Latest news with #FlyingCircus
ABC News
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Wild One: Keyo Roses Flying Circus - A Man
Whirling camerawork, throbbing lights, and questions about what it really means to be 'A Man' all await under the psychedelic big-top of this Wild One — the first ever video from Naarm act Keyo Roses Flying Circus. Directed by Hugo Morgan, 'A Man' combines distorted frames, fluid camera manoeuvres, and choppy cuts for a video that is truly trippy. Shot in the Northcote Theatre, Hugo, Keyo and the team wanted to create an uninterrupted performance that invites the viewer into the theatre as the only patron. "All the movement is continuous," explains Hugo, "but we also played with continuity and lighting to shape the environment and guide the audience through the different sections of the track.' 'This song is a conception of many hours spent smoking cigarettes in my room, unravelling the rope of masculinity to find balance and identity' says circus conductor Keyo Rhodes. 'I suppose it questions the idea of a man, the conflict between grace and strength, and if you dance around a bit things usually make more sense.'
Metro
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Monty Python star, 82, rushed to hospital after unexpected health scare
A legendary star of the Monty Python comedy troupe has revealed he was taken to hospital twice in the space of 72 hours. Eric Idle, 82, rose to prominence in the 1970s after joining the Python group co-creating the sketch series Flying Circus, which ran between 1969 and 1974. Through the late 70s and early 80s, Eric – along with John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin – starred in films such as The Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and The Meaning of Life. Such an esteemed collection made legends of the big and small screens, while a song Eric wrote for Life of Brian's soundtrack – Always Look On the Bright Side of Life – became an international hit. Relations between the old Python friends haven't been the best in recent years, but fans still adore each key member and look out for them individually. Which is why Eric worried fans this week after he revealed he'd been rushed to hospital two times in three days after a sudden and unexpected health scare. He wrote on X: 'I'd like to thank all the doctors nurses and staff in the Cedars GI ward for their kindness and help to me today. The second time in three days.' Eric is currently based in Los Angeles, California, and he thanked the hospital staff at the Cedars-Sinai medical centre before revealing the extent of his current health problems. 'I think I'm suffering from gastroenteritis,' he tweeted, before signing off with a message for his fans who were worried about him: 'I love you people.' Gastroenteritis is a common inflammatory condition and is often caused by a virus, but the symptoms can be nasty and difficult to deal with. Vomiting (projectile) and diarrhea are usually the telltale signs, but patients can sometimes struggle with a high temperature and disorientation as well. @SolitaryWasp sent good wishes to Eric, saying: 'Wishing all good things for you. You've brought me many smiles!' @AmyGravino reached out and said: 'We love you too, Eric! I was just in L.A. this weekend and thought of you. Please take good care of yourself and get better soon.' @JoeLeydon reminded the Monty Python comic: 'Please take care of yourself. The world would be a less amusing place without you.' More Trending Last year, Eric joked – in typically dry fashion – that he probably 'shouldn't be alive' after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2019, which left him needing surgery. 'I'm lucky and I enjoy every moment.' He added: '[I once worked on a] project called Death: The Musical and I asked my doctor which type of cancer I could use to finish off one of my characters. 'He said, 'Pancreatic cancer, it can finish people off in three weeks'. [10 years later] my doctor told me I had pancreatic cancer and I burst out laughing because I thought he must be joking.' Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: The Who legend Roger Daltrey, 81, reveals boozy knighthood celebrations MORE: 13 'cursed' horror films – from tragic on set deaths to mysterious 'haunted' props MORE: Cast of series getting Netflix reboot admit one episode 'wouldn't happen today'
Scottish Sun
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Monty Python star rushed to hospital for third time in two days as he reveals health battle
