Ian

FEARNE Cotton has admitted she’s not sleeping well and her brain “feels a bit wobbly” – after it was revealed her paedo ex Ian Watkins was killed in prison. 

Two prisoners serving time at HMP Wakefield were arrested this week for the alleged murder of the shamed Lostprophets singer after he was stabbed to death. 

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Fearne, 44, was rumoured to be dating Ian – who was 48 at the time of his death – in 2005, before he was jailed for 29 years in 2013 for offences including abusing babies.

Now the presenter has opened up about the struggles she’s been facing recently. 

Writing on Instagram, Fearne said: “Four life lessons from this week. 

“I’m not sleeping well. My brain is a bit wobbly at the moment but I’m grasping the lessons life is chucking my way.”

Fearne was flooded with support from followers and friends, including fellow presenter Holly Willoughby. 

Holly, 44, commented: “Love you Cotton Chops.” 

The two stars, who have been friends for 17 years after starting their careers hosting kids’ TV, are said to have reconnected last year after drifting apart. 

They worked together on Celebrity Juice but reportedly grew apart when Fearne quit the show in 2018. 

Meanwhile Ian is understood to have been ambushed and stabbed as inmates were allowed out of their cells.

West Yorkshire Police confirmed Watkins had died after being “seriously assaulted”.

The force said: “Detectives have charged two men with murder after the death of a prisoner at HMP Wakefield on Saturday.

“Ian Watkins, 48, was pronounced dead after being seriously assaulted at HMP Wakefield on Saturday morning(11 October).

“Rashid Gedel, 25, and Samuel Dodsworth, 43, both of HMP Wakefield have both been charged with murder.

“They are due to appear at Leeds Magistrates Court this morning.”

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Ultimately, despite the backing of a new contract that was to run until Euro 2024, Baraclough would lose his job after a record of six wins and eight draws from 28 games and was replaced by the same man he had succeeded in the role, Michael O’Neill.

“There were times we were going over and applauding the fans and you could see that they were frustrated because we weren’t getting the results, but I knew deep inside that this was a project that was going to last much longer than the period of a campaign,” Baraclough says.

“I’d signed a new contract that would take me up to the last Euros campaign, but things happen, Michael becomes available from Stoke, for instance, and decisions will be made that are out of your hands.

“At the time, I found it very, very disappointing that I didn’t get a World Cup and a Euros because that was what, ultimately, you were going to be judged on and I ended up being judged on a Nations League campaign where we were absolutely flooding the squad with these young players. That was the disappointment for me, but, look, there’s no bitterness.”

As such, Baraclough has enjoyed watching from afar as a number of his former players become seasoned internationals.

“Maybe the fans thought that the previous campaign should have yielded more than what it did, but there was no way it was going to just materialise that you go away to the likes of Greece and turn them over,” he adds.

“This World Cup campaign was somewhere where we looked into the distance and thought realistically this is the best time for this group to really start making an impact because players will now have 100, 150 first-team games under their belts, they’ll have 20 to 25 senior caps or beyond under their belts, and now they’re just starting to feel comfortable at this level.

“It’s now come to fruition. To see those players come through and be doing so well at a senior level, it’s fantastic.

“It’s not one person per se that can lay claim to somebody’s success but, just for me, I love looking back and saying I really enjoyed my time working with them and hopefully I helped in some way in developing them as people and as players.”

In our fiercely tribal and divisive culture, when consensus is illusory and we can’t seem to agree on even the most fundamental facts, the notion of shared history as a societal precept has left the building. But if we are indeed living in a post-truth era, Ian McEwan is here to tell us that things will only get worse.

In his bracing new time bender of a novel, the great British novelist posits that the past is irretrievably past, particularly in matters of the human heart, and any attempt by historians or biographers to wrench it into the present is folly — or in the case of this novel’s protagonist Thomas Metcalfe, intellectual vanity.

