Benidorm return in crisis as creator's secret DIVORCE from show star throws reunion into chaos
THE return of iconic ITV comedy Benidorm has hit the rocks following a huge falling out between creator Derren Litten and the show's biggest star Jake Canuso who plays randy barman Matteo.
The pair had quietly been a real life couple, and had been happily married for years, choosing to keep their relationship out of the spotlight.
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Living together in Benidorm, Derren even opened a bar called 'Matteo's' in the holiday hotspot which saw Jake often turn up for special guest appearances.
But the couple called time on their relationship at the end of 2022 - leading to one of the messiest divorces in TV history.
They were finally granted a divorce in August 2024.
Derren took to Twitter and said: 'I don't really talk about my personal life here but the reason I've been a bit scarce on the socials is for the last 18 months I've been going through a pretty miserable divorce.
'So I'm obviously poor now. And you thought we couldn't have more in common then we already do?!'
A source said: 'Matteo is Benidorm, he's the character that everyone wants to see.
'He's been part of the Solana since the beginning so for him not to feature in any future reboot, well it just would not be the same without him.
'Jake created one of the show's most loved characters in Matteo but with everything that's happened between him and Derren, it's not looking good.'
Benidorm has had a huge resurgence after Netflix bought the episodes from ITV.
Another source said: 'Conversations have been had.
Benidorm Trailer ITV
'The only way Jake will return is if ITV make him a huge offer, one that he could not possibly turn down.
'But obviously Derren is making negotiations difficult. He is the writer and creator and believes that he should make all the decisions.
'The fans would want to see Matteo, which ITV get. It's all become one big headache.'
A spokesperson for Jake insisted they were unaware of any planned return for Benidorm.
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BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Charli, Neil Young and Scissor Sisters give Glastonbury goosebumps
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At the end of her set, she reclaimed I Love It - the bubblegum pop anthem she donated to Icona Pop in 2012, before reassuring fans that she wasn't really ready to let go of her breakthrough album, after all."I think you have all proven to me that Brat is forever," flashed a message on the video screens as the music disintegrated into glitched siren sounds and pyrotechnics exploded. "And honestly, I don't know who I am if it's over."So that's settled: Charli can come back and headline again after Glastonbury's fallow year in 2026. Neil Young's set was a very different, but equally gnarly, proposition. The rocker walked on stage alone, hunched over with his face obscured by a corduroy cap, to play a hushed acoustic version of the classic Sugar that was a cunning misdirect. His new band, The Chrome Hearts, joined him immediately afterwards, launching into a furious flurry of guitar anthems - Be The Rain, Cinnamon Girl and Hey Hey, My My - full of jagged chords and intense crowd swooned when they switched back to acoustic mode for The Needle and The Damage Done and Harvest Moon; and cheered when Young announced he was playing Hank Williams' old guitar (a battered and worn acoustic) on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song Looking star might be 79 years old, but his voice is still unusually supple and youthful; buoyed up by The Chrome Hearts' close-knit they were at their best on the heavier material - in particular Like A Hurricane, whose time-bending guitar solo felt like a revelation. Young always seems to get great pleasure from playing that particular song, and it was mesmerising to ended the set with Tear Your Hatred Down, a savage takedown of politicians and the war machine, that contrasts the idealism of the 1960s with the cruelties of the modern world. Both as a protest song and a lament for human nature, it was a powerful way to end a peerless set. 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He was preceded by Mercury Prize winners Ezra Collective, whose life-affirming jazz and Afrobeat grooves got a helping hand from special guests including Loyle Carner and Sasha by drummer Femi Koleoso, they brought a carnival atmosphere to the field, with the audience making space for each other to sway, shake and generally flail their limbs as the sun set over Worthy Farm."You practice your whole life for just one second that might feel like that," beamed Koleoso as he came off stage. "Sometimes we're in these really negative bubbles where it's like, we all hate each other, we're all divided. But sometimes you just need to go to Glastonbury and see that that's a myth."Love for one another and respect for each other and our neighbours, it does exist, and it's a special thing to be the soundtrack to that."The festival continues on Sunday with performances from Rod Stewart, Chic, Wolf Alice, Joy Crookes and Pyramid Stage headliner Olivia Rodrigo.
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Jacky Jhaj: How was a paedophile able to hire Disneyland?
