Latest news with #TheBeast
Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Former The Chase contestant reveals why winners are told not to share the prize fund
The Chase has been on air via ITV since 2009 - and while winning the show is a rare event, one former contestant has revealed secret advice he was given about the prize money A former contestant from The Chase has revealed details of what happens if a team win the show - and the advice ITV gives regarding eliminated teammates and the prize fund. Viewers of the ITV show will be well aware that success is rare on the general knowledge quiz show. A group of four team together to test their knowledge against one of the genius Chasers - which includes Mark Labbett, Shaun Wallace, Anne Hegerty, Jenny Ryan, Darragh Ennis and Paul Sinha. The brain boxes play under the respective code names The Beast, The Dark Destroyer, The Governess, The Vixen, The Menace and The Sinnerman. After the individual rounds, where the contestants try to get home without being caught, the team then take on the chaser in another round of general knowledge. If the team answer more questions correctly than the Chaser, they win the prize fund that has been amassed over the course of the show - but the money is divided between those that succeeded. If a teammate is eliminated before the final, the winning team members are seemingly advised not to share any of the money with team members who were caught during the chase rounds. A former contestant named Steven Sneade, 69, from Liverpool, revealed all to the Daily Mail. He said: "If you win you have to sign another contract as you're accepting money from them. They told us not to give money to the contestants who didn't win money just because you feel sorry for them. "They can't stop you, but I think they just don't want you to have that in mind. They said it could take three months, but I had it in a week." The Chase has been on the air since 2009 and has aired over 2,500 episodes so far. The long-running game show is hosted by Bradley Walsh, 65 - who also hosts a variety of other shows, including the BBC series Gladiators. While he has been helming the show for 16 years, the entertainer has revealed he has no plans to walk away from the show. In a recent interview, he explained he would quit if the series lost its audience. He said: "Until people say they've had enough and start switching off, I'll do it. We've had such an extraordinary time together. It's the best job in the world." He also reflected on filming the pilot episode, which was recorded back in 2008 with chasers Shaun Wallace and Mark Labbett involved. He recalled: "The audience was made up of ITV bosses and they found someone in the office to be a contestant." "Straight away I took the contestant's side. I saw the Chasers as these big, all-knowing, bully types, so I started taking the mickey out of them. When they got a question wrong, I really gave it to them, and everyone was laughing. That's when I knew we had something." The Chase has spawned a number of spin-offs - with celebrity specials and a version of the show were contestants can take on the whole line-up of chasers. International versions of the show have appeared in 20 other countries including Australia, the USA, Spain and Germany. Some members of the UK version of The Chase have appeared in international versions - with Mark and Shawn featuring in the line-up in Australia.
Daily Mirror
2 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
Plan to humiliate Donald Trump during UK visit raises £10,000 in a day
Campaigners plan to plaster Britain with embarrassing posters of Donald Trump - while Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey says he "has a nerve" to come here at all Campaigners planning to plaster Britain with embarrassing posters of Donald Trump in time for his visit to Scotland have raised £10,000 in donations. And Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said the US President 'has a nerve' to come to the UK after his 'hokey cokey' approach to steel tariffs left UK manufacturing in limbo. Trump is set to travel to Scotland on Wednesday, and will visit his two golf courses during the trip. And Keir Starmer is expected to meet with the US President during the visit. 'Trump has nerve coming over to the UK when he's spent the last year playing tariff hokey-cokey with the British economy,' The Lib Dem leader told the Sunday Mirror. 'But in fairness, he can do less damage on a golf course than in the White House. 'His back of the envelope tariff 'plan' is hitting steelworkers hard across the country — and with nothing yet to show for the deal he signed with the Prime Minister, there's no end in sight for their worries.' When Trump last visited the UK in 2019, as many as 250,000 protesters lined the streets jeering and booing as he drove past in his presidential limousine, The Beast. Banners were unfurled by protesters bearing messages including 'No-one Likes You', 'Trump=Wasteman' and 'No Human Is Illegal'. And a giant blimp depicting Trump as a giant baby wearing a nappy floated over London during his visit. And on Thursday a huge poster of Trump with dead paedophile Jeffrey Epstein appeared on a bus stop near the US Embassy. It was the work of campaign group Everyone Hates Elon - who intend to plaster the UK with the embarrassing snap during Trump's visit, in what it describes as an 'act of public service.' 'In less than 24 hours we've hit our first target of £10,000 to make sure the photo of trump with Epstein follows him all over the UK, and now we're going to aim higher,' a spokesperson told the Mirror. Organisers say for every £15 raised they'll add another square metre to a huge banner of the image. "The Jeffrey Epstein files are tearing apart Trump's MAGA movement right now with even loyal supporters up in arms. So help us to expose Trump's crimes, while also fuelling the end of his hateful movement. In just a few weeks we can give him a welcome he'll never forget.'