Metcalfe is an associate humanities professor and a researcher living in England in the 22nd century (2119, to be exact) who has taken it upon himself to unlock the mystery of a poem called “A Corona for Vivien,” written in 2014 by a deceased literary eminence named Francis Blundy, a poet whose genius, we learn, once rivaled that of Seamus Heaney. The poem was composed for his wife Vivien’s birthday dinner in October 2014, an evening that has taken on mythic proportions in certain academic circles in the intervening years. It even has a name: The Second Immortal Dinner, in which Blundy for the first time read his corona, a poem composed as a sequence of sonnets, that had been lost long ago.

In Metcalfe’s hothouse literary universe, Blundy’s poem is important because it is a revenant. In the intervening years, interpretive speculation about it has run rampant. Some have called it a warning about climate change. Others say Blundy was paid a six-figure sum by an energy company to suppress the poem. Only fragments of it exist, certain fugitive lines that appear in correspondence between Vivien, Blundy and Blundy’s editor, Harold T. Kitchener. Metcalfe has taken it upon himself to find the long-lost document, allegedly written by Blundy on a vellum scroll and buried by Vivien somewhere on Blundy’s property.

Metcalfe’s task is greatly complicated by the fact that he lives in a future world where much of the planet has been either immolated or else submerged underwater by a nuclear cataclysm that McEwan calls “The Inundation.” There has also been a mass migration — “The Derangement” — in which millions, deprived of resources and land, have been driven from England into Africa. Entire cities have been lost, “the land beneath them compressed and lowered, so they did not drain, but persisted like glacial lakes.” Whatever repositories of learning that weren’t destroyed now exist on higher ground in the mountains, where the “knowledge base and collective memory were largely preserved.”

The built environment has eroded, but fortunately for Metcalfe, the digital world of the past is intact. Biographers from 2000 onward, McEwan writes, are “heirs to more than a century of what the Blundy era airily called ‘the cloud’ ever expanding like a giant summer cumulus, though, of course, it simply consisted of data-storage machines.” Here in the cloud are the many hundreds of emails and texts from Blundy, his wife and their circle, allowing Metcalfe the satisfaction of knowing he can piece together the events of the epochal dinner party down to granular details: cutlery used, foods prepared, toasts proffered.

Ian McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.

(Annalena McAfee)

What Metcalfe knows of the Blundys’ life together can be gleaned from the 12 extant volumes of Vivien’s journals. From the journals Metcalfe has surmised that Vivien, herself a brilliant literary scholar and teacher, had willfully lived out her marriage under Blundy’s shadow, the dutiful handmaiden to a literary eminence. “She enjoyed producing a well-turned meal,” Metcalfe posits. “She was once a don, a candidate for a professorship. Abandoning it was a liberation. She always felt herself to be in control. But it had surprised her how … she had emptied herself of ambition, salary, status and achievement.”

Despite the pile-up of particulars, Metcalfe knows he must find the lost poem, that it is the keystone without which the story crumbles into insignificance. If he fails in this task Metcalfe, already feeling like an “intruder on the intentions and achievements” of Blundy, loses his mojo: his mission aborted, his career stalled.

But just when it seems as if Metcalfe, after a long and arduous journey across land and water, has discovered something significant, McEwan drops the curtain on that story, and rewinds the narrative 107 years, back to Vivien Blundy and her story. At first, the basic contours conform to Metcalfe’s version of events: Vivien did forsake her academic ambitions for Blundy, who did write a poem for her that he read aloud on her birthday, and so on.

But Metcalfe, as it turns out, has the details right and the motives all wrong, never more so than when McEwan reveals the fact of a murder, conceived in such a way that no snooping academic could ever unearth it. Emails are composed yet remain unsent. Digital correspondence is deleted into the ether, sneaky evasions that are beyond the biographer’s grasp. Metcalfe’s thesis is driven by a romanticized notion of Blundy’s life, but as McEwan slowly and carefully reveals, his poem, ostensibly a “repository of dreams,” more closely resembles a passive-aggressive act. As for Vivien, the narrative she has proffered in her journals is far from the whole story. She is resentful of Blundy, thwarted in her career, simmering with resentment. Despite his scholarly assiduity, Metcalfe is moving down an errant path that will never square the facts with lived experience.

