Latest news with #TheSlap
ITV News
29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ITV News
One Night starring Jodie Whittaker comes to ITV1 & ITVX this August
ITV1 & ITVX will broadcast One Night, the six-part mystery drama, exclusively for a UK audience in August. Starring Jodie Whittaker, Nicole da Silva (Wentworth, Rush) and Yael Stone (Orange Is the New Black), One Night is the story of three women whose bond was all but destroyed by the traumatic events of one night 20 years ago. Since then, Simone (Nicole da Silva) has harboured secret hopes of becoming a novelist but most of her haphazard attempts have been shoved into her bottom drawer. Now, at the age of 40, she has finally written the one story she could never get out of her mind, and her debut manuscript has become an unexpected overnight success. But it soon becomes apparent that the devastating story the book tells doesn't exclusively belong to her. At the heart of Simone's novel is a tragedy which also happened to Tess (Jodie Whittaker) and Hat (Yael Stone), her two childhood best friends. As it becomes harder to prise fact from fiction, one person's memory and story from another's, the book threatens to derail all their friendships, bringing old traumas to the surface of the small coastal community where they grew up, and stirring its perpetrators, who want to make it all go away. Created and written by the award-winning Emily Ballou (The Slap, Taboo) and directed by Catherine Millar (The Twelve, The Secrets She Keeps) and Lisa Matthews (Doctor Doctor, The PM's Daughter), the full series will be available on the streaming platform. The ensemble cast includes Kat Stewart (Five Bedrooms, Offspring), George Mason (The Power of the Dog), Erroll Shand (Underbelly: Land of the Long Green Cloud), Noni Hazlehurst (A Place To Call Home, Fires), Tina Bursill (Doctor Doctor), William Zappa (The Dry, Miss Fisher & the Crypt of Tears), Damien Strouthos (The Twelve) and Jillian Nguyen (Barons). -ENDS- About ITVX Launched in late 2022, ITVX is UK's freshest streaming service, letting viewers stream new programme exclusives, with adverts, for free; ranging from premium dramas, documentaries, US series, comedy and reality shows to blockbuster films and much, much more. ITVX is the first streaming service in the UK to offer viewers the flexibility to access free content with ads and ad-free paid subscription, all in one place. Paying subscribers also have access to BritBox UK. ITVX live streams must-watch events, from live sport to Love Island, as they are broadcast on ITV's channels. ITVX also offers an ever-changing host of exclusive themed channels in line with viewer preferences and popularity; these constantly evolving pop-up channels provide a scheduled experience through a streaming service.
Sydney Morning Herald
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Secrets and lies: This ABC thriller will make you look at your mother's group differently
LITTLE DISASTERS ★★★★ The darker side of new motherhood, once barely whispered about, has proven a fruitful starting point for any number of psychological parenting thrillers in which mothers fall under suspicion – think Jenna Coleman in The Cry, or Jessica De Gouw in The Secrets She Keeps. This six-part drama, adapted from Sarah Vaughan's novel by Ruth Fowler (who created 2022 corporate thriller Rules of the Game), stars Diane Kruger as Jess, an American living in the comfortable bosom of the middle-class UK, with a young son and a newborn daughter. The series takes the distressing premise of implied post-natal depression and spins outwards to give a gripping account of judgment, betrayal, mistrust and a burning ethical dilemma. The model of neo-maternal perfection in her circle of female friends, whose children were raised alongside one another, from cloth nappies to organic rusks, Jess would seem the last mother to screw up even the tiniest dietary detail. But when she presents her baby, Betsey, to the emergency ward with an unexplained bruise, questions must be asked. And who should be the attending doctor? One of Jess' closest friends, Liz (Jo Joyner). It's here that the narrative goes nuclear in a manner not unlike The Slap – the expected chain of events shattering their friendship and dividing the community, with fingers swiftly pointed in both directions, mothers of all descriptions being so easy to blame. An interview device more commonly used in mockumentaries and reality programs breaks the fourth wall and draws us back to the victim – baby Betsey – and encourages reflection on the conflicting moralities of the situation. While it can initially be jarring to be faced with Liz in scrubs, explaining her side of the story to camera, these interludes serve to ground the swirling emotional fallout. Loading As the unthinkable is investigated, it turns out that – shock! – no mother is perfect. Or father, for that matter. The ensemble (which includes Patrick Balardi, Shelley Conn, Ben Bailey Smith, JJ Field, Stephen Campbell Moore and Emily Taaffe) explores the herd response to such a bombshell dropped in the middle of a seemingly innocuous and untouchable group. How an atmosphere of fear and accusation permeates this polite society is intriguing to watch.
