Thousands to celebrate Eid al-Fitr at Luton festivals
Mr Khan said alongside the celebrations he looked forward to enjoying pizzas, desserts and other food after a month of fasting. He said: "It's a massive celebration at the end of month of Ramadan which is a very holy month for Muslims."People have been fasting for a whole month, they want to celebrate. "Most of the rides are next to nothing, it is about 50p for a ride, to make it really accessible to families because this is for everyone to come and join us."1Eid Festival will host the event in Wardown Park and Inspire Eid Festival will host the event in Stockwood Park.
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BBC News
3 hours ago
- BBC News
BBC Music set to bring the best of Reading and Leeds Festival 2025 to audiences nationwide
From Thursday 21 August to Monday 25 August, Radio 1 will play host to some of the biggest names in music from the two Main Stages (Main Stage and Chevron Stage), while the BBC Introducing Stage will remain the go-to destination for discovering the most exciting emerging artists. BBC Radio 1 will be presenting live from Reading to deliver all the most memorable moments across the weekend directly to listeners, from exclusive backstage interviews to headline performances from some of the world's biggest artists. Listeners can tune in via BBC Sounds and on Radio 1. Vicky Hawkesworth, Nat O'Leary, Minah Shannon, Sam and Danni will be covering the festival on Radio 1 across the weekend. BBC One will broadcast three special shows which will feature highlights of the headline sets from Chappell Roan and Bring Me The Horizon. TV and iPlayer Chappell Roan @ Reading and Leeds Festival 2025 will broadcast on Friday 22 August at 10.40pm on BBC One. Breakout pop powerhouse Chappell Roan continues her meteoric rise with her biggest UK performance to date, as she takes to the Main Stage at Reading Festival for her highly anticipated performance on Friday 22 August. With her larger-than-life performances, audiences can expect a setlist full of huge anthems from Chappell's debut studio album 'The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.' Bring Me The Horizon @ Reading and Leeds Festival 2025 will broadcast on Saturday 23 August at 11.55pm on BBC One. BRIT award winning, Grammy-nominated and multi-platinum-selling rock group, Bring Me The Horizon, will headline the Main Stage on Saturday at Reading Festival. Bring Me The Horizon are one of the UK's most successful rock bands, with over 7.2 million albums sold globally to date. For anyone feeling the post-festival blues, BBC One will broadcast a special Reading and Leeds Festival highlights show on Thursday 28 August at 11:40pm. BBC iPlayer will be the place to watch coverage of the festival all weekend with the Reading & Leeds iPlayer Channel presented from on site in Reading each day by Jack Saunders and Sian Eleri. Kicking off at 2:00pm each day on Friday 22 August, Saturday 23 August and Sunday 24 August, the Channel will see Jack and Sian guide viewers at home through the festival highlights, performances from the Main Stage and Chevron Stage, and behind-the-scenes moments with special guests. Performances and highlight tracks will be available on-demand via iPlayer for 30 days following the festival, while a special compilation featuring standout moments from across the weekend will be available to stream for 12 months. Viewers can now dive into the most memorable performances and enjoy festival highlights from past years, available to watch on-demand or stream on the Reading & Leeds Hits Channel, all on BBC iPlayer. Radio 1 Radio 1 will count down to the festival with a wide variety of themed content across the week. On Sunday 17 August, a special edition of Radio 1's Life Hacks will offer advice for first-time festival goers. From Monday 18 August, the station will revisit iconic Live Lounge performances from artists performing at this year's festival each day at midday. Next week, Radio 1 is launching Live Lounge Late on Radio 1's New Music Show with Jack Saunders. On Tuesday 19 August at 7pm, Australian pop duo Royel Otis will perform an exclusive session for Radio 1's first ever Live Lounge Late. On Thursday 21 August from 6pm-8pm, Jack Saunders and Sian Eleri will host a Reading and Leeds special to warm-up audiences and kick off the festival energy. Radio 1 will broadcast live from Reading from 11am-4pm on Friday 22 August, Saturday 23 August and Sunday 24 August, bringing listeners live sets from the Main Stage and Chevron stages with Radio 1's Nat O'Leary, Vicky Hawkesworth, Minah Shannon, Sam