Latest news with #sketches
News24
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News24
My identikit sketches for the cops help survivors of crime to heal
'It's not the artistic life he imagined but Nicholas Marobane's sketches for the police have helped the 39-year-old to find purpose and meaning. 'I grew up in Burgersfort, Limpopo, and I've always loved to draw. In primary school I divided my books in half and the one half was just drawings. Drawings, drawings and drawings. I gave my parents a hard time. They couldn't understand why this child just wanted to draw. I used everything I could get my hands on to draw – crayons, pens, pencils, it really didn't matter to me. Drawing was what I wanted to do with my life. READ MORE | Cuff me, constable! YOU meets the hottie cop who made the internet blush People from Burgersfort don't really go and study after school but I wanted to see if I could do something more with my art after all these years of my parents and teachers telling me to focus on my schoolwork and draw less. I submitted a portfolio of my work to the University of Tshwane in Pretoria and was accepted to study fine art. It was exciting to go to the big city after Burgersfort and being away from home was quite an experience. I got my degree at 24 but I had to face a few harsh realities. I didn't realise there are so few people who care about art. It's actually sad that so many young people finish studying and start looking for work with bright eyes and then battle so much. I just went back to Limpopo. What was I supposed to do? There was a position open as a clerk at the Lyndenburg SAPS and I applied because I needed a job. I got the job and a while later the station commander told me I should try to get a foot in the door at the forensic department. They asked me do a course on facial recognition software. Then a position opened up in the forensic department in Polokwane as a sketcher, compiling pictures of suspects with the help of facial recognition software. I applied and here I am now – an artist in the police. My job isn't easy. I'm privileged to be able to draw for a living but I work with people who've been through terrible trauma. I sit with them and I have to work gently. When I interview a victim, I try to make them feel comfortable. I tell a story or something, as if I'm sharing their experience. I find it helps. READ MORE | THIS LIFE | I'm a magician and the looks on kids' faces make it so fulfilling When I've refreshed their memory and a sketch is finished, there's a kind of relief. The victims are happier when we're done. It sometimes feels like I'm applying a form of trauma therapy. We have a connection. I focus on eyes in my sketches. If the eyes don't have emotion, it's not a good likeness. I can try to capture every detail of the person – their scars, their hairstyle, their wrinkles – but if the eyes don't have emotion, it just looks like a caricature. I bring murderers and rapists to life. Honestly, it bothers me. I'm very, very fortunate to have the job I have. Everyone else in the forensic department struggles more than I do. They literally have to go and photograph bodies. In my art there are a lot of themes of chains. We're all tied down by something. In this country – corruption, poverty, injustice. I see that it gnaws at my colleagues as well. When I close my eyes, I see an exhibition in which I can tell all of their stories. My personal art is a little more abstract compared to my sketches for the police. I break away from symmetrical precision. I try to sketch people who could represent anyone. Work that people can buy, hang in their homes, and it represents something of right and justice. That's what I'm trying to do with my shop in town, EthosArt. I may be a policeman, but I'm an artist at heart. Art is life and if we let the arts die, then we die. Our ubuntu dies. If we stop seeing humanity in the world, humanity is forgotten. Doing nothing with my talent would make me feel like I'm contributing to everything that's being swept under the rug. I'm happy. I'm privileged. I was put on this Earth to do something with my talent and I think I'm doing it. This life is special. This life is sad, it's unfair, but it's the life we've been given. We have to appreciate every moment of it.'
