Latest news with #HarryPotter
BBC News
24 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
What's it like going to school on the Harry Potter set
While many children dream of going to school at Hogwarts, for a lucky few, it is a has begun on a new Harry Potter TV reboot at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, and a temporary school has been built so hundreds of child actors can keep up with real lessons while pretending to learn magical Miles, who doubled for Emma Watson's Hermione in the original films, remembers wearing her Hogwarts uniform while having lessons on said: "We're all there with full hair and makeup. At one point, Hermione has cuts from the Whomping Willow, you'll just be like sitting in your class with a fake nose bleed and a lip wound." As child actors were only allowed to film for four hours, doubles were used to capture shots where they were seen from behind or far the three leads had private lessons, other members of the supporting cast attended classrooms down the corridor from the dressing young actors would attend the school for most of the academic year, as they might be needed at any Year 6 and Year 9, the young actress only went to her normal school in Barnet, north London, for 15 said: "To get your license to work, your school has to be on board with you having that time off and working... Which actually at first my school weren't that happy with me doing."Initially, her school only released her for 30 of the 180 days Warner Bros had requested for filming, but Mrs Miles' parents fought for her to have the opportunity. Due to their filming schedule, children had lessons at different times, but every child on set had to spend a minimum of three hours a day in recalled: "Assistant directors will be checking how many hours you've done because if you haven't hit your three, then you're going to have to go back into school for like half an hour before you can go down to set."But say you've done your hours and they're like 'no we don't need you again for another hour,' you'll carry on schooling."Lessons were monitored by runners who tracked each half-hour a child spent in lessons or on breaks, she explained. Class sizes were small, and Mrs Miles remembers there being about seven pupils at most on busy days, much smaller than the potential 600 students at the school being used for the reboot."You could be in with anybody," she said. "It wasn't a set a set class, if that makes sense."She'd often find herself sharing lessons with young stars of the film, such as Tom Felton, Matthew Lewis or Alfred student had an independent curriculum, and teachers from their original schools would tell the tutors on set what each child needed to be Miles said: "They wouldn't stand at the front and be like 'this is what we're doing today'. They would individually give you their attention and set you on your task, so we'd all be doing different work." She praised her teachers who kept lessons engaging and added: "They really tried to make sure we had fun and we were doing all the things that we should be doing, which I think was probably really hard for them. "They were really understanding of the fact that we were also working, which is quite weird, having a group of like 10, 11, 12-year-olds who are also working full-time. "If you're at school, you're there nine to three, but if you're filming, you're there a lot longer. I think they were really understanding with the wide range of emotions you feel as a child working on a film set." Now, a new group of children are heading to the same film studio to shoot a new version of the JK Rowling books, including 11-year-old Dominic McLaughlin as the title Miles, who now lives only a short drive away in St Albans, advised any young actors joining the wizarding world to "enjoy it"."It's really a once-in-a-lifetime thing working on something like Harry Potter- well, it might not be now," she laughed."But it's a really unique experience, and it's kind of weird because when you're in it, it just becomes normal life. "When you come out the other side, you look back at it and you're like 'wow, that was so amazing,' the things we got to do, the different experiences and all the incredibly talented people, which sort of goes over your head as a child."The best thing about being a child is you just take it all in for what it is, but I think really just enjoy it, make the most of every opportunity that you have there." Follow Beds, Herts and Bucks news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
When did double-barrelled surnames stop being posh?
When the lead singer of Bob Vylan's name was revealed, it caused a fair amount of amusement. This anti-establishment musician who hit the headlines after ranting about the Israel at Glastonbury is actually called…Pascal Robinson-Foster. 'A posh double-barrel name is perhaps not the best handle for a self-styled Rasta radical. So he goes by the name Bobbie Vylan instead,' wrote veteran broadcaster Andrew Neil. But while it's vaguely amusing that Vylan's real name is rather less 'rock-n'roll' than his stage act suggests, Neil got one thing wrong: the era of double-barrelled surnames signifying poshness is over. Once upon a time, hyphenated surnames were a way of aristocrats displaying their social cachet. The upper class is full of Parker-Bowleses and Spencer-Churchills. The list of current earls in the Peerage of England includes a Chetwynd-Talbot, a Hastings-Bass, a Fiennes-Clinton, and an Ashley-Cooper. When, in 1964, the fourteenth Earl of Home faced the fourteenth Mr Wilson, it can't have been lost on the electorate that the former was a Douglas-Hume. It is no accident that the poshest pupil at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books is named Justin Finch-Fletchley. But times have changed, and now double-barrelled surnames can be more of a disadvantage than an advantage. Double-barrelled names have more recently reared their head as a political liability. When Annunziata Rees-Mogg, Jacob's sister and sometime Brexit Party MEP, embarked upon her political career, then-Tory leader David Cameron famously advised her to change her name to Nancy (also, curiously, the name of his own daughter: yes, the one he left at a pub). Less well-known is that Cameron also reportedly told her to drop the