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How I Met Your Mother: Cobie Smulders' finale defence reignites hatred for ending

'Is there anyone on Earth who enjoys the ending?'




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Seinfeld star Jason Alexander says fans bribed him for series finale secrets

The controversial ending of Seinfeld ranks as one of the most-viewed series finale ever




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Coronavirus: The Masked Singer costume designer is making PPE for NHS staff

'I have just got to keep going, making sure other people are going to be alright,' said Tim Simpson




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'Get back in your own area': Holly Willoughby forgets about social distancing on This Morning

Presenter said she was 'genuinely sorry' for blunder




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Stephen Fry lends voice to children's mindfulness app from BBC

The app aims to help young children look after their mental health




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Snoop Dogg stars as delivery driver in new Just Eat advert

The advert will air during Friday's 'Gogglebox'




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Lenny Henry's daughter posed as comedian and sent 'manipulative' false messages in attempt to win back boyfriend

Billie Henry was given a five-year restraining order




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Joe Gilgun: 'Stealing all day is hard graft'

The star of 'This Is England' talks to Annie Lord about the misrepresentation of working-class people on TV, the return of his show 'Brassic', and his struggles with medication for a bipolar disorder




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Stranger Things: Full list of films watched by writers reveals 'DNA of season 4'

All the clues you need in one picture




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Becoming, review: Michelle Obama's Netflix documentary gives emotion without intimacy

Ninety minutes in the company of the former first lady is like an inspirational infomercial, says Annie Lord




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Courteney Cox 'loved playing overweight Monica' in Friends because she 'felt free'

Actor also revealed her favourite episodes of the sitcom




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Space Force: Real chief wanted to be played by Bruce Willis instead of 'shaggy' Steve Carell

Series is a humorous response to Trump's actual Space Force




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Netflix secret codes: How to access hidden films and TV shows on streaming service

There are loads of titles you didn't know were on the streaming service




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SNL at Home: Saturday Night Live announces season finale with third remote episode

Brad Pitt and Tom Hanks have contributed to the programme remotely




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For all its absurdity, Netflix's Dead to Me captures the grief, anger and sadness of losing a partner

The first season ended with a cliffhanger – did Jen kill Steve or not? But what is most poignant about the second season is not who killed him, but how well the show deals with grief, writes Charlotte Cripps




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National Treasure series from Jerry Bruckheimer coming to Disney+

A third film is also in the works




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Frances Quinn: Great British Bake Off winner 'banned from Waitrose' after being accused of shoplifting

Show's 2013 winner was approached by store detectives after she appeared to not pay for her shopping




in

Pete Davidson fan delivered drugs to comedian's mother's house during lockdown

Davidson is currently quarantining in his mother's basement




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Into the Night: New mystery Netflix series draws comparisons to Lost and Speed

High-concept drama is just waiting to be binged




in

Elon Musk says he's selling all his possessions so people can't attack him for being a billionaire

Tesla CEO is back on Joe Rogan's podcast




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'Love in the Time of Corona': Coronavirus romance series filmed entirely remotely to air this summer

Show promises a 'funny and hopeful look at the search for love, sex and connection during this time of social distancing'




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Have I Got News For You: David Tennant jokes that Eamonn Holmes lives in a 'tin foil bungalow'

Holmes came under fire for giving validity to a conspiracy theory linking 5G to coronavirus




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Normal People's Paul Mescal was once in an advert for sausages, and fans have only just found out

The 'Normal People' star played an Irish teenager whose sausage inspires him to travel the world




in

Andrew Scott took Fleabag role to stop being typecast as a villain

Scott was best known for playing Moriarty opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in 'Sherlock'




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Tiger King's 'Texas-sized' team asks Donald Trump to pardon Joe Exotic

Joseph Maldonado-Passage was sentenced in January to 22 years in prison




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Phillip Schofield shares family photo during lockdown, appears to contradict reports he's moved out

TV presenter, wife Stephanie and their daughters played a game of Murder Mystery




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Miriam Margolyes shocks fans after admitting she 'had difficulty not wanting Boris Johnson to die' during coronavirus battle

Actor is famous for making her opinions known during interviews




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Car Seat Headrest: Making a Door Less Open review – Will Toledo in yet another guise

(Matador)
The indie maverick is a purveyor of all styles on his studiously eclectic 12th album

There’s a strange psychological cross-pollination going on behind the mask that Will Toledo, the artist mostly known as Car Seat Headrest, sports on the cover of his 12th album. Indulging an alter ego called Trait, Making a Door Less Open seeks out deliberately eclectic hybrids of his wry, lo-fi indie rock style (heir to the likes of Beck, Lou Barlow and Eels) and the satirical EDM he and his drummer Andrew Katz make as 1 Trait Danger. The result is much better than anyone who’s heard the latter, who often veer perilously close to a Bloodhound Gang remix project, might expect: Can’t Cool Me Down has a sultry 80s electropop feel, while the roil of self-deprecation and naked emotion on There Must Be More Than Blood underlines Toledo’s debt to LCD Soundsystem.

