Hollyoaks lines up two major arrests, cheating scandal and a rival soap star joining the show in shocking summer trailer
The Channel 4 soap has released its big summer trailer ahead of its huge 30th anniversary celebrations in October.
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And there is so much to whet fans' appetites.
Fans watching the trailer will see the bombshell moment Rex Gallagher turns on his dangerous sisters Grace Black and Clare Devine.
The two villains end up being arrested and facing prison for their sexual exploitation and modern day slavery rackets.
And there's the first look as Clare comes face to face with someone who could rival her in the evil stakes - her own grandfather, Fraser Black Sr - or Froggy as he prefers to be known.
The gangster will be played by Emmerdale star John Middleton - and he's sticking around as a series regular to go head to head with Clare.
Escaped killer Bobby Costello is also on the run with mum Mercedes McQueen desperate to protect him - but with Tony Hutchinson determined to take revenge, will Bobby escape with his life?
A shock cheating scandal is in the offing as Dillon makes a move on boyfriend Lucas' DAD Ste Hay.
And in a shocking twist Sienna Blake looks set to discover the deadly truth about her serial killer dad Jez - and his many, many victims.
But will she survive to the 30th in October?
And has John Paul McQueen discovered the truth about Jez as he can be seen smashing up the killer's beloved allotment where he keeps all the momentos of the people he's killed.
Hollyoaks Star Sherrie Hewson Quits—Could Benidorm Revival Be Next?
The soap has a lot to celebrate with Channel 4 boss Ian Katz has revealed the ratings have surged 11 per cent since the show went down to three episodes a week.
He said: 'Channel4's much loved soap, Hollyoaks, is having quite a year. While most soaps are in decline, its viewership for the year to date is up 11% thank to the brilliant creative leadership Lime's Hannah Cheers and our own Louise Donald.'
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The Guardian
8 minutes ago
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
Telegraph
8 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Stop it, Zippy. Why we all love a naughty puppet
Last week came the news that Hacker T Dog is to join the presenting team of Blue Peter. Hacker, for those of you unfamiliar with CBBC fare, is a gruff but extremely adorable puppet canine, given to dropping outspoken comments and mugging significantly to camera. He is making history as the first non-human host of Blue Peter, though some had doubts about Anthea Turner. Hacker's increased profile can only be a good thing. The splintered mirror of modern television has seen every factional taste and genre siloed off into its own isolated shard – including children's programmes, which not so very long ago were part of the cultural glue that bound the nation together. And puppets have started to disappear. It was once impossible to avoid them, from Muffin the Mule in the 1950s to Gordon the Gopher in the 1990s. Although nearly always aimed at children, they delighted us all. And Hacker continues the grand tradition of the best TV puppets: that they are naughty. Often, puppets were employed as tools for the socialisation of younger children, object lessons in how to go so far, and no further; Sooty and chums, and the Rainbow gang, fit this classic template. In both, we met three distinct characters: the good puppet (Soo the panda; George the hippo), the naughty puppet (Sweep the dog; and whatever Zippy was meant to be) and the median, well-adjusted puppet (Sooty and Bungle, both bears). The situation always turned on misbehaviour. So, for example, pushy Zippy would try to eat all the biscuits, doormat George wouldn't get his pink finger on a single biscuit, then Bungle would distribute the biscuits fairly. The guard rails were provided by the hapless human adult, Geoffrey, who ensured the return to social order. This was drama reduced in function to its barest Aristotelian bones. But whatever the moral lesson, the naughty puppet was always the most fun, and always the break-out star. My personal favourite of the era was Hartley Hare, of the 1973-81 ATV show Pipkins. How to capture him in words? He combined the manners of David Starkey and the looks of an item of roadkill, a fortnight since it had met its untimely end. Indeed, Hartley swaggered with a vanity perhaps unusual in such a flea-bitten and bedraggled article. A clip of Hartley sometimes goes viral on social media; when young people see him, they are terrified. Hartley had his own 'Geoffrey', in the form of Johnny, played by Wayne Laryea, who trailed in the hare's destructive wake, alternately apologising and affirming like a long-suffering wife. Basil Brush had a whole string of such enablers, and Rod Hull was literally inseparable from his Emu. As a child, I longed to be one of these puppet wranglers. It was my dream job. I even stage-doored Sooty's Matthew Corbett for career advice, and he was infinitely patient and kind to the small, voluble creature I was aged seven. But then, he'd had a lot of practice. Some naughty puppets made it out of children's TV and into the sphere of family entertainment. These characters tended to be naughtier in a different way. Basil Brush expressed carnal desire for star guests such as Clodagh Rodgers and Lulu, shuddering from his ears to the tip of his tail while emitting a full-throated 'phwoarr'. This only sowed confusion in infant