Channel

The brand new show is perfect for Rich House Poor House fans

A teenager has admitted “I really do not want to do this” after being stunned by a school’s strict regime during Channel 5‘s explosive new series.

Last week, Channel 5 launched a brand new show that was dubbed the perfect watch for fans of Rich House Poor House.

Titled Trading Places, the show takes a new group of young people each week out of their comfort zone and plunges them into a completely different life.

Tonight’s instalment (May 17) saw three 18 year olds, who have given up on education, as they were taken to one of Britain’s most elite and traditional private boarding schools – Christ College in Brecon.

A synopsis teased: “Three 18-year-olds who’ve given up on education bed down in one of Britain’s most elite and traditional private boarding schools, where excellent results and respect count for everything.”

Following Shadiya from Bristol, Molly from Essex and Danny from London, the synopsis continued: “For the next week, these three reluctant sixth formers will be bedding down in Christ College, a prestigious private boarding school in Brecon.

“Established by King Henry VIII, it’s one of the oldest schools in Wales and believes in getting results ‘the Brecon Way’. The strict rules and fierce competition will be a real test for its newest pupils.”

The students were forced out of their comfort zone as they re-entered a classroom for the first time in a while, but for Molly, things soon became a struggle.

Molly, a part time retailer from Essex, was distraught on GCSE results day when she found out she had only passed three subjects, leaving her with a very negative view of education. A post showing the moment she opened her results was viewed by more than 20 million people online.

On the show, Molly was recruited in the school’s chapel choir due to her musical background, but was soon seen struggling to read the sheet music and sing in French, leaving her deflated.

During practice, the 18-year-old was stunned as she admitted she struggled to keep up. Speaking to producers, she added: “When I heard I had choir practise, I was so happy, and then wow that is something different. I couldn’t sing in French and I just felt so awkward the whole time.”

She later said: “Music is literally the most important thing ever to me and that made music miserable.”

In a further revelation, Molly said on her diary cam: “Everyone is really polite which feels slightly odd. I feel like I haven’t really seen anyone express themselves properly.

“They’ve all kind of got the same humour, same kind of mannerisms, same attitude, it kind of feels like a cult.”

The next day, when it came to the performance, Molly continued to feel the nerves as she admitted: “Yesterday I was thinking about just walking out of the choir, I was like no I cannot do this.”

Getting dressed in a striking red robe, Molly could be heard telling the group: “I really don’t want to do this guys.”

However, despite her nerves, Molly performed in the chapel choir and was proud of her achievements. She told producers: “Being judged is something that really does scare me and concern me.

“I got bullied in Year 7 to 8 and that really did just ruin my time at school. I just felt really uncomfortable around everyone in a classroom watching me.”

Trading Places is available to watch on Channel 5.

CHONGQING, China — Three years ago, in the idyllic town of Woodside south of San Francisco, the United States and China held their first high-level talks on the dangers posed by artificial intelligence. President Xi Jinping and his longtime foreign minister appeared serious in their conviction that a channel should be a established between Beijing and Washington — a red phone for AI in case of emergencies.

They authorized a diplomatic effort that would begin in 2024 in Switzerland, only months before the U.S. presidential election. A large U.S. delegation arrived with high hopes that were abruptly dashed, according to four sources who attended the talks. The Chinese contingent dismissed American concerns over runaway AI as academic, almost theoretical, quickly turning the conversation to export controls seen in Beijing as yet another U.S. effort to hold China back.

“They naturally view any American diplomatic initiative involving limitations or restrictions of one flavor or another on a capability as being a trap,” Jake Sullivan, U.S. national security advisor under President Biden, said in an interview.

Despite the distrust — and Democrats losing the White House to Donald Trump — an accord was struck in November of that year in Peru, where both sides agreed to keep AI out of the command and control of nuclear weapons.

“It was a breaking of the seal that we could actually do something on AI,” Sullivan said. “In the transition, I told the incoming Trump team that they should really pick up that dialogue. But the Trump administration’s view was just far more laissez-faire, and they didn’t seem particularly interested in it.”

“That’s all changed in the past few weeks,” he added.

A Trump administration once eager to gun for technological supremacy is now, for the first time, reckoning with the power AI could unleash if left unchecked.

In a surprise reversal, quiet discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump’s state visit to China this week to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel, officials told The Times, prompted by shared alarm in Beijing and Washington over the debut of Mythos, Anthropic’s powerful new model.

