All the changes coming to Blue Peter in September
He will become the 44th presenter of the world's longest-running children's TV show, appearing regularly in the studio.
To mark his debut, Hacker T Dog will take viewers on a special tour of his hometown, Wigan.
Blue Peter will also introduce a new look and format, relocating to Campfield Facilities at Versa Studios in Manchester.
The show will cease future live episodes due to changing viewing habits, though the Blue Peter Garden and RHS Bridgewater garden will still be used for filming.
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Times
6 minutes ago
- Times
The academy players with more YouTube fans than game's biggest stars
They are famous footballers with millions of fans, watched live by thousands every week. Some earn big money — well above the national average — and attract sponsorship deals from prestigious international brands. It is not only their skills that are in demand. Holidays, haircuts, homework — it all makes waves, with every detail made public. After all, the aim is not to shut down, but to open up. These are not Premier League stars, but academy footballers, telling the world about their climb to the top. For a long time, the game's youngsters kept their heads down as they made their way up the ranks. Stuart Pearce had to play in secret for his mates' team as a boy, by adopting a fake name and hiding away as a goalkeeper. Inside training grounds, scrubbing the pros' boots with brushes was about as close as the kids came to stardom. At Manchester United, under Sir Alex Ferguson in the 1990s, the youth coaches in charge of the Class of '92 had a well-rehearsed riposte for any teenager believed to be getting above their station: 'When you've played 50 league games for the first team,' they said. 'That's when you can consider yourself a player.' Fifty league games? How about 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, where a swell of academy players are broadcasting their talent, lifestyle and character on camera. Search 'academy footballer' online and swathes of clips can be tapped and scrolled, with titles such as 'Day in the life of an academy footballer' (217,000 views), 'How an academy footballer trains for pre-season' (281,000) and '10 Things an Academy Footballer Can't Live Without' (64,000). Some accounts are focused on football — matches, sessions, career decisions — but not all. Many also offer invented games and challenges, or lift the lid entirely on their everyday lives, with trips to the barbers or a run-down of what's for breakfast. Many of these emerging players are hugely popular, while a select few boast followings to rival even the biggest names in the game. Lorenzo Greer, 16, has just been offered a two-year scholarship at Birmingham City, and his 'Tekkerz kid' YouTube channel, which he started aged six, now has 1.7 million subscribers — more than double Jude Bellingham's 896,000 — with his 651 videos attracting more than 492 million views. Tashall Sandhu, YouTube name 'Tash Baller', has 220,000 subscribers, with videos of him playing for Wolverhampton Wanderers Under-13 and celebrating 100,000 subscribers aged nine. Faran Ahmad, who plays for Leicester City Under-12, uploads near-daily home videos with a total of 7.6 million views. One of Ahmad's most watched videos — 'Come Shop With Me (academy player)' — is of him on a visit to Sports Direct. There are many, many more. The devotion of kids to a virtual world, at such a young age, will be enough to make many wince. That some accounts were created by parents, with mum or dad behind the camera, will set alarm bells ringing about expectation, exposure and pressure. For those who don't turn professional — and only one in 200 academy players in England do — there is a danger the feeling of failure will be painfully public. Hugo Scheckter, who has worked in player care at West Ham United and Southampton and whose company, The Player Care Group, has helped more than ten Premier League clubs, believes big social media profiles are 'not needed and not appropriate' for footballers younger than about 15. 'The difficulty comes where it's parents or agents pushing them into it,' Scheckter says. 