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Daily Record
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Here We Go's Alison Steadman says 'no more' as she shares sad career news
Alison Steadman shared some heartbreaking news on This Morning as she discussed her lengthy acting career in TV and theatre During her appearance on ITV 's This Morning on Friday (25 July), actress Alison Steadman shared her decision to retire from theatre. She sat down with Dermot O'Leary and Olivia Attwood to discuss her latest projects, including the third series of BBC 's Here We Go, but sadly announced she won't be returning to the stage. Dermot expressed his disappointment to Alison, saying: "This breaks my heart. You don't want to do theatre anymore," to which co-host Olivia chimed in: "Stage fright?" Alison confirmed: "Yeah, really. I've put my shift in and it was my favourite thing. I absolutely loved it, but no more." Over the years, Alison has graced the stage in numerous productions, beginning her career in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie after completing her studies, reports the Mirror. Her theatre credits include Abigail's Party, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Entertaining Mr Sloane and Hotel Paradiso. She even bagged an Olivier Award for The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. In other parts of the interview, Alison gave a sneak peek into what fans can expect in the new series of Here We Go, set to premiere on BBC One on Friday (25 July). "We're so excited," she exclaimed, before sharing some updates about her character Sue Jessop. "Well, she's moved in with them, it's what she's always wanted! She's living with them, she's rearranged the kitchen, as mother-in-laws do. She just loves it, she just loves being with all the family." Alison elaborated on the distinctive filming style of Here We Go. The series is shot in a single continuous take, leaving no room for cuts or edits. "It's filmed always in one long take, so there's no cuttings. It's quite tough sometimes. It's just quite tiring, sometimes the scenes can be four, five pages long," Alison shared with Dermot and Olivia. She confessed: "If you're filming it without a break, and you're doing take after take, sometimes you think 'Please let me rest!'" Alison shares the screen with Jim Howick, Katherine Parkinson, Tom Basden, Tori Allen-Martin, Freya Parks, Mica Ricketts, and Jude Morgan-Collie in the popular BBC sitcom. The series, set in the town of Bedford, narrates the unique tale of the quirky and dysfunctional Jessop family, through the lens of teenager Sam (Jude Morgan-Collie), who captures plenty of footage on his handheld camera. Flashbacks to less chaotic times also feature, giving the series a unique selling point.
Daily Mirror
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Here We Go star Alison Steadman on heartbreaking reason she's quit theatre
Alison Steadman, star of BBC's Here We Go, has revealed she's quit theatre despite it once being her 'favourite thing' to do Actress Alison Steadman opened up about her decision to quit theatre during an appearance on ITV 's This Morning on Friday (25 July). The TV star sat down with Dermot O'Leary and Olivia Attwood to chat about her latest projects, including the third series of BBC 's Here We Go, but sadly revealed she won't be appearing on stage in the future. "This breaks my heart. You don't want to do theatre anymore," Dermot said to Alison, with co-host Olivia adding: "Stage fright?" Alison sadly revealed: "Yeah, really. I've put my shift in and it was my favourite thing. I absolutely loved it, but no more." Alison has starred in numerous theatre productions over the years, having kicked off her career in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie after finishing her studies. She has also appeared in Abigail's Party, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Entertaining Mr Sloane and Hotel Paradiso. Alison won an Olivier Award for The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. Elsewhere during the interview, Alison teased what's to come in the new series of Here We Go, which launches on BBC One on Friday (25 July). "We're so excited," she said, before revealing what her character Sue Jessop has been up to. "Well, she's moved in with them, it's what she's always wanted! She's living with them, she's rearranged the kitchen, as mother-in-laws do. She just loves it, she just loves being with all the family." Alison went on to discuss the unique way in which Here We Go is filmed. The series is filmed in one on-going take, meaning there is no opportunity for cuttings or edits. "It's filmed always in one long take, so there's no cuttings. It's quite tough sometimes. It's just quite tiring, sometimes the scenes can be four, five pages long," Alison told Dermot and Olivia. She admitted: "If you're filming it without a break, and you're doing take after take, sometimes you think 'Please let me rest!'" Alison stars alongside Jim Howick, Katherine Parkinson, Tom Basden, Tori Allen-Martin, Freya Parks, Mica Ricketts, and Jude Morgan-Collie in the hit BBC sitcom. The series, set in the town of Bedford, tells the unique story of the dysfunctional and eccentric Jessop family, from the perspective of teenager Sam (Jude Morgan-Collie), who films plenty of footage on his handheld camera. Flashbacks to less chaotic times also feature, giving the series a unique selling point.