One senior administration official told reporters Sunday that the White House was looking to create a channel of communication for AI like others that they have “in many areas that have intense focus with the U.S. and China.”

“I think what that channel of communication looks like, its formality and what that looks like, is yet to be determined,” the official said, “but we want to take this opportunity with the leaders meeting to open up a conversation. We should establish a channel of communication on that matter.”

Mythos’ capabilities are seen across the industry and government as those of an unprecedented cyberweapon, able to infiltrate and exploit digital communication systems — including government databases, financial institutions and healthcare programs — with untold consequences.

Whether an announcement will come to fruition this week is not yet clear. Any talks between the United States and China over AI regulations — designing some kind of arms control agreement governing the use of a technology that neither side fully understands or controls — will be fraught with suspicion, misunderstandings and risk, experts say.

“Right now, there is almost no support from U.S. policymakers to engage in formal discussions on AI governance with China,” said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The logic is that this is a winner-takes-all race,” Mehta said, “and that it’s imperative to accelerate AI progress to ensure that the United States wins that race.”

America in the lead

China would enter those discussions with a powerful argument, that U.S. leadership in AI — and the prevailing strategy of American AI companies — is propelling the world to a fraught frontier.

Every major U.S. player in the arena — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft and Meta Platforms — is racing to be the first to build a model capable of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a threshold without a common definition, but that most agree will require a model to perform any intellectual human task.

The prevailing theory is that the first to achieve AGI will secure a prize that multiplies itself: a self-training, recursively improving intelligence, growing exponentially and leaving all competitors in its wake.

Chinese companies, by contrast, are following a state-sanctioned strategy focused on integrating AI into siloed industries and systems, training models to improve individual tasks and accelerate growth in a more tailored approach.

“The Chinese believe there is no single race, but multiple races,” said Scott Kennedy, senior advisor on Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “The U.S. is focused on achieving AGI, while China is focused on diffusion and applications of AI into the rest of their economy — manufacturing, humanoid robotics, all aspects of the internet of things.”

China scholars, AI industry insiders and successive administrations have questioned Beijing’s strategic thinking and forthrightness.

“It’s so baked into the community here that AGI will have this transformative potential that people can’t believe China isn’t focused on this, as well,” said Matt Sheehan, a scholar of global technology issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with a focus on China. “It says it’s focused on applications, but is that a fake out for an AGI program hidden in the mountains somewhere?”

But most insiders believe that Beijing’s guidance to Chinese companies reveals its true intentions.

“They are not as AGI-pilled as the United States is, and I think that remains the case today,” Sullivan said, “so they regarded a lot of the conversation in the U.S. around extreme frontier risk — misalignment and loss of control — as a bit abstract, and not really as relevant to how they saw AI diffusing in China.”

President Biden greets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Woodside, Calif., in 2023.

(Doug Mills / Pool Photo)

Although China’s progress has exceeded U.S. expectations — especially since DeepSeek released its model over a year ago — the state has focused computer power on specific applications rather than the broad strategy needed to develop more powerful models capable of advancing toward AGI.

“It’s not just chips. It’s money,” Sheehan added. “China’s leading companies are much more financially constrained than U.S. companies. There’s concern over a bubble here, but OpenAI is valued at something near $800 billion. Leading Chinese companies that have gone public are valued at $20 billion. There’s just an orders-of-magnitude gap in available financing.”

Still, some in the U.S. government fear China won’t need comparable computing power if it simply steals the technology wholesale.

Doing so isn’t simple. But last month, in a memo, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy accused Chinese actors of “industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems,” in effect replicating the performance of the most advanced existing models “at a fraction of the cost.” The memo did not accuse Beijing of endorsing the activity.

In the process, the memo added, carefully constructed security protocols are deliberately stripped away.

China’s negotiating advantage

Whatever its strategic calculus may be, China would enter talks with the Trump administration trailing in the race — while disagreeing on the nature of the finish line.

AGI, in theory, could reach a stage of recursive self-improvement that results in a loss of human understanding or control. But if it is only the Americans, and not the Chinese, seeking to reach that threshold, then who is responsible to stop it?

Daniel Remler, who led AI policy at the State Department during the Biden administration and took part in the Geneva talks, cast doubt on Chinese claims of disinterest in AGI and ignorance of its risks. China falling behind in the race is no strategic design, he said.

