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Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model review – Tyra Banks comes across terribly in this expose

This three-part documentary has remarkable access to people involved with this 00s TV hit. It’s an awful tale of body-shaming, humiliation and toxic treatment

If you’re a millennial woman, America’s Next Top Model may have been your first experience of appointment TV. The show, which ran for 10 years from 2003, was an early reality juggernaut and made a household name of the supermodel Tyra Banks, its creator and host. At its peak, Top Model drew more than 100 million viewers globally, and left a niche but indelible impact on culture. “Smize”, meaning to “smile with your eyes”, is in the Collins dictionary, while Banks’ infamous tirade (“We were all rooting for you!”) at an unruly model still circulates as a meme.

With its high-concept photoshoots and extreme makeovers, Top Model was ahead of its time in manufacturing viral moments. Today, however, the exacting critiques and body-shaming makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing, as gen Zers bingeing the show through the pandemic have pointed out. This latter-day reckoning is the peg for Netflix’s three-part docuseries, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model.

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model is on Netflix

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Winter Olympics briefing: Great Britain are on a golden roll as records tumble

If the Sunday already felt golden under the alpine sun for Team GB, it only glittered brighter after dark

Super Sunday? More like Golden Sunday. From the sunlit snowboard slopes to the floodlit ice track, Great Britain delivered a one-two punch that will live long in Winter Olympic folklore. In the space of a few hours, two British duos – Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale, then Tabitha Stoecker and Matt Weston – turned near-misses and nerves into history-making golds.

Bankes and Nightingale stunned the field to win the mixed team snowboard cross, capturing the first gold medal on snow in the nation’s 102-year history at the Winter Games. In the wild, elbows-out chaos of the event, the British duo seized a title few predicted was coming.

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The hill I will die on: ‘Being a DJ’ isn’t a proper job | Phil Mongredien

In what other field is a couple of hours’ work taking the credit for somebody else’s brilliance so venerated?

Who earns the easiest money in showbiz? And when I say “earns”, what I actually mean is “gets paid”. If David Guetta and Calvin Harris can make up to $1m for a festival-headlining set – a couple of hours’ work – there can only be one answer: DJs. Because boil it down and all they’re doing for such vast sums of money is quite competently playing music that somebody else actually created. They are proficient labourers rather than artists. In what other field is taking the credit for somebody else’s brilliance so venerated?

Ah, but they get people dancing, you say. Yet how difficult is it to get people to dance when they have come out with the specific intention of dancing, and a reasonable proportion of them are on another planet? These people have invested heavily in having a good time, so it invariably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given the sheer number of floor-filling tunes made during the past six or seven decades, it’s hardly a great feat to choose a few that other people will tolerate or even like.

Phil Mongredien is joint production editor for Guardian Opinion and Long Reads

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FA Cup fourth round: 10 talking points from the weekend’s action

Pressure is telling on Scott Parker at Burnley while Dominik Szoboszlai is reaching new heights for Liverpool

The lack of pressure on Scott Parker this season, despite a collection of desperate performances and an impending relegation, has been mystifying. Plenty at Turf Moor feel a strong sense of loyalty to Parker, especially the chairman, Alan Pace, but support in the stands is dwindling. The lack of backing in the winter transfer window left the squad short of quality and with limited routes out of their current predicament. The Burnley head coach’s Premier League record is miserable and the style of play is devoid of entertainment. At the weekend he had the chance to follow a first league victory in 17 matches at Crystal Palace with FA Cup progress against third-tier Mansfield, but instead Burnley were deservedly eliminated. The second-half efforts of the Clarets bordered on embarrassment in a half-full ground and it feels like things cannot continue like this much longer. Will Unwin

Match report: Burnley 1-2 Mansfield

Match report: Aston Villa 1-3 Newcastle

Match report: Liverpool 3-0 Brighton

Match report: Burton 0-1 West Ham (aet)

Match report: Hull 0-4 Chelsea

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Revitalised Scotland trample all over Steve Borthwick’s lofty ambitions | Robert Kitson

A humbling Six Nations defeat at Murrayfield has left the England coach with significant questions to answer

Some of life’s certainties are impossible to sidestep. And to the trinity of death, taxes and rail delays can now be added a fourth familiar staple. When Scotland play England at Murrayfield it is now all but guaranteed the hosts will raise their game to Ben Nevis‑type heights and the visitors will be taken down a peg or three.

