The story of the former cricket prodigy and car crash survivor Freddie Flintoff is fascinating … but this documentary shows he has such extreme PTSD that he keeps slamming the shutters down

Freddie Flintoff is numb. As the 98-minute Disney+ documentary Flintoff begins, we find its subject sitting in a hospital room. He can’t feel his lip, the one that was torn from his face in a nightmarish car accident on the Top Gear track in 2022. But more than that, he is mentally checked out. As one doctor after another tells him that he is recovering well and looking good, he stares at the ground dejectedly. He just wants everyone to stop sugarcoating everything and tell him the truth, he says. What he wants to hear is that he looks like “a fucking mess”.

Flintoff was designed as the big unveiling of the new, post-accident Freddie Flintoff. His days as a cricketing prodigy are over and so, it seems, are his days as a permanent light entertainment fixture. He is older, slower and more reflective. He is also plagued, night after night, by looping footage of the accident that ended Top Gear. Ostensibly this is where we’ll get to watch his comeback.

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© Photograph: Kerry Spicer/Disney+

© Photograph: Kerry Spicer/Disney+

‘Nobody has been harder … about Donald Trump than me,’ Maher says after fellow comedian compared his meal with US president to meeting Hitler

Bill Maher has responded to Larry David’s satirical essay in the New York Times that compared Maher’s glowing account of having dinner with Donald Trump to dining with Adolf Hitler.

Maher, a vocal critic of Trump in the past, had dinner with the US president and a group of his high-profile supporters, including their mutual friend Kid Rock, on 31 March. On an episode of his talkshow Real Time on 11 April, Maher described Trump as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on”, saying: “Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was – I swear to God – absent, at least on this night with this guy.”

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© Composite: Getty images

© Composite: Getty images

The executive told business summit that most people no longer want cinemas and ‘we deliver the programme to you in a way you want to watch it’

Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, has defended his company’s reputation, saying the streamer is “saving Hollywood” by securing an audience for content which would otherwise disappear.

Speaking at the TIME100 summit in New York on Wednesday, Sarandos said Netflix was providing a much-needed service to those people – for instance in rural areas – who are keen to see films, but without the means of going to a cinema.

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© Photograph: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME

© Photograph: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME

Late-night hosts discuss Donald Trump’s plans to install two 100-ft flagpoles at the White House, and Elon Musk stepping back from Doge to focus on Tesla

With many late-night hosts still on holiday, Jimmy Kimmel looks at Donald Trump’s new White House flagpole obsession and Elon Musk’s Tesla woes.

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© Photograph: Youtube

© Photograph: Youtube

In its second season, what happens in the acclaimed Star Wars thriller is hard to separate from what’s happening in Gaza now

In the new and final season of Andor, an occupied civilian population is massacred; their cries for help ignored by the Empire-run media, which instead paint the victims as terrorist threats to public safety. Meanwhile, the politicians who have enough backbone to speak out, and use the word “genocide” to describe these aggressions, are met with violent suppression.

Andor goes there. And when it does, Star Wars fans will be forced to reckon with how this story isn’t about what happens “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”. It’s about what’s unfolding right now in Gaza.

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© Photograph: Lucasfilm Ltd™

© Photograph: Lucasfilm Ltd™

The quintessential English actor answers your questions about being posh, appearing on I’m a Celebrity, and asking parked motorists to turn off their engines

I’m obsessed with the BBC Radio 4 programme, Nigel Havers’ Ravers, where you recount your experiences during the ecstasy-fuelled 90s summers of love. I’ve never been sure if it was a) genuine, b) a brilliant and strange parody, or c) a fever dream of my own imagination. What’s the truth, Nigel? UncleMonty
I just don’t remember it, so I’m Googling it … “Dermot O’Leary, Nigel Havers Ravers, the definitive guide to the 90s underground rave scene from a man who lived through it.” Raves are where people go mad, take a load of drugs and dance all night, right? I don’t think I’ve been to a rave in my life. I must have been bullshitting.

I had you in my cab once in Sydney, where you were expounding to your fellow passengers that you could identify the drama school of any young performer on stage. That was 35 years ago, mate. Still the case, you reckon? moodmeister
I don’t know what I meant by that, so I’m afraid that’s also bollocks.

