The housemates were asked to check in as passengers and crew onboard the British Eyeways Flight BB2025 with a number of rules to follow.
Big Brother announced: “Passengers, your destination is a luxury shopping budget but only if you can successfully complete your journey and that might not be as easy as it sounds. Every rule break will extend your flight time meaning a short smooth trip could quickly become a long-haul nightmare.”
Cameron and Feyisola took on the roles of pilot and co-pilot, with Jenny and Sam cabin crew and the remaining housemates as passengers.
Caroline, Richard and Zelah were on a stag do, Farida and Nancy were typical tourists, Elsa and Emily as returning backpackers on their gap year, Tate and Teja were business travellers and Marcus was a single dad.
However, after repeatedly breaking the rules, the flight became longer and longer. With the housemates having to endure over four hours on the flight, they soon quit, reports OK!.
As a result, Big Brother informed the housemates they had failed the task and would be living on basic rations. Fans vented their frustrations on social media, with one viewer stating: “The easiest task in the history of the show and they gave up.”
Another penned: “Well we all saw it coming… they FAILED the shopping task and now it’s basic rations for the lot of them. Hunger games incoming!”.
A third commented: “The easiest task in the history of the show.”
A fourth responded: “Sorry but if I was any of their employers I would be thinking a lot differently about some of them, they couldn’t follow some easy rules for 2 hours? ? ? Actually childish imo.”
Another declared: “I’d be fuming if i were in there following the task. all they had to do was f*** all and they still failed.” One person echoed: “Basic rations! !”.
During the shopping challenge, regulations stipulated contestants must not consume food that wasn’t allocated to them, whilst luggage had to remain with housemates constantly.
Contestants were also instructed to remain seated on the aircraft whilst the seatbelt indicator was illuminated. They were subsequently required to estimate their landing time without checking clocks.
Nevertheless, following more than two hours, they abandoned their challenge.
With the housemates bracing themselves for meagre provisions, numerous viewers are questioning precisely what this will entail for those within the Big Brother residence.
Big Brother airs Sunday to Friday at 9pm on ITV2 and ITVX.
ON Christmas Eve, 1956, a 15-year-old boy heads due south on a five-hour Greyhound Bus journey from his home in Hibbing, Minnesota.
Arriving in the state capital, Saint Paul, he meets up with two summer camp friends and they go to a shop on Fort Road called Terlinde Music.
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Folk star Bob Dylan snapped during an early photoshootCredit: SuppliedBob with Suze Rotolo, the girl on the cover of the Freewheelin’ albumCredit: UnknownAmerican folk singer-songwriter Bob singing during his first visit to Britain in 1962Credit: Redferns
Styling themselves as The Jokers, the fledgling trio record a rowdy, rudimentary 36-second rendition of R&B party hit Let The Good Times Roll and a handful of other covers.
The boy, with his chubby cheeks and hint of a rock and roller’s quiff, leads the way on vocals and piano.
Already enthralled by popular sounds of the day from Elvis Presley to Little Richard and the rest, he is now in proud possession of a DIY acetate — his first precious recording.
His name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, Bobby to his family and friends.
Less than seven years later, on October 26, 1963, as Bob Dylan, he takes to the stage in the manner of his folk hero Woody Guthrie, now adopting an altogether more lean and hungry look.
Acoustic guitar and harmonica are his only props as he holds an audience at New York City’s prestigious Carnegie Hall in the palms of his hands.
He performs his rallying cries that resonate to this day — Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.
He calls out the perpetrators of race-motivated killings with The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll and Only A Pawn In Their Game.
He dwells on matters of the heart by singing Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and Boots Of Spanish Leather.
His 1956 schoolboy shindig and the Carnegie Hall concert, presented in full for the first time, bookend the latest instalment in Dylan’s endlessly captivating Bootleg Series.
Titled Through The Open Window, it showcases an artist in a hurry as he sets out on his epic career.
“I did everything fast,” he wrote in his memoir, Chronicles Vol.1, about his rapid transformation. “Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast.”
But, as he continued: “I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.”
Among the myriad ways he achieved his stated aim, and then some, was by heading to the quiet surroundings of New York Public Library and avidly scouring newspapers on microfilm from the mid-1800s such as the Chicago Tribune and Memphis Daily Eagle, “intrigued by the language and the rhetoric of the times”.
He’d fallen under the spell of country music’s first superstar Hank Williams — “the sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod”.
Dylan affirmed that without hearing the “raw intensity” of songs by German anti-fascist poet-playwright Kurt Weill, most notably Pirate Jenny, he might not have written songs like The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll.
Then there was Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, who Dylan likened to “the scorched earth”. “There’s nothing clownish about him or his lyrics,” he said. “I wanted to be like that, too.”
‘Did everything fast’
We’ll hear more later about the man considered to be his primary early influence, Woody Guthrie, the “Dust Bowl Balladeer” who wielded a guitar emblazoned with the slogan “This machine kills fascists”.
And about leading Greenwich Village folkie Dave Van Ronk, known as the “Mayor Of MacDougal Street”, who had Dylan’s back from the moment he first saw him sing.
On two occasions in recent years, I’ve had the privilege of talking to Joan Baez, the unofficial “Queen” to Dylan’s “King” of the American folk scene in the early Sixties.
She championed him as he made his way, frequently bringing him on stage, their duets on his compositions like With God On Our Side revealing rare chemistry.
They also became lovers as Bob’s relationship with Suze Rotolo, the girl on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album, crumbled.
“He was a phenomenon,” Baez told me in typically forthright fashion. “I guess somebody said, ‘There’s this guy you gotta hear, he’s writing these incredible songs.’
The singer’s real name in his high-school yearbook in 1959Legendary musician Dylan performing on stageCredit: Unknown
“And he was. His talent was so constant that I was in awe.”
A leading figure in the civil rights movement, who marched with Martin Luther King, Baez added: “It was a piece of good luck that his music came along when it did. The songs said the things I wanted to say.”
But she finished that reflection by saying, tellingly: “And then he moved on.”
For Dylan, now 84, has forever been a restless soul, “moving on” to numerous incarnations — rock star, country singer, Born Again evangelist, Sinatra-style crooner, old-time bluesman, you name it.
In the closing paragraph of Chronicles, he admitted: “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden.”
But it is that initial whirlwind period, 1956 to 1963, centred on bohemian Greenwich Village and the coffee shops where young performers got their breaks which forms Volume 18 of the Bootleg Series.
Through The Open Window is available in various formats including an eight-CD, 139-track version, and has been painstakingly pieced together by co-producers Sean Wilentz and Steve Berkowitz.
And it is from Wilentz, professor of American history at Princeton University and author of the liner notes accompanying this labour of love, that I have gleaned illuminating insights.
I can’t think of too many modern artists of his stature, if any, who developed that rapidly
Sean Wilentz
He begins with the arc of Dylan’s development, first as a performer, then as a songwriter, during his early years.
Wilentz says: “He came to Greenwich Village in 1961 with infinite ambition and mediocre skills. By the end of that year, he had learned how to enter a song, make it his own, and put it over, brilliantly.
“By the end of 1962, he had written songs that became immortal, above all Blowin’ In The Wind and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.
“By the time of the Carnegie Hall concert in 1963, the capstone to Through The Open Window, his songwriting had reached the level we can recognise, that would eventually lead to the Nobel Prize.
“And his performance style, for the thousands in that hall, was mesmeric. I can’t think of too many modern artists of his stature, if any, who developed that rapidly.”
One of the show’s striking aspects is the lively, often comical, between-song banter. (Yes, Dylan did talk effusively to his audiences back then. Not so much these days.)
In order to assemble Through The Open Window, Wilentz and Berkowitz had “more than 100 hours of material to draw on, maybe two or even three hundred”.
Their chief aim was to find a way to best illuminate “Bob Dylan’s development, mainly in Greenwich Village, as a performer and songwriter”.
But, adds Wilentz: “Several factors came into play — historical significance, rarity, immediacy and, of course, quality of performance.
‘Good taste in R&B’
“We hope, above all, that the collection succeeds at capturing the many overlapping levels — personal, artistic, political and more.”
Though noting Dylan’s inspirations, Woody, Elvis and the rest, Wilentz draws my attention to “a bit of free verse” written by Bob in 1962 called My Life In A Stolen Moment, which suggests nothing was off limits.
“Open up yer eyes an’ ears an’ yer influenced/an’ there’s nothing you can do about it.”
This is our cue to take a deep dive into the mix of unheard home recordings, coffeehouse and nightclub shows as well as studio outtakes from Dylan’s first three albums for Columbia Records — his self-titled debut, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’.
Of the first track, that primitive take on Let The Good Times Roll, Wilentz says: “Dylan and the other two were obviously enthusiastic, and they had good taste in doo-wop and R&B.