Rees; Nancy Mogg might have been the future, once. Under Cameron's leadership, there were reports that other Tory candidates were told to go single barrel: thus Simon Radford-Kirby became Simon Kirby, and candidate Scott Seaman-Digby became Scott Digby. But while politicians were dropping the hyphens from their names, the same wasn't true in other fields. In football, there has been a crop of stars with double-barrelled names, including Trent Alexander-Arnold, James Ward-Prowse, Emile Smith Rowe, and Dominic Calvert-Lewin. It is a sign of the times that, whereas the men's and women's England football squads contain between them five double-barrelled names, Britain's Olympic equestrian team – surely the poshest sport – has none. There are proportionately far more double-barrelled surnames in elite football than rowing. All this reflects a wider trend. In 2017, it was reported that 11 per cent of couples now take on a double-barrelled name on marriage. It is difficult to work out what's driving this change. Is it that double-barrelled names are more common in mixed-race families (like Bobby Vylan's own), because both sides wish to preserve their cultural heritage? The shifting politics of double-barrelled names might also reflect an increase in single-parent families, or other deviations from the traditional norms of the nuclear family; single mothers quite understandably want to share a name with their children. Double-barrelled surnames can also carry some advantages. Aside from appearing to promote equality between the sexes, they also make people more distinctive, lowering the risk of confusion. Hence the full-back Kyle Walker-Peters, who plays for Southampton, is not the right-back Kyle Walker, who recently signed for Burnley. Names can still be signals of social class, with all that this implies: there is every difference, in the Shire of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, between the humble Bagginses and their snooty Sackville-Baggins cousins. But one should not be deceived by appearances: Ainsley Maitland-Niles could have been an excellent Victorian high court judge. In fact, he used to play for Arsenal.
Boston Globe
12 hours ago
- General
- Boston Globe
Tear it down, they said. He just kept building.
Advertisement From the ninth floor, he surveyed the sturdy, standardized apartment buildings in the distance where his neighbors live. 'They say the house is shabby, that it could be blown down by wind at any time,' he said — an observation that did not seem altogether far-fetched when I visited him last month. 'But the advantage is that it's conspicuous, a bit eye-catching. People admire it,' he added. 'Other people spend millions, and no one goes to look at their houses.' Chen's house is so unusual that it has lured gawkers and even tourists to his rural corner of Guizhou province, in southwestern China. It evokes a Dr. Seuss drawing, or the Burrow in 'Harry Potter.' Many people on Chinese social media have compared it to 'Howl's Moving Castle.' Advertisement To the casual observer, the house may be a mere spectacle, a Frankensteinian oddity. To Chen, it is a monument to his determination to live where — and how — he wants, in defiance of the local government, gossiping neighbors and seemingly even common sense. He began modifying his family home in 2018, when the authorities in the city of Xingyi ordered his village demolished to make way for a resort they planned to build. Chen's parents, farmers who had built the house in the 1980s, thought that the money that officials were offering as compensation for the move was too low and refused to leave. When bulldozers began razing their pomegranate trees anyway, Chen rushed home from Hangzhou, the eastern city where he had been working as a package courier. Along with his brother, Chen Tianliang, he started adding a third floor. At first, the motivation was in part practical: Compensation payment was determined by square footage, and if the house had more floors, they would be entitled to more money. They visited a secondhand building materials market and bought old utility poles and red composite boards — cheaper than the black ones — and hammered, screwed and notched them together into floorboards, walls and supporting columns. Then, Chen, who had long had an amateur interest in architecture, wondered what it would be like to add a fourth floor. His brother and parents thought there was no need, so Chen did it alone. Then, he wondered about a fifth. And a sixth. 'I just suddenly wanted to challenge myself,' he said. 'And every time I completed my own small task or dream, it felt meaningful.' Advertisement He was also fueled by resentment toward the government, which kept serving him with demolition orders and sending officials to pressure his family. By that point, their house was virtually the only one left in the vicinity; his neighbors had all moved into the new apartment buildings about 3 miles away. (Local officials have maintained to Chinese media that the building is illegal.) Mass expropriations of land, at times by force, have been a widespread phenomenon in China for decades amid the country's modernization push. The homes of those who do manage to hold out are sometimes called 'nail houses,' for how they protrude like nails after the area around them has been cleared. Still, few stick out quite like Chen's. A former mathematics major who dropped out of university because he felt that higher education was pointless, Chen spent years bouncing between cities, working as a calligraphy salesperson, insurance agent and courier. But he yearned for a more pastoral lifestyle, he said. When he returned to the village in 2018 to help his parents fend off the developers, he decided to stay. 