“Chinese technologists are close observers of the U.S. AI ecosystem, and sometimes they say what they think,” Remler said. “Many were impressed by the [Mythos] model to the point of despair. Leaders in China’s top AI labs have been vocal in recent months, even before Mythos, about how compute-constrained they are at the frontier. Some have said they may never catch their American competitors.”

Talks at this point in the race could follow a familiar pattern in the recent history of U.S.-China diplomacy, in which Beijing claims it is behind the United States in development, ultimately securing a handicap and greater concessions at the negotiating table.

In other competitive domains — such as with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and in cybersecurity negotiations between Beijing and the Obama administration — agreements were ultimately reached that Washington believes in hindsight disadvantaged American companies.

The Trump administration, Remler added, “needs to approach AI diplomacy with China with clear-eyed expectations anchored to our own national interests.”

Silicon Valley itself is divided over regulating AI. Anthropic, which was founded on concerns that other AI companies were failing to take safety and alignment concerns seriously, raised alarms over Mythos, its own model, to the Trump administration, a moment that has prompted reflection at the White House on the best path forward.

Spooked after meeting with leaders from America’s top banks over their vulnerabilities, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent internally advised U.S. government reviews of future model releases — a practice already underway in China, where the training parameters for models, known as “weights,” have been publicly released.

Even the suggestion of government oversight sparked backlash from Silicon Valley. Last week, the White House sent out a memo to reassure industry allies that submitting new models for federal review would be strictly voluntary.

If talks ultimately resume between Washington and Beijing on AI, experts believe the negotiations would be far more complex than those that resulted in arms control agreements governing nuclear weapons in the Cold War.

The superpowers would not only be discussing threats of instability to the global financial system, but also fears of proliferation — advanced AI tools getting into the hands of bad actors interested in using bio- or cyberweapons that could target both countries.

And they ultimately would have to decide whether to discuss regulating the integration of AI into the Chinese and U.S. militaries, an almost unfathomable goal between the world’s biggest adversaries, where trust is lowest and verification would be hardest.

Those in the industry who most fear what artificial superintelligence could bring have told the Trump administration that talks with China are an existential necessity.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive and co-founder of Anthropic, speaks at an event in New York in 2025.

(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

But even within Anthropic, which has championed diplomacy, there are concerns that Beijing could exploit its current disadvantage to entangle American industry at the cusp of its crowning achievement.

Rather than pushing for a single sweeping agreement, industry insiders are advising the administration to pursue targeted deals with Beijing to mitigate specific risks, like the pact on nuclear command and control, two industry sources said.

In private, both Xi and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi seemed to understand that the gravity of the emerging technology before them required some form of cooperation, Sullivan said.

“At a conceptual level, I believe they had a conviction on that and authorized it,” Sullivan said, “but I believe their level of urgency was considerably lower than ours, and saw this as a longer-term process that would play out over time.”

“Their level of urgency and their stake in it has gone up,” he added.

The cast and sex experts of Virgin Island spoke at the BAFTA TV Awards after the Channel 4 show was hit with criticism

The Virgin Island cast made a huge splash when the series first aired last year and instantly became a watercooler TV show, with many left questioning whether it was groundbreaking or exploitative.

The premise of the Channel 4 programme followed 12 adult virgins as they explored intimacy in a pressure-free environment, surrounded by experts helping to guide them towards breaking down barriers.

It led to emotional breakthroughs for the brave contestants, and sparked conversations across the UK, resulting in a BAFTA TV nomination in the reality category – which was eventually won by the Celebrity Traitors.

Speaking to the Mirror and other press on the red carpet at the annual ceremony, the cast and experts took the opportunity to hit back at the critics. Addressing the backlash, sex and relationship coach Celeste Hirschman told us: “The proof is in the pudding! The transformations are unbelievable, and in the second season as well!

Dr Danielle Harel agreed: “Exactly! There’s a little bit of a discomfort to see the methods, but honestly, when people see how it helps, they’ll really fall into it, they’ll love it. They’ll really understand why it’s so important.”

Discussing the biggest change in the latest episodes, they revealed that “hundreds and hundreds” of people applied to take part for the second season.