Telegraph
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Racial slurs, alien sex: The shocking return of politically incorrect comedy
Bad Thoughts is a new Netflix comedy offering, of the particular kind described as 'adult' but which is actually very childish, or at least adolescent-ish. It has a simple premise over its six bite-size episodes, each of which is an easily gulped down 15 minutes. In every instalment of Bad Thoughts, star Tom Segura takes a universal theme – love, family, communication – and serves up sketches to illustrate just about the crudest and most unpleasant aspects of that subject that he, or indeed you, could imagine; a cancer patient's last wish is to be vigorously 'banged' by a man her husband despises; a virtual reality video game where children play aliens raping humans; a gym where every man but our hero possesses an enormous penis. Segura is an American stand-up comedian, podcast host and Joe Rogan regular with a large and dedicated following. He has made his name saying naughty things and using naughty words in the process. It's all in the best tradition of what our own, somewhat more genteel, humorists Flanders and Swann described many years ago as the 'pee po willy bum drawers' school of humour. Segura is one of those men whose sense of the witty is forever trapped somewhere between his 13th and 14th birthday, when the darkness of the world is still fresh and new and exciting, and funny. Bad Thoughts is crawling with bestiality, abuse, racism, castration, involuntary bowel movements, age, terminal illness and death. Segura is also one of those curious straight men who never stops talking about the ins and outs of gay sex. (Seriously – there is more man-love in Bad Thoughts than in the entire runs of Heartstopper or Queer as Folk.) And there's nothing inherently wrong with any of that overgrown bike shed smut; it's a rich vein that has its place in the scheme of comedic things. As they enter their teens, children pick up on adults' discomfort around certain things, and it's that discomfort which is funny, not the things themselves. Exactly how funny you find it varies to taste. Segura's maleness and largeness are very unusual on modern TV, and they make you realise how much a person's physicality characterises how you react to them. Bad taste is often made tasteful, or at least acceptable, by camp and physical slightness – eg Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and John Waters. Segura is a very manly man, so there's no raised ironic eyebrow here. My own revulsion reflex kicked in a couple of times across the course of Bad Thoughts. Episode four contains two of the most disgusting things I have ever seen on a screen (all shot gorgeously in pin-sharp black-and-white), but as they involve joke-destroying spoilers I shan't detail them here. Let's just say I certainly felt my head turning involuntarily away from the TV when they occurred. You get three or four sketches in each episode, always starring Segura, either as a fictionalised version of himself or as a character. Segura appears as himself on a plain white set between them, talking to camera to guide you along. The sketches themselves often have the form of shaggy dog stories; they feel like story-telling jokes of the old school, and good ones, but acted out. This means that their pay-off punchlines are often the funniest lines, which is rare in TV sketch comedy. Paying off a sketch is something that has defeated many grand masters of the TV sketch form, who were forced to disrupt the accepted framework to get around it. Monty Python's Flying Circus avoided punchlines entirely; The Fast Show dispensed with everything except the punch line. In a strange way, despite its maximum gross-out quality and unsettling vibe, Bad Thoughts thus feels quite traditional. The straightforwardness and directness of its format put me in mind of the longer items in ancient, unpretentious sketch shows like Naked Video or, though Bad Thoughts has no directly topical element, Not The Nine O'Clock News. There is nothing strikingly new or innovative in the material, but that's OK, there doesn't have to be. Is it funny though? Yes, and often very. There are several moments where I thought 'well this one isn't going anywhere' and then found I'd been diverted in completely the wrong direction. So when the big laugh came, it came with the delicious frisson of the well-turned twist. But this isn't consistent. Bad Thoughts is patchy, and you sometimes find yourself wishing it was a bit cleverer. A protracted scenario about a failing country singer who kidnaps hundreds of his fans and imprisons them in a camp that's a cross between Squid Game and Pasolini's Salò is just too slight, and – perversely – too emotionally real to carry its epic length. A Steven Seagal spoof just isn't good enough, and seems like it dropped in from 2005, and indeed from another kind of show entirely. Segura is an assured performer and actor, but the actual actors who appear with him are often better. Robert Iler – the hapless AJ of The Sopranos, now all grown up – features in three interconnected sketches, and his vulnerability makes him a far more likeable and relatable 'hero' than Segura, who looks like he could kill an ox with one punch. You really feel for Robert Iler's character, which makes it funnier. It's interesting that Netflix is now the only broadcaster who will still go this near the knuckle. The BBC, not so very long ago, produced Julia Davis's Nighty Night – with its extremely uncomfortable jokes about disability and cancer, and a character who shoved cat food where it was never meant to go. Davies now does her deliciously icky thing on the Dear