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Cast revealed for new series of Peaky Blinders

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The seventh series of the TV show is being filmed in and around Digbeth Loc. Studios in Birmingham.

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Channel 4 Docudrama about Partygate

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Partygate: Inside No. 10's INFAMOUS Lockdown Party | Partygate | Channel 4

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The World Cup of adverts: How brands are competing to entertain, not simply sell

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Kim Kardashian, Timothée Chalamet and Susan Boyle feature in ambitious ads ahead of the World Cup.

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Really interesting article about the creation of the advert.

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Rising to the remit: C4’s “Super.Human.” wins gold for TV creativity

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The team charts the challenging route to victory for the third ad in its “superhuman” strategy

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Really interesting article about KSI and boxing controversy.

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KSI reacts as Andrew Tate ‘replaces’ him as Misfits CEO before boxing debut

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Tate, a British-American influencer, is due to fight TV personality Chase DeMoor in December

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Lots of food for thought for representation question.

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Sam Fender’s music offers a vision of masculinity that is complex, conflicted and deeply human

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Fender’s music exposes the increasing struggle of everyday life in the UK.

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Interesting story about example of a banned advert.

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Twix ad banned in UK for encouraging unsafe driving

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The video advert shows a car chase that ends with two caramel-coloured cars on top of each other.

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Here's an easy to use barcode generator for coursework.

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Free Barcode Generator. Choose the type of code you'd like to make, enter your information, and generate a downloadable barcode and HTML code for free.

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Here's the link to sign up to Canva.

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There are some fantastic videos on this site about different careers in the creative industries.

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creative careers education information innovation inspiration jobs recruitment

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Helping you break into the creative industries Download on iOS & Android 👇 www.linktr.ee/ericapp

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Use this video to complete task 2.

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Use this advert to help you complete task 12.

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Use this image to help you complete task 11.

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Media Language Revision: newspaper front cover

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Media Language Revision: newspaper front cover

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Use this image to complete task 5.

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Media Language Revision: analysis of codes

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Media Language Revision: analysis of codes

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Use this video to answer task 6.

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Media Language Revision: binary opposition

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Media Language Revision: binary opposition

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Use this video to answer task 8.

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What is Binary Opposition? Claude Lévi-Strauss Media Studies Structural Theory explained!

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Use this advert to complete task no. 9.

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An excellent documentary about the history of the development of the 'Assassin's Creed' franchise.

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The History of Assassin's Creed (2006-2023) | Documentary

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Short BBC documentary (15 mins) about Steven Bartlett's podcast. Interesting for ideas about regulation and power of online media creators.

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Steven Bartlett: The Truth Behind the Podcast

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An investigation finds potentially harmful health misinformation on The Diary of a CEO. Starting with a focus on business, the podcast has shifted towards health, raising concerns from experts.

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A great guide for making your own digital stories!

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Interesting article about rebranding and impact.

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Jaguar asks people to “trust and reserve judgement” on rebrand

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The iconic carmaker’s rebrand has certainly caught people’s attention, but will it pay off?

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Life as a production assistant making music videos.

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Journalism is a career that is an easy progression from Media Studies.

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The video games industry is not just about creating games!

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Interesting article about being a DoP in a creative agency.

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Insight into life as a culture editor.

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What does a spark do in the media industry?

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Really interesting intro to Butler’s work.

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Berkeley professor explains gender theory | Judith Butler

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The BBC has built a special election pop-up in the Roblox video game.

Players can meet Clive Myrie, Laura Kuenssberg and Jeremy Vine whilst helping Larry the Cat find ballot boxes across the game.

The aim is to have fun whilst learning about the election process - you can check it out here.

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BBC Roblox gaming pop-up injects fun into election process

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Players can meet Clive Myrie, Laura Kuenssberg and Jeremy Vine whilst helping Larry the Cat find ballot boxes across the game.

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Tubi will compete with the likes of Netflix, Disney+, ITVX and Channel 4's streaming platform as well as the BBC iPlayer.

The platform has been quickly gaining market share in the US where, according to Fox, it has almost 80 million monthly active users.

In the UK, Tubi says it will offer more than 20,000 films and TV series, including content from Disney, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The platform will also include a selection of British, Indian and Nigerian content.

UK viewers will be able to access content on the Tubi webpage and via a smartphone app.

"Tubi has spent the last decade honing our approach to vast, free and fun streaming in North America, and we feel that now is the perfect time to bring that recipe to UK audiences," Tubi chief executive Anjali Sud said.

Fox Corporation bought Tubi in 2020 for $440m (£348m) as the US media giant looked to attract younger audiences.

In recent years, streaming companies like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ have launched ad-supported services and raised subscription prices as they tried to boost revenues.

The moves came as they faced pressure to spend more money to grow their libraries of content as they try to attract more customers in an increasingly competitive market.

In March, Mr Murdoch's TalkTV network announced that it would stop broadcasting as a terrestrial television channel and became a strictly online service.

The network launched in 2022 but struggled to attract viewers on its linear platform.

Mr Murdoch had hoped the network would shake up the broadcasting establishment by offering an opinion-led alternative to established outlets.

The media tycoon played a pivotal role in the development of the UK's broadcasting industry by launching Sky in 1984.

Some commentators saw TalkTV as an attempt by Mr Murdoch to recreate his success with Sky.

Mr Murdoch's 21st Century Fox sold its 39% stake in Sky to NBCUniversal's owner Comcast in 2018 after losing a bidding battle for the network.

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Tubi: Free Netflix rival to launch in the UK

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Tubi will offer more than 20,000 films and TV series, including Hollywood titles and British content.

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Previews of Dustborn have praised its cartoon-style visuals and gameplay that mashes up several different genres.

Characters are at the heart of the game, and its diverse main cast has drawn a fair amount of attention.

It includes Pax's lover Noam, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, Sai, a Muslim, and Pax's younger sister Ziggy, who deals with anxiety and hyperactivity.

When it was first revealed, Dustborn was hit with some negative feedback from those who believe developers are being pressured into making their games more diverse.

Ragnar Tørnquist, creative director at developer Red Thread Games, insists that isn't the case.

"I think publishers and developers are just understanding more that there's a wider and more diverse audience out there," he says.

"Games are becoming more global, games are becoming more accessible to everyone.

"And that means the audience changes."

Ragnar says he understands why people might push back, "especially if you're the kind of player who's used to seeing yourself on the screen."

But he says there's room for games that feature casts, stories and perspectives we're less used to seeing.

"We're just making one game that will hopefully find an audience.

"Maybe it's a different audience, and I think we can afford to be different," he says.

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Dustborn: 'No-one forced us to make a game with a diverse cast'

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Adventure game Dustborn aims to tell a story about a diverse cast trekking across the USA.

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Andrew Rogers and Tom RichardsonBBC Newsbeat

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Can MPs help to level up the UK games industry?

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Despite it bringing an estimated £6bn to the UK economy, politicians don’t tend to talk about gaming.

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Article about the relevance of 'I, Daniel Blake' in 2020s.

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Ken Loach's 2016 film I, Daniel Blake is a scathing indictment of the British benefits system. The film follows 59-year-old widower Daniel Blake who suffers a heart attack and becomes unable to work. Despite medical evidence and GP support, Blake is told that he is not eligible to receive state benefits.

The film powerfully shows how the knotty bureaucracy of the benefits system robs claimants of their humanity and reduces them to a number. The story has been powerfully adapted and updated for the stage by the film's star Dave Johns to show how the cost of living crisis has worsened what was already bad in 2016.

As Johns says: "The story is still as relevant as it was in 2016; maybe even more so now ... [Daniel's] story could be anyone's."

The character of Daniel Blake is fictional. However, the stage production features real speeches, factual interviews, and social media posts. This moulding of fact and fiction humanises a group of people who are so often robbed of their dignity in the headlines and in politics.

Staging reality

When serving as secretary of state for work and pensions in 2016, Damian Green MP branded the film version of I, Daniel Blake " a work of fiction ". The play responds powerfully to this dismissal by projecting the words "THIS IS NOT FICTION" across the stage. The production forcefully shows that people really have to live like this.

As Daniel Blake puts it in a spray-painted message on the wall of his Jobcentre, "I, Daniel Blake, demand my appeal date before I starve." The poverty rate for families on universal credit stands at 54%. This explodes the myth that benefits claimants are "scroungers," with a breezy lifestyle funded by the working UK taxpayer.

The use of real political snippets demonstrates the gap between the UK government's policy objectives to boost wages and get more people back in work and their detrimental effect on real lives.

According to a 2022 report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 14.5 million people in the UK live in poverty. The 2023 report warns that because benefit payments have failed to sufficiently increase in alignment with rising inflation, the UK's poorest households have become even more vulnerable.

Crucially, the play destabilises the notion that the UK welfare system can act as a "safety net" should any of us fall on hard times.

Blake (David Nellist) has never sought state support before and his failure to be awarded sufficient points at his work capability assessment comes as a shock. As well as depicting the pinballing nature of the benefits system (at both the claiming and appeal stages) as Blake is sent from one interview to another, the production implicitly satirises an approach that reduces the complexity of human lives to a set of points-based descriptors.

Audiences see how anyone completing a work capability assessment must explain how their illness or disability affects their completion of a list of set activities. The more difficult you find that activity, the more points you might get.

Political theatre

Alongside the fictional Daniel Blake's story are the words and stories of real individuals, which is a technique central to documentary or "verbatim theatre". These are projected behind the actors to make it clear that this story is grounded in the lived experiences of many.

Documentary theatre often tells real stories. Here, however, they have decided to tell the story of the benefits system through a fictional character.

The phenomenon of " infrahumanisation," Coined by the psychologist Jacques-Philippe Leyens, occurs when certain groups in society (such as benefit claimants) can be seen as less than, or "below" human.

The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that fictional representations can cut through the biases people hold in public discourse. These stories become vital to ensuring we live in a just and democratic society.

By weaving the fabric of non-fiction through a personable, ordinary character, I, Daniel Blake, draws visceral attention to the human cost of such precarious living.

This production humanises the people behind the headlines. It spotlights the hurdles that the most vulnerable citizens face in realising their basic right to human dignity in the UK's benefits system.

In this way, I, Daniel Blake demonstrates how theatre can campaign for social justice and hold the government to account. Johns hopes that it will make people angry, generate discussion, and keep the cost of living crisis on the news agenda.

The play will complete its initial Newcastle run before embarking on a nine-venue UK tour. Wherever it travels, I, Daniel Blake's unique combination of black humour and sobering facts will seek to reclaim the personal narratives of those on the breadline. Crucially, it is only by doing so that it can pave the way for reform.

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I, Daniel Blake on stage is a powerful representation of real people struggling in the cost of living crisis

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As more people find themselves in poverty, the play's mix of fictional story with real-life testimony powerfully tells the story of what it's like to navigate the benefits system in the UK.

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Interesting article that shows the importance of international sales to the financial success of British TV.

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ITV made a loss of about £1m on its agenda-setting drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, despite it being the UK's most-watched TV show of the year so far, the broadcaster has revealed.
The four-part drama, which aired in January, showed the human toll on hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongly prosecuted for false accounting and theft due to faulty software.

It sparked an outcry and led to plans for new legislation to clear their names.

The series has been watched by 13.5 million people to date.

But Kevin Lygo, ITV's managing director of media and entertainment, said: "Mr Bates has made a loss of something like £1m and we can't continually do this."

Broadcasters are facing big financial pressures, and often rely on overseas channels or streamers buying the rights to show a programme to help recoup its budget.

Last month, ITV said 12 foreign broadcasters had bought the Mr Bates drama. But Mr Lygo said it wasn't sufficiently appealing to foreign viewers to break even.

"Of course, some things are very profitable on the channel, and some things aren't," he told the Voice of the Listener & Viewer spring conference on Wednesday, according to PA Media.

"But it's a challenge to be able to fund some of the things that aren't, obviously, of international appeal.

"We're hoping this may be, because it caused such a furore here that maybe sales will pick up, but there's no evidence of it yet.

"If you're in Lithuania, four hours on the British Post Office? Not really, thank you very much. So you can see the challenges here."

Another challenge for mainstream broadcasters is "getting enough audiences to turn up on the night" to watch a show, he said.

Five or six years ago, a programme like Mr Bates would have been expected to attract a live audience around six or seven million. The first episode of Mr Bates was watched by four million on the night, which is as "good as you get" now, he said.

It went on to gather steam and viewers. ITV followed the ratings success by announcing in February a drama about what it calls the "biggest health scandal" in British history, the contaminated blood scandal.

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Mr Bates vs Post Office drama lost £1m, ITV boss says

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The agenda-setting drama made a loss despite being the UK's most-watched TV show of the year so far.

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Show all about the making of latest series 'Doctor Who'. Some great career ideas in there!

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Go behind the scenes of the Time Lord's adventures.

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Article that highlights outdated stereotypes of gay men

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Article that highlights outdated stereotypes of gay men

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'Valentina Gomez, a far-right candidate for Missouri secretary of state, has caused outrage with a new anti-gay campaign video.'

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Valentina Gomez, a far-right candidate for Missouri secretary of state, has caused outrage with a new anti-gay campaign video.

The Republican shared the offending footage in which she is seen jogging on the streets of St. Louis to social media on Sunday (12 May 2024).

Giving the unintentionally hilarious clip a foreboding edge is the protective vest worn by the 25-year-old - and the fact she's running through Soulard, a neighbourhood popular with LGBTQs.

'Don't be weak and gay - stay f***ing hard' - Valentina Gomez

"In America, you can be anything you want to be," Gomez says in the video, before adding: "Don't be weak and gay. Stay fucking hard."

The video then cuts to a photo of Gomez by a truck wearing a National Rifle Association hat with a gun in each hand, an American flag at her side.

Addressing backlash to the video, Gomez said on social media on Wednesday: "I speak the truth, and I am waking up the lions to save America. Weakness will get us nowhere. The gloves are off, and I am here to protect and fight for Missouri."

"Currently taking action"

The video features Lupe Fiasco's song 'The Show Goes On'.

Fiasco, who has previously spoken out against anti-gay stigma in hip hop, subsequently said in a statement that he was "aware" of the use of the song and "currently taking action."

Mocking the clip in a social media post, Jason Kander, a former Democratic secretary of state in Missouri, said: "It's so refreshing to see a female GOP candidate who never served in the military doing the whole veteran cosplay, stolen valor [sic], bigotry as a substitute for strength routine as well as any man."

Gomez, an immigrant from Colombia, has previously stoked controversy by trolling transgender people in her camping videos. In February, she was also seen torching LGBTQ-inclusive books in another viral video.

Gomez, a real estate investor, previously used the term "weak and gay" in a video in March to criticise countries that ban flamethrowers, suggesting it is becoming her campaign slogan.

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'Don't be weak and gay': Republican candidate sparks outrage with homophobic campaign video

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"In America, you can do anything you want, so don't be weak and gay - stay f***ing hard" says Valentina Gomez in the video

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Global Story Affecting LGBTQ+ Community (Potentially Upsetting)

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Global Story Affecting LGBTQ+ Community (Potentially Upsetting)

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An example of how 'Attitude' aim to inform audiences of struggles faced by LGBTQ+ people globally

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Three lesbian women have died and one more is in critical condition after an alleged hate crime in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

A man threw a bottle bomb into the boarding house room of the two couples on 6 May, reports Human Rights Watch.

One of the woman, Pamela Fabiana Cobas, was severely burned and died almost immediately, says the non-profit and non-government organisation.

Cobas's partner, Mercedes Roxana Figueroa, reportedly died of organ failure two days later, with burns covering 90% of her body. Andrea Amarante died in the hospital on 12 May, as per local media.

Police arrested a 62-year-old male suspect but have not announced a motive for the attack.

As per The Guardian, Justo Fernando Barrientos allegedly fought the women to stop them escaping the flames, before escaping to the roof and attempting suicide. He was later arrested.

"Climate of violence"

Same-sex sexual activity has been legal in Argentina has been legal sing 1887. However, a series of anti-LGBTQ public statements by politicians is believed to be contributing to increased anti-LGBTQ sentiment in society.

For example, on May 2023, President Javier Milei said in a TV interview that education on gender and sexuality seeks to "exterminate the population" and causes "the destruction of the most important social nucleus within society ... the family."

Speaking to the Washington Blade after the attack, Congressman Esteban Paulón said: "We are in a rather complex context, where from the apex of power, the president himself and his advisors and downwards permanently instil a hate speech, instilling it when they close the [National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism or INADI], stigmatising the population that is there and the vulnerable groups. All this is generating a climate of violence."

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Lesbian women set on fire in Argentina leaving three dead and one in critical condition

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A man threw a bottle bomb into the boarding house room of the two couples on 6 May, and police have arrested a 62-year-old male suspect

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Useful article about representation

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The first full outing of Ncuti Gatwa's has yet to drop, and cast and crew are already in full swing shooting the follow-up season. If ever there was a vote of confidence by a major broadcaster in the success of a return/revamp/re-tweak of a long-running franchise, this is it. As if the return of Russell T Davies as showrunner and scriptwriter wasn't enough to create a buzz among the Whovians (as the committed Doctor Who fans are called), the epic series that celebrated its 60th anniversary last year is back and more relevant - and perhaps more needed - than ever before.

It's relevant because the title role is being played by one of the most exciting British actors of his generation, a Black and queer man from Rwanda, making this incarnation of the Doctor - the 15th - a casting that is more reflective of the world around it. And it's needed because, to quote two-time Doctor David Tennant, the world absolutely needs more kindness than ever before. "The Doctor is constantly fighting for every life, even his villains," says Gatwa when we meet for his interview in a posh London hotel. "He shows mercy and compassion to all because he understands that there's a need for everything, and that we need each other. It's really nice to have a show like Doctor Who running after all these years in this era that we are in now."

A breakout role in Sex Education as Eric would go on to make Gatwa more than just a global star. With his many intersectional identities, it helped him find balance and acceptance. As he shares in this interview, it was a gift that was more than just a job; it helped him find inner peace. As Sex Education wrapped, he found himself in a supporting role in Barbie, arguably the film of 2023, before taking ownership of the Tardis in its Christmas Day special.

Even after season two of Doctor Who wraps, Gatwa is not ready to slow down. His energy is in abundance as he vogues, poses, leaps, dances and shakes his tushy on set for his Attitude cover shoot. "I think this year my break will be to do something different creatively in between. Or another project, just, like, another character," he teases. "That will be my mental break in between. But I dunno. We'll see. We'll see whether I work or take a holiday."

His enthusiasm is infectious. As we speak, Gatwa gesticulates wildly, his eyes widen, whether it's to denounce the current government's scapegoating of minorities to distract from its abysmal performance in power or to regale me with stories about his Oscar-worthy Academy Award performance. He also speaks freely about how therapy has helped him deal with internalised homophobia - an issue he didn't realise he carried with him until Eric came along to show him otherwise - and even offers up the information that he's currently happily dating a muggle - aka, a regular civilian and not a celebrity.

Are you still mid-shoot on Doctor Who?

Yeah, midway through season two at the moment. We've just finished episode five, [I] want to say? Yeah, we've got three more to go. So, it is going quickly.

And then you can have a holiday?

And then I can have a holiday. [But] maybe this other project's building, so I might end up working all the way through.

Russell (T Davies) said on the Attitude panel at this year's Student Pride that he created the new Doctor around your casting - so, no pressure then! How does it feel that you didn't just fill a role, but you shaped it in a way?

My God. Is that what he said? It must be true if he said it. It's interesting because a couple of the questions that I've had have been like, "What were the conversations that you and Russell had in terms of shaping the character?" And I am like, "Actually, there weren't many." He really trusted me to just take the character where I wanted. But I think funnily enough that is what I found so difficult about season one. Every day, I'd come home, and I'd be like, "Was it OK? Was it right? Oh my God, it wasn't right. We need to reshoot it. I need to redo this bit." And he was constantly being like, "It's fine, it is great. This is what we want: we want what you're doing."

Was that through a sense of anxiety or self-doubt?

Certainly, the weight of 60 years of a show, because of the heritage - it was specific to this role. I never had that level of anxiety with any other role. It was specific to Doctor Who because this is a special show that lives in people's hearts. People have had it passed down to them. They watch it with their grandparents. It is a thing you have to care for.

The cast is wild, and very queer. What's it like working with Jinkx Monsoon and Jonathan Groff?

Incredible, incredible. They brought such depth, talent and creativity. I mean, Jinkx is playing a super villain and one of the most powerful that the Doctor has ever faced. She filled that role with such theatrical energy, it was incredible. She had just come off Broadway. How she was using her voice, body, all the tools in her acting toolkit... It was incredible to see that energy lock on in a camera space. For me, as a theatre actor, I was like, 'This is just really, really, really great to see someone's craft so finely tuned and placed so well in this space.' She is a formidable foe character-wise, and also just a great actor to learn from. Jonathan Groff brought something to the show that I don't think we've seen in a long time, which will make sense when it's released. But yeah, it definitely brings out a new side to the Doctor. It was really nice to see the Doctor vulnerable. Jonathan is so talented. He has such an ease to him and is such a kind, kind, kind person anyway. Seeing the world enriched with these incredible queer performers, bringing elements of themselves to the table, was amazing. The world which Russell's creating is so perfect

Was there much room for improvisation?

Once we get the scripts, they don't tend to change. Each line has been written for good reason. That gives you the boundaries to play in. But in terms of where we take those lines, how we say them and how we're creative in the space, that's all down to us. And Russell tends to know the performers that he's bringing in and he'll write for us.

Did you read social media reactions when they announced you were cast, or that the Doctor would be a Black man?

No, no, no, no. I got a brief glimpse of it in initial casting, but it's not something I'll avidly keep up on. The hate? It is kind of fascinating to me because there's so much energy they're putting into it. You are so angry over something so inconsequential that you can't be an interesting person. You can't have much in your life. I don't have the time to do that. And so, I think they need to go find a hobby is one thing. But another thing is that we do see a shift happening in casting, in positions of power and in the status quo. I mean, not a fast shift, things could tip over the other way a little bit quicker, but you see people kind of malfunctioning because things are changing.

Does the issue of race appear in storylines when they're going to Earth's past?

Race does make appearances, yes. It is quite different for the Doctor. It's not the first time. Jo Martin is the first Doctor that is Black [she played the time-travelling Fugitive Doctor in 2020], but it is the first time the Doctor's been Black for this long. And so, we have to address those elements of the character now, because Earth unfortunately is still quite a funny little place. And so, yeah, we will be addressing those things. Russell has such a knack of being able to bring in these elements of our humanity through this sci-fi lens in a really interesting way.

When David Tennant accepted the Rolling Stone UK Award in November last year on behalf of the BBC to mark the series' 60th anniversary, he shared some really powerful words about how the Doctor is a symbol of kindness, and that we've never needed that in the UK more than now.

That really resonates. It feels like, in this country and across the world as well, we're getting a lot more comfortable with how mean and dismissive we can be to each other. We've got so much access to each other nowadays, and that means people can swipe people's importance away, like you can swipe someone away from you on Tinder. The show stands true to these ideals of togetherness, family, the underdog, adventure and curiosity in one another instead of fear and judgement. It's like, 'Oh, who are you and what makes you different? What makes you special? Come on board!'

There's such a pushback against individuality, against gender diversity, against trans identities. How do you feel about the current state of the UK at the moment?

Everything trickles down from the top, and when you see politicians openly attacking marginalised communities, when you see our politicians openly attacking trans people, it makes it OK for everyone else. And it is scary to see that we've got to a point where it is fine to attack vulnerable people because that's essentially what's happening. People who are the most vulnerable, the most disenfranchised, most disconnected from everyone else are being told that they are the threats. It's sick because it's a hiding away of your own ineptitude. You're going to put the blame on immigrants, Black and Brown people, trans people, queer people, to hide the fact that you are not doing anything for people? It's easier to just create discord amongst people. It's divide and conquer, isn't it?