“I think they were much more ready in season two, so they dove in the deep end right away. And we had a little more time, which was nice,” Celeste continued. “And we have play time! We have a BDSM specialist coming in for episode five, so watch out!”

Dr Danielle interjected: “I think people came in more ready for the show, so they were ready to move faster.”

The contestants themselves also couldn’t rave about the series enough. Emma was met with cheers when she shared: “Well, I lost my virginity, so that’s an update, I think!

“Ever since, I’ve been exploring more with intimacy and getting more comfortable with it. Finding out what I like and don’t like. I’ve built so much more confidence and I’ve opened up so many more doors! It’s incredible!

“The pros taught us how it was done, I’m a free woman now thanks to these girls! I didn’t realise that would happen on a two week retreat but these are experts, so they know what they’re doing!”

Emma revealed that she first became intimate “about six months after” filming, during a “self-love journey” in Australia.

“That’s when I started to meet people and try it a bit more. I took away a lot of skills these girls gave me and I did my own learning in my own time, and then I blossomed in the outside world.”

Jason Thompson, who was also a guest at the sex retreat, proudly flashed a bejewelled cherry pin on his suit as he added:“I’m still a virgin, cherry is still in tact. I love myself again, a whole other level of confidence, I’m just all-round happier. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.”

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Trading Places aired on Channel 5 this weekend with dramatic scenes, as luxury-loving sugar baby Saffron broke down in tears.

Channel 5’s brand new series Trading Places got off to a dramatic start, with emotions running high from the very first episode.

The show takes a fresh group of young people each week, plucking them from their comfort zones and dropping them headfirst into a completely different way of life.

On Sunday night (May 10), viewers watched as self-confessed shopaholics Saffron, Umar, and Bridie swapped their lavish lifestyles for a 1960s-inspired, off-grid existence in Cornwall.

Things quickly became overwhelming for Saffron, however, when the reality of her new surroundings hit home upon arrival.

The moment she stepped into their accommodation with her suitcase in tow, the 26-year-old broke down in tears, reports Wales Online.

She commented: “I can’t do this, I don’t like any of it. I don’t want to do this anymore. No, I really don’t want to do this anymore. It’s too much, I can’t.”

Farm resident Babu stepped in to comfort a distressed Saffron, who struggled to articulate just how overwhelming she found the whole experience. She added: “The bees, the walking, the climbing. I’m not used to quiet at all.”

With some gentle encouragement from Babu, Saffron ultimately decided to stick it out and embrace farm life. Throughout the episode, viewers also gained a fascinating insight into her life back home.

Speaking candidly to the camera, she revealed: “I am a sugar baby. A sugar baby is basically a companion. When I have a long-term sugar daddy, then the items per month would be a few Chanel handbags or a few Christian Louboutins.

“The men that I’ve dated, they’ve always looked after me, I’m just a 24/7 princess, so I don’t know what life is without that.”

Saffron explained to the group at the farm that their relationships remain platonic, focusing primarily on conversation rather than anything physical.

After a difficult beginning, Channel 5 audiences witnessed a transformation in Saffron as she threw herself into producing fresh organic apple juice for sale at a farmers’ market.

The 26 year old became emotional later in the programme when discussing the bullying she endured in her younger years, though the experience appeared largely beneficial for her overall.

Reflecting as the episode concluded, she admitted: “The biggest challenge of this week has been the whole bl***y week! I know that everyone thought I was going to leave day one, myself included, but no, I stayed the week! I’m not proud of myself this week, no.”

She continued candidly: “I’m going to be real, I think there’s a lot more I could’ve tried, but there was so much emotion that kept coming over me every time in every single activity, I was finding bits of myself that I’d hidden for so long.”

Trading Places is available to watch on Channel 5.

Ted Turner, the brash media mogul who created CNN and revolutionized how Americans watched television, and who wielded his media empire and wealth to pursue liberal global causes and land conservation, has died. He was 87.

Turner died Wednesday, according to his family.

In 2018, he revealed he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a neurodegenerative disease, which had been progressing in recent years.

Turner’s outsized public persona — some called him the “Mouth from the South” for his free-wheeling trash talk — matched the Georgian’s influence on news, politics, sports and entertainment in the late 20th century. Turner repeatedly shook up established industries by invading quickly and expanding options for consumers, while railing against monolithic competitors who were less daring or nimble than his maverick Turner Broadcasting System.