“But if you listen closely, you can hear Dylan, on piano, calling things to order and pushing things along, the catalyst, the guy we know from other accounts who was willing to take more risks onstage.”
I ask Wilentz what he considers the most significant previously unreleased discoveries and he replies: “Most obviously Liverpool Gal from 1963, as it’s a song even the most obsessive Dylan aficionados have known existed but had never heard.
“He only recorded it once, at a friend’s party, and it’s stayed locked away on that tape until now.
Dylan was producing so much strong material that some of it was inevitably laid aside
Sean Wilentz
“While not Dylan at his peak, it’s a fine song. It’s significant lyrically, not least as testimony to his stay in London at the end of 1962 and the start of 1963. That stay had a profound effect on his songwriting, and one gets a glimpse of it here.”
Also included is near mythical Dylan song The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan, which he performed as “Bobby” in BBC drama Madhouse On Castle Street during his trip to Britain.
The only copy of the play set in a boarding house was junked by the Beeb in 1968 but this 63-second audio fragment survives.
Of even earlier recordings, Wilentz says: “I’m drawn to Ramblin’ Round.
“Although known (in his own words) as a Woody Guthrie jukebox, Dylan has never released a recording of himself performing a Guthrie song.
“Here he is, in an outtake from his first studio album, handling a Guthrie classic, and with a depth of feeling that shows why his earliest admirers found him so compelling.”
Wilentz considers other treasures: “There’s an entire 20-minute live set from Gerdes Folk City from April, 1962, concluding with Dylan’s first public performance of Blowin’ In The Wind.
“Then there are two tracks of singular historic importance, the first known recordings, both in informal settings, of two masterpieces, The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll and The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
If these versions shed fresh light on classics, let’s not forget the great Dylan songs that didn’t make it on to his albums, so great was the speed he was moving.
Does Wilentz find it staggering that songs like Let Me Die In My Footsteps and Lay Down Your Weary Tune were discarded?
“Yes and no,” he answers. “Yes, because these are powerful songs that were left largely unknown for years.
“No, because Dylan was producing so much strong material that some of it was inevitably laid aside.
‘Literary genius’
“Sometimes intervening factors kicked in. Take the four songs that, for business and censorship reasons, got cut from Freewheelin’ and replaced with four others.
“The album was actually better in its altered form, including songs like Girl From The North Country.
“But that’s how Let Me Die In My Footsteps was lost, along with a lesser-known song I love that we’re happy to include, Gamblin’ Willie’s Dead Man’s Hand, as well as an amazing performance of Rocks And Gravel.”
So, we’ve heard about songs but who were the key figures surrounding Dylan during his formative years?
Wilentz says: “Among the folk singers, Van Ronk most of all, and Mike Seeger, about whom he writes with a kind of awe in Chronicles.
“There was the crowd around Woody Guthrie, including Pete Seeger (‘Mike Seeger’s older brother,’ he calls him at one point) and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.”
He singles out producer John Hammond, “for signing him to Columbia Records and affirming his talent.
“But most important of all there was Suze Rotolo, who was a whole lot more, to Dylan and the rest of the world, than the girl on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”
Finally, I ask Wilentz why the singer felt uncomfortable at being labelled king of the folk movement, “the voice of a generation” if you like.
“People misread Dylan from all sides,” he argues. “Never a protest singer in the mould of Guthrie or Seeger, even though he worshipped Guthrie and admired the left-wing old guard by the time he turned up.
“But Dylan wasn’t one of them, though he sympathised, in a humane way, with victims of injustice.”
Dylan’s work springs from a matrix that is emotional, filtered through his literary genius
Sean Wilentz
Wilentz believes the recent biopic A Complete Unknown, with Timothee Chalamet making a decent fist of portraying the young Dylan, “is a little misleading”.
He says: “It wasn’t Dylan’s ‘going electric’ that pissed off the old guard and their younger equivalent as much as his moving beyond left-wing political pieties.
“Hence the song My Back Pages, from 1964: ‘Ah but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.’”
Wilentz concludes: “Dylan’s work springs from a matrix that is emotional, filtered through his literary genius.
“It was impossible for someone like him, living through those two years (1962-63), not to respond to the politics in an artistic way.
“How, if you were Bob Dylan, could you not respond to the civil rights struggle, the killing of Medgar Evers (Only A Pawn In Their Game) or Hattie Carroll, as well as the spectre of nuclear annihilation?
“Dylan had a lot to say, but he was never going to be the voice of anyone but himself.”
Maybe he’d already explained himself on Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright:
Walt Disney Co. is alerting viewers that its channels may go dark on YouTube TV amid tense contract negotiations between the two television giants.
The companies are struggling to hammer out a new distribution deal on YouTube TV for Disney’s channels, including ABC, ESPN, FX, National Geographic and Disney Channel. YouTube TV has become one of the most popular U.S. pay-TV services, boasting about 10 million subscribers for its packages of traditional television channels.
Those customers risk losing Disney’s channels, including KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles and other ABC affiliates nationwide if the two companies fail to forge a new carriage agreement by next Thursday, when their current pact expires.
“Without an agreement, we’ll have to remove Disney’s content from YouTube TV,” the Google Inc.-owned television service said Thursday in a statement.
Disney began sounding the alarm by running messages on its TV channels to warn viewers about the blackout threat.
The Burbank entertainment company becomes the latest TV programmer to allege that the tech behemoth is throwing its weight around in contract negotiations.
In recent months, both Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. and Comcast’s NBCUniversal publicly complained that Google’s YouTube TV was attempting to unfairly squeeze them in their separate talks. In the end, both Fox and NBCUniversal struck new carriage contracts without their channels going dark.
Univision wasn’t as fortunate. The smaller Spanish-language media company’s networks went dark last month on YouTube TV when the two companies failed to reach a deal.
“For the fourth time in three months, Google’s YouTube TV is putting their subscribers at risk of losing the most valuable networks they signed up for,” a Disney spokesperson said Thursday in a statement. “This is the latest example of Google exploiting its position at the expense of their own customers.”
YouTube TV, for its part, alleged that Disney was the one making unreasonable demands.
“We’ve been working in good faith to negotiate a deal with Disney that pays them fairly for their content on YouTube TV,” a YouTube TV spokesperson said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Disney is proposing costly economic terms that would raise prices on YouTube TV customers and give our customers fewer choices, while benefiting Disney’s own live TV products – like Hulu + Live TV and, soon, Fubo,” YouTube TV said.
Disney’s Hulu + Live TV competes directly with YouTube TV by offering the same channels. Fubo is a sports streaming service that Disney is in the process of acquiring.
YouTube said if Disney channels remain “unavailable for an extended period of time,” it would offer its customers a $20 credit.
The contract tussle heightens tensions from earlier this year, when Disney’s former distribution chief, Justin Connolly, left in May to take a similar position at YouTube TV. Connolly had spent two decades at Disney and ESPN and Disney sued to block the move, but a judge allowed Connolly to take his new position.
YouTube TV launched in April 2017 for $35 a month. The package of channels now costs $82.99.
To attract more sports fans, YouTube TV took over the NFL Sunday Ticket premium sports package from DirecTV, which had been losing more than $100 million a year to maintain the NFL service. YouTube TV offers Sunday Ticket as a base plan add-on or as an individual channel on YouTube.
Last year, YouTube generated $54.2 billion in revenue, second only to Disney among television companies, according to research firm MoffettNathanson.
The dispute comes as NFL and college football is in full swing, with games on ABC and ESPN. The NBA season also tipped off this week and ESPN prominently features those games. ABC’s fall season began last month with fresh episodes of such favorite programs as “Dancing with the Stars” and “Abbott Elementary.”
ABC stations also air popular newscasts including “Good Morning America” and “World News Tonight with David Muir.” Many ABC stations, including in Los Angeles, run Sony’s “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”
“We invest significantly in our content and expect our partners to pay fair rates that recognize that value,” Disney said. “If we don’t reach a fair deal soon, YouTube TV customers will lose access to ESPN and ABC, and all our marquee programming – including the NFL, college football, NBA and NHL seasons – and so much more.”
It’s the end of the Strictly road for Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman, who announced they’ve quit the BBC show – but who is set to take over presenting duties?
23:18, 23 Oct 2025Updated 23:19, 23 Oct 2025
Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman have announced they are both quitting Strictly(Image: PA)
And already bookies have been placing their bets on who will land the lucrative gig after BBC bosses have reportedly vowed that the show must go on after 21 years on air.
Fleur East, who already presents Strictly spin-off show It Takes Two has been given odds of 2/1 – and as that’s how Claudia went on to get the main gig when she took over presenting duties from the late, great Bruce Forsyth, it would make sense she would be considered for the job.