Do you feel hopeful for the future?

I had this conversation with Russell the other day and, yeah, you've got to try to find it somewhere. I mean, I am such a privileged man. I'm an actor in a well-paid, comfortable job, so I shouldn't have much to complain about. But you see inequality all around and you're like, 'Fuck me.' I just hope we learn to start listening to each other and to stop fighting each other because you think of huge existential things like Mother Nature coming along to give us a little slap, or AI RoboCop and his pals coming along. There's a couple of things coming along to affect our whole existence, and we still fight each other in such crazy ways. Try to be hopeful; try to be helpful.

Who was the first person you saw on TV that you felt reflected you?

Funnily enough, the first time when I was like, 'Oh, I could have a career on TV' was when I watched Top Boy and saw a bunch of young Black men on screen, which goes to [show] how far we have come in the landscape of casting for British screen. It was not long ago. I was in drama school, so 2011.

Between being a Scottish, British, Black person, an immigrant, and a queer person, do you ever find your intersectional identities in conflict with one another?

Yeah, I do. Sometimes. It's funny, when I'm chatting with other queer Black men about what it's like going into the barbershop - you still lower your voice and put a spring in your step. At times, in the past, I felt like that, although not so much anymore. I feel like I've kind of reached a place in my personal journey where I just am who I am, and that doesn't have to change wherever I go. I just have to exist. And it's a privilege to do so in my position because there's many people that are in my intersections that don't get a chance to just exist.

I think that's the reason why I say that I struggle with hope sometimes, because there's a lot of things protecting me from the experiences that I could be having, should be having and have had. And I'm aware of that. I'm aware that my experience is not the typical Black queer experience. So, I'm like, 'Shit is hard!' Just because I've now been cast as Doctor Who, all problems of inequality are now fixed? Things don't work like that. But yeah, now personally, I don't feel like they're in conflict with each other, but they can do for people and have done for me in the past. But I'm now just learning not to care what other people think.

It doesn't take much to take us back to the frightened person we were.

No, not at all. Not at all. Which is why we've got to keep pushing for more. Lots and lots and lots and lots more diversity, lots more inclusion on our screen. Lots and lots and lots of it for all you male gammons out there! [Laughs] I did an episode the other day where it was five men in a small space, and I realised how desperate I was for female company by the end of the week. When I saw my friend again, I was like, 'Oh my God, I feel like I can breathe.' And I was like, 'That's so interesting.' For the past week I felt like I couldn't, that I was slightly in defence mode. They were all lovely, lovely men, but there was still something in me that was like, 'Keep a little bit of your guard up. Don't let them get hold of you.' As soon as I saw my friend again, I was like, 'Oh my God.' [Breathes a sigh of relief.] Women have just always been my safe space. I think [that's true] for many a queer boy. I feel safe when I'm around women. I dunno whether that's a really gendered thing to say, but my nervous system seems to be a lot calmer when I'm around women than it is when I'm around men. Will that ever go? I don't know.

I don't think it needs to. You probably have more of a gift in that than some men because you let that in you. Whereas some men don't...

Right, right, right. I guess they fight it.

You must have been in your element with Barbie then.

I was in my element in Barbie! And also, it was a whole bunch of dance, and a whole bunch of queer men, as well. Barbie was such a safe space. It just felt like such a safe space every day, which I think was down to Greta [Gerwig] and Margot [Robbie] leading it, without a shadow of a doubt.

It felt like a natural progression from Sex Education, which in itself was game-changing in terms of the dialogue and the frankness in your character. What was that journey like for you?

Eric started off like a lifeline. I needed a job. I had to pay my bills. It was literally, 'I need a fucking job.' And it happened to be a huge Netflix gig. My agent was like, "You're definitely going to be able to afford an apartment." I was like, "Oh, OK." That's what it started out to me as, 'Just do your best thing with this job.' It was only when we actually moved to Wales, and I'd read all eight episodes, that I was like, 'Wow, this character; this is very interesting.' By the end, Eric ended up being that little surprise that teaches you more than you could ever teach him. That's what it ended up being to me. He taught me to be braver.

Did you have discussions with the writers as the series went on about what happened with Eric?

We definitely had conversations. It was an ever-evolving conversation as to where they want to take the character next. They would reach out and chat to us about where they thought they want to take the character. And they would ask what we thought of that. Laurie [Nunn, series creator] was definitely open to it being a collaborative process.

The struggle between culture and religion with personal identity is so common for queer people. They are often presented with the choice where they have to walk away from one in order to have the other. But I thought it was beautiful how there was a fusion in that, and Eric found a balance.

That's what he taught me. To answer your earlier question of, do you feel like there's intersections that fight against each other? I think through playing Eric, I've learned that no, they don't. I'm fully everything that I am. They're all allowed to exist in me, and they all make me [into] one thing, and that's what it should be for all of us.

When was the last time you experienced racism or homophobia?

Microaggressions exist everywhere. I'd say that is a daily thing. You pick and choose what things you'll allow to stick with you, to affect you, or to say something about. Homophobia, I don't know - other than my own internalised homophobia that I'm working through in therapy - not for a little while.

How far are you on that journey from where you were a year ago?

I didn't really realise I had any internalised phobia until I came into the public eye. I always thought that I was the most free-spirited person. No one could tell me what to do. I do whatever I want. Until I came into the public eye [and] I was like, 'Oh, I don't know.' It is an ever-evolving journey.

I think it's in all of us. It's hard for it not to exist. All these movements in equality, like same-sex marriage, we didn't have that as kids, that was just 10 years ago, or the Equality Act before that. So, it takes a while for us to unlearn those patterns of behaviour.

What I can do is try each day to tackle that and become more proud of who I am, fully. But it's a long old slog.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is total work in progress and 10 is fully realised, where do you sit on that scale in terms of your personal happiness?

Complete fulfilment being what? A 10?

Yes.

I'd go between four and six. But I'd say maybe that's the same for us all.

Yeah. I think anyone would be deluding themselves if they said they were a 9 or 10.

But you do meet those people every so often in your life. Like, 'Wow, my God, you grew up in such a functional family that you have no issues?'

Do you have any regrets or is there anything you would've done differently in the past?

No, not so much. I think I'm constantly telling myself, 'Live, don't just plan and live in your head. Live in the present.'

Take a moment to smell the flowers.

Yeah, I'm constantly telling myself that.

You got to perform at the Oscars. That's a moment...

Yeah, I did get to go to the Oscars. I met someone recently, and they've been a real reminder [as to why] I never date in the industry. I always date what I call muggles [laughs], like, a normal guy. But they really reminded me to actually live in your dream. The night before the Oscars, I couldn't even drink my water. My hand was like this [shakes his hand]. The only way that I calmed it down was like, 'OK, you have to go on and let your inner child perform.' You get so caught up in this life that it's important to stop and take it all in, whenever we can. Stop and breathe in the things that we appreciate, that are around us, if you're lucky enough to have them. So, counting blessings is always a good thing.

Did you feel you were ready to open yourself up to that relationship because of the work you had been doing with yourself? That perhaps you wouldn't have allowed them in before?

Yes. I was very, very emotionally avoidant. I strictly emotionally avoided everything my whole twenties. I was catching up with my sister the other day, and I was like, "I think from the way that we were raised, I think we were taught that we have to earn love." Instead of it being an unconditional thing or that being an unconditional entity. I'm not saying it is that. I don't know whether that comes from that African upbringing, that strict upbringing: get your grades, get into a good uni, become a doctor, become a lawyer. Start overachieving. It was like you have to prove why you're lovable. We're trained to be like, 'If I'm not exceptional, I won't be loved.' Certainly, I think that was my thing. So, yeah, I think I'm just learning now like, 'Oh, you are allowed to be loved.' You don't have to be excellent or aspire to that term, 'Black excellence'. What the hell? There's so much white mediocrity that gets celebrated, and Black people, we have to be absolutely flawless to get half of [that] anyway. So, I'm slowly training myself out of that and being like, 'No shit. You deserve love just for existing.' And that has taught me to be a lot more loving as well, in a weird way.

Doctor Who season 14 will begin on Saturday 11 May 2024. Issue 358 of Attitude magazine is available to order online here, and alongside 15 years of back issues on the free Attitude app.

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Doctor Who's Ncuti Gatwa on embracing his identity to find pride and joy

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From Sex Education to Barbie through to his fresh, titular role in Doctor Who, Ncuti Gatwa is a thoroughly modern British screen star. More than that, he is enjoying therapy, has proudly confronted his internalised homophobia and is now joyfully sitting on top of the world

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Assassin's Creed Shadows Cinematic Trailer

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Assassin's Creed Shadows Cinematic Trailer

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Assassin's Creed Shadows: Official World Premiere Trailer

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Article about the new 'Assassin's Creed' game coming this year. It shows how producers respond to fans and use community feedback to inform decisions.

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Andrew Rogers & Tom RichardsonBBC Newsbeat

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows finally takes series to Japan

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Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is a long-awaited pivot for the franchise into the country’s feudal 16th Century.

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5 Frames from Sam Fender's Seventeen Going Under

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Interesting analysis of key shots from the music video.

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5 Frames from Sam Fender's Seventeen Going Under

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Rimmel London ad banned for implying girls need make-up

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The Facebook advert featured a Love Islander and read "get ready to slay this back-to-school season".

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News Article: Regulation of Advertising and Female Objectification

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News Article: Regulation of Advertising and Female Objectification

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Calvin Klein: Ad with FKA twigs banned for objectifying women

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The Advertising Standards Authority ruled the ad was "irresponsible and likely to cause serious offence".

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Working class audiences want the BBC to take more risks when producing new programmes

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Interesting article about risk taking and programme making. Good to evaluate Hesmondhalgh.

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The BBC should take more risks when producing new programmes if it is to reconnect with viewers and listeners on lower incomes, according to new audience research published today by Ofcom.

In recent years, our research has shown that people in lower socio-economic groups - who account for almost a quarter of the UK population - are less satisfied with the BBC. So we have carried out an in-depth review to understand why this might be, speaking to viewers and listeners from these groups from across the UK.

What we found

Working-class audiences watch more TV than anyone else - 3 hours 44 minutes a day on average, compared to 1 hour 57 minutes among middle-class viewers - and the BBC remains an important part of their media habit, accounting for a quarter (26%) of their viewing time.

However, many of the people we spoke to feel that the BBC's programming is too dry and serious compared to other services. Instead, many turn to social media and podcasts to find newer voices that relate, more authentically, to their real-life experiences.

People in our focus groups expressed a distinct preference for streaming services, due to their hyper-personalised libraries of content which they can watch at their convenience. Streaming services and social media are also seen to offer more engaging and light-hearted content which better meets their needs for escapism and companionship.

Participants also felt there was little representation on the BBC of what they called "normal, working-class lives". Even when they did see 'people like them' represented in BBC programmes, they felt the portrayal often reverted to stereotypes or 'tokenist' characterisations.

Connection with BBC not lost

Despite these challenges, our study shows that audiences from lower income households still retain a connection with the BBC. Many participants rate the BBC's news offering, while others still consider it the home for coverage of big, milestone events that bring the nation together.

Programmes such as EastEnders, Match of the Day and Strictly Come Dancing are recognised as popular programmes, although among some, there was a sense that the BBC is increasingly reliant on established programmes and formats.

Overwhelmingly, people in the study want to see the BBC taking greater risks in producing new content and making sure audiences know about the variety of programmes available. Some observe that the BBC's reputation for classic archive programmes may risk audiences overlooking its newer programming, while others feel felt that the BBC could do more targeted marketing to promote fresh content.

The BBC will be aware of many of the challenges and issues raised in our study and is responding by commissioning more content that it believes will be of greater appeal to audiences from lower income homes. The BBC should carefully monitor whether this new content is cutting through and consider what further action may be needed to better satisfy their needs.

We will continue to monitor perceptions of representation and portrayal as part of our ongoing performance assessment of the BBC.

Annual Report on the BBC

Ofcom has also today published its sixth Annual Report on the BBC's performance covering the period April 2022 to March 2023.

Our report finds that the BBC is generally performing well in delivering its Mission and Public Purposes. It also finds that, as audiences continue to move online, the BBC is having to adapt to meet their needs and expectations. This means it is having to make difficult choices to reduce spend in some areas - including local radio - in order to reinvest in online services, as it moves to become a ' digital-first ' organisation.

As it does so, we are closely monitoring the impact of these changes and will hold the BBC to account on behalf of all audiences, including those who rely on traditional broadcast services. We will report on the impact of the BBC's changes to local radio in next year's Annual Report on the BBC. This will allow time for the changes to be fully implemented so that any impacts on audiences can be properly assessed.

More broadly, we are carrying out a review into what audiences across the UK value about local media. We expect to publish the findings from this local media review by the end of 2024.

Want to read more news like this?

Sign up to receive our monthly newsletter straight to your inbox. Each month we'll send you our latest round-up of news, information and advice.

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Working class audiences want the BBC to take more risks when producing new programmes

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The BBC should take more risks when producing new programmes if it is to reconnect with viewers and listeners on lower incomes, according to new audience research published today by Ofcom. In recent years, our research has shown that people in lower socio-economic groups - who account for almost a quarter of the UK population - are less satisfied with the BBC.

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Here's an interesting blog post on Clover's Final Girl Theory. The book is also really good if this is a genre you're interested in.

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As it's Halloween this month, it only seems apporiate for this month's "Feminist Film Theory 101" to focus on Carol J.Clover's "Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film." and the "Final Girl". Who is the Final Girl, and is she a true feminist icon?

From its first publication in 1992, Carol J. Clover's "Men, Women, and Chain Saws" has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema has on our popular culture since the mid-1970s. Clover studied slasher films from the 1970s and 1980s and defined the Final Girl as a female who is the sole survivor of the group of young people.

The Final Girl is the one who gets a final confrontation with the villain and she either kills him herself or she is saved at the last minute by someone else, such as a police officer. The Final Girl has been given a "privilege" of survival because of her implied moral superiority (for example, she is the only one who refuses sex, drugs, or other such behaviors, unlike her friends).

Clover states that the Final Girl is first presented to us through the use of the Male Gaze (see here for previous "Feminist Film Theory 101 which goes into some depth about the Male Gaze). This Gaze is usually the killers, perhaps best depicted by how Michael Myers stalks Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) in "Halloween" (1978). However, during the films, there is a transition where the narrative flips and the audience starts to identify with and root for the Final Girl. As Clover states, "These films are designed to align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the female victim - the 'final girl' - who finally defeats her oppressor."

What makes horror "crucial enough to pass along" is, for critics since Freud, what has made ghost stories and fairy tales crucial enough to pass along: its engagement of repressed fears and desires and its reenactment of the residual conflict surrounding those feelings Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, Carol J. Clover

According to Clover, horror films tap into society's repressed fears of gender. Like the fairytales of the past such as "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Snow White", films such as "Halloween" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" focus on the concept of an outside threat and a pure, Virgin 'princess' who must defeat evil. Horror films address the concerns of the society at the time, the late 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of the teen youth culture and sexual freedom which manifested itself in the slasher movie.

The final girl in many movies shares common characteristics: she is typically sexually unavailable or virginal (it is often implied that she may even fear sexual intercourse, or has no desire in it all), and avoids the vices of the victims like illegal drug use or excessive drinking. She sometimes has a unisex name such as Avery, Chris, or Sidney (perhaps this helps the male viewer identify with the Final Girl easier). Occasionally the final girl will have a shared history with the killer (often the killer will be related to her or a potential mate). The Final Girl is the "investigating consciousness" of the film, moving the narrative forward and, as such, she exhibits intelligence, curiosity, and vigilance.

However, the case can be made that Final Girl isn't a true feminist character as Clover argues, as she becomes masculinized through "phallic appropriation" by taking up a weapon, such as a knife or a chainsaw, against the killer. She also has a unisex name and is usually dressed in unisex clothes (think of Laurie's blue shirt or Ripley's white tank top). For the slasher film to be successful, it is necessary for this surviving character to be female because she must experience abject terror, and many viewers would reject a film that showed abject terror on the part of a male. However, the male viewer must still be able to connect and identify with the character, therefore, we see a very androgynous 'female' character.

The relation between the sexes in slasher films could hardly be clearer. The killer is with a few exceptions recognizably human and distinctly male; his fury is unmistakably sexual in both roots and expression; his victims are mostly women, often sexually free and always young and beautiful. Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, Carol J. Clover

But, while the Final Girl is the last character to survive at the evil clutches of Freddy or Jason, her long term fate is still questionable. On the surface, the Final Girl may seem like a feminist icon in cinema, but she has to endure one hell of a journey and has been subjected to abuse and terror from the killer. The fact that the Final Girl has made it to the end does not make her a victorious heroine. In many of these movies, the end is ambiguous, where the killer/entity is or might be still alive, leaving viewers uncertain about the future of the final girl. Perhaps a good example of this is at the end of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974), and even though Sally ( Marilyn Burns) escapes in the back of a pickup truck, Leatherface is still free, spinning around and brandishing his chainsaw in glee.

"[adjustments in gender representation] is an adjustment largely on the male side, appearing at the furthest possible remove from the quarters of theory and showing signs of trickling upwards, is of no small interest."Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, Carol J. Clover

The character of Sally doesn't exactly fit comfortably into Clover's Final Girl theory, as Sally is rather passive throughout the film. While she ultimately escapes Leatherface and his family, it is simply because she manages to outrun them and escape on the truck. She doesn't exactly move the narrative forward, nor does she face Leatherface in a showdown of sorts. Compared to the likes of Nancy ( Heather Langenkamp) from "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984), who lures Freddy Krueger ( Robert Englund) out of the dream world into the real world and sets him alight, Sally is not a true embodiment of the Final Girl trope. However, as we see from the film's ending, Freddy has not been defeated and he is still out to terrorize Nancy.

More often and not the Final Girl will often be written out of the sequels, or either brought back to be killed (shown in the sequel to Friday the 13th where the character of Alice is murdered) or she institutionalized (as seen by Sarah Connor in "Terminator 2: Judgement Day"). According, to Derek Soles it is the tragic destiny of such final girls and this "represents an expression of a patriarchal society where capable, independent women must either be contained or destroyed".

Since 1992, there has been some dramatic changes in the depiction of the Final Girl, with "Scream" (1996), "You're Next"(2013) and "It Follows" (2015) being perfect examples of a modern updating of the Final Girl as these female characters are active throughout the film, driving the plot forward and we see the film's narrative form primarily their point of view. It is also worth mentioning the fact that these 'final girls' have a sex life as well, something that the final girl of thirty to forty years ago was denied.

However, there are still issues with the lack of diversity in the Final Girl line-up. The majority of the Final Girls are CIS gender, white, and from a primarily middle-class background. And, films such as "It Follows" and "You're Next" were directed by male directors, and aimed a primarily male audience. Perhaps we will see the Final Girl evolve into an actual feminist icon, one who is a fully developed character and isn't an embodiment of the Male Gaze. And, with more female and non-binary filmmakers directing horror films, we will also hopefully see a Final Girl who ticks all the right boxes, and actually survives the monster and more importantly the deadly sequel.

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Feminist Film Theory 101: Carol J. Clover's "The Final Girl"

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As it's Halloween this month, it only seems apporiate for this month's "Feminist Film Theory 101" to focus on Carol J.Clover's "Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film." and the "Final Girl". Who is the Final Girl, and is she a true feminist icon?

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Fender talks about his background and discusses issues of class and privilege.

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"When I was a kid, and me mam fell on hard times, I saw how little help there is when you get to that place. There were times where she was like, literally: it's the rent or the groceries," he says. "I seen what that did to my mother's self-esteem. And her mental health. It was the shame of it. She used to always say, 'I feel embarrassed'. And so that struggle's always been close to me."

Every Christmas Copy Counts

Christmas is a vital and difficult time for Big Issue vendors, buy a copy from your local vendor every week and help them through the winter.

Now that Sam Fender is successful and famous, he's been asking himself: "Am I doing anything good with my life?" Over the last couple of years, that quest for meaning led him to build an ongoing relationship with The Big Issue. In late 2020, he met Big Issue seller Earl John Charlton and formed a strong bond that continues to this day.

Charlton has experienced homelessness and addiction issues but now has a full-time job and a place of his own. He credits The Big Issue with turning his life around.

He works at North East Homeless, a charity supporting people who are still in the teeth of the issues he faced not so long ago. Coincidentally, they're based right near Fender's studio. "I see Earl like nearly every other day when I'm down there. We'll always sit and have a cup of tea and a chat," says Fender. "He's very empathetic when I'm on a bad day."

Charlton is always a man with a plan, from putting on poetry nights to taking up boxing - all of it in aid of charity.

"He'll tell us what his latest shenanigans are and what he's up to," Fender smiles. "He is just a diamond. He's a true hero and a man of the people. But still, I was worried about him when he said he was boxing. He says, 'Are you gonna come to me fight?' I said, 'Aye, I'll come as long as nowt happens to you. And you better win!'"

It was Charlton's story, and his determination, that encouraged Fender to find a wider purpose, to explore ways he can harness his platform for good.

"I think I need to do some more stuff to do with this [taking action on poverty]," he explains. "Because the Tories aren't doing it. We've got the worst government I've ever seen in my lifetime. My dad reckons it's one of the worst he's ever seen. And he's sixty-fucking-six."

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By the time we're sitting in the storeroom, Sam Fender has heard lots of stories of families who are living through similar experiences to him and his mum. They're people on the sharp end of years of government austerity, now further pummelled by the pandemic.

He's very obviously moved. And he's trying to pick apart why so many people in the north-east of England - despite living in some of the country's most deprived areas - turned away from Labour, their traditional party of representation. Why places like Blyth Valley went Tory in 2019 for the first time in the constituency's history, heralding the fall of Labour's so-called Red Wall.

"You've got to ask yourself why that's happening," he says. "And I think it's because we've got a lot of culture wars being fought at the moment, which need to be fought, for things like LGBTQ+ rights, and racism, and gender inequality. It's about fucking time that we're having the conversations we're having.

"But what I think isn't really spoken about much is class. I don't think a lot of the left-wing, liberal papers talk about class as much as they probably should. Or they forget that class is threaded through all of these discussions.

"I've had arguments with people who've told us how privileged I am for being a man," he continues, by way of example. "And I completely agree that there is such a thing as white male privilege.

"But try and tell a lot of people from Easington [in Durham, notable for being the town with the highest percentage of white residents in England and where most of Billy Elliot was shot] that they've got white male privilege, when they've grown up in a fucking estate, in poverty. It doesn't fly with them. They'll probably feel like they're being preached to by a bunch of really privileged people."

Too many of the liberals Sam Fender meets in the arts and media circles don't really understand where he comes from. "A lot of them don't like the idea that they might be privileged," he says, and so they don't get the very real anger felt in working-class towns.

"I spoke to somebody who went to a really, really expensive private school and had a massive mansion that she grew up in, but she was talking about how much easier it would be for me to get certain jobs. I was like, 'Well, I didn't go to uni and that wasn't like, out of choice. It was because I wasn't actually good enough.' If it wasn't for Owain [Davies, director of OD Management, who discovered Fender], I'd probably still be in Shields not really knowing what to do. And not really having many opportunities. There isn't many opportunities for young lads."

At 27, Fender's life has changed drastically in a few short years. He's not on benefits any more and he's the most financially secure he's ever been in his life. "It's amazing. I love that. And who wouldn't?" he says.

But his family is still in North Shields. His friends are still there. And they're still living with a serious dearth of prospects. "A lot of my best friends are in right dire straits at the moment. And I can't fix that. Which annoys us. Also it's like, you have this level of guilt that comes with it, you know?"

