
Jeremy Clarkson fumes he's interrupted filming due to 'ridiculous' restrictions
Jeremy Clarkson has joined the chorus of disgruntled Cotswolds residents expressing their frustration at the holidaying US Vice President, JD Vance. The 65-year-old motoring journalist revealed that his new summer neighbour's presence has disrupted the filming of the fifth series of Clarkson's Farm, as the secret service has taken over the tranquil English countryside and a no-fly zone has been implemented.
The Vice President's visit to the Oxfordshire town has already sparked controversy, with locals bemoaning the disruption and left-leaning protestors descending on the area. The former Top Gear presenter explained that the one-mile no-fly zone around JD Vance's Cotswolds manor house rental is hindering his cameramen from capturing essential shots for his Amazon Prime show.
A no-fly zone has been established for security purposes while the Republican politician resides in the hamlet of Dean for the remainder of August.
On Tuesday (August 12), the broadcaster took to Instagram to display the no-fly zone which encompasses his own farm, Curdle Hill Farm - also known as Diddly Squat Farm, named so because he has claimed that's the sum total he stands to earn from it.
The father-of-three captioned the map snapshot: "The JD Vance no-fly zone. We are the pin. So on the downside, no drone shots today. On the upside, no annoying light aircraft," reports the Express.
However, Jeremy isn't the only celebrity irked by JD Vance's arrival in Chipping Norton. The broadcaster's right-hand man Kaleb Cooper expressed his annoyance that the heightened security had thrown him off his own farming tasks.
The farm worker, who has his own land and has carved out a successful career since the show, revealed that his wheat transport was delayed by the convoy as it passed through the local area.
He criticised the Vice President for his noticeable presence in the neighbourhood, stating: "My wheat got wet in the trailer last night as the convo stopped me in the rain in Chippy.
"I could easily have carried on my way and put it in the shed without causing any disruption. If he had just driven around in a VW Polo nobody would know who he was."
The grand property where the American politician is staying has been unveiled as Dean Manor, a luxurious house built in 1702 during Queen Anne's reign. The manor is nestled in a small hamlet in Oxfordshire, which is home to just 12 properties.
With towering 15ft stone walls and meticulously maintained six-acre gardens, it's no wonder this property was chosen by US secret service personnel due to its secluded and secure location. It's believed to cost a whopping £8,000 a week to rent.
Clarkson's Farm is available to stream on Amazon Prime.
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Scotsman
12 minutes ago
- Scotsman
Andrey Kurkov Edinburgh Book Festival
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Ordinary vexations get a lot more vexatious when your country is at war. Take, for example, an airline losing your luggage, which happened to Andrey Kurkov the day before our conversation. With civilian air travel grounded in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, retrieving his bags meant a 1000-kilometre round trip by road to an airport in Poland. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad As the Ukrainian writer who is best known around the world, and a fluent English speaker, Kurkov, 64, has become a kind of ambassador for his country, a ubiquitous giver of lectures, organiser of fundraisers and writer of articles for foreign press. He is also generous with his time in interviews with people like me. 'I was already, for many years, an explainer of Ukraine,' he says, mildly, speaking on Zoom from his Kyiv apartment. 'I would be invited to different festivals to talk about my books, but in the end I would talk about Ukraine and my books.' Andrey Kurkov | Orenda Books As with so many things in Ukraine, Kurkov's career divides into two parts: before the war began, and after. 'Before', he was a writer of highly acclaimed crime novels set in Ukraine, books with a sardonic edge and dash of the surreal. His best known is Death and the Penguin, published in English in 2001. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'After' has turned him from novelist to statesman, commentator, public intellectual. When Russia invaded, he stopped writing fiction and turned to non-fiction, writing for newspapers and websites around the world. He has published two collections of non-fiction writing: Diary of an Invasion and, most recently, Our Daily War. As the war grinds on, it feels more important than ever to share the day-to-day experiences of ordinary Ukrainians. Kurkov's calm demeanour, precise observation and wry sense of humour make him ideally suited to the task. His two-day journey to collect his luggage meant he missed a heavy night of shelling in Kyiv. 