The Age
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Secrets and lies: This ABC thriller will make you look at your mother's group differently
LITTLE DISASTERS ★★★★ The darker side of new motherhood, once barely whispered about, has proven a fruitful starting point for any number of psychological parenting thrillers in which mothers fall under suspicion – think Jenna Coleman in The Cry, or Jessica De Gouw in The Secrets She Keeps. This six-part drama, adapted from Sarah Vaughan's novel by Ruth Fowler (who created 2022 corporate thriller Rules of the Game), stars Diane Kruger as Jess, an American living in the comfortable bosom of the middle-class UK, with a young son and a newborn daughter. The series takes the distressing premise of implied post-natal depression and spins outwards to give a gripping account of judgment, betrayal, mistrust and a burning ethical dilemma. The model of neo-maternal perfection in her circle of female friends, whose children were raised alongside one another, from cloth nappies to organic rusks, Jess would seem the last mother to screw up even the tiniest dietary detail. But when she presents her baby, Betsey, to the emergency ward with an unexplained bruise, questions must be asked. And who should be the attending doctor? One of Jess' closest friends, Liz (Jo Joyner). It's here that the narrative goes nuclear in a manner not unlike The Slap – the expected chain of events shattering their friendship and dividing the community, with fingers swiftly pointed in both directions, mothers of all descriptions being so easy to blame. An interview device more commonly used in mockumentaries and reality programs breaks the fourth wall and draws us back to the victim – baby Betsey – and encourages reflection on the conflicting moralities of the situation. While it can initially be jarring to be faced with Liz in scrubs, explaining her side of the story to camera, these interludes serve to ground the swirling emotional fallout. Loading As the unthinkable is investigated, it turns out that – shock! – no mother is perfect. Or father, for that matter. The ensemble (which includes Patrick Balardi, Shelley Conn, Ben Bailey Smith, JJ Field, Stephen Campbell Moore and Emily Taaffe) explores the herd response to such a bombshell dropped in the middle of a seemingly innocuous and untouchable group. How an atmosphere of fear and accusation permeates this polite society is intriguing to watch.
ABC News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Colm Tóibín on the state of Irish literature, his favourite Australian writers and his latest novel, Long Island
Colm Tóibín — the Booker Prize-shortlisted Irish author — has already decided what he will read on the plane when he travels to Australia this week to attend the Melbourne and Sydney writers' festivals: Helen Garner's three-volume diaries. He's not the only international guest who has used the long flight from the northern hemisphere to read Garner's journals, recently published in the UK in one formidable edition. At Adelaide Writers Week, British writer Charlotte Mendelson told Kate Evans, host of ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf, that's what she read on the plane, too. "Everyone I know is reading Helen Garner," Tóibín tells ABC Arts, speaking via Zoom from his home in LA. Tóibín, who turns 70 this year, is the author of 11 novels, including The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004) and The Testament of Mary (2013), all shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He's well-versed in Australia's local literary scene, partly owing to his one-time side hustle as a publisher. In 2008, Tóibín and his agent, Peter Straus, established a small publishing imprint, Tuskar Rock Press, which published Australian authors, including David Malouf and Tim Winton, in the UK. It also published Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, which turned out to be a barbecue stopper there in the same way it was in Australia. "Every single person that summer was reading The Slap," Tóibín says. While the likes of Tóibín and his compatriots Sebastian Barry, Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney are exalted figures in Australia, Tóibín pushes back against the popular belief that Irish literature exceeds anything on offer here. "We haven't produced Germaine Greer … We haven't produced Robert Hughes. We haven't produced Richard Flanagan," he says. Nor, he says, has Ireland produced a diarist to compare with Helen Garner. In Australia, the author will attend events in Melbourne and Sydney to discuss the state of Irish literature and his latest novel, Long Island, a follow-up to 2009's much-loved Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, set in the 1950s, the young Eilis Lacey leaves her home in the Irish town of Enniscorthy — where Tóibín grew