‘Heartwarming' Sam Ryder sings with critically ill children at Disneyland Paris
Jax Morris, who was diagnosed at the age of two with a rare genetic blood disease and lives in North Ayrshire, Scotland and Kent-based Molly Townsend-Blazier, who was diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukaemia, were among those performing.
Sam Ryder at the launch of the Disney Music Festival at Disneyland Paris (Daniel Kennedy/Disneyland Paris/PA)
The two nine-year-olds were joined by Habiba Konate Naim, 13, from Greater London, who is living with genetic condition Williams Syndrome and has had a life-saving kidney transplant, and Eve Wilson, 16, from the south coast of England, who is undergoing treatment for a brain tumour.
'Singing with these amazing kids was honestly one of the most meaningful and heartwarming things I've ever done,' Ryder said.
'They met as strangers, and it was a joy to watch them become friends as we bonded over the power of music and singing. The whole experience was so pure, and it's been a real honour that I will cherish forever.'
Molly Townsend-Blazier, nine, participated (Daniel Kennedy/Disneyland Paris/PA)
The Make-A-Wish UK supporter said the charity is 'the best of humanity.'
He added: 'It transcends everything – politics, beliefs, all of it. It's only good. It brings out the best in everyone, and I just feel so lucky to be around that energy.'
Ryder said that 'getting to meet and hang out a few weeks' while rehearsing with the children helped break 'the ice so we could just sing, dance, and enjoy the moment together'.
He said: 'The main thing was making sure it felt like their day, building those bonds between them.
'If music was just the backdrop for all of that, then I'm humbled and honoured to have been part of it. They're amazing people — pure beauty, honestly.'
The performance in front of the Sleeping Beauty Castle at the launch of the Disney Music Festival came ahead of World Wish Day – which takes place on Tuesday – and was a collaboration between Disneyland Paris, charity Make-A-Wish and Ryder.
Sam Ryder at AIR Studios in Hampstead, London, during rehearsals (Daniel Kennedy/Disneyland Paris/PA)
Eve recently received a place at dance college, ahead of her GCSEs, and said her 'dream's always been to perform at Disney, and it's happening'.
Molly's father Ian said: 'At first, we thought we only had months with her.
'We had to wait a week for further tests, and eventually they confirmed it was leukaemia. It's been a challenging journey over the last two and a half, three years, with quite intensified chemo every day.'
When Jax was four, he underwent chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant and then had complications, viruses and autoimmune encephalitis, which the NHS says is a serious condition leading to swelling of the brain.
This caused brain trauma and mobility impairments, but he is determined to try to walk again, and is still in and out of hospital, according to the charity.
Disney and Make-A-Wish have worked together for 45 years, bringing children more than 165,000 wishes around the world and some 20,000 at Disneyland Paris.
Ryder represented the UK at the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest, coming second with the single Space Man.
