
BBC Make a Difference Awards: A day in the life of therapy horse
Bringing back memories for Malcolm
First Mr Kelloggs visits married couple Malcolm and Beryl, and Malcolm is very keen to feed him some biscuits. His owner Megan Gledhill politely explains that is not allowed. Then Malcolm comes out with a revelation: "My dad used to show horses, all through the summer."He went from Bournemouth, to Harrogate, Leeds, Manchester city ground, he trained them." The care home staff said they never knew this about him. "It's amazing, the joy it brings to them," says Alison Williams, who is responsible for wellbeing at the home and organised the visit. "It brings back so many memories of when they had their own pets, and we've heard stories today that we've never heard before, about people that kept horses, and we never knew that about them," she adds.
Kisses for Eileen
Next it is the turn of Eileen and Ray. "Come here baby, give us a kiss," says Eileen. Obediently, Mr Kelloggs edges closer and lifts his nose to Eileen's face for a kiss. Eileen is delighted: "That's it Ray, you're dumped now", the staff joke.It is a wrench for Eileen when it it time for Mr Kelloggs to leave, but another visit is promised. The tour continues into the rooms of Lesley and Mary. "What's his name?" Mary asks, but she is not impressed with the reply."No, that's not a nice name for a beautiful darling like you," she tells him. Megan explains that Mr Kelloggs got his name because he was born in Wales close to the site of one of the factories of the cereal manufacturer.
Lesley's face lights up when Mr Kelloggs enters her room. It brings back memories of a time she rode a horse.It is clear to see the impact he has on the residents, and it is the reason why he won a BBC Make a Difference award. Megan's mum Sharon Gledhill, who helps her to run Linking Hearts Therapy Horses, says it is a privilege to do what they do. "A lot of people, especially the people that are bedbound, they're not going to get a chance to go out into the forest and see a horse and be so close to a horse," she says. After touring the rooms, it is time to visit other residents in the lounge. Mr Kelloggs spends at least half an hour in there, meeting everyone individually. As he approaches each person, he is greeted with a big smile. "It's the sensory experience, they get to hug and kiss him and stroke him," says Sharon. "It just brightens them up and puts a spark in their day again."
How to nominate
The Make a Difference Awards recognise and celebrate people, across eight different categories, who are going above and beyond to make a difference where they live.Every BBC Local Radio station will host an awards ceremony in 2025.The awards are a chance to say thank you and show recognition and appreciation for people who love to make life better for others.Nominations can be made via the BBC Make a Difference website where you can also see full terms and the privacy notice.Nominations close on the 31st March 2025 at 17:00.
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Metro
4 hours ago
- Metro
The 20 best Commodore Amiga games to celebrate the 40th anniversary
GameCentral lists the most iconic games ever made for the Amiga home computer, back in its glory days of the 80s and 90s. It may not be much of a household name nowadays, but anyone who grew up gaming in the late 80s knows that, here in the UK, the Commodore Amiga series of home computers was one of the most popular formats of the time. Its success was one of the reasons the belated release of the NES never took off, something which has affected Nintendo's popularity in the UK ever since. However, once the Mega Drive and SNES launched in the early 90s, the Amiga slowly became overshadowed and, eventually, all but forgotten, apart from a mini-console release in 2022. The Amiga celebrates its 40th anniversary on June 23, but because it was only ever really popular in Europe its legacy is a difficult thing to honour, with only the occasional remaster or reboot for any of its games. But nevertheless, here are 20 of its most memorable titles – almost all of which were originally made in the UK. One of the very first games developed by long-running British studio Team17 – who are still going today as an indie publisher – this top-down shooter is heavily inspired by the movie Aliens and remains an all-time favourite amongst Amiga fans. