tue 12/08/2025

celebrity

The God of Soho, Shakespeare's Globe

In God we trust (or not): Phil Daniels plays The Big God opposite Miranda Foster as the Missus

It's grin and bear it - even on occasion bare it - time at Shakespeare's Globe, which closes its 2011 season not with a bang but with a wearyingly facetious whimper. A nice idea that in differing ways evokes such previous Globe newbies as Helen and...

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CD: David Guetta - Nothing but the Beat

David Guetta's 'Nothing but the Beat': 'The lowest common denominator just got lower'

If you want the distilled sound of global hypercapitalism, David Guetta is your man. A genial, workaholic Frenchman, he has created the sound of superclubs from Miami to Dubai to Kuala Lumpur – the sort of clubs where the VIP section is bigger than...

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Celebrity Big Brother, Channel 5

There were rumours – on Twitter, naturally – that Charlie Sheen was going into the House. But, alas, these were unfounded, and he didn’t. Maybe even Sheen has to draw the line somewhere. Instead, only four people I’d heard of actually went ahead and...

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DVD: Anna Nicole

“I wanna blow you all… a kiss” are our hapless heroine’s first and last words in this opera dealing with Anna Nicole Smith's real-life rise and fall in strip-cartoon, morality-ballad style. But it’s not by any means the shallow, voyeuristic tack-...

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Stephen Fry: In Confidence, Sky Arts

When a celebrity lets their public mask slip, something wonderful and also disconcerting can happen: they can noticeably become someone else. If they’re lucky, that change can be so marked that they become just another face in a crowd. Of course, if...

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Lead Balloon, BBC Two

It’s been more than two and a half years since the third series of Jack Dee’s comedy about a comedian. Everyone in Rick Spleen's world looks a little bit older, a mite more pinched and drawn, as if proximity to the man about the house is draining...

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Lily Allen: From Riches to Rags, Channel 4

Lily and Sarah Allen, vintage before their time

Why were any of us watching Lily Allen: From Riches to Rags last night, about the pop star's move from selling millions of tracks to stacks of vintage clothes? It was not because we need a lesson in the hardships of starting up a business - Allen...

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Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer, National Portrait Gallery

What ever happened to Ida Kar? If the question is not quite on the level of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, perhaps the answer is more interesting, if less melodramatic. Ida Kar - born Ida Karamian in Russia of Armenian parents, resident of Cairo...

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Waking the Dead, BBC One/ Celebrity Naked Ambition, Channel 4

By the trail of dead shall ye know Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, who bounces back irascibly for a ninth and final series of Waking the Dead. For once, British TV has the edge over its American counterpart. While Jerry Bruckheimer's US series...

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Great British Food Revival, BBC Two

White, knobbly, rotund and past their sell-by date – and those cauliflowers don’t look too healthy either

If you know which side your bread is buttered on, you should be up in arms about the white fluffy stuff you’ve been hoodwinked into putting into your toaster, implied a positively evangelical Michel Roux Jr in this first of a five-part series on the...

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Drowning on Dry Land, Jermyn Street Theatre

There’s a fascinating programme note for this production of Drowning on Dry Land, taken from an interview given by its author for the play's premiere at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. Back in 2004, Alan Ayckbourn told The Yorkshire...

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Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio and Street, National Portrait Gallery

British Museum Underground Station: 'a terrific evocation of a lost world'

If you’ve seen pictures of the Ballets Russes, then you’ve seen Hoppé photographs. But then, if you’ve seen any society pictures from the 1920s and 1930s, then you’ve seen Hoppé. And famous writers. In fact, for portrait photography in Britain...

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