Spectator
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The Good Life simply wasn't very good
A new documentary is to be screened later this year celebrating 50 years of everybody's favourite 1970s sitcom The Good Life. I will not be joining in with the festivities. During the two-hour show, 85-year-old Penelope Keith, who played the irascible Margo Leadbetter, will revisit some of the original locations, including Kewferry Road in Northwood, which stood in for fictional Acacia Avenue in Surbiton – I can feel your excitement growing. The producers have also promised to recreate some of the creaky old sets – OK, calm down at the back. While I'm all for a bit of nostalgia, do we really need to keep reminding ourselves how innocent TV sitcoms were before alternative comedy took a rubber sledgehammer to anything produced before 1979? 'I'm not watching the bloody Good Life,' screamed an incensed Vivian in an episode of The Young Ones. 'It's so bloody nice… confirming the myth that everyone in Britain is a loveable middle-class eccentric.' I'm afraid I'm with Viv on this one. For me, it wasn't just The Good Life's cardboard sets that wobbled but the entire flimsy concept. Margo and Jerry Leadbetter and their new age neighbours, Tom and Barbara Good (surely one of the weakest title puns ever), were certainly loveable, but they felt more like upper-middle-class Hampstead types than drab suburbanites stuck in dead-end jobs. Margo was supposed to be a middle-class snob with delusions of grandeur, but she looked and sounded like a proper aristocrat with her brusque demeanour and cut-glass accent. Unlike Alison Steadman's brilliant turn as Bev in Abigail's Party, Mike Leigh's tragic take on sweaty middle-class angst, Margo never had the contorted vowels and carefully concealed coarseness that made Bev so excruciatingly authentic. Margo just felt like a dotty dowager who'd accidentally wandered into a house full of naff Dralon furniture. No wonder she looked so fed up. And was anyone surprised when Ms Keith went on to play Lady Fforbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born, a part far more in keeping with her style? Felicity Kendal's Barbara also felt hopelessly out of place with her scrummy head-girl cutesiness and Sloaney-haired confidence – again, hardly your typical Surbiton type. We all fancied Babs, but did anyone believe she had sacrificed everything for the sake of the planet? As for the urbane Jerry, I didn't buy for one moment that he worked for a two-bit company designing plastic toys for cereal packets – it wasn't even an amusing conceit. The late Paul Eddington, a fine actor, imbued Jerry with the easy wit and debonair charm of a country squire or possibly a gentleman sleuth; he'd have made an interesting Bond for sure – but a humble draughtsman from the arse end of south-west London? Gimme a break. And if Felicity Kendal's treacly Barbara and Richard Briers's winsome Tom had been so keen on self-sufficiency, why didn't they just sell up and move to a smallholding in Suffolk? Neither couple appeared to have any children, so what were they even doing festering in the drab 'burbs? Looking back, nothing about the series rang true. The idea that installing a mangy goat and a couple of pigs in a suburban garden meant you never had to go shopping again was for the birds. Speaking of which, Margo would surely have had the Goods evicted on discovering they had named their recently acquired cockerel Lenin. The noise! The politics! No wonder Margo and Jerry became so concerned about their potty neighbours. Imprisoning farmyard animals in unsanitary conditions was surely a matter for the RSPCA. And if I'd been Barbara, I'd have told my penny-pinching hubby where to shove his second-hand loom. In 1975, you could pick up an old jumper from Oxfam for 20p, so why put your wife through the hell of having to weave a new one, which would have cost a lot more anyway? Unless, of course, they were virtue signalling their green credentials to those horribly rapacious neighbours: 'Jerry, I've scoured Bond Street,' as Margo famously lamented. A well-executed stereotype can distil the essence of a character, making them a perfect comedy foil 1970s sitcoms lived or died on the quality of their stereotypes. Warren Mitchell's Alf Garnett was completely believable as a cartoon bigot, as was Leonard Rossiter's absurdly over-the-top landlord Rigsby. John Cleese's portrayal of a middle-class hotelier on the verge of a nervous breakdown wasn't exactly subtle, but we instantly recognised the type. Back then, Brits tended to remain in their silos, only glimpsing how the other half lived via TV sitcoms. I doubt many BBC producers had ever met an actual Albert Steptoe, but Wilfrid Brambell's grotesque interpretation of a rag-and-bone man was real enough to carry a brilliant script. The reason The Good Life characters didn't work was because we couldn't place them properly. Nowadays, of course, we flinch at the idea of stereotypes, assuming they will always be crudely drawn depictions of reality. In fact, a well-executed stereotype can distil the essence of a character, making them a perfect comedy foil. With society becoming increasingly atomised, writers have lost the art of creating believable stereotypes; today, we demand complexity and back stories even from two-dimensional superheroes. The genius of 1970s sitcoms was their ability to hold up a madly distorted but instantly recognisable mirror to the tragicomedy we call life. Unfortunately, The Good Life's situational setting failed to match the comedic stereotypes and therefore failed to tell us much about the human condition. That said, I still giggle whenever I think of Margo going head to head with her nemesis Miss Mountshaft, dictatorial leading light of the local music society. With a name like Mountshaft, perhaps 1970s sitcoms weren't quite as innocent as we like to think.