Her co-presenter Janette Manrara is also in the running with odds of 3/1. While former It Takes Two presenter Rylan Clark and TV and radio host Roman Kemp are next in line. Zoe Ball, Holly Willoughby and Hannah Waddingham are more big names being put in the frame.
Former celebrity contestants, such as documentary maker Stacey Dooley, ex-England footballer turned pundit Alex Scott, This Morning host Alison Hammond and ex-eastEnders star Rose Ayling-Ellis have also been put in the running, according to odds from Gambling.com.
While he’s not mentioned in the odds just yet, Robbie Williams appears to have thrown his hat in the ring for the top job.
The 51-year-old Let Me Entertain You singer took to X to tell his 2.3 million followers: “Just got a rather fancy phone call about a very glittery dance floor job. Apparently, sequins and tuxedos might be in my future. Stay tuned,” followed by a wink face emoji.
A source told The Sun: “At this stage it’s all to play for and there isn’t any kind of heir apparent – though there are some obvious stars who’d be possibilities.
“What is more certain is the fact that execs are expected to opt for two more women, because the Beeb value the symbolism of an all-female presenting team on their biggest Saturday night show.
“But one element likely to play a big part is diversity because, as terrific as it is having two women hosting Strictly, they are also two middle-aged white people. This was a show created 21 years ago and now has to consider what it should look and feel like from 2026 onwards.”
The announcement has come at a good time for Claudia, who is one of TV’s most in demand presenters at the moment. She is currently enjoying huge success with BBC game show The Traitors and its celebrity version, which is airing at the moment.
She’s also landed another series of Channel 4 talent show The Piano. Both shows are said to be perfect for Claudia as “it’s lucrative and fun gig… but it also doesn’t eat into her life too much.”
With both shows only taking a few weeks to film, it will free up more time to spend with her family, including her husband Kris Thykier and their three kids. This is in comparison to Strictly, which “basically takes over her life for four months at a time”.
Tess and Claudia’s last show will be when the final of the current series airs on Saturday, December 20. But they will both in a special episode that will be shown on Christmas Day.
It’s been 21 years with 56-year-old Tess at the helm. Her former co-host was the late great Bruce Forsyth, who died in 2017 at the age of 89. Claudia, 53, who formerly presented Strictly spin-off show It Takes Two, stepped in in 2014 and has been Tess’ co-host for the past 11 years.
MEL B has admitted she’s been kicked out of the Spice Girls WhatsApp group chat in a new social media post.
Scary Spice says she’s been removed from the girl group’s chat after suggesting that they go on tour again.
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Mel B told her followers she’s been removedCredit: SplashIt’s not the first time she’s been pulled from the chatCredit: TikTok/@melaniebrownmbeFans are calling for the Spice Girls to go on tourCredit: Alamy
She announced the ordeal in a TikTok video, posing up a storm in a striking number while strutting in a pair of heels.
“Me on my way back to spice group chat after being kicked out for saying we are going on tour… again,” she wrote on-screen.
Mel, 50, made sure to use the hashtag “letmebackin” while tagging the Spice Girls.
Paired up to the tune One Step At A Time, the post has sparked comments from followers calling for another tour.
“The fact that we’re all still healthy and living life and all talking still. It’s nice.”
“I can’t say anything else to get myself kicked out. Don’t try Alison.”
The Spice Girls group chat has been discussed beforeCredit: GettyIt’s not the first time Mel has left the chatCredit: AlamyFans want the girls to play in VegasCredit: Rex
Referencing these developments ahead of the screening in Park City, Utah, writer-director Bill Condon told the audience: “That’s a sentiment I think you’ll see the movie has a different point of view on.”
Released in theaters Oct. 10, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is set in the final year of Argentina’s Dirty War, the violent military dictatorship that spanned from 1976-1983. The story begins in the confines of a Buenos Aires prison, where newfound cellmates Valentin Arregui Paz (Diego Luna) and Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) find they have little in common. Arregui is a principled revolutionary dedicated to his cause, while Molina is a gay, flamboyant window dresser who’s been arrested for public indecency.
Undeterred by their differences, Molina punctuates the bleak existence of their imprisonment — one marked by torture and deprivation — by recounting the plot of “The Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a fictional Golden Age musical starring his favorite actress, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), casting himself and Arregui as her co-stars. Transported from their dreary cell to the bright, indulgent universe of the musical, their main conflicts become a quest for love and honor, rather than a fight for their basic human rights.
When Argentinian author Manuel Puig began writing the celebrated novel, “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” in 1974, it was just a year into his self-imposed exile to Mexico as his native Argentina lurched toward authoritarianism. By the time the book was released in 1976, a military junta had seized control of the government. The next seven years were marked by the forced disappearance of an estimated 20,000-30,000 people, many of whom were kidnapped and taken to clandestine detention camps to be tortured and killed. Among those targeted were artists, journalists, student activists, members of the LGBTQ+ community and anyone deemed “subversive” by the regime.
Initially banned in Argentina, Puig’s novel has been adapted and reimagined multiple times, including as an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony Award-winning musical in 1993. With each iteration, the central elements have remained unchanged. And yet, as the 2025 adaptation arrived in theaters this month, this queer, Latino-led story of two prisoners fighting the claustrophobia of life under fascism feels at once like a minor miracle, and a startling wake-up call.
Tonatiuh, left, and Diego Luna in the movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
(Sundance Institute)
In the months since the film’s Sundance premiere, the parallels between the fraught political climate of 1970s Argentina and that of our present have only become more pronounced.
Amidst these headlines are people just like Molina and Arregui — activists, artists and human beings — finding their own ways to survive and resist an increasingly paranoid and repressive government. And while Arregui’s instinct is to remain unwavering in his cause, Molina’s is to retreat into the glamorous, over-the-top world of the “Spider Woman.”
In dazzling musical numbers expertly performed by Lopez, who delivers each song and dance with all the magnetism of a true Old Hollywood icon, both the prisoners and the audience can’t help but be drawn further and further into her Technicolor web.
Jennifer Lopez and Tonatiuh in the movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
(Roadside Attractions)
It might be easy to write these moments off as nothing more than a superficial distraction, as Arregui does early on, and characterize musicals as shallow and cliche. At first, Molina is happy to admit that’s why he loves them, but the truth is more complicated.
During Argentina’s dictatorship, discrimination and attacks by paramilitary groups against LGBTQ+ people became more and more frequent. Molina accepts the role society has cast him in, allowing himself to be the “monster,” the “deviant” or the “sissy” that people want him to be, while retreating mentally into the world of classic films and pop culture. For him, their beauty is a salve — an opportunity to abandon reality and cast himself in a role that doesn’t actually exist for him.
Though he never explicitly claims an identity, it’s made clear that he doesn’t just love “La Luna” — he wants to be her. And in their first feature lead role, the queer, L.A.-born actor Tonatiuh embodies all of Molina’s contradictions — his bluster, his pain, his radiance — to heart-wrenching effect.
As Molina and Arregui grow closer, the boundaries between reality and fantasy begin to melt, and their formerly rigid perceptions collapse along with them. Arregui takes on some of Molina’s idealism, and the musical he once saw as a tired cliche becomes something invaluable: a sliver of joy that can’t be taken from him. A cynic convinced of the world’s brokenness, he realizes that revolutions need hope too.
In the film’s final act, while the world around Molina hasn’t changed, he has. Still trapped within the confines of a society that is doing its best to crush him, he adopts Arregui’s integrity and realizes that he has a choice: “I learned about dignity in that most undignified place,” he says in the film. “I had always believed nothing could ever change for me, and I felt sorry for myself. But I can’t live like that now.”
Like the film within the film, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” isn’t an escape. It’s a lifeline — and a reminder that, even in the darkest of times, art has the power to transport us, sustain us and embolden us to be brave.
The annual Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain Awards left viewers in floods of tears after one winner shared their emotional story and called out the bullies that threatened his life
21:13, 23 Oct 2025Updated 21:13, 23 Oct 2025
Teenager of Courage winner Zach Eagling(Image: Rowan Griffiths)
The Daily Mirror’s Pride of Britain Awards viewers were once again moved to tears on an emotional night. Scenes, which aired Wednesday, showcased the nation’s incredible stories of strength, bravery and courage from incredible people up and down the country.
And it was teenager Zach Eagling that left viewers pouring their heart out online – and hitting out at those who targeted him online. The 13-year-old was successful in launching a campaign that changed the law to protect people with epilepsy.
In his VT before taking to the stage to receive the Teenager of Courage award, Zach and his mum explained how his online journey reaching milestones was met with hatred. Some users on social media would send him flashing images, which could potentially trigger a seizure.
However, instead of shying away from the content, Zach was determined to make a change and had a law passed making it a criminal offence for people to send such vile content.
He said: “I am so proud, I don’t know how I’ve managed it but I have. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this.”
