Isabella Pappas was nominated for an Olivier Award seven years ago – before she’d even started secondary school. The 18-year-old now stars in ITV’s new comedy-drama about grief, Finding Alice, opposite Keeley Hawes, Joanna Lumley, and Nigel Havers. With devastating precision and control, Pappas plays Charlotte, an only child who has to become her mother’s emotional rock when her father dies unexpectedly. LAURA DE LISLE: What was it like making Finding Alice? ISABELLA PAPPAS: One of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. Not only because of the cast, but because it was such an Read more ...

Polly Walker's character in Netflix's sumptuous new Regency romance, Bridgerton, could've easily been little more than a villainous Mrs Bennet. We meet Lady Featherington as she's forcing one of her daughters into a tiny corset, muttering about how she could fit her waist "into the size of an orange and a half" when she was the same age. But Walker finds the tragedy amid the comedy, creating a character you can't help but sympathise with, as she's done before in State of Play and Line of Duty. With a second outing pretty much in the bag, Walker discusses what makes Bridgerton Read more ...

Cerys Matthews is a best-selling author, award winning DJ and multi-million selling musician, singer, reciter... and broadcaster, originally from Wales. Her wide-ranging Sunday morning radio show on BBC 6 Music has a large, loyal and appreciative audience. She also presents the Monday night Blues Show on BBC Radio 2.As came across strongly in this interview, poetry is hugely important to her, and her passion for it comes across vividly. “I am a keen imbiber of writers and collections,” she says. Her direct involvement in poetry also extends to her roles as a judge for the Dylan Thomas Prize Read more ...

Simon Armitage is a poet at the top of his game: in his second year as poet laureate, he has given voice to the experiences of lockdown. In March, he released his collection Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems, a return to the childhood village in West Yorkshire that has served as his lifetime inspiration. This Sunday on Sky Arts, he features in an interview with Melvyn Bragg for The South Bank Show. Ahead of the episode, I spoke to Simon in typical pandemic form, over Zoom in my lunch break.INDIA LEWIS. When you went back to Marsden, your childhood home, did it make you rethink your life Read more ...

Frank Marshall might not be the biggest household name, but his footprint on Hollywood is unrivalled. He has produced hits ranging from Indiana Jones and Back to the Future to Jason Bourne and Jurassic World. He also takes occasional forays into directing, such as the madcap Arachnophobia and cannibalistic rugby tale Alive. Who better then to chart the career of The Bee Gees, a band far more influential than ever given credit for?How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is a top-tier music documentary, filled with world tours, lost demos and family drama. Marshall expertly balances the band's history Read more ...

Singer/pianist/songwriter/entertainer Joe Stilgoe responded remarkably rapidly to the new circumstances of March 2020. Even before the first nationwide lockdown was declared, he had started doing a series of daily performances on YouTube: “Stilgoe In The Shed”. Back in July, 67 online shows later, gigs were starting to come in again. So to mark what felt like the end of that period, he spent just one day in producer James McMillan’s studio, and recorded an album of a selection of the songs he had performed in his online shows.SEBASTIAN SCOTNEY: What are your thoughts about the new lockdown? Read more ...

Following the break-up of The Jam in 1982, Mick Talbot (b 1958) was chosen by Paul Weller as his sparring partner in a new band, The Style Council. Talbot, a keyboard player from south London, had flourished amid the late-Seventies Mod revival, initially in the Merton Parkas, with his brother Danny, but also in The Chords, and even appearing on a couple of The Jam’s records.Weller’s plan was to escape the lad-friendly guitar sound of The Jam. With The Style Council, he and Talbot explored soul, funk, jazz, R&B, easy listening, and more, resulting in a golden run of Top 20 hits that lasted Read more ...

After Bassam Tariq's feature debut These Birds Walk was released at SXSW 2013, things seemed to slow down. The documentary about a runaway boy in Pakistan garnered strong reviews, but soon Tariq was working in a New York butchers pondering his career. However, the film did catch the eye of someone: Hollywood star Riz Ahmed. The two began talking, and realised they shared the same interests in heritage and generational relationships. And thus, Mogul Mowgli was born.In the film, Ahmed plays Zed, a rapper on the brink of international success. During a flying visit to his family home in Read more ...

Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "watermelon" juices that soil still stirs, the book makes an urgent argument for recognising our uneasy intimacy with the nonhuman. In seven essays, from "On Hospitality" and "On Greenness" to "On Panpsychism", Tamás reckons with the ecological meanings of hospitality, pain and grief, and maps how we might undo the human exploitation of the earth and the teeming lives it sustains. I spoke with Tamás over email in early Read more ...

Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking from positions of immense privilege – ranging from the well-meaning to outright grifters.All too rarely does any of this speak to people’s lived experience of mental suffering, and that goes double in the music world, where perpetual insecurity has increased exponentially with the collapse of the live performance industry and the future looks particularly bleak right now. One new book, however, is Read more ...

“Whoargh! Steady lads!” Under that headline, NME reported that Kevin Rowland had “announced his return to the music scene with a bizarre national poster campaign depicting him in make-up and women’s clothing whilst hitching up his skirt to show his pants.”It was May 1999, five months before the release of his second solo album My Beauty. Kevin, the cornerstone of Dexys Midnight Runners, told the weekly music paper “I am not dressing up as a woman; I am not wearing women’s clothing or trying to be a woman; I am wearing dresses because I choose to (who’s to say I can’t?); I’m wearing MEN’s Read more ...

Ronald Harwood, who has died at the age of 85, was best known for his play about tending to the needs of the larger-than-life actor-manager Donald Wolfit. The Dresser, adapted by Harwood, went on to become a great film success starring Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney. His career in the theatre thrived without quite ever scaling the heights of Harold Pinter or his other great friend Simon Gray, but past the official age of retirement he enjoyed a remarkable Indian summer in both film and the stage.It began in 2002 when he won his first Oscar for the script of The Pianist, directed by Roman Read more ...