Fuck politics, man. Community's the way forward
Sam Fender

As a confirmed left-winger - "a borderline socialist" - Sam Fender finds himself fighting on two fronts. While he's frustrated by the failure of liberal elites to understand his home town, he also has arguments with people back home who've turned their backs on the Labour party. He thinks many of them have been tricked.

"I loved fucking Corbyn, quite frankly," Fender says. "I mean, he fucked up a lot of things. But I think his heart was in the right place and that's something that we've not seen for a long time.

"I just think he was done a massive disservice by the British press. And I think a lot of people who he would have potentially helped were groomed to hate him. The Tory party knew exactly what they were doing when it comes to turning him into a fucking enemy."

So how does he think Labour can turn things around? "They need to start having more working-class
representation. Like your Dennis Skinners and stuff like that. You need people like that, and young people like that. Who don't sound like the fucking Guardian when they're talking to people."

Crammed in a foodbank storeroom with a passionate, articulate, smart, young left-winger, a man using his lived experience of poverty to fight for his community, I can't help but wonder whether I'm looking at the solution.

Fender certainly has the ability to lead, the skill of speaking to exactly the constituency that the left needs to reclaim if they want to topple the Tories. Would he ever consider turning in his guitar for a career in politics?

"I couldn't. They would fucking destroy me," he sighs. "I'm not clean enough. That's the issue. All they'd have to do is just catch us one night on a bender, and then that would be me. I'm not a politician. I'm a fucking artist. I couldn't do it. They'd run rings around us."

On stage at Alexandra Palace, London in November Photo: Gus Stewart/Redferns

Sam Fender might not feel able to offer political representation, but by telling the stories of his friends and family, he does offer cultural representation. And, even more importantly, hope.

"Music was therapy to me before I did therapy," he says. "It was the only form of catharsis that I've ever had. And if I can provide some level of catharsis for somebody else who's listening, then that's what I've achieved."

This year, Fender will play the biggest tour of his career so far, including a headline date to 40,000 people in London's Finsbury Park. It's those concerts, seeing the whites of people's eyes, that makes his job worth doing.

"Have you seen the footage from the Ally Pally?" he asks. "Look..."

Locating a YouTube clip on his phone, he leans over to show me the end of his recent gig at Alexandra Palace. The music stops, but the crowd keeps chanting back at him. They're caught up in the collective power that only comes from live music. On the phone screen, and in front of me, Fender grins.

"Some of the kids down the front at London and Newcastle, the words looked like they were theirs more than they were mine," he says. "There was one guy in particular I saw. He was completely electric. He was singing every single word. That's why I'm doing this. Him down there. Or the small girl with blue hair who was just bawling her eyes out the whole time down the front, holding on to her phone and her wallet.

"It's like community," he continues. "It's 10,000 people together, united by something that's positive."

Whether that community is found in an arena concert or in a foodbank, it's powerful... and it matters. "Fuck politics, man. Community's the way forward."

Sam Fender headlines London's Finsbury Park on July 15. Tickets are available now
This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine out this week. Support your local vendor by buying today! If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play.

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Sam Fender: 'A lot of people don't like the idea they might be privileged' - The Big Issue

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Sam Fender is using his platform to speak out against poverty and social inequality. Because if the government won't act, someone has to.

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Interview about his life and influences.

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In 2011, Sam Fender was, by his own admission, "a little stoner" who had flunked out of his A-Levels in his hometown of North Shields, living with his mother in a flat with black mould on the walls. A decade later, he's one of the UK's best and most successful singer-songwriters: his 2019 debut album Hypersonic Missiles went to No 1, he won a Brit award, and his knack for writing songs about 21st-century disaffections marked him out from cheerier peers such as Ed Sheeran and George Ezra. His second album Seventeen Going Under, a superb record that channels the sound of Bruce Springsteen and the War on Drugs into an examination of his family, youth and frailty, is out in October.
How has the pandemic been for you?
I handled it as well as anyone else did: absolutely horrendously. I didn't look after myself; I wasn't one of these people starting up a fitness regime on TikTok. I had to shield, so for the first three months I was on my own. I just drank, over-ate, and played a lot of video games. I was pretty miserable by the end of it.
Your new album draws from your own life more than ever.
A lot of my lyrics used to come from pub craic. Someone at the end of the bar, complaining about their other half - I would finish the story. There's plenty of loudmouthed Geordie drug dealers, the most unsubtle drug dealers on the planet, and I'd get plenty of bits from that. Because I didn't have things to point at and write about during lockdown I started looking inwards, thinking: there's enough stuff from my own life. Why aren't I writing about any of that?

My mum was a nurse who birthed practically half the babies in North Shields. She suffered from fibromyalgia, which affected her mental health and her ability to work. I had a sense of helplessness. You haven't got a job, you're only 17; a lot of [the title track, Seventeen Going Under] came from that.

My father and I can drink beer and talk about music until the cows come home, but when it comes to expressing a grievance, it always ends up in a shouting match. One of my earliest memories is of him accidentally jamming my finger in a door. He was so angry at himself but he couldn't express it, so he just booted the wall under the staircase. I'm sat there crying cos I've hurt my finger, and I'm crying even more because I'm watching my dad kicking the house down. We laugh about it now; things have really turned a corner. We'll have these conversations about toxic masculinity and my dad goes: I didn't teach you anything like that, did I?
There's a very moving lyric about him kissing his mother's forehead when she died, and you imagining doing the same to him one day.
I was bawling my eyes out [when she died] - I'd never seen him like that. I saw him as me, as a son, and saw his loss. You give your parents a hard time because of course they will do things that upset and hurt you. But it's hard to raise a kid, especially when there's divorce and money issues. There were things that happened that I used to hold a grudge about, but a lot of it was my own fault because I never said what I needed to say. You don't know how to communicate these things when you grow up in Shields.
You mention drug dealing in the opening songs - were you having to do that yourself?
Put it this way: there was a time when I was 18 and working for some pretty suspect characters. Not at the pub I worked at - I had a different job which led to us meeting some very charming but very naughty people. They ended up disappearing and getting charged for things, but I wasn't involved in anything illicit, I was on the sidelines. Once I hit my mid-20s, I felt like I could write about it all in a way that wasn't completely dull.
You've also written about politics - Aye, from the new album, is probably the angriest song you've ever written. You sound really beaten down on some of these new songs.
Because of the polarity between the left and the right, I don't feel I have an identity with politicians on either side. The left wing have abandoned the working classes, and with a lot of the left - I don't want to sound like Piers Morgan when I say this - I feel like there is too much nitpicking and stupid fights, especially online. But I hate the Tories with a passion. I was raised to hate them, I still hate them, and I always will. They clearly know who they stand for and they don't represent people like us. A quarter of the kids in working families in my region are in poverty. Nobody sticks their neck out for the north-east. The line in Aye - "I don't have time for the very few" - that's the one thing that always going to be my main gripe on this planet, the sheer disparity between the 1% and the rest of the world. These culture wars are valid wars that need to be fought - there's a lot of bigotry, a lot of racism and homophobia. But in order to get the Tories out, you've got to start representing the working class people of this country.

The right are sitting back and laughing, sweeping up every election. Blyth Valley up here went Tory. It's a shipbuilding town. That's insanity. Working-class people up here think the Tories are on their side - which shows how completely the left have fucked themselves. I've had arguments with people who say Jeremy Corbyn's a twat, regurgitating Daily Mail headlines that he's a terrorist sympathiser. I'm like: how? Tell me in your own words. And they go, "Ah you're just one of them lefties". "Leftie" is now a slur in working-class towns - what happened there? It upsets me that we're in a place where the media have so much control over these blokes who have grafted all their life in a system that would benefit them if someone like Corbyn was in.

Life-changing things like becoming famous and having money happened all at once and I didn't feel like I deserved any of it. I was full of self-loathing with massive impostor syndrome, and then started hating myself even more because I was like: "Why am I so miserable when I've got this amazing stuff happening?"

'Four years ago I was on benefits' ... playing live in August. Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images for White Claw Hard Seltzer

There's a line in Seventeen Going Under that I love. It's one of my mate's sayings: "I've armed myself with a grin." I've always played the happy-go-lucky joker. But I grew up with pretty low self-esteem, though I had enough ego to want to do [music], and I used it as therapy. But it was getting to the point where the music wasn't enough. I was dealing with abandonment issues. My folks split up when I was young and I lived with my dad, but then he and I stopped getting on.

I was bullied in school because I had long hair and I was sensitive. My dad put boxing gloves on me to teach me how to punch. He'd say: "If you think someone's going to hit you, hit them first!" But I could never do it, and I hated myself because I couldn't. [Later] I overcompensated by lifting weights and going to the boxing gym and all these things to try and become something closer to the resemblance of my father. And the fact that I never fought back against these kids that used to push us around, or constantly berate us for years on end, it wears you down. It got to the point to where I was in my 20s I just snapped, and I did start trying to fight people. I knocked one of my best mates out. I'd find myself ripping cupboard doors off the wall because of things that had happened five years before. And it still didn't fix anything.
Yes - otherwise you wouldn't be writing songs like Dead Boys (from debut Hypersonic Missiles), that people have said helped them deal with suicidal feelings.
There was also an important person in my early life who took her own life. You don't realise these things affect you until you're older and you don't know why you're walking around with a pit in your stomach or why you push partners away. When I had a girlfriend, I realised I couldn't surrender myself to people. I didn't feel safe in a loving relationship. I'd self sabotage to almost gain control of the situation, because that's not the person hurting you, you're leaving them, and it makes you feel like you're in control of the situation. Because you have such fear of losing them.
On Mantra, you write about another kind of malaise: fame.
We're Geordies - we built a city on getting pissed and punching each other. That stays with you, and if you don't sort it out, it's like a tumour. I was also using every vice in the book to distract myself, and none of it was working. So I started doing therapy. I'm finally at a place where I can understand it, and the things that I hated about myself are what I should be celebrating - the fact that I'm an empathetic little softie is probably the best thing about me.
Is this at music industry parties?
I lost a good friend to suicide last year, and I'm not going to lie to you - over lockdown, and even before, I was in that sort of place myself. I had moments where I was so low that I thought about it. I never got to the point where I actually did it, it was more a thing of: I can't get out of the way I feel. I don't like to fling around suicide lightly - I've lost a lot of friends to it, so I don't want to be portrayed as someone who's survived. But I was at a stage where I was so low that silly thoughts did come into my own head. I didn't think I was ever going to be happy, and I drank myself to oblivion. But I've got fantastic people around me who really care and who pulled me out of my pit. Sometimes therapy is like Pandora's box - you pull stuff out and it actually makes you feel worse at first. You start to understand yourself, and that can lead you to disliking yourself even more. [The therapist] was like: all the things that you dislike yourself for, you should be proud of - and that was quite intense.
It's heartening to hear you sounding so upbeat now.
When you're famous, you get into these places where you're surrounded by back-sniffing sociopaths. I felt like now I'm famous and in a rock band I've got to play the part - but I just realised that I was paying attention to arseholes.

Not just that, all of it - other musicians... There's just loads of pricks in this industry, a lot of divas, and also others who want to grab on to your coat-tails. I don't care about where people are from - I've met people from much posher backgrounds who are fantastic, but it's just that when I walk into a situation where everybody is from a better standing than me, I get insecure, my imposter syndrome kicks in and I would find it easier to attach myself to the wrong'un in the room. You always feel like you don't belong, and that led me to hanging around with people who, regardless of their class, were just sociopath losers. Mantra was written when I was in a bit of a down time. My throat was fucked, and I was riding a BMX through Redondo Beach, Los Angeles, going: what has happened to my life? Four years ago I was on benefits - I need to keep my head.

I feel like I've got my integrity back, I'm more honest with myself about who I am, about my weaknesses and strengths. I don't quite hate myself as much. I've never given myself the time of day before, and now I am - it's been nice. I'm still learning, I'm still in the trenches at the moment, but I feel like there's a clear goal in sight. This record is about growing up, and the issues you carry through to adulthood. The closing song, The Dying Light, is sad. "Those dead boys are always there, there's more every year," but ends with a celebration: "I'm damned if I give up tonight / I must repel the dying light. / For Mam and Dad and all my pals / For all the ones who didn't make the night." I've got to keep going - because I've been preaching it! It's for them, all them people who have messaged me, that guy who's stopped himself from killing himself - they've realised there is purpose to this, and there's beauty to be had.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.

I'm not that big in America - though I'm going to try and change that, like! - so me and the boys are thinking about doing a stint out there for six months, and try and write a third record. I have so many ideas that have spawned from writing this one. I feel like I've started to close the chapter on that part of my life. I'm going to focus on not feeling like a bag of shit every day.

Seventeen Going Under is released on 8 October.

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Sam Fender: 'Leftie is now a slur in working-class towns'

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In a brutally honest interview ahead of his stunning second album, the Tyneside chart-topper discusses politics, family, fame and mental health

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Interview with Fender talking about the meaning behind the song (you only need to watch the first 10 mins or so).

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Sam Fender breaks down new song Seventeen Going Under | Behind The Lyrics | Radio X

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Interesting read looking at how the music video became a social media sensation.

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How Sam Fender’s Seventeen Going Under became a TikTok hit

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The lead track from the singer-songwriter’s second album achieved viral success due to an emotive TikTok trend.

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"Say My Name": The History Behind Beyoncé's "Formation"

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Interesting read about the history in Formation.

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While critics of Beyoncé's recently released video, "Formation" are right that it engages politics, even more profoundly it is about history. In it, Beyoncé rewrites Americans' traditional understanding of black America, taking aim at traditional portraits of black people as subjugated, regimented, and unquestionably heterosexual. In place of those traditional bonds, she restores to them their multifaceted history.

The video begins with Beyoncé on top of a police car drowning in a river-immediately evoking the chilling events of Hurricane Katrina, of black people who were abandoned by the government and remained in their homes only to appear later in the media on top of roofs and cars and in boats.

From that point forward, the video unfurls political messages by exploring the forgotten historical contexts encoded within familiar stories. The video features Beyoncé in a nineteenth-century drawing room clad in Victorian era high fashion; then dancing in a dark-wooded hallway where portraits of African royalty and other elite black ancestors hang on the wall; then she is seated in a parlor surrounded by other black women, who like her, are dressed in regal, high fashion of a century ago. She then appears on the steps of a stately porch surrounded by black men, where again, her outfit and theirs mark an earlier historical period.

These historical images upend traditional representations of black people in similar settings. Usually, African Americans in those scenes are depicted as oppressed, injured, defeated, and barely dressed. Beyoncé appears in high fashion not to appear "white" or like the elites of older epochs but rather to acknowledge the history of elite classes of black people in New Orleans. Throughout the past, black elites occupied fine homes and wore fine clothes, but they often don't appear in traditional historical narratives. The images on the wall of the ancestors, who hailed from royalty and other elite classes, not only illustrate a different past but also offer a glimpse into the interior of black homes that did exist.

The video also restores humanity and agency to black Americans by rejecting the traditional regimentation of black bodies. There, in the Victorian home, the video features Beyoncé's daughter, Blue Ivy, in a parlor with two other black girls. All three appear in white dresses. Blue Ivy stands akimbo with the other girls behind her. At first, they recall the traditional narrative of black children forced to stand in formation. Like the other historical images, this too evokes a forgotten past. Since the mid nineteenth-century American audiences have been fascinated by similarly well-dressed black children, but they were careful to picture these children not as carefree, but as carefully regimented.

An infamous nineteenth-century daguerreotype of "white slave children," featuring Rosina Downs, Charles Taylor, and Rebecca Huger, showed the children in a straight line, under the surveillance of the photographer. The images featured the children dressed in formal Victorian clothing, often appearing next to darker black children and adults in order to accentuate how fair they were. The image of Downs and the other black children appeared as sketches and photographs in the popular magazine Harper's Weekly and other publications, illustrating nineteenth-century Americans' obsession with noting gradations of color among people of African descent. Many historians have focused on these images as evidence of America's complicated and fraught history of color and racism. Yet Beyonce's video offers a new way of understanding these images; the poses of the children actually indicate how children of African descent have often been forced to stand in an orderly line. Blue Ivy and her friends break that line by running in a circle. Their frolicking in a formal space breaks the regimented formation to which even Downs and other black children, who were touted as celebrities, had to adhere.

Simple executions of movement in the "Formation" video telegraph these broader allusions. When Beyoncé appears on a stately porch surrounded by men in what appears to be a funerary scene, she bobs her head. The movement upsets the stately image of the photograph, evoking the costumes and setting from the television show, American Horror Story: Coven, which focused on history, witchcraft, and death in New Orleans. But the out-of-place movement also evokes the silhouettes that appear in modern artist Kara Walker's The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven. There, in its own play on allusions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's canonical novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Walker displays black bodies performing sexual acts and gesturing in ways that disrupt traditional depictions of enslaved people at work on plantations. The "Formation" video takes its cue from these displays, portraying bodily gesticulations, movement, and expressions that undermine the stereotypical portrait of black suffering, loss, and even labor.

Other evocative moments in the video attack the stereotypical view of black Americans as exclusively heterosexual. At the 1:10 mark in the video, Big Freedia, a New Orleans pioneer rapper, drops a voiceover, "I came to slay," which is slang for her success. The lyric illustrates the larger narrative of the song about Beyoncé's return to her ancestral hometown of New Orleans and her iconic status as a performer. Yet, Big Freedia's voice in the video signals a queer subtext within the song, evoking an often unrepresented black queer presence in the Deep South. It alludes to a tradition that can be traced to Jennie Livingston's classic documentary, Paris is Burning, about the subterranean drag ball culture of NYC in the 1980s. Like the portrait of the elites that quickly alerts the viewer to a larger historical context, Big Freedia's voice combined with shots of other black male apparently queer bodies twerking illustrate a larger subtext of sexuality, sex and the body that has often been policed-seen but not heard-in the South.

After her video first appeared on Saturday, Beyoncé performed the song at the Super Bowl halftime show where she has been criticized for being too political because her backup dancers were dressed as Black Panthers. Yet this accusation fails to recognize the intellectual and historical connotations embedded within the song and video.

To claim that Beyoncé is too political overlooks the fact that she was almost certainly invited to perform at the Super Bowl in the first place for political reasons. The organizers likely believed that they needed to include a black performer, yet when she appeared on stage with a hard-hitting performance that tapped into the larger cultural, progressive ethos that is pulsating throughout the country from the Black Lives Matter movement to electorates "feeling the burn," she was criticized as being too political.

All of this, too, reflects black history. Black artists often carry the burden of evoking history in their work in a way that white artists do not.

Last year's most popular music video was of Adele running through an abandoned house with a flip phone, trying to get in touch with a lost lover: that is what history meant to her-reaching out to a past lover. History and politics rarely intertwine in the music of artists like Adele; white artists have the privilege of separating the two. But Beyoncé starts her video by calling on the history of Katrina, for it weighs on her, calls her to action, and conjures the history of the late nineteenth century.

History and politics have been paramount to black artists for generations. From Billie Holiday's haunting song "Strange Fruit" about lynching, to Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddamn," which she wrote in response to both the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and four black girls in a church in Alabama to Janet Jackson's album Rhythm Nation 1814 that highlighted the social ills of the 1980s, black artists have struggled to use music to document the past, assert political claims, and shatter the mythology of the South as an agrarian utopia of American values. As the video "Formation" ends, Beyoncé drowns on top of the police car that sinks underwater.

In "Formation", Beyoncé follows in the tradition of other black artists: she remembers the past, she conjures the ancestors, she breaks convention, she pays homage to the queens, and, in so doing, she reminds us all why she is destiny's child.

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"Say My Name": The History Behind Beyoncé's "Formation"

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We're History tells the story of how America became what it is today. Written by scholars, it is real history, with its triumphs, failures, twists, and ironies.

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The last humanist: how Paul Gilroy became the most vital guide to our age of crisis

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Good background read into the work of this important theorist.

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In 2000, the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust published a report about the "future of multi-ethnic Britain". Launched by the Labour home secretary Jack Straw, it proposed ways to counter racial discrimination and rethink British identity. The report was nuanced and scholarly, the result of two years' deliberation. It was honest about Britain's racial inequalities and the legacy of empire, but also offered hope. It made the case for formally declaring the UK a multicultural society.

The newspapers tore it to pieces. The Daily Telegraph ran a front-page article: "Straw wants to rewrite our history: 'British' is a racist word, says report." The Sun and the Daily Mail joined in. The line was clear - a clique of leftwing academics, in cahoots with the government, wanted to make ordinary people feel ashamed of their country. In the Telegraph, Boris Johnson, then editor of the Spectator magazine, wrote that the report represented "a war over culture, which our side could lose". Spooked by the intensity of the reaction, Straw distanced himself from any furtherdebate about Britishness, recommending in his speech at the report's launch that the left swallow some patriotic tonic.

The Parekh report, as it was known - its chair was the political theorist LordBhikhu Parekh - was not a radical document. It was studiously considerate. Contrary to the Telegraph front page, it didn't claim "British" was a racist word. It said that "Britishness, as much as Englishness, has ... largely unspoken, racial connotations". This was the sentence that launched a thousand tirades, but where did this idea come from? Follow the footnote in the offending paragraph and you arrive at the work of an academic called Paul Gilroy.

Gilroy watched this "depressing and deeply symptomatic" episode unfold from across the Atlantic. He had joined Yale University the previous year, having left Britain in search of greener pastures. Several other non-white British academics had done the same: an article in the Guardian from 2000 about this exodus - headlined " Gifted, black ... and gone " - quotes one of Gilroy's reasons for leaving: "Even to be interested in race, let alone to assert its centrality to British nationalism, is to sacrifice the right to be taken seriously." The response to the Parekh report seemed to confirm that he had made the right decision. Twenty years later, it can feel like little has changed. Time moves forward but, on this issue, Britain stays still, having the same arguments over and over.

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Gilroy, 65, has since returned to Britain. Today, he is widely regarded as the country's pre-eminent scholar of race, culture and nationalism. It's a status that he has acquired slowly, without fanfare, through a steady drip of books, essays and lectures rather than dramatic public interventions. Over four decades his work has spanned disciplines - literature, history, philosophy, music, sociology - but it is built around a simple plea: that race and racism be taken seriously.

He first made a name for himself in the late 1980s with his book There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, which argued that racism was "deeply interwoven" with nationalism in Britain. His 1993 follow-up, The Black Atlantic, still his most influential work, used the writings of enslaved people and their descendants to demonstrate their centrality to the making of the modern world. In 2004's After Empire, more than a decade before the referendum on EU membership, he diagnosed Britain with "postcolonial melancholia": an inability to mourn the loss of imperial greatness, which was encouraging a corrosive nationalism.

Gilroy is a worldly scholar, who wants us to look beyond the nation-state and think on a planetary scale. He has been working for several years on a book about the effects that the climate crisis is having on our ideas about race and humanity. But he can't quite get Britain - or England, really - off his mind. In our conversations over recent months,he circled around the virulent nationalism that accompanied the UK's exit from the EU, the inhumanity of the Home Office 's policy toward migrants, and the renewal of the far-right political forces that he encountered as a young person in postwar London, when he, like so many others, was intimidated by racists in the street. "I really tried to warn people about racism and nationalism in this country," he told me, toward the end of one interview, when Brexit came up. "To have all of those things that could be seen so clearly swell up into this Leviathan and beat everything that I think is important and beautiful and serious and democratic about this culture to death ... It has given me one or two things to think about."