And after being handed the award by Strictly judges, Shirley Ballas said: “On behalf of everyone in Strictly, for you to be able to change a law that makes you rather extraordinary gentleman and we are extremely proud of you”
And fans online also shared there thoughts. One user on Twitter/X fumed: “genuinely what the f*** is wrong with people you’d send a little boy with epilepsy spending his time fundraising, flashing gifs trying to trigger his brain. like it absolutely baffles me there’s people like that out here #prideofbritain.”
Another agreed, saying: “#prideofbritain This a new low in terms of online bullying. How it actually enters someone’s head to do that leaves me speechless and very sad. Well done Zach Eagling. You’ve created good from their evil. They’re not fit to lick your shoes.”
A third added: “What an inspiration #Zach has proven to be – a force of nature with an `unbeatable’ attitude! #PrideofBritain.” And a fourth wrote: “Zach you are a legend! #prideofbritain”
All winners were nominated by the public, with the recipients being ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds. They were honoured for actions that were deemed extraordinary and inspiring.
The awards celebrated achievements such as overcoming adversity, performing extraordinary acts of kindness, and displaying immense courage.
The Prime Minister was in the audience at the ceremony, that is sponsored by P&O Cruises. The event, which took place on Monday night, saw Keir Starmer joined by his wife Victoria.
Speaking of the stories, the PM said: “I always arrive thinking of this problem, that problem, like the world is on my shoulders. But the moment I hear the first story, I think, ‘give your head a wobble’.
“You’re doing amazing things here. Loads of people sitting in their living rooms may well say, ‘if they can do that, maybe I can do that.'”
He also said: “People say, ‘oh Britain’s broken, people don’t care about each other’. But it’s the complete opposite: if given the chance, almost everybody will try to do something for somebody else. Just look around you.”
A NETFLIX star and British rapper has been charged with causing serious injury by dangerous driving after a fatal crash.
Justin Clarke-Samuel, who stars in Netflix series Supacell, allegedly failed to stop after hitting a 20-year-old man in Ilford, east London, on October 18.
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British rapper Ghetts has been charged with causing serious injury by dangerous driving after a fatal crashCredit: GettyBritish rapper Justin Jude Clarke-Samuels, aka Ghetts performs live on stageCredit: Getty
The 41-year-old, who goes by the name Ghetts, appeared at Stratford Magistrates’ Court on Monday, the same day the man died in hospital.
The indictment could change from causing serious injury to causing death by dangerous driving at the next hearing.
The rapper, from Woodford Green, was remanded into custody and is due to appear at Barkingside Magistrates’ Court on Monday, October 27.
Police are appealing for witnesses to the crash to come forward.
The rapper has featured alongside Skepta, Stormzy and Ed Sheeran, racking up millions of hits on Spotify.
In 2024 he performed at Glastonbury. In 2008, Ghetts was nominated for a BET Award for Best International Act: UK along with Chipmunk, Giggs, and Skepta.
His music has since been played on national radio stations including BBC Radio 1, Kiss 100 and BBC Radio1Extra.
Clarke-Samuel has toured internationally with Top Bar star and fellow rapper Kano, and was a member of East London British grime group Nasty Crew.
More to follow… For the latest news on this story keep checking back at The Sun Online
Thesun.co.uk is your go-to destination for the best celebrity news, real-life stories, jaw-dropping pictures and must-see video.
Every night before going to bed, Ela Minus shuts off her phone.
Oftentimes, the Colombian artist-producer won’t even turn it back on until the following afternoon. One day, in mid-September, when Minus logged on, she received an unexpected flurry of messages from both close friends and people she hadn’t spoken to in years. Each notification was congratulatory, but Minus had no idea what had transpired the night before.
It turns out the Latin Grammy nominations had been announced — and her song “QQQQ,” off her 2025 sophomore album, “Día,” was nominated for Latin electronic music performance.
“I was very confused. Nobody said what was going on in their messages. They were just telling me congratulations,” says Minus, who laughs about the moment over our Zoom call. She dialed in from Mexico City, a few hours before catching a flight to Italy to kick off a new leg of her “Día” tour.
“As soon as I figured out that I was nominated, I turned my phone off again. I needed a second to myself. To be completely honest, it was not even a little bit in my radar. I didn’t even know we submitted anything.”
Since its release last January, “Día” has left lasting impressions on critics and fans alike. In 10 synth-powered tracks, Minus channels her fluctuating emotional state as she navigated a period of reckoning — characterized by a life almost entirely lived in airplanes, hotel rooms and foreign studios — through ominous synthesizer chords and blasts of vigorous dance beats.
Much like her music, her path to Latin Grammy-worthy acclaim has been anything but linear.
“It’s not like I started singing on television, and now I’m at the Latin Grammys. It’s been an interesting path of continuous surprises and unexpected turns,” says Minus. “Not to praise myself, but every time I’ve taken an unexpected turn or been presented with it, something amazing comes out of it.”
“Every time I’m in L.A. for a longer period of time, I feel like I retire into myself more. Staying downtown too, felt very aggressive, yet familiar to me,” says Minus, of how L.A. influenced her latest record.
(Alvaro Ariso)
Minus was born as Gabriela Jimeno Caldas, in Bogotá, Colombia. She got her start in music as a drummer in a local punk band called Ratón Pérez, which she joined at the age of 12. Her percussion skills led to her leaving Colombia to attend the Berklee College of Music, where she double majored in jazz drumming and music synthesis. At school, she was introduced to hardware and software synths, and continued to explore her drumming abilities by experimenting with electronica.
After working as a touring drummer and helping design synth software, Minus’ solo career started to take off with the release of her 2020 debut album, “acts of rebellion.” She created the entire project by herself, from the depths of her at-home studio in Brooklyn. Composed of icy club beats and steadfast synthetics, she describes the album as “sonically concise,” in that she intentionally used limited instrumentation.
When approaching her 2025 follow-up record, she says that she yearned to pick up new instruments, switch up the process and hopefully end up with an entirely different result.
In a sudden turn of events, her rent in New York quadrupled because of COVID-19 inflation rates, and she had to leave the city. She says her life quickly became a “mess.” But her next steps were clear as ever — instead of settling into a new apartment, she took on a nomadic lifestyle, with making new music as her only goal.
“I wanted to start and finish a record in the moment, while all of this is happening, and when I’m feeling this way,” says Minus, who says she was feeling a self-imposed artistic pressure. “I figured I could postpone my personal life out of wanting to make this record.”
Over the course of six months, she hopped from city to city, living out of her suitcase and renting recording studios. She ended up in places like London, Mexico City and Seattle. The repetitious process of packing up and settling into new places allowed her to easily decipher which tracks she wanted to keep pushing and which ones she would leave behind.
Along her journey, she lived in downtown Los Angeles for a short period of time. She says she finds the city to be a bit “alienating” with a “uniquely heavy” energy. To her luck, the city’s ethos aligned with the sonic soundscape she was building out in “Día.”
“Every time I’m in L.A. for a longer period of time, I feel like I retire into myself more. Staying downtown too, felt very aggressive, yet familiar to me,” says Minus, who noted the lack of people walking, the amount of traffic in the streets and the boundless nature of Los Angeles.
The album began at a low point in Minus’ life, where she seems to be going through an identity crisis. Over spacey sirens and an accumulating bass line, on “Broken,” she admits to being “a fool / acting all cool” and being on her knees, without a sense of faith. Throughout the first several tracks, she confronts her inner monologue through candid lyrics, offering herself a reality check.
“Producing beats with really low bass lines feels comfortable to me. It makes me want to open up naturally to get to the point of writing lyrics and singing. When the production is more sparse, like with a guitar, it’s harder to write more vulnerably. It feels kinda cheesy,” says Minus.
“In myself, there’s this constant cohabitation of dark and light and aggressive and sweet sounds,” she continues. So when vulnerable feelings come out, the really hardcore, distorted sounds follow.”
Songs like “Idk” and “Abrir Monte” simulate the experience of being submerged as a muffled, yet pounding bass line takes charge. Other times, as in “Idols,” Minus’ dissected blend of club pop and dark ambient sounds lends a grimy, industrial feel to her mechanical melodies. She captures the commonplace (yet cathartic) experience of losing yourself in a sweaty mass of limbs on a dance floor.
The Latin Grammy-nominated track “QQQQ” marks a turning point in the album. It was a song she wrote in a matter of hours to depict her own mindset change. “I was very aware that [for] the first half of the record, there was a lot of tension. I just needed a moment of release for this [album] to land fully. I needed a moment of uncontrollable sobbing on the dance floor.”
The album ends with her resolving to confront her struggles with self-acceptance, with the frankly written “I Want To Be Better” — which escalates with the feverish punk pulse of “Onwards.”