'It was very bad. There was an explosion not far away from my daughter's home in the centre, 100 metres away, a high-rise was damaged, the windows were out.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This is daily life now for many Ukrainians: checking air raid siren apps; reckoning up the previous night's damage; checking in regularly with family and friends. On nights of intensive bombardment, no one gets much sleep. Kurkov says he has lost his sense of humour only twice in his life: at the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, in February 2022, and in 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimea. The day after being woken at 5am by the sound of explosions, he and his wife, who is British, left the city for Uzhgorod near the western border, partly to make it easier for Kurkov to travel. 'When we were in the car, I was driving and speaking on the phone to journalists. Then, when we reached Uzhgorod, I was asked by several newspapers to write articles to explain the reasons for the war. It happened automatically, naturally. I just started writing, sometimes four or five big articles every week. I forgot about fiction at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.' When the Kurkovs returned to Kyiv in July, morale in the city was high. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'When the Ukrainian army pushed the Russian army from Kyiv region, there was euphoria and everyone was sure that things were coming to an end,' he says. Did he think that? 'I didn't, I was sure that Russia will not stop the war until the death of Putin. Putin will not stop the war because this is his last war, and he started it in order to be remembered in Russian history as somebody who made Russia great again. But I was sure that we would have enough military help from the West to liberate the occupied territories and to keep Russia at bay.' When this did not happen, and the war in the east of the country became entrenched, Kyiv stared to return to a strange kind of normality. Shops and cafes reopened; the alcohol ban was revoked; people began to distinguish between the sound of a drone and a ballistic missile; danger became part of everyday life. 'Your behaviour adapts to the war, you know,' Kurkov said. 'You think perhaps I can go and have coffee, and if there is a siren I will move away from the windows in the cafe.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Cultural activities resumed too, and were embraced with a new passion. Kyiv hosts a book festival in June, and Kharkiv's is at the end of August. Ukraine's second city, 30km from the frontlines, is under constant bombardment, so all the events will take place in bomb shelters and underground spaces. Meanwhile, the theatres in Kyiv are full. In Odessa, when the shelling allows, people are going to the opera and drinking champagne. In this war, culture is a contested area. 'People understand that culture is actually the source of energy and the source of hope, because culture is part of national identity. This is a war against Ukrainian national identity, because this is the identity that forces Ukrainians to defend their land.' Writers have long been revered in Eastern Europe. Being a literary figure tends to be synonymous with speaking for your country, politically and philosophically. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Writers were punished by the regimes, they were killed, they were exiled. The nation remembers them, and they become symbols, they become heroes. For Ukrainians, there are no military figures who are considered as important as poets.' The country is also reckoning its losses, at least in part, by the loss of its writers. 120 Ukrainian writers, poets and publishers have been killed since the war began. When I ask Kurkov if he worries about his own life, he says simply 'No, I don't think about my own life, because if I worry I cannot function.' The mood in Kyiv, he says, is stoic. Humour has become blacker, his own included. People drink more coffee to cope with the sleepless nights. 'There is no depression. People are angry, bitter. They don't hide that they are afraid every night for their lives, they write about it on Facebook, but nobody is addressing Zelensky or anybody else publicly asking for peace at any cost. People joke that if you are not killed in the night then in the morning you have to go to work. I think the level of trauma, psychological trauma, is very high.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Returning to a kind of normality has also meant that, after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, Kurkov has returned to writing fiction again, finishing the third novel in his Kyiv Mysteries series, The Lost Soldiers (not yet available in English). The books are set in 1919, during the four-year period in which Ukraine declared its independence from Russia after the fall of the Tsars, provoking fierce retaliation by the Red Army. The first in the series, The Silver Bone, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. 