John Torode and Lisa Faulkner share announcement as ITV show future confirmed
John Torode and Lisa Faulkner will be returning to the kitchen for brand-new episodes of their hit ITV show John and Lisa's Weekend Kitchen, it's been confirmed
John and Lisa's Weekend Kitchen is gearing up for a fabulous tenth series, starring the dynamic duo of chef John Torode MBE and accomplished home cook Lisa Faulkner.
The upcoming series will see the couple whipping up sumptuous, budget-friendly dishes designed with the brighter days in mind.
It has also confirmed that viewers can anticipate the return of John and Lisa's Christmas Kitchen later this year.
Starting this summer, the early five episodes will be bursting with seasonal delights, kicking off with their 'Masterclass Magic' episode, where they'll divulge essential cooking secrets guaranteed to transform our kitchen routines.
Following the summer spread, John and Lisa are set to sprinkle some festive cheer on us all with John and Lisa's Christmas Kitchen, revealing tempting new recipes across five holiday-themed episodes planned to hit screens in 2025.
For those keen on crafting the perfect dining experience, John and Lisa are armed with an array of impressive recipes destined to dazzle any dinner party this series, reports Wales Online.
On their show, John and Lisa expressed: "We love our little show and we feel so grateful we get to do it.
"We have such an amazing team who give us so much freedom to just cook together and it's always the food we love and believe in.
"We never take it for granted as we just love doing our show!".
John, 59, is most recognised for his role as a judge on BBC's MasterChef, while Lisa, 52, is predominantly an actress.
She has featured in numerous soaps over the years including Holby City and Eastenders, and recently had a part in the BBC and HBO thriller The Girl Before.
The couple exchanged vows in 2019.
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Spectator
17 minutes ago
- Spectator
‘Too bohemian for Bournemouth': the young Lawrence Durrell
These legendary lives need the clutter cleared away from them occasionally. Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald turned their family's prewar escape to an untouched Corfu into a myth that supplied millions of fantasies. It still bore retelling and extravagant expansion recently, if the success of ITV's series The Durrells is any sign. (One indication of that pleasant teatime diversion's accuracy: the actor playing Larry, Josh O'Connor, is 6ft 2in. Larry himself was a whole foot shorter.) How Louisa Durrell, struggling with life in Britain after returning from India, went in a bundle with her children to a Greek island of cheap Venetian mansions, heat and innocent adventure is always going to have its appeal. What the Corfu idyll leaves out is why we should be interested in the story in the first place. Lawrence Durrell was a very good novelist, and this episode was only one of many that contributed to his work. That probably needs saying, since he is out of fashion today for a number of reasons. One is that his books, full of extravagant evocations of exotic places and pleasures, no doubt appealed to a British readership in the 1950s that was starved of such things. But how do the delights of Corfu, or indeed Alexandria, stand up when any of us can hop on a plane and sample them for ourselves? A second reason is connected: Durrell's literary style is undoubtedly baroque, his concept of a novel's structure sometimes baffling (especially in the late Avignon Quintet) and in general open to accusations of over-indulgence. I read the Alexandria Quartet recently for the first time since I was at school, and was surprised by how well it had survived – a steely, bloodthirsty thriller of betrayal, deals and gun-running coagulating out of innocent romantic delusion. Individual episodes, such as the duck shoot in Justine, are wonderfully exciting; and the prose, which I had expected to find overblown, can be startlingly close to the Martin Amis of the 1980s: Melissa's dressing-room was an evil-smelling cubicle full of the coiled pipes that emptied the lavatories. She had a single poignant strip of cracked mirror and a little shelf, dressed with the kind of white paper upon which wedding cakes are built. Here she always set out the jumble of powders and crayons which she misused so fearfully. A further reason for Durrell's unfashionableness is, of course, precisely the biographical expansion, and not just the Corfu fantasy. Sappho, his daughter from his second marriage, set down in her diary details of her sexual abuse by him before committing suicide, just as his character Livia, based on Sappho, had been described as doing. These things can destroy a novelist's reputation. For the moment, his story is still worth telling, and although this is not the first or most important biography, it has a strong appeal – which is partly accidental. Michael Haag, who had already written books about Alexandria and the Corfu