He was nominated for an outstanding original music and lyrics Emmy in 2023 for co-writing Fought & Lost, featuring Queen guitarist Sir Brian May, for the hit Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Metro
2 hours ago
- Metro
The quiet city named the BDSM capital of the UK
Just past the idyllic Cotswolds, you'll find the cathedral city of Gloucester, known for its towering spires, Roman history, and proximity to the Forest of Dean. But dig a little deeper and there's a rather saucy story to be told, as new research shows that this seemingly quiet city is actually the BDSM capital of the UK. It might not be the most obviously kinky hotspot, but as it turns out, Gloucester locals are eager to explore behind closed doors. Analysing over 200,000 UK-based search queries, 11% of all adult platform searches in the Southwestern city were strictly related to BDSM-adjacent terms. Wondering where London ranks? The Big Smoke doesn't even make the top 20 list of UK cities, as Salford took home second place, Sunderland third, and Wakefield fourth. Perhaps the most unexpected locations to make the list were Ipswich and Peterborough, which placed seventh and ninth, respectively, according to research from escort website Erobella. While Gloucester might've claimed the trophy for cities, there were three UK locations that had an even higher search percentage of BDSM-related terms. The North East came in at 12%, and just outside Liverpool, the Merseyside town of St Helens ranked at 16%. And if you thought West London was vanilla, think again, because 23% of all adult content searches in Hounslow were strictly related to BDSM. We didn't have that on our bingo cards. When it comes to Lovehoney's Sex Map for 2025 though, Gloucester doesn't reign so supreme. Locals aren't quite putting their money where their mouths are, as it ranks 631st out of 907 in terms of sex toy purchases. They might've placed 652nd for vibrators, but they're certainly not scrimping on the length, as the average one measures 6.8 inches, with a girth of 4.4. Fair enough. Just an hour away from Gloucester though, and the sleepy residents of Hereford are buying the biggest dildos in the country. The average toy purchased by residents here is 7.13 inches long, which is roughly the length of a standard pencil, manual toothbrush, or mid-sized banana. Impressive, right? More Trending Sex toys have been around longer than you'd think, too. As sexologist and expert at Gigi Engle, previously told Metro, they've been around pretty much 'as long as humans have existed.' The oldest sex toy in existence is 28,000 years old and was found in a cave in Germany. 'People have been using sex toys of various calibre in various ways – [made of] stone, of glass, of wood, of leather – since these materials have been invented,' Gigi explained. Elsewhere, there's the unproven rumour (which could likely be a myth, but it's fun nonetheless) that Cleopatra used to fill a glass jar with bees for pleasure. View More » Sex-enhancing aids are also referenced in the Kama Sutra; Ben Wa Balls (kegel balls) have historically been used in Japan, and there have been multiple archaeological findings that suggest the Romans were just as horny, with a 16cm phallus-shaped toy likely used for sexual pleasure uncovered at a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall in 2023. Do you have a story to share? Get in touch by emailing MetroLifestyleTeam@ MORE: 5 tips for approaching your work crush without making it weird — or getting fired MORE: Rachel Reeves reveals £15,000,000,000 transport projects – here's what we know MORE: Like JoJo Siwa, I dated a man after women — we're not 'fake lesbians'
The Herald Scotland
6 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Edinburgh Festival faces a summer of Gaza sponsorship rows
A quick recap, then a look at why this matters. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg pulled out of an appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) in 2023 on account of its long-standing relationship with Edinburgh-based investment firm Baillie Gifford. She viewed this hook-up as an example of 'green-washing' by a firm gaining from investments in companies whose interests were inimical to her beliefs. 'Green-washing efforts by the fossil fuel industry, including sponsorship of cultural events, allow them to keep the social license to continue operating,' she said in a statement. 'I cannot and do not want to be associated with events that accept this kind of sponsorship.' Following Ms Thunberg's withdrawal, and on the eve of the festival, over 50 authors published an open letter calling on the EIBF to end its relationship with Baillie Gifford. In May 2024, the EIBF announced it was doing just that. The Hay Festival, also sponsored by Baillie Gifford, announced the same decision a week earlier. Full disclosure: I was entirely on the side of the authors in the 2023 row and had little time or patience for the arguments of those who opposed them. Certainly not the cultural warriors of the right, who viewed the campaign as a chance to pour scorn on the 'wokerati' – but not even those festival directors and high-placed arts practitioners in the invidious position of having to defend tie-ins with companies such as Baillie Gifford. Grow up, they said, the arts wouldn't exist in their current form without this sort of corporate sponsorship. Really? I'm not so sure. Anyway, if you're right would that be such a bad thing? Fast forward another year and we have just had the launch of the 2025 EIBF. In the absence of Baillie Gifford as a corporate sponsor (a relationship which was always and self-evidently transactional in nature) we now have (cue drum roll) Sir Ian Rankin. As revealed in The Herald, the sainted knight has stepped in – though stepped up might be a better phrase – and agreed to help back the festival financially, along with fellow author Jenny Colgan