Latest news with #memes
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Jet2 holiday voiceover star Zoe Lister reveals why she was actually left in tears after the aeroplane advert went viral
Scroll through any social media app this summer and you will be sure to hear one voiceover that has gone completely viral: 'Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday'. The now catchphrase is from one of the airline's TV adverts and the voiceover is recorded by former soap star Zoe Lister. The advert is set to the background of Jess Glynne 's song Hold My Hand and has been used in various humorous memes. And Zoe - who also starred on Hollyoaks as Zoe Carpenter for four years until 2010 - has now opened up in a new interview about her worries when it started to go viral, saying she was left in tears. She told The Sun: 'Things started to get weird last year. People would send me videos of terrible turbulence with my really happy voiceover over the top. 'It was really funny, but I was really certain that Jet2 were going to rebrand. I didn't know what they were thinking about the viral stuff. 'I'm not joking, two weeks ago, I was crying to my husband about the direction of my life. I didn't know where they (Jet2) were going. I was hoping they had a sense of humour.' But she added that the company have chosen to look on the funny side and that it has become a 'positive and joyful' trend. She added: 'I'm very grateful that Jet2 are going to re-sign my contract!' Last week singer Jess finally met Zoe after their aeroplane advert became the latest trend on TikTok. Their viral sound has been all over social media this summer - with users adding the soundtrack over clips of travel fails - and while their advert has become a favourite for influencers, Jess, 35, and Zoe, 43, had never officially met. But last week the duo gave their fans what they wanted as they recreated the advert live in the Capital Breakfast studio. Speaking with Jordan North and Chris Stark on their morning show, Zoe revealed that she has developed such a close bond with the singer that she feels she is 'in her band'. Referring to the song, Jordan said: 'It genuinely is a banger. You go in any club, and it sounds so good.' To which Chris said: 'But it's wild how you always hear that song whenever you go on a plane and then it's in the advert. 'And then, for reasons no one really understands, this summer, it just exploded on TikTok. Has it surprised you how massive this has all gone?' Jess replied: 'Yeah, it's a massive surprise one hundred per cent. It's the most amazing thing to see though. 'It's mad because I feel like when I do my gigs, I feel like when I go to sing the hook, I feel like they're waiting for me to go ''nothing beats a Jet 2 holiday''. It is tempting but I need to take this seriously it can't be a joke.' Chris replied: 'Well, we want to make this moment happen Jess. I'm not going to lie we want to do something very special this morning. 'The whole of the UK is so excited about this. I've had so many messages over the weekend. So, we've not just invited you guys. 'Obviously Rudimental are here, Jess Glynne you're here, we've also invited the voice of the Jet 2 holiday advert. She's here, please welcome to the show Zoe! To which Zoe quipped: 'We're bonded I feel like I'm basically in your band now To finish the conversation, Chris said: 'The dream here is getting you guys to do the sound, that everyone is hearing, live together!' It took a while for people to realise that the voice behind the viral - and widely spoofed - Jet2Holidays advert belongs to the British soap actress. The UK-based organisation's ad, which features popstar Jess's 'Hold My Hand', shows a family of four enjoying a fun-filled holiday abroad while the voiceover skips through the offers and discounts available. The high-energy voice that viewers hear throughout the 30-second 'Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday' ad has become almost as distinctive as Glynne's UK chart-topping track - but until recently people had no idea that it belonged to ex-Hollyoaks actress Zoë. Zoe played Zoe Carpenter in the Channel 4 show between 2006 and 2010, making a brief return in April 2017. A writer as well as a performer, mother-of-two Zoe has also contributed to 56 episodes of the soap, which marked its 30th anniversary this year. Other past acting jobs include roles in Midsomer Murders, Crime Stories and Staff Room. According to her management company Harvey Voice's website, she has been the voice of Jet2Holidays for four years. Yet, it was only relatively recently that the mother-of-two revealed herself as the voice of the ad on TikTok - much to fans' delight.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
"Phew, phew... that's how LeBron felt, how do you like that?" - Lance Stephenson still regrets blowing in LeBron's ear after what a drunk fan did
