EXCLUSIVE 'Spencer's a hard person to be friends with': JAMIE LAING reveals truth about Spencer Matthews 'feud' in exclusive interview - and tells what happened with Palace and Meghan twerking
He arrives flustered for our interview at his office in Marylebone. This is The Sweet Factory, a big building tucked away down a mews – Crittall glass doors, big sofas and so many jars of pick 'n' mix it could kill a diabetic. From here, Laing presides over his growing empire: confectionery business Candy Kittens upstairs, podcast studios downstairs. But he has lost the keys to his new West London house, which he and Habboo only moved into last night (his next-door neighbours are David and Samantha Cameron, more on which later). A locksmith has been called.
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Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Telegraph
Cheltenham Music Festival closes with an uproarious raspberry from Malcolm Arnold
Eighty years old this year, the Cheltenham Music Festival decided to salute its own illustrious past in a closing concert from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales that was celebratory, nostalgic and madly rumbustious, all at once. There was plenty to celebrate, not least the fact that the Cheltenham Music Festival must be the only one in Britain if not the world to give birth to its own musical genre. After it was founded in 1945 the Festival became an indefatigable commissioner of new works, many of which were symphonies of a challenging, modernist kind. Cheltenham was determined to put itself on the map culturally, and nurturing an ever-growing body of 'Cheltenham Symphonies' as they became known was a very good way to do it. Alas most of them have not survived the test of time. But as last night's performance of Malcolm Arnold 's Fifth Symphony proved, the test of time isn't always fair. In 1961 when this symphony was premiered the fashion was for deeply serious modernist symphonies, and Arnold's symphony was simply too badly behaved. It's got tunes, for one thing – really good ones, that sound like a cross between Mahler and Rachmaninov with a bit of 'filmic' sentimentality thrown in. There's also what sounds like a car-chase from an Ealing comedy, and a madly cheerful menagerie of military pipes, all mixed up with aggressively modernist dissonance, which is surely Arnold blowing a raspberry at the po-faced 1961 musical establishment. All this was led with appropriate gleeful relish by conductor Gergely Maduras, and played with uproarious energy by BBC NOW. It was madly entertaining, but the most shocking thing was the desolate ending, which gave a sense of existential dread lurking behind the motley parade of different moods. Alongside this 64-year-old festival commission was a brand-new one, SoundingsDancesEchoes, a Fanfare for Cheltenham by the young British composer Anna Semple. It began with faint percussive sounds like distant thunder which groped upwards and burgeoned first into notes and harmonies and then into glowing, wheeling brass chords. Just as it seemed the music was going to become properly celebratory it deflated and dissipated into stray sounds. Semple was clearly determined not to write a conventional fanfare, and the result certainly had a poetic suggestiveness. But like many 'atmospheric' pieces it was dogged by a lack of momentum. There were two more salutes to Cheltenham Festival's past. The first of them was the Four Sea Interludes from Britten's Peter Grimes, conducted by the composer himself at the very first Cheltenham Festival. It's one of those pieces that's in danger of becoming worn smooth from over-familiarity, but here its wild, untamed quality came across vividly. The other salute was Elgar's Enigma Variations, also played on that far-off day in 1945. Here the beefy vividness in the orchestral playing that worked so well for Arnold and Britten was a disadvantage. The performance seemed lacking in finesse and brass-heavy, though it was redeemed by some lovely solo playing, above all from the principal cellist and violist.
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Chip off the old block! Eddie Hall's 13-year-old son destined to emulate his bodybuilding father as youngster shows off incredible gym routine - and he can already lift Tyson Fury's weight!