'They build up the kids as superstars and the kids don't want to let their parents down. It can be ten years of their life where they're footballer, footballer, footballer, when actually they're just child, child, child. Maybe for the elite ones who make it, that might be useful. For the other 99 per cent, it's pretty harmful.' Clubs are still finding their way too, unsure about how to handle this growing band of players with more videos than appearances. At one of the top Premier League clubs, staff created a cluster of fake accounts, which were designed to follow and interact with the players in order 'to understand them better'. But they cancelled the operation after deciding the 'show pony' impression created by their players' dealings on social media wasn't a fair reflection of their real personalities. At another club, there have been disagreements over the best approach. One senior figure recalled a meeting when he had to say to colleagues: 'Do we want footballers or influencers?' Another executive admitted their club were still grappling how to respond: 'We understand it's happening, but is pushing back the right thing to do? It's like a parent, it scares the life out of you some of things they do, but do you ban it? Do you cover your eyes and wish it wasn't happening?' The question is whether that fear is well-founded, given the actual experiences of some of the players. Greer, the 16-year-old Birmingham apprentice with more subscribers than Bellingham, talks confidently on the phone for half an hour. He is so relaxed, you wonder what all the fuss is about. 'It's just fun isn't it?' he says. 'I don't see it as a job, it's something I love to do and it helps me connect with other kids. They can relate to me because I'm still a kid as well.' He hasn't masked his low moments either. 'The pressure sometimes of having to be perfect… because 90 per cent of the kids I was playing against watched my videos so they wanted to show they were better than me or hurt me on the pitch,' he says. 'I've had bad patches. But I spoke to my dad, spoke to my coaches and my confidence came back. We often spoke about it on YouTube. I'd speak to my dad about it on camera. We shared it with the viewers. The viewers are like our family and they were supportive.' Greer says his dad, Nathan, launched his YouTube account when he was six, with a video about a new pair of boots, and the two of them have a joint channel called '90+2', where they talk about football together. 'When me and my wife started the channel, it had nothing to do with getting popular or making money, I didn't even know you could monetise a video on YouTube,' Nathan says. 'Daniel Radcliffe was Harry Potter and nobody says to his parents, 'What are you doing?' For some reason when it's social media and football, it's like, 'Is this fair on the kids?' In my case, it's perfectly fair. It's a good balance. It works for us.' In 2019, Greer was flown out to Turin for a Nike campaign with Cristiano Ronaldo. 'He's had crazy opportunities most boys could only dream of and I'm very proud of him,' Nathan says. 'For this next generation of kids, it's becoming normal. Everyone is a YouTuber now, everyone is famous now and less people will judge people for it.' Young players also believe influence online gives them a safety net, inside or outside of the game. They talk about the confidence gained from performing regularly on camera and the skills learnt in creating and editing videos. Financially, the more successful academy YouTubers can earn over £40,000 a year for their content, with one agent insisting their teenager had saved enough to buy a house. Even within football, players released by clubs see their channels as ready-made brochures for their skills and personality, an interactive CV for potential recruiters. Ben Brookes, who was released by West Ham at 13 and has just joined York City, said his YouTube channel, 'Road to Full Time Ball', now with 10.2k subscribers, helped resurrect his career. 'I just thought I'm going to start recording myself,' Brookes told the Beyond Football Podcast. 'As well as helping others on our journey, it also allows us to self-promote. If a manager wants you, it's more about your footballing ability, but if you're a leader, if you're confident, they love stuff like that.' Many clubs are already encouraging players to branch out. At Brighton & Hove Albion, where they give workshops on social media to players and parents from under-nines and up, Shona Richards from the player care department says trainees have also taken up language, piano and plumbing classes, while Scheckter explains how one footballer he worked with developed an enthusiasm for drawing by joining an oil painting club. 'A lot of them have amazing stories and can be real inspirations,' Richards says. 'We want them to be proud of that, while understanding the risks and getting the balance right.' For those mature enough, some clubs believe YouTube can be another string to their bow, a very modern way for academy players to expand their portfolio while enjoying an escape from the seriousness of football. In a game often criticised for failing to provide a safe landing ground for discarded youngsters, some kids are taking their own steps, by swapping the boot-cleaning brushes for a ball, tripod and camera.