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Behold, 'The Beast': Gigantic animal-like plasma plume 13 times wider than Earth hovers over the sun
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A giant plasma plume dubbed "The Beast" was recently spotted dancing above the sun as it showered our home star with blobs of impossibly fast fire. The shapeshifting projection, which stretched more than 13 times wider than Earth, was the first of several sizable solar structures to emerge in recent days. The animalistic mass appeared Saturday (July 12) over the northwestern limb of the sun, allowing photographers from around the world to snap some stunning shots, including Michael Jäger, who captured the plume from Martinsburg in Austria (see above); and Simon Metcalfe, who saw it from near his home in Gloucestershire, England (see below). Astrophotographer Daid Wilson also captured an amazing movie of the entire event from Inverness in Scotland, revealing that the morphing plume stretched more than 100,000 miles (165,000 km) across. The plume was at its peak size for around three hours and constantly changed shape during this time. "It looks to me like some huge 4-legged beast shuffling along," Wilson told This quote was picked up on several social media outlets, including Reddit and X, leading people to refer to the plume as "The Beast." Related: 10 supercharged solar storms that blew us away in 2024 The Beast is a solar prominence — a "bright feature extending outward from the sun's surface," made from ionized gas, or plasma, that is held in place by invisible magnetic field lines anchored to the solar surface, according to NASA. These structures are usually small but can grow to be more than 1 million miles (1.6 million km) long and can be seen hovering around the sun's disk during eclipses, such as during the 2024 total solar eclipse over North America. In the new images, smaller blobs of plasma can also be seen falling from The Beast toward the sun's surface. This is known as "coronal rain" and occurs when plasma cools and condenses, causing it to fall back to the sun's surface at extreme speeds as it travels along the invisible magnetic field lines. Prominences, which commonly form in a looped horseshoe shape, can also unleash solar storms, such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), when the magnetic fields that hold them up snap like an overstretched elastic band, flinging the plasma off into space. If these solar storms collide with Earth's magnetic field, they can trigger geomagnetic disturbances, which can cause radio blackouts, satellite disruption and vibrant aurora displays. But in this case, no CME was released, meaning The Beast poses no threat to our planet. RELATED STORIES —Watch eerie 'UFOs' and a solar 'cyclone' take shape in stunning new ESA video of the sun —'A wonderful spectacle': Photographer snaps rare solar eruption as 'magnetic noose' strangles the sun's south pole —Photos: Ghostly plasma loops linger on the sun after massive solar explosion Two more large prominences have also appeared on the sun in recent days: First, on Monday (July 14), and then again on Tuesday (July 15). Both of these structures were larger than The Beast, with a much more traditional shape, and unleashed CMEs. However, due to the angle from which they were released from the sun, neither of the solar storms will hit Earth, according to The recent flurry of activity is a reminder that the sun is currently nearing the end of the most active phase in its roughly 11-year sunspot cycle, known as solar maximum. During this period, magnetic instabilities make it much easier for chunks of plasma to break away from the solar surface. Solve the daily Crossword
Spectator
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
An unlikely alliance: Drayton and Mackenzie, by Alexander Starritt, reviewed
