David

Everton manager David Moyes’ post-match reaction to his side’s one-goal win against struggling Newcastle United, as well as the availability of Jack Grealish following disciplinary action.

MATCH REPORT: Premier League – Newcastle United 0-1 Everton

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Everton boss David Moyes says there is a way back for Jack Grealish at the club – but does not know when he will return to the team.

The former England midfielder missed both of the Toffees’ wins over Newcastle in the past week after a disciplinary issue.

The 31-year-old Manchester City loanee was left out of Thursday’s 3-1 victory in the Carabao Cup – a decision made by the club – after what was thought to be an unauthorised absence from training.

And again on Monday for their Premier League meeting – which Everton won 1-0 at St James’ Park with Thierno Barry scoring the only goal – Grealish was absent.

The Toffees said it was because of a lack of fitness – but Moyes was very coy at full-time.

“He’s unavailable at the moment and we will make a decision with the club when we think that availability comes back,” he told BBC Sport.

When asked whether it was indeed related to fitness, he added: “All I’m giving out is that he is unavailable at the moment.”

And when pressed over whether the disciplinary issue is over with, Moyes said: “No, I can’t comment on that.”

The stakes in Tuesday’s midterm elections are so high that Shane Dunn voted for the first time in his life, at age 65.

After a career as a cook up and down the East Coast, Dunn moved to the Philadelphia suburbs and voted last week in Levittown. “I was always a busy man,” he said outside his polling place. But now, “I’m learning what’s going on within our country, and this is actually what brought me out.”

Democrats got his vote. “It feels great, to put my word in,” he said, patting the “I Voted” sticker on his black hoodie.

Voters across the United States are getting their word in, too, as they determine which party controls the Senate and the House and takes charge of governors’ offices, legislatures and state leadership posts in the final two years of Republican Trump’s presidency.

What many of them see is that the America they’ve known is slipping away.

They see lawlessness coming from those who create the laws. They see hate stirred by politicians among neighbors, corruption at every turn, billionaires ruling the roost and a culture that doesn’t speak to how they live — in short, American bedrock at risk of crumbling. Not to mention those crazy gas prices.

In dozens of Associated Press interviews with people who cast ballots at advance polling places or drop boxes across the country, the angst was palpable, most sharply from those who oppose Trump but also from many who support him.

A vote is cast to stop the ‘madness’

“I saw my vote today as trying to put the brakes on just the madness,” said Arthur Horner, 59, who runs a food importing and marketing company that has been hurt by tariffs, after dropping his mail ballot at Dauphin County’s election bureau in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He voted for Democrats.

In Sioux City, Iowa, cattle rancher Elizabeth Marlett, 61, voted in Woodbury County’s historic Prairie-style courthouse and walked out stewing about a variety of things — the chemicals in processed food, her son’s struggles to get his veterans’ benefits and, perhaps most of all, what she sees as society’s leftward lurch. Things seem broken to her, too.

“Family values are going by the wayside, and they need to be brought back,” she said. “Our liberties have been stomped all over. Religion has been stomped all over. And I believe we in the majority need to step up and stop being silent.” She voted Republican.

Voters despair at the stoking of anger by Trump and allies

The anger in the air, stirred by a cursing president who abides no slights, is too much for some people.

“He’s just destroying us,” Democrat Linda Markle, 72, said of the president. She spoke outside the Warminster Township library in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

“I am so afraid for this country,” she said. “People used to look out for each other. Not anymore.”

“All people do now is just hate each other,” she said, and Trump “seems to have given them the courage to go ahead and be like that. … The division is horrible, absolutely horrible, and I can’t wait to see the back of him.”

Republican Chris Smith, 27, a Harrisburg software engineer who voted for Trump in 2024, sympathizes with Markle’s sentiment, to a point.

“A lot of people hate him for various reasons, and I can understand why,” he said, noting that ”I think he’s kind of going a bit crazy on a lot of things.” But he likes Trump’s effort to return manufacturing to the U.S. along with the goals of his tariffs, and he voted Republican because he still thinks that party is more fiscally responsible than Democrats.

In Ohio, Lori Wilkinson, a retired home health worker from New Pittsburg, and her husband, David, a janitor, consider themselves independents. David recently wrote to their Republican governor, Mike DeWine, to tell him what a good job he’s doing, and they voted for Republican George W. Bush for president in the past.

Trump? “He’s the worst president in United States history,” David said from the Wayne County election center. “You get up every day, and you’re like, ‘What’s he going to do now?’” Said Lori: “He’s got the hate just so bad, it’s just out of hand. It’s just out of control.” She fears that if Democrats win widely Tuesday, Trump will “go fricking berserk.”

Trump supporter Therese Mennell gets it. “There’s that kind of arrogant vibe about him that people don’t like, and sometimes I shut him off because of the way he talks,” the retiree said from the Wayne County center. “But, I mean, he’s doing the right thing. He is saving our country.”

Some pretend Trump is on the ballot

Despite his striking unpopularity in polls, Trump repeatedly asked supporters to pretend he’s on the midterm ballot, betting that would motivate fans to vote who otherwise might not. But that cuts both ways.