Turner created the cable stations TBS and Turner Classic Movies; he owned the Atlanta Braves baseball team, the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and revitalized professional wrestling with World Championship Wrestling.

Turner was one of the first adopters of cable and satellite broadcasting technology, and for many rural Americans living beyond the tower signals of major cities, he was the first person to bring them interesting TV.

The media baron constantly generated headlines. He had a Clark Gable pencil mustache, raced sailboats, cavorted with the late communist leader Fidel Castro in Cuba, and at one point married Academy Award-winning actress and activist Jane Fonda. His wealth enabled him to become one of the largest private landowners and wealthiest philanthropists in the U.S.

July 1990 image of Ted Turner with Jane Fonda.

(Tony Duffy/Getty Images)

His crowning cultural achievement was the creation of the Cable News Network in 1980, which created the model for today’s cable news titans. The 24-hour news channel was not widely expected to be a success. All-night broadcasting had not been proven as a business model in an industry dominated nationally by corporate monoliths like ABC, NBC and CBS, where news programming was something that happened on a set schedule. And CNN’s headquarters weren’t in media centers like New York or Los Angeles, but Atlanta.

But Turner believed that “over-the-air networks would decline as audiences turned to videos and other outlets for entertainment on demand,” wrote the late journalist Daniel Schorr in a 2001 memoir.

“The network future belonged to whoever would deliver what was happening now — live news and live sports. That was why he wanted to be the first to deliver all news, all sports, all the time,” wrote Schorr, whom Turner courted to join CNN.

Within two years, CNN had more than 9 million subscribers. By the 2000s, Turner’s once far-flung idea for an around-the-clock news service had become so successful that it had attracted imitators like MSNBC (now called MS NOW) and Fox News.

“We not only became profitable, but also changed the nature of news — from watching something that happened to watching it as it happened,” Turner said of CNN in 2004. “If we needed more money for [broadcasting from] Kosovo or Baghdad, we’d find it. If we had to bust the budget, we busted the budget. We put journalism first, and that’s how we built CNN into something the world wanted to watch.”

Fox Corp. Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, who was both a rival and friend of Turner, said his “vision for 24-hour cable news transformed the media industry and gave viewers everywhere a front seat to witness history unfold. His impact as a trailblazer has left an indelible mark on our cultural landscape.”

Turner recognized the value of global distribution long before his rivals, launching CNN’s international business in the mid-1980s. He bought his first western property, The Bar-None Ranch in Montana, and would eventually become one of the nation’s largest individual landowners with nearly 2 million acres, which provide habitat for threatened species and his beloved American bison.

“Ted’s entrepreneurial spirit, creative ambition and willingness to take risks changed the media industry forever,” David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, said Wednesday in a note to employees. “He believed deeply in the power of ideas, in doing things differently and in building platforms that could inform, inspire and connect people around the world.”

Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 19, 1938, and raised in Georgia. A mischievous child — who later became a mischievous adult despite attending the Georgia Military Academy — he had a tough childhood at the hands of his alcoholic father, Ed.

“Ninety percent of the arguments I had with Ed were over his beating Ted too hard,” Ted’s mother, Florence Turner, recalled later.

“My dad ran an old-fashioned household and he insisted that pretty much everything had to be his way,” Ted Turner said in a 2008 memoir. “My father and I had a complex relationship but I loved him.”

The younger Turner attended Brown University but dropped out before graduating. His savings had run out, his father had stopped financially supporting his tuition, and in his final days on campus, he was suspended for bringing a woman to his dorm room, according to his memoir.

He soon joined his father’s expanding billboard advertising company, Turner Advertising, where he had been working off and on for years since childhood.

He inherited the business at the age of 24 after his father died by suicide. By then, Turner had already had years of experience , and he worked furiously to reverse his father’s recent sale of part of the company to a competitor and paid down its daunting debt, an act that presaged the empire-building to come.

While growing the business, Turner also pursued his passion for competitive sailing, which is how he met his first wife, Judy Nye, in college. It’s also how their marriage ended. Turner intentionally hit his wife’s boat during a 1963 race to keep her from passing him, and the pair, who had two children, split immediately afterward.

It was to be the first of three divorces. . “My problem is I love every woman I meet,” Turner has said. He would go on to win the America’s Cup in 1977 while expanding his father’s company into a modern multimedia conglomerate.