"Phew, phew... that's how LeBron felt, how do you like that?" - Lance Stephenson still regrets blowing in LeBron's ear after what a drunk fan did originally appeared on Basketball Network. Lance Stephenson never had the kind of career that's getting its own documentary. He bounced around the league, played for eight different teams and the highest scoring average he ever put up came during the 2015-16 season with the Memphis Grizzlies — 14.2 points per game, for those wondering. But for all the midrange pull-ups and flashy ball fakes, there's one moment that will live on long after his stats are forgotten. Yeah, that moment, when Lance leaned over during the 2014 Eastern Conference Finals and gently blew into LeBron James' ear. One of the most "memeable" NBA moments It was both weird and hilarious. And it instantly became one of the most "memeable" moments in NBA history. Game 5, Indiana Pacers vs. Miami Heat, with Indiana trying to avoid elimination. Everyone knew Miami was the better team; they were deeper, more experienced and led by the best player on the planet. But Lance? He wasn't trying to match LeBron bucket for bucket. His job was to disrupt, distract, get in his head any way possible. So he tried the unthinkable and ended up creating a moment that still follows him to this day. During the early 2010s, the Pacers and Heat squared off in what became one of the NBA's fiercest postseason rivalries. On one side, you had Miami's Big 3. On the other, a rugged Indiana squad that prided itself on defense, physicality, and making LeBron's life hell for 48 (and sometimes even more) minutes. And at the center of that chaos was Stephenson, Indiana's wild card, tasked with pestering the King at every turn. But even in that high-stakes environment, nobody expected Lance to pull out that move. And at the time, Stephenson didn't think much of it either. It was just another mind game. Only later did he realize that moment would follow him well beyond the court. "I ain't gonna lie, I regret it sometimes, because we was at the club… and I'm standing at the bar and some drunk dude coming, 'Pheew, pheew,'" recalled Lance while imitating the blowing he felt right next to his ear. "I was like, 'Yo, what the f—-, are you crazy?' and he was like, 'That's how LeBron felt, how do you like that? I was about to go ham! I was about to go crazy on him," the fiery wing added, laughing about it will always be remembered as the guy who did "The Blow" Lance was never the quiet type. From dancing after big shots to staring opponents down after and-ones, even strumming the air like a guitar during player intros. That chaotic, unpredictable energy was baked into his DNA. It's what made him a fan favorite, and depending on the night, either a spark plug or a coach's headache. He might not go down as a guy who led his team to a title or racked up jaw-dropping stats, but he carved out a place in basketball history all the same, just not for the reasons he might've envisioned. Because at the end of the day, he is, and will always be remembered as the guy who blew into the King's ear. And like it or not, that's something, right?This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Jul 23, 2025, where it first appeared.
News.com.au
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
‘Lives have been detonated': Terrifying fact about Coldplay CEO
The memes, oh, the memes! In the week since Andy Byron, the married CEO of Astronomer, and the company's similarly married head of HR Kristin Cabot were caught embracing on camera at a Coldplay concert, the internet has responded by what it does best: Copying and pasting. Heads and TV characters and politicians. The meme output of Coldplaygate has been brilliant, prodigious, hilarious and the whole saga has been social media spawned, obsessively followed schadenfreude-laced soap. In short, the internet has been having a right good old time of it. But with the vast benefit of more than seven days of hindsight, Coldplaygate should scare the pants off all of us. Never before in history has one mistake, one moment, one stupid word or selfish deed or bad choice had the power to tear apart lives and to devastate peoples' worlds. To err is human – but for someone to film that erring and share it and have it so noxiously trend is decidedly 2025. Andy Warhol argued that everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame; today that phrase sounds less like a promise and more like a chilling threat. What Coldplaygate lays bare is the danger of what happens when the very human impulse for shaming and a good old fashioned pile on is combined with the ubiquity of phones and the terrifying swiftness of the algorithm. Virality and internet fame are now so often not a shortcut to celebrity and cash, something to aspire to, but something to fear. What did Bryon and Cabot's lives and families look like at 