The new styles don’t all gel. The sleazy, fuzzy synth-rocker Hollywood is pleasingly punchy, but brought down by facile lyrics (apparently Tinsel Town isn’t the dreamland it’s cracked up to be – who knew?). Two sister songs – the lumpen alt-rock Deadlines (Hostile) and the Hot Chip-with-extra-dour Deadlines (Thoughtful) – fail to charm, while What’s With You Lately is a wan, mopey strum that seems to have wandered in from an entirely different, very bad record. But on the likes of the pulsing, uplifting Famous and Life Worth Missing, Toledo finds new energy.

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Brian Howe, hard rock singer who fronted Bad Company, dies aged 66

Singer who also worked with Ted Nugent and Megadeth dies at Florida home of a heart attack

Brian Howe, the singer who fronted the British rock supergroup Bad Company for eight years, has died aged 66. He had a heart attack at his Florida home.

Howe’s manager Paul Easton said: “It is with deep and profound sadness that we announce the untimely passing of a loving father, friend and musical icon.”

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Kemistry & Storm – the tragic story of the drum'n'bass originals

As a pioneering female DJ duo, the two best friends were integral to the rise of the 90s dance scene, before a car accident changed everything. Storm talks about the soul sister she lost

Storm remembers the sound of glass shattering, but not how many seconds or minutes had passed before she realised something awful had happened. A 4.5kg metal cat’s eye had been dislodged from the road ahead by a passing van, and had smashed through their car windshield on the passenger side. It left Kemistry – her best friend and partner in one of the UK’s most pioneering drum’n’bass outfits – with devastating injuries. Minutes later, she died.

“I’ve had some really dark times and really dark thoughts,” says Storm, 20 years on from the accident. “Thoughts about me not being here, about going to join her.”

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Dave Greenfield: putting beauty at the rotten heart of the Stranglers

The keyboardist, who has died aged 71 of coronavirus, upended the rules of punk with organ arpeggios and a moustache – and pointed the way to post-punk

Music writer Pete Paphides’ recent memoir, Broken Greek, contains a vivid description of its seven-year-old author encountering the Stranglers for the first time, during a 1977 Top of the Pops appearance. “They landed in the living room while I was totally unsupervised,” he writes, “and scared the shit [out] of me. By now I would have seen images of punk rockers … but they looked like circus entertainers compared to [the Stranglers]. They looked too old to be punk. They looked like the sort of people you pass in the street and your mother puts her arm round you, stares at the pavement and doubles her walking speed … The point at which it all got too much was when the camera cut to Dave Greenfield – who has died from Covid-19 aged 71 – jabbing his keyboard while looking straight ahead with what seemed, beyond doubt, to be the eyes of a murderer, an effect somehow compounded by the army-surplus boiler suit he had decided to wear. Just like that, my list of phobias had got a little longer: worms, biting into mushrooms, insects, the fibreglass King Kong which stood next to a ring road in Birmingham city centre and, now, Dave Greenfield from the Stranglers.”

It’s funny writing, but it’s also very incisive about the Stranglers: in real life Greenfield was, by all accounts, the band’s most approachable and charming member, but otherwise Paphides has it spot-on. The Stranglers complained relentlessly about not being accepted by the punk cognoscenti, but what did they expect? They didn’t look like punks, particularly Greenfield, who defiantly sported that least punk of facial accoutrements, a moustache. They were old, at least by the standards of the day, old enough to have the kind of musical pasts it was wise to keep your mouth shut about in the scorched-earth environment created by the Sex Pistols: Hugh Cornwell had played bass in a band with Richard Thompson, later of Fairport Convention; Greenfield had been in a prog rock band called Rusty Butler.

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Car Seat Headrest: Making a Door Less Open review – cult indie star in middle of the road | Alexis Petridis' album of the week

(Matador)
Will Toledo’s alt-rockers have emerged out of lo-fi fuzz, but seem unsure of where to turn as they drift toward the mainstream

Anyone wondering how things have changed in the world of lauded US alt-rockers Car Seat Headrest might consider the four years that separate Making a Door Less Open from their last album of new material. Ordinarily there would be nothing unusual about that gap – but in the first four years of Car Seat Headrest’s existence, its mastermind, Will Toledo, released seven albums (one of them a two-hour double), four EPs (one of them as long as an album) and two compilations of outtakes. That’s more than 150 songs and 12 hours of music: a lo-fi spewing forth of ideas that won Toledo a cult following, which then grew exponentially, both in size and rabidity, when he recruited a band and signed to the august US indie label Matador.

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Drake: Dark Lane Demo Tapes review – rap’s whingeing king hits a dead end

OVO
There are flashes of skill and rawness in this odds-and-ends mixtape but it feels like a clumsy lunge at commercial success

In a world where the boundary between mixtapes and albums is becoming ever more blurred, the title of Drake’s latest album highlights its interstitial nature. That said, it’s still slightly misleading. There are tracks here that sound like demos – the mopey James Blake-isms of Chicago Freestyle are audibly unpolished – but for the most part, it ’s a way of collecting up leftovers and leaks, spare tracks he apparently has lying around the studio.