Thus it was again at the weekend as Scotland reignited the bonfire of English vanities and once more sent the auld enemy homewards tae think again. A chastened England were exposed repeatedly in thought and deed by opponents unrecognisable from the sodden losers in Rome the previous week and, as a result, the visitors were brutally consigned to a fifth Calcutta Cup defeat in the past six editions.

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‘I love you twenty-sixty times’: how lyrics written by a three-year-old became tear-inducing viral hits

When Stephen Spencer began setting his daughter’s surreal stories to music, he had 36 followers. Now his banging pop miniatures have been streamed nearly 30m times – and are making parents cry

I’m listening to the latest Stephen Spencer song when suddenly I burst into tears. Was it the falsetto vocals? The swirling harmonies? No, it was the lyrics: “What did Apple-the-Stoola say? He said ‘I love you’ twenty-sixty times.”

Spencer, you see, has a unique lyrical collaborator: his three-year-old daughter. Over the last four months, he has been posting short songs online based on her stream-of-consciousness stories. There’s a smooth soul number about “a regular rabbit, who has regular ponytails just like me”. A song called Funchy the Snow-woman that could fit easily on to a 1975 album, but for its lyrical message about using a litter tray in the forest. And a festive tune about a Christmas cat called Harda Tarda, who hopes that Taja (“a funny way to say Santa”) will bring her “a doggy, a puppy and a ninja-bread man”.

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One Day has been a bestselling novel, a forgettable film, a beloved TV series – now can it be a musical?

David Nicholls’s romantic saga is heading to stage, in the very city where its characters first felt the sparks fly. But how to cram 20 years of romance into two tune-filled hours? By focusing on the little moments, say its creators

Playwright David Greig and director Max Webster are not afraid of a theatrical challenge. The last show they worked on together – The Lorax at London’s Old Vic in 2015 – transformed a complicated Dr Seuss story about capitalism, global heating and a grumpy forest guardian into a bright and breezy family show. Greig has tackled mammoth musicals (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and mountainside thrillers (Touching the Void), while Webster’s biggest hit, The Life of Pi, conjured up floating tigers and raging storms with theatrical flair and swagger.

Now the two are collaborating on a staged musical of David Nicholls’s much-loved – and much-adapted – novel One Day, first published in 2009. That might sound like a relatively straightforward theatrical challenge but there are pitfalls aplenty when it comes to staging the near-iconic love story, which follows would-be couple Dex and Em’s relationship over the same day – 15 July – across two decades. A case in point: the fairly disastrous 2011 film starring Anne Hathaway.

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‘Bring it back’: Sicilians say Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo belongs with them

Much of Messina’s cultural memory was destroyed in a 1908 earthquake, but the Italian government has secured a masterpiece by the port city’s greatest son

On 28 December 1908, the city of Messina was struck by what is still considered the deadliest natural catastrophe in modern European history. In just 37 seconds, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake killed half its population and levelled much of the city.

Along with homes, churches and monuments, invaluable historical sources and documents were lost, including works by Messina’s greatest son, Antonello da Messina, the artist widely credited with transforming the course of Renaissance art.

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Is it true that ... central heating is bad for your skin?

Dry air indoors can cause an inflammatory reaction, yet so can cold, windy outdoor conditions – but turning down the heating and using a moisturising cream can help

‘This is kind of true,” says consultant dermatologist Dr Emma Craythorne. Human skin has evolved to retain water, thanks to a protective barrier on its surface. But that barrier isn’t totally watertight. Water is constantly moving across it, depending on the humidity of the surrounding air.

Skin tends to be most comfortable at a relative humidity of about 40%. When the air around us is drier than that, water is more likely to leave the skin. That matters because the process of water escaping across the skin barrier is mildly inflammatory.

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