6pm on Wednesday, July 16, the actual date of the concert? Very cookie-cutter, American dream-ish by all accounts. Spouses, kids, successful careers, impressive houses. Both were (and reportedly are) married and had big jobs at Astronomer, a billion-dollar AI company. Then, in the space of 12 hours, Byron and Cabot went from being anonymous professionals to having hit a degree of internet infamy I'm not sure we've ever seen before. That Wednesday night they attended a Coldplay gig at Boston's Gillette Stadium where the roving 'kiss cam' zeroed in on them as Byron held Cabot in his arms. Their immediate, instinctual reaction was called out by the band's frontman Chris Martin who told the roughly 55,000-strong crowd, 'Either they're having an affair, or they're just very shy.' The kiss cam moment had been filmed by 28-year – old Coldplay fan Grace Springer, who later that night, about 1am Boston time, posted the moment on TikTok. The app's black box algorithm did its thing and within two hours the internet was reportedly already on the case and Byron and Cabot's identities were being ferreted out. By about 3am there was an uptick in Google searches for their names, Business Insider reports. Before Springer had gone to bed the video had 'a couple of thousand views,' she later said. 'I woke up to seven million.' Byron and Cabot's lives and their families' lives, had been detonated and the internet was hoovering it up, devouring the messiness, the stupidity, the ego. The video only spread and spread. By midday on Thursday, less than 12 hours after Springer had posted the clip, it had generated more than 30,000 posts on X, per Insider. A few hours later, by that afternoon, Byron had been Googled more than two million times. Within 48 hours he had resigned as Astronomer CEO and his wife Megan Kerrigan Byron, had removed 'Byron' from her surname on her Facebook account before deactivating the page. Cabot has also since resigned from Astronomer and was photographed this week without her wedding ring. The terminal velocity of this is breathtaking. When Cabot finished her working day on that Wednesday, the day the video was filmed, she was a seemingly normal 56-year-old; now Us Weekly, Page Six and the Daily Mail are doing background pieces about her. The New York Times, The (London) Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN have all reported on this story. On Friday the Mail published photos of her in her garden at home. Just think about that – two weeks ago she was nobody and now she has a paparazzo outside her house. The numbers around the Coldplay video are impossible to rationally compute. On Springer's original account alone, the clip has been viewed more than 127 million times. On the X accounts of leading Gen Z celebrity news sites Pop Craze and Pop Base, it has racked up more than 217 million views. The combined viewer count on these accounts alone – 344 million – equated to every man, woman and child in the United States and four million Canadians having watched Byron and Cabot canoodling. That is a nightmarish level of exposure. George Orwell warned about a dystopian, governmental Big Brother – he could never have predicted that we would be both the watchers and the watched. We are everyone else's big brothers. The degree of surveillance we now all live under, the fact that cameras are everywhere, means that mistakes and bad choices can devastate multiple lives in a way they never have before been able to. RIP privacy. Anywhere and everywhere. Someone is always watching. For a life to change in a moment, it used to take a bad diagnosis, being in the wrong place at a violent time, Mother Nature running her angry course. Now you just need to have someone pointing a phone in your direction at an inopportune moment. What has also become clear in recent days is that Coldplaygate says something about how, in 2025, internet shaming, as New York University professor and investor Scott Galloway has argued, has become a form of group entertainment. Some time around the 900s, the English took a break from getting the plague to invent the stocks. It was about ritualised, communal humiliation and shaming, a community being given permission to jeer and use up rotten spuds, a wrongdoer punished not physically but humiliating them. Coldplaygate is a replay of that, minus the mouldy, lobbable marrows. Who wins here? Byron and Cabot's spouses maybe but what a humiliating, gut punch of a way to learn about alleged infidelity. Even Grace Springer who filmed it and now has more than 51,000 followers (and 11 million likes) has not really tangibly benefited, telling British breakfast TV this week, 'I've actually made no money from the video itself or the views'. This week she added a link to her TikTok account for donations to pay off her reported $121,000 in student loans. She has not revealed if anyone has given her a $1.