and Danni fronting the coverage. On Monday 25 August, Radio 1 will broadcast a special dedicated Reading and Leeds Festival show from 6pm – 1am, featuring key highlights and live performances from across the weekend. BBC Introducing on Radio 1 will be dedicated to Reading and Leeds 2025, hosted by Jess Iszatt and Jordan Blyth on Sunday 24 August (11.00pm – 1am). Alyx Holcombe will host a Reading Special on Radio 1's Indie Show (9pm – 10pm) on Sunday 31 August. Over on BBC Sounds, listeners can now enjoy a specially curated Reading & Leeds Anthems show by Jack Saunders. Following the festival, BBC Sounds will feature a selection of epic performances and highlights from the Main Stage and Chevron Stage. BBC Introducing The BBC Introducing Stage has been a familiar sight at the festival for over a decade, providing the ultimate destination for festivalgoers to find their new favourite act before everyone else has heard about them and playing a crucial role in propelling UK acts to new heights. The 2025 line-up includes Amie Blu, Artio, Ashley Singh, Chanel Yates, Charles, Cliffords, Déyyess, ENNA, EV, EVILLE, Girl Group, Finn Forster, Indoor Foxes, Jack Dean, JD Cliffe, Keo, Lleo, Mudi Sama, Mcxxne, Overpass, Niki Kini, NXDIA, Phoebe Green, The Pill, WENCH!, Unpeople and V.I.C. The stage has also previously witnessed jaw-dropping surprise sets from superstars like Ed Sheeran, The 1975, Loyle Carner and many more, who all have risen from the Introducing Stage with monumental slots and support from the platform on their journeys. This year, it promises unforgettable performances from the most influential and exciting names in indie, alternative, hip-hop and dance with over twenty emerging artists set to perform including the UK's rising country star, Chanel Yates, also known as The Cowgirl Polly Pocket, who will headline Friday at Reading and Saturday at Leeds. Egyptian-Sudanese singer-songwriter, Nxdia, will bring their powerful alt-pop signature songs to headline Reading on Saturday and Leeds on Sunday. South-East Londoner, Amie Blu, recognised for her stunning soulful voice, will headline Friday at Leeds and Sunday at Reading, plus many more exciting acts. One track from each artist performing on the BBC Introducing stage will be filmed and made available on the BBC Music YouTube channel and form a compilation programme for BBC iPlayer. In addition, BBC Introducing in Oxfordshire & Berkshire will present a special highlights show of Reading Festival on 28 August, whilst BBC Introducing in Leeds & Sheffield, and BBC Introducing in York & Humberside will broadcast live from Leeds on Saturday 23 August (8-10pm), with Emily Pilbeam, Christian Carlisle, and Jericho Keys. Both broadcasts will feature live performances and interviews from the BBC Introducing Stages. EC2 Follow for more
Telegraph
5 hours ago
- Telegraph
The double life of Big Mags: Paedophile hunter and secret heroin dealer
Nineties nostalgia is big business these days. Oasis are the hottest ticket in town, the biggest romcom of the year featured Bridget Jones, TikTok is awash with Gen-Zers pining for the 'Nineties summer' of their imagination and pedal pushers are making an uneasy comeback. Latching on to this trend was surely not on Myles Bonnar's mind when he created The Ballad of Big Mags (BBC Sounds), a six-part podcast about Margaret Haney, AKA 'Big Mags', a fearsome matriarch who ruled the roost over a notorious Stirling housing estate. Yet it made me, someone who spent his teenage years in the 1990s, hopelessly sentimental. It had it all: moral panics about paedophiles and 'neighbours from hell', tabloid sensationalism about sinkhole estates and untouchable criminals, a Scottish heroin epidemic. It even had a starring role for Robert Kilroy-Silk and his pugilistic daytime chat show. The only things missing were a Pulp soundtrack, a front-bench sex scandal and an appearance from Mr Blobby. Bonnar, however, wasn't laying it on that thick – by itself, the story of Big Mags stands as an intoxicating time capsule for the Britpop-New Labour era. Bonnar, whether he meant to or not, put his finger on something – even that era's tales of criminality and poverty carried a certain swagger. Haney had it in spades – a formidable, charismatic 'community leader' and the de facto head of a disreputable clan on Stirling's Raploch estate, she became irresistible media fodder when she came to attention in January 1997. Alan Christie was a convicted paedophile, recently released from prison, who had been rehoused in Raploch. Having got wind of it, Haney led a mob to Christie's house and forced