When it emerged that last weekend a convicted paedophile had organised a fake wedding to a nine-year-old at Disneyland Paris, many people were would do such a thing? How was it even possible? The BBC understands it was the latest bizarre stunt by Jacky Jhaj – a British man I have been investigating for two first came to my attention after a tip off from a teenage girl came out of the blue in was horrified that she had come face to face with a paedophile who she had been hired to fawn was too terrified of him to go on the record - but I tracked down a number of aspiring actors who had also been directed to scream at Jhaj while he was parading down a red carpet, and reach out to try and touch him. In all, 200 children and young women had been recruited by reputable casting agencies to play Jhaj's fans at a fake film premiere in London's Leicester Square that year. Some were as young as the end of the event someone recognised Jhaj - who had previously been found guilty of sexual activity with two 15-year-olds in 2016 and sent to fake red carpet was one of a litany of stunts he has organised since his release which often involve casting girls as his fans. All have been organised at great expense, while he was on the Sex Offenders Register and subject to restrictions on his the mock-wedding at Disneyland Paris a nine-year-old Ukrainian girl was flown in to play his theme park can be privately rented outside of its opening hours and actors had been booked at great cost to be there – one received £10, BBC understands that Jacky Jhaj, 39, who is from west London, has now been charged by French authorities in connection with organising the the past two years I've set out to try and understand how he has been able to carry out these stunts and why there are not more stringent rules preventing have taken place at high profile British landmarks – including the British Museum, the Royal Exchange in London and the University of also typically involve young people being hired to act as his fans in elaborate productions. Videos of some of them were uploaded to a YouTube channel which was watched more than six million times and had 12 million remained on YouTube for years until last September, when the BBC alerted Google, which owns the platform.A video on a separate channel showed him next to one of the victims he was convicted of sexual activity with – with her face anonymised. It had remained on YouTube for four years with more than a million told the BBC at the time that it takes users' safety seriously but offered no explanation as to how an account featuring a man with almost no profile or success had 12 million subscribers, or why the videos had not been previously on social media sites appear to cast Jhaj as a successful writer and singer and are often styled as music videos. Many are highly concerning - some feature him posing with young children and weapons. It is not clear if the guns are real or revel in his infamy. In one, he is greeted by fans apparently celebrating his release from Wormwood Scrubs prison.I wanted to know how he had organised the stunts – and if he had received help. What else do we know? Over the past two years, I have spoken to videographers, production assistants and technicians who were hired for some of the events before they discovered Jhaj's real man repeatedly appears in videos they shared with have been sent images and footage of him at three of the stunts by people who described him as assisting the choreographer hired for dance auditions, and apparently filming. At a different event last year, he was confronted by duped cast members who recognised Jhaj from our reports and showed him the online cast members filmed him acknowledging that Jhaj is a convicted sex offender but he says he is his "friend" and is now "free".At this event Jhaj was filmed posing naked in front of a mocked-up BBC News lorry in London which had been set on had initially appeared there disguised by prosthetics – before he removed them and was identified as the man from our findings from the French prosecutor also said that make-up artists had allegedly changed the organiser's facial features dramatically at the Disneyland event. How Jhaj funds his stunts - which involve extraordinary costs on venue hire, casts and props - is a production hired a tank, while in another a mock police car was set on booking of Disneyland Paris alone would have cost more than €130,000 (£110,000), according to the French broadcaster BFMTV.I was also told that hiring the red carpet space that is the home of movie premieres in Leicester Square would have required tens of thousands of was listed as a director of a business that was wound up in 2016 – but there is no other obvious source of money.I also wanted to know how he had been able to carry out these events while subject to a sexual harm prevention have seen a copy of it. It lists ten restrictions on his activities – but does not appear to explicitly prohibit the stunts he had order restricts Jhaj from contacting his previous victims, entering public places for the use of children and deliberately contacting any girl under the age of there is no blanket ban on hosting events with children under 16 if they are supervised – as was the case with the Leicester Square stunt, where some adults attended as chaperones. One police officer to 50 offenders I also wanted to know who, if anyone, was responsible for monitoring convicted my first report, a police officer who helped monitor Jhaj rang me, asking for information on his said he was responsible for managing the whereabouts of dozens of offenders - and it was challenging National Police Chiefs' Council advise that the minimum safe staffing levels at which paedophiles should be monitored is one officer to every 50 