In pictures: Nicola Coughlan and Maura Higgins stand out on TV Baftas 2025 red carpet
Nicola Coughlan
,
Maura Higgins
,
Siobhán McSweeney
,
Angela Scanlon
,
Laura Whitmore
and
Una Healy
were among the television stars adding glamour to the
TV Baftas
red carpet at London's Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall on Sunday evening.
Coughlan and Higgins both went for voluminous old-school gowns, while their fellow Irish stars chose more edgy looks. Among men,
Graham Norton
wore a black tuxedo with embellished collar, with the unusual accessory of a sling to support an injured arm.
Una Healy. Photograph: Ian West/PA Wire
Laura Whitmore. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire
Siobhán McSweeney. Photograph: Ian West/PA Wire
Angela Scanlon. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire
Maura Higgins. Photograph: Ian West/PA
Nicola Coughlan. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire
Graham Norton. Photograph: Eamonnfor P&O Cruises
David Tennant. Photograph: Ian West/PA Wire
Ella Thomas. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire
Frankie Bridge. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire
Anna Maxwell Martin. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire
Kirsty Wark. Photograph: Ian West/PA Wire
Joseph Fiennes. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire
Emilia Fox. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire
Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly. Photograph: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire
Ellie Simmonds. Photograph: Ian West/PA Wire
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
13 hours ago
- Irish Times
Never Flinch by Stephen King: Prolific author in crime thriller mode
Never Flinch Author : Stephen King ISBN-13 : 978-1399744331 Publisher : Hodder & Stoughton Guideline Price : £25 You don't write more than 70 novels without knowing how to follow your muse, and the muse that Stephen King is following is called Holly Gibney. She has now featured in seven novels or novellas for King, and she takes centre stage here again. Since we met her first 11 years ago as a mousy, repressed character in Mr Mercedes , Holly has found her confidence and blossomed into a smart and resourceful private detective. This story kicks off when the Buckeye City police department receives a letter from someone threatening to kill 'thirteen innocents and one guilty' in an act of atonement for the death of an innocent man. Holly is initially drawn into the investigation when the murders start, but then finds herself on the road acting as security for a controversial women's rights activist who is bringing her pro-choice rally from city to city, and has attracted the attention of a stalker with murderous intent. [ How Stephen King unlocks our imagination with every scare Opens in new window ] This is King in crime thriller mode, although elements of supernatural horror do occasionally push their way into Holly stories, where they seem ill at ease. The evil that Holly is chasing in Never Flinch is strictly flesh and blood, yet oddly the story feels less plausible than many of King's flights of fancy. READ MORE The idea that a shrinking violet such as Holly would take on a job as a bodyguard is utterly nonsensical – the character is far too smart and self-aware to put herself in that position – and is one of several elements that feel like parts from a different jigsaw. King takes aim at anti-abortion protests, queries the legal system, and there is a character that may or may not be trans, but is definitely problematic. It's a shame, as there are sections in here that work perfectly – the stalker gradually closing in on his prey could easily have been its own separate story, there are some heart-breaking father-son dynamics, and the murders in the serial killer story are genuinely chilling for how utterly senseless they are. King is simply too good at this not to make it a page turner but ultimately the whole novel seems to add up to slightly less than the sum of its parts.
Irish Times
18 hours ago
- Irish Times
Pulp: More review – Jarvis Cocker and co's great bait and switch
More Artist : Pulp Label : Rough Trade Britpop reunions have tended towards two extremes. There's the grubby cash grab, where a group who weren't all that great in the first place try to squeeze as much cold, hard currency as possible from their audience, regardless of the impact on their reputation. We leave it to the reader to conclude which artists fall into this category, though you can take it that we do not refer to The Boo Radleys or Echobelly. Then there's a comeback that casts an old band in a new light. Consider Suede, who have done their best work since re-forming. Or Blur, whose album The Ballad of Darren , from 2023, was a beautiful portrait of fiftysomething melancholy. Pulp 's first album for 24 years falls into neither category – because, though its intentions are noble, its execution is spotty. What's more, it makes the mistake of flooring the listener with a fantastic opening track, then peters out in a grim drizzle of indie plodders that showcase Jarvis Cocker 's way with a despondent couplet but don't achieve an awful lot else. More isn't entirely a disaster: it won't ruin your memories of Pulp's glory days, which is surely the risk with the Gallaghers ' imminent pension-top-up tour. But it achieves a feat beyond even Cocker's most despondent lyric in reminding the listener that some things are perhaps best left in the past, Pulp albums among them. READ MORE To their credit, there is never any sense of phoning it on the part of the musicians. (Cocker is joined by the drummer Nick Banks, the keyboardist Candida Doyle and the guitarist Mark Webber, but the record has been made without Russell Senior, Pulp's original guitarist, and, of course, Steve