In this moment of resurgent anti-racist politics, people are turning to Gilroy's work. An activist told me that she saw a placard listing the names of essential thinkers at a Rhodes Must Fall demonstration in Oxford - and Gilroy was the only living person on it. When the Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton shared a #BlackLivesMatter reading list on social media, he included There Ain't No Black ..., alongside works by Malcolm X and Maya Angelou. Steve McQueen's acclaimed TV series about Caribbean life in Britain, Small Axe, is further evidence of his influence: Gilroy was credited as an adviser. "He's the foremost intellectual in the United Kingdom: not an if, not a but, not a maybe," McQueen, a friend of Gilroy's, told me over the phone.

He may not have the public profile of someone like the late Stuart Hall, who co-supervised his PhD, but Gilroy's reputation in the field is unrivalled. People who work on race speak of his deep, formative influence; concepts that he developed such as the "black Atlantic" - which refers to the transnational slave-descended cultures that span Africa, Europe and the Americas - are firmly embedded in academia. In 2019, he was awarded the Holberg prize, a $700,000 award funded by the Norwegian government that is often called the Nobel prize of the humanities. (Not a single British newspaper covered it.) The awarding committee described him as "one of the most challenging and inventive figures in contemporary scholarship".

Too challenging, perhaps. For all the plaudits, there is something unsettling about Gilroy's way of looking at the world. He is an untimely figure. His ideas don't correspond to the vogueish pieties of identity politics or even cutting-edge studies of race. He is that most intellectually unfashionable thing, a humanist. And despite his insistence on understanding the importance of race, he has paradoxically spent much of his life encouraging people to work towards something radical, even utopian: moving beyond the idea of race altogether.

Gilroy does not like the spotlight. He was hesitant about being the subject of a profile, and friends of his seemed surprised when I told them that he had eventually agreed. There were moments in our conversations when he would artfully direct me away from personal questions or reflect wincingly on something he'd once said. He seemed wary of what happens to a life when it is turned into a narrative, the way it can be smoothed into something neat, familiar and false. In his work, he has always condemned the tendency to reduce the world to comfortingly simple categories.

When we first met in person, in between pandemic lockdowns last winter in Finsbury Park, north London, Gilroy was easy to spot between the dog-walkers and morning joggers. He is short and bearish, and has a crown of dreadlocks, wisped with grey, reaching down to his waist. Dressed in black, wearing mud-stained walking boots - a partisan Londoner, he is also an outdoors person - he moved across the sodden grass with careful, almost monkish purpose. In conversation, he speaks fluently, gently, like a late-night DJ soothing listeners as they drive, but his tone belies a barbed impatience with the state of things. "I can't watch videos of murder," he said in a recent discussion with the historian David Olusoga, referring to the killing of George Floyd. "I'm already angry enough."Racism, nationalism, intellectual complacency: these disfigure the world and move him, and this hasn't waned as he's grown older.

His mother, Beryl Gilroy, was a teacher, psychotherapist and novelist. She migrated from what was then British Guiana in the Caribbean in 1952, but she wasn't an immigrant: like the rest of the Windrush generation, she was a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies, moving from one part of the empire to another. If that cohort was expecting a measure of hospitality, they found a hostile environment. "Unable to adjust to the presence of semi-strangers who, disarmingly, knew British culture intimately as a result of their colonial education, and who represented a vanished pre-eminence," her son would later write, "the country developed a melancholic attachment to its lost imperial past."

This was the era of the colour bar, when those newly arrived discovered the hollowness of their formal rights. Landlords would refuse to rent rooms based on what the neighbours might think. The graffiti - "Keep Britain White", "[Enoch] Powell for PM" - put things more plainly. So, too did the violence: from the police, the marauding teddy boys, and the assailants, never caught, behind the murder of the Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane in 1959.

In her 1976 memoir Black Teacher, Beryl Gilroy described what it was like to navigate the education system of postwar London. She encountered parents who didn't want a black woman teaching their children, and had to deal with racism from the pupils themselves, who were often parroting their parents. Life among the "workaday English" often amounted to a "daily struggle for survival and dignity", but she was unflappable, eventually becoming the headteacher at Beckford primary school in north London.

In one scene of the memoir, though, we see her stalked by self-doubt. She worries about the child she is carrying, who was the product of what was once called "miscegenation", the mixing of races. Her husband, Pat Gilroy - a trained chemist and a communist, who left the party after Moscow's tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956 - was white. "Might there not be some flaws in the chromosomes?" she wonders, against her better instincts. "After I had defeated an army of nightmares my fears subsided, but I remember to this day the anxiety with which I first examined my son, seeking some flaw, born of a fear buried deep down inside me."

With a white father and a black mother, Paul - named after Paul Dienes, a Hungarian intellectual and friend of his father's - knew early on that he was different, and that sameness was overrated. Gilroy is not forthcoming about his childhood. He resisted the story that seemed to be taking shape as I asked him about it: the scholar of race who was drawn to the subject because of the racism he experienced as a child. "I am so phobic about the cult of victim-speak that I don't want to narrate my life in that way," he told me.

Those formative moments can't be erased, either. In the introduction to his book Between Camps, he recalls a childhood memory of coming across the painted insignia of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Moseley's political party, on a wall in bombed-out London. What was this doing in a country that had only recently helped defeat nazism? "I think that was a stimulus to begin a kind of critical reflection on the power of racism and fascism and nationalism in British life," he said. "It was literally having my face rubbed in all that shit."

As a teenager, Gilroy was drawn to the affirmative politics of black power, grew out an afro, and immersed himself in soul and funk. "We people, who are darker than blue," Curtis Mayfield, sang at Finsbury Park's Rainbow theatre in 1972, with a teenage Gilroy in attendance. "Are we gonna stand around this town / And let what others say come true?"

His mother didn't always make him to go to school because she knew the kind of things teachers said about kids like him. Instead, he would read voraciously, often at the local library in North Finchley. Through his mother, he discovered books - such as The Souls of Black Folk by the African American polymath WEB Du Bois - that he would wrestle with for the rest of his life.

Gilroy failed his English O-level exam, having gone out the night before to see the American singer-songwriter Boz Scaggs play at the Roundhouse in Camden. But he ended up at Sussex University, where, browsing the university bookshop one day, he came across a collection of essays, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. "I thumbed through it and thought, wow," he told me. Until then, he hadn't realised that scholars wrote about things like football, or pop music, or Caribbean culture. Now, after this encounter, academia seemed bigger, closer to life itself. Maybe, he thought, there might be a place for him.

The book that had captured Gilroy's imagination came from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, one of the few institutions producing academic work that made sense of what Britain looked like from ground-level. The CCCS was under the directorship of Stuart Hall, the pioneering Jamaican intellectual who famously coined the term Thatcherism and transformed British leftwing thought by focusing on the importance of culture.

When Gilroy joined the centre as a postgraduate student in 1978, he found that it had an egalitarian ethos; the traditional hierarchy dividing students from teachers was undermined. In 1982, he and a number of his fellow students published a text, The Empire Strikes Back, a landmark in the field of British cultural studies. Its central theme, developing Hall's work, was that the hard-right nationalism of the emergent 80s was being secured through appeals to racist fears.

The 80s were a heady decade, in which battles over belonging were constantly being fought. While the far right whipped up support by promising to "repatriate" them, Gilroy's generation affirmed that they were "here to stay and here to fight", as one leftwing group put it. His was a cohort, actually born in Britain, that was "equipped with a sense of entitlement that their parents had not been able to enjoy", as Gilroy later wrote. They were called the rebel generation for a reason: the 1981 riots, in places like Brixton and Toxteth, were a revolt against police harassment, and it was thanks to them that Gilroy found employment after leaving Birmingham. "Suddenly there were jobs in local government in new areas around policing, equal opportunities, around women's needs and experiences," he said. He worked at the Greater London Council (GLC), the city authority under the radical-left leadership of Ken Livingstone, where Gilroy did research for a unit that monitored the Metropolitan police.

He also gigged as a freelance journalist, writing for the counter-cultural music press. He got into prickly debates about jazz in the pages of the Wire and interviewed James Baldwin for City Limits. ("I never got on with the English in general," Baldwin told him, "People who believe that an elderly British matron is the Empress of the Indies and Queen of all Africa are dangerously removed from reality.") He was finding it hard to enter academia. "I wasn't perceived as somebody who was staying within the bounds of the acceptable limits of scholarly research. A lot of the hostility came from people on the so-called left," he said.

His first book, There Ain't No Black ... , published in 1987, was like a little grenade thrown into the discourse. His targets included English Marxists who couldn't understand the importance of thinking carefully about race; sociologists who portrayed Britain's black population as either victims or criminals; the "new racism" of Thatcher's Britain; and even the GLC, his old employer. In the book, Gilroy tookriots and social movements to be as politically significant as any political party or trade union. "My brain kind of cracked open when I read it," Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the celebrated American theorist of prison abolition, told me.

It is the second chapter that furnished the ideas that would, during the Parekh affair, offend the rightwing press. Gilroy marshalled a long list of examples - pervasive phrases such as "the island race" and "bulldog breed"; the way politicians spoke about immigrants as aliens; laws that privileged immigrants with a grandparent born in the British Isles - to argue that race and nation were enmeshed in the British psyche. The government's obsession with repatriating "illegal immigrants" was further evidence. Deportation, he wrote acidly, "assists in the process of making Britain great again".

Most powerfully, Gilroy treated Britain's Caribbean settlers not as a problem to be solved, but as people whose culture offered sophisticated readings of the world. He saw the soundsystem culture of reggae and dub - whose body-shaking bass frequencies could be heard, and felt, in parties across London - as harbouring a radical critique of the modern world. Darkened dance halls transported revellers out of the oppressive present, while the music's lyrics punctured the drudgery of labouring under capitalism.

Caribbean culture was also re-colouring Englishness itself. Gilroy analysed the 1984 single Cockney Translation by the London-born reggae artist Smiley Culture, which playfully juxtaposes cockney rhyming slang and black patois. "The implicit joke beneath the surface of the record," he wrote, "was that though many of London's working-class blacks were cockney by birth and experience ... their 'race' denied them access to [that] social category." He saw the song as a sign of his generation's emergent, hybrid Britishness.

Music is central to Gilroy's work, providing a kind of sonic argument against narrow nationalism. In his view, the history of black music is a powerful demonstration of how cultures, races, identities are all mongrel things, which can't be neatly packaged into ethnic parcels. Even a genre as seemingly American as hip-hop isn't purely American, he has pointed out: it was fertilised in the Bronx by Caribbean sound systems.

It was after a conversation with a musician, David Hinds, of the reggae band Steel Pulse, that Gilroy grew the dreadlocks that he keeps to this day. Interviewing him for a music zine during his Birmingham days, Gilroy spoke with Hinds late into the night, debating black power and music, and discussing Rastafarianism, a socio-political religion that connected people across the black Atlantic world. Growing out dreadlocks was a way of signifying one's ethical commitment to the "sufferers" of the world. In the Britain of the 70s and 80s, it was also a dangerous way to stand out.

When I asked him about this, more than four decades later, Gilroy resisted divulging what in particular prompted the decision to grow dreadlocks. I could tell that I was encroaching on personal territory. Instead, he answered by way of analogy. He talked about George Orwell, a figure whom he admires in all his contradictory complexity. In his essay A Hanging, set in Burma where he was a colonial officer, Orwell describes accompanying a colonial subject to the gallows. During this short journey, a dog runs up to the condemned and tries to lick his face. Moments like these humanise the prisoner, which horrifies Orwell, as it makes the injustice of what is happening inescapable.

In Burma, Orwell decided to tattoo his hands. "He did this to make sure he would never be comfortable in polite society," Gilroy said. "He marked his body in a way that said to them: I am not one of you."

An hour after sunrise, on a bright, cloudless day earlier this year, I met Gilroy on Hampstead Heath in north London for a walk. "There are so many migratory birds arriving at the moment it's a joy," he had written in an email a few days earlier. He was once again dressed in black, this time with a pair of binoculars around his neck and with dark-tinted, circular sunglasses. He lent me a pair of "bins", as he called them, and we walked over the hills and through the ancient woodland. "If we're really lucky," he said. "We'll see a kestrel." (I had heard from his friends that Gilroy was a birdwatcher, but when I first put this to him, he flinched. "I don't like 'birdwatcher' as an identity category," he said. He stressed that he does not wear camouflage or go to bird fairs and that he's "not part of that culture".)

The green, sun-speckled heath was almost empty of people. The morning air was piped with birdsong. It was a pastoral scene, the kind that might be called typically English. As we walked, Gilroy identified varieties of bluebell and rhapsodised over ancient oak trees. He has an exacting ear, easily distinguishing different species of bird from their interlaced song. "A lot of these birds have migrated from west and central Africa," Gilroy said. "What can I hear right now? I can hear a great tit, a blue tit, and there's a particular kind of warbler - that sound - which comes up from the area between Niger and Senegal." Later, to a bemused university colleague who happened to be walking by, he taxonomised three types of woodpecker.

The day before, Gilroy had delivered his inaugural lecture at UCL, where he has been a professor since 2019, via videolink. He used it to make sense of Boris Johnson's government and the Sewell report, published in March by the government's centre for race and ethnic disparities. For Gilroy, the report -which clumsily downplayed the significance of racism in British life - signalled an attempt to wind back the political clock to a time when anger at racism could be dismissed as people being chippy. "It's designed to be an insult to the likes of me," he told me as we walked.

The culture wars have been simmering for as long as Gilroy has been alive. In the 80s, he wrote about how the press would claim Labour-run councils' anti-racist endeavours were destroying freedom of speech. But much has changed, too; the Conservative cabinet, for instance, is more diverse than ever before. "Overtly racist messaging on immigration, culture and heritage," he said in the lecture, "while sock-puppeting the diversity and inclusion of minority government affiliates has, so far at least, proved to be a way to hold a new electoral bloc together and maintain the high temperature of populist and authoritarian ultra-nationalism."

But Gilroy believes there's something brittle about the Conservatives' approach, which seeks to launch American-inspired battles over cultural values. "I think that the British political class has been entirely bereft of any ideas of its own for a very long time," he told me. "And its dismal inability to imagine a future for this country that is not an American future is expressed in the turn towards denouncing ' critical race theory ' or going on about these things."

Race and racism have never been, for him, about individual attitudes. They rather constitute a terrain on which politics takes place, where social meaning is made. In After Empire, he describes race as something that "absorbs the cries of those who suffer by making them sound less human". The triumphant indifference of the UK government towards the suffering of others - it is in the process of making it even harder for refugees to claim asylum - is a sign that race continues to do its pernicious work.

The anti-racist mobilisations of 2020, the largest in British history, sparked by the murder of George Floyd in the US, took Gilroy aback. He remembers watching the toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston on a livestream. For many years, he had felt unsure about whether such statues should fall. He preferred to see them transformed, as in Hew Locke's 2006 artwork Restoration, which imagined the statue of Colston smothered in layers of guilty gold, or the May Day protesters who once gave Churchill's statue in Parliament Square a grass Mohican and lick of red paint. Gilroy is not an instinctive iconoclast: as a child, he told me, he queued with his parents outside Westminster Hall to see Churchill's body lying in state. He believes that politeness and civility are undervalued virtues.

But his doubts were swept away by Bristol's colourful crowd. "I couldn't believe it," he told me. When we spoke in December, he still seemed euphoric at the memory. Seeing Colston sink into the water had felt like a "beautiful symbolic eruption", a glimpse of what England could be. As the months went by, some of that optimism waned. "We witnessed something special and incredible last summer," he told me on Hampstead Heath in spring. "But I'm not seeing a lot of continued momentum. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places." Gilroy is at his gloomiest when thinking about the effect that "timeline media" like Twitter and Facebook is having on young activists, drawing them into circular and parochial arguments online.

Anti-racism has changed since Gilroy's youth, its edge blunted. For much of the 20th century, being against racism meant being for a radically different political and economic settlement, such as socialism or communism. Today it can mean little more than doing what Gilroy mockingly calls "McKinsey multiculturalism": keeping unjust societies as they are, except with a few "black and brown bodies" in the corporate boardrooms. ("I'm not very interested in decolonising the 1%", he told me.) What is left is a more individualistic anti-racist culture, which is keen on checking privilege and affirming the validity of other people's experiences, but has trouble creating durable institutions or political programmes.

There are moments when Gilroy shifts into lyrical lament, but he usually catches himself and tries to correct course. He has described himself as a " cosmic pessimist " moved by the "obligation to find hope". During one conversation, when I asked whether figures like Priti Patel, the UK government's hard-right home secretary, whose parents were Indian migrants from east Africa, represent the end of a unifying anti-racism, Gilroy demurred."For every Priti Patel, for every 'Dishy Rishi', there are people out there doing things that are important work in solidarity with one another," he said.

He talked about the annual march to Downing Street that memorialises the hundreds of people who've lost their lives to police violence. You can see "all kinds of faces" on those walks, he said. (He tries to attend each year.) Then he described the aftermath of the Grenfell fire in 2017, when people of all religions responded with food, support, solidarity. The rhetoric that came from the survivors of the Grenfell fire stirred him. "It was strongly humanistic actually," he said. Their banners, he explained, critiqued the murderous crime that they had suffered in the language of a common humanity.

A few years ago, on board a train headed for New Haven, Connecticut, Gilroy noticed something on the other side of the window: a bald eagle perched in a tree. He turned to his fellow commuters to see if they were also interested in what was, after all, their national emblem. They weren't. "They just thought I was some crazy black person," he recalled. By this point in career, in the early 2000s, Gilroy had left the UK for Yale, where he would become chair of the African American Studies department. He is proud of what he accomplished there, but there was some homesickness - and controversy.

One of the guiding principles of his work is a hostility towards "ethnic absolutism", be it white supremacism or black nationalism, which, Gilroy has said, "can be as toxic as any other form of nationalism". (He has pointed out that the black nationalist Marcus Garvey once boasted that his organisation was among the "first fascists".) Above all, he is deeply sceptical about the very idea of race itself. He sometimes places the word "race" in scare quotes to remind his readers that racial categories like black and white do not refer to some essential truth that stretches back through time. Instead, they are a modern invention, dating back to the ordering of the world by European imperialism. He likes to direct attention to the artificiality of these categories, the way they are made and remade. Indians during the 1857 rebellion against British rule were called "niggers" by officials; West Indian people, like Gilroy's mother, only became "black" when they arrived in England. ("How I hated that word 'black' and the emotions, concepts and associations it aroused," Beryl Gilroy wrote in her memoir.) As her son once put it, "It's white supremacy that made us black."

This rejection of race doesn't entail the denial of racism. Quite the opposite: race is a fiction with real effects - and Gilroy has spent much of his life pointing these out. But its constructed nature does mean that when we see a person's racial identity, what we're really seeing is a "virtual reality given meaning only by the fact that racism endures", as he has written. Subjugated people might find solace and community in their race, but the long-term consequence of anti-racist work should be to discard the idea of "race" altogether.

Gilroy spent the 90s weaving these ideas into his third major book, Between Camps - or as it was more provocatively titled in the US, Against Race - which came out when he was at Yale. The book develops a complex argument about the lingering afterlife of fascism in capitalist democracies, which is connected to a provocative critique of identity politics. Race, he argued, was becoming antiquated - and this was a good thing. "Action against racial hierarchies," he wrote, in what is perhaps his most quoted line, "can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of 'race'." Between Camps was also deeply critical of a regressive "conservatism" in corporate black American culture, which trafficked in a commodified blackness. (Among his targets were Spike Lee's decision to set up an advertising agency, and the nihilism of muchcontemporary hip-hop.)

Hazel Carby, who has been friends with Gilroy since their days at Birmingham, was head of Yale's African American studies department at the time. As a reporter wrote in 2001, she was hoping that Gilroy's arrival at Yale would help broaden "the field's purview beyond the borders of single nations and single-minded conceptions of race". It did, but he didn't endear himself."The audience bristled at this limey's apostasies" is how the cultural critic Sukhdev Sandhu described one of Gilroy's public appearances during this time. Some American critics found Gilroy's arguments muddled, haughty or excessively broad. Others felt that he had overlooked the practical implications of rejecting race: would it mean the end of anti-discrimination laws, for instance? Prof Ruth Wilson Gilmore loved Between Camps, but it didn't go over well with all her students. "I found that [some of them] found it really nerve-racking and distasteful to think that race as a category should go away," she told me. "And that there was something wrong with somebody who thought that way."

When I asked him about his experiences in the US, Gilroy was hesitant. It was clear he was wounded by the period. "I don't want to make this into an argument with black Americans because I've been immensely affected by that history and culture, and it's educated me in ways that I'm really grateful for," he said. Much of his work, particularly his early books, had resonated there too. Saidya Hartman, a celebrated professor at Columbia University, told me about the formative impact of The Black Atlantic on her work. "At that moment, in US scholarship, the emphasis was still on minimising the role of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the making of capitalism," she said. "So to have the Black Atlantic argue so powerfully for its constitutive role in the making of modernity was really important."

But Gilroy admitted to me that he struggled with what he called the "parochial" elements in African American studies. Eventually, he said, he experienced such "unpleasantness at the hands of some African American intellectuals who objected to my expressing my opinions about them as an outsider" that he returned to the UK. For some thinkers in the US, this irritation persists. In his 2017 book Black and Blur, the theorist Fred Moten wrote a lengthyand unsparing footnote that took Gilroy to task: "Who are you to lecture blacks in the United States, whom you conceive in the most egregiously undifferentiated way, about their international dissident responsibilities, while speaking of 'We Britons' ... ?"

But as the dust has settled, younger people have made use of Between Camps. It "anticipated so many of the problems and questions that we are grappling with now," says the US writer Asad Haider, who cited Gilroy's work in Mistaken Identity, his 2018 book about the limits of narrow identity politics. Haider gives a first-hand account of a student politics campaign that broke down because groups devolved into bickering, racialised sub-groups. The key idea he takes from Gilroy is that "we have to go beyond the identity-based conception of politics to one of universal emancipation". ("Bringing the word identity together with the word politics," Gilroy once told me, "makes politics impossible, actually, for me, in any meaningful sense. Politics requires the abandonment of identity in a personal sense.")

Gilroy doesn't endorse a colour-blind politics that pretends the idea of race can be wished away. The post-racial world has to be fought for, against the odds. When Haider asked if Gilroy would provide a quote for his book, which he did, Gilroy sent him a favoured photograph of his, taken at the Manchester Pan-African Congress of 1945. The scene features placards with slogans like "Arabs and Jews united against British imperialism!" and "Labour with a white skin cannot emancipate itself while labour with a black skin is branded".

In recent years, the appeal of an academic current known as Afropessimism has brought home just how untimely Gilroy's ideas are. Its best-known proponent, Frank B Wilderson III, at the University of California, Irvine, contends that black people are viewed by all other people, including people of colour, consciously or not, as outside humanity. The result is that they are subject to a "gratuitous" violence that is unlike any other type of racism. To Wilderson, slavery is not a thing of the past - in fact, it has never really ended.

The rise of Afropessimism is a bleak sign for the likes of Gilroy, schooled on Stuart Hall's argument that race is made politically meaningful through the struggle against capitalism, which is itself not eternal. Gilroy sees Afropessimism as part of an "ontological turn" - ontology is the study of being - in which race becomes an unassailable barrier between the self and the world, and anti-black violence an immutable fact. "What's interesting to me is how resonant the Afropessimist outlook has proved to be," Gilroy said. "I can't help thinking that it's got something to do with the fact that it absolves you of having to do anything at all. That really what you have to do is just be black. And there's a sufficiency in that."