To her, the album is equal parts apocalyptic and hopeful, reflecting both the chaos of the outside world and her newfound inner peace. Since making the record and performing it frequently, she says she’s internalized the lessons she learned along the way. “When you’re going through something, sometimes the only thing you can trust is time. Your perspective will change, maybe for better or for worse.
“Time heals,” adds Minus. “That’s something I learned for sure.”
Ela Minus will be headlining at the Echoplex in Echo Park on Oct. 29.
And when Marcus Skeet, the record-breaking charity runner and mental health champion received his Special Recognition Award, he got an extra surprise. After handing Marcus his trophy, pop star Anne-Marie, and podcast duo Pete Wicks and Sam Thompson revealed Pride of Britain had launched a special GoFundMe for mental health charity Mind in Marcus’s honour.
Money raised will pay for special mental health walking and running groups all over the country called Marcus’s Movers. The groups, which include mental health practitioners, cost £2,500 to set up.
Sam and Pete kicked things off with a £5,000 donation on stage, and then Pub Landlord Al Murray took to the floor to persuade some other famous faces to chip in too.
Dragons Den tycoon Duncan Bannatyne donated £20,000, bringing the total raised on the night to £50,000, enough to fund 20 potentially lifesaving Marcus’s Movers groups. A stunned Marcus told Ashley Banjo: “From the bottom of my heart, that means the absolute world. I’m lost for words.”
Now you can help by donating to the GoFundMe to help Mind set up even more Marcus’s Movers groups in communities all over Britain. The Daily Mirror Pride of Britain Awards with P&O Cruises celebrate unsung heroes like Marcus. His own life was transformed by walking and running – the teenager went from the lowest possible ebb to becoming a record-breaking charity fundraiser and Pride of Britain winner.
He was 12 when his dad was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. Marcus’s physical and mental health rapidly declined and he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and intrusive thoughts which dramatically impacted his life.
At 15 he was in “one of the darkest places”, and attempted suicide after spending months alone in his room with no contact with the outside world. Desperate to turn his life around, Marcus, now 17, started walking short distances at first, before building up distance and speed until he was jogging longer routes. He says: “My mental health was at an all time low so I decided to run, not just for mental health but to raise awareness. Running pushed my body and mind and the feeling after a run was like nothing else.”
Since then, Marcus has raised more than £200,000 for Mind through running, including a run from Land’s End to John O’Groats. The gruelling 874 mile challenge saw him become the youngest person ever – and the first under 18 – to run the entire length of the UK.
Marcus has documented his journey on social media in the hopes of inspiring others who are struggling with their mental health. He says: “Life is brutal, sometimes you feel like you’re in a place you can’t get out of. But I promise you, every road may have speed bumps but you’ll get over them. Mental health is such a big thing, everyone is different but I find running helps mine.”
ELON Musk’s ex Grimes has left her fans stunned after revealing her very unusual face tattoo.
The performer showed off her interesting new inking on Instagram but fans were immediately left confused.
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Grimes has shown off her new face tattoo – but many fans think it looks like ringwormCredit: InstagramThe singer is known for her wacky looksCredit: Twitter/GrimesShe famously dated Elon Musk and has three children with himCredit: Getty
Many were quick to comment to insist they thought the star had Ringworm as opposed to a new facial inking.
In a brand new selfie, a bare-faced Grimes showed off the tattoo which appeared to mimic a scar on her face.
A light circle has been inked on around her eye prompting much discussion from her followers.
Writing on Instagram about her interesting inking, Grimes said: “Spent like ten years emotionally working up to a face tattoo but I guess I drew on my face too much and literally no one noticed, not even my parents, not even after the video lol.
“That said I think @glyphomancer is onto something truly novel and innovative with her work esp on face tats- there’s a true beauty, delicacy, and innovation here imo.
“Feel like tats are in a crazy renaissance period that’s sort of under appreciated atm.”
However, her comments were littered with confused fans mistakenly thinking Grimes had ringworm.
One wrote under the snap: “THE RINGWORM?!.”
Another added: “It’s the ringworm on her eye I think.”
Someone else echoed: “That looks like ringworm.”
With a fourth penning: “Only ringworm.”
Ringworm is a fungal infection of the skin that often presents in a ring shape – very similar to Grimes’ inking.
It is often described as an itchy and red ring-like rash.
It can often be treated through antifungal medication or creams and gels prescribed by doctors and pharmacists.
Grimes first rose to fame through being a singer and musician but achieved more notoriety through her marriage to Elon Musk.
She began dating the business magnate in 2018 and welcomed a son with him in 2020, who is called X Æ A-Xii.
A year later, the pair had a daughter via surrogacy and were reported to have welcomed a second son in September 2023.
What is it about the musical biopic that has inspired so much Oscar love? Is it the genre’s front-row seat on the turbulent, provocative, culture-shifting lives of artists we’ve worshiped from afar? Is it the transformational, go-for-broke acting showcase it affords, and the painstaking period recreation so essential to the journey back in time? Or is it simply the enduring power of popular music and the icons who’ve created and performed it?
With the release of writer-director Scott Cooper’s biographical drama “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” starring kudos magnet Jeremy Allen White in an immersive portrayal of The Boss circa 1982, it feels like the perfect time to flash back on some of the most honored pop-music biopics in Oscars history.
‘A Complete Unknown’ (8 nominations)
Monica Barbaro and Timothée Chalamet in “A Complete Unknown.”
(Searchlight Pictures)
This nostalgic snapshot of the early career of legendary folk singer Bob Dylan racked up eight Oscar nominations, including for picture, director (James Mangold), adapted screenplay (Mangold and Jay Cocks), and actors Timothée Chalamet (Dylan), Edward Norton (Pete Seeger) and Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez). Though it exited the awards ceremony empty-handed (it also earned nods for sound and costume design), the film enjoyed solid awards-season grosses, largely positive reviews and further burnished Chalamet’s cred as a versatile and chameleonic leading man.
‘Elvis’ (8 nominations)
Austin Butler in “Elvis.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Tracking the meteoric rise and fall of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, this electric, eclectic, midcentury biopic impressed critics, shook up the box office and made a star out of Presley proxy Austin Butler. (Go ahead, say it: “Thank you, thank you very much!”) Though “Elvis” left the building on Oscar night with zero wins from eight nods — including picture, lead actor, cinematography and film editing — the movie brought the hip-swiveling singer back into the zeitgeist and gave director Baz Luhrmann yet another feather in his movie-musical cap.
‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ (8 nominations)
James Cagney stars as George M. Cohan in the 1942 biographical musical drama “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
(Turner Entertainment)
An oldie but a goodie, this popular — and patriotic — musical drama, starring James Cagney as prolific composer-singer-showman George M. Cohan, was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including for picture, director (Michael Curtiz), lead actor and supporting actor (Walter Huston). Cagney won his only Oscar for the exuberant role. (He also received nominations for 1938’s “Angels With Dirty Faces” and 1955’s “Love Me or Leave Me,” another musical biopic.) “Yankee” took home additional statuettes for sound and, as the category was then called, best scoring of a musical picture.
‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ (7 nominations)
Levon Helm and Sissy Spacek in “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
(Universal Pictures)
Country star Loretta Lynn may have been born a coal miner’s daughter, but Sissy Spacek was born to play her, as evidenced by the Oscar she won for her striking portrayal. The film, which spanned Lynn’s humble Kentucky youth and marriage at 15 through her extraordinary rise to chart-topping fame — and the nervous breakdown that nearly derailed her career — scored seven nominations, including for picture and adapted screenplay (by Thomas Rickman). Spacek, the film’s sole Oscar winner, would go on to earn four more lead actress nominations.
‘Bound for Glory’ (6 nominations)
David Carradine, who played folk singer Woody Guthrie in “Bound for Glory,” strums a guitar at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival.
(Keystone / Hulton Archive via Getty Images)
Seminal American folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was a pivotal supporting character in last year’s “A Complete Unknown,” had a biopic all to himself in this lyrical drama directed by the great Hal Ashby. Based on Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography and starring David Carradine as the itinerant, socially conscious musician, the movie was nominated for six Oscars, including picture, adapted screenplay and film editing. It won for Haskell Wexler’s evocative cinematography and Leonard Rosenman’s sweeping score — but remained more of a critical than commercial success.
‘Ray’ (6 nominations)
Jamie Foxx in “Ray.”
(Nicola Goode)
Jamie Foxx took home the Oscar, among many other prizes, for his vibrant embodiment of pioneering singer-songwriter-pianist Ray Charles. The ambitious box-office hit, which followed the influential crossover artist from his childhood in 1930s Georgia (when he went blind) through the late 1970s — and all the successes, detours and struggles in between — garnered six nominations, including best picture and director (Taylor Hackford). Along with the lead actor award, “Ray” won for sound mixing. Foxx also earned a supporting actor nod that same year for his fine dramatic work in Michael Mann’s “Collateral.”