Last year he had a scathing rant about his co-star's daughter's handling of the Python finances ACTOR'S PAIN Monty Python star rushed to hospital for third time in two days as he reveals health battle Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A MONTY Python star has been rushed to hospital for a third time in just two days. LA-based Eric Idle, 82, took to social media platform X to inform fans of his health issue. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 3 Eric Idle was taken to hospital three times in two days after falling ill Credit: Getty 3 He was a member of the iconic comedy group Monty Python He wrote: "So I'd like to thank all the doctors nurses and staff in the Cedars GI ward for their kindness and help to me today. The second time in three days. I think I'm suffering from Gastroenteritis. I love you people." Gastroenteritis is common and is inflammation inside the stomach which can cause issues like vomiting and diarrhea. Severe cases can lead to dehydration requiring medical treatment. Fans wished him well, with one writing: "Get well soon Eric." Another said: "Praying for healing for you sir. :)" A third commented: "Please take care of yourself. The world would be a less amusing place without you." Last year Idle revealed the surviving Pythons were locked in a bitter feud over finances. He claimed he receives only a fraction of the millions the legendary comedy team have made in the past. And he took aim at Holly Gilliam, the TV lawyer daughter of fellow Python Terry Gilliam, 84. She took over the Python brand in 2013 as part of HDG Projects Ltd. In messages on X, Idle wrote: 'I don't know why people always assume we're loaded. "I have to work for my living. I never dreamed that at this age the income streams would tail off so disastrously. Monty Python's John Cleese and Terry Gilliam reunite with Michael Palin for 81st birthday as fans praise the 'silly men' 'I have been working and earning for Pythons since 1995. And now no more.' In a dig at Holly Gilliam, he added: 'I guess if you put a Gilliam child in as your manager you should not be so surprised. 'One Gilliam is bad enough. Two can take out any company.' Daughter Lily Idle backed him, writing online: 'I'm so proud of my dad for finally finally finally starting to share the truth.' The Pythons, who also included John Cleese, 85, Michael Palin, 81, and the late Terry Jones — made a mint thanks to films, including Life of Brian, hit stage show Spamalot, which Idle co-wrote, and the original Flying Circus BBC TV series. They were back in the limelight in 2014 with Monty Python Live (Mostly) — One Down, Five to Go, a reference to former member Graham Chapman who died in 1989 aged just 48. It featured interpretations of some of their sketches, and reportedly earned the surviving members at least £2million each. It was a hit in Europe and the US and is still running on Broadway. Idle, who lives in California, dismissed comments suggesting he must still be wealthy, saying he had sold his house. He added: 'We still get something but not enough to keep me on the beaches.' Cleese was recently asked about his relationship with Idle by Candis Magazine and said: "We used to be close. But not in recent years.'
West Australian
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Ocean with David Attenborough: Conservationist calls on countries to protect our waters to save our world
Sir David Attenborough turned 99 on Thursday, was feted by King Charles and presided over the London premiere of a stunning new movie that he hopes will force the United Nations to save Earth's oceans. Not a bad day for the world's most famous biologist. For someone who has spent his career describing the lifecycles of all creatures great and small, Attenborough is acutely aware of his own mortality. It's an immutable fact he leans into in his movie, Ocean with David Attenborough, to add even more weight to its urgent message. 'When I first saw the sea as a young boy, it was thought of as a vast wilderness to be tamed and mastered for the benefit of humanity,' he says in the film in that unmistakable voice. 'Now, as I approach the end of my life, we know the opposite is true. 'After living for nearly a hundred years on this planet, I now understand that the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.' It's his sincere hope, and that of everyone attached to the film — produced with funding assistance from WA's Minderoo Pictures — that Ocean generates a veritable tsunami of support that flows into the United Nations Ocean Conference in June. It's there the nations of the world have what could be the last chance to vote on dramatic increases in marine conversation, before entire underwater ecosystems suffer catastrophic failure. 'This could be the moment of change,' Attenborough says in the film. 'Nearly every country on Earth has just agreed, on paper, to achieve this bare minimum and protect a third of the ocean. Together, we now face the challenge of making it happen.' Should it happen, it will further burnish the legacy of a man who has effectively become the human face of the natural world, tirelessly communicating wonders, fears and struggles on its behalf. And to think his first job application to the BBC in 1950, for a gig as a radio producer, was rejected. The consolation prize, however, was a job with the national broadcaster's nascent television department, where he found himself hosting the first series of Zoo Quest four years later. That show ran for a decade, and led to Attenborough's promotion into an administrative role at the BBC, where he spent a decade signing off on expenditure and commissioning shows by other people. He is erroneously credited with commissioning Monty Python's Flying Circus during that period – the honour goes to then-BBC1 controller Paul Fox – but Attenborough did greenlight Pot Black, a