In sharp contrast, Gilroy wants to reinvigorate an old ideal: humanism. In some scholarly circles, calling oneself a humanist can sound not just antiquated, but suspect. It was, after all, the name of the woolly ideology of equality propagated by Europeans at the height of empire, who spoke of the liberty of man while denying it to millions. But to Gilroy, there is hope in the promise of a radical humanism, illuminating a post-racial world. This, he believes, is the humanism of figures who regularly appear in his work such as Du Bois, Primo Levi, Toni Morrison and the French-Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon. If thinkers who had lived through the 20th century's abominations could hold on to the idea of a humanism worthy of the name, then so can we.

Gilroy's prose can be difficult. His style is meditative, incantatory. He does not so much pursue a thesis in a linear fashion as solder ideas together into striking shapes. Writers, political figures and musicians are plucked from history and the present, placed in conversation with one another; a chapter might begin with two epigraphs, one from Walter Benjamin and the other from Michael Jackson. Sometimes the effect is frustrating, sometimes revelatory. A single poetic sentence might illuminate paragraphs of slow, swirling argument.

In 2019, after winning the Holberg prize, Gilroy travelled to Norway to give the laureate's lecture, which he titled Refusing Race and Salvaging the Human. It is perhaps the clearest and most succinct statement of his worldview to date. "If you want to be serious about the struggle against racial orders," he said, explaining his motivation behind the lecture, "you have to adapt your understanding of what it is to be a human being and why that is worth fighting over."

The central scene is taken from the 1789 autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, the former slave and abolitionist. Equiano describes how he took control of a floundering ship during a storm in which the white crew had "become inert, apparently indifferent to their own fate". With a few others, Equiano rescued the vessel, working so hard that the skin was flayed from his hands. Equiano's actions scrambled the ship's racial hierarchy. He was temporarily recognised as a kind of "chieftain" by the crew.

Gilroy's point is that disasters can create the conditions in which we are forced to look beyond race towards our common humanity. What does he hate so much about race? It's not just that it is a bogus concept, not just that it leaves behind it an endless trail of atrocities, but that, on a smaller scale, it tries to limit what a person can be, telling them that they are one thing or the other, rather than many things at once.

In the lecture, he offered this summary of his politics, which might be best imagined daubed on the walls of a future flooded city: "It is imperative to remain less interested in who or what we imagine ourselves to be than in what we can do for one another, both in today's emergency conditions and in the grimmer circumstances that surely await us."

Gilroy is rarely at a loss for words. As we walked on Hampstead Heath, he discussed why he left Yale in 2005. It was partly to do with the way his ideas were received, but there was something else. He came to a stop by a wooden fence. As he paused, the birdsong seemed to grow louder.

"I have a weird love of England. And London in particular," he eventually said. "This is my home. God, it is. And I didn't know it was until I went somewhere else."

When I asked why this love was weird, he replied: "Because it's ambivalent. And because it doesn't love me back. It's unrequited."

He did, surprisingly, receive an invitation from Theresa May's office in 2017 to be put forward for a CBE for "services to cultural and literary studies". Gilroy wasn't bothered so much about the imperial connotation of becoming a Commander of the British empire, as that was clearly "absurd", but did find himself getting cross that the invitation came with a form about his ethnicity to fill in. "So the woman who is hounding my brothers and sisters to death over the Windrush scandal," he told me in an email, "[wanted] to monitor my ethnicity while handing me a bauble. How fucked up was that?" He declined the invitation.

In 2004's After Empire, which he wrote while in the US, Gilroy puzzled over his homeland from afar. Why did it seem to be so stuck, unable to yield a different conception of what it might be? The obsession with the second world war - from the English anti-German football chant "Two World Wars, One World Cup" to the endless, commemorative flyovers of spitfires - troubled him. It seemed like a symptom of a society trapped in a warped image of the past: where the arrival of immigrants or refugees were spoken of as an act of invasion, where memories of the anti-Nazi war were stirred to justify interventions in the Middle East. He noticed that the "neurotic" fixation on the war went hand in hand with a carefully curated ignorance about empire and decolonisation - the brutal conflicts in Malaya, Ireland, Kenya and elsewhere. This stifling airlessness, this "postcolonial melancholia", could also express itself through "outbursts of manic euphoria", as Gilroy recently reminded his followers on Twitter in the hysterical run-up to England's appearance in the Euro 2020 final.

But the book also offered a measure of hope. Gilroy saw stirrings of something positive in the hybrid styles and self-effacing humour of British pop culture - the Streets and Ali G are cited - but also in life as it was lived. Take the north London neighbourhood he has called home for almost 40 years, Finsbury Park. In the mind of England's rightwing newspapers, it is a byword for social breakdown: a den of Islamism, haunted by the threat of inter-ethnic tension. The cleric Abu Hamza, currently serving life sentence in the US on terror charges, was once the imam of the local mosque. In 2017, it was attacked by a white supremacist.

In Gilroy's view, to focus on this is to mistake the exception for the rule. He sees Finsbury Park as a "glorious expression" of actually existing multiculturalism, where racial differences are rendered banal by the flow of urban life. People in cities like London more or less get on, living side by side, with young people, in particular, developing cultures that mix styles, music and slang - the opposite of ethnic absolutism. Gilroy has elevated this observation into a theory, "conviviality".

Affirming the creole pleasures of urban life isn't enough, of course. The years after Gilroy wrote After Empire have seen the great recession, austerity, intensified gentrification, the fire at Grenfell Tower, and the pandemic, which has produced suffering for ethnic minorities at disproportionate rates. Convivial life is being tested. But it promises something more substantive, and hopeful, than mindless flag-waving.

He has always described himself as English, rather than British, he told me on Hampstead Heath. He loves England's countryside, its folk music, its language. "I think I was worried with the idea of Britishness that it would only end up being the black and minority ethnic populations who took it seriously. Because it has no cultural content." At that moment, a little greenfinch made itself heard."They're the ones I like the most to look at," he said. "They've got very forked tails and they're green. There's something about the greenness of the greenfinch, and the way it complements the leaves ... "

"I hope I don't sound patriotic," he said, moments after talking about his claim on Englishness. "Patriotism is a betrayal of that attachment. Because it reduces it to some sort of formula."

Gilroy is fond of the words of the Trinidadian historian CLR James, who wrote, in a 1969 essay, that "black studies" is the "history of western civilization. I can't see it otherwise." This might be the mission statement for what he imagines will be his final job: directing the newly formed Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of racism and racialisation at UCL. James's point was that studying race shouldn't be a parochial activity, but a way of understanding the world as it is for everyone. And as it might be. For Gilroy, this universalism is the whole point: the anti-racist struggle against police violence, he has emphasised in the past, should improve society for everyone, forcing the reform of "legal procedures that can impact on the lives of all citizens".

At the end of The Black Atlantic, Gilroy wrote that the "colour line", as WEB Du Bois termed the racial divisions etched across the globe, would soon no longer be the central axis of political conflict. It is still there, he told me, but the task is to see how it crisscrosses with other axes: health, wealth, gender, climate, technology. He wants his students to address race in a "planetary way". At the UCL Centre, they will consider artificial intelligence, public health, borders: the architecture of 21st-century life.

But the past lurks in the shadows. Late last year, during his regular early-morning walks in Finsbury Park, Gilroy noticed something that echoed the racist graffiti he couldn't escape as a child. Far-right vandals had been etching Celtic Crosses, a white supremacist symbol, into logs and tree stumps in the park during the night. "It's the old circle with the cross through it," he said. "A lot of neo-Nazi groups use the sign." There's an app through which you can report vandalism to the council, but he couldn't be bothered to go through all that. "I've been rolling over the logs so it doesn't show," he said, "in the hope that no one will roll them back the other way."

This article was amended on 6 August 2021. The Holberg prize is not awarded by the Norwegian government, but is funded by it. This has been corrected.

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The last humanist: how Paul Gilroy became the most vital guide to our age of crisis

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The long read: As one of Britain's most influential scholars, Gilroy has spent a lifetime trying to convince people to take race and racism seriously. Is Britain finally ready to listen?

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Really useful reminder for revision.

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The Bridge A Level Media Studies Key Scenes for Representation EDUQAS

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The report is interesting but just reading the blog post gives you a clear summary of media ownership.

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Media Reform coordinates the work of advocacy groups campaigning to protect the public interest in light of the Leveson Inquiry and Communications Review.

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Assassin's Creed Mirage: Why Arabic is at the heart of the new game

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Interesting article about the new AC game.

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Assassin's Creed Mirage is released this week - and reviews have called it a return to the series' roots. But there's also been one major change.

For this edition, set in 9th Century Baghdad, developers Ubisoft have recorded the game's performances in Arabic.

Previous games in the long-running stealth franchise have taken place in the Middle East, Europe and Africa, but the heroes have always been voiced by English-speaking actors by default.

Players can still choose to play the game with English dialogue, but its makers hope they'll choose the more "authentic" Arabic.

It was what fans heard when the game's first global trailer dropped in late August, and a move that's been welcomed by fans like Ameer, who grew up in Baghdad.

He says hearing Arabic in games isn't a first, but "it's usually with a terrorist saying something that people recognise as Arabic".

Engineering student Ameer, 20, says he was impressed by the trailer, when fans got to hear the Arabic dialogue spoken by main character Basim and get a glimpse of the game's world.

"I was like 'this is perfect'," says Ameer.

"Arabic is a beautiful language and the dialect they use in Mirage is a beautiful one," he says.

Mohammed Al Imam, who works for Ubisoft's Middle Eastern and North African branch, explains that the language spoken in the game is classical Arabic, a "1,000-plus years old" version "still preserved to this day in schools, academia and news and entertainment".

He says it differs from modern, spoken dialects but is still widely understood.

Mohammed says that it's common to see Arabic characters in Western media speaking in "broken Arabic" or "mimic the sounds without understanding the words".

"The intonation is off, their pronunciation is off.

"It's something that's been bothering the Arabic consumer for decades, similar to someone who's not French trying to act like a French guy."

He tells Newsbeat that one of the starting points for the project was to insist that "any Arabic line must be performed by someone who is fluent in the language".

Mohammed says the philosophy also worked in reverse - its translation team in charge of subtitles for English speakers playing with an Arabic voice track needed a deep understanding of both languages.

He points to one line in English script, where an impatient character complains that "camels will sprout wings on their humps" if they have to wait any longer.

In the Arabic, Mohammed says, the line is actually "if I waited any longer the Phoenix would have risen from its ashes".

He says these "small things" are scattered throughout the game, and might not be noticed by non-native speakers.

"But for Arabs, they'll know immediately," says Mohammed.

"And they'll point it out and say, 'Ah, that's inaccurate. They haven't done the research'."

Another key part of Mirage, and previous Assassin's Creed games, is faithfully recreating their historical settings.

Mohammed says Ubisoft also employed various historical experts to make sure the world was authentic where it needed to be.

Ameer, who currently lives in Istanbul, hopes the game will help the rest of the world to see Iraq differently.

"I feel like it's going to put in the mind of players that Iraq and the whole Arab world is really important to the entire world history," he says.

"In the past, all that people talk about is war.

"But Baghdad and the whole of Iraq [in the 9th Century] is a hugely important moment in history.

"This was the golden age," he says. In Ameer's opinion "all knowledge, books, and the biggest writers, mathematicians, they all originate from Iraq and Baghdad".

That's also something that Mohammed says drove his personal passion for the project.

"So seeing a positive depiction, seeing an accurate depiction, different characters with different personalities, not stereotypes, not cliches, was something that pushed me to to really put everything I have into it," he says.

Changes to popular franchises can be unpopular with long-term fans, but Mohammed thinks modern, English-speaking audiences will be receptive to the game's new approach.

"People are more exposed through social media, through the internet to different cultures, they're more understanding of different cultures.

"I mean, I grew up watching and consuming entertainment and media from other cultures and seeing people do the same. The other way around is refreshing."

Early reviews of the game, which is available on Playstation, Xbox and PC, have been generally favourable, according to aggregator Metacritic.

And some websites, including Polygon, IGN, and Eurogamer, have praised Mirage for its more focused approach, compared with sprawling recent titles in the series.

But other sites, such as The Gamer, said the return to the style of the franchise's earlier games "dredges up problems you may have forgotten".

Ameer says he's excited to get stuck in regardless, and also hopes that the game's approach will have an impact closer to home, and pave the way for more Middle Eastern games development.

"I hope games like this inspire people, they see themselves being represented, and they think 'maybe I can make something like this'.

"Why can't we make something about ourselves as well? It would be a beautiful future if we get more developers from everywhere."

The release of the game coincides with the reported arrests of five former Ubisoft employees over sexual harassment allegations.

According to French newspaper Liberation, the claims stem from a 2020 investigation into claims against high-ranking staff.

A spokesman told the BBC "Ubisoft has no knowledge of what has been shared and therefore can't comment".

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.

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Assassin's Creed Mirage: Why Arabic is at the heart of the new game

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The makers of the latest in the stealth action series have put Arabic front and centre of the project.

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Warner Bros to expand Barbie movie studios in UK

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The project will see capacity at the Leavesden facility near London expanding by more than 50%.

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Microsoft's new Call of Duty deal set for approval

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The revised offer "opens the door" to the deal being cleared, the UK competition watchdog says.

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When Rupert Murdoch started his career, he was young, hungry and desperate to claw back his family's stake in Australia's news business.

Known as "the boy publisher" - the 22-year-old had inherited a paper in the small city of Adelaide from his father, and a plan to take on the international media.

The 92-year-old is arguably Australia's most successful businessman internationally, and his unashamed quest for influence has underpinned his success.

"His genius has been to discover different ways in which his two passions - a desire for money and a thirst for power - can be combined," is how Prof Robert Manne, a former News Corp contributor, described it in a 2011 essay.

But as his 70-year-career draws to a close, his legacy at home remains an open question.

Australia has one of the most concentrated media environments in the Western world - with News Corp's 60% stake in the print market regularly drawing criticism.

Two former prime ministers have led calls for a Royal Commission into Murdoch's impacts on the nation's democracy - and his papers are accused of profiting off an "anger-tainment ecosystem".

"It's his lasting impact on institutions, right-wing news culture, and media ownership that matters, not what's happening to Rupert at age 92," says Prof Tim Dwyer, a media expert at the University of Sydney.

The "boy publisher"

The newspaper business runs in Rupert Murdoch's blood.

"There's this tendency to treat the Murdoch press as something that fell from the skies. Actually, Rupert is part of a lineage of popular press barons that goes back generations," Walter Marsh, who has written about the media mogul's early life, told ABC radio.

His father Sir Keith Murdoch was a well-known reporter and founding member of the Australian Journalists Association.

And by the 1930s he had acquired a string of newspapers and radio stations, establishing himself as a strong voice of the political right.

But by the time of Sir Keith's death in 1952, debt had seen much of the family business sold off, and all that remained was the Adelaide News with its readership of roughly 75,000.

When Rupert took the paper over, he used bigger headlines and brasher stories to blow away his competitors.

He was known to personally redesign pages when he saw fit, although he claimed his editors retained a great deal of freedom.

The tabloid techniques worked.

By 1964 he owned papers in every state and was in the process of launching the nation's first ever national broadsheet - The Australian. He was also planning his move into the UK market, something his father had tried but failed to do.

In 1996 News Corp expanded into 24-hour TV journalism with the launch of Sky News Australia, which stood apart with its opinion-based prime time offering.

The channel has long faced criticism for what are described as polarising or misleading segments including debates over the legitimacy of climate science, and a recent suggestion from one of its hosts that an upcoming referendum on Indigenous recognition could lead to "an apartheid system of governance".

"It's a brand that focuses on highly opinionated right-wing viewpoints. And it's a news diet which people here have become accustomed to. One of the worst consequences has been decades of climate change scepticism," Prof Dwyer says.

Political kingmaker

In one of his first TV interviews in 1967, a young Rupert Murdoch was asked if he "liked the feeling of power" his growing newspaper empire gave him.

"There's only one honest answer to that of course, and it's yes," he replied.

Murdoch's close relationships with some of the most defining political figures of the 21st Century is well documented across the US and UK.

Some Australian leaders say it was no different at home.

"The truth is as prime minister I was still fearful of the Murdoch media beast," former prime minister Kevin Rudd told a senate inquiry on media diversity in 2021.

"No one should be frightened of Murdoch, but can I tell you, he's a frightening kind of guy, because of the power he wields," he added.

It's a characterisation News Corp executives have pushed back on - telling lawmakers at the time that their reporting focused on "the robust and open exchange of news, views and opinions".

Mr Rudd started the campaign for a Royal Commission - Australia's highest form of public inquiry - into News Corp's power back in 2020, describing the company as a "cancer on democracy".

But despite receiving half a million signatures of support, including that of former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, efforts have stalled.

And Australia's current prime minister Anthony Albanese made it clear he doesn't support the proposal before entering office.

"It's a bit like complaining about the referee in a footy game. It might make you feel OK [but] it doesn't change the outcome," he said after the petition launched.

Mr Albanese's victory at the 2022 federal election - along with the success of a wave of climate-friendly, independent candidates - sparked fierce debate about whether News Corp's influence was waning in Australia.

"The election outcome exposes a gaping disconnect between News Corp and voters," political journalist Malcolm Farr wrote.

But Prof Dwyer says while the brand might be "on the wane" with younger Australian audiences turning away from traditional media, it's not about to lose its influence overnight.

And when it comes to Lachlan, he thinks continuity will be king.

"Things won't change very much at all - that's the whole point of the News Corp brand, it's there, it has a culture that's not going to be tampered with, it continues irrespective of who is at the helm. And Lachlan is not really known for his centrist views."

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Rupert Murdoch: How magnate transformed Australia's media

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The 92-year-old businessman changed the face of news worldwide, but it all started at home.

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Why fans dress up for Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Harry Styles

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Really interesting article about fandom.

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Special events have always been worth dressing up for.

But from Beyoncé's Renaissance tour to Harry Styles's Love on Tour, this year's trend in concert dressing has felt somewhat... extra.

Although Taylor Swift is set to grace the UK next summer, her presence has been well and truly felt by British fans on TikTok.

As the last lucky Swifties grab the final tickets for the UK Eras tour, fans' thoughts are already turning to what they will wear when the much-anticipated event finally arrives.

#ErasTourOutfits already has about a billion views on TikTok, filled with videos of Swifties lip-syncing, wearing outfits that capture Taylor's famous eras, or dressing up themselves, friends and their willing boyfriends as her actual lyrics for a quick viral video moment.

If you're a fan of Taylor Swift on TikTok, it's been inescapable on your "For You page".

If not, it's more than likely you've been exposed to a similar style of video or someone in your life dressing with the intention of seeing another very popular artist.

But where has this trend come from?

Sophie Hill, 23, from Manchester, sourced every part of her outfit second-hand to see Harry Styles during the UK leg of Love on Tour, inspired by Harry himself.

"I wore some Adidas campers that I got off Vinted, because they are 'Harry's trainer' and they are pink, which was the colour of the concert," she said. "I paired that with my feather boa from his last tour."

Sophie found a following on TikTok, visiting various charity shops as she looked for the perfect outfit, and gave fans suggestions from what she bought.

The videos have clocked up more than 1.5 million views.

"There's a colour aspect to it, the red the pink. Then there are patterns, anything heart-printed, all the fruits. The strawberries, the cherries, the watermelons, the kiwis - because he names a lot of fruits in his songs."

Sophie says Harry Styles started the trend of hardcore concert dressing, with a little help from TikTok.

"Harry wore a feather boa to the Grammies, a fan copied, the world of TikTok took it and it became a thing."

Sophie can't see a time when she won't be dressing up for concerts.

Sophie isn't alone in thinking this way. It is a trend that popular fashion companies have also taken note of.

Fast fashion brand NastyGal has had sections for 'The Eras Tour', 'The Reniassance Tour', 'Love on Tour' and Elton John's 'Yellow Brick Road Tour'.

Second-hand shopping apps are also jumping on the bandwagon - Depop created a Beyoncé-inspired metallic edit when she was in the UK on their homepage, as well as feather boas, cowboy boots and heart-eye shaped sunglasses heavily featuring in their "Festival Edit."

Stylist and photographer, Rosanna Elettra, has styled bands on tour such as The Gorillaz, and worked with other with other popular music stars like Kesha and Aitch.

She says this summer's wave of concert dressing dates back to the 60s.

"Fans of bands like The Beatles or The Rolling stones would often mimic their looks," she said. "While in the 70s and 80s, fans reflected punk artists through ripped jeans and custom leather jackets."

Rosanna says a lot goes into styling a band and that artists like Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and SZA are just the latest to do it and do it well.

"You need to look at the artist's music, lyrics, personal style, their evolving image and the essence of the tour.

"Fans are noticing this, Swifties are taking inspiration from the glimmering haze of her newest album Midnights, to the vintage dresses and cowboy boots evoking nostalgia of Swift's early country roots."

Rosanna believes that as well as social media, factors like the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have played their part in the influx of feather boas and cowboy hats.

"After extended periods of social isolation and the rising cost of living, fans are looking to maximise their experience, and dressing up in homage to their favourite artists is part of this experience. They want to feel part of the tour and then share it online with other fans."

Marion Moumpala, 27, from Manchester, did exactly this when dressing for Beyoncé's Renaissance Tour, sharing her experience on TikTok, and documenting fans' outfits in Sunderland.

"With the cost of living these days, any experience that we invest in we want to enjoy to the fullest, and I feel like dressing up is definitely part of it," she said.

"I was really inspired by Beyoncé's Renaissance album outfits, lots of silver, rhinestones and cowboy vibes.

"My advice for anyone who wants to look extra-cool at a concert, is create a mood-board based on the visuals for the concert."

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Why fans dress up for Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Harry Styles

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As Taylor Swift's UK Eras tour sells out, fans turn to what they will wear when they see her in concert.

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Really interesting look at synergy and conglomerates.

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Barbie the Album review – a cynical exercise in corporate synergy https://t.co/06nTMpqGLt

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Barbie the Album review – a cynical exercise in corporate synergy

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It falls to Sam Smith, PinkPantheress and Charli XCX to provide moments of flair on a relentlessly branded tie-in soundtrack that wears thin very quickly

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Barbie the Album review – a cynical exercise in corporate synergy https://t.co/06nTMpqGLt

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Barbie the Album review – a cynical exercise in corporate synergy https://t.co/06nTMpqGLt
— Guardian culture (@guardianculture) July 21, 2023

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Barbie the Album review – a cynical exercise in corporate synergy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.entities.urls[].description
It falls to Sam Smith, PinkPantheress and Charli XCX to provide moments of flair on a relentlessly branded tie-in soundtrack that wears thin very quickly

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Barbie the Album review – a cynical exercise in corporate synergy https://t.co/06nTMpqGLt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Barbie the Album review – a cynical exercise in corporate synergy https://t.co/06nTMpqGLt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Barbie the Album review – a cynical exercise in corporate synergy https://t.co/06nTMpqGLt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].title
Barbie the Album review – a cynical exercise in corporate synergy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.entities.urls[].description
It falls to Sam Smith, PinkPantheress and Charli XCX to provide moments of flair on a relentlessly branded tie-in soundtrack that wears thin very quickly

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Can't wait for the Barbie movie? Just as well - there are 45 more toy films to come | Peter Bradshaw

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Really interesting read about films, marketing and toys!

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or corporate Hollywood, there's a new buzzword in town: pre-awareness - or maybe it's just the newest, buzziest version of the oldest idea in movie storytelling. Toy manufacturer Mattel, while preparing for the launch of its forthcoming Barbie movie, is trying to reinvent a further 45 of its toy products as screen ideas: the franchise seedcorn of intellectual property.

Inspired by the success of the lumberingly stupid but lucrative Transformers movies, Mattel's toy stable, like Hot Wheels, He-Man and Polly Pocket, will be the basis of future movies, or streaming, or maybe even theatre. What Marvel did with its superheroes, Mattel is planning to do with its toys. And the point is that that the toys' customer base already know what to expect.

