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Last month, The Prince of Wales launched the Royal Parks charity in Hyde Park, following the merger of the Royal Parks Agency and the Royal Parks Foundation.

Shire horses take His Royal Highness to the charity launch reception

Credit/Copyright: PrinceOfWales.govt.uk

His Royal Highness toured the under-construction ‘super’ nursery, which will house the 500,000 flowers and shrubs that are needed for all eight Royal Parks – reducing lorry movements and the need to buy in plants.

The Prince then met school children in the wildflower meadow area who were engaged in insect meadow sweeping, and tried to catch some of the bugs for himself. His Royal Highness was also shown a story telling educational ‘snail’ from Mission: Invertebrate, whose mission is to educate people about the role invertebrates have to play on the environment.

After enjoying a trip in a horse-drawn carriage, The Prince arrived at the Ranger’s Lodge to launch the new charity,...

Keith Lemon has admitted that he would like Simon Cowell's house to feature on Through the Keyhole.

The second series kicks off tonight (August 30) with panel guests including Alan Carr, Ruth Langsford and Jonathan Ross.

"I'm blowing my own trumpet, but I think this series is better than the last," Lemon told Press Association. "We went to Los Angeles to do a few houses – they were really Hollywood-style houses."

However, Lemon said that there is still one person whose home he wants to visit on the show. "Simon Cowell's would be amazing. We come on straight after The X Factor, so it would be great to do an X Factor Through The Keyhole special."

Meanwhile, the Celebrity Juice star revealed that his revamped version had received the seal of approval by previous host Loyd Grossman, who had attended a studio recording.

"I said a few choice words in...

It's not just The X Factor that's back tonight - if you stick around afterwards, you'll get to watch Keith Lemon snooping his way through a bunch of celebrities' houses in a brand new series of Through The Keyhole. We caught up with Keith recently to find out what we can expect - and it involves black toilet paper, angry celebrities and much, much more...

Keith reckons the second series is better than the first.

"I think this series is better than last series because I was just finding my feet in the first one, and this one I know where they are, they're on the end of my legs. But it's quite loosey goosey, this one. I said, get rid of the autocue because I feel like I'm not doing anything if I'm just reading. So we got rid of the autocue and it has more of a Celebrity Juice flavour to it,...

As Nicolas Cage returns to Oscar-worthy form in David Gordon Green's extraordinary Southern Gothic drama Joe, we celebrate some of the strangest roles he's essayed along the way, from insect-munching Manhattanite to bee-wrangling bear impersonator. It's not always pretty, but it's never boring...

Vampire's Kiss (1988)

After he was a leading man, but before he was a very good one, Cage played that 1980s stalwart – the Yuppy Dick – in this off-kilter black comedy. Enunciating in an inexplicably anglicised drawl, like Loyd Grossman shouting through a tube, his character Peter Loew confides to his therapist: "I brought this girl up to my place, really hot, you knooooooow... Suddenly, this bat comes sweeping down out of noooowhere. I'll be daaaaamned if I didn't get really turned on!"

From here things only get stranger, with Loew exhibiting all the usual signs of vampirism: cringing at the sign of crosses/mirrors, shouting the alphabet...

News Ryan Lambie 1 Apr 2014 - 06:22

Action star Jason Statham now has his own brand of antiperspirant, which promises to provide the essence of man in a can...

George Forman has his grill. Loyd Grossman has his own range of cooking sauces. Now action star and Den Of Geek hero Jason Statham has unveiled his new line of spray-on deodorant, which the label claims will provide us with "the essence of man".

"From Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels to The Expendables franchise," a press release tells us, "Jason Statham has proved time and again that he's the alpha male of action cinema. His new line of antiperspirant - simply called Statham - will make a little bit of that machismo available to everyone."

With each fragrance named after one of his hit films - Blitz, Hummingbird and Crank are the first three, with The Mechanic, Chaos and The Bank Job...

MasterChef will celebrate its 10th series with John Torode and Gregg Wallace at the helm with the return of classic contestants from the last decade.

John and Gregg will team up with former winners and finalists to inspire and judge the latest crop of amateur cooks, who are hoping to join the show's Hall of Fame.

Previous stars of the show coming back include 2005 champion Thomasina Miers, 2009 champion Mat Follas, 2011 winner Tim Anderson and 2012 finalist Shelina Permalloo.

The original TV series MasterChef aired between 1990 and 2001 and was hosted by Loyd Grossman. It was revived in 2005 with new judges Gregg and John and has become a ratings smash for the BBC, shifting from BBC Two to BBC One.