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (5 nominations)
Rami Malek in “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
(Alex Bailey / Twentieth Century Fox)
Audiences and Academy voters were kinder than many critics to this often dazzling, mega-grossing ($910 million worldwide) portrait of groundbreaking Queen frontman and co-founder Freddie Mercury, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991. Although called out for sanitizing the queer, vocally gifted musician’s private — and not-so-private — life, the movie was nominated for five Oscars, including best picture. With wins for film editing, sound editing, sound mixing and, most notably, lead actor (for Rami Malek’s captivating turn as Mercury), the picture amassed the most statuettes in that year’s race.
‘Lady Sings the Blues’ (5 nominations)
Diana Ross in “Lady Sings the Blues.”
(Paramount Pictures)
Diana Ross made an auspicious feature acting debut in this sprawling biopic about the hardships and triumphs of celebrated jazz singer Billie Holiday. An iconic music star herself — she’d recently left the hit-making Supremes to go solo — Ross earned her first (and only) Oscar nod for her galvanizing recreation. The film received four additional nominations, including for original screenplay and costume design, but won none. Ross, who lost that year to Liza Minnelli in “Cabaret,” would go on to star in just a handful of other films. (“Mahogany,” anyone?)
‘Walk the Line’ (5 nominations)
Joaquin Phoenix in “Walk the Line.”
(Suzanne Tenner / 20th Century Fox)
The life of country-folk-rockabilly star Johnny Cash received a polished, emotionally rich big-screen treatment thanks to fine direction by James Mangold (who co-wrote with Gill Dennis) and powerful star turns by Joaquin Phoenix as the complicated Man in Black and Reese Witherspoon as his resilient wife, singer June Carter Cash. The popular, well-reviewed drama collected five Oscar nominations: lead actor and actress, costume design, film editing and sound mixing. Witherspoon captured Oscar gold — along with a raft of other awards — for her memorable performance.
The Married at First Sight UK star has been spotted partying with a famous face – and it’s not Grace
Samantha King Content Editor
15:00, 23 Oct 2025Updated 15:01, 23 Oct 2025
Ashley Dommett is partnered with midwife Grace Law on the programme(Image: Channel 4)
Married at First Sight UK groom Ashley Dommett has ignited speculation about a potential new romance after being caught on camera partying with two brides from last year’s series.
The 35-year-old Welshman is currently matched with midwife Grace Law, 31, on the programme’s tenth series presently broadcasting on E4. However, their conflicting values and differing humour has created tension within their partnership.
Whilst the pair remain coupled up on the programme, they have stopped following one another on Instagram in recent weeks, fuelling speculation that they separated once cameras stopped rolling.
An insider close to the production told The Sun: “Grace has gone rogue recently and been slamming the show and the edit on socials, and now her and Ashley aren’t following each other, it’s pretty clear they aren’t together any more.”
On Wednesday evening (October 22) former MAFS UK participant Hannah Norburn shared footage showing herself enjoying beverages with her Season 9 colleague Sionainn Carmichael, alongside Ashley, reports OK!
In the footage, the threesome each grin at the camera whilst dancing with drinks as Justin Bieber’s track Baby plays in the background. She captioned the post: “Mini MAFS reunion with a new recruit and the worlds most unlikely trio.”
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MAFS UK viewers were swift to swamp the comments section, questioning the stars about whether romance was developing.
However, Ashley maintained the group were “just friends,” disclosing: “It was actually Leisha Lightbody that organised the night but then had to work late and bail last minute.”
Both Hannah and Sionainn endured turbulent experiences during their series. Hannah was matched with a groom she repeatedly clashed with until he stopped communicating with her entirely, whilst also facing severe backlash from fellow brides who branded her a flirt with their partners.
She discovered comfort with co-star Orson, who similarly battled his own relationship troubles.
Meanwhile Sionainn departed the programme following an explosive row with her groom Ryan. She revealed to two fellow contestants that he admitted to “faking it all” throughout filming and viewed the experiment as merely a “holiday romance.”
Given their challenging ordeals, several comments beneath the footage targeted Hannah specifically, prompting Ashley to defend her.
“She’s actually a really nice person mate, had a class and needed fun night with them both last night,” he wrote.
Married at First Sight UK continues on Sunday night at 9pm on E4
“I’m in a huge, massive town I don’t really know,” he says, “and I’m looking for the movie district. And inevitably all the theaters are closed down. They’re all closed down. That’s what the dream is.”
I’m visiting Carpenter at his longtime production house in Hollywood on one of L.A.’s unjustly sunny October afternoons. A vintage “Halloween” pinball machine and a life-size Nosferatu hover near his easy chair. I tell him I don’t think Freud would have too much trouble interpreting that particular dream.
“No, I know,” he says, laughing. “I don’t have too much trouble with that either.”
Nonetheless, it truly haunts him — “and it has haunted me over the years for many dreams in a row,” he continues. “I’m either with family or a group, and I go off to do something and I get completely lost. [Freud] wouldn’t have too much trouble figuring that out either. I mean, none of this is very mysterious.”
Carpenter is a gruff but approachable 77 these days, his career as a film director receding in the rearview. The last feature he made was 2010’s “The Ward.” His unofficial retirement was partly chosen, partly imposed by a capricious industry. The great movie poster artist Drew Struzan died two days before I visited — Carpenter says he never met Struzan but loved his work, especially his striking painting for the director’s icy 1982 creature movie “The Thing” — and I note how that whole enterprise of selling a movie with a piece of handmade art is a lost one.
“The whole movie business that I knew, that I grew up with, is gone,” he replies. “All gone.”
John Carpenter with John Mulaney, appearing as a part of “Everybody’s in L.A.” at the Sunset Gower Studios in May 2024.
(Adam Rose / Netflix)
It hasn’t, thankfully, made him want to escape from L.A. He still lives here with his wife, Sandy King, who runs the graphic novel imprint Storm King Comics, which Carpenter contributes to. He gamely appeared on John Mulaney’s “Everybody’s in L.A.” series on Netflix and, earlier this year, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. gave him a Career Achievement Award — a belated lovefest for a veteran who was sidelined after “The Thing” flopped, cast out into indie darkness and was never personally nominated for an Oscar.
The thing that does keep Carpenter busy these days (other than watching Warriors basketball and playing videogames) is the thing that might have an even bigger cultural footprint than his movies: his music. With his adult son Cody and godson, Daniel Davies, Carpenter is once again performing live concerts of his film scores and instrumental albums in a run at downtown’s Belasco this weekend and next.
The synthy, hypnotic scores that became his signature in films like “Halloween” and “Escape from New York” not only outnumber his output as a director — he’s scored movies for several other filmmakers and recently made a handshake deal in public to score Bong Joon Ho’s next feature — but their influence and popularity are much more evident in 2025 than the style of his image-making.
From “Stranger Things” to “F1,” Carpenter’s minimalist palette of retro electronica combined with the groove-based, trancelike ethos of his music (which now includes four “Lost Themes” records) is the coin of the realm so many modern artists are chasing.
Very few composers today are trying to sound like John Williams; many of them want to sound like John Carpenter. The Kentucky-raised skeptic with the long white hair doesn’t believe me when I express this.
“Well, see, I must be stupid,” he says, “because I don’t get it.”
“The true evil in the world comes from people,” says Carpenter. “I know that nature’s pretty rough, but not like men.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Carpenter is quick to put himself down. He always says that he scored his own films because he was the only composer he could afford, and that he only used synths because they were cheap and he couldn’t properly write music for an orchestra. When I tell him that Daniel Wyman, the instrumentalist who helped program and execute the “Halloween” score in 1978, praised Carpenter’s innate knowledge of the “circle of fifths” and secondary dominants — bedrocks of Western musical theory that allowed Carpenter’s scores to keep the tension cooking — he huffs.
“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Carpenter says, halfway between self-deprecation and something more rascally. “It all comes, probably, from the years I spent in our front room with my father and listening to classical music. I’m sure I’m just digging this s— out.”
Whether by osmosis or genetics or possibly black magic, Carpenter clearly absorbed his powers from his father, Dr. Howard Carpenter, a classically trained violinist and composer. Classical music filled the childhood home in Bowling Green and for young John it was all about “Bach, Bach and Bach. He’s my favorite. I just can’t get enough of Johann there.”
It makes sense. Bach’s music has a circular spell quality and the pipe organ, resounding with reverb in gargantuan cathedrals, was the original synthesizer.
“He’s the Rock of Ages of music,” says Carpenter, who particularly loves the fugue nicknamed “St. Anne” and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. “Everybody would go back to Mozart or Beethoven. They are astonishing — Beethoven is especially astonishing — but they’re not my style. I don’t feel it like I do with Bach. I immediately got him.”