Family movies about toys are attractive to studios because you don't have to work hard to tell a story afresh. Audiences don't have the workload of not knowing, as the film begins, what is going on. Depressing, yes. It could well be an apocalypse of dumb - a further lurch away from the decent Hollywood tradition of making midmarket dramas about grownup people with grownup actors with well-made scripts.

Hollywood has, of course, long traded on pre-awareness. The movies have always adapted classic novels and plays, letting the publishing and theatre industries take the commercial risk. And quite apart from remakes and sequels, Hollywood has a pre-awareness based on genre: if you offer the public a western, for instance, they already know what to expect (and maybe for our generation, superhero films are the new westerns). The same goes for actors. Audiences knew what a John Wayne film was liable to be like, or a Jerry Lewis film or a Katharine Hepburn film or a Tom Cruise film. And for those rare directors with widespread brand recognition, like Alfred Hitchcock or Wes Anderson, people loosely knew what they would be sitting down to - but always with infinite scope for human variation and surprise.

But Mattel's version of "pre-awareness" looks different. Movies based on toys available for decades, even more than ones based on games such as the movie surreally derived from the board game Battleship, play on a deep-seated awareness of a product, which is not a complex narrative but a very rudimentary set of ideas, a much cruder kind of pre-awareness compared to the generic or star-based forms.

Yet the real problem for Mattel is unlikely to be story but tone. The Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie as the blond doll heroine is reportedly structured around the time-honoured fish-out-of-water plotline, with Barbie transported out of her perfect toy universe into the real world. It is highly likely that this film will be experienced on two levels - a serious one for the kids, and an irony-laden one for accompanying adults, who will be slyly invited to laugh at how naff or reactionary the cherished toys of their childhood actually were, or to smile affectionately at how they were charming and empowering.

But irony can be dangerous. Self-awareness can undermine the whole illusion.
Take the Marvel franchise. Ask any adult sophisticate which is the best Marvel film, and they are likely to say Thor: Ragnarok, directed by the super-smart comedy professional Taika Waititi. Everyone loves this film because it is funny: Chris Hemsworth, playing the mighty Norse god himself, takes the mickey out of it, and himself, to just the right extent. But Marvel are very aware that not every film in the franchise can be like this. The Marvel brand as a whole is deadly serious, its fans take it seriously - and if you send it up, that could hurt the bottom line.

Then there's James Bond, the most pre-aware franchise of all. For years, there has been talk of bringing in smart new writers to shake it up and be more funny and self-aware. Danny Boyle was (briefly) invited to take the 007 helm, but disinvited when he had his own ideas about script. Phoebe Waller-Bridge was supposed to be adding extra humour and zip. But how much did she really contribute? The 007 brand of course has little tics and quirks of humour, but it is fundamentally serious. Too much comedy and it just becomes Austin Powers.

This, I predict, is what risks jeopardising Mattel's "extended universe". Sheepish irony. If you are looking for ways of extrapolating a narrative from something as obviously ridiculous as Hot Wheels (and we all remember how the cars actually fell down from the track during the loop-the-loop, despite the gravity-defying stunts in the TV ads) then you will naturally be drawn to comedy, and playfulness is, after all, a natural tendency in dealing with a toy. Yet it will never quite be funny enough, and it will not match the quicksilver imaginative world which children have already brought to their much-loved games and dolls. Mattel's pre-aware toy movies have within them the seeds of their own destruction.

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Can't wait for the Barbie movie? Just as well - there are 45 more toy films to come | Peter Bradshaw

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The Transformers series has inspired Mattel to raid its stable for the screen. But the movies can't match the joy of the real thing, says Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw

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One example of innovative covers from the publisher.

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Interesting article about video games audiences.

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Twitch: Why horror games are a haven for some gamers

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Horror games offer frights and tension - but they also provide communities for many players.

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Context for our set products

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The long-anticipated report by MPs into whether Boris Johnson misled Parliament over Covid lockdown parties in No 10 is finally out.

The report by the seven-member privileges committee followed a year-long investigation and runs to around 30,000 words.

The former prime minister stood down as an MP last week after receiving an advance copy, angrily accusing the committee of bias.

Here are the key findings.

Contempt of Parliament

The committee was asked to decide whether Mr Johnson committed a "contempt" of Parliament when he said in the Commons, after the Partygate scandal emerged, that Covid rules were followed at all times in No 10.

They found that he did, in several ways:

by deliberately misleading the Commons about what he knew about the gatherings in his original statements

by deliberately misleading the privileges committee whilst they were investigating him

by referring to the committee's findings before they were published, in his resignation statement last week

by "impugning the committee" in his criticism of it, and being complicit in a "campaign of abuse" against its members

He deliberately misled MPs

The question of the former prime minister's intentions was one of the key aspects of the inquiry.

He had already admitted MPs were misled by his original statements, but he says he believed them to be true at the time, and they were based on assurances he had received.

However, the report found he was "deliberately closing his mind" about a lack of effort within Downing Street to enforce social distancing.

And it found he had made "after-the-event rationalisations" about the advice he had received.

Key evidence

One key bit of evidence came from Martin Reynolds, his former principal private secretary, a civil servant.

He told the inquiry that, while preparing for a session of Prime Minister's Questions in December 2021, he had questioned whether it was "realistic" for Mr Johnson to say rules had always been followed.

Mr Johnson also said he'd been given assurances by his media advisers that rules were followed.

But the committee said this advice, given in response to press stories, should not have been used to make broad statements about rules being followed at all times.

The report said he should have obtained an "authoritative assessment" before saying this, for example by consulting government lawyers.

Punishment

The report revealed that, before Mr Johnson announced he was standing down, it wanted to recommend suspending him from the Commons for more than 10 days.

This would have meant he would potentially have faced a by-election in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency.

But suspending him is no longer an option, given that he's already stood down as an MP in his blistering resignation statement last week.

However, the report says that now, given what he's said about the committee, they would have recommended a ban of 90 days - an extremely long ban by the standards of recent years.

And it says he should not get a parliamentary pass, which former MPs would normally be able to apply for.

Perhaps the greatest punishment in the report, ultimately, will be the damage it does to his reputation among Conservative MPs - and what it means for his prospects of any future political comeback.

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Boris Johnson Partygate report: Key findings at a glance

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A report by MPs into whether the former prime minister misled Parliament has finally been published.

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Xbox showcase 2023: Is Microsoft back in the game?

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Microsoft had a lot to prove in some people's eyes - did it manage to convince the doubters?

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The Inquiry - Is it Endgame for the Marvel Cinematic Universe? - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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The Ubisoft Forward 2023 is a wrap, and Ubisoft showed off a lot of its plans for the rest of 2023 and beyond. From a huge gameplay chunk of Star Wars Outlaws, to a release date for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, to updates on a trio of Assassin's Creed titles, Ubisoft packed a lot into this presentation. Read on to learn everything announced at the Ubisoft Forward 2023.

Star Wars Outlaws Gets 10-minute Gameplay Showcase

Star Wars Outlaws was announced as part of yesterday's Xbox Games Showcase, but Ubisoft waited for its own presentation to share the first look at gameplay. Outlaws is in development at Massive Entertainment, and Ubisoft is calling it the first open world Star Wars game.

The gameplay showcase showed off combat, including how adorable companion Nix can help protagonist Kay Vess in the heat of battle. We also saw Kay riding a speeder, deciding if she wanted to bribe an Imperial officer, and eventually hopping into a ship to escape into hyperspace.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Gets a Release Date

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is finally coming on December 7, 2023. The first-person action adventure will see players control a Na'vi trained by the RDA to fight against her own people. But the Na'vi eventually reconnects with her heritage, learning Na'vi weapons and skills to prepare for the RDA's inevitable return. Ubisoft showed off a new trailer and gameplay breakdown of the long-awaited title, showing gameplay that reminded us of Far Cry.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Gameplay Revealed

Following the announcement last week at Summer Game Fest, Ubisoft unveiled gameplay for Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. The 2D action Metroidvania is "semi-open world", and more areas open up to you as you gain new powers and improve your skills. We saw a lot of the game's fast-paced sword combat, with plenty of flashy finishing moves on some of the tougher enemies. Time powers are also present, but sometimes your enemies will use them against you. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is launching on January 18, 2024 on all platforms.

In Assassin's Creed Mirage, Direct Combat Is a "Back-up Solution"

Ubisoft shared an extended look at Assassin's Creed Mirage gameplay, showing off the back-to-basics stealth-centric gameplay. The gameplay focused on the concept that there's always a discreet way to take out your enemies, whether that's through Basim's hidden blade, blow darts, or smoke bombs. The game takes place in 19th century Baghdad and will follow Basim in a "tragic coming of age story". The game launches on October 12.

Assassin's Creed Nexus Features the Return of Classic Assassins

Assassin's Creed Nexus is the franchise's first foray into VR, and it will feature a three-pronged story starring a trio of returning characters: Assassin Creed 2's Ezio, Odyssey's Kassandra, and AC3's Connor. The game takes Assassin's Creed's classic stealth assassination gameplay and brings it to the first-person perspective, where players will still be able to use the hidden blade, sword, smoke bombs, bow, and more. The game is coming to Meta Quest 2, and does not yet have a release date.

Assassin's Creed Codename Jade Lets You Fully Customize Your Assassin

Codename Jade is the upcoming Assassin's Creed mobile game, and Ubisoft revealed it's set to enter a public testing phase later this month. And, in a series first, players can fully customize the appearance of their assassin, including gender, clothes, and more. The game takes place during China's Qin Dynasty, between the events of Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Origins.

The Crew Motorfest Arrives This September

The Crew Motorfest now has a release date of September 14, 2023. This is the third installment of The Crew franchise, but it's the first to see the series leave the continental U.S. Instead, The Crew Motorfest takes drivers to Hawaii, where it appears to emulate Forza Horizon's festival format. In addition to cars, players can expect to control bikes, boats, and aircraft, as well.

Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix Gets First Trailer

Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix is a new anime coming to Netflix later this year. It's based on the Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon expansion. We got a teaser trailer revealing that the show will star various Ubisoft characters from outside of the Far Cry universe.

XDefiant Coming This Summer, Open Beta Next Week

XDefiant is Ubisoft's upcoming free-to-play first-person arena shooter, and the company revealed it's coming sometime this summer. Before its official launch, Ubisoft is holding a open session from June 21-23 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Ubisoft also detailed its launch plans, which include 14 maps, five factions, five modes, and 24 weapons. In Year 1, Ubisoft will add four more factions, 12 new weapons, and 12 new maps.

Skull and Bones Closed Beta Coming in August

The long-delayed Skull and Bones is getting a closed beta from August 25 to August 28. You can register now at the game's official website. The beta's announcement was accompanied by a live musical performance set to a montage of Skull and Bones gameplay.

Tom Clancy's The Division: Resurgence Is Coming This Fall

The Division: Resurgence is an upcoming mobile game based on the Ubisoft co-op shooter franchise. We got a new trailer for the mobile title and a release window of Fall 2023.

Ubisoft Sizzle Reel Reveals Jet Set Radio and Halo Crossovers

A sizzle reel revealed Anno 1800 celebrating 25 years on PC and console, For Honor Year 7 Season 2 starting on June 15, Trackmania out now on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, a new planet coming soon to Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, a Roller Champions and Jet Set Radio crossover, Master Chief and the Aribeter joining Brawlhalla, a free trial for Rocksmith+ on PC and Mobile, The Crew 2 Season 8 Episode 2 out now, a new Skate add-on coming to Riders Republic on September 26, and Rayman coming to Sparks of Hope later this year.
Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over seven years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.

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Ubisoft Forward 2023: Everything Announced - IGN

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From a huge gameplay chunk of Star Wars Outlaws to a release date for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, here's everything announced at the Ubisoft Forward 2023.

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By Daniel Rosney and David Sillito

Culture reporter and media correspondent

The number of people taking a strong interest in the news has dropped by around a quarter in the last six years, a global study suggests.

A report by Oxford University's Reuters Institute says 48% of people around the world are very or extremely interested in the news - down from 63% in 2017.

In the UK, the proportion is lower than the global average at 43%.

More than a third of people (36%) worldwide say they sometimes or often actively avoid the news.

The authors of the institute's report said there was evidence that audiences "continue to selectively avoid important stories such as the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis as they cut back on depressing news and look to protect their mental health".

The Digital News Report 2023 also concluded that traditional TV and print news media are continuing to decline, while "online consumers are accessing news less frequently than in the past and are also becoming less interested".

Four in 10 people (40%) say they trust most news most of the time, down two percentage points compared with last year.

In the UK, the BBC was the most trusted news brand, followed by Channel 4 and ITV.

The research also reported that more than half (56%) of those surveyed worry about identifying what news is real and fake online - up two percentage points.

Rise of TikTok

The most important social media platform for news is still Facebook, although it is in long-term decline, with the number accessing it each week for news dropping from 42% to 28% over the past seven years.

Facebook has also downgraded news. It says less than 3% of its news feed these days is traditional news stories. The tweaking of the algorithm over recent years has been catastrophic for some organisations that relied on its traffic.

In the UK, 41% of 18 to 24-year-olds say social media is their main source of news (43% across all countries), up from 18% in 2015.

TikTok and Instagram have both seen increases in use. Instagram is now a source of news for 14% of people, with TikTok on 6%.

But the figures are much higher for young users. One in five (20%) 18 to 24-year-olds get news from TikTok, up from 15% last year. The report says the platform "is the fastest growing social network in our survey".

However, it is not necessarily news from traditional news providers. TikTok users are more likely to get news on the platform from celebrities, influencers or ordinary creators than mainstream news outlets or journalists.

Reuters Institute director Rasmus Neilsen said: "Younger generations increasingly eschew direct discovery for all but the most appealing brands.

"They have little interest in many conventional news offers oriented towards older generations' habits, interests, and values, and instead embrace the more personality-based, participatory, and personalised options offered by social media, often looking beyond legacy platforms to new entrants."

Liking, sharing and commenting about news on open social media platforms is also in decline.

Only around 10% of people in the UK are classed as "active participants" - they are largely male, old, have strong political views and are more highly educated than the rest of the population.

One reason suggested for the change is a growing sense that online conversations on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly toxic.

However, while the sharing of articles and engagement time may have dropped, it doesn't mean such sites are being deserted.

Twitter made headlines after it was bought by Elon Musk, but the number of people using the site each week appears to have has barely changed. There is, Reuters said, no evidence of a mass movement to rivals such as Mastodon.

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Sharp decline in appetite for news in recent years, Reuters Institute says

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There's been a sharp decline in the numbers taking a strong interest in the news in recent years.

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Women drinking beer clothed: why are rightwingers melting down over Miller Lite?

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An interesting read!

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s you've probably noticed, the word "woke" has been entirely wrung of any meaning in recent years. BlackRock and Silicon Valley Bank are "woke", according to the right. Walt Disney is woke. Pope Francis is woke. Even the US military industrial complex is woke.

The newest target? Miller Lite. Conservatives are hopping mad after discovering a two-month-old Miller Lite commercial that was released during Women's History Month.

What exactly is the problem with this ad? Well, it seems that people are taking extreme offense to the fact that the ad humorously points out that there is a long history of misogyny in beer advertising, including Miller's own legacy of using women in skimpy bikinis to sell lager. Fully-clothed women drinking beer? Woke!

Ilana Glazer of Broad City fame stars in the commercial, which encourages people to send in sexist beer ads so Miller Lite, which is owned by Molson Coors, can turn them into fertilizer. That fertilizer is then donated to female brewers who (bear with me here) use it to grow hops for beer. The whole initiative is called the "Bad $#!T to Good $#!T" recycling campaign. To recap: what is essentially an extremely belabored poop joke has incensed conservatives who are now calling for a boycott of Miller Lite.

If you're getting a sense of deja vu from all this, it's because we have seemingly entered week 934 of rightwing outrage about beer. The Miller Lite debacle follows an extended backlash to Bud Light's partnership with the trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney last month. When I say "partnership", I mean that Bud Light sent a personalized beer can to an influencer with 10 million followers who then made a sponsored video and put it on her Instagram page. We're not talking a giant campaign or a groundbreaking statement about trans rights - we're talking a tiny nod to inclusivity and an attempt to broaden Bud Light's reach among a different audience. Which, by the way, is not exactly a huge pivot for Bud Light: the brand has been running ads targeted at the LGBTQ+ community since the late 1990s. And yet there was still a massive backlash and a conservative boycott of Bud Light.

While conservative boycotts generally have very little effect, the backlash from the Mulvaney campaign was intense and reportedly caused a big 21% drop in sales across US retail stores during a week in mid-April, per an analysis of Nielsen figures cited in the Wall Street Journal.

People have every right to express their opinions and to boycott brands. ( Unlike many conservatives, I strongly support the right to boycott.) But what happened with Bud Light - and what's being repeated with Miller Lite - was nothing less than a targeted harassment and intimidation campaign.

Outraged conservatives found the marketing executives responsible for the campaign and hounded them online. Trolls went through social media and found embarrassing photos of Alissa Heinerscheid, who oversaw the partnership between Bud Light and Mulvaney, in college in order to try to paint her as a hypocrite for saying that Bud Light needed to update its "fratty" image. Her face was splashed all over rightwing media sites. She reportedly got death threats.

Both Heinerscheid and Group VP Daniel Blake, who oversaw marketing for Anheuser-Busch's mainstream brands, were put on leaves of absence. Rather than protecting their employees and sticking by a consistent set of principles, Anheuser-Busch, which owns Bud Light, seemed to throw its executives under the bus and kowtow to the bigoted masses. "We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people," the company's CEO, Brendan Whitworth, said in a wishy-washy press release titled Our Responsibility To America. "We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer." It then released a new patriotic ad pandering to conservatives.

A similar harassment campaign is now being waged against Sofia Colucci, the chief marketing officer for Molson Coors. Rightwing outlets are publishing hit pieces targeting the executive and Colucci has reportedly deleted multiple social media account pages because of the harassment. Thankfully Molson Coors is reacting with a little more courage than Anheuser-Busch and refusing to pander to bigots.

"People can take issue with our ads or our brands, but we won't stand by as people personally attack our employees - especially given that these are company decisions, and are never made by one single person," Adam Collins, Molson Coors' chief communications and corporate affairs officer, told Newsweek on Tuesday. Which is precisely what the people at Bud Light should have said. Indeed, if Anheuser-Busch had reacted with a little more guts, then conservatives might not have felt so emboldened to start attacking executives at Molson Coors.

Conservatives, it should be noted, have been getting outraged at adverts since the advent of television. You don't have to do much to trigger the right, after all; you just have to remind them that they live in the 21st century. In 2013, for example, a Cheerios ad with an interracial family sparked online outrage from the right (yes, you read that right: 2013). Then in 2016, Old Navy was similarly accused of "anti-white propaganda" because there was an interracial family in its ads. So none of this outrage is new. What does feel new, however, are the targeted attacks on marketing executives and the coordinated attempts to get them fired. The right has a history of using online mobs to get journalists it doesn't like fired, and now it's using this playbook to target and censor other industries.

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Women drinking beer clothed: why are rightwingers melting down over Miller Lite?

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s you've probably noticed, the word "woke" has been entirely wrung of any meaning in recent years. BlackRock and Silicon Valley Bank are "woke", according to the right. Walt Disney is woke. Pope Francis is woke. Even the US military industrial complex is woke. The newest target? Miller Lite.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64476762

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Rape jokes, racism, bullying - if you've picked up a controller, or scrolled a mouse, to dabble in some online gaming then you've likely come across plenty.

The gaming industry, like others where people interact online, has been trying to figure out how to get to grips with behaviour like this for years.

Ubisoft, makers of major franchises like Assassin's Creed and Rainbow Six, has now signed a first-of-its-kind deal with police to try and tackle the issue for its players.

The hope is for this agreement to start a conversation within the industry and see others follow suit.

Working with police

Online gaming is a joyful experience for millions of people every day.

It's a space where friendships are forged and memorable experienced shared. During the pandemic online games were a saviour for many people's mental health. However its dark side is also plain to see. Abusive behaviour, deaths threats and grooming - can be found in online gaming spaces.

"We want to be on the right side of history," says Damien Glorieux a senior director of the Newcastle-based Ubisoft Customer Relationship Centre.

It's here, and at four other locations around the world, that staff monitor how players of Ubisoft games are getting on - responding to requests for help and actively getting involved with the communities that have evolved around their titles. They deal with everything from purchasing issues to online toxicity.

Other companies have similar set-ups, but what's unique here is the involvement of local law enforcement.

The deal between the company and Northumbria Police works in two parts.

Firstly, it sees specialist officers share their knowledge and expertise on harmful online interactions with the 200-strong team working at the centre in Newcastle, who then apply that training to their daily work.

Secondly, an agreement is in place so that in extreme cases, where there is a threat to life or potential serious harm spotted, staff can fast track the information to police.

They will then decide whether or not to act.

Glorieux explains to BBC News: "We have millions of players, and tens of millions of interactions - so how can we spot incidents?

"It is daunting, but at the same time it is very important, which is why we wanted to sign this deal and try to make things right .

"We wanted to focus on the most extreme cases, make sure we do the right thing there because it gives us a solid foundation to build the rest of our work around."

Less than 0.01% of cases that the centre deals with end up requiring police intervention.

That works out as roughly a handful of cases a month. Most of the time, accounts will be temporarily banned or permanently closed if players have breached a code of conduct.

Staff in Newcastle can also recommend the company start legal proceedings in some instances.

'Threat to life'

Andrew Holliday and his team deal with the cases that get close to, or reach, the threshold for police intervention: "This isn't just a gaming problem, it's is an internet problem," he begins.

"There's a real appetite to make the whole ecosystem a better place.

"What we're working on closely with police on is triaging, you know, where we look at a case and decide - 'right is this is one we can deal with in-house? Or is this something we need to pass on?'"

Gaming is global and some of the cases seen by staff here cross national borders.

Holliday tells us about a recent case in Norway, saying: "Things were said and behaviours displayed that hit our threshold for intervention. There was a threat to life or serious harm.

"The agreement with Northumbria Police meant that after we flagged it, even though it wasn't a UK citizen - they were able to get Norwegian authorities involved.

"It was a lot quicker, more efficient and safer than trying to do it as a private citizen."

Some of the staff here argue that the games industry has shied away from talking about the reality of online play for too long. They say it needs to be more open and proactive in talking about the steps being taken to tackle unpleasant, dangerous or threatening behaviour.

For Northumbria Police, Detective Chief Superintendent Deborah Alderson has been leading the work with Ubisoft on this agreement.

She argues that policing "is about prioritising protecting the vulnerable".

"That means all of our communities not just the ones that we see in person, but our online communities as well," she adds.

"Policing changes continually, demands evolve and we have different challenges all the time - our job is to evolve with it."

'Vital' work

Deborah Alderson, whose son is a massive Fortnite fan, thinks work like this is vital, as more and more of our lives go online, and more and more people play,

She wants this arrangement to be replicated by games companies and other police forces across the UK, and is working with professor of police sciences, Dr Gavin Oxburgh of Northumbria University, to provide a blueprint for how it can be copied by others.

The centre in Newcastle was founded in 2014, initially as a call centre to deal with player issues but its role has developed significantly since then.

The staff clearly care about their work and the agreement with Northumbria Police has been in the pipeline for some time.

However, as well as wanting to lead the conversation within the UK industry on tackling harmful online behaviour, there is also a compelling business case for focusing on customer relations.

In an increasingly competitive market place, keeping people playing your games is harder than ever. They're more likely to stick around if they feel safe and listened to.

It's been a difficult few months for Ubisoft with games being cancelled and their financial forecast scaled-back. Keeping their player base happy is more important than ever.