Alexander Starritt has form with satire. His 2017 debut The Beast skewered the modern tabloid press, drawing comparisons with Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. For his third novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, he is back at it, mercilessly mocking everything from Oxbridge and management consultants to tech bros and new parents in a story that hinges on whether two unlikely friends can make a success of their tidal energy start-up. It's more fun that it sounds. The narrative opens in the early 2000s with James Drayton – someone who gets his kicks by finishing his maths A-level exam in 20 minutes and who finds undergraduate life disappointingly basic. 'He supposed he'd been naive to think of university as concerned with intellect… At this level, Oxford was just an elementary course in information-processing, a training school for Britain's future lawyers, politicians and administrators,' writes Starritt, using the omniscient voice. Lest this seem too obnoxious, James is self-aware enough to realise that finishing his exams so quickly meant 'he would have to leave the exam room alone while the rest of his class stayed inside together'. One of Starritt's many skills is how he ratchets up the poignancy, creating real characters rather than caricatures. The yang to Drayton's yin comes in the form of Roland Mackenzie, an Oxford slacker who scrapes a 2:2. They're at the same college but barely clock each other. Later, when James is the subject of articles and interviews, he will be asked if it's true that they were both in the same rowing boat. 'James didn't notice him at the time.' After Roland takes a gap year or two teaching in India, he somehow winds up at McKinsey, working alongside James. Roland finds it catastrophically boring. 'But even that he quite enjoyed, since the boringness was so authentic, like going to New York and it being just like the movies.' As the duo strike out on their own, seeking to disrupt electricity generation with a scheme to turn tidal power into light, at least initially, Starritt's granular detail over 500-odd pages skirted a similarly fine line between boring me and impressing me with its authenticity. There are even cameos from the central bankers Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi as the world economy tanks, although the step-by-step exposition in these chapters is overkill. What with the emotion of the escalating bromance and making James someone 'who hasn't read a novel since university', Starritt goes all out to hook the same sort of elusive male reader who lapped up Andrew O'Hagan's tear-jerking Mayflies. And good luck to him. He certainly hooked me.
India Today
7 days ago
- Science
- India Today
Mysterious phenomenon seen on the Sun, astronomers term it the beast
Astronomers worldwide are captivated by a dramatic solar event unfolding on the Sun's northeastern limb, where a massive prominence, dubbed 'The Beast', has been observed curling and shifting in an extraordinary display of cosmic Wilson, an amateur astronomer based in Inverness, Scotland, captured three hours of this phenomenon from his backyard solar observatory.'It looks to me like some huge 4-legged beast shuffling along,' Wilson remarked, sharing time-lapse footage of the prominence's movement with advertisement Solar prominences are enormous clouds of hydrogen plasma, suspended above the Sun's surface by powerful magnetic fields. The unusual, animal-like motion of 'The Beast' signals a period of magnetic instability, which could precede either a dramatic collapse or a spectacular events are prime opportunities for both scientific observation and solar photography, and astronomers are encouraging enthusiasts to monitor the Sun rare prominence appears at a time of heightened solar activity. Earth is currently passing through a stream of high-speed solar wind emitted from an equatorial coronal hole on the Sun, raising the possibility of minor G1-class geomagnetic storms, while generally not dangerous, can cause radio blackouts, power grid fluctuations, and dazzling auroras at high observation is part of a growing trend of backyard astronomers contributing valuable data to the scientific community. His footage, shared widely online, highlights the dynamic and sometimes unpredictable nature of our 'The Beast' continues to evolve, professional and amateur astronomers alike remain vigilant, eager to witness whether this magnetic giant will erupt or fade quietly back into the solar skywatchers and scientists, the prominence is a reminder that even on a 'quiet' Sun, extraordinary phenomena can emerge, reshaping our understanding of solar behaviour.- Ends
