some gore, and language
Clippers guard Bradley Beal is done for the season. He has a hip fracture and will undergo surgery, the team announced Wednesday.
The three-time All-Star, who is expected to make a full recovery in six to nine months, played in only six games this season, averaging 8.2 points and 1.7 assists. He signed an $11-million, two-year deal with the Clippers in July after the final two years of his contract were bought out by the Phoenix Suns.
The 32-year-old was listed as out for Wednesday night’s game against the Denver Nuggets because of left hip soreness. Beal previously missed games because of a left knee injury and lower back soreness.
Beal’s two seasons in Phoenix were riddled by injury as well. The 14-year veteran hasn’t played at least 60 games in a season since 2020-21 when he was with the Washington Wizards.
It was only the shadow of brilliant Real keeper Thibaut Courtois that threatened to stop Liverpool getting what they merited, with a stunning individual performance that revived memories of how he defied them when Jurgen Klopp’s team lost the 2022 Champions League final in Paris.
The Belgian made a string of magnificent saves, including four from Dominik Szoboszlai and a remarkable reflex stop from Virgil van Dijk’s header, before even he was powerless to stop Mac Allister’s header from the Hungarian’s free-kick.
Liverpool’s narrow victory margin does not touch the sides of their domination from first whistle to last, these crucial three points pushing them into sixth place in the Champions League table, a standing that will put them in the last 16 without the need to resort to a play-off if maintained.
Szoboszlai and Mac Allister ruled midfield, while Florian Wirtz provided some of the subtle touches that made his name at Bayer Leverkusen. Hugo Ekitike was a constant menace.
Liverpool were, unlike so often this season, rock solid at the back as Kylian Mbappe was marginalised, delivering a dreadful, error-strewn display. Vinicius had been beaten by Bradley long before the end.
If it was a miserable night for Alexander-Arnold, it was not much better for Jude Bellingham, offered the Anfield stage to deliver a reminder of his class before England head coach Thomas Tuchel names his squad to face Serbia and Albania after excluding him last time.
He provided one moment of danger in the first half when he forced Giorgi Mamardashvili to save with his legs, but was otherwise anonymous as Real failed to establish any sort of stranglehold.
Bellingham conceded the free-kick in a dangerous position that led to Mac Allister’s goal, offering little as Real tried to force their way back into contention, although he was not alone there.
He offered words of sympathy to Alexander-Arnold: “Obviously, it is one of those things in football. The fans booing isn’t a reflection of how they feel about him.
“I think it is more to give their team the edge and throw him off a little bit. I am sure they’re appreciative of what he has done for the club.”
Alexander-Arnold, once an Anfield idol, probably could not wait to get back to his new Madrid home, while life for Liverpool suddenly looks much brighter ahead of Sunday’s meeting with Manchester City at Etihad Stadium.