Samontae Mwangi, 20, and his brother, Gathenya Mwangi, 19, voted for the first time, casting early ballots Tuesday at their election center in Topeka, Kansas. Both work at a plant that manufactures trackside buildings for railroads.

They went with their grandfather, Lynn Henderson, 68, a retired Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. worker and a former Marine lance corporal who wore a Marine’s cap. Henderson said he took his grandsons to vote because his own mother died recently and he wanted them to have an event to remember him when he’s gone.

All three are hoping that the election produces Democratic victories and political change. Gathenya said the economy and discontent with Trump could motivate people who’ve voted in the past to show up, as well as those who never have. “It really could change, make a difference, I feel, if a lot of people vote,” he said.

Denise Wunder, a retired sandwich shop manager, pulled up to the center in a van featuring a decorative license plate with an American eagle. The strong Trump supporter is the daughter of Democrats. Illegal immigration is her top issue.

“I think Trump is kind of our last hope, because otherwise this world’s going to go to hell in a handbasket,” she said. “Yeah, he says stupid stuff, but, you know, so do we.”

In the Richmond, Virginia, suburb of Henrico County, voters arrived at a steady clip on a crisp fall afternoon a week from Election Day. The moment of decision found one conservative couple, Joan and Frank Bark, lamenting the country’s direction.

“I’m afraid Trump has gotten so egotistical, it’s affecting his ability to make intelligent or more favorable decisions,” Frank said. But, he said, “I don’t want the decisions that would be generated from that far left side, either.”

Joan, a retiree like her husband, said of Democrats: “I haven’t found very much that they want to change or work with. It’s just mostly, ‘I hate Trump.’” But Trump really isn’t on the ballot. They voted for Republican candidates.

In Nanuet, New York, people streamed into the small room of a community center to vote; some were in Halloween costumes. Primrose D. Sullivan, a nurse, is an independent. She scoffed at Trump’s wish that voters act as if he’s running.

“No, because he’s not,” she said. “When a patient comes into the hospital, you want me dealing in facts, not in, ‘Hmm, let me act like you might have cancer.’ No. Do you or do you not have cancer? We need to proceed based on facts.” She voted for Democrats.

Yet some see a cancer on politics, if not the presidency

Sullivan was among a number of voters who singled out the billionaires Trump has made common cause with and how that might feed into American decline.

“I don’t begrudge any of our wealthy people, Jeff Bezos or, you know, Elon Musk,” she said. “But I do have a certain problem with them wanting more and more and doing things that really don’t help humanity.”

“If we keep going the way these guys are going,” she went on, meaning both the political and CEO classes, “we’re not going to have anything like what we had in the past.” Theirs is a “self-destructive attitude,” she added, “because, honestly, if the whole planet destroys itself, the wealthy go with us.”

Outside the polling station at the YMCA in Fort Mill, South Carolina, Benjamin Updegraft offered a piercing denunciation of the elite as he traced his evolution from a “full-throated young Republican” who voted for Trump as a young man in 2016 to a “lifetime Democrat,” after casting his ballot in the Senate race.

He cited Musk’s throttling of his Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine, which disrupted a key defense against Russian attacks, and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad in the Ohio governor’s race featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Amy Acton among the reasons powerful men must be brought to heel.

“That needs to be cut out from this country like a cancer,” Updegraft said. “We have an incredible responsibility to take back the stranglehold that the worst people in this country have on the reins of power and to inflict punishment on them for their actions.”

In Scottsdale, Arizona, David Lee described his conservative upbringing, his past voting for Republicans and now his decision to turn against that party and vote Democratic in the contested races for governors and the House. He considers Trump’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement to be lawless.

“Nobody wants open borders, but you’re treating these people without due process, sending people to countries they don’t even belong to,” said Lee, 63. “There’s no more rules.”

Then there are those prices. And that war

The Trump supporters interviewed by the AP at the polls signaled their tolerance of the surge of gas prices from the Iran war, in some cases blaming factors other than the actual cause. Nor did they break with him on the war itself.

Among them was David Stouffer, 59, branch manager for a mortgage bank and three-time Trump voter, who spoke outside the Harrisburg elections office. “Iran has been killing Americans for 50 freaking years,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll suffer with some higher gas prices in the interim until they get that nonsense figured out.”

Does that put a crunch on your household budget, Stouffer was asked. “Of course it does.” How to cope with that? “I just keep driving.”

“He’s made the tax cuts real,” Stouffer said. “He has secured the borders. That, to me, is a very, very big deal.”

By the dozens, Democrats, independents and Republicans outside the core of Trump’s support differed with that assessment, even as some of them granted the president his achievements on taxes and immigration.

Horner, the food importer, is going “bonkers” with the tariffs and all the other moves bouncing between the Trump administration and the courts while a “feckless” and now electorally endangered Republican Congress largely stands aside.

“You can’t do business when every month you have to readjust your pricing because the president gets a wild hair on something that he’s not even constitutionally allowed to do,” Horner said. He added, “He’s just playing out the clock on all of this stuff — where you just know he knows it’s wrong.