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Its initial success led to a long line of sequels and spin-offs but while it attempted to segue into being a 3D shooter it was never able to compete with new challengers such as Doom. The attempts at a modern reboot never took off either, which currently leaves the franchise in limbo. When you think of cinematic games, your mind probably goes to big budget PlayStation games like God Of War and Uncharted. But in the 90s, that term was being used to describe 2D platformer Another World and its spiritual successor Flashback. While Another World was all style and little substance Flashback, which also appeared on contemporary home consoles, was way ahead of its time in terms of storytelling in an action games and including a relative amount of non-linear gameplay. A remake and a sequel have both been attempted but the original was very much of its time and even its spiritual sequel, 1995's Fade To Black, wasn't a hit, despite being one of the very earliest third person shooters. The Amiga would have been a far less exciting format without British developer Sensible Software, who have no less than three entries in this list. Cannon Fodder is arguably their greatest creation and something completely unique both then and now. It's essentially a top-down squad based action game, controlled by a mouse (all Amigas came with a mouse – it was the joystick you had to buy separately) where squad-mates would drop like flies, to later be memorialised in an in-game cemetery. The game was heavily criticised by the Daily Star for using images of a poppy but while Sensible were clearly goading tabloids into giving them free press, which they got, the game itself is very clearly anti-war and quietly poignant in terms of the fate of its virtual soldiers. When the Amiga first arrived in 1985, 3D polygonal graphics were all but unknown on home consoles, with even the milestone release of 1993's Starwing (aka Star Fox) on the SNES requiring a more expensive cartridge with extra processing power. And yet the Amiga was filled with hugely ambitious 3D games – all made by British developers and including the likes of Cybercon III, Infestation, Starglider, and Damocles. They all ran with horrendously low frame rates but despite that, Frontier still managed to simulate astronomically accurate solar systems and physics. Like many pioneering games on the Amiga, including 2D titles such as Shadow Of The Beast, Frontier wasn't actually much fun but it was always interesting to explore and play around with. And then when you got bored of that you could play the Amiga version of the original Elite, which was a lot more enjoyable. Speaking of hugely ambitious 3D games with terrible frame rates, that are no fun to play, Hunter was essentially GTA 3 but almost 25 years earlier. The story campaign had you trying to assassinate an enemy general but there's also a sandbox mode where you can take on targets in whatever you like, across an archipelago of islands. This involved driving around in a wide range of vehicles, that you could get in and out of at any time, as well as walking, swimming, and fighting on foot. It was horribly difficult but shared similarities with Midwinter and Carrier Command, in that all three games were decades ahead of their time, in terms of sandbox gameplay, and made by British developers that are now all but forgotten by the wider industry. Although Street Fighter 2 didn't appear until 1991 (there were several versions on the Amiga but none of them were very good), one-on-one fighting games weren't an entirely unknown concept before that, not least because the original Street Fighter came out in 1987. That very same year, the sequel to International Karate, by Jimmy White's 'Whirlwind' Snooker creator Archer Maclean, appeared and it's fascinating how different a concept it is, not least because there's actually three people fighting at a time. It'll forever be most famous for the cheat code that lets you drop the fighters' trousers but that doesn't negate the fact that this is probably the best pre-Street Fighter 2 fighting game on any format. Once one of the biggest gaming franchises of the 90s, Lemming sadly fell out of favour, and drifted into obscurity in the ensuing decades, primarily because it's best played with a mouse, which most consoles never had. It's a puzzle game where you have to stop swarms of lemmings falling to their death, as you block off and dig through the landscape to help them. The series was considered important enough to appear on a Royal Mail stamp, although it's now most famous for being an early work by DMA Design – the studio that went on to become Rockstar North. Without the financial success of Lemmings there would never have been a Grand Theft Auto, which is a sobering thought. Although Sony owns the franchise now, after buying original publisher Psygnosis. Rainbow Islands may be an arcade conversion, of one of the many games claiming to be the sequel to Bubble Bobble, but its true home has always been on the Amiga. It's certainly the only place it's ever enjoyed the degree of fame it deserves, thanks to a near perfect port by legendary developer Andrew Braybrook, creator of Uridium and Paradroid (Commodore 64 games which both had sequels on the Amiga). We know what it looks like, but Rainbow Islands is an incredibly