Derry Girls stars to link up in London production of Irish stage classic
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Scottish Sun
24 minutes ago
- Scottish Sun
Coleen Rooney revives Wagatha Christie skills as a detective investigating Man City charges in hilarious Paddy Power ad
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) COLEEN ROONEY revived her epic super sleuth skills to investigate Man City's Financial Fair Play case in a hilarious new Paddy Power sketch. The 39-year-old aka 'Wagatha Christie' has teamed up with the Irish betting company to announce its record-breaking 'Justice Refund'. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 2 Coleen Rooney has teamed up with Paddy Power to announce its record-breaking 'Justice Refund' Credit: Paddy Power 2 Coleen Rooney stars in the latest Paddy Power advert Credit: Paddy Power In the clip, no-nonsense Coleen, who is married to Wayne Rooney, is the boss of a parody 'Investigation Department' tackling a number mock cases. In a mock office she examines joke complaints including whether "nothing beats a Jet2 holiday" and the "latest refereeing conspiracy theories" by Arsenal fans. She then uncovers a suspicious phone call from a 'Mr Howard Wobb' heaping praise on VAR and hailing referees. But the sketch reaches its crescendo when she has to crack the case of the ongoing FFP saga. City were slapped with a whopping 115 charges over alleged breaches of Financial Fair Play rules back in February which then went up to 130. She gives her verdict saying that Paddy Power will sort it out once and for all if the game's bigwigs won't. The Paddy Power 'Justice Refund' is a payback scheme giving money back to all punters who backed a team that finished second to Manchester City in the Premier League since 2011. BEST FREE BETS AND BETTING SIGN UP OFFERS It covers eight seasons, meaning Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool fans who placed title bets in those years will have their stakes returned. More than 100,000 punters are set to benefit - including those who backed United in 2011/12, 2017/18 and 2020/21, Liverpool in 2013/14, 2018/19 and 2021/22, and Arsenal in 2022/23 and 2023/24. Rebekah Vardy LOSES bid to have Coleen Rooney's Wagatha Christie court costs slashed & faces £1.6m bill An official verdict on City's alleged 115 financial charges are still pending after the hearing concluded last December. City have vehemently denied the charges and have been fighting their corner at London's International Dispute Resolution Centre since mid-September. City have been accused of failing to accurately report their finances over a nine-year period from 2009-10 and 2017-18. It's also alleged they failed to provide all the details about former manager Roberto Mancini's pay packets between 2009-10 and 2012-13. The charges also relate to their alleged failure to disclose full player salaries between 2010-11 and 2015-16. In addition to their alleged financial wrongdoings, City have been accused of failing to co-operate with the Prem's investigation. If found guilty, City could be hit with huge financial penalties and a points deducation. They could also be RELEGATED if they're found to have committed the most serious charges. The club will likely appeal any verdict which doesn't go their way, meaning the final decision may not be made until the end of NEXT SEASON. The Wagatha Christie saga involved two former friends - Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy - and resulted in a High Court libel battle. Coleen shared a lengthy Instagram post accusing her pal of leaking stories about her. In 2022, three years after Coleen's initial accusation, Rebekah launched a libel case against her, which she lost.
Evening Standard
an hour ago
- Evening Standard
Øya Festival 2025 review: leave your chaos at the door
As for the line up, one reveller described it as an opportunity to see 'Glastonbury-level artists with ten times fewer people'. They're not wrong: Chappell Roan headlined opening night with the flamboyance of a pop star who knows exactly how to command a stage. Her camp, theatrical energy was met with polite cheers from those over the age of 20, and ear-deafening screeches from the gaggle of dragged up tweens next to me. Wet Leg brought their tight indie riffs and dry British humour to a rain-drenched crowd who cheerily laughed along, even though the sarcasm was probably lost on them. And the big names don't stop there. Other iconic international acts included pop princess Charli xcx, pioneering rock band Queens of the Stone Age, and controversial Irish rap group Kneecap.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Frank Grimes obituary