Leveraging the billboard business, Turner started buying local radio stations across the South in the late 1960s. In 1970, he bought the Channel 17 television station in Atlanta, competing with local network affiliates by airing old movies whose rights were affordable and picking up programming dropped by the less nimble competition. He didn’t like putting news on prime time back then — too negative — and soon picked up broadcast rights for the Braves, Hawks and other local sports.

Oct. 1998 photo of former President Jimmy Carter, right, and Atlanta Braves team owner Ted Turner, during Game 6 of the National League Championship Series in Atlanta.

(PAT SULLIVAN/AP)

The Braves were a ratings hit, and when the team flailed and went up for sale, Turner’s company became its owner in 1976. The team continued to flail but Turner boosted its profile with gimmicks such as sewing “Channel 17” on the back of a pitcher’s jersey and dressing up as the team’s batboy and manager, to the league’s disdain. Turner bought the Hawks shortly after.

Facing entrenched local network affiliates, Turner expanded his independent station’s reach across the South and then the U.S. by embracing the new technologies of cable and satellite broadcasting. Channel 17 became nationally known as the “SuperStation,” with call letters WTBS, later shortened to TBS.

The quirky Atlanta station’s local broadcasts of old movies and sports games had become national broadcasts.

Still hungry for more, Turner finally turned his attention to news programming. He launched CNN in 1980 in a desperate bid to create a national 24-hour news channel before the broadcast titans ABC, NBC and CBS — and their gargantuan budgets — could beat him to it.

“The 24/7 genre started with Ted Turner,” veteran CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour said Wednesday on CNN. “He was the original, and he made us all proud, and he made us all hopeful, and he made us all strive for his vision of a better world.”

There were some lean early years. But the nascent channel fended off an attempt by ABC to create a competitor, and critics could see the value of an ever-present news channel, even if quality was a little thin at times.

“Non-viewers of CNN are missing a lot. There are so many reasons to watch,” Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg wrote in 1986, hailing the 6-year-old channel as an “institution.” “It’s not always good, but it’s always there.”

In 1986, CNN was the only broadcaster running live coverage when the Challenger shuttle liftoff ended in disaster. In 1991, the network gave Americans a live and uninterrupted look at the invasion of Iraq. American officials held news conferences knowing that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was watching them on CNN.

Americans had seen images of war before, but not broadcast nonstop into their homes.

“CNN seeks to be a stethoscope attached to the hypothetical heart of the war, and to present us with its hypothetical pulse,” the French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote, critiquing the conflict as a media spectacle. Media scholars began to wonder whether a “CNN effect” was influencing government policy. Officials found that they now had to respond much more quickly to crises unfolding on live television.

Turner was not adversarial to communist countries of the era and even tried his own version of the Olympics, called the Goodwill Games, a bit of private-sector peace-craft that brought the Soviet Union and the U.S. out of their respective Olympic boycotts and back into direct competition in the 1989s. All on television, of course.

Turner also saw professional wrestling as part of his sports portfolio, at one point trying to pit his World Championship Wrestling program against competitor Vince McMahon’s wrestling empire, then called the World Wrestling Federation. Turner similarly tried to take a bite out of MTV with the Cable Music Channel, with a promise “to stay away from the excessive, violent or degrading clips to women that MTV is so fond of putting on.”

Moralism was a Turner hallmark. Turner had started his life as a conservative — Turner had met his second wife, Jane Smith, at a 1964 fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater — and turned toward more liberal-leaning causes, such as world peace, nuclear nonproliferation and fighting climate change, later in life.

At the 1990 American Humanist Assn.’s annual convention, Turner presented his “Ten Voluntary Initiatives” — his atheistic version of the Ten Commandments — which included pledges to world peace, environmentalism, nonviolence and “to have no more than two children, or no more than my nation suggests.” He would become a major private donor to the United Nations, pledging $1 billion and launching the United Nations Foundation nonprofit.

In 1991, a year marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first U.S. war against Iraq and the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Time magazine named Turner its “Man of the Year” for his “visionary” creation of CNN, which covered those events live. He also married Fonda that year (the ceremony was reported by CNN) and his Braves narrowly lost the World Series.

Time’s honorific was also a nice bit of corporate synergy. The magazine’s parent company, Time Warner, owned about 20% of Turner Broadcasting System stock.