Do you still ask parked motorists to switch off their engines? gregc1381
All the time. I tap on the window and say: “Do you mind turning your engine off?” The majority go: “Oh, sorry, quite right,” but a few do say: “Fuck off, what are you talking about?” I carry a little card that explains that an idling exhaust expels 150 balloons full of toxic air per minute. If nobody idled in Greater London tomorrow, it would cut pollution by a third. I know this because I was a Stop Idling ambassador for Westminster Council. I’m a fierce anti-idler.

Do you have a portrait in your attic that is mysteriously ageing? You look exactly the same as you did 40 years ago. Megatron66
Yes, but don’t tell anyone.

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© Photograph: Ollie Upton

© Photograph: Ollie Upton

After the apparent defanging of the once critical talkshow host, can the president get more stars onside? Some nuts will be tougher to crack than others

If President Trump invited you to the White House, would you go? This is the question US hacks and other media personalities have been asking themselves since the inauguration, an American version of that self-flattering British perennial: when Buckingham Palace calls, will you be buying a fascinator to accept the OBE? In both cases, no matter how pluckily anti-establishment an individual may have been to that point, the answer is often a resounding: you bet!

First, the rationalisations. In the US context, respect for the “office of the president”, for which there is no British equivalent that doesn’t prompt sniggering, is taken seriously enough that if the president calls, you don’t turn him down. There’s the standard argument in favour of engagement over boycott as a more constructive path to account-holding. And there is, for hacks, the perfectly reasonable rationale of pursuing the story. Of course, you’re going to say yes if Trump calls. How could you not?

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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© Photograph: HBO

© Photograph: HBO

“Musk says that he will dial back his work with the government so that he can spend more time with all 10 of his families,” Kimmel said.

This drama about dancers could have been as fun as Fame in tutus. Instead, it is a jarring, cringe-inducing mess. Wait till you see Simon Callow as an evil billionaire!

At first, Étoile looks as if it’s shaping up to be Fame in pointe shoes. One character even knowingly quotes the “This is where you start paying, in sweat” speech. This would be fine – great, even, because who didn’t love the quintessential 80s series about the high-energy kids from New York City’s High School of the Performing Legwarmers? The problem is that, as the new venture from Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino progresses, it doesn’t seem to be sure what it is. Apart from Whimsical with a capital W, an attitude that rarely works out well for anyone.

The setup is simple. Two dance companies – Le Ballet National in Paris and the Metropolitan Ballet Theater in New York City – are struggling after Covid and assorted other modern pressures such as anti-elitist attitudes and everybody’s terrible attention spans. So what if they swapped their top dancers and choreographers and launched a huge publicity campaign about it so everyone abandoned YouTube and became interested in ballet instead?

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© Photograph: Philippe Antonello/Prime Video

© Photograph: Philippe Antonello/Prime Video

Penn Badgley’s ‘sexy’ serial killer story was once ludicrously fun. But despite plenty of fan-pleasing cameos and a propulsive twist, the show’s sign-off is so bad that it’s offensive

You, in which a serial killer and stalker of women, but a sexy one, is somehow fashioned into the hero of the piece, is a fundamentally preposterous show. It washes its hands of plausibility in favour of vocal fry, phones without passwords and quasi-literary second-person monologues. Perhaps most preposterous of all is that it has stretched the story over five seasons. You used to be fun, at least: a guilty-ish pleasure, aware of its own over-the-top silliness, that once gave the impression of knowing that it wasn’t so much pushing at the edges of credulity as body-barging it into an abyss. But as the seasons have ticked away, the satire has seeped out, leaving a mess of its own making that it tries, and inevitably struggles, to clear up.

The main problem is that Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is both the hero and the villain. In this final – and that really is a mercy – season, You falls back on its old habit of not knowing which it would prefer him to be. After a predictably murderous stint as a lecturer at an English university, Joe is now married to billionaire and philanthropist Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), living in New York with her and with his newly returned son Henry. He is no longer pretending to be dead and another person. Instead, he is a public figure, hiding from his many misdeeds in plain sight.

