Latest news with #MySaturday
Telegraph
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Robson Green: ‘Four hours' sleep is enough for me'
How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: Robson Green 4.30am I think: Thank God, I'm alive. Friends my age are dropping like flies. I'm surrounded by birdsong in Northumberland and that really cheers me up. The first words I utter are: Are you awake?, which wakes up my partner Zoila. I have a cold shower, which I've been doing for 25 years. (I have a warm one later.) You get a wonderful sensation of blood flow through your body. I moisturise with L'Oréal Power Age. If my skin feels great, I feel healthy. I don't drink or smoke any more. I have two flat whites with extra shots and turn on Sky News. 5.30am Breakfast is berries with plain yogurt and a boiled egg. Once it's light, I go out and survey the garden for half an hour. I've had 15,000 daffodils this year. 7am I love my job so I go to my office, or The Shrine as I call it because it's full of pictures of my work. I always make plans of what the aim is in each job. I'm writing a script for a BBC factual project at the moment, where I'll be going round the world. I enjoy the energy changes between performing in drama, such as Grantchester [available on ITVX], and factual entertainment like Weekend Escapes [available on BBC iPlayer]. 11am I take Mum out two or three times a week. She is 88 and suffers from dementia. We drive around and play music from the years she can remember; she loves Engelbert Humperdinck. We go to Whitley Bay and reminisce about where she met my father. There's a wonderful ice-cream shop in Blyth, Ciccarelli's, where Mum has cherry flavour and I have rum and raisin. 1.30pm A favourite haunt is The View on Tynemouth Sands because it looks over the ocean. I have seafood linguine or grilled fish. All the ingredients are locally sourced. If I'm on my own, I chat to people I know or read. 3pm I go fishing in the Tyne, either outside my house or at Dilston or Devil's Water. I often go alone but Zoila sometimes comes, or my son Taylor [from Green's second marriage], who works in film production. Fishing has been my road to Damascus. It gives me a sense of belonging and calm. For casting practise, I target salmon, but it's illegal to keep them. Otherwise, I catch sea trout, chubb or, if I'm lucky, pike. Some days I meet my brother and Uncle Matheson and we go sea fishing for cod, ling and haddock with guys who run a fishing boat out of North Shields. I once saw a super-pod of dolphins, which was spectacular. Off Newcastle – that's nuts! 6pm I love cooking. I especially like making salt-and-pepper prawns, a Rick Stein recipe that has tons of crushed garlic. If I've caught a sea trout, I barbecue it with a tiny bit of lemon juice, with new potatoes, carrots or broccoli that I grow myself. I like the latest kitchen gadgets and was fortunate to be given a selection of high-class pans by the chef Chris Baber. 8pm I walk along the river for two to six miles. If there's a Premier League football match to catch up on, I watch that. I'm a mad Newcastle United fan. Or I watch a box set. I've just finished Shogun and I'm really into [South Korean] K-dramas. If it's still light, I sit on the balcony, watch kingfishers and otters on the river and the sunset over the Cheviot Hills. 12am My guilty pleasure is eating gruyère cheese in bed while watching Family Guy or reading. My current book is Fatherland by Robert Harris. Four hours' sleep is usually enough for me. I get good-quality sleep where I live – in the middle of nowhere.