Andy Millmoor is the player experience director at the centre, and says that when it comes to online behaviour, making people feel "safe and secure" is their number one goal.

"Toxicity takes a lot of different shapes," he says.

"The important things for us is when you're at home trying to have a good time and relax - our aim is to make sure you're doing that in a safe environment.

"When someone wants entertainment they've got a whole host of things they can do, and if you had a bad experience, if someone's giving you a bad time online - you're just going to go to one of the other options."

However Ubisoft is not alone, with the cost of living crisis likely to impact more gaming companies in the coming months - it may be another reason why more people in the industry take an interest in how this partnership works and develops.

No-one who works in this field expects a quick fix to a problem that has plagued online life since its inception - but here is one companies attempt to make games joyous every time people press play.

For more gaming content, go to Press X to Continue, the BBC Sounds gaming Podcast.

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Toxic gaming tackled by Ubisoft's unique police alert system

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Rape jokes, racism, bullying - if you've picked up a controller, or scrolled a mouse, to dabble in some online gaming then you've likely come across plenty. The gaming industry, like others where people interact online, has been trying to figure out how to get to grips with behaviour like this for years.

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Beyoncé's Dubai performance isn't just an affront to LGBTQ+ fans, but workers' rights in the UAE

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Interesting read in light of bell hooks etc.

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t's not a Beyoncé comeback if it doesn't "cause all this conversation", and the musician's first concert in more than four years has been no exception. Over the weekend, Beyoncé was paid a reported $24m to perform at the unofficial opening of luxury Dubai hotel Atlantis the Royal, in front of an invitation-only audience of celebrities, influencers and journalists. But this choice of location for Beyoncé's return to live performance - her first since the release of last year's widely acclaimed Renaissance, although none of the album's tracks were on the set list - has proved divisive.

Fans may well feel disappointed to see Beyoncé prioritise a private performance in Dubai for largely wealthy attenders, including Ronan Keating and Michelle Keegan of all people, given that she's yet to release videos for the album, let alone announce the long-anticipated Renaissance tour - for which ticket prices are expected to be eye-watering. But the majority of online criticism has been driven by UAE's laws criminalising homosexuality and gender reassignment.

To some, Beyoncé's performance in the UAE undermines the explicit purpose of Renaissance, which she has dedicated to Black queer culture. As expected, the performance has led to a heated online tug-of-war between righteous criticism and furious defence from devoted stans. Some defenders of Beyoncé have noted that UAE is not the only nation with anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, questioning if people would protest at her performing in her home state of Texas - where legislation outlawing sodomy, though made defunct by the Lawrence v Texas 2003 supreme court ruling, still exists, and may even be reinstated following the overturning of Roe v Wade - and saying that queer Emiratis deserve to see Beyoncé live, too. And many have correctly pointed out that Kylie Minogue's New Year's Eve set at Atlantis the Royal should have come under equal fire - although the anticipation for Beyoncé's live return, plus her wider international appeal, heightened the response to her performance. (Meanwhile Spice Girl Melanie C cancelled a New Year's Eve performance in Poland after being made aware of issues "that do not align with the communities I support": widely inferred to be the state of LGBTQ+ rights in the country.)

'Break My Soul may have been billed as the pro-worker Great Resignation anthem of last summer, but it is muted when money talks.' Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Atlantis The Royal

Representatives for Beyoncé have not responded to requests for comment on her decision to perform in the country. Defenders among her fanbase have also noted that there have been no recorded arrests, prosecutions or state punishments for same-sex sexual activity in the UAE since at least 2015. But it bears stating that 88.1% of UAE's total population is made up of migrant workers: what this means in practice, as research by the London School of Economics has shown, is that both gay Emiratis (through citizenship) and wealthy migrant workers (through class) have been privileged enough to effectively navigate UAE's underground gay social scene while evading Emirati authorities. But for poorer, queer migrant workers from India, Bangladesh, Egypt and the Philippines, many of whom are undocumented, or were denied birth certificates, it cannot be assumed that a lack of recorded prosecutions means that the UAE has been safe for them.

The issue of migrant labour adds an additional dimension to conversations on the ethics of concerts - it's as much about whereBeyoncé performs as who she's performed for and who she's accepted money from, namely business magnates whose activities are inextricably linked with the state and aggravate the worst excesses of inequality and exploitation. The UAE has laws and initiatives to protect migrant workers, and yet allegations are rife that much of Dubai's luxury playground has been built under appalling conditions amounting to indentured servitude.

The specific labour conditions behind the construction of Atlantis the Royal - owned by Kerzner International, which has an estimated yearly revenue of $3.1bn and was founded by the late South African business magnate Sol Kerzner - are unknown. But with the Investment Corp of Dubai, the emirate's sovereign wealth fund, purchasing a stake in Kerzner in 2014, there is a direct shared interest between the state and the building of luxury hotels. That a hypothetical wealthy gay Emirati might enjoy seeing Beyoncé perform is of little relevance to this material reality. Renaissance's lead single, Break My Soul, may have been billed as the pro-worker Great Resignation anthem of last summer, but it is muted when money talks.

Even ardent Beyoncé fans should find it hard to be surprised. As author and broadcaster Emma Dabiri wrote of Beyoncé and Jay-Z's 2022 Oscars afterparty crossing the picket line of Chateau Marmont workers, wealthy celebrities are "untroubled" by the "inconvenient demands" of exploited workers - though in the case of Atlantis, workers don't even have a voice or forum for complaint due to the UAE's lack of trade unions. And yet, many fans still prostrate themselves to defend her, unwilling to countenance the capitalist realities of her project as if it might undermine their love for her deeply felt music. It's not a contradiction for both to coexist. Why not have it both ways? Beyoncé certainly does.

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Beyoncé's Dubai performance isn't just an affront to LGBTQ+ fans, but workers' rights in the UAE

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t's not a Beyoncé comeback if it doesn't "cause all this conversation", and the musician's first concert in more than four years has been no exception. Over the weekend, Beyoncé was paid a reported $24m to perform at the unofficial opening of luxury Dubai hotel Atlantis the Royal, in front of an invitation-only audience of celebrities, influencers and journalists.

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Interesting read looking at popularity of YouTube stars.

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British vlogger Zoella has just reached the milestone of 10m subscribers to her main YouTube channel, but she has a long way to go to catch its most popular creator PewDiePie, who is about to pass 42m.

They're just two of the most prominent YouTube stars. In October 2015, online-video tracking firm Tubular Labs reported that there were more than 17,000 YouTube channels with more than 100,000 subscribers, and nearly 1,500 with more than 1m.

How have these YouTubers become so popular? It can seem baffling to people outside their main viewing demographic: smartphone-toting "millennials" who spend as much time (if not more) watching shortform video online as they do traditional TV shows.

Yet the top YouTube stars aren't just popular: they are genuinely influential figures for their young fans. A fact that entertainment industry magazine Variety has been confronting its readers with since 2014.

That year, it published a survey of 13-18 year-olds in the US conducted by Jeetendr Sehdev of the University of Southern California, asking them to rate the 10 most popular English-language YouTubers and 10 of the most popular traditional celebrities across a range of qualities representing "influence".

YouTubers took the top five places in the resulting chart, with Smosh, the Fine Bros, PewDiePie, KSI and Ryan Higa deemed more influential than Paul Walker, Jennifer Lawrence, Katy Perry and other celebrities.

When Sehdev ran the same survey again in 2015, YouTubers took the top six slots, ahead of stars including Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift.

When Variety asked teens to compare the influence of YouTubers with traditional celebrities, the YouTubers prevailed. Photograph: Variety

The surveys provided some useful evidence on why the online stars are so popular.

"YouTubers were judged to be more engaging, extraordinary and relatable than mainstream stars, who were rated as being smarter and more reliable. In terms of sex appeal, the two types of celebs finished just about even," explained Variety in 2014.

"Looking at survey comments and feedback, teens enjoy an intimate and authentic experience with YouTube celebrities, who aren't subject to image strategies carefully orchestrated by PR pros. Teens also say they appreciate YouTube stars' more candid sense of humour, lack of filter and risk-taking spirit, behaviours often curbed by Hollywood handlers."

That's one of the key things to understand about the popularity of YouTubers, if you're struggling to see it in their content - for their fans, the contrast with stars from the world of music, film and television has been a big factor in their rise.

Their very ordinariness - their relatability - is what makes them so appealing. The "girl or boy next door" who is "just like us" is not an unusual trope in the entertainment world but on YouTube, it's heightened.

Variety's 2015 study suggested that teenagers' emotional attachment to YouTube stars is "as much as seven times greater than that toward a traditional celebrity" for these reasons.

Many YouTube stars foster this sense of connection in the way they talk to their fans in videos, from the coming-out announcements of stars such as Connor Franta, Ingrid Nilsen and Shane Dawson to Zoella vlogging about her experience of anxiety attacks, or PewDiePie addressing speculation about his earnings.

There are technical aspects to this too. By necessity, vlogging started out as a format with a person talking into a webcam - and thus directly to the viewer - often close to the camera and filming in their bedroom.

It created a sense of intimacy, and one that many YouTube stars have tried to maintain even as they got better cameras and editing kit. But it even extends to how many of them address their audiences.

In December 2015, the Atlantic investigated the phenomenon that it dubbed "YouTube voice" - which relates to the linguistic characteristics shared by many top YouTube stars. It was parodied by the journalist Julie Beck, who wrote in the introduction to her article: "Hey guys! What's up? It's Julie. And today I want to talk about YouTube voice."

The piece outlines how overstressed and long vowels; extra vowels inserted into words - "terraping" instead of "trapping" for example - and aspiration (audible breaths) are common to many popular YouTubers.

To non-fans, these tics can be irritating. The linguist Mark Liberman described them as an "intellectual used-car-salesman voice" akin to "high-energy sales pitches" or even a "carnival barker".

But that's another point about the popularity of YouTube's stars: the way they divide fans from non-fans is a big part of their appeal too.

Music industry analyst Mark Mulligan explored exactly that idea in a blogpost in September 2015, explaining to labels why teenagers seemed to care more about YouTubers than musicians.

He suggested that teenagers struggle to "find music that they can own, that their mum and dad aren't going to sing along to too" - but have realised that their parents probably won't be quite as open to YouTubers.

"With no music subculture to cling to Generation Edge has instead gravitated to YouTube stars," wrote Mulligan.

Generation Edge is one of the many phrases bandied around to describe "people younger than us" in recent years. See also: Generation X, Gen C and the ubiquitous "millennials."

Mulligan wrote: "For those not in the target demographic, it can sometimes be difficult to grasp exactly what the creative value is of many YouTubers. But that generational inability to grasp the essence of YouTube talent is exactly the same dynamic that music always had when it was the spearhead for youth rebellion.

"A kid trying to explain to his mum why Stampy Does Minecraft is worth watching hours on end is simply a 21st century rerun of kids trying to convince their parents of the musical worth of Elvis, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and so on. That is the entire point of a youth culture - older generations aren't meant to get it," he added.

Is Stampy the new Elvis, Beatles or the Sex Pistols?

To summarise, then: to their fans, YouTube stars feel more authentic and relatable than many traditional celebrities, and that's something that is intrinsic to the videos they publish. The fact that this may annoy or baffle non-fans - parents in particular - is part of the appeal.

It may also be a pitfall in waiting, though, for any YouTubers whose fans perceive them to be drifting away from that authentic, relatable status.

Staying relatable when you're earning a high six- or even seven-figure annual income is one challenge, albeit hardly unfamiliar from the traditional entertainment world. But there are other trends that could change the relationship some YouTubers have with their audiences.

Many are working more with brands to sponsor their videos, for example. The risk is less that fans think they've sold out - many YouTubers are refreshingly upfront about their reasons for taking the cash - and more that some may end up making bad branded videos that turn their viewers off.

One of Variety's online influencers, the Fine Brothers, have been taking flak for another reason in early 2016: they attempted to trademark the word "react" and license out their reaction-video format to other creators.

Format licensing is standard practice in the television industry, but as the Fine Bros now know, it's capable of sparking a backlash in the YouTube community. It also risks being seen as another step away from their roots.

In 2016, the distinction between YouTubers and traditional celebrities is becoming increasingly blurred, not least because the former are no longer flying below the radar of the mainstream media. Some will struggle to stay connected to their fans in that spotlight, but not all.

The key thing to understand about YouTube stars is that the content of their videos - whether it's Let's Play game commentaries, makeup tutorials or personal vlogs - is only one half of their appeal.

The connection to their audiences is the other: they have grown up with the tools to forge and strengthen that connection, and many will use that as their anchor to keep their feet on the ground.

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British vlogger Zoella has just reached the milestone of 10m subscribers to her main YouTube channel, but she has a long way to go to catch its most popular creator PewDiePie, who is about to pass 42m. They're just two of the most prominent YouTube stars.

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Useful for Zoella and industry.

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Girl Online: What Zoella has taught us about successful influencer marketing

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Since Zoella started her first YouTube channel in 2009, she has amassed over 664m views, 11m subscribers, and helped propel the rise of what we now know as ‘influencer marketing’. And this week, she added to that list of achievements with the launch of her third book: ‘Girl Online: Going Solo’.

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Article on the Sky Anglo-French remake of The Bridge.

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Viewers may notice something eerily familiar about Sky's new serial killer drama The Tunnel, which begins with the discovery of a body in the Channel tunnel halfway between Britain and France.

It is, according to Sky, an "adaptation" of the Scandinavian drama hit The Bridge - in which a body is found in the middle of the Øresund Bridge, connecting Denmark and Sweden.

The Tunnel, which starts on Wednesday, is the story of a politically motivated serial killer and is believed to be the first bilingual TV drama to be filmed in English and French. It features the same "odd couple" detective pairing as The Bridge, from which it lifts much of its plot and some scenes wholesale.

But while the nuances of the original's Danish-Swedish interplay may have been lost on some viewers, this version focuses on a relationship much closer to home.

"We made it particular to the French-British experience," said Jane Featherstone, chief executive of Kudos Film and Television, the drama's co-producer, which also made ITV's murder mystery hit Broadchurch.

"We are neighbours and have so much in common and yet we are hundreds of miles apart on so many things - and this was an incredible opportunity to explore that," she said. "The team took what was wonderful from [the original] and then forgot about it, in the nicest possible way, and made their own show."

Laid-back British detective Karl Roebuck is played by Stephen Dillane - who plays Stannis Baratheon in the fantasy hit Game of Thrones - opposite his uptight French opposite number, Elise Wassermann, played by Clémence Poésy from BBC1 drama Birdsong.

Neither actor had watched the original, which had one of BBC4's largest-ever audiences, with more than 1 million viewers last year. Poésy's character, with her hints of Asperger's syndrome, is closer to her counterpart in the original (Sofia Helin's Swedish detective, Saga Norén) than Dillane's Roebuck, whose role parallels that of Kim Bodnia's Danish cop, Martin Rohde.

Ben Richards, the lead writer whose previous credits include BBC1's Spooks, said the story had changed "quite significantly while always working around that brilliant premise, this idea of the truth and what it means, and the relationship between personal and political motives". He added: "I loved the mixture of English and French in the show but I was worried about what it would look like," Richards said. "Most people can take a subtitled film, but can people take something that's moving between two languages?"

A collaboration with French broadcaster Canal+, it is the latest Scandinavian drama to be remade after the US version of The Killing and comes before a mooted stateside remake of political thriller Borgen. The Bridge has also been remade in the US (the body is found on the US-Mexico border between El Paso and Juarez) for Rupert Murdoch's FX. Featherstone said it had taken "months of gentle negotiation" to obtain permission to film the grisly scenes under the Channel. Dominik Moll, lead director and part of a mixed French-English team of writers and directors, said: "The only thing they didn't want was to see train passengers in danger or fires or whatever."

The midpoint in the tunnel, marked with a bright yellow point median sign, really exists, Moll said, but the film crew did not venture all the way to the middle. "Once you are a few kilometres in, it all looks the same, so it was pointless to go into the middle. Especially when you suddenly have to pee; it is really problematic."
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Sky's remake of The Bridge is set in the Channel tunnel - in English and French

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Viewers may notice something eerily familiar about Sky's new serial killer drama The Tunnel, which begins with the discovery of a body in the Channel tunnel halfway between Britain and France. It is, according to Sky, an "adaptation" of the Scandinavian drama hit The Bridge - in which a body is found in the middle of the Øresund Bridge, connecting Denmark and Sweden.

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Interesting article about the American remake of The Bridge and how the main characters compare.

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It is not an easy gig, reworking a character as distinctive as The Bridge's Saga Noren. Striding onto screen, great coat flapping, blonde mane flowing, Noren managed to breathe new life into a genre not short of detectives with great instincts but disastrous personal skills. Sonya Cross, her equivalent on FX's US remake, was always unlikely to come out of this tussle on top.

Viewed entirely on her own merits, Diane Kruger's take on the Swedish detective is an intriguing, noteworthy character who challenges traditional notions of TV cops in general, and female ones in particular. Viewed in the shadow of the detective that inspired her, however, she is found wanting. Cross has an interesting story to tell - but she's not the entirely original, other-worldly Noren that fans of the original show found so compelling.

Which doesn't mean the FX remake of Swedish/Danish thriller should be dismissed - it is a decidedly more convincing watch than the US Killing. If anything, shifting the action from the Oresund bridge that joins Denmark and Sweden to its altogether less picturesque equivalent marking the border between Mexico and the US, adds to the show's subtext of social justice: the differences between the two societies are starker, more pronounced. The border has a rather different significance for those living in El Pasoand Juárez than for those in Malmo and Copenhagen.

So the US remake of the Bridge, oddly, has geography going for it. And on the basis of the first two episodes, it appears that the FX production has also fixed some of the niggles with the original: Charlotte (she of the mysterious wig) already seems more fleshed out here, and the newsroom a great deal more believable - albeit with some heavy-handed alcoholism references.

The Martin Rohde equivalent, Marco Ruiz, is slightly more obviously sexy than he perhaps should be - this is an American remake after all - but the character is a pretty decent match for the put-upon Copenhagen detective more worried about the state of his tackle and a good night's sleep than matching a pair of unidentified legs to a long-dead body. There's enough twinkle, an amused tolerance of Sonya, and the warm and fuzzy homelife that makes an audience fall for him - even if his pad is a great deal less stylish than that of his Danish counterpart.

There's lots in the Bridge's favour. Even the chill, stark, Scandinavian landscape is neatly swapped for the dust and golden glow of the desert. But I still find myself longing for Saga to whizz up in her vintage Porsche and take charge of the situation. Kruger's detective lacks the humour that was so charming and essential to Saga's appeal, and also her physical presence: she awkwardly stomps around in her leather trousers, boots and heavy coat with a body she is entirely relaxed with. For all of the changing her shirt in the office and working a hand into her trousers before heading out for sex, that's not quite the case with Sonya.

There is an argument that we are more forgiving of subtitled drama because we can't hear the conversational changers, or even the slight blips, when we're watching in a language that we speak daily. It's also, perhaps, more difficult to identify tone: how much of Noren's charm is down to her speaking Swedish, rather than the way in which her lines are delivered? It's a difficult equation to weigh that up - but it does seem clear that Kruger is taking a slightly different approach to her detective.

While Saga is forceful, clear, determined, Sonya, despite suffering from the same lack of self-editing skills, feels altogether more vulnerable. She's also, I think we're meant to infer, more aware of - and prepared to change - her social difference. Her Aspergers seems much more acknowledged and heavily underlined. And while Saga seemed so very much from another world, Sonya just seems out of place in hers.

The problem, of course, is that I'm comparing a character I at first found awkward and less than entirely convincing before completely falling for, with a character who is just as awkward and has yet to be given time to develop. But Kruger still seems to be struggling to keep up with Helin's performance. She may, for all I know, be giving a more convincing portrayal of Aspergers, or eventually take the character further than the Swedish original. But at this point she's lacking that sense of a unique, new character that will define a series and beyond: that mercurial quality found in Sarah Lund, Birgitte Nyborg and Saga Noren. Perhaps it's something that no matter how good the production, will remain lost in translation.
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It is not an easy gig, reworking a character as distinctive as The Bridge's Saga Noren. Striding onto screen, great coat flapping, blonde mane flowing, Noren managed to breathe new life into a genre not short of detectives with great instincts but disastrous personal skills.

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BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour - BBC 100: Memorable moments from Woman's Hour over the decades

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Interesting context for our radio unit.

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Camilla, the Queen Consort - 24 February 2021

The then Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla, gave an exclusive interview to Woman's Hour's Emma Barnett at Clarence House in 2022 following the news of the Queen's wish for her to be known as Queen Consort in the future.

In the interview, Camilla pledged to continue to support victims and survivors of domestic violence for the rest of her life. She was sat next to Diana Parkes, whose daughter Joanna Simpson was killed by her estranged husband in 2010, and whose story Camilla credits with inspiring her to support such a cause.

Camilla became Queen Consort just a few months later when Queen Elizabeth II died on 8 September 2022.
Listen to Camilla's full interview here

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BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour - BBC 100: Memorable moments from Woman's Hour over the decades

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The then Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla, gave an exclusive interview to Woman's Hour's Emma Barnett at Clarence House in 2022 following the news of the Queen's wish for her to be known as Queen Consort in the future. In the interview, Camilla pledged to continue to support victims and survivors of domestic violence for the rest of her life.

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BBC Four - Washes Whiter, She's Not a Moron - She's Your Wife

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Really interesting for advertising and context.

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BBC Four - Washes Whiter, She's Not a Moron - She's Your Wife

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A look at adverts for cleaning, shopping and cooking products over the past 35 years.

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Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

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Really interesting research from Sonia Livingstone which seems to contradict what we thought we knew about video games.

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Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children

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Additional research necessary to parse potential benefits and harms of video games on the developing brain.

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Really useful explanation of these key terms.

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December 13, 2021

in this episode, we talk to Dr Steve Connolly, lecturer at Anglia Ruskin university, and author of The Changing Role of Media in the English Curriculum about Vertical & Horizontal integration. Writer Shaheena Uddin brings us up to date on the latest issue of Media Magazine and we find out 'What is a Macguffin?' in Two Minute Terminology Time.

The Theory Drop can be found at 00:14 and Two Minute Terminology Time can be found at 30:47.

Steve Connolly's book can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Changing-Role-of-Media-in-the-English-Curriculum-Returning-to-Nowhere/Connolly/p/book/9780367497736

Candyman Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPBH3XO8YEU

Ms Marvel official teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quWvXMqyq6I

Macguffin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin

Likes(1) | | Download(550)

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What is Vertical & Horizontal Integration?

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in this episode, we talk to Dr Steve Connolly, lecturer at Anglia Ruskin university, and author of The Changing Role of Media in the English Curriculum about Vertical & Horizontal integration. Writer Shaheena Uddin brings us up to date on the latest is...

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Useful for feminist readings.

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This week Giles & Phil speak to the Queen of the Media Teachers, Becky Fisher, aka Mrs Fisher from Youtube, who explains what the male gaze is and gives us a few examples. We also dip into the next issue of MediaMag and Phil tells us exactly what mis-e...

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This is great background reading for second wave feminism.

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In a statement, a spokeswoman for the paint firm said the series of ads were "intended to be a humorous celebration of special life moments that prompt people to paint their homes, in this case focusing on Hannah and Dave, a happy couple expecting a baby together".

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Crown Paints: Hannah & Dave ad prompts dozens of complaints

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In a statement, a spokeswoman for the paint firm said the series of ads were "intended to be a humorous celebration of special life moments that prompt people to paint their homes, in this case focusing on Hannah and Dave, a happy couple expecting a baby together".