“And what do we have? Higher healthcare, higher food, higher gas, a business environment that is complete chaos.”

But Jerry Casner, 74, of Mechanicsburg, a suburb of Harrisburg, wants as much of Trump as he can get. Alas, “he can’t run again,” Casner noted.

“Well, technically,” Casner said, “he can’t run again.”

Levy, Catalini, Hanna and Woodward write for the Associated Press. Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan.; Levy from Harrisburg, Pa.; Catalini from Levittown, Pa.; and Woodward from Washington. AP journalists Julie Carr Smyth in Wooster, Ohio; Erik Verduzco in Fort Mill, S.C.; Thomas Beaumont in Sioux City, Iowa; Joseph Frederick in Nanuet, N.Y.; Tassanee Vejpongsa in Warminster, Pa.; Mikella Schuettler in Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Sarah Rankin in Henrico, Va., contributed to this report.

More than 350 sportspeople – including Olympians Dina Asher-Smith and Tom Daley – have signed a letter to the prime minister calling on him to meet former sprinter Beth Dobbin and commit to increased funding towards ME research.

Dobbin, 32, recently revealed in an interview with BBC Sport she had been diagnosed with “life-decimating” ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) and as a result spends more than 22 hours a day in bed.

ME is a chronic, fluctuating disease, causing symptoms such as sleep problems, issues with thinking and memory, pain, and severe persistent fatigue that does not improve with rest, and more. It has no known cure or specific treatment.

More than 400,000 people in the UK are thought to have ME, though the true figure could exceed one million, with severity ranging from people able to work or study to those requiring round-the-clock care and tube feeding.

On 21 October, Dobbin wrote to the prime minister but did not receive a response – and she has now been backed by athletes across sport.

“For many of my team-mates, I dropped off the face of the earth four years ago when I developed severe ME,” she said.

“I’ve been taken aback and extremely touched by how many of them – and so many others in the sports world – have jumped at the chance to help by signing this letter. It means so much to me.

“I hope that, with all of them behind me, Andy Burnham is listening and will commit to doing what’s needed to deliver real change for a community that has been neglected for so long.”

Among the 360 sporting figures to have signed the letter are Everton manager David Moyes, his United States women’s counterpart Emma Hayes, and former Chelsea and England centre-back Millie Bright. Athletes Laura Muir, Eilish McColgan and Adam Gemili are among 114 Olympians and Paralympians to have added their support.

The letter calls on Burnham to “level the playing field” for funding into ME research with that for other illnesses “to give hope to the many affected that something is being done about this life-destroying, much-ignored illness and its spiralling impact”.

It says: “The disease has received extremely low levels of research funding compared to other conditions. Between 2019 to 2024, UK government research funders committed just £6.6m in funding for research into ME, compared to £79.1m for Parkinson’s and £496.4m for dementia.

“Prior to this, biomedical research funding was almost non-existent. As a result of the lack of research funding, there are no approved treatments.”

The suggestion caught Ross Newhan off guard.

The Angels had just reached the promised land, after more than four decades of wandering through baseball’s wilderness. Who better than Newhan, who had been there since Day 1, to write a first-person account of that long and winding road to their first World Series?

Newhan was reluctant. That would make the story about himself, which he despised. The editors prevailed, and within the story he delivered a sentence that struck deep within the heart of every loyal and long-suffering Angels fan.

“I can’t help but feel a sweep of emotions seep through the cynicism and dispassion that is the byproduct of being present for all or part of every Angel season,” he wrote on Oct. 14, 2002.

To this day, the Angels have one guy in the Hall of Fame: Vladimir Guerrero. The Times has two: Jim Murray, the Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist, and Newhan.

If Vin Scully provided the voice for the first half-century of Major League Baseball in Southern California, Newhan provided the words.

Newhan died on Sunday, at 89, after what his wife Connie called a “cardiac event.” His reporting — first at the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, then over 37 years at The Times — distinguished The Times as a national source for baseball coverage.

Ross Newhan, center, interviews Jim McGlothlin, left, and Jim Fregosi of the California Angels during the 1969 season.

(The Sporting News via Getty Images)

He was so renowned within baseball that the Dodgers, MLB, and the players’ union posted condolences.

Bud Selig, the former commissioner and occasional antagonist in Newhan’s columns, told The Times: “I mourn the passing of Ross Newhan. He was an excellent sportswriter, and I always had a great amount of respect for him personally and for his work.”

In his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, he reserved a special mention for a teacher at Wilson High in Long Beach, the one that envisioned a writer blossoming within a student dozing in class.

“If a high school journalism instructor named John Gartner hadn’t hollered my name and pounded my desk one day, I might still be sitting there asleep,” Newhan said, “with no real clue what I wanted to do in my life.”

Ross Newhan, receives the J.G. Taylor Spink Award from Jane Forbes Clark, chairman of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, N.Y., on Aug. 5, 2001.

(Associated Press)

In the 1990s, as a young reporter at the Riverside Press-Enterprise, I was among a small group of writers talking with Tony Gwynn, the San Diego Padres’ Hall of Famer. Newhan was there too, and as the group dispersed, he told me: “You ask good questions.”