snooker show, when BBC2 transitioned to colour. But the inexorable pull of the natural world eventually convinced him to resign from his post, even as he was being touted as a future head of the BBC, and he eagerly dived back into wildlife filmmaking. And the planet is lucky he did. From the early 1970s to today, if it crawls, bites or flies, Attenborough has caught it on camera and beamed it into our loungerooms. It was the seminal 1979 series, Life on Earth, that really put him on the map. At the time, it was the most ambitious natural history series ever filmed, taking in more than 100 locations around the world and enlisting the expertise of 500 scientists over its three-year production. To this day, it remains one of the most influential works to documentarians and established a benchmark for all subsequent wildlife filmmaking. The boy who grew up collecting fossils and natural specimens was suddenly one of the BBC's most valuable international commodities. In the years that followed he gave us a seemingly endless array of flora and fauna. Blue Planet. Planet Earth. Frozen Planet. Life. Mega-budget shows that wowed adults and children alike with never-before-seen moments of magic. But what once seemed endless now has a very permanent end in sight, and Attenborough is determined to go out with a bang. Ocean was shot over two years and contains many firsts for wildlife filmmaking, including capturing the first vision of industrial bottom trawling, the biggest mass coral bleaching event and the largest school of yellowfin tuna ever caught on camera. Australian underwater cinematographer Tom Park contributed incredible footage of coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef and said the emotion of being part of Attenborough's final film was hard to put into words. 'He's been an icon of mine for as long as I can remember, I grew up watching his films, and he's really a figurehead of the natural world,' Park told The Sunday Times. 'He's inspired generations of wildlife filmmakers, so to actually be able to have filmed part of his new film is the privilege of my professional career.' Park's portion of the film chronicles the devastating impact of last year's mass coral bleaching event, which is becoming increasingly common as ocean temperatures rise. It's part of a larger section of the movie that focuses on humanity's destruction of the marine world and is considerably more grim than Attenborough's usual style. The vision of bottom trawling, a commercial fishing method that sees a weighted net destroy the seabed, is hard to watch, even for someone as experienced as Park. 'We've never seen anything like it on the big screen before,' the cinematographer admitted. 'Everyone knows bottom trawling is bad, we've seen the stats, but when you actually put vision to this idea of bottom trawling, and it's showcased how they do it in the film, it's remarkably shocking.' Of course, the point is to shock. To make the audience question why bulldozing the Amazon rainforest is an unthinkable horror, but doing the same to the ocean doesn't move the needle for most people. 'Unfortunately, the ocean is out of sight and out of mind for a lot of us,' Park said. 'For the everyday public, for the policymakers, the ocean is this hidden, underwater world. 'But if people understand, and they see the beauty and the fragility, hopefully this will create empathy, and that will lead to action.' That action better come fast, because a certain 99-year-old doesn't have time to wait. Ocean with David Attenborough is in cinemas now.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How David Attenborough changed sport forever
The closest most of us associate the name Sir David Attenborough with the history of sport on television is his memorable commentary during an episode of Planet Earth II, broadcast in 2016. That was his breathless voiceover of the annual contest between freshly hatched iguana babies and racer snakes on the Galapagos Islands, a face-off which held the nation transfixed when that extraordinary footage of a life-or-death dash for the shoreline was first aired. But, unlikely as it may seem, the fact is Attenborough is also responsible for some of the few moments of the BBC's once prodigious sporting output that remain standing. Because, in the days before he became renowned for bringing us ever closer to the drama of the natural world, Attenborough was a hugely influential television controller. A wonderful moment on Centre Court as the crowd rises for Sir David Attenborough 💚 #Wimbledon — Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 1, 2024 Never mind the landmark series he commissioned like Civilisation, Monty Python's Flying Circus and the Old Grey Whistle Test, he is also the man who kept Match of the Day on our screens. Plus, he was so persuasive in his role as a telly executive he even managed to get the notoriously conservative Wimbledon authorities to change the colour of the tournament balls to yellow (eventually). Not to forget that, when millions of us hunker down to watch the final moments of the World Snooker Championship this weekend, we have one person to thank for it being on the box: David Attenborough. Back