nuanced action platformer, that's filled with secrets and enjoys one of the most flexible weapon systems in any 2D game. The rainbows you shoot out are at once projectiles, traps to catch enemies beneath you, and platforms to be traversed. It's a genius concept that cannot be re-released today in its original form because its soundtrack is technically a knock-off of Somewhere over the Rainbow. Arguably the first ever combat flight simulator, this went unnoticed by many even at the time, although it's a wonderfully imaginative evolution of games like Elite, that focuses solely on combat and arrived a full year before Wing Commander. It features a relatively realistic, physics-based control system and surprisingly involved story missions, obviously inspired by the previous year's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Developer Glyn Williams went on to make the Independence War games, which acted as spiritual sequels, but sadly they're almost completely forgotten too. In some ways it's a shame that Sensible Soccer was so successful, because it meant Sensible Software never got around to making other more experimental titles, like Cannon Fodder and Wizkid. An evolution of earlier game MicroProse Soccer, this was a direct rival to the otherwise popular Kick Off series and was very much the EA Sports FC of its day, except with a sense of humour and played from a top-down perspective. It has a spiritual sequel today, in Sociable Soccer by original creator John Hare, that's seen some success, but nothing like Sensi in its heyday. Although the Amiga rarely got the same games released on contemporary consoles, it did get lots of arcade conversations and PC ports. The PC didn't really come into its own as a games format until the mid 90s but there were notable titles before that time, including the original Civilization in 1991. A franchise so successful the most recent sequel came out just this year. The Amiga version was a bit slower, because of the limited processing power, but it worked very well and so did seminal real-time strategy game Dune 2 and UFO: Enemy Unknown – what would later become known as X-COM. Its predecessor Laser Squad was also a cracking turn-based game, even if it still looked like a ZX Spectrum game. Unsurprisingly, top-down racing games are not something you see much of nowadays, even from indie developers, but there were lots on the Amiga, including arcade conversion Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off Road and the excellent Skidmarks series. Super Cars 2 is most people's favourite though, not because it does anything particularly original but simply because it does it very well. The inclusion of weapons is relatively unusual though and ensures multiplayer matches are always glorious chaos. It was also essentially a sister series to the equally popular Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge games. This list of games isn't in any particular order but the two frontrunners for our favourite Amiga games of all-time are Rainbow Islands and this: the best game the Bitmap Brothers ever made and still the definitive example of a future sports game. It's basically a hyper violent version of handball crossed with hockey, where you aim to get the ball into the goal by any means necessary, including punching your opponents to the floor and creating score multipliers by throwing it at devices at the side of the arena. A follow-up has been attempted multiple times, with a new one currently in early access from Rebellion but nothing has matched the elegant simplicity of the original… or its amazing theme tune. As much as his reputation has been tarnished nowadays, Peter Molyneux was on fire during the Amiga era, doing all his best work while at now defunct developer Bullfrog, with titles such as Flood and Syndicate. Populous was his most famous game at the time and along with SimCity (which was also available on the Amiga) helped create the now largely abandoned god game genre. It's arguable how much real strategy was involved in the gameplay, but at the time Populus' open-ended nature and isometric graphics were a revelation. The sequel never added any real depth to the concept though and the franchise has been mothballed for almost two decades now. We've already discussed many of the Amiga's most innovative 3D games but arguably the most impressive is Starglider 2. Rather than being a straight shooter, like its predecessor, it is a completely open-ended sci-fi adventure where you can travel anywhere in a solar system, nominally in an attempt to blow up an enemy space station with a special bomb. No one ever bothered with that though and instead spent their time exploring the fascinating 3D worlds that featured no loading screens and flat-shaded (as opposed to wireframe) polygon graphics, as you travelled from outer space, through the atmosphere, and onto