The Times Daily Quiz: Friday August 15, 2025
2 After discovering white nougat, Theodor Tobler and Emil Baumann invented which 'unique chocolate bar'?
3 First published in 1854, The Orcadian is the oldest newspaper in which Scottish archipelago?
4 Which queen was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt?
5 In an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, who is called 'the new world Madonna with the golden touch'?
6 Which long flat bone of the human body is also known as the breastbone?
7 George Fenton and which Indian sitar player received a best original score Oscar nomination for Gandhi?
8 The title of James Goldman's play The Lion in Winter refers to which Plantagenet king?
9 Which Merseybeat band had a 1964 No 1 with Don't Throw Your Love Away?
10 Historically known as Sanhit, Keren is the second-largest city in which country in the Horn of Africa?
11 Concorde made its last-ever flight on November 26, 2003, departing Heathrow and landing in which city?
12 Henry Fonda and John Ford's friendship ended when the director punched Fonda on the set of which film?
13 Which firm, based in Holbeck, Leeds, was the world's biggest flat cap maker during the 1920s?
14 R360 is a proposed breakaway league in which team sport?
15 Which Ray Alan ventriloquist dummy is pictured?Scroll down for answersAnswers1 The Addams Family
2 Toblerone
3 Orkney
4 Cleopatra (VII)
5 Evita or Eva Perón, in the song Rainbow Tour
6 Sternum
7 Ravi Shankar
8 Henry II
9 The Searchers
10 Eritrea
11 Bristol, at Filton Airfield
12 Mister Roberts
13 JW Myers
14 Rugby union
15 Lord Charles
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The Guardian
30 minutes ago
- The Guardian
How scary can theatre really be? My horror marathon in search of stage frights
I am a wimp. When my friends used to gather to screech over horror movies after school, I would sit watching Countdown with one of their mums until it was over. I had to watch The Blair Witch Project with all the lights on and I never got through the opening scene of The Ring. But when it comes to horror on stage, I've rarely been fazed. Bar the odd jump scare, how scary can theatre really be? I set out to find out by watching a full day of horror shows at the Edinburgh fringe. I start off gently with Elysium, a winding eat-the-rich tale told through lilting song. The gated community of Elysium Court is designed to keep the riff-raff out, but the inhabitants should be more worried about what they're locking in. With the air of two friends casually making music in their garage, Milly Blue and Jessie Maryon Davies of Ghouls Aloud unpack the concept that exclusivity equals safety, watching from a distance as the containment crushes everyone in Elysium Court into the same make and model – or destroys them if they attempt to stand out. Blue's storytelling is sweet and unsettling, though occasionally veers off into tangents that don't serve the story. Davies laces tension through with moody piano, with Blue looping her voice in climbing harmonies above, as strange events begin to haunt Elysium's newest resident. Digging into the soil beneath the standard-issue astroturf that clamps down every garden in the Court, old monsters start to emerge. The darkness creeps in slowly and the script wants tightening, with some songs pausing the action rather than driving it on, but I decide I like my horror being sung to me. Maybe this was the problem all along. From the candy-pink satire of Elysium, the pitch-black Scatter: A Horror Play couldn't be a sharper shift. The room is so dark it's a struggle to even find your seat. This low lighting continues as Patrick McPherson's jaw-clenching show of hereditary haunting reserves any bright light for blinding flashes. Liberally smattered with jump scares, the show sometimes leans so heavily on Will Hayman's intense shadows and sharp, saturated filters that the design comes to feel like the main event rather than an anchor to sink us deeper into the story. McPherson plays Tom, a young man reluctantly recounting the trip he and his brother took to scatter their father's ashes in rural Wales. In the predictably traumatising process, they discover that their dad's end-of-life aggression, previously brushed off as delirium, was something far more sinister, his acts of violence actually a deeply troubled form of protection. Jonny Harvey's direction makes repeated use of the classic torch sweeping around a blackened room and heavy, breathless silences followed by piercing, sinew-shaking screams. These old tricks are effective. I sink into my seat every time the torch winds up. A traditional folk horror, Scatter takes itself seriously. You can't help wondering if the balance of tension would intensify if some lightness was buried anywhere in the text; McPherson's performance, though convincing, starts off dour and stays similarly severe throughout. The ending is rushed, but Scatter sets out to scare, and it succeeds. As we pick our way out of the theatre, my heart takes a moment to return to its regular pace. Later that afternoon, in another about-turn, Jed Mathre does a stellar job of making a whole room want to punch him in the face. Melanie Godsey's existential comedy, Sponsored By the Void, offers a queer awakening through the form of a supernatural visitor. Mathre plays the emotionally illiterate boyfriend to Leah (Kelly Karcher) who is so overburdened by his uselessness that she's close to bursting. When The Void (Jennifer Ewing) waltzes in, Leah is immediately felled by her hot dom energy and her demand that Leah does exactly what she wants. 'Do you eat?' Leah asks her, quivering. 'I devour,' The Void replies. Created by Seattle-based company The Co-Conspirators, this goofy, sultry sci-fi horror revels in Leah's uncompromising newfound confidence, with Kennedy looking on in horror and Leah's friend Val (Be Russell, funny to her bones) watching with delight as she rejects everything she has previously accepted without resistance. Subservience to men is the real horror here. Eschewing subtleness, the play asks direct questions of how a woman can get trapped into a role she never asked for, and how she can – with support of a sexy, suited-up otherworldly entity – break her way out of it. 