The majority of 13-year-olds are focused on evading homework, guzzling sweets from the tuck shop, and doomscrolling on social media for as long as their brains can take. It's a time in your life when you have absolutely no responsibility; pure bliss. Well, that's unless you are the son of the former world's strongest man. Instead of getting gripped by the endless one-minute videos on TikTok, the eldest of Eddie Hall's children spends his time in the gym as he looks to emulate his father's success. Eight years ago, the Briton was the biggest and brawniest on the planet and could deadlift the equivalent of a large adult horse. That's 500kg, just in case you weren't sure. It was a world record at the time, one that seemed unbreakable to most. However, it has since been topped by Hall's good rival Hafthor Julius Bjornsson, who lifted 501kg back in 2020. The 2017 strongman champ never got the chance to wrestle the record back, seeing as he retired from competition after his monumental triumph. However, it seems the baton has already been passed to his teenage son Maximus, who can already deadlift more than the majority of adults. View this post on Instagram A post shared by 𝐄𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐞 𝐇𝐚𝐥𝐥 - 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐭™️ (@eddiehallwsm) One day before Max's 13th birthday, Hall shared a video of deadlifting a massive personal best. The youngster impressively hauled up a mammoth 150kg, which Hall has called an 'unofficial world record' for a 12-year-old. That is 23kg more than heavyweight icon Tyson Fury weighed before his second fight with Oleksandr Usyk. It's quite a breathtaking weight for someone of Max's age to be lifting, it's already 30 per cent of the 500kg that his father managed to haul up back in 2016. Under the video on Instagram, Hall wrote: 'I'm so proud of max, he's been lifting weights for nearly three years now and he has become what I believe to be a prime example of what a human being should be… hard working, consistent, kind, funny, caring, well mannered, polite, and above all STRONG!!!' The craziest thing about it all? Max didn't even know what he was lifting; the weights were covered with bin bags because he wasn't feeling his strongest on the day. He told his father to 'stick whatever you want on and I'll pull it'. And that's what he did, before discovering just how much he pulled up to his hips when Hall ripped the bin bags off. Maximus can also lift 30kg dumbells on each arm in chesspress, which is a weight only many men and women can dream of shifting into the air. It's clear that the 13-year-old is following in his father's footsteps when it comes to lifting heavy weights, but when you compare the pair of them at that age, it's actually rather hard to see the resemblance. Eddie Hall previously held the world record for a deadlift of 500kg and won World's Strongest Man back in 2017 before retiring to become a bodybuilder Last month, Hall shared a picture of himself at the same age his son Maximus has just turned. It's fair to say, fans were left rather stunned by the picture. The image shows the young strongman, who now plies his trade as both a bodybuilder and a boxer, standing shirtless near a beach wearing nothing but shorts, trainers, and a ring piercing on his left nipple. Hall was a national-level swimmer at the time, cut a muscular but trimmer figure to the powerfully sculpted 'Beast' we know these days. However, he still looks more like a 25-year-old ready to take on Hyrox, than a teenager just a couple of years into secondary school. Last year, he shared a photo of himself, apparently at 16, looking like a fully-fledged movie villain, packing muscles most men could only dream of. Bane from Batman's The Dark Knight Rises incarnated. His son Max doesn't appear to have taken up one of his father's more recent hobbies, though. We are yet to see him don a pair of MMA gloves, but maybe he will save that for after he has broken the deadlift world record in a decade. Last year, the 37-year-old ventured into the realm of mixed martial arts in a rather bizarre fashion when he participated in a unique two-on-one fight in the World Freak Fight League. Hall took on TikTok superstars Jamil and Jamel Neffati – also known as The Neffati Brothers - and massively outweighed his two opponents. Both were comfortably half the size of the strongman. The Polish duo came into the fight at 20.7 stone combined, against Hall's massive 26.2 stone advantage. Can you guess what happened? I imagine so. His superior strength and weight advantage obviously pulled through, as Hall won the fight with a brutal knockout of his opponents in the chaotic third round. 'Yeah, the 2v1 came around, very weirdly,' Hall told Mail Sport. 'I was just training for a big fight that got canceled, and then there was a 2v1 fight landing on my lap. 'And I thought, you know what? Sod it. Let's go for a bit of a risk. But because of the size difference, I took it on. So it went very well.' Maximus, I'm sure, will always feel protected, too. A video recently circulated of his father, Eddie, chasing down a moving car after becoming involved in a furious row with motorists who allegedly created a disturbance outside his Staffordshire home. Hall can be seen swearing at the driver of a blue BMW and threatening, 'I'll twist your f***ing head off' as the car pulls away following the altercation. The footage depicts the final moments of a dispute that began off camera before escalating, with Hall claiming his children had earlier been upset by the honking of car horns outside his property. 'This video has been going viral across the internet painting me as a bad guy who smashes cars up, threatens people and upsets kids,' Hall posted on X. 'Well the truth is now Live on my YouTube channel so please look at both sides of the story before judging! '3 blacked out cars circled my kids home last night at 9pm revving engines, beeping horns, looking into the property and wouldn't leave when asked to do so... things escalated and here you're seeing the last 30 seconds of a total of an 18 minute harassment of my kids peaceful place of sanctuary.' At the backend of the video, as the two cars pulled away, Hall gave chase and a young child was heard crying in the back seat of the second car. 'Hey, get out, get out you f**ing p***k,' Hall is heard screaming. 'I'll f***ing rip your head, I'll twist your f***ng head off. All of you get out, I'll rip your f***ing head off.' He continued on his YouTube channel: 'I am just telling him to leave. I don't want to hear anything he has to say. You have been asked to leave politely, been asked to leave with a bit of a grunt, just f*** off. He added: 'The last bit of the interaction looks really bad. But when you get the context you will understand. I am telling this guy to f*** off, you are scaring my kids. He then says something like he wants a picture with his kids, I said I don't care. You want me to respect your children's emotions, what about my kids' emotions? 'He then starts creeping away, and he looks at me and says "I'm going to knock you the f*** out". Of course, after an 18-minute interaction, you see red. I am protecting my kids, so I blow up. 'I could see the guy was filming me so I ran towards the car to grab his phone and throw it in a bush or something. I might have clipped the side of the door with my hand. I didn't manage to get a hold of the guy at all - unfortunately.'