Joan And Jericha podcast, and the BBC's new comedy line-up, featuring Michael Palin and Rob Brydon, looks positively trad. (Which in itself is a relief, given their recent propensity for throwing wads of cash at talentless drag acts.) There's a sketch in Bad Thoughts – one of the funniest – about a school play which goes horribly wrong, with primary age kids re-enacting the horrors of American troops in the Vietnam war, complete with casual racism, to the excruciating embarrassment of their parents. It's no more unpalatable than the average sketch in Little Britain, but it's unthinkable that the BBC of today would even contemplate okaying it. Netflix is also the home of lots of cancelled or semi-cancelled comedians that nobody else will touch; Tony Hinchcliffe, Dave Chappelle, Shane Gillis, Matt Rife, Ricky Gervais and Louis CK. The standard across these names is wildly variable, but it seems regrettable that they have been corralled into one corner. There is good taste bad taste, and bad taste bad taste. Bad Thoughts is very much the latter. I tend to the Victoria Wood theory that dark humour is easy, and that it is much, much harder to create fun and uplifting comedy, or at least fun and uplifting comedy that is any good. As George Orwell said of Salvador Dalí, '… suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow … There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people… Along those lines you can always feel yourself original.' But. Bad Thoughts arrives at a very particular cultural moment, as what we have known – and either loved or hated – as ' woke ' seems to be dying out, or at least retreating a little. So different considerations apply. Segura is a hate figure for the so-called woke American left, who accuse him of all the usual tedious thought and speech crimes. "The best thing to do as an artist is to acknowledge the dark thoughts." @tomsegura & I discussed the art and science of humor and why the "dark topic comics" are such good people offstage and the onstage "ultra wholesome" comedians often are just the opposite offstage. — Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. (@hubermanlab) May 20, 2025 The speed of woke's dissolution has been quite startling. Between the production and release of Bad Thoughts, things have shifted so much that there are several sketches that already seem dated. The two or three scenarios that focus on disputes over unsayable words and identity groups are by far the show's weakest moments – but just a year or so ago they would've been among its highlights. It feels like it's time to move on. We have all wasted so much time with the rubbish of the last decade and the posing ninnies who pushed it. Woke is (possibly was) nihilistic nastiness disguised, very badly, as 'kindness' and 'inclusivity'. We all know that now, and it's no longer quite so hard to point it out. This war may be over, at least in that form. Rather like post-war Hollywood, we need some affable fun again now. Yes, there is a certain release and relief about this possible return to cultural sanity, but that palls quickly. We deserve to forget. We can start, hopefully, to depict the world honestly again, not trying either to correct it, or correct the correction. What this means for purveyors of bad taste like Tom Segura is that they need to find new unsayables and fresh unpalatables. And there will, inevitably, always be new ones.
Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Zara Gladman: ‘My coffin will be sent off the nearest waterfall'
Zara Gladman is a Glaswegian comedian best known for her online sketches about a West End mum. She was recently shortlisted for the Billy Connolly Spirit of Scotland award and has a new sketch show coming to BBC Scotland. Eating mince and tatties from a cup on Largs beach during a nursery trip. My dad's family are from Elgin, so we'd drive up there a lot and visit beaches like Lossiemouth and Hopeman. The first time I went, aged seven months, my mum had refused to travel any sooner because of the risky weather. During that trip, we were caught in a blizzard, the windscreen wipers snapped off and the AA had to weld one back on so we could finish the journey. Our
Sky News
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News
Everything you need to know about
In America, Saturday Night Live has been a television institution for the past 50 years – and now it's being given a makeover for its first foray over the Atlantic to the UK. Each Saturday night, a celebrity host will take to the stage in London to present a string of satirical sketches alongside the SNL team of stand-up comedians and improv comics. Through the sketches, the team tackle the latest political and pop culture news through a skewed, hilarious lens. Alongside each celebrity guest host will be a chart-topping star who will perform throughout the night as well. SNL creator Lorne Michaels is set to executive produce Saturday Night Live UK, in addition to continuing to executive produce SNL on NBC in the US. SNL UK will be produced by Broadway Video and Universal Television Alternative Studio's UK production team. Cecile Frot-Coutaz, CEO of Sky Studios and Chief Content Officer at Sky, said of the new project: 'For over 50 years Saturday Night Live has held a unique position in TV and in our collective culture, reflecting and creating the global conversation all under the masterful comedic guidance of Lorne Michaels. 'The show has discovered and nurtured countless comedy and musical talents over the years and we are thrilled to be partnering with Lorne and the SNL team to bring an all-British version of the show to UK audiences next year – all live from London on Saturday night!'