and other organisations and companies including Edinburgh-based legal firm Digby Brown and privately funded arts charity the Hawthornden Foundation. I'm not saying it was easy to fill the funding gap left by Baillie Gifford, and I don't know how well it has been plugged, but the festival has announced its largest number of events since the pre-pandemic days. Just saying. But don't think this issue is going away. Even as I write this, in Tel Aviv Greta Thunberg is being forced onto a plane, a method of travel she abhors and avoids for conscientious reasons. This is following her detainment while attempting to deliver aid to Gaza aboard UK-flagged humanitarian vessel The Madleen. Greta Thunberg was detained by Israeli authorities while attempting to deliver aid to Gaza (Image: AP) Along with the wider situation in Gaza and the West Bank and the ongoing climate emergency – and as tensions, tempers, emotions and body counts mount – there will be more and more scrutiny by more and more activists of more and more companies and institutions with links to, say, arms sales to Israel or fossil fuels or [insert injustice of your choice]. This will inevitably impact on the UK's arts institution and, as Edinburgh gears up for August, it will be inevitably be felt in Scotland. Actually it already is. A body signing itself the 'Edinburgh International Festivals' was one of the co-signatories supporting a recent open letter by Sir Alistair Spalding and Britannia Morton of London's Sadler's Wells venue published in the Financial Times (ha!). In it the authors complained about the 'relentless negativity' of 'activist groups' such as the one which 'pushed out' Baillie Gifford from its place as a sponsor of the arts. They added: '[P]artnering with businesses ensures our work goes further and has a greater impact. It adds more value and enables growth, ambition and risk taking.' Quoted in The Art Newspaper last week, corporate fundraising expert Martin Prendergast addressed the open letter and said 'the causes are right but the targets are wrong'. But creative producer Naomi Russell had a different take. 'I think protest and resistance drive change and historically this has great precedent,' she told the publication. 'That can be uncomfortable for the powers and established structures.' And so we come full circle: which side are you on? It's a question being asked a lot these days. Think carefully before you answer. Read more: Reel life Do you remember your first time? No not that. I mean the first time you realised there was more to the big screen than the latest James Bond or superhero offering. The first time you had your eyes opened to the kinds of films that maybe did not have car chases or shoot-outs and maybe did have subtitles and which – just as important – were shown in venues dedicated to what you later learned was called 'art-house cinema'. If you don't, I'm sorry. If you do, you'll know why I'm so delighted that Edinburgh's Filmhouse has announced its re-opening date: Friday June 27, just in time for this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) to return to its spiritual home. I was 16 the first time I went to the Filmhouse – in 1982, to see Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva. It was also the first subtitled film I had ever seen. A little later, still at school, I saw Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film Rumble Fish. It's still my favourite of his films and definitely in my all-time top five. Matt Dillon in Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film Rumble Fish (Image: Universal/Criterion) In the same year I also saw director Nicolas Roeg discuss working with Gene Hackman in a Q&A following a screening of Roeg's film Eureka. Many decades later I found myself in my usual spot on the back row of Cinema One and chatting to an older man in the next seat. I told him about my love of the Filmhouse, and about these seminal events in my cinematic life and how vividly I could still remember them. It turned out I was talking to former EIFF director Jim Hickey, who ran the Filmhouse between 1979 and 1993. He was the one on stage interviewing Roeg that night 30 or so years earlier. I could have cried. Him too, probably. It's a very personal story, but it is in no way meaningless because so many people in Edinburgh have similar ones to tell. That's why the Filmhouse's absence since the collapse in 2022 of parent organisation the Centre for the Moving Image has left such a huge hole. Sure there's still work to do to keep Filmhouse 2.0 afloat. But now, thanks to the efforts of those who battled to keep the flame alive, it has returned. Eureka! Read more: And finally The Herald's theatre critic Neil Cooper has been busy recently. His peregrinations have taken him first to Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum where he watched The Mountaintop, a production of Katori Hall's Olivier Award-winning play about Martin Luther King Jr's last night alive. Five stars for that one. Just around the corner at the Traverse Theatre he took in Ramesh Meyyappan's radical reworking of King Lear, then watched the entertaining Meme Girls at Oran Mor in Glasgow, part of the ongoing A Play, A Pie And A Pint season, and hot-footed it to Pitlochry for Nan Shepherd: Naked And Unashamed, the latest chapter in the cult Aberdeenshire writer's move from the margins of literary history to the centre. Elsewhere music critics Keith Bruce and Teddy Jamieson have also been busy, Keith at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall where he heard the Royal Scottish National Orchestra perform 'the mighty juggernaut' that is Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No 11 and Teddy at Glasgow's O2 Academy where he watched Morrissey. A slew of Smiths songs will have pleased many in the audience but Teddy was left wondering who the bequiffed Narcissus is really addressing these days.
