
Sci-fi fans have just days to watch huge film before it leaves BBC iPlayer for good
A gem of dystopian cinema that had a legion of fans in the 2010s is leaving BBC iPlayer in the next few days, giving audiences a last chance to catch up on a beloved film series.
Insurgent (2015) is the second instalment of the Divergent trilogy - based on Veronica Roth's book in which society is divided into factions based on human virtues, and teenagers must choose which faction to join.
Tris Prior, a member of the selfless Abnegation faction, discovers she is Divergent, meaning she possesses traits of multiple factions and is a threat to the rigid system.
She joins Dauntless, learns to trust the mysterious Four, and uncovers a conspiracy to destroy Divergents, leading her to question her identity and loyalty as she fights for survival against a powerful system.
Insurgent follows Tris and Four as the faction system is crumbling. They then must uncover what Tris' family sacrificed to protect and why the Erudite faction is so determined to stop them.
Tris grapples with her past, confronts her inner demons, and embraces her "Divergence" in the face of escalating conflict and new discoveries.
The books were already an established success among young adult audiences when Divergent, Insurgent and Allegiant were adapted into films.
With a cast led by Golden Globes, Emmy and BAFTA-nominated actress Shailene Woodley and Emmy nominee Theo James, Insurgent also boasts names like Kate Winslet, Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort, Octavia Spencer, Zoe Kravitz, Naomi Watts, Suki Waterhouse and Ashley Judd in its cast list.
Critics on reviewing platform Rotten Tomatoes generally criticise Insurgent for not holding up the hype built up by its predecessor, but also point out some of the film's strong suits.
'I liked the series from the beginning and the development of the characters and turns in the story', one wrote. 'Moments that the protagonists faced seem fresh and new with innocence contrasted by grief, loss, yet fierce pursuit for justice against a system that is oppressive. The scenery, cinematography, music seemed so futuristic and non-time based to be transported to a different place'.
'I started to watch this series again and it still holds up today', another commented. 'This second instalment of the series builds off the first in a great and unique way'.
Insurgent is followed by Allegiant (2016), and, collectively, the three films have grossed over $765 million in box offices worldwide.
If you plan on binge-watching the Divergent series, Insurgent (2015) will be available on BBC iPlayer until June 9th.
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New Statesman
3 hours ago
- New Statesman
Who's afraid of YouTube Man?
Conventional wisdom, and conventional whinging, dictates that we live under a tyranny of screen addiction. Modern telephones are treated as a sort of heroin, promising the easy oblivion of doomscrolling and social media. And, we are told, they're pushing it on your kids. Children will reportedly spend 25 years of their lives on their phones; the most hardened screentime-smackheads will clock up an absurd 41 years. We may be sleepwalking into a post-literate society, in which 'short-form video' becomes the sole courier of information and feeling. So frantic are commentators that they cannot decide which of their two favourite dystopias we are in. Are we the overalled slave army envisioned by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, screened and surveilled into a living nightmare? Or are we the joyous fools imagined by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, settling down to watch a 'feelie' dosed up on delicious, numbing soma? Behind this debate lurks the influential American critic Neil Postman, whose book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) forms the standard breviary for this techno-millenarianism. Postman fell into the Huxley school. He was also a comprehensive Luddite who avoided mobiles and refused email. Once, he waylaid a salesman for offering him cruise control on his new car. Postman's lifestyle and arguments have been taken up across the techno-sceptic intelligentsia. The Times journalist James Marriott leads the charge, condemning the decline he sees everywhere (all, paradoxically, while maintaining a popular column recommending obscure works of social history). Recently, in these pages, he lamented the decline of English literature. I couldn't help but feel the standards being exacted were severe. Marriott relates a cultural upbringing reminiscent of the young John Stuart Mill, who began learning Ancient Greek at three years old. Unsurprisingly, the rest of us are found wanting. This is trite, presentist Kulturkritik, and there are many trite arguments against it. People have never read as much or as well as clever people think they should. As John Carey writes in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), dons greeted the arrival of a reading public with a shriek, inventing the term 'highbrow' to preserve their graces. In the eyes of this class, people are always reading the wrong thing or reading the wrong way. Cycling through the skag of today's short-form videos, I am reminded of the kind of channel-hopping – Hollyoaks to MTV to Big Brother's Big Mouth – I once watched my sisters engage in on getting home from school. As long ago as 1993, David Foster Wallace analysed the impact of Americans watching six hours of TV a day – approximate to the '25 years' of damnation statisticians now predict. Television was the great stultifier then; now, prestige drama is venerated as the culmination of all the arts, the Gesamtkunstwerk. Meanwhile, the Eighties that so panicked Postman are seen as a rare period when long literary novels such as Midnight's Children and The Bonfire of the Vanities found a popular audience. Modern humans have always been in need of pointless entertainment. Forty years ago, people simply doom-flicked through their tabloid. 