him out. For several months, she leased out her services, turning up at similar protests across the country, becoming semi-famous off the back of it – sometimes she and her crowd would force a paedophile out of an area before they'd even moved in. You couldn't help but be impressed by communities coming together to prove the effectiveness of direct action. There was a host of amusing details: Haney rallying neighbours to her crusade by marching up and down the street shouting into a children's karaoke machine; the claim that she was the inspiration for EastEnders ' Big Mo (the BBC have denied this); the claim that she was the inspiration for a character in Ian Rankin's Rebus novel Dead Souls (Rankin has confirmed this). All in all she was a ready-made media treat: a flip-flop-wearing granny with a 60-a-day growl who made sex offenders quake in their boots. 'We'll always have people watching and waiting,' she warned paedophiles hoping to be rehoused. Yet Bonnar's meticulous story wouldn't amount to much without a sting in its tail. While the press was happy to paint Haney as the moral heart of the Raploch estate, there was a group of people who viewed the Kilroy appearance (where she went toe-to-toe with two anonymised paedophiles) and the interviews on BBC Scotland with disgust: the people of Raploch. Big Mags wasn't the only Haney on the estate, and as one local journalist put it, the family 'were a whole legion of one-man and one-woman crime waves – they were the stuff of legend'. By the mid-1990s, around 40 of Haney's extended family had been in jail or custody, while Big Mags herself had been convicted of assault, fraud and breach of the peace. As Haney said when a judge railed against her family: 'I don't know what he's complaining about; it's my family that keeps him in a job.' Soon the letters began trickling into the Daily Record, all from Raploch residents furious at Haney's newfound fame. One stated that the Raploch – which the media had dubbed 'Psychoville' – was respectable until she and her family came along. One declared bluntly: 'Big Mags is not our role model.' Her neighbours had good reason to complain. The woman who was being painted in the press as a salt-of-the-earth campaigner who wanted nothing more than to protect children was the head of a huge heroin-dealing operation. When the Daily Record ran a 'Dob in your local narco' campaign, the phone line was jammed with people desperate to shop Haney. Bonnar had got hold of a recording of a community meeting from 1992 in which Haney is railing against drugs in the Raploch. The locals cannot stifle their laughter. In the most satisfying of narrative twists, Big Mags, that scourge of the paedophile, began to get a taste of her own medicine. First, an angry mob saw her thrown off the Raploch estate. Then, wherever Haney was to be rehoused, local people would destroy the proposed house. The Haneys ended up in homeless accommodation in another area of Stirling, in what would become known as 'Fortress Haney'. One local journalist put the neighbours turning against Haney down to 'tall poppy syndrome', but I don't quite agree. It was 'enormous thistle syndrome' – Haney was an abrasive juggernaut of charm, influence and destruction, and one that gave all of Scotland a bad name. Bonnar clearly delighted in the fact that Haney's reign of chaos took place in the shadow of Stirling Castle. Big Mags, Queen of Scots. (Later, the people of Bannockburn rose up against her, helping Haney fit nicely into the folklore of Scotland.) It's a terrific listen, and the series is entirely fair to Haney, allowing all sides of this complex character to gradually edge into the light so that we can all make our own judgments. Throughout, however, is a nagging feeling that even Haney, a famed and feared drug dealer and chief executive of a 'family from hell', had within her a community spirit and a sense of societal cohesion that is almost entirely lacking today. Nineties nonsense nostalgia gone too far? Almost certainly. But the Big Mags, booze-and-fags 1990s gave the UK a shared sense of identity – whether we liked it or not.
BBC News
15 hours ago
- BBC News
🎧 Are Arsenal ready to take the next step?
An episode of BBC Radio 5 Live's Football Daily podcast all about Arsenal has dropped on BBC Cates and guests chat all things Gunners before the 2025-26 Premier League season gets under Arsenal winger Theo Walcott, BBC Sport football news reporter Alex Howell and Gunners fan Alex Moneypenny ask if Mikel Arteta's side are ready to go again and debate what a successful season looks to the full episode here