Scotsman
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Borders Book Festival, Melrose review: 'banter and rage'
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... Let's look back a bit. That's what Borders Book Festival director Alistair Moffat, newly minted MBE, is doing in his latest book – looking back at how much Scotland has changed in his lifetime – and in part it's what his festival's stars were doing last weekend. For Sally Magnusson and Kirsty Wark ('just a couple of pensioners talking to another lot of pensioners' – Wark) that meant looking back in banter on a half-century's worth of friendship and curiously intertwining – not to say, now that they're both novelists with the same publisher and even editor – mirroring careers. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Looking back is something Michael Palin has done every day since 6 April 1969, when he first started writing his journal 'to give each day a value': within a week he had the very first meeting about something that became known as Monty Python. 'It worked,' he said, 'because we took extremely silly behaviour very seriously.' Sally Magnusson PIC: Robert Perry / The Scotsman It's a strange art, this ability to be affable in front of 550 people without the slightest trace of ego, but Palin has it in spades. This is a man whom John Cleese ('the funniest man in my generation') wanted to take as his luxury item (because he talks so much it would be like a radio') on Desert Island Discs. The Dalai Lama even said he wanted to be his personal assistant, for heaven's sake. Alison Steadman is less assured talking about herself (who isn't?) but as soon as she started explaining how she got into character for her roles, she was fascinating. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Beverly in Abigail's Party, she said, drew heavily on a makeup artist at Selfridges, while her Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (the one with Colin Firth) owed a lot to her aunt. Jim Swire, played by Firth in the recent BBC drama Lockerbie, says he is still driven by the rage that started when he found out that one of the reasons his daughter Flora found it so easy to book a flight on Pan Am 103 in that normally busy time just before Christmas was that some passengers had been deterred by a US Helsinki embassy warning that a bomb would be put on a US-bound plane from Frankfurt. After 37 years, his demand that we be told all the facts of the case seems irrefutable. What about the future? Andrew Marr joined Magnusson and Moffat in a brilliant, freewheeling discussion of how the media can cope with what Gavin Esler on Friday called 'truth decay' – the way in which lies flourish as we retreat to our own thought-silos and rely on social media for news. Marr is, however, surprisingly upbeat: 24-hour TV news is on its way out, so is Trump, there's still great journalism out there, and it's more accessible than ever. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
Daily Record
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Kym Marsh makes baby news announcement after split from 'soulmate' toyboy
Kym is set to become a grandmother for the fourth time. Kym Marsh has shared some exciting baby news as her daughter Emilie, 27, is pregnant. The Hear'Say icon is set to become a grandmother for the fourth time, sharing the happy news four months on from her split with her boyfriend, Samuel Thomas, 30, who she previously described as her 'soulmate'. The 49-year-old shared an adorable snap of her grandson and granddaughter proudly holding a baby scan, sporting Big Brother and Big Sister alongside it Kym penned: "I am so thrilled to share the news!!! Grandchild number 4… incoming!!! Congratulations to my beautiful daughter @listentoemilie, my wonderful son in law @mikeyhoz and Teddy and Polly!! Can't wait to meet you little one! Many of the actress' friends and followers sent their congratulations to her on the post, one replied: "Congratulations to Emilie, Michael, Polly and Teddy. So thrilled for you all." While a second added: "The best news, so happy for your family." Kym first became a grandparent when she was just 42. However she admitted that she wouldn't go by the name 'Grandma' and so changed it to Yaya on grandson Teddy's request before finding out the name was Greek for 'grandma', according to The Mirror. Speaking to CBeebies about her family, she said: "I always knew I would be a young grandparent because of how old I was when I had my children. "I was 42 when I found out I was going to be a grandparent. It still came as a bit of a shock but I was so excited. "Both me and Emilie's dad were thrilled to bits. Then, of course, meeting Teddy was on another level." She continued: "I'm still a very busy person, but as a grandma I try to make as much time as I can. I like to think they will all grow up knowing that, even though I'm busy, I will always be there for them." Kym's happy news comes four months after she split with actor, Samuel, who she met while performing in 101 Dalmatians The Musical. Despite referring to the 30-year-old as her 'soulmate', Kym split with her co-star after six months. The mum-of-three, who has been married three times, met Samuel after she split up from her third husband, Scott Ratcliff. Fans thought Samuel, who is the same age as Kym's eldest child, David Cunliffe, may propose. But now it's all over, with Kym insisting she'll never walk down the aisle again. Kym opened up to the Independent about her future plans as she got ready to star in a theatre production of Abigail's Party in April, playing Beverley, she said of the seventies - when the play was written: "You were expected to get married back then. It was almost a little girl's dream. 'But not for Kym Marsh. I've been married three times, and three times it's not gone well – so no more for me. Three strikes and I'm out.' 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'.