Carpenter was also a film score freak since Day 1. He cites the early electronic music in 1956’s “Forbidden Planet” and claims Bernard Herrmann and Dimitri Tiomkin as his two all-time favorites. Just listen, he says, to the way Tiomkin’s music transitions from the westerny fanfare under the Winchester Pictures logo to the swirling, menacing orchestral storm that accompanies “The Thing From Another World” title card in that 1951 sci-fi picture that Carpenter remixed as “The Thing.”
“The music is so weird, I cannot follow it,” he says. “But I love it.”
Yet Carpenter feels more personally indebted to rock ‘n’ roll: the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors. He wanted to be a rock star ever since he grew his hair long and bought a guitar in high school. He sang and performed R&B and psychedelic rock for sororities on the Western Kentucky campus as well as on a tour of the U.S. Army bases in Germany. He formed the rock trio Coupe de Villes with his buddies at USC and they made an album and played wrap parties.
He also kept soaking up contemporary influences, listening to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” while location scouting for “Halloween.” Peter Fonda later introduced Carpenter to Zevon and he wanted the director to adapt the song into a film that never happened (starring Fonda as the werewolf, but “this time he gets the girl,” Carpenter recalls). In the ’80s he blasted Metallica with his two boys and he still loves Devo.
It’s incredibly rare for a film director to score their own films, rarer still for one to spend decades on stage as a performing musician. The requisite personalities would seem diametrical.
“My dad was a performing musician, so it was just part of the family,” Carpenter says. However, until 2016, when Carpenter first toured with his music, he was consumed with stage fright. “I had an incident when I was in a play in high school,” he says. “I went up and I forgot my lines. Shame descended upon me and I had a tough time. I was scared all the time.”
The director credits his touring drummer, Scott Seiver, for helping him beat it.
“Your adrenaline carries you to another planet when that thing starts,” he sighs with pleasure. “You hear a wall of screaming people. It’s a big time.”
He pushes back against the idea that directors “hide behind the camera.”
“The pressure, that’s the biggest thing,” Carpenter says. “You put yourself under pressure from the studio, you’re carrying all this money, crew, you want to be on time.”
He remembers seeing some haggard making-of footage of himself in post-production on “Ghost of Mars” in 2001 and thinking: Oh my God, this guy is in trouble. “I had to stop,” he says. “I can’t do this to myself anymore. I can’t take this kind of stress — it’ll kill you, as it has so many other directors. The music came along and it’s from God. It’s a blessing.”
John Carpenter is grateful but he doesn’t believe in God. He believes that, when we die, “we just disperse — our energy disperses, and we return to what we were. We’re all stardust up there and the darkness created us, in a sense. So that’s what we have to make peace with. I point up to the infinite, the space between stars. But things stop when you die. Your heart stops, brain — everything stops. You get cold. Your energy dissipates and it just… ends. The End.”
This is not exactly a peaceful thought for him.
“I mean, I don’t want to die,” he adds. “I’m not looking forward to that. But what can you do? I can’t control it. But that’s what I believe and I’m alone in it. I can’t put that on anybody else. Everybody has their own beliefs, their own gods, their own afterlife.”
He describes himself as a “long-term optimist but a short-term pessimist.”
“I have hope,” he says, “put it that way.” Yet he looks around and sees a lot of evil.
“The true evil in the world comes from people,” says Carpenter, who has long used cinematic allegories to skewer capitalist pigs and bloodthirsty governments. “I know that nature’s pretty rough, but not like men. You see pictures of lions taking down their prey and you see the face of the prey and you say: ‘Oh, man.’ Humans do things like that and enjoy it. Or they do things like that for power or pleasure. Humans are evil but they’re capable of massive good — and they’re capable of the greatest art form we have: music.”
The greatest?
“You don’t have to talk about it. You just sit and listen to it. It’s not my favorite,” he clarifies, alluding to his first love, cinema — “but it’s the one that transcends centuries.”
Music has always been kinder to him than the movie business. That business recently reared its ugly head when A24 tossed his completed score for “Death of a Unicorn.” (At least he owns the rights and will be putting it out sometime soon.) In addition to the high he gets from playing live, he is currently working on a heavy metal concept album complete with dialogue. It’s called “Cathedral” and he’ll be playing some of it at the Belasco.
It’s essentially a movie in music form, based on a dream Carpenter had. Though not one he finds scary. What scares Carpenter, it seems, is not being in control.
That happened to him in the movie world, it’s happening more and more as what he calls the “frailties of age” mount and it happens in that nightmare about getting lost in a big city and not finding any theaters.
“But I can’t do anything about it,” he says. “What can I do? See, the only thing I can do is what I can control: music. And watching basketball.”
New data has shed light on the alarming rise of “anti-LGBTQIA+ targeted hate and rhetoric.”
On 20 October, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) released a new report offering a five-year overview of the online and offline anti-LGBTQIA+ landscape.
“This Dispatch provides an overview of anti-LGBTQ+ mobilisation and how it is exacerbated by tech platforms,” researchers Guy Fiennes and Paula-Charlotte Matlach wrote.
“It incorporates activity which meets ISD’s definition of targeted anti-LGBTQ+ hate (‘activity which seeks to dehumanise, demonise, harass, threaten or incite violence against an individual or community based on their LGBTQ+ identity’), as well as activity which discriminates against LGBTQ+ people (and those perceived to be LGBTQ+), and which erases LGBTQ+ voices or rolls back LGBTQIA+ rights.”
Divided into two parts, the first half of the study presents statistics from various organisations highlighting the offline hate LGBTQIA+ people have faced across the US, UK and wider Europe.
In the US, more than 20 per cent of hate crimes recorded were motivated by anti-LGBTQIA+ bias for the third consecutive year, according to FBI crime data released in August 2025.
NGO GLAAD reported 918 anti-LGBTQIA+ incidents across the US in 2024, including seven fatalities and 140 bomb threats. Among those incidents, 48 per cent of victims were trans, non-binary or gender-nonconforming individuals.
The ISD report also included data from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, which found that LGBTQIA+ people are five times more likely to be victims of violent crime in the US compared to non-LGBTQIA+ people, and nine times more likely to experience violent hate crimes.
While the latest UK crime statistics reported an 11 per cent decrease in annual anti-trans hate crimes and a two per cent decrease in hate crimes related to sexual orientation, there was a sharp increase in both categories between 2021 and 2022.
“ISD calculated that in the five years between 2020 and 2025, anti-trans hate crimes in the UK rose by 50 per cent, and sexual orientation crimes rose by 18.1 per cent overall. The vast majority of anti-LGBTQIA+ hate crimes are likely unreported,” the report revealed.
Across wider Europe, a 2023 EU Agency for Fundamental Rights survey found that violence and harassment against LGBTQIA+ people had increased from 11 per cent to 14 per cent, while anti-LGBTQIA+ bullying in schools jumped from 46 per cent to 67 per cent.
When examining government and legislative actions, all three countries showed an increase in anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment led by government officials and lawmakers. The Trump administration, the UK’s Reform Party and Hungary were listed among the biggest offenders.
In the second half of the report, the ISD explored the online harm endured by the LGBTQIA+ community over the past five years.
Following a recent analysis of US-based violent extremist accounts and groups targeting the community, researchers found that “online hate spiked in response to real-world events and political developments.”
The data also revealed that the trans community is increasingly targeted by violent extremist accounts across various platforms, imageboards and forums.
“Anti-trans hate speech rose from 35 per cent of all anti-LGBTQIA+ speech in October to November to 46 per cent in December to January. There is a notable overlap between groups that direct violence and hate speech against LGBTQIA+ people and groups identified as threats to US national security and the government,” researchers explained.
Elsewhere, the study highlighted GLAAD’s 2025 Social Media Safety Index report, which found a lack of moderation of anti-LGBTQIA+ hate on social media platforms, alongside over-moderation of LGBTQIA+-inclusive accounts and content.
The report also examined the negative impact of AI content moderation systems, revealing that they have been “found to censor queer users who use ‘slurs’ to self-label (e.g. queer, gay, or femboy).”
“AI-driven censorship of LGBTQIA+ content that it labels as ‘sexualised’ or ‘offensive’ reflects offline biases that unfairly label queerness as inherently sexual and inappropriate,” researchers added.
On Thursday morning, fans of Strictly were shocked after Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman announced they had quit their presenting roles ends – but who could be set to fill their shoes?
A HOST a A-listers were spotted leaving Kim Kardashian’s surprise 45th birthday party in London last night.
Model Kate Moss, Wedding Crashers actress Isla Fisher and singer FKA Twigs looked all partied out as they left the chic soiree.