'I don't want my home to become a city. I feel like a guardian of the village,' he said, over noodles with homegrown vegetables that his mother had stir-fried on their traditional brick stove. In recent years, the threat of demolition has become less immediate. Chen filed a lawsuit against the local government and the developers, which is still pending. In any case, the proposed resort project stalled after the local government ran out of money. (Guizhou, one of China's poorest and most indebted provinces, is littered with extravagant, unfinished tourism projects.) Advertisement But Chen has continued building. The house is now a constantly evolving display of his interests and hobbies. On the first floor, Chen hung calligraphy from artists he befriended in Hangzhou. On the fifth, he keeps a pile of faded books, mostly about history, philosophy and psychology. The sixth floor has potted plants and a plank of wood suspended from the ceiling with ropes, like a swing, to hold a mortar and pestle and a teakettle. On the eighth, a gift from an art student who once visited him: a lamp, with the shade made of tiny photographs of his house from different angles. With each floor that he added, he moved his bedroom up, too: 'That's what makes it fun.' (His parents and brother sleep on the ground floor and rarely make the vertiginous ascent.) Each morning, he inspects the house from top to bottom. To reinforce the fourth and fifth floors, he hauled wooden columns up through the windows with pulleys. He added the buckets of water throughout the house after a storm blew out a fifth-floor wall. Eventually, he tore down most of the walls on the lower floors, so that wind could pass straight through the structure. 'There's a law of increasing entropy,' Chen said. 'This house, if I didn't care for it, would naturally collapse in two years at most.' He added, 'But as long as I'm still standing, it will be too.' Maintenance costs more time than money, he said. He estimated that he had spent a little more than $20,000 on building materials. He has also spent about $4,000 on lawyers. His family has been, if not enthusiastic about, at least resigned to Chen's whims. His parents are accustomed to curious visitors, at least a few every weekend. His brother came up with the idea of illuminating the house at night with lanterns. They have all united against their fellow villagers, who they say accuse them of being nuisances, or greedy. Advertisement 'Now we just don't go over there,' said Tianliang, Chen's brother. 'There's no need to listen to what they say about us.' In town, some residents said exactly what the Chens predicted they would: that the house would collapse any day; that they were troublemakers. (The local government erected a sign near the house warning of safety hazards.) But others expressed admiration for Chen's creativity. Zhu Zhiyuan, an employee at a local supermarket, said he had been drawn in when passing by on his scooter and had ventured closer for a better look. Still, he had not dared get too close. 'There are people who say it's illegal,' he said. Then he added, 'But if they tore it down, that would be a bit of a shame.' This article originally appeared in
CTV News
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Wizards & Wands soirée in Sudbury supports families of child with cancer
Northern Ontario Watch Sudbury's 'Wizards and Wands' event returns Saturday, raising funds for families of children with cancer. The Harry Potter-themed soirée features magic, games, vendors and more. Last year's event raised $10,000, with organizers aiming to double that this year. Tickets are still available.
The Irish Sun
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
English city that was once the country's ‘oldest town' is home to unique Barbie house and Harry Potter style train ride
DID you know that Colchester was once known for being England's oldest town? Despite this, it was actually given city status just two years ago as part of The Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations. 8 Colchester is also home to a train station that is barely used Credit: Alamy 8 The Chappel Viaduct looks like the bridge Hogwarts Express drive over in Harry Potter Credit: Alamy Colchester has a history stretched back thousands of years and was one of the very first Roman cities. The Essex city is also home to a train station that is barely used, and looks like something from Harry Potter. Chappel & Wakes Colne railway station in Colchester is around an hour from London, travelling to Liverpool Street station. Compared to some other regional train stations around the country, this one doesn't have many passengers. Read More on Essex Just 28,000 people use it a year, working out to around 77 passengers a day. The train station is right next to the Chappel Viaduct, with the huge brick structure built in the 1840s and measuring 1,066ft. It looks very similar to the Glenfinnan Viaduct in Scotland, which was used in Nearby is The Swan Inn pub right on the river, and their beer garden is found underneath the viaduct. Most read in City breaks And there is more history to Colchester too with it also being the place where the oldest hot cross bun in the world was baked. It was baked on Wyre Street in Colchester, on Good Friday 1807 - confirmed by the note on the bag it came in, and the bun is now rock hard. 'World's FASTEST bullet train' that can reach 280mph is unveiled - and it even has a dining car and plush business-class 8 The Swan Inn pub right on the river, and their beer garden is found underneath the viaduct Credit: Alamy Owned by a couple in Wormingford, the bun is older than the one kept in the British Museum, baked in 1869. While you won't be able to see the bun, something in Colchester you can't miss is the pink house. The six-bedroom mansion in Tiptree called the 'Eaton House Studio' is a dream to any fan of Barbie. The house boasts dozens of stylish rooms, each designed completely differently. There is a saloon and space-inspired kitchen, floral staircases, and unicorns in the garden. 8 The 'pink house' is a hot spot for celebrities and can also be rented out Credit: 8 The six-bedroom mansion in Tiptree called the 'Eaton House Studio' is a dream to any fan of Barbie Credit: 8 There a saloon and space inspired kitchen to floral staircases and unicorns in the garden Credit: It's attracted celebrity guests and was featured in Little Mix's Bounce Back music video. It was created by its artist owner Amy Griffith, who said she built it to "share my artistic vision with others". It can sleep 16 people and can be hired you even hire it out from £2,400 as it details on Plus, the And the 8 The house has attracted celebrity guests and was the featured in Little Mix's Bounce Back music video Credit: 8 Colchester was once England's oldest town and is now a city Credit: Alamy