minds. What exactly was his aim? How would such a congress be achieved? But the crown of puppet bawdry must go to Miss Piggy, and 1982's ABC special The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, easily locatable on YouTube, catches her devilry at its height. Miss Piggy behaves spectacularly badly in this spectacular. Guest star John Ritter lusts after her. She spurns him – but, in turn, Piggy herself pants for an uninterested George Hamilton, pinning him down on her chat-show sofa. But this is merely a cover to spur Kermit's jealousy. We live today in an age when the lightest of confections, from sci-fi to comedy, often come carrying a freight of significance, and often collapse laughably under that load. The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show is one of those rare fripperies that, by accident, genuinely does contain wisdom for the ages, addressing the human foibles of love, jealousy and sex – flesh and blood reflected back through foam and latex. The show culminates in its star discovering that this is only a special, and not the first episode of a series – at which point she proceeds to karate chop the head of the network, and brings the set crashing down. This is the apex of Miss Piggy's misconduct, and goes entirely unpunished. In the last few precious years before the culture wars kicked off, naughty puppets made a bit of a comeback, and even took a leap into adult entertainment. The comedian and ventriloquist Nina Conti; the hit Broadway musical Avenue Q; and BBC Three's scabrously adolescent Mongrels: all took the unruliness of the naughty puppet and amplified it to comic effect. All used puppets to broach icky subjects, in ways that would be unthinkable today. One of Avenue Q's hit tunes is a toe-tapper with the lyric: 'Everyone's a little bit racist sometimes. / Doesn't mean we go around committing hate crimes.' I hope that Hacker's elevation is a sign that misbehaving marionettes are on their way back again, for children and for adults. Television and puppets go hand in glove.
The Sun
8 minutes ago
- The Sun
Stacey Solomon urges fans to ‘be kind' as she shares health update on pet dog after emergency surgery
STACEY Solomon has urged fans to "be kind" after sharing a heartbreaking health update on her pet dog. The Loose Women panelist took to her Instagram page to share an update on Teddy, who fell ill earlier this year and was diagnosed with a "predisposed condition." 6 6 6 Back in April, Stacey, 35, told how the pooch had been rushed to the vets for emergency surgery. At the time, the mum of five admitted her fears he "might not fully recover" yet the adorable dog has battled through and now has wheels on his back legs. Alongside a new video showing Teddy scooting around their huge garden at Pickle Cottage with his new accessory, X Factor alum Stacey explained the situation. In her emotional words she wrote: "Our Darling Teddy has his wheels. "We have spent the last few days trying to teach teddy a new way of getting around & he's finally learning to love his wheels. "He was very nervous at first but seeing him today walking around with Peanut again was so special." In a plea to fans Stacey, who was seen supporting Teddy with his adventures in the garden, pleaded for fans for their understanding. She added: "We have spoken to our vet and have bought Teddy some wheels. If we are doing anything wrong please be kind. "This is a totally new journey for us and we are doing our best to give teddy the best life he can possibly have. "So just let us know if you have any tips." Stacey Solomon hits back at cruel troll who branded her a 'horse mouth' She finished with the touching words: "Teddy you've been such an amazing boy. "We know your whole world has turned upside down but you've been so calm and patient and we hope we are giving you the second chance that you deserve. To the moon & back Teddy." FAMILY LIFE Stacey, who has five children - Zachary, Leighton, Rex, Rose and Belle - shares her youngest three with her husband Joe Swash. The couple live at their Essex home, affectionately called Pickle Cottage, along with their beloved pets including dogs Teddy and Peanut, and their cat Princess. Inside Stacey Solomon's Pickle Cottage STACEY Solomon splashed out a massive £1.2million on Pickle Cottage - and Joe Swash didn't put in a penny. She solely stumped up the cash for their Tudor-style Essex property, which is set in 2.5 acres and boasts an outdoor swimming pool. The former X Factor star and Joe live there with Zachary, Leighton, Rex, Rose, and Belle. It's not known why Stacey went alone, as ex-EastEnders actor Joe is reportedly worth over £1million, but has also been made bankrupt twice in 2009 and 2013. Shrewd Stacey has shown she's a dab hand at running a wide range of successful businesses including TV, books, clothing and homeware ranges. Her main firm Key Map Entertainments is worth just shy of £3million - and she's also branched out into cosmetics. The former X Factor contestant registered the company Belle & Rose Ltd, named after her youngest two daughters. They currently have their own fly-on-the-wall BBC reality series, titled Stacey and Joe. Viewers have already seen the ex EastEnders actor break down in a candid chat with his wife while discussing the challenges he's faced with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Stacey previously confessed viewers would see 'domestics' between her and Joe. And this proved to be true, as the pair were seen clashing on screen over parenting issues. 6 6 6