a planet's surface. The highlight was undoubtedly listening to the space whales in the atmosphere of the system's gas giant but the whole game was a technical marvel, with many of the team going on to develop Starwing for Nintendo. While the Amiga had plenty of its own exclusives, and many titles shared with rival home computer the Atari ST, much of its portfolio was made up of ports from other formats, whether it be arcades, the PC, or earlier 8-bit computers. Exile is one such game, having first appeared on the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. That means nobody outside the UK has ever heard of it and yet it's a fantastically ambitious action adventure, with completely open-ended gameplay, a realistic physics engine, and clever artificial intelligence. Perhaps if it had had modern style signposting, and a lower difficulty, it might be better known today but the unfortunate truth is that if a game isn't popular in the US or Japan it's rarely ever seen again. Lucasfilm Games were a loyal supporter of the Amiga and while their later point 'n' click adventures had increasing trouble running on the format the original Monkey Island worked perfectly and thanks to the Amiga's excellent sound chip was arguably the definitive version at the time. Still one of the funniest games ever made – which says just as much about its level of competition as it does the game itself – this is both a charming screwball comedy and a graphic adventure whose puzzles are perfectly pitched as difficult but not impossibly illogical. As a bonus, the series is still going today, thanks to the 2022 soft reboot. If this were a list of most underrated Amiga games, The Sentinel would comfortably sit at the top since, even at the time it came out, very few people had ever heard of it. And that's despite it having been released previously on various 8-bit formats. The Sentinel is a remarkably unique stealth game, where you control an immobile robot and must avoid the glare of the titular Sentinel by teleporting from one spot to the other across an abstract 3D landscape. It was the creation of SIr Geoff Crammond, but as good as Stunt Car Racer and Formula One Grand Prix were, it's The Sentinel which stands as his greatest achievement. This is the main reason we semi-resent the existence of Sensible Soccer, as it's the weirdest and most experimental game Sensible Software ever made. It's nominally a sequel to their earlier 2D shooter Wizball, which was also ported to the Amiga, but has almost nothing in common with that in terms of gameplay. More Trending You play as the disembodied head of Wizkid in what could vaguely be described as a mix of Arkanoid and Rainbow Islands, as you knock tiles and other objects onto enemies below you. It's when you rejoin your body that things get really weird though, in what is one of the most thoroughly British video games ever made. No Amiga list would be complete without Worms, which was initially made as part of a programming competition run by the magazine Amiga Format. At heart, it's a pretty simple riff on Artillery games, where you have to judge the trajectory of shells fired from fixed gun emplacements, but here you can move and there's a much wider range of weapons. More importantly, it's filled with very British humour and a fantastic multiplayer mode. The series continues to the current day, although after the failure of battle royale spin-off Worms Rumble the next mainline entry has been reduced to an Apple Arcade exclusive called Worms Across Worlds. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: The A500 Mini console review – all 25 Amiga games reviewed from Alien Breed to Speedball 2 MORE: A classic 90s Amiga video game has got an unexpected reboot on Steam MORE: Flashback 2 review – from Amiga classic to modern calamity


The Guardian
5 hours ago
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Metro
5 hours ago
- Metro
Ozzy Osbourne predicted his epitaph would be about bats - this one isn't
The fact that Ozzy never took himself too seriously, made people love him all the more (Picture:) When my biography of Ozzy Osbourne was released in 2002, it flew off the shelves. It was an instant best-seller as fans flocked to read more about a man who was a genuine British eccentric. Gentle, funny and never anything less than 100% authentic, his frailties and insecurities only served to make him more human to us. And the fact that Ozzy never took himself too seriously, made people love him all the more. 'I know I'm just some bloke who won the lottery, it could easily have gone the other way for me,' he said. While Ozzy might be most famous for Black Sabbath, it was his unlikely reality series that gave fans all over the world – old and new – an insight into his character. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Up Next Previous Page Next Page The Osbournes was the series that would change the face of fly-on-the-wall television for ever. Before the Kardashians came The Osbournes, the docu-soap that made stars of heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne, his wife Sharon and their children Kelly and Jack. The show was a revelation – showing the Prince of Darkness as he'd never been seen before. For while almost every other utterance was a swearword, in every other respect the wildest man in rock appeared every inch the archetypal sit-com dad – 53 years of age, genial, flustered and completely baffled by his family and the modern world. The combination of eccentricity, celebrity and a complete lack of self-awareness was TV gold (Picture: Mtv/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock) The Osbournes was funny primarily because Ozzy wasn't actually trying to be. Viewers saw him struggling to change a bin liner, battling unsuccessfully with the TV remote control and collecting his incontinent dog from the vet. The combination of eccentricity, celebrity and a complete lack of self-awareness was TV gold and the show was an instant hit, pulling in more than six million viewers in America every week – the highest-rated show in MTV's 20-year history. When it was shown in Britain the ratings went off the scale. Just 10 years earlier, the man who had bitten the head off a bat, had seen his albums slapped with parental warning stickers. The show was a revelation – showing the Prince of Darkness as he'd never been seen before (Picture:) Now, hilariously, he was the one trying and failing to establish family values with his kids in his own inimitable way. In one unforgettable episode, teenagers Kelly and Jack are preparing for a night out when Ozzy – who was clean at the time, having long battled drug and drink issues – called them into the kitchen to deliver a little fatherly advice. 'Don't get drunk or stoned tonight. I'll be f*****g p****d off because I can't,' he warned. 'And if you're gonna have sex, wear a condom.' Before The Osbournes, a TV show based on Ozzy had been under consideration for a while and scriptwriters spent time with the family in order to come up with a show based on the rocker's life. Ozzy Osbourne at home two weeks after the birth of his baby boy Jack (Picture: Mike Maloney/Mirrorpix via Getty Images) Quickly realising that the Osbourne family's humour was far funnier than anything planned, they suggested a fly-on-the-wall series, where a full-time TV crew moved in, setting up cameras and filming with the family 24 hours a day. At the heart of the show was Ozzy's relationship with his wife Sharon. And while the couple bickered and fought, their love for each other shone through and to their kids' horror they were openly affectionate with each other around the house. Many episodes were spent feuding, but they were never happier than when united against a common enemy, including their next door neighbours, ironically accused of disturbing the Osbournes when they invited friends round for a folk-singing session bashing out tunes such as Kumbaya. 'You w*****s' have no respect!' Ozzy hilariously yelled. At the heart of the show was Ozzy's relationship with his wife Sharon (Picture: M. Caulfield/WireImage) The show literally transformed Ozzy's life. He was already a legend in the world of rock, selling more than 100 million albums as the lead singer of Black Sabbath and as a hugely successful solo artist. But the Osbournes introduced him to a whole new audience, who had not been witness to his excesses in the 1970s and '80s. And his new found fame even saw him invited to perform for the Queen at her Golden Jubilee Pop Concert at Buckingham Palace. 'He glorified drugs, drink and Satan, so why has Ozzy Osbourne been asked to play for the Queen?', one shocked newspaper asked. Ozzy was inclined to agree – the invitation was one that astonished him as much as it delighted him. But like everything else in his life, it did nothing to change him. As he reflected at the time: 'There's always someone out there greater than me and if it all goes down the s**t-pan, then I can't complain. 'Everything comes to an end, sooner or later I suppose. But the truth is I don't want it to end. I mean, what the f**k does a lunatic do when he retires?' Sadly, Ozzy never got to find out; his death tragically coming just weeks after his final performance. But as Ozzy himself dryly remarked: 'Whatever else I do, my epitaph will be – Ozzy Osbourne born December 3, 1948. Died, whenever. And he bit the head off a bat.' Do you have a story you'd like to share? Get in touch by emailing Share your views in the comments below. Arrow MORE: The Great British Sewing Bee is back – but I miss Kiell Smith-Bynoe Arrow MORE: Jess Carter proves there's no room for error as a Black player Arrow MORE: Ellen DeGeneres fled the States – now she must acknowledge her privilege