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A monster calls: why the ‘horror universe’ is an idea whose time has come | Film | The Guardian

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orror has been a staple of the movie business since its inception. People love to be scared, and Hollywood studios have wisely capitalised on this. There are many companies that have built their business, and their reputation, on horror films: cool-kid studio A24 are the newest in the game, with Ti West's trilogy of sweaty slashers X, Pearl and MaXXXine, the upcoming third film.

Horror universes may seem like a new phenomenon - but in fact horror films kicked the whole "universe" concept off, decades before superhero-led multi-platform series and films. Specifically, they started with Universal and its classic monsters series. Universal was associated with horror from the early days, when they accidentally hit the jackpot in 1931 with their versions of two literary properties, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The now classic adaptations by Tod Browning and James Whale, respectively, were cash cows that helped keep Universal afloat during the depression. They were joined by The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and The Wolf Man (1941). Subsequent films were an interchangeable pick'n'mix of ghouls; from the moment Frankenstein's monster met the Wolfman in 1943's imaginatively titled Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Universal mixed and matched their creatures to maximise box-office potential.

Lon Chaney Jr as The Wolf Man. Photograph: Photo 12/Alamy

However, this diluted the monsters' fearsomeness, with their appearances becoming more comedic than frightening as the years went by. The 1934 Hays Code ban on "brutality and possible gruesomeness" made actual horror all but disappear from American screens, and the monsters that had once terrified became old-fashioned. Oversaturation killed the monster.

Operating parallel to Universal was the now defunct RKO Films, which released more than 140 genre films between 1929 and 1956. The studio is mostly remembered for the array of classy horror pictures produced by Val Lewton, such as Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and The Seventh Victim (1943). Lewton was a fan of suggestion and shadow-play rather than outright monsters. His movies have influenced film-makers in the genre ever since, but they never quite acquired icon status.

It was the British production company Hammer that revitalised the monster and perfected a formula of gothic, violent and eroticised film-making - coincidentally, using the same two public-domain novels that had saved Universal. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) introduced a brutal, borderline-gory new take on Shelley's creature; a year later came Dracula, made by the same team of director Terence Fisher and stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, with Lee intentionally playing a much more overtly sexual take on the vampire. The success of these two films launched a franchise for each monster, establishing a signature style for Hammer horror fare, and the longstanding on-screen collaboration of Cushing and Lee.

More recently, Universal Studios had another shot at trying to reinvigorate its horror universe. In the mid-2010s they launched the star-studded Dark Universe, announcing Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein's Monster, Russell Crowe as Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde, Sofia Boutella as the Mummy and Tom Cruise as, conveniently, a new character that was bound to have a lot of very impressive stunts. Despite this marketing hubbub, only one film was released, 2017's The Mummy, which was entombed under the weight of negative reviews, disappointing box office and rumours of creative control battles between director Alex Kurtzman and Cruise. The Dark Universe was dead on arrival, leaving behind two lonely tweets.

Katie Featherston in Paranormal Activity. Photograph: Universum Home Ent./Cinetext/Paramount Pictures/Allstar

The slack was taken up by independent production outfit Blumhouse, who, through their 10-year first-look deal with Universal, successfully reinvented The Invisible Man in 2020 as a tech-rich story of domestic abuse. Blumhouse had already hit it big with the 2015 found-footage haunter Paranormal Activity, which supposedly became the most profitable movie ever made and spawned a franchise of eight further films. Blumhouse was also responsible for two more original franchises, a rare achievement in the past couple of decades: political slasher The Purge and the haunted house series Insidious. In 2017, their film Get Out established a bold new voice in the genre in Jordan Peele and spawned endless think pieces about "elevated horror" - as well as acting as a major cultural reset.

Blumhouse has become shorthand for modern horror in the same way that Hammer became synonymous with British horror. Meanwhile, A24, which turns 10 this year, made their mark on the genre in 2015 with Robert Eggers' lauded The Witch before cementing it with Ari Aster's horror family drama Hereditary in 2018.

The first generation of monsters - Dracula, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein's monster - would become cornerstones of the horror genre, bigger than any single adaptation, performance or film. Their impact is still being felt and it is only a matter of time until we see if Blumhouse or A24 have given birth to a new generation of monsters.

Anna Bogutskaya is a writer, host of The Final Girls podcast and co-lead programmer of In Dreams Are Monsters, which runs at venues across the UK from 17 October to 31 December. For more details click here.

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A monster calls: why the 'horror universe' is an idea whose time has come

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Two innovative production houses are reinvigorating horror films. Is this the beginning of a Marvel-style expansion of the genre?

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'Stealth mode': how Disney overtook Netflix in streaming wars

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Interesting article about the power of Disney.

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t might have taken the Walt Disney company less than three years to overtake Netflix in streaming subscribers, but its road to domination started more than 15 years ago with a carefully planned $100bn (£81bn) strategy to reinvigorate its empire for 21st century viewers.

The combination of Netflix priming a global audience for the streaming era and the serendipitous launch of Disney+ at the start of the pandemic, a service populated with crown jewel franchises such as Star Wars and Marvel, transformed what had been viewed as Disney's late mover disadvantage into unprecedented breakneck growth.

Just 16 months after launch, a bargain-priced Disney+ hit 100 million subscribers - a feat Netflix took a decade to accomplish - and combined with the US streaming services Hulu and ESPN+, the company has now edged ahead with 222 million subscribers.

When it comes to winning the global streaming war, content is king. Disney, the owner of the most successful Hollywood film and TV studio in history, is the home of many of the world's biggest and most-coveted franchises and characters thanks to a multibillion dollar buying spree that started in the noughties.

A still from the first Toy Story film in 1995. Photograph: Walt Disney/Pixar/Sportsphoto/Allstar

In 2006, a year before Netflix made the pivot from DVDs by post to streaming that would ultimately revolutionise traditional TV viewing, Disney spent $7.4bn buying Apple founder Steve Jobs's Pixar, the animation hit factory behind Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.

This was followed in 2009 by the surprise $4bn purchase of Marvel Comics' superhero universe, bringing in a multitude of characters including Iron Man and Captain America, taking Disney into new live-action territory.

The third transformational buyout came when Disney snapped up George Lucas's Lucasfilm, the production company behind the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, for $4bn in 2012. In each case the deals were criticised by City investors, but it has been Disney which has been laughing all the way to the bank.

A still form Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

In 2008, just before the launch of its first Marvel film - Iron Man starring Robert Downey Jr - Disney's share price was about $15, valuing the business at $26bn. The world's biggest entertainment company is now trading at $112 a share, giving it a market value of $205bn, almost twice that of Netflix.

"Disney has been successful in supplying a steady flow of high impact releases straight from the big screen while also expanding their franchises for streaming-only content," said Richard Broughton, the executive director of the market research firm Ampere Analysis.

"Netflix just hasn't had as many big franchise hits as they would have liked. Stranger Things has been the biggest, and to a lesser extent maybe The Witcher and The Crown, but they just don't have assets the scale of Marvel, Star Wars or Pixar," he added.

In 2018, the big players including Warner Bros and Comcast, which owns NBC Universal and Sky, began to stop licensing content to Netflix - and each other - in preparation of launching their own streaming services. Then Disney struck again, paying $71bn for Rupert Murdoch's entertainment business 21st Century Fox.

The deal, which included the 20th Century Fox Hollywood film and TV studio and FX Network, added a plethora of crown jewel assets including Deadpool, Avatar, Titanic, The Simpsons and Modern Family.

It also included ownership of Fox's Hotstar streaming service in India, with its tens of millions of subscribers, which flattered the growth rate of Disney+ when it launched in late 2019.

The service, which is expected to lose millions of customers as Disney loses the rights to air Indian Premier League cricket, accounts for 58.4 million of 152 million global Disney+ subscribers. However, the low-cost model means users pay on average just $1.20 a month.

The Mumbai Indians celebrate after defeating the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League final in 2019. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

Disney is aggressively forecasting that Disney+ itself will overtake Netflix in 2024, as it remains in high growth mode. It added 14.4 million subscribers in the second quarter, beating analysts' expectations, while Netflix struggled this year with its first loss of subscribers in a decade.

"In essence both companies are at different phases of growth," said Paolo Pescatore, a media and telecoms analyst at PP Foresight. "Disney is still in startup stealth mode when it comes to direct to consumer services. There are still millions of users to acquire as Disney continues to expand into new markets and rolls out new blockbuster shows."

While Netflix is already available globally, bar China, Crimea, North Korea, Russia, and Syria, Disney+ is still in the process of international rollout. It recently announced its availability in a further 60 countries and territories.

Disney maintains Disney+ is on track to hit profitability in 2024, but staying on top is an extremely expensive business.

Competition for subscribers has ignited an unsustainable content war, at the same time as stretched household budgets have forced consumers to cut back on entertainment services. Netflix will spend about $17bn making and licensing films and TV shows this year, and has a further $23bn on its balance sheet for long-term content costs, plus $14.8bn in long-term debt.

Disney is spending $30bn on content across all its TV, film and streaming services this year, which includes expensive live sports rights such as NFL for ESPN. Disney said that since launch it had lost more than $7bn funding Disney+.

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After pursuing a bargain-priced strategy to drive growth, Disney is now following Netflix in instituting significant price increases, starting in the US, as investors' focus shifts to costs and profitability.

Both companies will launch part advertising-funded subscription options in an attempt to appeal to more cost-conscious consumers as growth in subscribers and revenues in the global streaming market slows.

For now, Netflix remains the single biggest global streaming service, with analysts at Ampere predicting a longer timeline for Disney+ to achieve global parity.

"Disney's growth will slow in the next few years," says Broughton. "Factors include the loss of the Indian Premier League rights and the need to raise prices - our data suggests subscribers are now canceling entertainment services to cut costs - which will contribute to a similar slowdown as we are seeing at Netflix. We think that Disney+ and Netflix will about match one another as the world's biggest services at 240 million global subscribers in 2027."

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'Stealth mode': how Disney overtook Netflix in streaming wars

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t might have taken the Walt Disney company less than three years to overtake Netflix in streaming subscribers, but its road to domination started more than 15 years ago with a carefully planned $100bn (£81bn) strategy to reinvigorate its empire for 21st century viewers.

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Mirror owner's profits fall by nearly a third as newsprint costs soar

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Good examples for print sales focus.

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The rising cost of paper has dented profits at the publishing company Reach, which owns titles including the Mirror, the Express and dozens of local newspapers.

Physical newsprint costs have risen by 65% on a like-for-like basis over the last year, forcing the company to reduce the number of pages in its newspapers, increase cover prices and send fewer newspapers to shops.

Many paper mills have closed in recent years as a result of reduced demand caused by the widespread shift to online reading, while pandemic-related disruption has also affected supply chains. As the economy returns to normal after the Covid-19 pandemic, this has led to an enormous and rapid rise in prices charged by the paper mills that remain open.

"This puts current newsprint prices at their highest ever level," said Simon Fuller, the chief financial officer at Reach.

The rising costs of producing and distributing print newspapers is affecting all print publishers hard. It is most acutely felt by free newspapers such as Metro and London's Evening Standard, which cannot charge more to cover the cost of giving away hundreds of thousands of copies. The Guardian Media Group - the publisher of the Guardian - is also affected but earns more from its website compared with most British publishers.

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Reach, which has invested heavily in its online operation, said newsprint costs for its publications were largely to blame for a 31% fall in profits during the first six months of 2022, which has led to a rapid sell-off of the company's shares.

The business has invested heavily in its websites but said the war in Ukraine had hit income, because advertisers did not want to pay to promote their products alongside stories about human suffering.

The company is in dispute with members of the Nation Union of Journalists, who are demanding substantial wage rises to take into account the increased cost of living - and also Reach's decision to shut most of its offices, leaving staff to pick up heating bills while working from home.

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Mirror owner's profits fall by nearly a third as newsprint costs soar

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The rising cost of paper has dented profits at the publishing company Reach, which owns titles including the Mirror, the Express and dozens of local newspapers. Physical newsprint costs have risen by 65% on a like-for-like basis over the last year, forcing the company to reduce the number of pages in its newspapers, increase cover prices and send fewer newspapers to shops.

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Tory leadership: Why newspapers matter in race to be next PM

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The importance of newspapers in the Tory leadership election.

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The Conservative leadership contest will be less of a social media election than recent plebiscites because it will be determined by an electorate who are still heavily influenced by newspapers.

Through the 2015, 2017, and 2019 general elections there was a lot of focus on the use of political ads and viral content on social media - especially Facebook - to target voters.

This was true of the Brexit and Scottish independence referendums too. And former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was generally thought to have activated a very influential following on social media.

But Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss - the two contenders vying to become Tory leader, and thus prime minister - have to persuade a narrow section of the population that is much more attuned to newsprint than most Britons.

Being politically active by nature, and generally over 60, Conservative Party members still buy newspapers much more often than most of the public.

Therefore this is an election which has an almost late-20th-Century feel, in terms of media.

Newspapers arguably matter more than Twitter, which is doing such terrible damage to journalism, not least by completely warping journalists' perception of what the public thinks.

What, then, of the Tory-leaning papers?

Their final endorsements matter much less than their daily news coverage, and how that influences the campaign. The Sun and Express were both broadly supportive of Johnson for as long as they felt possible; it's not obvious who they will endorse.

The Telegraph, Johnson's alma mater, has long been his most vocal backer; but turned on him as the scandals accumulated. I don't detect from their news coverage any clear backing for a particular candidate. But many Tory members will buy the Telegraph. Its influence is significant, and could grow next week.

The same is true of The Times, which is perhaps leaning towards Sunak, in both its strong front-page coverage of his backing from MPs, and its running of powerful endorsements from columnists. William Hague's column this week will have been much appreciated by Sunak, the former Tory leader's successor as MP for Richmond in Yorkshire.

The Daily Mail has been on an interesting journey in recent years, reflecting the flux in personnel at the top.

Under Geordie Greig's editorship, when veteran reporter Simon Walters was still at the paper, it was fiercely independent of the prime minister, often giving him hell.

When Greig was ousted, his successor, Ted Verity, radically altered the tone, and the paper became more supportive of Mr Johnson.

It campaigned for Liz Truss to be in the final two in the Tory contest, although that is not the same as campaigning for her to be prime minister.

The paper's front pages clearly demonstrated a desire for Truss to beat Penny Mordaunt into the final two. Now, who knows if it will stick or twist.

Why the enthusiasm for Truss?

First, Paul Dacre, who has returned as editor-in-chief of the Mail titles, is an admirer, something he made plain in The Spectator.

Second, the Mail will have wanted there to be a proper contest in the final two, with both wings of the Tory party represented - a point made elegantly by Paul Goodman of the ConservativeHome website on Tuesday.

Yet the claim that Sunak and Mordaunt are on the centre or left of the Tory party, whereas Truss is on the right, is curious, and shows how vacuous so much of our political language has become.

Those who have worked closely with Sunak, in both No 11 and the Treasury, tell me he is a very committed free marketer, with a fondness for the dynamism of Singapore's economy, who has simply been expedient in channelling his inner Keynes through a pandemic.

Moreover, Truss, as the flag bearer for the right of the party, voted Remain, worked at a centrist think tank called Reform, and decades ago was a Liberal Democrat.

Much of this is ancient history in the sped-up politics of today, and candidates should be judged on their more recent actions and policies rather than what they did as students.

But it does show there is an irony in the narrative of a Sunak vs Truss final two being a contest of the Tory left vs right. A different media narrative could easily cast it as the other way round.

Finally, there are influential voices at the Mail, including columnists Dominic Lawson and Stephen Glover, who were sincere in their disdain for Mordaunt's credibility as a prospective prime minister.

In this old-fashioned newspaper election, the tenor of newsprint coverage over the next week could have a significant impact on who becomes prime minister - especially if the Times, Sun and Telegraph decide that, like the Mail, they know who they want, and give hell to whosoever they decide they don't want.

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Tory leadership: Why newspapers matter in race to be next PM

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The Conservative leadership contest will be less of a social media election than recent plebiscites because it will be determined by an electorate who are still heavily influenced by newspapers. Through the 2015, 2017, and 2019 general elections there was a lot of focus on the use of political ads and viral content on social media - especially Facebook - to target voters.

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Everything you need to know about... BBCR4 Woman's Hour

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Everything you need to know about WH.

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Everything you need to know about... BBCR4 Woman's Hour

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Assassin's Creed Fans Furious As Ubisoft Pulling Purchased Game From Their Collection

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More on this story…

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One of the most underrated - Assassin's Creed games has been pulled from Steam. Worse still, it looks like even if you already own it, you won't be able to access it from September.

While the 2014 Assassin's Creed III spinoff probably isn't as widely remembered as it deserves to be, it's a pretty great adventure in its own right.

Liberation stars Aveline De Grandpré, the series' first (and so far only) black female lead in an adventure that runs parallel to the events of Assassin's Creed III. It also happens to be the best thing to have come from Assassins' Creed III, although that isn't saying much.

Games getting pulled from sale isn't particularly unusual - although it's never great. The real issue here is that even those who have purchased the game will be unable to play it in a few weeks. A message on the Assassin's Creed Liberation HD Steam page states the game "will not be accessible following September 1, 2022."

The game also isn't showing up on the Ubisoft Connect storefront, either, which is concerning. It's not clear why this specific version of the game is being pulled, but Steam reviews do note that Liberation has been plagued by technical problems for some time now.

Needless to say, those who paid for the game are less than pleased at the prospect of Ubisoft taking it back off them. One user on Twitter described it as a "new low" for digital consumers, while others have genuinely suggested simply turning to piracy if this is what the future of digital ownership looks like.

"I strongly feel this is going to become more common as we move forward with a digital release only culture," one customer fears. "I hate it."

Another asked; "Seriously, What the f*ck Ubisoft? Luckily there's still piracy."

Earlier this month, PlayStation and Sony announced that it would be pulling certain digital movies from customer's libraries. Classics like Paddington, John Wick, and many more will no longer be accessible regardless of whether or not you paid for them. Yet another strong argument against relying on digital ownership - at least until we see big changes.

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Assassin's Creed Fans Furious As Ubisoft Pulling Purchased Game From Their Collection

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One of the most underrated - Assassin's Creed games has been pulled from Steam. Worse still, it looks like even if you already own it, you won't be able to access it from September. While the 2014 Assassin's Creed III spinoff probably isn't as widely remembered as it deserves to be, it's a pretty great adventure in its own right.

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Ubisoft to pull online from older games, which also takes away your DLC

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Interesting development…

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(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Ubisoft has announced that, effective September 1, it will be decommissioning the online features (opens in new tab) of a selection of older games. I've compiled a list of the PC games affected, their release dates, and what features will be removed below:

Anno 2070 (2011): multiplayer, linking accounts, online features

Assassin's Creed 2 (2009): multiplayer, linking accounts, online features

Assassin's Creed 3 (2012): multiplayer, linking accounts, online features, access to DLC

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (2010): multiplayer, linking accounts, online features, access to DLC

Assassin's Creed Liberation HD (2014): multiplayer, linking accounts, online features, access DLC

Driver San Francisco (2011): multiplayer, linking accounts, online features, access to DLC

Far Cry 3 (2012): multiplayer, linking accounts, online features, access to DLC

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (2010): co-op multiplayer, linking accounts, online features, access to DLC

Silent Hunter 5 (2010): multiplayer, linking accounts, online features, access to DLC

Space Junkies (2019): "As a multiplayer only title, you will be unable to play the game going forward."

Splinter Cell: Blacklist (2013): multiplayer, linking accounts, online features

Ubisoft states that "Closing the online services for some older games allows us to focus our resources on delivering great experiences for players who are playing newer or more popular titles." I'm certainly sympathetic to that argument—I doubt there's a ton of gamers out there still playing Splinter Cell: Blacklist's online multiplayer. Additionally, the remastered versions of listed games will be retaining online features.

However, cutting off DLC and, in one case, an entire game is troubling. Space Junkies, the multiplayer VR shooter, cost $40 at release and remains available for sale on Steam, with no notice that it will be rendered unplayable in two months.

If NFTs haven't been thoroughly debunked enough already, seeing Ubisoft completely end these services makes the company's Quartz NFT initiative even more absurd. What happens to that blockchain-backed investment once the game it's attached to shuts down, and the crypto booster pipe dream of a single NFT being used across multiple games never materialized?

This mass decommissioning also demonstrates the preservation issues inherent to walled garden online services. You can still enjoy online games significantly older than the ones listed thanks to their support for private servers. It's worth remembering that every live service game will one day stop getting official support and eventually shut down. Overwatch, Destiny, Ubisoft's own Rainbow Six Siege, there will come a point maybe years, maybe decades down the line when their servers are switched off and you won't be able to come back to them.

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch.

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Ubisoft to pull online from older games, which also takes away your DLC

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Assassin’s Creed 2, Far Cry 3, and the most recent Prince of Persia game are all having their online features decommissioned.

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This article from campaignlive.com provides a useful evaluation of the Super.Human advert.

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Netflix is planning a 'Squid Game' reality show with a record $4.56 million cash prize

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This is an interesting article thinking about how audiences engage with media texts.

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Netflix is doing "Squid Game" for real (without any of the blood and gore).

The streaming platform has approved a reality TV series called "Squid Game: The Challenge," which will pit 456 contestants against each other in a series of games inspired by the hit show.

Up for grabs is a $4.56 million reward - which Netflix says is the largest cash prize in reality TV history.

"The stakes are high, but in this game the worst fate is going home empty-handed," the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Netflix has opened casting for the show to English-language speakers around the world. Filming will take place in the U.K. The series is being co-produced by production firms Studio Lambert and The Garden, which is part of British broadcaster ITV.

Released in 2021, "Squid Game" quickly became an international success. It is Netflix's most-watched show of all time with people dedicating 1.65 billion hours of viewing time in the first 28 days of its release.

Set in South Korea, "Squid Game" sees 456 players in financial hardship risk their lives through various deadly children's games for a large cash prize. Hwang Dong-hyuk, the show's creator, took inspiration for the show from his own family's struggles after the 2008 financial crisis. A second series is now officially in the works.

Netflix said "Squid Game: The Challenge" will feature games from the original series as well some "surprising new additions." It will comprise 10 episodes in total.

The show could be a way for Netflix to use some of its lucrative content to bring more users to the platform. The company is facing headwinds from the impact of rising inflation, the removal of Covid-19 restrictions and competition from rival firms like Disney.

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Netflix is planning a 'Squid Game' reality show with a record $4.56 million cash prize

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Netflix is doing "Squid Game" for real (without any of the blood and gore). The streaming platform has approved a reality TV series called "Squid Game: The Challenge," which will pit 456 contestants against each other in a series of games inspired by the hit show.

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Assassin’s Creed - Official 15th Anniversary Update Overview | Summer of Gaming 2022

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Interesting on 15th anniversary of franchise.

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Assassin’s Creed - Official 15th Anniversary Update Overview | Summer of Gaming 2022

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Useful summary.

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0:00 / 8:56•Watch full video

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A look at how Wateraid targets its audience.

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0:00 / 4:13•Watch full video

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Free Thinking

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Released On: 13 Dec 2004

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An archive broadcast from 2004 to mark the death of cultural historian Stuart Hall.

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An archive broadcast from 2004 to mark the death of cultural historian Stuart Hall.

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Free Thinking - Stuart Hall - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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Another Mark Dixon video!

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The Times up 1,000 digital subs every day in first two weeks of Ukraine war

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The Times gained 1,000 new digital subscribers a day during first two weeks of Ukraine war

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The Times gained 1,000 new digital subscribers a day from innovating its Ukraine coverage during the first two weeks of the Russian invasion.

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Interesting for comparison with Saga in The Bridge.

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Really interesting look at ideas about ideology, beauty and advertising. Will be useful for either advertising or magazines.

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Interesting read about the 'end of audience'.