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© Photograph: CLIFTON PRESCOD/NETFLIX

© Photograph: CLIFTON PRESCOD/NETFLIX

The video-streaming platform has revolutionized how we watch things. Here’s a timeline of its biggest moments.

How do you control a class of kids after the whole nation’s watched you backstabbing on The Traitors, snogging strangers on Love Island or starving half to death on Hunted? Three teachers reveal all

When English teacher Joe Scott used to sign homework planners, it was because students were in trouble. But things changed in January, when the Southampton-based secondary schoolteacher appeared in the latest series of the BBC reality show The Traitors. Pupils started voluntarily pressing their planners into his hands – for autographs. “It felt funny,” says the 38-year-old. “It was such a juxtaposition.”

Teachers have always gone on reality TV – but they haven’t always come off well. In 2001, a contestant on the second series of Big Brother was fired from her job at an east London girls’ school after her towel slipped on air. Six years later in 2007, parents complained after an American elementary school teacher missed 22 days of work to appear on The Bachelor. Just last year, a Canadian educator was let go after taking unauthorised leave to compete on Survivor.

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© Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock

© Photograph: ITV/Shutterstock

The late night host also described the papal conclave as determining “who will be handed the keys to the popemobile” on Tuesday.

To mark 20 years since the first ever YouTube video, we’d like to hear your favourite YouTube TV shows

The first YouTube video, a 19-second clip posted entitled “Me at the zoo” posted by co-founder Jawed Karim, was uploaded on 23 April 2005. Now the most popular video-sharing platform in the world, YouTube has expanded far beyond short clips and into TV streaming.

To mark the anniversary, we’d like to hear your favourite YouTube TV shows of the moment. You can tell us your favourite and why below.

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© Photograph: AKP Photos/Alamy

© Photograph: AKP Photos/Alamy

No music, no script, no narration, no editing – slow TV like this is exactly the balm we need these days

Do you reach for your phone first thing in the morning as soon as you wake up? Me too. Only, for the past week, it’s not my WhatsApp, email or social media I’ve been desperate to check, but how many moose have managed to swim across the Ångerman river overnight.

I know. I need more going on in my life, right? How else to explain my fascination with watching dozens of Swedish moose (yes, moose is the plural of moose, sadly not “meese”) undertake their annual spring migration to summer pastures?

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© Photograph: SVT/AP

© Photograph: SVT/AP

Comedy spacecraft thefts, passive-aggressive in-laws and a planet being fracked to death – the revolution just got playful, comrades!

Comrades! Welcome back to the revolution. Andor is the Star Wars TV show with the sharpest political acumen: yes, like everything in the franchise, it’s about an underdog rebel movement fighting against a totalitarian empire in space, and it has plenty of thrilling battle sequences, but here there are no Jedi mind powers or cute green backwards-talking psychics. Under the hard-nosed stewardship of writer Tony Gilroy, Andor bins the magic and myth and replaces them with the reality of anti-fascist struggle, where the good guys are ready to risk their lives for freedom. It’s the Star Wars spin-off with the strongest claim to being a proper drama – but, in season two’s opening triple bill, it shows it can do sly, wry comedy too.

We’re a year on from where we left off, which is four years before the Death Star blows up at the end of the original movie – the point at which all the work done by our hero, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), pays off. We pick him up in an imperial military facility, where he’s posing as a test pilot for a spacecraft he intends to nick. There’s a classic Andor moment where Cassian meets the rebellion’s woman on the inside, a junior technician who has gathered her courage to make her contribution, and knows the rage of her superiors will be directed at her once Cassian has flown off. “If I die tonight, was it worth it?” she asks him, and gets a rousing speech in response, urgently whispered.

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© Photograph: Des Willie/Lucasfilm Ltd.

© Photograph: Des Willie/Lucasfilm Ltd.