Associated Press
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Riad Tizwa Marrakech Unveils 1960 Sketches by Pop Art Pioneer Derek Boshier
Riad Tizwa Marrakech Unveils Rare 1960 Sketches by Pop Art Pioneer Derek Boshier 'We are thrilled to show the drawings Derek made in the 19060's on one of his first trips abroad from the UK. His observations captured the beauty and creativity of Morocco.'— Daniel Bee MARRAKECH, MOROCCO, May 8, 2025 / / -- Riad Tizwa Marrakech Unveils Rare 1960 Sketches by Pop Art Pioneer Derek Boshier Hotel Riad Tizwa in Marrakech is honored to present a newly unveiled exhibition of 12 rare sketches by the late British pop artist Derek Boshier, created during his formative 1960 visit to Marrakech. These works, never before exhibited and shown for the first time in Morocco, offer a unique glimpse into the early vision of an artist who would become a defining voice in British pop art. Boshier, who studied alongside David Hockney at the Royal College of Art in London, emerged in the 1960s as a critical observer of the Americanization of British culture. His early works, such as Special K and England's Glory, juxtaposed consumer imagery with political commentary, establishing his reputation for incisive social critique. Throughout his career, Boshier expanded his practice across various media, including painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, photography, film, video, assemblage, and installations. His collaborations with musicians like David Bowie—designing album covers for Lodger (1979) and Let's Dance (1983)—and The Clash further cemented his influence on contemporary culture. Boshier's works are held in prestigious collections worldwide, including the Tate Britain, MoMA New York, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Boshier passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles on September 5, 2024, at the age of 87. His death was noted in major publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent, highlighting his significant contributions to the art world and his collaborations with prominent figures in music and art The unveiling at Riad Tizwa coincides with the riad's partnership with the prestigious 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Marrakech - the leading international art fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. This partnership underscores Riad Tizwa's commitment to fostering cultural dialogue and supporting the arts within the vibrant context of Marrakech. Founded in London in 2013 and now held annually in New York, London, and Marrakech, 1-54 has become a vital platform for emerging and established African artists, curators, and collectors. Marrakech's edition brings together galleries, institutions, and thought leaders for a vibrant, city-wide celebration of African creativity and innovation. Riad Tizwa is honoured to work with 1-54. To arrange an appointment to see the works - please email the hotel directly. Riad Tizwa Marrakech originally opened in 2006 and very quickly became one of the must stay hotels in the Red City. The heady combination of environmental consciousness, being located in the most upmarket neighbourhood of Dar El Bacha - and an aesthetic which ensures every bedroom is unique and warm, made Riad Tizwa an instant hit with discerning travelers from around the globe. This recent refurbishment introduced enhanced environmental features including state of the art solar panels and new sustainable local craft decorations - supporting Moroccan artisans, and also deepen the unique authentic aesthetic. The new bedroom on the ground floor is perhaps the most romantic in the riad – with both a walk-in shower and luxurious bath tub, and the new roof terrace, brings fresh stunning views across the medina adding to the relaxing and tranquil atmosphere. In 2008, the hotel received the esteemed Clef Verte International eco-label and was amongst the first Riads in Morocco to achieve the sustainable business practice award. Daniel Bee Daniel Bee PR +1 310 8542834 email us here Visit us on social media: Instagram Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content 'as is' without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