Telegraph
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
David Gray: ‘I wish I could banish Manchester United from my mind'
How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: David Gray 6.30am I'll probably be woken by a headbutt from one of my two Brussels Griffon dogs – who look like strange furry puffer fish – demanding that I get up and give them breakfast. My wife Olivia's not a morning person so that duty falls to me. I live in Marylebone but most weekends we'll be in our little house on the Norfolk coast. 7am I accept that after 30 years of going away on tour [Gray is currently on a UK and Ireland tour; ] it's my job to make the first coffee of the day, feed Connie and Frank, and let them out. 7.30am Boiled egg and Marmite soldiers will be our classic breakfast, or if we're trying to be healthy just fruit and yogurt. 9.30am On a beautiful summer morning when the tide is high, I take the 10-minute walk to the sea and swim. In fact, rain or shine, unless it's blowing a gale, I get into the water. It's a full physical and spiritual reboot, then you're ready for everything. 10.30am We might go for a long dog walk along the coast but never with headphones or earbuds. I don't want the experience to be polluted. I want to hear the nature around me and be completely connected. I'm so wired to nature it's a time when I'm very present. I'm very in the moment. I'm living the landscape, the birds, the calls, the place, the sound of the wind through the grass, the water. The whole thing is living inside me. 12.30pm There's a fantastic restaurant in Burnham Market called Socius, which allows dogs, so we'll try to get a table for a light lunch there and I might have a pint of Wherry amber ale. It's top notch. We both love to cook but the Sunday roast is my speciality. Or a nice soup or stew or risotto. Olivia's a little more dexterous and advanced. 1.30pm We love buying fresh ingredients for the evening meal, so we'll often get fish from the local fishmonger. 2pm This is when I should build in some meditation time, but I probably don't. I'm very high energy, always thinking, doing, organising, list-making, planning. The only thing I do occasionally do is Pilates. 3pm I'm trying not to acknowledge it at the moment, but Manchester United's fortunes are still very much part of my Saturday. Their current form means that by the afternoon, my anxiety is usually high. I wish I could banish them from my mind until someone has rescued the club, but I can't. 6pm There's a strong possibility we'll have friends visiting, so we'll definitely have an aperitif – a little glass of bubbles – to kick off Saturday dinner, which will of course be cooked using only the freshest, locally sourced ingredients. 8.30pm After dinner we'll play games with more drinks. Cards maybe or nomination whist, but my absolute favourite is Balderdash. I'm a good bullsh---er, particularly when I'm getting hammered. Once, I completed the course and won the game before anyone had got round the first corner. Everyone just kept voting for my ludicrous wordsmithery. I love the creativity and the laughs you can have from the game when everyone is on form. 11pm If everybody's collapsed into bed, we might watch a series like Slow Horses or The Wire, but my favourite ever show is the French drama Spiral. And strangely last year we got really into Foyle's War. Some of the characters are rather cardboard and the plots are ridiculous but it's like Second World War comfort food and for some reason I just accepted it. 11.30pm After Olivia has fallen asleep as Foyle's War is so boring, I'll turn the TV off and tell the dogs to get off the bed so they can wake me up again at 4.30am.
Telegraph
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Tony Robinson: ‘People are supposed to say 'I have no regrets' – but I do'
How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: Tony Robinson 7am I'll write. I've been immersed in my new book, The House of Wolf. It's like steel shutters being slammed down, and I concentrate on what I'm doing, regardless of what's going on around me. I was an only child – my parents doted on me and were always talking to me, but I wasn't listening as I was always doing something else. My mum took me to an ear specialist because she thought I was deaf. 9am A slow-burn breakfast because I don't want to eat again until evening. Microwaved porridge, zero-fat yogurt, and blueberries and raspberries decorating it in a pyramid, so you can't see the boringness of the porridge underneath. 10am I drive to see my granddaughters, who are 16 and 13, play football. It's one of the most exciting new things in my life. Women's football has exploded exponentially. If you watch boys' football, from about age 13, you could cut the ambition with a knife. With girls, there's a whole different spirit about it. I shout praise, which might be embarrassing for them to receive from a 78-year-old man, but I would say, honestly, it's when I'm at my happiest. 12pm Down the M4 to watch Bristol City. They're an extraordinary football team. Every year for the past 10 years – and I think I'm only slightly exaggerating here – they have come between 11th and 13th in the Championship, so a really exciting year is when they come 11th and a really depressing year is when they come 13th. This is not what most football supporters see as excitement. At the moment, it looks like we may make the play-offs this year, and consequently I'm in seventh heaven. 