Telegraph
5 hours ago
- Telegraph
‘So much crime and violence': the post-war London of Mark Gatiss's Bookish
London is over. So much crime and violence. So many knives and guns on the street. Too many boarded-up businesses. Too few bobbies on the beat. The details would make your hair stand on end. I've read all about them in the papers: the ones from 1946. They're all there, gloriously searchable, in the British Newspaper Archive, the digital best friend of any scholar or screenwriter who wants to explore post-war Britain – bread on ration; 18,000 Army deserters on the run; 1.5 million homeless; government debt at 252 per cent of GDP; the welfare state struggling to be born in a country hungry for change. This is the world of the new TV detective with whom, I hope, you'll soon be trying to work out whodunit. His name is Gabriel Book. He has a wife, Trottie, who sells floral wallpaper and shot a fascist in the Spanish Civil War. He has horn-rimmed spectacles, a mild and smoky voice, and a secret history. In a triumph of nominative determinism, he also has an antiquarian bookshop in a lane somewhere off the Strand. Books are Book's bag. He is the sleuth in a new six-part TV series, who does his reading, follows the references and checks the footnotes. He is created and played by Mark Gatiss, whom I have adored since the days when, as a member of the League of Gentlemen, he stuck bits of Sellotape to his face in small, hot rooms at the Edinburgh Festival. (He also co-founded something called Sherlock, reconsecrated the BBC Two Christmas ghost story and helped Russell T Davies revive Doctor Who.) We have written Book's cases together. They're not the open-and-shut kind. Bow Street will let him through the police cordon only if the problem is sufficiently outré, sufficiently fiddly. A tangle of skeletons unearthed on a bombsite. A killing on a film set. A tragic death in a grand hotel, in which an obscure Albanian legal text buzzes with significance. The year 1946 is a good moment for the gifted amateur detective who wants to get a foot in the police-station door. That year, crime was rising and police numbers were falling. Hendon Police College had shut in 1939 and showed no signs of reopening. The Met was about 4,000 officers short. Bombed-out houses, their windows blocked with cardboard, were easy pickings for thieves. Sentencing two ex-Army miscreants in March 1946, Travers Humphreys, the judge who sent John Haigh, the 'Acid Bath Murderer', to the gallows, gave his diagnosis: 'There is at present in this country a perfect orgy of breaking into shops and warehouses and stealing goods, and I regret to say that a very high proportion of the people who do that are either in or just out of the services.' Some didn't need to pick up a crowbar: that same year, a group of officers at RAF Halton were charged with smuggling champagne, cigarettes, cherry brandy and 'fancy buttons'. Guns – service-issue or trophies taken from fallen Axis combatants – added an extra element of danger. In London, a black-market revolver cost £5. The papers covered cases of veterans with twitchy trigger-fingers. Fleet Street shook its head in sympathy over William David Williams, a demobbed paratrooper who, disturbed in the night, reached instinctively for his Luger – a battlefield souvenir – and put a fatal bullet in his 16-year-old wife. It was respectful when a wing commander and his spouse were found shot dead in a locked hotel room in Bayswater. (Not much of a mystery: he murdered her and then turned the gun on himself.) Returned husbands who killed their wives for real and imagined wartime infidelities were often treated leniently by the courts and the press. Frederick Burt, who stabbed his spouse to death because 'she had a baby by an Irishman named O'Connell', received a five-year sentence. He might have served less, had he not decided to break out of prison. War trauma, it was thought, explained the actions of these men. Others tried and failed to use this defence in court. In 1946, Britain devoured the dreadful details of the case of Neville Heath, a sadist who whipped, slashed and strangled his female victims. Like Burt, Heath said he did not remember his crimes: he suffered blackouts, he claimed, after being forced to bail out of a bomber over Holland. Neither jury nor public were convinced. They were, however, fascinated. Heath evaded detection because he was good-looking, well-mannered and