The Sun
8 hours ago
- The Sun
How Sabrina Carpenter's ‘Pornhub' album cover sparked fury by pushing sexually dubious image to millions of young girls
KNEELING on all fours, black mini-dress riding up, Sabrina Carpenter pouts for the camera – her trademark platinum hair in the grip of a man's fist as her hand lingers suggestively on his leg. So, little wonder the cover image from the US singer's up-coming album Man's Best Friend, which she teased yesterday on Instagram, has sparked outrage. 5 5 5 While the former Disney Channel star has been praised in the past for 'owning' her sexuality in a feminist way, it seems this latest display has gone too far for many. One fan on X labelled it 'straight-up Pornhub fantasy', while a domestic violence charity issued a statement saying: 'Sabrina Carpenter's album cover isn't edgy, it's regressive.' The Espresso singer had already caused controversy earlier this year with her eye-popping legs-akimbo performance in red lingerie at the Brits, which prompted more than 900 Ofcom complaints from viewers who thought her scantily clad writhing wrong for a pre-watershed audience. Now, with her latest racy shot on the album cover, 26-year-old Sabrina is determined to send out a message that she has shed her Disney past in favour of a sexually charged image. Which is all well and good were it not for Sabrina's army of pre-teen fans who have helped propel her so quickly to stratospheric stardom. Her last album Short N' Sweet spawned a string of No1 singles and her tour sold out in minutes — with many children of primary school age among the concert-goers. Nicknamed Polly Pocket by fans because of her tiny 5ft stature, Sabrina's saccharinely sexy stage outfits, which often comprise lacy, pastel underwear, stockings and vintage baby-doll nighties, have been branded Lolita-like in the past. That comparison to Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel about a professor fixated on a 12-year-old girl is one the artist embraced in a shoot for W mag. She recreated an image from Stanley Kubrick's film version of Lolita where 14-year-old actress Sue Lyons gets soaked in a garden by water sprinklers. A friend told me recently how she had treated her daughter to tickets to see Sabrina's performance at the BST In Hyde Park concert in London next month as a present for doing well in her recent Year 6 SAT exams. But given Sabrina's latest imagery, I for one won't be in a rush to sing along with my 11-year-old to lyrics such as, 'I told that boy to sit me down on all fours/I told that boy go faster, now I'm all sore' — a tweaked version of the lyrics to Nonsense, which she sang to an audience in Singapore last year. The star has even described herself as 'vulgar' and 'obnoxiously horny'. On her recent Short N' Sweet tour it became a fan-favourite segment for her to mime a surprise sex act, while giant confetti cannons erupted in a suggestive way. Of course, such pornographic posturing is certainly nothing new in the world of pop. Sabrina's shocking shenanigans come straight from a playbook used by everyone from Madonna, who famously simulated pleasuring herself on stage, to Christina Aguilera writhing around in knickers and backless chaps in her 2002 Dirrty video. Britney Spears ' first ever mag cover shot caused a storm when she posed for Rolling Stone in 1999 lying on a bed in a bra, in a teenager-style bedroom, while clutching a Teletubby toy. But in an age when OnlyFans porn star Bonnie Blue, 26, has become world-famous for depraved stunts such as sleeping with 1,000 men in a day, the overt selling of sex to young girls takes on a more worrying aspect. Indeed, recent figures estimate close to four per cent of young women aged 18 to 34 are selling content on X-rated platform Only-Fans. Sure, most won't be behaving like Blue, but it exposes a trend toward women feeling compelled to sell themselves on the internet. There are, of course, many fans who praise Sabrina as a woman in control of her own music and performances. They applaud her sexual frankness and witty lyrics. 