Didn't anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room?

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Didn't anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room?

The Best Advice I Ever Received Came From a Talk Show Host

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

The Best Advice I Ever Received Came From a Talk Show Host

The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

One person dead and one with ‘life-threatening injuries’ after car hits pedestrians outside Melbourne showgrounds

Incident occurred outside venue where Supanova Comic Con event was being held on Saturday

One person is dead and another has been taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries after a car struck pedestrians outside a fan convention in inner Melbourne.

A car mounted the kerb on Saturday afternoon shortly before 5pm outside the Melbourne showgrounds, where the Supanova Comic Con event was being held.

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Mandelson scandal is biggest crisis for diplomatic service in decades, says ex-Foreign Office chief

Simon McDonald says Olly Robbins was ‘thrown under a bus’ by the prime minister and the decision feels wrong

UK politics live – latest updates

The Peter Mandelson security vetting scandal is the biggest crisis for the diplomatic service in decades, a former Foreign Office chief has said.

Simon McDonald, who was the permanent under-secretary of the government department until 2020, has spoken out in defence of Oliver Robbins, saying the civil servant was “thrown under a bus” by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, when he was dismissed from his role on Thursday.

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Story of Black British music writ large in first exhibition at V&A East

Museum says The Music is Black is part of a push to reposition scene as central to UK’s cultural history

Jacqueline Springer is standing in the middle of the V&A’s new exhibition space looking wistfully at a pair of drainpipe trousers, a tailored suit jacket and a porkpie hat, which create the unmistakable silhouette of Pauline Black, lead singer of the 2 Tone group the Selector.

Springer is the curator of the V&A East’s inaugural exhibition, The Music is Black, a landmark survey of Black British music, which opens this weekend. It starts with the early drumbeats in Africa and takes us right up to the latest innovations in pop and drill via jungle, grime, garage and two-tone.

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No generation is safe from the nostalgia industry – just look at the disappointing Malcolm in the Middle reboot

The revival of the hit 2000s sitcom has none of the political subversiveness of the original. But should we be surprised?

One day in the near future, millennials like myself will be shuffling off into care homes. Once inside, what will we do to pass the time? Narrative podcasts from the 2010s will probably be piped into our bedrooms as the evenings approach, with early albums by Arctic Monkeys and the Strokes available on request. Paperback thrillers about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and the disappearance of flight MH370 will line the bookshelves. In the TV room, the fight for the remote will be over whether to rewatch The Simpsons, The Office or Girls; but a small minority of us, particularly those born in the early 1990s, will lobby for Malcolm in the Middle.

In fact, reading the news in 2024 that the acclaimed US sitcom from the 2000s was being revived for a four-part miniseries on Disney+ was the first time I felt directly targeted by the nostalgia industry. (This must be what it feels like to pay hundreds of pounds to see Paul Simon in 2026, I thought.) At once I was transported back to the suburban Sunday evenings of my childhood – the melancholic advance of school the next day momentarily abated by Sky One (channel 106), where I’d find a new episode about this combustive, melodramatic family.

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Graham Norton: ‘Back in the day, my monologues were full of terrible jokes about people’

The comedian and broadcaster on moaning about his eyebags, being stabbed by muggers, and his publicity-shy pet

Born in County Dublin, Graham Norton, 63, studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. In the 1990s, he was a standup and appeared in the sitcom Father Ted. Since 2007, he has presented The Graham Norton Show for the BBC. He hosts Eurovision, is a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, and is presenting new reality show The Neighbourhood, which starts on 24 April on ITV. He has won nine Baftas and written three memoirs and five novels. He is married and lives in London and West Cork.

When were you happiest?
Our wedding weekend in Ireland.

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A dubious career move: how The Claudia Winkleman Show ended the presenter’s winning streak

It seems that even the Traitors host can’t save the ailing chatshow format. As her series ends, it’s hard not to feel that she never quite got out of Graham Norton’s shadow

Six weeks ago, before Claudia Winkleman launched her BBC One Friday night chatshow, media profiles regularly referenced her “Midas touch” with TV formats. She had left one golden programme, sashaying away from Strictly Come Dancing, but her portfolio still included three other winners: the mega hit The Traitors, its celebrity spin-off for the BBC, and Channel 4’s The Piano.

Half a dozen sofa chats later, Winkleman hasn’t exactly suffered the fate of the mythic King Midas, but The Claudia Winkleman Show can fairly be seen as her least glittering work for several years.

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Can a new biopic change your mind about Michael Jackson?

In life, the singer’s image was shaken by abuse allegations. In death, he is a billion-dollar business

In December 1993, Michael Jackson’s genitals were photographed by the Santa Barbara county sheriff’s department and the Los Angeles police department (LAPD). The pop music titan had been accused of sexually abusing Jordan Chandler, a 13-year-old boy who had accompanied Jackson on his Dangerous world tour and regularly shared a bed with the singer. Chandler had made a drawing of distinctive markings and blotches on Jackson’s crotch which matched the photos, law enforcement said. “Not just the genitalia,” said deputy district attorney, Lauren Weis, in comments echoed by LAPD colleagues. “But a particular mark on the underside of his penis which the victim described.”

The incident is a well-known part of Jackson lore; in a live satellite feed broadcast shortly after, the singer branded the strip-search “the most humiliating ordeal of my life”. The following month, Jackson paid a reported $25m to settle the case out of court. Jackson and his estate have always maintained his innocence in Chandler’s claims and nearly a dozen other allegations of child molestation. “All these lies and all these people coming forward to get paid … ,” he told Diane Sawyer in a 1995 interview. “Just lies. Lies, lies, lies.”

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Central bank bosses enlist for war game to gauge threat of Lehman-style bust

Finance chiefs to join exercise in Washington designed to assess how they would handle collapse of significant bank

The bosses of the central banks and treasuries of the UK, US and EU are to take part in a war game in Washington on Saturday to test how they would handle the collapse of a globally significant bank.

Amid growing unease over the risks to global financial stability, the most senior officials from the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England – including its governor, Andrew Bailey – are expected to take part.

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