When he burst on to the stage of the new Abbey theatre in Dublin in 1967, Frank Grimes, who has died aged 78, was acclaimed as the finest young actor of his generation. That first impact was made as a 19-year-old in a revival of Frank O'Connor's The Invincibles, a controversial piece about the assassination of the chief secretary of Ireland, and his deputy, in 1882. But it was as the young Brendan Behan in Borstal Boy (1967) that Grimes hit the big time. Behan's rollicking autobiographical novel was adapted by Frank McMahon, with Niall Toibín as the older Behan relating the story of the renegade roisterer on a bare stage. It was a smash hit in Dublin, Paris and then on Broadway in 1970, where Tomás Mac Anna's production won the Tony award and Grimes was voted most promising actor by 20 New York critics. In a sense, his subsequent stage career, mainly in London in the 1980s, was something of a deflation, though he invariably cleaned up the best reviews in plays by David Storey and Chekhov, and, in 1984, as a mercurial Christy Mahon in JM Synge's Playboy of the Western World on the Edinburgh fringe – all of these directed by Lindsay Anderson, who was Grimes's mentor when he first moved to London in the 70s. Latterly, Grimes was best known in the UK for his role as the unpredictable Barry Connor on ITV's Coronation Street. Between 2008 and 2015, Grimes appeared in 55 episodes of the soap, with his wife, Helen, played in the first season by Sorcha Cusack and in later episodes by Dearbhla Molloy. He also appeared in episodes of Casualty, The Bill, Doctors and Mrs Brown's Boys. Grimes's best performance on television, however, came in RTÉ's Strumpet City (1980, shown on ITV in the UK), adapted by Hugh Leonard from James Plunkett's novel, in which he played a beautifully modulated, mild-mannered Catholic curate in a chaotic Dublin under British rule before the first world war. The wonderful cast included Donal McCann, Cyril Cusack, David Kelly and Peter O'Toole. Born in Dublin, the youngest and seventh child of Evelyn (nee Manscier) and Joseph Grimes, a Dublin train driver, Frank was educated at St Declan's secondary school by the Christian Brothers, where he excelled at basketball, algebra and geometry. He trained at the Abbey and, after his success there, moved to London. He began his collaboration with Anderson and Storey in two plays at the Royal Court, The Farm (1973), as the feckless only son returning to an outraged family gathering with news of his impending marriage to a divorced, middle-aged woman; and as an art student in Life Class (1974), with Alan Bates as the art teacher and Rosemary Martin the model. Both of Grimes's performances were luminous, truthful and technically adroit. He played the young Seán O'Casey for RTÉ in The Rebel (1973), a documentary drama by John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy, and made his only appearance at the Royal Shakespeare Company in O'Casey's masterpiece, Juno and the Paycock; Trevor Nunn's 1980 revival at the Aldwych featured a mostly Irish cast headed by Judi Dench and Norman Rodway as Juno and Captain Boyle. Grimes's Hamlet in 1981, directed by Anderson, was the first Shakespeare at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, since 1957, but it seemed tame and tight-lipped after Jonathan Pryce's electrifying Royal Court version in the previous year. He was back on track, though, in Anderson's all-star cast in The Cherry Orchard at the Haymarket in 1983 (Joan Plowright as Ranevskaya, Leslie Phillips as Gaev), stuttering out Trofimov's revolutionary rhetoric before apologetically concluding that, when the day dawns, he would be there – 'or … I shall show others the way'. In 1987 at the Old Vic, in Anderson's revival of a 1928 American comedy, Holiday, by Philip Barry, with Malcolm McDowell and his then wife Mary Steenburgen alongside, Grimes was another memorably reluctant rabble-rouser, drunkenly excoriating the American rich, said Michael Billington, with 'a felt-tipped dagger'. Two years later, at the National Theatre, he was a friendless academic in psychological meltdown as Colin Pasmore in The March on Russia, Storey's own adaptation of his 1972 novel Pasmore. Another minefield of a domestic drama, it was directed by Anderson in the manner of one of his and Storey's earlier family reunion collaborations, In Celebration (1969). In an impeccably acted production, Grimes was both participant and observer at the celebratory rites of a family at odds, if not war. Grimes played supporting roles in several notable films, including Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far (1977), and in Anderson's The Whales of August (1987), starring Bette Davis and Lillian Gish as two elderly sisters on the Maine coast. He also appeared in Britannia Hospital (1982), the third of Anderson's blistering 'Mick Travis' trilogy. Grimes wrote several plays. Anderson directed his first, The Fishing Trip, at the Croydon Warehouse in 1991 and, before the director died in 1994, was helping him prepare his own one-man show, The He and the She of It, expressing a lifelong obsession with, and devotion to, James Joyce. Grimes married the actor Michele Lohan in 1968, and they had two sons, David and Andrew. After he and Michele divorced, he married the actor and art teacher Ginnette Clarke in 1984. Frank and Ginnette lived in New York from 1982 to 1987, after which they settled in Barnes, west London. His son David died in 2011. Grimes is survived by Ginnette and their daughter, Tilly, by Andrew, and by seven grandchildren, Emily, Hedy, Martha, Reuben, Toby, Monti and Oskar, and two siblings, Eva and Laura. Frank (Francis Patrick) Grimes, born 9 March 1947; died 1 August 2025