Metropolitan Police's average offender management ratio was one officer to 40 offenders – well within the benchmark.I asked other forces what their ratios were and some never replied. But 10 out of 26 forces failed to meet this benchmark, according to Freedom of Information requests received last one force, officers were responsible for monitoring 85 offenders each on forces defended their resourcing – arguing that these are advisory levels only and also dependent on risk assessments of successfully managing 50 sex offenders is "impossible" according to Jonathan Taylor, a safeguarding expert and former child abuse investigator."I feel so sorry for the officers", he says. "It's a poisoned chalice - one of the paedophiles will re-offend. This case also highlights concerns about a lack of safeguarding in entertainment and tech companies enabling these types of offenders."The BBC understands that Jhaj is currently detained in French custody. The local prosecutor there says the Ukrainian girl involved in Saturday's stunt had not been a victim of either physical or sexual violence and had not been forced to play the role of a statement also said Disneyland Paris had been "deceived" and that the organiser had used a fake Latvian ID to hire the BBC approached Disneyland Paris for comment - they did not Metropolitan Police said that a 39-year-old man is wanted by them for breaching restrictions placed on his activities, and is also separately being investigated for "any possible" fraud reporting by Alex Dackevych and Richard Irvine-Brown.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Green firebrand challenges Corbynites: Join me in the radical left
On June 29, 2016, Jeremy Corbyn appeared at a central London rally and made an attempt to move on from the Brexit referendum held the previous week. The Labour leader was instead heckled by a 33-year-old hypnotherapist actor who, unbeknown to the left-wing activists present, had just launched his political career as a candidate for the Liberal Democrats. 'What about Europe, Jeremy!' Zack Polanski jeered. 'Where were you when we needed you?' Corbyn, brow furrowed, appeared speechless, leaving his supporters to hiss and drown out the noise. Today, Polanski is neither an unknown on the left nor a Lib Dem. The tiggerish London Assembly member is running to become leader of the Green Party, of which he is already deputy and whose politics over the past decade have tracked him in moving steadily leftwards. He is still generating headlines and posing complicated questions of Corbyn and the Corbynites. The surprising dynamic is that Polanski — a gay vegan Jew who long ago traded his native Salford for north London — is now doing so in the spirit of comradeship. Addressing the question of his transformation, he invokes Corbyn's hero, Tony Benn: he is interested in where people are going, he says, not where they are from. As such, Polanski has spent recent weeks positioning himself as the radical socialist and pro-Palestine — for which read Corbynite — candidate for the leadership not only of the Greens but of the British left in its entirety. The size and political complexion of the Greens' grassroots membership today is poorly understood (last year it was estimated to number about 57,000, albeit it is thought to have grown since) but his 'eco-populist' vision has generated more noise than his two rivals, MPs Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns, who are running on a joint ticket. In the event that he wins the contest, the results of which will be announced at the start of September after a summer of campaigning, he wants the independent MP for Islington North in the tent. Speaking from the Glastonbury festival, where he is busy canvassing, and where Corbyn appeared on the Pyramid Stage at his peak in 2017, Polanski said: 'Anyone who aligns with our values in the Green Party is very welcome to join the party, and so I'd love to see progressive left-wing MPs in the party.' Does that include Corbyn? What of his parliamentary protégés, including those in the Socialist Campaign Group, the left-wing faction of Labour MPs? He confirms: 'Anyone who aligns — and I believe that Zarah [Sultana, the firebrand MP for Coventry South] and Jeremy do align with where the Green Party are — that's a decision for them.' He rattles off a list of socialist positions he would seek to enact: 'protecting the NHS'; 'building social homes'; a 'wealth tax'; and stopping the 'genocide in Gaza'. The reason such pronouncements are causing much debate, and a degree of discomfort, on the left is that it has spent the almost two years since October 7 discussing the future of progressive politics — but failing to identify a clear solution or leader before the next election. Polanski, as one Corbynite puts it, is threatening to 'eat [our] lunch'. Since last year, Reform UK has taken centre stage as the main opposition to Sir Keir Starmer and the established order in Westminster. Yet the Greens won four seats, their most so far and one fewer than Reform, secured two million votes, and came second in 40 seats. Elsewhere, disgruntled socialists and Muslim voters delivered five independent MPs, Corbyn among them. The difference is that Nigel Farage has long personified the anti-immigrant, anti-woke sentiment; is a dominant figure within Reform who has vanquished all internal allies; and has singular communications skills. The radical left has no such person. It has a more complicated relationship with hierarchy in the first instance. It is also less of the view that parliament is the only place where proper politics can be done, especially on the issue of Gaza. Parliamentary chicanery has had far less impact, and visibility, than weekly marches up and down the country, attacks