Daily Mail
6 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS Charli XCX is married! Brat singer stuns in a leggy white mini dress and her trademark shades as she puts on a VERY saucy display with The 1975 star husband George Daniel
Charli XCX looked nothing short of sensational as she tied the knot with The 1975's George Daniel at Hackney Town Hall on Saturday. The Brat singer, 32, threw convention to the wind and opted for a leggy white mini dress which she teamed with her trademark sunglasses.
Times
6 minutes ago
- Times
Why the Cotswolds is this summer's destination for mega-weddings
A couple of years ago the society wedding planner Lavinia Stewart-Brown was asked an unusual question by a bride and groom: could she source two elephants to stand outside the marquee and greet the guests at their Cotswold wedding? It took her a moment to realise that they were joking, but the idea took hold. 'We found them a pair of mechanical elephants that looked so real — they moved and even blinked,' Stewart-Brown says. The happy couple were delighted; their 200 guests spent the evening taking selfies in front of the robot Dumbos. No elephants were harmed in the making of this wedding. If weddings have become bigger over the past decade — glitzier, splashier, more expensive, more designed for Insta — nowhere does this apply more keenly than in the Cotswolds. Getting hitched in the land of honey-coloured villages and bursting hedgerows has become a status symbol, but it won't come cheap. For a mega-wedding in this part of the world the starting figure is £1,000 per guest, but it can shoot up fast. 'For a three-day event with 200 guests, you could be looking at a million — easily,' Stewart-Brown says. According to several weary planners, three-day weddings in this golden, moneyed patch of the country are now the norm. Would you like your destination wedding in Santorini, Lake Como — or Bourton-on-the-Water? Preparty on the Friday night, big do itself on Saturday, recovery brunch on Sunday. 'Before Soho Farmhouse it was old money rather than new,' one planner says of the boom in Cotswold mega-weddings. 'But since then, and with the celebs moving in, it has changed. There are lots of Americans. I did a huge American wedding last year and the couple live in London, but it was very much, 'We want the Cotswolds because 80 per cent of our guests are flying over from the States.' '' Next month another American, Eve Jobs, the 27-year-old daughter of the tech bro Steve Jobs, is marrying the British Olympic showjumper Harry Charles, 26, in these parts. Nobody's squeaking about where, but one wedding planner tells me he knows there's a 'biggie' happening at the ultra-hip members' club Estelle Manor later this year, which can be taken over exclusively for the right kind of fee. What fee is that? 'They can basically name their price,' my mole says. The guest list is a similarly closed secret, but you can expect other tech progeny (Phoebe and Jennifer Gates, daughters of Bill and Melinda, are pals), other young Olympians, models from New York and a smattering of twentysomething aristos. Think Shiv's wedding in Succession but stick it somewhere near Burford. ' 'The Cotswolds has become a brand,' says Henry Bonas, who's often described as 'the king of Cotswold parties'. I went to an eye-popping wedding he organised a few years ago, not far from Stow-on-the-Wold. There was a marquee for 300, dozens and dozens of candelabra dotted along the tables, thousands of tealights, the entire annual floral output of the Netherlands, and a moment during the speeches when the mother of the bride was handed — literally handed — two rare-breed ducks for the lake by her new son-in-law as a thank-you, and we all felt rather nervous about her Catherine Walker suit. • Wedding etiquette: from bridesmaids to reception and photos Bonas points out that the Cotswolds is, technically, a vast chunk of land spanning five counties, but in the past decade — as the number of members' clubs, trendy pubs and rich Londoners moving there has boomed — it has become synonymous with a certain kind of fairytale Englishness (pretty stone houses, endless wisteria), which makes it an obvious wedding choice for fashionable brides. At another Cotswold wedding I went to not so long ago there was even a cricket match during the reception and the bride gamely picked up the bat and made a few barefoot runs in her Monique Lhuillier dress