'Trash' and 'slop' (which literary theorists call ephemera and simulacra) are features of modernity broadly defined, not just of 2025. The more worrisome cultural turn here is: rather than rely on celebrities to provide the necessary drunkenness, depression and adultery to fill the average red-top, social media companies have convinced their customers to cough up their own intimacies for free. No one disputes that phones and videos make us feel good, at least in the moment. Having read the fearsome diagnostics – all the stuff about dopamine hits and reward pathways – I'd be wary of defending smartphone culture in the same way I'd be wary of defending tabloid newspapers. Or indeed heroin, which also feels good. But I will defend to the death what I regard as the greatest product of this brave new world: a tutor, a wonder, a friend. By which I mean YouTube. Many a golden hangover has been passed, my phone as horizontal as my body, dozed out before a buffet of videos short and long, thoughtful and mindless. Load up the homepage and what awaits you is a universe in thumbnailed panels, curated by the genius of 'the algorithm'. We're only a little over 20 years since the website launched, but it has been a background accompaniment to life ever since. These days, for me, it's a lot of football videos, old Harry and Paul sketches and celebrity impressions. I really like watching chat shows from the Seventies and Eighties, with Kenneth Williams hissing and honking away. The situation has only advanced since the arrival of YouTube on the TV, an upgrade that has made me the King Edward of couch potatoes. If this isn't the best use of my time, I'm reassured that when TS Eliot wasn't laying down epic poetry, he was down the music hall, and that Martin Amis broke up the composition of the novel Money with sessions of Space Invaders. Alan Hollinghurst played the same video game while dreaming up The Swimming-Pool Library (food for a future doctoral thesis?). Though probably none of us has a great novel in us, I feel I'm speaking on behalf of most young people, and especially men, in praising what may be the great solitary pleasure of our times. One friend likes a YouTuber called Ed Pratt. He films himself unicycling around the world. Others report dedicated relationships with everything from SAS to DIY videos. A culinary friend is keen on a chef-videographer called 'Willy Does Some Cooking', whose videos are packed with zany Gen-Z humour. Willy refers to chicken breasts as 'chicken tits'. Cooking and nonsense is just the half of it. The hunger of the internet to be more serious will surprise those who still see YouTube as the home of make-up tutorials or narcissistic vloggers. Entire new genres have sprung up: the video essay, sort of short-form Adam Curtis, and frequently as intriguing. Are you telling me you wouldn't click on 'Why Aren't There Locust Plagues Any More?', recently recommended by a friend? The pleasure of these videos can range from the shock of the strange to the utterly personal, the parasocial thrill of following a creator over projects and time. In certain quarters, it's commonplace to mourn the demise of intellectual TV discussion shows, and hear mention of Channel 4's After Dark or the BBC's Late Review. But since YouTube broadcasts have no transmission times or dates, a vast number of these programmes can always be found. You can dose up for an eternity on Tom Paulin or Germaine Greer. The algorithm is an expert sommelier, and next up there'll be Terry Eagleton laying into Philip Larkin, Clive James chatting with PJ O'Rourke, Gore Vidal vs Norman Mailer. I am a YouTube-first reader, having watched the above authors before I read their works. The little poetry I have by heart also comes from hearing it recited on video (Jeremy Irons's 'Prufrock' is pure bliss). The pre-eminent lit-tuber is the late Christopher Hitchens, whose withering oratory has left a mark on a generation, for better or worse. My favourite exhibition is an astonishing 2007 episode of Question Time, which features both Hitchens and his brother, the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, as well as Boris Johnson, and in which Christopher addresses Baroness Shirley Williams as 'madam'. Christopher Hitchens is at least partly responsible for transforming intellectual discourse into a kind of pugilism, these 'debates' styled more like boxing matches replete with slugs, hooks and jibes. Hitchens spawned a brood of hideous epigones, from Douglas Murray to Ben Shapiro, who 'DESTROY' and 'OBLITERATE' their opponents as soon as speak to them, and who benefit from credulous interviewers. But the form is finding its feet. And if podcasts are to be credited for mainstreaming long-form discussion, that is also a victory for YouTube, which hosts the best ones, from The Rest Is History to Novara Media's Downstream. 'There's a great convulsion of stupidity happening in the world, mostly to do with television,' Martin Amis said in 1984, of all years. 'People know a little about a lot and put very little effort into accumulating culture.' (I first heard those words on YouTube in sixth-form.) Forty years later, it's tempting to agree. But Amis followed up with a clarification: 'All writers think the world has reached its nadir, its low point. And in fact this age will be lamented just like the last – that's the paradox.' As perspective plays its trick, I do think there are profound reasons to be optimistic. The modernists' great fear of mass culture was its smothering effect, that it would clam the delicate highbrows beneath the density of middlebrow. On YouTube, though, both have carved out commercial niches. Even as highbrow outlets (Radio 3, BBC Four) lose funding, audiences find their way towards similar material. The oldsters are joining me on the couch: in the past two years, over-55s doubled the amount of YouTube they watch on their TVs, now second only to the BBC in broadcasting landmass. And as it gains ground