Turner launched the Cartoon Network in 1992, which helped introduce his then-newly acquired Hanna-Barbera characters — including Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear and Scooby-Doo — to a new generation of viewers.

Adversaries thought that Turner’s ventures could be reckless and impulsive. Far-seeing accomplishments in national broadcasting and the creation of CNN were also paired with several expensive misadventures, including a failed attempt to buy CBS.

Turner had to unwind a purchase of the MGM film studio less than a year after buying it, though he held onto one valuable asset: The studio’s film library, which became the foundation of the Turner Classic Movies channel and, later, jewels in the Burbank-based Warner Bros. studio vault.

In 1996, Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner to form the world’s largest media company, marking the beginning of the end of Turner’s apex in corporate media. Time Warner’s 2000 merger with budding internet giant AOL, then the largest-ever corporate merger, ended in disaster. Turner, who had not been a key player in the negotiations and had made no secret of his disdain for that deal, was fired as an executive.

“Ted Turner was one of the rare leaders who truly changed the trajectory of an industry,” Versant Media Chief Executive Mark Lazarus, a former Turner underling, said in a statement. “I saw firsthand his willingness to take risks and his belief that media could be something bigger and more impactful.”

CNN Worldwide Chairman Mark Thompson added: “He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand.”

Turner resigned from the AOL Time Warner board in 2003, and in 2007, announced he had sold his company shares. In his later days, one of his best-known ventures was his Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain. His philanthropy and land conservation efforts and protection of the American bison became guide posts during his retirement years.

While CNN maintains influence in the U.S. and abroad, its TV ratings have declined in recent years — a casualty of changing consumer behavior, the rise of social media, derision from President Trump — and several ownership changes.

During the past decade, CNN has had three different corporate owners. The company is poised to be sold again, this time to billionaire David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance. That proposed merger would bring CNN under the same roof as CBS News.

“I’ve often considered and joked about what I might want written on my tombstone,” Turner said in a 2008 memoir. “At one point, when I felt like I could get out of the way of the press, ‘You Can’t Interview Me Here’ was a leading candidate. … These days, I’m leaning toward, ‘I Have Nothing More to Say.’”

Turner is survived by his five children — Laura Turner Seydel (Rutherford), Robert Edward “Teddy” Turner IV (Blair), Rhett Turner, Beau Turner, Jennie Turner Garlington (Peek) — 14 grandchildren and a great granddaughter. The family plans a private and public service at a later date.

Pearce is a former Times reporter. Times Staff Writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — It’s Kentucky Derby Day, also known as the day everyone waits around for eight hours to watch a two-minute horse race.

But that’s part of what makes the Derby what it is … not just a race, but an event. And maybe 8 a.m. PDT is a little early to begin your neighborhood party, but we’re not judging. Besides, if you’re reading this in the Eastern Time Zone, 11 a.m. is prime brunch time.

What you really want to know, though, is what time the horses actually will break from the gate at Churchill Downs. For the seventh straight year, the official post time is 6:57 p.m. EDT, though a timeline released Friday at the track said the horses would load into the gate at 7:01, with a start at 7:02.

To spare you the math, that’s 3:57 p.m. in Los Angeles and the rest of the Pacific Time Zone, with the race starting just after 4. (In the last six years, the race has gone off sometime between 3:59 and 4:05.)

But you don’t want to just tune into NBC at the top of the hour. There’s the walkover of the horses from the stable area to the paddock beginning at about 3:15 PDT, the call for “Riders Up” (from retired jockey Pat Day) at 3:44, the “Call to the Post” at 3:45 and the University of Louisville choir singing “My Old Kentucky Home” right after that.

If you’re interested in any of the 11 races at Churchill Downs before the Derby, and there are some good ones, they begin at 8 a.m. PDT. The first two races are available on FanDuel TV (yes, it’s still in business) before Peacock and NBCSN take over at 9 a.m. That’s where the next four races, including two graded stakes, will be televised.

Then, once NBC’s coverage of the Premier League soccer game between Arsenal and Fulham ends at 11:30, the network will show the rest of the card, which features five stakes races leading up to the Derby.

The Derby does not end NBC’s sports day, however. After the trophy presentation, the network hopes much of its audience sticks around for Game 7 of the NBA Eastern Conference playoff series between the Philadelphia 76ers and Boston Celtics. Tipoff is scheduled for shortly after 4:30 p.m. PDT.