Comfort TV shows for the dead of Canadian winter

10 janvier 2026 à 16:26

Sometimes you want television that challenges you. Something that’s genre bending, envelope pushing, plot twisting. Something that’s the screen equivalent of an exercise routine. But other times, you want a show that carries adjectives you’d use for a sweater — cosy, comforting, familiar. Something built around a good yarn. Read More

‘Bring me a gigantic Gladiator who can cradle me like a baby!’: behind the scenes of the most joyous show on TV

The Guardian

Par :Helen Pidd

10 janvier 2026 à 13:00

When it first returned to our screens, people said Gladiators was a tired format. They had clearly forgotten the joy of watching half-clad hulks with silly names go to battle, says superfan Helen Pidd as she heads backstage

When Gladiators is filming at the Sheffield Arena, it feels as if everyone is in on the joke. The woman in the ticket office looks at me gravely. “Before I give you these,” she says, “I need to ask a question. These are very good tickets. You’re in the camera block, near the red contestant’s friends and family. So there’s something I need to know. If the camera is on you, are you going to duck and hide and get all embarrassed? Or are you going to go absolutely flipping mental?”

I’ve been up until the early hours painting portraits of my favourite Gladiators with the precise hope of making it on to the telly. Of course I’m going to go absolutely flipping mental! I’ve been waiting for this day since 1992.

Heated Rivalry: this queer Canadian hockey romp is so hot it threatens to scorch the ice it skates on

The Guardian

Par :Rhik Samadder

10 janvier 2026 à 08:00

Ravishing actors, charged glances, buttocks like pneumatic hams … this is one steamy love story. But it’s far more than just a porny sport-based bodice-ripper

I was surprised to learn that ice hockey romance is a genre, a popular one. Surprising, but it makes sense. Love in a cold setting has a fairytale quality. It’s why the great Russian romances endure, though they aren’t relatable. Most of us don’t sit by windows, waiting for a horse to bring word that our cousin has survived the winter in Smolensk. Perhaps it’s time for a modern Doctor Zhivago? Enter Heated Rivalry (Saturday 10 January, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), a Canadian queer romp so hot it threatens to scorch the ice it skates upon.

Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are star players from Montreal and Moscow respectively, mysteriously drawn to each other on the rink, in the full glare of the media. Well, not that mysteriously. The co-leads get down to business almost immediately, with a not-quite meet cute in a shower room. Every episode thereafter features charged glances, sweaty necks and muscular pumping. Even the camera feels as if it’s in lust, gliding over 8%-fat sports star bodies and the glass walls of luxury flats. It’s an audacious feat, making ice hockey sexy. Those padded uniforms usually make wearers resemble the Thing from The Fantastic Four.

Stephen Colbert on ICE killing of Minnesota woman: ‘A senseless yet entirely predictable tragedy’

The Guardian

Par :Guardian staff

9 janvier 2026 à 17:24

Late-night hosts discuss the Trump administration’s torrent of untruths over the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good

Late-night hosts expressed outrage over the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) officer in Minneapolis.

Stop the blues a-callin’! It’s our guide to the ultimate comfort TV

The Guardian

Par :Lucy Mangan · Rebecca Nicholson · Sarah Dempster · Phil Harrison · Kate Abbott · Stuart Heritage · Hollie Richardson · Chitra Ramaswamy · Leah Harper · Jenny Stevens · Alexi Duggins · Ann Lee · Benjamin Lee · Chris Wiegand · Rachel Aroesti and Hannah J Davies

9 janvier 2026 à 14:00

An afterlife sitcom, an angry penguin, tossed salad and scrambled eggs, and a Corby trouser press … our writers pick the shows they would happily watch on a loop for ever

I love every character and every aspect of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There isn’t a weak link in the cast and they work together as seamlessly and apparently joyfully as you could wish.

Becoming Victoria Wood review – intimate and hilarious portrait of the trailblazing standup

The Guardian

Par :Cath Clarke

9 janvier 2026 à 01:01

Featuring Wood, her famous sidekicks Julie Walters and Celia Imrie and other female standups, this documentary is tender, moving and an absolute hoot

There is a moment at the start of this documentary about the comedian Victoria Wood when you realise what she was up against at the beginning of her career: a snippet from the archives of Melvyn Bragg hailing her as Britain’s first female standup comedian. That wasn’t entirely the case, but it seems unthinkable now that it took until the 1980s for women to break through in any numbers. In 1985, when season one of Wood’s sketch show As Seen on TV aired on BBC2, there were sniffs of doubt that a woman could front a comedy programme, let alone a northern woman. How wrong they were. Clips from the show, featuring Wood, Julie Walters and Celia Imrie, are a hoot: high on a tipsy energy, the performers are all on the edge of collapsing into giggles.

For those who grew up with Wood as a national treasure, Becoming Victoria Wood will be a revelation. Her standup routines in the 1980s blazed a trail, with jokes about tampons and cellulite. She had a lonely childhood, was ignored by her mother and was shy and self-conscious about her weight. (Later press coverage fixating on her size was vile.) She didn’t feel clever or good-looking enough but she had a fierce streak of ambition that seemed to come from nowhere.

What is Stranger Things’s Conformity Gate craze – and why did it crash Netflix?

The Guardian

Par :Benjie Goodhart

8 janvier 2026 à 14:07

An online conspiracy theory has left hysterical fans believing that the Netflix show’s finale was a fake. Could Vecna still come back with a secret episode?

In recent days, my 14-year-old daughter has been exhibiting signs of becoming a conspiracy theorist. But this isn’t your common or garden Twin-Towers-grassy-knoll-moon-landings business. She has fallen, entirely and joyfully, for a conjecture known as Conformity Gate – and she is not the only one.

For the non Gen-Zers out there, Conformity Gate is the theory that the much-vaunted finale of Netflix behemoth Stranger Things, released on 1 January in the UK, wasn’t the real finale at all.

Fuelled by energy drinks and pasty from lack of sunlight, fans of the show have been beavering away in basements around the world to produce a fantastical hypothesis that the finale’s rather soupy 40-minute epilogue was all an illusion created by the show’s mind-controlling villain Vecna. A secret final episode, showing what had really happened, would be released on 7 January, at 8pm US Eastern Time (1am in the UK).

Explaining the labyrinthine intricacies of the “evidence” cited by Conformiteers would take thousands of words. Essentially, it involves some people sitting with their hands in their lap wearing orange graduation gowns, too many people wearing glasses, a roll of dice totalling seven, a dial changing colour, a wonky milkshake-timeline, strategically positioned exit signs, a woman having short hair, a door handle switching sides, a character missing some scars, and one of the characters remarking that the town of Hawkins “feels different” – hardly surprising, as it’s no longer full of murderous monsters, cracks in the earth, and a psychopath made out of tree roots.

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