up — to emigrate to the US. Despite her homesickness, she makes a new life in New York, studying bookkeeping and becoming engaged to a charming Italian plumber, Tony Fiorello. But when she returns to Ireland to visit her family, she feels the pull of home and forms a relationship with a local boy called Jim Farrell. Long Island picks up 20 years later. It's 1976, and Eilis is living on Long Island with her husband Tony and their children, Rosella and Larry, when a knock at the door up-ends her life. She finds a man on her doorstep who angrily informs Eilis that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child. He says he will not have the baby in his house and will leave it with Tony's family to raise when it is born. Furious with Tony and suffocated by his close-knit family, who live in neighbouring houses on the same street, Eilis escapes to Ireland to visit her mother for her 80th birthday. There, she reconnects with Jim and imagines another life without Tony. Early on, Tóibín wasn't sure if Brooklyn was a novel or a long short story. He was surprised that a character like the passive, amenable Eilis captured so many readers' hearts. "There's no great heroism there. She's one of those figures who live in the shadows," he says. "She's open to suggestion, meaning people like her, but she does nothing to gain their friendship. She doesn't look in the mirror much. She just wanders about in a sort of dream. She drifts, and I was interested in that idea of drifting." Tóibín based his early sketches of Eilis on his Aunt Harriet, his mother's younger sister, who worked in the office of a mill and played golf, like Eilis's sister Rose. "But at the same time," he says, "the character is invented." Unlike Eilis, Aunt Harriet never left Enniscorthy, which allowed his imagination to take over when Eilis began her new life in the US. "That, in a way, gave me the book," he says. "If [Aunt Harriet] had [left], I would have had too much material, too much fact, too much dull business of days." Tóibín is famously critical of sequels, which he says "destroy" the original book, and he never intended to write a follow-up to Brooklyn. It was only after the idea for the sequel's premise — Eilis's unenviable predicament — lodged in his head that he found himself "drifting" into the story. While many readers relished the chance to sink into Eilis's world once again, a sequel carries the risk of displeasing a readership already invested in a beloved character, as Tóibín has discovered. He has received a surprising number of emails from disgruntled readers voicing their desire for a neater resolution to the second story. But a Hollywood ending was never on the cards. "I wouldn't have done it any other way," Tóibín says. "The problem with this novel is you cannot offer a conclusion that is satisfactory because, no matter what you do, it has to end in compromise and disappointment … I think readers wanted things to end in one way, and they were never going to end in that way, ever." Tóibín is relatively unperturbed by the feedback. "I know this is a very old argument because Henry James [the subject of Tóibín's novel The Master] had the same sort of pushback in 1881 when he published Portrait of a Lady," he says. "People thought the ending … was abrupt and unsatisfactory." It could be that Tóibín is feeling the effects of mainstream success. While Brooklyn was critically acclaimed, making the 2009 Booker longlist, the 2015 film adaptation reached a much larger audience. Brooklyn was a box office success and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (for writer Nick Hornby) and Best Actress (for Saoirse Ryan's commanding portrayal of Eilis). While the film hewed closely to the book, it focused on the love story — would Eilis choose Tony or Jim? — rather than the difficult choice she must make between the safe but limited world of Ireland and the possibility offered by a life far from home in the US. Tóibín, for his part, loved the film, particularly Domhnall Gleeson's portrayal of Jim. Irish characters are often presented as charming but drunk and unstable "maniacs", Tóibín says. But here was Gleeson "showing an Irishman … as stable, trustworthy, tolerant, middle-of-the-road, easy-going". "I got a lot of energy from Domhnall's performance," he says. So, how has Eilis changed in the two decades between Brooklyn's end and Long Island's beginning? Feminism, for one. "While she doesn't refer to it, it makes it all the more real and present. She isn't reading [feminist writers] Kate Millett or Germaine Greer, but something has happened to her," Tóibín says. "For example, she believes her daughter should get the same or even a better education than her son. That's a big moment to say Rosella is going to university … to study law [and Larry isn't]." This newly empowered Eilis asserts her will in