episode, was at work on a full biography when he died in 2020. This turned out to be complete up till the end of the war, with Durrell only just starting on what would be Justine. Profile Books has decided to publish it as it stands, which in fact is an alluring decision. What we have is that most interesting approach of literary biographies – the formative years before fame. Durrell hardly ever lived in Britain, and indeed in later years the question sometimes arose of whether he was a British citizen at all. He was born in India in 1912, the son of a brilliant engineer (the wonderful loop at the top of the great Darjeeling railway is his father's work). Some memories of Indian life must have fed into the grotesquery he was capable of as a novelist. When his sister was bitten by her pet spaniel, rabies terrors meant that they had to carry the dog's severed head in a canister on a long train journey to be tested. The family was not quite Raj top-drawer, but Durrell was nevertheless sent back to school in England, and lived with his returning mother in a succession of inappropriately ostentatious houses. Aged 19, he was told by her that he was too much for Bournemouth. 'You can be as bohemian as you like, but not in the house. I think you had better go somewhere where it doesn't show so much,' she said. A brief and raucous Bloomsbury period followed; a noisy marriage; and then the celebrated decampment en masse to Corfu. It was not quite as idyllic in all respects as it has been painted. The young Durrells' enthusiasm for nude sunbathing with each other and visiting friends of both sexes (startlingly documented here in photographs) was one thing the Corfiots jibbed at. The decisive period, however, to which Haag devotes most space, was 1940s Egypt. At the outbreak of hostilities, Durrell had been evacuated with his wife Nancy and infant daughter Penelope Berengaria from Kalamata in the Peloponnese. The experience of war in Egypt was tumultuous, and the mix of different cultures, officialdom, idealists, high society and bohemian life is exactly what makes the Alexandria Quartet so enthralling. The Durrells' marriage broke down and Nancy departed in is hard not to conclude that the war, the heady experience of grand café society and the sense of being at the centre of things had changed Larry fundamentally. Soon he was in a tempestuous relationship with the unstable Eve, who became his second wife and ultimately the disturbing Melissa of the Quartet. As captivating as this novel sequence is, it shows (as Haag frankly admits) that Durrell's experiences did not quite equip him to write about the political situation. It has always been agreed that it would have been impossible for his character Nessim, a Copt, to have been a gun-runner for Zionists in Palestine. Durrell decided to make him one because he was irresistibly drawn to the idea that, alone in the drama, Nessim would have wanted to marry the Jewish Justine out of calculation rather than passion. Though it reveals the limits of what Durrell could accept about the time and place he lived in, the Quartet has its own reality. What he observed turns into a compelling statement, made of smoke and steel. It ought to return to fashion in time. Haag's book is highly readable and elegantly put together, and, if unintentionally, produces a satisfying whole by stopping where it does. In fact, I suspect that the second half of Durrell's life, especially the late years – full of tragedy, bad conduct and an undeniable decline in talent and readability – would not be as enjoyable an experience. We end with him returning to his beloved Greece after the war and starting to work on Justine, a book which hit the British reading public in 1957 at exactly the right moment. A full biography, on the other hand, would have to include Sappho's suicide; the dismal and incomprehensible final volumes of the Avignon Quintet (the last of which Faber returned to be revised, so little impressed were they); and Durrell's death in 1990, before the French state could seize his property for non-payment of taxes. I met him briefly in London in 1983; the strange thing now is that I have absolutely no impression of his being as short as he actually was. His presence was immense. Though this is a good biography, I have a request of publishers in general. Lawrence Durrell has been done often, and very respectably. In the course of Haag's descriptions of life at the British Embassy and British Council in wartime Egypt, the name of Robert Liddell comes up. Liddell was also a seriously good novelist, and one who often appears as the adviser and friend of writers such as Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy Compton-Burnett. His story – he was abused as a child, abandoned England after the death of his beloved brother, and lived in Egypt and Greece – could be gripping. Might a publisher, for once, commission not a life we've heard several times but one of this remarkable but still strangely neglected novelist?