Of course, facts are important, but they don’t necessarily reveal anything; it is the biographer’s folly to ascribe deeper meaning to them, to extrapolate truth from a disparate series of events. Metcalfe’s pursuit of revelation in a single lost poem is magical thinking, a relentless grasping for a chimera. McEwan’s elegantly structured and provocative novel is a strong argument for how little raw data, or even the most sublime art, can tell us about humans and their contrary natures.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

If there is one surname to strike fear into American golf it is surely “Poulter” with Ian having been at the centre of so much European success on a biennial basis.

Now it is the turn of the Ryder Cup legend’s 21-year-old son Luke to try to do something similar and thwart US hopes of retaining the Walker Cup at Cypress Point in California this weekend.

Fresh from starring in Great Britain & Ireland’s victory over Continental Europe in the St Andrews Trophy, Poulter makes his debut in the 50th Walker Cup as GB&I seek an away win for only the third time.

Who better to inspire upsetting the form book than someone with the genes of Poulter Snr, whose heroics helped Europe complete the ‘Miracle at Medinah’ when they came from 10-4 down to win the 2012 Ryder Cup.

Ian Poulter will be supporting his son over the two days of competition having shared dinner with him and his nine team-mates earlier in the week.

“Being able to talk to him about the Ryder Cup and his experiences, having the chance to ask him questions and what it means and how to play these events, how to deal with the pressure has been so important,” said Tyler Weaver, GB&I’s highest ranked player.

Team-mate Niall Shiels Donegan, who beat Luke Poulter at the recent US Amateur Championship, added: “Dinner with Ian was really special.

“Obviously he’s done a lot in team golf, and it was pretty cool to get some lessons from him.”

Luke, who won three-and-a-half points out of four at the St Andrews Trophy, says he will try to use his father’s exploits in the Ryder Cup – 15 wins from 25 matches between 2004 and 2021- as a motivating force.

“He never played a Walker Cup but he obviously has Ryder Cup knowledge, which is pretty similar to this,” said the younger Poulter, who had a hole-in-one at Cypress Point’s par-three third in Thursday practice.

“It’s amazing to see (his achievements). It gives me inspiration to try and follow in his footsteps.”

Having climbed to 27th in the amateur world rankings, the University of Florida student has already demonstrated many of his father’s golfing traits. It is also clear they share the same “never say die” attitude.

“I just like that head-to-head battle because it’s just you and the opponent on the golf course,” he told the R&A website. “You don’t have to think about anything, you just go hole by hole and try and beat them.

“And then with the team stuff, it’s just really cool. I just love when everyone’s supporting you and everyone’s pulling for you.”

GB&I lost a tight contest at St Andrews two years ago and the Walker Cup will again be staged at an iconic venue this weekend. Cypress Point was designed by Alister Mackenzie, the architect who laid out the Augusta National, home of the Masters.

For Shiels Donegan there is a degree of familiarity. The son of Scottish parents grew up near San Francisco and received vociferous local support during his run to the US Amateur semi-finals at the city’s Olympic Club.

“I’m fortunate to have grown up not too far from here, a few hours north, so I hope that they’ll come out in force again and have some more fun,” he said.

“Having grown up on the poa greens, it does give me a little bit of extra feel, but of course they’re going to be running firm and fast for everyone.

“You’re going to have to adapt to the conditions as you see them, and yeah, just do your best that you can.”

GB&I’s most recent win came at Royal Lytham and St Annes in 2015. Their last away victory was at Sea Island in Georgia 24 years ago.

So the Americans are firm favourites to retain the trophy, but their captain Nathan Smith is taking nothing for granted. “I think this is one of their best teams that I’ve seen in a while,” he said.

“I think the matches are always close, and it’s going to be a big test for us this week.”

Smith’s team is stacked with talent. It includes the top six in the amateur world rankings; Jackson Koivan, Ben James, Ethan Fang, Jase Summy, Preston Stout and Tommy Morrison.

