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Actor who played Shirley Johnson in the sitcom Citizen Smith, and whose dozens of other roles included EastEnders, Doctor Who and The Bill Cheryl Hall, who has died aged 76, was an actor best known for her roles in 1970s sitcoms. As Shirley Johnson in Citizen Smith, she was the girlfriend of Wolfie, the would-be revolutionary leading the Tooting Popular Front with the battle cry “power to the people”. Wolfie Smith, played by Hall’s then husband, the actor Robert Lindsay, and his small “army” of self-styled urban guerrillas, are simply inept, concocting plans such as stealing a Scorpion tank in order to mount an attack on the House of Commons, only to discover that parliament is in recess. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/DbmVUI4

Summerhall, Edinburgh Fadi Murad’s unconventional drama is a collage structured with the free-form imagination of a poet Last year, a group of Scottish producers staged a four-day mini festival called Welcome to the Fringe, Palestine . One of the excerpts was a scratch performance by Fadi Murad, which now returns as a full-length show. It is not a conventional drama. Rather, Come Back Home is structured with the free-ranging imagination of a poet, an impressionistic collage that resists straightforward interpretation. Murad’s theme is one of loss and the pull of home, focusing in particular on the death of his mother in a car accident when he was nine. He speaks touchingly from a child’s perspective of what it meant to lose the nurturer in his life, the one he turned to in just such a moment of distress. And he shares video footage of his younger self singing Mad World by Tears for Fears at her memorial. It is as cute as it is sad. At Summerhall, Edinburgh , until 31 August All our Ed...

Move by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is latest government rollback of climate science activity The Trump administration has pulled its support for an annual report on the environmental changes across the Arctic, a region that is already heating up four times faster than the global average due to the climate crisis. On Tuesday, Kim Doster, the communications director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), said the federal agency was withdrawing its support for the Arctic Report Card, which has provided environmental updates on the region to scientists and the public since 2006. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/EFgzKAo

The former Al-Ahli head coach, chosen by the club’s Saudi owners to replace Eddie Howe, admits ‘vacuum’ after sale of three key players Matthias Jaissle has been described as “fire” and a “rock star”, but his formal “unveiling” as Newcastle’s manager revealed a rather more considered and conservative character than advertised. At the precise moment the clock struck 3pm on Tuesday the 38-year-old German walked into a packed media suite at St James’ Park. Before taking his seat on the stage Jaissle, wearing a smartly understated open necked suit complete with a silk pocket square, took a deep breath and jumped down into audience, making a point of shaking everyone’s hand. It was a courteous and classy gesture. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/42EuH7B

Underbelly, Bristo Square, Edinburgh Audience members are invited to examine what they will do with their lives in this earnest shared thought experiment If you could hold the years of your life in your hands like coins, would you choose to spend them differently? This is the thoughtful, earnest tone of Ten Ways to Die Happy, an existential but somewhat formulaic Italian production (performed here in English) created by Emanuele Aldrovandi and Jacopo Giacomoni. In this gentle gameshow, we are asked not just to consider how we would use the finite time we have, but to put this thought experiment into practice. Eight people are plucked at random from the audience. My number is called, so I don a white robe, choose a new name for my new life, and take a seat on stage. Perla Ambrosini is our ethereal host, standing in fabric armour in a shallow pool of water. Each of us has a tray of flowers that we throw into the pool, every plastic bud representing the “energy” available to invest in wor...

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh With the air of a hungover postmortem, Richardson gives a head-spinning account of an encounter with an older comedian If you’re partial to a bit of gossip and scandal, Harriet Richardson is your girl. In this gloriously juicy debut hour, she dishes the dirt on the DMs she received from an older comedian and the intense, utterly absorbing events that followed. Yes, she found his eBay account. And yes, she spent six months tracking him down on a dating app only to play his profile song hundreds of times. But what else is a girl driven by obsession supposed to do? We meet Richardson, who until now has worked primarily as a performance artist, all smiles and ready to share. She takes us back to the creation of her 2024 viral piece 100 Dates , in which she spent Valentine’s Day online speed-dating in an attempt to analyse her relationship with infatuation and connection. The comedian in question used the project as the opening line of his first message to her...