Talk about inspiration: It was as if Clayton Kershaw had seen a kid throw a curveball and said, “Not bad.”

Behind a gruff and occasionally intense exterior, Newhan had a heart of gold. Mike DiGiovanna, the longtime Times baseball writer, called Newhan “a security blanket” for colleagues needing a fact check, a phone number or an introduction to someone famous.

“He was a giant without the giant ego,” DiGiovanna said.

Newhan trained former Times colleague Jason Reid on how to cover baseball. Reid affectionately called him “Boss Ross.” The two were such relentless reporters that, amid the wild initial days of the McCourt family ownership of the Dodgers, Reid got co-owner Jamie McCourt so frazzled that she actually said this: “This is bad because you guys remember everything and you write everything down.”

Newhan and Reid had reported on concerns with the McCourt financing before the ownership deal closed, and six years before Frank McCourt’s divorce attorney admitted in court that McCourt had put “not a penny” of his own money into the deal. That did not make Newhan and McCourt the best of friends, but neither did it make them bitter enemies.

“He seemed to take a sort of pride in being the guardian of Los Angeles baseball, for lack of a better term,” said Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch, then the Dodgers’ publicist. “He had an ability to garner respect from people even when he was writing something you weren’t happy about.”

Said Mike Scioscia, on whom Newhan reported as a Dodgers player and Angels manager: “Ross was a true gentleman and had a real matter-of-fact way of asking questions that put you at ease.”

Ross Newhan shares a happy moment with his great granddaughter, Bailey, earlier this year.

(Courtesy of the Newhan family)

There was nothing flashy about Newhan, not in his writing, certainly not in the way he conducted himself. He let his work and its credibility speak for itself.

Newhan is survived by his wife, Connie; his son, David, and daughter-in-law, Karen; his daughter, Sara, and son-in-law, Mike; five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

The story about David is the one most often recalled Monday, because it really was a story about his father.

David, the kid that tagged along with Newhan when the Angels held spring training in Palm Springs, developed into a major leaguer. He had joked with reporters that he hadn’t been sure if rumors of his call-up were true because “as everyone knows, you can’t believe what’s in the paper.”

In 2004, as Newhan and I covered a game at Dodger Stadium, David appeared as a pinch-hitter for the Baltimore Orioles against the Colorado Rockies, in his first major league at-bat in three years. Newhan was glued to his laptop, where these words suddenly appeared: “In play, run(s).”

Waiting, waiting, waiting … and then I heard one of the loudest screams I have ever heard. Rawitch heard it too. Everyone in the press box heard it.

“Home run.”

The scream was out of character for a professional writer, entirely in character for a proud father. He aced both, and we’ll miss him.

DAVID Beckham has showed off his ripped torso in a shirtless snap from New York City – and made a subtle nod to his estranged son Brooklyn.

Brooklyn let loose on his family in a scathing social media post in January, with things remaining tense ever since.

David shared the stunning snap on Instagram, which showed him standing topless on a NYC balcony with his morning coffee.

In later posts, he revealed he was having dinner in Brooklyn — the place his son was named after.

This appeared to be a subtle nod to Brooklyn as his mum Victoria discovered she was pregnant there with him.

Brooklyn said at the start of the year that he did “not want to reconcile” with his family, and accused his parents of “controlling” the narrative.

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His initial statement read: “I have been silent for years and made every effort to keep these matters private.

“Unfortunately my parents and their team have continued to go to the press, leaving me with no choice but to speak for myself and tell the truth about only some of the lies that have been printed.

“I do not want to reconcile with my family. I’m not being controlled, I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life.”

He then went on to recall the night of his wedding and how his mother danced in an “inappropriate way”.

Brooklyn also sent his parents David and Victoria a legal notice warning they can now contact him only via lawyers.

The extraordinary “desist” letter also instructed them not to “tag” him on social media.

Things then led to Brooklyn snubbing his father’s Hollywood star unveiling in June.

Just this month, Brooklyn let his shirt do the talking as he ramped up his family feud once more.

The telling ­message on Brooklyn’s top read: “It’s not clocking to you.” 

It refers to pop star Justin Bieber’s 2025 paparazzi meltdown, when he complained: “It’s not clocking to you I’m standing on business.” 

The singer meant photographers were not understanding he was busy and wanted to be left alone. 

EXCLUSIVE: His co-star Tessa Peake-Jones, who played Raquel, says it was ‘poignant and quite sobering’ watching the comedy legend grapple with the past

Only Fools and Horses star Tessa Peake-Jones has told how Sir David Jason felt saddened watching himself playing Del Boy in lost archive clips, as he hankered to be back in his prime.

The actress, who played his wife Raquel from 1988 for 15 years, says she enjoyed sitting with him, and other actors from the hit BBC sitcom, to watch newly discovered gems that they all believed had been lost many decades ago.