other ways, like subscribing to the New York Times, which she reads at home in solitude instead of attending the Fiorello family's boisterous all-in Sunday meals. It's a bold act of independence. In staking out time for herself every week, Eilis draws a boundary with her overbearing in-laws that would be hard to imagine for the passive young woman of Brooklyn. "She's become a much more thoughtful, serious person," Tóibín says. Tóibín, the outgoing Irish Laureate for Fiction, belongs to a literary culture that's celebrated around the world. Theories abound as to why Ireland, a country of 5 million, produces so many talented writers. Some trace the inventiveness of Irish literature to the intermingling of the English and Irish languages over time. Then there's the Irish tradition of storytelling, and the effect of widespread poverty that accompanied colonisation and the 19th-century famine. "We didn't have symphonies; we didn't have Rembrandt," Tóibín says. "Paper and pen are very cheap; you don't need any resources." Also shaping the Irish literary tradition is the culture's penchant for secrecy, a product of centuries of Catholic repression. "There are a great number of things that people don't talk about in Ireland," Tóibín says. "Maybe it's true everywhere, but you notice the distance between speech and thought, and there's always a novel in that." Writers in Ireland benefit from government funding in the form of literary bursaries, a translation fund and the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme, which pays a living wage to eligible artists. A national arts academy, the Aosdána, also pays a stipend to its members to make sure they don't "starve", Tóibín says. When the result is a culture that produces a body of work as powerful as Tóibín's, it's an easy case to make. Colm Tóibín appears at Sydney Writers' Festival (which runs from May 19 to May 27) and in Melbourne (May 19 and May 21), presented by The Wheeler Centre and Melbourne Writers Festival.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
It List: 'The Studio' skewers Hollywood, Ariana Grande radiates with 'Eternal Sunshine Deluxe,' Will Smith mounts comeback with 'Based on a True Story'
Hello, friends! I'm Kelsey, your guide to all things pop culture for Yahoo Entertainment, and this is the It List, our weekly rundown of what's new and notable. In it, I recommend a slew of upcoming releases to watch, stream, listen to, read and binge. I'll walk you through my favorites. When: is now streaming on Netflix. What to know: Stand-up legend Chelsea Handler is back in full force with a new special, in which she dishes about her famous exes and former collaborators. [People] Why I'll be watching: My colleague Taryn Ryder did a hilarious interview with Handler that convinced me she might be one of the funniest people alive. I need to watch to get her full story about playing pickleball with the Bush family. [Yahoo Entertainment] When: is in theaters March 28. What to know: Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd star as a daughter and father who accidentally uncover a unicorn's healing properties while en route to a weekend retreat with Rudd's sinister employer. [Entertainment Weekly] Why I recommend it: My interview with the cast went delightfully off the rails because they kept referencing inside jokes. When you watch the movie, you can tell the actors were having a blast on- and off-screen. [Yahoo Entertainment] When: is out March 28. What to know: Though it's been lovely watching Ariana Grande hold space for Wicked, she's back in pop star mode with six new songs. [Billboard] Why I'll be listening: I haven't missed one of Grande's new releases since Victorious, so I'll be seated for both the new music and its accompanying short film. [Rolling Stone] When: is out March 28. What to know: Almost exactly three years after 'The Slap,' Will Smith is dabbling in music again with his fifth studio album. It has 14 new tracks, which he's calling 'episodes' instead of 'songs.' [Yahoo Entertainment] Why I'll be listening: I trust that the person responsible for the greatest song ever recorded, 'Gettin' Jiggy Wit It,' knows how to make a banger. When: The first two episodes of are now streaming on Apple TV+. What to know: The star-studded series, led by Seth Rogen, parodies the pressure to balance making good movies with making money. [Rolling Stone] Why I recommend it: This was my favorite thing I watched at SXSW — I had to pause my TV to wheeze with laughter several times. If you loved 30 Rock and have the stomach for cringe comedy, this one's for you. [Yahoo Entertainment] We'll be back next week with our latest picks. Want more It List? Click here. Are there other things you're excited about? Let us know in the comments below. If you want more recommendations, check out the Great Pop Culture Debate.