on its neighbour, the two landmasses resemble rival civilisations, one traditional and patrician, the other endlessly diverse, radically democratised and revolutionary in temper. This is the domain of YouTube Man. He still reads – he tries to put his phone in another room – and he takes book recommendations from the people he watches. He's rarely seen the same TV show as his colleagues (though he suspects that nostalgia for 'water cooler' moments is so much hokum anyway). Instead, his quirks and specificities are served by all-embracing software, a space to indulge his highest and lowest instincts. He is our most generic cultural consumer. His needs are quite basic. In 2023, the journalist Helen Lewis speculated in her Substack newsletter The Bluestocking that podcasts were popular among men because they provide the mindless chat missing from their working lives, that they were 'a replacement for the pub'. Might YouTube Man be filling the hole left behind by other declining associative institutions and forms: the hobby club, the reading group? Men share videos as they once did articles. Think of the stunt-feature genre of journalism. The writer Geoff Dyer was once sent by a men's magazine to fly in a decommissioned Russian fighter jet. Only a YouTuber could do this now, and it would make for an enthusiastically shared video. As YouTube supersedes television, it will become an increasingly collective viewing experience. This is an ambiguous cultural development, but not a dystopian one. Social media is a radical experiment in leaving a culture to its devices. Rather like leaving a classroom of schoolboys unattended, we can see what it produces under its own steam, an unsupervised epoch of user-generated content. There will be the raised fist, the obscene remark and the vicious rumour: the last decade of history has prompted many liberals to develop a suspicion of 'democratisation'. But still, it must be cause for celebration that, when the teacher reopens the door, there is something more interesting on the blackboard than just doodles and phalluses. [See also: Gen Z cannot stop gambling] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related


Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
MasterChef viewers seriously divided as 'highly edited' new series lands - branding the BBC 'disgusting' for airing 'flat' three episodes and raging 'no one should be watching this!'
MasterChef viewers have been left divided as the controversial 21st series arrived on BBC iPlayer before its TV premiere after the broadcaster's decision to air the episodes. The popular show is set to return to television screens tonight after a last-minute scramble to re-edit it and limit the appearances of its stars Gregg Wallace and John Torode. Both presenters had been axed from hosting future iterations of the long-running cookery contest in recent weeks. Ahead of its debut on linear television, the first three episodes of MasterChef have been made available to watch immediately on catch up. However, as fans tuck into the under-fire culinary series, they've been left divided as they flocked to social media to share their thoughts. One viewer blasted the BBC as 'disgusting' and added that the corporation 'have nothing to be proud of'. The popular show is set to return to television screens tonight after a last-minute scramble to re-edit it and limit the appearances of its stars Gregg Wallace and John Torode Another wrote: 'I won't be watching. You shouldn't be showing it either. Poor decision Mr Davie. I think your days are numbered.' 'How obvious is it one of the contestants have been edited out,' a third viewer pointed out. A fourth posted: 'Without the banter and build-up by the hosts there's no narrative so the highly edited #Masterchef falls strangely flat . At least the contestants got their moment - kind of.' Any traditional banter between Torode and Wallace with their six wannabe chefs appears to have been all but ripped out in the final cut. Much of the conversations appear to be very factual, with the hosts rapidly quizzing contestant's about their dishes - and little else. In one 12-second clip, Torode, 60, is seen speaking to hopeful cook Gemma, a business development boss, and asking her simply 'where did you learn this style of cookery' before it cuts to a single frame of him nodding as she replies. While an 18-second interaction between the host and Gemma later on sees Torode asking 'what have you decided to cook for us', before the camera cuts back to him silently nodding twice while she responds. In another segment, Wallace, 60, chats very briefly to another contestant, Beth, with editors cutting to two different clips of him smiling broadly as she describes her food. Any traditional banter between Torode and Wallace with their six wannabe chefs appears to have been all but ripped out in the final cut Some MasterChef fans have praised and thanked the BBC for letting the series see the light of day. One commented: 'Another good series. Shame they got rid of John Torode.' Another penned: 'Thank you for showing it, one of my favourite things to watch on TV. I will put to the back of my mind the presenters and enjoy the efforts of the contestants which is what the show is all about.' Wallace and Torode were both sacked from the program in quick succession last month. MasterChef viewers took to social media to share their thoughts as the fandom was left divided over the scenes Wallace was fired after more than 45 complaints against him were upheld following a BBC investigation. Australian-born chef John, 59, also lost his job after two decades over allegations that he used the N-word, which he claims to have 'absolutely no recollection' of. One contestant, Sarah Shafi, will not appear on the programme after she complained about the behaviour of Gregg Wallace. She claimed she was 'eyed up and ogled' by Gregg Wallace on the show, while accusing the TV host of making an 'off' comment about his reputation with women.