But she revealed that at times the 86-year-old became maudlin as he looked back. “You know, he’d just been knighted, he was in every programme going, Darling Buds of May, all of them. And he said, ‘There I am in my prime, and now here I am as an old man sitting watching it.’ I found that really quite moving.

“He just said, ‘Oh, I’m finding it very sad,’ and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I ended up becoming his therapist on the sofa and he said, ‘I just I look at myself then in my prime as the best I could possibly be,’ which of course he was then – in his forties and fifties, he was more famous than anyone in Britain on telly.

“And I knew what he meant when he said he felt sad because this is us looking back on what we were, particularly for him because he was at his absolute peak. It must have felt very peculiar. You’re not ever going to be what you were then.”

And she added: “He’s still a very vibrant man, he’s got a lot of energy, he’s doing things all the time, but it was just very poignant and quite sobering.”

At the end of the first episode, which airs on Tuesday, David can’t get over how good the pair of them looked back then. “It is difficult because we are looking back at a time when we were both beautiful,” he says. Tessa responds with positivity, telling him: “Maybe we still are but we don’t see it as easily.”

But speaking afterwards she said she had also found watching the lost archive clips and outtakes difficult at times too. “Some actors really like looking at themselves. I will run a mile, I absolutely loathe it. So it was slightly torturous for me, particularly because not only are you watching scenes that you’re acting in, but you’re 30 years older.”

She believes that the secret of the comedy’s longevity is that its humour, written by the late John Sullivan and also starring Nicholas Lyndhurst as Rodney, had universal appeal. “John didn’t leave anyone out. He really cared about family and he cared about what people shared watching on telly.

“I know we all go, ‘oh, isn’t Del awful with all his scams’, but at the end of the day he’d do anything for anyone. He was kind. Looking at comedy these days, bar the odd brilliant one like Ghosts, some of them are quite cruel. It doesn’t make me laugh when you see someone being horrid about someone else.”

Tessa, now 69, says that she has received thousands of letters from fans over the years wanting to talk about her role as Raquel.

But even though she was in Only Fools for many years, she still gets more fan mail for one tiny role that she played in 2013.

“I had 30 seconds of screen time on Doctor Who,” she laughs. “But it happened to be when one Doctor becomes another. I was in a Christmas special when it happened – it was Matt Smith leaving and Peter Capaldi coming in. I must have had six lines in it, maybe seven. But I’ve had more fan mail about that 30 seconds of screen time than anything I’ve ever done in my career.”

She said the Only Fools fans aren’t far behind the Doctor Who ones. “We have many extremely obsessive fans who are almost as as powerfully connected.”

Tessa said the remaining cast from the hit sitcom were all astonished to hear that 66 bits of film, including full scenes and outtakes, had been discovered. “What’s so hilarious is that I believe all these bits and bobs were found in like a drawer at the BBC in White City,” she laughs. “Think what other gems are in drawers somewhere in those buildings. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?”

She said it had been hard at times to work out if she even knew whether the clips had been cut from the original upsides. “I suppose you’re you’re wound up in the general whirly gig of all of it. You’re rehearsing constantly. You’re filming every weekend – life’s marching at quite a pace. So I suppose even when you record these things, if they don’t get put in, you sort of forget them.”

But, in the films, Sir David marvels at just how much ends up on the cutting room floor. He laughs: “I remember discussing it with John – we cut more jokes out than other shows had got in their entire episode.” The extra bits span 10 episodes from the 90s and cover the stories about blow-up dolls, Peckham Spring water, Cassandra’s miscarriage and Raquel giving birth to Damian., as well as the Jolly Boys coach trip to Margate.

By the time Tessa joined in 1988 the show had been on air for seven years and was a huge hit. The actress is enormously proud of the reaction her first episode got, when Derek Trotter first met Raquel on a blind date. “John wrote that brilliant script and it’s the only time the programme’s ever won a BAFTA,” she recalls. “He did that just to see what would happen for Del Boy’s character if if he was to fall in love.”

Having conceived Raquel as a one-off character, the writer quickly changed his mind. “John saw the public response and thought he could take this character of Raquel further – that it might change the dynamics of Derek and Rodney Trotter’s relationship. He thought, ‘Iet’s bring her back and see what happens’. And then a lot did happen. Such a lot.”

Unlike Sir David Tessa does not consider Only Fools to be the pinnacle of her career. “This was one of many, many things. I wouldn’t call it the thing I’m proudest of, I don’t think it’s my greatest achievement being in Only Fools, much as I’ve loved doing it. I’ve still got to meet my peak,” she laughs. “I might reach it next year.”

And well she might because 2027 brings viewers not only the last series of ITV’s Grantchester, in which Tessa has played vicarage housekeeper Sylvia Chapman since 2014, but also new Channel 5 crime series The Last Resort, in which she stars as a sixty-something sleuth alongside Caroline Quentin and Jason Watkins.

Tessa believes that, for fans, these new documentaries will be the last surprise from Only Fools and Horses, which is marking its 45th anniversary having launched in 1981.. “We’re all too old and also there is no one to carry John Sullivan’s mantle,” she says. “He was a one-off genius. So I don’t think there can be any other surprises. Thank God for things like UK Gold – who knows, in 100 years people might still be watching it.”

