
As a Traitors obsessive, Gamble is in his element hosting its hugely popular companion show, Uncloaked. He discusses keeping the show’s secrets, edgelord comics and how he became known as a ‘mega wife guy’
Ed Gamble does not like seeing himself on screen. “I know a lot of comics who struggle with watching themselves,” he says. “No one should be having to look at their own face so much. It feels simultaneously arrogant and also the most self-flagellating thing you can do.”
Unfortunately for him, he is inescapable. Gamble presents the BBC’s wildly successful companion show to the Traitors, The Traitors: Uncloaked, along with the hugely popular podcast Off Menu, with the comedian and current Celebrity Traitors contestant James Acaster.
Continue reading...The government says it can transform the state with AI, but it is no match for the resulting stream of machine-generated slop. And we all pay the cost
Another morning, another avalanche of emails. Even after a guilty cull, my inbox is sitting at well over 7,000, but lately I’ve started subscribing to the Quentin Crisp theory of housework: why bother, when after four years or so you stop noticing the accumulating dust? Empty inboxes just fill up again anyway.
In theory, email was supposed to save hours of meetings, phone calls and standing over photocopiers. Instead, we just spend hours deleting stuff people wouldn’t have bothered telling us if it had meant picking up the phone, but which they can now spam to their entire database at the click of a button. The glorious ease and convenience of being able to reach the world in seconds came, we now know, with the inconvenience of them being able to reach you right back.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Australia’s politicians have been facing increasing threats and abuse. It can no longer be dismissed as social media noise or harmless comment
Victorian independent MP Helen Haines was at the opening of a dog park in Mansfield on Monday, out and about in her sprawling electorate of Indi, talking to locals and moving freely.
Later in the afternoon, at 3.35pm, she was unpacking a car outside her electorate office in Wangaratta when a man understood to be known to authorities struck her with his car. He allegedly completed a U-turn when he saw Haines.
Continue reading...Over the past decade, Hungary has been a beacon for the ‘postliberal’ right, with pro-Trump thinkers making regular pilgrimages to Budapest. Now Orbán is gone, how will the movement adapt?
A longer version of this article first appeared in The Drift
Espresso Embassy, a third-wave coffee shop in Budapest’s diplomatic and governmental quarter, is where visiting reporters and academics come to talk politics. On the way in for my morning coffee on 18 March, I passed a poster for Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party that had been vandalised with a marker pen: “the safe choice” had become “the certain way to get fucked”. From across the cafe, I spotted the American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum locked in conversation, possibly with a source. I heard someone exclaim: “Just like Mussolini!” It was election season in Hungary.
It was also a couple of days before Cpac Hungary, a satellite event of the US-based conservative conference. As members of the international right arrived in town, the notorious Orbánist thinktank known as the Danube Institute was hosting an event called On Censorship, Tolerance, the Left and God. The official line would be: bad, good, bad, good.
Continue reading...As we witness the endless indignities these grieving families have endured in the six decades since the mining disaster, it is impossible not to turn red with rage
‘I’d like to have known her that bit longer, really. Those eight years went very, very quickly. I loved the child. I lost her. And that seemed to me to be the end of everything really, when she’d gone.”
Ray Lee, now 90, lost his daughter Anne on 21 October 1966. It was the day her primary school, along with several surrounding houses, in Aberfan was engulfed by an estimated 100,000 tonnes of slurry from one of the colliery spoil tips that overshadowed the Welsh mining village. Anne was one of 116 children killed, alongside 28 adults.
Continue reading...The bestselling author says her books will no longer be supplied to UK bookshops over fears of prosecution. Zoe Williams and Haroon Siddique report
For now there might be a copy or two of Intermezzo left kicking around in your local bookshop – snap it up if you haven’t already, because soon that will be it.
Last year, Sally Rooney said she would be using her royalties to support Palestine Action, a group that is proscribed as a terrorist organisation under UK law. Since then, thousands of people have been arrested for supporting the group. Now, faced with the risk of prosecution under terrorism legislation, Rooney and her publishers have decided to stop supplying her books to retailers in the UK.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Undercover footage of Dan Jukes raises fresh questions about Reform leader’s statement that £5m gift was for security
Nigel Farage undermined his own claims that a £5m gift was for security when he referred to the money as a reward for Brexit, according to one of his closest aides.
The apparent admission came in undercover footage seen by the Guardian in which Dan Jukes says that it is “priced in” for Farage to profit from politics.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Utility seen as ‘litmus test’ of PM’s promise to bring ‘essentials of life’ under public control
Andy Burnham has told officials to rip up their plans for how to fix Thames Water and present him with more radical options for what to do with the stricken company.
In an early test of his promise to bring “the essentials of life” under public control, the prime minister is urging his advisers to go back to the drawing board and create a new list of policies for the utility.
Continue reading...Interior minister concedes police ‘lost control’ of weekend protests as PM vows to restore public order
Partial curfews have been issued for a number of French cities, including parts of Paris, after the government admitted police had “lost control” during violent weekend protests around the country.
Sébastien Lecornu, the French prime minister, said after an emergency cabinet meeting on Monday he was “fully resolved to restore public order” and had called for “local and partial” curfews if needed. There was “no question” of imposing a full curfew on entire cities, he said.
Continue reading...Independent MP is in critical yet stable condition after man allegedly did U-turn to strike her twice with his car
Brendan Nugent’s family say Helen Haines has been their friend for more than 20 years
‘I don’t want to be known as a hero’: barber who rushed to help Helen Haines praised by PM
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The man accused of attacking Helen Haines allegedly made a U-turn before ramming the independent MP twice in an alleged targeted attack near her electorate office, causing her to lose one of her legs.
The member for Indi was airlifted from Wangaratta in northern Victoria to Melbourne’s Alfred hospital for emergency surgery on Monday night.
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