BreakingNews.ie
3 hours ago
- BreakingNews.ie
First MasterChef episodes air after Gregg Wallace and John Torode sacked
Gregg Wallace and John Torode's final series of amateur MasterChef has landed on BBC iPlayer after both presenters were dropped from the popular cooking show. The first three episodes of the 21st series were released on iPlayer early on Wednesday morning, ahead of the first episode airing on BBC One at 8pm. Advertisement Both presenters can be seen in the introduction shots of episode one, with Torode saying: 'This is the sort of stuff that dreams are made of', while Wallace can be seen telling a contestant 'that is a cracker of a job'. MasterChef judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace have fronted the BBC show since its 2005 revival. Photo: BBC/PA. In November 2024 it was announced that Wallace would step away from his role on the BBC cooking show while historical allegations of misconduct were investigated, and last month a statement from Banijay UK and the BBC said they had agreed 'Mr Wallace's return to MasterChef is untenable'. Wallace issued an apology saying he was 'deeply sorry for any distress caused' and that he 'never set out to harm or humiliate' in the wake of the Lewis Silkin review that saw 45 out of 83 allegations made against him upheld. Torode was the subject of an allegation about using racist language that was upheld as part of the Lewis Silkin review, but the TV star said he had 'no recollection of the incident' and was 'shocked and saddened' by the allegation. Advertisement Last month the BBC confirmed the series, which was filmed last year before allegations against Wallace and Torode were upheld, would be broadcast in August, adding that it had 'not been an easy decision in the circumstances.' The BBC added that 'broadcasting this series is the right thing to do for these cooks who have given so much to the process. We want them to be properly recognised and give the audience the choice to watch the series.' But the corporation said a decision had not yet been made regarding the celebrity series and the Christmas special. Say hello to the first batch of cooks to enter the #MasterChefUK kitchen for 2025! 👋 Here's when you can see them on BBC One and #iPlayer this week — MasterChef UK 🍴 (@MasterChefUK) August 5, 2025 In episode one of the new series, contestants Thea, Penelope, Gemma, Gon, Shaun and Beth battle it out in the first task before two of the contestants are put through to the quarter-finals. Advertisement The remaining four cook again and Thea tears up during the task and says she 'didn't realise how stressful the MasterChef kitchen is'. Three of the contestants go through to the quarter-finals after another task sees them cook a two-course menu for three former MasterChef stars. In episode two, a host of new contestants – Charlie, Claire, Finley, Gifty, Jordan and Ruth – are asked to transform an everyday ingredient into a meal within 80 minutes. The contestants are then tasked with completing two more challenges as they are whittled down to three quarter-finalists. Advertisement The six remaining contestants compete in the first quarter-final in episode three, where they are tasked with one challenge, to cook a dish that will impress restaurant critic William Sitwell. Sitwell's brief, to use either a sweet ingredient in a savoury dish, or a savoury ingredient in a sweet dish, inspires contestant Claire to cook a chocolate steak with marshmallow sweet potato fluff. After the challenge, three of the contestants are sent home with the remaining three sent to the knockout week. Gregg Wallace was sacked as MasterChef presenter following the inquiry into his alleged misconduct by production company Banijay. Photo: Yui Mok/PA. A message on the BBC media centre, alongside interviews with the contestants, said: 'Please note this information is accurate at the time of filming, certain aspects may have since changed but this represents the contributors as the competition starts.' Advertisement One of this year's contestants, Sarah Shafi, asked to be edited out of the series. Asked whether the new series of MasterChef should be shown, Lisa Nandy told BBC Breakfast: 'It's absolutely not for me, as the Culture Secretary and a member of the Government, to tell broadcasters what they can and can't broadcast.' Asked what she thought as a viewer, she said: 'As a viewer, I won't be watching it.' She added: 'I've watched MasterChef on and off over the years, but I certainly won't be watching this series.' In an interview with The Sun last month Wallace apologised to anyone hurt by his behaviour, but insisted he is 'not a groper, a sex pest or a flasher'.