5pm Back to west London, listening to the radio. There's been a real renaissance of Radio 4, the imagination of the programmes is great. It could be a show about Ray Charles's childhood, then 'Who's best, Aristotle or Plato?' followed by a documentary about tap dancers with disabilities. If I'm part-way through a programme and get home, I sit in the car until it finishes. 7pm I'll read scripts, like the ones for The Madame Blanc Mysteries [Thursdays at 9pm on Channel 5; or streaming on In fact I didn't even need to look at the script at first, I just thought, '[Co-creator] Sally Lindsay is lovely and it's filmed in Gozo,' but then I read it and it was fantastic. I had a cameo role that turned into a whole series this time. As an actor, the length of your employment is normally so short that there's always part of you thinking, 'How am I going to pay the phone bill?' 8pm My wife and I always have Saturday evenings together; I can't remember the last time we didn't. I've been cavalier in my relationships as far as time is concerned – I think people are supposed to say, 'I have no regrets,' but I do. I wish I'd had the integrity to spend more time with partners. Sometimes you've got nine things on the go and the one you can put at the bottom of the list is your partner, but it's so damaging. 8.30pm Around 60 paces from home, we have an Everyman cinema, which knocks every other cinema experience into a corner. I feel like a little boy living next to a sweet shop. The last thing we enjoyed was the Bob Dylan movie [ A Complete Unknown ]. I'd have thought that, as an actor, I would recognise great actors, but I've never particularly noticed Timothée Chalamet is the truth. He is stunning in it. 11.13pm I turn to my wife and say, 'I'm thinking about going to bed,' and when we look at our watches, it is always 13 minutes past 11. In the middle of the night, I get up, go to my study and write down notes or plot ideas – 'his sister kills him', 'buy choc ices', 'get a new razor'…
Telegraph
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Prue Leith: People keep asking if the next Bake Off will be my last – probably because I'm so old
How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: Prue Leith 8am My husband John is naughty because he'll bring me tea and yogurt and I'll be furious because I won't be able to resist eating it. I don't usually have breakfast as it's about the only food I can resist and I have a problem keeping my weight remotely down. When I'm filming my Cotswold Kitchen series at home, I'm woken by Bambi, my makeup artist, banging on my door. 9am I choose the necklace or specs first and the outfit around that. I've got necklaces on a wall hanging up so I can see them – it's all cheap stuff, never gold. I enjoy putting my clothes together, but John buys them all. I hate shopping. 10am We've got a new potting shed and greenhouse and I'm thrilled. It's full of plants I had in childhood in South Africa, like bright bougainvillaea. I like propagating because my back hurts and I can do it on a high stool. I'm not as hands-on as I'd like because I'm no longer able to be. I find it vaguely surprising I can't do certain things any longer. 12pm We go for a jaunt. It's a pretty drive to the Vegetable Matters farm shop where, if you buy a cabbage, it's been picked that morning. For lunch, the Ebrington Arms near Chipping Campden does great steak and chips. 2pm I have a singing lesson. I can't tell you how wildly out of my comfort zone The Masked Singer was [Prue was in the latest series], but I wanted to learn to sing. The first time I had to rehearse as Pegasus, I sang without the costume and I can't say I was doing dance moves, but at least I was moving around the stage. Then, when I had the horse's head on, I couldn't move or hear the director telling me when to come in, so I just stood there looking like an idiot. I still don't know if I'm in tune, but at least I can make a noise now and I'm confident enough to try. 3pm Since Covid, I've been having a siesta. I've got my husband addicted to it too, so we're two old codgers having a nice kip in the afternoon. 5pm John loves shopping for children's toys, dangerous things like quad bikes and Segways. We have to make the grandchildren wear helmets, and they go bombing around the garden. We have 11 between us. John's youngest is nine months, the eldest is 16, nearly all boys. I'm very conscious I have an amazingly lucky, happy life. There's no reason to be unhappy. 6pm I love teaching the kids to bake cakes, like I do on Prue Leith's Cotswold Kitchen (Saturdays, 11.45am, ITV1 and ITVX). Everything happens in real time on that show, we never refilm anything – if I make a cock-up it is just, 'Oh dear, never mind, let's stick it together with cream.' Paul [Hollywood] and I are about to go through the challenges for the next series of Bake Off as well. People keep asking if it will be my last – I suppose because I'm so old so it's a reasonable question. I ask it myself. 7pm I cook everything we eat. John says he lives on leftovers, which is sort of true, because I can never throw anything away, but it wouldn't be a leftover if I didn't do some primary cooking. We'll have sausages and parsnip mash with skirlie, pinhead oatmeal fried with onions – so bad for you, full of butter – with sprout tops that look like tiny cabbages. God, they're delicious. 9pm Sometimes we have to say to each other, 'We cannot go to bed yet, it's only nine o'clock.' But it's very tempting. The fatal thing is, we don't turn the damn light out until midnight. John reads antique magazines and I read The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. I've been at it for two months now because it's so huge.