'ANTI-TAYLOR SWIFT' One tweet from a fan, following a sold-out concert last year, went viral. It read: 'Sabrina Carpenter is a genius for how she embraces her sexuality but still keeps women as her target audience. "Like, how is she performing in lingerie and I still feel like it's not for men at all? "I can't comprehend it, but I love it.' But I worry Sabrina's latest album cover, with its overtones of subjugation, has gone far too far. Coupled with growing fears about young boys being radicalised by Andrew Tate -style misogynistic bile online, which promotes slapping, hitting and keeping women 'in their place', is this a helpful image to push to young girls? Sabrina Carptenter's Rise to Fame SABRINA Carpenter's first role was as the lead in the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World. Between 2014 and 2017, she appeared in over 70 episodes. She also signed with the Disney-owned Hollywood Records and released her debut single, Can't Blame a Girl for Trying, in 2014. After four albums, she moved to Island Records in 2021. Her fifth album, Emails I Can't Send (2022), had her hit singles Nonsense and Feather. Around that time, Sabrina started to gain notoriety in the UK. She opened for Taylor Swift at the Eras Tour in 2023 and then achieved wider commercial success with her sixth album Short n' Sweet, which was released earlier this year. Number one singles from the album include Espresso and Please Please Please. In a sense, Sabrina is carving out a niche for herself as something of an anti- Taylor Swift. During Taylor's smash-hit Eras tour last summer, where Sabrina was the support act, young fans adored her in ever-bigger numbers — but for showing emotional, not sexual, vulnerability. While Taylor puts on a jaw-dropping show and is no stranger to donning a glitzy corset, by her own admission she has never thought of herself as sexy. She once said: 'In my life I don't gravitate towards being edgy, sexy or cool. "I just naturally am not any of those things. "I'm imaginative, I'm smart and I'm hard-working — and those things are not necessarily prioritised by pop culture.' But while the two singers may be different, they are also good friends. Very like Taylor, though, Sabrina has heavily mined her own life for musical inspiration. 5 Sabrina dated Saltburn actor Barry Keoghan and even writhed with him on screen in the video for her hit Please Please Please, which tellingly included the lyric: 'Heartbreak is one thing/ My ego's another/I beg you don't embarrass me, motherf***er.' The star, who also dated singer Shawn Mendes, even took aim at her own dad — the opening track of her album Emails I Can't Send is penned as an open letter to her father David after she found out he had cheated on her mum Elizabeth. The couple are still together but in the song Sabrina claims his behaviour has caused her to fear boyfriends will cheat on her — and indeed, it has been rumoured that her split with Keoghan was prompted by his infidelity. Her father did, though, encourage Sabrina's talent from a young age. Growing up in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, she and her three sisters were all home-schooled. Aged just ten, Sabrina began posting videos of herself singing along to Christina Aguilera songs on YouTube — and soon after that her dad built her a recording studio. In 2009, she came third in a singing contest run by Miley Cyrus, but her big break came when she was cast in Disney series Girl Meets World in 2013. Her aunt is Nancy Cartwright, the actress behind the voice of Bart Simpson — another famous on-screen rebel who doesn't care what the world thinks. But Sabrina's latest attempt to shock may have finally backfired. Her brand of performative sexuality might please, please some — but certainly not me, I'm afraid.