Those inclined to view Drake’s career with a cool eye might be surprised he has any spare tracks lying around the studio, given the state of his last album. Listening to Scorpion, 25 songs long, required a certain degree of mental stamina: you needed to steel yourself against the panicky sensation that you might die of old age before it ended. But it wasn’t the sheer quantity that was the problem so much as the quality of what was there. Scorpion had its moments but was so hopelessly uneven that it was easy to buy into the theory that its length was not due to its author’s teeming multiplicity of fantastic ideas, but an attempt to game the streaming services: more songs means more streams, more streams means a higher chart placing.

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Watkins Family Hour: Brother Sister review – a model of sibling harmony

(Family Hour/Thirty Tigers)
Sean and Sara Watkins are back and in reflective mood

California’s Sean and Sara Watkins are akin to royalty in American folk circles, firstly as founding members of the hugely successful Nickel Creek, and secondly as hosts of an 18-year residency at LA’s Largo club, where they perform alongside invited guests. Brother Sister draws on both strands of their history. Like its self-titled 2015 predecessor, the album sets aside the pizzazz of Nickel Creek for a down-home approach, but instead of boisterous, star-studded cover versions come five original songs and a minimal musical palette.

Alternating on lead, the pair’s vocals remain a model of sibling harmony, while the interplay between Sean’s intricate guitar picking and Sara’s elegant fiddle is similarly impressive – the breakneck bluegrass instrumental Bella and Ivan is a case in point. Mostly, however, the mood is reflective. Lafayette and Miles of Desert Sand chronicle the search for a better life, and Fake Badge, Real Gun is an artful snipe at Trump – “Throw your tantrums but the truth will be waiting”. Warren Zevon’s forlorn Accidentally Like a Martyr fits in neatly, while Charley Jordan’s ribald Keep It Clean is a gleeful example of a Largo session.

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Car Seat Headrest: from indie recluse to gas mask-wearing party starter?

US indie rock maverick Will Toledo is back with an experimental album that finds him collaborating with his own electronic side project

You cannot accuse Car Seat Headrest, AKA Will Toledo, of taking the easy route. Four years on from the release of breakthrough record Teens of Denial, Toledo is back with new album Making a Door Less Open, only now he is going under the name Trait and is wearing a gas mask in photos. Toledo’s restless and impassioned indie rock is looking a little different, too. The new album blends his classic songwriting chops with a bold exploration of electronic textures. This is the result of essentially making the album twice: once as Car Seat Headrest, and again alongside producer Andrew Katz as their jokey EDM side project 1 Trait Danger, before landing on a middle ground.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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Paul Heaton: 'Love feels like someone is hitting your heart with a cricket bat'

The musician on DIY smooching, dinner parties and why he won’t do interviews between 1.45pm and 2.15pm

Raised in Sheffield, Heaton, 57, founded the Housemartins in the early eighties. They had hit singles with Happy Hour and Caravan Of Love before splitting in 1988. Heaton then formed the Beautiful South, releasing 10 albums before disbanding in 2007. With former band member Jacqui Abbott, Heaton has released three albums, the most recent being Manchester Calling. He is married with three children and lives in Manchester.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Forgetfulness.

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Kelly Lee Owens: ‘I still have to fight to not be seen as ‘just the singer’’

The Welsh nurse-turned-indie rocker is now one of electronic music’s best exponents. She talks proving herself, the NHS and climate-crisis bangers

Kelly Lee Owens is showing me her crumpled bed, pixelated on the screen. It is five weeks into quarantine and this has quickly become the norm: an interview with an artist in their close quarters; ambivalent levels of grooming. Neither of us is wearing makeup, and neither of us care. “You know what I read?” begins the electronic musician, incredulously. “This is bullshit. There’s a [Daily Mail] headline saying that women’s breasts will be sagging because they’re not going to be wearing bras during this lockdown. So what?! Leave me to my saggy breasts.”

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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Kim Petras's lockdown listening: 'My fans have truly kept me sane'

The cult pop star shares her self-isolation favourites, including Dua Lipa’s disco and Daft Punk’s dystopias

Isolation has definitely been a test, but I’m really lucky: I’m able to work on new music while quarantined with my best friends in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles. I’ve been super active on Twitter and Instagram, and playing Animal Crossing and Mario Kart with my fans after sharing my Nintendo Switch codes online – it’s really important for me to check in on my fans as I worry about them a lot. They have truly kept me sane, so I’m keeping an eye open for anybody that needs to talk.

Related: Belle and Sebastian's lockdown listening: 'I have a dance-off with my kids every night'

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538: Daily presidential tracking polls...


538: Daily presidential tracking polls...


(Third column, 20th story, link)