Spectator
17 minutes ago
- Spectator
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? The BBC, it seems
'What a lark!' I thought to myself as I rose on a hot June morning to listen to a documentary on Mrs Dalloway. A century has passed since Clarissa bought flowers for her midsummer party, and Radio 4 has commissioned a three-parter, with actress Fiona Shaw presenting. 'What a plunge!' The first programme had been playing for all of two minutes before my hopes began to wilt like a delphinium. 'Her face adorns tote bags and internet memes,' says Shaw of Woolf in the preamble, which sounds as though it has been lifted directly from the series pitch to the BBC. 'I'll be asking what… Virginia Woolf has to say to us today.' There follow promises to explore Woolf's writing and to 'discover… how she challenged gender norms and wrote about mental health as human experience rather than just a medical condition'. My heart sank further with the first of many clips from interviews with experts. One author describes, in detail, his discovery of Woolf in the hands of a girl he fancied at school. Most of the contributors, in fact, prove to be the saving grace of this series. There's a fashion in documentaries at the moment for featuring many, many talking heads. This can be dizzying, but these – who include the excellent Alexandra Harris, Francesca Wade and Bryony Randall – provide much-needed depth. Shaw meets them at various Woolfian locations, including Monk's House and Bloomsbury's Gordon Square, and things improve. I'll admit to admiring Shaw in pretty much everything she does. Here, she is an articulate interlocutor, only armed in places with the heavy-handed script. There are some good forays into the sounds and silence of Mrs Dalloway and Woolf's aversion to Sigmund Freud. But then we realise how far from Woolf we've strayed. The novelist apparently waited until 1939 before reading any of Freud's works because she was 'wary of reductive tendencies of psychoanalysis to find a single answer'. This, indeed, was Woolf. She cannot be reduced; her prose, as we are reminded, is often concerned with the unexpressed thought. Her readers were credited with intelligence. We, on the other hand, are given the hard sell: told repeatedly not to be put off by her, not to be afraid of how difficult she is. It would have been nice to be enticed to her side with some of the subtlety and wit that won her readers in the first place. Those still afraid of Virginia Woolf and condemning of her snobbery might find The Girls of Slender Means more to their taste. 'Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor,' begins Muriel Spark's novella. It has been adapted many times for TV and radio, including with Patricia Hodge and Miriam Margolyes, but actor-playwright Simon Scardifield's version is a welcome addition. The narrator (Maggie Service) is skilled at weaving between character dialogue. The pauses are perfectly timed to make it sound as though she is there, observing the action, a calm voice amid the chatter of the May of Teck Club. This, the novella's setting, is a hostel for twentysomething-year-old women. Prepare for a lot of bickering over who is borrowing the Schiaparelli gown, the fat content of a cheese pie ('four million horrid calories!') and the assessment of vital statistics, hips especially. The narrative is of its time. There is no apology for this and nor should there be. Clever Jane, who works in publishing, makes frequent references to 'brain work' – that is, reading. Like studious Pliny the Younger, averting his eyes from the erupting volcano, Jane would sooner be at her books than celebrating VE Day outside. Selina is much less intellectual and more beautiful. There is a flurry at the arrival of a male author for dinner. The chemistry between Jane (hips: 38 inches) and author Nicholas – and Nicholas's interest in Joanna ('fair and healthy looking') – is well captured. As in Woolf, the internal narrative is all-important. Nicholas finds Joanna to be 'orgiastical' and longs to say, 'Poetry takes the place of sex for her, I think,' but doesn't. He is also eager to make love to Selina ('extremely slim') on the roof [a brilliant pause from the narrator] 'It needs to be on the roof.' Access is via a small window: suddenly hip-size matters. I won't spoil the plot, but Scardifield has made the narrative more uplifting than the novella with a simple switch in the order in which we learn events. This – and Spark's sharp one-liners – make it blissful summer listening.
Spectator
17 minutes ago
- Spectator
The vicious genius of Adam Curtis
In an interview back in 2021, Adam Curtis explained that most political journalists couldn't understand his films because they aren't interested in music. Having known a fair few political journalists, I can say with some certainty that he was right. Most politically motivated types are – not to be unkind, but it's true – total losers. This cuts across left and right, all ideologies and tendencies, from Toryism to anarchism to Islamism and back: whatever you believe, if you believe it too strongly you were probably a weirdo at school. The other kids went out clubbing; you stayed at home, drawing pictures of Lenin or von Mises on your satchel. The other kids were in bands, you were in a reading group. When political freaks grow up a bit they often get very performatively into social binge-drinking, as if to prove a point, but it's all hollow. The joy isn't there. There are important things about the world that will always be closed off to the political obsessive, because political obsessives don't understand music. Adam Curtis considers himself to be a political journalist, and he definitely used to be one. His BBC documentaries from the 1990s and 2000s are thorny and thematically dense attempts to grapple with the condition of the present. Pandora's Box (1992) was about how human reason bumps up against the inherent messiness of reality, and how projects for rationally governing the world end up collapsing into bizarre forms of unreason. Over six episodes, Curtis talks about von Neumann's game theory, Milton Friedman's Chicago school of economics, Kwame Nkrumah's dream of African self-sufficiency, the cult of Taylorism and how it overrode Marxism in the