– Only Fools and Horses: The Lost Archive, U&Gold, Tuesday 20th & 27th October

Rock band Pavlov’s Dog is mourning the loss of singer-songwriter and lead vocalist David Surkamp, who died Monday at age 74.

Violinist and Pavlov’s Dog member Abbie Steiling announced Surkamp’s death Wednesday on Facebook. Additional information about Surkamp’s passing, including a cause of death, was not revealed.

“David leaves behind a legacy of endless creativity, unmistakable artistry, and a body of music that has touched lives across generations and around the world,” Steiling said on the band’s behalf.

Pavlov’s Dog also remembered its vocalist for his “profoundly poetic spirit and a romantic heart that found its way into every note, every lyric and every performance.”

Surkamp was born May 23, 1952, and led Pavlov’s Dog, known for songs “Julia” and “Late November,” since its founding in 1973 in St. Louis. He founded the band alongside bassist Rick Stockton, violinist Siegfried Carver and drummer Mike Safron, according to the band’s website. The group, which first signed to ABC Records under a six-figure deal, released its debut album “Pampered Menial” in 1975. The release featured the band’s most popular songs and showcased Surkamp’s high-pitched and trembling, yet powerful, vocals.

Pavlov’s Dog’s second release “At the Sound of the Bell” followed in 1976 and its third, “Lost in America,” came more than a decade later in 1990. Surkamp departed Pavlov’s Dog while recording its junior album and traveled to Seattle to further develop his musical talents. This led to a collaboration with British musician Iain Matthews and their power pop duo Hi-Fi.

Surkamp and his Pavlov’s Dog collaborators reunited in the early 2000s and Surkamp’s wife, Sara, joined as a vocalist and guitarist. The group went on to tour Europe, including playing the Netherlands’ Arrow Rock Festival in 2006. Over the years, Pavlov’s Dog saw members come and go: Some musicians departed the group because of conflicting commitments and others — including founding members Carver and Rayburn — died in the late aughts and early 2010s.

The group, with Surkamp still at the helm, later released albums “Echo & Boo” in 2011, “Wonderlust” in 2025 alongside some live albums, remasters and unreleased demos.

“He always allowed the musicians around him to shine in their strengths, generous with the spotlight and appreciative of what each brought to the music,” Steiling continued in the band’s Facebook post. “No matter what life held for him, he came alive onstage. Even on his hardest days, when the lights came up and the count-off began, he was a consummate performer. If he was playing music, it was a great day.”

Surkamp was preceded in death by his wife Sara, who died in 2025 at age 72. He is survived by children Saylor and Evan.

Tech scion David Ellison spent three years doggedly pursuing his dream: acquiring Paramount, then Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ellison pulled off his bold feat this week by completing Paramount’s $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros., uniting two industry pioneers and a wealth of cherished properties — Batman, Bugs Bunny, Harry Potter and Maverick of “Top Gun,” as well as CBS, HBO, Comedy Central and CNN. All will be tucked under a corporate umbrella that Ellison is calling Skydance — the name of the studio he formed two decades ago.

The mogul and his lieutenants celebrated their victory in style, ringing the New York Stock Exchange opening bell on Thursday, capping a bruising battle to secure approval of a deal that had sparked protests across Hollywood over fears of looming job cuts.

Ellison and his team must braid together two huge film studios (housing nine film labels), four streaming services, three TV production studios, three animation units and more than 50 television networks, including two prominent news organizations. That could be a daunting task, particularly based on how previous Hollywood mergers have fared.

“Now, the real work begins,” David G. Fubini, a Harvard Business School senior lecturer, said in an interview.

Anxieties were evident Tuesday — the day the deal closed — when Ellison held a town hall meeting at Warner Bros., which drew nearly 500 employees.

During the session, CNN’s Anderson Cooper quizzed his new bosses, including about anticipated layoffs and news independence.

“Do you stand with CNN and our effort to completely restore access to covering President Trump?” Cooper asked, referring to CNN’s legal fight alongside MS Now and Politico to reverse the president’s ban on the three organizations.

“Of course,” Ellison replied.

CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper, pictured here in 2021, quizzed his bosses at a Burbank town hall.

(Evan Agostini / Invision / Associated Press)

Hours later, Ellison parried with reporters in Paramount’s darkened Stage 3, recently revamped with laser projection capabilities to simulate fantastical and far-flung settings for TV shows, such as the streets of New York.

“This was a turbulent process, and, at times, a really ugly process, to actually get this deal over the finish line,” Ellison acknowledged to reporters. “What I want to be able to do now is turn the page, and actually make sure that we are in the business of rebuilding trust.”

To do that, Ellison intends to make more movies and TV shows than rivals. He wants to ensure the Warner Bros. and Paramount studios, which will be kept separate for now, remain talent-friendly destinations.

Ellison has taken an opposing view from his predecessors who confronted crumbling industry economics by cutting expenditures to boost their corporate bottom lines.