South China Morning Post
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
US tech CEO in viral Coldplay concert video resigns
The CEO of an American tech company resigned Saturday after a video of him embracing an alleged colleague at a Coldplay concert went viral and fuelled relentless memes. 'Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met,' New York-based Astronomer said in a statement shared on LinkedIn. 'Andy Byron has tendered his resignation,' the firm said, after previously launching an investigation. During a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts on Wednesday, the jumbotron zoomed in on a man and a woman embracing in the stands. But the canoodling pair appeared shocked and horrified when they spotted themselves on the big screen, with the man ducking out of frame and the woman hiding her face. 'Uh-oh, what? Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy,' joked Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.
Forbes
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Viral Coldplay Kiss Cam Couple Now Stars In A Video Game
The Coldplay kiss cam couple has found themselves at the center of a meme frenzy. The Coldplay concertgoers who sparked an online frenzy this week with their stunned reaction to getting caught cuddling on a jumbotron keep plunging deeper into internet infamy. In addition to spawning countless memes, they're now starring in a video game called 'Coldplay Canoodlers' styled after a retro 16-bit title. 'You're the camera operator and you have to find the CEO and HR lady canoodling,' Jonathan Mann, the game's creator, wrote on X. 'Ten points every time you find them.' In case you've completely avoided social media the last few days and don't know which CEO and HR lady Mann is referring to, here's a quick primer. Footage projected on a giant screen at a Foxborough, Massachusetts, Coldplay concert on Wednesday night captured a happy-looking couple, the man embracing the woman as they swayed to the music. But as soon as the pair spotted themselves in the footage, they separated and tried to hide. She covered her face with her hands and turned her back to the camera, he dove out of frame. The reaction was so theatrical, Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin even delivered commentary from the stage. 'Oh, look at these two. Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy,' Martin joked. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder After a TikTok user reposted the footage — as of this writing, it has been viewed more than 92 million times — Internet sleuths quickly outed the pair as Andy Byron, CEO of AI startup Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the company's chief people officer overseeing human resources. Byron is married, but not to Cabot, and she is his employee. The New York-based data infrastructure company has launched a formal investigation and placed Byron on leave. 'Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability,' the company said in a LinkedIn statement. It's a messy situation, to say the least, characterized by the kind of personal drama and over-the-top antics tailor made for meme enthusiasts, especially those reveling in schadenfreude watching an allegedly cheating spouse get caught and publicly shamed. All over the internet, people are recreating the couple's snuggle-and-duck routine. 'I wanted to see how fast I could vibe code a simple game based on a viral moment,' Mann wrote on X on Friday morning. What Is Vibe Coding? Vibe coding refers to writing software with the help of large language models. Andrej Karpathy, a former head of AI at Tesla and an ex-researcher at OpenAI, coined the term in a social media post to describe a style of coding 'where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists.' In essence, vibe coding focuses on the 'vibe" of the software more than the code. Mann used ChatGPT to make the 'Coldplay Canoodlers' game, inputting such prompts as: 'Can you generate an 8-bit pixel image of a stadium concert viewed from the stage' and 'there should be a large jumbotron somewhere up in the stadium seats.' He also entered rough drawings of the visual style he imagined. A songwriter who lives in Hartford, Connecticut, Mann is best known as the 'Song a Day Guy' for writing daily tunes and posting them to his social media accounts and YouTube channel, where has almost 75,000 subscribers. He's been posting songs daily for 17 years now, with some of them commenting on news events or notable figures. This is the second game Mann has vibe-coded. The first celebrated his 6,000th daily composition. 'Coldplay Canoodlers' is no 'Elder Scrolls' or 'Red Dead Redemption' — all you have to do it is move your mouse to search the digital crowd and hold the target for a second to win the points. But the game captures one of the The response to the game, he said in an interview, has been unexpected. 'I have gone viral many times with my songs,' he said. It's 'very strange to have it happen with a game I made in four hours.' Jonathan Mann went back and forth with ChatGPT to vibe-code a video game based on a viral moment.