'The thing for me is that writing fiction is a pleasure and you cannot expect pleasure in this time of the suffering in the country,' he says. 'There was something immoral in this desire. It was escapism. But I am irritated with myself if I can't write fiction. I think, if I go to the theatre - and I go to the theatre with great pleasure now, much more than I used to - then why not find time to write a story?' He says the parallels between 1919 and the present situation are self-evident. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It's the same situation. In 1919, the Red Army attacked Ukraine in order to turn Ukraine into a Russian province. And the level of violence today against the Ukrainian civilian population is the same as it was then.' But there is enough distance to write about it through the lens of imagination. 'I use my imagination and I use archives. It's a pleasure, it's very interesting, and I can add my fantasy and my imagination to the real events, which I cannot allow myself to do with today's reality. I would not even start a novel about today's situation.' I ask him if he's still optimistic? 'Well, I'm a pathological optimist. This is a medical state.' His eyes twinkle just a little. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'I'm still an optimist, but I would say 'cautious optimist mixed with realist'. I think everybody who remains in Ukraine now, even if they don't realise it, they are optimists.' Andrey Kurkov will talk about Our Daily War at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 19 August at 5pm, and with Richard Lloyd Parry in a discussion on How to Resist, 18 August at 1.15pm


Scotsman
12 minutes ago
- Scotsman
Strictly Come Dancing 2025 cast: BBC decision has ruined it
Strictly Come Dancing has just ruined series 23 for me with its latest casting decision 😣 Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Strictly Come Dancing has announced its 10th celebrity. After a strong start, the decision has tanked the season for me. This is why the latest announcement has left a bitter taste in my mouth. Strictly Come Dancing has started to reveal the celebrities who will be taking part in this year's edition. It began with a bang as Nitro from Gladiators and Dr. River Song were unveiled as participants. However, it has now taken a turn that has left a bitter taste in my mouth with the 10th announcement of the season. Former The Apprentice star, businessman and social media influencer Thomas Skinner has joined the cast. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It might sound like a perfectly adequate addition and one that feels like it should have happened years ago. But for me, personally, it has ruined what enthusiasm I had for the show. BBC has just ruined Strictly Come Dancing with latest cast decision Thomas Skinner has joined the cast of Strictly Come Dancing | BBC I quite liked Thomas Skinner during his time on The Apprentice, he had buckets of charm and came across really well. His appearance on Celebrity MasterChef created one of the all-time great reaction gifs. If he had simply faded into the background, perhaps popping up on a TV show or another from time to time, he would have remained a fond figure in my memory. Unfortunately, that is not what has happened. He has become an increasingly loud and polarising figure on social media. If you have spent any time on X (formerly Twitter) in recent months, you have likely come across posts from the BOSH man (although Big John might have a stronger claim to that title). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Mixed in with posts about his family, business and favourite cafe, Skinner has dabbled in politics. For example, earlier this year he wrote: 'I don't think there is many in government you can trust in my opinion. It's all smoke and mirrors. Lies & corruption. This country needs to be run by the people, for the people.' Websites like The Telegraph, New Statesman and The Spectator have hailed him as one of the most important voices on the right. He has used terms like 'the woke brigade' to decry the 'death' of the English fry-up and pints on a Friday night. Skinner appeared on a Spectator video with former Reform MP Rupert Lowe titled 'How to Save England' in July. It is a pernicious idea that our country needs 'saving' at all. Skinner has also played into the growing right-wing narrative of the UK being 'unsafe' in his social media posts, once claiming his mates had 'no choice' but to flee to Dubai because of how 'lawless' the country has become. I'm sure the tax incentives played no part in those decisions. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He was quick to express his support for US President Donald Trump, after he was re-elected in November. The Daily Mirror reports that he blasted Foreign Secretary David Lammy for criticising Trump. He wrote: 'I love Trump, I think he is brilliant, that's my opinion. I think it's good he is back in charge, it will be good for the UK economy.' Just this week he posted about meeting with the Vice President of the US, JD Vance. He wrote: 'Here is a pic of Me and Vice President @JDVance towards the end of the night after a few beers🍻 I'm overdressed in my suit, but when the VP invites you to a BBQ, you don't risk turning up in shorts an flip-flops😂 Cracking night in the beautiful English countryside with JD, his friends and family. Once in a lifetime. Bosh.' It comes in the same week that Donald Trump called in the National Guard on the capital city of Washington D.C. and ICE continues to round up people for deportation. Same-sex marriage is also at risk of being overturned, with the Supreme Court formally asked to overturn it this week. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Have we learned nothing from allowing Nigel Farage on I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here? Making figures who dabble in the far-right (or are overtly in the case of Farage) seem 'reasonable' is a massive mistake. Thomas Skinner might not be an MP for Reform or a politician per se, but he has been dabbling in right-wing talking points more frequently. Giving him a spot on prime-time TV could lead more people towards his social media platforms, potentially letting them be sucked in by the narratives spun around how 'unsafe' our country is. After the first spate of announcements, I was excited - especially once La Voix was confirmed. But personally, the addition of Skinner has ruined it for me and left a bitter taste in my mouth. Social media reacts to Thomas Skinner's Strictly reveal I am not alone in my disappointment in the decision to cast Thomas Skinner. Many took to social media to express their concern after he was announced for series 23. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad One wrote: 'Well this has killed my mood after the excitement of La Voix.' Another added: 'First voted out I beg, what a disappointment.' A person joked: 'Who's next? Ghislaine Maxwell?' Another concerned user added: 'Farage next year?' One user on social media wrote: 'It's August, we don't play April fools.' Another echoed: 'Is this a joke?' In a salient point, a person said: 'Thought they didn't want political figures on the show.' And another echoed: 'The BBC and ITV's obsession with platforming right-wing grifters (never left wing) plays a major role in the current political landscape. They know exactly what they're doing.'


Daily Record
12 minutes ago
- Daily Record
Richard Madeley says 'my mum hated me' for life-changing decision he made
ITV Good Morning Britain host Richard Madeley made a life-changing decision at the age of 16 but it seems his mum was not happy about it and 'hated' him for it During today's episode of Good Morning Britain, Richard Madeley confessed that his mother was not pleased with a decision he made in his youth. On Thursday's (August 14) instalment of the ITV programme, the presenter, 69, brought up the topic of A-Level results day. In conversation with his co-host Charlotte Hawkins, he asked: "What did you get, Charlie?" To which she responded: "I got three As". Richard quipped: "Oh there's always one isn't there?!" However, she admitted that these were not her predicted grades and she hadn't performed as well in her mock exams. She explained: "We all went to the school to get them, it was really special and I was not expecting that at all. "I think having not done very well when it came to the mock exams obviously gave me some impetus to think, 'Well, I need to get cracking on this'" The focus then shifted to Richard, who disclosed that he had left school at an early age, reports the Mirror. When Charlotte enquired about his exam results, he said: "Well, I left school at 16 to join the local paper. My mum thought it was a very bad move, my dad thought it was great. "My mum hated me as I started work when I was 16 and she insisted that I go to night school and take A-Levels there. So, I took an English A-Level and I got a B, I think." However, the seasoned broadcaster pointed out that when he sat the exam, he was already two years into his position at the publication, which launched his career. It appeared Richard had made the correct choice as he had climbed to assistant editor and secured a role with the BBC by age 19. Nevertheless, the ITV personality has previously opened up about his difficult school experiences. During a chat on Good Morning Britain, he spoke about being singled out by bullies. He said at the time: "I was at school long before social media and I got really badly bullied through the first two years of my Grammar School, when I was about 12 and 13 years old. "I dread to think had we been online as well, it just would have been a nightmare. "I didn't report it. It was a sense of shame, not a sense of fear, that I was being targeted." Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'.