Mackey, its late bassist, who died in 2023.) The catalyst for the project was a run of gigs that year that included a stop at St Anne's Park in Dublin, the sort of unremarkable suburban backdrop that has been the fuel for Cocker's songwriting since his formative years as a skinny punk in Sheffield. [ Pulp at St Anne's Park review: Suddenly, a rather ordinary gig jumps to an extraordinary place Opens in new window ] It was while on tour that they trialled one of More's better tunes, the lush, string-drenched Hymn of the North. It's a beautiful moment, borne aloft by Cocker's ruminative, rumbling voice – if chocolate were a sound, and were also very sad, this is what it would sound like. But it is a rare pick-me-up across an LP that fails to reach either the bittersweet highs of His 'N' Hers and Different Class or plumb the melodramatic depths of This Is Hardcore, Cocker's 'Actually, I hate being famous' lament. More starts, however, with that bait and switch, in the form of the glorious Spike Island (written with Jason Buckle, Cocker's collaborator in Relaxed Muscle, his synth-pop duo). Tragically, this is not about the former prison camp in Cork Harbour – how great would it be if it were – but refers to The Stone Roses' disastrous gig in northwest England in the early 1990s, which has grown in the retelling to become a landmark in youth culture. The track is wonderful. Cocker's voice achieves a yelping majesty, and there's lots of dizzy, fizzy guitar going off in the background. Here the album dangles before us the illusion that you can go back and that everything will be the same. But it isn't 1995, and Pulp can no longer crank out bangers such as Do You Remember the First Time?, a point painfully illustrated as the LP unspools into a lustreless exploration of midlife ennui (not helped by James Ford's flat production). Cocker has a reputation as a scintillating observer of everyday life. But throughout More he risks stating the thumpingly obvious. Grown Ups, which plods along like a baroque Chas & Dave, finds him reflecting on how his peers have deserted their trendy neighbours of old and are more stressed about wrinkles than acne. Neither is an insight that will have you sitting bolt upright. A sort of blend of Serge Gainsbourg and Benny Hill, Cocker in his songwriting prime captured wonderfully the curtain-twitching prurience of the British middle classes. He comes back around to the theme of buttoned-down sexuality on Slow Jam, where he natters to Jesus about his sex exploits (Cocker's, that is), then proposes spicing up his love life with a threesome between 'you, me and my imagination'. More flickers to life now and then. An exhilarating disco groove propels Got to Have Love, which suggests Giorgio Moroder collaborating with Philip Larkin (an inspiration for all morose Yorkshire wordsmiths). And the project ends on a satisfying note with the comforting hush of A Sunset, written with Cocker's fellow Sheffield musician Richard Hawley. It's quite lovely. But, arriving at the end of an often listless, seemingly pointless record, lovely isn't enough.
Irish Times
a day ago
- Irish Times
Dept. Q on Netflix: A Thumpingly bingable thriller fuelled by mordant wit and a world-weary detective
Cosy crime receives a gritty do-over in the thumpingly bingable new Netflix cold-case procedural, Dept. Q. Relocating a bestselling Scandi-noir book series to overcast Edinburgh, the show suggests a big-budget take on ITV forensic thriller Unforgotten , with Matthew Goode excelling as an eccentric detective investigating the disappearance four years earlier of a criminal lawyer. The mystery has multiple layers. When finally revealed, the truth about what happened to Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie) is full of satisfying swerves, red herrings and shock revelations (your jaw will clatter open more than once). The story doubles as a redemption arc for Goode's enthusiastically curmudgeonly DCI Morck (his name a holdover from the Danish novels). If there is a deal breaker, it is the idea that the unpleasant Morck would receive a second chance after his bad judgement results in the death of one officer and the paralysing of another – a calamity that plays out in a nerve-shredding opening scene. In real life, so disastrous a fumble would surely spell the end of a career. But Morck remains convinced that he is a sleuthing genius even after he is busted down to a new cold case unit – the eponymous Dept. Q. Here, his first mission is to work out what happened to Merritt four years previously. There are parallels in Goode's performance with Gary Oldman as a mordant spook in Apple TV+ 's Slow Horses. Yet where that series gives James Bond a caustic, kitchen-sink makeover, Dept. Q is in the more formulaic tradition of a downbeat cop caper, the characters are both uniformly world-weary and fuelled by mordant wit. READ MORE Goode brings a chipper anti-charm to the mark of the ghastly Morck – it's a distinct improvement on his appalling 'Irish' rogue in 2010 hellscape romcom Leap Year . He bounces nicely off Kelly Macdonald, playing the psychologist trying to jolt him out of the guilt he feels over the maiming of his best pal in that initial shooting (the friend is now helping solve crimes from his hospital bed). He has the perfect distraction in the form of the Lingard's file, through which clues are scattered like confetti at a Coldplay concert. In his new basement office, Morck teams up with a Doctor Watson-esque Syrian IT expert, Akram (Alexej Manvelov), and it is when they join forces that Dept. Q achieves liftoff. Nothing about Dept. Q is original. Morck, moreover, is such a piece of work that you initially wonder if the show might be unbearable. But the mystery threaded through the story of a cantankerous copper is deftly drawn and, episode by episode (nine in total) reels you in.