The new-look MasterChef has inspired Celebrity, Junior and Professional spin-offs.

MasterChef series 10 starts on Wednesday (March 26) at 9pm on BBC One. The series continues Thursday at 9pm and Friday at 8.30pm.

In a...

My Life Is In This Spoon!

Welcome to The Taste. A Us reality TV import, which brings together X Factor ridiculous silliness, Voice-style ridiculous seriousness, a healthy dollop of Nigella Lawson and just about gets away with it. Just.

The concept is simple. 25 cooks serve up one single spoonful of their best dish, the three judges pick four people for their team, the rest go home. Then the judges and their teams go head-to-head and you can probably figure out the rest, if you've watched a single reality TV show over the last 20 years.

Cooking on TV used to be very different. Playful daytime TV larks (Ready Steady Cook), cold, hard competitions (old Loyd Grossman's MasterChef) or niche Food Channel 463 snooze-telly (456 Beef Dishes from Somerset). These days, it's primetime entertainment and big business.

From Jamie and Gordon to Bake Off and the spruced-up MasterChef, cooking TV is now Dramatic...

Tributes have been paid to Sir David Frost, who has died suddenly at the age of 74.

During his lengthy career, Frost was at the forefront of major changes in broadcasting and used his skill, creativity and persistence to provide viewers with some of the most memorable moments in television - and in some cases, world history.

Digital Spy looks back at six ways in which Sir David Frost made his mark on broadcast media below.

1. That Was the Week That Was (TW3)

That Was the Week That Was - or TW3, as it was often known - made politicians and the establishment fair satirical game in the early 1960s at a time when the Profumo affair was dominating headlines. Commissioned by the BBC, Frost was chosen to anchor the programme by its creator Ned Sherrin.

TW3 lampooned the class system, Britain's waning influence on the world stage (as in the clip below) and foreign affairs,...

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's follow-up to the darkly stylish Drive is the even more violent Only God Forgives. Is he revelling in sexual brutality?

"So," asks Nicolas Winding Refn, as we sit down for lunch in a swish new place in King's Cross, London, "what was the first reaction you had to my film? What was the first thought that went through your mind?"

Not only is this a reversal of the traditional interview roles, it's also a tricky question. The film under review is Only God Forgives, the follow-up to Refn's critically acclaimed and commercially successful Drive. Imagine a Quentin Tarantino homage to oriental slasher movies but directed by David Lynch at his most elliptical and unsettling, and you might get some idea of the strangeness of Only God Forgives. It features Ryan Gosling as a boxing promoter and drug dealer with impotence issues, Kristin Scott Thomas as his blond,...

Sir David Frost has given his backing to ITV's Through the Keyhole remake with Keith Lemon.

Leigh Francis's comedy character will front a revamped version of the show, which will have a six-episode first series run. The new show will have a similar format to the original with three celebrity panellists attempting to identity three mystery guests through a video tour of their homes.

Original Keyhole host Frost said: "I am delighted that the Keyhole format is now entering its fourth decade on TV. I know the pilot show went down very well with the studio audience and I wish Keith and his team the very best of luck for the series."

Frost's former co-host Loyd Grossman said: "Keith has definitely put a new spin on a very well-established, much-loved format. He has given Through the Keyhole a contemporary twist, but preserved the spirit and intention of the original programme.

Feature Ryan Lambie 8 May 2013 - 07:00

With their sitcom House Of Fools recently announced, we celebrate the enduring comedy brilliance of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer...

Readers of a certain age may remember the first time they saw Vic and Bob on television. For some, it may have been the 25th of May 1990, the fateful night "Britain's top light entertainer and singer" Vic Reeves burst onto screens with an absurdly fast, lounge-act rendition of The Monkees' I'm A Believer. In the background, his cohort Bob Mortimer looked on admiringly, dressed in the stovepipe hat and vast sideburns of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

For many viewers, this was a first glimpse inside the strange world of a comedy duo who'd already garnered a cult following in London pubs and clubs in the mid-1980s. Having impressed the likes of Jonathan Ross and Alan Yentob with their surreal, apparently semi-improvised comedy, Vic and...

It's hard to feel charitable towards Richard Curtis's malaria drama. There was more bite in Simon Cowell's dog's dinner

Mary and Martha (BBC1) | iPlayer

Lightfields (ITV1) | ITVPlayer

Food Glorious Food (ITV1) | ITVPlayer

Heading Out (BBC2) | iPlayer

Drama in aid of a worthy cause is not always more a pleasure than a duty, and Richard Curtis's feature-length Mary and Martha – an early curtain-raiser for Red Nose Day – was no exception. If its aim was to draw attention to the thousands of African children who die needlessly each year from malaria, all I can say is, it felt like it. I hope that doesn't sound too uncharitable. But I would have been as happy with a decent documentary as with this glossy weepie about two mums – one American, one English – having the bad luck to have a beloved son bitten to death by a mosquito in Mozambique and then...

Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway isn't original, isn't clever and isn't always that funny. However, it's a hefty improvement on ITV's recent Saturday night output - Splash!, everything with Keith Lemon - and luckily for Ant & Dec it's a million miles away from Red Or Black.

Over 7 million tuned in for the first episode last week. The simple format of celebrity guests, silly challenges, pranks and a shrieking studio audience hasn't been tweaked or altered during the show's three-year hiatus. It's still Noel's House Party but without Mr Blobby and an irritating bloke with a beard.

The boys have a new feature that involves humiliating a member of the audience by raking through their embarrassing Twitter updates, but that was the closest Takeaway came to a nod to modernity. Cosier than a cup of hot chocolate, a sheepskin rug and a blanket, Ant & Dec's enduring appeal stems from...

For Pop Idol, he gave us X Factor. For Opportunity Knocks, he gave us Britain's Got Talent. And now following the incredible success of The Great British Bake Off, Simon Cowell has brought us Food Glorious Food.

Featuring ex-MasterChef host and supermarket sauce-flogger Loyd Grossman, a fierce-looking woman from the Wi, a Geordie lady with a beehive the size of a beer barrel, and posho foodie fop Tom Parker Bowles, the show is on the hunt for Britain's best dish to sell on the shelves at Marks & Spencer.

Of course being a Cowell production, this isn't really a food show.

In the same way that The X Factor is more about the pantomime between the judges and the "journey" of the contestants, Food Glorious Food is focused on eccentric characters and ladled-on emotional stories. Actual cooking was at a bare minimum.

An inherent flaw in the format appears to...

Kerry Katona's secret stash of sex toys will reportedly be shown to the nation on Keith Lemon's upcoming revamp of Through the Keyhole.

The Celebrity Juice star stumbled upon Katona's collection while snooping around her home in Surrey, according to audience members at a taping of the ITV show.

"At one point Keith pulls open a drawer and inside is a big sex toy and other kinky paraphernalia," an onlooker told The Sun.

"He makes a big meal out of it and the audience just fell to pieces laughing."

The source added that Through the Keyhole panellists Geri Halliwell, Carol Vorderman and Dave Berry couldn't "keep a straight face".

Other finds made by Lemon reportedly include an erotic book at Blur star Alex James's Oxfordshire farm and boxer Amir Khan's naughty collection of chocolate bars.

Lemon was confirmed as host of ITV's primetime revamp of Through the Keyhole in mid-January.

Food Glorious Food stars Carol Vorderman and Loyd Grossman have taken a swipe at rival cookery shows, claiming that too many are aggressive and "shouty".

The duo are part of the presenting team on Simon Cowell's new ITV series Food Glorious Food, which is launching a hunt for Britain's best recipe.

Grossman, who famously presented MasterChef in the '90s, said that the charm of their show was that it involved "genuine amateurs".

"We have a lot of programmes on TV with guys in white jackets shouting at members of the public," said Grossman.

"But on this programme, it's not about chefs. It's about the love of food."

Vorderman told Digital Spy that she found "shouty" food shows a turn-off and that the competitive nature of them is slightly ridiculous.

"I don't like things that get shouty or when you get four people cooking a steak with caramelised onions like it's life or death,...

Loyd Grossman was hesitant about judging 'Food Glorious Food'. The 62-year-old presenter is making his TV comeback as a judge on the show alongside Tom Parker Bowles, Anne Harrison and Stacie Stewart and was concerned the programme would be as ''aggressive and hostile'' as creator Simon Cowell's other show, 'The X Factor', but is delighted by the tone of the series. He said: ''When I first heard it being described as 'The X Factor' of cookery I was a little bit unsure and not absolutely convinced it was for me. ''I didn't want to be on an aggressive, hostile show. There is enough...

Loyd Grossman was hesitant about judging 'Food Glorious Food'. The 62-year-old presenter is making his TV comeback as a judge on the show alongside Tom Parker Bowles, Anne Harrison and Stacie Stewart and was concerned the programme would be as ''aggressive and hostile'' as creator Simon Cowell's other show, 'The X Factor', but is delighted by the tone of the series. He said: ''When I first heard it being described as 'The X Factor' of cookery I was a little bit unsure and not absolutely convinced it was for me. ''I didn't want to be on an aggressive, hostile show. There is enough...