in the 1960s, while still in his early thirties, Attenborough had tired of his early career as a television executive and was studying for a postgraduate degree at the London School of Economics. But the BBC had long noted his innovative approach to programming and, with its new second television station struggling to make its presence known, persuaded him to become the second controller of BBC2, taking over in March 1965. His idea was to create a channel which, he once explained, 'catered to all levels of brow'. There was to be no traditional Reithian snobbery under his watch: all licence-fee payers would be invited to his channel. Not least fans of sport. On taking control, one of his first tasks was to rescue a programme commissioned by his predecessor Michael Peacock. Match of the Day had begun the previous August, its purpose to offer televised snippets of Saturday's football. And it had not gone down well in the corridors of the Football League. Those in charge of the game had always been wary of television, fearing that showing matches beyond the annual FA Cup final and the occasional England game would have a detrimental effect on live attendances. Thus it was decided among the game's hierarchy that the experimental first season of recorded highlights would be the last. But the new BBC2 boss was more than keen to keep the programme going. And in a meeting with the trepidatious blazers, Attenborough managed to assuage their doubts. He did it, he told a documentary to mark Match of the Day 's 50th anniversary, 'on the basis that nobody watched BBC2, which was more or less true. BBC2 was only visible in a small part of the country – London and Birmingham – and it had a tiny number of viewers'. 'Don't worry, no one's watching' is hardly the most compelling sell. But it worked. The Football League signed off on a new season-deal. Soon after which, thanks to Attenborough's shrewd negotiating skills, the show entered sporting folklore. Four years later, in 1969, Attenborough finally convinced the government to allow the BBC to introduce a new technology that had long since taken root in the USA and Japan: colour television. It required, however, expensive kit. And Attenborough needed something that would prove its vast superiority over bog-standard black and white to persuade viewers to fork out. So he called a meeting of senior producers, instructing all of them to come up with ideas. The best was a suggestion to embrace the game in which colour is absolutely central to its processes: snooker. Attenborough seized on the thought, sought the opinion of the established radio commentator Ted Lowe and immediately commissioned Lowe's idea for a show called Pot Black, a weekly competition involving eight players competing in one-frame challenges. Although available in colour for those who had new sets, for the rest of the nation it remained monochrome. Which explains Lowe's infamous attempt to clarify things in those early days: 'For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.' It was Attenborough, moreover, who, in 1973, in his new capacity of director of programmes for the whole corporation, encouraged Grandstand to screen highlights of the semi-final and final of the World Snooker Championship. In 1978, after the tournament moved to the Crucible, daily coverage was introduced, an innovation that has remained in place ever since. Snooker was not the only sport he brought to the television audience in colour, either. He loved tennis, in particular Wimbledon. 'I mean, it is a wonderful plot: you've got drama, you've got everything,' he once told the Radio Times. 'And it's a national event, it's got everything going for it.' So his new colour BBC2, he decided, would feature not just recorded highlights in the evening as was traditional, but live matches during the day. Thus it was Attenborough who was responsible for half the British workforce feigning illness in order to spend the afternoon behind closed curtains watching the tennis. Even then, he was always seeking improvements. He noticed, while watching his station's output, that it was hard for the home audience to follow white balls moving across green turf. Why not introduce yellow coating for the balls? The International Tennis Federation did a bit of investigation and discovered Attenborough was right: it was not just the green of the All England Club lawns, yellow was a much more visible colour against all the surfaces on which the game was played. In 1972, it decreed yellow was the way forward. Though being Wimbledon, the annual fortnight did not adopt the Attenborough yellow until 1986. By which time the great man himself had long moved on into his career as a nature documentary maker. There can be no doubt he was rather good at that, too. But it is in sport we have a lot to be grateful to him for. Thanks to his hapless successors in charge of sport, the BBC has largely wilted in the face of rights challenges from more commercially muscular operations. The fact is, there is not much more remaining in the corporation's portfolio that does not have, some six decades on, a mark left on it by Attenborough. Even in sport, it seems, he is a national treasure.