The 43-year-old executive, son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, proudly views his family as “owner-operators,” unshackled by quarterly earnings expectations or the need to dole out dividends to keep investors happy. The Ellison family controls the company’s voting stock, allowing David Ellison to take a long-term view as he charts Skydance’s course.

The goal is to “win in storytelling,” Skydance said in an investor presentation. It intends to build the media industry’s most “technologically capable” firm, which uses artificial intelligence to speed work flows. Skydance plans to spend at least $30 billion a year on film, television and video game content.

Skydance co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, Sarah Ellison, CEO David Ellison and investor Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital Partners on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

(Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press)

The realities of Ellison’s big swing will soon sink in as he and his team turn their focus to integrating the myriad operations and about 55,000 employees.

In some ways, Ellison is behind the curve.

Most major mergers are consummated after executives have dedicated months to quietly drafting detailed operational plans and organizational hierarchies. Ellison, in contrast, has spent the last nine months in a pitched battle for Warner Bros. — ultimately vanquishing Netflix, hundreds of vocal merger opponents, and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and his coalition of 11 other state attorneys general who filed an antitrust lawsuit in July in an attempt to derail the deal.

Ellison and Bonta resolved their legal fight Sept. 21. A week later, a federal judge cleared the way for the merger to close.

The lawsuit settlement with Bonta requires that the combined company produce at least 30 movies a year for five years. It also must maintain the studio facilities in Los Angeles, making “reasonable efforts to operate the lots in a manner consistent with past practices,” according to the agreement.

Skydance has committed to maintaining operations on the Warner Bros. lot, pictured here, and at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Ynon Kreiz, former chief executive of Mattel toys in El Segundo, has been tasked with leading the integration. The 61-year-old executive joined Ellison at Skydance as his co-CEO earlier this week. Day One of the combined company marked Kreiz’s second day on the job.

“They have a whole new management team that will be expected to immediately lead this massive integration,” Fubini, a former partner at consulting firm McKinsey, said. “The clouds have cleared, and they are at the base camp of Mt. Everest facing this enormous undertaking.”

In a report this week, TD Cowen Global Research maintained its “hold” rating on the newly constituted Skydance, expressing some doubts about Ellison and his team’s ability to “avoid integration and execution problems that have bedeviled other major media mergers.”

Hollywood has had a history of failed mergers, including Discovery’s 2022 takeover of WarnerMedia from AT&T, which led to years of cost cuts that ultimately seeded the ground for Ellison’s takeover. AT&T’s purchase of the same assets in 2018 also quickly unraveled, some 20 years after the epic failure of AOL Time Warner.

Ellison now must grapple with the hefty acquisition costs for Warner Bros., which climbed as the deal was delayed. The company emerged from the transaction with $86.8 billion in total debt; with most of that going toward buying out Warner Bros. Discovery’s stockholders at $31.17 a share.

The debt burden also includes more than $18 billion in obligations leftover from past mergers. Skydance has nearly $7 billion in cash on hand.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison and executive producer David Ellison arrive at the L.A. premiere of “Star Trek Into Darkness” at the Dolby Theatre in 2013.

(Eric Charbonneau / Getty Images for the Hollywood Reporter)

The Ellison family brought in foreign investors, including royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi as passive owners, to contribute equity to the deal. Gerald Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners, a longtime Skydance stakeholder, added $4 billion, bringing its total investment in Skydance deals to $6 billion.

The deal’s financial terms pose deep challenges, analysts said. Fitch Ratings this week downgraded Skydance credit, citing “materially higher leverage after the acquisition and significant execution and integration risks,” according to its report.

“Interest rate increases made financing this transaction far more expensive than anyone anticipated,” said Eric Talley, a professor at Columbia Law School. “Those lenders are going to start expecting their interest payments — Skydance executives won’t have the luxury of time.”

The company could struggle, Talley said, to “generate the cash flow needed to easily service that debt unless they can significantly cut costs.”

Skydance has promised investors that it will make $6 billion in cost cuts over three years. It anticipates $2 billion in reductions within a year, with the bulk of the rest occurring in the second year of the merger.

“They are going to be firing a lot of people,” TD Cowen Global Research media analyst Doug Creutz said.

During the press briefing, Kreiz sought to downplay the expected workforce toll, saying Skydance would achieve savings by combining technologies that support streaming services and marketing expenditures. It plans to save costs on real estate by locating employees at Skydance-owned properties in Santa Monica, Hollywood and Burbank.

HBO could move from Ivy Station in Culver City, its home for the last five years, to one of the studio lots.

Ellison and Kreiz said they would jointly manage the new colossus.

“Where David will focus on creative, technology, long-term strategy, including especially as it relates to the creative part of the business, I will focus more on the operations and the day-to-day management of the business,” Kreiz said.

Kreiz was named to Skydance‘s expanded board this week along with Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective; and Bobby Kotick, former CEO of Activision.

The new leaders expressed confidence they could expand and integrate their two major streaming services to drive growth. HBO Max and Paramount+ combined will reach more than 200 million subscribers.

The plan, they said, is to combine the two streamers within a couple of years, but the company may offer subscribers a bundle with the two offerings sooner.