on allegedly pro-Israel businesses and the recent infiltration of RAF Brize Norton. Polanski is adamant that opposition to Israel's actions in Gaza is not limited to the party's traditional urban base — in cities like Brighton and Bristol — nor the British Muslim community. He says of the Red Wall areas where Greens have performed surprisingly well — among them South Tyneside council, where they are the second largest party now: 'In fact, I think in those seats, people are equally concerned with the genocide in Gaza, and people are really affected by inequality.' The Greens — who were the first party in England and Wales to call the Jewish state an 'apartheid' and the first to say it was committing 'genocide' — has at times faced criticism for its track record on expelling antisemitic councillors, but also its focus on the Middle East. Its current leader hand-delivered a petition to her local council asking the mayor to write to the foreign secretary to demand a ceasefire, and prior to the last election circulated leaflets featuring the Palestine flag and images of rubble. Polanski is unapologetic about that. 'I think fundamentally, there's a genocide in Gaza. And actually, the Palestinian people are the story here,' he says. 'And I think often we can all get distracted by talking about groups and actions. And actually, I'd much rather focus on stopping the war, working for a ceasefire, and ending the occupation of Israel.' Adding to the complexity is the fact that many of the left's leading lights — such as Sultana — are still part of Labour, even if she is currently suspended. And others still suffer from what their nemesis, Lord Mandelson, has called 'long Corbyn': the trauma of his suspension from Labour, his repudiation at the ballot box in 2019 and the allegations of antisemitism. Still, leading figures on the left are increasingly of the view that something needs to be done to capitalise on the political moment. Gaza remains a galvanising force — and anti-Labour sentiment is not going away, either on the activist left or in the Muslim community. Support for Labour among committed progressives has fallen from 67 per cent in 2019 to 49 per cent at last year's election, and down to 39 per cent last month. Over the past week, three Greens have won council by-elections triggered by defections or resignations from Labour — including most recently its first in Greenwich. Current polling suggests that — even without a Corbynite tilt — the party would win ultra-safe Labour seats such as Huddersfield. Meanwhile, Luke Tryl, of the pollster More in Common, points to the fact that, in local elections in May, in seats where more than 30 per cent of voters were Muslim, half voted for independent candidates. Within a political tradition known for its splittism, there is unanimity within the left only about the fact such feeling demands one of three things: a new party, a parliamentary grouping or a national movement. To that, Polanski's rejoinder is simple: all three already exist in the form of the Greens. In the event he wins, he says, he intends to depart from the party's traditional identity — as a 'single-issue party' of polar bears and saving the countryside — and pivot towards full-fat leftism. He explains: 'So it's up to anyone what they want to do in terms of starting new things. But actually, I'd encourage anyone right now, whether they're a member of another party, or indeed, an MP from another party, if they align with our values, to join with the Greens.' While his party has a quixotic structure that requires leadership elections every two years and involves the grassroots in policymaking, Polanski has been unusually prepared to speak the usual language of conventional politics. He says the party needs to be less timid and to 'learn' from Farage, whose communications skills, and clarity of vision, have made him favourite to be the next prime minister. And despite the queasiness on the left about the role of parliament, Polanski has resolved, as Farage did, that all roads to power run through Westminster. He says: 'I actually have a constituency in mind, and I want to be one of the first group of new London MPs, or first group of London Green MPs.' • Baroness Jones: You're never too old to be arrested as a Green The question then — beyond the outcome of the race — is whether or not the rest of the left has a rival plan. After a More in Common poll suggested a party led by Corbyn could win 10 per cent of the vote, Andrew Murray, his former aide, last week revealed in an eyebrow-raising account in the socialist daily Morning Star two options had long been under consideration. One was Collective, a new national party founded by Karie Murphy, Corbyn's former chief of staff, whose central idea is to install him as interim leader. The other, which is nameless, seeks to create a looser parliamentary grouping of pro-Gaza MPs, possibly with Corbyn or Sultana as figureheads. Murray added that those two tendencies had now combined, indicating a new organisation could be launched imminently. For the Greens, or any new party, there is a final question. Even if the left found a way to unite, what is the best it could achieve at a general election in 2029? The idea of a progressive alternative to Starmer has acquired momentum precisely because of his rightward shift and his determination instead to court Reform votes. Yet if he continues to fall in the polls, would liberal and left voters not support him in order to avoid opening the door to Farage? More in Common says that most Green (57 per cent) and Lib Dem (51 per cent) voters would vote tactically to keep out Reform. For now, it appears that, whatever its configuration, in Westminster at least, the left is likely to remain on the periphery.