GB&I captain Dean Robertson has been taking a measured approach to the week, pacing his players’ preparations. He will be encouraged by the recent form of Scot Cameron Adam, who finished in the top 20 at the recent British Masters.

Robertson knows this weekend has to be a collective effort with an astute game plan. “The key messages we’ve had have been strategy number one,” the Scottish skipper revealed.

“Approach play, short iron approach play and specific distances where you need to position the ball under hole high have been things that we’ve been working on for a good number of weeks.

“Also, through developing the relationship and understanding of these players and the respect of them, we’ve really managed to bring them together, and there’s a real unity there.

“I’m really thrilled to be their captain, really proud, and I’m really excited for the match itself.”

There are 22 points up for grabs with GB&I needing 11½ points to regain the title, while the US need 11 to retain.

The contest will be made up of four foursome matches on each morning, with eight singles games on Saturday afternoon and 10 singles after lunch on Sunday.

As Hugh Bonnevilee brings back the much-loved mockumentary character at the 2026 World Cup, writer John Morton says this is Ian’s ‘biggest opportunity yet to get things right’

He spent many years as the BBC’s Head of Values but WIA’s Ian Fletcher has now found himself a new role – at the heart of global football. In time for next year’s World Cup the character, played by Hugh Bonneville, is to become Director of Integrity, building on the skills he developed at the London Olympics.

His move to join the Twenty Twenty Six Oversight Team, based in Miami, is the basis of a new six-part series for BBC1 and iPlayer, from the team behind W1A and Twenty Twelve.

Next year’s FIFA World Cup tournament, hosted by the USA, Canada, and Mexico, will see 48 countries taking part at 16 venues spread across North America.

READ MORE: Gavin & Stacey’s Ruth Jones and husband split after 26 years as he moves thousands of miles away

Announcing the new project, Ian Fletcher said: “I’m thrilled at the prospect of joining the Oversight Team in Miami for this unique event. And in terms of the Integrity role, to borrow a soccer analogy, this is a rare opportunity to set out your own goals and then score them on the global stage.”

As Paddington and Downton Abbey star Bonneville, 61, reprises his role as the jargon-obsessed boss, he will be joined by a new cast of characters including The Day of the Jackal’s Nick Blood and The Inbetweeners’ Belinda Stewart-Wilson.

The show’s writer and director John Morton said he was delighted that Ian was on his way back to the screen. “I wasn’t sure what Ian Fletcher had been up to recently. The last I heard he was still recovering from a serious Mindfulness Course in Somerset. So, it’s great to hear that he’s made it back and has re-emerged in his natural habitat at the centre of a well-known institution, but now on the world stage and facing his biggest opportunity yet to get things right.

“I’m thrilled and hugely grateful to the BBC for giving me the chance to follow him again, this time all the way to Miami, and I literally can’t wait to see what happens.”

BBC comedy boss Jon Petrie said: “We’ll miss Ian’s invaluable contribution to the BBC as Head of Values but how could he resist getting the call-up to be a part of one of the most expansive and ambitious sporting events in the world? We wish him, and the team, all the best.”

Executive producer Paul Schlesinger added: “It’s 15 years since Ian Fletcher’s journey started with the run-up to the London Olympics and we are delighted the BBC has given John another chance to capture the universal comedy of people trying to organise something really big in a room, but this time with an outstanding international cast.”

The rockumentary W1A was last seen in 2017, with the series revolving around Fletcher – formerly the Head of the Olympic Deliverance Commission in his role as the BBC’s Head of Values. His task at the Corporation was to clarify and re-define the core purpose of the BBC across all its functions and to position it confidently for the future.

He was previously flanked by Jessica Hynes, who won a Bafta for her role as BBC Brand Consultant Siobhan Sharpe – Head of Perfect Curve.

Other stars to feature regularly included Monica Dolan (senior communications officer Tracey Pritchard) and Jason Watkins as director of strategic governance Simon Harwood and Sarah Parish as Director of Better Anna Rampton.

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