early Soviet Union, nuclear physics, insecticides, and the way our social biases are repackaged for us in the form of a supposedly neutral science. There are a lot of words in there. Plenty of interviews with experts and significant figures, but also Curtis's clipped, precise narration, set to a collage of footage dug out of the BBC archive. Street scenes, offices, factories, politicians getting out of cars, but sometimes more abstract shots of industrial infrastructure and spaceships exploding in the sky. According to Curtis, most of that footage was there because he needed to finish the film on time and couldn't find anything else. But since then, this stuff has become his stock in trade. You know you're watching an Adam Curtis film when you hear someone talking about how plans to rationally control society fell apart to a Burial track and lots of black-and-white archive footage of people dancing at Butlin's. He was convinced he was simply illustrating his ideas. But this was a fantasy. In fact, he was unleashing forces that he could neither control nor understand. And then something strange happened. His style has become very easy to parody, which might be why Curtis has spent the last few years steadily paring it down. Shifty is his most abstract, imagistic film yet. His narration has now vanished entirely; instead, there are a series of sparse title cards that flash up over the archive footage, saying things like 'The Concept Of Privatisation Had Been Invented By The Nazis' or 'Underneath There Was Nothing.' All in all, over five episodes and five-and-three-quarter hours, Adam Curtis gives us significantly fewer of his own words than are contained in this review. They are sparse and stony, less like an argument than propaganda signs glowing in the night. The story he tells with them is – if you've seen any of his previous work – a familiar one. Every episode begins with the same words. 'There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move. When that happens things become SHIFTY.' In Britain, that moment came at the end of the 20th century. Before Thatcher, Britain was about strong communities, solidarity, labour unions, and a productive industrial base. But during the Thatcher and Blair eras, all of that was emptied out, and we became a society of cynical, self-interested individuals, trapped in a fantasy of the past, and led by politicians who no longer believed in anything at all. This story is not necessarily untrue, but it's also not really groundbreaking. To the extent that this country does still have a unifying national myth, it's this one – about how Thatcherism tore all our unifying national myths apart. But it doesn't really matter, because Curtis is doing something different to ordinary political journalism. His constant rummage through the BBC's archives has yielded a lot of good stuff, and he has a real vicious genius for putting it together. At the start of the very first scene, we see Jimmy Savile ushering a group of angelic blond children into Thatcher's office. Once they're inside he gives a chortling thumbs-up to the camera, and then closes the door. Alongside the stories of monetarism and shots of fox hunters riding in front of huge hazy steelworks, there are weirder threads. A dog owner is concerned that their pet seems to have spontaneously switched sex. At the London Zoo, which can no longer rely on state financing, zookeepers now have to be personable and cheerful, play-acting for a public who have become the only source of income. A kid plays with the effects pedal on his guitar. A woman shows off her designer handbags. In the planning meetings for the Millennium Dome, they try to pin down the values of modern Britain, but discover that they don't really have any. In the 'Spirit Zone,' instead of endorsing any particular religion, they've decided to fill the room with fog and write the words 'How shall I live?' on the wall. They're very proud of it. 'I think the question 'how shall I live?' is anything but banal. In fact, I think it's the biggest single question, probably, that's begged in the entire dome.' None of this really coalesces into a single point, but trying to make things coalesce into a single point is part of the rationalist, sense-making project Curtis has been critiquing his entire career. Our world is shifty now, and things will not make sense. You won't understand them with facts, but music. There's far less actual music here than in any of Curtis's previous films. Instead of Kanye or Nine Inch Nails or Aphex Twin, a lot of the shots of decaying industry are set to the sounds of static or howling wind. But music is one of the threads here. In one episode, we're introduced to the Farlight CMI digital sampler, a machine that can take any sound, convert it into data, and digitally reproduce it. The first song to be recorded entirely using samples was 'Relax' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which is then banned from the BBC for being too flagrantly gay, but it's already self-replicating around the world. People start using the Farlight CMI to switch out samples in the track and create their own remixes. Which is, of course, what Curtis is also doing. Later, we meet a bedroom producer called DJ Fingers, playing around with turntables in his south London home. 'Basically you're just making music out of other people's records. You know the record inside out when you're cutting up this break.' Once again Curtis has found a vision of himself in the archives. But it's not exactly celebratory. He was one of the first people to point out that in recent decades newness seems to have vanished from the world: we just repeat old fashions, old music, old fantasies about how to live. What does it mean, then, when one of our greatest and most popular documentarians does nothing but rearrange the past? At the end of the final episode, there's a kind of Adam Curtis auto-parody, of the type I just did above. A Bowie song, paired with clips from old films. 'Will People Come Together As They Did In The Past And Fight Back?' his stark title cards ask. 'Or Is This Just Another Feedback Loop Of Nostalgia? Repeating Back Sounds Dreams And Images Of The Past, Which Is The Way The System Controls You, And Is The Way This Series Was Made.'