Agatha Christie is one of those writers whose books have launched a thousand adaptations. OK, if not a thousand, then at least enough to sustain decades of interest — in some cases, about a clear century. Read More

It was a television event that could hardly be more Canadian if it tried. On the April 8 episode of CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Mark McKinney of The Kids in the Hall debuted his impression of Prime Minister Mark Carney. Read More

A television show that ended 50 years ago is among the most popular programs on modern streaming platforms. Don’t believe it? It’s true — where there’s Gunsmoke, there’s fire. Read More

Scooby-Doo and Netflix too! The talking Great Dane and his mystery-solving pals are finally headed to the screen for a live-action series. After Netflix announced in April 2024 that it was committed to the project, eight initial episodes are now on the way. They’ll explore how the gang first joined forces for their comically spooky hijinks, according to the streaming platform. Read More

The comic’s love for his home town leads him on this charming and wacky odyssey to find ‘his people’ across the pond. Brummies of the world unite!

Joe Lycett is on a mission to visit every one of the 17 Birminghams in the US and the one in Canada too. Why? Because he is a native of the UK’s own Birmingham, and he wants to see if there is any shared identifiable vibe and to foster a sense of togetherness among the scattered Brummies. Also, as he says, he has a pressing need to make a travelogue for Sky “and if anyone can do it, it’s Frank Sk– … it’s me”. There is also a Birmingham on the moon (a remnant of an impact crater – save your jokes, please, that’s Joe’s department) and one in Belgium. But “we don’t have a lunar budget and I’m not going to Belgium,” says Lycett, so off he sets round the US in a tour bus suitably decked out in Cat Deeley and Alison Hammond scatter cushions. They both hail from Birmingham in the UK. This is not difficult, people. Do try to keep up.

Joe has a sheaf of “friendship agreements” for the Birmingham mayors to sign – including a promise to stand together in Nato’s stead should it fall – a pen once used by the Queen Mother with which to do so, a collection of commemorative plaques and some Birmingham-centred presents to give to the people he meets along the way. There is Cadbury’s chocolate, of course, originally manufactured by one of the Quaker families whose histories are centred round the city; Bird’s custard (“sugar and asbestos”) invented by Brummie chemist Alfred Bird in 1837; HP Sauce (born of Nottingham but made famous under the aegis of the Midland Vinegar Company); and some of the 723 novels by “the David Walliams of her day”, Dame Barbara Cartland, originally of Edgbaston. Not all of these facts are in the programme, by the way. Joe’s enthusiastic spirit and evident love for his home town inspired me to go digging. He has that effect on you. And indeed on his driver, the North Carolinian Randy who, once he has figured out what little there is to figure out – and, indeed, that there is that little to figure out – relaxes and gets into the swing of things and functions as the perfect foil for his passenger.

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© Photograph: North One TV/©Sky UK Ltd

© Photograph: North One TV/©Sky UK Ltd

The news program has faced mounting pressure from both President Trump and its corporate ownership at Paramount, the parent company of CBS News.

© Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile for Collision, via Getty Images

The Star Wars prequel spans 12 episodes

© Disney/The Independent

It was the biggest open secret in TV history – but even though millions knew it was coming, that death still stunned beyond belief. Now, can it really achieve the impossible … and make us root for the killer?

This article contains spoilers for the The Last of Us season two. Please do not read unless you have seen the first two episodes.

When is a twist not a twist? This is a question many people will be asking after this week’s brutal episode of The Last of Us. Titled Through the Valley, it demonstrated more clearly than ever that the show has two types of viewer: those who primarily know it as a television series and were stunned beyond belief by the violent, unheralded death of Pedro Pascal’s Joel at the hands of Kaitlyn Dever’s vengeful Abby; and those who have played the video game on which it is based.

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© Photograph: HBO/2025 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. HBO® and all related programs are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.

© Photograph: HBO/2025 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. HBO® and all related programs are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.

“Is there anything more Catholic than waiting until Monday to die so you don’t upstage Jesus Christ?” Kimmel said.

The second season is underway, and we’ve got all the details on the post-apocalyptic show

© Liane Hentscher/HBO

Our Tech will have huge impact on the future of TV. We have the possibility to provide multiple new levels of interactions   RA Pro :Could you please provide us ...

L’article EyeCandyLab to impact the future of TV ! est apparu en premier sur Réalité Augmentée - Augmented Reality.