Carol Vorderman has insisted that Simon Cowell is not involved in the production of new cookery show Food Glorious Food.

The series has been billed as 'the X Factor of cooking', after Cowell admitted that his love of home cooking was the reason for wanting to be involved in the project.

However, presenter of the series Carol Vorderman stated the programme was more Antiques Roadshow than X Factor.

In an interview with Digital Spy, she said: "It's [Cowell's] company Syco, who are a co-production on the show, but he's not been hands-on in it.

"He obviously knows about it because it's one of his company's programmes. He loves the edit that he's seen so far, but I really don't want you to think that he's actively involved in this.

"This is not X Factor. It's not like that at all. It's got a very British feel and it's very eccentric."

Vorderman...

Simon Cowell is taking a break from dancing dogs and warbling karaoke singers to launch his first ever cookery project later this month - ITV's Food Glorious Food.

Judged by Loyd Grossman, Tom Parker Bowles, Stacie Stewart and Anne Harrison, the show is on the hunt for Britain's best dish.

Digital Spy caught up with presenter Carol Vorderman to find out why the show is "more Antiques Roadshow than X Factor" and got the scoop on a naked gardener contestant who revealed a little bit more than his plum pudding recipe.

What is Food Glorious Food all about?

"Obviously, it's a show about food! Ha! What we're trying to do is find the best home recipe. The prize that you probably know about is £20,000 and the final result is that their dish will be available to buy from Marks & Spencer, which is fantastic."

So you've basically spent a couple of...

Will Daniel Day-Lewis be tackling Nick Clegg? Probably not, but here's how it might look

Clegg

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Nick Clegg

The 2010 general election. A hung parliament. Political stalemate engulfs the country. Vibrant young politician Nick Clegg is visited by a vision of the Virgin Mary: "Nick," she says. "This is your time. You have the power to change things." Clegg is the story of one man's decision to grasp this power and make a right old pig's ear of it. Daniel Day-Lewis insists on remaining in character during production, asking both cast and crew to avoid eye-contact at all times, in case he sees it as invitation to wander over and make desperately awkward smalltalk.

Tagline He came. He saw. He did whatever Dave said.

James Dyson: Lust For Balls

Starring: Sly Stallone as James Dyson

The year is 2525. Cryogenically reanimated cyborg James Dyson, knowing that his power source is failing,...

This year's Edinburgh International Television Festival continues apace and ITV's Peter Fincham is the latest controller to take to the stage to discuss his vision for his channel. Is The X Factor running out of steam? Is there a fresh entertainment format out there? What exciting drama projects does ITV have coming up? And is a Simon Cowell-produced cooking show hosted by Loyd Grossman really going to be the next big reality hit? Stay tuned as Digital Spy presents a live blog packed with Peter's thoughts on the future of ITV...

15:03And that's all folk! No big news from the Fincham session, but he made it clear that the X Factor is here to stay - regardless of falling ratings. Like it or lump it guys. 15:01Fincham says that the expansion of channels has lead to more choice and better quality for viewers as broadcasters have had...

Loyd Grossman is to judge Simon Cowell's new TV show. The original 'MasterChef' host - who fronted the programme from 1990 to 2000 - will join Tom Parker-Bowles, the son of Prince Charles' wife Duchess Camilla, on 'Food Glorious Food'. An insider said: ''It is a great coup signing up Loyd to the show as he was always a favourite on the original version of MasterChef. ''Tom is also one to watch - and will bring a touch of class to proceedings.'' The ITV1 show - which starts filming next month - will see a team including Loyd and Tom scour the nation to...

Loyd Grossman is to be a judge on Simon Cowell's new ITV1 cooking show, it has been reported. Grossman will be joined by food writer Tom Parker Bowles on Food Glorious Food, The Sun reports. His previous TV roles include hosting MasterChef for ten years and serving as Through the Keyhole's location presenter between 1987 and 2003. "It is a great coup signing up Loyd to the show, as he was always a favourite on the original version of MasterChef," (more)...

Vernon Kay has signed up to host a new version of 'Through The Keyhole'. The 'All-Star Family Fortunes' presenter is set to team up with chat show host Paul O' Grady for the series, in which he will take on the role made famous by Loyd Grossman and snoop around celebrities' homes for clues. A source said: "Vernon and Paul are the top choices to reinvigorate the show. The whole programme had become stuffy and looked and felt dated. This time there will be a lavish studio, amazing celeb houses and a real sense of fun." The much-loved show has also...