plausible. He went about under the alias Group Captain Rupert Brooke and was rarely questioned. The actress Moira Lister once went on a date with him and felt sure she owed her survival to her blondeness: Heath preferred brunettes. (Alfred Hitchcock, obsessed with the case, used it as the basis for Frenzy, the nastiest film he ever made.) Heath's crimes demonstrated an unanticipated legacy of the war. It gave licence to liars, particularly those in uniform. The clubrooms of England were full of phoney wing commanders and nine-bob second lieutenants. For most, signing a bad cheque might have been the extent of their criminal ambitions; but who knew? When co-writing Bookish, one of the things that struck us was the ease with which it was possible for people in this period to reinvent and misrepresent themselves. The conflict had turned the whole world upside down. Histories could be hidden in that chaos. Some thought that murder itself had been altered. George Orwell, writing in Tribune in February 1946, advanced a celebrated thesis. 'Decline of the English Murder' is a parody of that genre that will probably never go out of fashion – the hyperbolic essay about how this country is going to the dogs. But its point is perfectly serious. Orwell asks us to imagine ourselves on a Sunday afternoon in the 1930s, pleasantly full of roast beef, feet on the sofa, newspaper in our hands. 'In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?' he asks. 'Naturally, about a murder.' Murder, he reasons, of a particular indigenous type, which, ideally, may involve a legacy, the respectable chairman of a local Conservative Party branch, a killer playing Nearer, My God, to Thee on the harmonium, while the victim drowns in the bathroom next door. The typical post-war killer, he argues, has no such genteel qualities. His Exhibit A is the so-called 'Cleft Chin' case of 1944, in which an American GI went on a killing spree with a teenage waitress from Neath who dreamt of a career in striptease. The canonical slaughters of the recent past, Orwell contends, were deeper and richer than this 'meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance halls, movie palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars'. The crimes of Elizabeth Jones and her conspirator were a dubious foreign import, like the grey squirrel or Spam. Not all violence could be so easily dismissed. The post-war period has another characteristic that disrupts our self-image of a nation responding with sobriety to the emerging story of the Holocaust – the rise in anti-Semitism and street fascism. In late 1945, residents of Hampstead launched an 'anti-alien' petition: 'We the undersigned petition the House of Commons in a request that aliens of Hampstead should be repatriated to assure men and women of the Forces should have accommodation upon their return.' The aliens were Jewish refugees, whom they suggested should be moved into camps. An anonymous letter to the press argued that these Jews had been sent to England to subvert it. When, in April 1946, the organisers of the petition held a rally to denounce 'aliens in our midst', a group of Jewish activists, mostly ex-servicemen, began surveilling fascist groups, heckling their meetings and – more controversially – beating up their members under cover of darkness. The young Vidal Sassoon was involved. The state and the police would not protect them, so they did it themselves. They were people of their time. So, too, is Gabriel Book, who is in a marriage of the lavender kind. He and Trottie love each other but they lead separate sexual lives. This was a dangerous choice. Immediately after the war, prosecutions for 'Unnatural Offences and Indecency with other males' doubled. In the year Elizabeth II became queen, 5,425 men were in court on such charges. From the safer moment of 1970, the barrister H Montgomery Hyde MP reflected on the trend. It was, he thought, an aspect of the post-war crime wave, noting, 'It is easier and incidentally safer and less troublesome to catch a homosexual than a burglar.' Most heroes of detective shows are not criminals themselves. Gabriel Book can never be quite sure that his offence will not be the next one to be investigated. As we follow him through London, from case to case, from corpse to corpse, we will have cause to remember it. Bookish airs on Wednesday 16 July on U&Alibi tie-in novel Bookish by Matthew Sweet is published by Quercus on July 17