Skydance, according to sources, also expects to bolster its free, ad-supported service Pluto TV, which offers more than 200 channels. The service hasn’t had much corporate attention in recent years amid the cuts and deal-making.

The executives have not disclosed which teams would soon be affected or how they will structure overlapping business units.

For example, the company’s three TV studios each have their own leader: Channing Dungey runs the largest, Warner Bros. Television; David Stapf has long managed CBS Studios; and Skydance executive Matt Thunell has been president of Paramount Television Studios since last year.

Integrating CNN and CBS

Anxiety over whether CNN and CBS News would be mashed together was quelled, at least for now.

Skydance announced that it was retaining CNN Worldwide Chairman Mark Thompson as head of the larger news organization. CNN journalists had worried that CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, who has presided over a year of turmoil at the network, would be put in charge of both.

Any news consolidation could take years, in part, because CBS News is largely unionized while CNN is a non-union shop.

“We are going to spend the next several months basically getting under the hood,” Ellison said.

CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, pictured here in 2023 in Los Angeles, has had a turbulent tenure at CBS.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Another challenge will be stabilizing the Warner Bros. film unit, which has had a rough year at the box office. This month, the top two Warner Bros. film executives, Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy, exited abruptly, clearing the way for longtime Ellison lieutenants Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein to oversee both film studios. The co-heads of DC Comics, James Gunn and Peter Safran, segued to the new Skydance.

Skydance also will have to deal with the NFL, which could demand substantially higher fees for CBS to keep its Sunday games.

The current contract allows the league to reopen negotiations because of the ownership change. Skydance is hoping it can wait three years until the contracts of other broadcasters also are up for discussion.

Skydance will be a major player in sports. Last year, Paramount agreed to spend $7.7 billion for UFC fights. The combined company also has rights to professional golf, including the Masters tournament; National Hockey League; Major League Baseball and NCAA basketball, including March Madness, as well as European rights to televise the Olympics.

“Until you actually get inside the company, there are things you won’t know,” Creutz said. “But they are going to have to come up with answers pretty quick.”

KATHERINE Ryan couldn’t resist taking a cheeky pop at David Beckham as she joked about being “cancelled” by the BBC after her rude slur about his wife Victoria.

Last month it was revealed that the broadcaster had upheld complaints after she made the offensive joke about Posh Spice while hosting an episode of Have I Got News For You last year.

Two weeks ago, Katherine issued an online apology to Victoria, 52, after the ruling by the BBC‘s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU).

Raising the controversy during a stand-up gig in Chelsea, London, last night, the 43-year-old declared her love for Victoria Beckham while making a sly joke about her famous footballer hubby.

“I have been cancelled by the BBC for allegedly calling Victoria Beckham the C word,” she said.

“Or as David Beckham knows it – the K word, because bless him the alphabet is hard,” prompting laughter from the audience.

SEQUINS & SORRYS

Katherine Ryan steps out for the first time since Victoria Beckham apology

NOT FUNNY

Katherine Ryan apologises to Victoria Beckham after slur pulled off iPlayer

“But I actually did not do that, I actually love Victoria Beckham.”

Speaking in an episode that aired on November 7 in 2025, Katherine made reference to a 2013 private email sent by David Beckham, where he allegedly used the word ‘c***’.

She said on the show: “I don’t know that we are allowed to broadcast the C-word, but you did reference Victoria Beckham earlier and we’ll allow that.”

The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit said “there was no such justification” for the comment which two viewers had complained was “gratuitously offensive”.

They added that the word was justified in relation to David’s alleged use of it, but not in reference to his wife.

Now an edited version of the episode has replaced the original on the BBC’s streaming service.

Katherine Ryan publicly apologised to Victoria in an Instagram reel where she shared a screenshot of her message to the fashion designer.

“Hi I’m comedian Katherine Ryan and today the BBC announced their decision to uphold a complaint made by two very influential viewers about a joke that I tried to make on an episode of Have I Got News For You eleven months ago,” she began.

“At that time, though there is no defence, I was suffering from a condition called matrescence.

“I was in that building with a 10-day old baby. Should I have left the house?

“This is gonna be a tough one for the feminists because I was a woman going to work but I did call another woman a c***.

“Sometimes I forget that celebrities are not my friends. If I had called Jimmy Carr a c***, he wouldn’t have minded.

“Joanne McNally, c***, she wouldn’t have minded but this was described by the BBC as a slur.

“As though c**** are part of a protected group,” Katherine said in her trademark sarcastic way.

“The trouble is now that section’s been taken off iPlayer so the incident only exists in printed media, online media and then you lost the context because on the day, if you watched it, it was clearly a joke and the whole audience went ‘huhhhh’ and I said ‘whoaaaa’.”

She then plugged her new book before adding: “I love Victoria Beckham so much that I actually included her in one of my celebrity firstborn daughter chapters.

“I’d like to read you that now whilst remaining very sorry.”

In her apologise message to Victoria shown on screen, Katherine told her it was a “throwaway” comment and that she immediately expressed her love for her after, making it clear it was a “stupid joke”.