Telegraph
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
George Russell: I always looked up to Lewis Hamilton – it's surreal being the older driver now
How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: George Russell 9am The first thing I do is jump in cold water. I live on the coast in Monaco so I'll go down in the lift from my flat and get straight in the sea, or into the ice bath at home. I have to pinch myself that I live here. I left school young so my friends are from the racing world, as well as athletes like tennis players and cyclists, who live here, too. To be in the top 20 of any sport requires huge discipline and sacrifice, so it's good to have like-minded people around you. 10am I never train on an empty stomach. Breakfast is overnight oats, berries and banana with yogurt, then avocado toast with ham or turkey. If it's not an intense day of training, I'll go for a cappuccino; if it is, an espresso. 11am A two-hour strength session. The most unusual workout routine racing drivers have to do is train our necks. We're strapped into the race car over our shoulders, our laps and through our crotch, so we've got a six-point harness and we go through corners at 160 miles an hour with the g-force pulling on our bodies. It's like your neck is trying to fly off. To put it into simple terms, imagine you're in the back of a car and someone goes round a roundabout quickly – yet going 50 times faster than that. My neck can see up to 50 kilos of force. 1pm My nutritionist says I need different colours so I have pasta with cucumber, tomatoes and yellow pepper to get the fuel in and carb up. 2pm Nap for 20 minutes – my trainer calls it a nap-uccino. I'll have an espresso before because coffee takes a good 45 minutes to kick in so it helps me wake up. I need a little nap to reset, but I can't overdo it or I feel like I don't know where I am in the world. There aren't many days I'm not moving. Deep down, I would love to be in a single location but, last week, I had nine flights in seven days. I'm pretty good with jet lag – my technique is shifting one hour per day. Before I travelled to Sydney for the Grand Prix, that took a lot of discipline. I started going to sleep one hour earlier each day so, the day before, I'm trying to sleep at 6pm, which messes with my brain. 3pm Interval training or a 12k run. Monaco is so small that I end up running to Italy, then France, and back over the border. I run the Grand Prix track, through the tunnel of the Monaco race, and do two laps of the harbour. It's going to be an exciting season. I've always been the youngest and suddenly I'm the older of the two partners – when I was teammates with Lewis Hamilton, I looked up to him, so it does become a bit surreal. Kimi [Antonelli, George's new partner for Mercedes after Lewis Hamilton left for Ferrari] is a great kid. He's been thrown in at the deep end and he's super-fast, I'm sure he's going to keep me on my toes. I'm entering a different chapter in my career but it doesn't change my approach. My job is to drive the car as fast as possible – whether I've got a seven-time world champion or an 18-year-old rookie as a teammate, I go about my business just the same. 5pm I'm terrible at relaxing, I can't sit around. I like playing padel with the other drivers or free diving, which is incredible for clearing my mind, because you have to solely focus on your breathing. But the most time I ever have off is half a day. I don't see anything in the Grand Prix destinations – I'm not taking this for granted and I'm not there to go sightseeing, I'm there to perform – but my favourite place is Austin because we always fly straight on to Mexico City afterwards, so we get to spend a couple of days there. On flights, I'll watch the race from the year before to get into the rhythm of that race weekend. 7pm Within 200 metres of my flat, I've got the coffee shop I love – where I always see Toto Wolff – and my favourite restaurant, Cantinetta Antinori. I order yellowtail sashimi and this nice panettone they've somehow created a starter with. Their specialty is carbonara, so I'll have that or a good steak, followed by tiramisu. My girlfriend Carmen [Montero Mundt] and I talk and catch up on the day. 9pm I try to be disciplined over scrolling social media as we live in a toxic world. It's challenging being in the public eye, everyone's got an opinion on what you do, what you say, how you look – it's often quite amusing. Instead, I watch Lost, which I've never seen before and it's a bit edge of the seat so it doesn't help the sleep, but I wind down by turning the lights down and watching with blue light blocker glasses on, so I look a bit funny. 11pm My coach says sleep is free performance. I'm quite relaxed the night before a race. I believe in myself and – it sounds cliché – but what will happen will happen. If I put the maximum effort in, there's nothing more I can do to give myself the best shot at victory. If you let nerves impact you, it's going to impact the result. I get butterflies before every single race, we all feel an element of pressure and if you didn't, you wouldn't care, but I need to limit that as much as possible.