in the field beside her parents' house. Bucolic. Many of the weddings Bonas organises are at private homes, but if you're an arriviste American who doesn't have a big posh house there, you could always con-sider Badminton (the Duke of Beaufort's home, but hireable if you have the dosh), Blenheim (the Duke of Marlborough's gaff), Kirtlington Park (Capability Brown gardens, splendid for social media), Cornwell Manor, Elmore Court or Sezincote. All available for thousands and thousands of pounds and rising steeply, and that's before you even get on to catering, booze, flowers, entertainment and the rest. If you want to go properly swank, the flower bill alone can reach £100,000, a source says, and the florist you need is Paul Hawkins. This summer, he tells me, the vibe for his Cotswold weddings has been Titania's lair meets Studio 54, 'which means achingly delicious roses, English-grown, lots of cow parsley and masses of foliage, so you literally have to cut down a whole wood. But it's all composted afterwards.' To fit in dress-wise, look to Caroline Castigliano, Reem Acra or Emma Victoria Payne. And you want a marquee from Original Marquees, run by a charming man called Harry Jones ('His tents are always pristine and very beautiful,' Stewart-Brown says). The photographer to book is Lara Arnott, not only because she takes ravishing photos but also because every single guest falls in love with her. Another reason the Cotswolds is handy for mega-weddings, says Jamie Simon, director of Banana Split, one of the UK's swankiest party planners, is that you can chopper in and out relatively easily. 'Plenty of space for helicopters,' he says breezily, 'and it's handy for Heathrow too.' This is helpful for both guests and entertainment. Banana Split can get you pretty much anyone you want to sing your first dance —Ed Sheeran? Adele? Stevie Wonder? One client wanted Paul McCartney, so they called him and he said, 'I don't do private events, but this is my fee.' Alas, Simon won't tell me Macca's fee. • How to be a cool bride in 2025 — from the hen do to the wedding dress Anyone involved in organising a mega-wedding for an actor, a toff or a tech bro will now almost certainly have to sign an NDA ('Oh, the NDAs …' one exhausted supplier says with a sigh), but the issue of privacy can also be less fraught in the Cotswolds. 'Lots of these estates are very private,' Simon says. 'Hidden away, so they're quite easy to secure.' Although paparazzi trying to use drones are an increasing problem, he notes. 'We have to plan some of our events now like low-level military operations, but you're not really allowed to fly drones over private land.' If you don't own a stately home in the Cotswolds, Simon says the next best thing is to take over one of the hotels. Such as Lucknam Park or Barnsley House, the latter of which has recently become another outpost of the Pig. 'If you take a 30 or 40-bedroom hotel, you've got your own private home.' A few years ago Banana Split organised a wedding at Barnsley House for a British couple that kicked off with a team-building event on the Saturday morning. 'Everyone woke up to wellies and boiler suits in different colours for their teams, and we went to a nearby farm and did duck-herding and bale-throwing,' Simon explains. 'A whole morning of activity. It was super-fun.' The rich, as they say, are different. Don't simply assume the wedding is 'somewhere near Soho Farmhouse'. The Cotswolds is an 800 square mile landmass. Plan accordingly. Do triple-check what the church is called, if there's a church involved. Which St Mary the Virgin do you want? The one in Bibury,the one in Fairford or the one in Tetbury? Don't do the Hugh Grant thing of screeching up just as the bride arrives. Do read the invitation properly and check what kind of transport arrangements have been made. At a recent Cotswold wedding I tried to drive to the church in my frock, only to realise they'd laid on minibuses because the local roads were so narrow. I had to reverse about a mile down a road marginally wider than a footpath, sweating heavily into my De La Vali. Do check the name of the pub you're staying at. Much as with churches, there are plenty of Bulls and Bells in these parts. Do book a taxi. You won't necessarily be able to Uber from a field at 1am. Don't say yes to the lunch on the Sunday. Hard rule. Get up, get breakfast, get on the road. The M40 can be bloody ona Sunday afternoon.