'I just want you to know what you're getting into,' David Alnwick says as he pops his head around the door, checking we're not actually here for the musical cabaret going on upstairs, before leaping to the side of the stage to fiddle with the video setup. Where a handful of these horror shows use film to enhance the spookiness, Alnwick's The Dare Witch Project is the only one to rely on it. Soldiering through technical issues, our eager host talks us through the footage he supposedly found in an old VHS he got off eBay. The man in the recordings looks surprisingly like him, with his clothes and his voice, and a determination to complete a challenge inspired by the infamous found-footage movie The Blair Witch Project. While most of the tension from this Free Fringe show comes from the screen, as Alnwick presents these clips of the mysterious doppelganger recording himself in the woods, there is a singular, inspired physical magic trick used to beautifully creepy effect. The looping inevitability built into the show mounts tension as we wait, nervously, for what we know is coming, but it takes too long to get there to truly shake any nerves. I find myself wanting to be more scared than I am. Perhaps I'm becoming a horror convert after all. The last show of the evening is the least terrifying. Maria Teresa Creasey's toothless attempt at a vampiric comedy-horror, Degenerate, begins ominously, as the writer-performer lies face-down, bound and gagged, waiting for one of us to untie her. But that's the end of the innovation. Pitched as experimental, Creasey's babbling speech acts like a fly being swatted, scattily returning to a smattering of ideas but never settling long enough to offer a performance worth our time. Hazily buzzing around the notion of women being deemed irrelevant as they age, Creasey's character eventually flits towards the eternal youth of the vampire and lip-syncs to clips of scary movies. She wants to last for ever. I'm glad this performance does not. Elysium is at Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower until 24 August; Scatter: A Horror Play is at Underbelly, Cowgate, until 24 August; Sponsored By the Void is at Greenside @ Riddles Court until 16 August; David Alnwick: The Dare Witch Project is at PBH's Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms until 24 August; Degenerate is at Pleasance Courtyard until 23 August
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Prince Philip told the Queen 'Thank f*** that's over' after Harry and Meghan's wedding, by the Royal butler who witnessed it - and the extraordinary revelations don't stop there...
Panicking as I hid behind a wooden screen in the ballroom at Balmoral, I wondered how I'd imagined I could possibly be part of something as traditional, timeless and regal as the Ghillies Ball – an annual event held to thank the royal staff for all their hard work. As a 13-year-old boy growing up in Airdrie, an industrial town not far from Glasgow, I'd watched mesmerised as our little living room was lit by the flickering light from a television documentary giving unprecedented insights into the life of the monarch and I'd been particularly enthralled by footage of the ball.
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Father Ted creator Graham Linehan accuses JK Rowling of failing to defend him after he was cancelled over gender critical views
Father Ted creator Graham Linehan has accused JK Rowling of failing to defend him after he was cancelled over his gender critical views. The Irishman, 57, told how he backed the author's views on SNP 's Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which she previously dubbed 'the biggest assault on the rights of Scottish women and girls' in her lifetime. But now, he claims she failed to defend his right to free speech when he received backlash over his comments regarding trans people, saying Rowling's 'silence' made him feel 'toxic' and isolated. Speaking with the Spiked Podcast, the creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd said the Harry Potter writer had 'never mentioned' him nor spoken in his defence. Recalling when Rowling became embroiled in the row over SNP's self identification reforms, he said he felt as though he could 'finally relax' and 'fight back' as someone was on his side. 'And now her silence about me is just added to the feeling that, that I've done something wrong, that I'm toxic and I know I am toxic, but it's not because I've done anything wrong,' he said. 'It's because people, people like JK Rowling won't stand up in defence of me. So it wasn't just the [trans rights activist] side pushing me out. 'It was a feeling of lack of solidarity and the kind of an embarrassment at my presence in the fight.' It comes after Rowling was vocal in her critics of SNPs reforms on gender self-identification which aimed to make the process for trans people to obtain legal gender recognition easier. Former Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon revealed in her new memoir that she experienced an influx of 'vile abuse' after the author posted a snap of herself in a t-shirt, which read: 'Nicola Sturgeon, destroyer of women's rights.' The ex-SNP politician alleged the incident made her feel at an increased risk of physical harm. Rowling claimed Sturgeon brazenly denied the reality of her views over transgenderism. In 2023, an Edinburgh comedy show which starred Linehan was cancelled due to complaints, as well as the venue, Leith Arches, saying the comedian's views didn't align with their 'overall values'. In September, the 57-year-old is set to appear at Westminster Magistrates Court after pleading not guilty to criminal damage as well as harassment against transgender activist, Sophie Brooks. He has denied both charges, which include, harassing the 18-year-old on social media last October, as well as damaging her phone in a 'Battle of Ideas' conference in London, where he was a speaker, in the same month. The case is set to go to trial on September 4, of this year. Following the court hearing in May, he claimed to have experienced abuse and threats after spending six years defending 'the rights of women and children'.
