Articles by Patrick Smith

Entertainment

Play for Today: Never Too Late review – Soapy, staid and lightweight. Is nostalgia all this returning institution has to offer?

Ah, they don’t make them like they used to. But props to Channel 5 for trying. Play for Today, the landmark BBC series that ran from 1970 to 1984, helped establish the careers of writers and directors such as Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Caryl Churchill, Dennis Potter and Ken Loach, took on subjects from the Troubles to race, class and camping trips, and gave emerging actors, from Ray Winstone to Brenda Blethyn to Helen Mirren, a proper platform. In resurrecting such a British institution, then, Channel 5 has already generated enough goodwill to withstand a choppy first instalment. And choppy it really is. While a warm, wistful glow envelops Never Too Late, a romcom about growing old and finding flashes of your flame, the result is soapy and staid, with the characters broad sketches working overtime for laughs. In a story written by Lydia Marchant and Simon Warne, former EastEnders’ star Anita Dobson plays the frail but fiercely independent Cynthia, who, after collapsing at a funeral, is put into a retirement village by her daughter Amanda (Tracy-Ann Oberman). She hates it, naturally. Shackled within the controlling regime of Nina Wadia’s Heather, the oppressive caricature managing Cedar Wood, Cynthia decides to get kicked out. She looks at the list of rules – and breaks them one by one. No narcotics? Sure, Cyn will bake some brownies with a secret ingredient. No antisocial behaviour? Pff, Cyn will flash her fellow OAPs in a game of strip bridge. No exotic animals? Of course, Cyn will release a Gaboon viper in the common room. Further complicating things is the presence of Frank (Nigel Havers), a Seventies pop star with whom she had a dalliance half a century ago. It’s their dynamic that proves most successful. “In all the retirement villages in the world, she walks into mine,” Frank tells Cyn, who’s impervious at first to his charms. Later, in a moment of sweet catharsis, their true feelings now apparent, Cyn says Frank has “more sex appeal in your good arm than any Gen-Z boyband”. On the drawing board, the script no doubt sounded topical, fizzing with hilarity; alas, in execution, it requires the cast to do too much heavy lifting – even if there is a pleasing melancholy suffusing the production. As Cyn, Dobson is clearly having a ball, threading her performance with skeins of impish humour and mournful sentiment. There’s also an amusing scene in which Frank and his rival for Cyn’s affections slap it out, septuagenarian style, to the strains of Strauss’s “The Blue Danube”. But for a strand that was renowned for tackling thorny societal issues, it’s surprising that it has made its comeback with something this lightweight. If it was hoping to be the new Abigail’s Party, it isn’t. Play for Today has been long-missed and excites considerable nostalgia for a more risk-taking age of single dramas on TV, yet one would imagine that the new series would at all costs aim to avoid appearing dated. It fails. This feels like Play for Yesterday, and that’s a problem.

Politics

Trump says he has an 'obligation' to sue the BBC over edited Jan. 6 speech

LONDON — President Donald Trump has said he has an obligation to proceed with his threatened $1 billion lawsuit against the BBC for editing a speech he made before his supporters' violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the presidential election result. The BBC's top executive, Director-General Tim Davie, and its news CEO, Deborah Turness, resigned Sunday amid a growing scandal over this and other alleged editorial misjudgments. Trump celebrated the news, though his legal team also wrote to the corporation on Sunday demanding a “full and fair retraction” and gave a deadline of 5 p.m. Friday for a response. A BBC spokesperson said: "We will review the letter and respond directly in due course." Asked Tuesday night whether he would sue, Trump told Fox News: "Well, I guess I have to you know, why not? Because they defrauded the public, and they've admitted it." "I think I have an obligation to do it, because you can't get people, you can't allow people to do that," he said, before comparing the action to his lawsuit against CBS for a "60 Minutes" interview with his then-presidential election rival Kamala Harris. CBS paid $16 million to settle the case. Trump complained that the BBC's edit of his speech "made it sound radical" when it was "a very calming speech." The saga centers on a "Panorama" documentary that aired before last year's election. In it, two parts of the speech were edited together to give the impression that Trump said: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol... and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell." In fact Trump initially said: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them." He said later: "And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." The House Jan. 6 committee said after an 18-month investigation that Trump spent much of the speech at the Washington rally “amping up his crowd with lies about the election, attacking his own vice-president and Republican members of Congress, and exhorting the crowd to fight.” BBC Chairman Samir Shah has apologized for what he called an "error of judgement" as the furor intensifies the debate over the embattled broadcaster’s future. Davie told staff in a 40-minute all-hands meeting Tuesday that despite mistakes the corporation had to “fight for our journalism,” BBC News reported. Trump also told Fox News he took offense at this coming from "one of our great allies," meaning the United Kingdom. The BBC is a public corporation funded by a national license fee of 174.50 pound ($228) per household, but it is editorially independent and frequently runs critical and revealing news stories about the government of the day. The incident and other claims of biased reporting have provided potent fuel for conservative critics of the BBC, including many lawmakers and right-wing newspapers who oppose the license fee and accuse the corporation of being culturally liberal and institutionally biased. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told Parliament Tuesday that the BBC is a "national institution" and warned against a sustained attack. The ten-year charter that governs the BBC, including its funding, is due for renewal in 2027.

Technology

Plane makes emergency landing after crew bang on cockpit door over comms problem - NBC News

A flight made an emergency landing Monday after its pilots lost a radio link with flight staff, prompting them to bang on the locked cockpit door and raising fears that someone was trying to break in