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Kate Moss looked all partied out as she left Kim Kardashian’s 45thi birthday bashCredit: GoffKim was seen rocking a barely-there frock as she braved rainy London last nightCredit: SplashThe US star also slipped into a second cream sheer corset for the eveningCredit: SplashModel Kate was seen leaving the swanky eventCredit: Splash
The party was held at Kim’s close friend and photographer Mert Alas’ swanky London home.
Kim put on a showstopping look in not one but TWO sexy mini dresses.
She was seen rocking a cut-out frock with her chest barely covered by a some loose material, while her black underwear was on show.
The KUWTK star was surrounded by her entourage and a member of her team who shielded her with an umbrella as she braved rainy London on Wednesday.
All’s Fair, which premieres on Hulu on November 4, follows a team of successful female divorce attorneys who start their own practice in Los Angeles, California.
Kim leads the cast in her second scripted series ever, following her acting debut in American Horror Story: Delicate in 2023.
FKA Twigs went all out in a faux fur jacket and satin trousersCredit: SplashMomager Kris Jenner also rocked the all-black and satin themeCredit: SplashKate was seen leaving the home of Kim’s best pal and photographer Mert AlasCredit: SplashSarah Paulson looked chic in a blazer and satin trousersCredit: SplashKate opted for a mini dress and satin coatCredit: SplashIsla Fisher was spotted wearing blue denim jeans and an orange t-shirtCredit: Splash
If you watched 54 Ultra’s music video for “Upside Down” and came away thinking it was a relic from 1980s music programs like “Solid Gold” or “Night Tracks” — you’d be forgiven for making the assumption.
Aside from the 25-year-old’s vintage wardrobe, hairstyle, and ‘stache that harks to that decade, the song itself — a silky, boppy ballad that channels the energy of groups like the Chi-Lites or solo acts like Johnnie Taylor — sounds and feels ripped from the era in a manner that’s hard to faithfully re-create these days.
That old-school vibe isn’t exactly how 54 Ultra started off when he began putting out solo music three years ago, but it’s what he’s settled into nowadays. The artist, whose real name is JohnAnthony Rodríguez (and yes, his name is supposed to be written together), hails from New Jersey and is of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent.
The name he settled on, 54 Ultra, came by way of uniting Frank Ocean’s 2011 album “Nostalgia, Ultra” and the historic nightclub Studio 54. It was sometime between 2019 and 2020 that he interned at a few different recording studios, songwriting in his spare time with the intention of writing and producing music for others.
“I remember I was trying to find a way to make a living out of music and introduce myself to other artists,” he says over the phone, recalling all the demos he had recorded and presented to artists he’d cross paths with.
“People would be like ‘Who’s singing this? Who demo’ed this?’ And I’d say ‘It was me.’ And then they’d say, ‘You keep it.’ After that [happened] a couple of times I realized that I might as well put it out by myself.”
His first solo singles, like the high-energy “What Do I Know (Call Me Baby)” and “Sierra,” were firmly rooted in the indie rock family tree. It wasn’t until more recently, first with “Where Are You” and later “Heaven Knows,” that Rodríguez began to explore a more retro and soulful approach.
The latter track made an appearance in a 2024 “rhythm and soul” playlist curated by Mistah Cee, an Australian DJ and music selector, who included the song between Bobby Caldwell’s “My Flame” and Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Devotion.” The segues between tracks are seamless, in no small part due to Rodríguez’s immaculate production and fealty to the tempo of the times. His was the only contemporary track on the playlist, but it fooled many who eventually caught on to the rest of his work.
“On YouTube, I remember that was a nice boost, because people would comment, ‘Who came from Mistah Cee?’ Or, ‘Who thought this was an oldie?’ or whatnot,” he says.
To date, it’s not only Mistah Cee’s most viewed playlist by a wide margin (5.6 million and counting) but also 54 Ultra’s most-streamed song on Spotify with 27 million. “That was a very organic wave of things happening, and I’m very grateful for that also because I didn’t expect [it] at all,” says Rodríguez.
Latin soul, of the kind that recalls the doo-wop and boogaloo era of the 1950s and ‘60s, has seen a resurgence in the past few years. Artists like Chicano Batman, Thee Sinseers, Los Yesterdays and the Altons, as well as solo acts like Jason Joshua and Adrian Quesada, have made inroads with listeners and on the radio. Rodríguez is enthusiastic about this opportunity to show different facets of Latin culture and music through this genre.
“I just feel like I’m grateful to be a part of that family, or that idea that people relate all the music together and being a part of that scene is pretty nice,” he says.
Despite his Gen Z status, he notably lacks the “smartphone face” that’s rampant among pop artists and celebrities — and is partial to dressing in an anachronistic way, which he pulls off with gusto. It might be easy to assume his regular getup is a result of wanting to match the music, but Rodriguez insists he was already dressing that way much before he ever considered dabbling in soul. There is a kind of freedom he associates with the wardrobe of that time.
“[The clothes] were never a costume or a gimmick,” he says. “Whether I did music or not, I enjoyed how it fits because that [period] just has the best clothes. I think that was peak menswear. No one cared about any type of gender assignment with clothing; everybody wore what they wanted, and all the measurements were the same … it seemed like everybody had fun back then. They weren’t worried so much about what people thought.”
“[The clothes] were never a costume or a gimmick,” says 54 Ultra of his vintage style.
(Max Tardio)
He shouts out Blood Orange, a.k.a. artist-composer Dev Hynes, as a major inspiration for him. “That’s my favorite guy,” he says. But at the same time, he offers an eclectic list of artists whose music lights fires for his own output; Brazilian musicians like Jorge Ben Jor, Lô Borges and Evinha have made his rotation, along with some moody ‘80s bands like the Smiths, the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
“And Prefab Sprout,” he adds excitedly. “That’s my jam. That stuff’s crazy.”
His reputation has grown this past year, putting him in rooms he never expected to be invited to. Earlier this year he found himself producing the song “All I Can Say” for Kali Uchis, off her 2025 album, “Sincerely,” and recently opened for her during a concert stop in San José.
Earlier this month, he kicked off a world tour promoting his latest EP, “First Works,” that will take him from D.C. and Brooklyn to London and Paris. The schedule includes multiple stops in California, including two in Los Angeles: Oct. 26 at the Roxy Theatre and Oct. 28 at the Echoplex.
For Rodríguez, a tour like this is the culmination of everything he’s worked toward in his admittedly still nascent but steadily growing career. He confirms that he’s been chipping away at a debut LP, which will brandish a more “fast and punchy” rock sound that recall his days playing basement shows.
“Anytime anybody asked me what I wanted to do, I would say: ‘I want to perform anywhere I can and for anybody, wherever that may be.’ I’ve always wanted things to resonate, and I’ve always wanted it to make sense.”
Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood has opened up about his long-running feud with a BBC co-star, explaining how their rivalry came to be from the very beginning
Strictly is back (Image: PA)
Strictly Come Dancing’s Craig Revel Horwood has spilled the beans on his long-standing feud with Brendan Cole, describing them as “archenemies”. The pair, who were both part of the BBC show, had a history of clashing.
In an interview with Radio Times, Craig said: “In my screen test I had to judge footage of two contestants rehearsing. I said, ‘She can hardly walk down the stairs, and the professional has the bowest legs I’ve ever seen’.
“That couple was Natasha Kaplinsky and Brendan Cole, and they went on to win it. By the end of that series, it was nail-bitingly exciting.”
He added: “It won the hearts and minds of a nation. As for Brendan, we really were archenemies. He was very mouthy and he’d say, ‘Oh, what would you know?’ So I secretly studied ballroom with Len’s wife Sue, because knowledge is power.”
Brendan was a regular feature on Strictly from its inception in 2004 until 2018, when he was told his contract wouldn’t be renewed, according to the Express, reports Wales Online.
Reflecting on Brendan’s departure, Craig said: “I think it was a good time for Brendan to go. He’s got a fantastic platform and can now build his career. You can’t dance forever.”
However, Brendan seemed hesitant to hang up his dancing shoes completely. Speaking on ITV’s Lorraine, he confessed: “It’s quite, actually, hard to talk about. The BBC haven’t renewed my contract. We get contracted year upon year.
“They’ve made an editorial decision to not have me back on the show. I’m a little bit in shock.
“I’m quite emotional, a bit raw about it. It’s done via a process of a phone call and stuff.
“I have had 15 incredible series on the show. I’m very proud of the whole show. It’s a great team.”
Craig has since confessed that he reached out to Brendan following their falling out, though for a rather particular motive.
He admits his reasons behind the peace offering weren’t entirely unselfish.
Speaking on Kate Thornton’s podcast White Wine Question Time, Craig said: “I invited him around two years ago to my house. I hadn’t spoken to him for years. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to see Brendan,’ just to see if he’s working..”
Kate erupted with laughter: “What a b***h!”.
Craig added: “Oh god this is going out to people, isn’t it? Anyway, he had an electric car. He was showing off. We hated each other.”
